I haven’t had a ton of new insight about how to reimagine or reframe my program of study based on the “living traditions” conversations we had a couple weeks back. In part, I think this is because I’ve inhabited the, “What is my program of study?” headspace for quite a while now. I’ve made a lot of progress on it, feel pretty connected to the ideas which most resonate with me, and now I just need to do something real and tangible. I want to jump into a project I’ve had stewing for a while, one which is very interesting and also very intimidating to me, which I’ve been calling The Improvisation Interviews.

To speak to the interesting parts:

  • As a burgeoning improviser, I am just starting to notice my own processes and approaches to learning this skill. I’m noticing things I like about my own sound: patterns I fall into, riffs I return to, specific ways I play the horn. But I also notice things I don’t like. But the noticing is what’s really helpful, good or bad. It used to be I had no idea what happened when I took a solo and I just woke up at the end. Now, I am starting to notice, and I want to notice even more. This project is all about noticing my own experiences in order to learn from them, but also asking other people to notice so I can learn from them.

  • The ways people talk about music fall on a spectrum from totally technical to textural. You can break down a musical phrase into pitch, melody, rhythm or even the BPM, spectral analysis, and sound frequencies. You can also break down a musical phrase in terms of tension and release, color, timbre, attitude, tone. The textural elements are connected to the technical ones, but we often lean to more technical explanations because textural ones are hard to capture and articulate. I want to capture the texture.

  • This tension of texture and technicality is interesting to me, for sure, and the thought of documenting this investigation, creating permanent pieces which capture my “findings,” is really exciting because I don’t think traditional forms will be enough to capture the non-literal/non-technical elements I am really interested in. For example, I don’t think a straight up documentary will work because it’s not about these people and their backgrounds and relationships to music. I mean, it is, but it’s also about their actual mental models of music. But journal entries or visual/other representations of their mental models also aren’t enough, because it’s also about people’s relationship to musical training. And a poem series isn’t enough because the technical pieces are still relevant and I want to be able to dig into them somehow. So, I think this promises to be a really evolving, multimedia piece, which will be very hard to satisfy me.

To speak to the intimidating side:

  • That last part, starting something expansive and challenging, working in mediums I’m not familiar with, beginning an artistic process where the final product isn’t already known, is pure intimidation for me. I think this is part of the reason I’ve been staying in the “about” place around my program of study, and is now why I want to push myself to just start.

So, what I want to do today is to get myself started on this road of work. I want to start by interviewing a few people I know very well about how they think about improvisation in order to get comfortable the tools and media involved in documenting work like this well and also to practice how to ask questions to get at the meat of what I want to learn more about. I know from casual conversations with musician friends that people aren’t primed to talk about these things in depth and that, like me, many people, especially those who are new to music-making, don’t notice or can’t articulate what it is they do when they make music. I want to learn more about how people improvise, what is actually going on in their minds when they are improvising in real time, and how the approach developing their craft of improvisation over the longer run.

In addition to all that, I also want to be thinking about where this project might ultimately go. I am personally drawn to projects with lots of smaller outputs along the way, e.g. the thought of making a feature-length documentary is not something I think I could just jump into. But, I do think I could collect some interviews and edit/post them in some form, do a second series of short interviews where the same (or different) people narrate their favorite improvisations, MST3K style. I could also imagine a poem series. Or some kind of musical analysis breaking down some of these improvisations and comparing them to each other (perhaps some of that social science coding we were talking about with regards to Plinkquito). Anyway, all of this is to say that, this is a huge question and I doubt I’m going to come to one unified goal for a large-scale project outcome exploring/answering the questions I have. Instead, I want to think about two things:

  1. Questions I could ask in these introductory/”practice” interviews to start digging into the nature of improvisation and hone my own understanding of my direction

  2. Different forms this project might take, in the long term or as by-products/mini-projects along the way

Improvisation interview questions

  • What is improvisation?

  • How do you improvise?

  • How do you practice/work toward getting better at improvising?

  • Having people narrate/respond to a favorite improvisation.

  • When you “think about” a musical idea, what are you *actually *imagining? Is this the same vocabulary/imagery/etc. you use to imagine your own improvisations?

  • Have people actually improvise with me in the moment and reflect, or looking at a recording from a session — perhaps this is also a possibility with other improvisations,

  • Perhaps in different contexts to find/compare through lines

  • What are one or two really clear memories you have related to improvisation? Maybe also asking about what the memory looks like, where are they in the memory, are you in your self/observing yourself? what stands out to you about the experience?

  • Enlisting other people into the project in a longer term way, so that the people I’m talking about getting better and better at talking about improvisation, maybe getting together for a weekend retreat where we dig into it, all solo multiple times over the same song and then reflect on, video, watch and pause the

  • Areas of therapy that try to uncover things they don’t have verbal memories might be a source of

  • Books from Febo re: theater improvisation and

  • The psychology of invention in mathematics re: ways to interview people to get them internalize things

  • Product design, ethnographic studies, design research, etc. focus groups

Project forms and ideas

  • Noble Oceans newsletter as a collection of reflections that might come out of individual interview sessions while the larger project is still underway

  • During Christmas, Aginando — a song with a recurring melody and improvising within very specific constraints, perhaps with our group? (AF)

  • Now this! News as a template — branded well and created with found footage, text, and a soundtrack over it — to create little video nuggets

  • Portraits of people and their improvisations, doing the nonlinear pieces, perhaps with images or animations or poems, as a way to capture each person

  • Related to the last one, Party Legends where people describe crazy party and a different artist illustrates it each time

  • Could there be a shared prompt for each interviewee where you collect “the same”

  • And all this is a part of traditions, like School of HONK, could the things we create be used by School of HONK, shared out, turn into workshops to share with people, live on the website, be in communication with the tradition, e.g. not anthropological

  • What if there was a different interviewer? Either someone who was also prepared, or StoryLab style stuff