Just a thought here: do you not think that for many musicians at least, the very weight of the performing tradition that precedes them when playing Brahms (and all the concomitant audience expectations - also a factor in improvisation, of course) might act as something of a constraint to an extent which is not the case with Ferneyhough or others, where performing traditions are vastly younger?

Thanks, Richard, for nailing it for me - at least in terms of the symbiosis possible between improv and notated comp. I remain equivocal in the issue(s) of interpretative performance, although find Ollie's foregoing position very seductive.

Yet another really, really interesting and useful discussion! I have a slightly tangential relationship to all this, since although I have done a fair bit of improvising over the years (in performance, that is), this activity is far outweighed by what, as end-product, is best described as notated composition. And yet it's not quite that simple. I've come to rely a fair bit on 'improvising' as a way of developing compositional material, and I'm not merely talking about sitting at a keyboard and jamming until a half-decent idea pops out, I'm talking about setting up improv strategies that will test and extend material, in ways that technical systems and methodologies don't on paper (at least for me) and can't really, because the outcomes are not just unpredictable/ illogical but alien to any technique which gurantees a certain degree of relatedness. Sure, most of the time I'll then take those outcomes and 'adapt' them to whatever seems necessary for a notated piece; but sometimes a weird and wonderful friction occurs between what is 'necessary' and what seems liberating, offbeat, totally incongruous.

This is all very fine griss to the mill for me ahead of a not-at-all-unrelated week ahead with Veronika.  

A rather improvisatory spelling of "grist," don't you think? 

see you in the Pedantry Thread...

I don't know whether this answers Evan's and or Ollie's points, but maybe I should go a bit further into my emboldened phrase. Bear in mind that I was trying to connect and at the same time mutually define the practices of composition of notated music and composition of improvised music: improvisation as a method of composition (and not, for example, interpretation as a method of improvisation). My point was that the "sound-materials" of notated and of improvised music are often indistinguishable from one another, especially on a short time-scale. A "plink" in a piece by Lachenmann is not that different from a "plink" in (to take an obviously related example) a piece by the group Polwechsel. Where they tend to part company is, returning to that phrase, how those "plinks" are structured in musical time and space - how they're affected by and how they affect other "plinks", how pitch- rhythm- and timbre-relationships are established and developed, and so on. The act of making a musical structure out of these objects (or processes or whatever they are) is of a different order, I think, from that which would result in a notated score, and certainly of a different order from the act of performing a preexistent score.

As for Evan J's question "why can't one "structure ideas/objects in musical time and space" in the course of a performance of Time and Motion Study I or, for that matter, the Brahms clarinet quintet?" Because the "space" of improvisation is so to speak a compositional space. It isn't that it's initially a blank slate, any more than the slates with which Ferneyhough or Brahms begins are blank; it's that the movements through that space which are available to the performer of improvisation are analogous to those available to a composer of notation, rather than those which are available to the performer of a notated score, though of course I'd be the last person to claim that highly-detailed notation somehow reduces the interpretative dimension of performance. Witness, for example, the fact that it's at least possible in principle to perform an effective musical improvisation on an instrument one doesn't have much control of (Ornette Coleman's violin playing, for example), while this certainly wouldn't apply to performing Time and Motion Study I.

I almost hate to spoil that moment for you or anyone else who may have heard it but I'm afraid that was an accidental foot-stamp (on a marble floor) rather than a slaptongue...

I think that developing that memory as far as one can (including the ability to sift out those aspects which are worth bearing in mind) is an important part of improvisational "training". But it actually works in both directions: one also needs constantly to have in mind what the possibilities implied at a certain moment might be, and of course constantly to revise these in view of what actually does happen. I'm talking mostly about group improvisation, perhaps I should emphasise: solo improvisation doesn't interest me that much as a practitioner, or at least I end up doing it very seldom indeed.

It's what happens in the heat of the moment when you don't maintain firm control over all your appendages and one of them makes an involuntary percussive contribution. I blame my right cerebral hemisphere. I suppose someone's going to turn one of my previous utterances back on me and point out that it in no way contradicts the score... Fair cop, guv.

PS: Here for a limited time only - a taragot in full flight. Played by an UNCREDITED (shame!) wizard from Ferenc Sánta's Gypsy Band.