essays and thoughts--jack wright

 

Leaving the business of music

 

I want to leave the music business. The extent to which I can do this and still be playing music in front of others is another question. My business efforts have not failed, they have simply come to crowd out the actual artistic focus of playing and developing music. In other words, for me “work” to which I give a positive valuation in my life has been replaced by “work” that has the negative connotation of meaninglessness, or rather a means to an end. My intention is to reverse the order, to spend my time with actual music and similarly engaging pursuits rather than devoting my life to business.

This change even comes at a time when I am increasingly successful in getting gigs and organizing tours. The hard work of soliciting venues and promoters, helping others (mutual back-scratching and networking), maintaining the image required of a serious musician, alongside some genuinely positive responses to my music—all this has gotten me to a very good place in the music world. I have little reason to complain beyond normal grousing, not enough by itself for me to want to quit. I have thankfully not become a star; for a combination of reasons not all of my making; my name or image does not attract audiences automatically like a magnet. Yet when I perform I am known to some through reputation, and that has certainly helped my business. I have preferred listeners rather than a public, and that is largely what I’ve had. I consider it my special triumph to have been able to limit my performing partners to those whom I choose on the grounds of my musical interest in playing with them, which is often not the case for professionals who are paid decent amounts of money.

Something has changed in the music world, perhaps inevitable and foreseeable, to bring about this shift, and I will try to explain.

“Musician” has usually been a difficult vocation but, in shifting with the needs and technology of the times, has always earned a living. The American free improviser, who appeared in the mid-seventies and played neither composed music nor jazz, was not able to bring home the bacon, that is, could not even cover the costs of playing this music. Nor did they expect to, with rare exceptions, without broadening and adapting their music to a version of rock, jazz or other commercial music. Curiously, “improvisational” was an attractive code word for “creative” in the eighties; it was a label slapped onto any music that could hope to be marketed, mostly where actual free playing was not in evidence. Actual free playing was underground and unknown except to its players. Only people willing to be cast as eccentrics and exiles from normative values would enter and remain in the field. There were then not many who would jump straight from music school into this music, as there are today. Such players, as inheritors of some aspects of the defunct avant-guard, tended to hold a view of the artist as independent; one’s reward was not social, typically it was even perversely anti-social. One would have to sacrifice social satisfaction (such as pleasing one’s parents by choosing a reasonable career) for a quirky music fetish. The obscurity of the free improviser in the seventies and eighties was comparable to that of visual artists before the expressionist market explosion in the fifties; it kept the numbers down, discouraging all but the boldest or most reckless heretics. Like librarians, we were supposed to be compensated by doing what we loved to do, always an argument for low pay and status. Largely for this reason musicians defected to more promising fields by the late eighties, at least supplementing free playing with paying gigs that had decent audiences.

Beginning in the late nineties improvised and composed music in the avant-guard tradition was reborn as a niche interest among younger musicians, where it could be considered popular at the same time as an alternative to the mainstream. Obscurity became a semblance of cultural transgression, reversing its role in the social order, now functioning to attract rather than dissuade. Free improvisation became a minor sub-genre, a realistic possibility, an opportunity in the age when the artistic, creative individual merged with the socially conventional career seeker, as had happened earlier in the visual arts. Once again it was confirmed that the twentieth century avant-guard, which had been in conflict with the dominant culture, could only be resurrected as an aesthetic and not as a critical movement. In the pluralist marketplace every niche is its own consumer group, competing for the entertainment dollar but not in conflict with the market system. Free improvisation has come to offer a vocation based on expectations that it would be a growing cultural field, not on real and stable income, like traditional working class musicians. Even the state and foundations have begun to give its sanction in the form of grants; universities provide courses in the proper way to improvise freely, and not just jazzily.

This trend is wedded to a broader social development, also of American origin, which encourages personal expression in a public format and stage performance in particular. The thrust behind it is egalitarian, at the same time ego-enhancing, and even of therapeutic validation: we all have the right to the kind of self-esteem that comes from audience approval. The fifteen minutes of fame, which was quite a joke at the time of Warhol’s quip, has now become a social ethic and entitlement. The only way to be counted as a human being is to be “in public” (of course the public first had to disappear). Performance and the mania for self-presentation is a non-political democratic advance, a continuation of New Left “participation” by other, more available means in a conservative political environment. One can pursue one’s love of music not as an amateur in private but actually perform it; in fact amateurism and the embarrassment to reveal one’s inadequacies has been overcome by the new performance ethic. Whether professor or politician, one is judged on the basis of the effectiveness of one’s performance, not far from the applause meter in fifties games shows. Joined to Reagan-era entrepreneurial fever, in the form of DIY careers-for-everyone, the performance ethic has finally reached those with tastes familiar to the anti-social eccentrics of the eighties.

