The Lived Experience of Improvisation

Simon Rose

Description

Improvisation is crucial to a wide range of artistic activities – most prominently, perhaps, in music, but extending to other fields of experience such as literature and pedagogy. Yet it gets short shrift in both appreciation and analysis of art within education. This is in no small part due to our tendency to view the world in fixed categories and structures that belie our ability to generate creative, groundbreaking responses within and between those structures.

The Lived Experience of Improvisation draws on an analysis of interviews with highly regarded improvisers, including Roscoe Mitchell, Pauline Oliveros and George Lewis. Simon Rose also exploits his own experience as a musician and teacher, making a compelling case for bringing back improvisation from the margins. He argues that improvisation is a pervasive aspect of being human and that it should be at the heart of our teaching and understanding of the world.

 

Preface

Part 1

Chapter 1: Human Improvisation

Chapter 2: The Development of Improvisation

Chapter 3: The Agency of Improvisation

Chapter 4: Improvisation and Knowledge

Part 2

Chapter 5: Recognizing Improvisation

Chapter 6: Process

Chapter 7: Learning

Chapter 8: Body

Chapter 9: Approaches

Chapter 10: The Capacity of Improvisation

Part 3

The Interviews

Roscoe Mitchell, Maggie Nicols, John Butcher, Pauline Oliveros, George Lewis, Mick Beck, Tristan Honsinger, Alan Tomlinson, Sven-Ake Johansson, Bob Ostertag

Sujets

• Musique
• Musique
• Technique musicale
• Technique musicale
• Techniques musicales
• Performing Arts
• MUSIC
• Theatre
• Multiple signal classification
• General officer
• Theory
• General
• Jazz

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books
• Date de parution: 03 janvier 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783206759
• Langue: English

Extrait

First published in the UK in 2017 by
Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2017 by
Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,
Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright © 2017 Intellect Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Copy-editor: MPS Technologies
Cover designer: Emily Dann
Production manager: Richard Kerr
Typesetting: Contentra Technologies
Print ISBN: 978-1-78320-673-5
ePDF ISBN: 978-1-78320-674-2
ePUB ISBN: 978-1-78320-675-9
Printed and bound by Short Run Press Ltd, UK
Contents
Preface
Part 1
Chapter 1: Human Improvisation
Chapter 2: The Development of Improvisation
Chapter 3: The Agency of Improvisation
Chapter 4: Improvisation and Knowledge
Part 2
Chapter 5: Recognizing Improvisation
Chapter 6: Process
Chapter 7: Learning
Chapter 8: Body
Chapter 9: Approaches
Chapter 10: The Capacity of Improvisation
Part 3
The Interviews
Roscoe Mitchell , Maggie Nicols , John Butcher , Pauline Oliveros , George Lewis , Mick Beck , Tristan Honsinger , Alan Tomlinson , Sven-Ake Johansson , Bob Ostertag
References
Preface
The book is intended for a non-academic as well as an academic audience. I hope the book will be of interest to musicians, teachers, those new to ideas of improvisation, those interested in inter-disciplinary improvisation, researchers and others. As the themes of educational inclusion are very much tied to improvisation in the book, I hope that those who plan and influence educational practice may also be interested.
Part 2’s themes of improvisation were developed from a complicated and lengthy process of analysis of interview transcripts involving a huge number of documents that are not included. Instead, selective quotations are used that represent these themes. Sometimes quotations encapsulate multiple themes and these become motifs within different chapters. Central to Part 2 is my own interpretation (Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis) and Part 1 aims to make this perspective clear by explaining some of my own experiences. On grounds of avoiding repetition, I deliberated about the inclusion of Part 3, the edited interviews, but on balance decided that these should be there: each of these interviews provides an additional contextualized perspective, based as they are on very different histories, and together they represent a first-order body of knowledge of improvisation. The interviewees are Mick Beck, John Butcher, Tristan Honsinger, Sven-Ake Johansson, George Lewis, Roscoe Mitchell, Maggie Nicols, Pauline Oliveros, Bob Ostertag and Alan Tomlinson. Their concepts, ideas, views and beliefs about improvisation provided the material for analysis and I sincerely thank them for these contributions.
My improvisation research has been ongoing for around ten years now, and there are a great many people I wish to thank for having aided my thinking. Although too numerous to list, among them are Oleyumi Thomas, Andrea Lowe, John Tchicai, William Parker, Chris Chafe, Matthew Rose, Paul Stapleton, Peter Pilbeam, Steve Noble, Simon H. Fell, Adam Bohman, Mark Sanders, Raymond MacDonald, Fred Frith, Evan Parker, Andrew Wass, Julie Myers and Lydia Rose. I want to thank those at Banff Arts Centre; the Improvisation as Community and Social Practice project (ICASP); musicians in the Bay Area improvised music scene in California, the London Improvisers’ Orchestra and the great many musicians as well as dancers in Berlin with whom I’ve collaborated; and students and staff at Daniel House School, Hackney, London.
Following work in theatre-in-education, I taught and found disaffected, bored students to be something of a norm, one that echoed my own experience at school. In drama and music I also found that these same students were likely to be the ones who seized the chance to express themselves and excel. The energy and motivation were there but not directed, and students’ potential was in effect being wasted. Education is often constructed in a way that will suit some, who will do well, while just as many, if not more, will not. Many don’t or can’t ‘fit in’ with the given construct on offer, drama and music in education can be particularly revealing of this dilemma. Within this picture, improvisation can play a central role.
Chapters 1, 2, 3 and 4 explain the context of improvisation, the reasons behind this book, the primary reference being experience. For Chapter 2, this comes in the form of a history of improvisation across different disciplines, chronicling the range of interest in improvisation. Chapter 3’s context of improvisation is provided by personal experience in education, music and drama. The issue of improvisation’s highly complex relation with understandings and constructs of knowledge is explored in Chapter 4 and is, by nature, academic – it includes a description of the method of study, phenomenology. The book can be read from beginning to end: its parts and chapters can equally be read independently. For some, the main interest may be in the themes of improvisation found in Part 2 within which teachers may choose to begin with Chapters 7 and 9 as well as Chapter 3. I hope that those with an inter-disciplinary or trans-disciplinary interest in improvisation will find Chapters 2, 5, 6 and 10 of particular interest. Musicians may well find Part 3 a good place to begin.
I use the term enacted improvisation in the book. Enacted grounds improvisation in the realm of experience. It refers to doing, involving action and actants (actors): those who perform through improvisation. Enacted improvisation implicates the theme of the body that ties all of the other themes. Enacted also helpfully links to many theories that support improvisation, for example: enacted cognition, situated cognition, activity theory, autopoiesis and others. The term enacted improvisation reiterates the importance of doing for discussion.
The study has focused on free improvisation in particular for which the initials FI are used. Free improvisation, or open improvisation , is used primarily as a way of delineating the term from the broader term improvisation, in order to signify an ongoing, developing activity rather than a style.
Part 1
Chapter 1
Human Improvisation

