At Decca in the early 1970s Birtwistle's early Argo recording  was automatically pressed onto unrecycled vinyl (better signal to noise, apparently) while the music that was making the money was pressed on recycled. That was finally changed, after many arguments. There was no rational for this decision. The bias was in the system, not the person. It is the responsibility of the person to speak out. Birtwistle probably wasn't even aware. That's also a form of compliance - > passivity or ignorance.
This is not Birtwistle bashing. I love and respect Birtwistle's early 'The Triumph of Time'.



[Baron Lloyd Webber?] Or Sir Paul McCartney? Or Sir Elton John?
Ah, a working class hero is something to be. http://www.lyricsfreak.com/l/lennon+john/working+class+hero_20082554.html
It would have been at _least_ a gesture to see one of the Manchester School return their gongs.
I don't believe the case for classical music has been helped at all by (Sir) Peter Maxwell Davies speaking out.
It's purely alienating. I'm not forgetting his work in Orkney at Hoy, either.

No need to return anything - Sandy Goehr turned down his knighthood in the first place.

I haven't contributed to the discussion so far, though I have been following it with great interest. It's just that these things raise so many complex issues relating to things I've been grappling with in my mind over the past few weeks and months, and I don't really feel equipped to chip in. That said, while I may lag behind most of you in knowledge, I doubt I'm going to catch up any time soon, so chipping in I am...Hopefully I can say something worthwhile among a lot of no doubt banal and perhaps misguided points!

Well, I think this point has already been made in reply, but I'd have to align myself with Derek Bailey's P.O.V. - that it's not possible to get the same sort of interaction in 'classical' music (well, let's say all notated music) - improvised music is the only place where that special magic can happen. Lets think of the number of different ways it would be possible to have such interaction:
(1) if there was more than one composer writing the score. OK, this could work with simpler, song-based forms, maybe, but when it gets to the question of more complex, longer pieces, it becomes almost impossible, I would have thought.)
(2) If the composer wrote something specially for a particular performer designed to try and bring out certain facets of that performer's playing - interaction on a certain level there.
(3) If a performer interprets a score in a particularly interesting way (the composer could even be dead) - say, Glenn Gould playing the Goldberg Variations, to go for the obvious example. This may differ from the original score quite drastically (or what certain people think the score should sound like). But let's not forget that we don't necesarrily know what the composer's intention is - unless they play the work, conduct the work. And their interpretation may vary from performance to performance. (Just as the reader's reading of a book may differ from the author's view - but does that make it invalid? And can we talk about 'authorial intention' anyway in a post-Barthes age? And does the author maybe not see every nuance of what they've written all at once at one time?)

Evan Parker: Why does it represent an ideal performance? It can't exist on its own - on its own it has no meaning. Just as the written text can't exist that way - it has to exist in relationship to whoever is reading it, and by reading it, interpreting it in their head. Even when it's being written it exists in relationship to the author/composer, who is writing with inherent interpretative biases, however large or small. Far more satisfactory is the idea he comes up with a little later in the same lecture: the score as "a recipe for possible music-making". So what different performers bring to the score, interpretation-wise, is partly what makes the score, just as what interpretations different readers/critics bring to the written text is partly what makes the text...Furthermore, I don't see how the score can be an ideal performane when the directions that can be given on it (dynamics, expression markings, what have you), however precise, cannot fully encompass every single performance factor down to a T. Except perhaps with performance by a computer. 

Even if, in some cases (where you've got a particularly autocratic control-freak composer who thinks his score is an ideal performance), we shouldn't reject the score just because of this - the frisson that exists each time in different interpretations, in deviations from the score, is an exciting thing, akin to the excitement of improvisation - but with more discipline, more control. In improvised music a lifetime of technical expertise and experience of musical situations gives you a large safety net (by this I mean a facility to avoid musical dullness, not a comfort zone of stock phrases and stale methodologies to fall back on). For instance, let's say Cecil Taylor, or Anthony Braxton: they both have such experience. Nevertheless, even if you have this experience, you're still more likely to come up with dross(?) for long periods for the sake of a few minutes of genius. Whereas in classical music you're less likely to have dross for long periods - maybe not genius, but certainly very listenable stuff. Maybe.

