Well, so much for that being the final post for 2006…
I’m still in the middle of my ‘real’ writing, thus the paucity of entries of late, but I could hardly leave 2006 like that, so, due to popular demand (or singular demand anyway) I’ll let you in on what I learned from my students.
A lot of us have ‘played tag’ in the context of improvisation. It’s very simple, if you’re not playing, or you’re off stage, you can ‘tag’ a player out and take their place. A simple scheme for rotating players and a performer-centered way of altering orchestration.
I’ve encountered this being done between ‘pieces’ (i.e. the tagging takes place when the performers are not playing). I’ve also encountered tagging during the ‘piece,’ but in large scale, long-duration performances where the ‘frame’ boundaries (beginning and ending) were insignificant. Both these lead me to presume (without evidence, anecdotal or otherwise) that the changeover of players during a small scale, short-duration (less than 5 minutes) performances would be unworkably disruptive.
I’m glad, despite my protests, that the students (VT in particular, who was largely responsible for devising the scheme) stuck to their guns.
Well, not only does it turn out I was wrong about the disruptiveness of the scheme, but the results (‘disruptive’ or otherwise) have interesting/creative possibilities in regard to, for instance, ending, structuring, and in terms of thinking about responsibilities (or lack there of), and the consequences of actions.
I’ll return to some of these issues in the future, but I’ll leave this post by saying that the results of this scheme were really interesting from the point of view of the performers (those being tagged out, those coming in, and those unchanging), and from the point of view of the audience. Additionally, those habitual set of tactics I carry around with myself (and it’s only under these unfamiliar circumstances that you realize how much baggage you carry around) just didn’t work, or needed major re-engineering.
Still being distracted from that ‘real’ writing I should be doing, but….
This started at surviving the crunch. Well, the entry ‘the past sure is tense’ had this interesting phrase:
At some point in antiquity music only existed in the present tense.Which is what I queried about. Ted Reichman posted an entry as a reply, and here’s my own response (and some clarification of my short and vague original query).
…Until people invented any forms of musical notation, recording etc. and thus became able to fix music, or at least an abstracted representation of music, into a durable physical form, if a specific piece of music, or even a way of making music, faded from the memory of every individual who ever knew it or heard it, poof, it was gone.As a practicing improviser, I’m pretty sure TR doesn’t mean it in this way, but if we accept this at face value, we’re only a stone’s throw from saying what the very old edition of the Grove Dictionary said:
It [extemporization or improvisation] is… the primitive act of music-making…. Among all primitive peoples… musical composition consists of extemporization subsequently memorized, and the process can proceed no farther until some method of notation is devised to record the composer’s musical thoughts independently of his musical performance. [my emphasis]
entry on ‘extemporization or improvisation’ in Eric Blom ed. (1954), The Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians 5th ed. vol. II, 1975 reprint, (London: MacMillan Press), p. 89.I wonder if we’ve all been brainwashed here. As performers (and improvisers) do we want to accept these terms? Is improvisation a “primitive act”? Is the recording process the route towards progress/evolution?
We wouldn't be able to do this historical examination without the recorded evidence.True, true, true, but the most basic recording device/technology in this case has nothing to do directly with those that we have been citing (audio recording and notation). The “applying [of] a set of contemporary ideas, canonizing, critiquing in hindsight” can be done with just two things: Memory and language (floating in a soup of society and culture).
…but I still remember the musical material of this concert (and so do John and Matt because we still talk about it)…All of which is activated by memory and language (feeding-off of, and feeding-back on, society and culture). You are, in more than one sense, ‘re-experiencing it’ and ‘re-creating it.’ TR is in this case, perhaps, “applying a set of contemporary ideas, canonizing, critiquing in hindsight.”
I am saying that it existed at that historical moment, and not at others, as molecules vibrating either in the air (active expression), or in peoples' brain cells (memory).How about if I paraphrase this thus: All music (including ‘recorded’ music) exists at a historical moment as molecules vibrating either in the air, or in peoples’ brain cells.
…a piece of music has been fixed in a physical form that will outlive the people who performed and heard that piece of music, it exists in the past tense. Not that it _existed_, which assumes that at some point it ceased to exist, but that it's simultaneously existing NOW, in physical form, and THEN, in the act of composition (in the case of notation) or performance (in the case of recording).Okay we need to extricate a couple of (interdependent) issues here.
I came across this interesting entry at Mixed Meters. The performance in question is by Debora Petrina—a self-identified ‘polymorphic artist.’ (Incidentally there’s an un-YouTubified version of the video in question on her site. YouTubified video.)
I’ve got no special insight into the specific whys or whats of Petrina’s performance, but what I find fascinating about this is the idea of self-consciously engineering the body and movement into the (concert) performance ritual.
Much of performance ritual gets handed down, and, perhaps in European Concert Music more than in any other tradition, without thought or critique. “Well, that’s how we’ve always done it”—never mind that, as anthropologists will tell you, such statements are (powerful) fiction. A stark example of this might be in acousmatiques in which the concert hall context and metaphor was accepted and (super-)imposed without, apparently, discussion or dissent.
I’m sympathetic to the idea that these rituals and context can (should?) be (re)examined, and the process of opening up these black boxes might reveal the unfamiliar, the unorthodox, and the complex (all good creative stuff).
I also find the self-conscious visibility of the body in this performance compelling—the body in motion as a site of creation, maybe. As discussed by Suzanne Cusick, European Concert Music has come to value the mind over the body, attempting to exorcise the body out of the Concert Hall:
The ideology of listening… strongly discourages physical engagement when listening. Even more, it discourages identification with the bodily work of performers. [my emphasis]
Cusick, 1999, p. 495.Again, think of the ‘all ears,’ discorporate, mind-to-mind model embedded in much acousmatiques.
As each discouragement draws the listener’s identification away from the physical, it directs it towards the imaginative mastery of all possible combinations embodied by ‘the music itself’. Socially mobile, freed from physical work, seeming to encompass all possibilities in a unified whole… a sonic experience of the middle-class self.
