After a concert of improvised music, the most common questions I get are “Was that all improvised

After a concert of freely improvised music, the most common questions I get are “Was that ‘all’ improvised?” and “How do you do that?” The first question is easily answered with a simple “Yes.” I find the second question is much more difficult and much more interesting to answer in conversation with audience members, but in fact both questions are inextricably intertwined. What is it that happens when a group of musicians improvises together? How do they do it? As in many activities of an artistic nature, there is a mystical element to musical improvisation. This mystical element is sometimes enhanced by the artist’s own desire to be seen as a kind of isolated genius with an exclusive access to the Muse. There is obviously no empirical way of discovering or describing this process, but perhaps it is less mysterious than we generally believe. As C.G. Jung put it in Modern Man in Search of a Soul,