http://www.jstor.org Imaging Music: Abstract Expressionism and Free Improvisation Author(s): Matthew Sansom Source: Leonardo Music Journal, Vol. 11, Not Necessarily "English Music": Britain's Second Golden Age, (2001), pp. 29-34 Published by: The MIT Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1513424 Accessed: 23/07/2008 15:55 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=mitpress. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We work with the scholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform that promotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].
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Imaging Music: Abstract Expressionism and Free Improvisation Author(s): Matthew Sansom Source: Leonardo Music Journal, Vol. 11, Not Necessarily "English Music": Britain's Second Golden Age, (2001), pp. 29-34 Published by: The MIT Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1513424 Accessed: 23/07/2008 15:55
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless
you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you
may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.
Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at
http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=mitpress.
Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed
page of such transmission.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We work with the
scholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform that
promotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].
Matthew Sansom
" ree improvisation" is the term most often used to describe the music and/or form of music-making most immediately associated with the likes of Cornelius Cardew and Derek Bailey and groups such as AMM and the
Spontaneous Music Ensemble. The form first emerged during the 1960s; it is now widely practiced by numerous artists
throughout many countries and has become (perhaps some- what ironically) a genre in its own right, with associated record labels, media, significant artists, aficionados and per- formance rituals. In seeking a definition of free improvisation, and given its oft-cited ephemeral and transient status, the ap- proach taken here considers free improvisation as creative ac-
tivity, encompassing its artistic agenda on the one hand and the process-based dynamic of its production on the other. The article opens with an exposition of the historical location of free improvisation within Western music history. Following this, and as a means of developing a fuller understanding of the activity's conceptual basis and processes, free improvisa- tion is explored as analogous with Abstract Expressionist art.
INDE'ERMINACY Free improvisation has its roots in the developments of jazz on the one hand and the experimental classical music of both America and Europe on the other. During the late 1950s and
early 1960s, a move towards a freer style of jazz improvisation (as exemplified in the playing of Ornette Coleman, Cecil Tay- lor and, later, John Coltrane) developed in contrast to the more idiomatic and established styles of Bebop and Hard-
Bop [1]. Through the development and questioning of the conventions of jazz's harmonic and metrical patterns and its structural principles, a variety of ideas and approaches emerged. As EkkehardJost comments, free jazz led to a het-
erogeneity of personal and group styles with new ways of ap- proaching issues of instrumental technique, ensemble play- ing and formal organization [2]. In retrospect, Steve Lacy says of these changes,
When you reached "hard bop" there was no mystery any more. It was like-mechanical-some kind of gymnastics. The patterns are well known and everybody is playing them.... It got so that everybody knew what was going to happen and, sure enough, that's what happened.... But when Ornette hit the scene, that was the end of theories. He destroyed the theories. I remember at that time he said, very carefully, "Well, you just have a certain amount of space and you put what you want in it" [3].
Similarly, developments in "art" music during this era articu- lated a response to the issues raised by a certain rigidity within
compositional technique. It is clear that during the 1950s, in-
creasing control and organization of pitch, rhythm and tim-
bre-the pursuit of the "illusory goal of total organisation" [4]- reached a point of exhaustion for
many composers. An increasing variety of sources challenged the modernist attempt to derive a common musical language from the principles of serialism. A cen- tral factor within these developing responses to integral serialism was the role of indeterminacy. The ex-
cessively complex notation of se- rial compositions led to the use of
approximate durations and pro-
ABSTRACT
The author defines free im- provisation, a form of music-mak- ing that first emerged in the 1960s with U.K. composers and groups such as Cardew, Bailey, AMM and the Spontaneous Music Ensemble. The approach here considers free improvisation as creative activity, encompassing its artistic agenda on the one hand and the process-based dynamic of its production on the other. After considering the historical location of free improvisation within West- ern music history, the article ex- plores free improvisation as analo- gous with Abstract Expressionist art. This comparison enables a fuller understanding of the activity's conceptual basis and the creative process it engenders.
