Improvisation

by Andrew Gordon Middleton

The meaning of the word ‘essay’ has a very different sense today than it did when Michel Montaigne first used it to describe his writing exercises. This is unfortunate but not so surprising. History has a tendency to clean up the edges. According to the Oxford American Dictionary the word still includes the original meaning: (formal) an attempt or effort. But then this is a dictionary and we don’t really expect it to reflect any normal usage. If you told your friend you were writing an essay today he is unlikely to rat you out. Your mother would hardly discourage your involvement in this doubtful enterprise.

An essay to M. Montaigne may not have been a dangerous art form but neither then was it a sure bet. It was an attempt whatever that meant to him or to you. This might mean to us that it is something that doesn’t have to have the codified form schoolchildren learn and learn to hate. It might also mean that it can fail horribly, not just fail in some mildly insipid way. Of course mild and insipid is not forbidden in any sense of the word as I understand it but then I am perhaps biased away from trying towards these traits. Exciting doesn’t have to be eXciTing! but then one might hope it is not insipid. At least not in any terribly uninteresting way.

All of the preceding musing is inspired by a workshop I attended this afternoon at the Casa del Popolo as a part of their Suoni per il Popolo festival. Ken Vandermark and Paal Nilssen-Love had agreed to talk about their approach to improvising and music in general. Their comments were very interesting for me. Vandermark said that he would rather play with people who were interested in pushing themselves, trying something new and willing to risk failure, a train wreck as he said. And when you get on stage without preset songs you do risk failure (and they laughed and remembered some train wrecks they’d inflicted on people). This has always supposed to have been one of the exciting things about live improvisation but even this is something of a chestnut. Poetry is inspiring. Moving pictures are romantic or sometimes funny. He made the comment that often he finds it very interesting to listen to some of the (in his example) jazz greats before they found their voice. At this point in their career they are experimenting and messing around (if these aren’t the same thing) and trying to find who they are without knowing who they are (if this statement isn’t pure drivel and repetition)

There is something about history that doesn’t abide such deviance. How do we know if we have a Rembrandt in our vault or a fake? Well we look at his brushstrokes and we compare these with accepted works; we look at his subject matter and decide if this was someone he would’ve painted. We compare the uncertain with the known. We try to limit the unknown to the known. So we make up rules after the fact about how Rembrandt would or would’ve painted. Maybe we need to agree on how he painted so we can satisfy some insecurity we have about whether or not to like the painting in question or to pay ten million dollars for it. Perhaps it comes down to a question of simple practicality. We perhaps shouldn’t like all paintings out there and certainly should not agree to pay ten million dollars for them all. But what about the times when he was experimenting late night at his studio and he held his brush in his other hand? These are interesting aren’t they? Maybe they were failures but isn’t failure sometimes more interesting than a sure thing? It certainly sounds more exciting to me.

So is history designed in some ridiculous way to miss the point, to miss the real action, to miss the history? So-called Classical music is much maligned on this point. People see the men in dark suits anxiously trying to interpret what the strange comments on the score could mean to them. Our understanding of what baroque music sounded like is not unlike our understanding of what dinosaurs looked like. We have clues and we have suppositions. We have ideas! Yeah, well. We haven’t really got a clue. We may understand the instruments and the notation (be that what it may) but we certainly don’t understand the jazz they had at the time. They didn’t believe future generations would be interested in their music. They thought we’d have our own music after all. What they left us is what we would today call fake books. They improvised the bass line and embellished the vocal line (so we hear) to the point that we have as much idea of what they played as if we only left behind our fake books so people would understand Miles Davis or John Coltrane.

But then our music schools can certainly teach you to play Coltrane’s changes. They can tell you what Charlie Parker did. We can tell a real Rembrandt from a fake. We can tell you the correct way to play Beethoven. They can certainly make Beethoven safe and boring. We can tell you how to write an essay too. It has a very clear structure, a topic even a topic sentence—often called a thesis for those who like to keep up on their jargon. It has a beginning, a middle and an end. Like history. . . . Which is to say it has a point. Unlike history. And never minding history, it can fail. Most unlike history it is most interesting because failure is an important option. It makes us try. Maybe that sounds better in French.