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 THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK
OF PHILOSOPHY AND
IMPROVISATION IN THE ARTS

Over the last few decades, the notion of improvisation has enriched and dynamized research on
traditional philosophies of music, theatre, dance, poetry, and even visual art. This Handbook offers
readers an authoritative collection of accessible articles on the philosophy of improvisation, syn-
thesizing and explaining various subjects and issues from the growing wave of journal articles and
monographs in the field. Its 48 chapters, written specifically for this volume by an international
team of scholars, are accessible for students and researchers alike.
The volume is organized into four main sections:

I Art and Improvisation: Theoretical Perspectives

II Art and Improvisation: Aesthetical, Ethical, and Political Perspectives
III Improvisation in Musical Practices
IV Improvisation in the Visual, Narrative, Dramatic, and Interactive Arts

Alessandro Bertinetto is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Turin in Italy and coordi-
nator of ART–Aesthetics Research Turin (Philosophical Seminar). He has been an Alexander von
Humboldt Fellow and a member of the Executive Committee of the European Society for Aes-
thetics. His most recent books are Eseguire l’inatteso. Ontologia della musica e improvvisazione (2016)
and Estetica dell’improvvisazione (2021).

Marcello Ruta studied music (classical piano) in Milan and Trieste and obtained his PhD in
philosophy in 2010 at the University of Strasbourg and his Habilitation in 2017 at the University
of Bern. He is the author of Schopenhauer et Schelling, philosophes du temps et de l’éternité (2014) and
co-editor (with Alessandro Arbo) of Ontologie musicale: perspectives et débats (2014).
 ROUTLEDGE H A N DBOOKS IN PHILOSOPH Y

Routledge Handbooks in Philosophy are state-of-the-art surveys of emerging, newly refreshed, and
important fields in philosophy, providing accessible yet thorough assessments of key problems,
themes, thinkers, and recent developments in research.
All chapters for each volume are specially commissioned, and written by leading scholars in
the field. Carefully edited and organized, Routledge Handbooks in Philosophy provide indispensable
reference tools for students and researchers seeking a comprehensive overview of new and exciting
topics in philosophy. They are also valuable teaching resources as accompaniments to textbooks,
anthologies, and research-orientated publications.
Also available:

THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF MODALITY

Edited by Otávio Bueno and Scott A. Shalkowski

THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF PRACTICAL REASON

Edited by Kurt Sylvan and Ruth Chang

THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF PHILOSOPHY OF EUROPE

Edited by Darian Meacham and Nicolas de Warren

THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF SOCIAL AND POLITICAL

PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE
Edited by Justin Khoo and Rachel Katharine Sterken

THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF POLITICAL EPISTEMOLOGY

Edited by Michael Hannon and Jeroen de Ridder

THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF PHILOSOPHY AND IMPROVISATION

IN THE ARTS
Edited by Alessandro Bertinetto and Marcello Ruta

For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/Routledge-

Handbooks-in-Philosophy/book-series/RHP
THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK
OF PHILOSOPHY AND
IMPROVISATION IN THE ARTS

Edited by
Alessandro Bertinetto and Marcello Ruta

NEW YORK AND LONDON

 First published 2022
by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2022 Taylor & Francis
The right of Alessandro Bertinetto and Marcello Ruta to be identified as the
authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters,
has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
With the exception of chapters 22, 24, 27, 28, and 37, no part of this book
may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publishers.
Chapters 22, 24, 27, 28, and 37 of this book are available for free in PDF format
as Open Access from the individual product page at www.routledge.com.
They have been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non
Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered
trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent
to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this title has been requested
ISBN: 978-0-367-20364-1 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-01649-8 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-17944-3 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003179443
Typeset in Bembo
by codeMantra
 CONTENTS

Figures ix
Contributors xi
Acknowledgments xvii

Introduction 1
Alessandro Bertinetto and Marcello Ruta

PART I
Art and Improvisation: Theoretical Perspectives 19

1 Improvisation as Normative Practice 21

Georg W. Bertram

2 Improvisation as Resonance 33
Giovanni Matteucci

3 Improvisation as Creative Performance 47

Caterina Moruzzi

4 Material and Improvisation in the Formative Process 60

Robert T. Valgenti

5 Ontology of Improvisation and Jazz 73

Daniel Martin Feige

6 Improvisation and Orientation 85

Marcello Ruta

7 Improvisation and Action Theory 100

Claus Beisbart
v
 Contents

8 Improvisation, Actions, and Processes 114

Pierre Saint-Germier and Clément Canonne

9 Rethinking Realtimeness in Improvisation 129

Sara Ramshaw

PART II
Art and Improvisation: Aesthetical, Ethical, and Political Perspectives 143

10 Appreciating Improvisations as Art 145

David Davies

11 Transformative Aesthetics: When the Unforeseen Emerges 159

Erika Fischer-Lichte

12 Improvisation as Spontaneous Creation versus “Making Do” 171

Andy Hamilton

13 Improvisation as Aesthetic Appearance 187

Christoph Haffter

14 The Expressivity of Musical Improvisation 201

Philip Alperson

15 Jazz Improvisation, Authenticity, and Self-Expression 214

Garry L. Hagberg

16 Manyness in Music Improvisation 228

Franziska Schroeder

17 Forms of Improvisation and Experimentalism 243

Daniele Goldoni

18 Improvisational Phronesis 259

Bruce Ellis Benson

19 Improvisation’s Ethical and Epistemological Challenge 271

Randy Fertel

20 Street Art and the Politics of Improvisation 285

Andrea Lorenzo Baldini

21 Improvisation and Political Emancipation 300

Matthieu Saladin

vi
 Contents

PART III
Improvisation in Musical Practices 313

22 Competing Ontologies of Musical Improvisation: A Medieval Perspective 315

Uri Smilansky and Marc Lewon

23 Improvisation and Essential Ornamentation in Vocal Music (1600–1900) 328

Livio Marcaletti

24 Freedom and Form in Piano Improvisation in the Early 19th Century 343
Katrin Eggers and Michael Lehner

25 Improvisation and Authenticity in Early 20th Century Western Music 355

Andrew Wilson

26 Improvisation and Composition: A Schoenbergian View 374

Sabine Feisst

27 Repeatability versus Unrepeatability in Free Improvisation 392

Thomas Gartmann

28 The Risk of Improvised Music: An Ethnographic Approach 405

Tom Arthurs

29 Empathy in Improvisation 421

Deniz Peters

30 Improvisation in Pop-Rock Music 431

Stefano Marino

31 “Improvisation” in Play: A View Through South Indian Music Practices 446

Lara Pearson

32 Improvisation in Arab Musical Practices 462

A. J. Racy

PART IV
Improvisation in the Visual, Narrative, Dramatic, and Interactive Arts 473

33 Dance Improvisation as Experimental Inquiry 475

Eric Mullis

34 The Springs of Action in Butō Improvisation 488

Carla Bagnoli

vii
 Contents

35 Stage Improvisation in the Commedia dell’Arte 502

Domenico Pietropaolo

36 Performance Art and Improvisation 515

Dieter Mersch

37 Improv, Stand-Up, and Comedy 530

Clément Canonne

38 Improvisation, Machines, Cinema 544

Gilles Mouëllic

39 Improvisation and Poetry 556

Rob Wallace

40 Improvisation in Painting 569

Alessandro Bertinetto and Marcello Ruta

41 Improvisation in Sculpture 585

Alice Iacobone

42 Improvisation and Artistic Photography 600

Alessandro Bertinetto

43 Improvisation and Installation Art 617

Elisa Caldarola

44 Installed Improvisation: The Case of Erwin Redl 631

Edgar Landgraf

45 Improvisation in Design Processes 645

Annika Frye

46 Urban Improvisations 659

Paola Berenstein Jacques

47 Improvisation in Cooking and Tasting 671

Nicola Perullo

48 Creativity and Improvisation in Games 685

C. Thi Nguyen

Index 699

viii
 FIGURES

12.1 Andy Hamilton’s Car 177

14.1 Excerpt from Phil Woods’s solo 202
14.2 Expected note from Phil Woods’ solo 202
14.3 “Fluffed” note from Phil Woods’s solo 202
20.1 A patch by Lady Muck left on an already yarn-bombed bike rack
by Carrie Reichardt. Photo by Carrie Reichardt 287
20.2 Fra32’s tags on a restaurant façade. Photo courtesy of the artist 288
20.3 Fra32, Heaven Spots in Beijing. Photo courtesy of the artist 291
20.4 Fra32, SAME. Photo courtesy of the artist 294
23.1 Musical examples from Michael Praetorius, Syntagma Musicum III,
Wolfenbüttel: Holwein, 1619: 234 332
23.2 Musical examples from Christoph Bernhard, Von der Singekunst, ca. 1650, passim 333
23.3 Musical example from Wolfgang Mylius, Rudimenta Musices, Gotha: Brückner,
1685: 109 334
23.4 Musical examples from Johann Joachim Quantz, Versuch einer Anweisung die Flöte
traversiere zu spielen, Berlin: Voß, 1752, passim 336
23.5 Musical example from Georg Joseph Vogler, Gründe der Kuhrpfälzische Tonschule
in Beispielen, Mannheim, 1778, Table XII 338
25.1 Erwin Schulhoff, Sami Dva, 1933. Overall structure - analyzed using notions
mentioned in Alfred Baresel’s Das neue Jazz Buch of 1929 362
25.2 Erwin Schulhoff, Sami Dva, Measures 1–8 (introduction + vamp), as transcribed
from the 1933 recording (transcription Andrew Wilson) 362
25.3 Erwin Schulhoff, Sami Dva, Measures 9–24 (transcr. Wilson) 363
25.4 Erwin Schulhoff, Sami Dva, Measures 89–95 (transcr. Wilson) 364
25.5 Erwin Schulhoff, Optimistische Komposition, 1936. Overall structure 365
25.6 Erwin Schulhoff, Optimistische Komposition, Theme 1, Measures 1–8 (transcr. Wilson) 365
25.7 Erwin Schulhoff, Optimistische Komposition, Theme 2, Measures 9–16 366
25.8 Erwin Schulhoff, Optimistische Komposition, Measures 17–20 (starting on m. 16) 366
25.9 Erwin Schulhoff, Optimistische Komposition, moving towards the climax,
Measures 37–42 367
25.10 Otto Luening, Trio for Flute, Violin, and Soprano (1923–24), Part IX, transcr. Wilson 368
25.11 Otto Luening. Trio for Flute, Violin, and Soprano (1923–24), Highgate Press, n.d.,
1960, p. 2 369

ix
 Figures

26.1 Arnold Schoenberg’s Noten-Bilderschrift (image-based notation). Courtesy

Belmont Music Publishers 376
26.2 Arnold Schoenberg’s letter to Arthur Leslie Jacobs from 5 March 1942 with a
theme for George Tremblay’s improvisation. Courtesy Belmont Music Publishers 379
26.3 Arnold Schoenberg, Three Piano Pieces, first of two manuscript pages, first
rendering, 7 August 1909. Courtesy Belmont Music Publishers 382
26.4 Arnold Schoenberg, First Cadenza for Georg Matthias Monn’s Cello Concerto in
G Minor, pages one and two of seven. Courtesy Belmont Music Publishers 385
40.1 Hero Lotti, On the 17.24 from Waterloo, 27/12/2016. Photo courtesy
of the artist 578
40.2 Hero Lotti, Oro Caffè, 10.30 am, 3/12/2019. Photo courtesy of the artist 579
41.1 An example from Theo Jansen’s Strandbeests series. Photo by Robbert van den
Beld, The Hague, September 2014 595
42.1 Germano Scurti, Improvviso con Jazz, 2016. Photo courtesy of the artist 611
42.2 Germano Scurti, Winnie. Stage Photos from S. Beckett’s “Happy Days”, 2016.
Photo courtesy of the artist 611
42.3 Pietro Privitera, The Caption from WUNDERGRAM, 2014–2016. Photo
courtesy of the artist 613
42.4 Pietro Privitera, Dark Dancer from WUNDERGRAM, 2014–2016. Photo
courtesy of the artist 613
43.1 Sarah Sze, Triple Point – Pendulum, USA pavilion, 55th Venice Biennale 2013,
Venice, Italy. Photo by Felix Hörhager, picture alliance/Getty Images 620
43.2 Sarah Sze, Triple Point – Planetarium, USA pavilion, 55th Venice Biennale 2013,
Venice, Italy. Photo by Felix Hörhager, picture alliance/Getty Images 624
44.1 Erwin Redl, Matrix XII Krems, 2019. Light Installation with blue LEDs, State
Gallery of Lower Austria, Krems, Austria. Photograph by LOPXP!X 634
44.2 Erwin Redl, Whiteout, 2017. Kinetic Light Installation, Madison Square Park,
New York, NY. Photograph by Ira Lippke 638
44.3 Erwin Redl, Islands of Light, 2016. Kinetic Light Installation, Duncan Park Lake,
Spartanburg, SC. Part of the installation series “Seeing Spartanburg in a New Light” 641
45.1 Design Concerns Each and Every One of Us. Poster by Nina Paim and Corinne
Gisel for Depot Basel, 2016 646
45.2 The design process where improvisation connects the concept and its
materializations (own drawing) 650
45.3 First hand-operated Electronic Shaver by Braun. A functional model with transparent
acrylic glass housing, 1943 652
45.4 Cutting Foil for the S 50, first industrially produced electronic shaver by Braun.
Developed by Max Braun, Artur Braun, Karl Pfeuffer, 1950 652

x
 CONTRIBUTORS

Philip Alperson is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Temple University in the United States.
His main area of research is the philosophy of the arts, specializing in the philosophy of music. A
jazz saxophone player, he is the former editor of The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism.

Dr. Tom Arthurs is an internationally acclaimed trumpeter/composer who is currently Head of

the cutting-edge Jazz and Contemporary Music Department at Bern University of the Arts. He
completed his PhD – The Secret Gardeners: An Ethnography of Improvised Music in Berlin (2012–2013) –
under Prof. Simon Frith, at the University of Edinburgh in 2015.

Carla Bagnoli is Professor of Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Modena (Italy). She
works and publishes on practical rationality, action theory, and moral epistemology. She is the
editor of Constructivism in Ethics (Cambridge UP, 2013) and author of Teoria della responsabilità
(Il Mulino 2019).

Andrea Lorenzo Baldini is Associate Professor of Aesthetics and Art Theory at the School of
Arts of Nanjing University and Director of the NJU Center for Sino-Italian Cultural Studies. His
interests focus on how creativity can transform our everyday practices by adding layers of ethical
and political meaning. He has published extensively on philosophical issues related to urban arts.
His recent articles have appeared in the Journal of Visual Culture and The Journal of Aesthetics and Art
Criticism. In 2018, his monograph A Philosophy Guide to Street and the Law was published by Brill.
He is also Delegate-at-Large of IAA.

Claus Beisbart is Associate Professor for Philosophy of Science at the University of Bern. Apart
from his work in the epistemology of modeling and simulation, he has broader interests, e.g., in
philosophical methodology. From 2015 to 2020 he was the co-editor of the Journal for General
Philosophy of Science.

Bruce Ellis Benson is Visiting Senior Research Fellow at the University of Vienna and Honorary
Senior Research Fellow at the University of St Andrews. A principal area of his writing is phe-
nomenology of music. His book The Improvisation of Musical Dialogue: A Phenomenology of Music
(Cambridge, 2003) was a pivotal point in the development of improvisational studies. He is the
author of over 100 articles and book chapters, many of which concern improvisation.

xi
 Contributors

Paola Berenstein Jacques is Professor at the Faculty of Architecture as well as at the Urbanism,
the Dance and the Visual Arts graduate programs at the Federal University of Bahia (Brazil). She
coordinates the Laboratório Urbano research group. She is a CNPq researcher and author of several
books, including: Les favelas de Rio (2001), Estética da Ginga (2001), Esthétique des favelas (2003),
Elogio aos errantes (2012), and Fantasmas modernos (2020).

Alessandro Bertinetto is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Turin (Italy) and coordi-
nator of ART – Aesthetics Research Turin (Philosophical Seminar). A former member of the Ex-
ecutive Committee of the European Society for Aesthetics, his latest books are Eseguire l’inatteso.
Ontologia della musica e improvvisazione (Roma: il Glifo 2016), and Estetica dell’improvvisazione (Bolo-
gna: il Mulino 2021). Personal Webpage: https://sites.google.com/site/alessandrobertinetto/.

Georg W. Bertram is Professor of Philosophy at the Freie Universität Berlin and since 2019
Dean of the Freie Universität Berlin’s Department of Philosophy and Humanities. He was Re-
search Associate in Philosophy at Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen (2002–2007), Assistant Pro-
fessor of Philosophy at the University of Hildesheim (2004), Research Scholar at the University
of Pittsburgh, and Visiting Professor at the Universities of Vienna (2006), Turin (2015), Rome 3
(2015), and IULM Milan (2017). Among his recent books are Art as Human Practice. An Aesthetics
(2019) and Hegels “Phänomenologie des Geistes”. Ein systematischer Kommentar (2017).

Elisa Caldarola has a PhD from the University of Padua, where she is a research fellow. She has
been a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Maryland, and a Visiting Scholar at the University
of Santiago de Compostela. She works mainly on installation art, depiction theories, and the on-
tology of art.

Clément Canonne is a CNRS researcher in the “Analysis of Musical Practices” team at IRCAM.
His work aims at understanding how people improvise together, bringing in perspectives from
ethnography and experimental psychology. He is also interested in the philosophy of music and in
the empirical approaches of aesthetic issues.

David Davies is Professor of Philosophy at McGill University, in Montreal, Canada. He is the author
of Art as Performance (2004), Aesthetics and Literature (2007), and Philosophy of the Performing Arts (2011).

Katrin Eggers is a musicologist and researcher in the philosophy and aesthetics of music. She did
her PhD on Wittgenstein as a philosopher of music and has published in the fields of music and
language, narrativity, gesture, and energy. She is currently writing a book on the visual aspects of
music. Her most recent publication is Eggers, K. and Stollberg, A. (eds.) Energie! Kräftespiel in den
Künsten, Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann 2021.

Daniel Martin Feige is Professor for Philosophy and Aesthetics at the State Academy of Art and
Design Stuttgart and studied Jazz Pianist. His latest books are Design. Eine philosophische Analyse
(Suhrkamp 2018) and Musik für Designer (AvEdition 2021). His new book Die Natur des Menschen.
Eine dialektische Anthropologie (Suhrkamp 2021) will be published soon.

Sabine Feisst is Evelyn Smith Professor of Music at Arizona State University’s School of Music,
Dance and Theatre. Author of over 80 articles and U.S. editor of Contemporary Music Review,
she published the books Der Begriff “Improvisation” in der neuen Musik (Studio 1997), Schoenberg’s
New World: The American Years (Oxford 2011), and two volumes of Schoenberg’s correspondence
(Oxford, 2016 and 2018).

xii
 Contributors

Randy Fertel is a writer and philanthropist dedicated to the arts, education, New Orleans, and the
environment. He holds a PhD in English and American literature from Harvard University (1981) and
is the author of A Taste for Chaos: The Art of Literary Improvisation (Spring Journal Books, 2015) and The
Gorilla Man and the Empress of Steak: A New Orleans Family Memoir (University Press of Mississippi, 2011).
He has taught English at Harvard University, Tulane University, Le Moyne College, and the New
School for Social Research. He specializes in the literature of the Vietnam War, exile, and improvisation.