W e like to describe the world in terms of fixed structures while our being is a creative response within changing structures, a truer description of being is through creative improvisation. Improvisation is a pervasive aspect of being human, in every sphere of life, enabling existence; life without the improvisational response is difficult to imagine. From an evolutionary perspective the capacity for improvisation is there for good reason. There is a need to more fully understand the processes of engagement in improvisation. Improvisation is clearly evident in performing arts, performing makes processes apparent as things are seen and heard, in so doing, we become aware of how performance occurs. Understandably we identify improvisation with such performing arts but this has also led to an over-identification. Improvisation is within all areas of existence; the process of mutation in evolution is itself highly improvisatory. Unsurprisingly improvisation is found in every sphere of activity and can be better acknowledged as a human capability.
This book explores the established practice of improvisation in music and, in particular, free improvisation – the creation of not-predetermined music in the act of performance. Improvisation in music is interpreted as a social example of the human capability of improvisation. The book considers what the lived experience of improvisation in music, represented by themes, also tells us about improvisation as a phenomenon across experience. Within a range of activity and disciplines, there is growing interest in the potential of improvisation. The agency of improvisation, as a capability, is the focus and the exploration of the lived experience of improvisation in music forms a case study for the broader experience. The question of theory’s relation to the practice of improvisation becomes central to the book’s themes and the intention has been to write in a way that is of use to both non-academic and academic readers.
The book gathers a ‘body of knowledge’ of improvisation in music from an international community of practice in which improvisation is central. Ten practitioners from Europe and North America took part in interviews: Roscoe Mitchell, Maggie Nicols, John Butcher, Pauline Oliveros, George Lewis, Mick Beck, Tristan Honsinger, Alan Tomlinson, Sven-Ake Johansson and Bob Ostertag. The criteria for inclusion was that participants should be very experienced in the practice and I was interested in diverse perspectives. The method of inquiry, phenomenology, focuses upon and interprets the particular within the participants’ experience (idiographic) rather than seeking an aggregate of opinion across a larger sample. The practitioners have spent their working lives with the advanced practice of improvisation in music and developed sophisticated understanding – recording and analysing this important body of knowledge is a way to better understand the phenomenon.
The research developed from work as a professional saxophonist and teacher of drama and music, which included work in special educational needs and with excluded students. The research is informed by an early training and career in drama and theatre-in-education in which improvisation processes are centrally important for devising and developing socially orientated, educational drama work. Three studies concerned with the practice of improvisation in music, drama and