Chapter 3: Radio as Collective Improvisation

Experimentation

Improvisational performers prioritize creative experimentation. In more conservative approaches to jazz, the experimental aspects of a performance may not venture far from established practices. In “freer” approaches like Harmolodics, experimentation may dominate such that an audience experiencing a performance for the first time cannot tease out a fundamental melody, harmony, or even rhythm. In either case, experimentation is inextricable from improvisatory practice, and, like relation, easy to take for granted in discussions of complexity and especially complex adaptive systems, distinguished as such by their responsiveness to change. Harmolodic practices arguably must always privilege experimentation to generate new and unexpected relationships between performance participants. Perhaps even more overtly experimental, though, is another iconoclastic musical philosophy: Hermeto Pascoal’s música universal.

When composer, musician, producer, and incomparable innovator Hermeto Pascoal passed in September 2025 at the age of 89, many online tributes to him included video clips from Sinfonia do Alto Ribeira, a 1985 documentary (dir. Ricardo Lua) about environmental crisis in Parque Estadual do Alto da Ribeira (Alto Ribeira State Tourist Park). One scene that circulated especially widely in my social media circles was often titled “Música da Lagoa.”[1] It begins with Pascoal and at least five other participants standing in a circle in the middle of a mountain lake, leaning down and humming against the surface of the water at various pitches to create a range of bubbling tones. This initial scene peels away to reveal the same group in roughly the same spot, this time blowing across the tops of bottles tuned with different amounts of liquid in a melody more recognizable to my ears.[2] Pascoal eventually trades water jugs for a bamboo flute, starting in the open air and then intermittently squatting down to partially submerge the flute in the water as he plays it. At one point, he ducks down entirely below the surface, still playing. The aqueous glissandi and swirling whistles Pascoal produces as he reemerges cues the ensemble to loosen their own technique: they clink the bottles together, whistle over them in unpredictable cadence, and gradually wind down as Pascoal dives once more beneath the surface. This performance fades into a final water scene, in which the ensemble stands and splashes the surface of the water in tight but blurry-edged rhythms.

It's a scene that epitomizes a philosophy Pascoal has cited as guiding his entire career: música universal, an understanding of music as dynamic practice influenced and produced by, potentially, everything (Borém and Araújo 2010). A self-taught multi-instrumentalist, Pascoal neither reified nor vilified strict musical conventions in his work, instead acknowledging many interconnected paths to creative expression in constantly adapting dialogue with one another. In “Música da Lagoa” and other performances in Sinfonia do Alto Ribeira, this manifests on a truly planetary scale as Pascoal plays in and with the world around him. An article in Brazilian news magazine Manchete published around the same time as the film’s release quoted Pascoal on his experience working on the film thus:

Mergulhei num rio tocando uma flauta de bambu e saiu um som celestial. Nunca tinha feito isso antes, mas minha intuição dizia que daria certo. Toquei os estalactites com os dedos e com baquetas. E quando soou o berrante, então, foi de arrepiar. Todo mundo paralisado, enquanto o som ecoava pelas galerias e pedras. Era preciso tocar a terra com essa experiência única de integração universal!

I dove into a river playing a bamboo flute and a heavenly sound emerged. I’d never done it before, but my intuition told me it would work. I played the stalactites with my fingers and drumsticks. And when the horn sounded, it was chilling. Everyone was paralyzed as the sound echoed through the galleries and stones. It was necessary to touch the earth with this unique experience of universal integration! (“Nas Cavernas do Alto Ribeira” 1985, 76; English translation mine)

In their filmed improvisations, Pascoal’s ensemble interacts with and reacts to earth, air, and water as fellow interrelated elements of a musicking assemblage. Their practices consciously foreground the influences of environmental factors, in this case in a very literal way. This is an understanding of musicking in keeping with assemblage theory and complexity studies, recognizing as it does the inseparability of endless layers of context from production of sound.

