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 studies was born out of a similar spirit: music scholars and practitioner-scholars have taken important leadership roles in the field. Reflecting the pre-eminent position of music in discus­ sions of improvisation in performance, critical improvisation studies draws substan­ tially from musical experience. In his essay for this Handbook, ethnomusicologist Bruno Nettl, one of the pioneers of twentieth-century scholarship on improvisation, found it "surprising that the word 'improvisation' (or any of its synonyms) appears rarely, if ever, in the early literature of ethnomusicology, and the concept is virtually untouched by the early scholars in this field:' While acknowledging that music historians had been inter­ ested in improvisation since at least the late nineteenth century, Nettl cites the work of Hungarian scholar Ernest Ferand as "the first attempt to synthesize the various kinds of improvisation in Western art music as a single concept:'2 Around the 196os, ethnomusicologists began producing detailed case studies of musical improvisation, concentrating on jazz, Hindustani and Carnatic classical music, and Iranian (Persian) music-a particular focus ofNettl's that formed the basis for his important article, "Thoughts on Improvisation: A Comparative Approach:'3 Since the mid-1970s and moving into the 198os, historical musicology's increasing interest in improvisation has gone hand in hand with the field's turn to cultural history, popular music studies, and the investigation of experimental music scenes, as expressed by the term "new musicology:' William Kinderman's work on Beethoven; Annette Richards and Kenneth Hamilton's work on European Romanticism (a topic Dana Gooley extends in this Handbook); John Rink's work in music theory on Heinrich Schenker; the work of Anna Maria Busse Berger, Julie Cumming, Peter Schubert, and Handbook contributor 2 GEORGE E. LEWIS AND BENJAMIN PIEKUT INTRODUCTION 3

Leo Treitler on medieval music; and the editors' engagement with experimental music, have produced important texts for the field, we took the view that critical and theoretical sound art, and interactive technology constitute only a small part of musicology's cur­ approaches would best enable cross-disciplinary conversation. rent engagement with improvisation studies. 4 Proceeding from the example of Fluxus, however, critical improvisation studies is creating an agenda in which the arts become part of a larger network tracing the entire DEFINITIONS AND ISSUES ...... human condition of improvisation. Critical improvisation studies has "exploded" in recent years, with a surge in interdisciplinary inquiry across many artistic and nomi­ nally nonartistic fields; for this Handbook, we commis~ioned new articles from a sizable Once upon a time (at least in musical scholarship ), constructing a definition of improvi­ group of distinguished senior and emerging scholars representing a wide variety of dis­ sation seemed a relatively straightforward matter. The Oxford Dictionary ofMusic's pithy ciplines in the humanities, sciences, and the arts. definition was typical, framing improvisation as a performance conducted "according One might look to musicology and ethnomusicology as among the earliest areas in to the inventive whim of the moment, i.e. without a written or printed score, and not 8 which the study of improvisation might have gained fraction, but we have evidence from memorY:' These perspectives appeared to draw implicitly upon an ideologically from Handbook essays by literary scholars Glyn Norton, Timothy Hampton, Angela driven dialectic between improvisation and composition, reflecting widespread conten­ Ester hamm er, and Erik Simpson, as well as a recent edited volume by Timothy McGee, tion regarding not just the nature of improvisation, but its propriety as well. This debate that serious scholarly and informed lay attention to improvisations effects and histo­ dovetailed with improvisation's fraught status in Western classical music history and ries, both within and outside of the arts, have been an integral part of world intellectual culture, in which improvisation, particularly since the eighteenth century, was com­ history since early in the Common Era.5 For example, spontaneous oral composition pared with the practice of composition, with clear prejudices in favor of the latter's pre­ has a very long history, appearing in the political arena well before the advent of the sumed advantages of unity and coherence in musical utterance. eighteenth-century Italian improvvisatori. One of the earliest focused critical works The British experimental guitarist Derek Bailey's Improvisation: Its Nature and on improvisation, the first-century Institutio Oratoria of Quintilian, was forgotten for Practice in Music, one of the most widely cited books on the subject, simply avoids cre­ over a millennium until the sixteenth-century recrudescence of the theory and practice ating a definition at all, preferring to describe cases in which improvisation-as Bailey of extemporaneous rhetoric in Europe. A 1947 book by a Catholic nun, Sister Miriam understands it-works, in order to fulfill the remit of the book to divine its nature and Joseph's Shakespeare's Use of the Arts ofLanguage, neatly analyzes and classifies the vast practice. Similarly, this Handbook makes no explicit attempt to negotiate a single over­ number of rhetorical deviees that Elizabethan schoolchildren of Shakespeare's time arching definition of improvisation. Rather, as we see it, the critical study of improvi­ were expected to learn to deploy in extemporaneous debate. 6 sation seeks to examine improvisations effects, interrogate its discourses, interpret Thus, while recognizing the important historical role played by music in the practice narratives and histories related toit, discover implications of tho se narratives and histo­ of improvisation, it is entirely in keeping with this larger history of improvisation as an ries, and uncover its ideologies. aspect of the broader human condition that our Handbook is intended to explore both Particularly before 1995, scholarly commentary on improvisation in the West was artistic and non-artistic ways in which improvisation functions in culture. We therefore found largely in discussions of traditional artistic expressive media-most centrally, asked authors to take particular care to contextualize their work in dialogue with larger music, dance, theater, and their tributaries. Reflecting its status as the West's preeminent debates and histories in their own and other fields. improvised music, jazz received a large share of scholarly attention early on, both appre­ We also decided to concentrate on theoretical, metatheoretical, critical, and histori­ ciative and disapprobative, from social scientists and philosophers in particular, includ­ 9 cal engagements with improvisation. We fully recognize that this focus tended to leave ing Alan Merriam, Howard S. Becker, and Theodor Adorno. out other encounters with the topic, sorne of which have been influential and even pre­ In dance, as Cynthia Novack, Melinda Tufnell, andAnn Cooper Albright have exten­ dominant, particularly in treatments of artistic practice. For instance, we decided not to sively docurnented, the emergence of contact improvisation in the 1970s was crucial to feature (auto)ethnographies, analytical case studies, or treatments ofparticular tradi­ an emerging experimentalism. In theater, the first-person accounts and methodological tions, methods, practices, genres, or works. Also essentially absent here are sorne regu­ interventions of Keith Johnstone were highly influential, while the work of Chicago's larly recurring features of edited volumes on traditional artistic media (in particular, Second City scene looked back to the work of Konstantin Stanislavski and the sixteenth­ the performing arts), such as (auto )biographies, interviews, first-person narratives, and century commedia dell'arte. The work of Handbook contributors Susan Leigh Poster, how-to discussions of practice. Finally, although sorne of our contributors discuss music Amy Seham, Thomas DeFrantz, Danielle Goldman, and Anthea Kraut has opened up pedagogy, we decided to forgo discussions of skill development, and/or working with this area of scholarship with additional perspectives on issues of race, class, gender, and children on musical improvisation.? Although these kinds of writing on improvisation sexuality.10 4 GEORGE E. LEWIS AND BENJAMIN PIEKUT INTRODUCTION 5

All three media attracted the attention of specialists in wellbeing and pedagogy-such formulation reminds us that the process-product opposition inevitably becomes as Émile Jaques-Dalcroze, Fritz Hegi, Tony Wigram, and Patricia Shehan Campbell­ mapped onto the improvisation-composition binary in Western music scholarship, as who developed therapies based in improvisation.11 The issues in this literature are well as the great divide between low and high culture that is now so regularly bridged. well summarized and extended in the Handbook article by Raymond MacDonald and Bis essay is one of many that invoke the process-product discussion as a way of open­ Graeme Wilson. Psychological, psychiatrie, and psychoanalytic strategies employed ing the door to discussions of whether improvised music meets the criteria of the work improvisation as well, as in work by John Byng-Hall on family counseling.l2 concept in Western music. A large number of key themes resonate throughout much earlier commentary. Anticipating the 1990s work of ethnomusicologist Paul Berliner on jazz, Berliner, archi­ However, most of them can be taxonomized un der a number of master tropes, the first tectural designer Charles Jencks's 1972 bookAdhocism: The Case for Improvisation used the 1 of which concerns a certain reluctance actually to use the term improvisation in discus- term improvisation as a trope for a pro cess of "using an available system or dealing with an sions of the practice. As a 2002 research proposai by Susan Poster, Adriene Jenik, and existing situation in a new way to solve a problem:'20 Jencks declared that the principle/ George E. Lewis noted, in art and music histories and criticism, "improvisative prac­ practice of adhocism was observable in and applicable to "many human endeavours;' an tices were often erased, masked, or otherwise discussed without reference to the term. observation also made byphilosopher Gilbert Ryle, writing in 1976. In one ofhis last essays, Substitutions such as 'happening; 'action: and 'intuition' often masked the presence of titled simply "Improvisation;' Ryle intimates that "I shall soon be reminding you of sorne improvisation:'13 Even one of the most frequently cited texts among later generations of the familiar and unaugust sorts of improvisations which, just qua thinking beings, we all in improvisation studies, sociologist Erving Goffman's 1959 The Presentation of Self in essay every day of the week, indeed in every hour of the waking daY:'21 Even ifwe may admit Everyday Life, never invokes the term.14 that, on sorne level, not all of our activities are improvised, the line between improvised and Related to the trope of masking is the trope of neglect, a point made by Nettl in the title nonimprovised activities may not be as bright as we suppose, and it maywell be that it is the of the introduction to his 1998 co-edited volume, In The Course of Performance: ''An Art non-improvised event that stands out as an anomalous event in the flow of everyday life. Neglected in Scholarship:' This trope tends to animate first-generation new improvisation For example, in his influential book, The Improvisation ofMusical Dialogue, philosopher­ studies; thus, in compensation for the massive Western cultural investment in neglect, theologian and Handbook contributor Bruce Ellis Benson identifies several improvisative dismissal, parody, and general opposition to improvisation amid which their work was moments within the nominally non-improvised activity of music composition.22 appearing, later scholars often (over)valorized the practice. For instance, as David Gere Ryle's essay invokes the quotidian and transposes the language of adhocism to a near­ noted in a 2003 collection of essays on dance improvisation, "To improvise, it is held, is universal register that sounds a lot like "using an available system or dealing with an to engage in aimless, even talentless, noodling:'15 Gere provides his own riposte, averring existing situation in a new way": that "improvisation is by its very nature among the most rigorous ofhuman endeavors:'16 Indeed, writers have emphasized that exhibitions of mastery and virtuosity compose I want now to go further and to show that ... to be thinking wh at he is here and now part of the pleasure of improvisation. Domenico Pietropaolo identifies this as a preoc­ up against, he must both be trying to adjust himself to just this present once-only sit­ cupation of long standing, to be found not only in musical genres, but also in the tra­ uation and in doing this to be applying lessons already learned. There must be in his response a union of sorne Ad Hockery with sorne know-how. If the normal human dition of medieval rhetoric and its forebears in Greek and Roman oratory: "[A] great is not at once improvising and improvising warily, he is not engaging his somewhat legacy of the second sophistic with its celebrated emphasis on virtuosity, improvisation trained wits in sorne momentarily live issue, but perhaps acting from sheer unthink­ 17 was for medieval rhetoric a skill to be mastered after long hours of practice:' ing habit. So thinking, I now declare quite generally, is, at the least, the engaging of Another trope that appears frequently concerns a binary opposition between process partly trained wits in a partly fresh situation. It is the pitting of an acquired compe­ and product. An influential1989 article by sociologist Alan Durant, "Improvisation in tence or skill against an unprogrammed opportunity, obstacle or hazard. It is a bit the Political Economy of Music;' maintains that the experimental improvised music that like putting sorne newwine into old bottles.23 emerged in the United States and especially in Europe in the mid-196os "foregrounds­ in its practice as well as in its name-the relationship between the product of perfor­ Remarkably, Ryle's essay does not mention music at all, an omission that could well be mance (the musical 'text') and the process through which that product cornes into strategie rather than unmindful. After all, had philosophers of music of his day wanted being:'18 Particularly in music, it is frequently asserted that improvisers are more inter­ to think about improvisation, numero us examples were on offer, but other than the work ested in the process of creation than in its products. In the influential formulation of of Vladimir Jankélévitch and Philip Alperson, the philosophy of music offered little Ted Gioia, this renders artistic improvisation (and jazz improvisation in particular) an where improvisation was concerned.24 In this Handbook, Alperson directly confronts "imperfect" art, governed by an "aesthetic ofimperfection:'19 this near-erasure, while Gary Peters, who se 2009 book, The Philosophy ofImprovisation, For Andy Hamilton, writing in 2000, "Gioiàs point about the 'haphazard art' was constitutes a new departure in the field, explores the relation between improvisation and that improvisation fails more often than art music; not that it always fails:' Hamilton's Edmund Husserl's ideas on time-consciousness.25 6 GEORGE E. LEWIS AND BENJAMIN PIEKUT INTRODUCTION 7

