If we broadly define composition as the act of conceiving a piece of music by organizing pitched sounds within musical time and space, and improvisation as the creation of a musical work during its performance, we could frame the continuum of Western music tradition. This continuum spans folk music, western classical music, jazz, and contemporary music, with the balance between composition and improvisation shifting closer to one pole or the other depending on the historical context.
According to Lydia Goehr in her The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works (1994)1, improvisation has often played a more important role than we think, alongside jazz and other musical genres that we directly associate with improvisation per se. Traditional folk music, for example, in most Western cultures has evolved through an oral tradition, transmitted from one generation to the next through imitation. This aural process inherently exposes the music to modifications, whether subtle or significant, made by individual musicians or groups. Such changes can occur both intentionally and unintentionally during transmission. One may see intentional modifications as improvisation, highlighting the musician’s creative contribution within the tradition’s framework.
Improvisation was also a significant aspect of Western Classical music until the 19th century, although it remains relatively unknown outside artistic circles. Composers were regarded more as artisans than artists, mainly working under patronage to create pieces for religious or social events. The scores they produced functioned as sketches, providing a framework but leaving many details—such as orchestration, structure, and duration—open to interpretation2. This flexibility was not due to incompetence or lack of resources but because performers, venues, and performance circumstances were often unknown beforehand. Performers were expected to adapt the material creatively, and their skill was partly evaluated by their ability to improvise. Musical pieces were primarily valued for the specific occasions for which they were composed, and often, they would be performed only a few times. The material created by composers was adapted in various ways to suit the occasion's needs, and it was not uncommon for composers to freely use compositional material from their colleagues. In this context, music served mainly to "entertain" according to the event, and the material used was considered "common property." As a result, reusing this material—whether by the same composer or another—was perfectly acceptable, especially given the high demand for production, which could fluctuate depending on the time of year and its associated festivities.
It was not until the 17th century that composers began to demand their music be performed more rigorously, though this would not become truly feasible until the 19th century when the creation of much more complete and detailed scores enabled performances that adhered more closely to the composition.
Many factors are connected to this shift3, either facilitating its emergence or contributing to its development, including the economic independence of composers and their evolving status as artists (which led to the music itself gaining independence, with written works acquiring intrinsic value, separate from any socio-religious event) or the separation of the roles of composer and conductor, which had historically been unified, allowing composers to convey interpretive ideas during performances without the need for explicit notation.
All these factors, combined with the emergence of the more detailed score, led to the introduction of the term work (werk), a concept still in use today and which has extended to other musical genres, including jazz and even some forms of popular music. Through numerous socio-economic implications, this shift, as Lydia Goehr's theory suggests, drastically altered humanity's relationship with music: the commercialization of musical works, the idealization of the composer, the secondary role of the performer, the reification of the musical work as an object to be listened to rather than interpreted, and many other changes that fall outside the scope of this research.
The aspect I would like to analyze more closely in this evolution to the term musical work, and later the term werktreu (literally 'faithfulness to the work'), is the complete separation between composition and interpretation4. Until the 19th century, composition and interpretation (with interpretation seen as improvisation) were nearly inseparable. The 'music' created (performed by musicians and heard by the audience) during an event resulted from both the material provided by the composer and the interpretation/improvisation carried out by the musicians, making it difficult to separate these two elements and determine the respective recognition for the composer and the performer. From the 19th century, but especially in the 20th century, the composer's work became distinctly separate from interpretation/improvisation (if any was present). Mostly during the Romantic period, where tonalism was still the rule, works of great composers like Tchaikovsky, Brahms, and Mendelssohn, to name a few, were performed with almost no room for interpretation.
It wasn’t until the 20th century, especially in the later half, that composers began to question fundamental notions in music—such as harmony (atonalism), form, notation, duration, and repetition—reintroducing improvisation while also opening new ways of understanding music. I would like to highlight, in particular, those composers who not only reintroduced improvisational elements but also integrated them seamlessly into composition, allowing performers, conductors, or both to make decisions about various aspects of the piece. I believe that this approach has contributed to a collective approach to the musical process, a more fluid artistic expression shaped by the collaboration of all involved, resulting in performances that can vary significantly depending on factors such as the musicians, the conductor, the venue, the instrumentation, and more. Thus, flexible forms -Henry Cowell’s Mosaic quartet (1935) and Stockhausen’s Momente (1962.WDR Cologne), where the different parts of the piece may be played in the desired order of the players, and Terry Riley’s In C (1968), where repetitions are open to performers-, Notational openness -Cornelius Cardew’s graphic scores in The great learning (1971) or Treatise (1967)- provided ample room for performer interpretation.
