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Re: david toop article - nytimes - today



> The heart of improvisation, IMHO, is to have good
>> strategies to throw yourself out of what you like and what you feel in
>> order to successfully experiment with the reactions of your musical
>> instinct when confronting the un-known.

Thanks for that quote, Per! I have never thought of improvisation in quite that way before, but it gave me an Aha! moment when I read it.  Does anyone have suggestions for practicing  throwing oneself out of what you like or feel when practicing at home alone?

This approach to improvisation makes me think of John Zorn's game piece "Cobra" where all the performers learn hand signals to tell the conducter what should happen next in the music, and then conducter conducts a downbeat to tell the performers when to implement the new command. It's a great piece to see live, since the performers are going to end up in a situation new to them at some point and requires them to listen to what is happening at the moment to know what to play next and not rely on the predetermined song structure.  This created an electric energy and synergy when I saw it live.

Jack

On Thu, Sep 10, 2009 at 2:10 AM, Per Boysen <perboysen@gmail.com> wrote:
> Per Boysen schrieb:
>>
>> In essence not far from what she tells about John Cage methods ;-)

On Thu, Sep 10, 2009 at 7:55 AM, Stefan Tiedje
<stefantiedje@googlemail.com> wrote:

> John Cage was not an improviser, nor did he want improvisation in his
> pieces. His work is about chance and the unforeseeable...


Yes, no one has said John Cage was an improviser! The article this
thread discussed also points that out. The similarity I mentioned is
the practicing of strategies for reaching into that realm of chance
and unforseeability. Unfortunately the link to the source article is
now lost from the thread's quote area but you should be able to find
it in the archives.

Greetings from Sweden

Per Boysen
www.boysen.se
www.perboysen.com