portional notation (for example Stockhausen's Zeitmasse
[1956] and Berio's Sequenza [1958]) and to an awareness of the illogicality in using conventional notation to produce re- sults that could only be approximate. In Europe, indetermi-
nacy was initially applied only to time, and it was not until the 1960s that it would be used with the parameters of pitch, form and means. These changes inevitably led to an openness to- wards the role of notation and the development of graphic scores and a shift by performers towards a more improvisa- tional role. Gy6rgy Ligeti, who along with Iannis Xenakis
openly attacked serialism [5], developed the idea that a work's formal shape is more dependent upon matters of texture and timbre than harmony, counterpoint or thematic working (for example, in Atmosphres for orchestra [1961] and Volumina for
organ [1961-1962]). The implementation of large-scale forms of timbral control and associated performance techniques (such as also in Stockhausen's Carre [1959-1960] and Penderecki's Threnos [1960]) further contributed to the
changing roles of notation and performance. In contrast to, but in tandem with, the collapse in Europe
of the modernist linear development towards increasing con- trol, American music had already begun undergoing a radical
rethinking. Starting in 1950, John Cage's applications of Zen
philosophy aimed to rid his compositions of intention and to let sounds simply be "themselves." Cage used chance opera- tions (indeterminacy being applied to all parameters, in con- trast to its gradual application in Europe) to derive the con- tent of compositions as he sought to achieve "a musical
composition the continuity of which is free of individual taste and memory (psychology) and also of which is free of the lit- erature and 'traditions' of the art" [6]. Cage, along with Morton Feldman, Earle Brown and Christian Wolff, initiated
Matthew Sansom, Department of Music, University of Newcastle, Newcastle upon Tyne, NEI 7RU, U.K E-mail: <[email protected]>.
LEONARDO MUSICJOURNAL, Vol. 11, pp. 29-34, 2001 29 ? 2001 ISAST
changes of attitude toward: the percep- tion of what can be experienced as mu-
sically significant, be it environmental sound, "silence" and/or other chance sound events; the possibilities of graphic notation (pre-empting many develop- ments in Europe); and the role of the
composer in relation to ideas of music as performance rather than prescrip- tion, as a unique event or "happening" rather than a permanent "work."
Inevitably there was a degree of cross- fertilization between Europe and the U.S.A. during the 1950s, but America's weaker demands of history and tradition, coupled with Cage's artistic vision, estab- lished its place in more experimental ap- proaches to music. Philosophical goals fundamentally different from those of the developmental and rationalist Euro-
pean tradition generated new possibili- ties of musical thought. In distinguishing between the "avant-garde" and "experi- mental," the English composer Michael
Nyman wrote in the early 1970s,
Experimental composers are by and large not concerned with prescribing a defined time-object whose materials, structuring and relationships are calcu- lated and arranged in advance, but are more excited by the prospect of outlin- ing a situation in which sounds may oc- cur, a process of generating action (sounding or otherwise), a field delin- eated by certain compositional "rules" [7].
The notion that a certain process might generate action has close affini- ties with free improvisation and will be returned to; at this point, however, it is
pertinent to provide some detail about the English composer and contempo- rary of Nyman, Cornelius Cardew.
RADICALLY DIFFERENT MUSIC-MAKING
Cardew's early works are serial composi- tions (two string trios [1955-1956] and three piano sonatas [1955-1958]), but after a short period as Stockhausen's as- sistant (1958) and contact with John Cage and David Tudor at the Darmstadt
composition courses of 1959, he aban- doned serialism. Composing Two Books
of Study for Pianists (1959)-a work that
engages the performer intellectually, technically and aesthetically through notational innovations and complex in- structions-he began exercising a more experimental and strongly ideological approach to composition and music that would lead him to an involvement with freely improvised music. Cardew wrote of his vast and intricately crafted graphic
score Treatise (1963-1967) that "Psycho- logically the existence of Treatise is fully explained by the situation of the com-
poser who is not in a position to make music" [8]. Cardew further explored the acute questioning of the processes of
composition and performance that such
large-scale indeterminacy provoked in
joining the experimental improvising (or "free improvisation") group AMM in 1966. Later he wrote,
Written compositions are fired off into the future; even if never performed, the writing remains as a point of refer- ence. Improvisation is in the present, its effects may live on in the solos of the participants, both active and passive (i.e. audience), but in its concrete form it is gone forever from the mo- ment that it occurs, nor did it have any previous existence before the moment that it occurred, so neither is there any historical reference available [9].
