Memorization and recall in collective improvisation – the example of the El Memorioso group
“Improvised music can get to be safe, quite quickly. In composition, I find it a bit easier to bypass my habits. It’s possible also in improvisation, but you have to keep working on strategies, putting a spanner in the works, making disturbances or being critical.” Robin Hayward, german tubist (Denzler & Guionnet, 2021, p.37)
The group El Memorioso, a quintet that I co-founded, has chosen not to endure or circumvent the phenomena of habit and routine that can emerge in long-term improvised group practice. Instead, it has embraced them through the adoption of a guiding principle: improvise freely for a certain period of time, then attempt to replay that first improvisation identically, one or several times, relying solely on the resources of memory. While the practical implementation of this principle inevitably encounters significant cognitive challenges that render the goal of exact replication unattainable, its primary value lies in initiating a process that is simultaneously constrained and improvised. This process highlights several phenomena related to the role of memory in improvisational practice, particularly memorization and recall.
Firstly, considering that each of these replications performs a “[singular] instantiation of the improvisatory project” (Canonne & Guerpin, 2018) initiated by the initial improvisation, an improvisatory project itself affected in turn by the “sedimentation” (ibid.) of successive and different replication-instantiations, we will describe comparatively the modifications that occurred between the initial improvisation and some of its replications, analyzing the group’s first record, Cinq formes du temps, as well as its separate tracks.
Secondly, we will relate this musicological analysis to the results of participant observations (interviews, self-annotations by musicians on recordings) highlighting two dimensions of the “phenomenology of common action applied to musical performance” (P. Saint-Germier et al., 2021) at work in El Memorioso. The first dimension is reflexivity, defined as “consciously reflecting on the details of what we are doing while we are doing it”. The second is integration, recognized when a musician “experiences his/her own actions and those of his/her partners as part of an integrated and meaningful whole”. We will demonstrate how each of these two phenomenological dimensions is favored to varying degrees at different stages of the process.
Thirdly, we will outline two recent developments in the group approach. On the one hand, the addition of different play protocols to the process aims to experience more precisely the phenomena triggered by memory work. On the other hand, the quintet’s electroacoustic augmentation brings two memory regimes into confrontation: the psychological memory of the musicians and listeners and the phonographic memory of the recording.
The El Memorioso project thus offers experienced practitioners of free collective improvisation a process that shifts certain reference points and provokes unusual interactions.
For the outside observer, it concretely brings into play certain categories drawn from the phenomenology of joint action applied to improvisation, and specifically mobilizes notions as memory and recall, little considered in general in case studies.
Keywords: improvisation, memory, phenomenology of joint action, process, participant observation
Biography
University Paris 8, Vincennes, Saint-Denis, France – nsouchal@gmail.com