Improvisation: Between Technique and Spontaneity [Illustrated] 1443818542, 9781443818544

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Improvisation

Improvisation: Between Technique and Spontaneity

Edited by

Marina Santi

Improvisation: Between Technique and Spontaneity, Edited by Marina Santi This book first published 2010 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Copyright © 2010 by Marina Santi and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-1854-2, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-1854-4

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 Improvisation between Performance Art and Lifeworld Marina Santi and Luca Illetterati Chapter One................................................................................................. 7 The Dialectical Eroticism of Improvisation Tord Gustavsen Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 53 Jazz as Classical Music Andy Hamilton Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 77 On the Spontaneity of Jazz Improvisation Gabriele Tomasi Chapter Four............................................................................................ 103 Improvisation as Phenomenon and Tool for Communication, Interactive Action and Learning Bjørn Alterhaug Chapter Five ............................................................................................ 135 Improvisational Creativity as a Model for Effective Learning Keith Sawyer Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 153 Cultivating an Attunement to Unfolding: Improvisation and the Discovery of Identity Frank J. Barrett Contributors............................................................................................. 163

INTRODUCTION IMPROVISATION BETWEEN PERFORMANCE ART AND LIFEWORLD MARINA SANTI AND LUCA ILLETTERATI

The word “improvisation” is used to describe a host of very different things. Improvisation can be considered a collective, creative phenomenon, an individual skilled performance, an emerging act within a rooted practice, or as a set of generative techniques, yet there are a number of issues with its concept and practice. It seems that improvisation is too evanescent to be enshrined by a definition, too vast to be captured by a description, too unpredictable to be clarified by an explanation. At the same time, when speaking of improvisation, we appear to be dealing with something whose features, examples and roles are well known as they appear in the different fields of life-experience. Whether we assume the phenomenon is too broad and vague, or take it as clearly evident and recognizable, we have little need, or opportunity, to look at it more closely. Underpinning this project is a decision to consider the notion behind improvisation; we attempted to understand what is actually meant by “improvisation”, i.e. its nature and its construct. However, dealing with this issue implies theoretical questions that also raise other, more pragmatic ones. Consequently, our initial question “What does improvising mean?” raised matters such as “When, why, and how do we improvise?” Following up this line of inquiry, the question “Who is the improviser?” arises. Our first answer, which we offered as a starting point for discussion, could be summarised as follows: “We are all improvisers, continually improvising within the practices that we develop in our relationships with the world. We are improvisers every day, without realising it; most of the time we are unaware of the power of this generative process, while giving improvised and unexpected answers to events. We all are improvisers, even though we do not often acknowledge

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Introduction it, even refusing it, relegating improvisation to the realm of crude spontaneism and evanescent episodes with neither stability, nor deep structural anchoring in consciousness and expertise.”

This project, however, aims to bestow on improvisation its legitimate role as a versatile, long-lasting generative process of knowledge and action, wherein new paths retrace old ones in a quest for alternative routes. In other words, we assume that whereas not all adaptation to change is improvised, all successful improvisations are good adaptive responses to change. In improvisation, shared practices, steeped in culture and history, are intertwined, yet constantly exposed to the force of innovation; respect and transgression – two apparently opposing, but intricately bound, concepts – are combined in an emergent response to a present situation. From this perspective, tradition may be considered a standard that is built on previous transgressions. Similarly we could also state that improvisation works alongside tradition by applying rules and standards, while continuously breaking with it to produce new forms. These emergent forms are governed by ongoing action, and it is exactly this governance that allows tradition to become a repertoire of ‘the strange’ and of ideas which become the norm. The potential shapes and eclectic results of this dialectic between the sedimentation and implementation of rules emerge sharply in the field of art. The study of improvisation in artistic practices could hold the key to understanding the more unstructured, at times more unconscious, forms of improvisation that pervade different fields of knowledge and professions, as well as our everyday experiences. What stands out is the contribution art makes to highlighting the essence of life’s patterns, which mostly unfold automatically.1 By analyzing music, as well as other visual and performing arts, we see that practices such as jazz and comedy of art have a tradition that legitimises improvisation, one that could emphasize what happens in other fields, including science and culture. What emerges is that the improviser is usually both a technical expert and an eclectic creative; the act of improvisation transcends the boundaries of mere execution, yet is not a 1

Interesting references on the topic are: Berliner, P.F. 1994. Thinking in Jazz. The Infinite Art of Improvisation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press; Monson, I. (ed.) 1997. Saying Something. Jazz Improvisation and Interaction (Chicago Studies in Ethnomusicology). Chicago: University of Chicago Press; Benson, B.E. 2003. The Improvisation of Musical Dialogue. A Phenomenology of Music. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Fischlin, D., Heble, A., and Monson, I. (eds.) 2004. The Other Side of Nowhere: Jazz Improvisation, and Communities in Dialogue. University Press of New England.

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pure expression of unshackled imagination. However, if improvisation is transcendence of the rules, those very rules are the condition that enables this transcendence to occur. Indeed, transcendence not only presupposes the rules, but in many respects creates and rises from them as it explores their most hidden potential, fully aware of the constraints they impose and the clashes it will provoke. Once again, the seemingly opposing concepts of “constraints” and “freedom” have the potential to form a strong relationship. Improvisation embodies the ability to move, starting from itself and not from an established rule; this movement, however, creates other rules which are valid only in the specific setting that generates them, though they may be extended and generalized to form a new kind of legitimate behaviour. In other words, improvisation is clearly an expression of freedom that never leaves the boundaries of its world, yet without them it could not even exist. The dialectical nature of improvisation seems to stretch from the extremes of rigid constraint and total arbitrariness, yet improvisation is where these opposing ideas meet. Musical dialogue within improvisation ensures that the original spontaneity of a composition emerges on each performance and that the technical nature of this performance inspires a potential composition. In other words, in some ways there is an improviser in every composer and performer, and it is thus the prerogative of improvisation to free the musician from the impoverishment of mere repetition. The features emerging from this study of improvisation in music could be used to interpret improvisation more generally as a phenomenon, process, or product of human activity. Within this extended concept, improvisation also appears to be an effect, not a mere result, of the strict application of essential techniques and an outcome of unexpected, surprising and spontaneous imagination born of a situation, which can never be planned in advance. A closer look at this feature suggests improvisation is a spontaneous performance that grasps and transforms elements into actions that, without technique, would otherwise be lost. Technique and spontaneity, far from being opposite poles, find within improvisation a place to reconcile their reciprocal and inextricable relationship. This relationship redirects the attention toward the situation from which the act of improvisation arises. These ideas were behind the title, and above all the subtitle, of the book: “between technique and spontaneity”. Improvisation lies in-between the paradox of defining, recognizing, learning, and teaching something that repeats the past (technique) and the creation of an undisclosed present (spontaneity). When improvising, we have to follow a model and then

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Introduction

surpass this model as well; to copy something and someone else, but copying is not enough; to listen, but listening does not suffice; and also to perceive, but the performance exceeds the perceived, promising more, something that can be used to spawn future creations and to understand the world. We have to listen, look and perceive carefully if we are to produce a previously unheard sound, an untouched work, an unseen frame or landscape. Yet these sounds, works and landscapes evoke past rules, while – as proleptic products – propose and foresee new constraints. Positing improvisation as an act that emerges from teaching and learning is another paradox, in that it expects the unpredictable to be crafted in advance, and personal, immediate and courageous resourcefulness to be learnt from imitation and practice. The solution to this antinomy is, in fact, put forward in experience of improvisation whereby a teacher outlines one model in order to teach another, and learners copy others in order to find their own style. In a way, the ontology of improvisation lies within the phenomenology of this overflowing teaching and learning process, thus overcoming its narrow common meaning that reduces improvisation to immediacy, ignoring the mediation used to generate and develop it. These considerations also highlight the dialogical, collaborative and shared dimension of improvisation as a practice based on ‘working together’, in which imitation and repetition foster originality and variation by confronting and bending the rules. In the improvisation process, performers become ‘characters’ and improvisation could be effectively understood as an ‘act of character’, with the meaning suggested by the Chinese writer Acheng: “...character is an act of writing. If you see something you like, copy it every day for six months, without skipping a day. When it seems similar to the original, write it again from memory, and when writing it from memory you deem it similar to the model, write it your own way. That is what talent is made of – breaking the rules. If you do not manage to do it, you will have to content yourself with writing characters that resemble their models.”

Following this line of thought, improvisation may be considered both an act of learning furthered by repetition and training, and an act of teaching promoted through crafting and scaffolding, but above all an act of knowing oneself and the world, effected by means of the new possibilities on offer. Such an act is performed as an answer – predictable enough to be recognized and surprising enough to be unique – to other suggestions in an authentic dialogue. The authenticity of dialogue lies in its genuine interest in a liaison that could entail recognition and loss, reinforcement and risk.

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In an authentic dialogue, tolerance of discomfort and perplexity accompanies the pleasure of finding a common groove. In the openness of dialogue, errors become an incident, and also an accident, that needs to be valorised and turned into an opportunity for growth. This is why improvisation is a joint venture that continuously escapes from each solo act. It always develops over a framework of conversation by adding something new, while responding to something else. Improvising means being able to detect the elements of a possible dialogical structure by careful listening even by one’s self and to tease it out, enriched and changed by one more voice even just one’s own. In this way, during the improvisation process, the original structure on which the discourse has to be based, with its rules and inner grammar, is at the same time reconfirmed and stimulated. To sum up, a good improviser needs to be brave enough to breach the confines of grammar and believing enough to use it to extend the field of discourse toward new, shared meanings. This could be an explanation as to why improvisation appears to be a unique spontaneous act of dialogue in a common technical language. The book is, in a sense, the result of a collective performance that took place in Italy over two days in May 2008; it consisted of a conference at the University of Padova, a concert at the “C. Pollini” Conservatory and a workshop at the Porsche Italia Auditorium.2 The contents page follows the main thread unravelled by the core questions raised in the project and by the possible answers of the authors during the meeting. The different lengths, styles, rhythms of these answers contribute to the development of the common theme. However, a second thread may appear in the continuous reference to jazz music as a metaphor, a practice, and a live model of improvisation. 2

We would like to thank the following partners: the University of Padova (all of the colleagues, PhD students, and staff involved in supporting this project by the Department of Educational Sciences, Department of Philosophy, Department of Linguistic, Communication, and Performing Arts Disciplines; Faculty of Education and Training; SSIS Veneto); Porsche Italia and Centro Porsche Padova, the “Cesare Pollini” Conservatory, Municipality of Padova; Centro d’Arte. We are also grateful to Alberto Zotti, Loris Casadei, Leopoldo Armellini, and Fiorita Luciano who believed in this project. A special thank you to the Tord Gustavsen Trio for their beautiful concert. A personal acknowledgement also goes to musicians Marcello Tonolo (piano), Marco Tamburini (trumpet), and to actors Francesco Burroni, Federico Stefanelli, and Daniela Amato, who were involved in the successful improvisation workshop.

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Introduction

The first article is by Tord Gustavsen, who ponders improvisation as an erotic, dialectical experience with a homologous ontological status. His work is developed around five polarities/dilemmas and their dynamic potential in the psychology and phenomenology of improvisation. The link Gustavsen’s article establishes between improvisation and jazz is elaborated by Andy Hamilton in his contribution, which compares improvisation with classical music. Hamilton argues that jazz could be considered classical music by reconsidering the traditional opposition between improvisation and composition within this art form. The core issue concerning the role and nature of the music performer and the common assumption behind the creativity of improvisation are combined in Gabriele Tomasi’s paper, which considers the concepts of “spontaneous” and “spontaneity”, both to analyse them as causal origins of music and as consequences of the involvement of some form of thought and reflection in music improvisation. Improvisation as a form of thought devoted to creative action is the focus of Bjorn Alterhaug’s contribution, which relates improvisation to all kinds of creative processes in human action, from everyday conversations to highly skilled professional activity. The author assumes that improvisation is a multiple phenomena, and proposes an interdisciplinary approach to the communicative dimension of improvisation in communities of cultural practices. The interdisciplinary perspective proposed by Alterhaug is developed by the last two contributions in the book by Keith Sawyer and Frank Barrett. Sawyer develops his contribution around the idea of innovation as the fundamental aim of the knowledge society, underlining the importance of teaching and learning for creativity today. Starting from the acknowledgement that innovative collaborations flow, in most cases, improvisationally, Sawyer argues that educating for innovation requires the creation of opportunities for collaborative improvisation, and he offers an insight into how to introduce this idea into educational environments. Improvisation, which Sawyer’s paper mainly considers to be a shared process of knowledge construction, is valorised by Frank Barrett in terms of the simultaneous actions of world-making and self-making. Barrett lays down these two actions as the bases for the construction of identity, which is considered a joint experience of coordination, negotiation and reorientation towards a positive, but not risk-free, development of self. Finally, this four-hands introduction is an attempt to explain why two colleagues embarked on this adventure, and to present the interpretation of the ideas that emerged in the following and enlarged polyphonic session. It serves as a provisional insight into improvisation and a dialogical movement open to discussion.

CHAPTER ONE THE DIALECTICAL EROTICISM OF IMPROVISATION TORD GUSTAVSEN

An Australian journalist wrote in a preview of our concert in Melbourne: “Music is all about sex. It's about tension and release, eagerness and restraint, gratification and generosity, control and surrender, and other delicately opposed forces in a more or less graceful fumble towards ecstasy”. 1

Let us start here. Although tabloid, this sentence summarizes a lot of what the dialectical eroticism of improvisation is about. I believe there are crucial parallels between the realm of music-making and the many realms of intimacy. Challenges facing us in one field can help us understand parallel challenges in other fields. The metaphorical –sometimes almost poetical – quality of understanding one thing in the light of another can be of great importance. We can gain inspiration and self-development both as persons and as musicians. My main argument is that a specific listing of five basic dialectical dilemmas or themes can be highly relevant to understanding the challenges of musical improvisation. This listing of dilemmas is collected from a psychological theory of development that in itself bridges the infant’s early forming of a self with adult challenges in close personal relationships at later stages in life. Thus, we have three levels constantly present in my dealings with these dilemmas:

1

Preview article for the Melbourne Jazz Festival 2008, printed in the city’s major newspaper The Age, April 2008 – journalist unknown.

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Chapter One

1) The infant forming a self through interaction with the primary caretakers 2) The adult engaging in intimate relationships –both as eroticism and as lasting companionship, and 3) The improviser relating to, making sense of, acting on, and being formed by his or her musical surroundings, that is, by the sounding music, by the physical instrument, and by the fellow musicians (if any). Now, instead of beginning (as I did in my more lengthy thesis) with summarizing and discussing existing theoretical approaches thus laying out extended background and terminology for our project –let me move directly to the “five polarities” or dilemmas. First I must rush into acknowledging, then, my sources for the listing of the dilemmas. Primarily we have Norwegian psychologist Anne-Lise Løvlie Schibbye, who is in turn building on theory from German psychoanalyst Helm Stierlin as well as a vast body of existentialist psychology. I am deeply grateful to Løvlie Schibbye for writing the beautiful little book called The Self–Yours, Mine, or Ours? (Løvlie, 1982), which was where I was first exposed to this line of thinking. For empirical data I use interview quotes collected from Paul Berliner’s book Thinking In Jazz heavily (Berliner, 1994). This is coupled with basic insights from the so-called “scenic music theory” as delivered to me through Rolf Inge Godøy and his renderings of Pierre Schaffer’s writings. The key concepts here are those of “musical objects” and their “emergent qualities”. The “five polarities” are descriptions of dilemmas that mankind is “doomed to” live with and encounter on a multitude of levels–dilemmas that must always be worked through in changing relations and changing situations throughout our life span. They are as follows: • Moment vs. duration • Difference vs. sameness • Gratification vs. frustration • Stability vs. stimulation • Closeness vs. distance Fundamentally, each polarity or dilemma comes with a set of dynamic potential, and a set of dangers. Dangers threaten when dialectics are “frozen” –that is when there is no creative movement, when the flow of relations (or the flow of music) is stalled in repetitive conflict. Dialectic potential, on the other hand, lies in dynamic resolution of conflict, and in fruitful integration of opposing forces. And –importantly– we are not aiming here for the dullness of a “middle way” –a middle way without any clear profile and striking qualities. You need to really embrace and explore

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each side of every paradox, but in ways that don’t bring about frozenness and repetitive conflicts. Now –let’s introduce the five dilemmas with a few remarks that bind them together. The art of improvisation is a field where you develop storytelling, narratives, form, harmony, etc. pretty much in the way a composer does. These are parameters of music frequently dealt with in existing literature. But this art form is just as much a live act where the musician confronts and faces the music, her fellow musicians, and the audience –in a very real time situation. A virtuoso improviser not only has to possess impressing analytical, creative and technical abilities, but equally important the ability to put these forces into play in the midst of multi-faced, often chaotic situations. The improviser has to build a musical unfolding that works on all levels from individual phrases up to the concert experience as a whole –without having much time to focus on each level separately. The improviser must attach musical activity to a basic “groove” and “mood”, while at the same time challenge and transcend these relatively stable qualities. The improviser must bring out his or her intensity and emotional presence without losing technical control, and without losing the ability to create overviews and orient herself in the musical landscape. All this, in my opinion, ties the art of improvisation closely to the basic challenges we have when developing as human beings. And, I believe that psychological and philosophical theory dealing with precisely these kinds of dialectical challenges in close personal relations, in sexuality and in child development, may shed a very fruitful light on the analogous challenges in making improvised music. First, we have…

1. Moment vs. duration The ability to negotiate musical time at different levels of resolutions is crucial for an improviser –all the way from the production of a single note via a gesture or phrase, a chorus or a bar structure, up to an entire piece. And even the concert as a whole– there are shapes unfolding in time on all these levels. And a good improviser must make her stuff work on every level. The first dialectical theme explores the intense dilemma between the here and now and the unfolding in time. Creative potential in this field can be summarized as the fruitful tension between involvement and intensity in the moment on the one hand, and the fullness and the reliability in that which lasts and builds itself over time, on the other.

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Chapter One

The dangers threatening on the dark side of this polarity, however, lie in the “blind”, restless and isolated moment vs. the empty and boring duration –a duration without intensity, without a focus and presence that can sweep you away and absorb you. As with all five polarities: the potential awaiting in the attractive versions of the dilemma has a tendency to transform into its destructive “shadows” if we are not able to initiate a dialectical movement. One side has to be brought into dialogue with the other –and new consciousness thus created in a process of synthesis. Moment vs. Duration Frozen dialectics Dynamic Potential “blind”, restless, empty, boring involvement & fullness & isolated duration intensity in the reliability in moments without moment that which intensity and lasts and focus builds itself over time The infant must go through a process from an undifferentiated state of being –where everything is experienced immediately in an all-embracing now– towards a familiarity with the passing of time by the experience of rhythms and cycles, and towards a coming to terms with deferred gratification. All of this has a huge potential for creating fear and anxiety. For an intimate relationship to grow and last, you have to find ways to unite childlike involvement in the moment with reliability and a sense of rhythm and an appreciation of commitment. When it works, moments gain reliability from duration, and duration gains intensity from moments. When it doesn’t work –you get bored or empty in duration, and the moments become “blind” in their search for fulfilment without perspective. By analogy, the improviser must also learn to unite his or her intense focus on the moment with a backward orientation and a forward orientation. Backwards in a feeling for the implications of musical events that have already taken place. Forwards as a deep feeling for the unique “loading” of any musical situations, a penetrating understanding of musical qualities that can be developed further in the course of the improvisation. He or she must learn to “hold back”, to distribute intensity, and thus shape musical substance over time. This is difficult, because the fuel of spontaneity and childlike involvement must be maintained at the same time.

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1.1 Negotiating musical form Orienting oneself in forms and chord changes underlying the improvisation also has to meet such a multi-directional imperative. You have to negotiate all the different levels at the same time, and at any given “now” relate yourself to the given location in the basic unfolding of form. Advanced improvisers often possess huge and impressing flexibility in this respect. Improvisers must develop an ability to experience and to “think” their musical now in different contexts –with a manifold, yet intensely focused fullness in perspective. Any given musical incident gains its meaning partly from its relatedness to the overall form, its relatedness to the musical processes activated in dynamics, timbre, rhythm, and to the gestural aspects of what has been going on in the music so far. You have to be completely there, in the heat of the moment. At the same time, you have to be in control of the unfolding, to be intuitively aware of the time line and the internal relations in the musical texture. And for great improvisation to really happen, this can not be an academic analysis, nor a troublesome shifting of focus back and forth; it must be a lived synthesis of man's basic dilemma between the moment and the duration.

1.2 Strategies and cross-modality The ability to unite moment and duration is fundamental for improvised strategy making. Short term, intermediate term and long term goals must flow in an organic decision making process. For this to happen, the improviser must orient herself through flexible and efficient cognitive representations of musical substance. The ability to create snapshot overviews is crucial. Overviews can facilitate spontaneous analysis of the musical processes going on, and spontaneous analysis of options for further development embedded in any given situation. Music can always be understood and encoded in an infinite number of ways, ranging from purely theoretical encoding based on for example harmony and rhythmic patterns, via visualizations of texture, timbre qualities etc., into more informal large-scale chunking of content –for example: “Yes, there we go again. We’re doing the soft touch approach to swinging eigths coupled with use of extreme registers in the piano and mallets on drums”. These kinds of informal labelling of musical situations are constantly developed both in individual musicians and among ensembles playing together over time. The complexity of different ways of understanding the music present in musicians’ consciousness is enormous. And this complexity can of

Chapter One

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course potentially cause the improvisation to stall because of sheer overflow –or because of inefficiency in processing and chunking. Crucial to achieving required efficiency in this field, then, is employing cross-modal representations. The tension between moment and duration is handled by the use of both • muscular-motor memory, • visual images of contour and texture, and • more conventional theoretical categorization based on harmony and other parameters. The different kinds of representation are all important in making up the totality of musical orientation. An improviser must possess a highly developed sense of integration in these landscapes, as well as a special kind of intense concentration, in order to hold these elements together and use them creatively in composing-in-the-moment. When such abilities are present, it is precisely the richness of this pluralistic universe of images – as well as the devotion in creative concentration amidst the richness– that assists the musician in producing musical meaning. "As artists explore different approaches to improvisation –whether vocally or instrumentally, or conceptually improvising away from an instrument without vocalizing their creations– their ideas can assume different forms of representation. Improvisers sometimes emphasize aural thinking. At other times, they emphasize theoretical thinking. Additionally, their rich field of imagination can feature abstract visual displays. Curtis Fuller ‘tries to paint little pictures’ when he improvises. Fred Hersch, too, ‘sees things very graphically that way’. He visualizes what he plays as ‘a kind of big playground with things jumping around on it, usually in terms of melodic movement: things going up this way, balanced by something going down that way’. Or he will see ‘large masses of things moving along: one string of notes jumping up and down, stopping, twitching around. Music has a feeling of space around it; it exists in space, these little mobiles of things. I like to think of music visually like that’, Hersch explains".2

1.3 Direction Handling the moment in relation to the flow of time also demands a special sense of musical direction. By necessity, any point in the musical unfolding is part of movement in time, but it is the improviser's task to make these directional movements “good”, “interesting”, and “organic”. Harmony, of course, matters a lot in this respect, and a basic challenge for beginners in jazz improvisation is for example the need to “anticipate 2

Berliner, 1994, 175.

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the chord changes”. An aesthetically satisfying jazz improvisation within styles based on chord changes, demands that you always combine an exploration of the various chords as universes in themselves with movements that foreshadow and prepare the chord to come. Bass player Rufus Reid states: “When I'm playing walking bass lines, I try to have the line moving somewhere. ... This has a lot to do with harmonic phrasing. If I'm playing a ii–V–I progression, I'm not just playing the notes of the chord. I'm moving toward V when I'm playing ii. I'm constantly flowing, pushing toward I. If you think consciously of moving somewhere harmonically when you play, it assimilates this swinging sound, because harmonic sound is motion”.3

More generally, David Sudnow says that “[t]o go for a sound is to go for a sound within a course. … It is in terms of securely targeted movements, implicated by preceding-forthcomingpositional-configurations, that the definition of sound is to be sought in the first place”.4

Here, Sudnow touches upon something very crucial in the “moment vs. duration” dialectics of improvisation. The improviser's intentional movement –both mentally and physically– when he or she executes a “go for a sound”, is the main component of improvisation as an activity. The way a sound works and acquires meaning in different musical and motor relations, must be a part of the improviser's internalized and embodied knowledge. This knowledge is fundamental to the ability to form anticipating “hypothesis” concerning potential sound events. It is also an important component in the ability to efficiently interpret events that have actually taken place –which in turn initiates further strategy making by processes of association, repetition, variation etc.. These insights can also be coupled with Alfred Pike's concepts of “intuitive cognition” and “prevision” from his essay A Phenomenology of Jazz (Pike, 1974). These notions capture the improviser's ability to immediately discover and “dig in to” fundamental qualities and possibilities for further development in a given musical event. Pike states: “What is first given must be developed. The incipient jazz image has its future horizons, and the improviser successively changes his viewpoint as

3 4

Reid, in Berliner, 1994, 352. Sudnow, 1993, 74.

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Chapter One he strives for these horizons. The immediate perceptual field contains within itself the potential structure of future fields”.5

Accordingly, in musical improvisation the present is always in labour with the future –labour both in the sense of “work” and as “giving birth”.

1.4 Perception “in a now” – duration conceptualized in the moment Now, let’s turn to the crucial term of “musical object”. The paradoxridden relationship between a constant flux of sensations and relatively stable perceptions in the form of objects in consciousness is of great interest to modern music theory and psychology. You have to “step out of time”, so to speak, to form objects in consciousness in the constant stream of sensations. An object in consciousness is a crystallized discontinuity in the continuous soundscape, and such crystallization is necessary in order to orient ourselves and make sense of what's going on. “The continuous is only perceivable through the discontinuous, as “the intuition of a temporal interval takes place in a now”.6 A “subjective now” in Husserl's terms contains both protentions and retentions –that is, both foreshadows of time to come and impressions from preceding portions of time. The improviser's chain of moments is a sophisticated chain of “subjective nows” along these lines. A musical object can be formed in consciousness on all levels of resolution of time –from a single note via a gesture or a phrase up to a concert as a whole.

1.5 “Emergent qualities” as pragmatic synthesis Here, we need to go into the basic notion of a musical object’s “emergent qualities”. Basically, emergent quality is anything striking about an object –a contour, a texture, a rhythmic pattern, etc.. From my experience, focusing on emergent qualities has significant potential for real-time practical solutions to some of the problems facing the improviser in the dilemma between moment and duration. A moment's experience; an appealing sound quality, a perceived contour, a subtle harmonic resolution, a tickling tension, etc., etc. –all is based on a “distributed substrate” sensed over time, but captured “in a

5 6

Pike, 1974, 89. Godoy, 1997, 63 (with a quotation from Edmund Husserl).

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now”. To contemplate this fundamental paradox in our perception of sound, can be very useful to the improviser. The wish to be existentially present in the details of the music can harm the ability to orient oneself in the broader soundscape. The urge to enter into deepness can harm the ability to get a grip of what one is actually delivering; that which can be perceived by listeners. I think that these dangers can be met by developing a habit of listening for the emergent qualities in phrases or musical events while they are still in the making in the improvisational process. Thereby, one strengthens the skill to perceive and control the relevant connections between details on a micro level and perceivable qualities on other levels of resolutions. While one is performing an improvised phrase, distinct emergent qualities usually manifests themselves –often to the surprise of the improviser, too – qualities that can be purified, developed, deepened or contrasted efficiently if taken seriously and understood in the right way. If consciousness during performance is actively searching for these qualities as qualities to encounter, and not only focusing on technique, theory and devices, nor exclusively on the inner creative “pressure” escaping objectivity, the improviser can come closer to a listener's reality without having to turn to populist, and often times alienating, ways of “communicating with the audience”. This is really about getting the dialogue happening in playing; not only with the other musicians (if any) and the audience (if any), but with oneself as a creative subject and an appreciating receiver. Hereby, the improviser strengthens her ability to build musical substance that works, in the sense that it offers striking and intriguing emergent qualities. This dialogic imperative demands the ability to negotiate relationships between unfolding in time (production of a distributed sound substrate) and existential moments (crystallized musical objects with emergent qualities perceived “in a now”); at a multitude of levels, the improviser must converse different “presences” and intimately feel connections between separate details building the larger units and the overall qualities of these units. Although the dialectics between moment and duration will always represent a field of challenge and risk even for advanced improvisers, an important path to practical solutions and development of improvisations skills in this area lies precisely in the common human mechanisms of sound perception –in the pendulum that is always moving between “floating” substance and stable objects. Contemplating these mechanisms, and developing them to a maximum, is likely to do the improviser a lot of good.

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To put it into a slogan: Play for yourself as a listener – by focusing creatively on emergent qualities of objects on a multitude of levels – get the dialogue going between inner urge and objective sound.

2. Difference vs. sameness For the second dilemma, we also start by laying out the difference between a constructive and a stalling version of the polarity. Creative potential in this field lies in the fruitful tension between individuality and clarity on the one hand and of belonging in immediate at-homeness and familiarity on the other. On the “dark side” of this polarity lies the alienating isolation and lack of integration or understanding on the one hand, and the undifferentiated symbiosis on the other. In this symbiosis one lives in repetitive patterns without really recognizing otherness, without any tools for breaking out of patterns, without any clarity of vision to separate between breathing, evolving patterns and lifelessly repeating ones. Difference vs. Frozen dialectics alienating undifferentiated isolation, lack of symbiosis, understanding repetitive patterns whether they actually breathe or not

sameness Dynamic Potential clarity of belonging, “at objects, home”-ness, individuality of familiarity and ideas understanding

As in the dilemma discussed in the previous section, the danger of transformation from growth-through-synthesis into stalling, unfruitful conflict faces us when we are unable to encounter the one side of the polarity with the other in a dialectical movement. Humans have an acute need of both sides in the polarity in their closest relations and also in their creative work. But the two sides can easily get into a difficult opposition, and the dialectical movement is easily “frozen” in repetitive conflict. Coming to terms with being separate and being connected; indeed, developing dialectical ways of being fulfilled in individuality through tight connections, and being relaxed in connected belonging through the acquisition of secure separateness; these are all basic challenges for the infant's forming of a self. And they are basic challenges for the adult living the existential themes of the human condition again and again. Emmy van

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Deurzen also explores these paradoxes in her account of existentialist psychotherapy: “The balancing act that we all have to work with is that of going out towards the world whilst maintaining a centeredness and equilibrium at the core. In terms of human relationships, this leads to the experience of the polarities of belonging and isolation, dominance and submission, power and impotence, contact and disconnection, recognition and rejection, participation and avoidance”.7

Relating this to musical improvisation, we get two sub-fields of tension: First, the tension between “entering into the music” on the one hand, and analyzing it as something “outside of” oneself on the other. Second, the relationship between continuity/similarity and variation/contrast in the musical substance. The latter sub-field is already well researched in music theory, although not often within an explicit dialectical framework.

2.1 Familiarity and curiosity –the unstable nature of the acting subject in making music An attentive creative improviser is situated the fundamental dialogue between doing and receiving. The improviser is and must be different and separate from the music in so far as he or she is making up strategies, doing informal musical analysis, labelling musical units, identifying musical processes, and challenging the material in ever new ways. At the same time, the improviser is one with the music in an infant-mother like symbiosis, constantly nurturing a need for familiar groove and secure belonging. The state of combined childlike devotion and adult-like control in relating to the music is crucial. Paul Berliner identifies this paradox in his interviews with jazz musicians; the calls for “letting go” and “let the music play you” are as frequent as the calls for taking control and being active in shaping the music. He states that “[t]his paradoxical relationships between musical actions calling for a passive performance posture and others calling for precise artistic control contributes to the mystique that surrounds improvisation”.8

7 8

van Deurzen, 1988, 39. Berliner, 1994, 219.

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Surely, it is a kind of mystique. At the same time, though, it is not very different from the mystique that we all live in our coming to terms with the need for belonging in familiar intimacy and warmth, and individualization in action, divergence and self-evaluation. This corresponds to the struggle between the “discontinuous” and the “continuous” in George Bataille's classic book Erotism (Bataille, 1986). We are discontinuous beings in keeping ourselves as separated individuals, but we long for the continuous in being fundamentally tied to the world and to other people. Eroticism is the field of most intense tensions and battles here. “Erotic activity, by dissolving the separate beings that participate in it, reveals their fundamental continuity, like the waves of a stormy sea”.9 We strive for unity and continuity, but these states are also threatening to us, as they violate our stable sense of individuality, thus bringing the intensity of life close to extinction and death. I believe that contemplating this analogy between the human condition and musical challenges has a creative potential for musicians. Apart from mere contemplation, how does one develop skills for handling this “mystique” in practice? Impressive analytical, technical and creative skills must be united with the courage to let go of control, and the courage to engage in something that you can never know the outcome of on beforehand. You have to dare “losing” yourself without guaranties as to how and when you get yourself back. You have to dare the encounter with the challenging unknown within what is familiar. Helm Stierlin talks of a labour necessary in human relations in order to live the dilemma between symbiosis and separateness fruitfully and dialectically: “Through this work we transcend the narcissism that keeps us from recognizing in the other anything but what is already known and familiar – that is, ourselves. This work makes us capable of incorporating the other's difference in us. Thereby, we ourselves become more complex, and gain greater opportunities for developing the relationship and our psychological understanding. But thereby, we envisage differences on a deeper level, differences that again has to be accommodated and transcended [opphevet]”.10

I do think that this “labour” in many ways corresponds to the improviser's challenges in constantly discovering the music anew, in seeing new “ways” and new solutions, and in bringing fresh curiosity to 9

Ibid., 22. Stierlin, 1994, 53 (my translation, from the Norwegian version).

10

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the situation, while at the same time hanging on to familiarity and intimacy with the musical landscape. When improvisation is flowing, it is precisely these oppositions that are constantly enriching each other in a dynamic movement. When the music is not flowing, the challenges are experienced as burdensome and alienating. Neither oneness nor curiosity is then blooming. Still, these are moments that should be lived without too much fear, because they nonetheless represent potential for breakthroughs and radical synthesis through honest search, craftsmanship and strokes of luck as well. Of course, no single technique or fixed method of practicing can ensure success in this dynamic field. Still, I would like to suggest the task of playing phrases or making musical events with an explicit focus on combining at-homeness and surprise; with the aim of getting a firmer grip of practical ways to unite with the music and confront it at the same time. This can be done through exploitation of intervals, harmonic contents, registral direction, different voicings, etc. –in short, every musical parameter routinely worked on by aspiring improvisers can be subject to this creative work. Furthermore, in practicing, the improviser should open up to the powerful experiencing of analogies between “life” and “art” along the lines drawn above. Much is to be gained for skilled musicians by just letting the music happen while reaching for an existential encounter with the situation as such: reaching for the feeling of being one with the music while at the same time being an agent confronting it.

2.2 Variation and continuity This work can involve drastic personal development and therapeutic processes. But it can also be found on a very practical level, where embracing familiarity can be experienced in elements of repetition and coherence, while differentiated manipulation lies in variation and musical contrast. Thus, our somewhat speculative psychological use of this polarity is closely connected to that which ties it to established music theory, in fields like motive analysis and rhythm; fields that are also heavily commented upon by jazz musicians in interviews. In these statements, one can often identify a basic preference for balance between repetition and variation. The ways in which you can invent motives, repeat them and manipulate through compositional techniques, are well known to most jazz improvisers. Relating his psychodynamic theory to esthetical experience, Helm Stierlin says that “we love a picture or a melody when they combine

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the beauty of the unknown with the beauty of that which is known to us”.11 The basic notion is that of lust: “In our striving for lust, chasing that which is new always walks hand in hand with the need for that which is the same, the need for what is known”.12 In these matters, Stierlin draws explicit parallels between aesthetic experience and the psychology of relations and sexology, and these are parallels that I believe are very useful for the phenomenology of improvisation. The improviser's work in developing skills for establishing continuity and variation, coherence and deviation in the musical substance –and more generally, to achieve the synthesis of secure familiarity and creative surprise –resembles the work needed to develop and deepen an intimate relationship. You have to be devoted in worshipping the familiar, the rituals and the at-homeness of belonging. At the same time you have to be devoted to looking for possibilities of development and growth, for new “themes” and meaningful contrasts in interaction patterns.

