Ethan Hein's "Free Improvisation" reminded me of all the books I've read that showed how improvisation was normative within "classical music" until European guys in the 19th century said "This cannot be!"

https://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2026/free-improvisation/

Free improvisation

Posted by Ethan February 16, 2026

 

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It’s strange to think of improvisation as a thing you can teach, because the mythology is that you just open your mouth and, like, let it flow, man. But people who can improvise effortlessly have been immersed in a certain musical vocabulary, and they know the standard riffs, the cliches and tropes. These are the raw material that makes spontaneous expression possible. If improv exercises creates a motivation in the kids to develop a vocabulary of the riffs and tropes, then I am doing my job. Beyond aural skills class, improvisation is a necessary skill for any would-be songwriters, producers, and performers of many pop styles where nobody is handing out charts or telling you what to play. But it’s also an opportunity for creative growth more generally, and for the personal growth that comes with it.

 

One of the things I’ve noticed in the last twenty or so years of reading about classical music is how it keeps coming up that in earlier periods it was not only normal to expect improvisation in performance, it was expected in basically every era until the mid-19^th century onward.  The great English Renaissance composer William Byrd couldn’t have been reprimanded for improvising too much if nobody was improvising.  Improvising over stock bass lines was intrinsic to the Italian partimento tradition.  Partimento even included approaches to fugue.  Musicians during the Baroque era were certainly expected to improvise.  There’s even a book out there on how to approach improvisation within medieval music. Jazz partisans need to understand that when it comes to improvisation there’s all the evidence in the world that people within “classical music” improvised and jammed right up to about the time that the big dogs of 19^th century “serious music” forbade improvisation.

 

As Taruskin put it in The Ox, the 19^th century concert music tradition took away as much as it gave and whether what we lost should have been deserves to be a live and seriously discussed and debated question.

Ted Gioia against AI slop music misses the terrible paradox, that AI music has been an utterly human endeavor from start to finish so what, exactly, is even inhuman about it?

Ted Gioia writes as if he’s been a prophet his whole career.  A prophet of what? Art for human’s sake and he at least can formulate zippy and memorable one-liners that distill his key ideas.

Matiegka's Op. 23 Sonata, I: using Haydn's Piano Sonata in B minor as a project for transformative transcription

I have been working on going through the solo guitar sonatas of Matiegka since July 4, 2023 (the 250th anniversary of his baptism, i.e. estimated date of birth for practical purposes). I have been working on completing an analysis of Op. 23 for some time.  Because I am a fan of Haydn's music I couldn't even start to address this sonata without being able to compare how Matiegka adapted and altered the music he took from Haydn's B minor piano sonata.  Rather than attempt to finish the analysis of Op. 23 in one marathon post that sprawls for maybe 40 pages, I'm confining myself to an analysis of just the first movement of Matiegka's Op. 23.  The rest will come later. This is about 7,700 words not counting all the in-score notes and observations.  Thankfully both Haydn's work and Matiegka's work are in the public domain and so this analysis will get moderately detailed for Haydn and fairly detailed for Matiegka. Analyses of movements 2 and 3 will come later.