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  • Improvisation in the Arts of the Middle Ages and Renaissance
  • Jon Banks
Improvisation in the Arts of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Ed. by Timothy J. McGee. pp. xii + 331. Early Drama, Art and Music Monograph Series, 30. (Medieval Institute Publications and Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, Mich., 2003, $35. ISBN 1-58044-044-4.)

This book comprises a selection of papers from a 1999 conference on Improvisation in the Arts at the University of Toronto. Within the constrictions of the given period, it includes essays on dance, drama, and the visual arts, and in fact only three of its twelve items directly concern music. This throws a particular responsibility onto its unifying theme, and as such the notion of 'improvisation' raises some interesting questions. Even within the single discipline of music, many different activities can be analysed and subsumed under the heading 'improvisation'. Jazz solos, organ preludes, Baroque continuo playing, and vocal ornamentations, as well as the embellishments and taqsim-type preludes practised by many modern interpreters of the medieval repertory, are all essentially improvisatory, yet the practitioners of each share little in the way of common ground in either technique or aesthetic outlook; certainly there are few who would class themselves as 'improvisers' to whom all these styles are a single natural territory. The abstract nature of improvisation as a connecting theme is compounded when comparisons are made not just within each performing art but between all of them. Even though dance, for example, is closely related to music and certain broader formal concepts of embellishment and variation are applicable to both, the capacities of musical improvisers tend to be judged largely on technical musical grounds—such as conformity to (or originality within) conventions of scale patterns and harmonic propriety—that have no direct equivalents elsewhere.

However, while the essays may vary in the technical material they deal with, they are all united by their settings in the medieval and Renaissance periods. Both eras, for musicians at least, are sufficiently remote to be beyond the reach of any continuing performance practice; our knowledge of this music is based on surviving written documents. What comes down to us in musical notation is, by definition, the part of the music that is not improvised; and the theoretical documents of the time can be frustratingly unspecific and require considerable contextual interpretation. It is a concern with the issue of how such information can be used to flesh out what are supposed to be only skeletal notations into vital performing arts that unifies these essays, and the ways in which this problem is addressed across the range of different performing disciplines that gives them their greatest interest.

These general issues are directly addressed at the outset in Domenico Pietropaolo's 'Improvisation in the Arts', which, though written primarily from a literary standpoint, draws on a number of examples from music and places them valuably in a wider context. Pietropaolo discusses the origin and evolution of the English term 'improvisation' across the performing arts and offers an analysis of its progressive changes in status and relationship with written texts. Attitudes are assessed not just in the traditional terms of intellectual history—though the long shadow cast by Aristotle's judgement that 'rude improvisations gave birth to poetry' is discussed at length—but also in the wider social context of the professionalization of [End Page 462] all kinds of artists in modern Europe and the extent to which their status and value was related to improvisatory skills.

The three essays that specifically concern music each deal with quite different aspects of improvisation. With a wealth of quotations and archival information, Timothy McGee's 'Cantare all'improvviso' supports Nino Pirrotta's assertion that improvised singing was the single most important musical art in medieval Italy, and goes on to review the various speculations that have been made regarding what the nature of that singing might have been. McGee usefully challenges the idea that medieval improvised music must have been in any way simple and rejects the style of the frottola repertory of c.1500 as a possible model. He is also convincingly sceptical about any relationship between improvised music and the simpler lauda forms...

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