There are improvisers of the earlier period attractive to the performing market today through a reputation as legendary and once boldly creative, but none without jazz credentials, which is still the recognized stamp of authenticity in the US. These players are in demand and often invited to festivals, where they are expected to draw the best audience. Besides them are growing numbers who compete through upward-mobile determination, organizing and business skills, trend-setting intuition, and factors such as gender, age, race, appearance, etc. The latter factors are not surprising, since the audience for free improv/free jazz forms an enclave of young, urban, apolitical but ideologically multicultural liberals, who have grown up in retreat from a conservative world. What that means practically is that if I tour with another unknown old white man like myself, for instance, my audience will generally be considerably less and gigs harder to get than if my partner is someone of more popular identity and image.

Since only a handful of “in demand” musicians make enough money to be able to refuse door gigs, what constitutes a professional or vocational free improviser today reasonably includes those who simply get a myspace and start signing up for gigs. To many venue presenters a myspace is even more attractive than a personal website, the dominant advertising medium of only a few years before. It indicates youth and social networking over the “traditional” self-marketer who presented signs of long-term commitment, accomplishment and acceptance. Audiences are likewise not required to be committed, even to pay the musicians who have entertained them. This is evident in that door gigs, which used to be scorned by performers as a mere first career step are increasingly being replaced by passing-the-hat, which makes paying for a performance voluntary. This is akin to busking in the street, literally begging, a considerable step down from the status of worker paid a known amount for a job. Yet given the new cultural situation, to be on a stage is actually considered a step up in status from any kind of wage work, even if one has to work a demeaning temp-job in order to do it.

Most gigs are available first-come, first-served, such that those who began twenty years ago are waiting in line, hustling and back-scratching no less than those who got in the business two months ago. As the flood of CD’s has driven down sales for each individual player, so the flood of prospective players, all seeking to perform as often as possible, has created a buyer’s market. The buyers—presenters, promoters, organizers—are themselves DIY’ers who have only a certain number of slots to offer, and rarely any money besides the door, if that, minus any cut from the venue. Audience growth has not kept pace with the number of performers, partly because of the in-group nature of the urban scene, which attracts a singular type of defined customer rather than curious music-lovers.
The market is where the musicians are, virtually all of them, whether they recognize it or not. If you want to get beyond playing for your friends you must have visibility and status or put in the work to acquire it. High-brow entertainment, even for an audience of five, is still entertainment and part of the culture industry. Venues are not interested to present players without something of a text or image to promote them; it is hype that brings in the audience beyond the few regulars. In this sense, these musicians are indeed workers, although reluctant to see themselves as such. Unfortunately, the adverse proportion of musician to audience has created a buyers market, in which there is no possibility for collective bargaining, or even individual pressure for better pay and conditions. In this sense these players are entrepreneurs, but lacking a business that actually accounts for itself in financial terms. This is where youth comes in, for the young have visions of future success—or at least an obliviousness to the possibility of failure--which sustains them and appears positively as idealism, as American as the struggling basement band next door.

Already there are signs that free improvisation no longer holds the attraction it did even five years ago. List-serves from ’98 to ‘02 that overflowed with enthusiasm for free improv have been wholly replaced by spam for concerts and cd’s. Private sessions, solely for the sake of musical exploration, have taken a back seat to gigs and recording sessions. This is clearly not a question of money, since the gigs barely pay for carfare and the cd’s cost players more than they earn. Rather it is considered nonsensical to spend time playing music off stage when gigs, even for a handful of listeners, are available. Finally, public funding is becoming available for any music that is “adventurous”, but it must be charted notationally or graphically to qualify. Improvisers, especially those with degrees, are encouraged to put their hopes on building their resumes and possible livelihood from music with compositional elements or at least appearance. To step beyond the improv youth ghetto requires credibility in the adult culture, which requires fresh but tamed young players.

I myself have clearly taken advantage of the growth of free improvisation and greatly encouraged it. Ambition of the young, plus the current unity of business and artistic career has brought into my musical world a huge number of players who challenge and interest me. It is largely because of them that I came out of my earlier retreat out west and sought out these players, who had developed a new way of playing that attracted me.

A market seemed to be opening, of musicians if not audience, and I began to pursue the route of professionalization to make myself available. I did what I had to do: created a website that would promote me, allowed an article on me to appear in Signal to Noise, reworked my resume to make myself more attractive to promoters (my earlier bio had proclaimed that I was “not in the marketplace”), released cd’s by the carload (until ’99 my project was to make one recording every ten years—now I have forty!), and tracked down every contact to a potential gig. I also organized weekend sessions called the No Net of around nine players, a marathon of playing to push our development as a musical community. As an older and obscure musician I had to become a self-promoter, though painting my image as close as possible to the difficult reality. I refused many common but unethical devices musicians use to promote themselves, such as listing famous musicians with whom they were no longer or never were real partners. Yet taking on music as a career was still a big step towards conforming with the normal functioning of the world, which had always been problematic. Through all this work I gained a place that most musicians would find enviable.

