Living Music by Rod Paton
Extract from Part 2 of ‘Living Music’
Improvisation and Composition
In defining the nature of improvisation it might be useful to look at how it is perceived in the context of or in contrast to composition. Improvisation and composition are, in effect, two aspects of the same process. This has been pointed out by many eminent musical thinkers, including Arnold Schoenberg and, more recently, the renowned improvising musician Evan Parker, who, in drawing attention to the work of the Dutch group known as the Instant Composers’ Pool, writes:
In the very naming of ICP (Instant Composers’ Pool), “instant composing” rather than improvisation was the preferred designation. In this way the false antithesis in which improvisation is talked about as an activity distinct from that of composition was avoided.
(Evan Parker. An extract from Man and Machine 1992, the full text of which can be found on www.shef.ac.uk)
We can regard improvisation as the primary act of all music making, the first stage and, in some senses the only stage, since the refining process through which performing and composing is honed and revised is, in reality, a process of re-improvisation: the creative musician/composer is constantly re-inventing and re-visiting the piece not because there is necessarily anything wrong with the original version but simply because musical forms are alive, life moves on and flux is a condition of this aliveness. In schools and in the wider community, improvisation is the essential common ingredient in any workshop activity, whether this takes place in the classroom, in evening classes, in music therapy sessions, or indeed, in any context where people gather together to musick. This transformation of the noun music into the verb musick (see Chris Small, 1987) serves to remind us that improvisations are always, can only be, musical acts whilst compositions can often be found lying lifeless between the pages of a score, dependent upon the ministrations of a trained musician to breathe life into them.
It is not difficult to work out why the term “composition” should have found favour in our language whilst “improvisation” is less well understood. As Alan Durant (1989) has pointed out, it originally meant “to act without foresight or planning” and, on entering the English language in the late eighteenth century, the term fairly rapidly acquired a “negatively valorised meaning” as in “an improvised solution”. This negative undercurrent betrays an attitude which devalues that area of mind which is non-conceptual and intuitive. We inhabit a culture where scientific method, observable phenomena and reductive thinking are dominant. Improvised forms are seen as less trustworthy, less valid than composed (i.e. notated) forms since the latter are fixed, analysable, explicable not to mention packageable, saleable and commodified. This renders composed musics safe. A truly improvised idiom cannot really be analysed since it is constantly in flux and thus difficult, though not impossible, as I shall argue later, to evaluate.
Thus, improvisation sits uneasily alongside many of those principles which underline our traditional attitudes to cultural activity including teaching and learning. We tend to value the product over the process. We are more comfortable with prescribed (notated) forms and we tend to conceive of excellence in terms of repetition and the graduated development of high-level, examinable skills. We favour competition over participation even though we may pay lip-service to the latter. The BBC’s Young Musician of the Year contest provides a high-profile fixture for the calendar whereas the activities of the London Musicians’ Collective remain by and large invisible and inaudible to the general public. And, if asked to lay our money on the table, (an action which, by definition, provides some measure of the value we place on things), we are more likely to pay up for a recorded commodity which is tried and tested, reviewed and approved, wrapped and packed in fingernail proof cellophane, rather than risk our earnings on unforeseen adventures. Far from being merely a lack of confidence then, this nervousness surrounding improvisation may be seen, culturally, as a deeply ingrained suspicion of anything which cannot be controlled, repeated, predicted or scientifically validated. We require things to be accurate; improvisation may be viewed (by many) as approximate. Improvised music, however, provides an experience which is anything but approximate. Rather, by responding directly to the place and time and context of performance, it catches the moment with an authenticity and a sense of immediacy which acts as a genuine reflecting mirror to the feelings and aspirations, identities and relationships of the participating players.