Free improvisation
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Free improvisation or free music is improvised music without any rules beyond the taste or inclination of the musician(s) involved; in many cases the musicians make an active effort to avoiding overt references to recognizable musical genres. The term is somewhat paradoxical, since it can be considered both as a technique (employed by any musician who wishes to disregard rigid genres and forms) and as a recognizable genre in its own right.
"Free improvisation," as a style of music, developed in the U.S. and Europe in the mid and late 1960s, largely as an outgrowth of free jazz and modern classical musics. Relatively little known and somewhat loosely-defined, none of its exponents can be said to be "famous" amongst the general public. However, in experimental circles, a number of free musicians are well known, including saxophonists Evan Parker and Peter Brötzmann, guitarist Derek Bailey, and the improvising group AMM.
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[edit] Characteristics
Although performers may choose to play in a certain style or key, or at a certain tempo, conventional songs are highly uncommon in free improvisation; more emphasis is generally placed on mood, texture or, more simply, on "performative gesture" than on preset forms of melody, harmony or rhythm. These elements are improvised at will, as the music progresses.
Guitarist Derek Bailey proposed non-idiomatic improvisation as a more accurately descriptive term, claiming the form offers musicians more possibilities "per cubic second" than any genre (Guitar Player, January 1997); while guitarist Elliott Sharp (himself occasionally active in free improvisation) has argued—partly tongue in cheek—that no improvisation is ever truly free, excepting the unlikelihood of amnesiac improvising musicians. (ibid) Interestingly, John Eyles notes that Bailey has been quoted as saying that free improvisation is “playing without memory” [1]
In his landmark book Improvisation, Bailey has written "The lack of precision over its [free improv's] naming is, if anything, increased when we come to the thing itself. Diversity is its most consistent characteristic. It has no stylistic or idiomatic commitment. It has no prescribed idiomatic sound. The characteristics of freely improvised music are established only by the sonic-musical identity of the person or persons playing it." [2]
Free music performers, coming from a disparate variety of backgrounds, often engage musically with other genres. For example, acclaimed soundtrack composer Ennio Morricone was a member of the free improvisation group Nuova Consonanza. Rock musician Thurston Moore has released a number of free improvisation collaborations. Anthony Braxton has written opera, and John Zorn has written acclaimed orchestral pieces.
As it has influenced and been influenced by other areas of exploration, aspects of modern classical music (extended techniques), noise rock (aggressive confrontation), IDM (computer manipulation and digital synthesis), minimalism and electroacoustic music can now be heard in free improvisation.
[edit] History
Though there are many important precedents and developments, free improvisation developed gradually, making it difficult to pinpoint a single moment when the style was "born". As an uncredited critic has written for Allmusic, "being freed of all rules, free improvisation cannot be traced back to a genre other than the very generic term 'avant-garde.'" [3]
However, in the same artcle cited above, Bailey contends that free improvisation must have been the earliest musical style, because "mankind's first musical performance couldn't have been anything other than a free improvisation." Similarly, Keith Rowe stated, "Other players got into playing freely, way before AMM, way before Derek [Bailey]! Who knows when free playing started? You can imagine lute players in the 1500s getting drunk and doing improvisations for people in front of a log fire.. the noise, the clatter must have been enormous. You read absolutely incredible descriptions of that. I cannot believe that musicians back then didn't float off into free playing. The melisma in Monterverdi [sic] must derive from that. But it was all in the context of a repertoire."[4]
[edit] Classical Precedents
Though a degree of improvisation was common in classical music until about 1900, after which the practice was severly curtailed.
Within decades, however, composers like Henry Cowell, Morton Feldman, Pierre Boulez and George Crumb, in some of their works, allowed or even required musicians to improvise. Perhaps the most notable example of this is Cornelius Cardew's Treatise: a graphic score with no conventional notation whatsoever, which musicians were invited to interpret (it's no coincidence that Cardew was a member of AMM).
Another notable group, Musica Elettronica Viva, were formed in Rome in 1966 by Alvin Curran, Richard Teitelbaum, Frederic Rzewski, Allan Bryant, Carol Plantamura, Ivan Vandor, and Jon Phetteplace -- most of whom had at least some crossover with the "experimental classical" world.
