Free Improvisation, Egalitarianism, and Knowledge

Abstract

ABSTRACTWhile numerous scholars and performers of free improvisation have noted that egalitarianism structures social interactions between participants of this musical practice, they have largely treated this concept as self-explanatory. Drawing on ethnographic participant observation I conducted in Berlin, Chicago, and San Francisco between 2008 and 2016, this article examines how egalitarianism generates several patterns of social interaction in habits of talk, embodied behavior, and musical sound. Conceptualizing egalitarianism as freedom from social and aesthetic hierarchy, I argue that participants of these scenes pursue egalitarianism through an array of behaviors that prevent other individuals from knowing what they prefer, intend, understand, and value in the practice of free improvisation. Preventing others from accessing these kinds of knowledge places each participant on an equal plane of unawareness which in turn allows them to experience creative freedom. More broadly, then, this article outlines how free improvisation is based in a concept of freedom in which the negation, rather than the accrual, of knowledge leads to greater experiences of personal liberty.KEYWORDS: improvisationfreedomegalitarianismknowledge Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 Jason Stanyek, “Articulating Intercultural Free Improvisation: Evan Parker’s Synergetics Project,” Resonance 7, no. 2 (1999): 44–7; David W. Bernstein, “‘Listening to the Sounds of the People’: Frederic Rzewski and Musica Elettronica Viva (1966–1972),” Contemporary Music Review 29, no. 6 (2010): 535–50; Barbara Rose Lange, “Teaching the Ethics of Free Improvisation,” Critical Studies in Improvisation/Études Critiques en Improvisation 7, no. 2 (2011): 1–11; Maud Hickey, “Learning from the Experts: A Study of Free-Improvisation Pedagogues in University Settings,” Journal of Research in Music Education 62, no. 4 (2015): 425–45.2 Burkhard Beins et al., eds., Echtzeitmusik berlin: selbstbestimmung einer szene / self-defining a scene (Hofheim: Wolke Verlag, 2011).3 David Borgo, “Synergy and Surrealestate: The Orderly Disorder of Free Improvisation,” Pacific Review of Ethnomusicology 10, no. 1 (2002): 1–24.4 See Christopher Boehm, “Egalitarian Behavior and Reverse Dominance Hierarchy,” Current Anthropology 34, no. 3 (1993): 227–54.5 Lange, “Teaching the Ethics of Free Improvisation”; Hickey, “Free-Improvisation Pedagogues.”6 Tom Arthurs, “Improvised Music in Berlin 2012–13: A Brief Ethnographic Portrait,” Critical Studies in Improvisation/Études Critiques en Improvisation 10, no. 2 (2015): n. 57.7 In terms of dates, I conducted fieldwork in Berlin during May of 2010, summer of 2012, and from fall of 2014 to summer 2016; Chicago from spring 2008 to summer 2010; and the San Francisco Bay Area free improvisation scene from fall 2010 to summer 2014.8 Dana Gooley, Fantasies of Improvisation: Free Playing in Nineteenth-Century Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018).9 Melvin James Backstrom, “The Field of Cultural Production and the Limits of Freedom in Improvisation,” Critical Studies in Improvisation/Études Critiques en Improvisation 9, no. 1 (2013).10 See Valerie Wilmer, As Serious as Your Life: The Story of the New Jazz (Westport, CT: Lawrence Hill, 1980); George E. Lewis, “Improvised Music After 1950: Afrological and Eurological Perspectives,” Black Music Research Journal 16, no. 1 (1996): 114–15.11 Performers active in this practice often choose objects that have neither been designed to function as musical instruments (or even to produce sound, for that matter) nor historically used as such. For example, Japanese noise artist Toshimaru Nakamura has developed the practice of “no-input mixing board,” in which the output of the device is routed directly back into any of its inputs. Similarly, the white Czech improviser Ivan Palacký performs on a sewing machine and white American improviser Judy Dunaway often performs using balloons.12 This kind of social practice is indeed an element of the work of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, the Black Artists Group, and the New York loft jazz scene. Nevertheless, each of these three musical communities regularly features forms of musical organization that greatly differ from what I describe in this article, to say nothing of their racial demographics, which are certainly contrast quite strongly from the scenes I analyze here.13 John Corbett, A Listener's Guide to Free Improvisation (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 1.14 Julie Dawn Smith, “Playing Like a Girl: The Queer Laughter of the Feminist Improvising Group,” in The Other Side of Nowhere: Jazz, Improvisation, and Communities in Dialogue, ed. Daniel Fischlin and Ajay Heble (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2004); Marc