Toilet humour aside, Armitage Shank is a name which needs no explanation. What will require explanation is its premise: “A concert of improvised music”. In comedy and theatre, improvisation is a respected tool in an actor’s trade. However, in classical music an audience gathers to pay homage to the many hours a composer painstakingly spent choosing their notes, and a performer painstakingly spent learning them all perfectly. If a listener were to be told that some of these notes had been spur of the moment decisions, the illusion would be broken. 

Of course, jazz music has centred itself around improvisation for the last hundred years. But the most popular forms of the genre contain this freedom in tightly defined structures. What if it wasn’t just the notes and rhythms that were improvised but the form itself? Gregor Forbes takes us through the rationale behind Armitage Shank and why improvised and noised-based music is the “closest art comes in the 21st century to the Romantic sublime”.

With no notes to demonstrate that you have learnt and no dead composer to pay homage to, Free Improvised Music is all about the present and is “focused on group interaction and communication”. Forbes explains this social dimension of the music:

“Free Improvisation is a great opportunity for experimentation, both musically and socially. There is no reason, for example, to 'agree' with what another musician plays: in many cases, improvisation can be confrontational and aggressive (what is worse than dull, passive improvisation?).”

This is not to say an audience is expected to simply watch a melodrama between performers. Forbes insists: “Of course, free improvisation communicates with the audience as well.” It is not without elements of the theatrical. Improvisers work with the precision and focus of classical performers to produce a spontaneous theatre of music, “where minute sounds and gestures take on great importance.”                        

To help the performers find these spontaneous sounds, the tools present include: pots and pans; kebab sticks; empty 7-up cans; cereal boxes; laptops; a melodica; as well as the more standard piano, guitar, trumpet and oboe.

The performances attempt to define Improvised Music, but it is an ethos and not a style. Perhaps it is like Armitage Shank itself and needs no explanation; definitions all go down the drain.

SJCMS Presents: Armitage Shank takes place on Thursday the 28th February from 9:15 PM in St John’s College Divinity School.