Post date: Mar 21, 2012 5:53:52 PM
SEM Niagara Chapter 2012
University of Toronto
Music Bldg, Room 330
Saturday, March 24
1:30-3:00
Panel: Improvisational Music and Everyday Life
SEM Improvisation Special Interest Group:
The Improvisation of Everyday Music
Pete Johnston (Independent Scholar)
The Utopian Imaginary in Improvised Music
Jonathon Bakan (University of Western Ontario)
Dinner Jazz: Consumption and Improvisation
Mark Laver (University of Guelph)
Discussant: Martin Arnold (Trent University)
Abstracts
Panel: Improvisational Music and Everyday Life
SEM Improvisation Special Interest Group
In a North American context, the phrase “improvised music” has generally come to connote an intensely avant-garde mode of music making that blends an aurally challenging aesthetic with a politically radical ethic. Improvisers generally refuse subscription to any popularly identifiable genre, eschewing both the sonic limitations and commercial presumptions associated with genre membership, preferring to either appropriate liberally from any musical idiom, or to avoid idiomatically distinctive sounds altogether. Moreover, as a musical practice that purposefully subverts rigid hierarchies and demands constant dialogical interaction, the improvised aesthetic prioritizes musical process over product, thereby (hopefully) evading easy commoditization as a musical artifact – a fixed product that can be endlessly reproduced and consumed in the market. For all of these reasons, improvised music is frequently conceived as being not only separate from any mainstream notion of “everyday life”; it explicitly and deliberately opposes the quotidian capitalist experience.
In this panel presentation, however, we propose that avant-garde improvised music does impact on the everyday in deeply meaningful (if occasionally unexpected) ways – in both practical and metaphorical senses. Each paper examines a different node where improvised music intersects with everyday life: as a potential model and method for radical social intervention; as a means of imagining and constructing alternate Utopian realities; and as a strikingly problematic soundtrack in many elite restaurants. Together, we explore the possibilities and limitations of the aesthetics and ethics of improvised musical practice. A leading improviser, composer, and improvisation scholar will serve as a discussant, responding to each paper.
The Improvisation of Everyday Music
Pete Johnston (Independent Scholar)
Improvisation has long been a topic of study in ethnomusicology, and is a central concern in the field of Jazz Studies. It offers a compelling lens for analysis as improvisation is at once a mundane, everyday activity we engage with in the context of conversations and social interactions, and a profound one that has resulted in the production of important works of art. Over the past decade musical improvisation has begun to be studied intensively by humanities scholars, who are bringing new methodologies and frameworks to bear in their investigations of musical practices. This trend has opened fruitful new areas of inquiry, and has revealed gaps in our understanding of improvisation; specifically, much recent writing highlights discrepancies between how improvisers’ musical practices might be operationalized as models for positive political, cultural, and ethical change in domains other than the art field, and the continued social and economic marginalization of subjects who claim the identity of improviser. This discrepancy speaks to the importance of accounting for specific social contexts and the varied understandings of what improvisation is—or perhaps more accurately, what it does for those who claim it as the basis for their actions, musical and otherwise. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in the improvised music field, I will explore how the discourse and practice of musical improvisation relates to improvisation as a general, everyday human activity, and make connections to the compelling ideas about improvisation as a radical social intervention that are emerging from outside the music disciplines.
The Utopian Imaginary in Improvised Music
Jonathon Bakan (University of Western Ontario)
In multiple discourses of jazz and other improvised musics, improvisatory creative processes have frequently been associated with a wide range of imagined utopian spaces – hypothetical spaces of freedom. These utopian spaces have sometimes been conceived as imagined physical locations, as in Sun Ra’s Afrofuturistic visions of outer space. Other times, implied utopian spaces have been delineated in psychological, rather than spatial terms, with improvisational practices serving as a indices of transcendant or spiritual states of being. In still other examples improvisational practices have been associated with specific political or ideological social agendas for the creation of a better, more egalitarian world. These utopian discourses in improvised music resonate with discussions across diverse academic fields on the significance of a utopian “imaginary.” This paper explores the notion of a utopian imaginary in improvised music, and begins the process of defining such utopian musical discourses in the context of related discourses in psychology, political science, and feminist studies — widely disparate fields where a whole range of writers have stressed the importance of imagined utopian vistas as locations where better and healthier worlds can be freely postulated as a means of implicitly critiquing the lived realities of our present-day, non-imaginary, and decidedly non-utopian world.
Dinner Jazz: Consumption and Improvisation
Mark Laver (University of Guelph)
It’s rare to find a high-end restaurant in North America that doesn’t have jazz music on the menu. As the acoustic counterpart to your braised leg of lamb and Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon, jazz music signals a level cultural refinement that befits culinary sophistication. Nor is the relationship between jazz and fine dining a unidirectional appropriation: from jazz album covers featuring bottles of fine wine, to the numerous beloved “club date” live albums, to the photography of artists like Herman Leonard, jazz musicians and other stakeholders have also developed the link between jazz and haute cuisine over many decades.
Certainly, the jazz-dining connection might be summarily dismissed as a simple matter of historical coincidence. Nevertheless, the historical connection between the two practices subtends an intriguing analogy: both the practices of playing jazz music and dining out are improvisatory. While jazz improvisation need not be unpacked here, it is worth noting that dining out demands a number of different improvised acts: deciding on a restaurant, browsing a menu, engaging in conversation with friends and strangers, and negotiating the bill at the end of the evening. Dining out therefore represents a fascinating juxtaposition of modes of improvisation: one – jazz music – ostensibly politically radical; the other – dining – highly pleasurable, but altogether mundane, elitist, and ostensibly apolitical.
This paper examines the juncture of improvised music and improvisatory eating with a view to unpacking the politics of dining and the limits of politicized improvised musical practice.