The amount of work this takes is a burden common to many mid-level musicians (in the scene hierarchy, that is) like myself, and for me it is sustainable, though with increasing reluctance. My father was a low-level bureaucrat and I always vowed I would not follow him there. This is in fact what the job entails: a large amount of office work for the small amount of actual reward of playing music of my choosing. That this proportion of non-musical work is increasing certainly contributes to my choice to withdraw from it.

There is a deeper problem for me elsewhere, which would not necessarily be a concern for other players. The more successful I am as a professional the more am I limited to playing a socially determined role and fulfilling a certain image, and I find this confining, claustrophobic even, and alienating. As a lover and player of music I am in contradiction with the job I have to do and the reward structure. It is assumed, for instance, that a musician would hope for a larger audience, an appreciative public, and better pay. It is true that I am often disheartened when, as recently, I played in a huge auditorium with an audience of only two. Yet I have always preferred small, diverse, even accidental groupings of curious and hesitant listeners over a large, scene-driven self-congratulating elite public clamoring for a spectacle. The ultimate of the spectacle is the festival, and I have not generally sought them out as good playing situations or for self-validation (morale-boosting). Festivals do sometimes open the door to more gigs and more money, and so makes my job easier, and more possible to play with other musicians, such as Europeans, who expect to be paid better than Americans generally do. But my preference is the more intimate situation with a diverse audience—low pressure, minimal concept of what will happen, and a more spontaneous, authentic response from listeners (especially evident in conversations afterwards).

I have not changed with the times. I am still back there with the social pariahs, and have not rejoiced in the new market situation, only in the new players, most of whom would not have been drawn to a music without the promise of normal social success somewhere down the road. In the past I was happy with a small audience and no wide appeal, only resentful (to my later regret) at those who did find ways to manipulate promotional appeal. Now a preference for small audiences can no longer be taken as a cover for the lack of a market, instead it is an anachronism, or worse, a sign of musical failure just as large audiences and sales of cds represent musical success.

I never intended to be successful in providing a service people would pay for. My aim was to challenge myself and develop musically, and to do this I had to play with people who were interesting to me. Many of these people were European, and as an unknown I had to become or at least appear to be a professional in order to get the kind of gigs that paid well enough to get me to Europe and to pay the group. My musical interest was not the one-shot highly paid concert, which is the financial life blood of European players, but the serial performance possible with the tour, which requires a huge amount of organizing. I have been able to tour there because of my tenacity and ability to cultivate relationships, but as state funding decreases and competition increases there is more and more work with less result.

Whether presenters or other musicians perceive oneself as a professional, a "serious musician", is crucial, and the rules for this have changed. In the 80’s to invest the money for a single record was considered enough to establish oneself, a kind of union card. It cost me a quarter of my income in 1982 to do this, but it was the only price I had to pay. As for image, an improviser was only half-considered legitimately as a musician, so this was not a concern. One who only played freeform might be thought of as a kind of homeless wanderer outside normal expectations, an anomaly respected for one’s personal choice perhaps but not with any pretence of making a contribution to art or society, which requires actual followers, devotees, or consumers. For an ex-sixties politico like myself, who resisted the Reagan reaction, this absence of social role made sense. I felt I was experiencing the world more immediately, in its fullness, at least not mediated by others’ understanding of how one functioned as a supposed member of society. There was no scene; my audience was mostly other musicians, friends-of-friends and accidental walk-in listeners. What I played did not fall within a genre of music for which they were the consuming public. At best they wanted to hear something they didn’t quite grasp, that perhaps they didn’t even want to judge, as one normally judges Art first in order to value it.

All this has radically changed. Last fall percussionist Andrew Drury and I played in Mostar, Bosnia and got an unusual response from a woman, “…but what is your motivation?” This is a question that would not be asked in more culturally sophisticated Europe or in the US today. Our motivation is understood here as part of the profession of the musician, who normally wants an unambiguously positive audience response, an indication that he is on the right path. Such is not my desire. Back in the eighties I may have been Johnny Appleseed spreading free improvisation all over America, but I also saw myself as a kind of Socrates, as if asking people, “Is this mess I just played music—if not, then what IS music? And what do you want?” This was obliquely related to other questions that were being thrown under the rug, about the boundaries we put on all our experience, political and otherwise. Improvisation for me was revolt by other means; I meant to keep revolt alive--that was my life purpose as it translated into music. As I have felt politics must engage self-inquiry and doubt, so also music—in the moment it is actually played. This too is revolt, related to the periodic revulsion for one’s own music, as of one’s political choices. So I didn’t want a complacent audience of followers but listeners who were conflicted, and even in conflict with me as to the value of what I did.

