Alvin Curran, "On Spontaneous Music" - University at Albany

Contemporary Music Review
Vol. 25, Nos. 5/6, October/December 2006, pp. 483 – 490
On Spontaneous Music
Alvin Curran
The following reflections are written five years apart, the first in response to Sabine
Feisst, for her doctoral thesis, the second written at the request of Giesela
Gronemeyer for the present publication. The author begs the reader’s understanding
for some occasional overlap.
Improvisation is the art of becoming sound. It is the only art in which a human being
can and must become the music he or she is making. It is the art of constant, attentive and
dangerous living in every moment. It is the art of stepping outside of time, disappearing in
it, becoming it. It is both the fine art of listening and responding and the more refined art
of silence. It is the only musical art where the entire ‘score’ is merely the self and the
others, and the space and moment where and when this happens. Improvisation is the
only musical art which is predicated entirely on human trust.
The art of improvisation assumes (and for me unequivocally proves) that human
beings are musical beings and that not unlike the great natural musicians of the
animal kingdom—from crickets and cicadas to whales, wolves and lions—all human
beings are born with, possess and participate in some form of music.
Regardless of the musical context (the people, place or time, tradition or style), the
art of improvisation puts the full responsibility for the music being made on the
person/s making it, and for the entire duration of its making.
Hence, in free improvisation the prevailing notions about the origins of music
(the gods, collective memory, composers, mythology, etc.) are temporarily eclipsed
by the sheer magical energy of the physical person/s making the music—for it is
they who are momentarily but fully responsible for the sounds they make. It is
they, the improvisers, in whom the traditional roles of composer, performer,
director and teacher are fused into one single role. It is they who, in every sense,
become—literally are—the music they make; and at best, transform everyone and
everything into that music—that sharing of air, time and space. This is
immediately as evident on hearing an improvised cadenza in a Beethoven piano
concerto as it is in hearing Coltrane’s endless concatenations on the song ‘My
Favorite Things’ or in a Dagar Brothers levitating performance of an evening raga.
And this is even far more evident in musics not rooted in tradition, but in
continuing experiment and research; such spontaneous musics could be said to be
based on almost ‘nothing’.
ISSN 0749-4467 (print)/ISSN 1477-2256 (online) ª 2006 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/07494460600989994

484 A. Curran
Improvised music is, however, generally based on something: a word, a set of fixed
tones, a melody, rhythmic pattern, chordal sequence, timbral change, gesture (crescendo,
diminuendo, fragmentation, drone, etc.), a reaction, a memory, a dream. Or any
combination of these. All musical cultures employing forms of improvisation codify
these forms around a specific set of sounds developed through a long historical process.
The history of ‘western’ twentieth-century music in its modernist and
postmodernist attributes can be viewed as a series of attempts to liberate music
from various forms of tyranny—rules and traditions real or imagined: triadic
harmony, memorable melody, the twelve equal-tempered tones, metered regular
pulse, European orchestral timbres, ranges of instruments, standardized durations,
fear of disorder and chaos, the fear of silence. In the middle and late 1960s we
witnessed attempts to embrace all of these aspects of musical liberation while
focusing at the same time on the philosophical, political, and economic liberation of
music from itself—that is, the freeing of music even from the need to liberate itself.
Nevertheless, a momentary and generalized ‘freeing’ of music, not only of all former
musical ideology and practice, but from its fiercely rooted social and economic basis
in the West, became the utopian challenge taken up in many different ways, by a
number of dedicated musicians throughout the world. La Monte Young in New York
City, Larry Austin and Pauline Oliveros in California, Takehisa Kosugi (the Taj
Mahal Travelers) in Japan, Terry Riley, Glass and Reich, Tudor and Cage, Christian
Wolff, the Sonic Arts Union (Behrman, Ashley, Mumma, Lucier), Franco
Evangelisti’s ‘Gruppo Nuova Consonanza’, Gavin Bryar’s Portsmith Symphonia,
Cardew’s Scratch Orchestra, The Spontaneous Music Ensemble – London and in
individual voices such as Alexander von Schlippenbach, Evan Parker, Peter Kowald,
Misha Mengelberg, The AACM (Muhal Abrams, Anthony Braxton) in Chicago, as
well as natural sound-artists Annea Lockwood and Maryanne Amacher etc.