2.3 Schemata theory–prototypes and generative acts At this stage, we should also refer to a completely different field of psychological theory –cognitive schemata theory. There is, of course, no room for any thorough introduction to such a vast and important field, but I still want to outline this linkage because it offers insights that are particularly valuable to us in exploring the difference vs. sameness dialectics. In cognitive schemata theory we deal with research on “information packages” and on prescriptions for action, by which relevant knowledge of a certain kind of situation, scene or activity is held together and integrated in a way that makes it easier for the actor to select sensory data, organize them meaningfully, interpret them quickly, and choose appropriate action on the basis of this. Humans have this kind of schematas for standardized types of action and categorized fields of objects encountering us in our perception. The building of an improviser's cognitive apparatus for interpreting the musical landscape and finding “ways” in it can be understood in terms of schemata theory. Interaction between more or less fixed schematas and a constantly flowing sensory input is basic. This resembles the interaction between “top-down” and “bottom up” processing of information often referred to in cognitive psychology. We orient ourselves using stereotypes, model objects and pre-understanding. But we live dynamically from the 11 12

Stierlin, 1974, 55 (my translation). Ibid., 53.

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fuel of sensory input challenging and enriching precisely this preunderstanding. If schematas are not there, nothing makes sense. If schematas are not efficiently negotiated, selected, combined and processed, the flow of improvisation will stall and disintegrate. But if schematas are too tight and rigid, if we are not able to open up to being challenged, to form new classes of objects, to dig in to the qualities of objects with acute attention to detail, and to look for fresh links between objects, then improvisation becomes a dull and predictable procedure. A main point in schemata theory is that scripts and scenes are often generalized or inexact representations of situations or actions (or complexes of actions). This kind of representation facilitates information processing while also opening up for new behaviour and creative solutions. When orienting yourself through inexact schematas, you get a quicker grip on the landscape, and you envision possibilities for action in the form of “sketches”, not always highly detailed programs. Thus, there will always emerge different variants of the same schemata, with differing degrees of deviation and “newness”. When a schemata is treated so freely that it runs the risk of disintegration, we have the following options: Either, the actor can withdraw toward “acceptable” variations and act in more conventional ways according to the original schemata, or he or she can establish a new schemata – related to, but distinct from, the old one. Thus, schemata theory integrates and specifies familiarity and creative differentiation in one and the same model. Forming, sustaining and modifying schematas is a basic human capacity and necessity. On a very fundamental level, then, the improviser works with an innate capacity of creative innovation in secure, familiar landscapes. I would say that the dilemma between sameness and difference has a potential for practical solutions right here. Exploring and contemplating this basic human mechanism is likely to be a useful tool in the pedagogies of improvisation. We should focus on having a sufficient number of relevant schematas to interpret and handle the musical situations that arise. We should help students developing sufficiently profiled and worked-trough schematas to facilitate a quick and efficient retrieval process from long term memory. At the same time we should challenge them towards getting sufficiently flexible schematas to prevent their musical actions from being automated and predictable. These are basic keys to flowing musical improvisation.

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2.4 Creativity in other metaphors – language and thought Paul Berliner uses the notion of “musical ideas” as the basic unit in the improviser's Lebenswelt and its creative processes, and he relates this to creativity in language and verbal thinking in general: “[I]mprovisers constantly strive to put their thoughts together in different ways, going over old ground in search of new. The activity is much like creative thinking in language, in which the routine process is largely devoted to rethinking. By ruminating over formerly held ideas, isolating particular aspects, examining their relationships to the features of other ideas, and, perhaps, struggling to extend ideas in modest steps and refine them, thinkers typically have the sense of delving more deeply into the possibilities of their ideas. There are, of course, also the rarer moments when they experience discoveries as unexpected flashes of insight and revelation”.13

The main focus here is how formation of freshness and newness in musical improvisation can be seen as analogous to the production of new sentences with familiar words in common language, and analogous to the process where one develops one's chains of thought by constantly going over old material anew, searching for new constellations and interrelations. This quotation from Berliner offers a powerful tool for approaching the problem of novelty or innovation in jazz –the endless discussion of what can pass as creative improvisation. Here, we often find a conflict between avant-garde attitudes on the one hand and neo-classicist ones at the other, where the first party tries to monopolize the definition of novelty –and, in fact, of creativity at large. Using Berliner's analogy, one can claim that it is totally arrogant not to recognize the freshness and newness happening within familiar stylistic boundaries every time a musician approaches the stylistic area with openness and the desire to “say something” in his or her here-and-now-situation. Basically, one does not have to invent a new language to tell a new story. Anything that is experienced as a creative encounter between a devoted musical consciousness and a musical substance, is in fact fresh newness –from the point of view of this particular musician at the very least– and must be recognized as such. The fact that other musicians or critics may not necessarily have similar experiences of this musical happening can, of course, be brought into a discussion of what kind of creativity one favors. But it should not be used in out-defining other people's branches of musical activity as un-creative. 13

Berliner, 1994, 216.

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Furthermore, the quoted passage hints to the possibility of the overwhelming in experiencing creative processes. When encountering “sacred otherness” in innovations in flowing musical improvisation –be it the freshness inside of known stylistic borders, novelty in “playing with” these borders, or innovations in braking them successfully– familiarity and differentiation is dialectically united in growth. The improviser has entered into the music and achieved intimacy, while at the same time transcended what is known and safe in a daring act of creativity. These moments are crucial: “It is in dramatic movements from formerly mastered phrases to unrehearsed patterns, from commonly transacted physical maneuvers to those outside the body's normal reach or hold, and from familiar frames of reference within compositional forms to uncalculated structural positions, that improvisers typically push the limits of their artistry”.14

Now, on to the third basic dilemma…

3. Gratification vs. frustration Without gratification from one's needs being met, there can be no warm feeling of safety. But without challenging encounters with obstacles and resistance, we will not build independence and skills in problem solving. The infant first and foremost has to experience the world as trustworthy. A “warm care received by the infant in response to his needs”15 is probably also crucial to the building of trustful relations at later stages in life. But at the same time, as Anne-Lise Løvlie puts it: “[W]ithout obstacles the infant becomes unaware of himself as the centre for his own actions”.16 Thus, the self is built through experiences of limits and challenges. Furthermore, it is suggested that the ability to conceptualize and come to terms with deferred gratification is grounded in the initial feeling of safety and of needs being met. Løvlie talks of an “optimal” frustration; which is a kind of resistance facing the infant in the right amount and at the right time, were the feeling of mastery is developed in an environment of challenges in a safe terrain, and where gratification is intensely enjoyed without getting stuck in narcissism.

14

Ibid., 217. Løvlie, 1982, 93. 16 Ibid. 15

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Importantly, “frustration” has a dual meaning here; it is relevant both in the sense of postponing gratification and in the sense of disappointment or disaster. We are now ready to specify the dialectical theme: Positively, this polarity embraces sensuous well-being and security through gratification on the one hand, and development through challenges and building of lust over time on the other. On the dark side, when the polarity is not lived dynamically and the dialectic is frozen, its negative counterpart emerges: On the one hand, a “blind” desire that recognizes neither the passing of time nor the other as a separate entity –that keeps one from achieving the deeper satisfaction based on patience and lust built over time. On the other hand, you get a constantly frustrated being-in-the-world or in the music, where you don’t really take in moments of joy or satisfaction, and where the encounters with problems and challenges fail to bring secure development, because one always moves from one disappointment/dissatisfaction directly to another. Gratification vs. Frustration Frozen dialectics Dynamic Potential “blind desire”, constant development sensuous lost in shortfrustration, not through well-being, sight, unable to able to take in challenges, security build over time and really enjoy building of lust through needs satisfaction over time being met

3.1 Disappointments and "musical saves" Relating this to musical improvisation, we start by considering disappointments in the sense of errors or musical events that are experienced as un-satisfying. Jazz musicians often talk of the challenge in using such events constructively. In the art of the moment there is no “undo button” –what you have played is unquestionably there. When you disappoint yourself, it is therefore crucial to be able to transform disappointment into a kind of challenge that can enter into a dynamic dialectical movement toward satisfying totalities. Paul Berliner states that “[i]mprovisers cannot retrieve their unintended phrases or unsuccessful 'accidents’. Rather, they react to them immediately, endeavoring to integrate them smoothly into their performances. Mistakes, in particular, they treat as spontaneous compositional problems requiring immediate

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musical solutions. The solutions result in what may properly be described as musical saves”.17

The process of improvisation is always risky, and pianist Kenny Barron says: “[P]art of the act of performing jazz is taking chances, and sometimes the chances you take don't work. But the craft is taking an idea that doesn't work and turning it into something that does work”.18

This has the potential of reducing the impression of a mistake as a mistake, and if integration is successful, what was in the outset a nonfitting alien element, can become meaningful and at-home in the musical setting. Different “musical saves” can in time enter into the reservoir of standardized improvisational tools available for quick retrieval and use. “Beyond the immediacy of these occurrences, artists sometimes 'remember their successful solutions to past accidents'. The musical saves become part of their musical knowledge, and they can draw on them when they come across other musical circumstances involving similar elements”.19

Thus, representations of troublesome situations and their respective strategies for solutions are parts of am improviser's cognitive apparatus, by way of “scripts” for the handling of certain “scenes”. Sometimes, what was initially experienced as a problem, coupled with a spontaneously produced solutions of this kind, can make up a totality of so much satisfaction that the improviser establish a new “lick” or a new tool from it. These tools can be used intentionally on later occasions, also without any feeling of initial disappointment. Thus, a successful dialectical movement in a troublesome situation can result in a new totality that will in itself produce lust at later stages, because it incorporates tension and release in a secure unfolding.

3.2 Satisfaction and longing In the dialectic between gratification and frustration in the sense of postponing resolution or building lust there is a clear connection to the 17

Ibid., 210. Barron, in Berliner, 1994, 210. 19 Berliner, 1994, 215 (quotations from bass player Chuck Israels). 18

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moment vs. duration dialectic treated earlier: This frustration is a kind of friction in which you have to let go of immediate gratification in order to achieve satisfaction on the basis of the unfolding over time. This often involves a lot of hard work to embody and carry out. Still, the experience of gratification from a musical landscape will always be based on what we have earlier labelled “emergent qualities” in a “musical object” on some level of “resolution”. And unfolding over time can only be conceptualized as a whole or as a Gestalt, experienced in a subjective now, and as such they are moments of intensity. Hence, gratification on the basis of extended duration and unfolding will always be phenomena of the moment, although perhaps with a different feeling of fullness resulting from its being based on perception or activity spanning over a larger period of time. The improviser switches between different levels of resolution in her zooming in on the musical landscape, and the forsaking frustration often lies exactly in the separation between levels: you have to give up your tendency to focus all your lust and attention on one level, because of the danger of losing the grip of another important level. Or because of the danger of lust-based approaches to separate moments leading to a lack of satisfaction with the flow of the unfolding at large. Putting your lust into details is necessary. But putting all your lust into a detail is also dangerous as you can lose your perspective, harm your technique, and seriously interrupt the flow.

3.3 Sexology as a guide for improvisers? Here, the connection between the phenomenology of improvisation and that of eroticism and intimate relations is so crucial that we have to develop it a bit further. Helm Stierlin also couples aesthetic experience to the field of eroticism at this point: “You have to be able to live in forsaking, work with it, to prevent desire from being extinguished in enjoyment. This goes for the gratification of vegetative and sexual needs …, as well as for the relatively complex and often independent esthetic, affective, social and other human needs”.20

The possibilities for gratification will always outnumber the ones you choose to pursue. It is a basic challenge to “liberate gratification from the lack of gratification”21, so that you can enjoy the releases, culminations 20 21

Stierlin, 1974, 62 (my translation). Ibid.

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and joys that are actually realized without too much sorrow over the possibilities for gratification that are not. This is, I think, immensely important in human relations and lustseeking musical activity alike. Improvisers can find growth here: You have to be desire-focused and lust-seekingly present in the music, both as a process and as stationeries of release and enjoyment. Over-simplifying for heuristic reasons a vast and nuanced field, we can draw on the stereotypes of male and female sexuality here; stereotypes where the masculine is characterized by its directedness, linearity and climaxorientation –but also its swiftness and unreliability, while the feminine is more oriented toward atmosphere, presence and duration, a more subtle ecstasy, and less toward a “one, major release” as the ultimate goal. This field brings about a wide variety of potential difficulties in intimate relations, but also a wide variety of possibilities for development, growth and fertilization of our intensities. We have to live our own intensities in openness and respect for the qualities of the other's intensity. A musical improvisation should perhaps have a resolute and determined feeling, directed toward a climax (or a limited number of climaxes), thereafter getting swiftly down toward an ending. However, it is just as important to be constantly present in, and attentive to, the smaller and subtle points of gratification, and to be devoted to the sacredness of every detail. You can choose to refine and isolate an aggressive, uncompromising style of playing –and you can choose to refine and isolate a searching, humble and receiving style. But, in most cases there is much more to gain by working on dialectical solutions in this dilemma. This means going for determined clarity united with contemplative humbleness, without getting stuck in a middle-of-the-road kind of non-profiled playing. Precisely here, I do believe that improvisers can draw important inspiration from androgynous characters, characters where the two sides of the dilemma are integrated in a single personality. And improvisers can draw inspiration from experiences of successful encounters between different kinds of intensities and forms of sexuality. The potential for liberation and fertility is actualized and released by the uniting of oppositions in eroticism and music alike.

4. Stability vs. stimulation Stability through order and rhythm is necessary. But stagnation is just around the corner if we are not faced with elements of stimulating deviation or novelty. The dialectic at this point can be outlined as follows: In its constructive version this polarity embraces the secure and stable

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experience of reliable rhythm and recognizable order that gives the predictability needed to free cognitive and emotional energy for creativity –an on the other hand, the newness of interesting stimuli and creative components that are taken into the system. By frequent intrusion of fresh elements the whole is challenged, and by integration and accommodation (cf. Piaget) of these elements the whole is developed dialectically. Thus, the ever-changing, but still reliable, whole, is made both stable and exciting/pulsating. In its destructive counterpart on the dark side, however, this polarity covers the fatigue of stability where repetitive patterns become un-dynamically stalling instead of grooving on the one hand. On the other hand, it covers the restlessness of over-stimulation, where fresh elements craving attention and offering novelty are never given the time or space to really work and be integrated in the whole in thorough processes. Stability vs. Stimulation Frozen dialectics Dynamic Potential fatigue, restless overinteresting reliable rhythm, repetition as stimulation stimuli, fresh predictability, stalling elements repetition as life boredom and groove Stierlin formulates the need for dialectic movement here: “We need stability in a relationship, so that we can satisfy our need for security and safety. But if stability is left to dominate, it leads to stagnation, and the bonds of safety are transformed into heavy burdens. Thus, in a relationship that is to develop, one must always search for an equilibrium between stabilization and stimulation, and always in new and more complex areas”.22

This polarity is closely related to the “difference vs. sameness” dialectic treated above. What is stimulating will often be something other than or different from what is presently present. And, of course, stability is often rooted in repetition and sameness. Still, there is a need to thematize stabilization vs. stimulation on its own –especially, in fact, with regard to improvised music with its peculiarities. For it is not the case that stimulating and stabilizing elements necessarily must alternate and replace one another over time during improvisation. The dialectic integration of these opposites in the musical unfolding does not have to happen as 22

Ibid., 66 (my translation).

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changes from one section to another (say, from up-tempo to ballad, from soft to loud, etc.). On the contrary, integration can happen all the time, in each phrase, and – immensely important– in the fundamental groove.

4.1 Tension and release in different musical parameters In improvisation, dialectics of stimulating excitement and stabilizing release or continuity can be constructed in a number of different musical parameters. ƒ Rhythm ƒ Symmetry vs. asymmetrical statements – play with the underlying form in phrases and building blocks. ƒ Harmony – with the play of “inside” and “outside” choice of notes; with chord substitutions, and the general play on establishing expectations in the listener and choosing to what degree to fulfil them (cf. Leonard Meyer’s Emotion and Meaning in Music, 1956). ƒ Other parameters like texture, registral movement, tone colour, phrase lengths.

4.1.1 Rhythm Rhythmic tension can be established by shifts in placement related to the steady pulse or “beat”; you can play “on top of the beat”, “behind the bind” or “ahead of the beat”, as jazz musicians put it. A single phrase can encompass its own tension and release here with subtle variations and challenges to the underlying pulse being built up and released. The possible variations and nuances at this point are huge indeed, and the way an improviser handles rhythmic placement and variation is constitutive of his or her style of playing; both the degree of flexibility and variation employed, and the unifying characteristics of his or her preferred tendencies in rhythmic placement. In Berliner's interviews we can also find references to a kind of rhythmic synthesis that is especially interesting in our context here. Consider this telling statement: “See, the triplet feeling in rhythm, 'dah-dah-dah, dah-dah-dah', makes you relax. It makes you hold back; you can't rush triplets. But the duple part of the rhythm is like marches, 'one and two and' or 'one and two and three and four and'. That kind of division of time makes you move ahead, forge ahead, march – 'boom, boom, boom, boom'. That's the push of the rhythm.

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And that's why it is so nice when you combine those two feelings. Then you get a complete rhythm that marches and still relaxes”.23

Whether or not it is actually impossible to rush triplets is a point up for discussion… But this statement points to what is probably an essential aspect of intriguing jazz rhythms (and folk music from many parts of the world for that matter). The incorporating of different “feelings” in one and the same basic groove through polyrhythm brings a multi-faced yet integrated whole, that –performed by the best musicians– combines stability and stimulation in a very sophisticated way. Music can combine forward motion with relaxation, directedness with coolness, repetition with variation etc. in one and the same gesture, and in one and that same basic groove.

4.1.2 Symmetry and edges Tension from challenges to the underlying symmetry can be established by phrasing in ways that are contrary to the structure on which the improvisation is built or to which it refers: “create interest and suspense by improvising melodic phrases that cross over barlines and assume abstract rhythmic relationships to the meter”.24 The form of cool jazz developed in New York in the 1950's with pianist Lennie Tristano and saxophonists Warne Marsh and Lee Konitz as key figures, stands out in particular at this point; to me it represents a unique fusion of stimulation and stabilization through its immensely complex and highly sophisticated use of intriguing cross-meter structure-challenging phrasing, coupled with a carefulness in volume/loudness, and a kind of “laid back” attitude that it shared with the rest of the cool jazz movement.

4.1.3 Harmony Stimulating elements can be brought into the music by way of harmonic content, too. “[I]t is the relative mixture of pitches inside and outside of the harmony that creates interesting melodies”.25 What passes for a “right” balance in this respect will vary strongly between different stylistic areas, but most branches of jazz do indeed have some conception

23

Persip, in Berliner, 1994, 153. Ibid., 250. 25 Ibid. 24

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of this fundamental balance –of what is the correctly intriguing harmonic tension, and of what is the correct way to treat dissonances: “[W]hatever the pitch relationships players choose to define as dissonant within the bounds of their jazz idiom or personal style, they regard the artful handling of dissonance as an indication of mature artistry”.26

Here, there is clearly a parallel between jazz history and the history of Western art music, in that the conception of dissonance, together with directions for aesthetically satisfying treatment of them (that is, those dissonances that are at all tolerated in given contexts), make up a constitutive element of stylistic development. The transitions from modality via simple tonic-subdominant-dominant harmony, complex functional harmony, advanced modal systems, atonality and back to neoclassical and neo-romantic ideals are in many respects the same in jazz (the modal blues [prior to its rigid standardization in tonic, subdominant and dominant chords] Æ New Orleans jazz related to dance tunes, marches, rag time, etc. with their “simple” chord changes Æ Swing musicians' careful exploration of the “upper structure” of chords leading into Æ the be-bop “revolution” in complex harmony [although still rooted in standard chord progressions] Æ modal music employing sophisticated “Western” (Impressionist) techniques of voicings and harmonic colouring [cf. Bill Evans' work on the legendary Kind of Blue album] and oriental flavors Æ “free jazz” with more or less complete atonality Æ return to tonality in both jazz-rock fusion and neo-bop, although often incorporating the experience and techniques of radical freedom in various ways). Berendt offers a summary of harmony in the history of jazz.27 This chapter is informative and well worth reading, but Berendt is probably over-simplifying the relationship between what is “African” and “Western” and –in my opinion– under-evaluating the originality and fundamental nature of jazz' intriguing harmonic ambiguity and fuzziness, also in its early decades. Berendt simply suggests that jazz borrowed its harmony, while contributing a unique rhythmic intensity not found in Western music –the “blue note” being the only “original” harmonic contribution by jazz. There is, of course, some truth in this, but I think we have to realize that the feeling produced by what I take to be the synthesis of stability and stimulation in blue notes – notes that are in fact both dissonances and non-dissonances at the same time – is both 1) deeply constitutive of jazz feeling and 2) in fact, highly original in music history 26 27

Ibid., 252. Berendt, 1992, 177.

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at large. The ambiguously flexibly flatted fifths, thirds and sevenths are clearly points of stimulation in that they must appear as dissonances of some kind to any ear at all familiar with the experience of straight, welltempered Western harmony. Still, these notes are clearly points of rest and finality in jazz, in a way that dissonances are usually not experienced in Western tonal music. The blue notes do not necessarily “resolve” into consonance; they are emphasized and appreciated in themselves as fullness and as intense, fuzzy completion. I think this points to a very fundamental stimulation/stabilization dialectic intrinsic to jazz experience and performance. On a less speculative level, Paul Berliner also identifies a kind of harmonic syncopation that is interesting: “subtly offsetting pitch selection from the piece's structure, drawing on pitches that either anticipate the following chord or delay the preceding chord's resolution”.28 The integration of subtleties like this is, again, a balancing of stimulating deviation and stable normality. In improvised music based on chord changes, the predictability and strictness of the changes is counter-worked by the use of foreshadowing and delaying of the harmonic progression. But the musical unfolding stands in risk of disintegration if you overstimulate your improvisation this way, not being able to “bring it down”. Advanced improvisers often bring all these forms of harmonic synthesizing –“inside” vs. “outside” pitches, blue notes challenging the tempered system, and harmonic syncopation in foreshadowing and delaying –to impressing levels. The richness of variation and ambiguity is integrated in a secure handling of the multi-layeredness, and you get a special kind of fullness in the harmonic content of an improvisation, based on constant synthesis of what is challenging and what is familiar.

4.1.4 Other parameters Other areas, too, can stage the dialectics between stabilization and stimulation. Again, Paul Berliner identifies: “… movements creating other contrasts: for example, between increased and decreased rhythmic activity, inflected and uninflected pitches, and registral ascents and descents. Each produces schemes of tension and release, ultimately impuring inventions with a sense of flow. So, too, does the progression among such different musical events as lyrical phrases; driving, finger-generated patterns; intricate chromatically embellished

28

Berliner, 1994, 198.

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lines; swinging bebop gestures; and diminished chord patterns that depart from a prevailing meter”.29

Development over time in phrase length and register can also be effective: “[A]rtists may create a sense of balance and continuity within the larger designs of long consecutive phrases by remembering and using phrase length itself as a model. Alternatively, players develop ideas by inventing consecutive phrases, each slightly longer than the one before, as if an outgrowth from it. … In other instances, soloists convey a sense of development by gradually expanding the range of consecutive phrases”.30

Elsewhere, I have devised a quantitative method of revealing patterns like this in transcribed solos. I treat phrase length, harmonic deviation and accenting-contrary-to-the-basic-meter in a way that produces simple graphs showing development over time effectively (Gustavsen, 1997).

4.2 Repose in tension In a philosophy of music written several decades ago, the dialectics between tension and release in aesthetic experience is described like this: “The aesthetic experience is a feeling for an object of such intensity as to result in the identification of the person with the object of experience; he becomes one with it and reposes in it. The aesthetic experience is thus a condition of repose in tension, the tension being due to the intense feeling, while the repose arises from the person dwelling in the object. This condition of repose in tension turns aesthetic experience into perfect experience, and therefore leads also to the culmination of human experience”.31

Even though the musician in the act of playing is likely to be more focused on the craft and the production side of the music than this ideal of contemplative experience allows, an improviser is also connected to his or her music through a similar combination of “repose” in a being in the musical objects and the landscape produced by their relations, and a “tension” in the constant intensity wishing to create something. In successful improvisation the improviser often experience being able to 29

Ibid. Ibid. 31 Schoen, in Edwards, 1956, 16. 30

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trust the music as something that carries and gives. Then, intensity and stimulation is staged in a secure environment, and the fresh products of efforts and creativity are infused in the whole in constant movements of integration. However, when the music is not flowing, soothing repose is transformed into frozen un-dynamics, and the musical efforts you make, become un-organic forcing of the unfolding. You try to establish the flow, but instead you get a frozen conflict where repose is replaced by uncomfortable un-dynamics, and where creative tension is reduced to an unresolved, unreleased, ever-more-frustrated-erotic-aesthetic drive or yearning. The kind of frozen dialectic stalling the creative flow at times like these is difficult –yet not necessarily impossible– to transform back into a more constructive process. Repose in tension is the state of alert calmness, of excited ease, of flexible stringency that we should always go for. It is a mysterious thing, but you can practice it, and thus increase the likelihood of it happening. Employ a combination of a) practical training in playing technique (not at all covered in this essay) focusing on muscular alertness-calmness, b) training in “musical saves” (cf. above) to strengthen the ability to transform disappointments into creative happenings, c) practical/theoretical exercises in harmony and rhythm –create your own normality-deviation dialectics etudes on these and other musical parameters, and d) mental training contemplating the quasi-sacred paradox of intensityin-the-midst-of-dilemmas and flexibility-in-the-midst-of-directednessand-going-for-it.

4.3 Groove – the embodied synthesis of stimulation and stabilization? Moving on from the paradox of repose in tension, we should now focus explicitly on a term that is already used several times: “groove”. In research trying to explain aspects other than the harmonic and motivic ones of “ethnic” or rhythmic music, this term is often a point of both inspiration and confusion. Numerous attempts have been made to define it. Here, we shall neither try to review these attempts comprehensively, nor set out to make our own concise definition. Suffice it to say that most scholars approaching the qualities of groove find that it embraces a basic, repetitive rhythmic pattern, but that the term also implies a mystifying “something more”. A groove is an extensively repeated rhythmic motion or pattern that can be varied and “stretched”, but nevertheless makes up a

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stable foundation for the musical unfolding. A groove is also a kind of state –based on these rhythmic qualities. In evaluating music, the adjective “groovy” will mean the embodied successfulness with which this is achieved. A groove is something you enter into (“getting into the groove”) or establish, and, having entered, the groove then is a stimulating space, place or environment for activity and enjoyment; “[a] groove is a comfortable place to be” (Feld, 1994). Simultaneously, a groove is a place that can be challenged and transformed. A groove is an embodied musical phenomenon, where cyclic rhythm and compelling “drive” invite us to participation and motion. So, a groove is a field of compelling potential for enjoyment, a field of secure cyclic movement, a field of challenging subtle variation, etc. In all of this, we can spot a clear connection to the dialectic between stimulation and stabilization. I believe that strong groove quality can be taken to represent an optimized dialectical unifying of stimulation and stability. In a groove that works well, you are being met, both in your need for safety and in your need for challenge and transcendence. Order and transgression is staged in one and the same act. Now, for the last polarity…

5. Closeness vs. distance In the last one of Stierlin's dialectical themes we highlight the tension between devotion and control by the use of a metaphor of distance in relating to the music. First, let us see how Stierlin himself expresses central aspects of this polarity: “Desire and pleasure request closeness. However, this closeness will be the end of desire and pleasure proper if one does not work for a certain distance – a distance to one's own needs, and to the other who can satisfy these needs. It is through this work of distancing that we can over and over again rediscover closeness”.32

From time to time, we have to “break our emotional attachment to the other in order to understand him”33 –and this involves great struggles: “This work of distancing is always difficult. It can … only happen in a painful feeling of being lonely and exiled. When moving away from others, we hurt the primitive animal inside us that seeks its vitality and 32 33

Stierlin, 1974, 68 (my translation). Ibid., 69.

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power through a primary emotional participation in others. We leave the tribe [or tree trunk – the Norwegian word ‘stammen’ can have both meanings] that carries us. … The difficulties and pain in the work of distancing equals the difficulties and pain in the work of creating closeness. We are over and over again presented with both kinds of work”.34

From Stierlin's somewhat dramatic descriptions we move on to specifying this dilemma towards our context. Creative dialectical potential in this field lies on the one hand in devotional closeness where you give in to being surrounded by the music, to be intimately at its mercy, and to respond to its qualities from an “organic” symbiosis: musician-and-music is one. On the other hand it embraces the distance needed to switch between different levels of resolution of time, and focuses or aspects, to differentiate musical objects, to understand what processes are at work, and to se musical “traps” in time to avoid them. Transformed into its destructive counterparts on the “dark side”, however, frozen dialectics leads to the helplessness of undifferentiated closeness and the kind of “at-its-merciness” where you are a victim of circumstances and don’t know how to control your actions and their consequences. On the other hand of the dark destructive side lies the alienation in distance where you don't “get in touch with” the music or the flow of the relationship, and cannot break the barrier against emotional participation; where you operate in the musical landscape from strategies that are “un-organic” in that they are not founded in a real musical presence. When the one side of the dialectic is left to dominate in a romantic relationship, in a parent-child relation, or –so I suggest– in a musical mind; frozen, destructive, repetitive patterns are likely to develop. We need closeness-and-distance, yet they are contradictory. This dilemma is in many ways connected to the ones already presented. Closeness will often be a quality of the immediate moment, while distance opens the door for extended conceptualization of unfolding over time –cf. the theme of moment vs. duration. Furthermore, closeness will imply sameness and identification, while distance offers differentiation and perception of separateness –cf. the theme of difference vs. sameness. Still, it is highly relevant to treat closeness vs. distance as a separate dialectical theme –it thematizes the relationship between musician and music in the very compelling physical-embodied metaphor of distance, a metaphor that is in fact experienced by many musicians as very 34

Ibid., 69.

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“real”, and in a fascinating way it focuses on a multidimensionality of being present in the music. Closeness vs. Distance Frozen dialectics Dynamic Potential alienation, helplessness in distance enough being blocked undifferentiated to… surrounded emotional closeness, and • switch participation, victim of between intimately un-organic circumstances, exposed, different strategies no control over organic aspects of action music, symbiosis • zoom in on different levels resolution, • differentiate musical objects, • understand processes, • identify “traps”

5.1 The singing mind Let us take this dilemma further, and mention a couple of “healing tools” that can help us move from stagnation into fruitful dynamics: Jazz musicians frequently make references to singing as a significant device for their creative musical agency. Singing can work in many ways for instrumentalists. First, as a pedagogic tool –you develop your “inner ear” and your phrasing skills when you supplement playing your instrument with vocal improvisation and vocal imitations during practice. Second, singing can also be a great help in performance –you can sing what you play, either constantly or in parts of the musical unfolding, either out loud or as barely audible humming, and this often helps you phrase better and create more “lyrical” and “organic” lines. Finally, singing also works on a more abstract level as a metaphor for playing –“to play is to sing”. The special kind of embodiedness or

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intimacy with the improvised line that the song metaphor expresses is very interesting. Saxophonist Lee Konitz states: “Improvising is a singing, whistling phenomenon when it's really happening. … It's a matter of getting intricately and sophisticatedly involved with a melodic line so that it is one with the performer”.35

Paul Berliner goes on to conclude: “If you can't sing it, you can't play it. It may be possible to perform phrases on an instrument mechanically … by translating representations like chord symbols directly into finger patterns without prehearing the sounds for which they stand, but singing requires that artists both grasp ideas firmly in their imaginations and invest them with expressive qualities”.36

David Sudnow uses the expression “being singingly present” about the kind of lyrical-devotional closeness that releases strong melodic improvisation in his own playing.37 This is a kind of closeness to the “sorts of actions” and “sorts of places” (or scenes and scripts in cognitive terms), that is not totally symbiotic, yet still deeply connected and involved. It points to a cross-modality in the cognitive representations of the music, and in the cognitive structures guiding the creative act; a cross-modality that gives fullness and dialogue in improvisational intensity. The improviser converses theoretical representation, rehearsed motorprograms, abstract images of structures, texture etc., and spontaneous song. This conversing is crucial both to taking in and understanding the present music, and to creating new elements in the musical unfolding. When the improvised line becomes “one with the performer” through the combination of a singing approach and an instrumental approach, we avoid the lack of perspective in symbiotic unity that can follow from a musician only focusing on his or her instrument, or on the “inner pressure” in isolation; we get a unity between music and musician which is excessively dialogic because of its extended multidimensionality, and yet organic because of its intimately embodied source. To me, the metaphor of singing really shows a liberating way in the problematics of closeness vs. distance. Singing what you play helps you get a fuller perspective or feeling for what you’re doing. It offers distance because it involves a dual presence in the music (both your fingers and your singing mind is working), while at the same time facilitating organic 35

Konitz, in Berliner, 1994, 180. Ibid., 181. 37 Sudnow, 1993, 87. 36

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unity between musician and music, because singing really comes from the inner core of ear-trained musicality. Thus, alienation in distance is fought by the very same tool that helps you avoid the stiffened closeness from getting lost in the physical instrument and your technique struggles. Just as “groove” represents an optimized dialectical synthesis of stimulation and stability, so does “singing” represent a synthesis of closeness and distance.

5.2 Closeness vs. distance as body vs. mind Another way of approaching the problematics of this dialectical theme is to take closeness as the physical or immediate, and distance as the intellectual or reflective. This is, of course, a very questionable simplification. The physical is never totally immediate –everything we feel is mediated in some way. Still, this cliché can open up for some interesting perspectives. The challenge of reaching dialectical dynamics between intimate closeness on the one hand and clarity from a distance on the other, lies in finding a unity of non-verbal sensing and intuitive acting on the one hand, and conceptualized reflection on the other. The improviser must find a way to be musically present that releases the body's potential for “smooth” executing of complicated movements without having to spend much attentional resources on controlling and monitoring these movements. But the presence on stage also has to release creative and, to a certain extent, critical conversation with the learned movements. And it must release the ability to discover fresh musical objects on a multitude of levels of resolution. Analyzing from a distance cannot be allowed to constitute a totally different being-in-the-music than the spontaneous closeness; they must integrate in dialectic dynamics. Paul Berliner reflects upon his empirical data in connection with the notion of “the singing mind”: “Under the aegis of the singing mind, there are moments in which musicians see no further into their evolving line than a few pitches, their body and mind so tightly joined as to be fully absorbed into the performance's immediate progress. (…) At other moments … the ideas that soloists realize during performances depend as much on the body's own actions as on the body's synchronous response to the mind. The body can take momentary control over particular activities ... while the mind shifts its focus to the next idea”.38

38

Berliner, 1994, 189-190.

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Here, we see that the bodily presence in improvisation can unite with reflection in mutually enforcing processes, it can almost absorb reflection, and it can also supplement it so that the improviser has several mechanisms of control or monitoring that work in parallel. However, the feeling of totally separate entities of understanding and agency in music can not be sustained over a long period of time without the danger of alienation. To avoid disintegration of the musical unfolding, one has to move towards fusion in improvisational control organs and monitoring, and then perhaps to subsequent re-differentiation for further nuances and flexibility.

5.3 "Traveling along the contour of an evolving phrase" Paul Berliner formulates a telling metaphor for a presence that incorporates focusing on details and overviewing the whole on the level of single phrases in linear improvisation when he describes the improviser as “travelling along the contour of an evolving phrase”.39 This metaphor highlights both the details, the movement and the contour as a whole, or – in other words: the distributed substrate, the unfolding trajectory and the emergent qualities of the resulting musical object. The “traveling” along a musical contour still in the making is the improviser's attentive, sensible and creative work where the basic “curves” and “dots” of the evolving musical happening are negotiated and experienced relationally, in a holistic movement. The improviser embraces the closeness needed to appreciate tiny nuances and the potential for expression lying on the micro level, as well as the distance needed to be present on several levels of resolutions, where sums of choices made on the micro level make up musical Gestalts. Here, there is a tight connection between the polarities “moment vs. duration” and “closeness vs. distance”, and the advice developed earlier to listen for the emergent qualities while a musical object is still in the making, applies equally well at this point. Also, this metaphor of “traveling along” points to the paradox-ridden relationship between improvisation as setting courses and directing flow on the one hand, and improvisation as going with the flow and obeying the implications of what is already there on the other hand. When the improviser “travels along a contour”, this implies both following a movement in obedience and creating the very same movement. Improvisational choices of path must be taken on the basis of a closeness that makes the improviser really experience the musical unfolding and 39

Ibid., 187.

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adjust humbly to it, but also on the basis of a distance that makes him or her capable of creating overviews and developing fresh directions or curves in the contours of the music.

