Imaging Music: Abstract Expressionism and Free Improvisation

A B S T R A C T

Matthew Sansom

ree improvisation is the term most often used to describe the music and/or form of music-making most immediately associated with the likes of Cornelius Cardew and Derek Bailey and groups such as AMM and the Spontaneous Music Ensemble. The form first emerged during the 1960s; it is now widely practiced by numerous artists throughout many countries and has become (perhaps somewhat ironically) a genre in its own right, with associated record labels, media, significant artists, aficionados and performance rituals. In seeking a definition of free improvisation, and given its oft-cited ephemeral and transient status, the approach taken here considers free improvisation as creative activity, encompassing its artistic agenda on the one hand and the process-based dynamic of its production on the other. The article opens with an exposition of the historical location of free improvisation within Western music history. Following this, and as a means of developing a fuller understanding of the activitys conceptual basis and processes, free improvisation is explored as analogous with Abstract Expressionist art.

INDETERMINACY
Free improvisation has its roots in the developments of jazz on the one hand and the experimental classical music of both America and Europe on the other. During the late 1950s and early 1960s, a move towards a freer style of jazz improvisation (as exemplified in the playing of Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor and, later, John Coltrane) developed in contrast to the more idiomatic and established styles of Bebop and HardBop [1]. Through the development and questioning of the conventions of jazzs harmonic and metrical patterns and its structural principles, a variety of ideas and approaches emerged. As Ekkehard Jost comments, free jazz led to a heterogeneity of personal and group styles with new ways of approaching issues of instrumental technique, ensemble playing and formal organization [2]. In retrospect, Steve Lacy says of these changes,
When you reached hard bop there was no mystery any more. It was likemechanicalsome kind of gymnastics. The patterns are well known and everybody is playing them. . . . It got so that everybody knew what was going to happen and, sure enough, thats what happened. . . . But when Ornette hit the scene, that was the end of theories. He destroyed the theories. I remember at that time he said, very carefully, Well, you just have a certain amount of space and you put what you want in it [3].

Similarly, developments in art music during this era articulated a response to the issues raised by a certain rigidity within compositional technique. It is clear that during the 1950s, increasing control and organization of pitch, rhythm and tim-

brethe pursuit of the illusory goal of total organisation [4] reached a point of exhaustion for many composers. An increasing variety of sources challenged the modernist attempt to derive a common musical language from the principles of serialism. A central factor within these developing responses to integral serialism was the role of indeterminacy. The excessively complex notation of serial compositions led to the use of approximate durations and proportional notation (for example Stockhausens Zeitmasse [1956] and Berios Sequenza [1958]) and to an awareness of the illogicality in using conventional notation to produce results that could only be approximate. In Europe, indeterminacy was initially applied only to time, and it was not until the 1960s that it would be used with the parameters of pitch, form and means. These changes inevitably led to an openness towards the role of notation and the development of graphic scores and a shift by performers towards a more improvisational role. Gyrgy Ligeti, who along with Iannis Xenakis openly attacked serialism [5], developed the idea that a works formal shape is more dependent upon matters of texture and timbre than harmony, counterpoint or thematic working (for example, in Atmosphres for orchestra [1961] and Volumina for organ [19611962]). The implementation of large-scale forms of timbral control and associated performance techniques (such as also in Stockhausens Carr [19591960] and Pendereckis Threnos [1960]) further contributed to the changing roles of notation and performance. In contrast to, but in tandem with, the collapse in Europe of the modernist linear development towards increasing control, American music had already begun undergoing a radical rethinking. Starting in 1950, John Cages applications of Zen philosophy aimed to rid his compositions of intention and to let sounds simply be themselves. Cage used chance operations (indeterminacy being applied to all parameters, in contrast to its gradual application in Europe) to derive the content of compositions as he sought to achieve a musical composition the continuity of which is free of individual taste and memory (psychology) and also of which is free of the literature and traditions of the art [6]. Cage, along with Morton Feldman, Earle Brown and Christian Wolff, initiated
Matthew Sansom, Department of Music, University of Newcastle, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 7RU, U.K. E-mail: <m.j.sansom@ncl.ac.uk>.

he author defines free improvisation, a form of music-making that first emerged in the 1960s with U.K. composers and groups such as Cardew, Bailey, AMM and the Spontaneous Music Ensemble. The approach here considers free improvisation as creative activity, encompassing its artistic agenda on the one hand and the process-based dynamic of its production on the other. After considering the historical location of free improvisation within Western music history, the article explores free improvisation as analogous with Abstract Expressionist art. This comparison enables a fuller understanding of the activitys conceptual basis and the creative process it engenders.

