Grains of Sound: Visual and Sonic Textures in Sand or Peter and the Wolf

There is a tendency in animation studies to discuss sound in the language of images, stressing sound’s alignment with visual cues (as in mickey mousing and leitmotifs). But sounds do not only mimic images: they add textures and emotions that change what we see. This article explores grain (texture) and timbre (tone color produced by specific instruments and techniques) as qualities shared by visual and sonic material. To do so, the author closely reads Sand or Peter and the Wolf (1969), where Caroline Leaf’s haptic sand animation is matched by Michael Riesman’s electroacoustic score. Leaf painstakingly molds animals by scraping away individual sand grains, and Riesman sculpts sonic textures with tiny adjustments to knobs and touch-sensitive pads on the Buchla modular synthesizer. Their collective improvisation with sands and sounds reveals new ways to think about artists’ material practices and the friction and interplay between images and sounds. They encourage spectators to perceive the animals as not merely plasmatic, or Sergei Eisenstein’s notion of contour-bending character animation. Instead, Leaf and Riesman deploy what the author calls ‘granular modulation’, expressing sand and animals with sensuous materiality. In Leaf’s and Riesman’s improvisations, grainy textures are the seeds of understanding how sound and vision become symbiotic – and encounter friction – in animation.

Coordinating Free Improvisation: An Integrative Framework for the Study of Collective Improvisation

Understanding how musicians can coordinate their musical actions when they improvise together remains an important theoretical and empirical challenge. In this article, we suggest a broad theoretical framework, compatible with up-to-date research on joint action, which can account for coordination in collective improvisation, especially in the hard case of so-called collective free improvisation. This framework addresses the limits of an account of coordination in collective improvisation that relies only on low-level, emergent coordination mechanisms, and shows how these mechanisms can be combined with planned coordination mechanisms to explain how improvisers deal with some of the main coordination problems that typically arise in collectively improvised performances. As such, our framework allows for the formulation of new hypotheses that pave the way for further empirical investigations on collective improvisation and sheds light on collectively improvised behavior at large.

Improvised ensemble counterpoint: on the notation of the bass in Agostino Agazzari’s Eumelio (1606)

Unfigured basslines serve as the starting points for collective improvisation in several sections of Agostino Agazzari’s Eumelio (1606). Agazzari makes clear that musicians used such basslines for effective ensemble improvisations in his well-known treatise Del sonare sopra’l basso con tutti li stromenti (1607) and in other contemporaneous documents. Gloria Rose has identified isolated examples of written ‘tablatures of the bass’, or contrapuntal templates from which ensembles improvised. However, analysis of the harmonic and modal parameters of the vocal monody in Eumelio shows how constrained the possibilities for improvisation actually were, indicating that the training of musicians c.1600 prepared them to improvise collectively from a bassline, even without such written tablatures. Some aspects of historical musicianship could lead to successful and enjoyable collective improvisation today, suggesting ways to bridge the gap between the contrapuntal training of modern and past musicians.

