Throughout the eras of the Western art music tradition, including the Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque, Classical, and Romantic periods, improvisation was a valued skill.
However, in the 20th and early 21st century, as common practice Western art music performance became institutionalized in symphony orchestras, opera houses and ballets, improvisation has played a smaller role.
[7][8] Following the invention of music printing at the beginning of the sixteenth century, there is more detailed documentation of improvisational practice, in the form of published instruction manuals, mainly in Italy.
Two of the earliest important sources for vocal ornamentation of this sort are Giovanni Battista Bovicelli's Regole, passaggi di musica (1594), and the preface to Giulio Caccini's collection, Le nuove musiche (1601/2)[12][13] Eighteenth-century manuals make it clear that performers on the flute, oboe, violin, and other melodic instruments were expected not only to ornament previously composed pieces, but also spontaneously to improvise preludes.
[14] The basso continuo (accompaniment) was mainly improvised, the composer usually providing no more than a harmonic sketch called the figured bass.
According to Encyclopædia Britannica, the "monodic textures that originated about 1600 ... were ready-made, indeed in large measure intended, for improvisational enhancement, not only of the treble parts but also, almost by definition, of the bass, which was figured to suggest no more than a minimal chordal outline.
Dieterich Buxtehude and Johann Sebastian Bach were regarded in the Baroque period as highly skilled organ improvisers.
Classical music departs from baroque style in that sometimes several voices may move together as chords involving both hands, to form brief phrases without any passing tones.
Adorno mentions this movement of the Italian Concerto as a more flexible, improvisatory form, in comparison to Mozart, suggesting the gradual diminishment of improvisation well before its decline became obvious.
[17] Beethoven won many tough improvisatory battles over such rivals as Johann Nepomuk Hummel, Daniel Steibelt, and Joseph Woelfl.
Amongst those who practised such improvisation were Franz Liszt, Felix Mendelssohn, Anton Rubinstein, Paderewski, Percy Grainger and Pachmann.
[19] After studying over 1,200 early Verdi recordings, Will Crutchfield concludes that "The solo cavatina was the most obvious and enduring locus of soloistic discretion in nineteenth-century opera.
[22] Even if improvisation is also found outside of jazz, it may be that no other music relies so much on the art of "composing in the moment", demanding that every musician rise to a certain level of creativity that may put the performer in touch with his or her unconscious as well as conscious states.
He is free to embellish by means of passing and neighbor tones, and he may add extensions to the chords, but at all times a good improviser must follow the changes.
[26] Since the 1950s, some contemporary composers have placed fewer restrictions on the improvising performer, using techniques such as vague notation (for example, indicating only that a certain number of notes must sound within a defined period of time).
[27] Other composers working with improvisation include Richard Barrett, Benjamin Boretz, Pierre Boulez, Joseph Brent, Sylvano Bussotti, Cornelius Cardew, Jani Christou, Douglas J. Cuomo, Alvin Curran, Stuart Dempster, Hugh Davies, Karlheinz Essl, Mohammed Fairouz, Rolf Gehlhaar, Vinko Globokar, Richard Grayson, Hans-Joachim Hespos, Barton McLean, Priscilla McLean, Stephen Nachmanovitch, Pauline Oliveros, Henri Pousseur, Todd Reynolds, Terry Riley, Frederic Rzewski, Saman Samadi, William O. Smith, Manfred Stahnke, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Tōru Takemitsu, Richard Teitelbaum, Vangelis, Michael Vetter, Christian Wolff, Iannis Xenakis, Yitzhak Yedid, La Monte Young, Frank Zappa, Hans Zender, and John Zorn.
[28] The American Rock band Grateful Dead based their career around improvised live performances, meaning that no two shows ever sounded the same.
[35] Brand, along with Guenter A. Buchwald, Philip Carli, Stephen Horne, Donald Sosin, John Sweeney, and Gabriel Thibaudeau, all performed at the annual conference on silent film in Pordenone, Italy, Le Giornate del Cinema Muto.
Improvisers needed to know a wide range of musical styles and have the stamina to play for sequences of films which occasionally ran over three hours.
In Melbourne since 1998, the Make It Up Club (held every Tuesday evening at Bar Open on Brunswick Street, Melbourne) has been presenting a weekly concert series dedicated to promoting avant-garde improvised music and sound performance of the highest conceptual and performative standards (regardless of idiom, genre, or instrumentation).
[5] Nazir Jairazbhoy, chairman of UCLA's department of ethnomusicology, characterized ragas as separated by scale, line of ascent and descent, transilience, emphasized notes and register, and intonation and ornaments.
A raga is based on a scale with a given set of notes, a typical order in which they appear in melodies, and characteristic musical motifs.
Only when the soloist is satisfied that he has set forth the full range of melodic possibilities of the raga and has established its unique mood and personality will he proceed, without interruption, to the metrically organized section of the piece.