This thread reminds of the time I went to an academic conference for pleasure, and discovered that rather than it actually being about the title written down, it was about a specific meaning of that phrase in domain language, and every talk descended into something that made more sense the more Deleuze and Guattari you’d read. I left halfway through.
To whit:
it frequently feels like we’re talking about very different things, and I don’t know how to join in. I came to improvisation, small I, through jazz - suck it - simply because that’s what I learned as a teenager: inventing within a framework, in real time, and using licks like an epic poet used stock epithet - two bars left and you need to get back to a IV chord, stick in a quick polumetis Odysseus and we’re back in the game.
Anyhow, that’s where I begun, to the fact, that I’m now reasonably happy joining in in a variety of group contexts. All very tonal and structured, though.
But we’re possible not talking about that, are we?
At the same time, it’s part of my composition process: starting with an idea, noodling, exploring. I’ve not actually ever really learned structured composition (beyond my Music GCSE) and yet this frequently feels less like what’s being described as improvisation, above, and more like invention. Certainly when I sit down and invent something, it’s not entirely free: I quickly lock into patterns I want to explore or progressions from the back catalogue.
And it feels like we’re not talking about that either.
I went to a night for a local, improvisation-based record label, which veered from genuinely exciting to intellectually interesting. And yet it also seemed to follow set rules: an interest in the electro-acoustic, an explicitly stated distrust and dislike of ‘computers’ - which to me feels like stating a distrust of ‘reeds’ or ‘valves’, though I think the shorthand is for sequencers and locked rhythms, maybe - and again, I felt slightly at the edge of that.
On a similar note:
One of the most frustrating things for me as an improviser delving into electronic music is the lack of control and flexibility electronic means of making sound gives the improviser. The tools are simply not advanced enough (yet!) to be useful in an improvisatory setting, unless, perhaps, its with other electronic sound. When you mix electronic sound with acoustic sound, in an improvisatory context, the boxes are nowhere close to being able to hang on a high level. They are too limited.
I mean, in one sense, I totally know what @gregsinibaldi is getting at… but it also feels like an entirely specific way of describing such tools, what ‘control’ is, what ‘useful’ is. And most specifically: what an ‘improvisatory context’ is. Like, I didn’t realise that context was so specific.
I either feel like I’ve missed something, or I’m an idiot, or I’m doing something wrong. I certainly feel like a thread I look forward to opening is seemingly getting more bewildering by the second. And this isn’t a moan: this is just me trying to understand - and perhaps ask - why I feel like this.
Might go and stick a Necks CD on to lift me out of this.
