Sync or Swarm FINAL

SYNC OR SWARM
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SYNC OR SWARM
IMPROVISING MUSIC IN A COMPLEX AGE
David Borgo
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2005
The Continuum International Publishing Group Inc

15 East 26 Street, New York, NY 10010
The Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd

The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SE1 7NX
www.continuumbooks.com
Copyright ! 2005 by David Borgo
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any
form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written
permission of the publishers.
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
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For my wife, Sylvia, and our son, Diego,
whose birth has made the notion of emergence
both more real and more wondrous
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CONTENTS
List of Figures 000
List of Audio Examples 000
Acknowledgements 000
Preface 000
1. The Sound and Science of Surprise 000

The Age of Complexity, 000 • Surrealestate, 000 • Sync or
Swarm, 000
2. Reverence for Uncertainty 000

Exploring Uncertainty, 000 • Performing Uncertainty, 000
• Experiencing Uncertainty, 000 • Documenting Uncertainty, 000
• Evaluating Uncertainty, 000
3. The Embodied Mind 000

Taking the Note for a Walk, 000 • The Body in the Music, 000
• It’s a Bit Like Juggling, 000 • Thinking about the Laundry, 000
• A Chameleon on a Mirror, 000
4. Rivers of Consciousness 000

Complexity and Emergence, 000 • Time and the Qualia of
Experience, 000 • The Phase Space of Improvisation, 000 • Hues
of Melanin, 000 • A Delicate Balance, 000
5. The Edge of Chaos 000

The Turbulent Mirror, 000 • Fractal Worlds, 000 • Self-
Organization, 000 • The Rage for Chaos, 000
6. Sync and Swarm 000

Coupling and Entrainment, 000 • Insect Music, 000 • By Lead or
By Seed, 000 • A Web Without a Spider, 000
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CONTENTS
7. Harnessing Complexity 000

The Map is Not the Territory, 000 • Group Creativity, 000 • The
Shores of Multiplicity, 000
Notes 000
References 000
Index 000
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LIST OF FIGURES
Table 1: Sam Rivers Trio—‘‘Hues of Melanin’’—Phenomenological Analysis 000

Table 2: Analyzed Performances with Mean Fractal Dimension and Standard
Deviation 000
Figure 1a: Evan Parker—‘‘Aerobatics 1’’—Fractal Correlation Dimension 000
Figure 1b: Evan Parker—‘‘Aerobatics 1’’—Correlogram 000
Figure 2: Evan Parker—‘‘Monoceros 1’’ 000
Figure 3: Evan Parker—‘‘Conic Sections 3’’ 000
Figure 4a: Evan Parker—‘‘Conic Sections 3’’—Detail of Fractal Correlation
Dimension 000
Figure 4b: Evan Parker—‘‘Conic Sections 3’’—Detail of Fractal Correlation
Dimension 000
Figure 4c: Evan Parker—‘‘Conic Sections 3’’—Detail of Fractal Correlation
Dimension 000
Figure 5a: Evan Parker—‘‘Broken Wing’’—Fractal Correlation Dimension 000
Figure 5b: Evan Parker—‘‘Broken Wing’’—Correlogram 000
Figure 6a: Derek Bailey—‘‘Improvisation 5’’—Fractal Correlation Dimension 000
Figure 6b: Derek Bailey—‘‘Improvisation 5’’—Correlogram 000
Figure 7a: Evan Parker—‘‘Chicago Solos 9’’—Fractal Correlation Dimension 000
Figure 7b: Evan Parker—‘‘Chicago Solos 9’’—Correlogram 000
Figure 8a: Evan Parker—‘‘Chicago Solos 10’’—Fractal Correlation Dimension 000
Figure 8b: Evan Parker—‘‘Chicago Solos 10’’—Correlogram 000
Figure 9a: Evan Parker Electro Acoustic Ensemble—‘‘Turbulent
Mirror’’—Fractal Correlation Dimension 000
Figure 9b: Evan Parker Electro Acoustic Ensemble—‘‘Turbulent
Mirror’’—Correlogram 000
Figure 10a: Peter Brötzmann—‘‘Machine Gun’’—Fractal Correlation
Dimension 000
Figure 10b: Peter Brötzmann—‘‘Machine Gun’’—Correlogram 000
Figure 11a: The Art Ensemble of Chicago—‘‘Ancestral Meditation’’—Fractal
Correlation Dimension 000
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LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 11b: The Art Ensemble of Chicago—‘‘Ancestral

Meditation’’—Correlogram 000
Figure 12a: The Art Ensemble of Chicago—‘‘People In Sorrow
(Part I)’’—Fractal Correlation Dimension 000
Figure 12b: The Art Ensemble of Chicago—‘‘People In Sorrow
(Part I)’’—Correlogram 000
Figure 12c: The Art Ensemble of Chicago—‘‘People In Sorrow
(Part II)’’—Fractal Correlation Dimension 000
Figure 12d: The Art Ensemble of Chicago—‘‘People In Sorrow
(Part II)’’—Correlogram 000
Figure 13a: Sam Rivers Trio—‘‘Hues of Melanin’’—Fractal Correlation
Dimension 000
Figure 13b: Sam Rivers Trio—‘‘Hues of Melanin’’—Correlogram 000
Figure 14a: Sam Rivers Trio—‘‘Hues of Melanin’’—Detail of Fractal Correlation
Dimension 000
Figure 14b: Sam Rivers Trio—‘‘Hues of Melanin’’—Detail of Fractal
Figure 14c: Sam Rivers Trio—‘‘Hues of Melanin’’—Detail of Fractal Correlation
Dimension 000
Figure 14d: Sam Rivers Trio—‘‘Hues of Melanin’’—Detail of Fractal
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LIST OF AUDIO EXAMPLES
Evan Parker
1. Conic Sections 3 (25:10)
—Evan Parker, solo soprano saxophone
" Recorded live at Holywell Music Room, Oxford (UK), June 21, 1989
" Released by AhUm Records 015 (CD), 1993
" Courtesy of Evan Parker and AhUm Records
The Sam Rivers Trio with special guest George Lewis

2. Trio #1 (10:34)
—Sam Rivers, tenor saxophone
—Doug Mathews, electric and acoustic bass
—Anthony Cole, drums and piano
3. Trio #2 (2:23)
—Sam Rivers, soprano saxophone
—Doug Mathews, bass clarinet
—Anthony Cole, tenor saxophone
4. Bass Solo (5:49)
—Doug Mathews, acoustic bass
5. Piano Solo and Trio #3 (7:32)
—Sam Rivers, piano
—Anthony Cole, drums
6. Spontaneous Creativity #1 (2:32)
—Sam Rivers, tenor saxophone
—George Lewis, trombone
7. Spontaneous Creativity #2 (4:53)
—Sam Rivers, piano
—George Lewis, trombone
—Anthony Cole, drums
" Recorded live at UCSD, March 8, 2004
" Previously Unreleased
" Courtesy of the Sam Rivers Trio and George Lewis
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LIST OF AUDIO EXAMPLES
Surrealestate
• Performances feature the following personnel unless otherwise noted:
—Gustavo Aguilar, percussion
—David Borgo, tenor and soprano saxophones
—Roman Cho, percussion and lap steel guitar
—Andy Connell, clarinet, soprano and alto saxophones
—Jonathon Grasse, electric guitar
—Kaye Lubach, tabla and percussion
—David Martinelli, drums
—Brana Mijatovic, drums
—Robert Reigle, tenor saxophone
8. Contrafactum in the spirit of Weddell Seals (3:04)
9. Sync or Swarm (6:31)
—David Borgo, alto saxophone
—Andy Connell, soprano saxophone
—Robert Reigle, tenor saxophone
10. FQP (1:16)
11. Contrafactum in the spirit of Giacinto Scelsi (2:34)
12. Contrafactum in the spirit of John Sheppard (2:16)
" Recorded at UCLA, 1999
" Released by Acoustic Levitation Al-1004 (CD), 2000
" Courtesy of Surrealestate and Acoustic Levitation
Total Time: 74:38
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Although writing a book may at first appear akin to the process of musical composi-
tion—both involve relative isolation, the possibility for revision, and a rather drawn
out timescale for completion—for me it has felt like an extended improvisation, and
in a very real sense, a collective one. As in musical improvisation, one draws on a
lifetime of experience and training, but all in service of that elusive and often fleeting
moment when an idea or connection is newly forged or a creative direction presents
itself for further exploration. From one perspective, the dialogic process of scholarship
happens at a far slower pace than that of improvised music, but both involve formative
experiences with mentors, considerable time spent exploring and internalizing the
work of others, and the lengthy and ongoing process of developing one’s own ap-
proach or expertise. Like the excitement of a good improvised performance, some of
the most fortuitous and mysterious moments during the research process can happen
without warning or explanation: when you glimpse the perfect book two shelves up
from the one you came to the library to find, or when you encounter a colleague at the
coffee shop or on the bandstand who suggests a line of inquiry or makes a pithy
remark that leaves a lasting impact on your thinking.
Good improvisation relies on this serendipity. As I worked on different sections of
the book, sometimes two or three at a time, new ideas and new collaborations arose
that often provoked a conceptual change or expansion, triggered the development of
entirely new sections or rewrites of older ones, or just as often ended up going no-
where. Much as in improvisation, great ideas come and go, often without being given
their proper due, while others may linger well pass their period of usefulness. Still
others might initially appear to have little promise, but can, over time, surprise with
their nuance or provocative implications. Although the finished product of a book can
belie this dynamic process of discovery, in fascinating ways, the process of looking,
perceiving, understanding, and describing arise together and shape each other. For
me, this book has been about a journey, not about arriving at a final destination. The
resoundingly social nature of collectively improvised music means that it has the
power to inspire and to infuriate, at times in equal measure; I can hope for no less or
no more for my own work.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
In addition to the numerous authors and musicians mentioned in the text whose
work has left an indelible mark on my own thinking, I would like to thank the follow-
ing individuals who have graciously offered guidance, feedback, and/or collaboration
through the years. As the now-clichéd riff goes, any shortcomings should be viewed
as my own rather than inherent in the work of others. Joseph Goguen and Rolf Bader
both gave willingly of their time and expertise to produce the collaborative work found
in chapters four and five, respectively. Keith Sawyer, David Ake, Pantelis Vasilakis,
Robert Reigle, Evan Parker, Bertram Turetzky, and Shlomo Dubnov all read a draft of
the manuscript and offered thorough and insightful feedback, for which I am ex-
tremely grateful. Timothy Rice, Robert Walser, Katherine Hayles, Roger Savage, Cheryl
Keyes, Ali Jihad Racy, Joe DiStefano, Roger Kendall, Steve Loza, and Jacqueline DjeDje
provided exceptional guidance during my graduate studies at UCLA. Chuck Dotas and
David Pope were outstanding colleagues and good friends at James Madison Univer-
sity. And my colleagues at UCSD, both past and present, have generously offered sup-
port and feedback, in particular George Lewis, Bertram Turetzky, Anthony Davis, and
Mark Dresser. Other musicians who have selflessly shared their time and energy with
me to discuss this work include: Lisle Ellis, Sam Rivers, Adam Rudolph, Ralph ‘‘Buzzy’’
Jones, and Kevin Eubanks.
The writing of this book was made possible by grants from the Center for Humanit-
ies and the Faculty Career Development Center at UCSD. An earlier version of chapter
two appeared in Black Music Research Journal vol. 22 no. 2 (2004). Portions of chapter
three will appear in the edited volume Playing Changes: New Jazz Studies (Robert Walser,
editor, Duke University Press). And chapter four appears in a slightly altered form in
the Jazz Research Proceedings Yearbook vol. 25 (2005). I wish to thank these journals and
presses for allowing me to include that work here.
Additionally, I would like to thank my musical mentors who, through their shining
artistry and example, have profoundly shaped my understanding of, and respect for,
the traditions of jazz and improvised music: Larry Aversano, David Baker, Dominic
Spera, David Liebman, Kenny Burrell, Gerald Wilson, Garnet Brown, Roberto Miranda,
and Billy Higgins. Special thanks go to the many wonderful musicians with whom I
have had the good fortune to perform: many are famous, others are not, but all are
exemplary in their passion and commitment to the art. To Robert Reigle and all of the
musicians who made up the collective Surrealeste I owe a profound debt for their
boundless spirits filled with the joy of exploration and the gift of empathy. David
Barker, my editor at Continuum, has been a joy to work with, and Gabriella Page-Fort,
his assistant, did a superb job of copyediting and preparing the manuscript. Finally, I
would like to give special thanks to my parents, Suzi and Peter Borgo, and to the rest
of my family, without whose support none of this would have been possible.
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PREFACE
I find I do some of my best thinking on airplanes. The romantic in me likes to think

that floating above the clouds allows my thinking to become untethered from its
normal cycles, habits, and conventions. Perhaps a more down-to-earth explanation,
however, is simply that with the complexity and congestion of our daily lives, long
flights offer one of the few uninterrupted stretches of time with which to read and
contemplate.
It was on an eighteen-hour flight from Los Angeles to Yerevan, Armenia in the
summer of 1995. At the time I was a graduate student studying ethnomusicology at
UCLA and I was a teaching assistant and performer in the jazz program. Under the
auspices of an exchange program between the university and the Yerevan Symphony,
our jazz quartet was invited to travel to Armenia to give a series of concerts at Khat-
chaturian Philharmonic Hall. The group included myself on saxophones, David Ake
on piano, Todd Sickafoose on bass, and David Whitman on drums; friends affection-
ately knew us as ‘‘The Three Daves Plus Todd.’’
For the flight, I brought along a copy of the book Complexity by Michael M. Waldrop,
a Christmas present from my parents that, with all my graduate coursework, I had not
gotten around to reading.1 The book explains for general readers the emerging science
of complexity and the internal workings of the Santa Fe Institute. My parents—New
Mexicans at heart despite their many years spent on the East Coast—thought Wal-
drop’s descriptions of the institute would be interesting and that these new scientific
ideas might rekindle an early love affair of mine with the sciences. They were right.
Back in high school—before I started skipping my calculus classes to practice Char-
lie Parker solos—I was fascinated by the then-new ideas of artificial intelligence and
had been accepted into the program in computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon Uni-
versity. But bebop rather than circuit boards was to be my immediate calling. My first
saxophone teacher, Larry Aversano, early in my studies gave me a copy of the Omni-
book, a well known collection of Charlie Parker solos transcribed from his Savoy and
Dial recordings. I proceeded to practice diligently from the book as if the notes con-
tained within were no different than the other saxophone exercises with which I was
familiar, working over examples with odd names like ‘‘Ornithology’’ or ‘‘Moose the
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PREFACE
Mooche’’ until my fingers could at least approximate even the most rapid and angular
musical passages. I enjoyed the melodic and rhythmic intricacy of the music—its
daunting technical challenge—but at that time I could not fathom how these compli-
cated solos were ‘‘composed’’ in the heat of the moment nor how Parker’s playing on
a given tune could and would differ dramatically from night to night. Since that time
the idea of in-the-moment creativity has become an overriding interest in my life.
I declined the offer from Carnegie Mellon and chose instead to pursue a jazz per-
formance degree at Indiana University. After four years of intense ‘‘wood shedding’’
under the tutelage of respected jazz educator David Baker, I embarked on a career as
a professional touring saxophonist that took me throughout the United States and to
various parts of Europe and Latin America and to the Middle and Far East. Along the
way I became fascinated by the variety of cultures I encountered and, in particular, by
the diverse musical traditions to which I was being exposed. I returned to school to
pursue a Ph.D. in ethnomusicology, by this point my fledgling interest in the sciences
a thing of the distant past.
Early in my graduate studies I pursued coursework in the musical traditions of Latin
America and Asia and I developed some basic proficiency on the Japanese shakuhachi
(flute) and the Indian sitar. My overriding interest in improvisation, however, contin-
ued to provide a thread that bound together my disparate pursuits. As my musical
horizons were expanding outward, my studies in the discipline of ethnomusicology
also provided me with a more nuanced understanding of the complex cultural web
that informs all modes of human expression. As a result, I found myself pulled deeper
into the vast history of jazz and African American music and the traditions of impro-
vising with which I felt most at home. Many jazz musicians have historically been
very welcoming of non-Western influences. Since the 1960s, these proclivities have
only continued to grow in magnitude and scope. I was, of course, already aware of the
important work of John Coltrane and others in this regard, but at UCLA I began to
investigate in much greater detail the ‘‘freer’’ approaches to improvisation that had
emerged in the 1960s and had continued to develop since that time, often well under
the radar of the increasingly conservative jazz community.
Through some fortuitous friendships with other interested ethnomusicologists and
musicians, I began to play regularly in an improvising collective called Surrealestate,
an exciting and eclectic grouping of performers with backgrounds ranging from ‘‘new
music’’ composition and modern jazz, to popular, electronic, and various non-Western
musics. This diverse yet surprisingly cohesive group met on a weekly basis for nearly
six years to explore the practice of improvising music together. These hands-on experi-
ences exploring new musical possibilities, and the particular challenges of doing so
within a large and disparate social group, have played an incalculable roll in my under-
standing of the process of collective improvisation.
My first realization as a performer in this expanded musical realm was that one
couldn’t rely on the forms, harmonies, and conventions of mainstream jazz, practices
that had consumed much of my early apprenticeship years. Yet, as the members of
Surrealestate became more comfortable playing with each other, it was equally clear
that distinct forms and practices were emerging and becoming an important part of
our collective identity. Not only did the personnel and instrumentation of the group
self-organize to a great degree, as word spread between friends and colleagues about
our weekly ‘‘sessions,’’ but also the musical terrain and our collective approach to it
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PREFACE
seemed to congeal with little to no discussion and no strong leadership. With less
shared musical experience and agreed-upon musical ‘‘vocabulary,’’ the members of
Surrealestate began to develop a keen ear for each other’s strengths and particular
tendencies, an attitude open to unpredictable combinations and experiences, and an
outlook filled with collective empathy. I soon realized that the ‘‘freedom’’ inherent in
free improvisation is not an ‘‘anything goes’’ type of anarchy, but involves collective
discovery in a communal environment and a mode of personal liberation made possi-
ble through cooperation and mutual respect.
On that long flight to Armenia, and while Surrealestate was only in its infancy, I
read about ‘‘The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos.’’ Modern science
has traditionally sought to take complex systems apart in order to discover their fun-
damental parts; for instance, to discover the smallest building blocks of matter, or
more recently the makeup of the human genome. Reductionism has been enormously
successful in helping to explain how complex things are made up of lots of simpler
things. But it cannot, by itself, answer important questions regarding how things in-
teract in complex ways to produce striking simplicities; the simplicities of form, func-
tion, and behavior. Here I was reading about a new breed of scientist not simply
interested in taking things apart, but in understanding how things come together;
how diverse systems display collective behaviors that are not predictable in terms of
the dynamics of their component parts. As an improvising musician interested in
human creativity and collective dynamics, Waldrop’s book was striking a chord with
me. I read on.
In the book, Waldrop describes scientific work on topics ranging from the origins of
life and the workings of the mind, to the unpredictable dynamics of political and social
groups and the unnerving disruptions of the stock market. It was not the exact nature
of the topics under discussion that caught my attention, but rather the fact that these
seemingly unrelated systems might have anything in common at all. I was also in-
trigued that this wide-ranging and somewhat unconventional approach to science
seemed to be gaining momentum. This was the first I had heard of chaos theory.
Chaos, in its everyday usage, is synonymous with disorder or even randomness. I
soon learned, however, that chaos in its scientific sense describes an orderly-disorder
in which extraordinarily intricate and unpredictable behaviors can arise from ex-
tremely simple dynamical rules. Like many, my first glimpse at the fractal diagrams
now made famous by chaos theory produced a deeply felt aesthetic response. But it is
not their complexity—or not only their complexity—that is fascinating. Rather it is
their remarkably ordered and eerily familiar simplicity—or is it simplexity?—that
makes them captivating and provocative. Waldrop’s descriptions of the science of com-
plexity spoke of systems poised on ‘‘the edge of chaos,’’ never quite locking into place
nor dissolving into complete turbulence; systems that could self-organize and adapt to
a constantly shifting environment. ‘‘The edge of chaos,’’ he writes, ‘‘is where new
ideas . . . are forever nibbling away at the edges of the status quo, and where even the
most entrenched old guard will eventually be overthrown. . . . The edge of chaos is the
constantly shifting battle zone between stagnation and anarchy, the one place where
a complex system can be spontaneous, adaptive, and alive.’’2 I can think of no better
definition of improvised music.
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1
The Sound and Science of Surprise
Surprises play with our expectations, our sense of order and disorder. They are neither
predictable nor unpredictable in their entirety. Randomness does not produce a sense
of surprise, but rather confusion, dismay, or disinterest. And small departures from an
orderly progression, if insufficiently interesting or dramatic, will pass without much
notice. Surprises are by definition unexpected, and yet those that most capture our
interest or delight have a feeling of sureness about them once experienced.
In 1959, Whitney Balliett, the longtime critic for The New Yorker magazine, published
a book of essays on jazz that memorably described the music as ‘‘The Sound of Sur-
prise.’’ Balliett heard in jazz the unpredictable and the astonishing: qualities that con-
tinue to provide awe and wonder to performers and listeners alike. Some thirty-five
years later, mathematician John L. Casti grouped a number of the emerging scientific
fields—often with ominous names like catastrophe, chaos, complexity, and critical-
ity—under the general title ‘‘The Science of Surprise.’’
Musicians and audiences tend to be interested in the very human surprises of indi-
vidual and collective creativity. Scientists, on the other hand, are usually most com-
fortable investigating the surprising yet presumably manageable workings of the
natural world. In the same year that Balliett fixed his memorable phrase into the jazz
lexicon, C. P. Snow published a book titled The Two Cultures, in which he described a
breakdown in communication between the sciences and the humanities, a breakdown
that he considered to be a hindrance to solving (or even discussing) many of the most
pressing problems the world faces. In the second edition of his work, however, Snow
optimistically predicted that a ‘‘third culture’’ would emerge and close the communi-
cations gap between the existing two.1
Although much does still separate the sciences from the humanities—and some
separation may always be important—the emergence of a ‘‘third culture’’ that would
improve the communication between the two seems both immanent and eminently
desirable. This book takes as its starting point the current historical and cultural mo-
ment that has afforded similar self-understandings to emerge in the sciences and in
the arts—a moment in which our very ideas of order and disorder are being reconfig-
ured and revalued in dramatic ways. I believe the methods and findings of the new
sciences of surprise are useful in illuminating the dynamics and aesthetics of musical
improvisation. Conversely, a better understanding of the workings of improvisation,
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THE SOUND AND SCIENCE OF SURPRISE
how musical techniques, relationships, and interactions are continually refined and
negotiated in performance, can provide insight on how we understand the dynamics
of the ‘‘natural’’ world and our place within it.
The idea that cultural threads can organize concurrent scientific and artistic activi-
ties is of course not entirely new. From the time of Phythagorus and Aristoxinus,
connections between science and art, math and music, have been of considerable in-
terest (although the Ancient Greeks were often more interested in timeless rather
than timely connections).2 In just the past few decades, however, developments in the
natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities, all subsumed by a more encompass-
ing change in values and perspectives, now appear poised to produce an unprece-
dented fusion of ideas across disciplines. In particular, contemporary scientists and
artists are beginning to embrace uncertainty—a word that tends to evoke doubt, con-
cern, and indecision in the Western worldview—as not only an inherent part of what
they do, but more importantly as the fundamental source of novelty and surprise in
the world.
During the last century, a ‘‘crisis of representation’’ emerged across many academic
and creative disciplines as individuals were forced to abandon the notion that there
exists an ‘‘absolute’’ or ‘‘privileged’’ vantage point from which observations, judg-
ments, and analyses can be made. Artists, scholars, and scientists alike gradually
shifted their focus from an overriding concern with isolated objects to the changing
relationships between those objects: a shift from structures to structuring and from
content to context.
In the social sciences, ideas such as history, language, and culture, once thought to
have independent meaning and objective status, were repositioned as currents of
thought, patterns of behavior, and malleable social and personal constructions. Heady
words like post-structuralism and cultural postmodernism were invoked to describe
the increasing awareness among scholars of the ethnocentric aspects of static and
totalizing investigations.
In the natural and physical sciences, several dramatic new theories questioned and
eventually altered the accepted view of reality. In the nineteenth century, Darwinian
evolution had the effect of removing man from his privileged position in the universe
and placing him firmly in the natural order of things: a natural order seemingly driven
by competition and uncertainty. And the laws of thermodynamics showed that the
amount of entropy, or disorder, in the universe is always increasing. Then in the early
twentieth century, Einstein’s relativity theory and pioneering research in subatomic
physics appeared to deal a fatal blow to the existing paradigms of Euclidian regularity,
Cartesian objectivity, Newtonian reducibility, and Laplacean predictability. The emerg-
ing scientific orientation implied that reality does not fundamentally consist of dis-
crete objects in space and there can never be an exterior, objective viewpoint from
which to observe.
Musical sounds and artistic sensibilities also underwent a dramatic upheaval
around this time. Artists in every culture have always responded to—and have helped
to shape—the then-dominant worldview. As scientists and scholars were grappling
with ideas of relativity and uncertainty, many artists were questioning the perma-
nence and certainty of their own work, choosing instead to emphasize its inherent
polysemy and permeability. And the sounds of surprise provided much of the sound-
track for these turbulent and exciting times.
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SYNC OR SWARM
In the first half of the twentieth century, jazz and other African American musics
dramatically changed the sound (if not always the face) of commercial and creative
music in the United States and abroad. These syncopated rhythms and improvisatory
sounds prefigured many dramatic changes in both music and society. The emerging
modernist (read: pan-European) traditions of composed music also underwent sig-
nificant changes at this time. While some composers found inspiration in (or sought
to ‘‘elevate’’) these exciting new strands of ‘‘popular’’ music, others turned toward a
substantial increase in complexity, adopting serialized methods for ordering the vari-
ous musical dimensions as well as more and more sophisticated ways to notate and
control their increasingly complex ideas.
The pendulum, having swung as far as it seemingly could in the direction of explic-
itly ordered performance, then appeared to shift back toward uncertainty. At approxi-
mately the same time that jazz musicians were expanding the role and conception of
improvisation in the new styles dubbed ‘‘bebop’’ or later the ‘‘avant-garde,’’ ‘‘new
music’’ composers began experimenting with less deterministic modes of ordering
performance—ranging from chance operations, to graphic or intuitive instructions
that afforded the performer a greater degree of musical latitude—and reviving the
practice of improvisation—an essential part of earlier pan-European practice which
was virtually abandoned (at least in art music circles) around the time of Beethoven.3
Since these formative years, an eclectic group of artists with diverse backgrounds in
modern jazz and classical music—and increasingly in electronic, popular, and world
music traditions as well—have pioneered an approach to improvisation that borrows
freely from a panoply of musical styles and traditions and at times seems unencum-
bered by any overt idiomatic constraints. This musical approach, often dubbed ‘‘free
improvisation,’’ tends to devalue the two dimensions that have traditionally domi-
nated music representation—quantized pitch and metered durations—in favor of the
micro-subtleties of timbral and temporal modification and the surprising and emer-
gent properties of individual and collective creativity in the moment of performance.
Approaches to free improvisation do differ enormously in their details and aesthet-
ics—and these issues will be teased out in the next chapter—yet it is remarkable that
an interest in (or reevaluation of) uncertainty in music emerges at roughly the same
historical juncture as similar moves in the natural and social sciences. Katherine
Hayles, in her work on the relationship between contemporary science and literature
(and perhaps unaware of similar moves made in improvised music) asks the following
question: ‘‘Why should John Cage become interested in experimenting with stochastic
variations in music about the same time that Roland Barthes was extolling the virtues
of noisy interpretations of literature and Edward Lorenz was noticing the effect of
small uncertainties on the nonlinear equations that described weather formations?’’
Hayles argues that the work of these and other individuals takes place in a ‘‘cultural
field within which certain questions or concepts become highly charged.’’4 For many
researchers and observers, the final decades of the last century brought to light the
fact that both scientists and artists engage the world around them through networks
of understanding shaped by the current cultural and historical moment.
The Age of Complexity

Ours is a complex age—one in which changes appear to be occurring at an ever-in-
creasing rate, threatening to defy our ability to comprehend and keep pace and exert-
ing immense and unpredictable influence on our personal and shared future. The
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networks of connections that link individuals, nations, and cultures are becoming
more complicated and more complex. And our combined impact on local and global
ecosystems is becoming more pronounced and potentially dangerous. Mark C. Taylor,
in his book The Moment of Complexity, writes: ‘‘This is a time of transition betwixt and
between a period that seemed more stable and secure and a time when, many people
hope, equilibrium will be restored . . . Stability, security, and equilibrium, however,
can be deceptive, for they are but momentary eddies in an endlessly complex and
turbulent flux. In the world that is emerging, the condition of complexity is as irreduc-
ible as it is inescapable.’’5
With this new age comes an increased need to understand the nature and behavior
of complex systems in the physical, social, and humanistic sciences. As opposed to
systems that may simply be complicated, complex systems are highly interconnected
and through this array of influences and interactions they demonstrate possibilities
for adaptation and emergence. In other words, complex systems are those that exhibit
neither too much nor too little order. Their dynamics are hard to predict but not en-
tirely random. In short, they offer the possibility of surprise. Complex systems tend to
adapt and even self-organize in a decentralized, bottom-up fashion.
Certain aspects of bottom-up organization have been with us since at least Adam
Smith’s notion of decentralized markets and Charles Darwin’s theory of biological
evolution, but the dominant metaphor of the Industrial Revolution was undoubtedly
that of the machine and of the hierarchy. With the recent development and prolifera-
tion of computer technologies, the machine metaphor has continued to hold sway over
our collective imaginations. But as these technologies transform from isolated desktop
assistants into portals on an increasingly networked world, new metaphors—both jus-
tified and overblown—are beginning to creep into common usage. Businesses, govern-
ments, the educational community, and artists are all scrambling to understand—and
to take advantage of—the power and potential of network culture.
Although the ‘‘science of surprise’’ encompasses diverse work in several disciplines,
certain methodological approaches and epistemological notions inform the field as a
whole. In general, researchers aim to model spontaneous, self-generating order, not
to discover static, reduced, and deterministic laws. Because of the findings of twenti-
eth century science, contemporary researchers have been forced to accept (often reluc-
tantly) that irreducibility, irreversibility, and unpredictability are essential rather than
aberrant behavior in the world. Writing specifically about chaos theory, Steven Kellert
identifies three methodological concerns of contemporary science as holism, experi-
mentalism, and diachrony. He explains, ‘‘The behavior of the system is not studied by
reducing it to its parts; the results are not presented in the form of deductive proofs;
and the systems are not treated as if instantaneous descriptions are complete.’’6 This
systemic, qualitative, and historical approach also resonates well with the methodolo-
gies of much social and humanistic research, and with current thinking in musical
studies as well.
It is unfortunate that we have but a single English word, music, to describe such a
vast array of ways in which to engage with this most human pursuit. We use the word
music to describe not only the dynamic sounds themselves, but also the representation
of sound as both audio recording and as musical notation. Christopher Small has
coined a new verb, ‘‘musicking,’’ meant to evoke taking part in any way in musical
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SYNC OR SWARM
activity. He intends for it to remind us that music is at heart a dynamic and social
form through which we bond with one another and create shared meanings.7
The static and symbolic representation of music as notation has provided an invalu-
able tool to composers and performers (particularly those in the Western tradition).
More recently, audio recording has revolutionized the ways in which we can craft and
engage with musical sound. But no static representation of music, no matter its detail
or fidelity, can purport to capture the whole of musical meaning. With each new hear-
ing or performance, new subtleties and new meanings will emerge. Each listener not
only attends to different details and constructs different meanings, but she will bring
to bear on her engagement with music a lifetime of personal and cultural experiences
and sensibilities. As a temporal art that invokes and plays with memory, identity, and
emotion in countless ways, musicking hinges on individual experience and cultural
understandings and exploits both our sense of familiarity and surprise.
Our ways of investigating musical behavior and analyzing musical sound in the past
have often avoided or downplayed the ‘‘sounds of surprise.’’ Much like the way in
which our previous scientific models excelled at static and reduced descriptions of
physical phenomena, our traditional modes of investigating music have also excelled
at illuminating its non-dynamic qualities. In an often-quoted passage, Benoit Mandel-
brot, the inventor of fractal geometry, eloquently commented on the impossibility of
capturing nature’s beauty within static Euclidian forms: ‘‘Clouds are not spheres,
mountains are not cones, coastlines are not circles, bark is not smooth, nor does light-
ning travel in a straight line.’’8 It is also impossible to capture the full beauty and
complexity of musical expression in its static, Euclidian form as notation. As David
Roberts wryly comments, ‘‘The score is no more the music than a recipe book is a
meal.’’9
Playing and listening to music together provides a cultural space and a cognitive
means through which individuals and social groups can coordinate their actions and
behaviors. Improvisation, in particular, focuses special attention on these emergent
qualities of performance. By referencing the scientific and cultural paradigm shift that
is well underway, I intend to argue for a systems or ecological understanding of music
that takes serious account of all of the following:
• Music is an event centered on the real time production of sound; music is not an
abstraction, such as a score, transcription, or recording.
• Music lives when it is heard and understood; the active, human process of listen-
ing is the essence of music. Therefore, the physical and cognitive capabilities and
limitations of human listeners are crucial for analysis. What cannot be heard and
understood is not (human) music.
• Music is always situated in a particular social and historical context. This context
includes the location at which music production occurs, the prior musical experi-
ences of both performers and audience, as well as their expectations and prejudices.
• The above cannot be separated from the immediate and further flung networks
of performers and audience, up to and including their communities and cultures.
In summary, music is temporal, embodied, enacted, situated, social, cultural, and

historical. An important goal of this book is to illuminate these aspects of music in
5
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general and, in the process, to demonstrate that the freer forms of musical improvisa-
tion, those that have often been dismissed as ‘‘chaotic’’ in the pejorative sense of
the word, may actually reveal ‘‘chaotic dynamics’’ that demonstrate turbulence and
coherence at the same time. Borrowing poetic language from the new sciences when
commenting on a recording of free improvisation, Fred Bouchard writes: ‘‘The music’s
splintered fragmentation implies a new wholeness, its seeming chaos a fresh order, its
complexity a ringing simplicity, its turbulence an inner peace.’’10
Surrealestate
On the afternoon of October 19, 1996, I was one of ten musicians who walked into
the auditorium at the Armand Hammer Museum of Art in Los Angeles, California
to begin a performance titled ‘‘Surrealism in Music.’’ The concert was organized in
connection with an exhibit of Rene Magritte’s paintings then on display in the muse-
um’s corridors. Our group, which had been meeting on a weekly basis to improvise
collectively for nearly a year by that point, took on the name Surrealestate that day, a
moniker that would stay with us through many more playing sessions, concerts, and
an eventual compact disc release.11 The performance at the Armand Hammer, our first
real gig, brought together in nascent form many of the musical strands that the group
would continue to explore and develop over the next several years.
For the concert that day we took positions, not on stage, but flanking the audience
from both sides and from the back. The group included myself and Robert Reigle on
saxophones, Alan Ferber on trombone, Loren Ettinger and Jonathon Grasse on electric
guitars, Andrew McLean on North Indian tabla drums, Todd Sickafoose on double
bass, and Gustavo Aguilar, Mark Ferber, and David Martinelli on various percussion
instruments and drum set.12 During the performance, the group explored both un-
scripted improvisation and pieces that were partially structured through the use of
compositional schemes developed by various group members. These schemes ranged
in style from scores utilizing standard or graphic notations to conceptual pieces that
avoided the use of notation entirely. At one point we phoned Steven Keonig, a poet in
New York City, and had him read his poem titled ‘‘Ants Eating Through Brick’’ over
the house loudspeakers while we improvised a collective and spontaneous accompani-
ment. And for our finale, the ensemble performed ‘‘The Marriage of Heaven and
Earth’’ by group member Robert Reigle, which then segued directly into his arrange-
ment of Movement IV of ‘‘Pfhat’’ by Italian composer Giacinto Scelsi. Although there
was no direct influence when the pieces were originally composed, both emphasize a
high cluster pitchband that can serve to focus the listener’s and player’s attention on
the sacred and the sublime.13 To complicate matters even further, during the entire
concert that afternoon, a lone boombox sat on the otherwise empty stage, playing Erik
Satie’s ‘‘Vexations’’ at a volume level only audible during the quietest moments of the
performance.14
The name Surrealestate brings to mind the bizarre or abstract—the ‘‘surreal’’—and
the grounded and tangible—the ‘‘estate’’ or ‘‘real estate.’’ Our musical explorations
also tended to draw inspiration from both the mundane and the extraordinary, from
the orderly to the disorderly. Perhaps the one thing that unified us as a group was
our desire to explore the types of synergy and ‘‘orderly disorder’’—the sync and the
swarm—that often go hand in hand with improvising in such a large, diverse, and
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SYNC OR SWARM
unpredictable setting. But more than that, we developed a strong bond of friendship,
conviviality, and trust through our weekly sessions spent exploring musical possibili-
ties and horizons together. The personnel and the musical direction of the group
changed considerably over the five or so years that I actively met with them, and much
to everyone’s delight, the group has continued on even after many of the original
members went separate ways.15
From the start, we organized in an egalitarian fashion, although saxophonist Robert
Reigle did often serve as a de facto leader, not through any brute force, but rather
through his infectious spirit and musical convictions. For our weekly sessions, all par-
ticipants were encouraged to bring in sketches or designs for group improvisations, or
to make suggestions as we collectively brainstormed new strategies to implement and
explore. Several players, including myself, came to the group from primarily jazz back-
grounds, while others had experience with Western classical music, contemporary
composition, American popular musics, and various ‘‘world’’ music traditions, includ-
ing Hindustani, Latin American, East Asian, and Balkan musics. These diverse back-
grounds proved to be both an asset and a liability for the group. We reveled in
interesting combinations of players, instruments, styles, and techniques, but each
musician also had to confront the challenge of reconciling his or her own tradition,
tastes, and personal experiences with the ongoing process of musical and community
formation.16
We often began our weekly playing sessions with a collectively improvised perform-
ance; the only instruction, either overt or implied, was to listen first to the silence
before beginning to play. After the free improvisation, the group might look over a
sketch brought in by a member or establish a group conceptual design on the spot by
soliciting individual suggestions. With a membership that could occasionally range in
the double digits, we found that these schemes could help us to maintain direction
and coherence for our sessions and performances, although many of our most cher-
ished moments were group improvisations without a pre-established framework.
Compositions for the group ranged in scope from a few inspiring words or figures
to more lengthy multi-page scores employing standard European notation, either bor-
rowed or invented graphic notations, metaphoric or conceptual instructions, or various
combinations of all of these.17 In all cases, however, the group viewed the process of
composition as offering a guide or springboard to collective improvisation; and group
improvisations could, in turn, lead to new compositional ideas. We also performed
interpretations of the work of African American composers such as Ornette Coleman,
John Coltrane, Cecil Taylor, and Albert Ayler, as well as work from pan-European
composers ranging from Guillaume de Machaut and Claudio Monteverdi, to Alfred
Schnittke and Giacinto Scelsi. Yet even when using an explicitly notated score, the
group was predisposed to the improvisatory, and, at times, showed a strong propensity
for subtle humor.18
More often, however, we would establish a few guiding elements prior to beginning
a collective improvisation. These could be as simple as a general sense of mood, length,
contour, or dynamic that we might want to explore, or they could be of a more specific
or conceptual nature, such as exploring difference tones, or ‘‘vertical’’ or ‘‘sharp’’
sounds.19 Alternately, we might choose to organize ahead of time smaller configura-
tions within the group that could transition from one to the other: for instance a series
of trios, duos, or solos, or various combinations of these.20 In certain cases, we adopted
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game-type rules to structure when, how, or how many people might play together,
among other things. At other times, we explored ways in which conducted gestures
might help to establish interesting ensemble dynamics or transitions. Finally, to make
certain our preconceived designs stayed as ‘‘fresh’’ as possible, we frequently incorpo-
rated chance elements such as drawing lots just prior to a performance to establish
who would perform what aspect of a piece, ensuring that all of the musicians re-
mained on the creative edge.
An alternative to using notation of any form was to look for inspiration in other
sounds, other arts, and other media. During several of our live performances we ex-
plored intermedia connections with poetry, painting, film, and even television soap
operas. And the group’s CD release was titled Contrafactum, from the plural of the word
contrafact, meaning a newly created artwork that is based in interesting and significant
ways on another work.21 Before the group recorded several of the performances that
eventually comprised the CD, we listened to short excerpts from pre-existing record-
ings and then improvised in the spirit of what we had just heard. These source record-
ings included excerpts of music by Cecil Taylor, John Sheppard, Giacinto Scelsi, and
Korean shamans, as well as an environmental recording of Weddell Seals in the Ant-
arctic. Several of these contrafactum recorded by Surrealestate, along with a free im-
provisation by the three saxophonists in the ensemble, can be heard on the compact
disc that accompanies this book.
Sync or Swarm
Nothing seems to raise a heated debate among musicians faster than the question of
whether improvisation can be taught. In certain respects, the best way to learn about
improvisation as a performer is undoubtedly to jump right in and start doing it. When
I first joined the faculty at the University of California in San Diego, I was asked to
teach a graduate-level performance seminar on free improvisation and was somewhat
perplexed by the idea. I had studied jazz improvisation in the university setting early
in my career, but many graduate students come to UCSD with a background in com-
posed ‘‘new’’ music and little interest in learning the more mainstream approaches to
jazz. For my Ph.D. research I had investigated the cultural and aesthetic dimensions
of freer forms of improvisation, but the expectation was that this should be a perform-
ance rather than a research-based seminar. My experiences with Surrealestate had
provided me with considerable experience improvising in a freer setting, but these
meetings had happened outside of the traditional realm of academic coursework.
There were no courses on free improvisation at UCLA where I did my Ph.D. in ethno-
musicology, and there are few courses of this kind in the university setting anywhere.
Entering into this new pedagogical terrain I had no immediate models on which to
draw. So I contacted George Lewis, the noted improviser, researcher, and then profes-
sor at UCSD in the Critical Studies and Experimental Practices Program.22 George gave
me a brief description of how he had handled the class in the past and managed to
assuage some of my fears that an academic course on free improvisation had to be
somehow different from a collective workshop. In fact his own teaching approach,
indelibly influenced by his association with the A.A.C.M. (Association for the Ad-
vancement of Creative Musicians) in Chicago, has always focused on this experiential
approach to learning.23
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SYNC OR SWARM
In his response to my query, George mentioned that he often begins the class in
much the same way that they used to teach swimming—throw them in the deep end
and work with what naturally happens. The title of this book is a not-so-subtle riff on
that idea. Improvising music most definitely has elements of that ‘‘sink or swim’’
attitude. There is the leap into the unknown or the uncharted, the adrenaline rush that
can accompany the excitement and danger of an uncertain future, and the mandate to
make something happen—to swim—or else that initial excitement may give way to
fear and failure. Sync or Swarm also refers to the delicate and exquisite dynamics that
can emerge in complex systems, but only under certain conditions that require intense
communication and cooperation and a shared history of interactions. It describes the
critical moment at which a complex system either moves toward a state of greater
fitness or is extinguished.
Improvising music hinges on one’s ability to synchronize intention and action and
to maintain a keen awareness of, sensitivity to, and connection with the evolving
group dynamics and experiences. The most successful improvisations, to my ears, are
those in which the musicians are able to synchronize, not necessarily their sounds—
although this too can miraculously happen—but rather their energies, their inten-
tions, and their moments of inspiration. During the most complex and dense passages
of collective improvisation, a swarm-like quality also emerges, in which individual
parts may be moving in very different directions and yet the musical whole develops
with a collective purpose. The health of the community of improvisers also depends
on the ability of individuals to synchronize, or come together, for an evening of music-
king. Yet at the same time, improvisers must act in swarm-like ways such that new
dynamics and configurations can percolate through the community, producing a deli-
cate state in which individuals acting on their ‘‘local’’ information can produce com-
plex global behavior.
I also hope that the subtitle of my book, ‘‘improvising music,’’ can be read in multi-
ple ways. Although the more common term ‘‘improvised music’’ does have the advan-
tage of reminding us of the long and important tradition of improvised music, it tends
to foreground the more static semantic construction of a ‘‘music’’ that has already
been ‘‘improvised.’’ I have often been struck by the fact that we describe this dynamic
form of musicking-in-the-moment by attaching to it a past tense verb. By adopting
the present progressive, improvising, I hope to highlight the fact that even as I write
these words (and as you read them), creative musicians are working in and around
established practices and codes, improvising music. Although my text will not pretend
to touch on all or even most of the creative sonic avenues currently under exploration,
I hope that many of the cultural, aesthetic, and scientific issues that I highlight will
resonate with those who are actively engaging with contemporary music in all its
facets. With a slight shift of emphasis, therefore, my subtitle can also be read as impro-
vising music, a play on the fact that the very notion of what we mean by ‘‘music’’ is
continually being reshaped as we make our way through a new millennium.
Sync or Swarm looks through the lens of contemporary science to illuminate the
process and practice of improvising music, and it explores the contemporary musical
domain for its ability to offer a visceral engagement with emerging scientific notions
of chaos, complexity, and self-organization. Before introducing the scientific side of
the equation, chapter two, ‘‘Reverence for Uncertainty,’’ presents a more thorough
introduction to contemporary improvised music and the growing body of scholarship
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on the subject, focusing considerable attention on the cultural values and aesthetic
practices that continue to be negotiated within the community of improvisers. In it, I
probe important questions about the ways in which artists and involved listeners de-
fine, document, perform, experience, and evaluate this music, and I explore the histor-
ical, social, economic, political, and even spiritual dimensions of these intriguing
issues. Many of the themes that are conveniently sketched out here receive additional
treatment in the chapters that follow.
In one sense, the remaining chapters funnel outward in scope, from the perspective
of a solo improviser, to that of a group interacting in performance and over time, and
finally to the network dynamics that bind together improvisers and groups into a
musical community. The final chapter on pedagogy, however, should remind us that
network dynamics also affect how individuals learn and perform, completing the her-
meneutic circle. From a systems perspective, all of these influences—the individual,
collective, and communal—play a role at each level of description.24 Individuals learn
and develop through social experience, groups wax and wane through musical and
interpersonal communication, and a community is both formed and shaped by the
individuals whom it serves.
The individual chapters also present different aspects of the emerging science of
surprise: starting with the cognitive domain and moving through physical, biological,
and social perspectives. Yet the way we think, is influenced by our biological being and
by the fact that we are situated in, and continually engage with, a physical and social
world. In other words, although these chapters might be envisioned as investigating
separate disciplines, here too we are ultimately led to conclude that these findings and
approaches are interrelated.
One of the hallmarks of ecological thinking is to regard systems as ‘‘wholes made
up of wholes.’’ Each component in a complex dynamical system is, in intriguing ways,
not only interconnected but also able to maintain its own internal structure and to
evolve over time. To treat the individual as merely a part of the improvising group
denies not only his or her wholeness, but also his or her connection with, and respon-
sibility to, the musical context and moment. To envision an improvising ensemble as
the simple addition of individuals also misses the dynamic, interactive, and emergent
qualities of performance. Finally, to examine a group or an individual in isolation of
historical, cultural, and societal contingencies and opportunities ignores the richness
of network dynamics.
Chapter three, ‘‘The Embodied Mind,’’ focuses on the solo improviser in general and
the performance practice of English saxophonist Evan Parker in particular. Describing
his approach, I draw on several contemporary ideas in cognitive science that are chal-
lenging traditional notions of Cartesian dualism by demonstrating the ways in which
mind, body, and environment interact. To highlight these embodied and enactive ap-
proaches to cognition, I probe issues of interest to researchers in cognitive linguistics,
science studies, and general systems theory. Here, as in most of the later chapters, I
aim for a middle way that takes into account the rich details of musical performance,
but in so doing does not separate those details from a more comprehensive under-
standing of the emergent properties of music in general, and the embodied and encul-
tured aspects of musical meaning in particular.
Chapter four, ‘‘Rivers of Consciousness,’’ highlights ensemble dynamics in improvised
performance, focusing attention on the work of African American multi-instrumentalist
Sam Rivers and his trio. The scientific aspects of this chapter move us from general
10
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SYNC OR SWARM
systems theory to the more specific case of nonlinear dynamical systems. This work
emanates from collaborative and co-authored papers with Joseph Goguen, a Professor
in Computer Science and Engineering at UCSD, who has wide-ranging interests and
expertise in the fields of nonlinear dynamics, cognitive science, consciousness studies,
and the philosophy of music. In this chapter we explore the phase space of improvisa-
tion, focusing on the delicate group interactions that can occur during transitional
moments in this complex dynamical phase space, and we pay particular attention to
the ways in which listeners (both audiences and performers) attend to and process
the qualitative aspects of musical performance. We illustrate these ideas with a phe-
nomenological analysis of ‘‘Hues of Melanin,’’ a collective improvisation by the Sam
Rivers Trio featuring Cecil McBee on bass and Barry Altschul on drums.
Chapter five, ‘‘The Edge of Chaos,’’ is both more broad and more specialized in its
treatment of nonlinear dynamical systems. I investigate certain aspects of the new
sciences of chaos and complexity, focusing in particular on the variety of ways in
which contemporary music is articulating the emerging cultural framework of ‘‘chaot-
ics.’’ And in collaboration with Rolf Bader of the University of Hamburg, I apply some
computer analysis of the effective fractal dimension of music to recorded examples by
Evan Parker and Sam Rivers, as well as by the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Peter Brötz-
mann’s group, and Derek Bailey. Finally, I offer some general comments in connection
with current thinking in the sciences on the promising and problematic aspects of
self-organization with regards to collective improvisation, illustrated by a brief discus-
sion of a recent controversial concert event and the variety of listener responses that
it provoked.
Chapter six, ‘‘Sync and Swarm,’’ investigates some very recent ideas in the sciences
of sync, swarm intelligence, and network theory, offering some observations about the
dynamics of musical performance and community that are just appearing on the hori-
zons of musical research. The discussion moves from instances of physical coupling
and biological entrainment, through the decentralized dynamics of swarm behavior,
to the complex networks that organize and affect social identity and communication.
Along the way I touch on issues ranging from musical groove to human-computer
interactions, from generative music making to historiography.
Networks organize and inform many aspects of our physical, biological, and social
worlds, from living cells to global ecosystems, and from the dynamics of the human
brain to the virtual communities of the World Wide Web. In music, networks organize
not only the social world of performance (with whom you play) but also the ideascapes
of musical activity (by whom you are influenced and in what directions your creativity
flourishes) and the political realities of a musical community (how historical and eco-
nomic factors often dictate which musicians and musical ideas gain notice and pres-
tige). Networks make communication and community possible, but they can also
concentrate power and opportunities in the hands of a few. By looking to our still
nascent understandings of ‘‘small world’’ networks, I explore the complex of factors
that establish, maintain, expand, and can even destroy musical communities.
The final chapter, ‘‘Harnessing Complexity,’’ highlights the ways in which learning
and cognition are situated within and distributed across physical and social settings.
Drawing on current research in creativity studies, ethnographic interviews with cele-
brated improvisers and pedagogues, as well as on my own experiences engaging with
11
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improvised music in a collective setting, I propose some strategies for reconceptualiz-

ing music pedagogy in general and for harnessing the complexity of improvisation in
the classroom.
Within just the last few decades, we have become increasingly aware of the social,
cultural, and historical influences that affect the work and perspective of all creative
individuals. Researchers and practitioners in both the arts and sciences choose to in-
vestigate topics that are deemed interesting, useful, and understandable by the pre-
vailing cultural climate of the times and their ‘‘results’’ necessarily reflect their prior
knowledge and their chosen mode of inquiry. Katherine Hayles expresses this senti-
ment succinctly: ‘‘culture circulates through science no less that science circulates
through culture.’’25 Philosophers of science now commonly speculate on the broader
cultural conditions that authorize or overlook certain scientific fields and modes of
investigation. Stephen Kellert, for instance, argues that contemporary science ‘‘pro-
vides an occasion for investigating the interaction between our methods for gaining
knowledge about the world, our notions of what that knowledge should look like, and
our conceptions of what kind of world we inhabit’’—a descriptive turn-of-phrase that
undoubtedly rings true to many artists as well.26
In juxtaposing these contemporary developments and understandings, I will show
that the method of modeling the natural world emerging from the ‘‘science of sur-
prise’’ is compatible with the ways in which musicians are engaging with ‘‘the sounds
of surprise,’’ not proof of the music’s inherent worth. For that, we need look no further
than the community of performers and listeners who are passionately committed to
this music. My comparison often occurs on the level of metaphor, but this should not
be perceived as an inherent shortcoming. In fact, a growing body of scholarship in
cognitive studies argues for the notion that the way we think and learn is deeply
ensconced in metaphor; new understandings develop by connecting with and by ex-
tending previous knowledge and experience. We invoke metaphors when our conven-
tional tools of language and analysis fail to adequately describe a subject or process at
hand. Free improvisation confounds most conventional musicological approaches.
Like any good metaphor, however, this one can only succeed based on the similarities
and on the subtle tensions and new understandings that may be uncovered through
the process of comparison. In so doing, we may also find correlations between the two
that are more akin to homology than analogy, as well as the possibility for moving
beyond metaphorical affinities to distill an explicit method that can be applied in
practice.27 Sync or Swarm uses the lens of the new sciences—their shifting methods,
goals, and findings—to illuminate the practice and aesthetics of musical improvisa-
tion, and it probes the individual, social, and historical aspects of improvisation to
illuminate the shared cultural moment in which uncertainty may be revered rather
than feared.
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2
Reverence for Uncertainty
We regularly face uncertainty in our daily lives. What will the weather be like this
afternoon? Will I get to my destination on time with all of this traffic? Has this food
been out of the refrigerator too long? And uncertainties operate on larger social and
time scales as well. Is our government pursuing the right domestic and foreign poli-
cies? Can our planet withstand the environmental impact of X, Y, or Z? Will my health
be such that I can still play saxophone when I’m sevety-five? Uncertainties also com-
plicate our understanding of and engagement with the past. How did life evolve on
this planet? What provoked the last ice age? What kind of person was my great, great
grandmother? I wonder what Buddy Bolden really sounded like.
Out of shear necessity we often plow right through a whole host of daily uncertaint-
ies. We can’t let the decision of where to go for dinner slow us down to where we get
nothing accomplished that day. For other long-term or recurring uncertainties we may
take steps to reduce or offset their inherent risk. For example, if the morning traffic is
frequently congested and I have an important meeting that day, I may decide to leave
twenty minutes ahead of my regular schedule to reduce the chances of arriving late.
And I might regularly vote in local and national elections and write to my representa-
tives in government in an attempt to influence public policy. Or I might take out an
insurance plan to guard against unforeseen health or natural disasters, or start a sav-
ings plan to ensure my family’s financial future.
While uncertainties often provoke concern, they also provide hope, surprise, and
anticipation. For instance, we can look forward to the uncertainties of visiting new
places or meeting new people, or to an unexpected twist or surprise ending in a movie
or novel. We may wish the best for our family and friends in the face of an uncertain
future. Or, we may simply wonder with anticipation over the sounds that we will hear
at a concert that evening.
Musicians are frequently trained to reduce uncertainties. To execute a musical pas-
sage, we are told, requires precise timing, intonation, phrasing, and a whole host of
expressive qualities under express control of the performer. Uncertainty is also the
bane of precise ensemble playing. We need to feel certain that the clarinets will enter
with the countermelody four measures after letter B or else the entire composition
may be in jeopardy. The string section cannot be uncertain about where to place the
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REVERENCE FOR UNCERTAINTY
pitch or which is the most desirable bowing combination. Missed entrances or impre-
cisely articulated passages have lost many aspiring classical musicians a spot in their
desired orchestra.
But perhaps this is too dismal a picture. Musicians of all types relish certain uncer-
tainties. The joy of making music in a large, orchestral setting comes from those un-
predictable moments when the entire ensemble is phrasing perfectly together, the
conductor (and perhaps even the audience) all are in sync, sharing and feeling the
musical moment. Skilled musicians can continue to find new expressive possibilities
in even the most practiced phrases or rehearsed repertoire.
Yet improvising musicians do more than relish the subtle uncertainties that keep a
musical composition or performance feeling fresh and vital. Uncertainty is their raison
d’être. They not only welcome, but they worship the sound of surprise. They revere the
uncertainties of new techniques, new conceptions, and new performance occasions,
groupings, and venues. During performance, improvisers also must revere the process
of exploring and negotiating uncertainties together.
Exploring Uncertainty
A compromise between order and disorder, improvisation is a nego-

