The Teaching of Contemporary Improvisation
Charity Chan, Mills College
Formed in the fall of 2004, the contemporary improvisation
program at Mills College is one of the few graduate programs in the United
States dedicated solely to the study of improvisation apart from any specific
focus such as jazz. As the brainchild of guitarist/improviser/composer Fred
Frith, the program grew exponentially in its first two years. With a long
history of performing and teaching in the field of improvisation, Fred Frith is
remarkably positioned not only to initiate such a program, but also to talk
about pedagogies of improvisational music.
Based on a core curriculum of academic and performance
courses, the program includes a number of annual workshops conducted by
visiting composers, performers, and improvisers such as Maggie Nicols, Joëlle
Léandre, Frank Gratkowski, Jean Derome, Pierre Tanguay, Janet Feder, Lê Quan
Ninh, Frédéric Blondy, and Marque Gilmore. Course work includes intensive large
and small group ensemble playing as well as studying scholarly discourse
surrounding improvisation and contemporary music. In the academic year 2007-08,
Mills College faculty will be joined by Roscoe Mitchell (Darius Milhaud Chair
in Composition) and Zeena Parkins (visiting faculty).
The Music Department at Mills College is distinctive in a
number of ways. It has a long history of being at the forefront of experimental
and contemporary music and is an all-women’s college at the undergraduate
level. For Professor Frith, it is a priority that the Music Improvisation
Ensemble (MIE) at Mills College be composed of equal numbers of women and men. The
majority of its students have very different backgrounds and levels of
institutional music training. Students range from having extensive formal
training in music to being mostly self-taught. Their musical backgrounds
include a diverse set of influences such as rock, jazz, classical, and Arabic
music. In addition, students come from an unusually broad international pool,
including students from South and Central America, Canada, Europe and Asia as
well as the United States.
As the study of contemporary improvisation begins to take
root in many different institutions around the world, Mills College offers its
students a rare opportunity to investigate the reasoning behind such a program,
the difficulties in creating and establishing one, and perhaps most
importantly, the problems that may arise in attempting to create a program for
studying a practice often viewed as being entirely “free” of pedagogical
imperatives.
In this interview, much of my interest was to discover more
about the rationale in creating a program dedicated to the study of
contemporary improvisation. Much like jazz in the decades before, studying
improvisation at an educational institution appears, at first, to be an absurd
notion, if not a direct contradiction to the practice itself. In asking Fred
Frith about the process of, reasons for, and intent behind creating this
program of study, it is my hope that some of the questions and concerns about
the institutionalization of improvisation (or even music study as a whole) will
be further illuminated.
C.C.: Why did you decide to create an improvisation degree at Mills College?
F.F.: It was the result of a logical process. Mills has long recognized the
importance of improvisation. After all, Terry Riley, Pauline Oliveros, Alvin
Curran, and Anthony Braxton have all been on the faculty during the last twenty
years, and current faculty Chris Brown and Maggi Payne, for example, are both
actively involved with improvisation. I think a sea change occurred when they
searched for someone to teach improvisation in the African-American tradition,
which is now a fairly established academic post in institutions across North
America, and found that it was difficult to fill the position. Perhaps the
difficulty has become more acute with the de facto split between conservatives
in the jazz world and the more dynamic and creative end of the tradition. I
don’t know. Anyway, the department felt compelled to re-open the search with a
much broader definition of improvisation, which was when they invited me to
join the applicant pool. Actually, I made it clear before I agreed to apply
that I didn’t feel either qualified or ready to teach improvisation located
solely within the African-American tradition, so if that’s what they were
looking for they shouldn’t ask me, and they, in turn, made it clear that they
were no longer centering their search there. That, in itself, made it
interesting to me as someone who grew up as an improviser situated somewhere
between blues and jazz, rock improvisers like Pink Floyd and Grateful Dead, and
contemporary music experimentalism. Anyway, I was not hired to start an
improvisation degree but to teach improvisation, whatever that means. There was
no agenda and no pressure to conform to a curriculum. I was basically left to
get on with it. And my field of operations was broad from the beginning. The
ensemble I directed did a lot of notated music and even songs, not only
improvisation. I teach courses to undergraduates about film music and also
about high culture/low culture issues in a “rock” course. I spend about an
equal amount of time teaching composition. I am, after all, officially a professor
of composition. No one’s quite had the nerve to hire a professor of
improvisation yet!
