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

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

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