Improvisational creative practice, little discussed in nineteenth-century American literature, is a subject of increasing interest in adjacent fields, including British and European Romanticism, musicology, and twentieth-century American literature. Musicologists including Ernst Ferand, Bruno Nettl, Rudolf Rasch, and Gabriel Solis assert that improvisation exists in a mutually generative relationship with composition. When written down, improvisations become compositions which, polished and in print, become sites for future improvisation. The word derives from the creative practice of improvvisatores, eighteenth century Italian musician-poets celebrated for their uncanny ability to extemporize song-poems in response to audience prompts. The British Romantics frequently invoked musical practices and forms, while the improvising singer-poet, often with lute or harp in hand, became a stock figure in fiction, poetry, and music. Improvisation was culturally fraught: rhetorically powerful and associated with political upheaval and freedom movements, yet derided as insufficiently attentive to form, dangerously indifferent to race and gender norms, and overly emotional, a “craft” contrasted with the “work” of composition. See Brad Gooley, Fantasies of Improvisation: Free Playing in Nineteenth-Century Music, Oxford University Press, 2018, and Angela Esterhammer, Romanticism and Improvisation, 1750-1850, Cambridge University Press, 2008.

Americanist scholarship has largely focused on the twentieth-century, particularly jazz- and blues-inflected poetics. Scholars of literature, music, and cultural studies including Henry Louis Gates, Fred Moten, Roger D. Abrahams, and Eric Lott have noted instances of improvisation in readings of nineteenth-century writing, speech, and music performance. Recently, musicologists and literary critics have begun to offer more sustained examinations of a distinctly American set of improvisational practices reaching back into the nineteenth century, as in Brent Hayes Edward's Epistrophies: Jazz and the Literary Imagination, (Harvard University Press, 2017) and George Boziwick’s “My Business is to Sing’: Emily Dickinson’s Musical Borrowings” (Journal of the Society for American Music, vol. 8, no. 4, 2014, pp. 130-166). Still, most such readings treat either improvisation or the nineteenth century as ancillary to the main argument. In general, improvisation as a musical, cultural, and literary force in the nineteenth-century US has received less sustained critical attention than in Romanticist or musicological scholarship.

Nineteenth-century America was not lacking in improvised creation. To the contrary, it suffused creative practice. Orators and clergy spoke spontaneously from the stage and pulpit, professional musicians were expected to improvise, and amateur musicians, both enslaved and free, north and south, extemporized on familiar tunes at home and in church. American writers borrowed familiar European tropes and practices. They wrote about extemporaneity, as when, in “Intellect,” Emerson wrote, “Our spontaneous action is always the best.” Most importantly for this panel, they wrote improvisationally, evoking the spontaneous, audience-directed, playful practices of improvising performers. Their words broke free of established literary-textual constraints, capturing the headlong feeling of in-the-moment performance-composition.

This panel offers three distinct but interrelated presentations, each fifteen minutes long, on nineteenth-century American literary improvisation and its relation to power and authority. John Hay will discuss James Fenimore Cooper’s “rapid writing” and its later revision into more polished “author’s editions.” Paul Fess will describe how instances of improvised music-making in narratives by formerly enslaved writers revealed for readers the power structures underlying slavery. Gerard Holmes will consider the poet Emily Dickinson’s engagement with musical improvisation, its importance in shaping her distinctive composition practices, and its later effacement in officially sanctioned print representations.

John Hay’s “James Fenimore Cooper’s Rapid Writing” examines Cooper’s composition process, particularly his perceived lack of revision. During his career, Cooper was alternately praised and censured for the speed of his composition. “The rapidity with which he wrote forbids the idea that he ever strove earnestly for it,” observed his early biographer Thomas Lounsbury. Cooper himself admitted that The Spy (1821), was “hastily and carelessly written.” But for his admirers, such as Francis Parkman, this unbridled outpouring conveyed a “rude vigor” appropriate for a national American literature, a rejection of British and Anglophilic “polished luxury.” In fact, Cooper revised extensively, as contemporaries including William Cullen Bryant and recent scholars such as Joseph Rezek have noted. Yet despite his inclusion among the first American novelists accorded republication in an “Author’s Revised Edition,” his emendations were always minor (nothing like the famous reworkings of Henry James). Cooper’s revision practices reveal a broader set of expectations for the era’s expected level of polish in prose fiction. In an era of “loose, baggy monsters,” how slowly and carefully were authors supposed to craft their novels?

Paul Fess’ “The Improvised Sound Work of Slave Narratives” examines representations of musical improvisation in late-antebellum North American slave narratives, including Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave (1853) and Frederick Douglass’ first two autobiographies. Close readings of scenes involving improvisatory music show narrators manipulating the sentimentalist aesthetic mode, expanding the terms of the slave narrative beyond simple pathos to reveal the disciplinary power and social relations that defined the slave system. Theories of improvised action have enabled scholars to understand the daily acts of resistance enslaved people undertook, animating debates about whether such acts signified brief, transcendent spaces of freedom, or only illusions of liberation that ultimately reinforced the slave economy. This presentation contributes to this conversation by exploring how representations of spontaneous music making evoked the social formations through which race and enslavement were negotiated.

In “’Discretion in the Interval’: Emily Dickinson’s Musical Performances,” Gerard Holmes argues that the poet’s engagement with improvised musical performance, as a listener and performer, provides new ways to consider her written work. Dickinson, a skilled pianist and singer who was remembered for late-night improvisations, preserved copies of her poems that recorded variant words and phrases, much as a performing composer might record performance prompts on sheet music manuscripts. She periodically rewrote and customizing these poems, often extemporaneously with or within letters to specific readers, as an improvising musician adapts existing works for particular audiences and settings. Dickinson wrote not teleologically, toward increasing perfection, but multiplicatively, toward increasing possibility. This argument offers a rationale for study of Dickinson’s musical interests beyond hymnal forms, helps explain her discomfort with the delimiting fixity of print, and questions print conventions around her work.