One area that could be taken up by scholars working on the aesthetics of improvisa­ Instead of challenging the aesthetic tradition whose concepts fail to account for the tion is the relation between an aesthetics of perfection/imperfection and issues of moral specificities of this improvisational art form, Gioia propagates an understanding of perfectionism taken up by philosophers working largely outside of music but with sig­ jazz in terms of nineteenth -century aesthetics of genius that asks us to ignore this art nificant musical interests, such as Stanley Cavell. Arnold I. Davidson's Handbook essay form's "imperfections" and appreciate improvisation as "the purest expression pos­ 32 addresses moral perfectionism and improvisation, relating it to Pierre Hadot's ideas on sible of the artist's emotions and feelings:' the spiritual exercises conceived by philosophers of antiquity as a means toward trans­ formation of the self, and taking as his example the music of Sonny Rollins. For Hadot, Homologies between musical improvisative practice and sociopolitical expression were given powerful voice in LeRoi Jones's 1963 book, Blues People. 33 Around the same l Attention (prosoche) is the fundamental Stoic spiritual attitude. lt is a continuons vig- tiffie, the phenomenological sociology of Alfred Schutz, in his well-known 1964 essay, ilance and presence of mind, self-consciousness which never sleeps, and a constant "Making Music Together;' asserted that "a study of the social relationships connected tension of the spirit. Thanks to this attitude, the philosopher is fully aware of what he with the musical process may lead to sorne insights valid for many other forms of social does at each instant, and he wills his actions full y .... We could also define this atti- intercourse:'34 Anthropologist John Szwed noted that tude as "concentration on the present moment:' ... Attention (prosoche) allows us to 26 respond immediately to events, as if they were questions asked of us ail of a sudden. The esthetics of jazz demand that a musician play with complete originality, with an assertion of his own musical individuality .... At the same time jazz requires that Samuel Wells's essay for the Handbook approaches ethics from an ecclesiastical per­ musicians be able to merge their unique voices in the totalizing, collective improvi­ spective that invokes improvisational theater. Other philosophers engage improvisa­ sations of polyphony and heterophony. The implications of this esthetic are profound tion without often invoking aesthetics or artistic examples, such as Martha Nussbaum and more than vaguely threatening, for no politic al system has yet be en devised with and Barbara Herman's writing on moral improvisation and situational ethics, as weil as social principles which reward maximal individualism within the frame work of spontaneous egalitarian interaction.35 J. David Velleman's work on collective intentions,27 an issue that Garry Hagberg's article in this Handbook takes up in detail. 28 In this way, improvisation is also frequently symbolically endowed with the potential for Issues of identity have been strongly connected with discussions of musical improvisa­ the overthrow of hierarchical practices. A contrary turn in this discussion is provided tion through such putatively African American cultural tropes as signifying, storytelling by political theorist Yves Citton's invocation of improvisations "diagonality in relation and narrative, persona! voice, and individuality within an aggregate. 29 The emergence of to the traditional parameters of vertical domination and horizontal equality: its (funda­ jazz studies as an important academie discipline has attracted both senior and emerging mentally political) challenge is to devise collective forms of agency which articulate the scholars in film, literature, history, social science, and cultural studies, as weil as music, outstanding power of the participating singularities with the princip le of equal respect generating a set of new questions around jazz that are explored in edited volumes by necessaryto find non-oppressive strength in numbers:'36 In his Handbook article, Citton Daniel Fischlin andAjay Heble, Robert G. O'Meally, Brent Hayes Edwards, Farah Jasmine notices that Bruno Latour's declaration, "Il n'a pas de monde commun; il faut le com­ Griffin, Sherrie Tucker, and many others. 30 As a field, literary studies has made significant poser" can easily be redirected toward a view of an improvised common world in which, contributions to jazz and improvisation studies, and this is reflected in Handbook articles following fellow contributor Daniel Belgrad, a "culture of spontaneity" exercises strong by Walton Muyumba, Patricia Ryan, Hazel Smith, Sara Villa, and Rob Wallace. sociopolitical effects. 37 Particularly in earlier jazz studies literature, the identity of the artist was often deemed In any case, as pointed out by both Stephen Greenblatt and Tzvetan Todorov, improvi­ homologous with the musical results, a relationship that Gioia has forcefully asserted: sation can easily support imperial ideologies.38 Greenblatt and Todorov see in improvi­ sation a practice vital to the European conquest of the New World, in particular via what Indeed, only a particular type of temperament would be attracted to an art form which values spur-of-the-moment decisions over carefully considered choices, the former calls "the ability to both capitalize on the unforeseen and transform given which prefers the haphazard to the premeditated, which views unpredictability as materials into one's own scenario:' Greenblatt calls this ability "opportunistic;' a term a virtue and sees cool-headed calculation as a vice. If Mingus, Monk, Young, and that speaks to the oft-invoked foregrounding of attention and awareness in discussions Parker had been predictable and dependable individuals, it seems unlikely that their of improvisation but without ceding to the practice any kind of moral high ground. music could have remained unpredictable and innovative. 31 The mobile, improvisatory sensibility that Greenblatt identifies in imperial conquest (and the machinations of Iago) also marks epochal change: the sensibility, according It is but a short step from an assumption of this nature to the invocation of notions of to Greenblatt, emerges with the early modern period. We can identify a similar peri­ genius and self-expression, as Edgar Landgraf, one of the most wide-ranging among odizing turn in Michel Foucault's late fascination with Kant's essay on Aufklarung recent improvisation theorists, points out: and the specifie qualities of modernity, which Foucault understood to be a kind of 8 GEORGE E. LEWIS AND BENJAMIN PIEKUT INTRODUCTION 9 improvisational attitude or ethos toward the self, its contemporary moment, and its his­ In any event, attempts to elucidate the nature of constraint have suffered from a torical contingency-in short, a "mode of reflective relation to the present:'39 Although discourse that frames constraints as somehow outside of the system of improvisative he does not use the term improvisation, Foucault adopts many of its key characteristics production itself. Sociologist of science Andrew Pickering saw this discourse as "the in his description of the modern ethos, which is one of continuai performance and test­ language of the prison: constraints are always there, just like the walls of the prison, even ing of the self as an "object of a complex and difficult elaboration:'40 though we only bump into them occasionally (and can learn not to bump into them at The point of this experimental historico-critical attitude, for Foucault, is "both to grasp allf'46 Against this static, essentialist model, Pickering substitutes a related but more the points where change is possible and desirable, and to determine the precise form this flexible notion of resistance: change should take:'41 The critic therefore attempts to ;convert states of domination, in which power relations are frozen or blocked, into mobile sites for the conscious practice of In the real-time analysis of practiee, one has to see resistance as genuinely emergent freedom. 42 The philosopher's employment of improvisationallanguage (experimentation, intime, as a block arising in practice to this or that passage of goal-oriented practiee. adaptation, reflection on the present, mobility) in relation,. to considerations of freedom Thus, though resistance and constraint have an evident conceptual affinity, they are, in his final years was not a co incidence-as many authors have noted, including Ali Jihad as it were, perpendicular to one another intime: constraint is synchronie, antedat­ ing practice and enduring through it, while resistance is diachronie, constitutively Racy in this Handbook, improvisation is frequently represented as symbolic of freedom indexed by time. Furthermore, while constraint resides in a distinctively human and liberation. At the same time, however, moderating this image of improvisation as an realm, resistance, as I have stressed, exists only in the crosscutting of the realms of engine for change is the hillary opposition of freedom/ structure (or freedom/ constraint), human and material agency. 47 routinely invoked in response to portrayals of musical "free improvisation:' In these invocations, improvisation must always be entirely unfettered, leading the Another frequently encountered trope of the constraints on improvisation involves analyst to develop fettered alternatives in the form of "regulated;' "constrained;' or the notion of a knowledge base from which improvisers are said to draw. In music this "structured" improvisation. For example, in her 2004 book Undoing Gender, Judith can involve larger questions of an idiom, genre, or cultural milieu that grounds musi­ Butler presents a model ofhow constraint is encountered in social interaction: cal expression-in Derrida's formulation, "the logic that ties repetition to alterity:'48 In his 1978 book Derek Bailey advanced the now-influential yet still theoretically rocky If gender is a kind of a doing, an incessant activity performed, in part, without one's opposition between idiomatic and non-idiomatic music,49 and analogously, sociologist knowing and without one's willing, it is not for that reason automatie or mechani­ Pierre Bourdieu's 1977 book Outline of a Theory of Practice asserted that improvisation cal. On the contrary, it is a practice of improvisation within a scene of constraint. Moreover, one does not "dd' one's gender alone. One is always "doing" with or for in sociallife draws from a habitus that forecloses the possibility of "unpredictable nov­ another, even if the other is only imaginary. What I cali my "own" gender appears elty:' Bourdieu's notion of the habitus, worked out with and against his ethnography of perhaps at times as something that I author or, indeed, own. But the terms that make rural Berber kinship practices, critiques the romantic notion of unmediated spontane­ up one's own gender are, from the start, outside oneself, beyond oneselfin a social­ ity. He discovers a "durably installed generative principle of regulated improvisations." 5° ity that has no single author (and that radieally contests the notion of authorship For Bourdieu, the habitus exists (again) within a recursive logic, both producing and 43 itself). being produced through praxis. Each individual agent, acting without objectively struc­ tured correlation with others, "wittingly or unwittingly, willy nilly, is a producer and On this view, the primary constraints on human freedom lie in the social encounter reproducer of objective meaning:'51 Tho se who produce these actions manifest a kind of with multiple agents, mediated as they may be through convention, language, tradition, "intentionless invention:' 52 oridiom. More routinely offered than this early irruption of the notion of emergence is the idea Often enough, discussions of constraint turn from the simple presumption of their of improvisation as a process of concatenation and recombination. Ethnomusicologist presence in any situation to a further assertion of a fundamental need for constraint as a Paul Berliner's 1994 book on improvisation in jazz described the practice as "reworking precondition for a "successful" improvisation, an assertion that can appear surprisingly precomposed material and designs in relation to unanticipated ideas conceived, shaped, bereft of corroboration. For example, in his 1964 book on the anthropology of music, and transformed un der the special conditions of performance:' 53 Often these materials Alan Merriam admitted, "While it is clear that there must always be limits imposed were portrayed in jazz parlance as "licks"-stock, memorized phrases (or as the saxo­ upon improvisation, we do not know what these limits are:'44 Perceptions of conceptual phonist Eddie Harris called them in his bo~k-length compilation, "cliché capers")-that rigidity in the frequent mapping of the freedom/structure binary onto low/high culture the players concatenate to produce the music. 54 Cognitive psychologist Philip Johnson­ oppositions, as weil as the improvisation-composition binary (which Merriam adopted Laird terms this (somewhat dismissively) the "motif theory;'55 and points out the the­ in his book), have prompted more nuanced approaches based in theories of mediation, ory's inability to account for change and novelty. Organizational scientists Kathleen 45 su ch as in the recent work of Georgina Born. McGinn and Angela Keros, on the other hand, had no trouble asserting in a 2002 paper 10 GEORGE E. LEWIS AND BENJAMIN PIEKUT INTRODUCTION 11

