Composition and improvisation: where the catalogue draws the line
Written, improvised or both? Reading RANDOM ACOUSTICS track lists, from Witzmann's percussion pieces and FOURinONE to Georg Graewe's note on Battuto.
Articles
The label described its programme as "electronic music as well as contemporary chamber music, new jazz, and of course cross-overs in these areas". On the release pages that range shows up in a small, practical place: the track list. Some lists print a composer's name and a year beside each piece. Others give letters, numbers or phrases, and no composer at all. Read together, they show a label that put written and unwritten music side by side and never kept the two apart.
Two ways of making one piece of music
Composition settles a piece before it is played. Someone decides the notes, or the rules, and the performers carry them out. Improvisation makes those decisions during the performance. Between the two lies most of what jazz and new music have actually done, from a written theme with improvised solos to a score of instructions with no notes in it.
The label's founder worked across that whole span. The label text introduces Georg Graewe as "composer, pianist and ensemble leader", and his biography lists compositions "for solo piano as well as trios, quartets, pieces for chamber ensembles and full symphony orchestra". The catalogue he built has the same breadth, and a handful of records mark out the territory.
A composer's name first: Witzmann's pieces for percussion quartet (RA 024)
The plainest case of written music is RA 024. Its original heading names the composer first, THOMAS WITZMANN, then the title, ZEUG FUER SCHLAGQUARTET, then the four players of the Schlagquartet Koeln: Thomas Meixner, Thomas Oesterdiekhoff, Dirk Rothbrust and Achim Seyler. Thomas Witzmann is not among the players listed. Each of the five pieces carries a year, from "Flaschenzug" (1990) to "Dreisatz" and "Rattleshake" (both 1994), so the disc gathers pieces dated across five years and presents them as a set. Michael Peschko recorded it at LOFT in Cologne on 13 and 14 September 1996, and the total time is printed as 62:07.
The titles name objects and procedures. Flaschenzug is German for a block and tackle. A Rommelpott is a friction drum, Cymbala is Latin for cymbals, and Dreisatz is the German school name for the rule of three. Zeug, in the album title, is everyday German for stuff or gear. The page says nothing about the scores, so this article will not describe them either. What it does show is authorship: the music belongs to someone who is not among the performers.
Nothing written: FOURinONE live at LOFT (RA 026)
A little over two years later the same room produced the opposite case. FOURinONE played at LOFT on 15 January 1999, and RA 026, Stelen, is that concert. Steven A. Loewy's liner note is explicit: "Every piece on this recording is completely improvised, meaning that nothing is written. There are no melodies in the conventional sense, although snippets of song emerge from time to time."
The titles show what naming looks like when nothing was written down. "Vielleicht ist nichts völlig wahr, und selbst das nicht" (perhaps nothing is completely true, not even that) answers the first of the two epigraphs at the head of Loewy's note, the line he attributes to Al-Hassan b. Al-Sabbah: "Nothing is true; everything is permitted." Another track is called "Pause - oder was?", roughly "a break, or what?". None of these titles could serve as an instruction to the players.
Loewy frames the record as "the tension between freedom and order". In his account the order is real and comes from the musicians themselves. He credits Martin Blume with "total control over his drum set", and he says music of this kind "requires incredible rapport among the players", here Blume, Johannes Bauer, Luc Houtkamp and Dieter Manderscheid.
Graewe's note for Battuto and its Schoenberg reference (RA 023)
The sharpest text on the subject sits in the middle of the catalogue. Georg Graewe wrote the liner note to RA 023, Battuto, in Berkeley in February 2000. The record is by John Corbett on guitar, Mats Gustafsson on tenor saxophone, flageolet, fluteophone and flute, Terri Kapsalis on violin and Fred Lonberg-Holm on cello, recorded at AirWave Recording Studios in Chicago on 7 October 1996. Graewe's biography names Gustafsson and Lonberg-Holm among the musicians he was then performing with.
He heads the note with a quotation from G. Cooper and L.B. Meyer's The Rhythmic Structure of Music, about the fourth of Schoenberg's Sechs kleine Klavierstücke, op. 19: "The piece is very tight, not at all a fantasy or improvisation." Then he complicates it. Schoenberg, he reminds the reader, "has described composition as slowed-down improvisation". Graewe first heard Battuto on a car ride through Chicago in 1996, with no information beforehand, and was struck by "the tightness of the musical text". The eighteen cuts, he writes, "have all the density, clarity and logic of some of the best scores from the heroic days of the 'new music' of the 1950's". Then the punchline: "There are moods, too, and fantasy, and lots of improvisation, and, as I can assure you, all four of the performers are well read."
