notesdontmatter

Forum – Week 11 – “Improvisation 1”:

Noise. Is it an underrated sonic phenomenon with multiple unexplored musical applications? Yes. Did we lift the lid on any of these hidden miracles today? In a word; no. I’m unsurprised at the my perceived lack of interesting musical outcome resulting from today’s session. This is largely due to the time frames involved. Giving people a couple of months to build an entirely new instrument, with virtually no time to examine its performance possibilities and develop some kind of consistent technique, and expecting ten to fifteen people to ‘improvise’ musically with these things ad lib is a tall order. I don’t consider myself an ignoramus, and believe my mind is wide open, but being involved in many sessions of similar construction up to this point, I’m starting to find the concept tedious. I just haven’t experienced anything worthwhile during exercises of this type.

Perhaps if we had slowly worked on the instruments over the whole year and put together a pre-determined composition with them, based on results of personal and group experimentation, then maybe something worth listening to may have been produced. In this situation however, it’s just the same old story, be it today’s direction sheets dictating vagaries, or Harris’s from “Compossible”, or anything that leaves too much open to interpretation. I think part of the problem I have with this approach is that it’s always been presented to me in a large ensemble situation. There is a reason why Orchestras and Big Bands have conductors and rigid scores; when big groups get together and just improvise individually with only the vaguest suggestion of approach, and no predetermined ‘style’ to base their playing on, it rarely produces more than mediocre results from a musical perspective.

There was a moment of potential interest when Stephen suggested that all who were using sustained tones should aim to create some beating frequencies with each other and have the percussive instruments manufacture some sort of polyrhythmic effect out of the result.
This did reach a climactic point in which all involved were harmonised nicely, but it was short lived.

Perhaps I’m judging too harshly at this early stage, but there is only one week to go and I’ll be very surprised if the results improve in that time...


Reference:

Whittington, Stephen. “Forum – Week 11 – Improvisation 1.” Workshop presented at EMU space, Level 5, Schultz Building, University of Adelaide, 18th of October, 2007.

posted by David J Dowling @ 4:09 PM