Ibid., p. 495.By making the body invisible, we’re positing a vanilla, mayonnaise, ‘universal’ human, but the result is, ironically, very much gender, race, class and culture specific.
Other things have conspired to keep me away from this blog (not least having to do some ‘real’ writing this month), but also one of those brick walls has hit on the blog as well….
Having, optimistically, kick-started this thread on the solo context, I thought I could separate the various elements—the various techniques and tactics—that I enroll when solo. I would talk about, say, the lexical model, the cyborg aspects, the pianistic transpositions in their own corresponding entries. Well, at least that was the scheme I proposed in that first entry.
Things, however, never work out quite how you expected, and as I tried to formulate these ideas in my head, they started unravelling. Or, more accurately, the opposite of unravelling—elements started to fuse together. Or, better yet, I realized that these discrete categories were a lazy dogma that I carried around without thinking about its unworkability.
I couldn’t figure out how to talk about one element without another infecting it. Couldn’t figure out how to maintain the ‘purity’ of the ideas (yet more blurry boundaries, but this time in regards to writing and thinking music). Thinking about pianistic transpositions, for instance, would intersect with notions of the vocabulary, which, in turn, seemed to be connected with the cyborg dialogs.
I will get back to this, but the process of writing about this might be a little bit more haphazard, a little bit tentative and aimless (hopefully in the best sense of the word), than I had initially sketched out.
One chilly winter’s night, some years ago, in a city under the sea (well, almost), AMC (who appeared in these pages before) and I were walking from a salsa club run by one of AMC’s friends and colleagues.
“I don’t think I’m built for that. I mean—how do you do that?” I said, recalling of the movement of limbs and hips at the club. Neither of us know how to salsa, but via unplanned meanderings, detours and parenthetics, our conversation turns to another dance we are incapable of—the tango.
“Whenever I meet an Argentinian, someone from… Like C or E, I ask them if they can tango, and they say yes, and I just ask how? How do you do it? And they say it’s easy—just learn a few moves and make up the rest….”
AMC interjected, “but that’s the description of anything that’s really, really hard!” Adding, “think about improv. Think about how many classical musicians can’t improvise. I’ve met classical musicians—with beautiful, beautiful technique—but can’t improvise. And, all I can say is you learn a few things and make up the rest.”
Let’s continue where we left off last time:
As we’ve already covered, when you play in position all fingers behind the stopping finger should be touching the strings. So, for instance, in the case of the first three notes of pattern A the resulting fingers on the ’board should be finger 1 (C#), fingers 1+2 (D), and fingers 1+2+3+4 (E).
In line with our last excursion in learning the geography, let’s repeat the patterns going down, but this time following the major mode’s (A major’s, in this case) arrangement of intervals.
Continue the process across the strings:
Incidentally, note how the three patterns that we marked A, B and C (and the corresponding hand shapes) recur. There’s nothing particularly magical about this, it’s simply a side effect of how a major mode is constructed, but it does make your life a little easier.
Now ascending:
Try different scales/patterns, and, as with the last time, once you’re comfortable with this, fire up the metronome, vary the rhythms, articulation and phrasing, add a little swing, etc. Be creative.
By the way, in addition to making reasonable warm-ups (but only in moderation and in combination with other tasks), these exercises are also an effective tools for getting acquainted with new or non-standard tunings.
Group improvisation is much more (a performative, structuring) diplomacy (including the cyborg variety) than the ordering of truth. It is not so much about empathy (and thus speaking on behalf of ‘those without voices’), but creating a social environment in which no one can be voiceless.
Let me return again to the quote that I opened this blog with:
What happens is what happens; is what you have created; is what you have to work with.
Anthony Frost and Ralph Yarrow (1990), Improvisation in Drama (London: MacMillan), p. 2.However much we may desire the world to be a certain way, however much we want others to be like us, to like us, and live like us (although without coming over our borders for fear of replacing us), we cannot do this without one party doing violence onto another.
…avoid the reflex of trying to make it into somthing you think it ought to be, rather than letting it become what it can be.
ibid. p. 3.To improvise in a collective context requires you to understand your own desires, understand that others have autonomous desires, yet know that together we share the same space and time—the same resources. We all have to compromise. We need to understand that the results may not resemble anything that you, or anyone else, initially dreamed of. The resulting settlement may be inelegant, ugly, and may have to be renegotiated periodically. The result will probably be a place of conflict and mutual misunderstandings, but violence done by one against the other can nevertheless be minimized.
Solo.
Well, I’ve been trying my hand at the solo guitar improvisation context for a few years now. It’s still, when I stop to think about it, terrifying, but it is getting a little easier every time, and, although I have yet to leap off the edge in this context, I’m beginning to find the geography a little easier to navigate—a little more comfortable. In fact, it feels as though the my most recent solo performance (just earlier this month), was the first time it came together in any semblance of a musical way.
Let me kick-start this thread on solo improvisation by outlining some themes and topics I want to return to.
Once upon a time I played the piano, and it was with that particular instrument that I first tried my hand at solo improvisation. Under the guidance and tutorage of CL, I studied strategies and tactics of pianists such as Paul Bley, Cecil Taylor, Keith Tippett, and, under my own steam, Marilyn Crispell. And it took years to figure out how to translate and transplant these pianistic techniques and strategies onto the guitar(ist). The process was, not just convoluted, but sometimes, well, backwards (realizing that existing guitar(ist) techniques could be redeployed as pseudo-pianistic ones).
The approach of creating and defining a vocabulary of boundaries and areas of exploration is something that probably warrants several posts to itself. This lexical approach to improvisation is associated with players like, say, Anthony Braxton, but in (very) different ways I can also discern in playing of musicians as diverse as Taylor and Pauline Oliveros.
The way I finally cracked (or at least allowed me my first steps into) the solo context was by listening to what the guitar had to suggest. The strategy I found was maybe more a very body conscious cyborg diplomacy than, perhaps, anything to do with personal expression.
Solo. Is that alone together, or is that in partnership by myself?
