Improvisation/Indeterminacy

Improvisation and indeterminacy seem to be aligned terms, both being associated with an acceptance of contingency and an openness to the unexpected. We can find diverse discussions of contingency across improvisation studies. Dan DiPiero, for example, usefully proposes a simple definition of improvisation as a ‘contingent encounter’, where contingency stands as an umbrella term temporally spanning the not-yet-known and the could-have-been-otherwise (2018, 2). Similarly, Gary Peters highlights that improvisation characterises choices ‘within a contingent context, without absolute criteria, where all outcomes are thus intrinsically uncertain’ (2012, 2). Meanwhile, indeterminacy in music is most associated with the work of John Cage and with the development of his understanding of ‘experimental music’. DiPiero’s and Peters’s conceptions of improvisation are at first glance congruent with Cage’s famous definition of the experimental act: ‘not […] an act to be later judged in terms of success and failure, but simply as of an act the outcome of which is unknown’ (1961, 13). But how the terms of improvisation and indeterminacy have been deployed, and the musical practices they have been associated with, has not always borne this congruence out. The connections and divergences between improvisation and indeterminacy remain an open area of inquiry.

This special issue of Contemporary Music Review follows from volume 38, issue 5, on the theme of ‘Improvisation and Social Inclusion’, edited by Franziska Schroeder, Koichi Samuels, and Rebecca Caines. That issue emphasised how, through the field of improvisation studies alongside a wide variety of practical endeavours, improvisation has come to take on a valence far beyond its traditional musical domain, becoming a tool for thinking through notions of ex- and in-clusion, diversity, and access, as well for engaging with wider social, cultural, and political issues, in diverse performance practices. The essays included in that issue took as their task examining how improvisation can enable us to explore new modes of inclusion and social organisation (Schroeder, Samuels, and Caines 2019, 442). Improvisation was widely understood as a complex social phenomenon, and the topics and themes engaged with included the use of technological means to improve inclusivity in musical practices and spaces, how improvisation can be put to work in educational contexts, and the role of improvisation in community music practices. Themes of collaboration, participation, dialogue, and well-being emerged across a wide range of cases, and with this the notion of ‘inclusion’ was itself challenged and reshaped. This current issue continues the task of exploring how improvisation and inclusion can and do relate, through the specific lens of the concept of indeterminacy.

The multiple senses of indeterminacy frame a key area of examination here. Indeterminacy is a notion that has appeared in many guises since the beginning of the twentieth century. By the 1950s, the musical discourses that gave indeterminacy a particular prominence, including but far from limited to Cage (Cage 1961; Wolff 2017), could partake in a strange collision of disparate historical and contemporary fields. The embrace of chance and contingency by Marcel Duchamp and others in the pre-war, artistic avant-garde (see Molderings 2010), the fundamental uncertainties posited by quantum mechanics (see Cline 2019; Barad 2007), and the recursive systems, open to contingency, theorised in cybernetics and information theory (Kline 2017) each informed musical notions of indeterminacy. With such varied influences, the ways in which indeterminacy would manifest in music was always set to be multiple, but in its widest scope musical indeterminacy can be seen, again seemingly congruent with improvisation, as the attempt to accommodate chance, uncertainty, unpredictability, and probability into aspects of musicmaking that had formerly been supposed determinate.

Yet the travails of the concept of indeterminacy over the last half century show that indeterminacy and determinacy can be dangerously difficult to distinguish and unpick. Recent work on the politics of digital culture and what the philosopher Gilles Deleuze called ‘societies of control’ (1992) have shown how extremes of indeterminacy, such as those produced by the masses of personal information gathered by state and private actors, may be flattened into a stultifying lack of differentiation. In these contexts, individuals become indeterminate clusters of data, which mechanisms of power can then manage into a world where all humans are statistical distributions, apt to discipline, regulation, and segregation (Lushetich 2021). Here agency is erased from the equation. This may seem a very different terrain from that of musical indeterminacy. But the discourse of musical indeterminacy, and its co-articulation with improvisation, has also played out in terms of how individual freedom and expression relate to the contingencies of the world. This raises the question of how musical indeterminacy may itself produce new modes of exclusion along with its new modes of freedom.

The most prominent disjunction between improvisation and indeterminacy may be that associated with Cage. Cage’s notion of indeterminacy as an element of his ‘experimental music’ is presented as a means to rid the performance space of preconceptions, even to the extent of ‘depart[ing] from music’ (1961, 28). However, Cage’s desire to rid music of ‘man-made theories or expressions of human sentiments’ (10) in favour of a concern with ‘the sounds themselves’ (28) precludes identity, personality, or emotion from being properly musical concerns, and may thus conflict with themes of social inclusion. George E. Lewis’s landmark 1996 article, ‘Improvised music after 1950: Afrological and Eurological perspectives’, a recurring point of reference in this issue as well as in the ‘Improvisation and Social Inclusion’ issue, prominently thematised this apparent opposition between indeterminacy and improvisation, detailing how social, tradition-derived, expressive forms of improvisation in Afrodiasporic musical practices have been criticised for not matching the standards of depersonalisation and the elimination of memory and history of ‘Eurological’ indeterminacy (1996, 107–09). Here, notions such as ‘indeterminacy’ and ‘experimental music’ serve an exclusionary function.

