sexual freedom, improvisation and access to pleasure

May 2023, revisited January 2025. Part of a larger text. If interested in more please contact me.

It’s been many years of following a very intimate and profound intuition that was calling me to believe there is a link between sexuality and improvisation. I strongly embodied the belief that the energy that emanates when playing is intrinsically sexual. Throughout this research, I figured that I was confusing the sexual with the erotic. In her chapter Eros, eroticism, and the pedagogical process, bell hooks defends:

“to understand the place of eros and eroticism [...], we must move beyond thinking of those forces solely in terms of the sexual, though that dimension need not be denied [...]. “Erotic potency was not confined to sexual power but included the moving force that propelled every life-form from a state of mere potentiality to actuality””.

In his Dialectical eroticism of improvisation Tord Gustavsen writes,

“I believe there are crucial parallels between the realm of music‐making and the many realms of intimacy.[...] The improviser must bring out their intensity and emotional presence without losing technical control and without losing the ability to create overviews and orient herself in the musical landscape. All this, in my opinion, ties the art of improvisation closely to the basic challenges we have when developing as human beings. And, I believe that psychological and philosophical theory dealing with precisely these kinds of dialectical challenges in close personal relations, in sexuality and in child development may shed a very fruitful light on the analogous challenges in making improvised music”.

But if I am to claim eros as a motivating force, still under bell hook’s line of thought, I can’t obviate the number of social constructs around eroticism, sex, sexual orientation and gender identities/expressions that get in the way of seeing this force as soulful, as something mysterious or mystic. Within the Western culture we live in, eroticism is very often understood as explicitly sexual, which religion comes straight away to tell us is something unsacred, dirty, shameful and opposite to spirituality. These social constructs and ideas mingle together to create a big emotional mess among humankind. I believe, inspired by and agreeing with Gustavsen's work, that “challenges facing us in one field can help us understand parallel challenges in other fields. The metaphorical - sometimes almost poetical - quality of understanding one thing in the light of another can be of great importance. We can gain inspiration and self-development both as persons and as musicians”. This bidirectional learning and growing process is what I think needs to be understood under the right light. The points that have marked my own personal experience are the ones I will be focusing on: learning music through institutions, gender expression, sexual orientation and the relationship to my body. 

I always had a very strong sensitivity for music but I always learned it in school. Basically, through institutions and in an academic formal manner. Might be that as a young kid, that is positive. Still, I think it created, already then, a separation between the joy I felt when listening to music and the sensations when playing and performing myself. Being in school quickly became something clearly negative for my relationship to music, to myself and to my body. In Eros, eroticism, and the pedagogical process, bell hooks states that “the public world of institutional learning was a site where the body had to be erased, go unnoticed. Professors [are] trained in the philosophical context of Western metaphysical dualism, [...] many of us have accepted the notion that there is a split between the body and the mind.” Even though she is writing about higher education and academic contexts, I believe this applies to every pedagogical level.

As exposed in the first chapter, women experience all kinds of sexual violence from an early age, this being the extreme of a wide spectrum of violence. Music schools and conservatories are no exception, bell hooks cites “a study which revealed that every so many seconds while giving lectures many male professors were thinking about sexuality - were even having lustful thoughts about students”. The way this comes out, consciously and subconscious-lee, obviously and blurrily, is as discrimination towards women. I find it relevant to insert Objectification theory at this point: 

“One marker of [heteropatriarchy] is the socially sanctioned right of all males to sexualize all females, regardless of age or status. This sexualization occurs in many forms, ranging from sexual violence to sexualized evaluation. The most subtle and deniable way sexualized evaluation is enacted [...] is through gaze[...]. The psychological repercussions arising from the more subtle and everyday practice of sexualized gazing [...] is what we seek to redress”. 

In this study, Fredrickson and Roberts analyze the consequences of being a woman in a society that objectifies the female body: “distinct from attempts to uncover why objectification occurs, objectification theory takes as a given that women exist in a culture in which their bodies are looked at, evaluated, and always potentially objectified”. It is important to note  potentially in this phrase, meaning that this objectification doesn’t need to actually happen for women to experience its consequences. 

There are different “psychological and experiential consequences of sexual objectification for (a) the emotion of shame, (b) the emotion of anxiety, (c) peak motivational states, and (d) the awareness of the internal body states”. On what affects my understanding of musical practice and performance, I will be focusing on the effect of sexualization and objectification have on peak motivational states and linking the awareness of the internal body and the emotion of shame with women’s access to pleasure. 

