After the Lecture/Performance
of Emmanuelle Pépin and Lionel Garcin
SOUND – Listening – GESTURE
in Improvisation
Cefedem AuRA, January 24 2023
Discussion with the Cefedem students
And
For the Cefedem: Philippe Genet, Gwénaël Dubois, Nicolas Sidoroff
For PaaLabRes: Jean-Charles François
Translation from the French by Jean-Charles François
Summary :
1. Improvisation in the Instant, and Reacting to Others
2. Experience as Preparation to Improvisation
3. Improvisation as Writing
4. The Body as Support for Improvisation
5. Text and Improvisation
6. Technique through/for Improvisation
7. Learning through Improvisation
1. Improvisation in the Instant, and Reacting to Others
Emanuelle Pépin:
As Barre Phillips said after an improvisation: “That’s it, it’s done!” It only exists once: it’s the result of what happened now with you. Nothing was planned, except a text, somewhere, generated by the body… and by our encounter! Thank you very much, because in an improvisation, the audience and its listening, are fully participating to what’s brewing here. You are really partners, and even if, at times – you may not realize it – you are “participators”, “particip’actors” of what’s going on. Thank you to have offered this space. Thank you to you, Jean-Charles, and also to all at Cefedem.
Nicolas Sidoroff (Cefedem and PaaLabRes):
Thank you. As usual, we follow the performance with questions to Lionel and Emmanuelle.
Student:
The speed of reaction to each other’s proposals was quite impressive. Do you have automatisms, as a jazzman can have phrases in his vocabulary within an improvisation? For example, when you make a call, do you know that a given sound will stop at a certain time? Are you conscious of it or not at all?
Lionel Garcin:
For sure, there are vocabularies and textures, and so on, but at the level of the form, there is no call: we don’t know how long it’s going to last, it’s really being decided in the instant. It’s because we’re listening on a global and energetic level, and because we are both in the same space. In fact, we don’t react. Perhaps we react quickly, but it’s not really that: rather it’s happening because we are in the same space, because we understand each other…
Emanuelle Pépin:
… without understanding each other! We don’t understand anything at all!
Lionel Garcin:
Without understanding each other, yes! We can be completely surprised, but we breathe together, there’s an obviousness that comes from listening.
2. Experience as Preparation to Improvisation
Jean-Charles François (PaaLabRes):
Does that mean that there’s no preparatory work between you?
Lionel Garcin:
Yes, there is a preparation: we’ve eaten together, discussed things, and so on! [laughs] In fact, there is no preparation other than being connected.
Emanuelle Pépin:
After that, it’s more a question of readiness to welcome what’s being manifested in the air, in the atmosphere. It happens very fast in fact. It’s precisely because there’s no premeditation, no particular expectation that there’s fulgurance. It’s almost at the speed of light, it’s not a reaction. It’s so much wider: for example, here, it’s a duo of sound and movement, but there’s the whole space that’s going to completely modify this relationship, that’s going to make the sound resonate differently here and the body move differently there. It’s not a reaction: at a given moment, it’s a matter of being in the same space of listening, as you said. At the outset that’s what it is, a state of listening. After that, yes, it’s work, it’s an enormous amount of work.
Student:
But it’s not really rehearsal time?
Emanuelle Pépin:
No preparation, no rehearsal. We don’t rehearse, but we do spend time together. Rather, we devote our lives to trying to update our techniques, our tools and transformations in the body according to our moods and state of being. We work really on the instant: “instant composition” it’s here and now, and after that it’s too late! This fleeting lapse of time contains all our experiences. For that, yes, there are tools: I’ve worked for hours in dance studios, on placement for example. I’ve worked up to 8 hours a day. Now, it’s still hours of work, but it’s different, like assessing textures and wondering what I can do with them, almost deconstructing the technique, what has formatted me, to try to find and find again, that is to find each time new ways, in this kind of freshness, how it all comes about, with above all not wanting to reproduce a form. More precisely, the answer to your question is “no.” I have a way of doing things, Lionel has a way of doing things, I recognize his sound, his distinctive touch, his artistic gesture, what all that means in terms of content. It’s a signature, we are all unique. It’s a question of the encounter of a singularity with other singularities that creates something other than our usual knowhow. It’s a mixture of the known and the unknown, the familiar and the completely foreign. If you start by saying to yourself “I’m going to do an arabesque”, it’s over, because that means you’re thinking. If you’re premeditating, it doesn’t work anymore.
