Words without Discourse: Creative Strategies on Free Improvisation.
Manuel Falleiros
2.2. Open Work and the Evidential Paradigm
The concept of the work of art, which began to be questioned after 1950 in various artistic modalities, was discussed by Umberto Eco, who created a category defined as “open work”. This category intends to indicate certain artistic works that have lost their rigid form given by the character of “untouchable freezing”, and presented, in the participation of the interpreter or the public within the course of the creation of the work, the possibility of multiple and not previously defined results. The closed work, on the other hand, would be one that should not be altered, that does not allow for versions, and is unavailable to be detached from its contexts.
[…] A classical musical work, a fugue by Bach, Aida, or Le Sacre du Printemps, consisted of a set of sound realities that the author organized in a defined and finished way, offering it to the listener, or else translated into conventional signs capable of guiding the performer so that they could substantially reproduce the form imagined by the composer; the new musical works, on the contrary, do not consist of a finished and defined message, in a univocally organized form, but rather in a possibility of various organizations entrusted to the initiative of the interpreter […] (Eco, 1976).
A work of art, being considered open, presents a proposal given initially by the artist, whether the composer or the interpreter themselves, which is configured in the establishment of a field of possibilities for modifications that will arise from the experiences or interpretations of such a work. Even in an open work, we can find the vestiges of the path of construction of the initial proposal and, subsequently, we can also observe an extensive range of possibilities for execution, added to those that are virtually possible. In this context, the participation of the interpreter can function as a compositional device and not as a detachment from their function. Being the interpreter a tool of unpredictability for the composer in their composition, there would be no substantial change in the role of the interpreter in relation to choices and constructions. There is no real choice if you are offered the answers and you are indicated the one that is desirable.
Furthermore, the concept of the open work presents the possibilities of the public’s listening as an emancipation from socially conditioned fruition, achieved through choices detached from norms and tradition:
By not offering a perspective that directs the ear to points pre-established by the artist, the contemporary work presents to the spectator the proposal of an active participation in the fruition of the work, allowing them to decide the directions to take and elaborate their own criteria of reading (Terra, 2000, p. 127).
However, many times, in our experiences observed in the living space of the atelier, we noticed that for the improviser themselves, who is inserted and accustomed to this type of selective listening, it is very difficult to perceive all the sound relationships (which occur both by chance and by intentional interactions) generated by the group of improvisers. The average listener, unprepared, who has in their listening arsenal the experience with closed music and with the interpretations of listening provided by specialists, may find themselves constrained and disoriented in the face of such a demanding listening activity.
An approach more in contact with the experience of the improviser would be to suppose that, at the moment of improvisation, only some relationships are observed, despite all being present, and that this observation cannot always ensure an intention of listening for an effort to build fruition. Thus, we observe that listening choices are not activities that are so controlled, coordinated, and simple to be made in Free Improvisation. In an improvisation, the music created is a unique and unrepeatable performance, obviously like any performance, however the difference resides in the fact that there is no strong preceding and sedimented sonic imaginary as a referential source for the one who listens. In this case, the listener will not have a basis to support their set of references formed by their previous experiences with music.
The question of the listener in the open work also affects the improviser as a listener, since this ability is a fundamental action for Free Improvisation. Given that improvisation, as we conceive it, does not intend to merely deal with the system of expectations from memory (such as creation from a discursive memory), it is difficult to imagine that any listening dependent on a conscious, purposeful, and aesthetic choice is made at the moment of reception of the performance. This is because, at least conceptually, Free Improvisation should be something from which one cannot suppose anything. Giving the listener who is not playing the possibility of an engaged fruition when we offer them the responsibility of cooperative construction of the work from their own listening models is an individualization of listening that appears, first of all, more as an invitation to virtuality than as a possibility of concretizing the partnership. Thus, it makes no sense for improvisation to count on the effective participation of the listener as a co-producer of a work: after all, improvisation, in its condition only of performance and references, is not a work; just as the listener who only passively observes the game of relationships for the construction of the improvisation is not an artist.
Then contemporary improvisation, before being treated as a work, could be seen as a path without purpose, as an activity, in which the very performance of doing something is the revelation of the creative process. Furthermore, for some contemporary improvisation artists, assuming the finalization of a work is to make it lesser, not only because its materiality can give propensity to utilitarianism, but also due to the risk of losing the sense of event imbricated in a specific time; and it is at this point that the role is reversed: the untouchable freezing that conditions artistic making to the condition of a work, in the case of contemporary improvisation, would lead it further away from its artistic potential. For improvisation, the work is while the art happens.
