Philosophy of the Performing Arts

performance i: improvisation and rehearsal 153
improviser, far from creating ex nihilo , improvises against some sort of musical
context” (1984, 22). Richard Cochrane recounts a cautionary anecdote by
Ekkehard Jost that illustrates this fact: “A sceptical saxophonist was invited to
join a free-jazz session. On being told to ‘do his own thing,’ he proceeded to
play ‘I Do Like to Be Beside the Seaside’ throughout the session. ‘[His] associates
were extremely angry about this and told him not to bother to come again’”
(see Cochrane 2000, 142 n. 22). In a similar vein, Stephen Davies stresses that
improvisations are subject to “the general social, stylistic, formal, syntactic,
and other constraints governing the culture’s music.” In a passage that may
recall our discussion in Chapter 5 of the ways in which eighteenth-century
performers drew upon elements from other performances, he also remarks on
the importance for the improviser of resources available in the tradition:
The musician usually acquires a repertoire of phrases and figurations. Some
of these will be of her own invention and others belong more widely to the
performing community. When she improvises, she draws on this stock. The
difference between formulaic improvisation and excitingly original improvi-
sation often lies in how the units are combined, contrasted, and developed,
not in their novelty. (S. Davies 2001, 12)
The claim that spontaneity is the essence of improvisation is, it would
appear, quite compatible with an acknowledgment of the role of tradition
in improvisation.
Second, Gould and Keaton’s claim that all interpretation involves improv-
isation seems to operate with a much weaker notion of improvisation than
the one that concerns Alperson and that is manifest in eighteenth-century
classical music. Alperson, it will be recalled, stresses that there is an ele-
ment of composition in improvisation. He cites the New Grove Dictionary of
Music , which defines improvisation as “the creation of a musical work ... as
it is being performed” (Alperson 1984, 20–21). It is because the product of
an improvisation is a novel musical construction that we can appreciate in it
some of the same kinds of qualities that we appreciate in a performable musi-
cal work. Similarly, what classical improvisers such as Mozart and J. S. Bach
did was to generate a musical structure without being guided by pre-existing
prescriptions. But Gould and Keaton, in the passage just cited, grant that the
interpreting musician does not exercise creative freedom in respect of the
musical structure of her performance. She improvises only in respect of the
way in which this structure is realized in sound. Even if there is a sense in
which the interpreter improvises, then, this does not bear upon one of the
distinctive values of improvisation, both in the classical tradition and in jazz.
As a result, Gould and Keaton’s case against the “spontaneity” view of
improvisation must rest on Harrell’s performance, which purports to be