Improvisation - Oxford Reference PDF

10/2/2019 Improvisation - Oxford Reference
Oxford Reference
Encyclopedia of Aesthetics (2 ed.)

Edited by Michael Kelly
Publisher: Oxford University Press Print Publication Date: 2014

Print ISBN-13: 9780199747108 Published online: 2014
Current Online Version: 2014 eISBN: 9780199747115
Improvisation.
To explore the roles of improvisation in art, this entry comprises three essays:
J I
I E M
The first essay analyzes the aesthetic implications of improvisation and, in turn (at least indirectly), the impact
that improvisation has on aesthetics. The second essay continues and expands this analysis while discussing
jazz music in particular. The final essay analyzes the role of improvisation in experimental music in the twentieth
and twenty-first centuries. For related discussion, see E ;I ;J ; and M .
Overview
To improvise is to do or produce something on the spur of the moment. There is a sense in which all
human action is improvisatory, and in that sense, all art, as the result of human action, has some
improvisatory element.
Beyond that general point, improvisation has a special place in aesthetic theory and in artistic practice.
For a start, improvisation may be assigned an originative role in at least two important senses. Aristotle
makes an art-historical claim, speculating that it was the improvisations of the authors of dithyrambs
and phallic songs that gave birth to poetry and its two proper types, tragedy and comedy.
But improvisation may also be thought of as originative in a more fundamental sense, to the extent that
improvisation is regarded as an anticipatory phase, an indispensable element, or even the primal core
of artistic creative activity. Artists know well the importance of improvisation in their creative endeavors
and this aspect of improvisation has not escaped the attention of philosophers. Aristotle himself
suggests that the prepoetic improvisations of ancient Greece grew out of fundamental and natural
human proclivities—above all, the instinct for imitation, the sense of harmony and rhythm, and the
natural desire to know. R. G. Collingwood, although he does not use the term “improvisation” explicitly,
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captures the sense of its importance for artistic activity when he opposes the essentially expressive
activity he calls “art proper” to “craft,” an activity in which a preconceived result is produced by means
of consciously controlled and directed action. Suppose a sculptor was simply playing with clay,
Collingwood asks, and found the clay under his fingers turning into a little dancing man. Would this not
be not a work of art because it was done without being planned in advance? To the contrary,
Collingwood argues: a planned work may indeed be a work of art, but artistic expression is necessarily
an exploratory activity whose end cannot be foreseen and preconceived.
Of course, the extent to which improvisation may involve consciously controlled and directed action or
distinctions between means and ends and planning and execution is a complex issue. The originative
claim about the role of improvisatory activity with respect to artistic creation thus finds itself taking up
issues, not only in philosophical anthropology, but also in psychology, action theory, and the philosophy
of mind, not to mention the actual conventions and histories of individual artistic genres and practices.
In any case, it is certainly safe to say that improvisation in the arts has seemed to many to feature
certain qualities on which the arts have traditionally placed a high premium: invention, transformation,
expressive freedom, spontaneity, and creativity. And it is not surprising that improvisational activity has
been explicitly highlighted in a wide array of artistic practices, ranging from ancient poetic recitation,
medieval minstrelsy, musical performance in the Baroque era, to modern jazz and blues, Beat poetry,
rap music, folk music, theater, dance, and stand-up comedy.
Artistic improvisation brings something into being, but what that something is and how we are to
understand its mode of becoming are questions of great theoretical interest. Artistic styles and artworks
in a variety of arts can be said to be “improvisatory” insofar as certain artistic features (bold brush
strokes, frequency of embellishment and repetition, freely varying metrical schemes) might bring this or
that aspect of improvised actions to mind. But the most difficult ontological questions are raised by
those artistic practices that explicitly feature extended individual or ensemble improvisational activity,
including improvisatory theater and musical performances of Indian Carnatic ragas, classical Persian
radifs, and most styles of American jazz. In these cases, improvisation can be profitably understood in
relation to prevailing views about artistic production, performance, and presentation. In the case of
much Western classical music practice of the past two hundred years or so, for example, it is not
implausible to distinguish more or less clearly between the stages of composition and performance:
one commonly thinks of the composer’s activity as concerned with creating at least the defining
outlines of the musical work of art and capturing those outlines in the notated score, and one thinks of
the performer as presenting and interpreting that work for an audience. In such a framework, much
hangs on the notion of a “work,” a reasonably well-articulated, enduring thing that, in the minds of
many, figures as the main focus of the composer’s activity, the performer’s interpretive efforts, and the
audience’s proper object of attention. Analogously, one might think of a typical performance of a
scripted play, where the playscript functions as the anchor for actors, directors, and other members of
theatrical groups to present instances of the dramatic work authored by the playwright.
One might understand the activity of improvisation, on the other hand, as a spontaneous activity in
which the improviser simultaneously practices the interdependent functions of composition and
performance. This view raises many interesting questions. It is a point of contention, for example,
whether all improvisations bring works into existence. Clearly, some improvisations are more in the
spirit of embellishments and can legitimately be seen as interpretations of preexisting works whose
themes and patterns provide the organizing structure around which improvisatory activity is focused. In
such cases, one can reasonably appreciate improvisations as if they were primarily performances of a
work to which the twin values of fidelity and creativity would appropriately apply.
But there is no a priori principle governing either what aspects of a work might or might not be
improvised on or how radical improvisations might be within a given domain. Consider the range of
improvisational practice in modern jazz, often thought to be the paradigmatic case of improvisatory art.
One might have thought that one indispensable feature of jazz has been improvisation around more or
less fixed harmonic patterns or structures. It is certainly true that many jazz performances do involve a
clear statement of a melodic theme in the context of an explicit or implied harmonic structure followed
by improvised choruses on “the changes,” that is, the harmonic structure of the piece. In addition, some
harmonic patterns (those in George Gershwin’s “I’ve Got Rhythm,” for example) have become
canonical to the point of being regarded virtually as works themselves. But it must also be remembered
that jazz musicians have improvised on works precisely by reharmonizing them, often in ways that
depart radically from the original. Indeed, the degree of departure from works can become so high that
some jazz improvisations “of” previous works cannot be readily identified as such, even by those
thoroughly immersed in the tradition. One cannot, for example, hum the tune of “My Favorite Things”
behind Coltrane’s famous improvisations on that tune because in his improvisations Coltrane departs
from the harmonic structure of the song, soloing instead on a vamp consisting of two chords, E minor
and E major. There is also, of course, the existence of “free jazz” in which not only does harmonic
patterning cease to be a central structuring principle but so, too, does the normative ideal of obedience
to a preexisting work. To further complicate the ontological issue, one might go so far as to claim that
neither improvisations nor performances themselves qualify as works just insofar as they are activities,
events, or processes, whereas artworks, presumably, are enduring, repeatable things.
This last position, however, rests on a notion of a work that seems both conceptually contestable and
unduly narrow in the face of artistic practice. A more reasonable position would be that, certainly in the
context of artistic improvisation, the notion of a “work” is transformed from something conceived of
primarily as a product, as something made, to something more along the lines of a process, of an
experience, or of something in the making.
Improvisations themselves can be considered as aesthetic objects in their own right, as objects suitable
for aesthetic contemplation, whether the improvisations are live or recorded and whether or not
improvisations are presented or understood as deriving from preexisting works. Experienced audiences
can and do attend to the formal, expressive, and mimetic features of the sounding structures of musical
improvisations, for example, just as they can in the case of performances of previously composed