Lionel Garcin:
Yes, it’s not a matter of working on pre-established forms, it’s a matter of being in a space of listening: it’s from the space of listening that forms are born. The thinking is there, not as something for producing, but for reading. We read the forms that are in the process of emerging. All the work that goes into composition of the form is there, but not beforehand, it happens after listening.
Student:
When did you start as a duo?
Emanuelle Pépin:
It was during the CEPI Encounters (CEPI: Centre Européen Pour l’Improvisation) in September 2020 in Valcivières, a village in Auvergne, which was mentioned earlier by Jean-Charles. During this event, the person hosting the encounters had asked me, knowing that I was writing, if I could propose something. Lionel was there and I proposed a performance with him, just like that, because we knew each other well. You could call it a lecture-performance. I’ve no idea what came of it, but it was born there, and that’s it! Since then, we never worked again on this project. For today, we just saw each other, we’ve talked about it and it’s still there, it’s in the body and in the communication: yesterday we spent some time together, it was very cold in fact, and it wasn’t in the body, but it was already an act in itself. This is also what happened today: I really don’t know how it went! I certainly didn’t want to know how it would turn out. We didn’t want to know, because if we had, it would have failed!
Lionel Garcin:
But we’ve known each other for 20 years, we’ve been practicing together for 15 or 18 years, not necessarily as a duo. Sometimes there are 12 of us, or 20, I don’t know! As a duo we’ve played maybe only 3 times, including today.
Emanuelle Pépin:
Both of us, 3 or 4 times, yes.
3. Improvisation as Writing
Student:
But it’s not really rehearsal time! At the end of your performance, was there no doubt in your minds that it was in fact the end?
Emanuelle Pépin:
No! [laughs] [to Lionel] You had some doubts?
Lionel Garcin:
No! But the ending is important. The beginning, the ending, all this, it’s all fractal: each time there’s a big form, with each breath, each phrase, each period, there’s birth and death, and the acceptance of that which knits the ensemble together. There is an obviousness to it. You can have doubts sometimes, but today that wasn’t the case.
Emanuelle Pépin:
In fact, it’s a form of writing: it’s another form of composition. But still, it’s composition, it’s not anything goes. We don’t throw ourselves into doing things like that, gesticulating, “I can, he can, we can, putt, putt!” – I’m caricaturing a little. It’s about something else. At this precise moment, it’s consciousness in motion. It’s not an analysis of what’s going on, we are not in the process of saying to ourselves “Ah yes! there, it’s the beginning, there, it’s…”, and so on. Being totally “with it”, we are aware of the present, of what is happening, of what already happened: as the piece progresses, memories are combined and accumulated, creating in itself an organicity of duration.
Lionel Garcin:
It’s organic, yes!
Emanuelle Pépin:
There’s an awareness, which I call contemplation. At a given moment, our ability consists in being able to contemplate what’s happening. Creating a sufficient space allows to feel, listen to, and measure what ‘s in the process of happening, to reach this consciousness of writing, but it’s not intellectual.
Lionel Garcin:
It’s not, it’s the ability of the body, it’s alive. In fact, it’s just simple, organic. As it’s alive, it’s already there.
