I was having a conversation with Grant Billings at the Steinway Gallery in Naples, Florida about piano competitions. We kept circling around the same frustrating problem: how do you actually judge improvisation when contestants might be coming from completely different musical traditions?
The standard approach treats improvisation assessment as genre-specific. Jazz competitions evaluate harmonic sophistication, rhythmic swing, idiomatic vocabulary, conversational responsiveness. Classical competitions judge form and coherence within established structures. If someone wanted to hold a genuinely cross-cultural improvisation competition (not just "jazz" or "classical" categories), what criteria could possibly work?
The usual evaluation categories fall apart immediately. You can't judge "stylistic authenticity" when contestants are playing in different styles. You can't assess "harmonic invention" the same way for someone improvising on jazz changes versus someone working within Arabic maqam versus someone realizing a Javanese gamelan balungan. Even something as basic as "interaction and communication" means radically different things across these traditions.
My goal became clear: find universal characteristics that would define general improvisation competence, characteristics that wouldn't privilege Western music or reduce non-Western traditions to Western analytical categories. I wanted to understand what made improvisation work regardless of cultural context, to identify teachable skills that could transfer across any tradition.
The problem was that nobody had really figured this out. You couldn't do it with brain scans (neural correlates don't explain lived experience). You couldn't do it by treating each tradition as its own self-contained system (that just recreates the problem). What I needed was an approach that could respect cultural particularity while identifying universal cognitive architecture underneath all the surface differences.
I started digging into the research. What I found was a field stuck in an uncomfortable stalemate. On one side, cognitive researchers argued that improvisation involved universal mental processes (pattern recognition, memory structures, real-time synthesis) that operated identically regardless of cultural context. On the other side, ethnomusicologists countered that this universalism imposed Western analytical categories on non-Western practices, erasing cultural specificity.
Both positions had merit. Both felt incomplete.
Then I discovered something that changed how I understood the entire problem: every tradition I studied, no matter how different, insisted that authentic improvisation required "making it your own."
The Pattern That Wouldn't Go Away
In jazz, the message was explicit. You study the masters, you learn the vocabulary, you transcribe solos until your fingers know the patterns. But at some point, if you're just replicating what you've learned, you haven't really arrived yet. The goal is to absorb all that material until it transforms into something distinctly yours.
In Arabic music, I found the exact same principle expressed through different language. Master oud player George Michel was learning improvised taqasim from his teacher Scott Marcus. Marcus could teach him the technical aspects (modulation patterns, maqam navigation, structural rules) but when it came to the essential quality that makes improvisation actually compelling, Marcus said something remarkable: "Play from your heart. No, that's mine! Play something of your own!"
The teacher could explain the rules. He couldn't transfer the authenticity. That had to come from somewhere else.
In Javanese gamelan, the emphasis on collective integration might seem to contradict this individualism, but the principle appeared there too. Players are expected to realize the balungan in their own way within strict constraints. The technical execution can be taught, but the ability to make the instrument "speak" (to use a phrase that appears across multiple traditions) requires something beyond mere competence. You have to find your voice even while serving the collective structure.
Three completely different musical worlds. Three completely different metaphorical frameworks for thinking about improvisation. Yet all three demanded the same thing: authenticity through personal transformation of received material.
This pattern suggested something important. If "making it your own" operated as a universal constraint across traditions with radically different aesthetics, social structures, and philosophical foundations, then maybe there was a cognitive architecture underneath all the cultural variation. Maybe the question wasn't whether improvisation cognition was universal or culturally specific. Maybe it was both, operating at different levels.
The Temporal Architecture Hidden in Plain Sight
What I eventually discovered (through a framework developed by Swedish researcher Sven Bjerstedt building on philosopher Paul Ricoeur's work) was that improvisation across all traditions follows the same temporal consciousness structure. It's a three-stage process that happens every single time someone improvises, regardless of their cultural context.
First comes prefiguration: the accumulated knowledge musicians bring to performance. This includes everything they've learned through years of listening, practicing, and absorbing their tradition's vocabulary. In jazz, it's the chord progressions you've internalized, the licks you've practiced, the recordings you've studied. In Arabic music, it's your knowledge of maqam characteristics, your familiarity with canonical performances, your understanding of what creates tarab. In gamelan, it's your grasp of the balungan, your internalization of the layered rhythmic structures, your understanding of your role in the collective.
Next comes configuration: the real-time synthesis happening during performance. This is where musicians navigate multiple streams of information simultaneously (e.g. what they're playing now, what they just played, what's coming next, what other musicians are doing, what the audience needs) while maintaining coherence. Configuration is where the actual improvisation happens, where accumulated knowledge gets transformed into present-moment musical decisions.
Finally comes refiguration: the way performances transform understanding over time. When you hear an incredible improvisation, it doesn't just entertain you in the moment. It changes what you listen for in future performances. It alters your aesthetic expectations. It expands your sense of what's possible within the tradition. This transformation accumulates through repeated exposure, gradually building the sophisticated listening capacity that eventually becomes the prefiguration for your own improvisations.
The cycle is continuous. Refiguration from past performances becomes prefiguration for present configuration, which creates new performances that will refigure future understanding. The structure operates identically across all of my studied traditions.
What varies is the implementation.
Why This Matters for Anyone Who Makes Music
Here's what made this framework click for me personally: I grew up playing piano, mostly just messing around and "making stuff up" without any formal training in improvisation. I always felt like I was operating outside theoretical understanding, like whatever I was doing couldn't be explained or taught systematically. Either you could improvise or you couldn't. It was mysterious, ineffable, almost magical.