works. Those familiar with the musical culture and traditions in which improvisations are produced
know that extraordinarily high levels of complex, subtle, and expressive achievement are possible, a
fact to which the improvisations of Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, and Bill Evans, for example, readily
attest.
But one must not lose sight of the fact that improvisations also feature productive activity as such. One
great attraction of improvised performances is precisely the opportunity to witness, as it were, the
shaping activity of the improviser who creates an artistic utterance unmediated by another human
being. It is as though we are able to gain access to the artist’s mind at the moment of artistic creation.
This sense is heightened by the risk and excitement inherent and often evident in spontaneous creative
acts and by the innovation, inventiveness, technical agility, and imagination that such activity demands.
Improviser and audience share in a sense of immediacy. In improvisation, the rough draft is also
necessarily the final product. One has only one go at it, without the luxury of rewriting, erasing,
replaying, and so on. One feels that one’s abilities are far more exposed and obvious to the
experienced audience than is the case for nonimprovisatory arts.
Improvisation also brings into focus the extent to which the exercise of human skills can be an object of
aesthetic appreciation, especially when these skills are exhibited, as it were, in the moment. One sees
this not only in the case of the improvisations of individuals where a performer can display a range of
spontaneous creative and artistic productive activity but also in the case of ensemble improvisation,
especially in theater and music, where skills of social protocol and interactivity among members of the
ensemble are part of what makes artistic improvisation alluring for players and audience alike.
The element of interactivity among members of an improvisatory ensemble is only part of what
contributes to what we might call the social dimension of improvised art. Perhaps in part because it
places such an emphasis on spontaneous production, on the interrelation of intelligence to action in the
moment, individually and in groups, artistic improvisation can stand as a symbol of human freedom.
This dimension of meaning was self-conscious and evident, for example, in the improvised jazz of
African Americans during the tumultuous years of the American civil rights movement in the middle of
the twentieth century.
One might well say then that in improvisation, as perhaps in no other form of art, are the actions and
experience of the artist and those of the audience so thoroughly intermingled. The evaluation of
improvisations must be made within this context and it might not be going too far to suggest that,
insofar as improvisation in art broadens the notion of the “work,” so does it deepen our understanding
of art in general.
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P A. A
Jazz Improvisation
Although jazz music, and particularly jazz improvisation, has as a topic of scholarly analysis covered
some significant ground in recent years, it remains too-little-discussed within the larger field of
aesthetics. This circumstance is regrettable, not only because of the diminished coverage of the arts
that this omission implies, but also because the art of jazz improvisation presents a rather large number
of aesthetic practices that would revise or unsettle a number of prominent aesthetic theories. A few of
these tensions between jazz improvisational practice and aesthetic theory will be discussed here under
seven main headings: (1) improvisation and the definition of a musical work; (2) the relation between
improvisation and language; (3) critical evaluation and creative aspiration in jazz improvisation; (4)
conceptions of intention and execution in improvisational contexts; (5) the power of group-
improvisational practices to cast light on collective intention and group agency; (6) the ethical
dimension of improvisational performance; and (7) the distinctive relation between the player and the
instrument (which will be discussed briefly here in the context of a ventriloquist model).
Improvisation and the Definition of a Musical Work.
It will be helpful to begin by briefly characterizing some of the central improvisational practices in jazz.
Many jazz compositions are written with underlying recurrent harmonic structures (often referred to as
“changes”) on which the performance is constructed, and they are also usually composed with a
melodic line that is played at the beginning and the close of the piece. Although these musical building
materials are written down, they are almost never played as written. First, the harmonic structures will
be voiced by chordal instruments (for example, piano, guitar, vibraphone) differently as each
interpretation of the piece develops; it is extremely unlikely that these structures will be realized exactly
the same way in any two performances (and if they are, this would be cause for aesthetic suspicion,
not congratulation). Second, the melody (often referred to as the “head” of the piece) will rarely, if ever,
be played the same way on any two occasions; the melody as written is itself perennially open to
interpretation, and the interpretive license implicitly granted within this musical culture covers a very
broad range of possibilities. Thus, successful innovative and creative performances depart substantially
from the musical information given in the score in ways idiosyncratic to the individual performer or in
ways stylistically demanded by the genre of the piece, so the improvisational aspect of a jazz
performance extends into the written as well as the unwritten sections of the piece. The field-wide
expectation is that every element of the piece that can be variously expressively interpreted will be; to
play just the notes as written would, in a sense, be speaking the wrong language (that is, conforming to
conventions external to, and thus inappropriate for, the idiom) within an ensemble.
Turning our focus from this initial glimpse at improvisational practice to aesthetic theory, it is undeniably
clear that the problem of the definition of the musical work has been among the most central issues in
musical aesthetics. If the work is not reducible to any particular performance of the work, and if it is the
kind of object that can be given a very large number of interpretations, then it seems that it must in
some sense be an abstract object, a fully articulated mental object, originating in the mind of the
composer, against which all performances, or instantiations, of the work must be judged. According to
this view, often called musical idealism or Platonism, criticism is a matter of the comparison of the
particular sonic event against its ideal progenitor, where the sounded work’s proximity to the imagined
ideal would constitute the sole measure of artistic achievement. This idealist view is a close relative of
the theory of musical works constructed on the type-token distinction derived from the philosophy of C.
S. Peirce; here, the many works are seen as tokens of the single type constituted by the composition.
But again, the token, or the particular performance, would be evaluated in terms of its fidelity to the
type, or the universal, that the token merely instantiates; the work’s identity is given at the abstract level
of the type. Still another definitional theory constructed upon an ontological dualism between work and
performance suggests that the musical work is a sound pattern, exemplified in its performances; here,
the sound pattern plays a role reminiscent of a detailed architectural plan or blueprint as progenitor of,
and exactingly precise guide to the building of, its corresponding material structure.
But even the preceding cursory glance at the nature of jazz compositions, and particularly the
performances of those compositions, renders such theories of musical definition implausible. These
definitional theories—Platonistic, type-token, or fixed sound-pattern conceptions of the musical work—
progress from the realm of the implausible to that of the utterly inapplicable when we move beyond the
“head,” where the melody is creatively presented, to the main body of the piece where the individual
players in the ensemble “take solos,” improvising new melodic lines over the “changes,” the underlying
recurrent harmonic structures. Very frequently, the improvising soloists begin building a solo with
motivic material derived from the head; this could be a melodic or rhythmic fragment taken from the
written melody, or, as often happens, it could be a fragment taken from the melody as played by the
performer on that one occasion. Or it could be the musical atom of a single ascending or descending
interval, where that particular interval is a signature feature of the longer melody from which it is
derived. Frequently, soloists will then investigate the permutational possibilities of these motifs as the
solo unfolds, and usually this melodically integrative material will be supplemented with freely
improvised new material (that is, melodic strains not thematically related to the head), which in turn can
be motivically fragmented and reemployed in turn. That is one of the many ways (there are in fact
countless others, and this in part accounts for the inexhaustibility of the artform) a jazz solo can
develop “organically” or unfold as a melodic analogue of narrative story-line coherence.
