"There's an awful lot of resources that can be drawn upon in an improvised music concert"
About this Quote
Improvised music gets stereotyped as pure spontaneity: vibes, risk, maybe a little chaos. Fred Frith quietly detonates that fantasy by calling it "resources". The word is almost bureaucratic, and that is the point. He frames improvisation less as mystical inspiration and more as a kind of real-time logistics: a player marshaling materials, habits, memories, techniques, and social cues on the fly.
"Awful lot" does two jobs at once. It’s casual, even self-effacing, but it also widens the frame beyond notes. In Frith’s world, the resources aren’t just scales or chops; they’re listening skills, ensemble dynamics, the acoustics of a room, the history embedded in an instrument, the audience's attention, the unplanned mistake that becomes a motif. Improvisation becomes a practice of noticing and repurposing, not simply inventing.
The subtext is a gentle corrective to the romantic myth that improvised music is untrained or "anything goes". Frith, a composer steeped in experimental and avant-garde scenes, insists on craft without sounding doctrinaire. By speaking like a pragmatist, he also democratizes the act: if improvisation is resource management, then the goal isn't purity or genius, but responsiveness. You don’t transcend context; you draw from it.
Contextually, this reflects late-20th-century improvised music’s pivot away from heroics toward ecology - the concert as a system. Frith isn’t diminishing freedom; he’s explaining what freedom is made of.
"Awful lot" does two jobs at once. It’s casual, even self-effacing, but it also widens the frame beyond notes. In Frith’s world, the resources aren’t just scales or chops; they’re listening skills, ensemble dynamics, the acoustics of a room, the history embedded in an instrument, the audience's attention, the unplanned mistake that becomes a motif. Improvisation becomes a practice of noticing and repurposing, not simply inventing.
The subtext is a gentle corrective to the romantic myth that improvised music is untrained or "anything goes". Frith, a composer steeped in experimental and avant-garde scenes, insists on craft without sounding doctrinaire. By speaking like a pragmatist, he also democratizes the act: if improvisation is resource management, then the goal isn't purity or genius, but responsiveness. You don’t transcend context; you draw from it.
Contextually, this reflects late-20th-century improvised music’s pivot away from heroics toward ecology - the concert as a system. Frith isn’t diminishing freedom; he’s explaining what freedom is made of.
Quote Details
| Topic | Music |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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