Read more
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 I
- Introduction
- George E. Lewis and Benjamin Piekut
- I. Cognitions
- 1. Cognitive Processes in Musical Improvisation
- Roger Dean and Freya Bailes
- 2. The Cognitive Neuroscience of Improvisation
- Aaron L. Berkowitz
- 3. Improvisation, Action Understanding, and Music Cognition With and Without Bodies
- Vijay Iyer
- 4. The Ghost in the Music, or The Perspective of an Improvising Ant
- David Borgo
- II. Critical Theories
- 5. The Improvisative
- Tracy McMullen
- 6. jurisgenerative grammar (for alto)
- Fred Moten
- 7. Is Improvisation Present?
- Michael Gallope
- 8. Politics as Hypergestural Improvisation in the Age of Mediocracy
- Yves Citton
- 9. On the Edge: A Frame of Analysis for Improvisation
- Davide Sparti
- 10. The Salmon of Wisdom: On the Consciousness of Self and Other in Improvised Music and In the Language that Sets One Free
- Alexandre Pierrepont
- 11. Improvising Yoga
- Susan Leigh Foster
- III. Cultural Histories
- 12. Michel de Montaigne, or Philosophy as Improvisation
- Timothy Hampton
- 13. The Improvisation of Poetry, 1750-1850: Oral Performance, Print Culture, and the Modern Homer
- Angela Esterhammer
- 14. Germaine de Staël's Corinne, or Italy and the Early Usage of Improvisation in English
- Erik Simpson
- 15. Improvisation, Time, and Opportunity in the Rhetorical Tradition
- Glyn P. Norton
- 16. Improvisation, Democracy, and Feedback
- Daniel Belgrad
- IV. Mobilities
- 17. Improvised Dance in the Reconstruction of THEM
- Danielle Goldman
- 18. Improvising Social Exchange: African American Social Dance
- Thomas F. DeFrantz
- 19. Fixing Improvisation: Copyright and African American Vernacular Dancers in the Early Twentieth Century
- Anthea Kraut
- 20. Performing Gender, Race, and Power in Improv Comedy
- Amy Seham
- 21. Shifting Cultivation as Improvisation
- Paul Richards
- V. Organizations
- 22. Improvisation in Management
- Paul Ingram and Bill Duggan
- 23. Free Improvisation as a Path-Dependent Process
- Jared Burrows and Clyde G. Reed
- VI. Philosophies
- 24. Musical Improvisation and the Philosophy of Music
- Philip Alperson
- 25. Improvisation and Time-Consciousness
- Gary Peters
- 26. Improvising Impromptu, Or, What to Do with a Broken String
- Lydia Goehr
- 27. Ensemble Improvisation, Collective Intention, and Group Attention
- Garry L. Hagberg
- 28. Interspecies Improvisation
- David Rothenberg
- 29. Spiritual Exercises, Improvisation, and Moral Perfectionism:
- With Special Reference to Sonny Rollins
- Arnold I. Davidson
- 30. Improvisation and Ecclesial Ethics
- Samuel Wells
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.
