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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Focal Points in Collective Free Improvisation

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OLLECTIVE FREE IMPROVISATION (herein abbreviated as CFI), while not a recent phenomenon in music (free jazz’s first experiments date from the late 1950s), remains under-studied. The extant literature either deals with political aspects (Carles and Comolli 2000) or tries to analyze the resulting music, using musicological tools (Jost 1994) or new concepts drawn from the complexity sciences (Borgo 2005). My research on CFI focuses on a cognitive approach, in order to understand the process of collective improvisation: 1 how a group of improvisers who do not know each other and are not using a common referent 2 (Pressing 1988) can answer the challenge of making music together. This paper deals mainly with non-idiomatic improvisation 3 and with cases of “pure” improvisation, where musicians have never played together before, such as in Derek Bailey’s Company Weeks (Bailey 1993). In that perspective, I think we can consider CFI under the generic class of coordination problems. C