Facilitating an Empirical Understanding of the Free Improvisation Environment: A Progressive Set of Games focusing on Listening, Space, and Feedback.
by
Matthew O’Neill, B.M., M.M.
D.M.A. Document
In
Music Composition
Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of Texas Tech University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of
DOCTOR OF MUSIC ARTS
Approved
Dr. Jennifer Jolley Chair of Committee
Dr. Angela Mariani
Dr. Stacey Jocoy
Dr. Mark Sheridan Dean of the Graduate School
December 2020
Copyright 2020, Matthew O’Neill Texas Tech University, Matthew O’Neill, December 2020
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank my committee for their encouragement, patience, and faith in my work. The fruition of this project would not have been possible without their support and endorsement. The project would also not be possible without the dedication and hard work of all the members that make up the Texas Tech Mysterium Free Improvisation Ensemble. I am eternally grateful for all the hours spent listening deeply to one another, making music, experimenting, performing, and recording. I also thank my amazingly supportive and talented fiancée Briana Dunn. Without her tireless support, advocacy, love, musical skills, and patience I would have never been able to finish this work. Lastly, I would like to pay homage to the late Dr. Susan Allen. Her gentle and passive guidance helped me learn the benefits of free improvisation empirically and intuitively for myself. I will continue to share what I know and learn with others in her honor. Thanks for the magic, Susie.
ii Texas Tech University, Matthew O’Neill, December 2020
TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... ii
ABSTRACT ...... v
I. INTRODUCTION ...... 1
Descriptions, Themes, and Narrative ...... 8
II. LITERATURE REVIEW ...... 20
Free Improvisation Ensemble Education ...... 20 Hickey ...... 20 Allen ...... 23 Pedagogical Material Collections ...... 27 Stevens ...... 27 Hall ...... 29 Agrell ...... 32
III. METHODOLOGY ...... 35
Tenets of Effective Free Improvisation ...... 36 Jan LaRue SHMRG ...... 36 The Mysterium Free Improvisation Ensemble ...... 38 Rehearsal Techniques and Structure ...... 39
IV. PEDAGOGICAL GAMES ...... 45
Introduction ...... 45 Preparatory Games ...... 46 Susie’s Pocket Game ...... 47 Nonsense Conversation Game ...... 51 Beginner Games ...... 53 Pass the Sound ...... 53 One-Thing, Three-Times ...... 56 Intermediate Games ...... 59 Pass the Duet/Trio ...... 59
iii Texas Tech University, Matthew O’Neill, December 2020
Mini Concerto Game ...... 62 Soloist ON/OFF Concerto ...... 63 Fade Out ...... 65 Explode ...... 66 Stairwell ...... 66
Tuning Games ...... 68 Tuning Vocal Drones with Mouth Filtering ...... 68 Tuning Unpredictability ...... 69 Tuning Space Chords – with Voices or Instruments ...... 70 Dynamic Crossfading ...... 72 Advanced Concept - Feedback Loops ...... 73 Advanced Games ...... 76 Dynamic Crossfading with Longer Gestures ...... 77 Tuning PolyRhythmic and Polytemporal Space Textures ...... 78 Antiphonal Elisions ...... 79 Insurgent Feedback Loop Snowball Effects ...... 80 Towards Hyper Aggression ...... 80 Towards Hyper Passivity ...... 81 Student Projects ...... 82 Double/Triple Exposures ...... 83
V. CONCLUSION ...... 86
BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 88
APPENDICES
A. IMPROVISATORY PIECES……………………………………………….95 Introduction ...... 95 Aeras ...... 95 Tok Pisan ...... 103
B. STUDENT STATEMENTS ...... 109
C. JAN LARUE’S CUE SHEET ...... 117
iv Texas Tech University, Matthew O’Neill, December 2020
ABSTRACT
This document provides a set of progressive games and accompanying rehearsal strategies for use in a free improvisation ensemble setting. The games synthesize the basic tenets of effective free improvisation as noted by veteran improvisers. Additionally, the games have been created empirically in an egalitarian free improvisation environment, are designed to progressively expose students to the disposition of free improvisation, and are meant to serve as a viable solution to fill the need for improvisation in university music programs. This document will also outline the curriculum used in the Mysterium Free Improvisation Ensemble that I created and direct at Texas Tech University, the ensemble’s semester projects and two improvisatory pieces I created for the ensemble.
v Texas Tech University, Matthew O’Neill, December 2020
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
In the discourse of music education reform, scholars call for the reintegration of improvisation and composition; specifically, they suggest this integration into the current nineteenth-century hierarchical model of music making.1 The College Music
Society’s Task Force on Undergraduate Music Majors (TFUMM) noted the historical anomaly and fallacies of this model. In their 2014 report, they called for fundamental changes to the present model used in secondary music education. The task force appealed for a paradigm shift; namely, the reintegration of creativity through improvisation and composition, exposure to global musical diversity, and the incorporation of these concepts beyond mere surface level attempts.2 Moreover, they urge institutions to adopt new curricular strategies that facilitate an “improviser- composer-performer identity” for their students.3 For the task force, this identity better aligns with the “21st century global landscape” and should replace the “interpretive performance specialist identity” of the older nineteenth century model.4 The task force notes that their suggestion should be heeded if universities want their music programs
1 For more on the shift away from improvisation in Western music see: Derek Bailey,
2 Patricia Shehan Campbell, David E. Myers, and Edward W. Sarath, “Transforming Music Study from its Foundations: A Manifesto for Progressive Change in the Undergraduate Preparation of Music Majors,” College Music Symposium 56, (2016): 4-6.
3 Ibid, 5–6.
4 Ibid, 9, 15. 1 Texas Tech University, Matthew O’Neill, December 2020 to remain relevant to graduating high school seniors pursuing music and have their enrollment at viable numbers.
The College Music Society TFUMM’s report echoes the National Association of Schools of Music’s (NASM) 2006 addition of crucial standards for improvisation and composition studies for undergraduate degree curricula. NASM now requires improvisation and composition in all undergraduate music degrees. For graduate degrees, they only mandate improvisation for jazz studies, music therapy, and sacred music, notably ignoring pre-classical music, for which some knowledge of improvisation is critical. In reference to doctoral work, NASM only explicitly employs the word “improvisation” for jazz studies. Their descriptions for specializations in composition, sacred music, and early music contain language that implies improvisation. NASM does not specify the extent to which institutions are to cover improvisation in the curricula.5
In an advisory to faculty and administrations outlining implementation of the new composition and improvisation standards for undergraduate music degrees,
NASM states it “does not promote a particular approach” and does not “require or even suggest that a separate class be offered.”6 Individual institutions and their faculties do gain valuable academic freedom and autonomy from the lack of NASM guidelines on the implementation of improvisation and composition. Unfortunately,
5 National Association of Schools of Music, Handbook 2019-20 (Reston: National Association of Schools of Music, 2020): 130–141.
6 “Advisories for Music Faculty and Administrators: NASM Standards,” National Association of Schools of Music, December 2010, https://nasm.arts- accredit.org/publications/brochures-advisories/nasm-standards-advisories/.
2 Texas Tech University, Matthew O’Neill, December 2020 this ambiguity has also allowed massive inadequacies in the way institutions implement these standards.
In 2013, composer and educator Anna Song investigated the extent to which
U.S. universities were assimilating improvisation in their music courses. Her study surveyed sixty-one music faculty members across twelve institutions of higher education. She found that, “a majority (80 percent of those studied) of the collegiate music faculty in the United States is not integrating improvisation into their teaching, or doing so in less than 15% of the time.”7 Not surprisingly, her study showed that the vast majority of improvisation education at the collegiate level only existed in jazz related courses. Virtually all other non-jazz improvisation education presented was found in early music ensembles and music education courses, although only to a minimal degree.8
Free improvisation is arguably most capable to answer TFUMM’s call. Many note that free improvisation, as an “open-ended pedagogical approach,” is best fit to amalgamate the styles, languages, and sonic identities of its participants in an egalitarian way.9,10
7 Anna Song, “Music Improvisation in Higher Education,” College Music Symposium 53 (2013): 2–6.
8 Ibid, 6.
9 See Schyff 2019, Niknafs 2013, Allen 2015.
10 Dylan Van Der Schyff, “Improvisation, Enaction, and Self-Assessment,” in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical and Qualitative Assessment in Music Education, ed. David J. Elliot, Marissa Silverman, and Gary E. McPherson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 324.
3 Texas Tech University, Matthew O’Neill, December 2020
Here, free improvisation is distinct from the hierarchical model present in music education. Free improvisation environments yield a heterarchical model of music making.
While attempts at producing viable free-improvisation pedagogy and curricula have been made to fill the need described, they tend to focus on prescribing musical materials, (e.g. scales, meters, keys, etc.), and assessment.11 Often, such endeavors unintentionally align with the hierarchical product-based model of music making. By placing free improvisation into a standard skills-based learning framework, these attempts contradict what seasoned free improvisers believe regarding how the practice should be experienced and taught. Jazz musician and pedagogue, Dylan van der
Schyff, claims that these attempts at free improvisation pedagogy “tend to follow a linear schema.”12 He notes the following:
...a focus on a standardized and technically driven music improvisation pedagogy ignores the informal, exploratory or ‘free’ processes of discovery, collaboration and adaption that result in situated forms of knowing and doing.13
A common topic in free improvisation pedagogy discourse is the idea that if free improvisation is to be understood, then it must be experienced. Improviser and music education scholar, Maud Hickey, writes extensively on free improvisation in education. She notes that free improvisation “…cannot be taught in the traditional
11 See Wood, 2019.
12 Dylan Van Der Schyff, “Improvisation, Enaction, and Self-Assessment,” in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical and Qualitative Assessment in Music Education, ed. David J. Elliot, Marissa Silverman, and Gary E. McPherson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 323.
13 Ibid, 323.
4 Texas Tech University, Matthew O’Neill, December 2020 sense, but experienced, facilitated, coached, and stimulated.”14 She further notes this should be done through “learner-directed enculturation.”15
This document cannot possibly fully implement the College Music Society
Task Force’s plea for a fundamental paradigm shift in university music education.
Fortunately, it is possible to find an intermediary between the full recommendation and the mere surface attempts currently practiced. The task force noted:
…small groups in which members improvise and compose are arguably some of the most prevalent ensemble types in the United States and across the globe. In educational settings, small ensembles of improvising musicians in all styles could complement the standard classical chamber music model, or could provide the basis for a new model that achieves new kinds of synthesis.16
In another study, Hickey further provides evidence for the viability of improvising ensembles. Citing a specific lack of pedagogical strategies, Hickey investigated commonalities in the teaching practices of veteran improvisers. She concluded that free improvisation as a distinct practice “provides possibilities for engendering creativity in classrooms with an immediacy unlike other more common forms of improvisation that require background knowledge and pre-learned skills…” and that free improvisation ensembles, in particular, “offer a potential vehicle toward more creative and egalitarian music making.”17
14 Maud Hickey, “‘Can Improvisation be ‘Taught’?: A Call for Free Improvisation in our Schools,” International Journal of Music Education 27, no. 4 (2009): 293–294.
15 Ibid, 293–294.
16 Ibid, 16.
17 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): 442.
5 Texas Tech University, Matthew O’Neill, December 2020
Since free improvisation methodologies inadequately reflect the major tenets of master improvisers and are rarely included in university music programs, there is a need to create small free improvisation ensembles to conduct valuable research.18 As such, the small free improvisation ensemble acts as a strong vehicle for the experience-based pedagogy that Hickey advocates. These ensembles allow for the maximum amount of experience with the process of improvisation and real-time composition. Additionally, small ensemble courses are easy to create. Most universities have low enrollment requirements for small ensembles, require small facility footprints, and can often be created by graduate students with faculty permission. Furthermore, the syllabi for small ensemble courses offer faculty far more autonomy in terms of curricula and learning outcomes than lecture classes thus allowing for progressive, informal learning environments. The small free- improvisation ensemble provides a valuable environment to foster an empirical understanding of the process; Schyff refers to this as the “disposition” of free improvisation.19 Currently, a progressive way to facilitate this disposition does not exist.
This document provides a set of progressive pedagogical games and accompanying rehearsal strategies for use in a free improvisation ensemble setting.
These games and rehearsal strategies synthesize the most basic tenets of effective free
18 For the major tenets of master improvisers, see Descriptions, Themes, and Narratives.
19 Dylan Van Der Schyff, “Improvisation, Enaction, and Self-Assessment,” in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical and Qualitative Assessment in Music Education, ed. David J. Elliot, Marissa Silverman, and Gary E. McPherson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 326.
6 Texas Tech University, Matthew O’Neill, December 2020 improvisation as noted by master improvisers. Furthermore, they have been created empirically in a small free improvisation ensemble, are designed to progressively expose students to the disposition of free improvisation, and are meant to serve as a viable solution to fill the need for improvisation in university music programs. In addition, this document will outline the following: the curriculum I use in the
Mysterium Free Improvisation Ensemble that I created and currently direct at Texas
Tech University, the ensemble’s semester projects, and two improvisatory pieces I created for elements of the ensemble.
7 Texas Tech University, Matthew O’Neill, December 2020
Descriptions, Themes, and Narratives
In order to discuss the possibility of a list of tenets for effective free improvisation or the creation of any pedagogical games on the subject, I will first introduce some of the themes and narratives on the subject of free improvisation and propose a model for an ideal free improvisation-playing environment.20 Before beginning, assertions that the practice cannot and even should not be defined under the umbrella of a single definition should be noted. Improvisation and especially free improvisation are problematic terms to define and attempts to do so often simply describe some facet of the practice. Others do not attempt it at all. Since these descriptions and quasi-definitions typically exhibit an author’s stance on common binaries and issues in the field, they will be used to highlight the various themes and narratives pertinent to this document. Furthermore, the blanket term improvisation appears in conversations of both idiomatic and non-idiomatic forms of the practice.
Due to the frequent overlap in descriptions, the following introduction will also inspect definitions and descriptions of the general term that pertain to the practice of free improvisation.
The most well-cited description of free improvisation comes from English guitarist and improviser Derek Bailey’s seminal work Improvisation: Its Nature and
Practice in Music. Bailey describes free improvisation as having “...no stylistic or idiomatic commitment…no prescribed idiomatic sound. The characteristics of free
20 For a more detailed look into these narratives and others see George Lewis and Benjamin Piekut, The Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies. Vol.1 and 2. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 1–35.
8 Texas Tech University, Matthew O’Neill, December 2020 improvisation are established only by the sonic-musical identity of the person or persons playing it.”21
Although Bailey’s description is vague, it can still be used to answer the following question: what attracts musicians to the free improvisation environment? An answer could be that the free improvisation environment offers an outlet for musicians to freely express their “sonic-musical identities,” here taken as a synonym for one’s musical “voice.” Despite Bailey’s use of the singular “person” in his description, he notes in another discussion that:
For many people free improvisation is about playing with other people. Some of the greatest opportunities provided by free improvisation are the exploration of relationships between players. In this respect solo improvisation doesn’t make any sense at all.22
Here we can see that free improvisation offers an appealing practice for those searching for communal self-expression. In free improvisation, any sound is possible, and there are no mistakes. I would add that as long as there are no sounds that are harmful, this works. While improvising freely, we can be ourselves, sonically, and celebrate the differences in musical choices of others through our interaction with their sounds. As musician, improviser, and author Stephen Nachmanovitch put it,
Those of us who gravitate towards improvisational music do so because we enjoy relating to other human beings as equals. That is the core of the experience for me. That is the chief relevance of our musical
21 Derek Bailey, Improvisation: Its Nature and Practice in Music (Ashbourne: Moorland Pub. In association with Incus Records, 1980), 99.
22 Ibid, 125.
9 Texas Tech University, Matthew O’Neill, December 2020
practice…improvising brings us into a living model of social openness—a model of people interrelating to each other through the practice of listening.23
As such, sociality and egalitarianism are common themes in conversations and endeavors regarding improvisation. The inherent sociality and equality free improvisation provides readily extends from the local to the global domain. Discourse and efforts around sociality and democratizing music-making within free improvisation range from community outreach up to a global society. Additionally, discussions exist regarding the heterarchical idea of leveling traditional musical relationships between composer, conductor, performer, and audience. The common areas of discourse continue that free improvisation is an activity that allows for co- creation between the roles of creator, performer, and audience.24
The implicit sociality and egalitarianism of free improvisation, while enticing to those seeking a more democratic form of music making, begs us to consider how we as participants interact in order to achieve such aims. The appeal of free playing environments attracts many different types of musicians from diverse cultural backgrounds, playing traditions, and skill levels. Naturally, conflicting thoughts exist over efficacy of process and product, guidelines for interaction, and who can, or should, participate. Although many deem free improvisation as a “free” practice, it seems the old adage “your freedom stops where mine begins” is quite relevant.
