Emotional Improvisation: Musical, Interactive, and Intermedial

Musical improvisation accommodates emotional expression par excellence: in all times and cultures, improvising performers engage with the creation of meaning in the moment an act in which exploratory movements meet with habitual ones. Improvisers tend to arrive at clear instances of expression after and by way of lengthy detours, erring, and indistinct and discontinuous passage work, to eventually disintegrate back into the commonplace and inarticulate. Such expressive plateaux, and the flow that marks them, are often the exquisite artistic goal of an improvisation. They are by no means confined to solitary or private occurrence, as, in an ensemble situation, they form acts of reached communality. Emotional improvisation may be seen not to fare quite as well in state-of-the- art avant-garde intermedial and/or interactive settings, that is, across media, and across the analogue-digital divide. The aesthetic terrain of these two rapidly growing areas of contemporary artistic practice, different from other aesthetics, may not appear readily permissive of emotional expression; yet it does arise in such settings, if perhaps more rarely and obscurely so than in traditional ones. The purpose of this arts based research project is to unravel and enhance ways in which emotional expression occurs in the above experimental settings. The project`s artistic research method is performative: it operates from the first- and second- person perspectives to identify and instantiate emotional expression in improvisatory performance. Improvisers engage with each other in acts of (up to fully unrehearsed) emotional co-improvisation acts to be analysed practically and methodically (including the method of performed identification) regarding the processes and conditions through which interpersonally and collectively found expression emerges. Expressive acts shall be differentiated as to the level of collectivity, structural prearrangement, spontaneity, intermediality, and interaction with digital media therein. We expect to cover new ground by approaching the topic of improvisation by using the method of improvisation. The project features an international group of musicians and dancers, ranging from excellent upcoming to internationally high profile, with Klangforum Wien as principal co-investigator, plus collaborations with SARC (Belfast) and ICMuS (Newcastle University). Aim is to meet a rising need to research and advance existing poetic means and problems, and social assemblages of co-expressive improvised intermedial and interactive performance. Results (audiovisual documentation, autoethnographic work and critical reflection) shall be published in artistic research journals and in the form of an artistic research monograph.

How can duo and trio improvisations be "jointly free" in moments of peak flow? What is the key to the sophisticated practice and understanding of both in-the-moment and overarching expressive togetherness in a musical ensemble - what are its conditions? It can now be said that "chemistry" between two improvising musicians is due to a very particular togetherness they manage to establish through a specific character of listening and responsiveness: In a nutshell, mutual empathy creates a state of sympathy, of a shared emotional episode, not only in the sense of 'being in it together' or 'negotiating and sharing musical space' but in the sense of literally - for a certain timespan - sharing an emotion. The dialogical and affective/emotional structure of this togetherness - a shared voice - is spelled out in Peters (2020). For this an improviser - any duo or chamber musician actually - rather than just (or even instead of) imagining her or his musical continuation needs to "listen out" as one would to a natural environment, in a state of utter responsiveness to the other. This includes a grasp of the other's affective state present in the shared actions; continuously responding musical actions need to be as fine-grained as in a contact improvisation from dance. Blending the sounds alone will not produce the result, nor will an attitude of agreeable playing: On top of sounding like one instrument and one body (see Peters 2018 on shared instrumentality) listening out needs to reach into the affective reality of the players, so that - without losing individual autonomy - a we-subjectivity can be established (Peters 2020). This means it is not just You and I who are playing, but We. If players listen out for we-ness in this way (perceiving each other through the joint sounds they make and letting their actions be coloured by the perception of the other), complex joint musical decisions become possible in real time. Ultimately, then, it is the development of shared sensibilities through a deeply dialogical approach to the other (Peters [Routledge, forthcoming]) that is the basis of interpersonally sophisticated music-making. The project advances methods regarding series of artistic experiments (Peters [Routledge, forthcoming]) and regarding "concept driven artistic exploration" (Peters [Rowman & Littlefield, forthcoming]), opening up a fundamentally new dimension to both ensemble research and musical aesthetics, in showing how artistic research involving first- and second-person experience can yield knowledge. Further, the project reveals a key to understanding improvisation as a form of art.