Improvisation and Pedagogy: Background and Focus of Inquiry

Abstract

By the end of the nineteenth century, the practice of improvisation as a form of professionalized artmaking had all but disappeared from Western classical music. 1 This gradual elimination of improvisation did not take place without resistance, most prominently including French organ performance. However, this break with what had heretofore been "the" Western tradition certainly constituted a radical rupture with over a half-millenium of canonical practice, and the extreme understatement with which the historiography of Western music treats this rupture justifies my ironic characterization of it as "The Silent Revolution." By the 1960s, much academic work on improvisation was largely centered, not on professional training or aesthetic inquiry for adult musicians, but upon pedagogy for children and young adults in which improvisation was deployed therapeutically. The migration of the eurythmic methods of Emile Jaques-Dalcroze from its origins in conservatory study to its current status as a method of teaching young people is a prime case in point.