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

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