tiation between codes and their pleasurable dismantling.1
—John Corbett
Free improvisation is not an action resulting from freedom; it is an

action directed towards freedom.2
—Davey Williams
The Latin roots of the word ‘‘improvisation’’ refer to the unforeseen or the uncertain.3
Improvisation as an example of human creativity is somehow at the same time both
mundane and mysterious. In a musical context this situation is no different.
David Cope rightly points out that improvisation ‘‘must inherently exist in all music
in which exact notation of every detail is not possible: therefore in all music.’’4 Derek
Bailey begins his important book on the subject by writing: ‘‘Improvisation enjoys the
curious distinction of being the most widely practiced of all musical activities and the
least acknowledged and understood.’’5 There is a growing body of scholarly work on
improvisation, although the emphasis on in-performance creativity and interaction
tends to defy the standard musicological tools of the trade as well as the accepted
conservatory methods for evaluating competency and aesthetic value.6
For many (in the contemporary Western world at least), jazz represents the most
thorough engagement with improvisation. For many jazz lovers, improvisation has
been the defining trait of the music. Louis Armstrong may have been the first to dem-
onstrate fully the individual improvisatory possibilities of jazz, but countless others
have followed suit. In a frequently quoted remark when asked about ‘‘freedom’’
music, drummer Philly Joe Jones commented: ‘‘Everyone’s been playing free. Every
time you play a solo you’re free to play what you want to play. That’s freedom right
there.’’7
The unpredictability inherent in jazz improvisation, however, has been diffused at
various times in the music’s history. For example, Hollywood films and the commercial
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SYNC OR SWARM
Swing industry of the 1930s and 1940s often severely limited the amount and type of
improvisation that could take place. The modern sounds of bebop emerged during the
war years at least in part as a reaction to these restrictive and homogenizing influences
in the industry.
‘‘Evolution or revolution?’’ has now become a clichéd question asked by jazz histori-
ans regarding the transition from swing to bebop, but the music arguably reflected
both continuities with, and radical departures from, earlier jazz practice. The standard
instruments of jazz were still favored, even if the preferred ensemble size shrank con-
siderably. Several of the most common song forms (12-bar blues, 32-bar AABA) were
still in common usage even if their harmonic structures, melodic phrases, and tempos
were dramatically altered. The streamlined bebop combo and compositions did, argua-
bly, represent a dramatic shift toward a more democratic musical setting that could
allow for greater portions of improvisation and heightened conversational interac-
tions, and many beboppers sought to integrate the aural, physical, and intellectual
aspects of their music in performance. The musical ‘‘revolutions’’ initiated by Charlie
Parker, Thelonious Monk, Dizzy Gillespie, Kenny Clarke, Bud Powell, and other bebop
pioneers challenged the established practices of the music industry, fought against the
stereotyped notions of African American artists as ‘‘entertainers,’’ and often carried
with them strong social and political connotations in light of the emerging civil rights
movement.8
Several revolutionary aspects of bebop jazz were expanded in the ‘‘avant-garde’’
styles of the late 1950s and 1960s, while many of the conventions of jazz dating from
the music’s earliest days—the use of uniform pulse and cyclic song forms, for in-
stance—were challenged and even dispensed with by proponents of the ‘‘new thing.’’
Yet, experimentation with the form and format of jazz could be heard years, if not
decades, before this ‘‘official’’ arrival of the avant-garde.9 In a passage that pokes fun
at our desire to pigeonhole history and the emergence of new musical styles, the edi-
tors of Gramophone-Explorations write: ‘‘Quite when the equation of ‘tune $ improvisa-
tion % jazz’ somehow got rearranged into ‘jazz—tune % improvisation’ is one of the
more regularly rewritten dates in the history of modern music. . . . Furthermore, it’s
unlikely that any committed practitioner of free improvised music . . . would subscribe
to such a facile, simplistic definition anyway.’’10
When Louis Armstrong liberated the role of the jazz soloist or Papa Jo Jones made
swing music truly swing, the reverence for uncertainty in jazz was already evident.
When Coleman Hawkins only fleetingly referred to the melody of ‘‘Body and Soul’’ he
prepared the way for many more freedoms to follow. And when Charlie Parker began
his improvised phrases at unusual points in the chorus structure, or Thelonious Monk
used considerable dissonance and rhythmic variety in his performances, the notion
that jazz was dominated by conventions was resoundingly laid to waste. Yet when
Ornette Coleman offered the jazz community Something Else in 1958, his sound and
approach did spark the curiosity, creativity, and ire of many performers and listeners.
Coleman’s words from the album’s liner notes seem prophetic:
I think one day music will be a lot freer. The pattern for a tune, for instance, will
be forgotten and the tune itself will be the pattern, and won’t have to be forced
into conventional patterns. The creation of music is just as natural as the air we
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breathe. I believe music is really a free thing, and any way you can enjoy it you
should.
The impact of Coleman’s music was not extensively felt until his two-and-a-half
month engagement at the Five Spot in New York City starting in November of 1959.
By this point, his early use of 12-bar blues and 32-bar bop tunes had given way to a
mature form of thematic improvisation that, while often still swinging in a more-or-
less traditional sense, relied little on preconceived musical harmony and form. Accord-
ing to John Litweiler, Ornette’s playing ‘‘makes clear that uncertainty is the content
of life, and even things that we take for certainties (such as his cell motives) are ever
altering shape and character. By turns he fears or embraces this ambiguity; but he
constantly faces it, and by his example, he condemns those who seek resolution or
finality as timid.’’11
For sympathetic musicians, critics, and audiences, this emphasis on uncertainty al-
lowed for creativity unencumbered by the constricting harmonies, forms, and rigid
meters of bebop and swing styles. It evoked a return to the collective practices and
ideals evident in the earliest forms of jazz that emanated from New Orleans and
pointed the way toward a more inclusive musical stance that could draw on insight
and inspiration from the world over. To unsympathetic listeners, these uncertainties
resulted only in musical mayhem devoid of the swing, melody, and harmony that
made traditional jazz music so vital and technically demanding. John Corbett draws
an interesting distinction between people who view free jazz as a failed experiment
and those who revel in the constant experimentation of jazz:
Jazz experiments. . . . Is the second word a noun or a verb? . . . If you see a noun
then what we’re talking about are discreet events in jazz history, those ‘‘experi-
ments’’ that punctuate the jazz timeline like great exclamation points, or better
yet, like giant question marks. . . . On the other hand, perhaps you read the word
‘‘experiments’’ as a verb and ‘‘jazz’’ as its subject. Thus, experimenting is what
jazz does.12
Coleman’s performance approach paved the way for the use of melodic improvisa-
tion and open forms not based on strict harmonic associations, but the move to sever
completely ties with uniform tempo and to push the envelope of egalitarian ensemble
interaction to its furthest extremes may be best witnessed in the work of Cecil Taylor.
Taylor studied piano from the age of five, immersing himself in both the work of
twentieth-century classical composers (through his studies at the New England Con-
servatory) and the improvised music tradition of African American jazz. Litweiler
writes that, ‘‘His very first record [Jazz Advance recorded in 1956] placed him unmis-
takably among the jazz avant-garde, back when John Coltrane was beginning his ca-
reer with Miles Davis and still discovering himself in bop; when Eric Dolphy was
playing bop in Los Angeles and Ornette Coleman’s cataclysmic first LP was more than
two years in the offing.’’13 On that album, bass player Buell Neidlinger and drummer
Dennis Charles maintain standard song forms and swing feel throughout, but on the
solo piano rendition of ‘‘You’d Be So Nice to Come Home To,’’ Taylor anticipates the
mature free jazz style of the 1960s and feels no need to maintain a steady pulse or
standard song form.14
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SYNC OR SWARM
The year 1961 proved to be a pivotal year for Taylor. His father, a loving supporter
of his son’s activities, died that year and Taylor recalls that it triggered an introspective
assessment of his creative direction. While his newly found convictions often led him
to menial labor or the welfare office for financial assistance, his musical fortitude
would once again set the jazz world on end. The recording Nefertiti, The Beautiful One
Has Come marks the formation of the Cecil Taylor Unit and the unalterable trajectory
of Taylor’s music to move without standard song forms and uniform rhythmic pulse.
The rhythmic freedom of the Unit was due in great part to the innovative drumming
of Sunny Murray. Murray was, along with Milford Graves of the New York Art Quartet,
one of the first jazz drummers to abandon completely the long-established timekeep-
ing role for the instrument. His style involved countermelody rather than accompani-
ment, deliberate contrast instead of overt collusion. Litweiler aptly describes this new
rhythmic direction:
This music has two basic modes: ballad-rubato and whirlwind fast, seemingly as
fast as the human physique can stand to play or the human ear can distinguish
between notes. Here is the arrival of energy music; such tempo extremes vitiate
the possibility of swing, so in the cyclone tempos, continuity is sustained by ki-
netic force. In fact, Cecil Taylor is introducing an entirely new concept of rhythm
to jazz, in which rubato and terrifically fast speeds are not opposites but alterna-
tive aspects of a single tempo.15
Coleman’s ‘‘harmolodic’’ ideas of allowing melody and harmony to share equal organi-
zational footing rattled the jazz establishment, but Taylor’s dissolution of jazz pulse
and traditional swing pushed the music into vast and uncharted waters.
Centuries before the first strands of jazz music were heard in New Orleans, improvi-
sation had been an integral part of the European art music tradition. Not only does a
tradition of keyboard improvising date to at least the Baroque period, but many of the
most respected composers, including Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven, were as well
known in their day as improvisers. Instrumentalists were also frequently called upon
to improvise the cadenzas to sonatas in performance. According to Alan Durant, only
in the nineteenth century did the word improvisation begin to acquire a negative valo-
rization, as in ‘‘off-hand’’ or ‘‘spur of the moment,’’ implying the degree of preparation
to be insufficient (e.g., an improvised shelter, an improvised solution).16 During this
same period, the improvisational latitude afforded performers of classical music was
radically diminished. Durant writes:
In the development of the new concert forms of the 19th century, which were
coupled with larger changes in conceptions of art and the artist in society, the
participatory possibilities invited by earlier concert forms are displaced by individ-
ual compositions whose concern is less to act as a spring-board to creative per-
formance by the musicians playing on any particular occasion than to record
individual insights already achieved by the composer.17
In the early twentieth century, composed music underwent a substantial increase

in complexity, particularly due to the serialization of compositional practice introduced
by Arnold Schoenberg and the Second Viennese School. Beginning with a system for
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ordering and transforming the twelve pitch classes in the Western chromatic scale,
these composers eventually designed additional systems for ordering rhythm, texture,
timbre, and dynamics that could work in conjunction with the serialization of pitch.
The pendulum, having swung as far as it seemingly could in the direction of explic-
itly ordered performance, then appeared to shift back toward uncertainty. At approxi-
mately the same time that jazz musicians were expanding the role and conception of
improvisation in their performances, improvisation appeared to resurface in the pan-
European ‘‘classical’’ tradition after a century and a half of neglect. Composers such
as John Cage (with his ‘‘indeterminate’’ works) and Karlheinz Stockhausen (with his
‘‘intuitive’’ music) left many musical details of a composition to be decided upon by
the performers or through chance operations. These and other modern compositional
approaches do vary considerably in their details, and individual composers often ex-
press extremely different views on the importance and validity of improvisation, but
these new approaches did significantly expand the scope and definition of ‘‘composi-
tion’’ as a practice.18 Some composers at this time even took to exploring the potential
of improvisation on their own, in a sense conflating the act of creation and perform-
ance by removing the interpretive step from the traditional musical equation.19
Not only was the accepted method for musical composition being questioned, but
the very nature of music and musical sound was being challenged as well. In a rather
prophetic statement, John Cage remarked in a 1937 lecture titled ‘‘The Future of
Music’’: ‘‘Whereas, in the past, the point of disagreement has been between disso-
nance and consonance, it will be, in the immediate future, between noise and so-called
musical sounds’’20 Mid-century pioneering work with electronics further provoked this
‘‘disagreement’’ and composed work that employed graphical scores began to offer
additional avenues for composer-performer interaction. Cornelius Cardew, one of the
leading exponents of this practice and an early member of the improvising ensemble
AMM, writes:
Rather than serving as notations, many graphic scores were intended as an ‘‘in-
spiration’’ to the musicians, or as an aid to improvisation. In this sense graphic
music (or musical graphics) represents a reaction against notation—though often
preserving relics of musical notation—as opposed to graphic notation which rep-
resents a development of musical notation.21
Since these pioneering early years in both the United States and Europe, an ap-
proach to improvisation drawing on these and other traditions has emerged in the
contemporary music community. A variety of names have circulated at various times
and in various locales to describe this musical practice, each with its own group of
adherents and each with its own semantic shortcomings.22 The preferred terms tend
to highlight the creative or progressive stance of the performers and the cutting-edge
or inclusive nature of the music itself: for example, free or free-form, avant-garde,
outside, ecstatic, fire or energy, contemporary or new, creative, collective, spontaneous,
and so on. Stylistic references (jazz, classical, rock, world, or electronic) are variously
included or excluded, as are cultural or national identity markers (Great Black Music
or British Free Improvisation).
The primary musical bond shared between these diverse performers is a fascination
with sonic possibilities and surprising musical occurrences and a desire to improvise,
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SYNC OR SWARM
to a significant degree, both the content and the form of the performance. In other
words, free improvisation moves beyond matters of expressive detail to matters of
collective structure; it is not formless music making, but form-making music. Musi-
cian Ann Farber explains:
Our aim is to play together with the greatest possible freedom—which, far from
meaning without constraint, actually means to play together with sufficient skill
and communication to be able to select proper constraints in the course of the piece,
rather than being dependent on precisely chosen ones.23
Mike Heffley, in a recent book on free improvisation, highlights three kinds of free-
dom in the music: freedom-from-form, freedom-to-form, and freedom-in-form. Free-
dom-from-form describes the reactive process of stretching, challenging, and breaking
rules and conventions that were once embraced as laws. Freedom-to-form is a proac-
tive step in which rules, patterns, and conventions from other musical traditions, and
those of idiosyncratic origin, are embraced as temporary and mutable structures or
designs. Freedom-in-form, for Heffley, signifies the consummate stage as well as the
point at which the process has gone full circle: ‘‘One path is chosen from among all
possible, and its route, uncharted from without, has nonetheless imprinted its own
order on the improvising body as a law unto itself . . . that will come in its turn to be
so challenged and changed.’’24
How exactly this freedom-in-form is achieved by musicians is often a point of ex-
treme contention. As Derek Bailey points out: ‘‘Opinions about free music are plentiful
and differ widely. They range from the view that free playing is the simplest thing in
the world requiring no explanation, to the view that it is complicated beyond discus-
sion. There are those for whom it is an activity requiring no instrumental skill, no
musical ability and no musical knowledge of any kind, and others who believe it can
only be reached by employing a highly sophisticated, personal technique of virtuosic
proportions.’’25 Defining free improvisation in strictly musical terms may also poten-
tially miss its most remarkable characteristic—the ability to incorporate and negotiate
disparate perspectives and worldviews. Jason Stanyek asserts that free improvisation
is above all ‘‘a fertile space for the enactment and articulation of the divergent narra-
tives of both individuals and cultures.’’26
Authors interested in free improvisation tend to vary considerably in their ap-
proaches to the subject, producing everything from biographical and formalist work to
in-depth social, cultural, and political analysis. Arguing that the arts are predomi-
nantly autonomous or self-referential discourses, some authors present the ‘‘freedom’’
in the music strictly in terms of varying degrees of liberation from functional harmony,
metered time, and traditionally accepted performance roles and playing techniques.27
Other authors have interpreted free jazz and free improvisation as a social and cultural
response to the appropriation and exploitation of African-American music styles.28
They focus considerable attention on the birth of the practice during the civil rights
movement in the United States and on the music’s place within the context of an
emerging postcolonial world. Still other authors have allied themselves with Marxist
or neo-Marxist critiques of hegemonic culture and have focused on free improvisa-
tion’s implied critique of capitalism and its related market- and property-based
economy.29
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The diverse strands of free improvisation that have emerged since the music’s for-
mative years also challenge facile notions of shared identity or idiom. Not only has
dissent raged within the jazz community since the early ‘‘assault’’ of Ornette Coleman
and others, but the development of a distinctly European approach to free improvisa-
tion and the extreme hybridization of the music—incorporating avant-garde, elec-
tronic, non-Western, and popular music practices—combine to make generalized
discussion of idiomatic qualities or shared cultural aesthetics in the music extremely
difficult.30 John Litweiler believes that, ‘‘The precedents of free improvisation . . . are
in all kinds of music, and no single kind.’’31
In a special edition of the magazine Gramaphone-Explorations dedicated to
‘‘Counter-Currents in Modern Music,’’ the editors write, ‘‘Music which is entirely im-
provised, with no overt reference to a pre-determined structure, has now been with us
for many years. It is often assumed to be derived from jazz. . . . The truth is that there
are in fact many improvising musicians who have either worked in the jazz tradition
but who see free improvisation as something else entirely, or who have abandoned
jazz (often in exasperation) by choice, or who have arrived at free improvisation via
avant-garde rock, electro-acoustic music or sound-art.’’32
For some, one’s approach to energy, virtuosity, and stylistic inclusion or exclusion
can define quite clearly one’s idiomatic allegiances. Despite their many differences,
the first generation of African-American free jazz musicians all seemed to share an
intense approach to energy, momentum, and rhythmic drive; think of Cecil Taylor,
Albert Ayler, John Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders, Henry Grimes, Archie Shepp, and
Sunny Murray, among many others. The second generation of African-American pio-
neers along with many European contemporaries began to explore other ways—both
more and less dense and more and less structured—of creating intensity. For even later
generation improvisers, this extreme range of approaches to energy and aesthetics can
provide fertile creative ground, but it also presents a point of considerable contention
in the community. The spectrum of contemporary improvisation appears to be both
strongly linked to the traditions of free jazz and, at the same time, increasingly open
to artists with little to no jazz experience. Steve Day argues that, ‘‘Jazz always contains
improvisation, but improvisation does not always contain jazz.’’33 Nick Couldry de-
scribes free improvisation as ‘‘a hybrid of both classical and jazz traditions.’’34 Tom
Nunn elaborates on this often-mentioned connection:
One of the common links that developed between these two traditions was instru-
mental virtuosity, wherein techniques expanding and extending the sonic possi-
bilities of instruments provided the material of improvisation. The use of
atonality, dense textures, asymmetrical or non-metrical rhythm, and open forms
or forms derived from the music rather than imposed upon it are other examples
of developments common to both jazz and the avant garde leading up to today’s
free improvisation.35
Despite any sonic similarities between the emerging avant-garde traditions, many
composers were extremely critical of musical improvisation or reluctant to challenge
the implied hierarchy of composer-performer-listener. For example, Luciano Berio dis-
missed improvisation as ‘‘a haven of dilettantes’’ who ‘‘normally act on the level of
instrumental praxis rather than musical thought. . . . [B]y musical thought I mean
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SYNC OR SWARM
above all the discovery of a coherent discourse that unfolds and develops simultane-
ously on different levels.’’36 John Cage’s frequent and well publicized objections to
improvisation also tended to revolve around the notion that it could only produce
music based on habit. In conversation with Joan Retallack a month before he died,
however, Cage signaled a potential change of heart: ‘‘I became interested because I
had not been interested. And the reason I had not been interested was because one
just goes back to one’s habits. But how can we find ways of improvising that release us
from our habits?’’37 David Toop believes that, ‘‘This suggests that Cage had not paid
close attention to the kind of improvisation, from the 1960s onward, that either began,
or learned through practical experience, to do exactly that.’’38
The denigrating opinions of free improvisation that were frequently expressed by
respected twentieth-century composers, particularly during the music’s formative
years, betray a belief that musical notation is the only means to inventing complex
musical structures and, by extension, the only valid measure of musical creativity.39
This tendency to view all modes of musical expression through the formal and archi-
tectonic perspective of resultant structure is deeply entrenched in the music academy
and derives in great part from a bias toward the study of pan-European composed-
notated works. A story from African-American pianist Cecil Taylor highlights the issue:
I’ve had musicologists ask me for a score to see the pedal point in the beginning
of that piece [‘‘Nona’s Blues’’]. They wanted to see it down on paper to figure out
its structure, its whole, but at that point I had stopped writing my scores out . . .
and the musicologists found that hard to believe, since on that tune one section
just flows right into the next. That gives the lie to the idea that the only structured
music that is possible is that music which is written. Which is the denial of the
whole of human expression.40
A pronounced dichotomy between notated and improvised forms of musical creativ-

ity appears to be less apparent in the African-American creative music community.
Black composers, including Olly Wilson, T. J. Anderson, Hale Smith, William Banfield,
and Alvin Singleton, have incorporated improvisation into their work. While many
African-American improvisers—particularly those with close ties to the Association
for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM)—interact with and incorporate
notation in a variety of performance contexts. Trumpeter, composer, and AACM mem-
ber Wadada Leo Smith, for instance, has devised an open-ended symbolic framework
he now calls ‘‘Ankhrasmation,’’ the purpose of which is ‘‘to create and invent musical
ideas simultaneously utilizing the fundamental laws of improvisation and composi-
tion.’’41 According to George Lewis, the definition of ‘‘composition’’ among African-
American creative musicians can be a fluid one, ‘‘appropriating and simultaneously
challenging and revising various pan-European models, dialoguing with African,
Asian, and Pacific music traditions, and employing compositional methods that did
not necessarily privilege either conventionally notated scores, or the single, heroic cre-
ator figure so beloved by jazz historiography.’’42
Eric Porter, in his recent book titled What is This Thing Called Jazz?, focuses on the
frequently neglected ideas of African-American jazz musicians and the self-conscious
aspects of black cultural production. Through a close reading of texts by Charles Min-
gus, Abbey Lincoln, Amiri Baraka, Yusef Lateef, Marion Brown, Wadada Leo Smith,
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and Anthony Braxton, Porter raises many important issues about the relationship be-
tween jazz, classical, and popular musics, the role of improvisation and composition
in musical creativity, and the political, economic, and spiritual dimensions of the new
jazz. He, along with other recent authors including Ajay Heble, Sherrie Tucker, and
Julie Dawn Smith, also focuses the critical lens of feminist studies on this music,
which has traditionally been viewed as a predominantly masculine pursuit.43 Many
jazz musicians are only now beginning to realize these embedded inequities. Anthony
Braxton, for one, finds it ironic that many of the politically and spiritually aware musi-
cians of the 1960s could also function as ‘‘chauvinist and oppressor.’’44
The frequently touted ‘‘openness’’ or inclusive nature of free improvisation does at
times obscure the gender sensibilities and the different cultural aesthetics represented
by its practitioners. George Lewis has made a strong case for a clear distinction be-
tween an ‘‘Afrological’’ and ‘‘Eurological’’ approach to this music.45 His terms are not
ethnically essential but instead refer to historically emergent social and cultural atti-
tudes. Lewis’s study focuses on the work of two towering figures of 1950s American
experimental music: Charlie Parker and John Cage. Both artists continually explored
spontaneity and uniqueness in their work, and Lewis argues that each musician was
fully aware of the social implications of his art. The essential contrast he draws be-
tween the two lies in how they arrived at and chose to express the notion of freedom.
Cage, informed by his studies of Zen and the I Ching, denied the utility of protest. His
notion of freedom is devoid of any kind of struggle that might be required to achieve
it. Parker, on the other hand, was, paraphrasing LeRoi Jones, a nonconformist in 1950s
America simply by virtue of his skin color.46 Lewis argues that for African-American
musicians, ‘‘new improvisative and compositional styles are often identified with ideas
of race advancement and, more importantly, as resistive ripostes to perceived opposi-
tion to black social expression and economic advancement by the dominant white
American culture.’’47 An Afrological perspective implies an emphasis on personal nar-
rative and the harmonization of one’s musical personality with social environments,
both actual and possible. A Eurological perspective, on the other hand, implies either
absolute freedom from personal narrative, culture, and conventions—an autonomy of
the aesthetic object—or the need for a controlling or structuring force in the person
and voice of a ‘‘composer.’’
Contemporary free improvisers often struggle with the issues implied by Lewis’s
Afrological/Eurological model. English guitarist Derek Bailey betrays a Eurological per-
spective when he describes his practice of ‘‘non-idiomatic improvisation’’ as a ‘‘search
for a styleless uncommitted area in which to work.’’48 Gavin Bryars, a celebrated En-
glish bass player and early improvising partner of Bailey, abandoned improvisation
after 1966 to focus exclusively on the ‘‘aesthetic autonomy’’ offered by an Eurological
approach to composition. Bryars argued that, ‘‘In any improvising position the person
creating the music is identified with the music. . . . It’s like standing a painter next to
his picture so that every time you see the painting you see the painter as well and you
can’t see it without him.’’49
Not all European improvisers, however, favor a Eurological approach to the practice.
English saxophonist Evan Parker clearly sees his approach as part of the African-
American jazz tradition:
What’s important to me is that my work is seen in a particular context, coming

out of a particular tradition. I don’t really care what people call it but I would
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want it to be clear that I was inspired to play by listening to certain people who
continue to be talked about mainly in jazz contexts. People like John Coltrane,
Eric Dolphy, Cecil Taylor—these were people that played music that excited me to
the point where I took music seriously myself. That continues to be the case.
That’s where what I’m doing has to make sense, if it makes any sense at all.50
Contrasting Bailey’s and Parker’s approaches, British critic Ian Carr writes:
[W]ith monastic vigilance [Bailey] tries to avoid the habitual side of playing.
Compared with this religious sense of purity, this sense of keeping an untainted
vision, Evan Parker’s approach is secular, agnostic, and robust. He is prepared to
rub shoulders and get involved with all sorts and conditions of musicians, and
seems able to do this without losing his essential identity.51
These and other remarks reflect an intriguing tension within the community of free
improvisers between Afrological issues of personal and cultural identity and Eurologi-
cal conceptions of music as an autonomous art. African-American drummer and com-
poser Max Roach stated concisely the issues and his intentions:
Two theories exist, one is that art is for the sake of art, which is true. The other
theory, which is also true, is that the artist is like a secretary. . . . He keeps a record
of his time so to speak. . . . My music tries to say how I really feel, and I hope it
mirrors in some way how black people feel in the United States.52
Roach’s comments highlight the fact that African-American jazz and improvising
musicians have frequently sought to celebrate aspects of black life and culture and, at
the same time, cast off the burden of race, especially when that burden of ‘‘racial
authenticity’’ infringes on the marketability or the creativity of black musicians and
their music. This dilemma has played out since the 1960s most clearly in the tension
between Black Nationalism and universalism evident in the commentary of many
celebrated African-American improvisers. Despite the helpful and often-illuminating
distinctions between Afrological and Eurological perspectives, the continued hybrid-
ization in the community of contemporary free improvisation has made discussions of
cultural belonging a very prickly topic. As multi-instrumentalist Anthony Braxton
wryly comments: ‘‘Why is it so natural for Evan Parker, say, to have an appreciation
of Coltrane, but for me to have an appreciation of Stockhausen is somehow out of the
order of natural human experience? I see it as racist.’’53 A growing scene of Asian-
American improvisers, centered primarily in the San Francisco Bay Area, also high-
lights the problematic nature of binary thinking and cultural and aesthetic dyads.54
George Lewis, in a more recent article, advances the notion that experimentalism
was becoming ‘‘creolized.’’ Where the so-called ‘‘third-stream’’ movement (a proposed
fusion of jazz and classical styles) had failed, Lewis argues ‘‘independent black experi-
mentalism challenged the centrality of pan-Europeanism to the notion of the experi-
mental itself.’’55 AACM members, in particular, frequently rejected the prescriptive
tenets of cultural nationalism and questioned the idea that black music is a hermetic
field. Yet they presented their work as an example of creative black music and as an
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homage to black people. Weaving together cultural naturalism, pan-Africanism, and

universalism offered, to many, the most effective means to negotiate the constraints
put upon their creativity by the hegemony of Western economic, discursive, and aes-
thetic ideals. As saxophonist Marion Brown poetically states, ‘‘I’m like a man walking
into the future backwards.’’56
Performing Uncertainty
How do individuals and groups negotiate their frequently diverse ideas about and
approaches to improvisation in performance? In what ways do culture and creativity,
memory and muscle factor into improvisation? And how does context affect the mean-
ings and economics of performing improvised music?
Venues for this music can run the gamut from small, local coffeehouses to well
publicized and well attended international festivals.57 And the featured ensembles at
these venues cover the full spectrum from one-time meetings between improvisers
(the ‘‘all-star event’’) to the many longer-term associations with essentially unchang-
ing personnel (the ‘‘working group’’). The former can provide a sense of immediacy,
excitement, novelty, and risk to participants, whereas the latter may offer an intimacy
and depth unavailable in the earliest stages of interaction.58 Tom Nunn believes that:
Free improvisation, by virtue of its open and incorporating nature, invites (indeed
demands) the development of personal and group styles. As an improviser accu-
mulates experience, a unique style develops naturally. Likewise, as a group devel-
ops rapport and players within a group become increasingly familiar with one
another’s musical tendencies (i.e., personal style traits), a general style peculiar
to the group will usually develop.59
Free improvisers, in general, share the view that technical and improvisational ac-
complishments are best arrived at through in-context development and experience
rather than through isolated training. The idea of ‘‘rehearsing’’ during playing ses-
sions, however, is less common since, as the term implies, the ‘‘re-hearing’’ of musical
details to perfect a musical gesture, formal section, or complete performance runs
counter to the aesthetics of improvisation. According to bassist Reggie Workman, he
would like to rid our vocabularies of the verb ‘‘to try.’’ In improvisation, you do not
try, you do!60
This is not to say that practice techniques are unknown to improvisers. One common
device used in both free and idiom-specific improvisation traditions is handicapping.
Handicapping refers to a self-imposed challenge designed to limit material or tech-
niques available to the improviser. These may be conceptual or even physical handi-
caps imposed on the performer. Conceptual handicaps could involve playing only one
note or within a specified range or aiming for a uniform mood to an improvisation.
Bassist Bertram Turetzky relates that his first instruction to classical musicians who
have no previous experience with improvisation is to play a b-flat continuously for
several hours in as many ways as possible.61 Physical handicaps might include using
only a particular part of an instrument or only one hand. In a recent clinic, for exam-
ple, kotoist Miya Masaoka asked a student drummer to improvise using only his
elbows.62
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While from one perspective these devices may appear to limit individual creativity,
they can also remind each participant to focus attention on the collective statement
and the musical moment rather than to become easily overwhelmed with the enor-
mous scope of individual musical possibilities. Tom Nunn finds that the biggest mis-
take made among first-time improvisers is to focus exclusively on that for which they,
as individuals, are responsible. Or, alternately, participating in simple call-and-
response style interactions does not allow for meaningful musical relationships to
emerge and be explored.63
Many improvisers discuss spiritual, ecstatic, or trancelike performance states.64
Some cite total mental involvement, while others describe a complete annihilation of
all critical and rational faculties. Musicians stress performance goals ranging from
complete relaxation or catharsis to a transcendental feeling of ego loss or collective
consciousness. The sheer energy and density of sound at times experienced in free and
collective improvisation can potentially create a state of hyperstimulation verging on
sensory overload. The idea of spirit possession also appears in the improvising commu-
nity. Saxophonist Jameel Moondoc describes a time when ‘‘the music got so intense
that spirits came into the room, just hovering around, and in one aspect it was incredi-
bly scary. It was almost like we were calling the ancestors, and they came.’’65 Others
describe a voluntary, self-induced form of trance—more akin to shamanic prac-
tices—as they guide the listener on a spiritual journey.66 Despite these diverse belief
systems, a feeling of spirituality and reverence pervades many improvised perform-
ances. William Parker, the celebrated improvising bassist, feels that ‘‘Free music can
be a musical form that is playing without pre-worked structure, without written music
or chord changes. However, for free music to succeed, it must grow into free spiritual
music, which is not . . . a musical form; it should be based off of a life form. It is not
about just picking up an instrument and playing guided by math principles or emo-
tion. It is emptying oneself and being.’’67
While the spiritual concerns of improvisers can be diverse and often difficult to
analyze, the economics of performing contemporary improvised music has been a topic
of some concern for both performers and scholars of this music. Improvisers have
frequently joined together to form artist-run collectives aimed at establishing creative
and financial control over the production and dissemination of their work and ensur-
ing the proper respect and remuneration for their efforts.68 Although the lifetime of
these various collectives runs the gamut from months to decades, the impulse to pool
resources and to pursue communal approaches to creativity remains strong among
improvisers. The tendency to form improvising collectives was and is, in great part, a
direct response to the notion that jazz and improvised music most appropriately be-
long in the underfunded club and cabaret. George Lewis writes:
For the black musicians . . . the ‘‘club,’’ rather than the concert hall, had been
heavily ideologized as the ideal, even the genetically best-suited place for their
music. Early on, however, black experimentalists realized that serious engage-
ment with theater and performance, painting, poetry, electronics, and other inter-
disciplinary expressions that require extensive infrastructure, would be rendered
generally ineffective or even impossible by the jazz club model. In this light, the
supposed obligation to perform in clubs began to appear as a kind of unwanted
surveillance of the black creative body.69
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For a time in the 1970s, the ‘‘loft’’ became an ‘‘alternative’’ space for performances
of this increasingly multimedia expression, and creative scenes began to flourish, par-
ticularly in and around New York City. But just as the term jazz had been criticized for
decades as a boundary-imposing and financially limiting label, the new loft venues—
perceived to require minimal infrastructural investment and therefore undeserving
of extensive financial support by established arts-funding agencies—quickly became
another obstacle to the recognition-seeking and border-crossing strategies of creative
musicians and improvisers. Although the situation has arguably improved since that
time, venues and funding for ‘‘new music’’ tend still to be hypersegregated according
to racialized categories.70
Experiencing Uncertainty
How do listeners and performers of this music engage with the sounds and practices
of ‘‘uncertainty’’? Can improvised performance offer a window into different concep-
tions of musical structuring and complexity? Improvisation, by virtue of its emphasis
on collaboration and in-the-moment creativity, does seems to invite different ap-
proaches to performance, listening, and analysis—approaches that focus as much at-
tention on the human and cultural aspects of music making as on the formal structure
of the musical work.71
Since, on hearing the initial sound in a free improvisation, neither the performers
nor the audience know exactly what direction the music will take, open and attentive
listening is essential to creating and maintaining the flow of the music and to extract-
ing meaning and enjoyment from the experience. The fact that both the performer
and audience perspectives begin at the same point offers, according to Tom Nunn, ‘‘a
level of excitement, involvement and challenge to the audience listener that is unique,
at least in degree, to free improvisation.’’72 Derek Bailey writes, ‘‘Undeniably, the audi-
ence for improvisation, good or bad, active or passive, sympathetic or hostile, has a
power that no other audience has. It can effect the creation of that which is being
witnessed. And perhaps because of that possibility the audience for improvisation has
a degree of intimacy with the music that is not achieved in any other situation.’’73
Writing from the perspective of a devoted fan, Steve Day exclaims: ‘‘Improvisation
does not end with the musician. The sound is not complete until the sound enters the
consciousness of those that hear. Improvised music is unique in that it asks the lis-
tener to continue the creative process of interaction. . . . To really listen therefore, is to
experiment and experience the spontaneous soundscape that is present in any situa-
tion. The listener too must improvise.’’74 And Ben Watson, Bailey’s recent biographer,
playfully argues that, ‘‘The audience for Free Improvisation may be small, but it is
committed: part of this commitment stems from the way free improvisers respect the
specificity of the audience. Deprived of that, you might as well be twiddling your
thumbs as some pop act or classical orchestra goes through its well rehearsed show.’’75
Offering a more pessimistic view of the situation, Jonty Stockdale writes in a recent
essay:
In a freely improvised performance the inconsistent or infrequent use of conven-

tional signposts causes such activity to be challenging and problematic for the
musicians involved, but especially so for an audience who are forced to rely on
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SYNC OR SWARM
the accumulated knowledge of prior musical experience and the assimilation of

underlying codes embedded within it, to attempt to evaluate and derive meaning
from such performance. As prior listening experience and exposure to music of
differing practices can vary so dramatically from one listener to another, the likeli-
hood that there is any sense of a shared understanding of what any freely impro-
vised performance might be aiming to convey, is highly speculative.76
He concludes that, ‘‘The result is a situation where for any performance, each impro-
viser adopts a position from which to start (at the edge of what is already known and
what is to be explored) and for the audience (with previous individual experience as
a frame of reference) a position from which to start listening.’’77
Like many other commentators, Stockdale finds that experiencing improvisation
live affords additional inroads to listeners, including the opportunity to observe body
language and visual interaction. He argues that, ‘‘Whilst we may not know what rep-
resents the current edge of possibility for any one musician, certainly the extent to
which physical gestures move from the restrained to the exaggerated, gives us clues
as to where this might lay through any given performance.’’78 But the notion that
audiences would be better at gauging meaning through physical and visual, rather
than auditory clues, is also difficult to support, since many musicians may use ‘‘exag-
gerated’’ physical gestures that have little to do with their ‘‘current edge of possibility.’’
Although Stockdale may be correct in assessing that a shared sense of understand-
ing is difficult if not impossible to come by, other authors have stressed that contempo-
rary music offers the possibility for different approaches to listening, approaches not
focused principally on underlying codes. Roland Barthes, for instance, in his essay
titled ‘‘Listening’’ in The Responsibility of Forms, proposes three types of listening.79
‘‘Alert’’ listening, he argues, is one practiced by all beings equipped to hear. In this
type of hearing, ‘‘a living being orients its hearing (the exercise of its physiological
faculty of hearing) to certain indices . . . the wolf listens for a (possible) noise of its
prey, the hare for a (possible) noise of its hunter, the child and the lover for the
approaching footsteps which might be the mother’s or the beloved’s.’’ With this type
of listening, one listens with expectation for specific sounds of disruption in the envi-
ronment, or in other words, to what one desires to hear.
The second type of listening, ‘‘deciphering,’’ takes us further into the realm of the
human. ‘‘What the ear tries to intercept,’’ Barthes explains, ‘‘are certain signs. . . . I
listen the way I read, i.e., according to certain codes.’’ But Barthes identifies a third
approach to listening which he describes as ‘‘entirely modern’’: an approach that ‘‘does
not aim at—or await—certain determined, classified signs: not what is said or emitted,
but who speaks, who emits: such listening is supposed to develop in an inter-subjec-
tive space where ‘I am listening’ also means ‘listen to me.’ ’’ What is expressed is,
perhaps, less important than the fact that it is the production of another human; it
carries a sense of identity and holds out the possibility for interaction.
Without conventional codes that might easily guide a listener on a musical journey,
many people’s first experiences with free improvisation evoke feelings of alienation,
confusion, or even hostility. Over time, however, committed listeners may develop new
ways with which to approach the music and perhaps even seek their pleasure in the
avoidance of conformist practice. A respondent to a survey that I conducted among
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active audiences members described the qualities of performance to which he attends

this way:
Pulse, texture, use of the instrument’s full frequency-range, dynamics, density,

timbre, interplay between performers when there is more than one. That’s too
much to keep in your conscious mind all at once, but after a while one learns how
to recognize these elements intuitively and from then on listening attentively
becomes easier. I think that’s one reason why it is so hard for some listeners to
appreciate free improv music—they are used to listening for melody, and not used
to listening for density or texture, so they don’t know how to decode freely impro-
vised music and as a result it ends up sounding like random noise to them.80
In a similar formation to Barthes’s, albeit with somewhat different terminology and

motivations, composer Barry Truax describes three general modes of engaging with
the acoustic soundscape: background listening, listening-in-readiness, and listening-
in-search. For Truax, background listening is akin to ‘‘distracted listening’’ while the
listener is actively engaged in another activity. Listening-in-readiness involves focused
attention, but the attention is on familiar sound associations built up over time that
may be readily identified. With listening-in-search, one scans the acoustic soundscape
for particular sounds, attempting to extract or create meaning from their production
or the environment’s response to the sounds produced.81 A less humanistic vision per-
haps that Barthes’s, but one that also identifies a type of listening not predominantly
focused on identifying familiar sound associations.
Authors concerned exclusively with free improvisation have also remarked on the
importance of listening in less directed ways. Borrowing terms from the visual arts,
Mark Bradlyn asserts:
The first step in learning to listen is stopping still and opening our ears, first to
figure, next to ground, next to field. The field, the aggregate soundscape is the
most difficult to perceive. . . . [T]here must be a constant flux, a never fully fo-
cused shifting among figure, ground, and field. . . . One performer’s playing may
suddenly emerge as a stark figure against the ground of another’s only to just as
suddenly submerge into the ground or even farther back into the field as another
voice emerges.82
Bradlyn concludes that collective free improvisation may falter if participants and lis-
teners fail ‘‘to hear the texture, the field, in pursuit of the dramatic figure, the ges-
ture.’’83 Elsewhere he suggests that improvisation ‘‘succeeds as music only to the
extent that listening achieves equal status with playing.’’84
Jason Stanyek finds even more at stake in the process of listening than the ‘‘musi-
cal’’ success of the improvisation. He asserts that, ‘‘if free improvisation has anything
emancipatory or ‘anticipatory’ about it, then this kind of proleptic vision is contained
within the act of listening, not in the sounds themselves.’’ For Stanyek, ‘‘listening is
the way identities are narrated and negotiated and the way differences are articu-
lated.’’85 He elaborates:
Indeed, the critical nature of free improvisation, its ability to accommodate the
disjunctures which invariably arise out of any intercultural encounter (and per-
haps the fact that free improvisation resides outside of many of the economic and
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aesthetic strictures of the culture industry), all help to provide a welcome antidote
to the music-as-a-universal-language trope which pervades many intercultural
collaborations.86
Yet the critical commentary on the ability of improvised music to communicate,

particularly across cultural divides, seems to agree little. Stanyek describes free impro-
visation as ‘‘a particularly fertile ‘communicative arena’ in which divergent individual
and cultural narratives can be articulated.’’87 Wrangling over Derek Bailey’s notion of
the music as ‘‘non-idiomatic,’’ Stanyek finds that, ‘‘There’s something else going on
there, a vital, not reified, connection with idioms and ‘markings.’ ’’88
Referencing Stanyek’s notion of a ‘‘communicative arena,’’ however, Ben Watson
retorts that, ‘‘as a way of denoting the particular qualities of the avant-garde extreme
plumbed by Free Improvisation, it’s useless.’’ Instead, Watson shares a humorous pas-
sage from Derek Bailey’s book that, as originally intended, was meant to criticize those
improvisers who adopt an anti-virtuosity attitude, often appropriating ‘‘ethnic’’ instru-
ments for their perceived limited opportunities and, therefore, more direct expressiv-
ity. Bailey writes:
So, in performance, grunts, howls, screams, groans, Tibetan humming, Tunisian

chanting, Maori chirping and Mozambique stuttering are combined with the Afri-
can thumb piano, Chinese temple blocks, Ghanian soft trumpet, Trinidadian steel
drum, Scottish soft bagpipe, Australian bull-roarer, Ukranian stone flute and the
Canton one-legged monster to provide an aural event about as far removed from
the directness and dignity of ethnic music as a thermo-nuclear explosion is from
a fart.89
This passage, of course, does not address the issues that surround cross-cultural
collaborations between improvisers who are themselves cultural insiders. Bailey’s pas-
sage, in fact, is written as if only Westerners are engaged with (or should be engaged
with?) ‘‘non-idiomatic’’ improvisation. With a touch of his own hyperbole, Watson
argues that:
Portraying Free Improvisation as a multicultural, hands-across-the-oceans,

United Nations-logoed ‘communicative arena’ (something to be staged in the
ghastly Millennium Dome, perhaps?) gives no inkling of either the animosity it
encounters or the enthusiasm it inspires. Stanyek’s blandishments conceal the
way Free Improvisation’s dogged pursuit of authentic musical interaction shrieks
protest at what capitalist business-as-usual does to music—and what passes for
musical communication in official channels, both commercial and ‘‘art.’’90
Describing Bailey’s annual Company Week gatherings of diverse improvisers, Wat-

son writes: ‘‘If you create an oasis for direct communication in a world mediated by
commodity glamour and reassuring boredom, it isn’t inevitable that everything you
hear will be brilliant. But it does matter.’’91 We must be careful, however, since the
uncertainties associated with contemporary improvised music are, in important ways,
mediated by specific personal, social, economic, and cultural experiences. Since the
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1960s, the revolutionary timbres, textures, and approaches of this music have reso-
nated in extremely varied ways, from Black Power or transcendental spirituality to
socialism, anarchy, and postmodern angst and confusion, among other things. Yet
many artists ascribe to the notion that, in the moment of performance and through
the act of listening, our personal, social, and cultural understandings—and interper-
sonal and intercultural sensibilities—can also be powerfully changed in the rapture
and rupture of improvisation.
Documenting Uncertainty
Can and should improvised music be recorded? How do we engage with the sounds of
‘‘uncertainty’’ when they become in some ways fixed, detached from their original
context and replayed at a different time? The many issues surrounding the recording
of improvisation have received considerable attention.92 Tom Nunn argues that ‘‘Much
of the unknown-about-to-be-known is lost in recordings. The image of the musicians
playing together, communicating, collectively creating in the moment is impossible to
capture on tape.’’93 Cornelius Cardew believes that ‘‘documents such as tape record-
ings of improvisation are essentially empty, as they preserve chiefly the form that
something took and give at best an indistinct hint as to the feeling and cannot convey
any sense of time and place . . . what you hear on tape or disc is indeed the same
playing, but divorced from its natural context.’’94 David Roberts finds that ‘‘for musics
not predicated upon the dissociation of form and performance, recording can, and
often does, spell the kiss of death.’’95 Vinko Globokar insists that recordings of this
music should be listened to once and then discarded.
These artists and authors seem to agree on two central points: (1) an audio record-
ing, no matter its fidelity, necessarily reproduces only a limited spectrum of the per-
formance experience and (2) the act of listening to improvised music away from its
initial performance context and on several occasions forever alters its meaning and
impact. Their disregard for the simple utility of recordings or of the sense of tradition
that they can and do engender also seems to betray a certain Eurological perspective—
one focused on the aesthetic autonomy of the artistic experience devoid of its social
implications. Martin Davidson, of Eminem Records, expresses a rather different view-
point. He argues that ‘‘recordings and improvisation are entirely symbiotic, as if they
were invented for each other. . . . [T]he act of improvising is filling time (either a
predetermined or an open-ended amount) with music—something that could be
called real-time composition, and something that has more need and more right to be
recorded than anything else.’’96
Most improvisers acknowledge the advantages that recordings can offer in estab-
lishing and disseminating a tradition, although individual artists may differ widely in
their specific views on how the recording process should be approached. Some em-
brace, while others disavow, the possibilities of editing material or reordering perform-
ances that are inherent in the process of producing a recording. There is even little
agreement about whether musicians might be more or less conservative in a studio
setting or in front of a paying audience.97 Most improvisers conceive of recordings as
important documents or milestones in an evolving career, but there is some disagree-
ment over whether they should be limited to the ‘‘best’’ possible performance of an
artist, or if they should simply document one’s playing as on any other night. Derek
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Bailey remarks that all that is usually claimed for a recording is ‘‘that it should provide
evidence of musical identity or of changes in identity.’’98 From a purely practical stand-
point, the exchange of recordings affords an important avenue of social and musical
networking, allowing artists and listeners to connect and to build bridges in the dis-
persed and often marginalized improvised music community. Finally, many perform-
ers acknowledge the educational value that recordings can offer through repeated
listening.
Scholars of African-American and improvised music have frequently engaged in—
and struggled with—the issue of an oral/literate dichotomy in music performance and
analysis.99 The increasingly interconnected and technologically sophisticated context
for modern culture challenges us to view contemporary music as a complex site
wherein new oral/aural cultural forms and practices are electronically inscribed into
society. Tricia Rose, in her study of rap music, adopts (from Walter Ong) the concept
of ‘‘post-literate orality’’ to describe hip-hop culture. She writes: ‘‘The concept of post-
literate orality merges orally influenced traditions that are created and embedded in a
post-literate, technologically sophisticated context.’’100 Arguing a similar position,
Daniel Belgrad states that African-American music offers a model of ‘‘secondary oral-
ity’’ in a postliterate culture, ‘‘the possibility of asserting the values of an oral culture
within a culture already conditioned by writing.’’101 Well before these scholars began
to tackle the subject, Wadada Leo Smith addressed this same issue:
In ancient times when all people held improvisation as their art-music form, it
was said then that theirs was an oral tradition. . . . In our times now, an oral-
electronic tradition is being born, and this signifies the age of a new improvisa-
tion-art-music-form. One only needs to think in terms of the media and its proper
use to understand how any significant event, and I’m speaking culturally now
and particularly of music, can be immediately received anywhere in the world
within seconds or minutes depending on the transfer in time lapse through satel-
lite techniques: indeed an oral-electronic tradition.102
Improvisers, although centered on collective and spontaneous contribution in per-

formance, are equally aware of developing an individual sound and style and defend-
ing a career path within the music industry. Yet their approach confounds many
established legal and cultural norms of music ownership and the standard practices of
music copyrighting and royalty compensation. For instance, before 1972 it was not
possible to register an improvised sound recording with the Library of Congress. In
the current era, royalties—an important economic component of countless musicians’
careers—are still dispensed almost exclusively to composers (or to the record labels
that maintain copyright over the recorded sound), to the detriment of improvising
artists.103 Improvisation also challenges us to rethink ingrained notions of musical
value and conventional approaches to musical analysis and discourse.
Evaluating Uncertainty
Can improvisation be criticized? If so, then by whom? What is implied by the word
criticism? According to Marion Brown, ‘‘ ‘Criticism’ is by definition a product of the
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gulf between musicians’ ideas and those of the audience. Once a listener determines
that his or her interpretation does not match the performer’s, one becomes a critic.’’104
Even among performers, a gulf can surface between divergent interpretations. While
some artists freely engage in conversations and critical reflection immediately follow-
ing a group improvisation, others are loath to do so, since each member’s immediate
impression of the improvisation may differ considerably, and candid discussion can
make subsequent improvisations by the group too self-conscious. Listening to recorded
playing sessions at a later date, either alone or as a group, is one common means of
self-evaluation and group feedback among improvisers.
The jazz critical establishment has historically been harshly divided over the relative
merits of freer forms of improvisation. Both journalists and musicians appeared to
take sides almost immediately after the arrival of Ornette Coleman’s quartet in New
York, and the subsequent debate has hardly subsided to this day. Beyond the stylistic
quibbling, however, it may be the apparent critical vacuum that has done more harm
to the reception and recognition of this music. In 1973, Marion Brown self-published
Views and Reviews in order to set forth his personal aesthetic philosophy and to chal-
lenge the critical status quo of writers who betray a preference for composed music
and who, by virtue of their powerful institutional positions, can dramatically affect
the lives and livelihoods of black avant-garde artists. Eric Porter, paraphrasing Brown,
writes:
[O]ne is prone to judge a piece of music by its formal, or compositional, elements.

