Limitations, Stravinsky, Skew Collective:
I want to begin this post with a piece of writing that I did early 2021. It goes hand in hand with my last post about contrast, and introduces another closely related idea that I hold dear to my heart: using limitations as a vehicle to enhance creativity. Here’s the essay:
——-
Since the beginning of my time in music school, I’ve been wrestling with the push and pull between muscle memory and improvisation. On the one hand, muscle memory is necessary to even pick up an instrument and play a single note. However, modern neuroscience tells us that as you repeat a motor pattern, you reinforce that neurologic muscle memory pathway, making you more likely to follow the same path in the future.
This is an essential dilemma in learning to improvise, because improvisation depends on taking nothing for granted, soaking in the present moment and the sounds around you, imagining the sounds that the music needs in the upcoming moment, and delivering them from your soul (or from the universal intuitive human spirit, whatever you want to call it) in real time. So, if you’re unable to engage in the improvisatory process fully because your muscle memory sabotages you, taking over and spitting out a previously practiced idea that may or may not be appropriate for the musical moment, then in my opinion you’re not improvising at the highest possible level. But then this begs the question: how can you ever gain facility on your instrument if practicing sequences of notes can lead to this type of muscle memory trap that can poison an improvisation? How can you ever get better at improvising?
My answer to this dilemma is to practice improvising with limitations. Create arbitrary rules for an improvisation that force you to break away from the muscle memory pathways that you are prone to fall into while using your intuition alone. This allows you to practice improvisation, the essential skill of making decisions in the moment, but without getting stuck in cognitive ruts (which become harder to escape the more they’re repeated/ingrained). Through this type of practice, you invariably stumble on new material, new muscle memory pathways that you find beautiful that you never would have discovered without implementing the rules that force you to explore.
For example, if I ask a pianist to improvise with no rules for five minutes, they might not play anything they haven’t ever played before (they will probably play a new combination/re-ordering of old ideas). But if I ask them to improvise with their left hand always remaining in the lowest octave of the keyboard, and in a 9/8 meter, and pianissimo, and their right hand has to play two notes at at time, then I can almost guarantee you they’re going to play something they’ve never played before. This experience of improvising something you’ve never improvised before is an incredibly important skill to develop as a jazz musician. It helps build your ears, your intuitive sense of melody, your sense of spontaneously creating something, all while not making any of the things you already know more stale.
Beginning my Sophomore year of undergrad I began to obsess over integrating this concept into my practice on the drums. And this is a good time to note that this philosophy is far from original. Many composers and improvisers have come to the same conclusion. Marquis Hill gave a masterclass on this exact topic when he came to play with the Plummer Ensemble at IU in 2017. During his clinic we played the tune Solar for over an hour, each musician in the band taking about two choruses with a different rule that was given to them by the audience. “No minor thirds allowed!” “start every line on beat three!” “only play descending lines!” and so on. I’m paraphrasing, but Marquis said something to the effect of “If you practice with arbitrary rules, then when you take them away you’ll feel totally free, like you can play anything.” It’s like the hitter in baseball warming up with the extra heavy bat. Marquis incorporates this technique into his own practice, and I believe it’s a big part of why his improvisations feel so fresh.
Perhaps the most famous advocate of the philosophy of limitations to enhance creativity is Igor Stravinsky, who said something to the effect of “ask me to write a piece for orchestra and I’ll stare at a blank page for hours, but ask me to write a piece for twelve tubas and flute and my mind is swimming with possibilities,” and “The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees themself.”
While I worked on integrating these ideas into my drumming, it only made sense that I would also integrate them into my compositions too. I gradually discovered that if I imposed limitations on many different aspects of a composition, that the piece would basically write itself. Like Stravinsky said, if I wrote a classical piece for solo piano with no rules I might find myself stuck, but if I applied the same rules that I gave for the example piano improvisation, (left hand lowest octave, 9/8 meter, etc) then I would have no trouble generating interesting material. In fact, I found that the more constraints I worked under, the more unique the piece would be, and ironically, the more creative I felt in composing it. This was a huge step for me.
Eventually, the creative experience of making a bunch of constraints became even more interesting to me than the traditional aspects of composing. The conceptual planning phase was where I was finding joy in the compositional process, and the writing down of notes and rhythms felt like necessary minutia, like finishing work or detailing.
Eventually, I learned that if I focused on the constraints seriously enough I would end up composing styles and genres themselves.
For example, if I wrote fifty pieces of music for solo violin, I wouldn’t necessarily be creating a new genre if I just wrote whatever I felt like. But if I wrote fifty pieces of solo violin music that only use the note E, that last a maximum of 90 seconds each, and that must employ a scratch tone for more than 75% of the piece, then I have created a style/genre of violin music. It might not be a very good style, and you might not like this particular genre, but it is its own genre because it has its own conventions, stylistic identifiers, and rules.
