Cattle sing to the urban dwellers

[quantum]

... publishers publish.

[ted]

One of the most precious listening freedoms we have is complete autonomy to allow internal, personal imagery to expand as it pleases. Indeed, cattle are certainly present, within a naive, parallel perspective landscape. Like one of those rarely taken seriously as art except by children, who mostly know better than grown-ups in this regard, while reading children's books. Curiously, there is one such (Nonesuch ?) on the cover of my LP of Noel Lee playing the Ives first sonata. And then more curiously, bits of this actually sound like parts of the Ives.

In improvisation, it pays to be a child again, for whom metaphysical conceit is natural, before the Rollos of academic magisteria try to hammer it out of them on the anvil of "musical education".

But are the cows benevolent or sinister ? That is the critical question here.

[Bob]

How do you improvise like that?

[quantum]

Ted, thank you for sharing your observations. 

Often in my music making, I like reside in that zone in between definable meaning and undefinable haze.  That constant flow of sensory input that stimulates the mind to wonder, dwell and shift focus between fleeting moments.  The input of the listener is important to me, in that they engage what they hear and in doing so continue the lineage of creativity. 

Perhaps the disposition of these cows can be see to go either way, depending on the context of the listener.


Bob, mon capitaine may be ready to break open a bottle of Picard.

To me, it is about being intimately in touch with the creative flow, and not allowing inhibitions to prevent raw ideas from showing themselves. 

[ted]

To me, it is about being intimately in touch with the creative flow, and not allowing inhibitions to prevent raw ideas from showing themselves. 

Sadly, those inhibitions seem to be ineluctably present in close to all formally trained players, the very few exceptions being those who are lucky enough to have acquired the flow for themselves in their youth. I remember you said as much some years ago. I wish you had been wrong, but now I rather think the conjecture is true.

[Bob]

What are you think of though?  Chords?  Tone sets?  It's not just randomly hitting keys.

[ted]

What are you think of though?  Chords?  Tone sets?  It's not just randomly hitting keys.

That is a very difficult question to answer in any easily understood fashion about my own playing Bob, and I certainly cannot answer it for quantum, or anybody else for that matter. For myself, the nearest analogy is probably mathematical chaos, a function which is completely determined but unpredictable, resulting from a very complex set of feedback loops in the brain.

At the heart of it, I suppose you could say, is the "idea", but exactly what constitutes an "idea" is necessarily vague and beyond my ability to satisfactorily define. The things you mention, chords, sets, other musical elements such as phrase and rhythm, the haptic aspect, associated images, emotions, thoughts, memories and lyrics are components of an idea but they are not ideas in themselves.

Improvisational form for me implies a totally dynamic, fully determined, unpredictable yet non-random, serial generation of ideas. The results of a priori structured form and unconscious, random playing, seem equally uninteresting to me, although this is very much a personal view, the degree of order being itself a rightful creative choice like anything else in music.

One remarkably simple mode of thought is what I term the "cellular transition", which amounts to thinking about ways in which an idea might spring from the preceding one. If I play a cell, an idea, and repeat it imprecisely (imprecision is vital) parts of it will form the musical DNA of the next cell. The sound data of a cell is transformed into the dynamic instruction for the next, then the sound of that suggests instruction for another, and so on indefinitely.

This flow can be achieved at the conscious level and does not require a transformed mental state, "inspiration" or anything like that. It can be "practised" in the same way as anything else, chords, rhythms, technique, can be practised at the instrument. When I begin an improvisation this is a conscious process, but over about ten minutes (less as I get older) it morphs into an unconscious one in which the well known effect of becoming an observer or a channel ensues. If a block should occur, and it is normal for occasional blocks to happen, then all that is necessary is to revert to the conscious process.

That is what I think about, Bob, although I'm not sure "thinking" is quite the right word for it, and it may bear little resemblance to how others go about it.