Year: 2013
Type: article
Abstract: This essay asks what it would mean to conceive of music analysts as improvisers. Drawing on Derek Bailey’s observations on improvised music and performance, Lydia Goehr’s distinction betweenimprovisation impromptuandimprovisation extempore,and elements of David Lewin’s analytic work, I argue that such a conception returns continually to the relationship between the analyst and the analyzed work as it unfolds in real time, i.e., in listening. Rather than placing moments of heard music within ana prioritheoretical frame, which I call “idiomatic listening,” analysis-as-improvisation resists the idea of stability suggested by theories of music. I suggest that analysis-as-improvisation thereby reflects part of what analysis has historically accomplished as well as the goals analysts implicitly pursue.
Source: Music Theory Online
DOI: 10.30535/mto.19.2.8
Author: August Sheehy
Institution: University of Chicago
Language: English
Subfield: Music
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W1541698655