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Critical Studies in Improvisation / Études critiques en improvisation, Vol 9, No 2 (2013)
Book Review
The Improvisation of Musical Dialogue: A Phenomenology of Music
Bruce Ellis Benson
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003
ISBN-10: 0521009324
216 pages
Reviewed by Melvin Backstrom
Bruce Ellis Benson’s The Improvisation of Musical Dialogue is a significant addition to the scholarship on the
philosophy of music, and specifically that of musical improvisation. It is a provocative work that challenges
many of the assumptions of the musical work-concept that has so influenced musical practices in the
Western world over the last two hundred or so years. In this regard, it can be understood as an
improvisation-focused companion to Lydia Goehr’s widely influential work, The Imaginary Museum of
Musical Works, on the history and consequences of the work-concept. Although Goehr addresses
improvisation a number of times—for example, pointing out how its value and practice diminished through
the 19th century in seemingly direct proportion to the increasing power of the work-concept that insisted on
performer fidelity to its notated exemplar—it is not her primary focus (232-34). Instead, she concentrates on
historicizing the work-concept (Werktreue) ideal of performer fidelity to scores in opposition to those who
would posit its seemingly timeless, universal applicability to music of the Western art tradition, thereby
“dismantling the force of [its] regulative concept” (271).
Goehr’s goal, then, is a highly pluralistic one. She does not wish to completely discount the continuing value
of the work-concept but to instead argue for an appreciation and equal validity of musical performance
practice not based on its ideals: “I am…not convinced that…one could justify rewriting the history of music
produced under the work-concept, according to a non-work-based aesthetic, to make it look as if musicians
had, despite their ‘misleading’ claims to the contrary, never ‘really’ composed, performed, and conducted
works” (284). Benson’s goal, by contrast, is to do precisely this; he argues “that the process by which a work
comes into existence is best described as improvisatory at its very core, not merely the act of composing but
also the acts of performing and listening…[I]mprovisation is not something that precedes composition…or
stands outside and opposed to composition. Instead, I think that the activities that we call ‘composing’ and
‘performing’ are essentially improvisatory in nature” (2). By his account, all the so-called musical works that,
for Goehr and others, define the Werktreue ideal (Beethoven’s symphony no. 5 as the perennial
paradigmatic exemplar), and are thus thought to be fundamentally opposed to the flexibility and
performance-situatedness of improvisation, are only so in theory. In reality all music, scored or not, is partial,
unfinished, and fundamentally constituted by improvisation.
In the first chapter, Benson sets out his thesis in dialogue with the history of composition and performance
practice in Western art music (hereafter WAM) and various influential theories of musical ontology (such as
those of Levinson, Goodman, and Wolterstorff) in order to show how their theories do not adequately explain
the entirety of this musical tradition despite their claims to the contrary. Specifically, he contrasts how
Beethoven and Rossini understood performance in relation to their compositional activities as expressing a
fundamental divide within the WAM tradition that is not merely at the level of style but of philosophical import
(16). Whereas Beethoven understood his compositional activity as the production of finished works that were
subsequently to be performed as close as possible to his notated specifications, Rossini conceived his
compositions as “a mere recipe for a performance” requiring the input of performers and audiences (16-17).
The former is essentially monological; the latter, by comparison, is dialogical.
And yet, as Benson points out, it is the Beethovenian paradigm that has been so influential in the practice
and theory of music over the last two centuries—to the point that even some partisans of musical genres
and traditions whose practices are in many ways wholly opposed to its insistence on notational fidelity, in
particular jazz, have succumbed to its power: for example, the “painstakingly historically accurate
performances of Duke Ellington compositions” conducted by Wynton Marsalis and William Russo (Benson
14). In order to counter this hegemony of musical practice, Benson appeals to historical accounts of Baroque
(and earlier) musical performance, before the Werktreue ideal came to have any widespread regulative
force, to argue for their greater faithfulness to the reality of musical performance then and, ultimately, now as
well. Rather than autonomous entities whose forms are wholly dictated by composers, “pieces of
music…were things that facilitated the activity of music making, not ends in themselves. As a result,
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performers and composers were united in a common task, which meant that there was no clear line of
separation between composing and performing” (22). In other words, music was an inherently participatory
endeavor rather than the encapsulating one (and here I draw on the useful terminology of philosopher
William Desmond), in which the composer wholly determines a work that performers then reproduce to the
best of their abilities and that has dominated for the last two centuries (Desmond xix). Benson argues that
moving from the latter model to the former points to improvisation as the middle ground between
composition and performance and thus offers a productive way of overcoming their apparent opposition.
