Improvisation and Form in Law and Music

Desmond Manderson, ANU College of Law, ANU College of Arts & Social Sciences, McGill University Faculty of Law, has published Fission to Fusion: From Improvisation and Formalism in Law and Music, as 6 Critical Studies in Improvisation 1 (2010). Here is the abstract.

This paper asks the question, what happened to improvisation in the classical music tradition? why did it so dramatically decline in legitimacy and practice around the classical era. This apper (sic) draws connections between musical, legal, and political history in order to demonstrate the cultural change in the eighteenth century transformed people's understandings of texts, authority, legitimacy, and genius, in ways that changed the relationship of interpretation to textual authenticity with lasting effects in both music and legal professions. This paper thus continues the work on legal and musical history begun by this author in Statuta v Acts, Et Lex Perpetua, and Songs Without Music.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.