Yet, significantly but not exclusively in the wake of Lewis’ article, recent scholarship has reopened the question of what constitutes ‘experimental music’, and thus of how indeterminacy can be understood. The exclusionary function of terms like ‘experimental’ and ‘indeterminacy’ has been challenged by the ‘experimentalism otherwise’ that, as Benjamin Piekut has highlighted, was always circulating around and beyond the fringes of ‘experimental music’ (2011). This work highlighted figures including Henry Flynt, Charlotte Moorman, and the Jazz Composers Guild, showing already how much that went, and goes, by the name of ‘post-Cagean experimentalism’ is marked by an attempt to work through the limits of Cage’s own practice (see also Gottschalk 2016). These practices show that Cage’s challenge to presuppositions need not preclude personal, social, and political concerns. Piekut’s recent work on the ‘vernacular avant-gardes’ of rock and pop has extended this further still (2019).

At the same time, certain offers to ‘inclusion’ may not be entirely desirable. As Schroeder, Samuels, and Caines highlighted, inclusion may serve to reinforce the binary of centre and margin, with disciplines and institutions ‘keep[ing] certain people and practices at the edges’ (2019, 442), while sustaining and renewing themselves through added ‘diversity’. Sara Ahmed has acutely shown how such a limited form of inclusivity often brings with it a demand to ‘attunement’ with the system, outside of which exclusion still takes place: ‘if being incorporated by an institution requires that you are in tune, then being out of tune is to get in the way of its tune’ (2006, 63). In this light, practices and scholarship that show indeterminacy from a wholly new perspective become as important as the immanent extension and reworking of the terms of experimental music and of indeterminacy.

We might then conceive of three terrains on which to engage the improvisation-indeterminacy meeting, and to think through its relation to questions of inclusion. The first involves opening a space to recognise overlooked affinities between previously opposed practices, as some instances of improvisation and indeterminacy have been. The second is to attempt to turn factional distinctions—often characterised by the assertion of moralistic hierarchies, the diminishment of one side of the distinction—into critical distinctions, where differences can be acknowledged and taken as an opportunity for engagement and discussion. The third is, through practical or theoretical resources, to take on the conjunction of improvisation and indeterminacy anew. The essays in this issue move between these categories, while suggesting new paths for thinking, and working with and between improvisation-indeterminacy. The first three articles provide a critical historical and theoretical explication and contextualisation of some markers of improvisation in the context of ‘post-Cagean experimentalism’. With these articles in mind, the three practice-oriented articles that follow, spanning folk music, classical music, and New Music, can be seen to problematise and extend the terms of improvisation and indeterminacy.

To begin, Christopher Williams examines the landscape architect Richard Halprin’s 1969 RSVP Cycles, a method of collaboration based around explicit consideration of the passage between resources, scores, the recursive evaluation of these, and performance. Bringing the RSVP Cycles to bear on the contemporary case of composer-improviser Richard Barrett’s fOKT ensemble works (2005), Williams highlights how improvisation emerges through the interaction of many factors in the (musical) environment. Yet what Williams’ analyses show is that, while the Cycle involves a participatory approach that diminishes the determinacy of the musical work for an indeterminacy of practice, it is not straightforwardly inclusive. The Cycle risks an artificial flattening of the power relations that hold between those involved, and countering this requires attending to the determinacies at work in the situation.

The cybernetic terms of the RSVP Cycles—control and feedback among them—are also key in Theodore Gordon’s study of the early work of Pauline Oliveros. Gordon explores how Oliveros’ late 1950s and early 1960s work improvising with electronic instruments allowed her to develop her interest in an ‘androgynous’ music that was simultaneously ‘linear’, working with disciplined and fixed protocols, and ‘nonlinear’, behaving and emerging in unpredictable, unstable ways. Conceiving of herself as one node in a complex technological system, the components of which each had a certain uncontrollable agency, allowed Oliveros, Gordon argues, to prefigure the concerns with musical subjectivities and the destabilisation of traditional musical identities that she later developed in a feminist context. The indeterminacies at play here are as much subjective as musical, with improvisation serving as a means to experiment with the self. This work with technology, suggests Gordon, allowed Oliveros draw from the work of John Cage while challenging the lingering persistence in Cage’s work of a separation between linear and nonlinear functions.

