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An exploration of collaborative contemporary improvisation

This is an example of a sustained research collaboration sharing new insights on collaborative contemporary improvisation. Performing on piano, the researcher has collaborated with Anto Pett and other colleagues to develop shared repertoires and processes that permit extended creative improvisation in a contemporary ‘classical’ ensemble.

Shorr’s continuously developing work in this area is represented here in a portfolio of four improvised ensemble performances, documented on video: an improvised duo with Pett at the Conservatoire Piano Festival in 2011 (10’37”); an improvised trio with Pett and Alistair MacDonald (live electronics; researcher in this submission) at the Conservatoire Piano Festival 2013 (7’50”); an improvised quartet with Pett, MacDonald and Anna-Lis Poll (voice), also at the Piano Festival 2013 (9’46”); and finally, a sequence of improvisations by a large ensemble comprising of the researcher, with Pett, MacDonald, Poll and Kanno (violin; researcher in this submission) at the Edinburgh Festival (August 2013) as part of the Conservatoire’s Oxygen collaboration with the University of Edinburgh.

Shorr’s work with Pett and others involves the development of shared understandings of responsibility in improvised ensemble performance, and how such responsibilities are established and negotiated in a given improvisation to allow a dynamic interplay of the collaborators’ musical personalities.

As Head of Keyboard and Collaborative Piano at the Royal Conservatoire, Shorr has introduced improvisation as a core element of all piano students’ training; his work in this area has also resonated in the interdisciplinary Innovative Conservatoire (ICON) group, where he has worked with theatre and dance practitioners. Those wider interdisciplinary ambitions for this work are reflected in his commissioning filmmakers and in forthcoming work focussed around Shakespeare’s Sonnets.