The degree developed a little later out of our understanding
that there was a category of graduate applicants to Mills who didn’t fit into
either the Composition MA or the Performance MFA, which was totally grounded in
European classical performance. Many who were primarily instrumental performers
applied for the MA program but were clearly not “composers” in the traditional
sense. And after a while, there were enough of them that we decided a new
performance degree would make a lot of sense and allow us to admit talented
individuals who otherwise didn’t quite fit. As should be clear from the above,
this was something that I helped to create based on a perceived need. The fact
that the number of students in that category quadrupled within two years to the
point where we can’t really go any further without more resources should
indicate the depth of that need.
C.C.: There has often been criticism (from
both inside and outside the practice) that institutionalizing improvisation
(creating degrees, programs, etc.) is contradictory to the ideology of
improvisation. Do you think this is true?
F.F.: Well, first of all, that begs the
question of whether “improvisation” is a single and identifiable genre with a
universally understood ideology, which is debatable. I think that
institutionalizing anything can have adverse effects, to the degree that academia is
seen as a kind of self-sustaining mechanism tending towards the canonization of
certain ideas at the expense of others. I’ve heard it argued that the primary
role of professors of composition is to train future professors of composition
to teach future professors of composition, for example. And the
institutionalization of jazz certainly seems to have had the effect of reducing
the scope of the music as it is officially sanctioned, generally making the
milieu of that music thoroughly conservative in much the same way that the
institutionalization of classical music has drastically reduced, rather than
expanded the options or so it often seems from the outside. Frankly, all of the
agenda-driven, ideological discourse surrounding improvisation doesn’t hold
much appeal for me. Not to say that it isn’t important or necessary, more that
it appears to unconsciously set up the very ossification that it’s intended to
avoid. George Lewis reportedly said that since all the things you can do as an
improviser have now been done, the most interesting thing left to do now is to
talk about it. I guess I haven’t got there yet! I’m pretty pragmatic. I teach
what I’m interested in, but I work with students on how to best realize what
they are trying to achieve. I would imagine that’s what most teachers do,
actually. Since I never studied music formally—I have no degree in music
at all—I had no real experience of how academic settings in music really
function until I got here. And we’re not exactly typical. I’ve taught classes,
meanwhile, at SF State, UC Berkeley, UC Santa Cruz, UC Davis, UC Irvine, UC
Denver, and at Stanford, so my horizons are a little larger than they were, but
I can’t pretend that I’m at all well-versed in the practices of academia or
that I care much, one way or the other! Creating a degree and a program at
Mills for improvising came about because there was an overwhelming demand for
it.
In the end,
improvising is what we all do. It’s how we get through life, even within the
rigid structures where we may have to work. Kids learn that they are musical by
the fact of being able to make stuff up. When their talent is recognized, they
are taught to do what they’re told and follow a rather specific set of rules. I
like to keep the focus on improvisation as the act of making stuff up. When you
do it with other people, then all kinds of social aspects come into play, and
mostly the qualities that make a good improviser are not dissimilar to the ones
that I appreciate in my friends: being a good listener, sensitivity to your
social surroundings, being there when you’re needed but knowing how to step
back too, knowing when to be supportive, when to be assertive, when your
opinion is valuable, when to just go along with something, when to insist!
Patience. Tolerance. Openness. The fact that I’m teaching in an institution is
pretty much irrelevant to the way I work with improvisers; I focus on the same
things when I work with them outside the institution.
I also
think, though, having been here for seven years, that there are a lot of
assumptions made about the “academic” setting that are peculiar. There was an
article in Wire Magazine about Joanna Newsome, who was a student here, and the writer, who
clearly didn’t know much about Mills, said that she’d moved from the Music to
the English Department because of the pressure to conform to a severe academic
agenda imposed on her by Alvin Curran and Morton Subotnick and I! Well, you
know, Subotnick was a student here a long time ago, but he actually teaches
somewhere else, and Alvin and I never had any contact with Joanna at all,
except in my case, regarding an audition for a scholarship for which I
enthusiastically recommended her. So, this is a projection on the part of
somebody who’s decided what kind of environment an “academy” is, maybe because
he went to one and was made to feel that way himself and never figured out that
there may be other ways to do things! The same magazine also interviewed
Deerhoof, who spoke of meeting in my composition class and of how much I
encouraged them. So what is the reader supposed to believe? An institution can
be what you want to make it, both teachers and students . . .
