Friday 23 March 2018


Improvisation - Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue…


If you are a musician who is curious about the development of improvisation in modern music one of the inevitable questions that will arise is “is there an essential difference in the outcomes of creating organised music and freely composed music?” Much has been written about the fact that complex schemes for organising sounds produce results that may (or may not) sound like improvised music, and vice versa.
In the 20th century organisation became an obsession with many composers. The development of serialism to total serialism saw a system of accountability for each mark put on paper, and as far as the score was concerned, the composer, if asked, could make an argument for each parameter and each value within each parameter. A person improvising is unlikely to make any such claims, we are not built to create music and logically account for every detail, moment by moment in time, so outcomes must be dissimilar. Comparisons of the sound worlds of organised and improvised have been made in error (in part) because we misunderstood the difference between indeterminate music and improvised music – I shall come back to this shortly.

Should we accept organised music as a combination of sounds and sound characteristics that follow a logical plan or structure we must accept that my car engine produces music, at least when it is running smoothly, otherwise it produces noise, as do I when my language loses its structures in place of utterances of frustration! Musical logic suggests a formal argument, so sonata form is a logical musical system. If the music consists of clouds of clusters from stroked strings on the inside of the piano with the pedal depressed, it can still operate with the idea of introduction, two contrasting musical events, a development and recapitulation. No pitches or rhythms need to be defined yet the music has its own logic. Is it organised, free, or semi-organised / semi-free? If only wholly determined music is organised how do we describe the rest of music?

The same difficulties arise when we attempt to describe what is free; one of the most influential musical figures of the 20th century, John Cage, may be thought of as a composer who tried to liberate the constraints of music, but he is always concerned with the detail of the sounds produced from his scores. His freedom concerns removing the elements of control from the individual, taking the composer’s choice away to permit sound to exist in a context controlled by the performer.

When I discussed the idea of drawing a progressive table from freedom to control to assess where on the scale various types of improvisation could be placed, my fellow blog writer Nurtan came forward with this:
I think, the lowest level (detection) is analogous to the requirement of a minimal level of organisation so that a population of listeners would be able to recognise it as some means of aural communication. The next level is analogous to the degree of organisation necessary to perceive or discriminate it as a recognisable entity – i.e. Piece A is different to Piece B.
The phrase “some means of aural communication” triggered some thoughts as it offered a starting point on a range of music making from least to greatest coherence, starting (in my opinion) with the performer controlling one musical parameter only.

The performer will: 
  1.   Control one parameter
  2.   Control a pair of parameters
  3.   Repeat small scale / localised events
  4.   Select or reject previous material
  5.   Embellish and extend chunks of chosen musical material
  6.   Create clearly defined relationships between events (e.g. musical sequences)
  7.   Confine events to specific predetermined designs, scales, modes, rhythmic patterns and rhythm cycles.
  8.   Control the entire composition to show long term relationships between the full ranges of musical parameters.

On the first point it has to be said that working exclusively with one parameter is not possible, play a succession of pitches for a period of time and some element of every other parameter also comes into play. However one can make a composing intention of (let us say) spatial setting so that it becomes the main focus for the listener.
As we are dealing mainly with the developments in improvisation from the mid-20th century we must remember that the improviser’s musical material may range from instrumental tones to using field recordings, so point 5 could be, as suggested, a musical input or an exploration of the word “talk” in a variety of languages. Similarly with point 6 the designs may be musical structures or take the form of a concept:

everyone plays the same tone
lead the tone wherever your thoughts
lead you
do not leave it, stay with it
always return
to the same place
Later in his e-mail Nurtan extended his thinking by giving me an example of cohesion by drawing on statistical outcomes using dice to explore degrees of probability / certainty. The outcome showed that:

As we make the rules more explicit, we start to pack more information – thus making the sequences potentially more coherent.
Responding to this observation means that in addition to a progressive table of coherence we need three further statements regarding the types of information used to generate an improvisation:

  1.   A performance without reference to predetermined material
  2.   A skeleton framework containing indicators and or some predetermined material
  3.   Predetermined material which has a free parameter.
Improvisation without reference to predetermined material is somewhat problematic as human beings always draw on their personal stock of musical references, style of playing, expertise and limitations with an instrument. Going a little further some improvisations are rehearsed beforehand in order to enhance the outcome, and some skeleton frameworks are reworked time and again, and as a consequence “best options” are regularly used. Point 3 is often a method of ‘blurring’ the music by deregulating rhythm.

Followers of jazz improvisation are well aware of the increasing complexity of harmony over the 20th century and the methods used to balance freedom and coherence, a quick guide is available here:


Similarly the post 1950’s development of harmony and acceptance of sound/noise as music meant that improvisation in contemporary classical music could draw on vast new reserves of material. As a result performers could present almost anything to their public, the challenge would be in creating musical textures and conventions that could be shared. The game of freedom and restriction would have to be played out again.
Readers who want to follow up “skeletons” in contemporary music would do well to read through Stephen Bailey’s comments on Stockhausen’s Solo:


I close with some of Stockhausen’s thoughts regarding “Intuitive” music, where the composer makes his case for performers presenting almost anything to their public:

Question: Were there ever any performances which ­ in your view ­ were failures?
Stockhausen: Do you mean, in which we couldn't play at all?
Question: No, in which something was played which to your musicians' creative sense seemed to be rubbish? Or is there such a thing as rubbish?
Stockhausen: Absolutely. The first sign of rubbish is the emergence of clichés: when pre-formed material comes out; when it sounds like something which we already know.
Question: Have you any way of eliminating acoustical rubbish from the creative process?
….­ rubbish in the sense that they produce dynamic levels which erode the rest for quite some time, without realising it themselves. In certain situations some become very totalitarian, for example, and that leads to really awful situations of ensemble playing. The sounds then become extremely aggressive and destructive…..they all play at once. This is one of the most important criteria: "Do not play all the time", and "Do not get carried away to act all the time".
After several hundred years of having been forced to play only what was prescribed by the composers, once musicians now have the opportunity ­ in Intuitive Music ­ to play all the time, they do. The playing immediately becomes very loud, and the musicians do not know how to get soft again, because everybody wants to be heard. I mean, it is easy to get loud, but how can you get soft again? Finally you think: "Nobody hears me anyway, so I might as well stop".