Part 1

Name: Scott Roller
Nationality: American  
Occupation: Cellist, multi-instrumentalist, composer, improviser, sound designer, producer,
Current release: Out now on Open_Music are three new album releases as part of the  new bandcamp series ELEKTROAKUSTIKA. Volume 1 sees Scott collaborate with Phillip Staffa, whereas the other two are quartet performances.  Elektroakustika 2 features Céline Papion, Michael Kiedaisch, and Roderik Vanderstraeten, Elektroakustika 3 involves Jörg Koch, Jochen Keil, and, again, Roderik Vanderstraeten.

If you enjoyed this interview with Scott Roller and would like to know more about his music and current live dates, visit his official homepage. He is also on Soundcloud, and Facebook.

For the thoughts of one of Scott's collaborators, read our interview with multi-instrumentalist, composer and percussionist Michael Kiedaisch. Scott describes their creative relationship as follows: “We have not only made music together in many different formations during that time, but were both closely connected with the founding of Open_Music e.V. 2005 in Stuttgart, Germany - a platform for improvisation in performance and education which has won many awards over the years and has enjoyed institutional support from the City of Stuttgart since 2012.”



When did you first start getting interested in musical improvisation?

In the summer of 1971, I turned 12 during a 6-week summer music camp in Illinois where my father was working on his doctorate. Several factors came together to provide me with a sort of revelation that influenced the rest of my life:

I had the good fortune of attending a course called “New Music for Young People” in which we learned about various key developments in art music in Europe and the US since the Second World War. I also encountered a wide range of jazz for the first time, both live and on records, and witnessed my first free group improvisations, which brought all of these factors together.

Since then I had a fairly clear vision of what I wanted to do with music (which I have been lucky enough to manage to do professionally).

Which artists, approaches, albums or performances involving prominent use of improvisation captured your imagination in the beginning?

I was fascinated by the concepts and approaches to sound which I first experienced through the so-called New York School (Cage, Feldman, Wolff, Brown) and iconic figures like Ives, Cowell, and Partch – but also through Europeans like Stockhausen, Boulez and Nono. At the same time, I loved Miles Davis, Charlie Mingus and Cecil Taylor. This mixture of art music and jazz (together with progressive rock and other alternative music) always seemed very natural to me and I never took stylistic boundaries too seriously.

In our high school I had the opportunity to play not only in orchestra and chamber music ensembles, but also in big band, theater productions and jazz-rock ensembles. I spent several summers in further music camps where I encountered more contemporary music (including purely electronic music, which I immediately loved).

Tell me about your instrument and/or tools, please. How would you describe the relationship with it? What are its most important qualities and how do they influence the musical results and your own performance?  

My parents were both professional musicians / educators, so I had a somewhat special situation. I started with violin and piano when I entered school, switched to cello when I was 9 but continued piano until I went off to university. I also learned bassoon, voice and guitar (both electric and acoustic), and had the chance to visit electronic music and recording studios from an early age.

I studied cello / composition at the University of Texas in Austin for three years before I got to spend a year in Paris on a grant when I was 20. During my time in Paris I had the chance to work (and write in my journal) very freely and attend many concerts and workshops, such as at IRCAM, where I experienced Xenakis and Boulez first-hand.

For most of my professional life, cello was my primary instrument in a solo and ensemble context, both for notated music and improvisation. Its wide tonal range, palette of colors, the ability to produce a broad gamut of articulations and its closeness in some situations to the human voice has made it a satisfying tool for many situations.

That said, the combination of the iconically classical cello tone with electronics has always appealed to me and has played a wide variety of roles over the decades. As I got more involved with making music for dance and theater productions starting around 2000, the introduction of tools like computers, loopers and FX technology allowed me to extend my improvisations in time to create complex atmospheres and textures in real time as a solo performer.

In the past five years, electronic music has pretty much taken over as my first love, including a whole range of modular hardware / software synths, interactive media and generative techniques. In the past ten years, I have worked more and more with iPads and use them both in education and performance. I have come to see generative music as a logical marriage between improvisation and forms of (algorithmic) composition — and free group improvisation as an especially human form of generative music.

Focusing on improvisation can be an incisive transition. Aside from musical considerations, there can also be personal motivations for looking for alternatives. Was this the case for you, and if so, in which way?

Since my early youth, I was interested in pursuing both musical performance and composition which, in a classical, academic context, can prove to be a real challenge.

During my studies I often felt a real sense of dichotomy, of being a bit torn (especially in terms of time) between writing and playing, and most of my cello teachers were opposed to my other side. Up until about 2005, I did continue to accept commissions for notated compositions and, for the most part, found that model relatively rewarding. For some ideas, I wanted to have the ability to determine as much as possible. But I often felt a sense of alienation with the process of conceiving, working out and realising ensemble compositions.

Group improvisation (especially in ensembles where we have enough experience with one another to have developed a common language) and solo improvisations with the technological extensions I frequently use now bring all of the processes together for me. Composition and performance really are different aspects of the same unified experience, which I find tremendously satisfying and organic.

Can you talk about a work, event or performance in your career that's particularly dear to you? Why does it feel special to you? When, why and how did you start working on it, what were some of the motivations and ideas behind it?

After my year in Paris, I returned to Texas to finish my bachelor’s degree at North Texas State University (now University of North Texas) in Denton, a school known for its jazz education program. There I was invited to join an improvising chamber quartet called BL Lacerta, which was made up of a string, woodwind, brass and percussion / electronic musician. They had improvised together for years and had already established a wonderfully eclectic but deep approach to free improvisation with which I immediately felt at home.

We had the good fortune to be awarded a Chamber Music America residency in Dallas Texas, which allowed us to work intensely from 1981-83, presenting a continuous concert series of free improvised chamber music, making recordings and collaborating with a number of guest artists like the musicians John Cage and Pauline Oliveros but also painters, dancers, poets and other performers.

[Read our Pauline Oliveros interview]

In a very real sense, my two-and-a-half years with BL Lacerta were my “Master’s in Improvisation” and provided me with many seminal aspects in my understanding of improvisation. Most of the ideas which informed my later educational work with improvisation were conceived during this time.



What, would you say, are the key ideas behind your approach to improvisation? To you, are there rules in improvisation? If so, what kind of rules are these?

Openness is an important quality to me in improvising — being open to the ideas and input from other musicians without judging too quickly, and sharing responsibility for the flow of the music without anyone imposing their own ideas on it from the beginning.

I prefer improvised music that relies heavily on spontaneous communication (without predetermined structures) and an awareness of participating in a collective act of composition.

This compositional approach leads me to prefer interactions which lead to the creation of “pieces” with a real sense of organic form (and concerts made up of sequences of such contrasting movements) to more extended, less “composed” streams (with some exceptions, of course), especially if it seems to me that the musicians are more involved with showing off their individual virtuosity than listening to and sharing musical ideas with one another.

Openness also to all possible forms of musical material, all sound, without regard for specific genres, and I find it very rewarding to play with musicians who are at home in many styles and traditions of music so that one has an enormous range of possible references to play off of and synthesize into whatever forms the music itself seems to want to go.

I cannot accept the idea of “rules” in improvisation, though it certainly can be a creative strategy for a group to agree upon certain restrictions as to parameters or associations with which they would like to work on some occasions. The thoughts that I present are not intended to make it possible to derive any sort of rules for good improvisation – but rather to consider “qualities” of good improvisation as I understand it.

But the fundamental nature of free improvisation must be freedom itself, and there are as many valid forms of improvisation / composition as there are practicing artists in a given context at a given time.