Types of musical improvisation: a classification discourse

This article systemizes the types of musical improvisation according to various approaches to this phenomenon. It uses as the basis the classification by Ernst Ferand, which presently needs to be supplemented and clarified. It was stressed that the most general approach to the phenomenon of musical improvisation is its classification based on the layer principle (folklore, academic music, “third” layer). Within these layers, there are various forms of musical improvisation whose systemization is based on different principles, including: performer composition (collective or solo improvisation), process technology (full or partial improvisation), thematic orientation (improvisation theme in a broad and narrow context), etc. It was emphasized that classification of musical improvisation by types is manifested the most vividly when exemplified by jazz, which sums up the development of its principles and forms that shaped up in the previous eras in various regions of the world and have synthetized in the jazz language, which today reflects the interaction between such fundamental origins of musical thought as improvisation and composition. It was stated that the basic principles for classification of the types of musical improvisation include: 1) means of improvisation (voices; keyboard, string, wind and percussion instruments); 2) performer composition (solo or collective improvisation); 3) textural coordinates (vertical, horizontal, and melodic or harmonic improvisation, respectively); 4) performance technique (melodic ornaments, coloring, diminutiving, joining voices in the form of descant, organum, counterpoint); 5) scale of improvisation (absolute, relative; total, partial); 6) forms of improvisation: free, related; ornamental improvisation, variation, ostinato, improvisation on cantus firmus or another preset material (Ernst Ferand). It was stressed that as of today, the Ferand classification proposed back in 1938 needs to be supplemented by a number of new points, including: 1) improvisation of a mixed morphological type (music combined with dance and verbal text in two versions: a) invariable text and dance rhythm, b) a text and dance moves that are also improvised); 2) “pure” musical improvisation: vocal, instrumental, mixed (S. Maltsev). The collective form was the genetically initial form of improvisation, which included all components of syncretic action and functioned within the framework of cult ritual. Only later did the musical component per se grow separated (autonomous), becoming self-sufficient but retaining the key principle of dialogue that helps reproduce the “question-answer” system in any types of improvisation – a system that serves as the basis for creation of forms in the process of improvisation. Two more types of improvisation occur on this basis, differing from each other by communication type (Y. Lotman): 1) improvisation “for oneself” (internal type, characterized by reclusiveness and certain limitedness of information); 2) improvisation “for others” (external type, characterized by informational openness and variegation). It was emphasized that solo improvisation represents a special variety of musical improvisation, which beginning from the Late Renaissance era becomes dominating in the academic layer, distinguishable in the initial phase of its development for an improvising writing dualism (M. Saponov). The classification criterion of “composition” attains a new meaning in the system of professional music playing, to which improvisation also belongs. Its interpretation becomes dual and applies to the performance and textural components of improvisation, respectively. With regard to the former, two types occur in the collective form of improvisation: 1) improvisation by all participants (simultaneous or consecutive); 2)improvisation by a soloist against the background of invariable fixed accompaniment in other layers of music performance. The following types of improvisation occur in connection with the other – textural – interpretation of the term “composition”, which means inner logical principle of organization of musical fabric (T. Bershadska): 1) monodic, or monophonic (all cases of solo improvisation by voice or on melodic wind instruments); 2) heterophonic (collective improvisation based on interval duplications and variations of the main melody); 3) polyphonic (different-picture melodies in party voices of collective improvisation); 4) homophonic-harmonic (a combination of melodic and harmonic improvisations, typical for the playing on many-voiced harmonic instruments). It was emphasized that in the theory of musical improvisation, there is a special view at texture: on the one hand, it (like in a composition) “configures” (E. Nazaikinskyi) the musical fabric, and on the other hand, it is not a final representation thereof, i.e., it does not reach the value of Latin facio (“what has been done”). A work of improvisation is not an amorphous musical fabric; on the contrary, it contains its own textural organization, which, unlike a written composition, is distinguishable for the mobility and variability of possible textural solutions. The article’s concluding remarks state that classification of the types of musical improvisation in the aspect of its content and form must accommodate the following criteria: 1) performance type (voices, instruments, performance method, composition of participants, performance location); 2) texture type (real acoustic organization of musical space in terms of vertical, horizontal and depth parameters); 3) thematic (in the broad and narrow meanings of this notion: from improvisation on “idea theme” or “image theme” to variation improvisations on “text theme”, which could be represented by various acoustic structures: modes, ostinato figures of various types, melody themes like jazz evergreens, harmonic sequences, etc.).

Structured Surround Soundscapes: A Three-Pronged Strategy for Effective and Meaningful Collective Improvisation

This article presents a three-pronged strategy for teaching collective improvisation in the general music classroom through structured surround soundscapes. This strategy consists of developing socio-interactive skills, shared understanding, and personal music vocabulary in collective improvisation. In the music classroom, these concepts should be consciously developed in tandem through hands-on means to foster effective and meaningful collective improvisation. The structured surround soundscape project presents one such way this may be enabled using the three-pronged strategy to nurture ensemble improvisers who can engage in fluent sociomusical conversations in real-world contexts.

Beyond Schemata in Collective Improvisation: A Support Tool for Music Interactions

This article presents results of experiments undertaken with expert musicians using the author’s original system for systemic improvisation. By promoting the formation of parallel and simultaneous layers of sustained musical relationships, this system facilitates an enhanced focus on local clusters and their development over time. This tool opens a novel perspective on improvised interactions and how they are formed, evaluated, updated, modified and abandoned during a performance, encouraging a critical evaluation of collective schemata.