Heffley - Composed Theory of Improvisation (44763301)

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A Composed Theory of Free Improvisation

by Mike Heffley © 2000
Introduction
Imagine a government one day dissolving itself and, as its last official act, declaring its state
henceforth to be, literally, one of anarchy. Imagine that state then going on to solve the
perennial social problems that had eluded even its best governments, and to become a model for
the rest of the world to follow. How would we study such a workable anarchy? How would we
discern the secrets of its success as we assessed it to learn how (or whether) we should follow
its example?
These questions convey something of the challenge the practice of so-called "free"
improvisation poses to the music theorist. When critics judge it a musical failure, that judgment
usually, solipsistically, indicts its premise (spontaneous musicking); conversely, when judged a
success, the judgment itself validates the premise.
I will back into my own response to the challenge of judging the premise on its own merit by
defining terms, both negatively and positively. In establishing what a few things are not, we
will move most quickly to what they are (or at least might be). In the process, we will also
survey the concrete terrains of context--historical, cultural, musical, philosophical, discursive
(within and between disciplines)--from which to draw a theory. I will conclude with a reflection
on the theory's practical value to the musician and music educator in personal, professional, and
pedagogical terms.
The Terms
The first term to tackle is "theory." It is commonly enough confused with analysis, philosophy,
and even the various "-logies" (of music, of music in culture, of "socio-," of "anthropo-") that I
should state my usages for this project. Some etymological reminders and tinkering will suffice.
My discipline/discourse is Ethnomusicology, a relatively recent branching from (Comparative)

Musicology. The suffix comes from the Greek logoV (logos), originally widely defined to cover
linguistic and rational phenomena. I include here the semiotic charge dating from its New
Testament usage ("the word made flesh") and still current in our modern "logo" (understood as
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metonymic). An inquiry into the "logics" of a music, then, will most properly include (and
increasingly does, even in conventional musicology, as it long has in ethnomusicology) not
only analyses of its systems and mechanics but also of its biological, psychological, social,
historical, and cultural/mythological contexts.
Do theory and philosophy belong with these logics? Yes, but they also extend beyond them,
because logical studies are (here) local studies, studies of concretes, some of which are airier
than others. The mythos breathing in the sonata form--the Romantic artist with his Western
torch--may look abstract, even transcendent, compared to a particular sonata, but it is clearly
not a universal; the nineteenth-century formalist philosophies enunciated by Hanslick
(1885/1974) and Schopenhauer (1883/1966) are likewise peculiar to Romanticism and its
extramusical contexts in a real time and place. Again, musicology (and its ethno- cousin) can
and does, in its most liberal and recent interdisciplined applications (we should include folklore
studies in their company), cover this terrain.
Theory, however, I would emphasize not as musicological so much as "musicosophical" (from

soFia [sophia], wisdom), understanding the former to be a subset of the latter. "Theory's"
etymological poetry is rich. Stemming from the Greek qea (thea), or spectacle, the original
association was with the theater, conceived as a framework in which to view the doings of the
gods in both history and the heavens. I take the realm of logos--the "logical" terrain described
above--as that theater. I ascribe theory, accordingly, to a surrounding "sophical" terrain, that
from which the logical theater emerges, draws on for constructive material, is grounded in,
reverts to in time.
The symmetry in the terms "musicology" and "musicosophy" signals the fusion (as opposed to a
Platonic split) between a locally sited, sounded music in all its logical as well as its sophical
glory.1 Thus at a semantic stroke do we leave all issues of separation between concept,
creativity, and expression; between body (music), mind (music's rationale), soul (music's
mythos/meaning)--all three of which manifest variously in the many, and thus are "-logized,"
comparatively and contextually--and their one comprising spirit (the universal theory
overarching them [as in arkhe [arche], first principles], about which we "-sophize"--
archaeosophy?).2 We situate the local (music, its rationale, its mythos) and isolate the universal
(its theory) without violating or compromising any aspect with itself or each other (in theory,
anyway; we'll see if we can put it into practice so as we proceed).3
Before continuing with this etymological-historical grounding, through the words "free" and
"improvisation" (and, symbiotically, "composition"), let's first survey abovementioned concrete
terrains.
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Recap
We have just examined a musical discourse that is (as clearly as so many others) local--specific
to certain historical streams and moments, to sociocultural dynamics, to a body of recorded
work and performance practices, to an emerging critical and journalistic press, to people in
places. But this local music--free jazz, then new and improvised music--shares fundamental
premises with a tradition only slightly less obviously global (widely shared, transhistorical and
transcultural; Bailey [1980] provides a good sense of this).
The use of the word "free" as a contemporary musical descriptor dates from the musical
revolutions of the late 1950s and early 1960s in jazz. Improvisation in the jazz tradition has,
from the beginning, cast off and/or made free with its composed premises, increasing chance,
spontaneity, and (musical, mythical, paradigmatic) options for the improviser. Eventually, by
the 1960s, solo and group improvisations took place on nothing deliberately predetermined or
assumed, and "free jazz" as a movement was born. While it has thrived in its original American
far less than in Eurasian and Canadian scenes, all three parts of the world (among, increasingly,
others) have developed a thick body of material that gives this musical philosophy and practice
that is also an idiom its historical and cultural sites. If you look up the coupled words "free
jazz" in a standard music reference, or on a good computer data base, you gain instant access to
a province shaped and mapped enough for ethno/musicological work. You see it divided into
sites of instrument, period, place, key artists, record labels and publications with aesthetic
ideologies and slants, inter/national/regional/local venue networks and styles, analytical/critical
and ethnographic literature and journalism, all within a manageable window of time and place,
all current and thriving, offering you a thousand new uncharted special areas of interest to
explore and map.
As with "improvisation" as an issue standing alone, "composition's" "logical" symbioses with

improvisation are also staked out in the literature with the comprehensiveness of a fair-to-good
map; Dean, Smith and Dean, Kumpf (1981), and Noll (1977) provide good surveys and
assessments of various recent-to-current compositional approaches that incorporate, even
centralize, improvisation. Most usefully here, the topography of that terrain includes more areas
of theory and philosophy than its counterpart in improvisation.4 The text of a score--what we
might see as literacy's theater of music--is more compatible with our literate tradition of theory
and philosophy than the theater of performed sound (especially improvised, especially freely
improvised, in which the text leaves the stage most completely).
That overview of the "logical" terrain should suffice to lead to a discussion of its "sophics," and
thence, more specifically, to a theory of improvisation and composition both free of
prescription.
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Some Questions
Stravinsky stated that composition was frozen improvisation; Pierre Boulez stated that, given
different versions of the same performance, one will always take the best one.5 What
implications do such statements hold for the centralization of free improvisation? What is
gained, if anything, from not seeing improvisation as a means to the end of composition? from
not reifying a given recorded improvisation as definitive? from not canonizing either?
The question comes, of course, with (local) historical as well as musical assumptions and
limitations, the unpacking of which (through other local examples) will guide and frame our
moves toward a global answer.
Taken alone, these composers' positions don't necessarily constitute an attack on improvisation;
indeed, both justify it on composition's own terms (Stravinsky suggests improvisation as
generatively and Boulez as developmentally essential to composition). Read as an attack,
however, the implication is that:
composition's freezing of improvisation is a freeing of it into a comprehension and

fulfillment of whatever is good about it (Stravinsky); and that
the nature of that improvement lies in the opportunity composition affords the improviser--
the (performative) interpreter of a (definitive) text, most narrowly, and the (creative and
spontaneous) composer of a sonic text (a peformance deemed definitive), most widely--to
assess all realizations and to present the best possible realization of the text, to rescue
improvisation's potential as product from its own actuality as process in the ephemera of
the real-time flow; to assert itself (composition) as a fixed standard by which to judge the
improvisation, a consummation and thus canceler of the improvisation--the moment of
death to its moment of life; to stand there as a generative matrix for new improvisations,
new lives, the primary purpose of which is to generate new deaths/compositions (Boulez).
The question's thrust: Why is improvisation ever a proper spectacle for public performance,
why is it not rather always and only a stage along the way toward its own composed perfection
of expression? What is gained by seeing it as an end in its own right, with its own different but
equally valuable ends and means? What is gained even when it does, in Eric Dolphy's words,
vanish unrecorded in the air as it sounds?
Some Answers
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Composition and improvisation in the West have each defined a single spectrum of a process
that is, at one pole, little more than arranging (making scores/improvisations according to
traditionally established and well-elaborated systems) and, at the other, borders on creatio ex
nihilo (creating such systems and elaborations oneself). In constructing and then assessing the
relationship between composition and improvisation, we will take that spectrum into account.
Drawing on above-sketched "logical" terrain, we will also understand the historical window
onto that spectrum to be the Western music tradition dating roughly from plainchant to the
present; we will further consider the African-American developments of both improvisation and
composition in both concert music and blues/jazz lineages as taking place within that larger
Western cultural history (leaving to the side, arbitrarily and temporarily, their genealogy down
African lines). This specifically Eurocentric perspective will serve this particular question's
concern with a relationship between literate and oral (music) cultures, and that in ways we can
mine fruitfully en route to stating a theory.
At this point we have suggested two goods without carefully defining either one: the good of
composition, begun and mediated by improvisation (per Stravinsky and Boulez); and the good
of improvisation unmediated by any composition (a good we must establish before theorizing
about). We've alluded to a spectrum between the derivitave and the definitive occupied by both;
in so doing, however, notice that we've not defined "good" according to its position on that
spectrum (that is, whether a composition or improvisation is better or worse according to its
relationship to tradition or innovation). We have seen the good of composition defined (by
Boulez) at the expense of that of improvisation (to the effect that, at its best, whether
traditionally derivative or radically definitive, improvisation is always the lesser, composition
the greater, good).
We now put this deconstruction of the question "Why is improvisation ever preferable to
composition as an end in itself?" into a diagram intended to begin the defense of
improvisation's good. That visual abstract will also serve to frame historical and
historiographical details offered as context for this question. That context established will
suggest another such abstract--of the composer, the improviser, and their relationship--which we
will bring to life with a few concrete examples of people playing those roles in that
relationship, selected for the points they make. I will end by inferring my theory of free
improvisation from these two framings of historical/historiographical and aesthetic/practical
information.
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Fig. 1: The narrative of literacy
Fig. 2: The narrative of orality
Before we put our flesh on these bones, let's pick through them a bit, as we did the question.
Fig. 1 signals the primacy of composition over improvisation asserted by the question; it is
captioned as the narrative of literacy (rather than "the literate tradition") to signal both history
(fact: literacy did emerge from orality) and historiography (narrative: that emergence
demonstrated a teleological imperative, an evolutionary development from primitive orality to
sophisticated literacy--something akin to the layering of the limbic by the neocortical brain,
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both a transcendence and a subsumption of the primitive).
Fig. 2 reverses the relationship, posits the primacy of improvisation to be argued here; it is
captioned "the narrative of orality" to signal its historical/historiographical message: literacy
emerged from orality not as its consummate and supreme blossom but as a local and transient
bloom from the larger, more enduring plant.
Fig. 1's outer/outward-pointing arrows depict the self-sufficiency of a closed system;6 the
rationale thereof lies in the ascription of a steady-state recycling of improvisation and
composition in which improvisation is never centralized as a process but always issues from,
refers to, a composed generative matrix and always leads through development of that matrix to
a goal--actualization of potential, perfection of its expression--which in turn needs the
codification of a fixed notation (more broadly, traditional prescription) for its own development
into a new generational matrix for a new improvisation, and so on (I distinguish between "goal"
and "composition" to allow for discussion of improvisation as, again, something that could
conceivably achieve composition's ends [what Braxton has often called "the Golden
Performance"] without recourse to its means [notation]). The infinite recursion of improvisation
is placed inside that steady-state circle to depict it (as footnote 6's examples variously do) as
primal but problematic, incomplete.
Staying within the narrative of literacy for a moment, let's return to some of the broadest
context--the etymological--couching the scheme of Fig. 1. We said above that Stravinsky's
beneficial "freezing" of improvisation was a "freeing" of it to its highest potential, in
composition; the above references to free jazz, especially in Europe, justify a usage of that word
"free" in conjunction with "improvisation" that will serve us well here as a reminder of the
creatio ex nihilo part of our spectrum (also noted above). Why here? Because Fig. 1's closed
system is a picture of just that edge of the creative spectrum, because it is a picture of a creative
source giving forth more than it takes, in contrast to Fig. 2's image of a derivative expression
drawing from more than it could ever take in.7 This is part of the narrative of literacy, as
posited: (the) improvisation (of nature) thrashes around upon and within itself blindly until it is
agented through the emergence of (the) superior composition (of suns out of gases, life and
sentience out of elements, "higher" out of "lower" life) into the teleological goal of (the)
freedom (of its fulfilled potential).
How then shall we understand these key words of this narrative?
We see in interviews with "free" players much reference to the music as something akin to a
private language developed between close friends, or family. "Free" comes from same root
(Indo-European prijos) as friend, beloved, kin, dear. This suggests something about the nature
of freedom that resonates more with Augustine's command to "Love, and do what you will"
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than with the idea of the absence of constraints abhorred by the composer. The free improviser
may be free from principles and powers she deems less than "love"--and for our purposes, we'll
define "love" as that which the improviser decides to, is compelled to, strives to experience and
offer as music--but she is constrained by that music, whatever she may discover it to be in the
pursuit of her freedom. We might thus define that freedom as unbreakable, compelling
friendship with oneself and all one's inner worlds; with one's "others" and with their inner
worlds, through the outer signs of same; and with the sheer stuff of one's world--the details of
physical spacetime, including one's body, in all its sub-, trans-, and super-humanity.
Think of "free improvisation," then, not as undisciplined so much as essentially personal

