The contributors to this collection are all wrestling with different aspects of the same problem: what can we know about Improvisation in the Arts of the Middle Ages and Renaissance? The surviving artifacts of artistic praxis-- conveyed via musical notation, written verses, playscripts, dance manuals, and objets d'art (drawings, paintings, sculpture)-- are oftentimes the results of improvisation, but they are now situated at the opposite end of the creative spectrum. They represent the culmination of a process which has become fixed in a proscriptive medium. How can we look through these records and use them to help us reconstruct, retrospectively, that very process? How close can we come to the artist at work?
In his editorial preface, Timothy J. McGee explains that these papers were originally presented at a conference hosted by the University of Toronto in 1999, and he emphasizes the fact that their several methodologies are informed by the authors' joint expertise in scholarship and performance. This is important, and it yields some valuable insights. Further insights are generated by the juxtaposition of articles on music (vocal and instrumental), dance, drama (which here includes popular romance), and a closing treatment of the visual arts. Unfortunately, few of the papers address, even speculatively, the nature of performance prior to the fourteenth century. In most cases, this causes little concern, since what can be deduced about the techniques of improvisation in the later Middle Ages may well be applicable to the earlier period, and to a greater degree of magnitude. But occasionally, certain anachronistic assumptions about the available evidence-- in particular, about what types of information for performers one might expect to find in the textual record-- can lead to misunderstandings.
Domenico Pietropaolo's introduction to the volume, "Improvisation in the Arts," is a useful overview of the role that improvisation played in all aspects of performance, at least up to the eighteenth century. It was then, he argues, when the arts were becoming increasingly specialized and professionalized, that the value placed upon the artist's ability to work extempore was eventually trumped by a preference for artistic control. This is a theme that comes up again and again in these essays: as playwrights and composers gained in authority, the individual performer's contribution to the work of art was correspondingly circumscribed. As Pietropaolo sees it, the rise of an early modern "entertainment industry" based on "the commercial value of artistic entertainment" enabled a new generation of skilled professionals to place "their labor on a par with other productive activities in the new market economy." The fifteenth through seventeenth centuries were the transitional period, when the "marketplace showman" and the "court performer" of the Middle Ages evolved into the "celebrated virtuosos of music, dance, and drama" (4-5). Ironically, however, this apotheosis coincided with that of the artistic auteur, who wished to regard the performer's skills as ancillary. The work of art was reconceived as the set of preconditions to which the performer was expected to adhere; it was no longer that which was created in performance. In this context, Pietropaolo suggests that improvisation "was an artistic technique designed to safeguard the freedom of the theater," and even suggests (this is intriguing, and worthy of more thought) that there was a symbiotic relationship between censorship and textuality (22-23).
Pietropaolo's thesis is compelling and well-presented, but at least one of its premises cannot be verified until someone attempts to write a serious history of professional entertainers in the millennium prior to 1500. I am not at all convinced that it is fair to characterize medieval performing artists as a set of "minstrels, tumblers, and mimes," sorry mountebanks who could hardly eke out a living "in the age of feudalism." And it is actually untrue that it was only in the Renaissance that "performers first achieved professional status and incorporated themselves into a guild or arte" (24). There was a confraternity of jongleurs in Arras as early as the twelfth century, and a guild of professional minstrels in Paris by the end of the thirteenth. In this instance, as in another important area, Pietropaolo's own scholarly predisposition colors his view of the period prior to that when dramatic documents become more plentiful, and more informative. An expert on the commedia dell'arte, whose performers improvised within a set of parameters defined by a given scenario, and who self-consciously evaded the written transmission of their dramatic traditions, Pietropaolo rejects the notion that some medieval playscripts may have been devised through improvisation, like some modern sketch comedy or "workshopped" plays. He asserts that improvisation can refer either to "the creation of a complete and previously unscripted text, using only the vocabulary and logic of the repertoire and the logic of the genre" or "to the addition of supplementary material to a scripted but incomplete text" (12). But he states explicitly that the first type is applicable only to extemporaneous rhetorical composition or, in some cases, to music and dance; is not at all applicable to drama. Yet Darwin Smith has recently shown that the playscripts of late medieval French farces were the by-products of just this sort of complex negotiation (see his extended analysis and edition of Maistre Pierre Pathelin (Saint-Benoit du Sault: Tarabuste, 2003)).
Why does this matter? As I noted above, the challenges we face when we attempt to reconstruct the history of pre-modern artistic performance are formidable, given that the relationship between those ephemeral entertainments and the surviving records is almost always impossible to ascertain. Does the written artifact predate the moment of performance, or is it the residue of that performance, a transcript? If the former, how much room does it leave for artistic license, and (a more fundamental issue) how can we measure this? If the latter, do we assume that the recording we have reproduces the composer's creative initiative, or the performer's-- and what is the difference, if any? Questions such as these underscore all of the essays in this book. As Pietropaolo asks, "What is the difference between an improvised and a non-improvised performance?" (21). From the perspective of the audience, he notes, there isn't any. From the perspective of the scholar this may also be true.
