richard barrett
page three

I was wondering if you feel differently about jazz and pop music after having worked in the field of improvisation, with people such as George Lewis obviously influenced by jazz artists like Braxton.

When I mentioned jazz, I wasn't thinking of people like that. At that time, my experience with improvised music was very limited; since then, I've become much more involved with it. Let me put it this way: with popular music, or with the more traditional areas of jazz, the emphasis is not on getting lost at all; the music communicates by appealing to a sense of formal security. To a certain extent, you know what's going to happen next. If a pop song, for instance, happens to put a new twist on what is supposed to happen next, then that makes it very interesting. I think that a lot of the classics of pop music are based on that kind of principle; they depart just enough from the accepted form of that music that they make you prick up your ears and listen to it. The same goes for jazz, to a certain extent. I guess I became more interested in the music which didn't take the audience's expectations for granted, and which would attempt something which popular or jazz music cannot do, which is to contextualize itself within the framework of its own composition, so that previous listening experience would not matter. The various movements that take place within the composition are appreciated in relation to one another, and not in relation to something standing outside the composition.

I don't know if I would take such a solipsistic view of it nowadays, since the process of group improvisation is very far from the impression I might have been giving of myself as rather introverted. I guess that's one of the things that one learns from being regularly involved in improvised music.  

Who do you improvise with regularly?

Since 1986, I've been involved in the FURT Duo with Paul Obermayer, and we started off playing various kinds of instruments that we found lying around: our aesthetic was not being able to play. At a certain point we discovered that there was such a thing as samplers in the world, and that enabled a theater of virtuosity to come into being. We decided to retire for a couple of years after a couple of concerts that were abject disasters; we didn't let ourselves reënter the public domain until we had thought out our act better. But since 1991 we've been performing quite a lot; the work has been proceeding at pace. In my early twenties, I was involved in improvisation in London as well, but I always considered it a "down time" activity, rather than something more central. It was actually George Lewis who extended my activities in the improvisational sphere; since then, FURT has become much more compositionally oriented. It's not strictly improvisation in any meaningful sense these days. Paul and I work on structures in a way that a lot of filmmakers or choreographers work: instead of starting off with your material, you discover it by throwing everything into a box and seeing what falls out through the holes.

A couple of years ago, after I met George for the first time, he invited me to take part in a concert in Paris, where there were a number of improvisational luminaries performing. The one I got on best with, musically speaking, was Evan Parker, who had been a hero of mine for a long time. We've worked together a few times since. After coming to Holland, I got involved with a number of saxophone players, such as Peter van Bergen, and through him, the Loos group, and also Luc Houtkamp, who is a different kettle of fish, since he's using electronic devices as well. And of course, Mary Oliver and I have been working together for two or three years. The interesting thing about that partnership is that we both have our roots in contemporary composition, and the kinds of structural ideas which one finds in that area tend to spontaneously burst into an improvised piece in a way quite distinct from working with someone like Evan, who basically comes out of a more jazz-oriented tradition.  

Has your view of notation changed after having worked with musicians less grounded in written music?  

I wouldn't say that I myself was grounded in notation, really, since I wasn't a conservatory composer to begin with. I came to my conclusions about music before I could deal with notation. This goes back to the relation of the more marginal areas of instrumental playing with the central areas, those things that the instrument was built for. Improvisors, I suppose by definition, explore the ground between those two areas in a much more thoroughgoing way than most composers. I'm much more interested in knowing what George Lewis has to say about the trombone than what Xenakis has to say about it, for instance. When composing since the late eighties—I suppose this goes back to the cello piece—I like to think my way into the instrument I'm writing for as far as possible. The cello piece inaugurated a whole series of solo pieces for string instruments. It continues to this day, on the basis of trying to work out how the music of someone like George Lewis, or Paul Rutherford, or Ray Anderson, uses the instrument, how their music relates to the ergonomics of instrumental playing. Through George, I eventually came to an understanding of the trombone which is not an instrument I can play at all. When I was working with Andrew Sparling during the composition of the clarinet piece, I found that there's only so much you can achieve with consultations with a player: after all, if the player is coming up with the best ideas, they might as well write the piece themselves. So I bought a clarinet and annoyed my neighbors with it for a while, just to get a feeling of the physical meaning of making those kinds of sounds.

