Art Ad Libitum

...When a Method actor makes an exit in a rehearsal, for example, his director may call him back and ask him to continue acting out the life of his character, which is conceived as extending indefinitely beyond the artificial limits of the play...

...Thus, for the first time, we have now an American improvisational theater in The Premise, Second City and other cabaret companies spotted around the country...

...Considered from another angle, the current interest in chance and accident apparent in objet trouv?©, musique concr??te and other arts of "happening" clearly connects with the unpredictability of the improvised performance...

...Closely allied with the cabaret theater in a common front against the complacencies of the American Dream are the new "sick" comics, headed by Lenny Bruce and including Dick Gregory, Jonathan Winters, Shelley Berman, Bob Newhart, Tom Lehrer and Mort Sahl...

...While this may sound plausible, it is actually a very poor compromise...

...Enough has been written about the "spontaneous bop prosody" of Allen Ginsberg and other Beat poets to make the association between Beat literature and improvisation apparent...

...behind them one perceives the looming presence of the Method (the American version of Stanislavsky, now the leading school of acting in this country...

...When the actors, comics and musicians do actually improvise before an audience, they either seem frightened by their own audacity or appear to be faking...

...In the other, the work is essentially the creative effluence of the artist, coextensive with him and subject to all the vicissitudes of his mind and body...

...It is as unique as jazz, which it resembles in its freeassociative spontaneity and its angry stridency...

...Stravinsky himself-following, as ever, the astonishing course of his life-dialectic -has called for a music combining "composed [elements] with improvised elements.' The composers of musique concr??te allow their performers considerable freedom...

...Despite this grand tradition of musical improvisation-almost unique to music and therefore reflecting some quality of its essence-since the last years of the 19th century serious music has drawn further and further away from the ideal of improvisational freedom...

...That these arts generally fall far short of the jazz ideal is obvious from the fact that they involve so little real public improvisation...

...Nichols and May do one improvised turn in an evening's entertainment-I found it embarrassing...

...With such a discipline ingrained in hundreds of gifted performers who have nowhere else to go, the discharge of histrionic energies into the cabaret theater is certain to continue and increase...

...Many of the great composers-Bach, Beethoven, Handel, Bruckner-were famous as improvisers, and many masterworks -the organ concertos of Handel, the piano concertos of Mozarthave come down to us in outline form because their composers assumed in the performer the capacity to fill in the outline with suitable ornaments, harmonies, cadenzas, etc...

...During one period of his career, Jackson Pollock, the greatest of the tribe, worked on long rolls of canvas which he progressively spattered with patterns of enormous kinetic energy...

...The essential link is a common emphasis on the creative experience as opposed to the product...

...As a musicologist wrote some years ago, "the further we go back into the history of Western artmusic, the more important and the more widespread is the role of improvisation...

...Improvisation is no longer, as in the past, merely an extension of the arts flourishing at the moment: Jazz is unique, cabaret theater and "sick" comedy are "phenomena,' action painting and Method acting have established new styles...

...and finally, the "objective" (die neue Sachlichkeit) esthetic of Stravinsky and Sch?¶nberg which, beginning with a music presumably needing no interpretation, has culminated in electronic music - a music without man...

...Moreover, Bruce, an essentially serious man, did not want to appear as an entertainer doing an act -one of his prime targets is the fatuous glamor of Show Biz...

...Method actors are legion in the American theater, and they are all trained to some extent in improvisation...

...In an age of "blocks" and "hangups," of the drying up of essential human energies, any kind of impulsive, spontaneous behavior seems exciting and glamorous...

...There are, of course, several reasons for this: the vast accumulation of printed and, subsequently, phonographic records, with the resultant reverence for tradition and the authority of the score...

...For there is a fundamental disparity between deliberate or composed art and improvisational art: In the one case the artist sublimates his being into the art-work, which ultimately assumes a fixed and autonomous existence-the artist disappears and the work endures...