5.4 The sculptor We include another telling metaphor from Berliner's book: the sculptor's work with his or her physical material in a constant dialogue between the material facts of the stone and the intentions or strategies of the artist. “A sculptor chipping at a marble block mediates between the initial vision for the sculpture and its evolving shape. Each chisel stroke potentially alters its form in unintended ways or reveals new features in the grain's internal flow that suggests modification of the artwork's design”.40

This is in many ways parallel to the improviser's relationship to the musical substance –although a sculptor will frequently employ a more thoroughly worked out model of the whole of the work before the chipping really starts. Both forms of art demands closeness in that the artists “tune” their bodies in line with the material and let themselves be formed by what is actually taking place, while at the same time distance enough to avoid getting helplessly stuck when problems arise, and distance enough to conceive of ideas that do not just follow the material along the most obvious patterns but impose challenges and surprise. Again, it is important to focus on evolving Gestalts or wholes; to be attentive to potentials in the material (both obvious/familiar and surprising/fresh potentials) –potentials for establishing emergent qualities in objects– in a process of constant dialogue between given physical substance and your creative energy.

5.5 Subjectification vs. objectification The capacity for constant movements of differentiation and subsequent integration is a central theme for Anne-Lise Løvlie. Perceiving the world from one's own standpoint, with one's own needs and desires as a basis, is important. But narcissism is around the corner if one does not simultaneously understand objects as existing outside of oneself, and if one does not see others as separate agents with ontological status of their own. The immediate, self-centered way of experiencing the world –where

40

Ibid., 219.

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“the world is experienced only-as-it-relates-to-[my]-needs”41– is called subjectification, whereas the differentiated approach is called objectification. Subjectification and objectification in relation to our surroundings must take place simultaneously to achieve the synthesis of passionate closeness and lucid distance. One must expand, interpret and integrate one's surroundings in a manifold Lebenswelt of meanings, relations and emotions. This demands courage to undertake the movement from the safe and familiar into the insecure and unknown –and back. And that we establish an intimacy precisely in this movement –an intimacy that opens up for real integrated integration. The improviser must –as we have explored in many ways by now– take chances. Making music is an act of courage, and great moments often arise when secure at-homeness and breaking of new grounds are mutually enforcing each other. You are safe enough to risk something, and the gratification in successful encounters with the unknown strengthens and expands the at-homeness and readiness for ever new challenges. This ideal situation requires an apparatus of orientation with which you relate to fellow musicians and sounding music out of a combination of sincere, desire-driven subjectification and attentive, differentiating objectification. The feeling of safety requires a certain gratification and a basic subjectification in the playing situation. This safety can in turn open up for flexibility and courage. When an improvisational potential presenting itself to the improviser is to be pursued and developed, the situation requires objectification to understand the potential and its relational placement in the musical landscape. In the act of materializing new stuff into the flow of musical unfolding, you focus again on your desire for musical gratification from this placement, however with a kind of objective clarity needed for the freshness to really take its place without being swallowed by the impatient urge for the most familiar forms of gratification. Thus, the dialectic of subjectification and objectification is crucial for true musical dynamics.

5.6 States of the body bringing closeness and distance into play Before leaving the last dilemma, we should also touch upon one of the most “personal” and poorly researched aspects of making improvised music: postures and movements of the body. There is, of course, a vast amount of physiological information concerning “correct” positions and technique, and there are pedagogical systems for achieving efficient use of 41

Løvlie, 1982, 29.

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the body –efficient in the sense of getting a maximum of control and potential with a minimum of physical effort. However, among performers there are significant stocks of embodied knowledge in this area that are seldom formalized or verbalized. How you sit or stand, and how you “tune” yourself into your instrument is constitutive to the evolving of the Lebenswelt of making music, and thus also to the kind of music you are able to produce. David Sudnow tries to verbalize something here, and talks of the body's “being at the piano”.42 He writes about how his own playing developed drastically with inspiration from the mere sight of a particular pianist's (Jimmy Rowles') characteristic movements of the head, shoulders, arms and back during ballad playing. It is clear from Sudnow's descriptions that the establishment of a kind of intimate dialogue was a crucial breakthrough for him when employing similar movements himself –a dialogue with his own body and its potential, where closeness and distance together made up a fullness. In Sudnow's own embellished language: “[C]onversation with myself now began to take a certain form, looking down at these hands of mine, their ways, my ways of employing them, seeking practically useful terms for conceiving ‘my relationship to their ways’, reflecting upon how I could employ them, and what it meant, as manageable practices at the keyboard, to “employ them” for this music to happen”.43

Sudnow discovered that a certain kind of circular movements of the arms expressing and strengthening the “flowing” and flexible qualities of the music, combined with a tapping movement of the foot expressing and strengthening the more metronome-like pulse aspects of the music, released completely new things in his own playing. There is an interesting parallel here to the quotation presented earlier about rhythmic synthesis between “marching feeling” and “relaxed feeling” in the combined staging of “dah-dah-dah” and “boom-boom”. A forward-confident-marching attitude and a relaxed coolness can thus be united in both musical rhythm and physical presence. And this coupling of the body's and the music's rhythm is crucial, whether the bodily involvement takes the form of tiny, subtle movements or more overt, spastic or dance-like movements. Often, we need helping devices or techniques to achieve the right synthesis of distance and closeness, also body-wise. It is easy to be 42 43

Sudnow, 1993, 83. Ibid., 84.

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“caught inside”, and it is easy to be left “standing outside”. From my own experience I know that I can sometimes facilitate the overall musical dialogue with just minor adjustments of the way I sit at the piano: increasing the distance from my head to the keyboard slightly can release a feeling of freedom and control that is easily lost when the desire for intimate involvement in the music leads to a jerky and closed closeness with the instrument. The fundamental paradox of this is that the closeness to the music as an unfolding flowing whole is strengthened by a minor distancing to the physical instrument or to one particular angle in the involvement. And paradoxes like this are found all the time. You work your way through involvement and overviews, through intimacy and distancing.

5.7 The fear of extinction Finally, in keeping with Stierlin's own work, we will take these issues even further; towards a very general –and perhaps also somewhat speculative– level. In Stierlin's writing, the challenges of closeness vs. distance are related to a basic anxiety or Angst: a fear of death or extinction –and to the fundamental intra-personal work of coming to terms with this anxiety in a multitude of situations and relations throughout our life-span. “… any development towards a closer relationship to the other will present a challenge to the defense mechanisms … described as our defense against the fear of death. We are challenged to find a new equilibrium between dependence and independence. Our reward will be the intimacy, the complete recognition, that is the safest guarantee against loosing the grip of the balancing …. But this reward can only be achieved if we dare to wake the slumbering monsters, the archaic anxieties from childhood. The close relationship to the other can thus awaken desire, greed and destructiveness from early childhood, and point these drives to the person to whom we stand helpless, and to whom we have thereby in a way reinstated the child's dependent relationship. We must risk loosing our own ego-limits, and be exposed to an inner terror”.44

Stierlin identifies two basic forms of fear of death: the fear of extinction in enormous loneliness, and the fear of extinction in being swallowed.45 This corresponds to our reflections concerning “left standing outside” and “getting helplessly caught” in the music. You will have to 44 45

Stierlin, 1974, 69 (my translation). Ibid., 70.

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face both these dangers in the process of improvisation. You have to dare to remove yourself from the safe and familiar through a creative distancing, and you have to dare to lose control and be absorbed in closeness. These acts of courage must take place in a dialectical movement, or else you will eventually encounter –precisely– “death” or extinction. The music stops flowing naturally if you are too far away from it. And it stops developing if you lose your perspective and keep repeating things weather they sound good or not. “Death” in this sense, then, takes the form of a disintegrated musical unfolding, a lack of gratification through playing, and a loss of self esteem as a musician. Of course, transferring dramatic motives like these from psychoanalytic theory to music performance is questionable, but I have no doubt that the tension between involvement and control is really working in analogous ways here. And that successful improvisation will normally take a dialectical sublation or Aufheben of this dilemma. When the dilemma is handled dialectically, you play in an intimate at-its-merciness to the music while at the same time being able to change its directions, create new forms, objects, directions or sounds etc. out of overviews and control. This combination is a great feeling –it can surely bring about a quasi religiouserotic fulfilment.

5.8 Summing up and moving on By now, we have explored the situation of musical improvisation eclectically using the “five dilemmas” from Stierlin and Løvlie, and the fundamental dialectical line of reasoning that lies behind this theory. Each one of the polarities sheds a different light on the challenges facing the improviser. At the same time, there are clear connections and overlaps between them, some of which we have also demonstrated. Before ending this talk, I would like now to focus on a theme from jazz history that is, on closer examination, tightly connected to most of the a-historical theory presented so far.

5.8.1 Jazz as springing from the crossroads between “African” and “European” Treating the stimulation vs. stabilization dialectics of jazz harmony, we have already touched upon the issue of “African” and “Western” elements of jazz. This is, of course, an enormous field of study, in which music theory and American history come together in a very intriguing way. Naturally, no attempt can be made here to present a thorough review of

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existing research. Nor will I contribute a comprehensive account of the field from my own point of view. Still, making references to this historical/musicological/theoretical puzzle is crucial for the empirical placement of our dialectical theory. What I have been treating as the existential here-and-now challenges of improvisation, are of course just as much challenges presented in a specific historical and cultural location, with the burdens and the tools delivered by the past operating as “flexible constants” defining and laying out the musical situation. A whole mythology can be traced in the research on jazz history concerning “African” vs. “European/White/Western”, with respect to the music itself (as if music can ever really be separated from people playing and listening) as well as the sociology and social psychology of its subcultures. Here, sensuality is seen as clashing creatively or antagonistic with intellectuality, groove with semantic-musical content, “hot” with “cool”, etc., etc.. The Afro-American traditions of blues and spirituals are seen as sources on the “African” side, while ragtime, marching bands and to a certain extent (while undoubtedly playing a very important role on later stages of jazz' development) Western art music, on the “white” side. The African elements of collective improvisation, modal/static harmony and groove with repetitive patterns and driving poly rhythms were put in a fruitful play of fusion with European ideals of section-based form, harmonic progression, individual virtuosity46 –and, importantly, of a constant innovative praxis in all of these fields. The process of fusion between the “African” and the “European” did not happen once and for all. In addition to taking place historically in the beginning of the previous Century, it always keeps on happening in jazz – or at least in jazz that is alive and breathing. You converse unfolding of form with music as a state of being. You converse harmonic progression with modal landscapes. You converse compositional clarity with groove. One can see the schism between the “African” and the “Western” as a theme that must be re-worked dialectically throughout jazz history, and a theme that is also re-worked dialectically in the personal development of 46

The focus on individual, soloist virtuosity is of course also found in much African music, for instance in the "master drummer" function, where a particularly skilled drummer improvise solo cross-rhythms to the ever repeating rhythmic ground laid by the other drummers. Surely, in ensemble work, performers of European art music also experience collectivism and states of being-part-of-alarger-body-of-music. However, I do think that it is fair to make a distinction between individuality and collectivism as a general emphasis in European art music and African music respectively, as long as we keep in mind that this is an overt over-simplification done for heuristic purposes, not for historical correctness.

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musicians. Comparing with the dilemmas presented earlier, the “African” will correspond to the heat of the moment, the stabilization in repetition (remember, however, the inherent stimulation-stabilization synthesis in groove), the immediate gratification in grooving, the closeness and sameness in physical-sensual symbiosis with the music. The “Western”, on the other hand, will correspond to conceptualization of trajectories and duration, the stimulation and difference of contrasts and novelty, the tolerated frustration involved in deferred gratification, and the distance of analysis and comparative listening. I would suggest that improvised music has a very significant potential for healing or uniting the gap between these clichéd extremes. Jazz –at its best– builds bridges over a schism that is paralyzing post-colonial culture; the strange and seldom very fruitful combination of antagonism, mystification and idealization in the relationship between Occident and Orient. We envy each other, idealize each other, and dislike one another in mostly non-fusion ways. There is a need for healing dialectics. Not in Marxist-like totalitarian revolutionary utopias, but in a responsible, post-modern dialectical way; opening up for the freedom to transcend and sublate dilemmas on a personal level while not forgetting the links to socio-historical processes and to cultural heritage. Once again, let us turn to the practical level to exemplify this:

5.8.2 Unfolding of form vs. music as a state of being Charles O. Harman describes the potential for synthesis in form. He talks of the African heritage of “music as a state of being” vs. the European tradition of pieces of music with a beginning, different sections, and an end, and he states that “[t]he standard structure of a small-group jazz performance brings these different onthologies of music to a truce or compromise –ideally, a synthesis”.47 The standard convention for jazz performance in small ensembles is: theme presentation (tutti) –a number of soli, each of which in themselves an unfolding with a distinct dramaturgy, and with the possibility of other players entering in to “comment” or back up the improvisation –a second theme presentation, often with a Coda. Thus, we have a form with sub-forms –a complex, yet straight linear, unfolding. But the whole of this unfolding derives its musical intensity – and, ultimately, its meaning and significance– from a groove and a state. You don't necessarily have to pay attention to the theme to enjoy the solos, and a brilliant motif connection between parts of the unfolding is really not 47

Hartman, 1991,10.

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of much value if the overall musical intensity is not happening (It Don't Mean a Thing If It Ain't Got…). The groove is, if one is forced to choose – which, ideally, one should not– ultimately more important than each section in itself. Furthermore, musicians should be willing to sacrifice any planned scheme or form if a repetitive intensity is developed that is strong enough to “demand” more time. The length in time of each section is more dependent on the intensity developed in this particular section than on a proportion-like relationship to the length of the other sections. Thus, the logic of plans and schemes is coupled with the logic of spontaneity and situation. And so, the most widely used jazz performance idiom is in itself a dialectical solution to the tension between the demand for music as a state of being, and the demand for music as a nuanced unfolding.

5.8.3 Tempered vs. non-tempered universes of sound We can also look at the relationship between well-tempered “Western” tonality and the use of blue notes in jazz from the point of view of “African” vs. “Western” (cf. the remarks made concerning the blue note earlier). When jazz developed in the fuzzy encounter between spirituals, blues, ragtime, marching band traditions and others, a field of tension was simultaneously activated between tonality based on tempered intervals and tonic-subdominant-dominant harmony on the one hand, and modal music with a high tolerance for –indeed, preferences for– subtle nuances in the size of intervals on the other hand. This field of tension is brought into play in the particularities of every instrument and its possibilities and limitations in relation to the tempered system. I do think, in passing, that one could write the whole history of jazz piano as a series of attempts to come to terms with the paradox of playing music that actually requires flexible blue notes on a completely stiff, tempered instrument –a kind of continuing grief process over the lack of blue notes. The different styles, voicing traditions, and approaches on the instrument represent different ways of trying to incorporate the ambiguity of blue notes and their consonance-in-dissonance status without losing what is, after all, the fascinating qualities of the piano compared to the more pitch-flexible instruments. So, I maintain that the tension between tempered and non-tempered universes of sound is also constitutive to the synthesis of “African” and “Western” in jazz (and, subsequently, in most of jazz' children in Western popular music). It is connected to the tension between the subtle flexibility of static harmony (bringing, in successful ritual-like music, ecstatic results), and the richness, yet often the rigid stiffness, of harmonic

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progression in chord changes. And precisely this tension is dialectically dealt with and played with in good jazz. You have harmonic progression and you have a modal or bluesy feel. In closing, I do not think that the implied link between musical synthesis and human liberation in dilemmas between order and openness; logic and ecstasy; direction and cycles; analysis and spontaneity; is at all arbitrary or dangerous. As long as we stick to a non-authoritarian, metaphor-embracing, locally situated dialectical view of history and liberation, I believe this linking can do nothing but inspire us fruitfully.

Conclusions? The puzzles of jazz actions are now situated in a broader context, involving even the history of civilization. However briefly carried out, I do think that this excursion offered a very necessary perspective. Nevertheless, our main focus is the challenges for the individual improviser here and now, and the processes in consciousness of the individual improviser here and now. My conception of this has both expanded and integrated itself along the work involved in my thesis, and it always seems to take on another circle when I re-visit the material, as I have done for this little talk. I have tried to provide a bridge between terminology from scenic music theory; the five dialectical themes of Stierlin; and all the practical musicianship touched upon in our exploration of them. We have to end here, leaving for later the very interesting task of developing further the practical implications of our theory.48 Still, mind you, most of what we have presented does indeed have the double status of being manifestations of what is actually happening in flowing improvisation on the one hand, and implicit suggestions for practicing improvisation on the other. In this way, I believe we have already outlined a general frame for dialectical practicing of improvisation. To illustrate: One should practice handling the tension between long-term and shortterm musical perception. One should practice handling the tension between going with the flow and controlling and directing the music. One should practice being “inside” the music and listening from “outside” in an intimate dialogic presence –one should play for oneself as a listener. Dilemmas are there to be explored and experienced –we have so much to gain from personal development in going for the extremities and going 48

The Norwegian thesis on which this essay is built has a separate section suggesting rehearsal tasks for expanding one's musical consciousness developed from the theory presented.

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for the intriguing movements of synthesis, while trying to avoid ending up in the boring middle of the road. We should practice giving and receiving, being cool and being hot, being hard and being soft. We should expand our consciousness contemplating the dialectical eroticism of improvisation.

References Bataille, G. 1986, Erotism: death and sensuality, San Francisco: City Lights. [First English edition: Death and Sensuality: a Study of Eroticism and the Taboo, Walker & Co., New York 1962 (Original title: L'Erotisme, Les Editions de Minuit, Paris 1957). Berendt, J. E. 1992, The Jazz Book, New York: Lawrence Hill Books. Berliner, P. F. 1994, Thinking in Jazz: the Infinite Art of Improvisation, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Collier, J. L. 1993, Jazz: the American theme song, New York: Oxford University Press. Edwards, A. C. 1956, The Art of Melody, New York: Philosophical Library. Ellis H.C. and Hunt R.R. 1989, Fundamentals of Human Memory and Cognition, Dubuque – Iowa: Wm. C. Brown Publishers. Godøy, R. I. 1997a, Formalization and epistemology, Oslo: Scandinavian University Press / Universitetsforlaget. —. 1997b, Knowledge in Music Theory by Shapes of Musical Objects and Sound-Producing Actions, in M. Leman ed., Music, Gestalt and Computing, Berlin: Springer Verlag. —. 1998, Cross-modality and conceptual shapes and spaces in music theory, in Systematische Musikwissenschaft 1998, Bratislava: Asco Art & Science. Gustavsen, T. 1997, Palmevinsdrankeren – presentasjon og kritikk av en enkel kvantitativ analysemetode anvendt på Jon Balkes improvisasjon (emneområdet analysemetodikk til musikkvitenskap hovedfag), [Norwegian essay in jazz analysis – English abstracts can be ordered from [email protected]], University of Oslo. Keil, C. and Feld, S. 1994, Getting Into the Dialogic Groove, in C. Keil and S. Feld ed., Music Grooves, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Keil, C. 1994, Motion and Feeling Through Music, in C. Keil and S. Feld ed., Music Grooves, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Løvlie, A. 1982, The Self, Oslo: Universitetsforlaget. Meyer, L. B. 1956, Emotion and Meaning in Music, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

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Pike, A. 1974, “A Phenomenology of Jazz”, Journal of Jazz Studies, vol. 2, december 1974. Stierlin, H. 1969, Conflict and Reconciliation, New York: Anchor Books. Sudnow, D. 1993, Ways Of the Hand, Cambridge–Massachusetts: MIT Press. van Deurzen, E. 1998, Paradox and Passion in Psychotherapy: an existential approach to therapy and counseling, West Sussex: John Wiley & Sons.

CHAPTER TWO JAZZ AS CLASSICAL MUSIC ANDY HAMILTON

My question is: what is the relation between improvised and classical music? In particular, in what sense is jazz an art music? Its products have many of the features of art music, despite evidently being less contrived than the great works of the Western canon. Historically, jazz has drawn for its material on the charms of ephemeral pop music –what Noel Coward described dismissively as the “potency of cheap music”– which consist in their powers of association for individual listeners. When those materials are used as they are in jazz, an art of great power can be created. The present situation is more complex, but jazz still provides a case study of the dialectic between popular and art music. This dialectic gives rise to central aesthetic questions which are much-discussed in musicology and sociology of music, but whose deeper roots philosophical aesthetics tends to neglect. My suggestion is that jazz shares some of the features of Western art music –that apparently unique, autonomous art music which contrasts with traditional art musics such as gagaku, courtly gamelan and Indian classical music. Unlike Western art music, however, jazz's artistry consists not in composition, but in improvisation, often on popular materials. Jazz historian Scott DeVeaux writes that “in the discourse of jazz, the point at which jazz becomes 'Art' is thought to be in the move from swing to bebop. For a lot of people that's the moment at which jazz becomes itself, because it sheds…this exterior husk of commercialism”.1 The “discourse of jazz” seems to me right in saying that jazz became an art, and one with a fairly capital “A” –a practice involving skill, with an aesthetic end, that richly rewards serious attention. But many will have reservations about describing jazz as an art music; even more so, about describing it as a classical music. This article attempts to convince sceptics 1

http://www.grovemusic.com/grove-owned/music/feature_jazz/jazz01.htm

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that the description is benign, and that the process of classicisation has been a largely beneficial one.

1. Legitimation by the aesthetics of imperfection Jazz does not need to be “legitimated” in a practical as opposed to philosophical sense. What is in question is not whether jazz has artistic value, but from where that value arises. In the past, condescension from classical music bred insecurity among jazz players, hence for example the desire of Charlie Parker and Hampton Hawes to play with string orchestras. Clearly it is patronising –in fact, merely stupid and ignorant– to describe Charlie Parker as the Horowitz of the saxophone; one could equally call Horowitz the Charlie Parker of the piano. One view is that jazz's artistic value arises in part at least from its status as improvised music. Ted Gioia, in The Imperfect Art, defends the “imperfect art” of improvisation. His defence he labels “the aesthetics of imperfection”, in contrast to “the aesthetics of perfection” which takes composition as its paradigm. The “aesthetics of perfection” emphasises the timelessness of the work and the authority of the composer. The “aesthetics of imperfection” values the event or process of performance, especially when this involves improvisation. The appearance of the musical work in the later 18th century saw a divide between composition and improvisation.2 Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven were all accomplished improvisers, but after 1800 the belief that composition has a higher value than improvisation began to solidify in Western art music. The aesthetics of imperfection is right to insist on a relation between performance and pre-performance activity not envisaged by critics of improvisation such as Elliott Carter and Boulez –though in its claim of “pure spontaneity”, a full-blown aesthetics of imperfection is excessive.3 The correct view, in contrast to the extremes of perfection and imperfection, is that while interpreters think about and practice a work with the aim of giving a faithful representation of it in performance, improvisers also practice, but with the aim of being better prepared for what Steve Lacy terms “the leap into the unknown”.4 2

Goehr, 1992, 234. Hamilton, 2007a, ch. VI. 4 “[There] is a freshness, a certain quality that can only be obtained by improvisation, something you cannot possibly get by writing. It is something to do with the "edge". Always being on the brink of the unknown and being prepared for the leap. And when you go on 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...” 3

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Many improvisers will formulate structures and ideas, and at an unconscious level these phrases will provide openings for a new creation. Thus there are different ways for a performer to get beyond what they already do, to avoid repeating themselves. For the improviser, the performance must feel like a “leap into the unknown”, and it will be an inspired one when the hours of preparation connect with the requirements of the moment and help to shape a fresh and compelling creation. At the time of performance they must clear their conscious minds of prepared patterns and simply play. Thus it makes sense to talk of preparation for the spontaneous effort. Lee Konitz puts the matter succinctly: “That's my way of preparation –to not be prepared. And that takes a lot of preparation!”. This is the qualified truth in the "imperfectionist" claim that improvisation is valuable because it is closer to the original idea. Konitz has “complete faith” in the spontaneous process.5 So “spontaneity is a kind of authenticity”. The aesthetics of imperfection asserts essential differences between jazz and Western art music. But there are also growing similarities, arising from the developed artistry of jazz, which means that it can be described as an “art music of imperfection”.

2. An alternative legitimation – jazz as America's classical music These similarities are stressed by a contrasting but not inconsistent kind of legitimation, suggested by Grover Sales's Jazz: America's Classical Music, whose publication in 1984 sparked a minor cultural furore. Sales regards jazz today as based in American rather than AfricanAmerican experience, a national classical music and no longer an urban folk music. In 1987 the US Congress echoed his conception of jazz in a resolution designating jazz as a national treasure which deserves attention, support and resources to ensure that it is preserved, understood and promulgated. Three claims can be distinguished in the description of jazz as “America's classical music” –that it is (1) a quintessentially American artform; (2) a kind of classical music; (3) the unique American classical music.

(Weiss, 2006, 51). 5 In Hamilton, 2007b, Ch. 6.

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Claim (3) can be dismissed immediately. There was an American classical music before jazz, although up to Ives it relied on European models almost exclusively, and to a considerable extent after – Copland and Carter did, but not Cage and Partch. The view that jazz is an American classical music is quite defensible, however. The “American” aspect of this claim not my main concern, though I believe that it remains true. However, it is relevant in this sense. Those who practise a “folk” or collective art, including African-American forms such as the blues or early jazz, may come to aspire to the creation of a more autonomous art. “High art is not suited to them” parallels “Democracy is not suited to Africa”. Earl Hines would be entitled to regard himself not simply as part of the collective African-American heteronomous expression, but an original talent in his own right.6 We need to separate (1) and (2), and then consider whether (2) is compatible with a qualified aesthetics of imperfection.

3. Is jazz a classical music? The claim commonly means: 1. Jazz is a serious art form in its own right, despite long association with the entertainment industry – in Adorno's language, it is an autonomous art. 2. It has arrived at an era of common practice, which is codified and taught in the academy. 3. It has a universality, and constitutes an international language which transcends national and ethnic boundaries.

6

Richard Hadlock comments: “Hines, Waller, Tatum and Wilson could play a very acceptable blues when called upon but, given complete freedom, made little use of blues forms. They had scant regard for boogie-woogie, despite one of them having a hit record from that way of playing 'St. Louis Blues'. Why do we continue to link so-called African-American musicians with Africa or with some genetic code which causes an urge to swing and play the blues?” [email to the author, 10 June 2008].

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During the 20th century, jazz won the universal status that was previously the claim solely of the Western classical tradition. But feature 3. is neither necessary nor sufficient for the sense in which I take jazz to be a classical music. It is not sufficient, because rock and roll, for instance, has a universality, is an international language, but does not constitute an art music taught in the academy –with very limited exceptions. Nor is it necessary, because Indian classical music is not a universal language. Among those who defend jazz's classical status is pianist Billy Taylor, who argues that “jazz is very serious music…it has developed steadily from a single expression of the consciousness of black people into a national music that expresses American ideals and attitudes…its influence is international in scope…Americans of African descent, in producing music which expressed themselves, not only developed a new musical vocabulary, they created a classical music –an authentic American music which articulated uniquely American feelings and thoughts”.7

Taylor offers a synthesis of the African-American narrative –here at least, he omits the importance of musicians trained in Western art music in early jazz –and the “melting pot” view of American culture. Another proponent of this standpoint might be Wynton Marsalis, director of Lincoln Centre's jazz programme and the most powerful patron in jazz, who has been described as a “neo-classicist” who aims to codify the music, undermining its “revolutionary impulses”. When he became prominent in the early 1980s, jazz was at its lowest ebb commercially; Marsalis and critic Stanley Crouch defended a “jazz purism” which rejected both jazz-rock fusion and free jazz –the former as too commercial, the latter as lacking jazz values of melody and swing. Marsalis was musical advisor to Ken Burns' TV series, from the early 2000s, which follows the Marsalis line. Jazz’s academic status is shown by music programmes like that at Berklee, which encourage the idea of jazz improvisation as a craft that can be taught academically. What David Liebman calls the “apprenticeship system” of going on the road with Art Blakey, Miles Davis and other leaders has been replaced by an academic training.8 Another factor is canon-creation –the ready availability on CD of the complete history of

7

He adds that “a typical jazz performance…demonstrates the democratic process at work. There is no conductor directing the musical flow…” (Taylor, 1986). 8 Interview in Jazz Review, April/May 2008.

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jazz from the earliest recordings. The role of critics in creating and sustaining a canon is also significant. As Krin Gabbard (2000) writes: “The jazz history we have now really wouldn't exist without the critics… would we have Ornette Coleman without Martin Williams? There were certain artists who fit the aesthetic and the predetermined historical notions of critics so perfectly that they were written into the jazz canon by the critics”.

4. Defining popular and classical music We must explore in more depth what “classical music” means. It now exists as one half of a polarity, inter-defined with popular music –each phenomenon depends on the other, though they did not quite originate together. But at least from the 17th century onwards, “classical” described an artistic or literary work involving formal discipline, that is a model of excellence. Often such works derived from ancient Greek or Latin models –hence the use of “Classics” to describe the study of Ancient Civilisation. Since music had no Greek or Latin masterworks, the application of the term “classical” lacked such associations. However, Mozart's biographer Niemetschek, describing the “classical worth” of Mozart’s music, wrote that “The masterpieces of the Romans and Greeks please more and more through repeated reading, and as one’s taste is refined –the same is true for both expert and amateur with respect to the hearing of Mozart’s music” (1797, rev. 1808). The terms “classic” or “classical” were first applied to music during the 19th century. A.L. Millin's Dictionnaire des beaux-arts from 1806 defines classic (“classique”) as “a term that is applied to composers who are generally admired and who are regarded as authoritative”.9 In 1802 J.N. Forkel, listing what he considered the most outstanding of Bach's keyboard works, added that they “may be all considered as classical (klassisch)”.10 By the 1830s “classical” music had become increasingly identified with the “Viennese classics” of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. This use, followed for instance by Charles Rosen in The Classical Style, conforms with that of the other arts in referring to a period of particular excellence or influence. However, as European art and popular music became separated during the 19th century, “classical music” came to refer to the entire output of Western art music –a practice which signalled the 9

Trans. Peter le Huray and James Day, 1981, 293. On Johann Sebastian Bach's Life, Genius, and Works, trans. A.C.F. Kollmann, 1820, reprinted David and Mendel eds., 1966, 343. 10

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construction of what has been termed a “museum of musical works” that makes up the modern concert repertoire. In fact, the classical style was a popular one in the context of the audience of its time, limited to the bourgeoisie and aristocracy. “Classical music” therefore means, in order of decreasing specificity: (i) music conforming to a style-period within Western art music, viz. the first Viennese School of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven –music in which inheres ideals of balance and proportion, in contrast to Baroque garishness and disproportion. (ii) Western art music in general.11 This sense appeared only as the contrast with popular music developed, and is the definition understood by the ordinary listener, for whom “classical music” denotes a range of music from Baroque or earlier to the contemporary avantgarde. (iii) music that possesses a standard of excellence and formal discipline, belonging to the accumulation of art, literature and humane reflection that has stood the test of time and established a continuing tradition of reference and allusion. It was only from the early 20th century that classical and popular music began to be defined as a contrasting pair.12 Popular music is music aimed at the mass of the population. “Popular” is normally defined in terms of scale of activity –for example, sales of sheet music or recordings. The growing divide between art music and popular music during the 19th century is illustrated by English critic Haweis's Music and Morals from 1871, which assumes a moral-aesthetic hierarchy, with German symphonic music at the top and street entertainers at the base. Wagnerian opera deepened the divide, and modernism made it into a rupture; for many commentators, modernist art actively sets itself against popular culture. In music, unlike in painting, design and architecture, modernism did not fundamentally affect the tastes and practices of 20th century mass culture, though its effect on film music and, less directly, popular music has been significant.13 The most influential account of the sociology and aesthetics of the classical/popular divide belongs to Adorno. He held that from the 19th century onwards, all varieties of music, from folk to avantgarde classical music, are subject to mass mediation through the culture industry, a term 11 There is a further consideration, inapplicable to music: (iv) that which has to do with Greek or Latin antiquity. 12 During the early 20th century, the German Popularmusik gradually replaced Trivialmusik and Unterhaltungsmusik. 13 Entry on "Modernism" in Sadie and Tyrrell eds., 2004.

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which implies mechanical reproduction for the masses rather than production by them. “Popular music” in its present-day sense thus implies a mass culture. A common misinterpretation assumes that the culture industry embraces only popular music and art, but according to Adorno, it also commodifies art music of the past, transforming it into “museum-art”. For Adorno the split is not so much between serious and popular music as such –a division which has become, in his view, increasingly meaningless due to the almost inescapable commodity character of cultural products in the 20th century –but rather between music which accepts its character as commodity, and self-reflective music which critically opposes this fate, and thus alienates itself from society.14 Popular classics, the most commodified products of this category of museum-art, are one way in which the concepts of the classical and the popular are brought together. They combine “popular” in the sense of having mass appeal, and “classic” in sense (iii). They include a range of music from the Baroque era to the 20th century, typified by Bach's Air on a G String, Vivaldi's Four Seasons, Mozart's Symphony No. 40 and Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, Beethoven's 6th Symphony, Wagner's “The Ride of The Valkyries”, Tchaikovsky's “Waltz of the Flowers” from The Nutcracker, Debussy's “Clair de Lune”, and Holst's The Planets. Popularisation does not disqualify this music from being classic, in the sense of pertaining to a standard of excellence; some examples are also the greatest of high art. Mozart's Symphony No. 40 and Vivaldi's The Four Seasons have become popular classics and hence commodified, though unlike commodified pop music, these works were not originally a product of the culture industry. Classic and popular are also brought together in the “classic pop song”, a piece of pop music which attains to a standard of excellence –a possibility which Adorno would question.15 A fusion of the genres of classical and pop is a third possibility. Some writers argue that “classical music” as such –and not just the “popular classics”– is a kind of popular music. Middleton describes what is now commonly known as classical music as “in a sense, the first modern popular music, laying the foundations for what would subsequently be its 14

See Paddison, 1982. Even Beethoven's music, which does not (for Adorno) accept its character as commodity, is commodified in radio transmission (see "The Radio Symphony") because of the muted playback abilities of the equipment of the time – Adorno softens his view as technology develops. 15 "Classic pop songs" are represented, for example, by polls of the Hundred Greatest Songs: "Imagine" by John Lennon, "Bohemian Rhapsody" by Freddy Mercury and Queen, "Hey Jude" by The Beatles, "Every Breath You Take" by the Police.

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installation as the core of middlebrow taste”.16 Parakilas, in his “Classical Music as Popular Music”, argues that Western art music is not a “normal” variety of classical music, but is the product of special historical conditions: “Adaptation to new uses and new media gives classical music new kinds of popularity, but [that] popularity…continues to be specialized. Even when [it] reaches people in numbers which would be impressive for popular music, that popularity is explained…by the music's special associations rather than by its universal appeal”.17

Singing of the Psalms was perpetuated in ancient Hebrew culture, as the singing of Homer was in ancient Greek culture, he holds; Christian churches maintained their repertories of chant from medieval times to modern. But the modern-day classics of Western music are unprecedented in being perpetuated by primarily musical institutions, as opposed to schools and religious bodies which incidentally cultivate music –that is, as I would put it, music has become an autonomous art, whose production no longer exclusively serves direct social functions for the aristocracy and church. Until around 1800, conservatories, opera houses, orchestras, music publishers and journals were devoted principally to new music; only then did they began perpetuating what they would earlier have discarded, the best recent works in their repertories, from which eventually appeared a new perpetuated repertory. This is the background against which the word “classic”, long in literary and artistic use, was first applied to music. One objection to applying the term “classical music” to Western art music is the apparent implication that it is the unique classical music, which clearly it is not. However, I will argue that even its unique “abnormality” in Parakilas's sense is now qualified by the appearance of a comparable “abnormal” classical music, jazz.

5. The critique of “jazz as classical music” Factual and normative dimensions of jazz's classical status interpenetrate, but should be distinguished. There is the question of whether, as a matter of fact, jazz exhibits classical tendencies, and the question of whether such tendencies are, or would be, desirable. Some argue that jazz is still poised uneasily between art and entertainment, close to popular music in the ordinary sense of the term, and contrasting with Western art music.18 16

R. Middleton, "Popular Music", in Sadie and Tyrrell eds., 2004. Parakilas, 1984, 1. 18 Though there are continued claims, e.g. by Emmett Price, preceding reference, 17

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Trumpeter Brad Goode writes that “most jazz musicians, post be-bop, consider themselves to be ‘artists’ and consequently only consider the integrity of the music during their performances”, an attitude he finds inadvisable if the musicians wants to make a living. I would argue that jazz can be a classical music, even though it exploits the divide between the classical (in Parakilas's sense) and popular (in the mass sense) –this is one of its distinctive strengths as an art of improvisation, as we will see. Before considering criticisms of the classicising tendency, it is important to stress that the alternative to a jazz canon is ephermerality and neglect by any except the music's immediate producers and audience. This fact should be noted while considering criticism of jazz as classical music under three headings: (1) Elitism. The common view that classical music –Western art music– is “elitist”, may also incline some to deny that jazz is a classical music. This view is supported by the work of Bourdieu and others, who have analysed autonomous artworks as cultural capital and expression of social status.19 Clearly these writers are correct to insist that knowledge is power, and that knowledge of the arts can both impress and oppress. However, one cannot infer from these sociological truths that the classics are inherently a bourgeois category, and that, for instance, an alternative “people's art” is required. For by the same token, “street credible” knowledge of popular music –such as intimate knowledge of hiphop– is power and cultural capital also. The charge of elitism, which Parakilas shares, is not only mistaken, but also culturally debilitating. Classics in all artforms are not “the preferences of the elite”, they are the common heritage of humankind. Following Jonathan Rose in The Intellectual Life of the English Working Classes, I prefer the term “the classics” to “high culture”. As we saw, the classic is the accumulation of art, literature and humane reflection that has stood the test of time and established a continuing tradition of reference and allusion. It demands, and best rewards, seriousness and intensity of attention; but this does not mean that it is the preserve of the socially and

that it is a folk music. One of many versions of a possibly apocryphal anecdote concerns Big Bill Broonzy, interviewed on a Chicago radio program by Studs Terkel. After Broonzy sang, Terkel asked, “Is that a folk song?” Broonzy replied, “I ain't never heard no horse sing it”. 19 Bourdieu, 1987.