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changes of attitude toward: the perception of what can be experienced as musically significant, be it environmental sound, silence and/or other chance sound events; the possibilities of graphic notation (pre-empting many developments in Europe); and the role of the composer in relation to ideas of music as performance rather than prescription, as a unique event or happening rather than a permanent work. Inevitably there was a degree of crossfertilization between Europe and the U.S.A. during the 1950s, but Americas weaker demands of history and tradition, coupled with Cages artistic vision, established its place in more experimental approaches to music. Philosophical goals fundamentally different from those of the developmental and rationalist European tradition generated new possibilities of musical thought. In distinguishing between the avant-garde and experimental, the English composer Michael Nyman wrote in the early 1970s,
Experimental composers are by and large not concerned with prescribing a defined time-object whose materials, structuring and relationships are calculated and arranged in advance, but are more excited by the prospect of outlining a situation in which sounds may occur, a process of generating action (sounding or otherwise), a field delineated by certain compositional rules [7].

score Treatise (19631967) that Psychologically the existence of Treatise is fully explained by the situation of the composer who is not in a position to make music [8]. Cardew further explored the acute questioning of the processes of composition and performance that such large-scale indeterminacy provoked in joining the experimental improvising (or free improvisation) group AMM in 1966. Later he wrote,
Written compositions are fired off into the future; even if never performed, the writing remains as a point of reference. Improvisation is in the present, its effects may live on in the solos of the participants, both active and passive (i.e. audience), but in its concrete form it is gone forever from the moment that it occurs, nor did it have any previous existence before the moment that it occurred, so neither is there any historical reference available [9].

The notion that a certain process might generate action has close affinities with free improvisation and will be returned to; at this point, however, it is pertinent to provide some detail about the English composer and contemporary of Nyman, Cornelius Cardew.

RADICALLY DIFFERENT MUSIC-MAKING

Cardews early works are serial compositions (two string trios [19551956] and three piano sonatas [19551958]), but after a short period as Stockhausens assistant (1958) and contact with John Cage and David Tudor at the Darmstadt composition courses of 1959, he abandoned serialism. Composing Two Books of Study for Pianists (1959)a work that engages the per former intellectually, technically and aesthetically through notational innovations and complex instructionshe began exercising a more experimental and strongly ideological approach to composition and music that would lead him to an involvement with freely improvised music. Cardew wrote of his vast and intricately crafted graphic

In Cardews work with AMM, the influences of serialism and the European tradition, American indeterminacy and the experimental tradition and jazz came together to form a radically different kind of music-making [10]. Although the improvised music that emerged from this grouponce called John Cage jazz [11]reflected many Cageian ideals, it differed with respect to emotional intent, impact and response. For Cage, the absence of such qualities informed his aesthetic stance and compositional process, whereas AMM accepted emotion in music as a possible dimension for meaning to inhabit [12]. Also, although indeterminacy, or rather each musicians choice to incorporate chance events, was central to their music, it was wholly different from the compositional indeterminacy of such works as Stockhausens Aus den sieben Tag (1968). As Eddie Pr vost, a longtime member of AMM, wrote, AMM differed from all such projects because it denied all external authority and resisted attempts to impose their will upon events [13]. A final historical point needs to be made here (with reference to the title of this volume of LMJ) concerning the international status of free improvisation during the 1960s. Before the formation of AMM, Lukas Foss was working in the U.S.A. with his Improvisation Chamber Ensemble. In his 1963 article The Changing Composer-Performer Relationship: A Monologue and a Dialogue [14], he identified free improvisation as one area in which the traditional duality between composer and performer was being questioned, raising many new is-