Last time we took steps to learn the geography of the fingerboard, we were only using the ‘finger-per-fret’ shape. Let’s now go and try and apply the extended shape we learned last time to this task.
Within reason, you should be able to use whatever scalar pattern you want, but I’ll use the run-of-the-mill major mode here if only because its general familiarity. Most of the procedures covered in learning the geography last time are still applicable so I won’t rehearse them here. Needless to say you should be able to play the scalar pattern (major mode in this case) with the first finger with no problems.
One you do that, all that’s apparently left to do is add the other fingers (as before, the position of the first finger is marked my the diamond notehead):The corresponding hand shapes are as follows:The first two hand shapes will be familiar by now, so shifting from A to B should be logical and straightforward. Shifting from B to C, on the other hand, requires you to shift, and think of, your first finger while simultaneously changing hand shapes. Keep in mind what I’ve said about this. Specifically:
…as you shift up [or down] the neck of the instrument, you’d be getting your bearings from the first finger, and be thinking in terms of two positions with two corresponding hand shapes….I wouldn’t rush this—there’s a lot of information to be encoded and absorbed into your mind and body—so I’ll leave it there and continue in part 7b.
Is any improvised music really idiomatic?
I’ve already remarked on the label ‘non-idiomatic improvisation’ in connection with ‘pan-idiomatic improvisation’, and, in addition, in examining the term ‘free improvisation’, I’ve stated that ‘free improvisation’ could denote an “assortment of overlapping or unrelated things”, and to some, perhaps lesser, extent, this is also the case with ‘non-idiomatic improvisation.’ Also, in the same way that we can read the ‘free’ to denote an aspiration rather than an achievement, ‘non-idiomatic’ could denote an (unachievable) aim.
Having already iterated the corresponding problems and pitfalls, I don’t want to rehearse them here in the context of this new term. I do, however, want to ask whether improvisation can, under any circumstance, be idiomatic. I am not asking if non-idiomatic improvisation is possible (analogous to the question of whether an improvisation can be truly free), I’m asking if ‘idiomatic improvisation’ is a misnomer.
According to my computer’s online dictionary, idiom is “a characteristic mode of expression in music or art.” Hmm… not sure that helps here. So, beyond definitions of idiom that assume communication or expression (thorny parameters that likely end up in the ‘I-know-it-when-I-see-it’ domain), what might be a pragmatic, workable definition of ‘idiom’? I’ll propose, for the purposes of this discussion, that idiom is the mechanism via which the intricate and contingent nexus of expectations play out through performance. Listening to a performance, if expectations are met, we have something that is idiomatic, perhaps even stereotypical.
Fine, fine, fine… But in practice, how is an audience member processing, and judging, these chains and chains of probabilities? In practice, how are you even to know which set of probabilistic archetypes—which idiom—is in operation? And how does this all play out in the practice of improvisation?
Take a guitarist, an improviser. Just that choice of instrument comes with so much cultural baggage that an audience member, for all I know, is immediately calculating clouds of probable scenarios. Again, fine, fine, fine… but does this mean that the audience member cannot be surprised? That they cannot have their expectation confounded? (Incidentally, I think the problem with our reasoning here is that we’re assuming, and implicitly positing, intentionality as knowable, and as a significant (perhaps primary) ingredient in thinking about expectations; we’re to some extent still thinking about communication or expression.)
I’d argue that all improvisation must, by definition, at least allow the possibility of the redefinition of idioms. That the act of improvisation negates, kicks around, or opens up, the black box of the idiom. Although I think a performer can be idiom-conscious and improvise at the same time, I don’t believe they are bound by it. I like to think that audiences of improvisation don’t come to be spectators at an authorization ceremony, but are witnesses to a, at a bare minimum, mild shakeup.
What’s surprising is not that improvisation can confound the chain of expectations, but that, for example, Pulitzer Prize winning neo-classicists can consistently fulfill them ;-)
Derek Bailey, himself probably the best known proponent of the ‘non-idiomatic’ moniker, remarked that the difference between free and idiomatic improvisation depends on the former’s ability to “renew and change the known and so provoke an open-endedness which by definition is not possible in idiomatic improvisation” (Bailey, 1992, Improvisation: Its Nature and Practice in Music, London: British Library National Sound Archive, p. 142). Yet, in earlier in the same book, acknowledged that improvisation in general is “the sap through which music renews and reinvigorates itself” (ibid. p. 28). Does this mean that even Bailey saw that idiomatic improvisation could be, at times, free?; that it might, on occasion, not be idiomatic at all?
Things I’ve learned from The Cambridge History of 20th Century Music:
If you’re relaxed and comfortable with the tasks covered in the last entry on position playing, you should be secure with the shape colloquially known as ‘finger-per-fret’. Although this hand shape is fine up to a point, if you tune your guitar intervals larger than major thirds, and that’s the case with all but one adjacent pair of strings in standard tuning, then the whole chromatic scale is not available in a single position. In order to cover the chromatic scale, we need four fingers to span five fret positions.
Above, left is the shape we’ve covered so far, as above, right is the extended shape (I’ve heard this referred to as ‘extended-finger-per-fret’ which sounds to me like a klugy designation at best). From now on, the bulk of our position playing will be shared between these two hand shapes; shifting from one shape to the other.
A question you may be asking is, conceptually, do you (a) shift the first finger while keeping the rest of your hand stationary, or do you (b) shift your hand while keeping your first finger stationary. Since you’d be only moving one finger (a) seems to be more efficient, on the other hand, given that you should be getting your bearing from your first finger, (b) seems more in line with the reasons for playing in position. The image below shows the ‘finger-per-fret’ shape in the center, with movements (a) and (b) represented on the left and right respectively:
The simple answer to this query is both (a) and (b); the more complex answer is neither (a) nor (b).
