AMS Philadelphia 2009 Abstracts - American Musicological Society

Abstracts saturday evening 161
virtuoso iMProvisAtion: MusicAl PrActices
AnD MusicologicAl Discourses
Mai Kawabata, University of East Anglia, organizer
Dana Gooley, Brown University
Elisabeth Le Guin, University of California, Los Angeles
Nina Sun Eidsheim, University of California, Los Angeles
This panel proposes new frameworks for explaining virtuoso improvisation in Western
music from about 1550 onward—starting with the recognition that improvisation cannot be
meaningfully theorized without historicizing it, and moving beyond the classic studies by Ferand
and Schleuning. Our panel will include live demonstration as we examine the practice
and performance of early modern musical improvisation—the period of the first great flowering
of soloistic virtuosity for its own sake—forward into the legacies of Boccherini, Paganini,
Ernst, Liszt, Chopin, and Schumann, through to contemporary improvisers such as Apap and
Ratkje. This will entail a consideration of the intersections and conflicts among “theatricality,”
embodiment, subjectivity and its performance, gestural semiotics, the lexicalization of expressive
codes, and ideas about the expression of self in music, drawing on recent developments
in theatre studies, dance, and gender scholarship (Joseph Roach, Susan Foster, Judith Butler).
The interdisciplinary emphasis of our approach reflects the fact that many of the issues raised
by improvisation are not exclusive to music. Improvisation also problematizes musical meaning
in the nineteenth century as it comes to be seen as oppositional to the act of composition,
with significant consequences for its position in musicology. By identifying and unpacking
such historical dichotomies, and facing the challenge of accounting for meaning in an art
form that is by its nature ephemeral, we seek to illuminate this neglected aspect in the history
of performers. In so doing, and as practitioners ourselves, we hope to enrich and complicate
the dialogue between musicology (which too often elides performance into score) and performance
studies (which too often fails to account for the sonic dimension).
Dana Gooley will track the increasing value placed on “improvisatoriness” in nineteenthcentury
critical rhetoric about performers and compositions. Why did improvisation become
a figure of praise at the moment when it was most declining as a practice? This talk gives special
attention to Wagner’s essay “On the mission of opera,” which establishes Shakespeare and
Beethoven as privileged sites of improvisational artistic creation.
Elisabeth Le Guin will examine antecedents to Romantic improvisational ethics in early
treatises on virtuoso improvisation of poetry and music, dating from sixteenth-century Italy
and Spain. These works (Ganassi, Ortiz, Rengifo) constitute a transition to written transmission
of formerly oral improv practices, and as such can be understood as opening the rift
between text and act that was to widen into a chasm by the nineteenth century; but in fact
they are as interesting for what they do not theorize or textualize, as for what they do.
Mai Kawabata will focus on the ironic parallels between the improvisatory practices of Paganini’s
generation and violin virtuosi today (Gilles Apap, Tracy Silverman, Mark O’Connor),
with reference to the Romantic notion of authentic self-expression and the post-Cartesian attribution
to the body of selfhood.
Nina Sun Eidsheim will address vocalists’ millennia-old pursuit in creating new sounds
through extending the vocal apparatus and modifying space. While briefly contextualizing
such practices in historical terms, contemporary music in which the voice is modified by electronic
devices is the focus. With live demonstration of some of the techniques in question,
this presentation specifically discusses the practices of Norwegian improviser Maja Ratkje.