Student:
In the introduction, there was a long moment of silence, and in fact it had already started. I don’t know how other people perceived it, but we heard every small noise, every little sound… I saw that you reacted to everything: at one point, I moved my foot and there was a look on your part as if there had been a sound. The floor creaked, tables were moved in the room above, etc. Each sound takes on a different importance. As members of the audience, you’d said to yourself “Ah! this happened or that happened, and it generates reactions”. It’s true that it’s spontaneous, here we are in a piece at a time T, and it’s already passed! Tomorrow if you do it again in the same place and with the same public, it will be something else again. I appreciated a lot the moment of silence at the beginning, because I think that sometimes we don’t take enough time, because there is an audience, and we have to perform, that’s that! Here, the silence was like inviting children to “hush, listen!”
Emanuelle Pépin:
It means taking into account, taking into consideration the space in which the piece will take place. It’s the space that “invites us to”. The space consists of elements, like plants outdoors, or all of you, here, indoors, that create the “setting” in quotation marks. As everything starts from this act of listening, it’s not a question of wanting to put yourself in a listening situation at all costs, but silence offers this – even if the silence, in a sort of way, doesn’t exist because there’s always rustling, even our bodies resonate. And this, you can feel it in the air. It’s an activity, a “tension towards” and that’s what we create with, which also applies to writing.
Student:
What about the choice of outfit? It seems that you didn’t come dressed by mere chance. Is it part of an improvisation? Is it a choice?
Emanuelle Pépin:
Yes, it’s a practical choice. I don’t have many pants with which I can, for example, make a sudden movement without tearing them apart from front to rear! That’s what happened to me before, so I try to find materials that are strong enough. But it depends: today I had two additional pants, but I saw that the floor could have caught me. It’s not that I fear for my pants, but it would have interfered with the movement, or else I could have play with them, but well…
Lionel Garcin:
I was under the impression that the meaning of your question was that it wasn’t completely improvised because we’d already chosen the outfit.
Student:
That’s it. Was it more than a choice for comfort?
Lionel Garcin:
I never asked myself that question, I take something I’m used to. At the same time, improvisation is only a matter of choice. All the same, there’s a given writing, the instrument is a writing, there are constraints, there are limits. It’s also the case for the body and the space. We write with what’s there, we’re not in total indetermination, so it’s part of what’s given to us.
Emanuelle Pépin:
Then, it all depends on the situation. Here, it’s all about working specifically with sound. As I was saying earlier, I can have a perception of sound through the skin and through the body’s tissues. But there are materials on top of the skin, and if these materials aren’t breathing or porous, it cuts off listening. On another occasion, I worked with a visual artist who was making calligraphy on large strips of wild silk. I didn’t know him, but I’d observed his work beforehand. So, I chose an outfit with a fluid quality and with colors that were not going to clash with his material. Yes, there are sometimes scenographies for which I bring in materials and objects.
Student:
Earlier, you talked about simplicity. I’m not sure about dance, but musically I found that there was a lot of complexity: circular breathing, research into timbres, sounds with or without reeds, etc. Did you acquire these capacities before or was it the fact that you are involved in research that led you to these areas?
Lionel Garcin:
It might be because I am attracted to it, but it mostly came through practice. I didn’t learn these things beforehand. All this vocabulary was born out of improvisation practice, particularly improvisation in large ensemble, with several musicians playing other instruments. There’s a desire to go towards them, to compose with them: you find themes that combine and all the play with the body enables you to find things. So, this vocabulary was more generated by practicing improvisation.
Student:
For me, certain things appear to be complicated, but in fact they became simple, is it the way you see it?
Lionel Garcin:
Yes, when I speak of simplicity, I’m not referring to the content of the music, its relative complexity… Simplicity is the basis on which the body lies, like with the simplicity of listening. Then, what’s built on it is another matter, yes.
4. The Body as Support for Improvisation
Student:
I have a question for you, saxophone player. In music, we are a little bit educated in a logic of body statism: sometimes we don’t really know what to do with our body on stage, even we’d like to hide it. But you, you moved all over the place, you were in movement, you danced too?
