In this series (Why Improvisation?), I am interested in the *feeling* of improvisation as an everyday activity, experienced by those doing it. My interviewees are not necessarily motivated by career ambition. Many are committed to, or simply have to, economically sustain themselves through other means, and are often explicitly critical of the effects of economic and institutional pressures on expressive activity.
These interviews are recorded on my phone, with very minimal editing for clarity. They take place mostly in and around the Open Improvisation Lab, and other creative music series I help curate in Pittsburgh with Pittsburgh Sound Preserve. Open Improvisation Lab is a free jazz / free improvisation jam session open to anyone to participate in, regardless of skill level, medium/instrument, or artistic background.
I ask interviewees to briefly (~ 3-7 min) answer the following questions:
Why Improvisation?
Why is it a part of your practice?
What does it mean to you?
How does it make you feel?
Why Improvisation [003] w/ Nick Fagnilli
Nick Fagnilli is a Pittsburgh based human who composes, teaches a wide age range of humans, and performs/improvises.
IG: @fagnillious
Website: fagnilliousmusic.com
Nick Fagnilli has been an inspiring human to be around here in Pittsburgh. I remember first seeing Nick out at the Government Center at shows that Patrick Briener and I were curating that would become the Tough Pill series (now curated with Adam Kantz). Nick is someone who embodies a radically decentralized ethic in music creation and music education. As he’s been a regular at Open Improvisation Lab and other creative music series around town, we’ve connected on a shared love for Zen Buddhist and Taoist philosophy and practice as a part of bigger toolkits to grapple with the underlying assumptions that underpin cultural production in socioeconomic situations characterized by formalized social dominance hierarchies (our current capitalist predicament, European feudalism, etc.). We regularly talk about new possibilities for music education and cultural and community organizing.
I’ve talked to Nick about potentially writing something longer for the Culture as Care Journal. Nick sent me an audio file of his response to my Why Improvisation? prompt that expands on some of the ideas that we’ve talked about him writing on. So, this is a longer, modular piece, “Why Improvisation? [plus]…”. The response Nick sent me feels like an extension of our regular, ongoing conversation that we have, and that we are both having with others. I first listened to the audio file in my car the day Nick sent it to me, while I was on a bond fund restitution run; Nick recorded and sent it over during a gap in his music lesson teaching schedule on June 25th, 2024.
Because of the length, I’ve added headings to help navigate the topics and perspectives Nick Expresses. I’ve also added emphasis in places that Nick vocalizes emphasis in the recording:
Nick Fagnilli:
Why improvisation? Why is it a part of what I do? What does it mean to me? How does it make me feel? I feel inclined to start at the beginning.
[Early Experience]
Um, I learned how to improvise over jazz songs when I was a teenager in high school. And, I heard a lot about the, the vague differences and similarities between improvising and composing.
I came to believe that improvising is composing very quickly and composing is improvising very slowly. So from the very beginning of my practice as a composer and a player who could stand on his own two feet, I felt that it was very necessary to improvise in order to make music in a functional way.
[John Cage: What he got right and what he didn’t]
I was also very influenced by a particular clip of John Cage speaking in which he says, “When I listen to music, I get the sense that somebody is talking to me. But when I listen to sound, such as the traffic on the street, I don’t get that sense. I hear sound behaving by itself, and I’m perfectly content with that. I don’t need sound to pretend that it is something else.”
And, I suppose that started me down a rabbit hole, uh, where eventually I uncovered, you know, what John Cage got right, and what he didn’t get right—from a philosophical standpoint, what, what stands up about his philosophy and what doesn’t stand up.
Um, and so over time, as I uncovered those things. I began to prefer a kind of improvisation that sort of approaches being a sound that simply behaves. Uh, to try not to communicate, you know, maybe some intentional idea, uh, through the sound, but just to behave as a sound in an environment of sounds.
[Experience at Open Improvisation Lab]
I have to say that since we’ve begun the Open Improvisation Lab, all of the things that you [the session organizers] wrote in the community agreements… are, are now very deeply held convictions that I have about improvisation.