Musical practice - individual and collective - requires high levels of concentration, being a both mental and physical activity. This state of full absorption is often called among musicians “the zone”. In his book Effortless Mastery, Kenny Werner calls it “the inner space”, and mentions different great musicians speaking on the matter: Bill Evans refers to it as the “universal mind”, Toot Tielemans as “ground level zero”. Werner affirms:  “the highest state a musician can be in is a selfless state”. Both to practice and perform, a musician needs to be in a place where the mind is quiet, where there is no judgment, no expectations, so there is full access to doing and being, a state of actuality (as quoted above). Besides all the ego issues, insecurities, inadequacy and anxiety feelings that many musicians experience through the process of learning music, there is an extra layer that especially affects girls and women due to their gender. 

This inner space, “Csikszentmihalyi calls [it]  "flow"... [He] identifies it as “a prime source of optimal experience, [...] we feel we are truly living, uncontrolled by others, creative and joyful”. In Objectification Theory, they present two ways in which patriarchal society prevents or derails peak motivational states to females. First, women’s activities are interrupted from a very early age to call attention to their bodies and their appearance. They start already in elementary school: boys are encouraged to occupy space and take risks, while girls are flattered when being quiet and “behaving good”, not making themselves dirty when playing etcetera. These types of comments increase into adolescence and adulthood, commenting on the weight or breast development. The second is a consequence of the first

Society is full of messages in all types of media that put the value of women on their body. If we sum this to the continuous reception of comments on their bodies, self-objectification becomes a common phenomenon among girls and women, adopting an observer’s perspective on their own body. “As Simone de Beauvoir wrote, when a girl becomes a woman, she is “doubled; instead of coinciding exactly with herself, she … [also] exist[s] outside”. As mentioned above, selflessness is essential for a good and joyful practice, which means to lose self-consciousness. If women internalize an observer’s view of themselves, that is a form of self-consciousness that is incompatible with the single mindedness of “flow” states, “the zone” or the universal mind of Bill Evans. 

When playing music, there is a spiritual, an intellectual and a bodily aspect of it. All three of them are tightly related and equally important. The flow or inner space refers to the spiritual, transcendental part of the performance and practice. Objectification of women’s bodies, as we have seen, not only affects their focus capacity but also the awareness of the internal body state. 

“Multiple studies suggest that in the absence of relevant contextual cues, women are less accurate than men at detecting physiological sensations [...]. Perhaps by consequence, women appear to make less use of these bodily cues [...]. How might women’s inattention to physiological cues come about? [...] Because women are vigilantly aware of their outer bodily appearance, they may be left with fewer perceptual resources available for attending to inner body experience”

As stated previously, in order to internalize any musical element, a chord progression, a clave, a rhythm, a melody, patterns, or all of that together; a musician needs to embody whatever they are learning. This means paying attention to the tiniest details of what’s happening within their bodies when making music. There is a huge range of small and internal physical actions that affect the sound made on the instrument, details into which I’ll get further on concerning my instrument and learning process. But to give some examples, singers need to be very self-aware of what is going on within their whole respiratory system, mouth and face resonators. All instrumentalists, to a different extent or focus on a body part, need to know how they move their fingers, with how much pressure they hit a cymbal, a string or a key. All this is executed with very specific body parts, and when the technical level is higher, it requires a great knowledge of the body itself in order to know how to practice or to find where the difficulty is. It requires the ability to understand and listen to the body. 

In the documentary series The Principles of Pleasure, Ericka Hart states “I do wholeheartedly believe that sex education could teach us so much about bodily autonomy beyond in a sexual sense, but really in every instance”. As stated by Gustavsen and Werner, music can help understand other fields, has the power to confront ourselves and make us better people, “a true master is not just a master of technique or language, is a master of [them]self”. Hart’s affirmation is the other side of that coin, is one of those other fields that can be understood through music. In the same documentary series, Dr. Lori Brotto defines interoception as: 

“...our ability to know what’s happening inside our body. When it comes to sexual health, this is a very gendered phenomenon, not only because most genital structure is hidden from view but also it probably relates to young girls being told that masturbation was wrong and dirty or scolded for touching themselves. Without deliberate exploration, a young girl or a woman remains largely unaware of what feelings are like”

Added to this lack of connection to the body, according to Objectification theory, “empirical studies have reported that women experience more shame than men”, and they define it as:

“...the negative emotion that occurs when people evaluate themselves relative to some internalized or cultural ideal and come up short [...]. The internalization of another’s gaze is central to the experience of shame. [...] Shame, then, results from a fusion of negative self evaluation with the potential for social exposure”

Among other negative effects on women’s psyche, such as comparing themselves to the unattainable and mythic idea of how their body should look according to the model’s size shape, shame generates reactions that I clearly understand as performance and practice disruptors. “Shame generates an intense desire to hide, to escape the painful gaze of others, or to disappear, alongside feelings of worthlessness and powerlessness also compound with an already fragmented state of consciousness. It disrupts ongoing activity [...]. This disruption is “adaptative”, its function is to inhibit or change that which fails to live up [...] standards. Thus, it is considered a moral emotion, and is used to socialize societal standards”.

