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This text can only be subjective. My métier is neither musicology nor literature. This statement can be refuted. The milieu is nevertheless well known, the “home-made” character, the social club atmosphere of many jazz cellars, the existential flair of pseudo-intellectual atmosphere, which smells of damp walls, where the in-tension is all around and obstructs creation.
You get none of that in the Workshops. No re-production takes place. The result may be repeated, to be sure, but never the “already-made”. What happens here is formulated experiment, chance, but nothing spectacular or speculative is attached to it, and it is simply a prerequisite and forms a sort of basis. The less conspicuous and plainer the results, all the more closely do chance, combined with knowledge and ability, form a whole. Spontaneity and sensitivity, movement in stillness, concentration in sound, the serious participation in playing develops into a new esthetic. Intelligence shows itself through economy.
Inventions are without risk, they are immediately used, a precision is noticeable. The music does not have the sleekness of studied routine. Connecting passages increase the tension. Questions are posed, to which the answers are music. Each is in his own time and reacts to it, playing music. Daily constitution of groups may favor or damage the result, the Philharmonic must be newly founded every day and sometimes does not take place; that is when variety turns into a cave of murderers, a clinching, when one beats oneself with one’s own weapons. Tolerance becomes more severe. Boring chatter of mediocre music rarely occurs; one ends the session before that could happen.
As in the case of no other music, this music is to be taken for what it simply is – namely, as music whose field of association is limited to the pure sound itself; romantic flights of fancy in nature, dreams or feelings are not operable. Brilliance of the presence of the sound alone is sufficient, without causing resistance. It is concerned exclusively with music and, rejecting any literary element, it becomes an abstraction. The extended space of this new reality provides the individual with ample free room.
In spite of brittle ness and abstraction, the whole is music, bound up with a visible ambiance, which acts as a balancing element and is necessary; if the music sometimes eludes the “Only-Enthusiasts”, it is not because of chilling technicality or an unworldly melodramatic element. In essence, to be sure, it is very much of its time and clearly grows out of it. That it sometimes protests against the time, I find a good thing.
Translator unknown
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