Sunday, August 26, 2012

A QUICK LOOK AT THE NATURE OF IMPROVISATION/COMPOSTION

I recently had the pleasure of spending a fantastic week at the end of June attending the Lute Society of America’s biannual seminar in Cleveland. The performances were drop-dead beautiful and the lectures, workshops and classes where fascinating. What was particularly dear to my heart, though, was the general trend of much of the discussion, among students and faculty alike, which was focused on the nature of improvisation and strategies for approaching it, and its relationship with the compositional process. Of course, this was as applied to music in the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries. To my delight, though, we found that there is basically no difference between how improvisation was approached in the past and how it is approached today in jazz, blues and popular music. Sitting among some superb musicians and some of the leading scholars in Early Music, I found that many of the issues under discussion were exactly the same as what we used to hash out decades ago, as improvising blues musicians, over bottles of cheap wine in a basement studio in Brooklyn; indeed, we found the answers to some burning questions back then and I was able to take many of the conclusions we had come to and offer them as constructive contributions to our discussions in Cleveland. There were a number of surprised nods of agreement among some very learned heads on the observations and solutions I offered. We discovered that as musicians, regardless of academic background, we all face the same challenges when improvising and composing and are all equally creative in dealing with the concepts associated with the two, and their application. Where can the fine line between composition and improvisation be found? Can it even be found anywhere at all? It’s a fuzzy line, seemingly more of a messy smudge that obliterates the end of the one word and the beginning of the other (and vice versa). I’m not sure if they are as much two distinct forms of expression as they are just dual aspects of one primary creative process. The answers to questions like this are never easy to sort out and more often than not, if not being impossible to answer, turn out to be a complex mess. I don’t expect to find all the answers here, but I do hope to explore some avenues of inquiry (...and to add to the confusion it pays to remember that things are not always as they seem, nor are they otherwise).
There are "compositions" that, as documents, may very well be no more than a record, a snapshot, so to speak, of an ongoing creative process of improvisation. This is a view shared in the visual arts by abstract expressionist painter Wilhelm deKooning. DeKooning felt that his paintings were never really finished, and that those canvases taken from his studio and exhibited publicly were only documenting a stage, a thin slice, of what was going on from day to day in his creative process. He felt that his life—spent in a constantly evolving act of painting—was his true artistic statement. The paintings, as documents, were incidental. It’s almost as if he viewed the whole concept of "the work of art" more as a verb than a noun. Ornette Coleman seems to share the same point of view: in the liner notes of his 1959 recording, Change of the Century, he states that, "In a certain sense there really is no start or finish to any of my compositions. There is a continuity of expression, certain continually evolving strands of thought that link all my compositions together. Maybe it’s something like the paintings of Jackson Pollock". It’s interesting to note that Coleman, the consummate improviser whose recorded works are largely improvised, refers to his works as "compositions". Apparently the line was pretty fuzzy for him, too. This begs to question as to when does one stop calling the process of creating "improvising" and call it "composition"?
As far as the documentation of an improvised performance, Derek Bailey—that arch-improviser—in his book, Improvisation: It’s Nature and Practice in Music, adds this to the discussion: "Essentially, music is fleeting; its reality is its moment of performance. There might be documents that relate to that moment—score, recording, echo, memory—but only to anticipate or recall it." On the basis of this statement we can conclude that music, by necessity, has no choice but to be experienced as an ongoing endeavor, in the flux of time, from performance to performance; it, puts the real experience of music in the forefront and squarely in the "Now". This is fertile ground for the performance of improvised music. Bailey also says that improvised music is best heard live and then forgotten as soon as possible, the implication being that the more you listen to a recording of an improvised performance, the less you’ll get out of it. While I don’t deny that there are real benefits (and real pleasure) to be derived from listening to the recording of a hot solo by your favorite performer, over and over, it’s also true that the overall artistic value of recording such performances can indeed be a hit-and-miss thing (eg. "Emergency", by Tony Williams & co.). Often it is most valuable solely as a reference document of or for the performer.
