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CONCRETE_MUSIC

                               February 2001  
                          

    "Some singers improvise well with 'gibberish' -
    Phil Minton, David Moss, Shelley Hirsch,       
    Dorothea Schurch, Lauren Newton but singers who
    are strong enough to improvise with words are  
    less numerous (Maggie Nichols...)  Is it fear of
    (or dislike of) concrete meaning?"             
                                  
                     Fred Frith
                     on the ba-newmus@ella.mills.edu
                     mailing list, Feb 12, 2001                  


That's one of the things I like about the factoid "good 
language improvisation is rare".  It seems pretty clear 
that it says a lot about the difference between  
words and music, but I'm not entirely sure what. 

Could there be a fear of concrete meaning?  Well, I have
heard it suggested that a lot of musicians are very
uncomfortable dealing with other people when they're not
playing music.  You could say that they're hiding behind
their instruments in a way. There's a kind of shy-extrovert
syndrome that comes up a lot.

But then it might really be a lack of interest in concrete
meaning.  Maybe everyone is going for a post-Cage music
where the sounds are supposed to be themselves without
having to symbolize something else.  You might prefer
singing scat because with "real" words the meaning tends to
obscure the sound (personally, these days I much prefer pop
music that's sung in a language I don't know).

Or it might be a sense that instrumental music alone can
communicate something deeper than words can.  The cliche
would be that words transmit thought, and music, emotion. 

You could argue that it's hard to say something worth
hearing with words, the ground all seems to have been
covered before.  It's easy to tell when a sentence is stale
or rings false, not so easy with a sax solo.

Does this point in the direction that there's something
inferior about improvised instrumentals?  You can't do them 
wrong because you can't do them right because they just 
don't mean very much anyway? 

You might draw an analogy between the rules of conventional
language and the rules of conventional music.  Free improv
is about abandoning the accepted musical language (and
possibly about finding and inventing new languages), which
is one of the reasons why a lot of people can't get into it.
They literally don't know how to listen to it.

So maybe the reason that improvised language (as opposed to
scat vocals) is rarely heard on the improv music scene is
that in a lot of ways it would be a hybrid artform, a
mixture of the conventional and the unconventional, both 
concrete and free. 

Anyway, I think there's a lot of different chains of thought
you could follow from this starting point.  I don't have 
anything definite to say about it myself...



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