Written from the perspective of two people currently involved in experimental and electronic music in Australia, this chapter provides an overview of some of the key movements and works in the genre, from the twentieth century to the present day. Focusing primarily on music that exploits technology and experimental approaches that progress innovation in art music contexts, it highlights some of the diverse practitioners – performers, composers, improvisers, sound artists, and instrument makers – who have pushed the boundaries of what is possible, often blurring the lines between art forms in the process. While it is unable to provide an exhaustive historical or contemporary account of the innovations that have been achieved here, or those responsible, the selected representative survey should serve to contextualise Australia’s contributions to electronic and experimental music, demonstrating our reputation for presenting ‘mavericks’ to the music world.

This chapter examines the current state of jazz in Australia through the lens of notable practitioners—Andrea Keller, Simon Barker, Gian Slater, Kristin Berardi, Phil Slater and Jamie Oehlers. Presented as a panel discussion, the participants explore the term ‘jazz’ as it is perceived both by audiences and the practitioners themselves, discuss the challenges of presenting original music in a country as isolated as Australia, and question whether there is an audible Australian jazz ‘dialect’.

Schubert acquired the art of improvisation from Salieri, who had trained him in the old school of a kapellmeister, a proficient keyboard improviser able to compose, in a short space of time, a mass, symphony or opera, and furnish publishers with songs, chamber music and piano repertoire. Schubert’s friends dismissed his teacher’s theoretically grounded practice of keyboard improvisation as old-fashioned, unknowingly realising that numerous treatises were lamenting its disappearance from musical pedagogy.The skills Schubert acquired were finely honed in Viennese salons. Whereas pianists of the mid nineteenth century played for a vastly expanded concert audience with a lower level of musical education, Schubert’s improvisations – unlike Liszt’s or Hummel’s – were exclusively in private, elite company, where he was immediately understood. Sonnleithner recalls Schubert’s multilevelled improvisations, where he played light waltzes for friends to dance to while others gathered around listening, as he satisfied simultaneously popular and learned tastes. Louis Schlösser remembers Schubert improvising fantasies on Hungarian tunes, which shows the pleasing, popular side of Schubert’s improvisations. One of the most distinctive elements resulting from Schubert’s ‘improvisatory’ compositional technique is his use of harmony at local and structural levels, and novel use of form whose roots are in his improvisor’s fingers.

Schubert’s twenty-eight ballads provide an unusual perspective on his approach to writing for the piano for several reasons. First, the role of improvisation within balladeering was much more pronounced, traces of which remain within Schubert’s published works. Second, the piano was used to provide more explicit scene-setting, through the use of scenic effects, than is generally the case in Schubert’s other Lieder. Third, the ballads allow for the re-examination of narrative processes within nineteenth-century Lieder – in other words, how songs told stories.This chapter focuses on three ballads that show Schubert adopting different approaches to rendering poetic imagery in musical terms. It begins with his 1815 settings of Friedrich Schiller’s ‘Der Taucher’, D77, and Ludwig Heinrich Christoph Hölty’s ‘Die Nonne’, D212, considering their use of elaborate ‘Schauder’ or ‘shudder’ effects, which now tend to be dismissed as hackneyed but might instead be considered to offer access to often-overlooked aspects of early nineteenth-century performance culture. At the other end of the stylistic spectrum, and of Schubert’s career, comes his simple strophic setting of Gottfried Herder’s ‘Edward’, D923 (1827). Concepts and practices of the ballad shifted over the course of Schubert’s career and would continue to do so for subsequent generations.

This chapter gives a practical guide to the creative process through step-by-step description of the composition of a short piano miniature, from initial idea to final score.

As a composer/practitioner, Julián Graciano offers insights into tango as a transnational musical form by analyzing the performance element of spontaneity and improvisation in two musical genres typically associated with the United States and Argentina, namely jazz and tango respectively. Graciano shows show how the two genres have impacted each other in sound, style, and technique, illustrated with numerous musical examples of his own tango-jazz hybrid compositions and other tango and jazz composers. As a bonus, Graciano provides a video tutorial on how to realize a tango lead sheet.

