Living With the I-Word: Improvisation and its Alternates

Abstract

The word improvisation is burdened with limitations placed on it by changes occurring in Europe in the 19th century, the period when the model of the hyphenated performer-composer prevailing in Europe up to that point was being split into two specialties. By the 20th century, composition and improvisation had been cast in bronze as mutually defining opposites, the presumed starting point of any approach to how music is made and heard, regardless of historical period or cultural origin. As a way of creating a more critical approach to discourse dependent on the ubiquitous "I-word," this essay seeks to problematize it by focusing on the more general concept of variability itself, or mouvance, as the French literary scholar Paul Zumthor described it in his studies of medieval lyric poetry. More than a century of scholarship on the music of Chopin, the songs of the medieval troubadours, folk music of the British Isles and Balkans, and Turkish classical music—all repertoires which do not rely on the conventions of I-discourse—will provide examples of differing levels of tolerance for performer control of musical events, of different definitions of musicianship, and of different performance poetics. Reflex jazz-related I-genres intentionally play no role in this exercise, forcing us to reflect on I-qualities where we least expect to find them and thus to re-examine our dependence on the I-concept in our thinking about the full spectrum of music-making. None of the I-alternates offered here—musicianship, mouvance, control, variability, or poetics—can be considered competitors for the I-word’s universalizing pretensions, but rather offer insight into what I believe is the I-word’s real content.