It is clear, however, even at this preliminary point that the musical work being undertaken in an
improvised solo is as close (or closer) to composition as it is to a preexisting musical work. To put it
Platonically, these musical practices give us sonic embodiments without the mental ideals behind those
embodiments; to put it in terms of the type-token distinction, one has tokens without types; and to put it
in terms of sound patterns, one may indeed have patterns of sound, but the patterns do not predate the
sounds (so it is as though the architectural plan is transcribed from the existing building rather than vice
versa). Jazz improvisation, as a broad-ranging body of creative practices, constitutes a powerful
challenge to a good deal of music-definitional theory that has still not been wholly and satisfactorily
met. And there remains the sense that this expansive network of creative improvisational practices
simply overwhelms the rather staid theoretical options derived from (and to varying degrees at home
with) other musical idioms. Indeed, one embedded presupposition beneath some work-definitional
theories is that a kind of invariance is a precondition for explanatory adequacy; it is precisely a practice-
led inquiry into improvisational jazz (engendering a respect for a kind of Heraclitean flux at the level of
the work) that could unearth, unsettle, and free us from this narrow presupposition that can all too
easily encourage a procrustean fitting of the particular practices to the general theory.
The Relation between Improvisation and Language.
Since much speech is undeniably improvisatory in nature, and since music, and particularly
improvisatory music, is often construed as a kind of language, this relationship seems clearly to warrant
investigation. Here, too, the on-the-ground practices of musical improvisation present further facts
interestingly at odds with much received opinion.
Despite the revolutionary work of Ludwig Wittgenstein in the philosophy of language in the mid-
twentieth century, linguistic dualism is still a powerfully attractive conception of linguistic meaning to
many; that is, for every outward or physical utterance there is thought to be an inner mental
predecessor to that utterance of a nonlinguistic nature, which gives that particular utterance its
meaning. Such alleged pre-linguistic ideas are thought to predate the utterance just as Platonic
musical-ideational works allegedly predate their outward expressions in sound. Thus, linguistic dualism
is closely related to its aesthetic counterpart, and just as linguistic dualists believe we need to look
behind the utterance for its inner meaning, so musical dualists believe we need to look behind the
melody for its meaning. The actual embodied artistic labors, in context, of jazz improvisers quickly
reveal the misleading nature of this dualistic conception of musical meaning (or, to put it in another of a
number of possible ways, those labors reveal the instructive impossibility of tracing from tokens back
behind those tokens to their alleged predecessor type). As in any improvisatory activity, in jazz soloing
one very frequently discovers in midstream where one “wants to go”: that is, the melodic trajectory, or
the developmental impetus of a motif, reveals itself during a performance to the performer (we will
return to this subject in the final section below). This plain fact appears strange and counterintuitive
only to those who attend more closely to the dictates of dualistic theory than to the facts of musical
practice; interestingly, this fact concerning midstream discoveries of the music’s internally generated
trajectory becomes by contrast intuitively plausible as soon as one attends more closely to the above-
mentioned improvisatory nature of conversations and of the frequently improvised specific linguistic
utterances contained within them. What Wittgenstein called a “picture,” that is, a conceptual model or
template that is laid down in advance of the inquiry that (perhaps unwittingly) directs the subsequent
investigation, can, as he put it, “hold us captive.”
Indeed, it might be suggested that listeners find jazz improvisation familiar in an intuitively deep way
precisely because they already possess, and use extensively, a parallel improvisatory capacity in
language. Highly skilled musical improvisers—Sonny Rollins’s extended improvisations constitute one
case in point—are often extraordinarily attentive improvisers, finely attending to the nuances of
directional significance, to the developmental implications of the musical or thematic logic as it unfolds
in the music as they are making it. Here, musical creation is contemporaneous with critical discovery;
that is to say, as a soloist is creating a musical structure, that soloist is simultaneously functioning as an
analytic critic of that structure. So if we move to the concept that ties music and language together at
the deepest level, that is, if we are to speak of meaning in these contexts, then it becomes apparent
(given a healthy respect for the details of these musical practices and a healthy disrespect for the
mischaracterizations of those practices that are motivated by over-unifying theory) that the meanings of
improvisational phrases are discovered and attended to as (and just after) they are created, and not—
as the dualistic conception appropriated from linguistic dualism would suggest—before.
In this way then jazz improvisation in fact rather severely destabilizes a familiar conception of musical
meaning that has been generated by a prior conception of linguistic meaning, and there is—once we
are conceptually enabled to entertain the possibility—every reason to believe that a philosophical
inquiry into the details of improvisation could also shed new light on the nature of linguistic meaning
and of interaction in speech. We may find that we better understand one aspect of linguistic creativity
and interaction by first looking at what took place at the highest artistic moments of, say, the Bill Evans
Trio (a sort of living, breathing, interactive musical organism) than we understand that trio by looking at
language (or, perhaps more likely, coming to it with nested presuppositions concerning the nature of
language) first.
Critical Evaluation and Creative Aspiration in Jazz Improvisation.
Several problems emerge from the previous sections. If we first inquire into the evaluational “logic” of
our critical judgments of particular improvisational performances, we see at once that criticism can
rarely if ever itself be dualistic in structure; that is, it cannot proceed in terms of the comparison of the
sonic event with an ideal as indicated by a score or any other extramusical type. The standard is not a
matter of the degree of correspondence to an ideal where that ideal has autonomous existence prior to
the performance. It may however be true that there are cases that initially appear to approximate
dualistic criticism, as in the critical evaluation of new performances of Duke Ellington’s or Count Basie’s
big-band arrangements. But in such cases, first, the comparison is made not to an abstract type or
score, but to the recordings of the original sonic events; second, the improvised solos in these
neoclassical performances significantly and instructively blur the correspondence between score and
sound as discussed above. Despite the impossibility of modeling critical evaluation in dualistic terms,
however, there certainly are critical standards that are employed in the evaluation of jazz
improvisations, but such standards are extremely resistant (and interestingly so) to generalization or
summarization; they are in any case not imaginary ideals. Here, the historical dimension of this art form
comes to the fore: very frequently, (1) the levels of technical facility, (2) improvisational
resourcefulness, (3) imaginative reach, (4) improvisational-compositional ability conjoined to
spontaneous analytic attentiveness, (5) capacities to maintain a sense of form and organic growth
within an improvised solo, (6) ranges of tonal and dynamic shadings, nuances of attack and vibrato,
and so forth, and (7) the employment of vocalization and speech patterns instrumentally (we will return
to this shortly), along with countless other critical criteria, will be employed in making historically
informed judgments in terms of the standards of a given instrument.
There is, in fact, an instructive sense in which these critical standards are doubly resistant to
generalization: it is not just that these criteria are numerous and of manifold kinds; it is also true that
although the great performers in the history of improvisation frequently display many or all of these
critical excellences, beyond a certain level of performance it is often considered a failing rather than an
achievement to sound to too great an extent like, for example, John Coltrane or Sonny Stitt, Miles
Davis or Clifford Brown, Charlie Christian or Django Reinhardt. A fundamental creative aspiration in
jazz is thus very often to find one’s own improvisational voice, but to do it in a way that at once both
does and does not acknowledge precedent: the aspiration, more precisely, is often to find a style that is
both unique and simultaneously deeply historically rooted. Aesthetic theory has labored extensively on
the problem of critical evaluation and evaluative canons; it is clear that when it turns to the criticism of
jazz improvisation as a philosophical problem, it must, in a fashion that is seemingly paradoxical, allow
for a kind of critical standard that is simultaneously historical and sui generis, simultaneously