Because this presents a problem when analyzing fully improvised music or com-
positions that include improvisational elements, Brown proposes that a different
set of aesthetic principles must be invoked when evaluating such music. ‘‘Bal-
ance’’ is achieved in improvised music not through a compositional structure but
through musicians’ personal expressions and the emotional bond they create with
their audience.105
In his discussion of the treatment afforded various ‘‘downtown’’ musics by the Vil-
lage Voice in the late 1970s, George Lewis further highlights the issue of how, where,
and by whom this music should be criticized. The Voice, at that time, separated critical
discussion of various musical genres under the headings ‘‘Music’’ (i.e., reviews of work
from the high culture ‘‘West’’) and ‘‘Riffs’’ (‘‘the low-culture, diminutively imagined
‘‘Rest’’). Lewis concludes that the AACM and other creative artists with similar ideolo-
gies were ‘‘destined to run roughshod over many conventional assumptions about
infrastructure, reference, and place.’’106
The practice of so-called jazz musicians and improvisers engaging with extended
notation and graphic scores, electronics and computers, and multimedia approaches to
performance directly challenged the binary thought—black/white, jazz/classical, high
culture/low culture—that was and is still common in critical discourse. Lewis points
out, however, that even African-American critics and activists were not immune from
attempting to regulate and restrict African-American creativity. Amiri Baraka, whose
important early work strongly supported the then-emerging ‘‘avant-garde,’’ later criti-
cized many black creative musicians for being unduly influenced by European
modernism.107
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Several journals and magazines consistently publish reviews of improvised music

recordings, performances, and festivals and provide a window into the critical values
espoused by the contemporary print media.108 As with music criticism in more tradi-
tional veins, comparisons to previous recordings or similar well known groups or play-
ers factor prominently in these writings. Malcom Barry writes: ‘‘[I]nevitably there is
difficulty in separating the form from the individuals practicing that form. . . . [T]he
anti-composed music becomes identified with particular figures just as composed
music does.’’109
Critics of improvised music most often base their evaluations of a performance on
the perceived level of ensemble rapport. Did the musicians and music congeal in a
meaningful way? Were the ensemble or sectional transitions effective? Did the musi-
cians explore novel and interesting relationships? Reviewers also frequently comment
on the presence (or absence) of references to established musical styles (jazz, rock,
classical, electronic, or world). Although these comments can be helpful in orienting
the reader (and prospective buyer) prior to actually hearing the music, critics variously
praise or denounce the use of these ‘‘style signs’’ as ingenious layerings and postmod-
ern juxtapositions or as unfortunate by-products of too heavy a reliance on established
techniques and practices.
Even if most overt idiomatic qualities are consciously avoided by the performers,
improvisers still incorporate and experiment with the accepted tools of artistic expres-
sion: stability, interruption, repetition, contrast, and so on. Improvising music involves
a constant balancing act between complexity and comprehensibility, control and non-
control, constancy and unpredictability, a balancing act that can invite considerable
debate and disagreement. The issue of control verses noncontrol brings to mind an
issue touched on earlier in this chapter—the idea of virtuosity in improvisation. Do
our standard conservatory conceptions of virtuosity provide an accurate measure of a
musician’s improvisational skills? A frequently recounted story may serve to illumi-
nate this issue. By his own account, multi-instrumentalist Steve Beresford likes to
explore the totally controlled and the totally uncontrolled. His expansive approach to
instrumental technique, however, allegedly got him ostracized from a 1977 Company
Week (Derek Bailey’s annual meeting of improvisers) because his approach to his
instruments was deemed ‘‘insufficiently serious.’’110
Nick Couldry devotes a rather extensive discussion to the subject of virtuosity in
improvised music. He highlights, in addition to conventional notions of instrumental
ability or more contemporary notions of so-called extended techniques, the idea of ‘‘a
virtuosity in finding,’’ or the ability to imagine new sounds and discover an individual
voice. He also finds an ‘‘intensity of application’’—in his view, more virtue than virtu-
osity—important to the demeanor of improvised performance.111
‘‘Extended techniques’’—the exploration of unconventional sounds and devices on
conventional instruments—have been, and continue to be, an important part of the
vocabulary of many improvisers.112 And critical evaluation is often based on a per-
ceived mastery of these difficult techniques. For example, Tom Johnson wrote in a
1980 Village Voice review of an Evan Parker solo performance: ‘‘In short, this was not a
hit-and-miss affair the way it is with most woodwind players when they turn on their
multiphonics. This was a musician who had transformed these new sounds into a
vocabulary that was familiar to him as major scales are to most musicians.’’113
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‘‘Intensity of application,’’ however, would seem to imply, if not conventional no-

tions of virtuosity, at least a sense of personal conviction and performance energy.
Arguably, this intensity can be heard in the full spectrum of sounds explored by con-
temporary improvisers, ranging from the incredibly dense and loud to the almost un-
imaginably soft and sparse.
Perhaps what is most often missed, however, in critical discussion of improvised
music is its functional quality. In his Views and Reviews, Marion Brown seeks to disman-
tle the Western aesthetic that elevates art as an object of beauty above and beyond its
functional purpose. Brown argues not only that improvised music is as ‘‘valid’’ as
composed music but also that, even when ’arrived at through mutual cooperation at a
folk level, [it] may be as successful as any other kind of music.’’114
This may, however, beg the question that many of the music’s detractors are quick
to level at it: if this music is as social and as liberating as many profess, then why is it
not more popular? This question is by no means new. Many politically and socially
active black avant-garde artists have faced this continuing question of why black cre-
ativity is seemingly so removed from African-American communities. Anthony Brax-
ton, in his Triaxium writings, casts blame on a general lack of recognition of artistic
creativity in American society and on the market forces that promote popular music
to black audiences.115 George Lewis additionally finds that academic cultural studies
have frequently downplayed or even disparaged those indigenously black musics that
are not obviously or predominantly based in or represented as mass culture. Lewis
argues that in this context, ‘‘the entry into classical music by black composers be-
comes, rather than bourgeois accommodation, an oppositional stance’’ challenging
‘‘fixed notions of high and low, black and white.’’ He summarizes:
Thus, in the age of globalized megamedia, to the extent that certain oppositional
black musical forms have been generally ignored or dismissed by academic theo-
rists, the idea is thereby perpetuated that black culture, as academically defined
and studied, is in fact corporate-approved culture, and that there is no necessary
non-commercial space for black musical production.116
Porter, however, finds historical evidence for a strong connection between creative
music making and a vision to make progressive music meaningful to a wide spectrum
of people. He expresses that, ‘‘difficult as it was to implement effectively, [this vision]
can be understood as a reflection of the Black Arts movement in the jazz community,
where making a living went hand in hand with making music relevant.’’117
Clearly, the diverse personal experiences and opinions of free improvisers and the
transcultural and hybrid nature of the musical activity make generalized discussions
of critical values within the community somewhat problematic. Yet despite the fre-
quently expressed desire among certain artists for a ‘‘styleless’’ or ‘‘nonidiomatic’’ ap-
proach to music, more than four decades of recorded documents and live performances
attest to a growing tradition and reveal certain shared traits to the music. Within this
dispersed and disparate community, there does appear to be—at the very least—a
shared desire to meet together, often for the first time in performance, to negotiate
understandings and embark on novel musical and social experiences.
Improvising music, it appears, is best envisioned as an artistic forum rather than an
artistic form; a social and sonic space in which to explore various cooperative and
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conflicting interactive strategies. It highlights process over product creativity, an en-

gendered sense of uncertainty and discovery, the dialogical nature of real-time interac-
tion, the sensual aspects of performance over abstract intellectual concerns, and a
participatory aesthetic over passive reception. Its inherent transience and expressive
immediacy even challenge the dominant modes of consumption that have arisen in
modern, mass-market economies and the sociopolitical and spiritual efficacy of art in
general. Yet improvising music may simply remind us that all music takes place within
and through social relationships.
Ajay Heble writes that, ‘‘From its very inception jazz has been about inventiveness,
about the process of change [and] that sense of change and inventiveness is most
powerfully registered in its cultural forms that accent dissonance and contingency, in
music making that explores the sonic possibilities of traditionally outlawed models of
practice.’’118 John Gennari also asserts that jazz has served—and continues to serve—
‘‘as a progenitor of new forms, an inventor of new languages, a creator of new ways
to express meaning.’’119 And George Lipsitz argues that jazz and improvised music
have offered ‘‘cultural, moral, and intellectual guidance to people all over the
world.’’120 But Jerome Harris reminds us that, ‘‘The movement of jazz onto the global
stage is a trend that may be judged to hold some dangers.’’121 Among other things,
Harris identifies ‘‘the possibility that jazz may lose benefits that derive from cultural
closeness between the makers, mediators, and audience—among them, some easy
broad consensus about its aesthetic direction.’’ Slyly referencing Ornette Coleman’s
seminal work, Harris concludes that, ‘‘The shape of jazz to come may differ from that
which has come before.’’122
The increasingly trans-national and trans-cultural nature of improvising music does
seem to preclude the possibility of a broad consensus. Yet, as musical devices and
relationships are negotiated within performances and within the community of impro-
visers, musicians offer important rhetorical commentary on desirable social organiza-
tion, the politics of representation, the public function of art, and the possibilities for
resistance to embedded cultural and historical constructions. By paying attention to
the ways in which artists and involved listeners define, document, perform, experi-
ence, and evaluate this music, we may gain insight not only into the process of artistic
and cultural innovation but also into the processes by which we engage with and
participate in our natural and social worlds. Nearly all societies and artistic communi-
ties have an ‘‘avant-garde,’’ a cultural space in which new ideas may be expressed and
explored. As musicians and musical practices continue to work across and between
national, cultural, and stylistic boundaries, improvising music may play a special role
in both generating and coping with complexity.
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3
The Embodied Mind
One of the challenges I continue to confront in my professional career is how to teach

improvisation to aspiring jazz and creative musicians in an effective and appropriate
manner. There is, of course, no shortage of pedagogical texts on the subject, most of
which focus on the ‘‘rules’’ of theory and appropriate scale and chord choices, or offer
‘‘licks’’ that can quickly make your improvising sound more convincing or ‘‘authentic’’
in a given style. But as many improvisers will attest, it is not the notes you play, but
how you play them. And how you play them comes at least as much from your physical
connection with the instrument as from any mental awareness or intellectual plan-
ning. Students frequently wonder what I am ‘‘thinking’’ when I improvise, and I am
often led to answer that many of my favorites times spent improvising seem neither
entirely mental, nor entirely physical, but rather when these binary divisions seem to
dissolve and disappear, if only for a fleeting moment.
In this chapter, I hope to confront—and propose a means through which to by-
pass—the Cartesian split between mind and body (or intellect and intuition) that so
often plagues the analysis and discussion of jazz and improvised music. Are there
more appropriate ways to characterize the nature of the relationship between an im-
proviser’s intentions and actions? How does an improviser’s physical connection with
her/his instrument factor into this relationship? Why has the creative role of the body
frequently been neglected in the music academy and conservatory? To address these
and other questions, I turn to contemporary approaches in cognitive science that focus
on issues of embodiment and I offer a detailed investigation of the performance prac-
tice and aesthetics of improvising saxophonist Evan Parker, whose playing and per-
spective offers a potent example of body-mind integration. Many of the themes
developed here will be taken up again in chapter seven with regards to the pedagogy
of improvisation.
Taking the Note for a Walk

The thing I always come back to is Paul Klee’s description of draw-
ing—taking a line for a walk. I think of solo saxophone as taking a
note for a walk. And we’ll see afterwards where we went rather
than me leading you round a path I know well.
—Evan Parker
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Born in Bristol, England on April 5, 1944, Evan Parker has emerged as one of the
leading saxophone free improvisers. His early musical influences, however, were very
much in line with those of other English youth growing up in the fifties. A fascination
with pop and skiffle music, especially by the singer Lonnie Donegan, gradually in-
spired Parker to investigate the roots of these musics in the American blues and jazz
traditions. Although only a limited number of records became available in England,
Parker began to digest the music of Leadbelly, Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee, Louis
Armstrong, Dave Brubeck, and Paul Desmond.
Parker started his saxophone studies on alto at the age of fourteen, strongly influ-
enced by the velvet sonorities of Desmond’s playing on that horn, but soon switched
to tenor and soprano after hearing the music of John Coltrane for the first time. Since
Parker’s father worked for the airline industry, he was able to get free flights to New
York City in 1961 and 1962 and had the opportunity to hear and meet many of the
great American free jazz musicians, including Cecil Taylor and his newly formed unit
with Sonny Murray and Jimmy Lyons. From Cecil Taylor (and saxophonist Eric Dol-
phy) Parker claims to have inherited a sense of wide interval playing that moves away
from clearly ascending and descending phrase structures.1
Parker was equally impressed by the explosive saxophone styles being developed
by Archie Shepp, Steve Lacy, Albert Ayler, Pharaoh Sanders, and John Tchicai.2 He
explains:
In the case of Albert it was to do with his access to the altissimo register, control
of the overtones, in the case of Pharaoh, it was to do with his articulation, a
certain kind of double and triple tonguing. And in Tchicai’s case, to do with his
way of floating over what was already a non-metric pulse, on those New York Art
Quartet records . . . I thought I could achieve . . . not exactly a synthesis, but I
could work my way through the gaps that were left between what those people
were doing.3
Following his truncated undergraduate studies at Birmingham University in Botany,

Parker moved to London and, in late 1966, began playing at the Little Theater Club
alongside many of England’s most capable and celebrated improvisers, including
Derek Bailey, Trevor Watts, Dave Holland, John Stevens, Tony Oxley, Kenny Wheeler,
Paul Lytton, Barry Guy, Paul Lovens, Louis Moholo, and others.4 Outside of England,
Parker has cultivated longstanding associations with Alexander Von Schlippenbach,
Peter Brötzman, George Lewis, Anthony Braxton, Steve Lacy, Ned Rothenberg, Irène
Schweizer, Paul Bley, Sainkho Namtchylak, Philipp Wachsmann, Walter Prati, and
Mario Vecchi, among others.
Despite his continuing interest in collective improvisation and his fascinating range
of musical collaborators, Parker is perhaps best known for creating a distinctive solo
saxophone language. His use of circular breathing, overtone manipulation, multiphon-
ics, polyrhythmic fingerings, and various slap and multiple tonguing techniques (in-
volving an up/down motion rather than the more traditional throat attack) allow him
to form complex, overlapping patterns of sound that are both highly virtuosic and
serenely beautiful. He states:
My evolution in solo playing has been to exploit technical possibilities and acous-
tic possibilities unique to the solo situation. When you have all the space to fill,
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THE EMBODIED MIND
Evan Parker photographed by Caroline Forbes
you can listen more closely to the specific resonances in the room, to the specific
interaction with the acoustic, to the overtone components in the sound—the har-
monic components in any one note become more audible. The temptation to frag-
ment individual tones into their harmonic components becomes very attractive
because you can hear yourself that much more closely; you can hear the detail of
what’s happening in any one sound.5
Evan Parker’s solo saxophone recordings now number in the double digits, starting
with the album Saxophone Solos (1975) and followed by Monoceros (1978), The Snake
Decides (1986), Conic Sections (1989) and Process and Reality (1991) among others.6 With
Chicago Solos (1995), Parker released his first album of solo tenor saxophone playing.
And starting in the 1990s, Parker has also released several examples of his solo saxo-
phone playing with live computer processing, including Hall of Mirrors (1990) and Solar
Wind (1997). Since his first foray into the relatively uncharted territory of solo saxo-
phone performance—Coleman Hawkins’s ‘‘Picasso’’ (1948) and Anthony Braxton’s
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double-LP For Alto (1969) were pioneering examples in this format—Parker’s style,
technique, and aesthetics have changed considerably, yet a certain fundamental ap-
proach remains important, along with a very personal sound and relationship to the
instrument.
In describing his solo approach, Parker has spoken of a desire to create the ‘‘illusion
of polyphony’’ on a monophonic instrument. He is able to accomplish this by combin-
ing circular breathing, a penchant for exploring several layers of musical activity at
once, and the specific ability to sustain a low tone while articulating selected overtones
(or its reverse, sustaining an overtone while interjecting low notes). He explains: ‘‘I
try to give [the listener] a sense of dialog with myself anyway, you know the way I
move lines around in the overtone structure against lines in the lower register of the
instrument. There is still some sense of dialogue in the music but it’s just one person
speaking to himself.’’7
Parker first explored circular breathing after encountering it in the work of saxo-
phonist Roland Kirk and ethnographic recordings of traditional music from Africa and
the Middle East.8 And he refined this technique in response to the extended duration
sounds of amplified strings and controlled feedback being exploited by his colleagues
Derek Bailey and Hugh Davies in the Music Improvisation Company in the early
1970s. Parker has commented that his initial decision to play and record solo resulted
directly from discovering new instrumental possibilities that the technique of circular
breathing made available.9 Assisted by this uninterrupted flow of sound, he follows
his temptation to fragment and his penchant for wide interval leaps—all at phenome-
nal speeds of execution—to create the illusion of exploring up to three distinct regis-
ters of the instrument simultaneously. Parker characteristically explains both the
tangible and less tangible influences on his decision to explore these unusual saxo-
phone devices. He recalls:
Listening to the drum music from various African cultures on records, especially
the wonderful work published by Ocora and thinking about polyrhythms I started
to work on patterns of fingerings in which the left and right hands worked in
different superimposed rhythms. To some extent, this overlapped with work on
broken air columns (so-called cross-fingerings) and thoughts on how to apply
the fundamentals of Bartolozzi’s pioneering work New Sounds for Woodwind to the
saxophone. At a certain point I had a flash of insight the force of which I still find
difficult to communicate: that the saxophone can just as well be seen as a closed
tube that can be opened in various ways as an open tube that can be closed in
various ways. Although this thought may sound obvious I suspect it has been one
of the most important keys to my development.10
In analyzing Parker’s approach to saxophone polyphony, John Corbett offers several

parallels between Parker’s solo and group playing. Corbet states that:
In a sense, you are like a solo-group, trying to invent or produce a way of playing
as a soloist that’s like playing as a group: coordinating things in a way that may
be controllable, but not predictable . . . something like a group dynamic where
you and the relationship between the subset of techniques you might be using at
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THE EMBODIED MIND
a given time and the instrument are all three interacting in a way that’s like
different performers.11
Parker’s own ideas seem to corroborate this solo-group notion when he describes
his playing as a ‘‘schizophrenic context’’ in which ‘‘it’s almost as if there are two
people, one of whom is playing the saxophone and one of whom is talking to the guy
who plays the saxophone. And when it come to it, the guy playing the saxophone
actually gets the final say, and the one telling him what to do stands there and say, ‘I
tried, fellas. There he goes again.’ ’’12 His comments challenge the idea of a singular
controlling intellect in improvisation and establish the importance of the body and
non-conscious and non-analytical processes in performance; processes that may be
equally important in reception as well (a twenty-five-minute solo improvisation by
Evan Parker can be heard on the accompanying compact disc). To probe these ideas
further, let us turn to the question of embodiment and its role in expressive communi-
cation and cognition.
The Body in the Music
You get legs dangling down there and arms floating around, so
many fingers and one head. . . . Not only can the natural environ-
ment carry you beyond your own limitations, but the realization
of your own body as part of that environment is an even stronger
dissociative factor. . . . What we do in the actual event is important—
not only what we have in mind. Often what we do is what tells us
what we have in mind.13
—Cornelius Cardew
Much of the history of Western inquiry has been guided by the principle that the
world-out-there and the internal world of mental states are distinct, and analysis can
and should proceed by breaking systems into their component parts and by studying
their properties and relationships from an observer-independent position. Variously
referred to as reductionism, rationalism, objectivism, realism, positivism, or structural-
ism, this general orientation influenced both philosophical and scientific thinking for
centuries.14 The last half-century has witnessed enormous strides in the study of mind
and consciousness and, most recently, a significant shift toward ‘‘ecological’’ or ‘‘sys-
tems’’ thinking in the fields of cognitive science and consciousness studies.
Although examples of systems thinking can be found going back centuries if not
millennia, its modern origins are often dated to the first Macy Conferences held in
New York City in 1946, which brought together pioneering cyberneticists, mathemati-
cians, engineers, and neuroscientists organized by the dynamic leadership of Norbert
Weiner and John von Neumann, and humanities and social science researchers clus-
tered around Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead.15 Although many of the central
ideas of systems thought were adopted from biology, including feedback and homeo-
stasis, the then-nascent field of cognitive science organized instead around a notion
of mind that identified cognition with computation, and the brain as the hardware on
which it runs. This approach, often called cognitivism, has been slowly but steadily
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replaced by a view of the mind and consciousness that acknowledges the important
role that the body, emotions, and social factors play in how we think.
Several assumptions of cognitivism—the idea that we inherit a world outside of
ourselves with definite physical properties, that we engage this world through internal
representations and information processing, and that ‘‘we’’ do so from a pregiven and
undivided sense of self—have been replaced with the notion of cognition as the
‘‘bringing forth’’ of a world and a conception of self that is inseparable from an organ-
ism’s biology and its history of interactions and lived experience. Summarizing the
exciting research in this area, Wayne Bowman explains that, ‘‘In contrast to cognitivist
theories, embodied accounts construe mind as an activity emergent from, structured by,
and never wholly separable from the material facts of bodily experience.’’16 And be-
cause bodies are always both physically and contextually situated, theories of embodi-
ment insist on biological, psychological, and cultural dimensions for all human
cognition.
Possibly the most dramatic assault on the cognitivist position came in the form of
autopoiesis, a theory first formulated by Chilean neuroscientist Humberto Maturana
and his student Francisco Varela.17 They envisioned reality not as something that was
external to and merely reflected or represented in cognitive structures, but as some-
thing that was actively constructed by organisms as they continuously maintain their
structure and self-organize. As a neuroscientist whose primary research was in the
field of color vision, Maturana was fascinated by the phenomenon of perception. He
was also dissatisfied with the standard definitions of life from biology that offered
nothing more than a list of features and functional attributes—descriptions of what
living systems do rather than what they are. After a decade or more of struggling with
these two fundamental problems in systems thinking, Maturana and Varela proposed
the theory or autopoiesis, literally ‘‘self-making,’’ as a means of unifying them. By
thinking about organization rather than structure, processes rather than properties,
they realized that life and cognition share a fundamental circular organization, a net-
work of production processes, in which the function of each component is to partici-
pate in the production or transformation of other components in the network.
Summarizing this position, Fritjof Capra explains: ‘‘The human nervous system does
not process any information (in the sense of discrete elements existing ready-made in
the outside world, to be picked up by the cognitive system), but interacts with the
environment by continually modulating its structure.’’18
In a seminal paper titled ‘‘What the Frog’s Eye Tell’s the Frog’s Brain,’’ Maturana
along with other prominent researchers in the Macy group demonstrated how sensory
receptors, far from being passive and objective transmitters of ‘‘reality,’’ actually speak
to the brain in a way that is already highly processed.19 Unlike human eyes, which are
always moving, scanning, and blinking, a frog fixes its eyes on a scene and leaves
them there. Maturana et al. were able to show that a frog’s eye perceives small objects
in rapid motion well (e.g. flies or other possible prey), but responds far less to larger,
slower moving, or stationary objects. In other words, a frog’s reality (and by extension
our own) is constructed by its sensory apparatus in such a way that there can never
be a one-to-one correlation between perception and world. Our ears may even operate
much like the frog’s eyes, in that we disregard static information over time—a back-
ground hum or traffic noises for instance—and focus our attention instead on changes
or discrepancies in the sound around us.20
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THE EMBODIED MIND
While the early formulation of autopoiesis has been criticized for its marked empha-
sis on individual autonomy and the ‘‘operational closure’’ of living beings, Francisco
Varela, Maturana’s student, went on to develop more balanced views on the subject,
at times influenced by his study of Buddhism.21 As Varela and his co-authors in The
Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience explain, ‘‘cognition is not the
representation of a pregiven world by a pregiven mind but is rather the enactment of
a world and a mind on the basis of a history of the variety of actions that a being in
the world performs.’’22 In more simple language, they argue that, ‘‘knowledge depends
on being in a world that is inseparable from our bodies, our language, and our social
history.’’23 According to this version of embodiment, dubbed enactive cognition, human
conceptual, sensory, and motor processes have coevolved with each other such that
they are inextricably linked. Summarizing this enactive perspective on cognition, Bow-
man writes, ‘‘In this way, the body is in the mind. Mind is rendered possible by bodily
sensations and actions, from whose patterns it emerges and upon which it relies for
whatever intellectual prowess it can claim. At the same time, the mind is in the body, in
the sense that mind is coextensive with the body’s neural pathways and the cognitive
templates they comprise.’’24
Contemporary neuroscientific research supports this systems perspective on body
and mind. Citing the important work of Valerie Hardcastle, pianist and music cogni-
tion researcher Vijay Iyer writes, ‘‘We can make more sense of our brains and bodies
if we view the nervous system as a system for producing motor output. The cerebellum
is connected almost directly to all areas of the brain—sensory transmissions, reticular
(arousal/attention) systems, hippocampus (episodic memories), limbic system (emo-
tions, behavior). All areas of our brain seem geared to coping with their functions as
they pertain to problems of motor control.’’25
Beyond the realization that mind and body are inextricably intertwined, however,
enactive cognition proposes that these neural pathways and cognitive schemata arise
from a body’s interaction with an experience-shaping environment. As Bowman puts
it, ‘‘mind extends beyond the physical body into the social and cultural environments that
exert major influence on the body and shape all human experience.’’26 In this light,
embodiment encompasses not only the notion that our ideas, emotions, and actions
are all grounded in, and informed by, our bodily selves, but also the perhaps more
troubling notion that the boundaries of the human ‘‘self’’ are in fact constructed
rather than given. Gregory Bateson, a leading figure at the Macy conferences and a
strong proponent of systems thinking, frequently made this point with a koan-like
simplicity: ‘‘Is a blind man’s cane part of him?’’27 The question aimed to spark a mind-
shift. Although it may be convenient to conceive of human boundaries as defined by
their epidermal surfaces, in Bateson’s example the cane provides essential information
to the man about his environment in a way that makes them, from a systems perspec-
tive, inseparable.
For Bateson’s koan to work, however, we must envision a blind man actively engaging
with his environment through his cane as surrogate ‘‘eyes.’’ A stoic subject who did
not move an inch would not provoke our epiphany that his cane is, in fact, part of his
sensorimotor apparatus and therefore his cognitive being. In fact, blind persons have
been tested with a video camera that translates images into patterns of skin stimula-
tion. Researchers found that the skin patterns have no ‘‘visual’’ content unless the
individual actively directs the video camera using head, hand, or body motions.28 Like
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SYNC OR SWARM
our earlier example of the frog, an organism and its environment are inextricably
bound together in a dynamic process of reciprocal specification and selection. Not only
are sensory modalities evoked by action, they are engaged and reengaged over time in
the individual. For instance, a study of olfaction in rabbits demonstrated that the
sense of smell does not objectively map external features but depends instead on the
perceiver’s engagement and reengagement with external stimuli—in short, on its em-
bodied and enacted history.29
In a now classic (albeit rather cruel) study, Richard Held and Alan Hein raised two
kittens in total darkness. 30 Periodically, however, they would turn on the lights and
place the kittens in separate compartments of a carousel that was specially designed
so that only one of the animals was able to reach the ground with its legs. As the
active one pulled the passive one along a circular track, both kittens were exposed to
near identical visual stimuli. The active one, however, was able to link the act of walk-
ing to its own perceptions, while for the other, action and vision did not correlate.
After a number of weeks, the kittens were released into the world. The active kitten
learned to move and behave normally, but the passive kitten was afflicted with agno-
sia, a condition of mental blindness brought on by neurological rather than physiologi-
cal causes. Its eyes could see, but its brain never learned to interpret the sensory input.
It continued to stumble and bump into objects, unable to coordinate its movements
with what it saw because in its experience, action and perception had never existed in
the same continuum, their connection had been severed. Held and Hein’s experiment
proved that these two faculties were inseparable: perception relied on action and ac-
tion was only possible through perception. Citing their work, Varela and his coauthors
conclude that, ‘‘this beautiful study supports the enactive view that objects are not
seen by visual extraction of features, but rather by the visual guidance of action.’’31
Enactive cognition, therefore, suggests a ‘‘middle way’’ between the traditional view
of a world with pregiven qualities that are recovered and represented by the cognitive
system—what Varela and his co-authors call the chicken position—and its opposite,
an entirely solipsistic cognitive system that projects its own world as a reflection of
internal laws of the system—what they call the egg position. Scientific work with color
vision offers a basis for this perspective and their explanation is worth quoting at
length:
Our discussion of color suggests a middle way between these two chicken and
egg extremes. We have seen that colors are not ‘‘out there’’ independent of our
perceptual and cognitive capacities. We have also seen that colors are not ‘‘in
here’’ independent of our surrounding biological and cultural world. Contrary to
the objectivist view, color categories are experiential; contrary to the subjectivist
view, color categories belong to our shared biological and cultural world. Thus
color as a case study enables us to appreciate the obvious point that chicken and
egg, world and perceiver, specify each other. . . . Our intention is to bypass entirely
this logical geography of inner versus outer by studying cognition not as recovery
or projection but as embodied action.32
This systems view of cognition dramatically highlights that the point for under-
standing can no longer be a world with pregiven qualities that are passively recovered
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THE EMBODIED MIND
by the body and represented by an isolated mind. We must instead confront the com-
plexity of the dynamic coupling between an organism, in which its nervous system
links sensory and motor surfaces, with its environment. More recent work in cognitive
science has supported this systems perspective by demonstrating empirically that
many cognitive tasks are greatly simplified by our propensities to: (1) anticipate expe-
riences and perceptions (only the differences from expectation need to be processed);
(2) use information already in the world (so that mental representations are often not
required); and (3) to distribute the demands of real-world cognition among several
individuals.33
These aspects of the theory of enactive cognition also have significance for the study
of music in general and improvisation in particular. Bowman notes: ‘‘When we hear a
musical performance, we do not just ‘think,’ nor do we just ‘hear’: we participate with
our whole bodies; we construct and enact it.’’34 Music is all too often thought of as an
objective and static commodity, whether as a notated score or a recorded performance,
rather than as the dynamic individual and social activity that it more accurately repre-
sents. Traditional musicological and pedagogical practices have relied heavily on these
static representations of music making, to the point that replacing the notion of music
as ‘‘something-out-there’’ with a systemic and dynamic perspective may seem as radi-
cal as the original formulations of autopoietic theory were to cognitivist-minded re-
searchers. But if music research and applied study is to engage productively with the
increasingly systems-centered approach to scientific research, we need to rethink and
reconfigure many of our most cherished notions.
For instance, many approaches to improvisation have wrongly separated mind from
body. They treat the improviser as an information processing machine that attempts
to represent, restructure, and reproduce external musical constructs in real time, often
focusing on the unfortunate shortcomings that insufficient time and unreliable mem-
ory can create.35 An embodied and enactive approach to improvisation, however, de-
nies this independent, pregiven world of musical constructs. Just as there is no
absolute color ‘‘out there’’ independent of a perceiver’s history of coordinated actions
with his environment, there is no ‘‘swing’’ eighth note, ‘‘bluesy’’ melody, or even a
‘‘lydian dominant scale’’ independent of an individual’s perceptually guided actions
operating within a more encompassing biological, psychological, and cultural context.
An embodied approach focuses instead on the ways in which improvisers perceptually
guide their sensorimotor patterns to engage with local situations, and the ways in
which the local situation changes continually as a result of improvisers’ perceptions/
actions.
Music researchers and educators in general have frequently accepted, either uncriti-
cally or unwittingly, a cognitivist explanation of ‘‘knowing’’ and ‘‘understanding’’
such that explanation, analysis, and instruction of music are often conceived of as the
simple transmission of ‘‘rational,’’ ‘‘objective,’’ and therefore ‘‘mental’’ knowledge.
Both the notion that music exists primarily as a symbolic rather than incorporated
system and the tacitly accepted idea that music ‘‘composition’’ happens away from
and prior to music making have contributed to this situation. With an enactive view
of music and music cognition, however, not only is the mind embodied in a very real
sense (both in performance and in listening), but the body and mind are socially
and culturally mediated. In contrast to the detached abstractions of many Eurological
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musicians, Evan Parker is adamant about the importance of the embodied and enact-
ive aspects of his performance:
[T]he aim is not to ‘‘let sounds be sounds,’’ or however Cage put it, but to ac-
knowledge the fact that producing the sounds means something to you, being in
control of the sounds means something to you, interacting with the other players
means something to you. And have the outcome, the musical outcome, be at least
an expression of those things.36
Like Maturana and Varela, philosopher Mark Johnson’s work The Body in the Mind
also challenges the Cartesian split between mind and body and attempts to mediate
between extreme objectivism and solipsism.37 Johnson insists that our reasoning is
not rooted in abstract conceptualization but instead in our history of experience with
perceptual and physical interactions. For Johnson, much of our verbal and conceptual
imagination originates in bodily and kinesthetic experiences that are metaphorically
extended to give structure to a wide variety of cognitive domains. Johnson believes
that these schemata emerge from certain basic forms of sensorimotor activities and
interactions and provide a preconceptual structure to our experience. As an example,
consider how our embodied sense of vision, ‘‘to see’’, has come to be used in a variety
of ways to mean, ‘‘to understand.’’ Beyond perhaps its most common usage, ‘‘Do you
see what I mean,’’ the schemata can be creatively extended to create such sentences
as ‘‘Can you shed some light on this subject for me,’’ or even more creatively, ‘‘It
would take an electron microscope to find the point of this article.’’
The mental operations that we perform to work through a problem or situation also
have analogs to spatial manipulation, orientation, and movement. For example, our
physical interaction with a container’s interior, boundary, and exterior, give structure
metaphorically to our conceptualizations of the visual world (things go in and out of
sight) and personal relationships (one gets into and out of a relationship) among other
things. Container schemata also appear to structure many of our understandings in
the musical domain, including our notions of harmony, rhythm, and form. For in-
stance, jazz musicians often talk about staying ‘‘inside’’ the chord changes or traveling
‘‘outside’’ of a tune’s pre-composed harmony, while a particularly tight rhythmic mo-
ment may be described as ‘‘in the pocket’’ or ‘‘in the groove.’’38 It is interesting to note
that container schemata may also affect our tendency to place musical practices into
stylistic ‘‘boxes,’’ a practice that has often circumscribed African American creativity
in undesirable ways. Many improvisers are increasingly dissatisfied with the notion
that musical practices necessarily fall either ‘‘inside’’ or ‘‘outside’’ of conventional
thinking.
The general cognitive process through which we structure an unfamiliar or abstract
domain in terms of a more familiar or concrete one is referred to as cross-domain
mapping. Recent work in cognitive linguistics has offered substantial evidence that
cross-domain mappings are not simply manifestations of literary creativity, such as
figures of speech, but rather are pervasive in everyday discourse and integral to the
very process of cognition and consciousness.39 Cross-domain mappings do not simply
‘‘represent’’ one domain in terms of another. They are grounded in our bodily experi-
ences and perceptions and create precise, inference-preserving mappings between the
structures of both domains.40
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THE EMBODIED MIND
Because of the rather abstract and transient nature of musical sound, cross-domain
mapping plays an important role in musical discourse. Our musical vocabularies are
in fact filled with embodied metaphors: pitches are high or low; sounds are close or
distant; textures are dense or sparse. We cross modalities with other senses: sounds
can be light, bright, clear, or dark; harmonies can be sweet or tart; textures can be
sharp, rough, or smooth. Larry Zbikowski, a music theorist whose work draws heavily
on cognitive science, writes:
Although we speak of ‘‘musical space’’ (and locate tones within it), this space
does not correspond, in a rational way, to physical space; although we speak of
‘‘musical motion,’’ the motion is at best apparent, and not real. The concepts of
space and motion are extended to music through metaphorical transference as a
way to account for certain aspects of our experience of music. These metaphors
are not an addition to musical understanding, but are in fact basic to it.41
We should remember, however, that these embodied metaphors are based on

human experiences with both the material and social worlds. One conceptual meta-
phor that frequently seems incontrovertible to many is pitch relationships as relationships
in vertical space. We discuss pitches as moving along a continuum from low to high.
From an embodied perspective, this metaphor appears to map clearly onto human
anatomy; for all speakers and singers, low tones feel low down in the throat or the
chest and high tones feel high up in the head. After a century of ethnomusicological
inquiry, however, it is also clear that this metaphor is not valid in every culture or even
in every time period in the West. In Ancient Greece, pitches were conceived of as
‘‘sharp’’ or ‘‘heavy.’’ The Suya speak of ‘‘young’’ (high) and ‘‘old’’ (low) sounds, based
on the changing male voice. Indonesians have ‘‘large’’ and ‘‘small’’ pitches to corre-
spond to the size of their gongs and metallophones.42 And in Burkina Faso, the notion
of ‘‘high’’ and ‘‘low’’ pitches is inverted from that of the West, since the bass notes of
the indigenous xylophone are physically higher off the ground to make room for larger
calabash resonators.43 This ‘‘inverted’’ conception also carries over to other instru-
ments in the same music culture as well.44
Why, then, has the conceptual metaphor of pitch relationships as relationships in vertical
space become the dominant one in the contemporary Western world? It does not corre-
spond to the physical layout of all, or even most Western instruments: e.g., to go up
in pitch on a cello or stand-up bass you must go further down the neck of the instru-
ment, and even on a piano the ‘‘higher’’ notes simply lie to the right of the performer,
not above. But it does correspond well to the Western system of notation that has been
in use to preserve and to visualize music for several centuries; ‘‘higher’’ pitches do
appear further up the musical staff.45 As Zbikowski notes, ‘‘The cross-domain map-
pings employed by any theory of music are thus more than simple curiosities—they
are actually key to understanding music as a rich cultural product that both constructs
and is constructed by cultural experience.’’46
Robert Walser was one of the first music scholars to champion Johnson’s notion of
embodied schemata as a useful tool for musical analysis and discussion, since they can
describe at the same time general and preconceptual human experiences and culturally
specific, polysemic signifiers. Paraphrasing Johnson, Walser writes that, ‘‘metaphor
mediates between bodily experience, on the one hand, and discourses of language and
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music, on the other.’’47 In other words, music is mediated by our experiences of our
bodies and our interactions with the rest of the material world, just as our bodily
experiences are, in turn, mediated by music, language, and other aspects of culture.
Remarkably, a similar view to the one emerging in cognitive science can also be found
in the field of anthropology. As Jacques Maquet, a proponent of aesthetic anthropol-
ogy, explains: ‘‘A first step is to realize that artifacts, behaviors, ideas are not purely
cultural: they are not related only to their traditions of origin. They are also related to
what is common to all human beings, and to what is particular to the individual who
has created them.’’48
Walser focuses his treatment on Johnson’s force schemata and its manifestation in
musical timbre, according to Walser ‘‘the least successfully theorized and analyzed of
musical parameters.’’49 His study focuses on heavy metal guitar and vocal technique
as a musical and cultural site where timbre is paramount and images of power and
force are continually circulated between musicians, audiences, and the music and
marketing industries. The ‘‘powerful’’ sounds of heavy metal can resonate with listen-
ers in both embodied and encultured ways. For instance, people experience distorted
sounds and noise on a daily basis, both within their own bodies, as when a scream or
yell overexerts the capacity of the human vocal chords (signifying heightened meaning
or immediacy of response), and in their interactions with standard technology such
as overdriven stereo equipment or poor telephone connections. Improviser/composer
Cornelius Cardew also highlighted these forceful interactions: ‘‘It is not the exclusive
privilege of music to have a history—sound has history too. Industry and modern
technology have added machine sounds and electronic sounds to the primeval sounds
of thunderstorm, volcanic eruption, avalanche and tidal wave.’’50
Heavy metal and other popular music forms, including rap and techno, have used
electronic equipment and effects to exploit these modern industrial sounds and the
physical immediacy that can be evoked by musical ‘‘noise.’’ In jazz and classical mu-
sics, where acoustic instruments and the human voice have remained for many the
primary means of expression, extended instrumental and vocal techniques can also
reference and impart Johnson’s force schemata. But we must remember that although
force schemata can communicate certain shared meanings on the basis of human
embodiment, their culturally conditioned aspects also signify in a multitude of ways.
Just as heavy metal distortion and power chords have been used in differing musical
and cultural circles to sanctify the Devil and exalt the glory of God, the forceful ex-
tended techniques now commonplace in free jazz and free improvisation have signified
in varied ways from the Black Power of the 1960s to transcendental spirituality or
postmodern angst and confusion.
Music has the remarkable ability to evoke and reference a whole host of embodied
sensitivities and encultured or symbolic qualities. In performance these work together
in extremely complex ways. Combined they attest to the power of music to influence
people and societies, to bring people together and to drive them apart. Wayne Bowman
explains:
The list of bodily constituted musical ‘‘properties’’ is an extraordinarily long one,

inclusive of such diverse yet central musical features as: tension and release; dis-
sonance and consonance; volume and balance; accent, meter and syncopation;
tonal center and modulation; texture and density; line and phrase; height and
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depth; advancement and recession; vital drive and groove; movement and ges-
ture—to say nothing of the immense range of so-called expressive attributes like
seriousness, whimsy, playfulness, tenderness, or violence. It is the body’s presence
in each of these, and their consequently intimate links to personal and collective
identity, that account for music’s remarkable capacity to affirm or offend, to con-
front or console, and that account for the fact that people are seldom diffident
about their musical preferences.’’51
Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner, with their notion of conceptual blending, have
built on the idea of cross-domain mapping to provide a more nuanced picture of the
ways in which new meanings and understandings can arise from the blended input
of several conceptual frames.52 The basic processes of conceptual blending include
composition, completion, and elaboration. Composition projects the content from two
or more inputs into the blended space, completion fills out the pattern in the blend by
referencing information in long-term memory, and elaboration involves extending or
applying the now fully formed blend into new domains or new situations.53 At each of
these stages of the blend, new content and new meanings may develop that were not
available from either of the input spaces. Blends can be created ‘‘on the fly’’ with only
fleeting significance, or they may become established in conventions of thought and
over time lose their efficacy or allow for other distinct blends to emerge.
While a few scholars have adopted the notion of conceptual blending to analyze the
emergent meanings found in musical settings with text, purely instrumental music
offers a more perplexing challenge.54 But by engaging with the emerging fields of
embodiment studies, music scholars are beginning to challenge many stereotyped or
tacitly accepted notions about music’s relationship with the body. For instance, Su-
zanne Cusick, in her article titled ‘‘Feminist Theory, Music Theory, and the Mind/Body
Problem,’’ highlights the ways in which academic discussions of music too often ig-
nore the embodied aspects of performance. She writes, ‘‘Music, an art which self-
evidently does not exist until bodies make it and/or receive it, is thought about as if it
were a mind-mind game.’’55 By which she means the composer’s mind creates patterns
of sounds to which other minds—those of listeners and critics—assign meanings. Ac-
cording to Cusick, these ‘‘mind-mind messages’’ are imagined to be transmitted by
disempowered (and symbolically mechanized) performers between ‘‘members of a
metaphorically disembodied class, and, because disembodied, elite.’’56
Embodiment theory has done much to attack the perceived objectivism (and Euro-
centrism) of Cartesian science, but at least in its early incarnation it did not always
take full account of the specific contexts provided by embodiment. While finding
much in Mark Johnson’s influential work The Body in the Mind to recommend it, Kath-
erin Hayles remarks, ‘‘It is ironic that he reinscribes objectivist presuppositions in
positing a universal body unmarked by gender, ethnicity, physical disability, or cul-
ture.’’57 Other scholars such as Elizabeth Grosz rightly point out that, ‘‘Indeed, there
is no body as such; there are only bodies—male or female, black, brown, white, large
or small—and the gradations in between.’’58 And Cusick argues that, ‘‘When music
theorists and musicologists ignore the bodies whose performative acts constitute the
thing called music, we ignore the feminine.’’59
Walser and Susan McClary, in an article titled ‘‘Theorizing the Body in African-
American Music,’’ also stress the importance of music scholars engaging with the
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complex discursive fields of physicality and sexuality while remaining diligent not to
reduce music in general, and black music and its related forms in particular, to the
trenchant views that segregate body from mind. Notions of the body have historically
been used both to denounce and to celebrate African American expressive forms, and
Walser and McClary highlight the ways in which mind and culture (as ‘‘high art’’)
still remain, for many, the exclusive provenance of Eurocentric discourse. They write,
‘‘The binary opposition of mind and body that governs the condemnation of black
music remains in full force; even when the terms are inverted [by romanticizing the
black body], they are always ready to flip back into their more usual positions.’’60
Unlike some in the improvised music community who may wish to distance them-
selves from the traditions of American jazz, Parker, although English, is adamant
about the relationship of his music to the African American tradition of creative im-
provisation. In an interview with Graham Lock, Parker was resolute in his convictions:
What’s important to me is that my work is seen in a particular context, coming

out of a particular tradition. I don’t really care what people call it but I would
want it to be clear that I was inspired to play by listening to certain people who
continue to be talked about mainly in jazz contexts. People like John Coltrane,
Eric Dolphy, Cecil Taylor—these were people that played music that excited me to
the point where I took music seriously myself. That continues to be the case.
That’s where what I’m doing has to make sense, if it makes any sense at all.’’61
Although Parker’s playing does bring to mind, to varying degrees, memories of Col-
trane, Ayler, Dolphy, Tchicai, Lyons, and Lacy, he has not been content with simple
imitation or idolatry. With only a bit of hyperbole, Steve Lake writes: ‘‘Coltrane galva-
nized innumerable saxophonists—to imitation, above all. Parker moved swiftly
through this perhaps necessary phase, and grasped the larger challenge implicit in
Coltrane’s music. To pay appropriate homage, one had to be unsentimental as the
master was in affecting radical upheaval in the shape of jazz itself.’’50 In the analysis
that follows, I hope to illustrate ways in which improvised music in general, and the
solo practice of Evan Parker in particular, challenge many of the aforementioned di-
chotomies by foregrounding the sonic and contextual qualities of an intelligent body
and an embodied mind. The social, cultural, and even ethical dimensions of an embod-
ied approach to music and music instruction will also be taken up in the final chapter.
It’s a Bit Like Juggling
Evan Parker’s saxophone practice has an undeniable physical quality to it. His primary
extended saxophone devices include: split tones and multiphonics produced by intri-
cate cross-fingerings or ‘‘venting’’ the instrument in different places along the tube;
exaggerated articulations including rapid and multiple tonguing effects and slapping
and popping techniques; and polyrhythmic fingering patterns that often produce
highly angular and complex linear shapes and subtle microtonal variations of pitch.
To develop these extended techniques, Parker has worked to liberate different bodily
aspects of his playing—the fingers, the tongue, the larynx, and the breath—so that
each physical system may achieve a substantial degree of independence. He then com-
bines these body techniques, most of which are concealed from view, with the acoustic
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THE EMBODIED MIND
attributes of the instrument and the concert space and with any overriding creative
concerns for the performance.
Each of these saxophone techniques exploits sonic textures that in other contexts
might be referred to as ‘‘noise’’ in the pejorative sense.63 Many devotees of Western
‘‘classical’’ music (particularly those with nineteenth century leanings) idolize a purity
of sound, articulation, and pitch, whereas Parker’s extended devices seemingly ignore
or transcend the normal design and use of the instrument. By expanding the natural
range, timbre, and traditional connection between tongue and fingers, Parker may
also be able to convey metaphorically a heightened meaning or immediacy to listeners
(just as distorting the human voice or overdriving electronic equipment often do). His
polyphonic approach also allows him to circumvent obvious ascending and descending
phrases in a way that challenges the dominant conceptual mapping (derived from
notated music) of pitch relationships as relationships in vertical space. Even Parker’s
use of circular breathing to set these extended techniques into motion, when exam-
ined in isolation, may connote hyperextension on a biological level, appearing as it
does to bypass the human need for oxygen. Ethnomusicologist Ali Jihad Racy has
noted that in the Arab world, the technique of circular breathing often connotes a
certain mystique and may be an important factor in triggering states of elation and
psychological transformation among listeners.64
Researchers interested in music cognition have proposed a plausible relationship
between bodily motions and musical correlates that, to some extent, is bypassed in
Parker’s solo approach.65 For example, the standard phrase length in music can be
seen to correspond with the dynamic swells associated with breathing or the gradual
sway of the body or a limb. The musical beat (particularly of dance-based musics)
corresponds not only to the frequency range of our heartbeat (as the musical term
implies), but also generally to the rate of walking, sucking, chewing, head nodding,
and sexual intercourse. Subdivisions of the pulse, perhaps at the level of the individual
note, often correspond to the speed of speech patterns or hand gestures.66 And on the
level of microtiming, small deviations such as grace notes or temporal asynchronies
seem to correspond with rapid flams between fingers or limbs, or to the rate of delivery
of individual phonemes in speech.
Drawing on considerable neurological and cognitive data, Vijay Iyer suggests that,
‘‘In the sensoriomotor perspective, a perceived rhythm is literally an imagined move-
ment. . . . Hence the act of listening to rhythmic music involves the same mental
processes that generate bodily motion.’’67 And Wayne Bowman theorizes a similar po-
sition when he writes, ‘‘If it is indeed the case that rhythmic/temporal features in
music perception/cognition arise from activation of substantial parts of the same neu-
ral circuitry involved in bodily movement and action, the bodily dimension so often
evident in acts of musical listening (and music making) is not just a function of fortu-
itous resemblance, representation, or association. If listening and music making acti-
vate the same neural circuitry as bodies in motion, we have a material basis for the
claim that bodily action is an indelible and fundamental part of what music, qua
music, is. And if music requires bodily motion as a precondition of its being, so too
may music shape and inform other possibilities for embodied being.’’68
As alluded to earlier, however, Evan Parker’s solo music seems, in some ways, to
deny these first two levels of musical and bodily correlates. His lengthy passages using
circular breathing can extend well beyond the natural limits of the breath, and his
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sense of pulse often avoids any obvious connections to the recurring patterns of walk-
ing or of the circulatory system. On closer listening, however, even in the midst of an
extended passage made possible by circular breathing Parker tends to introduce a new
layer or element at roughly the same interval as a standard phrase. While his repeat-
ing-but-not-repetitive patterning frequently seems to cycle at roughly the rate of a
medium tempo pulse or beat, though rarely in such an orderly or predictable fashion.
Even on the level of subdivided pulse, Parker’s rapid, angular, and ‘‘polyphonic’’ struc-
tures seem less akin to the pace and design of regular speech than to glossolalia, or
other forms of heightened speech. Expressive microtiming also seems to play a central
role in Parker’s music, but Iyer’s focus on groove-based music and their expressive
divergence from a shared pulse offers little help in analyzing the more abstract quali-
ties of Parker’s playing. To what might Parker’s music be oriented, if not to these
standard notions of bodily correlates?69
Parker adopts a telling embodied metaphor that captures well the sense of height-
ened awareness and ability evoked by his music, as well as the seemingly paradoxical
way in which his performances are fully embodied and yet seem to point at times to
an extension or a denial of the corporeal form:
It’s a bit like juggling. . . . You have to do the easier tricks first: get into the rhythm
and suddenly your body is able to do things which you couldn’t do cold. The best
bits of my solo playing, for me, I can’t explain to myself. Certainly I wouldn’t
know how to go straight to them cold. The circular breathing is a way of starting
the engine, but at a certain speed all kinds of things happen which I’m not con-
sciously controlling. They just come out. It’s as though the instrument comes alive
and starts to have a voice of its own.70
This passage is replete with implications for a theory of musical embodiment. Jug-
gling, or more simply balancing objects in gravity, is a physical sensation we are all
familiar with. The delicate skills and inherent risk involved with the venture can be
appreciated on a biological level. But juggling, as Johnson might point out, has also
been metaphorically extended from the biological into the conceptual domain: ‘‘jug-
gling’’ options, careers, or responsibilities. The cross-domain mappings have a cultural
dimension as well. For instance, risk taking might be frowned upon in certain societies
while in others it is seen as an indispensable tool for survival and success.
In attempting to juggle or balance an object in gravity, there is, in one sense, clear
effort and intentionality. Yet a desire for too much conscious control—thinking too
hard about the task at hand—can lead to continual corrections that eventually upset
the delicate system. When witnessing a juggler at the peak of her of his performance,
one can focus on the specific moves and the rhythmic quality of the performer tossing
and catching items in succession, but the items in flight and the entire system itself
tend to take on a life of their own. At its most basic, juggling represents uncertainty
and risk, and audiences are undoubtedly lead to empathize with the performer, whose
task can seem at times insurmountable, or at least untenable in the long run.
Juggling also highlights that, in order for the system to achieve and maintain its
organizational complexity—its constancy—there must be a continual flow of energy
and matter and an undercurrent of insecurity. As more items may be added to the
‘‘trick,’’ the organizational complexity of the system, and the resulting feelings of both
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awe and anxiety can be multiplied exponentially. The specific associations and feelings
that are evoked in individuals by the embodied qualities of performance will of course
be based on personal and encultured sensibilities. Some might wish to turn their head
away in fear, unable to watch. Others may revel in the system’s remarkable dynamical
qualities. Still others may secretly hope for an embarrassing collapse. The performance
may also bring to light a whole host of memories or recollections that have less to do
with the actual event than with the lived history of the audience members, but which
are provoked by the shared and embodied aspects of the performance.
Of course Parker’s musical approach involves more than simply repeating a well
worn trick. Unlike some who might wish to envision improvisation, particularly in its
freer manifestations, as emerging from nowhere, a tabula rasa, Parker does not shy
away from certain ‘‘fixed’’ aspects of his performance practice—those things that have
been explored and embodied over time. In a more technical description of his solo
approach, he remarked:
In some ways, in some situations, the freedom of the total music, if it has any
sense of freedom, is only possible because some parts are very fixed. And by hold-
ing those fixed parts in a loop, putting them on hold for a while, then you can
look for other regions where variation is possible. But then I might discover a new
loop in that new region which immediately loosens up the loop or loops that I’ve
put on hold elsewhere. That’s what I’m trying to do: I’m shifting my attention
from different parts of the total sound spectrum. . . . That’s where the use of
repetition, although it appears to be a voluntary loss of freedom, actually opens
up regions of the instrument which otherwise I wouldn’t be aware of.71
Thinking about the Laundry
Parker goes on to describe his playing as a potent means of shifting activity to the
creative and intuitive side the brain: ‘‘when the music’s really going you switch from
left-brain activity to right-brain activity—and once you’ve made that switch the left
brain can think about more or less anything it wants. The laundry, anything.’’72 Al-
though Parker has worked diligently to establish these extended techniques and to be
able to juggle their multiple interactions, he believes the best parts of his playing to be
beyond his conscious control and his rational ability to understand.73 The embodied
aspects of his playing have emerged, not through conscious or concerted means, but
through continually engaging with the musical environment, idea space, and the in-
strument itself.
Musical complexity may be the first and easiest inroad into Parker’s solo improvis-
ing style, and the sheer virtuosity of his technique undeniably receives the most com-
ment in print. But this avenue alone can also serve to reify an analytical stance toward
his music that denies both its transcendent possibilities and its embodied and contex-
tual nature. Ian Carr, for instance, describes Parker’s solo playing this way: ‘‘The resul-
tant effect is possibly something like (if it could be done) putting one bar of music
under a very powerful microscope or a stethoscope. What we see or experience is still
music, but we are aware of the fibers of it, the component parts, the usually concealed
physics, in extreme close-up.’’74 Although an evocative description of Parker’s timbral
and textural explorations, Carr’s analogy is perhaps too reminiscent of a reductionist
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SYNC OR SWARM
brand of science and a structuralist view of music theory. His statement maintains a
strong separation between the music being made and the musician making it; ‘‘put-
ting one bar of music’’ under a microscope in the lab.
Despite his command over an extended vocabulary of saxophone devices and
sounds, Evan Parker seems to enjoy the inherently unpredictable ways in which they
may combine. He allows the intelligent body, the acoustic environment, and a faith in
the immediacy of the moment, to have a hand in shaping performance. In what could
function as a direct rebuttal to Carr, Parker describes his approach this way: ‘‘It re-
mains theoretical until it’s happened. It’s not like somebody doing rigorous scientific
research, where you set out to determine is this true? then link together the outcome
of those smaller experiments to test the bigger hypothesis. It’s not really like that.
Could be dressed up like that, but what’s really going on is a nonverbal, largely non-
conceptual kind of activity, once called ‘play.’ You know, ‘playing’ the saxophone.’’75
In the final chapter we will return to this notion of play to which Parker is referring.
Former Village Voice critic Tom Johnson, although also clearly under the spell of Par-
ker’s extended techniques, argues instead that it is Parker’s seamless integration of
the physical and mental aspects of his playing that will continue to impress listeners
well after the shock of his technical wizardry has worn off. Johnson writes:
He was never playing ‘‘special effects.’’ He was just playing the way he always
plays. His circular breathing was so much under control he wouldn’t even bother
with it some of the time. If a phrase needed to go on and on, he would sneak the
extra air into the horn to make it go on and on, sometimes for several minutes.
But at other moments, when that wasn’t the point, he would quickly revert to
normal breathing. When he would go for a particular tonal area, he seemed to
know exactly what notes would come out, and he knew just how to wiggle his
fingers to make his complex sustained textures ripple or flutter or sputter the way
he wanted them to. He heard where the tonic was, when there was one, and how
to ease back into it, if he desired. He even had control over the difference tones,
which are odd, low tones that vibrate inside your ear when two high pitches,
slightly out of tune, vibrate in a certain way. . . . In short, this was not a hit-and-
miss affair the way it is with most woodwind players when they turn on their
multiphonics. This was a musician who had transformed these new sounds into
a vocabulary that was familiar to him as major scales are to most musicians.76
Steve Lake agrees that, ‘‘A mere combining of ‘extended’ techniques won’t necessar-
ily result in music, much less magic and mystery.’’77 And those critics who are even
more suspicious of Parker’s highly technical approach, or those who fear his aesthetic
leans too far toward the transcendent, are often quick to denounce his playing as less
interactive, less improvised. Ben Watson, author of a recent book on guitarist Derek
Bailey and the development of (primarily British) free improvisation, carps: ‘‘In inter-
views, Evan Parker claimed to be pushing his circular breathing gambit as ‘far’ as he
could—pressing himself up against a brick wall and pressing further—but the totali-
tarian afflatus of his technique steamrollers specific ambience, turning his music into
the kind of dependable commodity required by promoters and applauded by the gen-
eral public.’’78 Watson’s comments are undoubtedly sparked, at least in part, by a long-
standing and well publicized (although not well understood) professional split between
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THE EMBODIED MIND
Derek Bailey and Evan Parker, but he does strike an especially sensitive nerve when
he describes the ongoing debate between many free improvisers in general: ‘‘To the
mainstream, all avant-gardes look the same, but the avant-garde is actually bifurcated
by a struggle between transcendental idealists and dialectical materialists.’’79
Parker’s approach and aesthetic seems to ask listeners to envision these in dialec-
tical relationship rather than as a simple dichotomy. In response to criticisms such as
Watson’s, Parker counters that the specific ambience of performance makes all the
difference: ‘‘Beyond certain preconditions like good physical shape of lower lip and a
good reed the most important [factors] are, one, acoustics and, two, a feeling that it
means something to some other people in the room.’’80 But he is also aware that on
certain nights the ‘‘magic and mystery’’ that Lake described remain resolutely out of
reach and listeners are forced to settle for, in Lake’s words, ‘‘interesting/clever/complex
music.’’ When pressed Parker responded: ‘‘The only hope is that when the magic
proves elusive there is still enough in the shell of ‘interesting/clever/complex’ to have
earned my fee.’’
Although willing to acknowledge the material side of his playing and his livelihood,
Parker remains adamant that his music is not principally about its technical features.
He has adopted another kinesthetic metaphor that describes well the synergetic im-
pact of his work and makes a strong case against submitting it to a simple reductionist
analysis:
There’s an analogy with the spokes on a revolving wheel. Everything’s in motion,

the rim of the wheel is supported by the spokes, but when the whole thing is
turning you don’t see the spokes any more. If the thing didn’t have that speed of
rotation, it would make sense to count the spokes and think about them one at a
time. But the whole point is to get the thing revolving and the spokes are only
there to enable the rim of the wheel to turn. There’s some kind of equivalent of
that in the music. You could, you can, after the event, slow the thing down and
look at how all the pieces fit together. But the whole point is that the pieces fit
together that way in order to generate the speed of movement which is the music.
. . . The music is not what you hear in analysis, it’s what is there in the real time
of performance.81
In his treatment of free improvisation, Watson is determination to champion the

physical and material qualities of the music in an effort to reveal ‘‘transcendence as a
lie,’’ but at times he veers dangerously close to the celebratory primitivism that has
plagued discussions of improvisation, and particularly African American jazz, in the
past. For instance, in a passage celebrating Derek Bailey’s less referential and reveren-
tial approach (by contrast with the ‘‘transcendental’’ work of fellow English guitarist
John McGlaughlin), Watson writes: ‘‘In comparison to the sweeping virtuosity of the
Mahavishnu Orchestra—which evokes traditional virtues from Liszt to Ravi Shankar—
the kind of virtuosity proposed by Bailey is so shockingly physical that the listener is
forced to think of such acts as armpit-scratching and nose picking. Its return of music
to the physical act debunks civilization itself.’’82 Elsewhere Watson references Parker’s
playing in the same light:
When Hugh Davies is pursuing a close-miked scrunch and Bailey is signaling his
involvement with a series of rasped pings—or Evan Parker is pushing overblown
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SYNC OR SWARM
soprano saxophone into glottal regions of nose-blow anguish—we are witnessing

