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On spontaneous music
Alvin Curran
Published online: 08 Jan 2007.
To cite this article: Alvin Curran (2006) On spontaneous music, Contemporary Music Review, 25:5-6,
483-490
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Contemporary Music Review
Vol. 25, Nos. 5/6, October/December 2006, pp. 483 – 490
On Spontaneous Music
Alvin Curran
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The following reflections are written five years apart, the first in response to Sabine
Feisst, for her doctoral thesis, the second written at the request of Giesela
Gronemeyer for the present publication. The author begs the reader’s understanding
for some occasional overlap.
Improvisation is the art of becoming sound. It is the only art in which a human being
can and must become the music he or she is making. It is the art of constant, attentive and
dangerous living in every moment. It is the art of stepping outside of time, disappearing in
it, becoming it. It is both the fine art of listening and responding and the more refined art
of silence. It is the only musical art where the entire ‘score’ is merely the self and the
others, and the space and moment where and when this happens. Improvisation is the
only musical art which is predicated entirely on human trust.
The art of improvisation assumes (and for me unequivocally proves) that human
beings are musical beings and that not unlike the great natural musicians of the
animal kingdom—from crickets and cicadas to whales, wolves and lions—all human
beings are born with, possess and participate in some form of music.
Regardless of the musical context (the people, place or time, tradition or style), the
art of improvisation puts the full responsibility for the music being made on the
person/s making it, and for the entire duration of its making.
Hence, in free improvisation the prevailing notions about the origins of music
(the gods, collective memory, composers, mythology, etc.) are temporarily eclipsed
by the sheer magical energy of the physical person/s making the music—for it is
they who are momentarily but fully responsible for the sounds they make. It is
they, the improvisers, in whom the traditional roles of composer, performer,
director and teacher are fused into one single role. It is they who, in every sense,
become—literally are—the music they make; and at best, transform everyone and
everything into that music—that sharing of air, time and space. This is
immediately as evident on hearing an improvised cadenza in a Beethoven piano
concerto as it is in hearing Coltrane’s endless concatenations on the song ‘My
Favorite Things’ or in a Dagar Brothers levitating performance of an evening raga.
And this is even far more evident in musics not rooted in tradition, but in
continuing experiment and research; such spontaneous musics could be said to be
based on almost ‘nothing’.
0) Any physical space is a potential musical space as is any time of day or night an
appropriate musical time.
1) All music starts anew each time, as if there had never been any music before it.
2) Any member of the group may utilize any audible or imaginable sound at any
time.
3) Musical remembering and musical amnesia are of equal value—in short, one
could build on past or conditioned experience or try to forget everything ever
known.
4) The requirements for musical participation are no longer based on purely
musical skills, education, technique, experience, age, gender, race or religion
but on an implicit code of universal harmony and mutual acceptance. This
resulted immediately in a form of transnational music.
5) Each player provides his/her own instruments and sound sources.
6) The act of collective performance has no specified duration and performances
begin and end by tacit (musically understandable) agreement.
7) Without leaders, scores, or any rules at all, the music should be based on the
musicians’ mutual respect for and trust in one another, the public, and the
individual and sum of all the sounds emitted into the performing space.
8) Because this music is fragile and dangerously based on almost nothing
(ephemeral sounds and precarious human relationships), the players must
cultivate extraordinary levels of attention, awareness and artistic efficiency—
primarily through silence and rigorous listening, and appropriate action and
reaction—so to prevent the music from becoming literally nothing. This form
of personal and collective commitment endowed everyone involved (including
the producers and public) with finely tuned ears and magnanimous attitudes.
9) No matter what transpires, a sense of transcendent unity is likely to be the
unspoken goal of every improvisational event. (This sense of unity, though not
always achieved, is very recognizable, almost tangible in certain moments.
Especially when one cannot answer the questions: ‘did I make that/did we
make that/did you make that/did they make that?’
10) All members share equally in the promotion, economic stability and creative
growth of the group—in return for an equal share in received proceeds.
11) This is a space for your own contribution.
15 – 17 July 1995
486 A. Curran
music, just kindly drop a coin in the cup.’ The well-groomed morning travelers
offered no resistance, and dutifully dropped coins in this ‘alien’s’ cup; as promised,
he did not play again. I thought, Man! What an original economic strategy—getting
the public to pay you not to make your music!!!!! My god, what if after 1945 the
new music community—instead of madly searching for the new Beethoven among
us—had adopted the brilliant strategy of this New York City street artist: offering
not to play its music, in exchange for money!!!!! We’d probably all be sipping cool
drinks in an Internet cafe in Tahiti today rather than sitting in airless halls listening
to interminable grating sonic aggregates, still waiting for some illumination or new
saint to appear.
