Since Paul Stapleton asked for feedback, I’ve decided to answer the query with three (plus one) simple questions:
1. Is ‘success’ (however that’s defined) a meaningful idea in approaching (as listener or performer) improvisation?
I’ve tried to address this issue from the other side before, so let me paraphrase that here:
What is the status of ‘success’ in improvisative performance? Is the notion of success relevant to improvised music? If relevant, is it important in the ongoing practice (evolution, mutation or adaptation) of improvisation?
And does that success or failure depend on a more-or-less autonomous criteria (whether or not you call that criteria ‘musical’)? Furthermore:
Not withstanding the desirability of both, is it better to fail as a piece of music, yet leap into the unknown, or is it better to craft a listenable piece of music, but remain in a safe space?
2a. If yes to question 1, what might success mean in an improvisative practice?
I’ve circled around this issue without necessarily addressing it.
It wasn’t going to be great every time. It can’t be. We aim for greatness (however you define that) perhaps (I know I do), but we often fail.
…[The right attitude for improvisation is one] that encompasses a personal (or shared) understanding that some outcomes are more desirable (however you gauge that) than others. Add to that a sense of how to improve (evolve, mutate and adapt)—a creative intelligence—that makes the next one likely better than the last, and you have the model improviser. Aren’t we, to borrow a term from Mark Dresser, involved in a personal pedagogy?
That logic seems a little circular to me—I’ve failed to define many of these elements—and I fear that I’ve sketched out a practice that is defined largely by reflexive criteria (“I did that because I felt like it”). Certainly that does not tally with my professed skepticism of wishful, transcendental musicality.
Aside: I find it interesting that Dominic Marcella points up the YouTubified duo with Bruce Coates as an example of unsuccessful music. Bruce and I would probably agree that it was not our best moment by a long shot (I’ve referred to this performance as our “first crash and burn”), but I wonder if Marcella’s invocation of a holistic ideal music helps or hinders ongoing practice?
I think there are broader social, cultural and ideological forces here that make this question answerable (or at least addressable), but I want to know what you think.
2b. If no to question 1, how does the next day’s performance build upon the previous day’s?
There appears to me, at least in theory, possible ways of approaching evolution (at least in the Darwinian or Braxtonian senses) without the explicit mandate of ‘success’.
Sometimes the less than satisfactory improvisations bring into relief approaches or contexts that you are not able (yet) to deal with… or a performer highlights your relative lack of inventiveness or skill…. Even if these are musically less than successful (whatever that means), all these are valuable and are worth participating in as a performer and as a listener. [Read the rest…]
I still haven’t really defined the criteria for this here. I have my own ideas (primarily to do with politics and the sociality of performance) which I may write about at a later date, but what do you think?
3. Do prepared means (plans, schemes, compositions) define the criteria by which an improvisation is successful?
I was curious about the game plan that Paul and Nick Williams has for their duos at the March Stet Lab. By their reckoning, it didn’t quite work… but is that relevant either as performer or as listener? Similarly, the game of tag that opened the March Lab; was the game important or was it peripheral? It certainly affects the dynamic of real-time music-making, but in what way (if at all) is it important to the gauging of success?
In other words, if you have a plan, is success dependent on how closely you follow it? Is the criteria for judging success based upon the shape, form or effect of the plan? or can it be something else?
How much baggage do we bring to (improvisative) play? I’d argue that, as improvisers, our activities and engagement with real-time play might be more… constructive if we step-off this line between Cagian denial of agency and authorial determination. As improvisers, I value your (and my) identity and history (maybe even our prejudices), but I hope that there’s a possibility of their mutation through playful engagement.
I’m asking: what do you think?
4 Comments
Wow. There are a lot of words there. I’m not sure I understood a lot of it either… So I’m not certain what I have to say is valid.
But for me [I can’t speak for anyone else]:
I make music for those who will listen.
1. If anyone appreciates/likes it – we win
2. If NO ONE appreciates/likes it – we lose
I’m always listening though and I try not hate myself. So I almost always win. Which might be cheating.
If someone decides that they don’t like what I do, then that’s fine. I’m only human and am trying to communicate beyond words – maybe the next time will be different.
And they may not be listening in the first place. If a critic sets him- or herself up to hear a certain sort of dialogue, or requires music to be framed in a specific way, then every musician that doesn’t fit the criteria will fail. But is the critic REALLY fulfilling the role of Listening? Or point checking? We play for those who Listen, not those who Analyse.
The fact that I am TRYING to communicate beyond words is the important thing for me. I need to think about what I’m saying, and how it fits in with what’s being said to me, through music. That’s what I feel part of the job of a musician is – no matter what style of music. The winning and losing are nice bonuses, but irrelevant in comparison to the effort, which musician and audience alike can notice. And just because you “fail” today, doesn’t mean that the audience will never listen to you again; just as it shouldn’t stop one from making the genuine effort.
So an actual answer to question 1: only to a certain extent, and not as much as people might like to think.
2b. As a musician, I have to listen actively. And with reflection. This stuff is personal. I need to take into account my own “musical bloodline” – what I do is language-based, so my thing is the acquisition of “meaningful sound” to express the things I want to say. What I tried to communicate yesterday may not have worked then because it wasn’t appropriate – but it may work in the newer situation. And so I have to think about whether to try it; and if I decide to try it, I have to then think about whether I said the right thing. So I guess I’m saying constantly reflective practice, and mindfulness.
