06 Jul When Are We Really Improvising?

Like you, I’ve been improvising for a long time. Improvisation is so ubiquitous that it doesn’t actually need to be called anything. Essentially, that’s the biggest problem in examining improvised activity. Noticing, seeing, remembering, acting, not-acting, playing, resting, driving, cooking, listening. It’s in everything people do. Offering the entire world as one interconnected and improvised relationship is my favourite shared activity with tense students who are reluctant to improvise.

Today I want to share a paper I wrote (gulp) 10 years ago for the now defunct International Association of Jazz Educators that deals with that tension. Reading older writing shares the same awkwardness of listening to the sound of your own voice, only you can’t edit your voice that much. There are ideas of mine in this paper that clearly prove I am a wild and reckless dreamer first and academic second. Central to the paper is this incredible solo by flugelhornist Freddie Hubbard (1938-2008). Apologies for the use of jazz font, it was a different time, we were all experimenting. Also, the indenting is inconsistent. I’m still getting the hang of WordPress. Happy to send a pdf of the paper if you contact me.

 

Mel Lewis and Friends (1977)

Freddie Hubbard (flugel); Cecil Bridgewater (trumpet); Micheal Brecker (tenor saxophone); Greg Herbert (alto sax); Hank Jones (piano); Ron Carter (bass); Mel Lewis (drums). Recorded June 8 and 9 and mixed June 18, 1976 at Generation Sound, NYC.  A&M SP-716

 

When are we really improvising?: Towards an Understanding of Reciprocal Contingency

Patrick Boyle

Presented at IAJE in New York City, January 12, 2007

This paper addresses a critical concern for improvisers. When I ‘improvise’, on what basis is my playing merely an iteration of the learned patterns indicative to the particular musical style and on what basis am I creating spontaneous utterances?

I consistently encounter younger students of improvisation who feel overwhelmed. There is so much musical material to cover that there seems to be not enough time in the day to attend to everything. Agitation and frustration set in, and bad habits are formed. They attempt to feel good about themselves through repetitive practice of familiar material, or (even worse) they avoid practicing altogether. Even though it can be difficult to do, in my experience with such students I have found it beneficial to try and talk about improvisation intellectually only when a practical element is obvious and accessible.

I often get questions from younger improvisers that stem from preoccupations of sounding ‘right.’ What is the right way to swing eighth notes? Which scale will ‘work’ over Dbm7? Why is my time bad? I feel that students will only make to be creative without feeling the need to sound ‘right’ all the time. Utilizing the power of limits, I want to generate a culture of confidence where even the newest student is making conscious decisions about improvised art.

A major concern throughout this work is what I am now calling the convergence of tradition, idiosyncrasy, and individuality in improvised artistic behavior: how acquired materials converge with the unknown.  I posit that improvisation is a social process that is procedure-driven. To improvise does not imply that no rules are in effect or that an idealistic state of freedom is attained. Saying there are ‘no rules’ is itself a rule. All players have their own internalized ‘cookbooks’ of licks and formulae. I am interested in how improvisers consistently reiterate these personal stylings in the pursuit of spontaneity, regardless of genre or ability.

Human nature is, at the core, controlled by a driving force that compartmentalizes and governs on several levels.[1]  Even the very hands improvisers use  act as a containing agent that can accumulate energy and intelligence.[2] There is a delicate interplay in the varying relationships among the fingers and the different attributes they bring to a given task. Indeed, humans are bound by both biological structure and all the culturally constructed ideologies that have manifested themselves throughout the millions of years of evolutionary development. All creative action, including intentionally created human sound, is indelibly marked by that which it means  to be human. According to Nachmanovitch:

Our body-mind is a highly organized and structured affair, interconnected as only a natural organism can be that has evolved over hundreds of millions of years. An improviser does not operate form a formless vacuum, but from three billion years of organic evolution; all that we were is encoded somewhere in us.[3]

