Living Inside the Notes

Great work Kyle, don't let the naysayers dissuade you.
By the way, I see your next post will be #1000 - gonna have a birthday cake?

KG replies: That number includes a few of the peripheral features to the right like "About" and "Sites to See." The actual number of blog entries isn't quite there yet.

I agree with you 100% on downtown group improv, and re: your earlier post "A Modernist By Any Other Name" I was wondering what you thought of Zorn's early game pieces, where he controls group improv practically down to the nanosecond. Honestly, I personally have a hard time telling the difference between those pieces and completely free playing, but maybe that's just personal prejudice. Still, they are process (or systems) pieces, so I guess in some universe you could think of them as drawing a line from modernism to improv to minimalism, although it's a pretty dotted line, to be sure.

KG replies: Hi Eric. I did think that all of Zorn's game pieces were a laudable attempt to get away from the clichés of spontaneous free improv and introduce some internal controls. The early ones sounded very much like Kagel. Cobra was more interesting, but not a recording I enjoy listening to much.

Through my somewhat jaded historical view, the 80's was in fact the decade when free improvisation became a global musical art and lingua franca enabling various forms of spontaneous music by anyone, anywhere, anytime (the essence of the old MEV gospel)...one could say this musical style had become the new pop music of the recalcitrant 70's underground. Arising as if out of nowhere and conferring instant musicianship degrees to anyone, it gave this movement and many of its practicioners an "untouchable" aura. This of course is all myth, in reality, the hard core improvisers, not only composed, experimented in formal and sonic research projects but practiced and critiqued and constantly revised their musical practices and philosophies... nonetheless - a strong committment to liberational and collective leftist politics always provided a formal hard edge and self-assured impervious exterior to this movement. So in a word, I disagree with Kyle, that while the improvised music in general pretended to be beyond criticism it was in fact (in some quarters) always aware of its weaknesses, vulnerabilities and above all failings. Also, while great solo improvisers, like Braxton,
Malcolm Goldstein, Maryanne Amacher, LaMonte Young, Terry Riley, Charlemagne, Harold Budd, Pauline Oliveros, Evan Parker, Roscoe Mitchell, Fred Frith etc etc are in fact astounding spontaneous music makers, they are composing every millisecond of the way - surely no special guarantee of anything - excepting the sound architect's skill to avoid structural collapse and knowledge of when and how to embrace silence.

The transcription problem is one of good ears and good musicology and really doesn't concern me, except when I try to transcribe my own improvisations (very very rarely).... My practice has always been, to compose them out from the start - so from pieces like the end of the MAGNETIC GARDEN -- all these multi-layered canons are in fact composed melodies... as is the second (strumming part) of FOR CORNELIUS, and now almost all of my extensive piano pieces in the collection: INNER CITIES, are nearly all written out (rather composed-out) improvisations... so for me, this is how I have continued to have my cake and eat it too.

ac

KG replies: Thanks for your thoughts, Alvin. But it's interesting that almost all the musicians you name are from a generation older than the ones who dominated the scene in the late '80s - a generation who, I'd agree, took a more disciplined approach.