The phenomenon of improvisation in the context of music as a “game”: Classical Antiquity, Baroque, Modern Era.
This article describes specifics of improvisation as a special form of musical game based on performing. The nature of game forms of art (J. Huizinga), in particular, music, has been analyzed and systemized; development paths of these forms, beginning from Classical Antiquity and ending with Modern time originating at the turn of the 20 th century, have been traced. The role of jazz, which became a priority link in improvisational art of music and influenced the entire music creation process, has been highlighted and emphasized. Both traditional dichotomies of music play-ing forms (“improvisation-composition”, “music performance-creation”) and “im-provisation-interpretation”, which became the basis for jazz playing in the second half of the 20 th – 21 st century, have been outlined. The key points of the theory of jazz improvisation, requiring further in-depth study in the broad scientific dis-course using information from classical art studies, musical sociology, philosophy and psychology, have been determined. The starting point in the term “improvisa-tion” is its dual nature, meaning simultaneous mental creation and “presentation” of a created work (V. Dahl). In this process, the most important component of music as an art of sounds in time manifests itself in syneresis. It means that the verbal origin, i. e. performing acoustic game per se, lied at the core of music as an acoustic phenomenon, which for a long time (from Classical Antiquity up to the Baroque) had only the game sense related to achievements of playing or singing musicians in the sphere of technical skills. Music has been filled with deep artistic content as the forms of music playing improved, and this process was closely related to personalities of composers – authors of music works. The opus music (T. Cherednichenko), which appeared in Europe back in the Early Renaissance Age, raised certain barriers before im-provisational art whose “habitat” was being comprised of almost exclusively the “third layer”: music of everyday life and entertainment. Among academics, di-verse functions of “music as a game” (J. Huizinga) have long been reduced to performing skills, to which improvisational moments are related as well (a typical example is performance improvisations in Da Capo opera arias). Only during the Romantic era, when the attitude toward music as a type of divertimento, i. e. entertaining pastime, the “game of beads” (H. Hesse), has been finally overcome did improvisation as an artistic factor of subjective self-expres-sion of performer composers, equally great in these two spheres of music art, be-gin to gradually revive. However, the true flourishing of improvisation at the new “whorl” of historical musical “spiral” was related to the art of jazz, which became one of the main intonation ideas of the Modern Era (E. Markova). In jazz, and especially in its phenomenological paradigms (A. Soloviev), there is a special type of improvisational art defined in this article by the term “improvi-sation-interpretation”, which means an act of creation and reproduction of music as a syncretic process realized on the basis of certain norms not reduced to any tex-tual expression recorded with symbols. Here, interpreted models are represented by genres and styles, performance models and other noumenal notions, not texts, which distinguishes improvisation-interpretation from traditional forms of impro-visations-variations typical for classical jazz (jazz which existed before bebop). In the new historical conditions beginning from the second half of the 20 th cen-tury, improvisation in jazz attains features of stylistic pluralism and is not being reduced to any typical forms. It stems from erasure of boundaries between various types of “third-layer” music playing and from certain approximation of its main forms – jazz, rock and pop music – to academic layer. In the conditions of nobrow style (J. Seabrook), the stylistics of jazz and jazz-related estradized forms of other types of improvised music playing become, on the one hand, academized, regulat-ed and presupposed (E. Trembovelsky), and on the other hand, it often finds itself on the verge of complete spontaneousness, going beyond the interpretational field (the so-called non-accompanied forms of solo improvisation in free jazz style). The final section of the article presents key points which, in our opinion, are the most prospective from the viewpoint of further study of the improvisation phenomenon in its contemporary interpretation, and functioning in the semantic “section” of today’s forms of public music playing. It requires a differentiated ap-proach to improvisational forms in writing techniques of the 20 thcentury academ-ic creativity, defined by the common term of “avant-garde” (aleatorics, sonorism, stochastic music, music of timbres, etc.), and to the newest types of academized “third-layer” music playing, whose development is determined (as before) by jazz. Jazz still remains the main “inspirer” and “trendsetter” in musical improvisation innovations. Jazz art shows their diverse forms and individual creative transforma-tion variants via works of its leading representatives: Chick Corea, Herbie Han-cock, Bobby McFerrin, Chris Potter, Christian McBride, Gonzalo Rubalcaba, Vad-im Neselovskyi. Works of each of them deserve a separate study, including in the aspect of improvisation factor, which represents the prospects of further study of this article’s topic.