Today, that one should embody revolt through improvisation is not possible to maintain and communicate. What is valued for performance in improv is the same as for other genres—not the actual process of intelligent searching but the presentation of what one has found. I play today mostly for a specific cultured public, and as an accepted musician I have a respected place in that small world. This provides a secure setting in which to present music, since the response is all but guaranteed, yet in the denial of conflict that very guarantee denies a fully spontaneous interaction with listeners. There is a conventional frame around the music which values it before a single sound is made. Performances are linked one to another, and a tour is successful if it becomes a series of simulacra, without the risk of failure. Musical failure and business failure have become identical, and without the possibility of failure—rejection of one’s own music--there is no growth, at least for me. From a musical point of view this situation is boring and alienating. This re-minted avant-garde music world is no different from other market exchanges, except that here one is buying the ideology that the end is idealized Art or expression, and not profit and personal advancement. Whatever means are necessary is subordinated to that supremely valid end, which is seen as vaguely an alternative to the dirty world of capitalism, hierarchy, repression--and to political conflict. An artist is on the right side, liberal, tolerant, etc. almost by definition, without lifting a finger to confront what everyone knows to be exploitative and unjust.

To many this is very seductive, not only as a role in relation to the world but in relation to one’s own artistic activity. It is indeed very unusual for a performer not to be enchanted when receiving attention from a consuming public or disappointed when that is lacking. A public is a condensed, singular entity, as opposed to multiple listeners, who may or may not “buy” what they are hearing; it is no wonder the former is preferred. Similar with written criticism; the performer is thrilled with a complimentary review, regardless of its lack of literary value or insight, criticism that could be very useful to the player. Today the ideology of Art reigns supreme, including the belief that the best rises to the top and is recognized and rewarded almost without hesitation. “Obscure outsider” is only a stepping-stone to the media success story we can read in the small avant-garde music press (Signal to Noise, The Wire) just as we find in mainstream magazines. The story of the unacknowledged and only posthumously recognized artist is a thing of the past; the acknowledged front-runners today are considered comparable to the geniuses that the past suppressed. In the internet age what deserving art could ever remain unheralded? This is parallel to the ideology that we (on the “left”) are at least in the process of uncovering all the oppressed in the world and are finally giving them their due, if only by publicizing them. In fact the Art world of publicity and promotion is as self-congratulatory as the entertainment industry that it seeks to distinguish itself from; its small scale seems to belie this, yet only reinforces the notion that the elite stands for something better. We can have our cake (the artist who suffers nobly from low pay) and eat it too (we are accepted in our lifetime). This validates those most favored in the hierarchy as well as those struggling upwards for recognition. It satisfies the desire to have one’s self-esteem mirrored in the world, where profession, skill, and class (musician as a worker bonded with other workers, for instance) has been replaced by one’s ability to intuit and match what the market calls for. The art world is the triumph of the same neo-liberal capitalism that artists would generally be horrified to find themselves schmoozing with.

I wish to distance myself from this, and that means from my own petty struggles to be included and accepted, my competitive resentments. I want my artistic ups and downs to be truly my own and not allied to what the marketplace offers me. In practical terms, pulling back from the business means I will have to minimize my aid to other musicians (mostly Europeans, who get little response when they write directly to American promoters unless they are highly visible); to stop planning grandiose tours in Europe; to cease soliciting gigs as a daily and continuous activity. I will lose the pleasure of being considered one of the best tour organizers around, of having something to point to that validates me as a musician. I must not respond to the next great playing experience with someone by saying, “we should do a tour!”, nor to the request to release yet one more CD. I will have to hold back, which is not in my nature to do!

Improvisation, unlike composition, is dependent on actually playing before and with others. So I will lose a lot of what I love to do, the intensity of new musical discovery, of searching new routes of expression and influence. I would also lose the surreptitious pride I have in being something of an “international” musician, and whatever other promotional label that might be applied to me. But I expect such a retreat to open up a space in myself that puts me in touch with the world once again without the mediation of role or job, a place of no importance. Importance is always comparative, a social and market factor, but a player’s true, personal relation to what he or she does musically always has another track available on which to be understood. My purpose now would be such self-understanding.

This shift away from the music scene brings me closer to my self, my history of self-questioning and openness to change, which goes back to my early teenage years. It is a history of engagement followed by pulling back, spiraling and recycling from the active to the contemplative life and back again. Actually, for about ten years, from ‘89 to ‘99 I was mostly reading, writing, painting, and thinking. Now my function must again change with the times, from full-fledged booster and participant to at least part-time questioner of where things are going.

I certainly expect to continue playing and even some touring in the US. I am welcomed to play here, especially outside the large cities, and so must expend little effort, but without enough pay to bring my European partners. I would love to be invited rather than to have to solicit gigs, but if I limit myself to invitations I do not expect to be performing very often.