(amenable to the logical inquiries of reason, of sciences soft and hard) and universal (amenable
to the sophical enquiries of wisdom: theology, philosophy, poetry and the other arts) at once--
the personal and universal as friends--however distinguishable as one rather than the other…8
"Improvisation's" word origin is the same as that of "provide" (foreseen)--it means unforeseen.
Improvisers are future-makers, their spontaneous utterances working from the existing materials
of "composition:" anything pre-existing, or unfolding (the sense of composition's root word),
something to improve upon: a scale, a pattern, a melody…which themselves might have started
as improvisations on an idea, a fact of nature, a feeling or need…which themselves might be
seen as the improvisations of evolution on what it has composed so far. The etymology of
"free" is rich mythopoetically, these other two words not so much.9
Think of "free" in the sense we mean when we say we free our mind of thoughts and all content
in order to meditate; thoughts and feelings arise, but we are free in our detachment from them;
the ultimate goal of meditation-- "enlightenment"--may even arise, but we are free too from any
attachment to that (it must be continually sought and regained, we cannot expect it to provide
once-and-for-all "composure").
Think, too, of free in the sense we mean when we say "Aha!" or "Eureka!": the revelations of
Poincarré stepping on the bus, of Einstein realizing the equality of energy and mass, of
Stravinsky experiencing the composition of Le Sacré as divine inspiration rather than
methodical ratiocination, of Jung suddenly noticing the beetle on the windowsill at the very
moment he reads the word "beetle"--of you (interpreter) and I (composer) in this, our common
improvisatory moment (frozen in this text)…the moment of creative freedom, when we are free
of what previously burdened us as unrealized and unactualized potential. When the mind is
clear and expecting something new, however grounded in the familiar, when the soul and heart
are in their "love," when the universe responds meaningfully, all are in their freedom.10
This improvised/composed discussion of mine establishes the narrative of literacy not by

disproving that of orality so much as by having the narrative of literacy do as much as could
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possibly be done by that of orality (even Bailey's perfect expression of the narrative of orality
[footnote 9] reconciled improvisation to by equating it with composition. And Attali defends
improvisation against Boulez [146] but still, in his final chapter, gives composition the primary
role [despite footnote 9's point] in his vision of our future). Remember, improvisation is not left
out of Fig. 1's narrative, it is simply put in a place, a relationship, and asked to please stay
there.
Fig. 2 moves that place, from a closed to an open system and from the position of subset within
the set (of composition) to that of set containing subset (again, composition). This narrative of
orality is an open system in that it draws from the same world that the narrative of literacy's
system rather supplies with the effulgent products of its its steady-state generation. It depicts
the formation of "goal" (purpose, teleoV), "text" (product of creation), and even "generative
matrix" (process of creation) as (local) subset to the (global) set of "improvisation"--the sound
of the unforeseen--and it pictures that formation as a transience within rather than a stabilization
or fulfillment of the unforeseen (much like "chaos" scientists view order). It further depicts that
unforeseen as "coming in from" rather than "going out to" the cosmos.
This shift of improvisation between the two narratives suggests a reframing of the original
challenging question: "Explain why we should not accept Fig. 1 as the truer picture; AND
explain why we should accept Fig. 2 as the truer picture; OR explain how we can, and why we
should, accept both as the truest picture."
The narrative of orality historicizes and historiographs the same historical and musical data so
as to posit improvisation as composition's Urgrund and ultimate purpose (composition as
servant to improvisation), rather than the reverse. That narrative in those terms:
written notation began in the West as a mnemonic device serving the performance of an
oral tradition in which (like in the Arab world, a common cultural influence on both West
and much of the West African populace brought to America as slaves) text and its
meaning were central, music secondary;11
was elaborated into a medium for musical elaborations (which its own elaborations not
only reflected but fed and stimulated);12
then into texts that, between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, served to chronicle
stylistic, practical and theoretical changes in the music; that chronicle served the historical
narrative of literacy, reifying "the work" (score) as a kind of scripture;13 that score's
newfound autonomy as an aesthetic object (per Hanslick) constituted its value as an object
of commercial exchange (Attali 46-86);
this paradigmatic shift in music culture resonated with that in the larger culture, in which
the seed of fighting, killing, and dying for The Word that sprouted from Moses on Sinai
through the life and death of Christ, the Roman destruction of the Jewish temple in 70
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A.D., the Crusades, flowered in the European invasions of the Americas, the slave trade
and colonialism;14
that flower then wilted, went back to seed, through the twentieth-century wars and the rise
of the oppressed/suppressed cultures and people "of the body" (indeed, of their bodies)
against that Western "culture of the word" (with the Holocaust, the West shot off its own
history's foot; meanwhile, every victim of literacy's narrative [modernism/modernity] from
the world of orality, from the Indians to the Africans to the native Americans to the
Indonesians and Asians--even to the generative source of the West's own womanhood--
turned the mastery of the narrative of literacy that was forced on them against its own
hegemonic self-application, reclaiming it as servant rather than [usurping] master);15
orality is thus restored as the ground from which literacy has arisen and to which it has
fallen; the upstart, if not yet all of its still-disastrous effects and momentum, has (in
theory, and at least half in practical terms) been repudiated.
That combination--"all in theory, half in practice"--is a key distinction. What I've presented are
two different narratives equal in force and authority; the problems just described arose not from
one rather than the other of those narratives so much as from their conflicts. This takes us back
to the third reframing of the question: "Explain how we can, and why we should, accept both
Fig. 1 and Fig. 2 as the truest picture."
In challenging then defending improvisation from an historical narrative that can be read as
local rather than global (Fig. 1), positing for it an alternative narrative that can be read as
global as well as local (Fig. 2), I yet haven't moved beyond conflict to symbiosis. Fig. 3
pictures that move.
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Fig. 3: The narrative of the marriage of orality and literacy
Fig. 3 proffers a situation in which improvisation and composition enjoy equal and symbiotic
status atop an historical moment underpinned by what Tomlinson conceives as hermeneutical
and archaeological layers; I've added my own timeless (ahistorical) bedrock, drawn from
Bielawski's scheme.16
Simply put, the historical/hermeneutic level 2 comprises the most immediate musical discourse,
directly accessible to the (level 1) consciousness of the composers/improvisers, on which they
do in fact consciously draw (examples below). As do "composition" and "improvisation," these
circles have areas both of overlap and independence. Level 3's circles are broader, no longer
directly accessible to consciousness (because they represent the pre-literate incarnations of their
traditions), but (since literacy) still in historical memory and vestigial traces. These two levels
we might see as cultural elaborations (1, 2) on cultural systems (3), calling them hermeneutical
insofar as they impinge on historical consciousness.
The fourth level gets us into the archaeology of the subconscious; it overlaps with
consciousness but is also separate from it; that isn't to say it isn't a part of life, both of cultures
and individuals. It extends into the molecular and ultimately quantum fabric of biology and
physics, thus closing the system of being we polarize variously between conscious and not, this
and that, light and dark, spirit and matter.17
To remain conscientiously grounded in the concretes of discourse and literacy itself as we move
to a statement of theory, Fig. 3 includes an area marked "corresponding literature." My sources
are cited merely as samples I think fit, not as exhaustive or definitive; further, that fit is with
the central focus of this essay as much as with each of the chart's five levels, so we'll leave the
composer's circle behind as we scan those sources. Finally, my reflections on the sources are
italicized, and are based on my own experience as a "free" composer/improviser as much as
anything else.
The literature corresponding to the top level (1) is that about free jazz as developed by African-
American artists in the 1950s--60s and picked up by Europeans in the late '60s/early '70s (see
Gray, and Chapters Three and Four). I draw from these sources and my own fieldwork and
journalism on free players, and from the articles and books about specific artists and groups.
Whatever I propose for a theory, whatever I say along the way in formulating it, whatever
sources from other disciplines I deem pertinent--and however that--is in the light of the logical-
sophical information within these sources.
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The free player is pictured here as a closed circle, one who conceives, creates, defines, refines,
and evaluates--contains--her own self-sufficient musical kosmos; her circle is thus separated
from the rest of the world by the top horizon. However, as the lines connecting it to the other
circles suggest, her freedom is as much a freedom to as from similarly self-sufficient kosmos
(the next row of circles down). Those represent the other logi/sophi--complete with all their
traditions, stylistic conventions, personal variations of the participating artists, historical/cultural
associations--on which the free player draws.
In the case of free jazz, we can trace clearly both the "jazz" and the "free" lines--i.e., virtually
all of the artists seminal to the local genre did come out of the "pre-free" jazz tradition, and that
shows in the skills they bring to their liberatory reactions against certain elements of that
tradition. One of those second-line circles might be labeled, then, "the jazz tradition" (or even
"bebop," or "energy music," or "Bill Evans piano style," to name some subsets); the others
might be labeled traditions from the rest of the world (gamelan, electronic experimental,
Western classical, South Indian); they might also be labeled with names of artists (Braxton,
Bach, Beethoven, Ives, Cage, Ali Akbar Khan, a single performance of, or piece by, any of
those).
The point is that no free player is lost in space by virtue of his freedom, each has inherited and
acquired (or assumed) musical parents, backgrounds, roots, influences, families/clans, contexts
from which he is free primarily in proportion to the degree to which he can personally
synthesize, re-situate--re-originalize, re-originate, thus regenerate--those things.
The literature pertinent to level 2 is that on those various sites; the free player might draw from
these traditions as well as any other (e.g. Braxton--when he's playing free, or from what he calls
the "open space"--from jazz, from Schönberg, etc.), in the understanding that the goal is not
some sort of historical purism or appropriation, or mastery on the terms of the source, but rather
a personalization of the material or approach suggested by it.
If the free players had no such connections, to each other or to the various provided kosmos, the
aesthetics and theory for this music would be very different. They would spring from a sort of
Locke-ian notion of the mind/soul as a blank slate with, paradoxically, a creative generative
capacity. All that issued forth in freedom then would be valued as music simply by virtue of
being; all that issued forth at the command of something provided from without would be
understood as conditioning rather than that freedom. More--ontogeny would not be experienced
nor perceived as a recapitulation of phylogeny; the act of introspection would not simulate a
journey back through evolutionary history, as it does when, with or without the help of sound,
one proprioceives from one's neocortex "down" to one's limbic and reptilian brain…or "out" to
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one's neurophysiological microcosm of the electrochemical, or one's cardiovascular microcosm