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economically dominant classes.20 The concept of the classic is backwardlooking in making essential reference to the test of time; contemporary high culture is that which critical opinion predicts will become classic. (Clearly, one must allow that new works can belong to high culture.) At the time they are produced, many future classics have minority appeal, but this often broadens. The process of canon-formation raises many questions which cannot be pursued here, but it is interesting to note its stability in freer societies, in contrast for example to canons imposed by totalitarian regimes. Although I do still refer to “high culture”, reservations about its misleading elitist implications must be borne in mind.21 The issue is complex in many ways. This is shown by Cohen's defence of the interesting idea that art is the focus of an “affective community, a group whose intimacy is underwritten by their conviction that they feel the same about something, and that that thing – the art – is their bond”. He continues by arguing that “distinctions between high and low, and rare and popular [cut across] the distinction between wide and narrow ranges of human connection. Some works connect me with many people, including, sometimes, considerable varieties of kinds of people [while others] connect me with very few people…people who are much like me…And sometimes a work of depth connects many of us partly because we do not relate ourselves to it in the same way”.22

On Cohen's view, a single person might join both high and low audiences, and thus be an appreciator of both fine and popular art; and a single work might find favor with both audiences. This is not a problem for the classical/popular distinction however, as Panofsky points out, since an artwork's limited appeal may be a defect:

20 Rose argues that classic literature offers a versatility of insight which is itself empowering and subversive: “If the classics offered artistic excellence, psychological insights, and penetrating philosophy to the governing classes…then the politics of equality must begin by redistributing this knowledge to the governed classes” (Rose, 2001, 7). 21 Elitism is discussed further in Hamilton, 2008a. 22 Cohen…“The Simpsons and some Marx brothers movies connect me with both very young people and some widely varying kinds of people my own age and older”; artworks with more limited connections include some stories by I.B. Singer and Richard Stern.

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Chapter Two “Noncommercial art has given us Seurat's “Grande Jatte” and Shakespeare's sonnets, but also much that is esoteric to the point of incommunicability. Conversely, commercial art has given us much that is vulgar…to the point of loathsomeness, but also Dürer's prints and Shakespeare's plays”.23

While he does not belong in Panofsky's category of the incommunicable, it is a criticism of a great composer such as Schoenberg that his art lacks broad diachronic appeal. Over the course of history, the classics come to appeal to a larger number than the local preferences of popular culture. In crude commercial terms, this year, Celine Dion sells more than Beethoven, Charlie Parker or Jimi Hendrix, and over 50 years Cliff Richard sells more than any of these, but over 200 years Beethoven, Parker or Hendrix will sell the most. As Parakilas puts it, “The rock song has one kind of popularity because it is current; the symphony has another kind because it is classic, because it never becomes dated”.24 Here then is an explanation of the phenomenon that Ted Cohen describes: “very popular works are typically thought to be slight, to be ‘easy’, to be superficial, [and so] many people are able to appreciate them. On the other hand…precisely because of its enormous, penetrating depth, [the greatest art] must be able to reach all who are genuinely human… on this account, Hamlet is transcendental, Dallas is subterranean…”.25

The explanation of this phenomenon is that Hamlet reaches a large audience diachronically, while Dallas reaches one synchronically, then disappears rapidly into obscurity. (2) Connotations of respectability. A Village Voice writer suggests that the description of jazz as “America's classical music” is meant to

23

Panofsky, 1995, 120. Panofsky actually writes “vulgar or snobbish (two aspects of the same thing) to the point of loathsomeness”, but since neither Ted Cohen nor myself understand what this means, I have cut it. 24 Parakilas, 1984, 1. 25 He continues: “This striking incongruity has been present for some time. [For Hume] the truly beautiful has pleased at all times, in all places, and [also] there are ages in which no one can apprehend the truly beautiful. He seems to say both that the truest beauty is for everyone, and that it is reserved for a very special very few” (Cohen, 1993).

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“legitimize it, make it blandly respectable and therefore ignorable”26. But to reiterate, our search is for legitimation in a philosophical not a practical sense. The Village Voice response is any case a clichéd one. Is classical music bland? Outside the annals of Socialist Realism and its fellow travellers, is it normally a criticism of an artwork that it is not politically radical? Are King Lear, Monteverdi's Vespers, St Paul's Cathedral or Turner's “Rain Steam and Speed” blandly respectable and therefore ignorable? The objection is that the classics are affirmative of society and uncritical. I believe that Parakilas concedes too much to this line of criticism when he writes that the classics belong to individual listeners, to the musical authorities which conferred classical status on them, and finally to the social and political authorities which support those musical ones: “Classical music is approved music; it is politically and socially safe…Still, the politics of comfort make many listeners uncomfortable…. not only some who do not like classical music anyway, but also…music scholars who insist on remembering the powers which classical music has lost”.27

It would be naïve to ignore such considerations, but before subscribing to the “power politics” aesthetic of Cultural Studies, we must ask what “belonging” involves. Am I supporting the political status quo when I read Thomas Hardy's poetry or listen to a Beethoven piano sonata? Because they manifest independent thought, under an authoritarian regime such actions can take on an oppositional hue; it does not follow that under a liberal democracy they become uncritically complaisant. (3) Allegedly static common practice. This final objection is the most powerful, I think. It is a musicological commonplace that in the 18th and 19th centuries, Western art music entered an era of common practice based on functional harmony and the tonal system of major and minor keys – though some would claim that this period began before the 18th century. Some would argue that this era came to an end with the “emancipation of the dissonance” by Schoenberg and his contemporaries, while others hold 26

Village Voice 01/09/01. He cites Andrew Porter's comments on Verdi's Un Ballo in Maschera, while denying its continuing relevance: “Serious opera has always been a political art, and it was not for nothing that Bourbon censorship forbade the performance of 'Ballo'”. (Parakilas, 1984, 6) 27

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that, to all intents and purposes –that is, concerning music in everyday life – it is still with us, Schoenberg and his contemporaries notwithstanding. Arguably, there has been a corresponding period in jazz. Like classical music, jazz has also seemingly reached the limits of radicalism, though by a very rapid process of development. Within Duke Ellington's lifetime, an avant-garde surfaced; it was as if Pierre Boulez had overlapped with Bach. Much as classical tonality returned to fashion in the 1970s and 80s, however, jazz has lately seen a conservative reaction. Conrad Cork argues that while the evolution of jazz practice was rapid for about five decades, it became much reduced since the 1970s, either “because the music has atrophied [or] because it has arrived at a period of common practice, where it can function on its own terms”.28 Others take a more critical view of common practice, arguing that it means that classical musics and languages are no longer created actively, but are conserved in conservatories; interpreters study the seminal texts in order to restore them to life. Thus Emmett Price writes that “classical implies static, non-changing; a relic frozen in time. Jazz has never been static, non-changing or frozen”, while Alex Ross refers to the “pernicious” implication that jazz “has become 'classical' in the pejorative sense: complete, finished, historical”.29 This negative picture is too critical, I believe. Classical music is not the curatorial exercise that these writers assume, and which the authenticity movement in early music may appear to support. The idea that classical musics are “static, non-changing, frozen” is misguided. As Parakilas argues, rather than resuscitating corpses, the classical repertory keeps “certain old works…ever-popular, ever-present, ever-new. It is an idea founded on reverence for the past, but not necessarily on a modern

28 Cork, 1996, 73. He continues: “André Hodeir…claimed that jazz had traversed five centuries of [Western European art music] musical history in as many decades. Prior to André Hodeir, the word 'classic' was applied to the New Orleans jazz of the 1920's. Hodeir was probably the first to deny that classification [arguing that] the first 'classical' period in jazz was the 1930's, when it first became an art form sui generis, as musicians found freedom in their efforts to incorporate the momentous discoveries of Louis Armstrong…”. 29 Emmett Price, http://www.allaboutjazz.com/php/article.php?id=807, November 8, 2003; Classical View: Talking Some Good, Hard Truths About Music by Alex Ross, 12 Nov. 1995, http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A00E2D61439F931A25752C1 A963958260&sec=&pagewanted=2

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scholarly conception of history….[It may not take] notice of historical differences between one work and another within it”

as proponents of early music do. Classical musicians resemble popular musicians in rendering their entire repertory in a common present, he adds: “[But unlike] monastic choirs or sitar players or nightclub musicians or singers of traditional ballads, [they] decide the right style of performance for each work according to its place in history. They do not, however, reconstruct performance styles archeologically, as early-music performers do…[but read] the whole tradition as a map of expression…divided into style-periods, each representing a stage of evolution…Romanticism is an answer to Classicism; Impressionism and Expressionism and Verismo are divergent outgrowths of Romanticism”. “The classical style of playing Beethoven is not Beethoven's style of playing, but a style about Beethoven. Performers…have to learn their way around the whole tradition before they can render any one style. They have not learned Classical restraint unless they have also learned Romantic passion…”. “…[They] play Bach and Bartók on the same instruments and with a single, if flexible, technique. [But they] perform a score with a particular kind of faithfulness to history: the score by itself tells them just what notes to perform, as it does not do for early-music performers…”.

A crucial question when considering the criticism that classical musics are “static, non-changing, frozen”, is the extent to which a repertory is closed, or admits new material. Parakilas comments that such a repertory “need not be kept up-to-date with works from the period just past. The repertory of Gregorian chant, for instance, was considered closed by the time of the Renaissance, and performers did not sing the older chants within that repertory differently from the younger chants, though the repertory as a whole was performed differently from place to place and from one period to the next”. 30 30

He adds: "Early-music performance makes the classics sound unfamiliar. Harnoncourt's ways of performing Bach sounds unfamiliar compared to Klemperer's, not only because in the late-twentieth century it happens to be newer, but because it is based on an idea of discontinuity between the past and the present. [It] makes Bach belong to his own time, not to all time. It frees him from the burden of being timeless, immortal, and universal, the burden of being classic. It removes him from a tradition belonging to listeners today and returns him to a tradition which those listeners can only imagine". He also comments that classical

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However, if it is a living classical repertory, it will be kept up to date. This, I think, is true of both Western art music, and jazz as classical music. But in what follows I will give this issue further consideration. A reverence for the exact notes transmitted by history, Parakilas argues, is characteristic of classic repertories. His comment that since Charlie Parker has become “classic jazz”, musicians give classical performances which reproduce exactly the “text” of a recorded performance, probably refers to arrangements of Parker solos by the group Supersax; George Russell's arrangement of Miles Davis's solo on “So What” is another example. However, these cases are not central; they are an “early music” rather than a classical tendency in jazz. As an improviser's and not an interpreter's art, jazz imposes strict limits on the former possibility, but less so on the latter, as we will now see.

6. An era of common practice in jazz: repertoire, method and style How does the concept of a common practice apply to an art of improvisation as opposed to one of interpretation of composed works? The phrase “in the tradition” is common in jazz, but what does it signify? The common practice or tradition relates to three things: the materials which improvisation is based on, which until relatively recently consisted mainly of a repertoire of standard songs; the method or approach to improvisation, for instance a thematic approach, or the Berklee pattern-based model; and finally, the style-periods of jazz to which all except the most original contemporary practitioners adhere, such as bebop, hardbop, modal jazz, fusion, free jazz, and so on. The first sense of common practice, common repertoire, is the clearest. The term “standard” appeared in the late 40s or early 50s, referring to what became known as the Great American Songbook of classic showtunes and film-themes written mostly between the 1920s and 1950s.31 These standards, and the smaller number of “jazz standards” by composers such as Monk, Ellington, Coltrane and Davis, are the repertoire of modern jazz. It became accepted that a working jazz musician required a good knowledge of these standard songs, which

performers do not introduce pieces as pop performers do. Even André Previn would never introduce a performance of Beethoven's 5th Symphony with the words, "It goes something like this…" (Parakilas, 1984, 6). 31 "Standard" also has a use in wider popular culture, beginning in the LP era with Ella Fitzgerald's Songbook albums from 1956 onwards, and Frank Sinatra's albums from the same time.

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provide a fruitful basis for improvisation, and a common language for players who have not played together before. This is still true. However, from bebop onwards, players wrote original compositions on standard harmonic structures, as well as ones not based on those structures but which follow the style of show-tunes. In both cases the themes often began as improvisations –Charlie Parker's compositions are a notable example. Expansion of the standards repertoire into post1960s pop material has been limited, but there are surprises, for example Abba's “Waterloo” as performed by Yuri Honing. Not anything can be good or idiomatic jazz material; British pianist John Law's use of plainchant does not seem convincing as a basis for jazz, while Bill Evans's composition “Waltz For Debbie” is perhaps too saccharine. In recent decades the use of popular material has declined, however. As Jeff Williams writes: “Improvising on standards, jazz standards and so on is not quite where we are right now, though no doubt it will continue. The highly trained musicians coming out of conservatories these days are also composers… It's a full-fledged art music now in that regard, leaving the casual listener in the dust, much as contemporary classical music has. And in this milieu there can frequently be heard something approaching aesthetic perfection in improvisation. The studiousness involved leaves little to chance”.32

Jazz common practice as a method involves an approach to improvisation, through model solos and scale-patterns, which is taught in the jazz conservatory, and reflected in self-tuition manuals. Classic recordings from the era of Lester Young or Charlie Parker onwards are treated as works and objects of study, whose solos are classics –an important element of classicisation that we will return to later. There seems to be a consensus about methods in which harmonic rather than thematic considerations predominate. The final element in common practice is the place of the style-periods. The era of common practice dates from bebop, or perhaps Lester Young's first recordings in 1936. But there now exists what could be termed the postbop mainstream, which assimilates elements from the 1950s onwards in a “common present”. (Thus even bebop might need preservation, hence the possibly ironically-title British band, “Bebop Preservation Society”). In Western art music, the tradition extends from Bach to Brahms or later, in jazz it extends from Miles Davis to Michael Brecker, or later. When 32

Email to the author, 2/2009.

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Ornette Coleman or Anthony Braxton are described as players who are “in the tradition”, this means that despite their avantgarde credentials, they have essential connections with the era of common practice –bebop in the case of Ornette Coleman, perhaps the cool playing of Warne Marsh and Lee Konitz in the case of Braxton.33 This connection may be highlighted in certain recordings – Braxton's recordings of Monk or Tristano compositions, for example. Critics of jazz as classical music disparage the value of common practice manifested in these three ways. They criticise the standards repertoire for its lack of meaning for younger audiences.34 Academic Berklee methods and postbop style preservation means that having emerged from the same academic institutions, “all performers now sound the same”. But there remains a wide variety of interpretations among both classical and jazz performers despite academic or conservatory training. In Western art music, more damage to individuality results from the pursuit of recorded perfection, which leads to a consistency in which performers sound like their recordings, rather than stressing interpretational spontaneity in each performance. In jazz, individuality is suppressed not by academic training as such, but by the wrong kind –that which encourages dependence on pattern-playing. Maoist permanent cultural revolution is neither possible nor desirable –one cannot expect radical innovation and originality from all practitioners. The avantgardist critique of jazz as classical music makes some valid objections, but there is an alternative reaction, which sees jazz players as like classical performers in rendering their entire repertory in a common present, but deciding the right style of performance on each occasion, according to the historical place of the material. Although in jazz “the piece” is principally a basis for improvisation, there is sense to the idea of authenticity to the standard repertoire. Pianist Bill Carrothers heard a story that in Miles Davis's mid-60s band, Wayne Shorter wanted to use a particular song, but the leader rejected it “because I don't know what that tune wants”. Carrothers continued: “When you start to impose your will on the song, it doesn't quite work. [I have] to refer back to its original essence in

33 Though Konitz has vigorously repudiated the claim that he could have influenced Braxton; see Hamilton, 2007b. 34 The only standards that my students seem to know – Music students as well as Philosophy – are "Summertime", "Over The Rainbow" and "Moon River", if the last one counts.

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some way –or what I think the essence is!”.35 This is not the concern of trumpeter Brad Goode, in contrast: “My goal is to use the song as a means of expressing my own essence…I need to know a song to a great depth before I perform it [so it] can become an adventure in exploring new possibilities, rooted in spontaneity and interaction…”.36

Standards can be reinterpreted in many ways without losing their identity. When Bill Evans recreated “Beautiful Love”, he transformed a rather trite pop song into art music, finding possibilities never previously conceived. Lee Konitz's method of looking at the original publication, and then making incremental changes to the theme rather than treating it as a set of changes, encourages in-depth treatment of the material.37 But “updating” as in Wynton Marsalis's Standard Time, or the work of pianist Jessica Williams, destroys the material's integrity; one wonders why the musicians did not simply use their own composition. It is evident from the preceding discussion that jazz exhibits the same trifurcation as Western art music: early music (curatorial approaches to New Orleans jazz, Ellington, Parker), classical music (postbop mainstream) and new music (free jazz and free improvisation –though these are perhaps acquiring their own “classical” status). As we saw earlier, “classical” jazz performances that reproduce the “text” of a Charlie Parker performance constitute an “early music” variant that is peripheral to mainstream jazz practice. Organisations such as Lincoln Center do sometimes promote this early music approach, for instance in tributes to jazz composers such as Ellington, Jelly-Roll Morton or Thelonious Monk –in these cases, the players are meant to improvise “authentically”, and not indulge in Coltrane-like sheets of sound. This approach contrasts with the less specifically historical tendency of finding the song's essence. However, it is important to note the danger that if one separates new from classical music in this way, the latter becomes safe and static by definition. Hence a key question for both Western art music and jazz: how exactly is a musical tradition demarcated? The classics exist in our present, as many writers have acknowledged – for instance Jan Kott in Shakespeare Our Contemporary. Repertoires 35 REF. However, a quick Google search shows that "doing what the songs wants" is almost a cliché among pop performers. For instance, Lyle Lovett, http://www.paulsnyder.net/lyle.htm. 36 Jazz Review interview, June 2008. 37 Hamilton, 2007b, 139-40.

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become classical when they cease to be thought of as mere entertainment and start to be seen as texts worthy of faithful interpretation. At the 19th century Paris Opera, Gluck operas were played thousands of times, not as “classics” but as standards or old favourites, broken up and reassembled to please the audience. Today they are classic, and their integrity is maintained; musicologists argue about definitive versions. Classics are timeless and transcendental, appealing to all historical eras, because they capture what is essential about humanity; they lose their historical contingency and become –in one sense of the term– autonomous art, a concept which through the work of Adorno has become essential to aesthetic understanding.38 Autonomy is a feature of classical music implicit in Parakilas's account, in the idea that the institutions which began to perpetuate classical music were primarily musical ones. Folk music is heteronomous, but so arguably is the art music of Balinese gamelan. Jazz has developed autonomy from direct social function as entertainment. When Jazz At Lincoln Center re-enacts famous recordings and performances, they make jazz canonical, and direct it into the category of autonomous art. This is a much more positive description of the phenomenon. In contrast, in the club environment, the music is often just background to drinking and talking –a modern version of Tafelmusik.

7. Art and entertainment: jazz as an art music of improvisation In jazz, an aesthetics of imperfection, expressed through improvisation, allows popular materials to achieve art music status. In its early decades, jazz grew out of the entertainment industry, and used its materials; later jazz players developed loftier aspirations. As we have seen, some writers distinguish a classical art that requires restoration, from a living art that involves novelty and innovation; on their view, while there can be creativity in the interpretation of a classic, the creativity is the limited kind that re-enacts or reanimates. This is a misguided account of many classical performing arts, I believe. Interpretation is neither “mechanical reproduction”, as proponents of the aesthetics of imperfection often view it, nor restoration as in the case of painting. Of course there are different approaches, as there are in the restoration of paintings; but there never was a pristine authentic performance –the performing arts involve interpretation inexhaustibly. As Parakilas notes, it is the project of the

38

It is discussed in Hamilton, 2007a, and 2008b.

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early music tendency, but not classical performers, to replicate historical Beethoven performances. It would be wrong sharply to separate “classical arts” and “living arts”, therefore. Parakilas's assumption is that classical and new music are separate approaches, but if there is a continuum, the rigid demarcation between classical and living arts is undermined. In performance, whether jazz or Western art music, the era of common practice has not come to an end, I believe. Each of these practices aspires to exist in a “common present”, as a living art. In such cases, classical exemplars offer inspiration rather than rigid templates. The dialectic I have outlined elsewhere between aesthetic perfectionism and imperfection, recurs, therefore.39 Improvisation in jazz is perfectionist in its affinities with Western art music; while interpretation in Western art music is imperfectionist in its affinities with improvisation. But improvisation imposes limits on classical perfectionism in jazz. Recordings such as A Love Supreme or Mingus Ah Um are rightly described as “classics”, since as recordings they are fixed in their perfection, and work without qualification to classicise jazz. Concert recreations of A Love Supreme reconstruct but cannot replicate the recording; replication would be perverse, and would fail artistically. Jazz's nature as an improviser's rather than an interpreter's art bears on its classical status, because improvisation is an expression of performers' creativity. In improvisation, the performer rather than the composer is the primary creator. In interpreted music, the composer is the primary creator, and the performer is secondary, though still creative. This fact sets limits to the “classicisation” of improvised music, depending on whether the performer takes the Carrothers or Goode attitude to the material –whether the song's essence, or their own, is the primary concern. It is interesting that in jazz, the value of spontaneous creation, as opposed to prepared solos, began to be stressed at the same time –the transition from swing to bebop– that jazz was becoming an art music, and therefore “classicised”. That is, improvisation became valued in jazz as the music was gaining an identity beyond the realm of entertainment and commercial commodification. This fact lends support to the suggestion that jazz is an art music of improvisation. But that question is material for another occasion.

39

This was outlined in Hamilton, 2000, and 2007a, Chapter on Improvisation.

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References Bourdieu, P. 1987, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. R. Nice. Harvard: Harvard University Press. Cohen, T. 1993, “High and Low Thinking about High and Low Art”, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 51 (2), 151-56. Cork, C. 1996, Harmony with Lego Bricks, Revised edition. Leicester: England: Tadley Ewing Publications. David, H. and Mendel, A. 1996, The Bach Reader, New York. Gabbard, K. 2000, “Race and Reappropriation: Spike Lee Meets Aaron Copland”, American Music 18 (4), 370-390. —. 1995, Jazz Among the Discourses, Durham: Duke University Press. —. 1995, Representing Jazz, Durham: Duke University Press. Goehr, L. 1992, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works, Oxford: Clarendon. Gioia, E. 1988, The Imperfect Art, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hamilton, A. 2007a, Aesthetics and Music, London: Continuum. —. 2007b, Lee Konitz: Conversations on the Art of the Improviser, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. —. 2008a, J.S. Mill’s Elitism: A Classical Liberal’s Response to the Rise of Democracy, in E. Kofmel ed., Anti-Democratic Thought, Imprint Academic. —. 2008b, Adorno and the Autonomy of Art, in S. Giacchetti ed., Nostalgia for a Redeemed Future: Critical Theory, Delaware: Delaware University Press. le Huray, P. and Day, J. 1981, Music and Aesthetics in the Eighteenth and Early-Nineteenth Centuries, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Macy, L. 2001, Ken Burns's Jazz: A Discussion with Scott DeVeaux and Krin Gabbard, Oxford: Oxford University Press, available on-line at: http://www.grovemusic.com/groveowned/music/feature_jazz/jazz01.htm Paddison, M. 1982, “The Critique Criticised: Adorno and Popular Music”, Popular Music, 2, 201-18. Panofsky, E. 1995, Three Essays on Style, ed. Irving Lavin. MIT Press. Parakilas, J. 1984, “Classical Music as Popular Music”, The Journal of Musicology 3 (1), 1-18. Rose, J. 2001, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, Yale: Yale University Press. Sadie, S. and Tyrrell, J., eds. 2004, New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, New York: Oxford University Press.

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Taylor, B. 1986, “Jazz: America's Classical Music”, Black Perspectives in Music 14, 1. Weiss, J., ed. 2006, Steve Lacy: Conversations, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Acknowledgements Thanks to Frank Barrett, Keith Sawyer, Bjorn Alterhaug, Gabriele Tomasi, Joanna Demers, Philip Clark, Conrad Cork, Lee Konitz, Marina Santi, Luca Illetterati, Lewis Porter, Brian Marley, David Udolf, and Jeff Williams.

CHAPTER THREE ON THE SPONTANEITY OF JAZZ IMPROVISATION GABRIELE TOMASI

As an ordinary jazz lover –neither a musician nor a musicologist– I have always conceived of improvisation as, in some sense, a spontaneous kind of music-making. My conception of improvisation, then, is precisely the one Philip Alperson supposes we all would agree about.1 To my eyes, at its core lies the idea of spontaneity, which in this context I take to express two things. First, it expresses the fact that a piece of music is produced with no reference to any specific blueprint. Second, as far as the creative aspect of the performance is concerned, if we embrace the widely assumed view that improvisation is the creation of a musical piece at the very moment of the performance, then “spontaneity” and “spontaneous” can be said to express something about the causal origin of the music, i.e. the idea that spontaneous music originates in the performers themselves at the time of performance. Admittedly, to clarify the meaning of “in” in the expression “in the performers” could prove to be a very intricate matter and, while I shall not focus on such a task here, I shall nevertheless say something about this. In this paper, in fact, I shall try to move beyond my common sense assumptions about the spontaneity of improvisation, and show that a sense can be given to the idea of improvisation in music understood as a spontaneous action.2 The paper is divided into four sections. In the first two sections a couple of possible (and commonly shared) uses of the terms “spontaneity” and “spontaneous” are distinguished and discussed. In the third section I argue for a conception of “spontaneous” in music making, which may help to deal with the intricacies of the causal sense of spontaneity. My general 1

Alperson, 1984, 17. By ‘improvisation’ I refer first of all to such a process, and not to an artistic product. For a similar distinction cf. Alperson, 1984, 21 and Berliner, 1994, 221.

2

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claim is that we can attribute spontaneity to musical improvisation because it involves a form of thinking or reflection. In the final section of the paper I argue that this sense of spontaneity is also involved in that crucial aspect of jazz, which is the player’s search for an individual voice.

1. Spontaneity and creation The idea that improvisation is the art of making music spontaneously is widespread.3 Sometimes –maybe because of the famous analogy between the artist and God as creator– holding this idea also means connecting the word “spontaneity” to a conception of improvisation as a sort of creation ex nihilo. This picture seems at least prima facie plausible, since improvisation lacks what common sense takes to be the first stage of music production, that is, composition or, better, composition resulting in a musical score, the second stage being the performance by means of which a composition is then rendered into a sequence of sounds.4 While a performance is therefore of something that already exists, improvisation apparently involves neither the faithful re-creation of a composition nor the elaboration of a prefigured musical idea. Though appealing, this picture may not be accurate in many respects. From a historical point of view, one could observe that in the Renaissance and Baroque there was no idea of musical works as distinct entities and, consequently, composition and performance were not opposed to each other. Performance was to a large extent improvisational.5 It is further 3

Berliner points out that artists typically reserve the term ‘improvisation’ for “realtime composing – instantaneous decision making in applying and altering musical materials and conceiving new ideas. […] From this standpoint, - he notes - unique features of interpretation, embellishment, and variation, when conceived in performance, can also be regarded theoretically as improvised”(Berliner, 1994, 221-222). As is well known, improvisation is by no means an exclusive property of jazz. Improvisational practices are to be found not only in some non-Western musical traditions, but also in so called ‘Western art music’. In this tradition improvisation can range from the minimal level of “filling-in” certain details that have not been notated in the score, to the addition of measures or sections, as in Baroque or Classical cadenzas, to the altering of a score (or a “chart”) by changing the melody line and/or the chords, as again in Baroque music. This latter form of improvisation is also typical in jazz. For a list of different types and degrees of improvisation cf. Benson, 2003, 26-30, where eleven forms of improvisation are distinguished. 4 Cf. Alperson, 1984, 18-20. 5 It is from the eighteenth century on, with the rise of the concept of a work with a stable identity, that performance began to be seen as essentially reproductive. In

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possible to question the binary schema composition/performance and argue, as Bruce Benson does, that improvisation is an essential part of what a performer does in every occasion.6 Or to conceive of improvisation and composition as ideal types or “interpenetrating opposites”, as suggested by Andy Hamilton.7 Aside from this, the picture evoked also appears misleading for at least two more direct and simple reasons. First, improvisation is often improvisation “after” pre-existing musical materials. Jazz standards or otherwise composed pieces or tunes offer tacit (and quite loose) guidelines, which musicians accept as a starting point for new formal elaborations. However far these elaborations may end up from the original tune, the tune remains the vehicle of improvisation.8 Secondly, the internalized cache of musical forms must be considered, i.e. the stock of figures and phrases jazz players master and out of which they have gradually learned to construct solos of their own. This does not mean that improvisers simply put together in their performances things they already know. Rather, such materials act as frameworks for the direction that improvisation will take.9 Therefore, to consider improvisation as a kind of creation ex nihilo appears to be mistaken. A player never begins with nothing for, as Benson notes, even improvising without a chart or chord “still requires that one be situated within a discursive practice”.10 Consequently, it seems wrong to ascribe absolute spontaneity to improvisation. Before going on, I would like to put forward some brief considerations on the fact that improvisation – even if it does not start from nothing and is very often “after” some piece of music – is nevertheless a kind of spontaneous creation or, say, is genuinely creative. regard to this, jazz improvisation may be seen as providing an alternative to the prescriptive model of the score, and to the limitation of the performer’s freedom in classical music. 6 Cf. Benson, 2003, ch. 3. 7 Hamilton, 2007a, 197-217. 8 Therefore, an important element in the training of an improviser is the knowledge of a repertory of tunes. 9 They work in the same way as the experiences one gains from the simple fact of being out in the (jazz art) world, and above all during the intensive learning process that the art of improvisation presupposes. As Paul Berliner has shown, the ethos and the aesthetics of the jazz community in general, and the particular network of players in which improvisers are involved, shape and influence their way of playing (cf. Berliner, 1994, part II). 10 Benson, 2005, 463. This seems true also of an improviser like Keith Jarrett, who maintains that he cannot even have a tune in mind, because it would influence his capacity to generate music.

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Though absolute spontaneity may be impossible, relative spontaneity is possible.

1.1 Improvisation as creation It could be agreed to call “creation” the act of producing something, when what results from it is new and unique. Generally, by using the term “new” in this context we simply mean that when creation occurs something is brought into being that never existed before, where the novelty of the item could also consist in a new arrangement of pre-existing elements. Creation in this sense obviously does not occur in art only, though art may offer paradigmatic cases of creation. This is a very basic use of the term. Still, the term has also a richer, evaluative, sense, according to which the mere making of something new does not suffice for speaking of creation. Sometimes novelty is connected to originality. Often we call “original” a work that is not realized by following models or, in art, by imitating other authors.11 However – at least in the case of art - what we are referring to is also a feature of artists, that is, creativity, the ability they have to produce works which are in some salient sense new and of considerable value. I shall not go further into this difficult matter here.12 I merely observe that we must be cautious and that it might be helpful to distinguish the originality of the artist from that of the work. An artist could be called creative, or original, as he or she creates new patterns or forms, and would not be less original if he or she went on to perform a number of works that exploited the first innovation and were not original, since they would not differ in notable ways from the innovative one.13 Moving from this very simple observations, it is clear that for improvisation to be, at least in the basic sense, a kind of music creation, it has to be the creation of new (and unique) sound sequences. Do 11

The opposite of ‘original’ in this sense is ‘derivative’ or ‘rule-governed’, but not ‘forged’. An original work in the sense of ‘authentic’ may not be a novelty at all, while a forgery could be something new, since it need not be an attempt to copy some existing work, as the well known case of Van Meegeren’s Vermeers testifies. 12 Cf. Elster, 2000, ch. 3 and for a survey on the topic the essays collected in Gaut and Livingston, 2003. 13 Actually, originality is often defined as a durable break with existing conventions. Obvious examples are non-figurative art and atonal music. ‘Originality’ in this sense is commonly attributed to style, manner, technique etc. and, consequently, to works that employ innovatory techniques or manifest novelty of form or medium. I shall hint at another sense the term can have below.

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improvisations match such a condition? Do they really bring into existence something that never existed before? It seems that this condition has some sort of regulative sense. If we look at improvisations, considered not as actions but as artistic products, we observe that they often show a twofold aspect. They are simultaneously faithful to (at least some of) the structural properties of a given piece, and new, since their structural properties are not completely determined by decisions taken prior to the time of their performance.14 This double aspect depends on the fact that improvisations transform the pre-existing musical material they are “after” into something that is both new and connected to what it once was. Improvisations not only repeat but also rework this material, so that it retains its identity and yet changes. They are something new, in the way that a commentary –in this case on a given piece– can be.15 I think this is enough to consider the act of improvising a creative action. A further aspect must be examined. According to the general conception of creation presupposed here, in order to consider an act of making as a genuine creation, what results from it must not only be new but also unique. Till now I have said nothing on this further requirement and it is not an easy task to clarify what “unique” means in this context. It might be observed that each thing, in so far as it is distinguishable from each other thing, is unique. However, what one may wish to express with “unique” 14

Following Young and Matheson, by “structural properties” of a tune I mean properties like “its melody, harmony, and length (in bars, not in temporal duration)”. Young and Matheson understand structural properties in contrast to expressive or interpretative properties such as “tempo, the use of rubato, dynamics, and so on”(Young and Matheson 2000, p. 127). However fuzzy the line between the two types of properties may be, once it has been drawn, it allows for distinguishing the sense in which there is a personal contribution of the pianist in performing a Beethoven sonata from the sort of decision process that constitutes improvisation, as in this second case decisions made while playing affect more than the expressive properties of the performance only. It does not seem misleading to say that what Alfred Brendel or Maurizio Pollini “add” to a Beethoven sonata makes them performers, or better interpreters, but not improvisers, because they create performances with the structural properties demanded by Beethoven’s score, that is performances faithful to the defining features of the sonata. On the contrary, improvisers freely select structural properties of the music they play; they have to face “the problem of deciding the direction” of the music they are playing in a sense that interpreters normally are not confronted with, though they also decide the “direction”. 15 For the characterisation of improvisations as “commentaries” on a given piece cf. Benson, 2005, 458, 460.

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here is rather the fact that the result of a creative act is, in some sense, unrepeatable. Uniqueness, here, indicates that the result of a creative act is not a case of a general rule, or that it is not produced according to such a rule.16 Improvisations also seem to satisfy this second more elusive condition. Moreover, in improvisations there is something that deepens the sense of uniqueness connected to non-repeatability. What I have in mind is what Lee B. Brown calls presence, that is, a special sense of musical improvisation coming to life at the very time that we are listening to it, the idea that an unscripted event is taking place.17 It could obviously be objected that whether a performance is or is not an improvisation may not be understood merely by listening to it. To a certain extent, improvisation may be undetectable. However, I think Andy Hamilton is right in talking about the existence of a genuine phenomenon of “improvised feel”, that is, the feel from which the distinctive form of an improvised performance arises.18 Surely, it is difficult to deny that recording technology transforms in some way the living process of improvisation. With our CD-players we can go back again and again and listen as many times as we want to what, as a particular action, had a peculiarly singular character. Therefore, it seems that something of the sense of the living creation of the music we listen to is lost. Recording technology apart, improvisations as artistic products are transient processes just like the actions they result from; actually, they are one with these actions. This fact marks their uniqueness as the uniqueness of what is at one time and no more, what has an ephemeral and transient character.19 Given all this, it seems that we could consider musical improvisation as a kind of creation, though maybe not as strictu sensu creation ex

16

One could think that, while natural events can be explained as cases of some law, creative achievements defy explanations of this kind. Of course, this does not imply that natural events are not, in a sense, unique or non-repeatable. Despite what we believe about the uniformity of nature, it is disputable whether the very same events or, rather, merely similar events may occur more than one time in nature. Cf. Hospers, 1985, 247, and the brilliant observations by Ryle, 1976, 72-73. 17 Brown, 1996, 356-357, 365-366. 18 Hamilton, 2007a, 199-204. As Lee Konitz puts it: “There’s something maybe more tentative about [improvisation], maybe less strong or whatever, that makes it sound like someone is really reacting to the moment”(Hamilton, 2007b, 111). 19 I am not sure that the fact that improvisers might repeat exactly the same notes in different performances constitutes an objection to this. Maybe in such cases they do not play something completely anew, but, even so, they do play something new, because other elements in or around them might have changed and influenced the way they play the very same notes. Cf. n. 22 below.