But since what is understood by “improvisation” falls among a wide spectrum of differences, Benson lays out
eleven different varieties with the seventh (altering a score’s melody and/or chord progression) broken down
further into five sub-varieties (from the slight variation of a melody to completely disregarding it while keeping
the basic structure). Particularly significant about his typology is that it is so broad as to include nearly every
form of music imaginable, including those that are usually considered as wholly opposed to improvisation.
His first type, for example, includes fully notated music. Benson argues that since there is always some
detail that must be filled in by performers of even the most rigorously scored works, such music should be
considered improvisational even if only to a quite minimal degree. Such a minimalistic kind of improvisation
also characterizes his ninth type, which covers the way in which composers use “a particular form or style of
music as a kind of template. Thus, Mozart’s Così fan tutte depends on the opera buffa form, which has
relatively strict requirements,” but the ways in which such requirements are followed, however, are “subject
to improvisation” (29). And his eleventh type covers the way in which composers and performers work within
a particular musical tradition by modifying its rules and expectations so that “the tradition is itself improvised
upon. Any practice of discourse involves such improvisation” (30, emphasis added). Given such an
expansive definition, it is difficult to imagine any music that would not be a product of improvisation.
Indeed, improvisation's ubiquity within all musical practices is the conclusion that Benson intends. His goal
would seem to be to thereby turn the tables on the work-concept’s primordial hegemony for which
improvisation stands in a negatively dependent relationship: improvisation is that which does not constitute a
musical work. Instead, he wants to show that improvisation is actually more fundamental in constituting
musical experience with musical works which are not opposed to its practices but, rather, defined by a
historically and culturally contingent denial of their essentially improvisatory character. The value of this
change in perspectives, he argues, is (following Heidegger’s notion of “dwelling” or “standing-within” from
“On the Origin of the Work of Art”) in privileging the participatory, dialogical character of music over the
monological expressivity that characterizes musical creation within the Romantic-Modernist paradigm
(Heidegger 191-92).
In his second and third chapters, Benson traces the connections between the origins of a musical work, the
Ursprung, to its realization as a finished manuscript, the Fassung letzter Hand, and finally its performance.
His goal here is to question the still prevalent romantic thinking of musical composition as a sui generis act
that creates (or, following Peter Kivy’s Platonic view of musical works, discovers) a work of music solely out
of a composer’s inspired imagination, the performance of which is then simply a realization of what the
composer indicates on the score. Instead, he argues that composing is necessarily as socially constituted an
activity as performance, since the creation or discovery of anything can only happen within a community that
deems the results significant; and it is only through such procedures that the myriad of decisions that
supervene on a composition for a performance to occur are possible. Composition is, therefore, necessarily
discursive, a form of structured practice, in which composers change, alter, and adapt styles, forms, and
musical languages in various ways. Most often these are fairly traditional and only involve an exploration of a
range of expected possibilities; on occasion, however, composers expand the range of possibilities and thus
produce something more unexpected. But such expansions are only possible in terms of a social context
that both provides the materials out of which they are fashioned (e.g., musical instruments, tempered
tunings, notational systems, performance traditions, etc.), and allows for them to be recognized as
expansions of musical possibilities. To therefore refer to what the composer (or author) does as creation or
discovery, as we typically do, Benson argues, is to mischaracterize it.1 In contrast, a much better way to
understand such processes of reworking, transforming, and putting together previously existing materials is
as essentially improvisatory since these are the same actions in which improvising musicians also engage.
To further counter the widespread notion of composition as creation ex nihilo Benson proceeds to a number
of examples to show how even the most celebrated composers (e.g., Bach, Handel, Mozart, Beethoven,
Wagner, Copland) have depended more on their musical contexts as a source for their creativity than (as
romantic notions would have it) some flash of inspiration from the unknown. Benson further argues that
something similar to such pre-compositional discursive processes occurs post-composition as well. In other
words, he calls into question the very idea of the musical work as something finished by the composer.