In Cardew's work with AMM, the in- fluences of serialism and the European tradition, American indeterminacy and the experimental tradition and jazz came together to form a "radically dif- ferent kind of music-making" [10]. Al-
though the improvised music that
emerged from this group-once called "John Cage jazz" [11]-reflected many Cageian ideals, it differed with respect to emotional intent, impact and re-
sponse. For Cage, the absence of such
qualities informed his aesthetic stance and compositional process, whereas AMM accepted emotion in music as a
possible dimension for meaning to in- habit [12]. Also, although indetermi-
nacy, or rather each musician's choice to
incorporate chance events, was central to their music, it was wholly different from the compositional indeterminacy of such works as Stockhausen's Aus den sieben Tag (1968). As Eddie Pr6vost, a
longtime member of AMM, wrote, "AMM differed from all such projects because it denied all external authority and resisted attempts to impose their will upon events" [13].
A final historical point needs to be made here (with reference to the title of this volume of LMJ) concerning the in- ternational status of free improvisation during the 1960s. Before the formation of AMM, Lukas Foss was working in the U.S.A. with his Improvisation Chamber Ensemble. In his 1963 article "The
Changing Composer-Performer Rela- tionship: A Monologue and a Dialogue" [14], he identified free improvisation as one area in which the traditional duality between composer and performer was
being questioned, raising many new is-
sues for contemporary music-new ideas for coordination, performance problems, conducting techniques and instrumental discoveries. Additionally, from the early 1960s, the international Fluxus movement further conflated the traditional categories associated with musical practice [15].
Returning to England, mention should also be made of Gavin Bryars (later to work with Cage and Cardew), Tony Oxley and Derek Bailey, who also worked within the field of improvisation during this pe- riod: between 1963 and 1966, their musi- cal explorations shifted from more obvi-
ously idiomatic jazz to freely improvised music (or "non-idiomatic improvisation," to use Bailey's term [16]).
This contextualization reveals free im-
provisation as a specific and definable
activity, displaying an awareness of music as a unique sound event; acknowledging and exploring the role and significance of the performer as creator/composer without the dictates of notation, graphic or otherwise; incorporating the use of chance, encouraging the use of ele- ments outside conscious and deliberate control; and exhibiting an openness to the totality of sounds-both as an ex-
ploratory approach in conjunction with
experimental instrumental techniques and in relation to environmental con- text (not only aurally but also in other fields of awareness).
MUSIC AND THE VISUAL ARTS
Having located, albeit briefly, free im-
provisation within Western music history, I now consider its relation to certain his- torical, conceptual and procedural as-
pects of the visual arts during the twenti- eth century. It should be noted that this connection with the visual arts has a his- torical and explicitly practical root in much of the work carried out in the art schools of Great Britain at the end of the 1960s and early 1970s [17]. Colleges in Leeds, London, Liverpool, Falmouth, Portsmouth and elsewhere became homes for much experimental music-
making thanks to visits from composers and performers such as Cardew, John Tilbury, Howard Skempton, Gavin
Bryars and Christian Wolff [18]. That said, I compare here the activity of free
improvisation (in no sense as the unique embodiment of experimental music, but rather as having a key role in the project of rethinking music and the subject mat- ter of art) with certain approaches evi- dent in the visual arts during the twenti- eth century. Such a comparison provides
30 Sansom, Imaging Music
insight into the nature of free
improvisation's creative dynamics of pro- duction and its artistic agenda and aes- thetic basis. Significantly, this approach also helps identify specific aspects of the creative process in music (an area typi- cally avoided due to traditional categori- zations and the "splitting-off" of compo- sition as a specialist activity).