Saxophonist and Improviser, David Borgo, investigated cultural and stylistic differences among free improvisers. He concluded that “within this dispersed and
23 Stephen Nachmanovitch, “Equals, Snapshots, Presence: ISIM – the International Society for Improvised Music.” NewMusicBox, November 4, 2009, https://nmbx.newmusicusa.org/equals-snapshots-presence/.
24 See Lange 2011, Allen 2015, Heble and Laver 2019.
10 Texas Tech University, Matthew O’Neill, December 2020 disparate community, there does appear to be – at the very least – a shared desire to meet together, often for the first time in performance, to negotiate understandings and embark on novel musical and social experiences.”25 This “negotiation of understandings” might elicit thoughts of predetermined structures or guidelines and thus would negate the possibility of a truly free improvisation. In practice, however, these negotiations happen intuitively and aurally between improvisers in the course of performance. Improvisers achieve this through intense listening, unspoken musical dialogue, and attention to their personal perceptions of the spontaneous sonic environment.
Music education scholar Panagiotis A. Kanellopoulos presents the idea of impromptu and unspoken negotiations through the dialogic aspect of free improvisation. Kanellopoulos notes that free improvisation is a “site of resistance to fixity and closure.”26 With this, he makes the case that “…improvisation is dialogic exactly because it creates a very special sense of interaction which is characterized by unfinalisability and openness.”27 Taking the idea of negotiations one step further than
Borgo, Kanellopoulos relays that,
…free improvisation is not a process where previously formed positions or identities are being brought into contact, conflict, or negotiation, but that alterity is produced through the process…one’s identity [emphasis added] is
25 David Borgo, “Negotiating Freedom: Values and Practices in Contemporary Improvised Music,” Black Music Research Journal 22, no. 2 (2002), 19–22, accessed April 3, 2020, doi:10.2307/1519955.
26 Panagiotis A. Kanellopoulos, “Freedom and Responsibility: The Aesthetics of Free Musical Improvisation and Its Educational Implications – A View from Bakhtin,” Philosophy of Music Education Review 19, no. 2 (2011): 124.
27 Ibid, 124.
11 Texas Tech University, Matthew O’Neill, December 2020
constantly being lost the very moment it is being found.28
Here, Kanellopoulous uses the term identity to describe our individual preferences for musical ideas, gestures, roles, etc., and our socio-musical faces; or in other words, how we perceive others’ perception of our musicianhood. Using this definition, a major attraction of the free improvisation environment is its ability to provide a fertile space for the relinquishment and rediscovery of our musical identities, a process that can enable us to learn something new and profound about our musical inclinations.
Free improvisation environments also provide a platform for improvisers to enter into optimal experience states of consciousness known as “flow”.29 Many describe flow states as all consuming, highly enjoyable, and transformational experiences. Requiring intense concentration, a “flow experience” is one where self- consciousness is temporarily lost, action and awareness intertwine, negative thoughts can decrease, time seemingly suspends, and, where following the experience, the concept of the self emerges stronger and more enriched than before. 30
Free improvisers often seek out these states as a collective, dialogic endeavor.
Kanellopoulos advocates that “dialogic free improvisation should not be regarded as a
28 Panagiotis A. Kanellopoulos, “Freedom and Responsibility: The Aesthetics of Free Musical Improvisation and Its Educational Implications – A View from Bakhtin,” Philosophy of Music Education Review 19, no. 2 (2011): 124.
29 Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. (New York: Harper and Row, 1990), 78–126.
30 Ibid, 78–126.
12 Texas Tech University, Matthew O’Neill, December 2020 given, but as a consciously sought-after condition.”31 Nachmanovitch presses the possibilities of this thought:
…you create a language together. There is a commerce of feeling and information back and forth, exquisitely coordinated. When coordination works, it is, again, not a matter of meeting halfway. It is a matter of developing something new...32
Improvisers and economic scholars Jared Burrows and Clyde G. Reed called the development of something new through collective in-the-moment “coordination” a musical “equilibrium.” They defined this equilibrium as a “coherent musical space” that improvisers “collectively explore and enhance.” In a description of a hypothetical free improvisation performance, Burrows and Reed outline a process of feedback in which improvisers
…listen carefully to their own musical expressions, those of other musicians, and the combined sounds of the group. They examine their emotional and intellectual reactions to what they are hearing. They then make musical choices about when and what to play, and how to play. Each player may choose to lead, to follow, to support, to play in contrast, to attempt to change musical direction, or to not play at all. This all happens in a moment.33
David Borgo, through an exploration of feedback in improvisation, found that the cybernetic process of negative feedback aided interest in improvisation, cybernetics being the study of regulatory systems in machines and organisms,
31 Panagiotis A. Kanellopoulos, “Freedom and Responsibility: The Aesthetics of Free Musical Improvisation and Its Educational Implications – A View from Bakhtin,” Philosophy of Music Education Review 19, no. 2 (2011): 125.
32 Stephen Nachmanovitch, Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art. (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1991), 95.
33 Jared Burrows and Clyde G. Reed, “Improvisation, Democracy, and Feedback,” in The Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies, Vol.1. ed. by G. Lewis and B. Piekut, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 398.
13 Texas Tech University, Matthew O’Neill, December 2020 specifically those dealing with communication and control. He notes this process
“helps maintain a balance in the evolving improvisation so that one idea does not continue to amplify indefinitely…”34
Descriptions of free improvisation often stress the importance of listening.
The argument suggests that without a sense of urgency for listening, improvisers will not be able to take advantage of many of the qualities of free improvisation. These include their abilities to make music democratically, interact dialogically, reciprocally express their sonic identities, experience equalibria or flow, and recognize feedback processes developing in their environment.
It is my experience that the effectiveness and success of a free improvisation directly correlates to the quality and depth of listening occurring in the ensemble.
Once improvisers are aware of this concept they can begin to formulate other tenets for effectiveness in free improvisation. As discussed, the free playing environment allows for the collective interaction and fusion of individual sonic expressions of self.
Without attention to, and awareness of, our fellow improvisers, the possibility of the aforementioned opportunity for an egalitarian playing environment is unobtainable. Since our individual identities can be revealed through sound, then the consciousness and coordination of each other’s identities through listening is possible.
This is an aural responsibility that we must uphold in order to obtain an egalitarian playing environment. Through this commitment to be aurally attendant of one another, we can engage in an effective collective free spontaneous music. As Nachmanovitch
34 David Borgo, “Sync or Swarm: Musical Improvisation and the Complex Dynamics of Group Creativity,” In Algebra, Meaning and Computation, 1–24. Vol. 4060. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. (Berlin: Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2006): 6.
14 Texas Tech University, Matthew O’Neill, December 2020 puts it: “Out of the pure and complete act of listening and nothing else, we can produce coordinated, organized music; which is nevertheless from that time and place and from that moment.”35
It is apparent when improvisers listen to each other during a performance.
Music education scholar, Nasim Niknafs, described a particular free improvisation performance she attended: “one striking element about this music all through the performance is that the performers are coherent, and profoundly listening to one another.”36 As Niknafs does not explicitly state an aural component in her assessment,
I add that it is aurally apparent when improvisers are not listening to each other. The importance of listening will be further explored in the methodology portion of this document.
Reiterating some of the previous themes examined thus far, Borgo further outlines several other key themes in the improvisation discourse:
Free improvisation, it appears, is best envisioned as a forum in which to explore various cooperative and conflicting interactive strategies rather than as a traditional "artistic form" to be passively admired and consumed. Improvisation emphasizes process over product creativity, an engendered sense of freedom and discovery, the dialogical nature of real-time interaction, the sensual aspects of performance over abstract intellectual concerns, and a participatory aesthetic over passive reception.37
35 Stephen Nachmanovitch, “Improvisation as a Tool for Investigating Reality,” (Keynote address, International Society for Improvised Music, University of Michigan Ann Arbor, December 1, 2006).
36 Nasim Niknafs, “Free Improvisation: What It Is, and Why We Should Apply It in Our General Music Classrooms,” General Music Today 27, no. 1 (2013): 30.
37 David Borgo, “Negotiating Freedom: Values and Practices in Contemporary Improvised Music,” Black Music Research Journal 22, no. 2 (2002): 21, accessed April 3, 2020. doi:10.2307/1519955.
15 Texas Tech University, Matthew O’Neill, December 2020
The prevalence of the process/product binary in the literature on improvisation is extensive, and the consensus is overwhelmingly in favor of process as the primary aim rather than product. As mentioned earlier, one cannot truly know what free improvisation is without an empirical understanding of the practice. One eloquently worded description comes from American psychologist Keith R. Sawyer who noted that the practices of “product creativity” and “improvisational performance” share many similarities, and, in improvisational performance, the “creative process is the product”.38,39
Narratives of improvisation often pair the common composition/improvisation binary in tandem with the product/process dichotomy. An argument exists as to whether or not improvisation is simply accelerated composition and similarly, whether or not composition is just slowed-down improvisation. Proponents for a distinction between composition and improvisation often cite the temporal, preparational, and structural differences in their processes of both creation and performance. Those who see the two terms as poles on the spectrum of a singular practice have cited the hierarchical position of the compositional work as a historical anomaly that distracts us from the natural entwinement of composition and improvisation. In essence, the taxonomic bisection of a historically singular phenomenon results from the concept of
38 Keith R. Sawyer, “Improvisation and the Creative Process: Dewey, Collingwood, and the Aesthetics of Spontaneity,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 58, no. 2 (2000): 149.
39 I found few explicit statements from free improvisation proponents that gave evidence to a preference for the contrary, but as will be shown in the literature review portion of this document, some improvisation pedagogues’ strategies for teaching free improvisation show an implicit bias for traditional hierarchical orderings and inclusion of musical materials (pitch and pulse) and thus unknowingly promote a efficacy for product.
16 Texas Tech University, Matthew O’Neill, December 2020 the musical work as an object created by the composer and recreated by others.40 As
Jazz pianist and philosopher Andy Hamilton put it:
The dichotomy between improvisation and composition is rooted in historical circumstance and lacked its present meaning, or perhaps any meaning at all, before the musical work-concept achieved hegemony - a process of increasing specificity of the score that was completed during the ninetieth and early twentieth centuries.41
In addition, Hamilton eloquently posits the notion that these two terms can be a part of the same continuum and still be separate: “…there is in important respects a fluid contrast between a composed work and an improvisation. Their exemplars stand in a continuum, and ‘improvisation’ and ‘composition’ denote ideal types or interpenetrating opposites.”42
The amount of control the creator(s) in an improvisation or composition further bolsters the argument for the spectrum model of the practices. Whereas a composition utilizing algorithms meticulously constructed by a composer and reproduced by a computer could be at one extreme, collective free improvisation, with no predetermined form, structure, or guidelines, could be at the other. The creator(s) of either an improvisation or composition can choose the amount of control they wish.
40 See Benson (2009), Rose (2012).
41 Andy Hamilton, “The Art of Improvisation and the Aesthetics of Imperfection,” The British Journal of Aesthetics 40, no. 1 (2000): 169.
42 Ibid, 171.
17 Texas Tech University, Matthew O’Neill, December 2020
Whether or not the musical product or process is predetermined, the amount of control is still up to the creator(s).43
The sheer amount of commonalities between composition and improvisation makes separation of the practices difficult. Even in completely notated works, many composers improvise to create musical material. This material can then be modified and/or organized to whatever degree the composer chooses for the performer’s faithful recreation. Other composers use theoretical methods involving high degrees of forethought and systematic planning in their processes yet will incorporate improvisatory sections into their works to allow for performer agency. The degree or range of choice between these two broad approaches is extensive. Similarly, some improvisers will only work in predetermined frameworks, complete with set phrase lengths, chord changes, tunes, and meters; but in improvisatory sections, have highly original and spontaneous improvisations where they try not to quote others or themselves. In contrast, others will only work in completely free environments, drawing exclusively upon their extensive memoria of practiced licks and never variating them or inventing anything new.44 Once again, anything and everything in between these two examples exists. It would seem the musician’s aesthetic and particularities toward their individual practices dictate their outlook on the composition/improvisation dichotomy. Regardless of whether or not the terms are
43 See Dean (1989) and Burrows and Reed (2015). Dean’s argument for spectrum actually separates the practices of improvisation and composition. Dean notes that like composers of the mid-twentieth century, improviser’s choices exist in a spectrum of control, from predetermination of specific ideas to the incorporation of aleatoric practices. Burrows and Reed place both practices on the same continuum with a similar argument.
44 See Mariani (2017) and Allen (2015).
18 Texas Tech University, Matthew O’Neill, December 2020 separate yet merged, two ends of exactly the same spectrum, or share similarities while differing in key respects, one term cannot exist without the other. For that reason, this document disregards the taxonomic bisection and considers free- improvisation as collective and spontaneous composition. Furthermore, the level of choice and predetermination in practice constitutes the location on the composition/improvisation spectrum.
With the narratives and themes from the examined descriptions and discourses on free improvisation, we can formulate a model for an effective free improvisation- playing environment. An ideal free improvisation environment should:
• Allow improvisers to freely express themselves sonically and be heard. • Allow any sound and combination/sequence of sounds that are not harmful. • Be built upon mutual respect in order to facilitate the negotiation collective freedom. • Provide an egalitarian environment that promotes diversity. • Be able to facilitate a collective state of flow. • Be able to liberate improvisers from hierarchical roles in music making (e.g. composer/conductor/performer/audience). • Focus on process over than product. • Uphold active, engaged listening as the single most important obligation to our fellow improvisers.
In order to create a list of effective tenets for free improvisation, the next chapter presents an assessment of the pedagogical literature. The available pedagogical literature will be assessed through the lens of this model and the literature’s ability to facilitate an understanding of the disposition of the practice of free improvisation.
19 Texas Tech University, Matthew O’Neill, December 2020
CHAPTER II
LITERATURE REVIEW In order to create the list of basic tenets for effective free improvisation presented in the methodology portion of this document, I will first summarize and assess the relevant literature. My model for an ideal free-improvisation environment will act as a lens. Where necessary, I will discuss themes and narratives presented in the previous chapter that exist outside of the model. This literature review is divided into the following sections: 1. select literature that discusses free improvisation ensemble education and/or reflects the ideas of noted masters of the practice, and 2. pedagogical materials in the form of collections of pieces, games, exercises, and prompts written by either noted master improvisers or improvising music educators in universities that have incorporated improvisation into their programs. In addition, this review will access the literature for its ability to progressively facilitate a disposition of the practice of free improvisation.
Free Improvisation Ensemble Education
The available information on the pedagogy of free improvisation ensembles is scant at best. This section will look at three crucial sources.
Hickey
A case study by music education scholar Maud Hickey provides the most important work to date on the matter of free improvisation ensemble pedagogy. She investigated commonalities amongst well-known master improvisers, who as pedagogues, taught improvisation ensembles in the university setting. Hickey
20 Texas Tech University, Matthew O’Neill, December 2020 interviewed and attended the classes of Pauline Oliveros, Ed Sareth, Fred Frith, and
David Ballou. Through her study she identified teacher tools, unique vocabularies, physical teaching space, and feedback as four key themes that were shared amongst the instructors.45 The teacher tools were in the form of general prompts, or short exercises that were meant to prime longer improvisations or serve as warm ups to facilitate ensemble cohesion. Hickey noted that these tools were implemented in the moment without preplanning. She found that each pedagogue displayed a preference for a unique vocabulary of words to describe the music that was being improvised, and relied on metaphors and general descriptors of character over typical musical terms.
She observed that all of the pedagogues had their ensembles sit in circles and that each had an average class size of twelve members. Hickey also discovered that there was a
“complete avoidance of qualitative assessment” and that the “pedagogues felt adamant that the free-improvisation ensemble was not the place for judgmental feedback.”46
Furthermore the master improvisers displayed a vast amount of improvisation in their teaching. All of the teachers were able to effortlessly offer the students immediate and relevant constructive (as opposed to qualitative) feedback, issue relevant improvisatory prompts, and ask thoughtful discussion-provoking questions through extemporization.47 There was never a defined lesson plan by any of the faculty and
45 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): 434.
