Book Review:

The Philosophy of Improvisation – Gary Peters

Marc Hannaford

Introduction

Peters, in his synopsis, points to the fact that “improvisation is usually either
lionized as an ecstatic experience of being in the moment or disparaged as the
thoughtless recycling of clichés.” This book is written to “elaborate an innovative
concept of improvisation”1 that draws on the work of continental philosophers
from Kant to Levinas. This paper will discuss concepts that resonate most
strongly with me.

Background

Peters is chair of critical and cultural theory at York St. John University, England.
His main area of research “is in the area of continental philosophy and aesthetics
from Kant to the present. This often overlaps with certain areas of pedagogical
research as well as a range of art practices (from music and the performing arts
to visual art and literature). Some recent research and conference papers have
also begun to look at issues within the fields of philosophy, art practice and
science.”2 He is also an improvising and composing guitarist that is obviously
influenced by bluegrass and country music, but seems to create music that

1 Gary Peters, The Philosophy of Improvisation (London: The University of Chicago Press, Ltd.,
2009).author's synopsis
2 ———, "Gary Peters - York St. John University - Academia.Edu,"

http://yorksj.academia.edu/GaryPeters/.
occupies a space outside of traditional genres, as you might expect after reading
this book.3

The Junkyard Improviser

Peters’ discussion of the junkyard improviser stems from two sources: Walter
Benjamin’s vision of Paul Klee’s painting Angelus Novus (Figure 1), and television
shows such as Scrapheap Challenge (U.K.) and Junkyard Wars (U.S.A).

Figure 1: Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus

3The webpage http://yorksj.academia.edu/GaryPeters/Papers (accessed 30/09/11) contains

mp3 files of Peters’ music.
Both the television shows, where contestants are asked to construct various,
functioning objects from items found in a scrapheap in a certain time limit, and
the poem by Benjamin provides many points of discussion:

A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel

looking as though he is about to move away
from something he is fixedly contemplating.
His eyes are staring, his mouth hangs open, his wings are spread.
This is how the angel of history must look.
His face is turned toward the past.
Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one catastrophe,
which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage
hurling it before his feet.
The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead,
and make whole what has been smashed.
But a storm is blowing from Paradise;
it has got caught in his wings with such violence
the angel can no longer close them.
This storm irresistibly propels him
into the future to which his back is turned,
while the pile of debris before him grows skyward.
This storm is what we call progress.4

Both the Benjamin and the shows ask the participant (the artist or contestant,
respectively) to look backwards to explore how “pile of debris”
- este pile of debris, para o improvisador é o seu arquivo, o seu
conhecimento base, o ponto de partida da improvisação. O “look backwards” é o
olhar para dentro, para o seu conhecimento saber utilizá-lo para a construção de
algo que não existia antes.
might be used “into the future to which his back is turned.” The challenge
for the improviser is how to take what is already there (Levinas’ ‘Il y a’) from
history and use it productively; that is, make it give (Heidegger’s ‘Es Gibt’)
something that it previously didn’t.

Peters draws the readers attention to the following predicament for the
improviser: “the there and the given are not identical but, rather, a shift

4 Walter Banjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History," in Illuminations (Schocken, 1969).

The there The given

O improvisador utiliza o There para oferecer

Given, que por sua vez se vai transformar
There, para mais tarde de transformar mais
Uma vez num Given. Assim dialecticamente.
dialectical or differential relation that, precisely because of its interminable
mobility, demands both obedience and disobedience to ensure one never
collapses into the other (the there into the given): the death of improvisation.”5
Such a description of the challenge facing the improviser neither ritualises
improvisation using ecstasy or inspiration, nor reduces it to a regurgitation of
previous materials. Instead it allows for constructive discussion of improvisation
as a process.

Negative and Positive Freedom

“Freedom” is a problematic word in the discourse on improvisation in that it is

used often as an excuse to not engage to the “scrapheap of history” and is tied to
states of ecstasy. Isaiah Berlin, in his Two Concepts of Liberty, provides Peters
with the notions of negative and positive liberty: the former is a “freedom-from,”
and the latter a “freedom-to.” Negative freedom is a collective ideal in that it
“protects the collective by establishing a realm of non-interference that . . . allows
the individual the scope and the space for ‘spontaneity, originality, genius [and]
mental energy,’ all of which figure large in the world of improvisation.” 6 Positive
freedom, on the other hand, has an association with the individual striving,
above everyone and everything, for mastery. As Peters points out, many regard
this view of freedom as violent and destructive. Drawing on Anthony Braxton’s
ambivalence to free-improvisation, the striving individual becomes “the master
who would rather enslave you than go unrecognised as a nobody.” It is the

5 Peters, The Philosophy of Improvisation, 12.

6 Ibid., 23.
interplay between these two types of freedom that, in my opinion, create the
gainful tension necessary for engaging improvisation. Negative freedom allows
for a collectivity positive freedom cannot, but can result in an aesthetic space too
precious for any strong gestures, resulting in overly polite, static improvisations.
The brashness of positive freedom brings excitement and momentum to a
collective, providing it does not destroy it: in this case the collective demands
everyone to engage in positive freedom.

The Origin of the Work

The becoming or emergence of the work “requires the marking of an unmarked

space.”7 A marked space “demands a continuation that is governed by the
available mark-making resources, thought both materially and as a history of
mimetic patterns,” while the unmarked does not. Marking the space sets in
motion the work that (invoking Heidegger) is a dualism between artist and
artwork: “The marking of a space . . . sets in train a movement, an emergence or
occurrence that, while producing an artwork, is also originary and originating in
gesture of the artist too . . . ‘The artist is the origin of the work. The work is the
origin of the artist.’ ”8 What Peters is expressing here is that art is made by artists,
each demands the other. Therefore the marking of the unmarked space is not
simply a moment but a process that the artist engages in, what Peters calls the
“working of the work,”9 that defines him as well as the works origin.