the pursuit of instrumental ability beyond civilized elevation. The unconscious
basis of curiosity—the child’s interest in the products of the body—is foregrounded
in these sounds, refusing the transcendent beauty of staged virtuosity.’’83
Watson seems intent on postulating free improvisation as a ‘‘universal human lan-

guage’’ with an anthropological basis in ‘‘intimations of inhalation and exhalation, of
muscular tension and relaxation, of sexual arousal and relief.’’84 In so doing, however,
he all but ignores the ways in which our relationship to our bodies, and the relation-
ship that others have to them, are constructed within specific cultural settings that
can harbor and impart a variety of racial, gender, and sexual constructions.85
There is much to be learned from a treatment such as Graham Locke’s Blutopia that
suggests that the music of Duke Ellington, Sun Ra and Anthony Braxton, but more
broadly African American expressive culture in general, are predicated on two im-
pulses: one impulse to remember (the ‘‘blues’’ impulse of his title) and another im-
pulse to construct through music a vision of the future (the utopic reference).86 Parker
acknowledges the important relationship that his music has to the African American
tradition of creative music in general and to the music of specific individuals as well,
and he acknowledges the ways in which his techniques have developed and have
become embodied over time. From one perspective, these changes occur at a rather
glacial pace. Parker comments: ‘‘It’s curious how the changes drop into the existing
material almost camouflaged. It’s only by going back and hearing in blocks of five
years that the differences become more obvious.’’87 Yet he also acknowledges the ways
in which the specific dynamics of performance—its acoustics and ambience—make
possible those occasions on which one may enter into the idealized space of music’s
utopian vision.88
As with the wheel in his analogy, Parker’s music is firmly grounded in its specifics
and yet it is not about them. Rather, the music is about propulsion and momentum
and the fact that it can open up an entirely different world of experience, much as
the wheel afforded humans a dramatic change in lifestyle and perspective that was
unavailable before.89 The circularity of his metaphor and his playing also bring to mind
the ‘‘strange loops’’ that Douglas Hofstadter finds in the ever-rising notes of a Bach
canon, in the endlessly rising steps of an Escher staircase, and in Gödel’s proof of
unprovable mathematical axioms.90 And these strange loops have much in common
with the auto-catalytic sets of systems theory that create a circular world in which all
causes are results, and all results are causes. Although Parker’s earlier comments
about scientific research may be on target for the methods and ideologies of reduction-
ism, the emerging scientific paradigm has shifted attention to the importance of quali-
tative research approaches and of systemic perspectives, taking seriously the notion
that, to borrow Heinz von Forester’s pun, the act of ‘‘observing systems’’ is inseparable
from those ‘‘observing systems’’ who are doing the observing.91
A Chameleon on a Mirror
Another koan-like riddle favored by Gregory Bateson, first proposed to him by his
student Stuart Brand in the early 1970s, asks ‘‘What color is a chameleon placed on a
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THE EMBODIED MIND
mirror?’’ It illustrates well one of the central tenets of systems thinking: reflexivity.
Katherine Hayles defines reflexivity as ‘‘the movement whereby that which has been
used to generate a system is made, through a changed perspective, to become part
of the system it generates.’’92 As in juggling, the individual parts that generate the
system—the performer and his apparatuses—are intrinsically part of the system being
generated. Like Bateson’s koan provided earlier, in which the blind man’s cane be-
comes part of the observing system, Parker and his horn are involved in generating
the music; yet from a changed perspective, they and the reflexive system they define
are the music. Wired editor and futurist Kevin Kelly explains it this way: ‘‘The lizard-
glass demonstrates an entirely different logic—the circular causality of the Net. In the
realm of recursive reflections, an event is not triggered by a chain of being, but by a
field of causes reflecting, bending, mirroring each other in a fun-house nonsense.
Rather than cause and control being dispensed in a straight line from its origin, it
spreads horizontally, like creeping tide, influencing in roundabout, diffuse ways.’’93
The motion of a wheel also highlights rather well another fundamental aspect of
systems theory: that experience involves two different but interrelated processes. We
can envision these as a linear and circular view. The linear view has more to do with
the result of a process, and the circular view animates the feedback loop that shapes
its form. For instance, when watching a wheel move, we can focus on either its linear
motion, the path it traces out through space, or on its circular motion, the fact that its
individual spokes go around and around, maintaining its integrity. You may even have
had the experience of watching the wheels on a car go by and, although it is clear that
they are moving rapidly, the wheels themselves appear to be frozen in time. In a very
real sense, a wheel represents both of these dimensions, its organization as a feedback
loop that defines its inherent circularity, and its ability to progress through linear time.
To make our example a bit more illustrative, let’s imagine a snowball instead of a
wheel. Now we can focus on the path created in the snow as it barrels downhill, the
linear view, or we can focus on the circular motion of the snowball itself, which also
represents its intimate connection with its environment, its feedback structure. In
other words, the snowball emerges from its environment (it is shaped from surround-
ing snow) and in rolling downhill it takes in new resources from its environment that
allow it to grow, leaving a path in its wake. Although we can view each facet of this
system as separate—the path and the snowball—and each in turn as separate from its
environment—the snowy context—they are coupled together in such a way that they
are bound up with one another; they are intrinsically inseparable. No snowball with-
out a path through the snow, no path through the snow without a snowball, and
neither of course without the system-wide context of snow.
Although both circular and linear views are tangible in the snowball example, many
feedback systems are not as easy to visualize. For instance, instead of a snowball con-
sider a line of dominoes falling. The linear view is clearly embedded in the pattern of
pieces that is constructed ahead of time. Once the system gracefully succumbs to the
simple touch of a finger, however, we can marvel at the force that both triggers and is
fueled by the fall of the dominoes. Sure, we might want to dismiss this as nothing
more than gravity, but what is often forgotten about Newton’s law is that gravity
describes a force between two objects pulling on one another. Because our day-to-day
experiences with gravity include an extremely large mass, the Earth, we often uncon-
sciously think about it as a one-way relationship. Here we have a nice reminder of the
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SYNC OR SWARM
importance of system dynamics. As we watch the dominoes fall, the linear and circular
views—the pattern and form of the system—combine to produce an intriguing exam-
ple of emergence.94
The pattern of Parker’s musicking—the linear view—can seem impressive on its
own, but it is simply the unfolding of the feedback structure, the trace that the music-
king leaves behind. The form of Parker’s musicking—its circular nature—is enfolded
in the relationship between the various physico-cognitive processes of the performer
and the tight coupling with the instrument, the sounds that it may produce, and
the specific context for performance. Both perspectives are valid alone, but a systems
perspective sees them as intimately woven together, fundamentally inseparable. In
conversation with David Toop, Parker acknowledged a fondness for thinking in terms
of feedback structures:
It’s the key notion of the 20th century. I’m not an expert on cybernetics but
bringing an ability to generalise about feedback is a 20th century phenomenon.
Before that there were specific applications but I don’t think there was a general
awareness of how many control systems can be analysed in terms of the feedback
between inputs and outputs. It’s certainly high on my list of analytical tools.95
This awareness of feedback processes has led to an important shift in Parker’s think-
ing, a move away from dualistic concerns. Speaking of his early solo practice, Parker
admitted:
You know I was very keen on the distinction between improvisation and composi-
tion at that time, consequently I’ve come to realize it was a false kind of distinc-
tion, but for me the special problem was to distinguish between solo improvising
and composing, precisely because it was one mind at work and none of those
qualities of group improvisation. But subsequently I’ve come to think rather dif-
ferently about the whole thing. I don’t think it’s accurate to speak about an im-
provisation as something different from composition . . . it’s more accurate to
speak of it as opposed to notated music.96
Parker’s earlier observation that the saxophone seems to have a life and a voice of
its own, although on the surface sounding a bit transcendent, may also be better
understood as an example of the circular causality of embodiment and enaction theo-
ries; the perceiver and environment determine each other through reciprocal structur-
ing and selection.97 While it might be hard to envision the saxophone changing as a
result of Parker’s playing, it must be remembered that the instrument is much more
than a tube of brass with keys, pads, corks, springs, and screws. The saxophone takes
on a musical identity only in interaction with a performer. Parker’s horn is not simply
dependent on his playing, nor an extension of it, but in important ways his horn
shapes his playing. As he uncovers new sounds, places other layers on hold, new
combinations can emerge that were not predictable in their entirety. Just as it is valid
from one perspective to say that Parker plays the saxophone, it is equally valid from
another perspective to say that the saxophone plays Parker.98
In a rather poetic comment, Parker eloquently expresses the productive tension be-
tween pattern and form, permanence and flux, or process and reality that informs his
playing and his own brand of systems thinking:
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Every time I start it’s the same place and every time I start it’s somewhere differ-
ent. It depends on how you want to look at that place. The same as when you get
up in the morning, it’s a new day, but it’s also got a hell of a lot in common with
the day before. It’s a question of how you want to incorporate the cyclic repetitive
elements into the Heraclitian flux, the river you can never step in twice. Both
things are true and both things are absolutely inadequate descriptions of reality.99
The contemporary orientation of cognitive science on issues of embodiment points

toward a ‘‘middle way’’ between purely objective and purely subjective descriptions of
phenomena. This orientation resonates well with contemporary improvisation studies
that are attempting to avoid the dichotomy between the objective analysis of improvi-
sation as ‘‘product’’ and the solipsistic description of improvisation as a purely intu-
itive process. I offer some more technical analysis of Parker’s solo improvisations in
chapter four, but his performance practice and perspective offer an intriguing subject
for this embodied view of improvisation. Parker often provides eloquent and exact
descriptions of the technical aspects of his saxophone playing, while at the same time
he continually stresses the liberating aspects of improvised performance. According to
him, ‘‘in the heat of the moment a lot of the stuff you work on and practice is forgotten
or takes second role. The impulse to express something through playing becomes more
important than the technical procedure. But the more solid the technical understand-
ing is, than the better the basis for expression is.’’100
Parker’s very personal and virtuosic solo saxophone style draws attention to the
bodily aspects of his performance just as it denatures—at times with the assistance of
modern technologies—the very idea of a grounded or objective sense of self. As he
eloquently states, ‘‘in the end the saxophone has been for me a rather specialized bio-
feedback instrument for studying and expanding my control over my hearing and the
motor mechanics of parts of my skeleto-muscular system and their improved function-
ing has given me more to think about. Sometimes the body leads the imagination,
sometimes the imagination leads the body.’’101
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RIVERS OF CONSCIOUSNESS
order and balance unfailingly emerges, despite the fact that the musicians do not plan
any details of their performance in advance. Rivers describes his trio’s approach this
way: ‘‘The communication is in the music while we are performing. I set a tempo into
what we are going into and they’re listening to me. We go in and out of tempo by
listening, it’s an intuitive kind of playing.’’2
In February of 2004, we had the pleasure of hosting Sam Rivers at UCSD under the
auspices of the UC Regent’s Lecturer Program for a week of performances, workshops,
and talks. Sam came from Orlando, Florida with his current trio, including Doug Ma-
thews on bass and bass clarinet and Anthony Cole on drums, piano, and saxophone.
During his visit, Sam shared his wisdom and musicality in a variety of diverse settings.
He spoke with our undergraduate music majors about his half-century of professional
experience, and he offered a guest lecture to Anthony Davis’s jazz history class, ending
with an unscripted duo between the two seasoned improvisers that received a stand-
ing ovation. He and his trio spent an afternoon providing a performance workshop for
my graduate-level improvisation ensemble, and Sam was the guest soloist that eve-
ning at the large jazz ensemble concert under the direction of Jimmy Cheatham. For
the featured concert with his trio, we invited trombonist George Lewis to ‘‘sit in’’ with
the group and reconnect with Sam, who had been something of a mentor to George
in New York in the 1970s. Several selections from this performance can be heard on
the accompanying compact disc. Throughout the week, Sam’s energy, conviction, and
passion for his music were continually on display.
During his visit, Sam often described his musical approach with his trio as ‘‘sponta-
neous creativity’’—an approach to improvising without preconceived structures in
which everything is created ‘‘on the spot.’’3 But far from implying a music without
form, Sam spoke of his preference for music that undulates in an organic manner,
foregrounding moments of tension and relaxation, complexity and simplicity. This
connection to natural rhythms, frequencies, and processes has been apparent in much
of his recorded work, including the albums Streams, Waves, Contours, Colors, Crosscurrents,
Crystals, Sizzle, and Hues, for example. Although Sam feels that ‘‘titles come last,’’ he
states, ‘‘I really try to put a word with the music that will in some way express what
the music is all about.’’4 In the liner notes to his 1978 album titled Waves, Sam admit-
ted to ‘‘thinking in terms of forces of nature . . . the motion of waves, changing cur-
rents, changing flow.’’
In the past few decades, several scientific approaches, often grouped under the um-
brella of nonlinear dynamical systems theory, have emerged aiming to model the un-
predictable behavior of systems in which the whole can be greater than the sum of its
parts.5 Nonlinear dynamical systems theory arose from studying natural processes,
such as heartbeats, tides, seasons, and plant growth. The similarity of such processes
with the organic qualities of much improvised music, and Sam Rivers’s conception in
particular, is one indication that the connections we are attempting to build between
the two may be warranted. For example, sudden transitions from one stable state to
another occur in both and can be interesting, pleasing, or disconcerting. Such behav-
iors cannot arise in the linear dynamical systems that were the focus of natural sys-
tems research until recently.
While the full complexities of musical performance are still beyond the scope of
these scientific approaches, their emphasis on systems that involve complex internal
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SYNC OR SWARM
Sam Rivers
dynamics (including both cooperation and competition) along with a pronounced abil-
ity to adapt to new circumstances and conditions may offer insight into the complexi-
ties of musical production, interaction, and reception, with particular relevance to how
we understand improvisation. This chapter reflects collaborative and co-authored
work done with Joseph Goguen at UCSD.6 In it we investigate the dynamics of group
improvisation, focusing on the importance of transitional moments in the music.
Many of the most effective collective improvisations, it seems, involve decisive musical
‘‘phase spaces’’ (in the language of nonlinear dynamics) and transitions between
phases, all negotiated by the group with an awareness of what has occurred and a
conception of what may follow. The exact behavior of the ensemble at transitional
moments appears to be both locally unstable and, in intriguing ways, globally com-
prehensible. These ideas are illustrated with an analysis of a 1973 performance by
Sam Rivers’s trio with Cecil McBee on bass and Barry Altschul on drums [‘‘Hues
of Melanin’’]. Although we take into account the rich sonic details of the recording,
we do not isolate them from the ways in which listeners (both audience and perform-
ers) experience and engage with the qualitative aspects of musical performance, nor
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from a more comprehensive understanding of the emergent properties of musical

consciousness.7
As we saw in the previous chapter, the dynamic complexity that informs, and can
be generated by, an individual improviser is immense. Mind and body, moment and
place, emotion and intellect, preparation, experience, and spontaneity all collide, col-
lude, and (in the best of moments) cooperate to create a compelling performance.
When the complexities of individual improvisation are combined and amplified in a
group setting—particularly those settings without an overriding ‘‘composition’’ or a
shared harmonic or rhythmic framework—the sheer volume and variety of interac-
tions, influences, intentions, and potential (mis)interpretations that come into play
would seem to preclude the possibility for anything meaningful to emerge. Yet these
freer settings for group improvisation challenge us to engage with the complexities of
collective dynamics and decision-making and with the emergent qualities of ensemble
performance.
Complexity and Emergence
Some of the reasons why free improvisation was a logical develop-

ment in musical history can be understood retrospectively through
relatively recent scientific studies of complexity and emergence.
Creating musical coherence, variety and beauty without the instruc-
tions of a director was possible through the skills of listening and
response that many musicians already possessed.8
—David Toop
The emergent when it appears is always found to follow from the

past, but before it appears, it does not, by definition, follow from
the past.9
—George Herbert Mead
Complex systems are those in which the future emerges out of the interaction of innu-
merable forces, each leaving its indelible trace on the course of events. As opposed to
systems that may simply be complicated, complex systems exhibit the possibility for
adaptation and emergence by being open to energy influxes from outside the system
and through their own highly interconnected nature. Their dynamics are hard to pre-
dict but not entirely random. They can exhibit regularities, but these regularities are
difficult to describe briefly and impossible to describe over time with absolute precision.
Within the context of dynamical systems theory, creating the conditions for com-
plexity requires two components: an irreversible medium and nonlinearity. The irrevers-
ible medium of most complex systems is time. Whether one is interested in a physical,
biological, social, or artistic phenomenon—a snowflake, an ecosystem, a political
movement, or an improvised music performance—it is the notion of time that sup-
ports the creation of complexity and the possibility for a sense of surprise that makes
these systems both fascinating and fragile. Nonlinearity describes the property of a
system whose output is not proportional to its input. The popular adage about the
straw that breaks the camel’s back or the battle that was lost for want of a horseshoe
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nail illustrates this principle well; a small quantitative change initiates a dramatic
qualitative one.10
In the mathematics of dynamical systems theory, iterating nonlinear equations can
produce surprising breaks, loops, recursions, and all varieties of turbulence, such that
the behavior of the whole is not simply reducible to that of its parts. Many nonlinear
systems also display an extreme sensitivity to their initial state and subsequent pertur-
bations, such that a small change in one variable can have a disproportionate, even
catastrophic impact on other variables. In these systems, no amount of access to addi-
tional detail can alter their inherent unpredictability.
As a result, contemporary work with nonlinear dynamical systems theory often
seeks to discover the qualitative features of a system. In other words, it tries to predict
the possible general shapes of processes, rather than actual numerical values of param-
eters that may be associated to them. Most ‘‘real-world’’ phenomena exhibit nonlinear
behaviors, from the explosive outcome of earthquakes to the spread of ideas in modern
society. Mathematician Stanislas Ulam famously described the study of nonlinearity
as the ‘‘study of non-elephants.’’ But since nonlinear equations can introduce extreme
difficulties and uncertainties into the mathematical modeling of natural systems, sci-
entists have focused the bulk of their attention, until recently, on the elephants.
The most common answer to this historical oversight maintains that nonlinear stud-
ies needed to wait for the advent of the digital computer to be able to model easily
and accurately the long-term behavior of complex equations. Steven Kellert contends
that this may be a partial answer, but he finds equally interesting the social and cul-
tural factors that may have influenced this scientific neglect.11 According to him, the
twentieth century’s overriding social interest in the exploitation of nature contributed
to the institutional disregard of physical systems not readily amenable to analysis and
manipulation. This situation is in many ways analogous to the appalling neglect of the
study of musical improvisation in the Western academy.12 Although improvisation
may be, following Derek Bailey, ‘‘the most widely practiced of all musical activities,’’
music notation (whether in the form of prescriptive ‘‘score’’ or descriptive ‘‘transcrip-
tion’’) has arguably been the ‘‘elephant’’ of musicology, receiving the bulk of scholarly
and pedagogical attention.13
To some extent, the relative scarcity of studies on improvised music would also seem
to have a technological explanation. Improvisation study, according to this line of
reasoning, had to wait for the development of technologies that could ‘‘capture’’ the
details and nuances of its ephemeral form.14 Centuries earlier, musical notation had
offered the possibility of a concrete record of musical creativity. It promised (particu-
larly to composers in the Western tradition) a more permanent and unchanging record
than oral tradition alone could provide and a medium that could facilitate the creation
of complex musical ideas by a single individual over time and facilitate their communi-
cation to others when organizing intricate performances.
From its inception, however, notation was devised as a mnemonic aid for perform-
ance, neither intended nor expected to capture the full details of the music.15 Yet by
about the mid-nineteenth century, notation began to be viewed by some as the actual
music rather than a form of musical shorthand.16 As musical studies matured in the
West, the allure of focusing the bulk of attention on this tool that appeared not only
to document but also to define musical activity was too hard to resist. Even as early
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recording technologies were being developed and employed by music researchers, par-
ticularly those with an ethnographic bent, notation remained the tool through which
these newly recorded music examples were analyzed and shared with other interested
researchers, necessarily filtering out many aspects of the sonic and cultural experi-
ence.17 How, one might ask, can the multifaceted and temporal art of music ever be
reduced to a static, two-dimensional representation?
Jazz music, for its part, has had an intriguing, if somewhat ambivalent, relationship
with recorded sound and musical notation. The development of the music—barring
the earliest decades—occurred simultaneously with the budding recording industry so
that much recorded jazz has been preserved for archiving and analysis.18 Recording
and disseminating jazz undoubtedly helped the music to spread quickly beyond its
geographical origins and facilitated the sharing of improvisational ideas and ap-
proaches among players. But from an analytical and pedagogical standpoint, an over-
reliance on recorded sound in many academic settings has arguably missed much of
the spontaneity and flexibility of jazz, focusing undue attention both on a canon of
celebrated recordings and on requiring students to adopt a standard repertoire of
‘‘licks’’ or ‘‘clichés.’’19 Notation, too, has an ambivalent place in jazz’s history, as both
an important tool for conveying ideas and organizing performances, but also as some-
thing to be feared for its potential, in the absence of a strong commitment to oral and
aural methods, to standardize certain aspects of performance practice.20
Without a doubt, recording technologies have provided an invaluable tool in the
study of improvised music, much as the computer has become the tool par excellence
for the study nonlinear dynamics. But it should be clear that a technological explana-
tion to the non-treatment of improvisation in the music academy is insufficient. The
undervaluing, in both academic and applied study, of the nonlinear dynamics of musi-
cal performance in general and improvisation in particular can also be attributed to
the fact that they are much less amenable to formalist analysis and manipulation.
The scientific approaches of reductionism, positivism, and naturalism, have relied
on breaking down complex systems into their smallest component parts in a search
for underlying ‘‘natural laws.’’ These approaches have been extremely successful at
illuminating the materials and dynamics of nature at a great range of scales. Yet mat-
ter, from atoms to organisms and galaxies, appears to have an innate tendency to self-
organize, generating complexity and emergent properties that can be described only
at higher levels than those of the individual units. Life, for instance, remains one of
the great mysteries of modern science. It is not some sort of essence added to a phys-
ico-chemical system, but neither can it simply be described in ordinary physico-chemi-
cal terms. It is an emergent property that manifests itself when physico-chemical
systems are organized and interact in certain ways. Consciousness, too, appears to be
neither an epiphenomenon, nor a simple result of neurons firing. After a certain level
of complexity, new behaviors emerge that are not fully describable in terms of the
behaviors of their parts. On a more mundane level, the qualities of water—its ‘‘wet-
ness’’ and its ability to flow in a variety of controlled and turbulent ways—is not
present in the mixture of hydrogen and oxygen; it has a new unity that sacrifices the
properties of its parts. Additionally, under the right conditions, water can undergo a
‘‘phase transition’’ into ice or steam, each of which have qualitative aspects that are
not present in the original compound.
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Music is also best described as an emergent property of humans attending to orga-

nized sounds in time. At each level of explanation, qualities emerge that are not de-
scribable simply in terms of the dynamics of the previous level. On even the most basic
level, a single musical tone, say an A-440 produced by an oboe player, can be analyzed
in terms of frequency, intensity, duration, and signal and spectral envelope, among
other things. But when perceived and processed by a human listener, it will produce
qualitative aspects in her conscious experience that cannot be described completely
through physical analysis alone. When asked, she might describe the sound as nasal
or buzzing in quality, or it might evoke cultural or geographical references, say to the
Middle East, or perhaps a historical reference to the practice of tuning a nineteenth-
century symphony orchestra. That single sound also can never exist in temporal isola-
tion; in other words, it might take on different qualitative aspects depending on what
came before it or what might reasonably be expected to follow. When that single oboe
sound is combined with a second tone, a musical interval is produced that will have
emergent properties—with perhaps cognitive, emotional, or cultural connotations—
that were not found in the isolated tones. Add a third sound and a chord is produced,
the qualitative and emergent aspects of which inspired these lines of poetry from
Elizabeth Barrett-Browning:
And I know not if, save in this, such gift be allowed to man
That out of three sounds he frame, not a fourth sound, but a star
In fact nearly all of our common analytical terms for music describe emergent prop-
erties. Harmony and rhythm describe qualities that emerge as tones and silences are
combined simultaneously and in succession, and melody appears to be an emergent
phenomenon that draws on harmony, rhythm, contour, and other musical and cogni-
tive dimensions as well. Our difficulties in approaching the emergent qualities of
music in general, and of improvised music in particular, are not dissimilar to those of
traditional physicists who tended to steer clear of the complexity that is readily appar-
ent in daily life. Quantum theory and cosmology may have much to say about the
behavior of matter at the smallest and largest spacio-temporal scales, but clearly many
interesting things emerge at a human scale—including life, intelligence, and con-
sciousness—whose qualities are not simply explainable in terms of interacting parti-
cles or unfolding galaxies. As we will see more in the chapters that follow, many
emergent properties only reveal themselves in the dynamics of collective groupings,
not only as a superstructure of culture, but also in the symbiotic relationships that
develop between individuals, and in the ways in which knowledge and learning can
be distributed across groups. Adopting a musical analogy, science writers John Briggs
and F. David Peat highlight the interdependent and emergent qualities of complex
systems this way:
In the sense that parts seem autonomous, they are only ‘‘relatively autonomous.’’
They are like a music lover’s favorite passage in a Beethoven symphony. Take the
passage out of the piece and it’s possible to analyze the notes. But in the long run,
the passage is meaningless without the symphony as a whole.’’21
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Time and the Qualia of Experience
One of the most fundamental and also most mysterious features of music (and of
experience generally) is the way in which what is essentially a continuous flow gets
divided unconsciously and nearly instantaneously into ‘‘chunks,’’ each of which has a
distinct qualitative character.22 In philosophy, the phenomenological units of experi-
ence, including their qualitative ‘‘feel,’’ are called qualia (the singular form of this
Latin word is ‘‘quale’’). But qualia are often treated by reductionist science as a ‘‘resid-
ual category’’: that which is left unexplained or which remains after all objective fea-
tures have been subtracted. Even philosophers often give simplistic examples of
qualia, such as the ‘‘redness’’ of the color red. Our notion of qualia differs from that
of philosophers in that qualia are not atomic, nor are they discrete. Rather, they have
complex internal structure, consisting of other qualia. For instance, the qualia that
appear in music can range from whole performances, through sections and phrases,
down to fragments of tones and sounds. Following are some of our conclusions about
the nature of musical qualia:23
Qualia are created as part of the process of perception; they do not exist independently.
• Qualia are associated with segments of experience, but not all such segments are
qualia, only those that are considered significant.
• Qualia are hierarchically organized; some qualia appear as parts of other qualia.
• Each quale has as its context the larger grain qualia in which it is embedded, and
most qualia have an internal structure consisting of sub-qualia. Foreground and
background are determined by the structural organization of qualia; they are not
pre-determined.
• Qualia have different saliencies, which indicate their relative significance; these
can change over time.24
• If left alone, the saliency of a quale will gradually decay, but when it or something
related to it is heard, then its saliency increases, since it becomes more likely to
be relevant to future musical events.
• A quale can also be retroactively ‘‘swallowed up’’ by other qualia, ceasing itself to
be a quale; this can be considered an instance of what is sometimes called ‘‘down-
ward’’ or ‘‘backward’’ causation.
• There is no direct relationship between the saliencies of qualia and their sizes;
very salient qualia can be any size.
• Consciousness consists of qualia, and the degree to which we are conscious of a
quale is proportional to its saliency.
• Our perceptions of time are also linked to qualia; the qualitative character of the
flow of time is that of the largest grain salient qualia (for example, it may be
smooth, bumpy, fast, slow, etc.); our sense of time may even appear to disappear
at moments of great intensity (as in Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s sense of ‘‘flow’’)25
Unlike the usual scientific analysis of time that envisions it as a point moving along
a line at a constant rate, our phenomenological experience of time is considerably
more complex. In music, for instance, both performers and listeners continually look
into the future and the past in order to engage with sounds and their meanings as
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they unfold.26 Although actual experience necessarily occurs in the present, according
to phenomenologist Edmund Husserl we experience the flow of time as a continual
‘‘sinking away’’ of present events into the past.
Husserl named this mode of experience retention. With retention, the immediate past
can be experienced in the present, but in a different ‘‘mode’’ from that in which it was
originally experienced. For instance, in music we can ‘‘hear’’ an ‘‘echo’’ of a phrase
just played for about 10 seconds after, but beyond that most details are lost. Husserl
named this short-term buffer fresh memory, and it has recently been experimentally
verified and given a neurological basis in what is called ‘‘sensory memory.’’ This form
of memory differs from the more familiar short term and long term memories that
have been much studied in psychology in that it is not conscious, i.e., it works whether
we are aware of it or not (though conscious attention may make it work better).
Humans also continually anticipate what might come next, greatly reducing our
cognitive processing needs and allowing us to experience the sensation of surprise.
Husserl adopted the term protention to describe this mode, and, like the related concept
of retention, it appears to be ‘‘hardwired’’ into the brain, although there have, as yet,
been few neurological studies of protention.
For Husserl, ‘‘objective moments’’ of time are not pre-determined, but rather, objects-
in-time arise through the processes of retention and protention. Unlike moments in
physics, these objects-in-time are ‘‘temporally thick,’’ since they relate to real events
that take time to process. Based on considerable experimental research, it appears that
qualia, or at least ‘‘emotional’’ qualia, function as ‘‘indices’’ for the retrieval of these
temporally-thick memories and they playing important roles in many other mental
processes as well.27
In light of these phenomenological and experimental findings, we argue that musi-
cal meanings are best located in the act of listening rather than at the structural level
of notation or even sound. Just as a painting becomes more than simple brushstrokes
when viewed as a whole, music lives when it is heard and understood. The active,
human process of listening is the essence of music, making the physical and cognitive
capabilities and limitations of human listeners crucial for analysis. Therefore, we will
construct models of musical experts (either performers or listeners) rather than mod-
els of disembodied pure music, a vacuous abstraction that cannot ever really exist.
Our primary goal here is to define two functions that describe the dynamic qualities
of music and listening.28 By music, we mean music making, the process of sound unfold-
ing in time from instruments in response to the control exercised by musicians and to
any predetermined instructions that may exist (the ‘‘score’’ in a generalized sense),
plus of course any applicable fixed acoustic properties of instruments, microphones,
halls, etc. By listening, we mean the active, dynamic process of understanding music,
which includes the hierarchical segmentation of what has been heard into qualia, the
anticipation of what may come in the future, the saliencies associated with these, as
well as the current state of relevant memories, including sensory, short and long term
memories, and transpersonal cultural memories.
Music and listening, as we define them here, are tightly coupled, in that the current
state of each acts as the control of the other. For example, musicians are continually
listening to the combined sound of the performance (and to their own sounds when
actively playing) in ways that directly affect what they do next. Listeners are also
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continually engaging with the acoustic soundscape and the activities of the perform-
ance in ways that affect their perceptions and understandings of what is occurring,
what has occurred, and what might reasonably be expected to occur next. In other
words, our evolving understanding of music (as performer or audience member) and
the future directions it may take are determined by what sounds are heard now and
our expectations based on what has been understood about what was heard before,
taking into account as well long-term cultural patterns and personal predispositions.
Nonlinearity can arise in this tightly coupled system due to both the great complex-
ity of factors involved and the fact that the state of each function, music and listening,
acts as the control of the other.29 In improvised performances in particular, small de-
tails in sound production or perception can, when attended to or acknowledged by
participants and listeners at appropriate moments, trigger transformations in the
music or its reception, such that the eventual outcome is disproportionate to any initial
causes. This includes the possibility that current activity in the performance or its
reception can force a reinterpretation of previous moments. In other words, the qualia
of musical experience remain dynamic; they can be altered, incorporated into, or even
supplanted by more recent qualia.
We conjecture that active listeners try to construct a minimum complexity description
of what they hear now by combining and transforming fragments of what they heard
before and what they expected to hear now.30 These stored fragments are not simply
unprocessed sonic details; rather, they include the qualia of musical experience. The
various transformation possibilities that may be anticipated by listeners are also asso-
ciated with cognitive weights that reflect the perceived difficulty of their application.
By anticipating what might come next and comparing that with what does come next,
listeners can greatly reduce the complexity of understanding.
The level of surprise at a given moment of listening, therefore, is determined by the
difference between what is heard and what is expected. Despite Whitney Balliett’s
memorable description of jazz as ‘‘the sound of surprise,’’ music that is maximally
surprising would not, in fact, be maximally ‘‘interesting’’ or good. Jazz and improvised
musics do, however, place great importance on engendering a sense of freedom by
surprising listeners in ways that involve manipulating expectation through the trans-
formation of both large and fine grain structure.31 More technically, the level of sur-
prise can be described by a conditional complexity measure.32 Intuitively, this measures
how difficult it is to understand the current musical moment in relation to those
moments that directly preceded it, assuming as well some given knowledge about
the types of musical moments of which this is a particular instance. The conditional
complexity measure does not measure aesthetic preference, rather it is an ‘‘under-
standing’’ of the music based on psychologically and culturally appropriate compo-
nents and weights. Because our model takes into account memory hierarchy—with
sensory, short and long term, and transpersonal components—such an analysis will
reveal not only small grain, but also large grain structures, as well as how all these
structures are interrelated.
It is important to note, however, that human listeners are not capable of doing
arbitrarily complex computations in real time. As a result, this process can fail badly
for unfamiliar forms of music, resulting in a sense of confusion and displeasure. On
the other hand, it seems to work remarkably well for familiar forms of music, and it
provides us with a sense of pleasure when approximate understandings are readjusted.
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Humans evolved a general capacity for anticipation in order to enhance survival both
in the wild and in highly social communities. We continually predict the physical
actions of others and their complex thoughts and behaviors by attributing intention
and planning to them. This natural mechanism rewards correct anticipation with plea-
sure, arouses curiosity when anticipation fails mildly, arouses doubt and uncertainty
for greater failures, and arouses fear in case of significant failure in a dangerous situa-
tion. To invoke our previous discussion of Husserl, emotion arises from relations in the
temporally thick ‘‘now’’ among retention, protention, and perception. When compar-
ing anticipation with reality in the relatively safe environment of music listening,
these same instinctive responses appear to provide the origin of musical emotion
(these ideas will be taken up again at the conclusion of the next chapter).33 Music
pleasure, it seems, arrives not from exact matching of expectation with reality, but
rather from slight readjustments to our future anticipations following surprise. This
also helps to explain the ongoing pleasure that musicians encounter when transform-
ing familiar materials in subtle ways.
The Phase Space of Improvisation
This kind of thing happens in improvisation. Two things running

concurrently in haphazard fashion suddenly synchronize autono-
mously and sling you forcibly into a new phase.34
—Cornelius Cardew
An important goal of this chapter is to study the structure of the phase space of impro-
visation, with a particular focus on the transitions between phases. Our emphasis will
be on a space of possible understandings within that phase space. The phase space of
a system is a multi-dimensional ‘‘map,’’ sometimes referred to as its ‘‘geometry of
possibilities,’’ which allows investigators to describe and analyze a system’s dynamics.
The number of dimensions of a given phase space is based on the degrees of freedom. For
instance, the motion of a standard pendulum can be mapped into a two-dimensional
phase space charting its relative position and momentum. The motion of a car driving
in open terrain could be mapped into a four-dimensional phase space corresponding
to the two dimensions of direction available and the relative momentum of the vehicle
moving in each of those two directions. A rocket ship moving freely in space has
available an extra dimension of direction and momentum, increasing its phase space
dimensions to six. Phase space diagrams, just like more conventional forms of map-
ping, bring into focus aspects of reality that might otherwise be overlooked.35 In more
technical language, phase spaces are lower dimensional subspaces of state space, since
only certain variables are given a key role.
Conventional music notation, whether used as a prescriptive score or as a descriptive
transcription, details a linear dimension of time (running steadily from past to future),
a pitch dimension (lower to higher) for each available voice, as well as additional
markings that can describe changes in tempo, dynamics, timbre, articulations, etc. As
notated, these dimensions are discrete, not continuous. Pitches come in twelve chro-
matic varieties within octave intervals, time markings (rhythms) are available in a
limited number of divisions, primarily of twos and threes, and markings for dynamics,
timbre, articulation, etc. also come in a limited array of options. Without a doubt,
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contemporary composers and skilled transcribers have expanded and elaborated on

these available options, but the representation of music on notation paper, by neces-
sity, limits a more complete description.
The frequent reliance on notation as a compositional, performance, and analytical
tool in the traditional academy has also tended to shape our perceptions and evalua-
tions of music in subtle ways. In other words, notation is never value neutral. It in-
volves choices of what to notate, that is, of what is important. Even the choice to
notate involves the value of exercising certain kinds of control over performers. The
situation is similar for transcription and analysis, since an analyst must make value-
laden choices of what to analyze, how to analyze it, and how to report the results,
among other things.
Music performance, in its vast cultural and historical diversity, is of course not lim-
ited to the prescribed or described dimensions of notation, nor is it discrete in this
fashion. Musicians from all genres and backgrounds explore in performance the con-
tinuous features of those musical dimensions that can be represented by notation, as
well as others such as timbre and the subtleties of phrasing that are even more difficult
to notate conventionally. In addition, musics that hinge on a high degree of improvisa-
tion in performance often foreground the dynamic qualities of sound and style that
are only hinted at in notated form.
Jazz history, for instance, is littered with stories of performers from Pee Wee Russell
to John Coltrane who, when given a detailed transcription of their improvisations,
could not perform them, highlighting the ways in which many important musical
qualities remain implicit rather than explicit for performers. The freer forms of impro-
visation, those without a strong allegiance to notation and with an often more flexible
approach to temporal, tonal, and timbral dimensions, would seem to imply a huge
number of degrees of freedom and an enormously complex phase space.36 For our
purposes, musical ‘‘phases’’ refer to phenomenologically distinct sound worlds. These
might be articulated by a pronounced textural, harmonic, temporal, or timbral quality,
or they may involve complex arrangements of these and other factors. During an im-
provisation, each musician explores her or his own phase space, while the group phase
space is defined by the combination of all of these.
Researchers have adopted the notion of attractors in phase space to help understand
and simplify the behavior of a wide variety of dynamical systems. An attractor is a
region of phase space that seems to ‘‘pull’’ the behavior of the system toward it, as if
magnetically. A small number of attractor types can describe the behavior of a wide
variety of dynamical systems. For instance, a simple pendulum operating with friction
will eventually settle on its lowest gravitational point; this final resting point ‘‘at-
tracts’’ the behavior of the system. But many other dynamical systems, say a rock
rolling down a hill into a valley, can be described with this same notion of a fixed-point
(or static) attractor. In fact, a simplified way of conceiving phase space is to consider
the hills and valleys of a real landscape to be hills and valleys of energy.
A second type of basic attractor, a limit cycle (or periodic) attractor, describes the
behavior of systems that forever oscillate within a fixed or limited range. Take the
pendulum discussed above and place it in a vacuum to eliminate the effects of friction,
and its continual swing is describable by a limit-cycle attractor.37 Limit cycles, particu-
larly when coupled together in interesting ways, have proven effective in modeling the
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behavior of many natural systems, including some simple ecological systems and sta-
ble predator-prey relationships. With the introduction of notions such as quasi-period-
icity and the sophisticated geometry of torus attractors, scientists had hoped to be able
to model accurately the behavior of all complex systems.
The Newtonian vision of a regular and predictable universe, however, was placed
under stress as early as the late nineteenth century when the French mathematician,
physicist, and philosopher Henri Poincaré wondered about the long-term stability of
the solar system. He found that, although Newton’s equations work perfectly well for
any idealized two-body system (e.g. the moon orbiting the earth), the small effects of
adding a third body to the system (e.g., the influence of the sun on the earth and
moon) requires a series of approximations, precluding the possibility of a closed form
solution. Initially, Poincaré’s warning shot across the bow of reductionism went un-
heeded; only a few short years later, physicist were immersed in the emerging fields
of relativity and quantum mechanics.
In the 1960s, as the story goes, Edward Lorenz rediscovered a fundamental limit to
the predictability of complex systems while attempting to model the dynamics of
weather formations.38 When restarting his computer simulation that involved three
nonlinear equations, Lorenz entered a slightly truncated version of the initial values
from a previous run only to be shocked at the rapid and pronounced divergence from
his previous results. He realized then that the complex and nonlinear dynamics of
weather formations would preclude the possibility of accurate predictions in the long
run. His most picturesque analogy for this postulates that the flapping wings of a
butterfly can significantly alter weather conditions halfway across the globe, the
famed ‘‘butterfly effect’’ of chaos theory. Lorenz’s 1963 paper published in The Journal
of Atmospheric Sciences, however, garnered little attention outside of the field of meteo-
rology until the 1970s, at which time it helped to reinvigorate work on the theory of
nonlinear dynamical systems.
A third type of attractor in nonlinear dynamical systems has been given the evoca-
tive title ‘‘strange.’’ Mathematical physicist David Ruelle first coined the term, but
the Lorenz attractor and the Mandelbrot set—named after Benoit Mandelbrot who
discovered fractal geometry—may be the most familiar strange attractors. Both have
appeared on thousands of t-shirts and computer screens around the world. Yet even a
simple system of two pendulums linked in a way that the behavior of each affects the
other will produce chaotic results that can be described by a strange attractor.39
For another example, imagine a rotating water wheel that allows for a controlled
drainage in the buckets. When the speed of water supplying the buckets reaches a
critical value, the wheel will begin to slow down, reverse directions, and speed up, all
with a strange unpredictability. Despite the seemingly controlled nature of this exam-
ple, even the slightest change in the rate of water flow after the critical point can cause
the system to exhibit strikingly different behaviors, highlighting its extreme sensitivity
to initial conditions. To conceptualize this principle you might also imagine shooting two
balls into a pinball machine with an extremely small difference in their initial force
and then charting their respective trajectories. Although the second ball approaches
the first obstacle with only a minor difference in trajectory, that small difference will
quickly be amplified by the complexity of the layout and the positive feedback of the
bumpers until the second ball’s path diverges radically from that of the first. Or you
might envision dropping two snowboards from near identical positions at the top of a
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ski slope filled with moguls. Here too, due to the complexity of the system and its
extreme sensitivity to initial conditions, the path of the objects will diverge significantly.40
One of the hallmarks of the dynamics of nonlinear systems is iteration, which in-
volves a continual re-absorption or enfolding of what has come before through the
process of feedback. Negative feedback is well known as a common way to regulate
mechanical and social systems; the thermostat in a house, for instance, uses negative
feedback to achieve but not exceed a desired temperature. Piloting a boat, an analogy
adopted by Norbert Weiner when founding the field of cybernetics, involves a constant
cycle of steering, assessing deviation from the desired course, and counter steering.41
Judicial and punitive systems also provide negative feedback in society so that individ-
uals or businesses operate within acceptable bounds.
The feedback found in nonlinear systems, however, is positive. If negative feedback
regulates, positive feedback amplifies. Despite its cheery sounding name, positive feed-
back, according to Mitchel Resnick, has an image problem: ‘‘People tend to see positive
feedback as destructive, making things spiral out of control.’’42 The standard examples
offered of positive feedback include the screeching sound that results when a micro-
phone is placed near a speaker or the folk notion of ‘‘the bandwagon effect,’’ which
tends to evoke a mindless mob latching on to a new idea unthinkingly. But positive
feedback plays a crucial role in creating and extending new structures, particularly in
nonlinear environments. For instance, a howling PA system is due to the linear effects
of positive feedback, but when driven into a nonlinear range, we hear the tools of the
trade of Jimi Hendrix and countless other creative electric guitarists. In nonlinear
dynamical systems, positive feedback can become a generative or organizing force.
Like all forms of human activity, music relies heavily on feedback. But at least in its
more conventional forms, music often seems to rely more heavily on the regulatory or
negative variety. Musicians not only use regulatory feedback when practicing to im-
prove specific techniques on their instrument, but this type of feedback is a crucial
part of the way musicians tune and balance their sounds in an ensemble setting:
attempting in the former case to minimize the ‘‘beating’’ between tones and, in the
latter case, to ‘‘phase lock’’ in order to maximize the resonance of the combined group
sound. Within the pan-European concert traditions, the score and any rehearsed inter-
pretive decisions also provide a strong source of negative feedback in performance.
Although seasoned performers make important expressive decisions in the moment in
order to breathe life into the music, the score (at least in its more traditional forms)
ensures that many, if not most, of the musical details of the performance will remain
intact and predictable (at least for those already familiar with the piece). Historically
speaking, in the pan-European concert traditions the surprising but also potentially
disrupting qualities of positive feedback in performance have been downplayed.
In an improvising situation without a preconceived musical score or any formally
agreed-upon performance attributes, this balance of feedback appears to be rather
different. Each gesture can conceivably produce rather sudden and dramatic shifts in
the ensemble sound and approach; in other words, radically divergent and nonlinear
effects. Admittedly this is an abstraction that stereotypes both notated and improvised
music performance. No score can prescribe all of the variables, nor predict all of the
vagaries of a musical performance, and equally, no improvised performance begins
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SYNC OR SWARM
from a tabula rasa, devoid of individual, social, and cultural traditions and expecta-
tions. In addition, positive feedback undoubtedly plays a role in musical creativity of
all types; on both the macro level, as artistic ideas can spread rapidly within a commu-
nity, and on the micro level, as a minute performance gesture or a compositional germ
may blossom into an important creative moment or full-blown work. But free improvi-
sation, at least in its idealized form, would seem to display a far greater sensitivity to
its initial state. The musical iterations in performance are allowed to feedback into the
system, the content of the music, to a far greater extent than with performances that
use traditionally and even most unconventionally notated scores. Even a small change
in the first performance gesture—a shift in dynamic level, attack, or articulation, etc.—
can lead to a sudden divergence from the evolution of a system started with nearly
identical initial conditions. In more poetic language, the slightest musical distur-
bance—the metaphorical flapping of a butterfly’s wings—can potentially lead to sur-
prising and divergent performance outcomes. Unpredictable sonic combinations,
unintended ‘‘noise,’’ and the intentional process of interpolation and dissociation all
introduce additional complexities into the evolving system.
None of this, of course, negates the possibility of theorizing, which is arguably an
innate aspect of the way in which all human beings engage with their environment.
Music scholarship has always relied on modeling techniques, from formal transcrip-
tion and/or score analysis to historically and culturally sensitive contextual readings
of a performance. As was shown in the previous chapter, our musical terminology is
also filled with analogies, many if not most of which relate to our own sense of em-
bodiment. Recent scholarship has drawn insight from literary, linguistic, semiotic, cog-
nitive, and philosophical paradigms, to name only a few. A fundamental mistake is
made only when a given model is seen to supplant the actual experiences it describes.43
Our increasing sensitivity to the nonlinear behavior found in many natural and
social systems is already beginning to provoke a shift from quantitative reductionism
to a more qualitative and holistic appreciation of complex dynamics. Briggs and Peat
explain:
Nonlinear models differ from linear ones in a number of ways. Rather than trying
to figure out all of the chains of causality, the modeler looks for nodes where
feedback loops join and tries to capture as many of the important loops as possible
in the system’s ‘‘picture.’’ Rather than shaping the model to make a forecast
about future events or to exercise some central control, the nonlinear modeler is
content to perturb the model, trying out different variables in order to learn about
the system’s critical points and its homeostasis (resistance to change). The mod-
eler is not seeking to control the complex system by quantifying it and mastering
its causality; (s)he wants to increase her ‘‘intuitions’’ about how the system works
so (s)he can interact with it more harmoniously.44
We are still in the earliest stages of extending these modeling techniques into the
domain of human and social dynamics to the point where they can help explain why
and how these forms and dynamics can be aesthetically and emotionally powerful. But
models need not be complex to be useful. For example, a sequence of chord symbols
and cadence markings provide a very useful model for classic forms of jazz. Nonlinear
dynamical systems theory, in its current form, does not offer a full explanation of the
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structure or beauty of improvised music, but it may offer fresh insight to our discus-
sions of the complex dynamics that are involved in all musical performance, and, in
particular, to our discussions of contemporary forms of group improvisation.
Like other complex dynamical systems, the exact development and structure of an
ensemble improvisation is inherently unpredictable, and yet through certain shared
understandings, nuanced interactions and interconnections, and a shared cognitive
ability to attend to and parse musical sound, dynamical orderings can emerge that are
both surprising and comprehensible. Without predetermined arrangements or tech-
niques for managing the flow of the music (such as a Butch Morris-style ‘‘conduction’’
or a John Zorn-style game piece), the ability to transition as a group from one musical
‘‘phase space’’ to another becomes critical. Many improvisations display a sectional
nature in which distinct phase spaces may be explored and then surprisingly dis-
carded. Small-scale interactions and individual phase transitions may continuously
occur within the ensemble as relationships and ideas are dynamically articulated, but
larger-scale group ‘‘phase transitions’’ occur less frequently, often at moments of un-
expected synchrony when the ensemble’s combined explorations seem to coalesce
around a common set of ideas, or at moments when a need for new complexities (or
more comprehensibility) is felt by one or all of the members. From a phenomenologi-
cal perspective, these transitions may appear to happen either on their own or to be
directed by certain individuals or by the group as a whole, but in most cases their
appearance is acknowledged by the group and necessarily influences the ongoing for-
mation and reception of the music.
Although it may be tempting to imagine locating the initial gesture of an improvisa-
tion as a point in phase space and starting an analysis from there, in truth, that initial
point is already implicated by feedback processes in a complex network dynamic (in
the case of improvised music, to the encultured and embodied techniques and sensibil-
ities of all of the performers, to the specific context for performance, etc.) such that an
immense uncertainty is already built in. As the system iterates (as the improvisations
continues) and its parts feed back into each other, the complexity and uncertainty
begin to reveal themselves.
This immense and innate complexity makes improvised music locally unpredictable,
but the dynamics of group improvisation can also reveal more stable global behaviors.
In the theory of nonlinear dynamics, systems can bifurcate (or multi-furcate) by
branching off into entirely new states and demonstrating novel behaviors and emer-
gent order in ways that are intrinsically unpredictable.45 Yet the behavior of the system
at these moments is profoundly influenced by the previous history of the system. De-
pending on which path it has taken to reach instability, the system will follow one of
many available branches. By way of analogy, all of the factors that contribute to the
development of an improvisation up to the point of transition—including each individ-
ual’s personal history and cultural understandings and the ensemble’s collective expe-
rience improvising with each other—can affect which subsequent musical path the
group pursues.
To continue our analogy, contemporary improvisers tend to favor ‘‘strange’’ musical
attractors to those that rely on periodic cycles or predictable interactions. They avoid
low complexity regions (called ‘‘basins of attraction’’) while constantly creating new
patterns, or patterns of patterns, in order to keep the energy going, all the while work-
ing to maintain the coherence of the performance. They metaphorically surf the ‘‘edge
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SYNC OR SWARM
of chaos’’—an evocative phrase that has technical implications that we will explore
further in the next chapter—to ensure continual development and excitement without
exceeding the cognitive abilities and aesthetic interests of listeners. Although from the
perspective of an uninitiated listener, contemporary improvisation may seem to veer
in the direction of confusion and displeasure, it, like all music, engenders an emotional
and aesthetic response by playing with familiarity and expectation.
For example, if too many references to traditional musical idioms creep into a per-
formance or an underlying harmonic character or tempo lingers for too long, many
improvisers will immediately begin to search for more uncharted and uncertain musi-
cal terrain. The exact aesthetic approach and tolerance of idiomatic components will
vary considerably from individual to individual, ensemble to ensemble, and even from
performance to performance, as will the speed at which the group transitions into new
dynamics, from mere seconds to several minutes or more. Some improvisations, in
fact, may not ‘‘bifurcate’’ at all, offering instead a detailed and focused investigation
of a single attractor. Improvised performances on the whole, however, tend to contain
moments in which apparent order—stable states and limit cycles—can quickly dis-
solve into ‘‘chaos’’ (in the everyday sense of the word), and sections in which ‘‘cha-
otic’’ (in the mathematical sense) dynamics can produce surprising periods of
emergent order and structure.
Like this general description of the music, there is something of an inherent tension
or paradox in the dynamics of strange attractors. Even though they can involve an
infinite number of loops and spirals, they are also contained within a finite region of
phase space. They are seemingly able to reconcile contrary effects; as attractors, nearby
trajectories converge on them, but their sensitive dependence on initial conditions
means that initially close trajectories diverge rapidly. Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart ask
us to think of ping-pong balls in the ocean. If you release two balls from near identical
locations below or above the surface of the water, they will both be attracted to the
surface. But once there, they will continue to bob freely and unpredictably, perhaps
quickly diverging from one another only to possibly cross paths at some unlikely future
moment.46 To push this analogy further, even as an improvising group may have tem-
porarily settled into a musical attractor, like our bobbing ping-pong balls each musi-
cian will still continue to explore micro details and personalized variations so that the
improvised section remains highly surprising and unpredictable. Additionally, mo-
ments of ‘‘attraction’’ in which players seem to be working together toward a shared
musical end may be interrupted or compounded by intentionally disruptive or dissoci-
ative behavior from others, which may or may not lead to a dramatic transition in the
music.
Hues of Melanin
To illustrate these ideas in a specific musical context we will focus on a few transitional
moments in the work of Sam Rivers’s trio (with Cecil McBee on bass and Barry Alt-
schul on drums) from their 1973 concert at Yale University, released as ‘‘Hues of Mela-
nin.’’ The complete improvisation lasted just over 44 minutes and was broken into
three distinct sections on both the original and re-release of the performance.47 We
will focus on the first section, before Rivers switches to piano, which comprises the
first 34 minutes of improvisation. In the next chapter, the same performance is given
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a computer analysis that provides a means to link the perceptual and phenomenologi-
cal frame of the listener, discussed here, with a more technical look at the musical
sound stimulus itself.
During the performance, a pronounced change in the flow of the improvisation
tends to occur every two or three minutes as the trio transitions between moments of
rapid propulsion and phlegmatic rubato. The group also moves between more and
less dense textures and frequently switch between periods of polytonal exploration,
extended harmonic drones, and more open sections exploring chromatic and timbral
variation. Table 1 provides a phenomenological reading of the various transitions be-
tween sections and subsections that occur in ‘‘Hues of Melanin.’’ For it, we borrowed
terminology about transition types from Tom Nunn’s book, The Wisdom of the Impulse,
although many of the trio’s dynamics do not fall neatly into one of his seven categories.48
The large-scale sectional transitions—or, in our terminology, bifurcations—are most
easily recognized by a shift from shared tempo to more open rhythmic realms, or vise
versa. We designated subsections for moments of minor cadences or moments at which
the group’s synchrony or dialog is most pronounced. The catalysts for these phase
transitions vary, but a few common ones include trill-like figures, repeated tones, or a
gradual descent that can signal a slowing of pulse and energy.49 A quick, tossed-off
melodic fragment or rhythmic impetus is often used to jumpstart the group’s up-
tempo explorations.
For example, at approximately two minutes into the trio’s improvisation, Rivers
begins a trill figure on soprano that triggers Cecil McBee and Barry Altschul to relax
their dense and intense development, in favor of more sparse musical territory (A3 in
Table 1). And at approximately seven-and-a-half minutes into the performance, Rivers
plays another trill that eases the group’s energy, then follows it with a quick melodic
fragment that triggers Altschul and McBee to shift into up-tempo exploration (D).
While signals frequently come from Rivers’s horn, the other two members also can
and do initiate bifurcations. For instance, Cecil McBee often adopts a similar trill figure
on his bass to function as a sectional cue, or he improvises a figure that gradually
descends into the lowest register of the instrument to signal a slowing of pulse or
lessening of energy to the other musicians. Withdrawing and re-entering into the trio
texture, as Barry Altschul often does, or shifting instruments (and adding voice), as
Sam Rivers is prone to do, provide other opportune moments for musical bifurcations
and nonlinear dynamics in the performance.
Although these catalysts can be effective in triggering sectional transitions, their use
and influence never become predictable, but frequently produce dramatically different
results over the course of an extended performance. For example, ten-and-a-half min-
utes into ‘‘Hues of Melanin’’ Rivers interjects a melodic catalyst that does not provoke
a complete shift to shared tempo, but rather a gradual collapse into a drone-filled
melodic and rhythmic space. Soon a powerful moment of sync arrives when Rivers and
McBee land on the same pitch during a gradual scalar ascent, provoking a moment
of heightened intensity and spurring increased collective exploration. Finally, a fresh
melodic fragment by Rivers launches the trio into an up-tempo improvisation full of
gentle tug-and-pull between the three members (E2 to F).
Perhaps the most difficult aspect of highlighting the subtleties of the structural
transformations and transitions that take place in much improvised music is providing
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SYNC OR SWARM
Table 1: —Sam Rivers Trio—‘‘Hues of Melanin’’—Phenomenological