With the acquisition of language proficiency, active concentration is no longer required for common conversational speech. In addition to the utterances themselves, word/sentence arrangements, use of tenses, enunciation, tone, and overall connectivity are so internalized that it is solely “the content of the communication, whose quality of articulation will be all the greater the richer the vocabulary you have at your disposal” that is the supreme, and unconscious, focal point.[4] The same act of referential organization is true in improvised music. The parameters indicative to the style of music being played, as well as the qualitative use of those parameters (consonance/dissonance, parallel/contrary motion, tempo etc.) must be so ingrained that truthfully they are not thought of at all unless intentionally part of a controlled process (to be explained). It’s well and good to direct students to listen to as much jazz as possible, but it is equally important that they make conscious decisions about how they want to sound. You have to know what you want to say/play/listen for before you can say/play/hear it. All of the conceivable hierarchies and their functions need to be available for implementation and processing on the spur of the moment: instantaneous composition, the spontaneous construction of order, or “intuition in action.”[5] As a social practice, improvisation is the ability for a performer to react to his/her own decisions in real time to create continuity of expression and engage in collaborative effort.

According to educator Emile-Jacques Dalcroze:

[Improvisation] develops students’ speed of decision-making, of instrumental execution, of effortless concentration and immediate plan-formation, and to establish direct communications between the spirit that pulses, the brain which represents and co-ordinates, and the arms and hands which put into execution.[6]

         Since decision making can be viewed as the conscious redirecting of attention, the improviser’s field of cognitive action is manifested as a result of the particular qualities which bear on the direction of attention. Humans have limited resources in the sense that only a few operations can be carried out simultaneously. Therefore, attention acts as an organizational and constraining agent to expedite decision making. It organizes the entire field of action into the minimum number of tasks that can be processed, and further constrains the level of concentration for each individual task.

         Ed Sarath proposed an extremely engaging cognitive model for improvisation in a paper he contributed to the 1994 IAJE Jazz Research Proceedings Yearbook.[7] An aesthetic that transcends the norms of traditional improvised performing arts is dependent on the consistency with which an improviser can simultaneously route attention alongside, and away from, the obligations of style. These convergent phenomena are the result of the intersection of linear/nonlinear temporality and from this, three properties regarding the level of inherent “newness” in performance can be observed. From the perspective of the improvising artist, these properties are the following:

1. The Future is Unmanifest

The activity of improvisation, and for that matter life in this universe itself, carries with it the assumption that a certain degree of unpredictability is continuously at play. Indeed, the very fact you are reading this sentence and the precise order of what is to follow is unknown exemplifies this point. The artist is “continually drawn to the present as the last thing known” as a result of this expectation.[8]

2. Perception of the Present is Intensified

The perception of the present can vary during performance, but it is more sharply focused when improvising. Considering that some actions are particularly high-maintenance, a player may be forced to direct a certain amount of attention on the mechanics of the activity itself. As Sarath explains, “temporal awareness in improvisation is implosive, forever discarding the linear relationships between past and future coordinates for the stability and self-sufficiency of the moment.”[9]

3. Perception of the Past is Neutralized

Whereas the future has yet to come into existence, what occurs in the past has been audibly realized. In so doing, a referent is created (hence the use of the word “neutralized”). This referential knowledge of the past, in conjunction with a heightened present state, (itself a result of the uncertainty of the future) consolidates a temporal and attentive motion which directs attention from the past towards the present. In the course of performance, an improviser has to be able to access information from the past while, simultaneously, not being bound by it. These are two ostensibly dichotomous processes, and their reciprocal nature is facilitated through nonlinear thinking.

The field of play that is created by these three attentive conditions can be realized in terms of contingency. Differing from a choice, a contingency is a possible future event that is potentially able to influence present action.[10] To call something a contingent event is to acknowledge a notable distinction between intent and circumstance: by disassociating the intent these events are merely circumstantial data. For something to be a contingency, a variable or a set of variables must be present.

Moving from one idea to the next and the resultant predicaments players deal with is perhaps the most difficult area to put in words. No matter what the genre is, there are several moves available to a player at any given time. Contingencies are musical moments where there is no particular best move, and there is an overriding sense of inevitability. The playing field is constantly changing: with each new decision a clean slate of new variables appears. The palette is limited only by the intersection of the environment, imagination, and ability.

