Starting from the experiments of three European improvised music ensembles at the turn of the 1960s and 1970s, Matthieu Saladin aims to identify an aesthetic of free improvisation, an aesthetic which according to him has an authentic political dimension.
Improvisation in music is a practice probably as old as music itself. It occupies an important place in many cultures and musical practices, even if its place in the Western scholarly tradition has continued to diminish dramatically since the XIXe century. The popularity that has been experienced throughout the XXe century jazz, of which improvisation is a major ingredient, as well as the growing attention paid to indeterminacy and open forms in avant-garde art music, nevertheless contributed to giving new life to this practice in European musical consciences to such an extent that we saw the emergence in the 1960s of musical ensembles almost exclusively dedicated to improvisation in a total and radicalized form. It is to these European experiences of free improvisation that Matthieu Saladin’s book is devoted, Aesthetics of free improvisation. Musical and political experiments.
Chronicle of an emergence
The so-called improvisation free » can be described as a form of radicalized improvisation. In other genres of improvisation, such as jazz in its most traditional forms, improvisation can be compared to embroidering on a predefined canvas: the jazzman improvises from a standardwhich is often a song from an American musical. He certainly has a certain margin of freedom in the construction of his melodic lines, a margin of freedom which he uses in the moment by composing his melodies over the course of his pen, to use a literary metaphor. But in doing so, he follows at every moment the structure of the standard and obeys certain stylistic constraints specific to jazz music. The free improvisation that interests Matthieu Saladin aims, on the contrary, to reject any form of prior constraint in order to immerse the music in a constant flow of spontaneous creation where in principle anything can happen at any moment. Improvising then amounts, so to speak, to embroidering without a canvas. Free improvisation thus generalizes to music as a whole the freedom which only appears in a partial and localized form in the more traditional genres of improvised music.
The idea of free improvisation, in the sense that we have just defined, is a relatively recent invention. It was in fact in the musical (and not only musical) effervescence of the 1960s that this approach to improvisation emerged, of which the ensembles AMM and Spontaneous Music Ensemble in Great Britain as well as Musica Elettronica Viva in Italy are pioneers in Europe. A first ambition of Matthieu Saladin’s book is to tell the story of this emergence, by successively drawing portraits of these three figures of free improvisation in the first three chapters of the book.
We can thus explore the different paths that led each of these groups to their own practice of improvisation and appreciate the particular angle from which they viewed it. The members of EMS are initially jazz musicians marked by the turning point that the free jazz at the beginning of the 1960s. They envisage free improvisation as a method of mutual listening, based on a principle of equality between the different members of the collective. AMM for its part was born from the meeting of people disappointed with jazz and intrigued by the new resources of improvisation (Cornelius Cardew), all of whom set out in search of “ self-invention » (p. 45), where the “ self » sought is a collective self which supposes a “ disidentification of sonic individuality » (p. 53) of each instrumentalist. MEV perhaps occupies a somewhat special place insofar as its main instigators are American avant-garde composers exiled on the old continent, fascinated by the latest discoveries in electro-acoustic technology and the new possibilities they offer in terms of live interaction.
The labyrinths of freedom
Once the presentations have been made, the central chapters of the book can identify the main lines of an aesthetic of improvisation from these three particular experiences. Chapter 4 unfolds the notion of freedom. Free improvisation frees itself from any dependence on the notion ofmusical workwith all that the latter implies in terms of stability and permanence, to instead draw music towards the side of pure process, with no other temporal anchor than that of the present. Once this principle is established, numerous consequences follow, such as for example the necessity of forgetting: “ it was a question, through forgetting, of favoring a relationship with sound understood in its immediacy, of concentrating on listening to its presence alone, focusing on it by enveloping it with their own play » (p. 154). As the author very rightly points out, this necessary forgetting has at the same time something impossible, insofar as there exists an irreducible musical memory which inevitably permeates musical consciousnesses and bodies and solidifies itself in habits of listening and of play. This is why improvisation, considered as practicalrequires from musicians the paradoxical adoption of a set of rules supposed to limit the establishment and return of habits.