And by heavily combining sets of limitations, I could compose music that I was unable to imagine beforehand. The fact that I didn’t know what a piece would end up feeling like when I put certain sets of rules together was extremely exciting, and it gave me a distinct sense of discovery. “What if I write something with Coltrane changes, but in a minor key, with the harmonic rhythm stretched out, and constant crescendos and decrescendos of different lengths? And what if throughout the piece the harmonic rhythm gets gradually faster and the crescendos get gradually shorter?” Again, this example might end up being a bad piece of music (the limitations are a little heavy handed I’ll admit), but maybe it will end up sounding really fresh and original and interesting! The point is, It’s beyond my imagination. I don’t know what it will sound like, and the feeling of not knowing makes me want to go figure out whether or not it’s cool. Maybe by implementing limitations you’ll stumble on something you’ll want to use in a composition, but even discovering bad combinations is a victory because it teaches you something about your taste in music and your preferences for style.
——-
This was the original concept that I brought to my friend Jonah Tarver when I approached him about collaborating on a new project. I was looking to expand the ideas you read above further in three specific ways.
1. What if I just composed the systems of rules, and made them so complete that I could delegate the job of deciding the minutia (specific notes and rhythms, etc) to a computer, largely through randomization?
2. What if I extend this concept into other forms of art? How do I put these types of limitations on something like sculpture, architecture, or dance?
3. What do these ideas look like when combined with the ideas about contrast, rates of change, and form (like those that I discussed in my last post)?
Again, I’m not blazing a brand new trail with either of these ideas. There are plenty of people making generative art in all sorts of different artistic mediums. But I decided I was passionate enough about these ideas to take a crack at them, and Jonah was early in his journey in learning to code and was enthusiastic to get the experience of working on my art + coding projects.
I proposed a number of projects, and the one that we settled on first was a visual art generator that makes large digital pieces. We met weekly to discuss this project, and we put in a ton of work to make something that I’m very proud of. Essentially, the idea was to start with a blank digital canvas filled with thousands of 1 pixel squares. First, a single square would be filled with a random color. Then, the blank squares surrounding the first square would be colored too, either with the same color, a closely related color, or a new random color. Then, the next set of surrounding squares would be colored, and so on, until the entire canvas is full of sprawling color.
We also added flexible controls that give the generator its own rules and parameters to work within: “in this piece, each subsequent round of new squares has a 2% chance to be a totally random color.” Or “in this piece every square has a high amount of red.” To me, this process is exactly the same as the process of imposing musical limitations on improvisations or compositions.
Here are some of the pieces we were able to create with this initial program Jonah made:
Over time, I tried to expand the group beyond just me and Jonah to create an artists collective dedicated to this idea of enhancing creativity through constraints. We called this group Skew Collective. I’m also not the first person to try to do something like this. In the mid 20th century there was a group of French artists who called themselves Oulipo, who beat me to the punch. Members of this group would take on herculean challenges of artistic limitation. One such artists wrote an entire novel that does not include the letter E.
My vision was to expand on their group’s model, and to have artists in many different mediums working under self imposed constraints, but with the added twist of incorporating computer randomization as a decision making aid. When the artistic constraints are set, all you need to do is press go on your computer and watch a piece of art materialize before your eyes, often into something you couldn’t have imagined beforehand.
With this collective I also hoped to create some educational tools, and make them available to artists of all levels who may find these ideas useful or inspiring. I eventually hoped to get some grants that would allow for the funding of projects related to the collective.
The project as it was initially conceived fizzled out for two major reasons: a lack of time to work on it, and not getting that funding. We reached a point where it became impossible to scale up the project to the proportions we wanted without an upgrade in computer hardware and without serious time devoted to administration, both of which are expensive.
Skew Collective is something I hope to reignite in the future, but until then, I’m trying to round out my skill set by learning the computer/coding aspects of the project that I initially had to delegate to Jonah. I'm sure many of the people reading this also follow me on instagram where you often see sketches of Max/MSP (music + coding) and p5.js (visual art + coding) projects that I’m working on all the time. I’m proud of what I’ve been able to make so far, proud of the work I did starting the collective, and there’s nowhere to go but up with this creative concept that means so much to me.
Coming down the pipe I have two giant blog posts that I’m looking forward to releasing. One is an exploration of the question “what does it mean to listen,” and the other is about an amazing rhythmic concept I recently learned about, along with the practice method I created that has brought my odd meter playing to a higher (and more organic) level.
I’m also hoping to sell prints of my visual art soon so keep your eyes peeled for that, and I’m hoping to use at least some of the funds I raise from those to record an album.
If you’ve made it this far, it means the world to me that you’re reading my blog! Please reach out if you have any thoughts, comments, criticisms, or anything else about this post! I will eventually add a place on this blog where you can comment beneath each post, but that’s a project for another day. Until then be well, and I hope you got something out of this!
Jake