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Giving many examples in which composers have revised or otherwise changed one of their works postpublication or post-first performance, he argues that just as the beginnings of musical creativity are inevitably
the product of a kind of socially situated discursive improvisation, so are its endings. For contrary to the
concept of Fassung letzter Hand, that a creator’s last version is by definition the full, complete, and correct
description of the work, Benson argues that musical works as scored are always partly incomplete. Not only
are there always characteristics necessary to a performance that are not described by the score, but the
intentions of composers are nowhere as clear or self-evident as they are usually taken to be.
Such uncertainty is particularly the case with music composed prior to the 20th century, given that the
modern concern with the intentionality supposedly discoverable through an Urtext—the absolute priority
given to a composer’s definitive final manuscript—contradicts what we know about the higher priority given
to other levels of intentionality by earlier composers. For example, Mozart’s reworking of Handel’s Messiah,
Mendelssohn’s extensive edits of J.S. Bach’s St. Matthew’s Passion for its revival in 1829, or Brahms’
changing of the time signature in the first movement of Schubert’s Ninth Symphony from cut to common
time. Rather than fidelity to the composer’s text, Benson points to these alterations as attempts at fidelity to
the composer’s intentions for the work. That is, if, as is likely, Bach’s intentions for his St. Matthew’s Passion
were to create a momentous, powerful musical expression of the final days of Christ’s life before his
crucifixion, then the instrumentation, specific notes, rhythms, and overall length are less important than
making whatever changes one might think necessary for this intention to best be realized. Specifically, given
how much more accustomed modern listeners are to much larger musical ensembles than existed in Bach’s
lifetime, it would, contrary to partisans of the “historical performance movement,” arguably be more authentic
to his intentions to increase the size of the orchestra, possibly substantially, in order to more accurately
realize the work’s power for modern ears.2
Now one could of course dispute this, but Benson’s point is that there is nothing in the score to help one
decide; one has to simply choose. Scores both preserve the intentions of the work’s composer and provoke
later compositional intentions by performers. They are, in other words, “multipart invention[s]…that
begin…before the composer and continue…far after the composer is finished” (124). And, he argues, such
an ongoing, thoroughly social and dialogic practice situated between the traditional dichotomy of
composition and performance is best considered as a kind of improvisation.
In the fourth and fifth chapters, Benson draws out the implications of this improvisational understanding of
composition and performance. Using the distinction between ergon and energeia—that is, product versus
activity—he begins by critiquing Roman Ingarden’s contention that a musical work’s existence is predicated
entirely upon its score even though “this schematic formation does not exhaust the musical work” (Benson
127). However, the ontological status of this "extra" to the score is then rather dubious. Ingarden argues that
performance possibilities are not added by performers but rather inhere to the work and are merely
discovered by them. But given that it is clearly the involvement of performers who are adding this extra
“something more,” it seems highly questionable to posit it as belonging to the work prior to any performance.
If musical works are products of history (i.e. created at particular times and places), then it makes far more
sense to think that they can be, in a sense, created again—with some variations (mutatis mutandis)—than to
have them somehow immediately escape history, entering into the eternally unchanging world of Platonic
Ideas. And if musical works are necessarily historical and essentially incomplete without realization in
specific performances, then “work,” with its connotations of stability and wholeness, would be a less than
ideal, indeed highly problematic, term to use. Benson therefore proffers “piece” as a more accurate way to
describe what it is that composers create on account of its pointing to their essential incompleteness.
It is also in Chapter Four that Benson turns specifically to musical genres that foreground the use of
improvisation. Not surprisingly, given his earlier challenging of the usual composition-improvisation binary,
he argues that improvisation is not the wholly spontaneous process that it is sometimes made out to be.
Improvisers are always improvising on something—whether that includes a pre-known formal structure or
simply their own past musical experiences. There is, in other words, something unavoidably mimetic about
improvisation. Therefore, contrary to Philip Alperson, one is indeed interpreting when one improvises: not
necessarily a work, but at least some musical tradition or style (Alperson 26).