generalizable in terms of the rubrics of evaluation that emerge from established traditions and canons
of performance and yet unique in their nuanced recognition of particularity (there is a direct analogy to
ethical judgment here). At the highest levels of achievement, the jazz artist develops the ability to
speak with a uniquely original voice within a language everyone shares; at those levels this is done in a
way that is historically rooted in, but not entirely predictable by, established precedent. The model of
evaluative comparison to an ideal misses far more than it captures in this artform; to supplant this
model with a way of seeing this art that acknowledges creativity within performance captures far more
than it misses.
Intention and Execution in Improvisational Contexts.
Jazz improvisation can be helpfully connected to the philosophy of mind. The improvising soloist is, to
be sure, engaged in intentional activity, but the role that intention plays within the various contexts of
this activity is every bit as complicated as the role played by intention in literary aesthetics. For
example, a saxophonist might well intend to play a passage within an improvised solo exactly as
Charlie Parker played it (a common practice called “quoting”), and in doing so simultaneously intend to
acknowledge the master’s insight at that juncture, intend to entertain the Parker connoisseurs in the
audience, and intend to sound, for a fleeting moment, unlike himself (or, alternatively, to sound like
himself in showing the imaginative capacity to quote passages that lie beyond the reach of his
internally contained or nonimitative style). This improviser may well also expand or alter the harmonic
significance of the melodic line that he has, until the quotation, been playing, but while the Parker
quotation itself achieves this expanded significance, it may be the farthest thing from his mind. Yet, it is
insufficiently nuanced to say that because the expanded significance was not preconceived, it was a
mistake. It decidedly was not, and this fleeting moment of expanded harmonic significance is surely
acceptable as one aspect of the performance in the critical description of this solo.
Thus, like much-investigated literary cases, the meaning of the phrase is not circumscribed wholly by
authorial (or player’s) intention. On a lower level of intentional analysis, the improviser might intend to
play a C-natural but accidentally play a C-sharp; here, there may be in use a clear criterion of one-to-
one correspondence between intention and execution, but such a simple conception of intentional
activity as a dualistic match of outward execution to inner intention applies only to the most rudimentary
cases of missed notes. Suffice to say for the present that when aesthetic theory moves fully into the
area of improvisational intention, it will need a vastly more sophisticated—and multifaceted—
conception of intentional activity than that offered by the conventional twin categories of imaginative
preconception and technical execution. And beyond this intentional problem, it seems likely that the
very nature of musical thought, of what we might call presonic imagination, will be illuminated by an
investigation into improvisational thought; as indicated above, we could certainly stand to be
substantially clearer than we are at present about the relations between composition (meaning the very
large number of musical practices that are encompassed by that generic term) and improvisation.
Indeed, it is arguable that all composition has, if in a restricted sense, its genesis in improvisation, and
it seems undeniable that one of the central virtues of improvisation is that it provides access to musical
thought directly and immediately. In this sense one could say that jazz improvisation is an art that
places not only the products of creative work before the audience; rather, pulling aside a veil, both the
conditions and the enactments of that creativity are themselves put on stage.
Improvisation, Collective Intention, and Group Agency.
Philosophers of mind and action have in recent years focused on the possibility of a group of persons
engaging in a distinctive kind of collectively intended action that cannot be reduced to the sum total of
the individual intentions combined. The evolving intentional content (evolving, for our purposes, within
the context of a live performance) of an ensemble is mutually inflected, and more strongly in some
cases mutually constitutive, so that a given player cannot autonomously know what he or she intends
either (1) in advance of the interactive performance or (2) independently of the emergent intentions-in-
action of other players. Collective intention of this shared kind is worked out within the span of its
enactment, so that the improvised work, the performed piece that emerges within that span, will be
unique to that performance. What the focus on collective intention will allow, once fully investigated, will
be a deeper understanding of the special kind of creative musical work that is undertaken in
improvisational ensembles, where autonomous and self-contained intention moves aside in order to let
the player “de-individuate” into a larger collective force, and where we see more clearly a broadened
taxonomy of intentional action. This allows into consideration action of a kind that is still fully intentional,
but without thereby presuming it to be wholly temporally preconceived action. The fuller consideration
of this way of seeing collective improvisation will include the examination within jazz improvisation of
the subordination of individual intentions to joint agency, the cross-constitution of intentional content, for
example, the pianist closely and exactingly listening to, and then gently supporting, then prodding, then
commenting upon, then sequencing the ideas of, then reharmonizing the presumed harmonic
underpinning of, then sequencing the rhythmic figures of, then dynamically shaping the overall
development of, the saxophone player’s improvised solo.
This entire focus on group action can be linked to competing ways of seeing human selfhood: the
philosophical picture of a self-contained, hermetically sealed Cartesian consciousness would make
collective intention of this kind seem metaphysically impossible from the outset; by contrast, a
conception of a human self as a relationally enmeshed, contextually emergent being would make
mutually interactive collective intention seem far more plausible. It has also been suggested that the
focus on collective intention can show one more way in which jazz improvisation is (if nonobviously) a
representational artform: the suggestion is that the spontaneously interactive, relationally embedded,
intentionally interconnected lives we lead are reflected in the mirror of this music.
A development in the philosophy of language, called semantic externalism, investigates the ways in
which the content of language can be external to the mind of the speaker, so that the philosophical
picture of internal hermetic containment is here again—but now in terms of semantic content—
challenged. This can be applied to group agency (as one can see from the immediately preceding) and
particularly to group attention: just as not any single speaker can be fully cognizant of all aspects of a
given utterance or conversational exchange, so no single speaker can be fully aware of, and focused
on, every aspect of an improvisational musical exchange. Yet with a distribution of labor, all aspects,
through division by subsets across players, can be attended to, acknowledged, and interactively
integrated, thus preserving overall coherence. One can usefully think here of a spotlight model: any
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one spotlight will leave many areas of a stage dark, but with as many or more spotlights than areas, all
areas can, in a distributed fashion, be illuminated. And part of the mastery of improvisational interaction
can then be described in terms of knowing which aspects to spotlight in any given passage and what to
do with what is therein spotlighted. The mimetic dimension of such shared undertakings has also been
noted: no less than mutual human understanding itself is supported by such distributions of, and
subsequent interactions with, forms of attention, and this too is made visible in the mirror of improvised
jazz.
The Ethical Dimension of Improvisational Performance.
Although this issue has not to date been sufficiently examined, it becomes clear upon a little reflection
that ethical considerations manifest themselves throughout the multiform practices of jazz
improvisation. For reasons mentioned in the preceding, it will be evident that the obligation to listen,
carefully and constructively, with a highly trained ear, is paramount to successful group performance.
Performers and listeners coming to the art of jazz improvisation for the first time can easily, and
understandably, miss the central importance of this element of jazz. In ensemble music that is
conducted, for example, a player has an obligation to master the part and play it well, to watch and play
from the conductor’s gestures, and to listen to the relation between that player’s part and the section
(for example, strings, brass, and percussion) in which he or she plays, and to the relation of that
section to the whole. In the improvising ensemble, one is called upon to listen, here again closely, but
in a differently focused way. Absent a conductor and predetermined parts, the player has to maintain a
