the perils of short-form solo improvisation

 The Perils of Short-Form Solo Improvisation

I am around halfway through a month-long project of 31 daily two-minute vocal improvisations. Two minutes does not seem a lot but a huge amount can happen vocally and mentally in that time. There are challenges, most obviously that solo improvisation is limiting. There are no other people, not even one, to be in dialogue with. Any exploration or development of, reaction to, or disruption of ideas has to come from you. And all the ideas being explored, developed, reacted to, or disrupted are yours. So you listen, think "how is this going", "where should it go", 'when", and then monitor whatever your next thing is. But that is also common to my longer-form solo improvisations and not my main focus here.

Duration is more to the point. Two minutes does not allow time to sit with a sound, let it unfold, and respond at leisure. You can explore one sound or idea in depth, you can expand to a small number of sounds or ideas you can still allow to have a decent amount of time, or you can tumble through a large number of sounds or ideas, perhaps giving one or two more time to breathe.

Personally I find short-form solo improvising a lot harder if I come in cold, if I do not have an initial cue, sound, or idea to start with. That is not a problem with longer-form solo improvisations. Then I can start with not a single conscious idea. But when my time is strictly curtailed I need a starting point. It can be simple: a word or image I respond to, a natural or mechanical sound I mimic, a couple of stones in my mouth. Or it can be more complex: an event or emotion I set out to explore.

In the current project my starting point is a cue, in the form of a single word each day. Each word is a person, place, or event that is significant in my life. Each leads to sounds I can mimic or gesture towards, to emotions, or to an event whether or not I started with another event. This is where all those questions I mentioned at the beginning come in, that consciousness of what I'm doing. And with them another consideration. As I am improvising and listening to myself the question, "do I follow where the sounds suggest I go, or do I ignore that and stick to the plan, the exploration of ideas already unfolding?" Neither route is right or wrong. Or I could pivot and disrupt both. All the while the clock keeps ticking down. These thoughts and decisions happen fast.

In common with longer-form improvisations there are more considerations. Physical limitations and possibility. There are sounds I cannot make or do not know how to make yet. There are sounds I cannot make reliably. On any given day my voice might fail on sounds I can normally make. But then if I probe, explore, play, try something different I might find a sound that is new to me. There are always sounds I have never made before, or was not conscious of making before. In short-form improvisations all this is happening while I have an eye on the timer.

But still there is more. Significantly, how much do I want to give at least the appearance of structure to what I am doing? I can of course not bother, or simply get so caught up with other concerns that I do not get round to consciously providing structure, or the illusion thereof. But if I do try to create structure or its appearance, if I want to make the two minutes sound like ideas were introduced, explored, and concluded I do not have  much time to accomplish that. With longer-form improvisations it is easy. I can develop ideas; I can build up to a huge sound and come back down again more than once before ebbing away or building to a crescendo; I can keep returning to one or two ideas throughout; I can end where I started. In short-form, realistically I only have access to the last two options: returning to a limited set of ideas, or ending where I began. And the effect of either is very different from the same approach in longer pieces.

This is not meant to be an exhaustive exploration of all the thoughts I might have, but an illustration of the sheer volume of things that flash through my brain while improvising. Though quite often these thoughts are reactive and take the form of negative responses. Sounds are bad, or too common, or repetitive, or lack clarity or intention, or they are the wrong sounds, or I have killed the improvisation and do not know where to go next, and on and on.