Interview with Vinko Globokar ca.

1997

Vinko Globokar spans both the generational and geopolitical divisions of this study's

province. His parents emigrated in 1929 from Slovenia, in northern Yugoslavia, to work in a

mine in France, in which country he was born in 1934. In 1947, the family returned to Slovenia,

where he was educated in the communist school system. The Yugoslavian government sent him

to Paris to study and train to become a professor and teacher of the trombone in Ljubjana; he

managed to extend his studies and eventually gain French citizenship. His work as a musician

has had him traveling throughout Europe and the U.S. all his life, and today he lives in Berlin (as

a "guest"), retains French citizenship, and works as a teacher part of the year in Italy.

Globokar did only one recording for FMP (5, die sich nicht ertragen können [5, which could

not endure themselves], 1180), something of an anomaly for both him and it. His career as a

whole, however, makes that casual connection worth exploiting in this chapter. He has a

reputation both as a jazz/free-jazz improvising trombonist of seminal influence (especially for

trombonists) and a notable composer of new European art music (especially for the trombone).

His track record in both areas authorizes him to speak at length and in depth about the

relationship between improvisation and composition from a more conventionally formal

perspective than perhaps any of the other elders here, and about the concrete details of the

overlap between the "new" and "improvised" music scenes in Europe.

In addition to this dual citizenship in the (cultural) realms of the improviser and composer,

Globokar's history shuttling between East and West sides of the Iron Curtain positions him

likewise uniquely in the social history that gave rise to much of FMP's own musical topos.

Globokar was part of the legendary team at the Institute de Recherche et de Coordination

Acoustique/Musique IRCAM headed by Pierre Boulez in 1973.1

"Boulez got an invitation from Pompidou to start a center," he recalls. "Boulez asked four

people—Jean-Claude Risset, Luciano Berio, Gerald Bennett, and me—to be part of the group

1
. The official founding date of 1976 reported by Morgan (1991: 477, and Grove) was
preceded by the activity Globokar describes here.
that would staff this Institute. I was responsible for the instrumental-vocal department, Berio for

electronic music, Risset for computer music, and Bennett for the theoretical side.

"I would say that during the period from '73 to '76, everything was allowed in our projections

about the thrust of the Center; it was kind of a euphoric period of brainstorming. In '76 the reality

came out, which was that the building cost a lot, and was kind of a flagship model of the proud

expectations of the cultural ministry. So you have to show something, you can not only talk

about it. And this brought about problems on the aesthetical level.

"In the beginnning I was very happy, but it was all downhill from there. What I wanted to

support was not of general interest there. A seminar on improvisation was not very popular. To

invite Claudio Abbado to conduct Hindemith was more important. So in '79 I left."

We are sitting in Globokar's fifth-floor Berlin apartment on a sunny afternoon; it is elegant in

its orderly displays of fine art in every room, great books on the shelves, folk instruments from

around the world hung on one wall, his own scores and recordings shelved on another…and

plenty of light streaming through plenty of glass siting a grand view of a greenly serene inner

court.

He is ruddy, stocky, a hale 60-something, short cropped hair graying to white. We sip his

cognac and smoke his cigarillos. He answers my query about his sense of the FMP musicians

when they emerged in the late 1960s with more details about his own history.

"I started as a jazz trombonist in Yugoslavia," he says. "At that time I had no interest in

composition. As a young man, my trombone hero was Frank Rosolino, 2 because he played very

fast!" he laughs.3 "Then I came to Paris, studied at the Conservatoire and played in night clubs

2
. The late Frank Rosolino was a West Coast trombonist famous for his fluid style on the
horn. I had the privilege of studying and playing with him briefly in the 1970s.
3
. Has Globokar continued to listen to jazz much?
"Live, yes; on record, seldom."
What does he think about the relationship between European jazz and American jazz?
"I have the impression that European jazz is more diversified than American. I may be
wrong, I don't know. For instance, take the French jazz. It's a very strange mixture of jazz and a
lot of folk material coming from everywhere—from jungle, from street songs, from chansons. So
on American military bases to earn my money and so on. At the same time, I started to compose

and to play new music.

