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Improvisation informs a vast array of human activity, from creative practices in art, dance, music, and literature to everyday conversation and the relationships to natural and built environments that surround and sustain us. The two volumes of The Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation
Studies gather scholarship on improvisation from an immense range of perspectives, with contributions from more than sixty scholars working in architecture, anthropology, art history, computer science, cognitive science, cultural studies, dance, economics, education, ethnomusicology, film, gender
studies, history, linguistics, literary theory, musicology, neuroscience, new media, organizational science, performance studies, philosophy, popular music studies, psychology, science and technology studies, sociology, and sound art, among others.
List of contents
- Preface to Volume II
- Introduction
- George E. Lewis and Benjamin Piekut
- I. Cities
- 1. Improvisation Technology as Mode of Redesigning the Urban
- Christopher Dell and Ton Matton
- 2. Lots Will Vary in the Available City
- David P. Brown
- 3. Improvising the Future in Post-Katrina New Orleans
- Eric Porter
- II. Creativities
- 4. Billy Connolly, Daniel Barenboim, Willie Wonka, Jazz Bastards, and the Universality of Improvisation
- Raymond MacDonald and Graeme Wilson
- 5. A Computationally Motivated Approach to Cognition Studies in Improvisation
- Brian Magerko
- 6. A Consciousness-based Look at Spontaneous Creativity
- Ed Sarath
- 7. In the Beginning, There Was Improvisation
- Bruce Ellis Benson
- III. Musics
- 8. Landmarks in the Study of Improvisation: Perspectives from Ethnomusicology
- Bruno Nettl
- 9. Saving Improvisation: Hummel and the Free Fantasia in the Early Nineteenth Century
- Dana Gooley
- 10. Negotiating Freedom and Control in Composition: Improvisation and Its Offshoots, 1950 to 1980
- Sabine Feisst
- 11. Musical Improvisation: Play, Efficacy, and Significance
- A. J. Racy
- 12. Improvisation in Freestyle Rap
- Ellie M. Hisama
- 13. Speaking of the I-Word
- Leo Treitler
- IV. Writings
- 14. Modernist Improvisations
- Rob Wallace
- 15. Diversity and Divergence in the Improvisational Evolution of Literary Genres
- Jennifer D. Ryan
- 16. Improvisatory Practices and the Dawn of the New American Cinema
- Sara Villa
- 17. Brilliant Corners: Improvisation and Practices of Freedom in Sent for You Yesterday
- Walton Muyumba
- 18. Improvisation in Contemporary Experimental Poetry
- Hazel Smith
- V. Media
- 19. Subjective Computing and Improvisation
- D. Fox Harrell
- 20. Improvisation and Interaction, Canons and Rules, Emergence and Play
- Simon Penny
- 21. Imposture as Improvisation: Living Fiction
- Antoinette LaFarge
- 22. Role-Play, Improvisation, and Emergent Authorship
- Celia Pearce
- 23. Bodies, Border, Technology: The Promise and Perils of Telematic Improvisation
- Adriene Jenik
- 24. She Stuttered: Mapping the Spontaneous Middle
- Sher Doruff
- VI. Technologies
- 25. Live Algorithms for Music: Can Computers Be Improvisers?
- Michael Young and Tim Blackwell
- 26. Improvisation of the Masses: Anytime, Anywhere Mobile Music
- Ge Wang
About the author
George E. Lewis, Edwin H. Case Professor of American Music at Columbia University, is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a MacArthur Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, and author of the award-winning 2008 book,
A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music.Benjamin Piekut, Associate Professor of Music at Cornell University, writes on the history of experimental and improvised music after 1960. He is the author of
Experimentalism Otherwise (2011) and editor of
Tomorrow Is the Question (2014).
Summary
The Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies gathers contributions from more than sixty authors pioneering new scholarly approaches to improvisation in the arts, humanities, social, and natural sciences.