Be that as it may, the practice of documenting improvisation is not a new concept and goes back a surprisingly long way. We can catch a glimpse of it with the recercar. Recercars are written records of improvised performances that occur most commonly in the lute repertoire of the 16th century. In 1508, Joan Ambrosio Dalza, published a number of abstract, free form recercars that play primarily as improvisations. By mid century, Francesco da Milano was publishing recercars that, while still retaining a loose feel, come across as being much more organized. As time progressed the form of the recercar became formalized to the point where it morphed into the fugue. It, in effect, became an established compositional form and virtually unrecognizable from it progenitor.
I believe there is a direct correlation between the recercar, as it appears on the printed page, and, say, an ECM recording of Ralph Towner playing a live concert of improvisations. They didn’t have audio recording equipment in the 1500s and couldn’t catch everything, but what they did was write down is what they remembered of an improvised performance. They wrote down their best licks. To take it a step further, they may have strung some of their best licks together, in a pleasing way (and in a satisfying way, possessing a greater measure of internal rhetorical coherency), to form a composition. In my own experience, blues solos that began as improvisations in performance eventually, after playing them literally over a thousand times, were edited to the extent that they became composed solos. I could very well have written them down and called them recercars. There is a clear connection here that spans centuries. Examining the evolution of the recercar throughout the 16th century nicely illuminates the close symbiotic relationship that improvisation and composition share; it serves as an archetype of what goes on within the mind of the individual musician. The process of thoughtful organization of spontaneous musical ideas, as illustrated in these works, is probably the clearest link I can find in the fuzz between the two disciplines.
Crawford Young, being the genius that he is, approaches the issue from the opposite direction, saying, " Improvisation is really only memorized composition". Seab Meador once told me that he learned how to play guitar by listening to as many records as he could and stealing as many riffs off them as he was able. In this fashion he eventually built an aural library, a lexicon of licks that he could draw from when improvising. I believe every improvising musician can relate to this as we have all done the same thing. The really fun and creative part is when the moment comes, usually in performance, where you morph those riffs into something else: something all your own. These are the moments that you eventually find and develop your own voice, where you find ideas that you want to preserve, where you may have the urge to compose a vehicle with which to preserve them. Thus we have moved from composition to improvisation and back to composition; we’ve come full circle, and the process will renew itself when someone hears our riffs and adds them to their own improvisational vocabulary.
I’ve also heard improvisation referred to as "spontaneous composition", but I believe this may be stretching it a bit too far. Composition implies intent; it implies a desire to preserve a specific musical idea for duplication in future performances. A purely improvised performance expresses no such intention, it functions completely in the "now". True, ideas born of improvisation–truly inspired ideas–that make a deep impression remain to become parts of possible forthcoming composed works. But in this capacity they are not spontaneous, they are willfully manipulated. Anyone who has improvised an inspired solo knows that doing it is not a conceptual thing, it’s an experiential thing. The thinking is peripheral; it’s really a matter of doing. It’s spontaneous. Is it composition? I don’t think so. It’s a matter of expressing something else, and what hat that something else is, is a matter for an essay all by itself.
This little excursion has the potential to quickly turn into a book–or at the very least a series of posts. I’m just getting started. Every time I put down an idea it generates three more. As far as I can tell, improvisation and composition are intertwined in the ultimate symbiotic relationship. Although it often appears that one cannot exist without the other, I won’t go so far as to say that all composition is the product of improvised ideas; there are always exceptions. I’m not yet satisfied as to whether they exist as two independent entities, or as two aspects of the same creative principle, or both. There are too many factors to consider to come to any immediate conclusion. So, for now, I’ll leave it at this.

