ABSTRACT

Remembering Pressing’s work on the psychology of improvisation, it is quite conceivable that expert improvisers have trained themselves to make lightning-quick “subconscious” evaluations of their surroundings and act accordingly – this decision-making relying on the execution of a learnt repertoire of cognitive assemblies that run on a level too fast to perceive consciously. Such assemblies use feedback and feedforward to predict outcomes, and make use of previously learnt and practiced materials, experiences with the same musicians, short- and long-term memory during a given performance and other accumulated conventions, cultural knowledge, concepts and ideologies. Limiting the risk of non-working aesthetic outcomes, and reducing the potential for searching even further, were musicians who used pre-planned rules and concepts as a basis for improvisation – agreeing on common aims, processes and strategies before performance, and not deviating from them during its course.