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On spontaneous music

Online Publication Date: 01 October 2006To cite this Article: Curran, Alvin (2006) 'On spontaneous music', ContemporaryMusic Review, 25:5, 483 - 490To link to this article: DOI: 10.1080/07494460600989994URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07494460600989994

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On Spontaneous MusicAlvin Curran

The following reflections are written five years apart, the first in response to Sabine

Feisst, for her doctoral thesis, the second written at the request of GieselaGronemeyer for the present publication. The author begs the reader’s understandingfor some occasional overlap.

Improvisation is the art of becoming sound. It is the only art in which a human beingcan and must become the music he or she is making. It is the art of constant, attentive and

dangerous living in every moment. It is the art of stepping outside of time, disappearing init, becoming it. It is both the fine art of listening and responding and the more refined art

of silence. It is the only musical art where the entire ‘score’ is merely the self and theothers, and the space and moment where and when this happens. Improvisation is the

only musical art which is predicated entirely on human trust.The art of improvisation assumes (and for me unequivocally proves) that human

beings are musical beings and that not unlike the great natural musicians of the

animal kingdom—from crickets and cicadas to whales, wolves and lions—all humanbeings are born with, possess and participate in some form of music.

Regardless of the musical context (the people, place or time, tradition or style), theart of improvisation puts the full responsibility for the music being made on the

person/s making it, and for the entire duration of its making.Hence, in free improvisation the prevailing notions about the origins of music

(the gods, collective memory, composers, mythology, etc.) are temporarily eclipsedby the sheer magical energy of the physical person/s making the music—for it is

they who are momentarily but fully responsible for the sounds they make. It isthey, the improvisers, in whom the traditional roles of composer, performer,director and teacher are fused into one single role. It is they who, in every sense,

become—literally are—the music they make; and at best, transform everyone andeverything into that music—that sharing of air, time and space. This is

immediately as evident on hearing an improvised cadenza in a Beethoven pianoconcerto as it is in hearing Coltrane’s endless concatenations on the song ‘My

Favorite Things’ or in a Dagar Brothers levitating performance of an evening raga.And this is even far more evident in musics not rooted in tradition, but in

continuing experiment and research; such spontaneous musics could be said to bebased on almost ‘nothing’.

Contemporary Music ReviewVol. 25, Nos. 5/6, October/December 2006, pp. 483 – 490

ISSN 0749-4467 (print)/ISSN 1477-2256 (online) ª 2006 Taylor & FrancisDOI: 10.1080/07494460600989994

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Improvised music is, however, generally based on something: a word, a set of fixed

tones, a melody, rhythmic pattern, chordal sequence, timbral change, gesture (cres-cendo, diminuendo, fragmentation, drone, etc.), a reaction, a memory, a dream. Or any

combination of these. All musical cultures employing forms of improvisation codifythese forms around a specific set of sounds developed through a long historical process.

The history of ‘western’ twentieth-century music in its modernist andpostmodernist attributes can be viewed as a series of attempts to liberate musicfrom various forms of tyranny—rules and traditions real or imagined: triadic

harmony, memorable melody, the twelve equal-tempered tones, metered regularpulse, European orchestral timbres, ranges of instruments, standardized durations,

fear of disorder and chaos, the fear of silence. In the middle and late 1960s wewitnessed attempts to embrace all of these aspects of musical liberation while

focusing at the same time on the philosophical, political, and economic liberation ofmusic from itself—that is, the freeing of music even from the need to liberate itself.

