Liner Notes

AMM at UEA
14th February 2005

Chance is a fine thing. The conjunction of staff circumstances, the intake of a particularly lively community of students and a speculative e-mail from John Tilbury about his forthcoming book on Cardew, led Jonathan Impett – Head of the School of Music at UEA – to designate a ‘themed’ year in which improvisation would underpin a significant part of the curriculum and associated activities. So over the twelve or so months preceding Valentine’s Day evening 2005 John Tilbury and Eddie Prévost had become regular visitors to Norwich, giving lectures and workshops, and an AMM performance was to mark the culmination of this activity. Hoping for something special I set up a pair of microphones and let the tape run……….

Perhaps the most surprising aspect of the experience for me was its immediate memorability. Even before replaying the recording I had a clear aural memory of the sequence of events/sounds – a response which was shared and commented on by other members of the audience – and replaying the tape I found myself anticipating the musical development with an eerie accuracy. Three months on I’m marginally less accurate, but the experience is just as engaging.

Tilbury and Prévost's technological and sonic resourcefulness is revealed anew here partly through the opportune positioning of the microphones between the two, placing us as listeners in the middle of the stage, with John on the left and Eddie on the right. Among other things we are immediately aware ‘who is doing what’, although occasionally this seems to defy instrumental logic. Despite availing themselves of entirely different technologies, they can produce sounds which are almost identical, or fuse sounds through awesome real-time skill and intimate awareness of their vastly different resources: a moment where John’s piano clusters isolate and make explicit the pitches in Eddie’s bowed cymbal is one magical example here.

Improvisers tend to share with other performers a physical language of ensemble – of eye-contact, of hands poised, of coincident signals – but there seems no need for this between these musicians. Their confidence in the sound world (and each other’s abilities) is such that they have little recourse to such explicit strategies, indeed in this performance they barely looked at each other until the end.

One final observation: there’s something extraordinarily beautifully ‘composed’ about their activity, albeit composed in real-time. I think it’s the unequivocal quality of what they do that makes this performance so immediately memorable. As musicologists increasingly acknowledge the often unplanned and messy practice of composers (as distinct from the romantic mythologizing and naïve assumptions of ‘intention’) it becomes quite evident how insufficiently complex and subtle are our discussions of the relationship between improvisation and composition. In a world of ubiquitous computing where increasingly we can make ‘real-time’ decisions with complex outcomes this becomes an urgent issue. Neither composition nor improvisation results from banal preference, but both are born out of the reality of a musically-active life, availing themselves of characteristic sets of strategies and procedures, speaking of relationships between objects, sounds, people and ideas. There’s an ethical perspective here, which is intimately bound up with the aesthetic one, and this isn’t something which distinguishes AMM from previous musical precedent (whether we call it composition or improvisation) but rather is something which ties them absolutely to the way good music has always been produced.

Simon Waters
3rd June 2005