Performance in the WAM tradition and, say, jazz is then not nearly so different as it is often made out to be
since both involve the representation of musical experience, whether it is as specific as a song or as broad
as a genre such as free improvisation (146). Both are thoroughly defined by improvisation on Benson’s
account; the difference is quantitative rather than qualitative: “whereas in jazz a musician improvises freely
and openly, in classical music the requirement of fidelity has meant that the improvisational element has, to
a great extent, been suppressed—or else has operated covertly” (147). Therefore, contrary to Werktreue
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dogma, composition is neither historically or ontologically prior to performance since it is only through
performances that music exists at all. Although the idea of the historically transcending musical work has
been of enormous historical importance within Western culture, it is actually illusory. Compositions are, in
fact, always pieces waiting to be realized as music through their performance.
To then return to Goehr’s idea of an “imaginary museum of musical works,” Benson obviously stresses its
imaginary quality to a much stronger degree. Instead of Goehr’s historically produced “reality” (at least
insofar as it’s believed in) of the musical work, Benson argues, “there…are no ‘works,’ at least in the sense
of self-contained, autonomous entities. There have always only been pieces, despite whatever our theories
have proclaimed…[T]he ‘structures’ that we call pieces of music are ‘composed’ of the activity of music
making itself, rather than music making ‘plus some other thing’ (that we would call a ‘work’) (161).” Musical
activities that posit the work-concept differ from explicit improvisations not because the former partake in the
real existence of musical works whereas the latter do not; rather, such variations in musical practices result
from the mistaken belief in “self-contained, autonomous [musical] entities” that the work-concept has
engendered over the last two hundred or so years (161). Music is always only an activity, something people
do, and never a thing apart—whatever some (primarily) composers and philosophers might claim.
The social and ethical implications of such an understanding of musical practice are Benson’s focus in
Chapter Five. He contends that because “music making is something that we inevitably do with others
(whether they are present or not), 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 (164).
Working off of Levinas’ anti-Kantian critique of the autonomous subject, Benson argues that the ethical
imperative of music making is the furthering of dialogue through the refusal to resolve the tension inevitably
found between these differing positions. While he not surprisingly wants to dethrone the absolute authority of
the composer, he also wants to avoid, as some have done, enthroning the authority of the performer or
listener instead. Each must be allowed to “speak” without dominating the musical conversation: “a dialogue
can only be maintained if there is a pull exerted by both sides. The danger for genuine dialogue, then, is not
the presence of tension but its loss or imbalance” (171). Although entailing a loss of freedom from constraint,
for Benson such tension is productive of a freedom for dialogue.3 Just as the playing of a stringed instrument
depends on the correct balance of the pull exerted by its various strings, so it is only through the balancing
and continual renewal of the reciprocal demands of composer, performer, and listener that musical activity is
realized in the best ethical and aesthetic manner (170). And it is precisely through an awareness of the
inherent contingency, dependence on background social knowledge, and need to constantly make choices
within the structures provided by this background, that the thoroughly improvisational character of these
identities is recognized and, for Benson, hopefully exemplified.
Having wrapped up a discussion of the book's contents I now must turn to my criticisms. Although Benson
explains very well what is problematic with the musical work-concept, he does not, to the degree it deserves,
consider why it has had such lasting influence and what might be lost by entirely jettisoning it, as he seems
quite eager to do. Such a discussion would undoubtedly have made for a considerably longer book, and it is
to his credit that the one he wrote is as concise as it is, but these are important corollary questions to his
overall argument.
For as convinced as I am in many ways by what he says, ultimately I find myself agreeing with Goehr’s more
pluralistic perspective. While the musical work-concept is undoubtedly a historically produced, culturally
contingent concept, one might still think that its disappearance—or, rather, the disappearance of the belief in
its existence—would entail a real loss, given how integral it has been to the development of WAM over the
last two centuries. While its effects have sometimes been pernicious, it has also produced many incredible
musical pieces and performances (if not works). Given the much needed critique it has received from Goehr
and then, more radically, Benson, could one not therefore think that it might still have a limited role to play in
producing a certain kind of musical experience for which its belief might be beneficial? To, pace Bernard
Williams, desire to believe in its reality if, perhaps, only strategically (Williams 149-50)?