"So I had two paths into the '60s, so to speak: I knew all those composers like Berio,

Stockhausen, and Kagel, I played their music as an interpreter. I was in Stockhausen's group that

did Aus Sieben Tagen, the group that did its first performances. So I had these experiences, and I

started to improvise also; but I was already improvising in jazz, so it was much easier."

Globokar was in Berlin from 1964-68; he reports having heard the Globe Unity Orchestra at

the Berlin Philharmonie Hall in 1966. Around the same time, he started New Phonic Arts, with

saxophonist Michel Portal, percussionist Jean-Pierre Drouet, and Carlos Alsina, an Argentinian

composer who played keyboards and piano. The group specialized in free improvisation, and

played some two hundred concerts throughout Germany and France between 1969 and 1982, in

the thick of that time and place of free improvisation's flowering.

"In the 1970s, improvisation was in," he recalls. "You would approach a radio station and say

you wanted to do something; they would ask you what and you'd say you wrote a new piece.

'No!' Then, I would like to improvise. 'Yes, come!' In the '80s this kind of postmodern,

neoromantic trends came in, and improvisation was out. So it was rarer and rarer that we got

invitations, and each of us had his own life, as musicians; then it started to be impossible to have

common dates."

New Phonic Arts' brand of free improvisation came with its own aesthetic ritual.

"We did hundreds of concerts where we never spoke of what we would do beforehand," he

says. "We came on the stage and played, and afterwards never spoke about what happened.

When we were on the plane or in the restaurant, there was never a discussion about the results of

the playing. It was a kind of unspoken rule, because the character of the four people did not

allow for any type of discussion of aesthetics."

what you see in serious music, the need to integrate music from other cultures, is also present in
the French jazz."
 The group also decided they shouldn't record, after releasing two recordings in their early

years.

"In the beginning, New Phonic Arts did two recordings: one for Wergo, a German label, and

one for Deutsche Gramophon," says Globokar. "The first one we did in a studio, where we did

some improvisation and then selected from the best takes. For the second one, we proposed three

types of recording: in the hall with an audience who paid nothing to enter—and it was in Paris,

with much publicity, and it attracted about a thousand people. The next day each of us invited

some friends, so it was an audience of maybe twenty people. The third day we improvised

without any audience at all, but in front of microphones. It showed, of course, that the best

recording was in front of the big audience—but there was a mistake on the part of the technician,

so you hear a kind of basic noise on the recording, so we used the take with the smaller

audience."

Globokar's FMP recording, then, came out after fifteen years of experience in free

improvisation. He met Jost Gebers while teaching in Cologne between 1968 and 1976; Gebers

invited him to make the record, which is a multitracked free improvisation with himself on

several instruments (trombone, alphorn, zurle, didjiridu, voice) in the studio.

"As a trombone player, I avoid as much as possible the use of the trombone in my

compositions. The reason is that I know the instrument quite well, and I am afraid to use clichés,

because it's against my aesthetic," he explains. "So I've written only three pieces for trombone:

one for five trombones, one for trombone with choir and electronics, and one recently, for a

dancing trombone player. All other pieces I have written for brass were for any brass player.

"So when Jost asked me to do something, I had the choice of writing something for

trombone, which I did not want, or to improvise. And, again, to improvise, I don't like the

prepared improvisations, so that you predetermine in any way at all what you improvise. For me,

it must be totally spontaneous or totally determined. I think that the moment you start to organize

a little, the logical extension of that is complete organization.

 "So I decided to come here [Berlin], I asked him for one microphone, to record one

improvisation; he wanted twenty minutes, so I put the clock on and improvised. Then I

overdubbed another improvisation to that track, then another to those two, and so on through

five. I decided on the fifth track to try to cover whatever I didn't like about the other four. To

destroy the banalities, let's say. When it was finished, I said, 'okay, it is finished.' I did not correct

anything, and I heard the result only once. It was done. We got an ephemeral product."