FANA



I


Cool dark waftings, just slightly moist,
slow movements of air hovering
in the clear black spaces
between the upper rafters inside the cathedral.
Serenity of the tomb; the dead.
Cold stone buttresses.
Limestone arches hidden behind
the heads of pillars in the wings.


At the heart of the cross,
at its very center, its altar,
the atmosphere is pierced
by the breath of angels.
Celestial glow.
Stone floor made radiant
by sunlight filtering through
the stained glass cupola above
and floating down slowly,
                     slowly,
slowly on the backs of sifting dust,
the minutae kicked here and there
by Brownian movement, randomly,
settling, ashen.  Shed moth wing scales.
Finally to illuminate the polished marble floor
in a circle of sacred light,
edges fuzzy and fading
to silent shadow along the stone molding
in the corners.


But the circle,
the light,
has cracked the roof of the sepulcher in spring,
laid open the vault door,
and let in the scent of lilacs,
and the rustling of new leaves
fresh in the warming breeze.
It is a smile.
A beat of the Divine Heart.
Mind and Hope.


II


Behind, from below comes the sound of a horn
reverberating along the tiled walls,
a cacophony of shuffles,
foot falls, following after
my steady trudge after
all the others have faded away
down the corridor.
I am alone with the whispering ghosts of melody,
the thoughts of a man playing a horn
alone.
                                           Saxophone,
baby's wail, child's singsong,
lovers' moans and orgasms,
souls of urban men and women.
Soul of a black Heart.
Sound disembodied
as if the man had grasped
the spark of divinity and swallowed it,
inhaled it deep into his gut
and, with chakras swollen and blazing,
until his whole body and
soul were charged with its energy
and he could contain it no longer,
put horn to mouth and blew,
exhaled this power,
this transcendent smell of hallway piss,
taxis home at dawn,
spare change and turnstyles clicking,
muffled in the heated blast of
air-conditioner exhaust,
and suit after suit after suit
are stuffed in as doors slide closed.
Exhaled and gave all
for free.


I know him:
his thin, angular black face,
buffed, black leather skull cap,
small grey goatee
and horn perched like a brass bird
springing from his mouth.
Singing.
Tail grasped berween white teeth and
black lips.  Serene stance.  Singing reed.
The spirit of Africa hidden
in the simple mystery of what lies
behind his sunglasses, in his eyes.
He plays in the old style
with a quick, shallow vibrato.
But he really doesn't care much about style.
He doesn't have to.
He plays the tender standards,
the old standbys, the naturals.
But he plays them fresh,
he plays them new.


III


Stopping, bathed in sound,
I close my eyes
and still see the holy geometry
etched in the crimson light on the
insides of my eyelids, in a
stained glass mosaic of capillaries.
Corpuscles.  Small flashes of royal blue.
White and yellow.  Forest green.
The figures come to me:
kneeling in a garden by a rock
with lambs, robes and children,
a throng of illuminated faces looking over shoulders.
Translucent.  Radiant,
the low morning light fresh behind them,
shining, silent.
In silence, so swiftly dissipated like
the echo of a cough
or the grate of a shoe on concrete.
Decrescendo; diminuendo.
And finally, the dull click of the turnstyle
or the redundancy of the exit gate clacking closed.
Sterile sounds.
Alone with their echoes.
Only alone and no more.


Sometimes in the rush between stations
on the express,
in the pumping, urgent rhythms of the
shaman wheels, I can hear an
harmonica wailing.
Wailing the blur of steel I beams,
the rushing wall of forced air
at the tunnel's mouth.
The thin reed sound.  The Pan sound,
most fitting for this place
at this speed, stopping at this station.
I get off the train and as the roar recedes
the bare walled catacombs
are left in peace.
The Saints, beggared and in tatters,
plead quietly along the gutters.
The rest continue their pilgrimage,
heads bowed, humble, obedient.
And, eyes closed for a moment,
the light comes back;
the shield is buffed in the sun
on the steppes, where the wheat grows
golden and rippling.
The breeze cools my forehead
and tickles my eyelashes
while my own feeble steps
bring me higher and higher
closer to the open, to cloud,
to sky.


IV


The trains roar below
one after another, a
numbing rumble of mass.
Steel on steel.
Steel disks of wheels
screeching on the rails around
the turns.  Screaming.  Bellowing.
Twenty Third Street and Ely.  Union Square.
Howard Beach.  One Hundred and Twenty Fifth Street.
Watches, shirtsleeves, tense hands and
newspapers.
Minds wiped clean among the broken glass,
skulls crammed with the shifting light of a
television on the livingroom wall.
Mashed potatoes, roast chicken.
Boiled vegetables.
Uneasy pupae hurtling through
the blackness of the tunnel.
Taught cocoons.  Sensitive.


