The article offers a phenomenological perspective on improvised music, a musical praxis which is more often dealt with in sociology. While sociological texts focus on the topics of music in the society, rather than on the questions of sociality in music itself, this article deals with the latter by viewing the improvisational moment by means of a phenomenological method. The author attempts this by looking at the differences between improvisation and composition. It turns out that differences between them are also the differences between subjective, internally sensed time and time reproduction through memory—improvisation celebrates the living-in-time, its attention is paid to time in which social relations are most intense, while composition more often finds its greatest invention in triggering memory associations within itself.
