On the Nature of Musical Free Improvisation

Tom Nunn

This comprehensive work is amazingly thorough and exhaustive.. tremendously interesting  and readable, though scholarly, researched, footnoted and all the rest. Best idea for me is simply excerpt a few paragraphs to give the reader a taste of the content and it's readability.. here goes...
 

   The big question often asked by those about to try free improvisation for the first time is,
"What do I play?" or from the audience's perspective, "What do you do when you free improvise?"
   The easy answer, of course, is "Do anything!"  And along with this usually goes the maxim,
"You can't make a mistake in free improvisation."  As explained earlier, however, these comments are more mythical than true.

    Let's say three musicians who have never improvised before and who normally read music
(and can play well) sit down and free improvise.  What happens?  Almost invariably, after trying to "sound like" free improvisation (and failing), the musicians will call on what they know how to play already, be it "licks" or quotations from "the literature".  Actually, they don't have a clue as to what to do.  This happens because they are under the misconception that free improvisers make the music.  Therefore, they each feel personally responsible to make something happen, yet nothing happens as a group, nothing congeals.  The music sounds either chaotic/random or collage-like.  There is little or no interaction among the players.

     In truth, free improvisation is not made, ut us allowed to make itself.  The free improviser allows INFLUENCES to work, allows the music to form itself through his/her body and mind, and just as importantly, the group mind.  But what necessarily goes along with this is a certain kind of intense concentration on the music as it happens  (as well as some level of technical proficiency).  What the three novice improvisers (in spite of their technical proficiency) are failing to do is simply to listen. Each one is so focused on what she/he is responsible for individually that there is little or no attention to the potential music, itself.  As elementary as this seems, it is perhaps the greatest hurdle, initially, in learning to free improvise.

.....

   In that period of silence just before a performance begins, the free improviser should ideally have nothing in mind, the first sound being entirely impulsive. The instant the sound is heard, the music begins; everything from here on is responsive, whether consciously or subconsciously.  And being a performance, the response is necessarily spontaneous.  The Intelligent Body goes to work, not only generating sound, but generating musical ideas as well, ideas which capture the attention of the Intellect....

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   Music, itself is fleeting--it's here, it's gone.  The next time is different, never the same.  Change is the dynamic basis of music, of cours: it is a temporal art articulated through change over time moment by moment.. And, of course, change functions historically, period by period, cycle by cycle.....Change, after all, is the succor of creativity.

          Nunn  forages topics such as the Complex Nature of Processes,

Confounding Principles of Complexity, the Voice of New Music, the Voice of

Improvised Music, Networking, Experimental/Original Instruments in Free

 Improvisation, Education and Group Exercises.. Discussions, Examples, Live

Performance vs. Recording, Producing,  Contextualization, Projection, Flow

Perception, Impressions, Influences and Processes, and Critical Listening, to be

brief.  While the designations may seem arbitrary and personalized (as opposed to

"scientific"), he's hitting close to a workable frame of reference for an area

notoriously troublesome for those relying on logic to interpret the ineffable, or for

those who glibly believe that free improvisation is somehow completely beyond

logic.  In fact, this is thorough enough that I could flunk a test on it.

                                                                                    -Davey Williams

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