Some thoughts on improvisation prompted by Eddie Prevost: No Sound Is Innocent [Copula Press, 1995]

I'm at the railway station, at the window, ordering a ticket but I cannot speak. The words are becoming stuck in my mouth, almost glued to the roof of my mouth. It is probable that small bubbles of spittle have hit the window that separates me from the booking clerk. I splutter on. A queue forms. Aware of the audience the words become even more unwieldy. I attempt associations: stations in the general direction of where I want to go, approximate times of travel. I grapple with communication but it is failing. Looks of patience turn into grimaces as the queue grows. I finally give-up trying to speak and ask for a pen and paper. By writing the words and slipping them back under the window this enigmatic situation is resolved by a fluency of communication. There can be no ambiguity, no hesitation. There can be no attempt at translating the flayed syllables and repeating consonants, no disentangling the ending of one word from the beginning of another. Communication must be as stable as a product and it must not 'take its time', it must not seek to temporalise itself, it must not improvise with meaning.

It is perhaps strange that improvisation has become closely associated with music when it is improvisation that is, in many ways, a fact of life, an important factor in all communication. If we look at improvisation from the point of view of the way in which we converse and relate to each other it is hard to deny that an element of improvisation is at play. We improvise with language and we improvise with the meanings of that language. Our memories, the material with which we are at play and in continual relation, are to a large degree prompted by chance meetings and occurrences. Improvisation thus establishes us as active amongst others, it maintains in us a relation to a social scene that can never be fully determined. By improvising we are saying that who we are and what we do is to a large degree unpredictable, that it is a measure of the degree to which we are open to being affected by the presence of other people and other situations. This latter point is crucial in that when we speak of improvisation as a daily practice we cannot posit a pure improvisation, an umediated form of expression, a mode of communication that has escaped all determination. This is in a sense a conventional description of improvised music, the common clichŽ of improvised jazz that is borne on the back of an overdetermined notion of the 'free': the wailing saxophones of a child's ventral gurgling.

Our improvising, it seems to me, is a matter of entering into relation in the widest possible way: a relation with our unconscious, a relation with the materials of expression, a relation with the medium of expression, a relation with the imagination, a relation with the recipient of our attempted communications etc.The wider the scope of potential relation then the more possibilities there are to both come across the ways in which our activity and expression is determined (by the hidden social messages in language, by the technique of virtuosity, by the closure of product) and to modify and change this determination; to maintain that the social is never fully determined, that its potential for freedom is never closed, but persists as the outcome of experimentalism; an autotheorisation that is practiced by all.
     

This, it seems to me, is the political dimension of improvisation for when we speak of experimentalism we are talking, in part, of the way in which we enter into relation with the outcome of our activity, its purpose. Do we see it as a product? Improvised musics have always been resistant to the notion of making music into a commodity and whilst this suggests, to some, a purist reluctance to avoid the contradiction of having undetermined activity ('free' improvisation) being determined by the commodity form (record release), it should also cause us to move the accent back a step or two so as to come to focus on the process that comes before the product. Just as the stammerer reveals to his interlocutor a different relationship to language, a different duration, a struggle to be expressed, so, it seems to me, the improvising musician dispenses with "pre-ordained objectives" for musical communication and comes to give an overdue attention to the process of activity: the being-in-formation rather than having form determine being. This has many ramifications: there can be no outcome to improvisation other than the continually presented ambience of context and inter-action which itself feeds the improvisatory process, prolongs it in absentia; the musical message that is thus created is a message, often enigmatic, that, like the stammerer's misplaced breaths and broken words, breaks our expectation for clear and coherent communication, and actively invites the interlocutor's participation in establishing what is meant. Its purpose is social.
    

Such a reception-centric mode of improvisation, the removal of the barrier between the musician and the listener, their being reconvened as "meta-musicians", serves as an encouragement to expression: "vague notions of good and bad are replaced by a catalogue of possible meanings". Thus, with the accent upon process, meaning as process, with the stress laid on the moment of activity, even on the moments before activity, the outcome becomes less a matter of product (live recording as document) and more a matter of other wide-ranging transformations. If improvisation does not become a method, an aim, a genre, if it is not seen as a specialist endeavour through which virtuosity can re-emerge, if it is seen as a continual accompaniment to our everyday lives in which meaning and responses do not always emerge instantaneously, if it is heard as that which contains the phases of its own construction and carries the emotions to which it gave rise, then it can operate as a "practice of self-invention" that is spurred-on by negotiation between the determined and the undetermined, between pleasure and displeasure.

Such a negotiation accompanies us at all times in our attempt to be free and it is improvisation that becomes the medium of this negotiation. If I hold up the queue for a ticket to a place I cannot even pronounce I am, at that moment, in a place akin to improvisation. I have to choose other words. I have to think of metaphors. I have to find a means of expression that can be understood. I should sing my sentence. I should adopt an unfamiliar accent. Most of all, though, I am learning not to be ashamed of myself, but am becoming keen to establish my difference through accepting that my communication is flawed and is liable to be misunderstood. I have the courage to fail and through this enforced bravery I can recognise that standardised communication can itself have its own limitations: there is nothing to negotiate, there is not even anything to desire if all my communications are flawless and do not necessitate that I am susceptible to the differences of others. Where then is a meaning I can participate in?
     

By improvising other options become open to me. Crucially the option most resisted and yet most useful in negotiating with freedom is the practice of "self-invention" that comes with improvising, with allowing desire into the process, for what is most crucial here is that, by improvising, by entering into relation, I do not invent a 'self' as such but become the repository of communications from the other that enables me to enter into a relation with myself as other, as the precipitate of countless identifications with others and with, say, the determinations of language that can 'speak' me. What is crucial about "self-invention" is not that it becomes a 'guise', a means of avoiding negotiation, a chameleon-like activity verging on hypocrisy, but that it is a resistance to being overly determined by hard and fast definitions of 'individuality': "There is a tacit acknowledgement that AMMs strength comes from each member allowing other voices to impinge upon individual aspirations and sensibilities. No one is subdued or subordinated unless they allow themselves to be. Fundamental to this experience is the maintenance and development of a sense of 'self' that can bear, even enjoy, sublimation -- but does not fear annihilation".

