164 performance as art
Second, while Brown may be right in questioning the use of studio tech-
niques in manipulating the sound of traditional types of improvisatory jazz
performances, such techniques are crucial to those recent developments in
jazz broadly labeled as “jazz fusion.” It is surely not difficult for the cultivated
listener to adjust her expectations when listening to recordings of traditional
jazz performance so that she seeks out different values in such performances
from the ones she seeks out in fusion recordings.
5 The Place of Rehearsal in the Performing Arts
In examining the place of improvisation in the performing arts, I have
focused for the most part upon musical performances. As the brief dis-
cussion of theatrical improvisation may have indicated, however, the con-
clusions that we have reached concerning improvisation in music admit
of fairly easy generalization to theater and dance. Our focus on musical
improvisation was partly motivated by the fact that it is philosophers of
music who are largely responsible for the literature on improvisation in the
performing arts. Indeed, it is to philosophers of music that we owe much
of the philosophical literature on the performing arts in general. Perhaps
this last fact also explains the relative neglect of rehearsal in that literature.
For, to the extent that musical performances are subsumed under the clas-
sical paradigm, rehearsal seems to be of little philosophical interest. Given
a performable musical work that an ensemble intends to perform, the pri-
mary purpose of rehearsal is to arrive at a shared understanding of how that
work is to be interpreted in the resulting performance and to anticipate
difficulties that might arise in harmonizing the contributions of individual
members of the ensemble.
Rehearsal in theater and dance, however, is philosophically interesting
precisely to the extent that it calls into question whether the classical para-
digm can be extended to theatrical and dance performances. We may recall
from Chapter 6 that the role of ensemble revision in theatrical rehears-
als might seem to support the ingredients model over the classical para-
digm as an account of at least some theatrical performances. Indeed, where
rehearsals involve ensemble revision they raise some of the same issues as
improvisation, since they have a compositional dimension. The final form of
a theatrical or dance performance involving such rehearsals usually incor-
porates substantive changes made as a result of innovations introduced in
rehearsal. Furthermore, it is a feature of dance and theatrical practice that
improvisations by performers in rehearsal may result in new constraints on
subsequent performances. Does this, then, give us a less problematic exam-
ple of improvisational composition?