This article documents experiences of Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra’s virtual, synchronous improvisation sessions during COVID-19 pandemic via interviews with 29 participants. Sessions included an international, gender balanced, and cross generational group of over 70 musicians all of whom were living under conditions of social distancing. All sessions were recorded using Zoom software. After 3 months of twice weekly improvisation sessions, 29 interviews with participants were undertaken, recorded, transcribed, and analyzed. Key themes include how the sessions provided opportunities for artistic development, enhanced mood, reduced feelings of isolation, and sustained and developed community. Particular attention is placed upon how improvisation as a universal, real time, social, and collaborative process facilitates interaction, allowing the technological affordances of software (latencies, sound quality, and gallery/speaker view) and hardware (laptop, tablet, instruments, microphones, headphones, and objects in room) to become emergent properties of artistic collaborations. The extent to which this process affects new perceptual and conceptual breakthroughs for practitioners is discussed as is the crucial and innovative relationship between audio and visual elements. Analysis of edited films of the sessions highlight artistic and theoretical and conceptual issues discussed. Emphasis is given to how the domestic environment merges with technologies to create The Theatre of Home.
An account is provided of a UK national seminar series on Arts, Health and Wellbeing funded by the Economic and Social Research Council during 2012–13. Four seminars were organised addressing current issues and challenges facing the field. Details of the programme and its outputs are available online. A central concern of the seminar programme was to provide a foundation for creating a UK national network for researchers in the field to help promote evidence-based policy and practice. With funding from Lankelly Chase Foundation, and the support of the Royal Society for Public Health, a Special interest Group for Arts, Health and Wellbeing was launched in 2015.
Age is a flexible construction. It takes shape in relation to a social distribution of cultural resources for the configuration of age-specific identities. It is spatially and temporally produced. This chapter describes how musical engagement can produce anachronistic enactments of age-linked categories. Studying the ways that music is appropriated for this purpose highlights age-banded categories—adolescence included—as identity performances, constituted through musical practices, tastes, listening habits, and engagement. Music can also facilitate anachronistic age identities and these may offer developmental opportunities as well as opportunities for asylum (shelter from distressing features of daily life). This chapter explores how ‘reverting’ to adolescent musical practices and tastes affords the identity performance of the ‘inner teen’. It concludes that using music for age-band travel can be catalytic for major life change as well as for smaller processes of adaptation and coping.
Book reviewed in this article:
Sociology and its Publics: The Forms and Fates of Disciplinary Organization T.C. Halliday and M. Janowitz (eds)
Social Evolutionism: A Critical History Stephen K. Sanderson
History and Social Theory Peter Burke
Time: An Essay Norbert Elias
Postmodernity Barry Smart
Social Movements: The Politics of Moral Protest Jan Pakulski
A Communitarian Defense of Liberalism: Emile Durkheim and contemporary Social Theory M.S. Cladis
Pierre Bourdieu Richard Jenkins
Social Research and Social Reform Colin Crouch and Anthony Heath, (eds)
Prospects for Democracy: North, South, East and West David Held, (ed.)
The Elite Connection: Problems and Potential of Western Democracy Eva Etzioni‐Halevy
Lives in Trust: The Fortunes of Dynastic Families in Late Twentieth Century America George E. Marcus with Peter D. Hall
The Politics of State Expansion: War, State and Society in Twentieth‐Century Britain James E. Cronin
The Development of Industrial Society in Ireland J.H. Goldthorpe and C.T. Whelan (eds)
Social Theory for Action: How Individuals and Organisations Learn to Change William Foote Whyte
Sociological Perspectives on Modern Accountancy Robin Roslender
Professions and Patriarchy Anne Witz
White, Male and Middle Class: Explorations in Feminism and History Catherine Hall
Shaping up to Womanhood: Gender and Girls’ Physical Education Sheila Scraton
Symbolic Interaction and Cultural Studies Howard S. Becker and Michael M. McCall, (eds)
Fashion, Culture and Identity Fred Davis
Fields of Vision: Landscape Imagery and National Identity in England and the United States Stephen Daniels
The City Assembled: The Elements of Urban Form Through History Spiro Kostoff
Television and the Drama of Crime: Moral Tales and the Place of Crime in Public Life Richard Sparks
Writers in Prison Ioan Davies
Death, Dying and Bereavement Donna Dickenson and Malcolm Johnson, (eds)
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