February 2002: In comparison between set and improvised performances, what do you think the audience gets from a set performance?

January 2002: "It is not possible, given any degree of optimism and generosity in regard to people in general, to set a time limit on creative reflection or a limitation on the number of people involved in the creation...".

American composer Earle Brown, in his classic article about Form in New Music, Darmstädter Beiträge zur neuen Musik X, Mainz 1966, p.61.

December 2001: Freely improvised music is - at its best - saturated with vitality, spontaneity and fury - and sometimes also with a surprising gentleness. Composed music, on the contrary, has a tightness thanks to its inner discipline and form, and it is this inner coherence which often embraces the listener and gives a feeling that the music has a direction and motivation which is inscribed within an intelligent discourse.

November 2001: "free musik - free mind - free world"

October 2001: Ge-Suk: what do you think of calling graphic notations "half-improvisations" ?

September 2001:

(Note: "rhythmic music" is a Danish label for non-classical musics such as jazz and rock)

***

August 2001: "As an improvising musician, one should first of all be so self-conscious as to discard criteria which have little or no validity concerning improvised music and instead point to that which is specific improvisational qualities. No, nobody can improvise an Ockeghem-like four-part diminution canon, and it is an open question whether an improvised fugue can be as good as a written one. But which kind of composition can make the moment present, go into specialities offered only by this moment, this situation? Which kind of composition can make the tension processes between players graspable for the musical experience? Which kind of composition can deal with a differentiation of the timbral possibilities of one instrument like improvised music can?"

June 2001: "what is a good performance? It lies in the hands and head of a ... performer...the shortest way between two people is not a straight line".

May 2001: "One of the things that puzzled me was just how little the musicians, all men at that time, seemed to talk to each other. Often they would meet and with barely a word prepare to play together. There appeared to be very little communication in any recognisable sense. Then somehow out of this apparent absence of communication would come the most wonderful sounds."

April 2001: "Composition could be said to be a process which stores and categorises information having cumulated in past times, so as to make it posible to get forward without having to re-invent the wheel all the time.

March 2001: "Improvisation is its preparation".

February 2001: "One aspect of Alterations that was so interesting was its 'cooperative confrontation'. Almost any musical statement was possible at any given time, no matter what else was happening at that time. Aggression, destructiveness, stupidity, wilfulness and perversity were as much a part of the organisational process of the music as the more treasured improvisation virtues of listening, reflection, intelligence and cooperation."

January 2001: "...out of a free moment which is under the influence of nothing, a purely intuitive music can emerge".

December 2000: "A source of continuing inspiration to the younger musicians was John Stevens' work in concerts and workshops. Maggie Nicols was another improviser who excelled at leading workshops. Within one hour, a roomful of assorted and embarrassed individuals could be led to build a communal musical experience of enormous power."

November 2000: "yuou can improvise or you can compromise."

October 2000: "The first commandment of anarchy: You must feel responsible for the whole.
(...)
One more commandment of anarchy is that one must master the balancing between uncompromising individuality and diffuse opportunism.
(...)
You cannot trust that people and states remain as they are. Instead, you must train yourself all the time to perceive their changes better and better."

September 2000: "It's the same thing with abstract paintings - I can control what's on the canvas, NOT what you see. Else I should make a horse or a house. It is a silly idea to control something which is not absolute."

July 2000: "..it seems to me that unless form and content are compatible they are likely to cancel each other out. Can anarchy music be directed by a conductor?"

Eddie Prèvost, "Commentary on the Proceedings", in: Improvisation. History, Directions, Practise. The Proceedings held at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London on March 31st 1984. London (Association of Improvising Musicians), 1984.

June 2000: "Thank you for the CD. It is difficult!

May 2000: "...what is heard is indistinguishable from its process. In fact, process itself might be called the Zeitgeist <time spirit> of our age"

From Michael Nyman: Experimental music. Cage and beyond, p.2. This important book from 1974 on the anglo-saxon tradition of indeterminate music has now been re-printed (with a preface by Brian Eno).

April 2000:  "Exposure to the indeterminacy of collective interactions is deliberately chosen by musicians engaging in free collective improvisation. There is no score, no set of written instructions. This doesn't just mean there is no predetermined form to be unfolded: it also means there is nothing to co-ordinate or to synchronize the intentions of the musicians as the music unfolds. In other words, I can make a sound that I intend to mark the end of a musical phrase, and there is nothing that stops you hearing it as a sound initiating a new phrase, or, simply, continuing the current phrase. And what you play (or don't play) next will reflect your interpretation of the opportunities. Our different intentions in each moment are generated by our different constitutive listenings to what is happening in the previous moment. To speak of intention is to emphasise not a kind of consciousness, but a tendency or projection towards a particular result in the immediate future. In each moment what is played is 'as if' some particular outcome is going to follow from it. In free collective improvisation, this outcome will generally either not happen, or turn into something else. I believe that the unfulfilled implications of each musical act are a vital kind of information that forms an integral part of the overall impression. In other words, the totality of what is happening is precisely the generation of a rich field of possibilities, containg not only what was actually played, but also what might have been played.

