Critical Responses to “Theorizing Improvisation (Musically)”

Abstract

[1] As the abstract for the joint AMS/SEM/SMT session noted, improvisation studies have "exploded," with a recent surge in interdisciplinary critical inquiry across musical and nominally nonmusical fields in the sciences, arts, and humanities. Many of these fields have drawn substantially from music studies, a fact which is both salutary and challenging. Just as cultural historian Andreas Huyssen, widely read by scholars of modernism and postmodernism in and beyond music, declared that the Fluxus movement was the first avant-garde led by music (Huyssen 1994, 200), many of us today view the study of musical practice and conceptual paradigms as central to the development of an exemplary, radically interdisciplinary literature of improvisation studies.[2] Perhaps readers will forgive me for saying that this development may be a bit more than music scholars alone can handle. Jacques Attali, whose book Noise: The Political Economy of Music (1985) has also been widely influential in music studies, is an economist, not a music scholar. Thus, in addition to addressing the question of what the study of improvisation as such has to offer music scholarship, I want to ask what we music scholars can offer a wider field of critical improvisation studies, and what improvisation theorists can contribute to wider intellectual discourses. Or, to bluntly recall Dred Scott: Does music tell us anything that we are bound to respect?[3] The answer is clearly yes; the work of music scholars is indeed being read and deployed by scholars in many nominally non-musical fields, and the authors writing for the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies (Lewis and Piekut forthcoming), many of whom are not music scholars, are using musical and non-musical models to address issues ABSTRACT: This paper constitutes a response to selected topics and issues discussed by panelists in the 2012 joint AMS/SEM/SMT session on improvisation. The growth of critical improvisation studies is discussed, the place of music in the field and the implications for interdisciplinary scholarship are examined, as well as issues related to musical analysis, listening and intentionality, the ideologically charged relationship of improvisation to composition, histories of improvisation outside of musical domains, possible theoretical and conceptual migrations of ideas from music to nonmusical domains, digital interactivity, improvisation as a basis for intercultural, transnational, and human-machine communication, and the impact of improvisation considered as a fundamental human condition.

The Field of Musical Improvisation

“…Attali 1985;Prevost 1995), or by offering responses and alternatives to all kinds of social, cultural, and ethical issues (e.g. Fischlin and Heble 2004;Peters 2009;Lewis 2013). Therefore, the question seems legitimate as to what improvisation in music can offer to the concept of and more general ideas on freedom.…”