Analysis—Transition types: [From Nunn 1998]
T1 sudden/unexpected segue—an unprepared, immediate change with unexpected
continuation
T2 pseudo-cadential segue—an implied cadence with sudden and unexpected continuation
T3 climactic segue—a peak moment that stimulates unexpected change and continuation
T4 feature overlap—one feature of the antecedent section is sustained and becomes part of
the consequent section
T5 feature change—a gradual change of one feature that redirects the flow (usually subtly)
T6 fragmentation—a gradual breaking up, or fragmenting, of the general texture and/or
rhythm
T7 internal cadence—a prepared cadence followed by a short silence then continuation with
new material. (In addition to presenting a moment of resolution, an internal cadence can
signal a moment of extreme unpredictability in the performance since there is always the
possibility that it will become the final cadence of the improvisation.)
Letter Time Transition Type (salient detail) Texture/Tempo

A 0:00 FREE—introductory call
A2 0:46 T5 (bass repeated tones-Ab) repetition/density
A3 1:57 T2 (soprano trill D-Eb) relaxation/intensify
A4 2:33 T2/T4 (cadence on C) layered complexity
B 3:02 T1 (soprano descending phrase) FAST tempo

B2 4:06 T5 (soprano and bass dialog/
glissando)
B3 4:26 T5 (bass drone)
B4 4:55 T5 (soprano pedal tones)
C 5:29 T2 (soprano trill on D) FREE

C2 5:48 T7 (drum cadence)
C3 6:43 T2 (soprano high note)
C4 7:05 T2/T4/T6 (soprano and
bass low A)
D 7:35 T7 (trill/melodic trigger) MEDIUM tempo

D2 9:20 T6 (drums fall out of time) begins to fragment
E 9:54 T7 (cadence to B/unison FREE—intensifies

trill on E)
E2 10:29 T1/T6 (melodic trigger leads to
fragmentation)
E3 11:04 T2 (C- tonality, unison G, drum
cadence)
F 12:02 T1 (melodic trigger) FAST tempo
G 13:10 T2 (trill on D) followed by T5 GROOVE

(bass groove)
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Letter Time Transition Type (salient detail) Texture/Tempo

G2 14:04 metric sync
G3 14:52 T6 (bass triggers descent) FREE
H 15:17 T7 (trill, drum cadence) bass solo w/ voice&perc

H2 16:45 T6/T5 (flute and voice hollers) FREE—intensifies
I 17:55 T7 (drums drop out, bowed flute solo

bass)
I2 18:18 T5 (bass overtone bowing, more activity
voice and flute)
I3 18:50 T2 (flute cadenza, bass drone)
I4 19:25 T2/T5 (flute, bass, drums, intensifies
activity, voice)
J 20:00 T7 (brief flute solo, drums bring FAST tempo—very complex
in time)
J2 21:24 T5 (bass rises, interaction, FREE—interactive
flute&voice)
J3 22:00 T2/T4 (drums briefly relax)
K 22:36 T6/T1 (flute descending phrase, FAST—bass drone

drums time)
K2 23:47 T5/T6 (melodic fragment) FREE
K3 24:30 T2 (trill) FREE—voice
L 25:25 T7 (voice and bowed bass sync— sparse drums

unison)
L2 26:30 T5 (flute reenters, bass bowed
harmonics)
L3 27:15 T2 flute solo
M 28:23 T1 (flute trigger, bass figure, MEDIUM tempo

G mixolydian)
M 229:10 T5/T6 (bass alternates whole begins to fragment (esp. bass)
step)
N 29:56 T2/T6 (vocal scream, drums FREE

drop down)
N2 30:50 T2/T5 (bass drone, speed intensity (screams!)
drums and flute)
N3 31:41 T6/T7 (flute chromatic descent,
ritardando)
O 32:00 T1 (flute melodic trigger) now MEDIUM/fractured tempo

expected
O2 32:40 T5 (flute fast runs, bass drones)
P 33:30 T6 (voice, bass drone, drums) drum solo

(transition to piano section)
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SYNC OR SWARM
a sense of their hierarchical complexity. The linear aspects of cause-and-effect style

playing and analysis can be interesting, but the nonlinear, part-whole relationships
that emerge in performance frequently convey more subtle meanings to listeners and
performers. For instance, the transitional devices used early in the trio’s perform-
ance—the trills and melodic and tempo triggers—diminish in cognitive ‘‘weight’’
when they reappear at subsequent moments, necessitating altered formulations and
responses and highlighting new strategies of collective expression and interaction in
order to maintain the overall complexity of the performance.
On close analysis, certain sub-sections of the performance also have enough similar-
ities to give the listener the impression that the ‘‘phase spaces’’ of the improvisation
are warping in on themselves. Attractors in the phase space of nonlinear, chaotic sys-
tems are often described as analogous to pulling taffy. Points that may at first be close
together can quickly diverge only to nearly reconnect at surprising moments in the
future. For one example, an intense group development begins to bifurcate at five-
and-a-half minutes into the performance (C1) when Sam Rivers lands on a trill, fol-
lowed by a medium-tempo melodic trigger that initiates a Latin-esque groove from
Barry Altschul. The group, however, soon aborts this groove to explore a rubato, modal
area, followed by a decisive climax (C3).50 And at thirteen minutes into the perform-
ance, a similarly intense development is again subdued by soprano sax trill. This time,
however, the groove that was prematurely halted earlier appears to resurface (with
slight alterations) from a strong, flowing, funk-type bass line provided by Cecil McBee.
A similar modal exploration is still there, but this time layered on top of the reformu-
lated groove in such a way that the earlier moment is both remembered and reconfigured.
Although moments of sync and similarity are clearly cultivated and enjoyed by the
musicians, the trio rarely lingers in these basins of attraction for long. For instance,
shortly after the climax of the first section discussed above (at C3), the soprano and
bass briefly synchronize on a pedal tone on concert A (C4). Both musicians are aware
of the connection, and yet rather than linger on its implied togetherness, they quickly,
and with apparent conviction, move into more distant, chromatic areas in search of
new sonic orderings.
This tendency for the group to flirt with the known while surfing the edge of the
unknown is apparent as well in the rhythmic domain. At just after the fourteen-min-
ute mark, the trio arrives at a shared pulse and meter—perhaps provoked by the strong
‘‘add-of-four-into-one’’ figure by Altschul that seems to lift the energy of the entire
group (G2). Though the moment of synchrony is clearly felt by all, the players also
quickly begin to work against the groove and any strong sense of tonality so that the
nonlinear dynamics of the improvisation can continue to evolve (G).51
Our final example—one we have dubbed ‘‘coupled oscillators’’—is drawn from near
the end of this 35 minute improvisation and illustrates how even the sectional struc-
ture and transitional nature of this trio’s music can evolve into a complex layering or
coupling of multiple tempos and textures (N2). Rivers is by now on flute and voice
and the trio seems able to successfully articulate, not a unified sense of pulse or texture
as in many of the previous examples, but the coexistence of conflicting and comple-
mentary expressions and motivations. We hear a sort of speed pulse in the drums, a
type of sheets-of-sound playing in the flute, and a powerfully articulated and varied
drone in the bass. Even as Rivers improvises a final melodic fragment to signal a
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collective transition back to a shared sense of tempo for the trio (O), the saliency of
this type of transitional gesture, which has been used several times by this point in
the performance, has increased to the point at which new strategies for responding
are required to maintain the complexity and interest of the performance. We hear a
new sense of tempo referenced by the group, but in rather loose and playful ways that
immediately deconstructs this more traditional performance practice.
The notion of signifyin(g) refers to a mediating strategy for discourse, rooted in pan-
African discursive mythologies, involving aspects of repetition and revision to create
double meaning, indirectedness, and subtle humor.52 To signify is to replace the static
concepts of signifiers and signifieds (objects—persons, places, things) with a dynamic
in which dialog informs all modes of communication and meanings become malleable
and, at times, intentionally ambiguous.53 In a general sense, our approach may provide
some cognitive basis to phenomenological explanation on how this process of signify-
ing, which is deeply entrenched in African American arts, language, and music, in-
vokes a subtle and continual play of reference and revision, of complexity and
comprehensibility. We conjecture that these occur, at least sometimes in music, after
the saliency of a quale has become so large that it is incapable of sustaining surprise,
and can therefore be used as a riposte, a goad, or even a rebuke. Complexity then arises
from the failure of the quale to conform to its previously established role. Another way
to put this is that the system becomes increasingly unpredictable and hence chaotic
as the saliencies of cadences rise to a critical level.
With regards to the general practice of Sam Rivers’s trios and the specific dynamics
evidenced on ‘‘Hues of Melanin,’’ we find that:
• The improvisation as a whole can be segmented into sections, each a region of

phase space, on which intersubjective agreement by expert listeners can be
obtained.
• Within each segment, performers shift among a number of ‘‘voices,’’ each of
which is also a certain region of phase space, again with transitions that are inter-
subjectively stable.
• Thus, the phase space is hierarchically structured. However, different performers
may have different subspaces for their own particular set of voices.
• Transitions among segments are often prefigured by certain figures, which have
quite different saliencies for performers: some are quite subtle, while others are
rather obvious; all can be considered cadences, in a broad sense of that term. A
short trill to signal a lessening of intensity and a quick melodic fragment to estab-
lish a sense of tempo appear to be the strongest transition triggers in our data set.
Weaker markers include figures that descend to a strong low note, and hints (of
varying strength) of V/I chord sequences.
• The presence of a transition-prefiguring cadence may not actually produce a tran-
sition, and even when it does, there may be a period of reorganization that pre-
cedes it. These figures may at times be repeated, which increases their saliency as
transition triggers, but also increases the expectation that they will produce novel,
and therefore more complex results on each reoccurrence. At certain levels of
complexity, obvious cadence points may even be intentionally ignored or subverted.
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A Delicate Balance
An important goal of improvised music appears to be ensemble self-organization so

that critical levels of complexity, responsiveness, and surprise can be reached and
maintained over the course of an extended performance. While each new gesture
could conceivably trigger a structural transition in the music, players must not allow
themselves to be overwhelmed by the speed of interaction and availability of options
in order to avoid potentially crippling states of oversaturation and indecision. In a
workshop setting with our graduate student improvisation ensemble, Sam Rivers,
with his current trio, stressed the importance of interactions and awareness, but he
also made it clear that certain levels of complexity would emerge only if individuals
stay true to their own creativity.
Both inexperienced and overbearing improvisers tend to focus too much attention
on what they, as individuals, are responsible for. The inexperienced improviser can,
through indecision or a reliance on overly simple cat-and-mouse type interactions,
offer too much ‘‘inertia’’ and not enough ‘‘momentum’’ to the situation. While the
overbearing improviser can offer too much ‘‘momentum’’—in the overpowering
strength of his or her ideas and convictions—and not enough ‘‘inertia’’ in the form of
measured interactions so that a critical level of complexity and coherence is never
achieved. To return to our earlier model, in one case the coupling between listening to
and producing music is too tight, and in the other it is too loose. A story recounted by
Steve Lacy about his time spent playing with Thelonious Monk highlights the issue
well. Lacy said of Monk, ‘‘He mostly told me what not to do.’’ Monk would remind
Lacy to ‘‘play your part, I’m accompanying you. Don’t pick up on my things.’’ In other
words, offer some ‘‘momentum’’ to the improvising situation. But Monk also told Lacy
to ‘‘make the drummer sound good. . . . Don’t play everything. Just play certain things,
let other things go by.’’54 In other words, allow some space (or inertia) for the collective
improvisation to develop.
Although dramatic transitions can conceivably occur at any moment in the freer
forms of jazz, in practice, experienced improvisers tend to explore ideas, identities,
and relationships for considerable stretches of time. If distantly related ideas were
circulating at every moment, the desired balance between complexity and coherence
might never be achieved. In other words, a complete lack of coherence would elimi-
nate the possibility for surprise by not supporting predictions or expectations.
Improvising music certainly requires focused listening, quick reflexes, and extreme
sensitivity to the group flow, but it equally demands individual fortitude and tenacity
not to be overwhelmed by the speed of interaction and the availability of musical
options. Sam Rivers expressed it this way:
I want to keep moving and experimenting and not be repetitious. I mean when
you’re reading The Iliad and The Odyssey, you don’t repeat! You just keep going and
going! But how do you do that? Because you have experience with so many differ-
ent types of melody, so many different kinds of music. So that’s how you become
creative and prolific in improvising.55
Improvising music, then, can demonstrate turbulence and coherence at the same
time. The findings of nonlinear dynamical systems theory require that we confront
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and rethink ingrained notions of order and disorder, simplicity and complexity. Jazz
music has, for its brief century or so of development, challenged many of the same
notions in the artistic community. Swing and improvisation, hallmarks of even the
most conservative definitions of jazz, both rely on nonlinear dynamics to create the
sense of momentum and surprise. Since roughly the 1960s, freer styles of improvising
have pushed the ideas of nonlinear musical dynamics even further, challenging the
adequacy of older musicologies and highlighting the need for innovative approaches
to studying the emergent properties of musical performance and musical conscious-
ness. These performances often have a sense of coherence like that of a natural proc-
ess, rather than an artificial symmetry like that of a classical sonata or a 32-bar AABA
song form.56
We have focused on the hierarchical complexity of the phase space of improvised
music and the pronounced moments of phase transition in which improvisers give
listeners the subjective experience of being delicately poised between evolving along
two or more quite different paths. Not only is science evolving, as nonlinear, qualita-
tive models and computation intensive analyses overtake older linear models that de-
mand explicit solutions, but also music and the arts are evolving, as representational,
individual-centered works are being overtaken by interactive, socially-oriented, non-
linear forms. By drawing on aspects of these contemporary sciences, we offer a way of
looking at music that takes account of its inherently dynamical nature and focuses
attention on the act of listening, since music only lives when it is heard and
understood.
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5
The Edge of Chaos
The emerging notion of chaos as a creative force, a dynamic form of orderly-disorder,

has resonated with countless artists in the past several decades. Two heavy metal
groups adopted names taken directly from the new sciences—Chaos Theory and Order
from Chaos—while references in song and album titles have cropped up in the work
of artists as diverse as the Sex Pistols, Steve Coleman, Alanis Morisette, Ozomatli, and
Yusef Lateef. Improvising turntablists Otomo Yoshihide and Martin Tétreault make
reference to chaos in their work, as does the improvising ‘‘supergroup’’ Organized
Chaos, featuring saxophonist Peter Brötzmann, guitarist Nicky Skopelitis, and drum-
mer Shoji Hano. The appeal of chaos as a type of orderly-disorder seems unbounded
by notions of musical style or genre.1 Most recently, the electronic music composer/
improviser/live computer processor Lawrence Casserly titled one of his recent compact
disc recordings The Edge of Chaos
Although chaos may the best-known term connected to the new scientific paradigm,
there have been others. Before ‘‘chaos’’ became the rallying cry of interdisciplinary
science, catastrophe theory, inspired by the pioneering work of French mathematician
René Thom in the 1950s and 1960s, demonstrated the ways in which abrupt, qualita-
tive changes in a system may be caused by sudden dislocations or disruptions rather
than quantitative and continuous developments. Thom examined a broad range of
natural, social, and cultural phenomena to support his conclusions.2 And more re-
cently, the label complexity theory has emerged to describe a related, but in many
ways different, approach to the study of nonlinear dynamical systems.
John Briggs and F. David Peat, in their very readable introduction to chaos theory,
present the differing aspects of the new sciences as two sides of the same turbulent
mirror: a portal through which order and chaos dynamically and mysteriously inter-
twine.3 Their treatment is informed by the mythic idea, shared by many ancient cul-
tures, that cosmic creativity depends on reciprocity between order and disorder.4
Artists, in particular, have felt similar connections to this dynamic interplay of forces.
‘‘To be a creator,’’ Briggs and Peat write, ‘‘requires operating in a shadowy boundary
line between order and chaos.’’5 But the world of science has traditionally been one of
regularity and predictability—from planets to atoms to the genetic code, the world has
been divided into its parts and, until recently, held up to a mirror of platonic purity.
Scientists have long admitted that the world outside of the laboratory seldom behaves
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THE EDGE OF CHAOS
as orderly as the mirror of those laws we hold up to nature, but chaos was thought to
be the result of a complexity that in theory could be stripped down to its orderly
underpinnings.
Contemporary scientists, however, are beginning to construct a new mirror to hold
up to nature: a turbulent one. On one side of this mirror, researchers have been most
interested in the orderly decent into chaos: how mathematically simple systems can
demonstrate complex behaviors. In intriguing ways these systems are deterministic, in
that every step is determined by the state immediately preceding it, yet unpredictable,
since one cannot predict a distant future state without going through every intermedi-
ate state.
On the other side of the turbulent mirror, more recently referred to as complexity
theory, researchers are attempting to understand how order can emerge out of chaos:
how extremely complex systems can spontaneously give birth to delicate forms and
structures. Put another way, chaos theory deals with systems that rapidly become
highly disordered and unmanageable, while complexity theory deals with highly inter-
connected systems that may, at certain times and under certain conditions, self-organize
in a way that produces emergent forms of order.6 These emergent forms cannot be
deduced from the equations describing a dynamical system but can describe the pat-
terns arriving from the evolution of such systems in time.
Scientists on both sides of this turbulent mirror share a fascination with the ‘‘edge
of chaos,’’ the balance point between stability and extreme turbulence. The edge of
chaos is a technical term (often associated with the Santa Fe Institute) that describes
when a dynamical system is in a critical region between order and disorder.7 You might
envision water boiling or evaporating on the boundaries of its phase space. This critical
state only occurs in dynamical systems that are dissipating internal energy, are open
to continual energy influxes from outside the system, and are operating under what
are known as ‘‘far-from-equilibrium’’ conditions.
Because we now have better probes for collecting data in turbulent situations, and
we have powerful computers for analyzing that data, chaos researchers have begun to
make some limited progress on the various routes that lead to chaos.8 Many of these
discoveries have directly influenced musical practice. But these direct applications of
the findings of chaos theory to music have been most easily integrated into a composi-
tional approach that values not only complexity, but also control. This branch of chaos
theory focuses on the process by which relatively simple equations can, when iterated,
produce extreme complexity in an entirely deterministic fashion
Understanding how order can emerge from chaos has remained somewhat more elu-
sive, and the very question is forcing many scientists and artists to rethink their meth-
odologies and epistemological assumptions. The interactive and improvisational
dimensions of musical performance may best articulate this other side of the same
turbulent mirror. Like the word chaos, ‘‘free’’ improvisation has produced its fair share
of semantic confusion. But although it may imply randomness to some, it too can be
about relatively simple iterative and interactive processes that create a complex musi-
cal tapestry and a type of emergent order.
On both sides of this turbulent mirror and at the center, musicians, like their scien-
tific counterparts, are beginning to cross the boundaries that have traditionally sepa-
rated disciplines, practices, and genres. As old ways of doing things begin to dissolve,
however, new tensions can arise, and old ones can persevere. In this chapter, we will
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SYNC OR SWARM
investigate practices on both sides of the mirror and in the middle, and we will probe
further into the fascinating qualities of self-organization that have been identified by
chaos and complexity researchers, finding some analogies with qualities of improvised
music. With the assistance of Rolf Bader at the University of Hamburg, I also employ
some of the tools of chaos theory to analyze examples of improvised music, including
performances by Evan Parker and the Sam Rivers Trio that connect with the previous
two chapters, as well as improvisations by the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Peter Brötz-
mann’s group, and Derek Bailey. Although these new analytical tools provide a win-
dow into the orderly-disorder of music that was unavailable only a few short years
ago, like earlier methods that investigated music in the physical or symbolic domains
alone, they must be integrated into a systemic perspective that recognizes the nature
of music as inextricable from its personal, social, and cultural particulars.
The Turbulent Mirror
Chaos does not mean disorder. . . . It represents an abstract cosmic

principle referring to the source of all creation.9
—Ralph Abraham
Somewhere underneath, very deeply, there’s a common place in our

spirit where the beauty of mathematics and the beauty of music
meet. But they don’t meet on the level of algorithm or making
music by calculation. It’s much lower, much deeper—or much
higher, you could say.10
—Györgi Ligeti
I accept chaos. I’m not sure whether it accepts me.11

—Bob Dylan
Chaos theory, according to many, has changed not only the findings of science, but
also its presiding methodology and epistemology. While much has been written in the
fields of science studies and even literature on the broader cultural conditions that set
the stage for, and have been altered by, chaos theory, surprisingly little has been writ-
ten on the role that contemporary music has played in articulating or responding to
this new cultural paradigm.12 The term ‘‘chaotics’’ has been used to describe not the
specific mathematics of chaos theory, but rather the emerging cultural framework that
is authorizing new visions of order and disorder in society. According to Katherine
Hayles, chaotics is a new cultural paradigm ‘‘affecting not simply scientific practices
but social and intellectual ones as well.’’13 Chaotics, it seems, affects not only the
answer, but also the thought that provokes the question.
The mathematics of chaos theory is already beginning to have a pronounced effect
on music and music studies. For composers, chaos theory offers a set of tools that can
transform relatively simple operations into extremely complex material in order to
generate musical ideas for compositions.14 Among many in the newest generation of
composers, fractals and iterated algorithms are as familiar as tonic and dominant
chords were to their distant and not-so-distant predecessors. For music theorists, the
new sciences hold out the appealing promise of a precise method for analyzing the
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THE EDGE OF CHAOS
seemingly insurmountable complexities of much contemporary music.15 But as Judy

Lochhead points out in her provocative article titled ‘‘Hearing Chaos,’’ within the in-
terpretive domain ‘‘scant work has been devoted in either music or cultural studies to
the role that musicians played in disclosing the new cultural paradigm of ‘chaotics.’ ’’16
Lochhead focuses her treatment on the roughly mid-century musical shift toward
chaotics, focusing on a disparate group of composer/creators including: John Cage,
Pierre Boulez, Steve Reich, György Ligeti, Iannis Xenakis, and Elliot Carter, as well as
Ornette Coleman, Roscoe Mitchell, Jimi Hendrix, and the Grateful Dead. She finds in
the creative work of these artists ‘‘multiple construals of chaotics through musical
manifestations of disorder, order, probability, randomness, freedom, and indetermi-
nacy.’’17 In order to frame these diverse approaches within a descriptive scheme, Loch-
head articulates four categories of musical chaotics: ordering to create unpredictability;
ordering to create an aural analogue to chaos; chaos as creative potential; and liberatory chaos.
Within the first mode, ordering to create unpredictability, Lochhead locates the inte-
gral serialism of Boulez, the process-oriented minimalism of Reich, and the complex
micro-polyphony of Ligeti. Although these methods are not identical to the mathemat-
ical formulations of chaos, she argues that, like the current mathematical theory, they
demonstrate how relatively simple deterministic operations can, when iterated, pro-
duce extremely complex and unstable results. In other words, Boulez’ notion of the
‘‘ambiguity of a surfeit of order being equivalent to disorder’’ is, in Lochhead’s formu-
lation, analogous to the way in which science writer James Gleick describes chaos as
‘‘order masquerading as randomness.’’18
Lochhead find aural analogs to chaos in work by Carter and Xenakis. In Carter’s
Double Concerto for Harpsichord and Piano with Two Chamber Orchestras, for instance, the
five seamless movements can be heard to evolve from the spontaneous creation of
order out of a seemingly random or entropic state, to a Coda that recounts the entropic
flow into disorder. And Xenakis used mathematical formulae, including gas laws that
describe probabilistic behaviors, to create aural imagery of such seemingly chaotic nat-
ural events as the collision of hail or rain with hard surfaces and the songs of cicadas
in a summer field. Despite their compositional differences, however, Lochhead argues
that Carter and Xenakis shared an advocacy for control and precision in order to create
sound worlds that evoke chance and unpredictability, and they both, in varying ways,
strongly denounced improvisation-based compositional practices as inherently limited
by the conditioning of the performer or the real-time constraints of performance.19
John Cage espoused similar ideas at various times, and it is with his work and philoso-
phy that Lochhead locates her only example of chaos as creative potential.
Lochhead reserves the category of liberatory chaos for comments about the music
of Ornette Coleman and the AACM, Hendrix’s burning guitars, and the Grateful
Dead’s use of feedback. She locates these musics within the African American and
counterculture rebellions of the 1960s, and she offers a (now standard) definition of
free jazz in terms of its negative features: liberated from ‘‘such things as tonal har-
monic structure, hierarchical textures, metrical rhythmic structures, sectional form,
and timbres traditionally construed as ‘musical.’ ’’20 ‘‘For the performer/creator of free
jazz,’’ Lochhead concludes, ‘‘the execution of music liberated from traditional modes
of organization enacted a negation of the status quo—musically and socially—while
aligning new modes of organization sometimes with chaos as creative force and some-
times with randomness and unpredictability as emancipation.’’
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SYNC OR SWARM
Throughout, Lochhead argues compellingly that music gave shape to the new para-
digm of chaotics in ways distinct from literature and science, allowing ‘‘a unique vis-
ceral engagement with concepts of chaos.’’21 But by segregating the improvised
examples into the category of liberatory chaos and by effectively reducing them to an
‘‘oppositional stance to musical order,’’ I fear that Lochhead misses the opportunity to
highlight the interactive, adaptive, and constructive qualities of improvisation that
make it, in the best of instances, a system continually on the ‘‘edge of chaos.’’ In a
footnote, she informs the reader that Cage’s work would be equally at home in the
philosophical category of liberatory or expressive chaos, but she does not seem to af-
ford this same latitude for the improvisers to ‘‘cross over’’ (or is it to ‘‘move up’’?) into
the ‘‘ontological’’ and ‘‘denotative’’ modes of chaos.22 They are left simply to offer
‘‘alternatives’’ to the status quo.
I would not want to downplay the importance of liberatory tropes in the perform-
ance practice of free jazz and progressive rock, especially during the 1960s in the
United States. People as diverse as George Lewis and Jerry Garcia have highlighted the
‘‘anti-authoritarian’’ impulse in improvisation.23 Even in Europe, the early years of
free improvisation were often inspired by a rebellious attitude toward the ‘‘accepted’’
forms of modern music, as well as a fear of spreading fascism. One need only listen to
the album Machine Gun (1968) by the Peter Brötzmann Octet, perhaps the first record-
ing to bring together many of the first generation European free improvisers, to
glimpse the general desire at the time to demolish as many barriers to musical expres-
sion as possible. Albums such as Paul Rutherford’s Iskra 1903, the title of which refer-
ences the birth of Bolshevism in Russia, also made explicit that the musical revolution
went hand-in-hand with revolutionary political leanings for many. Or for a subtler
example, an often-told story in the annals of free improvisation describes a 1974 con-
cert by Rutherford who, while performing Luciano Berio’s explicitly notated work
Sequenza V for Trombone, offered a healthy dose of his own improvised extended tech-
niques, all of which evaded the notice of the critics and intelligentsia in attendance.24
This example, however, may also highlight the different sides of our turbulent mir-
ror. Without a doubt, a significant number of composers have produced work that
discloses or resonates with the emerging paradigm of chaotics. But in many of these
cases, once the various compositional strategies have been employed resulting in a
finished ‘‘work,’’ the relationship between the performers, audience, and music re-
mains unchanged from standard practice. In other instances, the latitude that per-
formers can expect is still markedly less than that commonly assumed by improvisers.
When discussing Cage’s use of chance operations in Music of Changes, Lochhead herself
points out that, ‘‘Once a score is fixed, however, a predictable relationship exists be-
tween composer, score, and performed sound.’’25 And referencing Cage’s indetermi-
nate pieces, Lochhead explains: ‘‘While the relation between composer and work is
indeterminate in such pieces, the relation between performer and work or listener and
work remains much the same as in pieces employing chance procedures.’’26
Musical performance based on notation, in both its traditional and more unconven-
tional manifestations, preserves what theorist Jacques Attali called the mode of ‘‘Rep-
resentation,’’ in which music is seen as an object of exchange.27 Improvisation and
other highly interactive art forms, however, can foreshorten or even eliminate the
distance between artist, audience, and work. They may herald Attali’s final stage, con-
fusingly called ‘‘Composition’’ since it actually describes something more akin to im-
provisation, in which musicians are inventing the message at the same time as the
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THE EDGE OF CHAOS
language. Attali specifically locates this mode in the transgressive aspects of African
American free jazz and he proposes that music might again emerge as the harbinger
for a new social order.
Unlike similar treatments of chaotics that highlight the emerging paradigm’s con-
nection to cultural markers of postmodernism (the work of Katherine Hayles, for in-
stance), Lochhead argues that mid-century ‘‘chaotic’’ music was most directly linked
to practices of high modernism. She contends that composers, such as Cage, Boulez,
and Carter, ‘‘aspired toward an ‘objective,’ less culturally determined music.’’28 But
this aspiration certainly does not pertain to the music and improvisational approaches
of many African American musicians, including Ornette Coleman and the members
of the AACM, both subjects of Lochhead’s analysis. One need only consider the slogan
adopted by the Art Ensemble of Chicago, ‘‘Great Black Music Ancient to Future’’ to
put this rather Eurocentric notion to rest.
George Lewis argues that the ‘‘power of whiteness’’ has served to mask the impor-
tant role that improvisation played in establishing the contemporary music paradigm
and, in particular, to denigrate the important contributions of African American jazz
musicians in this regard.29 According to Lewis, words like indeterminacy and intuition,
or even ‘‘happening’’ and ‘‘action,’’ are used to hide the presence of improvisation in
contemporary music discourse. Also referencing Cage’s musical and philosophical
stance, Lewis writes:
After three hundred years of the very real silence of violence and terror, rather
than a freely chosen conceptual silence of four minutes or so, one can well imag-
ine the newly freed African American slaves developing a music in which each
person is encouraged to speak, without conflict between individual expression
and collective consciousness. In contrast to this notion of improvisation as a
human birthright, a simple response to conditions, an embodied practice central
to existence and being in the world, Cage’s Puritanical description of improvisa-
tion contrasted the image of a heroic, mystically ego-driven Romantic improvisor,
imprisoned by his own will, with the detached, disengaged, purely ego-transcend-
ing artist who simply lets sounds be themselves.30
Many pan-European composers disavowed improvisation simply because the post-

WWII forms of jazz were becoming widely recognized as art forms that could compete
for the mantle of high art music. But as Lewis’s comments highlight, this battle was
often waged on philosophical terrain that downplayed issues of race and class in favor
of the more solipsistic and community-denying isolationism of Eurocentric discourse.
Lochhead includes a frequently quoted passage of Cage in which he described his
desire to create music ‘‘free of individual taste and memory (psychology) and also of
the literature and traditions of the art.’’31 Although Cage could control the composi-
tional process, he could not control listening. It is in listening that music is created,
and listening is never free of memory. Cage did arguably play an important role in
urging listeners to hear more fully their natural environment, but he did so by at-
tempting to displace the human from its integral role within that environment.32 Free
improvisers advocate similar qualities of active and engaged listening, but they implic-
itly acknowledge that the infinite variety of sound around us requires a human social
space for interaction and selection.
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Chaotics is an exciting avenue of exploration that draws on many sympathetic and

synergetic connections between science, culture, and art. Far from simply responding
to scientific discoveries, musicians have played an active role in disclosing and explor-
ing the paradigm of chaotics. But as we highlight this important role, we must also
be careful not to reify existing notions or re-inscribe old hegemonies. As Lochhead’s
treatment and the burgeoning literature for composers and theorists on the subject
suggest, the tools and orientations of ‘‘chaos’’ are not always equally applied.
As I have argued in the earlier chapters, improvisation, like all music, should most
appropriately be situated in the embodied, phenomenological, and social realms. But
many of the tools of chaos can be usefully applied to this music as well to shed light
on its structural complexities and to help us avoid the Eurocentric notion that only
those musics that are conceived of prior to performance (and represent the singular
and controlling vision of a composer, I am tempted to add) can manifest themselves
through ontological and denotative modes of chaos. Improvisation, particularly in its
freest manifestations, may afford a better avenue for investigations into the visceral
qualities of chaotics since it encourages musical creations that involve the paradoxical
link between determinism and unpredictability characteristic of chaotic systems. In
order to pursue this further, I had to enlist the assistance of Rolf Bader, an expert on
measuring the fractal dimension of music.
Fractal Worlds
Paradoxically, complex systems, whether in music or physics, pro-

duce turbulence and coherence at the same time. . . . As mathemati-
cians topple the tyranny of the straight line of Euclidian geometry,
one is reminded of that ecstatic sense of discovery with which 20th-
century composers proclaimed their liberation from the bar line.33
—Richard Steinitz
[Fractals] provide our first glimpse into a new realization spreading

across science—that randomness is interleaved with order, that
simplicity enfolds complexity and complexity harbors simplicity,
and that orders and chaos can be repeated at smaller and smaller
scales.34
—John Briggs and F. David Peat
[T]o some extent all sounds are fractal in nature, for example an
organ pipe can be thought of as making sound which begins with
air hitting an edge, which creates turbulence, a fractal sound, which
is then resonated by the pipe. So by symbolising a sound as a note,
one not only loses most of the data, but also replaces fractal proper-
ties with the linear ones of a note.35
—Chris Melchior
Fractals are the poster child of chaos theory. These strange yet strangely familiar plots
have by now been seen on computer screens around the world. Countless people have
been fascinated by their intrinsic complexity and by their ability to unfold new levels
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THE EDGE OF CHAOS
of pattern and structure on all scales. Fractal geometry was the brainchild of Benoit
Mandelbrot, a Polish-born French mathematical physicist, who has been a tireless
missionary for spreading the word about their usefulness in contemplating the com-
plexities of the world around us.
Mandelbrot coined the term fractal from the Latin fractus, which means broken or
irregularly shaped. He explains that, ‘‘Fractals are geometrical shapes that, contrary to
those of Euclid, are not regular at all. First, they are irregular all over. Secondly, they
have the same degree of irregularity on all scales. A fractal object looks the same
when examined from far away or nearby—it is self-similar.’’36 Mandelbrot is fond of
demonstrating the notion of self-similarity by breaking off successive pieces of cauli-
flower; each smaller piece maintains the distinctive characteristics of the whole yet
exhibits novelty and subtle difference.
In his now classic paper that introduced the notion of fractal dimensions, Mandel-
brot asked: How long is the coastline of Great Britain? This may at first seem a silly
question, since humans have been mapping out continents and national borders for
centuries. But all maps will smooth out a certain amount of detail. At what level
should we be content to take our measurements? Every hundred meters? Every ten
meters? How about at the level of individual pebbles or sand along the shore? Mandel-
brot reasoned that the length of a coastline would always vary depending on what
quantity we chose as the measurement unit.37 As Briggs and Peat explain: ‘‘If in the
end quantity is a relative concept—it always involves some smearing out of details—
then it is considerably less precise than we believed. In place of quantity, such as
length, Mandelbrot puts the qualitative measure of effective fractal dimensions, a
measure of the relative degree of complexity of an object.’’38
A similar difficulty exists for measuring musical sounds. Like our conventional
maps, notational approaches by necessity reduce the immense sonic detail of music to
discreet and linear representations in the form of notes, rhythms, dynamic and articu-
lation markings, etc. By applying the analytical tools of fractal dimensions to the sonic
aspects of recorded music, however, we may be able to arrive at a useful measure of
the relative degrees of complexity of a given performance. An important disclaimer is
needed here. Although computers can process the digital information contained in a
musical recording in rather involved ways, they will never replace the need for analysis
to be informed by a contextually rich and culturally sensitive understanding of the
performance. Combined with a phenomenological perspective, however, an analysis
of the fractal dimension of recorded sound may be able to offer some helpful insight
into the music. At the very least, it offers a visual representation of the evolving sonic
complexity (not perceptual complexity, as we will see) of a musical passage or an
entire performance that is unavailable through any other existing analytical means.
With this representation, it is often possible to see significant structural changes
within a single performance, and to compare various performances in terms of their
dynamic properties.
One of my motivations for pursuing this line of inquiry is that transcribing music
like that produced by Evan Parker in a solo situation would not only be near-impossi-
ble, but also arguably a fruitless task as well. Fellow improviser Steve Beresford once
remarked: ‘‘At its most multi-layered, Parker’s solo playing would drive the best
human transcriber round the bend, let alone a machine.’’39 But modern computers are
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SYNC OR SWARM
able to crunch the sonic details of Parker’s recorded output in ways that may be help-
ful, even if they too could not possibly hope to notate those same sounds in any con-
ventional way. Another motivating factor for this direction was simply that fact that
many musicians, including Parker himself, have noted connections between the
emerging sciences and the process of improvising music:
Nowadays we all know about fractals in nature and all of that . . . the idea that
there is detail at every level. So you could look at the landscape, or then you could
look at the tree, or then you could look at the leaf, and then you can take a
microscope out. . . . And at every level there is detail that’s just beyond what you
can focus clearly on. That’s it. I mean to try to have that, in improvisation, to have
that quality as well—this is quite a challenge.40
Reflecting on his approach to solo improvisation in particular, Parker finds several

intriguing comparisons with the iterative dynamics of chaotic processes, although they
must have been intuitively felt at first:
Through the repetition of simple phrases which evolve by slow mutations (a note
lost here, a note added there, a shift of accent, dynamic or tone colour) their
apparent ‘‘polyphonic’’ character can be manipulated to show the same material
in different perspectives. The heard sound is monitored carefully and the small
increments of change introduced to maintain or shift interest and the listeners’
attention. Recent popularization of the ideas of chaos theory means that most
people are now familiar with fractal patterns and Mandelbrot figures. Without
wishing to jump on a band wagon, the process involved in the evolution of a
phrase in this way of improvising has something in common with the equations
that generate these patterns and figures where the output from one basically sim-
ple calculation is used as the input for the next calculation in an iterative process
which by many repetitions finally generates a pattern or figure whose complexity
is not foreseeable from the starting point.41
Well before the notion of fractal patterns became commonplace, Parker was think-
ing about audible processes in music, and he was also concerned with the ways in
which the emerging discourse about them was being dictated by composers. In a 1968
essay titled ‘‘Music as a Gradual Process,’’ composer Steve Reich wrote: ‘‘What I’m
interested in is a compositional process and a sounding music that arc one and the
same thing.’’42 In the essay, Reich compared performing and listening to a gradual
music process to ‘‘placing your feet in the sand by the ocean’s edge and watching,
feeling, and listening to the waves gradually bury them.’’ To conclude, however, Reich
writes of a ‘‘particular liberating and impersonal kind of ritual,’’ arguing that, ‘‘The
distinctive thing about musical processes is that they determine all the note-to-note
details and the over all form simultaneously. One can’t improvise in a musical proc-
ess—the concepts are mutually exclusive.’’ Parker took issue with this at the time,
writing a formal response to Reich’s dehumanizing notion of process, and more re-
cently he communicated to me that he ‘‘objected to the notion that the process needed
to be mathematically rigorous in order to be perceived or to function as ‘process’.’’43
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Fractal patterns in nature tend to be the result of growth processes or near-repeti-

tive, continuous, and cumulative dynamics. As examples, you might envision the crack
in a rock ledge or the dendritic web in a river system formed through earthquakes and
tectonic shift. But complex fractal patterns are also found in the human body, in the
way that our respiratory, nervous, and circulatory systems branch out in self-similar
ways to maintain a high level of complexity even at the smallest scales. For instance,
our blood supply is transported through the body via veins and arteries at the largest
scale, but the same characteristic branching structure is repeated with smaller blood
vessels right down to the capillaries, allowing for all parts of the body, from organs
down to the smallest tissues, to be as close as possible to both the supply and exhaust
systems. Even our brain activity appears to have low-level chaos as its default state,
allowing for a spontaneity and flexibility that would be impossible with more regular
forms of order.
The most common method for measuring the fractal dimension of a visual pattern
involves a box-counting algorithm. Researchers mathematically employ progressively
smaller and smaller ‘‘boxes’’ to measure the density of a pattern at various levels of
magnification in order to calculate an overall fractal dimension to the object. For in-
stance, in a fascinating article devoted to analyzing the fractal dimensions of Jackson
Pollock’s drip paintings, Taylor, Micoloch, and Jonas employed a box-counting algo-
rithm to computer scans of Pollock’s work. They discovered that Pollock was not only
able to produce remarkably consistent fractal properties and dimensions, but also to
increase the complexity of his work gradually over the span of his career, from roughly
D%1.45 to D%1.72.44 These numbers can be intuitively understood if we remember
that a line has a dimension of D%1 and a plane has a dimension of D%2. The scans
of Pollock’s paintings are two-dimensional representations, but his designs do not
cover the entire surface of those two dimensions. To be clear, however, D refers to
more than simple coverage density. Rather, it indicates ‘‘depth’’ of development and
self-similarity (and it also reflects the fineness of measurement units). For a point of
comparison, values for natural fractal patterns such as coastlines and lightning range
between about D%1.25 and D%1.30.
The fractal qualities of Pollock’s work can also be intuitively appreciated with the
notion of scaling. The visual consequence of fractal scaling is that it is not always easy
to determine the magnification and hence the size of what is being viewed. For exam-
ples in nature, you might envision snow-covered rocky terrain or a moss-covered wall,
both of which may display similar patterns up close and from far away such that a
photograph of either may not easily convey a sense of scale. By extracting color detail
from their computer scans of Pollock’s work, Taylor et al. also found that each individ-
ual layer of his paintings consist of a uniform fractal pattern, and when they are
layered to build up the complete pattern, the fractal dimension of the overall painting
rises. Finding fractal properties in the work of Jackson Pollock does not imply, how-
ever, that he was attempting to represent the forms of nature. Rather, it demonstrates
that his painting techniques and sensibilities intuitively emulated the patterns of
growth found in nature. It may be interesting to note here as well that Ornette Cole-
man’s 1960 album Free Jazz, which launched the movement for many, prominently
featured a Jackson Pollock painting on its cover.
Analyzing the fractal dimension of patterns in time has proven to be considerably
more difficult. Time series are, at least in one sense, only one-dimensional, since they
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simply move through the time axis; they do not have an immediately apparent inde-
pendent physical reality in our three dimensional world. Many of our conceptual met-
aphors for music make connections to the physical world of motion, space, distance,
and texture, but as we saw in chapter three, these dimensions are not inherent in the
musical sounds themselves. So any higher dimensionality for music is always, in some
senses artificial.
Despite these challenges, researchers have developed mathematics designed to ana-
lyze transient signals in terms of a fractal correlation dimension. In brief, these tech-
niques calculate how many simple dynamical subsystems would be needed to achieve
the complexity of the initial time series. An example may help to clarify this. For
instance, C. Nicolis and G. Nicolis calculated from time series data of the Earth’s ice
volume record that there may be a global climatic attractor of approximately D%3.1.
This means that models involving only four variables could provide a description of
the salient features of global climate change.45 The challenge is that we do not know
exactly to what subsystems these variables might refer. For musical examples, the
fractal correlation dimension measures the recorded sound in terms of the number of
vibrating subsystems that would be needed to produce its complexity at a given mo-
ment. Far from a simple frequency analysis, this method provides a means to describe
the richness of musical sound in a manageable yet abstract way to facilitate analytical
and comparative work.
In the procedure used by Rolf Bader, there are three main subsystems taken into
account: the harmonic overtone components of the sound; the inharmonic frequencies
that are part of the sound; and any large amplitude modulations, all measured by
correlating successive moments in time.46 The harmonic and inharmonic components
of a sound describe in more technical ways the sonic dimensions we normally associ-
ate with pitch, timbre, and noise, among other things. And amplitude modulations
take account of traditional parameters such as dynamics, articulations, and phrasing.
The exact calculations that Rolf’s system performs are incredibly complicated. A
single twenty-minute example of music can require upwards of a week of number
crunching from even a top-of-the-line personal computer system. The analysis starts
by embedding the time series in a multidimensional space called pseudo-phase space.
A space of up to eighty dimensions is necessary to get correct results.47 These dimen-
sions, I should note, are completely different from the final fractal correlation dimen-
sion reported by the system. The system arrives at a final plot by embedding the eighty
or so pseudo-phase space dimensions into a two-dimension space, using the Takens
embedding theorem among other things.48
This process of embedding the multi-dimensional pseudo-phase space into a format
that can more easily be comprehended by humans is a delicate one. Therefore, the
final results sometimes visualize the data very well, but not always. Additionally, the
computer integrates over a minimum time interval of 50ms, arriving at twenty distinct
readings per second of music—a rather large data set.49 In order to display an entire
performance or large sections of one in graphic form, however, only a few hundred
distinct points can be easily represented. To avoid taking a random sampling of mo-
ments for the plots (which would have little meaning), the computer calculates mean
values. This limits the level of detail we are visualizing through the plots, though it
has the benefit of reducing analysis ‘‘noise’’ and the irregularities that are artificially
imposed by the analysis process, as well as the effect of ‘‘smoothing’’ the contour of
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THE EDGE OF CHAOS
the plot in ways that reveal broad trends in the musical signal. Only when we look at
the smallest time scales, in the range of a few seconds, can the computer display the
exact values it calculates for each time interval.
Consequently, this method should not be relied on as a starting point for analysis.
We should also keep in mind that these plots offer one measure of the complexity of
the recorded sound itself, and do not encompass all of the aspects of a phenomenologi-
cal hearing of the music. They can, however, provide visualizations of the evolving
sonic complexity of a musical signal in a way that, when compared against the percep-
tions of human listeners, can be particularly useful.
Before discussing any individual results, it may be helpful to gain a slightly better
sense of the general range of fractal dimensions in music. A pure sine wave has a
fractal dimension of one, as does the steady state of a pure harmonic overtone spec-
trum produced on an instrument. But when attack transients, intensity increases, and
decay are taken into account, all musical sounds produce higher fractal dimensions,
including all complex sounds produced by a computer. The attractor of a chaotic sys-
tem has a fractal dimension typically exceeding D%2. For instance, John Argyris, one
of Rolf’s mentors, calculated the fractal correlation dimension of the Lorentz attractor,
one of the best known strange attractors of chaos theory, as D%2.08.50 In contrast,
white noise, which has no correlation between subsequent sounds, has infinite de-
grees of freedom and a fractal correlation dimension of infinity. This is why the final
moment of a plot often produces a rapid rise since as the final tones fade, noise briefly
dominates, and the fractal dimension rises quickly toward infinity. Pure silence would
also produce a fractal dimension of infinity, however, the slight background noise of
recordings prevents this from happening in our analyses.
Different instruments also have inherently different fractal characteristics since they
incorporate very different approaches to producing sound. For instance, Rolf found
that violins have the most complex attack transient, with dimensions up to D%8. The
saxophone and other reed instruments, however, hover around D%3 for a standard
tongued attack. The drum set and various percussion instruments also have the po-
tential to produce rather large dimensional readings due to their many inharmonic
components of sound and their possibilities for rapid and significant amplitude modu-
lations. Changes in pitch alone can, in many cases, have little effect on the fractal
dimension plot. But variation in the density of sound events, in the range of amplitude
modulations, and in the sonic qualities of timbre and attack will produce more dra-
matic results.
It is critical to note here that perceptually salient moments are not always accompa-
nied by an increase in the fractal correlation dimension. In fact, the perception of
complexity by listeners happens on several levels and should not be thought of as a
property of the stimulus alone. Rather, it is a property of the relationship between stim-
ulus and listener. This relationship reflects not only the complexity of material at each
time point, but also the change in complexity through time as well as the previous
experience and implicit rules that determine what is complex to a listener. In other
words, significant changes in the relative complexity of sound over time, and the expe-
riences one has with listening to similar or related stimuli, will also affect which mo-
ments are deemed most salient or most interesting. For instance, although a complex
sound stimulus may provoke listeners’ immediate attention, a sudden diminution in
the complexity of the overall sound can also correspond to arresting or intriguing
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SYNC OR SWARM
moments for listeners. It is possible to represent by a temporal derivation plot the

relative changes in the fractal correlation dimension—rather than the moment-by-
moment figures presented here—but this also represents only the change in the stimu-
lus rather than the evolving and complex relationship between stimulus and listener.
In all cases, therefore, it is important to correlate the fractal dimension plots with
the perception of ‘‘tension’’ or ‘‘complexity’’ by listeners. For now, this is left for the
reader to experience by following the plots while listening to the music.51 A follow-up
study could correlate the fractal dimension plots with a significant sampling of indi-
viduals of various backgrounds and experience reporting on the ‘‘tension’’ or ‘‘com-
plexity’’ of the music as they listen. These results could in turn be correlated to the
responses of the artist(s) listening back to their own recording(s). Even here, however,
the researcher must be content with the fact that much of our cognitive processing
while listening happens unconsciously, so listeners may not always be aware of their
own judgments, nor of their own inherent biases.
Since we have already investigated music by Evan Parker and Sam Rivers in some
detail, I asked Rolf to do some computer analysis of their work, along with a few
interesting examples from the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Peter Brötzmann, and Derek
Bailey to provide general points of comparison. As in the investigation of Pollock’s
drip paintings, the fractal correlation dimension may also provide an interesting mea-
surement for comparing a single artist’s work over a longer span of time, so for this
reason I included several representative improvisations by Evan Parker spanning over
twenty-five years of his recording career. Table 2 lists information about the various
performances along with the mean fractal dimension calculated and the standard
deviation.
For many of the examples I have also included a correlogram that maps time in the
horizontal axis (aligned to the fractal dimension plots) and the presence of any over-
tone structures (from 100Hz at the bottom left to 20kHz at the top left) in the vertical
axis. This is not simply a spectrogram, but rather a plot of any periodicity in the spec-
trogram, such that the white points in the plots correspond to the overall amplitudes
of the harmonic structure at a given frequency. In many instances, these correlograms
provide a helpful overview of any subsections within a performance (although certain
of the recordings by Evan Parker produced nearly black correlograms due to the pres-
ence of many inharmonic frequencies in his sound and articulations).
The first three Evan Parker performances that Rolf and I analyzed are considered by
most listeners to be not only representative of different phases in his development, but
also exemplary in their own right. They are all rather lengthy improvisations (between
sixteen and twenty-five minutes each), which allows for the exploration of multiple
textures and techniques and the possibility for large-scale formal developments to
emerge.
Figures 1a and 1b provide plots of the fractal correlation dimension and a correlo-
gram of Parker’s solo titled ‘‘Aerobatics 1,’’ recorded at his very first solo saxophone
concert given in 1975. The title is a nice allusion to the juggling metaphor that we
encountered in chapter three, but in many ways Parker had not yet developed the
ability to seamlessly keep three or more distinct musical layers ‘‘in the air’’ at the same
time. The improvisations on Saxophone Solos tend to be more segmented than his later
work, moving between sections that explore a single dominant extended technique on
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Table 2: Analyzed Performances with Mean Fractal Dimension and Standard