This chapter draws on experiences of mixing methods in the interdisciplinary research of dance, choreography, immersive performance/participatory performance, and fandom. Reflecting on the methods employed in the author’s book Tandem Dances: Choreographing Immersive Performance, the chapter treats the research process as improvisational and compositional, emerging in tandem with the work being researched. These methods include audience research, choreographic analysis, participant observation, and analysing media content. The aim of the chapter is to make the research process explicit so other researchers might apply a similarly compositional approach in audience research in other performance contexts.

Touching down in a few of the many geographies of Black sound, this chapter pauses to listen in between the lines and forms of Black literary creation. Inclusive of readings of Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Paul Beatty, Jesmyn Ward, and others, this chapter examines the penetrating collusions of the sonic and/as the literary in order to briefly mark their interreliance and to consider the conditions and futures of blackness as improvisational practice.

Throughout jazz history, improvisation has been central to the music’s aesthetic and social force. From the polyphonic group extemporizations of early styles, through the featured solos within Swing Era arrangements, to bebop’s harmonic steeplechase or the open form experiments that followed, jazz musicians have privileged departures from through-composed scores and fixed musical texts. This essay considers the social, ideological, and aesthetic stakes of these departures, exploring how the music’s emphasis on improvisation constitutes both an ongoing impetus for artistic innovation and a vital challenge to the American status quo. By opening up a cultural space for validating otherwise marginalized Black innovators, improvisation has offered resources for hope, social transformation, and Black mobility. It has also enabled an ongoing critique of existing discourses, subjecting the rigidity of white supremacy, Eurocentrism, or sexism, for instance, to reformulation through an articulation of other possible futures.

Since the 1920s, American writers have evinced a fascination with and investment in fictional representations of jazz music and jazz musicians. As this essay demonstrates, part of jazz’s appeal for fiction writers is that it offers the opportunity to explore various kinds of border crossing. This essay surveys several jazz fictions to explicate how these fictions portray jazz as a local event, often focusing on musicians who may not be known beyond their own communities, but who live to play the music. Using Nathaniel Mackey’s concept of artistic othering, this essay investigates how writers portray the jazz musician’s search for a space to belong, where artistic forms of risk-taking are affirmed and the contingencies jazz musicians face, whether it be in the form of substance abuse, underemployment, self-doubt, or social injustice can be managed through instances where self-repair, improvisation, and community constitute the foundations of the musician’s lifeworld. Jazz fiction, in other words, is deeply concerned with the contradictions of American life and how playing jazz music involves the act of containing contradictions.

This chapter explores Messiaen’s relationship with Charles Tournemire, particularly focusing on how Tournemire understood Messiaen and how this relationship was seminal and fruitful to both composers. Of primary importance is the role of organ improvisation and the type of apocalyptic Catholicism espoused by Tournemire as a context for Messiaen’s art.

The American Songbook has been a fruitful source of improvisation for jazz musicians, either through artists interpreting those songs themselves, or crafting new songs from their chord changes as bebop musicians did prolifically in the 1940s. This chapter investigates this influence, beginning with the debt that jazz improvisers owe to Tin Pan Alley composers, before turning that relationship around to consider how the success of those same songwriters depended on an ongoing attempt to identify what made jazz appealing to American listeners and distil aspects of that enigmatic essence into the commercially viable object of popular song. In examples like Harold Arlen’s “Stormy Weather,” Irving Berlin’s “Putting on the Ritz,” or any number of Cole Porter compositions, we see the workmanlike creators of Tin Pan Alley incorporating not just musical elements associated with jazz, but also a more general “sensibility,” intended to recreate the music’s blues-informed world-weariness or performative impertinence.

