Hello Pedro,
J. Coltrane or the bird passed a very long time about learning and experimenting patterns that sounds good all along standards. "Love supreme" is from my point of view like the synthesis of all the knowledge J. C. got from playing in clubs with best jazz players. By analysing his playing I could say that it's just patterns putted together, but they did improvise though.
Terry Riley with his "In C" idea just showed how to improvise a structure with a simple concept. The player can decide whenever he play or not, the patterns are evolving according to the sensitivity of musicians. Obviously there can be more complex way of improvising structures, but basicly it's quite the same concept. Why would something more complex would be more pertinent?
In TED performance we see how interfaces would be used to interpret electronic music, unfortunately the player doesn't seem to have a lot of culture in electronic music, but maybe someone else with a lot more experience and knowledge would show a performance like great improvisators we know, I'd love to see how squarepusher would play with this ^^
The blank page proposed by matohawk is the kind of stuff that might help pd users to have an approach of improvisating with pure data or max, like it was done in jazz club, but instead of jazz standards the material is rather the objects proposed by those softwares, and certainly all the electronic stuff that has started to emerge since the birth of first synth.
This subject is a door opened to a lot of speculating, cheers.
----- "Pedro Oliveira" hello@partidoalto.net a écrit :
Hi Patrice,
I think you didn't get my point... I mentioned Coltrane as an example of a musician that extrapolated his own instrument from the 12-tone idea (particularly from A Love Supreme on).
However, I think that open musical structures are a more complex subject to put it into the "improvisation" badge. For instance, if you take Terry Riley's "In C", to name a well-known piece, its structure is fairly open, although no player improvises. This is also used in many musical pieces and it was discussed even by Umberto Eco as open works ... and correct me if I'm wrong, but I think they differ from improvisation...
And again, what "whatever he likes" mean when you're using Pd? If you're the composer and the performer, you're free to put whatever pleases you aesthetically but that doesn't consist of improvisation, as I see. When you design a patch in Pd you don't have all possibilities in your hands at any given time, and that is why I think the idea of improvisation is, perhaps, misinterpreted.
I'm not postulating an ultimate truth or mentality whatsoever, I'm just.. speculating. :)
Cheers!
On Mon, Jun 20, 2011 at 3:27 PM, Patrice Colet < colet.patrice@free.fr
wrote:
If the musical structure you are playing on is opened, also when the player is free to put whatever he likes, you can call it an improvisation. You don't need to be Coltrane to improvise, what the hell is that mentality????
----- "Pedro Oliveira" < hello@partidoalto.net > a écrit :
Jumping on the discussion (not a frequent poster, but I do follow),
I
must say I agree with Marco... but one question (kinda related, but
at
the same time isn't): what would consist, then, "improvisation" when using Pd?
I mean, if you consider free improvisation the only thing I can
think
of, in five seconds, is "live coding". However, if you think of an instrument there are also "pre-given" structures one must follow,
that
is, pitch range, playability, timbre and so on. Roughly, with traditional instruments (from western tradition) you can't go that
far
away from the 12-tone paradigm (of course, a few exceptions here and there with guys like Otomo Yoshihide for the guitar or Coltrane/Evan Parker for Saxophone), but then, again... what is true improvisation in the context of Pd, Max, whatever?
I'm asking because, like I said, I do agree with Marco - recombining patterns doesn't consist of improvisation for me as well... and if improvisation in that case consists of playing notes over the riffs and patterns, why use a gestural controller? Just for the sake of technology?
Such topic interests me a lot, I'd love to hear your thoughts :)
On Mon, Jun 20, 2011 at 1:43 PM, Marco Donnarumma <
devel@thesaddj.com
wrote:
Ingo, thanks for your explanation, I think to understand how he's playing.
The movement looks to me secondary - it's more like a dance movement and not too much music control.
This might be a very personal take, but if movement is secondary in gestural control, why one uses gestural control at all? I believe that effective and ancillary gestures are what reinforce
our
perception of an instrument as a musical tool, rather than a mere "device". Imho many gestural controllers would benefit of a better focus on
this
aspect.
How would you play such melodic lines (like those jazz licks) - in time - simply with gestural control?
Setting an array of preset chords, triggering them with multiple switches, deploying a timeline which holds the trigger until the
onset
of the next beat or quarter, etc... I guess the list here could come up with many other methods. I'm not saying that's trivial, I only think that it's not the
"future"
as it is presented in the video.
How would you improvise on scales, pattern or harmonic structures? After all he's a jazz player calling his music "beat jazz".
What do you call improvisation in this case? How much is he improvising? I can imagine he's "improvising" with the melodic lines, but playing samples and presets chords doesn't match my own definition of improvisation.
cheers, M
-- Marco Donnarumma Independent New Media and Sonic Arts Professional, Performer, Instructor ACE, Sound Design MSc by Research (ongoing) The University of Edinburgh, UK
Portfolio: http://marcodonnarumma.com Lab: http://www.thesaddj.com | http://cntrl.sourceforge.net | http://www.flxer.net Event: http://www.liveperformersmeeting.net _______________________________________________ Pd-list@iem.at mailing list UNSUBSCRIBE and account-management -> http://lists.puredata.info/listinfo/pd-list -- Pedro Oliveira www.partidoalto.net soundcloud.com/iburiedpaul _______________________________________________ Pd-list@iem.at mailing list UNSUBSCRIBE and account-management -> http://lists.puredata.info/listinfo/pd-list-- Patrice Colet
-- Pedro Oliveira www.partidoalto.net soundcloud.com/iburiedpaul