SMT-V: The Society for Music Theory Videocast Journal
SMT-V is the open-access, peer-reviewed video journal of the Society for Music Theory. Founded in 2014, SMT-V publishes video essays that showcase research in music theory in a dynamic, audiovisual format, presented so as to have the potential to engage both specialists within the field as well as interested viewers outside the music theory community. The journal features a supportive and collaborative production process, and publishes several videos each year. Read more about SMT-V here.
Latest Issue: 11.6 (November 2025)
Reconstructing a Nineteenth-Century Fantasy: Between Model Composition and Reimagining Improvisation
Gilad Rabinovitch (Queens College, CUNY)
Though we tend to perceive classical music as fixed “composers’ compositions,” historical music making and learning in Europe included a great deal of improvisation. This video reports on my creative reconstruction project: a reimagining of a fantasy latent in pedagogical fragments in Carl Czerny’s ([1829] 1983) Systematic Introduction to Improvisation. Czerny’s treatise is uniquely generous in documenting a variety of improvised genres, ranging from serious fantasies to light variations and potpourris on popular tunes. My reconstructed fantasy takes three written-out transformations of a hypothetical audience suggestion and uses them in a multi-movement sonata-fantasia. Though my project—as recorded by pianist Bang-Shyuan Chen—is a composition, not an improvisation, it represents one of the many scholarly and musical paths towards reimagining historical practices. In addition to providing a background on improvisation in this period, I discuss two technical aspects associated with this project—motivic transformation and the large-scale organization of a sonata-fantasia.
Keywords: Carl Czerny, historical improvisation, fantasia, model composition, sonata form