Simple answer first: When shifting up or down the neck, you still get your bearings from your first finger, thus, in such situations, (b) describes better the mental processes involved. However, once you have shifted into position, (a) describes better the processes involved since the first finger may occupy two fret positions. Let’s illustrate this with two ways to approach a scale fragment:
The first of these, you’d be thinking in terms of a single position in which the first finger occupies two fret positions—thus (a). In the second example, as you shift up the neck of the instrument, you’d be getting your bearings from the first finger, and be thinking in terms of two positions with two corresponding hand shapes—thus (b).
Now the more complex answer: Eventually, you should not be thinking about macroscopic gestures (the position and movement of the first finger/arm/etc), and the microscopic gestures (the shape and orientation of your finger/hand/etc) as separate phenomena with corresponding independent mental processes. This should come with study, time and practice.
Incidentally, some of you may know of a technique in which the fourth finger occupies two fret positions (in which case a single position spans six fret positions). I am not going to cover that here primarily because I don’t use this fourth finger extension at all frequently, and thus I feel unqualified to talk about it.
When I meet, on occasion, a younger, or relative novice, improvising guitarist, and we talk about their models or gurus, I hear the usual suspects (or, should I say, white men?)—Bailey, Frith, etc; never Rowe. Yet, in numerous ways, many of these relative rookies to this practice/tradition are following in the footsteps, not of these more ‘guitaristic’ improvisers, but of Keith Rowe.
Maybe it’s because he is not one of my own models, maybe because I admire his tactics and methodologies from a distance rather than using it as a bounce-off point for my own work, maybe because I find his approach to the instrument so alien, that I find Keith Rowe’s playing (which seems like so much the wrong word for what Rowe does) fascinating and disconcerting. Rowe’s approach borders on what I might, in my most dogmatic moments, consider, well, just plain wrong ;-)
I don’t want to make it sound like my fascination is akin to watching a car crash, but there is something unnerving about all of this. I almost feel like I should not appreciate his playing (there’s that verb again). Something gets to me, for instance, as I watch Keith Rowe - Prepared Guitar (a YouTubified Subsonics ep.):
…Pollock for example, laid the canvas on the floor which meant he broken the link with European easel painting in one swoop—in one move. I could of figured that if I did the same with the guitar—if I laid the guitar down—I would achieve a whole number of things that were my objective at the time: A break with the past, the possibility of developing a completely new language, a sense of detaching yourself from the immediacy of the instrument, and creating a gap between you and…Then there’s that expression:
…the essential material.Whatever that means.
I feel nearer, more a part of the paining… literally be in the painting. …There is pure harmony [between painter and painting], an easy give and take, and the painting comes out well.
Jackson Pollock quoted in Ellen G. Landau (1989), Jackson Pollock (London: Thames and Hudson), p. 168.When I think of, say, Lavender Mist, I don’t see the result of detachment from the material/media; I see gestures, the body, the canvas in some kind of impossible hybridity that problematizes the apparent frozen state of the canvas and the movement of the body.
I approach paining the same way I approach drawing, that is, direct…. No sketches / acceptance of / what I do—. …the more immediate, the more direct—the greater the possibilities of making… a statement.
Pollock quoted ibid., p. 169.Although the final outcome may be paint and canvas—that distilled materiality—this non-representation is a consequence of embracing “the immediacy of the… essential material.”
With the guitar in its conventional and normal position against your stomach, it’s very much an expression coming out of your stomach about yourself: The ‘I’; who I am; my person; experiences transmitted. And it was really to do with expression—the expression of sentiment. Whereas laying the guitar on the table; it was much more reflecting something about the world rather than a personal view point. So, therefore it became, in a sense, more industrial, more mechanical.I do have the guitar against my stomach (well, by my ribs anyway), but I don’t agree that this is necessarily about an expression emanating from myself. I disagree, as I think Row does, with this notion of the guitar as a medium through which the message is transmitted. I also disagree that the source of this transmission is the guitarist, as I think Rowe does too. However, while I’ve rejected these ideas in favor of a performative social metaphor or a cyborg model, Rowe is interested in material in a very sculptural sense.
Having taken our first steps in integrating the small-scale and large-scale gestures in position playing, let’s revisit those one string lines, but, this time, instead of playing the line with the first finger, this time play it with the fourth. Again, this could be any scale, arpeggio, or melody, but, as the example, I’m still taking Morricone’s music from Cinema Paradiso:
The first finger’s position is marked by the diamond notehead, and, in tablature, with the number in square brackets.
What we’re doing here is shifting the ‘finger-per-fret’ shape up and down the neck. As you shift this shape, you should be thinking of the position of the first finger (and only thinking of the fourth finger in terms of the ‘finger-per-fret’ shape relative to the first). Remember, in position playing the guitar player gets their bearing from their first finger. The fact that the note three frets above the first finger is the one that you hear should not be your primary concern, just target the appropriate fret with the first finger and the rest should fall into place.
As always, try different strings, and different lines/melodies.
If you’re having difficulty keeping in mind the position of the first finger, try a variant like the following:
Exercises like the one above allows you to sound the fret at the first finger to aurally remind you where you are.
Once you’re comfortable with these, try, for example, playing the line alternately with the first and the fourth finger:
By alternating sounding the first and the fourth finger in such cases, we’re psychologically and physically constructing a non-linear relationship between sounding/fretting actions (and the corresponding aural feedback) and macroscopic gestures.
Incidentally, I hope I don’t need to, at this stage, remind you to relax and take your time….
‘Art’ is a term of exclusion.
There. I’ve said it.
To say one thing is art is to deny that that other thing (right over there, elsewhere, whose? well, not mine) is not. There cannot be such a thing as inclusive art.
I leave it up to each of us to decide whether that’s a good thing or not. (I’ve laid down my cards already.)
You may be wondering why, in these discussions of position playing, that I’m not talking about finger independence. If you’re used to those rigorous and exhaustive compendiums of fingerboard calisthenics (or s&m exercises), you may be asking what the reason for the relative simplicity of these exercises is.