Nevertheless, a momentary and generalized ‘freeing’ of music, not only of all formermusical ideology and practice, but from its fiercely rooted social and economic basisin the West, became the utopian challenge taken up in many different ways, by a

number of dedicated musicians throughout the world. La Monte Young in New YorkCity, Larry Austin and Pauline Oliveros in California, Takehisa Kosugi (the Taj

Mahal Travelers) in Japan, Terry Riley, Glass and Reich, Tudor and Cage, ChristianWolff, the Sonic Arts Union (Behrman, Ashley, Mumma, Lucier), Franco

Evangelisti’s ‘Gruppo Nuova Consonanza’, Gavin Bryar’s Portsmith Symphonia,Cardew’s Scratch Orchestra, The Spontaneous Music Ensemble – London and in

individual voices such as Alexander von Schlippenbach, Evan Parker, Peter Kowald,Misha Mengelberg, The AACM (Muhal Abrams, Anthony Braxton) in Chicago, as

well as natural sound-artists Annea Lockwood and Maryanne Amacher etc.The improvisation groups AMM in London and Musica Elettronica Viva (MEV) in

Rome, however, can be said to have taken the most radical position in regard to this

process of ‘liberation’. Musically speaking, both groups were attempting to literallyreinvent music from zero. With revolutionary fervor, yet in a most pacific way,

everything pertaining to the art of music (within their imaginations) was called intoquestion. And while these groups had no boards of inquisitors—there were no trials,

prison sentences, tortures or disappearances—they tacitly agreed on a new musicalpractice which would invest each member of the group with the responsibility for

every sound made, thus heightening the individuals’ listening awareness and playingresponses to all the sounds made at any instant (however simple or complex), as wellas heightening their overall sense of commitment to the work; they further agreed

that any audible or imaginable sound, or sound source, was equally valid as rawmusical material. This, indeed, gave birth to some of the most remarkable musics of

the time and, as far as one knew (in l966), there had never before been a music madeon such far-reaching principles of individual freedom and democratic consciousness;

this was collective music pure and simple—and without knowing it, a stunning artisticexample of political anarchy. From my experience in the founding of the group

Musica Elettronica Viva, I would like to describe what I believe were the principal

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codes of action and expected behavior and implicit strategies and goals of our group

improvisations—the music in all of its various phases has been described anddocumented elsewhere.

What the group MEV (along with AMM) essentially did was to redefine music as aform of property that belonged equally to everyone and hence to encourage its

creation freely by and through anyone anywhere. This idea alone had greatimplications for the art of improvisation, for it brought forth a new and quite flexiblecode of behavior based on the following principles:

0) Any physical space is a potential musical space as is any time of day or night an

appropriate musical time.1) All music starts anew each time, as if there had never been any music before it.

2) Any member of the group may utilize any audible or imaginable sound at anytime.

3) Musical remembering and musical amnesia are of equal value—in short, onecould build on past or conditioned experience or try to forget everything everknown.

4) The requirements for musical participation are no longer based on purelymusical skills, education, technique, experience, age, gender, race or religion

but on an implicit code of universal harmony and mutual acceptance. Thisresulted immediately in a form of transnational music.

5) Each player provides his/her own instruments and sound sources.6) The act of collective performance has no specified duration and performances

begin and end by tacit (musically understandable) agreement.7) Without leaders, scores, or any rules at all, the music should be based on the

musicians’ mutual respect for and trust in one another, the public, and theindividual and sum of all the sounds emitted into the performing space.

8) Because this music is fragile and dangerously based on almost nothing

(ephemeral sounds and precarious human relationships), the players mustcultivate extraordinary levels of attention, awareness and artistic efficiency—

primarily through silence and rigorous listening, and appropriate action andreaction—so to prevent the music from becoming literally nothing. This form

of personal and collective commitment endowed everyone involved (includingthe producers and public) with finely tuned ears and magnanimous attitudes.

9) No matter what transpires, a sense of transcendent unity is likely to be theunspoken goal of every improvisational event. (This sense of unity, though notalways achieved, is very recognizable, almost tangible in certain moments.

Especially when one cannot answer the questions: ‘did I make that/did wemake that/did you make that/did they make that?’

10) All members share equally in the promotion, economic stability and creativegrowth of the group—in return for an equal share in received proceeds.

11) This is a space for your own contribution.

