Composer Roscoe Mitchell holds cards with his notation that can be shuffled and reordered to generate new musical material. He sometimes provides the cards to help inexperienced improvisers. Photo by Wendy Nelson
“Why won’t big American orchestras improvise?” writes Seth Colter Walls in Tuesday’s (8/25) New York Times. “Improvisation has largely been left to the very occasional special guest, like the pianist Aaron Diehl, who … sometimes improvises during a Gershwin concerto. In their orchestral works, [composers George Lewis, Anthony Braxton, and Roscoe Mitchell] sometimes ask the musicians to improvise, too. The improvising composer-performers Henry Threadgill and Anthony Davis have [won] the Pulitzer Prize for music…. The trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith was a finalist for the Pulitzer in 2013…. All six of these composers have written large-ensemble or orchestral music, most of which has rarely if ever been played by major American orchestras…. All of these musicians are Black. Beginning to program their orchestral music … would be one way to address larger patterns of racial exclusion in classical music. The American Composers Orchestra … has performed works by Mr. Threadgill and Mr. Lewis … [The BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra] has also performed work by Mr. Mitchell, Mr. Braxton and Mr. Lewis…. The Spektral Quartet’s new double album, ‘Experiments in Living,’ juxtaposes works from the Germanic canon with … the fully improvised ‘Spinals,’ which the group conceived with the improvising vocalist Charmaine Lee.”