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nihilo.20 More precisely, it can be defined as the activity of creating a new, unique and maybe valuable sound-sequence in the course of playing it.21 In the light of this definition, we can now come back to the question of the sense in which improvisational musical activities are to be considered as spontaneous.

1.2 A workable sense of “ex nihilo” What I have said in the first part of this section suggests that we should drop the alleged ex nihilo aspect of improvisation. Improvisations are often “after” a tune and are framed by materials artists have in their storehouses. Maybe we should use “spontaneity” just to refer to the fact that the performance is executed without reference to prior directions, such as a score or a sketch. Nevertheless, the claim that improvisation is a creative action, could help to rescue a meaning for the ex nihilo quality of improvisation too, and for the idea of spontaneity connected to it. It must first of all be considered that, as emphasized by Hamilton, the improvisers’ training should aim at keeping them from playing what they already know. Ideally, at least, improvisers should not play “homeprepared” material, though talented players are able to do this efficiently.22 Hamilton quotes the following statement by saxophonist Steve Lacy: “[…] when you go on 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.”23

What Lee Konitz says is intriguing as well. While stating his “complete faith in the spontaneous process”, the saxophonist declares that his own way of preparation is “to not be prepared. And that takes a lot of preparation”. Paradoxical as it may sound, it seems that the more prepared 20

Davies, 2001, 16. Brown, 1996, 357. 22 Hamilton, 2007b, 108-110. This, I suggest, does not mean that they are not improvising at all. As observed by Ryle (cf. Ryle, 1976, 73-77), in a partly novel situation – as every new session certainly is – a proper response is necessarily a partly novel one. The notes can be the same as the ones rehearsed “at home”, but the players might be in a different mood, or the acoustic might be different, etc. Therefore, players need to adjust themselves to the present unique situation and in doing this they “apply” – so to speak – the prepared material. In other words, they must improvise. Otherwise, they would not engage the rehearsed music in the present situation, but they would act from sheer habit. 23 Hamilton, 2007a, 205-206. 21

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a musician is –in terms both of having thought about what to play and of having explored various possibilities– the more able he or she is to achieve spontaneity.24 What “spontaneous” means in this case may not be completely clear. As an action, improvisation may be considered spontaneous with regard to the relationship between the “home-practiced” musical material and the notes played during the solos. This way, we would emphasize the fact that the music played has no relation (or only a loose one) to former musical material, or that the direction of the sound in the performance is not predetermined. Accordingly, we would give to “spontaneous” the meaning of “not preordained”. Konitz significatively says that when he plays he forgets everything he practiced before and tries to find out “something for the moment”, according to the rhythm, the acoustics, the audience, how he feels at the moment, and so on. The player has –in a sense– forgotten his or her previous practice, so that his or her action is, though not in an absolute sense, ex nihilo. Actually, jazz improvisers often use the term “spontaneous” in relation to ideas arising without their preconception or volition. While hinting at the unpredictable relationship between the musical material they practised and the actual ideas occurring to them during solos, artists use expressions like “things always happen ‘spontaneously’”, or say that it is the music that leads.25 I think that by such expressions artists mean that the spontaneous character of improvisation consists in its not stemming from processes of deliberation. However, this does not imply that improvisation does not involve processes of reflection of some sort. On the contrary, I shall argue that it relies on such processes, and that it can be considered as spontaneous precisely for this reason. To justify my claim I shall proceed as follows: in the next section I shall briefly pause on a passage on spontaneity from Bill Evans’ well-known sleeve notes to Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue (1959). Then, in a further section, I shall introduce a conception of spontaneity, which differs slightly from those considered so far, and I shall try to show that it can be applied to improvisation.

24

Cf. Benson, 2003, 142-143, who comments appropriately: “It is when one already is prepared that one feels free to go beyond the confines of the prepared”. I shall come back to this topic in section 2.1. 25 Cf. Berliner, 1994, 205.

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2. Spontaneity and unpredictability As we have seen, by using the words “spontaneity” or “spontaneous” we hint at the fact that improvised music (in the different degrees in which it can occur) is executed without reference to directions (i.e. to a score or a sketch), or that it has no relation to any prepared material. Therefore with such terms we can also allude to the unpredictable character of the ideas that occur to players during a solo, and, in relation to this, to the direct character of their action, that is, to the fact that improvisers’ decisions about what to play are not mediated by deliberation. One could be tempted to interpret such directness to the extent of suggesting a lack of conscious control over the sound sequence. What is at stake here is crucial and I believe that Evans’ sleeve notes are a good starting point for a closer examination of this idea. Introducing the recording of Kind of Blue, Evans suggests a parallelism between jazz and some Japanese visual art -I suppose he is referring to sumi-e (or suiboku-ga), i.e. monochrome ink painting on parchment- in which, he writes, “the artist is forced to be spontaneous”.26 What this sort of oxymoron means with regard to sumi-e is not difficult to understand. Unlike oil paint on canvas, in sumi-e it is not possible to erase or correct a mark once it is on the surface, because, in attempting to do this, one risks breaking through the parchment. Further, hesitations and unnatural or interrupted strokes may damage the line. Such particular constraints – stemming from the genre and the medium – force the artist to act without deliberation with the movement of the hand, and, in this sense, they force the artist to be spontaneous. That he could have already conceived the whole painting before applying the first brush stroke on the parchment does not seem to compromise the spontaneous character of his action. Are there similar constraints in jazz improvisation? It is quite natural to think that the irreversibility of music places on the improviser a constraint comparable to the ones a sumi-e painter is subjected to. Erasures are not possible. While composers, like oil painters, are allowed to take “time out” and correct the score, improvisers cannot delete moves subsequent to the opening gambit and redo them. As Lee B. Brown points out, they can only build upon the steps they have just taken, they must “plunge ahead”.27 And just because they must go on to do something, they cannot but take immediate decisions about how to go ahead -where falling silent also becomes part of the music created. 26 27

On this kind of painting cf. Yashiro, 1958, ch. 5. Brown, 2000, 114.

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Therefore, it does not appear misleading to say that, like sumi-e painters, improvisers are forced to be spontaneous. Evans sees this situation in a positive light. Through the parallels with sumi-e he wants to stress the importance of a direct communication between the idea to be expressed and the hand of the artist. I suppose this directedness does not exclude some sort of reflection, otherwise the artist would not know what he or she wants to express. Two questions intertwine here. The first concerns the nature of the evoked reflection; the second, how it could combine with spontaneity. As we will see, part of the answer lies in an element that Evans’ notes recall, that is, the artist’s learning process. We now need to go a bit further into the idea of spontaneity.

2.1 On the prepared character of spontaneous actions Spontaneity is commonly identified with actions suddenly performed and not consciously prepared, or with a groundless, automatic or instinctive way of acting. If we recall that the etymological root of the term “improvisation” is connected to the Latin “improvisus”, we may think that improvisation is considered spontaneous, as it is an unforeseen and unforeseeable way of acting. However, if improvisation happens as something unexpected, that is, something we cannot foresee on the ground of prior (musical) data or events, nevertheless this does not exclude the possibility that it may be like an event that, having been prepared for a long time, takes place all of a sudden.28 Surely, the features of spontaneity just hinted at are correct. Spontaneous actions happen suddenly, more or less unexpected; in a way they are groundless and unconsciously performed. However, it does not seem correct to maintain that spontaneous actions are always unprepared, that they are actions about which no reflection takes place, that they are automatic or instinctive. I can spontaneously hit a key on the piano. Undoubtedly, this is a spontaneous movement of one of my fingers; but it is a mere spontaneous physical movement; it is not like playing piano spontaneously. In order to do this, I should have learned and I should master what is required to play piano.29 Similarly, there is no doubt that the art of improvisation depends on practice and exercise, on the internalization of skills. We tend to consider the performances of 28

I owe this formulation to Sparti, 2005, 120. An account of the learning process, of the “embodiment” of skills that results in the practical knowledge of how to play jazz piano, is offered by Sudnow, 2001. Cf. also the remarks by Sparti, 2005, 135-156. 29

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improvisers without thinking about the long practice required to achieve precisely the freedom of “movement” within the constraints of an instrument, the structure of a tune, the feature of a language or a style and so on, that they display. We value their performances without taking into account the conditions that made it possible for them to spontaneously play and (at least in certain occasions) to produce something new, to overcome the limits of the already given and known. Improvisation is anything but unprepared playing. It involves an intensive and demanding learning process, which aims at obtaining precisely the abilities that spontaneity presupposes: a high degree of control over the instrument, and a mastery of the jazz idiom.30 The point I want to emphasize is that spontaneity has conditions. To consider improvisation as spontaneous, since it is an unexpected action that has in some way an unconscious or groundless character, does not mean that it is automatic or instinctive, obtained without practice and preparation. Improvisation relies on what may be called “blind” capacities, that is, skills that have become a sort of habitus for the performer. Likewise, it depends on what may be called “embodied” musical knowledge. Thanks to these two elements the improviser is able not only to play, but to play in a way shaped –to put it in Paul Berliner’s words– by both the musical language of jazz, and the idiomatic patterns of movement associated with the playing technique of a given instrument.31 Therefore, the more a musician is trained, the more spontaneous he or she can be. However, this view raises question about the creativity of improvisation as making music spontaneously. Isn’t it, that just because improvisation relies on embodied skills and knowledge, it inevitably tends to be routine and mechanical, to incline more towards the reiteration of clichés than towards the creation of something new?

2.2 Spontaneity, creation and reflection Spontaneity does not by itself guarantee that the music making at issue is genuinely creative. However, to answer the question we have just posed, 30

Paul F. Berliner has documented (cf. Berliner, 1994, part I-II) how jazz musicians must undergo years of training, including long hours of practice, to develop “the mental rigor to handle varied musical elements within a solo successfully”(Ibid, 267). A glimpse into how a process of learning in the art of improvisation may run is offered by some passages from an interview with Steve Lacy, quoted by Day 2000, 108-111. In the interview Lacy recalls his four-month stint with Thelonious Monk. Day’s comment on the passages is also enlightening. 31 Cf. Berliner, 1994, 190.

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we must recall that improvisers’ training aims at developing the abilities required for the creation of something new, since this is what is highly valued in the aesthetics of the jazz community. Of course, this is not to deny that improvisations may be prosaic and predictable, or very conventional. Many of them, though they might be spontaneous, are just so. But for argument’s sake let us consider the ideal case. What does playing while avoiding what one already knows require? In other words, what does a musician need in order to avoid what is in his or her “muscular memory”, phrases he or she has learned, which felt good at the time they were discovered, and then happen to be unconsciously repeated as a matter of habit by the player, when he or she feels they fit a certain musical pattern?32 My claim is that it requires, in addition to the already mentioned abilities, also a capacity to reflect. Interestingly, Lee Konitz considers mechanical playing as “a lack of real connection to what you are doing at the moment”.33 To be connected to what one is doing at the moment a kind of alertness or responsiveness is required. Improvisers have to pay attention, to listen to or, better, to follow what they play. As Jerrold Levinson points out, “improvisers follow what they have just played by means of playing something else”.34 Claiming that an improviser is able to follow his or her own music in this way means describing musical improvisation as a productive activity, and presupposes that improvisers can react to the music they play, that is, that they can catch the musical opportunities as they emerge from the sound sequence.35 In typical improvisations, Lee Brown observes, players can be heard “probing and testing possibilities latent in the music they are making”.36 Clearly, this is possible only if they are reflectively present to it. This kind of attentive presence is often connected to the metaphor of a “third ear” that talented improvisers possess. Such an image comes quite 32 This is the way Lee Konitz characterizes what is in the muscular memory in Hamilton, 2007b, 107. 33 Hamilton, 2007b, 109-110. 34 Cf. Levinson, 2006, 216-217. As Levinson notes, what is central in this kind of following is consequently not the tracking of what already exists but a bringing into being at each step. 35 Berliner quotes the following words from Max Roach: “After you initiate the solo, one phrase determines what the next is going to be. From the first note that you hear, you are responding to what you’ve just played […]. It’s like language: you’re talking, you’re speaking, you’re responding to yourself. When I play, it’s like having a conversation with myself”(Berliner, 1994, 192). 36 Brown, 1996, 364.

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naturally to mind, as what is involved in the self-monitoring character of improvisation is above all a capacity to listen to, or to follow the music while playing it.37 Sometimes expressions like “aural musical thinking” or “aural conceptualization” are also used in this context.38 In general, I believe they are ways of referring to forms of reflection, or of musical representation, which rely on mental dispositions working at an intuitive, pre-theoretical, or sub-personal level, that is, at a level that does not require the content of the mental states to have conceptual character. Nevertheless, through these dispositions a sort of rational control of the played sounds is exercised. It is revelatory that, when asked how far ahead he thinks while playing a solo, Lee Konitz answers: “Just, ideally, on the note I’m playing. I know, on some level, where I’m headed in the tune, but it’s most important for me to play each note as clearly as I can”.39

The saxophonist’s words confirm that at some level –maybe at the level I have called “sub-personal”– the player “knows” where he or she is going. Konitz also says that he is “very much aware of the developmental possibilities of the notes” he chooses at a given time.40 This suggests that, in a sense, improvisation presupposes a capacity to draw “inferences”, to follow the implications of the music played just a few seconds before, that is, to respond to the requirements (in terms of possible developments) of what has just been played.41 Because of this, it does not appear misleading to speak of “thinking while playing”, or better of “thinking in sound”. 37 Cf. Berliner, 1994, 207, who makes clear that the image also conveys the idea of an evaluative instance of the improvisation in the making. 38 This conception is also commonly elucidated with the metaphor of singing or of the singing mind. Commenting on this metaphor, Paul Berliner notes that of course it might be possible to mechanically perform phrases on an instrument, by means of translating representations (like, say, chord symbols) directly into finger patterns without pre-hearing the sound for which they stand, “but singing requires that artists both grasp ideas firmly in their imaginations and invest them with expressive qualities” (Berliner, 1994, 180-181). 39 Hamilton, 2007b, 108. 40 Ibid, 106. 41 Also the widely used metaphor of storytelling hints at the capacity of improvisers to explore musical ideas with a logic such that the direction of the music seems inevitable. When this is the case, improvisers’ playing has the kind of cohesiveness and connection, which gives the solos a sense of continuity and closure, i.e., a kind of narrative feature (cf. Berliner, 1994, 201-205, 262-267). Cf. also Elster, 2000, ch. III.9.3.

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Actually, improvised music seems at the same time both to embody thinking, (i.e. it presents us with images of thoughtful acts such as questioning, answering, searching, inferring, concluding, and the like) and to make evident to the listener the thought processes of the player. The listener, in fact, is constantly confronted with decisions that cannot but be regarded as manifestations of a capacity of reflection in the musician.42 The point, as Paul Berliner emphasizes, is that soloists reflect on the notes they have played “with breathtaking speed”. Reflection takes place while players push forward to explore the implications of new ideas that demand their attention.43 This whole description may sound fascinating. But is it also a reliable description? Actually, processes of reflection need not be entirely conscious. Often it is just when they are unconsciously performed that they make an artist’s playing particularly confident and successful. That they occur in this way depends on how well the improviser’s capacity of reflection (which encompasses, among other things, a capacity of comparison) is trained. It seems plausible to conjecture that an artist’s learning process results not only in bodily but also in mental dispositions, since processes of reflection need to take place in improvisation. In fact, as suggested above, it is only through reflection that a player comes to know at which stage of development of a certain phrase he or she is, and what, given his or her abilities, he or she can do in response to the given musical situation. That a given sound sequence is played at a particular moment, depends both on the fact that an artist’s mental dispositions enable him or her to understand when the right time to play that very sound sequence has come, and on the fact that the artist possesses the necessary practical skills to play it. To question this means regarding the improvisers’ decisions as the result of causes that are completely hidden to the improvisers themselves. This would be a rather deterministic account of their behavior: from a first person point of view their acts would be described as the blind effect of an unknown cause. This is not a very attractive picture. If what I have said so far is correct, then we have at least sketched the outline of an answer to the question whether, in improvisation, reflection 42

For this distinction cf. Levinson, 2006, 213. Berliner, 1994, 219-220. However, Lee Konitz declared that for him it is not possible to really improvise when he is playing very fast. He tells Andy Hamilton that he has been trying to play as hard as he could, but he could not get to where “the really hard players were”. One of the reasons why he was not able to do that, he said, is that he did not know what he was going to play. He added: “You can play as strongly as you want, when you are not thinking about what note to select” (Hamilton, 2007b, 106).

43

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can combine with spontaneity. I suggest that the two things can go together, as reflection is partly unconscious. My hypothesis is that reflection, in this context, gets embodied, like physical skills, through the improviser’s training process. Jazz improvisation relies on a complex coordination of hands, body, time and so on, and on the capacity to pay attention to the constant changes of the music, and to react to and adjust all such elements, while, in a way, not engaging oneself in thinking.44 Therefore, it seems plausible that a kind of embodied intelligence, no less than physical skills, makes the spontaneity of improvisation possible. Improvisation as a spontaneous kind of music making depends essentially on bodily and mental dispositions that result from a long and demanding learning process. I shall now go a little deeper in highlighting the relevance of thinking or reflection in improvisation, and the attribution of spontaneity to improvisation. I shall introduce a definition of spontaneity which slightly differs from the ones examined in the previous section, since it is connected to the genetic or causal sense, which is sometimes attributed to this concept.

3. Spontaneity as cognitive independence As I have said at the very beginning, while relating the concept of spontaneity to the making of improvised music, one may want to hint, in a somehow obscure way, at the causal origin of the music “in” the performer. We call acts that are not planned or arranged “spontaneous”. However, voluntary and unconstrained or free actions are also said to be “spontaneous”. This use of the term echoes the Latin spontaneitas, spontaneous, or sponte. An agent acts sua sponte, when he or she voluntarily performs an action, not being forced by others or by an external cause. Though a differentiation between spontaneum and voluntarium occurred, followed by a tendency to employ the first term to define those actions which are performed without previous reflection or premeditation45, 44

Cf. Berliner, 1994, 189-191. At the beginning of the 17th century the two concepts could still overlap. For a reconstruction of the discussions of the time cf. Piro, 2002, 147 f. Aristotle had already traced a similar distinction. When, in the Nicomachean Ethics (1109 b 301112 a 17), he discusses the notion of hekoúsion, that is of the voluntary, he maintains that acts done by children and non rational animals are also voluntary, since their principle is in the agent and it depends on the agent whether they are accomplished or not. The extension of the voluntary (hekoúsion) is therefore wider than that of proaíresis, that is of choice. Not all that is voluntary is also an object 45

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the concept of spontaneity nevertheless maintained an essential function in defining the concept of freedom, as spontaneity was considered a condition for imputing actions to a given person, that is, for the attribution of responsibility.46 The idea that an act is spontaneous in so far as it is performed “by the agent him- or herself”, is to be in part understood in a figurative sense, by analogy with physical processes: if, while considering a physical process, we want to go backwards, then we will get to its starting point. Exemplary is the way Kant considers spontaneity in the third antinomy of his Critique of pure reason. He introduces the notion in the context of a discussion of causality. According to the thesis of the antinomy, just because it is a law of nature that nothing takes place without a sufficiently determined a priori cause, we have to admit spontaneity as a power of absolutely beginning a state or as a causality that does not presuppose a preceding state and its causality.47 According to this point of view, without this absolute spontaneity even in the ordinary course of nature the series of phenomena on the side of the causes can never be complete. Kant calls this spontaneity “transcendental freedom”. He ascribes to reason a spontaneity of this kind and suggests that, endowed with it, reason is the unconditioned condition of every voluntary act.

of choice (proairetón)(cf. Aristotle, 1984, 1753-1756). 46 According to Leibniz, for example, spontaneity, or the fact that the source of the action is within the agent, is one of the two conditions of a free act, the other being intelligence, as required to understand the object of deliberation. Sometimes Leibniz adds a third condition, that is, contingency, to exclude logical or metaphysical necessity. Cf. Leibniz, 1978, VI, §§ 301-302, 296. 47 The argument roughly runs as follows: when taken in unlimited universality, the proposition that according to the law of nature nothing happens without a cause sufficiently determined a priori, is self-contradictory. In fact, the causality of the cause through which something happens is itself something that has happened; therefore, it again presupposes, in accordance with the law of nature, a previous state and its causality, and this in the same way a still earlier state, and so on. Hence, if everything happens according to mere laws of nature, there will always be only a relative and never a first beginning, and consequently no completeness of the series on the side of the causes descending one from another. But the law of nature is precisely that nothing happens without a cause sufficiently determined a priori. Therefore, we must assume a causality that does not presuppose, in accordance with the law of nature, a preceding state and its causality, i.e., an absolute causal spontaneity beginning from itself a series of phenomena that runs in accordance with laws of nature. Cf. Kant, 1998, 484.

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Actually, with regard to the causal history of our decisions and actions, we perceive and depict ourselves as creators, that is, we place ourselves at the origin of the causal series that results in our decisions and actions. We ascribe to ourselves what is called “agent causality”. However, attributing to spontaneity a genetic or causal sense may be misleading, as it is doubtful that we can form and apply to ourselves a meaningful concept of a “first cause”. Regarding the processes in which we act, we are causes only in relation to certain contexts, that is, we are, as causes, always only relatively independent. If this is correct, why do we not dismiss the concept? Why do we demand spontaneity, if the concept, understood in a causal sense, seems to have no point, since it does not allow a univocal ascription of action? It may be said that we demand spontaneity because without it, we could not connect absolute claims to what we think or do, but only relative ones. Let us think about the case at issue, that is, the case of (a particular) art. It appears that, without supposing spontaneity in artists, we could not claim originality for their work, that we could not look at works of art with the sense of being confronted with something new and unique, unpredictable and unexpected. Had players no capacity to act spontaneously, we could not conceive of the responsibility they have for their musical actions and their effects. Among such effects may be counted effects players’ performances have on fellow players (effects that may take the form of an invitation, a request etc.), or effects they produce on the audience, and also effects that affect the definition of the features of a given musical genre. Likewise, we could not think a painter responsible for the decisions, say, about how to structure a certain painting and what colours to apply to a certain canvas; or we could not consider a composer responsible for selecting a certain sound sequence at a given time. But if in a causal, genetic sense, we are not absolutely independent in our acting, in what sense can we attribute spontaneity to ourselves? What could a workable conception of spontaneity be, in order to account for the idea we have of artists as creative causes of their own actions? It is clear that, if one assumes that only what is empirically provable exists, there is no spontaneity whatsoever. However, it seems disputable to conclude that, since spontaneity is not an empirical fact, it also has no effect. Pure thoughts can be very effective. Spontaneity is presumably a fundamental fact, a fact that deeply influences our self-image, but it is not an empirical fact. If we accept this, then, following a (broadly) Kantian strategy, we should not try to elaborate a view on the basis of the results of

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empirical sciences (neurosciences, psychology etc.).48 Instead, we should rather seek to obtain from a rational model some insight about how we could conceive of our spontaneity. A reasonable way to answer the question at issue seems to me the following: spontaneity can be attributed to human agents in so far as it is conceived of as a cognitive capacity, that is, as cognitive independence.49 According to this conception, what we call “spontaneity” or “spontaneous” comes about in the use of concepts (or in thinking), and results from that use (or from thoughts). Taking “concept” in a very broad sense, to include however conceived abilities to discriminate and to draw certain inferences, we could say that, generally, a cognitive capacity manifests itself in the use of concepts. Following Wilhelm Vossenkuhl, I further assume that the use of a concept is independent, if and only if we come to know what the concept means by putting it into use. We are then cognitively independent in so far as we connect a concept to what we think and do, and if our thinking and acting have for us no other meaning than the meaning of that concept.50 This account suggests that, limited to the making of this connection, it can be said that we act spontaneously, because the sense of what we think and do is given by the concept we have of it. According to this account, the point of spontaneity is clearly conceptual self-determination. Though this is not the Kantian absolute beginning of a state, it is nevertheless a kind of beginning, since we ourselves determine the sense of our thinking and acting. Conceptual self-determination is crucial, because it implies that it is the activity that is identified through the concept and not the other way around. Since the act of differentiating and identifying, unlike the result it produces, is not an objective part of the world, there could be nothing that determines my identification of an act apart from my use of a concept.51 48 For an evaluation of the relevance of some of these results for the conception of freedom cf. Walde, 2006. 49 The conception I am proposing was suggested to me by Vossenkuhl, 1994 and Vossenkuhl, 2006, 192-234. My account of spontaneity is strongly influenced by the first of these two texts, but both inspired this paper more than it would appear from the footnotes. I have also benefited from a power point presentation on spontaneity and football that Vossenkuhl kindly sent me, and from some conversations with him. 50 For the sake of simplicity (and brevity) I do not enter in the distinction Vossenkuhl draws between logical and semantic independence, though it is essential for the conception of spontaneity (cf. Vossenkuhl, 1994, 333-335). 51 Regard to the idea that my act of determination is no part of the world, we could recall proposition 5.632 of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, according to which the thinking subject does not belong to the world, it is no part of it (cf. Wittgenstein,

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Therefore, though I might not be the cause of my thoughts and actions, because I am embedded in complex causal histories, however, as Vossenkuhl observes, these histories would not determine the meaning and cognitive content of my actions. Consequently, in so far as what determines the meaning of my decisions and actions are my concepts of what I want to do, I will act spontaneously. In a certain way the spontaneity of the use of concepts is transferred to such activities, so that, in so far as I conceptually determine them, I can consider them as spontaneous. Abstract as it might appear, the idea that I act spontaneously in so far as I am determining myself with regard to the meaning of what I think and do, seems to capture a basic feature of human agency. In fact, decisions and actions are (at least in part) conceptual activities. Were they not so, we simply would not know what we (want to) do. Therefore, in so far as we express our will and determine it according to a conceptual representation, it may be said that we act spontaneously, or that the spontaneity of an action consists in this very determination. Without further pursuing the topic, I shall now attempt to show that this conception of spontaneity is also important for conceiving improvisation in music creation.

3.1 On the conceptual character of improvisation The attempt to connect the spontaneity of improvisation to the use of (in a broad sense) conceptual content might appear doubtful. Such a comprehension of spontaneity appears more appropriate to the act of composing. Though composition and improvisation can involve similar processes, it seems that the act of composing has a clearer cognitive nature than improvisation, because composition normally involves reflection, elaborations of musical ideas, deliberative processes and so on. Undoubtedly, composition involves a conceptual activity. By contrast, improvisation often happens at a speed that seems to make for example impossible processes like weighting up the best among several alternative melodic lines. Characterized as it is by decisions taken on the spot, improvisation seems to exclude reflection and the use of concepts. I have just questioned the picture according to which the spontaneity of improvisation is one with its being a groundless, automatic or instinctive activity, unexpectedly and partly unconsciously performed. As we have seen, the spontaneity of improvisation depends on a bundle of conditions, among which is also the acquisition of a capacity of reflection. Such a capacity (which is always involved when improvisers monitor their music 1922, 150-151).

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at the very same time they are playing it) can be trained, and this, according to my hypothesis, allows for reflection to be carried out, at least in part, “unconsciously”.52 Conceptual contents of some sort are presumably involved in this self-monitoring feature of the improvisational activity. The point is not only that improvisers ought to have a fundamental understanding of melody and form, or, as trumpeter Tommy Turrentine puts it, that they have got to have “a basic conception” of whatever they are playing “just to know when to start and stop”.53 Improvisers produce particular structures of sounds that embody a design. Ideally, at least, improvisers do not aim simply at creating music as they play, but also at presenting music intended to be worth hearing.54 This suggests that complex processes of reflection and comparison need take place in improvisational music making. If an artist consciously plays a note or introduces some kind of variation at a point, his or her decision should be connected to some musical ideas, i.e. ideas that give the decision the (musical) meaning it has.55 Since such ideas presumably have a conceptual character too, improvisation may be considered as a spontaneous action.56 And it may be said that, in so far as improvisers connect concepts to their 52

Admittedly, the expression ‘unconscious reflection’ sounds odd. I have tried to avoid the maybe odder one ‘unreflective reflection’. I think its use is justified if we take into account that spontaneity has conditions in the learning processes of the artists. Among other things, it depends on the practice of musical thinking. Musicians have to perform musical knowledge ‘off the page’, so that aural conceptualizations can gradually take the place of more theoretical forms of music representation. The achievement of this capacity, together with that of the skills required to instantaneously translate ideas into sounds, are conditions of spontaneity, because they are the conditions of a close coordination, as Berliner puts it, “between the body and the conceptualizing mind”(Berliner, 1994, 178). 53 Cf. Berliner, 1994, 177. 54 Cf. Brown, 1996, 354 and Brown, 2000, 119. According to Lee Konitz, the improvisers’ intention “is to end up with a composition”, that is, with an improvisation “that really stands up to analysis as a good piece of music” (Hamilton, 2007b, 135-136). 55 I do not think the situation changes if the note is played without thinking about it. However unreflective the playing is, it remains an intentional action. And this, it seems to me, for two reasons: it belongs to an activity that has an aim, and it is an action that contributes to the particular end the improviser is pursuing, since in relation to this end the playing could have a momentary utility. 56 One might think that maybe the decisions about the direction of the music are more a matter of feeling than of the use of concepts. In a sense it might really be so. It might be that the sense of improvisers’ decisions is given by the feeling they connect to them. However, again, how can they know about their feeling, if not through the use of a concept?

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activity of creating sequential structures of sounds, they spontaneously create such structures. Or, alternatively, it may be said that the origin of the music improvisers play is in themselves. I shall now conclude by suggesting that spontaneity as cognitive independence is involved in an artist’s process of finding an “individual voice”.

4. Spontaneity and the Finding of a Voice (with a further Kantian suggestion) Generally speaking, an artist is estimated highly in the jazz art world because of his or her having an individual voice, that is, a distinct musical identity.57 Jazz musicians strive to find a recognisable individual sound, because achieving it can be regarded as evidence of originality, of uniqueness of expression.58 However, achieving an individual voice is not an easy matter. Saxophonist Gary Bartz says that, for an individual “fully to play himself, rather than to sound like someone else, is possibly the hardest thing to do”.59 The point is perceived as crucial in jazz. In an interview with pianist Ted Rosenthal, Keith Jarrett asserts that jazz at its best “signifies the vitality of the individual”. And then he explains: “If I thought to play like Coltrane would be my goal, then I’m wrong. If I thought to play like anybody was my goal, then it’s wrong in jazz. Because the whole survival of jazz depends on there being people who aren’t playing like anybody else.”

The point is not simply that in the jazz world people have to distinguish each other. Jarrett’s point, instead, seems precisely to be 57

Martin, 2002, 137-138. It is not easy to define what an individual voice is. Stressing that instrumental timbre and instrumental technique acquire a more individual character in improvised music, Andy Hamilton quotes the following statement from jazz saxophonist Sam Rivers: “I listened to everyone I could hear to make sure I didn’t sound like them”(Hamilton, 2000, 174). Various elements contribute to an artist’s sound profile, elements like timbre and vibrato, phrasing and vocabulary. Timbre is further personalized through the articulation of pitches with various qualities of hardness or softness. For all good instrumentalists touch is also a pertinent issue (on this see Berliner, 1994, 124-135). Other, maybe more elusive elements can obviously contribute, since the finding of an individual voice appears to me as strictly connected to the task of finding a personal or individual style in the sense given to this notion by Wollheim, 1987, ch. I. 59 Berliner, 1994, 274. 58

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originality. The pianist quotes a line from Basho, a haiku poet: “Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise: Seek what they sought”.60 We find a similar thought in Kant’s outline of the attitude apprentices should have towards the works of an artist of genius. He suggests that they should not look at them as examples to copy or imitate. Kant says that novices have to follow these works, but what he is actually thinking about is not a form of imitation. His idea is that if learners are talented, the works of a genius can arouse in them ideas similar to those of their creator, that is, they can awake in learners a feeling of their own originality.61 Kant characterizes genius as “the exemplary originality of the natural endowment of a subject for the free use of his cognitive faculties”.62 Without entering into the details of Kant’s theory, I simply observe that the expression “exemplary originality” hints at two important features of an artist. If “originality” means a capacity for producing something about which no determinate rule can be given, the specification of this capacity as exemplar suggests that what it produces must be intelligible. Otherwise it cannot serve as a model or norm for others, as a basis for inspiration. According to Kant, originality consists primarily in finding material to express the artist’s ideas, while exemplarity derives mainly from the way such material is coherently put together. This way of unification is the indeterminate but intuitively recognizable “rule”, which other people can merely imitate, but which can also inspire talented people to produce their own exemplary creations. Now, in a sense, jazz musicians’ personal voice appears to be something quite like this “rule”, which can be recognized in the works of a given artist. However, there may be something more involved in the finding out of a “personal voice”. A musician’s concern for the individual quality of his or her sound, or for being able to state something personal in music, often corresponds to a crucial (ethical) need to “be oneself”. In the narratives circulating within the jazz community it is not unusual to find a characterization of good music as music coming from a “good person”, a person that, among other things, is “true to him– or herself”. The quest a jazz musician is involved in is one that is often not only aesthetic, but also existential, because “it is a quest that must reach to the depths of our Egos”, where, as guitar player Kenny Burrell puts it, “we can find what makes us distinct (i.e. what distinguishes us from everyone else)”.63 60

The quotation is from Rosenthal, 1996. Cf. Kant, 2000, §§ 47, 49. 62 Ibid, § 49, p. 195. 63 For Burrell “such a distinctiveness is an infinite source of creativity”. Cf. Duranti and Burrell, 2004, 92. 61

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It is clear that by “originality” we often express the idea that an artist’s creativity cannot be reduced to the ability of producing something new under some relevant aspect. Of course we think that artists should not confine themselves to repeating or imitating. However, we also think, to put it roughly, that they have to give something of themselves and by themselves. This is precisely where spontaneity enters the picture. As we have seen, improvisers act spontaneously when the choices they make receive their meaning from ideas they connect to them. Decisions an artist takes because of mere emotional impulses, or as mechanical reactions to requests or prompts e.g. from other players, or from the audience, are not cognitively independent, since they receive their meaning from these very factors, and not from the artist’s musical concepts. The same seems true of the elements that enter in the emergent voice of an artist. Artists very often play what other artists have already played, and include in their way of playing stylistic features of their idols. But, apparently, it is precisely the fact that they can connect what they play to their own musical ideas that makes their music distinguishable. It seems to me that there are striking similarities between the process of finding a voice and that of developing a character, or a personality. Both processes take place in and through a community, and in both cases models are crucial. To develop a personality, after having interiorized elements of the models, one, so to speak, projects one’s own identity on such models. This is when the process is accomplished. Likewise with the finding of a personal voice.64 Artists have idols they look to, while developing their skills and dispositions. They can also learn to play solo like their idols played, and to do it spontaneously, without following a score or a sketch. Their individuality as players depends on the development of these abilities, as they provide a reliable basis for the music artists play and the way they want to play it. However, individuality is not reducible to this. Plain imitation, however good it may be, is a rather feeble form of cognitive independence, and that artists find their identity, or individual voice, only when they achieve a form of independence in musical conceptions, so that the decisions they take on the spot receive their meaning from their own ideas. It seems to me that only when this happens, that is, only if the decisions about the direction of the soundsequence and how to play it are connected to the artist’s own ideas, the music created can result in something like the expression of individuality. 64

Peter Martin emphasizes that in pursuing the goals of self-expression and finding their own ‘voice’, most players operate “within an accepted framework of stylistic conventions that both influences their artistic choices and provides a foundation for what they do” (Martin, 2002, 138).