Erika Fischer-Lichte is Professor of Theatre Studies at Freie Universität Berlin and Chair of the
Institute for Advanced Studies on “Interweaving Performance Cultures.” Among her many publi-
cations in English are History of European Drama and Theatre (1990), The Semiotics of Theatre (1992),
Theatre, Sacrifice, Ritual. Exploring forms of political theatre (2005), The Transformative Power of
Performance (2008), The Routledge Introduction to Theatre and Performance Studies (2009), Dionysus
Resurrected (2014), and Tragedy’s Endurance (2017).

Annika Frye is a design researcher and design theorist. She is Professor of Design Studies at
Muthesius Academy of the Arts in Kiel and Research Professor at Design Academy Eindhoven.
Her research is focused on the design process and its ephemeral qualities, on the relationship of
design and art as well as design and digitality.

Thomas Gartmann is a musicologist whose research fields are contemporary music, the ontol-
ogy of music, jazz, interpretation research, music and politics, music instruments, and libretti. He
is Head of Research at the Bern University of the Arts (HKB) and is jointly responsible for Studies
in the Arts, the joint doctoral program of the HKB with the University of Bern.

Daniele Goldoni is Professor of Aesthetics at Ca’ Foscari University Foundation, and has written
books on Marx, Hegel, and Hölderlin (Gratitudine 2013), as well as papers on aesthetics and new
economy (The Economy of Creativity and the Inhabitant 2019) and on improvisation (Presence and
Immanence 2018). He is the Director of Musicafoscari’s workshops for improvisation and festivals,
he plays the trumpet in free improvisation and jazz contexts.

Christoph Haffter studied philosophy and musicology in Basel, Paris (VIII), Berlin (Humboldt),
and New York (Columbia). He is a PhD student at the University of Basel and works as assistant at
the chair for Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art at the University of Fribourg. He was editor of the
journal for contemporary music Dissonance and works as a music critic.

Garry L. Hagberg is the James H. Ottaway Professor of Philosophy and Aesthetics at Bard
College and Editor of the journal Philosophy and Literature. He is presently finishing a new book,
Living in Words: Literature, Autobiographical Language, and the Composition of Selfhood, and working
on a book on aesthetic issues in jazz improvisation.

Andy Hamilton teaches philosophy, as well as the history of jazz, at Durham University, special-
izing in aesthetics, philosophy of mind, and political philosophy. His monographs include Aesthet-
ics and Music (Continuum, 2007) and Lee Konitz: Conversations on the Improviser's Art (University of
Michigan Press, 2007). He co-edited Philosophy of Rhythm: Music, Aesthetics, Poetics (OUP, 2020),
and has also written books on Wittgenstein, and on self-consciousness. He contributes to The Wire
magazine and elsewhere, writing on contemporary music.

Alice Iacobone is a PhD student at FINO (Northwestern Italian Philosophy Consortium). She
graduated from the University of Turin; she has also studied at Université Paris Nanterre and at

xiii
 Contributors

Freie Universität Berlin. Her research interests are focused on dynamic and performative ontolo-
gies of art, material agency, philosophical morphology, and visual studies.

Edgar Landgraf is Professor of German at Bowling Green State University (Ohio). His book
Improvisation as Art: Conceptual Challenges, Historical Perspectives was published in 2011. He also co-
edited Posthumanism in the Age of Humanism: Mind, Matter, and the Life Sciences After Kant (2018) and
Play in the Age of Goethe: Theories, Narratives, and Practices of Play Around 1800 (2020).

Michael Lehner is Professor of music theory and a staff member of the Institut Interpretation of
the Bern University of the Arts (HKB). His research fields are musical analysis, the history of mu-
sic theory in the 19th century, and the operas of Richard Strauss. His most recent publication
is Lehner, M., Meidhof, N., and Miucci, L. (eds.) Das flüchtige Werk. Pianistische Improvisation der
Beethoven-Zeit, Schliengen: Edition Argus 2019.

Marc Lewon is a musicologist and performer specializing in music of the Middle Ages and Re-
naissance. He received his PhD at Oxford University with Reinhard Strohm and is a Professor of
medieval and Renaissance lute at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis.

Livio Marcaletti is Head of the FWF stand-alone project “Translating and rewriting Italian op-
era in German-speaking countries (ca. 1600– ca. 1750)” at the Austrian Academy of Sciences. On
the same topic of his contribution to this volume, he is about to publish a book based on his PhD
dissertation, “Le Manieren di canto nella didattica tedesca del Sette e Ottocento,” A msterdam:
Stile Galante Publishing (forthcoming).

Stefano Marino is Associate Professor of Aesthetics at the University of Bologna. His main re-
search interests are critical theory, hermeneutics, pragmatism, aesthetics of fashion, and music. He
has authored several monographs, has translated into Italian books of Adorno and Gadamer, and
has co-edited various volumes and special issues of journals.

Giovanni Matteucci is Full Professor of Aesthetics at the University of Bologna. His research
concerns the determination of the aesthetic as a relational field according to the extended mind
model (see Estetica e natura umana. La mente estesa tra percezione, emozione ed espressione, Roma
2019) and phenomena of widespread aestheticization. He has authored several publications and
has edited the Italian translation of a number of classics of contemporary thought. He is edi-
tor-in-chief of the journal Studi di estetica and the President of the Italian Society for Aesthetics.

Dieter Mersch was Head of the Institute for Theory and Professor for Aesthetics and Theory
at the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK). His main areas of research are post-hermeneutics,
aesthetics, and the philosophy of art, as well as the philosophy of media and the philosophy of
image. His most recent works aim to establish an epistemology of aesthetics, reformulating the
research concept of art to “other knowledge.” Personal Webpage: http://www.dieter-mersch.de/.

Caterina Moruzzi is Research Assistant at the Department of Philosophy, Universität Konstanz.

Her research addresses topics in aesthetics and philosophy of mind, with a particular emphasis on
issues concerning creativity, Artificial Intelligence, and the ontology of music.

Gilles Mouëllic is Professor of Film Studies at Rennes 2 University. Among other publications,
he is the author of Jazz et cinéma (Cahiers du cinéma, 2000) and Improvising cinema, Amsterdam
University Press, 2013 [Improviser le cinéma (Yellow Now, 2011)].

xiv
 Contributors

Eric Mullis is a philosopher and dance artist who has published essays on dance in Dance Research
Journal, Performance Philosophy, Dance Research, Dance Chronicle, and the Journal of Performing Arts
and Digital Media. His recent book is entitled Pragmatist Philosophy and Dance: Interdisciplinary Dance
Research in the American South (Palgrave MacMillan 2019).

C. Thi Nguyen is Associate Professor of Philosophy at University of Utah. He writes on aes-

thetics, social epistemology, and practical rationality. Recent topics have included the philosophy
of games, aesthetic trust, trusting in objects, cultural appropriation, and moral outrage porn. His
first book is Games: Agency as Art (OUP).

Lara Pearson is a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics,
Germany. Her work focuses on musical practices in South India, examining bodily dimensions
of music experience and meaning. In addition, she has published on cross-cultural aesthetics and
cultural heritage.

Nicola Perullo is a philosopher and academic, and Professor of Aesthetics at the University of
Gastronomic Sciences of Pollenzo (Italy). His early areas of interest included late Wittgenstein,
phenomenology, Derrida, aesthetics of the 18th century, and Vico. His recent and current field of
study concerns food philosophy and ecological aesthetics. His most recent publications include:
Taste as Experience, New York; Columbia University Press 2016; Epistenology. Wine as Experience,
New York: Columbia University Press 2020.

Deniz Peters is Professor for Artistic Research at the University for Music and Performing
Arts Graz, Austria. Integrating musicology, philosophy, and pianistic experimentation in his re-
search approach, he has published chapters with Routledge, Lexington Books, Springer, Oxford
University Press, Leuven University Press, and on Leo Records.

Domenico Pietropaolo is Professor of Drama and Italian literature at the University of Toronto
in Canada. His research interests include theatre history, Italian literature, and semiotics. His
most recent publications include the books Semiotics and Pragmatics of Stage Improvisation (2016) and
Baroque Libretto (2011), co-authored with M.A. Parker.

A. J. Racy, PhD, is Distinguished Professor of Ethnomusicology at the University of California,

Los Angeles (UCLA). He has published numerous works on music and musical cultures of the Mid-
dle East, including his award-winning Making Music in the Arab World: The Culture and Artistry of Ṭarab
(Cambridge University Press, 2003). Born in Lebanon, Racy is a well-known composer, recording art-
ist and multi-instrumentalist who has performed and lectured widely in the United States and abroad.

Sara Ramshaw is an Associate Professor at the University of Victoria Faculty of Law in British
Columbia, Canada. Her research interests fall broadly in the area of arts-based approaches to law,
with a specific focus on the improvisatory arts, especially music, dance, and theater.

Marcello Ruta studied music and philosophy in Italy. Thereafter, he obtained his PhD in phi-
losophy in 2010 at the University of Strasbourg and his Habilitation in 2017 at the University of
Bern. In 2014, together with Alessandro Arbo, he edited the collective volume Ontologie musicale:
perspectives et débats, published by Hermann.

Pierre Saint-Germier has been a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Institut de Recherche et

Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM) and is now “boursier” at the University of

xv
 Contributors

Louvain-la-Neuve. He holds a PhD in Philosophy from the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon.
He has been working on many topics including conceivability and possibility, thought experi-
ments, the logic of imagination, as well as musical aesthetics and cognition.

Matthieu Saladin is an artist and Associate Professor in visual art at University Paris 8 (TEAMeD /
AI-AC). His research is focused on sound art and experimental music. He is the editor of the series
Ohcetecho (Presses du réel), the chief editor of TACET, Sound in the Arts, and collaborates with
journals such as Volume! and Revue & Corrigée. His practice takes place in a conceptual approach
and often uses sound. He is interested in the production of spaces, the history of artistic forms and
creative process, and in the relationships between art and society from a political and economic
point of view. His work is represented by the gallery Salle Principale.

Franziska Schroeder is a saxophonist, theorist, and a Reader at the Sonic Arts Research Centre,
Queen’s University Belfast. There she leads the “Performance Without Barriers” research team,
which investigates inclusive and accessible music making. Franziska has written for many inter-
national journals, including Leonardo, Organised Sound, and Performance Research, as well as for
Cambridge Publishing and Routledge. Among her books is the edited volume on improvisation
entitled Soundweaving.

Uri Smilansky is a musicologist and performer specializing in music of the 13th to 15th centu-
ries. He is currently a member of the research project Music and Late Medieval European Court
Culture led by Karl Kügle at the University of Oxford.

Robert T. Valgenti is Professor of Philosophy at Lebanon Valley College. His research interests
include contemporary Italian philosophy, hermeneutics, and the philosophy of food. He is the
translator of Luigi Pareyson’s Truth and Interpretation (2013), Gianni Vattimo’s Of Reality (2016),
and Gaetano Chiurazzi’s The Experience of Truth (2017).

Rob Wallace (Lecturer, Honors College, Northern Arizona University) is the author of Impro-
visation and the Making of American Literary Modernism (2010) and co-editor (with Ajay Heble) of
People Get Ready: The Future of Jazz is Now! (2013).

Andrew Wilson is Researcher, Lecturer, and PhD candidate in the Department of Musicology
of the University of Basel (Switzerland). His recent publications are “‘Darius Milhaud, composi-
teur et expérimentateur’, questions de recherche actuelle,” Cahiers de la Société québécoise de recherche
en musique (SQRM) 16 (1&2), 2015, and “Neue Sachlichkeit and Schulhoff’s Improvisations,” Danish
Yearbook of Musicology 43/2, 2019: 20–33.

xvi
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The project that resulted in this Handbook originated from the research activities we have car-
ried out thanks to several institutions to which we are very much indebted. The Alexander von
Humboldt Foundation supported Alessandro Bertinetto’s research on “Improvisation as a Para-
digm for the Philosophy of Art” (2011–13) and a subsequent research stay at the Freie Universi-
tät in Berlin. This research was further developed thanks to the Spanish Ministry of Economy
and Competitiveness with its projects “Aesthetic experience of the arts and the complexity of
perception” (FFI2015–64271-P) and “Normative Aspects of Aesthetic Appreciation” (PID2019–
106351GB-I00), as well as by the continuous scientific and financial support of the Italian Minis-
try of Education, University and Research. The Swiss National Science Foundation bestowed the
funding for the organization of the international conference “Authenticity versus Improvisation in
the Philosophy of Music?” organized in 2017 at the University of Bern. Some of the participants
at that conference are contributors to this volume; other contributors include participants from
further relevant research meetings such as the interdisciplinary conference “System and Freedom:
Rationality and Improvisation in Philosophy, Art and Human Practices” organized in 2015 by the
“Luigi Pareyson Studies Center” at the University of Turin, Italy, and workshops organized by
the University of Guelph (Canada), the Freie Universität Berlin, the Berlin Exploratorium (Ger-
many),1 and the University of Udine (Italy). Our heartfelt acknowledgments go to the funding
institutions that supported these conferences, as well as to the memory of Prof. Dr. Dale Jacquette,
who passed away in 2016 after having begun and coordinated the research project within which
the Bernese Conference was carried out.
This Handbook has been produced in the midst of a public health, social, and economic emer-
gency, which has made things significantly more difficult than usual. We therefore again address
our sincere thanks to all the contributors for their engagement and commitment, without which
such a rich and innovative book would not have been possible. We are also grateful to the Phi-
losophy Department at the University of Bern and in particular to Claus Beisbart who supported
us in many ways during the editing process, as well as to Thomas Gartmann, his colleague at the
Bern University of the Arts. Jerrold Levinson and Edgar Landgraf did us the significant and time-
consuming favor of reading, correcting, and commenting on a first draft of the introduction to the
Handbook: we are profoundly grateful to them for that. Thanks also to Anna Zöe Büchi, Ercan
Murat Isik, Jan Lüthi, and Soham Astik for their editing work as well as to Alice Iacobone for
collaborating in compiling the index of this Handbook. Ben Young assisted us with the significant
improvement of the linguistic quality of some parts of the Handbook – our thanks also go to him.
Finally, invaluable assistance was provided by the exceptionally professional team at Routledge,

xvii
 Acknowledgments

especially Andy Beck, Megan Hiatt, Marc Stratton and Vaishnavi Venkatesan, who helped us
bring this Handbook into being.

Note

xviii
 INTRODUCTION
Alessandro Bertinetto and Marcello Ruta

1 Why This Handbook?

This handbook is devoted to philosophical issues concerning artistic improvisation. As “an aspect
of the broader human condition” (Lewis and Piekut 2016: vol. 1, 22), and indeed of “human
­rationality” (Bertinetto and Bertram 2020),1 improvisation has been the subject of philosoph-
ical inquiry since the pioneering writings on the subject offered, among others, by Vladimir
Jankélévitch (1955), Gilbert Ryle (1976), Jean-François de Raymond (1980), and Michel De
­Certeau (1980). In recent years, improvisation has been the focus of philosophical studies ex-
tending beyond the domain of arts and aesthetics,2 becoming common currency in essays on
anthropological, neurological, cognitive, sociological, psychological, pedagogical, political, or-
ganizational, managerial, and urbanistic issues.3 This has, in turn, infused new approaches into
research on improvisation in the arts, moving away from traditional examinations of its practice
in music, dance, and theater, toward scientific, pedagogical, psychological, social, political, and
ethical topics pertaining to a variety of different arts.4
The number of philosophical studies dedicated to improvisation in various artistic practices and
disciplines is growing rapidly, and it is not possible to offer here a complete survey of the literature.
However, for the aims of the present volume, special mention must go to The Oxford Handbook of
Improvisation in Dance, edited by Vida L. Midgelow (2019), and to The Oxford Handbook of Critical
Improvisation Studies, edited by Georg Lewis and Benjamin Piekut (2016). While the first offers a
series of contributions on improvisation in dance – some with a philosophical focus concerning
ethics or aesthetics, or by adopting a phenomenological or scientific-cognitive approach – the sec-
ond is the most important editorial accomplishment regarding improvisation studies to emerge in
recent years. Culturally linked to studies on improvisation carried out at Columbia University by
George Lewis, and to the research group of the University of Guelph responsible for the publica-
tion of the journal Critical Studies in Improvisation, the two volumes of this monumental handbook
present a wide range of studies covering the most diverse fields: cultural studies, urbanism, sociol-
ogy, organizational research, philosophy, improvisation in non-Western music and avant-garde
music, improvisation among animals and in nature, technology, creativity, artificial intelligence,
and role-playing games, to name just a few. The editors’ introduction remains a key reference text
for orienting oneself in improvisation studies at an interdisciplinary level.
How, then, does the Routledge Handbook of Philosophy and Improvisation in the Arts differ from its
forerunners? Our aim is twofold: to be interdisciplinary and to maintain a narrow focus ‒ namely,
to present philosophical investigations on artistic improvisation in a variety of artistic practices. In other

DOI: 10.4324/9781003179443-1  1
 Alessandro Bertinetto and Marcello Ruta

words, the contributions to this volume are concerned specifically with the arts, the field where
the notion of improvisation was born, developed, and continues to flourish.
That improvisation in the artistic field played a significant role even in ancient Greece is evi-
denced by the fact that in the Poetics Aristotle argues that poetry owes its origin to improvisation
(ἐκ τῶν αὐτοσχεδιασμάτων).5 The Latin term “improvisus” (i.e. “unforeseen”) is mentioned by
Cicero (see Cicero 2002: 52). The use of the notion slowly moved from the domain of rhetoric,
in which it was traditionally at home – signifying the capacity to speak on the fly (“ex tempore
dicendi facultas”: Quintilian 1921: 10.7.1) – to the realm of artistic practices (above all theatre and
music), in which during the Renaissance period it settled. The Italian and Spanish dictionary of
Lorenzo Franciosini (1707) defines improvisation as the practice of “composing verses without
thinking about them.” Subsequently the notion came to indicate the composition of dialogues in
the moment, such that, in 1750, the playwright Carlo Goldoni could adopt it for his comic theater,
calling the Commedia dell’Arte the “commedia all’improvviso” (“improvised comedy”). The prac-
tice, and the notion, became popular in the realm of poetry (see Esterhammer 2008) and, since
the improvised recitation of poetic verses was usually accompanied by music, the term came also
to mean “composing music while performing,” a meaning adopted by other languages, including
English. Thus, the historical meaning of the term became linked especially to the performing arts.
From the arts, the notion of improvisation moved to the sphere of everyday life, referencing
certain (still heterogenous) kinds or ways of acting, such as: “A spontaneous action where one acts
in an unforeseen way” (Levinson 2010: 213); habitual and routine ways of action learned through
practice and automatized to different extents (like driving cars and riding bicycles); makeshift,
expedient, and “making-do”; unprepared and unpremeditated reactions to unexpected emergen-
cies; and conscious invention and ideation through execution and realization, including through
reshuffling and recycling pre-existing materials.
Improvisation is a kind of agency that is structured and, at the same time, capable of adapting
to changes in its surroundings. Accordingly, it is sometimes conceived of as the model of human
action as such (cf. Preston 2013). Furthermore, even natural evolution, culture, gender, and the
private sphere can be understood as improvisational processes (cf. Butler 2004; Hallam and In-
gold 2009; Nachmanovitch 2019). Nevertheless, it is in artistic and other creative practices that
improvisation is of the greatest importance. Given that improvisation is, in general, a mode of
action where success is not guaranteed, and given the mostly harmless character of failure in the
arts – where they are usually not as disastrous as they might be in scientific, social, and political
experiments – art remains the ground most conducive to the flourishing of improvisational prac-
tices. This makes improvisation in the arts also the most fertile ground for philosophical reflection
and analysis of related ontological, phenomenological, ethical, and aesthetic issues.
For this reason, this handbook combines a focus on the arts ‒ encompassing both performing
and non-performing art ‒ with philosophical inquiry. Among the questions asked are the follow-
ing: How might we articulate the notion and grasp the phenomenon of improvisation in different
artistic practices and from different philosophical perspectives? What are the ontological and phe-
nomenological properties of improvisation in the arts? What are the peculiarities of improvisation
in terms of creativity, artistic normativity, and aesthetic taste and judgment? What are the specific
features of the aesthetic experience of artistic improvisations? How does improvisation develop in
relation to the specific media and procedures of each artistic practice? What is the contribution of
improvisation to the artistic sphere as a whole? What is the aesthetic, moral, social, and political
import and impact of the art of improvisation?
Rather than propagating the aesthetic, anthropological, moral, cultural, or socio-political as-
sumptions and clichés about improvisation that are widespread in this field – such as assumptions
about the spontaneous, irreversible, unrepeatable, anti-normative, or democratic quality of im-
provisation, or presuppositions about the coincidence of process and product, or the deviation