In the game of chess, especially during the end game when there are fewer pieces on the board to obstruct play, opposing players have a variety of options before them. Earlier in the game, each player was arguably more immediately influenced by the actions of the other player as there was less space available to play. The major difference between unpredictability in chess and improvised music is that in chess, there is a clear objective on behalf of both players to checkmate the opponent. The goals of collaborative musical improvisation are less apparent. Nonetheless, there is a shared notion of constant fluctuation of the field of play.

In an art gallery, as you maneuver yourself around a huge statue to view it, you are changing your physical location in relation to the object. Each new position alters your visual perspective. Each decision produces a new set of contingent facts. An element of reciprocity is incurred when the decisions of an improviser alter the potentialities of the subsequent decisions. In conversation for instance, while waiting to make next move a participant’s expected response is subject to the initial actions of the other.[11]

To return to our chess analogy, a chess game can show the nature of reciprocal contingency. White makes a move. Immediately, this changes the range of contingencies available to black. Had white made another move, the field would be entirely different. Again, the field shifts as white counters and the process continues. Blackjack is another game in which propinquity of contingent reciprocal function is evident.

To better understand this in relation of music, I have modified Sarath’s the tripartite cognitive event cycle of actuality, possibility, and probability by adding another tier called unintentionality. There are overlapping, though non-contradictory, concepts here with the notion of reciprocal contingency. Actualities are contingent sound events which are heard. Recall that contingent events can still be deemed “events” whether or not they have occurred and to this end they can be realized as possibilities: events which may become actualized based on the intent of the artist. Those possibilities (contingent events) that have the most potential to become actualized in sound due to any number of reasons (they may be recipes of habit from the player’s cookbook for instance) are called probabilities. The cycle of events looks something like this:

…an event sounds (the actuality), a field of future successors (the possibilities) is inferred by the artist, one is chosen (the probability – the possibility with the most cognitive thrust) from which a new slate of implied successors emerges, and the process continues throughout the during of the piece.[12]

         As logical as this rendering of the event cycle is unto itself, I posit this fourth category, unintentionalities, addresses a grey area that exists between actuality and possibility. There are sound events that occur that are not from the plane of possibilities. An event sounds, a field of possibilities manifests itself, the one with most potential is selected, and in its activation something entirely unexpected happens – something that could have (or perhaps was) been taken into account but in any case exists. Such unintentionalities might be an overblown harmonic, a skipped or inadvertently muted string, dynamic incongruity etc. Bachmann states:

…learning to improvise is to a large extent learning to cope with the unexpected and to take advantage of one’s mistakes. A chord may suddenly appear one’s fingertips which bears no relation to what had been expected and wanders off the path originally embarked upon; nothing for it but to change one’s plans; either follow the detour till it joins up with the main route, or else adopt the newly opened route and change the intended continuation.[13]

         These types of contingent events are also reciprocal in that upon their actualization, the entire field changes. It is certainly conceivable that unintentionalities could exist as a subset of either actuality or possibility. The plane of possibilities is infinite, unless qualified by those possibilities which relate to style (both individual, instrumental, and genre specific) and to this end unintentionalities may not warrant classification whatsoever. The ability for a performer to draw serviceable material out of mistakes made in the course of performance is likely the most valuable skill one can cultivate.[14]

Through acknowledgment of contingent events as possibilities, an improviser engages in a cognitive state that is nonlinear in that attention directed towards the future is limited while the present moment “stands alone.” By this I mean that the intensifying the present moment creates a centralized space that is not bound by the future, but just aware of it. Conversely, acknowledging contingent events as probabilities engages a linear cognitive state in that attention is very much drawn towards the future. These are the contents of an improvisers bag of tricks.

As stated previously, intellectualizing improvisation should incur a practical element. This protracted explanation of intent and circumstance is just another way to encourage younger students to make conscious choices about what they are doing. Encouraging students to play with their own conviction is just as important to me as teaching good intonation, playing in time, and other fundamentals. The most personal musical statements come from a strong belief in the material. It is not my motive to negate the wondrous, mystical experiences associated with improvisation, but I do want to make it clear that it is a process that can be acquired, learned, and (though extensive practice) improved upon. I want my students to blow through their “mistakes” and “create” spontaneity with confidence. Creativity exists when limitations are negotiated head-on. To elucidate this point, examine this transcription of the Freddie Hubbard flugelhorn solo on the blues tune “Sho’ Nuff Did” (EXAMPLE 1). This is an excellent solo to elucidate constant tension between principles of structure and improvisation.