sues for contemporar y music new ideas for coordination, per formance problems, conducting techniques and instrumental discoveries. Additionally, from the early 1960s, the international Fluxus movement further conflated the traditional categories associated with musical practice [15]. Returning to England, mention should also be made of Gavin Bryars (later to work with Cage and Cardew), Tony Oxley and Derek Bailey, who also worked within the field of improvisation during this period: between 1963 and 1966, their musical explorations shifted from more obviously idiomatic jazz to freely improvised music (or non-idiomatic improvisation, to use Baileys term [16]). This contextualization reveals free improvisation as a specific and definable activity, displaying an awareness of music as a unique sound event; acknowledging and exploring the role and significance of the performer as creator/composer without the dictates of notation, graphic or otherwise; incorporating the use of chance, encouraging the use of elements outside conscious and deliberate control; and exhibiting an openness to the totality of sounds both as an exploratory approach in conjunction with experimental instrumental techniques and in relation to environmental context (not only aurally but also in other fields of awareness).

MUSIC AND THE VISUAL ARTS

Having located, albeit briefly, free improvisation within Western music history, I now consider its relation to certain historical, conceptual and procedural aspects of the visual arts during the twentieth century. It should be noted that this connection with the visual arts has a historical and explicitly practical root in much of the work carried out in the art schools of Great Britain at the end of the 1960s and early 1970s [17]. Colleges in Leeds, London, Liverpool, Falmouth, Portsmouth and elsewhere became homes for much experimental musicmaking thanks to visits from composers and performers such as Cardew, John Tilbury, Howard Skempton, Gavin Bryars and Christian Wolff [18]. That said, I compare here the activity of free improvisation (in no sense as the unique embodiment of experimental music, but rather as having a key role in the project of rethinking music and the subject matter of art) with certain approaches evident in the visual arts during the twentieth century. Such a comparison provides

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insight into the nature of free improvisations creative dynamics of production and its artistic agenda and aesthetic basis. Significantly, this approach also helps identify specific aspects of the creative process in music (an area typically avoided due to traditional categorizations and the splitting-off of composition as a specialist activity). The development of modern abstract art provides certain obvious and strong parallels with the musical issues already considered. The prior destructuring of tonality at the turn of the century can also be considered (less helpfully, I would argue) alongside the destructuring of representation in the visual art of the same period. Abstraction dealt exclusively with art s own intrinsic formal language of line, tone, color, surface texture and composition; and this new mode of presentation demanded a new aesthetic response. The origins of, and issues within, these developments are central to art history and were a significant influence upon the music emerging during the 1950s and 1960s. This is especially so in the work of Cage and the phenomenon of free improvisation, providing related (but distinct) resolutions to some of the aesthetic and creative problems raised by the destructuring of arts subject matter [19]. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, a number of artistic movements developed new forms, procedures and theories of art. It is in the ideas and practices of the Surrealist movement that the most significant parallels between improvisation and Abstract Expressionism have their origin. Surrealism, which arose in Paris from the dwindling Dada movement with its cynicism towards bourgeois rationalism and its nihilistic outlook, took onboard the ideas of Freud and the unconscious as a means of liberating the imagination from what they believed to be the crippling effects of logic and reason. With little regard for Freuds models, the Surrealists sought to break the barrier between consciousness and the unconscious, maintained as they saw it only for the sake of order and control, through dreams and automatic writing. The following conclusive definition is from the first Surrealist Manifesto written by the poet Andr Breton in 1924: SURREALISM, noun. Pure psychic automatism by which it is intended to express, either verbally or in writing, the true function of thought. Thought dictated in the absence of all control exerted by reason, and outside all aesthetic or moral preoccupations [20].

