Is it possible for an improvisation to be free? If so, what is an improvisation free from? If not, how should one understand the term free?
Improvised music as we understand it is “the action of inventing or making something, such as a speech or a device, at the time when it is needed without already having planned it” (Cambridge Press, 2017). In this paper, the nature and practise of improvisation will be examined from a physiological, sociological and philosophical perspective in order to understand how these have a contributory factor in how we perceive improvisation and to what extent these factors govern this action. Please feel free to leave your opinions and research in the comments!
In Derek Bailey's "Improvisation: Its Nature and Practise in Music" (1992), an Interview with John Stevens explains the process in which he engages in free improvisation with students from a peripatetic perspective (Bailey, 1992, Pg. 120). From his exercises we deduce that his students learn to express musical ideas through the fundamental principles of music; pitch, harmony, rhythm, phrasing and structure are all elements of improvisation explored not exclusively in Stevens' etudes or exercises, but also documented in accounts with other leading practitioners with respect to their idiomatic music in this book. One element which could be further explored within Bailey's book is the appraisal from an audience's perspective, the social preconceptions of the concert experience and to what effect this determines how the performer engages with an audience.
Bailey states "Perhaps I can confine myself to the obvious assumption that much of the impetus toward free improvisation came from the questioning of musical language. Or more correctly, the questioning of the ‘rules’ governing musical language" (1992, pg. 84). If 'free' improvisation is to be considered a progression of the musical language, with each musician or group speaking their own developed vernacular dialect of performance systems and techniques separated from tradition or idiom, then surely their music loses its historical and contextual idiomatic/semantic referential quality and falls into obscurity with reference to a chronological retrospective of musical tradition? Wishart Writes; “a perception and conception of music focused through notation can lead to an abstract formalist approach – a preoccupation with conventional notation can lead us into formalism, a situation where there is no longer any experiential verification of our theories about how to compose music” (1996, pg. 11). In this respect, it could be argued that 'free' improvisation is liberated from the lineage of musical heritage and ancestry, although this is problematic in its own right as removed from a conventional formal musical context, the work cannot be academised by scholars who seek to further understand this movement. The rationale remains with the performer who fails to resource this information and we are only equipped with abstract obscure terminology to digest or explain this phenomenon. Perhaps this is the intention of the music all along as Bailey states "while it is today present in almost every area of music, there is an almost total absence of information about it. Perhaps this is inevitable, even appropriate. Improvisation is always changing and adjusting, never fixed, too elusive for analysis and precise description; essentially non-academic. And more than that, any attempt to describe improvisation must be, in some respects, a misrepresentation, for there is something central to the spirit of voluntary improvisation which is opposed to the aims and contradicts the idea of documentation" (1992, Pg. ix).
With regards to emphatic music cognition (EMC), it has been clearly argued that an audience's emotional response to patterns and gestures derived of these music elements come from a conditioned Pavlovian (2003) context of previous musical style, performance and idiomatic traits (White, 2001). What happens to the audience when you remove stylistic idioms of performance and would this elicit a chemical response of dopamine in the brain or not? Considering Stevens' quotation "I am always keeping watch for the equivalent of the little kid at school that is shy - who feels the more things are going on the more he is excluded. And the way I would set up something would always be in direct relationship with that person feeling comfortable", is free improvisation something that can be taught through an emphatic relationship between performer and audience and in turn is free improvisation always at the mercy of an audience that finds the concepts and gestures of free improvisation unrecognisable as patterns?
