There's an awful lot of resources that can be drawn upon in an improvised music concert. Fred Frith More Quotes by Fred Frith More Quotes From Fred Frith ...what's always exciting is when you hear something amazing when you least expected it. Every now and then I'll hear something for the first time that forces me to re-examine my frames of reference, and re-consider musical parameters in general, and that's wonderful . And what's even more wonderful in a way, is when you hear something that you know, and already think you have an opinion about, and then suddenly discover that it isn't what you thought it was, but something quite different, which makes it just as surprising as if you'd never heard it before. That's REALLY great! Fred Frith musical different thinking It's like learning a language; you can't speak a language fluently until you find out who you are in that language, and that has as much to do with your body as it does with vocabulary and grammar. Fred Frith vocabulary body doe There are always things to examine. What's great is not feeling that I have to refuse any of them. Maybe no good from a PR perspective, but from the point of view of everyday life, it keeps things interesting. Fred Frith perspective views interesting I think that one of the things that influences me most as a composer is to what extent I can deconstruct and reconstruct the material that I'm working with. Fred Frith composer influence thinking If you write songs you have an idea how they're going to sound. Fred Frith writing song ideas Improvised music involves a lot of intuition and I like developing intuition. Fred Frith instinct intuition developing If you mean do I use the guitar when I'm sitting at home writing stuff, then basically no, never. All I would ever write would be stuff that my fingers easily fall into. Fred Frith home writing fall I started getting interested in the notes that I could hear being generated when I hammered on while playing a classical guitar. Fred Frith classical-guitar notes guitar I write with a mouse, because it has no psychological associations or memories or habits associated with it. Fred Frith association writing memories The totality of a record is usually beyond ones ability to imagine when you start working on it, but the component parts are, usually, fairly clear one way or another. Fred Frith records imagine way I don't know if I'm striving for anything that I can put into words. Fred Frith strive ifs knows As an improviser I'm now pretty comfortable with trios, so I'm thinking of working up to quartets. Fred Frith quartets trios thinking Well, I think music for kids is never anything but experimental is it? Fred Frith wells kids thinking We play melodic music, we play songs, we play all kinds of things and when you improvise you don't just shut out different languages, you use all the languages that you have. Fred Frith different play song You could say that everything the musicians have learned and known over the years, all of their technical resources, are in a dialogue with the things they are discovering every time, as if it was the first time. Fred Frith musician years firsts I remember playing football dressed in peculiar costumes with some friends in France and laughing so hard we couldn't even stand up, let alone kick the ball. Fred Frith laughing-so-hard france football We went through this business of me writing out all the parts for these old songs from Gravity and Speechless and we'd been performing that, but we don't do that any more. Fred Frith old-songs me business writing I think things changed as a result of a certain perception of our politics. When we went through our zealous, self-righteous period it didn't exactly win us any friends. Fred Frith result win friends politics We played some gigs in Switzerland a couple of weeks ago and it was the first time I really felt the group was really a band in the sense of something I could write for. Fred Frith group band first-time time Some things don't wind up sounding like you'd expect, which is just as well. Fred Frith things like you wind