that, "improvisations are inherently both active and interactive and contain both famil­ and to "go with the flow"), just as the mobile, communal living situations of the young, iar moves and unique approaches:'56 middle-class participants provided the setting and values which nourished this form. Dancers and audiences saw contact improvisation as, to use Clifford Geertz's phrase, Though distinct, motif theory is commonly linked to the notion of the referent or 3 a "model of" and a "model for" an egalitarian, spontaneous way oflife. 6 model to which improvising musicians take recourse57 and to the most widely refer­ enced of all early knowledge-base theories, Albert Lord's 1960 book, The Singer of Here, the role played by memory and history becomes a particularly thorny issue. In Tales. Milman Parry's pioneering discovery of recurring formulas in Homeric verse, a complex contradiction, improvisation is viewed as iterative and repetition-oriented, combined with the fieldwork on Serbo-Croatian oral improvising poets conducted by habit-based, and essentially unrepeatable-all at once. The presumed ephemerality of Parry and his student Lord in the 1930s, uncovered majpr structural analogues between improvisative products became provisionally forestalled via sound recording technolo­ that poetry and Homeric verse, leading to the development of the now influential oral­ gies, and yet the emergence of these technologies also led to novel formulations of the formulaic theory. 58 However, Parry was ambivalent about calling Homer himself an oral iterability/alterity binary in comparisons between the ontology of a real-time improvi­ poet, and possibly reprising the trope of masking, Lord was wary of conflating oral com­ sation and its recorded version. position with improvisation. 59 Both of these cautions, as "'Angela Esterhammer shows in Another dimension of musical improvisation, this time of an aesthetic nature, this volume and other writings, had been thrown to the winds by nineteenth -century is the expectation that a good improvisation be, as Bailey wrote, "a celebration of the commentators.60 Theodor Adorno's anti-jazz polemics again raised the topic of formu­ moment:'64 The best improvisation will be unique, avoid stagnation and the common­ las in the middle of the twentieth century, but in the context of his critique of a capitalist place, and constantly display or embody innovation, originality (albeit via recombi­ "culture industry" that only offered pseudo-individualized performances, standardiza­ nation of existing elements), novelty, freshness, and surprise. The improvisation must tion, and feigned authenticity. 61 also take risks, which come in at least two flavors. Dance the orist Curtis L. Carter main­ Psychologist R. Keith Sawyer's wide-ranging and influential work on improvisation, tained that "improvisation as a form of performance runs the risk of falling into habituai pedagogy, music, and theater is crucially informed by his work as a jazz pianist. Sawyer repetitive patterns that may become stale for both performers and viewers:'65 The other rethinks the notion of the "knowledge base:' this time in terms ofhigher-level cultural kind of risk, as expressed by philosopher David Davies, draws upon the composition­ references rather than individual formulas: improvisation opposition, in that an improviser is "crea ting a musical structure without 66 It's difficult for casual audiences to believe that improvisers do not draw on material the resources for revision available to the composer:' that has be en at least partially worked up in rehearsal, but I've performed with many In his discussion of key issues and ideologies surrounding ethnomusicological inter­ improv groups repeatedly-and attended rehearsals-and I have never seen even a pretations of musical improvisation, Stephen Blum writes, "We are not likely to speak single line used twice. However, all groups draw on culturally shared emblems and of improvisation unless we believe that participants in an event, however they are moti­ stereotypes, which in sorne sense are "preexisting structures:' vated, share a sense that something unique is happening in their presence at the moment of performance:'67 However, improvisation can take place on much larger time scales As might be expected, the nature of improvisative temporality became a major point of than "the moment;' and with much larger forces, such as the long-term coping strategies commentary. An influential formulation in art music distinguishes between aleatoric or that anthropologist Paul Richards discussed in his Handbook essay on farming com­ indeterminate modes of expression and the improvisative. One well-expressed theoreti­ munities in Sierra Leone, where shifting rice cultivation requires dynamic analysis and cal binary opposition is found in a 1971 essay by French musicologist Célestin Deliège, response in real-if extended-time to changing natural and social conditions. A num­ but in the United States the issue is best known through the writings of composer John ber of improvisative methods are deployed that must also change dynamically, and an 62 Cage. extensive knowledge base is one result. Reflecting reaction to the composition-improvisation binary, musical improvisa­ Before concluding an overview of this nature, one would need to consider the fre­ tion is frequently characterized as "real-time composition;' "instant composition;' and quently invoked metaphorical relation between music and spoken language. Johnson­ the like. Most frequently, however, artistic improvisation is portrayed as an immediate Laird's description presents the fundamental idea: (and even unmediated), spontaneous, intuitive creation in real time that bears signifi­ cant analogues to everyday experience. As dance theo rist Cynthia Novack portrayed the If you are not an improvising musician, ,then the best analogy to improvisation is expectations generated by contact improvisation, your spontaneous speech. If you ask yourself how you are able to speak a sequence of English sentences that make sense, then you will find that you are consciously The experience of the movement style and improvisational process itself were thought aware of only the tip of the process. That is why the discipline of psycholinguistics to teach people how to live (to trust, to be spontaneous and "free;' to "center" oneself, exists: psychologists need to answer this question too. 68 -