The note is a compact argument. Cooper and Meyer use "not at all a fantasy or improvisation" as praise for a written piece. Graewe holds a record with "lots of improvisation" to the same standard of tightness and finds that it meets it. "Well read" answers his own earlier jab at the improviser of the 1970s and 80s as "a kind of cult hero who can't do wrong, since he refuses to read", and the matching jab at the trained performer who cannot play "more than one note without some composer-authorized paper".
The track list keeps the question open in its own way. The eighteen pieces are grouped under pasta names, "tagliatelle", "trenne d'abruzzo" and "fusilli bucati lunghi", each set numbered in Roman figures. The tagliatelle set is split: parts I to III open the record and IV to VI close it. Whether those sets were planned or found in the playing, the page does not say.
In between: Chamber Works, Polwechsel and Stangl (RA 003, RA 009, RA 015)
RA 003, Chamber Works 1990-92, is Graewe the composer, and it shows how many shapes a chamber work can take. Three pieces, three line-ups:
- "15 Duets", 13:02 in all, recorded at the MUSEUM Bochum on 4 January 1991 with six players: Phil Minton (voice), Michael Moore (clarinet), Anna le Baron (harp; Graewe's biography spells her Anne LeBaron), Graewe (piano), Hans Schneider (bass) and Gerry Hemingway (drums). Six players can form exactly fifteen different pairs. The page does not say whether that is the plan.
- "Flavours A", marked "edited version" and in five sections, recorded in Donaueschingen on 18 October 1991 with Phil Wachsmann (violin), Melvyn Poore (tuba) and Graewe.
- "Variations Q", in three parts, recorded at the STADTGARTEN in Cologne on 3 November 1993 with Horst Grabosch (trumpet), Michael Moore (bass clarinet), Ernst Reijseger (cello) and Graewe.
Polwechsel, RA 009, offers less to go on. Radu Malfatti (trombone), Burkhard Stangl (guitar), Michael Moser (cello) and Werner Dafeldecker (double bass, guitar) recorded it at VHS Ottakring in Vienna and at the Kino in Pottenstein. Its four pieces are named after points of the compass: "NORD", "OST", "NNO-FERNAUMOOS", "SUEDWEST". John Butcher's biography, which spells the group "Polwecshel", calls it "the Austrian new-music group", a description that places it on the new-music side of the catalogue.
RA 015, Ereignislose Musik - Loose Music, is credited to Burkhard Stangl and played by three people: Gunter Schneider on contraguitar and banjo, Malfatti on trombone and Stangl on electric guitar. Its titles borrow the forms of written music. The longest track, at 30:39, is "Konzert für Posaune und 22 Instrumente", a concerto for trombone and twenty-two instruments on a record that lists three players; another is "Trio Nr.1 (1993)". The page does not explain the arithmetic, and this article will not invent an explanation.
Two more records sit nearby. RA 012, Slamadam by the Gerry Hemingway Quintet, labels three of its five tracks as versions: "If You Like (quintet version)", "Waltz Anywhere (quintet version)" and "Pumbum (quartet version)". A piece that exists in a quintet version and a quartet version has an identity apart from any one performance, which is one working definition of a composition. Earl Howard's RA 004 prints both kinds of title on one disc: "Hell (1986)", "Pele's Tears (1986)" and "Bottle, for live electronics (1992)", followed by "Quartet One" and "Quartet Two" with no year at all.
What to take from the catalogue
Read as documents, the track lists show a pattern. Where a piece is presented as a composition, the page carries a composer's name or a year, as on RA 024, RA 004 and RA 003. Where the pages name no composer, the titles are often letters or numbers: "spelling A" to "spelling E" on RA 001, "VE 1" to "VE 11" on RA 002.
Use the pattern as a reading aid and nothing more. RA 026 is the only record whose note says that nothing was written, and Graewe's note on RA 023 is a warning against judging method by surface. The label printed all of this under one name, and at LOFT it was recorded in one room: the composed pieces of RA 024 and the improvised concert of RA 026 were both made there.
For the rooms themselves, see the rooms where these records were made. For a listener's way into the improvised side, start with how to listen to free improvisation, and use the musician index to see how often the same players crossed between the two.
Records discussed
- RA 001 · Spellings, Frisque Concordance
- RA 002 · Vicissetudes, Frank Gratkowski and Georg Graewe
- RA 003 · Chamber Works 1990-92, Georg Graewe
- RA 004 · Pele's Tears, Earl Howard
- RA 009 · Polwechsel
- RA 012 · Slamadam, Gerry Hemingway Quintet
- RA 015 · Ereignislose Musik - Loose Music, Burkhard Stangl
- RA 023 · Battuto
- RA 024 · Zeug fuer Schlagquartet, Thomas Witzmann
- RA 026 · Stelen, FOURinONE