Improvised Music after 1950: Afrological and Eurological Perspectives

Since the early 1950s controversy over the nature and function of improvisation in musical expression has occupied considerable attention among improvisers, composers, performers, and theorists active in that sociomusical art world that has constructed itself in terms of an assumed high-culture bond between selected sectors of the European and American musical landscapes.Prior to 1950 the work of many composers operating in this art world tended to be completely notated, using a wellknown, European-derived system.After 1950 composers began to experiment with open forms and with more personally expressive systems of notation.Moreover, these composers began to designate salient aspects of a composition as performer-supplied rather than composerspecified, thereby renewing an interest in the generation of musical structure in real time as a formal aspect of a composed work.After a gap of nearly one hundred and fifty years, during which realtime generation of musical structure had been nearly eliminated from the musical activity of this Western or "pan-European" tradition, the postwar putative heirs to this tradition have promulgated renewed investigation of real-time forms of musicality, including a direct confrontation with the role of improvisation.This ongoing reappraisal of improvisation may be due in no small measure to musical and social events taking place in quite a different sector of the overall musical landscape.In particular, the anointing, since the early 1950s, of various forms of "jazz," the African-American musical constellation most commonly associated with the ex-