I would like to think that a performer who comes to the pieces with a sympathetic attitude is going to find that the difficulties have the necessities that I was claiming for them, that their energy is not being wasted. The music emerges from a consideration of the physicality of the instrument—performer relationship to such an extent that, in a strange sort of way, the music is very idiomatic. I use the phrase "radically idiomatic" to describe my attempt to extend the capacity of an instrument, a process quite distinct from, for example, going through Philip Rehfeldt's book on the clarinet and choosing extended techniques to place here and there. I treat the instrument as, on the one hand, a musical object, and on the other as something with a very important relationship to the performer, something with a history. The history of the instrument and the history of the instrument—player relationship are things that form my attempted return to first principles. Any performer will be able to play a C major scale more quickly and fluently than a quarter-tone scale, and this is the type of thing that interests me a lot. For example, I often write long stretches of unmeasured grace notes, buried within which is an obscure parameter which might be called the "ergonomics of pitch succession." If the player is taking seriously my instructions to play the phrase as quickly as possible, an internal rhythm will be produced, because the process of getting from one note to another is a great deal more awkward in some places than in others. In this way the physical fabric of the instrument and its player become part of the fabric of the music. It's something that is derived from improvisation.  

Dahlhaus has an essay on improvisation which expresses well, I think, one important reaction to it. He begins by describing the "musical work," a phrase which he might get from Adorno, referring to an autonomous, self-enclosed piece of art, like a painting or a sculpture; against this he contrasts improvised music, which had been going on throughout the Renaissance and before. Dahlhaus locates the appearance of the musical work in the eighteenth century's creation of the bourgeois concert hall; thus the musical work, with the concert hall's separation of the audience and the musicians, mirrors the stratification of the bourgeois society. Now this distance between audience and musicians, which is reflected in various formal principles of compositional construction itself, is an objectification; and Marx gives us the possibility of its reification and, finally, the danger of alienation. Thus the role of improvised music is two-pronged: on the social level, it removes the distance between the audience and the musicians; on the aesthetic level, large scale formal procedures are necessarily rejected, since the music's present moment is the only frame of listening for the listener/musician. It resembles serialism's moment-form with the difference that it is not systematic.  

But there's an emergent quality of large scale form in improvised music: a musician cannot simply determine it, but if the improvisation is succeeding, the formal shapes can emerge are just as interesting, and in their own way, just as involuted, as anything one could dream up in compositional terms.  

My question is, is there a political element in your improvisational music-making, an anti-bourgeois element? And secondly, is there a difference in aesthetic appreciation between a composed work and an improvised one—simply by virtue of having been improvised?

There are a lot of questions there; I'll deal with the last one first, which is that I often place myself in the situation of the listener not caring how those sounds got to be the way they are. Whether it results from deterministic, compositional practice, or from improvisation, is not something I worry about. It's possible to listen without making value judgements on what kind of process gave rise to the music at hand. The work that I do with Paul Obermayer, for example, involves by now such a complex interaction between what is improvised, what has been worked out, and what has emerged from improvisation and subsequently rationalized, that it's impossible even for us to say whether sounds can be characterized in terms of compositional or improvisational practice. I think it's quite obvious with a lot of my compositions that they relate more to the tradition of improvised music than to any classical music tradition.

Well let me put it this way. If one makes a strict separation between composition and improvisation, on the one hand you have something which is obsessively, precisely notated, and on the other you have a number of people going up in front of an audience, without having rehearsed, and off they go. Each situation is able to do things musically, structurally, that the other cannot. As far as I'm concerned, these two extremes are entirely complementary. I tend to see a change in atmosphere regarding the old arguments: composers saying improvised music is useless, since these guys are just making it up as they go along; the hard line improvisers responding, yes, you lot are just writing down sets of instructions and using musicians as your slaves. I think that one should really get beyond that view of it. A composition is not quite a set of instructions but a set of propositions, that if these actions were to be carried out, some kind of interesting music might result; on the other hand, nobody goes into an improvised performance having no idea of what they're going to do. If we go back to my old central subject of the structure of the imagination, there's very little to say that composition and improvisation are cognitively different.

The question of reification, though, is quite interesting. I agree completely with you, in the sense that improvisation per se resists the process of commodification which has infected most other forms of art.