FORM IS ONLY EMPTINESS...

...emptiness is only form

a discussion between Tim Hodgkinson, Simon Fell,
Charles Hayward and Phil England

TH: Somehow we've got to talk about improvisation meeting composition, presumably in terms of our own work, and lead out of that into ideas.

SF: It might be useful to talk about why we bother to combine the two. What can one offer the other, if anything? A lot of improvisers find the whole idea very difficult - including me on many occasions - because it often denies the basic characteristics of improvisation.

CH: The thing that appeals to me about composition and improvisation being put together is that it reflects the way I have to live in my day to day life. I'm constantly dealing with structure, the watch, the clock, picking up the children, but at the same time I'm having to be spontaneous and react to moments within that agenda. So I find something about composition, songwriting or some thought before the event and the reaction to the moment meeting together that helps me understand how to deal with day to day reality. For some people just being in the moment is what their reality needs to be and constitutes what they need to investigate. That's fine. Different people come to different solutions to problems.

TH: Presumably it would be possible for a free improviser to live in a very planned way.

CH: Absolutely. Some people form these incredibly incongrous contradictions or anomalies about the way they live their lives and the music they play.

TH: That's really interesting. It seems to me biological that we're improvising and planning all the time. But there are people who make a different type of connection between their work and their life and want to reverse the thing more - they choose to be a composer and to make something as totally determined as they can.

CH: For me with three kids and everything, the flat is totally cluttered, sometimes a really open, clear field of sound with things entering in very appointed places, that's my idea of heaven. So I understand the idea of reversing the polarities: people have to deal with this in the day to day but they go to some other place and work on some other place. We're talking about the function of music in society, aren't we really? What it does.

SF: I think that to fulfill all our potential as human beings we have to have not just order and not just disorder, but some malleability between the two. The work I'm doing does not imply that I have no faith in improvisation, it's just saying, 'Wouldn't it be interesting - or what would happen - if we did this?' We're not trying to make a better version of improvisation or a better version of composition but something which is another form which will have its own beauties. Some musicians who deal solely in composed musics just wouldn't take part in something which involved an improvisational angle.Similarly some improvisers won't work in ways that are structured at all. But I find that with a lot of the improvisers you can speak to them, to become a lot more structured. What have you found, Charles, that improvisers can bring to a project?

CH: They bring a personal input which means they have a creative investment in the process. The commitment becomes stronger - it isn't the session musician mentality, people actually bring themselves to the work. It took me a long time to realise how much Duke Ellington was taking from the players: whole pieces were based around player's idiosyncracies or obsessions. In Accidents and Emergencies people actually want to bring themselves to the music in a genuine way, to be there in the moment as well as in the rehearsal, see that they've actually changed a whole way of thinking about a piece of music. I like to try and workshop on things. It's not like there's a finished thing and we're going to do it like this. It's more, 'Here's some ideas, let's see what happens.' For me, being an open, sensitive musician or one who can respond to the situation involves trying to develop a language for each piece or project. Everyone would try and find a common language and they would start to build up a picture of what was good or what was not good for that project. 'Let's work on this very spontaneously, let's sing parts to each other, but once we get that together let's not deviate from those parts, let's build up this way of working.' There is a project I did recently with two slide guitars, three saxes and some drums. Everything was written but spontaneously generated in rehearsal. Parts became very fixed by trying them out. And then people would say 'I want to do this.' 'But is it going to fit and what will it be? How does it sit? Because this is the aesthetic we're working on here.'

TH: That's the rock method isn't it?

CH: For that piece it was like that, but it sounded more like a slow blues. I'll use Kylie Minogue's process if it feels right. It's not that a person's cool or uncool about the way they work, it's what's right to get this thing done.

TH: That idea of giving yourself to the demands of the project I think is very important. But you can also think of music in general as having a kind of geography which is outside you. You can't simply do what you want. When I went throught the process of being in Henry Cow we started vaguely with soloing, quite jazzy and undefined, but gradually we pushed the elements apart so we'd end up with sets of free improvisations and completely written pieces - but there wouldn't very much in the middle at all. That is actually a division that I've tended to maintain in my own work. That was just my particular historical accident. But I think there is an argument that free improvisation is a specific practice and to the extent that composition is used in it, it's used to solve certain practical problems like size. Pure free improvisation tends to work beautifully with small groups of people but when you get above a certain number it's very difficult to make it work without there being limits of some type or another. Look at the classic examples of people who've used compositional techniques with groups of improvisers: it's tended to be larger groups and and I don't think that's a coincidence.

