Improvisations: a new sub-forum?

[Gardener]

I just seem to think that not many people really understand the spirit of improvised music. Improvised music has a heart of it's own. Maybe it's comparable to written music, but it certainly does not mean the same to the "composer" as a written work. To me, they are distinct. Improvisations are good the first time. They can be recorded. But it's not fun to try and notate them and play them over - it's just not the same because it's not improv anymore. Written music is INTENDED to be performed more than once.

Well, not all written music is intended to be performed more than once. Personally I like all my pieces to be performed, but I'm perfectly happy with a single performance. The reason I write them down is not so much to enable a repeated performance, but more that it gives me the ability to influence many musical details to a fine degree, while still keeping a larger structure in mind, and the ability to focus the musical direction of a piece on something clearer and more distinct than I'd get when playing without a score. But the borders really aren't strict in this respect. The amount of detail you have pre-arranged and fixed can vary a lot, independantly of whether you write the music down or not (even though not writing anything down gives you some limit on the number of things you can accurately control as a "composer"). Between a totally aleatoric composition and a very predetermined improvisation, anything is possible.

Last spring I wrote a piece for guitar, viola and live electronics which was written for one single performance, for specific performers, with specific equipment, in a specific room. Most of it is written down, but a lot of that couldn't be understood by anyone but the performers for whom (and with whom) I wrote it. A performance by other people at another time in another room would (although technically possible) be quite impractical, and not really the point of the piece. What's the difference between such a thing and an improvisation where lots of things are agreed on before the performance between the performers? It also contained freely improvised "pieces", by the way, which raises the question: How long does an improvisation have to be to count as a separate piece within a "concert program", instead of an "improvised part" within a "composition"? Are the boundaries between sets of pieces that form a program and one piece made of several parts not extremely vague?

Sure, a "totally free" improvisation is somewhat different, but I hope nobody here sincerely believes that we are ever "totally free" when improvising. We just might not actively notice the restrictions and boundaries we have placed around ourselves. Every kind of musical performance is a mixture of artistic freedom and determinism/conventions, the question is merely the balance and where the main conscious focus lies.

That being said, for my personal practice, I -do- make a distinction between improvisation and composition. This mainly depends on the mindset with which I approach a piece/performance. But this distinction can be quite ambiguous at times, and may be totally different for somebody else.

[Gijs]

I understand that notion that it can sometimes be ambigious whether or not something is a composition or an improvisation. Yet i think this only accounts for a small percentage of the improvised music/ composed music. I think a lot people understand the distinction between a improvisation and a composition in the way i mean it in this context. Futhermore I think the people who will post there improvisations in a sub-forum for improvisations will be people who have done and recorded something wich they call an improvisation on there respective instruments and therefor the problem of distinction will be lost. The discussion of the that small percetages of pieces wich are ambiqious is theoratically interesting, but practically i don't think it's an implication for the forum.

Thuogh like i've said i will make a improvisation journal/thread soon and i hope that people with the same interest will post there improvisation in the threat and we can talk about it in this form.

[jujimufu]

Go go gardener rangers!! *tuuu tuuu tuuu tuuu tuuuu*