Free Open Form Performance

Description

"This was a period in which the ‘free playing’ of experimental jazz developed through the likes of John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman and Sun Ra, met with the ‘open’ compositional systems of the avant-garde that had come through those such as John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Earle Brown. Just as FLOSS brings together two related, yet differing, ethics of software production (’Free Software’ and ‘Open Source’), we might describe this music as Free Open Form Performance (abbreviated as FOFP). ‘Free playing’ was a term preferred by Coleman and other jazz musicians who rejected the use of the term ‘improvisation’ on the grounds it was often applied to black music by white audiences to emphasise some innate intuitive musicality that denied the heritage of skills and formal traditions that the black musician drew upon. ‘Open’ comes from Umberto Eco’s ‘Poetics of the Open Work’, an essay from 1959 which was amongst the first to survey and analyse the experiments with aleatoric, indeterminate and partially composed works that were emerging in the classical avant-garde. By the late 1960s these two strands of development had crossed over, with jazz composers such as Coleman and Anthony Braxton consciously working with the instrumentation and structural forms of the classical avant-garde, and groups such as the Scratch Orchestra adopting the collective structure of ensembles such as the Art Ensemble of Chicago. Experiments with notation were significant to many of these groups and composers, but in the Scratch Orchestra, the exploration of notational production was one of their founding aims." (http://www.metamute.org/en/All-Problems-of-Notation-Will-be-Solved-by-the-Masses)

More Information

Read the essay at http://www.metamute.org/en/All-Problems-of-Notation-Will-be-Solved-by-the-Masses