spontaneous resourcefulness that includes at its center a creative agility and unpredictable
responsiveness. That can only take place, at the high levels of achievement in the artform, with the
intricately nested abilities players abbreviate as “chops,” that is, with the set of skills that intertwine
technique, deep musicianship, mastery of the underlying harmonic, melodic, and rhythmic
vocabularies, and a developed individual style with “big ears,” that is, the capacity to identify in the
moment all the musical materials that are presented by other players in the ensemble and to react
appropriately to them.
This creatively engaged sense of listening can carry an obligation to track over time a developing motif
and to imaginatively hear in the mind’s ear its potentialities, or an obligation to keep track of the played
background against which a present thematic gesture stands or from which it evolves. As in moral life,
the acknowledgment of the autonomy of another may emerge as significant when providing improvised
accompaniment support for that player: one wants to see where they are melodically and what they are
implying harmonically, without in a musical sense smothering them, or following so closely that what is
intended to sound as a challenging or tension-producing harmonically significant melodic line is
transformed into a melodic line that entirely fits (and thus generates no tension) within the improvised
accompanying harmony. Also, from the accompanist’s point of view, one has an obligation to maintain
within the performance a vigilant awareness of the long-form evolution of an improvised solo; to hear
each momentary phrase as just that, that is, as one mere brief and detached episode followed by
another, is no more to understand an accomplished player’s progress than a parallel episodic
perception of a person’s life would yield genuine human understanding. And the soloist has an
obligation to be aware of, and to respond to, the attentiveness, the energy, the nuanced decisions, and
the inter-intentional content of the accompanists, and to keep track of the pacing, duration, and time-
consumption of his or her improvised solo. These ethical matters in music directly parallel those in
human conversation: “talking over” another person never preserves the subtle values inherent in talking
with another person.
One can, and probably should, think of speaking in clichés as a form of inattentive dismissiveness: one
is not really listening, and thus one is not genuinely engaged in a way that manifests sensitivity and that
can often generate insight. Precisely the same is true in improvisational playing, and one has a musical
duty to avoid cliché, to press into more difficult and demanding ways of addressing a musical
challenge, and to do so in a way that strives for originality and for insight. Such musical insight can be
shown in spontaneous invention, in seeing a new connection, a new way through a harmonic
sequence, a new permutation of a melodic fragment, a new cross- or polyrhythm, or many other things.
The nonchalant ease of well-worn cliché is the enemy of all of these values, and accomplished
improvisers show a habituated resourcefulness on a nightly basis that allows them to transcend this
kind of compromised or hampered invention. It is, in brief, to respond to what the situation calls for. Or
to make the ethical imperative explicit: it is to play as one should.
The Instrumental Ventriloquist.
A new way of seeing a number of aspects of artistic performance and creativity has been ushered in
recently by a ventriloquist model; for present considerations, this would bring to the fore the
fundamental observation that a player makes an instrument, in a distinctive sense, speak. This
approach is striking for two reasons functioning together: first, the most basic ontological distinction
between the animate ventriloquist and the inanimate dummy is placed before us, so that we can marvel
at the illusion of animate presence in the inanimate. But second, and at the same time, it shows in
sharp focus the extent to which a set of artistic materials, once “enlivened” through authorial action, can
and do “talk back,” that is, we can see the distinctive way in which materials can seem (as we
revealingly say) to take on a life of their own. What we can come to realize here holds central
significance for the understanding of instrumental improvisation. The spectacle that the ventriloquist
puts before us is precisely that of one metaphysical kind of entity animating, or in a sense giving life to,
an entity of a different metaphysical kind. And that is the picture or the conceptual model that has been
bequeathed to us from the broadly Cartesian tradition, where the inner intangible entity, itself only
contingently embodied, moves the outer physical entity through the manipulation of hidden pulleys and
levers. Although this quickly becomes a complex issue, we can see, by comparing ourselves to the
ventriloquist’s spectacle, that our self-controlling intentional experience is on a phenomenological level
nothing like that. And we see at the same time that, rather than operating an instrument at a distance—
indeed a metaphysical distance—the relation between player and instrument is nothing like that.
The ventriloquist develops, in a larger frame of reference, the style, or indeed the character, of the
dummy—a persona emerges, and then develops, over time. (The leading ventriloquist Edgar Bergen’s
Charlie McCarthy is perhaps the best case.) And once this persona fully emerges (just as a kind of
persona of an instrument will emerge in the hands of a gifted improvisational performer), then in a
smaller frame—moment to moment, passage to passage, exchange to exchange—what is and is not
possible for the dummy to “say” will be constrained within a set of stylistic and expressive limits. The
point here is that, just as not anything is sayable by the ventriloquist in the voice of the dummy, the
player will also listen intently to where the music is going, what the instrument is saying, and will
respond, in a kind of Bergenesque dialogue, to that. In a sense (a sense that involves stylistic limits,
the reach of an expressive style, the development of thematic continuity, and the sense of what is and
is not possible in terms of what can coherently come next given what has already happened—all of
which are issues that are central to the development of a player’s improvisational style), the dummy,
like the instrument, becomes (if somewhat unexpectedly) independent. It makes its own demands
within the delimited context of the present “conversational” exchange. Although it may well sound
strange to say (especially given Cartesian presuppositions), that is not exactly inanimate lifelessness in
a blunt or generic way. But nor is it animate: an instrument does not play itself any more than a dummy
actually speaks. The truth of the matter is that an intricate, long-developed, layered, and often complex
relationship is formed with an improviser’s instrument (just in the sense that Bergen had, indeed, a
relationship with McCarthy that did not reduce without remainder to the pulling of hidden levers).
Again, the player, as we commonly say, makes the instrument speak: without a player, it obviously
remains mute. (But we do say: “It just sits there,” as though an animate presence is not now moving or
engaging.) Yet when brought into the context of musical discourse, it lets its presence, its character—
indeed its distinctive voice—be known. (Players not infrequently speak of stepping through into a state
of musical grace or of “being in the zone,” where, as it is in such cases frequently put, “the music
played itself.”) This is probably true in any musical idiom, but it is very much heightened in the art of
jazz improvisation, precisely because the preconception of what is going to be “said” is not in place, the
precise content of (what is seen as) the exchange is not predetermined. This thus gives the analogue
to Charlie McCarthy—the instrument—its due freedom. And—here is another way in which the
ventriloquism model is apt—this is true of our conversational interaction as well: we do not sit behind
the scenes in our Cartesian interiors, fully mentally pre-ordaining what we will say in the heat of an
enlivening conversation. On that dualistic model, speech would be an outward performance of a
previous inner mental “score.” In truth, we are not reciting, but spontaneously interacting; a close study
of the real phenomenology of jazz improvisation brings this out from beneath what may be layers of
embedded philosophical presupposition. And in bringing such matters out, it is thus not only philosophy
that can bring light to the practices of jazz improvisation, but also the reverse: jazz improvisation,
listened to closely, can help bring conceptual clarity and critical substance to some areas of philosophy.
Be all that as it may, “improvisation” is a word that encompasses a very broad range of musical deeds,
and the full elucidation of its many multiform senses, as it appears in problems of musical definition, in
analogies with language, in critical evaluation, in problems of musical intention, in collective action, in
the context of ethical considerations, in making an instrument speak, and in further issues beyond
those mentioned here, is one of the philosophical achievements to which we might look forward within
the larger field of aesthetics.
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G L. H
Improvisation and Experimental Music
To be sure, constructing a definition of improvisation was once considered a relatively straightforward