Focussing on the 1820s and 30s, traditionally seen as transitional decades when many leading Romantic writers passed away, Chapter Fifteen analyses the effects of politics and of the cultural marketplace on literary production, arguing for a late-Romantic episteme recognisable in Britain, Germany, France, Spain, and Italy. After discussing some of problems inherent in the concept of late Romanticism, the author defines it as a series of cultural practices including improvisation, speculation, and performance that reflect the transitory nature of the period. This has been alternately labelled in German literary history as Spätromantik, Biedermeier, and Vormärz, none of which perfectly correspond. Informed by recent research in book and media history, the chapter discusses periodicals’ role in shaping the literary field, in particular Costumbrismo in Spain. These new forms of experimental and ephemeral writing reflect the period’s intense commercialism and consciousness of time, which contrast with the Romantic desire for transcendence. E. T. A. Hoffmann’s last story, ‘Des Vetters Eckfenster’ [My Cousin’s Corner Window], Walladmor, a satirical hoax in imitation of Walter Scott, and Balzac’s Colonel Chabert, serve as examples of late-Romantic tendencies.

The arias in Mozart’s The Magic Flute are some of the most vivid and enduring in the operatic repertoire. This chapter examines how poetic structures, musical and dramatic conventions, and the abilities of the singers who originated the roles shaped their creation. While many writers focus primarily on musical form when analyzing arias, this study reveals that other elements contribute as much or more to the aria’s expressivity and the dramaturgical role it plays. Analysis also demonstrates how each aria in this work contains something unusual or extravagant – a musical element or moment that stretches the customary practices of eighteenth-century music. This fact alongside the arias’ diversity of style, color, and affect suggests the composer took great care to make each one distinctive. Consequently, Mozart’s skill and creativity was and is on display. Thus, the arias make manifest one of the opera’s main themes: the power of music.

Planned actions, as prescribed in protocols and trained in exercises, help frontline responders take action under enormous pressure. Yet, these same actions are often hard, if not impossible, to implement during crises, either because the specific situation was not anticipated and there are no plans in place or because prepared plans do not produce the desired results. As a consequence, frontline responders will need to improvise and adapt their activities to crisis situations. Yet, improvisation under extreme stress is very difficult and may be inefficient or even dangerous to responders. The resulting dilemma for responders is how to choose the right course of action. This requires a view of both action patterns as complementary and even mutually conducive, as most crises will demand a combination of plans and improvisation. Reflective acting helps frontline responders to find the right balance and define adequate response activities.

This chapter argues for an integration of American theater produced across generic and institutional lines during the postwar decades into our understanding of theatrical modernism. It models thinking about theater across traditional divisions of textual drama from non-textual performance, Broadway from Off- and Off-Off-Broadway, and the avant-garde work of the 1960s from what preceded it. Theater in the midcentury was drawn toward both medial specificity and the strategic incorporation of other media, particularly film, and accordingly deployed two key formal strategies: improvisation and citation. Although important to theater in diverse ways before modernism, these became widespread, self-conscious tactics of postwar theater across generic lines, and expanded and developed over the 1950s and 1960s. The chapter closes with a reading of The Living Theatre’s 1959 production of The Connection as an exemplary case study.

Chapter 2 explores the music produced in the monastic institutions of ninth- to eleventh-century Europe. Describing the context of the Carolingian Empire, and the renaissance of learning, literacy, and writing that it brought about, we look at some of the earliest examples of musical notation from this vast region of Europe. We examine the Latin songs, or versus, produced in monasteries, charting their wide range of themes and their possible functions in monastic life. Our earliest evidence of polyphonic singing in church comes from music theory texts dating from the ninth century onwards: we consider what these texts can tell us about the improvised practice of organum (or parallel organum) singing, and provide a practical exercise for readers to try improvising organum themselves. Further music theory texts from the tenth and eleventh centuries document the changing approaches to organum singing over the period, and finally we consider how music theory related to actual practice, by looking at the first surviving examples of practical polyphony from medieval Europe.