SF: Not at all. If you have three or four skilled improvisers then probably the best thing they can do is improvise. But there's still something to be said for sending that improvisation in a different route by suggestion. I think for most involved in composition, larger ensembles provide the thrill of sonic densities and working with complexity. But rather than composition being something that facilitates more effective improvisation for larger groups, I would say that improvisation is the thing that will sustain, revivify or rescue composition. I think that improvisation can survive perfectly well without composition. I'm not sure that composition will survive or continue to exist in the way it has done without drawing on the incredibly powerful and rich resource of improvised and non-prescribed music. You can take someone with an incredibly developed technique that would take you years to master, and probably considerably more time to find a way of notating, and a lifetime for someone to learn to play. Why go through that process if you can get those people to come and do it? Improvisers have this incredible listening facility. Something that constantly strikes me when I'm playing with many classical performers is how little they listen to what is going on: they're mainly following a line from A to B. For any improvising musician their ears are their main instrument. It's invaluable to use the spontanaeity that results from that.

TH: The other thing about the classical music context is the people that do bring their personality in tend to work as individuals. There's this division between the soloist and the ensemble work. The soloist can be the personality. But there is no interaction - this thing that is more than the sum of its parts, where everybody is bringing the life in.

SF: There's a hierarchy of creativity in concert music which you don't have in improvised and some popular and rock musics. If you're in the sixth desk of the second violins...

TH: ...you wait for the bow movement of the section leader. That's why orchestras have this strange slowness about them.

SF: When people contribute part of themselves to a project, if the project is not developing in a way that the musician thinks appropriate, "correct" or "good," that might create a certain tension which you don't get with someone who is just there to play a role. For example, I might say to an improviser, 'I'd like you to improvise and ignore what's going on here which is going to happen simultaneously.' That can be very difficult and I've had problems with people who say, 'I can't do that or I can't hear what's going on over there.' I say, 'You're not meant to hear it, it's not supposed to effect what you're doing. That's when I think you hit a strange conservativism in the improvised community because you're saying, 'Let's take your sensitivity and abuse it.' Which I don't do lightly because that sensitivity is valuable but in order to create new forms you juxtapose things that wouldn't happen in any straightforward improvising environment.

TH: When I've done improvising workshops I get people to do pieces where they mustn't listen, which makes them aware of listening and not listening. You have to play whatever you started out playing and stick to it. And in fact you get some rather beautiful pieces of music coming out of it.

PE: What are some of the other ways you organise? What other strategies do you employ?

SF: It varies. The piece we did for the Leo Records Festival, for example, was a matter of me preparing a score. Rather than give this score to a group of people who can play it as written, I was interested in the compromises and the rewritings and the inventions that people make when they're working with something that they only have a tenuous or slightly slippery grasp of. So nothing's safe: it's gone... it's back again. I wrote this score and presented it to people I wanted to play with, some of whom had a lot of experience reading music, some of whom had very little. Along the way a lot of things were changed and a lot of things went wrong, which was the idea. And something came out which was not my score, not free improvisation nor a smooth, disciplined performance, but an interesting collision of very complicated notation - transcriptions of Boulez stuck in there with jazz pieces, bits of Ives orchestrated - with very flexible interpretation. A lot of the work I've done has been in the studio where you can have physical separation, overlay and reverse things, do things with people's improvisations that perhaps they hadn't envisaged. But that's a different form altogether and it's the form that most interests me because you can acheive things that are impossible in any live situation. If you sample an improvisation or a composition, you can build up a very strange world - as in the piece Frankenstein - where you half recognise that this is a composition, but the sample is another composition or the sample sounds like the improvisation I heard earlier. At the same time there's another composition going on around it. All of these things are more or less unique to studio technology. You can work on complexity and layers, whereas in a live situation musicians will tend to coalesce.

TH: I wrote an article where I argued that these ideas were already in the music before they came out of the technology. Charles Ives, for example, set up these pieces where you have a sense of several different ways of ordering things simultaneously.

CH: I've done work before where improvisations have been windowed or dropped into structured recordings. I've spent eight hours moving a moment forward to make it conincide with another moment. This is what a recording studio makes you do. This is improvising in a way, but the desire becomes compositional.

TH: Although the process is improvisatory, you're actually composing.

