On Critical Improvisation Studies 1 GEORGE E
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THE OXFORD HANDBOOK OF CRI TI CAL IMPROVISATION STUDIES VOLUME 1 Edited by GEORGE E. LEWIS and BENJAMIN PIEKUT OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS CONTENTS Preface xi Acknowledgments xv Contributors to Volume 1 xvii Introduction: On Critical Improvisation Studies 1 GEORGE E. LEWIS AND BENJAMIN PIEKUT PARTI COGNITIONS 1. Cognitive Processes in Musical Improvisation 39 ROGER T. DEAN AND FREYA BAlLES 2. The Cognitive Neuroscience oflmprovisation 56 AARON L. BERKOWITZ 3. Improvisation, Action Understanding, and Music Cognition with and without Bodies 74 VIJAY IYER 4. The Ghost in the Music, or the Perspective of an Improvising Ant 91 DAVID BORGO PART II CRITICAL THEORIES 5· The Improvisative 115 TRACY McMuLLEN 6. Jurisgenerative grarnmar (for alto) 128 FREDMOTEN 7· Is Improvisation Present? 143 MICHAEL GALLOPE 8. Politics as Hypergestural Improvisation in the Age ofMediocracy 160 YVES CITTON ... viii CONTENTS CONTENTS ix 9· On the Edge: A Frame of Analysis for Improvisation 182 2 1. Shifting Cultivation as Improvisation DAVIDE SPARTI PAUL RICHARDS 10. The Salmon ofWisdom: On the Consciousness of Self and Other in Improvised Music and in the Language that Sets One Pree 202 PART V ORGANIZATIONS ALEXANDRE PIERREPONT 2 2. Improvisation in Management 11. Improvising Yoga 217 PAUL INGRAM AND WILLIAM DUGGAN SUSAN LEIGH POSTER 23. Pree Improvisation as a Path-Dependent Process JARED BURROWS AND CLYDE G. REED PART III CULTURAL HISTORIES 12. Michel de Montaigne, or Philosophy as Improvisation 227 PART VI PHILOSOPHIES TIMOTHY HAMPTON 24. Musical Improvisation and the Philosophy of Music 419 13. The Improvisation ofPoetry, 1750-1850: Oral Performance, Print PHILIP ALPERSON Culture, and the Modern Homer 239 25. Impr~visation and Time-Consciousness 439 ANGELA EsTERHAMMER GARYPETERS 14. Germaine de Staël's Corinne, or Italy and the Early Usage of 26. Improvising Impromptu, Or, What to Do with a Broken String 458 Improvisation in English 255 LYDIAGOEHR ERIK SIMPSON 27. Ensemble Improvisation, Collective Intention, and Group Attention 15. Improvisation, Time, and Opportunity in the Rhetorical Tradition GARRY L. HAGBERG GLYN P. NORTON 28. Interspecies Improvisation 500 16. Improvisation, Democracy, and Feedback DAVID RoTHENBERG DANIEL BELGRAD 29. Spiritual Exercises, Improvisation, and Moral Perfectionism: With PART IV MOBILITIES Special Reference to Sonny Rollins 523 ARNOLD l. DAVIDSON 17. Improvised Dance in the Reconstruction of THEM DANIELLE GOLDMAN 30. Improvisation and Ecclesial Ethics 539 SAMUEL WELLS 18. Improvising Social Exchange: African American Social Dance 330 THOMAS F. DEFRANTZ Index 553 19. Fixing Improvisation: Copyright and African American Vernacular Dancers in the Early Twentieth Century 339 ANTHEA KRAUT 20. Performing Gender, Race, and Power in Improv Comedy 354 AMYSEHAM PREFACE It is far too early to create a history or prehistory of what many are now calling "critical improvisation studies;' but we can point to sorne significant early irruptions. Properly speaking, the project that resulted in this two-volume Handbook began around the turn of the twenty-first century with an important early conference, "Improvising Across Borders: An Inter-Disciplinary Symposium on Improvised Music Traditions:' The conference, which took place in April1999, was conceived by Dana Reason, then an innovation-minded graduate student in the Department of Music at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), and produced in collaboration with her fellow graduate students Michael Dessen and Jason Robinson. The conference featured performances as weil as paper presentations from both scholars and practitioners, and the call for papers welcomed proposais from musicologists, ethnomusicologists, and musicians, and also from scholars in other disciplines such as cultural studies, sociology, women's studies, and literature. We are interested not only in performative notions of improvisation but also the cultural contexts that influence and shape improvised traditions. Possible topics include: cul turallocation with regard to cross-cultural trends in current music-making, the politics of reception, theorizing the social and political implications of improvised traditions, the role of gender and body, and the relationship of improvisation to cur rent changes in music-or other-pedagogies.1 In 2002, a trio of scholar-artists, also based in the University of California sys tem, Adriene Jenik and George Lewis from UCSD and Susan Leigh Poster from UCLA, built on this earlier effort by co-convening a Residential Research Group at the University of California Humanities Research Institute with the title "Global Intentions: Improvisation in the Contemporary Performing Arts:' The