Thoughts on Improvisation: A Comparative Approach
Bruno Nettl · 2014
From an early age Bruno Nettl was fascinated with musical improvisation. Born in Prague in 1930, he was inspired early in his life by the discovery of unscored Indian classical music. Nettl and his family moved to the USA in 1939, and in 1964 he began teaching at the University of Illinois. Much of his most important work has been done with the music of indigenous peoples in North America, Iran, and South India. In 1983 Nettl published his seminal work The Study of Ethnomusicology: Twenty-Nine Issues and Concepts (revised and reissued in 2005). In 1998, with Melinda Russell, he edited In the Course Of Performance: Studies in the World of Musical Improvisation, and in 2009, with Gabriel Solis, he edited Musical Improvisation: Art, Education, and Society. Four decades after it appeared, “Thoughts on Improvisation” remains an invaluable introduction to the worldwide practice of musical improvisation, which in fact questions the ways in which we compartmentalise music-making: “Should we not then speak perhaps of rapid and slow composition rather than of composition juxtaposed to improvisation?”