“Steve, in 15 seconds, what is the difference between composition and improvisation?”
Without hesitation he answered:
“In 15 seconds, the difference between composition and improvisation is that in composition you have all the time you want to think about what to say in 15 seconds, while in improvisation you have only 15 seconds…”
Back at home I timed his answer. It took exactly 15 seconds.
Frederic Rzewski reffering to a short interview with Steve Lacy taken while on tour in Rome 1969.
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A Few Words About the Group
Time plays play a crucial role in improvisation with fast decisions and spontaneous strategies becoming the best way to work while different languages and vocabularies interconnect to provide a fresh and dynamic listening experience.
Key virtues are sincerity, a positive creative attitude, an understanding and connectivity to the materials involved and their possibilities, a keen interactivity and….of course…. the chance to get lost!
Improvisation in Jazz is often a recombination, a continuous process of renewal in which old material, patterns and licks are adjusted, sometimes rejected or re-transformed within language boundaries.
Here we are dealing with something else – A place where Improvisation and its strategies are meant as Composition in Present Time.
This means neither “unity” nor “totality” but rather “multiplicity”. In multiplicity what matters aren’t the “terms” or the “elements” but what exists “between”.
In other words, the “between” is a system of relationships that are inextricably linked with each other.
E.C.I.O. Conceptual Goal
To the members of E.C.I.O. music has a strong affinity with shapes and their relartionships to each other, investigating with relish the continuous morphing of sounds.
In performance each musician combines individual musicality with an overview of the whole ensemble creating an improvisation where things happen. We strive for a multi-perspective musical creation and we feel improvisation is always related to something concrete. Never abstract but real and vital.
Internationally renowned composers, imaginative musicians, the members of the ECIO are also innovative voices on their instrument.
This is their core perspective, looking at the sounds they produce as a material to be manipulated, driving us in a marvellous journey through explorations in textures, melodies and dangerous flights of idiosyncratic chamber music, lyrical spots and dramatically intriguing changes.
Present Time Composition:
The main goal is to create a musical experience, to provoke a fresh communication, to combine different expressive plans and surfaces and to deliver a fluid structure that is solidly centered and where the nerve endings are very much alive.
Brilliant interplay, intriguing inner voices and tone nuance make up the output of this large ensemble.
Modularity
The members of the E.C.I.O. are from different European countries – along a North-South axis: Finland, Uk, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Spain.
E.C.I.O. it’s a trans-generational ensemble, featuring some of the most innovative and legendary voices on the contemporary New Music scene.
Due to the skills and to the unusual line-up E.C.I.O. can be modular.
With a solid heart and adaptive flexibility: more combinations and smaller combos from E.C.I.O can be involved to suit different performing requirements.
E.C.I.O. can lead workshops and master-classes that will explore action and re-action strategies in music, generative collisions, dissonance and turbulence of musical elements and timbre explorations, extended techniques, graphic scoring and conduction.
E.C.I.O. is a democratic orchestra that delivers positivity.