Contemporary Free Improvisation is not and does not worry exactly about being open to offer multiple results, but each performance is, by its nature, a unique artistic event that does not proceed to another interpretation: contemporary improvisers have paradoxically recovered the lost aura of Benjamin. Thus, Free Improvisation would not assume, a priori, the position of an open or closed work, but its ideal form is that of a collaborative event in which the interactions between those who make it would determine its form, while its content is biographical, dependent on individual actions validated by the collective.
Therefore, the element that reveals the property of closure or openness of the work is its form, both as its abstract constitution and the representation of the final product considered untouchable. For an analysis based on Creative Processes, the presentation of the final form of a work is nothing more than one of the possibilities in which the artist’s extensive work ended up configuring itself. Thus, it would not be only the form, in the sense of representing the finalized work, that would provide us with the necessary data to reveal the construction process.
Under the context of Creative Processes, improvisation could not be considered a closed work, but it also does not completely approximate the concept of the open work as we saw earlier. This occurs because the closure or opening for improvisation is given by other controlling delineations that are no longer the form, or its physical support, nor just the interpretative possibilities and mediating apparatuses, but, above all, by time. Time is the frame of improvisation.
In Free Improvisation, the improviser defines that, at a certain point in time, certain selections will begin to be made. They will choose to listen to certain sounds instead of others, hierarchizing them: the improviser can choose that the sound of the audience or the street, or the sound generated by themselves or their colleagues, will serve as a stimulus or an element of construction or interaction. Thus, an unexpected sound can be immediately incorporated into the interactive play of a group of improvisers, or completely ignored.
This first moment of pre-action establishes an idea to be followed, that is, the tendency of the trajectory can be any stimulus, coming from a first sound of the instrument, an ambient sound, a proposal or prescription, a word, and the improviser chooses that in that period of time important actions and selections will be carried out, thus elaborating a kind of functional “frame” that indicates: “art is contained here”. In this process, the improviser initiates a vague trajectory, but one that is governed by a tendency that directs their construction towards consistency. For the improviser, construction is the clarification of this tendency revealed by the trajectory.
The following determination governed by time is the delineation of an evolutionary contour in the chain of the artist’s realizations. As we saw earlier, the occurrence of the improvisation event represents a cut, in the artist’s time, a cut that is marked by a moment of realization perceived by the performance. Furthermore, as we had also said, the moment of execution of the improvisation is not the only demonstration of creation, but rather its relationship with the previous one, since it reveals a constant preparation, finite only by the mortal condition of the artist, of their reserve of procedures and of their artistic thoughts. Every improvisation can be considered the next chapter, sequence of the previous improvisation. The cut time that delimits the frame and the trajectory that reveals the construction are events witnessed in the atelier, and it is from the observation of the manifestation of these events that we will be able to reach the mode of operation of the artist.
Another contour that delineates the sphere of creative possibilities within contemporary improvisation would be the promotion of biographical crossings through interaction.
Thus also, the connections that are established in an improvisation practice include the most diverse elements of different natures, such as diverse musical elements (instrumental, sound procedures, etc.), the personal dispositions of the musicians, the interactions between them, the biographies of each one, accidents, surprises arising from the unpredictability of the system, etc. This without mentioning the connections between the disparate sound elements present as lines during the performance (Costa, 2003, R. L. M., emphasis added).
This is also a temporal delineation that occurs in two moments, as each biography changes with each lived time just as it merges into a single time to create the potential convergence that improvisation requires. In this way, the opening ends up finding the limit of a closure. Contemporary improvisation is open, and it is closed. Closed because, in the limit, if an improvisation admits another interpretation it becomes in fact another creation totally independent of the first. It is open because the determination of the form is linked to a unique, improbable temporal delineation and intrinsically dependent on the operating biographies. It is in these temporally defined spaces that the performing artist determines, by the tendency of their trajectory, with complex musical operations, what is usually called a work: the representation of a directed effort. But, for the performing artist, what is called a work would be before the indication of their trajectory than the demonstration of a finished work.
