RE: Put Your Voice Where Your Mouth Is

["Krispen Hartung" <info@krispenhartung.com>]

-----Original Message-----
From: Per Boysen [mailto:per@boysen.se] 

> However...
Personally I'm a big fan of improvised, on-the-fly or otherwise 
unpredictable musical performances and I always care to point out what 
is really happening when I'm doing such gigs. Just to make sure the 
audience doesn't think some parts were pre-recorded (or "pre-composed" 
if you want to go really impro).

I'm with you here, Per. I've just come to accept that some music
listeners don't like improvised music. They like the predictability,
repetition, and overall orderliness of hearing a song the same way every
time. This is fine, and the diversity is actually a good thing.  I think
it's just how people are psychologically built.  Personally, when I
break out of the improvisational mode, I start feeling like a cover
musician of my own music. This is why my past attempts of playing in
original pop bands, where we played our songs just like the CD, failed
and I became almost depressed.  I could never be a cover musician for
long periods of time.

> Speaking of how the public look at performers, I think you tend to 
become badly biased from being a musician yourself. I remember once 
sitting together with some friends, non of them being an active 
musician, and watching a band on the telly. Everyone said they hated 
the singer. I said he was ok, since I thought he sounded quite okay. 
But when we discussed it a bit more I realized that the others were not 
really talking about his singing, they were just put off seeing him 
move his body in the same way as Bryan Ferry does when singing. This I 
had not noticed at all - couldn't care less, really ;-)

Excellent point. I guess this is an inevitable result of the
subjectivity and generality of music critique. Every person has his/her
own mental paradigm or schema for how they evaluate a musical
performance.  Some people put more weight on the process (improvised,
real time looping, canned, rehearsed, etc), whereas others put more
weight on the final output (how the end result makes them feel, the
behavior of the performer, the originality of the tune, etc).  This is
why people can argue for hours on the merit of a performance and end up
realizing that they were comparing apples and oranges, or arguing about
two entirely different things. 

K-