The development of modern abstract art provides certain obvious and strong parallels with the musical issues already considered. The prior destructuring of to-
nality at the turn of the century can also be considered (less helpfully, I would ar-
gue) alongside the destructuring of repre- sentation in the visual art of the same pe- riod. Abstraction dealt exclusively with art's own intrinsic formal language of line, tone, color, surface texture and com-
position; and this new mode of presenta- tion demanded a new aesthetic response. The origins of, and issues within, these de-
velopments are central to art history and were a significant influence upon the mu- sic emerging during the 1950s and 1960s. This is especially so in the work of Cage and the phenomenon of free improvisa- tion, providing related (but distinct) reso- lutions to some of the aesthetic and cre- ative problems raised by the destructuring of art's "subject matter" [19].
Throughout the first half of the twen- tieth century, a number of artistic move- ments developed new forms, procedures and theories of art. It is in the ideas and
practices of the Surrealist movement that the most significant parallels be- tween improvisation and Abstract Ex-
pressionism have their origin. Surreal- ism, which arose in Paris from the
dwindling Dada movement with its cyni- cism towards bourgeois rationalism and its nihilistic outlook, took onboard the ideas of Freud and the unconscious as a means of liberating the imagination from what they believed to be the crip- pling effects of logic and reason. With little regard for Freud's models, the Sur- realists sought to break the barrier be- tween consciousness and the uncon- scious, maintained as they saw it only for the sake of order and control, through dreams and automatic writing. The fol-
lowing conclusive definition is from the first Surrealist Manifesto written by the
poet Andre Breton in 1924: "SURREAL- ISM, noun. Pure psychic automatism by which it is intended to express, either
verbally or in writing, the true function of thought. Thought dictated in the ab- sence of all control exerted by reason, and outside all aesthetic or moral preoc- cupations" [20].
The Freeing of Form: New Procedures Breton's first attempts at automatic writ-
ing (1919) [21], which share an affinity with Freud's clinical method of free as- sociation, came to the attention of artists
Joan Mir6 and Andre Masson. Along with Max Ernst, they developed new pro- cedures as direct counterparts to auto- matic writing. Masson stated of his tech-
nique that "I begin without an image or
plan in mind, butjust draw or paint rap- idly according to my impulses. Gradu-
ally, in the marks I make, I see sugges- tions of figures or objects. I encourage these to emerge, trying to bring out their implications ...." [22] Masson's interest was in the point at which a line was in the process of becomingsomething else, and he went on to develop the method of automatic painting in a series of sand paintings. Having roughly spread glue over the canvas, he would throw sand on and shake it off, then use lines and patches of color to evoke the
suggested images. Similarly, Ernst began using materials
such as sacking, leaves and thread to construct images from an initial frot-
tage. Frottage was used as a means of
excluding all conscious mental guid- ance (of reason, taste, morals), reducing to the extreme the active part of that one whom we have called up to now the "author" of the work, the procedure is revealed to be the exact equivalent of that which is already known by the term automatic writing [23].
Again, the significance of the proce- dures employed by the Surrealists was revealed when Mir6 wrote: "I begin painting, and as I paint the picture be-
gins to assert itself, or suggest itself, un- der my brush. The form becomes a sign for a woman or a bird as I work. The first
stage is free, unconscious...." [24] Surrealism's fixation with dream im-
agery and the use of "automatic" meth- ods of working established the signifi- cance of the unconscious, both as a
present force in everyday life and more
importantly as a source of direction in artistic production. These procedures, along with the use of unusual materials, discouraged deliberate control and en-
couraged the emergence of more un- conscious imagery. Such factors provide significant similarities with the proce- dures of free improvisation, and the pre- vious descriptions of automatic painting are strongly evocative of the processes of free improvisation. A description by Cardew highlights this: "We are searching for sounds and for the responses that at-
tach to them, rather than thinking them
up, preparing them and producing them. The search is conducted in the medium of sound and the musician himself is at the heart of the experi- ment" [25]. As percussionist Frank Perry has stated, "improvisation has meant the
freeing of form that it may more readily accommodate my imagination" [26].
There is a shared attitude towards the
possibilities of each medium's material
make-up: from the incorporation of found and environmental objects to new
ways of using more traditional elements
(for example, in Ernst's use of paint straight from the tube or the unconven- tional use of a musical instrument).