C.C.: It is often the case that when music programs or styles become
institutionalized, that they are usually said to become formulaic and so what
made the music special in the beginning gets lost; one example of this is with
jazz music programs in universities and conservatories. Is this also the case
with improvised music? Is there any way of escaping this potential problem?
F.F.: Is it the “institution” that’s the problem, or the agenda of the
teachers who get the posts, or the kinds of people who want to have those
posts? Or the concept of the “curriculum” as a means of demonstrating to the
“consumer” (the student) a set of specific goals that you are aiming for them
to attain in order to get good “grades,” which makes for clarity of purpose but
a tendency to allow teachers to rely on the same material so they don’t have to
constantly rework or rethink their courses; they can just wheel them out, year
after year, without much critical reappraisal. I agree with Philip Tagg’s
observation that what is characteristic of the academy is that it revolves
around the idea of a recognized “canon,” which encourages comparison between
institutions that are all seen as being basically on the same page. It
encourages and rewards conformity to a certain degree, but maybe as a result, there are other
institutions busy addressing this very difficulty. Mills is certainly one of
them, but it isn’t the only one. As long as teachers have a dynamic relationship
with what they teach and are prepared to re-examine their own practice on a
continuous basis, they will be able to engage their students. That’s true of
any subject, not just improvisation. It’s far too early to say if the teaching
of improvisation in academic settings will produce the kind of formulaic
approach that you’re talking about. It may, but I have a feeling that the kind
of people who are interested in doing it are the ones most likely to resist
allowing it to become formulaic! What I see, right now, is the establishment of
“improvisation” as a sexy field for aspiring musicologists to make their mark
and a way to create jobs for a certain breed of practitioner reared in an
academic setting and wishing to remain there for life, if possible. I mean,
we’ve had acousmatics, and electro-acoustics, computer music, and all the other
branches of contemporary practice that, having been named, can spawn university
departments, and conferences, and symposia, and festivals, and competitions,
and other forms of respectability so that they, too, can be self-sustaining
mechanisms to keep certain folk with creative energy and initiative alive and
kicking. Is that so bad?
C.C.: It seems, then, that you believe institutionalized improvisation study
does not necessarily have to become formulaic and, ultimately, detrimental to
improvisation. Indeed, you believe institutionalized music study can create
unique areas in which creation and change are not only possible, but are a
common occurrence. Do you think the challenges and consequent solutions of
improvisation pedagogy can be applied constructively to other areas of music
study, including the scholarly study of music?
F.F.: Hmm. Did I say all that? Let’s slow down here! Does institutionalized
improvisation necessarily have to become formulaic and, ultimately, detrimental
to improvisation? No, but it very well might, depending on the degree to which
it is seen as a finite program with a clear-cut set of goals that can be taught
by someone with the aid of a textbook or the equivalent thereof! Can
institutionalized music study create unique areas in which creation and change
are not only possible, but are a common occurrence? Why not? In my experience,
being able to spend a long and focused period working with the same people in
an open-minded and open-ended way can produce results, both fabulous and
unforeseen. When I spent six months with “young unemployed rock musicians from
the ghettos of Marseille” (as described by their own government program) we
were able to do things at a level of sophistication that I could not achieve
with the Ensemble Modern, brilliant musicians whose whole practice is rooted in
the score. Show them a score and there’s nothing they can’t do. Without one
it’s hard work to keep their respect. Hardly any of the kids in Marseille could
read music, so that was never an option. But we had time: not a few three-hour
rehearsals but months of nine to five work and that demonstrated amazing
possibilities. It wasn’t in an “academic setting,” but, in the end, that seems
irrelevant, except in the important respect that they were being paid to work
with me, not paying for the privilege! Anyway, you go to college, if you’ve got
any sense, to find stuff out and to screw up (as often as possible) because
that’s how you learn, and when will you have that luxury again? If you have
that attitude, finding “unique areas in which creation and change are not only
possible, but a common occurrence” does not seem so unrealistic to me.
