This article was downloaded by:[Alerta - Chile 2005/2006 Consortium]

On: 26 September 2007

Access Details: [subscription number 778577079]
Publisher: Routledge
Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954
Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Contemporary Music Review

Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information:
http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~content=t713455393
Some thoughts about improvising
Chris Brown

Online Publication Date: 01 October 2006

To cite this Article: Brown, Chris (2006) 'Some thoughts about improvising',
Contemporary Music Review, 25:5, 571 - 573
To link to this article: DOI: 10.1080/07494460600990703
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07494460600990703

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.informaworld.com/terms-and-conditions-of-access.pdf

This article maybe used for research, teaching and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction,
re-distribution, re-selling, loan or sub-licensing, systematic supply or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly
forbidden.
The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be
complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae and drug doses should be
independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings,
demand or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or
arising out of the use of this material.
Downloaded By: [Alerta - Chile 2005/2006 Consortium] At: 05:16 26 September 2007

Contemporary Music Review

Vol. 25, Nos. 5/6, October/December 2006, pp. 571 – 573

Some Thoughts about Improvising

Chris Brown

I played classical piano music until I was about 18, not improvising at all, when the
siren call of avant-garde music became irresistible. I discovered Henry Cowell, John
Cage, Pauline Oliveros and David Tudor at the same time as I first heard the music of
Sun Ra and Cecil Taylor, so improvising was always central to my passion for new
music. By improvising I started to make my own music, but resisted pursuing the
traditional path of the composer because I wanted to perform rather than become a
specialist who designed music for others to play. I started realizing that most music in
the world is performed off-the-page, and that the primacy of a visual reference can
really obstruct a critical aspect of musicianship. Nevertheless, I was writing down my
own pieces, but the notation was only one aspect of them, as I always worked with
performers who understood the improvisational approach. By the time I was 25 I felt
that the tonal and timbral limitations of the piano were too restrictive, and began
building electroacoustic instruments for improvised music. At this point, notation
became irrelevant, and my compositional impulse moved over to making tape and
studio musics. At 30 I got involved with microcomputers, which allowed me to
scratch the itch that wanted to compose structures to shape improvisational music
without restricting it. A few years later, I started working with other like-minded
computerists, connecting our machines in networks, and teaching them to interact
with each other. Now as I write this I am preparing three concerts: one for four
players playing on two computer-based instruments called ‘reacTables’ located in two
different European cities and connected in a network; another for the six-person
group ‘the Hub’, which was that same network music ensemble we started in my
thirties, in its third incarnation; and a free improvisation duet for myself on piano
and interactive electronics with Tim Perkis on his invented electronic instrument.
These thoughts on improvisation that follow arise from this musical practice.
It’s impossible to separate improvisation from any kind of live musical
performance practice. Improvisation is an inherent aspect in all performance. It is
experienced as you’re playing a piece you may have played a thousand times when
you decide at the spur of the moment to play one note somehow differently than you
did the last time. This choice then influences every other micro-decision you make as
the music flows out of you.

ISSN 0749-4467 (print)/ISSN 1477-2256 (online) ª 2006 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/07494460600990703
Downloaded By: [Alerta - Chile 2005/2006 Consortium] At: 05:16 26 September 2007

572 C. Brown
An improviser takes the way something occurs in the moment, whether intentional
or accidental, and includes it as a factor in making all the subsequent real-time
decisions. While wrong notes may occur, the improviser in every performer finds a
way to make that note sound right. Improvisation presumes that the performer is a
creator in the musical process—it is the antithesis of the idea that a composition has
an idealized and singular form that a performer strives only to reproduce.
Every successful improvisation creates its own unique formal structure. This is
distinct from the structures used in traditional improvisational styles, like the
elaborated melodic forms of ragas, or the melodic and harmonic variations of jazz.
Well-known, or pre-composed structures provide frames for building and following
the improvised form. This is the structure that a successful improviser creates, built
on those known foundations but lifting away from them. A live performance of a
through-composed work can also be understood to contain such a performative
structure. To create such unique structures in real time is inherently a narrative art,
one moment building on the directions taken by the last.
On the other hand there is an aesthetic within ‘free improvisation’ that encourages
these structures to arise outside of any predetermined form. It is an art of unknowing,
in which the performer tries at all moments not to know the ultimate direction of the
music. Such a free improvisational form, unencumbered by intention, may be easier
to create when it is based on the interaction between players in a group. No longer up
to a single individual’s control, the form evolves from the response of each player to
directions provided at each moment by the others. By simultaneously playing and
listening to the other players, the ultimate direction of the performance may be
completely unknown. This tends to work best when the performers have not played
enough with each other yet that they can either predict each other’s behavior, or have
developed an ensemble language based on the directions they have taken in the past.
This is a particularly pure form of improvisation without a safety net, requiring both
attention to the moment and a memory of the form as it evolves.
Among the many ways of achieving this kind of interaction with musical
unknowns is the practice of instrument-building. When instrumentation is newly
invented or extended, form is generated by the players’ exploration of instrumental
territories they have not yet themselves experienced. Normally audiences expect
performers to have full command of their instrument’s potential, but this is
impossible when the instrument itself is new. There is, however, a learnable art to
handling such situations musically. The reward is the infusion of the excitement of
discovery into the fabric of the music, which unfolds as a narrative between the
performer and the unknown. Within the discipline of the instrument-builder/
improviser, one prepares for a performance by building the instrument, and saves for
the performance moment the process of discovery that can be so revealing. The
instrument itself plays the role of the formal structure, or the composed foundation,
for the improvisation.
Finally, when instruments themselves are brought into interdependent relation-
ships, such as within an information network, this process of discovery can become
Downloaded By: [Alerta - Chile 2005/2006 Consortium] At: 05:16 26 September 2007

Contemporary Music Review 573

particularly selfless, moving past the boundaries of personalities and individual
instruments. The relationships between all of these become generative, and the
ensemble becomes one big instrument. The goal of this music network practice is to
discover in real time a music in which many voices weave themselves into a single
emergent fabric.

http://www.cbmuse.com