[NewMusic] George Lewis Essay

[Jon Raskin]

I recently found this essay that has some interesting things to say about
improvisation, graphic scores and orchestra's.
http://www.americancomposers.org/improvise/lewis_essay.htm
Improvisation and the Orchestra: A Composer Reflects
By George E. Lewis
In 1960, the influential ethnomusicologist Mantle Hood coined the term
"bimusicality" to describe the work of musicians of the Imperial Japanese
Court, who were trained in both gagaku and pan-European classical
traditions. As it happens, well before the publication of Hood's article,
musicians trained in jazz were already well known as early practitioners of
the bimusical. In 1930, William Grant Still's optimistic belief in the
viability of a "Negro Symphony Orchestra" was based on his own experience as
both composer and performer in classical, jazz, and popular idioms.
Imagining the players in such an orchestra, Still predicted that "their
training in the jazz world will even have enhanced their virtuosity, and
they will be able to play perfectly passages that would be difficult for a
man trained only in the usual academic way."
For much of the 20th century, the boundary between high and low culture in
the U.S. has been symbolized musically by the great competition between jazz
and classical traditions, a stand-in for a more fundamental, culturally
nationalist struggle. In proposing an amalgamation of these traditions in
the late 1950s, Gunther Schuller felt that "by designating this music as a
separate, third stream, the two other mainstreams could go their way
unaffected by attempts at fusion."
In the ensuing years, however, the rise of postcolonialism and the stirrings
of the civil rights movement had vastly complicated these discourses. As
scholar and composer Jason Stanyek has noted, cross-cultural, face-to-face
improvisative spaces often feature an "embodied collective learning" where
sociality is marked as an important experience for both artists and
audiences. In an unpublished essay from 1988, composer and pianist Frederic
Rzewski declared that the improvised music of Musica Elettronica Viva, an
ensemble that he helped to found, was "based on friendship&ldots;Any
unfriendly act on the part of some individual threatens the strength of the
music we are all trying to create." Rzewski's experience recalls critic
Christopher Small's observation of African improvisors, who respond "not
only to the inner necessities of the sound world&ldots;but also to the
dynamics of the human situation&ldots;"
Romanticism: Hot Potato
The fading of expertise in improvisation from "classical" music has become
the subject of a slowly growing body of scholarship. Most recently,
ethnomusicologist Angeles Sancho-Velasquez connected this disappearance with
the twilight of 19th-century Romantic ideals of spontaneity, inwardness, and
sublime and ineffable mystery. In 1911, however, composer Ferruccio Busoni
was still holding fast these ideals in his "Sketch of a New Aesthetic of
Music," declaring that "notation is to improvisation as the portrait to the
living model."
In 1962, composer Lukas Foss, who briefly explored collective improvisation
in the late 1950s, could precisely reverse Busoni's terms, asserting that
improvisation "relates to composition much in the way that the sketch
relates to the finished work of art." By this time, the image of the
Romantic ego-driven mystic had been transferred first to bebop, and then to
improvisation in general; no less a personage than Pierre Boulez dismissed
the practice as "personal psychodrama."
But if we disconnect improvisation from the debates over European
romanticism, we can see the practice of real-time analysis, exploration,
discovery and response to conditions as fundamental to the existence and
survival of the individual and the species. The philosopher of mind Gilbert
Ryle maintained that thinking itself was a question of improvisation, saying
of the normal human that "if he is not at once improvising and improvising
warily, he is not engaging his somewhat trained wits in some momentarily
live issue, but perhaps acting from sheer unthinking habit."
In this light, the moral imperatives and double-star binary oppositions that
have "informed" so many discussions of improvisation and composition become
something of an intellectual way station in classical music's mid-century
confrontation with the postcolonial condition. In the interest of new music
that incorporates both disciplines, the binary will undoubtedly need to be
jettisoned--not just for performers, but for the entire network that
nurtures the culture of orchestral performance--composers, theorists,
scholars, academicians, and the economic and technical support
infrastructure that is so crucial to the performance of orchestral music.
Stations Along The Path
In large measure, the composerly avant-garde of the 1960s and 1970s, both in
Europe and the United States, tended to view improvisation as, in the 1965
words of Roger Reynolds, "more or less profitable wanderings in a
well-defined maze where the composer, performer and listener know the rules
and references." One is struck by the vast gulf separating this view from
the experiences of the improvisors themselves. As saxophonist Steve Lacy
observed, "you have all your years of preparation and all your sensibilities
and your prepared means but it is a leap into the unknown."
In 1950s contemporary music, one path toward this leap involved the advent
of graphic scores, whose seemingly indeterminate methods, particularly as
applied by composer Earle Brown, often reflected not only an ideology of
personal self-determination, but also a transhistorically, transnationally
imagined community of thought and practice.
for Brown, the goals of this community became collapsed onto the idea of
style. Brown told British guitarist Derek Bailey in a 1992 interview:
It is somewhat my responsibility to create conditions which, in a certain
sense, won't be violated stylistically. For instance, if there's somebody
who is very good at improvising in the style of Bach, or in the baroque
period, very often I suggest something verbally. Like, I ask for erratic,
jagged rhythms, so that he would not make sequences of 8th notes.
As Brown told guitarist Bailey, "I was working with improvisational forms."
Thus, beyond the conventional reading that a composer's task involves
countering the performer's force of habit in the service of new music,
Brown's suggestions reveal that the future history of any graphic score or
improvisation will be partly oral, partly aural as mediated through
recording, and partly related to the texts that musicians, scholars, and