Finger-to-finger independence is one of those things that you come across in keyboard pedagogy (and even there it is not quite as useful as sometimes made out). One of the things that differentiates the keyboard from the fretboard (excepting instruments such as the clavichord and the Ztar) is that the former has random access (you can, more or less, press any combination of keys) while the latter, in comparison, has significant restrictions in degrees of freedom (only one note per string). While the former is conceptually a set of non-latching pushbuttons, the latter is a set of single-pole, multi-throw switches (in the case of the guitar, this would be something like six SP20T switches). Nothing wrong with that, but it does mean that very, very little of a guitar player’s repertoire of gestures requires, or draws upon, the finger-to-finger independence of movement.
Generalizing for a moment, I would not recommend that any budding guitar player work specifically on finger independence unless their particular technique demands it (e.g. touch/tap playing or contrapuntal fingerstyle). Furthermore, unless you know what you are doing, unless you are mindful of your physical/physiological parameters and constraints, it may be best to take your time and approach this at a later date, and with caution. It does not help that many of the published collections of exercises range from useful, if approached properly, to pointless, and possible sources of injury.
My two cents….
How do improvisers, in an open, group context, know how to end? How do they manage, on occasion, to stop on a dime?
If, as a performer in such contexts, you’ve yet to experience such a moment—that knock-your-socks-off coda—please, come back to this post at a later date: There’s no substitute for discovering the phenomena yourself.
Yeah, go away, do some playing, come back when you’re done.
Okay, you’re back. Now you know that it is possible to create satisfying endings—maybe heart-stoppingly dramatic, or maybe subdued and elegant—spontaneously. You’re perhaps asking self-conscious question such as, what is the underlying mechanism behind these endings, or whether there are steps to maximize the chances of such endings (and minimize the probability of damp squibs and fizzles).
A solution that less experienced improvisers sometimes suggest is the cue. However, should just one performer in the group miss the prompt, you’re not only back to the original quandary, but you’ve now got yourselves in a situation which a skeptical audience may view as a goof-up (well, ’cause it was). Cues are useful things, particularly in time-constrained, large group settings, and in settings where there is an escape hatch (I’ll maybe talk more about such things in another post), but as a control signals for (more or less) instantaneous, collective, group behavior, it has, I think, far too many pitfalls.
I’m also distrustful of pre-agreed (or stereotypical) musical gestures (e.g. cadence like shapes) as markers for potential endings. Although an audience is less likely to notice a goof-up, you’re still stuck with some of the same problems as cueing. In addition, if part of the point of improvisation is to take us to the unknown, then there’s no guarantee that pre-agreed gestures will make any kind of sense when we get there. And there’s no way you can plan for every single eventuality in such an open context.
How an improviser approaches endings in a group context may be the best kept secret in the practice of improvised musics. Well, it’s a secret in so far as it’s seldom discussed or theorized, but the mechanism itself can be as simple as you want it: See a potential exit; just take it. Should the rest of the group not follow, that’s fine, the performance continues without you, at least for the time being. Should all but one of the performers ‘end,’ well, that wasn’t and end was it? It was just the point at which that person started a solo. That solo might directly lead to an end, or maybe it segues into another section which, maybe, then ends.
Do you see the pattern here? As improvisers, we are spontaneously, and retroactively, justifying what is happening and has happened. You are avoiding the “reflex of trying to make it into something you think it ought to be, rather than letting it become what it can be.” The significance of a gesture is not written in stone, it’s up for grabs and, in all probability, will be recursively defined and redefined as the performance continues.
…There’s a certain amount of anticipation and tactical considerations which help make the bigger shape. But on a detail for detail level, it’s not done by adding one thing to another, it’s done by… instantaneous is the wrong word because you’ve done it before you’ve thought about it. You can only listen to it… after it’s happened. But you’ve done it before you’ve thought of it.
Evan Parker quoted in Graham Lock (1991), ‘speaking of the essence’, Wire (issue 85), p. 32.The character and function of every element in the performance is generated performatively rather than preordained. Is that the ending coming up ahead? Well, maybe, but we won’t know for sure until it ends.
Seems like a long time since my last entry on position playing, and even longer on natural harmonics. So, let me get back to these…
These are the simplest exercises. They’re not, well, even really exercises. These make passable warm ups, but, you know, there are much better stuff you can do for that purpose. Think of these as stepping stones towards playing (and thinking) in position.
If you’ve managed the tasks on playing in position pt. 1: don’t get lost, you should have no problem playing, with the first finger on the fretboard, a chromatic scale (or any other set of intervals for that matter). Find a comfortable point on the guitar (say, around the neck’s mid point), and, just stopping using your first finger, play a descending chromatic scale on the treble E string:
Now lets add the other fingers.
The position of the first finger is marked in each case with a diamond notehead. Your first finger should remain at this position while fingers two, three and four land on the fingerboard for the upper notes. Relax, don’t use excessive force: you don’t actually need to press down the string with anything other than your fourth finger, but the other fingers should nevertheless rest approximately at the fret positions. The result should be that archetypal ‘finger-per-fret’ shape.
This is important: The point of these exercises is to get you used to feeling your location on the fingerboard with that first finger while simultaneously getting comfortable with the distribution of fingers down the frets (the finger-per-fret shape). I reiterate, you should not have to press down hard with all fingers, but at least rest the non-fretting fingers (second and third) gently on the string as the fourth finger comes down.
Stop when it starts to become uncomfortable. As you play these, it is entirely reasonable for you not to go all the way down the neck of the instrument. As you repeat the shape towards the bass end of the instrument’s neck, as the adjacent frets become more distant, you may find that your fingers, hand, arm, etc. become less comfortable. Stop and take a break.
You got the idea? You can now do the same on this on the other strings.
And ascending:
Once you get this under your belt, try using a metronome, vary the rhythms, articulation and phrasing, add a little swing, etc. Be creative.
Remember, these are transitory exercises, once onto the next step, you’ll probably never play these again (maybe except to demonstrate to your own students), so don’t dwell on, or over play, these.
By the way, some weeks ago I saw the damnedest thing. One of the best things I'd witnessed in a while, and one of the worst… on the same bill. The second act was so baaaaaaad that MLM and I just packed up and left after barely three minutes. I mean, it was lame, lame, lame… lame.