of the oceanic, or one's skeletal microcosm of earth's bedrock, or one's respiratory microcosm of
the atmosphere (per Sansonese). The moment would be free rather by virtue of its constant
casting-off of the past, decontextualizing of the present, and arbitrary assertion of the future; the
farther back the past, the less, rather than more, would be its relevance to the (musical)
moment.18
This notion of freeplay as generative tabula rasa simply fits neither facts nor experience as
reported by the vast majority of free improvisers, nor by other disciplines. The brain/mind
system, the more it is studied by (for example) linguists, evolutionary psychologists, and
sociobiologists is seen to be as much like an array of specialized systems genetically
"hardwired" for specific adaptations (to nature) as like a general-purpose computer waiting to be
programmed (by nurture, or, per Hall, "acquisition"). Universal and ultimate issues and
questions--what/who is humanity? what is the meaning of life?--arise viscerally in pursuit and
development of the most individual, local, and conditional logics.
The third level, of fewer and larger circles, denotes ancient systems and practices with which
we have no longer a direct connection but which still influence us explicitly through the
documentation that survives about them, as it resonates with or speaks to our own current
experiences; or implicitly, through vestiges and branches still alive in current music. Examples
are Western Medieval chant and later modal polyphony, pre-Melakarta Indian music, pre-
colonial gamelan, ancient Greek (from Pythagoras to Boethius), ancient Egyptian and Asian
traditions as gleaned from texts and pictures. Other sources: Apel, McKinnon, Hiley, Jeffrey (on
Western chant); Rouget (on ancient Israel, Greece, and Arabia); Godwin, and James (on the
specifically musicosophical perennial traditions of Western "speculative music;" see Godwin
[1989]).
Pertinence to free theory: interest in these circles is viscerally sparked by the process of free
improvisation itself, as though they corroborated and expounded on insights gained in the act
of musication--not via a scholarly historical interest. The enquiring mind of the questing free
player wants to know what there is to know about them because his organism has thoroughly
plumbed the knowns of its more accessible "past" and seeks roots with depths to match the
heights of his corresponding reaches through his fruits into his "future" (in quotes, because
time is relative in the cosmic/planetary/human organism's ontogeny's recapitulation of its
phylogeny [again, see Bielawski for a musicological-analytical rationale of this]). The
important distinction between this and simple historical interest is that the free player/singer's
interest is timely, and timeless; ever-deeper primal past becomes ever more immediate present
and pressing future.
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Perhaps Rouget deserves special consideration in seeking empirical support for this hypothesis.
If we grant that any present freedom must be a freedom to as much as from its nested layers and
infinite webs of context, and that the human organism itself empirically supports that
hypothesis…can we also say, in light of Rouget's extensive data and theory on the phenomena
of trance and possession in relation to language and music, that the ever-timely recapitulation of
cosmic history taking place in our organism is not only evident but experienced? That the well-
known altered states, and less extreme and more mundane instances, of subjective time warps--
the speeding or slowing, freezing or melting of our time sense--are our organism's unmediated
(yet musically manipulable) experiences of the quite concrete continuum between the timely and
the timeless?
The one big circle--the archaic--represents Urgrund, arkhein, first principles, and that not only
of music as a distinct art form and practice, but the primal ground of language, of writing,
mythmaking, storytelling, magical incantation; of mathematics19--AND all the phenomena
those systems measure/codify/reflect, from the stars and planets and their cycles to the feeding
and mating cycles of insects; of music as a speculative ("mirroring") science ("knowing") of all
that, and also as an aspect of it too integrated (as expressive and physical sounds with unique
identities) to merely mirror. Sources, selected for their suggestions of such Urgrunds as they
occur in history, are Davidson (1987) and McKenna (1994), both for a vision of early Africa as
an archaic source of the ancient West--pertinent to a free theory applied to "free jazz"; Walker
(1983), for a vision of the pre-/proto-historic feminine as an archaic force appropriated by
ancient patriarchies--pertinent to the role of gender in discussions of musical Urgrund; and
Deutsch (1992: 88-90), Blacking (1993), Powers (1992), and Suhor (1986), for suggestions of
genetic language/music continuities/connections,20 and therein a mundane/sacred continuum;
Johnston, Sansonese and McClain, for their visions of ancient physics and measurements of
sound as contiguous with ancient myth (human images of sub-/super-human forces) and
religion (understandings of the relationships of those forces); and, in all of those, with the
ancient architecture, theater, poetry, dance, sculpture and painting that, along with the
myth/religion, still loom so large in our world today.
Free players/theorists will personalize this sort of material as readily as any other, making
intuitive and spontaneous connections between such first principles and their own "bottom line"
of subjectively idiosyncratic voices and aesthetics.
Note that we are taking the process of free improvisation and theory thereabout out of the
province of a local site of post-jazz experimenters and into that of all musickers, both
composers and improvisers, everywhere and everywhen. Cage is engaging in free improvisation
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when he conceives his pieces--say, something deriving a musical syntax from a linguistic one--
though his performers aren't necessarily doing so, even when they are spontaneously "taking
chances;" or Stockhausen, when he decrees that players be intuitive…he is improvising freely
as a composer, his performers rather improvising on his "work;" Bach (who of course
improvised as well as composed) freely improvised on the premise of the Lutheran God every
time he composed a piece of liturgical music…his players merely interpreted that
improvisation, even when they improvised on his figured bass.
The bottom circle stands for the human agency which embodies the potential from which all the
others arise. It is conceived as contiguous with the nonhuman world of animal and cosmic life,
distinguishing itself therefrom only via the line connecting to the larger circle. It includes the
infinity within the self-aware psyche and that in the world at large.
Sources here are Young (1991) and Mâche for concepts/data of "zoomusicology;" McKenna, for
theories about primeval language/musical/visual expression; Schafer, for physical (both natural
and urban) world as soundscape; Rouget, for his bridge from that inner to the cultural world as
music site; Attali, for his recollection of music as an act of violence and sacrifice; and
Sansonese, for inner world as proprioceived sound/myth/visionscape--comprising mental
visualizations, Jungian meanings, the internal sounds of the organism--which are the very
provisos of any freedom the human organism can know and express.
Which is just what the free player deals with every moment, distinguishing herself therefrom
only by her (finite) improvisations on them (the infinities of both inner and outer worlds).
Perhaps the most useful concept from this level of consciousness (individual/mass/historical) to
a theory of free is that of "Rough Music," a heading found in some dictionaries of occult lore
(see also Attali) that denotes music with an aesthetic of harsh, ugly and licentious affect,
something that emerges as a purging agent in cultures sick with overrefinement, out of touch
with the life force and joy therein. Henry Miller is a good example of a "rough" writer; free
jazz certainly served that function for those wasting away in the body-numbing cerebro-junk of
the bop tradition, or under the shadow of dominant cultures and their appropriations and
assimilations of earlier challenges, as in African America, Germany, and Japan. When all else
fails, the free improviser knows she can simply start thrashing in a sheer panic and riot to
survive, as a way to new order potentially grand and vast, knows from experience that such
stability and order do arise from such instability and chaos.21
Stating the Theory
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From above mix of musings and data, we can draw a theory of free improvisation. Like all
theories, it can be tested in the light of this and any other data.
1. Per Cage and St. Anselm, there is always something rather than nothing.22 Consciousness
is a spectrum that mines itself--or doesn't, as it will--from out of its infinite depths (past,
sub-, inner) through its finite logic/matter (present, body/mind/world) towards its infinite
heights (future, outer, super-). The infinite is suggested by the finite (per Bohm's physics);
the finite's suggestion of the infinite as the set to which it is a subset--as the greater field,
and its Urgrund--as well as the subset to which it is a set is more plausible than not by
every rational criterion. We can per/conceive only within the limits of the finite, though
we can stretch those limits into what previously lay beyond them, in the realm of infinite
potential (thus we surmise the continuation in both directions of our consciousness beyond
the finite, because we have grown something from nothing, and we have stretched and
grown beyond previous finite limits).
2. Visualizing/picturemaking, storytelling/mythmaking, dancing, drama, speech and music
are all similar and intertwined in their origin and nature in our consciousness in their
similar dialectic between nature and nurture--genetic hardwiring and cultural/historical
conditioning, Urgrund and locale. There is something in all of them that is born fully and
complexly developed, and that is then worked and developed further by human agency.
Rationalizing and mythologizing intrinsically underly all of those natured/nurtured
abilities; so does irrational, "mythless" (meaningless) noise. Free improvisers demonstrate
this, attempt to strike a balance between the rational/meaningful and the sensory/noisy that
will maximally meet the needs of the organism.
3. Free improvisers have the following materials from which to make something that to them
and X number of others will be enjoyed as music, though to Y others it may only be
understood so, and that only from outside it (i.e., understood but not experienced as
music, as a foreign language is understood to be a language even by its non-speakers);
1. a. the "sight/sound/meaning" of their own inner "silences"--proprioceived
subconscious and superconscious, as well as conscious; these include actual sounds,
resonances, frequencies, of one's body/nervous system, and the intervals, patterns,
combinations of patterns they make as a whole system; visualizations (including
thoughts, dreams) that spontaneously link with the sounds, either by association
through cause-effect or otherwise; meaning--myth, dramatic content, images--that
spontaneously emerges from inner life (per Jung's archetypes); the inner experiences
of expressed actions (speaking, dancing/moving, sounding);
b. the "sight/sound/meaning" of the outer world: actual immediate phenomena