12 GEORGE E. LEWIS AND BENJAMIN PIEKUT INTRODUCTION 13

Linguist François Grosjean also maintains that spontaneous language production . s drawn from multiple fields and thereby moving beyond the preoccupations of 1ssue ' shares important features with music improvisation, including recourse to knowledge any one. bases. Most directly, Grosjean asserts that "spontaneous language production is a form of improvisation:'69 Extending this insight, Sawyer finds that everyday conversation is "both improvised and collaborative:'70 IMPROVISATION AS A WAY OF LIFE ...... [M]ost everyday conversation is improvisational-no one joins a conversation with a written script, and participants generally cannot predict where the conversation will The view of artistic improvisation as symbolizing social and political formations was l go. Everyday conversation is also collaborative, because no single person controls or dear to many authors in an earlier moment of improvisation studies. Newer critical directs a conversation; instead, the direction of its flow is collectively determined, by engagements with the practice tended to turn this view on its head, finding that social ali of the participants' contributions. This view of conversation as both improvised and political formations themselves improvise and that improvisation not only enacts and collaborative will be my starting point, leading rrw into a discussion of several such formations directly but also is fundamentally constitutive of them. This turn allows key characteristics of group improvisation, characteristics that 1 will argue apply equally to both verbal and musical improvisation. 71 the new critical improvisation studies to free itself from musical and artistic models while encouraging novel theoretical models of musical improvisation that can invoke For Sawyer, the key characteristics of improvisation include the social in a higher register. The kinds of theorizations found in abundance in this Handbook tend to feel com­ • Unpredictable outcome, rather than a scripted, known endpoint; fortable invoking the term improvisation without either special pleadings or the earlier • Moment-to-moment contingency: the next dialogue turn depends on the one just problematizations and maskings. This is in part because important new discussions of before; improvisation are taking place across a large range of fields: anthropology and sociology; • Open to collaboration; organizational, political, cognitive, and computer science; economies, theology, neuro­ • An oral performance, not a written product; science, and psychology; philosophy, cultural studies, and literary theory; gender and • Embedded in the social context of the performance. 72 sexuality studies; architecture and urban planning; education; and many others. In work­ ing with the contributors for this Handbook, we realized early on that scholars working in In Sawyer's work, these features come together to describe a phenomenon of "collab­ these areas did not necessarily situate their work in dialogue with the tropes identified in orative emergence:' In a 2003 book on the topic, he presents an ethnographie study of the previous section of this Introduction, and often had little or no investment in musical improvisational theater in early 1990s Chicago that explores how conversations work, histories and ideologies, such as the cherished opposition between improvisation and using analytic techniques developed for the study of everyday conversation. The result, composition. For instance, McGinn and Keros sought to "define an improvisation in the in Sawyer's terms, presents a challenge to traditional "individualist" psychological context of a negotiation as a coherent sequence of relational, informational, and proce­ 73 methods. dural actions and responses created, chosen, and carried out by the parties during the Ingrid Monson's 1996 book, Saying Something: Jazz Improvisation and Interaction, social interaction:'76 The prosaic and provisional nature of this definition, in expanding provides an important perspective on the ongoing metaphor of music-as-language the frame of reference beyond the artistic, places considerable pressure on ideologies that by situating jazz improvisation as a ldnd of conversation taldng place in the context impose upon the concept of improvisation the special sense of creative autonomy and of African American cultural styles. 74 The work draws upon the linguistics of Michael uniqueness that so many commentators on music portrayed as fundarnental. Silverstein, for whom an everyday conversation amounts to an "improvisational perfor­ Nonetheless, musical improvisation continues to play an important role as a model mance of culture" in which "an interactional text ... is a structure-in-realtime of orga­ for how various fields of scholarship pursue the identification and theorization of nized, segmentable, and recognizable event-units of the order of social organizational improvisative structure and function in human endeavor more generally. For instance, regularity .... [S]ocial action in event-realtime has the capacity to be causally effective in 1998 the influential journal Organization Science devoted an entire issue to the pos­ in the universe of identities as a basis for relationships and further social action:'75 sibilities of conceptually migrating concepts from improvisation toward theories and What emerges from this extended, yet necessarily incomplete, discussion of issues is practices of business management. The issue, which was later published in book form, the futility of drawing boundaries around the critical study of improvisation. Rather, in was one outcome of a 1995 symposium held in Vancouver, Canada, "Jazz as a Metaphor this project, we defer definitions in order to allow the scholarly conversation to wander for Organizing in the 21st CenturY:' The conference included performances by noted into unforeseen areas. Our intent is to place scholars in virtual dialogue, where the total­ Canadian jazz musicians as well as organization scholars such as Frank Barrett, an ity of the compendium itself formulates an articulated, emergent, yet unbounded set of accomplished pianist. GEORGE E. LEWIS AND BENJAMIN PIEKUT INTRODUCTION 15

The title of the issue's introduction, "The Organization Science Jazz Festival: of rules and constraints is never far from a discussion of improvisation, Ciborràs conclu­ Improvisation as a Metaphor for Organizing;' playfully cast individual articles as perfor­ sion is that "ordinary decisions on markets and in hierarchies are de facto improvised, no 81 mances on a festival. Influenced by Berliner's Ihinking in Jazz, contributions by Barrett, matter how rules and norms are supposed to guide and constrain behavior:' Karl Weick, and Mary Jo Hatch spurred the field's now influential "jazz metaphor" for Research in ethnomethodology has exercised significant impact on improvisation reconceiving interaction and creativity in business and management interactions. This studies. Tamotsu Shibutani's 1966 book Improvised News anticipated actor-network metaphor provides one route toward thinking of improvisation in ways that could be theory in its investigation of the circulation of rumor, an outgrowth of his experience in applied to both artistic and nonartistic exchanges. 77 a Japanese American detention camp during World War II. "If enough news is not avail­ Around this same time, Claudio Ciborra, who se wo.çk combined organizational the­ able to meet the problematic situation;' Shibutani wrote, "a definition must be impro­ 82 ory and information systems theory, published another influential book, Ihe Labyrinths vised. Rumor is the collective transaction in which such improvisation occurs:' of Information: Challenging the Wisdom of Systems, in which he introduced notions of Like Ciborra, later generations of computer science theorists worldng on interactive bricolage and what he called "drift" in his work on improvisation in management sys­ systems design, such as Paul Dourish and Philip Agre, also draw upon ethnomethodol­ tems and their associated technologies, including his early studies of the Internet. In ogy. Dourish's interpretation of the ideas of Harold Garfinkel maintains that "work is not 83 Ciborràs words, 50 much 'performed' as achieved through improvisation and local decision-maldng:'

Drifting describes a slight, or sometimes significant, shift of the role and function The ethnomethodological view emphasises the way in which social action is not in concrete situations of usage, compared to the planned, pre-defined, and assigned achieved through the execution of pre-conceived plans or models ofbehaviour, but objectives and requirements that the technology is called upon to perform (irrespec­ instead is improvised moment-to-moment, according to the particulars of the situa­ tive of who plans or defines them, whether they are users, sponsors, specialists, ven­ tion. The sequential structure ofbehaviour is locally organised, and is situated in the 84 dors, or consultants) .78 context of particular settings and times.

For Ciborra, drifting in the life of technological systems takes place in two related arenas: Agre's late-1990s work is critical of the notion of planning as intrinsic to the operation of a real-time, real-world, situated computational system. For Agre, a central question the openness of the technology, its plasticity in response to the re-inventions car­ concerns how ried out by users and specialists, who gradually learn to discover and exploit fea­ tures, affordances, and potentialities of systems. On the other hand, there is the sheer human activity can take account of the boundless variety oflarge and small contin­ unfolding of the actors' being-in-the-workflow and the continuons stream of inter­ gencies that affect our everyday undertaldngs while still exhibiting an overall order­ ventions, tinkering, and improvisations that colour perceptions of the entire system liness and coherence and remaining generally routine? In other words, how can life cycle.79 flexible adaptation to specifie situations be reconciled with the routine organization of activity?85 The encounter between freedom and structure ostensibly played out in musical improvisation also becomes connected with notions of planning. What is frequently Agre maintains that heard is that the best improvisations are unscripted and unplanned, appearing with little or no preconceptions or premeditation, and/or drawing upon intuition and the uncon­ Schemes that rely on the construction of plans for execution will operate poorly in scious mind. Hamilton quotes trumpeter-composer Wadada Leo Smith to the effect a complicated or unpredictable world such as the world of everyday life. In such a that "at its highest level, improvisation [is] created entirely within the improviser at the world it will not be feasible to construct plans very far in advance; moreover, it will moment of improvisation without any prior structuring:'80 routinely be necessary to abort the execution of plans that begin to go awry. If con­ tingency really is a central feature of the world of everyday life, computational ideas As it happens, both Ciborràs work and the improvisative approach to organization and about action will need to be rethought. 86 management theory more generally do call into question the efficacy of traditional mo d­ els and practices of planning. A 1999 Ciborra article contrasts planning-oriented views Asserting that "when future states of the w,orld are genuinely uncertain, detailed plan of organization, such as the work of Allan Newell, Herbert Simon, and the artificial intel­ construction is probably a waste of time;'87 Agre concludes that ligence research of Terry Winograd, with research that he sees as more compatible with real-time choice and memoryprocesses, su ch as the social theory ofAnthony Giddens, the activity in worlds of realistic complexity is inherently a matter of improvisation. By sociology of Alfred Schutz, and the philosophy of Edmund Husserl. While the discourse "inherently" I mean that this is a necessary result, a property of the universe and not 16 GEORGE E. LEWIS AND BENJAMIN PIEKUT INTRODUCTION

simply of a particular species of organism or a particular type of deviee. In particu­ Rethinking traditional approaches to planning has become a focus of the field of lar, it is a computational result, one inherent in the physical realization of complex emergency management, as with recent work by Tricia Wachtendorf, James Kendra, and things.88 David Mendonca. Noting that "improvisation has had something of a checkered history in the emergency management field since its appearance in a disaster response seems to Agre's use of improvisation as a computational metaphor brings him to a definition of suggest a failure to plan for a particular contingency;'95 Wachtendorf and Ken dra none­ improvisation that focuses less on materials, as with Berliner's notion of recombina­ theless assert that "while planning encompasses the normative 'what ought to be do ne: tion, than on an interactionist dynamics of decision making. Agre proposes a view of improvisation encompasses the emergent and actual 'what needs to be done:"96 Indeed, improvisation as "a running argument in which an age:qt decides what to do by conduct­ the authors assert, following sociologist Kathleen Tierney, that "improvisation is a sig­ ing a continually updated argument among various alternatives;' where "individuals nificant feature of every disaster.... [I]f an event does not require improvisation, it is continually choose among options presented by the world around them. Action is not probably not a disaster:'97 realized fantasy but engagement with reality. In particular, thought and action are not One notes in this work on computation and emergency management a very differ­ alternated in great dollops as on the planning view but are bound into a single, continu­ ent viewpoint on the relation between the indeterminate and the improvisative. Rather ous phenomenon:'89 than posing a distinction between the two based on directed acts of aesthetic choice, The relationship of improvisation to planning has been explored at the level of man­ these non-artistic theorists assert an understanding of indeterminacy as an aspect of agement of software projects, particularly the emerging "agile project management" everyday life that is addressed improvisatively. Also absent in this expanded context are (APM) model. Stephen Leybourne sees agile models moving away from "plan-then ideological debates common in musical research concerning whether or not improvisa­ execute" paradigms toward a multistage model: "envision, speculate, explore, adapt, and tions must inevitably rely upon preset, memorized formulae, rules, and cultural mo dels. close:'9o "If the known attributes of APM are mapped onto these accepted and empiri­ Finally, as we see in a number of this Handbook's articles, freedom and structure are cally derived constructs of improvisational worldng;' Leybourne maintains, "the over­ not taken as oppositional.98 Rather, structure and freedom-as well as power, agency laps and common areas can then emerge. These constructs are creativity, innovation, and constraint-become emergent in improvisative interaction. Indeed, in concert with bricolage, adaption, compression, and learning:'91 those fin de siècle daims that improvisation is uniformly subversive, resistant, or uto­ Of course, not everyone views bricolage as an unalloyed good. Togolese economist pian, we might also wish to see more research into the many other kinds of communi­ Kako Nubukpo's scathing critique of African economie planning deploys the term ties and institutions that have been "empowered" by their mastery of improvisational pejoratively: practices, such as the global financial industries, or the nation-state, which has proven remarkably resilient in spite of the rumors of its passing. Few African economists have a clear theoretical positioning. We are primarily in Computer scientists have also deployed mathematical analogues to improvisation, the register of bricolage, of opportunism, or if you want to be kinder, of pragma­ notably in process control algorithms, and in experimental models of Internet search tism! There are two kinds of bricolage. Sorne are not bothered bythe inconsistencies, engines. The evolutionary "harmony search'' algorithm, in wide use in civil engineering provided their power positions are assured .... The others have no clear theoretical and industrial applications, is a metaheuristic path optimization algorithm that adopts positioning: we are in situations characterized by the absence of discussion of mac­ the metaphor of a jazz trio searching for the ideal harmony. roeconomie paradigms, with improvisation in the face of societal challenges.92