2
 Introduction

from rules, conventions, and habits – the studies collected in this handbook offer precise, exten-
sive, and well-informed investigations on specific aspects of different forms of artistic improvi-
sation, drawing on contemporary as well as historical artistic practices. Moreover, as an implicit
endorsement of our belief that improvisation is a universal artistic resource and ideal, as well as a
significant dimension of human action as such – one might say, a key expression of what it means
to be human – this handbook is not limited to Western art, but also addresses other artistic tradi-
tions. Thus the approach of this volume, though strongly philosophical, remains open to histor-
ical, social, and empirical questions. Finally, while some contributions adopt the lens of analytic
philosophy, others draw on philosophical traditions such as pragmatism, hermeneutics, phenom-
enology, cultural studies, and critical theory. In fact, one of the driving ideas of this handbook is
that the conceptual richness and variety of the phenomena associated with improvisation requires
a wide-ranging analysis, which calls for insights from heterogeneous philosophical approaches
that can illuminate their subject from distinct perspectives, and in doing so, expand and deepen
the reader’s knowledge and understanding.
The Handbook is organized into two parts and four sections. The two sections of the first part
are dedicated, respectively, to theoretical investigations of artistic improvisation – particularly fo-
cused on ontology and phenomenology – and to aesthetic aspects of improvisational arts and their
ethical and political meanings and effects. The two sections of the second part are dedicated to
music and to a diverse range of other arts. The reason why a whole section is dedicated to improvi-
sation in the musical arts is self-explanatory: as recognized by many experts on the subject, music
and music studies have long had a leading role in the field of improvisation practices (Lewis and
Piekut 2016: vol. 1, 21). This is demonstrated by, among other things, the great number of publi-
cations devoted to traditional and new forms and technologies of musical improvisation, emerging
not only in the final decades of the previous century, but also in very recent years.6 While Section
3 seeks to do justice to the preeminence of improvisation in music, we supplement this focus with
a series of contributions, collected in Section 4, on other performing arts, installation art, and
also arts rarely associated with improvisation ‒ such as painting, sculpture, photography, poetry,
literature, architecture, and design ‒ and even practices not always considered artistic, including
culinary aesthetics and gastronomy as well as games such as role-playing games and videogames.
No doubt, many chapters could have been placed in different sections than those we have cho-
sen; to some degree, the organizational structure of such a handbook is itself the result of mindful
improvisation. As editors we take full responsibility for any perceived inconsistencies; neverthe-
less, we hope that our choice of structure offers the reader a tool to navigate the works collected
herein and appreciate their contents.

2 Philosophy and Improvisation in the Arts

Only a few decades ago, the practice of improvisation could still have been described as a neglected
topic in much of the literature on the arts and philosophy (Nettl and Russell 1998); but since then
matters have changed significantly. The role of improvisation in the arts, primarily in music and
the performing arts such as dance and theater, is now widely recognized, thanks, in part, to many
of the contributors to the present volume. The very meaning of the practices of improvisation and
their artistic, cultural, and social import are studied in a scientifically informed way at both a his-
torical and theoretical level. Nor are the philosophy and the aesthetics of improvisation any longer
a novelty. In this regard, this handbook consolidates, reflects on, and extends existing research
trends, while also providing new perspectives and opening new fields of research.
In the following pages we sketch some of the main topics discussed in the various chapters of
this handbook. (For a short description of each contribution, see Section 3). From the theoretical
point of view, a first key issue concerns art improvisation’s ontology. While the main ontological

3
 Alessandro Bertinetto and Marcello Ruta

models adopted for the performing arts usually (though this handbook picks out interesting excep-
tions) distinguish between the work (as an artistic object) and its performances (as its realization),
improvisation seems to conflate work and performance. As a consequence, the idea is widespread
that, in improvisation, invention and realization as well as process and product coincide. This is
true, but only to a certain point, given that not everything in improvisation is invented on the
spot. Improvisers usually know how to dance, play an instrument, recite, etc., and improvisation
follows the conventions and rules of the artistic practice and genre to which it belongs, while also
appealing to pre-prepared materials for realizing a performance that can count as improvisation
on the whole. Furthermore, it is possible to distinguish between the process of improvising and its
result ‒ so much so that audio-video recordings can give us access to the product after the produc-
tion process has ended. This, moreover, occurs quite as a matter of course when improvisation is
at work in arts such as painting, sculpture, and literature – here observers and readers perceive the
result of improvisation, not its process.
On closer inspection, many of the ontological qualities ascribed to improvisation (e.g., situa-
tionality, unrepeatability, ephemerality, fragility, and uniqueness) seem to be ontological proper-
ties of all events, including performative interpretations of musical, theatrical, and dance pieces
(Ruta 2017), and not exclusively of improvisations. Conversely, the specific aesthetic qualities of
improvisation do not depend solely on its link to “the moment” and its unrepeatability. As the
relevance of improvisation in non-performing arts shows, improvisation does not always coincide
with performance in the sense of a live event shared between artists and the public. Still, it remains
true that artistic improvisation is particularly marked by its occurrence in so-called “real time” – a
notion that surely is as philosophically interesting as it is questionable. Improvisatory creativity
unfolds through the interactions that occur in the situation of its unfolding: the interplay between
the performers, the relationship with the audience, and the interaction with the performative sit-
uation. Whether it is intentional improvisation or reactive improvisation (impromptu, as Lydia Goehr
calls it [Goehr 2016]), acting responsively and appropriately with respect to the moment in which
it takes place is a distinguishing mark of the artistic sense of improvisation. What is achieved can
be unexpected even for the improvising artist, who is stuck in an “epistemic paradox” – they know
how to do, but do not know what they will do (Bertinetto 2016a). Thus, the artistic normativity of
the improvised work emerges, in part, during its formation – to the point that the very notion of
mistake becomes interestingly problematic (Bertinetto 2016b).7
Many other theoretical questions arise in relation to these themes. Besides the crucial question
of whether improvisation (in art and in other human practices) can truly be said to occur at all, or
is rather only an ideal and/or artistic goal, some of the issues at stake in the philosophical debates
(e.g., in aesthetics, theoretical philosophy, and the cognitive sciences) are the following:

• explaining the cognitive, decisional, bodily, and interactive processes of improvisational ac-
tion, and understanding their development;
• clarifying the relationship between improvisational action and its preconditions (such as cul-
tural conventions; artists’ competence, preparation, and embodied knowledge; as well as the
material resources of an artistic practice);
• illuminating the specific nature of improvisational creativity, which ensues both from im-
itation and invention, thereby investigating notions like “spontaneity,” “unpredictability,”
“novelty,” “inspiration,” and “virtuosity,” which are traditionally related to it;
• accounting for the possibility of simulating or feigning an improvisation;
• describing the phenomenological and temporal structures of the production and experience
of artistic improvisations;
• discussing whether, and how, is it possible to perceive the improvisational nature of a perfor-
mance and, especially, to perceive the expressive qualities of improvised art;

4
 Introduction

• analyzing the specific character of the experience of improvised art and explaining its link
with particular aesthetic moods, attitudes, and items (trust, choice – or avoidance of choice8 –
risk, expectation, surprise, wit, humor, wonder, etc.); and
• reflecting on the link between the work and its improvised performances, as in the perfor-
mance of a Jazz Standard.

With respect to this last question in particular, two approaches compete in contemporary debates
on the philosophy of art. According to the first approach, which is based on an ontological model
of a structural kind,9 improvisation is an “odd” case: either it is a sort of deviation from the meta-
physical rule according to which performances (such as musical performances) are tokens of an
immutable normative type (the work) that repeatedly instantiate the type as indicated in the score
(Dodd 2012; 2014), or it is a practice in which there are no works at all, but only playings (Kania
2011). The second approach, conversely, considers improvisation the very model of the ontology
of art. Accordingly, the retroactive and autopoietic normativity of improvisation, whereby the
sense of improvisation emerges from the performative interactions that shape it, is paradigmatic
for the ontology of art in general. Artworks and performances are embedded in changing cultural
practices. Hence, the interpretation, say, of a musical work does not repeat it; rather, performances
realize works, thereby contributing to (trans)forming them (cf. Feige 2014; Bertinetto 2016a, and,
in the same vein, Eric Lewis’ (2019) “afrological”10 proposal).
Another important debate concerns improvisational creativity.11 On the one hand, there are
those who conceive of improvisation as the application of the general case of artistic creativity,
understood as the realization of an intentional plan. On the other hand, there are those who argue
that artistic creativity does not proceed on the basis of pre-established projects and intentions to
be put into practice, and that the artwork results from interactions between artists, the materials
they use, and the situation in which they work. In this view, it is precisely because improvisers are
not authors fully in control of their work that improvisational practices draw attention toward the
work’s contingent materiality and situatedness. This is what makes improvisation the epitome of
artistic creativity, while also constituting a significant feature in common with the aesthetics of
performativity.
Of course, the debate on the aesthetics of improvisation and on the ethical and political issues
connected to it is lively and not limited to the topic of artistic creativity. It is fair to say that nei-
ther the Romantic idea of inspired, genius-like creativity, which has governed the aesthetics of
improvisation since at least Mme de Stael, nor Adorno’s aesthetic prejudice about improvisation
as a static standardized and repetitive pseudo-artistic practice (Adorno 1990) are now considered
viable aesthetic frameworks for understanding the arts of improvisation. Both are heirs of an
aesthetic ideology in which improvisation was the exceptional case or a minor practice: banal en-
tertainment rather than authentic art. In the contemporary debate, the two main philosophical ap-
proaches to improvisational aesthetics (or to the aesthetics of the unexpected) revolve around the
“aesthetics of imperfection” and the “aesthetics of success.” Starting at least from Ted Gioia’s landmark
1988 book on jazz, the first approach has had and still has several supporters (e.g., Brown et al.
2018). Its point is roughly this: as shown in particular by the case of jazz, artistic improvisation,
due to its particular ontological dimension, has specific aesthetic features that distinguish it from
other artistic practices regulated by canons of beauty and formal perfection. In particular, impro-
visation is, as the stereotype goes, characterized by the coincidence of process and product and
by the impossibility of correction, thus relying on aesthetic and expressive aspects far from those
in force in artistic manifestations not dependent on the adventures and happenstances of creation
in the moment. However, the aesthetics of imperfection do not only concern improvisation, but
rather artistic performances as such, which are consigned to the contingency that characterizes, at
least potentially, every event.

5
 Alessandro Bertinetto and Marcello Ruta

The second approach, the “aesthetics of success,” was theorized in the aesthetics of the 20th cen-
tury by Italian philosopher Luigi Pareyson’s “theory of formativity” (Pareyson 2010).12 According
to Pareyson, art is a kind of making that invents the way of making while making. Apart from the
decidedly more optimistic flavor of the label “success” as opposed to “imperfection,” the idea is
that every work and every artistic performance configures its normativity in a self-referential way.
This is what Luhmann (2000: 246) described as the “self-programming of art” – a feature recog-
nized and demanded by the aesthetics of autonomy developed in the late 18th century by authors
such as Karl Philipp Moritz, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, and Immanuel Kant (cf. Landgraf 2011).
This does not mean that the artists in their making, and the public in its reception, do not refer
to cultural, artistic, and aesthetic rules, conventions, or procedures, but rather that the normative
force of such conventions, procedures, and rules is shaped by their application – i.e., through the
work or performance – in a (trans)formative and situational way. Depending on the constraints of
specific artistic practices, failure may ensue from a different kind of shortcoming – such as lack of
novelty, weak technical skills, poor interplay, or formal triviality. There are, however, no criteria
the respect of which guarantees the success of a work or performance; aesthetic criteria are, in
fact, (trans)formed through/by the work or the performance. The lack of pre-established guar-
antees of success is the very condition for the possibility of the artistic (situational and concrete)
success of the artwork (see Bertram 2018). On this basis it is easy to see that improvisation – as a
modality of artistic production and artistic performance – neither is necessarily characterized by
a specific aesthetic dimension, which is in turn responsible for the peculiar expressive properties of
an artistic practice (although sometimes it is to be articulated aesthetically in this way: on the “ex-
pressive specificity of jazz,” see Levinson 2015: 131–43), nor is it necessarily to be understood as a
phenomenon always apart from usual consolidated artistic practices and experiences. Indeed, im-
provisation can become the model of a social aesthetic (Born et al. 2017), while its specific aesthetic
qualities may also be seen as paradigmatic of art per se, as eminently exemplifying the aesthetics of
success (cf. Bertinetto 2021). One may think, in particular, of features like: the emerging character
of the artistic sense of an artwork as well as its novelty and originality; the formative power of the
present situation and one’s dedication to the moment in which the improvisation is taking place,
as well as the attitude of experimental imaginative curiosity directed towards aesthetic discoveries
and inventions (both of which involve both the artists and the public); and expressive authenticity
as responsiveness – not only on the part of the artists, but also as encoded in the artwork itself –
towards the situation in which the art is produced. These are among the qualities to be considered
guides for understanding the aesthetic experience of art as such in its multiple and culturally
evolving dimensions.
Moreover, due to its power of generating its own normativity (Bertram 2010) – which com-
plicates the naive assumption of improvisation as transgression of rules and testifies, rather, to the
relationship between improvisation and practices such as recycling and collage – artistic impro-
visation might be considered the performance or the enactment of Kantian aesthetic judgment
(Peters 2017; Bertinetto and Marino 2020). In short, on this model, the “grammar of contin-
gency” implemented in improvisation performances and works may be conceived of as quintes-
sential for the practice(s) and experience(s) of the arts.13
Many of the chapters of this handbook discuss and problematize these themes in different
ways, showing the richness of the aesthetic perspectives disclosed by philosophical reflection on
the practices of artistic improvisation. Similarly rich in scope, theoretical depth, and variety are
the ethical, moral, and political reflections elicited in the improvisational artistic field. On the one
hand, it is undeniable that, even in arts not traditionally understood as performative, improvisa-
tion is characterized by the specific modality and dimension of a type of acting – and the world of
action is always entangled in ethical, social, and political questions. On the other hand, many of
the values and/or qualities of improvisation are also important moral, ethical, and political issues.

6
 Introduction

Examples of this kind are freedom, authenticity, responsiveness, sensitivity to the right moment
(when “one cannot at first see the solution and then, suddenly, one sees it – in the moment”: Goehr
2016: 474); judgment in the application of a norm to a concrete situation (phronesis); the practical
intelligence capable of exploiting a situation to its advantage (metis); the configuration and expres-
sion of personhood through actions and deeds; the methods of organizing a collectivity through
joint actions of a collaborative or competitive kind; and, surely, the utopian or eutopian ideals of
some artistic improvisational movements.
Therefore, improvisation seems capable not only of exemplifying14 moral or political con-
tents (in reference to jazz specifically, see Hagberg 2008), but also of relating art and society in
a transformative way, while questioning and sometimes overcoming the separation between art
and reality that dominated the Western aesthetic ideology between the 18th and 20th centuries
and that is still dominant in certain sectors of the study of the philosophy of art today. Improvi-
sation’s capacity to overcome, or at least to question, the dichotomy between art and life, thereby
stressing the political relevance of artistic practices, is not least due to its power of performative
self-reflection through which artistic production is exhibited in its product as real actual making,
and in which the public not only interacts with the performers, but is involved as a co-performing
partner within the work. The aesthetic meaning and value of an artist’s action as regards the impro-
visational work of art is certainly questionable; and yet it seems undeniable that artistic improvisa-
tion is an emblematic case for the exercise of a participatory (Bourriaud 2002) and transformative
(Fischer-Lichte 2008) aesthetics, which also penetrates into the everyday sphere.
These issues reveal the artistic and theoretical fruitfulness of philosophical investigations of the
notion of improvisation and of improvisational artistic practices. Yet, as shown by the chapters of
this handbook, they are not the only issues that will concern us. The contributions to this volume
develop philosophical approaches to the arts of improvisation in ways that are both original and
well informed, combining historical with theoretical insights that open new research perspectives
and fill voids in the existing literature on improvisation. As editors, we are sincerely grateful to
the authors who have contributed to this volume. It is thanks only to their competence and intel-
ligence, and their unflagging willingness to collaborate with us in a period as difficult as that of
the COVID-19 pandemic, that it was possible to gather together the highly illuminating insights
it is our pleasure to share in this handbook.

