Abstract

The editors survey the history of the scholarly study of improvisation; although music scholars have led the recent push toward a consolidation of critical improvisation studies as an interdisciplinary area of inquiry, contributors to these Handbooks provide compelling evidence that improvisation has captivated thinkers across many disciplines for nearly two thousand years. The chapters collected here foreground theoretical, critical, and historical approaches. The editors also adumbrate the various ideological associations of the term improvisation and how those associations have been elaborated in the scholarly literature.