improv\e
short for…
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perhaps Mary Catherine Bateson learned this wasn’t only a good way to dance.. but the best way to live. in peripheral visions, she writes of giving up all the prep she had been used to doing, especially in regard to her speaking engagements. she said she found that swimming in the vulnerability of the moment, kept her thinking alive, kept her awake.
what if we’re missing it/life/us, because we’re spending too much time prepping.
we prep to ease the stress of a shipment/perfection/validation/slipping out of the normal/familiar.
and how often is the shipment not what people need, because it wasn’t improv.
it wasn’t you alive in the now, being vulnerable/raw/real.
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imagine.. 7 billion people.. free enough to – improv.
perhaps that’s how we move.. how we ..
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Zac on improv:
Bobby McFerrin on the pentatonic scale.
and..
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“Improvisation Is …” – Stephen Nachmanovitch
a space to realize the ability you already have
improve doesn’t mean just anything.. it’s intensely/imensely structured, presence.. response to what is right there..
improv is experimental science – keep correcting and changing till you get something you like.. micro second by micro second…
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What skills do you need in a situation of chaos? Chutzpah. Imagination. The ability to improvise.”
from Steven Pressfield learning hebrew
fitting with improv\e ness
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from Rebecca Solnit‘s hope in the dark:
ch 17 – after ideology, or alterations in time
loc 1728
Cornel West came up w idea of jazz freedom fighter and defined jazz “not so much as a term for a musical art form but for a mode of being in the world, and improvisational mode of protean, fluid and flexible disposition toward reality suspicious of ‘either/or’ viewpoints.”
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Jason on improv
lunged into situation you aren’t fully in control… stepping into the now.. silencing the future focus… freedom
what’s possible when i let go.. of my fear/doubt
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from Douglas Rushkoff‘s team human:
89
on music – the market has exercised such control over music since advent of recording studios and their appropriately named ‘control rooms’.. but today .. amplified by tech.. mixing board.. sync to a computer generated metronomic beat.. force performance to inhuman perfection.. sounds ‘better’.. or at least more accurate to the pitch and rhythm. but what is the perfect note/pace, really? the one mathematically closest to the predetermined frequency?
90
diff musicians might interpret not differently depending on context, or slide up to the note – intentionally emphasizing the effort required.. or slide down after hitting it, as if diminished in conviction..
love
ringo starr, famously lagged ever so slightly behind the beat – as if to express a laziness or ‘falling down the stairs’ quality of playing..
love – improv ness
ringo’s delay is human, and so close to the ‘normal’ beat of the song that it would be immediately corrected by production techs biased toward making humans sound just as ‘good’ as computers
our mechanomorphic culture is embracing a digital aesthetic that irons out anything uniquely human.. any quirks of voice/intonation – gravel, wobble, air, or slide – are reinterpreted as imperfections.. the idea is perfect fidelity – not to the human organisms actually performing the music, but to the mathematics used to denote the score.. we forget that those notations are an approx of music, a compromised way of documenting an embodied expression of human emotion and artistry as a system of symbols so that it can be re created by someone else..
the figure and ground are reversed when the human performance is seen as a n impediment to the pure data, rather than a way of connecting people on both perceived and unconscious levels.. the noises that emanate from the human beings or their instruments are not expressions of autonomy but samples to be manipulated; raw material for digital processing or labor to be extracted and repackaged.
91
human interpretation no longer matters, and any artifacts of our participation are erased..
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from marion milner’s life of one’s own:
136
same w singing.. as soon as my attention slipped back to the problem of trying to sing (rather than just listening to it).. then my voice wandered off the note
137
it seemed that i had always tried to keep in tune by attending to the muscles in my throat which felt as if they controlled the sound, just as i had tried to play tennis by the deliberate placing of my limbs. after this i found that i could keep in tune whenever i chose, so long as i thought only of the melody and forgot that my throat existed..
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improv\ing
be you. 