Deviation
Standard
Performer(s) Performance Album Date Mean Deviation
Evan Parker Areobatics 1 Saxophone 1975 3.882 1.609
(soprano sax) Solos
Evan Parker Monoceros 1 Monoceros 1978 3.514 0.622
(soprano sax)
Evan Parker Conic Sections 3 Conic 1989 4.779 0.624
(soprano sax) Sections
Evan Parker Broken Wing Process and 1991 3.917 0.556
(soprano sax) Reality
Derek Bailey Improvisation 5 Solo Guitar 1971 3.029 0.412
Volume One
Evan Parker Chicago Solos 9 Chicago 1995 3.482 0.521
(tenor sax) Solos
Evan Parker Chicago Solos 10 Chicago 1995 3.279 0.624
(tenor sax) Solos
Evan Parker Turbulent Mirror Toward the 1997 4.847 1.095
Electro-Acoustic Margins
Ensemble
Peter Brötzmann Machine Gun Machine 1968 8.797 3.492
Group Gun
Art Ensemble of Ancestral Urban 1980 2.956 0.443
Chicago Meditation Bushmen
Art Ensemble of People In Sorrow The Pathe 1969 2.886-I 0.814-I
Chicago Parts I and II Sessions 4.491-II 1.535-II
Sam Rivers Trio Hues of Melanin Trio Live 1973 4.060 1.121
the instrument. Both the fractal dimension plot and the correlogram clearly show five
primary sections of development, each roughly three minutes in length.
In the first section, Parker starts in the extreme overtone range and gradually inter-
sperses tonguing devices, rapid figuring techniques, multiphonic sounds (split tones),
and occasional humming into the instrument (a technique that he would later aban-
don) to increase the complexity of the performance. The peak in fractal dimension for
this section, D%8$, comes at approximately 1:38 into the improvisation when Parker
emphasizes a very rich and powerful multiphonic.52 This is followed by a section of
rapid ‘‘chattering’’ that maintains the fractal dimension near D%5.
The second section begins with the sudden drop in fractal dimension, a result of a
dramatic decrease in the density of sounds. After a few isolated gestures with pregnant
pauses, Parker begins an extended exploration of the extreme overtone range at 2:45
into the performance. While sustaining these high sounds, Parker employs slight fluc-
tuations in pitch and surprising leaps to the normal range of the horn that produce
variations in complexity. The long tones that Parker uses prominently in many of
the performances on Saxophone Solos gradual disappear in his later solo soprano work,
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Figure 1a: Evan Parker—‘‘Aerobatics 1’’—Fractal Correlation Dimension
Figure 1b: Evan Parker—‘‘Aerobatics 1’’—Correlogram
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THE EDGE OF CHAOS
although as we will see they have reentered his solo vocabulary by way of the tenor
saxophone. Although these extreme overtones can produce a perceptual feeling of
tension or hyperextension for the listener, their sonic components are relatively non-
complex (and therefore have a lower fractal correlation dimension). In the extreme
upper range of the instrument, sounds have few additional harmonic partials above
them to enrich their character. For instance, listeners often have difficulty differentiat-
ing saxophone and clarinet sounds when the instruments are played in their extreme
altissimo registers since many of the identifying timbral qualities of the instruments
are absent
At approximately 6:30 into the improvisation, Parker increases his fluttering with
these extreme overtones, eventually cadencing at 7:10. The third section begins with
high-amplitude multiphonics, the most pronounced of which leaps off the fractal di-
mension plot at just before 8:00. More rapid chattering takes us to the 9:00 mark. Here
Parker produces a type of reverse sound envelope by muting the bell of the horn with
his left leg, effectively closing off the tube.53 A return to extreme overtones at 10:10
produces another drop in the fractal dimension, but it is followed by multiphonic
exploration at 10:45.
A forth section begins in earnest with a more pronounce and lengthy drop in the
fractal correlation dimension, around 11:30. Parker is again in the whistle tone region
of the instrument, exploring long tones with fluctuations. His circular breathing tech-
nique is often audible at these points, an aspect of his playing that he more effectively
hides in his later solo work.
The fifth section begins at the 13:00 mark and leads us to the end of the perform-
ance. The techniques that were formerly explored independently are now crossing
paths in rapid and unpredictable ways. Parker seems to be accelerating toward an
ending, all the while increasing the overall density of his sound and patterning. Here
we begin to glimpse the ‘‘polyphonic’’ nature of his solo playing that emerges more
prominently in subsequent years. The brief dips in the fractal dimension plot during
this final section correspond to times when Parker ceases vocalizing along with his
playing. Although the final ending follows an intensification of the performance, it
still seems to arrive rather suddenly, with little preparation.
In the following years, Parker was able to integrate the extended techniques that
are already prominently displayed in his first recordings into a more seamless develop-
mental practice. The shock value of these new instrumental sounds gave way to a
more concerted exploration of the evolving complexity of an improvisation. Figures 2
and 3 present the fractal dimension plots for ‘‘Monoceros 1’’ (1978) and ‘‘Conic Sec-
tions 3’’ (1989), two lengthy improvisations that highlight well this shift in Parker’s
approach. The significant decrease in the standard deviation for these two perform-
ances as compared with ‘‘Aerobatics’’ (from 1.61 to .62 for both Monoceros and Conic
Sections), underlines their more unwavering composition. I have not included the
correlograms for these two performances, as they are both almost completely black
from the density of inharmonic sounds.
The plot of ‘‘Monoceros 1’’ shows the outlines of a strong fractal arc: the perform-
ance gradually increases in complexity, only to give way in the final minutes. The one
prominent drop in dimension, just after the 8:10 mark, corresponds to another ex-
tended development of extreme overtones, which provides a brief respite in the devel-
opment. The shorter drops in the complexity arc also correspond to moments of
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Figure 2: Evan Parker—‘‘Monoceros 1’’
Figure 3: Evan Parker—‘‘Conic Sections 3’’
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THE EDGE OF CHAOS
overtone exploration. During these moments, however, Parker is often employing

much more variation than in similar sections of the ‘‘Aerobatics’’ example from three
years prior. In general, he sounds more comfortable sustaining and controlling the
extended sonic properties of the instrument.
The fractal dimension plots also show quite well moments when Parker is achieving
his full ‘‘polyphony’’—with three or more distinct registers of the instrument being
explored near simultaneously—and moments when he slips (both intentionally and
perhaps at times unintentionally) into a reduced texture or into the regular range,
timbre, and monophonic qualities of the instrument. For one example, at 12:30 into
‘‘Monoceros 1,’’ following a minute or more of polyphonic exploration, we hear Parker
briefly drop the top voice from the texture only to regain it almost as quickly. The plot
here shows a drop from the D%4 range to approximately D%2.8. In the final minutes
of the performance Parker’s dense, polyphonic exploration seems to be approaching a
ceiling of physical possibility.
Starting around 19:30, he begins to ease the density of patterning until he is left
exploring only the extreme overtone range. With a final graceful decrescendo, he con-
cludes the improvisation.
‘‘Conic Sections 3’’ (Figure 3 and Audio Example 1), recorded eleven years after
Monoceros, demonstrates even more ability and flexibility in improvising dense and
overlapping patterns. The mean fractal dimension for this twenty-five-minute impro-
visation is D%4.78, considerably higher than the other two examples we have already
encountered. Some of the increase, it should be noted, may be due to the higher degree
of reverberation present on the recording. Parker recorded Conic Sections in the Holly-
well Music Rooms in Oxford. In the accompanying notes, Parker comments that, ‘‘The
acoustics of the Rooms are so distinctive that I was pushed away from the kind of
playing I’d had in mind; it seemed as though the room itself had something in mind
too.’’ Reverberation, according to Rolf, can add chaoticity since if a sound is prolonged
as a reverberated event while another event is played, both our perception and the
computer’s calculation will take note of the additional complexity. But the perform-
ance on ‘‘Conic Sections 3,’’ one of Parker’s most celebrated, does seem to bear out a
higher plateau of complexity in general.
The first half of the plot shows Parker developing an arc of increasing complexity
that at times drops briefly only to continue its climb. He begins the improvisation
already deeply entrenched in interlocked patterns. The first small dip arrives at ap-
proximately 1:40 when the already dense polyphony seems to reach a moment of
temporary gridlock, slowing down but not halting the overall patterning. At 3:35, one
of the polyphonic voices disappears briefly, only to be followed by some dramatic regis-
ter leaps that create even more complexity. At nearly the 5:00 mark, the dense sonic
traffic comes to a sudden halt, with only one voice surviving to carry on the development.
Parker has spoken of his use of ‘‘interruptions’’—pauses, immediate segues to sim-
pler textures, or the held tones of his earlier work—to regain the listener’s awareness
and to allow him the chance to begin combinations anew:
When you’ve been playing complex music for longer than a certain amount of
time, you’re in danger of losing the audience’s attention. They just oversaturate
with the detail, the information. After a while, it’s like there’s new information
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SYNC OR SWARM
but it’s the same kind of new information. So the change is no longer a change.
It’s like looking at new ways to make changes that are really changes.54
His comments bring to mind Gregory Bateson’s definition of information as ‘‘a dif-
ference that makes a difference.’’55 Parker calls these ‘‘interruptions on a bigger scale
than the usual interruptions.’’ For him, ‘‘the usual interruptions are the substance of
the music—the interference between the two patterns or the compatibility or lack of
compatibility between two patterns. That’s the usual stuff of the detailed music, so
to impose a break on that you need to do something different, with long notes or
whatever.’’56
Another interruption occurs at 7:40, followed by one a minute later (8:36) that has
more of a gradual rallentando quality to it. But perhaps the most dramatic shift in
musical materials occurs at the 14:00 mark. Here, Parker switches from his 3-part
polyphony to a development centered in the middle range of the instrument focused
on a more linear contour with occasional bursts of rapid tonguing. Because of the
highly reverberant room, this section lasting until 17:30 has an uncanny ‘‘swarm-like’’
quality to it. Starting around 16:50, Parker begins to relax this insistent texture, add-
ing some high register bursts and eventually slowing the pulse and reducing the dy-
namic. He resolves to a micro-tonal figure at 17:30, the lowest fractal dimension
reading in the performance.
The final section of development is interrupted by a few additional brief respites—at
19:18 with a chromatic figure using alternate fingerings, at 20:30 with a flurry of high
notes, and at 21:02 with a return to the chromatic figure of 19:18—before building
with articulation and fingering cascades to a dramatic conclusion. Parker has dis-
cussed in some detail the two ways in which his solo improvisations often conclude:
One is where the thing unravels. If you think about the music as the pattern in a
carpet—you know how the fringe of a carpet is made out of the weft, you can see
the component threads? Sometimes it’s interesting for me to let the thing unravel
so the pattern is gradually pulled apart and you’re left with only the threads, the
strands. Or another way—and again this is me observing what tends to happen
rather than me describing a plan of action—is the complexities reach such a pitch
that they cancel one another out and you get a blur of . . . almost like white noise.
Not white noise but an impenetrable kind of thickness. The whole thing locks. It’s
a gridlock. Everything locks solid and—it stops!57
In order to take full advantage of the computer’s ability to analyze recorded sounds
in minute detail, I selected a particularly dense passage of Parker’s solo ‘‘polyphony’’
for a closer analysis. Figure 4a shows the section from 4:00 to 5:00 in ‘‘Conic Sections
3,’’ a passage in which Parker’s acoustic ‘‘juggling’’ is fully engaged. Only near the
very end of the plot do we see a quick drop in overall complexity that corresponds well
with Parker’s transition to less dense materials. On this scale we can clearly see regular
waves of complexity occurring approximately every six seconds or so—roughly the
length of a standard musical phrase or human breath. But there are also micro-struc-
tures along the peaks and valleys that are just barely in view.
Figure 4b brings out the detail from 4:00–4:20. Here we can see more clearly the
shorter waves of complexity that occur in Parker’s playing, usually with one or more
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Figure 4a: Evan Parker—‘‘Conic Sections 3’’—Detail of Fractal Correlation

Dimension
Figure 4b: Evan Parker—‘‘Conic Sections 3’’—Detail of Fractal Correlation

Dimension
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Figure 4c: Evan Parker—‘‘Conic Sections 3’’—Detail of Fractal Correlation

Dimension
cycles occurring within a single second. Like Mandelbrot’s cauliflower, this additional
detail uncovers self-similar structures to the whole. In fact, the similarity of these
fractal dimension plots to a mountain range that demonstrates scaling properties is
uncanny.
In Figure 4c, Rolf and I looked at the detail of Parker’s playing over the span of only
three seconds, from 4:07–4:10. At this scale, we are able to see the exact results calcu-
lated for each time interval. This level of detail highlights some additional qualities of
Parker’s playing but also some limitations to this type of computer analysis. The plot
displays pronounced cycles of complexity that have a certain similarity to those that
we saw on the level of musical gesture and phrasing. Parker appears to be dealing
with waves of complex sound from the smallest to the largest scales. But on listening
at a greatly reduced speed, it is also clear that there is much more detail in Parker’s
playing than the computer is able to take account of. Here we are forced to confront
the intersection between ‘‘signal,’’ ‘‘signal noise,’’ and ‘‘analytical noise’’ that plagues
this, or any other, analysis method.
Figures 5a and 5b offer the fractal dimension plot and correlogram for Parker’s
performance on ‘‘Broken Wing’’ from the album Process and Reality. This considerably
shorter performance provides an excellent example of a developmental arc. The only
significant interruptions occur at 1:07, when Parker slows briefly to a sustained tone
before continuing, and at 1:19, 1:30, and 1:46, when he offers dramatic breath-length
pauses, all of which are easily seen on the correlogram.
As a a point of comparison, Figures 6a and 6b present the fractal dimension plot and
correlogram for Derek Bailey’s guitar improvisation titled ‘‘Improvisation 5,’’ originally
released on the Incus LP Solo Guitar Volume One from 1971.58 Bailey’s improvisation
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Figure 5a: Evan Parker—‘‘Broken Wing’’—Fractal Correlation Dimension
Figure 5b: Evan Parker—‘‘Broken Wing’’—Correlogram
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Figure 6a: Derek Bailey—‘‘Improvisation 5’’—Fractal Correlation Dimension
Figure 6b: Derek Bailey—‘‘Improvisation 5’’—Correlogram
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here is roughly the same length as ‘‘Broken Wing,’’ but he tends to avoid any clear
developmental strategies in favor of a more sectionalized approach. Within each sec-
tion, Bailey often explores in detail only a few specific techniques. Due to the more
stately pace of the improvisation, the correlogram here nicely shows the sectionalized
nature of his work. One of the more visible moments on the correlogram, from 1:00 to
1:30, highlights Bailey exploring some subtle timbral shadings of a sustained sound.
Figures 7a/7b and 8a/8b detail two tenor saxophone solos by Evan Parker from his
first solo release on that instrument titled Chicago Solos (1995). Although many connec-
tions can be made between his solo styles on soprano and tenor, the sheer size of the
larger horn, and the additional air that it requires, make some things less possible.
These are two of the more dense solos from the album, yet they still do not reach the
mean fractal dimension of most of his soprano work. But because Parker can rely less
on the mesmerizing effects of his soprano polyphony, much of his tenor work explores
quite a few more musical directions and options. As Stuart Bloomer noted in a Cadence
review at the time, Parker’s tenor approach has some connections to the first soprano
recordings. For instance, he focuses on much shorter pieces, but with nothing of the
feeling of a technical exercise that tended to pervade Saxophone Solos.59 Although Parker
is quite capable of circular breathing for considerable stretches of time on tenor as
well (as ‘‘Chicago Solo 9’’ demonstrates), he tends to use standard phrase lengths to
greater effect (as in ‘‘Chicago Solo 10’’).
The fractal plots of ‘‘Chicago Solo 9’’ demonstrate well the contour of Parker’s im-
provisation: entering at a relatively high degree of density and complexity, working
toward a calmer plateau, only to build up again to a final burst and then subside: a
rather different technique than much of his solo soprano playing. While in ‘‘Chicago
Solo 10,’’ Parker employs dramatic pauses and unpredictable phrases. Starting from
pianissimo, he gradually builds to a dramatic height that offers a hint of his complex-
ity on soprano, but never abandons the more capricious quality of his tenor.
Finally, figures 9a and 9b highlight a recording by Evan Parker’s Electro-Acoustic
Ensemble titled ‘‘Turbulent Mirror’’ from their first ECM release Toward the Margins.
The ensemble is comprised of Evan Parker’s working trio of many years, with Barry
Guy on bass and Paul Lytton on drums and percussion, along with live electronics and
signal processing by Walter Prati, Marco Vecchi and Philipp Wachsmann, who also
adds violin and viola. Even in this larger, denser, and more convoluted musical setting,
the ensemble is able to create a nice developmental arc to the performance. The mean
fractal dimension is considerably higher, no doubt due in part to the additional elec-
tronic processing that not only keeps certain sounds alive in the ear as reverberations,
but also re-interjects transformed versions of the live sound into the ensemble.
Because of the size and the ‘‘regenerative’’ possibilities of the ensemble, each indi-
vidual tends to play less than they might otherwise, allowing space for comment and
transformation and producing something of an undulating quality to the work. When
Parker does launch into a circular breathing passage at 1:48, the overall dimension
elevates, while the final decrease in fractal dimension is dominated by the sustained
sounds of Wachsmann’s viola, a transition that is clearly visible in the accompanying
correlogram as well.
Deciding what feature or set of features may have provoked a certain shift in the
fractal dimension of ensemble music is not always easy. It is interesting to note, how-
ever, that the softer passage from about the 3:30 mark in which the sound processors
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Figure 7a: Evan Parker—‘‘Chicago Solos 9’’—Fractal Correlation Dimension
Figure 7b: Evan Parker—‘‘Chicago Solos 9’’—Correlogram
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Figure 8a: Evan Parker—‘‘Chicago Solos 10’’—Fractal Correlation Dimension
Figure 8b: Evan Parker—‘‘Chicago Solos 10’’—Correlogram
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Figure 9a: Evan Parker Electro Acoustic Ensemble—‘‘Turbulent Mirror’’—Fractal

Correlation Dimension
Figure 9b: Evan Parker Electro Acoustic Ensemble—‘‘Turbulent

Mirror’’—Correlogram
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are more clearly heard, drops in dimension only briefly, as all of the acoustic instru-
ments fall silent, before maintaining a rather high fractal dimension. The computer’s
calculations seem to be able to take notice of very subtle and soft sound transforma-
tions as well.
After Rolf had run many of the Evan Parker examples for me, I was still grappling
with the computer’s ability to arrive at these results and my own ability to understand
them. So I asked if he could analyze a few examples as test cases that, to me, seem to
represent the sonic extremes plumbed by improvisers. We ran plots of Peter Brötz-
mann’s ‘‘Machine Gun’’ (Figures 10a/10b) from the 1968 album of the same name,
and the Art Ensemble of Chicago’s ‘‘Ancestral Meditation’’ (Figures 11a/11b) from the
1980 live album Urban Bushmen. The Brötzmann example is one of the most famous
(or is it notorious?) examples of early European free improvisation. It brought together
Brötzmann, Evan Parker, and Willem Breuker on saxophones, Fred Van Hove on
piano, Peter Kowald and Buschi Niebergall on basses, and Han Bennink and Sven-
Ake Johanson on drums. The title track includes, after some sonic ‘‘machine gun’’ fire,
some extremely high volume and high energy playing from everyone involved. The Art
Ensemble piece is, by contrast, one of their most delicate and sublime. It involves,
after a powerful stroke on a gong, a timbral meditation on a single pitch.60 I have
included the plots and correlograms as Figures 15 through 18, since they demonstrate
that the computer is able to take account of both obvious and more subtle sonic
variations.
In his email forwarding the results of the ‘‘Machine Gun’’ analysis, Rolf excitedly
wrote, ‘‘The Brötzmann piece is noise! We never had such high fractal numers up to
D%18, which is unbelievable!’’ The mean fractal dimension for the entire performance
is D%8.8, nearly twice as high as even the Electro-Acoustic ensemble performance.
The plot does reach some impressive heights during the background ‘‘screams’’ behind
Parker’s solo, but it also shows well the drop in sonic complexity during the impro-
vised call-and-response of the two bass players (starting at 6:00) and the gradual
buildup with the reentry of the horns. Further dips correspond to moments when
Willem Breuker is playing entirely alone on bass clarinet (8:40), and when the group
uses a brief second of silence (at 11:25). The rather odd big-band-style riff (13:15) also
reduces the fractal dimension, as does the brief moment of Han Bennink providing
military style drums behind Breuker (at 9:40). Musical devices that follow a strong
rule-based system will tend to reduce fractality since the computer detects things hap-
pening on a more regular basis.
Even more encouraging, however, was the computer analysis of The Art Ensemble
of Chicago performance, which captured many of the group’s subtle timbral variations.
The correlogram displays nicely the fundamental overtone series of the piece and its
subtle variations, while the peaks of the fractal dimension plot highlight well the
moments when the sound intensifies or when a new timbral layer is introduced, in-
cluding the evocative breath sounds and instrumental gurgles of the wind players near
the end. The valleys in the plot match moments when the drone sound seems to
simplify or purify for a moment, before new complexities are added to enrich the
composite texture. The lower mean value of D%2.97 and a standard deviation of only
.44 reflects the meditative quality of the piece, and yet the dramatic contour shows
nicely how very small changes can make a world of difference in focusing our ears
and minds.
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Figure 10a: Peter Brötzmann—‘‘Machine Gun’’—Fractal Correlation Dimension
Figure 10b: Peter Brötzmann—‘‘Machine Gun’’—Correlogram
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Figure 11a: The Art Ensemble of Chicago—‘‘Ancestral Meditation’’—Fractal

Figure 11b: The Art Ensemble of Chicago—‘‘Ancestral Meditation’’—Correlogram
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To offer another snapshot of The Art Ensemble’s sonic breadth, Rolf and I also did
an analysis of their performance titled ‘‘People In Sorrow,’’ which was recorded in
1969 during their time spent in Paris. The complete performance is over 40 minutes in
length, although it was originally released in two parts to fit the sides of a long-playing
record. This division was maintained on the CD re-release and for our analysis, al-
though the two figures represent one complete performance. Some background noise
is still present—the CD appears to have been mastered from a vinyl source—so the
absolute readings for fractal dimensions should not be trusted in their entirety, but
the relative changes in dimension provide an excellent example of the group’s un-
canny ability to develop complexity over long stretches of time.
Starting at fractal dimension readings of D!2, the performance builds very gradu-
ally, eventually reaching heights of approximately D%14 three-quarters of the way
through the performance, and finally returning to relative calm. The piece is loosely
structured around a minor-key melody that returns throughout the work, in various
guises, but always, as one Amazon.com reviewer put it, ‘‘just under the surface of
things, just slightly out of reach.’’ The members of the group improvise with, over,
and around these subtle appearances of the theme, producing several prominent sub-
sections that build and subside in complexity as the overall development of the per-
formance continues.
Part I (Figures 12a/12b) begins with the Art Ensemble’s characteristic percussion
and ‘‘small instruments’’ that only obliquely hint at the melody to come. Eventually
Lester Bowie’s trumpet, Roscoe Mitchell’s flute, and Malachi Favors’s bass playing
begin to take more prominent roles. After a brief bass solo, a more intense percussion
section creates the most sustained plateau of complexity. This is followed by a very
soft section, filled with small percussion and breathe sounds, and in which one of the
members can be heard to say ‘‘Mommie, there’s a rat scratchin’ in the walls,’’ bringing
to mind the difficulties of growing up in a housing tenement. A final unison statement
of the theme produces a temporary cadence.
Part B (Figures 12c/12d) begins with all three horns playing the melody, leading
into a poignant bassoon solo by Joseph Jarman. The ensemble gradually intensifies,
and with the addition of drums, percussion, and vocalized screams, reaches several
more brief climaxes. A sudden and unexpected moment of silence (15:16) is followed
by an intense section that features an insistent, siren-like drone, rapid walking figures
by Favors, and all three horn players variously improvising angular phrases and un-
hurried fragments of the melody together. The final statement of the theme is inter-
spersed with brief moments of dissonance until the ensemble texture finally dissolves
to whence it came.
The most lengthy and involved computer analysis that Rolf and I did concerned the
Sam Rivers Trio improvisation, ‘‘Hues of Melanin.’’ The fractal correlation dimension
plot and correlogram are provided in Figures 13a and 13b. The overall contour can
broadly be attributed to instrumentation and intensity changes, but a closer analysis
also reveals many interesting developments in the performance. For this reason, I have
included a few more detailed plots of subsections of the piece that correspond to some
moments that were highlighted in the phenomenological analysis provided in chapter
four (see Table 1).
The first fifteen minutes are a collective improvisation by the entire trio, with Rivers
on soprano saxophone. The fractal dimension hovers around D%5 with several promi-
nent peaks and a few valleys. The first prominent dip, at 5:45, follows a strong cadence
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Figure 12a: The Art Ensemble of Chicago—‘‘People In Sorrow (Part I)’’—Fractal

Figure 12b: The Art Ensemble of Chicago—‘‘People In Sorrow (Part I)’’—Correlogram
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Figure 12c: The Art Ensemble of Chicago—‘‘People In Sorrow (Part II)’’—Fractal

Figure 12d: The Art Ensemble of Chicago—‘‘People In Sorrow (Part II)’’—Correlogram
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Figure 13a: Sam Rivers Trio—‘‘Hues of Melanin’’—Fractal Correlation Dimension
Figure 13b: Sam Rivers Trio—‘‘Hues of Melanin’’—Correlogram
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by the trio as Barry Altschul, the drummer, drops out for a time to allow for a soprano
and bass duet. The prominent peak at 11:07 also involves a strong cadence accented
by Altschul, and the subsequent unison moment of sync makes for one of the most
dramatic shifts from D%11$ to D%4.3 within the span of a few seconds.
In the second half of the performance, Rivers switches to flute (with occasional
vocal interjections) and the trio explores several more extended moments in which
various solo and duo opportunities arise. Combined, these reduce the overall fractal
dimension of the performance but the trio builds through several fractal arches with
many prominent peaks and valleys. For instance, starting at 15:20, the trio relaxes
into a bass solo by Cecil McBee. At 16:15, McBee hits on a repeated note figure and is
left to play almost entirely by himself for a short time, producing the lowest fractality
reading. But the complexity builds again as Rivers and Altschul add commentary and
supportive textures behind McBee’s continuing solo. Rivers slowly usurps the spotlight
until near the 18:00 mark he is suddenly left to perform briefly unaccompanied, pro-
ducing another prominent valley. McBee soon joins him, now performing arco and,
with Altschul creating percussion colors, the three musicians undulate together. At
19:20, McBee drops out entirely, and by 20:00 Rivers is again by himself on flute. But
he does not let the intensity subside, and the bass and drums reenter and build to a
frenetic up-tempo emsemble section. At 25:30, Altschul drops out briefly again leaving
an arco bass and vocal duet. For a full minute, from 27:15 to 28:23, Rivers is alone on
flute until he signals with an in-tempo melodic fragment for the others to reenter.
From here they build together with the most prominent peaks corresponding to Riv-
ers’s ecstatic hollers. With another melodic fragment, the trio shifts to a playful,
shared tempo, and a drum solo provides a segue during which Rivers switches to piano
for the continuation of the performance (not analyzed). The moments of bass and
flute solos can be seen easily on the correlogram (since this is when the spectrum of
the sound is harmonic and can be interpreted by the correlogram).
For a more detailed analysis, we need to look at some finer grain structures. Here,
it can be especially illuminating to explore the ways in which a phenomenological
analysis, like the one offered in chapter four, relates to the computer analysis of fractal
correlation dimension.61 Figure 14a corresponds with the section from letters A to B
in my original phenomenological analysis. Here, as elsewhere in the performance,
most of the structural points that I identified correspond extremely well with signifi-
cant shifts in the fractal correlation dimension. The moments of cadence and transi-
tion line up with sudden changes in the calculated complexity of the recording, or
often precede the shift in complexity by a few seconds as the players respond to or
affect changes in the group sound.
For instance, the repeated tone in the bass that triggers a shift to more dense and
intense exploration at letter A2 appears as a prominent valley in the computer reading,
followed by a strong developmental arch. Additionally, the trill figure at A3 that signals
a temporary cadence corresponds with the lowest dip in fractal dimension. Even the
pseudo-cadence that I identified as A4 mirrors a relative drop in the plot. And the
tempo trigger that launches the trio into a fast-pulsed exploration also lines up ex-
tremely well with letter B. Some of the most prominent peaks in the plot correspond
to powerful cymbal crashes that, because of their inharmonic frequencies, can produce
relatively high fractality (e.g., at 3:32).
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Figure 14a: Sam Rivers Trio—‘‘Hues of Melanin’’—Detail of Fractal Correlation

Dimension
Figure 14b: Sam Rivers Trio—‘‘Hues of Melanin’’—Detail of Fractal Correlation

Dimension
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The more detailed plots can also remind us that, as listeners, the moments in the
music that are most compelling from a phenomenological perspective, are often those
in which a dramatic shift in perceived complexity takes place, or when a given expec-
tation is either confirmed or denied by the musicians. In other words, increasing musi-
cal complexity can attract the attention of listeners, but, as Evan Parker noted, too
much complexity can overwhelm. Listeners are often most provoked by well-timed
and dramatic shifts in the relative complexity of a performance. For instance, at 3:15,
Rivers ends his improvised line with a short, bluesy call that the others acknowledge
through their reduced intensity, rather than by a more direct response. The fractal
dimension here drops significantly, but for the listeners this exchange signals a mo-
ment of heightened attention, as an expectation has been created and resolved in a
surprising way.62
Figures 14b and 14c highlight the section between letters E and H of my original
analysis. There is so much going on here in the music that an even closer level of detail
could provide additional insight. Broadly speaking, E to E3 acts as an extended ca-
dence, E3 to F is organized around the bass drone, and F results from a melodic trigger
that launches the trio into shared tempo. G highlights another temporary cadence
brought about by a trill figure, and the trio slowly works into a groove section that
eventually synchronizes at G2 and climaxes at G3. H signals the shift to the bass solo
as Altschul reduces his complexity on the drums and Rivers partakes in some playful
mimicry.
Although the drone section at E3 may sound rather relaxed, the fractal dimension
is quite high, most likely a result of Barry Altschul using some auxiliary percussion
that adds inharmonic components to the combined sound. But here again, the dra-
matic rise and sudden drop in complexity (provoked by the unison figure) attracts
listeners’ attention. The fast-pulsed section at letter F is sprinkled with drum crashes
that produce peaks in the fractal dimension, while the trill at letter G triggers a reduc-
tion in the overall complexity until a groove slowly emerges. On close listening, the
moments when the bass and drums synchronize or when Rivers and McBee land on a
unison pitch produce the small dips in the fractal dimension. These moments may,
however, be perceived by listeners as structurally important or of increased interest.
The final detailed plot that I have included highlights the section from letter N to
O2 (Figure 14d). During this section Rivers begins vocalizing to provoke even more
complexity from the group (and perhaps to add a bit of humor as well: ‘‘Just do it,’’
‘‘Do it tonight,’’ ‘‘Save me!’’). His most pronounced scream is accompanied by heavy
crashes by Altschul and a rising figure from McBee, resulting in a fractal dimension
of D%9$. The drone section following N2 is also perceptually rich with detail and
tension, but sonically it remains in the D%3.5 range: another nice reminder than
perceptual and sonic complexity do not always go hand in hand. Rivers cues a lessen-
ing of intensity with a chromatic descending line at N3, and a cadence by the trio
follows shortly thereafter at letter O. His final melodic trigger launches the group into
a shared tempo full of playful fluctuations, discussed in chapter four in the context of
signifyin(g).
Many of the properties of mathematical fractals have captured the interest of artists
and laypeople alike. The characteristic quality of fractal organization, in which
branching structures continue to elaborate themselves in order to allow for maximum
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Figure 14c: Sam Rivers Trio—‘‘Hues of Melanin’’—Detail of Fractal Correlation

Dimension
Figure 14d: Sam Rivers Trio—‘‘Hues of Melanin’’—Detail of Fractal Correlation

Dimension
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efficiency in exchanges, provides an interesting metaphor for some group improvisa-

tion that focuses on this delicate sonic filigree yet still maintains a certain clarity of
presentation, speed of communication, and flexibility for quick shifts and transitions.
Noticing this connection, Todd Jenkins writes in his recent encyclopedia of free jazz
and free improvisation:
The best free performances are often those in which the players do not seem to
clash. Even without set boundaries, musicians build structures based upon intu-
ition, anticipation, and logic. The mathematical discipline of chaos theory states
that even supposedly random events can have a basis in logical action and reac-
tion. Good free performances reflect this idea of controlled chaos, and players who
work together long enough develop an uncanny intuitiveness as to their next
moves.63
Next to the rich complexity and subtle self-similarity of fractals, Euclidian geometry
seems horribly dull.64 Mandelbrot has shown that irregularity is exciting and that it is
not just noise distorting Euclidian forms. According to Briggs and Peat, this ‘‘noise’’ is
‘‘the bold signature of nature’s creative forces.’’65
In some ways, conventional European music notation may be akin to conventional
Euclidian geometry. The regular and static forms that are at the heart of both ap-
proaches have led researchers to ignore many subtle properties of nature and sound,
lumping together and dismissing those qualities that do not easily fit the model as
‘‘chaos’’ and ‘‘disorder’’ on the one hand (geometry), or ‘‘performance practice’’ and
‘‘improvisation’’ on the other.66 But one of the most exciting things about our emerg-
ing understanding of fractal organization is that it demonstrates that similar principles
of growth and form are operating at vastly different scales. Briggs and Peat ask, ‘‘how
could something that measures thousands of light-years across have anything in com-
mon with objects that can be encompassed in the hand or on the head of a pin?’’67
Rather poetically they muse:
Strange attractors and fractals evoke a deep recognition, something akin to the
haunting recognition afforded by the convoluted and interwoven figures of
Bronze Age Celtic art, the complex designs of a Shang ritual vessel, visual motifs
from the West Coast American Indians, myths of mazes and labyrinths, the itera-
tive language games of children or the chant patterns of so-called ‘‘primitive’’
peoples. The regular harmonies of classical Western art become almost an aberra-
tion set beside these forms. Yet as we look at the greatest art we realize that even
in classical forms there is always a dynamism of chaos within the serenity of
order. All great art explores this tension between order and chaos, between
growth and stasis. In confronting the orders of chaos, of growth and stability, it
appears we are now coming to face with something that is buried at the founda-
tions of human existence.68
Self-Organization
We tend to imagine chaos as the inevitable outcome of a system that exhibits no

central control. Primary school educators are intimately familiar with the all-too-real
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notion of chaos that can ensue in a classroom when students are losing focus or not
following the prescribed rules for work or social conduct, or when the teacher steps
out of the room for a moment leaving the students unattended. In many other social,
biological, and physical systems, we are also predisposed to think of order in terms of
hierarchies and control. Our governments are often structured around the notion of
leaders, from kings to councilmen. Even our own bodies and our sense of self, as the
story goes, are operated by command centers: the heart provides the pulse and pace
for our body, and the brain controls our thoughts and movements and provides an
undivided sense of self in the process (a notion that we of course challenged in chapter
three).
Yet, the deeper we probe, we are often led to conclude that systems do not always
(or even inherently) organize in this way. The natural world is filled with examples of
species that operate in a collective fashion that defies a top-down or centralized chain
of command (We will explore this idea more in the next chapter). In the physical
domain, a stream of water can create a vortex that remains stable despite the fact that
its exact components are rapidly changing. And our own bodies maintain their form
despite the fact that our individual cells are fully replenished every seven years or so.69
The Great Red Spot on Jupiter is a fascinating example of a self-organizing system
that can even make our all-too-easy distinctions between the living and non-living
worlds rather complicated. Essentially a storm system in the upper atmosphere of the
planet, it has been present for at least several centuries, substantially exceeding the
lifetime of the average gas molecule contained within it. Biologist Stuart Kauffman of
the Santa Fe Institute writes of the Great Red Spot that, ‘‘The similarity to a human
organism, whose molecular constituents change many times during a lifetime, is intri-
guing. One can have a remarkably complex discussion about whether the Great Red
Spot might be considered to be living—and if not, why not. After all, the Great Red
Spot in some sense persists and adapts to its environment, shedding baby vortices as
it does so.’’70
The work of the Russian-born, Belgian chemist Ilya Prigogine is most often refer-
enced in relation to the increasing attention being paid to self-organizing systems. In
particular, his work focuses on the ways in which open systems operating in far-from-
equilibrium conditions can spontaneously self-organize. To envision what this might
mean, let’s look at the famous ‘‘butterfly effect’’ of Edward Lorenz. First, imagine a
balloon filed with air. The molecules of air inside the balloon are either paralyzed or
moving around at random, the definition of a system at equilibrium. Now place a
butterfly inside of the balloon. The butterfly will surely flap it wings and stir the air
molecules, but since the system is self-contained, no large-scale patterns can emerge
and it will remain at a near-to-equilibrium state. Few ‘‘real world’’ physical, biological,
or social systems, however, are self-contained in this way. If instead we place that
same butterfly in the earth’s atmosphere—where the weather is continually stirred,
agitated, and energized from rotation, gravity, and solar radiation, among other
things—even the slight disturbance created by its flapping wings could amplify
through positive feedback to produce a severe thunderstorm in another part of the
globe weeks later.
Although reasonable predictions of local weather patterns over the span of a few
days can be reliable, when viewed as a whole, the global weather system is in a state
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of non-equilibrium. Temporary storm systems can form, and even maintain them-
selves for days or weeks, but they can also suddenly disappear without warning. These
storms systems, like the relatively long-lived Great Red Spot on Jupiter, must continu-
ally take in energy, leaving disorder in their wake.
Prigogine has named these types of emergent phenomena dissipative structures, to
highlight their near paradoxical qualities of ordering and dissipation. As Briggs and
Peat explain, ‘‘Dissipative structures are systems capable of maintaining their identity
only by remaining continually open to the flux and flow of the environment . . . arising
out of a far-from-equilibrium flux and riding upon it . . . organizing space and giving
an inexorable direction to time.’’71
Prigogine began his Nobel Prize winning work by contemplating the question of
time. He was struck by the fact that time reversibility—a rather counterintuitive no-
tion—was deeply entrenched not only in classical, Newtonian physics, but also in
quantum theory. According to both sets of equations, systems can run both forwards
and backwards; time has no preferred direction.
Yet two nineteenth century theories, evolution and thermodynamics, proposed a
world that was governed by an arrow of time; albeit with radically different connota-
tions. The second law of thermodynamics, first formulated by German scientist Rudolf
Clausius, states that the universe is heading toward a state of maximum entropy or
disorder: a thermodynamic equilibrium. But to biologists, like Darwin, life appeared
to represent not only stable order, but an order that could reproduce itself and increase
its own fitness over time. Prigogine wondered in what way these discrepant visions of
time’s arrow—one negative and the other positive—could be reconciled. And how
might they, in turn, reconcile with the notion of reversible time that was commonly
accepted in physics? Rather ambitiously, Prigogine hoped to unify the microscopic and
macroscopic worlds and the fields of dynamics and thermodynamics. One of his earli-
est books on the subject urged researchers to shift their perspective From Being to
Becoming.72
One of Prigogine’s favorite examples of dissipative structuring is Bénard instability.
In general, as a pan of liquid is gradually heated from below, the heat begins to travel
from the lower surface to the upper one through convection. At first, while the system
is still near equilibrium, this flow proceeds in an orderly fashion. But as the difference
in temperature between the layers grows and the system moves farther from equilib-
rium, it undergoes the rapid onset of chaos. Under laboratory conditions, researchers
have shown that this path to chaos proceeds through an orderly process known as a
period doubling cascade. A similar orderly decent into chaos has been found in many
other systems and provides one of the first great discoveries from the order-into-chaos
branch of nonlinear dynamics.
Prigogine focuses on the system’s ability to undergo another bifurcation point as
the liquid continues to be heated and the heat can’t disperse quickly enough. At this
point, the system shifts out of its chaotic state and transforms into an orderly lattice
of hexagonal currents known as Bénard cells. These rotating convection cells represent
patterns that are millions of times larger than the range of the intermolecular forces
that cause them. They provide a textbook example of order out of chaos, a defining
quality of emergent and self-organizing systems. Certain chemical reactions, such as
the Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction, also produce remarkable self-organizing patterns,
such as evolving spirals and changing colors that highlight qualities of dissipative
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structuring.73 Similar processes are at work in the flicker of a candle flame, in the
traffic patterns at rush hour, and perhaps in the growth of cities and social movements.
Increasingly, cities and societies are being envisioned as complex, self-organizing,
and adaptive systems that operate through an intertwined network of flows, from
money, food, and energy, to people, and information. As with the scaling properties
we saw in fractal geometry, these flows, patterns, and functions often appear self-
similar across many scales, from neighborhoods and districts to nations and interna-
tional conglomerates. To some extent, increasing economic interdependence between
the local, the regional, and the global is provoking this scaling property, but changes
in society and the arts may also have a profound impact.
Prigogine’s work does not violate the second law of thermodynamics, but it relies
on a formulation of entropy that contextualizes its negative and positive powers. Briggs
and Peat write of dissipative structures:
They are open systems, taking in energy from the outside and producing entropy
(waste, randomized energy) which they dissipate into the surrounding environ-
ment. Of course one system’s entropy may be another system’s food; consider the
dung beetle, for example, or the mitochondria in our own cells which transform
wastes from fermented food molecules into ATP, a molecule that in fact stores
energy. The second law (that entropy overall always increases) is not violated by
the appearance of these systems, any more than gravity is violated by an orbiting
moon. As a moon takes advantage of gravity to stay in orbit, so dissipative struc-
tures take advantage of entropy.74
In what ways might these ideas of self-organization and dissipative structuring re-
flect on the musical process? The notion of an ‘‘arrow of time’’ is of course crucial to
all music, but it is particularly pronounced in improvised forms. My favorite illustra-
tion comes from a chance meeting between composer/improviser Frederic Rzewski
and improviser/composer Steve Lacy. Rzewski asked Lacy to describe in fifteen seconds
the difference between composition and improvisation and Lacy replied: ‘‘In fifteen
seconds, the difference between composition and improvisation is that in composition
you have all the time you want to decide what to say in fifteen seconds, while in
improvisation you have fifteen seconds.’’75 Lacy’s formulation of the answer lasted
exactly fifteen seconds.
An improvising ensemble can also be described as an ‘‘open’’ system. In a very
general sense, the ensemble takes in energy gradually from the enculturation, educa-
tion, training, and experience of its members, and more immediately in the form of
interactions between members and influences from the physical and psychological
context of the performance (i.e., the acoustic space, the potential sonic materials, the
performers’ state of mind, the audience’s reaction, etc.). More technically, because
active listening plays such a central role in shaping the dynamics of improvised per-
formance, the control and feedback parameters are tightly coupled and the system
remains open to continual energy influxes from its environment. Improvised music is
also ‘‘dissipative’’ in the literal sense that if no external energy is applied to the system,
the complexity of the music will decrease, tending toward zero as listeners get bored.
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Improvisation requires a constant influx of energy to offset these dissipative qualities.

(These qualities are discussed in more detail in chapter four).
The ‘‘equilibrium’’ of an improvised music performance is disturbed, in a general
sense, through the expectation by all present that music will be made. Free improvisa-
tion, in particular, often carries with it the specific mandate to deconstruct or re-
contextualize known or familiar musical properties. But more technically, the freer
forms of improvisation can be said to be ‘‘far-from-equilibrium’’ because (in good
performances, at least) the musicians are supplying a great deal of external energy.
Similar to the dual nature of entropy in dissipative systems, one person’s ‘‘waste’’ in
an improvised performance—perhaps an unintended gesture or ‘‘noise’’—may also
become grist for the improvising mill of others in the ensemble.
Over time, an improvising ensemble will often establish its own sense of identity or
coherence. Although the system remains open to environmental fluctuations, in the
language of dissipative structures it is ‘‘operationally closed.’’ Audience engagement
is certainly crucial to a successful improvised performance, but the musicians tend to
focus their direct attention on one another rather than on the audience explicitly. The
boundary that develops naturally within an ensemble is not necessarily one of per-
sonal affinity or exclusion, or one of aesthetic mandate, but rather one of trust and
conviviality. Like the boundary of a storm or the membrane of a human cell, this
boundary is both permeable and permanent. It defines the identity of the system but
also allows for the ongoing dynamics of exchange that are necessary to maintain its
existence. Of course, a certain danger may lurk for both physical and musical systems
if this boundary becomes either too porous or too impermeable. If too much exchange
is fostered with outside forces, the identity of a system may be put in jeopardy. Like-
wise, if too little exchange is allowed or encouraged, a system may decline either from
reduced internal dynamics, or from its inability to continue to adapt to the changing
dynamics of its environment.
Acknowledging what many reluctant, first-time, or even veteran listeners to free
improvisation may at times feel, saxophonist Steve Lacy recounted that after a year of
playing in this manner with the same group he felt that they were playing ‘‘freely’’
but it didn’t sound free anymore: ‘‘What is this? I couldn’t believe it—it sounds the
same every night. What are we going to do? That’s what we were trying to get away
from.’’76 In describing his preferred working method, Evan Parker offers another per-
spective on this delicate balance of permanence and permeability, trust and freedom:
Things that are established as known between yourselves probably form as useful
a context for the evolution of something new as anything. But the inter-personal
relationships should only form the basis for working, they shouldn’t actually de-
fine the music too clearly, which they very often do. In practice, the closest I
would get to a laboratory situation is working with the people I know best. It can
make a useful change to be dropped into a slightly shocking situation that you’ve
never been in before. It can produce a different kind of response, a different kind
of reaction. But the people I’ve played with longer actually offer me the freest
situation to work in.77
Individual musicians can differ widely in their specific preferences for maintaining
a creative balance in their work, but most seem to acknowledge the defining qualities
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and the inherent dynamism of one’s own identity and the ways in which it may be
shaped through immediate interaction with others and over time. For another point of
comparison, consider these positions espoused by Eliott Carter and Derek Bailey. Car-
ter argues that, ‘‘You could say that a musical score is written to keep the performer
from playing what he already knows and leads him to explore other new techniques
and ideas. It is like a map leading a hiker through unknown country to new vistas and
new terrain, revealing to him new possibilities of experience that he did not know he
could have.’’78 Employing the same analogy to hiking, Bailey writes, ‘‘One could ap-
proach the unknown with a compass and a method but to take a map makes it point-
less to go there at all.’’79
Carter’s comments are more allied with a top-down model of organization that in-
volves a hierarchy and the execution of sequential operations. Bailey appears more
connected to the notion of a bottom-up, self-organizing system that involves decen-
tralized or overlapping authority and typically a patchwork of parallel operations. The
former might best be described as complicated, while the latter is truly complex.
Nearly all systems in real life appear to involve aspects of both of these approaches,
but many of the things that we find most interesting in nature hover near the complex
end of this spectrum.
Complexity, however, is a surprisingly difficult concept to define well. The Latin root
of the word complex, complexus, means different elements interlaced together to form
a single fabric, a type of unity in diversity.80 Physicist Murray Gell Mann offers a defi-
nition of complexity focused on its structural qualities. He argues that a system should
be called complex when it is hard to predict, not because it is random but rather
because the regularities it does have cannot be briefly described.81 Robert Axelrod and
Michael D. Cohen stress the interconnectivity of complexity, arguing that, ‘‘a system
is complex when there are strong interactions among its elements, so that current
events heavily influence the possibility of many kinds of later events.’’82
Self-Organizing Systems (SOS) is a general term that describes a diverse range of
systems that exhibit both complex and adaptive dynamics. SOS, by definition, operate
without imposed centralized control. They are most often comprised of numerous indi-
vidual agents that are autonomous but also exhibit a high degree of interconnectivity.
In other words, SOS rely on the nonlinear causality that comes from peers influencing
peers. As a result, the dynamics of SOS can be both promising and problematic. To
borrow terminology from Kevin Kelly, SOS are adaptable, resilient, and boundless, but
they are also nonoptimal, noncontrollable, and nonunderstandable in their entirety.83
Due to their nonlinear dynamics, SOS are able to adapt to new stimuli and to inter-
nal changes. Although clockwork systems can be built to adjust to predetermined
stimuli, only nonlinear systems can evolve (in the biological sense) over time. SOS
actively respond to changing circumstances in order to transform whatever happens
to their advantage.
SOS are also resilient, in the sense that the whole can be maintained while individ-
ual parts change or even disappear. In fact, moments of change or failure create the
possibility for new forms of order to emerge and for the system as a whole to reorga-
nize at higher levels of complexity. Think of a flock of birds. With only the slightest
motion to flight from one individual, the entire flock can spontaneously take flight.
And since the activity of the flock is based on individual birds adjusting and adapting
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SYNC OR SWARM
to their neighbors, if one bird disappears, the flock simply rearranges itself and contin-
ues unabated.
Finally, SOS are boundless, in the sense that positive feedback can lead to ever-
increasing order. SOS are able to build on their own scaffolding by extending new
structure beyond the bounds of its original state.
Decentralized systems, however, do not always work well, just as those based on
top-down organization can fail. For instance, SOS are inherently nonoptimal, since
without centralized control they can foster inefficiencies and redundancies. Although
their emergent properties can dampen some of these effects, much as a free market
can establish a generally agreed-upon price for goods, SOS can never eliminate ineffi-
ciencies as a well-designed linear system could. But by accepting rather than avoiding
error, SOS offer fertile conditions for learning, adaptation, and evolution.
SOS are also inherently noncontrollable. They can be guided at ‘‘leverage points’’ or
tweaked from within, but without centralized control or an explicit hierarchy, it can
be impossible to initiate system-wide changes quickly and efficiently. But noncon-
trollability can also be an asset. For instance, our dreams are noncontrollable in their
entirety yet often produce rather exciting and unexpected results.
Even when working well, the dynamics of SOS are, in their entirety, nonunder-
standable. Without clear lines of causality, SOS can quickly become tangled swarms
of intersecting influence and logic until it becomes impossible to arrive at an objective
or complete understanding of the system’s dynamics.
Finally, SOS are often slow to emerge; they are nonimmediate. The more complex
they are, the longer it may take them to warm up: hierarchical layers have to settle
down; lateral causes have to slosh around a while; individual agents have to acquaint
themselves with one another. Summarizing the differences between top-down and
self-organizing systems, Kelly writes: ‘‘For jobs where supreme control is demanded,
good old clockwork is the way to go. Where supreme adaptability is required, out-of-
control swarmware is what you want.’’84 Most tasks, of course, will forsake some con-
trol for adaptability or vise versa.
Several relevant analogies can be drawn from music. The freer forms of improvisa-
tion lie perhaps closest to the ideal of a self-organizing system. Their bottom-up style
emphasizes the possibilities for adaptation and emergence; they accentuate creativity-
in-time and the dynamics of internal change. The structures of improvisation can also
continue to be extended in boundless ways (although the system may be circum-
scribed, at least in part, by the abilities, materials, and experiences of those who are
participating). Improvised music is, from one perspective, resilient to individual ‘‘mis-
takes’’ since sounds can be re-contextualized after the fact by either the original per-
former or others in the group. And if one musician drops out or is unable to make a
performance, the system can often continue to function without major interruption,
perhaps even organizing in ways that are both novel and more complex.
From another perspective, however, group improvisation may be less resilient to
personality conflicts or pronounced aesthetic differences between individuals. With
traditional musical practices that are organized in a predominently hierarchical man-
ner, personality differences can often be managed in deference to the group leader,
the authority of the musical score, or the professionalism of ‘‘getting the job done.’’
Free improvisation ensembles tend to aim for a more egalitarian organization that
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makes them particularly susceptible to the full spectrum of both musical and so-called
‘‘extra-musical’’ influences.
Despite its many promising qualities, improvisation is also rarely, if ever, the ‘‘opti-
mal’’ means to achieve a specific musical end (although it may in fact be both a
quicker and easier route to certain types of chaotic dynamics). The internal dynamics
of an improvising ensemble (particularly larger groupings of musicians) can be slow
to respond to change, and are, for the most part, beyond the control of any one individ-
ual. Even when things do appear to work well, it will be impossible to analyze the
system’s dynamics during or after the fact with absolute precision. As with other
emergent forms of order, the collective dynamics of improvisation will, by definition,
always transcend the full awareness of individuals. For these and other reasons, many
ensembles chose to adopt certain compositional schemes or devices in order to offer
some additional degrees of control over the situation. In general, however, SOS and
improvisation have the remarkable ability to absorb the new and the diverse without
disruption.
There is no guarantee, particularly in individual performances, that divergent com-
ponents will find ways to self-organize effectively. Similar to mechanical systems, we
may learn as much or even more by examining occasions on which improvised per-
formance appears to falter.85 But since this hinges on issues of intention, reception,
and interpretation, even locating these moments can provide a distinct challenge.
A recent event that occurred at the eleventh annual Guelph Jazz Festival highlights
these issues well. The festival’s slogan, ‘‘Sounds Provocative,’’ got a particular workout
this year.86 Sainkho Namtchylak, a Tuvan singer noted for her extended vocal tech-
niques, was invited to participate in an improvised concert with African American
musicians William Parker and Hamid Drake, on bass and drums respectively.87 Namt-
chylak began her performance with a short, undulating melody and proceeded to re-
peat this phrase, with only subtle alteration for a half-an-hour while the bass and
drums duo developed an improvised discourse that complemented, or by some ac-
counts simply worked in tandem to, her irresponsive performance. Namtchylak sang
with arms folded tightly across her chest, checking her watch in the first moments of
the performance and at occasional intervals thereafter as if to say, in the words of
Toronto Globe critic Mark Miller, ‘‘How much longer?’’88
She appeared visibly irritated, and it was clear that she only intended on performing
as long as contractually required.89 Much of the subsequent controversy that sur-
rounded the event centered on her treatment by the festival staff and the heavy-
handed decision by festival organizers to interrupt the group’s performance. (The mu-
sicians later resumed and finished the performance after a collective uproar from the
audience.) Without weighing in on this aspect of the controversy, but rather by survey-
ing the variety of reactions to the performance from an Internet discussion, we can
get a sense of the polysemic nature of improvised music and the challenging questions
of reception and meaning that it raises.90
Initial reactions in the audience were mixed, as some visibly left irritated and others
began to have conversations among themselves (often at full volume) as if to imply,
in the words of a contributor to a subsequent Internet discussion, ‘‘nobody could pos-
sibly be listening to this.’’ Others later remarked that the layered tensions produced
by this approach struck them as ‘‘conceptual’’ in the ears of one, and ‘‘remarkable’’ in
the ears of another. One simply chose to envision what he was witnessing on stage as
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a type of live theater or reality television. Another listener didn’t hear repetition in Ms.
Namtchylak’s performance at all, but rather ‘‘a fairly interesting display of microtonal
pitch shifting.’’ Some felt that Parker and Drake were ‘‘smoking’’ or that they at least
‘‘valiantly tried to get things going,’’ while at least one remarked that it was they who
were ‘‘playing on another planet . . . not very improvisational.’’ Some wondered about
the motivations behind grouping these musicians together to begin with, while others
felt that improvisational pairings with Asians in general often aim for this ‘‘enormous
tension’’ in which ‘‘musicians don’t sound like they are playing together in the con-
ventional sense.’’ Another questioned whether Parker and Drake should have in fact
wound things down on their own to confer with Namtchylak and ‘‘try to get on the
same page.’’
When the musicians resumed after the interruption from festival staff, Ms. Namt-
chilak abandoned her repetitive melody and offered a performance that was praised
to varying degrees as: ‘‘her trademark if a touch lackluster throat singing’’ by one; or
‘‘more tuneful but still with some apparent distraction’’ by another; to ‘‘trans-
spendid,’’ ‘‘unbelievable,’’ ‘‘furious, virtuosic, and encyclopedic,’’ and, perhaps most
poetically, as ‘‘a textbook case of kicking ass and taking names, Tuvan-shaman style.’’
At one point Namtchylak shifted into an ‘‘incantory stream of hyperspeed syllables’’
described by one listener as a ‘‘Pentecostal fire of labial and glottal cascades.’’ That
same listener felt that most in the audience agreed that she was ‘‘putting one mother
of a curse on us all.’’
Several respondents argued that the success of a given collective improvisation ulti-
mately rests on the degree of communication between the players, and in this light
Ms. Namthcylak’s performance for the first half-hour would seem to have failed mis-
erably. A particularly adamant Internet contributor remarked, ‘‘I really do wish . . .
that alongside the feel-good PC nonsense served up as rationale for the value of the
music, someone at the festival would take an aesthetic stance and defend the decision
to shut Namtchylak down on the grounds that she was not performing the improvisa-
tional music she had been hired to perform.’’ Yet another expressed just as steadfastly,
‘‘I will maintain to all corners, that first section was worth hearing for the bizarre
contrast of her inertia and their dynamism—a supremely interesting combination if
you closed your eyes to her scowling and just listened to the sound.’’
So was this particular meeting of improvisers a successful musical interaction, or
was it a disaster that would have been best avoided altogether? Were the individual
musicians communicating, albeit in perhaps unconventional ways? Parker and
Drake’s gradual and tandem build-up of energy and intensity seems to clearly fall
into the accepted realms of musical communication, but what of Ms. Namtchylak’s
performance? Perhaps Parker and Drake had grounds on which to decry foul play.
And yet they didn’t. They, in fact, seemed most disturbed when the proceedings were
prematurely brought to a sudden halt.
In halting her performance, was the festival acting under preconceived notions of
the types of material and interactions that Ms. Namtchylak would be expected, and
therefore allowed, to perform? Acknowledging this slippery slope in free improvisa-
tion, Steve Day, a self-pronounced avid fan and author of the book Two Full Ears,
writes:
In a live concert, both musicians and audience have, to some extent or other,
predetermined the expectation of their ears. If I go to hear Evan Parker I would
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not expect to hear Charles Lloyd’s ‘‘Forest Flower,’’ nor when I go traveling to
some foreign field for a Charles Lloyd concert, would I expect Mr. Parker’s multi-
harmonic circular breathing solo patterns. However inventive and spontaneous,
the areas of interest have been drawn. . . . Not only do I expect the great improvis-
ers to improvise, I also expect them to be ‘‘true’’ to their own agendas. As soon as
I voice these statements, I am back in a land of rules and regulations. Egg shells
to be trod on.91
In some respects the various listener responses appear to be shaped by the issue of
whether intense personal emotions, such as anger, should be given voice in the collec-
tive arena of improvised music. One listener chastised many of the other respondents
for thinking that Namtchylak ‘‘should be allowed to continue expressing her very
personal anger at the expense of the 3 or 4 hundred people who’d paid to see her in
good faith.’’ Others commented that a decision to pull Ms. Namtchylak off stage pro-
voked by contractual violations or the possibility of sponsor discontent was not only
distasteful but also potentially dangerous for the continued health of improvised
music on the whole. One even remarked that removing an improviser for ‘‘contractual
reasons’’ was analogous to handing out speeding tickets at a formula-one car race.
Finally, one listener took his hat off to her for ‘‘having the courage to scream and vent
in front of us all, exposing herself as vulnerable, hurt, frustrated, furious, and steadfast
in her belief that people need to listen.’’
Ironically, the festival director Ajay Heble’s own book titled Landing on the Wrong Note
has a chapter devoted to the ethico-political authority of jazz titled ‘‘Up For Grabs,’’ in
which he discusses his difficulty in reconciling his admiration for saxophonists Charles
Gayle’s music with his distaste for Gayle’s oppressive on-stage pronouncements about
the sins of abortion and homosexuality. As Heble works through this ‘‘peculiar prob-
lem,’’ he attempts to find a balance between a respect for postmodernism and its
recognition of the value of difference and multiplicity and a certain accountability that
he finds is missing in Gayle’s own brand of free jazz. Heble struggles with the very
questions that I am foregrounding here: ‘‘whether meaning is best understood as a
function of intent or effect.’’ In a telling remark he asks, ‘‘Do we arrive at judgment
on the basis of the artist or of the offended audience? And what if only half of the
audience is offended, and the other half is moved to applaud or shout praises?’’ Heble
reluctantly concludes that, ‘‘music’s complex and multiple ways of inhabiting the so-
cial landscape necessarily complicate our understanding of any determinate ethicopol-
itical allegiances.’’92 At least for that one recent September evening in Guleph, a
majority of listeners were willing to counteract the decision of the festival organizers
and to allow a space for Ms. Namtchylak’s fierce and frustrated outpourings.
The Rage for Chaos
The music represents our disillusionment with the fundamental im-

pulse of other modern, Western musics to organize nature, as repre-
sented in sound. We have a different way of dealing with so-called
‘‘chaos’’: it is not our enemy, not even a matter to be fashioned
into durable, self-validating human objects. We are ‘‘at play’’ with
sound.93
—Jack Wright
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I’m attracted to improvisation because of something that I value.