Lionel Garcin:
I practice a lot with dance, so it may happen that after a while you get fed up with the instrument, you don’t play it for three days and you only work with the body. Because sometimes the instrument is so cumbersome! When you want to rediscover the simplicity of being connected to organic things, the instrument sometimes gets in the way. There is so much technicity needed for reconnecting with the organic, that you have to develop other techniques that are immediately organic: working through the body helps you to access this organicity that you’re trying to prolong with the instrument. But when I play concerts, I don’t move, I love to be only in the sound, with feeling the body, but with the body immobile. Well immobile… you have to move, but it doesn’t do the same thing. Today, I’ve taken more the space into account, but most of the time I prefer to be simpler and concentrate on the music.
Student:
Is it like a “letting go”?
Lionel Garcin:
Yes, letting go, in the sense that once you have given all the importance to space and sound, you tend to disappear as a separate person, and to be freed from yourself, giving way to all the rest. It doesn’t necessarily last a long time, but…
Student:
All that you mention here, speaking of space, of life, of composing from what already exists, of concentrating on the present moment, I have the impression that it’s linked to precepts like Buddhism, personal development, a sort of ancestral wisdom. I would like to know if you had been involved in these kinds of sciences, because the lexical field of feelings and emotions comes up often. Do you rely on these precepts, or have you developed these sensibilities over time?
Lionel Garcin:
Yes, I think it’s connected. For me, the traditions you mention are also part of our culture, in poetry and art, even if sometimes we’ve lost them in some ways. I came to music because, without realizing it, I was lacking that dimension. I was going towards academic research in the sciences, when I met Barre Phillips, with whom I felt there was another dimension that I didn’t have. And then, through the body too, because it all functions in connection to sensations. In dance, they have a phenomenal knowledge of the conscious body, so it’s necessarily linked.
Emanuelle Pépin:
And then, there are all the approaches to somatic technic. As far as I am concern, I didn’t go looking outside the institution. I come from the Conservatorium and the Centre National Chorégraphique, with a real discipline in different dance techniques. At a certain point, I felt limited in the expression of the living, the gesture, the relationship. When I met choreographs from American line of work in France who were developing this kind of approach, I thought: “This is it!”. It was through work that things became clearer. I read a lot, and I also listen to the ways people function. In these practices, that’s what is being developed and refined, in order to try to get to the source of listening and create the space for a relationship between our inner and outer worlds.
The same previous student:
What keeps coming back is that every time you have artistically achieve a background and an education, you have to go through a process of unlearning. To go further, you always go towards these great expressions, because they are more liberating, they allow you to feel more profoundly, and to access a certain form of freedom. Many musicians and dancers turn to improvisation, because apparently it both liberates and connects. Is it the path to be taken by everybody?
Lionel Garcin:
For me, improvisation is like a philosophical and poetical practice of discovering reality through practice, linked to our history and that of other civilizations, which exists outside the consumerist production of the artistic industry. It’s something else.
5. Text and Improvisation
Jean-Charles François:
Could you say a few words on the relationship between text and improvisation? Because what’s also interesting in this context is the tension between improvisation and a predetermined text: there’s the integration of the fixity of the text in improvisation, the written text that’s read at a certain time, and the text outside the written score that’s perhaps improvised. This relationship appears to me very interesting.
Emanuelle Pépin:
I think I would need more time to answer. As it happened three years ago, it’s still very new, and I don’t have any distance. What I can say is that the text comes from practice and experience. It’s become a form of score. But in the car coming here, I thought: “How am I going to proceed? Am I going to follow the text, to read it?”, knowing that I have difficulties to project my voice in performance. In fact, I considered the texts as an improvised piece in which perhaps you could – it was reassuring to use the word “perhaps” – let the word come. In any case, it’s as if, in the movement, the text and the words were there all the time.