CH: There's this other reality for me which is three o'clock in the morning with a little keyboard very quiet so I don't wake anyone else up in the flat and I'm writing a song but am I improvisising? There's a moment there where there was nothing and suddenly there is something.

TH: Improvisation has always been part of the method of composition in that sense.

SF: Maybe it's only a a historical blip this difference between improvising musicians and classical musicians. If you go back a few centuries you find composers who would improvise their parts to their piano concertos or ad lib them certainly. It's really a late 18th Century, 19th Century phenomena, this fixity of the score. Figured bass in baroque music is very similar to jazz chord symbols - it invites the same degree of personal stylistic interpretation. There's a direct connection.

TH: I compose. I try not to compose the same way twice and sometimes it seems to be very improvisational. For example, the last thing that I had to do was a ten minute piece for an orchestra and it all happened in the garden in about ten minutes. I did a drawing of it and heard it and knew what it was going to be like. And the notes came last. In that sense it was very improvisational. But I have done things that were very mathematical or with drawings and bits of tissue and tracing paper and stuff. But at some point in the process almost invariably there is this input of accident. A dog will bark. That's just what we need! Just like in the studio, the tape will overrun and you'll suddenly hear the next thing on the tape and you think, that's it, it's in the same key, why don't I just stick it over. It's the same thing.

CH: And there's also being in the studio with two or three other people and the improvised tape is of some other event is exclusively of those four people. The song that is being worked on is has been generated by those people. And then you get this weird thing where you're improvising at another stage later and the improvisation becomes more and more refined because you're dealing in the recording medium so you can play things over and over again. And it gets back into being composition again. So it's constantly buzzing backwards and forwards between these two states. I think there's a lot of hoo-haa about composition and improvisation. In Regular Music it's quite structured and a lot of the players make it sound exactly the same each time, but it never is, there's always variations going on.

TH: I tend to think that on some level or another that pure improvisation isn't pure. When you listen to pure free improvisation, the things that are enabling you to hear it and for it to be played is to do with the existence of other musics. I'm not convinced that it is "non-idiomatic". I listened to a duo of Roger Turner and John Russell and I thought there was a lot of Dixie in it. And it wouldn't have been the way it was if there hadn't been all that other music.

SF: A lot of that stems from the need to identify a music at the time when it was perhaps very difficult to establish a rationale for it in its own right. I think thirty years on the idea of non-idiomatic music is something we would all take with a bit more of a pinch of salt. It's just a rejection of certain other idioms or perhaps an opening up to any idiom but you can't really say it's non-idiomatic. It exists and therefore it must have an idiom.

TH: Well it feeds on idioms in a negative way by constantly fragmenting them.

SF: At one time there was a need in improvised music to reject everything and that in itself was quite restrictive.

TH: It compromised the music because it introduced a schema which wasn't the point. I see it as a form that tries to be pure although it's impossible to be pure. But I see that as being a perfectly valid thing to do.

SF: The way many movements start off is by rejecting history and saying they are nothing to do with that. In retrospect you see how things grew out of each other and very few things - if anything - exist in complete isolation.

PE: Isn't there also a sense in which a lot of the early free improvisers aligned themselves with the serialist aesthetic? Maybe not with the same justifications, but they were definitely listening to those people. What the improvisers liked about serialist music was the liberation from harmony, which is like a control system.

SF: In improvised music you don't have the tyranny of pitch which even today dominates most people's thinking about composition. Timbre is a part of it but pitches are still paramount for anyone who plays notated music. And one of the beauties of serial music for the improviser is that it blows apart that significance of pitch. Ironically, because it is so mathematically tied to pitch. But for any listener the pitch relationships are not discernable in the same way as in diatonic or romantic music. So you get a situation where people felt you could put that note in and that it would work just as well as the other one. And this is what actually makes improvised music possible - we can work in a situation where pitch is not the most significant thing. The whole textural and abstract nature of improvised music comes from that break with the dead hand of harmony.

PE: But similarly free improvisation has a fluidity of rhythm doesn't it? Time can contract or expand in improvised music.

SF: Yes, rhythm is more difficult to dispense with because music is a time-based art form. We perceive events in their relationship to the progression of time. There may be no stated rhythm, but you will always perceive some relationship of fast and slow. Nevertheless I think it's pitch which is crucial. Free improvisers don't go around playing like Stravinsky or Bartok because the pitch relationships are still too strong there. But once you break with that, you get the feeling that you could put something of your own in without upsetting anybody or destroying the composer's vision. I dare say in many performances of serial music and music today there are notes going in there which aren't the one's that are written down.