During the years that followed, a number of factors influenced the course of Surrealism, most notably the
pre-World War II immigrations of the
European Surrealists to America. Works
by the likes of Ernst and Masson were now a direct presence within the Ameri- can art world. During the 1930s and 1940s the crisis over art's subject matter was an ever-present issue facing the art- ist: the American painter Adolph Gottlieb said at the time, "the situation was so bad I know I felt free to try any-…
Imaging Music: Abstract Expressionism and Free Improvisation Author(s): Matthew Sansom Source: Leonardo Music Journal, Vol. 11, Not Necessarily "English Music": Britain's Second Golden Age, (2001), pp. 29-34 Published by: The MIT Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1513424 Accessed: 23/07/2008 15:55
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless
you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you
may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.
Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at
http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=mitpress.
Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed
page of such transmission.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We work with the
scholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform that
promotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].
Matthew Sansom
" ree improvisation" is the term most often used to describe the music and/or form of music-making most immediately associated with the likes of Cornelius Cardew and Derek Bailey and groups such as AMM and the
Spontaneous Music Ensemble. The form first emerged during the 1960s; it is now widely practiced by numerous artists
throughout many countries and has become (perhaps some- what ironically) a genre in its own right, with associated record labels, media, significant artists, aficionados and per- formance rituals. In seeking a definition of free improvisation, and given its oft-cited ephemeral and transient status, the ap- proach taken here considers free improvisation as creative ac-
tivity, encompassing its artistic agenda on the one hand and the process-based dynamic of its production on the other. The article opens with an exposition of the historical location of free improvisation within Western music history. Following this, and as a means of developing a fuller understanding of the activity's conceptual basis and processes, free improvisa- tion is explored as analogous with Abstract Expressionist art.
INDE'ERMINACY Free improvisation has its roots in the developments of jazz on the one hand and the experimental classical music of both America and Europe on the other. During the late 1950s and
early 1960s, a move towards a freer style of jazz improvisation (as exemplified in the playing of Ornette Coleman, Cecil Tay- lor and, later, John Coltrane) developed in contrast to the more idiomatic and established styles of Bebop and Hard-
Bop [1]. Through the development and questioning of the conventions of jazz's harmonic and metrical patterns and its structural principles, a variety of ideas and approaches emerged. As EkkehardJost comments, free jazz led to a het-
erogeneity of personal and group styles with new ways of ap- proaching issues of instrumental technique, ensemble play- ing and formal organization [2]. In retrospect, Steve Lacy says of these changes,
When you reached "hard bop" there was no mystery any more. It was like-mechanical-some kind of gymnastics. The patterns are well known and everybody is playing them.... It got so that everybody knew what was going to happen and, sure enough, that's what happened.... But when Ornette hit the scene, that was the end of theories. He destroyed the theories. I remember at that time he said, very carefully, "Well, you just have a certain amount of space and you put what you want in it" [3].
Similarly, developments in "art" music during this era articu- lated a response to the issues raised by a certain rigidity within
compositional technique. It is clear that during the 1950s, in-
creasing control and organization of pitch, rhythm and tim-
bre-the pursuit of the "illusory goal of total organisation" [4]- reached a point of exhaustion for
many composers. An increasing variety of sources challenged the modernist attempt to derive a common musical language from the principles of serialism. A cen- tral factor within these developing responses to integral serialism was the role of indeterminacy. The ex-
cessively complex notation of se- rial compositions led to the use of
approximate durations and pro-
ABSTRACT
The author defines free im- provisation, a form of music-mak- ing that first emerged in the 1960s with U.K. composers and groups such as Cardew, Bailey, AMM and the Spontaneous Music Ensemble. The approach here considers free improvisation as creative activity, encompassing its artistic agenda on the one hand and the process-based dynamic of its production on the other. After considering the historical location of free improvisation within West- ern music history, the article ex- plores free improvisation as analo- gous with Abstract Expressionist art. This comparison enables a fuller understanding of the activity's conceptual basis and the creative process it engenders.