Not only does this prevent girls and women from getting on stage or avoiding public spaces, but it also gets in the way of concentration during practice and rehearsals. “Individuals experiencing shame tend to attribute their shortcomings globally to the self in its entirety”. Within a musical context, this means that a player that has internalized shame, will consider that when they make a mistake, that makes them bad players (or even worthless persons in the most extreme cases), and feeds the vicious circle of lack of self confidence. It also doesn’t allow for any learning to happen: on one hand, if one mistake makes a bad player, then it is impossible to learn from their own mistakes, and so this generates paralysis. To avoid the feeling of shame, a simple defense mechanism can be developed: denial. If there is no mistake, then there is no shame and there’s nothing wrong. But then, if we can’t observe what was wrong, it is impossible to learn anything. On the other hand, if the problem is always considered as coming from oneself, it becomes very difficult for an ashamed player to put perspective into the playing.  This conditions the capacity of the player to choose and to identify which players they like to play with, as well as a difficulty to listen. On top of these internalized beliefs, thoughts and feelings, within the jazz scene there is a certain standard about how an improviser should sound, which is related to a certain body appearance. I will discuss this topic later on. 

The intersection of difficulty to reach peak motivational states, the low body awareness and the experience of shame are the foundation for women’s conditioning to access pleasure. I believe pleasure to be the common axis that binds improvisation and sexuality. To enjoy in both fields, there needs to be trust, understood as self-confidence and interpersonal trust. This allows in both cases to let go, get carried away by others. Improvisers need to be able to listen, to their bodies and to the music. It implies being an active subject, and it is something you learn by doing and trying. In both cases there is a need for knowledge of the body and the instrument, if there is any, in order to be free, express oneself better and decide what is wanted. Both improvisation and sexuality can be done individually and collectively, and involve emotions, corporality and spirituality. 

In sexuality the unequal access to pleasure can be seen through the orgasm gap, also called pleasure gap: while 95% of men (heterosexual and homosexual) have orgasms during a sexual intercourse, only 66% of heterosexual women and 86% of lesbians orgasm. As Dr. Emily Nagoski states in The principles of pleasure, “people are raised with the myth that because penis and vagina sex is very reliable for a cisgender heterosexual male to have an orgasm, that’s how a cisgender heterosexual woman is supposed to have an orgasm”. If we translate this to the way jazz tradition understands improvisation, the equivalent would be to state that because jazz has predominantly been played by men, in the way they would enjoy themselves, that’s how it should be played, when it is clearly not inclusive. On The Routledge Companion to Jazz and Gender, the article about drummer Terri Lyne Carrington on jazz curatorship through the Jazz and Gender Justice she inaugurated in 2019, they explain: 

“What would jazz without patriarchy sound like?” Carrington is deliberately enacting a feminist curatorial practice of jazz by directly confronting the role gender has played in understanding and enacting jazz”

I think the link between sexuality and improvisation I’m defending can be a powerful liberating source if understood in the direction of transcending heteronormative and binary norms. Even though I think female players might experience more difficulties to learn, creating the breeding ground for the lack of representation at a professional level, there are also many other factors that keep the gender gap in the music industry. These go from the compatibility with parenthood to the hostile and harrassy environment described in the first chapter, as well as by Matana Roberts in her “Gender Issues in Jazz and Improvised Music Part 1”:

“You really start to notice the differences when a few male musicians who used to be your mentors recognize your budding womanhood as a chance for them to use their influence to be sexual leeches. It’s at this point that you have to develop certain emergency bells in your psyche—watching carefully to make sure you are not vulnerable to those creepy guys out there that really don’t have your creative growth in their best interest.” 

Jazz history is dominated by a white heteronormative perspective and discourse, analyzed as seen in the work of Frank Tirro, the authors of The Routledge Companion to Jazz and Gender or Angela Davis among others. I find it important to address some points they discuss and reflect upon. 