Does he listen to this kind of spontaneously improvised music by others?

"Never. Because I think, really, that this music should not be put on record. Improvised

music has no reason to be on record. Of course, there are commercial reasons, or musicological

reasons—for somebody living in Australia, it is nice that he can hear the Chicago Art

Ensemble—but even then he is only getting a skeleton, because if you see the Art Ensemble live,

with all their masks and costumes, it is a spectacle; you put it on this thing, all that's gone.

"On the one hand, I think one must ask, for whom is the improvisation important? For the

player, or the audience? I think the big joy is in the people who are playing it; for those who are

listening, it's a kind of lottery, because the codes for understanding the language are ephemeral.

It's an event which happens once and will never happen any more. So, when New Phonic Arts

was asked to do a third record, we refused. For ten years we played without allowing recording.

Also not on radio.

"There was a reason for this. In the group, gradually, a lot of theatrical events on the stage,

such as comportment, started to be very important; to have only an audio recording would be to

have only a poor skeleton of the reality. The people who are present will get one hour of joy or

understanding, if you like—but this event should go in the air without leaving any trace."

This calls to mind readings from Walter Benjamin and his later German colleagues, glimpsed

in Part I, on the issue of recording new and improvised music. As with John Cage, Derek Bailey

and the FMP artists who all share a feeling of the live event as primary and the recording, for all

its various benefits, as secondary and problematic, Globokar's career does include the moniker
"recording artist"—but that history, as he described it above, is the most radical I encountered in

terms of its frequency of refusal to record, as an improviser, on principle.

"Now I still improvise—but only with someone with whom I have never played, and then

only once," he says.4 "If you do not know someone, then it's really a kind of reaction principle of

improvisation; if you improvise twice, your memory is already starting to work, in your

knowledge of the person. Then the consequence is to sit down behind a table and start to work; if

you want to go further, then you have to discuss and to work and to organize.

"Again, the moment you start to organize a little," he reiterates the point, "the logical

extension is into total organization. This is why in the '60s I did only two compositions in which

I ask the musicians to improvise, and then I started to leave the improvisation out completely, so

that you will not find in my scores any improvisation. Because I think that as a composer you

can only ask someone to improvise if you know him, if he's your friend. But if you write a score,

and you write 'in this place, improvise,' that score may go to the Tokyo Philharmonic, and this

guy whom I do not know, who perhaps never improvised, plays something! So I have really two

completely different attitudes—either total free improvisation, or I take the responsibility of the

tasks, and I write them down."

Alongside these many years as a jazz and then a post-jazz improviser, Globokar was

developing as a composer. How did that start? Who were his favorites and influences? How does

he see his work in the context of European tradition?

"When you are a beginner, you are always trying to achieve the level of something that

already exists," he says. "So at that time, in the '60s, Stockhausen was a composer I had worked

with as a musician, so he was a kind of model; or Berio—those are the two, I would say—whose

level I wanted to reach. But then, through the experience of improvisation with New Phonic Arts

in the '70s, I changed my view a little; '72, '73, I would say that I started to kill those fathers in

my unconscious. Then it was finished.

4
. A recent example of this at that time was a trio gig he'd just done with Fred Van Hove and
trombonist-composer George Lewis.
 "We are living in a situation in which it is difficult to find criteria by which to judge a work;

there is no common language, with this proliferation, explosion of different tendencies, attitudes,

etc. So I like, I would say, not a work by someone, but rather the production of someone who is a

radical, responsible person. I don't like the music of people who each year says—" he sniffs, as if

at the wind—"'Aha, we have to go there.'

"When I was in Paris Conservatoire, I started to play in the Michel Legrand big band," he

continues. "I started gradually to write arrangements for big bands. One day I decided—by then I

had finished at the Conservatoire, and had begun to play new music, etc.—and I wanted to study

harmony and counterpoint more seriously, but with the idea of writing music for theater, or big

band. I asked a friend if he knew someone who could give me lessons; he said his father had a

friend who was a very good musician, theoretician, etc., perhaps he would agree to teach me…a

composer named René Leibowitz, and he wrote books about Schönberg, Webern, and Berg, etc.

