 |
| Randall Snyder. Credit: Daily Nebraskan |
I came across Randy Snyder in a rather unusual way. Using my subscription to Newspapers.com, I spent much of my spare time in 2016 searching for mentions of phrases like "improvised music", "improvisation ensemble", "ensemble improvisation", "music improvisation", and so forth. This search has, to date, borne much fruit, as longtime readers of this blog will attest.
With the phrase "improvisation ensemble", I struck a vein. In Lincoln, Nebraska, there was for several years a group called the Lincoln Improvisation Ensemble, under the direction of Randall Snyder. A Google search for "Lincoln Improvisation Ensemble" turned up a few curiosities, including an LP on Discogs, the liner notes of which mention the LIE:
 |
| From Bob Reigle with Surrealestate (Aardwoof No. 1) |
Other than this release, very little turned up. I decided to contact Randall and see if he could answer some questions I had about the LIE. He was very gracious with his time, and agreed to the publication of our conversation and some score excerpts.
Many of Snyder's scores are available for download here:
Here's a transcript of our conversation in mid-2017:
Can you talk about how the Lincoln Improvisation Ensemble came together?
RS: I started teaching at the University of Nebraska in 1974, and started the group up the very first semester, that fall. That iteration of the band went for about 3 or 4 years, and then it kind of petered out. Then I started it up a second time, [in the] mid ‘80s. And that had a slightly shorter lifespan, maybe about three years. So there were two groups really, of all different personnel - students.
How did you come to be interested in improvisation?
RS: My background was as a composer. I’d say for lack of a better description, kind of in the Elliott Carter tradition. And also a jazz musician. I was interested in trying to find an ensemble that could create chromatic improvisation. When I got my DMA at the University of Wisconsin (Madison), I played in an ensemble that was directed by Les Thimmig. That was one of the models for the group I wanted to start when I got the teaching position here in Nebraska. That group was a very orthodox group; it did not allow for even modal improvising, and I wanted to make this group slightly less strict, in terms of its aesthetic. So while we had chromatic free improv in the center, we went into lots of different directions, ultimately even getting into multimedia and theatrical pieces, with film, dance; it’s kind of hard to summarize. We did a lot of different kinds of things; it depended on the input of the players, where they wanted to take the group. While I was the director of the group, I wasn’t the leader, in terms of making decisions about repertoire. That was left up to the players. So we had a couple good years. I get it’s kind of hard to characterize it, because it was kind of all over the map.
Can you say more about the place of free improvisation in the LIE?
RS: It was the center of it, really. We used some “formats”; some pieces we would just walk out on stage without any preconceived notion of what was going to happen. Then other pieces had “formats”, which might have pitch classes that were selected ahead of time, or some generalized notions of things. Some of these got to be very elaborate, in terms of graphic notation for example. Some of my students were influenced by Stockhausen with his Seven Days in May, and modular improv. I think the 80’s group was more prone to using guidelines. I would say in general that group was a little more “conservative”, if I could use that expression. John Link was a member of that group; he’s a composer in New York, and teached at William Paterson. Several players continued in this vein, one was Robert Reigle, he had a group called Surrealestate. He’s been teaching in Ankara, Turkey, and he signed this petition against President Erdogan, and he was summarily fired. And he had tenure.
 |
| TIME, SPACE(d), COLOR - A format by Snyder |
One of the purposes of the group was for my composition students to try out ideas. These “formats” a lot of times were like compositional plans. I stressed that a composer, before they start writing a piece, should have an idea of what’s going to happen in the piece; to draw a kind of roadmap, often using pictorial or graphic notation, just to give a sense of the overall disposition of the piece. And these would be brought in separately as these kind of roadmaps. Have you ever heard of the magazine EAR? There was an article called “Playing Free In Nebraska”; one of my students contributed the article. There was a West Coast EAR and an East Coast EAR; this was the West Coast magazine. I imagine that came out in the late 70’s. It was a nice article; it talked about various ensembles in Nebraska that specialized in free playing.
Did the LIE make any recordings?
