ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the sample of Johann Nepomuk Hummel fantasias. Hummel's compositional input into the fantasias on borrowed themes is substantial, and includes many original insertions. The contrapuntal and harmonic learning displayed by Hummel's improvisations reflected contemporary improvisational training. In his treatise Hummel also alludes to 'variety of character' and 'changes of colouring'. Many instead seem to encompass the ideals of logic, motivic continuity and lacking 'diffusiveness' espoused by Hummel in his treatise. Hummel's compositional input into the fantasias on borrowed themes is substantial, and includes many original insertions. The final part of the Fantasia is instead dominated by non-melodic triplet figuration – and the central couplet substitutes motivic economy with multiplicity. The 'improvisation' concept encodes the functioning of musical memory; and certain processes imply a distinction between 'extroverted' signifiers of improvisation and more introspective, 'learned', even ruminative, manipulations of motif, syntax and harmonic progression whose discernibility is correspondingly limited.