The Freeing of Form: New Procedures

Bretons first attempts at automatic writing (1919) [21], which share an affinity with Freuds clinical method of free association, came to the attention of artists Joan Mir and Andr Masson. Along with Max Ernst, they developed new procedures as direct counterparts to automatic writing. Masson stated of his technique that I begin without an image or plan in mind, but just draw or paint rapidly according to my impulses. Gradually, in the marks I make, I see suggestions of figures or objects. I encourage these to emerge, trying to bring out their implications. . . . [22] Massons interest was in the point at which a line was in the process of becoming something else, and he went on to develop the method of automatic painting in a series of sand paintings. Having roughly spread glue over the canvas, he would throw sand on and shake it off, then use lines and patches of color to evoke the suggested images. Similarly, Ernst began using materials such as sacking, leaves and thread to construct images from an initial frottage. Frottage was used as a means of
excluding all conscious mental guidance (of reason, taste, morals), reducing to the extreme the active part of that one whom we have called up to now the author of the work, the procedure is revealed to be the exact equivalent of that which is already known by the term automatic writing [23].

Again, the significance of the procedures employed by the Surrealists was revealed when Mir wrote: I begin painting, and as I paint the picture begins to assert itself, or suggest itself, under my brush. The form becomes a sign for a woman or a bird as I work. The first stage is free, unconscious. . . . [24] Surrealisms fixation with dream imagery and the use of automatic methods of working established the significance of the unconscious, both as a present force in everyday life and more importantly as a source of direction in artistic production. These procedures, along with the use of unusual materials, discouraged deliberate control and encouraged the emergence of more unconscious imagery. Such factors provide significant similarities with the procedures of free improvisation, and the previous descriptions of automatic painting are strongly evocative of the processes of free improvisation. A description by Cardew highlights this: We are searching for sounds and for the responses that at-

tach to them, rather than thinking them up, preparing them and producing them. The search is conducted in the medium of sound and the musician himself is at the heart of the experiment [25]. As percussionist Frank Perry has stated, improvisation has meant the freeing of form that it may more readily accommodate my imagination [26]. There is a shared attitude towards the possibilities of each mediums material make-up: from the incorporation of found and environmental objects to new ways of using more traditional elements (for example, in Ernst s use of paint straight from the tube or the unconventional use of a musical instrument). During the years that followed, a number of factors influenced the course of Surrealism, most notably the pre-World War II immigrations of the European Surrealists to America. Works by the likes of Ernst and Masson were now a direct presence within the American art world. During the 1930s and 1940s the crisis over arts subject matter was an ever-present issue facing the artist: the American painter Adolph Gottlieb said at the time, the situation was so bad I know I felt free to try anything, no matter how absurd it seemed [27]. As with Surrealism, the emerging aesthetic emphasized the artists capacity for self-expression and rejected the supremacy of the intellect, carrying forward the well-established ideal that maximum spontaneity would express the deepest levels of being. Art functioned as a form of self-realization through which they [artists] could redeem their alienation from society and from the given aesthetic tradition [28]. With this came a new emphasis on the act of painting. Appropriating the notion of pure intention within the activity of mark-making (a key interest being Eastern art and in particular Chinese calligraphy [29]), artists emphasized the qualities existing within the activity of paintingits happening. Other influences included the drawings of children and psychotics, following the idea that an over-developed conscious mind could hinder the spontaneous expression of the imagination [30].

Material Facture and Form

The term Abstract Expressionism, like most such classifications, covers the work of a number of artists from different countries over several years. The Oxford Companion to Art states,
Though the diversity of the work of these artists makes it less susceptible

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than most schools to be confined within any general formula, the essence of Abstract Expressionism may perhaps be summed up as imageless and anti-form painting, improvisatory, dynamic, energetic, and free in technique, tending to stimulate vision rather than gratify established conventions of good taste [31].