I am not looking for a rest, because I am not tired; quite the contrary, I have more real energy for my own interests as ends in themselves. My first enthusiasm is to create some open space, then watch to see what will fill it.

June-August 2008

some dissociated thoughts on form

I hear improvisers today say, "not enough form" and then I hear this huge belly-laugh coming from improvisation itself, saying, "What isn't form?" "What's not to like about it?"

To think of form as something that is missing is to define it as that which the player could and should intend, conceive and apply. To add the missing form is a way to find a kind of truth in music. An idealistic impulse says, there is something more that could be here: meaning, and each meaning is distinct from all others, as are all pieces of music. We are wasting our time on the activity of improvising when we could be uncovering this thing of cognitive/aesthetic value, which alone can be communicated. Form is value, and value ultimately derives from the creator, man the creator of the human world of meaning. Out of His self-love God breathes over matter, the void "without form and meaning", and through form turns it into content. He endows it with meaning only by His Conscious Act. If the Artist is not this God, then what could He possibly be doing with His energy?

The sociological plays a part in this interest in form. A trend that has been riding along with the increasing legitimation of improvisation is for musicians to want to be treated like (they imagine) the creators of high art are treated, a step beyond "mere musicians". They want to be, as a group and each one individually, the queen bee and not the workers. It is not improvisers that so many young players aspire to be but artists; that is considered to be the meaningful role. They want to escape the usual category of performer, the trained seal who simply follows the instructions of others or one’s former successes, which is understandable. We are sometimes boosted into the high art tradition as a kind of flattering compliment coming from others. For instance, a comment heard often from former art students is "I like your work". Is the improvisation of a focused moment elevated by being framed as a work--created, done with, and ready for the archive? Or it might be termed a "work in progress", to be finished later, collected and located in an oeuvre. To deny that an improvisation is a work in this sense (rather than difficult work that one enjoys) indicates to many that it has no form, no trajectory, no meaning of cultural challenge for others.

This relates to the familiar search for spectacular achievement, what makes an impact and is worthy of being heard. Whom do we seek to impress? It is the high art spectator who looks for form and meaning, who interrogates the one from whom sounds somehow emanate: "Please explain what you are doing and why," with the threat that if we don't help them out they will abandon us. And so we stop making incongruous sounds and try to answer this questioner, who participates from the sideline. "What does it all mean? When can I call it Art--and you an Artist?" Sometimes the players themselves do this in anticipation of being interrogated and possibly abandoned. The effort then is to provide a frame around performance that will definitively classify what they do as art, instead of an anxious object mirroring an anxious performer.

My view is that in improvisation one is always already engulfed in form, and in free-form improvisation the effort is to find some way to follow it. It is the path one does not know, yet one is experienced with such exploring. We are giving birth to form (conceiving) whether we carry out a conceived plan or not. Many players are frustrated with this, cannot or do not want to work so blindly, and so they prefer to create and apply one specific form for each piece that they think of as interesting or novel. This gives a consistency to the piece that is often lacking in following a path one does not know. This is neither good nor bad, it is all part of the realm of music, which unlike high art tends to be defined broadly, as anthropologists would. Sometimes the conception for an improvisation is sufficiently explicit that it is indicated beforehand as in a composition, and called structured improvisation. If one wants to say something non-subjective about such a piece one can easily point to the structure as its individualizing identity. In our culture it is quite attractive to be able to speak in non-subjective terms, as if subjectivity were, as used to be said of free improvisation, a matter of what you had for breakfast.

Music with a formal, conceptualized unity certainly has a right to be considered art; some have even said that art cannot exist without some pre-conception. Structured improvisation, along with composition, holds a traditional view of the art object, which must be accessible to an act of interpretation that can place it in relation to others. This forms a kind of community of objects, with genealogy, clans, and hierarchy. This way of dealing with art has often been criticized from the point of view of anti-art, beginning with Duchamp, and yet anti-art, with which form-oriented improvisation is aligned, has managed to cling to the art object and heroic status of the artist, now as cultural transgressor. Free improvisation, on the other hand, has never allied itself with conception the way anti-art has come to do, yet in common with Duchamp and Cage it has encouraged surprise, inconsistency, and art that cannot be understood as art, art that has not attained the status of a genre.

