Improvisation in the Arts of the Middle Ages and Renaissance (review)

This volume of essays on improvisation in the arts during the early centuries had its origin in a conference which took place in May 1999 at the University of Toronto. The editor, Timothy McGee confirms that the book does not 'pretend to be either comprehensive or evenly distributed in its scope and coverage. Its advantage is that it brings together, under a single cover, essays on all of the arts.' After the broad-ranging, introductory essay 'Improvisation in the Arts' by Domenico Pietropaolo, the collection continues with three essays each on music and dance, four on drama, and one on art.

McGee's objective is to provide the reader with some clarity on the 'role played by improvisation from the late Middle Ages to the time of Shakespeare and beyond'. He defines improvisation as 'the extent to which the performing artist was not only allowed but expected to improvise'. He considers that 'A surviving text, whether it be literature, music, or choreography, is incomplete and requires unwritten additions by the performers in order to bring it to life in terms of the expectations of the early centuries'. While this definition is useful in application to the essays in both music and dance, it is less pertinent to the drama essays and the final essay on art.

Pietropaolo's introduction to the volume provides an effective overview which focuses on the development of improvisation as determined by the changing aesthetic relationship of performance to notation. He develops his theme by referring to the hierarchy in today's artistic culture which places 'written words far above spoken words, written texts above their physical enactment, compositions above performances, concepts above designs, and designs above the objects that embody them'. By contrast he insists that up to the eighteenth century '…performance was not an instrument for the execution of previously conceived art but itself art of the highest caliber, equal and possibly superior to the art of composition…' One of the factors promoting the early popularity of improvisation was its importance in training in rhetoric. Since rhetoric was basic to all education in this era, the mental apparatus for improvisation could be transferred from the verbal to the non-verbal arts.

McGee's essay in the music section, 'Cantare all'improvviso: Improvising to Poetry in Late Medieval Italy', investigates improvised singing and proposes a possible musical model for the tradition of improvised singing in the late Middle Ages. He uses the written repertory to discover the unwritten art of the improviser, and his analysis of the 14^th century Gheradello da Firenze's 'Per non far lieto' is convincing.

Rosenfeld's main contribution, in his essay on 'Performance Practice, Experimental Archeology, and the Problem of the Respectability of Results', is his demonstration of experimental archeology, which is the reconstruction of the processes, man-made and natural, that culminate in the artifact. His aim is to investigate improvisation through performance and he neatly captures both Pietropaolo's proposed method of regressive historical analysis and McGee's method as well.

Keith Polk provides the closing essay for the music section with the aim of considering the set of conditions associated with improvisation around 1500 and exploring how performers responded to these challenges. The focus is clearly on the early 16^th century when the repertory of late medieval court dances was gradually overtaken by a confusing array of dances which while choreographically less complex were much more demanding with respect to musical improvisation.

This provides a nice transition to the dance section, which opens with a survey of popular and art dances in 15^th and 16^th century Italy by Barbara Sparti. She counterpoises the characteristics of improvisation and composition in an appendix, and while this is a fairly crude oversimplification it is certainly thought-provoking. Better is Nevile's essay which aims to demonstrate that improvisation was a fundamental and distinguishing...