Of course, talking about all this is rather hard without going into specifics - making abstract statements and then finding lots of exceptions to the rule and so on and so on. Maybe my use of Taylor and Braxton as examples wasn't appropriate, as I find very little dross in their music. But anyway...

I seem to be arguing two (four?) sides here really: for and against notated music, and for and against improvised music. But I think what I'm trying to say in the end is this: on the one hand notated music doesn't allow for the amount of special magic that is peculiar to improv, the magic that results from the "interplay of different musical minds" - yes, there is the interpretative frisson between score and performance, but the changes/level of interplay and spaces for difference there are so much smaller that we may be talking more in terms of ideas, of what should be, than what is...But on the other hand, in improvised music, you may stumble around in the dark trying to find that magic without finding for it ages. This is something you can't do in notated music because you're following a score - you've got something to guide you along the way: even if you deviate from that way occassionaly and in exciting ways, you always keep that light in sight. Some people may not even notice the stumbling around in improv. Who knows, such stumbling may even be magic to them! Though I think that this special magic that Bailey talks about (somewhere in his book, can't remember exactly where) is something that is noticed by performers and audience (if there is one), as something special. You can't fake it - it's the genuine thing, it's the capturing of something very very special. Some kind of deeper meaning or truth? (Coltrane would have said so, maybe.) For instance, the end of the Cecil Taylor/Braxton gig (sorry to bang on about them again!) at the RFH last month (which I wrote about on these here boards at the time) - that was such a moment. And from the comments of others who were at the gig, I think it was something that was noticed by others too.

So, in the end, it's not helpful to say that 'improvisation is better than notated music', as Derek Bailey seems to do - both have things to offer that the others don't, or that they don't offer on the same level/to the same degree. Which wasn't really your original point. Your original point was: "why don't classical/notation composers utilise the 'interplay of different musical minds' more"? And my reply was - because they cannot do it to nearly as great as level as is possible in improvised music - though improvised music has its drawbacks.

Oh dear, I've led myself down lots of avenues I didn't intend to go down, tied myself up in knots, and got very long-winded. Hopefully this message remains actually readable. Let me know if it doesn't and I'll try again!

OK, this is my final post for the night. Sleep calls.


I think that this 'responding to another musical mind' is absolutely crucial (though I have to say I speak from a position of inexperience, having only quite recently started to listen to and think about, and then to dabble a bit in playing, improvised music). And the collective in improv is crucial - it is a music with an unusually large capacity collaborative/collective thought - perhaps one of the reasons why it tends to be favoured by left-leaning musicians (sharing, communism, etc). Paradoxically, it's also quite individualistic - the opportunity to be the 'instant composer' yourself, rather than having to play what someone else has written; the opportunity to change the direction of a piece of music at any given time;the opportunity to express things deep within yourself, to find out something about yourself, musically or otherwise (something maybe you couldn't find out without the other musicians you're playing with, that has to be coaxed out of you by interaction with others -self-knowledge as a result of collective interaction).

So where does this leave the solo improviser? Derek Bailey addresses this very question in his book, which I quoted from in my last post. (It's in the chapter entitled 'solo', pp.105-112 in the Da Capo Press edition). As he addresses it from a positon of vastly greater experience and knowledge than me, I hope others won't mind if I quote extensively from what he says rather than trying to find my own solution to the question.



Bailey then mentions the loss, in solo improvising, of "the unpredictable element usually provided by other players."

He continues,  [Whereas in group improv you can get moments where you're not sure who's producing which sound (particularly the case with electronics, it seems), and you get a music that's made out various personal musics, but they combine to create a collective music. This phenomenon is described by an improvisor, 'Mr Improv', on the 'Barrett at Spittlefields' thread further down the 21st century forum page: "I dont think it's exclusively laptops that leave you wondering where the sounds are coming from. last year i saw pat thomas birgit ulher and gail brand in concert in newcastle. and it was\a stunningly meshed music they played with many moments when you couldnt distinguish one instrument from the other, which for me is often a very satisfying occurence. i've sometimes played improvised peices with others and completely lost track of which sound i was making. one time it wasnt till everyone else stopped i realised i wasnt makin any sound at all. does it matter?"] Bailey goes on to make this very point: 

He concludes: 