Jazz music is, by definition, one of the genres where improvisation plays a crucial role. By 'jazz', I refer to a vast array of subgenres, some more academically classified under the jazz umbrella than others, each incorporating improvisation to varying degrees. As Berendt J. and Huesmann, G. point out in their The Jazz Book: From ragtime to the 21st century5 from the swing era to bebop, hard bop, and modal jazz, spanning the 1920s to the late 1950s, traditional jazz—with its dominance of the tonic-dominant relationship within the Tin Pan Alley standards framework—maintained its stronghold. The concept of the chord scale establishes a relationship between vertical (harmonic) structures and horizontal (melodic) ones, allowing the improviser to choose between playing inside the changes—where the available notes consist of chord tones and harmonic tensions (which may or may not be resolved)—or playing outside, using chromatic approach notes that are neither chord tones nor harmonic tensions. These note choices create a spectrum of consonance and dissonance, ranging from fully consonant (inside) to mildly dissonant (harmonic tensions) to highly dissonant, in the case of chromatic approach notes.
Jazz forms are also structured yet flexible, with a designated space for the melody (which may be improvised around the original), followed by solos, and then a return to the melody to conclude the piece.
In the 1960s, free jazz emerged as a radical new force in the jazz scene. Though anticipated in the late 1940s by musicians like Lennie Tristano and his Intuition and Digression(1949) and further developed in the 1950s by figures such as George Russell (The Jazz Workshop, 1956), Charles Mingus (Pithecanthropus Erectus, 1956) or Cecil Taylor (Looking Ahead, 1958) among others, the first major breakthrough came in 1959 with Ornette Coleman's The Shape of Jazz to Come. However, it was his Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation (1960) that officially coined the term “free jazz6.” Following Coleman's lead, a wave of musicians—including Albert Ayler, Carla Bley, Don Cherry, John Coltrane, Steve Lacy, Sun Ra, Pharoah Sanders, and many others—embraced free jazz, pushing the genre into an open space of "free tonality7" in which meter, beat, and formal symmetry all disappeared, a range of world music from India, Africa, and Arabia were melded into an emphasis on intensity, unknown to earlier styles of jazz, even religiously ecstatic or orgiastic style of playing, added to the search of a realm of noise—having to do not so much with ugliness, unrest, aggression, or violence as with sheer enjoyment of sound for its own sake8-. Jazz again became what it had been in the twenties when the white public discovered it: a great, crazy, exciting, precarious adventure. At last, there was collective improvisation again, with lines rubbing against and crossing each other wildly and freely.
Freely improvised music is rooted in the desire to renegotiate the rules of performance with each new occasion. Musicians must strike a balance between deep introspection—listening to themselves—and acute awareness of their fellow performers. This requires a quality that John Coltrane, in his mature free-jazz period, called “selflessness9.” However, the ideal of absolute musical freedom soon revealed itself to be an illusion. While free jazz initially liberated musicians from rigid norms, roles, and clichés, it inevitably developed its own conventions. Just as New Orleans jazz and bebop had once sounded chaotic to conservative ears, free jazz, too, was revolutionary—until it wasn’t. As saxophonist Steve Lacy put it: ‘It was very exciting, revolutionary music: but after one year, the music started to sound the same, every night. It was no longer ‘free.’[..] After some years of this, the discarded elements (melody, harmony, rhythm, structure, form) returned to the music: renovated, refreshed, wide open with possibilities. We called this ‘poly-free,’ because the freedom might be anywhere, in a given piece. Also one became free to be not free if one chose10.’
Since then, open improvisation has not only persisted but also expanded and branched into various directions. However, one particular approach interests me the most—the development of a framework that reintroduced a set of limits or controls within free music. This emerged as a way to revitalize the somewhat static outcomes that resulted from unrestricted improvisation11. The concept of controlled chaos highlights one of the central paradoxes in improvisation: the dynamic tension between individual self-expression and the expectations of the collective. This tension was addressed through the intervention of a guiding figure—typically a conductor or director—who acted as a mediator between structure and freedom.
One of the most influential figures in this approach was Anthony Braxton (1945), a "trans-idiomatic" American composer who has repeatedly opposed the idea of a rigid dichotomy between improvisation and composition through many of his works. It was also his former student, Walter Thompson (1952), an American composer, woodwind player, and educator, who created Soundpainting, a multidisciplinary live-composing sign language I would like to refer to. Soundpainting challenges the traditional image of the composer as the sole guardian and extender of musical tradition. It also redefines the role of the conductor, transforming it into an intermediary between the composer and musicians: Through gestures, the conductor facilitates the performance but ultimately depends on the ensemble players to complete it, a concept that closely aligns with the approach I’ve taken in my research project ensemble. Together with other collective improvisational projects, such as John Zorn’s Cobra (1984) and Butch Morris’s Conduction system (1985), Thompson's Soundpainting has influenced my work, particularly in terms of cues and the 'democratisation' of a composition.