blog 4

Following my previous blog, I am continuing to look at the beginning part of my essay about the history of improvisation and the subsequent erasure. This is such an interesting topic for me the more I look into it.  I think it is important to explore the history of music – something that to be honest never really interested me before - so as to try to come to terms with the difficult and ever existing question of why music is how it is and what we can do for its progression. I think it is a phase that everyone at one point will go through – I mean, the struggle of deciding what and why you do something. This is all rhetoric of what I have already written for which I am very sorry!

I read a few chapters from the book ‘The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works, An Essay in the Philosophy of Music’ by Lydia Goehr, which explain very clearly the way in which music was viewed, written and then the development and gradual removal of improvisation between the mid 18^th and 19^th century. From what I understood – Until the mid 18^th century, music was used solely for social, political and religious functions. It wasn’t respected as an individual form of art – unlike the fine arts, but seen as a performance rather than something that had a finished product. Music had been known to empower religious and moral beliefs, for this reason, purely instrumental music was rejected because words were much more intelligible than just melodies. During the late 18^th century, however this began to change, theorists such as Schilling who was quoted as saying ‘No aesthetic material is better suited to the expression of the ineffable than is sound’. Instrumental music was said to have a meaning of its own which was more transcendant, Herder is quoted in 1800 to have said ‘Music has developed into a self-sufficient art, sui-generis, dispensing with words’. It was now viewed as one of the highest forms of art leading to the important change to the way in which composers were looked at.

Thus followed the beginning of the ‘Musical Museum’, which Lizst wanted to create in the 1800s, whereby ‘In the name of all musicians, of art, and of social progress, we require … the foundation of an assembly to be held every five years for religious, dramatic, and symphonic music, by which all the works that are considered best in these three categories shall be ceremonially performed every day for a whole month in the Louvre, being afterwards purchased by the government, published at their expense’.

During the 19^th century, the composer was looked at as being almost supernatural. The cadenza became the only part of the piece where the musician was given the freedom to improvise a virtuosic solo. The composer had such a dominant effect on music that their composition was not to be touched by the musician. There were pieces, which were specifically for improvisation which were virtuosic and then ones written by the composer, that gradually were lost when the audience objected to the obvious nature of them. Another aspect that finished improvisation in classical music was the introduction of the larger symphony and the necessity of the conductor. The conductor and the composer had gradually less to do with one another. After the 1800s, the previous role of the conductor as someone to keep the beet facing the audience was replaced when the symphony expanded and the musicians needed help reading the score, resulting in him facing the orchestra and leading them in interpretation. This move between the composers, conductors and the musicians limited the music moving further away from the freedom of any improvisation.