Becoming an improvisor (A Draft Section from my Thesis)

This is another section from my thesis which concerns the ways that free improvisors engage in the creation of a group identity and how they exclude audiences. I thought it would be interesting for anyone who wants to know my work to see how I integrate theoretical concepts into my work

Becoming an improvisor and protecting the boarders of free improvisation.

In their seminal work ‘Gender Trouble’ Judith Butler argues that ‘what constitutes through division the ‘inner and ‘outer’ worlds of the subject is a boarder and boundary tenuously maintained for the purposes of social regulation and control.’ (Butler 1990, 182) How can this this line of demarcation be drawn within an artistic community? To understand this we must examine the ways in which membership of the group is enacted and how that which exists outside the group is defined. This process (called ‘foreclosure’) is itself an exclusionary and hierarchal form of thinking as those who exist outside the group formed through this process exist in ‘a domain of abject beings, those who are not yet ‘subjects,’ but who form the constructive outside to the domain of the subject.’ (Butler 1993, xiii) The group who exist outside of the foreclosure (audience, in this case) help formulate the group contained within (‘artists’) while being lesser by the act of being defined as ‘outside.’

The act (or set of actions) of becoming an improvisor and protecting it’s borders takes many forms. The first of these is through practice and experience. For instance Simon H. Fell prefaces his discussion of the tensions present between freely improvised and scored music with a discussion of his experience of playing, arguing that this provides him with an insight that validates his research, stating that ‘my research is therefore underpinned by long-standing and eclectic experience of actually playing improvised music.’ (Fell 2015, 188) [emphasis added] Likewise in discussion with Pamela Burnard in her book ‘Musical Creatives in Practice’ (Burnard 2012) David Toop is keen to situate his own improvisational practice within a lifetime of playing music. (Burnard 2012, 9) To become an Improvisor one must Improvise however one must have ‘a long standing and eclectic experience of actually playing’ or even an undefined but lengthy history of experiential engagement within the community of free improvisors to become an improvisor. This is, obviously, an impossible circle for any individual out with the demarcation of ‘improvisor’ to square. This tendency towards reliance on skill and practice comes to the forefront in how improvisors discuss ‘practice’ and solo playing. Derek Bailey argues that ‘it is clear in solo playing that the instrument achieves a special potency and it’s importance to this kind of music-making is at it’s most obvious here.’ (Bailey 1998, 109) Further, Bailey argues that ‘special instrumental techniques’ (Bailey 1998, 109) are central to this kind of playing and while discussing the relationship of the improvisor to their instrument he argues that ‘technically, the instrument has to be defeated.’ (Bailey 1998, 101) This is exemplified by Ronnie Scott who states that ‘I practice to become as close to the instrument, as familiar with it, as possible. The ideal thing would be to be able to play the instrument as one would play a kazoo.’ (Baily 1998, 101) while Burnard refers to ‘improvised creativity’ interacting ‘with the idiomatic morphology of the instrument, or [that it may] may consist of deliberately finding new ways to play the instrument.’ (Burnard 2012. 5)

In addition to the centring of virtuosity another issue arises for inclusion of and audience participation in improvisation in the ways in which the act of improvisation is discussed. Rod Paton describes one of the components of improvisation as ‘a mental or psychological trigger which suspends reality or literal thinking in favour of the imagination…and the mind is therefore able to travel, not exactly into the unconscious, but into a kind of suspended state between conscious and unconscious.’ (Burnard, 2012, 13.) This is echoed by Ronnie Scott who describes improvisation in the following way ‘what seems to happen is that one becomes unconscious of playing, you know, it becomes as if something has taken over and you’re just an intermediary between whatever else and the instrument.’ (Baily 1998, 52) Additionally Even Parker describes Christine Jeffrey’s contribution to The Music Improvising Company as ‘a combination of trance and whimsy’ (Baily, 1998, 96) while Cardew stated that ‘When you play music, you are the music’ and that during improvisation ‘two things running concurrently in haphazard fashion suddenly synchronise autonomously and sling you forcibly into a new phase.’ (Cardew 1971, 126) Though Cardew offers us a sense of movement within his discussion of the act of improvising, a metaphor that calls back to the physical world rather than abstract ideas of voluntary self effacement or trance states, he none the less offers no actual method for entering this state.

If improvisation relies on years of practice, a high level of virtuosity and the ability to experience altered states which can only be achieved through the act of improvisation then the freedom that Fell identifies as a fundamental component of improvisation and the experience of improvisors (Fell 2015, 187) is not shared with the audience, the ‘ideally egalitarian’ (Fell 2015, 188) and non hierarchal nature of improvisation is experienced only by those who can be elevated to the level of improvisor.