The paradox is real and even central. This freedom of improvisation is not given for free: its exercise requires specific work, obeying principles and rules (listening to others, not occupying the entire sound space, avoiding automatisms). But these rules present themselves less as external constraints limiting the freedom of the improviser than as conditions of possibility of a space of authentic freedom. The freedom of the improviser does not consist in evolving as he wishes in an indeterminate space but rather in the construction and maintenance of an intersubjective space whose geometry is not imposed from the outside, but emerges and varies from time to time. thread of interactions.
The collective dimension of improvisation is in turn at the center of chapter 5, where the author insists on the structuring character of listening in the constitution of an improvising collective. In the wake of literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, collective improvisation is then conceived as a form of expression that is intrinsically dialogicin the sense that the improvised statement always already presupposes a statement to which it responds, even if it occurs at the very beginning of a collective improvisation or is part of a solo improvisation. Listening then focuses on virtual statements, taken from the common background of a musical culture or from the idiosyncrasies of a personal musical construction, with which the solitary improviser implicitly dialogues.
Chapter 6 gives the author the opportunity to consider the experimental dimension of this improvised music, distinguishing it in particular from experimentation as it may have been considered in music in the wake of John Cage: while that -this implies a withdrawal of all artistic intentionality, improvised experimentation grants a place to a subjectivity supposed to intervene in the face of accidents which may arise during the performance. The possibility of error, excluded by the Cageian conception, is in free improvisation not only recognized, but also welcomed as a source of creativity.
The politics of improvisation
The aesthetics of improvisation that emerges from the central chapters of the book would remain incomplete without taking into account its social and political inscription, as if making free improvisation a strictly artistic or aesthetic category would amount to operating a unfortunate reduction. The last two chapters of the book aim precisely to develop this socio-political dimension for itself, from the angle first of the resistance that this practice may have encountered (chapter 7), then of the politics that it contains implicitly (chapter 8).
Free improvisation, by calling into question many “ evidence » musical, (for example the idea that a concert presupposes a distinction between listeners and musicians, the very idea of a distinction between musicians and non-musicians) comes quite naturally to confront the socio-economic structures which govern the musical production, and therefore capitalism more generally (to be quick). But it is interesting to note that the emergence of free improvisation initially took place, from the musicians’ point of view, in a certain apoliticism, in the sense that commitment to the practice of free improvisation was not not the consequence of a political agenda a priori. We even observe that a movement of politicization of some of these improvisers (Keith Rowe and Cornelius Cardew ofAMM who embraced Maoism in the early 1970s) was able ultimately lead them to turn away from free improvisation, in favor of music that is authentically “ revolutionary » depositary of a predefined political message.
The political dimension of free improvisation, at least as it is described in the final chapter, resides less in the activism of some of its practitioners than in the immanent politics that emerges within the practice of free improvisation itself. ‘improvisation. Free experimentation, by refusing the authority of the written word and the constraint of predefined frameworks, inevitably calls for a policy of musical creation. The reconstruction of this politics in which the author engages is then placed under the philosophical patronage of Jacques Rancière, from whom the concepts of politics and democracy are drawn. The principle of equality of anyone ” with “ anyone », which characterizes democracy according to Rancière (On the edge of politicsParis, Gallimard, 2004), is found very concretely in improvised musical practices, as when MEV performs in an institutional concert hall welcoming people who openly display their status as “ non-musician » on the concert program, as if improvisation should allow “ anyone », whatever one’s skills, to find one’s place. Free improvisation thus presents itself as the purest realization of a truly democratic form of musical creation.
An aesthetic per case
Taking a step back, we could qualify the aesthetics that Matthieu Saladin proposes as empirical aesthetics, or even aesthetics by case. His approach consists in fact of the contextualized description of three contemporary musical experiences of each other to identify less a set of common characteristics than a subtle network of analogies and differences capable of grasping not a “ essence » free improvisation, but rather a play of family resemblances capable of illuminating its various facets.
A great quality of Matthieu Saladin’s book is that it never indulges in an apology for free improvisation. The paradoxes and difficulties which do not fail to arise in the formulation of an aesthetic of improvisation, far from being evaded, are clearly identified and interpreted as such, which gives this aesthetic reflexivity and depth of view. quite appreciable. This book thus constitutes a welcome and important addition to the still burgeoning French-speaking literature on the aesthetics of musical improvisation.