I have just finished listening to and remastering 16 hours of recorded tapes of the
group Musica Elettronica Viva—which I co-founded. In its heyday (1966 – 1973), this
indefinable group was considered benignly revolutionary by an attentive European
mainstream press and was a musical icon on the fringe of the fringe counterculture.
Whatever the merits of the group’s music, MEV—its actions as well as its music—
struck fear into the heart of the music establishment, because it believed that the
music was the property of no one individual or author, but that of the group, and
that music is a universal human right, and any human being, by mere will, can also be
a music-maker.
Incidentally, these two beliefs are now again at the center of an ethical and legal
debate over the definition of music and its ownership and use on the Internet.
At the beginning of the 30-plus years of MEV history, the original core group
(Alan Bryant, Alvin Curran, Jon Phetteplace, Carol Plantamura, Frederic Rzewski,
Richard Teitelbaum, Ivan Vandor) took for granted the inherent value of a fixed
group structure as such. But in time, as we became accustomed to playing with many
self-invited guests—and even with many so-called non-musicians—a concept
emerged, largely promoted by Rzewski, to create a music by inviting the general
public to participate, without any structure or rules: the ‘Sound Pool’ announced,
‘Bring a sound, cast it into the pool’ and people did; they came in droves and often
left at the forced invitation of the local police and fire departments. ‘Sound Pool’ was
both an open request and an authorization for anyone to make ‘music’ together as
they pleased—freely.
These were not jam sessions nor happenings (both of which are based on
determinate themes and structures), but collective music events for many people
Contemporary Music Review 487
(usually 50 or more) which, after an initial launching by MEV’s catalytic example,
inevitably developed into independent throbbing dense polyphonies, multiple walls
of sound of any color, speed, density and feeling. The ‘Sound Pool’ was often enacted
in large rooms, where groups of musicians could form casually, play independently
and dissolve into other groups, where individuals could wander from place to place
playing offhandedly with an anonymous passerby or stopping to join in a small or
large ongoing pocket of music. In short, a sea of freely mutating human symphonies
which could at certain moments bring to mind a Cage ‘Music Circus’, a Pauline
Oliveros ‘Meditation’, or even a Globe-Unity mass improv., though none of those
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same illusive and unnamable space—unified by making the same music together, as if
it had been composed, magically composed . . . and this music we knew was ours, we
had in fact composed and performed it in the moment—bang-zoom!! Just like that.
Whatever else remains of the MEV legacy, we challenged the noble traditions of
western music in a new and untried way: by daring to reverse the ‘proper’ professional
balance between technique and passion, by asserting—I’ll say it again—that we, and in
fact anyone, could make a music based on nothing, with any sounding means and
without written score, sketch, agreement, leadership or even, we hoped, memory. That
in fact we could make music of powerful emotive content and attraction outside the
canons of historical western compositional practice was a profound discovery to all of
us in the group and to many outside. The collective process and a few early (middle-
sixties) electronic technologies allowed us to extract the hidden sounds inside any
object, or from the entire sounding environment, or from electricity itself, as well as
those drawn from the depths of the human mind and body—this was the nuclear
matter of our daily experimental live-electronic group improvisations.
That the utopian cultural implications of this practice were in succeeding decades
absorbed, codified, expanded on, contested, marginalized, even somewhat forgotten
is history’s natural way. Thirty-five years later, as I sit here in the July heat, it seems
to me that the revolution we had the privilege of participating in has evolved into
largely standardized improvisatory practices (some still vital, others not) that all in
some way had their origins in those mad fortuitous encounters among Free Jazz,
Indeterminacy, European structuralist composition, explosive countercultures, and
movements for social and economic justice. One could even argue that today’s
sizeable worldwide free-improvising community, while apparently alive and well, is
making music in a temporal cul de sac a predictably common practice. Is this music
movement at an end, buried in no longer provocative atonalisms, collage, and macho
virtuosity, and overshadowed by the economic power of mainstream jazz, the
gravitational forces of the European New Music ‘Betrieb’, and more youthful forms
of hip-hop, noise and electronics—all which have successfully incorporated elements
of the earlier freely improvised music styles? I ask myself, will the myth of Schoenberg
outlive the myth of Cecil Taylor, or will both of them fade while Beethoven and Dr.
Dre slip away with the culture bounty?
In retrospect, maybe not much of the sixties experience was truly revolutionary,
and less of it had profoundly transformative consequences, but 30 years later, as
490 A. Curran
trends and technologies in music are unfolding at a dizzying rate, thankfully the
confrontation between progressive and regressive has not been globalized out of
existence. The youth culture, without setting a foot in the piazza, imagines it can
subvert the entire social and economic order by the simple click of a mouse. And with
the planet now choking on its own voracious music consumption—music of every
kind everywhere all the time—surely someone will be able, once again, to inject it
with a wicked dose of orderly disorder. MEV is dead! MEV lives!
http://www.alvincurran.com