While the sensus communis “grounds the aesthetic judgement of taste . . . in the
free play of human cognition, which is common to all,”10 it does not account for
how a work is produced prior to the judgment of taste; this is done by Kant’s
genius who “appears to be able to spontaneously originate artworks untarnished

7 Ibid., 12.
8 Ibid., 13.
9 Ibid., 17.
10 Ibid., 36.
by the history of representation.”11 Mimesis, acting as reproductive imagination,
intermingles with the productive faculties, and sets the scene for the self-
reflexive artist beginning of the work. The power of origination, as described by
Kant, can be “followed” but not “imitated.” The process of bringing the work into
being, and of not letting this work become fixed, is what will be followed, rather
than the materials of patterns of mimesis themselves. The works “primary aim is
to produce beginnings” that “concerns the gathering of past and future time in
the now of the work that must begin again at every moment if its negative and
positive freedoms are to be maintained.”12
What, then, is required of the artist if, as Kant says, they are unable to imitate
genius but all works are also transient and therefore unable to be followed?
Peters arrives at the conclusion: and “originary ‘yes!’ ” 13 This affirmation allows
the artist to sense their own creativity; Kant speaks of a quickening of
“productive imagination and the understanding, a cognitive intensification that is
responsible not only for the feeling of pleasure associated with the reception of
the work but also for the production of the work out nowhere.”14

The artist also makes the originary mark with material from the “scrapheap of
history.” Rather than discuss the use of this “scrap” in terms of transcendence or
liberation, Peters states that “success for the scrap yard improviser . . . [depends]
on the ability to find new and novel ways of inhabiting the old and reviving dead
forms through a productive process of reappropriation that promotes
improvisation more as a means of salvation and redemption that of creation: re-
novation.”15 “Novel” is a problematic word, as it often used to describe that
which Peters wishes to avoid: an endless demand for the “new” that can only end
in the contrived, something transcendence and liberation won’t do.

Dialogue and Competition

11 Ibid.
12 Ibid., 38.
13 Ibid., 39.
14 Ibid.
15 Ibid., 18.
Theatresports helps Peters highlight the role competition and dialogue play in
the working of the work because “although fundamentally competitive,
Theatresports is almost exclusively focussed on the work . . . rather than on the
players.”16 Any “fixing” of the work, in the Theatresports model, is a failure;
players keep the work moving through improvisation and, sometimes, chance. In
this way Theatresports is exemplary in allowing dialogue and competition to
coexist productively. Dialogue might be thought of as the sensus communis of the
group; together they create a common sense of purpose that allows each
member to make decisions. These decisions are also, due to differences that stem
from each player, are in competition to one another, not through an ego-based
need to control, but through the spontaneous juxtaposition of gestures. The
resolution of these differences is necessary to allow the work to continue
working, what Keith Johnstone calls “failing gracefully.”17 Linking failure to
productivity returns Peters to the discussions of Benjamin and Heidegger, and
the “scrapheap of history.”

Irony

Peters cites irony as being the method by which improvisers can “deflate the
inflated, mock the portentous, and the reduce the fetishism of ‘spontaneous
creation to knockabout anarchy.”18 Not to be confused with impartiality, irony is
“a manner of inhabiting forms, ” rather than a form itself, and “allows fascination
to continue, the fascination necessary to draw both producers and receivers to
the artwork again and again to there confront what Blanchot describes as the
‘image’ that is neither immediate or mediate but rather the intoxicating distance
that holds the Being and being of art apart.”19 Without irony art falls back into
the fixed, producing more and more cultural artifacts that reinforce the “there”

16 Ibid., 58.
17 Ibid., 60.
18 Ibid., 69.
19 Ibid., 70.
without “giving.” Irony is the means by which artists can seriously engage in the
tradition without merely imitating.

I find this discussion particularly useful because I am interested in developing a

language for improvisation that is both unique but informed by the history of
jazz and improvised music. “Imitation . . . assimilation . . . innovation”20 are oft-
used but rather unspecific and unhelpful explanations for engaging in the jazz
tradition. How one could go about realising these steps, particularly the
processes of assimilation and innovation, is very rarely addressed. Analyses of
contemporary improvisations in terms of ironic engagement with history’s
“scrapheap” would make these processes clear and provide one way of
developing the personal voice informed by tradition that the above mantra
propagates.

My previous paper, “Two Views on the Application of the Work Concept”

suggested that artists working within the jazz genre run the risk of having their
work fixed by the “work concept.” If this is the case, then irony presents a way of
avoiding this.

Summary

There are other concepts covered by Peters that I have not fully outlined here.
They include tragedy, comedy and chance. I chose not to cover these not because
they are not fascinating, or well explained, but simply that the above topics are
most applicable to my practice. Far from having the “light touch” Ian Buchanan
describes in his back-cover blurb, it remains one of the most fascinating,
courageous and useful discussions of free improvisation I have come across.

20Paul F. Berliner, Thinking in Jazz: The Infinite Art of Improvisation, Chicago Studies in
Ethnomusicology (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994), 120.quoting Walter Bishop Jr.
 Bibliography

Banjamin, Walter. "Theses on the Philosophy of History." In Illuminations:

Schocken, 1969.
Berliner, Paul F. Thinking in Jazz: The Infinite Art of Improvisation, Chicago
Studies in Ethnomusicology. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press,
1994.
Peters, Gary. "Gary Peters - York St. John University - Academia.Edu."
http://yorksj.academia.edu/GaryPeters/.
———. The Philosophy of Improvisation. London: The University of Chicago Press,
Ltd., 2009.