Re: PrePrepared vs. Improvisational Live Looping Performances

[Per Boysen <perboysen@gmail.com>]

INteresting reading. Thanks for everyone posting!

Lately I have noticed, to my big surprise, that people at my gigs
think I am classically trained. This totally wrong. My "instrument of
the day", the alto flute, I actually bought just four years ago to
start using particularly with looping. However...

...like classical players I do practice a lot. But I don't practice
playing particular pieces. I practice what I call "instant composing".
It's the technique to improvise musical structures that lock in over
time, as opposed to the kind of improvisation where you "react to
sound in the moment" . You train your mind to spread out into the
future and into the past and you learn to see a chain of moments as
one unified process. And this process doesn't flow in one direction,
it is more like a sea than a river.

Technically you have to explore all relations between melodies,
scales, chords and in live looping particularly parallel
transposition. A musical parallel transposition happens when you speed
shift a chord. Depending on being a minor or major chord it brings
certain implications for how you can go melody-wise with it. And the
transposed interval also affects rhythm since the loop goes faster if
speeded up (in pitch) and slower if slowed down (in pitch).

This was just the short version, but my point is that by exploring how
all these parameters relates musically you can develop a paradigm for
your expression. Oddly, it really is discipline that can set you free.

Greetings from Sweden

Per Boysen
www.boysen.se
www.perboysen.com