When quantifying the term 'free', we must understand that there are ideological schisms concerning causation. Pierre-Simon Laplace considers determinist philosophy; "We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future" (1951, Pg. 4). Whilst it is to be understood that we as humans are the sum of our previous experiences and circumstance (White, 2001), musicians of the 20th century have been experimenting with the theory of determinism to create its antithesis, indeterminism. Artist John Cage experimented with removing the human nature of performance and composition by subverting the concert experience with his work "4:33 (1952). "Chance was used by Cage to free the composer from controlling sounds, to free him of his likes and dislikes. Indeterminacy opened the field of music to non-intentional sounds -- the concepts of non-intention and interpenetration are most critical. By Cage's standard, improvisation does not involve either chance or indeterminacy, since improvisers continuously make choices that are determined by their likes and dislikes, i.e., their tastes and memories, and they intentionally make sounds" (Soloman, 2002). By removing the orchestrated quality of western music, Cage's "4:33" is establishing an environment in which we can observe an immeasurable potential for variational sound to manifest due to the Uncertainty Principle with regards to Chaos Theory (Borwein & Rose, 2012). The music is henceforth free from any formulaic regulation, and the musical language is at the whim of the environment in which it is observed. With recent technological advancements in the late 20th century, scientists have begun to comprehend incredibly complex systems and patterns with the use of computers to process this information. If this has only become feasible now because of the processing power and data handling of powerful computers, then how can an audience predict the mathematical potential of this piece of art? Umberto Eco explains the experience of open work; “the invitation offers the performer the chance of an oriented insertion into something which always remains the world intended by the author. In other words, the author offers the interpreter, the performer, the addressee a work to be completed. He does not know the exact fashion in which his work will be concluded, but he is aware that once completed the work in question will be his own” (Eco, 1989, pg. 19).
Through scientific observation it is to be understand that music improvisation creates an emphatic relationship between improviser and audience based on gestural performance. Leman writes "the paradigm of embodied music cognition is based on a number of concepts, related to: ( i ) the body as mediator, ( ii ) the gesture/action repertoire, ( iii ) the action/perception coupling and ( iv ) the link with subjective experiences, such as intentions, expressions, empathy and emotions" (2012). The emotional payoff of listening to music is a release of dopamine as a neuro-transmitter within our brain in order to elicit a positive physiological response (Salimpoor et al. 2011). If it is to be understood that the audience is anticipating a chemical payoff involved in the consumption of music in which they have been conditioned to like, then how would they anticipate via the human mirror neuron system non-typical stylistic patterns and gestures in which they would not recognise? If this implies biologically we are pre-disposed to have an empathetically biased preference to form and structure because of our ability to receive dopamine from it, does this make improvised 'free' music functionally non-compliant with regards to the popular music culture model of Simon Frith and how could it be regarded as "music for social or bodily pleasure" (Popular Music, 2005, Pg. 133) if its design is of an introverted and self-exploratory nature from the perspective of the performer?
An audience's reception is not solely formed from the concert experience, but since the invention of mediation technology we have been engaging in music consumption over the past century through a variety of technologies. Simon Frith discusses how popular music should be considered mass mediated for it to fit within the popular music culture branch (Popular Music, 2005, Pg. 133). Why does improvisational music fail to qualify and be regarded as mass mediated? Bailey comments on 'free' improvisation music and states "two regular confusions which blur its identification are to associate it with experimental music or with avant-garde music. It is true that they are very often lumped together but this is probably done for the benefit of promoters who need to know that the one thing they do have in common is a shared inability to hold the attention of large groups of casual listeners" (Bailey, 1992, Pg. 83). Noted as one of the first albums to explore the concept of modal improvisation (Boothroyd, 2012, pg. 1), Miles Davis' "Kind of Blue" (1959) is still to this day critically acclaimed as one of the best jazz improvisatory albums to date with the Recording Industry Association of America recognising this album to have sold 4,000,000 copies to date (RIAA, 2008), second only to Louis Armstrong with respect towards jazz sales charts. The album was marketed as an experiment in music arrangement and compositional improvisation, developing a new language of quartal harmony in which does not revolve around the ii-V-I functional