The centring of skill within improvisation has critics within the field of free improvisation itself. An example of this is when John Stevens argues that ‘studying formally with a teacher may be the right way to achieve certain specific aims, but to do only that is a very distorted way of approaching a musical instrument.’ (Bailey 1998, 98) Likewise Cardew criticises technical brilliance by arguing that ‘elaborate form and brilliant technique conceal a basic inhibition, a reluctance to directly express love, a fear of self exposure.’ (Cardew 1971, 129)[1] However both these objections themselves offer no way for audiences to become artists and offers greater freedom only to those already accepted within the community of free improvisors

In his foundational work on Liberation Pedagogy ‘Pedagogy of the Oppressed’ Paulo Freire argues that ‘the radical requirement – both for the individual who discovers himself or herself to be an oppressor and for the oppressed themselves – [is] that the concrete situation which begets oppression must be transformed.’ (Freire 2017, 24) We have to accept that the one of the key tasks that we must undertake if we are to liberate others and to allow them to begin the process of overcoming their own oppression is to transform the ‘concrete situation’ that helps bring this oppression into existence. If we ask to what degree free improvisation engages in this process we must argue that free improvisation, as it stands, offers no means to achieve liberation for audiences and becomes a form of work which is forced upon them.

[1] This quote itself displays an unexamined form of hierarchal thinking in that it exists within a tradition of men eroticising inanimate objects (in this case an instrument.) Taken in conjunction with the imagery of speed, energy and movement used by Cardew in this piece it may become possible to accuse him of sexism. Indeed if we recall the ‘combination of trans and whimsy’ Even Parker sees in Christine Jeffery’s work as well as the lack of female voices in Bailey’s seminal work on improvisation it may be possible to ask questions of the relationship Free Improvisation has with gender.

References.

Bailey, D. (1998) Improvisation: It’s Nature and Practice in Music. USA: Da Capo Press.

Burnard, P. (2012) Musical Creatives In Practice. Oxford: Oxford Scholarship Online.

Butler, J. (1993) Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex.’ New York and London: Routledge.

Butler, J. (1990) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York and London: Routledge Classics.

Cardew, C. (1971) Treatise Handbook. In Prévost, E. (ed.) Cornelius Cardew: A Reader. Matching Tye, Copula. 2006

Fell, S.H. (2015) A More Attractive Way of Getting Things Done: Some Questions of Power and Control in British Improvised Music. Contemporary Music Review 34(2-3) p. 187-196

Freire, P. (2017) Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Translated from the Portuguese by M. B. Ramos. UK: Penguin Modern Classics

Photograph by Kamal Badhey

Speaking Out.

This constitutes a redrafted form of a piece of writing I had considered worthless. That I had considered it worthless speaks of the very oppressive systems which limit our ability to speak of ourselves within an intersectional framework. Our selves are of no worth within an academic framework which seeks to silence us and to take upon itself the model of the 'correct' way to theorise.

Speaking out is an act of rebellion.

Why read theory when we are hungry: Reading with and through bell hooks and Hélène Cixous.

This is a narrative of my first exposures to critical theory. This is not a narrative confined to academic settings. This is a narrative which is set on trains, in the waiting rooms of Gender Identity Clinics and in dark corners of public houses which constituted some of the few places where I and those like me where told explicitly that we where safe. This is a narrative of theory as liberation, as the measuring out of my (and other’s) confinement and the search for a way out.

In ‘Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom’ bell hooks[1] states that ‘I came to theory because I was hurting-the pain within me was so intense that I could not go on living. I came to theory desperate, wanting to comprehend-to grasp what was happening around and within me. Most importantly I wanted to make the hurt go away. I saw in theory then a location of healing.’ (Hooks 1994, 59) I was desperate, I was hurting and I came to theory and found a way to understand the forms of violence that surrounded me. I found in theory a way to become the subject of my own analysis.[2] Theory allowed me to move beyond the condition of ‘living under the sign of the ‘unliveable’ (Butler 1993, xiii) and to create a space in which I could be, in which I could live.

‘The pain within me was so intense that I could not go on living.’

Theory gave me the tools to fashion an identity which stood in opposition to that forced on me as a Genderqueer person, an identity enforced by medical gatekeepers who withheld treatment for those who were not deemed to be performing their gender properly. Butler allowed me to understand that gender is an ontology without a core, an ontology sustained through its performance, a series of ‘fabrications manufactured and sustained through corporeal signs and other discursive means.’ (Butler 1990, 185) I was being asked to enact and enforce a boundary which constituted me as other, as non-subject. Butler gave me a way to form an identity which forsook ‘a sense of ‘the normal’ (Butler 1990, 189) to ask ‘what kind of gender performance will enact and reveal the performativity of gender itself’ (Butler 1990, 189) and to enact my own subversive performance of gender.

For people living with oppression theory becomes not an abstract tool but a way to ‘name our pain and to theorise from that location.’ (hooks 1994) To read in hooks of a woman who found release in theory and to tell hooks that before this point ‘there has been so much hurt in me’ (hooks 1994, 73) is to see myself finding a model for not only the pain but the radical possibilities that had been formulating within myself.

To reiterate: theory gave me the tools which allowed me to understand that I was living within a system of oppression and the tools to critique these systems, to escape their control and to form a stable sense of self which sits in opposition to them. Theory gave me life.