Musical performances seek a best state (fantastic harmony) determined by aesthetic The result of this lack of expertise, as Nubukpo sees it, results in improvisation: estimation, as the optimization algorithms seek a best state (global optimum­ "Economie improvisation is the contextually rational response of African governments minimum cost or maximum benefit or efficiency) determined by objective function to events perceived as random. The lack of control of the instruments of economie sov­ evaluation. Aesthetic estimation is determined by the set of the sounds played by ereignty (currency, budget) translates in practice to an obligation to react instead of act­ joined instruments, just as objective function evaluation is determined by the set of ing:'93 On the surface, Nubukpôs lament is reminiscent of Richards's account, in this the values produced by component variables; the sounds for better aesthetic esti­ Handbook, of shifting cultivation in Sierra Leone. However, what emerges from the mation can be improved through practice after practice, just as the values for better economist's account seems more in tune with a remark by Handbook contributors Ton objective function evaluation can be impr~wed iteration by iteration. 99 Matton and Christopher Dell, who in their book on improvisation and urban studies, point out that "improvisation is often experienced as something rather forced than as Beyond such specifie applications in search algorithms, the general relation between emancipatory .... Well, we had to improvise, is what people say, in the hope that soon a technology and improvisation is explored by a number of contributors in this situation will be established where order rules again:'94 Handbook. Tim Blackwell and Michael Young explore both the mathematics and the 18 GEORGE E. LEWIS AND BENJAMIN PIEKUT INTRODUCTION 19 social aesthetics of "live algorithms:' Computer programs that can be said to impro­ CONCLUSION vise, as well as interacting in meaningful ways with improvising musicians, go back to ...... ·········· the 1970s advent of relatively small, portable minicomputers and microcomputers that made live, interactive computer music a practical possibility. During the 1970s and Since we began this project, a number of influential volumes have emerged that engage 198os, composer-performers such as Joel Chadabe, Salvatore Martirano, Frankie Mann, improvisation in unusual and exciting ways that challenge prior orthodoxies within David Behrman, George Lewis, David Rosenboom, and the California Bay Area scene fields, revise histories that preserve traditionallacunae in the areas of gender and race, surrounding the League of Automatic Music Composers (Jim Horton, John Bischoff, and construct new historiographies. Spearheaded by University of Guelph scholars Rich Gold, Tim Perkis, Mark Trayle, and others) begjln creating computer programs Ajay Heble (literary theory) and Daniel Fischlin (theater studies), the Improvisation, that interacted with each other and human musicians to create music collectively, Community, and Social Practice (ICASP) international research initiative has con­ blurring the boundaries between improvisation (in the traditional sense of purposive sistently provided leadership in the field. Founded with a grant from Canadàs Social human activity) and machine interactivity. Much of this work was influenced by dis­ Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), ICASP's remit begins with the courses in artificial intelligence, and MIT's Marvin Minsky, one of the founders of the assertion that "musical improvisation is a crucial model for political, cultural, and ethi­ field and a virtuoso improvising pianist, was one of the first to propose musical improvi­ cal dialogue and action:'103 100 sation as a gateway to understanding larger issues ofknowledge representation. Later, ICASP features seven interrelated research areas: gender and the body, law and jus­ as computing technology underwent its second wave of miniaturization, new possibili­ tice, pedagogy, social aesthetics, social policy, text and media, and transcultural under­ ties opened up for collaborative, networked improvisation; Ge Wang surveys sorne of standing, all of which come together to produce an ongoing series of colloquia, summer these new possibilities for mobile music making in his contribution to these volumes. institutes, publications, postdoctoral fellowships, and its open-source peer-reviewed Another widely influential figure in this area was the groundbreaking psychologist-per­ web journal, Critical Studies in Improvisation/Études critiques en improvisation.104 One cussionist-computer scientist David Wessel, who passed away suddenlywhile preparing important focus of ICASP's social policy team is on ethics, democracy, and human his article for this Handbook. rights, as represented in recent books by Tracey Nicholls, as well as Heble, Fischlin, Technologists often adopt improvisational theater as an area of focus. Research on George Lipsitz, and Jesse Stewart. Other ICASP-affiliated authors have contributed to computers as intelligent agents in virtual theater is the subject of Handbook articles by legal studies, with recent books and articles by Sara Ramshaw, Tina Piper, and Desmond Celia Pearce and Brian Magerko, while installation and gaming contexts are explored by Manderson.l05 For example, Ramshaw's analysis of Jacques Derridàs remarks on impro­ Simon Penny and D. Fox Harrell. Psychologist Clément Canonne, working on Collective visation cites the "openly responsive dimension of improvisation, which, although never Free Improvisation (CFI), references earlier work by Michael Pelz-Sherman, who calls complete or absolute, glanees toward the singular other and keeps alive the possibility of free improvisation "heteroriginal" music, in which artistic decisions are made in per­ democracy, ethics, resistance and justice in society:'106 In fact, bath scholars and journal­ formance relationships between multiple agents who seek to construct a shared repre­ ists routinely offer the notion of musical improvisation as symbolic of democracy itself. 01 sentation of the improvisation.l Other models of real-time performances, both over Like ICASP, this Handbook is designed to serve as a marker for what the interdisci­ the Internet and in live broadcasts, are recounted in Handbook articles by Sher Doruff, plinary study of improvisation has already achieved in terms of an exemplary literature. Antoinette LaFarge, and Adriene Jenik (in the human-to-human domain) and by David Particularly influential on this project has been the work of many scholars we have not Rothenberg, who discusses his sound improvisation with a very tractable humpback already cited in this Introduction. The five edited volumes on improvisation in Walter whale. These articles also consider ways in which improvisation fosters new imaginings Fahndrich's Improvisation series (1992-2003) have included work on improvisative of the aesthetic, social, cultural, and political dimensions ofhuman-computer and inter­ dimensions in semiotics, psychology, anthropology, music therapy, aesthetics, film, species interactivity. dance, and linguistics, among other fields. Research at the nexus of improvisation, neuroscience, music, and cognitive science As this Handbook goes to press, weâ like to make mention of sorne recently pub­ has also provided new discoveries about the brain, as Aaron Berkowitz, David Borgo, lished books that bode well for the diverse future of the field: Improvising Medicine, Julie Ellie Hisama, Roger Dean and Freya Bailes, and Vijay Iyer discuss here. This research is Livingstone's ethnographie study of an African oncology ward; Peter Goodwin Heltzel's presaged by the 198os and 1990s work of Jeff Pressing, a crucially important early figure ringing Pentecostal call to justice, Resurrection City: A 7heology ofImprovisation; Edgar in improvisation studies. His models of how people improvise encompass physiology Landgraf's Improvisation as Art; and the important volume edited by Hans-Friedrich and neuropsychology, motor control, skill, and timing; music theory and oral folklore; Bromann, Gabriele Brandstetter, and Annemarie Matzke, Improvisieren: Paradoxien des 102 artificial intelligence; and much more. Unvorhersehbaren. 107 20 GEORGE E. LEWIS AND BENJAMIN PIEKUT INTRODUCTION 21