Lionel Garcin:
Yesterday, when you read the text to me, it was clear that it couldn’t work like that, just by reading it. Even if it comes from practice, it would have to be updated to the present time and reincarnated. It’s the fact that you re-improvise it in the very instant by having the basis of the written notes.
Emanuelle Pépin:
Yes. In fact, it would not have been right to just read it.
Lionel Garcin:
That would only be illustration.
Emanuelle Pépin:
Even if sometimes the gesture called for the word and the word called for the gesture – gesture in the broadest sense of the word: the dance or sound gesture.
Lionel Garcin:
When I hear these phrases, it’s as if they confined me in a place of listening, giving me a new perspective. Perhaps I wasn’t listening that way, but it makes me read what’s going on from another point of view. It doesn’t necessarily mean changing what’s going on but reading it from another point of view. I don’t know if it’ll change the way things are, but it changes the way I read it.
Emanuelle Pépin:
Yes, it changes listening, and it changes the sound.
6. Technique through/for Improvisation
Philippe Genet (Director of Cefedem AuRA):
I would like to come back on the question of formatting, and then of liberation. Most of the students here, who will be teaching or are already teaching, are wondering about the transmission of these kinds of practices. Sometimes, today, in order to free oneself from an academic teaching, improvisation is often mentioned in our courses as a way to bring precisely both a form of freedom and a new language. I’d like to know whether sometimes you have to deal with transmission, by teaching workshops, or courses, and how you apprehend this type of approach. Do you have to wait until you have acquired a solid technique or can you, immediately, in a very intuitive way, have an approach that perhaps allows people to become aware of their own body, gesture, and instrument. Is it a possible entry to musical or dance practice for young children?
Lionel Garcin:
Yes, it can be done directly, immediately, that’s for sure. But you can free yourself without improvising. A performer at the top of his/her art doesn’t need to improvise. I don’t know, that’s a big question really! Yes, we lead workshops from time to time, but I am a little bothered when it’s taught, as if it’s a form that could be taught, when in reality it’s a rather anarchic practice.
Emanuelle Pépin:
Yes, but at the same time there are a lot of tools, very concrete entry points. Whether for dancers or musicians, the relationship to the body is already an enormous issue. And this represents many hours of practice, of work: you can enter through the awareness of the skeleton, the relationships to gravity, the displacements, the architecture, the situation of the body in space, the sound gesture, the musician’s gesture with the instrument, the body of the instrument in space, the body of the instrument and the musician, the sound textures, pitch, and effectively how to live it too. The working approach to improvisation consists in going through the body, but that doesn’t mean that it’s going to be dance.
Lionel Garcin:
And going through situations of not knowing too.
Emanuelle Pépin:
And not to reject technique at all, on the contrary, it’s fabulous! This said, when you have a public of persons who have never practiced dance, you observe an astonishment, like a state of infancy, a generosity, without a priori, a “dare to go”. Often, there’s a great deal of awkwardness, but with a certain sensibility too. Sometimes, with people who come with a really solid background, you have to find ways to address differently their relationships to the instrument, to the space, to others, to writing, as simply taking these things from another point of view. Improvisation is not necessarily an entry to freedom.
Lionel Garcin:
You can also get locked into it too.
Emanuelle Pépin:
Yes, completely! It’s just a question of “being there” and it represents a hell of a job, involving sensations, perception, awareness of space, awareness of how sound travels, how to compose, etc. There are so many tools to play with!
Lionel Garcin:
In terms of teaching, the improvisation scene is very close to the social structure of traditional communities, in the sense of being all mixed together from beginners to lifelong practitioners, which doesn’t pose any problems. Many sessions of collective practices take place where all people are together, like in a village where there are percussionists, old and young, playing all together to find some common ground. That’s also how you learn, through practice. So, you don’t necessarily need to have a technique from the start, the technique will come along. This dialectic with technique and acquired knowledge is of great importance. That’s the way to go forward.
