Far from being mutually exclusive, writing and improvisation have always nourished and fertilized each other in the history of Western music. Why should things be any different today than they were in the Middle Ages, or at the time of Johann Sebastian Bach? A subjective plea for curiosity and porosity.

I've been exploring the field of improvisation on France Musique (the program À l'Improviste) for some twenty years, and for twelve years I've been at the helm of a program that highlights the music being written today (the program Alla Breve, now known as Création mondiale), and yet writing about these two approaches to the world of sound is rather difficult for me. Why is that?
The following reflections are a sketch of an answer, rather improvised ...

As a preamble to these ramblings, and to revive the idea of the prelude that improvisers in Bach's time always cultivated - and that musicians in certain cultures still practice today - I'd like to offer these words, once collected from the American violinist Malcolm Goldstein: "I love Bach's music because it's the music of an improviser. I don't know why the practice of improvisation has ceased to be such a natural thing, as it once was in Bach's time, for example. Being a musician meant so much more. It would be great to find this in the training of today's musicians!"
That day, Malcolm Goldstein reminded me that he never started a day without playing Bach's music, and that it seemed vital to him to reconnect with the "trilogy" of musicians of the past: the ability to be an interpreter (instrumentalist or singer), an improviser and a composer, and to move from one to the other with the ease of a brook(Bach, in German).
In the 20th century, the musicians who most immediately embodied this trilogy were undoubtedly jazz musicians and organists. Austrian composer, organist and improviser Wolfgang Mitterer has these three practices so ingrained in him that he told me he couldn't conceive of the composer's activity in isolation from instrumental practice, from contact with the instrument. The fact is that every organist improvises, with varying degrees of skill and enthusiasm, and learns to do so: it's a practice inherent to the instrument and its function of accompanying religious services. One of the former titular organists of Notre-Dame de Paris, he also teaches composition at the Dijon Conservatory, Jean-Pierre Leguayhas written a fascinating account of his practice of improvisation, both inside and outside the liturgy.

If we leave the churches to look for spaces where improvisation is alive and well and spontaneous today, the landmarks become blurred. To explore them, you need to have a taste for adventure and porosity, to frequent jazz clubs and festivals, certain particularly curious theaters, improvisation festivals (there was even a time when the two designations "jazz" and "improvised music" coexisted), those dedicated to experimental music, and to take an interest in the many collectives (Coax, Umlaut...) that, each in their own way, have the potential to create a new kind of music.) who, each in their own way, embody the spirit of Johann Sebastian Bach, blurring the separations between composition, improvisation and interpretation by sailing seamlessly between these three practices..

Recent years have also seen the emergence of orchestras of improvisers of all stripes (from jazz, contemporary music and experimental music) who cultivate the back-and-forth between the two approaches to sound, the improvised and the written. This is particularly true ofONCEIM, based in Paris and founded in 2011. The musicians in this ensemble are performers, improvisers and composers all rolled into one. I think I'm right in saying that, at the outset, ONCEIM (Orchestre de Nouvelles Créations, Expérimentations et Improvisations Musicales) mainly approached the idea of structure and composition by inviting a musician from the orchestra to invent a more or less open form, likely to be played by it. Gradually, Frédéric Blondy, pianist and artistic director of the ensemble, turned to composers from outside the orchestra, important figures in experimental music such as Stephen O'Malley, John Tilbury, Peter Ablinger Éliane Radigue... ONCEIM has its Berlin counterpart with the Splitter Orchester, founded in 2010, which brings together some twenty composers/performers of ten different nationalities around very similar work processes, on the borders of improvisation and composition, with a strong focus on the exploration of sound and its projection in space.
The list of ensembles/orchestras created over the last ten years is long. Let' s mention here Una collective of improvisers based in Bordeaux and initiated by double bassist David Chiesa, which defines itself as "an improvisation society": "Le UN improvises, invents playing devices, works with the cinematographic image" (ensemble statement of intent). At one point tempted to explore the written word, I think the ensemble has narrowed its focus to improvisational situations.