46 Ibid, 436.
47 Ibid, 434–436.
21 Texas Tech University, Matthew O’Neill, December 2020 they all purposefully let the class take its own direction.48 Another common trait amongst the different free improvisation pedagogues was the egalitarian nature of the classroom environment. Noting the master improvisers never conducted or stopped improvisations, Hickey further states,
The pedagogues in each of these cases played roles, and perceived their roles to be, different from what one might consider typical for an ensemble conductor. They all understood their institutional role as the instructor or authority figure for their classes, and their syllabi reflected class expectations, course materials, assignments, and so on. But their actions and perceptions were as ensemble guides and facilitators rather than as leaders or directors.49
Hickey’s work evaluated the rehearsal techniques of master improvisers for the purpose of delineating some useful commonalities that could assist K–12 improvisation pedagogy, not to discern an ideal free improvisation environment. As such, some elements of our model for an ideal improvisation environment were not discussed. However, many of the elements were mentioned.
Not surprisingly, the importance of listening was emphasized with Pauline Oliveros’s pedagogy. In addition, nonhierarchical egalitarian environments, a focus on process over product, and the presence of safe spaces that would facilitate many of our model’s elements were observed.
48 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): 438.
49 Ibid, 437.
22 Texas Tech University, Matthew O’Neill, December 2020
Allen
American harpist, improviser, and life-long educator Dr. Susan Allen was
Associate Dean of the California Institute of the Arts School of Music, where she taught harp, improvisation, and chamber music. While little of her pedagogical materials were written down, much of her philosophies on improvisation and a little of her methodology for teaching it are preserved in two separate written sources and a recording of her advanced improvisation ensemble’s performance at Texas State
University in 2010. Of the written sources, the first article, published in 2002 for the online journal Radical Pedagogy, discusses large ensemble free improvisation pedagogy. The second written source, the manuscript of her book Passage of Desire:
Improvisation and the Human Journey, was left unfinished at the time of her death in
2015. The review here will mostly cover her philosophical ideas and teaching techniques, these being of central importance to my research. Allen’s games will be briefly mentioned, as they will be reintroduced in the games chapter of this document.
A call for an egalitarian creative environment in music is primary to Allen’s ideas on free improvisation. Furthermore she calls for a removal of the hierarchies of teacher, maestro, composer, conductor, etc. In addition, this idea extends to the audience participating as co-creator.50 Allen sums up her reasoning for a democratic music- making environment in her philosophical writing in Passage of Desire. In this text,
Allen asserts that humans all truly desire meaning. For her, we can find deep meaning in being heard by others. Through the inherent improvisatory aspect of our socializing,
50 Susan Allen, “Teaching Large Ensemble Music Improvisation,” Radical Pedagogy 4, no. 1 (2002): 8, accessed March 1, 2020, http://radicalpedagogy.icaap.org/content/issue4_1/01_Allen.html.
23 Texas Tech University, Matthew O’Neill, December 2020 we can reveal and transmit our true selves to each other, and in turn, will be receptive to understand the true identities of others. However, this situation must be reciprocal for it to have any permanence. The prospect is contingent upon our abilities to allow others to be heard and our willingness to listen to them. Through this situation, Allen calls attention to the potential for free improvisation to be a vehicle for a “global vernacular” and concludes that since free improvisation is a temporal art based on process, not product, it resists commodification, and thus inconsequential material desires. Since people have no desire to take from each other while communicating through spontaneous collective music, Allen argues it is the perfect practice to achieve this global vernacular.51 Allen rejects the hierarchical model of music making and the use of predetermined forms. For her, these are Eurocentric concepts that are
“paternalistic, capitalistic, and colonial”, and should be discarded.52 In addition to being a vehicle for a global vernacular, Allen considers free improvisation as
“collective composing-in-the-moment.”
Homologia – consensus reached by many parties (Democritus) – this is the piece we create. We agree to collectively demonstrate how we interact. We agree to work in collaboration, non-verbally with others. The result of this demonstration is a piece of music, as it were. It is a composition, comprised of all the self-narratives of all the participants.53
While many pedagogues share the notion of improvisation as spontaneous composition, whether as a product or a process, few strongly consider listening and the
51 Susan Allen, “The Passage of Desire: Improvisation and the Human Journey,” Unpublished Manuscript, 2015, xxxiv.
52 Ibid, xxiii.
53 Ibid, xxxix.
24 Texas Tech University, Matthew O’Neill, December 2020 interpretation of materials by improvisers in their discussions. For Allen, listening is the most important concept in improvisation because without it a genuine discourse between people is impossible. In discussing the CalArts Improvisation Ensemble, she expresses the importance of listening. She notes,
It requires that each and every member of the group use everything that they have ever learned, and all at breakneck speed. They must listen intently, they must analyze what they are hearing, they must listen to the whole and to the individual, they must be aware of dynamics, timbres, rhythms, intervals, and harmonies -- all simultaneously.54,55
Allen used games that explored social interaction guidelines to teach large groups of improvisers and explore the possibilities of these unique situations. As mentioned earlier, listening is the most important concept in improvisation, but this alone does not serve her purposes as a free improvisation guide completely. As she states,
Throughout the teaching of this ensemble, these exercises I have devised only serve to further familiarize members of that ensemble with one another. They serve to make the student aware of what others are playing, what others like to play, and how their instrument might interact in varying ways with the other instruments and persons in the ensemble. And they serve to help the students listen more carefully to the sounds that are being produced around them - to “socialize” their music making.56
As we can see, Allen’s dialogic approach fosters ensemble member interaction in order to facilitate interpersonal stylistic understandings. Allen places importance on
54 Susan Allen, “Teaching Large Ensemble Music Improvisation,” Radical Pedagogy 4, no. 1 (2002): 2, accessed March 1, 2020, http://radicalpedagogy.icaap.org/content/issue4_1/01_Allen.html.
55 As daunting as these abilities sound, it must be mentioned that the group discussed was composed of proficient musicians who possessed strong musical faculties.
56 Allen, 5.
25 Texas Tech University, Matthew O’Neill, December 2020 one key facet in an improvisation environment: making space for others to be heard.
She notes:
If we all make sounds at the same time, it is difficult to differentiate the individual voices. However, if we try to fit our utterances between those of others’, a resplendent weave of sound emerges. Here is what the collective unconscious might sound like, were it to have a sonic form. These multitudes of voices, each representing an individual, yet happening in an unpredictable sequence that somehow sounds like a piece of strange music. This is an associative moment that we can hear.57
Trying to “fit our utterances” into unoccupied sonic space requires a focused listening.
Goal oriented listening ultimately serves the purpose of facilitating the negotiation of freedom between members of an improvising ensemble. It is not a directive, or even a suggestion per se; it is an option for an ensemble disposition with a positive consequence noted.
Allen’s games are played with the ensemble in a circle to foster community.
They are typically short prompts to illicit improvisations that explore sociality. As mentioned earlier, some of the games are used as the impetus for my own research and will introduced and described in the methodology and research sections of this document. Suffice it to say now that the materials she left briefly describe these games, without much in the way of rehearsal techniques.
Susan Allen’s ideas about free improvisation show a strong sense of egalitarianism and liberation from traditional hierarchical roles of music making. Listening and negotiating freedom are also adequately addressed.
57 Susan Allen, “The Passage of Desire: Improvisation and the Human Journey,” Manuscript, 2015, xxi.
26 Texas Tech University, Matthew O’Neill, December 2020
Pedagogical Material Collections
Stevens
English jazz drummer turned free improviser John Stevens was a founding member of the Spontaneous Music Ensemble. His pivotal text Search and Reflect is an archive of pieces/exercises used to teach and facilitate improvisations at the
Community Music organization in London. The text is a well-cited practical guidebook for free improvisation. It is broken into two main sections: Rhythm and
Improvisation.
Stevens bases his prime concept for improvisation on what he calls the
“fundamental elements of music.”58 These are sound and silence, which through duration cause rhythm. All exercises build from the initial principle of keeping time with others. Stevens’ Click Piece, found second in the improvisation section of the book, illustrates his concept. In this piece, members of the group are asked to try to produce the shortest sound possible (e.g. click), either with voice or instrument, and repeat this “cyclically”. Here we can safely assume “cyclically” means “to a pulse.” It is an exercise that requires intense listening. The overall sonic effect is a pointillistic texture that is unpredictable in nature. Gradually the clicks of the participants start to organize from people following each other, and can become a single pulse from the whole ensemble. For Stevens, this provides proof that people want to play inside a pulse with each other.59
58 John Stevens, Julia Doyle and Ollie Crooke, Search & Reflect: Concepts and Pieces by John Stevens (Twickenham: Rockschool, 2007), 5.
59 Ibid, 63.
27 Texas Tech University, Matthew O’Neill, December 2020
Stevens, like many, feels that free improvisation is open to anyone, regardless of skill set. As such, the rhythm section of his book acts as an intro into music making through the concept of keeping time with others. Stevens’ rhythm exercises are taught by rote until pulse can be felt by every member of the group with any accent or division of beat in common duple, triple, and quadruple time. Once fledgling improvisers have assimilated these concepts, he exposes students to rhythmic notation, polyrhythms, and very briefly, microtones.
While this text can be used pedagogically and is for all intents and purposes progressive, many gaps are present. A criticism of this text has been that while good,
“its use is best interpreted by experience improvisers for group activity.”60 I would further add that the experience needed would be from one of his workshops. The gaps for beginners present in the progression of the text exist primarily from the fact that this text is an archival of exercises/pieces rather than a pedagogical method. Following this fact, it is understandable that the text assumes basic pitch notation and scale understanding from the reader. However, the use of traditional notation in works on free improvisation usually induces suspicion.
The text places a high degree of emphasis on listening. Sometimes, Stevens’ approach emphasizes a gradual focusing of listening over the course of an improvisation. Stevens achieves this by having many of the exercises require improvisers to purposely ignore the sounds of others, concentrating on only their own sound, and then gradually becoming aware of the sounds of others, at which point they focus on the collective sound. For other exercises this concept is partially reversed,
60 Simon Rose, “Improvisation, Music and Learning: An Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis” (Ph.D. diss., Glasgow Caledonian University, 2012), 35.
28 Texas Tech University, Matthew O’Neill, December 2020 where the improvisers purposefully try not to focus on what they are playing at all and only focus on the sounds of others.
Like all of the other free improvisation pedagogues discussed so far, Stevens has his group sit in a circle. Importantly in regards to freedom, Stevens places an emphasis on having members be conscious of the dynamics of their sound. As some instruments are naturally louder, Stevens makes a conscious effort to let participants know they should try to balance their dynamics with those around them so everyone can be heard. Deep listening is achieved through drum circle like participation with keeping count as the initial objective. Some exercises/pieces are meditative through the inclusion of concentration on the breath. Overall, the playing environment is democratic and egalitarian in nature. The high degree of emphasis on keeping time in the text is due in no small part the fact that Stevens is a drummer. I do not feel
Stevens’ strict requirement of time keeping allows improvisers to be able to freely express themselves sonically, but the emphasis on listening could be indirectly capable of exposing students to the disposition of free improvisation to some degree.
Hall
Saxophonist and professor of Music at Brandeis University Tom Hall founded and directs the Brandeis Improv Collective Ensemble. His book Free Improvisation: A
Practical Guide, begins with some philosophical ideas on the practice of free improvisation that he calls “agreements”. Hall believes that we all possess the ability to improvise, any sound can be used, our improvising should be a truthful and
29 Texas Tech University, Matthew O’Neill, December 2020 vulnerable expression of our inner selves, and the act of improvising should incorporate play and be fun.61
Hall makes a case for providing definite, albeit scant limitations in free improvisation exercises, noting that they will focus awareness, but that we shouldn’t follow them too strictly. Similarly, to the improviser pedagogues that Hickey studied,
Hall notes that through free improvisation with a group of people, a lingua franca for discussion will form, and that this is normal because “there is no widely accepted language for talking about freely improvised music.”62
Hall, like Stevens, considered free improvisation an activity that should be open to all, regardless of skill level. A significant amount of Hall’s exercises have a musical material focus that can inhibit freedom. These exercises require set pulses and grooves, scales, and forms and thus have a confining effect on the improvisers.
While there are 124 exercises all presented in text, the vast majority are vaguely laid out in as situations or prompts for improvisers to try and are simply variations of a few of Hall’s foundational games. An extreme example in the vagueness can be seen in the overtly minimal exercise 96: “Name an emotion, then play it.”63
The 124 exercises are organized by beginning exercises, duets, advanced grooves, textures, playing silence, groups within a group (mostly roles), melody and accompaniment, musical parameters (dynamics, opposites, form, sand scales), tasting shapes (imagination with other senses), combining exercises, warmups, and solo
61 Tom Hall, Free Improvisation: A Practical Guide (Boston, MA: Bee Boy Press, 2009), 20–24.
62 Ibid, 29.
63 Ibid, 103.
30 Texas Tech University, Matthew O’Neill, December 2020 exercises. Ironically warm-ups are presented in chapter 14 starting with the 109th exercise.
Of note, Hall mentions the concept of creating space in improvisation. His reasoning is that space provides context to the resulting sounds in an improvisation and thus his reasoning has a product focus. This is in opposition to the idea of leaving space for others. Leaving space for others increases performer agency and thus has a process focus. “Music is both sound and silence…we tend to think of improvisation as playing a series of sounds, but it is the silence and the space between these sounds that defines them.”64 While Hall does not address the democratic use of silence, he does mention that improvisers should be aware of silence to “avoid the common problem of everyone playing sound all the time.”65
Aside from the prescribed musical materials of pulse, grooves, forms, and scales in some of the exercises, overall, Hall’s exercises allow improvisers to freely express themselves using any sounds with a focus on process over product in a semi- progressive manner. Through the lens of my proposed model for effective free improvisation environments, Hall’s pedagogy does not seek to expressly liberate improvisers from the hierarchical roles found in music making since a good deal of his exercises place foreground and background roles on the improvisers.
64 Tom Hall, Free Improvisation: A Practical Guide (Boston, MA: Bee Boy Press, 2009), 80.
65 Ibid, 80–81.
31 Texas Tech University, Matthew O’Neill, December 2020
Agrell
Classical hornist and improviser Jeffrey Agrell has written a series of books devoted to games for teaching improvisation. This document will investigate the first of these books, Improvisation Games for Classical Musicians as it adequately outlines his principal ideas and concepts.
Agrell considers improvisation a historically forgotten and neglected skill that is necessary for comprehensive musicianship. Citing the current focus on notation and preference to recreate rather than create in university music programs, he criticizes the model, noting it “tends to ossify tradition”, and actively hinders creativity. 66
Agrell’s pedagogical effort nobly intends to provide an aurally inspired non- idiomatic approach to improvisation that fills its virtual nonexistence outside of jazz in the university music setting. In a rather telling statement of his condemnation of the conservatory model, he indicates that the book is meant as “…a complement to the
“literate” approach…” used currently in most institutions.67
A reoccurring theme in Agrell’s book engages the “literate” versus “aural” musician dichotomy. For Agrell, a musician can only attain comprehensive musicianship through the development of the skills necessary for both playing by ear and reading.68
66 Jeffrey Agrell, Improvisation Games for Classical Musicians (Chicago: GIA Publications, Inc., 2008), 2.
67 Ibid, 3.
68 Ibid, 281.
32 Texas Tech University, Matthew O’Neill, December 2020
Despite the fact that Agrell’s purpose for the book is to teach the “aural tradition” of improvisation while noting comparisons with the literate model, many of his thoughts and games tend to center on composition and product. He describes improvisation as “just fast composition,” yet he also somewhat confusingly and unknowingly distinguishes them. He states improvisation “…leads quickly to composition; first (you) learn to generate ideas quickly, the learn to polish them.”69
While Agrell provides a significant amount of improvisational games, many of the games are purely compositional exercises.70
Agrell’s opinions on the importance of listening also exemplify his preference for improvisation as sped-up composition. According to him, students need to “learn to hear as composers, to be able to hear a snippet of melody (played by themselves or a partner) and aurally identify scale steps, then find the notes and immediately play them back on their instrument.”71 Agrell mentions listening as an important concept.
Rather than advocate for the inclusion of deep listening, a common and prevalent theme in writings of the practice of free improvisation, he uses the topic to argue for the inclusion of music theory and aural skills into improvisation pedagogy.