Philippe Genet:
In academic teaching, it’s not the case: you have first to develop a technique before being able to go further. It seems obvious that improvisation arrives at a given moment, like a door opening leading you at once to another universe, to other spaces. My question was directed towards knowing how you can articulate this. I say that specifically here at the Cefedem where the pedagogical issues are put forward: how to articulate this entry, knowing that it modifies the relationship to writing? You had no scores, except the text on the floor. How to proceed when writing is already very present in the practices?
Lionel Garcin:
This raises the question of the relationship to desire. Why should we have to acquire from the onset this or that technique? Through improvisation, you realize that you are already into a live practice, or in the real world like in a martial art fight. You’re inside it, it’s not a theory that will lead you to a practice in 10 years’ time. You’re confronted with the real. And when you feel, for example, that you cannot go through it, and that you don’t have the technique, that’s when you can turn to academic teaching (or not). You must develop this technique because you feel in your body that you need to go through it because you are stuck. So there, it can be something that awakens the desire, or rather the necessity to do it.
Emanuelle Pépin:
I often work in a lifelong professional circus arts training center. I’ve been hired to give technical classes on condition that, at the same time, I offer improvisation workshops. It’s all done together. For example, it’s obvious that to do a triple somersault on circus apparatus means taking a great deal of risk because of the volume and mass involved. It requires some skill and generates a lot of fear: some people can’t get over the fact of throwing themselves backwards like that, even with a harness, and in this case, they turn to jugglery. However, if you do a work on the state of imbalance, going a little further towards falling, feeling the floor, working on gravity, rebound and trust with others, then all of a sudden, it’ll be possible to climb 4 meters high, on a little platform and to throw yourself backwards. Whereas to go only through technique, aiming at the figure – we call that a figure to be performed – you lose many people along the way. It’s a shame, because through other means, be it sensations, perception, the imaginary, or creativity, technique can be nourished by all these experiences and enable you to surpass your own abilities in unexpected ways, that’s certain! I think that in teaching, in training contexts, it’s quite good to put these on the same level right away, even if it’s to go more in-depth into a technique, whatever it might be, to refine it, to master it, but also to have a more “open” approach, if you can call it that way.
Nicolas Sidoroff:
I will intervene here on two levels:
a. In a 6-minute Ted-talk video, a trapeze artist, Adie Delaney, explains how she changed her trapeze teaching method.She explains that one says usually: “You’re going to put your foot there, and then your hand has to climb up the rope” and so on. However, some people are extremely scare, even though the trapeze is relatively low: there is a moment when you have to sit on the crossbar, and hold on by yourself, it’s not at all obvious to do. She says that she’s now trying to accompany the body progressively to include people in this learning process. If it will take you three months to dare to take your hand off the rope, then you will take three months, it doesn’t matter, because it will learn you how to read the body’s signals, to have a really specific relationship with the body, and to know how to listen to it. I compare this with the whole background of schools, notably artistic, that remain hyper-excluding: “If you can’t do what we ask of you, you are out! In any case we don’t need many orchestral musicians, let alone soloists!” And if you don’t understand that, they make you feel it with two or three sharp little evaluations (etc.), and then you find it hard to start over, or you start over somewhere other than in an art school. (I’m saying it this way, but that’s not what the school explains!) I think that there’s a rather interesting relationship with school that needs to be explored, at least in terms of how to include people in this type of learning process.