This trajectory with its qualities of openness and closure bequeaths us a series of dregs, splashes, and shavings representative of the process. Finally, they represent the last point of connection that we lacked to continue with our methodological adaptation. Just as in the research technique in Creative Processes, and in Genetic Criticism, we find there our revealing “drafts”: the traces of the atelier.
Considering that poetics (artistic making) is not in the object, but in the transfiguration of the matter that constructs it, we can perceive it in the steps of its own development. Reconstructing these steps would be to do a study more grounded in poetics than in the finalized work, after all, the artist’s techniques are applied or sometimes arise from the necessities imposed by the trajectory. It is not by coincidence that one usually says “follow in the footsteps” as a reference to a hunt in which the peculiar characteristics of the “footprints” would allow reconstructing an event. Carlo Ginzburg shows us how this “method” became, for our societies, qualified as rational only around the 19th century, although its origin is more remote:
For millennia, man was a hunter. During countless pursuits, he learned to reconstruct the shapes and movements of invisible prey through tracks in the mud, broken branches, pellets of dung, tufts of hair, stagnant odors. […] He learned to perform complex mental operations with lightning speed, inside a dense forest or in a clearing full of traps (Ginzburg, 1990, p. 151).
It is clear that the history of hunting is a metaphor, and according to Ginzburg we must not be tempted to use it mechanically. But in fact, what this epistemological model, called the Evidential Paradigm, presents in its operability is to make it possible to figure the absent. This method, centered on residues, on revealing marginal data, is a representative of modern thought and influenced the birth of various branches of study in the human sciences:
If reality is opaque, there are privileged zones — signs, clues — that allow deciphering it. This idea, which constitutes the essential point of the evidential or semiotic paradigm, penetrated the most varied cognitive realms, profoundly modeling the human sciences (Ginzburg, 1990, p. 77).
As Ginzburg points out, Giovanni Morelli, an art critic, was the one who presented this method to the world, around 1875, in an essay, in which he shows the possibility of recognizing, through “clues”, the difference between a true painting and a fake one. For this, “it is necessary to examine the most negligible details, and those least influenced by the characteristics of the school to which the painter belonged” (Ginzburg, 1990, p. 144), because it is in the moment of loss of control, that is, in the moment of the escape from traditions and meticulously trained gestures, that the artist shows their individual traits.
This method of analysis appears at the end of the 19th century, and is highlighted by Ginzburg because of the operative proximity between Morelli’s method, Freud’s psychoanalysis, and the sharp deductions of Sherlock Holmes [12]. The coincidence in the use of these methods by these three characters may be Medicine, since Freud was a doctor, Morelli had graduated in medicine, and Conan Doyle, author of the adventures of the detective Sherlock Holmes, had also practiced medicine. The three methods are examples of how this paradigm, which established itself in the human sciences and is based on medical semiotics, allows a diagnosis to “reconstruct a complex reality not directly experienceable” (Ginzburg, 1990, p. 146).
Ginzburg presents a convergence of analysis procedures based on how the revealing signs of the object’s reality are named: “Clues: more precisely, symptoms (in the case of Freud), clues [indícios] (in the case of Sherlock Holmes), pictorial signs (in the case of Morelli)” (Ginzburg, 1990, p. 144).
The doctor must act like a detective who has the power and the duty to correctly attribute the cause of a disorder to an exact element, so that in the identification, isolation, and suppression of this, the system finds its normality again. The investigator must find the “deviation”, represented by the cause of the disease, the murderer, or the forger of paintings. The search for precision was historically very important in the legitimization of this method as a “science of exactness”. But in artistic thought, we are not interested in eliminating “deviations”, but rather in identifying them, as they may turn out to be exactly the objective of our search, since art also has as an interest a deviation that can expand the world beyond its normality.
Morelli was heavily criticized in his time because he did not place the problems of authorship from an aesthetic bias, but rather a philological one. Accused of being driven by a desire to recognize determining signs that would allow an irrefutable judgment of precision, Morelli’s method was often disregarded among specialists, although it is believed that many used it tacitly. His influence, however, is undeniable, and this type of thinking crosses various sciences and survives in contemporary scientific behavior.
It is not surprising that this method possesses similarities with the research proposal of Genetic Criticism and studies in Creative Process. What is done here is to objectify the marginal data negligible and tangent to the work to reveal the truth of the artist, or rather, to reveal their mode of artistic operation or their creativity. This would lead to a second stage, also historically delineated, according to Ginzburg, of the development of this analysis: there must be a person trained with the capacity to observe and interpret signs or clues left by the artist in the course of their action.
