The Improvisation of Musical Dialogue

Benson, Bruce Ellis

doi:10.1017/cbo9780511615924

Cited by 125 publications

(47 citation statements)

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“…Although disciplinary discourses about the utility of phenomenology are arguably more well developed in ethnomusicology (Benson 2003, Berger 2010, Friedson 1996, the approach has had ongoing currency in linguistic anthropology (e.g., Hanks 1995, Urban 1996, allowing for fruitful interdisciplinary collaboration. Emotion has been a particular focus [for example, see two recent works on the affective indexicality of the nonreferential musical-linguistic forms ululation ( Jacobs 2008) and vocables (Ninoshvili 2010(Ninoshvili , 2011].…”

Section: Subject-making Processes: Voice Emotion Intersubjectivitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Music, Language, and Texts: Sound and Semiotic Ethnography

Faudree

2012

Annu. Rev. Anthropol.

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This review surveys recent research on language-music: the unified expressive field comprising sounded and textual signs whose segmentation into “language” and “music” is culturally constructed. I argue that approaching language-music semiotically will promote—alongside the discipline's emergent “auditory turn”—greater holism in anthropological practice if coupled to the joint effort of attending to textuality while decentering its primacy. I discuss recent scholarship that demonstrates, if often implicitly, the merit of this approach. I organize this work into three overlapping themes of active research: scholarship on chronotopes and soundscapes exploring processes that reconfigure time and place; work on subject creation focusing on voice, emotion, intersubjectivity, and listening; and scholarship on the social dimensions of object creation, including technological mediation, authentication, and circulation. I conclude by discussing future directions in research on language-music and the promise such work offers of furthering the call to broaden anthropology's holism while loosening adherence to its text-centered practices.

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Section: Subject-making Processes: Voice Emotion Intersubjectivitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Music, Language, and Texts: Sound and Semiotic Ethnography

Faudree

2012

Annu. Rev. Anthropol.

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“…However, the difference between 'open' styles and more rigid ones seems a difference of degree rather than of kind. Benson (2003) points out that precisely written pieces of classical music or ballet always contain Unbestimmtheitstellen, or 13 Or the choreography can be quite loose. The dancer may still have to move to a mark on the stage, yet this is not done via premeditated steps.…”

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confidence: 99%

“…Where Benson (2003) argues that classical forms of music contain more improvisation than we might at first be aware of, he also holds that improvisation-heavy styles such as jazz or raga are conversely Bfar more organised than [they] might appear^(p. 136). It goes without saying that improvisation in such styles is no random sounding of notes, but a skill involving intense study and practice, albeit one that-certainly historically, and probably even today-tends to involve a more practical form of learning, involving playing with and imitating experts rather than learning theory (ibid, p. 140, n. 25).…”

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Being-in-the-flow: expert coping as beyond both thought and automaticity

Bergamin

2016

Phenom Cogn Sci

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“…[8] With Sheehy's question of how "analysis itself [can] be understood as improvisational" (2013, [4]), we are reminded of Bruce Ellis Benson's (2003) ideas about the embeddedness of improvisation in any compositional enterprise-and by extension, any human endeavor. Benson's fellow philosopher Lydia Goehr's (forthcoming) extempore and impromptu conceptions of improvisative practice also provide tools for a new kind of analysis that engages real time and intention.…”

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Critical Responses to “Theorizing Improvisation (Musically)”

Lewis

2013

MTO

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[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.

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The Improvisation of Musical Dialogue

Cited by 125 publications

References 0 publications

Music, Language, and Texts: Sound and Semiotic Ethnography

Music, Language, and Texts: Sound and Semiotic Ethnography

Being-in-the-flow: expert coping as beyond both thought and automaticity

Critical Responses to “Theorizing Improvisation (Musically)”

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