matter. The Oxford Dictionary of Music’s pithy definition was typical, framing improvisation as a
performance conducted “according to the inventive whim of the moment, i.e. without a written or printed
score, and not from memory.” This definition draws implicitly upon an ideologically driven dialectic
between improvisation and composition in Western classical music history and culture, in which
improvisation, particularly since the eighteenth century, has been compared with the practice of
composition, with clear prejudices in favor of the latter practice’s presumed advantages in creating
unity and coherence in musical utterance. This disapprobation was articulated concomitantly with the
near disappearance of expertise in improvisation in classical music by the turn of the twentieth century,
even if Ferruccio Busoni, as late as 1907, was advocating improvisation as a path to the music of the
future in his “Sketch of a New Aesthetic of Music,” declaring that “notation is to improvisation as the
portrait to the living model.”
Composer Michael Nyman’s influential 1999 book, Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond, drew
explicitly upon these earlier Western cultural histories in moving to define the peculiarly twentieth-
century practice of experimental music. Like many other texts from this period, Nyman’s work
constructs the term as portraying a particular group of white male American composers who came to
prominence in the 1950s and 1960s—John Cage, Christian Wolff, Earle Brown, Morton Feldman, La
Monte Young, Alvin Lucier, Terry Riley, Cornelius Cardew, and Steve Reich, among others—as the
most radical aesthetic heirs to the classical Western tradition, artists who posed trenchant aesthetic
alternatives to a comparatively decadent modernist European avant-garde of Stockhausen, Boulez,
Birtwistle, Berio, Xenakis, and so forth.
Nyman bases his definition of experimental music on Cage’s understanding of the experimental act as
“an act the outcome of which is unknown.” From that point, the musicologically minded object of the
book’s discourse is to identify characteristics of experimental music that fulfill that requirement—on
Nyman’s view, the use by experimental composers of open forms and situations; preference for
processes and tasks rather than products; performer choice and acceptance of environmental and/or
interactional chance and contingency; valorization of the unique and spontaneous moment; and a
redefinition of the ontology of composition as no longer necessarily embodying a dialectic with notation.
All of these aspects of experimental music practice seem compatible with mid-twentieth-century
practices of improvisation that emerged alongside of or even prior to the 1950s advent of
experimentalism in music. However, twentieth-century Western experimentalists often tended toward a
diametrically opposed viewpoint. The European composer Lukas Foss, an early proponent of
experimental improvisation who later abandoned the practice, concluded that in improvisation, “one
plays what one already knows,” a position sharply at variance with the experience of the saxophonist
Steve Lacy, who seemed to echo the Cageian definition with his observation that in improvisation “you
have all your years of preparation and all your sensibilities and your prepared means but it is a leap
into the unknown.” Cage’s own fraught relationship with improvisation and, in particular, his frequent
public disapprobation of the practice during his lifetime, including his late-career statements that
“improvisation is generally playing what you know” and “doesn’t lead you into a new experience,” was
offered by generations of music critics and historians as a pretext for alienating the practice of
improvisation from the experimental corpus.
But improvisation, particularly in the United States can be seen as part of experimentalism from its very
advent in the 1950s, if we consider improvisation and experimental music not as a set of musical
processes and practices, but as sociomusical locations that, as musicologist Benjamin Piekut
maintains, represent historical, social, linguistic, and technological processes that have been fabricated
through a network of discourses, practices, and institutions. In doing so, we can see that much of what
remains of improvisation’s continued fraught status in music histories emerges in response to the
worldwide influence of jazz, which by the 1950s had crossed boundaries of geography, class, race,
language, and ethnicity (if not gender) in ways that led to a perception of the genre as a rival to
Western classical music. Indeed, as Piekut remarks, “Supporters of American experimentalism have
expended the most energy mapping two antigroups: the European avant-garde and U.S. jazz. In the
latter case, we have seen less a mapping than an inscription: ‘terra incognita.’ Don’t go there!” But if we
do “go there,” we find that in the wake of bebop’s success in cementing jazz’s claim to art music status,
we can bring multiple strains of twentieth-century experimental music making together in terms of their
common commitment to an improvisative aesthetic. As part of what Daniel Belgrad (1998) called a
“culture of spontaneity,” a 1950s improvisative ethos was inspiring explorations in film, literature, visual
art, theater, photography, and dance.
At this moment, American composers such as Cage, Wolff, Brown, and Feldman became influential for
their experiments with open forms and more personally expressive systems of notation, designating
salient aspects of a composition as performer or environment supplied rather than composer specified.
Early Cage even deployed “considered improvisation” in his compositions, but later Cage avoided it as
too related to individual psychology, taste, and the sonic signification of history and memory. Cage and
Feldman became very critical of jazz, avoiding overt association with it, while Wolff and Brown (a
former jazz trumpeter) were less distanced from this branch of American music. Brown later declared
explicitly that he was working with improvisational forms, and he and Wolff were at times mildly critical
of those among their circle of colleagues who crafted more or less rigorously composed secondary
scores as realizations of indeterminate works, rather than simply exploring spontaneous performance
as a component of the musical experience.
Proceeding from Brown’s pioneering work, graphic notation became one pathway linking the practices
of improvisation and indeterminacy, showing that Cage’s early musing that “composing’s one thing,
performing’s another, listening’s a third. What can they have to do with one another?” appeared to
describe improvisation rather well. Eventually, improvisation, in concept and practice, became identified
with an expansion of the meaning of experimental music, around the same moment as the first stirrings
of the free jazz and extended collective improvisations of Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler, Cecil Taylor,
Sun Ra, John Coltrane, and other African American musicians of the early 1960s. Free jazz became
widely viewed, in Europe and the United States, as posing sonic challenges to racism and the social
and economic order generally.
A later generation of American experimentalists, such as Pauline Oliveros, Larry Austin, and Foss, also
began exploring free improvisation, often declaring a particular concern with separating their music
from overt association with what they saw as jazz’s conventions. As early as 1955, Foss organized a
group devoted to “nonjazz” group improvisation, and Austin, relating his experiences with group
improvisation in the early 1960s, describes his group as having “consciously ruled out any overt jazz
expression.” In fact, a number of the early postwar European and Euro-American free improvisers had
been jazz musicians who sought to transform their practice, often by actively expunging the jazz
elements in particular. The British improvisers who formed the free improvisation group AMM self-
critiqued the “very emulative style of American jazz” that they had been performing before beginning
their extensive association with British composer Cornelius Cardew, whose graphic notation book
Treatise (1963–1967), composed prior to that association, explicitly encouraged improvisation.
Cardew’s text scores embraced a communitarianism that culminated in works such as The Great
Learning (1968–1971) and the formation of the Scratch Orchestra, a highly influential
ensemble/collective founded with Howard Skempton in 1969, as well as his work with AMM.
