Jonathan Jones offers improvisation as America's most important contribution to the arts, naming Marlon Brando, Jackson Pollack, and Charlie Parker its chief representatives. He equates the artistic "freedom" of improvisation with American freedom, and reaches some sweeping conclusions about this country.
The big problem for me is that he doesn't bother to define improvisation, and seems to use it in at least a couple different senses. Musically, improvisation isn't just making up the notes as you go along -- rather, it's about navigating a structure within tight parameters, using sequences that have been practiced and practiced until they live in your fingertips or your inflections. It may be freer than other music in some sense, but it's a far cry from Jones's description of Pollack's "pure improvisatory expressions, with no given form, no figurative constraint." If Pollack was improvising, it was a completely different improvisation than Bird's.
It also seems a little unfair to talk about improvisation as an American contribution, since there are earlier, even ancient examples that are just as stunning. Much of Indian music is improvised, and Bach was a master improviser on the organ (a good Christmas gift for me if you can find it: a copy of Marcel Dupre's Improvisation a l'Orgue). The Homerian epics are believed to have been improvised by bards of the time, which explains all those wonderful descriptives (rosy-fingered Dawn, gray-eyed Athena) that fit so neatly into dactyllic hexameter and gave them breathing space to think up the next line.
I don't have much to say about acting and painting, but maybe what made bebop so unique was the use of improvisation to actually usurp the dominant musical culture. Charlie Parker improvised over popular tunes of the day so that they were no longer recognizable except in structure. When he ran into legal troubles playing a popular song in this way, he'd just write a new melody against the same old harmonic sequence... all the musicians would know. Isn't this explicit appropriation of the dominant forms really the more novel (and more influential) contribution of bebop? It sets up a completely new relationship between text and pretext (!) that leads inevitably to hip-hop, cultural studies, and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. (Two out of three isn't bad!)
I don't know if improvised comedy a la Second City or Best in Show come from America, but they certainly fit into the improvisation tradition I was talking about the post. Those setups have a lot of formal constraints to help people build the comedy.
As far as the Shakespearean actors, I do think they were making up their stage directions, but I assume Caleb meant something more when he said the plays may have been improvised. I'm actually looking into this and will report back soon...
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