Discovering this temporal consciousness framework shattered that misconception. When I sat down at the piano to improvise, I wasn't accessing some mystical creative force. I believe I was using the same cognitive architecture that operates in every improvising musician across every tradition in human history. The same three-stage process. The same temporal awareness spanning memory, present attention, and anticipation.
What differed was the cultural implementation. My prefiguration came from years of listening to everything from classical music to electronic production to jazz to film scores, creating an eclectic vocabulary that didn't belong to any single tradition. My configuration happened within harmonic constraints I'd internalized from Western music theory (even though I couldn't articulate them formally at the time). My refiguration came from listening back to my own recordings and gradually developing aesthetic preferences about what sounded "right" to me.
The cognitive process was universal. The content was personally specific.
This distinction between architecture and implementation resolves the tension I started with. You can teach students how to improvise (the universal temporal consciousness processes, the multi-directional awareness skills, the real-time synthesis under constraints) separately from where to improvise (the specific vocabulary of jazz chord progressions, Arabic maqam grammar, or Javanese balungan structures).
The cognitive architecture is teachable across cultures because it represents species-level human capacity. Anyone with a functioning temporal consciousness can learn to activate prefiguration, navigate configuration, and develop through refiguration. These are fundamental human cognitive abilities.
Cultural implementation requires immersion because metaphorical frameworks and social structures must be lived, not just explained. You can't learn what counts as authentic jazz phrasing or proper maqam navigation or appropriate gamelan integration from a textbook. You have to spend years inside the tradition, absorbing it through repeated exposure until it becomes part of your prefiguration.
The Pedagogical Revolution Nobody Asked For
This has huge implications for music education. Instead of teaching improvisation as a collection of separate traditions (jazz improvisation here, Arabic improvisation there, gamelan improvisation over in that corner), we could teach the universal cognitive processes first, then show how different cultures implement those processes through varying coordination structures, constraint systems, and aesthetic frameworks.
Imagine a curriculum where students start by developing temporal awareness: learning to consciously activate their accumulated knowledge (prefiguration), practicing multi-directional attention during real-time synthesis (configuration), and systematically building their aesthetic judgment through repeated exposure (refiguration). They develop these cognitive skills using culturally neutral exercises before applying them to specific traditions. (This could be using traditional theories within each culture without idioms, or even more rudimentary: physical and verbal movement, cues, and gestures.)
Then, when they choose to study jazz or maqam or gamelan in depth, they already understand the underlying architecture. They know they need to build prefiguration through extensive listening and practice. They know configuration requires balancing multiple simultaneous demands. They know refiguration happens gradually through accumulating transformative experiences. The cultural implementation becomes faster and deeper because they understand what they're actually learning to do.
This doesn't erase cultural specificity. Arabic music's emphasis on ecstatic performer-audience fusion is irreducibly particular to that tradition. Jazz's conversational metaphor reflects specific social values about egalitarian exchange. Gamelan's organic collective flow embodies Indonesian philosophical principles about community and harmony. These cultural dimensions matter enormously.
But they're implementation parameters, not the cognitive architecture itself.
The framework also resolves my original assessment problem. You can evaluate students on universal criteria (depth of prefiguration, quality of real-time synthesis, coherence across temporal horizons) while respecting that what counts as "good" synthesis varies culturally. A jazz student and a gamelan student might both demonstrate sophisticated configuration while producing completely different musical results, evaluated against tradition-specific aesthetic standards but measured using shared cognitive competencies.
What You Already Know (Even If You Don't Know You Know It)
If you've ever improvised anything (music, cooking, conversation, problem-solving at work), you've already experienced this temporal consciousness structure. You just might not have had language for it.
When you're cooking without a recipe, you're drawing on prefiguration (every meal you've eaten, every technique you've learned, every flavor combination you remember). You're navigating configuration (balancing heat levels, timing multiple ingredients, adjusting seasoning in real time, responding to how ingredients actually behave versus how you expected them to behave). And if you're paying attention, you're developing through refiguration (noticing what worked, what didn't, building intuitions that will inform future cooking).
The same structure appears in conversation. Your prefiguration includes accumulated knowledge of social norms, relationship history with this particular person, vocabulary and concepts you can draw on. Configuration involves real-time synthesis (processing what they just said, formulating your response, monitoring their reactions, adjusting your approach based on their engagement). Refiguration happens when conversations change how you understand someone or transform your perspective on a topic.
Expert improvisation in any domain means developing sophisticated prefiguration, maintaining multi-directional awareness during configuration, and systematically building through refiguration. The cognitive architecture doesn't change. What changes is the domain-specific knowledge, constraints, and aesthetic criteria.
This is a description of how to learn anything at its core. Musicians just make this process audible.
The Resolution
Looking back at my original dilemma about grading students across different traditions, the answer became clear: assess the cognitive processes, respect the cultural implementations.
Students need to demonstrate that they can activate accumulated knowledge effectively (prefiguration), synthesize multiple information streams coherently in real time (configuration), and develop their understanding through reflected practice (refiguration). Those capacities transfer across any improvisational context.
How those capacities manifest in actual performance will vary depending on whether someone is playing jazz, Arabic music, gamelan, or something else entirely. The aesthetic criteria, the social structures, the metaphorical frameworks, the specific constraints all differ. That's not a bug, that's the feature. Cultural diversity in implementation proves the architecture's universality.
When I sit down at the piano now to "just make stuff up," I know exactly what I'm doing. I'm engaging species-level cognitive architecture that operates identically whether I'm improvising in my living room or whether Sabah Fakhri is creating tarab in a concert hall in Damascus or whether forty gamelan musicians are breathing as a collective organism in Java.
We're all accessing the same temporal consciousness. We're all navigating the same three-stage structure. We're all making it our own.
The cognitive process is universal. The making it your own part is where culture lives.