Defending the “Improvisation as Conversation” Model of Improvised Musical Performance

ABSTRACT It was in the 1990s that the metaphor commonly employed to explain and understand improvisation in jazz, “improvisation as conversation” came into prominence. In 2015 however, Wilson and MacDonald, from the perspective of music psychology, argued that this widespread model for understanding improvisation via language metaphors was inadequate to explain improvisation in music, broadly construed. While I agree with Wilson and MacDonald that there are flaws in the “improvisation as conversation” model, I also believe this model offers benefits and insights worth preserving. Thus, rather do away with the model, in this paper I defend a conversational understanding of improvisation by rethinking the idea of language and conversation that underpins the model. Instead of deploying a “rule-based” understanding of language, in this article I explore how understanding language as “conversation,” such as explicated in the philosophies of Gadamer and Davidson, might effectively address some of the challenges presented by Wilson and MacDonald.