portional notation (for example Stockhausen's Zeitmasse
[1956] and Berio's Sequenza [1958]) and to an awareness of the illogicality in using conventional notation to produce re- sults that could only be approximate. In Europe, indetermi-
nacy was initially applied only to time, and it was not until the 1960s that it would be used with the parameters of pitch, form and means. These changes inevitably led to an openness to- wards the role of notation and the development of graphic scores and a shift by performers towards a more improvisa- tional role. Gy6rgy Ligeti, who along with Iannis Xenakis
openly attacked serialism [5], developed the idea that a work's formal shape is more dependent upon matters of texture and timbre than harmony, counterpoint or thematic working (for example, in Atmosphres for orchestra [1961] and Volumina for
organ [1961-1962]). The implementation of large-scale forms of timbral control and associated performance techniques (such as also in Stockhausen's Carre [1959-1960] and Penderecki's Threnos [1960]) further contributed to the
changing roles of notation and performance. In contrast to, but in tandem with, the collapse in Europe
of the modernist linear development towards increasing con- trol, American music had already begun undergoing a radical
rethinking. Starting in 1950, John Cage's applications of Zen
philosophy aimed to rid his compositions of intention and to let sounds simply be "themselves." Cage used chance opera- tions (indeterminacy being applied to all parameters, in con- trast to its gradual application in Europe) to derive the con- tent of compositions as he sought to achieve "a musical
composition the continuity of which is free of individual taste and memory (psychology) and also of which is free of the lit- erature and 'traditions' of the art" [6]. Cage, along with Morton Feldman, Earle Brown and Christian Wolff, initiated
Matthew Sansom, Department of Music, University of Newcastle, Newcastle upon Tyne, NEI 7RU, U.K E-mail: <[email protected]>.
LEONARDO MUSICJOURNAL, Vol. 11, pp. 29-34, 2001 29 ? 2001 ISAST
changes of attitude toward: the percep- tion of what can be experienced as mu-
sically significant, be it environmental sound, "silence" and/or other chance sound events; the possibilities of graphic notation (pre-empting many develop- ments in Europe); and the role of the
composer in relation to ideas of music as performance rather than prescrip- tion, as a unique event or "happening" rather than a permanent "work."
Inevitably there was a degree of cross- fertilization between Europe and the U.S.A. during the 1950s, but America's weaker demands of history and tradition, coupled with Cage's artistic vision, estab- lished its place in more experimental ap- proaches to music. Philosophical goals fundamentally different from those of the developmental and rationalist Euro-
pean tradition generated new possibili- ties of musical thought. In distinguishing between the "avant-garde" and "experi- mental," the English composer Michael
Nyman wrote in the early 1970s,
Experimental composers are by and large not concerned with prescribing a defined time-object whose materials, structuring and relationships are calcu- lated and arranged in advance, but are more excited by the prospect of outlin- ing a situation in which sounds may oc- cur, a process of generating action (sounding or otherwise), a field delin- eated by certain compositional "rules" [7].
The notion that a certain process might generate action has close affini- ties with free improvisation and will be returned to; at this point, however, it is
pertinent to provide some detail about the English composer and contempo- rary of Nyman, Cornelius Cardew.
RADICALLY DIFFERENT MUSIC-MAKING
Cardew's early works are serial composi- tions (two string trios [1955-1956] and three piano sonatas [1955-1958]), but after a short period as Stockhausen's as- sistant (1958) and contact with John Cage and David Tudor at the Darmstadt
composition courses of 1959, he aban- doned serialism. Composing Two Books
of Study for Pianists (1959)-a work that
engages the performer intellectually, technically and aesthetically through notational innovations and complex in- structions-he began exercising a more experimental and strongly ideological approach to composition and music that would lead him to an involvement with freely improvised music. Cardew wrote of his vast and intricately crafted graphic
score Treatise (1963-1967) that "Psycho- logically the existence of Treatise is fully explained by the situation of the com-
poser who is not in a position to make music" [8]. Cardew further explored the acute questioning of the processes of
composition and performance that such
large-scale indeterminacy provoked in
joining the experimental improvising (or "free improvisation") group AMM in 1966. Later he wrote,
Written compositions are fired off into the future; even if never performed, the writing remains as a point of refer- ence. Improvisation is in the present, its effects may live on in the solos of the participants, both active and passive (i.e. audience), but in its concrete form it is gone forever from the mo- ment that it occurs, nor did it have any previous existence before the moment that it occurred, so neither is there any historical reference available [9].