The interpretation of these signs can follow two paths, defined according to each historical-social moment: that of divination or that of deciphering. Divination turns to revealing the future, and deciphering the past. The discomfort we have in the face of divination is the fruit of a slow process of its discrediting in contrast to the continuous affirmation of deciphering, which relies on the saturated and incontestable presentation of verifiable proofs; however, the cognitive processes of both use the same type of intellectual operations: analysis, arrangement, comparison, classification, decomposition, etc. For the realization of a “diagnosis”, these operations are also used in a complementary manner. The deciphering of signs is what allows divination, which, in turn, could be interpreted as an arrangement of thought. The formalization of divinatory thought passes through the construction of conjectures and assumes refined specifications, determined by the concepts of generality and universality.
The “reader” trained to observe and select the correct clues and decipher or translate them, disposing of their meaning, will be responsible for formulating, through these determined operations, a narrative that brings us closer to the object: “Only by observing attentively and recording with extreme minuteness all the symptoms — the Hippocratics affirmed — is it possible to elaborate precise ‘histories’ of each disease: the disease itself is unattainable” (Ginzburg, 1990, p. 155).
Thus, if we use the Evidential Paradigm to analyze a creative act, which is apparently intangible, what we can do is compose a narrative that explains the genesis of this phenomenon, clarifying its implications; a narrative produced from the analysis, arrangement, comparison, classification, decomposition of the clues observed in the creative act. The production of such a narrative, which provides meaning to clues apparently disconnected from each other, depends on the observation and interpretation of these clues, depends on a specialized, trained, and prepared gaze to select, from the totality of clues, those that can provide content, those that are significant, those that “tell” us something about the meaning of the creative act. The clue that “tells” us something is that from its observation, meanings linked to the evidential narrative can be attributed by intellectual operations.
As we saw, for studies in Creative Process, the artist never stops in their creative movement and selects and stores everything they believe is important for a future construction, material that we call here process documents. In Free Improvisation, the artist accumulates procedures and experiences from their performances that inter-relate with their artistic-musical biography in a continuum that extends throughout their life, only delimited by the moments of realization. The first problem that arises for the methodology of the Evidential Paradigm is what type of clue, or process documents, should be selected in the construction of this explanatory narrative, since an equivocal observation ends up, instead of bringing us closer to the object, diverting us from it:
In “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”, the police cannot go beyond their assumption that the murderer was a human being. It was, therefore, unable to comprehend any of the clues or even realize what they meant. The problem of what to look for, how to direct the research, which clues are important and which are not, what “truth” to look for — all these are problems with which both Poe and Peirce concern themselves. The relevance of this type of questioning — and hypothetical positioning of the type of mind equipped to deal with it — constitutes an important part of abduction (Harrowitz in Eco; Sebeok, 1991, p. 214).
It is not just any narrative that we are interested in creating when evidentially analyzing a creative act, but rather one that possesses certain qualities that allow it to be verified as true. For this, the specialist “reader” must select from the available clues those that, through the use of intellectual operations, are subject to generating a plausible narrative. Such a narrative, directed to the environment of contemporary improvisation, will find its creative clues in the dynamics of the atelier. In it will be dispersed the documents of record, storage, and experimentation, with which this “reader” can narratively reconstruct the path taken by the artist, highlighting their creative actions.
The construction must begin with the adequate selection of the clues. This collection procedure, vulgarly called in the novels of the detective Sherlock Holmes as observation, is carried out in the confrontation (in the clash) between perceptions and hypotheses, about the observed space. Perception is a condition in which one has only a certain impression of something. Perception is, first of all, a trained gaze that is not an identity of the object, nor its representation, it is rather a refined selection, a calculated filter to predict that a certain condition will present itself. Hypothesis, on the other hand, would be what allows us to delimit the field of intellectual operations, which in turn is defined according to what is most probable for each environment or situation. In this process of electing the most reasonable hypotheses, we must take into account the forces that operate in each environment. Reasonable hypotheses are not born from a selection based on the discarding of hypotheses considered irrational. The set of hypotheses constructed with this selection basis may not bear any direct relation to the events. This is what leads us to generate hypotheses forged by adaptation so that they are ready to function in universal terms, but not in the specific case of the object of research. Reasonable hypotheses are those accepted, even if they initially seem absurd or completely improbable, by the fact that they bear a certain relation to what we observe in the environment, with the events and the objects involved.