(environmental soundscape), cultural/historical cosmos (Schafer's keynote sounds, all
spacetime-local rationales), interactions with other improvisers (including all creative
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people, really--that point in consciousness spectrum where creation happens);
c. that music is not only meaningful (on the terms of the form/dynamics of the
human/planetary/cosmic organism, and how it is semiotically related to same) but
moral (according to the terms of that organism's health and needs, and how it is
semiotically and organically related to same). However, the latter is complex,
because that organism's agenda includes death as well as life (thus we get variations
on the theme of sacrifice for the greater good).
Consider a few examples from current musical discourse (close to my work), just to show how
Fig. 3's marriage (and its harmonies and clashes) takes form in various "couples." The
musical/cultural project of Albert Murray, Wynton Marsalis and Stanley Crouch23 marries
improvisation with composition as both are defined by the prebop/postbop/neobop lineage of
the jazz tradition (in other words, a musical definition fixed in the diatonically hierarchical
framework of pre-twentieth-century Western popular and concert music, complete with their
associated hierarchies of "high" and "low" classes and art forms, and in correspondingly
diatonic pre-1950s jazz-improvisational practices). It is a marriage of equals--no uneasiness or
conflict such as used to exist between Africa and Europe in America, the couple is now civil
and gracious, mutually respectful and equal in power struggles.
Anthony Braxton's work, by contrast, includes both twentieth-century dodecaphonically

"democratic" (non-hierarchically pitched) compositional and corresponding post-1950s extended
(into "noise" as well as other non-diatonic premises) improvisational practices in its conception,
also in a happy balance, along with an oft-articulated social vision free of sexism, racism, and
(perhaps most pertinent to this comparison) musical/cultural parochialism/chauvinism.
Whatever conflict takes place between the once-warring elements within these two different
marriages is minor compared to the larger potential conflict now between them. (One might
posit this same dynamic by replacing--counterintuitively but correctly--Marsalis/Murray/Crouch
with Schönberg/Adorno [1973] and Braxton with Stravinsky/Bernstein [1973]).
To make another point, we might put Alvin Lucier's work in the composer's circle of Fig. 3,
and suggest some aesthetically likeminded performers (Sven-Åke Johansson? Axel Dörner?) for
the improviser's circle. Returning to our original question--what is gained through improvisation
as an end rather than means?--consider what is gained when a violinist plays the beats created
by the sound waves between two notes according to the composer's dictum: the concretes of a
concept get publicly explored, a concept that might have been overlooked, marginalized, or
forgotten without the composer's act of casting and centralizing it into a piece.
Now picture the same performance arising in the improviser's circle; the phenomenon is
conceived, mined, and left behind. What is gained? If anything, it is the preservation of the
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universe, the protection of its impersonal potential from personal appropriation. The
engagement with the sound is not ascribed to a "composer," and can be ascribed to an
improviser only during the engagement itself; the phenomenon is left for future improvisers and
audiences to discover and enjoy, if they are led to do so, if they chance to do so, and is not
forced upon them as a thing of its own or of someone else's value, as a "work" demanding their
respectful attention and service.
What is gained by not fixing the improvisation with written notation is thus akin to what might
have been gained by Europeans if they had eschewed personal competition for personal
ownership and control of land, as though "the land" were something smaller than them (like the
inner circle of Fig. 1), in favor of the Native American systems of collective and individual
stewardship of a collective resource experienced as larger, as, indeed, source ("the world" of
Fig. 2).
This is not to single out Lucier; the same could be said of Braxton or any composer, whatever
his/her relationship to improvisation (or, in fact, of anyone who puts his/her name to any
process by virtue of his/her designs on it). An analogy less problematic (friendlier to Fig. 3) is
the scientific practice of naming natural discoveries after the discoverer (e.g. Halley's comet).
This practice is cross-culturally global, is non-invasive of both the nature being discovered and
of whatever other systems or ways of engaging nature others might be using.
I will end by linking all of the above to the personal, professional, and pedagogical. My own
description of my private musical universe as a free improviser would be instructive here (as
opposed to one in terms of some rationale I take in from the world). If I were invested in an
"imported rationale," I might describe my work and role in terms of, say, the jazz tradition,
discussing my personal influences and mentors, my unique contributions to a public historical
discourse. I would have developed this persona in the thick of the discourse, first as a novice,
then journeyman, then master, having had a clear goal and path sited for me from the first.
As it is, freedom has meant freedom from goals and paths as much as anything else--from self-
image, from desire and ambition, every bit as much as to irresistible compulsion and self-
determination. I've been articulating something that has been going on as a result of deliberate
choices made long ago that were leaps of faith into the dark at first and for long, only gradually
emerging as something that could even be articulated, or that could articulate. My own music's
sophics would include detailed musings over the role and nature of 1) the voice; 2) single-line
wind instruments, and 3) strummed, struck, and plucked polyphonic instruments--what they
each and all do for my organism psychic and physical, how I make them do that.
These sophics would include a look at the three worlds within each of those three worlds,
something that was at first a potential and then became a new physical reality (eg., how I
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theo/auto-didactically constructed my own three different embouchure musculatures, appropriate