As for whether such creation and change are the result of
“the challenges and consequent solutions of improvisation pedagogy” is a
question with limited usefulness. Because if you believe that, then you’re
probably well on the way to codifying a practice which will then, no doubt,
precisely inhibit the very creation and change it is supposed to encourage! As
an improviser, I want to focus on being here, in this moment, in this place,
with these people, and seeing what happens, what has happened, what will
happen. Another moment with other people will neither have the same focus, nor
the same meaning. I think the analysis of music has tended towards the idea
that there is a “desire” on the part of a “composer,” a “goal” that is realized
using “this” set of techniques. Fair enough. But how do you apply that to a way
of making music which is determinedly collaborative, which has no idea where it
is going, which may be successful and disastrous in equal measure?
C.C.: What do you think the greatest problem is with teaching improvisation, a
practice that is often thought of as entirely free and spontaneous?
F.F.: I had a student, a few years ago, who
came into the MFA Performance program, the chamber music one. We didn’t have an
improvisation degree then, but she was really interested in improvisation,
regarded it as an important thing to learn how to do. She took my graduate
seminar on the history and practice of the interface of improvisation with
composition in the last fifty years. We studied Indeterminacy, Earle Brown,
Pauline Oliveros, Third Stream, Sun Ra, Braxton, Butch Morris, Zorn, Barry Guy,
all kinds of different approaches and traditions. She was in my ensemble for
two years, in which we tackled many improvisational pieces: Cardew’s Treatise, Stockhausen’s Aus den Sieben
Tagen, my graphic scores,
some Christian Wolff pieces, some pure improvisation, plus, Cecil Taylor came
and worked with us, and also Leo Smith. Plus, she had a semester of
improvisation workshops with Joëlle Léandre. Plus, she was a member of the
informal Monday afternoon sessions that I run in my office, where a small group
of regulars comes just to play.
Then she
wrote her thesis on improvisation pedagogy and, basically, said that she found
the lack of improvisation teaching very difficult, that she felt like she
hadn’t been taught how to improvise. I was fascinated by this; we talked about
it a lot while she was writing the paper. And I understood that as a classical
instrumentalist, there are certain practices that you learn and one of them is
how to engage in constructive critical dialogue. You play a piece in front of
peers, and your teacher and people tell you what they think you did wrong and
how you can do better. They’re all holding a score, so they have this reference
where everyone can see how it’s “supposed” to sound, and then they can point to
particular deficiencies, either of reading, or interpretation, or of the
technique required to realize a particular passage. It makes perfect sense and
is a very important part of learning an instrument at a high level. So players
get used to the idea that after playing in a pedagogical setting, there will be
feedback that will help them understand what to do, feedback based on a more or
less universal idea of what is “good” or “acceptable” in a given setting and
what is “bad” or “unacceptable.” And in the two years of fairly intensive study
of improvising at Mills, she was still waiting for someone to tell her what to
do, to tell her what was good and bad, and in the absence of that kind of
feedback, her assessment was that she hadn’t been “taught” anything. Whether
she had learned anything is another question, but she hadn’t got to that point,
she was too busy feeling let down!
So if you
want to know the greatest problem with teaching improvisation, maybe you should
start right there! Who’s defining the rules? Should there be any? And what
happens if you break them? Is there “good” and “bad” in a universally accepted
sense? How do you teach something that, at least nominally, has no accepted
norms? I believe that all effective teaching is the act of facilitating the
process of people teaching themselves. If your ego needs to be told, “I am the
source of all wisdom, and I am telling you what is good and bad,” then, at
best, people will learn how to conform effectively to your taste and at worst
feel inadequate and unappreciated. Is that teaching improvisation?
C.C.: That improvisation doesn't have any
accepted norms has often been a point of contention. As you said, because
improvisation doesn't really have a set external frame of reference (for
example, a score), it often means statements made by different improvisers are
taken by students to be absolute truths or that certain approaches are
considered to be better than others. For instance, statements and opinions made
by Eddie Prévost, Wadada Leo Smith, and Joëlle Léandre. While these
perspectives aren't necessarily conflicting, it is often difficult to conceive
of a means in which all of these perspectives are equally viable. How do you
think the seemingly conflicting ideas surrounding improvisation should be or
could be reconciled?
F.F.: I think conflict is very valuable.
