Have you ever been in a room full of people and everyone stops talking at the same time? The awkward silence lingers for just a moment, then leaves as soon as it came. The funny thing about musical improvisation is that from my experience, experimental musicians strive for that awkward moment. It is a moment of both clarity and confusion and no one knows what’s going to happen next. Let me elaborate.
The musical improvisation I am referring to is not the kind you find on a jazz album. No. What I am talking about is purely experimental. It is the kind that could leave you perplexed, astounded, angry, happy, and tired, all at the same time! Let me provide you with a few explanations as to how this music is composed.
Imagine music as a graph with the x-axis as time and the y-axis as activity. Before the music starts, there is nothing on the graph and therefore, the graph can be seen as a blank canvas for the artist(s) to ‘paint’ on. When the music starts, the artist(s) then decide in real-time what the graph is going to look like. If there is one artist, it is easy to control the amount of activity in a performance. When there are multiple artists, the graph takes the shape of the overall activity of a performance over time thus making it harder for a single artist to control the look of the graph This leads to two different types of performances that artists need to grasp: solo and group.
A group of musicians who play together can be seen as a group of people in conversation. The main difference is that the musician’s conversation involves sound instead of only words and gestures. Just like a regular conversation, the people conversing do not know what direction the conversation will take. The conversation can have moments of extreme activity or moments of awkwardness. It can last for a long time or a short time. The conversation could end abruptly, slowly, or even in an argument! The same goes for musicians who improvise. The outcome of the performance all depends on the artist(s).
In traditional Western music improvisation, there are loose boundaries in which performer(s) can improvise within. These loose boundaries can be defined by key or scale patterns, rhythm, and/or time allotted for said improvisation. However, with experimental improvisations, there are no rules. Let me state again, there are no rules. This means that anything goes for anything. A good example of this would be that a performer could play the cup, pencil, and stones while the moved around the performance space (a performer’s instrument is what they make of it).
One would be surprised to find out that most of the improvisations I have experienced did not end in disaster! Yes, there are no boundaries, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t certain performance courtesy’s. The group of artists could set guidelines as to what they would like the performance to ‘look like’ (as in how the graph will look). They could also set their own limitations such as instrument choice and number of events allowed per minute. For example, here are a few common guidelines as to how a performance could be structured:
I have attempted to provide a background as to what experimental musical improvisation is and isn’t. However, there is no substitute for the actual performances of such music. It is here that I will provide you with more concrete examples. Here is a very small list of performances:
I have split this post into multiple parts as there is no way I could cover four years within a single post. In the next few parts, I will discuss more about this music. I will then dive into my experiences with the experimental music improvisational group, XiME.