The dead are fallen on the platform,
the dying wander absently among the ruins,
the conductor mouths, the horn
blows three short blasts.
Bedford Avenue.  Smith and Ninth Streets.
Fourth Avenue.
Archways and rafters shatter,
splinter and fly apart.
Lofty spaces collapse,
fading with the whistle blasts
on the periphery, past my temples.
Cromwell's armored citizen army has
smashed the stained glass windows
of all the old churches,
and they have been replaced with plain clear glass.
Only dim fading memories remain.
Only visions vainly glimpsed at.


And finally, all alone again
with the sound of the horn,
the click of the turnstyles in the dim light,
in the corridor under the stained mosaic of cracked tiles:
False place names.  Tag.  Sign.
And me, alone,
one among the wiggling mass,
to worm my way out,
up into the fetid air
to where the wheat no longer grows
on the remains of where once
a cathedral had been;
and where once angels, wings folded down silken backs,
sang in tier upon tier,
and light touched and turned all to gold
there remains only a circle, sacred,
glowing on the station floor.

Friday, May 25, 2012

IN PRAISE OF SMALL VENUES

I remember once reading that Segovia had taken the guitar and its music out of the salon and brought it to the concert hall, and having done so, restored it to legitimacy. I always had a problem with this.
It seems to me that there are many these days who make the mistake of assuming that size of venue is a measure of the quality of music presented there. The appearance of the guitar in solo performance on the great large stages of the world has, for example, in a sense legitimized it for many pundits as a "serious" instrument on which is performed "serious" music. This is taking the whole thing about size completely out of context, for no good reason. This is not to challenge the artistic validity of highly amplified rock concerts with elaborate stage shows, where small groups of musicians play to mega-audiences; they are a different animal and there is a different aesthetic at work there. What I am addressing is the issue of performance by small acoustic or lightly amplified ensembles (classical. jazz or otherwise) and solo performers. These performances were meant to be presented in small, intimate spaces. I don’t believe they were ever intended to appear in front of a large audience; I do believe their performance suffers, and they lose something in their musical message when they do so.
During the Renaissance and Baroque periods there was some very fine music produced by some of the world’s greatest musicians in some very intimate settings: Monteverdi in the court at Mantua, Luys Milan in the Valencian court , Robert DeVisee at Louis XIV’s bedside. There is a account of Francesco da Milano holding his listeners spellbound at a royal banquet in Milan. Selected Venetian cognoscenti were in the habit of retreating to a special salon deep in the Doge’s palace to hear musicians perform. The list of examples goes on. Probably the largest performances given to the general public–the closest things to today’s media extravaganzas-- were those of the great choral works performed in the cathedrals.
We seem to have forgotten that some music is better heard in small intimate settings. Performance practice throughout history bears this out. Performers and composers for solo guitar know this from direct experience and most players I know prefer to make music in smaller spaces. I have no doubt that, for the most part, the audience also feels the same: no one wants to sit in the back of Avery Fischer Hall when John Williams gives a guitar recital there. This crosses over to other musical disciplines as well. I would much rather see a jazz quartet at a small supper club than in a large concert hall. The tablaos in Madrid and the the gypsy caves and tavern back rooms of rural Andalucia are where you go to see and hear the heart & soul of flamenco plumbed to their depths. From a purely aesthetic point of view, solo and small ensemble players of any type of serious art music would have to be out of their minds to prefer playing to a large, faceless audience instead of in the intimacy of a small gathering. It’s not the same. They are not interchangeable.
This is especially true for modern "art music" composition. More often than not, modern atonal or dissonant works heard in a large hall sound like mush. I spent a season attending recitals of some very modern works at the Rose Studio in Lincoln Center. It’s a small room (150 people, max) where the audience sits right up close to the performers. Much of it was pretty involved music, by the likes of composers from Webern to Zorn, but it comes across beautifully when it’s up close and personal. The close proximity of the audience, indeed, drew them into the very act of performance itself. We, in a sense, became a part of it. This added dimension of involvement gave the music an immediacy that commanded my complete attention. I became totally immersed in what was going on and, consequently, understood the message. The music spoke. This would have been impossible in a large hall.
Trends in composition also indicate that many beautiful works were designed for small performance settings. Miguel de Fuenllana’s sacred "duos" for solo vihuela are perfect examples. These were small musical prayers set for performance in, at most, a small chapel. The most moving performance of these duos I ever gave was to a single listener, on a dark and silent late summer night in a backyard set back off the beach on the Long Island Sound. The only light we had was supplied by half a dozen candles set around the music. The music came alive in a way only such a setting could have engendered: quietly, delicately, magically, with a sense of space at once grand yet intimate. It was the performance of a lifetime; I don’t think I’ve ever played them as well since. My listener sat there entranced, bundled in a blanket, wide-eyed and silent. It happened again (though, personally, I don’t feel I played that well that night), at a performance one night on vihuela in a gallery on Lake Michigan in the fall, lights turned off, dozens of candles everywhere (something about those candles and this music), the walls covered with beautiful paintings. Though there was standing room only, you could hear a pin drop throughout the performance. People told me they’d never heard anything like it in that town.
These are the kind of places this music was meant to be performed in. These are the settings. Setting is so important for this kind of music (there is definitely an element of theater here); it brings out the best of what it is supposed to be. The experience of such performances, for both artist and listener, would be lost in a large venue. The aesthetic surrounding these kinds of performances is totally alien to the concert hall.
Today’s large venues serve more as an indicator of an artist’s popularity, if anything, than as a reliable gauge of the quality of the music being produced. It also serves as an indicator of the availability and demands of a mass market for what has become a very commercialized product.. The construction of these large halls was not to facilitate an increased quality of music, but to exploit the larger audience that a growing middle class was providing. They were what we would call today a new marketing device. The invention of new and louder instruments, like the piano and the modern classical guitar, and the composition of symphonic works for larger orchestras were a response to the growing size of available venues. It was not the other way around. While they may have appreciated the increase in independence and income, composers and performers were not necessarily looking for larger halls in which to make better music. Beautiful music was being written and played for all manner of instruments long before they entered the concert hall. In this sense, they never lacked for legitimacy, and functioned as vehicles for expressing the soul on the deepest levels long before their appearance on the stage at Carnegie Hall.
Personally, I’ll leave the concert halls to the symphony orchestra; that’s the only place they’ll fit in anyway. As a solo performer, I’ll take the intimacy of a small space any day...and the magic that is unique to an intimate gathering of souls in a beautiful place with an inspired setting, to swim in the pure sound of Music.