It’s one useful way to progress. Reconciling conflict . . . what do you mean by
that I wonder? Coming to an agreement? Why is that necessary? As long as you
proceed with mutual respect, you don’t have to have identical opinions,
feelings, or ways of doing things. It would be sad if we did. We all tend to be
bundles of contradictions anyway, as we negotiate the shaky territory between
our origins, our upbringing, our education, our social milieu, the way we wish
to see ourselves and others to see us, our skill sets, our ambitions, our
beliefs. Even as we are being radical and iconoclastic in our art, we may find
ourselves behaving in a traditional way as teachers, reproducing the same
mannerisms and methodologies that our own teachers adopted towards us. Same
thing if you have kids, as any parent will tell you. Or we may get anxious
about how “history” will see us and start “setting the record straight.” There’s
all kinds of bullshit out there. It doesn’t matter really. Those who learn from
us usually take what they need, what makes sense to them, and discard the rest.
That’s how it should be. That’s how we learned in the end. I don’t see many
believers in absolute musical truth knocking around the halls of Mills, you
know. The only problem I see arising is when teachers or students start to get too
self-important.
C.C.: Do you think that improvisation is socially resonant? That it “teaches”
methods and means of an ideal society?
F.F.: Well, I talked about the values that
are associated with a good improviser being not dissimilar to the ones you look
for in your friends. But politically, that idea’s been around for years. In the
70s, there were a lot of folks holding up improvisation as a superior
democratic model because, you know, all the players were equal, there was no
social hierarchy, no leader, no external authority like a score, and so on. Did
that teach methods and means of an ideal society? You’ve got to be
kidding! I remember reading a
review of a performance of Berio’s Sequenza for trombone in which it was cited
as a great performance of the piece because the player actually ignored the
score after a few bars and just improvised. Is that really cool or really
arrogant? I had a friend who performed at an improvised music festival in
Seattle, and she brought a music stand with her because they were going to play
some particular piece or other. And the guy who was sharing the bill, a
renowned improviser of some thirty years practice, was so upset that he threw
the stand off the stage, because it didn’t belong there, this was about improvisation.
If you think that years of improvising will produce people who are not
dogmatic, self-righteous, and intolerant, well, think again! There’s always a
danger whenever you start asserting that one form of musical practice is
“better” than another on some sort of politico-social level. Every form of
music is capable of being vibrant, dynamic, uplifting, and, needless to say,
the opposite. I don’t think that being a good improviser is going to make you a
better person than if you are a good Baroque violinist or a good tabla player.
Being a disciplined orchestral player is not somehow inferior to being an
improviser. I’ve been improvising since I could walk, just like everyone else,
and composing started not too many years after that. I’ve been doing both ever
since. I regret not having had any formal training because there are certain
things I don’t know how to do. On the other hand, I’ve been testing my work in
front of an audience since I was fourteen and working with wonderful musicians
who have taught me, and continue to teach me, everything that I know as a
musician. Some of them have been classical musicians, some are in the world of
jazz, some deal with songs, some are improvisers. Have I learned less from
Evelyn Glennie, or Katia Labeque, or Viktoria Mullova, or Werner Bärtschi,
because they are “classical musicians”? Of course not! That level of virtuosity
is totally inspiring, whatever the context you work in. Nobody spends too much
time talking about how their chosen musical milieu represents an ideal society,
nor claiming that their chosen field of operations is ideologically superior,
at least not the people I hang out with.
C.C.: At Mills, you try to have an equal
number of men and women in all aspects of the improvisation program, from the
number of women in ensembles to the number of women that are in the program. Is
there a particular reason for this?
F.F.: Well, it’s not only Mills. If I’m
doing a workshop somewhere, I always ask them to aim for that too. Because in
my experience, if I don’t, the overwhelming likelihood is that all but one or
two of the participants will be male. It just keeps perpetuating the same old
shit. I remember doing a workshop in Mexico City, and I had, as usual, asked
for gender parity if possible. At a press conference beforehand, a journalist,
a woman, asked if it was normal that all the workshop participants should be
men. And I said, “of course not . . . very much the opposite, women are
encouraged to participate.” And she looked at me strangely and said, “Really?”
like this was the first time she was hearing this. At the workshop there were
fifteen men signed up, and then, she showed up with about twenty women friends!
It was great! Biggest workshop I ever did!