Pascoal’s articulation of música universal is also compelling as a reference point for discussing aesthetics and ethics in the community radio context because of its respectful regard for play and experimentation. Música universal rejects the oversimplification of these as signs of thoughtlessness or incompetence and instead positions them as worthwhile practices. Indeed, Pascoal’s personal artistic standards have been well documented. Pascoal critiqued modern electronic production for its facilitation of “low-quality performers” and the hegemony it gives “the omnipresent figure of the music producer” (Connell 2017) in popular music today. While there is ample room to push back against such a statement, especially in considering how digital audio workstations and other tools can also decenter production power, the reasoning behind Pascoal’s perspective is worth attention: he objects to the equating of freedom and accessibility with lowest-common-denominator creation, especially when such things are mobilized to attain and consolidate power by a single individual, i.e. the omnipresent producer. The música universal approach intervenes by encouraging the unbounding of musical convention while still emphasizing thoughtfulness and cooperative co-creation.

Community radio welcomes the novice for much the same reason as Pascoal invites experimentation. One of my colleagues referred to WFHB participants as “motivated, gifted amateurs” and better for it:

They get to do what they’ve always wanted to do, and it’s amazing—the musicologists, yourself, but there’s lots of other people who are, maybe that wasn’t their major, maybe it wasn’t their vocation, but they’re deeply into it. And there are people who are committed about ecology,[3] and, so I’d say that in some ways, amateur radio is better than pro. Maybe we’re not at the CNN level for a lot of it, but we are way better at what… we surprise everybody, I think, [at] the Society of Professional Journalism Awards, and I think we’re a vital part of the music scene. (Interview 30)

This colleague points to one of WFHB’s more concrete achievements, its success at the annual awards ceremony of the Indiana chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists, and the more nebulous but oft-referenced contributions of WFHB to the South-Central Indiana music scene. These are evidence of the advantages of an amateur body of programmers who are presumably internally motivated to make high quality radio. While there is a prescribed training regimen—music programmers-to-be must take two introductory classes and then sit in with three different established programmers before they can host a show, for example—there is also room to maneuver once a programmer has full on-air privileges.

Two relatively new but already expert WFHB colleagues I spoke with made especially succinct comparisons that underscore the potentials for free play within best operating practices. Programming well is “just a matter of fine tuning,” explained one. “It seems very intimidating, like anything that is very fun or rewarding. Like Euchre has a lot of small rules. But it’s very easy once you get all those little, small things” (Interview 34).

“You can't go on The Breakfast Club and read The People Could Fly,” said another, referring to the popular radio show syndicated out of WWPR in New York since 2010 and Virginia Hamilton’s award-winning book of Black American folktales, respectively (Interview 3). “But with community radio,” this colleague continued, “I think there is an emphasis on that creativity and vast access to music.” Both of these colleagues are well versed in the station’s prescribed on-air procedures and off-air protocol, and they recognize that they are not confines in place for the sake of confining but parameters within which there is still ample sonic possibility.

This understanding of possibilities for change within charted systems is, perhaps, one of the strongest ideological commonalities between community radio and jazz, at least as they are conceived of by some of WFHB’s most motivated, gifted jazz enthusiasts. One such colleague spoke directly to this overlap during our interview:

Since jazz is an improvised art form, people are trying to find new things to say all the time… jazz is both backward-looking and forward-looking simultaneously, and self-consciously backward-looking and forward-looking. And so in a way, that’s what I try to do… I’m self-consciously trying to get the listener to understand that there are forms of the music that are challenging and interesting and ways musicians [are] looking for ways to remove the constraints of the past. They know the past and they understand the past and they come from it, but they’re actively trying to remove those constraints. (Interview 18)

It is not for me to say that all community radio practitioners are always self-consciously trying to remove the generic constraints of radio performance. Most WFHB music shows, for example, follow the formula of twenty-minute sets of scripted announcements, music, and announcing what has just played. There is room for innovation in the music choices even within this structure. My colleague’s above reflection, though, points to the availability of and historical precedent for aesthetically novel practices based in the ethical framework of community radio. The rules of the game make it possible to play. In the case of community radio, built directly on ideals and senses, that play can move in many more directions than it can in more strictly scripted media.

[1] Video embedded in companion webpage.

[2] My initial analysis, informed by the modicum of music theory I learned when formally and reluctantly learning cello at the age of 11, was that the melody could be transcribed as being in the key of B-flat major. My brother, who has learned music theory on purpose, believes it would fit better into C-minor, but concedes that it meshes well with B-flat Mixolydian.

[3] In mentioning ecology, this colleague is specifically referring to the news program Eco Report, a weekly WFHB public affairs program discussing environmental issues. It has been on the air since 2007.