For example, the ability of many orchestral musicians to read and perform scores as expertly as they can
likely has something to do with their self-understood specialization as not improvising musicians but, rather,
performers whose job it is to solely interpret pre-existing musical works (an ability that, as an
improvisationally-focused musician, I often wish I had to the same degree). And, furthermore, their
concomitant familiarity with the Western musical canon allows them to focus on musical nuances within it to
a greater degree than explicit improvisers who have more macro musical decisions to deal with. From the
perspective of the orchestral musician, then, one might think that there is something of the Platonic noble lie
to the work-concept (Plato 93). Though not real, its belief facilitates a reverence towards the musical text
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that justifies a focus on developing the technique and reading abilities necessary to play challenging scores
in large ensembles in which individual performance choices must be subsumed to those decided by or for
the group.
And I cannot help but see a connection between Benson’s lack of attention to this arguably productive side
of the work-concept and the ways in which musical experience is inevitably structured by its history. In a
closing expression of desire for forms of musical ecumenism that transcend genre barriers, he describes
some which he finds exemplary: “In performances of [Nigel] Kennedy and the Kronos Quartet there is no
sense that one is hearing autonomous works, nor that one is hearing rock or blues or jazz or classical music.
Instead, one just hears music” (190). Although this may well be the way that Benson hears the music of
these performers, universalizing his experience as he does seems hardly justified. Given the range of
material that the Kronos Quartet performs in a variety of different venues for a variety of different audiences
it is almost certainly the case that some audiences, and probably many if not most, do hear autonomous
works defined by genre expectations in their performances. While their repertoire and, in the case of
Kennedy, unusual sartorial choices may well challenge how their music is listened to, the overwhelming
connotations of the instruments, technique, and performance style with which the quartet and Kennedy play
(their concerts still largely follow the usual decorum of classical music) are almost certainly powerful enough
to reinscribe the musical experience within the work-concept despite its questionable ontological status. I
would think that the influence of Bourdieu’s empirical grounding of intra-cultural differences might have
therefore been highly salutary in pointing to the social and economic conditions for the belief in the existence
of the autonomous art work (Bourdieu 247-49).
But Benson has written a challenging and important book that deserves to be read by all those interested in
improvisation, the aesthetics and ontology of music, and its performance practice. It is quite possibly the
most thorough philosophical treatment of the relations between improvisation and musical understanding
and practices available today. He has set a high standard for the philosophical treatment of improvisation
that I can only hope is matched or exceeded in the near future.
Notes
1
In contrast, Benson draws on Levinson and notes that “there is a special aura that envelops composers, as
well as other artists, because we think of them as true creators” engaged in something resembling a “godlike
activity” (Benson 37; Levinson 67).
2
In fact, though not mentioned by Benson, Bach made at least three major revisions of The St. Matthew
Passion. See Chafe, “J.S Bach’s ‘St. Matthew Passion’: Aspects of Planning, Structure, and Chronology.”
And see Kivy, Authenticities, for further discussion of the conflict between differing notions of musical
authenticity.
3
Benson does not connect his discussion to Isaiah Berlin’s contrast between positive and negative forms of
freedom but the resonance is clear. See Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty.”
Works Cited
Alperson, Philip. “On Musical Improvisation.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 63 (1984): 17-29. Print.
Benson, Bruce Ellis. The Improvisation of Musical Dialogue: A Phenomenology of Music. New York:
Cambridge UP, 2003. Print.
Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Trans. Richard Nice. London and
New York: Routledge, 2010. Print.
Chafe, Eric. “J.S Bach’s ‘St. Matthew Passion’: Aspects of Planning, Structure, and Chronology.” The
Journal of the American Musicological Society 35.1 (1982): 49-114. Print.
Desmond, William. Art and the Absolute: A Study of Hegel’s Aesthetics. Albany: SUNY Press, 1986. Print.
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Goehr, Lydia. The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music. Revised
Edition. New York: Oxford UP, 2007. Print.
Heidegger, Martin. “On the Origin of the Work of Art." Basic Writings, 143-212. Ed. David Farrell Krell. New
York: Harper Collins, 1993. Print.
Kivy, Peter. Authenticities: Philosophical Reflections on Musical Performance. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1995.
Print.
Levinson, Jerrold. “What a Musical Work Is.” Music, Art, and Metaphysics. Ithaca: Cornell UP. Print.
Plato. The Republic of Plato. Ed. and trans. Allan Bloom. 2nd ed. New York: Basic Books, 1991. Print.
Williams, Bernard. “Deciding to Believe.” Problems of the Self: Philosophical Papers 1956-1972. New York:
Cambridge UP, 1973. 136-51. Print.
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