The Ethics of Free Improvisation: Proposals for a Discourse of Free Improvised Music

The Ethics of Free Improvisation: Proposals for a Discourse of Free Improvised Music Cesar Marino Villavicencio Grossmann (bio) In the absence of pre-specified rules and prescriptive materials, free improvisation presents itself as impermeable to traditional analysis. Consequently, developing guidelines for analyzing free improvised music may be considered difficult. The thought of developing modes of talking about free improvisation comes from my personal experience as a performer of ancient music, namely the repertoire from the sixteenth until eighteenth centuries produced in Western Europe, the contemporary repertoire for my instrument, which is the recorder, and my experiences with free improvisation. The attempt to understand how similar music expressivity actually is, regardless of the style I am performing, seeded pursuing a PhD research to analyze this more deeply. That brought me to building an understanding by attempting to use a mode of thought, one that is subliminal in the entire ancient music repertoire, in free improvised music. This mode of thought is [End Page 33] rhetoric. In this paper, rhetoric is presented as a suitable area for establishing a discourse on free improvisation that is also useful in understanding its aesthetics. Examining my own development as improviser and studying the results from improvisation projects, this investigation proposes that the ethics of the social environment in which this music activity is realized is crucial for understanding the musical practice. The creation of form (res) and content (verba) collectively has uncovered ethics as the primary force in establishing the style of free improvised music. Ethics, the driving dynamism in rhetorical theory, helps us to understand this music aesthetically, and opens ways to develop an understanding that could become useful for the elaboration of pedagogical approaches. Also, it appears that the realization of this activity is important for developing individual expressiveness based on the comprehension and respect of the collective. The idea of finding a rhetorical perspective of free improvised music (FIM) came during the experiments I made in building an electronic interactive instrument during my studies at the Institute of Sonology in the Royal Conservatory, The Hague, The Netherlands. The “tool” used for testing the instrument’s interactive system was improvisation. Through the course of building the sensors and experimenting with the instrument, the role of improvisation itself changed from being the exploring medium to the explored one. It became clear, by analyzing my own behavior, that in the course of the musical improvisatory process the elaboration of structures, models and gestalts were apparently rooted in my past experiences with rhetorical music, namely the music from the sixteenth, seventeenth, and part of the eighteenth centuries, such as structural formalisms and principles of repetition, recapitulation, variation, etc. Although this could just indicate that human beings tend to deal with themselves in terms of their formal training, the possibility of having rhetoric embedded in my improvisations1 was a revelation that gave me the first impulse to put together a two thousand five hundred year old discipline—rhetoric—with another of just over half a century of existence—free improvisation. First this article will explain the contact with the more stylistic side of rhetoric, which I applied in the realization of an experiment with guided improvisation. After a short discussion on the terminology implemented for addressing the compound of elements employed for shaping the communication process with the use of sounds and a description of analytical approaches used in the past to describe FIM, we discuss proposals for building an understanding of FIM. Next, following an attempt to address the controversial issue of defining what actually the word “free” in the context of this music style actually [End Page 34] might mean, the contact with the deeper philosophical ambit of rhetoric and its concern with the development of eloquence through the concept of the virtuous man, vir bonus, is presented. In this manner, intrinsic aspects of rhetoric such as decorum, phronesis, and kairos are discussed within the ambit of collective FIM, pointing out that their role inside the realm of collective musical creation might signify that the aesthetic outcome of this musical practice is the result of its ethics. Heuristic Discoveries The genesis of what has become a very exciting path of discovery...