The improvisation groups AMM in London and Musica Elettronica Viva (MEV) in
Rome, however, can be said to have taken the most radical position in regard to this
process of ‘liberation’. Musically speaking, both groups were attempting to literally
reinvent music from zero. With revolutionary fervor, yet in a most pacific way,
everything pertaining to the art of music (within their imaginations) was called into
question. And while these groups had no boards of inquisitors—there were no trials,
prison sentences, tortures or disappearances—they tacitly agreed on a new musical
practice which would invest each member of the group with the responsibility for
every sound made, thus heightening the individuals’ listening awareness and playing
responses to all the sounds made at any instant (however simple or complex), as well
as heightening their overall sense of commitment to the work; they further agreed
that any audible or imaginable sound, or sound source, was equally valid as raw
musical material. This, indeed, gave birth to some of the most remarkable musics of
the time and, as far as one knew (in l966), there had never before been a music made
on such far-reaching principles of individual freedom and democratic consciousness;
this was collective music pure and simple—and without knowing it, a stunning artistic
example of political anarchy. From my experience in the founding of the group
Musica Elettronica Viva, I would like to describe what I believe were the principal

codes of action and expected behavior and implicit strategies and goals of our group
improvisations—the music in all of its various phases has been described and
documented elsewhere.
What the group MEV (along with AMM) essentially did was to redefine music as a
form of property that belonged equally to everyone and hence to encourage its
creation freely by and through anyone anywhere. This idea alone had great
implications for the art of improvisation, for it brought forth a new and quite flexible
code of behavior based on the following principles:
0) Any physical space is a potential musical space as is any time of day or night an
appropriate musical time.
1) All music starts anew each time, as if there had never been any music before it.
2) Any member of the group may utilize any audible or imaginable sound at any
time.
3) Musical remembering and musical amnesia are of equal value—in short, one
could build on past or conditioned experience or try to forget everything ever
known.
4) The requirements for musical participation are no longer based on purely
musical skills, education, technique, experience, age, gender, race or religion
but on an implicit code of universal harmony and mutual acceptance. This
resulted immediately in a form of transnational music.
5) Each player provides his/her own instruments and sound sources.
6) The act of collective performance has no specified duration and performances
begin and end by tacit (musically understandable) agreement.
7) Without leaders, scores, or any rules at all, the music should be based on the
musicians’ mutual respect for and trust in one another, the public, and the
individual and sum of all the sounds emitted into the performing space.
8) Because this music is fragile and dangerously based on almost nothing
(ephemeral sounds and precarious human relationships), the players must
cultivate extraordinary levels of attention, awareness and artistic efficiency—
primarily through silence and rigorous listening, and appropriate action and
reaction—so to prevent the music from becoming literally nothing. This form
of personal and collective commitment endowed everyone involved (including
the producers and public) with finely tuned ears and magnanimous attitudes.
9) No matter what transpires, a sense of transcendent unity is likely to be the
unspoken goal of every improvisational event. (This sense of unity, though not
always achieved, is very recognizable, almost tangible in certain moments.
Especially when one cannot answer the questions: ‘did I make that/did we
make that/did you make that/did they make that?’
10) All members share equally in the promotion, economic stability and creative
growth of the group—in return for an equal share in received proceeds.
11) This is a space for your own contribution.
