The Improvisation of Musical Dialogue is a significant scholarship in terms of the philosophy of musical improvisation. Although improvisation is addressed for a long time, Goehr concentrates on the ‘Werktreue’ ideal of performer fidelity to scores instead of applying to Western art music arbitrary. Although music works define the Werktreue ideal that are opposed to the flexibility and improvisation, composing and performing are essentially improvisatory concepts in nature. Indeed, all music is partial, unfinished and constituted by improvisation.
Benson sets out his thesis in dialogue with the history of composition and performance practice in Western art music (WAM) and various influential theories of musical ontology. He also appeals to performers and composers were integrated in a same task, which meant that there was no clear boundary to separate the composing and performing. While, improvisation cannot constitute a musical work. Because there are no two based elements of performance and composition in improvisation. It only plays the neutrality role between composition and performance and thus generates a productive method that overcomes their apparent opposition. Improvisation can be divided into different varieties in terms of different forms of music imagination, including the opposite aspects of improvisation. So in Benson’s opinion, it is difficult to imagine any music that would not be a product of improvisation.
Benson traces the connections between the origins of a musical work and its performance. His goal is to question the prevalent romantic thinking of musical composition creates a work of music from a composer’s inspired imagination, while the performance is a realization of what the composer indicates through the score. Indeed, composition is the creation of ‘ex nihilo’. Scores preserve the intentions of the work’s composer and provoke compositional intentions by performers. Then, social and dialogic practice situated between the traditional dichotomy of composition and performance is best considered as a kind of improvisation. Benson draws out the connotations of the improvisational understanding of composition and performance to promote ‘piece’ in an accurate way. Composition is neither historically or ontologically before performance since it is only through performances that music exists at all. Although the idea that the historically transcending musical work was quite important in historical Western culture, it is actually illusory. Compositions can be realized as music when they are performed. Composition is achieved inevitably with others, musical dialogue is fundamentally ethical in nature; all voices within it—the composer, performer and listener—must be respected without anyone being wholly in control.
Reference,
Benson, Bruce Ellis, 2003: The Improvisation of Musical Dialogue: a phenomenology of music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)
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