"He was the wrong person, but he did expose me to a world I had never known about,

because in Yugoslavia the modern music was Shostakovitch and Prokofiev. So I studied with

him for four years, after which I felt I'd gotten all I could get, and I met Berio and asked him if I

could work with him. He came to Berlin as a Ford Foundation Resident; I studied with him, and

that was my entrance into new music. My first work was done when I was thirty years old: Opus

1, a huge thirty-minute work on a text by the poet Maiakovsky, in three languages, with three

small orchestras and three small choirs." he laughs. "Opus 1! Boom!"

Did he like it? does he still like it?

"This question, 'still like' I would answer this way: when I compose, for me it's a very private

thing, a kind of fighting with myself, so I am never in a hurry. That means I produce something

at the very edge of the envelope of my ability. So it makes no sense to think in terms of still

liking it. It was written in '64, and it was the level I was capable of then. So it's no different than

doing my best now, the approach is the same. I'm composing a piece for twenty-six musicians

now, in fact, and it's the same problem on this end of the timespan as it is for the beginning. To

ask whether I like or not, the answer must be, 'I cannot do better.'"
 So then the question is what does one learn over time? If one always does one's best, gives

one's all to one's work, what is it one learns from piece to piece? Is there any sort of development

or evolution, or is it always the same?

"For each piece I take a different theme to reflect, so there are no two pieces built on the

same problem. Because if you are working only on the technical level of developing the musical

parameters, then you can have a behavior like Mondrian in painting, in which all his life was a

development of the same idea. But in my case it is different, because for each piece you have to

invent something new."

This reinvention of the musical cosmos with every new piece strikes me as reflective of the

"one-time rule" for free improvisation he established after playing "hundreds of concerts" with

the same three people. I wonder if it also came about after employing some other approach to

composition until it, like that group improvisation, was done to death for him.

"Usually composers structure the musical parameters, combining pitches with time, rhythm,

articulations, timbre, etc.," he explains. "The result is a form, holding all their combinations. I

would say it's a kind of musical thinking from the beginning to the end.

"In my own work, sometime in the '70s, I started to doubt the viability of that approach for

myself. I experimented so much with instruments to find new sounds—this was the aesthetic of

the '70s, 'the material'—and I noticed after a while that all this material was for me completely

gray. I would find a sound, it would interest me; the next day I shrugged it off, it was already old

news. So it was this kind of grayness in the material that provoked me to reverse the procedure.

"Now, since the '70s, all the pieces you heard have, at their first inception, something that has

nothing to do with music. By that I mean you can take any of those pieces as an example, and I

can tell you what is the idea behind it. One is about the idea of resistance, one is about

emigration, another is about any sort of psychological event between two people, and so on. This

idea, this initial concept, dictates which instruments to use. If you need a computer for the idea,

you take it; if you need a violin you take that, but you have no special love for any particular

sound or sound maker. I start to love them when I see that I need them.
 "Then also this theme your music is reflecting leads you to invent the technique of

composing most suitable to it. For me, each piece in my body of work is a kind of declaration of

my view on life. That is to say, too, that at the beginning of the work I have no sounds in mind;

the actual sound of the music comes completely on the end of this compositional procedure—the

complete opposite of improvisational procedure. I start with a lot of writing, with words, designs,

combining things for a description of problems, etc., then I do a design of the form—and the

very last step is to think about the sound."