Well, okay, we've all been spectators to lousy performances, so why am I writing about this one? It brought out something interesting in the audience’s reactions, illustrating something about our desires and expectations of music and performance in a way significant to those of us who practice improvisation and not-one-hundred-per-cent-idiomatic performance practice, and, in particular, those of us who sometimes perform for skeptical, unversed, and/or hostile audiences.
During the first act (the one that MLM and I thought rocked), the audience in general was unruly, loud, boisterous. Actually, I didn’t mind too much (I’ve played clubs with worse), but for MLM (who is more familiar with concert audiences) it was a major distraction. But, like I said, I really did not mind the audience’s general unruliness. However, here’s the deal, come the second act…
silence
Well, actually the silence followed several “shhhh” noises (from, as far as we could tell, some of the the same loudmouthed individuals from the first half), which in turn followed on from comments such as “this bodes well: They have a bass player.”
So what triggered this self-imposed, self-policed reverent silence? What cued these individuals—who were more than happy to mumble, talk, laugh and shuffle ’round during the previous act?
I think they were responding to the music stands.
Both acts, IMHO, displayed a certain lack of presentation skills and theatrical know-how. The second act was certainly not more ‘professional’ or ‘serious’ (for starters the guitar player spent the whole of the setup time noodling away with the amp turned up)…
…but, hey, they at least were (apparently) ready to read from parts.
I’m not about to do a ranting piece of ‘the state of culture in our society.’ I don’t believe that this audience was stupid. I might be persuaded that they’re not fully conscious of what they were doing and why, probably unaware of the implication of their actions and behavior, but I don’t believe they were acting out of ignorance per se. Our little cultural economies put enormous value on texts, scores, parts and notation, and put enormous value on traditions and practices that employ these texts, scores, parts and notation (however much that may be a pantomime act). The audience that night were responding to this. They knew the second act had greater worth.
They weren’t dumb, they just weren’t thinking.
Not quite a road story, but….
It’s in novel situations that you often find out what your dogmas, habits and prejudices are; when playing somewhere you’d never been before, with players you’d never played with, or for an audience you didn’t already know. The place in question was, looking this up, less than a hundred kilometers away from the nearest town than I have some experience of, but the socio-musical interactions were as unfamiliar as any I’d encountered recently.
There I was, playing (improvising, in fact), and I note that, musically, there was a little more literal interaction—verbatim imitation—between musicians than I’ve been accustomed to, and I was aware that there was much less distinction between, let’s say, foreground and background voices than what I expected. Admittedly, the former—this less ambiguous interaction—may have been the result of having a couple of horn players (single reeds in particular) who were familiar with each other’s sounds, and two players are hardly representative of the whole scene, but the latter—the lack of foregrounds and backgrounds—says as much, I think, about my own assumptions and expectations as it does about the place I was in.
And, looking back, I notice how much of a surprise this was, that I was there, fumbling around trying to understand why certain things—things that should have been ‘sure-fire’ tactics—fell flat, while certain things, apparently without effort, floated right through the mixture.
It’s probably the (semi-literate) aural diffusion and transmission of improvised musics that results in this strong, localized, regional character. The distance that separates the familiar and the unfamiliar in this case, those ninety-odd kilometers, is not an unimaginable commute in our mass-transit condition, but, for traditions heavily dependent on practice and by-example coaching, it is quite a leap. Somethings transmit across those distances with little problem—the raw sound of the music, for instance—other things are more likely to stay put. Playing that evening, for example, I could hear a little bit of Evan Parker in BC’s playing, but I was still bewildered by the local musical customs and protocols of interaction.
Like I say, it’s always interesting and instructive to find out exactly what your prejudices and lazy dogmas are.
A little side note: It was very nice of be.jazz to include improvising guitar on the jazz and blogs list. Cheers.
I’ll write about this in more detail in the future, but I’d just like to briefly explore the terms ‘non-idiomatic improvisation’ and the more recent ‘pan-idiomatic improvisation.’
The term non-idiomatic is, at least to me, more strongly connected with improvised musics from West Europe, particularly England (and I don’t mean the U.K.). It’s a term that I link to a certain generation of players that seem to self-consciously engage with a take on experimentalism and improvisation (the same group that might also use the term ‘free improvisation’). One player associated with that term is, for instance, Derek Bailey. It strikes me that to claim freedom from idiom, and, perhaps, by consequence, also from culture and tradition, was a particularly post-War, post-colonialist, European desire: A dream to purge yourself of history, maybe, or a dream to rid yourself of colonial complicity. Now, to say that you are free of idiom, is that analogous to saying that you are, for example, colorblind? That this is a desire to erase your identity because of what it stands for—what it stood for?
If the desire for the ‘non-idiomatic’ is akin to the desire for color or gender blindness—to not see the cues of oppression—and has its ideological roots in multiculturalism, then the ‘pan-idiomatic’ has its ideology rooted in diversity and difference. It’s no particular secret that, say, Eugene Chadbourne’s playing is explicitly idiomatic, or that John Zorn’s music is a snap shot of his record collection, that their music is, to some extent, a celebration of personal and social histories rather than the denial of it. And though this term—‘pan idiomatic’—may be relatively novel, the ideas embedded in it can also be found in the rhetoric and work of, for instance, members of the AACM. It seem to me that when Ishmael Wadada Leo Smith talks about ‘creative contemporary world music,’ he’s aware of difference and diversity and is very much embracing personal and social histories.
Anyway, I may not get a chance to post another entry for a few days, but when I get back, you never know, maybe I’ll throw in a few road stories… ;-)
I’ve briefly touched on the subject of ‘structure’ (October 11th and October 3rd). In regard to structure imposed from outside, as I said in limits and boundaries: wikiality that
I don’t believe that this particular understanding of ‘structure’ is helpful to the practice of improvisation. Nor do I have much affinity with the desire for this ‘structure.’We tend to see structure and form as things—as objects.
