My current creative work seeks to expand the range of forms, rhythms, media, and timbre available to the improvising musician. While my work is informed by a wide range of western musical traditions, from European art music to American musical theater, my principal inspiration is the wide range of African diasporic and African-American musical frameworks, from jazz song form to spiritual rhythmic traditions such as bata drumming. The great body of works created by African-American composers and improvisers serves as a jumping off point for my own improvisation based composition. The traditions and mores of jazz improvisation still yield great music but I think there are new ways to approach improvisation that retain concepts of tonality and pulse based rhythm while finding new pathways and systems for developing thematic improvisation and narrative improvisational music.
These new musical ways require systematic development of aural and tactile musical skills as well as positive and creative engagement with and incorporation of computer-based approaches to music. Current developments in computing invite a new dialog between technology and music, each medium informing the other’s trajectory. The interfaces presented by the diverse world of musical instruments are extremely well-designed and refined, and show the way for computer interface designers. Just as pencil and paper rival the computer as a system for graphic expression, instruments such as the tabla or violin are far better suited to sonic expression than any currently available computer interface. In contrast, the computer provides great ease in matters of data management and formalized thought, and its abilities can help guide musicians and composers in the development of fresh approaches to musical expression, especially as aids in externalizing and codifying difficult to access personal musical “instincts.” Music and computers are coevolutionary partners.
In addition to a friendly relationship with computers, to progress effectively improvising musicians should work towards acknowledgement of and symbiosis with their bodies, the vehicle of improvised sounding. Social and cultural pressures often create improvising musicians who are tense and afraid, musical performers rather than musicians who are sharing experience. This problem is exacerbated, I believe, when the compositional or improvisational framework is mismatched to the performer. While music (even improvisational music) as repertory deserves encouragement, it seems that times and society have changed while many musical styles have remained strikingly similar to older forms, parroting the energetic expressions of earlier practitioners. Improvisational materials should reflect the improviser’s world!
Towards the goal of finding fresh vehicles for musical improvisation I revisit and investigate my relationship with established improvisational, tonal, and compositional processes. The root questions are: How do I hear music? How do I codify and access memory (from “muscle memory” to “cultural memory” to learned musical techniques or patterns) to enact an improvisation? How is tonality processed in my brain? How is rhythm processed in my brain? Can I answer the above questions in such a way that my improvisation becomes more personal, tuned to my mind/brain/body, meaningful, and true? These solipsistic questions, which are more philosophical than practical, open interesting avenues for both applied and pure musical research investigating the boundaries between shared and individual musical experience, the technical perception of music versus the aesthetic reception of music (and sound generally), organized sounding among humans or other species or interspecies groups, and the function and perception of music, sound, and speech generally.
With these ideas in mind I am active in the development of and research into new improvisational frameworks for ensemble and solo performance, interactive computer music programming (see descarga and leaf piece), computer-based composition, and teaching.
