Nexus, the improvisor is more interested in how he feels than how his audience feels.
Not totally uninterested in his audience I might add but a sense of prioity to his own interests)
I agree, but some artists get a stroke of the ego by their audience cheering maniacally. The effect of the audience cannot be wholely discounted. As I posted earlier about emotions, there is an emotional response to both the pure beauty of the work and also an emotional response to the gratification of the audience. And also a number of other factors that we may not even be aware of.
Take for instance, Jimi Hendrix once more. He was booed off the stage for attempting to further his musical range. The crowd wanted the same old schlock, over and over again. Jimi took this hard, he had grown accustomed to the roar of the crowd. He delved deeper and deeper into heroin addiction and died.
Now, Frank Zappa always played for the fringe. He cared not a whit for what the audience thought of his work. His work spoke to him and if it should happen to speak to others as well... ? So much the better. But he played for himself first.
So, we have to accept that there is not one type of improvisor. Everyone improvises in their own particular way for their own particular reasons. And, this in itself is a form of improvisation.
In this sense we are discussing "deliberate" froms of improviation when for most persons we do it in a semi deliberate fashion at every opportunity ( or so I propose)
Everyt decision we need to make is in a simple way a small problem that is faced and each problem requires improvisation to find a solution. And as every one improvises in a unique fashion is makes precisise predictability difficult. Thus free will is evident.
This semi-deliberateness of which you speak... It stirs once more the embers of the inner self acting as it will. As does everyone improvising in a unique fashion. We are a consequence of our biological structure, our emotional structure, our instinctual structure, our social structure, our educational structure, our environmental structure, there are practically infinite numbers of structures which we inhabit at any given time. And it is the subtle blending of these various structures that define us, our motivations, our free will. It seems to me that uniqueness of improvisation is a consequence of this deeper interplay of structures, a symptom rather than the cause.
What if we remove ourselves from ourselves. What if we posit the observation of some strange unhuman observer who's motivations and ideals are vastly different than the ideals of a human. It observes the humans scurry about in their daily lives. Would it see the uniqueness of each individual's improvisation? Or would it find patterns which indicate that the whole of the species is following an inborn trend that varies little?
It might be said that within a horde of rats (You're from Australia, right? I understand the rodent problem get's extremely bad out there from time to time.) the individual rats see themselves as unique, as improvising their way through life in a unique, unpredictable manner. But to a human observer, they seem to blend together into a nameless mass. Individuals indistinct. Of course, this is positing a human level of self-awareness on the rats which most likely doesn't exist...
) but never quite reaching...