March 2000: "Form can only be invented; material can only be discovered"

February 2000: In 1968 I ran into Steve Lacy on the street in Rome. I took out my pocket tape recorder and asked him to describe in fifteen seconds the difference between composition and improvisation. He answered: "In fifteen seconds the difference between composition and improvisation is that in composition you have all the time you want to decide what to say in fifteen seconds, while in improvisation you have fifteen seconds." His answer lasted exactly fifteen seconds. --Frederic Rzewski

January 2000: "Tradition is something distinctly different from habits, even from very good habits, since, according to its nature, habit is acquired unconsciously, whereas tradition is the result of a conscious and well-considered approval.

December 1999: Gerhard: "Intuitive art is getting exciting exactly when it begins to be boring. When you get stuck, you have to create.

November 1999: "To be a free improvisor, you have a certain attitude to rules, to throwing them away, to accepting elements of chance".

October 1999: "There is a kind of tension to be maintained between total heterogeneity (where there is no cheese and pickle sandwich) and total homogenization where all identity markers are flattened out and we arrive at a kind of filtered 'new age-world music' pap. (Like a cheese and pickle sandwich in the blender!) The aim as I see it is to initiate and to respond to the initiatives of others in proportion to a sense of demands made by the particular piece of music as it unfolds."

September 1999: "What is art? Action in front of existence. What is a work of art? An attempt to cope with existence once for all".

August 1999: "The music is difficult in a way comparable to the way Adorno finds the music of Schoenberg difficult - not out of being pretentious or obscure, but because it demands active and concentrated listening from the very beginning...it demands not only contemplation but also action."

July 1999: "When the water is clear, you can see the fishes. When the air is clear, you can hear the sounds".

May 1999: "How can the organizing powers in improvisation be indeterminate? How can improvisation serve as a democratizing means within a social space? Improvisation is often ripe with uncertainty, how can this uncertainty function to democratize these spaces?"

April 1999: "The analogy with speech can help us. If the classically trained musician finds thinking and performing music simultaneously a well-nigh impossible feat, he can find comfort in the fact that all of us practise the art of thinking and performing speech simultaneously every day without giving it a moment's thought."

March 1999: "Contrary to other extreme art forms there is often room for humour, at times even to hilarious merriment and still there is no degeneration into flipped-out nonsense (...)

Febrary 1999: "I would like to play for you... no pieces, just music"

January 1999: "Nowadays one notices everywhere a wish to "humanize" music. To achieve this, we must take a risk and first "humanize" the tasks of the performer."

December 1998: "Creation is not the replacing of nothing with something or chaos with pattern. There is no chaos; there is a vast, living world in which the rules for specifying the pattern are so complicated that after you look at a few of them you become tired. The creative act pulls out some more inclusive shape or progression that gathers an immense amount of complexity into a simple, satisfying notion.

November 1998: "...I worked in an improvisation group called Symfrones. We became very inspired by Stockhausen when he came to Oslo in 1969 with his group and improvised freely...We thought that we could also do something like that and began to play together. There we acquired a kind of understanding for what music was without looking at specific stylistic criteria...Thoresen and I found out that there is a hidden world underlying all styles..."

October 1998: "During the 1950-ties and 60-ties, graphic and verbal notations operating with aspects of indeterminacy came to hold a central position (cf. LaMonte Young 1963, Chr. Wolff, Prose Collection, 1968; C.Cardew, Nature Study Notes, 1969)..."

September 1998: "The priorities of notation do not merely reflect musical priorities. They create them".

August 1998: "Considering the developments which have taken place in extending the physical parameters of sound within recent years it seems reasonable to consider the potential of the human mind ... to consciously extend it further into the actual generation of the work seems to me to be an inevitable and important step; a step which not only expands the potential of the "environment" of relationships (the work) but also the communicative potential, its inherent multiplicity of "meaning". Rather than diminish the responsibility of the composer or anyone else, it expands and intensifies all of the dimensions of creating and perceiving ."

July 1998: "It can seem a paradox to allow for open form - not to speak of improvisation - in works that are constructivistic to the degree found in my works. It only works in a close collaboration with musicians. Apart from that, it is a paradox the qualities of which attract me."

April 1998: "To me, intuitive music is to cut the time - it shows what I am, what people are"