Studying Norwegian Free Improvisation

My purpose is to study the aesthetical specificities of Norwegian Free Improvisation and to include the data I will gather in a broad transcultural study on Free Improvisation in Europe. I am invited by the Norwegian Academy of Music in Oslo, one of the g reatest music schools in Norway. I will follow the improvisation classes as a pianist, in order to understand from the inside the most important features of Norwegian free improvisation. Then I will conduct some experiments in the recording studio with st udents of the Academy: my goal with these experiments is to highlight the cognitive processes underlying free improvisation. Particularly, I want to show the link between some aesthetical constraints (against the naive idea of pure improvisation) and the very nature of the mecanisms of coordination which are common to every collectivly and freely improvised music. The music made by numerous norwegian free improvisers is very specific by its stylistic content, its formal and temporal structure... It would be one of the first analytical study of this music from an "Empirical Musicology" approach, for it will include informations from both the musical and cognitive aspects.