b. The second point concerns the sort of ideal that Lionel presented, with the meetings between very advanced people and inexperienced people. I’ve witnessed many discussions after improvisation sessions, in which the participants no longer wanted to work together and expressed their frustration. In reality, this welcoming space that you’ve described concerning the body, the space, ourselves, yourselves, is a relationship that needs to be constructed. It’s not innate, and some people have gone through schools that have prevented them to develop this kind of thing. How do we make sure that in the space we create, in the practice we manage to create, people who aren’t very well equipped can find tools, and that the ones who are a little better equipped can include these people. This is what I call “peripherical legitimate participation” that you can find in certain traditional practices. Jean Lave, a researcher, has highlighted it in African tribes, in the making of bags or baskets: you find the experts at the center, who make them very quickly, and next to them those who know a little less, who watch a little and take a little longer, and then those who know even less, who watch… and struggle! Which doesn’t matter, because the bags and the baskets are already done. And all around them, the kids are circulating, watching, touching, etc. and developing a peripherical learning process that is becoming increasingly central. This type of learning is not at all obvious to implement in our societies.
Lionel Garcin:
No, but it exists in small doses.
Nicolas Sidoroff:
I am not saying that it doesn’t exist, but that you must pay attention a bit to it, so that it can exist.
7. Learning through Improvisation
Gwénaël Dubois, Cefedem AuRA:
I’d like to come back to the relationship between interpretation and improvisation, as well as the question of technique that is nourished by improvisation, and the whole academic relationship we have with our heritage. I’m thinking, for example, to the 19th Century classical repertoire, where composers like Chopin or Liszt laid the foundations for all the pianistic technique played today. There isn’t a place in musical higher education where pianists aren’t asked to play a Chopin Etude at the admission exam, when in fact these pieces were composed through improvisation. It’s quite an interesting point to raise: the two volumes of Etudes published by Chopin before the age of 25 were built through improvisation. These pieces are indeed very difficult to play in an approach where you want to play the repertoire. You have to work as if you could achieve that, which is very difficult because you don’t go through the creative processes he used, in which he without a doubt felt great. There’s the famous example that has been noted in a student essay at the Cefedem: Chopin told his students to play his Etudes “with ease!” even though they’re horribly difficult. Each Etude, as their name indicates, focuses on a particular aspect. But in today’s teaching, it seems to me that we can perhaps think about how to reconsider the heritage as a way to improvise. How to work with Mozart without playing Mozart, but improvising it, and trying to use the same improvisation procedure? The idea of desire that you raised is also very important: should we start with a more or less free improvisation, to see where it might lead us, then approach a composer from there? There’s no magic receipt, but you really have to rethink these elements. Because those composers, who produced incredibly difficult pieces to play that today confine us to a rather pathetic academism, were in fact improvising.
Earlier, you said: “If I think of doing an arabesque, it’s over”. You can find the same thing in interpretation: when you are playing something that pose a bit of a problem, if you think: “There’s an E flat”, it’s over, it falls flat on your face. If you think: “It’s hot, this passage!”, it’s over too. In fact, it’s not because you’re thinking that you’re failing, but there’s a bit this kind of thread where you have to let go, but not completely because otherwise you can’t make it, you’re no longer conscious of your body. I find that there is a quite complex duality. Is that what reunites us a little, whatever our practice? Whether it’s completely free improvisation or completely academic academism, I have the impression that ultimately, what unites all practices is this sort of thread that you have to let go while you’re playing. That’s certainly something we could work on.
Lionel Garcin:
These questions are really interesting. I don’t have any answers, but these are issues that I’m putting into practice in my own work. Concerning what you’re talking about, this thread, I have the impression that the thinking actually pulls us out of the thing. If it’s there as a comment, it deflects us from the thing. It’s not by letting go that you’ll be more in your body, it’s the contrary: it’s when you’re in your body that you’ll let go, let go this manner of commenting. The thinking has to be there, but it should be transparent, as a reader of what’s going on, as a silent reader.
Gwénaël Dubois:
From the point of view of teaching, I think that it can be taught, or at least shared. We are talking about it, so it’s evident that it represents something tangible. Maybe we shouldn’t systematically target pieces ever more difficult, but that it might help to work on easier pieces.
