DIMC Conference Discussion 2004


Present were: Jens-Ole Paulin, Rii Numata, Anke Ames, Hanne Hyllegaard, Carl Bergstrøm-Nielsen, Henrik Rasmussen, Corinna Eikmeier, Gerhard Pischinger, Astrid Penkert


Carl: did you touch on interesting moments during your actual work till now?

Jens-Ole: we had a rule, not to make a unity
Astrid: you have to be very strong
Gerhard: it is difficult to be a soloist because everybody joins you
Astrid: it is a point of quality for me in improvisation, that not everyone wants to play at the same time.

Anke: much improvised music is like water wawes, rather alike. Can be nice, but is not enough for me.
Hanne: it gets very much alive when everything is allowed, in your energy piece.
Carl: it takes a big collective discipline to realise it. Maybe this flexibility is a modern ideal - compared to old improvisors like Derek Bailey, Evan Parker, Cecil Taylor etc. who usually sound the same (even if Bailey coined the progressive term "non-idiomatic improvisation" and changed his style through Webern studies).
Anke: I like the possibility to make something new happen when I go and play
Carl: could it also be going in and out of styles?
Anke: yes!
Gerhard: it is something to think about what Anke says about the wawes and her point to make scores - normally we think of composiiton as limitations, but here, the composition is taking away the limitations of the wawes.
Anke: formerly, it was said one should avoid melody, but if you can predict what happens, it is not free either
Rii: to me, free improvisation is not very free, many things we cannot play.
Corinna: everyone has own limitations inside - if we get new ones, we can throw our own ones out of the window.
Carl: I like to make quotations, but not stick to styles. Maybe having fun with playing styles is the most important thing!

Carl: we represent very different contexts - a Japanese educational context, the new Leipzig tradition of improvisation studies, my improvisation teaching and the experimental scene of Copenhagen, the Rotterdam scene, meditative work with development groups bordering on "new Age"...
Jens-Ole: when we play long notes, music becomes meditative, the gap is not so big. - I draw printings on the computer which plays them.

(Here, we had a showing of graphics we played from by Anke and Rii - click here to see them)

Corinna: I often use hings from literature or nature for improvisation, I think that's the same.

Carl: Did you experience a particularly successful playing rule ?

Hanne: I introduced the idea to play long tones and beautyful disharmonies. Afterwards, we went on with structures in a similar way - a whole catalogue of structures.
Carl: We felt very good about Anke's Energy Piece the first time and we played it again today. Seems it suited us well, hard to explain why.
Henrik: How do we get inspired ... maybe it's good to make the musician a little bit confused.
Hanne: too much confusion is not good.
Rii: what do you mean by confusion?
Carl: Opening up for intuition, becoming awake (as Stockhausen said). I think this is a classic metapher with meditation people to see higher consciousness as an awakening
Hanne: society is sleeping.
Rii: It could be about accepting new values, accepting new ideas is dynamic. I recently participated in a seminar given by Otomo Yoshide, he also spoke about confusion.
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