Hannaford, “Subjective (Re)positioning in Musical Improvisation: Analyzing the Work of Five Female Improvisers,” Music Theory Online 23, no. 2 (2017); Hannah Reardon-Smith, “The Uncanon: Radical Forgetting and Free Improvisation,” Sound Scripts 6, no. 1 (2019): 1–8.15 Ritwik Banerji, "Whiteness as Improvisation, Nonwhiteness as Machine," Jazz and Culture 4, no. 2 (2021): 56–84.16 For a history of this idea, see Lewis, “Improvised Music After 1950.”17 For an elaboration on the notion of leveling, see Boehm, “Egalitarian Behavior.”18 For further elaboration on this sense of the term ritual, see Rupert Stasch, “Ritual and Oratory Revisited: The Semiotics of Effective Action,” Annual Review of Anthropology 40 (2011): 159–74.19 Pseudonyms have been used for each venue and ethnographic interlocutor.20 Andre Béteille, Inequality among Men, (Oxford, England: Basil Blackwell, 1977).21 As a creative, playful examination of this egalitarian stance, performance artist Diego Chamy organized a “competition” among improvising duos at a music festival in Berlin in 2009 for a cash prize. Like Carl’s reaction, it provoked a sense of disgust among audience members, who took offense at the very idea of trying to determine the “best” of the duos featured; see Diego Chamy, “Das Interaktion Festival: Eine kritische Verteidigung / The Interaktion Festival: A Critical Defense,” in Echtzeitmusik berlin: selbstbestimmung einer szene / Self-defining a scene, ed. Burkhard Beins et al. (Hofheim: Wolke Verlag, 2011), 298–316.22 Even when speaking German, it was common for improvisers I worked with to use the term “session” as a loanword.23 In a German context, this person’s specific national identity may be less consequential than their race, which would likely be taken as East Asian.24 Here, I use “genre” in the linguistic anthropological sense of a particular form of social interaction rather than in the more common humanistic sense of a type of artistic work; see Richard Bauman, “Genre,” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 9, no. 1/2 (1999): 84–7.25 For whatever reason, this was the precise phrase I heard improvisers use on numerous occasions when asking this question.26 This corresponds with what ethnographers of communication have observed in other egalitarian communities, where communicative ambiguity appears to similarly function as a leveling tactic; see Donald Brenneis, “Talk and Transformation,” Man 22, no. 3 (1987): 499–510; Brackette Williams, "Humor, Linguistic Ambiguity, and Disputing in a Guyanese Community," International Journal of the Sociology of Language 1987, no. 65 (1987): 79–94.27 This is a type of high-occupancy apartment building constructed from large, mass-produced concrete slabs.28 This particular comment may seem charged with meaning and yet its speaker introduces it without clarifying what it refers to. Similarly, none of the participants of this interaction inquire as to what the comment means, thereby preserving a sense of mystery about its meaning, a feature of such conversations which is consistent with the general tendency to leave various intentional stances unknown.29 As mentioned previously, given that the three scenes I discuss here are overwhelmingly white, this also means that the potential pool of session invitees or performance collaborators is as well.30 As unsettling as this seems, improvisers often greatly value this unpredictability; see Burkhard Beins, “Entwurf und Ereignis / Scheme and Event,” in Echtzeitmusik berlin: selbstbestimmung einer szene / Self-defining a scene, ed. Burkhard Beins et al. (Hofheim, Germany: Wolke Verlag, 2011), 166–81.31 This is a functional term to describe the intentional abstention from the production of sound. Realistically, an actual absence of sound is not possible; see John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961); Lorraine Plourde, “Disciplined Listening in Tokyo: Onkyō and Non-Intentional Sounds,” Ethnomusicology 52, no. 2 (2008): 270–95. Unless otherwise noted, my use of this term refers to intentional abstention from sound production.32 Inharmonicity and noise refer to sounds which lack a definite pitch or obvious bands of acoustic energy emanating from sources vibrating at a definite frequency, respectively; see Denis Smalley, “Spectromorphology: Explaining Sound-Shapes,” Organised Sound 2, no. 2 (1997): 107–26.33 As scholars of free improvisation now readily note, this aesthetic tendency constitutes the basic sonic parameters that define free improvisation as a genre; see Chris Atton, “Genre and the Cultural Politics of Territory: The Live Experience of Free Improvisation,” European Journal of Cultural Studies 15, no. 4 (2012): 427–41; Backstrom, “Limits of Freedom.” That is, rather than transcending the boundaries of musical genre (as is often claimed about this practice), free improvisation exhibits generic traits just like