For the gaze to be precise, we must first be aware of which objects can be found in the environment and what transformations they can undergo. The type of “clue” that we are expecting to find in the atelier as the environment of Free Improvisation, relates to contemporary poetics in the mode of sonic manipulation, biographical experiences, and the treatment of material transformation. In the possibility of diffracting this modality of improvised music by separating the elements of its constitution, we would obtain from this process the sonorities that would represent the raw material or matter, and the relations representing the fine organization. These two elements, which are constantly reconstructed by their intercommunication at various levels, are responsible for the complexity of the environment in contemporary improvisation.
The study within this dynamism will only be possible through the establishment of a finite field, delimited by a temporal cut with the purpose of observing the artist’s creation path. Within this delimited temporal field, the possibilities of sonic materials and their relations would be conditioned by the historical moment in which the artist is inserted and from which the reason for their choices, perspectives, and pretensions would emerge for us. These facts, of great importance for the analysis, must be observed without the resource of a command support such as the score or other means, despite counting on the recordings that expose the concrete details of the sonic material that the former would not provide. As for the fine relations, they can be seen as the choices of the moment, that is, the adjustments of actions for the construction and formalization of the sonic matter, present in the environment of contemporary improvisation. This material would be collected through interviews.
Both the manipulation process and the material presented by contemporary music are the constitutive influences of the improvisation model that we propose to study. Composers and musical thinkers have an important role here in establishing diverse perceptions linked to the field of music. From observation, it was possible to gradually distance oneself from the abstract formulation that the score offers, to turn to the multiple possibilities of construction that the concrete sonic matter offers.
[…] a sound is not a stable and permanently identical entity to itself, as the abstract notes of a score might suggest us and that all our musical tradition is based on this assimilation of the real thing by the symbol, but that every sound is in fact essentially variable, not only every time it is “played”, evidently, but also within its own duration (Murail, 1992).
Murail suggests that, instead of describing sounds through the parameters of timbre, pitch, intensity, and duration “[…] it would be more realistic, more in accordance with physical and perceptual reality, to consider it as a field of forces, each force having its own evolution” (Murail, 1992).
Contributing to the possibility of these perceptions, the proposal formalized by Pierre Schaeffer, in the mid-20th century, affirms that the artist no longer needed to work on the signs written on the score to obtain, via the interpreter, the desired sonic effect within what this system of codes could offer, but now the composer could work more directly with the sound and its materiality. This idea subsequently provided not only a possibility of action, but a formalized thought directed to the exploration of direct and materialized sound, moving away from the need for the virtuality of the score.
Schaeffer justifies his sonic proposition by presenting us in his book Treatise on Musical Objects written in 1966, a change in the way of apprehending sounds. For this apprehension that Schaeffer proposes, another form of perception is necessary. Apprehending does not mean solely the way our body is capable of reacting to certain stimuli, but also how we are prepared to interpret them. A person can listen to Schaeffer’s work “Étude aux Chemins de Fer” (1948) [13], and understand that they are trains. However, this differs from being prepared to interpret beyond simple apprehension, with which one can have another understanding about Schaeffer’s creative construction. Interpretation is beyond the simple physical capacity to apprehend, it involves conceptual and intellectual elements. It is necessary, in some cases in music, years of training and study to be able to perceive.
For Schoenberg [14], the birth of the systems that condition our perception, such as, for example, the major mode, depends on the confluence of observation and adaptation promoted through intuition. This formulation and constant reorganization of what man can observe in the circle of things and in the events of his time, generates by adaptations, the intuited systems over the consolidated systems.
Some composers and other musical thinkers have presented us with a variety of systems conducted by this type of genesis demonstrated by Schoenberg. Thus, in the apprehension of sounds in the manner proposed by Schaeffer, these sounds, initially alien to our musical listening conduct, pass through the determination of a deliberate perception that transforms them into a system stemming from a deliberate positioning of listening. Hence, Schaeffer’s listening proposals clarify much of what had been presented as a constitutive characteristic that would represent the hypermodern tendencies, present in contemporary musical actions. As an example of this, the reminiscence of the idea of noise as music or its ingress into what was already conceived as such, as in the futurist proposal, can be interpreted as a timbral inclusion if we abstain from referencing the iconoclastic character sometimes present in the musical aesthetics that serve revolutions.
