期刊名称：Proceedings of the European Society for Aesthetics
电子版ISSN：1664-5278
出版年度：2017
卷号：9
页码：510-532
出版社：European Society for Aesthetics
摘要：A common way of characterising improvisation, and even morespecifically free improvisation, is to point out its unrepeatability. Suchcharacterisation misses the point. If we consider improvisation as a sonicproduct, the above characterisation is plainly false, as it is possible for aperformer, who has never been acquainted with a previously improvisedperformance, to improvise by chance that same sound structure a secondtime. If we consider improvisation as an overall performance, thenunrepeatability becomes a non-informative characterisation, as it doesn’t helpat all in distinguishing an improvised performance from any other livemusical performance.Another possibility is to characterise free improvisation as neither acomposition nor a performance of a normative sound structure. Followingthis characterisation, however, the risk of cataloguing performances ofstandard jazz as free improvisations is unavoidable, as many of them do notintend to instantiate the normative structure provided by the standard, buttake it only as inspiration for improvisation.In order to provide a plausible characterisation of free improvisation, I willdevelop my argument in two different steps. In a first step, I will characterisefree improvisation as a non-interpretative musical performance. This doesnot exclude that in free improvisations existing musical material can be used,as is often the case. But, differently from a standard jazz performance, theperformer does not commit in advance to any specific musical material to beused (as normative sound structure or as simple inspiration) for hisperformance. In a second step, I will make use of Niklas Luhmann’s notionsof code and program, and thereby characterise free improvisation as a selfprogrammingmusical performance. These two steps will providerespectively the necessary and sufficient identity conditions for a free musicalimprovisation.