Perhaps it is obvious that the musical is a process? Perhaps it is something that we knew already? It sounds obvious, but I’m not certain about this, for large parts of musicology have found it difficult to handle processes. Perhaps this is a symptom of the desire to cleave to the purity of order and avoid the uncertainties of ordering. For one way of putting the point is to note that musicologists, like many others, tend to prefer to deal in nouns rather than verbs. They slip into assuming that musical structure is an object, like the scaffolding round a building, that will stay in place once it has been erected.
my paraphrase of Law, 1994, p. 14.John Law was in fact talking about the social. Substitute ‘social’ for ‘musical,’ ‘sociology’ for ‘musicology,’ and ‘sociologists’ for ‘musicologists,’ and you’ve reconstructed the original text. (He is also defining sociologist broadly to encompass all of us who have a stake in how society functions (or not) and, here, I use musicologist in a similarly broad manner. We are, in a sense, all musicologists.)
I have, for various reasons, rejected the labels art and artist. Ask me what I do, and beyond the more specific monikers of guitarist, musician, improviser and performer, I’m likely to respond that I’m an entertainer: What I do is entertainment. Well, for the last ten years or so, that’s been the story, but recently I’ve begun to look under the hood of these terms. I’ve again begun to question if these particular terms—entertainer, entertainment—also come with unacceptable cultural, political baggage.
The label of ‘art’ signifies many of the problems of… well, the art world, and the ‘New Music’ world in particular. Stuck-up, cloistered, reclusive and exclusive, ‘New Music’ is a subculture with a rapidly diminishing audience outside its own ivory towers. ‘Artist,’ in this context, stands for those who are unable or, more worryingly, unwilling to engage with audiences. Certainly, while in academia, I found it useful to symbolically (if not materially) reject these trappings by embracing the role of entertainer, the task of entertainment.
But that was years ago. Although I don’t believe ‘New Music’ has changed much, I can’t assume that the political situation in general remains the same. Whilst I remain skeptical as to whether the term ‘art’ can be resuscitated, I’ve become troubled by the implications and connotations of the alternative label I have been using. I worry that when print and broadcast news aspires to spectacle and diversion, that by claiming entertainment as purpose, I am sidling up to CNN and News Corp. Is dissent and resistance possible from the position, at least lexically, shared with Murdoch and Berlusconi’s grand smokescreens? I wonder if the recent voices of protest from Hollywood cannot change the political landscape because they are hampered by the ‘entertainment’ label. I wonder if Michael Moore is too easily dismissed as a clown?
Yet, on the other hand, I know the transformative, political power that clowns can have. That clowns can tell (create) truths, and though they may never topple rulers, they can shakeup the status quo. And I cannot help wondering about the rhetorical power of figures such as The Coup (who, in fairness, probably call themselves artist), Bill Hicks, Paul Verhoeven or Frank Zappa (who situated himself in the entertainment industry). All entertainers extraordinaire, yet, in their own ways, powerful political voices of dissent and resistance.
Because “everyone’s bodies are different, and guitars vary in shape and size,” I’ve expressed skepticism that playing in position was a “more efficient or comfortable playing technique.” Let me elaborate on that (not at all straightforward) relationship between position playing and physical comfort here. Also, keep the following discussion in mind for when we return to looking at natural harmonics.
My usual disclaimer. Specifically:
I have no knowledge of your physiology, your particular instrument, or your posture. Please, please, please, note that the following may not be applicable to your situation, and, at best, should be adapted to fit your your needs. Be careful and listen to your body: If it hurts, or it’s uncomfortable, stop and review.However, in very general terms, in approaching this material, your whole fingerboard-side arm should have mobility. If your elbow cannot swing around comfortably, you’re probably not doing this right. A common mistake is to make these fingerboard shapes while attempting to keep your forearm frozen, resulting in having to twist and contort your hand/fingers.
(Incidentally, note that the thumb is not opposite the first finger. Contrary to some accounts of how the guitar’s neck should be held, you may find it is uncomfortable if the thumb directly opposite the first finger.)
The orientation and location of the fingerboard hand will depend on multiple factors. Even at best, the result is to some extent a compromise: Trading off the comfort of your fingerboard hand and arm against your picking hand/arm, your back, legs, etc. Before you go and radically rethink your posture, it’ll be instructive to think what might be the most comfortable fingerboard shape.
In practice, the most comfortable position for the fingerboard hand will likely resemble something like the shape above, left. Or, clearing-up and abstracting a general shape, something like the above, right. This is a diagonal fretting pattern that, from first to fourth finger, moves bass to treble across the strings, and bass to treble up the frets.
The shape that is perpendicular to the strings (above, left) is under theorized, but will be familiar if you think about the fingering of chords. (The algorithm for finding the fingering pattern for chords is, from first to fourth finger, (a) move bass to treble up the frets unless you need to stop two or more string on a given fret, in which case (b) bass to treble across the strings. Does this resemble anything we’ve already covered?)
Okay, why all this information? Understanding what shapes are more comfortable and what is less, helps us understand why certain patters are easier to play than others. Specifically, when we return to natural harmonics, when we start discussing clusters, or two handed touch/tapping, we’ll come back to these ideas. In effect, becoming aware of the physiological-physical interface and its pressures and compromises, we are taking our first baby steps towards becoming consciously engaged in the cyborg relationship between humyn (guitarist) and artifact (guitar).I learn from my students all the time, of course, but every once in a while they come up with something that you’ve never thought of, or, as happened this week, they come up with something you, for whatever reason, never tried before. Funny thing is, I'd dogmatically (in a lazy fashion) assumed, without realizing that I had, that the student proposed socio-musical scheme would not work. (So I learned about my prejudices, too.)
Would you know it? The scheme worked beautifully….