15 – 17 July 1995

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007 Postscript: From the Bottom of the Soundpool

. . . somewhere between 28th St and Columbus Circle a total freak in dreads, dashiki,

sandals and some toy antennae bobbing on his head gets into the number 1, uptowntrain. He’s clutching a destroyed alto saxophone—looked like it came out of thescrap metal yard. Without any warning he begins to blow into this mangled

instrument, emitting screeching sheets of murderous high frequencies alternatingwith truck-horn-like jolting blats. After an initial assault of about 45 seconds, he

cuts short and says, deadly serious: ‘Folks, if you want me to stop playing thismusic, just kindly drop a coin in the cup.’ The well-groomed morning travelers

offered no resistance, and dutifully dropped coins in this ‘alien’s’ cup; as promised,he did not play again. I thought, Man! What an original economic strategy—getting

the public to pay you not to make your music!!!!! My god, what if after 1945 thenew music community—instead of madly searching for the new Beethoven among

us—had adopted the brilliant strategy of this New York City street artist: offeringnot to play its music, in exchange for money!!!!! We’d probably all be sipping cooldrinks in an Internet cafe in Tahiti today rather than sitting in airless halls listening

to interminable grating sonic aggregates, still waiting for some illumination or newsaint to appear.

I have just finished listening to and remastering 16 hours of recorded tapes of thegroup Musica Elettronica Viva—which I co-founded. In its heyday (1966 – 1973), this

indefinable group was considered benignly revolutionary by an attentive Europeanmainstream press and was a musical icon on the fringe of the fringe counterculture.

Whatever the merits of the group’s music, MEV—its actions as well as its music—struck fear into the heart of the music establishment, because it believed that themusic was the property of no one individual or author, but that of the group, and

that music is a universal human right, and any human being, by mere will, can also bea music-maker.

Incidentally, these two beliefs are now again at the center of an ethical and legaldebate over the definition of music and its ownership and use on the Internet.

At the beginning of the 30-plus years of MEV history, the original core group(Alan Bryant, Alvin Curran, Jon Phetteplace, Carol Plantamura, Frederic Rzewski,

Richard Teitelbaum, Ivan Vandor) took for granted the inherent value of a fixedgroup structure as such. But in time, as we became accustomed to playing with many

self-invited guests—and even with many so-called non-musicians—a conceptemerged, largely promoted by Rzewski, to create a music by inviting the generalpublic to participate, without any structure or rules: the ‘Sound Pool’ announced,

‘Bring a sound, cast it into the pool’ and people did; they came in droves and oftenleft at the forced invitation of the local police and fire departments. ‘Sound Pool’ was

both an open request and an authorization for anyone to make ‘music’ together asthey pleased—freely.

These were not jam sessions nor happenings (both of which are based ondeterminate themes and structures), but collective music events for many people

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(usually 50 or more) which, after an initial launching by MEV’s catalytic example,

inevitably developed into independent throbbing dense polyphonies, multiple wallsof sound of any color, speed, density and feeling. The ‘Sound Pool’ was often enacted

in large rooms, where groups of musicians could form casually, play independentlyand dissolve into other groups, where individuals could wander from place to place

playing offhandedly with an anonymous passerby or stopping to join in a small orlarge ongoing pocket of music. In short, a sea of freely mutating human symphonieswhich could at certain moments bring to mind a Cage ‘Music Circus’, a Pauline

Oliveros ‘Meditation’, or even a Globe-Unity mass improv., though none of thosemodels suffice to describe the levels of ecstasy or life-threatening chaos generated

during some of them.These were musics characterized above all by a shocking absence of authority or

leadership, which at times shocked even us. They were based on the principle thatanyone making any sound in any way (alone or in company) could consider this act

to be an act of spontaneous music-making. I am not speaking here of ‘improvisation’,which I consider to be a highly specialized artistic behavior, but am merely describingwhat might be the most fundamental, perhaps primordial, level of musical

consciousness and state of collective-spontaneous sounding together.Thus anonymous individuals in the act of collective liberation became their own

