Safety First

I’m a little snowed under with another project and will unfortunately have to bow out of doing a full-scale teaching diary for the time being (you are, of course, welcome to write about the class in any form you want). I will leave you with a few links though.

• If you haven’t already, as discussed in today’s class and pointed to in my last post, have a listen to the two magicians.
• More on Anthony Braxton, Marilyn Crispell, Gerry Hemingway and Evan Parker.
• The musician who said improvisation was about finding an ending was Charles Hayward.
• The duet that Kevin mentioned by Marian Murray and myself was from the May 2008 Stet Lab (you’ll find this under the title ‘don’t eat the red acid!’).

Finally, if you’re looking for further listening material, I highly recommend destination OUT which posts rare and/or obscure recordings of improvised music(s). (They have, among other things, recently completed a Braxton blogathon.) Subscribe to their feed, download their mp3s, listen, study and learn… and have fun.

We tackled two major elements during this class:

1. getting to get the class to crit
2. how to end and improvised performance

The Big Crit

the good

Play: there’s a several minute stretch of discussion by Andrea, Owen and Paul after the first improvisation. I don’t need to add anything to this; we’re talking about our work.

But…

the bad

Play: are we happy with that? (Our contract made during our first class was to be frank and critical of our work.)

Andrea says we have room for improvement. Owen asks how we might improve. Andrea suggests through more playing and discussion. …But our discussions pretty much exclusively fixated on our successes, and we’re afraid to discuss, in specifics, our less desirable traits—our flaws, our failures, our near and not-so-near misses. How are we going to achieve ‘high-quality’ performances if we don’t apply the same criteria that we bring to bear on the work of our elders and models?

We also tend to propose ‘solutions’ without fully specifying the problem, without asking what is wrong with what we are doing? what dissatisfies us about our current state / performance?

(This will potentially, and eventually, relate to examining criteria.)

the ugly

Kevin: we could be more pig headed.

Owen: did not like my playing. (Excellent! a proper crit!) “The jazz parts put me off.” But if you didn’t like my playing, what could you do to stop me? (An unasked question: what could you have done to redirect, redefine or subvert my playing?)

My crit: I don’t trust the group (but this is actually my problem, not the group’s fault). What sucked? I agree with Kevin, we performed like sheep. Paul could be more assertive, less polite; Kevin could demonstrate more nerve; Andrea could make strong statements by dropping out. We rarely do endings that go bang…

the art (craft? science? magic?) of ending

ending a

Andrea sees a convergence of agency [sorry, my paraphrase] between performers signaling an ending. But is that what’s really happening if, as we’ve discussed before, this kind of interaction, as observed from a third party, is extremely unreliable sign to navigate by.

Owen desires a more abrupt ending… What do you need to do to get that ending?

ending b

Owen feels a need for signals.

We’ve done a lot of ending in the last few weeks, so we are capable of doing endings. What is the mechanism?

Kevin rephrases this question: how do you signify an ending? (This is an interesting, and telling, way to think about the problem… wonder where this leads to.)

Andrea: stop playing, and wait for the others to stop. Certainly works (this is a pretty good answer).

Kevin talks about leaving your options open for coming back in if the others do not take the exit. However, if I guessed what Kevin was doing, and I sabotaged it, what’s happens then?

Andrea brings up the audience as creator of meaning and possibly somehow the arbitrator of the ending. (But how?)

(The answer to our question is between Kevin and Andrea’s statements.)

If two performers desire different kinds of endings, what happens? What can you do in that situation?

ending c

This one, for me, sounded cool. None of us got quite what we wanted, but the results were interesting. (Something to return to.)

How was that? did it suck? was it better? We’re good at describing what happened, but not so willing to make ‘quality’ assessments.

Andrea talks about an ending being a consensus or compromise. Andrea is on to something here: the last improvisation, for him, felt like “we’re have an ending; oh no, we don’t; oh yes, we have… everyone did their own ending… it was cool in a sense, but it was also… forced. Or not an ending as such. [emphasis mine]” Some of this was desirable (“it was cool in a sense”), but held back by some other notion of an ending (“not an ending as such”). Where does this other notion of an ending come from (this ‘real’ / ‘true’ / ‘authentic’ ending)? And if we don’t push this somewhere (“forced”), if we don’t make it happen, then how does the music happen? (Andrea thinks the music can happen without the group making it happen.)

Me: “You’ve actually articulated the idea [of how endings work]… but we’re stuck on this one word [actually two] which is ‘false ending’… There is no double bar line… but we can end, which I agree is magical, but like magicians… the person doing it knows full well that there’s a sleight of hand.” Are we unwilling to open the hood and examine the engine? Improvisation can appear magical (is magical), but are we afraid to loose this sense of magic by examining the sleight of hand?

other notes

Are we imagining a preordained ending? (If we are, is this a useful concept?)

An unanswered question: Kevin, last week, expressed a possible improvisative tactic as “continue as you mean to go on”. Why? Why would you continue as you mean to go on?

Owen suggests prepared elements several times during this class. I’m resisting this: prepared means (scores, compositions, etc) are useful things to bring to improvised music, but, as stated in the first class, we are not going to be dealing with them (at least during this first term). I want to see what is possible within an open improvisative context before resorting to other means.

Andrea, like last week, brings up the word ‘control’. Do we not have significant amounts of control (25% share/stake in a quartet, 20% in a quintet)? Is there a question of responsibility for our performance? it seems to me that we cannot hold anyone else to account for the music…

homework

Listening to some endings:

Anthony Braxton and Evan Parker, ‘ParkBrax 5’ (from Duo (London) 1993).
Derek Bailey, George Lewis and John Zorn, ‘On Golden Pond’ and ‘The Warning’ (from Yankees).
Marilyn Crispell and Gerry Hemingway, ‘Billy Duck’ and ‘Jump’ (from Duo).