3. No.
If an orchestra screws up a score but it sounds good, does it matter if it sounds good to the listener? Personal experience time:
Some percussionists will do a gliss up the xylophone [echoing the rest of the orchestra] to the A towards the end of the second movement of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5, even though there isn’t one in the score [listen to the Leonard Bernstein version – with gliss – and compare to the Andre Previn]. I got told off for not putting one in – and bearing in mind I can’t actually read music – I bluffed my way in with the intention of improving my reading – I felt great pointing this out to the section leader! And his response was “oh, but it’s on lots of recordings…”
The dude was measuring my success in my part based on something that was nowhere in the plan, but on stuff he’d heard and liked. And that’s the “rigidities” of Western orchestral music.
You ask about baggage. I don’t know what you mean. Can you expand? Incidentally, it may not have been your best performance on that video, but I liked it. Hope to hear more.
Thanks for the response, Corey.
The winning and losing… irrelevant in comparison to the effort…. And just because you “fail” today, doesn’t mean that the audience will never listen to you again; just as it shouldn’t stop one from making the genuine effort.
Just reading Bob Ostertag’s book and he makes a similar observation:
You’re formulation makes sense to me, and, from a practitioner POV, and this strikes me as a much more useful approach to ongoing practice than comparing your work to some inherited or pre-existing criteria. Your model has a potential to be about (the embrace of) unforeseen possibilities as opposed to dogma.
This stuff is personal. I need to take into account my own “musical bloodline”…. And so I have to think about whether to try it; and if I decide to try it, I have to then think about whether I said the right thing. So I guess I’m saying constantly reflective practice, and mindfulness.
I tend to agree, but this is also the part that I have anxieties about. How do you do this while avoiding a kind of musical solipsism? I want to avoid the self-fulfilling and self-defining arms race that is, for example, much of Academic Composition, or the vanilla liberalism of Cagian denials of self.
Which is not to say that the alternative of an absolute, pre-exisiting, universal criteria of quality is any more desirable (it isn’t), but I have questions about how to proceed on this tight rope.
If an orchestra screws up a score but it sounds good, does it matter if it sounds good to the listener?
Another way to put this: does it matter if your performance went awry (in comparison to some pre-existing plan) if you found a bunch of neat stuff, gained knowledge, illuminated your practice and artistic sensibility as a consequence? …and the audience was there for that journey!
You ask about baggage. I don’t know what you mean. Can you expand?
Maybe ‘baggage’ was the wrong word. What I meant was that if I were to play with you, say, I want to hear Corey Mwamba—your history, your identity, your licks, ticks and tactics—and I would want to hear how that, in real-time interactive play, meshes (or not) with Han-earl Park—my history, my identity, my licks, tricks and tactics. It seems to me that it is in these encounters that new ideas and approaches—alternative identities and reroutings of histories—are forged and constructed.
Interestingly enough, the duo with Bruce ‘crashed and burned’ not because of some lack of intellect or over abundance of emotion (even if those things can be measured), but because of the acoustic environment. It came as a shock to both of us how our musical and interactive vocabularies depended heavily on the relatively dead acoustic space of the club, and, as a consequence of the heavy reverb of the gallery, had to quickly adopt alternative tactics in our play. It took another year and a half or so before I finally figured out a ‘solution’ to the problem [hear…].
Thanks for reading (and getting me thinking)!
Han
“I tend to agree, but this is also the part that I have anxieties about. How do you do this while avoiding a kind of musical solipsism?”
I’m not sure whether I succeed in it or not [I’m certain I don’t all the time], but I can’t do what I described without listening actively, and listening isn’t active without reflection externally and internally.
I have to listen actively – that’s what makes good creative spontaneous music [for me]. It’s all linked. I can’t listen without being reflective and vice versa: I try to remember what I’ve heard, what is being or has been said to me, and get a sense of where I am physically. What I DO with that information sometimes changes, sometimes stays the same from gig to gig.
It varies because where I am/who I’m with/what I’ve heard changes – that’s the best thing about playing gigs – it’s ALIVE with the rest of the world in a way the studio cannot be.
But it has to be done with my voice – thus it’s all tied to my ego, as well as being tied to the audience/room/other musicians.
It has to be me, but it also has to be everything else. Which thus makes it not solipsist.
When i was a teenager I used to practise a martial art called Shorinji Kempo, which is a Buddhist sect in Japan. One of the tenets of Shorinji Kempo is “live half for oneself and half for others”. Thinking about it, I guess that’s where this all comes from. You’ve really got me working the grey matter!
C.
“Maybe ‘baggage’ was the wrong word. What I meant was that if I were to play with you, say, I want to hear Corey Mwamba—your history, your identity, your licks, ticks and tactics—and I would want to hear how that, in real-time interactive play, meshes (or not) with Han-earl Park—my history, my identity, my licks, tricks and tactics. It seems to me that it is in these encounters that new ideas and approaches—alternative identities and reroutings of histories—are forged and constructed.”
Yep yep. Total agreement. I think it has to be that way – otherwise you may as well play along to a record…