Oliveros, a central figure at the San Francisco Tape Music Center, formed a free improvisation group
with Riley and Loren Rush in 1958. Around the same time, the Italian composer Giacinto Scelsi, who
like Cage was profoundly influenced by Asian music, was using transcriptions of recorded group
improvisations he and others created in his home as the foundation for such groundbreaking works as
the Canti del Capricorno with vocalist Michiko Hirayama. In the mid-1960s, the advent of minimalism
proper was attended by the soprano saxophone improvisations of Riley and La Monte Young, both of
whom studied with the Hindustani classical singer Pandit Pran Nath. In Europe, the Fluxus art
movement called upon improvisation as the animating feature of many works such as Benjamin
Patterson’s whimsical Paper Piece (1960), in which bits of paper were systematically exploited for their
sonic possibilities, and Philip Corner’s notorious Piano Activities (1962), at whose premiere an old
piano was sawed in half.
Around the same moment, European musicians such as Willem Breuker, Misha Mengelberg, and Han
Bennink in the Netherlands; Fred van Hove in Belgium; Albert Mangelsdorff, Manfred Schoof,
Alexander von Schlippenbach, Peter Brötzmann, Karlhanns Berger, and Gunter Hampel in Germany;
and John Stevens, Trevor Watts, Paul Rutherford, Derek Bailey, Tony Oxley, Barry Guy, Kenny
Wheeler, and Evan Parker in England, combined extensions, ironic revisions, and outright rejections of
American jazz styles with a self-conscious articulation of historical and cultural difference. These
European musicians were widely credited with the development of a more open conception of “free
improvisation” that was generally acknowledged in Europe to have broken away from American stylistic
directions and jazz signifiers. Borrowing from a critically important event in nineteenth-century
American history, the end of chattel slavery, in 1977 Joachim Ernst Berendt called this declaration of
difference and independence “The Emancipation,” a term that has entered the general lexicon of
German jazz historiography.
Improvised music making was becoming widely viewed as symbolic of a dynamic new approach to
social order that would employ spontaneity to unlock the potential of individuals and to combat
oppression by hegemonic political and cultural systems. In “free improvisation,” the primary work was
often as much critical and political as aesthetic—not how freedom counters constraint, but how
freedom may be achieved, practiced, and maintained in the face of power. Free improvisation, whether
in art or in life, was not merely symbolic of these issues, or a simulation of them, but an actu-al
confrontation with them—what Muhal Richard Abrams once called “a human response to necessity.”
Classically trained violinist Malcolm Goldstein, an early proponent of free improvisation in New York’s
downtown experimentalist movements of the 1960s, discussed this and other implications of the
relationship of improvisation to cultural, political, and social issues in his self-published 1988 book
Sounding the Full Circle.
A number of other improvisation initiatives in Europe appeared around the time of the events of May
1968. Musica Electronica Viva, founded in Rome by pianist Alvin Curran, electronic improviser Richard
Teitelbaum, trombonist Garrett List, pianist Frederic Rzewski, and several others, all had close
associations with Cage, but their ideas about group improvisation parted company with Cage’s views,
producing works such as Zuppa (1968) in which, as with Fluxus and the Living Theatre, active
participation of the audience was encouraged. In 1969, composer-instrumentalists, clarinetist Michel
Portal, trombonist Vinko Globokar, pianist Carlos Roqué Alsina, and percussionist Jean-Pierre Drouet
formed the free improvisation group New Phonic Art, as an implicit challenge to what they saw as the
norms of contemporary classical music and the society that supported it. The group was criticized by
no less a personage than composer Luciano Berio, who said regarding the group’s work that
“improvisation presents a problem in that there’s no true unanimity of discourse among the participants,
only, once in a while, a unity of behavior.”
Composers such as Foss abandoned the practice of improvisation early on. Precisely reversing
Busoni’s turn-of-the-century defense of the practice, Foss declared in 1962 that improvisation “relates
to composition much in the way that the sketch relates to the finished work of art.” Later ensembles in
the academic realm included the ensemble KIVA (violinist Mary Oliver, trombonist John Silber, and
percussionist Jean-Charles François) at the University of California’s Center for Music Experiment in
San Diego, where Oliveros worked for a number of years. Oliveros built on her early work at the Tape
Music Center to develop her improvisative practices, as well as her personally developed practice of
Deep Listening, in pan-stylistic and intercultural directions that encompassed text-scores, writings,
performances, and even explorations of telepathy.
Many forays into improvisation in experimental music incorporated technology. Around 1965,
saxophonist Eddie Harris was seriously experimenting, in concert and on records, with a new
generation of real-time music technologies, forging a trenchant connection between advanced
electronic music techniques, extended acoustic instrumental technique, and down-home funk that
presaged trumpeter Miles Davis’s better-known forays of the late 1960s and after. The 1970s advent of
relatively small, portable minicomputers and microcomputers made live, interactive computer music a
practical possibility, and during the 1970s and 1980s, composer-performers such as Joel Chadabe,
Salvatore Martirano, David Behrman, David Rosenboom, and the California Bay Area scene
surrounding the League of Automatic Music Composers (Jim Horton, John Bischoff, Rich Gold, Tim
Perkis, Mark Trayle, and others) began creating computer music machines that interacted with each
other and human musicians to create music collectively, blurring the boundaries between improvisation
(in the traditional sense of purposive human activity) and machine interactivity. By the 1990s,
turntablism, as pioneered by artist such as Grandmaster Flash, Afrika Bambaataa, DJ Kool Herc, and
Grand Wizard Theodore, was a form of experimentalism that became a primary medium for
improvisation, not only in hip hop, but also in other experimental music scenes, with the work of
Christian Marclay, DJ Spooky, and Marina Rosenfeld. “Ambient” forms emergent in the late 1990s, like
Japanese Onkyo, with musicians such as Sachiko M, Toshimaru Nakamura, and Otomo Yoshihide
deploying silence and extreme noise in equal measure.
By the end of the 1970s, the African American experimental musicians’ collective known as the
Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), founded in Chicago in 1965, with
composers such as Anthony Braxton, Amina Claudine Myers, Abrams, and the members of the Art
Ensemble of Chicago, was creating extended-form works that combined improvisation and
composition, extended technique and instrumentation, intermedia, and invented acoustic instruments.
Joseph Jarman even presented a concert with Cage in 1966. In the wake of the civil rights and black
power movements, academic music programs at universities such as Wesleyan brought musicians like
saxophonist and free-jazz pioneer Marion Brown, who acted as a graduate student assistant, to interact
with graduate students in ethnomusicology, and with professors such as Nigerian drummer Abraham
Adzenyah, and mrdangam performers Ramnad Raghavan and T. Ranganathan. The Creative Music
Studio, founded by the German vibraphonist Karlhanns Berger and his spouse Ingrid Sertso in the
early 1970s in the forests near Woodstock, New York, brought together representatives of the Beats
such as Allen Ginsberg, members of the AACM such as Braxton and Roscoe Mitchell, pioneers of
experimental 1960s jazz such as Ornette Coleman and trumpeter Don Cherry, and experimental
American classical composers and performers such as Cage, Maryanne Amacher, and Rzewski. A
crucial part of Creative Music Studio pedagogy and performance drew upon the importance of
improvisation to many traditions of music around the world, and performers from Asian and African
musical traditions, such as the Zen practitioner and shakuhachi performer Watazumi-doso, came
together with American improvisors to create a new kind of intercultural music performance think tank
and pedagogical site.
Beginning in 1977, members of a second generation of European free improvisors, headed by