RS: We recorded every concert on reel-to-reel, but [there were no] recordings that were good for public consumption. I guess we felt that was beside the point of the group, to make documents like that. There are recordings available, I think mostly at the archives at the UN Lincoln, and I retired from there about 7 or 8 years ago, so I don’t know what’s going on there now. I doubt that there’s any interest in this sort of thing.
Did you have a hard time getting the LIE accepted as a part of the U-N curriculum?
RS: The chairman was a composer, a very cool guy. He welcomed the idea, which was amazing in retrospect. That was the first group, and after a year or two, we mostly played gigs. It was a gigging band, basically. Then it became part of the curriculum, as an elective ensemble. The players in the 80’s band, they got 1 credit in lieu of having to play in wind ensemble or something. I think the curriculum was revised later, and I don’t know if it’s still there as an option. It may be, I really don’t know. The school has turned in a direction toward more commercial jazz; right when I was leaving, it was heading in that direction, and I wasn’t that interested in that path.
Do you have any particularly fond memories of the LIE that you’d like to share?
 |
| A typical ad for an LIE concert. Several of these can be found in papers from the period. |
RS: I think the first band, it was my first year there, and the players in the band were almost my age, and they were applying using the GI bill. Some of them were Vietnam veterans, some outstanding talented people. That group in particular, we became like a club. It was like a rock band; we would rehearse and go out for drinks afterward. I recall some of the first gigs; we would play anywhere, for free of course. We played one performance at an arts fair, and a couple people complained about the noise. This was an indoor amphitheater, it sat about 2,000 people. They came and told us we had to stop. Some of my students were there, and they complained about this, so they wrote letters to the editor, and it became sort of a cause celebre for a while, it was funny. So there was a debate in these letters, about “What is art?” and all this kind of stuff. (laughs)
What paper were those letters to the editor in?
RS: Well there were two papers back then, there’s only one now. Either the Lincoln Journal, or the Lincoln Star. And now there’s just the one paper, called the Lincoln Journal Star. I recall there was a columnist who interviewed me about this.
These were students who were taking my History of Jazz class, they weren’t music majors; it’s not like our own people were sending in these letters. They just came to hear the band, and we were told within three minutes that we had to stop playing. It was astonishing, the anger that we aroused, which I suppose is one of the traditional roles of music. We weren’t that loud! We started out as primarily an acoustic band, but we used analog synthesizers. Near the end, we were keeping up with the changes in the technology.
One of my students was a medical student, and he created a biofeedback piece. And I was the subject: I was wired up, I wandered out on stage looking like Frankenstein. The galvanic skin response, I remember: when I started sweating, that would cause a signal to change. [Changes in] the heartbeat was monitored, and that would cause something in the electronics to reflect that. He said that, because there was some danger of a loop effect happening, that there had to be a doctor there, in case I fell upon some hard times! So one of his teachers was there, just to make sure that things didn’t get out of hand.
Did the LIE begin as a class, or was it an extracurricular group?
RS: We rehearsed at the school, but it wasn’t a class. I wanted to get to know the students better; we were out drinking one night, and over a beer we thought it would be fun to go in this direction. Some of the players envied jazz musicians. They couldn’t play jazz; at least, they couldn’t play bebop. They wondered if there was another way that they could experience playing improvised music, but not under even the strictures of avant-garde jazz of the ‘60s. So I’d say that, with one or two exceptions (we had about 10 people as a core group), most of them did not have jazz chops. So this was kind of an alternative way for them to experience playing non-written music.
 |
| Program notes from a concert on 22 April, 1986 |
RS: It was about the end of the decade, I’d say. We started in ‘74, we kind of reached a peak in ‘76, in terms of frequency of performances, and the excitement of the group. And then players left; I recruited some new players, but it kind of died a natural death, by the end of the 70’s. ‘79 if you want to put a year on it. Then it started up again: I had a new crop of people, and they had heard about [the earlier group], and wondered if we could reconstitute it. I started by using some of the more successful written formats as starting points. In that group, I think I was really more the “leader” than I was in the first group: I was older, they hadn’t had quite the richness of experience that the players of the first group had.
I’d say we had maybe 2, 3 good years. It didn’t last quite as long as the first group. And then there was talk of starting it up again, but I was in a different direction in the 90’s musically, so I wasn’t personally quite as interested as I had been in the past. 𝄇