TH: Oh, definitely there is a lot of that. And the composers don't often correct the mistakes either. They can't hear them.

SF: But also from a political and social point of view that then opens up the door to non-classically trained musicians. I think it's very important that free improvisation was able to incorporate them. Theoretically it should have been inclusive because it was non-idomatic, but it has actually excluded a lot of people who wanted to sing a tune or wanted to play a 4:4 beat. But I think that historically we're at a point where it's okay to do a lot of those things.

TH: Well, in general of course it is. There are a lot of different musics and all one would want is that the people in them should be as strong as they can be. You can't say this is right and this is wrong. But there is this point that you made earlier that improvisation as an aspect of performance has a particular kind of relevance at the moment to where music has got to in general.

SF: Composers are wandering about a bit at the moment. I just think there's so much energy and so much truth in improvisation that it doesn't need composition but that composition needs improvisation to renew itself, or to go back to some of the principles which inform improvisation. People like Richard Barrett and many others who are among the finest composers working at the moment are very clued into and involved in improvisation because they can see this is a way to bring that commitment, that life back. And this is why so many small groups are flourishing - because it's very much an orchestral problem, this lethargy. The small vibrant groups are tending to bring exactly that kind of rock-improv aesthetic and composers say, 'Yeah ad lib here.' What we're doing is opening a door a little more so that the energy instead of being twice or three times removed is a little bit nearer.

TH: I see this as being the future in a way. In some ways the combination of the market and the traditional structures of classical music seem to have been passed by history. The way that the music should be being made is in these small groups, but these have problems, sometimes due to the fact that there's tremendous pressure on them to run about very fast doing lost of gigs with everybody competing as individuals in the market. Rock groups for me were the original example. You had these people who were so economically marginal that they didn't have a bat's chance in hell, but you had that dream that it might work and you had that commitment of time to a group project. So that what rock groups came up with was this unique thing, a crystalisation of enormous swathes of time spent in cellars.

SF: One of the things that ties together a lot of the music that I like is that all the bands lived in the same house: Sun Ra, The Magic Band, Hermeto Pascal. You put all of the musicians in a house, they have no food, no money, no nothing and they work on that and produce something which is amazing. It's very difficult to sustain: if the music does work in the marketplace, then people say, 'Well I'd quite like to eat this month,' and the music starts to get less intense. I still think you can get a small classical ensemble, say Ensemble Moderne, get them to play something which is quite energetic and sparky, but it won't have the feel which really interests me of people like Mingus, Monk or Ellington or even some of Stockhausen's works. Which is the thing of being incredibly well organised but at the same time teetering about: the musicians are reigning it in and they're just sort of not sure there. There is something there which gives me so much of a thrill. That is why I like to get those people into the 'wrong' environment. I love that sound of people working with something which is slightly beyond what's under control because I think it transforms the music and it transforms the way you listen to it, you're on the edge of your seat. And when people do start to improvise the transition is much less abrupt because it already sounds like it's fallen apart. That's why I still prefer that to one of these young groups like Icebreaker, because they haven't really got that rough edge, that raggedness. For me it's a problem of how I incorporate that into incredibly intellectual and abstract structures and produce something which gives you the best of both worlds. Is it ever going to be possible?

CH: For me what Mingus or Ellington will have is much more mystery. When I listen to someone like the Ensemble Moderne, I hear the music and I'm immediately bored stiff 'cos all I'm doing is listening to music and I'm rooted to this experience of listening to music. Whereas what I really want is something that takes me to something beyond the music, where it's not all laid out.

PE: A lot of people who do compose for improvisers regularly talk about trying to get the best out of the performers. Butch Morris talks about "combustion" - the energy his Conduction process creates. Anthony Braxton talks about a similar thing. It's devising strategies where people actually take off. You've got a creative tension going.

TH: That's what Iancu Dumitrescu wants as well.

PE: And then you've got something like John Zorn's Cobra where he's giving the musicians the opportunity to determine the formal structure of the piece all the time: to interrupt and say well, you two play now and in such and such a manner. All the people in the group are giving those instructions all the time. So you have uncertainty all the time.

