[....]

"The third principle, improvisation, has obvious relevance to the example of Homeric diction, as it does to the combinative dexterity of spontaneous composition in music. Far from being a deviation from the norm in the arts of the West these practices disclose what is essential to making. In even the most rigorously classical composition order is achieved by working with chance. A structure is developed gradually out of the chaotic interactions between the mind of the artist and the materials at hand, that is, the fragments of previous works. At the most fundamental level, poiesis is a schematizing of fragments of the previously made. Through a complex process of struggle among layered revisions, these fall into a pattern that cannot be foreseen but only revealed as it emerges in time."

"The concept of improvisation appears in Aristotle’s Poetics, where it denotes the unskilled, haphazard manner of working which was gradually displaced by the poets as they developed their art. At the beginning of Western aesthetics the technological theory of making is founded on the concept of improvisation as amateurish, ignorant. The verb ‘to improvise’ is autoschediazein, implying the self-development of an external form, a schema, as one proceeds, rather than working with a preexisting idea according to a preexisting rule. While the word was generally used in a perjorative sense, it has a positive application in complex systems that change over time, compelling one to rely on instinctive impulse rather than on rules. In Thucydides and Xenophon improvisation is associated with political and military genius, with a sure sense of timing and of touch, nourished by experience, empathy, and talent. These are of course the very qualities we associate also with lasting achievement in the arts. Now allegory is unusual among the older literary genres in being a more openly improvisatory form. It therefore provides us with an occasion to reflect on the wider significance of the two models of artistic production being considered here: technological making, the imposition of form on indifferent substance, and schematic, or improvisational, making."

Gordon Teskey

One can hardly I improve on Teskey’s headtune/A section but maybe there can be a riff on the backside B section which we herein present in conjunction with a CD of contemporary improvised sounds. (And in those terms, the text becomes a riff on the sounds, setting up oscillations between the old presense/absence shell game wherein the sounds gravitate to the front, one of the few anchors we got these days. Like, ‘knock knock who’s there?’ Being (sic biggie-size-it ‘B’), as Father Walter J. Ong pointed out, one of the few indicators of interiorities…but then who’s counting the coup marks these days anyways, when absence greases the wheels of all sorts of vehicles, even the take-five crowd? We all be slip, slidin’ away, some maybe just a gnat’s breath faster. Not that it makes any big diff, any which way you riff on it … the whole world seems to be slippin’ that big allegorical/virtual Pie-in-the-Sky anyhow so I say break out the damn drums and let’er rip ….you have nothing nothing to lose but your con-sensus communis.

(Let’s just be-here-now for a minute: I can’t help but think often times that a sticking point for many people in dealing with ‘improvisation’ is that it seems secondary sort of activity because it doesn’t involve the whole panoply of labor relations, work, and the controls that go along with labor. It seems TOO EASY for many people probably and doesn’t entail the sort of sacrificial economy that ‘work’ requires. There seems an effortlessness to it that belies its worth. This lack of effort is misleading; the resultant effort of improvisation is the result of many years of ‘attunement’, which DID in fact involve labor. )

So we got some walking/talking/sputerring/halting/moving-all-over/banging/thinking-in-circles (I mean come on, is there any other kind?!) sorts of material in what will ensue here. Does improvisation even exist? Is improv the ONLY thing that exists when it comes right down to it? Can we think otherwise? Is it the ether we swim in, walk in, talk in etc? Or do we gravely misjudge our degrees of freedom, the old Eternal Return sneaking round the corner, could it be old Mackie’s always back? Somebody’s got to make the rules right? We’ve GOT TO HAVE THE RULES RIGHT?? I mean, you get all these folks making stuff up and you got, well, I guess you got history — and no way out at that. But then apparently few people want out anyway. Besides we’re told all the time there’s no place to go anyway, assuming you COULD get out, which you can’t. (I’m reminded of a saying I picked up somewhere: What class of people is most intent on preventing escape? Wardens of course.)

You got anything you want to add, find some way to shove it on over here.

RC

Atlanta summer 2002