bassoonist Lindsay Cooper, vocalist Maggie Nicols, trumpeter Corine Liensol, cellist Georgie (later
anthropologist Georgina) Born, pianist Irene Schweizer, and singer-saxophonist (and later filmmaker)
Sally Potter formed the Feminist Improvising Group, taking up the challenge posed by the fact that free
improvisation’s presence as a predominately white male community (an issue by no means limited to
the European improvisation community) radically undercut the music’s claims to progressive societal
critique. In 1980s Quebec, a “musique actuelle” scene developed among Francophone musicians such
as Jean Derome, Joane Hetu, and Danielle Palardy-Roger, incorporating practices of antivirtuosity that
French musicologist Sophie Stevance called “performance contre competence.” A later California
collective, Trummerflora, drew upon the energies of San Diego–based experimental musicians and
filmmakers, such as Hans Fjellestad, Ellen Weller, Marcelo Radulovich, Marcos Fernandes, and
Damon Holzborn, to forge creative connections with electronic music improvisors such as Tijuana’s
Nor-Tec Collective. Another Los Angeles avant-garde improvisation scene included Vinny Golia, Nels
Cline (who later joined the rock band Wilco), Alex Cline, and G. E. Stinson.
In the 1980s, improvisation had become as much a collective art as a site for soloistic virtuosity.
Saxophonist John Zorn; guitarists Fred Frith, Eugene Chadbourne, and Elliott Sharp; vocalist Shelley
Hirsch; pianist Wayne Horvitz; and electronic improvisor Bob Ostertag, among others, created hybrids
of jazz, rock, country, klezmer, and many other forms of American and European music, oriented
toward timbre, extended instrumental and electronic technique, and noise elements, in lieu of melodic
and harmonic structure. Coming out of the legacy of 1960s free jazz, steady beats had long been
basically abandoned. In the late 1980s, a number of these musicians, including Zorn, Hirsch, Sharp,
Anthony Coleman, David Krakauer, Gary Lucas, and Annie Gosfield, rose to prominence in what
became known as a “Radical Jewish Culture” musical movement, piqued in partial reaction to an
ongoing klezmer revival in which Krakauer, the African American clarinetist Don Byron, and the band
The Klezmatics were prominent figures. The movement self-consciously foregrounded Jewish history
and culture as structures of feeling for a new musical experimentalism.
By the 1990s and 2000s, many of these musicians had also forged strong links with the earlier
European free improvisation scenes. Trumpeter Lawrence “Butch” Morris brought many of these
scenes together as an improvising conductor of ensembles, creating large-ensemble, completely
improvised extended works in which a conductor, drawing on Morris’s extensive repertoire of codified
and documented gestures and symbols, functioned as a centralized conduit of musical current linking
other improvisors in real time. These linkages between American improvisors and their counterparts
around the world became more prominent in the late 1990s with the emergence of the yearly Vision
Festival, a New York–based project of the bassist William Parker and his partner, choreographer
Patricia Nicholson, that provided a forum for performances, workshops, and conferences by
improvising musicians from around the world.
Indie rock bands such as Chicago’s Isotope 217 and the ensembles of Jim O’Rourke utilizing rock-
based elements in the creation of improvised music, and jam bands such as Phish extended the legacy
of the Grateful Dead by collaborations with members of the Sun Ra Arkestra. Saxophonist Steve
Coleman, one of the organizers of the M-BASE collective of exploratory musicians in the 1980s,
pursued intercultural collaborations with Afrocuba de Matanzas and other Cuban and Brazilian
musicians, extending and experimentalizing the Afrodiasporic notion of clavé well beyond its standard
usages in Latin music. Younger musicians, such as saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa and the pianist
Vijay Iyer, expanded on Coleman’s rhythmic and metric experiments to incorporate Karnatic rhythmic
practices. Extending the notion of the intercultural, philosopher and clarinetist David Rothenberg
combined essays on improvisation and human nature with forays into what might be termed
“interspecies improvisation,” in which groups of musicians “jammed” with birds, wolves, elephants, and
whales.
Although one searches in vain for a unitary aesthetic of improvisation, it might be possible to venture
some general characteristics and principles underlying the state of experimental improvisation in music
in the twenty-first century. Some of these share or even draw from those early aspirations of the
experimental composers of the 1950s, such as the acceptance of chance and contingency, and the
valorization of the unique and spontaneous moment. In addition, one finds a clear preference for
conversational and convivial processes, as well as a communitarian and collective ethics. Resistance
to institutional hegemonies is expressed as lack of hierarchy between human and nonhuman roles, as
well as between humans and other humans. This is grounded in a sense of empathy in the relation
between bodies, and the acceptance of a community of differences and commonalities between one
ear and another.
Experimental improvisation’s preference for a self-fashioned kind of mobility of identity manifests itself
in a fundamental mobility of temporality, conditioned in turn (at least in free improvisation) on an
assumption that there will be as little precomposed pattern material as possible—no prearranged
sequences, scales, chord models, dynamics, timbres, motives, rhythm patterns, or other material. At
the same time, improvisors are interested in both processes and product, since the practice involves
close monitoring of outcomes in a recursive rather than simply iterative way.
One finds, following Andrew Pickering and Karen Barad, an understanding of agency as an emergent
improvisative achievement of a specific interaction, rather than an essential or intrinsic attribute of
subjects. Improvisation takes on an epistemological function—again drawing on Pickering, knowledge
becomes part of performance itself, or even generates knowledge. Part of that knowledge is gained
through a process of emotional transduction, or the transference of inner states among improvisors and
listeners through sound, where listening and the encounter with memory are also improvised.
A recognition of the necessary presence of intentionality in the indeterminate space means that
improvisation demands a close relation to everyday life, even under conditions of extreme aesthetic
risk. As Arnold I. Davidson has written, “when one searches for new forms of self and of social
intelligibility, new modes of freedom, the improvisatory way of life assumes not only all of its ethico-
political force, but also all of its very real risks of unintelligibility and self-collapse.” Living with this kind
of instability is a condition of improvisation’s widely noted aspiration toward human freedom, where
improvisation becomes critical practice as well as aesthetic statement, a space where discontinuity,
disruption, support, and struggle become audible pathways to new experience, as the participants in an
improvisative interaction wrestle with a dangerous hybrid formed from agency and indeterminacy
whose ultimate outcome is a continuous transformation of both Other and Self.
[See also A P ;C ,J ;C ;E ;E ;
F ;J ;N ;S ;S ; and S A .]
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10/2/2019 Improvisation - Oxford Reference

Encyclopedia of Aesthetics (2 ed.)

Publisher: Oxford University Press Print Publication Date: 2014

Aristotle. Poetics. Translated by Richard Janko. Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1987.

Collingwood, R. G. The Principles of Art. Oxford: Clarendon, 1938.

Improvisation and the Definition of a Musical Work.

The Relation between Improvisation and Language.

Critical Evaluation and Creative Aspiration in Jazz Improvisation.

Intention and Execution in Improvisational Contexts.

Improvisation, Collective Intention, and Group Agency.

The Ethical Dimension of Improvisational Performance.

The Instrumental Ventriloquist.

Kraut, Robert. Artworld Metaphysics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.

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Improvisation and Experimental Music

To be sure, constructing a definition of improvisation was once considered a relatively straightforward

Beginning in 1977, members of a second generation of European free improvisors, headed by

Berio, Luciano. Two Interviews. London: Marion Boyars, 1985.

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