Following Gordon, Iain Campbell takes a theoretical perspective on the expanding adoption of improvisation as a general analytical framework in the humanities and ‘posthumanities’. Campbell too takes Cage as a point of departure, drawing a link between, on one hand, the aversion to improvisation and favouring of performing practices stripped of subjective expression that characterised Cage’s conception of indeterminacy, and, on the other, the decentering of the figure of the human in materialist, Actor-Network, and other theories in the posthumanities. With this, Campbell suggests that established critical perspectives on the exclusionary characteristics, and the social and political limits, of Cagean indeterminacy and experimentalism can be brought to bear on work in the posthumanities. He argues that, while there are fruitful links to be drawn between improvisation and indeterminacy, a pluralistic approach is required to do so.

The first of three practice-oriented articles, by Susanne Rosenberg, details the work of Folk Song Lab in the Folk Music Department at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm. Rosenberg describes how the interactive group improvisation sessions of Folk Song Lab explore the form of the folk song, treating it not as a fixed and determinate entity like a score or recording, but rather as a ‘cognitive frame’ that offers a point of reference for diverse realisations. With this, Rosenberg introduces a common concern of the three practice-oriented articles set up in the three historical-theoretical articles, namely an interrogation of the ‘work’ form and the traditional requirement to show fidelity to the work (Goehr 1994). In contrast to the work form, Rosenberg highlights how the engaged pedagogy of Folk Song Lab encourages the ‘flow’ parameters of risk, mimicry, play, and reorientation among participants, with performance being treated as an active and recursive collective creative situation, not determined in advance, recalling the perspectives of Williams and Gordon. Here the role of internalised knowledge, skill, taste and so on is not erased, but remains a compelling route of inquiry.

Jonathan Ayerst, in turn, starts from his perspective as an organist to examine what is at work in the apparent exclusion of classical musicians from improvisation. Through a detailed study of the persistence of the work-concept in classical music institutions, Ayerst argues, with reference to the Marxist structuralist philosopher Louis Althusser’s notion of ideology, that the values and beliefs about classical music that persist in many institutions are directly opposed to values associated with improvisation, and moreover that classical musicians internalise such beliefs in their self-conceptions. Yet, through Althusser and his analyses of the formation of subjectivities, Ayerst offers some suggestions to begin, tentatively, to undo a subject-position where improvisation seems forbidden due to subjection to the work. In contrast to a perspective where the determinate identities of the interpretive classical musician and the virtuoso improviser are strictly opposed, Ayerst suggests that improvisation can allow a more flexible, perhaps indeterminate, identity to emerge. Here determinate identity is challenged by improvisation’s ‘game-like perspectives’ (Ayerst, 12), with identity forming in the knowledge that, at every step, things could be otherwise.

Finally, Clare Lesser details her experience performing Hans Joachim Hespos’ Weiβschatten (2017), explicated through a reading of Jacques Derrida’s 1966/67 essay ‘Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences’. Lesser focuses on Hespos’ complex and varied score, detailing how it contains both explicit instruction to improvise but also, more significantly, an ‘information overload’ of instructions, choices, and discursive framings that force the performer into decision and action in unpredictable directions. Lesser argues that this diminishes the significance of any distinction between improvisation and indeterminacy, with their concomitant inclusions and exclusions, and suggests that a more important notion is decentering. Drawing from Derrida, she puts forward that the performance situation of Weiβschatten can be understood, in terms similar to those expressed elsewhere in this volume, as one of ‘play’, the play of a movement through shifting layers of reference that can find no stable ground.

Across these articles we witness improvisation and indeterminacy coupling and decoupling in diverse ways, corresponding to the shifting registers that the wider theoretical discourse on indeterminacy has come to occupy. Indeterminacy can mark a zone of free play in dynamic systems and an openness to change, or it can operate hand in hand with mechanisms of control and the management of behaviour and difference. The articles combined here show how exploring and working within the conjunctions and disjunctions of indeterminacy and improvisation offers a means to better understand and work with the mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion at work in our musical and social spaces.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Franziska Schroeder

Franziska Schroeder is a saxophonist and improviser, originally from Berlin. She moved to Belfast to work as one of the first UK research council funded fellows for network music performance, based at the Sonic Arts Research Centre, Queen’s University Belfast. She is now a Professor of Music and Cultures at Queen’s University Belfast where she teaches students in improvisation and digital performance. Franziska has recorded her music on diverse labels (pfMentum, Creativesources, Bandcamp) and her work on ethnographies of improvisation cultures in Brazil (2013) and Portugal (2016) are published online. At Queen’s she leads the research team ‘Performance without Barriers’; a group dedicated to researching more accessible and open ways to designing music technologies for and with disabled musicians. The group’s agenda-setting research in designing virtual reality (VR) instruments has been recognised by the Queen’s Vice Chancellor’s 2020 Prize for Research Innovation.

Iain Campbell

Iain Campbell is a Research Associate at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, University of Dundee, where he is working on the project The Future of Indeterminacy: Datification, Memory, Bio-Politics. He has written on topics across philosophy, music, sound studies, and art theory for publications including parallax, Sound Studies, and Deleuze and Guattari Studies. He received a PhD from the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Kingston University London in 2016, with a thesis exploring experimental practices of music and philosophy in the work of John Cage and Gilles Deleuze.