co-conveners developed an introductory guiding narrative for the research project that declared an intent to focus on (1) how improvisation mediates cross-cul~ural, transnational and cyberspatial (inter) artistic exchanges that produce new conceptions of identity, history, and the body; (2) how improvisation functions as a key element in emerging postcolonial forms of aesthetics and cultural production; and (3) how improvisative production of mean ing and knowledge provides models for new forms of social mobilization that fore ground agency, personality, and difference. The group will ask questions concerning xii PREFACE PREFACE xiii how improvisation expresses notions of ethnicity, race, nation, class, and gender, as 2. Susan Leigh Poster, Adriene Jenik, and George E. Lewis, "Proposai for a 2002-2003 weil as how improvisative works are seen as symbolizing history, memory, agency, Resident Research Group: Global Intentions: Improvisation in the Contemporary difference, persona! narrative, and self-determination.2 Performing Arts;' (2002). The UCHRI research group included Georgina Born, Renee Coulombe, Anthea Kraut, Antoinette LaFarge, Simon Penny, Eric Porter, and Jason The conveners observed that any practice for which such expansive daims could even be Stanyek. Fos ter, Jenik, and Lewis, "Proposai for a 2002-2003 Resident Research Group:' entertained, much less sustained, obviously deserved serions study. Their narrative also 3 identified issues of power, authority, resistance, dominance and subalterity, the role of the individual in relation to the social, and mo dels for social responsibility and action, as salient to the study of improvisation. Improvisation in \he arts was seen to subvert hier archies; challenge totalizing narratives; empower audiences; exemplify new (and quite often utopian) models of social, economie, and political relations; and in one memo rable phrase, "overthrow the patriarchal organization of the art world, preparing fertile ground for a contestatory politics:'3 The research group discussions at UCHRI, which took place weekly over a three month period, often manifested a distinct unease with then-dominant portrayals of improvisation, as weil as with sorne of the scholarship that proceeded from those under standings. In pursuing a critical review of the already substantialliterature on the topic, the group graduaily realized that the purview of a new kind of improvisation studies needed to range weil beyond the arts. That discovery crucially informed the current project. In the first of this two-volume set, we hear from scholars examining topics in cog nition, philosophy, anthropology, cultural history, critical theory, economies, classics, organization science, and mobility on stages ofvarions kinds. We expect readers to jump across sections and volumes, so for both volumes, we have created a nonlinear order of chapters to foster surprise. We encourage readers to extend their engagement into Volume 2, which includes investigations into city planning, music, creativity, media, lit erature, computing technologies, and theology. George E. Lewis and Benjamin Piekut NOTES 1. Dana Reason and Michael Dessen, "Cali for Papers: Improvising Across Borders: An inter-disciplinary symposium on improvised music traditions;' (1999), http:// goldenpages.jpehs.co. uk/static/ conferencearchive/ 9 9-4-iab.html. Accessed December 23, 2014. Presenters included Douglas Ewart, Ed Sarath, Ingrid Manson, Ajay Heble, David Borgo, Sarita Gregory, Bennetta Jules-Rosette, Catherine Sullivan, Eleanor Antin, Eddie Prévost, Alvin Curran, Tom Nunn, Jonathan Glasier, and Jason Stanyek. A vision ary keynote address was delivered by Pauline Oliveros, later published as "Quantum Improvisation: The Cybernetic Presence;' in Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and Culture, ed. Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008). For an account of the conference, see La Donna Smith, "Improvising Across Borders, the Symposium on Improvisation: A Review and Persona! Account;' (1999), http://www. the-improvisor.com/improvising_across_borders.htm. Accessed December 23, 2014. ········································································································ INTRODUCTION On Critical Improvisation Studies ········································································································ GEORGE E. LEWIS AND BENJAMIN PIEKUT CuLTURAL historian Andreas Huyssen has perceptively observed that Fluxus, an art movement that featured improvisation as a key element, was "an avant-garde born out of the spirit of music .... [F] or the first time in the twentieth century, music played the leading part in an avant-garde movement that encompassed a variety of artistic media and strategies:'1 We would like to venture that critical improvisation