'Enjoy sublimation': sublimation could loosely be defined as the coming into relation of instinct and the ego, in other words, and very tentatively, as a relation between the unconscious and the conscious. That sublimation is mentioned in a book devoted to improvisation serves to highlight the theme of "self-invention" in that, whilst sublimation is seen as that which 'civilises' and adapts the instincts, it is nonetheless a process of transforming the instinctual pressures, of not being determined by innate needs. Sublimation is then, in the context of improvised music, a means by which instinctual energies (the hyperventilation of many a sax player) are not taken as the foremost expression of freedom, but are themselves negotiated in the process of harnessing those energies to meet and interact with the expressions of others.
    

Sublimation does not simply imply an adaptation to the mores of society but it too becomes a material, a force, that needs to be reckoned with in the process of improvising a relation between the determined (instinct) and the attempt to be free (undetermined). It is here where 'individuality' itself must become negotiable if it is not to seek refuge either in an overdetermination of the communal that cannot allow for difference or in an 'individuality' that is socially produced as the very meaning of freedom. It could be said, then, that the practice of "self-invention", its implied refusal to adopt the passive coordinates of identity, leads it to its correlate in improvisation in that it enables a different relation to perception and time to open up.

'Does not fear annihilation': no time, no perception. Is this that the ego is overwhelmed? That there is a flooding of the conscious by the death drives? A desire for death and the removal of all meanings? Yet it is not to be feared when the death drive is only a metaphor for the suspension of control; the dissolution of identity. The solidified ego accepts that it is no longer the centre and accepts the loss of control that ensues. But this loss of control, being in relation to the unconscious, helps to dissolve the fluency of our normative relation to the determined. Knowledge, even 'self-knowledge' becomes that which cannot be maintained with any certainty. The syntax changes. The inflection changes. Words break down into fricatives and spittle hits the window.
    

The annihilation that lies in improvisation is not the demise of meaning, but the destruction of a knowledge that knows too-well how to know but less how to feel. But death cannot be feared when it is only an enigma that cannot be countenanced. It cannot be spoken-of without a stammer. Instead annihilation offers the message of the other as alien-ness: a flooded breach in the smoothness of soloing self-representation. Not the death of the subject but the 'aliveness' of the subject to the presence of the other that cannot be accepted, that cannot breach the ego fortifications (the hardened determinations of 'individuality'), without some kind of trauma occurring. A trauma that accompanies the dissolution of knowledge and certainties, that is prepared for nothing as grand as death but, in improvising a response to the enigmatic message, is prepared no longer to be the centre, but to sublimate the ego as well in the free-flow of meaning that is "self invention".

Stammering I watch myself stammer and also hear myself stammer through the ears of another who does not stammer and expects only fluency. A frustration rises that is almost equal to my fear but rather than smash my fist down on the counter rather than turn and throw a tantrum, rather than blame the bemused ticket clerk I sublimate an aggression that is as much an aggression with myself than it is an aggression with the social pressure to speak at the appointed moment and speak with words that can be understood. It is the watching myself stammer and the hearing it too that provides me with a distance from myself into which comes the possible responses of those who wait. They are in the gap between myself and my words and I make such allowances for them. Such a mute but "conscious expression of alienation" where as a 'self' I cannot be expressed presents me with a picture of myself against a social backdrop: a non-self, a nothing-any-more-than-any-other self. And so I begin to perceive through other eyes and such a negotiation, coming from many other 'centres' of perception, means that I loose all reference point to 'self', become like music: the spluttered words are as enigmatic to me as they are to the others in the queue, what they mean, what function they serve is only secondary to the process of attempting to speak.

If anything we should oppose to improvisation the risklessness of coming pre-prepared. Thought can quicken under the pressure to be expressed and it can slow down under the pressure to accede to meaning and solidify that meaning as always and ever the expression of a 'self' that becomes equated with the thought as produced and pre-planned. The product is not always a score, not always notation, but the risk recedes in inverse proportion to the myth of perfection. A perfect rendition could get me where it is I want to go but am I so sure that such a place is where I want to go and not where it is expected that I should be? Is the quick thought of improvisation not then the speed with which the thought merges with the action and both merge with emotion? Is it not rather sublimated instinct that, being transformed, becomes a desire unrelated to 'need' and 'satisfaction' which quickens perception to the degree that it can sensualise thought?
     

Either quick or slow would be to be too determined, would be to not have negotiated the speeds that occur between, for it is through improvisation that perception and desire are not separated-out as two instances that follow one after the other but are that, like thought and action, which are in rhythm. Such varying speeds are crucial in seeking after freedom for it is the manner in which we temporalise ourselves that is crucial if we wish to negotiate the ways and means by which we are determined. For if language can 'speak' us so too can the institution of time temporalise us into a duration that linearises, that instils the notion that 'time is running out', that 'there is never enough time'. Instead of the time of the product - the capitalistic divisions of before and after... of nine-to-five... of millennia - improvisation, being open to alterity, bringing in desire and perception as a rhythm, offers up a notion of time that can be made rather than imposed: "Differentiation of time-value is a human attribute: we make time".This could well be the time of process; the time before beginnings that are expecting no ending other than the negotiated fade-out that is the continuance we cannot abandon and can always re-join as the malleable meaning we participate in.

Howard Slater
Break/Flow
October 1999