With scholarship of this quality emerging, we can be sure that this Handbook will John Rink, "Schenker and Improvisation;' Journal ofMusic 1heory 37, no. 1 (Spring 1993); become a spur to further exploration. So much work has been going on in so many George E. Lewis, "Improvised Music after 1950: Afrological and Eurological Perspectives;' Black Music Research Journal16, no. 1 (1996): 91-123; Benjamin Piekut, Experimentalism fields that as researchers and readers become more familiar with the diversity of new Otherwise: The New York Avant-Garde and Its Limits (Berkeley: University of California approaches to improvisation-perhaps more than ever before-they will be surprised Press, 2011); Melina Esse, "Encountering tlle Improvvisatrice in Italian Opera:' Journal to find analogies and similarities between findings in disciplines seemingly far distant of the American Musicological Society 66, no. 3 (Fall 2013): 709-770; Benjamin Piekut, from their own. In the co ming years, we hope to see new work that engages with topic "Indeterminacy, Free Improvisation, and tlle Mixed Avant-Garde: Experimental Music areas in the posthumanities: new materialism, vitalism, and assemblage theory, among in London, 1965-75;' Journal of the American Musicological Society 67, no. 3 (Fall 2014): others. Spanning a wide range of disciplines in the hpmanistic, natural, and social sci­ 769-824. ences, this research examines concepts-like adaptation, self-organization, uncertainty, 5· See Timotlly J. McGee, Improvisation in the Arts of the Middle Ages and Renaissance translation, and emergence-that could be profitably viewed through an improvisa­ (Kalamzoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2003). tional squint. If, as Rosi Braidotti has recently observed, new work on the posthuman 6. Sister Miriam Joseph, C.S.C., Shakespeare's Use of the Arts of Language (New York: has already begun (and will continue) to bridge the "'two cultures of science and the Columbia University Press, 1947). 7· For excellent examples of these kinds of writings on improvisation, see Patricia humanities, then critical improvisation studies is well poised to make significant con­ 108 Shehan Campbell and Lee Higgins, Pree ta Be Musical: Group Improvisation in Music tributions to these unfolding conversations. Indeed, one important outcome of the (Lanham MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2010); Cornelius Cardew, "Towards an Ethic of volume is to demonstrate that at levels of theory and practice, improvisation provides Improvisation;' in Treatise Handbook (London: Edition Peters, 1971); Cornelius Cardew, a site for the most fruitful kind of interdisciplinarity. One can also expect that a volume Scratch Music (London: Latimer New Dimensions, 1972); William Forsytlle, Improvisation of this magnitude and scope will generate sorne controversies as to the propriety and Technologies: A Tool for the Analytical Dance Bye (with CD-ROM) (Ostfildern: Hatje usefulness of studying improvisation. In our view, sparldng this ldnd of debate is a prime Cantz, [1999] 2012); Malcolm Goldstein, Sounding The Full Circle: Concerning Music objective. Improvisation and Other Related Matters (Sheffield, Vt: Self-published, 1988), http:/ /www. We feel that the study of improvisation presents a new animating paradigm for schol­ frogpeak.org/ unbound/ goldstein/ goldstein_fullcircle. pdf?lbisphpreq=1; Keith Johnstone, arly inquiry. Borrowing a conceit of David Harvey's, we can consider a fundamental Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre (London: Methuen, 1981); Stephen Nachmanovitch, "condition'' of improvisation, and the essays we have commissioned for this Handbook Pree Play: Improvisation in Life and Art (New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam, 1990); Pauline Oliveros, Software for People (Baltimore: Smitll Publications, 1984); Leo Smitll, demonstrate the ways in which the study of improvisation is now informing a vast array Notes (8 Pieces) Source, A New World Music: Creative Music (New Haven, CT: Kiom Press, of fields of inquiry. Our hope is for these volumes to serve as both reference and starting 1973); Viola Spolin, Improvisation for the Theatre (Evanston: Nortllwestern University point for a new, exciting, and radically interdisciplinary field. Press, [1963]1983); Miranda Tufnell and Chris Crickmay, Body Space Image: Notes Toward Improvisation and Performance (London: Virago Press, 1993); Frances-Marie Uitti, "Impossible Music" [special issue on improvisation], Contemporary Music Review 25, NoTES no. s/6 (zoo6); Ruth Zaporah, Improvisation on the Edge: Notes from On and Off Stage (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2014); John Zorn, ed. Arcana: Musicians on Music, 1. Andreas Huyssen, "Back to the Future: Fluxus in Context;' in Twilight Memories: Marking Vols 1-7 (New York: Hips Road/Tzadik, 2000-2014). Also see the classic autoetllnographic Time in a Culture ofAmnesia (New York: Routledge, 1994), 198. account of the acquisition of improvisational skill, David Sudnow, Ways of the Hand: The 2. Bruno Nettl, Volume 2. See Ernest T. Ferand, Die Improvisation in der Musik: Eine entwick­ Organization ofimprovised Conduct (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978). lungsgeschichtliche und psychologische Untersuchung (Zurich: Rhein-Verlag, 1938). 8. "Improvisation;' in The Oxford Dictionary ofMusic, znd revised edition (New York: Oxford 3· Bruno Nettl, "Thoughts on Improvisation: A Comparative Approach;' The Musical University Press, zoo6). Available at http:/ /www.oxfordmusiconline.com:8o/subscriber/ Quarterly 6o, no.1 (1974): 1-19. article/opr/t237/es140. Accessed December s, 2011. 4. See William Kinderman, "Improvisation in Beethoven's Creative Process:' in Musical 9· See Theodor Adorno, "Perennial Fashion-Jazz:' in Prisms, trans. Samuel Weber and Improvisation: Art, Education, and Society, ed. Gabriel Solis and Bruno Nettl, 296-312 Shierry Weber (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1981); Alan P. Merri am, The Anthropology ofMusic (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2009); Annette Richards, The Pree (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 119-132; Howard S. Becker, Outsiders: Fantasia and the Musical Picturesque (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Studies in the Sociology ofDeviance (New York: Free Press, 1963). Anna Maria Busse Berger, (Berkeley: University of Medieval Music and the Art ofMemory 10. Essays by these Handbook contributors are in Volume 1. Also see Amy Seham, Whose California Press, zoos); Leo Treitler, With Voice and Pen: Coming ta Know Medieval Song Improv Is It Anyway? Beyond Second City (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, zoo1); and How It Was Made (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); Leo Treitler, "Medieval Susan Leigh Foster, Dances 1hat Describe 1hemselves: The Improvised Choreography Improvisation;' World ofMusic 33, no. 3 (1991): 66-91; Kennetll Hamilton, After the Golden of Richard Bull (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2002); Danielle Goldman, I Age: Romantic Pianism and Modern Performance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008 ); Want ta Be Ready: Improvised Dance as a Practice of Freedom (Ann Arbor: University of ------

22 GEORGE E. LEWIS AND BENJAMIN PIEKUT INTRODUCTION 23

Michigan Press, 2010 ); Thomas F. DeFrantz and Anita Gonzalez, eds., Black Performance 27. See William Day, "Knowing as Instancing: Jazz Improvisation and Moral Perfectionism;' Theory (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014). The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 58, no. 2 (Spring 2ooo): 99-m; J. David n. See Campbell, Pree to Be Musical: Group Improvisation in Music; John Byng-Hall, Velleman, "How to Share an Intention;' Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 57, no. Rewriting Family Scripts: Improvisation and Systems Change (New York: Guilford 1 (March 1997): 29-50; Barbara Herman, Moral Literacy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995); Émile Jaques-Dalcroze, Rhythm, Music, and Education, trans. Harold Press, 2007); Martha C. Nussbaum, Love's Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature F. Rubinstein (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1921); Fritz Hegi, Improvisation und (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990 ). Musiktherapie: Moglichkeiten und Wirkungen von freier Musik (Wiesbaden: Dr. Ludwig 23. Hagberg's many contributions to the philosophy of improvisation include his guest edi­ Reichert Verlag, [1986] 2010); Tony Wigram, Improvisation: Methods and Techniques for torship of the special issue of the Journal ofAesthetics and Art Criticism (58, no. 2, Spring Music Therapy-Clinicians, Educators, and Students (jLondon: Jessica Kingsley, 2004). 2000) on improvisation in the arts, as well as contributing, along with William Day, Philip 12. Byng-Hall, Rewriting Family Scripts. Alperson, and others, to that journal's 2010 "Symposium on Improvisation" ( 68, no. 3, 13. Susan Poster, Adriene Jenik, and George E. Lewis, "Proposai for a 2002-2003 Resident Summer 2010). Research Group: Global Intentions: Improvisation in the Contemporary Performing 29. Henry Louis Gates's notion of signifying, developed in the context of literary theory, h~ • has become highly influential in jazz studies. See Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Signifying 14. See Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: Anchor Monkey: A Theory ofAfrican-American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Books, 1959). Press, 1988). Among the many articles invoking notions of storytelling and persona! 15. David Gere and Ann Cooper Albright, eds., Taken by Surprise: A Dance Improvisation voice, see Lewis, "Improvised Music after 1950: Afrological and Eurological Perspectives:' Reader (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press), xv. For Samuel Floyd's notion of "individuality within the aggregate;' see Samuel A. Floyd, 16. Gere and Albright, Taken by Surprise, xlv. Jr., The Power of Black Music: Interpreting Its History from Africa to the United States 17. Domenico Pietropaolo, "Improvisation in the Arts;' in Timothy J. McGee, ed., (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). Improvisation in the Arts of the Middle Ages and Renaissance (Kalamzoo: Medieval 30. Among the many new and exciting volumes that have appeared under the aegis of jazz Institute Publications, 2003), 9. studies in recent years are Paul Berliner, Thinking in Jazz: The Infinite Art ofImprovisation 18. Alan Durant, "Improvisation in the Political Economy of Music;' in Music and the Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press); Daniel Fischlin, Ajay Heble, and George Lipsitz, ofCulture, ed. Christopher Norris (New York: St. Martins Press, 1989 ), 253. eds., The Pierce Urgency of Now: Improvisation, Rights, and the Ethics of Co-Creation 19. See Ted Gioia, "Jazz: The Aesthetics oflmperfection;' The Hudson Review 39, no. 4 (1987): (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2013); Ingrid Monson, Saying Something: 585-6oo. Also see Andy Hamilton, "The Art of Improvisation and the Aesthetics of Jazz Improvisation and Interaction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Robert Imperfection;' British Journal ofAesthetics 40, no. 1 (2ooo ): 168-185. G. O'Meally, ed., The Jazz Cadence ofAmerican Culture (New York: Columbia University 20. Charles Jencks, Adhocism: The Case for Improvisation (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2013 Press, 1998 ); Robin D. G. Kelley, "Dig They Freedom: Meditations on History and the Black [1972]), vii. Avant-Garde;' Lenax Avenue 3 (1997): 13-27; Brent Hayes Edwards and John F. Szwed, ''A 21. Gilbert Ryle, "Improvisation;' Mi nd 85, no. 337 (1976): 69. Bibliography of Jazz Poetry Criticism;' Callaloo 25, no. 1 (2002): 338-346; Krin Gabbard, 22. Bruce Ellis Benson, The Improvisation of Musical Dialogue: A Phenomenology of Music ed., Representing Jazz, Jazz Among the Discourses (two books) (Durham, NC: Duke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). University Press, 1995); Aldon Lynn Nielsen, Black Chant: Languages ofAfrican-American 23. Ryle, "Improvisation;' 77- Postmodernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Charles O. Hartman,Jazz 24. Philip Alperson, "On Musical Improvisation;' The Journal ofAesthetics and Art Criticism Text: Voice and Improvisation in Poetry, Jazz, Song (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University 43, no. 1, Autumn (1984): 17-29; Vladimir Jankélévitch, Liszt: Rhapsodie et Improvisation Press, 1991); Robert G. O'Meally, Brent Hayes Edwards, and Farah Jasmine Griffin, eds., (Paris: Flammarion, [1955]1998). Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004); 25. Gary Peters, The Philosophy of Improvisation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, Nichole T. Rustin and Sherrie Tucker, eds., Big Bars: Listeningfor Gender in Jazz Studies 2009). Coincidentally, a recent PhD dissertation uses evidence from the persona! archives (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008). of Derek Bailey to advance the possibility that the guitarist was also influenced by Husserl, 31. Gioia, "Jazz: The Aesthetics oflmperfection;' 590. via his engagement with an unpublished treatment of Husserlian time-consciousness, 32. Edgar Landgraf, "Improvisation: Form and Event, A Spencer-Brownian Calculation;' written as an undergraduatesenior thesis byone of us (Lewis) in 1974 and borrowed bythe in Emergence and Embodiment: New Essays on Second-Order Systems Theory, ed. Bruce guitarist sometime in the 198os. See Dominic Lash, "Metonymy as a Creative Structural Clarke and Mark B. N. Hansen (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2009), Principle in the Work of J. H. Prynne, Derek Bailey and Helmut Lachenmann, with a 202n26. Creative Component" (PhD dissertation, Brunei University, 2010). 33. LeRoi Jones, Blues People: Negro Music in White America (New York: William Morrow, 26. Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way ofLife: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault, ed. 1963). Arnold I. Davidson (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 1995), 84-85. A contrasting approach to 34. Alfred Schutz, "Making Music Together: A Study in Social Relationship;' in Alfred Schutz, consciousness is presented by Edward Sarath's Handbook essay. Collected Papers 2: Studies in Social Theory, ed. Arvid Broderson (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1964), 159. 24 GEORGE E. LEWIS AND BENJAMIN PIEKUT INTRODUCTION 25