3 Overview of Sections and Contributions

As indicated above, the approach of this volume is interdisciplinary in at least three respects: (a) its
chapters concern different artistic practices; (b) it is both theory and praxis focused; and (c) it includes
approaches that draw both on analytic and continental philosophy. Consequently, the Handbook pres-
ents several dissonances, in terms of topics treated, vocabulary employed, and strategies of argumen-
tation. Such dissonances are intentionally left unresolved, as the Handbook does not aim to present
a neutral and/or synthetizing view about improvisation, but wants rather to offer a rich and detailed
overview of the diverse philosophical research on improvisation in the arts. This research is charac-
terized by the heterogeneity of topics treated, traditions referred to, vocabulary employed, arguments
developed, and methodologies adopted. The heterogeneity of approaches is reflected in every section.
In Section 1, Art and Improvisation: Theoretical Perspectives, artistic improvisation is investigated
along several theoretical directions. The chapters here deal with the specific ontological status
of improvisation through theoretical notions such as “resonance” and “orientation,” and draw
connections with action theory and philosophical topics such as “creativity” and “normativity.”
Normativity is at the heart of Georg Bertram’s contribution. Bertram approaches the ontol-
ogy of improvisational performances through the innovative notion of “norm in statu nascendi.”
His main point is that, by definition, in spite of the possible employment of existing material or

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 Alessandro Bertinetto and Marcello Ruta

stylistic patterns, improvisational performances do not follow pre-constituted norms; rather, they
develop their own specific – and therefore autonomous – normativity through different kinds of
interactions developed in the course of the performance. Analogously, making use of notions such
as “radical improvisation” and “resonance,” Giovanni Matteucci focuses on the articulation of
expressive forms in the event of improvisation. Radical (“free”) improvisation is conceived as the
coming into existence of a form through its materialization. “Resonance,” a concept taken from
Merleau-Ponty (and nowadays extensively treated by Hartmut Rosa), concerns the aesthetic expe-
rience of attending to a radical improvisation by reacting to, or inhabiting, what happens without
pre-formed expectations, in a kind of living vibration.
Caterina Moruzzi grounds her ontology of improvisation in her “Musical Stage Theory,” ac-
cording to which every performance must be viewed as a different musical work. Hence, when
speaking of musical work as a repeatable entity, we actually denote a “collection of performances,
related through a repeatability-relation” (51). Thereby, the break between works and perfor-
mances is overcome. In this respect, artistic improvisation is paradigmatic for the ontology of art
as a whole. This point is extended thereafter to new forms of artistic improvisation, including
human-robot interactions.
A central aspect of the ontology of improvisation is its relation to composition, the subject of
Robert Valgenti’s contribution. Following the path opened by Luigi Pareyson, Valgenti argues
that improvisation is to be considered neither as opposed to composition, nor as a specific form
of composition, but rather as an element always at work in any composition: namely, one that
allows a movement between the artist’s personal style and the possibilities opened by the existing
artistic material. Another view of the matter is offered by Daniel Martin Feige, who explores the
connection between improvisation and composition in jazz. Finding a tertium datur between the
notion of a Jazz Standard as thin musical work and ontologies conceiving single performances as
musical works, Feige performs a paradigm shift in jazz ontology. He argues that each performance
of a Standard retroactively transforms it and that this is the reason why the Jazz Standard figures
as the paradigm for the general notion of musical work. Thereby the notion of musical work (and
generally of artwork) acquires processual connotations, related to its historical constitution.
Such connotations, however, can also relate to the single performance-output. The main aim
of Marcello Ruta’s contribution consists in proposing the use of the notion of “orientation” as
a hermeneutical tool with which to analyze key aspects of improvisational performances. After
an initial investigation of the relationship between these two notions (orientation and improvi-
sation) as articulated in five common symptoms, he essays an application of this approach in the
specific domain of free improvisation, the notion of which is also an object of his analysis. Ruta’s
focus on orientation paves the way for discussing the relation between improvisation, on the one
hand, and process and action, on the other. Claus Beisbart’s chapter discusses improvisation in
action-theoretic terms, that is, from the perspective of a more encompassing philosophy of action,
like that of Michael Bratman. The key point developed in his contribution is that improvisation
precludes comparatively specific prior plans as to how to do something. Applying this proposal to
artistic performances, Beisbart obtains a picture of artistic improvisation (qua performance) that
sits well with pre-theoretical intuitions, while also defying conceptions in vogue in the literature.
Similarly, Pierre Saint-Germier and Clément Canonne challenge the dominant thesis according
to which the focus of artistic appreciation of improvisation is not the final product, but rather the
performance as the improvisers’ action. Their move is to consider the very product of an improvised
performance as a process, the aesthetic qualities of which cannot be reduced to syntactical relations
among artistic materials (such as sounds, expressive gestures, and the like), but should be located
in the unfolding performance.
The last chapter of this first part again tackles the topic of normativity, which opened the sec-
tion, through studying the link between art and law in relation to the temporality of improvisation.

8
 Introduction

Drawing on the philosophies of Henri Bergson and Jacques Derrida, Sara Ramshaw’s contribu-
tion explores the (real) time of attentive listening as it pertains to both justice and art. Uniting the-
orists of attunement, such as Nathan Crawford and Lisbeth Lipari, with Bergson, Ramshaw calls
for a more dynamic and vibrant conception of improvisatory time in art and justice as attunement
in duration. In doing so, she aims to rethink the real-timeness of improvisation as an (imperfect)
listening to otherness, which, in its openness, enables both creativity and social change.
Section 2, Art and Improvisation: Aesthetical, Ethical, and Political Perspectives, examines the con-
nection between the aesthetic dimension of improvisation and ethical-political topics such as its
potential emancipative power and its conception as supposedly free action and participative social
practice. Reflections on the aesthetics of improvisation often aim to identify and discuss specific
traits that are appreciated in improvised performances and artworks, thereby examining the expe-
rience of artistic improvisation in aesthetic and ethical as well as political terms.
David Davies’s contribution defends the view that improvisations might be appreciated for
their “pure” aesthetic properties, as well as for the properties they have because of their improvisa-
tory origin. Accordingly, one should appreciate “the ways in which the performer(s) respond(s) to
such things as opportunities for creativity, so that a ‘mistake’ is no longer seen as such in the overall
context of the performance” (154). Therefore the specific artistic character of improvisation seems
to rely particularly on the generation of the criteria for its aesthetic judgment on the spot. Impro-
vised performances not only induce aesthetic judgment, however; they also can be transformative
experiences. In her contribution, Erika Fischer-Lichte argues that the transformative power of
art in performance becomes effective in particular because of the emergence of the unforeseen,
which is due, to a great extent, to the autopoietic feedback loop between actors and spectators.
Improvised performances, as the staging of the unforeseen par excellence, thereby seem to eminently
exemplify an aspect of performance, only to be experienced by recipients who, in Goethe’s words,
see themselves as “travellers who visit foreign places and lands” (168).
In his contribution, Andy Hamilton differentiates between improvisation as spontaneous cre-
ation, as commonly understood in the aesthetic domain, and “making do,” as commonly under-
stood in the more general domain of human action, where improvisation relates mainly to actions
undertaken under unforeseen emergency situations. In this respect, the notion of “making do”
applies not only to improvisations, but to live performances more generally. Accordingly, an aes-
thetic of imperfection seems to be applicable also to non-improvised performances. But how is the
specific aesthetic import of improvisation to be understood? Christoph Haffter argues that it can
be articulated in a series of predicates, like “liveness” and “unpredictability.” Those predicates are
appreciated in their aesthetic specificity, and can, therefore, possibly be exemplified also by non-
improvised artistic performances. On the other hand, those properties, as rooted in historically
and culturally situated specific artistic materials, can be differently appreciated each time – what
two centuries ago could appear as unpredictable, can nowadays sound, paradoxically, like a cliché.
A key topic for the aesthetics of artistic (and in particular musical) improvisation is that of ex-
pressiveness. In this regard, Philip Alperson, who has authored many influential publications on the
philosophy of musical improvisation, starts his investigation with an analysis of an improvised solo
by jazz saxophonist Phil Woods where Woods apparently “fluffs” a note. Alperson argues that mu-
sical performances, as eminently shown by improvisations, should not be evaluated independently
from their expressive value. The question whether Woods’s “fluffed” note is a mistake is misguided;
rather, the musical event is to be regarded as the result and reflection of an expressive commitment
of the performance. Expressiveness is also at the center of Garry Hagberg’s contribution. Hagberg
considers “authenticity as self-expression” paramount for identifying the specific aesthetics of im-
provisational artistic practices. Leaning on Nietzsche’s and Sartre’s philosophical approaches, as well
as on an analysis of Thelonious Monk’s improvised performances, Hagberg argues that authenticity
cannot be measured in terms of an adequate externalization of a pre-formed content. In fact, the

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 Alessandro Bertinetto and Marcello Ruta

content – rather than the presupposition – of an authentic performance is its result. Yet authenticity,
in the context of improvisational practices, is not always realized through the affirmation of personal
individuality. This, at least, is Franziska Schroeder’s point. Her contribution consists both of an anal-
ysis of Fernando Pessoa’s fragmented and multiple personalities, as well as of an exploration of the
notion of multiple subjectivities in the practice of music improvisation. Pessoa’s notion of “empty
stage,” in this respect, allows us to view free improvisation as going beyond the paradigm of inter-
subjectivity; thus, we might consider improvisers not simply as subjects who communicate through
music, but rather as empty stages on which plural configurations of music-playing can develop,
where self approaches itself, while also reconfiguring itself and others.
A further significant aspect of the aesthetics of improvisation is its relation to freedom and
novelty. In this respect, Daniele Goldoni argues that the ideology of progress, which dominated
notated music in the 19th and early 20th centuries, was largely adopted by improvisation later in
the 20th century. The most “pure” and “free” improvisational practice in force nowadays was fos-
tered by an idea of innovation central to non-improvised music. Paradoxically, some avant-garde
prohibitions against old clichés ended up becoming new “compositional” clichés in improvisation.
Goldoni claims a “free” use of some avant-garde linguistic achievements not as “rules” but as
means for experience and awareness, thanks to a “porous” (Benjamin) improvisational interaction.
These aesthetic considerations also have ethical dimensions. One of them is the “improvisa-
tional phronesis” that is the focus of Bruce Ellis Benson’s chapter. Here phronesis is in opposition to
poiesis as a practice not geared toward the creation of a product. This distinction has consequences
that concern the ethical dimension. Indeed, in contrast to musical practices built upon the notion
of musical work, which tend to be hierarchical, directive, and vertical, practices that, like im-
provisation, are centered on phronesis tend to be communal, free, and horizontal; improvisational
performances create communities that involve the public in intentionally non-hierarchic ways. A
further key aesthetic and ethical quality of improvisation is spontaneity, traditionally connected
to concepts like “nature” and “immediate experience.” Randy Fertel investigates this issue in his
contribution, while also considering the epistemological and ontological import of spontaneity.
His main point is that while epistemologically we not only cannot have a guarantee of immediacy,
sometimes we have reasons for claiming its impossibility (Fertel refers to Ernst Gombrich’s figure
of “no-innocent-eye,” claiming the non-tenability of the notion of an “immediate experience”).
Further, on the ethical side, the appeal to nature as more authentic than reason is rather dubious,
as Fertel, referring to John Stuart Mill, astutely observes.
As emerges in Andrea Lorenzo Baldini’s and Mathieu Saladin’s respective contributions, there
are good reasons to talk also about a political relevance of the aesthetics of improvisation. According
to Baldini’s investigation on improvisation in street art, the specific connection between improvi-
sational aesthetics and the political import of street art is that, by illegally using public spaces for
producing their artworks, street artists are forced to make on-the-spot adaptive aesthetic decisions,
pressed as they are by the urgency to leave such places before being caught by the authorities. While
Baldini illustrates this notion with reference to a series of videos of graffiti artists in action, Saladin
focuses on improvisation workshops organized by the percussionist John Stevens in the late 1960s,
thereby maintaining that the political force of the aesthetics of improvisation has further emancipa-
tory aspects. The main point of those workshops was not purely musical, but was also practical, and
indeed political and pedagogical; as Saladin observes – comparing Stevens’s practice to the Universal
Teaching Method elaborated by Jean Joseph Jacotot in the 19th century – they were meant not only
to collectively re-affirm a principle of equality between individuals, beyond established divisions
between professional and social categories, but also to increase individuals’ self-confidence.
Section 3, Improvisation in Musical Practices, is specifically dedicated to the musical domain. It
provides historical and conceptual perspectives on concrete musical practices, where improvisa-
tion plays multifarious roles and takes on very different configurations. This allows us both to

10
 Introduction

refine our understanding of the subject and to question longstanding assumptions about impro-
visation that are the result of implicitly accepting improvisatory practices, such as free improvisa-
tion, as paradigmatic for the field.
Marc Lewon and Uri Smilansky use the musical practices of the Middle Ages to explore the
value of ontological separations not only between the composed and the improvised, but also
between the expressive and the functional; the planned and the immediate; the written and the
heard; and, perhaps most importantly, between the act and the consumption of improvised music.
This challenges the idea of improvisatory universals that are not culture specific. In a similar vein,
focusing on vocal music, Livio Marcaletti investigates the notion of “ornamentation,” as a way to
modulate expressiveness, within the tradition of historical musical improvisation. Their practical
and conceptual distinction is in fact the historical result of the evolution of musical notation and
the contemporary approach to the musical score. Through a careful analysis of musical treatises of
the last four centuries, Marcaletti shows that the conceptual opposition between the “essential”
musical text and the “accessorial” improvisational ornament is not self-evident, but should be
considered historically contingent.
It seems, then, that the distinction between composition and improvisation only started to make
sense in the modern era. But the relationship between the notions of composition and musical
work and that of improvisation has always been complex, both practically and theoretically. This
complexity also concerns the problem of the alleged decline of the practice of improvisation in
19th- and 20th-century Western music. In this regard, Katrin Eggers and Michael Lehner focus on
the progressive decline of musical practice during the 19th century. The chapter shows how impro-
visation within the classical tradition is conceived as the production of musical performances that
have, paradoxically, the appearance of compositions, by achieving an equilibrium between a sense
of freedom and formal complexity. It is possibly this ambition that contributed to making improvi-
sation less and less viable, according to the increasing complexity attained by the musical language.
The relationship between improvisation and the musical work is also the subject of Andrew
Wilson’s chapter. Wilson radically questions a view about improvisation that was dominant in the
Western musical tradition, showing on the one hand that improvisation remained an observable
phenomenon in various art music contexts of the first half of the 20th century and, on the other
hand, that this phenomenon assumed different forms. In order to observe these forms of improvi-
sation, Wilson relies on the post-1950 conception of musical work of art as defined in the science
of art music (i.e., Musikwissenschaft als Kunstwissenschaft) and which he equates with “that which
is not improvisation” (357). In a close cultural context, a specific case is studied by Sabine Feisst.
Based on an unmatched knowledge of Arnold Schoenberg’s ideas and work, Feisst’s contribu-
tion provides a provocative theoretical perspective on improvisation, inspiration, and spontaneity.
Schoenberg was not known as an improvising performer. But as a friend of George Gershwin,
Oscar Levant, Artie Shaw, and many other skilled, improvising musicians, he keenly observed
improvisation’s aesthetics and theories and did not pit it against composition. Rather, he saw im-
provisation as “intricately linked with his compositional aesthetics” (374).
A key theoretical question, then, is that of the distinction between improvised performances,
traditionally considered unrepeatable, and performances of musical works, traditionally under-
stood as repeatable manifestations of the work. But is unrepeatability a necessary condition of
musical improvisation? Based on personal experience of attending a series of improvised perfor-
mances held in 2005 by the Swiss trio Koch-Schütz-Studer, Thomas Gartmann maintains that
the notion of “repetition” can be extended to aspects of a musical performance that are not strictly
sonic, like the general layout or the very structure of the event, as repeated free performance
events; moreover, video recordings enable the repetition of improvised performances, thereby
throwing a different theoretical light on the unrepeatable process, without eliminating its irre-
ducibly contingent character.

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 Alessandro Bertinetto and Marcello Ruta

“Risk” and “empathy,” two notions specifically linked to musical improvisation practices,
are at the center of the contributions, respectively, of Tom Arthurs and Deniz Peters. Arthurs
discusses this notion of “risk” in the context of contemporary “free” improvisation. Based on
interviews with well-known musicians of the Berlin community, Arthurs identifies four strategies
to deal with such risk: “Real Improvising,” “Tricks and Conscious Interventions,” “Pre-Planned
Rules and Concepts,” and “Composition.” This last strategy consists of using musical material
composed in advance; while this can be seen as “cheating,” since “free” improvisation avoids the
use of such material, the chapter interestingly stresses how such strategies were often considered by
musicians as artistically valuable. Peters’s contribution, based both on his interpersonal musical ex-
perience and on philosophical, psychological, and musicological literature, offers an excellent and
refined example of artistic research on the role of “empathy” in musical improvisation. Under-
standing empathy as a condition for realizing the “togetherness” required in collective improvised
performances, Peters maintains it is not only a feeling between musicians, but also (and possibly
more importantly) “towards the emergent joint music” (421). In this respect, empathy seems to be
a powerful enabler of both the dialogical and kairological aspects of improvisation.
In the realm of pop-rock music, as tackled in Stefano Marino’s contribution, improvisation
also plays an important role, presenting several aspects that need to be taken into account. First,
Marino discusses the role played by improvisation in the interactions between composition, per-
formance, and recording. Then he focuses on the creative role of “mistakes” and the variety
of improvisational practices, ranging from so-called “pseudo-improvisation,” which embellishes
existing patterns with more or less codified artifices, to forms of free and radical improvisation.
Finally, resorting to Richard Shusterman’s somaesthetics, he stresses that the role played by the body
in pop-rock music is a key aspect for the aesthetics of improvisation.
The contributions of Lara Pearson and Ali Jihad Racy, in this section, and that of Carla
Bagnoli, in the following section, widen the cultural perspective of the Handbook, offering the
readers perspectives on improvisation in Indian, Arab, and Japanese cultures. The relationship
between improvisation and composition is again at stake in Pearson’s contribution. Through a
comparative analysis of Karnatak, jazz, and free improvisation music practices, Pearson maintains
that the opposition between improvisation and composition, as well as that between preparation
and spontaneity, misconceives what happens in all three improvisational practices. Instead, she
proposes that improvisation is better conceptualized as “play within and between pre-existing
musical structures” (447), and explores how this concept works also for the improvisations, such
as conversation, that occur in everyday life. The intertwining, rather than opposition, between
improvisation and composition is also one of the three main aspects of Racy’s discussion of im-
provisational practices in Arab music. Racy first provides some terminological insights about
improvisation-related terms in Arabic; second, he shows that in Arab musical performances, no
different from other musical practices, composition and improvisation are not opposed but rather
interact to different degrees; finally, this interaction is illustrated in a typology, articulated in
seven categories.
Section 4, Improvisation in the Visual, Narrative, Dramatic, and Interactive Arts, provides a broad
overview of the role of improvisation in art forms that have received less attention in the field,
as well as in practices not always considered part of the arts, such as cooking and videogames. As
they raise philosophical issues concerning artistic practices usually not considered relevant for
improvisation, the contributions in this section implicitly defy the traditional ‒ and questionable
‒ distinction between artistic and non-artistic practices.
The section begins with artistic practices where improvisation is traditionally at home: dance,
theater, and performance art. The philosophy of dance improvisation is a growing research field,
as demonstrated by Eric Mullis’s and Carla Bagnoli’s chapters. Mullis, endorsing an approach that
was, more or less, officially introduced by Erwin Goffman, focuses on the connection between

12
 Introduction

dance improvisation and everyday practices. First, dance improvisation can foster the acquisition
of different kinds of procedural knowledge, related both to the dancer’s own body and the ex-
ternal environment. Second, the audience of dance improvisation can recognize in the artistic
performance something that they have already possibly experienced. Third, dance improvisation
deals with historically and culturally situated habits and embodiments. Through the analysis of
butō dance, Bagnoli’s contribution focuses on action-theoretic and normative aspects of dance
improvisation. As Bagnoli argues, in a way antithetical to Beisbart’s view, butō improvisation is
athelic but disciplined. Under this description, it challenges theories of rational action as mediated
by intentions, and theories of arational action as expressive of individual subjectivity. Its norma-
tivity does not emerge from aesthetic standards or procedures, but builds upon ascetic exercises of
“unselfing.” A community is generated though the shared experience of the living body.
Another established and important field of research in aesthetics and the philosophy of impro-
visation is that of theater and performance art. Domenico Pietropaolo analyzes different aesthetic
aspects of the Commedia dell’Arte, arguing that this classical form of improvisational theater has
an ambiguous or two-sided status: codified characters on the one hand, and significant room for
improvisation (aided both by memory and imagination) on the other. According to Pietropaolo,
Luigi Pareyson’s aesthetics of formativity (already discussed in Valgenti’s chapter, in Section 1) can
be an effective hermeneutical tool for understanding such hybrid situations between formal and
impromptu constraints. Another key issue of the aesthetics of improvisation in the performing arts
is precisely the relationship between improvisation and performance. In this regard, taking as a
starting point Marina Abramović’s performance of The Artist is Present, Dieter Mersch aims both
to establish connections and mark differences between both notions and practices. While they are
connected through the concept of the “unexpected” as well as through their ambiguous ontolog-
ical status between artwork and event, their specific poietic characters and artistic normativity are
responsible for their differences. In this respect, improvisation and performance emerge as two
complementary, rather than similar or opposed practices. A particular kind of performative im-
provisation is discussed by Clément Canonne: improvisation in comedy. The author’s question is
why comedy, rather than tragedy, is usually associated with improvisation. His answer is that im-
provisation has an enhancing effect on humor (analyzed through the four traditional accounts of
humor: the “superiority,” “incongruity,” “release,” and “play” theories). Moreover, improvisation
entails elements – such as potential unpredictability, risk of misunderstanding, and openness to
interaction with the public – that are more congenial to comedy than to non-humoristic genres.
Gilles Mouëllic’s technically informed discussion on the history of cinematic improvisation
opens a series of chapters dedicated to art forms other than the performing arts. According to
Mouëllic’s analysis, while in its beginnings, improvisation in cinema was mainly centered on the
initiatives of actors in front of the camera, a first technological break allowed the rise of the so-
called “direct cinema,” and, therefore, the possibility of registering in a documentary-like way
artists’ creative processes. Further progresses in montage techniques and the portability of new
devices fostered both individual and collective improvisational practices in movie production.
Drawing in part on Fertel’s contribution to this volume, Rob Wallace’s chapter under-
mines the rigid opposition between composition and improvisation in poetry. Poetry can,
thus, be read fruitfully as a genre of paradigmatic works that are often improvisatory – even
when they are composed. In this respect, and in line with the approach adopted by Haffter,
“improvisation itself potentially becomes not only a process of creation but also a process of
reception” (565).
What is the relevance of improvisation in the realm of visual arts? This is the general key
question variously discussed in the following three chapters. In their contribution, Alessandro
Bertinetto and Marcello Ruta analyze the role of improvisation in painting. Even considering the
most radical forms of improvised painting (such as Pollock’s Action Painting, or its quasi-ancestor