Le UN - Jean-Christophe Leforestier from Ensemble UN on Vimeo.

Long before this blossoming, smaller ensembles had shown the way, constantly navigating between orality and writing: I'm thinking of h[iatusan international contemporary music ensemble founded in 2005 by cellist Martine Altenburger and percussionist Lê Quan Ninh. The majority of the members of this variable-geometry ensemble have experience as both performers and improvisers, which leads them to propose projects combining written pieces and improvisations, "in a permanent oscillation between the two disciplines, highlighting the coherences or ruptures of artistic practices that are too often considered antinomic".
Lê Quan Ninh defines ] h[iatus's explorations in these terms:"The long-tested experiences of performance and improvisation form the basis of the singular vision of contemporary music that the ensemble wishes to share: a music that comes not only from those who write it, but also from those who play it, who are, as it were, in the field of sound every day, experiencing the transformations brought about by patient proximity to the musical material and the instrument.
It has to be said that improvisers' approach to sound is very different from that of non-improvising musicians, for improvising means first and foremost questioning one's relationship with the instrument and one's culture, seizing it as a creative tool in its own right, as a means of releasing one's own poetry in ever-changing artistic circumstances...
The improviser acquires a virtuosity of listening, an ability to adapt and a sense of the material that, if he or she is also an interpreter, enables an organic understanding of the works and their inner movements. These become, as it were, a bundle of circumstances to be traversed: circumstances of time and space, abstract and concrete circumstances of musical material, circumstances of transitions, etc., which are like other aspects of the circumstances with which the improviser must work, such as the acoustics permitting such or such dynamics, the volumes of air to be moved, the need for silence, the duty of solidarity, the necessary sharing of perceptions. It is in this transversality of circumstances that the work of l'ensemble]h[iatusis situated in this transversality of circumstances, a transversality that leads us to confuse the written and the improvised.  

Laboratorium - trailer / teaser from Ryoanji Asso on Vimeo.

Inspired by my work with these ensembles, I couldn't possibly help you see more clearly in this interweaving of practices. Better still, I admit I have no desire to oppose - or even compare - the written and the improvised, and prefer myself to favor a transversal way of thinking that tends to confuse them. How can we respond to composers who resist improvisation because they consider it to be simply gestural music - isn't all music gesture, gestures? - or as an unreflected, imperfect expression of the moment, a simple outlet for the musician wishing to express himself in music, and quite simply to play his music? What can we say to those who prefer to point out the formal weaknesses of an improvisation rather than acknowledge the wealth of formal invention of certain improvisers, which cannot be reproduced on paper? And what can we say to improvisers who forget to nourish their practice by listening closely to other music, whether written or "oral"?

Opposing orality and writing, as we superficially oppose the forest to the garden, makes no sense: the game is lost in advance! Who's to say that the forest, as a living organism, doesn't obey an internal organization, and that the layout of a garden - and this is true even of our formal gardens - excludes all fantasy and invention? How can we remain insensitive to the art of the gardeners of the Middle Ages, who knew so well how to combine design and the organization of plants in space with wild, untamed grass? In the history of mankind, long before the advent of writing, music was nevertheless born of improvisation, and even today, many composers improvise mentally or on the instrument all or part of their future works before putting them down on music paper, whatever the universe they are exploring. Doesn't a composer of electronic or acousmatic music go through phases of improvisation with the sounds he has recorded or stored in his sound library? 

At this point in my ramblings, I allow myself a stream of questions.
In what way are the first draft and the organization incompatible? Don't they share the idea of invention, of creation? And isn't it conceivable that a seasoned improviser could go very far in organizing sounds when he's in a performance situation? I've experienced enough improvised music concerts to be able to say that some of them have left me with the memory of an accomplished, organized and magnificent sound world, giving me aural, sensory and intellectual pleasure as great as the most meticulous of compositions. 