Monday, March 5, 2012

THANK YOU, PALESTRINA

And that evening
all the voices of Canada
came carried on the winds
out of the northwest at dusk,
blowing the flimsy white frilled drapes about
in the old woman's window; and she stood leaning
on the sill with her housedress billowing all around her
like she was young again, her hair blowing back, and she smiled.
"Oh thank you, Palestrina", she said, "Oh thank you, Palestrina", again
as Missa Benedicta Es swirled in her heart, in the air, in the night all around her.

Monday, February 20, 2012

SOUNDS LIKE HORSES

Another old post worth reviving...


  One of the things about Baroque music that I’ve noticed is that many works are in triple time (3/4, 3/8, 6/8). This applies to both art music and popular (dance) music. (No, I haven’t forgotten the pavan or the allemande.) What I find really striking, though, is that the most common metrical figure is a short pick-up note followed by a dotted note—usually a sixteenth, followed by a dotted eighth. I think there is a good reason for this, though it is one that escapes most all of us in western industrialized society today: these are the rhythms of a horse’s gallop. This is perfectly natural, as horses were a part of everyday life fron Antiquity to the end of the nineteenth century and everyone would have been familiar with the rhythms their hoof beats made.  They were a common part of the aural environment and are what people would have listened for and would have expected.
   Contrast this with the predominant beat of music today, especially popular music, which is 4/4 with the accent on the two and the four or, in the case of house dance tracks, a straight loud 2/4. I can’t think of a single dotted rhythm in pop music. What do we have here? We have the sound of the machine. Machine sounds dominate our sonic world, so subconsciously these are the sounds we all relate to, like it or not, and it comes out in our music. No one rides horses anymore, so rhythms based on their gallop are meaningless to our ears. Though we may take some small pleasure in them as curiosities from the past, we neither expect nor desire to hear them in the music we make today. The sound of the machine, though: now that’s something we know, something that’s in our blood.
   In a way the loss of this natural lope to our sensibilities is kind of sad, as it reminds us once again of the increasing distance between how we perceive our current manufactured reality and the natural world around us. Our isolation is in many ways nearly complete. There’s no point in waxing nostalgic about it, though. One is indeed the product of one’s environment, and where this will take us is anyone’s guess. Put plainly, in Judy Segabarth’s immortal words, it’s just "Natural Selection, At Work".
It’s a wiggly world.