to my own need and way to access and minister to the subconscious/body level of my being
[via the trombone's pedal tone and low register]; the discipline and mastery of my conscious,
rational, direct expressions [via the midrange]; and the access to my superconscious,
transcendent aspect [high register]). I would talk about my experiences of agenting similar states
of consciousness in my auditors, those whom my music touched and moved; I would talk about
similar physical-mental-spiritual self-re/wiring I did via the voice, and the hands on keyboard
and strings. All this is entirely distinct in my mind from my other experiences of being trained
from without, according to some pre-existing musical agenda and tradition (though there is, of
course, overlap).
My own narrative of composition and improvisation has had a very happy life in the nest of
Wesleyan's high-tech labs. I can improvise on the MIDI grand, or the K-2000 synthesizer (or
even, with a little more hardware, on my trombone and with my voice, both as verbalizer and
vocalizer); I can simultaneously produce both written documents of such soundings and
manipulable and faithful recordings (computer sequences). I can work these written and sonic
texts like a composer, I can play with them like an improviser, or like a player in a large or
small ensemble (using multitrack recorders); I can sample, and do "microscopic" operations on
the sound terrain of the samples. I can combine thus the narratives and media of literacy and
orality so fruitfully as to produce children that carry the genetic material of both their parents
and stand in the world as my arguments and proofs of the happiness and rightness of this
marriage.
The personal and professionally musical leads, for me, into the pedagogical. As one who has
needed to develop in tandem as person and artist, I have also needed to explain that
development, first to myself, then to others. I suspect that free improvisation--both the process
and its history--has been so overlooked in jazz studies and pedagogy, compared to the rest of
the jazz tradition, because its concept and context are so much more difficult (indeed,
frightening) to grasp and articulate. I've been compelled to theorize because I've found myself
caught up (indeed again, caught) in the "theater" of that music. In that circumstance, one needs
to make a way out, in, and through, both for oneself and one's fellows, just as has been done
(still so recently) in pre-free jazz scholarship and practice.
We can cap these musings by recalling our opening image of a (paradoxically) official "state" of
anarchy. Free improvisation in music is that state; it has given birth to other states, and they in
turn to it. It is our reminder that order and chaos should and do construct each other, and that
we would thus do well to acquaint ourselves with both, and with both the promise and the
dangers of their relationship.
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Almatexts
Notes
1. This terminological move, of course, goes right back to Pythagoras, to whom both the very word for
philosophy and the logical foundations of Western music are (mythico-historically) ascribed.
2. Such separations come after Pythagoras, from Plato through Boethius, and should not be cast aside here
before salvaging one of their logical aspects: the concept of improvement. One of the advantages of a
hierarchical Great Chain of Being is the fixity of physical, moral, and spiritual standards it implies, holding
out a situable goal and the hope and means to approach it--the possibility of rising or falling from one's
"natural" station. Improvisation, in mutation and natural selection, is nature's means of self-improvement.
The problem that began with Plato and crystallized in Boethius is the rigid fixing of that hierarchy; it has
proven truer to phenomena to think of it as "tangled" (per current physics, a tangled hierarchy is one in
which the criteria and positions of "high" and "low" are continually negotiated, in flux, exchanged). The
relevance of all that here lies in the rigidly hierarchical distinction between composers, their interpreters,
and improvisers, on the one hand; and theorists, on the other. For us, the relationship between the theorizing
about and the making of music, between the sophos and the logos, are best understood as an interactive,
mutually nurturing symbiosis constantly seeking balance, rather than a "high" noumenos and a "low"
phenomenos. Improvement (and improvidence, in improvisation, musical and otherwise) is always thus an
achievable yet conditional goal in spacetime, contingent on the given state of the cosmic/planetary/human
organism (see James [1993: 11, 74] for a detailed picture of the latter).
3. Having touched base with Pythagoras, Plato, and Boethius, it would behoove me here to relate this study
to a more recent historical root, one similar to the ancient Greek one, in the microcosm of my professional
discipline. Ethnomusicological discourse is very much rooted in nineteenth-century German philosophy's
syntax and issues; the scientific work of Helmholtz (see Johnston [1989]) provides a direct lineage both to
the way we ethnos have chosen to analyze and theorize about the musics of the world (or, in reaction, the
ways we later took care not to) and to the way the (mostly) German physicists have chosen to analyze and
theorize about the universe. If Helmholtz could thus serve as our Pythagoras, his contemporary Wagner
might be called on as a sort of anti-Plato: an example of the dangerous mania music can induce when the
universal and individual cease to coinhere and become rather incoherent in the aspects that distinguish them
from each other (as the atomic bomb did with energy [flow, horizontal] and mass [moment, vertical]).
The legacy of Helmholtz, Stumpf and the other Berliners has flourished in modern technology, and in the
area of music and theory thereof. This, of course, is the area (of indeterminacy, chance, in both musical and
physical reality) that has overlapped most interactively with free improvisation when the latter cut loose
from its "jazz" moorings, especially in Europe. And Wagnerism has been through the twentieth-century fire
with Nietzsche, Schönberg, Hitler and Adorno, and is still present in Stockhausen's "cosmic music" (his
description of his work), a music that, with technology's help, unleashes the energy within the "atoms" of
sound that his precursors managed only to free from their "molecular" (intervallic) chains.
In neither Helmholzism nor Wagnerism are we yet free of hive-like scientism nor destructively grandiose
individualism, though neither have overcome us, thanks to the pliability and submission abovementioned
fire has wrought on them, and the power and resilience of the rest of the world.
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4. See Berendt (1987) and Noglik (1979: 165-195) for the contemporary German accounts of this.
5. Stravinsky's composerly use of improvisation is described in Asaf'yev (1982: 226). Boulez articulates
fully his problem with improvisation in Attali (145-46), essentially expressing the critique of it I will pose
here. That critique ripples throughout the literature on and by other composers and critics as various as
Stravinsky, Boulez, and Adorno (1963); John Cage (in Revill [1992: 158-59]), Karlheinz Stockhausen (in
Morgan [1991: 417]) and Anthony Davis (in Dean [143]) and Anthony Braxton (in Dean [133]). The
common gist of their various complaints comes from the assumption that, either always or sometimes,
process' purpose is product (at least) as much as expression or communication, and that composition is the
only way to turn process (improvisation) into product (or even, we might add, product into process, in the
case of composition for improvisers). Considering the later careers of Glenn Gould and the Beatles, as
examples, that product need not be a score, can also be a recording.
6. In physics, a closed system is one that needs no energy from outside it to operate it (a plant is an open
system, since it needs light; the regulation of heat in a thermostatically controlled house is a closed one
because the house's own internal fluctuations of temperature turn the heat on and off). All closed systems are
"local," or limited in definition, since everything ultimately feeds on everything else (the house's furnace
needs fuel); but the question of whether the universe itself is closed (eternally oscillating between expansion
and collapse) or open (per Bohm 1980, the "explication" of an "implicate order"--in other words, a logos
made flesh) is still an open one in science. See Chapter Four's explication of Miller (1966) for his use of
these physics of general entropy and "local" formations of order therefrom as reflective of free-music
making, and to correlative social dynamics, in a move to ground free improvisation in a veritable biosocial
imperative, as opposed to the abstract one of an inherited paradigm. Indeed, Miller posits free-music makers
as the heralds, even progenitors, of a new, utopian society, one with roots (proclaimed by the music) in
tribal shamanic cultures, and fruits appropriate to same in the Millennial visions of Teilhard de Chardin.
7. And, a propo of the narrative of literacy and its etymologies, it was the West's Judeo-Christian/Greco-
Roman roots that came up, through the "people of the book" (ancient Israel), with shekinah--the presence of
transcendent spirit in matter and culture--and then with "the Word made Flesh," in the Incarnation. This
myth is the very picture of the closing of the system between physis and spiritus, unto a balanced equality
of immanence and transcendence (indeed, very much like a thermostat).
By contrast, Baudrillard's (142) words about non-Western cultures bespeaks the narrative of orality: "All
other cultures are extaordinarily hospitable: their ability to absorb is phenomenal. Whereas we waver
between the other as prey and the other as shadow, between predation pure and simple and an idealizing
recognition, other cultures still retain the capacity to incorporate what comes to them from without,
including what comes from our Western universe, into their own rules of the game…Being oneself means
nothing to them: everything comes from the Other."
8. The invocation of Augustine augments the previous footnote's introduction of our subject's historically
framed religious mythos, summed up pithily by Le Mée 1994. Her depiction of the Medieval monastery as
an expression (literacy's) of just this kind of freedom confronts and informs us exactly as does, say, the Sun
Ra Arkestra, which was also a (orality's) freely congregated collective whose music was a centerpiece
embedded in a mission-from-God context. (Both assemblages, incidentally, have exhibited similar
vulnerabilities--to a descent into cult--issuing from a blurring and imbalance between the immanent and
transcendent, and between the timeless universal and its timely expressions.) Le Mée's emphasis on vocal
expression as sacrifice and vulnerability complements Attali's and Foucault's (1977) view of it as violence
and power (more on which ahead); her discussion of "theodidactic" (God-taught) music training pertains
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directly to free improvisation. Many free improvisers, from the time of John Coltrane on, describe the music
as prayer to a transcendent intelligence (see Such [1993: 117-24]), something that effects the healing and
health of the cosmic/planetary/human organism, something that grounds and tunes that organism. The
silence from which plainchant continually rises and falls is close in concept to the use of silence
surrounding both post-Cageian chance operations, and their service to "divine influences" (Revill 90) and
post-AACM, especially the British, free improvisers (see Carr 1973).
. But their relationship does deserve some attention. Bailey (140), recounting a panel discussion of
prominent free improvisers, writes (corroborating Fig. 2) that "the predominant view to emerge was that
there is no such thing as improvisation, or, if there is, it is indistinguishable from composition." But then he
asserts that "in any but the most blinkered view of the world's music, composition looks to be a very rare
strain, heretical in both practice and theory. Improvisation is a basic instinct, an essential force in sustaining
life. Without it nothing survives. As sources of creativity they are hardly comparable." Mâche (1992: 25)
points out the ease with which sequencer/synthesizer/computer technology allows the free improviser to
capture and then rework his improvisations as compositions. Attali (133--48) sees composition as the most
promising site of music practice, but the case he makes for it would hold as much air if the word
"composition" were replaced by "improvisation." These examples all show this paradoxical drawing and
blurring of distinctions between the two.
10. This citation by Rouget (1985: 268) of the twelfth-century Arabic writer on Sufism, Ghazzali, resonates
with footnote 8: "'It is in him who loves God and has a passion for Him and longs to meet Him…and no
sound strikes upon his ear but he hears it from Him and in Him,' that music gives rise to wajd," (trance;
emphasis mine). My emphasis underscores the freedom to as much as from sounds. Thus Braxton and Evan
Parker can sound like two lyrical cool-jazz players duetting spontaneously in a fresh boppish style for one
free improvisation, then like two serialist composers for another, then play with their own unique saxophone
vocabularies for a third. They are as free to converse (and to extemporize) in a language they love as they
are to create a new one in that same love (creativity).
11. See Apel (1961: 88). Apel's account of this is taken up in historical and contemporary texts. Tomlinson
(1993) shows clearly that both musical texts and practices were still deeply embedded in the context of "the
unforeseen" (magic); pedagogical texts such as those by Johann Quantz (1789/1985) and Leopold Mozart
(1756-87/1951) evince the analytical bent away from that context that would culminate in Romanticism's
formalism, extending through the doctrine of "the work" into projects such as Schenker's and Boulez's.
12. See Dahlhaus (1983: 4) for the rise of this reification of "the work," and Moore (1992) and Rink (1993)
for the concurrent decline of improvisation in the West.
13. Foucault; Tomlinson (1995: 343-79); Treitler (1989); and White (1978) all convey a sense of how the
narrative of literacy functioned during the nineteenth and lingers in the twentieth century as the vehicle of
hegemonic power.
14. The literature alluding to all this includes discourses loosely and broadly tagged "postmodernist,"
"postcolonialist," "negritude," "whiteness," "feminist;" its two great manifestations in music/music
scholarship include (1) the American redirection of the narrative of literacy through its geographical remove
from the rest of the West and its closer mix of diverse peoples (e.g., Mellers [1964]), and (2) the rise of the
African-American musical traditions through their own national to the international (especially Western
European) arenas, a rise that documents reappropriation of literacy's devices for the purposes of orality, and
(incidentally) a reintroduction of improvisation to the West on its own terms, successfully reinstating it not
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only as a component of "low" culture but confounding the hierarchy between low and high introduced by
the narrative of literacy in the first place (see Badger [1989: 48-66]; Cook [1989: 30-47]; Kater [1989: 11-
43]; Robinson [1991: 11-25; DeVeaux [1989: 6-31]; and Noglik [1979 and 1987] for a sense of the power
of this African-American coup in Western strongholds as diverse as America and Germany throughout the
first half of the century; and Crouch [1995] and Kumpf [1981] for the extent of that power since).
15. Tomlinson's (1993) foreword establishes his "hermeneutics" as drawn from the work of Ricouer and
Gadamer, and his "archaeology" from that of Foucault. Bielawski (1985: 8-15) posits a full seven different
conceptions/representations of time and history to go with our conventional linear chronology, including a
"composition and performance" time zone, and zones peculiar to the speeds of sound and light.
16. We find in Sansonese (1994) a brilliant affirmation of this model, one that brings new theoretical life to
the already lively postulations of our recent and current improvisers and composers, such as Cage, Harry
Partch, Alvin Lucier, Oliver Messiaen, and Anthony Braxton. Connerton (1989) persuasively posits the
collectively interactive and synergetic consciousness of many such bodies as constituting and constituted by
memory and intent even at those moments when they deliberately try to make a complete break with a past
and to construct willfully and launch upon a new present and future.
17. See also Ridley, for a sense of how the science of genetics can read the human genome we all embody
as a "23-chapter" (the genome comprises twenty-three chromosome pairs) autobiography of our species.
18. In other words, musica humana, the realm of Sansonese, Rouget, and McClain (1978); and musica
mundana, that of Mâche and Schafer (1980).
19. See also Rouget's chapter on opera, and James (123), for the suggestion that different musical
phenomena such as Schönberg's Sprechstimme, African-American, and ancient bardic declamation all
evince these links.
20. As the study of "chaos" by physicists demonstrates so powerfully in the "butterfly effect," that of a
butterfly's wings in China on the weather system over North America (per Gleick 1987).
21. St. Anselm's "proof" of the existence of God was that there was something rather than nothing. Cage
discovered this in the sound of his own organism's "silence" when in a diachronic chamber free of sounds
external to it (Pritchett [1993: 75]).
22. See Woodward (1994); Whitehead (1995); Radano (1993: 269--76) for a sense of this controversy.
Synopses of key references
James, Godwin, Johnston: Well-informed journalistic/scholarly surveys of the history of music, science,
philosophy, and metaphysics, examining both their early and ongoing historical synchronicities and
polarizations.
Sudnow: A study of "improvised conduct" by a jazz pianist/sociologist. Good subjective empirical