...And there is the common modern faith-nowhere so strong as in America-in the unconscious life behind or beneath the "blocks," a faith clearly reflected in the current preoccupation with myth, primitivism, psychoanalysis, and so on...

...In this he is typical of his age and country: Practically everyone in modern America has longed for the jazzman's imaginative freedom and creative gusto...

...Perhaps the most fundamental interpretation of the improviser is that which stresses his existential struggle...

...The Foss ensemble works from charts or schemes which provide entrance cues and harmonic notes to keep the musicians together, but which allow an almost total freedom in the number, pitch and intensity of the notes to be played...

...most of it is self-conscious rant...

...Foss has frankly avowed that the inspiration for his endeavor was envy of the jazz musician's jam session...

...He failed at first because he hadn't the dramatic gifts: He wasn't an actor like Mike Nichols, a farceur like Sid Caesar, or even a clever mimic like Jonathan Winters, who employs a radio actor's technique of voices, accents and oral sound effects...

...The improviser is a man continually struggling to recreate himself...

...Jazz is the ideal condition toward which all our improvisational arts aspire...

...In his daily confrontation with the unknown, the improviser assumes a moral grandeur, for who else evinces so dramatically the power of the naked ego to dominate its circumstances...

...Eventually, he evolved a kind of hipster sermon with dramatic exempla that is totally unlike anything ever offered to the American public as art or entertainment...

...One thing has been achieved: The basic freedom has been won, the new prospect opened...

...the enormous sophistication and heterogeneity of modern compositional styles, disabling to the improviser who, to speak freely, must speak a familiar language...

...And now we have in the Improvisation Chamber Ensemble of Lucas Foss, a full-scale effort to achieve the ancient ideal in the modern idiom (Studies in Improvisation, RCA LM/LSC-2558...

...In improvisation the relations of art and artist are reversed: The artist endures, the work is evanescent...

...Mary McCarthy's jibe, "You cannot hang an event on the wall," is typical of the kind of criticism always leveled at the improviser when he offers his work as deliberate composition...

...What we descry is both exciting and disturbing...

...We are still waiting for performers who dare, performers who can give us the matchless thrill of witnessing the creative act itself...

...The fact that Bruce, Gregory and Sahl constantly appear in the same clubs and on the same bills with jazz musicians is in itself suggestive of the mutual affinity of the two forms...

...The only way to record the action painter is, therefore, to catch his process on film, exactly as we record the jazz musician on tape...

...That there is nothing fanciful about this idea should be obvious to anyone who has watched action painters at work...

...An idea winged off the top in the heat of a session will not have the same force when it is slotted into a set piece...

...Already this milieu has generated one of the most brilliant and original comedy teams of modern times, Nichols and May...

...Unconsciously, he was providing a striking visual analogue to the jazz musician's indefinitely extended solo, likewise headlong in movement, sketchy in outline and informed by the same fell violence...

...A slight softening can now be detected in this rigid fabric of "Western art-music...

...Yet the crudeness of the struggle is grimly suggestive: In the years to come, one suspects, the arts as we know them-those elaborate, formal disciplines requiring a high degree of sublimation-may gradually deteriorate into a wild and desperate welter of raw creative energies...

...Most of the material is evolved in private "rehearsal" sessions, and then fixed for performance...

...The connection between action painting and improvisation needs a word of clarification, however...

...Improvisation is now part of the great struggle against emotional and spiritual inhibition, which is an essential element in the life of every American...

...As Foss has said, "We try to remember the good notes, forget the bad ones...

...These performers, however, are merely the vanguard of the new movement...

...Like Nichols and May, Bruce started out trying to do dramatic bits replete with situation, characters and dialogue...

...The last art to respond to the yeasty spirit now working in American culture is, oddly enough, the art with the longest and noblest tradition of improvisation: classical or serious music...

...On all sides, improvisational versions of the conventional arts are springing up with a vigor that betokens a profound cultural urgency...

...Bruce does four minutes of real "blowing" in a 40-minute performance...

...The audience-suggested skits at The Premise, really no more than enacted jokes, are often, one suspects, rigged...