Musical improvisation

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Musical improvisation is the creation of music in the moment of performance, rather than the playing of a piece fixed in advance. Researchers sometimes describe it as spontaneous musical composition.^[1] An improvising musician has to do several things at once in real time: invent and judge melodic and rhythmic ideas, coordinate with other players in an ensemble, and carry out complex finger and body movements.^[1:1]

Improvisation is central to many musical practices, including jazz and the classical music of South Asia, and it was a regular part of Western classical music until the mid-19th century.^[2:1][3:1] In the 20th century, free improvisation tried to make music without the rules of any particular style.^[4:1] Scholars debate whether "improvisation" is a useful cross-cultural term at all, since the idea grew out of European music and some traditions have no equivalent word.^[2:2] Since the 2000s, neuroscientists have used brain imaging to study what happens in musicians' brains while they improvise.^[1:2]

Improvisation and composition

In Western music scholarship, improvisation has usually been defined against composition, the creation of a fixed work. Ethnomusicologist Laudan Nooshin argues that this pairing is a binary that "developed in the context of one specific music tradition (European art music) at a particular historical moment", and that it does not describe many other musical practices well.^[2] Adrian McNeil notes that a recurring theme in recent scholarship is that such a simple binary fails to represent a more complex and diverse musical reality.^[2]

In Western art music

According to ethnomusicologist Angeles Sancho-Velázquez, improvisation did not die out at the end of the Baroque period, as music histories have often assumed. It stayed an important part of Western classical music well into the 19th century, and then nearly disappeared from public performance around the middle of the century, as a fixed canon of works by composers such as Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven became established.^[3:1]

Sancho-Velázquez attributes the decline to several developments at once: nationalism, changes in the social and economic setting of public concerts, new intellectual currents, and changes in ideas about beauty and artistic genius.^[3:2] The critic Eduard Hanslick wrote in 1854 that a composition, because it follows formal laws of beauty, does not "improvise itself in haphazard ramblings". Franz Liszt, who had been a well-known improviser, gave up his career as a touring piano virtuoso in 1848 and from then on improvised only in private.^[3:3]

Jazz

Improvisation has been part of jazz from its beginnings. Musicians in early New Orleans bands blended improvised parts in a style sometimes called "collective improvisation". The style gave players more freedom and spontaneity, and it attracted younger musicians and dancers.^[5:1] In the 1920s, star soloists moved away from the collective approach. Louis Armstrong first took the collective style further with his Hot Five recordings, and then, with "Wild Man Blues", broke away from it altogether; his solo work set a new direction for jazz.^[5]

Free improvisation

Some musicians have tried to improvise without the conventions of any established style. The English guitarist Derek Bailey (1930–2005) moved from jazz to what he called a "non-idiomatic" approach, known as free improvisation. He set out his ideas in the book Improvisation: Its Nature and Practice in Music (1980). From 1970 he ran the record label Incus, at first with Tony Oxley and Evan Parker, and from 1976 he ran Company, a festival for improvisers that took place in Britain, the United States and Japan.^[4:1]

Beyond the Western concept

In 1998 the ethnomusicologist Bruno Nettl observed that case studies of improvisation had mostly focused on three areas: South Asia, Iran and jazz.^[2:1] Scholars of non-Western traditions have warned against applying the European idea of improvisation to other music. Writing about the Arabic taqsim, Habib Hassan Touma argued in 1971 that researchers should avoid European definitions and terms. Laudan Nooshin has raised similar concerns about Iranian classical music, and Ali Jihad Racy about Arabic music.^[2:1]

Hindustani classical music, the classical music of northern India, is often celebrated as an improvising tradition, yet its vocabulary has no word equivalent to "improvisation". Its own terms, such as badhat, vistaar and upaj, mean growth, expansion and spontaneity. The musicologist Adrian McNeil argues that a model of fixed "seed ideas", grown and expanded during the performance of a raga, describes this music better than a split between composition and improvisation.^[2:2] In McNeil's account, the raga has the most room to expand in the alap, the opening section of a performance, which is not bound to a tala (a fixed rhythmic cycle).^[2:3]

Cognition and neuroscience

The most influential psychological model of improvisation, according to psychologist Roger Beaty, was proposed by Jeff Pressing in 1988 and 1998. Pressing treated improvisation as an acquired skill built through long training. Improvisers draw on a store of knowledge held in long-term memory, such as practised motor patterns and musical material, and on "referents", well-rehearsed cues that guide what they play. They also constantly compare what they play with what they intended, and adjust. Pressing argued that fluent improvisation depends on processes that have become automatic and need little conscious attention.^[1:3]

In a 2008 study, Charles Limb and Allen Braun used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to scan six jazz pianists while they improvised and while they played over-learned material. Improvising was associated with widespread reduced activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, together with increased activity in the medial prefrontal cortex.^[6:1] Later studies, reviewed by Beaty in 2015, tested jazz pianists, classically trained musicians, freestyle rap artists and non-musicians. These studies found activity in premotor and lateral prefrontal regions, which are associated with motor planning and control, as well as in regions associated with spontaneous thought. Beaty suggests that improvisation may depend on cooperation between brain networks for deliberate control and for spontaneous thought, rather than on simply "letting go".^[1:2]

Wikidata: Q1049625