Free improvisation

Free improvisation (also known as free-form music) is a form of improvised music centered on a commitment to non-idiomatic musical expression. It developed through free jazz, serialism and indeterminacy, and is characterized by a general rejection of formal music theory and tonality, instead following the intuition of its performers and the exploration of dynamic, timbre and texture. The term can refer to both a technique—employed by any musician in any genre—and as a recognizable genre of experimental music in its own right.

Free improvisation, as a genre of music, developed primarily in the U.K. as well as the U.S. and Europe in the mid to late 1960s, largely as an outgrowth of free jazz and contemporary classical music. Exponents of free improvised music include the improvising groups AMM and Spontaneous Music Ensemble, as well as solo instrumentalists such as saxophonists Evan Parker, Anthony Braxton, Peter Brötzmann and John Zorn, trombonist George E. Lewis, guitarists Derek Bailey, Henry Kaiser, Fred Frith, Taku Sugimoto and Toshimaru Nakamura, bassists Damon Smith and Jair-Rohm Parker Wells, and composer Pauline Oliveros.