I mentioned above the orgasm gap is smaller among lesbians. Nevertheless, it is important to reflect on the direction of Yoko Suzuki’s work in order to not misread these affirmations. Suzuki defends that 

“gender expressions and sexual orientations tend to be conflated in the perception of jazz performance. [there is a] common association of female instrumentalists with lesbians in the context of jazz saxophone performance. I suggest that this equation consists of three assumptions: (1) Jazz is a “masculine” music genre; therefore, (2) females who play jazz very well, especially on instruments normally associated with men, should be masculine; (3) masculine females are gay”.  

The proof of these beliefs is seen in comments I’ve heard about myself, said to my female colleagues by male colleagues and read testimonies in papers throughout this research. The phrase “you sound like an old black man” and its derivations are quite common to hear under the intention of a compliment. Suzuki defends “a majority of stakeholders in jazz associate musical sound with a certain type of body” (the body type mentioned above). If on the one hand the beauty standard for women is slimness and whiteness, but on the other hand to be a good player the standard is to be a big black man, an incongruity is created for female performers in relationship to their bodies. Both assumptions are simple stereotypes, thus it is urgent to get rid of these simplistic and reductionist ideas in order to attain freedom when performing. 

“Female jazz saxophonists’ masculinity is performed by stereotypically “masculine” musical sound, attitudes, and their body as a musician that is absorbed into the creative moment whether the performer is heterosexual or homosexual. [...] Masculinity performed by female jazz saxophonists, however, would threaten and disturb gender norms that have been persistent in the jazz world precisely because it does not involve lesbian desire. [...]. There is a wide range of women-identified experiences, what she calls “lesbian existence”, whether they identify themselves as lesbian or not.

“Masculine” and “feminine” are energies and, as presented in Eastern philosophies of yin and yang, both are essential. Throughout history, however, they have been labeled and given positive and negative connotations, which results in misogyny. It is crucial to go beyond these ideas and enter a more flexible and fluid space regarding gender identity and expression: “Halberstam suggests that female masculinity has its own cultural history and not simply a derivative of male masculinity and that studying female masculinity helps us to understand male masculinities. In exploring and historicizing diverse forms of female masculinity, he concentrates on a variety of queer female masculinities because he believes that female masculinity becomes problematic and disturbs gender norms when it involves non-normative sexuality. According to Halberstam, female masculinity becomes threatening and unacceptable when coupled with lesbian desire”.

Having this in mind, we can reflect on the unequal access to pleasure as a consequence of heteronormative and binary social constructs that permeate into musical practice. The aim is to break down those constructs in order to experience a diversity of musical and bodily expressions. Music institutions should play a role in this transformation, even though I believe not every musician and performer has to go through institutional learning in order to make music or be able to be a professional. But since conservatories are still a very useful tool, it would be great to turn such spaces into diverse, inclusive spaces for all. 

I want to claim eroticism as a creative force that transcends gender expression and sexual orientation, inspired by bell hook’s writings: 

“When we limit "erotic" to its sexual meaning, we betray our alienation from the rest of nature. We confess that we are not motivated by anything like the mysterious force that moves birds to migrate or dandelions to spring. Furthermore, we imply that the fulfillment or potential toward which we strive is sexual - the romantic-genital connection between two persons”. 

As musicians, we need to be connected to our body, our soul and our knowledge when performing. As improvisers, we need to not only be free, but feel free in all those three domains. It is widely believed in conservatories and academia that thinking is equivalent to knowing.  This assumption not only gets in the way of having a joyful learning process, but it’s also a very Western colonialistic and patriarchal way of understanding knowledge. Feelings, passion, eroticism and the bodily experience need to be claimed as a central and valid source of knowledge. 

One example is Steve Coleman state “because Western cultures do not really study rhythm in depth, there is no nomenclature for looking at and analyzing rhythms. The only language people have is the language of music notation, which is very limited, and it’s just how things look on “paper”. That's not good. Because rhythm is movement and it needs to be studied as movement, not as notation.” In such a phrase what I understand is that within Western cultures institutionalized learning, there is no room for learning through the body. Musical learning is a bodily experience full of emotions and passions, that should be a path of joy. Students need teachers that dare to be passionate, to be driven by eros: 

“There is not much passionate teaching or learning taking place in higher education today. Even when students are desperately yearning to be touched by knowledge, professors still fear the challenge, allowing their worries about losing control to override their desires to teach. [...] To restore passion to the classroom or to excite it in classrooms where it has never been, professors must find again the place of eros within ourselves and together allow the mind and body to feel and know desire”.

I would like to close this chapter under one more strong statement by bell hooks: “to call attention to the body is to betray the legacy of repression and denial that has been handed down to us by our professarial elders, who have been usually white and male.”