Thus, it is possible to present the same concept of timbral expansion through compositional negotiation with the sonic matter, as we observe in Debussy or Ravel, in which the valorization of timbre through the exploration of its possibilities in the process of musical argumentative development also demonstrates an inattention to figural development, anticipating the possibility of a fruition subject to another listening, a listening committed to spectrum filtering and particularization of the details of the sonic nucleus, which were examined more minutely by the poetics of the 20th century.
We see that the principles of musical discursive development, in which the thematic material develops through variations without losing its identity, begins to share space with a system in which development is presented by the flow that is evidenced by the transformations of the sonic mass, a system that would gradually become independent of the score, as in Free Improvisation. This system stipulated from observation mediated by intuition is based in essence on what music has as its most fundamental and obvious component: sound. Centered on this idea, timbre perceived as an emissary element of sound, becomes the elementary material upon which musical construction will take place.
The new hierarchy achieved by timbre in the first half of the 20th century, mainly after Varèse, with its sonic masses and its timbral clusters and compounds, consolidates the idea of a composition built directly on the transformation of the sonic object, […] (Zubem, 2005, p. 164).
Varèse (1883-1965) wants to diffract sound through the prism of timbres. His strategy of eliminating melody due to a prudishness of reference made him delve, among other things, into percussive sounds and extract from them their own poetics, their own internal intelligence. The sensitive observation of the intelligence of sound can be admitted as part of the formulation of a system as presented earlier from Schoenberg, which shows that musical ideas start from natural phenomena and laws of matter and subsequently their formalization via intellectual operations. Thus, Cecília Salles also describes the process of creating a work of art.
All this inclination towards the characteristics of the sonorous in disregard of the abstraction that a system of codes provides is, therefore, derived from expanded perceptions that allowed intuitive apprehensions and organizations, and intellectually formalized in the constitution of various lines of systems. Among these codes, contemporary improvisation is an unprecedented system, the fruit of the inflection of these listening tendencies.
Superposition for Ives, more than a simple casual encounter of any two distinct universes, like the encounters of small town bands in his youth, provides the possibility of listening to relationships not yet established, not instituted and fixed by habit (Zubem, 2005, p. 66).
In the system of contemporary improvisation, those artists who were more linked to sonic production are at the core of their understanding and activity. Therefore, the interpreters, who were in their tradition more directly linked to sonic production, are protagonists in this contemporary improvisation, while the figure of the composer would come to work solitarily for a finished product, whether in the sonic plane or in the establishment of proposals. This explains the attitude of some improvisers who are prudish about considering improvisation as a work, and rather consider it a making or “giving” of art, and some composers consider their works as improvisations, first using the artifice of chance, freeing the fundamental role of a series of possible, but unnotified procedures.
These procedures typical of the instrumentalist encompass, beyond the artistic-musical biography (see Costa: 2003), also the technical tradition of the instrument and the transcendence of this by the instrumentalist through the in-depth exploration of resources, and new techniques arising from the need to extract unique sonorities required by the environment.
However, classes of musical artists such as instrumentalists, composers, and performers, have in common an obsession with the exhaustion of the possibilities of sonic matter, each by the means that competes to them, which allows the establishment of aesthetic relationships through the observation of the natural laws of matter. The mode of operating the matter, the mode of action of what the artist intends to do, or their style, is the negotiation between possibility and creative desire considering the particular quality of a matter and its possibilities of formalization. The sonic matter, in this way, incites the artist to act in a certain direction that turns upon the matter itself, transforming it into a compound impregnated with meanings. Limit exploration, therefore, is also an important clue that the observer must include in the formulation of the narrative of creation.
