Cheers!
an endless contortionist is a concept for creating based on the principals of free music in juxtaposition with meticulous composition.
Focusing on chaos, dysfunction, and disfigured beauty; every artist involved brings about a rejection and reinterpretation of themselves on their instrument.
Curated by M – each series features a unique particular lineup and concept.
Free
Freely improvised music, variously called ‘total improvisation,’ ‘open improvisation,’ ’Free music,’ or perhaps most often simply, ’improvised music,’ suffers from – and enjoys – the confused identity which its resistance to labeling indicates. It is a logical situation: freely improvised music is an activity which encompasses too many different kinds of players, too many different attitudes to music, too many different concepts of what improvisation is, even, for it all to be subsumed under one name.
Two regular confusions which blur its identification are to associate it with experimental music or with the avant-garde music. It is true that they are very often lumped together but this probably done for the benefit of promoters who need to know that the one thing they do have in common is a shared inability to hold the attention of large groups of casual listeners. But although they may share the same corner of the marketplace they are fundamentally quite different to each other.
Improvisers might conduct occasional experiments but very few, I think, consider their work to be experimental. Similarly, the attitudes and precepts associated with the avant-garde have very little in common with those held by most improvisers. There are innovations made, as one would expect, through improvisation, but the desire to stay ahead of the field is not common among improvisers. And as regards method, the improviser employs the oldest in music making.
Historically, it pre-dates any other music-mankind’s first musical performance couldn’t have been anything other than a free improvisation-and I think that it is a reasonable speculation that at most times since then there will have been some music-making most aptly described as free improvisation. Its accessibility to the performer is, in fact, something which appears to offend both its supporters and detractors.
Free improvisation, in addition to being a highly skilled musical craft, is open to use by almost anyone-beginners, children and non-musicians. The skill and intellect required is whatever is available. It can be an activity of enormous complexity and sophistication, or the simplest and most direct expression: a lifetime’s study and work or a casual dilettante activity. It can appeal to and serve the musical purposes of all kinds of people and perhaps the type of person offended by the thought that ‘anyone can do it’ will find some reassurance in learning that Albert Einstein looked upon improvisation as an emotional and intellectual necessity.
The emergence of free improvisation as a cohesive movement in the early sixities and its subsequent continuous practice has excited a profusion of sociological, philosophical, religious and political explanations, but I shall have to leave those to authors with the appropriate appetite and ability. Perhaps I can confine myself to the obvious assumption that much of the impetus toward free improvisation came from the questioning of the ‘rules’ governing musical language.
Firstly from the effect this had in jazz, which was the most widely practiced improvised music at the time fo the rise of free improvisation, and secondly from the results of the much earlier developments in musical language in European straight music, whose conventions had, until this time, exerted a quite remarkable influence over many types of music including most forms of improvisation to be found in the West.
Leo Smith speaks of free improvisation almost exclusively as an extension of jazz and Cornelius Cardew considers it mainly in terms of European philosophy and indeterminate composition. And both accounts are valid, each reflecting perfectly one of the twin approaches to free improvisation which took place in the sixties. They also indicate that for musicians of integrity, in either field, wishing for a direct, unadulterated involvement in music, the way to free improvisation was the obvious escape from the rigidity and formalism of their respective musical backgrounds.
Opinions about free music are plentiful and differ widely. They range from the view that free playing is the simplest thing in the world requiring no explanation, to the view that it is complicated beyond discussion. There are those for whom it is an activity requiring no instrumental skill, no musical ability and no musical knowledge or experience of any kind, and others who believe it can only be reached by employing a highly sophisticated, personal technique of virtuosic dimensions. Some are attracted to it by its possibilities for musical togetherness, others by its possibilities for individual expression.
…In all its roles and appearances, improvisation can be considered as the celebration of the moment. And in this the nature of improvisation exactly resembles the nature of music.
- Derek Bailey