harmony chord progression used commonly in jazz. “The reduction in the number of chords is often said to allow players a freer rein in melodic invention, releasing them from outlining fast-moving changes with standard formulae, allowing the possibility of both continuing for as long as desired and creating melodic lines from any combination of scale degrees” (Barrett, 2006, pg. 195). Despite the album utilising the stylistic idioms of jazz as the foundation of composition, this clearly evidences the fact that experimental and avant-garde improvisational music can be incorporated into 'popular music', contrary to Bailey's statement, providing the work is not too far removed from the stylistic function of idiomatic music. Does this therefore imply that an audience’s attitudes towards music are conservative by nature and the listener expects an element of transparent traditionalism in order to gain commercial merit? Dr Anthony Storr states in his work “Music and the Mind” (1997) “As our concert programmes demonstrate, the majority of Western listeners appreciate only a narrow range of music, perhaps from the middle of the 17th century to the middle of the twentieth century. To promote a concert consisting only of contemporary art music is usually to court financial disaster – Although these limitations may be deplorable, one can hardly blame the ordinary listener for being so unadventurous – I am not defending the musical conservatism of the average listener, but simply attempting to explain it. Appreciating music other than that with which one has been familiar from childhood is more difficult and more demanding than many professional musicians admit” (Storr, 1997, Pp. 49 – 51). Does this imply that the conservative attitudes embodied in idiomatic music from a socio-cultural perspective form the basis for ethnocentric cultural comparatives and if so, how can music be considered a “universal language” if we experience it differently dependent on our geographical location of heritage.
Barrett argues the commercial success and popular social reception of "Kind of Blue" is due to the album being presented as a modal improvisation album as opposed to a blues album. “Kind of Blue has been misrepresented by its promoters. The roots of blues in the best-selling jazz album have repeatedly been obscured in favour of modal features whose associations are less problematic for those coping with the realities of racial injustice” (Barrett, 2006, pg. 185). With the form of blues abstracted and fused in this context with modal improvisation, is Miles Davis’ improvisational album free from the socio-political trappings indicative of 1950’s America? Parallels can be observed between Miles Davis' "Kind of Blue" and that of Indian classical music, specifically between the styles of Hindustani (Northern Indian) and Carnatic (Southern Indian) culture. Both musical styles place an enormous precedence on the importance of improvisation and adhere to a one raag per musical piece rule, yet their sociological history is completely different and this in turn has had an interesting effect on the development of these two styles. Whilst Carnatic music is occupied with the conservation of old tradition and form as a means of preserving its cultural identity from the advancement of cultural globalisation, Hindustani music has embraced a secular and more liberal approach to multi-cultural music due to its 4000 years of migration (Bailey, 1992, Pg. 1). Ravi Shankar, an embodiment of the Hindustani traditions of music achieved global recognition for his work through his collaborations with The Beatles during the 1960's. Whilst Shankar acknowledged at the time "I wonder how much they can understand, and where all this will lead to. There is so much in our music that goes back thousands of years" (Worth, 1971), it is evident to see now just how much of a cultural impact the fusion between Eastern and Western musical traditions had on the representation of Hindustani classical music globally but to what cost? This presents a difficult dichotomy of thought; for these improvised styles to succeed commercially, has the popular music industry benefacted the growth of these two case studies and given them more artistic liberty and exposure, or has the interaction with the popular music industry forfeited the artist’s ethnocentric quality at the expense of being palatable to an alternative audience?
It is clear to see that upon inspection, the concept of freedom within music creates a plethora of questions with regards to how we engage with music from a physiological, sociological, economic, ethnocentric and academic perspective. It is argued in this paper that the nature of improvisation is governed by our physiological response to the phenomenon which in turn is pre-determined by where we are born geographically and how we comprehend external information based on our previous experiences in life. Within this respect, improvisation is by no means ‘free’ and by analysing music from these broader perspectives we are given a larger context in which we can evaluate the nature of music and performance.
Bibliography:
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Discography:
Davis, M. (1959) Kind of Blue. Columbia Records. New York City, NY, U.S.A
Videography:
Worth, H. (1971) Raga. Apple Films. London, U.K.
Cage, J. (1952) 4:33. [Online]. Available at <www.youtube.com> [Accessed 16/04/2017].