[edit] Jazz Precedents
Perhaps the earliest free recordings are two songs by jazz pianist Lennie Tristano: "Intuition" and "Digression," both recorded in 1949 with a sextet including saxophone players Lee Konitz and Warne Marsh. In 1954 Shelly Manne recorded a piece called "Abstract No. 1" with trumpeter Shorty Rogers and reedsmith Jimmy Giuffre which was freely improvised. Jazz critic Harvey Pekar has also pointed out that one of Django Reinhardt's recorded improvisations strays drastically from the chord changes of the established piece. While noteworthy, these examples were clearly in the jazz idiom.
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the free jazz movement coalesced around such important (and disparate) figures as Cecil Taylor, Sun Ra, Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, as well as many lesser-known figures such as Joe Maneri. Free jazz allowed for radical improvised departures from the harmonic and rhythmic material of the composition – for instance, by permitting performers to ignore conventional repeating song-structures. Such music often seemed far removed from the preceding jazz tradition.
These ideas were extended in 1962's Free Fall recording by jazz clarinetist Jimmy Giuffre's trio, featuring music that was often freely and spontaneously improvised, and which had only tenous similarity to established jazz styles. Another important recording was New York Eye and Ear Control (1964), a soundtrack for a film by Michael Snow, recorded for the ESP-Disk label under the leadership of saxophonist Albert Ayler. Snow suggested to Ayler that the band simply play without a composition or themes.
The Spontaneous Music Ensemble was formed by John Stevens and Trevor Watts in the mid-1960s and included, at various times, influential players such as Derek Bailey, Evan Parker, Kenny Wheeler, Roger Smith, and John Butcher. As with the AACM, many of these players began in jazz, but gradually pushed the music into a zone of abstraction and relative quietude. The British record label Emanem has documented much music in this vein.
There was (and continues to be) often considerable blurring of the line between free jazz and free improvisation. The Chicago-based Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), a loose collective of improvising musicians including Muhal Richard Abrams, Henry Threadgill, Anthony Braxton, Jack DeJohnette, Lester Bowie, Roscoe Mitchell, Joseph Jarman, Famadou Don Moye, and Malachi Favors was formed in 1965 and included many of the key players in the nascent international free improv scene. (Braxton recorded many times with Bailey and Teitelbaum; Mitchell recorded with Thomas Buckner and Pauline Oliveros.)
In 1966 Elektra Records issued the first recording of European free improvisation by the UK group AMM, which included at the time Cornelius Cardew, Eddie Prévost, Lou Gare, Keith Rowe and Lawrence Sheaf.
[edit] International Free Improvisation
Through the remainder of the 1960s and through the 1970s, free improvisation spread across the U.S., Europe and East Asia, entering quickly into a dialogue with Fluxus, happenings and performance art (Cardew, for example, being associated with La Monte Young and other New York happenings artists) initially and making its influence immeadiately felt on rock and roll. (Syd Barrett of Pink Floyd was famously an AMM devotee; the Grateful Dead were noteworthy extensions of the influence.)
By the mid-1970s, free improvisation was truly a worldwide phenomenon. Japanese players like saxophonist Kaoru Abe and guitarist Masayuki Takayanagi took the music to dazzling heights. The Los Angeles Free Music Society ran ahead with rambunctious glee through the ideals of free music. And in 1976 Derek Bailey founded Company Week a festival which lasted until 1994 and combined an ever-changing roster of improvisers who collaborated, sometimes for the first time, live. This "musical chairs" approach to collaboration was partly Bailey's response to Stevens's insistence that musicians needed to collaborate for months or years to improvise well together. The spirit of Company survives in many similar ongoing festival and events worldwide.
[edit] Electroacoustic Improvisation
A recent branch of improvised music is characterized by quiet, slow moving, minimalistic textures and often utilizing laptop computers or unorthodox forms of electronics.
Developing worldwide, with centers in New York, Tokyo and Austria, this style has been called "lowercase music" (a term coined by gallery artist and musician Steve Roden for his own work) or "EAI" (electroacoustic improvisation), and is represented, for instance, by the American record label Erstwhile Records, and by the Austrian label Mego.
EAI is often radically different even from established free improv. Eyles writes, "One of the problems of describing this music is that it requires a new vocabulary and ways of conveying its sound and impact; such vocabulary does not yet exist - how do you describe the subtle differences between different types of controlled feedback? I’ve yet to see anyone do it convincingly - hence the use of words like 'shape' and 'texture'!"[5]
[edit] Free improvisation on the radio
The London based independent radio station Resonance 104.4FM, founded by the London Musicians Collective, frequently broadcasts experimental and free improvised performance works. WNUR 89.3 FM ("Chicago's Sound Experiment") is another source for free improvised music on the radio.
