The Plank: Notes on a free music improvisation group March - May 2019
The central concern of all my work is improvisation. I am, after all, a bag lady queen and I carry props of facilitation, directorship, miscellaneous skills and the honed senses of the animateur. These tools protect and mark out territories where improvisation can happen for others.
And here is a place where there is no longer need for up-the-sleeve or back-pocket repertoire. A place unencumbered by pre-constituted knowledge and tricks of the mind – because ‘I’ no longer stands in the same way for ‘I’ am part of a multiplicitous deep-listening. Not knowing anything, just a body in the world, before thought, animated by the impulses of the virtual.
At least this is what is strived for. It takes immense concentration, this listening. My mind wanders and my playing becomes automatic or I become overly self-conscious. Somewhere in between these states is a present-moment encounter between everyone in the room. The sense of individual self gives way to the sense of group self and the emergence of the new. This is not Jazz, following Manning (2009) & Stern (1987), this is the relation between players as the creative node, not what the individual humans do. This is not music as trope, it is not ‘jamming’. It is perhaps communicative musicality (Trevarthen and Malloch, 2014) but not as proto music, rather, when it really happens, pure music – a choral murmuration. A floating intentionality. (Cross, 2005)
Virtuosos of the virtual – musicianship of difference. Deleuze said that pure difference was crucified by its ‘quadripartite fetters’ under which only that which is identical, similar, analogous or opposed can be considered different (Deleuze 1994:138). Music is territorialised by these fetters and the hegemonic figure of the ‘special’ musician an individual bestowed with a superior talent – but music leaks out into difference in virtual practices that contain such diverse assemblages. Visual artists play within this assemblage marking the ephemerality of sound and producing wonderous pictures that are the stuff of time. And at the time their making of marks can sometimes be heard: rhythm, as mark, as rhythm.
This practice requires deep-attending, deep-sensing and an ethics of creative aesthetics
It requires caring more about ‘joining forces with the cosmos’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:96) than about the self. Putting thinking aside, we aim to sense the virtual, that which is emerging out of the group 'AT the time and IN the moment [..] working on the edge of what is intelligible’ (Macrae, 2019). This is music as process. Music never was a fixed thing despite all the Cartesian rational mind has done to attempt its fixing.
While they use music to talk about their complex philosophy, Deleuze and Guattari state quite clearly that it is not known where music begins (1987:300), but it is clear they consider it beyond the anthropocentric. They wonder even if what we actually do as music is a warding off of the forces of chaos. (ibid: 311).
And the forces of chaos indeed rise up in this group, sometimes in full-pelt cacophony. Feeling the pandemonium run through our ensemble is exhilarating, liberating – but it is not always such force. Sometimes it is sporadic bursts of body-before-thought, scribbling and scrambling out of silence, sometimes it is bird-song refrains twittering, joyful and taking flight. Often it is a feeling of inconsistent, stumbling, stutter, never finding inspiration or coherence.
No territory lasts for long, if territory ever actually forms at all - it constantly shifts. The people in this group are committed to nomadic music making, rhizomic musicing, emergent listening. There is never a groove as such, sometimes a polyrhythmic layering of expressions. Occasionally a breathtakingly beautiful refrain arises from between the parts – and time does something extraordinary. I suspect at these times we breathe out together as we witness this ephemerality. This grace taking flight.
* I use the term virtual as Deleuze & Guattari use it: a philosophical term to mean the arising possible, the emerging potential, the impulse, as real as the actual.