Improvisation as a Way of Knowing

Introduction: A Problematic Foundation for Scientific Work on Improvisation[1.1] The lack of a single widely accepted definition of improvisation has not hindered the development of a field of improvisation studies. On the contrary, research questions surrounding improvisation accommodate a wide range of disciplinary perspectives, including musicological, music-theoretical, historical, ethnographic, philosophical, sociological, political, psychological, neuroscientific, and computational. The existence of the recent two-volume "Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies" (Lewis and Piekut 2016) demonstrates that the growing field is productively motivated by this plurality of perspectives.[1.2] Despite this diversity, there are some common threads that run through these perspectives on improvisation. These include issues concerning novelty, freedom, indeterminacy, spontaneity, constraints, and other related concepts. Of course there is variation in the employment of these concepts and numerous perspectives from which to engage with them, but they are nonetheless prevalent in many areas of the discourse. These concepts do not function as necessary and sufficient criteria to define improvisation; on the contrary, they are often critically interrogated in order to problematize the construct itself. Such work reveals that it is difficult to strictly and clearly delineate improvisation from other kinds of musical performance, despite the (at least initial) intuition that it can be meaningfully distinguished.[1.3] Within this uncertainty, critical inquiry is valuable in its ability to construct an understanding of what and where improvisation is, and to understand the role of culture and history in shaping such constructions. However, for psychological and neuroscientific research, which has to choose a concrete--if interim--operational definition of improvisation in order to do experiments, these problematic concepts provide a problematic foundation. It is possible for scientific work to proceed upon this uncertain foundation--e.g., see Jung, Mead, Carrasco, & Flores' (2013) comparison of the scientific study of creativity to the study of the similarly underdefined concept of the gene. As I propose below, however, there are other scientific questions to ask within a different framework of inquiry that are arguably more sensitive to critical work on improvisation, better able to describe differences among musicians and among musical behaviors, and more effective scientifically by virtue of having hypotheses that are readily falsifiable.[1.4] My main aim in this article is to develop an alternative theorization of improvisation that can serve as a basis for scientific research and contribute a conceptualization of the phenomenon to the broader field of improvisation studies. This theorization formulates improvisation in terms of ways of knowing. In what follows, I will show what this means, and how such a view is supported by observations of improvisatory practices and theories from cognitive science. Then I will demonstrate how to build an empirical research program using this theorization. I will describe how this theorization bears on music-theoretical work, critical work, and other strands of cognitive science.[1.5] In order to argue for the value and motivation of this approach, it is important to show how scientific work has been influenced by the problematic concepts mentioned above through a review and critique of existing studies. This, in turn, requires understanding why concepts like novelty, spontaneity, and freedom, which are invoked in many of these scientific studies, are contentious. It is not my intention here to fully recapitulate the critiques of these concepts, but I will briefly outline some of the problems with using them to distinguish improvisation from other modes of music making. Following Alperson's (1984) distinction between improvisation as a product and as an act, my criticisms of these concepts rest on the position that improvisation is best characterized as a process: a particular way or set of ways of making music. …