The Performer's Perspective: Bernardes "Overriding Actuality"

Overriding Actuality: Some Thoughts about Improvisations

Gilberto Bernardes


Leonard B. Meyer, a distinguished authority in music theory presents us, in the chapter “The End of Renaissance?” of his book Music Art and Ideas (1967), an impressive analysis of a period of around 500 years, where according to the author there was always, in all the inter-human latency, something new to discover. By the time Meyer claimed that we completed this global historic process and that we would face an emergent period in music with the coexistence, during the same historical moment, of a huge variety of aesthetic directions and a plurality of styles.

If we don’t consider exclusively the study of the erudite western music tradition, then modernity, this huge vast field where we move, presents such a diversity of music practices and styles as well as scholarship directions, and critic approaches, thus proving the Meyer assumption concisely. The audience, this vague concept more and more difficult to define in its singular form, has suffered a tribalization phenomenon, which is parallel to the multiplication of music practices. Several life styles have also risen in relation to this fact. There are a number of different communities sharing ideologies, a phenomenon that is most clearly visible by their exterior symbols like ways of dressing, hairy styles. This also applies to the music that they consume.

In the continuation of the erudite music traditions, which in western societies is generally referred to as classical music by the whole social, the tribalization phenomenon is equally present, even if it seems less evident. In the erudite music traditions devotions to specific aesthetic orientations are maybe even more radical than in the social areas mentioned above. It is these radical devotions that have led the erudite contemporary music field to be described as a wild archipelago in which 600 tendencies fight by their primacy.

In my daily work as a creative artist (mainly as a performer of contemporary music and improviser) I intensively reflect on these sort of ideas. In order to establish some vision of the future, or at least to my future, I feel a tremendous necessity of rethinking the agents in play, all that has been my scholarship learning path, the vision of the world that was inherent to it and the doxas that are always present and incomprehensible to me.

For some years, improvisation in its non-idiomatic form, mainly coming from free jazz and what’s called free improvisation (from the late-1950s on) had a great influence on me. It was the beginning of an interest in this area that led me to embrace the subject as a way to understand and to put in practice my creative needs. Also, it was an essential medium to understand the world where I live, since I found music to be one of the most privileged places to think about reality.

So for this article, I will trace a vision that I have been constructing for some time and that presents some of the core commitments of my musical approach, focusing on a particular practice – improvisation.

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