This paper will present the core role of improvisation groups in the late Sixties / beginning of the Seventies in the process of building the new status of music material in the post-serial context. Analysing some “Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza” (GINC) and “New Phonic Art” recordings, specific interaction models will be detected and discussed as phenomena of a larger creative process of exploring new music resources. Sound material limitations, exclusion of specific “motivic” treatment, using prepared instruments and avoiding all “traditional music” references are all elements of a specific music aesthetic shared by composers/improvisers involved in this experience. A particular attitude to the written trace for the improvisation can also be detected. Both groups carried the increasing freedom from the “dictatorship” of the score and the great involvement of the interpreter in the musical shaping of the piece to its logical extreme: no score at all was used. But there exist the so-called “esercizi (exercises)”. What is the status of those activities? Are they a kind of a “pre-compositional” process of studying the material possibilities? the interaction dynamics? the formal shaping? the mutual listening process?

The fact that the members were not only performers, but in first line composers gives to the absence of a score a very specific meaning. Here Lydia Goehr’s categories of improvisation extempore or impromptu can represent a starting point, but a deep understanding of the structure of the improvisations, the limited choice of the sound material, the position of individual actions are also highly linked to the composers’ experience with written music. The individual poetic expressed trough written works by Franco Evangelisti, Mario Bertoncini or Vinko Globokar, among others, has to be introduced as a part of the analytical process. The pallet of one’s position in the group and one’s action/reaction model (built ultimately on one’s personal preferences) is something that influences the global result and is not simply predictable (even if acting in a range of finite possibilities, as will be shown). Famous improvisations as GINC’s RKBA 1675/I from the 1966 LP Album or New Phonic Art’s 1973 Free Improvisation Album will offer the opportunity to examine some of the mentioned question in detail.

The research focuses on 1) analytical and theoretical problems of improvised music in relation to the graphic dimension. (Free improvisation has the doubtful reputation of having no structure, presuming no theoretical background and being not suitable to analysis, but some models developed in the filed of sound analysis as for instance Lasse Thoresen’s, Spectromorphological analysis of sound objects or Pierre Couprie’s, EAnalysis can be discussed as possible ways to solve the question); 2) the research investigate a possible way to track a single improviser’s action in the context (adopting a revised version of Regula B. Qureshi analytical model); 3) and examine the relationship between improvisation and written music by observing the improvisation as a part of a larger creative process on the path of music language transformations of the Sixties and Seventies.

The research is based 1) on archive material study (Paul Sacher Fondation – Vinko Globokar; Nuova Consonanza Archive – GINC, Archive Franco Evangelisti, Mario Bertoncini private archive) in order to investigate information coming from correspondence, writings or music autograph sketches, schemata, recordings, etc; 2) on developing new analytical tools in order to analyse (recorded) improvised music from the point of view of the listener as well as that of the performer; 3) on comparative historiographical method due to reconstruct the global context.