That is a freshness, a certain quality that can only be obtained by
improvisation, something you cannot possibly get by writing. It is
something to do with the ‘‘edge.’’ Always being on the brink of the
unknown and being prepared for the leap. And when you do go out
there you have all your years of preparation and all your sensibilities
and your prepared means, but it is a leap into the unknown.94
—Steve Lacy
Chaos has become a metaphor, but far too often the wrong meta-
phor. Not only is the metaphor being extended to areas where there
is no reason to expect a dynamical system, but the very implications
of the metaphor are being misrepresented. Chaos is used as an ex-
cuse for the absence of order or control, rather than as a technique
for establishing the existence of hidden order, or a method for con-
trolling a system that at first sight seems uncontrollable.95
—Ian Stewart
Morse Peckham in his 1965 book Man’s Rage for Chaos, considers artistic behavior not
as some special kind of activity cut off from the rest of human behavior, but rather as
much an adaptation to the environment as any other human activity. Peckham was
most concerned with finding a way to reconcile all of the various arts with the notion
of a physiological basis for artistic behavior. In brief, he theorizes that a primary drive
of human beings is toward order: to perceive the environment as comprehensible and
to make successful predictions about the future. In a statement that anticipates much
of the current thinking in cognitive science, Peckham argued: ‘‘I am convinced that to
every situation a human being brings an orientation which is not derived from that
situation but already exists in his perceptual powers before he comes to that situation.
Such an orientation works only because it filters out any data which is not relevant to
the needs of the moment.’’96 But he also felt that, since such an orientation does not
prepare an individual to deal with a particular situation but only with a category, or kind,
or class of situations, much of the suppressed data may very well be relevant.
The arts, according to Peckham’s hypothesis, serve the function of breaking up en-
trenched orientations, weakening and frustrating the ‘‘tyrannous drive to order,’’ so
that humans may be better able to deal with change, complexity, and chaos. Artists
present the unpredicted; they offer the experience of disorientation. ‘‘The artist’s pri-
mary function,’’ according to Peckham, ‘‘is executed by offering a problem, but not a
problem to be solved.’’97 If art were simply about a search for unity and order, then, as
Peckham sees it, the job of art would have ended long ago, since our esteemed aesthet-
icians have claimed the ultimate in unity and order for so many past works. Instead,
Peckham views art as the continual presentation of discontinuities, and he locates art
not in the ‘‘work’’ itself, but in the perceiver’s role of maintaining a search-behavior
focused on awareness of discontinuities. With interesting similarities to the phenome-
nological model that we proposed in chapter four, Pekham posits the emotional quality
of art as the result of a discrepancy between expectation and actuality. For him, and
for us, the emotional affect is not inherent in the work, but rather in a successful
performance of the perceiver’s role.98
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Pekham distinguishes between four types of discontinuities: implicit discontinu-

ities, internal discontinuities, modal discontinuities, and external discontinuities. In
short, they are produced when an art perceiver experiences discontinuities with cul-
tural expectations of a perceptual field, expectations established with the work of art
itself, expectations established by a tradition of art activity or style signs, and expecta-
tions established by learning to anticipate or predict art activity from engaging with
predecessors in the same category. For Peckham, art helps us to envision and to cope
with chaos.
Recent work in the cognitive neuroscience of music concerned with the role that
music plays in human evolution and development supports Pekham’s views rather
well. Summarizing work in the field, Ian Cross argues that music is especially well
suited to testing out aspects of social interaction by virtue of its nonefficaciousness
(from a strict biological perspective), while its polysemic nature—its multiple potential
meanings—provides a vehicle for integrating our domain-specific competences so as
to endow us with the multipurpose and adaptive cognitive capacities that make us
human. Cross writes: ‘‘[M]usic can be both a consequence free means of exploring
social interaction and a ‘play space’ for rehearsing processes that may be necessary to
achieve cognitive flexibility.’’99
Play is one of those marked words in the contemporary English language. For most,
the word evokes pleasant emotions or memories (perhaps of childhood), but it also
brings to mind the Puritan-influenced notion of play as non-serious and unproductive
action of a frivolous or even ethically suspect nature. While this view of play as a
marginal, even subversive, activity may be prominent in the West, other cultures fre-
quently view play as something that is both embedded within cosmology and integral
to the daily social activities of individuals.100 Trumpeter Don Cherry was fond of say-
ing, ‘‘There is nothing more serious than fun.’’101 And philosopher Hans Georg Ga-
damer appears to echo his words when he writes: ‘‘Seriousness is not merely
something that calls us away from play; rather, seriousness in playing is necessary to
make the play wholly play.’’102
To speak of ‘‘play’’ in relation to the sciences, however, may strike some readers
as an oxymoron.103 Yet Jay Mechling argues that, by altering our usual patterns and
deconstructing our notions of common sense, play can provide a source of creativity
in both the arts and the sciences. According to him, the ability to bi-sociate, or to
perceive self-consistent but habitually incomparable frames of reference together,
allows both the scientist to ‘‘solve the problem’’ in an experiment and the audience
member to ‘‘see the joke’’ or ‘‘get the point’’ of a story or performance.104
Anthropologist Edward T. Hall agrees that, ‘‘Play is serious business.’’ In an article
on improvisation in music, Hall discusses the biological origins of play, asserting that
play originates in the limbic system of mammals, a region that is also the center of
emotions, parenting, and social organization and is distinct from the word- and num-
ber-based learning of the neocortex. In a statement that supports a similar position to
those of Pekham and Cross, Hall writes: ‘‘Play is the device which not only permits
mammals to have fun, but gives them a means of mastering the skills needed for
survival.’’105 For humans in particular, Hall argues that, ‘‘Without this variety—the
sheer joy of being able to ‘play’ with the system—life would gradually lose its
meaning.’’106
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People cooperating in a musical activity, like the concert event described above, need
not find the same meaning in what they do in order for the musical event to assist
them in acquiring and maintaining the skill of being a member of a culture. As Cross
sees it, ‘‘The singularity of the collective musical activity is not threatened by the
existence of multiple simultaneous and potentially conflicting meanings.’’107
To reference my own subtitle, the activity of ‘‘improvising music in a complex age’’
allows participants and listeners to experience and explore complex, decentralized,
interconnected, and emergent dynamics without an immediate concern for their own
survival: it is consequence free. Congestion or confusion in improvised music, while
perhaps momentarily unfortunate, does not carry with it the immediate dangers of
biological survival (such as confusion or congestion on the highways can). Yet through
continual engagement with art, viewed as the successful performance of the per-
ceiver’s role, we may in fact be better prepared to survive and flourish in our increas-
ingly interconnected, and therefore interdependent, world.
There is of course some danger that these new scientific theories could become
nothing more than hosts to rather mindless syllogisms. As in the past, the most egre-
gious examples of interdisciplinary euphoria often trumpet this new work as the final
‘‘theory of everything.’’ In his advanced introduction to the field of science studies,
David Hess argues that the new sciences of chaos and complexity mark a postmodern
shift in emphasis toward open systems and patterns of self-organization. But he also
worries that applications of chaos and complexity theories to social phenomena ‘‘may
obfuscate as much as they clarify.’’ He continues:
In a sense, we are back to the key concept of reification: changing social processes
are projected onto nature in new scientific models (that may also be ‘‘true’’ in the
sense that they represent part of the world that had not been seen previously),
and in turn these new models are fed back into theories of society. These theories
of society may point to new aspects of the social world that had not been seen
previously, but at the same time they may deflect attention from a more critical
inspection of the fundamental continuities of modernity and capitalism.108
Encouragingly, however, chaos and complexity studies frequently predict what an-
thropologists and researchers interested in culture have always known, that several
answers may be equally valid: in other words, that alternative styles of social life are
possible. Chaos and complexity theories tell us not only that diversity and adaptability
are desirable traits, but also that irregularity and unpredictability are essential quali-
ties for the health of a system.109 Complex dynamical systems are best able to function
adaptively since their network dynamics allow for both enduring patterns of organiza-
tion and spontaneous responses to unexpected occurrences; they are poised at the
edge of chaos. The complex dynamics of human societies also appear to illustrate the
idea that the more complex a system, the more robust it may become, but also the
more numerous the fluctuations that can threaten its stability. In this light, impro-
vising music together may offer a consequence-free space in which to explore the
complex dynamics created by a continual tension between stabilization through com-
munication and instability through fluctuations and surprise.
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6
Sync and Swarm
Sync makes life possible: from the cascade of biochemical reactions that allow for the
operation of a single cell, to the circadian rhythms that control sleep and allow for
proper functioning of our organs, to the firing of neurons whose synchronized sym-
phony leads to human consciousness. Our growing understanding of sync in the phys-
ical world has also made countless technologies possible: from the lasers that allow us
to listen to CDs, check out at the supermarket, and improve our eyesight; the clock
circuitry that allows radio and television signals to be decoded and computer chips to
function properly; to the satellite signals that make possible global communication
and positioning technologies that can locate and direct everything from cell phones
and cars to missiles.
A new science of sync is just now on the horizon as biologists, physicists, mathema-
ticians, astronomers, engineers, sociologists, and artists are beginning to notice con-
nections with the work of others and to find compelling reasons to begin working
together. Steve Strogatz, in his book Sync: The Emerging Science of Spontaneous Order,
offers a primer on much of the work that has been done to date and a reminder of just
how far we are from understanding sync in its more complex forms. He writes: ‘‘For
reasons we don’t yet understand, the tendency to synchronize is one of the most per-
vasive drives in the universe, extending from atoms to animals, from people to plan-
ets.’’1 Despite the increasing resources being dedicated to the subject, however, only
in a few instances do we have a clear idea of how order can emerge on its own. And
these tend to be examples of sync in physical space, such as when water molecules
crystallize into ice just below the freezing point. As Strogatz laments, ‘‘Explaining
order in time, however, has proved to be more problematic.’’2
Music offers an excellent site for the study of sync in performance and in the dy-
namics that shape a musical community. In his book Keeping Together in Time, historian
William H. McNeill’s makes the argument that coordinated rhythmic activity is funda-
mental to life in society. Although he focuses his treatment on group activities such as
military drill and certain forms of religious ritual and social dancing that produce a
type of ‘‘muscular unison,’’ there is no reason to believe that similar forms of collective
bonding are not at play in all forms of musicking, including those that that do not
rely, at least overtly, on a shared or steady sense of pulse. In fact, there is increasing
neurological evidence that the perception/cognition of music’s temporal features arises
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SYNC OR SWARM
from activation of substantial parts of the same neural circuitry involved in bodily
movement and action.3 So as listeners and performers share in the same sonic experi-
ence they are, in effect, moving together.
William Benzon, in his book Beethoven’s Anvil, envisions a type of coupling and en-
trainment that takes place during musicking, both within the minds and bodies of
individuals, and also with the minds and bodies of others. According to him, music
requires that our symbol-processing capacities, motor skills, and emotional and com-
municative skills all work in close coordination such that, under ideal circumstances,
it can produce a type of group interactional synchrony. Avoiding many of the ‘‘infor-
mation processing’’ and ‘‘conduit’’ metaphors that tend to dominate conventional
scholarship on music cognition and communication, Benzon envisions ways in which
the sonic flow of music correlates with the flow of neurophysiological substrates, sup-
porting the possibility for tight coupling among individuals who share a common mu-
sical culture.4
Tightly coupled behaviors, however, need not be blindly imitative. Albert Einstein
famously remarked: ‘‘He who joyfully marches to music rank and file has already
earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the
spinal chord would surely suffice.’’5 Yet in musicking, we also experience far more
subtle and supple forms of sync. According to Strogatz, these supple forms of sync
‘‘embody the qualities that we like to think of as uniquely human—intelligence, sensi-
tivity, and the togetherness that comes only through the highest kind of sympathy.’’6
These types of human sync, however, may turn out to be different from other ani-
mals’ sync in degree rather than kind. Social insects, for instance, frequently display
intricately woven group behaviors through a type of swarm intelligence. Colonies of
bees have fascinated observers for millennia with their ability to move around with
apparent abandon yet at the same time to display a collective sense of purpose. Watch-
ing bees in flight, one can even sense the underlying undulation between sync and
swarm, order and chaos, which appears to inform many qualities of life.
If, as I have argued in the previous chapters, group improvisation may be heard in
its best moments to demonstrate complex and emergent properties that are somehow
greater than the sum of its parts, then investigating individuals and ensembles in
isolation of the network of surrounding influences will not suffice. We need to reorient
our analytical framework to take account of the dynamics that occur in ensembles
as they musick together over days, weeks, months, and even years. And we need to
acknowledge the ways in which influences in musical communities circulate through
more than the sounds of performances and recordings; meaning is everywhere, not
simply in the ‘‘sounds themselves.’’ The networks involved include a host of social
conventions and material artifacts that affect the ways in which music is made and
heard: from the funding sources or media attention that a performer may receive to
the casual conversations or critical reviews that a performance may provoke. While it
may be fairly common to acknowledge the subtle influence that specific audiences and
venues can have on performance, especially in relation to improvisation, the network
of material, economic, technological, educational, and social factors at play, and the
complex meanings that they generate through their interactions, are far more involved
than that. In fascinating ways, this network-style organization both shapes and is
shaped by the activity of all of its participants; everyone changes the state of everyone
else. Although the spontaneous and surprising occurrences in improvised performance
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can attract our immediate attention, it is through the dynamic interplay of social,
material, and sonic culture that we begin to sense the true lifeblood of the music.
Coupling and Entrainment
The picture that is emerging suggests that we are like wheels within
wheels, hierarchies of living oscillators. Or to put it more vividly,
the human body is like an enormous orchestra. The musicians are
individual cells. . . . The players are grouped into various sections.
Instead of strings and woodwinds, we have kidneys and livers, each
composed of thousands of cellular oscillators. . . . The conductor
for this symphony is the circadian pacemaker, a neural cluster of
thousands of clock cells in the brain, themselves synchronized into
a coherent unit.7
—Steve Strogatz
The phenomenon of sync can appear to be both mundane and miraculous. When all
is working well, we rarely notice its precision. But on closer investigation, our internal
dance of time—the way we synchronize with the twenty-four-hour day and regulate
our various body processes accordingly—is actually rather challenging and complex.
(Parents with newborns and many blind people know all too well the debilitating
aspects of not being able to synchronize with regular sleep patterns.) The ways in
which we can synchronize with the outside world, through social bonding, language,
and music, are truly remarkable.
Steve Strogatz describes three levels at which sync operates. At the lowest, micro-
scopic level, cells within a particular organ vary their chemical and electrical rhythms
in lockstep with one another. At the next level, the body’s internal synchronization
keeps all of the various systems and organs synched to the same twenty-four -hour
cycle, yet engaged at different intervals in order to maximize efficiency while conserv-
ing energy. At this level of self-synchrony we are also able to synchronize our speech
with our gesturing, among other things. The third level of synchrony happens between
our bodies and the world around us. At this level we synchronize to the environment
and have the ability to entrain with others.
Entrainment describes a shared tendency of a wide range of physical and biological
systems to coordinate temporally structured events through interaction. Dutch physi-
cists Christiaan Huygens first identified entrainment in 1665 when he realized that
two pendulum clocks in his room were synchronizing on their own. Huygens deduced
that vibrations were being transmitted through the wall that physically linked the
clocks thereby minimizing their collective energy expenditures. A well known biologi-
cal example of entrainment involves the ability for women who live or work together
to synchronize their menstrual cycles (here the interaction happens through phero-
mones), but we also entrain with others when we enter into conversation, timing our
phrases and pauses and synchronizing our body postures and movements to facilitate
close communication.8
For over three decades, William Condon and his colleagues have been studying this
type of interactive synchrony through close analysis of videotapes. Their research dem-
onstrates that, in conversation, listeners can synchronize their body movements to the
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SYNC OR SWARM
speech patterns of others with a lag of only 43 milliseconds (roughly one frame of film
at 24 frames per second).9 Not only are human infants able to demonstrate this type
of synchrony 20 minutes after birth (and perhaps they are learning to synchronize to
voices in utero during the last months of pregnancy), so far as we know our closest
primate relatives can neither synchronize with one another nor hold a steady beat.10
Timothy Perper’s work on human courtship found that, during dating, a couple
moves from standard forms of conversational synchrony to full-body synchrony where
they are looking at each other continuously and touching each other regularly.11 R. C.
Schmidt studied the dynamics of two people given the task of coordinating the swing-
ing motions of a leg to a metronome while sitting within sight of one another. He
found that, below a certain tempo, people are able to synchronize either in phase (with
parallel swinging motions) or out of phase (moving in opposite directions). When
the tempo reaches a critical point, however, only in-phase coordination is possible.
Surprisingly, these results are the same if a single person is asked to coordinate the
movement of their own fingers, suggesting that interactional synchrony and self-
synchrony have the same structure, exhibit the same dynamics. Based on this and
other research, William Benzon hypothesizes that ‘‘Human beings create a uniquely
human social space when their nervous systems are coupled through interactional
synchrony.’’12
This type of entrainment is a much noticed although sadly understudied aspect of
musical performance. Outside of isolated studies of musical meter, and some research
in the fields of music therapy and biomusicology, little work has been done on the
subject.13 Martin Clayton, Rebecca Sager, and Udo Will are publishing a useful re-
source on the topic of entrainment for music scholars that might be especially helpful
to ethnomusicologists:
An entrainment model suggest we look at engagement with music not simply as

a process of encoding and decoding information, but of embodied interaction and
‘‘tuning-in’’ to musical stimuli. . . . Entrainment in musicking implies a profound
association between different humans at a physiological level and a shared pro-
pensity at a biological level. The implications of this view for studies of socialization
and identification are obvious, and so too is the link to questions of enculturation:
someone’s ability to respond appropriately to a given musical stimulus can, since
it is a learned application of a basic biological tendency, be a marker of the degree
to which an individual ‘‘belongs’’ in a particular social group.14
Studies on groove, many of which emanate from the fields of ethnomusicology and
jazz and improvised music studies, are relevant here as well.15 For instance, Charles
Keil’s notion of participatory discrepancies, although a cumbersome phrase, reminds
us that music involves participation and that it is founded on appropriate degrees of
being ‘‘out-of-time.’’ Steve Feld’s discussion of ‘‘lift-up-over-sounding,’’ an aesthetic
principle of the Kaluli of Papua New Guinea, also evokes a musical relationship that
is synchronized but out-of-phase. In fact, Clayton et al. offer what seems to me a
compelling definition of groove as ‘‘the socio-musical process of being entrained at the
preferred degree of synchronicity.’’16 This allows room not only for marches, but also
for free improvisation to groove.
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To return to Strogatz’s three levels of sync, the first two occur in music within the
individual performer, as his or her mental and physical concentration synchronize.
Ethnomusicologist Paul Berliner describes this as the moment when ‘‘the gap between
intention and realization disappears.’’17 More poetically, pianist and phenomenologist
David Sudnow describes this in his book Ways of the Hand as ‘‘singing with the fin-
gers.’’18 The third level of sync, that with the outside world, occurs as performers
listen to each other and respond to ongoing events, the audience, and the context of
performance in order to make music together.
While it might be tempting to argue, as Bruce Johnson does, that jazz and impro-
vised music offer an especially fertile space for this type of synchronization—‘‘an ear-
site in an epistemology dominated by eyesight’’—all musical performance involves, in
its own way, the process of synchronizing actions, intentions, and sounds in order to
make for a compelling experience.19 The process of listening to music together can also
bring audiences and performers into a type of neural synchrony as cognitive, percep-
tual, and motor constructs all may be engaged together. Clayton et al. believe that, ‘‘If
entrainment is a factor in any interpersonal interaction and communication, we
should expect that it is a factor in any variety of musicking.’’20
To counterbalance the ‘‘jazz and its others’’ orientation of much improvisation re-
search, musicologist Nicholas Cook highlights the interactive format of a classical
chamber group and argues that musicians of all types must make continual, detailed,
and spontaneous decisions in order to perform music together well. Rather than make
a strong distinction between ear and eye music, as Johnson does, Cook argues that a
more helpful distinction can be made between music as text and music as perform-
ance. He argues that in a chamber group the score ‘‘choreographs a series of ongoing
social engagements between players, setting up a shared framework or goal.’’21 While
discussing orchestral music, however, Cook concedes: ‘‘We hear the music of large
groups as embodying social interaction even when that is not literally the case; music,
in short, symbolizes social interaction even when it doesn’t actually represent it.’’ Al-
though I am sympathetic to Cook’s main points, I will be most concerned here with
the ways in which collective improvisation challenges players and listeners to establish
and maintain a very immediate and visceral type of social synchrony.
At its most basic, collective improvisation requires synchronizing starting and end-
ing gestures. These brief initial and concluding moments, however, can take on
heightened meanings. Evan Parker once commented, ‘‘The starts of pieces are very
good often because they are impossible to theorize about.’’22 They occur without imme-
diate sonic materials on which to base the ensemble’s development and without ex-
plicit expectations from listeners (although there may be many implicit ones from
both audiences and performers). If an earlier piece has just concluded, a new begin-
ning may of course be heard in relationship to it. And the history that improvisers
share together can also provide a strong point of reference for subsequent meetings.
But in principle, beginnings can emerge from nowhere and quickly move in unex-
pected ways. Endings, too, can be one of the most challenging and satisfying moments
of improvised performance, as the entire ensemble must collectively agree on what
will then become the final gesture (and the final mood) of a given performance.
At times, improvisers can also synchronize their simultaneous gestures without
warning: perhaps landing on a unison pitch together, implying a similar rhythmic
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pattern, or producing a particularly compatible timbral quality during an improvisa-

tion. These moments of transient sync can arrive by chance or through a heightened
sensitivity brought on by interactional synchrony: a skill that may be developed over
time as well.23 Bassist Bertram Turetzky told me in a recent interview, ‘‘Sometimes
you play with people who have E.S.P. [extra-sensory perception]. You’ll hit a high E
and all of a sudden someone else hits the high E. And sometimes they’ll tell you after,
‘I had no idea what you were playing, my hand just went there.’ ’’ Turetzky recalled,
‘‘It has happened to me many times.’’24
While these moments of transient sync can be both surprising and pleasing, an even
more durable type of sync is involved when performers are able to develop their energy
levels and emotions together over long stretches of time. Steve Strogatz points out
that ‘‘when the bells of two different churches happen to ring for a time together on
Sunday morning, or for a moment the blinker in your car flashes in perfect time with
the car ahead of you at a stop light, such sync is pure coincidence, and hardly worth
noting.’’25 Of course moments of musical sync are already far more complicated than
this. Spontaneously landing on a unison pitch or near-identical gesture, for instance,
is much less likely to occur than car blinkers temporarily synchronizing, since the
range of choices available to improvisers is far greater and there is no specific mandate
that individual musicians follow repetitive patterns that might naturally overlap. But
Strogatz’s point is well taken. Persistent forms of sync, those that could not possibly
happen by accident or those that occur far more frequently than would otherwise
be predicted, are even more interesting and more challenging to explore. Strogatz
observes:
Such persistent sync comes easily to us human beings, and, for some reason, it
often gives us pleasure. We like to dance together, sing in a choir, play in a band.
In it’s most refined form, persistent sync can be spectacular, as in the kickline of
the Rockettes or the matched movements of synchronized swimmers. The feeling
of artistry is heightened when the audience has no idea where the music is going
next, or what the next dance move will be. We interpret persistent sync as a sign
of intelligence, planning, and choreography.26
The (perhaps unique) challenge of freer improvised music, then, is to provide this
heightened sense of expectation and surprise to both audience members and to other
performers collectively, in a more or less bottom up fashion.
One of Strogatz’s main research areas has been the remarkable synchronized flash-
ing of fireflies. In parts of Southeast Asia, Africa, and isolated pockets in the United
States, large groupings of fireflies can synchronize their flashing without warning and
seemingly without design. For at least 300 years, Westerners traveling to these regions
have mused in print about their fascinating encounters with this natural light show,
but few offered an explanation, and those who did assumed some sort of central firefly
must be cueing all the rest. George Hudson wrote in 1918, ‘‘If it is desired to get a
body of men to sing or play together in perfect rhythm they not only must have a
leader but must be trained to follow such a leader. . . . Do these insects inherit a sense
of rhythm more perfect than our own?’’27 We now know that each firefly contains an
oscillator, a little metronome, whose timing adjusts automatically in response to the
flashes of others. Through the use of computer modeling techniques, Strogatz and his
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colleague Rennie Mirollo showed that under the right conditions a perfect synchrony
could emerge. Strogatz describes this and other recent work in the area of sync as, ‘‘a
crucial step in the development of a science that could finally contend with the myster-
ies of spontaneous order in time as well as in space.’’28
The models that Strogatz describes for understanding sync among coupled oscilla-
tors, despite their rather simplified design, demonstrate some fascinating connections
to improvised music. To help visualize this work, Strogatz describes the oscillators as
runners doing laps on a circular track. Each runner is influenced by his own internal
dynamics and by his interactions with other runners. In the simplest case, if the run-
ners completely ignore one another they diffuse all over the track, each running at his
own preferred speed, unaffected by the others. But by giving each runner an influence
and sensitivity function, in addition to a preferred speed, interesting orderings begin
to emerge. The influence function might be analogous to a musician’s ability to recruit
support or at least attention from others in the group. The sensitivity function mea-
sures that same musician’s willingness and ability to pay attention to and connect
with the musical developments of others in the ensemble. The preferred speed can
also be seen as roughly analogous to a preferred aesthetic, including expectations of
such things as musical density or dynamic. For the purpose of analogy, we may wish
to think of the coupled sync explored by these models in the broader sense of groove
described above.
Even these rather simplified models showed a remarkable range of behaviors. For
certain combinations of influence and sensitivity, the group actively opposed synchro-
nization, even if everyone started together. In other instances, certain combinations of
influence and sensitivity produced a type of runaway positive feedback that led every-
one to synchronize quickly, to rush to an emerging consensus. These dynamics, when
transposed into the musical realm, could offer some interesting sonic results. Layering
highly intentional sounds that avoid any sense of collusion can produce a very com-
plex texture. And the rapid dovetailing effect of all of the musicians coalescing around
a shared idea, theme, or gesture can also be intriguing to hear. But without additional
dynamic tensions available for exploration, or a coupled and evolving sense of entrain-
ment, both of these formats would arguably lose our interest over time.
One of the nice things about envisioning these models is that they represent a type
of cooperative sync in which there are no leaders, no ultimate boss, and yet remarkably
coordinated behaviors can arise. More complex versions of the models showed that,
although group synchronization is not hierarchical, it is not purely democratic either.
Runners did not necessarily synchronize at the speed of the fastest member. Rather,
by varying the influence and sensitivity functions, runners might synchronize near the
speed of the average runner, or the pack might actually go faster or slower than the
preferred speed of any of its members. Strogatz remarks that, ‘‘It was all wonderfully
counterintuitive.’’29 While under ideal circumstances, musical entrainment in impro-
vised performance can and should produce an emergent whole that is greater than the
sum of its parts, sync does not always work that way. At times it may simply maintain
the status quo or even bring down the overall energy and interest of the group.
By controlling the diversity of the initial population of runners in the models, some
additional dynamics emerged as well. When starting with groups comprised of ex-
tremely diverse members, the models showed that a pack would never form, even if
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their influence and sensitivity functions predisposed them to do so. In musical situa-
tions involving a group comprised of individuals of extremely diverse experience and
ability levels, improvising together will often fail to produce much interest without
some sort of preconceived scheme or strategy to assist the development. Although one
might think that a homogenous group would stand a better chance of synchronizing,
the models of runners actually showed that only beyond a certain threshold of diver-
sity could a phase transition to mutual synchronization occur. In situations where
musicians share too much in common to begin with—say they emanate from near
identical backgrounds or idiomatic traditions—it may be equally challenging for the
group to collectively discover new musical territory. Finally, regardless of the relative
homogeneity of the group to begin with, the models showed that a final state of inco-
herence was always possible, perhaps offering another analogy to the challenges in-
herent in freer forms of group improvisation.
These and similar models have proven useful in understanding many situations in
which order can emerge in complex systems, but it remains difficult to verify them
experimentally since it would require exact measurements that can be extremely dif-
ficult to come by. Even in the case of fireflies, taking measurements at the level of the
individual insect and their individual cells and at the level of the entire system is a
daunting thought. But these models have helped us to envision ways in which com-
plex systems can organize themselves. As Strogatz remarks, ‘‘No maestro is required.
. . . Sync occurs through mutual cuing, in the same way that an orchestra can keep
perfect time without a conductor.’’30
Insect Music
At one level, improvisation can be compared with the ultimate oth-

erness of an ant colony or hive of bees. Perhaps it was no coin-
cidence that in the wake of drummer John Stevens and the
Spontaneous Music Ensemble, certain strands of English impro-
vised music were known, half-disparagingly as insect music.31
—David Toop
Improvisation is not a revolution that pits itself against codification;

it is diffuse. Like ants stripping a carcass, it works from the inside
and outside of codes.32
—John Corbett
In Euro-American art-music culture this binary [between composi-

tion and improvisation] is routinely and simplistically framed as
involving the ‘‘effortless spontaneity’’ of improvisation, versus the
careful deliberation of composition—the composer as ant, the im-
proviser as grasshopper.33
—George Lewis
Scientists, artists, and laypeople alike have for centuries watched in wonder as a flock
of birds spontaneously takes flight and navigates in perfect harmony, or as a hive of
bees throws off a collective swarm into the air. The ancient Greeks and Romans were
famous beekeepers and harvested respectable yields of honey from homemade hives,
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SYNC AND SWARM
yet they got almost every fact about bees wrong. As Kevin Kelly points out in a chapter
of his book Out of Control provocatively titled ‘‘Hive Mind,’’ the idea of the hive as an
emergent, decentralized system was late in coming.34 It was not until the modern era
that the hive was found to be a radical matriarchy and sisterhood (with only a smatter-
ing of male drones) and that the notion of the Queen bee as supreme supervisor was
discounted. When a swarm pours itself out through the front slot of a hive, the queen
bee can only follow.
At the dawn of the twentieth century, the Belgian poet Maurice Maeterlinck won-
dered, ‘‘Where is ‘this spirit of the hive’ . . . where does it reside? What is it that
governs here, that issues orders, foresees the future?’’35 We now know that within the
swarm a half dozen or so anonymous workers scout ahead to check for possible hive
locations. When they report back to the swarm, they perform an informative dance,
the intensity of which corresponds to the desirability of the site they scouted. Deputy
bees follow up on the more promising reports and return to either confirm or discon-
firm the desirability of the new location. Although it is rare for a single bee to visit
more than one potential site, through the process of compounding emphasis, the more
desirable sites end up getting the most visitors. In other words, the hive chooses: the
biggest crowd eventually provokes the entire swarm to dance off to its new location.
We can sense in this and other examples of decentralized decision-making a quality
that appears to inform all life: emergence. William Morton Wheeler, the founder of
the field of social insects, argued as early as 1911 that an insect colony operates as a
type of superorganism: ‘‘Like a cell or the person, it behaves as a unitary whole, main-
taining its identity in space, resisting dissolution . . . neither a thing nor a concept, but
a continual flux or process.’’36 Other terms have been proposed as well. Kelly adopts
the notion of a ‘‘vivisystem’’ since, like superorganism, it extends certain qualities and
dynamics of living systems into the social realm without the more problematic claim
of extending life to them. Both terms leave open the idea that ‘‘multiorganism organ-
isms’’ may take a very different form than multicellular ones.37
Even the sound of the swarm can fascinate human ears. For her aptly titled ‘‘Bee
Project,’’ kotoist and multimedia artist Miya Masaoka’s positioned a glass-enclosed
bee hive of 3,000 bees in the center of the stage and amplified, manipulated, and
blended its sounds with those from a trio of improvisers, all according to the instruc-
tions in her score. Later versions of the same work have used spatialization software
to twist and tilt the sound of the hive so that listeners can be sonically located within
the swarm.
As the three quotes offered at the beginning of this section illustrate, there are
several ways in which we might wish to locate musical connections to the swarm.
Some improvised music provokes such quick reactions from players and evokes such
complicated and dense soundscapes for listeners that a literal analogy to a swarm of
insects may seem rather appropriate. And the ways in which individual improvisers
can be heard to be ‘‘picking at’’ a shared body of modern techniques and sensibilities
but in resolutely individualistic ways, or to be following their own creative spark while
also being sensitive to and dependent on the evolving group dynamic, may bring to
mind the behavior of social insects that seem to have their own agenda while also
working in ways that organize the group without supervision. Finally, as we will see
more in the next section, the notion of ‘‘insect music’’ has perhaps become most asso-
ciated with a type of generative compositional scheme, and often with the power of
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computers to create complex patterns from relatively simple materials, such that ques-
tions about the ways in which creativity may be facilitated or constrained and the
ways in which cultural understandings may be reflected, reshaped, or remain con-
cealed in this type of work become particularly important.
In addition to being an extremely skilled improviser, the English drummer John
Stevens will always be remembered for his instrumental role in developing the scene
at the Little Theater Club in London that nurtured many in the first generation of
English free improvisers and for his commitment to passing on this music in general.
One of his early pedagogical approaches was titled Click Piece, and it included little
more that the instruction to play the shortest sounds on your instrument.38 In the
collective setting, however, one would gradually become aware of an emergent group
sound. As David Toop explains, ‘‘The piece seemed to develop with a mind of its own
and almost as a by-product, the basic lessons of improvisation—how to listen and
how to respond—could be learned through a careful enactment of the instructions.’’39
Steven’s Click Piece highlights one of the central aspects of swarm intelligence, that
relatively simple decentralized activities can produce dramatic, self-organizing behaviors.
In the scientific community, a growing number of researchers are exploring new
ways of applying swarm intelligence (or SI) to diverse situations.40 For instance, the
foraging of ants has led to improved methods for routing telecommunications traffic
in a busy network. The way in which insects cluster their dead can aid in analyzing
bank data. The distributed and cooperative approach used by many social insects to
transport goods and to solve navigational problems has led to new insights in the
fields of robotics and artificial intelligence. And the evolving division of labor in honey-
bees has helped to improve the organization of factory assembly line workers and
equipment. As Eric Bonabeau and Guy Théraulaz see it: ‘‘The potential of swarm intel-
ligence is enormous. It offers an alternative way of designing systems that have tradi-
tionally required centralized control and extensive preprogramming.’’41
But beyond these business and technological applications, one of the main lessons
of contemplating SI is that organized behaviors can develop in decentralized ways.
Can exploring and thinking about SI affect the way we make and think about music?
It remains difficult for many people to envision complex systems organizing without
a leader since we are often predisposed to think in terms of central control and hierar-
chical command. The notion that music can be organized in complex ways without a
composer or conductor still leaves many scratching their heads in doubt. Scientists
have also been predisposed in the past to look for chains of command, instances of
clear cause and effect. But the emerging field of SI demonstrates that complex behav-
iors and efficient solutions can be arrived at without a leader, organized without an
organizer, coordinated without a coordinator.
The secret of the swarm lies in the intercommunication of its members. Through
direct and indirect interactions among autonomous agents and between agents and
their environment, swarm systems are able to self-organize in decentralized, robust,
and flexible ways. Bonabeau, Theraulaz, and Marco Dorigo, a physicist, biologist, and
engineer working together at the Santa Fe Institute, offer a list of four basic ingredi-
ents that through their interplay can manifest in swarm intelligence: 1) forms of posi-
tive feedback, 2) forms of negative feedback, 3) a degree of randomness or error, and
finally 4) multiple interactions of multiple entities.42
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Positive feedback in SI can be usefully summarized as simple ‘‘rules of thumb’’ that

promote the creation of structures: activities such as recruitment and reinforcement.
Negative feedback counterbalances positive feedback and helps to stabilize the system:
it may take the form of saturation, exhaustion, or competition. A certain degree of
randomness or error is also crucial, since it enables the discovery of new solutions and
produces fluctuations that can act as seeds from which new structures develop. Fi-
nally, SI generally requires a minimum density of mutually tolerant individuals, since
individuals should be able to make use of the results of their own activities and the
activities of others.
While something of a general and descriptive list, these ingredients do play impor-
tant roles in collective improvisation. Through positive feedback musicians not only
develop their own ideas from a kernel of inspiration, but they also work together to
support the ideas of others and the evolving ensemble sound. They ‘‘recruit’’ others to
support or sustain their own developments, or they may choose to ‘‘reinforce’’ the
creative direction of others instead. Similar to the ways in which information about
the best food source or the shortest path can be compounded among a swarm of bees
or a colony of ants, positive feedback increases the ability of an improvising group
to follow the more ‘‘promising’’ of many concurrent ideas being pursued by various
members.
Negative feedback in improvisation helps to keep things interesting. By intention-
ally looking elsewhere for new ideas or new musical areas to explore, individuals can
either signal transitions away from ensemble moments that have lingered too long or
seem to be going nowhere (the feelings of saturation and exhaustion), or they can
productively layer divergent sonic qualities and musical ideas together or provoke oth-
ers to boost their own creativity (through a competitive element). Negative feedback
helps to maintain a balance in the evolving improvisation so that one idea does not
continue to amplify indefinitely (although a more static approach can produce inter-
esting results as well).
Unexpected occurrences, in the form of randomness or error, often provide both
source material and inspiration for individuals and groups to explore new sonic terri-
tory, musical techniques, and interactive strategies. Noticing and capitalizing on unex-
pected fluctuations as an improvisation unfolds can produce important structural cues,
developments, and transitions, and it represents a particular joy of improvised music
making in general. Without this third ingredient, groups of improvisers who work
together over a longer period of time might become too familiar with one another’s
musical language and approach or might fall into regular strategies of support and
counterbalance (and this of course does happen). Finally, the notion that individuals
and the group as a whole benefit from multiple interactions and perspectives is some-
thing of an axiom in ensemble forms of improvisation. One of the particular challenges
of much contemporary improvisation, for both players and listeners, is to remain
aware of and sensitive to the many musical gestures and processes circulating within
the playing of each individual (including one’s own playing) and between members
of the group.43
Systems demonstrating swarm intelligence do differ widely in the amount and types
of intercommunication between members. Without a doubt there are important differ-
ences in the degrees of freedom allowed in a swarm of bees and in the sonic swarm of
collective improvisation. But if interesting complexities can emerge from groupings of
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individuals with a limited array of communication possibilities, how much more can
we expect from experienced and creative artists? J. Stephen Lansing, an anthropolo-
gist who also serves as external faculty at the Santa Fe Institute, wonders about com-
plex adaptive systems in general: ‘‘What if the elements are not cells or light bulbs but
agents capable of reacting with new strategies or foresight to the patterns they have
helped to create?’’ 44 Much of the current research by social scientists on complex
adaptive systems is concerned with precisely this question.
Even within the field of improvised music, the range of allowable or expected partic-
ipation can vary greatly. To return to our earlier example of John Stevens’s Click Piece,
although this generative approach to collective improvisation offered an effective way
to make ‘‘quite ravishing’’ music with a large ensemble comprising players of mixed
ability and experience, to more skillful and confident musicians—such as Evan Parker,
an early duo partner with Stevens—it quickly became an unproductive limitation.
Simplifying the parameters for improvisation can be useful and even necessary for
making large ensembles swarm effectively, but in the more intimate setting of a small
group, arguably the preferred arrangement for the majority of free improv enthusiasts,
a less restrictive framework is usually desired.45
In much freer improvisation, the collective pattern of the group is more important
than any of the individual actions heard in isolation. But this does not deny freedom
to individual musicians. In an interview with Monastery Bulletin, an online magazine
with the subheading ‘‘Timeless Periodical for the Liberation of Music and Literature,’’
Evan Parker highlighted ways in which freedom works within the collective unfolding
of what might easily be termed swarm dynamics:
The freedom is of course that since you and your response are part of the context
for other people, and they have that function for you, it’s very hard to unravel the
knots of why anybody is doing what they do in a given context. I think it’s pretty
clear that you could sort of go with the flow, or you could go against the flow.
And sometimes what the music really needs is for you to go with the flow, and
sometimes what it really needs is for you to do something different. Or anybody,
somebody, to do something different. So that’s why people improvise, presum-
ably, because they want the freedom to behave in accordance with their response
to the situations. But since their response then becomes part of the new situation
for the other players, it’s very hard to say why a particular sequence of events
unfolds in the way it does. But we get used to following the narrative of improvi-
sational discourse.
Parker’s notion that ‘‘the music’’ needs for things to happen, needs for musicians to
do things, is a fairy common way in which improvisers speak about the process of
performance. In his liner notes to the album In Order to Survive, bassist William Parker
expresses that, ‘‘Creative Music is any music that procreates itself as it is being played
to ignite into a living entity that is bigger than the composer and player.’’ While his
comments certainly resonate with the notion of a vivisystem or superorganism
touched on earlier, they may also highlight an additional dimension of SI research:
interactions within a swarm can be both direct and indirect. The direct interactions
are the obvious ones: with ants this can involve antennation or mandibular contact,
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food or liquid exchange, chemical contact, etc. But indirect interactions are more sub-
tle. In SI they are referred to by the rather cumbersome term stigmergy (from the Greek
stigma: sting, and ergon: work).46 Stigmergy describes the indirect interaction between
individuals when one of them modifies the environment and the other responds to
the new environment rather than directly to the actions of the first individual. This
helps to describe the process of ‘‘incremental construction’’ that many social insects
use to build extremely complex structures or to arrange items in ways that might at
first seem arbitrary or random. And because positive feedback can produce nonlinear
effects, indirect interaction can result in dramatic bifurcations when a critical point is
reached: for example, some species of termites alternate between non-coordinated and
coordinated building to produce neatly arranged pillars or strips of soil pellets.
But swarm intelligence has its limits and its drawbacks. Social insects can adapt to
changes in their environment, but only within a certain degree of tolerance. For in-
stance, many social insects are able to seek out and find new food sources when an
existing one is exhausted, or some species are able to reallocate labor roles if the num-
ber of required workers for a specific task dwindles, all without explicit instruction.
But the ‘‘army ant syndrome’’ offers a compelling example of the limits to this adapt-
ability and of swarm intelligence in general. Among army ants, when a group of forag-
ers accidentally gets separated from the main colony, the separated workers run in a
densely packed ‘‘circular mill’’ until they all eventually die from exhaustion. Although
able to function well within the group under normal circumstances, an unpredictable
perturbation of a large enough degree can destroy the colony’s cohesiveness and make
it impossible for the group to recover.
For a musical analogy, while sensitivity to the group is an essential component of
improvised performance, to blindly base one’s own playing on what others do or to
simply follow the group as an overriding strategy can lead to rather inflexible and
ineffective results, producing a musical ‘‘circular mill.’’ And many improvisers, if they
sense that all of the participants are following each other too carefully, will ‘‘go against
the grain’’ or ‘‘forge out on their own’’ into new sonic territory; in other words, they
will defy the logic of the hive mind.
The cohesion of small groups can also be jeopardized by imbalances that lead to
polarization. Drawing on research with decision-making among corporate boards and
committees, James Surowiecki identifies a few qualities that appear to factor into all
intimate social settings: earlier comments are more influential; higher status people
talk more and more often; status is not always derived from knowledge/experience.47
Since constantly making comparisons and adjustments to others can result in an un-
productive ‘‘group think,’’ it is important for individuals to champion their own ideas
in small group settings. But too much vehemence in this can lead to a completely
polarized setting or to an ‘‘information cascade’’ when others are subsumed by a sin-
gular view or opinion. In short, deference to the ideas of others is important, but so is
dissent when required.
The field of SI is still very much in its infancy. It is often extremely difficult for
researchers to understand the inner workings of insect swarms and the variety of rules
by which individuals in a swarm interact. Even in those cases when we can under-
stand the behaviors of individuals, we may still be unable to predict or understand the
dynamics of the overall system since countless other environmental factors come into
play. When transposed into the realm of humans, these uncertainties only compound
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themselves. Discussing the business and technological applications of SI, Bonabeau

and Théraulaz confess that: ‘‘Although swarm-intelligence approaches have been ef-
fective at performing a number of optimization and control tasks, the systems devel-
oped have been inherently reactive and lack the necessary overview to solve problems
that require in-depth reasoning techniques.’’48 We still don’t know enough about social
insects, little less social humans, to be able to understand how certain group behaviors
emerge and evolve.
Nevertheless, the notion that a group can have capacities and capabilities that ex-
tend beyond the scope of any of its participating members is a powerful one. As Kevin
Kelly points out, the hive does possess much that none of its parts possesses. Not only
does swarm intelligence represent a type of distributed perception for the hive, but the
hive also possesses a type of distributed memory; the average honeybee operates with
a memory of six days, but the hive as a whole operates with a distributed memory of
up to three months, twice as long as the lifetime of the average bee.49 Bonabeau et al.
write:
We suggest that the social insect metaphor may go beyond superficial considera-
tions. At a time when the world is becoming so complex that no single human
being can really understand it, when information (and not the lack of it) is threat-
ening our lives, when software systems become so intractable that they can no
longer be controlled, perhaps the scientific and engineering world will be more
willing to consider another way of designing ‘‘intelligent’’ systems where auton-
omy, emergence and distributed functioning replace control, preprogramming,
and centralization.50
We might also hope that the music world will continue to explore ways of organizing
sonic and social experiences that do not hinge on centralized notions of control.
By Lead or By Seed
People seem to have a strong preference for centralization in almost

everything they think and do. People tend to look for the cause, the
reason, the driving force, the deciding factor. When people observe
patterns in the world (for example the flocking of birds or the forag-
ing of ants), they often assume centralized causes where none exist.
And when people try to create patterns and structures in the world
(for example, new organizations or new machines), they often im-
pose centralized control where none is needed.51
—Mitchel Resnick
The evolution of a complex dynamical system is not ruled by a Pla-

tonic king, constructed by a Cartesian architect, or forecast by a
LaPlacean spirit, but grows much like a living organism.52
—Klaus Mainzer
If the practice of free improvisation continues and grows, control

over music will tend to decentralize toward a communal expression
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and experience—not the work of a single composer, not at the di-

rection of any controlling individual or style, not an expression of
one ego, and not the separations between player and instrument,
musicians and audience, amateur and professional, art and life.53
—Tom Nunn
The behavior of the slime mold Dictyostelium discoideum confounded scientists for
centuries. Under hospitable conditions, when the weather is cool and the food supply
abundant, the mold operates as thousands of distinct single-celled units, moving and
feeding separately from one another. But when those conditions shift for the worse,
the distinct life forms coalesce into a single, larger organism that can withstand a
higher level of ecological adversity and can move en masse to find new sources of
food. The question that confounded scientist for centuries was simply, how do these
individual slime molds synchronize their behaviors in order to coalesce into an aggre-
gate swarm, a collective whole? The conventional wisdom was that this display of
group solidarity must come at the behest of a smaller group of ‘‘pacemaker’’ cells that
send out chemical messages in the form of cyclic AMP. But despite years of working
on the problem, no one was able to locate these ‘‘pacemaker’’ cells. None of the indi-
viduals possessed any distinguishing characteristics that set them apart from the
others.
The problem, it turned out, was not that scientist were unable to locate these pace-
maker cells but rather that they presumed their existence to begin with. Until just
recently, scientists were often heavily conditioned to look for centralized rather than
decentralized systems: instances of control rather than cooperation. The story of slime
molds offers an example of just how recalcitrant these conditioned views can be. In
1970, Evelyn Fox Keller, a Harvard Ph.D. in physics who was interested in applying
mathematical insight to biology, proposed an alternate view.54 She demonstrated that
slime molds could self-organize into a community without a centralized command,
without any specialized cells initiating the aggregation. Despite the appearance of cor-
roborating research, it took more than a decade for the scientific establishment to
accept her view and it remains difficult for many to think in terms of decentralized,
emergent phenomena.55
Mitchel Resnick, author of Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams and the creator of the
StarLogo agent-based modeling program, finds that people tend to assume that pat-
terns are created either by lead or by seed.56 By which he means that when people
observe patterns in the world they either assume a leader orchestrated it or some
preexisting or pregiven inhomogeneity in the environment gave rise to the pattern.
For instance, while Resnick was working in his office one afternoon on a StarLogo
simulation of emergent slime mold behavior, Marvin Minsky walked in. Minsky, who
is perhaps most famous for his decentralized notion of a ‘‘society of mind,’’ watched
the computer-generated slime molds moving around and inside of little green blobs
on Resnick’s screen for some time. Then he remarked, ‘‘But those creatures aren’t self-
organizing. They’re just moving toward the green food.’’ Even Minsky, who has
thought long and hard about self-organizing behaviors, jumped to the conclusion that
the green blobs were pieces of food placed throughout the virtual world to act as seeds
that would attract the slime molds. But in fact the green blobs were pheromone trails
that each slime mold dropped behind itself while also ‘‘sniffing’’ ahead to follow the
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scent others had already left behind. When he introduces his modeling techniques to
students, Resnick finds similar tendencies to want to impose a leader or at least a
collective goal on these computer agents.
Why do people have such a strong commitment to centralized approaches?57 Why,
for example, did scientists believe that bird flocks and bee hives must have leaders, or
that slime molds required pacemaker cells in order to aggregate successfully? Resnick
asserts that, ‘‘Our intuitions about systems in the world are deeply influenced by our
conceptions of ourselves.’’58 Although modern theories of cognition are increasingly
demonstrating that our minds are composed of thousands of interacting entities and
that we function in social settings by distributing cognitive demands and resources
among the group, we tend to experience ourselves as singular. In his work using Star-
Logo as an educational tool, Resnick found an inherent tension: ‘‘[P]eople felt a gut
attraction to decentralized phenomena, even as they clung tightly to centralized
preconceptions.’’59
This situation appears to be the same in many musical circles as well. I can remem-
ber well walking the halls of UCLA’s Ethnomusicology Department after I had pub-
lished my first scholarly article titled ‘‘Emergent Qualities of Collectively Improvised
Performance’’ and one particular fellow graduate student always asked me when she
saw me, ‘‘What is an emergent quality?’’ Despite my many earnest (and at times
horribly confused) attempts to answer her well meaning question, she still found it
difficult to envision ways that any system—and in particular a musical one—could
produce emergent qualities. But for most people this sense of emergence is a very real
yet notoriously hard to pin down aspect of all good music.
Steve Johnson, in his book Emergence, offers a compelling romp through ‘‘the con-
nected lives of ants, brains, cities, and software,’’ and identifies three general historical
phases to our fascination with emergence. The first phase involved innovative but
often isolated thinkers who sensed forces of self-organization without knowing ex-
actly what they were up against. For not-too-distant examples of this phase we might
look to the school of organismic biology or the Romantic movement in art, literature,
and philosophy. During the second phase, since roughly the middle of the twentieth
century, scientists began to see the benefits of working across disciplinary lines to
identify qualities of self-organization. Johnson writes, ‘‘By watching the slime mold
cells next to ant colonies, you could see the shared behavior in ways that would have
been unimaginable watching either on its own.’’60 Here we can locate work from the
early Macy conferences and the beginnings of cybernetics and systems theory, as well
as the formation of the Santa Fe Institute and similar interdisciplinary research cen-
ters that make the study of self-organization and complexity their primary focus.61 In
the most recent phase, according to Johnson only in the past few decades or so, we
stopped analyzing emergence and started creating it.
In this third phase we can locate software simulations of cellular automata such as
John Conway’s deceptively simple yet brazenly titled computer program the ‘‘Game of
Life.’’ Conway’s simulation captures some remarkably complex and life-like behaviors
by modeling the birth, survival, and death of individual cellular automata based solely
on their local conditions and a small set of operational rules. On an even grander scale,
James Lovelock’s computer simulation titled ‘‘Daisyworld’’ models global temperature
regulation to support his Gaia theory, which envisions the planetary ecosystem as a
type of superorganism. We may also wish to locate in this most recent phase the ways
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in which our day-to-day life is now swarming with systems designed to exploit the
properties of emergence: from network, communication, and global positioning tech-
nologies of all types, to the ways in which they are increasingly being combined to
harness and increase their collective synergy.
The musical world has witnessed a similar proliferation in the ideas and technolo-
gies of emergence. Music making, regardless of cultural or historical particulars, is
arguably about emergence, not only in the sonic domain as vibrations coalesce and
combine, but more importantly in the cognitive and social realms. As Christopher
Waterman puts it, ‘‘Good music is good consociation.’’62 The first phase has been in
place since the earliest musical gestures aligned people into emergent groups through
the process of shared musicking. Johnson’s second phase corresponds roughly to the
mid-twentieth-century shift when ideas of improvisation and open and emergent
form began to circulate more freely across stylistic and cultural divides, although not
without difficulty, as we have seen in previous chapters and will see more in this one.
The most recent phase of musical emergence has seen these ideas continue to flourish
in disparate corners of the music world, perhaps most dramatically when supported
by the convergence of acoustic and electronic music technologies. But although new
technologies have frequently made these approaches possible, generative music, as
some have dubbed this approach, has strong foundations in the experimental music
from earlier phases as well.
In conversation with David Toop, electronic composer Brian Eno discussed how he
was attracted to the early minimalist works of Steve Reich and Terry Riley for their
economy of compositional materials: ‘‘There’s so little there. The complexity of the
piece appears from nowhere.’’ Reflecting on these experiences and the current shift
underway, Eno remarks: ‘‘I think one of the changes of our consciousness of how
things come into being, of how things are made and how they work, is the change
from an engineering paradigm, which is to say a design paradigm, to a biological
paradigm, which is an evolutionary one.’’ Favoring these organic metaphors, Eno lik-
ens generative music making to gardening. In gardening, you have some degree of
control, but you never know precisely what will emerge, since living things respond to
changing conditions during their growth. ‘‘Generative music,’’ according to Eno, ‘‘is
like trying to create a seed, as opposed to classical composition which is like trying to
engineer a tree.’’63
Modern biology has done much to shape our thinking about the dynamics of com-
plex systems that can emerge without a grand-overseer, but it has been only relatively
recently that the collective, cooperative, and bottom-up aspects of biological develop-
ment have begun to receive their proper due. Darwin’s influential theory of evolution
described the increased fitness of biological species through natural selection based on
random mutations. While his theory has remained a pillar of much modern science, its
emphasis on strictly random mutations and the highly competitive aspects of nature
(frequently described as ‘‘red in tooth and claw’’) has been challenged by many for its
inability to take account of the self-organizing, interconnected, and cooperative as-
pects of life.
The current orthodox paradigm in biology is Neo-Darwinism, a synthesis of Dar-
win’s theory of evolution by natural selection, Mendel’s laws of inheritance, and mod-
ern genetic findings from molecular biology. Although considerable new scientific
insight has been added to Darwin’s original evolutionary ideas, Neo-Darwinism still
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hinges on the notion that small, undirected, essentially random changes allow for
reproductive success and produce evolutionary change. There are, however, an increas-
ing number of dissenting voices that are highlighting the important role that self-
organization can play in the evolution of life forms and in the regulatory aspects of
life on a planetary scale.64 As Fritjof Capra explains in The Web of Life:
The driving force of evolution, according to the emerging new theory, is to be