Composers hear music differently than everyone else. Their experience in constructing pieces enables them to aurally decode melody, harmony, form, timbre, and rhythm…Players who improvise are in effect composers…and need this ability of instant analysis to inform their choices of the moment. For improvisers, music theory is not an abstract system separate from performance;
69 Jeffrey Agrell, Improvisation Games for Classical Musicians (Chicago: GIA Publications, Inc., 2008), 8.
70 Ibid, 199–203 under “Composition Games.”
71 Ibid, 11.
33 Texas Tech University, Matthew O’Neill, December 2020
it is a necessary practice, and a highly desirable part of improvised performance.72
He concludes with stating:
This improvisation course and the method of technical practice given here are designed to convince players of the worth of creating written and improvised music, to practice thinking in music and getting in the habit of creating. Freedom from the printed page gives us a chance to think for ourselves. 73
Agrell offers little in the way of arguments for using an empirical approach to understanding the nature of improvisation, he does note it “...needs to be experienced to be appreciated.”74 For Agrell, the true value of the experience of improvisation lies in unlocking the creative abilities of the improviser as a composer, not experiencing the experience. This notion lends further credence to the argument that Agrell focuses on product significantly than process.
In further assessment of the text through our the lens of our model for an ideal free improvisation environment, it can be noted that Agrell does feel improvisers should be conscious of how much space they are leaving in the sonic space. He mandates that “the more people in the group, the less each one plays.” and “Silence is a very important part of interesting music. Don’t forget to rest at times.”75
Overall, the book is product-focused which is at odds with the vast majority of writings on the subject.
72 Jeffrey Agrell, Improvisation Games for Classical Musicians (Chicago: GIA Publications, Inc., 2008), 30.
73 Ibid 34.
74 Ibid, 23.
75 Ibid, 271.
34 Texas Tech University, Matthew O’Neill, December 2020
CHAPTER III
METHODOLOGY
My methodology for creating a progressive set of pedagogical games and accompanying rehearsal techniques for a free improvisation ensemble begins with compiling a list of the most basic tenets of effective free improvisation as noted by master free improvisers. The games in this document were designed for use in an ensemble setting. The collective explorations found in ensemble settings contribute to the games’ viability and potential to be varied. I have taken an extreme amount of care to allow for an empirical understanding of the Free Improvisation Environment (FIE).
The dialogic and heterarchical nature of this pedagogy aids empirical understanding of the practice and the nature of the FIE. The games are played and then subsequently discussed with a great deal of attention to what was heard in an improvisation. To formulate questions that pertain to the flow or growth of the improvisation, we as an ensemble take advantage of the framework of musicologist Jan LaRue’s “Cue Sheet for Style Analysis” known as SHMRG (sound, harmony, melody, rhythm, and growth). This chapter outlines, presents, and describes the tenets used in this pedagogy, Musicologist Jan LaRue’s critical analysis framework SHMRG, the
Mysterium Ensemble, and the rehearsal techniques/structure I use for the ensemble.
35 Texas Tech University, Matthew O’Neill, December 2020
The Tenets of Effective Free Improvisation and Teaching Philosophy
The following list is the tenets of effective free improvisation used to develop this curriculum:
1. Active, engaged listening is our single most important obligation to our fellow musicians. 2. Allowing space for others to speak and be heard allows for true freedom. 3. Any sound and combination/sequence of sounds that are not harmful can be used. 4. Consciousness of the tendencies of certain musical materials to force a trajectory and dominate the FIE will allow for greater freedom in the ensemble. 5. We all possess innate social abilities that allow us to discern meaning out of unpredictability and aid us in spontaneously creating collective free music. 6. The process of free and spontaneous collective music making is the product. 7. We can only understand improvisation through doing it. 8. We can be trained to form instantaneous objective analytical hypotheses of sonic environments that involuntarily inform our sonic utterances. 9. Whether we are aware or not, we create sonic precedence through the processes of repetition, variation, and contrast, and this precedence leaves an imprint in our minds if we are conscious of it. 10. Consciousness of feedback loop systems in an interactive social FIE involuntarily informs our improvisations, and this consciousness aids in creating meaningful experiences.
Jan LaRue’s SHMRG
Musicologist Jan LaRue, in his seminal book, Guidelines for Style Analysis presents five Basic Components for Analytic Hypotheses System. This system, known as SHMRG, stands for: Sound, Harmony, Melody, Rhythm, and Growth. These categories are easily laid out on a handy chart known as his Cue Sheet for Style
Analysis (see Appendix C). While LaRue’s purpose was to provide a tool for the musicologist to analyze any possible type of piece of music, it is also an invaluable text for understanding composition and free improvisation. The main premise is that we can discover meaningful things about the shape of a piece of music, or its growth
36 Texas Tech University, Matthew O’Neill, December 2020 through considering the elements of sound, harmony, melody, and rhythm. LaRue outlines the following categories known as “The Four Options for Continuation” to help us understand shape:
1. Repetition, recurrence (return after change) 2. Development (Variation, Interrelationship, Mutation) 3. Response (Interdependence, Balance) 4. Change (Difference, Contrast)76
Any sound and a subsequent sound can be categorized by one of these four options.
This fact has profound implications for the effectiveness of free improvisation environments. These options enable improvisers to be cognizant that the choices they make create precedence. Those working with improvisation have also noted these processes, albeit not seemingly through LaRue’s influence.77
LaRue continues,
Music is essentially movement; it is never wholly static. The vibrations of a single sustained note, the shock waves of a clipped staccato induce motion even in isolation. Any sounds that follow may then confirm, reduce, or intensify the embryonic sense of movement. At the same time that a piece moves forward, it creates a shape in our memories to which its later movement inevitably relates, just as the motion of a figure skater leaves a tracing of visible arabesques on the ice when the movement has passed far away.78
The imagery of the ice skater's marking on the ice is illuminating, and the four options for continuation serve as excellent pedagogical tools for explaining to improvisation students that we are able to consider the past and future, and not just the present, when we improvise.
76 Jan LaRue, Guidelines for Style Analysis, ed. Marian Green (Sterling Heights: Harmonie Park Press, 2011), 3.
77 See Biasutti (2017).
78 LaRue, 1.
37 Texas Tech University, Matthew O’Neill, December 2020
The Mysterium Free Improvisation Ensemble
The Texas Tech University Mysterium Free-Improvisation Ensemble is an experimental free improvisation ensemble course that I created in the spring of 2018 at
Texas Tech University in Lubbock Texas. The ensemble was named in homage of the
Texas State University Mysterium for Modern Music Ensemble. Aside from being a performing ensemble, the TTU Mysterium is an exploratory environment.
My pedagogical purpose with Mysterium as an environment is to discover more effective means of teaching and learning, or rather, leading others to know the disposition of improvisation. The ensemble members gain a fundamental understanding of this disposition through the previously mentioned progressive set of free improvisation games. In addition, I utilize questions based on innate social interaction behaviors/communication abilities, deep listening/attendance, feedback systems, and the creation of musical growth in an improvisation. We collectively investigate the creation of musical growth using the parameters of musical style outlined by musicologist Jan LaRue through SHMRG. Some of the games are borrowed directly from the advanced free-improvisation course at California Institute of the Arts taught by the late Dr. Susan Allen, while others have been extrapolated, adapted, or created with the guidance of her improvisation philosophies found in the writings she left. A few games have been created from and/or adapted from the ideas of John Stevens and Pauline Oliveros. The other games are ones I created for the ensemble. Two prime goals of the group are (1) to discover new ways to facilitate a working FIE (free improvisation environment) and (2) be able to work as a new-music
38 Texas Tech University, Matthew O’Neill, December 2020 ensemble that occasionally rehearses and performs open-works/graphic scores in collaboration with composers, choreographers, and artists. I created the course to share the benefits of free improvisation to traditional university music students. Specifically, the ensemble setting gives composition students a free environment to try out their ideas in a real-time performance setting and likewise provide performance students a place to create rather than replicate music.
The ensemble contains both graduate and undergraduate music students playing traditional instruments often utilizing live signal-processing and strictly electronic instruments like no-input mixers and electromagnetic inductors.
Rehearsal Techniques and “Structure”
The Mysterium Ensemble sessions have no predetermined structure. My primary “rehearsal” goal with the group is to consistently facilitate an open and free environment that allows the members to be socially uninhibited and open to sonic communication. A significant part of my strategy to achieve this goal is making a point to not consider myself an authority over my students.
While teaching, I never trouble myself with director-musician roles, although, in promotion of the group’s activities, I regrettably have to assume this title. I consider my job to be a facilitator rather than a director. I also actively play in the group as an ensemble member. Not only does playing in the group help foster an egalitarian atmosphere, it also makes it much easier for me to demonstrate a concept. By simply allowing myself to be a co-learner as well as a facilitator, I can avoid the negative aspects of director/student dichotomy. Through gently guiding, I can encourage the
39 Texas Tech University, Matthew O’Neill, December 2020 students to be themselves and thus more confident in their abilities to improvise. I work diligently to promote an egalitarian society through my demeanor, language, attitude, and communication. I also make sure to fully listen to them the best I can and allow them to be heard when they speak. I have found that the mutual respect that forms in the group, and my experience about the subject matter, ensures the students listen when I need to speak. This, of course, does not need to be laid out as laws or rules with a new group to facilitate, just acted out in order to work. I do this to encourage a freer atmosphere for sonic creation. My secondary goal is to help guide the ensemble through the use of games and discussions that sequentially reveal to the members the principles of free, spontaneous group music interaction as I understand them.
Though the freedom in my teaching might indicate a lack of preparation,
I almost always have a daily agenda, but it is never absolutely set in stone. I assert that, while guiding a free improvisation ensemble, it is wise to maintain an acute awareness of the pulse of the room. Furthermore, the guide should always be ready to shift gears in a moment's notice to reclaim the group's mental attendance if it wanes.
Free improvisation is, by its very definition, or lack thereof, spontaneous. Through my experience with this practice, I have learned that its temporal nature must be reflected in its discussion and teaching. I always improvise what I do while guiding the
Mysterium Ensemble and I do this by design.
As a way to boost flexibility in my guidance and to encourage an open and free environment for the ensemble, I do not discourage social interaction at the beginning of each session. All rehearsals begin with time for the group to form into a circle and
40 Texas Tech University, Matthew O’Neill, December 2020 get comfortable. This includes allowing natural communication and socialization to occur unchallenged. I do not care if, in a traditional sense, they are goofing-off during the beginning of class. In all honesty, I want them to! The informality aids the improvisations.
Sometimes, with seasoned hands, conversation turns into an improvisation organically. The members just start responding to each other's words with sounds, either vocal or instrumental, completely in the moment. These instances are never subdued and are allowed to take their full course. They are exciting occurrences of total play. After a few minutes of playing around, I settle the group down by either initiating a conversation about our improvisational discoveries in general or continue discussion from the previous session. I then use this time to sense what to suggest we do first. Often, I began class with one of the most basic introductory games with the express purpose of getting everyone to actively listening to one another. Sometimes, we begin class with a completely free improvisation. Other times, we begin with a specific game that focuses on an aspect of free playing or a game to get us “in tune” with each other.
There are times, once class has started, when I notice the group is not actively listening to each other as well as I know they can. When this happens, I suggest we do variations of the initial concept games that I covered on the first day in Mysterium.79
When the group is actively listening, we can jump into more advanced concepts and experiments straight away. The direction we take depends on what the circumstances are, how well we are listening, and whatever paths are suggested or are revealed
79 See Initial Concept Games.
41 Texas Tech University, Matthew O’Neill, December 2020 through our playing. As the guide for this group, I look for any viable ways to keep the creative flow and interest going. Occasionally, things do not work and the creative flow slows or stops all together. In these instances, I redirect the attention of the group and prompt discussion and/or further experimentation.
We typically talk about what happened and what we heard after each game or improvisation. In many instances, the ensemble uses Jan LaRue’s SHMRG guidelines to aid the discussions. I firmly believe the person guiding the ensemble should avoid describing something that was played, either individually or collectively, as good or bad. I also avoid declaring what something was and instead allow people to come up with their own perceptions. Instead, I try to foster the ensemble members’ thinking with questions in between improvisation. These can give them things to consider subconsciously while playing. Some possible questions might be:
• What things/sounds did we hear or notice others do/make? • Did we interact with these things or sounds and, if so, how? • Was what we heard primarily textural, rhythmic, melodic, timbral, etc.? • According to our perception, were these things working in combination with something else we heard and, if so, how? • What was the sonic fabric like and did this change or stay the same? • What things did you hear that you think caused something? • Did you hear counterpoint or dialogue from anyone? • Could you tell if what you heard was created consciously or not simply from hearing it? • What do you remember yourself doing at the time? • Did we zone out and stop paying attention for whatever reason? • Were some of us trying to control where the group headed so fervently that it made everyone stop paying attention to their listening?
These discussions are always fascinating and revealing. The ensemble members will start asking each other questions and laughing about what they perceived about someone else’s direction. There is never a right or wrong but there is
42 Texas Tech University, Matthew O’Neill, December 2020 effective or less effective. Here, effectiveness relates to the quality of the process, or in other words, how well we are able to connect to the experience through listening.
These sorts of things can result negatively on individual and/or collective perception of the quality of the experience.
While I mention our effectiveness, or lack thereof, in regard to our ability in creating and maintaining a FIE, I make sure my comments and questions are void of any critical disapproving notions about what individuals played or what happened. I purposely distract the group from our musical product and focus on our musical process. I can honestly say that to date, there has not been a single instance in the ensemble where people argue or even disagree.
It is absurd that anyone in the ensemble truly knows what is happening aurally from any measurable standpoint. The complexities of a free improvisation, which grow exponentially the more players you have, make it impossible to listen and discern every nuance. Individually we have our perceptions of what we are personally doing, and of what is happening at the collective level. When we are listening attentively, we will all feel what is happening; although, we will all remember it from our distinct and unique perspectives. We cannot describe the feeling adequately. No perception is invalid, however, we can individually and collectively know when something is genuine. We can feel when someone is uncomfortable, or on fire. We can feel when the music is going this or that way, if we are losing it, or going towards it.
However, our sounds or individual directions while improvising can agree and/or disagree. The discussions we have in between improvisations help us understand these phenomena.
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In conclusion, I improvise the vast majority of my coaching in response to the group. This is not to say, however, that my pedagogy is uninformed. Over the years, I have gathered, and created a decent body of highly adaptable free improvisation games that focus on individual concepts of free collective sonic interaction. This set of easily variated games and their intended purposes aid me in quickly improvising my teaching. The games presented and explained in the following chapter are the most useful I have found for progressively exposing students to the disposition of free improvisation.
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CHAPTER IV
PEDAGOGICAL GAMES
Introduction to the Games
A crucial point for one to know before playing the free improvisation games in this document is that they really are games and should be fun. An appealing aspect of the following collection of games is their simplicity and adaptability to be made more challenging or more interesting as the students who play them become better improvisers. A second point is that these games should be learned sequentially. Their ordering has been devised through many hours of experimentation in real classroom settings to best facilitate an understanding of the tenets of effective free improvisation presented in the methodology chapter. Once learned, they can, and should, be used and variated freely to fit rehearsal needs.
Many of the games, or variations of them, should be played every session.
Others, after learning, can be played every so often as a reminder of the underlying concepts or as tools to sharpen and hone the group’s listening abilities. Since they are games, it is sometimes helpful to think of them just like other games we play socially.
Similar to when we might play a new board game with some friends and some may not be into it, a perceived measurement of the pulse of the room will prove invaluable to the teacher.
While playing the games presented here with an ensemble, group, class, or workshop, it is vital to pay attention to the individual player's demeanor and body language. If a decrease in group enthusiasm is observed, it is imperative that the game
45 Texas Tech University, Matthew O’Neill, December 2020 is quickly switched up in some way to keep the excitement of discovery active. This could be done by varying the game being played or by switching to another game entirely. Remember, also, that the group might create their own variations of games and these should be encouraged, tried, and discussed.
An exciting facet of the games is their simplicity and adaptability to be made more challenging as the students become better improvisers. That being said, we cannot improve our skills at a game by not playing it. These games must be played repeatedly for the rewards of spontaneous free playing to be experienced.
Fluency with the games’ underlying concepts and intricacies is recommended.
Although the games are not complicated, the individual game sections should be read thoroughly before attempting. Be mindful of any pre-requisite games or concepts suggested before attempting a specific game. The prerequisites for each game have been included where necessary. My hope is that this collection of games will encourage further work and refinement of their underlying ideas by other practitioners.
