Improvisition

Igor Stravinsky, New York, NY, 1946 by Arnold Newman

(Not a typo, a portmanteau).

When I was studying jazz in music school I would sometimes compose solos as a way of working out their possible form in real-time. It's a form of cheating at improvisation.

"Composition" in the loftiest, most exalted sense, implies that everything has been worked out down to the tiniest articulations. Now anyone can sound like a composer with a library of good orchestral samples replete with all the articulations, bowings, etc. It sounds great out of the box but might not sound good performed by a real orchestra as improvised. It's cheating at composition and orchestration.

Samples are kind of like cover bands as a proxy for the real thing, when in fact performances by the original band are more improvisational and avoid sounding exactly like the record. The primary yardstick for a cover band is if they can play the songs exactly as they were "mixed", not necessarily as played in one take--like on a jazz record. A guitarist in a Cars cover band probably would play Elliot Easton's solos as if they were scored on staff paper, which is neither composition nor improvisation but a possible portmanteau of them: improvisition 

In the 70s and 80s, an 8-bar solo verse was almost a fixture of pop songs. Some were composed and less improvised, like Easton’s solo on Just What I Needed, or one that is just blues but worked so well, like Elvin Bishop's solo on Fooled Around and Fell in Love or Denny Dias' sitar solo on Steely Dan's Do It Again.

The recording studio as an instrument seems like a more recent idea, but it was an instrument all along--like a composer's piano. It is a place to improvise until it becomes composition. But the funny thing is that ultimately we want things to be more freely improvisational and less worked out. If I were Elliot Easton I'd tire of playing the same solos as if they were scored, but audiences don't tire of them. They seem to want things fixed and predictable, but you can't get to that point without improvising the ways it could be fixed. But the reality is that it never is or should be. Jazz is right on that score.