15 – 17 July 1995
Contemporary Music Review 485

486 A. Curran
Postscript: From the Bottom of the Soundpool
. . . somewhere between 28th St and Columbus Circle a total freak in dreads, dashiki,
sandals and some toy antennae bobbing on his head gets into the number 1, uptown
train. He’s clutching a destroyed alto saxophone—looked like it came out of the
scrap metal yard. Without any warning he begins to blow into this mangled
instrument, emitting screeching sheets of murderous high frequencies alternating
with truck-horn-like jolting blats. After an initial assault of about 45 seconds, he
cuts short and says, deadly serious: ‘Folks, if you want me to stop playing this
music, just kindly drop a coin in the cup.’ The well-groomed morning travelers
offered no resistance, and dutifully dropped coins in this ‘alien’s’ cup; as promised,
he did not play again. I thought, Man! What an original economic strategy—getting
the public to pay you not to make your music!!!!! My god, what if after 1945 the
new music community—instead of madly searching for the new Beethoven among
us—had adopted the brilliant strategy of this New York City street artist: offering
not to play its music, in exchange for money!!!!! We’d probably all be sipping cool
drinks in an Internet cafe in Tahiti today rather than sitting in airless halls listening
to interminable grating sonic aggregates, still waiting for some illumination or new
saint to appear.
I have just finished listening to and remastering 16 hours of recorded tapes of the
group Musica Elettronica Viva—which I co-founded. In its heyday (1966 – 1973), this
indefinable group was considered benignly revolutionary by an attentive European
mainstream press and was a musical icon on the fringe of the fringe counterculture.
Whatever the merits of the group’s music, MEV—its actions as well as its music—
struck fear into the heart of the music establishment, because it believed that the
music was the property of no one individual or author, but that of the group, and
that music is a universal human right, and any human being, by mere will, can also be
a music-maker.
Incidentally, these two beliefs are now again at the center of an ethical and legal
debate over the definition of music and its ownership and use on the Internet.
At the beginning of the 30-plus years of MEV history, the original core group
(Alan Bryant, Alvin Curran, Jon Phetteplace, Carol Plantamura, Frederic Rzewski,
Richard Teitelbaum, Ivan Vandor) took for granted the inherent value of a fixed
group structure as such. But in time, as we became accustomed to playing with many
self-invited guests—and even with many so-called non-musicians—a concept
emerged, largely promoted by Rzewski, to create a music by inviting the general
public to participate, without any structure or rules: the ‘Sound Pool’ announced,
‘Bring a sound, cast it into the pool’ and people did; they came in droves and often
left at the forced invitation of the local police and fire departments. ‘Sound Pool’ was
both an open request and an authorization for anyone to make ‘music’ together as
they pleased—freely.
These were not jam sessions nor happenings (both of which are based on
determinate themes and structures), but collective music events for many people

Contemporary Music Review 487
(usually 50 or more) which, after an initial launching by MEV’s catalytic example,
inevitably developed into independent throbbing dense polyphonies, multiple walls
of sound of any color, speed, density and feeling. The ‘Sound Pool’ was often enacted
in large rooms, where groups of musicians could form casually, play independently
and dissolve into other groups, where individuals could wander from place to place
playing offhandedly with an anonymous passerby or stopping to join in a small or
large ongoing pocket of music. In short, a sea of freely mutating human symphonies
which could at certain moments bring to mind a Cage ‘Music Circus’, a Pauline
Oliveros ‘Meditation’, or even a Globe-Unity mass improv., though none of those
models suffice to describe the levels of ecstasy or life-threatening chaos generated
during some of them.
These were musics characterized above all by a shocking absence of authority or
leadership, which at times shocked even us. They were based on the principle that
anyone making any sound in any way (alone or in company) could consider this act
to be an act of spontaneous music-making. I am not speaking here of ‘improvisation’,
which I consider to be a highly specialized artistic behavior, but am merely describing
what might be the most fundamental, perhaps primordial, level of musical
consciousness and state of collective-spontaneous sounding together.
