Critical Responses to “Theorizing Improvisation (Musically)”

[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 such as ethics, social identity, order, and negotiation; computational creativity, telematics, and the virtual; time, consciousness, and complexity; indeterminacy and agency; migration and mobility; representation, cognition, and enactment; economic development; and the remarkable observation that improvisation can serve as a means of conceiving the histories of people and nations.[4] Music is already in a leading, perhaps overdetermining position within improvisation studies; when the word "improvisation" is invoked, the common assumption is that we are talking about music. But improvisation is everywhere: this ubiquitous practice of everyday life, fundamental to the existence and survival of every human formation, is as close to universal as contemporary critical method could responsibly entertain. Thus, it may be that if we strategically decouple "improvisation" from this implicit signification, in favor of a more prosaic standpoint toward improvisation as a simple human condition, we may be better able to see the effect of music studies reflected in non-musical fields.[5] Paul Steinbeck draws upon the work of Marion Guck in asking, "Which fictions or stories do we tell when we analyze musical improvisation?" (2013, [3]). The question reminded me of Hayden White's assertion that "narrativity . . . is intimately related to, if not a function of, the impulse to moralize reality-that is, to identify it with the social system that is the source of any morality we can imagine" (1987, 14). White goes further in asking, "Has any historical narrative ever been written that was not informed not only by moral awareness, but specifically by the moral authority of the narrator?" (1987, 21).[6] What I want to suggest here is that the most central analytical fiction might not be any particular narrative or the crafting of it, but the culturally and professionally situated claim to authority for the practice of analysis itself. Moreover, if these tales of improvisation are informed by disciplines beyond music study, how might our music-based tools be refitted for use in the analysis of social and political practices? Analyzing improvisation involves inferences, not only about musical structure, but also about the sonically communicated intentions the musicians exchange during the performance-an analytic project that differs from work on (most) composed music (Canonne and Garnier 2011). …