Equivalents can be observed in the way formal qualities of structured harmony, melody, rhythm, etc. exist within freely improvised music. The inevitable presence of such qualities is secondary to the exploratory processes emphasized in the act of music s creation. Formal qualities are experienced and evaluated as emergent (unconscious) and arbitrary (chance) elements (i.e. based on the quality and nature of the experience over-and-above an intellectual justification based on historic references and/ or specific idiomatic context), in much the same way as the paintings of Abstract Expressionism, whether action painting, color-field painting, gestural/lyrical expressionism, matter painting, art brut, etc. The emphasis upon process and material qualities enabled by freedom from the image and more (traditionally) formal concerns is paralleled by freedom from functional harmony and/or traditional modes of compositional construction, resulting in a direct engagement with the medium of sound and the processes of musical creation. The legacy and significance of Surrealism within Abstract Expressionism continued with the emphasis placed upon images of the unconscious [32], the value of psychic automatism, a distrust for overly polished technique and a pronounced taste for disintegration and horror [33]. Methods of production that facilitated the relaxation of conscious control remained a central concern. Sentiments similar to Massons fascination with the metamorphosis and transformation of images within the painting process are expressed by both Jackson Pollock and Robert Motherwell. Pollock said,
When I am painting, I have a general notion as to what I am about. I can control the flow of the paint: there is no accident. . . . I have no fears about making changes, destroying the image, etc., because the painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through [34].

The spontaneous emergence of forms through the free handling of paint is paralleled musically by the way in which formal, idiomatic and/or traditionally functional elements occur in freely improvised music. Free improvisation, as a language spontaneously developed amongst the players and between players and listeners [36], has no stylistic or idiomatic commitment to fulfill and yet maintains the potential to reveal a particular musicians history (be it psychical, emotional, physical or musical). The improvising guitarist Derek Bailey holds that while there is no prescribed idiomatic sound to free improvisation, its characteristics are established by the sonicmusical identity of the person playing [37]. The intensity of the interactions between the artist and medium and the dynamic of emergent qualities represent the central focus of both art forms [38]. Structurally, freely improvised music is characterized by the exploration of the relationships between order and disorder, with differences of emphasis existing from performer to performer and from group to group: it is inevitable that references to and occurrences of more idiomatic, familiar and/or repetitive material will be viewed with a variety of attitudes and aesthetic concerns [39]. Continuing the analogy, within Abstract Expressionist art there exists a varying importance placed upon the role of the image. For example, the English painter Francis Bacon, who employed trance-like states to create his work, came to criticize Pollock for failing to return to and work with the images discovered through chance procedures and created by the paint itself [40]. One can clearly observe such differences of approach in the paintings of Pollock and Bacon, and, as a further example, across the oeuvre of Wassily Kandinsky. Significantly, such comparisons and examples reveal a dynamic tension existing between what has been described by (and explored in the work of) Anton Ehrenzweig as articulate (conscious) and inarticulate (unconscious) form [41].

THE AESTHETICS OF PRESENCE

The influence of the Orient has already been identified in relation to art history, Cages music and free improvisation. The philosophy of Zen Buddhism, the aesthetic of Chinese poetry (in which the quality of the brush-stroke is of equal importance to literary content) and the I Ching all aided the de-

Motherwell thought of the process of painting as an adventure, without preconceived ideas, on the part of persons of intelligence, sensibility and passion. Fidelity to what occurs between oneself and the canvas, no matter how unexpected, becomes central [35].

velopment of strategies and techniques that encouraged movement away from conventional teachings and aesthetic concerns. Eddie Prvost explicitly acknowledges these influences upon the musicians of AMM, in particular Chinese calligraphy [42]. In visual arts, Mark Tobey, for example, was devoted to the study of East Asian paintingvisiting China and Japan, living in a Zen monastery for a month and converting to the Bahai World Faithas a means of liberating his aesthetic development. The directness and presence of the mark-making in the work of artists such as Hans Hartung and Franz Kline share a similar sense of intention and energetic force present in the immediacy and interactions of much freely improvised music. True to their Surrealist origins, new techniques (classically, Pollock s drip method) were developed to increase the subtlety of response to the artists intuitive interactions with the canvas. Furthermore, alternative materials were commonly incorporated, such as burlap in the work of Alberto Burri and Massons use of sand and glue referred to above. Likewise, the use of musical instruments in unconventional ways and more unusual sound sources (from childrens toys to homemade electronic devices) has become established means of sound-production in freely improvised music. Such approaches have expanded the available vocabulary of sounds and textural possibilities and help to relax conscious control, diminishing the role of learned responses/processes. This approach is exemplified by the use of the electric guitar flat on its back, augmented with various pieces of electronics, metal, plastic and wood [43]. Pr vost writes that this style of guitar playing (that of AMMs Keith Rowe specifically) enable[s] certain actions to be carried out, to let dribbles of sound meander, collect in drowning pools of volume or run off the edges into congealed silence [44]. The comparison with Pollocks action painting is both obvious and intentional [45]. The primary purpose in both visual and aural contexts is the transcendence of conventional physical, artistic and cultural boundaries imposed by traditional materials/instruments and procedures. This emphasis is also reflected in the previously mentioned fascination with outsider art and the dislike of technical virtuosity. In relation to this, Dubuffets comment that he

