Entextualization and the Improvised Past

[1] The flourishing of improvisation studies over recent years has placed "classical" music and its adherents in an unfamiliar and somewhat defensive position. For once, other musics, narratives, and disciplinary approaches are of central concern while the "classical" and its associated values are revealed to be peripheral, abnormal, and even paradoxically ephemeral.(1) Although this might prompt well-founded consternation in some quarters, numerous scholars and performers of eighteenth-century music have embraced the incursion of improvisation as a means of injecting elements of historicity and contingency into their engagement with the period and its repertoire. In different ways, Robert O. Gjerdingen (2007a and 2007b), Robert D. Levin (2009 and 2011), and Aaron Berkowitz (2010) have recently demonstrated that musical thought and practice in eighteenth-century Europe were deeply informed by improvisation as a pedagogical, compositional, and performative mode. In particular, Gjerdingen's insights have issued from a consideration of the political, social, psychological, and cognitive forces that transformed Neapolitan conservatorii into sites renowned throughout Europe for their distinctive methods of musical training and enculturation, producing what he has described synonymously as galant court music and "Neapolitan ethnomusic" (Gjerdingen 2012).[2] In what follows, I briefly address how the concept of improvisation can open up three other ways of thinking beyond the traditional historical, literary, and theoretical modes that enable musicological inquiry. First, I will suggest that attempts to model past improvisatory processes might lead away from historical narratives and toward an archaeological concern for materiality and its mediation. Second, I will claim that conceiving of improvisation numerically rather than alphabetically can allow us to register its processual, algorithmic elements more clearly than words and their attendant hermeneutics permit. Finally, I will argue that considering the performative aspects of eighteenth-century improvisation under the rubric of simulation or reenactment might be more fruitful-and historically enlightening-than adopting the rhetoric of restoration and reconstruction that has suffused so many musical attempts to reanimate the past.[3] To outline these modes of thought I will draw on Joel Kuipers', Michael Silverstein's, and Greg Urban's concept of entextualization, defined as "the process of rendering a given instance of discourse as text, detachable from its local context" (Silverstein and Urban 1996, 21; see also Kuipers 1990). In terms of eighteenth-century music, the concept of entextualization can be understood from two perspectives. On the one hand, it can help account for the means by which the discursive flow of eighteenth-century music lost contact with its cultural milieux as it hardened into a corpus of canonical texts over the course of the nineteenth century; on the other, it can outline alternative routes and methods by which musical practices were transmitted, thereby suggesting new sites where improvisation might be located. In both cases, entextualization has to do with relations between systems of representation and storage and the methods by which knowledge is transduced in the course of performance.[4] The notion that entextualization can illuminate improvisatory practices has been advanced by anthropologist Karin Barber. In critiquing and extending the scope of the concept as defined by Silverstein and Urban, she aligns entextualization not with "frozen utterance," as they suggest, but with the creative concatenation and reordering of poetic matter (Barber 2007, 30-31). In Barber's interpretation, entextualized elements are not to be identified with the literary and scripted and thus opposed to the oral and extemporized. Texts are not defined by medium, but are created whenever and wherever "instances of discourse . . . are made available for reproduction in other contexts" (30). …