The game of finding and revealing a higher truth must also be the game of finding the untruth, which for improvisation means disowning what one might do thoughtlessly, spontaneously, in order ultimately to be able to identify with what results from the act of playing. Only that, it is hoped, will bring justifiable satisfaction. You create your own conventions, by which you will be able to recognize what you are doing and judge it. In other words, to be sure there is form one must bring some idea of form to the playing, which assumes some idea of what cannot be form, what one refuses to recognize as form. In this schema form is only that which can be, if not fully articulated, at least traced, remembered, accounted for as the moves (in art-speak, "strategy") of talent or genius. Music aspiring to be art refers to an art that is intentional, pointing back always to the creator, from whom it can be abstracted and expected. And the spectator who wants to come from a concert or recording enlightened must abstract what he/she hears from the matter of sound. "I like your work" means I am one of those able to discern the form you have imposed on matter. Form that is felt, experienced as one is immersed in it, is considered a lesser form of art, a subjective and expressive act coded as "gestural", which substitutes for “subjective”. It is our ability to abstract that allows us to point to what is concrete as something apart from our activity; it is abstraction that allows us to have a point to what we are doing, that is, to make a point (sometimes called a statement).

The game of higher truth/lesser truth is a game often played in Art, a game of strategy that ends successfully in a point, a theory of what should be, from which feeling is derived and comprehended. It has all the earmarks of our culture in the anthropological sense, that is, the game of purposive fulfilling of ideals, reward for services rendered to the culture and responsive colleagues, etc. Duchamp’s readymades, with which he intended to disrupt this game, have been turned into cultural icons which do little more than perpetuate it. They go in search of horses to beat that aren’t quite dead, rather than challenging their own assumptions. The earlier avant-garde has been de-fanged and assimilated to the psycho- and socio-dynamics of culture with the small "c", which is the price of its success. But that's a longer story than I wanted to get into here...

In terms of the dialectic of the finite/infinite game (see the essay PLAYING below), the search and achievement of form is a finite game, that is, it has a goal and we can at least theoretically know when we get there by knowing when we are not there. As art criticism, this has been taken to task as the Intentional Fallacy, the validation of art according to whether the artist has achieved her or his intention. The improvisation that I would counterbalance to this is the infinite game, that is, it is not played for stakes, whether personal, social, political or cultural. It has no winners, that is, no one to recognize when it is done well or not. What it values is to keep the game going. It is by its nature impossible to state concretely what this would mean without ending the game. You might begin by saying, you allow it to interest you without trying to make it interesting, you receive what you do rather than presenting it for self- or other's judgment.

I would add to that: the most useful values one could bring to the infinite game are acute attention to what is going on, unquestioning trust in it, and humility. If you think about what awareness truly entails you will see that humility is the personal quality that is required above all others, and quite elusive. To know that I do not know how to proceed is the result of much experience and cannot be gained overnight or easily imparted to others. If I go further and assert that these might be the true qualities of art, then improvisation would not have to ride in the back seat like a poorly disciplined child. But I do not assert this, because to do so would be precisely the move to identify what is and is not art, and that is precisely the move of the finite game, which would claim for improvisation a place in the art world.

II.

What then IS the relation of form to an improvisation, how does it enter into actual playing?

My practical life as a musician shapes my ideas, and vice versa. I will begin with the specific instance I’m most knowledgeable about, my own solo playing, a story of the defeat of good intentions. I might be totally committed to beginning with a certain sound, or intend to play differently from last time, but once I am present in that strange silence that precedes the playing I cannot sustain any plan. It all just drops away like props or costumes, and usually I experience it as a loss: I am on my own. How often have I had a little speech prepared beforehand, even written, that would give a key to the listeners’ understanding! But then I simply can't violate that silence, a kind of humbling awe. I am creating form as my unintended act right off the bat, by leaving a particular space of time before I make a sound. I am not trying to fulfill the requirements of theatrical performance; I am not in control of myself in that way, that I could think of doing that. Once into the sound, despite accidents such as a slip into a high harmonic I try to avoid, the playing is disciplined and intent, focused on sound. I work at playing, it doesn't just "happen" passively, as people sometimes characterize spontaneity, yet all this is unprescribed, unthought, unachieved. Awareness that is takes a mental form appears when I feel I've gotten carried away by an emotion (usually fear) and thereby lost focus, or have lost the context for the sounds I'm making, or the thread of continuity. I might worry that I'm repeating myself, or just filling the time with a display of tricks out of nervousness. I cannot get back on track by remembering what I wanted to do initially but by slowing that worried mind, turning my attention to the context, allowing some space, and attending to the form in which I'm engulfed once again. After the playing, in a prosaic moment like now, I can see that the music I play is the submission to form rather than the creation of it. Hence my rhetorical question above, "what's not to love about form?”

