Reading around free improvisation

Abstract

Freedom in musical performance has come to mean many things. For performers re-enacting the classical score, freedom is expressed through a range of adjustments to musical parameters such as colouration of tone, tempo, timing displacement and emphasis. The composer has laid out in the score a comprehensive set of instructions to be observed, and performers are trained to observe such instructions in the realisation of the work. Clearly, the trained performer is aware of their role as an intermediary for the re-enactment of another’s ideas, and that to deviate from the score to the extent that notes are altered or reordered, or for passages of a work to be omitted or extended, is considered inappropriate. The formal separation of the role of composer from that of the performer, and the status of the score, is challenged through the tendency in jazz and popular music performance, to regard pre-composed elements as starting points for exploration, elaboration and deviation as befits the mood of those involved. This expression of desire for freedom and the will to move beyond convention and constraint is most evident in improvised interactions, where individuals function both as composers and performers-realisers in a process preoccupied with the exploration of spontaneous thought and gesture and subversion of dominant practices and codes. In his article Ephemera Underscored: Writing Around Free Improvisation, John Corbett (1995:217) embarks upon an investigation of the nature of free improvisation through examination of the improviser’s vocabulary, and addresses questions surrounding such matters as freedom, knowledge and risk. He argues that through the absence of a coherent framework for understanding what music might mean, improvised performance gives rise to particularly complex and vague notions of meaning. Through the borrowing of meaning from other semiotic systems, and the construction of an inner language comprising of a shifting syntax of players, techniques and contexts, improvised music may be seen as especially problematic. My study results from the juncture of three strands of inquiry: John Corbett’s investigation, a quest for greater understanding of personal involvement and the contribution of others in freely improvised performance, and the informal study of a group of postgraduate jazz students brought together through a common desire to contest institutional and conventional musical thought and practice through free interaction and improvised group performance.