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hold[s] to be useless all those types of acquired skill and those gifts (such as we are used to finding in the works of professional painters) whose sole effect seems to me to be that of extinguishing all spontaneity, switching off and condemning the work to inefficiency [46]

enjoys kinship with Cardews view that

technical mastery is of no intrinsic value in music (or love). . . . Elaborate forms and a brilliance of technique conceal a basic inhibition, a reluctance to directly express love, a fear of selfexposure [47].

Art as an expression of the artist s alienation from society and the given aesthetic (especially important to the Dada and Surrealist movements) led not only to new procedures and new materials but to new forms. The disorientation of the spectator aided the destruction of conventional ways of understanding the world and dealing with experiences according to preconceived patterns. Improvisation shares a similar strategy of alienation: the aspiration to live beyond forms of stifling institutionalized orderbe it Western classical aesthetics (Cage); white-dominated capitalist culture (jazz); or other commercial factors and established aesthetic systems (the underground)led to the emergence of free improvisation and remains a key aesthetic focus. The vast size of many Abstract Expressionist paintings served this end through the overpowering predominance of textural surface qualities and their engulfing and disorientating affect upon the spectator. Prvost states that the notions of theory, practice, hierarchy and structure of the period were, for AMM, replaced by a focus upon the color and texture of sound (analogous to a painterly aesthetic ), a soundworld in which there was not even a formal beginning and ending [48].

musical tradition provides the musical parallel to these developments. Cage s Eastern-influenced aesthetics, jazz s struggle with racism and capitalist control and reactions to integral serialism contribute to the twentieth centurys central theme of redefining the content of works of art through an emphasis upon what can be called material facture. Free improvisation draws from these trends and, along with Abstract Expressionism, represents a highly personal and abstracted use of its medium (approached, ultimately, as sound). Cardews comparison of free improvisation with composed music views written compositions as historic reference points to the musics concrete form; improvisation, on the other hand, has no such reference to its concrete form [50]. The thesis here is that the paintings of Abstract Expressionism can be viewed as equivalent historic reference points for the 1960s genre of free improvisation. By virtue of the similarity of processual dynamics and artistic agenda, the concrete forms of Abstract Expressionism can be approached as historical references, or indeed scores insofar as such paintings can be understood in their broadest sense as imagistic representations of past and potential performances of free improvisation. References and Notes
1. The mid-1950s style of Hard-Bop, largely indistinguishable in musical terms from its parent style of Bop (Bebop), reaffirmed Bop s modernist intentions through continued and uncompromising adherence to melodic, harmonic and rhythmic density as a reaction against cool and West Coast styles. In relation to free jazz, Ekkehard Josts analytic study points out that its development cannot only be linked to the playing of one or two outstanding musicians, but that the multiple influences of the time are equally significant: The influences felt in the divergent personal styles of the Sixties encompass musicians like Sidney Bechet, Ben Webster, Thelonius Monk and Lennie Tristano as well as Stravinsky, Schoenberg and Cage. Ekkehard Jost, Free Jazz (New York: Da Capo Press, 1994) p. 11. 2. Jost [1] pp. 910. 3. Derek Bailey, Improvisation: Its Nature and Practice in Music (New York: Da Capo Press, 1993) p. 55. First published in 1980 by Moorland in association with Incus Records. 4. Pierre Boulez, Recherches maintenant, in Relevs dapprenti (Paris, 1966) pp. 2732. 5. Paul Griffiths, Modern Music: The Avant Garde Since 1945 (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1986) pp. 138141. 6. John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings (London: Marion Boyars, 1987) p. 59. First published in Great Britain in 1968 by Calder and Boyars. 7. Michael Nyman, Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1999) p. 4. First published in 1974 by Studio Vista, Cassell, and Collier Macmillan, London. 8. Griffiths [5] p. 182.

