Improvisation and Audience Engagement

This study suggests that a little improvisation in classical music might increase audience engagement.

An area of the brain known to be involved in sustained attention, working memory and the inhibition of responses, known as the Brodmann 9 area was much more active in both musicians and listeners during the improvised performances. This indicates that the audience were much more engaged when listening to classical music containing improvised elements.

This is really easy for me to believe, given my feeling professional musicians tend to make such a fetish out of sight reading they risk ending up sounding more mechanical than human. If you spend a lot of time sight reading, you're training your brain to play the surface of the music rather than feeling it. Of course, really fine players can play with feeling while sight reading, but not everyone is that good. 

The thing about improvisation, for better or worse, is that the player is creating the music in the moment, so is much more personally involved. My sense is that if more classical players improvised at least occasionally they would be reminded there's more to music making than simply playing what they see.