35. John Szwed, "JosefSkvorecky and the Tradition ofJazz Literature;' World Literature Today Academie Press, 1991): 291-326. The long-out-of-print Harris book is Eddie Harris, Jazz 54, no. 4 (1980 ): 588. Cliché Capers (Chicago: Wardo Enterprises, 1973). . Kathleen L. McGinn and Angela T. Keros, "Improvisation and the Logic of Exchange in 36. Citton, this Handbook, vol. 1. 56 37. Daniel Belgrad, The Culture ofSpontaneity: Improvisation and the Arts in Postwar America Socially Embedded Transactions;' Administrative Science Quarter/y 47 (2002): 445. . See Nettl's article in this Handbook. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 57 38. Stephen J. Greenblatt, "Improvisation and Power;' in Literature and Society, ed. Edward 58. See Nettl's article in this Handbook. Also see Milman Parry, The Making of Homeric Said (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980 ); Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of Verse: The Collected Papers of Milman Parry, ed. Adam Parry (Oxford: Clarendon America: The Question of the Other (New York: Harper & Row, 1984). Press, 1971). . According to Adam Parry, Milman Parry "almost never discussed Homer, that is, the author 39. Michel Foucault, "What Is Enlightenment? ;'in Eth id: Subjectivity and Truth, trans. Robert 59 Hurley and others, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: New Press, 1997), 313. or authors of the Iliad and the Odyssey, as opposed to the tradition in which Homer worked; 40. Foucault, "What Is Enlightenment? ;' 311. nor did he ever demonstrate, although at times he seems to assume it, that Homer was himself 41. Foucault, "What Is Enlightenment? ;' 316. " an oral poet:' The Making ofHomeric Verse: The Collected Papers ofMilman Parry, lx-lxi:' As 42. Michel Foucault, "The Ethics of the Concern of the Self as a Practice of Freedom;' in Lord put it, "Ifwe equate [oral composition] with improvisation in a broad sense, we are again Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, trans. Robert Hurley and others, ed. Paul Rabinow, 281-301 in error. Improvisation is not a bad term for the process, but it too must be modified by the (New York: New Press, 1997). restrictions of the particular style. The exact way in which oral composition differs from free 43. Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge, 2004), 1. improvisation will, I hope, emerge from the following chapter:' Lord, The Singer ofTales, 5. 44. Merriam, The Anthropology ofMusic, 179. 6o. See Angela Esterhammer, Romanticism and Improvisation, 1750-1850 (Cambridge: 45. See Georgina Born, "Digital Music, Relational Ontologies and Social Forms;' in Bodily Cambridge University Press, 2008). The range of scholarship in this area is far too great to Expression in Electronic Music: Perspectives on Reclaiming Performativity, ed. Deniz Peters, summarize in this short Introduction, but the work of Gregory Nagy and D. Gary Miller Gerhard Eckel, and Andreas Dorschel (New York: Routledge, 2012), 163-180. provide two contrastingviewpoints. 46. Andrew Pickering, "The Mangle of Practice: Agency and Emergence in the Sociology 61. See Adorno, "Perennial Fashion-Jazz:' Among Adorno's critics, sociologist Heinz of Science;' American Journal of Sociology 99, no. 3 (November, 1993): 583. One detects a Steinert stands out because of his impatience with the tendency to explain away certain anxious Puritanism in the insistence on the inherent presence and power of con­ Adorno's standpoints on jazz. See Heinz Steinert, Die Entdeckung der Kulturindustrie, straints in improvisation. It is as though there is a deeply rooted fear that an improvisation, oder: Warum Professor Adorno Jazz-Musik nicht ausstehen konnte (Vienna: Verlag für like noise, slaves, or subjects of authoritarian regimes, could simply get out ofhand and Gesellschaftskritik, 1992). run buck wild, de-authorizing the authorities, overturning well-formed arrangements, 62. See Célestin Deliège, "Indetermination et Improvisation;' International Review of the and putting out its tongue at the judgments of theorists. Aesthetics and Sociology of Music 2, no. 2 (December, 1971): 155-191. John Cage's fraught 47. Pickering, "The Mangle ofPractice;' 584-585. relationship with improvisation is explored by Sabine Feisst, a contributor to the present 48. Jacques Derrida, "Signature Event Context;' in Limited Inc (Evanston: Northwestern Handbook, in Sabine Feisst, "John Cage and Improvisation: An Unresolved Relationship;' University Press, 1988 [1977]), 7. Quoted in Edgar Landgraf, Improvisation as Art: Con­ in Musical Improvisation: Art, Education, and Society, ed. Gabriel Solis and Bruno Nettl, ceptual Challenges, Historical Perspectives (New York: Continuum, 2011), 22. 38-51 (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2009). 49. See Derek Bailey, Improvisation: Its Nature and Practice in Music (New York: Da Capo 63. Cynthia J. Novack, "Looking at Movement as Culture: Contact Improvisation to Disco;' Press, 1992). TDR 32, no. 4 (Winter, 1988): 105. 50. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Iheory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge and 64. Bailey, Improvisation, 142. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 78. 65. Curtis L. Carter, "Improvisation in Dance;' The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 58, 51. Bourdieu, Outline afa Iheory ofPractice, 79. no. 2 (Spring 2000 ): 182. 52. Bourdieu, Outline ofa Iheory ofPractice, 79· 66. David Davies, Philosophy ofthe Performing Arts (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 140. 53· Berliner, Ihinking in Jazz, 241. 67. Stephen Blum, "Recognizing Improvisation;' in In the Course ofPerformance: Studies in the 54. Philosopher Jerrold Levinson has spoken of how his "concatenationist" notion of the appre­ World ofMusicalimprovisation, ed. Bruno Nettl with Melinda Russell (Chicago: University hension of musical form might coexist with the experience of improvisation. See Clément of Chicago Press, 1998), 27. Canonne and Pierre Saint-Germier, "De la philosophie de l'action à l'écoute musicale: 68. Philip N. Johnson-Laird, "How Jazz Musicians Improvise;' Music Perception 19, no. 3 Entretien avec Jerrold Levinson;' Traces 18, no. 1 (2010): 211-221. For a detailed explication of (Sprinpoo2): 417. Levinson's theory, see Jerrold Levinson, Music in the Moment (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 69. Francois Grosjean, "Language: From Set Patterns to Free Patterning;' in Improvisation III, 1997). ed. Walter Fahndrich (Winterthur: Amadeus, 2005), 71. 55. See Philip N. Johnson-Laird, "Jazz Improvisation: A Theory at the Computational Level;' 70. R. Keith Sawyer, "Improvised Conversations: Music, Collaboration, and Development;' in Representing Musical Structure, ed. Peter Howell, Robert West, and lan Cross (London: Psychology ofMusic 27, no. 2 (October 1999): 192. 71. Sawyer, "Improvised Conversations;' 192. 26 GEORGE E. LEWIS AND BENJAMIN PIEKUT INTRODUCTION 27

72. "Improvisation and Narrative;' Narrative Inquiry 12, no. 2 (2002): 321. les incohérences, pourvu que leurs positions de pouvoir soient assurées .... Les autres n'ont 73. See Improvised Dialogues: Emergence and Creativity in Conversation (Westport, pas de positionnement théorique clair: on est dans des situations caractérisées par l'absence de CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2003). discussion des paradigmes macroéconomiques et par l'improvisation face aux défis sociaUX:' 74. Monson, Saying Something. 93 . Kako Nubukpo, rimprovisation économique en Afrique de l'Ouest: Du coton au franc CFA 75· Silverstein, "The Improvisational Performance of Culture in Realtime Discursive (Paris: Karthala, 2011). "!:improvisation économique est la réponse contextuellement Practice;' 268. rationnelle des pouvoirs publics africains à des événements perçus comme aléatoires. 76. McGinn, "Improvisation and the Logic of Exchange in Socially Embedded L'absence de maîtrise des instruments de souveraineté économique (la monnaie, le bud­ Transactions;' 445. get) se traduit concrètement par une obligation de réagir au lieu d'agir:' 77- One of the most frequently cited articles is Karl E; Weick, "Improvisation as a Mindset 94. Ton Matton and Christopher Dell, Improvisations on Urbanity: Trendy Pragmatism in a for Organizational Analysis;' Organization Science 9, no. 5 (September-October 1998): Climate ofChange (Rotterdam: Post Editions, 2010), n.p. 543-555. Weick's work, as well as a recent book by Frank Barrett, draws on the notion of 95. James M. Kendra and Tricia Wachtendorf, "Improvisation, Creativity, and the Art of the aesthetics of imperfection. See Frank J. Barrett, Yes to the Mess: Surprising Leadership Emergency Management;' in Understanding and Responding to Terrorism, ed. Huseyin Lessons from Jazz (Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2012). For a compilation of Durmaz, Bilal Sevinc, Ahmet Sait Yayla and Siddik Ekici (Amsterdam: IOS Press, key articles on the topic, see the chapter in this volume by management theorists Paul 2007), 324. Ingram and Bill Duggan, which serves as an overview of the scholarship in this area, with 96. Kendra and Wachtendorf, "Improvisation, Creativity, and the Art of Emergency particular attention to issues of individual and group decision making, strategy, trust, Management;' 324-325. intuition, and divergent thinking. 97· Kendra and Wachtendorf, "Improvisation, Creativity, and the Art of Emergency 78. Claudio Ciborra, The Labyrinths of Information: Challenging the Wisdom of Systems Management;' 324. Also see David Mendonça, Gary Webb, Carter Butts, and James (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 85. Brooks, "Cognitive Correlates of Improvised Behaviour in Disaster Response: the Cases 79. Ciborra, The Labyrinths ofInformation, 87. Ciborràs ideas on improvisation were integral of the Murrah Building and the World Trade Center;' Journal of Contingencies and Crisis to his work on systems. A list of his publications can be found at http:/ /is2.lse.ac. uk/Staff/ Management 22, no. 4 (December 2014). The impromptu/extempore dynamic in impro­ Ciborra/publications.htm. visation pursued by Lydia Goehr in this Handbook provides a certain corroboration from 8o. Hamilton, "The Aesthetics oflmperfection;' 337. a philosophical perspective. 81. Claudio U. Ciborra, "Notes on Improvisation and Time in Organizations;' Accounting, 98. For instance, see Handbook contributions by Christopher Dell and Ton Matton, Eric Management and Information Technologies 9, no. 2 (1999 ): 85. Porter, and David P. Brown. 82. Tamotsu Shibutani, Improvised News: A Sociological Study of Rumor (Indianapolis: 99· Zong Woo Geem, Joong Hoon Kim, and G. V Loganathan, ''A New Heuristic Bobbs-Merrill, 1966), 57· Optimization Algorithm: Harmony Search;' Simulation 76, no. 2 (February 2001): 62. 83. Paul Dourish, Annette Adler, and Brian Cantwell Smith, "Organising User Interfaces The H,andbook essay by Clyde Reed and Jared Burrows deploys an economies theory Around Reflective Accounts" (paper presented at the Reflections '96 Conference, San based on path dependence to investigate the dynamics of musical choice. Francisco, CA) http:/ /www.dourish.com/publicationsh996/refl96-electronic.pdf. 100. See Marvin Minsky, "Music, Mind, and Meaning;' in Machine Models of Music, edited 84. Dourish, Adler, and Smith, "Organising User Interfaces Around Reflective Accounts:' by Stephen Schwanauer and David Levitt, 327-354 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1981). 85. PhilipE. Agre, Computation and Human Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Recent accounts of work with musical computers that explore its improvisative char­ Press, 1997), 149. acter include John Bischoff, Rich Gold, and Jim Horton, "Music for an Interactive 86. Agre, Computation and Human Experience, 155. Network of Microcomputers;' Computer Music Journal 2, no. 3 (1978): 24-29; Jim 87. Agre, Computation and Human Experience, 147. Horton, "Unforeseen Music: The Autobiographical Notes of Jim Horton;' Leonardo 88. Agre, Computation and Human Experience, 156. Music Journal Online 9 (1999); George E. Lewis, "The Secret Love between Interactivity 89. Agre, Computation and Hum an Experience, 161. and Improvisation, or Missing in Interaction: A Prehistory of Computer Interactivity;' 90. Stephen A. Leybourne, "Improvisation and Agile Project Management: A Comparative in Improvisation V: 14 Beitriige, ed. Walter Fahndrich, 193-203 (Winterthur: Amadeus, Consideration;' International Journal of Managing Projects in Business 2, no. 4 2003); "Living with Creative Machines: An Improvisor Reflects;' in AfroGEEKS: Beyond (2009): 524. the Digital Divide, ed. Anna Everett and Amber J. Walllace, 83-99 (Santa Barbara: 91. Leybourne, "Improvisation and Agile Project Management;' 524. Center for Black Studies Research, 2007); Chris Salter, with foreword by Peter Sellars, 92. Béatrice Hibou and Boris Samuel, with Kako Nubukpo, "Les macroéconomistes afric­ Entangled: Technology and the Transformation of Performance (Cambridge: MIT Press, ains: Entre opportunisme théorique et improvisation empirique-Entretien de Béatrice 2010 ); Scot Gresham-Lancaster, "The Aesthetics and History of the Hub: The Effects of Hibou et Boris Samuel avec Kako Nubukpo;' Politique Africaine, no. 124 (Décembre 2011): 89. Changing Technology on Network Computer Music;' Leonardo Music Journal8 (1998): In the original French: "Peu dëconomistes africains ont un positionnement théorique bien 38-44· défini. Nous sommes avant tout dans le registre du bricolage, de !opportunisme ou, si l'on veut 101. Michael Pelz-Sherman, ''A Framework for the Analysis of Performer Interactions in être plus gentil, du pragmatisme! ll y a deux sortes de bricolage. Les uns ne sont pas gênés par Western Improvised Music" (PhD dissertation, University of California, San Diego, 28 GEORGE E. LEWIS AND BENJAMIN PIEKUT INTRODUCTION 29