I’ve come to believe through the practice that we have done, that improvisation is a kind of community care and that it is distinctly a different, and more connected feeling than reproducing a piece of music that has already been written. I think that no matter what the size of the group, I think even if we did improvisations with six, seven, ten people, we would still be able to get this, this result: of a lack of intentionality becoming a very deep kind of intentionality, and allowing the behavior of a sound or a group of sounds to tell us a story.
[Experience at Open Improvisation Lab, cont. — beyond John Cage]
So what I mean by all that is to connect to what I said earlier about Cage, and connecting that to what I do now.
I want to improvise in such a way that supplants my preconceptions. Or my personal ideas, but I’m doing that for the purpose of allowing the behavior of sound to tell me something. To tell me a story. So, in that way, I’m kind of rejecting Cage’s proposition that there’s either, you know, sound that is defined by a fixed idea or narrative, versus sound that just is.
I too am fine with the sound that just is. I love that very much and I teach my students to really try and listen to sound musically and that just by deciding to listen to sounds as if it is music, we are then making music without even making our own sounds or intervening in the sounds that we’re hearing at all.
Uh, so that means, on one level, yes, I’m accepting the behavior of sound as it is, but I’m allowing that activity of sound to become, uh, an emotional journey for myself, a kind of, I don’t want to say narrative. I want to say, you know, its own kind of journey or event.
[Open Improvisation Lab, Teaching, and a Reorientation of “Full Body Listening”]
Uh, so in the present day, I have tried to take what I’ve learned doing at Open Improvisation Lab, and I take that to my students, to the children that I teach in a classroom setting, in a Montessori school. And, I hope in my music education masters to expand upon the benefits of adapting and teaching this concept to young students.
And what I hope, what I believe it does—I know Montessori kids are not a great sample size—but what I hope it does is bring a definitive confrontation to the idea of whole body listening. And—I think I’ve said this to you [eli] before—the impression that I got when I was told about this idea as a child, and the impression that some of my students got, not all of them, the majority of them, is that your body is doing all kinds of things, and now you have to listen and you have to check with your body, and make sure your limbs aren’t moving and put your eyes in a place and do all these things so that now your body is in a state of listening.
But if all of those things that Cage said, all the things that we do in the improv lab, and if the content of Pauline Olivaros sonic meditations are true, then I firmly believe that the body is always in a state of listening. The body is always taking in information and processing it. And you can kind of, you know—maybe, maybe this is not, uh, medically sound—but you, you can equate the other senses right to a kind of listening this way.
If I’m defining listening as taking information from the outside world and interpreting and processing it, then all of the senses do that, right? So the whole body is listening. And, I also say that because sound does not just take a path directly into our ear holes; sound hits our body from head to toe.
And so what I say to the children is that the body is always listening. And if you focus on the ability to listen that’s already there, then the body calms itself. Or at least it can, right?
[The Autonomic Nervous System and Full Body Listening]
I, I need to look more into the research on this, but I cited a couple things for my, um, for my master’s [entrance application] essay. And, I’ll just read the, I’ll just read the, the abstracts, uh, for two of these papers in particular:
“Music attenuated a decrease in parasympathetic nervous system activity after exercise.” So I’ll pull a little bit from the abstract here:
“Music and exercise can both affect autonomic nervous system activity. However, the effects of the combination of music and exercise and autonomic activity are poorly understood. Additionally, it remains unknown whether music affects post exercise orthostatic tolerance.” [Nick says] Now I don’t know what that means, so. Uh, “we evaluated autonomic nervous system activity before and after each session of exercise using frequency analysis of heart rate variability. High frequency power. An index of parasympathetic nervous system activity was significantly increased in the music session.
So, combining music and exercise increased, it looks like, heart rate and other things like that, heart rate variability. And what was the word they used? Orthostatic tolerance.
Additionally, both music and exercise did not significantly affect heart rate, systolic blood pressure, or also heart rate variability indices in the orthostatic test. These data suggest that music increased parasympathetic activity and attenuated the exercise induced decrease. in parasympathetic activity without altering the orthostatic tolerance after exercise. Therefore, music may be an effective approach for improving post exercise parasympathetic reactivation, resulting in a faster recovery and a reduction in cardiac stress after exercise.