journalists have produced about it.
Brown's 1950s work reflected his strong interest in the psychology of open
forms, from the music of Charlie Parker to the visual mobility of Calder and
Pollock. Once a graphic score migrates conceptually beyond the communities
in which it originated, however, the metatext that it represents inevitably
becomes transformed. In that sense, either the graphic score or the
improvisation can become a site for asserting affinities with, or
articulating fealty to a received tradition.
A powerful alternative, however, finds both improvisation and indeterminate
notation transforming whatever combination of traditions the musicians
performing the work have emerged from, thereby transforming the entire
network from which the music emerges.
Teaching Improvised Music
Performer-centered models in which individual players adopt new skills,
communicate cross-culturally, and articulate personal research directions,
have found trenchant articulation in improvised musics. Accordingly, in more
liberal circles, it is often asserted that orchestral performers "should
learn to improvise"--whatever that may mean.
Learning new performance skills is only part of the issue, however.
Christopher Small's understanding that "the tension and the possibility of
failure which are part of an improvised performance have no place in modern
concert life," could be applied not only to performers, but also to the
economic and social infrastructure that supports classical music itself.
Orchestra performers operate as part of a network comprised not only of
musicians, conductors and composers, but also administrators, foundations,
critics and the media, historians, educational institutions, and much more.
Each of the nodes within this network, not just those directly making music,
would need to become "improvisation-aware," as part of a process of
resocialization and economic restructuring that could help bring about the
transformation of the orchestra that so many have envisioned.
Improv(is)ing the Orchestra
Many of the most radical practices and social changes that emerged from what
cultural historian Daniel Belgrad called "the culture of spontaneity" of the
1950s and 1960s seem to have occurred without very much input from the
modern symphony orchestra. In both Europe and the United States,
improvisation, and free jazz in particular, was widely viewed as symbolic of
a dynamic new approach to social order that would employ spontaneity both to
unlock the potential of individuals, and to combat oppression by hegemonic
political and cultural systems.
In the late 20th Century, the most common route toward the encounter between
improvisation and the orchestra, from Larry Austin to Hans Werner Henze to
Steven Mackey, involved having star improvisors "front the band." While the
results can be spectacularly successful, a more radical integration of
improvisation into the orchestra, rather than simply grafting improvisative
elements onto its surface, could explicitly call into question the nature of
the orchestra itself as a sentient sound-producing body.
The set of alternative models that reimagine the orchestra along
improvisational and communitarian lines includes Cornelius Cardew's "Scratch
Orchestra," Pauline Oliveros's "Sonic Meditations," and Lawrence "Butch"
Morris's "Conductions," in which an improvising conductor functions
literally as a centralized conduit of musical current linking other
improvisors. These models provide trenchant examples for recuperating the
symphony orchestra as a developmental site for new aesthetic models that
foreground agency, identity, embodiment, cultural difference and
self-determination.
If, in performances of improvised music, the possibility of internalizing
alternative value systems is implicit from the start, we can more clearly
view the difficulty with the earlier pluralist conceptions of improvisation
and the orchestra, where, as art critic Hal Foster put it, "minor deviation
is allowed to resist radical change." Similarly, the pluralist tendency to
situate African-American music as the vehicle of orchestral
transubstantiation, while well-grounded historically, risks becoming overly
narrow in the new century, as improvisative traditions from around the
world, influenced or not by African-American forms, become part of a
landscape that could inform the classical music of the future.
Indeed, what might a new American classical music sound like in a
postcolonial world? Certainly, such a new music would need to draw upon the
widest range of traditions, while not being tied to any one. Rather than
quixotically asserting a "new common practice," perhaps such a music would
exist, as theorist Jacques Attali put it, "in a multifaceted time in which
rhythms, styles, and codes diverge, interdependencies become more
burdensome, and rules dissolve"--in short, a "new noise."
Improvisation, so fundamental to what being "American" is all about, would
play an important role in fostering that new noise. For Attali, who includes
the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians as emblematic of
the project of using music to build a new culture, subsumed under the term
"composition" is a set of processes and practices that appears to resemble,
not composition as it is practiced in the West, but improvisation.
"Music is no longer made to be represented or stockpiled," Attali wrote in
1977, "but for participation in collective play, in an ongoing quest for
new, immediate communication, without ritual and always unstable. It becomes
nonreproducible, irreversible."
George Lewis, improvisor-trombonist, composer and computer/installation
artist, studied composition with Muhal Richard Abrams at the AACM School of
Music, and trombone with Dean Hey. The recipient of a MacArthur "genius"
Fellowship in 2002, a Cal Arts/Alpert Award in the Arts in 1999, and
numerous fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Lewis has
explored electronic and computer music, computer-based multimedia
installations, text-sound works, and notated forms. A member of the
Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) since 1971,
Lewis's work as composer, improvisor, performer and interpreter is
documented on more than 120 recordings. His published articles on music,
experimental video, visual art, and cultural studies have appeared in
numerous scholarly journals and edited volumes. In Fall 2004, Lewis will
become the Edwin H. Case Professor of Music at Columbia University.


Jon Raskin
Rova Saxophone Quartet
www.rova.org
www.jonraskin.com
http://www.myspace.com/jonraskin
http://www.myspace.com/rovasaxophonequartet