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 Alessandro Bertinetto and Marcello Ruta

Cozens’s blotting), key differences remain between improvisational painting and improvisation in
the performing arts. In particular, viewers do not need to become acquainted with the impro-
visational process (the pictorial performance) in order to aesthetically experience the produced
painting. Still, as the chapter shows through paradigmatic examples, the aesthetic import of im-
provisation in painting can be articulated in a series of aesthetic properties.
Alice Iacobone develops two original lines of research to argue for the aesthetic relevance of
improvisation in sculpture, thereby broaching a new research field. The first one draws on ac-
counts of sculpture in which a major role is played by the dimensions of tactility and movement,
from 18th-century debates up to recent neuroscientific research. The second approach concerns
the performative turn in plastic arts. Iacobone shows the fruitfulness of the notion of improvisa-
tion for describing not only contemporary sculpture but also sculpture in general.
Similar issues are posed by photography. According to Bertinetto, since photography can be ex-
plained as a “situated and responsive practice of im-pro-visation” (600), the analysis of improvisation
in photography contributes to understanding photography as human agency, thereby offering valuable
insights into the relationship between intentional agency and art. Improvisation is artistically relevant
to photography, particularly when the photographic “eye” interacts with the shooting situation, in such
a way that the photo enacts a specific “grammar of contingency,” in which photography, like perform-
ing improvisation, aesthetically appears as in-between action and event.
Improvisation and installation art is the topic of Elisa Caldarola’s and Edgar Landgraf ’s chapters.
Based on the concrete example of Sarah Sze, Caldarola focuses on three aspects of improvisation
in this relatively new artistic domain: the improvisational quality of the artwork as resulting from
the improvisational attitude of the artist, the improvisational artistic experience of the public, and
the improvisational processes of the curatorial work. In this regard, through discussion of concrete
examples, Caldarola shows that “sometimes artists deliberately leave curatorial teams free to decide
how to install their works” (627). Landgraf discusses the oeuvre of the artist Erwin Redl and argues
that, as a consequence of the active participation of the public, Redl’s installations acquire two fea-
tures that are emblematic of improvisation: radical contingency and materiality. Adopting a post-
phenomenological approach, Landgraf shows how Redl’s installations are, in fact, events, rather than
objects. They reveal the supremacy of the material aspect of perception over the formal ones, con-
firming the anti-Kantian aesthetic approach that characterizes the works of this Austrian-born artist.
Design, architecture, and urbanism are at stake in Annika Frye’s and Paola Berenstein Jacques’s
chapters. Frye analyzes two main aspects of improvisation in the design process, namely the mate-
rial and emergent dimension and the participatory and collective character of the design process.
“Bricolage” and “adhocism” are the two main notions employed by Frye for the analysis of im-
provisational design. In fact, improvisational design is, on the one hand, conceived as emerging
from the reorganization of existing materials; on the other hand, it is the result of the adaptive
re-functionalization of already existing objects created by other individuals in other contexts.
Jacques resorts to the very same notions – “bricolage” and “adhocism” – in order to discuss the
“precarious form of construction in favelas (slums) in Rio de Janeiro” (664). In spite of the gen-
eral lack of interest in improvisation practices in architecture, possibly motivated by the ordering
and controlling import of architecture as such, Jacques shows that both notions can designate, in
Michel de Certeau’s terms, tactical moves within urban spaces, theoretically and practically op-
posed to the strategies articulated by institutional urbanistic approaches.
The last section brings the Handbook to a close with reflections on the role of improvisation
in aesthetic practices that have only recently been considered viable forms of artistic expressions.
Nicola Perullo focuses on the production and reception aspects of cooking as improvisatory art.
On the production side, the realization of a recipe is much more than the result of rule-following:
better still, the very notion of rule-following, particularly in this context, involves improvisational
aspects. On the gustatory side, creativity and improvisation also play an important role, namely in

14
 Introduction

the use of imagination for classifying the various properties of food. Finally, Thi Nguyen’s chapter
is dedicated to role-playing games and videogames. The analysis is developed along two theoreti-
cal perspectives: designer-centric and player-centric. As Nguyen argues, neither conception is ex-
haustive. Games are plural in form and function, and exist on a spectrum between designer-centric
and player-centric designs. This young and exciting research field shows, therefore, (at least) two
things: while improvisation is not always to be contrasted against design or composition, the rigid
distinction between authors and recipients, which for centuries has characterized theoretical re-
flection about art, can be a matter for discussion and/or rethought. This, then, is a way to reiterate
some of the theses formulated in the many contributions to this handbook, with their different
theoretical variations and developments. The aesthetics of improvisation can also contribute to
a rethinking of traditional categories of the philosophy of art, as well as to artistic practices and
procedures that are not explicitly and/or programmatically regulated by the ideal or the goal of
improvisational freedom.

Notes
1 Both these dimensions of improvisation have been dramatically illustrated on a global scale by the way in
which all of humanity, in order to respond to the COVID-19 emergency, has had to recur to measures
that, for reasons not linked to time issues alone, had a de facto improvisational character.
2 To name just a few: Alperson 1984; Bailey 1992; Butler 2004; Ramshaw 2013; Velleman 2009; Herman
2008; Peters 2009; Sennett 2008; Preston 2013.
3 E.g., Ciborra 2002; Gagel 2004; Kurt and Näuman 2008; Berkowitz 2010; Dell 2012; Göttlich and Kurt
2012; Powell 2012; Kazanijan 2016; Asma 2017; Repnikova 2017; Chater 2018; Van Middelaar 2019;
Torrance and Shumann 2019; Lösel 2019; Zorzi 2020.
4 See Smith and Dean 1997; Feisst 1995; Nettl and Russell 1998; Hamilton 2000; Benson 2003; Sawyer
2003; Fischlin and Heble 2004; Fischer-Lichte 2004; Sparti 2005; Ferreccio and Racca 2007; Lampert
2007; Hallam and Ingold 2007; Fähndrich 1992–2008; Esterhammer 2008; Solis and Nettl 2009; Gröne
et al. 2009; Cafaro 2009; Bormann, Brandstetter and Matzke 2010; Wallace 2010; Santi and I lletterati
2010; Goldman 2010; Sparti 2010; Landgraf 2011; Davies 2011; Rousselot 2012; Drinko 2013; Mouëllic
2013; Lösel 2013; Zanetti 2014; Feige 2014; Sbordoni 2014; Bertinetto, Ivaldo and Sbordoni 2015;
Bresnahan 2015; Heble and Caines 2015; Fertel 2015; Pietropaolo 2016; Santi and Zorzi 2016; Bertinetto
2016a; Siddall and Waterman 2016; Born et al. 2017; Peters 2017; Frye 2017; Brown, Goldblatt and
Gracyk 2018; Sbordoni and Rostagno 2018; Lewis 2019; Nachmanovitch 2019.
5 Aristotle 1997: 59 (1448b24).
6 To add some titles to those previously given: Caporaletti 2005; Saladin 2014; Schroeder and Ó hAodha
2014; Toop 2016; Figueroa-Dreher 2016; Guido 2017; Borio and Carone 2017; Mariani 2017; Lehner,
Meidhof, and Miucci, 2019; Mills 2019.
7 On this topic, see also Hamilton 2020.
8 Cf. Levinson 2015: 149.
9 See Davies 2011 for a discussion in relation to performing arts.
10 The term was famously coined by George Lewis in reference to Afro-American musical improvisatory
practices and in contrast to the “Eurological” kind of musical improvisation, rooted in cultured music
of European origin. See Lewis 1996.
11 The issue is also being studied in connection with AI research: Saint-Germier 2017; Lösel 2018; Moruzzi
(this volume).
12 Pareyson’s theory of formativity has roots in Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s morphology and in Johann
Gottlieb Fichte’s philosophy of the image (German: Bild). Pareyson was Umberto Eco’s teacher at the
University of Turin and his philosophy influenced Eco’s pioneering book The Open Work (Eco 1989), in
which the fundamental role of improvisational practices in the artistic avant-gardes of the 20th century
was discussed.
13 And not only this, improvisation has also recently been considered a central practice for the aesthetics of
the body (or somaesthetics). See Marino 2019.
14 We use here the notion of “exemplification” in the Goodmanian sense of possession of and reference to
a property. See Goodman 1976: 52 ff.

15
 Alessandro Bertinetto and Marcello Ruta

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18
 PART I

Art and Improvisation

Theoretical Perspectives
 1
IMPROVISATION AS NORMATIVE
PRACTICE
Georg W. Bertram

How is an ontology of improvisation possible? After all, it might seem that improvisations
­contradict the very idea of ontology. They are, one might think, happenings that lack stable being
and, thus, exceed the bounds of ontological reflection. What is more, improvisation in the sense of
“bricolage” (Lévi-Strauss 1966: 24) can be seen as a strategy to overcome metaphysics in general,
since it promises an understanding of human practices that does not rely on stable foundations.
Therefore, a critic might call even searching for an ontology of improvisation a serious theoretical
mistake. But this reasoning would be deeply misleading because it supposes ontology as an enter-
prise that excludes processes, transformation, and instability. Even though improvisations are not
static, they have a specific being that provides the basis for calling something an improvisation.
This article investigates the being in question.
Those who are not skeptical about the very idea of an ontology of improvisation tend to con-
struct their ontology of improvisation around the question as to whether improvisations constitute
works. They rely on a common distinction within the philosophy of art, which differentiates
between works of art and mere performances that do not attain the status of works (cf. Young
and Matheson 2000; Davies 2001: 15; Feige 2014: 56–89). According to this perspective, the most
important aim of the philosophy of improvisation is to identify why improvisations aren’t works
and, thus, to define the features of this specific type of artistic value and the ways in which it is
fundamentally different from the type realized by works.
The distinction between composition and improvisation within the philosophy of music serves
an analogous function. Compositions, one is tempted to think, are works with a stable structure
that more or less prescribes how performances should take place, whereas (“total”) improvisations
involve no such prescription (cf. Wolterstorff 1975: 121). Even thinkers who reject such a sharp
distinction between composition and improvisation tend to delineate what an improvisation is by
drawing on this distinction. In this sense, the distinction between works (of art) or compositions,
on the one hand, and improvisations as performances, on the other, informs different ways of
constructing an ontology of improvisation.
Contrasting improvisations with works (of art) or compositions fits with how many improvis-
ing artists understand their craft as something fundamentally different from what is realized by
works of art. Improvisations aim at creating a type of artistic value that transcends what one might
call “aesthetics of works” (cf. Eco 1989: 21 ff.). One might say that this image is an aspect of the ar-
tistic marketing structure of improvisations (think, for instance, of the works and theories of John
Cage, Eddie Prévost, and Derek Bailey). But it is, in general, problematic to build a conception of
something primarily on how its practitioners understand it. To illustrate, if one bases an analysis of

DOI: 10.4324/9781003179443-3 21
 Georg W. Bertram

what family is solely on the basis of how its members interact with one another and the roles they
assume, one risks overlooking the essential societal role of family. In short, how those immediately
involved understand a certain practice can always be part of a one-sided self-conception – a false
consciousness. Thus, rigorous analysis always needs to question the perspective of the engaged.
And indeed, juxtaposing improvisation with composition is highly problematic; as Alessandro
Bertinetto has shown, it necessarily yields conclusions that fail to adequately grasp the specific-
ity of improvisation (cf. Bertinetto 2012a). If one claims that there is “no categorical distinction
between improvisation and performance,” but rather “a continuum of practices” (Cook 2017:
64), one might think that improvisation should not be understood in contrast to musical compo-
sition, but that the very idea of composition should be rethought on the basis of the concept of
improvisation (cf. Bertinetto 2020). But this move still doesn’t help us determine the specificity of
improvisation. It is just an expression of the insight that the concept of composition does not help
us understand what improvisation is.
Another reason ontological reflection on improvisation needs reorientation is that impro-
visation cannot be restricted to art. Improvisation is an essential aspect of everyday practice
(cf. Ryle 1976; Bertinetto and Bertram 2020). Because of this, it is not possible to ground ontolog-
ical reflection on improvisation in a distinction that is inseparably attached to art. We have to start
with another basic concept. In what follows, I identify practice as the genus to which improvisa-
tion belongs. I then argue that improvisation has to be understood as a specific type of normative
practice.1 According to this conception, improvisation’s specificity can be defined by the fact that
in it, guiding norms are developed on the spot.
My argument is structured in five parts. The first develops a rough conception of what im-
provisation is. Against this background, the second part articulates the basic structure of im-
provisation in terms of impulse and response. The third part explains the way in which the
impulse-and-response structure has to be understood as the basis of the specific type of normative
practice that improvisation is. An important aspect of the normative practice in question, I argue
in the fourth part, is improvisational skills. Finally, the fifth part summarizes the specificity of
improvisation being a normative practice.

1 Towards a Preliminary Concept of Improvisation

What is an improvisation? An improvisation is a practice that develops something on the spot. Those
who improvise do not know what to do in advance. They develop what they do while doing it.
But this definition of improvisation necessitates determining what it means to characterize events as
practices. A practice is an event where something is done. But what is done can be done within very
different frameworks. I’d like to distinguish between three types of practices in order to establish a
preliminary conception of improvisation: the first type being rule-governed practices, the second
improvisational practices, and the third practices in which something is simply done differently.
Rule-governed practices are practices that are determined by pre-given rules (be they prescrip-
tive or constitutive ones; cf. von Wright 1963: 7 ff.; Searle 1969: 33–42). Within these practices,
rules are applied. Improvisations are practices characterized by a lack of pre-given rules (though
from this it does not follow that within improvisations there are no norms at play – see Section 3
of this chapter). But practices that are not rule-governed encompass more types of practice than
improvisational practices alone. Another type of non-rule-governed practices might be called
practices in which something is simply done differently. If I cook a meal and just omit salt for the
sake of mere curiosity or fun, I am not improvising. I am just doing something differently. For
my cooking to be improvisational, I would need to develop a dish through a series of actions not
guided by a fixed recipe or something similar. In this way, improvisational practices are distinct
from practices that just differ from how things are done habitually.

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But what does it mean to situate improvisation between, on the one hand, practices that are
governed by pre-given rules and, on the other, practices in which something is just done differ-
ently? We can get a better understanding of how to distinguish between the three types of prac-
tices by invoking the concept of the unexpected. While the unexpected is an essential element
of improvisation (Bertinetto 2012b), it does not play any role in either rule-governed practices or
practices in which something is just done differently. This is especially apparent in practices that
are determined by pre-given rules. If practices are guided by rules, only two different end results
are possible, namely, cases in which the rules are followed and cases in which they are broken.
Neither possibility is unexpected. The same holds for a practice in which something is just done
differently. Where randomness reigns, nothing unexpected can happen.
In comparison with the two other types of practice characterized thus far, improvisation can
be specified through the concept of the unexpected. The example of cooking is telling in this
regard. If I just omit salt, the result cannot be unexpected in a strict sense. This is different in the
case of improvising while cooking. Here, it may be the case that the result of the omission of salt
is unexpected. Maybe I leave out salt in the hope that this would make the dish taste interesting.
But since the taste is not as interesting as I thought, I am forced to react to the unexpected result
and modify my approach to the dish. It is typical for improvisation that something unexpected
prompts a reaction and changes the way the practice is continued.
Phenomenologically, the unexpected can play two different roles within an improvisation.2
First, it can be the starting point of improvisational practices. The famous case of Apollo 13 can
be explained in this way. The unexpected explosion of one of the spacecraft’s oxygen tanks forced
the crew to leave the command module and install itself in the lunar module on its way back to
Earth. But since the system for removing carbon dioxide from the lunar module was not designed
to handle this unanticipated long journey, the crew was forced to improvise a modification to the
system. A different form of the unexpected occurs if it is produced within the improvisation itself.
Think of the improvisation of a jazz quartet and an unexpected fill-in played by the drummer. An
unexpected event like this does not have to mean a great deal. In lots of artistic improvisations, all
kinds of unexpected things occur, each providing slight breaks or changes within what is played.
In this way, the unexpected is an essential element of improvisational practice.
These preparatory reflections help determine what an ontology of improvisation should con-
sist of. We have to understand improvisation as a practice the specificity of which can be better
grasped through the dialectics between the expected and the unexpected (see Peters 2009: 97).
Even though one might think that acting on expectations is not a feature of improvisation in the
strict sense (cf. Derrida 2004), a closer look reveals it to be an essential dimension of it. Think of
the improvisation of a jazz quartet.3 If, through some action of the drummer, a specific rhythmic
structure is established, it is expected for the players to react to the drummer’s input in some
fashion. What is established during the improvisation evokes expectations. This does not mean
that, in continuing, the players are forced to follow the expectations in question. Rather, they
themselves are invited to contribute new impulses that realize something unexpected. In this way,
the unexpected is developed against the background of a development of expectations. In what
follows, I will explain how the dynamics between the expected and the unexpected are essential
for improvisation.

