Group musical improvisation represents a profoundly collaborative creative process. The improvised framework demands that musicians collectively and spontaneously negotiate a set of dynamic musical and non-musical challenges. Similarly, in the post-fordist global marketplace, unexpected challenges have become a quotidian part of the business experience. Just as a group of musical improvisers must negotiate sudden musical changes, unanticipated changes in the marketplace demand a collaborative creative response. Since the early 2000s a wide variety of corporations have begun looking to group musical improvisation as a model for corporate design. Corporations ranging from Starbucks to Procter & Gamble to Research In Motion have hired improvising musicians to run seminars and workshops in order to develop more improvisatory – and more profitable – business practices. Complicating this narrative, however, is the ethic that is commonly attached to improvised musical practice: as numerous scholars have suggested, improvised musics frequently emerge from marginalized communities around the world, and often represent kinds of musicking that purposefully challenge the logics of the free market economy, especially in its present neoliberal guise. In this article, I suggest that this species of arts-based consultancy - together with a huge and ever-expanding body of writing on "creativity" - operates to provide an aesthetic aspect to "creative" and "knowledge-based" labour in the postindustrial North American "knowledge economy," and by extension, to neoliberalism itself. I argue that this aestheticization of neoliberal economics threatens to occlude the profoundly socially destructive impact of the laissez-faire neoliberal regulatory regime that has taken hold of economic and social policy on an increasingly global scale over the last three decades. Finally, however, I explore how the lessons of improvisation studies might intervene in the corporate appropriation of improvisation.
To a considerable extent, the mythology of rock and roll rebellion is predicated upon a similarly mythologised male sexual potency that Simon Frith and Angeld McRobbie have characterised as ‘aggressive, dominating, and boastful, … [constantly seeking] to remind the audience of [its] prowess, [its] control’ (Frith and McRobbie 1990, p. 319). In this article, I look to Roy Orbison – a musician who was a key figure in the genesis of rock and roll, but who nevertheless subverts this phallocentric meta-narrative. Focusing on the 1987 concert film, Roy Orbison and Friends: A Black and White Night, I argue that Orbison's staid performance style, unusual voice and unconventional songwriting as evidenced (and amplified) by that film trouble the purportedly monolithic rock and roll masculinity, and the concomitant mythology of rebellion. At the same time, however, I propose that even as normative masculinity appears to be destabilised, a close reading of the film reveals that the performance situates Orbison within a different masculinist discourse: the 19th-century Romantic discourse of masculine genius that continues to inflect 21st century notions about artists and art music. Thus, in Black and White Night, normative and non-normative masculinities are thoroughly imbricated, each simultaneously destabilising and reaffirming the other.
Musical improvisation represents a profoundly collaborative creative process. The improvised framework demands that musicians collectively and spontaneously negotiate a set of external challenges-possibly including a harmonic progression, a texture, a tempo, a groove, or the expectations of an audience-as well as internal challenges, such as divergent tendencies, tastes, or knowledge bases within the group. A successful negotiation hinges on a dialectic of individual knowledge and collective innovation: musicians depend on the individual years of practice through which they developed their unique technical, listening, and expressive skills, while at the same time responding quickly and spontaneously to the rest of the group (and to other variables in the performance milieu) in a manner that evinces innovation, creativity, and surprise. Therefore, while improvisation depends heavily on a musician's cultivation of individual skills, both the improvised process and the (hopefully successful) outcome of that process are equally shared among members of the group.
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