In these four blues choruses, Hubbard employs devices that may be interpreted as probabilities. Note the motive at measure 2 as it recurs throughout the solo. While its restatements are each slightly different, there is no doubt: it is clearly the same motive being varied. I think it is plausible to state that this motive begins as an actuality, though as the solo continues it becomes a probability. As Hubbard progresses, this phrase is reiterated in such a way as it takes on a prominent organizational role for the first three choruses. The frequency of occurrence soon makes it a logical structuring agent, referent, and probability all at once.[15] At these points, in a linear cognitive state, Hubbard is bound by both the past and the future. The present is not intensified which diminishes the overall level of spontaneity due to the lack of density in the contingent environment. In another instance, Hubbard plays a series of inverted minor seventh chords at measures 21, 31, and 32. I think these phrases can be read as consequent possibilities extending from what came before them.

         There are two instances that can be viewed as formulae in action. The first is a descending series of triads and minor seventh chords at measures 20-21 and again at measures 43-44 (marked Formula A). Both occur at the same point in the harmonic progression. This example is a true formula (and holon) in that it exists as several smaller vocabulary units (the sixteenth-note sequential descending arpeggio) which combine to create a longer, coherent pattern. A second instance of a formulaic pattern is the sequential chromatic descent at measures 4, 34, and the fourth beat of 44 (marked Formula B). This example shows the difficulty in distinguishing between formulas and motives. In motivic improvisation, a very limited number of motives (often only one or two) are manipulated through various means to forge new material. As this phrase itself is repeated and not developed whatsoever, I posit it is a formula. Unlike Formula A, it does not occur at the same point in the harmonic progression (though Owens has shown that formulas can exist in different harmonic contexts). This is a common device of trumpet players in this style: the harmonic ambiguity of the lick acts in a connective function (i.e. it provides an easy way out of potentially dangerous situations: the essence of probability).

So apt is the word extemporize, often a synonym for improvise, for when looked at etymologically means “without time.” In fact, the event cycle shown here proves that when an improviser is playing without time – that being a nonlinear state that magnifies the present and undermines the temporal polarity of past and future – the field of play is in its highest degree of flux. Improvisation as a verb occurs at this intersection of intent and action. This “rapid composition in a performance situation deviating in many elements from a prior existent model” is instigated by intent, and manifested by action.[16] Only when the speed of the decision making results in a thriving contingent field of play that is both dynamic and urgent – which in turn, generates a feeling of perpetually being a part of “now,” is a performer really improvising.

NOTES:

[1] Edward T. Hall, “Improvisation as an Acquired, Multilevel Process.” Ethnomusicology Volume 36 (1992): 223.

[2] Stephen Nachmanovitch, Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art. (New York: Penguin, 1990) 7.

[3] Ibid. 27.

[4] Marie-Laurie Bachmann, Dalcroze Today: An Education Through and Into Music. (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995) 109.

[5] Nachmanovitch, 41.

[6] Emile-Jacques Dalcroze, “L’improvisation musicale.” Le Rhythme. Volume 34 (1932): 3.

[7] Ed Sarath, “Nonlinear Time Dynamics: A Cognitive Model for the Improvisation Process.” Jazz Research Papers 1994. 127-35.

[8] ibid 128.

[9] ibid 127.

[10] Casey Sokol personal communication

[11] Fran Lebowitz, Social Studies. (New York: Random House, 1981) 7.

[12] Sarath, 128. Parentheses are mine.

[13] Bachmann, 109.

[14] Nachmanovitch, 88-93. Nachmanovitch has detailed the value and power of mistakes have for performers.

[15] A main reason I have selected this solo for analysis is because of its logical, and beautifully simple, design that results in part from this opening motive.

[16] Robert Bowman, The Question of Improvisation and Head Arrangement in King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band. Masters thesis, York University, 1982, 163.