Thus anonymous individuals in the act of collective liberation became their own
musics, and the ‘Sound Pool’ was the sum of all of them—as if in a mass spontaneous
urban psychodrama. This work—a radical assault on the sacred cows of bourgeois
culture—was at once an act of conceptual suicide for the music of the ‘closed’ group
and at the same time an act which raised the collective music concept to its most
dangerous and unstable experimental limits; it further precipitated an intense debate
among core MEV members—a debate which centered on the nature of music,
composition, improvisation and the social limits of these newly created music rituals.
To balance the musical needs and sanity of the group, a plan emerged where we
would divide an evening in two parts: the first would focus on open-form
compositions—often works of our own; and the second part, usually initiated by
Christian Wolff’s ‘Sticks’, would lead to the ‘Sound Pool’ proper.
In the context of these liberational melees, improvisation per se was an academic
issue. Yet improvisation and the individual skills we had all quickly developed was a
kind of sacred burning bush which has remained a strong source of inspiration to
most of us to this day, as well as to a large number of musicians who performed with
us in the seventies and eighties (Garrett List, Steve Lacy, Anthony Braxton, Maryanne
Amacher, Karl Berger, to name a few). Group improvisation, as I defined it earlier, is
music-making which embraces all of the contradictions of indeterminacy and hence a
commitment to indeterminate aesthetics; it demands refined skills in both the
extensions of classical instrumental technique as well as analog and digital electronic
techniques combined with lightning fast decision making, repression of the ego, and
mutual trust; but above all it is centered on the newly emerging skill for the
individual players to perceive the totality of music not only in the present, but in the
past and future as well.

488 A. Curran
While these performance considerations of trained composers and performers
applied to MEV music at all times, the group aesthetic also embraced a liberational
anarchism, in apparent dialectical contradiction—which brings us back to the sixties’
Zeitgeist. Both in the closed group improvisations of early MEV (often called
‘Spacecraft’) and the mass ‘Sound Pool’ events, one of the main collective goals was
the generation of a kind of tribal energy, with whatever means it took: from skillfully
crafted improvisation to reckless indeterminacy, from loose associations to free ones,
from induced mental states akin to autism and amnesia to illuminating states of
unity—awareness of everyone and everything. At once death-defying, life affirming
and ecstasy seeking, grounded in a volatile mix of the politics of Anarchy,
Communalism, and Transcendentalism, the music was unmediated, idiosyncratic
and raw. No Ivy-League-via-Darmstadt bleep-blop, no spotless minimalisms, no
frills, no money back, just plain musical vulcanism, straight up. It was these essential
qualities that fascinated and terrified the establishment, as they in their mandated
ways attempted to tame us and own us and our music—our ‘work’ brought
everything into question, including authors’ rights and the nature of a public concert.
The crude amplified sounds we made often took the form of an extended primal
scream . . . anyone in their right minds would have paid us not to play, but alas no one
had the imagination or courage to do that. Instead, the mixture of adventurousness,
uncertainty and utopian enthusiasm typical of the times spurred our project on.
MEV’s founders were mostly composers, refugees from esteemed American
academies, living precariously in Europe and dedicated to the idea of experimental
music. Youthful, even naïve, we all shared a desire to strip ourselves naked, liberating
ourselves from the vestments of the past and present. Our techniques and concepts
grew directly from the fertile soil prepared by Cage, Tudor and Mumma in the late
fifties—early sixties and by the work of the AACM (American Association of Creative
Music) and the Arts Ensemble of Chicago. But in contrast to the advanced theorizing
and mathematical rigor within the Cage circle, MEV felt its sense of mission as an
existential drive to live in the moment, including our hand-to-mouth economy—in
fact, we often could not see far beyond that to fully comprehend the global meaning
of all that was going on. This drive was a manifest reality of the ’68 counterculture,
and this above all was our guide, the voices of our teachers (Carter, Babbitt, Sessions,
Petrassi, Nono, Mel Powell) notwithstanding.
