Lighter,

re: Improvisation

My tentative theory about this runs as follows:

Early chanty singing included improvisation as one of its values. My biases incline me to suppose that this may have been because much African American music, as a generalization, tends to value improvisation highly. This is in no way to say that other cultural musical orientations would not value it, but rather only to note that its value in African American music is tangible and its presence in chanties could be said to be in accord.

At some point, the "art" of chanty singing (or of being a chantyman), I propose, undergoes a shift. The singing of chanties expands greatly to a sort of "user-base" that is far beyond the smaller set of earlier singers (both Black and White) who would have cultivated those earlier aesthetic values. An exponentially larger body of participants go on to receive the repertoire and the working techniques of chanties once the genre had become so ubiquitous in sailing vessels that everyone (no matter their background and experience) entering that space would find themselves in the position of performers. Finding themselves in the position of performers, however, would not mean, in such a diffuse environment, that they would learn to cultivate all the values that earlier singers felt were important. To them, chief values would include the value of chanties to get the work done, whereas the finer details of aesthetic values might remain unknown.

I propose that what I described in the preceding paragraph was happening concurrently while other singers still cultivated the value of improvisation.

I have documented (more tangibly) a similar sort of minimizing of aesthetics in the drumming of Punjab, as, in the last couple decades, performing has expanded from a set of exclusive "hereditary-professional" musicians to the general public.