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I wanted to give these comparative, unsystematic observations on improvisation in music and in analytic work the label of impromptu. The aim of the argument, which does not aspire to any kind of completeness, is to try and bring some clarity to the complex and inexhaustible material of analytic intervention by comparing it with the idea of musical improvisation.
The very title contains and anticipates the difficulties we come upon in this territory, both in the musicological domain and in that of analytic psychotherapy. The impromptu is something improvised, literally «not prepared». It would scarcely be reassuring if the author of a conference paper or a scientific study had not prepared his argument, and was improvising on a whim.
In reality the impromptu is a musical form which is intended to be spontaneous, barely «studied», seemingly improvised on the spot and not composed at the desk: and hence, above all in the Romantic period, particularly close to the sentimental effusions of a mind freed from excessive formal bonds and capable of expressing itself musically in more intimately sincere ways than usual.
It is difficult, but by no means impossible, for a very complex musical structure, for example a fugue with most voices, to be improvised on the spot. A fugue is also the product of calculations that elaborate the inventive moments according to certain formally rigid rules which can be reconstructed a posteriori by anyone who might wish to analyse this type of compositions. Here the musical game is rigorously regulated and needs time to be built up. The inventive and creative moment consists in the more or less imaginative and daring way in which the rules of the game are managed. We find ourselves in a series of oppositions, and thus in an unstable equilibrium between order and transgression, between free invention and the established constraints of harmonisation, and so on. The contest between harmony and invention with its estrosità [imaginative flair] - I am