Kaleea, I think what your prof told you about playing by ear being considered "uncouth" and all that was indeed true, but it had to have been limited to a coterie of the more ignorant and hard-nosed music "educators" during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, perhaps more in American than in Europe. But hardly to composers and musicians themselves. Lots of private teachers, particularly of piano, seem to feel (or, at least, used to feel) that way.

During the Renaissance and Baroque periods, it was common for people of the middle and upper classes to get together for a musical evening and, basically, jam. The host would bring forth a "case of viols," someone else would tune up a lute, and one of the guests would bring a box of recorders. They would sit around a table with copies of the music, usually just the melody line. Someone would play, or perhaps sing, the melody, while the person with the viola da gamba filled in a bass line, someone with a sopranino recorder would do a high obbligato, and those with the other viols, recorders, and a lute or two would fill in the middle parts. What they were playing would probably—could probably—never be played the same way twice.

This sort of playing was where modern "Early Music" groups such as the New York Pro Musica and the Baltimore Consort draw their inspiration. Later, composers took these small instrumental ensembles, wrote parts that had previously had been improvised, and what we now call "chamber music" got its start. During most of the history of music, improvisation has been an important—in some cases, essential—part of a musician's tool-kit, including amateur musicians.

They tell the story of how Beethoven was invited to some nobleman's home to play for his guests, and when he arrived, he discovered that another composer, whom he, with apparently good reason, regarded as an unimaginative, sycophantic little twit, had also been invited to perform. Beethoven was steamed! The twit had written a string quartet, and the quartet was played first. When Beethoven's turn came, he made a great show of flopping the manuscript for the piano sonata he had planned to play on the floor beside the piano, then reached over and took the part the twit had written for the second violin off the second violinist's music stand, and proceeded to improvise a "theme and variations" from in for half an hour—brilliantly!

Don Firth