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Presumably it is from that moment, that, to use the Kantian term, a “rule” becomes recognizable in the sound of an artist. It is revealing that, according to Keith Jarrett, to keep their voice once they have found it, artists do not need to check what they play in order for it to sound “like their voice”. If an artist proceeds in this way, Jarrett comments, he or she will never sound like him- or herself. Then he adds: “But if you just go and play the instrument from the deepest emotion you can feel about what’s going on, it’s going to be you.”65

Players can reflect not only cognitively, but also emotionally, about what to play.66 However, Jarrett’s words may also hint at the fact that the correctness of a player’s sound, its “like him- or herself” character, is determined by the sound itself, and not by some external standard. A player does not choose a voice and then apply it. A voice and a sound are not separate things. I suggest that what Jarrett means by talking of playing an instrument “from the deepest emotion you can feel about what’s going on” could be expressed in a more prosaic way, by saying that having and keeping a voice is a matter of spontaneity. And it is so, precisely because a player knows which his or her voice is, since he or she knows how to keep it. If this is correct, cognitive spontaneity is where the spontaneity of improvisation, in all the senses that we can give to it, is accomplished.67

References Alperson, P. 1984, “On Musical Improvisation”, Journal of Aesthetic and Art Criticism XLIII, 17-29. Aristotle, 1984, Nicomachean Ethics, in J. Barnes ed., The Complete Works of Aristotle, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Benson, B.E. 2003, The Improvisation of Musical Dialogue. A Phenomenology of Music, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —. 2006, “The Fundamental Heteronomy of Jazz Improvisation”, Revue Internationale de Philosophie LX, 453-467.

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Rosenthal, 1996. To recall once again, this is also a capacity developed and trained in the demanding learning process that jazz musicians undergo. While stressing that, to express one’s voice, one has simply to play from one’s own deepest emotion, Jarrett let slip in the background the time spent in trying to find the voice. 67 I would like to thank Elisa Caldarola, Andy Hamilton, Hilary Siddons and Alberto Vanzo for their helpful comments. 66

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Berliner, P.F. 1994, Thinking in Jazz. The Infinite Art of Improvisation, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Brown, L.B. 1996, “Improvisation, and the Principle of Continuity”, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism LIV, 353-369. —. 2000, “Feeling My Way’: Jazz Improvisation and Its Vicissitudes—A Plea for Imperfection”, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism LVIII, 113-123. Davies, S. 2001, Musical Works and Performances: A Philosophical Exploration, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Day, W. 2000, “Knowing as Instancing: Jazz Improvisation and Moral Perfectionism”, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism LVIII, 99-111. Duranti, A. and Burrell, K. 2004, “Jazz Improvisation: A Search for Hidden Harmonies and a Unique Self”, Ricerche di Psicologia XXVII, 71-101. Elster, J. 2000, Ulysses Unbound. Studies in Rationality, Precommitment and Constraints, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gaut, B. and Livingston, P. eds. 2003, The Creation of Art. New Essays in Philosophical Aesthetics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hamilton, A. 2000, “The Art of Improvisation and the Aesthetics of Imperfection”, British Journal of Aesthetics XL, 168-185. —. 2007a, Aesthetics & Music, London: Continuum. —. 2007b, Lee Konitz. Conversations on the Improviser’s Art, Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. Hospers, J. 1985, “Artistic Creativity”, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism XLIII, 243-256. Kant, I. 1998, Critique of Pure Reason, translated and edited by P. Guyer and A.W. Wood, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —. 2000, Critique of the Power of Judgment, edited by P. Guyer, translated by P. Guyer and E. Matthews, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Leibniz, G.W. 1978, Essais de Theodicee, in Die philosophische Schriften von G.W. Leibniz, hrsg. Von C.J. Gerhardt, Bd. VI, Hildesheim/New York: Olms. Levinson, J. 2006, Musical Thinking, in J. Levinson ed., Contemplating Art. Essays in Aesthetics, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 209-219. Martin, P.J. 2002, Spontaneity and Organisation, in M. Cooke and D. Horn eds., The Cambridge Companion to Jazz, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Piro, F. 2002, Spontaneità e ragion sufficiente. Determinismo e filosofia dell’azione in Leibniz, Roma: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura.

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Rosenthal, T. 1996, “Keith Jarrett. The “insanity” of doing more than one (musical) thing”, www.tedrosenthal.com/tr-kj.htm. Ryle, G. 1976, “Improvisation”, Mind LXXXV, 69-83. Sparti, D. 2005, Suoni inauditi. L’improvvisazione nel jazz e nella vita quotidiana, Bologna: Il Mulino. Sudnow, D. 2001, Ways of the Hand. A Rewritten Account, Cambridge (Mass.): The Mit Press. Vossenkuhl, W. 1994, “Spontaneität”, Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung XLVIII, 329-349. —. 2006, Die Möglichkeit des Guten. Ethik im 21. Jahrhundert, München: C. H. Beck. Walde, B. 2006, Willensfreiheit und Hirnforschung. Das Freiheitsmodell des epistemischen Libertarismus, Paderborn: Mentis. Wittgenstein, L. 1922, Tractatus logico-philosophicus, with an Introduction by B. Russell, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Wollheim, R. 1987, Painting as an Art, London: Thames and Hudson. Yashiro, Y. 1958, 2000 Years of Japanese Art, London: Thames and Hudson. Young, J.O. and Matheson, C. 2000, “The Metaphysics of Jazz”, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism LVIII, 125-133.

CHAPTER FOUR IMPROVISATION AS PHENOMENON AND TOOL FOR COMMUNICATION, INTERACTIVE ACTION AND LEARNING BJØRN ALTERHAUG

“Yesterday is history. Tomorrow is a mystery. And today? Today is a gift. That's why we call it the present”1 —Babatunde Olatunji (Nigerian master drummer)

Prelude In March 2008 I was part of a jazz quartet touring parts of Norway with the renowned jazz musician Lee Konitz. During this tour I was reading a book: Lee Konitz, Conversations on the Improviser’s Art, by Andy Hamilton (Hamilton, 2007). I was very fascinated by the book, especially because I had the opportunity to directly talk to Lee Konitz about his improvisational philosophy and other issues concerning musical improvisation, which was raised in the book. Lee told me that the author of the book was a philosopher and jazz pianist. I was curious, contacted Andy and we had interesting dialogues on improvisation by phone and email on Lee Konitz’ improvising concepts. During this correspondence Andy told me about the improvisation conference, “Between Technique and Spontaneity”, which was to be held in Padova, May 2008. When I realised that the conference was arranged by the Department of Education, Department of Philosophy and the Department of Linguistics, it surprised me why not music was represented as part of this event, as music, especially jazz, in the later years has been a topic for exploring improvisation as phenomenon, interaction and practice. At the same time I 1

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was happy that disciplines of linguistics, philosophy and education were concerned and interested in exploring improvisation, which seem to be a neglected research topic in these disciplines in Norway, and I guess in other parts of the world too. I contacted the organizer of the conference, Marina Santi, and, with support of the Faculty of Arts at my university in Trondheim, NTNU, I attended the conference as an observer and a participant in discussions. The meeting strengthened my belief that improvisation as phenomenon and tool for communication, interactive action and learning will be of crucial significance as an interdisciplinary research topic in a global world. That is, for me, the most important effect of the event. In the following I will try to elucidate aspects of improvisation, try to bring in relevant aspects, and give examples where improvisation as a potential for acting and communicating is present. Most of my life, jazz music has been my main interest and passion, privately and professionally. Jazz is therefore the field of knowledge and experience that I feel most at home, accordingly jazz improvisation will have a dominating place in this essay, but as stated elsewhere; improvisation is related to all kind of creative processes in human acting; from everyday conversations to highly skilled professional activity. It is my belief and hypothesis that more insight in these processes will be of great importance in finding new perspectives and fruitful ways in the search for new approaches, theories and methods in learning and the learning sciences.

1. Approaching improvisation generally Improvisation as a concept has remained a largely unstudied and untheorised topic, especially in terms of its relevance for contemporary work in cultural studies, anthropology, pedagogy, sociology, and philosophy – in other words, as an interesting and obvious topic for interdisciplinary research. As Bruno Nettl states: “...it must be repeated that among activities and processes studied by music historians and ethnomusicologists, improvisation plays a small part.”2 However, in musicology today this topic seems to gain more interest as a research topic dealing with music as performance and interactive action in real time, a supplement to the more traditional research on musical scores, which treats music mainly as notation – text. Improvisation is the human practice from which all music derives; as such, it represents a tool for communication and interaction that seems 2

Nettl, 1998, 14.

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crucial both in a local and in a global context. The directness and dialogic nature of improvisatory practice, which is something that happens “on the spur of the moment” and mostly in social settings, “face to face”, makes it particularly relevant and interesting in relation to learning and communicational aspects in a globalised reality. In the book “The Other Side of Nowhere” Daniel Fischlin and Ajay Heble (editors) argue that music “specifically, creative improvised music and free jazz - can reinvigorate our understanding of the social function of humanities research within the broader context of how that research plays a role in shaping notions of community and ‘new forms’ of social organization”.3

This rather optimistic attitude to the potential of improvisation of these editors largely converges with my own attitude; an attitude that has grown out of experiences and efforts to shed light on this topic during my 40 years as a jazz musician and an academic. Dealing with a phenomenon and concept that refers to performance, a temporarily happening raise different challenges and problems concerning approaching the topic and what kind of research strategy that would be the most adequate. Commenting on improvisation, Nettl adds that improvisation is not a phenomenon, but consists of multiple phenomena, which again points to a research strategy, that has to be based on of quite different and interdisciplinary perspectives: ... “Recognizing the significance of singling out improvisation for specific studies as if it were one kind of a thing, we will nevertheless probably find it necessary to discard this simple line of demarcation between improvisation and pre-composition, or to draw lines at different points....And of course we will increasingly have to look at improvisation as a group of perhaps very different phenomena”.4

Accordingly, to find adequate theories and methodologies in this area might be challenging. However, being involved in a program for Action research for some time, I realised that an action research perspective might be fruitful in approaching improvisation.

3 4

Fishlin and Heble, 2004, 21. Nettl, 1998, 16.

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2. Action research and improvisation Improvisation and action research may be said to have common characteristics that may be interesting and which perhaps could be mutually inspiring. In the following I will give a brief overview with comments on action research and improvisation. Compared with the short history of action research, since John Collier and Kurt Lewin developed the term in the 1930s and 1940s, the history of improvisation reaches back to antiquity. But if we examine some of the fundamentals of action research, we find concepts that were used by such ancient philosophers as Plato and Aristotle: practice, empiricism, theory, dialectic, dialogue, etc. Both improvisation and action research also seem to have a basic methodological orientation among major thinkers and educators such as Donald Schön, Paulo Freire and to a certain extent John Dewey. Action research and improvisational work appear to share the fact that in their own separate ways they seek to build bridges between theory and practice and, through their particular forms of practical intervention and participatory dynamics, seek to give expression to social participation and solidarity. With their shared and unambiguous foundations in practice and their reference points in the conceptual world of the ancients, it is reasonable to expect to find interdisciplinary connections that allow each to cast instructive light on the other. Throughout its relatively brief history, responses to action research have been mixed, generating often heated scientific debate. During the 1970s, significant sectors of Norwegian social sciences declared action research to be an unproductive path that would never achieve results on the same level as “real” scientific research. Today, however, action research is well established and respected. The action research spiral’s cyclical movements (Coghlan and Brannick, 2001) seem to resemble the work done in a jazz group during rehearsal and up to the performance. The individual components in the practice process/research process are repeated in a spiral-like way: action – evaluation – diagnosing – planning the action, then a round of the same components, but now based on a status report and a plan of interventions and new experiential variations. For every spiral repetition with desired changes and evaluations comes new understanding and insight: An exciting potential path of enquiry, but beyond the scope of this article. This practice-based action research and improvisational activity, where a practice community of “natives” conducts research on themselves and

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articulates their own skills and experiences within their own practices, seems today to strengthen the knowledge-theoretical legitimacy of what we can call “a socially distributed knowledge production method”. This should give legitimacy to attempts within the vocational subjects to develop a practice-related foundation of knowledge, which could be developed as an alternative and supplementary research strategy, more than just an application of the results of traditional research. In the jazz culture, as in other professional cultures which base themselves on experience and silent knowledge, there is unfortunately often resistance to researchers interpreting and finding out what these practice communities are actually doing. My experience in the jazz community is that a researcher’s perspective on improvisational activity is often looked upon with scepticism and suspicion. This often hampers a mutual and important dialogue between researchers and practitioners, limiting the constructive and productive possibilities in a society which now to a large degree demands knowledge and insight as one based on experience and social interaction. Here I believe that the jazz culture and improvisation-related activity have a lot to gain from insights into action learning and research. The artificial division in musical life between performer and scholar, practitioner and theoretician, is unhealthy. To see these as complementary and supplementary dimensions within the music field would strengthen both performers and researchers. Action research represents, in my opinion, a particularly constructive approach to the understanding of improvisational work on its own terms. Similarly, I believe that studies of improvisational groups at practice, both in the studio and performance situations could give us new perspectives on learning, socialization processes and organization from an action research perspective. Like action research, improvisation has encountered a certain amount of scepticism, but has in recent years become increasingly topical and relevant in different contexts. Even so, in a range of situations I have heard statements and attitudes to improvisation that both amaze me and arouse my curiosity, as the following short story illustrates. In 1999 I was in charge of a research project at NTNU in Trondheim entitled: “Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Improvisation”.5 The goal of his project was to examine the phenomenon and concept of improvisation. In 2002 I learned that my hometown newspaper had printed an account of this project. A letter to the editor which appeared immediately after this 5

It should be mentioned that my personal contact with Professor Paul F. Berliner was of decisive significance for the funding of the project, and that Berliner was attached to the program as a senior Professor 2001-2002.

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article, gave strong confirmation of the fact that improvisation provokes and seems almost life-threatening to certain people. The following excerpt appeared in Rana Blad on July 27, 2002 in the editorial section: “Improvisation has truly not been any condition for survival. It has been a condition for the complete opposite: spontaneous and thoughtless actions, risky behaviours, miscalculations, economic ruin and other catastrophes that at their worst were definitive. The world of improvisation has been thought to be a death zone that both small farmers, industry workers and their descendants have tried to distance themselves from without this attempt always being successful…”.

I found it extremely unlikely that a reply would change in any way the writer’s understanding of and attitude to improvisation, so the writer got the last word in this case. However, the letter seems to show an understanding that unfortunately appears to be widespread: improvisation as merely an emergency strategy. Let’s examine the word improvisation.

3. Improvisation: etymology and history The Latin improvisus means “unforeseen” or “on the spur of the moment”. The root of the word improvisation is the Latin word for “see”: Visare. Visus is something which has been seen, while pro means before, in advance. Provisus does not exist as a separate word in Latin, but it would have had the meaning “something which has been seen in advance”. The prefix im- is negative, yielding the meaning “something which has not been seen in advance”. From improvisus, which gradually got the meaning “unforeseen” or “unexpected”, “surprising”, Italian has formed a verb improvvisare – to do something without preparation, solve an unexpected situation, and the noun improvisation is derived from this verb.6 Another Latin term was extempore actio, which originally meant “acting outside time” –outside the normal flow of time, which could be related to the term “experienced” time (Bergson, 1990). I will discuss other definitions of improvisation below. Ancient Greek and Roman performance culture was mainly oral, and we see parallels to many music cultures of today, e.g. folk music, jazz, and popular music. This ancient literacy was both a tool and basis for oral communication. In Athens around 500 BC, there were annual, organised recitals that lasted for many days. The Greeks grew up with the epic poems such as the Iliad 6

Conversation with professor Gunhild Vidén, Department of History and Classical Studies, Norwegian University of Science and Technology

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and the Odyssey. However, they were not read, they were heard. This is an illustration of the importance of the aural aspect and recitation/learning by heart as crucial elements of improvisation, irrespective of historical period. Actually, this is the foundation of an academic discourse on improvisation that can be found in Parry’s studies of Yugoslavian bard’s performance of “homerian” poems. (Parry, 1928). The Roman Quintilian (35-100 AD) says the following about making a good speech: “to be free to improvise, you have to know the speech so well that you do not feel restricted by it.”7 Proficiency as an improviser in rhetoric contexts, according to the old sources, is due to two factors – natural predisposition and practice; in other words, talent and training. The former is regarded as the most important, but the ability to improvise is also a matter of practising, and one can find a lot of explicit advice and instructions for the improviser concerning memory techniques and elements that influence the performance, including voice, face, body, ear and rhythm. (Andersen, 1990) Even pressure to deliver and nervousness are treated in this connection. For instance, Crassus said: … “if not even the most proficient and relaxed speakers go to work with a certain anxiety and are moved by nervousness when they start to speak, well, then they are lost to all sense of shame”.8

This focuses the very important role of emotion, state of mind, and mood in performance situations. From ancient times up till today, we find improvisation in every known musical culture, even if there is a great variation in how it is handled in the different traditions. However, one crucial element seems to be of special importance regardless of historical time: the aural aspect, listening with awareness and alertness in the course of performance. This focus on the ear, in contrast to the eye’s significance in human interaction will be an urgent matter of discussion later in this writing. It also seems obvious that improvisational activity is affected by how society functions and is organised.

4. Improvisation and society, a brief overview In European art music history, improvisation had a central place from the early medieval ages until the age of romanticism, but around 1850 a 7 8

Andersen, 1995, 110. Ibid., 121.

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great deal of the improvisation of this tradition became invisible. Part of the explanation for this seems related to the changes in society; the different functions of society became more and more specialised, and economic systems and efficiency produced an accelerating development toward a top-ruled, pyramidal organisation in different parts of society. The rise of the formal concert hall during the 19th century gradually put an end to concert improvisation. The industrial era brought with it an excessive emphasis on specialisation and professionalism in all fields of living. Most musicians confined themselves to the note-for-note playing of scores written by a handful of composers, who somehow seemed to have access to the mysterious and godlike creative process. Composition and performance progressively became split from each other, to the detriment of both, and the eye became the dominant sense regarding art music production in the industrial age.

5. Unwritten vs. written traditions As we see, improvisation in all kinds of nuances strongly depends on how society is organised and how it functions. In the article “Medieval Improvisation”, Leo Treitler points out that the very concept of improvisation is a product of cultures that have valued the opposite form, composition, as a norm.9 Descriptions of improvisation are linked mainly to Western societies, even though we find descriptions on improvisation in early Indian and Arabic writings. In these cultures improvisation is considered a basic prerequisite for all music behavior, and it is not necessary to mention it in theoretical writings. Consequently, music performed before the notation system was invented, and music outside the confines of the Western world was and is produced and presented in unwritten traditions. Improvised music has a longer history than the history of written music, and both traditions have lived side by side as musical expressions through the last Millennium. Improvised music happens “in the course of performance” and is not written down on paper; consequently it has not been a part of the “serious” written musical traditions and did not gain the status, attention and scientific significance it seems to deserve: The new and the old lost continuity. We entered a period in which concertgoers came to believe that the only good composer was a dead composer or – in some cases– a contemporary hero, a worthy heir to the dead composers.

9

Treitler, 1991, 33.

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Christopher Small makes this distinction between composed and improvised music: “In short, composed music is the account of the journey of exploration, which might well have been momentous, but it is over before we learn of it, while improvisation is the journey itself, which is likely to make small discoveries rather than large, or even no discoveries at all, but in which everything that is found can be of interest or value”.10

6. Jazz and “African ways” In the beginning of the 20th century, New Orleans became the centre for a development of a new musical expression –jazz. Improvisation reappeared in this music in a way that proved to be of vital importance and influence for all kinds of music throughout the century. “Of all the musical forms to emerge during the twentieth century, jazz was by far the most significant”.11 Jazz has a relatively short history. The first references to it come from the West Coast of America, where the San Francisco Bulletin of March 1913 used the term to describe a dance music full of vigour and “pep”.12 Attempts to define this expression have since stimulated many discussions, and even today the discussion has not reached a final conclusion. This should be taken as a sign of good health and evidence of a vital cultural expression. The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz definition is as follows: “A music created mainly by black Americans in the early 20th century through the amalgamation of elements drawn from European-American and tribal African music”. This rather open definition recognises that “…on the whole, ethnicity provides a core, a centre of gravity for the narrative of jazz, and is one element that unites the several different kinds of narratives in use today”.13 With the emergence of jazz in the first part of the 20th century, improvisation gradually found its place on the musical scene and in recent years it seems to generate interest within different fields of research. Jazz has spread all over the world, and today we can describe jazz as a global music. One of the main reasons for this relatively fast dispersion is to be found in the African elements of jazz: African ways of behavior with 10

Small, 1996, 176-177. Shipton, 2001, 1. 12 Ibid. 13 DeVeaux, 421. 11

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respect to life and music, which are closely interwoven. The expression “African ways” should not be conceived as if the African is something unambiguous or homogenous. The African refers to heterogeneous practices, but fundamental to these ways of communicating is the inclusive, interactive, dialogic aspect; where the actor or musician is the message (Sidran, 1981). In the combination of singing, dancing and drumming, there is a “celebration of life” which has many layers of tacit knowledge, experience, religion, and joy. In every such performance and meeting it seems very important to bring forth personal, individual voices, inviting others to make their contribution and to be open to all directions and possibilities such dialogues and interactions may take. Behind these actions and activities – communities of practice – full of joy and sorrow – there is a deep feeling of belonging to a collective of local identity where nature plays a decisive part. This identity musicologist Charles Keil names “humanity” and he define it in this way; “…as entertainment from the white or public point of view and as ritual, drama or dialectical catharsis from the Negro or theoretical standpoint”.14 Keil writes that this “ritual” has a clear connection to West African musical practices, and he means that the “entertaining” blacks are masters what concerns sound, movement, “timing” and the spoken word, which he sees as the kernel in the black culture. This rather generalised description and essentialism require some remarks. In the postcolonial period, parts of Africa has been saddled with poverty and deep conflicts between tribes and regions, a gloomy fact that strongly contradicts an idealisation of African ways of acting. Although these human, political, social and global urgent and complex questions are part of the context of this paper, they will not be discussed here. The main focus is particular aspects of African ways of acting which I have experienced in different musical settings – for example, in West African traditions and in the interplay with African-American jazz musicians, and these aspects provide a valuable contribution to the discussion and discourses on interaction and communication in a global world.

7. Ubuntu In his book No Future without Forgiveness, the Reverend Desmond Tutu talks about a South-African term ubuntu, which means “to be a human being”. All human relations that are imprinted of mutual respect, dignity and community are terms or expressions for ubuntu. 14

Keil, 1966, 15.

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Ubuntu-Botho means “the art or virtue of being a human creature”. We are born to live in a subtle network of mutual dependence. “I am only a human being through another you.” We say “A person is a person through other persons”. It is not, “I think, – therefore I am”. It says rather: “I am human because I belong. I participate, I share”.15

This view of the world or humanism represents a universal ubuntu that includes all people irrespective of race, sex, ethnicity, political, cultural and/ or religious belonging. As Tutu has claimed at several occasions: “We are all born different, – like a rainbow. A rainbow is a rainbow just because the colours are different. The different colours come together, and then we get a rainbow.”

The influence of “African ways” then seems to represent a potential for action that may be looked upon as “an alternative modernism”: celebration of the unpredictable –improvisational– rooted in tradition and internalised knowledge and experience combined with training to act “on the spot”. The risk of a romanticisation of “African ways” is clearly present in such pompous pronouncements, but as an alternative to over 200 years of Western rationality, time has come to develop conceptual frameworks grounded on alternatives: interaction, emotions, social creativity and internalised, tacit knowledge, and Africa is a rich source for such a framework.

8. Improvisation: Emergency solution, or? In everyday language, improvisation is given different meanings. These different usages often cause confusion when improvisation as a concept and phenomenon is discussed. There seems to be two main meanings of the word: 1) Improvisation as emergency actions, e.g. “the plans failed hence I had to improvise”. Note that this statement presupposes that human action is normally based on following rules and instructions. 2) Improvisation based on a high state of readiness, bodily experiences, internalised skills and practice; a highly rated way of acting. This meaning is based on another important concept –embodied knowledge or tacit knowing: During our adolescence, we develop a kind of readiness for “whatever may happen”. This readiness is acquired mainly through 15

Tutu, 1999, 31.

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direct involvement in various problem-solving situations, and this type of knowledge is mediated via bodily experiences and alert awareness. Merlau-Ponty’s contribution for understanding the significance of the body as the centre for perception, experience and comprehension is in this context very important and relevant. Mans existence is projected through acting between others and with the world. It is through the body that our consciousness develops and is formed. It is the body that first understands the world; the experience comes before the analysis of the experience. In the Phenomenology of Perception Merleau-Ponty wrote: “Insofar as I have hands, feet; a body, I sustain around me intentions which are not dependent on my decisions and which affect my surroundings in a way that I do not choose”.16

In this writing improvisation is understood in accordance to the second meaning: based on a high state of readiness, bodily experiences, internalised skills and practice. Among the primary goals is to acknowledge improvisational activity as a crucial and inevitable activity in different contexts that demand training and practice. All human beings, whatever their background, have creative potential. It is therefore necessary to underline that creativity and improvisation are human features of a general character, which we may recognise as easily in a masterpiece as in everyday activities. Through history, it is likely that improvisation as part of tacit knowledge has been of decisive importance for the active creation of knowledge and man’s ability to survive, e.g. when inventing new tools and adopting new approaches and perspectives (Polanyi, 1966). But there is a distinction between creativity and improvisation.

9. Creativity and improvisation: A distinction Creativity and improvisation, as we see, are words and concepts that are closely connected, and often used interchangeable. Creativity has for many years been of vital research interest, and there are several writings and research literature on this topic. Most of this literature is centred towards the individual’s creativity, “the lone genius”, and describes this ability as somewhat God-given, which just belongs to some chosen few, with references to famous inventors, like Bell, Wright and Edison and composers, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, etc. Creativity as a group activity in real time seems far less explored. What kinds of processes are taking place 16

Merleau-Ponty, 1962, 440.

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individually and collectively when groups up to a number of 6-8 interact? To meet questions like this we have to start with exploring some small, but important differences, between creativity and improvisation. “Creativity” is derived from the Latin word creare, “to create”, and as such it is close related to improvisation. Even if these two words seem to represent the same meaning, and often is used by chance, there is a distinction that may be useful to figure out.17 Creativity is a solution-oriented and innovative developing process where there is an exchange between exploring, reflection and new exploration. The exploration part does not necessarily have to be of a practical kind, and might be a combination of practice and reconsiderations; a circular circuit of idea-acting-consequence. Creativity is as such understood as a slow floating improvisation, a process based on knowledge, proficiency and reflection over time. This process is often referred to as an individual exploring process, a necessary preparation phase that makes the ground for the “in-the moment-innovative”, what apparently happens in a “magical” way by creative, improvising persons. Improvisation may be described as immediate actions, where there is no time for cognitive reflections, however, action based on deep internalized knowledge, proficiency and creativity, combined with extreme awareness and alertness. Improvisation is as such the creativity manifested in the moment’s invention and intuition. In interactive acting situations on the spot, improvisation has to, to benefit a common goal, unfold in a proficient collective who share the creative capacity; the members of the spirit of the community has to be on wavelength in order to interact/improvise together. Trust, confidence, tolerance and humor are important keywords in this kind of interaction.

10. Creativity and Improvisation in action An illustrating example on positive effects due to the fruitful combination of creativity and improvisation is the captain and his crew who recently, January 2009, were forced to land the airplane on Hudson River because of crowds of birds damaging the engines. This emergency situation was solved elegantly due to a high state of readiness, internalised skills and practice. The pilot and the crew had been 17

This distinction is based on an unpublished manuscritpt: Komplekse bevegelser og fotballfaglige utfordringer (“Complex movements and football technical challenges”) by Svein Halvard Jørgensen, 2009.

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creatively trained and prepared for different emergency situations, but unlikely, they were not trained for this very special situation. However, all kinds of emergency actions and procedures had been rehearsed repeatedly in simulators and in other contexts. When this dangerous situation occurred, the crew was mentally and physically prepared; the procedures and necessary actions for this situation were done automatically. Creativity and improvisation were coordinated on the spur of the moment; a superb combination for solving unexpected situations, and not at least for innovative thinking and new ideas; ideas and thoughts that were not seen or heard before. In this very critical happening, there was obvious no time to look in the manual and find written procedures to solve this unexpected and dramatic situation: a situation that was highly unforeseen.

11. Preparation and presence It is possible to be prepared for the unexpected, the unforeseen, and how? Investigating and exploring situations like this should hopefully lead to findings that can revitalize and shed new light on learning processes and pedagogy in general. A core point in this kind of group acting on the spot, regardless if it is an airplane crew, a teacher with his pupils or a jazz sextet, is the balance between the preparation phase and the ability to handle chaotic and turbulent situations in a cool way; the demanding relation between challenge and proficiency. Playing jazz has been described as being between panic and boredom. When Lee Konitz was asked how he did prepare for his improvisations, his answer seems simple, but is obviously a deep reflection on his activity as a jazz improviser during 65 years: “That’s my way of preparation –not to be prepared. And that takes a lot of preparation!”.18 In this saying Konitz stresses the importance of thoroughly preparation for good improvisation. This might seem as a paradox, which it is, but for interaction and improvisation in real time, a “lot of preparation” and “not to be prepared” are basic prerequisites for acting on the spur of the moment. When you are improvising and you bring too much of your preparation into your immediate actions, the interactive actions would not be “unforeseen”, but calculated and planned, which means that you are not totally present and alert in the interactional happening. This state of mind will hinder the flow of the interaction because of rational, cognitive thinking is to slow to match the intuitive, spontaneous moves between 18

Hamilton, 2007, 4.

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yourself and others, which takes place during real time interaction: Improvisation. My own experiences from playing jazz concerts tell that when you enter the stage you have to put aside all kinds of thinking that directs you to questions like these: “How were the chords in this tune?” or “Do I remember this tune’s form?”. Such questions might reveal that your preparation has not been good enough; accordingly you are anxious for not doing things right and properly. When the brain starts working on this kind of problems, the concentration is lost and your acting is directed by distracting elements. Jazz pianist Keith Jarrett and other musicians have in different occasions expressed that to be able to improvise well you have to be complete “empty”: a kind of passivity that makes space for presence, attention and alertness.

12. Meeting a master As a student of musicology in Trondheim in the late 1960s, I did not find jazz on my curriculum. It was all about the history and character of European art music. To me, who came from an oral musical tradition incorporating dance music and jazz, this omission was very interesting. I became an eager student of the scores of Bach, Mozart and Mahler, harmony instruction and other components of this fascinating musical world. But my main interest was displayed during late evenings and late-night hours, when I played jazz in the wonderful atmosphere that was a part of student society in Trondheim at that time. I wondered after a time why we weren’t listening to any jazz in the musicology program. Was this music, which I most frequently played and which was most was most familiar to me, not worth anything? Such reflections often occurred to me, and it was obvious that at this time the musical form called jazz was not regarded as being especially relevant for an academic program in music at the university level. The following short anecdote from my student days represents the germ of an idea for the work with improvisation that in recent years I have been involved with at the University of Trondheim, NTNU. Around 1970 the world renowned tenor saxophone player Ben Webster was invited to Trondheim to give a concert, and I was chosen to perform with him. I was barely 25 years old, and my experience as a jazz bass player was relatively minor. Everyone in jazz circles knew of course “the star” Ben Webster, and there was naturally enough a lot of talk about this world famous star coming to Trondheim. Stories even went around saying

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that Webster could be quite a temperamental musician. His experience as a boxer didn’t lessen my nervousness; I was quite simply frightened to death when we met this black musician wearing a little hat on his head and holding a tenor saxophone in his hand. He seemed, however, to be both pleasant and good-natured. There wasn’t a lot of time for practice before we were to play our first concert in the student union in Trondheim. Some standard tunes were agreed upon, ones we all knew without needing to practice them. The tension within me rose, almost to panic level, but at the same time a feeling of trembling, happy expectation. In the first “set”, the first part, my estimated pulse rate was up to 180 and I tried as best I could to follow Webster’s lead, quite respectfully and carefully listening for Webster’s slightest musical movements, as I wanted to follow him musically and do my best for this celebrity. After a while I didn’t think it was going all that badly, and the audience was quite clearly very enthusiastic. Somewhat more relaxed, I seated myself close to Ben during the break in order to possible hear something he had to say about our playing. He seemed satisfied and talked mostly of other things than music: funny stories from his career spent around the world. It seemed that we were not entirely hopeless. As the people-responsive person Webster was, he obviously understood that I was tense and needed a comment, so just before we were going to begin the second set, he turned to me and said: “Yeah Bjørn, you’re doing fine. But, you shouldn’t listen that much, then you lose yourself. You know, I need your initiative to play my best and then our best!” What a lesson from a master! The second set was a true joy, I felt that I was accepted and I believe it was due to that feeling of security that I felt I did a much better job as accompanist than during the more or less panic-stricken first set. The goal of our meeting and musical enterprise was very clear: to create the best music possible. In order to achieve the best possible music, no matter which genre, there are a series of factors and complex relationships that play a part. In jazz, which to a large degree is based on experience and oral tradition, the clear assumption is that, in order to play well together, everyone in the group knows inside out the basic material on which they are to improvise. This means that everyone shares the same knowledge and at all times must be oriented as to where one is located structurally over the course of time while playing together. This is vital if the band is to find its “groove”, the common rhythmic multiple that allows opportunities for creativity and musical ideas to flow freely within a given framework. This creates space for, and requires you to play in your own personal manner, listen to yourself, and, naturally, you must be extremely

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attentive to everything happening during the course of the performance. In this way the individual and collective forces in a team -a cooperative group- can be given the best opportunities for development, something that leads to the best music through a collective, non-hierarchical approach. In this kind of setting the boundaries between being a star soloist and the other members of the group disappear, since the only factor important here is to make use of the complementary skills and qualities of each individual musician in the group. If one person in the group becomes very dominant, the entire collective interaction will suffer because of this, and the improvisation will lose its quality. Initiative, attention, personal involvement, listening to the others and one’s own voice make the music alive and interesting for both the musical group and listeners.

13. Planned aimlessness To a greater or lesser extent, improvisation is found in all forms of music studied, and is therefore an element common to all types of music. In this way we are unpredictable, we improvise. Improvisation is central to the creation of new ideas in all areas of human understanding. Its significance is related to the experience of its “magical” and self-liberating qualities. Improvisation’s scientific significance and challenge is that it gives us the clearest, unedited version of the way we think, as displayed in behaviour. Improvisation is one of the most characteristic features of the jazz tradition. Recent years have seen the appearance of literature providing insight into and knowledge of jazz, and especially the character of improvisation in different contexts. Improvisation in the context of jazz music involves what we paradoxically can call elements of planned aimlessness. A colleague, baritone-saxophonist John Pål Inderberg, who works in jazz instruction at the Department of Music at NTNU, usually expresses this paradox in the following way: “Our students take four to six years here in order to become spontaneous musicians”. The idea that improvisation is only an emergency strategy is, at least in a jazz context, a profound misconception. In jazz thorough preparation is vital for good improvisation. The fundamental improvisational practice in jazz has roots in African drumming, dance and song. In his book Music of the Common Tongue author Christopher Small (1987) identifies a series of unique features of African music, underlying a range of different practices. In particular, music is an integral part of everyday life and plays an important role of all

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aspects of social interaction and self-realisation. Rhythm is the central organizing principle in all human communication. Furthermore, it is supposed that everyone is musical, and that everyone plays an expected role in all forms of making music. Finally, improvisation is important and common to all musical meetings; it is diversely developed, always within frameworks and conventions that we can find, for example, in interpersonal conversation. African musical practice is based on action and process, an interaction that happens in the moment, but which is based on thousands of years of fundamental traditions and experiences that function like a glue in order to hold society together. In today’s diversity of jazz expression and where jazz may be said to have become an international musical language, and where we find local dialects in various places on the globe, both fundamental traditional understanding and the wish to break with tradition through innovative improvisation, are conspicuous.

14. Definitions and different meanings If one looks up “jazz improvisation” on the Internet, there is a wealth of educational information as to how one can teach oneself to improvise in jazz: harmonically, melodically, scale-based improvisation, etc. These are purely instrumental explanations of jazz improvisation.19 There are very few places where jazz improvisation is regarded as a more general phenomenon and given deeper explanation in a broader context. In several encyclopaedias there appear many attempts to define improvisation, often emphasizing the unprepared – something that is created on-site, in the moment. In the Norwegian Standard Dictionary it is called: “Improvised, made without preparation from just those means that one (happens) to have available,” in Gyldendal’s Dictionary: “improvisation…unprepared preparation…”. These definitions correspond to what we find in everyday language, improvisation understood to be an emergency strategy: “the plan failed, so I had to improvise”. As mentioned before, these types of understandings are based on the fact that human interaction is normally based on following written rules and instructions. The meaning we attach to improvisation here strongly diverges from the idea of an emergency strategy. Improvisation here will incorporate the idea of a “high state of readiness”, and as a first-rate solution, a meaning that is related to another important concept, “silent knowledge” or “tacit knowledge”. “Tacit knowledge” is knowledge based on experiences and internalized to 19

See Alterhaug et al, 2002.