SF: There are three basic approaches aren't there? One is some kind of synthesis of the two elements; then there's the framing approach where you construct something in which you improvise - like with Barry Guy's Jazz Composers Orchestra; and then you've got the juxtaposition approach like Zorn. For me they're all valid but the latter two don't acheive that injection of energy into structure. In fact I think they tend to produce music which really gives you the advantage of neither. You can get quite good improvisation and interrupted composition but I think a more thorough fusion of the two is more pertinent.

TH: I feel that too about game pieces, they're kind of lighter than say Mingus or Ellington. They're like a new kind of light entertainment. It's really fun but it does't have this quality you're talking about.

PE: Is there a sense about what you're doing, Charles, with Accidents and Emergencies, that you're giving a context to people to bring out the best in them?

CH: The most important thing for me is actually the audience.

The musicians are all aiming outwards. It is not about us being happy with our creativity. The creativity is about acheiving something in the audience. That is the first thing. But to acheive that you have to get the best out of the musicians, make them feel that they are able to give this thing really strong and really clear. So yeah, in a way I am trying to do that. I'm constantly trying to provide an agenda of forwardness so that the thing doesn't stagnate. You get on with that and something else will come against it. You don't have to worry because it will be clear, strong and contrasting. Or it might be that someone has got a song as well so why pretend it doesn't exist. It's not purely about improvisation it's about getting out to people. So let's start that set with that song.

SF: For me I would regard composition as being suggestion rather than instruction.

TH: What about the New Complexity strategy: you don't know the musician but you give them something to play which is impossible? The source of your tension is this collision between the training they've had and the fact that this part is insanely complicated. Which is something certainly Brian Ferneyhough has talked about.

SF: Yes, I listened to Richard Barrett's Ruin this week which had that sort of energy which we were talking about and which I'm not used to hearing in orchestral pieces. In contrast, a piece I've written for a concert by the IST trio, actually contains the simplest music I've ever written because I knew I could give it to them and they could construct a ten minute piece which will be fantastically interesting, complex and sensitive - because I know the musicians and the way they play.

PE: One of the things Anthony Braxton is aiming at with his quartet work, for example, is piling on the complexity. They'll be playing three compositions independently, or they have a pulse track to play which has a broad rhythmic structure around which you fill in the gaps. He'd throw new compositions in front of them just before they went on stage and change the set completely every night. But when they come to the free bits they're really charged as a result.

SF: Somebody asked me last week what really turned me on to this principle more than anything and I think it was the 1974 Braxton Quartet with Kenny Wheeler and Dave Holland, where you had really exciting modern jazz/bebop with the most bizarre post-serial/New Complexity melody lines in the horns, played with exactly that sort of unison that isn't united, accuarcy that isn't accurate which makes jazz so special to me. Braxton isn't afraid to write music that is ostensibly intellectual but then he goes out and plays it like a jazzer. There's bits where he obviously can't play his own music but it doesn't matter. And the theme will develop into the improvisation rather than saying right, end of framing structure, start of improvisation.

CH: For me it's like breathing, like second nature. I can't really see the division. People ask me, 'Why do you want to write songs?' To some very good friends of mine it seems to be a very perverse endeavour. But I think repairing the car is a perverse endeavour! The problem for me about songwriting is how to make it not intensely personal so that you can share it with people creatively and with the audience. Some way of making it communicate.

TH: If I write a song, I'm almost performing it from the very beginnings of writing. We know that what's going on in the mind is very similar if you are thinking about singing and if you are actually singing. So from the very beginning these two things are linked: as you write it, you imagine it being performed already, even if only the first line exists.

CH: Summer holidays are great for that for me. I'm away from the instrument and all I have in my head is the mood, the atmosphere. It becomes so electrifying I can't wait to get back to make this happen. By carrying it in my head I'm making it more clear. But in a strange sort of way it's all an improvisational experience. I can't pretend that yesterday didn't happen. I'm developing an idea of what a song is about. Some parts of life do facilitate going back to them and making them happen again. They'll never be the same, you carry on refining and developing it. There's no fixed point where the improvisation of it stops really. I think life's like that.

SF: But should art reflect life?

TH: Or should it criticise life?

CH: It should criticise life. It should offer ways out of where we are now to new ways of it being better. We have to allow for all these different points of input: towards an experience that is shared. After that it doesn't really matter what the process is, as long it's offering a viable way of thinking about things. That's the way I see what it's about: experimenting with ideas for day to day life in the future. It's a safe ground for trying out very dangerous projects.