User:EstherMariePauw/Africa Open Improvising

Africa Open Improvising is a South African music collective that explores the capacities of free improvisational music to impact on musicians, audiences and sonic atmospheres of a university campus. Affiliated with Stellenbosch University’s Africa Open Institute for Music, Research and Innovation, the collective is known for its unique blend of free improvisational music that fosters collaboration among artists from diverse traditions and disciplines, driving innovation in both musical performance and interdisciplinary research.

Africa Open Improvising emerged in March 2020, adapted its activities during the Covid-19 pandemic and explored various inter-disciplinary research and creative projects.

Ethos

The collective's emphasis on free improvisational music invites postures of listening and interplay that encourage music-making from diverse musical origins, on a diversity of music instruments, as played by musicians who are self-taught artists, classical, jazz, experimental musicians, and more. The group's ethos centers on inclusivity, welcoming anyone to join sessions, with a resulting emphasis on sonic curiosity, listening, experimentation and community-building. These aspects of sonic openness foster inter-relational energies focusing on collaborative and fluid musical exchanges. The collective maintains an open audience policy, allowing for walk-ins and interdisciplinary collaboration with visual artists, dancers and researchers.

History

Africa Open Improvising was initiated in March 2020 by improvisers Garth Erasmus (playing indigenous and self-made instruments like the ghorrah and mcinci and saxophone), Esther Marie Pauw (on flutes) and Pierre-Henri Wicomb (playing prepared piano). The collective's musicians through have also included Jacques van Zyl (neural nets electronic noise music), John Pringle (percussion), Carina Venter (cello), Lize Briel (flutes), Cara Stacey (bows), Antoinette Theron (voice), Juliana Venter (voice), Likhona Tokota (tuba), Mo Laudi (synthesiser) and Peter Baxter and Melanie Hufkie of the AMM All-Stars improvising collective (London), and more players.

During the COVID-19 lockdown, the collective adapted to online and hybrid performance formats, allowing musicians to connect across national and international boundaries. This shift provided opportunities to engage with digital technologies as creative tools, and as a research endeavour, resulting in the group's discovery of (what they called) 'Zoom-curated music'. For Zoom-curated music, musicians used the 2020 edition of Zoom as a meeting site whilst acknowledging that time lagging and preference of one audio channel over the other in multiple simultaneous audio channels settings would occur. In individual home settings, players could therefore respond to fragments of Zoom-related sound, during simultaneous play session. Individuals used recording equipment at home to record their own music making that responded to the remnants of music that Zoom relayed. Thereafter, tracks were collated, and players found that Zoom had seemingly acted as an independent creative force that produced music outside of immediate experience, so that online play had produced complete, whole compositions in the ether(net) of the whole. The collective’s SoundCloud site notes ‘Online Play’ tracks that were produced in this way by Zoom as an external curator.

Dissemination of music

The improvised recordings by the collective are disseminated through platforms like SoundCloud and the Internet Archive, attesting to the democracy and availability of their work. Their recordings are also available for further open source editing, manipulation and sampling, without copyright policies that bar sharing of creative sources. Audio recordings and written reports are archived by the Africa Open Institute for Music, Research and Innovation for future access and research.

Projects

The activities of the collective include regular improvisation sessions and some public performances at the Africa Open Institute and on events organised by the Sonic Experimentation Network of South Africa (SENSA) . At the end of the Covid-19 pandemic, a public concert at Pieter Okkers House in Stellenbosch resulted in a published article with film and audio online .

In 2023 one of their collaborations was with the London-based collective AMM-All Stars, a meeting facilitated by filmmaker Aryan Kaganof. This partnership, highlighted by a joint performance and recorded improvisation, which was filmed by Kaganof as Slave Bell Quintet, available online , Subsequent xenochrony of shared tracks were radio-broadcasted by Ben Watson (music writer) in London, underscoring the collective’s openness to adaptation, open source sharing and international collaboration. Xenochrony (pioneered by Frank Zappa was first introduced to the collective by Peter Baxter and implemented by Ben Watson for broadcasting on Watson's two programmes on London radio stations, Soho Radio and Resonance FM.

In 2024, the collective engaged in a series of music improvisations with a NAO-6 humanoid robot, in a programme towards increasing cultural diversity in AI-humanoid interactions in African contexts, as initiated by the Goethe Institute. The collective's use of a humanoid robot in improvisation reflects its commitment to interdisciplinary exploration and innovation in music-making.

Interdisciplinary group work

The Africa Open Improvising collective fosters transdisciplinary research and creative outputs through making music that intersects as a physical sonic phenomena (considering physics), through reflecting on practices (philosophy, ethnography), as creative endeavours (in sonic installations) through sciences that include mathematics (through improvising with mathematicians such as Zurab Janelidze who specialise in Gestalt psychology as applied to research in mathematics ). The collective's current work is enabled through technological innovations (such as improvising in a joint project between humans and humanoid robots) and through inter-arts collaboration with visual artists and dancers.

Legacy and influence

The Africa Open Improvising collective serves as a research and innovative creative collective to welcome fluidity of music genres and types of music-making on an African campus where undergraduate music education has, in the past, focused largely on classical Western music training which, in performance, has relied extensively on score-reading to enable performance. Although jazz studies and indigenous genres and styles of music-making are becoming acknowledged fields of study on the Stellenbosch campus, the essence of creating through fine-tuning the ear, through improvised musician interaction and through exploring the sonic capacities of the music instrument within and outside of its vocal origins is highlighted in the research and creations of Africa Open Improvising. The collective's focus on creative installation-making through individual acknowledgment in groupwork contributes to affect the research projects (in particular) as well as the atmosphere (in general) of a university campus that strives to transform away from the mass-group militarisation of student behaviour, and to move away from standardising set behaviour by students, and, instead, encourage creativity, respect, listening postures, and quiet celebrations of those aspects of cultural sensing that may be deemed marginal.

In summary, the collective's audio tracks shared online constitute material artistic creation, whilst the collective's methodological approach of openness portray balances of individual and social audio practices. In addition, the collective's interdisciplinary research projects demonstrate curiosity and commitment to impact on research environments through innovation. These three aspects, together, serve to influence the sonic atmospheres of the Stellenbosch University campus in positive ways.