on improvisation as a form of composition

[acroyear]

Bill Bruford:

Arnold Schoenberg allegedly offered the notion that all composition is just very slow improvisation, and I accept the corollary to be true, that improvisation is extremely fast composition. Things sound best to me when the composed sounds improvised and the improvised sounds composed. I was always most comfortable in the cracks between the two.

Comments

[dglenn.livejournal.com]

That doesn't fit everything I do while composing ... but it does describe rather a lot of it. (A lot of what I write starts off with an improvisation that I decided was cool enough to try to play again, and write down once it starts to jell. Then I try to write the rest of the piece ... often by improvising several versions and writing down what seems to work best. Other times I start with a theme I want to explore ... and explore it by improvising around it for a while before I start writing things down.)

Arranging is different, but composing, yeah, it's a lot like improvising slowly, with lots of the audio equivalent of White Out on hand.

http://www.panix.com/~dglenn/tmp/DGA-sampler.pdf (I need to add some of my more recent compositions to this.)

For me, seeing improvisation as very fast composing is more of a leap (you spend less time consciously thinking, "what about if I try this," for one thing, though that element is still in there; for another, there's a lot more room to play it safe/conservative/lazy and still come out okay in an ephemeral improvisation, than in a composition), but yeah, a lot of the similarities work in both directions.

Let's see whether I can post this via Lynx from Panix, since I can't do it from Safari at Mom's house (though I can get comments to go through on some journals).)

[acroyear70.livejournal.com]

in a sense improv as fast composition is. For professional (and damn talented) musicians who practice 5 hours a day and jam regularly (e.g., like the members of King Crimson, Genesis, Marillion), the instincts are honed much more than semi-pro musicians.