description of the "ways of the hand," corroborating the suggestion that all improvisation is always both free
and determined.
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Bailey: Interviews with cross-cultural improvisers, including fellow free improvisers, by guitarist Derek
Bailey. Brings forth the common feeling among those who do it that free improvisation is essentially no
different from other kinds of creativity, especially composition, and that all are grounded in some ultimate
ineffable intelligence and force for which the improvisers serve as media.
McClain: A theoretical linkage between bodies of myth and ancient mathematical systems (and their
musical counterparts).
Sansonese: A theoretical linkage between bodies of myth and the proprioceptive experience of deep
meditation, interesting here especially for its notion of phonic choices for language and sonic choices for
music being determined largely by the internal sounds of the human organism, as their mythical meanings
are determined by the roles and relationship of their sources.
Rouget: Informed speculation on the nature of trance and possession from ancient to current music
traditions. Interesting here for its conclusion that music, again, is at the service of rather than the cause of
the consciousness variously aspected as trance, possession, inspiration, furor, remembering, devotion, etc.
Mâche: A study of animal sound behavior, and related natural phenomena, and myth that foregrounds
"musica humana's" contiguity and continuity with the "sound behavior" of other mammals, and birds.
Schafer: A close look at the various soundscapes both nature and human societies have created.
Powers: A careful look at the usefulness of linguistics to musical analysis. Interesting here for its suggestion
that free improvisers may be doing a musical equivalent of glossalalia, as well as language-construction.
Blacking: An argument for an intrinsic, universal musicality that generates both logics and sophics; and for
the natural impulse and need in each new generation to regenerate them.
Sample sources from which to build a theory of free improvisation (from Gray). The point here is the
progression from general to specific over a broad spectrum, and the necessity of such a plethora of timely
concretes for the formulation of one timeless abstraction (theory).
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The Bearable Whiteness of World Music:
Power's Strategic Essentialism as Service as Freedom
Introduction
The preceding meditation has been on Western music as an art form and Western music history
as a social-political history. Throughout these pages, we've seen the international free-
jazz/improvised music scene as anticapitalistic, multicultural, and as a labor of love, not for
profit, in contradistinction to a music industry that has burgeoned down American capitalist
lines since the end of the Cold War. What exactly is the contour of those lines, and how do they
relate to the improvised music scene?
In the tight weave of theory fabric with which Veit Erlmann (1993, 1996) covers the global pop
music industry and wraps its "world music" process/product, some seams are stitched between
his positions and those of others, and some threads are deliberately left loose.
First the seams:
Here my argument differs substantially from other, more familiar readings of the
phenomenon that leave considerable space for the interpretation of different kinds of
world music as an assertion of a politics of difference--of nation, community, and,
most notably, race--and of the local, as resilient articulations of opposition against
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Western hegemony: it maintains that synthesis is the central category of this global
aesthetics in the making. Although representing no particular global cultural or
political entity as such, world music offers the panoramic specter of a global
ecumene, of a totality long deemed lost by contemporary critical thought. (1996:
468)
The "other readings" he mentions as contradistinct to his (Slobin 1992, Goodwin and Gore
1990, Guilbault 1993, and Waterman 1990) are so by virtue of their various concerns that,
Erlmann feels, all bespeak an undue unconcern, underestimation, even umbrage at the very idea
of such a totality, let alone its concretes. Erlmann, by contrast, sees what is generally tagged the
postmodern not so much as a radical shift toward the manifold via a rift from the modern--
where, of course, the "earlier notion" of such totality resides (468)--as an extension of modern
into its "postness" as a triumphant, irreversible "late" phase. Concealed within that extension,
he sees that earlier notion (of an "organic" totality) become reality (albeit through "a kind of
transversality born from the random play of unrelated differences" [468]), as an "ecumene"--yet
also thereby as an even more pervasive, stabler hegemony, one, indeed, synonymous with the
"late," or "third stage" capitalism he also posits.
Such grounding in Marxist-inflected terminology/thought (per Frederic Jameson [1991] and