musics, and the ‘Sound Pool’ was the sum of all of them—as if in a mass spontaneousurban psychodrama. This work—a radical assault on the sacred cows of bourgeois

culture—was at once an act of conceptual suicide for the music of the ‘closed’ groupand at the same time an act which raised the collective music concept to its most

dangerous and unstable experimental limits; it further precipitated an intense debateamong core MEV members—a debate which centered on the nature of music,

composition, improvisation and the social limits of these newly created music rituals.To balance the musical needs and sanity of the group, a plan emerged where wewould divide an evening in two parts: the first would focus on open-form

compositions—often works of our own; and the second part, usually initiated byChristian Wolff’s ‘Sticks’, would lead to the ‘Sound Pool’ proper.

In the context of these liberational melees, improvisation per se was an academicissue. Yet improvisation and the individual skills we had all quickly developed was a

kind of sacred burning bush which has remained a strong source of inspiration tomost of us to this day, as well as to a large number of musicians who performed with

us in the seventies and eighties (Garrett List, Steve Lacy, Anthony Braxton, MaryanneAmacher, Karl Berger, to name a few). Group improvisation, as I defined it earlier, ismusic-making which embraces all of the contradictions of indeterminacy and hence a

commitment to indeterminate aesthetics; it demands refined skills in both theextensions of classical instrumental technique as well as analog and digital electronic

techniques combined with lightning fast decision making, repression of the ego, andmutual trust; but above all it is centered on the newly emerging skill for the

individual players to perceive the totality of music not only in the present, but in thepast and future as well.

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While these performance considerations of trained composers and performers

applied to MEV music at all times, the group aesthetic also embraced a liberationalanarchism, in apparent dialectical contradiction—which brings us back to the sixties’

Zeitgeist. Both in the closed group improvisations of early MEV (often called‘Spacecraft’) and the mass ‘Sound Pool’ events, one of the main collective goals was

the generation of a kind of tribal energy, with whatever means it took: from skillfullycrafted improvisation to reckless indeterminacy, from loose associations to free ones,from induced mental states akin to autism and amnesia to illuminating states of

unity—awareness of everyone and everything. At once death-defying, life affirmingand ecstasy seeking, grounded in a volatile mix of the politics of Anarchy,

Communalism, and Transcendentalism, the music was unmediated, idiosyncraticand raw. No Ivy-League-via-Darmstadt bleep-blop, no spotless minimalisms, no

frills, no money back, just plain musical vulcanism, straight up. It was these essentialqualities that fascinated and terrified the establishment, as they in their mandated

ways attempted to tame us and own us and our music—our ‘work’ broughteverything into question, including authors’ rights and the nature of a public concert.The crude amplified sounds we made often took the form of an extended primal

scream . . . anyone in their right minds would have paid us not to play, but alas no onehad the imagination or courage to do that. Instead, the mixture of adventurousness,

uncertainty and utopian enthusiasm typical of the times spurred our project on.MEV’s founders were mostly composers, refugees from esteemed American

academies, living precariously in Europe and dedicated to the idea of experimentalmusic. Youthful, even naı̈ve, we all shared a desire to strip ourselves naked, liberating

ourselves from the vestments of the past and present. Our techniques and conceptsgrew directly from the fertile soil prepared by Cage, Tudor and Mumma in the late

fifties—early sixties and by the work of the AACM (American Association of CreativeMusic) and the Arts Ensemble of Chicago. But in contrast to the advanced theorizingand mathematical rigor within the Cage circle, MEV felt its sense of mission as an

existential drive to live in the moment, including our hand-to-mouth economy—infact, we often could not see far beyond that to fully comprehend the global meaning

of all that was going on. This drive was a manifest reality of the ’68 counterculture,and this above all was our guide, the voices of our teachers (Carter, Babbitt, Sessions,

