Programming for extended section meetings will emerge from listserv discussions, and will be oriented around the institutions or individuals that are available in the host city. Based on our conversations at the 2014 SIG meeting in Pittsburgh, our membership prizes flexible programming and prioritizes music-making. Hence, each year, the local scene liaison will solicit recommendations for guest speakers or workshop facilitators to invite to the meeting—funded through member dues—at our annual business meetings and via the listserv. Final programming decisions will be made by a consensus among the elected officers. The particular form that a given meeting takes will depend on where we are and what outside scholars or practitioners are available to participate, but we anticipate that most years will feature group improvised performance sessions, facilitated by a local improvising musician or group of musicians. We are also motivated to organize events off site at conferences, such as attendance at local concerts or other music events. Such activities would afford conference attendees opportunities to participate in the local music scene in a way that is sometimes lacking at SEM conferences.
Indeed, outreach has been central to the mission of the Special Interest Group, and would continue to undergird the activities of a reconstituted Section. At the 2014 meeting, the SIG launched an open-sourced, online bibliography of improvisation resources. An ongoing project, the bibliography continues to develop through the input of the SIG membership and other interested parties. It is freely accessible online through our webpage.
An impulse to collaborate has been similarly foundational to the improvisation special interest group - evidenced by our joint meeting with the SMT improvisation interest group in 2012, and numerous panel and paper co-sponsorships with collaborators ranging from SMT to the Society for Arabic Music Research. In future years, we will also continue to pursue collaborative initiatives with other sections and special interest groups. At our most recent meeting, members proposed organizing co-sponsored panels with the Historical Ethnomusicology Section, and with the Special Interest Group for European Music. Improvisation is, after all, a musical practice that represents a natural pivot point between a multiplicity of fields of study in ethnomusicology - a practice that is in evidence in musicking in virtually every corner of the globe.
In this way, the structure of the SIG - and the proposed structure and goals of the Section - grow out of the practice of improvisation itself. In our dedication to collaboration and dialogue and our commitment to outreach and community impact, our actions as individuals and as a section flow from an ethic of improvisatory praxis. As Daniel Fischlin, Ajay Heble, and George Lipsitz write in their recent monograph, The Fierce Urgency of Now: Improvisation, Rights, and the Ethics of Cocreation (Duke, 2013), “In a world filled with paths we can or must take, improvisation compels us to think about the paths we can make. It requires an open attitude toward other people as well as a creative disposition toward art. Improvisation is a manner of speaking that requires listening, a collective conversation that turns great risks into splendid rewards. By definition, it invokes collective interchange that is potentially transformative” (Fischlin et al, xii). Improvisation is thus not merely an object of study; rather, it is a potential model for how to be in the world: as scholars, as music-makers, as educators, and as learners.