Hmm. So, what do you think? I, I kind of take this to mean both things, you know, music can calm the body and sometimes it doesn’t calm the body. This other paper I looked at: “Active and passive rhythmic music therapy interventions differentially modulate sympathetic autonomic nervous system activity.”…
“Dysregulation of the autonomic nervous system. And the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal…” Oh god. “Dysregulation of the autonomic nervous system, and this stuff in the brain, has been implicated in psychiatric disorders. Music therapy has been shown to modulate heart rate variability and salivary stress markers, physiological markers of the ANS and HPA axes. Given the prominent role of arousal and stress physiology in many psychiatric disorders, music therapy has the potential to provide therapeutic benefits in psychiatry.”
[Therapeutic Benefits of Improvisation in a Music Education Setting]
And this is—I’m going to stop right there, because what I’m hoping to do is take this improvisatory practice and articulate properly the therapeutic benefits of, you know, as opposed to a situation where you’re, you’re, you’re in a—let’s say, I’m a, just, just for an example, let’s say I’m a high school band director.
And sure, you’re a school band director, of course you have to do pieces, you have to give them exercises and stuff, but, but, you know, what would be the benefit of composing together? And then also as part of that practice, improvising together, right? So, I would have a big argument with my high school band director about this, because I used to say, you know—he, he studied with Jack Stamp at IUP.
He, he could, he could compose, you know. He wasn’t a slouch. And, so I said, Dr. Rosano, why don’t we play your pieces? You know, I’m sure they’re better than a lot of the pieces we’ve done. And he said, because it’s not about me. It’s about you guys, which, fine.
You know but what if, what if he had composed with us? What if, what if he had, you know, pulled on our ideas and, and suggestions for a piece of music and, and done it that way. And that’s, that’s what I do with the elementary kids. I try to give them a pre-made product as little as possible. So if they’re not actively improvising something, they are seeing me improvise, putting together a final product, a final performance.
So, I want to illustrate to them through, you know, both creative exercises and through constructing arrangements and things more or less on the fly, that the elements of music are within their control. And, that anybody can write music. And indeed, I believe it may be the most human thing that one can possibly do is make music, make their own music.
And I was telling, uh, my, my friend’s cousin—I teach him piano and it’s at their grandmother’s house. So I was telling the grandmother one day about this, and she really, she looked at me and goes, “Is that possible? Can you teach everybody to compose?” And I, the, my response was the most emphatic, “yes, yes, you can.”
Everybody can improvise music, make music. Everybody should improvise music and make music. It is an infinite resource. As you [eli] say, it’s an infinite resource. And, and our, our human creativity as a concept can be an infinite resource if we allow it to be.
[Why am I doing this?]
Now, I’m not somebody. Who, uh, gets burnt out, by the way, by engaging with music every single day. I know, I know many, many, many musicians who find they need some other facet of their life so that they don’t completely burn out on the music. But I have been, you know, weathering that and surviving that by finding different angles through which to interact with music. Because when I’m not interacting with music, oh man, I go, I go insane. I want to die. It’s awful. I, I need to be thinking about it, interacting with it all the time, or else I go crazy.
And, that’s what I learned in my, in therapy when I was in my undergrad, because I was going in, I was, I was really wracking my mind. “Why am I doing this? I’m putting dots on paper. I, I can’t conceive of myself writing music that people care about.”
So why am I doing this? What’s going on? Why do I care? And, why am I willing to do this despite what’s probably going to be a lack of reward long term in my life? And, what I landed on ultimately after a couple years was that I do this to keep my head on straight. That the feeling of understanding the world, the feeling of sanity that I get when I make music make sense, is uh, the most amazing reward I could possibly ask for. And anything that I get—recognition, a commission, anything like that shit—[it’s] icing on the cake. Icing on the fucking cake.
[There is an Ineffable Quality of Making Music, Accessible at Any Skill Level]
Um, so, I guess I’ve already covered, you know, how does it make me feel, you know, just by saying that. Uh, and so, it means to me that there is this ineffable quality of making music that you can access at any skill level.
Again, that’s one of the things that you [the session organizers] emphasize at Open Improvisation Lab. And, uh, It’s, it’s something that took me many, many sessions to accept, to wrap my head around.
Um, because obviously we’ve had a couple of sessions where somebody comes in and they’re just not, they’re just not understanding how open, the open improvisation is, right?
