The Instant Composers Pool and Improvisation Beyond Jazz

Floris Schuiling

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780815368571
• eBook ISBN: 9781351254366
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

The Instant Composers Pool and Improvisation Beyond Jazz contributes to the expansion and diversification of our understanding of the jazz tradition by describing the history and practice of one of the most important non-American jazz groups: The Instant Composers Pool, founded in Amsterdam in 1967.

The Instant Composers Pool describes the meaning of "instant composition" from both a historical and ethnographic perspective. Historically, it details instant composition's emergence from the encounter between various overlapping transnational avant-gardes, including free jazz, serialism, experimental music, electronic music, and Fluxus. The author shows how the improvising musicians not only engaged with the cultural politics of ethnicity and race involved in the negotiation of the boundaries of jazz as a cultural practice, but transformed the meaning of music in society—particularly the nature of improvisation and performance. Ethnographically, The Instant Composers Pool encourages readers to reconsider the conceptual tools we use to describe music performance, improvisation, and creativity. It takes the practice of "instant composition" as an opportunity to reflect on music performance as a social practice, which is crucial not only for jazz studies, but for general music scholarship.

PART I

Beyond Jazz History

1

PERFORMANCE ART AND LUDIC COUNTERCULTURES

Han Bennink and Misha Mengelberg played together for the first time on 4 September 1960 in jazz club Persepolis in Utrecht (Van den Berg 2009, 58). Both budding jazz musicians, they found each other through a shared interest in the music of Thelonious Monk. At this time, Bennink was in art school at the Kunstnijverheidsschool (“School of Applied Arts”), the current Gerrit Rietveld Academie. Mengelberg was a composition and music theory student at the conservatory of The Hague while simultaneously pursuing a career as a jazz pianist. In the world they inhabited, cool jazz was the fashion and Monk was seen as an offbeat and incompetent pianist. In contemporary art music, twelve-tone music was largely unknown and regarded with suspicion. Ten years later, the world had changed completely. Any sound could now be called music—indeed, any gesture, or even any idea, could be called music, poetry, or sculpture. The emergence of performance art had not only revolutionized the art scene, but through new international political movements like Situationism, “happenings” had become a hallmark of the emerging counterculture which aimed to transform public space into a ludic environment fit for the creative and nomadic existence of the human beings of the future. Bennink and Mengelberg, together with fellow ICP founder Willem Breuker, were right in the middle of these processes, and to some extent agents of what historians have called the “expressive revolution” (Righart 1998).

Categorizing the various “schools” in European improvised music, Mike Heffley writes:

The Dutch were the louder anarchists, the humourists, the ironists, the rugged individualists and musical gamesters/tricksters radicalized around their own folk and music theatre traditions, nudged by the Fluxus movement to provide a grassroots populist (if also intellectually esoteric) alternative to both commercial pop-schlock and pompous classical Kultur.

(Heffley 2005, 66)

The influence of the ICP on this description is palpable, and in this chapter we will see various important influences on this style of music-making. The influence of Fluxus, specifically, will be discussed at length, but its significance lies more in its “intellectual esoterism” than in its grassroots populism. Where Heffley connects Fluxus to a countercultural iconoclasm as a matter of course, we will see that the relation of Fluxus—and in fact of the ICP—to countercultural politics was by no means straightforward.

Mengelberg’s time in Fluxus is often mentioned in relation to the ICP, but is hardly ever discussed in detail. Most journalistic articles and concert programmes refer to it only to say that it was a form of absurdist performance art. Kevin Whitehead, in his book about improvised music in Amsterdam, argues that Fluxus was not so important for Mengelberg at all: “Mengelberg’s Fluxus connection is often cited, but his involvement was short-lived” (Whitehead 1998, 35). He cites Mengelberg in an unpublished interview with John Corbett: “Fluxus was nothing. Fluxus was a bunch of idiots who all did their things and saw at a certain point that some other people were working in similar amorphous directions” (Whitehead 1998, 35). This indeed seems rather dismissive, but it can also be understood as an admonition that Fluxus was a very heterogeneous movement with no clearly outlined programme, which is not to say that some of the ideas in Fluxus did not have an important influence on his musical thought. Jürgen Arndt cites Mengelberg as saying something similar but more positive: “Fluxus did not have a program; it stands for nothing. Fluxus only means current. I felt there was a very intense connection to Dadaism, and in my opinion, Dada was the most brilliant art movement of this century” (Arndt 2012, 355). Indeed, he even becomes uncharacteristically personal in his description of that period:

This was the first time for me where I had the impression with everything I tried musically—sense and non-sense—that there were other people in the world doing these things and talking about them. There, I felt more or less at home.