1998); Clément Canonne, "Focal Points in Collective Pree Improvisation;' Perspectives of New Music 51, no. 1 (Winter 2013): 40-55. 102. See Jeff Pressing, "Improvisation: Methods and Models;' in Generative Processes in Adorno, Theodor. "Perennial Fashion-Jazz;' In Prisms, translated by Samuel Weber and Music: The Psychology of Performance, Improvisation, and Composition, ed. John A. Shierry Weber, 119-132. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981. Sloboda, 129-178 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988). Psychologists John Sloboda and Eric Agre, Philip E. Computation and Human Experience. Cambridge: Cambridge University Clarke are particularly significant in this area as well. Important early work includes Press, 1997· John A. Sloboda, "Improvisation;' in The Musical Mind: The Cognitive Psychology of Alperson, Philip. "On Musical Improvisation:' The Journal ofAesthetics and Art Criticism 43, Music (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 138-150. Also see Eric F. Clarke, "Creativity in no. 1 (Autumn, 1984): 17-29. Performance;' Musicae Scientiae 19, no. 1 (Spring, 2005): 157-182; David Dolan, John Bailey, Derek. Improvisation: Its Nature and Practice in Music. New York: Da Capo Press, Sloboda, Henrik Jeldtoft Jensen, Bjôrn Crüts, and Eugene Feygelson, "The Improvisatory 1992. Approach to Classical Music Performance: An Empirical Investigation into its Barrett, Frank J. Yes to the Mess: Surprising Leadership Lessons from Jazz. Boston: Harvard Characteristics and Impact;' Music Performance Research 6 (2013): 1-38. Business Review Press, 2012. 103. Improvisation, Community and Social Practice webs,te, http:/ /www.improvcommunity. Becker, Howard S. Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology ofDeviance. New York: Pree Press, 1963. ca/about. Belgrad, Daniel. The Culture of Spontaneity: Improvisation and the Arts in Postwar America. 104. The ICASP website is http://www.improvcommunity.ca. The journal is at http://www. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. criticalimprov.com. For sorne of the work produced under ICASP's auspices, see Tracey Benson, Bruce Ellis. The Improvisation of Musical Dialogue: A Phenomenology of Music. Nicholls, An Ethics of Improvisation: Aesthetic Possibilities for a Political Future (Lanham, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. MD: Lexington Books, 2012); Fischlin, Heble, and Lipsitz, The Pierce Urgency of Now: Berliner, Paul. Thinking in Jazz: The Infinite Art of Improvisation. Chicago: University of Improvisation, Rights, and the Ethics of Co-Creation; Rebecca Caines and Ajay Heble, eds. Chicago Press, 1994. The Improvisation Studies Reader: Spontaneous Acts (New York: Routledge, 2014); Ajay Bischoff, John, Rich Gold, and Jim Horton. "Music for an Interactive Network of Heble and Daniel Fischlin, eds., Rebel Musics: Human Rights, Resistant Sounds, and the Microcomputers:' Computer Music Journal2, no. 3 (1978): 24-29. Poli tics ofMusic Making (Montréal and New York: Black Rose Books, 2003). Also see Sara Blum, Stephen. "Recognizing Improvisation:' In In The Course of Performance: Studies in Ramshaw, Justice as Improvisation: The Law ofthe Extempore (New York: Routledge, 2013). the World of Musical Improvisation, edited by Bruno Nettl with Melinda Russell, 27-45. 105. Ramshaw, Justice as Improvisation; Tina S. Piper, "The Improvisational Flavour of Law, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. the Legal Taste of Improvisation;' Cri tic al Studies in Improvisation/Études Critiques en Born, Georgina. "Digital Music, Relation al Ontologies and Social Forms:' In Bodily Expression Improvisation 6, no. 1 (2010 ), http://www.criticalimprov.com/ article/view/n91/1725; in Electronic Music: Perspectives on Reclaiming Performativity, edited by Deniz Peters, Desmond Manderson, "Fission and Fusion: From Improvisation to Formalism in Law Gerhard Eckel, and Andreas Dorschel, 163-180. New York: Routledge, 2012. and Music;' Critical Studies in Improvisation/Études Critiques en Improvisation 6, no. 1 Bourdieu, Pierre. Outline of a Theory of Practice, translated by Richard Nice. Cambridge and (2010 ), http:/ /www.criticalimprov.com/article/view/n67/1726. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977- 106. Ramshaw, Justice as Improvisation, 14. Also see Sara Ramshaw, "Deconstructin(g) Braidotti, Rosi. The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013. Jazz Improvisation: Derrida and the Law of the Singular Event;' Critical Studies in Bromann, Hans-Friedrich, Gabriele Brandstetter, and Annemarie Matzke, eds. Improvisieren: Improvisation/Études critiques en improvisation 2, no. 1 (2oo6): http://www.critica­ Paradoxien des Unvorhersehbaren, Kunst-Medien-Praxis. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2010. limprov.com/article/viewArticle/81/179· Derridàs remarks on improvisation appear Busse Berger, Anna Maria. Medieval Music and the Art of Memory. Berkeley: University of in a published transcript of a 1982 documentary: Kirby Dick, Amy Ziering Kofman, California Press, 2005. and Jacques Derrida, Derrida: Screenplay and Essays on the Film. (Manchester, UK: Butler, Judith. Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge, 2004. Manchester University Press, 2005). In addition, a fascinating colloquy between the phi­ Byng-Hall, John. Rewriting Family Scripts: Improvisation and Systems Change. losopher and Omette Coleman appears in Timothy S. Murphy, "The Other's Language: New York: Guilford Press, 1995. Jacques Derrida Interviews Omette Coleman, 23 June 1997;' Genre 37, No. 2 (2004): 319- Caines, Rebecca, and Ajay Heble, eds. The Improvisation Studies Reader: Spontaneous Acts. 329. Michael Gallope's Handbook article examines this encounter in considerable detail. New York: Routledge, 2014. The interface between critic al theory and improvisation is also explored here in essays by Campbell, Patricia Shehan, and Lee Higgins. Pree to Be Musical: Group Improvisation in Music. Alexandre Pierrepont, Davide Sparti, Tracy McMullen, and Fred Moten. Lanham MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2010. 107. Peter Goodwin Heltzel, Resurrection City: A Theology of Improvisation (Grand Rapids, Canonne, Clément, and Pierre Saint-Germier. "De la philosophie de l'action à l'écoute musi­ MI and Cambridge, England: William B. Eerdmans, 2012); Landgraf, Improvisation as cale: Entretien avec Jerrold Levinson:' Traces 18, no. 1 (2010): 211-221. Art; Julie Livingston, Improvising Medicine: An African Oncology Ward in an Emerging Canonne, Clément. "Focal Points in Collective Pree Improvisation:' Perspectives ofNew Music Cancer Epidemie (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012); Hans-Friedrich Bromann, 51, no. 1 (Winter, 2013): 40-55. Gabriele Brandstetter, and Annemarie Matzke, eds., Improvisieren: Paradoxien des Cardew, Cornelius, ed. Scratch Music. London: Latimer New Dimensions, 1972. Unvorhersehbaren, Kunst-Medien-Praxis (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2010). Cardew, Cornelius. "Towards an Ethic of Improvisation:' In Treatise Handbook. London: 108. Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013). Edition Peters, 1971.