This chapter explores the ramifications of musical improvisation for understanding self and other. It argues that contemporary cultural theory is over-invested in Hegelian notions of the self as created through the field of the other and the concomitant emphasis on “recognition” as the central factor in the construction of the subject. This emphasis on recognition is, in part, installed through the theory of performativity. The article illuminates problems with this theory and then offers an alternative theory, the “improvisative,” that focuses on “generosity” rather than “recognition.” It argues that the practice of the improvisative may offer a better approach to effecting human agency than the performative. An examination of the improvisative practices of middle and high school age girls at the Girls’ Jazz and Blues Camp in Berkeley, California demonstrates this effectiveness.
This essay investigates composers Pauline Oliveros and John Cage, their use and abuse of Buddhist philosophy, and how these (mis)understandings influenced and were reflected in their attitudes toward improvisation. While John Cage famously claimed to remove his “self” from his work, I argue that his practices (informed by a mis-reading of Zen through a Protestant ideology) served to further instantiate a self that mastered the body. Oliveros’s interest in meditation, improvisation, and corporeal practices demonstrates an understanding of the “self” as intersubjective and de-centralized. I argue that the ideology of the subject/object, self/other split within the Western intellectual tradition has functioned to attenuate the radical elements within these artists’ work that challenged Western conceptions of the self, influencing Cage’s own philosophical understanding, and marginalizing the improvisatory and corporeal practices of Oliveros.
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