Yet my musical mind is no blank tablet. As I play I encounter and employ many forms that are familiar from other music. When I play with a certain kind of keyboard player I will hear myself playing classical music, and this doesn’t please or bother me, it is simply surprising. Other times I am sure that I am a barking dog, or a whinnying horse, and that I gravitate in those directions because they are familiar. I am influenced by those I play with and my playing has changed from being largely Dionysian to at least somewhat Apollonian, or from the sublime to the beautiful. All this has to do with form. But I have never intended to do what no one else has done, to innovate form, to be unique as a player, to create as the Artist-God, ex nihilo. Rather I choose to swim in the sea of form and play with all the fish that share the habitat. I am porous to influence but for reasons I don’t defend some influences are more equal than others, and they shift in definite directions I can discern. The form of ecstatic free jazz, for instance, does not appeal to me today, except for a certain real-note free-harmonic exploration that is impossible in any other form. The past ten years I have been influenced by relatively reduced music (want of a better term?), a long story I won’t go into, but have never wanted to take on the responsibility or aura of being a self-conscious reductionist. I play with my in-flowing influences and what comes out does not concern me as much as my own openness. That is, the sense of freshness I feel at times in my playing could easily be reduced by analysis to common figures, gestures, musical ideas—nothing I’d call my own. To know that enlightens me but does not affect me negatively, as if I should be finding something new to do.

The way I look at it, any human can play with sound, and can do it most inventively when they don’t feel they are supposed to be making music. Of course this is quite rare, it is rare especially for musicians to play with sound and not think we are headed towards something called music. Improvisation is in line with this effort to play with sound without thinking of it as music, a kind of do-it-yourself that yields almost unrecognizable results. Improvisation opens the door to a lot of bunglers who still get the job done, and time is not of the essence, improvisation is not very efficient. Music is off in the distance, the longer the distance, that is, the harder to imagine that what we do is music, the greater the attraction. There is, surely, something called artistic/musical talent, which can make an improvisation more interesting, as it can spectator sports. But an 8th grade christmas pageant from South Dakota--can genius and skill ever hope to top that? Or a high school basketball game? The strange thing is, however, talent is often hidden under the standard norms of talent, and it takes cultural upheavals to uncover what is hidden, and make talent available to the talented. After the cultural upheaval come the consolidators, the teachers of the new standards, the elaborators of victory, which is largely what is visible at any time.

It was Kant who got us going down the road of art spectators, and that is a fine project as far as it goes. I do not want to disrespect spectators, I just don't quite know how to do that role very well, any more than artist. I am confused where others seem to be clear and untroubled. I am from the era when improvisers (the ones I hung out with at least) were not quite able to fit into the world--half in, half out. How do I "judge my own work"? Any art student/philosopher could make mincemeat of my "approach"; it is an effort not to care when so many do. If you can play roles well--artist, musician, performer, spectator, critic--then your suffering will be normal. You will be able to keep at bay the wolves and birds of prey that would remind you that you merely exist, and at their leave. To me improviser is not a role, not a mask; as far as music is concerned it is an activity that places us closer to the meaninglessness we secretly crave to affirm than to the hoped-for fulfillment of any role we could adopt to achieve personal progress and happiness. It is, as many of the anti-art movements proclaimed, a bridge between art and life, but unlike those movements the bridge is a mere thread, a suggestion, and not to be advertised as the one and only Truth.

The craving for form, the Apollonian as the hero to save us from messy, subjective chaos, is a symptom of our painful modern experience: advanced culture is not able to find adequate reasons to affirm and sustain its values collectively. Decentered society and its culture can no longer pretend to be able to defend itself. Aesthetic values especially are de facto generalizations of what each of us happens to like, and not de jure or de moribus, what we collectively and unconsciously assume. Nothing is a given--this is the nihilism that was once advocated and now is our condition. Only a few decades ago people might have still argued over what is and is not music as if it were a collective experience. Experimental music was said to be on the edge of meeting the bare criteria, as if in the future this or that might cross the threshold. Today this debate no longer seems to be about anything meaningful. Each genre has its debates under its own terms, at least for the so-called experimental field (few debate the boundary of jazz anymore, for instance). We seem to need to know that what we are doing is valid, we want aesthetic standards; the pressure is on every musician to create something that--whether they use the word or not--is music, and considered so by at least some others.

In the interests of inclusiveness (who would dare be exclusive in this egalitarian world we live in!) we might say music is any sound or grouping of sounds that comes from one who claims it to be music. In the days when the lines of art and life were clear, a Duchamp consciously violated a taboo with his readymades. Art by designation of the artist was one of the challenges of Concept Art in the sixties and seventies, for there was still something there to be challenged. Times have changed. Now there is the appeal to "creator's rights"—open the floodgates, give everyone a hearing, and let the listeners sort it out. 90 percent of the venues for improvisation in the US are open to anyone who has made a recording and asks for a gig; you just have to get in line in order to be an artist/performer. But somewhere each of us as spectator draws lines, all kinds of lines, which is why attendance is so minimal. One of the lines might be drawn around what we would value in some common, public way, either advocating it or simply desiring company for our taste. People attend a concert sometimes because they have been told a performer is important, recognized, and they are pressured to be in on it. Another line is what is recognized by others as valid but that one can't imagine listening to oneself.