Preparatory Games
These preparatory games are taught to facilitate the disposition of free improvisation. The initial concepts are 1. active listening allows effective free improvisation to happen and 2. we all possess innate social abilities that allow us to actively listen to, and play, with each other effectively.
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Susie’s Pocket Game
The first concept, active listening is beautifully illustrated in Susie’s Pocket
Game. I have been teaching this game for years now as the very first game, and it has always worked for me. This game comes from a lecture recital by Susan Allen and the
California Institute of the Arts Advanced Free Improvisation Ensemble. The game is simple yet profound and is the very best way I have found to show people the underlying principle of how free improvisation works. It is best performed with at least five people participating, and is particularly effective with a group of 10-30 persons. The game is comprised of two separate parts:
Part 1:
Ask the group to collectively say things that are in their pockets, purses, wallets, etc. upon being cued. If the group is on the smaller side, the prompter will want to have a quicker sense of urgency in their tone when describing the instructions.
This will allow for the proper effect to be created. Using the word “list” instead of
“say” or “tell me” things in your pocket, etc., will usually do the trick.
After explaining the direction, ask them if they are ready, and cue them again to start. A cacophony of random items will erupt from the group. The individual listings will combine and continuously drone on in a stochastic fashion. The overall sonic effect should be reminiscent of an airport terminal or reception full of people talking, having their own conversations; in the case of this game, there are only individual “conversations.” If you listen in to any single sound source, then you will eventually sense a drop in their enthusiasm when the speaker realizes they are not
47 Texas Tech University, Matthew O’Neill, December 2020 being heard. Some people drudge along trying to follow directions and not stick out; others desperately try to be heard only to realize it is a hopeless endeavor. The collective mass of their individual sounds is in some ways akin to the sound of a sleepy church congregation reciting liturgy or a large group of people singing happy birthday to some unfortunate soul. Some individuals will try to purposely stand out to be humorous with what is in their pocket, purse, or wallet. A competition over who is the funniest or possessor of the most trivial object between two or more people who hear each other might ensue. This side game tends to get old quickly, and the participants in the competition eventually lose interest.
The particular words of individuals blur and offer the distinct sound of people not being heard. The meaning of most words becomes diffused in the sound mass. The audible drop in enthusiasm mentioned earlier starts something like this: the individual tries to say their items and be heard; they begin to listen only to themselves in the vast hum of the collective as they realize there is no space to be heard; by this point, their enthusiasm begins to fade. The individual becomes isolated save for a few recognizable words they hear, or words they said themselves. Eventually, the group’s enthusiasm will diminish; their verbal offerings wane as the typical list of items is exhausted. At this point, stop the first part of the game.
Part 2:
After the group has stopped, ask them to try listing items it again, but this time, do so while actively listening for space to fit their words into. Direct them also not to worry about unintentionally overlapping onto another person's words in time. As we
48 Texas Tech University, Matthew O’Neill, December 2020 might try to talk at the same time as others, it is important to just find an aural space to put our words.
After this brief explanation, ask them if they are ready and then cue the group again. The difference in the sonic atmosphere from the first part will be immediately apparent to everyone. The words are clearly intelligible and fall on the sonic canvas like individual drops of rain during a light sprinkle. Initially, people tend to say their possessions swiftly, and the words themselves have a short percussive quality to them as people try not to take up too much space while listing their items. Eventually, someone will notice a prolonged silence and say a word with less urgency. They will stretch out the time it takes to say the word. This will often have a relaxing effect on others. The quickly spoken words at the beginning of this prompt will start to dissipate for others in turn. Duets and trios of slower spoken words, and even short phrases, will coincide with each other amongst a backdrop of the remaining, quickly inserted words. People will also play with accents and inflections. Once again, the list of items exhausts itself, and the prompter can stop the group.
At this point the group is ready to understand the most basic tenet for the efficacy of intelligibility and effectiveness in free improvisation:
We must actively listen to each other.
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Pauline Oliveros reaffirms the importance of actively listening to each other.
Her Deep Listening practice and research is the most in depth study into this form of listening and its implications. In the introduction of her book Deep Listening, Oliveros asserts that listening is fundamentally different from hearing in that it requires active engagement, and that we can learn to do it involuntarily through the experience of practicing it. As, the term “Deep Listening” refers to both her book and retreats/workshops, and the term “listening” is too easily confused with “hearing,” I will be using the term “active listening” in this document.
Allen describes the power of active listening and leaving space for others,
“You make a sound; I make a sound. We sound at the same time. We sound one after another. We trade sounds. We ask a question of each other with sound, We respond in sound, We don't sound. We wait... If we all make sounds at the same time, it is difficult to differentiate the individual voices. However, if we try to fit out utterances between those of others', a resplendent weave of sounds emerges. Here is what the collective unconscious might sound like, were it to have a sonic form. These multitudes of voices, each representing an individual, yet happening in an unpredictable sequence that somehow sounds like a piece of strange music. This is an associative moment that we can hear.”80
The point is, for us to freely create music together in a meaningful way, we must be able to actively listen to others and be actively listened to by them. This is not to say people who are not listening in a group are not freely improvising. They very well could be. What it means is that those people are doing it by themselves, ignorant of what others are doing; and this can obviously intrude on the freedom of others and cause group playing to suffer.
80 Pauline Oliveros, Deep Listening: A Composers Sound Practice (New York: iUniverse Inc., 2005), 21.
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Nonsense Conversation
The next basic game and concept is my Nonsense Conversation game. This game is related to multi-language improvisation experiments done by the advanced improvisation ensemble at CalArts. These were done by having people who speak different languages try and communicate with each other while speaking their native tongues, seeing if nonverbal cues would suggest meaning. My version was adapted from this idea to explain another basic tenet of intelligibility in free improvisation scenarios. That is, we all possess innate social abilities that to allow us to play with each other effectively if we actively listen to one another.
As always, be mindful to remind the group to actively listen.
Directions:
Ask the group to sit quietly for a moment and think about any random topic.
This topic is meant to be unique to the individual person, and they are to use it throughout the game. The players are asked to being conversing with each other upon being cued. They are to respond and interact with one another as if they were talking about the same subject. A disclaimer should be made that there will probably be laughter, so just keep going. If, on the off chance, two or more participants choose the same subject matter, stop and have everyone think of a new topic. This game works best with between three and six people but could be more. It is advised to break larger groups into sections of three or four persons.
I have guided this game many times, and it is always a lot of fun. The members of the group will very quickly begin to play along and act interested or dismissive of each other's statements. They will ping-pong off each other in agreement over totally
51 Texas Tech University, Matthew O’Neill, December 2020 different topics. Sometimes they will argue or gang up on each other. The prompter is to let this nonsense go on for a while until it feels that interest might soon begin to subside. At this point, the group is stopped and asked the following question:
If an average person, with normal facilities, who did not speak or understand a word of our language, walked by and listened to us, would they be able to tell whether or not we were having a real conversation?
The answer is very likely not. Our delivery and responses will be too natural.
People will naturally use their everyday linguistic improvisational skills to make communication effective.
The experiment works because the members of the ensemble use what they innately know about the nature of our conversations without being conscious of it. We, as social beings, have interacted and seen others interact with each other since before we could talk. Most people are aware when others in the room are upset at each other or at them. Most people can sense if it is time to change subjects by someone else's body language, or if someone is pleased with them. Situations involving common human interactions, particularly misunderstandings, form the basis of television sitcoms, comedy movies, their analogs in theater and opera.
We humans are, in fact, incredibly good actors, even when the script is implausible. This is apparent in witnessing a child caught in a pathetic lie about something they were not supposed to do. No matter how bad their story, they will try to sell it using what they know about innocence until they realize the futility of the charade. This includes how they speak, emote, and use body language.
The nonsense conversation game and its discussion illuminate the fundamental concept of the power of our inherent natural communicative abilities. Whereas this
52 Texas Tech University, Matthew O’Neill, December 2020 game may seem to be more of a free-improv comedy exercise, it elegantly yields this concept for our purposes, by teaching that it almost does not matter what you say, but how and when you say it. This is also an excellent notion for musicians trying group free improvisation for the first time as it allows them not to worry about creating something aurally appealing, which is a common stress amongst the uninitiated. The idea that any sounds are possible, directly aids in bolstering individual confidence to create.
The importance of the idea that “what you say is not as important as how and when you say it” in a group free improvisation setting cannot be stressed enough.
Since it is intricately linked to our abilities to listen and communicate with one, it allows us an avenue to freely create music with one another successfully.
Beginner Games
Pass the Sound
This is a beautiful game to wake the ensemble up and charge their active listening skills. It is recommended to play this game often. In the TTU Mysterium ensemble, a variation of this game gets played most sessions as a warmup or at both beginning and end of class. Play this game only after the group knows the Pocket and
Nonsense Conversation intro games.
Directions:
Be mindful to remind the group to actively listen.
In Pass the Sound, the ensemble sits in a circle and a direction around the circle is prescribed. A single member is selected to be the starter. The game begins by
53 Texas Tech University, Matthew O’Neill, December 2020 the starting person playing a single short idea. This could be a single note, percussive sound, a small fast melodic fragment, a timbre, etc. Once they play, the next person in the circle immediately after them plays a single idea and so on around the circle. The players are free to change their sound to any short idea they want when it comes back around to them. Do not establish a pulse beforehand! The players will feel the beat for reference rather than listen for space, and the point of the game will be lost. Let them know that if someone misses their turn, to just skip to the next person and keep the sound passing around. They can jump back in when it comes around again. Let them know that the idea of the game is to reinforce their listening and see if they can get the sound to pass around the circle as seamlessly and as quickly as possible.
The first time a group plays Pass the Sound, there will often be sluggish transitions with gaps of varying sizes in between people. After a few spins around, stop the group and ask them what they heard happen. Once they have answered, get them to try it again faster.
Once again, the object is for the players to react and sound off as quickly as they can, avoiding gaps in the sound. Once the holes are gone, stop them and ask them to try it again, going around even faster. Feel free to change the direction often when they are transitioning seamlessly.
Keep doing this, stopping when the gaps are gone, and asking to increase the speed around the circle choosing different people to start until it breaks down. This will demonstrate to them the swiftness they are capable of in their sonic reaction times.
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Pass the Sound also adds the small benefit of keeping up ensemble enthusiasm.
A lot of musicians love to play fast, and this gives them a fantastic opportunity. They do not have to worry about sounding bad and they can really fly without killing their chops.
Once learned by the group, it is recommended to only spend a few minutes playing it as a warm-up. After a session or two, variations of this game can be played.
Feel free to use any geometric pattern that is possible with the number of players available (e.g. a diamond pattern for four players, or a star-pattern for a group of five).
These are more difficult, and time should be taken to speed them up. Playing
Pass the Sound with other shapes will develop a rapid spatial awareness to sound by the ensemble, and also serve to break up the monotony of playing the same exact game every class. The students will even eventually get bored with variations, and this is a good thing. The added bonus of the tedium experienced by the members in repeating games or variations thereof are that they get tired of what they are playing.
The boredom will start to force them variate their ideas more, creating more elaborate gestures and finding new timbres on their instruments, which serves to enrich everyone's experience.
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One Thing-Three Times
The One Thing-Three Time or “Gestures Game” was an exercise I learned from Susan Allen and her improvisation class, I am not sure if she created it, nor do I know her name for it, but it is a wonderful exercise to do often. I was only taught the game, not the many pedagogical benefits. These I have learned through experience playing and guiding it, some of which are admittedly obvious.
Try this game with duets and trios before moving up to quartets and larger groups. The more complex the sonic environment, the harder it is to actively listen for both space to play and to our inner ears that guide our playing. Less experienced players will struggle with saying too much in larger groups, thus affecting their perceived experience in a way that inhibits desire to continuing trying improvising.
Students should all have played the Pocket, Nonsense Conversation, and
Around the Circle games before attempting the Three Things game.
Directions:
As always, be mindful to remind the group to listen for space to put their sounds into.
The group members sit, preferably in a circle. They are asked to create an improvisation by collectively playing gestures. This gesture could be anything, a single note, a melodic idea or fragment, a series of timbral changes, etc. They can start whenever they like and can variate their idea upon repetition. Examples could be augmentation, transposition, whatever the like at the moment, however, they only get to play the gesture three times. When all the players have spent their three gestures or
56 Texas Tech University, Matthew O’Neill, December 2020 utterances, the improvisation is over. This game works best in trios or quartets to start, so adjust accordingly.81
If the Pocket, Nonsense Conversation and Pass the Sound games are taught well, the students will naturally utilize and build upon their understanding of them.
These, so far, are:
1. The importance of listening for space. 2. All material is viable for use in free improvisation. 3. We all possess the innate ability to create and discern meaning out of unpredictability. 4. We are capable of very quick reaction times that enable us to seamlessly communicate.
Generally, the overall duration of the game will be quite short the first time
One Thing-Three Times is played with a group. As the first person finishes, the texture will start to thin out, leaving people exposed, which in some cases will make some of the more skittish players drop out by getting through their remaining gestures more quickly. Groups also tend to do this same thing, speeding up their remaining gestures, because they are noticing that the improvisation is coming to an end, and they feel like they took too long. It is advisable to reassure them to not worry about such things.
They can always actively listen if they get done too earlier, and can use the sonic space created by others leaving as a way to listen more acutely to themselves and the resonance of the space.
81 N.B. With folks new to free improvisation, it is imperative to begin shortly after giving the directions. It is not advisable to provide new students too much time between instructions and starting games. Every so often, a student might try to compose out what they are going to do when the prompter is talking, and this will impede their development in spontaneous musical creation.
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One of the real advantages of this game for beginning improvisers is that it allows them the peace of mind that they only have to create one musical idea, and the idea can be as simple as they like. If they want to play the same single note three times, they can. They just have to do it on the fly.
Another benefit from this game is that if the members don’t like what they played, they can just try to play the idea again on subsequent iterations and make it how they like it. They also learn to sell an idea that they are not particularly fond of.
The guideline that they must stick to their first gesture, no matter how loosely, also puts a slight pressure on them to commit to their idea, so they aren't just throwing out gesture after gesture without considering what they are doing. One last benefit is that in the complexity of the free improvisation environment, particularly in one with more players, no one will know if you make a “mistake”; you can mess up and choose a totally new idea. Not that this is encouraged, but the students will make this realization themselves within the first couple of times playing this game. The group will naturally become more relaxed after they realize no one can hear every tiny detail of their performance and thus do better at improvising.
This game teaches an economy of material, a concept the need for which composition faculty are all too aware of when teaching over-eager composition students. The point is, through repetition of this game, the student learns that there are lots of possibilities with a single idea.
Many variations of this game are possible, but one I particularly like is to just loop the whole game three times. I do this in class after they learn it to get them accustomed to longer improvisations and to the possible sounds they might hear from
58 Texas Tech University, Matthew O’Neill, December 2020 the other members. I always have the students play this version at some point for their first performances, particularly if it is a standard concert hall, in front of audience type of deal to give them a little something to hang on to. If there is only a student or two that need it, I suggest it to them and have everyone else freely improvise. Not to force structure, but just alleviate anxiety until they are buffed up a bit in their confidence.
Intermediate Games
Pass the Duet
The next game I teach in my curriculum sequence is Pass the Duet game.
Students should all have played all the preparatory and beginning games; (Pocket,
Nonsense Conversation, and Around the Circle, One Thing-Three Times), before playing Pass the Duet.
Directions:
Before beginning, be mindful to remind the group to actively listen for space to put their sounds into.
Let the group know the game duets that are daisy-chained around the circle, and that they are free to use the One Thing-Three Times concept if they like to help them create material. The length of time they play for should be kept reasonable, with
10–45 seconds being acceptable.
The game is started by the first person beginning to freely improvise. After a short period, the person next in line joins them when they feel it right, listening for space to play along. As the first person starts to end their improvisation, the third
59 Texas Tech University, Matthew O’Neill, December 2020 person in line begins. The process continues all the way around the circle. It is recommended to always ask a member if they would like to go first instead of assigning the task to them. I usually just look around the circle to see who would like to go through my perception of their eagerness, obviously avoiding the person who always wants to go first to allow everyone a chance. Once a starting person is selected, the direction is chosen.82
The first time or so Pass the Duet is played, it will typically be choppy, with noticeable gaps between players just like their first few times playing Pass the Sound.
