Improvisation

Some nights I couldn't get anything interesting out of the synthesizer and then there were those magical nights when it seemed every new sound was a source of inspiration.… A tiny movement of a wire or knob could make a huge difference. Filters were imperfect and the stray capacitance of my hand changed things.… Broken modules were frustrating, but with experimentation I found they could produce even more interesting sounds.… No longer interested in making tapes, I just wanted to experience new sounds, to find the elusive combination of timbres that would enable transcendence.… I was living with a machine and it was becoming part of me [1].

So writes Trevor Pinch of his first synthesizer, painstakingly cobbled together in 1973 from plans in a hobbyist magazine. In our technologically mediated world, most of us value our computers, phones, cars and saxophones for their rational utility—their ability to get a job done efficiently, predictably and reliably. For playfulness, exuberance and inspiration—in love, art, food or music—we turn to people, not machines. But Pinch speaks of his instrument not as one would a typical machine, but rather as one might a might a volatile lover or—more to the point—a moody musician: unruly and irrational perhaps, but an inspiring collaborator nonetheless.

Musicians have long had a tendency to anthropomorphize their instruments, but the embrace of idiosyncrasies of the kind Pinch describes is a relatively recent development. David Tudor expressed the zeitgeist of the homemade electronic music scene of the 1970s when he titled his loose collective of young performers "Composers inside Electronics": in describing his approach to circuitry, Tudor said, "I try to find out what's there—not to make it do what I want, but to release what's there. The object should teach you what it wants to hear" [2]. This openness to the inherent musical implications of the technology went beyond the compositional process: the unfamiliarity of such new devices, combined with the unreliability of amateur workmanship that Pinch describes, led to unpredictable performances. No matter how the pieces were scored—conventional staves, prose instructions, graphic notation, oral tradition—the instability of the instruments demanded flexibility: that ability to think on one's musical feet that we usually associate with improvisation.

The proliferation of commercial MIDI synthesizers in the 1980s and computer music software since the 1990s has been characterized by a growing rationalization of behavior—electronic instruments today behave more like cars than Pinch's balky filters. Yet the spirit of stray capacitance and loose wires lives on as a musical aesthetic: Self-described improvising musicians have embraced electronic devices over the past few decades—either as extensions of more traditional instruments, or as instruments in their own right—and the tradition of the open-form score, dating from the heyday of unpredictable circuits, perpetuates a spirit of improvisation in "composerly" circles as well.

For LMJ20—the 20th-anniversary issue of Leonardo Music Journal—I invited authors to reflect on the role of improvisation in technologically tinged music. The response was significant. We received far more submissions than we could publish in print—included in this issue are abstracts of several papers with links to their full versions on the web [3].

A dozen papers address various strategies and techniques of performing with technology. Pianist Sarah Nicolls contributes case studies of four interactive works for piano and live computer systems. Ben Neill and David Rothenberg discuss their collaborative activities with clarinet, trumpet and a host of signal processors. Doug Van Nort describes his turntableinspired "greis" software system, developed for use with the improvisational trio Triple Point, while Dafna Naphtali and Hans Tammen analyze their interactive improvisations for "Endangered Electric Guitar" and software signal processing. John Robert Ferguson and Robert van Heuman discuss "exploring the dialectical relations between precision and indeterminacy" in their electronic duo. In Nick Fox-Gieg and Margaret Schedel's collaboration, the bowing gestures of a cellist control real-time computer animation, while drawing on a graphics tablet produces musical sounds.

The development of improvisation strategies for non-improvising classically trained instrumentalists is the focus of Chapman Welch's essay...