Improvisation, Analysis, and Listening Otherwise

[1] Derek Bailey, the English guitarist and indefatigable champion of free improvisation, wrote in 1980, "For the description--or evaluation--of improvisation, formal technical analysis is useless" (1993, 15). As categorical as his assertion sounds, I don't think Bailey was criticizing analysis so much as diagnosing a conceptual gap between improvisational and analytic practices at the time. Had he been a committed music analyst rather than an improvising performer, the sentence might have read, "For formal analysis, improvisation is beside the point." There is an element of truth in these reciprocal statements: improvisation and analysis seem to pursue different ends. But putting the problem this way obfuscates a linguistic sleight of hand that turns the activities of improvising and analyzing into pseudo-objects: "improvisation" and "analysis."[2] Improvisation as such can't be analyzed because "improvisation" is not a thing. Or, if it is--if we speak of an improvisation--it is the kind of "thing" that "seems to name the object just as it is even as it names something else" (Brown 2000, 5). Improvisation is not a structure that can be broken down into its constituent parts in order to see how it works (to paraphrase Ian Bent's (1987) definition of analysis). Rather, I would argue, improvisation is a mode of action, or even an attitude, that involves not only degrees of spontaneity but also an implicit or explicit valuation of such freedom with respect to the activity. Such a broad conception accords with the word's use in everyday language, in which it means so much more than a certain kind of musical performance.(1)[3] Music analysis is not a thing either. It is--as David Lewin liked to remind his readers--something one does to, or with, music. Or, as Arnold Whitall put it in the Oxford Companion to Music, "analysis is interpretation--even a kind of performance" (2013). To speak of "analyses" leads away from the practice of analyzing and suggests that the finished product (the analysis) is what is important, as others have recognized (Agawu 2004). This hierarchy of values recapitulates, almost uncannily, the structure identified by Bruno Nettl (1998) in which compositions take precedence over improvised performances (recordings of which may be treated as compositions for the sake of analysis).[4] With a shift in emphasis from thing to process, however, analysis and improvisation might be brought into a productive relation. To put this in the form of a question: If music analysis is first and foremost an activity, and improvisation is a way of acting, in what sense can analysis itself be understood as improvisational? I suggest that whatever the answer to this question turns out to be, it hinges on the analyst's relation to the music as it unfolds in real time--which is simply to say that it will return us again and again to the moment of listening and what happens, or can happen, in that moment.[5] Lydia Goehr's (2012) recent distinction between two varieties of improvisation may be useful here. She describes the first, improvisation impromptu, as the sort of improvisation prompted by unforeseen turns of event that force one to adjust a planned course of action; as we say, one improvises a solution. The second variety, dubbed improvisation extempore, is practiced within a pre-established spatial, temporal, and conceptual frame that, once entered, allows one to acknowledge, "Now I am improvising." I will return to improvisation extempore shortly, but it is worth lingering on improvisation impromptu for a moment in the case of music analysis, for it is a useful reminder that music analysis, even at its most formalized, can be motivated by something unexpected. How often does one analyze a piece because something about it forces a question: why is that moment so beautiful? Or, more circumspectly, why did the music go like that? And: what do I do with this as a listener?[6] In point of fact, in the act of listening, I have already done something. …