The first section of this book, devoted to music, opens with Timothy McGee's "Cantare all'improviso: Improvising to Poetry in Late Medieval Italy." McGee combines anecdotal evidence with analysis of surviving verses and melodies to develop a methodology that allows him to "propose a probable musical model for the tradition of improvised singing" by professional poet/musicians and civic heralds in Italian cities (31). Nowhere else in the collection are the difficulties of extrapolating improvisational techniques from written sources dealt with so expertly. In "Performance Practice, Experimental Archeology, and the Problem of the Respectability of Results," Randall A. Rosenfeld issues a provocative challenge to musicologists and other scholars of performance practice by holding up an alternative model of scholarly investigation derived from experimental archeology. This discipline has long since arrived at a procedure for evaluating the results of historical reconstruction, and Rosenfeld considers a few of the more famous examples (i.e. the deployment of the trireme Olympias by the British Trireme Trust and the Hellenic Navy), offering some guidelines for the adaptation of analogous techniques to the solution of very different problems. Keith Polk's essay on "Instrumentalists and Performance Practices in Dance Music, c. 1500" segues nicely into the following section on dance, as Polk discusses the instrumental "crisis" of the sixteenth century (98), when the familiar repertory of late medieval court dances was very quickly replaced by an array of more accessible social dances, less choreographically complex but much more demanding with respect to musical improvisation. This is a fascinating glimpse into the world of the professional instrumentalist, and his (or her) artistic efforts to ensure that repetitive dance tunes were imbued with infinite variety. Polk also notes that instrumentalists were gaining professional stature in other ways, thanks to their early intervention in "the new trade of publishing and in composition" (109).
The essays on dance are almost exclusively concerned with late medieval or early modern Italy. Barbara Sparti surveys the techniques of "Improvisation and Embellishment in Popular and Art Dances in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Italy," Jennifer Neville examines "Disorder in Order: Improvisation in Italian Choreographed Dances of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries," and G. Yvonne Kendall looks at early printed instruction manuals aimed at well-heeled amateurs in "Ornamentation and Improvisation in Sixteenth-Century Dance." Indeed, it is worth remarking that the improvisatory onus in dance fell on the amateur, not the professional. And it is hard to avoid noticing that the richness of the Italian source materials-- on which all three essays are based--argues for the special status of this pastime in Italy, or at least for the cachet of dances and dancing-masters with an Italian accent. However, this is hardly grounds for asserting, as Neville does, that Italy, and Italy alone, possessed a "national choreographic style" (145) in which improvisation played a far greater role than in the dances of other locales. Why should Italy have a "national" identity expressed through dance when it had no such identity expressed through other means? Hearkening back to the problem of the sources, and our unspoken expectations with regard to what they should and should not contain, it makes little sense to claim, based on the silence of the textual record, that "fifteenth-century French dance practice had no such improvisatory elements" (159)-- especially given that Polk, in a previous essay, had argued just the opposite: that European court dances prior to 1500 were very intricate indeed, and very demanding of the individual dancer's initiative.
The section on drama in this book privileges England rather than Italy, although the titles of the two essays dealing with the Middle Ages do not admit as much. To be sure, Clifford Davidson's "Improvisation in Medieval Drama" gestures in the direction of liturgical drama, the legendary liturgical subversion of Till Eulenspiegel, and (bizarrely) South Indian sacred dance, but he concentrates on the opportunities for improvisation in the English Corpus Christi cycles, morality plays, civic spectacles, and may games. Linda Marie Zaerr recounts her own experiences as a performer of Middle English verse romance in "Medieval and Modern Deletions of Repellent Passages," offering insights into both accidental and deliberate omissions. Finally, a pair of essays explore the world of professional theatre in Elizabethan England: Jane Freeman listens for "Shakespeare's Rhetorical Riffs" and David N. Klausner tracks "The Improvising Vice in Renaissance England." Freeman is interested in Shakespeare's studied use of standard rhetorical formulae, which might have lent an artificially improvisational tone to scripted dialogue, making it hard "to distinguish between spontaneous improvisation and rehearsed improvisation" (247). This is an intriguing approach, although it's rather surprising that Freeman confines her analysis to verse repartee, and does not include any of the prose passages which would almost certainly have played as improvisatory (Kent's upbraiding of Oswald in King Lear, Macbeth's drunken porter, and so on). But perhaps this is because Klausner's article is complementary, and treats the comic uses of planned and unplanned improvisation, within the context of the play and in the impromptu exchange of insults with hecklers. As Klausner shows, some playwrights left room for informal ad-lib dialogue in prose, in gibberish, or in real (or simulated) foreign languages (one recalls that the actors playing Owen Glendower and his daughter must speak together in Welsh in 1 Henry IV), yet the ability to improvise in verse was very widely cultivated, to the extent that even some audience members proved themselves adept at it.
Improvisation in the Arts closes with Leslie Korrick's consideration of "Improvisation in the Visual Arts: The View from Sixteenth-Century Italy." For the most part, our gaze is directed toward virtuosic feats of drawing and drafting, though painting and sculpture are also touched upon. As with the poet-musicians discussed by McGee, the art of improvisation among visual artists was facilitated by the individual's cultivation of a personal artistic vocabulary which could be articulated within the parameters fixed by genre. It is salutary to be reminded that in this age, as in our own, the distinction between the artist as solitary creative genius and as public performer was constantly elided.