Oh, this is so interesting—he is describing the process of a writer! (Indeed, he is an avid

reader of serious literature.) I am reminded of the literature on the bardic tradition, from Homer

on through the Yugoslavian guslars, the literature on Hildegard that likened her musico-dramas

to that same tradition, the evolution of European poetry with song, the Singspiel, the connections

between Goethe and the Romantic music and literature…closer to my own home, the blues, the

jazz and poetry mix African Americans and the Beat writers developed, Braxton's mature work

in the opera and similar formats, Borah Bergman's recent forays in that direction—and, of

course, here we certainly must mention Cecil Taylor's body of work with words, on his liner

notes, in his improvising, fed by constant and wide-ranging reading, his many declarations that

poetry is as important to him as music—and the artists we will soon meet here. Not to mention

my own work as a musician with words…

Globokar's body of work evinces a real fascination with words, and the voice, and the

connections of both with music. His account of how his music has come to depend heavily on

narrative, a dramatic impetus behind the music, leads me to ask him if it ever did touch on his

own Yugoslavian roots.

"Yes. I did two works on Yugoslavian folklore. One is Kolo, for trombone, and one is Étude

for Folklora. The tradition of the bards is poetic more than musical improvisation. It was very

interesting, for instance, during the war. The musicians called the guslars originally improvised

on texts describing the historical wars with the Turks. During the war, in '40-'45, they started to

improvise long epics about what Tito did!" he laughs.

 In terms of FMP, as we will see, it has also become very interesting how they started with a

pure musical aesthetic from a jazz or a European composition perspective, but as they've matured

and their music developed, widened to collaborations with traditional musicians: Kowald's ties

with a Mongolian singer, Japanese butoh dancers and shakuhachi players, African drummers;

Brötzmann's with Moroccan guembri players, and with a Japanese taiko drummer (details in

Chapter Seven). Globokar's version of this expansion to non-Western ethnic traditions is his turn

to his own Yugoslavian folk material.

"Because I was living there, I played in folk groups myself," he says. "As a child in France,

we had a small cultural group of Slovenian people at this mine; I was five years old, singing all

those Slovenian things in a choir.

"But something else should be said," he adds. "It's clear that a sound is without the precise

signification of a word. So this dramatic or literary speculation I employ is not something I

expect to be understood by the listener; in the end what you hear is music. But to construct it, I

need it."

He has told me that the New Phonic Arts—much like Albert Mangelsdorff's own period with

exclusively free improvisation—was a finite chapter in his history of personal and musical

growth; and that, also like Mangelsdorff, he still improvises that way regularly mostly as a

soloist. Has he then come to see improvisation as a process that tends to lead naturally to

composition? and composition as the process most appropriate to any sustained musical activity

between two or more players? It seems as if improvisation has found a little place in his overall

aesthetic…

"A very important place," he agrees. "Because when I compose I am from this European

school, which is rational, very structuralist and so on. So the improvisation is something

necessary for your health. But as a composer, I can add this: what do you get as a composer from

an improvisation, what are the useful consequences? I think it's on two levels: one is to see how

the behavior of musicians goes—how they interact, how they carry themselves."
 Aha, and hmm—he mentioned this too already in connection with New Phonic Arts, as with

the Art Ensemble of Chicago. I recall Miles Davis' interview with Dick Cavett, in which Miles

discussed the importance of comportment in the jazz tradition, the way a musician carries

himself and his instrument; and Anthony Braxton's catalogue of bodily postures and gestures,

and the way he's incorporated them into his body of work. 5 Günter Sommer, as we will see, had

his own take on this aspect in the context of his own music. It all goes to the relationship

between the discourse of performativity and the one explored here, on improvisativity. We will

return to it in Part III's analytical-theoretical musings.

"So I tried to do a kind of interrogation of these processes," he continues, "through imitation,

or following someone, or doing the opposite of what someone was doing, or developing an idea,

or to have a contradictory attitude and propose something completely different, etc. So these

categories that you can track in an improvisation, you can also use them in composition.

"The second level, I would say, is the way an improviser struggles with an instrument. Of

course, that's not a problem if you simply construct a vocabulary of personal clichés; I avoid this,

so that I never work at home on any kind of prepared structures. When I improvise, I try to go on

with what I have to do in the moment. This means that the mind is always faster than the

instrument, and that provokes different accidents, and in these accidents I think you can find

material for composition."

I found his composing to be generally sort of wild and free.

"Energetic?"

Right…

"It's not free; everything is fixed."