Jean Baudrillard [1990])--of "historicism;" "totality," "totalization," and "total system;" and
"simulacrum"1--resonates with Erlmann's own professional associations with the political
histories and public and professional-academic cultures of Berlin and South Africa, where the
repercussions of Marxism, anarchism, and liberal democracies imposed after wars (from the
Second World through the Cold to Mandela's) jostle with those of Wilhelmian, Hitlerian, and
apartheid political histories; with the broader European colonialism; and with the still broader
and more recent discourse on whiteness. His "total world system" has a local name--"the West"-
-however bent it has been on passing for universal.
This paper will mediate between Erlmann's insistence on the entrenched efficacy of this new-
and-improved totality (that encompasses, with everything else, that industry we call "music")
and a contradistinct voice he doesn't cite: George Lipsitz's (1994), while not one of the "other
readings" Erlmann mentions, stands naturally on the shelf next to them, as well , I submit, as
closer to Erlmann's work than theirs do.
This brings us to those threads Erlmann left loose. They are there for us to tighten, to
consolidate his weave's pattern, or to pull on and unravel, perhaps to reweave his work, perhaps
with some new threads. I will do all of the above here. Working Erlmann's loose ends with their
counterparts in Lipsitz's comparable cloth will join the two into a bigger, stronger cover, one
that, like a reversible coat, will show how right both are, and in what ways.
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Erlmann's loose ends are these:
It is this tension between a total system and the various local cultural practices that
opens up a space for ethnography. Thus, musical ethnographies will increasingly
have to examine the choices performers worldwide make in moving about the spaces
between the system and its multiple environments. Rather than casting these moves
in binary terms such as choices between the West and the Rest, between participation
and refusal, the politics of global musical production creates numerous, highly
changeable "border zone relations" that allow performers to constantly evaluate their
position within the system (1996: 474, and 1993: 6-7, both essentially the same
statement).
And this:
The issues raised by the world music of the 1990s, or at least those raised by some
of its more self-consciously avant-gardist examples, challenge us to conceive of new
ways of "mapping" this space (1996: 484, my emphasis, an aside we'll return to).
The first passage leads us to Lipsitz's own loose ends--which, again, comprise one of those
"border zone relations" for which Erlmann sees new ethnographic opportunity. The second
passage will spur us on to accept its challenge, to conclusions informed by the mediation
between Erlmann's vision of a total world system and Lipsitz's meditation on the St. Louis
music community/history in the light of his looks at "popular music, postmodernism, and the
poetics of place."
Erlmann's own music- and culture-specific use of "pastiche" and "nostalgia" (1993: 10-14)
invokes the Frankfurt theorists, especially Adorno, and constitutes his aesthetic framing of the
current global music industry. He sites "world music" as a (Western-located) construct of that
(local-cum-global Western) industry. He most consistently seems not to buy the suggestions of
the "other readings" (e.g., Slobin's, of a "superculture" among "inter-" and "subcultures") that
what he calls the "world system" (see footnote 1) is but one aspect among others at play, and
not necessarily always the most relevant or even powerful one. Yet, again, he does nod to such
a possibility (e.g., to Guilbault's [1993] book --though in fact her concluding remarks [210] do
leave a loose end of her own that could tie in neatly with Erlmann's tight weave) without letting
it distract his own view of a real totality.
Lipsitz peculiarly affords a look at such a possibility within Erlmann's weave, cued by the
background of his own long involvement with whiteness studies (see Chapter Two, p. 221).
While Dangerous Crossroads itself doesn't draw directly on that background, its two loose ends
do suggest it. The first:
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As author of this text, I know that my own Euro-American identity offers unearned
privileges and imposes unpayable debts to aggrieved racial groups whose subjugation
has underwritten my own privileges throughout my life. Yet, while it is impossible
to speak from a position of purity, strategic anti-essentialism may enable us to
understand how our identities have been constructed and at whose expense, as well
as offering insights into how we can pay back the debts we incur as examples from
others show us the way out of the little tyrannies of our own parochial and
prejudiced backgrounds (64).
This is "loose," because it is the one place other than the whole of Chapter Nine where Lipsitz's
subjective voice breaks out of his recitation about other subjects and declares its identity and
relationship to them. Towit, as they have chosen to be "strategically anti-essentialist"--in
preferring a deliberate and self-interested eclecticism of musical influences and gestures over a
liberatory/resistant expression of ethnicity that finds itself imprisoned as its reflexive reactivity
against whiteness reveals the constraining influence of same--Lipsitz is claiming that that
whiteness too can be so strategically abandoned. I tie this move up with Erlmann's challenge to
begin to "conceive of new ways of 'mapping' this space" (1996: 484). Also, its self-revelation
expounds on Erlmann's vision of a totality/hegemony, the Western (read white) identity of
which is effectively concealed by the "equalizing logic of commodity exchange" (479).
Lipsitz's Chapter Nine is loose because it is the one part in which the author looks at a place
and its music community not as a function and expression of flux--of identity, of people, of
musical styles and gestures--so much as one of a life (again, his own) spent largely "trying to
stay put" (173).2 The tenor of this subjective account of St. Louis speaks to Erlmann's use of
the word "nostalgia," as we'll see; at the same time, it is one (unique) along with eight other
(mutually similar) ethnographies that are (all nine) clearly offerings that would fit Erlmann's
concept of "border zone relations," where he sees the ethnographies that will "map this space"
taking place.
Having made and hinted at the direction of the connections, the following summaries of
Erlmann's papers and Lipzitz's chapter will move us, with the input of a few other voices, into
the "new mapping" I see in them.
Erlmann
Erlmann (1993) says he's concerned with "world beat" or "world music" for its impact on the
way ethnomusicologists do their work. Methodology and theory was until as recently as the
early 1980s shaped by the premises of dominant West studying threatened Rest, with the end of
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rescuing and preserving them from drowning in the Waters of Hegemon. With the globalization
of technology and economy, that model no longer applies. The West's "damage" has been done,
for better or worse, and now the Rest are responding to it, even turning it to their own ends.
He focuses on "The Dialectics of Homogenization and Diversity," "The Politics and Aesthetics
of Difference," and "Pastiche and Nostalgia: The Aesthetics of 'World Music.'" Under the first
heading, he scans the view of "world music" shared by several scholars who refuse to see it as
some liberatory/resistant gesture against cultural imperialism and Western consumerism. After
throwing out some examples to make his point--that capitalism, though it may have
imperialistically imposed itself on "others," thrives on, indeed requires, difference, diversity
rather than conformity, to function effectively as a totalizing system--Erlmann advocates a
musical ethnography that takes into account the way each local subject proactively relates to,
even symbiotically works, milks, mines the total system for local ends.
Having so covered those dynamics, he turns to "Politics/Aesthetics." The dilemma he sees lies
in the fact that even if a thousand flowers may now bloom in the new garden, the garden itself
is still shaped and overseen by the West, a locale among others functioning as the little man
behind the curtain to whom the great and terrible Oz would have no attention paid. Erlmann
optimistically suggests that "synthesis" may extend into the relationship between flowers and
garden (speaking aeshetically/politically) even as it does, fruitfully, into that between global and
local, West and Rest (speaking economically/politically). After discussing the longstanding and
ongoing dynamics of "modernity and tradition;" of the West's long-held, however dated, visions
of real global unity; of "creolization" as the possible engine of synthesis between flowers and
garden(er), he ends by stating the problem: a lowest common denominator still seems to prevail
as bottom line. The garden itself keeps the flowers from their fullest, wildest bloom, asserting
"the banal" as Utopia. (Here he resonates most with Baudrillard's visions of global culture, of
the prevalence of an alienating simulated reality, and with Foucault's similar readings of the
historical process and moment).3
In order to get beyond that dilemma of alienation, he proposes "Pastiche and Nostalgia" as a
sort of aesthetic fertilizer with which to improve the garden. Pastiche (per Adorno) he applies to
"world music" to yield two returns: "reconfiguration of time and space," and the "role of
nostalgia." He cites other work (Jameson, Baudrillard, Giddens 1991, Jeudy 1991, and Virilio
1980) to see therein the old medieval picture of the circle whose center is everywhere/when and
circumference nowhere/when. (This is my description of his reconfiguration of time and space,
from its earlier configuration of the "organic totality," in which the geographical or temporal
center is in one place/time and its peripheries radiating out to every other.)
After Adorno, Erlmann's offering of this theory reads like a peace offering (something like Jerry
Falwell opening his heart to the gay community). Adorno's (1973) position on pastiche (re:
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Stravinsky) was decidedly critical, as his confirmation of totality (re: Schönberg) was totally
hearty. Erlmann's is by comparison both noncommittal and friendly to the idea of pastiche, even
as it champions Adorno's regard of it. His words about ceasing to lament the West's damage to
the world and to move on corroborate his acceptance of the pastiche Adorno rebuked and
scorned, even as they acknowledge its undesirability. They also turn the tables on its victory.
"The wrong side's victory," he implies, "has proven the right side's rightness."
Presumably, the next logical step would be for the right side--a "good" rather than "evil" (per
Baudrillard) totality--to take and run the system that has prevailed. As it stands, difference is
the name of the game of the "same," and difference can be mined out of both time
("nostalgically") and place (the local reconfigured for, reoriented to, the global). Every new take
on the old is the new, every timely "dance" is the same timeless kinetic thrill-of-the-moment.
If we extend this logic as far as possible, to every possible past and future (e.g., when the Rest
were/will be center, the West a margin-that-is-nowhere), the garden and flowers both have the
"room" they need, and the power's in the flowers to shape the garden, to garden themselves.
Frankenstein's monster (pastiche as nightmare), like Baudrillard's clones (113), become not so
much ill-begotten blights as primitive versions/images of a good and right, and inevitable,
human process.
Erlmann's 1996 statement restates much from 1993, adding some deepening and broadening
detail. For example:
World music is a new aesthetic form of the global imagination, an emergent way of
capturing the present and historical moment and the total reconfiguration of space and
cultural identity characterizing societies around the globe (468, my emphasis).
My emphasis calls attention to one of several variations on the "total reconfiguration" idea.
Here he expounds on the space, leaves out the time; elsewhere (479) he mentions the "complete
reconfiguration of local identity and the ideologies and aesthetic forms attached to it;" "cultural
production…cut loose from any particular time and place, even if local tradition and authenticity
are what the products of the global entertainment industry are ostensibly about" (475).
Postmodern pastiche serves modernist totalization, we now see, more effectively than did the
modernist ideological projects that once opposed it. Images of "zapping" (482), "hyperspace"
(484), "relatedness" replacing disjuncture (483), and "historicism" replacing (the dialectic of)
history all help to paint this picture of ultimate-unity-in-ultimate-diversity.
Remember, we are not speaking in the abstract here: the real-world engine of this post/modern
global culture and the aesthetic thereof stems from the exchange of commodities, thus from the
commodification of everything, as the initiation of everything from all locals to the one global,
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from all histories to the one global (post-historical, historicistic) moment. And, from all
subjective to the one objective--financial/aesthetic--value. Per Baudrillard (47), such value is a
shift from the "being worth something" to the "making something worth something."
Erlmann articulates the aesthetic aspect:
A new relational aesthetic, a theory of sympathetic mediation and the interface has
taken the place of an aesthetic founded on the idea that a work of art contained a set
of meanings, some kind of truth that would become apparent through mimetic
representation…the age of representation, as Paul Virilio would say, has given way
to the age of presentation (1996: 481).
In sum: what passes for food (the totality's encouragement of local individuation) is in fact bait
on a hook. For that to change, the fish would have to learn to extract the bait from the hook, or
to find their own way to the source of the bait, as systematically and effectively as it was
pinned to the hook. (In this regard, to Erlmann's loose ends we should add his example of a
musical gesture [483, South African Thomas Mapfumo's chimurenga music] that truly,
successfully does sound outside the total system--somewhat like an alternate globality in
embryo, retaining the integrity of its alternative vision outside the loop, as if in stasis, refusing
to be born unless the world as it is becomes the world as they see it. Masters of the erotic who
choose celibacy over mutual masturbation…but, sadly, as vast minorities.)
Lipsitz
Which brings us to (Slobin's, Guilbault's, Goodwin and Gore's, and Waterman's natural ally, by
Erlmann's lights) Lipsitz. Dangerous Crossroads overlaps with my own work in the jazz and
new-and-improvised-music scenes and their overlaps with global popular and traditional music
cultures; and Chapter Nine is where Lipsitz speaks most directly from his personal grounding in
the poetics of a place that also has personal significance for me, St. Louis. My grandmother
came from there, and two of my best, most longstanding friendships in my Eugene, Oregon
home of twenty years were with Malinké Robert Elliot and Arzinia Richardson, who were both
active in the cofounding of the St. Louis Black Artists Group (BAG), a seminal embodiment of
the free-jazz movement in the 1960s. Two of the artists Lipsitz mentions from that milieu,
Oliver Lake and Julius Hemphill, were players I collaborated with in the context of my big
band, the Northwest Creative Orchestra, in the late '80s-early '90s.
Lipsitz admits something I can readily identify with: that, after writing for eight chapters about
global crosscurrents of people and music, his own concern has been more with staying in one
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place and digging into it. His observation that the blues and jazz for which St. Louis is famous
were spawned out of an ethnic mix rather than purity (174, the Greek- and African-American
kids) corroborates my own friends' tales of their African-American milieu being heavily
influenced by the German-traditional music pedagogy and discourse of the last hundred years,
up to the moment. His recollection (177-8) of the guitar's origin in Spain, and the blues'
grounding in Western European harmonies, shore up rather than undermine Duke Ellington's
side of the debate with Eurocentric purist C. Vann Woodward, the position that the strongest
Afrocentric expressions have resulted from the strongest engagements with their Eurocentric
counterparts, rather than from a distance from them. His mention of Fred Ho's journey through
that jazz of European and African American parentage to his own Asian American statements
(178), of pianist John Hicks' classical training that took a back seat to his blues background, of
drummer Max Roach's vision not of inversion of Eurocentric dominance over Afrocentrism but
rather of democratization of the two, and of hip-hopper Hank Shocklee's expansion beyond
Western conventions of music into the larger sound terrain (179)…all bespeak a vision of world
music that grows from the grassroots to the highest cultural heights, rather than from the
corporate boardrooms of the music industry.
He thus ends his looks at the global popular music industry by touching base with a concrete,
lived experience--one he is admittedly nostalgic for, seeing it past (176)--of the blues and jazz
in St. Louis as an example of a musical confluence of dispossessed and dominant cultures
coming together and creating something that was intrinsically universal directly due to the
disparity from which it started (a true example of Baudrillard's reading of the proper
relationship between powerful self and less powerful other as a mutually beneficial though one-
sided enthrallment [165]). It was an engagement that resulted in a complete empowerment of
the underdog's identity and social status, if less completely, at first, his fortunes. The
globalization of blues and jazz, as America's original and commanding art forms, is a tale of the
whale swallowing a willing Jonah in order to transport him to where he needed and wanted to
go. The "superculture" was turned into a "servant culture," theoretically if not always
practically, by the same process that lionized Martin Luther King as an American hero, gave
Nelson Mandela political victory, and made Michael Jackson what he became: the process of
the underdog turning the hypocritical word of the "evil" totality into a hypercritical truth, of
then holding it to its professions of morality, democracy, and equal opportunity, against the
threat a weak link can pose to a strong chain.
The blues and jazz have proven themselves just such a universal expression as they've spread
around the world despite their problematic associations with American cultural imperialism,
because they've inspired local scenes--such as the ones I'm dissertating on, in West and East
Germany--to dismiss the hegemony and focus on the spark of liberatory, resistant selfhood at its
own core, to come up with new expressions that match their own cultural context, often
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challenging those commercial and elitist preservationist postures blues and jazz did go on to
strike in the aspirations of a black middle class, or of an ego-driven star system, or of academic
privilege, to the American dream of fame and fortune, or at least social status and prosperity,
above all else.
The same totality Erlmann sees as absolute power serves, in Lipsitz, as the empowerer of the
lowliest local--lowliest not in its place on the food chain so much as in its complete (some
would say abject) acceptance of the totality--but that as the means, not the alienator,
manipulator, or quasher, of individuation. We have a symbiosis, a marriage, between king's son
and chargirl, bearing real love and fruit. As all Baudrillard's cultural dilemmas have their
solutions in nature (sex over cloning, tangled over rigid hierarchy, etc.), blues/jazz per Lipsitz is
the supreme timely example of an engagement of the total (Western music/industry) by the local
(African-American culture/music) in which the power of the latter reshaped that of the former as
much as the reverse, in mutual transformation.
Whiteness as Strategic Essentialism
All of this begs other questions. Let's lay aside for the moment the argument we can make for
the willing perpetual assimilation of the local by the totality; jazz's history is one of radical
local gestures seizing the totality's frame to reshape it, then being framed by it…only to leap off
to another such radical gesture. Its sameness-in-difference exists only if we do indeed
"spatialize time,"4 because in the moments unfolding there have repeatedly been shocks of the
new (though, arguably, since the 1980s, less so all the time, in the corporate/academic-
commodified music that still goes proudly by the name "jazz"). The international improvised-
music scene, mentioned seldom in English-language music scholarship,5 is playing that
underdog role--which observation brushes us up against Erlmann's passing mention of the
"avant-garde" (second loose end), and would lead us into another story worth tracing, but not
here (except to mention that abovementioned St. Louis-born BAG was a seminal forerunner of
it).
But even a demonstration of Erlmann's "hell" as a "heaven," via Lipsitz, isn't the finally
interesting point. Such tricks of perception are easiest in the abstract; the more real details, the
more the perception settles down one or another line. Erlmann, like Jameson and Baudrillard,
insists on the importance of recognizing the totality for what it is in order to monitor/influence
it; the "other readings" tend to pooh-pooh that as misspent, misspending intellectual energy. I
feel, as Erlmann noted re: Slobin, that the totality is the elephant in the room whether you
mention it or not, so you might as well come to terms with it directly, whatever else you do
with the locals.
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If we look it in the face, per poet Charles Olson,6 what do we see? having nodded to those who
would valorize the local, and to their counterparts worrying over the total, having nodded at
their nods to each other, what do we see that we haven't seen before?
Most obviously, we see an "ecumene" that truly is global, not merely aspiring to be (as every
"white" reach for the totality from the ancient Aryan and Hebrew conquerors to the Greek and
Roman states to the Catholic Church to the Soviet Union has had to do, due to built-in limits of
geography and/or technology, as well as approach). Also, this ecumene's name is "commodities
exchange," not "religion," "ethnicity," "nationality," or "ideology." Finally, though that name
doesn't reveal the identity of the ecumene's convener and governor, it has one: a cohort called
the West, a.k.a whiteness. The mask covering this supremacy is constituted by anyone
anywhere who accepts its terms and turf (its version of history, entrepreneurial capitalism,
democracy--even, not necessarily but largely in fact, the English language).
We describe thereby a moment that began some 4500 years ago, when the Aryan invasions
began, powered by the wheel and the horse, to seize power over civilizations from North Africa
to India to the Mediterranean. The invaders were barbarians imposing power-over-from-
without, seeking bounty and infrastructure generated by others denied them by virtue of their
situations in harsher, poorer climes/terrains and histories. Ethnicity and religion were not
primary, because when they conquered they were masters at letting themselves be assimilated
from above, through tolerance of/conversion to their victims' gods and social mythi, through
intermarriage, and a general willingness to be civilized, cultivated--always within the context of
their own patriarchal, hierarchical dominance.7 That's one thing.
This power-over-from-without brought its own internal power dynamics. The Aryan tribes,
including the Germanic ones that established this "West" of ours only a millennium ago, had a
social pattern of blind obedience to (elected) absolute rulers in times of war, but fierce
independence in times of peace. Power-over-from-within thus waxed great in times of violent
expansion, and waned into an instability of the collective that was often just as violent when
internalized. Whiteness, the West, was always schizophrenic in this way, founding both
imperialistic tyranny and grassroots individualism within the same thrusts of its history as "The
Man." That's the other thing.
All this, of course, is an accident of history; "whiteness" could have been "blackness" had
history seen civilization begin in Africa and spread gradually abroad, as humanity did,
eventually becoming a global ecumene too, with the same mutations of "race" and culture
varying with the globe's environments, but with an unbroken sense in us all as originally
African, as "black." And, of course, when we put it that way we realize it is that way, in a
sense; the West's hegemony is experienced by the Rest as a power-over-from-without for
part2outro 09/08/2006 07:21 AM
obvious reasons, but more deeply it can be read as a power-over-from-within, and if read so,
treated so. If we are all Africans, and some of us went out and seized/generated the seat of
power over the bodies and body of us, and in so doing also checked and balanced that power
with a commensurate empowerment of each of us, we have less to worry about than if we were,
say, Neandertals, killed and corralled by homo sapiens, and thereby driven to extinction (or, for
that matter, if we were weak whites who were so extinguished by that mighty hypothetical
African empire).
That analogy's evocation of genocidal racism is deliberate; it is, of course, an all-too-real