I remember—I remember one session back at the gallery at Atithi where I was paired up with these two other cats, and they had no idea what was happening. They, you know, the guy just played some simple changes on the guitar. The other one played the tambourine. And I enjoyed myself, but really — I — No, you know what, that’s a lie.
I didn’t enjoy myself in that session. Because they were, you know, they were given that floor that was so wide open. And they went in there and set up a fence about two square feet long. And, just sat inside that fence.
You know, um, but after that, you know, I, I kind of had to get out of the, the, the building and really sit there and, and process my, my dissatisfaction, my, what was bordering on anger, uh, that, you know, this is the, this is an opportunity to make any kind of sound we want.
Why would they go out there and just do the, the, the squarest thing they could possibly do? Um, and you know, I knew logically that that was not the mindset that you [the session organizers] wanted to engender at the sessions, and that even that should be acceptable. But, that didn’t change my sort of disregulation, dissatisfaction from that experience.
[Prescriptive Music Theory as Expressively Limiting form of Domination]
Um, and, and what I, what I, I think—what I walked away from that with was, that these two musicians were at, uh, a certain level of understanding that I consider to be a point in a musician’s development that’s going to make or break them. Where they understand how most music works, uh, but then they think those are the rules all the time, if that makes any sense.
Like, if I had taken two semesters of music theory and said to myself, okay, in taking my music theory courses, I have now learned how to compose music, and when the music doesn’t follow these rules now, I freeze up, I don’t know what to do. Which is the thing that made me the most angry, uh, out of any, in all of my musical experiences.
When I come across people who, who believe that—it’s not a hot take, I’m, I’m sure everybody in our circle believes this about music theory, it’s not a hot take anymore. That, you know, if somebody believes that music theory, music theory is… is prescriptive rather than descriptive.Uh, and, and, and thinks that the, that these classes that we get, that explain, you know, primarily music up to Schubert, right? Um, people just get the impression that that’s how music works, because that’s how hard it’s taught to them. That’s how hard it’s, it’s hammered into their brains.
And it just makes me so mad because it’s the reason, it is the reason I’m, I, I, I don’t—don’t want to hear anything about, you know, an audience with a capital “A” is going to relate to, et cetera, et cetera. The reason music theory is taught so hard—and that directly leads to people thinking that, things that don’t follow a certain historical common practice, is not music; or is not good music.
Um, I don’t need to waste any time getting upset about that. I can—I’m about to—you know, because we’re, we’re finding an antidote to that. This is what I’m saying, is that we’re, we’re doing something that is based in the practice, in the practice that, that begins, I believe from the basic behaviors of sound. That’s what I think music theory should be. I think we should be teaching people how sound works in terms of sound being vibration, in terms of having attack, decay, sustain, release, in terms of timbre, harmonic series, the texture of a sound, and the sensory information that the body processes from a sound.
And the, the, the information mentally, that we can interpret from a sound. It can do almost anything to our body, sound. I really, I really think that. And I, and so, that to me is a theory of how music works that unifies so many things. That unifies teaching music, it unifies performing music, it unifies composing music, it unifies music therapy.
And it even, it even acknowledges sound healing. In a way, I think, I think at the very least there needs to be some kind of reckoning between music therapy and sound healing. These sound healing people have way more interesting tools that they’re using for bullshit reasons, but they have more interesting tools.
I think music therapy needs to do legitimate, uh, some, some legitimate examinations of, of things like those, those vibration tables, uh, and, and how—you know, actually, physically, the vibrations of sound can affect our body’s nervous system and our mental state. Because I just don’t see enough of that being discussed in actual music therapy.
I really think that music therapy has to, has to let in, to some capacity this kind of sound therapy, this kind of sound healing. Because they’re onto something. They don’t know what they’re onto, but they’re onto something. I fucking guarantee it.
Alright, I felt the need to stop right there. Um, yeah, I think that really sums it up. This practice of improvisation means to me a new theory of music that originates from the basic behaviors of sound. And so how can we manipulate the basic behaviors of sound and then turn that into music? That to me should be music theory.
Uh, and the first way to do that is just to improvise. Is just to make a random choice and go with it until something makes sense. That’s my first step in composing. That’s my first step in improvisation. Well, maybe, first step in improvisation might be to react to somebody else’s sound, right? But it’s one and the same.