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become a reservoir of possibilities that are automatically brought forth in, for example, musical forms of interaction such as jazz improvisation. It means that the practitioner is prepared to take on the unexpected, to treat, for example, a mistake as a new creative challenge, and in that way break with routine patterns. Among the many different definitions of jazz improvisation, I find Paul Berliner’s definition appropriate to this context: “Improvisation involves reworking pre-composed material and designs in relation to unanticipated ideas conceived, shaped, and transformed under the special conditions of performance, thereby adding unique features to every creation”.20

This definition indicates that good, creative improvisation is dependent upon preparation and training which fundamentally incorporates the idea of spontaneous and intuitive action. It is important also to point out that musically speaking, not all improvisation is necessarily good. As in all human practices, there is both good and bad improvisation. In relation to other ways of expressing oneself musically, improvised music implies a great degree of unpredictability and therefore the risk that the result might sound bad. However, if we are talking about competent and experienced musicians, the musical result will most usually be very good to listen to, even though jazz has been referred to as “an imperfect Art”. Accordingly, the quality of improvised music lies in the complex nature of the process, in that which develops during the performance: Live music. Improvisational activity is not a finished product; it unfolds in a time dimension and is therefore an irreversible creative happening. The relationship between live music and recorded music seems to me comparable to the difference between fresh and frozen fish.

15. Golden moments and eroticism Jazz’s African roots based on oral traditions calls for a type of spontaneous interaction which to a large degree is managed intuitively, but, as stated formerly, is based on deeply internalised experience. This type of interaction, in jazz terms called “keeping time”, requires musicians to organize their flow of experience “on the spot”, where, in the best possible case, the past, present and future melt together in ecstatic moments. During the act of improvisation, it is important to “put aside” much of the thought and rationality that must be done beforehand. It is 20

Berliner, 1994, 241.

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simply about letting go, letting the intuitive and impulsive take over. While I am attempting here to give a written account of what happens during improvisation, it is striking how difficult it is, indeed nearly impossible, to find words that do justice to the complexity of this activity. In Egil A. Wyller’s book The Time Problem of Olaf Bull there are, however, descriptions I find useful in verbalising the moment: “Through the specific, creative moment, the artist throws himself into a future relationship. He exposes himself to all possibilities and ‘raves’ helplessly against ‘the future’, abandoning himself to whatever the moment might bring. He becomes a nomad and a bohemian…By so doing he has reached the creative, Apollonian state of ecstasy…which captures physical time’s three linear aspects, the past, the present and the future, and unites them in the eternal moment”.21

All jazz musicians know that playing jazz – improvising – is all about working hard in order to achieve “the golden moments” – the ecstatic heights that are notorious and one of the main reasons we play jazz. There is of course the fact that such moments do not appear all too often, but the drive – the motivation – to get there is an absolute prerequisite for these kinds of strongly emotional moments, known in psychology as “peak performance”, to take place. In order to enter into this type of “trancelike” states, it is important that there is good balance between challenges and levels of skill. If the balance is poor, the player will feel either insecure or frightened, or he/she will be bored and contribute little to the creative process. Both of these states will be unfortunate for the entire ensemble, and the music will not sound good. If, however, the balance is optimal, the musicians will have a good feeling and experience an “aesthetics of presence” in such a way that that one speaks of entering into a “flow zone” and that “one gets played”, as certain musicians express it when one is in the middle of an intense session and becomes an observer of what one’s own fingers are doing on the instrument. In such moments one will enter a state of constructive uncertainty and confusion, one finds oneself in a transcendental states and in a risk zone. But when it is “swinging”, it’s like being in the Garden of Eden, as the jazz pianist Herbie Hancock put it during a TV interview in 1986. The American jazz trumpet player and big band composer Thad Jones also tried to explain this during an interview with music researcher Kjell Oversand:

21

Wyller, 1959, 93.

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“The aesthetic of presence is what it’s all about here. You submit, give yourself up without a thought. Selfishness, the need for possession and spirit of competition make way for generosity, closeness and belonging. One develops a presence that borders on telepathic intuition. It is not enough that you believe this or that will happen. By looking behind your fellow players’ closed eyes, and sensing the nerve impulses and muscular movements in their bodies, you achieve a feeling of security in relation to whatever will happen. In such moments improvisation like the language that is spontaneously developed between two lovers, and is usually called eroticism”.22

These kinds of descriptions may seem quite high-flown and do not really offer any concrete information about jazz improvisation. In everyday language, by persons who do not know jazz music very well, one often hears jazz described as being “unstructured”, or that it simply lacks structure. However, if we look more closely at what happens when people improvise in jazz, we find that in all forms of jazz there is a basic structure, a frame of reference. This structure is often not as clearly formed as in other musical genres such as pop, rock and art music, but is often limited to a short harmonic sequence, melody, rhythm or sound (depending on stylistic preferences) which serve as a starting point for the development of creative ideas during the improvisational session.

16. Mutual consent Both the post structuralism debate of the 1970s and a personal negative attitude to the word structure long before that, may be the explanation as to why I do not like the word structure in a musical context, and especially not in jazz music. Structure is often associated with orders, limitations and strict boundaries. I therefore find the word “consent” or “mutual consent” more appropriate. It implies that those frameworks used by musicians are not forced upon them from without, but are accepted by common, mutual choice as a creatively improvisational starting point, generally comparable with those rules in, for example, football. This consent can be flexible; it may be expanded upon and altered depending on the interaction between the collective dialogues. However, if these areas of consent become too loose, the participants will not recognize the basic patterns and will thereby lose both the referential contact and the communicative bonds among themselves, and the result 22

Oversand, 1987.

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may be chaos. Chaos is not to be despised, as it may be exciting and interesting for a short period of time, but collective ensembles do not have optimal conditions under such circumstances. It should be underlined that the “jazz metaphor” should not be interpreted in a narrow stylistic meaning, but be used in an expanded way; like the evolution of the jazz history during the last 100 years. Depending on style and history, there are of course many other starting points for jazz improvisation: Various types of ostinatos, (usually a repeated bass figure) short melodic fragments, modal scales, bass figures, etc. These framework references create as such the underlying playing rules for improvisation. In the following I will use examples from traditional jazz, but this does not mean that the “jazz metaphor” should be restricted only to mainstream jazz. We find the most common areas of mutual consent in the jazz tradition in what is defined as standards: American film and musical melodies that through many years have become a repertoire that most musicians know very well. Summertime, I Can’t Give You Anything But Love, But Not For Me, etc. may be examples of songs that serve as a basis of the mutual consent lying at the heart of improvisation. These “songs”, as jazz musicians call them, are often constructed from musical forms consisting of 32, 16 or 12 bars and may be said to function as a minimal structure that allows great flexibility and dynamic interaction. The agreements are learned by heart and internalized through innumerable rehearsals; something that allows the musician not to have to think about where he/she is located in the improvisational stream no matter if the musician is playing accompaniment or solo. Jazz musicians say that they are playing “solo” or “chorus” in a jazz group and each taking turns at improvisation parts of a standard song. In American jazz language we find the word “chorus”, which refers to improvisation over standard songs’ chord progressions, often 12, 16 or 24 bars. They say that “…you play three choruses, and I’ll take two”, etc. The term “chorus” comes from when jazz musicians often just improvise the refrain (chorus) of a melody, while the verse itself is left out. It is important to clarify here that everyone in a jazz groups participates in improvisation –solos are passed around to each member of the group– and naturally enough, each soloist is more prominent during his solo. Those who are accompanying him try as best they can to listen and support the soloist’s initiative, so that the collective expression of the group is heard in the best possible manner. This means that everyone in a jazz group must at all times know where “one” is located in the cyclical development of the abovementioned agreements or improvisational starting points. This confidence regarding the basic

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material makes it unnecessary always to accentuate the same single beat in each bar: These are implicitly understood and may therefore be played around with, as for example, having the second beat being accentuated or the soloist continuing beyond the basic improvisational cycle, extending the standard song theme and playing some bars of it into the next cycle. Improvising involves more than paraphrasing, ornamenting or modifying; it is creating something new from existing material. To me improvisation is “an existential act”, to express it rather pompously. By this I mean that through the process there takes place a realization of one’s own potential in a group, a mastering in real time that releases creative energy and activates all the senses, where the physical and cognitive complement one another. Unquestionably most important faculty during this activity is the auditory, the musical ear. In addition, a high level of mutual trust exists in the group, something that creates the basis for the necessary personal feeling of trust to be able to express oneself freely. Trust and confidence are therefore decisive factors in improvisation as they make up the prerequisite for sociability during this type of activity. Some years ago, during a talk on improvisation, I invented, or better, improvised four basic terms for achieving the best conditions and “attunement” for interacting and improvisation. These terms might be expressed in Norwegian letters as the “Four T’s”: Tillit, Trygghet, Toleranse, and Trivsel. A possible translation in English of these Norwegian words might be: Trust, Confidence, Tolerance, Job satisfaction. These terms, even if they might seem a little pompous, are very decisive when it comes to creating an optimal improvisational atmosphere, whether it is a jazz group or in other human situations. Improvisation might therefore be seen as a kind of meta-activity and learning process that is a continuum which can function on different levels, from amateurs to professionals and in different contexts.

17. Body and Soul In the introduction the visual and the auditory were referred to as being two completely different ways of sensing the world. Ever since Greek thinkers laid the foundations of European philosophy, humanity has assigned special status to the sense of sight. The Greeks were, it is said, Augendenker. Only Heracles among the other Greek philosophers steadfastly maintained that hearing was the source of knowledge, as he heard the Word, logos, in whose moving current he attempted to place his consciousness. His famous statement, “We do not descend twice in the same river, because the river we descend into is not the same, and we who

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descend one more, are no longer the same” underlies his main message that everything flows and is in the process of irreversible change. This seems to be very appropriate to improvisational practice and process thinking. Regarding this relationship between the written and the oral, Marshall McLuhan (1964) presented extremely interesting observations and theories as to how a series of technologies, the phonetic alphabet, the art of printing and the discovery of the telegraph, had changed human thought and actions radically. He claims that the effect of the phonetic alphabet was the most revolutionary (in preliterate times the auditory was the most pronounced sense and the balance between people’s various senses was harmonised). After the coming of the alphabet, the eye became the dominant sense, with the written and the printed word in a position of pre-eminence. In an interview given in 1969, McLuhan speaks of this23: “The ear, as opposed to the cool and neutral eye, is sensitive, hyperaesthetic and all-inclusive, and contributes to the seamless web of tribal kinship and interdependence in which all members of the group existed in harmony.”

He also speaks here of acoustic space, which he explains in the following manner: “Acoustic space is organic and integral, perceived through the simultaneous interplay of all the senses: whereas “rational” or pictorial space is uniform, sequential and continuous and creates a closed world with none of the rich resonance of the tribal echo land. Our Western time-space concepts derive from the environment created by the discovery of phonetic writing, as does our entire concept of Western civilization”.

In the study of music, and in music education in our western world, it is the visual that is central. Music is to a large degree reshaped and reduced to signs, received through the eye, and unfortunately often without the ear and other senses being noticeably connected. This can cause the directive auditory experience to suffer and the time dimension, the irreversible in music, be reverted to space, the reversible, which often leads to little spontaneity and live music making. The visual, the gaze, is usually associated with control, monitoring, having command of the situation. While we can let our gaze wander back to the starting point, complete a reversal, this is not possible with the auditory sense. The auditory gives us access to a phenomenon current that 23 From “The Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan”, Playboy Magazine, March 1969.

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cannot be stopped or reversed. The new technological aids, video players, CDs, etc., give us nonetheless opportunities for reversal, something that at first glance can give us the feeling of being able to understand things better. But isn’t this type of stop in the phenomenological current just an attempt to quantify something that may not be quantified –to make time into space? When the gaze becomes unilaterally emphasized, the possibility to develop diversity in our sensual apparatus is reduced, especially within music, but also within other areas of human activity. What in principle constitutes a human being is the interaction with other people. When the world is comprehended through eyes and head, important experiential gaps open up in the socialisation process and human development. Unilateral emphasis on a “head culture” reinforces the spatial, quantitative, measurable dimensions which in turn can reinforce the recirculating tendency of knowledge in schools and universities that usually are mainly based on “gazers” like Plato, Descartes, Kant and Hegel. This usually leads to a societal organization where we are governed from above, from the top of a pyramid. This can impose definite barriers on our understanding of the aspect of change in people and in society, and may obscure liberating aspects of human development. Improvisational activity in music requires a strong activation of all the senses, and the auditory becomes particularly important in order to be able to communicate spontaneously. Seen in this light, or may be better: heard in this connection, this activity promotes the natural aptitude and potential with which we humans are born.24 This should therefore attribute great significance to the development of both the cognitive and aesthetic dimensions in us: A good balance between body and soul. Research on improvisation also shows that improvising leads to a form of meta-learning; a type of experience and learning which exceeds both stylistic and formal boundaries. Psychologist R. Keith Sawyer writes: “By improvising and rehearsing together, the children were learning essential conversational and social skills: How to solve problems and

24

Thanks to professor Bruce Johnson, Department of Cultural History at the University of Turku – Finland, who made this comment to my sentence above “Seen in ...”: “One of the points I make to students when I am discussing this subject is the way language itself traps us in visual frameworks: insights, visions, perspectives, the Enlightenment, imagine, visualise, etc. – in English there is no escape. The word ‘Theory’ itself is from the Greek word for spectacle”.

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develop plans in group settings, how to share decision-making, and how to collaborate on a creative task.”25

18. Kind of Blue Knowledge from jazz improvisation has generated a series of books and articles attempting to connect these insights with contexts other than music. Frank J. Barrett (2002) has attempted to compile a list of characteristics of jazz improvisation that may have relevance in other contexts. He lists a series of features, one of which he calls “provocative competence”. By this he means that in jazz improvisation there is a strong drive to break out of established patterns. Simultaneously with the jazz musician being faithful to his own tradition, the musician wishes to break practised, fixed patterns and would like to create something new. In this effort the musician must often use so-called provocative contributions that transform the situation and make space for new and fresh ideas. Barrett uses Miles Davis’ recording of “Kind of Blue” from 1959 with musicians John Coltrane, Bill Evans, “Cannonball” Adderley, Jimmy Cobb and Paul Chambers, as a good example of how Davis, “provoked” these gifted musicians beyond their usual limits. This recording is considered to be central to jazz history. Barrett claims that within jazz culture mistakes are regarded as an important source of learning, therefore anxiety about making them is not crippling. However, a distinction must be made between those mistakes caused by carelessness and lack of attention and mistakes which occur as a consequence of a conscious striving to do things better. One of the most important points, in my opinion, is his argument that jazz uses so-called “minimal structures” to give opportunities for maximal flexibility. As previously mentioned, improvisation occurs in jazz in standard songs or other mutual agreements, which in itself is a challenge to the improvisational motivated musicians to create something new, something unpredictable, or better formulated: never before heard. Barrett also refers to the fact that shared tasks, where a continual discussion and dialogue take place with the purpose of creating the most dynamic and synchronized interaction, is a vitally important characteristic of jazz improvisation. So far this writing has mainly tried to elucidate improvisation framed in a jazz context, but there has also been attempt to bring improvisation in 25

Sawyer, 1999, 199.

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other contexts. My experience, attitude, and conviction after nearly 45 years as a pedagogue and jazz musician, still doing both professions, towards improvisation as a phenomenon and important tool in human relations is clear: My experience as an improvising jazz musician has influenced me in my pedagogical practice, and my years as an improvising teacher has made me a more reflected jazz musician. Using improvisation as my main tool in both fields has strengthened my belief that improvisation has pedagogical and deep human aspects that until now to a great extent, are under-elucidated in education and society as a whole.

19. Improvisation and learning Improvisation is therefore to a significant degree a product of experience, participation, will and motivation to bring one’s personal voice into a collective with the goal of improving the enterprise and one’s own level of skill. Imitation of the greatest jazz musicians through history is a fundamental feature of the way jazz musicians learn their musical language. It is the auditory that is the most important element in the attempt to imitate subtle nuances in the musical world, without becoming indistinguishable from that which is being imitated, but to acquire a solid foundation for liberating oneself from tradition, building on it and creating something new. In that sense improvisation will challenge just playing what is written in the score; the most traditional way of making or reproducing music. This does not mean that music reading skills should not be taken seriously, but in Western cultures, the only thing that counts is mainly to read what is written as fast as possible. Improvisation is almost completely absent from the high art tradition and accordingly also from the music education curriculum. R. Keith Sawyer makes a radical claim and raises actual and relevant questions in his paper “Improvisation and Teaching”: “I argue improvisation should be at the core of the music curriculum. Improvisation should come first and should remain at the core of music education throughout the later years of increasing expertise.”26

He continues to claim that we need a transformation… “that places the performer at an equal status with the composer (…). Musicians educated with improvisation at the centre, will have a better

26

Sawyer, 2008.

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developed ability to think musically –to deeply understand music as well as better prepared to interpret written scores.”27

In addition Sawyer says that “…improvisation is a better pedagogical practice in general and not just for music education”, which for me stresses the interdisciplinary perspectives connected with improvisational activity. In this context he refers to cognitive scientists who from the 1970s have studies the mental structures and processes underlying expert performances. Examples includes doctors diagnosing a patient, lawyers analyzing a case, architects designing a building, and scientist interpreting the results of an experiment. This research gives a good understanding of what sort of knowledge underlies expert performance. The four features he mentions here are: Deep conceptual understanding, integrated knowledge, adaptive expertise, and collaborative skills. Sawyer raises the question whether classroom teaching and curricula of our schools today result in graduates that possess this kind of knowledge. His answer is: “too often, no”. Rather than acquire conceptual understandings, students memorise facts, and Sawyer proposes a new kind of learning environment. These new learning environments, for example named project based, inquiry based, and problem based, (Sawyer, 2006) are unified by their improvisational nature. Students work together in a relatively unstructured, improvisational fashion, mostly in collaborative groups to solve own problems and challenges. This approach is mainly based in constructivism – a theory of learning that argues students must actively construct their own knowledge, rather than passively absorb it from a teacher or a book. Sawyer’s approach is not a special new one; the American pragmatists of the early 1900s, William James, Charles Peirce, John Dewey’s “learning by doing” and other pedagogical achievements during the 20th century have claimed much of the same as Sawyer. However, what is new and most interesting is the focus on the interactive aspects of group acting and the concepts “improvisus” or “improauditus”: not seen or heard before. The focus on the creative forces unfolding here and now, in the course of performance, where history and future are combined, opens up for the creating of new knowledge and insight based on the intuitive senses and forces that activate the whole body in the interactive learning process. These aspects of human activity are not explored thoroughly in a broader research context.

27

Ibid.

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Postlude In different branches of life, groups of individuals face the paradox of planning (trying to create the future) which is in contrast to their inability to foresee what the future entails. To cope with this paradox, the function of leadership is often strengthened in order to get a better and more effective organisation. This type of organisation is based on a hierarchical and pyramidal form of thinking that seldom yields the expected result. This is because it neither extracts the full potential of each individual nor the complementary forces within the group. In contrast, another way of organising that converges with research in complexity theory, is that which we find in the jazz group. In small jazz groups, distributed tasks, rotation of soloing (leadership) and continual negotiation can lead toward a dynamic synchronisation. These are elements that create a flow of ongoing invention and mutual support within the group. The complex responsive processes perspective, CRP, (Stacey, 2001) is a transformative process view, where human phenomena in organisations are a result of people interacting with each other and the environment. By the responding processes they create, they transform the reality of both themselves and their environment. In humanistic theory of today we can see an increasing weight and importance of the performing aspects: Man’s different expressions is no longer simply understood as reflections or descriptions of the world, but also as something that actively intervenes this world and thereby contributes to a constitution or creating of the world or reality. The growing interest and focus the performing aspects related to communication and learning, which the Padova conference and initiatives at my own university are examples of, give hope for increased interdisciplinary research on improvisation to shed light on improvisation as an urgent phenomenon and practice in different contexts in a globalised world.

Coda In the introductory quote by Olatunji, the existential dimensions of history, presence and future were poetically expressed, which to a great extent have relevance to improvisation, communication and learning. I will end this article with a quote by Asplund that in my opinion elegantly captures the essence of the dialogic and communicative aspects in all improvisational activity:

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“I don’t know what I have said until you have answered and you don’t know what you have said until I have answered. You show me what I have said and I show you what you have said.” 28

References Alterhaug, B., Jørgensen, S.H., Setreng, S.K. 2002, Improvisare necesse est, in Forskning på tvers, Tverrfagligeforskningsprosjekter ved NTNU, Trondheim: Tapir Akademiske Forlag. Andersen, Ø. 1990, I retorikkens hage. (In the Garden of Rhetoric), Oslo: Universitetsforlaget. Barrett, F. J. 2002, Creativity and improvisation in jazz and organizations, in K. N. Kamoche and M. P. E. Cunha eds., Organisational Improvisation, London and New York: Routledge. Bergson, H. 1990, Tiden og den frie vilje, (original title: Essai sur les données immédiates de la concience), Oslo: Aschehoug. Berliner, P. F. 1994, Thinking in Jazz, Chicago II: Univ. of Chicago Press. Coghlan, D. and Brannick, T. 2001, Doing Action Research in your own Organization, London: Sage Publications. DeVeaux, S. 1991, Constructing the Jazz Tradition: Jazz Historiography, in R. Walser ed., Keeping Time, Readings in Jazz History, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fisclin, D and Heble, A. eds. 2004, The Other Side of Nowhere, USA: Wesleyan University Press. Hamilton, A. 2007, Lee Konitz, Conversations on the Improviser’s Art, Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. Keil, C. 1966, Urban Blues, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Merlau-Ponty, M. 1962, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. by Colin Smith (New York: Humanities Press, 1962) and (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962) translation revised by Forrest Williams, 1981; reprinted, 2002. McLuhan, M. 1994, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, Reprint Edition Paperback, MIT Press. Originally published in 1964. Molander, B. 1993, Kunnskap i handling (Knowledge in action), Goteborg: Daidalos. Nettl, B. and Russel, M. eds 1998, In the Course of Performance, USA: The University of Chicago Press.

28

Molander, 1996, 97.

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Oversand, K. 1987, “Improvisasjon og tilstedeværelsens estetikk”, “Improvisation and the Aesthetics of Presence”, in Musikklidenskapelig ed. Ola Kai Ledang. Parry, M. 1928, The Traditional Epithet in Homer. Trans. by Adam Parry in The Making of Homeric Verse: The Collected Papers of Milman Parry, 1-190. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971. Polanyi, M. 1966, The Tacit Dimension, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Sawyer, K. R. 1999, “Improvised Conversations: Music, Collaboration and Development”, Psychology of Music 27, 192-216. —. ed. 2006, The Cambridge handbook of the Learning Sciences, New York: Cambridge UP. —. 2008, “Improvisation and Teaching” Critical Studies in Improvisation, Vol 3, No 2. Sidran, B. 1981, Black Talk, New York: Da Capo Press. Shipton, A. 2001, A New History of Jazz, London and New York: Continuum. Small, C. 1987, Music of the Common Tongue, Hannover: Wesleyan University Press. Stacey, R. D. 2001, Complex Responsive Processes in Organizations: Learning and Knowledge Creation, London: Routledge. Treitler, L. 1991, “Medieval Improvisation”, The World of Music 33, 3. Tutu, D. 1999, No Future without Forgiveness, An Image Book, New York: Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc. Wyller, E. A. 1959, Tidsproblemet hos Olaf Bull, The Time Problem by Olaf Bull. Oslo: Gyldendal Norsk Forlag.

CHAPTER FIVE IMPROVISATIONAL CREATIVITY AS A MODEL FOR EFFECTIVE LEARNING KEITH SAWYER

In the last several decades many of the world’s most developed countries have shifted from an industrial economy to a knowledge economy, one based on the creation of knowledge, information, and innovation. My argument in this chapter is that (1) creativity is a fundamentally collaborative process, (2) the most innovative collaborations flow improvisationally, and (3) educating for innovation requires creating opportunities for collaborative improvisation in the classroom. First, studies of innovation have revealed that it is a fundamentally collaborative process. Even the individual process of generating ideas is deeply embedded in social and cultural contexts. And studies of the history of invention and of contemporary examples of organizational innovation show that in today’s knowledge society, collaboration is the source of successful innovation. Second, studies of collaborating groups reveal that groups are most creative when they follow an open-ended, improvisational group process. The collaborations that result in unexpected insights are deeply improvisational. Third, I argue that schools should strive to educate students who are capable of creativity. It is not sufficient for students to only master a static body of knowledge; our graduates must be capable of generating new knowledge, and of functioning in a world where knowledge is always expanding and changing. Because creativity is deeply collaborative, and because effective collaborations are improvisational, educational settings should be designed to involve students and teachers in improvisational interactions. Here, I draw on learning sciences research to describe the sorts of knowledge that underlie creative performance. Drawing on this research, I advocate the use of situated, collaborative knowledge-building activities. In conclusion, improvisational teaching methods will result in students who are better prepared to participate creatively in society.

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1. Creativity is fundamentally collaborative When psychologists first began to study creativity in the 1950s and 1960s, inspired by Guilford’s legendary Presidential address at the American Psychological Association annual meeting (Guilford, 1950), they focused on the personality of the creator. Many important insights resulted from this first wave of research, but by the 1980s scholars had begun to realize that a narrow focus on the solitary individual could provide only a partial explanation of creativity. Research on the history of invention and close examination of scientific discovery has revealed that collaboration is increasingly important in professions that require creativity (Sawyer, 2006c, 2007). Creative products in today’s economy are not the result of isolated work; they result from collaborative teams and geographically dispersed social networks (as in open source communities). Ask any older scientist today and you will hear that science has become dramatically more collaborative in recent decades. When Pink (2005) or Freidman (2005) argue that a country will lose ground economically if its graduates are not capable of creative work, they are not talking about isolated individuals; they are talking about the need for creative teams. In the 1980s, several researchers began to explore the social and cultural dimensions of creativity (Amabile, 1983; Csikszentmihalyi, 1988). This research gained inspiration from a similar shift in cognitive science that occurred during the 1980s and 1990s – a shift away from focusing on internal mental states and processes, to an analysis of how cognition is distributed across people, tools, and environments (Hutchins, 1995; Salomon, 1993). For example, in the late 1980s, Csikszentmihalyi formulated his influential systems approach, which argued that creativity emerged from a system containing the creative individual, the surrounding field of others working in the area, and the domain, or body of knowledge and prior works (Csikszentmihalyi, 1988, 1990; also see Gardner, 1993). Through the 1990s, a second wave of creativity research pursued the idea that creativity is found in collaboration and group dynamics. In the last few years, this research has resulted in several books that explore collaborative creativity (Farrell, 2001; John-Steiner, 2000; Paulus and Nijstad, 2003; Sawyer, 2003a, 2006c). This second wave of research has provided a new perspective on creativity. It shows how creativity is embedded in social groups and how creative products emerge from collaborative networks. The most substantial studies of group creativity have been social psychological studies of brainstorming groups (e.g., Paulus and Nijstad, 2003), but these studies have not analyzed the interactional processes that occur within the

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groups. This failure to analyze collaborative processes is a significant lacuna in creativity research, because a wide range of empirical studies has revealed that significant creations are almost always the result of complex collaborations. These include studies of innovative businesses by organizational behavior researchers (Hargadon, 2003) and historical studies of the origins of successful innovations (Basalla, 1988). Even studies of individual creators, when researchers focus on the social and cultural origins of their ideas, have revealed a high degree of collaboration behind their ideas (Csikszentmihalyi, 1996; Farrell, 2001; John-Steiner, 2000). One potential path forward is for creativity researchers to borrow methodologies and frameworks from those cognitive scientists who have contributed to our understanding of distributed cognition. In the years since the field of cognitive science shifted to a distributed perspective in the 1980s, cognitive scientists have developed a sophisticated set of methodologies and have conducted a broad range of empirical studies of how various cognitive processes are distributed across groups. Perhaps the most widely used methodology is interaction analysis (Sawyer, 2006a) – a methodology that involves videotaping naturally occurring groups, transcribing their words and actions, and then analyzing those transcripts using appropriate coding and categorization schemes.

2. Creative collaborations are improvisational Not all group work is improvisational. Many task-oriented groups develop routines and procedures that facilitate the group’s task, and the outcomes of these encounters, although collaborative, are predictable and scripted (see Jordan and Henderson, 1995, for multiple examples). Examples include factory work, where labor tasks are divided among different workers to increase efficiency of production, as well as complex knowledge work such as managing air traffic control, which involves multiple knowledge workers. Much of this group work is relatively structured, with operating manuals describing the exact nature of the task assigned to each member of the team; divergence from the approved procedure often results in a loss of efficiency. Improvisation is sometimes necessary even in these relatively constrained work environments; several influential studies of distributed cognition have demonstrated that groups sometimes diverge from routine, and engage in distributed cognitive behavior that is emergent. A now classic example is Hutchins’ (1995) study of Navy navigation teams; he found that in most cases, the teams follow well-established group routines, but that when emergencies occur,

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the team is often capable of collaboratively creating a novel, improvised response. Nonetheless, the normal course of work remains largely predictable and structured. However, when groups are challenged to undertake novel tasks, or when the task itself is not well understood or has not been clearly specified, creativity is required of the group. In such cases, the group’s collaboration cannot be scripted or planned out in advance; this sort of planning works well to enhance efficiency, but blocks innovation precisely because it is designed to reduce the variance of what occurs between the group members. When innovation is required, the group’s challenge is to generate a solution that is unexpected, unpredictable, and unplanned. I use the term distributed creativity to refer to situations where collaborating groups of individuals collectively generate a shared creative product (Sawyer and DeZutter, 2009). Distributed creativity ranges from relatively predictable and constrained, to relatively unpredictable and unconstrained. Some groups engage in creative activities that are relatively predictable – for example, a symphony orchestra performs from a score and is guided by a conductor. My own research, in contrast, has focused on collaborating groups that are relatively unconstrained, such that unexpected creativity could result – for example, as with improvisational theater groups, which improvise dialogue, plot, characters, and relationships (Sawyer, 2003b). I use the term collaborative emergence to refer to these group processes (Sawyer, 2003a). Collaborative emergence is more likely to be found as a group becomes more aligned with the following four characteristics: x the activity has an unpredictable outcome, rather than a scripted, known endpoint; x there is moment-to-moment contingency: each person’s action depends on the one just before; x the interactional effect of any given action can be changed by the subsequent actions of other participants; x the process is collaborative, with each participant contributing equally. Collaborative emergence is a defining characteristic of social encounters that are improvisational, because only when the outcome is not scripted can there be unpredictability and contingency. Social encounters that are more ritualized – like formalized greetings between customers and store clerks – or that are controlled by a single individual, like a business meeting – are less likely to manifest collaborative emergence. To demonstrate the above four characteristics of collaborative emergence, Example 1 is an improvised dialogue that occurred during a 1993 performance by Off-Off-Campus, a Chicago theater group. This is

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the first few seconds of dialogue from a scene that the actors knew would last about five minutes. The audience was asked to suggest a proverb, and the suggestion given was “Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth”. Example 1. Lights up. Dave is at stage right, Ellen at stage left. Dave begins gesturing to his right, talking to himself (from Sawyer, 2003b).1

1

Dave

All the little glass figurines in my menagerie, The store of my dreams. Hundreds of thousands everywhere!

2

Ellen

3

Dave

4

Ellen

Yes, can I help you? Um, I’m looking for uh, uh, a present?

5 6 7

Dave Ellen Dave

A gift? Yeah. I have a little donkey?

8

Ellen

9 10

Dave Ellen

Ah, that’s= I was looking for something a little bit bigger, Oh. It’s for my Dad.

Turns around to admire. Slowly walks toward Dave. Turns and notices Ellen. Ellen is looking down like a child, with her fingers in her mouth.

Dave mimes the action of handing Ellen a donkey from the shelf.

Returns item to shelf.

By turn 10, elements of the dramatic narrative are starting to emerge. We know that Dave is a storekeeper, and Ellen is a young girl. We know that Ellen is buying a present for her Dad, and because she is so young, probably needs help from the storekeeper. These narrative elements have emerged from the creative contributions of both actors. Although each 1

Transcript notation follows the conventions generally used by conversation analysts and elaborated in (Atkinson and Heritage, 1999). = (equals sign) indicates a break in speech, with either the same speaker or another speaker continuing; // (double slash) in two successive lines of dialogue indicates the onset of overlapping speech.

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turn’s incremental contributions to the unfolding story can be identified, none of these turns fully determines the subsequent dialogue, and the emergent dramatic narrative is not chosen, intended, or imposed by either of the actors. This example demonstrates the moment to moment contingency of collaborative emergence. A wide range of actions is possible at each moment; the actors don’t know what is going to follow an action, and they don’t know how their actions will be interpreted and elaborated. The emergence of the narrative cannot be reduced to actors’ intentions in individual turns, because in many cases an actor cannot know the meaning of her own turn until the other actors have responded. In turn 2, when Ellen walks toward Dave, her action has many potential meanings; for example, she could be a co-worker, arriving late to work. Her action does not carry the meaning “A customer entering the store” until after Dave’s query in turn 3. In improvisation, many actions do not receive their full meaning until after the act has occurred; the complete meaning of a turn is dependent on the flow of the subsequent dialogue. This sort of retrospective interpretation is common in collaborative emergence. The concept of emergence has received increasing attention in psychology and in other social sciences in the last ten years (see Sawyer, 2005). A property of a system is said to emerge from the system’s parts in interaction when (1) the system property is not held by any of the parts (a commonly used example is water; water is a liquid, but hydrogen and oxygen are not); (2) the system property could not be predicted even if one held a full and complete knowledge of the parts. In Example 1, neither of the actors began the performance with a mental representation of this particular sequence of ten turns; and these ten turns could not have been predicted even with a full and complete knowledge of the mental states of Dave and Ellen. Emergence and complexity are generally contrasted with reductionism – the traditional analytic approach of explaining a system by decomposing it, explaining the components, and then putting the components back together to work upwards to an explanation of the entire system’s behavior. Although reductionism is quite successful at explaining many systems in nature, beyond a certain level of complexity it becomes difficult to execute successfully. A reductive analysis of Example 1 would involve first conducting a detailed study of the relevant mental representations held by Dave and Ellen, and their personality traits and predispositions that are relevant to theater performance, and then using these individual findings to explain the performance. With collaborating groups that display collaborative emergence, this approach has limited

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usefulness – due to the radical contingency of the unfolding dialogue, and due to the prevalence of retrospective interpretation, which means that the intentions behind an utterance are not necessarily explanatorily relevant. Emergence is commonly observed in complex dynamical systems – systems with many elements, organized into multiple levels of subcomponents, with multiple interactions among elements and subcomponents. For example, emergence is commonly attributed to the brain-mind relationship – subjective mental states like “pain” are often said to emerge from the brain’s neurons in synaptic interaction, but yet to be irreducible to the brain. Emergence is also often attributed to the socialindividual relationship, to argue that properties of social institutions often emerge from individual interactions but yet are not reducible to properties of individuals. Because collaborative emergence results from interactions among participants, it must be analyzed as a discursive, distributed process. Researchers who study distributed cognition argue that knowledge and intelligence reside not only in people’s heads, but are distributed across situated social practices that involve multiple participants in complex social systems. “Knowing” is reconceived as the ability to participate appropriately in these shared cultural practices. In the distributed cognition perspective, mind is considered to be “social, cultural, and embedded in the world”.2 Likewise, the distributed creativity perspective locates creativity in the symbolic social interactions among members of a group. Improvised narratives are good examples of collaborative emergence because they are so obviously created by the collaborative efforts of the entire group. No single speaker creates the narrative; it emerges from the give and take of conversation. The narrative is constructed turn by turn; one actor proposes a new development for the play, and others respond by modifying or embellishing that proposal. Each new proposal for a development in the narrative is the creative inspiration of one person, but that proposal does not become a part of the play until the other members of the group respond to it, and potentially redefine it retrospectively. In the subsequent flow of dialogue, the group collaborates to determine whether to accept the proposal, how to weave that proposal into the drama that has already been established, and then how to further elaborate on it. When groups of individuals work together to generate a collective creative product, the interactions among group members often becomes a more substantial source of creativity than the inner mental processes of any one participating individual. This becomes increasingly likely as the 2

Gee, 2000, 195.