Pauline
[Oliveros] used to observe—when she was here—that Mills, being a
women’s college, the men who come into the graduate program should ideally
consider themselves a privileged minority! Only problem was—and it was
the first thing that struck me when I got here—was how few women there
were in that program, so I mentioned it to Pauline and we decided to try and do
something about it. And it has been a struggle, but we’re getting closer to
parity all the time. What I find extraordinary is how you can ask the question!
Does it need a particular reason to afford women the same opportunities as men? I’ve been
performing and collaborating with women on a regular basis for most of my
professional life, and it pisses me off that there are fabulous, talented,
brilliant women wherever I look but that whenever I play at major international
festivals, the number of women in the program is still tiny. There are
honorable exceptions, obviously, but still, I was having this conversation in
the 70s. Isn’t it time to stop talking about it and get on with addressing it?
I played at the Music Unlimited Festival in Austria recently, and I was
speaking to the pianist, Irene Schweizer, who I’ve known for over thirty years,
and she said with great excitement that this was the first time she’d performed
at a festival where there were more women than men on the bill and not only
that, but nobody was congratulating themselves about it! That kind of tells you
what you need to know, right? Personally, I think it’s of an immediate and
obvious benefit for men to work closely with women, even if it’s only to rid
themselves of the deeply ingrained understanding that men working with men is
the norm. When it’s no longer the norm, the problem will begin to disappear, I
would hope. But that’s secondary to the issue of making sure that all the
opportunities are genuinely equal.
C.C.: What value do you think theoretical and academic work in improvisation has
for the discipline?
F.F.: What is “theoretical work” in
improvisation? People trying to figure out how it works and then codifying it?
I think that has value in perpetuating the careers of professionals who like to
do that kind of thing. But flippancy aside, I think we’re back where we
started. How is “academic” defined? For many, like that guy in Wire Magazine, it’s clearly a pejorative word. You
know, people who are cut off from the real world (where writers from Wire
Magazine live) and
pontificate from their ivory towers using words (that most of us don’t
understand) to discuss issues (that most of us don’t recognize) while forcing
their students to conform to criteria that most of us are disinterested in. And
this caricature has nothing to do with my admittedly limited experience in the
academic environment. What I see, daily, is a bunch of people, teachers and
students, trying to figure stuff out. They do this in an engaged, critical,
friendly, and passionate manner. Academic work in improvisation, in my neck of
the woods, usually means a bunch of people improvising together, which makes it
identical to non-academic work in improvisation. In the academy, we talk about
it, we expose each other to different ideas about it, we practice it, we argue
about it, and that’s not any different from my ten years in Henry Cow, for
example. So for me, nothing has changed really. I’m still just getting on with
it, either at Mills or outside of Mills, it’s the same.
C.C.: How much involvement do you think
scholars should have, then, with the practice of improvisation?
F.F.: Not sure I understand the question.
If they want to improvise, they should improvise. If they want to write about
improvising, they should write about it. We’re humans, therefore, we have an unlimited
desire to quantify, sort out, categorize, statistify, and otherwise arrange the
data that confront us. I don’t have a problem with that as long as we
acknowledge that there are some forms of understanding that have nothing to do
with writing papers and reading them at conferences.
C.C.: How important do you think writing
about improvisation is? What benefits can writing about improvisation have
(including writing done by both performers and scholars)?
F.F.: It’s important, if you have something
useful to say and not, if you don’t! Benefits would include illuminating
different aspects of the practice, placing developments into a variety of
historical and sociopolitical contexts, figuring out how different aspects of
the practice work and, you know, all the rest of the things people write about.
Not to mention its use in fostering and sustaining careers in universities! In
my experience, there is an artificial divide between those who see themselves
as scholars and those who see themselves as musicians. Many musicians I know
have a vast range of scholarly knowledge about all kinds of aspects of their
practice, but their scholarship may be looked down on in certain contexts
because they haven’t been educated in an academic way, they don’t use the right
terminology, they just don’t fit into the agenda. Scholars are rather less
likely to turn out to be great musicians. But it happens! In the end, it’s all
good, right? Now it’s me stereotyping academia!
C.C.: What advice do you have for musicians
interested in entering into the world of contemporary improvisation?
F.F.: Same advice I have for musicians
entering any other field of endeavor or anyone else. Have fun, but don’t waste
your time.