We study improvisation.

This morning I had the pleasure of a short conversation over skype with some musicians from the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki. This group of artists has been participating for the past few weeks in an electroacustic improvisation workshop under the guidance of Luis Alejandro Olarte and Marianne Decoster-Taivalkoski. At the end of the workshop some of these musicians will be performing at the Helsinki Meeting Point, next week Thursday. By the way, I want to express how proud and honoured i am to give them an opportunity to experiment with all the work they have done during this period of study and research. Bacause that’s what they do, they study improvisation, applying their talent and intelligence and intuition to understand and expand the practice, the models and the issues involved in this art form.

At the beginning of our conversation I read them a quote from “Improvisation, It’s Nature and Practice in Music” by Derek Bailey, English avant-garde guitarist and leading figure in the free improvisation movement. The quote says:

“Defined in any one of a series of catchphrases ranging from ‘making it up as he goes along’ to ‘instant composition’, improvisation is generally viewed as a musical conjuring trick, a doubtful expedient, or even a vulgar habit.”

I mentioned in one of my previous post how the word improvisation has become so loaded, to the point of being emptied of meaning or plainly vulgarized. A kind of stigma or prejudice has been attached to the word, effecting the way the work is perceived and regarded.
As I see it, too often the amount of work, research, study, intellectual investigation, philosophical questioning invested in the practice of improvisation goes largely disregarded.