What was revolutionary in our vanguard music was the process, even more than
the product. The music began as it ended, based on telepathic signals. It did not
matter what found objects we rubbed, scratched or banged on, what we blew into or
how, what we dropped on the floor or beat on the walls, what instruments we played
conventionally or unconventionally, what home-made or sophisticated electronic
circuitry was employed and so on—what mattered is that we did it, ‘punto e basta’,
that the urgency of the moment to focus our collective attentions onto a challenging
act of spontaneous creation was what mattered. Whether the music was tonal or
atonal or microtonal, repetitive or disjunct or fragmented, sequential or continuous
or sweet/sexy or abrasive, violent or disgusting, banal or even idiotic mattered little,

Contemporary Music Review 489
in comparison to the singular task of keeping the musical energy high and unified,
efficient and in constant evolution.
To do this, to make music obliterating any awareness of related tradition or
predetermined structures, required an enormous self-discipline, commitment and
momentary suspension of the individual’s self. It required above all a new expanded
musicality, one that could equate beauty with ugliness and vice versa. The resulting
musics were liberating in every sense . . . After performances, rather than return to
reality as if we had been casually experimenting in a scientific lab, we returned often
with the shared knowledge that we had all been somewhere, on a voyage—in the
same illusive and unnamable space—unified by making the same music together, as if
it had been composed, magically composed . . . and this music we knew was ours, we
had in fact composed and performed it in the moment—bang-zoom!! Just like that.
Whatever else remains of the MEV legacy, we challenged the noble traditions of
western music in a new and untried way: by daring to reverse the ‘proper’ professional
balance between technique and passion, by asserting—I’ll say it again—that we, and in
fact anyone, could make a music based on nothing, with any sounding means and
without written score, sketch, agreement, leadership or even, we hoped, memory. That
in fact we could make music of powerful emotive content and attraction outside the
canons of historical western compositional practice was a profound discovery to all of
us in the group and to many outside. The collective process and a few early (middlesixties)
electronic technologies allowed us to extract the hidden sounds inside any
object, or from the entire sounding environment, or from electricity itself, as well as
those drawn from the depths of the human mind and body—this was the nuclear
matter of our daily experimental live-electronic group improvisations.
That the utopian cultural implications of this practice were in succeeding decades
absorbed, codified, expanded on, contested, marginalized, even somewhat forgotten
is history’s natural way. Thirty-five years later, as I sit here in the July heat, it seems
to me that the revolution we had the privilege of participating in has evolved into
largely standardized improvisatory practices (some still vital, others not) that all in
some way had their origins in those mad fortuitous encounters among Free Jazz,
Indeterminacy, European structuralist composition, explosive countercultures, and
movements for social and economic justice. One could even argue that today’s
sizeable worldwide free-improvising community, while apparently alive and well, is
making music in a temporal cul de sac a predictably common practice. Is this music
movement at an end, buried in no longer provocative atonalisms, collage, and macho
virtuosity, and overshadowed by the economic power of mainstream jazz, the
gravitational forces of the European New Music ‘Betrieb’, and more youthful forms
of hip-hop, noise and electronics—all which have successfully incorporated elements
of the earlier freely improvised music styles? I ask myself, will the myth of Schoenberg
outlive the myth of Cecil Taylor, or will both of them fade while Beethoven and Dr.
Dre slip away with the culture bounty?
In retrospect, maybe not much of the sixties experience was truly revolutionary,
and less of it had profoundly transformative consequences, but 30 years later, as

490 A. Curran
trends and technologies in music are unfolding at a dizzying rate, thankfully the
confrontation between progressive and regressive has not been globalized out of
existence. The youth culture, without setting a foot in the piazza, imagines it can
subvert the entire social and economic order by the simple click of a mouse. And with
the planet now choking on its own voracious music consumption—music of every
kind everywhere all the time—surely someone will be able, once again, to inject it
with a wicked dose of orderly disorder. MEV is dead! MEV lives!
Gallipoli, 6 August 2000, edited by Susan Levenstein
http://www.alvincurran.com