There is surely music I can affirm as good and would not contest, but I am not interested in for often mysterious reasons. Still another line, even more subjective, encircles what I want to listen to right now, implying that sometimes I am bored with what I value, not necessarily seeking a new value but recognizing that what I need to listen to might escape the categories I normally affirm.

There is a play of these boundaries, which is part of our post-modern experience. An example: one fall I put a microphone outside my window and recorded the sounds that simply were there--the squirrels running around the trees, dropping seeds of the berries, the kids coming home from school verbally abusing each other, the trash truck, cars, etc. (I had barely heard of Cage at the time, so was not following his instructions.) Over the years this tape became a personal icon, much as Duchamp’s urinal, which he thought of as still a urinal when he placed it in a show, became admired for its beauty. I valued hearing this tape, which represented the unconscious improvisation of the world but which I took into my life for pure sensory pleasure. I preferred it much of the time over music; it was as specific as a piece of music but I could not present it to others as my or the squirrels' etc. created "work". It was simply listening pleasure; others might have their own private pleasures, which cannot be joined in a common experience like music. Through repeated listening I began to hear it as music, that is, as form, yet perhaps valued it in part because it was private and unshared, an escape from the social world that music represents.

I view improvisation in much the same light. If an improvisation, the infinite game, is one specific experience of play, like the squirrels and the kids and the truck, it doesn't matter if the recording or performance is valued by anyone, even the participants. Music, on the other hand, is sound experienced as aesthetic form, and it is the direction we tend to take improvisation. It is not inherent in the sound material, it needs to be felt, experienced, for it to exist. It is always linked; it can never be unique if it joins us with others and with our own experience. An improvisation can have form in this sense, but not because it is improvisation. Improvisers allow, at least encourage the myth of a free and formless space as the ground on which to act, a kind of loophole to escape the search for music. Some use this loophole for the pure fun of playing as an anarchic release, and some seek to create something that follows a sense of form, that imagines form--and many places in between these two.

Again, drawing on my experience. When I was a child I assumed I would be a musician but not a creator of music myself; I would be a player rather than a composer, oriented towards the actual making of sounds rather than conceiving them. That was normal at the time, just as today people more commonly aspire to be creators of music rather than "mere" players. In fact, I failed to become that musician until, some twenty years later, the world I knew as a child had shattered in significant ways, and I myself changed, such that I could more easily reject following the musical conceptions of others. When I experienced the possibilities of improvisation I could connect creatively with a musical form. Ever since I began down this path, the effort to create music apart from improvisation is too earnest for me, it always ends up circling the wagons against the wildness of pure play, as much as I might enjoy and learn from others who think of themselves as creators. I want to leap out and join the Indians, who seem to be having more fun, and a more dangerous life.

I am creating something akin to a composition, only to find that I am continually reinforcing my habits, the tendency against which Cage warned musicians who wanted to improvise their own creations. I quickly reach the limit of repeating myself; "my" music becomes too much mine, all about me, the Artist. I have never wanted to play a music that was mine, it feels too claustrophobic. The door open to play, however, is a door to the universe, one of many; it means we do not have to be saddled with our valued creations. If improvisation has a use in creating music then it is here, not as a resource for experimentation with form but as an escape clause, a healthy mockery of our confident assertions. This is another way of saying to our avant-garde pretensions (certainly mine as well), that the universe ("nature" or the Greek "physis", as it hits us on the head) is always ahead of us and infusing us at the same time.

So, is improvised music like children’s play or is it serious art, with a cognitive role; if it is both then what is the relation between these two, friendly or hostile? I have said that the finite/infinite game is a dialectic, itself a playful relation. I would not discourage the finite games of Artistic progress, not the manifestoes of reductionist rules, nor debates about relative achievements of the current heroes, nor the view of music as aesthetic enlightenment. These are all necessary, as are the marketplace of music, the constant genre delineations, and the struggle to capture the minds of young aspiring musicians. Improvisation, as I say, is not in itself music, musicians use it as one pole from which we swing to the other which is music, the cultural object subject to so much foolishness. What I am stressing is our uncertain place between these two, and our freedom to swing both ways.

I have said above, the desire for more form comes from a sense that improvisation by itself lacks cognitive value, which must be added by the player as a kind of composer. But cognitive value is not exclusively the province of the unified compositional object, a specific content to be gained, like information or enlightenment. The cognition appropriate to improvisation is that of experience in working with sound as a material, comparatively uninteresting to talk about. It is practical learning, like experiencing our habits as we play, and letting sounds be sounds instead. Cage of course was the great teacher here, only he discouraged improvisation in favor of the compositional device of chance. So we need to find ways that, as we enter sound with ears open we are not stupid about what we are doing, not oblivious but down to earth and ready to learn before we propose to educate others what they should be doing.

March 2007, revised Oct. 2007

 

An Avant-Garde Reborn--
Free Improvisation and the Marketplace

      Why I do this and Why it is public