There was one fundamental flaw in the very idea of the Jazz Instrumental competition at the eisteddfod: it depended on the competitors performing notated music. The event involved no improvisation whatsoever.
‘There’s never been a time when improvisation has been given the respect it deserves,’ said jazz pianist Keith Jarrett in 2005. A jazz musician best known for his completely improvised solo concerts could be expected to be a little irritated with a recent lack of respect in the music world, but Jarrett’s view was short-sighted. Improvisation is still ubiquitous throughout the world, just not in most types of music given serious critical attention in the West. Jazz was shunned by the academy until graduate programs were established in the latter decades of the twentieth century; freestyle rap is perhaps musical improvisation’s most popular current form.
We celebrate musicians of mythology, forgetting they were all improvisers. Name the tune Orpheus performed to rescue Eurydice from the dead. Or the music Pan played to enchant his followers. And which composer helped the Pied Piper lure the children of Hamelin over the nearest cliff? Their music wasn’t notated or available for purchase or download. Their life-changing acts of music-making didn’t differentiate performance from composition. The stories of Orpheus, Pan and the Pied Piper reflect the world of music as it was for most of its history—musicians invented it as they played their instruments, or they experimented with variations of melodies they had picked up along their travels, without regard to precise notation or copyright. Musicians composed while they performed: in other words, they improvised.
In 1829, a decade prior to his Letters to a Young Lady, Czerny wrote a book entitled The Art of Improvisation. Fifty years after Nannerl Mozart dazzled her father with her spontaneous creativity, it was now expected that virtuosi improvise preludes to the works on their recital programs, to extemporise (an interchangeable term) on given themes or familiar tunes, and to invent cadenzas (codas) to works during performance.
One early student of The Art of Improvisation was ten-year-old Clara Wieck, whose piano performances during the 1830s regularly featured her improvisations. Touring with his adolescent prodigy, Frederick Wieck wrote to his wife that ‘No one could believe that she could compose, since that has never been true of girls of her age, and when she improvised on a given theme, all were beside themselves.’ On another occasion he boasted: ‘Clara, as a girl, already has an advantage over all the female pianists in the world, in that she can improvise.’40 By the time she became her century’s greatest woman pianist, improvisation had been part of public performance for two centuries, and Clara was considered one of the greatest exponents.41
Czerny believed that any amateur pianist could learn how to improvise, as long as she had attained a ‘more than moderate skill in playing’. It wasn’t a specialised skill set of the elite virtuoso musician and the concert hall, but rather an approach to music, a way of playing almost any instrument, that many amateurs could share. In Letters to a Young Lady, Czerny described extemporising as playing that ‘which has neither been written down before, nor previously prepared or studied, but which is merely the fruit of a momentary and accidental inspiration’.42 He encouraged his ideal student Cecilia to attempt to ‘connect together easy chords, short melodies, passages, scales, arpeggioed chords, or which is much better, leave it to your fingers to effect this connection, according to their will and pleasure’.
But, typically of a creative act that gave women a channel for self-expression, the practice of improvisation triggered ambivalent responses. Not even Clara Schumann could count on the support of her husband in the practice. ‘One word of advice,’ he wrote her, ‘don’t improvise too much; too much gets away that could be put to better use. Resolve always to get everything down on paper right away.’43 Thus does the document trump the improvisation, the composer the improviser.
As a teenager, Clara did compose. ‘Composing gives me great pleasure,’ she declared in 1853. ‘There is nothing that surpasses the joy of creation, if only because through it one wins hours of self-forgetfulness, when one lives in a world of sound.’44 But she didn’t perform her own compositions during concerts as her contemporary Liszt did, or as Bach, Beethoven and Mozart had done before her. She suffered from too much self-doubt. At the ripe old age of twenty, when we are nowhere near wise beyond our years, she decided to abandon it. ‘I once believed that I possessed creative talent, but I have given up this idea,’ she wrote. ‘A woman must not desire to compose—there has never yet been one able to do it. Should I expect to be the one?’
Instead, Clara introduced into concert programming the idea of performing other composers’ works. In her Vienna debut in 1837, for example, the nineteen-year-old presented Beethoven’s piano sonatas to a concert audience in their entirety for the first time—ten years after the composer’s death.45 Clara made this practice her own as she performed all over Europe for decades to come; it was her choice, but her promotion of the works of older male composers exerted enormous influence over the format of concerts that persists today. By the mid-nineteenth century, works by dead composers dominated the concert halls of Europe. The acrobatic hijinks of virtuoso pianists such as Franz Liszt (who studied as a child prodigy with Czerny) presenting their own compositions gave way to the model of performers who focused on interpreting the works of others.46 In this genre of music, the separation of creator and performer was all but complete.
By century’s end, improvisation had gone out of fashion. This attitude is reflected
