-A humanitarian approach to structured improvisation-
Innovators such as Anthony Braxton and John Zorn have been extremely influential to musicians of all kinds over the decades. However, few outside of this world of avant-gardeism and musicianship can truly come to appreciate the intense world of structured improvising. What entails the mass misperception of structured improvisation is not much of a mystery. There are two fundamentals of it which produce confusion among the masses. The first is that the musicians generally play "whatever is on their mind", and this ultimately adds up to untraditional noise, such as high-register squealing and the ever-popular "reed biting" technique established by Albert Ayler and others in the sixties. Although, as unapparent as this may seem, this is not the quality of structured improvisation which shoos away the layman. The more important quality to structured improvisation - that the musicians are playing the notes, calling the cues, and following the conductor, precisely in the manner which they want to - is what truly disallows most music fans to understand and/or appreciate the vast possibilities to be held within structured improvisation.
My life's work will generally focus on ways of performing, composing, and producing music which melds the practical and the moderately to extremely creative. Whether it is constructing a piece which strikes a balance between expressing what I want to communicate and what the performers themselves wish to communicate (and sometimes I am among those performers), or instead coming up with new compositional, improvisational, and theoretical music methods, I always in the end attempt to construct a musical environment which submerses the listener into an environment whose vibrations can be felt in the same manner by all who try and understand it. When I observed these general "issues" faced by progressives who attempt to implement structured improvisation into their work, the first thing I noticed was not the sounds made by the performers, but instead the lack of communication with the audience, that rubbed audience and listeners the wrong way. So, of course, to tackle this problem, I had to achieve an improvisation system that allowed listeners to have a closer connection to the sounds.
My solution to the problem is what I call "topographical improvising." When one thinks of the topography of land, I would assume that one would be able to notice the same objective features of the land as the next person. This quality is the basis of topographical improvising. The conductor of the structured improvisation, through this system, constructs a set of improvisational rules for all of the performers in the ensemble. These rules are placed on cards which are to be read only by those intended to see them, and each card has a trigger, which may be either a topographical feature or change, or even just an observation or action performed by an individual, or group of bystanders.
However, just as one can notice a topographical feature of land, one will not always judge this feature in the same light as another. We as humans are dignified in that some people think the rain is beautiful, and that others feel depressed while on a Tropical Paradise vacation. This quality in people is what is used to define the improvisational characteristics held within topographical improvising. Indeed, the same free-form elements are found in my aleatoric music invention, but the pretenses are, of course, quite different. It is for this reason that I believe those who experience a topographical improvisation performance are more likely to understand and appreciate it as opposed to a rendition of John Zorn's "Cobra" (of course, not to at all undermine the brilliance of Zorn's work). This is because the only necessity in making a topographical improvisation work is a skilled composer - one who can define the best improvisational rules to produce results that best craft an environment with music. That way, people can qualitatively follow the music along with their own observations of the environment. Therefore, the conductor/composer are on no higher level than the audience. The intentions, definitions, and ideas behind each cue card, each note played, are directly understood by the audience. Only the interpretation of these sounds differ, and this is the same result as music that includes accessible lyrics written on elementary levels: the objective meaning of the verse-chorus-verse track is the same to all listeners, though the level of understanding of this meaning, and the subjective interpretation of this meaning based upon respective individual experiences, differ greatly.
It is my hope that through topographical improvising I can combine the qualities of accessible pop music with the musical genius to be heard through structured improvisation. Listening to Tayk 2 of my Broken Hearts On Ice release, "A Topographical Improvisation", I believe that I may have the beginnings of the solution to the problem. I will work extensively over the years to better understand structured improvisation and improve upon topographical improvising, hopefully allowing the combining of accessibility with genius once and for all within classical and jazz music. If anybody believes that this may be undermining the valuable genius of improvisational innovators such as Zorn, Braxton, and Brotzmann, I would like to make it quite clear that I am not at all trying to improve upon, or "fix", their work. They have constructed beautiful, innovative music for those who can appreciate it. If they wanted to make their messages clear to the general populous, they would do so. Although, this is not the path they have chosen to take. I, however, am one to generally push new things on people who I feel would sincerely benefit from experiencing them. By performing and composing topographical improvisations, I hope to bring a very exclusive gift of musical genius to a wider audience, and I feel I am on my way to doing so. In this day and age, everybody could benefit from some mutual understanding.
-Andrew Grathwohl