In Cardew's work with AMM, the in- fluences of serialism and the European tradition, American indeterminacy and the experimental tradition and jazz came together to form a "radically dif- ferent kind of music-making" [10]. Al-
though the improvised music that
emerged from this group-once called "John Cage jazz" [11]-reflected many Cageian ideals, it differed with respect to emotional intent, impact and re-
sponse. For Cage, the absence of such
qualities informed his aesthetic stance and compositional process, whereas AMM accepted emotion in music as a
possible dimension for meaning to in- habit [12]. Also, although indetermi-
nacy, or rather each musician's choice to
incorporate chance events, was central to their music, it was wholly different from the compositional indeterminacy of such works as Stockhausen's Aus den sieben Tag (1968). As Eddie Pr6vost, a
longtime member of AMM, wrote, "AMM differed from all such projects because it denied all external authority and resisted attempts to impose their will upon events" [13].
A final historical point needs to be made here (with reference to the title of this volume of LMJ) concerning the in- ternational status of free improvisation during the 1960s. Before the formation of AMM, Lukas Foss was working in the U.S.A. with his Improvisation Chamber Ensemble. In his 1963 article "The
Changing Composer-Performer Rela- tionship: A Monologue and a Dialogue" [14], he identified free improvisation as one area in which the traditional duality between composer and performer was
being questioned, raising many new is-
sues for contemporary music-new ideas for coordination, performance problems, conducting techniques and instrumental discoveries. Additionally, from the early 1960s, the international Fluxus movement further conflated the traditional categories associated with musical practice [15].
Returning to England, mention should also be made of Gavin Bryars (later to work with Cage and Cardew), Tony Oxley and Derek Bailey, who also worked within the field of improvisation during this pe- riod: between 1963 and 1966, their musi- cal explorations shifted from more obvi-
ously idiomatic jazz to freely improvised music (or "non-idiomatic improvisation," to use Bailey's term [16]).
This contextualization reveals free im-
provisation as a specific and definable
activity, displaying an awareness of music as a unique sound event; acknowledging and exploring the role and significance of the performer as creator/composer without the dictates of notation, graphic or otherwise; incorporating the use of chance, encouraging the use of ele- ments outside conscious and deliberate control; and exhibiting an openness to the totality of sounds-both as an ex-
ploratory approach in conjunction with
experimental instrumental techniques and in relation to environmental con- text (not only aurally but also in other fields of awareness).
MUSIC AND THE VISUAL ARTS
Having located, albeit briefly, free im-
provisation within Western music history, I now consider its relation to certain his- torical, conceptual and procedural as-
pects of the visual arts during the twenti- eth century. It should be noted that this connection with the visual arts has a his- torical and explicitly practical root in much of the work carried out in the art schools of Great Britain at the end of the 1960s and early 1970s [17]. Colleges in Leeds, London, Liverpool, Falmouth, Portsmouth and elsewhere became homes for much experimental music-
making thanks to visits from composers and performers such as Cardew, John Tilbury, Howard Skempton, Gavin
Bryars and Christian Wolff [18]. That said, I compare here the activity of free
improvisation (in no sense as the unique embodiment of experimental music, but rather as having a key role in the project of rethinking music and the subject mat- ter of art) with certain approaches evi- dent in the visual arts during the twenti- eth century. Such a comparison provides
30 Sansom, Imaging Music
insight into the nature of free
improvisation's creative dynamics of pro- duction and its artistic agenda and aes- thetic basis. Significantly, this approach also helps identify specific aspects of the creative process in music (an area typi- cally avoided due to traditional categori- zations and the "splitting-off" of compo- sition as a specialist activity).
The development of modern abstract art provides certain obvious and strong parallels with the musical issues already considered. The prior destructuring of to-
nality at the turn of the century can also be considered (less helpfully, I would ar-
gue) alongside the destructuring of repre- sentation in the visual art of the same pe- riod. Abstraction dealt exclusively with art's own intrinsic formal language of line, tone, color, surface texture and com-
position; and this new mode of presenta- tion demanded a new aesthetic response. The origins of, and issues within, these de-
velopments are central to art history and were a significant influence upon the mu- sic emerging during the 1950s and 1960s. This is especially so in the work of Cage and the phenomenon of free improvisa- tion, providing related (but distinct) reso- lutions to some of the aesthetic and cre- ative problems raised by the destructuring of art's "subject matter" [19].