Right, but the feel and the sound of it is often very spontaneous and vital, like an

improvisation.

5
. See his Composition Notes for these stick-figure representations. In his opera, Shala Fears
for the Poor, his random use of these gestures and postures pointed out their power, as body
language, to signify and express independently of text or music.
 "Because I would say that if you want to reproduce chaos, improvisation is not what you

should use. The best chaos in music is that which is controlled, through the composer's

knowledge."

Can we say that his aesthetic is similar to Stravinsky's, or Boulez', that composition is only

frozen improvisation?

"No," no, we can't. "I would say the difference between improvisation and composition is

this: the first idea that you have in improvisation is the good one; the second is too late, because

the train already went. In composition, normally the first idea is not good. So you get an idea,

then you like what's behind it—it's like an onion, where you peel away the layers. And when you

go all the way through it to its end, very often it will happen that you say, 'no, it doesn't work.'

Then again, and again, until finally you find something that does work. It's a problem of time. In

improvisation you have no time to reflect, or at least a very short time; in composition you have

to have time to reflect. It is not a composition when you just play an improvisation on the piano,

then say 'oh, very nice,' and then write it down."

What about the MIDI pianos that allow one to have an instant transcription of anything

played? Would it fit in the way that he works to do an improvisation, have it all on the computer

in musical notation, then to work it from that into a composition?

"Scelsi did this, an Italian composer, now deceased," he says. "He built a kind of electronical

instrument which was able to do micro-intervals. He improvised on it, and then he had somebody

write it down for him, because he was not able to do that himself. So he had another composer

do this work for him. And these transcriptions of his improvisations were his compositions."

But that isn't how Globokar would work. He has used paths into creating a piece other than

the process of a writer already examined:

• Laboratorium, a series of pieces based on applying traditional techniques across

instrumental family lines, such as one for trombone that has the player sounding on the

inhalation as well as the exhalation of his breath, suggested by the way a bow travels both ways
across strings ("if you look into the history—not only Occidental but all other cultures—there is

no instance of a brass instrument played by inhaling," he says);

• Kolo, for a trombonist (representing the modern spirit) and choir (representing the archaic

world);6

• Hallo, Do You Hear Me? which used the recording studio as a composer's tool. ("I use

the technology generally when and as I need it. If a project shows that I need the technology, I

will take it, at its most sophisticated. But it's only a part of other things, so I would not say that I

would spend all my life behind a computer. This piece was a commission from the European

Broadcasting Union, where an orchestra was in Helsinki, a choir in a hall in Stockholm, and a

jazz quintet in Oslo; they asked me to make a piece for those three entities, I did not choose it.

Everybody played at the same time, eight in the evening, three concerts in three countries. In a

studio I was getting the three concerts, and I just manipulated the dynamics. Then there was a

chance to a recording, and I used the technology by making a click track, then overdubbing the

three concerts onto different tracks in sync.")

Also, writing. His Laboratorium : Texte zur Musik 1967-1997 (Saarbrucken: Pfau Verlag,

1998) consists of essays by and interviews with him. Some from that (in their original titles) that

most pertain here:

• Man improvisiert…bitte, improvisieren Sie!…komm, laßt uns improvisieren…

"That comes from an article I wrote when I was in IRCAM, in Paris. I was the head of the

instrumental and vocal department. I organized a big symposium on improvisation. Roscoe

Mitchell came, then some Indian musicians, then Persian musicians, Tunisian musicians, etc.—

6
. That also seemed to me something from a very European kind of consciousness, because if anything, in
America, people are less grounded in tradition and history, and are looking for that ground, rather than to just be out
there in space. This piece seemed to say that the individual must struggle to individuate himself from the great
burden of history. Does Globokar ever see any strength or direction for his future come from this archaic ground?
"No. I would say about the history that nobody fell down from the moon yesterday; we all have some kind of
historical background. But when you have to create something, the history helps you only to understand what has
come before, but that understanding is only to let you know what to avoid."
"So that tells me how you might see something like Orff's Carmina Burana—or maybe Wynton Marsalis
playing bebop?"
"Exactly."
improvisation in different cultures. I wrote about this symposium in this article. The translation:

'they are improvising, you should improvise, let's go improvise.' I tried to explain that the word

'improvisation' is like a hat in which you put a lot of ideas. What exactly does it mean? The guy

who comes home from work in the evening and noodles around on the piano just to relax, like he

reads the newspaper, that's improvisation; the Indian musician who at five years of age begins to

invent on a raga, he is also improvising; the Persian musician improvises by another set of rules.

