Inventing the Iceberg: Exploring Derek Bailey’s Dichotomic Taxonomy

Abstract

During a forty-year career as a leading figure of European Improvised Music, Derek Bailey often emphasised the somatic, playing-based nature of his engagement with musical improvisation. He repeatedly avoided discussion of the philosophical, political or aesthetic implications of improvised music praxis by invoking the intangible emic intimacy of the link between player and instrument (and other ‘players’), while contrasting this with the ethnocentric apologia of etic improvisation commentators and ‘demonstrators’. Bailey also bemoaned a lack of investigation of what improvising musicians actually do, suggesting that the wide-ranging discussion of improvisation aesthetics within academic discourse had effectively displaced analytical technical examination of the actual substance of improvised music performance and its modes of realisation, a process of apparently irresistible subject expansion he described as ‘inventing the iceberg’. If Bailey’s ideas have (or had) validity, what consequences might player/demonstrator differentiation have for the oft-posited inclusiveness of improvised music practice? And how might Improvisation Studies need to be re-aligned in order to address more effectively such practical aspects of improvised ‘musicking’? Does an emic rejection of ‘public discursive abstraction’ (Scott) and the avoidance of the ‘sclerotic tendency’ (Bailey) facilitate or mitigate inclusion within improvised music? This study makes use of unprecedented access to Bailey’s archive of unpublished writings and correspondence, along with a range of musician interviews and the author’s personal experience as an improvising musician. It reflects upon what developments there have been in improvisation studies in the 13 years since Bailey’s death, and to what extent the situation he describes may have changed. The author investigates the unease or distrust with which a proportion of practising improvisors (those whom Bailey describes as ‘players’) view the activity of the theorists and critical commentators who discuss what they do, and considers Bailey’s positing of the improvising ‘demonstrator’.

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