Aspects of improvisation are not only included in but are essential to the performance of some of the heart of the literature. That is especially true of someone who studied music during the last fifty years when historically informed performance practice has been stressed more than it had been in the fifty years before. And no intelligent and competent musician I know my age or younger hasn't practiced improvisation, in the performance of baroque music - in which it is not only possible but essential, in the improvisation of cadenzas shorter or longer and certainly no intelligent classical musician since the 1940s if not from earlier has be uninfluenced by jazz improvisation. During my college years I went through Jacques Hotteterre's L'Art De Préluder and Francois Couperin's L'Art De Toucher Le Clavicin, both of which teach improvisation practices. And both of which are available in English translations I didn't have access to back then. I only wish my German had been up to going through C.P.E. Bach's Versuch über die wahre Art das Clavier zu spielen. But I didn't know enough German until grad school and my goals weren't along those lines at the time.
I always, from the first lessons, encouraged my students to improvise intelligently and with an intentional purpose in mind, a structure and a goal. And I try to teach them ways to avoid falling into habits and routines. Music should never be made on a routine or habitual basis because it becomes pointless and boring background noise, though, for so many pop musicians, that's the point of it.
When I have said that I don't improvise, I mean that I don't improvise in the way that good and competent jazz musicians improvise, I certainly don't mean the kind of toodling around that Erin apparently does, either that or the brain dead backbeat banging that she once said she lived for. I could do that when I was eight, any not entirely stupid kid figures out that they can make a semblance of music by noodling on the black keys of the piano just about as soon as they can reach them.
This discussion says a lot about what I'm talking about, especially avoiding cliches.
But when I talk about improvising, I mean something a lot more involved and interesting than the kind of junk that generates the musical genres of new age and space music. I certainly mean something more than the aural wallpaper factory of pop music is based in.
Update: More Out Of Duncan's Left Behind
No wonder you loved that "Icarus" by Oregon. You don't recognize proto-New Age when you hear it.
"My brother corrects me that it wasn't Weather Report who played Icarus, it was Oregon, another group I wasn't that hot on. They were all right but I liked Ralph Towner's work with other musicians better."
A life in pop music not only makes you insensitive to music of any sophistication or complexity, a life in pop music scribbling has made you illiterate as well. Or is that a result of remaining at Duncan's Brain Trust as the adults fled in droves?