This dissertation investigates how historical musicians’ relationships to harmonic or contrapuntal rules intersected with their individual and collective experiences of fully improvised or improvisatory music. Within the realm of interpersonal relationships, musicians experience and develop powerful mental and artistic bonds through improvisation. Deep levels of sympathy and communication were documented in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, within the cultural contexts of Bernardo Pasquini (1637–1710), Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (1714–1788), and Christopher Simpson (1602–1669), the three musicians I focus on in this study. In the arena of harmonic rules and parameters, I contend that what appears to be “rule-breaking,” when it shows up on paper can instead be viewed as a frozen-in-time representation of the type of liberties that may have been commonplace in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century improvisation. Improvisers in this era seem to have been more concerned imparting a large-scale sense of harmony and producing engaging melodic variety than with compliance to the most formal rules of counterpoint. Through studying surviving documentation of historical improvisation, I show how its spirit can suffuse formal composition. By shifting focus from fine points of historical musical style to a discussion of generalized artistic and conceptual concerns around improvisation, I suggest that modern day musicians can discover how they themselves relate to baroque works that demand performers’ agency and creativity. My approach aims to suggest ways in which performers today can apply lessons from the past in modern interpretations of improvisation-based baroque music. / Music Performance

A un moment de l’histoire où l’émotion se veut l’adjuvant moteur de l’exercice et de l’action publique, ce travail de recherche s’inscrit à rebours d’une conception faisant de l’instantané et de l’événement les modes d’appréhension et d’expression de « sociétés liquides ». Fondé sur une approche critique, interdisciplinaire et humaniste, il étudie le comportement organisationnel dans un monde social lourdement impacté par un « managérialisme » mutilant l’histoire, la culture, et l’identité de cadres dirigeants publics dans les collectivités territoriales. Réhabilitant l’approche biographique comme stratégie d’accès au réel, la recherche met en évidence un « contrat psychologique » fondé sur un « équilibre stable » fruit d’une « double transaction biographique et relationnelle » autour de « l’éthique du bien commun », entre éthique de conviction et éthique de responsabilité. Elle étudie par la suite les logiques d’action qui se construisent aujourd’hui dans les administrations territoriales, où « l’image de l’organisation » comme « prison psychique » fait émerger des comportements allant de la défection à la résistance. / At a time in history when emotion wants to be an auxiliary driver in running local government, this research reverses the concept where snapshots and events are seen as ways of expressing and dealing with "fluid societies." Based on a critical, interdisciplinary and humanistic approach, it studies organisational behaviour in a social world seriously affected by a "managerialism" that is mutilating the history, culture, and identity of managers in local authorities. Reinstating the biographical approach as a strategy for getting to the core of reality, the research highlights a "psychological contract" based on a "stable equilibrium", the result of a "double biographical and relational transaction" which focusses on "the ethics of the common good", the midpoint between the ethics of conviction and responsibility. It then examines the working principles that are surfacing in local government today, where "the organisation's image" as a "mental prison" leads to behaviour ranging from defection to resistance.