9. Cornelius Cardew, Treatise Handbook (London: Edition Peters, 1971) p. xvii. 10. Edwin Prvost, No Sound Is Innocent: AMM and the Practice of Self-Invention. Meta-Musical Narratives. Essays. (Harlow, U.K.: Copula, 1995) p. 9. 11. The term was used by the music and concert organizer Victor Schonfield. Prvost [10] p. 12. 12. Prvost [10] p. 14. It should be noted that this possible dimension needs to be understood or perhaps qualified in relation to the quote that follows in the main text, that AMM . . . denied all external authority and resisted attempts to impose their will upon events, a comment obviously directed against notions of authorial intent and the artist but that nevertheless highlights an interesting and significant ambiguity. 13. Prvost [10] p. 13. 14. Lukas Foss, The Changing Composer-Performer Relationship: A Monologue and a Dialogue, Perspectives of New Music 1 (1963) pp. 4553. 15. For a detailed consideration of links between Fluxus and Cardew s Scratch Orchestra, see Michael Parsonss article, The Scratch Orchestra and the Visual Arts, in this issue of LMJ. 16. Bailey [3] pp. xixii. 17. For a detailed discussion of this the reader is, again, referred to Parsons [15] and to Eddie Pr vost s article, The Arrival Of A New Musical Aesthetic: Extracts From A Half-Buried Diary, also in this issue of LMJ. 18. This is documented in Brian Enos foreword to the long-overdue second edition of Nymans Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond. Originally published in 1974 [7] p. xi. 19. Although worthy of more detail than appropriate here, it is necessary to comment on the musical arts apparent time lag in the questioning and destructuring of content. In comparison to the visual arts (and putting aside the issue of representation for art forms), art music and its works have traditionally been more heavily mediated. The musical event has its genesis with the genius composer, is stored in notation and is realized, after much effort, by highly skilled performer-interpreters within specific and uniquely related performance contexts. From this perspective it can be argued that it was a smaller step for the visual arts to turn the subject matter of art in upon itself and towards the material of the medium. The ossification engendered by musics history required visionaries and inter-disciplinarians (such as Cage and those musician/artists working in the art schools of Britain) to unhinge musical experience and musical understanding from the notation-based composerperformer work axis. Additionally, the displacement of notation, by advances in technology, as the primary means of music storage has continued to enhance and focus this paradigm shift. 20. Dawn Ades, Dada and Surrealism, in David Britt, ed., Modern Art: Impressionism to Post-Modernism (London: Thames & Hudson, 1992) p. 226. First published in 1974. 21. Anna Elizabeth Balakian, in Andr Breton, Magus Of Surrealism (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1971), describes automatic writing as a process involving a triple convergence: the psychological concept of the liberation of psychic inhibitions, the mathematical one of the coincidences of chance verbal encounters, and the hermetic one of the oracular function of the medium-poet, p. 61. 22. Ades [20] p. 229. 23. Ades [20] pp. 229230. 24. Ades [20] p. 231. 25. Cardew [9] p. xviii. 26. Bailey [3] p. 112.

CONCLUSION
It has already been said that the shift initiated by abstraction focused the subject matter of art upon itself. Concern for symbolism and iconography was replaced by an engagement with abstract form. Artists explored the nature and function of art on its own terms through explorations of the medium s intrinsic formal language of line, tone color, composition and texture. In Abstract Expressionism these elements are foregrounded alongside the (essentially modernist) agenda of an artist seeking a maximum of interaction with these qualities as a means of self-expression [49]. The breaking down of functional and formal elements of the