If, after the first rotation, the players cannot trade off seamlessly, have them look at the person that they play after to help them anticipate their entrances. If, after another rotation, there are still significant gaps between players, have them nod each other in.
Eventually, with some practice, the players will stop needing to nod each other in.
They will simply use their ears to note when another person is going to stop and will perfectly elide what they are going to play with the ending of the previous person.
As the players get better at eliding their entrances, have them all close their eyes and actively listen for the timbre and/or the spatial proximity of the individual that comes before them to find their entrance.
Make sure to change directions in the circle every so often, as well as having the players move around to different seats from time to time to variate their experience. Allow time for larger instruments like cellos or tubas to move. If there is a piano, or if you are lucky, a harp, have the members move around them into new seat.
82 N.B. The first few times, this game is played, it is advisable for the one guiding the improvisation to not go first or be too showy when it is your turn to play in order to alleviate anxiety students playing in the duets might feel. In my experience, I have noticed playing first could make them nervous if they feel they have to live up to the teacher.
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Once the elisions are smooth, variations can be made. Adding another person in line to the duet before the first person drops turns the game into Pass the Trio, where you simply have the players come in sequentially until a trio is formed. Just like in Pass the Duet, have the first person drop out before the next person after the trio comes in as seamlessly as possible, and continue on around the circle. This game can be done passing solos back and forth, but it is advised to have the students play the Mini
Concerto game before they do to allow them plenty of time to get comfortable playing in such an exposed fashion. Another variation is to have them play shorter ideas and trade-off quicker. This will not be as fast as the speed experienced in Pass the Sound, but it should be played more little more urgency than how the group has done it up to this point.
It is recommended to always ask a member if they would like to go first instead of assigning the task to them. I usually just look around the circle to see who would like to go through my perception of their eagerness. Once a starting person is selected, the direction is chosen. Furthermore, in the first few times, this game is played, it is advisable to make sure you as the one guiding does not go first or be too showy when it is your turn to play. This will aid in alleviating any anxiety the improvisers might be experiencing.83
83 N.B. At this point, feel free to start setting up duo and trio free improvisation in rehearsal. Just ask the group “can we play some short duets or trios? Establish groups and a batting order. Then have every group play with applause in between each one. Afterwards discuss what happened.
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Mini Concerto Game
This game is adapted from Susan Allen, but I doubt if it is original to her. It is best started with trios or quartets, working up to larger ensembles in sessions. If you have a larger group just break them into 4–5 people and have one group play while the other listens, trading places after the first group has finished. If upon starting the improvisation it is noticeably less effective than when there has been three players improvisation together then adjust the size accordingly.
Directions:
As always, be mindful to remind the group to listen for space to put their sounds into.
Ask around and find someone willing to be the soloist while the other(s) are instructed to accompany them, like in a concerto. Let the soloist know that virtuosity is not required for their solo. The only thing they need to do actively listen and try to be in the foreground of the sonic space. The other players act as concertino, accompanying the soloist, and are charged with actively listening and trying to be in the background. Let the players know they can use the one thing three times a concept if they are still feeling uneasy about creating. Let them know that eventually, they will not need to. Have everyone in the ensemble take a crack at being the soloist. Let the improvisation finish naturally. Be sure to get the group to give short applause after each soloist finishes.
The first few times this game is played, a simple “call and response” or homophonic-like texture with longer-lined melodic material from the soloist with
62 Texas Tech University, Matthew O’Neill, December 2020 long-lined, “pad” style accompaniment will more than likely happen. The improvisers will pick up new ideas that others are trying and will tend to start using and variating these ideas themselves the more times Mini Concerto is played. The great benefit of this game is that every member of the group gets to play a solo while the others are busy doing something else that supports them. The complexity of the sonic environment is such that both parties, soloist and concertino will have to use every bit of their energy while actively listening and playing to make the improvisation work.
They will be trying their best just to fit their sounds in space, and adjusting their sounds to others. There really is so little time to feel nervous and think, “everyone is listening to me!”
Acting as soloist in this “anything goes as long as we actively listen” atmosphere will build the necessary confidence for students to play by themselves if they need it. It will also teach the more outgoing students they should respect everyone else by not always trying to be the soloist.
Soloist ON/OFF Concerto
This game is best started with trios or quartets, working up to larger ensembles in sessions. If you have a larger group just break them into 4-5 people and have one group play while the other listens, trading places after the first group has finished. The group should sit in a circle. If the group’s improvisations have been less effective with more players than when they played with fewer people, adjust the size of the groups accordingly.
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Directions:
As always, be mindful to remind the group to listen for space to put their sounds into.
This game is exactly like the Mini Concerto with two noteworthy twists. First, a single member is selected as the ON/OFF switch. This person stands in the center of the group. The rest of the group will play the improvisation, but they will have to do so with their eyes shut. The ON/OFF switch member is tasked with tapping members on the shoulder to turn them into soloists. Once the group hears a soloist, they transition into the concertino, adjusting their playing to be more background level material. The switch person is free to turn solos on and off as they choose.
It is essential to let everyone have a try being the switch person. It breeds camaraderie, and the group will learn a lot more about the possibilities that can happen. It will also reveal many things to the group about themselves, their collective self, their sonic preferences, and their playfulness.
It is always fun when the switch person gets cheeky and turns two people into soloists at the same time, and the soloists fight back and forth until they realize what happened, and the whole group bursts into laughter. The first time that situation occurred, the entire group realized the next variation would be to try this game with a pair of soloists.
This game is compelling in many respects. It allows people to have fun as a soloist. They are busy thinking about who got tapped, or will they be tapped next. The active listening skills required here are through the roof, but with their eyes closed and having fun, they have no problems. A major benefit of this game is the practice
64 Texas Tech University, Matthew O’Neill, December 2020 students get with identifying the direction sounds are coming to them from. This skill will be useful in later games, and even helps in the performance of the earlier games.
For instance, Pass the Duet and Pass the Sound.
Through the Soloist ON/OFF Concerto game, the students learn to adjust to the sonic environment with directionality. While playing, they are either moving towards the foreground or towards the background, and they will do this both quickly and musically if they are listening and adding space to their utterances. If someone is tapped on the shoulder and begins to be soloist, they will take a second to listen to how to come in, if ten seconds later they are tapped again, they will naturally find a musical way to transition to the background. This happens because when we are tapped again, we are right out front, and most people don't want to be left hanging. It's like trying to get a high-five from someone and them not seeing you. We almost innately play these moments off; there is no time to think about it. I do not encourage making people feel this way, but if it is a natural tendency for us to react to situations like this, why can't we use them towards our advantage?
Endings – Fade Out and Explode
After the group has some experience playing in short duos and trios and have played the Mini Concerto and Soloist ON/OFF Concerto, they will inevitably know that most of the improvisations fade out to finish. Have a discussion about this and the reasons why they think it happens. After this discussion I like to have the whole group do two separate games that are just the inverse of each other.
Fade Out
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Directions:
Upon cueing have the whole ensemble begin improvising at a forte dynamic with the idea that they are going to slowly fade out and ritard simultaneously to nothing. Practice this a few times with the whole group again, asking them to try more gradual or quicker fade outs. Feel free to break them into smaller groups.
Explode
Directions:
Upon cueing, have the whole ensemble begin improvising slowly and at a soft dynamic. They will then simultaneously crescendo and accelerate until a sort of critical mass is formed and then everyone tries to hit their last notes together. This is very difficult to do but it is possible, and quite an experience to be a part of. Practice this a few times with the whole group again, asking them to try more gradual or quicker explosions. Feel free to break them into smaller groups.
Stairwell
Stairwell really is not so much a game as it is a place to go have an improvisational session. The idea is to first introduce the students to Pauline
Oliveros’s Deep Listening Album through discussion, then go take them to a very resonant place to have a spatially separated improvisation. You can choose to play part of the album or not before you go. I choose not to only because I want the group to hear a space like that live first. I believe Oliveros would have wanted that to. At Texas
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Tech University, I would take the ensemble to the stairwell the lead up to our carillon if it wasn’t freezing, if not a back stairwell in the music building would make a poor substitute for the carillon stairs. If you do not have a reverberant stairwell close by, take the group to any reverberant space where there is room to spread out. If not, get some microphones and speakers and try some experiments with long digital reverb as a substitute.
If you have a space picked, plan ahead for chairs if there is nowhere to sit.
Pianists can bring a small keyboard instrument, maybe a melodica or just use their voices or an auxiliary instrument.
Directions:
Space the musicians as far apart as possible. For a stairwell, you might have to set a time where there will be no traffic. What you do will depend on the number of players you have but what I like to have them do in a space like this is have the group do an very quiet spread out improvisation, first vocally with a drone for a brief meditation, then with percussive vocal sounds. Percussive vocal sounds will illuminate to the group just how long very short sounds last. Once the students have found their ways to the space and know what it sounds like inside you can schedule times to return and make the most of the space. I like to have at least a few excursions to these spaces per semester to work with reverberant rooms. The next game, Tuning Vocal
Drones with Mouth Filtering can be run-through and then played again in your reverberant space after the student have been acclimated to both space and game.
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Tuning Games
All of the following games should ideally begin with a short breathing meditation. These are best done with everyone's eyes closed in an extremely resonant space.
Tuning Vocal Drones with Mouth Filtering
Directions:
Play a low tone on a piano, or if you are lucky enough to have a cellist or bassist in the group, ask them to bow a low note at mezzo piano and sustain it. They will be the fundamental. If playing the piano, just reiterate the note every so often to keep the pitch going. Alternatively, a drone from a drone app on a smartphone could be played softly.
After the fundamental has sounded for a while, have everyone hum the tone in whatever octave they like. Once the group has had a moment with the note, cue them to sing their note at a mezzo piano dynamic and using staggered breathing to keep it going. Once the group is in tune, have them change the vowel shape of their mouth slowly back and forth from E to OO, adjusting their mouth shape at their own pace. It is a beautiful exercise when everyone is tuned up and listening intently. Overtones will emerge from the texture, particularly in a resonant space or with a microphone, speakers, and reverb effects unit.
This game will allow the students to experience light overtones to a fundamental and enable them to play with the timbres available through filtering. If you have someone available who can do overtone singing to come by and give a
68 Texas Tech University, Matthew O’Neill, December 2020 tutorial that would be excellent. There are also some great tutorials readily available with a google search. The point of this exercise is not to have everyone be great diaphonic singers but to improvise with mouth filtering to get a wash of overtones that will aid in tuning to the fundamental. With a little practice, a great deal of overtones will emerge, like the little whistles that happen when some people talk, and although encouraged, they are not necessary for this tuning exercise. If achieved, the overall sonic effect is a heterophony of the harmonic series of a single fundamental. To further variate this exercise, try with two or more fundamentals.
Tuning Unpredictability
Often times in free improvisation, there will be a lot of unrelated ideas in the sonic environment that will exist simultaneously. All sorts of tempi, scales, tonics, rhythms, timbres, and meters get used, but if used while actively listening, the sonic tapestry can be intelligible through our ability to use our language skills to communicate meaning. In free improvisation, it is as if there is heterophony, not in melodic line, but in our attempts to express personal meanings collectively. The following tuning games cover several different musical parameters and are designed to aid in forming ensemble cohesion and refine their listening abilities in these types of situations.
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Tuning Space Chords - with Voices or Instruments
The impetus for Tuning Space Chords came from a thought I had about extended just intonation while listening to the Texas Tech University Goin’ Band play space chord warm-ups. The marching band will play random pitched long-tones together when cued, forming these massive dissonant chords, and then when cued again, play a predetermined major triad. This process is done for tuning purposes. That week, I asked the group to use their voices to try this experiment. Since extended just intonation, if tuned correctly, is capable of extremely dissonant chords that will be beat-less, I figured that theoretically, all of the notes they will sing can be adjusted to fit some fundamental, even if all the notes they are singing would technically be transposed down many octaves, and the fundamental might not be present. Regardless if that is at all correct, as an ensemble, we have been able to get random chords like this relatively beat-less through concentrated listening and focused shading of our pitches by tiny degrees. It is a wonderful listening exercise, and we do it on instruments as well. This initial idea found itself into a composition of mine titled
Aeras, presented at the end of this document which was graciously performed by the
TTU Mysterium ensemble.
Directions:
Ask the group to each sing random long tones at a mezzo piano dynamic upon being cued, hold it using staggered breathing, micro tune the chord by shading their pitches up or down, and adjusting their dynamics until the resulting chord is as beat less as possible. Possible issues that might arise include ensemble members moving
70 Texas Tech University, Matthew O’Neill, December 2020 their pitches too quickly or too far, and students that are not proficient singers forgetting to stagger their breathing. Often, students like the aforementioned will hold their notes for so long that when they finally take another breath and go to sing, they cannot find their original pitch. When one or more members of the ensemble do this, the introduction of so many new pitches cause everyone else to move their pitches by more than microtonal degrees. While this is also a fun exercise, it is very hard to micro shade your tuning effectively. Remind the ensemble that the object is to micro shade their pitch while listening intently to how it fits with the pitches of the other members.
After the ensemble can perform this tuning exercise easily, have them add in mouth filtering and then subsequently try the game with instruments. Fixed-pitch instrumentalists, (e.g. piano, guitar, harp, etc.) should with sing or play secondary instruments that have movable pitch. Follow with discussion on how well everyone felt they were able to micro shade and tune the overall chord. If it were a complete disaster, which can happen, have the ensemble try it again but with new random pitches. Doing this will usually sort it out. Often times it was a member or two not so familiar with dissonant harmony next to each other creating a dissonant interval they could not wrap their ears around. Also, there are times when the random singing will produce a fairly consonant sonority. While stumbling upon this sort of chord is neat, it is not the overall goal. Try this exercise often, and your ensemble will notice its ability to tune any type of dissonance very quickly.
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Dynamic Crossfading
For Dynamic Crossfading, split the ensemble up into pairs of duos or trios and getting a batting order for the pairs. Once everyone has gone discuss other parameters this will work for and create variations.
Directions:
Have a pair of duos or trios sit or stand apart from each other on opposite sides of the room. Get the players to figure out which side will go first. Have the starting side cue each other in and start playing a loud random long tone that they then decrescendo to nothing. As they start to decrescendo the other side crescendos long tones from nothing creating a crossfade. They then repeat the cycle a few times until it is smooth.84 Once the ensemble can smoothly crossfade with long tones or arpeggiated/repeated notes (see note), have them try it with gestures and longer improvised ideas.
Dynamic Crossfading is an exercise that requires sharp listening skills to crossfade dynamics as smoothly as possible. Potential issues to look out for is gaps in transitions, and hiccups in the decrescendos and crescendos. Often, when a group will change their dynamics to slowly, the wind instruments and voices will have to stagger their breathing and upon coming back in will be louder or softer than they would have been if they weren’t interrupted by the need to breath. Furthermore, this game is a great way for players to discover how wider their actual dynamic range is. Some university students, when asked to play without sheet music will only utilize a very
84 If there are classical guitars, pianos, or harps, remind them they can play an arpeggiated or quickly repeated chords to imitate a single note crescendo or decrescendo.
72 Texas Tech University, Matthew O’Neill, December 2020 narrow portion if their dynamic range. I have noticed even with seniors and graduate performance majors, who can play the snot out of anything with a rich and wide array of dynamic shading in their solo re-creative performances will play only loud or soft the entire time in free improvisation environments. If this is experienced in your ensemble, remind the players that sheet music often utilizes elaborate degrees of dynamic contrast and that they can use this as well if they wish. I do not like to tell ensemble members that they should do this or that in their playing, but I do recommend reminding them of possibilities that can enrich their experience.
Advanced Concept – Feedback Loops
By the time the students in the improvisation ensemble have come this far, it is far past time to have discussions with the about the concept of feedback loops, both social and sonic. With the number of disciplines that use feedback models in their research, I have rarely seen a group of university students who are not already familiar with them. If they are not, I remind them of the term homeostasis, and then they quickly remember some of the bits of information for STEM mandated bubble tests in middle and high school. Regardless, a simple description of how a home thermostat, a car's cruise control, or how our bodies regulate temperature will remind them of or teach them the basics they need to know. How these feedback systems relate to free improvisation environments is extremely interesting.
