Musical Games for Musicians

18AD

I was thinking about this over a year ago and it popped back into my head.

The idea is to come up with musical "games" that musicians could play. So these would be played with a group of musicians.

I'll just list some of the ones I have come across and came up with myself to get the idea across.

1. The audience/musicians pick a number of notes, say, four, that the musicians then improvise with. e.g. A C# F & D#

2. Someone is assigned as music conductor and tells everyone what to do or guide the piece through playing. One form of this has the conductor using visual cards to guide the music. So you'd have to musically interpret a red jagged shape or any other number of things.

3. Similar to the 2. Whoever is the conductor can assign anyone they choose to be the next conductor. I call it chasing.

4. Similar to 3. The tagged person is the only one who plays. Everyone else stops. They can tag anyone whenever.

5. Decide on a number of notes and everyone has to continue on the next set of notes to compose one melody line. e.g. first person plays 6 notes however they want, then stop and the next person plays the next 6 notes and so on. A type of exquisite corpse.

That's all I can think of now. I hope you'll add to this list of ideas or, at the very least, find it interesting.

Jemmaa

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmkN2mHnvBM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmkN2mHnvBM

18AD

These two I was familiar with. The rest I just found now.

Mike Garson:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0iME7emVZhY

John Zorn:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ihwRDmbOQU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xKfSseWENc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDSTZ8PwVEA

This was a little "Audience Participation" improvisation I threw in this last summer at a house concert. The melody is sparked by taking part of an audience member's phone number and assigning the numbers to notes on the keyboard.

Nothing was prepared in advance, and the short edit you see just before starting the improv was just to remove the name of the audience member who gave their number. (I like to name the piece after the individual whose number is being "played".)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n9glW86H4nM

Concept:

John Zorn and Lawrence "Butch" Morris have developed two of the most notorious conducting systems for creating musical pieces in real time. The latter developed a system called "conduction," which is based on "ideographic signs and gestures activated to modify or construct real-time musical arrangements."[1] He realizes it through both ad hoc and stable groups of musicians around the world (not necessarily improvisers) to whom he teaches the system and later on conducts. For his part, Zorn wrote the composition "Cobra," which consists of detailed rules for a given group of musicians directed by a prompter[2]. In both cases, as well as in similar attempts, one can find a common characteristic: the existence of a predefined system of signs, gestures, rules, etc., that the musicians should learn in order to participate in the construction of a piece. The conductor thus uses a language in order to give the musicians orders or proposals that the musicians have to perform at least to a certain degree. In contrast, the New Anti Zorn Initiative's main aim (at least with regard to the creation of music in real time) is to try to realize a conduction without the use of a predefined conducting system.

The New Anti Zorn Initiative doesn't aim to question the validity, legitimacy, or efficiency of "idiomatic" conductions, but simply to explore the possibilities of "non-idiomatic" conduction. The experience cou­ld be interesting for several reasons. For example, since music created through free improvisation pretends to be non-idiomatic, it should be interesting to find a non-idiomatic (or proto-idiomatic) method of conducting that is more empathetic with this way of making music than idiomatic or pre-structured approaches. Even among musicians who usually don't improvise, a non-idiomatic conduction system could improve musical confidence since "mistakes" cannot be made, given that there is not an established way of reading the conductor's gestures. At the same time, musicians would still be required to develop the focus necessary to interpret a conductor's signs in real time.

Another advantage to a non-idiomatic conduction system relates to the fact that the formalized or idiomatic expressions used by a conductor often serve to encapsulate his or her individual style or intentions. Therefore, an invisible superstructure is present whenever such an idiomatic conduction system is used by someone else. As with any other frame, this superstructure might be helpful or discouraging depending on the person, though in general an individual conducting language is never as inspiring when adopted by another conductor. A non-idiomatic conduction could also be a good alternative for people who want to experience conduction but don't feel especially inspired to learn idiomatic approaches.

With regard to the improvised music scene specifically, this initiative could make improvisers more sympathetic to conduction systems in general. If the practice of conduction came to be seen as something more at hand, it would blur the line between musicians and the conductor (since, for example, musicians wouldn't need to learn a special technique in order to stand in place of the conductor).

In this way, the infamous parallelism between orchestra/factory would start to collapse, leading toward several unknown situations. The number of conduction styles and languages could multiply exponentially over a short period of time, becoming as various as the number of musicians. The long process of developing, defining, and improving a personal conduction language or system (something certainly difficult to achieve or simply not desired by many improvisers) could be avoided. On top of this, if conduction became a less-resisted system, musicians improvising in non-conducted situations could start to incorporate different degrees of conduction into their own practice. Were this to happen, the entire idea of conduction, which has been a bit of a taboo among improvisers, could become more accepted, thus expanding the spectrum of possibilities for improvised music.

-Diego Chamy, July 2010