2 The Basic Structure of Improvisation: The Single Action

Approach vs. the Interaction Approach
Improvisation is a type of practice. Thus, it is tempting to conceive actions as its basic units. One
approach to this thesis might be to say that every action determines the course of an improvisation
anew by selecting between different options. This idea could be elaborated further by stating that

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the spontaneous selection about how to continue is restricted by a complex structure of constraints
that shape the action’s options.
If you sit by yourself playing the piano, you have to act within the constraints of the in-
strument, of your playing skills, of your understanding of harmonic structures, etc. Bound by
these constraints, you make choices about how to go on while improvising. Or think of another
example: While discussing a scientific presentation together with an audience, you select elements
of possible answers under the constraints of academic habits, social customs, rules of courtesy, and
so on. It might seem that the second case poses a lot more constraints than the first, thus making
it more difficult to choose what to do. This could explain why it feels harder to give a scientific
presentation than it is to improvise at home on the piano. Some of the actions realize something
expected, others bring unexpected things into being.
Let’s call the description of improvisation outlined here the “single-action approach” to an
ontology of improvisation. The basic idea of the approach states that improvisations are developed
through single actions that continuously change the structures of the more overarching impro-
visational practice in question. Every new action brings the improvisation to a new stage, which
itself then becomes the basis of further actions (cf. Brandom 1994: 182–6 for a related explanation
of linguistic practices). Even though it might seem promising to conceive of improvisation in
terms of single actions, the approach is mistaken. Its main defect lies in the very idea that impro-
vising can be adequately described as a matter of selecting among options. The approach suggests
that improvising is a moment-to-moment activity that entails both moments of more expected
and moments of less expected choices. The approach provides no account of why we can draw
the distinction between what is expected and what is unexpected and why, in improvising, we
have to make choices at all. The approach fails to answer the question as to why and how certain
choices are meaningful within an improvisation. To answer this question, it is necessary to shed
light on the relation between two acts within an improvisation. In what way does one act of se-
lection orient the act that follows it? And why is it possible to conceive of some actions within an
improvisation as acts that present something unexpected, whereas other acts are considered to set
forth the expected? In order to answer these questions, we have to explain how different actions
within an improvisation are bound up with one another.
Another shortcoming of the single action approach is that it does not offer an adequate account
of group improvisations (cf. Lewis 2019: 68). Think again of a jazz quartet. It consists of four
players improvising. If we take single actions to be constitutive of their improvisation, we cannot
really distinguish between what a single saxophone player improvises alone from what she impro-
vises while playing with other players. The single-action approach makes it appear as if, in both
cases, she would treat the sounds she produces and those produced by others as external constraints
for her actions. Think of when a saxophonist practices by playing along with a recording of three
instruments (“playing on an Aebersold”). The recording gives, so it seems, the very same orien-
tation a live improvisation with three other players would give. But this is definitively false. Even
though a recording of other instruments may be helpful for training purposes, practicing like this
is different from group improvisation. The difference is clear: In the practice situation, whatever
the saxophone player improvises does not mean anything to other players. The opposite holds true
when she improvises with three other players within a jazz quartet.
Identifying the shortcomings of the single-action approach highlights that an adequate expla-
nation of improvisation should offer an account of interactions within improvisation. I, thus, call
the position that I present and defend in what follows an interaction account of improvisation (see
Bertram 2010 for an initial outline of the interaction account). The account is meant to explain
both how actions within improvisations are bound up with one another and what motivates
choices within improvisations. When I play the piano by myself, it may happen that I just play
what I have already played several times before. But I can also try something new. When I do that,

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I am, in the very next moment, confronted with the problem of how to continue. One option is
that I toss out what I just played; maybe I thought it was boring or just didn’t lead anywhere. This
could result in the absence of any attempt to respond to what is new. But it is equally possible
that I try to continue and develop the new idea further. In this case, my ensuing actions provide
answers to what could be regarded as an initial impulse. This gives us an idea of how the basic
relationships among actions within an improvisation can be interpreted – it is a relation of impulse
and response, of call and answer.
The structure of impulse and response is best exemplified by actual interactions within an
improvisation. If, in dance improvisation, someone moves her arm with a specific rhythm, the
fellow improvisers are confronted with the question of how to react. Their reactions can, in the
abstract, take three forms. The first option is that they take up the rhythm of the impulse and
move with a similar rhythm. The second option is some kind of counter-action. This can be done
in at least two different ways: On the one hand, counter-actions can open a dialogical structure
of statements and contradictions that together realize a community of conflict between different
perspectives. On the other hand, counter-actions can stage an irresolvable antagonism that ends
in a lack of community. The third option is the sheer lack of an answer. This may result out of
ignorance or negative assessment. The fellow improvisers may just not have been attentive enough
to perceive the affordance that the impulse provided for them. Or they might think that it’s not
worth it to react to the impulse. In the latter case, they implicitly evaluate the impulse as not pro-
viding a launchpad for a plausible further development of the improvisation.
Taking the connection between impulse and response as the germ of improvisation allows us
to understand that improvisations are all about how to react to impulses that improvisers are con-
fronted with within the improvisation itself. This becomes clearer if we say that every impulse can
itself be understood as a response. The dancer’s impulse is motivated by what has been developed
within the improvisation beforehand. It is itself a – negative or positive – response to expectations
formed in the process of improvising. Strictly understood, no impulse within an improvisation is
a beginning (see Derrida 1992). Even the start of an improvisational performance has to be un-
derstood as a reaction to previous improvisations and whatever else improvisations react to. Thus,
every act in an improvisation is, in principle, both an impulse and a response.
As a response to previous impulses, every action within an improvisation implies an essential
dimension of perception. Someone who improvises can only succeed if she not only produces
actions but is, at the same time, receptive to the actions she is reacting to (be it her own or those
of others). According to the interaction approach, production, and reception coincide within
improvisations. In order to explain the relationship between the expected and the unexpected
in an improvisation, the coincidence in question is crucial: Expectations are bound up with how
improvisers perceive what has been realized in the course of improvising. Only by being percep-
tively open in this way do improvisers have the ability to react to expectations that have been
constructed during the improvisation and, by extension, the ability to create something unex-
pected sometimes.
The interaction approach of impulse and response enables us to understand why an explanation
of improvisation that focuses on single actions is misleading. Such an explanation makes it seem
as if the constraints that bind singular actions stem from outside. But improvisations establish
structures and constraints within the improvisation itself. The general form of constraints within
an improvisation can be captured through the concept of impulse: Actions within improvisations
are constrained by the impulses that they respond to. Improvisations consist of chains of actions
that construct constraints for themselves. For sure, this does not imply that there are no external
constraints relevant for improvisations. Lots of external constraints are relevant. But they are not
the basis on which actions within improvisations are connected with one another. Their connect-
edness has to be explained on the basis of internal constraints.

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As discussed above, the single-action approach does not provide an answer to the question of
why a choice selected within an improvisation is meaningful for future actions. The foregoing
reflections have brought us to a point at which we can explain why this is so. The single-action
approach makes it seem as if every action within an improvisation stands on its own. It suggests
that improvisers would, in every moment, have to establish something meaningful out of lots of
different options they are confronted with as if improvisation were a creatio ex nihilo, formed on
the basis of external constraints. This gives the impression that every improvisational action pro-
duces something meaningful in and through itself. But this contradicts the very idea of producing
something meaningful because what is meaningful has to be meaningful for future actions. For
the single-action approach, every action determines what is meaningful for itself, and, thus, no
past action counts as being meaningful for it. From this follows that no (past) action has the po-
tential to be meaningful for future actions. But, if it is not meaningful for some future action, it
isn’t meaningful at all. This is to say that the single-action approach’s explanation of actions as
producing something meaningful is, at the same time, an explanation to the effect that nothing
meaningful is realized.
The interaction account helps us overcome this contradiction. If we understand improvisa-
tional actions as responses, we understand how they can produce something meaningful. They are
meaningful to future responses for which they provide impulses. As realizing something mean-
ingful, improvisational actions are impulses that wait for responses. In the abstract, these responses
have the options characterized above: They may take up the impulse, produce some kind of
counter-action, or not respond to it at all. At least through the first two types, the impulse is taken
as meaningful. As such, it can last for whole improvisational performances and even much longer.
Impulses in improvisations can shape the way a performance unfolds. They can even shape many
coming performances as well – think of John Coltrane’s style of playing the saxophone. This gives
us an explanation of how what is expected is established within improvisations. What is expected
is established through chains of practices that develop out of impulses. These chains are the back-
ground against which something unexpected can be created by new impulses.
To sum up, what has been said thus far, I’d like to emphasize that the ontology of improvisation
has to begin with the interaction of impulse and response as the kernel of what improvisation is.
Note first that, as the examples suggest, impulse and response do not necessarily have to be pro-
duced by different performers. The structure of impulse and response is constitutive of both solo
and group improvisations. And note second that the interaction of impulse and response often in-
cludes much more than two actions. In most cases, impulses within improvisations are interlinked
with lots of responses that unfold over time.

3 Norms in Statu Nascendi

The impulse-and-response structure of improvisation poses the question as to how the connection
between the two elements has to be understood. Let’s consider again an impulse realized within
an improvisation. How does an impulse bind actions that respond to it? As we have already seen,
responses that hold the impulse to be meaningful have different options. They can prolong what
the impulse provides, or they can set a counter-impulse. When a response prolongs an impulse
(through repetition, variation, or some other technique), the response retroactively determines
the impulse as a normative authority for itself. The impulse sets a norm to which the responding
actions have to adhere if they aim to prolong it.
Two aspects of the normativity in question are decisive here: First, the response is essential for
a norm to be established. Impulses, as such, in the sense of single actions, do not constitute norms.
They provide affordances for norms that are only ever constituted through reactions. Second,
it is decisive for the concept of normativity involved that norms are brought into existence and

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developed over time. They are not everlasting stable entities but, rather, change with the develop-
ment of the practices guided by them. As to the second type of reaction, if impulses are answered
with counter-impulses, conflicting norms are brought into play that can be further unfolded
during improvisation. Conflicts between norms mutually shape and refine them.
In this way, the interaction approach to improvisation conceives of improvisation as a specific
type of normative practice. According to a common understanding that I touched on above, nor-
mative practices are practices that apply norms. This is to say that the norms in question precede
the practices in the sense that their content is determined independently of the practices in ques-
tion. One does not necessarily have to understand the norms as being totally independent of prac-
tices (as something like Platonic entities) in order to embrace this viewpoint, because it is sufficient
to distinguish structurally between the constitution and the application of norms. This could be
called a “two-phase” model of normativity. The very idea of applying norms can be grounded on
the premise that the constitution of norms precedes practices that are guided by them.
However, improvisations cannot be understood as normative practices in this sense because
improvisational practices do not rely on norms that are established in advance. One might object,
saying that many improvisations are based on material that precedes them. When some organ
player improvises on a hymn or a jazz musician improvises on “My Favourite Things,” they are
committed to a structure that exerts normative force on them. But commitments like this do not
constitute improvisations as normative practices because the repetition of a specific structure as
such does not define them as improvisations. Rather, the normativity of improvisations is estab-
lished through the way in which different elements within them are bound to one another.
Another objection might counter, saying that impulses – which, as I have argued, are essential
elements of improvisations – have to be understood as norms that precede responses. But this
would be a misunderstanding, for a simple reason. Within improvisations, norms are retroactively
established through responses. The most important lesson of the interaction approach is that an
impulse within an improvisation does not stand on its own. The impulse only becomes what it is
through the responses that follow it. Thus, it has to be regarded as a potential norm. Responses to
the impulse “decide” whether a norm comes into being. Within group improvisations, decisions
like this connect different individuals with one another in a way that helps form the group. When
improvisers play together, they constitute an improvisation through their collaborative effort.
This explanation can draw some support from Jacques Derrida’s and Ludwig Wittgenstein’s
reflections on repetition (cf. Derrida 1982) and rule-following (Wittgenstein 1958: §§198–202).
They make clear that norms within improvisations have to be constituted through repetition.
Importantly, repetition does not presuppose norms, but has to be understood as their basis. The
basic form of repetition is when a second practice picks up what has been established in a first
practice. What the first practice “proposes” is established as a norm through the second practice.
The connection of first and second practice builds the nucleus of a chain of repetitions that can
be continued by a series of other practices. Through chains like this, norms are established and
prolonged. Thus, norms are constituted through potentially endless repetitions. Think of jazz
standards. The harmonic scheme of a jazz standard (like Gershwin’s “I Got Rhythm”) can be
endlessly reiterated; every new instantiation of it is bound up with changes. Thus, the chain of
practices through which a norm is established within improvisations has to be understood as a
chain of constant variation and change.
In this way, Derrida’s and Wittgenstein’s conceptions of normative practices allow us to un-
derstand how these practices can be bound up with constant change. Their philosophies enable
us to appreciate the thought that norms do not necessarily have a pre-given identity. Rather,
their identity can always develop and, thus, entails change. This opens up space for a different
conception of what the application of a norm looks like. Here, application is not the reiteration
of a norm that is already established. Rather, application is a practice that re-establishes the norm

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(cf. Gadamer 1960: 306–10 for a related explanation). In other words, within improvisation, the
constitution of norms and their application cannot be distinguished. In contradistinction to the
two-phase model, the interaction approach reveals that the normative structure only evidences
one phase – a phase in which constitution and application are inextricably connected with one
another. This is the first fundamental feature of improvisation as a normative practice.
A second characteristic consists of the constant renewal of norms. In every moment of an im-
provisation, new impulses can call for the constitution of new norms. Every impulse within an
improvisation can be understood as questioning the norms that governed the improvisation up
until the moment it chimed in. Impulses question norms in an ambiguous sense, though. On the
one hand, the questioning can be an aspect of what it means to apply norms that have already been
guiding the improvisation. On the other hand, the questioning can be an attempt to establish new
norms and, thus, instigate a break. The fundamental ambiguity results from the double potential
inherent in impulses, as there is no clear-cut distinction between continuity and discontinuity,
between constant change and complete renewal.
Note that this is a conceptual claim. We can doubtlessly think of experiences of clear conti-
nuity and clear discontinuity in improvisations, such as when the character of an improvisation
changes completely from one moment to the other. Still, this kind of experienced discontinuity
could perhaps be understood as a form of continuity in the sense that what preceded it gave an
affordance to instigate the radical shift. Such continuity within discontinuity exemplifies the
meaning of the notion that improvisations contain no clear-cut distinction between continuity
and discontinuity. Every impulse can prompt a development in either direction. It can effect a new
application of already established norms, and at the same time, it can attempt to kick off some-
thing new. Improvisation as a normative practice is a constant struggle between continuation and
starting something new. Wittgenstein coined a pithy phrase to grasp this sort of structure: “We
make up the rules as we go along” (Wittgenstein 1958: § 83). Improvisations engage in a constant
making up of norms.
A third characteristic of improvisation as a normative practice has been implied in the forego-
ing reflections: its temporal structure. According to a common misunderstanding, improvisation
happens in the here and now. But, as the elucidation of the connection between impulse and
response demonstrates, the basic temporal structure of an impulse is not the present. Rather, it
is oriented towards the future because an impulse always requires an answer to realize itself. As
explained, only through responses to impulses are norms established within an improvisation. In
addition, every impulse is itself a response to past impulses, and it might itself contribute to the
constitution of norms by taking past impulses as being authoritative for itself. Thus, the temporal
structure of improvisational normative practices can be captured in the formula: “opening up the
future by responding to the past.”
In this way, the impulse-and-response structure of improvisation is bound up with a spe-
cific temporal structure of normativity. This temporality can be illustrated with a concept from
chemistry – norms within improvisations are always in statu nascendi. The instability of guiding
norms is a defining feature of improvisations as normative practices. They wait to be developed
further through future responses, which, in turn, constantly question the norms that impulses
establish. The norms established within improvisational practices are renewed again and again. In
this sense, improvisations are bound by norms that are always in the making.4
Defining improvisation in this way helps us understand how its creative aspect is based on nor-
mative structures. As I have argued, improvisations are not composed of single actions. Rather,
they are structured by interactions that adhere to an impulse-and-response structure. Thus, it is
not possible to grasp the creative aspect of improvisation by referring to single actions. The cre-
ative dimension has to be explained with reference to interactions as the structuring elements of
improvisation. On these grounds, the creative dimension of improvisation has to be conceived

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of as being bound up with its normativity. Improvisation is a form of creativity realized through
normative practice. The constant making of norms (norms in statu nascendi) is what explains im-
provisation’s creativity.

4 Improvisational Skills and the Evaluative Dimension

of Improvisational Practices
Defining improvisation being a specific normative practice necessitates including another element
into the ontological equation – namely, the skills of those who improvise. If the constant ques-
tioning of guiding norms through impulses is at the core of improvising, then the skills necessary
to develop impulses are a key element. In short, improvisation has to be conceived of as a skilled
practice. The skills of improvisers are an essential part of improvisation as a normative practice.
They are bound up with the specific kind of normativity realized in improvisation.
To illustrate, compare the normative practice of improvisation with a simple routine. The skills
involved in simple routines run on stereotypes (think of the way factory work is represented in
Chaplin’s Modern Times), and the skills do not change in any way. They are a prerequisite for en-
gaging in the routine practice. As such, they exist independently of the specific continuation of the
practice. During the practice, the skills continue to exist as they have before it. Things are com-
pletely different in improvisation. Thinking about how people criticize failures in improvisations
might help us appreciate this point. Improvisations are considered failures if improvisers simply
repeat what they have been trained to play. The success of improvisations is measured with refer-
ence to the realization of novel, unexpected impulses. However, the success of improvisations also
relies on adequate responses to unexpected impulses. These two points, anchored in the structure
of impulse and response, give us abstract criteria for judging improvisation’s success.
Thus, the skills for improvising have to be conceived of as skills for producing and reacting to
the unexpected (cf. Peters 2017: 165). Improvisers have to learn not to stick to trained patterns
and established schemes, but to produce elements that question and break trained patterns and estab-
lished schemes. The skills required for improvisation are the ability to question and, thus, unlearn
and revise routines (see Bertinetto and Bertram 2020: 204–8). This holds for the production of
adequate reactions as well. If an improviser is confronted with an impulse by a fellow player, she
does, in principle, not know how to react to it. No pattern or scheme will help her arrive at an
adequate answer. She has to deviate from what she has learned and played thus far in order to react
successfully. The skills needed for the development of a deviation like this are skills of questioning
and un- or re-learning routines.
These skills are exercised and altered in the act of improvising. Again and again, the impro-
viser’s skills are challenged by impulses and responses; her interactions with them alter her skills.
In this way, improvisations affect the skills brought to the session by improvisers. One might say
that the skills for improvising imply what Catherine Malabou calls “plasticity” (Malabou 1996):
Improvisers’ skills entail the ability to develop those very skills constantly. In effect, the constant
development of norms within improvisation correlates with a constant development of skills; both
are constitutively bound up with one another.
But the skills analyzed thus far involve more than the production of impulses and reactions.
They also encompass perception. An improviser who wants to respond to an impulse, like a new
rhythmic structure, has to perceive it as something unexpected, which she recognizes in its spec-
ificity despite not being able to anticipate it. If we think of skills as consisting of trained patterns,
we cannot explain how someone is able to perceive something unexpected in its specificity. Thus,
the plasticity of perception should be regarded as a pertinent skill for successful improvisation.
A common assumption of what one might call a post-Foucauldian understanding of human
practice holds that normative structures condition what is perceivable (cf. Foucault 1979). This

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assumption plays a decisive role in theories like those of Pierre Bourdieu (1977), Jacques Rancière
(2004), and Judith Butler (2005). The basic reasoning behind these positions is that normative
structures established within a cultural context inform the way in which those who live in that
context think and act. Thinking and acting are intrinsically connected with perceptive skills;
therefore, normative structures inform perceptive skills. It follows that those who live in a specific
cultural context are not able to perceive things, properties, and events that do not fit in any way
within their cultural context’s normative structures.
This line of reasoning can help articulate the kind of perceptual skills involved in improvisa-
tion. If the skills were restricted in line with the post-Foucauldian model, those who improvise
would not be able to perceive what impulses confront them with. They would only perceive what
conforms with already established normative structures. But impulses in improvisations do not
conform to pre-existing normative and perceptual structures. It follows that the perceptual skills
of improvisers must enable them to perceive something that is unexpected in its specificity. In
this way, the perceptive skills that ground improvisation must be open towards non-normalized
impulses, which makes it possible for improvisers to overcome given patterns and established
schemes. Only through such openness can improvisers assess the unexpected affordances of im-
pulses. In this sense, the process of unlearning and relearning in improvisation applies not only to
playing and acting but also to perception.
Connecting the perceptual dimension of improvisational skills with their normative dimension
leads to the conclusion that another essential aspect of responses in improvisation is evaluation. By
responding, improvisers evaluate impulses (of their fellow players). Evaluation is a key component
of improvisational responses. An improviser’s responses can value impulses as providing a good
idea, making real an interesting exception, or provoking a break with the norms that had thus
far guided the improvisation. Improvisational responses implicitly entail statements like this. The
evaluative dimension of responses might be described as reflection embedded in practices because
practices of responding implicitly reflect on impulses’ potential to inspire the improvisation. The
evaluations can manifest themselves in the three different types of responses outlined above: pro-
longing, countering, or ignoring the impulse.
An objection might be that evaluation presupposes norms and is, thus, not intelligible if no
pre-given norms are in play. But the assumption on which the objection rests is not tenable. Even
though some evaluative practices presuppose the norms to which they refer, not all such practices
do.5 Think of jurisdictional practices within case law systems in which judges do not rely on fixed
laws (cf. Derrida 1992; Brandom 1999; Ramshaw 2013). The judges’ actions involve evaluating
past cases in order to decide whether they provide exemplary rulings. Their evaluations are im-
plicit in the judgments they make. But this does not mean that the judges evaluate in the absence of
real normative orientation. Their normative orientation lies in the future. How they evaluate is the
object of future evaluations of judges to come (and how these judges evaluate is itself again the ob-
ject of future evaluations of other judges). The case law model helps us understand how evaluation
works when it is not grounded in pre-given norms. Here, evaluations are normatively bound by
future evaluations. This is how we have to conceive the normative grounding of evaluations in im-
provisation. The evaluations implicit in responses are normatively bound by how future responses
will evaluate these responses. In this way, we have to explain what it means that the constitution of
norms is dependent on evaluations that themselves are not grounded in pre-given norms.
Norms in statu nascendi depend on the performative, perceptual, and evaluative dimensions of
improvisers’ skills. The normativity specific to improvisation is dependent on skills developed in
such a way that they can be productively transformed within improvisational practices. But trans-
formation, as such, does not suffice. Only in connection with evaluation can normative structures
be established within practice. Improvisation as a normative practice is grounded in performative,
perceptual, and evaluative skills.

