[spacer height=”0.1px”]Marcelo Bettoni
December 2025
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John Corbett and Free Improvisation: A Practice of Expanded Listening
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When I began delving into John Corbett’s thinking, I discovered something that transformed my way of understanding free improvisation: it’s not about mastering a language, but about learning to be present in sound. Corbett understands free improvisation as a living territory, something learned through experience, through sound that bursts forth without asking permission. This idea led me to rethink how I approach music teaching: improvisation is not just another genre to study, it’s a way of relating to the sonic world.
One of the most radical proposals I find in his work is also the simplest in appearance. In A Listener’s Guide to Free Improvisation (2016), Corbett proposes starting with the most basic thing: listening without expecting anything. This premise clashes head-on with traditional music training, where everything is oriented toward anticipation: we know what chord comes next, what thematic development to expect, what resolution will come. In my teaching experience, I’ve noticed that students arrive with a kind of “mental script” about how music should sound. When that script isn’t fulfilled, discomfort arises. But that’s precisely the pedagogical starting point that Corbett offers us: sound doesn’t arrive to confirm expectations, but to open a relationship. Changing that attitude—from control to curiosity—is perhaps the most profound transformation we can foster in a classroom.
What I value most about Corbett’s approach is how he connects musical practice with human interaction. From a pedagogical perspective, his most significant contribution is understanding free improvisation as a form of human interaction, rather than as a style. This vision allows improvisation to be worked on as an ethical practice: when musicians listen to each other without hierarchies, they also learn to respect the other’s space, to sustain uncomfortable silences, to accept when someone interrupts their idea and transforms the collective direction. I’ve confirmed that this ethical dimension of improvisation has effects that transcend the musical. In my classes, when we propose free improvisation exercises, we’re not just working on music: we’re working on the capacity to yield protagonism, to build something that none of us could have imagined individually. It’s learning about collaboration in its purest form.
Corbett doesn’t romanticize free improvisation. In Extended Play: Sounding Off from John Cage to Dr. Funkenstein (1994), he warns that free improvisation can be chaotic, uneven, even frustrating for those seeking immediate order. This honesty is pedagogically valuable. Improvised music then becomes an exercise in tolerance for uncertainty, an increasingly necessary skill in any area of contemporary life. From my teaching perspective, this coexistence with uncertainty is one of the most powerful learnings that free improvisation offers. We live in a culture that rewards efficiency, predictability, and immediate results. Improvisation forces us to suspend those expectations and remain attentive to what emerges, even if we don’t know exactly where it’s taking us.
Musicologically, I find particularly useful how Corbett situates free improvisation in a broad but non-linear historical context. Corbett places free improvisation within an expansive genealogy: the free jazz of the sixties, European avant-gardes, sound art, performance. He doesn’t arrange them in an evolutionary line; rather, he shows how musicians took elements from diverse traditions, stretched them, and generated practices that today coexist without needing to be rigidly classified. This perspective has allowed me to present free improvisation in my jazz history classes not as an isolated chapter or as a “radical stage” that came after bebop, but as a current that constantly dialogues with multiple traditions. Students can thus understand that music doesn’t advance in a straight line toward “novelty,” but rather branches out, returns to itself, reinterprets its past.
In the classroom, the concept that Corbett calls “expanded listening” has become central to my pedagogical practice. Expanded listening means noticing the minimal gesture, valuing the accidental, understanding that a change in timbre can be as significant as a melodic motif. Teaching this doesn’t require grand theories or extensive discourses about avant-gardes. In my experience, it’s enough to propose very brief duo exercises, where the objective is to sustain a sonic relationship, not to impress. Sometimes I ask them to improvise for two minutes using only two notes. Other times, to respond only to their partner’s silences. These are almost fragile exercises, but in that fragility something fundamental emerges: attention to the other, listening as concrete action and not as background.
I believe Corbett is particularly necessary in the current context. In a world where technology pushes us toward perfect editing, he reminds us that music is also a human act, full of doubts, surprises, and detours. Free improvisation, seen from his perspective, is not an extended technique or just another expressive resource: it’s a way of being attentive to the present, to others, to the environment, to what happens when we dare not to know completely. This last idea resonates deeply with me as an educator. Much of my work consists of transmitting knowledge, structures, techniques. But free improvisation reminds me that I must also teach my students to unknow, to doubt, to remain open to the unexpected. In that sense, Corbett’s thinking has not only enriched my way of teaching music: it has transformed my understanding of what it means to educate.
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Sources cited:
Corbett, J. (1994). Extended Play: Sounding Off from John Cage to Dr. Funkenstein. Duke University Press.
Corbett, J. (2016). A Listener’s Guide to Free Improvisation. The University of Chicago Press.
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Buenos Aires guitarist & musicologist Marcelo Luis Bettoni is the author of a number of books including El sonido de los modos (The Sound of Modes, Tinta de Luz, 2021), Rítmicas de guitarra (Guitar Rhythms, Tinta de Luz, 2021), and most recently an exhaustive history of jazz, Las Rutas del Jazz (The Roots of Jazz, Publiquemos, 2024).
Read Marcelo Luis Bettoni’s essays on Arteidolia
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