We as humans utilize many different feedback systems, both positive and negative. When we sweat or shiver, our bodies are utilizing a negative feedback loop in the form of our temperature regulatory system. This means that some variable, in
73 Texas Tech University, Matthew O’Neill, December 2020 this case, heat or cold, causes the system to counteract. For our sweat/shiver example, when we are hot, we sweat. The perspiration cools our bodies because our system counteracts this overheating and tries to cool us down. When it is too cold, our body temperature regulatory system causes us to shiver, creating heat, and causes our blood vessels to constrict, which prevents more heat from being lost. So our body temperature regulatory system counteracts the variables of excessive heat or cold and brings our internal temperatures back to normal, and thus we get homeostasis. The classic human body example of positive feedback is what happens in a woman’s body right before childbirth. When the child moves into position to be born, it stretches a woman's cervix past its normal position and causes an imbalance of pressure. This causes hormones to release that cause more pressure, which in turn causes more hormones, and so on, until the baby is born. This amplification of labor contractions is akin to audio feedback. When a microphone gets so close to a speaker it is connected to, the output of the speaker gets reamplified, sent back out the speaker, and so on until a powerful resonant oscillation occurs, sending the sound person into frenzy. The analogy here for an improvisation ensemble is that the more we actively listen to, and give each other adequate space for expression, there will be homeostasis in the intelligibility of our sonic output.
The more we actively ignore each other, the harder we all have to try for our expressions to be heard. This in turn, causes us to work even harder to be understood, which causes people to more actively ignore each other, and so on towards an irreversible, unintelligible, disappointing, and unhappy mess. The person expressing themselves the loudest might think they are happy, but unless they are a complete
74 Texas Tech University, Matthew O’Neill, December 2020 narcissist, they won't be pleased with the process either. We can however, through being aware of this phenomenon, can do something to stop this positive feedback by exerting our inputs and outputs. If we notice the intelligibility of our musical communication going down, there is a good chance we need to output less. There is however, one issue that needs to be addressed. Positive feedback can also confusingly happen in the opposite direction. In positive feedback the output of the system can go in either direction. “A positive connection is one in which a change (increase or decrease) in some variable results in the same type of change (increase or decrease) in a second variable.”85
So, if we make more sounds trying to be heard and cause everyone to do it, there will be so many sounds the output is a highly active, yet unintelligible mess that goes nowhere. In a system where every player is trying their hardest to be heard, one person stopping will not usually be enough to reverse the positive feedback. But if we go too far in the other direction, and give each other too much space, the improvisation will limp to a standstill and go nowhere. And if this happens long enough, one person begins to play in earnest hopes to keep the thing going is not usually sufficient to reverse the positive feedback (now just in the other direction).
These thoughts suggest a need for a balance between our giving and taking of sonic space. I believe this can only be done through mutual respect and courtesy. The midpoint between too much positive feedback in either direction in this improvisation
85 Science Education Resource Center, “Feedback Loops,” Starting Point, April 19, 2020, https://serc.carleton.edu/introgeo/models/loops.html.
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(or compositional) model is where the drama in our music lies. It is what we find the most excitement.
Advanced Games
By the time the ensemble has learned all the beginning and intermediate games, they will have gained enough experience with active listening to be playing free improvisations of more extended durations and working on the advanced games.
They will have had a good deal of exposure to solo playing and playing in larger groups. They will also have had adequate time to build up their personal confidence and know quite a bit about each other's tendencies and characters. At this point in their free improvisational experience, it is best to maintain their practice playing all the games they have learned so far, or variations thereof, and spending a lot of time playing within duets, trios, and quartets, switching the players up often. Frequently the
TTU Mysterium ensemble will play in trios, one at a time, with applause in between, and then have some discussion on what we heard after we have all played.
By now the group can also play in larger groups and will need adequate practice for this to be successful. Large ensemble free improvisation is much more difficult than playing in duos and trios. Some advice before starting with these larger groups is to tell the players that less is more. The more they provide space for each other, the richer their musical ideas will be. Imagine a large group of people all trying to tell their story at the same time, talking over each other, and ignoring and interrupting one another. Sometimes a situation like this in improvisation can be very effective sonically, but it tends to get old with everyone really fast if it is the entire
76 Texas Tech University, Matthew O’Neill, December 2020 group is capable of. Large groups of people can discuss things together, but a little respect and patience for each other go a long way. The following games will explore this idea.
Dynamic Crossfading with Longer Gestures.
Dynamic Crossfading with Longer Gestures is best done with two players at a time to begin. Once two players can achieve this, then the game can then be worked up to pairs of duos, trios, quartets, and larger. This game requires very active listening.
Break the group up into duos and find a group to volunteer to go first.
Directions:
Have two people sit across from each other. One player begins soloing a longer idea at a mezzo forte or forte dynamic. When the first player is ready to end, they make a long decrescendo towards niente or as near niente as possible on their instrument. At the moment the second player notices the first player’s decrescendo, they begin a longer idea that crescendos from niente or as near to niente as they can achieve on their instrument. After the second player gets to the top of their dynamic range, or however ever high they feel is musically appropriate in the moment, they can start to decrescendo and the first player comes back in from nothing, and the cycle repeats.
Both players need to be hyper aware of when the other player begins to change direction and importantly, how much room they have left in their trajectory. If player one begins to decrescendo, player two will need to not only know when player one started this decrescendo, but how long they are going to be able to do this. The
77 Texas Tech University, Matthew O’Neill, December 2020 musical material is not important, although by the time the students reach this game, they will be able to play musically with each other, even if their musical ideas are very different. The intense listening between them will make their negotiations work, however the task now is to play together in a duet that has the restriction of this crossfading dynamics.
The crossfading will happen at different intervals of time due to the length of ideas and feedback between the players interpreting how much time is left before their partner reaches the extent of their dynamic trajectory in each iteration. Ask the players to go through a few iterations of the crossfade, not worrying to have a prescribed amount of them. If the students ask, just say a few and let them figure out how many, this way they are not worrying about how many times they have crossfaded and they are focusing on listening and being attentive to their partner.
Tuning PolyRhythmic and PolyTemporal Space Textures
Directions:
Ask the group to each play a gesture random rhythm, in a random meter and tempo and loop it or just continue in that meter tempo upon being cued. Once cued, the objective is for them to micro tune their rhythm by shading their tempos faster or slower by incremental amounts, using variation in dynamics to help them hear until a perceived unity is achieved. If successful, try it again and see if the group can get to a perceived unity more quickly. Between repetitions of this game, it helps to give a little time before starting. Not so much time that they start preconceiving their ideas, but
78 Texas Tech University, Matthew O’Neill, December 2020 enough time that they don’t just repeat the last thing they did. I have noticed that students will often do this if they were given a cue to create something different in such close proximity to their last idea. They will just continue doing almost exactly what they just played.
Tuning PolyRhythmic and PolyTemporal Space Textures can be quite difficult.
If it is not at all working when you ask the group to try this, break them into trios or even duos, and then work back up. It might take a few sessions, but make sure to add a few of runs of this game each session. It could be as short as one to two minutes.
Antiphonal Elisions
This game and its variations should be played with duets and trios before attempting quartets, quintets, and higher. If your group has an easy time playing effect quartets, then start at trios, likewise if your group can play trios with ease, start this game with duets, then move up to larger groups. If your ensemble finds any of this easy, later try it with larger groups. To prepare, play a round or two of Pass the Sound while in a circle or other geometric shape, then play Pass the Duet.
Directions:
This game is simply the trading off of groups. Play this game with two groups of musicians on opposing sides of the rehearsal space.
One group starts improvising together for a short while, maybe 45 seconds to a minute; then, they stop, and the other group begins. The tricky part is that they have to try eliding this transition as seamlessly as possible. The second group to go needs to
79 Texas Tech University, Matthew O’Neill, December 2020 be all ears, anticipating from the sound of the other group for when they will stop, and be ready to jump right in. Let it go back and forth a time or two, and stop them if there are gaps. If there are, have the group use the techniques used in Pass the Duet to fix gaps in transitions between players can be applied here if there are pauses in between exchanges. These were to assign a person in each group to nod the other group in. Try again, if good, stop and have them try again with just looking, and after a while, the groups will be able to transition smoothly without a leader and later with their eyes closed.
Try it a few more times with different orientations of the players. Variations of this game include; using three smaller groups in a triangle across the room, or other shapes, or incorporating dynamics like in Dynamic Crossfading with Longer Gestures presented earlier.
Insurgent Feedback Loop Snow Ball Effects
In this game, the ensemble builds upon their active listening skills developed in the Soloist ON/OFF Concerto game. This game has two versions that are directional inverse of each other. The idea is to cause a positive feedback loop in either direction.
Towards Hyper Aggression
Directions:
The group sets up in a circle, and a member is chosen as the insurgent selector.
The players close their eyes and begin to improvise. The group by this point can make a free improvisation work, but on the off chance that their first try doesn’t work so hot,
80 Texas Tech University, Matthew O’Neill, December 2020 start them again and play the One Thing, Three Things game to springboard off into free improvisation.
After a moment or so, the insurgent selector taps a member on the shoulder, and this player begins to stop actively listening on purpose and begins to purposefully take a little more sonic space than they would normally. As people infringe upon this insurgent space they are asked to interrupt and get a little more aggressive to ward them off, after another moment, the insurgent selector taps another player, and they do the same as the first insurgent. The insurgent selector keeps this going until the improvisation becomes an out of control mess of unintelligibility. Let the improvisation cook like this for a minute or two, then stop and discuss how everyone felt during the improvisation.
Towards Hyper Passivity
Directions:
Try the game again; this time, do everything the same, but when the players are tapped on the shoulder, they give more space than they usually would instead of take more, and they allow themselves to be interrupted more. The insurgent selector keeps this going until the improvisation becomes a lifeless mess of pointlessness. Let the improvisation steep like this for a minute or two, then stop and discuss how everyone felt during the improvisation.
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Student Projects
As the Mysterium Free Improvisation Ensemble is a course for small ensemble credit at a university, it was necessary to create a plan for assessment. While free improvisation could be easily be considered the most subjective of musical studies and resistant to being taught or assessed, certain reasonable parameters can be addressed in an assessment plan. In addition to easily assessable requirements like performance attendance and class participation, I made it a requirement for students enrolled to create midterm and final projects. For these projects, the students are asked to create something original for the group to play. This can be in the form of a text, graphic, or open score. What they create could be a game, a situation, an experiment, a sonic- algorithm, etc. To place focus on the importance of process over product, my only requirements are that they show original thought using what they have learned about the nature of free improvisation, try to maximize performer agency, and have clear and simple instructions. The students always rise to the occasion and surprise me. To help students along with text and graphic scores, I set a day to discuss these types of notation. I bring in a copy of Pauline Oliveros’s Anthology of Text Scores to try a few and peruse the possibilities of text and mandala notation. I also make time to have the students watch Michel Plourd’s extremely informative YouTube videos on graphic notation.
While the notion of a composition project for the ensemble could certainly be considered at odds with the process of free improvisation, I have found that the projects allow students to see how the limitations they place on the free improvisation environment either impedes or evokes performer agency. Some restrictions, like role
82 Texas Tech University, Matthew O’Neill, December 2020 assignments, (e.g. accompanist, soloist, etc.) that may seem rather open will inhibit players far more than anticipated by imposing an identity on an improviser. Other times, more confining restrictions like “only play short sounds when you perceive a soft dynamic” can offer interesting avenues for the improvisers to be creative while not requiring the imposition of an identity. I have found through four semesters of teaching this course, that restrictions in student projects that maximize the ensemble’s potential to listen more intently are the most successful in getting the group to access a state of flow.
The final projects and some free-improvisations of the Fall 2019 ensemble were recorded and submitted alongside an abstract of my work to the International
Society for Improvised Music's 12th Annual Conference in Melbourne Australia, and we were fortunate to be accepted to put on a lecture-recital. With the world currently facing the COVID-19 crises, the conference has been postponed until December, and all Mysterium rehearsals have been shifted to online.
Double/Triple Exposure Improvisations
As classes moved online nationwide in the spring of 2020 due to the Covid-19 pandemic, our class projects could not be performed effectively with free live-syncing technologies online. To replace the experience, I asked the ensemble create triple exposure trio recordings, which were overdubbed improvisations. The seven members of the ensemble, myself included, were assigned to three trios; one where we played first, one where we played second, and one where we played last. A list of seven trios was compiled by randomly ordering everyone and making sure each member only
83 Texas Tech University, Matthew O’Neill, December 2020 played three times. Once a batting order was selected, we were each tasked with making an initial recording of an improvisation. We discussed the logistics of collectively making 21 separate recordings and agreed upon a four-minute window for all recordings.
Any instrument or sound source could be used but it had to be completely improvised in a single take. Once completed, the initial recordings were sent to me and then accordingly redistributed via email to the next person in the line-up for the specific trios. Upon receiving someone else’s recording, members listened to it through headphones on one device while simultaneously recording a new improvisation to it on a separate device. For this step, members once again could only do one take and furthermore were instructed to not pre-listen to the recording they received. This second recording was sent back to me and overdubbed in recording software into a new single recording of a duet.
Once completed, the duets were sent to their respective destinations and the last person of each trio repeated the process of listening to the duet on headphones and recording an improvisation to it on a separate device. The final recordings were sent to me and with recording software overdubbed with the duets to create the final triple exposure trios. For my personal second and third recordings, I made sure when overdubbing not to listen so as not to get a sneak preview. Likewise, all members of the ensemble were instructed to not look at the visual representations provided by many listening software programs of the recordings they received, as this would give them foreknowledge of when sounds were going to be played.
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For our final class meeting of the semester, we listened to the trios together and discussed them. Collectively we found the projects successful but far more difficult than freely improvising in the same space with one another. The lack of a physical spatial orientation to each other and the ease of overcrowding the recording due to the lack of peripheral visual cues present in live improvisation were consistently felt by every member. In addition the experiences of playing first, second, and third were discussed. Both pros and cons about each experience were mentioned. For instance, while ensemble members noted that playing first in the trio allowed them to play uninhibited by the sonic input of others, it also forced them to be conscious of what overcrowding the recording might do to later players. For playing second, members noted that some of the recordings they played to were too busy or not busy enough, causing them to either play significantly less or more than they had anticipated. In playing third, many noted that while there was more material to play to, the direction of the improvisation seemed set and subsequently found it both easier to play to but less free.
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CHAPTER V
CONCLUSION
I believe that free-improvisation is a powerful practice that helps musicians from all walks of life. After two years of teaching an improvisation small ensemble course at a university, I have witnessed many benefits of a dedicated improvisation ensemble that I had not previously considered.
Some of the more notable benefits to music majors gained by universities providing such an ensemble include:
• Helping performers sharpen their ensemble communication skills and giving them the confidence to play off the page. • Helping student composers write more organically by allowing them to play out their ideas in a live setting and gain a sense of flow in their writing. • Aiding music educators by providing them with the opportunity to work outside of strict pedagogical systems/theories, providing them with valuable perspectives on the importance of play in education through experience. • Helping students of idiomatic improvisatory musics (jazz, vernacular, etc.) by offering a safe environment in which to improvise using concepts and materials outside of the frameworks that they are accustomed to. • Giving musicology, music therapy, conducting, and composition students an additional ensemble setting to play in.
Further empirical research into the subject of free improvisation ensemble pedagogy could investigate deeper into the potentialities of the understanding of feedback systems for collective spontaneous musical creation. A study of such nature in particular would benefit from more work in the areas of how acoustical space, individual instrument characteristics/abilities, and individual improviser perceptions impact the free improvisation environment. In addition, more work on contemplative practices inside free improvisation pedagogy would be of value.
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In conclusion, I would like to stress just how vital improvisatory studies should be to music education. As post-secondary music education has been primarily focused on the reproduction of composed pieces of music, we have strayed from the very practice composers of bygone eras were fluent in; one in which the written score is, on a very basic level, a palimpsest of a temporally created musical utterance.
In a post-modern musical world that is void of any international musical style, free improvisation, can act as a potent, diverse, and empirical catalyst to reintegrate the temporal aspect of music creation into how we educate music majors.
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APPENDIX A
IMPROVISATORY PIECES
Introduction
While this document has focused on presenting a progressive set of free improvisation games, it also includes two pieces I composed that utilize a great deal performer agency. The first piece αέρας or (aéras), is a graphic score that incorporates text directives, and the second, Tok Pisan, is strictly a text score.