Petrassi, Nono, Mel Powell) notwithstanding.What was revolutionary in our vanguard music was the process, even more than

the product. The music began as it ended, based on telepathic signals. It did notmatter what found objects we rubbed, scratched or banged on, what we blew into orhow, what we dropped on the floor or beat on the walls, what instruments we played

conventionally or unconventionally, what home-made or sophisticated electroniccircuitry was employed and so on—what mattered is that we did it, ‘punto e basta’,

that the urgency of the moment to focus our collective attentions onto a challengingact of spontaneous creation was what mattered. Whether the music was tonal or

atonal or microtonal, repetitive or disjunct or fragmented, sequential or continuousor sweet/sexy or abrasive, violent or disgusting, banal or even idiotic mattered little,

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in comparison to the singular task of keeping the musical energy high and unified,

efficient and in constant evolution.To do this, to make music obliterating any awareness of related tradition or

predetermined structures, required an enormous self-discipline, commitment andmomentary suspension of the individual’s self. It required above all a new expanded

musicality, one that could equate beauty with ugliness and vice versa. The resultingmusics were liberating in every sense . . . After performances, rather than return toreality as if we had been casually experimenting in a scientific lab, we returned often

with the shared knowledge that we had all been somewhere, on a voyage—in thesame illusive and unnamable space—unified by making the same music together, as if

it had been composed, magically composed . . . and this music we knew was ours, wehad in fact composed and performed it in the moment—bang-zoom!! Just like that.

Whatever else remains of the MEV legacy, we challenged the noble traditions ofwestern music in a new and untried way: by daring to reverse the ‘proper’ professional

balance between technique and passion, by asserting—I’ll say it again—that we, and infact anyone, could make a music based on nothing, with any sounding means andwithout written score, sketch, agreement, leadership or even, we hoped, memory. That

in fact we could make music of powerful emotive content and attraction outside thecanons of historical western compositional practice was a profound discovery to all of

us in the group and to many outside. The collective process and a few early (middle-sixties) electronic technologies allowed us to extract the hidden sounds inside any

object, or from the entire sounding environment, or from electricity itself, as well asthose drawn from the depths of the human mind and body—this was the nuclear

matter of our daily experimental live-electronic group improvisations.That the utopian cultural implications of this practice were in succeeding decades

absorbed, codified, expanded on, contested, marginalized, even somewhat forgottenis history’s natural way. Thirty-five years later, as I sit here in the July heat, it seemsto me that the revolution we had the privilege of participating in has evolved into

largely standardized improvisatory practices (some still vital, others not) that all insome way had their origins in those mad fortuitous encounters among Free Jazz,

Indeterminacy, European structuralist composition, explosive countercultures, andmovements for social and economic justice. One could even argue that today’s

sizeable worldwide free-improvising community, while apparently alive and well, ismaking music in a temporal cul de sac a predictably common practice. Is this music

movement at an end, buried in no longer provocative atonalisms, collage, and machovirtuosity, and overshadowed by the economic power of mainstream jazz, thegravitational forces of the European New Music ‘Betrieb’, and more youthful forms

of hip-hop, noise and electronics—all which have successfully incorporated elementsof the earlier freely improvised music styles? I ask myself, will the myth of Schoenberg

outlive the myth of Cecil Taylor, or will both of them fade while Beethoven and Dr.Dre slip away with the culture bounty?

In retrospect, maybe not much of the sixties experience was truly revolutionary,and less of it had profoundly transformative consequences, but 30 years later, as

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trends and technologies in music are unfolding at a dizzying rate, thankfully the

confrontation between progressive and regressive has not been globalized out ofexistence. The youth culture, without setting a foot in the piazza, imagines it can

subvert the entire social and economic order by the simple click of a mouse. And withthe planet now choking on its own voracious music consumption—music of every

kind everywhere all the time—surely someone will be able, once again, to inject itwith a wicked dose of orderly disorder. MEV is dead! MEV lives!

Gallipoli, 6 August 2000, edited by Susan Levenstein

http://www.alvincurran.com

490 A. Curran