I explain that these rules are something the improviser does not know the source, the inventor of;

you, as an American, don't know who invented the rules of the blues, that they have twelve bars

and so on; it is a kind of tradition. The raga is also a tradition. That is 'they are improvising.'

"In 'you should improvise,' I talk about people who have taken the improvisations of other

musicians, and they are selling them as a product; appropriating someone else's knowledge as

their own. They should improvise themselves, generate their own knowledge. And 'let's go

improvise' is about free improvisation."

• Das Verhältnis von Natur und Kultur als kompositorisches Problem (The Relationship

between Nature and Culture as a Compositional Problem, 1974)

"Here I am trying to explain exactly about improvisation and composition, that improvisation

has more to do with our unconscious world, and composition more with the conscious."

• Réflexions sur le compositeur et l'intrument (1980): "It deals with the importance of the

instrument in the compositional process."

• Om det individuelle eller det kollektive (On the Individual and the Collective): "I wrote a

kind of book for a course I taught, in which I put people together, students with instruments, and

try to bring them to a point at which they create something personal. Normally in schools you

have two categories of students: those who only play, performers, which means what you play is

always music created by someone else, mainly by people who are dead; and those more involved

with thinking, like composers, who play only seldom. So in this article I argued for the necessity

of each musician also to invent his own music, and not only to produce the music of others."
 What is of interest to American readers and discourse is the fact that the free jazz movement

in the '60s started in America, but then grew much more, into many different directions, in

Europe, over time. In America now it is more or less looked on as an historical cul-de-sac (as

tracked in Chapters Three and Four). What does it mean that it grew so well in Europe, in the

way that it did in so many different artists and countries?

"I would answer that from two directions," he says. "One is from the people who are from

jazz culture; the other is more from new music, or the experimental field, which is not bound to a

style or idiomatic language, like the jazz tradition is.

"In jazz, I think it was a stream, a body of information that came from the States and was

taken over by the musicians here. But it goes back to the sociological and political situation of

the '60s, when it started. The demonstrations in Berkeley, and in Paris in May of '68, showed you

the nature of the resistance to the power, the wish for individual voices to be heard. For me, the

music in general, in history, is always a kind of parallel to the social and historical events, a

poetical reflection of what happens in the population. This is only natural. Why was there no

free-jazz movement in Russia at the time?

"And in Europe, in the compositional field, you had the element of chance, which also came

from America, from John Cage. It's not improvisation, but let's say it's a process of

deconstruction of things. Then the aleatorical techniques, where the composer still writes out

certain elements, but the ways of handling them in performance are left to the musicians. Then

the graphical devices that began to appear, through Ligeti and others, in notation in the '60s; then

the music consisting only of verbal instructions, such as Stockhausen's Aus Sieben Tagen. New

Phonic Arts, for example, comprised musicians who were playing all this other music, from this

culture of ours, until one day we decided that we no longer needed a composer.

"I notice a big lull around the end of the '70s and throughout the '80s," Globokar recalls. "It

[improvisation] did not continue so much. But now it comes back, and I jokingly call it the neo-

improvisation. We have had neo-romantic, neo-etc., and now it's neo-improvisation. Because the

behavior and the way the groups are working now is very similar to the way it was in the '60s."
 As a composer, Globokar's work addresses many of the same issues of musical process's

relationship to the physical body and the instruments as do the FMP improvisers. What does he

think about the late twentieth-century European culture, from the point of view of a composer

who is contributing to it? If I, as an American, talked about culture in America, I would say that

it's a funny situation now with jazz-as-classical music. How would he talk about the

corresponding situation in Europe?