There is a tension in the examination of my own relationship to theory. This tension arises when moving from a discussion of self to a discussion of others. A critical understanding which frees me but not others fails to fulfil the ‘radical requirement’ (Freire 2017, 24) Freire identifies as a central component to liberation, the need for the systems that create oppression to be overthrown.[3] This is something I have tried to do in my life, the real lesson of critical theory, and something that I knew before I read Freire. As bell hooks states: ‘When our lived experience of theorizing is fundamentally linked to processes of self-recovery, of collective liberation, no gap exists between theory and practice’ (hooks 1994, 61) the separation of theory and praxis only exists if we see theory as a discrete process which comes into being by the process of naming and learning[4] (hooks 1994, 61/62) but, as Cixous makes plain ‘We are in the burning bush. We are born in the burning bush…We are nailed fast by events.’ (Cixous 2005, xvi) To exist within systems of oppression is to be ensnared with or without recourse to theory. Theory is not a practice which occurs within academia and which academics must somehow find a way to translate into action out with the academy, it is a process and a way of being which liberates us as both individuals and as a collective. It is a process and a way of being which allows us to see that we are constructed and to call to those who would oppress us and demand that they acknowledge ‘the seams and sutures in yourself.’ (Stryker 2011, 86)

[1] In both the body of the text of this chapter and in my references I have chosen to respect the form bell hooks asks for her name to be written. I feel that there is a degree to which I must apologise for being a white academic using her writing without reference to the community she specifically addresses. This would be compounded by misrepresenting her identity.

[2] ‘This exclusionary matrix by which subjects are formed thus requires the simultaneous production of a domain of abject beings, those who are not yet ‘subjects’ but who form the constructive outside to the domain of the subject.’ (Butler 1993, xiii)

[3] I am reminded of an act of radical liberation pedagogy. I was unemployed and applied for a temporary loan while waiting on benefits, knowing I would spend hours in this process I took a copy of ‘Gender Trouble’ with me to read again. While waiting with a group of women one asked what I was reading and when I told her she asked what it was about. I explained Butler’s theories, and this sparked a truly radical conversation which resulted in several of them women vowing to change how they brought up their children in response to Butler’s work. Theory is a tool of the oppressed to achieve liberation and that ‘any theory that cannot be shared in everyday conversation cannot be used to educate the public (hooks 1994, 64)

[4] Of importance here is hooks’ observation that the act of naming is a privileged act which ‘may obscure what is really taking place’ and can be said to constitute part of the structure of white supremacy. (hooks 1994, 62-63)

References:

Butler, J. (1993) Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex.’ New York and London; Routledge Classics.

Butler, J. (1990) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York and London; Routledge Classics.

Cixous, H. (1994)Preface: On Stigmatexts by Hélène Cixous, in Cixous, H. (1994)Stigmata Translated from the French by Eric Prenowitz. London and New York: Routledge Classics.

Freire, P. (2017) Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Translated from the Portuguese by M. B. Ramos. UK: Penguin Modern Classics.

hooks, b. (1994) Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York and London; Routledge.

Stryker, S. (2011) My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage. Kvinder, Køn & Forskning Nr 3(4), pp. 83-96

'Oh God, do I Have to Travel?'

I promised more on my experience of the Sonic Rebellions conference in Brighton so here we go...

'Oh god, do I have to travel?'

I hate traveling. In her TED talk Hannah Gadsby speaks about how, as a neuro-divergent person, things which terrify others leave her untouched but that otherwise day-to-day things fill her with terror. Most things that are boring fill me with terror: going to work, meeting someone for coffee, speaking to friends and on and on. My sister told me recently that as a child I went through life frightened of everything, I still do but curiously not when these things are what others would find terrifying but I had to travel.

I don't travel well. I was panicking on the bus to Haymarket Station, I was panicking on the platform waiting on the train to London. I panicked on the train then when I got into London I panicked afresh, not sure I knew how to get from King's Cross to Victoria (for those who have not done this journey a million times you hop on the Underground for a few stops.) When I got to Victoria I panicked while waiting on the train to Brighton. I stood on the concourse muttering to myself and stroking the handle of my umbrella. When the platform was called with two minutes to spare I ran across the station trying not to scream.

I don't travel well.

When I Stand Up Everything is Easy.

I presented on the second day of the conference. The only thing that bothered me was that I may have forgotten my presentation so I buried my USB drive deep in my jacket pocket beneath my phone and triple checked that I had copied it correctly onto the desktop before sitting down to hear Markus Hetheier's talk on the Manchester DIY Electronic Scene.

It came my turn to stand and address a packed room and suddenly everything was easy. That's the odd thing, waiting on a connection in Victoria Station is terrifying, delivering a theoretically complex presentation to a room of upwards of thirty people is easy.

So What?

I wanted to take the time to talk about my experience of being an autistic scholar attending a conference so far from the things that ground me and help me cope with the daily pressures of an neurotypical world.