Improvisation, Analysis, and Listening Otherwise

Abstract

This essay asks what it would mean to conceive of music analysts as improvisers. Drawing on Derek Bailey’s observations on improvised music and performance, Lydia Goehr’s distinction between improvisation impromptu and improvisation extempore, and elements of David Lewin’s analytic work, I argue that such a conception returns continually to the relationship between the analyst and the analyzed work as it unfolds in real time, i.e., in listening. Rather than placing moments of heard music within an a priori theoretical frame, which I call “idiomatic listening,” analysis-as-improvisation resists the idea of stability suggested by theories of music. I suggest that analysis-as-improvisation thereby reflects part of what analysis has historically accomplished as well as the goals analysts implicitly pursue.