(A personal lecture about the meaning, phenomenology, and practice of free improvised music.)
Since 1989, Baltimore experimentalist and Red Room / High Zero / Volunteer’s Collective founder John Berndt has performed a huge arrange of truly freely improvised music—–across 600+ concerts , collaborating with over 400 other artists, including many that he met at the moment of the concert.
He has lead many ensembles, including SECOND NATURE, an improving orchestra focused on the research frontier of improvised music, the problematics of large group improving. He is also a composer & philosopher focused on para-cultural topics, and he has often said he views the experience of music as more efficient and less mediated version of what philosophy tries to do.
In this personal account, he will try to give an account of the conscious experience of improvising, the wide variety of ways of approaching and thinking about it, the deeper questions of the existence of structure and intelligibility, and most of all, why he has been so drawn to the experience of music created with minimal preconception in the moment.
“And, alas! How always knows no duty, except to supply what the heart was deficient in!” – Jane Austin
“Solo instrumental improvisation is exactly like mining for minerals, you work on a tiny seam for days or weeks and then suddenly a whole universe opens up to you.” – Evan Parker
“There is never a circumstance where we encounter an objectivity without bonded, corollary subjective states.” – Henry Flynt
“I like music, but I don’t understand the sound it makes.” – Brother Theodore
