Philosophy of the Performing Arts

performance i: improvisation and rehearsal 151
brings them into being.^1 In the previous chapter we followed most theo-
rists in taking the distinguishing feature of improvisational activity to be
its spontaneity , the lack of a preconception on the part of the performer as
to how given elements in the performance should unfold. Alperson, for
example, takes it to be a matter of general agreement that “improvising
music is, in some sense, a spontaneous kind of music making” (1984, 17).
Stephen Davies similarly characterizes improvisations, or “music making
simpliciter ,” as “spontaneous and unregulated musical playings that are not
of works” (2001, 11).
There are, however, some who dissent from this happy consensus. In a
response to Alperson, Carol S. Gould and Kenneth Keaton (2000) argue
that what they term “fluency” in departing from a score is what is crucial for
improvisation. Spontaneity need not be present. They argue for this conclu-
sion in the context of making two further points. First, they reject the idea
that the distinction between jazz performance and classical performance is
that the former involves improvisation and the latter involves interpretation.
Second, and relatedly, they claim that performance in the performing arts
always involves a measure of improvisation. When we describe a perform-
ance itself as an improvisation, we are merely registering a difference in the
extent to which the performance as a whole requires that the performers
depart from pre-existing compositional material. While we shall side with
the standard view that spontaneity is the core of improvisation, we may
better understand what that view entails if we consider Gould and Keaton’s
arguments for their alternative proposal.
Gould and Keaton advance a number of considerations that are
intended to place jazz performance and classical performance on a com-
parable footing. They point first to the value placed upon improvisation
in the classical tradition in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries,
something we noted in Chapter 5 in discussing Goehr’s challenge to the
classical paradigm. They cite improvisational feats by J. S. Bach, Mozart,
and Beethoven, and also the improvisational demands made by perform-
able works of that period that employed such devices as the concerto
cadenza and the basso continuo. Second, they argue that improvisation
in jazz, like interpretation in classical music, presupposes a tradition that
furnishes both norms that determine what is acceptable and existing pat-
terns upon which performers are able to draw. A musical tradition, then,
provides both the jazz musician and the performer of classical music with
a necessary background for her performances. Improvisation, they main-
tain, “has a logic of its own ... All improvisation in musical performance
relies on the foundations of the particular musical tradition in which the
work exists” (Gould and Keaton 2000, 146).