This year, I have had the privilege of being a guest participant in Ray Anderson's improvisation class at Stony Brook University. As a “good student”, the thing for me to say, which is also really true: it's been a wonderful experience, and I've learned a lot. As a free spirit, I also have a lot more to say.
The most intriguing observation for me is how the class navigates the realm of emotion, and of pure next-ness, which perhaps might be termed subconscious emotion. When improvising in a group, we may have a general emotion in mind, and start from there, but in the moment itself, when it's time to do something, somehow the next sound appears. It is this connection between the two, the letting what one feels in the moment tie to and directly influence what happens next, that was central to the magic that happened in the class.
Apart from Ray, a great jazz player, we were a group of classical musicians, and as is often the case in our reverent tradition, we take pieces as already completed and learn how to execute them; it is still rare, though this is evolving as musical institutions look back to how the music we play was actually created, for our education to feature freestyle classical jam sessions, and a strong focus on both improvisation and composition for instrumentalists. So we heard a great deal from Ray about “turning off the inner critic”, to free up from comparing to the enormous shoulders of the greats of the past and present. It's about getting up the courage to walk a new course without recourse to a map. He actually had a session entirely on ugly sounds, encouraging them, to get out the fear of making them. In this class, better to speak and have the result be un-aesthetically-pleasing, than not speak at all – and as it turns out, in art there are no wrong answers, everything can go somewhere, or nowhere if we prefer.
Since we were exploring entirely free-style, we removed all constraints of style. It is true that constraints sometimes give more options than pure freedom, but our aim here was not to create a perfect polka, or a judicious smooth jazz jam, or a sonorous sonata. The aim was to link the visceral emotion of creation, response, and sound, with something coming out of our instruments. As a result, we found ourselves talking much more about situations, than about music. We'd have a follower and a responder, a soloist and an accompanist, a joiner and an abstainer. What those would sound like was left up to us. And somehow, we found strings of sounds, however imprecise, that would convey what we felt in the moment, much as a baby might make sounds, without knowing a language, that somehow seem appropriate to her in her situation. After that, it was inventing situations, either explicitly, or as we went along, that would create the framework we played within and without. In one very interesting experiment, each one of us “conducted” the ensemble, with gestures to distinguish desired articulations, dynamics, solos, rhythm, and anything else we could come up with. It left room for the players to improvise around the indications – a solo could be anything – and, in being on the spot, it let the “conductor” try out whatever came to mind, which wound up being an interesting reflection of the very personal unique types of patterns each of us gravitate towards. Indeed the structure of each improvisation in the end reflected and perhaps exaggerated each of our very distinct personalities, and in this realization we could take what we learned about our tendencies, and apply our increased self-awareness towards a greater freedom in improvisational decision-making, and refresh potential habits with views of new directions.
In composition, there is much focus on “creating a language”; in these improvisation sessions, I had the opportunity to get my feet wet in the pre-language stage. My conclusion: it is great fun to play with the ethers, from which life congeals and springs up!
The most intriguing observation for me is how the class navigates the realm of emotion, and of pure next-ness, which perhaps might be termed subconscious emotion. When improvising in a group, we may have a general emotion in mind, and start from there, but in the moment itself, when it's time to do something, somehow the next sound appears. It is this connection between the two, the letting what one feels in the moment tie to and directly influence what happens next, that was central to the magic that happened in the class.
Apart from Ray, a great jazz player, we were a group of classical musicians, and as is often the case in our reverent tradition, we take pieces as already completed and learn how to execute them; it is still rare, though this is evolving as musical institutions look back to how the music we play was actually created, for our education to feature freestyle classical jam sessions, and a strong focus on both improvisation and composition for instrumentalists. So we heard a great deal from Ray about “turning off the inner critic”, to free up from comparing to the enormous shoulders of the greats of the past and present. It's about getting up the courage to walk a new course without recourse to a map. He actually had a session entirely on ugly sounds, encouraging them, to get out the fear of making them. In this class, better to speak and have the result be un-aesthetically-pleasing, than not speak at all – and as it turns out, in art there are no wrong answers, everything can go somewhere, or nowhere if we prefer.
Since we were exploring entirely free-style, we removed all constraints of style. It is true that constraints sometimes give more options than pure freedom, but our aim here was not to create a perfect polka, or a judicious smooth jazz jam, or a sonorous sonata. The aim was to link the visceral emotion of creation, response, and sound, with something coming out of our instruments. As a result, we found ourselves talking much more about situations, than about music. We'd have a follower and a responder, a soloist and an accompanist, a joiner and an abstainer. What those would sound like was left up to us. And somehow, we found strings of sounds, however imprecise, that would convey what we felt in the moment, much as a baby might make sounds, without knowing a language, that somehow seem appropriate to her in her situation. After that, it was inventing situations, either explicitly, or as we went along, that would create the framework we played within and without. In one very interesting experiment, each one of us “conducted” the ensemble, with gestures to distinguish desired articulations, dynamics, solos, rhythm, and anything else we could come up with. It left room for the players to improvise around the indications – a solo could be anything – and, in being on the spot, it let the “conductor” try out whatever came to mind, which wound up being an interesting reflection of the very personal unique types of patterns each of us gravitate towards. Indeed the structure of each improvisation in the end reflected and perhaps exaggerated each of our very distinct personalities, and in this realization we could take what we learned about our tendencies, and apply our increased self-awareness towards a greater freedom in improvisational decision-making, and refresh potential habits with views of new directions.
In composition, there is much focus on “creating a language”; in these improvisation sessions, I had the opportunity to get my feet wet in the pre-language stage. My conclusion: it is great fun to play with the ethers, from which life congeals and springs up!
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