30
 Improvisation as Normative Practice

5 Summary: Improvisation as a Normative Practice

What is improvisation? I started my reflections with the claim that improvisation as a practice has
to be distinguished both from practices governed by pre-given rules and practices in which some-
thing is simply done differently. We have seen that it is possible to account for this distinction by
conceiving of improvisation as a specific type of normative practice. Improvisation is characterized
by the fact that, within it, norms are constantly in the making. They are established and renewed
by webs of impulses and responses, which have the double potential of, on the one hand, reproduc-
ing and, on the other hand, breaking norms. Bringing forth impulses and responses presupposes
performative, perceptual, and evaluative skills that are transformed within the practice of impulse
and response itself. Improvisation presupposes an openness towards skills being questioned and
transformed. Improvisation is a practice in which norms and skills are developed in strong correla-
tion to one another. In turn, their intertwined development is bound up with a temporal structure
that exceeds the present. On the basis of past developments, improvisational practices open up the
future, in the sense that they wait for future practices to determine their normative impact. The
ontology of improvisation can be summarized as such: Improvisations are normative practices in
which (a) norms are established in statu nascendi through (b) the constant and future-oriented pro-
duction of impulses and responses that (c) transform the norms and skills of improvisation itself.6

Notes
1 The account offered in this paper has been developed and sharpened over the course of many discussions
with Alessandro Bertinetto. Among others, Bertinetto and Bertram 2020 provides an indispensable
background for everything presented here.
2 The two different roles of the unexpected can be understood as motivating a distinction between two
types of improvisation; see Goehr 2016.
3 Other examples can be found in classical music. Think of someone who improvises in a specific style
(e.g., Palestrina or Bach) or of someone who improvises a fugue. In these cases, one acts according to
expectations built on structures that precede the improvised performance.
4 Bertinetto has highlighted an important consequence of improvisation’s normative nature by arguing
that mistakes are always possible within improvisations; cf. Bertinetto 2016.
5 Without any doubt, evaluations within improvisations often rely on cultural and social norms. But
if these norms become important for the improvisation’s internal development, they are transformed
through the improvisation itself and, thus, no longer function as external presuppositions.
6 I am grateful to this volume’s editors for helpful comments on previous versions of this text and to Adam
Bresnahan for his comments and for helping me with the English text.

References
Bertinetto, A. (2012a) “Paganini Does Not Repeat. Musical Improvisation and the Type/Token Ontology,”
Theorema: International Journal of Philosophy 31/3: 105–26.
——— (2012b) “Performing the Unexpected. Improvisation and Artistic Creativity,” Daimon: Revista Inter-
nacional de Filosofía 57, 117–35.
——— (2016) “‘Do Not Fear Mistakes – There Are None’: The Mistake as Surprising Experience of Cre-
ativity in Jazz,” in M. Santi and E. Zorzi (eds.) Education as Jazz: Interdisciplinary Sketches on a New Meta-
phor, Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, pp. 85–100.
——— (2020) “Improvisation and Ontology of Art,” Rivista di estetica 73/1: 10–29.
Bertinetto, A. and Bertram, G. W. (2020) “’We Make Up the Rules as We Go Along’ – Improvisation as an
Essential Aspect of Human Practices?,” Open Philosophy 3: 202–21.
Bertram, G. W. (2010) “Improvisation und Normativität,” in G. Brandstetter et al. (eds.) Improvisieren. Para-
doxien des Unvorhersehbaren, Bielefeld: transcript, pp. 21–40.
Bourdieu, P. (1977) Outline of a Theory of Practice, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Brandom, R. B. (1994) Making it Explicit. Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment, Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press.

31
Another Random Scribd Document
with Unrelated Content
and the scarlet geraniums, with a perfect glow of colored air about
the flowers, standing out in rich contrast with the dark green leaves
of the evergreens behind them. "There's myrtles, and larels, and
boxes," says one of the men selling them, "and there's a harbora
witus, and lauristiners, and that bushy shrub with pink spots is
heath." Men and women, selling different articles, walk about under
the cover of the colonnade. One has seed-cake, another small-tooth
and other combs, others old caps or pig's feet, and one hawker of
knives, razors, and short hatchets, may occasionally be seen driving
a bargain with a countryman, who stands passing his thumb over
the blade to test its keenness. Between the pillars are the coffee-
stalls, with their large tin cans and piles of bread and butter, and
protected from the wind by paper screens and sheets thrown over
clothes-horses; inside these little parlors, as it were, sit the coffee-
drinkers on chairs and benches, some with a bunch of cabbages on
their laps, blowing the steam from their saucers, others, with their
mouths full, munching away at their slices, as if not a moment could
be lost. One or two porters are there besides, seated on their
baskets, breakfasting with their knots on their heads.

As you walk away from this busy scene, you meet in every street
barrows and costers hurrying home. The pump in the market is now
surrounded by a cluster of chattering wenches quarreling over
whose turn it is to water their drooping violets, and on the steps of
Covent Garden Theatre are seated the shoeless girls, tying up the
halfpenny and penny bundles.
 THE HORRORS OF WAR.

I n a work recently published in London, entitled "Lights and

Shades of Military Life," M. de Vigny, the author, gives incidents
from his own experience which place in a striking light some of the
unutterable horrors of war.

In his first march, with his ambition glowing as brightly as his

maiden sword, and his hopes yet fresh as his untarnished epaulets,
he falls in with an old chef de bataillon. He was a man of about fifty,
with mustaches, tall and stout, his back curved, after the manner of
old military officers who have carried the knapsack. His features
were hard but benevolent, such as you often meet with in the army,
indicating, at the same time, the natural goodness of the heart of
the man, and the callousness induced by long use to scenes of blood
and carnage. This old soldier of the Empire is marching along beside
a little cart, drawn by a sorry mule, in which sits a woman—a maniac
—whose story he tells with a soldier's frankness, as a part of his own
history. The old man had been a sailor in his youth, and at the time
of the Directory was captain of a merchantman. From that situation
he was promoted, aristocracy being at a discount, to command the
Marat, a brig of war, and one of his first duties was to sail with two
political prisoners, a young Frenchman and his wife. He supposed
that he was to land them at Cayenne, to which place other exiles
had previously been dispatched in other vessels; but he carried
sealed orders from the Directory, which were not to be opened till
the vessel reached the Equator. On the passage, the captain and his
young passengers became greatly attached to each other, so much
so that he wished to leave the service, and, with what fortune he
had, share and alleviate their fate. In their youth and innocence, and
earnest love for each other, the young unfortunates had twined
themselves about the rough heart of the sailor, and he regarded
them as his children. But there was the ominous letter, bearing the
red seals of the Directory, which was to decide their fate—and the
time arrived for it to be opened. The seals were broken, and what
was the captain's horror to find that it contained an order for him to
have the young husband shot, and then to return with the wife to
France. After he had read the paper, he rubbed his eyes, thinking
that they must have deceived him. He could not trust his senses. His
limbs trembled beneath him. He could not trust himself to go near
the fair young Laura, who looked so happy, with tidings that would
blight her existence. What was he to do? He never seems to have
thought of leaving the order unexecuted; the iron of unreasoning
obedience had seared his soul too deeply for that. The horrid task,
revolt at it as he might, was a duty, because he had been ordered to
do it. He communicated the order to his victim, who heard his fate
with a stoicism worthy of an old Roman. His only thought was for his
poor young wife, so fair, and fond, and gentle. He said, with a voice
as mild as usual, "I ask no favor, captain. I should never forgive
myself if I were to cause you to violate your duty. I should merely
like to say a few words to Laura, and I beg you to protect her, in
case she should survive me, which I do not think she will." It is
arranged between the victim of slavish obedience, and the victim of
the cruelty of the Reign of Terror, that poor Laura should know
nothing of what was to be her husband's fate. She is put into a boat
at night and rowed from the ship, while the tragedy is being acted
out; but she sees the flash of the muskets, her heart tells her too
plainly what has happened, and her reason fails under the shock. "At
the moment of firing, she clasped her hand to her head, as if a ball
had struck her brow, and sat down in the boat without fainting,
without shrieking, without speaking, and returned to the brig with
the crew when they pleased and how they pleased." The old captain
spoke to her but she did not understand him. She was mute,
rubbing her pale forehead, and trembling as though she were afraid
of every body, and thus she remained an idiot for life. The captain
returned to France with his charge, got himself removed into the
land forces, for the sea—into which he had cast innocent blood—was
unbearable to him; and had continued to watch over the poor
imbecile as a father over his child. M. de Vigny saw the poor woman;
he says, "I saw two blue eyes of extraordinary size, admirable in
point of form, starting from a long, pale, emaciated face, inundated
by perfectly straight fair hair. I saw, in truth, nothing but those two
eyes, which were all that was left of that poor woman, for the rest of
her was dead. Her forehead was red, her cheeks hollow and white,
and bluish on the cheek bones. She was crouched among the straw,
so that one could just see her two knees rising above it, and on
them she was playing all alone at dominoes. She looked at us for a
moment, trembled a long time, smiled at me a little, and began to
play again. It seemed to me that she was trying to make out how
her right hand beat her left." It was the wreck of love and beauty,
torn by the blind slave obedience, at the bidding of vengeance and
hate. M. de Vigny was a young and thoughtless soldier; but young
and thoughtless as he was, the phantom glory must have beamed
brightly indeed, to prevent him from seeing the gloomy darkness of
such a shade of military life as this, and keep him from shaking the
fetters of blind obedience from intellect and mercy. He never saw the
old chef and his charge again; but he heard of them. In speaking to
a brother officer one day of the sad story, his companion in arms
replied, "Ah, my dear fellow, I knew that poor devil well. A brave
man he was too; he was taken off by a cannon-ball at Waterloo. He
had, in fact, left along with the baggage a sort of crazy girl, whom
we took to the hospitable of Amiens on our way to the army of the
Loire, and who died there and raving at the end of three days."

If in this story we recognize the goodness, the true nobility of heart

of this old soldier, we can not fail to see in all its hideousness, the
horrors and evils of a system which deadens intellect, paralyzes
virtue, and dims the light of mercy—the system of slavish obedience,
crushing out all individuality, and making the good and the bad alike
its subservient instruments.

As a pendant to the above we take a few extracts from the story of

Captain Renaud, once a page to Napoleon, of whom Byron truly
says:
 "With might unquestioned—power to save—
Thine only gift hath been the grave,
To those that worship'd thee."

And so poor Renaud found. He had the misfortune to fall under the
displeasure of the Emperor, and was sent from the army to serve on
board that abortive flat-bottomed-boat armada, which threatened a
descent upon the shores of England. Here he was taken prisoner,
and, after a long captivity, being exchanged, hastened to Paris to
throw himself at the feet of the conqueror. The reception was a
strange one. It took place at the Opera, and we quote a description
of it. "He (Napoleon) placed his left hand upon his left eye to see
better, according to his custom; I perceived that he had recognized
me. He turned about sharply, took no notice of any thing but the
stage, and presently retired. I was already in waiting for him. He
walked fast along the corridor, and, from his thick legs, squeezed
into white silk stockings, and his bloated figure in his green dress, I
should scarcely have known him again. He stopped short before me,
and speaking to the colonel, who presented me, instead of
addressing himself direct to me, 'Why,' said he, 'have I never seen
any thing of him? Still a lieutenant?'

"'He has been a prisoner ever since 1804.'

"'Why did he not make his escape?'

"'I was on parole!' said I, in an undertone.

"'I don't like prisoners!—the fellows ought to get killed,' said he,
turning his back upon me.

"We remained motionless in file, and when the whole of his suite
had passed: 'My dear fellow,' said the colonel, 'don't you see plainly
that you are a fool? You have lost your promotion, and nobody
thinks the better of you for it.'"
Poor obedience, blind, slavish, unreasoning; its reward was often to
be spurned. "Fool" indeed; a great many people will be inclined to
re-echo the colonel's epithet, not because Renaud had been a
prisoner—not because he was not killed, or did not escape, but
because this same habit of obedience had so thoroughly taken the
true man out of him, that he did not cut the epaulets from his
shoulders, and leave glory to find some other fool. But he was a
soldier, and a soldier's first duty was obedience. He went to his
regiment, and from his after-life we extract another "shade" of the
horrors of war. Captain Renaud narrates how he surprised a
detachment of Russians at their post. It was a glorious achievement
of course—a parallel to any of the atrocities of the North American
Indians. "I came up slowly, and I could not, I must confess, get the
better of a certain emotion which I had never felt at the moment of
other encounters. It was shame for attacking men who were asleep;
I saw them wrapped in their cloaks, lighted by a close lantern, and
my heart throbbed violently. But all at once, at the moment of
acting, I feared that it was a weakness very like that of cowards; I
was afraid that I had for once felt fear, and taking my sword, which
had been concealed under my arm, I briskly entered first, setting the
example to my grenadiers. I made a motion to them which they
comprehended; they fell first upon the guns, then upon the men,
like wolves upon a flock of sheep. Oh, it was a dismal, a horrible
butchery. The bayonet pierced, the butt-end smashed, the knee
stifled, the hand strangled. All cries were extinguished, almost
before they were uttered, beneath the feet of our soldiers; and not a
head was raised without receiving the mortal blow. On entering, I
had struck at random a terrible stroke at something black, which I
had run through and through. An old officer, a tall stout man, whose
head was covered with white hair, sprung upon his feet like a
phantom, made a violent lunge at my face with a sword, and
instantly dropped dead pierced by the bayonets! On my part, I fell
beside him, stunned by the blow, which had struck me between the
eyes, and I heard beneath me the tender and dying voice of a boy,
saying, 'papa!' I then comprehended what I had done, and I looked
at my work with frantic eagerness. I saw one of those officers of
fourteen, so numerous in the Russian armies, which invaded us at
that period, and who were dragged away to this awful school. His
long curling hair fell upon his bosom, as fair, as silken as that of a
woman, and his head was bowed, as though he had but fallen
asleep a second time. His rosy lips, expanded like those of a new-
born infant, seemed to be yet moist with the nurse's milk; and his
large blue eyes, half open, had a beauty of form that was fond and
feminine. I lifted him upon one arm, and his cheek fell against mine,
dripping with blood, as though he were burying his face in his
mother's bosom to warm it again. He seemed to shrink from me,
and crouch close to the ground, in order to get away from his
murderer. Filial affection, and the confidence and repose of a
delicious sleep pervaded his lifeless face, and he seemed to say to
me, 'Let us sleep in peace!'

"At this moment, the colonel entered, followed close by his column,
whose step and arms I heard.

"'Bravo, my dear fellow,' said he, 'you've done that job cleverly; but
you are wounded!'

"'Look there,' said I; 'what difference is there between me and a

murderer?'

"'Eh! Sacre dieu! comrade, what would you have? 'Tis our trade!'"

Great God! what a trade for men to give themselves up to, for
considerations of all kinds, from peerages and pensions down to a
shilling a day. Legalized murder as a profession for the poor foster-
children of passive obedience, who, when they trust themselves to
think, sometimes find themselves—and upon their own showing, too
—little better than murderers. Poor Captain Renaud, however,
continued in the service still. So thoroughly was the man smothered
in the soldier, that neglect, contempt, contumely, and the sensations
of a homicide were not sufficient to induce him to break his fetters.
After Napoleon's fall, he remained a soldier of the Bourbons, and
there was a sort of poetical justice in his death; for in the sanguinary
revolution of 1830 a gamin de Paris, a boy scarcely able to hold a
horse-pistol, shot the veteran of the Empire.

M. de Vigny closes his portion of the "Lights and Shades" by setting

up an idol for soldiers to worship, and which is to sustain them
under all their sufferings. The profession of arms has lost the
attribute of apparent usefulness which once belonged to it. The star
of glory is setting below the horizon of peace; and warriors, knowing
themselves at once hated and feared—feeling themselves out of
place in the era which is beginning—degraded from heroes into
policemen—are to lean upon Honor for support; but we think, that in
the midst of obloquy, privation, and neglect, that sentiment will
prove but a broken staff, incapable of bearing such a load of misery
and wrong.
 THE FACTORY BOY.
BY HARRIET MARTINEAU.

I n the middle of a dark night, Joel, a boy of nine years old, heard
his name called by a voice which, through his sleep, seemed miles
away. Joel had been tired enough when he went to bed, and yet he
had not gone to sleep for some time; his heart beat so at the idea of
his mother being very ill. He well remembered his father's death,
and his mother's illness now revived some feelings which he had
almost forgotten. His bed was merely some clothes spread on the
floor, and covered with a rug; but he did not mind that; and he could
have gone to sleep at once but for the fear that had come over him.
When he did sleep, his sleep was sound; so that his mother's feeble
voice calling him seemed like a call from miles away.

In a minute Joel was up and wide awake.

"Light the candle," he could just hear the voice say.

He lighted the candle, and his beating heart seemed to stop when
he saw his mother's face. He seemed hardly to know whether it was
his mother or no.

"Shall I call—?"

"Call nobody, my dear. Come here."

He laid his cheek to hers.

"Mother, you are dying," he murmured.

"Yes, love, I am dying. It is no use calling any one. These little ones,
Joel."
"I will take care of them, mother."

