Improvised Music after 1950: Afrological and Eurological Perspectives

Abstract

Since the early 1950s, controversy over the nature and function of improvisation in musical expression has occupied considerable attention among improvisers, composers, performers, and theorists active in that sociomusical world that has constructed itself in terms of an assumed high-culture bond between selected sectors of the European and musical landscapes. Prior to 1950, the work of many composers operating in this world tended to be completely notated, using a well-known, European-derived system. After 1950, composers began to experiment with open forms and with more personally expressive systems of notation. Moreover, these composers began to designate salient aspects of a composition as performer-supplied rather than composer-specified, thereby renewing an interest in the generation of musical structure in real time as a formal aspect of a composed work. After a gap of nearly one hundred and fifty years, during which real-time generation of musical structure had been nearly eliminated from the musical activity of this or pan-European tradition, the postwar putative heirs to this tradition have promulgated renewed investigation of real-time forms of musicality, including a direct confrontation with the role of improvisation. This ongoing reappraisal of improvisation may be due in no small measure to musical and social events taking place in quite a different sector of the overall musical landscape. In particular, the anointing, since the early 1950s, of various forms of jazz, the African-American musical constellation most commonly associated with the exploration of improvisation in both Europe and America, as a form of art has in all likelihood been a salient stimulating factor in this reevaluation of the possibilities of improvisation. Already active in the 1940s, a group of radical young black improvisers, for the most part lacking access to economic and political resources often taken for granted in high-culture musical circles, nonetheless posed potent challenges to notions of structure, form, communication, and expression. These improvisers, while cognizant of musical tradition, located and centered their modes of musical expression within a stream emanating largely from African and African-American cultural and social history. The international influence and dissemination of their music, dubbed bebop, as well as the strong influences coming from later forms of jazz, has resulted in the emergence of new sites for transnational, transcultural improvisative musical activity. In particular, a strong circumstantial case can be made for the proposition that the emergence of these new, vigorous, and highly influential improvisative forms provided an impetus for musical workers in other traditions, particularly European and composers active in the construction of a transnational European-based tradition, to come to grips with some of the implications of musical improvisation. This confrontation, however, took place amid an ongoing narrative of dismissal, on the part of many of these composers, of the tenets of African-American improvisative forms. Moreover, texts documenting the musical products of the version of the move to incorporate real-time music-making into composition often present this activity as a part of American music since 1945, a construct almost invariably theorized as emanating almost exclusively from a generally venerated stream of European cultural, social, and intellectual history--the Western tradition. In such texts, an attempted erasure or denial of the impact of African-American forms on the real-time work of European and Euro-American composers is commonly asserted. This denial itself, however, drew the outlines of a space where improvisation as a theoretical construct could clearly be viewed as a site not only for music-theoretical contention but for social and cultural competition between musicians representing improvisative and compositional modes of musical discourse. …