Creative Word: Wait
Worked with a musician today that worked with recently towards this improvisation we are performing and tried to find a better balance with our music. The whole thing is driven by very loud noise but still needed some contour to it. Obviously I could talk about balance that came from waiting for the right moments, but this isn’t a new concept to me so I’ll talk about something new that came from thinking about ‘waiting’. I have read some improvisation pedagogy that my professor let me borrow and I was extremely bored by it because all it did was try to dictate things that often occur in improvisations anyway: leaving space for other people, starting an improv by emerging from silence, etc. These are all valid, but do not really challenge people to be creative, the book tries to lead everyone to the same sound of improv. In this improv I asked this musician to emerge from noise with me. The improv is initiated by very loud and incessant noise/rhythms as opposed to the mysterious buildup that is common to most improvisations I have been a part of.
I want to bring this up despite the word being ‘wait’, because in my situation today, nothing very different would have emerged from it if we only followed the contours of the ‘average’ improvisation. ‘Wait’ did inform some good decisions throughout the piece, but the choice to use noise as our steady-state makes for a much harder to predict improvisation. I think the choice to move away from logical form of an improvised piece makes it sound more like a composition.
Creative Experiment: Asking Why
Here are some questions that are led to answers worth hanging onto. I didn’t make 10 good questions, but I tried asking why through the day.
Why do I want to do this piece so soon? I don’t want the result to be too refined, it is supposed to be chaotic and this time period is where some innovative gems live.
Why do I want to include a drummer? This drummer has a good sense of improvisation and contributes well to the noisy sound I want to make. If I did this without him, I think this piece would settle down into something less active simply because it would be too much for me to do myself. (This goes against what I said yesterday).
Why am I using the instruments I am using? I have created a backlog of interesting sounds that I want to put out there without letting them linger too long in a piece. Putting them in an improvisation gives me a lot of time to work with these sounds and find how they work together.
Why do I want to do a noise piece? It’s not something I have done before on my own, I want to expand my horizons and not put myself in one category as a composer.
Do I actually enjoy this piece? Yes. I’m not asking this question to fill space, but it’s a question worth asking when it comes to pieces that don’t sound conventionally pleasing. “Am I doing it for shock value/to be weird?” I actually thing there’s a lot of wonderful things that happen in noise. There’s such complex harmonic content that your ear can latch onto and find it’s own melody in. Even the same noise can sound different through multiple listenings.
Daily Dose: Active Listening
I love the piece I am working on because it challenges me to enjoy sounds that aren’t conventionally pleasant, especially on the drummers side of this piece. What I mean by this is that even though the sounds I am making are not that pleasant I can still bend them in a number of ways to make them enjoyable to me (even if they are just dissonant things that I personally enjoy); by adding this drummer, I am adding a wildcard that I can’t totally anticipate and cannot bend in these ways. I am forced to actively listen and learn to enjoy what he is doing. The piece requires a lot of active listening to find the musicality within the noise and move to making new musical connections.
Daily Act: Quiet and Attentive
I was far more attentive during our rehearsal of this piece today than I was the other day, and in response my drummer was more attentive as well. I think my misconception of noise music led me to ignore my simplest instincts when it comes to making music. It was good to reset and analyze this thing again like it was a piece of music. I left a lot of space (except for the purposefully noisy steady-state I mentioned earlier), which made for a much better rehearsal.
Mijomabo 