L’improvisation comme forme d’expérience. Généalogie d’une catégorie d’appréciation du jazz

• Main Author: Olivier Roueff
• Format: Article
• Language: fra
• Published: ENS Éditions 2010-05-01
• Series: Tracés
• Subjects: authentification; experience form; improvisation; jazz; performative appreciation
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/traces/4578

Improvisation is considered here as a category of aesthetic appreciation rather than as a category of musical activity. It is seen as determining different forms of experience which regulate listeners’ as well as musicians’ activities, because it implies an act of attribution : the artist is regarded as the author of the performance, through which his internal subjectivity is supposed to « express » itself. Consequently, improvisation can only be thought of as an enigma which needs to be explained, the mysterious alchemy of an « instantaneous composition ». A genealogy of the uses of the word « improvisation » in the history of jazz in France enables us to trace the various situations of activity and subjectivity which have been performatively invented and implemented throughout the 20th Century, from the virtuoso to the racialized artist, the accursed artist, and finally the experimenter.