any other contemporary genre.34 Critics of egalitarianism refer to this as “leveling down,” or an approach to egalitarianism based in the idea of stripping privileges to place all on an equal plane; see Deborah L. Brake, “When Equality Leaves Everyone Worse Off: The Problem of Leveling Down in Equality Law,” William Mary Law Review 46 (2004): 513–618.35 In Isaiah Berlin’s terms, this particular dimension of freedom in this musical practice, in which performers are not expected to demonstrate certain kinds of conventional competencies, constitutes a “negative” (freedom from) rather than positive (freedom to); see “Two Concepts of Liberty,” in Liberty, ed. Henry Hardy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 166–217.36 Strictly speaking, however, the habit of gaze aversion means that all this stoicism is primarily oriented towards onlookers since fellow players are unlikely to see these muted facial expressions anyway. All the same, this still amounts to a suspension of critical judgment as the audience does not see players visibly evaluate their fellow performers as their facial expressions change during the performance.37 Sofia Dahl et al., “Gestures in Performance,” in Musical Gestures: Sound, Movement, and Meaning, ed. Rolf Inge Godøy and Marc Leman (New York: Routledge, 2010), 36–68.38 Joel Robbins and Alan Rumsey, “Introduction: Cultural and Linguistic Anthropology and the Opacity of Other Minds,” Anthropological Quarterly 81, no. 2 (2008): 407–20. In many ways, the linguistic anthropological concept of an opacity doctrine shares much in common with other theories of opacity, especially in the work of Edóuard Glissant; see Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997). While Glissant’s discussion is a productive illustration of the sensory apparatus that undergirds political autonomy, it is distinct from (and as yet unconnected with) linguistic anthropological discussions of opacity, which focus on how particular speech communities develop ideologies about what one can or cannot know about other minds.39 Graeme B. Wilson and Raymond A.R. MacDonald, “The Sign of Silence: Negotiating Musical Identities in an Improvising Ensemble,” Psychology of Music 40, no. 5 (2012): 558–73.40 Graeme B. Wilson and Raymond A.R. MacDonald, “Musical Choices During Group Free Improvisation: A Qualitative Psychological Investigation,” Psychology of Music 44, no. 5 (2016): 1029–43.41 Rupert Stasch, “Knowing Minds is a Matter of Authority: Political Dimensions of Opacity Statements in Korowai Moral Psychology,” Anthropological Quarterly 81, no. 2 (2008): 443–53.42 Clément Canonne and Nicolas Garnier, “Individual Decisions and Perceived Form in Collective Free Improvisation,” Journal of New Music Research 44, no. 2 (2015): 145–67.43 These are small canals that divert the flow of the River Spree through the city.44 The unspecific quality of this praise may partially be due to the inherently disorienting effect of performing nearly an hour’s worth of pulseless music without a predetermined composition, using cumbersome, unpredictable extended techniques or instrumental preparations to manipulate sounds, all while attempting to listen to oneself and others as one composes and performs simultaneously. The disorienting nature of these experiences has been described by numerous players and other observers see John Corbett, Extended Play: Sounding Off from John Cage to Dr. Funkenstein (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), 201–08; Beins, “Entwurf und Ereignis.” If the stylistic features of free improvisation themselves are a product of an egalitarian commitment, these effectively induce an egalitarian stance on abstaining from peer criticism because they leave improvisers unable to really recall what took place over the course of the piece itself. Additionally, while players often make personal recordings of their sessions and performances, I rarely observed improvisers review them as a group for the purpose of recollection and self-evaluation, a behavior very much consistent with Derek Bailey’s overall skepticism of recordings as an authoritative, objective document of the events of an improvised performance; see Derek Bailey, Improvisation: Its Nature and Practice in Music (New York: Da Capo Press, 1993).45 See Timothy Rice, “Understanding and Producing the Variability of Oral Tradition: Learning from a Bulgarian Bagpiper,” The Journal of American Folklore 108, no. 429 (1995): 266–76.46 Ben Watson, Derek Bailey and the Story of Free Improvisation (New York: Verso, 2004), 78.47 Kwami Coleman, “Free Jazz and the ‘New Thing’ Aesthetics, Identity, and Texture, 1960–1966,” The Journal of Musicology 38, no. 3 (2021): 261–95.48 Corbett, Guide to Free Improvisation, 1.Additional informationFundingThis work was supported by Fulbright Germany and the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies.