It's an ancient premise that you can't actually teach someone to truly compose music or write poetry or create in any of the arts. The reason being that humans already have the access to this knowledge. This brings to mind Plato's story of Socrates coaxing a young boy to give correct answers to complex mathematical questions.
Why then should anyone bother to write about composing music and especially music for improvisers? First there's the aforementioned coaxing, and for thousands of years we have been acculturated to view only things occurring in three dimensional space as real or valuable and to see things that occur, or at least originate, in the other dimensions as fantasy. A treatise on the process of artistic creation can show that it is indeed possible to bring information from unseen sources and what some of the possibilities are.
The quest, then, is to find the essential area of ourselves where this knowledge is. Clearly, it doesn’t exist in the ego or personality where we have easy access. It is rarer than rare when it reveals itself full blown as with Mozart. It can appear in snippets when one works in earnest. It then becomes crucial to recognize when this happens. When you recognize your true voice it appears more often.
This is the alchemist translating mediaeval Arab texts and encountering a moment of illumination. This is Bach coming upon the exquisite architecture of his ideas, later to be notated, while improvising on the organ. This is John Coltrane finding a spiral of infinite melodic shapes through his relentless search.
The improvising musician, composer or serious listener who is following an improvised solo through its contours can distinguish what is coming from the player’s own voice and what are patterns, however well crafted, taken from recorded or transcribed performances of other musicians.
After monumental artists like Charlie Parker or John Coltrane opened doors to worlds of possibilities, untold numbers of players mimicked the results without inhabiting those worlds in a way that the music could enfold through their own voices. This results is a degradation of apparent possibilities.
Transcribing or studying transcriptions or studying by ear alone need not lead to new performances filled with constant quotes from famous solos. The player who uses fragments of other players’ solos to construct his or her own “style” is contributing to a more and more limited future for improvised music, no matter how well executed the mimicry may be.
The composer/improviser cultivates something as natural and a part of us as our skin or our hair.
We must use cunning and a passionate search for consciousness to provide a vessel for the music and all its aspects to emanate from deep within ourselves rather than from the surface of our intellect or from imitating an outside source.
Next: The Heritage of Artistic Revelation
Copyright © 1993-2010 Jack DeSalvo
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