Other consecrated musical ideas are also guiding lights for the interaction process in contemporary improvisation. What defines the functioning of the interactive game in the environment of improvisation is what is grounded in the dialectic of musical thought. “All good music consists of many conflicting ideas: each of them acquires personality, and validity in opposition to the other” (Schoenberg, 1991, p. 121). In music, this conflict is not necessarily the demonstration of an opposition of poles of sonorities, but rather a complementing confluence, which improvisation allows from its permeability to socially established oppositions and extramusical character stimuli. These musical ideas that have become consecrated concepts serve both as procedural support in acting, and as conceptualization in the pragmatics of the communication of ideas; for example: harmony, chords, clusters, dissonances, consonances, tonality, atonality, polytonality, dodecaphony, polyphony, homophony, melody, line, planes, accompaniment, deflection, iteration, elision, rhythm, tempo, counterpoint, pointillism, ornamentation, form, sections, motive, phrase, smooth/striated time, granulation, fragmentation, basso continuo, pedal, ostinato, melisma, and so many others that could also be added to this list coming from personal concepts or originating from other musical cultures. However, as a process, these consecrated modalities for the contemporary improviser tend to approximate more to a reference to a particular sonority than to laws of conduct that ensure the fulfillment of rules. Thus, if a contemporary improviser were to refer to a session of their improvisation in which a contrapuntal idea emerged, they would probably not be referring to the rules of compositional writing, but rather to a certain musical texture with the following characteristics: polyphonic, interwoven, and of complementary designs. This explanation is fundamental to understanding the meaning of many of these clues left in the performances.
In this sense, we find a classification that meets the broader musical thought, which in turn represents models of operations that determine musical action. The English composer Brian Ferneyhough presents three models of musical thought that serve both perception and compositional production as well as for an improvised performance. Costa, in his approximation between improvisation and composition, reports that:
[…] it is inevitable that the improviser deals simultaneously with these three dimensions (figure, gesture, and texture) in a non-linear way. During an interactive performance, time is not necessarily directional or discursive and there is no correct development for the performance. Every sonic act has the potential to produce significant changes in the flow of the performance. And this depends on its degree of resonance that is only revealed in the real time of the interaction. Sometimes, an event that is apparently secondary in a complex texture becomes prominent and provokes significant changes. The simultaneous layers in the flow of the performance interact in all directions: horizontal, vertical, and diagonal. Thus, the ideas presented by Ferneyhough can be applied to an improvisation environment in which each small musical act (figure) that occurs in a complex and multidirectional texture has the potential to become a significant line capable of producing important changes in the sonic flow. Or else, all sonic events can be thought of as lines of energy that interact in unexpected ways, and the potential difference between them is what produces the succession of provisional states that delineates the performance (Costa R.L.M. 2010, p. 451-452).
The researcher who will construct their narrative from the clues must observe that in the environment of contemporary improvisation, these systems of formalization of sonic matter, or musical ideas, become action procedures. In these procedures, the improviser, despite the range of possibilities that the environment allows, is restricted to what constitutes their vehicle of expression: their technical capacities, their biography. In this way, even in the environment of Free Improvisation, in which possibilities are not governed or restricted by a set of compositional procedures, it is not possible to believe in an infinite environment of action merely by the immense possibilities it appears to have.
Once the plasticity and style are mastered (resulting from a perception of the mode of operation), we will take the opposite path, which would be to stimulate a direction and observe how the improvisers behave in the establishment of the game [15]. In the modality of improvisation we are studying, the formalization of the sonic matter occurs through interaction. In this case, the contaminations, biographical crossings, which are characterized as influencing agents in the process of artistic construction through interaction, must be observed in the course of the improvisation, limiting the field of action of the improvisers through the establishment of conditions for the game. These conditions do not necessarily figure as rules: conditions and rules have distinct natures, since we are not interested in controlling the action in Free Improvisation, but in stimulating the creative process.
We finally establish our study framework within the particularities of contemporary improvisation: time as a cut and frame, the sonic object as construction material, and interaction as operation. Having established the field of research and its objects, we can proceed to discuss the possibilities of narrative construction and highlight their implications.
Notes
[12] Character from the detective novels written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Sherlock was known for a precise method of discovering criminals through minimal details.
[13] Symbolic work of contemporary music, especially musique concrète. In it, Schaeffer uses recorded sounds of trains to compose.
[14] “Our major scale, the sequence C-D-E-F-G-A-B, whose sounds are based on Greek and ecclesiastical modes, can be explained as an imitation of nature. Intuition and combination cooperated so that the most important quality of sound, its upper harmonics (which we represent — like all sonic simultaneity — vertically), was transferred to the horizontal, to the non-simultaneous, to the successive sonorous” (Schoenberg, 1999, p. 61).
[15] According to Costa (2003), interaction in improvisation is built through a concept of play; in the case of free improvisation, the play would be ideal because it creates its rules as it goes. “the interaction between musicians who assume their instruments as a kind of extension of their voices and decide to start a game: an ideal game in which what matters is the continuity of the game itself (Free Improvisation)”.