What is improvisation?, by Joris Roelofs
Karl Marx mockingly referred to the Hungarian revolutionary leader Lajos Kossuth as ‘an improviser who is moulded by the impressions he receives from the audience facing him at any given moment, not an author who stamps his original ideas on the world.' Marx similarly derided Giuseppe Mazzini for a failed uprising and compared him to a poetry improviser: ‘Has one ever heard of great improvisators [sic] being also great poets? They are the same in politics as in poetry.’
Marx’s improvisation-bashing raises important questions: how does improvisation relate to politics? Why does Marx connect improvisation to poetry? In this talk, I look more closely at the meaning of improvisation and reconsider improvisation as a political phenomenon. While improvisation—especially in the context of jazz—has been theorised as a model for democratic and emancipatory politics, these conceptions often raise more questions than they answer. Exactly how political practices and institutions can possibly be modelled on jazz improvisation practices remains unclear. Moreover, improvisation might be just the right tool for anti-democrats: Donald Trump became notorious for going off-script and disregarding official policy—he even framed himself as a defender of improvisation by proposing a ban on teleprompters.
Rather than buying into utopian accounts of improvisation as a key to world harmony, I want to revisit its relationship to politics. Instead of focussing solely on modern jazz improvisation, I will take a historical approach—one that recaptures earlier experiences of improvisation often overlooked in contemporary jazz discourses.
Joris Roelofs
Joris Roelofs is a bass clarinettist and composer based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. In addition to his activities as a musician and composer, he chairs the Clarinet Department (Jazz) at the Conservatorium van Amsterdam. He teaches a master’s course on music and philosophy, Freedom and Improvisation. Joris’s lectures Great Philosophers on Music and Nietzsche’s Muses also explore the relationship between music and philosophy. A member of the International Nietzsche Research Group in Stuttgart, Germany, Joris currently works on a PhD dissertation on Nietzsche, improvisation, and the notion of freedom.
By exploring the terminological history of ‘improvisation’, two key elements come into focus: (1) the terms ‘improvisation’ and ‘improvise’ were originally associated with verbal performance—such as theatre, poetry, or political oratory—rather than with music, and (2) past conceptions of improvisation emphasized public communication and performer-audience interaction rather than artistic production. By stepping back from the often celebratory, artist-focussed accounts of jazz improvisation, I aim to offer a deeper understanding of improvisation that places the performer-audience relationship at the heart of the concept.