So, to summarise Bailey's points, rather crudely:
1) Solo improvisation allows the improviser to examine their own playing more rigorously than in a group context, where frailties in the playing may be concealed by the musical support of other players, who can 'bail' you out of a situation, whereas solo, you're musically naked - you can't shy away from certain difficulties.
2) Solo improvisation can be a means of self-expression, a more personal approach than the collective mechanics of group playing, allowing the individual to explore their own musical thought in greater depth
3) What you lose is the unpredictability of playing with others and the moments of collective 'magic' where everyone is on one wavelength and creates a "stunningly meshed music...music independent of the characeristics of instruments or even individual styles, unidentifiable passages..."
4) So solo improv is perhaps not something that it would be musically healthy to exclusively pursue: but, besides its rewards for itself, it can feed back into group improvising in a positive way in that it allows you greater flexibility: while playing solo, you test & challenge the limits of your improvising language, and hopefully try to extend them so that you can play with more variety and flexibility in a group

I wonder if there's a theatre board somewhere where you have people posting about the relative merits of improvised and text-based performance and deploring the hierarchialisation of author and performer in the likes of Shakespeare and Beckett. Somehow I doubt it. I wonder whether in that respect theatre is healthier than music... Certainly improvisation plays an important part in an actor's training which perhaps gives them a different angle on the relationship; perhaps there's also a greater understanding of how essential performance is in that field.

I have no problem accepting that you can't notate what's special about Cecil Taylor. I also have no problem suggesting that no one could have improvised Mahler's 9th. I do have a problem with statements like Bailey's "formal, precious, self-absorbed, pompous, harbouring rigid conventions and carefully preserving hierachical distinctions; obsessed with its geniuses and their timeless masterpieces, shunning the accidental and the unexpected" although I hope and trust that its context shows it to be less ignorant about what happens in classical music than it seems (do I need to mention Bach, Handel, Mozart, Beethoven, Liszt, Messiaen? Probably not). Maybe that kind of starting-point is essential for his work, of course. It's probably worth bearing in mind that when a composer or an author releases a text into the world they're relinquishing control over the circumstances of its completion; the result is a collaboration which can cross generations and that has something to be said for it too.

That historical model is often cited in various contexts, not just in discussions of free improvisation, but it is really very one-sided. The 19th century did see a development of the notion of the masterpiece, written for posterity, but at the same time it also saw the rise of the cult of the star virtuoso, especially on piano, violin and cello. And arguably such virtuosos took greater liberties with the written text than had ever previously been the case, in a different manner to the stylised embellishments and ornamentations of earlier times, which tended to follow relatively consistent principles. And the 20th century saw new levels of notational detail, but at the same time witnessed open-form scores, graphic scores, text scores, and other types of composition that left more decisions in the hands of the performer(s) than anything in the 19th century. Both centuries have witnessed the simultaneous development of almost antagonistic trends.

The performances, of others' music, of David Tudor or Vinko Globokar or Irvine Arditti or ollie sudden wouldn't be the same in the hands of any other performers, but nor would they be the same without the provision of written texts from which they play. As ollie says, nor could the improvisations of Cecil Taylor be notated (Finnissy has written a few pieces that entail some stylistic imitation of Taylor, but ultimately they are a different type of music - would be futile to talk of them as simply 'better' or 'worse'), same goes for Brötzmann, Bailey, Parker, Oxley, or whoever. There's much to be said for calling for greater recognition of genres which are sometimes denigrated, but not much to be gained by trying to create a new set of hierarchies of value in this respect.

And I have no evidence that John Ogdon was ever actually offered one.

Broadening the sphere from Manchester, can you imagine what would have happened had one been offered to Alan Bush?! I'm also wondering whether Anthony Payne has yet turned one down (must ask him, though cannot be certain of a truthful answer - only a dusty one!...).

Perhaps Sir Richard Barrett will offer us his thoughts on this in the form of a three-page essay before a knighthhod.

Leaving aside knighthoods per se but remaining with the British honours system for a moment, I do rather wonder who in his/her right mind would want to have conferred upon him/her the right to "command" something whose very existence may have expired before his/her birth (i.e. the British Empire"). Ah, well - I suppose that, in reality, mine is neither to wonder why nor to worry about such things in my own right - although I wouldn't object to being awarded an OBE as long as it was understood to signify an Outsider of the British Establishment...

Best,

Alistair

Thanks Oliver. Thats another fine mess you've got me out of ......