November 5, 2007
this is a journey into sound
Last night I accompanied the graduation shows for Asaf’s solo improv class and Shana’s scene study class. It was fun, though playing two shows in a row is a really good way to highlight the limitations of my sonic palette. I’m not a one-trick pony, exactly, but I’m in the single digits.
However: there were times last night when I was approaching the musical improv much more like I approach it onstage; that is, there were a few moments when I just let my fingers fall where they might and then worked with whatever came out.
When I first started accompanying improv, I thought that being a better musician would allow me to come up with more different ideas and more accurately execute the ideas I did come up with, and both of those are true. But that’s also the musical-improv equivalent of standing offstage thinking, “In the next scene, I will be a pirate who threatens a young girl with ravishment and then repents my evil ways.” Entertaining? Quite possibly. Improv? Not so much.
The idea of practicing diligently every day just so I can nail “Hot in Herre” when pimped to it (as opposed to fumbling around and mangling it, as I did last night) fills me with ennui. Traditionally, the ideal improv accompanist is someone who is not only technically gifted but who also has a huge catalogue of songs at the ready AND has an improviser’s sensitivity to what’s happening onstage. Good luck with that. Dave Asher in Chicago fits this description, which is why he’s one of the few improvisers at iO who actually gets paid. (Locally, our best and brightest is Michael Brockman, for whose presence Girls Girls Girls is forever in my debt.)
I would love to play as well as Brockman, but I’m not remotely interested in listening to and learning the week’s 20 most popular downloads just in case someone mentions them onstage. (Not that he does that; he doesn’t have to. But I would actually have to sit down and learn those songs in order to play them.)
There’s a double standard, which is completely understandable but insidious nonetheless: improvisers who would cover their faces in shame if someone started doing Shakespeare monologues or Austin Powers impersonations in a scene are still thrilled when recognizable pop music makes its appearance. And I get that, I really do. I just don’t have the skill set and don’t want it, at least not to do that.
What I am interested in, and which I got a small taste of last night, is actual musical improvisation: really being in the moment and responding to whatever just happened. This is difficult with scoring, which can’t turn on a dime the way a scene can — or, rather, it can, but it loses its emotional impact when it does so — and it’s even more difficult for me, given my limitations as a musician. But I feel like there’s a lot of interesting possibility there.
Improv’s relationship to music is between twenty and fifty years out of date. On the one hand, you have the traditional piano accompaniment, which is an enjoyable theatrical convention — but that’s all it is. Solo piano music hasn’t been popular for many decades now, so while it’s music, it’s not the music that most people listen to.
On the other end of the spectrum, you have the integration of recorded, multiinstrumental music into shows, as intros, outros, and for specific prearranged sections. I saw a great show called Indra’s Net in Chicago where the format was the leadup to and aftermath of an event that affected the whole community. (In the show I saw, it was food poisoning at a barbecue.) The leadup and aftermath were straight improv scenes, but the event itself was staged as a comic ballet to recorded music.
But recorded music can’t be changed by what’s happening onstage. At the same time, improvising music with multiple musicians is incredibly difficult, and there’s the additional problem of volume.
There’s a huge unexplored expanse of territory between music and improv, and anyone who starts wandering around in it now may well be considered a pioneer ten years hence. Sara Farr has been doing really interesting soundtracking for Get Up using prerecorded music and sounds, in which the improvisational element lies not only in what choices she makes from a huge library of material but also in the performers’ relationship to the music. (For example, at the top of the show Shana and Shannon ask the audience to pick a random number and Sara plays the corresponding file, which then inspires the audience suggestion.)
My personal bet is that the sound improviser of the future will be someone adept on both kinds of keyboard, blending prerecorded samples and files with spontaneous musical creation as seems appropriate. And what seems appropriate to some people will probably err more and more toward continual soundtracking. The fact is that we’re getting to the point where an improv scene is one of the few places where music isn’t playing constantly.
And now that I think about it, maybe I’m missing the point entirely. Maybe instead of figuring out ways to shoehorn music into some of the few remaining silent spaces in the world, I should be more concerned with keeping them that way.
Leave a comment
You must be logged in to post a comment.