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degree of contingency increases – as the dependency of each participant’s action on the preceding sequence of actions increases, and as it becomes increasingly difficult to predict an individual’s actions using individual factors such as personality traits or cognitive models. These characteristics – increased contingency and decreased explanatory power of individual variables – hold true for a wide range of groups, from business teams engaged in brainstorming (Paulus and Nijstad, 2003; Sawyer, 2003a), to musical ensembles (Berliner, 1994), to friends engaged in small talk (Sawyer, 2001). These characteristics are found in the most extreme form in improvisational groups – jazz, improv theater, and improvised dance. Distributed creativity can occur in single encounters and across multiple encounters. In a business context, a cross-functional team is often brought together for an hour or two to brainstorm potential solutions to a specific problem; the conversation that ensues represents distributed creativity, and if successful, a creative solution emerges by the end of the encounter. Interaction analyses of single encounters have been conducted with jazz performances (Monson, 1996) and with improvised theater performances (Sawyer, 2003b). But equally common are situations where the same group comes together multiple times, with the intention of generating a creative product across repeated encounters. This latter situation is the norm in the performing arts, where musical or theater ensembles rehearse many times over weeks or months to generate a collectively created performance.

3. Collaborative improvisation in classrooms Traditional classrooms are based on an implicit model of teaching and learning that Papert (1993) called instructionist: the teacher provides information to students that typically consists of single-sentence statements of fact, and step-by-step procedures for solving specific kinds of problems. Students are expected to memorize the information and then demonstrate that they’ve memorized it by doing well on a test – either by restating the facts correctly, or by applying the memorized procedure to solve a problem. Instructionism is also sometimes referred to as a transmission and acquisition style of teaching and learning. In contrast, learning sciences research (Sawyer, 2006b) emphasizes a new style of learning – one in which the teacher works with students in a community of learners, providing appropriate scaffolds to student project groups as they build knowledge together. In a classroom based on the scientific principles emerging from the learning sciences, students often talk to each other as they construct knowledge together. The teacher is always present but is not

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dominating the discussion; the teacher often facilitates or channels the discussion, but if students are working together effectively an experienced teacher may realize that the best thing to do is to stay silent. In emphasizing peer collaboration, the learning sciences is drawing on over 20 years of educational research that has consistently demonstrated that collaboration helps students learn (see review in Sawyer, 2006a). These accumulated research findings have had a significant influence on educational practice; practicing teachers believe that collaborating groups provide a uniquely effective learning environment (Antil, Jenkins, Wayne, and Vadasy, 1998), and both large-scale assessment programs and smallscale in-class assessments increasingly use collaborative group work (Webb, 1995; Webb, Nemer, Chizhik, and Sugrue, 1998). In the United States, the National Research Council’s National Science Education Standards (1996) and the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics’ Professional Standards for teaching mathematics (1991) both advocate negotiation and collaboration in inquiry. In effective classroom discussion, the topic and the flow of the discourse emerge from teacher and student together; it is unpredictable where it will go. Social constructivists have found that the unpredictability of multiple competing voices is what makes discussion a uniquely effective teaching tool (Bearison, Magzamen, and Filardo, 1986; Cobb, 1995; Doise and Mugny, 1984; Perret-Clermont, 1980). Thus constructivist teaching is fundamentally improvisational, because if the classroom is scripted and overly directed by the teacher, the students cannot coconstruct their own knowledge (Baker-Sennett and Matusov, 1997; Rogoff, 1990; Sawyer, 1997). Educational research on collaborating groups has begun to emphasize the features that they have in common with improvising groups: their interactional dynamics, their give-and-take, and the fact that properties of the group emerge from individual actions and interactions. Several researchers have noted that many classroom interactions balance structure and script with flexibility and improvisation (see the essays collected in Sawyer, in press).

3.1 The tension between structure and improvisation Studies of everyday conversation have revealed that ambiguity is a source of anxiety, and participants act to reduce it as soon as possible. Speakers generally want to define an interaction as quickly as possible, narrowing the range of possible outcomes, and they often use ritual sequences to do so (Berger and Calabrese, 1975; Collins, 1981; Goffman, 1959). For the same reasons, improvisational discourse is stressful for

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teachers, and the natural response to classroom anxiety is to impose even more structure on the class. Thus, many teachers continue to use interactional sequences and strategies that keep them in control of the flow of dialogue, such as the infamous Initiation-Response-Evaluation (IRE) sequence (Mehan, 1979; Sinclair and Coulthard, 1975). One of the most difficult skills for teachers to acquire is how to break out of these routines and lead open discussion, where the students partially guide the direction of the class. Borko and Livingston (1989) compared the lesson planning and the classroom teaching of three student teachers with the three experienced teachers they were teaching with. All six of the teachers – the three novices and the three experts – had been identified as exceptionally talented. The three novice teachers had been identified as strong, with high potential to become excellent teachers; and the three experienced teachers had been identified by the school administration to be experts. Borko and Livingston’s analysis identified several critical differences in how the novices and the experts balanced structure and improvisation. All three experts engaged in several levels of lesson planning, from planning the entire year to planning a single day’s lesson. All three teachers made their decisions about how to teach a given day’s lesson shortly before that lesson began. For example, they looked over the textbook and their notes in the morning before the school day started, and also a few minutes before the class was to begin. They used this time to make decisions about how to introduce new topics, and they selected examples and problems for the students. All three teachers reported that most of their planning occurred outside of the formal planning time (allocated in their schedule by the school administration) and they also reported that they never wrote down their lesson plans. Fine-tuning of their lesson plans occurred spontaneously throughout the day – for example, in the car while driving to the school.3 All three experts were skilled at keeping their lessons on track, focusing on the day’s desired learning outcome, while also “allowing students’ questions and comments to be springboards for discussions”.4 They were able to generate appropriate examples and problems on the spot, in response to the unique needs of the class each day. Borko and Livingston conclude that one of the core components of teacher expertise is the ability to use the agendas they create in advance to guide their improvised actions in the classroom: 3 4

Borko and Livingston, 1989, 480. Ibid., 481.

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“Like improvisational actors, these teachers work from mental scripts that consist of general outlines of their lessons. They fill in the outlines during interactive teaching to ensure that their instruction is responsive to student performance.”5

The three novice teachers worked very differently. All three of the novices, like the expert teachers, engaged in lesson planning. However, their planning was almost exclusively short term: they focused at most one day ahead, and rarely thought about how the day’s lesson would fit within the whole chapter of the textbook, or how it would fit within the annual school year curriculum. Another difference from the experts was that the novices constructed detailed mental plans for how they would present the material in the class session. For example, one of the novices said “I do script out what I'm going to say, my little introductions or my little lectures, and I kind of script those out in my head”.6 All three teachers mentally rehearsed their planned presentations shortly before teaching. Developing such a detailed plan was time consuming and inefficient. In addition to these differences in lesson planning, the novices differed from the experts in how they interacted with students during the lesson. While their planned lessons were clear and complete, all three ran into problems when student questions forced them to deliver an explanation that they had not prepared in advance. All three had trouble responding to student questions in a way that would keep the lesson on track, even when the question was appropriate and directly related to the day’s lesson. Borko and Livingston conclude that “difficulties that novices encounter when deviating from scripted lesson plans can be understood as limitations in their ability to improvise”.7

3.2 Fostering classroom collaboration At the same time that learning sciences research has demonstrated the importance of collaboration for learning, research also shows that many students do not know how to collaborate effectively (e.g., Azmitia, 1996). Participation in group musical performance or in theater could result in transferable improvements in collaborative ability. The basic insight of constructivism is that learning is a creative improvisational process (Sawyer, 2003a). Recent work that extends constructivist theory to classroom collaboration conceives of learning as co-construction. Both 5

Ibid., 483. Ibid., 486. 7 Ibid., 491. 6

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neo-Piagetian social constructivists and Vygotskian-inspired socioculturalists focus on how knowledge is learned in and by groups (see Sawyer, 2006a). Sociocultural studies have demonstrated the importance of social interaction in groups, and have shown that a microgenetic focus on improvised interactional process can reveal many insights into how learning takes place. A central theme in the sociocultural tradition is the focus on the group rather than the individual. Socioculturalists analyze the entire group as their unit of analysis; cognition is “an aspect of human sociocultural activity” rather than “a property of individuals”.8 As a result of this emphasis, these scholars examine how groups collectively learn and develop; in Rogoff’s terms, learning is reconceptualized as a “transformation of participation in sociocultural activity”.9 Socioculturalists hold that groups can be said to “learn” as collectives, and that knowledge can be a possession or property of a group, not only of the individual participants in the group (Rogoff, 1998). In sociocultural and social constructivist theory, effective teaching must be improvisational, because if the classroom is scripted and directed by the teacher, the students cannot co-construct their own knowledge (Sawyer, 2004). Such talk is open-ended, is not structured in advance, and is an interaction among peers, where any participant can contribute equally to the flow of the interaction. The sociocultural perspective implies that the entire classroom is improvising together; and it holds that the most effective learning results when the classroom proceeds in an open, improvisational fashion—as children are allowed to experiment, interact, and actively participate in the collaborative construction of their own knowledge. In improvisational teaching, learning is a shared social activity, and is collectively managed by all participants, not only the teacher. In improvising, the teacher creates a dialogue with the students, giving them freedom to creatively construct their own knowledge, while providing the elements of structure that effectively scaffold that co-constructive process.

Conclusion My argument in this chapter is consistent with theoretical perspectives that emphasize the collective nature of situated social activity, perspectives that include distributed cognition (Salomon, 1993) and sociocultural theory (Rogoff, 1990, 1998). These approaches emphasize that much 8 9

Rogoff, 1998, 68. Ibid., 68.

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cognition occurs “in the wild” (Hutchins, 1995) – in real-world settings that are deeply contextualized, and within activity structures that are fundamentally collaborative. Ultimately, a complete understanding of how classroom collaboration contributes to learning would involve studies of groups, as well as traditional individual psychological study of participating individuals. Conceiving of creative teaching and learning as an improvisational performance emphasizes the interactional and responsive creativity of a teacher working together with a unique group of students. In particular, effective classroom discussion is improvisational, because the flow of the class is unpredictable and emerges from the actions of all participants, both teachers and students. Creative teaching is disciplined improvisation because it always occurs within broad structures and frameworks. Expert teachers use routines and activity structures more than novice teachers; but they are able to invoke and apply these routines in a creative, improvisational fashion (Berliner, 1987; Leinhardt and Greeno, 1986). As Borko and Livingston found, the most effective classroom interaction balances structure and script with flexibility and improvisation. There is an international consensus developing that we need math and science curricula that results in cognitive outcomes that support creative performance (OECD, 2008). The global economy needs workers who can use math and science creatively, not workers who have simply memorized decontextualized facts and procedures. If math and science continue to be taught in the instructionist style, then no amount of creativity training or arts education can help redress the problem. The problem is deeper and more foundational than that, and this is why learning sciences research can be invaluable. Learning scientists emphasize the importance of deeper conceptual understanding, problem solving, and thinking – the cognitive structures that support innovative work. And learning scientists are developing innovative new curricula that are aimed at transforming classrooms, particularly in math and science. An international consensus is developing around the key competencies required for the 21st century. The OECD DeSeCo project (the term DeSeCo is taken from the phrase “The definition and selection of key competencies”) identified three key competencies10: 1. Using tools interactively (language, symbols, text, knowledge, information, technology). 2. Interacting in heterogeneous groups (relating well, cooperating, managing). 10

Benavides, Dumont, and Istance, 2008, 24.

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3.

Acting autonomously (see the big picture and act within it; form life plans and personal projects; assert rights and needs).

The European Parliament and Council recommended eight key competencies for lifelong learning11: 1. Communication in mother tongue 2. Communication in foreign languages 3. Mathematical, science, and technological competence 4. Digital competence 5. Learning to learn 6. Interpersonal, intercultural and social competence 7. Entrepreneurship 8. Cultural expression As a recent OECD publication states, “Flexibility, creativity, communication with peers, problem-solving, and deep thinking are at the centre to all these concepts”. To learn creativity, students need to participate in collaborative conversations, guided by teachers and curricular structures, but with the freedom to improvisationally construct their own knowledge. In collaborative classrooms, teachers and learners build knowledge together, and unexpected insights emerge.

References Amabile, T. 1983, The social psychology of creativity, New York: SpringerVerlag. Antil, L. R., Jenkins, J. R., Wayne, S. K., and Vadasy, P. F. 1998, “Cooperative learning: Prevalence, conceptualizations, and the relation between research and practice”, American Educational Research Journal 35 3, 419-454. Atkinson, J. M. and Heritage, J. 1999, Jefferson's transcript notation, in A. Jaworkski and N. Coupland eds., The discourse reader, New York: Routledge, 158-166. Azmitia, M. 1996, Peer interactive minds: Developmental, theoretical, and methodological issues, in P. B. Baltes and U. M. Staudinger eds., Interactive minds: Life-span perspectives on the social foundation of cognition, New York: Cambridge, 133-162.

11

See the Official Journal of the European Union of 30 December 2006. http://eurlex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/site/en/oj/2006/l_394/l_39420061230en00100018.pdf, last accessed 21 Jan 2010.

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Baker-Sennett, J. and Matusov, E. 1997, School "performance": Improvisational processes in development and education, in R. K. Sawyer ed., Creativity in performance, Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 197-212. Basalla, G. 1988, The evolution of technology, New York: Cambridge University Press. Bearison, D. J., Magzamen, S. and Filardo, E. K. 1986, “Socio-cognitive conflict and cognitive growth in young children”, Merrill-Palmer Quarterly 32 (1), 51-72. Benavides, F., Dumont, H. and Istance, D. 2008, The search for innovative learning environments, in Innovating to learn, learning to innovate, Paris: OECD, 21-44. Berger, C. R. and Calabrese, R. J. 1975, “Some explorations in initial interaction and beyond: Toward a developmental theory of interpersonal communication”, Human Communication Research 1, 99-112. Berliner, D. C. 1987, Ways of thinking about students and classrooms by more and less experienced teachers, in J. Calderhead ed., Exploring teachers' thinking, London: Cassell Education Limited, 60-83. Berliner, P. 1994, Thinking in jazz: The infinite art of improvisation, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Borko, H. and Livingston, C. 1989, “Cognition and improvisation: Differences in mathematics instruction by expert and novice teachers”, American Educational Research Journal 26 (4), 473-498. Cobb, P. 1995, Mathematical learning and small-group interaction: Four case studies, in P. Cobb and H. Bauersfeld eds., The emergence of mathematical meaning: Interaction in classroom cultures, Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 25-129. Collins, R. 1981, “On the microfoundations of macrosociology”, American Journal of Sociology 86 (5), 984-1014. Csikszentmihalyi, M. 1988, Society, culture, and person: A systems view of creativity, in R. J. Sternberg ed., The nature of creativity, New York: Cambridge University Press, 325-339. —. 1990, The domain of creativity, in M. A. Runco and R. S. Albert eds., Theories of creativity, Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 190-212. —. 1996, Creativity: Flow and the psychology of discovery and invention, New York: HarperCollins. Doise, W. and Mugny, G. 1984, The social development of the intellect, New York: Pergamon Press. Farrell, M. P. 2001, Collaborative circles: Friendship dynamics and creative work, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Friedman, T. L. 2005, The world is flat: A brief history of the twenty-first century, New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Gardner, H. 1993, Creating minds, New York: Basic Books. Gee, J. P. 2000, Discourse and sociocultural studies in reading, in M. L. Kamil, P. B. Mosenthal, P. D. Pearson and R. Barr, eds., Handbook of reading research, Vol. 3, Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum195-207. Goffman, E. 1959, The presentation of self in everyday life, New York: Anchor Books. Guilford, J. P. 1950, “Creativity”, The American Psychologist 5 (9), 444454. Hargadon, A. B. 2003, How breakthroughs happen: The surprising truth about how companies innovate, Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press. Hutchins, E. 1995, Cognition in the wild, Cambridge: MIT Press. John-Steiner, V. 2000, Creative collaboration, New York: Oxford. Jordan, B. and Henderson, A. 1995, “Interaction analysis: Foundations and practice”, Journal of the Learning Sciences 4 (1), 39-103. Leinhardt, G. and Greeno, J. G. 1986, “The cognitive skill of teaching”, Journal of Educational Psychology 78 (2), 75-95. Mehan, H. 1979, Learning lessons, Cambridge: Harvard. Monson, I. 1996, Saying something: Jazz improvisation and interaction, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. National Council of Teachers of Mathematics 1991, Professional standards for teaching mathematics, Reston, VA: Author. National Research Council 1996, National science education standards, Washington, DC: National Academy Press. OECD 2008, Innovating to learn, learning to innovate, Paris, France: OECD. Papert, S. 1993, The children's machine: Rethinking school in the age of the computer, New York: BasicBooks. Paulus, P. B. and Nijstad, B. A. 2003, Group creativity: Innovation through collaboration, New York: Oxford University Press. Perret-Clermont, A. N. 1980, Social interaction and cognitive development in children, New York: Academic Press. Pink, D. H. 2005, A whole new mind: Why right-brainers will rule the future, New York: Riverhead Books. Rogoff, B. 1990, Apprenticeship in thinking: Cognitive development in social context, New York: Oxford University Press. —. 1998, Cognition as a collaborative process, in D. Kuhn and R. S. Siegler eds., Handbook of child psychology, 5th edition, Volume 2: Cognition, perception, and language, New York: Wiley, 679-744.

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Salomon, G. ed. 1993, Distributed cognitions: Psychological and educational considerations, New York: Cambridge. Sawyer, R. K. 1997, Pretend play as improvisation: Conversation in the preschool classroom, Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. —. 2001, Creating conversations: Improvisation in everyday discourse, Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press. —. 2003a, Group creativity: Music, theater, collaboration, Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. —. 2003b, Improvised dialogues: Emergence and creativity in conversation, Westport, CT: Greenwood. —. 2004, “Creative teaching: Collaborative discussion as disciplined improvisation”, Educational Researcher, 33 (2), 12-20. —. 2005, Social emergence: Societies as complex systems, New York: Cambridge. —. 2006a, Analyzing collaborative discourse, in R. K. Sawyer ed., Cambridge handbook of the learning sciences, New York: Cambridge, 187-204. —. ed. 2006b, Cambridge handbook of the learning sciences, New York: Cambridge University Press. —. 2006c, Explaining creativity: The science of human innovation, New York: Oxford University Press. —. 2007, Group genius: The creative power of collaboration, New York: BasicBooks. —. ed. (in press), The teaching paradox, New York: Cambridge University Press. Sawyer, R. K. and DeZutter, S. (2009), “Distributed creativity: How collective creations emerge from collaboration”, Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 3(2), 81-92. Sinclair, J. M. and Coulthard, R. M. 1975, Towards an analysis of discourse: The English used by teachers and pupils, London: Oxford University Press. Webb, N. M. 1995, “Group collaboration in assessment: Multiple objectives, processes, and outcomes”, Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis 17 (2), 239-261. Webb, N. M., Nemer, K. M., Chizhik, A. W. and Sugrue, B. 1998, “Equity issues in collaborative group assessment: Group composition and performance”, American Educational Research Journal 35 (4), 607651.

CHAPTER SIX CULTIVATING AN ATTUNEMENT TO UNFOLDING: IMPROVISATION AND THE DISCOVERY OF IDENTITY FRANK J. BARRETT

How is it possible for jazz musicians to improvise and attune to what unfolds within a group context? How are they able to spontaneously create novel forms of music in a collaborative setting? I explore three dynamics that characterize improvising jazz musicians: a mindset of positivity, analogical imagining, and embodied immersion in experience. Improvisation is an excellent site to study the process of self-making and world-making as simultaneous activities. As opposed to the mechanistic world view, the lens of improvisation views humans as active, striving, creating agents. This is a view of humans as agents capable of novelty, creativity, surprise. People can reconstitute themselves, creatively imitate others, try out new roles, create fictions or “as if” behaviors, seek out and surround themselves with settings and actors who engage in reciprocal role taking.

1. Jazz Improvisation as mutual negotiation and joint activity Jazz bands consist of diverse specialists living in turbulent environments, interpreting vague cues, processing large chunks of information, extemporaneously inventing responses without well thought-out plans and without a guarantee of outcomes, discovering the future that their action creates as it unfolds. Jazz bands have minimal hierarchy, decision making is dispersed, they are designed to maximize flexibility, responsiveness, innovation, and fast processing of information (Barrett, 1998, 2000). It is a

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form of social organization that produces order with little or no blueprint, it is organized from the bottom up: individuals have personal freedom to take initiative and operate on their own authority (their musical imaginations) guided by the constraints of the task, the conventions of practice, and the enactments of other players. Information flows freely yet is restrained, members are diverse yet conform, members are richly connected, constraints are minimal, and feedback is non-linear (i.e. there are many possible responses to a given stimuli and these responses can themselves stimulate unexpected behavior). Jazz improvisers are committed to creating new musical ideas, developing spontaneous combinations. Gunther Schuller writes that improvisation is “playing extemporaneously... composing on the spur of the moment.” Given the exploratory nature of improvisation, incoherence and chaos lurk just around the corner. There is some peril involved in an activity in which the future is unknown, yet one is expected to create something novel and coherent in the presence of an audience. Improvisation, then, is a high-risk joint activity: Players must be willing to respond to one another’s enactments, hope that others are responding in turn, and commonly yearn for a shared sense of the rhythm and creation of a groove. When musicians are listening attentively, they have enormous amount of influence over the direction of one another’s playing. At any given moment, the music can go off into an unanticipated direction: a solo line might suggest unique sets of chord voicings that in turn might lead to expanding the harmonic extensions that a melody can explore. It is a recursive process in which every player has the potential to alter the fabric of the musical landscape, depending on what he or she hears, and how they respond. Players quickly notice and respond to unanticipated cues, abandon what doesn’t work, and create novelty that takes the system in a new direction. They grapple with the constrictions of patterns and structures, strive to listen to what is happening around them and respond coherently and at the same time they try to break out of these constrictions and patterned structures to create something new with the awareness that committing to either path entails a risk. When players are relating and responding well, the jazz band achieves a state of dynamic synchronization.

2. A mindset of positivity If improvisation involves wading into the unknown with no guarantee of outcome, abandoning well-learned routines and habits, the activity seems perilous. What kind of mindset is required to create spontaneous

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utterances when the conditions are so unclear? Like comedy improvisers, jazz improvisers employ a positive mindset. They respond to the situation, to others’ utterances, with the assumption that they can move the action forward (Barrett and Fry, 2005). Jazz players assume that every utterance, no matter how challenging or difficult, can lead in a positive direction. Often, in fact musicians find themselves in the midst of unstructured activity with no agreed upon direction or guarantee of outcomes. And yet, it’s paramount that the player take action. Noticing the potentials rather than the obstacles that one faces necessitates an affirmative mindset, the assumption that there is a latent, positive possibility to be noticed and valued. In order for jazz to work, the improviser must assume that whatever has happened will make sense, that prior note selections must be leading somewhere, and that there must be some order in the disparate material waiting to be enticed and queried. Rather than engaging in fault finding or holding one another responsible for inevitable errors that happen when one is experimenting on the edge of one’s familiarity, each player is committed to sustaining the ongoing dialogue. To do this, musicians assume that there is an affirmative potential direction in every interaction and every utterance. They assume that everything that is happening -even the most blatant ‘errors’- makes sense and can be a possible springboard for an inspired musical idea. This affirmative mindset can be seen in the way musicians deal with errors. Jazz players are often able to turn these unexpected problems into musical opportunities. Errors become accommodated as part of the musical landscape, seeds for activating and arousing the imagination.

3. Analogic imagining Dialogic interaction between parties can be categorized as either analogic or dialectic. Dialectic imagining moves interaction forward by negation, questioning, challenging, or undercutting previous utterances, focusing on the gulf that separates actual and ideal. Analogic imagining, on the other hand, helps to build an unfolding narrative by building upon prior gestures – a metaphorical enactment that involves searches for linkages, seeing common patterns within diversity, a search for similarities among differences with the assumption of an emerging harmonic wholeness. While a dialectical imagination seeks to uncover the hidden meaning, analogic imagination brings together concrete and general and seeks to extend ideas, actions, and utterances. Efforts to combine seemingly unrelated material often leads to the creation of new meaning.

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How do jazz musicians enact analogic imagining? Players are constantly interpreting the musical material before them, merging their own ideas with others’, attempting to create a coherent statement. They are constantly anticipating one another’s intentions, making guesses and predictions, and attempting to extend them. Players are committed to stay engaged with one another, to listen to emerging ideas, and to pay attention to cues that can point to an unexpected trajectory. Jazz players look back on what’s happened, draws upon familiar repertoires, including wellknown quotes from established repertoire. Players are attentive to one another’s enactments, look for ways to complement, extend, or modify what has happened, linking familiar with new utterances, adjusting to unanticipated musical cues that reframe previous material. This might involve imitating a musical utterance, repeating in a different key, varying the rhythm slightly. Saxophonist Paul Desmond articulates the analogical mindset, noting that the player must “crawl out on a limb, set one line against another and try to match them, bring them closer together”.1 Matching and bringing utterances closer together means that the player is attempting to “spot the rhyme,” the potential linkages between gestures. Sometimes these explorations involve patterns and phrases from more advanced players or important predecessors. Imitating others’ material is a necessary step to learning and developing one’s own voice. Musicians tend to freely acknowledge the importance of tradition. Dizzie Gillespie said: “Each musician is based on someone who went before, and eventually you get enough of your own things in your playing, and you get a style of your own”.2 Miles Davis consciously tried to sound like Dizzy Gillespie; Wynton Marsalis imitated Miles. It is often through variations on others’ styles, intentionally or unintentionally that one develops one’s own voice. Dizzy Gillespie said: “All I ever did was try to play like (Roy Eldridge), but I never quite made it. I’d get all messed up ‘cause I couldn’t get it. SO I tried something else. That has developed into what became known as bop”.3

4. Embodied immersion Jazz improvising is an activity of bodily involvement in risky environment in which players are continually interpreting what’s happening 1

Gioia, 1988, 92. Dyer, 1997, 187. 3 Ibid., 188. 2

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around them and learning from supposed mistakes. When players say that they are out on a limb, that they leap into the unknown, jump into the morass and try to develop a groove, they are speaking of the embodied nature of improvisation. They are immersed in a fluid social world in which changing ensembles of relations are continuously transforming themselves. This embodied immersion in experiences that may put one on edge or may be over one’s head or comfort level, is essential to improvisation. One must have the experience of swiftly moving in on certain details, catching fleeting flashes that from one’s accumulated knowledge and experience grabs one’s attention; then in real time, the players discover, sometimes uncomfortably, whether one has misestimated, misunderstood the other’s gestures, or when one’s utterances become inspiration for others. These are meaningful and potentially transforming moments that cannot be accessed simply by reflective learning. Players experience the excitement of triggering and inspiring others; the embarrassment when one mistakes or mis-interprets, the recovery and resilience as players continue to go on together. To watch jazz players improvising is to watch a situation becoming imbued with ongoing meaning and significance. Further, it is the risk of taking action in the presence of other living bodies that one develops expertise and learns wisdom of practice (in an Aristotelean sense). Learning to respond to the situation builds up rich interpretive repertoires that will enrich what one notices in the future, what one decides to focus on and respond to in the future. Without a sense of risk and the heightened awareness of consequence and possibility of embarrassment, deep transformation and learning are less likely. This theme is related to the next point – identity formation. Embodied engagement in risky situations helps to construct a context that allows one to differentiate relevant aspects from trivial; these are situations that allow one to develop the ability to acquire skills, to learn how to learn. In this regard, the situated, vulnerable body, including emotions, plays an important role in one’s capacity to make sense, constructing a context that allows one to differentiate relevant aspects from trivial. Plunging into activity, throwing oneself into a situation and making passionate commitments, sensing responsibility, noticing consequences – these are the ingredients necessary for the development of competence and identity formation. Learning to improvise is more than a cognitive enterprise. Players are frequently thrown in over their heads. They speak of the intense involvement that the craft demands. Charlie Parker: “Music is your own

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experience, your thoughts, your wisdom. If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn”.4 Trumpet player Red Rodney, so committed to learning the art, turned to heroin in imitation of Parker, assuming that if he imitated this habit, he also might grant him Parker’s gift for endless invention. John Coltrane’s intense and continual striving and reaching to break free from musical forms is an example of improvising as embodied art. Full immersion and embodiment help to open the way for breakthroughs. Holding on to routines and stock responses obstructs immersion in the immediacy of now. To be open to what is unfolding is to be vulnerable in the face of the unknown. Musicians explore the further reaches of their comfortable grasp, testing the limits of their understanding. The surrender of deliberation, the commitment to appreciate the potential of preceding enactments and to build on whatever emerges, the attunement to the inevitable surprises –these are embodied experiences that serve as catalysts for recapturing poetic wisdom that Vico wrote about. Embodied immersion in experience involves continual openness to surprise, a willingness to be open to the immediacy of wonderment. Habits of deliberation, repetition and reliance on pre-existing categories, usually are signs of disembodiment.

5. Identity Finally, I would like to raise questions about the relationship between improvisation and identity. Identity offers a framework for considering ontological security, a sense of stability and predictability amidst threats of chaos and disorganization (Giddens, 1991). Identity allows one to take comfort in the everyday conventions, a sense that will not be overwhelmed by anxiety or experience the dread or a loss of coherence that concerned Kierkegaard. We bracket anxieties, provide modes of orientation, create fictional, “as if” environments that frame and make sense of everyday practices.5 As Giddens and others have noted, since the 18th century and the advent modernity identity is no longer “given” or primarily determined by stable cultural institutions. Identity is something that must be constructed. What does it mean to say that identity must be constructed? Since the Enlightenment, building or transforming a coherent sense of identity is now a project (Barrett and Sarbin, 2008). Self identity is narratively construed; we form and reform a coherent sense of self by linking past 4 5

Ibid., 199. Giddens, 1991, 37.

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with an anticipated future trajectory. Also self reflexivity is an ongoing concern -- some events intrude (interrupt / disrupt) coherent narrative and become barriers or obstacles to identity construction and must be faced or integrated. A person with a reasonably stable sense of self-identity has a feeling of biographical continuity which she is able to grasp reflexively and to a greater or lesser degree, communicate to other people. That person also, through early trust relations, has established a protective cocoon which ‘filters out,’ in the practical conduct of day-today life, many of the dangers which in principle threaten the integrity of the self.... a person’s identity is not to be found in behavior, nor –important though it is – in the reactions of others, but in the capacity to keep a particular narrative going. The individual’s biography, if she is to maintain regular interaction with others in the day-to-day world, must continually integrate events which occur in the external world, and sort them into the ongoing ‘story’ about the self.6 Following Baumeister, Taylor, and Giddens, these feelings of selfidentity are both robust and fragile. Fragile, because the biography the individual reflexively holds in mind is only one ‘story’ among many other potential stories that could be told about her development as a self; robust because a sense of self-identity is often securely enough held to weather major tensions or transitions in the social environments within which the person moves. Following Taylor’s (1989) detailed account of the historical emergence of the contemporary understanding of the self, it is only by virtue of having a location in a moral space that one can be said to have a self. Identity is a narrative quest in which we make sense of our lives in orientation to an “incomparably higher” good. Constructing narratives that orient the self in relation to a moral framework determine what makes a life worth living. In modern/post-modern culture, there is a tentative, searching, uncertain nature of many of our moral commitments.

6. Improvisation, Identity and Modernity If identity involves both robustness and fragility, it would seem that jazz musicians might offer a good exemplar of modern identity construction. Players are agents initiating action but also simultaneously creating structures –both enablers and constraints– for others. Improvisers are striving agents creating novel material and yet are open, receptive to other, unanticipated stimuli. They must be tempted often to play it safe and 6

Ibid., 54.

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rely upon routines and yet players work to stay responsive, to be open to others’ enactments. A number of interesting questions emerge: How do jazz musicians orient themselves in relation to the “good,” especially if the “good” means that one should be adaptable, open, responsive, creative? What narratives do they convey that help create, maintain, or transform a self-narrative that orients them in this equivocal moral space? If as a condition of modernity, there is no unquestioned framework by which people judge their lives and measure their fullness or emptiness, then how do musicians construct coherent moral narratives? Most studies of identity take a fairly cognitive view, as if identity is an adaptation process in which people test out, discard and revise various identities throughout their careers. Jazz musicians cannot be accused of being disengaged subjects. They are constantly, reflexively shaping and reshaping self-identity. They are committed to creating and exploring novel situations. Their experiences can lead to ecstasy and transformation, or to despair. The literature on jazz improvisers is replete with examples of both. Improvisers are continually putting their identities at risk. Players have to simultaneously imagine several provisional pathways and yet continue to strive for coherence – in the moment. The dramatic tension of whether to play it safe or try something new invites more exploration. That is why I find the question of attunement, responsiveness and openness so compelling.

7. Conclusion In this chapter I have discussed jazz improvisation as a joint activity that involves mutual negotiation. I have proposed that three factors allow ongoing mutual negotiation and openness to the unfolding music; a mindset of positivity, a mindset of analogic extension, and the risk taking of full bodied immersion. Finally I propose that studying jazz improvisation might offer a unique window into the dynamics of identity construction, one that appreciates the robust and fragile nature of identitymaking.

References Barrett, F. J. 1998, “Creativity and Improvisation in Jazz and Organizations: Implications for Organizational Learning”, Organization Science 9, 605 - 622.

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—. 2000, Cultivating an Aesthetics of Unfolding: Jazz Improvisation as a Self-Organized System, in S. Linstead and H. J. Hopfl eds., The Aesthetics of Organizations, London: Sage Press. Barrett, F and Fry, R. 2005, Appreciative Inquiry: A Positive Approach to Building Cooperative Capacity. Taos, New Mexico: Taos Institute Press. Barrett, F. and Sarbin, T. R. 2008, “Honor as a Moral Category: A Historico-linguistic Analysis”, Theory and Psychology 1 (1), 5-25. Dyer, G., 1997, But Beautiful. A Book about Jazz, London: Jonathan Cape. Gioia, T. 1988, The Imperfect Art, New York: Oxford Univ. Press. Giddens, A. 1991, Modernity and Self Identity, Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press. Taylor, C. 1992, Source of the Self, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard Univ. Press.

CONTRIBUTORS

Bjørn Alterhaug is a jazz bass player, arranger, composer, and professor at the Department of Music, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) Trondheim. He has performed with international jazz artists, played on a large number of LPs and CDs and his compositions number about 200 for different instrumental combinations and styles. Since 1999 he has been leading a research project entitled: “Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Improvisation” at NTNU. Frank J. Barrett, is a Faculty Member in Human and Organizational Development at the Fielding Graduate University. He is currently Professor of Management in the Graduate School of Business and Public Policy at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. He has written and lectured widely on social constructionism, appreciative inquiry, organizational change, jazz improvisation and organizational learning and development. He has published articles on metaphor and masculinity. He is also an active jazz pianist. Andy Hamilton teaches Philosophy, and also History and Aesthetics of Jazz, at Durham University; he is also Adjunct Lecturer at University of Western Australia, Perth. He has written many articles on aesthetics, political philosophy, and philosophy of mind, and has published a monographs about aesthetics and music, and a conversations with Lee Konitz on the improviser’s Art. Luca Illetterati is a Professor of Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Padua. He works on the relationship between philosophy and natural science in philosophy tradition; he also deals with the status of philosophy with special regard to German classical philosophy, from Kant to Heidegger. He has investigated the concept of limit in relation to human experience, the problem of translation, and the issue of teleology and purposiveness in science. Tord Gustavsen is a professional jazz pianist and composer. He is also a kind of undercover scholar, with a philosophical degree in Musicology from the University of Oslo, Norway - specializing in the psychology of

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improvisation. He has been working as a freelance musicians ever since graduation. He has toured in Europe, USA, Australia and Asia extensively, and this stopped him from further formal studies and scientific publications. The life as a musician has also opened up the same fields of study for him from a performer's point of view. Marina Santi holds a PhD in Educational Sciences and is an Associate Professor in Teaching Methodologies and Special Education. She lectures at the Faculty of Education and Training at the University of Padova, Italy. Her work deals with dialogue and argumentation concerning knowledge construction processes and the investigation of social interaction as cognitive potential for learning. She specialises in “Philosophy for Children” as an educational model and methodology in order to develop critical, creative and caring thinking and to construct inclusive social environments. Keith Sawyer is an Associate Professor of Psychology and Education at Washington University in St. Louis. He has studied interactional processes in jazz and improvisational theater groups, and has applied those findings and methods to the study of collaborative creativity in other environments, including classrooms and business organizations. He is the author of numerous books on the topic, and editor of several books on learning sciences. Gabriele Tomasi is an Associate Professor of Aesthetics at the University of Padua. He has published books and articles on Kant and Leibniz, focusing his attention particularly on topics located between ethics, aesthetics and metaphysics. More recently Wittgenstein’s view of aesthetics and the sense of the world in the 'Tractatus' became the focus of his researches.