HOW MASS MEDIA HAVE AFFECTED MUSICIANS’ LIVELIHOODS

This is an old post from my myspace days, but I've updated it a tiny bit and it's still worth posting...

 
   To begin, let it be duly recorded that I am a guy that owns more than three thousand CDs. I will be the first to admit that the majority of my musical listening experience comes from recorded music and that recorded music has been a valuable, indeed, an essential resource in my musical studies. I have no problems with recordings in the home, as a personal vehicle for the enjoyment and exploration of the musical landscape. I also, to some extent, acknowledge the validity of a recording as an artistic statement in its own right; there are things you can do in the studio to produce works of musical art that just can't be done live. This being said, however, I do have some real problems with the commercialization of music and the negative impact recordings, and their manipulation by media culture, have had on musicians’ livelihoods.
   There used to be a time when the owner of a cafe, restaurant or other venue had to go out and hire musicians to play if he/she wanted music in their place. This held true up until the advent of tape and, ultimately, CDs and other digital media. Now, all one has to do is get a good sound system, flip on a recording/download and presto: instant music. Who needs to hire bands? This has had a catastrophic effect on musicians' livelihoods; due to the loss of demand, paying work opportunities for the rank and file (that is, the vast majority of us) have dwindled almost to nonexistence. By way of illustration, consider this: During a recent conversation I had with an old timer, he informed me that forty years ago there were three times as many members in AFM 802 as there are today. Why? Because there was work for them. They were making a living wage playing music in local clubs, because there was a paying demand for it. That is not so, now. By making recordings of ourselves widely available we have cut our feet out from under us. People don’t need to have us around to listen to us.
   Before the advent of the recording industry, international stars may have been few and far between, but there was plenty of work around for everyone else. You might not become a household word worldwide, but if you could play, you could always make a living doing so...and right in your home town. Such a musical culture fostered individuality and diversity, things that today’s global media is actively working to smelt down into one dully glowing pool of unified slag. Such a musical culture produced the likes of J.S.Bach and Franz Listz, and gave birth to jazz in New Orleans, flamenco in Spain and raga in India. The world was not musically sterile before the invention of the record player. The primary listening source then, though, was the live performance. Recordings have altered our entire relationship with music, and how we view its place and function in our lives.

So why the allure of mass media culture for musicians today? The prospect of worldwide distribution and ultimately (yes, admit it) celebrity seem to be the main motivating forces. But lets face it, the trade offs are prohibitive. I hear story after story of how new bands who sign with major labels net in the neighborhood of 2% of the total sales figures of their recordings after paying recording costs, management, production, marketing and touring costs. That’s to be split among the band members. Example: I read of one band that grossed 8.5 million dollars in product and each of the four band members walked away with $40,000 at the end of the year, no vacation and no medical or other benefits. Period. That’s less than half a percent. Sure, those that become popular make up for it with concert revenue. You can count them on one hand. The rest? No one knows, because no one hears from them again. They fade away, in debt. (Even popular acts can suffer like this: TLC, for all their popularity, had to declare bankruptcy...and stop making music.) Who benefits from recordings? Everybody but the artists. True, in its heyday in sixties pop music, there was a good living to be made with recordings. (We won't discuss the countless artists that got ripped off by producers/managers/corporations; we'll just acknowledge that there were a number that were quite successful in making a living from their records.) Those days appear to be gone.    Personally, I don’t think the trade offs are worth it. I’m not interested in world fame. I’d rather have the respect of my peers and the support of a loyal local following. For me the most satisfying media outlet is word of mouth; the most rewarding musical experience is live performance. I’d be perfectly happy playing small venues and being fairly compensated for it. (I prefer small venues anyway, for aesthetic reasons, but that’s another post.) I’m afraid, however, considering present social and cultural trends, that dissolving the unholy alliance between music and mass media culture-- better yet, the dissolution of mass media culture entirely-- is something that cannot be easily accomplished, if indeed it can be accomplished at all.
We may have painted ourselves into a corner with this one.