ABSTRACT
In 1938 Ernst Ferand published what continues to be the only large, scholarly book on the subject of musical improvisation. 1 A rather thorough search reveals that this book was but little reviewed and was received with only mild enthusiasm. 2 Although it develops many concepts with considerable sophistication, and gives much data as to the nature of improvisation in various periods of European music history, it seems not to have had great impact on its own time, despite the fact that, through his later encyclopedia articles and anthologies, Ferand has obviously remained the single outstanding authority in international musicology on this subject. Perhaps his work was taken lightly simply because the subject of improvisation was taken lightly by musicologists; it seems to have been regarded as something not having cardinal importance 3 —as not truly art, but craft, which results in such “microcosmic” alterations or elaborations of composed music as ornamentation or the realization of figured bass, or in such musical acrobatics as the ability of a few organists to extemporize fugues on themes suggested to them on the spur of the moment.
