Last year, my song „Hidden Path“ was created as part of the master bands. Due to the corona situation, we spent a whole day recording the songs that were created instead of doing a final concert.
This year it’s going to be different and we’ll spent the next month rehearsing a set of original compositions of the master students which will see the light of day in a concert.
I thought about using this project to put my method of sound-based visuals into a larger framework. The improvisation in the group. For this I would like to involve all master students.
For this I will use the next weeks to animate another video, on which the improvisation is oriented.
From this, various possibilities emerge to implement my method in the group. My first impulse was to divide the project into several stages:
1: Improvising in the group during rehearsal
2: Own composition, created from the preceding improvisation
3: Rehearsal of the composition
The advantage of this approach would be that I would have visualized the whole process of my method: original music becomes visualization – visualization becomes improvisation – improvisation becomes composition.
If I look at this approach realistically, such a large group and variety of instruments will either lead to a lot of chaos within the improvisation, or to a hesitant indecisiveness, because nobody wants to interrupt the ideas of others. In both cases it can be assumed that the inspirational revenue for a resulting composition would be rather sparse.
To prevent this scenario, another approach would be to improvise over a longer period of time. Here, the group would improvise on the video several times over the course of 2-3 weeks.
I imagine that in this scenario, ideas or motifs would solidify or occur repeatedly once the visualization is internalized. From here, the path from improvisation to composition is paved. The approach may already intuitively give composing the space to emerge on its own.
Realistically, however, in our rehearsal situation, there won’t be quite the time for it. The door opens and closes, time is limited, the group will not be the same every week. In the end, I will have recorded a lot of improvisations, which will probably stand on their own and in no context. From here I could pick out motifs randomly for the following composing process. From my point of view, the whole thing shows too much arbitrariness.
So now there is a need of narrowing down the impro scenario in some way. The improvisation should retain the value of the unmediated and not constructed. At this point there remains a final possibility of implementation: the group of master students sees the visualization for the very first time in the concert situation. Here the question arises whether the group should be given the chance to perform several improvisations in order to feel confident with the situation of improvisation. This could be helpful especially with such a large ensemble. On the other hand, the immediacy of the experiment is increasingly lost.
An alternative would be to divide them into two groups and let them improvise one after the other.
Possibly the finished „music video“ gives the necessary impulse for a final decision of the realization.