"You, my child! How should that be?"

"Why not?" said the boy, raising himself, and standing at his best
height. "Look at me, mother. I can work. I promise you—"

His mother could not lift her hand, but she moved a finger in a way
which checked him.

"Promise nothing that may be too hard afterward," she said.

"I promise to try then," he said; "that little sister shall live at home,
and never go to the workhouse." He spoke cheerfully, though the
candle-light glittered in the two streams of tears on his cheeks. "We
can go on living here; and we shall be so—"

It would not do. The sense of their coming desolation rushed over
him in a way too terrible to be borne. He hid his face beside her,
murmuring, "O mother! mother!"

His mother found strength to move her hand now. She stroked his
head with a trembling touch, which he seemed to feel as long as he
lived. She could not say much more. She told him she had no fear
for any of them. They would be taken care of. She advised him not
to waken the little ones, who were sound asleep on the other side of
her, and begged him to lie down himself till daylight, and try to
sleep, when she should be gone.

This was the last thing she said. The candle was very low; but
before it went out, she was gone. Joel had always done what his
mother wished; but he could not obey her in the last thing she had
said. He lighted another candle when the first went out; and sat
thinking, till the gray dawn began to show through the window.

When he called the neighbors, they were astonished at his

quietness. He had taken up the children, and dressed them, and
made the room tidy, and lighted the fire, before he told any body
what had happened. And when he opened the door, his little sister
was in his arms. She was two years old, and could walk, of course;
but she liked being in Joel's arms. Poor Willy was the most
confounded. He stood with his pinafore at his mouth, staring at the
bed, and wondering that his mother lay so still.

If the neighbors were astonished at Joel that morning, they might be

more so at some things they saw afterward; but they were not.
Every thing seemed done so naturally; and the boy evidently
considered what he had to do so much a matter of course, that less
sensation was excited than about many smaller things.

After the funeral was over, Joel tied up all his mother's clothes. He
carried the bundle on one arm, and his sister on the other. He would
not have liked to take money for what he had seen his mother wear;
but he changed them away for new and strong clothes for the child.
He did not seem to want any help. He went to the factory the next
morning, as usual, after washing and dressing the children, and
getting a breakfast of bread and milk with them. There was no fire;
and he put every knife, and other dangerous thing on a high shelf,
and gave them some trifles to play with, and promised to come and
play with them at dinner-time. And he did play. He played heartily
with the little one, and as if he enjoyed it, every day at the noon
hour. Many a merry laugh the neighbors heard from that room when
the three children were together; and the laugh was often Joel's.

How he learned to manage, and especially to cook, nobody knew;

and he could himself have told little more than that he wanted to
see how people did it, and looked accordingly, at every opportunity.
He certainly fed the children well; and himself too. He knew that
every thing depended on his strength being kept up. His sister sat
on his knee to be fed till she could feed herself. He was sorry to give
it up; but he said she must learn to behave. So he smoothed her
hair, and washed her face before dinner, and showed her how to fold
her hands while he said grace. He took as much pains to train her to
good manners at table as if he had been a governess, teaching a
little lady. While she remained a "baby," he slept in the middle of the
bed, between the two, that she might have room, and not be
disturbed; and when she ceased to be a baby, he silently made new
arrangements. He denied himself a hat, which he much wanted, in
order to buy a considerable quantity of coarse dark calico, which,
with his own hands, he made into a curtain, and slung up across a
part of the room; thus shutting off about a third of it. Here he
contrived to make up a little bed for his sister; and he was not
satisfied till she had a basin and jug, and piece of soap of her own.
Here nobody but himself was to intrude upon her without leave;
and, indeed, he always made her understand that he came only to
take care of her. It was not only that Willy was not to see her
undressed. A neighbor or two, now and then lifted the latch without
knocking. One of these one day, heard something from behind the
curtain, which made her call her husband silently to listen; and they
always afterward treated Joel as if he were a man, and one whom
they looked up to. He was teaching the child her little prayer. The
earnest, sweet, devout tones by the boy, and the innocent, cheerful
imitation of the little one, were beautiful to hear, the listeners said.

Though so well taken care of, she was not to be pampered; there
would have been no kindness in that. Very early, indeed, she was
taught, in a merry sort of way, to put things in their places, and to
sweep the floor, and to wash up the crockery. She was a handy little
thing, well trained and docile. One reward that Joel had for his
management was, that she was early fit to go to chapel. This was a
great point; as he, choosing to send Willy regularly, could not go till
he could take the little girl with him. She was never known to be
restless; and Joel was quite proud of her.

Willy was not neglected for the little girl's sake. In those days,
children went earlier to the factory, and worked longer than they do
now, and, by the time the sister was five years old, Willy became a
factory boy; and his pay put the little girl to school. When she, at
seven, went to the factory, too, Joel's life was altogether an easier
one. He always had maintained them all, from the day of his
mother's death. The times must have been good—work constant,
and wages steady—or he could not have done it. Now, when all
three were earning, he put his sister to a sewing-school for two
evenings in the week, and the Saturday afternoons; and he and
Willy attended an evening-school, as they found they could afford it.
He always escorted the little girl wherever she had to go: into the
factory, and home again—to the school door, and home again—and
to the Sunday-school; yet he was himself remarkably punctual at
work and at worship. He was a humble, earnest, docile pupil himself,
at the Sunday-school—quite unconscious that he was more
advanced than other boys in the sublime science and practice of
duty. He felt that every body was very kind to him; but he was
unaware that others felt it an honor to be kind to him.

I linger on these years, when he was a fine growing lad, in a state of

high content. I linger, unwilling to proceed. But the end must come;
and it is soon told. He was sixteen, I think, when he was asked to
become a teacher in the Sunday-school, while not wholly ceasing to
be a scholar. He tried, and made a capital teacher, and he won the
hearts of the children while trying to open their minds. By this he
became more widely known than before.

One day in the next year a tremendous clatter and crash was heard
in the factory where Joel worked. A dead silence succeeded, and
then several called out that it was only an iron bar that had fallen
down. This was true: but the iron bar had fallen on Joel's head, and
he was taken up dead!

Such a funeral as his is rarely seen. There is something that strikes

on all hearts in the spectacle of a soldier's funeral—the drum, the
march of comrades, and the belt and cap laid on the coffin. But
there was something more solemn and more moving than all such
observances in the funeral of this young soldier, who had so bravely
filled his place in the conflict of life. There was the tread of
comrades here, for the longest street was filled from end to end. For
relics, there were his brother and sister; and for a solemn dirge, the
uncontrollable groans of a heart-stricken multitude.
 FIDGETY PEOPLE.

T here are people whom one occasionally meets with in the world,
who are in a state of perpetual fidget and pucker. Every thing
goes wrong with them. They are always in trouble. Now, it is the
weather, which is too hot; or at another time, too cold. The dust
blows into their eyes, or there is "that horrid rain," or "that broiling
sun," or "that Scotch mist." They are as ill to please about the
weather as a farmer; it is never to their liking, and never will be.
They "never saw such a summer," "not a day's fine weather," and
they go back to antiquity for comfort—"it was not so in our younger
days."

Fidgety people are rarely well. They have generally "a headache," or
"spasms," or "nerves," or something of that sort; they can not be
comfortable in their way, without trouble. Most of their friends are ill;
this one has the gout "so bad;" another has the rheumatics; a third
is threatened with consumption; and there is scarcely a family of
their acquaintance whose children have not got measles, whooping-
cough, scarlet fever, or some other of the thousand ills which
infantine flesh is heir to. They are curiously solicitous about the
health of every body; this one is exhorted "not to drink too much
cold water," another "not to sit in the draught," a third is advised to
"wear flannels;" and they have great doctors at their fingers' ends
whom they can quote in their support. They have read Buchan and
Culpepper, and fed their fidgets upon their descriptions of diseases
of all sorts. They offer to furnish recipes for pills, draughts, and
liniments; and if you would believe them, your life depends on
taking their advice gratis forthwith.

To sit at meals with such people is enough to give one the

dyspepsia. The chimney has been smoking, and the soot has got
into the soup; the fish is over-done, and the mutton is underdone;
the potatoes have had the disease, the sauce is not of the right sort,
the jelly is candied, the pastry is fusty, the grapes are sour. Every
thing is wrong. The cook must be disposed of; Betty stands talking
too long at the back-gate. The poultry-woman must be changed, the
potato-man discarded. There will be a clean sweep. But things are
never otherwise. The fidgety person remains unchanged, and goes
fidgeting along to the end of the chapter; changing servants, and
spoiling them by unnecessary complainings and contradictions, until
they become quite reckless of ever giving satisfaction.

The fidgety person has been reading the newspaper, and is in a

ferment about "that murder!" Every body is treated to its details. Or
somebody's house has been broken into, and a constant fidget is
kept up for a time about "thieves!" If a cat's whisper is heard in the
night, "there is a thief in the house;" if an umbrella is missing, "a
thief has been in the lobby;" if a towel can not be found, "a thief
must have stolen it off the hedge." You are counseled to be careful
of your pockets when you stir abroad. The outer doors are furnished
with latches, new bolts and bars are provided for outhouses, bells
are hung behind the shutters, and all other possible expedients are
devised to keep out the imaginary "thief."

"Oh! there is a smell of fire!" Forthwith the house is traversed,

down-stairs and up-stairs, and a voice at length comes from the
kitchen, "It's only Bobby been burning a stick." You are told
forthwith of a thousand accidents, deaths, and burnings, that have
come from burning sticks! Bobby is petrified and horror-stricken, and
is haunted by the terror of conflagrations. If Bobby gets a penny
from a visitor, he is counseled "not to buy gunpowder" with it,
though he has a secret longing for crackers. Maids are cautioned to
"be careful about the clothes-horse," and their ears are often
startled with a cry from above-stairs of "Betty, there is surely
something singeing!"
The fidgety person "can not bear" the wind whistling through the
key-hole, nor the smell of washing, nor the sweep's cry of "svee-eep,
svee-eep," nor the beating of carpets, nor thick ink, nor a mewing
cat, nor new boots, nor a cold in the head, nor callers for rates and
subscriptions. All these little things are magnified into miseries, and
if you like to listen, you may sit for hours and hear the fidgety
person wax eloquent about them, drawing a melancholy pleasure
from the recital.

The fidgety person sits upon thorns, and loves to perch his or her
auditor on the same raw material. Not only so, but you are dragged
over thorns, until you feel thoroughly unskinned. Your ears are
bored, and your teeth are set on edge. Your head aches, and your
withers are wrung. You are made to shake hands with misery, and
almost long for some real sorrow as a relief.

The fidgety person makes a point of getting out of humor upon any
occasion, whether about private or public affairs. If subjects for
misery do not offer within doors, they abound without. Something
that has been done in the next street excites their ire, or something
done a thousand miles off, or even something that was done a
thousand years ago. Time and place matter nothing to the fidgety.
They overleap all obstacles in getting at their subject. They must be
in hot water. If one question is set at rest, they start another; and
they wear themselves to the bone in settling the affairs of every
body, which are never settled; they

"Are made desperate by a too quick sense

Of constant infelicity."

Their feverish existence refuses rest, and they fret themselves to

death about matters with which they have often no earthly concern.
They are spendthrifts in sympathy, which in them has degenerated
into an exquisite tendency to pain. They are launched on a sea of
trouble, the shores of which are perpetually extending. They are
self-stretched on a rack, the wheels of which are ever going round.
The fundamental maxim of the fidgety is—whatever is, is wrong.
They will not allow themselves to be happy, nor any body else. They
always assume themselves to be the most aggrieved persons extant.
Their grumbling is incessant, and they operate as a social poison
wherever they go. Their vanity and self-conceit are usually
accompanied by selfishness in a very aggravated form, which only
seems to make their fidgets the more intolerable. You will generally
observe that they are idle persons; indeed, as a general rule, it may
be said, that the fidgety class want healthy occupations. In nine
cases out of ten, employment in some active pursuit, in which they
could not have time to think about themselves, would operate as a
cure.

But, we must make an allowance. Fidgets are often caused by the

state of the stomach, and a fit of bad temper may not unfrequently
be traced to an attack of indigestion. One of the most fidgety
members of the House of Commons is a martyr to dyspepsia, and it
is understood that some of his most petulant and bitter diatribes
have been uttered while laboring under more than usually severe
attacks of this disease. He has "pitched into" some "honorable
gentleman" when he should have taken blue pill. And so it is with
many a man, in domestic and social life, whom we blame for his
snappish and disagreeable temper, but whose stomach is the real
organ at fault. Indeed, the stomach is the moral no less than the
physical barometer of most men; and we can very often judge of
tempers, conditions, and sympathies, pretty accurately, according to
its state. Let us, therefore, be charitable to the fidgety, whose
stomachs, rather than their hearts, may be at fault; and let us
counsel them to mend them, by healthy and temperate modes of
living, and by plenty of wholesome occupation and exercise.
 ANECDOTES OF SERPENTS.

W e need not go to the Valley of Diamonds with Sinbad to find

enormous serpents. The companions of other sailors have
been swallowed up by those monstrous reptiles, as was too-clearly
proved to the crew of the Malay proa, who anchored for the night
close to the island of Celebes. One of the party went on shore to
look for betel-nut, and, on returning from his search, stretched his
wearied limbs to rest on the beach, where he fell asleep, as his
companions believed. They were roused in the middle of the night
by his screams, and hurried on shore to his assistance; but they
came too late. A monstrous snake had crushed him to death. All
they could do was to wreak their vengeance on his destroyer, whose
head they cut off, and bore it with the body of their ship-mate to
their vessel. The marks of the teeth of the serpent, which was about
thirty feet in length, were impressed on the dead man's right wrist,
and the disfigured corpse showed that it had been crushed by
constriction round the head, neck, breast, and thigh. When the
snake's jaws were extended, they admitted a body the size of a
man's head.

But to see the true boas in their native forests we must cross the
Atlantic; and those who are not familiar with the story may have no
objection to learn how Captain Stedman fared in an encounter with
one twenty-two feet and some inches in length, during his residence
in Surinam.

Captain Stedman was lying in his hammock, as his vessel floated

down the river, when the sentinel told him that he had seen and
challenged something black, moving in the brushwood on the beach,
which gave no answer. Up rose the captain, manned the canoe that
accompanied his vessel, and rowed to the shore to ascertain what it
was. One of his slaves cried out that it was no negro, but a great
snake that the captain might shoot if he pleased. The captain,
having no such inclination, ordered all hands to return on board. The
slave, David, who had first challenged the snake, then begged leave
to step forward and shoot it. This seems to have roused the captain,
for he determined to kill it himself, and loaded with ball cartridge.

The master and slave then proceeded. David cut a path with a bill-
hook, and behind him came a marine with three more loaded guns.
They had not gone above twenty yards through mud and water, the
negro looking every way with uncommon vivacity, when he suddenly
called out, "Me see snakee!" and, sure enough there the reptile lay,
coiled up under the fallen leaves and rubbish of the trees. So well
covered was it, that some time elapsed before the captain could
perceive its head, not above sixteen feet from him, moving its forked
tongue, while its vividly-bright eyes appeared to emit sparks of fire.
The captain now rested his piece upon a branch to secure a surer
aim, and fired. The ball missed the head, but went through the
body, when the snake struck round with such astonishing force as to
cut away all the underwood around it with the facility of a scythe
mowing grass, and, flouncing with its tail, made the mud and dirt fly
over their heads to a considerable distance. This commotion seems
to have sent the party to the right about; for they took to their
heels, and crawled into the canoe. David, however, entreated the
captain to renew the charge, assuring him that the snake would be
quiet in a few minutes, and that it was neither able nor inclined to
pursue them, supporting his opinion by walking before the captain
till the latter should be ready to fire.

They now found the snake a little removed from its former station,
very quiet, with its head as before, lying out among the fallen
leaves, rotten bark, and old moss. Stedman fired at it immediately,
but with no better success than at first; and the enraged animal,
being but slightly wounded by the second shot, sent up such a cloud
of dust and dirt as the captain had never seen, except in a
whirlwind; and away they all again retreated to their canoe. Tired of
the exploit, Stedman gave orders to row toward the barge; but the
persevering David still entreating that he might be permitted to kill
the reptile, the captain determined to make a third and last attempt
in his company; and they this time directed their fire with such effect
that the snake was shot by one of them through the head.

The vanquished monster was then secured by a running-noose

passed over its head, not without some difficulty, however; for,
though it was mortally wounded, it continued to writhe and twist
about so as to render a near approach dangerous. The serpent was
dragged to the shore, and made fast to the canoe, in order that it
might be towed to the vessel, and continued swimming like an eel
till the party arrived on board, where it was finally determined that
the snake should be again taken on shore, and there skinned for the
sake of its oil. This was accordingly done; and David having climbed
a tree with the end of a rope in his hand, let it down over a strong-
forked bough, the other negroes hoisted away, and the serpent was
suspended from the tree. Then, David quitting the tree, with a sharp
knife between his teeth, clung fast upon the suspended snake, still
twisting and twining, and proceeded to perform the same operation
that Marsyas underwent, only that David commenced his work by
ripping the subject up: he then stripped down the skin as he
descended. Stedman acknowledges, that though he perceived that
the snake was no longer able to do the operator any harm, he could
not, without emotion, see a naked man, black and bloody, clinging
with arms and legs round the slimy and yet living monster. The skin
and above four gallons of clarified fat, or rather oil, were the spoils
secured on this occasion; full as many gallons more seem to have
been wasted. The negroes cut the flesh into pieces, intending to
feast on it; but the captain would not permit them to eat what he
regarded as disgusting food, though they declared that it was
exceedingly good and wholesome. The negroes were right, and the
captain was wrong: the flesh of most serpents is very good and
nourishing, to say nothing of the restorative qualities attributed to it.
One of the most curious accounts of the benefit derived by man
from the serpent race, is related by Kircher (see Mus. Worm.), where
it is stated that near the village of Sassa, about eight miles from the
city of Bracciano, in Italy, there is a hole, or cavern, called la Grotto,
delli Serpi, which is large enough to contain two men, and is all
perforated with small holes like a sieve. From these holes, in the
beginning of spring, issue a prodigious number of small, different-
colored serpents, of which every year produces a new brood, but
which seem to have no poisonous quality. Such persons as are
afflicted with scurvy, leprosy, palsy, gout, and other ills to which
flesh is heir, were laid down naked in the cavern, and their bodies
being subjected to a copious sweat from the heat of the
subterraneous vapors, the young serpents were said to fasten
themselves on every part, and extract by sucking every diseased or
vitiated humor; so that after some repetitions of this treatment, the
patients were restored to perfect health. Kircher, who visited this
cave, found it warm, and answering, in every way, the description he
had of it. He saw the holes, heard a murmuring, hissing noise in
them, and, though he owns that he missed seeing the serpents, it
not being the season of their creeping out, yet he saw great
numbers of their exuviæ, or sloughs, and an elm growing hard by
laden with them. The discovery of this air Schlangenbad, was said to
have been made by a leper going from Rome to some baths near
this place, who, fortunately, losing his way, and being benighted,
turned into this cave. Finding it very warm, and being very weary, he
pulled off his clothes, and fell into such a deep sleep that he did not
feel the serpents about him till they had wrought his cure.

Such instances of good-will toward man, combined with the

periodical renovation of youthful appearance, by a change of the
whole external skin, and the character of the serpent for wisdom,
contributed, doubtless, to raise the form to a place among the
deities.

Their aptitude for tameness was another quality which aided their
elevation. The little girl mentioned by Maria Edgeworth, of blessed
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