Throughout the first half of the twen- tieth century, a number of artistic move- ments developed new forms, procedures and theories of art. It is in the ideas and
practices of the Surrealist movement that the most significant parallels be- tween improvisation and Abstract Ex-
pressionism have their origin. Surreal- ism, which arose in Paris from the
dwindling Dada movement with its cyni- cism towards bourgeois rationalism and its nihilistic outlook, took onboard the ideas of Freud and the unconscious as a means of liberating the imagination from what they believed to be the crip- pling effects of logic and reason. With little regard for Freud's models, the Sur- realists sought to break the barrier be- tween consciousness and the uncon- scious, maintained as they saw it only for the sake of order and control, through dreams and automatic writing. The fol-
lowing conclusive definition is from the first Surrealist Manifesto written by the
poet Andre Breton in 1924: "SURREAL- ISM, noun. Pure psychic automatism by which it is intended to express, either
verbally or in writing, the true function of thought. Thought dictated in the ab- sence of all control exerted by reason, and outside all aesthetic or moral preoc- cupations" [20].
The Freeing of Form: New Procedures Breton's first attempts at automatic writ-
ing (1919) [21], which share an affinity with Freud's clinical method of free as- sociation, came to the attention of artists
Joan Mir6 and Andre Masson. Along with Max Ernst, they developed new pro- cedures as direct counterparts to auto- matic writing. Masson stated of his tech-
nique that "I begin without an image or
plan in mind, butjust draw or paint rap- idly according to my impulses. Gradu-
ally, in the marks I make, I see sugges- tions of figures or objects. I encourage these to emerge, trying to bring out their implications ...." [22] Masson's interest was in the point at which a line was in the process of becomingsomething else, and he went on to develop the method of automatic painting in a series of sand paintings. Having roughly spread glue over the canvas, he would throw sand on and shake it off, then use lines and patches of color to evoke the
suggested images. Similarly, Ernst began using materials
such as sacking, leaves and thread to construct images from an initial frot-
tage. Frottage was used as a means of
excluding all conscious mental guid- ance (of reason, taste, morals), reducing to the extreme the active part of that one whom we have called up to now the "author" of the work, the procedure is revealed to be the exact equivalent of that which is already known by the term automatic writing [23].
Again, the significance of the proce- dures employed by the Surrealists was revealed when Mir6 wrote: "I begin painting, and as I paint the picture be-
gins to assert itself, or suggest itself, un- der my brush. The form becomes a sign for a woman or a bird as I work. The first
stage is free, unconscious...." [24] Surrealism's fixation with dream im-
agery and the use of "automatic" meth- ods of working established the signifi- cance of the unconscious, both as a
present force in everyday life and more
importantly as a source of direction in artistic production. These procedures, along with the use of unusual materials, discouraged deliberate control and en-
couraged the emergence of more un- conscious imagery. Such factors provide significant similarities with the proce- dures of free improvisation, and the pre- vious descriptions of automatic painting are strongly evocative of the processes of free improvisation. A description by Cardew highlights this: "We are searching for sounds and for the responses that at-
tach to them, rather than thinking them
up, preparing them and producing them. The search is conducted in the medium of sound and the musician himself is at the heart of the experi- ment" [25]. As percussionist Frank Perry has stated, "improvisation has meant the
freeing of form that it may more readily accommodate my imagination" [26].
There is a shared attitude towards the
possibilities of each medium's material
make-up: from the incorporation of found and environmental objects to new
ways of using more traditional elements
(for example, in Ernst's use of paint straight from the tube or the unconven- tional use of a musical instrument).
During the years that followed, a number of factors influenced the course of Surrealism, most notably the
pre-World War II immigrations of the
European Surrealists to America. Works
by the likes of Ernst and Masson were now a direct presence within the Ameri- can art world. During the 1930s and 1940s the crisis over art's subject matter was an ever-present issue facing the art- ist: the American painter Adolph Gottlieb said at the time, "the situation was so bad I know I felt free to try any-…
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