picture of intra-human (not only interracial--intertribal, interregional, inter- and intrafamilial,
intergender) relations around the world, and in recent memory, and one we expect not to have
seen the last of. Best, until we do, to hang it up in plain sight, where we can keep an eye on it.
Still, its power has not yet proven the equal of the larger truth and consensus of our common
humanity, however horrible its dreams and attempts to do so. Indeed, as Erlmann points out
(477), the greater our differences, the more the commonality of our humanity beckons (a kinder,
gentler vision of hegemony).
A deciding moment in the birth of modern capitalism, and the rise of modern whiteness and the
West to its global status, came in seventeenth-century New York, then New Amsterdam, when
Dutch governor Peter Stuyvesant was overruled by his superiors in Holland when he wanted to
exclude Jews from the city. The interests of business won out over bigotry, and helped establish
the principle of the separation of church and state in America. This isn't to say that the interests
of business have not also been served by exploitation, once everyone is included--but the
inclusion itself has served to undermine the imbalance of power, in the long run.
Is this a useful "new way of mapping this space"? Can we posit the total system as a dirty job
that someone had to do, one way or another, from within or without, not only because that
someone insisted on wielding power-over but because the whole human family insists on
colluding with its own self-ordering as a collective that, through all trial and error, both serves
the interests of its individuals and requires service from them? Must that insistence always meet
resistance as tyranny, or as the banal?
Belgrad:
Searching in the ruins of Copan for keys to the Maya civilization, Olson became excited
about the history of Kulkulkan, the Maya priest-king. The mythical Kulkulkan symbolized
to Olson the possibillity of social power through cultural authority. He wrote to Creeley:
Are not the Maya the most important characters in the whole panorama…simply
because the TOP CLASS in their society, the bosses, were a class whose daily
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business was KNOWLEDGE, & ITS OFFSHOOT, culture?…
and that any such society goes down easily before a gun?…((The absolute quote
here, is, one prime devil, Goebbels, who sd: "When I hear the word 'kultur' I reach
for my gun."))
This statement of Olson's turned the myth of progress on its head. The most desirable
cultures, he asserted, fell most readily before the weapons of Goebbels and his kind. The
idea suggests an inversion of social Darwinism, for it implies that colonizing powers are,
as a rule, inferior to the cultures they displace. (73)
And:
Olson implied that this loss [of treasures trampled underfoot as worthless by invading
Europeans] had occurred because European civilization identified its progress solely with
wealth as defined by the accelerated exchange of commodities; as a result, all other
standards of value faded before an accumulative desire.
This voice argues that hope lies not in a radical break with the past but in a selective
recovery of it--even underfoot, in the Americas, there are clues to social alternatives that
suffered untimely destruction. (75)
Well, one such selective recovery may be Europe's own contempt for the totality as
commodities exchange, also deep-mythically rooted, from the story of the golden calf to that of
the beast of Revelations to the Marxist critique of dialectical materialism and the American
narrative of universal life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. If we must admit that Mammon has
functioned as motivator, equalizer, and democratizer better than have military, political,
ideological, and religious engines, doesn't that still leave infinite room to consider how much it
can and can not improve this coop now that we know there's nobody here but us chickens,
pecking green?
SOURCES
Mike Heffley|||||||||Almatour |||||||||Almatexts
1. Indeed, Jameson himself equates "postmodernism" with "late capitalism," "multinational capitalism,"
"spectacle or image society," "media capitalism," and "the world system" (1991: xviii).
2. Having milked the tight/loose analogy dry, I would reverse it for Lipsitz. Compared to Erlmann, his work
is predominantly a loose weave--a scatter of looks at different scenes, not a systematic, abstract
generalizing--and the two anomalies I'm extracting from it here are more in keeping with the "tightness" (via
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the whiteness) I'm seeing in Erlmann.
3. As Baudrillard states, Foucault's The History of Sexuality spells this out in the most visceral terms of the
erotic in culture.
4. Belgrad's (1998) reading of poet Charles Olson pertains in this regard: "On leaving politics, Olson
defined his cultural work as an 'archeological' project aimed at making the past 'spatial' rather than
'temporal.' By this he meant that it should be possible to reclaim past ways of life for their potential
contributions to the present" (71). This is a theme that virtually marks our time's aesthetics, and not only
those of the pop music pastiche but also of what Erlmann tagged the "more self-consciously avant-garde,"
including Wesleyan's own Anthony Braxton's "tri-axium" concept.
5. See Berendt 1983/7, Belgrad, and Smith and Dean for some of the best of what assessments there are of
this "post-jazz," multicultural scene, which could itself be fodder for a debate over whether it was "post-"
more by virtue of jazz's supposed Amerigemonic influence or jazz's liberatory core.
6. Olson: "The West still has possibilities, despite the long dominance of European culture ('the whiteness /
which covers all'): 'The light is in the east. Yes. And we must rise, act. Yet / in the west, despite the
apparent darkness (the whiteness / which covers all), if you look, if you can bear, if you can, long enough…
/ so you must, and, in that whiteness, into that face, with what candor, look…' (Belgrad, 76).
7. See Walker (1983).
References
Baudrillard, Jean. 1990/1993. The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomenon. London/New
York: Verso.
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Heffley - Composed Theory of Improvisation (44763301)

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part2outro 09/08/2006 07:21 AM

A Composed Theory of Free Improvisation

My discipline/discourse is Ethnomusicology, a relatively recent branching from (Comparative)

Theory, however, I would emphasize not as musicological so much as "musicosophical" (from

As with "improvisation" as an issue standing alone, "composition's" "logical" symbioses with

composition's freezing of improvisation is a freeing of it into a comprehension and

Fig. 1: The narrative of literacy

Fig. 2: The narrative of orality

both a transcendence and a subsumption of the primitive).

How then shall we understand these key words of this narrative?

Think of "free improvisation," then, not as undisciplined so much as essentially personal

This improvised/composed discussion of mine establishes the narrative of literacy not by

Fig. 3: The narrative of the marriage of orality and literacy

one's neurophysiological microcosm of the electrochemical, or one's cardiovascular microcosm

Stating the Theory

b. the "sight/sound/meaning" of the outer world: actual immediate phenomena

people, really--that point in consciousness spectrum where creation happens);

Anthony Braxton's work, by contrast, includes both twentieth-century dodecaphonically

theo/auto-didactically constructed my own three different embouchure musculatures, appropriate

Synopses of key references

Sudnow: A study of "improvised conduct" by a jazz pianist/sociologist. Good subjective empirical

Deutsch, Diana. 1992. "Paradoxes of Pitch." Scientific American 267:88&endash;90. August

Dick, Phillip K. 1981. Valis. New York. Bantam Books.

Godwin, Joscelyn. 1989. Cosmic Music. Rochester, Vermont: Inner Traditions.

Meltzer, David. 1994. Reading Jazz. San Francisco: Mercury House.

Sumarsam. 1990. "The Evolution of the Javanese Gamelan." Ethnomusicology 34:328&endash;31.

Jost, Ekkehard. 1974. Free Jazz. Graz: Universal Editions.

"AMM Music London." 1972. Jazz Podium (April): 120.

Ansell, Kenneth. 1977. "Company." Impetus, No. 6: 240-241.

Carr, Ian. 1973. Music Outside. London: Latimer New Dimensions.

Parsons, Michael. 1968. "Sounds of Discovery." Musical Times (May): 430.

Free Jazz in Germany

"Free Jazz ohne Publikum?" 1972. Jazz Podium (September): 15-17.

Noglik, Bert. 1981. Jazzwerkstatt International. Berlin: Verlag Neue Musik.

Free Music Production (FMP, a sample label)

Brauer, C. 1978. "Still More FMP." Cadence (March): 24--25.

Forst, Achim, ed. 1982. Informationen. Berlin: Free Music Production.

"Free Music Production." 1985. Coda, No. 201 (April/May): 22-23.

Margull, G. 1973. "Konsequenz." Jazz Podium (July-August): 13-16.

Wood, Anthony. 1983. "FMP." Wire, No. 4 (Summer): 30-32, 42.

"Eurojazz personalities." 1974. Jazz Forum, No. 27 (February): 67-69.

"Alex Schlippenbach." 1975 Jazz Magazine, No. 234 (July): 15-17.

The Bearable Whiteness of World Music:

Power's Strategic Essentialism as Service as Freedom

First the seams:

Such grounding in Marxist-inflected terminology/thought (per Frederic Jameson [1991] and

Erlmann's loose ends are these:

Erlmann articulates the aesthetic aspect:

Whiteness as Strategic Essentialism

That analogy's evocation of genocidal racism is deliberate; it is, of course, an all-too-real

business was KNOWLEDGE, & ITS OFFSHOOT, culture?…

the whiteness) I'm seeing in Erlmann.

7. See Walker (1983).

Lipsitz, George. 1995. "Toxic Racism." American Quarterly 47/3: 416-427.

Virilio, Paul. 1980. Esthétique de la disparation. Paris: Editions Balland.

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