"I would say that in the '60s there was an explosion of language," he answers. "Before the

'60s you still had a kind of spine, a common spine, to which you could refer. This was serial

music. Then it exploded into so many different directions. So in the '60s I expressed myself with

the word 'we,' because I was part of groups, we had projects, etc.

"Thirty years later I express my identity only with the word 'I.' Who is then the person who

uses the word 'we?' These are only groups who want to defend and promote something

commercially. So you have groups dedicated to schools of composing, such as 'the new

simplicity,' 'the new complexity,' 'the neo-romantics.' They are groups proposing something, but

they are not projects with utopian character. They are projects with an agenda to say, 'this is the

truth.' This phenomenon holds no interest for me. If you look into each country you see some

people composing, researching something on their own, not monumental, but experimental

things.

"And this gap between those people and the big concert institutions, always presenting the

same few names, is deeper and deeper. What happens in the institutions that are propagating the

different 'schools' has nothing to do with invention. The invention still exists—it would be false

to say that nothing is happening any more today—but to find it is an effort, because it isn't on the

big posters. It is only with a small group of people that you can hope to be inventive, not with a

mass. And you can also present this invention only in small situations."

He's seen a lot of both worlds, of West and East, and the Communist collapse, and the spread

of American capitalism into the culture here. Does he see himself in a good situation to be

protected from both dangers?

 "I do not see myself protected," he says. "I feel that I can do what I want. I will tell you

something that is perhaps the most important thing in our conversation here. We are living in a

world where specialization is rampant; this one is an expert on this, that one an expert on that—

and we are living in a world where everyone is categorized. Brötzmann? Free jazz—an

automatic reflex; everyone has his category. I think that a person like Leonardo da Vinci would

be considered mad today, because he was painting, he was writing poems, he was developing

weapons, planning a flying machine, etc. I think that art, today, is perhaps the only field where

multiple activities are possible.

"This, for me, is why I have tried, at least inside the field of music, to do all the activities—to

compose, to improvise, to play, to conduct, to write, etc. So when I play an instrument, the

experiences of the composer are involved in it; when I'm conducting, it's helpful to know what it

means to play an instrument. So the more activities you do, the more secure you are."

What is his experience over the course of his life as a professional, working musician,

especially trying to be a composer who makes social statements? How does he see the

relationship of his work to this historical situation going on around him?

"First of all, I am a person whose identity doesn't really come from something like

nationality," he says. "There are musicians who are flags for their country; I am not a flag. I was

living eight years in Yugoslavia, here now for thirteen years, born in France, came back and

lived there for thirty, thirty-five years, then I was in the States quite a lot—and I have also been

in Italy, because for the last fifteen years I have been teaching in Italy every month for five days.

"So if you ask me what I am, I can only respond that I am communicating only with

individuals in my work; I never sit and drink a coffee with a nation. What kind of a larger impact

I might have with my work, then, is a mystery. All you can do as a composer, I think, is to be as

serious as possible behind the desk, and when you finish the work, you say 'here it is.' If it's

okay, it's okay; if it's not okay, it's the same. Because you can't do anything more with it after it's

done.
 "Then there's another thing. Today the role of the media is very important. So between what I

invent from my head and your ear, here comes a secondary external discourse which comments

on my activity. And very often the discourse is more important than the work. So you have a lot

of people who have a good opinion of me, or a bad opinion of me, who have never heard my

piece."

The pieces he has made about general issues, then, have a personal stake behind them? For

example, was the piece about emigration about his parents' experience?

"Yes, and my own."

And the Balkan situation, obviously very close to him?

"Right."

The Berlin situation with the Wall up and then down, and the problems of Reunification:

have they been of any visceral personal interest to him?

"No, not so much. I lived here four years, between '64 and '68, studying. But at the time I was

more involved with music; the political situation did not interest me so much. I was still an

aesthetician," he laughs.