On Reception of Improvised Music James Dennen The genuine artist lives only for the work, which he understands as the composer understood it and which he now performs. He does not make his personality count in any way. All his thoughts and actions are directed towards bringing into being all the wonderful, enchanting pictures and impressions the composer sealed in his work with magical power. —E.T.A. Hoffman ([1815] 1919:69; in Goehr 1994:1) Something of the musician’s own “character” will be heard in the choices he or she makes, in the patterns of emphasis that constitute a performance style. So it is that his or her own “subjectivity” appears. —Naomi Cumming (2000:9) In the great room of a house perched in the green hills above Oakland, California, a six-year- old girl, playing quietly by herself, hums along with music that her father plays on the hi-fi. As the song evolves into something she no longer recognizes, the young girl stops humming but continues to listen, secondarily, as the tune becomes strange and dissonant, eventually trans- forming itself into a concatenation of bizarre squeals and squawks unlike anything she’s ever heard. Suddenly, and unexpectedly, the song changes again, back to the song she unconsciously recognizes and, recommencing her humming, the young girl notes a sense of having returned to a place she remembers.1 The song is a version of John Coltrane’s “My Favorite Things,” recorded live at the New- port Jazz Festival in 1963, which the father treasures not only because of the pleasure he gets each time he plays the track but also, and in particular, because he attended the event, when the 36-year-old sax-playing luminary, at the peak of his career, graced the stage with this 17-minute version of the song (Coltrane [1963] 1993).2 What the father hears at once as an awesome record of virtuosity and a series of spiritual journeys departing from the popular song, the daughter, who recognizes the tune from The Sound of Music (1959), hears, without apperceptive inter- ference, as an adventure to unknown places replete with an unexpected triumphant return. To imagine such a moment, and thereby to uncover some of the various listening experiences shared (or exclusively felt) by a child and an adult—sophisticated (in this case) by an apprehen- sion of the improvisatory nature of the piece, an appreciation for its mastery, and a personal recollection of the originary event—is to begin to construct a typology across a wide range of modalities in the reception of improvised music. By isolating modes of listening that are unique to improvised performance—if in fact such uniqueness exists—a deeper understanding of subject 1. This scenario, which I revisit throughout the essay, is a fictionalized example inspired by a true story that a friend tells about her earliest exposure to jazz. It is intended principally as a way of isolating a limit subject in the young child listener. Dynamics of race, gender, and class—a little girl, the adult male living in a primarily white, high- rent district that overlooks many of the blighted (principally brown and black) inner-city neighborhoods of lower Oakland, the African American performer captured by recording, etc.—which are implicit in this example (and indeed in any concrete example), have been put aside in this essay, but are important areas for further consider- ation of improvised performance and its reception. 2. All examples (and corresponding time markers) in this essay are drawn from the live recording of John Coltrane at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1963. The original studio recording of John Coltrane’s “My Favorite Things” was released in 1960. TDR: The Drama Review 53:4 (T204) Winter 2009. ©2009 New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 137 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2009.53.4.137 by guest on 02 October 2021 formation, on the part of the listener within this dynamic, might be developed. Also at stake here are questions of immanence: that is, are there qualities specific to improvisation that can- not survive beyond the moment of performance? Distinguishing viability across the temporal and spatial divide between a live performed event and its corresponding recorded media, I am concerned principally with the effects of the temporal displacement that occurs when a piece of music is effectively frozen and transported to another time and place for its reception. Thus, sample “reads” of live improvised material—tapped to reveal potential social value that per- formed improvisation might have for its spectators3—will exclude phenomena specifically related to material liveness such as olfactive, haptic, nonsensory communal, and/or sonic/visual peculiarities of live reception, in order to probe possible participatory and/or emancipatory qualities of recorded improvisations in particular and the status of spectatorship within the ontology of performance in general. What Is Improvisation? Every action performed contains within it some element of improvisation. Offstage, this is obvious as most of everyday life unfolds in an unscripted manner, but with regard to actions framed explicitly as performance—such as theatre or musical performance—the issue of impro- visation is complicated slightly by actions (or components thereof) that have been scripted.4 Nonetheless, even during the most exhaustively scripted performance, a performer must improvise in the gaps between each predetermined action. If we take, for example, the instance of a theatre playscript, carefully memorized and rehearsed by an actor beforehand, upon close enough investigation, it is clear that between planning (no matter how thorough) and embodied performance the choices are literally infinite and therefore it is impossible to produce a scene, or even a single staged event, without some improvisation involved in its execution. This principle translates easily to any medium, including music; no matter how completely composed and carefully practiced, music in live performance must negotiate an unapproachable gap between the ideational and its material realization. Each time a phrase, or even a single note, is played there will be an improvised element in its production. This proposition is further supported when we consider the embodied aspect of much live musical performance wherein the musicians become part of the received object by staging themselves as “players” along with their music.5 This line of reasoning seems to have a rather unproductive endpoint in sight: if all possible performed actions can be appropriately considered improvised (with regard to some portion of 3. Though the terms “spectator” and “listener” are somewhat interchangeable when discussing reception under live conditions, in the reception of recorded music, there is only “listening” and no (material) spectating, for obvious reasons, and therefore there are no spectators of recorded music. As I am not discussing video-recordings, the exception does not apply and therefore the word “spectator” implies both spatial and temporal continuity between embodied performers and embodied spectators. 4. The division illustrated here—between “performance” and “everyday life”—is a simple one that does not incorpo- rate important distinctions outlined by performance theory, from Erving Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Every- day Life (1959) to Richard Schechner’s Performance Theory ([1988] 2003) to Philip Auslander’s Liveness (1999), and many others. I am limiting performance to the common use “staged” variety for the purpose of outlining, at the outset of this study, basic constituent elements of improvised performance confined to a more or less traditional (pre-performance studies) setting. 5. Again, I have attempted to simplify examples in an effort to clarify an elemental distinction between what is deter- mined prior to a performance and what is not. Thus, excluded from this illustration are forms of electronic and dig- ital music that operate under production conditions whereby human actions cannot alter a sound’s properties at the moment of its sounding—that is, where sound (re)production has been entirely digitized, and thereby effectively “pre- recorded.” Further, elements of musical performance that constitute or reference culturally determined aspects of a musical figure such as biographical detail, celebrity, identificatory politics, etc., have also been excluded. The latter will be referenced en masse under “subject-centered” listening below but otherwise left for future investigation of im- provisation and its reception. For a discussion of the relationship between the musical “work,” the performance, and mediated representations of the self during musical performance, see Philip Auslander’s “Musical Personae” (2006). JamesDennen 138 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2009.53.4.137 by guest on 02 October 2021 their execution), then it is also possible to frame any action, event, or set thereof, as an improvi- sation (and pay special attention to its improvisatory qualities) and therefore to engage in the reception of all events (whether onstage or off) as improvised. Thus, in an attempt to address conditions particular to improvised performance, it is necessary to eschew such a broad notion of improvisation (however indisputable) in favor of a more conservatively construed definition. Henceforth, “improvisation” will refer to performances, or portions of performances, specifically framed as such, that either depart from (or do not have) an explicitly predetermined structure therein. Further, it will be assumed that (adult) spectators have accurate knowledge of which portions of a given performance are improvised and feel confident in the accuracy of that knowl- edge. Improvisation, referring to the contemporaneous conception (composition) and execution (performance) of an idea, is the musical phenomenon with which I am concerned here.6 Two Types of Listening Returning to Newport 1963, we can begin to distinguish modes of reception that are unique to an improvised performance.