In creation, I believe in the interplay of communicating vessels, porosity, constant back-and-forth, organic links between practices, much as in physics there are phase transitions for the same element. If water is present in different forms - ice, water, steam - so too is the phenomenon we call music, which can offer itself to our ears in forms that are in no way mutually exclusive. Each of us is free to prefer one state or the other, or to feel more at ease in it. In music and artistic expression in general, I believe in what circulates: in openings in a seemingly closed system, in rules that insinuate themselves into what at first glance looks like disorder. I believe in contamination!

Long before experimental music, illustrations of this sleight-of-hand were to be found in early music. Musicians of the Chant sur le livre (Middle Ages), Renaissance and Baroque periods (ornamentation, realization of the figured bass) needed a great deal of imagination to "flourish and develop" the few notes or lines they had in front of them! Moreover, the history of Western music is full of contrasting moments and periods of transition that left room for freedom. I'm thinking of those periods when the codes of writing were relaxed to let in the wild grass - the current ofEmpfindsamkeit for example, at the time of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach ! 

What about jazz, you might ask?
I'll leave it to jazz specialists - or rather, specialists in the many faces of jazz - to complete these reflections, and will confine myself to sketching an escape route to European and French ensembles that I've come into contact with, orchestras such as pianist Alexander von Schlippenbach's Globe Unity Orchestra. Alexander von Schlippenbachthe Barry Guy New Orchestra, Joëlle Léandre 's Tentet , ÈveRisser 's recent ensembles (White and Red Desert Orchestra), Christophe Rocher's Nautilis ensemble... in which we find this constant, fruitful and delightful back-and-forth between writing and improvisation. 

ZONES LIBRES - Teaser from Ensemble Nautilis on Vimeo.

A few days ago, Brazilian composer and conductor Januibe Tejeraformerly a close associate of the improv collective Warning with whom he collaborated on several projects, confided to me his deep interest in improvisation: "Some composers feel betrayed when their music sounds improvised, because they claim an extreme refinement of writing. I belong to the other clan. The more spontaneous a piece of written music seems, i.e. the less you feel it obeys imposed structures, the happier and more surprised I am. The difficulty lies in combining this appearance of spontaneity with the long process of writing. As a composer, I'm constantly balancing between these two energies: on the one hand, the lived continuity of the work, and on the other, our reality, which is more distended. You have to relate the two things in your writing. It's a fact that I try to bring improvisation back into my writing: it's a real desire! Not to mention improvisational work with instrumentalists, especially in solo and duo forms, moments of improvisation designed to get to know both the instrument and the musician for whom I'm writing this music."

As a finale to this inherently "open" subject, one last look: that of performer-improviser-composer Thierry EscaichThierry Escaich, a musician who began his exploration of sound as a child on the accordion before discovering his instrument, the organ, and with whom À l'improviste listeners once shared great moments of improvisation: It's improvisation that nourishes most of my works. I often speak of a kind of initial spurt in any creative experience; this spurt is improvisation - sometimes, it's also improvisation in the metro, in traffic jams - it's what comes all at once, which doesn't mean that we don't conceive complex forms! The starting point is a gesture, whether harmonic or rhythmic (...) Olivier Messiaen had a rather special relationship with improvisation, which I analyze very well myself as a composer; he always limited his improvisations, except in the course of the office, no doubt driven by a kind of fear, as if this practice could take away his ideas, or prevent him from then realizing them in his own works. As a composer, I had the same question. Initially, my improvisations were quite distant from my compositions. On the other hand, until about ten years ago, when I composed, I would deliberately put myself in a situation; it was as if I were "watching" myself compose! Gradually, these two worlds have come closer together; as a composer, I try to rediscover the spontaneity, the outpouring that you can expect from an improvisation, and when I improvise, I try to structure - but not too much - to try to keep that kind of flame, those rustlings of wings...".

Anne Montaron

Photo article ONCEIM © OlivierOuadah