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27. Anthony Everitt, Abstract Expressionism, in Britt [20] p. 253. 28. Everitt [27] p. 254. 29. Peter Wollen points out that Orientalism preceded Surrealism as the initial vehicle for a rejection of instrumental reason within the avant-garde, and that there was a strong transitional Orientalist current at play within the Surrealist movement itself, in Raiding the Icebox: Reflections on TwentiethCentury Culture (London: Verso, 1993) p. 24. 30. It should be noted that these developments were also current within Europe. Although terms differ (Abstract Expressionism being more usually applied to American painters, with Gestural or Lyrical Abstraction more often used to describe European equivalents) Surrealism and its associated influences resulted in similar painting-styles on both sides of the Atlantic. Indeed, it was the French artist Jean Dubuffet who coined the term art brut (raw or crude art) after his fascination with the art of children, psychotics, and amateurs. 31. Harold Osborne, ed., The Oxford Companion to Art (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1970) p. 4. 32. In the words of Jackson Pollock (from 1944): I am particularly impressed with their [the Surrealists] concept of the source of art being the unconscious Ades [20] pp. 249250. 33. Wollen [29] p. 72. 34. Pollock quoted in Everitt [27] p. 265. 35. Motherwell quoted in Everitt [27] p. 266. 36. Cardew [9] p. xx. 37. Bailey [3] p. 83. 38. The following description by flautist Jim Denley of the improvisational process provides a musical example of the way in which artist and medium can, in a sense, exchange autonomy and influence one another. My lungs, lips, finger, voice box and their working together with their potentials of sound are

dialoguing with other levels which I might call mind and perception. [One could easily include the term unconscious.] The thoughts and decisions are sustained and modified by my physical potentials and vice versa but as soon as I try to define these separately I run into problems. It is a meaningless enterprise for it is the very entanglement of levels of perception, awareness and physicality that makes improvisation. See Bailey [3] p. 108. 39. It seems that many free improvisers accept without question that extremes of chaos, and non-idiomatic and non-repetitive playing are what characterize their art and when idiomatic references or repetitive, harmonically centred and/or clearly melodic content occurs, it is to be eradicated immediately. Alternatively, such events can be incorporated as dimensions of the musics process (and hence its ongoing and developing structural relationships). A further distinction exists in groups who emphasize texture, where repetition is key but functions quite differently to the repetition of, for example, a strong melodic and/or rhythmic idea. These thoughts touch on an area left undeveloped in this article. For further discussion of the relationship between unconscious intuitive playing and the more conscious intellectual manipulation of material, see Matthew Sansom, Musical Meaning: A Qualitative Investigation of Free Improvisation, Ph.D. Thesis, University of Sheffield, 1997. 40. Wollen [29] p. 73. 41. See Anton Ehrenzweig, The Hidden Order of Art (London: Weidenfeld, 1993). First published in 1967. 42. Prvost [10] p. 15. 43. I once heard this type of playing referred to, somewhat disparagingly but not inaccurately historically, as 70s art-school playing. 44. Prvost [10] p. 17. 45. The comparison with Pollocks action paint-

ing is not a new one. In 1967 Lukas Foss wrote of group improvisation: One might call it ActionMusic . . . Chamber improvisation lays the emphasis on the performance resulting from the situation, and puts the responsibility for the choices squarely on the shoulders of the performer. It bypasses the composer. It is composition become performance, performer s music. Reginald Smith Brindle, The New Music: The Avant-Garde Since 1945 (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford Univ. Press, 1990) p. 86. First published in 1987. 46. Everitt [27] p. 287. 47. Cardew [9] pp. xviiixix. 48. Prvost [10] p. 9. 49. The emergence and success of modernist abstraction should, of course, be seen in relation to the re-institution of realism in Stalinist and Nazi totalitarian art. This move served to confirm modernist abstraction as the alternative style of the democratic free world, banishing realism for good. 50. Cardew [9] p. xvii.

Manuscript received 28 December 2000.

Matthew Sansom is a Lecturer in Music at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, England. Alongside wide research interests that include creativity, musical meaning, popular music and club culture, he is an accomplished saxophonist (specializing in free improvisation) and DJ and produces studioand groove-based electronic music.

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Sansom, Imaging Music