(Arndt 2012, 357)

The influence of performance art was also playing a role in the upcoming counterculture. The 1960s countercultures in the Netherlands, like many of the other protest movements emerging globally in this period, are notable for their close engagement with contemporaneous forms of performance art, and indeed in the “aestheticization” of their protests. However, although there was clearly a relation of the Dutch counterculture to performance art, the connection with Fluxus specifically is rather tenuous. Mengelberg describes his fascination with Fluxus mostly in artistic and musical terms; his sense of the movement providing a place for him is based on a shared aesthetic rather than political outlook. The question of Fluxus having aesthetic or political aims was an important point of discussion within the group, and as we shall see, this was in fact a more general point of contention in the encounters between artists and activists. The description of both artistic and political avant-gardes in terms of “happenings” challenging authorities and traditions too easily overlooks the heterogeneity of the various performance art movements and their relation to the counterculture—which in fact was itself not a uniform movement. In this chapter I take a close look at this diverse environment, not as a space neatly separated into schools (Fluxus, Darmstadt, happenings) and subcultures (beat, Provo, hippies), but rather as a heterogeneous landscape of overlapping networks and alliances.

The political efficacy of avant-gardes was famously questioned by the work of Peter Bürger, which is a prime reference in art historical literature on avant-garde art movements (Bürger 1984). Although Bürger acknowledges that very little avant-garde art is actually political in content, he makes its political practice, namely the attack on art “as an institution” through the reintegration of art with everyday life, into one of its definitive characteristics. When writing of the avant-garde, Bürger is mainly thinking of Dada and the post-war movements that continued its legacy, of which Fluxus was one. One of his core arguments is that the former ultimately failed to fulfil its ideals of abolishing art as an institution, and consequently that the latter was a lost cause from the start, because it institutionalizes an already failed historical avant-garde. Although Bürger’s work remains the starting point for most research on the avant-garde, few art historians would still accept his argument without qualification (Foster 1996; Sell 2008; Mann 1991; Harding 2013). Rather than seeing the avant-garde in terms of its attack on the institution of art, recent work proposes to be more sensitive to the different contexts, aims, and premises of specific artists. Fluxus participants had very different attitudes towards the institution of art, and disagreed about whether its criticism should even be a core concern of the movement; such differences are not easily classified under one definition of an “avant-garde”.

As we shall see throughout Part I, questions of whether their artistic practice was conducive to, contiguous with, separated from, or even opposed to political action were continuously debated by the ICP musicians and the wider contemporary music scene. This chapter will describe perhaps the most radical challenge in these debates, namely whether the very category of “music” or “art” would not have to be abolished. The ICP musicians—and indeed many other contemporary musicians in the Netherlands—did not go along with the more radical movements in this period, but chose to keep making music, even “art”, although they would continue to be politically engaged. Somewhat paradoxically, then, the main influence of Fluxus on the ICP is an aesthetic one, and it is a particularly important one for the very concept of instant composition which was based on Tomas Schmit’s Fluxus work on “instant poetry”. This chapter thus provides a set-up for the more in-depth political arguments of contemporary musicians discussed in Chapter 3, but also lays the foundation for some of the theoretical discussions of Part II.

Mengelberg and Performance Art: Early Encounters

Mengelberg was part of a group of composers who all studied with Kees van Baaren, which included Louis Andriessen, Peter Schat, Reinbert de Leeuw, and Jan van Vlijmen.¹ As will be discussed in Chapter 3, Mengelberg and his fellow students would organize various demonstrations and political concerts from the mid-1960s onwards. In his book on avant-garde music in 1960s Amsterdam, which deals mostly with composed music but reserves a chapter for the ICP, Robert Adlington describes the situation of this generation of composers as follows:

As students in the late 1950s, they were the first composers to gain a schooling in serialism, a schooling that they sought to deepen through further lessons with prominent figures of the postwar avant-garde, and involvement in influential trade meetings such as the Darmstadt Ferienkurse. Yet even before this training was complete, these composers were exposed to drastically different models of creative practice, in which absurdity and happenstance took priority over intricacy and precision. Simultaneously, the global tensions of the cold war were reaching their height, and in Amsterdam local expressions of dissent were gaining new focus. From this conjuncture inevitably arose difficult questions about the purpose of progressive artistic pursuits. Did the future of music lie in serialism—in 1962 still a novelty in the Netherlands—or in indeterminacy? How might either of these relate to the creative public manifestations emerging on the streets of Amsterdam? What was the point of composition in the face of the atom bomb?