αέρας
Αέρας. Aeras is Greek for air or wind. The choice to use Greek is purely aesthetic. One of the major influences for this piece is the heavy wind one can regularly experience in West Texas. In Lubbock Texas, there is a distinct absence of the aural tranquility afforded by less windy locations. The muffled sound of air rushing past my ears has always been a beautiful yet highly consuming and disorienting phenomena. For a time when I was young, my family lived on the island of Oahu in Hawaii. Sometimes we would go hiking high in the mountains where it can be very windy. Often on a flat plain near KoleKole Pass, the wind would blow so hard the sea of grasses would lay flat, swirling and undulating like the ocean far below. I would get lost in moments like this, where the sound of the wind and the grasses were so consuming you would have to yell and read lips to be able to understand one another. In Lubbock, there has been more than once the wind has reminded me of those times. Here, I find that the sound of the tree branches whipping through the air along with the white noise envelopes of their leaves create a wonderful and
95 Texas Tech University, Matthew O’Neill, December 2020 unpredictable counterpoint to the sound of the plentiful dust eddying across the ground. These sounds can be quite captivating if we listen to them deeply and with attention. I often sit and try to listen for patterns in the sound of the wind, and I have noticed that sometimes through intense listening, intricate patterns can emerge from the combinations made from what I choose to pay attention to. Through improvising what is included and excluded from my attention, I can enhance my listening experience and listen to something unpredictable like wind as music.
Αέρας was written for realization by elements of the Texas Tech University
Mysterium Free Improvisation Ensemble and makes use of air sounds both prerecorded and live. The prerecorded air sounds are meant to explore the unavoidable and arbitrary sounds of the wind. The piece incorporates both prerecorded breath sounds made through piccolo, flute, clarinet, trombone, horns, and air sounds created by an air compressor. In addition, live air sounds are created by an air blowgun connected to 8-gallon air compressor that is hidden on stage. A musician using a midi controller and a laptop computer running the digital audio workstation Ableton Live plays the prerecorded sounds. The midi controller allows the improviser the freedom to use dynamics, articulation, and signal processing effects musically in real time. It also allows the musician to capture live sounds via the microphones set amongst the ensemble, manipulate them, and use them as further musical material at a later time.
This technique is very much an improvised real-time musique concréte.
While the work has a predetermined form and some predetermined musical material directives, it incorporates several of the free improvisation pedagogical games used in the ensemble rehearsals. These include two of the Tuning Games (Drones, and
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Space Chords with Mouth Filtering), Fade out, and Explode. While there is framework for improvisation, and thus is not free, the framework is relatively loose and allows for a good deal of performer agency. There is only one note, B-flat that is ever called for specifically, and no rhythm or meter present. The times given are suggestions and are to act as rough guidelines. Other games like One Thing-Three
Times, Antiphonal Elisions, or Pass the Sound could be used intuitively by members of the ensemble if they chose intuitively in the moment.
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Performance Notes
The time stamps at the bottom of the score are merely suggestions. The graphic notation is to be interpreted by the players. Dynamics should be generally observed, while direction inside of boxes should be adhered to.
The piece requires a performer to play an air compressor, a die-grinder, and an air gun.
All performance directions are written out on the score. The musician playing the air- compressor should be familiar with the air-release valve, how to interchange tools from the air hose, and how to disconnect the air hose from the compressor.
The air compressor should be hidden on stage and not plugged in.
A laptop with Ableton Live should be used to record, and manipulate live sounds, as well as play and manipulate pre-recorded air sounds of the musician’s choice. I suggest air sounds from wind instruments, however any breath or air sounds are permitted. In addition, the musician playing the laptop should play a no-input mixer and/or live-process ones sound.
The following pages provide the signal flow chart, a overview of an air compressor and its accessories, and the setup for the no-input mixer.
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Tok Pisan
Tok Pisin [talk pidgin] means to speak the pidgin language of Papua New
Guinea. Both my mother and grandfather were born in Hawaii and for a brief period I was fortunate to have lived there on the island of Oahu. Similarly to Papua New
Guinea, Hawaii has its own pidgin language called local by most, which is very much an amalgamation of many languages. Hawaiian Pidgin contains many words borrowed from Hawaiian, Filipino, Cantonese, Portuguese, English, Japanese, and Korean to name a few. It is a language that developed on the sugarcane plantations as a way for many people from diverse backgrounds to understand each other. Living in Hawaii, I heard people talk local in school, in stores, at the beach, etc. and my grandfather would from time to time speak a very old school pidgin. It’s richness, history, and specifically its efficiency has always fascinated me.
Hawaii also gave me the opportunity to hear the speech of a diverse array of tropical birds. I was always fascinated by their talk, and would wish I could speak it.
As I miss Hawaii and am saddened by what I know it has become, I often listen to field recordings of tropical island birds for reflection. These recordings have always had an eerie, yet comforting quality to me, and are like pictures with ghosts in them, they contain impressions of the forest’s spirit. It is if they are alive and dead at the same time.
I often listen to the Australian nature sound recordist Marc Anderson’s recording of dawn in the rainforest of West Papua. In the performance of this work I utilize transformations and samples of this recording.
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My musical work with live electronics in freely improvised environments has brought my attention to the sonic possibilities of the feedback loops of the no-input mixer. These second-hand instruments are capable of sounds that are often reminiscent of tropical birds, although they are not the easiest instruments to use when wanting to converse with other musicians. Tok Pisin is an attempt to communicate electronically in a sort of pidgin with the birds and forest of West Papua using these unwieldy electronic instruments. This piece is meant to be a contemplative and meditative endeavor. The musicians are asked to listen deeply while performing and try to connect to the static captured forest and its inhabitants in the recording, try to converse with them, and ask forgiveness from the spirits that are captured in it.
Instrumentation
Tok Pisan is scored for three No-input Mixers each with foot pedal for volume control. One Midi Controller with responsive triggers and knobs and/or faders, a
Laptop with Digital Audio Workstation, and a processed recording of Marc
Anderson’s New Guinea – Lowland Rainforest Dawn.
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Performance Notes
For this piece, the text score acts as a guided meditation. The musicians are asked to enter into a contemplative state and try to make their sonic utterances blend with the recording of the birds.
The signal flow for the no-input mixers is the same for all three. The following setup page show only the large mixer, however the instructions it provides applies equally to the smaller mixers.
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Tok Pisin
A - 0’0” - 3’45” No-input Mixers & Reverse Bird Loops Rainforest Recording
Listen to the birds Consider the meanings of their talk When you arrive at understanding Ask them something Listen to their responses Consider their meaning Mindfully participate in their discussion
Listen to the birds Allow the conversation to go where it wants to go Always remembering to listen Wait for them to ask you something Allow them to listen to your response If you could say anything to the birds say it now The birds are leaving
B - 3’45” – 5’30” No-input Mixers & Mixer Loops Crossfade to reverse
Wait…
Breathe Be the wind through the leaves Flow gently through the forest
Breathe Take care to not interrupt the memory of the birds Be mindful that you are now the very air the birds once used.
Breathe Listen and allow your sounds to blend with all other sounds you hear Calmly dissipate between the branches of the forest canopy
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A’ - 5’30” – 9’20” No-input Mixers & Forward Bird Loops Rainforest recording in reverse
Wait…
Breath Listen inside for the memory of the bird’s voices When you hear their ghosts, listen.
Breath You are the listening, flowing wind As the memories speak, let their words drift across you
Breath Allowing their words to resonate, wait for your chance to speak When it is right, offer a solemn plea to the birds for their forgiveness.
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APPENDIX B
STUDENT STATEMENTS
Alyssa Wixson
The Mysterium Ensemble is a wonderful, supportive group of students who are interested in exploring the possibilities of improvisation. For me, it has been an outlet in which to try out new ideas, including everything from extended techniques, to live electronic music, to nontraditional notation. Currently, about half of our ensemble, including myself, are composers, and being a composer can be an isolating experience.
This ensemble has given us a community in which to learn, create, explore, and experiment in live time, and I truly believe it has helped us to hone our unique voices, in addition to giving us another avenue of music-making to explore. As a composer, engaging in free improvisation on a regular basis has profoundly changed my approach to composition. Certainly, my scores have surface features that stand out as improvisationally influenced: for example, I give the performers room to make real- time decisions regarding pitch, rhythm, dynamics, and other parameters. On a deeper level, the formal architecture of my pieces has a certain freedom that I relate directly to improvisation. Even my compositional process feels improvisational; when I set out to compose a piece, I frequently imagine how it might play out in an improvisatory environment as part of my idea-generating practice, and this has allowed me to develop a highly intuitive, individual voice. An aspect of this ensemble that might come as a surprise is our frequent intellectual discussions regarding the nature of improvised music, which lead directly into topics such as communication, group
109 Texas Tech University, Matthew O’Neill, December 2020 decision-making, and the nature of music itself. I am a better thinker as a result of these conversations, and more prepared for my immediate future as a graduate student and a TA. During my graduate school interviews earlier this semester, the professors with whom I met often noticed and commented favorably upon the improvisation- derived features of my compositions. In particular, they were interested in my solutions to approaching rhythm, which stem from an interest in non-metric rhythms that I developed while playing with Mysterium. I have received generous financial offers from multiple graduate programs, largely as a result of these schools’ interest in my now improvisation-influenced compositional voice.
Brian Spruill
Mysterium has helped me as a composer through practicing real-time composition within an ensemble. This practice allows me to study how progression and forward momentum can successfully occur in non-tonal music. After each performance and rehearsal, we discuss what was successful musically and what factors resulted in a success. We are challenged to compose in the moment through musical elements like texture, timbre, rhythm, dynamics, and other non-pitched centric elements. As a performer, Mysterium pushes me to explore my instrument beyond techniques and tonalities I come across in composed music. Furthermore, it pushes me to be engaged musically with the entire ensemble. Rather than reading my part like in a traditional ensemble, I am challenged to listen to everyone in the ensemble in order to collaborate to create cohesive music that works within the aggregate sound of the whole. As a musician, Mysterium gives me a safe space to experiment with new
110 Texas Tech University, Matthew O’Neill, December 2020 sounds, techniques, and technology that help me develop my creativity and sound.
Through technological integration within the ensemble, I am given a vehicle to search for my own unique voice within music. More so, our study of non-traditional scores and contemporary works provides a distinct space to investigate the possibilities of graphic and text scores techniques.
Ryan Montemayor
Mysterium has definitely been one of the most challenging ensembles I’ve been a part of. Particularly when I was first starting out in the ensemble. As I continued to grasp the concept of what free improvisation was, I began to feel more comfortable as an ensemble member, which in turn benefited the entire group. Some of the major concepts that I believe helped me better understand free improvisation were listening and communication. When it came to listening, it took me a while to understand that in an ensemble of this sort you have to be listening more than you’re playing, otherwise you’re that one guy in the group that sticks out. As my ears continued to develop while playing in Mysterium, my ears were also developing in all of my other ensemble playing. Mysterium taught me that when playing in an group of any size, listening must be the priority of the performers if an effective performance is to occur. For example, whenever I am in wind ensemble, I find myself playing softer and instead listening to the voices around me to find exactly where I fit in the ensemble. I find that this makes playing in symphonic wind ensemble more enjoyable, and this came as a product of having to listen so intently in Mysterium. The second major musical concept that I am continuing to develop through my time in Mysterium
111 Texas Tech University, Matthew O’Neill, December 2020 is the concept of communication. Being able to communicate is pretty much non- negotiable in a free improvisation ensemble if you want to have an effective performance. Playing in Mysterium is where I learned how to really communicate with another performer, because it forced me to have to think in real time how to effectively contribute collectively to the music.
Chad Scarborough
I count my time in Mysterium as one of the most important experiences in my music education. It was the most pure opportunity I have ever received to put my understanding of music to work--to really apply my ears and my knowledge of what music is and what it can be. Forcing myself to make music with no preconceived notions of how that music would sound allowed me to appreciate more deeply the spontaneous compositional process, the importance of collaboration between musicians, and the raw sounds I was creating and experiencing. I believe it would not be an exaggeration to say that most of my appreciation for the music of now comes from my time in Mysterium.
A.J. Perry
In my short time in the TTU Mysterium, I have gained three skill sets I haven't been able to develop to the same degree in any other ensemble. These are; a sense of line, sensitivity to the LaRue SHMRG elements in music, and nonverbal communication in my playing.
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In my own playing and composition before my exposure to free improvisation, my ability to create long phrases was cut short to maybe four to eight-bar phrases. In my compositions, I couldn't develop ideas further than a five-minute piece, and even then, it sounded very sectional. We once discussed the idea that music can exist as water flowing in a river or stream; that as long as the river has water, it will flow. The river won't always be the same, but the water is connected to itself. On the contrary, this water could exist in different buckets or ponds, isolated from itself, thus representing unconnected ideas. This analogy has proved helpful in both my improvisation and composition practice. It has also aided my work in the more traditional ensembles I play in, like my quintet and the wind ensemble. My ability to pull a line out of the air, either while improvising or composing, and spin it to become a more developed passage has grown tenfold after thinking in terms of free improvisation.
Likewise, there is a level of sensitivity to the LaRue parameters to music required. When I am improvising, I am can incorporate any small set of SHMRG elements that I like, either individually or in combination. As a typically monophonic instrumentalist, Bassoon primarily, I can only fill so many rolls at a time and in improvising I need to have an awareness to all five. What sound am I contributing, what harmonies (if any) are we creating, am I playing a melodic line? Is there a melodic line? What is the nature of our present rhythmic vocabulary? Where are we going? Or where are we coming from? To name a few. This type of listening has also contributed to my nonimprov playing, especially in chamber music. I find myself asking these same questions. My answer to these questions determines how I am going
113 Texas Tech University, Matthew O’Neill, December 2020 to communicate to other musicians. Am I leading, am I following? All these were never at the forefront of my playing. I used to just play my parts from top left to the bottom right and only play the ink. Playing in a free improv ensemble has been a great way to elevate my listening, communication, and ensemble skills.
Landon Reese
Mysterium was my first improvisational experience as a musician. Being a classically trained trumpet player that very interested in jazz however, I had no idea how to improvise or even where to start. Mysterium taught me how to use my ears, and how to create interesting improvisational lines as I went. This class was very informative and opened up my ears and my mind to new things I wouldn't have otherwise been exposed to. Now that I've been playing in the jazz bands at Texas Tech for a while now, I am very thankful for the training Mysterium has given me to be successful. Improvising is now much more comfortable. Through my experience with
Mysterium, I have been able to develop my own unique pedagogy when it comes to improvising on the trumpet. Mysterium taught me to have a more "free improv" in my playing, and thus not constricting it solely to modes, scales, or even anything. This background sets me apart in a unique way from the other trumpets here at Texas Tech.
Mysterium has been an essential part of my development as a musician, and I am grateful that I had the opportunity to perform with that ensemble.
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Briana Dunn
As a master’s student in flute performance, I found being a member of
Mysterium very liberating. Not only did it just give me more opportunities to perform, but it also brought confidence to my other group and solo performances at Texas Tech.
I received a bachelor's in flute performance from Texas State University in 2012 and was fortunate enough to meet Matthew O'Neill during that time. I remember when
Susan Allen visited our school with her CalArts free improv ensemble and thought they were fantastic players both as individuals and even more so, as a group. Once I graduated with a performance degree, it was challenging to make myself practice and audition for professional orchestra positions knowing how competitive and cut-throat that culture can be. So I basically didn't touch my instrument for 4 years except for the occasional wedding gig. I finally came around to applying for graduate school and convinced myself to fall in love with the flute again. After I found out Matthew was going to offer a free improvisation ensemble, I jumped on it! Graduate school is intimidating and even more so after taking a few years "off." What I can say about my two years in Mysterium is that it gave me the confidence and freedom to perform from the heart. The 'cherries on top' of the experience were the other enthusiastic musicians in the ensemble who had a wide range of expertise. (freshman undergraduates all the way through experienced graduate students). Playing together, we were able to have so many strong moments that we even surprised ourselves with how we sounded! It was all due to Matthew's guidance as a supportive, non-judgmental, and inspiring leader, as well as everyone's willingness to let their guards down and listen to the space between us! I feel that every university should offer this sort of experience for
115 Texas Tech University, Matthew O’Neill, December 2020 all music majors -- performers, composers, educators, etc. -- because it provides an outlet for many of the skills and knowledge being taught in other areas of music.
There are so many facets of our music education that students may not be able to apply to their actual music-making, and this is just what they're missing. I am forever grateful for the memories made, friendships built, and musical creations through the
Texas Tech Mysterium Ensemble.
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APPENDIX C
JAN LARUE’S CUE SHEET FOR STYLE ANALYSIS (SHMRG)
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