Uncommon Measure: A Journey Through Music, Performance, and the Science of Time

by Natalie Hodges

This is because the temporal structures of improvised music differ from the current of time that constitutes composed, prepracticed pieces, where you always have to be thinking downstream, remembering ahead, in a sense. Instead, improvisation is like going over a waterfall again and again; there’s a void opening up before every moment, and you plunge over the edge and yet somehow never fall, never reach the other side, even as you hurl yourself over again and again; and when you look back you’ve created a river, the very current you’ve been sailing down. Like the particles that instantaneously sync their polarities, to improvise with someone else is to pinpoint a moment of intersection in time, between past and future, you and me—to seize life and hold it still. Each moment melts like an individual snowflake and yet is replaced, simultaneously, by another which is wholly different and equally beautiful, so that you inhabit a present that is continuous and yet made up of individual moments falling and faintly falling, the drifted accumulation of the past.* To improvise is to reiterate the momentary again and again, but also to affirm its part in the completeness of things, the continuity of time.