Lionel Garcin:
I am not an interpreting musician, but at some point I wanted to know what it meant to feel like an interpreter. I didn’t do it on saxophone, but I worked on piano pieces to get inside them, and I have the impression that effectively it’s important not to go for things that are more complex than what you can do, but on the contrary to choose what you can grasp as a whole and go more in-depth into states of being, have a focal point, a piece, and then for example approach it in many different ways. Starting with a support that you know allows you to focus on the origin of the rhythm in the body. In other words, having different levels of reading that you can name and giving yourself the possibility of going deeper into the sensation, but with a defined form that you know better and better, rather than: “That’s it, it seems to be working at the external level, so I can move on to a more difficult one.”
The composers like Chopin created their own technique through improvisation. To open up the possibility of having one’s own individuality within a collective, or a culture, is an interesting proposition. For example, if I had to play the etudes of the things I do improvising, not only I would not be capable to do it, but above all it would bore the hell out of me!
Gwénaël Dubois:
In the same logic, research has shown that the pieces by Czerny, which are given to all kids in conservatories, were originally intended as support for improvisation. Since then, they’ve become pretty awful pieces! Czerny used them as basis for improvisation with taking the motifs and developing them in all kinds of combinations. It’s a bit like transforming your playing techniques into studies for the students.
Lionel Garcin:
I’ve already been asked! It reminds me of the Indian classical flute that I went over there to study for a while. It’s highly codified, but the way it works is amazing. There’s a form there, with different levels of working with it: the technical level, the emotional level, the spiritual level, etc. When you learn a raga, it’s like working, let’s say, with a Lydian mode, but if you play a Lydian mode, it won’t necessarily result in a raga, because there are intonations, augmentations that create the emotional sensation of that raga. All this is named and worked on, and every day it’s recast. Day 1, you learn the scale and one or two little motifs, and you have the impression that you’re going to do it all over again on day 2, but not at all, the day 2 is completely different, improvised in fact: the teacher starts to improvise with the student, at a certain level, and transmits to her/him little fragments of phrases. Each day it’s new, never the same twice. And after a while, it’s like a field that is created, a melodic field, a field like in physics, there, which is clear, but which is never completely fixed.
Student:
What you’re doing is difficult for most people to listen to. Are you able to make a living from it and ensure that this kind of performances could be long-lasting?
Lionel Garcin:
We try to panhandle with this, and it doesn’t work out too well! You see, today is the second time we’ve done this in three years’ time, so…
Same student:
But you mentioned also other groups…
Lionel Garcin:
Yes, I make a living more or less from improvisation, after which, additionally, I do other things as well sometimes. Improvisation has very little visibility in institutional places, so it’s very often done in underground and poor economics contexts.
Emanuelle Pépin:
I don’t say “I improvise” anymore! For example, I’m invited to perform at a contemporary art museum, and they know that I work in improvisation, but… it’s not said. Obviously, I went several times to visit the museum, I’ve done a lot of research, there will be a storyline, but whatever happens, I’ll be improvising at the time. You also have to think about how it can get to enter places that don’t initially program what you are doing. I experienced this situation for more than 30 years. I give a fair number of workshops, and for me they go hand in hand, pedagogy is very nourishing for creative work. When I intervene in long-life professional training centers, it’s through improvisation. When I play in groups, I improvise. When I play on my own, when I do performances, whether in museums or notional theatres, they don’t necessarily know that I’m going to improvise, and when I tell them they don’t believe me anyway! Many times, after a performance people say, “but it’s written!” Yes, it’s written in the instant, but it takes different forms each time.
Lionel Garcin:
And after that, there are set-ups or agencies [dispositifs] that can be used in other places. For example, I propose a work based on bird calls, in which there’s a lot of improvisation, in fact practically everything is improvised. But the set-up is like some writing, and there is something about it that’s very attractive: we are five soprano saxophonists playing 20 meters apart, each one in a tree. In fact, it’s the same work as we did today, with additionally a work on bird language. So, you can widen and develop improvisation practices using all kinds of different set-ups.