(Adlington 2013, 23–24)

The description captures well the various radical changes that were to happen in the course of the decade. In his book, Adlington presents an essentially Bürgerian argument: the political aspirations of the avant-gardists largely failed because of a blindness to the political (bourgeois) nature of modern music and the institutions in which it is embedded. Of the “Van Baarenites”, Mengelberg most consistently pursued the forms of “absurdity and happenstance” to which Adlington refers. While his fellow students remained mostly within the confines of contemporary art music—either as composers, conductors, or in other capacities—Mengelberg consciously moved outside it. If the others wondered whether the future of music would be in serialism or indeterminacy, Mengelberg moved in circles where people more fundamentally questioned whether there should be a future for music at all.

In 1958, his first year as a conservatory student, Mengelberg visited Darmstadt. Originally going to see people like Karlheinz Stockhausen and Boulez, he was put off by their “pomposity” (Schouten 1973, 58), and was much more fascinated by the lectures of John Cage, who happened to give his famous lectures/performances that year:

He was smoking six cigarettes at a time but also manipulating them, burning them or laying three on an ashtray and burning the fourth. I remember the manipulating more than the lecture. His talking was also interfered by David Tudor playing. I remember thinking that the lecture, manipulating and playing should appear as one . . . I hated musical theatre in the classical sense, but there were new possibilities.

(Whitehead 1998, 24)

The work of John Cage and especially the forms of performance art that followed it had a decisive influence on Mengelberg’s approach to music, perhaps even more than jazz. That is to say, while jazz and classical composition seem to have co-existed in his musical practice just fine, it was this upcoming avant-garde that began to transform his approach to both, thus informing his response to the “difficult questions about the purpose of progressive artistic pursuits” to which Adlington refers.

Cage’s lecture directed Mengelberg’s attention to new modes of performance that would have a long-lasting impact on his musical aesthetic. Mengelberg’s first experiments in such new forms of performance art were done in the context of the “Mood Engineering Society” (MES), a movement initiated by Dutch visual artist Willem de Ridder. Although very short-lived, and by all accounts a failure, the MES brought together a diverse and talented group of artists and musicians, and formed an explosion of new approaches to music and performance at a time when twelve-tone composition was still a very controversial method in composed music in the Netherlands. Originally a painter, De Ridder started showcasing human-size (and larger) wads of blank canvas as “paper constellations” from 1960 onwards for people to interact and play with. These crumpled-up canvases turned the end (or failure) of artistic expression into possibilities for new forms of playfulness. Later initiatives similarly revolved around playful interaction as a new direction for traditional art forms, such as his “Society for Party Organization”, which organized parties as a form of “auto-theatre” in which there was no distinction between performer and spectator (De Ridder 2008). Such ideas were also the basis for the MES, for which De Ridder primarily gathered composers and musicians. He initially approached electronic music pioneer Dick Raaijmakers, who had assisted Edgard Varèse with his Poème Électronique in 1958 and was now working at the Studio of Electronic Music connected to Utrecht University. Through Raaijmakers, he probably got to know other contemporary musicians. These included Andriessen, Mengelberg, and Schat.²

In an open letter in 1962 Schat and De Ridder propagated “auto-theatre” and interaction as opposed to the traditional, unidirectional mode of stage performance. They note that “contemporary music is simply contemporary life”, noting that when art and life are separated, masterpieces and “art” emerge, which clearly is to be avoided (Beeren 1979, 35). In the programme book of the first MES concert, they criticized the fact that all the new theatres and concert halls that were being built in the post-war reconstruction perpetuated the “goggle-box theatre” of the Renaissance with its “feudal arrangement of seats and balconies” instead of providing a more flexible set-up in which “the space could be adapted to the work of art rather than the other way around” (De Ridder 1962). This concert programme itself fulfilled such an auto-theatrical function: it was large and unwieldy, and a small “paper constellation” had been attached to the front page of each programme. Experimental typography meant that audience members had to move the programme around, thus participating in the creation of movement and sound before the concert itself had even started. The concert opened with a piece by Mengelberg, Exercise for Flute, with a graphic score containing scratches and ink stains (Beeren 1979, 39). Other pieces...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Series Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I Beyond Jazz History
• PART II Beyond Jazz Practice
• Bibliography
• Index