Starting a blog is something that has been crossing my mind for quite some time now. I find that there is something of a necessity in making this space of meaning around my practice. My practice as a pianist. My practice as a composer. My practice as a human being.
I am not sure where this writing will take me, if anywhere. I have started many things in my life which I have left uncomplete, or which I have later undone myself. It is very much possible that this blog will end up like one of those botched attempts at making something meaningful. Something just started and left to rot without a second-thought. An echo of something that could have been, and which is no more.
This is why I intend this blog as an introspection into myself, rather than a reach towards others. I do not want to add additional pressure unto myself. On the other hand, I guess that, precisely as an act of introspection, can this blog become a space where I make myself seen to the outside therefore acquiring some relevance for others who read it. Think of this as an archive following its own peculiar logic. A repository of my memories and experiences. At not so neat classification of my thoughts, of my shortcomings and fears, possibly also of my hopes. I am not worried, at least for now, to justify what I say with sources and citations, I just need to put out what I feel and what I think. This is also why I have removed earlier, more academically centered posts from this blog to truly start something from fresh.
I find I have often struggled to be earnest in my music. Or at least, I find I have often struggled to put my emotions, rather than concepts in what I compose. I am still not sure whether this is a problem or not: the music we are playing with Anaphora (my Trio) is something I am very proud of, and it is essentially a result of working from specific theoretical concepts relating to improvisation and its relation to the Body and how this relation can be moulded by different musical – improvisational -- forms. There is nothing ‘emotional’ and ‘personal’ there on first sight. This is only something of a surface impression however.
I find that there is something deeply personal in the Body and in Improvisation. Music is always produced through a body. This body is mine and it must connect with other bodies, even if only with a later temporal version of itself, to improvise and respond to the musical impulses it is faced with. Even if those musical impulses were generated by my own body, it is still my body that must respond to them. The question becomes to see how to establish a connection with myself so that I may be able to connect with something else, whatever that is. There is something deeply and personally empowering in enabling my body to do so within the collective context of the Trio. It highlights the possibility of a shared collective endeavour. The possibility of something more. After this possibility has been highlighted by abstract thought it becomes our responsibility as human beings and musicians to grasp it and actualise into reality through a work within the Trio rehearsal.
What I am trying to say is that in every theory and every concept, there are experiences and feelings which become formalised through a rational structure. There is something of the every-day in theory. What is interesting is how this essence of everyday life -- echoes of smells, sights, movements and interactions with other bodies in given spaces – can become art precisely through their inscription in theory. By formalising this “everyday life” we can somehow wield these things into action. Put a name on them and control them.
I feel there is something very tangible and graspable in this, and yet also something extremely elusive. How are we to rationalise something that is essentially un-rational? Are we not perhaps betraying those embodied experiences by the very act of putting them into a discourse? It seems that we are dealing with an energy transfer: attempting to capture the energy of the lived experience into another type of structure entirely which should ideally enable the use of this energy for other purposes. It is in this transfer that something problematic appears.
To use a scientific analogy, Entropy is a thermodynamical law according to which no energy can be transferred and converted without this energy losing a bit of itself. I am sure this is quite a simplification of the process of Entropy itself, but I think that the example serves very well the problem with which we are faced. How can we transfer this energy into words, into a theoretical structure, without losing some of it in the process? In a way, it is exactly this little particle of energy, of something, that makes the whole. It is clear to me that without this something, the whole cannot exist in the first place. It is not that with this loss, we just have a ‘whole minus a something’, we simply do not have anything at all. Therefore, what also interests me, is to try and find ways to circumvent the nature of any transfer, in my case an artistic one, whatever artistic may mean.
How is it that something happens instead of not happening at all? What is this factor that makes things suddenly shift in our reality and makes things that were otherwise unthinkable and impossible become a necessity, the only possible solution, or, at the very least, something that is now thinkable and possible? The Arab spring can be explained with many factors, but these factors in their addition cannot explain the event in its whole. There is this tiny unquantifiable particle that makes everything fall into place, that makes something impossible, possible. Likewise, in music many quantifiable factors contribute to the quality of a performance but there is something un-capturable, deeply embedded in the moment itself that makes it whole. That makes ‘it’ happen. I wonder if this ‘it’ can be captured. Is it just there? Can a theory ever reproduce the whole or is it doomed to just be a sum of its parts? And then what? How to do something whole? If I cannot find a way to recreate this wholeness, what am I even doing? This is something that troubles me a lot and I have not yet found a definite answer to it. I also wonder If I do want to find a definite answer to this or if maybe the whole creative process is structured around this constitutive failure in truly rendering reality up to this non-quantifiable particle.
I think that in some sense, Improvisation not as content but as form of my practice, as its meta-structure, can be both the answer and the failure of an answer to this. The notion of incompleteness that is contained within the concept of failure and therefore within the concept of improvisation. Improvisation is the failure to be a finished entity, a repeated failure at that. It is never complete and therefore always dynamic because there is always something more to be said and to be improvised upon.
Maybe improvisation cannot recreate this little particle which I suppose we are all looking for. But I think that, once this particle is found, it can explore it and dissect, it can let itself be directed by this little particle. Improvisation, not necessarily only musical improvisation, can inspect this particle. A tiny precious thing that can become everything that can be. Or cannot.