Recording Processes in the Context of Free Musical Improvisation: Spatial and Temporal Ruptures in Musical Performances as Factors that Challenge the Field’s Aesthetic Proposals

Abstract

This article deals with the aesthetic-sound problem of free improvisations that are recorded and overlaid. This situation presents itself as an ethical-musical dilemma because, traditionally, collective free improvisations are carried out with musicians sharing the same time and space–for example, when free improvisers get together to play live. In these cases, instant sound processes of interaction and communication occur between participants, as free improvisations are created in real time. However, when improvisations are recorded through recordings, which are later superimposed, the usual co-participation of musicians in the same instantaneity/spatiality no longer occurs. Thus, the aesthetic-sound problem of the temporal and spatial rupture between the musicians' creative acts, which no longer appear as simultaneous, can be seen. Given this, it is worth asking: do recorded and superimposed free improvisations still contain certain essential properties of the field of free improvisation or, on the contrary, do they irreparably distort it? Can musical creations made from overlapping recordings really be called “free improvisations”? The reflections presented here are based on ethnography carried out between 2020 and 2022 with members of the Laboratório de Improvisação Musical Livre at UFRGS during the coronavirus pandemic, a situation that forced these musicians to interact musically through virtual means.