I started this whole blog out by asking why we might practice improvisation (and again on October 7th). In addition to the social dimensions of improvisation, in both posts, I mentioned the idea of improvisation as a leap off the edge into the unknown…. Here’s the Steve Lacy quote that I was thinking of at the time (the quote also touches on strategies for getting to the ‘edge’):
I’m attracted to improvisation because of something I value. That is a freshness, a certain quality which can only be obtained by improvisation, something you cannot possibly get from writing. It is something to do with the leap. And when you go out there you have all your years of preparation and all your sensibilities and your prepared means but it is a leap into the unknown. If through that leap you find something then it has a value which I don’t think can be found in any other way. I place higher value on that than on what you can prepare. But I am also hooked into what you can prepare, especially in the way that it can take you to the edge. What I write is to take you to the edge safely so that you can go on out there and find this other stuff. But really it is this other stuff that interests me and I think it forms the basic stuff of jazz.
Steve Lacy quoted in Bailey, 1992, pp. 57–58.I suppose some might see this as an affirmation of the notion of leadership. Well, they probably have a point, but I read this statement as a celebration of change, contrast and diversity, and an invitation to differ, dissent and contradict.
To kick off a little experiment, I’ve thrown this blog under the Creative Commons license. Well, let’s see what happens….
Still on hiatus from natural harmonics, and having proposed that the purpose of playing in position is not to get lost, let’s look at how this works in practice.
An element often neglected in those fingerboard diagrams is any indication of each finger’s function in position playing; in particular, the function of the first finger. The first finger is responsible for your bearings.
Let me say that with some emphasis:
In position playing the guitar player gets their bearing from their first finger.
Looking at piano, as a contrasting example, the pianist gets their bearing from the position of their thumbs. Thus, the pianist will shift their hand, aim to land their thumb on the appropriate key, and, while moving into position, the hand shape will be altered depending on the line/chord shape. A similar principle applies to the guitar and guitarist, except the player gets their bearings from their first finger.
One of the simplest ways to practice this is to play a line on a single string. You can do scales, arpeggios, or, my preferred pedagogical atom, a melody. Take something you’re familiar with; something with a mixture of intervals. Something like Somewhere Over the Rainbow or Morricone’s music from Cinema Paradiso:
Relax. Find a comfortable posture. Move your fingerboard hand into position. Choose, arbitrarily, one string. Stop the string only using the first finger and play.
Try and feel the movement of your body as you do this. Mentally note how each interval leap, each part of the fingerboard, feels different in your arm, shoulder, in your body. (If you’ve ever had problems playing with your eyes shut, this may be the time to try closing them again.)
Experiment with the motion of your arm. Try smooth motions, abrupt shifts; try slides, glissandi or play the notes staccato.
Try different phrasing; try different strings; try different melodies.
Try improvising on one string with the first finger stopping the string.
Have fun (but don’t over do these).
Attention: I have no knowledge of your physiology, your particular instrument, or your posture. Please, please, please, note that the following may not be applicable to your situations, and, at best, should be adapted to fit your your needs. Be careful and listen to your body: If it hurts, or it’s uncomfortable, stop and review.
Although I cannot give explicit advice about movement without making assumptions about your posture, and, consequently, your instrument and your body, keep in mind that position playing is “a framework for linking together small and large gestures”, and thus what we are practicing here is the macroscopic gestures. Generally speaking (and always adapt this advice based on your real-world posture, etc) the first finger’s movement should be macroscopic. Do not be afraid of broad, sweeping gestures. The movement should not come from the twist of your wrist. Try moving your arm, swing your elbow, work your shoulders, etc. You may feel your back, buttocks, legs affected by, or contributing, to this movement.
If your movement is hampered (e.g. your elbow is locked into your ribs), you may seriously want to consider reexamining your posture.
What do you call this? Free improvisation? Open improvisation? Total improvisation? Each term comes with its baggage. If we wish for some kind of ahistorical, innocent purity, we ain’t gonna find it here. Each designation encapsulates a particular historical vantage point; comes with its own mythology. They are liberating in some ways, and oppressive in others. In short, these terms are political.
I don’t wish to fuel (local and transnational) factionalism in improvised music traditions (there’s certainly enough chauvinism and tribalism already) by opening up and inspecting these labels, but these labels confuse and alienate as much as they simplify and welcome. Coming to grips with these signifiers is part of the process of understanding the history and practice of improvised musics.
Take, for example, the twists and turns that’re found in Wikipedia’s entry on free improvisation (archived version dated October 12th 2006 ). According to the article:
…[in free improvisation] the musicians make an active effort to avoiding overt references to recognizable musical genres.So where is genre positioned in relationship to the term free improvisation? For that matter, what is the relationship between style and free improvisation?
…[free improvisation] 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.
…[Derek Bailey claims that] the form [free improvisation] offers musicians more possibilities "per cubic second" than any genre….
…[free improvisation] "cannot be traced back to a genre other than the very generic term 'avant-garde.'"
"Free improvisation," as a style of music….Furthermore, the article confuses free improvisation as tradition (a sub-culture or sensibility that is more or less specific to a time and place, and/or a group of people/actors), and the technique, genre or style (an element or “piece” that can be executed or practiced within the bounds of one or more traditions). Without clarification, the article suggests that the latter pertains to the former. Beyond Wikipedia, the tangle of these, at best, overlapping terms is not particularly helped by the occasional sloppy, ad-hoc generalizations, and the various sects claiming this term as their own.
…Performers [in free improvisation] may choose to play in a certain style….
…it [is] difficult to pinpoint a single moment when the style [free improvisation] was "born".
…Bailey contends that free improvisation must have been the earliest musical style….
[Bailey:] "It [free improvisation] has no stylistic or idiomatic commitment."
Just a brief post to say that I’ve, for the first time, started using a capo. …Well, it’s probably more accurate to say that I’ve started experimenting using a capo.
It probably does not help that I did not come though a tradition of guitar playing that uses these contraptions, nor was I ever a student guitar player who used these as training wheels, nonetheless I’m finding the whole experience slightly disorientating (understand that I’m not using this for the purpose of changing key). One thing in particular that I found surprising was how different an experience, physiologically/psychologically, it was to, say, retuning the strings.
Anyway, I’ll report back when I have something a little more substantive….