found not in the chance events of random mutation, but in life’s inherent ten-
dency to create novelty, in the spontaneous emergence of increasing complexity
and order . . . Our focus is shifting from evolution to coevolution—an ongoing
dance that proceeds through a subtle interplay of competition and cooperation,
creation and mutual adaptation.65
Symbiosis, a term first coined by German botanist Anton DeBary in 1873 to describe
the process through which members of different species live in physical contact, has
tended to be relegated to specialized biological status. If we learned of the term at all
in our high school biology classes, it was most likely illustrated with an example of a
parasite: perhaps a tapeworm that can live within the stomach of a dog. But symbiosis
is far more prevalent than we were originally led to believe. Lynn Margulis, one of the
preeminent researchers dedicated to refocusing contemporary evolutionary theory on
the cooperative aspects of life, writes in her book Symbiotic Planet: ‘‘We are symbionts
on a symbiotic planet, and if we care to, we can find symbiosis everywhere.’’66
Microbes are Margulis’s true passion. Because they are often construed as primarily
agents of disease, their role in regulating the global ecology as well as the health of
humans, animals, and plants is often ignored. Additionally, since the microbial world
is downplayed in conventional evolutionary theory, so too is the important role that
cooperation, sharing, and symbiosis play as sources of innovation in evolution. She
writes: ‘‘From the level of microorganisms on up to the so-called higher organisms,
including multi-cellular plants, animals, and even human beings, sharing is as essen-
tial to survival as struggle.’’67 According to Margulis and her son Dorion Sagan, ‘‘Life
did not take over the globe by combat, but by networking.’’68
This belief has led Margulis to the much stronger claim that in certain cases long-
term cohabitation results in symbiogenesis, the appearance of new tissues, organs, or-
ganisms, even new species. Although it has taken some time, her work finally con-
vinced the scientific establishment that cells organized through the permanent
incorporation of bacteria as plastids and mitochondria. Margulis believes, however,
that most evolutionary novelty arose, and still arises, directly from symbiosis.69 Al-
though gradual changes within a species due to environmental pressures can be well
demonstrated by the current theory, the biological community has yet to produce com-
pelling evidence of the formation of even a single new species due solely to natural
selection and the gradual accumulation of gene mutations. Unfortunately, as Margulis
laments, ‘‘the idea that new species arise from symbiotic mergers among members of
old ones is still not even discussed in polite scientific society.’’70
Despite the inherently social nature of music performance, the notion of creative
cooperation in music composition circles still remains something of a taboo subject as
well. Pauline Oliveros’s work developed at approximately the same time as Reich’s
and Reiley’s and in great part as a reaction to the dominant ‘‘engineering’’ paradigm
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that was prevalent in mid-twentieth century ‘‘new music’’ composition (and to some
extent still is today). Her fascination with improvisation, ‘‘deep listening,’’ and the
integrated body-mind of the performer also positions her strongly within this emerg-
ing biological paradigm. Some of her early tape delay pieces were reportedly inspired
by hearing the sounds of frogs living in the pond outside of her window at Mills
College. When large groups of frogs are calling, an observer can hear startling mo-
ments of perfect synchronization, moments in which groups and individuals are
slowly moving out of phase with one another, and moments when the calling sud-
denly stops, all for reasons that are difficult for humans to discern. More than two
decades after Oliveros’s work, David Dunn made her amphibian inspiration even more
tangible in his ‘‘Chaos & The Emergent Mind of the Pond, ’’ a sound installation
that incorporates both ambient field recordings and computer generated sounds and
effects.
Some of Evan Parker’s recent projects also reflect a generative or biological perspec-
tive in both overt and subtle ways. On perhaps the most overt level, he recently re-
leased a recording dedicated to fellow soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy titled Evan
Parker with Birds, in which he improvises to bird sounds that were recorded and pro-
cessed by John Coxon and Ashley Wales of Spring Heel Jack. More subtly, certain
aspects of Margulis’s sybiogenesis research inspired and shaped his third ECM album
with the Electro-Acoustic Ensemble. And for his 60th birthday, Parker soloed with the
London Symphonietta, improvising to a work that he heard for the very first time
during performance. Django Bates had arranged the piece, ‘‘Premature Celebration,’’
from individual bars of music that had been supplied by composers from around the
world though a type of ‘‘open source’’ design. David Toop finds that Parker’s improvis-
ing can give the impression to listeners that ‘‘something is alive and growing, like a
timelapse photograph of plant growth, one of the creatures grown in the ‘garden of
unearthly delights’ by William Latham’s computational breeding program or the vola-
tile communities generated in Conway’s Game of Life.’’71
The English group Morphogenesis demonstrates their connections to the emerging
biological paradigm in name as well as in sound and approach. Morphogenesis is a
biological term that describes the capacity of all life forms to develop ever more com-
plex and baroque bodies out of impossibly simple beginnings. The group Morphogene-
sis integrates instrumental, electronic, and environmental sounds into ‘‘a kind of
hinterland between composition, improvisation, and process/generative music.’’72 In
concert, they often use remote microphones situated outside the performance venue
to add the sounds of wind, rain, or traffic to their evolving improvisations. 73 And
group member Michael Prime has created a ‘‘bioactivity translator’’ which he uses on
humans and trees among other things in order to incorporate patterns produced by
living things into the group’s music.
In addition to her Bee Hive project already discussed, Miya Masaoka has created
interactive installations that translate a plant’s real-time responses to its physical envi-
ronment into sound. Plants can exhibit a surprisingly complex relationship to their
environment including demonstrating a level of self-recognition, sensing the presence
of friends, foes, and food, and challenging and exerting power over other species.
Scientists believe that not only can plants communicate with each other and with
insects by coded gas exhalations, they can perform cellular computations and remem-
ber even the tiniest transgression for months. A testament to the growing notion of
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‘‘plant smarts,’’ the first ever conference on plant neurobiology was held in 2005.74
Masaoka has also explored related projects in the human domain that use medical
equipment, such as EEG, EKG, and heart monitors, to make audible the processes of
the brain and body. Challenging audiences’ cultural as well as sonic perceptions, her
most recent version of this work asks, ‘‘What is the Sound of 10 Naked Asian Men?’’75
The tendency for generative musicians to find inspiration and sound sources outside
of the human realm (or directly wired to it!) does raise some particularly hairy ques-
tions. Perhaps most controversial of these is the issue of abdicating control of the
creative process. David Rothenberg, the author of Hand’s End: Technology and the Limits
of Nature and Sudden Music: Improvisation, Sound, and Nature, asks simply: ‘‘My main
question on generative music is: can we trust machines to create for us?’’76
One might wish to dismiss this question with the quick answer that computer’s
don’t create, people do. Or better still, if we accept that listeners ‘‘create’’ music, then
the question becomes unimportant, since humans will do the ‘‘creating’’ regardless of
who or what generated the stimulus. But the notion that computers are simply the
tool with which people do their creating deserves some scrutiny. This line of reasoning
implies that, just as writing can be used to quite different effects by different authors,
computers simply provide a platform and a means for human creativity. This just-a-
tool answer, however, fails to distinguish between those tools whose main role is to
improve a user’s ability to do a pre-existing job and those tools that can in fact create
a job that nobody thought to do, or nobody could have done, before.
Although computers are extremely good at storing and retrieving large amounts of
data, this is an example of their ability to improve on a pre-existing job: humans were
already able to store and retrieve data. It often takes considerable time before the
possibilities inherent in a new technology become apparent.77 Early film was described
as ‘‘photographed theater.’’ And when Edison invented the phonograph he envisioned
an automatic Dictaphone, not a technology that would go on to shape dramatically
our relationship with music: not only where and how we hear it but also how we
create, manipulate, and define it, and how we define ourselves in relationship to it.
Applications like Conway’s Game of Life and Resnick’s StarLogo simulations dem-
onstrate that computers may be best suited to modeling emergent and decentralized
forms of order: those qualities that tend to be difficult for humans to conceptualize
easily. Mitchel Resnick finds that when students work with computers in this way it
helps them to internalize a sense of emergent behavior, making intuitive something
that may at first seem rather counterintuitive. Along these same lines, Brian Eno re-
counts his early experiences with Conway’s Game of Life at the San Francisco
Exploratorium:
Life was the first thing I ever saw on a computer that interested me: almost the
last actually, as well. For many, many years I didn’t see anything else. I saw all
sorts of work being done on computers that I thought was basically a reiteration
of things that had been better done in other ways. Or that were pointlessly elabo-
rate. I didn’t see many things that had this degree of class to them. A very simple
beginnings and a very complex endings [sic].78
Computers can and do assist composers in hearing and notating their ideas, improving
on their ability to do a pre-existing job. But their generative possibilities offer a win-
dow into musical orderings and possibilities that were, for the most part, unimagin-
able beforehand. Yet we must be careful, since even these ‘‘decentralized’’ approaches
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to generative music making can mask certain cultural assumptions. Perhaps the more
insidious concern raised by ongoing human-machine interactions is in what ways do
they reflect notions about the nature and functions of music that may already be
deeply embedded in their construction and use?
Writing about human-computer interactions in general and his Voyager system in
particular, George Lewis finds that, ‘‘Interactions with these systems tend to reveal
characteristics of the community of thought and culture that produced them.’’ Many
have commented on the problematic and biased language often adopted by computer
engineers in general. For instance, it has become commonplace to talk about machine
intelligence, memory, or languages in ways that not only encourage the dangerous
metaphor of humans as machines but ignores the fact that these terms are full of rich,
subtle, and not always well understood meanings in the human realm. And the lan-
guage of computer use is filled with military and masculine metaphors of control—
enter, escape, command, target, master, slave, etc.
New technologies can also, if implemented uncritically, mask the ways in which
decisions about the integrity, usefulness, and by connection the funding of public art
are culturally sanctioned. The dangers of evoking a biological paradigm without also
being alert to this unquestioned cultural dimension have played out many times before
as well, perhaps most notoriously in Social Darwinism. Social Darwinism saw only
competition in nature, and in its application it was very much allied with the notion
of systems organized ‘‘by lead.’’ The emerging symbiotic outlook that emphasizes the
continual cooperation and codependence of all living things may make us less fearful
of these metaphorical forays from biology into the social sphere.
But care must always be taken not to accept current scientific wisdom at face value
when the concerns of people are involved. In his book Silicon Second Nature, anthropolo-
gist Stefan Helmreich offers an ethnography of the Santa Fe Institute and argues that
the artificial-life models being explored there reflect the unconscious cultural assump-
tions and social prejudices of their creators: ‘‘Because Artificial Life scientists tend to
see themselves as masculine gods of their cyberspace creations, as digital Darwins
exploring frontiers filled with primitive creatures, their programs reflect prevalent rep-
resentations of gender, kinship, and race and repeat origin stories most familiar from
mythical and religious narratives.’’79 Simulation models, just like their generative
counterparts, may serve as a type of Rorschach test, revealing the researcher/creator’s
cultural background and psychological idiosyncracies. Lewis, well aware of these types
of criticisms, argues that his Voyager program explores a type of multidominance that
is central to African-American aesthetics and musical practices.
Composers such as John Cage, however, seem to propose with pieces like The Music
of Changes (1951) an inverted formulation of Rothenberg’s question: ‘‘Can we trust
humans to create music?’’80 And Eno, although often characterizing generative music
as a polar opposite of most ‘‘classical’’ music, talks of ‘‘removing personality’’ from his
music and of giving the music no more prominence than a painting hanging on the
wall, preferably a landscape without a foreground figure. The newest forms of genera-
tive composition demonstrate that music can now easily be made that is inherently
unpredictable, unrepeatable, and unfinished: a situation for which our notions of
‘‘composer’’ as leader do not comfortably apply. But these systems, as currently con-
ceived, rely on an initial ‘‘seed’’ planted by an individual who is external to the system
and who then stands back and observes the result from a distance. To this person,
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whether ‘‘engineer’’ or ‘‘gardener,’’ we still attribute the usual benefits and baggage
that accompany the notion of ‘‘composer.’’ At a lecture on his concept of generative
music making, Eno remarked:
If you move away from the idea of the composer as someone who creates a com-
plete image and then step back from it, there’s a different way of composing. It’s
putting in motion something and letting it make the thing for you. . . . This is
music for free in a sense. The considerations that are important, then, become
questions of how the system works and most important of all what you feed into
the system.81
Eno’s words may bring to mind, for some, biologist Stuart Kauffman’s notion of emer-
gence as ‘‘order for free.’’ But in the biological world, as in our social one, this order
can and does come at a cost: species die out and cultures are diminished or
extinguished.
For now at least, there does appear to be a split between those most interested in
exploring emergent properties on computers and those most interested in doing so in
the human social realm. Acknowledging perhaps a growing divide in the new and
improvised music communities, Evan Parker remarked: ‘‘If the more instrumental
approach, the more expressive approach is gradually succeeded by the PowerBook
players and the very quiet players, you’d have to say it has evolved into something else
or it simply died out depending on the way those successors choose to represent their
activities.’’82
Music making has always had an intimate relationship with technologies. And per-
haps that relationship has always been perceived, in varying and overlapping ways,
as able to facilitate, constrain, and even co-opt aspects of human creativity. But for
improvisers, a human element of risk and empathy does often remain paramount.
Pianist Denman Maroney, in a recent presentation at UCSD, demonstrated how he
uses various bars, bowls, and sticks made of copper, rubber, and plastic inside of a
standard grand piano to produce an enormous vocabulary of ‘‘hyperpiano’’ sounds.
These tools, at times remnants of new technologies (CD jewel boxes, for instance),
allow him to unlock timbres and textures inside the piano in both well and not-so-
well understood ways. Early in his career, Maroney spent several years sampling these
hyperpiano sounds to be used in performance in order to avoid the stares of worried
club owners who imagined that their instruments were being damaged. But he was
never satisfied with the results. The samples always reproduced the exact same
sounds, denying him the joy, as he put it, of wallowing in the tension between deter-
minate and indeterminate outcomes. (Of course current generative and processing
techniques might allow for a more interactive approach with digital technology.)
Even when he plays on the instrument in the conventional manner, Maroney has
devised extremely complex ways of composing and improvising using up to three lay-
ered rhythmic cycles at a time. For example, he might play a pulse of 7 beats atop one
of 6 beats atop one of 5 beats, using various registral and articulation decisions to
differentiate the voices. And he often takes advantage of the rare points of coincidence
(210 beats in this example) to affect formal changes in the music. Inspired as a child
by the chirping of crickets and the sawing of his woodworking father, he set out to
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capture the sounds of chaos but paradoxically arrived there through a very determinis-
tic solution. Even though he has used computers to hear these and other more compli-
cated rhythmic layerings, Maroney insisted that he is interested in the human aspect
of performance: the opportunity to make difficult things sound easy and easy things
sound difficult that can only come from human intentionality and action. He also
hopes to maintain those childhood feelings that led him to explore these complexities
in the first place.
One of the challenges of continuing to incorporate computers into musical perform-
ance will be to create this sense of empathy for human listeners. This obstacle may
not be insurmountable, and the simple fact the people often become very attached to
their computers is an encouraging first sign. But computer ‘‘musicians’’ do not (yet)
have a body as such, and it will remain difficult for listeners to empathize with them
in the same way that they can with human performers.83 Yet generative and decentral-
ized behaviors already seem to have an inherent pull on our psyches: the unexpected
successes of screen saver programs that exhibit unending processes of transformation
would seem to offer some indication of this as well.
Mitchel Resnick found that his StarLogo slime-mold program tended to evoke very
different interpretations from different observers: an economist was reminded of the
development of cities; an educational researcher saw instead the interaction of chil-
dren in classrooms as they form learning communities; a business student envisioned
information flowing through an organization; and finally a Zen student saw people in
search of religion. When people constructed their own multi-agent simulations, Res-
nick also found that they frequently became deeply invested in the fate of their ‘‘tur-
tles’’ and the outcome of their virtual worlds. One student compared the experience
to visiting a relative in the hospital and watching the heart monitor alongside the bed
continually fluctuating.84
To return to the question that began this section, why do people assume that sys-
tems are organized either by lead or by seed? In part, this is undoubtedly due to the
fact that many if not most of our social institutions and artistic creations are organized
in this way. Our schools, businesses, and even families often carry with them a strong
notion of hierarchy and control (perhaps too much at times, all though certainly some
of it is needed). When people hear music they tend to assume a composer, a leader.
And in many cases this intuition is also right. But one of the more encouraging aspects
of much contemporary music is that it is not always easy or even possible to know if
a particular instance of music was or was not composed ahead of time.85 And the
generative power of computers is blurring these lines even further. Perhaps most en-
couraging of all, however, is the fact that creativity is increasingly being viewed as a
web of network interactions operating on all scales, reflecting individual, social, cul-
tural, and historical dimensions. An extreme reliance on centralized organization and
centralized metaphors in the past has led to a situation in which many people are
unwilling or unable to imagine systems organizing in a decentralized fashion. Decen-
tralization may be biological coded for ants and other social insects, but it does not
seem to be as natural or automatic for humans. Or it may simply be that, because we
are within the system, we remain unaware of its emergent properties, just as individ-
ual bees and ants may be unaware of their group’s emergent social organization (al-
though this hypothesis is difficult if not impossible to test).86 At any rate, we appear
to be living in an age of increasing complexity and increasing decentralization. Yet
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when confronted with complex situations that negate the possibility of a clear leader,
most people will assume that an external seed is responsible for a given pattern. For
instance, when people are stuck in a traffic jam they invariably want to find the reason
that their trip is being delayed. Is there an accident? Are they doing construction? Did
the police pull someone over or set up a radar trap?87
In general these can be useful intuitions and in many cases they may even be cor-
rect. As Resnick sees it, ‘‘The problem is that people have too narrow a conception of
seeds. They think of only preexisiting inhomogeneities in the environment . . . In self-
organizing systems seeds are neither preexisting nor externally imposed. Rather, self-
organizing systems create their own seeds.’’88 The majority of traffic patterns (and
therefore delays) are simply caused by the pattern of the cars themselves: the density
and arrangement of the parts within the whole. No external seed is needed to produce
an emergent structure.
When envisioning the shift toward decentralization, we may also be guilty of look-
ing for the catalyst, the domain that is sparking decentralization in all of the others.
Are new decentralized scientific models influencing the way we design technologies,
conceive of organizations, and envision art? Or are new technologies provoking us to
view the natural world, ourselves, and our interactions with society in more decentral-
ized ways? Or does the activity of art provoke us to feel emergence and decentraliza-
tion in ways that affect how we live in and engage with the world around us? And if
we believe this to be the case, which art form is provoking the others?
It seems better to view these domains and practices as a type of auto-catalytic sys-
tem in which the decentralization of each domain reinforces and catalyzes the decen-
tralization of the others. The network structure of social, economic, artistic, and
scientific organizations continually impacts how ideas circulate and which ideas are
deemed valuable? Resnick writes: ‘‘Most likely, there is no single, ultimate cause. Each
domain provides new models and new metaphors that influence the others, refining
and accelerating the decentralization trend.’’89 As we saw in the previous chapter,
however, musicking can provide an especially powerful ‘‘consequence-free’’ space for
playfully exploring new modes of interaction, organization, and understanding.
A Web Without a Spider
In the new systems thinking, the metaphor of knowledge as a build-

ing is being replaced by that of a network. As we perceive reality as
a network of relationships, our descriptions, too, form an intercon-
nected network of concepts and models in which there are no
foundations.90
—Fritjof Capra
For mathematicians and physicists, the biggest surprise is that com-

plexity lurks within extremely simple systems. For biologists, it is
the idea that natural selection is not the sole source of order in the
biological world. As for the social sciences, I suggest that emer-
gence—the idea that complex global patterns with new properties
may emerge from local interactions—may someday have a compa-
rable impact.91
—Stephen Lansing
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Because we tend to value individualism and innovation so highly in this culture, we

have often fostered, directly and indirectly, the notion that individual musicians spin
their own individual web from whole cloth as they create. But as we move our gaze
into the social and historical realm, and we realize that all thought is in fact social,
the notion that any one individual is controlling the unfolding web becomes rather
untenable. Models that focus on the creativity of individuals are not wrong, but like
Newtonian science, they may be inappropriate for trying to make sense of certain
types of phenomena. What we need are new models operating at a different level. As
much as we may be conditioned to imagine our selves and our leaders as in control,
the complex and interconnected age we inhabit is making it increasingly clear that
structure and organization can emerge both without lead and even without seed. What
happens and how it happens depends on the nature of the network.
Music, as an inherently social practice, thrives on network organization. On perhaps
the most tangible level, a musician’s livelihood and creative opportunities frequently
depend on the breadth and depth of one’s network of social and professional contacts.
But network dynamics shape the sounds, practices, and communities of music in de-
cidedly more complex and subtle ways as well. Musicians are influenced by their years
of training or apprenticeship, countless hours spent listening to music both publicly
and privately, and perhaps most comprehensively (yet frequently least acknowledged)
by the historical and cultural conventions of a given time and locale. The topics and
techniques of music education also depend on these network-style dynamics, which
inform the process of choosing canons and of exploring and imparting the intricacies
of musical theory and musical aesthetics. Finally the music industry’s far-reaching
networks of production and distribution, and increasingly its consolidated and insular
organizational practices, have the power to structure, at some degree or another, the
networks of inspiration and possibility for nearly everyone who is deeply committed
to music.
What implications does the study of networks have for musical scholarship and
more broadly for our understandings of human creativity, history, and culture? Net-
works may organize not only the social world of musical performance (with whom
you play) but also the ideascapes of musical creativity (by whom you are influenced
and what you chose to create) and the realities of musical community (how historical,
cultural, and economic factors often dictate which musicians and musical ideas gain
notice and prestige). Well aware of these concerns, George Lewis writes in a recent
essay reflecting on improvisation and the orchestra:
Orchestra performers operate as part of a network comprised not only of musi-

cians, composers and conductors, but also administrators, foundations, critics and
the media, historians, educational institutions, and much more. Each of the nodes
within this network, not just those directly making music, would need to become
‘‘improvisation-aware,’’ as part of a process of resocialization and economic re-
structuring that could help bring about the transformation of the orchestra that
so many have envisioned.92
Networks make communication and community possible, but they can also concen-
trate power and opportunities in the hands of a few. In this section I explore some
recent insights from the emerging fields of network study in order to investigate some
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ways in which musical studies might productively grapple with the complex of factors
that establish, maintain, expand, and even destroy musical communities.
Although networks have interested researchers for decades, until recently, each sys-
tem tended to be treated in isolation, with little apparent reason or possible means to
see if its organizational dynamics had anything in common with other networks. From
molecules to microorganisms, plants to people, and genes to Gaia, networks play a
crucial role in shaping our physical and biological worlds. On the social level, networks
also organize the structure and activities of everything from families and friends, to
corporate boards and terrorist cells. Additionally, layers of technology continue to facil-
itate and, at times, impede these network dynamics. Electric power lines and transpor-
tation routes crisscross the country. Satellites relay signals to distant parts of the
planet. And the World Wide Web is already linking ideas and information in ways that
cannot be easily predicted nor understood. We are only now beginning to piece to-
gether some important qualities of, and approaches to, the study of complex dynamic
networks on a broad scale. But Albert-László Barabási, one of the leading researchers
in this still nascent field, optimistically predicts: ‘‘Network thinking is poised to invade
all domains of human activity and most fields of human inquiry. It is more than an-
other helpful perspective or tool. Networks are by their very nature the fabric of most
complex systems, and nodes and links deeply infuse all strategies aimed at approach-
ing our interlocked universe.’’93
The notion of networks may bring to mind rather bare-boned models of how things
are connected. To some extent this is true, since simplifying detail on one level of a
network can highlight organizational similarities on another that would otherwise go
unnoticed. Perhaps the most compelling example of this is the way in which Lynn
Margulis’s research into symbiosis in microbiology, combined with James Lovelock’s
research into the self-regulating aspects of the Earth’s atmosphere, has led to the
notion that ‘‘Gaia is just symbiosis as seen from space’’: all organisms are co-existing
symbiotically since they are all bathed in the same air and the same flowing water.94
Network models, however, are increasingly able to take account of some of the rich
dynamics that occur when individual components are not only doing something—
generating power, sending data, even making decisions—but also are affecting one
another over time. Steven Shaviro writes in his book Connected, Or What It Means to Live
in the Network Society:
As it seems to us now, a network is a self-generating, self-organizing, self-sustain-

ing system. It works through multiple feedback loops. These loops allow the sys-
tem to monitor and modulate its own performance continually and thereby
maintain a state of homeostatic equilibrium. At the same time, these feedback
loops induce effects of interference, amplifications, and resonance. And such ef-
fects permit the system to grow, both in size and in complexity. Beyond this, a
network is always nested in a hierarchy. From the inside, it seems to be entirely
self-contained, but from the outside, it turns out to be part of a still larger
network.95
The notion of ‘‘six degrees of separation,’’ based on an experiment by sociologist

Stanley Milgram, has popularized ‘‘small world’’ networks to many.96 But despite this
intriguing idea, that individuals are much more closely linked than might normally be
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imagined, we still know very little about how these network dynamics evolve. How
can six billion people on the planet be linked so closely? And if this is the case, why
are we usually unaware of this small world property? Are there ways that we might
more successfully navigate in a small world, to take advantage of these close connec-
tions? Or are others already doing so in ways that make for an inherent power imbal-
ance? What are the implications of small world properties for other networks besides
our network of friends? And how does the structure of networks change over time or
reflect both internal and external dynamics? As Duncan Watts summarizes:
Networks are dynamic objects not just because things happen in networked sys-
tems, but because the networks themselves are evolving and changing in time,
driven by the activities or decisions of those very components. In the connected
age, therefore, what happens and how it happens depend on the network. And the net-
work depends on what has happened previously.97
Watts along with Steve Strogatz, his advisor at Cornell University, started off work-
ing on the synchronized chirping of crickets. But Watts’s research direction changed
dramatically when his father asked him during a phone conversation if the notion of
six degrees of separation might relate to his work on sync. Strogatz and Watts decided
to see if they could shed some mathematical light on the subject. They gave themselves
a semester, thinking either that the problem had most likely already been tackled, or
that it might not lead anywhere productive.
The problem, simply stated, is if we imagine the six billion people on the planet as
six billion dots, how can we connect them so that they will exhibit this small degree
of separation. Our first instinct might be an orderly, linear approach. But to achieve
six degrees of separation, each individual would need to be connected to approxi-
mately 250 million people. This is hardly a realistic model of our network of friends.
For graph problems that are more complex than linear approaches would allow,
mathematicians have used random distributions as a working approximation.98 If we,
instead, connect each individual dot randomly to fifty friends (a more reasonable fig-
ure), at six degrees of separation we arrive at upwards of 15 billion connections,
enough to cover our global population and then some. But although a random model
did produce the desired result, Watts and Strogatz were troubled by its inability to
conform to common sense. Although fifty friends may sound like a reasonable figure
for one individual, does each of our friends in turn have fifty distinct friends, who in
turn have fifty more distinct friends? Even more troubling, is each new group of fifty
friends connected randomly across the globe? This was a tough pill to swallow, even
in our interconnected age. In short, random graphs pay no attention to physical prox-
imity or similarity of habit. What Watts and Strogatz needed was a graph that is nei-
ther entirely ordered nor entirely random.
They found their answer in a 1973 paper by sociologist Mark Granovetter titled ‘‘The
Strength of Weak Ties.’’ By asking people about how they got referred to their current
job, Granovetter found that 84% reported that the contact was through a friend or
associate whom they only saw rarely. Only 16% got jobs through a close contact. Gra-
novetter realized that these weaker ties linked together more distant parts of the social
network. A rumor, fad, or fashion, for example, will spread much farther if it is not
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only shared with close friends, but also with a few more distant ones who are con-
nected to other social groups as well.
Drawing on Granovetter’s insight, Watts and Strogatz created a graph that linked
close friends in an orderly manner, but also added a few random ‘‘weak ties’’ that
could easily span large distances. Their ‘‘small-world’’ model exhibited the high degree
of clustering we would expect in social situations, but also the low degree of separation
that Milgram had first uncovered, which allows for unexpected surprises.99 And their
model even offered some insight into the way in which fireflies and crickets synchronize.
Our own brains appear to exploit small world properties as well.100 There are approx-
imately six billion neurons in a marble-sized portion of our grey matter. And clustering
plays an important role in localized processing centers. But long-distance axons can
link different parts of the cerebral cortex in ways that appear to facilitate the inte-
grated and instantaneous qualities of consciousness. These weak ties allow for speed,
flexibility, efficiency, and resilience in cognitive functioning. Recent research on our
working (or short-term) memory also points to a small-world dynamic, in which neu-
rons participate in self-sustaining burst of electrical activity in order to store a memory
temporarily.
Although only limited work has been done on music networks to date, one study
that explored the relationships between jazz musicians from 1912 to 1940 found small
world properties. By using the Red Hot Jazz Archive database on the Internet, Pablo
Gleiser and Leon Danon found that, on average, early jazz musicians were separated
from one another by only 2.79 steps. Their model also captured the clustering of jazz
musicians by geography, with New York and Chicago as the major hubs, and by race,
due to the highly segregated nature of the music industry at the time. As in most
human networks, a few individuals had very high degrees of connectivity. Guitarist
Eddie Lang topped their list, with connections to 415 other musicians, while artists
like Jack Teagarden, Joe Venuti, and Louis Armstrong were all in the top ten of most
connected musicians. A similar study with more contemporary artists might uncover
interesting properties of clustering and connectivity as well.
This notion of extremely well connected hubs highlights some shortcomings of the
Watts and Strogatz model that were illuminated by the work of Albert-Laszlo Barabási
and his team working at Notre Dame University. Although Watts and Strogatz cap-
tured the high clustering and small degree of separation that is characteristic of small
world networks, their model was not dynamic. It did not take account of the evolution
that is characteristic of all real world networks, in which new nodes may be added all
the time, and established nodes—those already with many connections—tend to at-
tract even more.
Barabási and his team were interested in understanding the network organization
of the Internet and the World Wide Web.101 No one knows the exact structure of either.
They have connected in exceedingly complex ways as an unavoidable consequence of
their evolution, and they continue to do so. But by sending out ‘‘robots’’ to scour the
Internet for connection information, Barabási was able to show that the Internet and
the World Wide Web demonstrate small world properties. It typically takes no more
than four network connections to transmit an email from the United States to Hong
Kong, and never more than ten. And with over one billion pages, the World Wide Web
demonstrates only nineteen degrees of separation (nineteen clicks can get you from
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any page on the web to any other). Even with the expected thousand-fold increase in
the next five years, that number should only increase to twenty-one.
The data that Barabási and his team uncovered, however, did not conform to the
mathematics of Watts and Strogatz. Barabási found enormous hubs and an extreme
disparity in the connectivity of various nodes that could not be explained through
‘‘weak ties’’ alone. Their data represented what we might intuitively expect about the
World Wide Web, given the prominence of sites such as Yahoo, Amazon, or Google
and the huge number of personal web pages that are often linked to very few others.
The exact distribution that Barabási found is called ‘‘scale-free,’’ and it can be de-
scribed mathematically by a power law. Unlike the well known bell curve, in which
the majority of individuals fall in the middle of a given range (e.g., the average height
of adults, or the average grades in a class), power laws imply that there is no expected
or average size. When plotted on a logarithmic graph, the connectivity of the World
Wide Web produces a descending straight line, which means that as the number of
links increases, the number of web pages with that many links decreases exponen-
tially. In other words, there are many poorly connected web pages and only a few with
huge numbers of links.
We commonly think of this principle as ‘‘the rich get richer,’’ and it was first identi-
fied by Vilfredo Pareto, who noted that 80% of the property in Italy was owned by 20%
of the population. Often referred to simply as the 80/20 principle, this relationship
offers a reasonable approximation for the wealth distribution on local, regional, na-
tional, and even international levels.102 Recently, the 80/20 principle has been applied
to a large variety of managerial situations, many of which are true, some of which are
not.103 Barabási describes this general principle as preferential attachment, and he
offers a few network situations that approximate this 80/20 rule well: 80 percent of
links on the web point to only 15 percent of webpages, 80 percent of citations go to
only 38 percent of scientists, 80 percent of links in Hollywood are connected to 30
percent of actors.104 Many natural systems demonstrate power laws with slightly dif-
ferent exponents, including the metabolic network within the cell, the network of
inlets and outlets produced by river formation, the distribution of earthquakes due to
tectonic shift, even the network organization behind the English language (Zipf’s
law).105 But why do these diverse systems appear to share a similar design? What do
power laws imply (other than nonlinearity)?
One clue is in their evolutionary history. Hubs tend to emerge in systems that are
complex, operate without a designer, and take account of the compounding effects of
historical development. For instance, visible web pages attract links, visible research-
ers attract citations and coauthors, and well connected musicians attract both atten-
tion and imitation. Two qualities are essential for scale-free organization to emerge in
a system: growth and preferential attachment. Growth offers a clear advantage to
senior nodes, but preferential attachment can, in some instances, allow relative late-
comers to quickly establish themselves as hubs.
Barabási’s more detailed network models take account of both external growth—the
new links that are formed as new nodes are continually added to a system—and inter-
nal growth, which may involve the disappearance or rewiring of existing nodes and
links. In the social realm, these internal dynamics correlate to the fact that senior
members of a community may begin to take in fewer new connections or may lose
connections as they age or retire. In the business world, while early arrivals certainly
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prosper, established companies can lose their edge and rival companies with innova-
tive ideas or products can attract their customer base and outpace them.
In the real world there are also limits to growth potential. These can take the form
of control factors that are imposed on a system, or they may be due to the inherent
costs associated with continual growth. Many explicitly designed systems display
more uniform qualities than a scale-free network. For example, dictatorships aim to
keep the power in the exclusive hands of the ruling class and to ensure that all others
are kept in a roughly equal subordinate position. And networks such as the interstate
highway system or the electrical power grid have been purposefully designed to have
roughly the same number of connections between each node. The airline industry,
however, is based on the idea that a few centralized hubs can, in turn, connect passen-
gers to smaller flights and further flung destinations. As these hubs grew, they tended
to attract more and more business from different carriers looking to increase their own
numbers and connections—a clear example of the scale-free properties of growth and
preferential attachment. But airline hubs can also become overloaded, resulting in
reduced efficiency and cancelled or delayed flights, potentially encouraging smaller
carriers to find less-traveled markets in which to locate their business (e.g., the South-
west Airlines business model that has proven so successful). In the real world, unlike
on the Internet, adding new links can carry with it considerable costs (financial, social,
psychological, etc.). For many networks, there is a point at which adding new links
becomes increasingly difficult or begins to have a negative impact, and this can place
an upper limit on scale-free growth.
Barabási found that for his models to be more realistic he also needed to include an
intrinsic property for each node, a fitness factor, that could account for the ability of
newcomers to succeed in a rich get richer environment. For instance, Google has
emerged as the undisputed hub of the search engine market even though it was pre-
ceded in the marketplace by several years by Yahoo! and AltaVista among others. Due
to Google’s superior technologies, its fitness factor outweighed the advantage of the
earlier arrivals. Barabási calls this ‘‘beauty over age’’ or the ‘‘fit get rich’’ principle106
Even in these more involved models of dynamic networks, as long as growth and
preferential attachment are at work, a scale-free organization almost invariably fol-
lows, although the exact power law coefficient can vary considerably.
Scale-free organization tends to fail only when the competition or interconnectivity
of a system is in some way jeopardized. For instance, Microsoft managed to create an
environment in which healthy competition and a natural hierarchy are all but absent,
producing the near-monopoly situation we see today in computer operating systems.107
One of Barabási’s students, Ginestra Bianconi calculated that in terms of topology, all
networks fall into one of only two possible categories: either the ‘‘fit get rich’’ behavior
of competitive hierarchies or the ‘‘winner takes all’’ behavior of a system that has
reached a tipping point.
With this critical juncture in mind, much of the research on network dynamics has
been concerned with their robustness. How will the Internet fare if a given number of
routers fail? How will a given disease spread based on its infection rate and the soci-
ety’s network dynamics? How will a given species extinction effect the global ecosys-
tem? Or conversely, what is the best strategy for producing failure in a network of
terrorist cells? Scale-free networks, it turns out, are remarkably resistant to random
fluctuations—a very good reason for them to be favored in natural systems. Remove a
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few links or nodes at random and a scale-free system will often reorganize and con-
tinue as if unaffected. But under focused attack, scale-free systems do not hold up so
well. Removing a few central hubs can produce far greater damage, from which a
system may not be able to recover. For instance, the quite common failures of routers
on the Internet rarely create a significant problem, but if one were to target just a few
main hubs and disable them completely, the entire system might fail. Similarly, the
global ecosystem appears able to recover from random events and extinctions, but
biologists are concerned that if a few keystone species are lost, the functioning of the
entire system may be jeopardized.
Are there lessons in all of this network research for musical studies? One lesson of
network thinking in the social domain is that the emergence of well connected hubs
cannot be attributed solely to the properties of individuals. To attribute the inequities
of Pareto’s principle strictly to the ‘‘talent’’ of individuals—whether we are discussing
money or music—is to miss the point that emergent structure is also shaped in impor-
tant ways by the dynamics of the system. Many of the first generation of free jazz
innovators—Cecil Taylor, Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler, and John Coltrane—had
their work dismissed by critics and musicians alike. And for every artist that was
eventually able to land a record deal, how many went unrecorded? The reemergence
of players like Sonny Simmons, Charles Gayle, and most recently Henry Grimes, at-
tests to the fact that countless skilled and innovative musicians do not fare well in the
network of the music industry. And even those who did—Miles Davis and Sonny
Rollins among others—voluntarily dropped out for lengthy periods to reassess their
creative direction. If the quality of their work simply spoke for itself, then why did it
take so long for others to recognize it? This is not to deny the merits of any individual’s
work, only to acknowledge that countless other factors play a role both in how that
work is accomplished and in how one’s work is brought to the attention of others.
Network thinking demonstrates that, since power laws emerge in a network from
the compounding effect of historical development, our standard explanations for the
observed inequities in the world may not be correct. They may simply be describing
what Jared Diamond calls proximate causes. In his important book titled Guns Germs
and Steel, Diamond highlights how geographic differences, including climate and the
availability of crops and animals for domestication, played a more fundamental role
in producing the global inequities of the modern era than those proximate causes
referenced in his title that are usually offered as explanation.108
But this should not be seen as providing an incontrovertible explanation for contin-
uing inequities. Although scale-free networks imply a certain disparity—an increasing
number of better-connected hubs—the range of this disparity can vary dramatically.
To return to Pareto’s principle of wealth distribution, although 80/20 is a decent ap-
proximation across various locales and scales, economies can veer closer to 90/10 or
70/30. In general, more spending across the board redistributes wealth, and taxation
operates as a type of forced trade, but more unregulated investment can increase
wealth disparity. If investment irregularities overwhelm the natural distribution of
wealth via transactions, an economy may ‘‘tip’’ into an extreme range in which only a
few hubs, the equivalent of Bill Gates’s Microsoft, prosper. In Mexico, for instance, by
some accounts the richest 40 people control 30% of the total wealth of the country.
The Mexican economy may have already tipped into this extreme range. More ex-
change between people does not remove a power law, but it can make it less severe.
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In music, the disparity of attention also seems to be regulated through the process
of interaction. This can come in the direct form of collaboration between artists, but
also in the indirect form of media attention, record sales, performance opportunities,
and arts funding or sponsorship. While the improvised music world may seem insu-
lated from the rapid fads and fashions of the music industry on the whole—in both
desirable and undesirable ways—even here the logic of networks can be hard to dis-
pute. Derek Bailey often adamantly denounces his title as one of the ‘‘grandfathers’’
of free improvisation, but his career and creative work is still shaped in dramatic ways
by the network that has bequeathed him this ‘‘dubious’’ honor. And this is true no
less for those who readily accept the acclaim that they are offered.109
As any musical tradition expands in scope and popularity, better-connected ‘‘hubs’’
will tend to emerge. In jazz, for example, the ‘‘hubs’’ of Armstrong, Ellington, Parker,
Davis, and Coltrane are impossible to ignore. During their lifetimes they were well
respected and well connected (although not always early in their careers and not by
everyone) and their influence has only grown since. With the spread of jazz education
and the increasing reliance of major labels on re-releasing canonical jazz recordings,
the visibility and ‘‘connectedness’’ of these hubs may only continue to grow. In the
last few years, Columbia, Atlantic, and Verve have all drastically reduced their roster
of living artists in favor of re-releasing older material. Even the Marsalises, perhaps
the most visible jazz performers today, no longer have a major record deal. David
Hajdu perceptively writes in a recent Atlantic Monthly spread on Wynton: ‘‘Where the
young lions saw role models and their critics saw idolatry, the record companies saw
brand names—the ultimate prize of American marketing. For long established record
companies with a vast archive of historic recordings, the economies were irresistible:
it is far more profitable to wrap new covers around albums paid for generations ago
than it is to find, record, and promote new artists.’’110
For an artistic tradition to remain dynamic and healthy, however, the scale-free
dynamics that take note of history and provide hubs for a common language and style
should not become too powerful. The hubs of the ‘‘great person’’ approach to jazz
instruction ensure that the music is not in jeopardy of disappearing, since scale-free
networks are inherently resilient to minor fluctuations. Pops, Duke, Bird, Miles, and
Trane will continue to be remembered, esteemed, and emulated—as they should be.
And as individual clubs, record labels, local scenes, and musicians come and go, there
is no possibility of these established styles of jazz practice evaporating on the whole.
But if the disparity between the hubs and the remainder becomes too great, there may
be a ‘‘tipping point’’ beyond which communication and innovation in a tradition can
suffer dramatically.111 In the same Atlantic Monthly article, Jeff Levinson, the former
Columbia Jazz executive, is quoted as saying: ‘‘The Frankenstein monster has turned
on its creators. In paying homage to the greats, Wynton and his peers have gotten
supplanted by them in the minds of the populace. They’ve gotten supplanted by dead
people.’’112
Another lesson of network thinking is that power law dynamics happen on every
scale through the process of growth and preferential attachment. When physicists find
power laws, they often conclude that a system is poised at a critical state, on the border
of disorder and order. Power laws, in fact, are at the heart of many of the discoveries
of chaos theory, including fractals and phase transitions. Like fractals, power laws
display a type of self-similarity, in which the properties of the system operate on all
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scales; they are ‘‘scale-free.’’113 The discovery of power laws has allowed scientists to
claim that there are universal principles behind many complex networks. But does
this imply that all real networks that display scale-free dynamics are on the edge of
randomness and chaos or en route from a random to an ordered state? Not necessarily.
Barabási attributes this scale-free topology to the fact that organizing principles are
acting at each stage of the network formation process. As the earlier chapters have
argued, the process of nonlinear growth does appear to function across scales, from
individuals to ensembles, and from communities to cultures.
While this topological insight on the nature of complex webs can be interesting,
does network theory have anything to say about ways in which to navigate the web?
While contemplating the Watts and Strogatz small world model, Jon Kleinberg, a pro-
fessor at Cornell, wondered how individuals in a network might actually find the
shortest path. Milgram’s original ‘‘six degrees’’ experiment had asked people in Ne-
braska to send a letter to a specific stockbroker in Boston by passing it on to a close
friend that might be in a better position to know the target person. Kleinberg won-
dered how these folks might have arrived at their decision. He reasoned that they used
contextual cues to pick an optimal person to whom to forward the letter. Geography
may be the most obvious clue—think of someone near Boston who could help out—
but the other cues were undoubtedly based on things like profession, class, race, in-
come, education, religion, or personal interests: in short, all of the social cues that
people use every day to identify themselves and others. These are technically called
‘‘affiliation networks,’’ and the fact that Watts and Strogatz did not even consider
these options to make their original model more realistic is a telling reminder that,
while attempting to simplify situations and problems, scientists often ignore those
characteristics that add complexities, challenges, and meaning to our daily lives.
Steinberg realized that the random ‘‘weak ties’’ of the small world model did not
conform at all to the reality of how people make decisions. So he devised a variation
in which the probability of a random link connecting two nodes decreases with their
distance-apart.114 In other words, his model makes those connections that link to-
gether extremely distant parts of the network less likely, while more moderate ‘‘weak
ties’’ occur more frequently. Mathematically, Steinberg’s model demonstrates that the
‘‘ideal’’ small world network in terms of ‘‘searchability’’ would follow an inverse
square law, implying that each person has the same number of friends in their neigh-
borhood as in the rest of the region, the rest of the country, and the rest of the world.
Although certainly an idealized situation, this may increasingly be the case for many
individuals—and in particular musicians—who travel extensively and who rely on
telecommunications technologies to maintain their network of contacts. Kleinberg
found the perfect drawing to illustrate this principle: a 1976 New Yorker cartoon that
shows 9th Avenue taking up roughly as much space as an entire city block, which in
turn occupies the same space as the rest of Manhattan, the rest of the United States,
and the rest of the world.115
Watts, inspired by Kleinberg’s research, developed a more nuanced model that took
account of a homophily parameter, named after the sociological tendency of like to asso-
ciate with like. Watts’s new model could now begin to take account of the fact that
people, in order to maximize the efficiency of their small world searches, take account
of multiple social variables at the same time. The notion of ‘‘distance’’ from the origi-
nal model no longer applied simply to geographical remove, but also to how one per-
ceives themselves as more or less distant to others based on a variety of social factors.
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People who share a profession, for instance, may regard themselves as close even if
they live in different parts of the country or world. Watts reasoned that the multidi-
mensional nature of individual social identity enables messages to be transmitted via
a network even in the face of what might appear to be daunting social barriers.
The physicists and mathematicians whose work had propelled modern network the-
ory into the spotlight finally had to take a dose of sociological reality. The field of
sociology is intimately concerned with the relationship between individual agency and
social and network structures. And some remarkable insights have emerged from
analyses that take into account the dynamics of individuals, the role or position that
they may take in social groups, and the ways in which social groups are related to the
network structure of economic, political, and religious organizations. But sociologists
have also been guilty of centralized conceptions of networks, searching for those key
individuals or institutions that wield the most influence. Watts, who recently took a
post as a professor of sociology at Columbia University, has a different view:
But what if there just isn’t any center? Or what if there are many ‘‘centers’’ that
are not necessarily coordinated or even on the same side? What if the important
innovations originate not in the core of a network but in its peripheries, where
the chief information brokers are too busy to watch? . . . In such cases, the net-
work centrality of individuals, or any centrality for that matter, would tell us little
or nothing about the outcome, because the center emerges only as a consequence of the
event itself.116
Actor-Network Theory (ANT), a sociological approach that has emerged out of sci-
ence and technology studies, is geared toward embodying this very tension between
the centered ‘‘actor’’ on the one hand and the decentered ‘‘network’’ on the other. As
John Law, one of the field’s leading researchers, remarks: ‘‘In one sense the word
[actor network theory] is thus a way of performing both an elision and a difference
between what Anglophones distinguish by calling ’agency’ and ‘structure.’ ’’117 In
short, ANT does not accept the notion that there is a macrosocial system on the one
hand, and bits and pieces of derivative microsocial detail on the other. According to
Law:
If we do this we close off most of the interesting questions about the origins of
power and organization. Instead we should start with a clean slate. For instance,
we might start with interaction and assume that interaction is all that there is.
Then we might ask how some kinds of interactions more or less succeed in sta-
bilising and reproducing themselves: how it is that they overcome resistance and
seem to become ‘‘macrosocial’’; how it is that they seem to generate the effects
such as power, fame, size, scope or organisation with which we are all familiar.
This, then, is the one of the core assumptions of actor-network theory: that Napo-
leons are no different in kind to small-time hustlers, and IBMs to whelk-stalls.
And if they are larger, then we should be studying how this comes about—how,
in other words, size, power or organisation are generated.118
In what is perhaps its most radical move, ANT attempts to take account of the
heterogenous networks that include not only social or human dimensions, but also
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the material dimensions that make human and social behaviors possible. ANT explores
how these heterogeneous networks come to be patterned to generate effects like orga-
nizations, inequality, and power. Joseph Goguen explains:
Actor-Network theory can be seen as a systematic way to bring out the infrastruc-
ture that is usually left out of the ‘‘heroic’’ accounts of scientific and technological
achievements. Newton did not really act alone in creating the theory of gravita-
tion: he needed observational data from the Astronomer Royal, John Flamsteed,
he needed publication support from the Royal Society and its members (most
especially Edmund Halley), he needed the geometry of Euclid, the astronomy of
Kepler, the mathematics of Galileo, the rooms, lab, food, etc. at Trinity College,
an assistant to work in the lab, the mystical idea of action at a distance, and more,
much more.119
As in a house of mirrors, the science of networks has seemingly led us to a place in

which all of the details matter and, to some extent, none of them do. Since at least
the work of Emile Durkheim we have known that large-scale social phenomenon—the
predictable number of Parisians who commit suicide every year—can be independent
of the particulars—which Parisians are actually led to kill themselves and why. And
despite the enormous complexities of the Isaac Newton example described above, sci-
entists in the modern era glean what they need to from Newton, usually without
reading his original work, and they move on to more pressing concerns.
Yet the details and vagaries of a network system do seem to matter enormously.
Although network theory often focuses on large-scale behaviors, these large-scale be-
haviors are fundamentally provoked by the ability of one individual to influence an-
other and the notion that people can change their strategies depending on what other
people are doing. Barabási acknowledges that, ‘‘We must move beyond structure and
topology and start focusing on the dynamics that take place along the links. Networks
are only the skeleton of complexity, the highways for the various processes that make
our world hum. To describe society we must dress the links of the social network with
actual dynamical interactions between people.’’120
The goals of network theory are gradually shifting from describing the topology of
systems to understanding the mechanisms that shape network evolution. Network
theory tells us that very different things can be connected through surprisingly short
distances. Small effects can have large causes, while at other times large disturbances
may be absorbed without much notice. Although the predictive power of network
theory is still an open question, it may be enough that through these perspectives and
approaches we can gain a better understanding of the structure of connected systems
and the way that different sorts of influences propagate through them. Watts reminds
us that, ‘‘Darwin’s theory of natural selection, for instance, doesn’t actually predict
anything. Nevertheless, it gives us enormous power to make sense of the world we
observe, and therefore (if we chose) to make intelligent decisions about our place in
it.’’121
The musical community has a vested interest in understanding network dynamics,
although individuals may vary considerably in their specific expectations. Network
thinking can shed light on the cultural power inequities that produce imbalances in
social and economic interactions. It may also tell us much about the spread of ideas in
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musical communities and marketplaces under diverse historical and cultural condi-
tions. Creative musicians may hope to find in network dynamics glimpses of future
directions for innovation or influence, strategies for how to avoid or disrupt net-
work hubs and established practices in hopes of alternative community reorganiza-
tion, or the means by which they might increase their own professional contacts and
opportunities.
In our increasingly complex and interconnected age, both dimensions of network
thinking—the historical and the future-oriented—seem to be taking on a greater im-
portance. Through the proliferation of recorded music in the twentieth century, histor-
ical hubs are both better known and more influential than ever could have been
imagined in previous eras. Historiographic research is consequently focusing on situat-
ing these icons, as well as lesser-known individuals, more fully in a historical and
cultural context. The motivation is not to dethrone any individuals from canonical
status as much as it is to make us fully aware of the rich context that affected the lives
and work of all musicians, both those remembered and those forgotten.
Contemporary popular culture and the consumer-driven music industry have also
seemingly sped up exponentially the rate at which new stars are made and forgotten.
Individuals are faced at times with a disorienting array of options and opportunities,
unable to decide on or to take advantage of any of them. While much jazz, improvised,
and classical music may appear to exist outside of the machinations of the popular
music industry, because the immediate networks for these musics are smaller does not
mean that they are any less impacted by processes of growth and preferential attach-
ment (as the scale-free property of networks suggests).
Moments in which humans come together to synchronize their ears, brains, and
bodies may be more vital than ever. Through the wonders of technology we can con-
nect to the farthest reaches of the globe in an instant, but in the age of iPods and web
surfing we also experience the world in increasing isolation at the same time. Musical
improvisation may even allow us to explore our own homophily parameter, as familiar
and less familiar sounds and people join together to find a common ground, if only
temporarily. Duncan Watts’s current research shows that the most searchable net-
works involve individuals who are neither too unidimensional nor too scattered. As
long as people have at least two dimensions along which they are able to judge their
similarity to others, then small world networks are possible—people can still find short
paths to remote and unfamiliar areas.
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7
Harnessing Complexity
Western educational systems have traditionally relied on a strong distinction between

knowing and doing, tending to value the former over the latter. Knowing, in this dichot-
omous formulation, comprises static information structures within one’s head, and
doing refers to the straightforward process of executing a given operation based on
these preexisting knowledge structures. This duality is also apparent in folk wisdom,
which makes a distinction between ‘‘know what’’ and ‘‘know how,’’ in this case often
valuing the latter over the former.
But a small revolution is underway in fields related to psychology, education, and
cognition (including things like robotics and artificial intelligence), involving a shift
in perspective from knowledge as stored artifact to knowledge as constructed capability-in-
action.1 From a systems perspective, what people perceive, how they conceive of their
activity, and what they physically do all develop together. In other words, knowing is
a process co-constituted by the knower, the environment in which knowing occurs,
and the activity in which the learner is participating. In contemporary lingo, it is both
situated and distributed—situated in the general sense that all knowledge is in part a
product of the activity, context, and culture in which it is developed, and distributed
because knowledge as action rather than artifact exists not simply in the mind of the
individual, but rather as something shared between individuals in a physical and so-
cial setting.
Learning, from this perspective, is not so much a matter of what one knows, but
who one becomes. And education becomes less about the transmission of abstract
knowledge and more about helping students to participate in a community of practice.
In other words, learning is best thought of not as receiving a body of factual knowl-
edge, but rather as a process that involves becoming a different person with respect to
possibilities for interacting with other people and the environment.2 Music, in particu-
lar, provides an especially fertile site for acknowledging and studying these situated
and distributed aspects of learning. While improvisation, broadly conceived, becomes
a critical component of both the learning and teaching process in general.
Yet improvisation in the contemporary music classroom has been, for the most part,
neglected. Tom Nunn laments that, ‘‘It may be acknowledged—in a way akin to
chicken soup as a cure for a cold (it can’t hurt)—but it is not taken seriously. It may
be presented in some extramusical way, such as notation, analysis, etc., but as an
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expression of composition, it goes unrecognized.’’3 Even more pessimistically, Jonty

Stockdale remarks: ‘‘The ability to improvise freely is a common skill applied whether
in conversation, role-play, movement, dance, or the playing of games, and yet it is an
ability that is seemingly suppressed through the conventions of music training.’’4 In
this chapter, I investigate and scrutinize methods for imparting the skills, and perhaps
more importantly, the culture and even ethics, of improvisation. In addition to my
own experiences performing with and coaching improvising ensembles, I draw on
ethnographic interviews with celebrated musician/educators Anthony Davis, Mark
Dresser, Lisle Ellis, and Bertram Turetzky.
The Map is Not the Territory
Abandon Knowledge About Knowledge All Ye Who Enter Here.5

—Bruno Latour
There are no wrong intervals if played in succession

There are no wrong chords, only wrong progressions
There are no wrong notes, only wrong connections
There are no wrong tones, only wrong inflections6
—Eddie Harris
The score was never meant to imprison the performer’s imagination.7

—Larry Soloman
It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing.

—Duke Ellington
Referencing the well known phrase by semiotician Alfred Korzybski, William Clancey
writes in his tutorial on situated learning: ‘‘Knowledge is not a thing or set of descrip-
tions or collection of facts and rules. We model knowledge by such descriptions. But
the map is not the territory.’’8 Our educational system in the West, however, has noto-
riously underappreciated the situated and distributed aspects of learning, often tacitly
accepting that knowledge, or at least knowledge worth having, is primarily conceptual
and hence can be abstracted from the situations in which it is learned and used. But
by ignoring or downplaying these aspects of the learning experience, it is becoming
increasingly clear that educators and educational institutions are often unable to pro-
vide usable, robust knowledge to students.
Improvisation instruction in the music academy, for instance, has frequently oper-
ated under the notion that conveying the map is all that music educators are able to
offer. Although practice and performance may be emphasized, they are frequently
separated out from the process of learning ‘‘what’’ and ‘‘how’’ to improvise: in other
words, the process of ‘‘learning’’ is conceived of as distinct from the process of
‘‘doing.’’9
This often leads to an emphasis on product-oriented music making and instruction.
Teachers highlight the ‘‘materials’’ of improvisation, usually relying heavily on stan-
dard European musical notation to do so, and they prescribe the ‘‘parameters’’ or
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‘‘structures’’ on which to improvise, often employing ‘‘lead sheets’’ that highlight the
melody, form, and chord changes of ‘‘standard’’ compositions. Although these can
serve as useful mnemonics for improvisers, to use them as a starting point and as a
continual centerpiece of the learning experience tends to devalue the visceral, embod-
ied, and experiential qualities of improvisation and to underemphasize the importance
of developing musical ears, memory, instincts, sensitivity, and creativity.
During a recent interview, Bertram Turetzky exclaimed: ‘‘The academics talk about
scales and this and that strategy—and I’ve read all the books—but that is not the way
the masters taught.’’10 Turetzky favors a more embodied and experiential approach.
When working with students, his goal is ‘‘to hook up the fingers to the ears.’’ Accord-
ing to him, ‘‘You have to learn how to hear. You can listen, but you’ve got to hear. In
other words, you have to process some of the stuff.’’
For one exercise, he asks students to sing a passage from a fixed starting point—at
first simply a few notes—and then to reproduce the passage on their instrument. Ture-
tzky finds that even many advanced players can’t perform this exercise well at first.
He remarks: ‘‘If you can’t do it, you are depending on scales. It is not visceral. It is not
integral to your being. It doesn’t express anything except the tricks that you have
learned.’’
Turetzky is referring to a disjuncture between inscribed and incorporated forms of
knowledge. Many music schools, and jazz programs in particular, place undue empha-
sis on the normalized, abstract, and detached mode of inscription, rather than the
more collective, visceral, and engaged qualities of incorporation. Turetzky’s remarks
are also confirmed by recent neurological findings that show that in order for our
senses to be able to engage productively with the world, they must develop over time
and in tandem with action and intention.11 If one learns to play music through the
predominant use of inscribed forms of knowledge, making the necessary connections
between ear, mind, and hand to become a fluent improviser may always remain
difficult.
Mark Dresser, a former student of Turetzky, comments, ‘‘You find in jazz schools
there are some very skilled people, but the music ends up being variations on the same
theme, because the notation ends up leading the way that everything is formed.’’
Dresser is referring to the fact that Western notation, when used to convey aspects of
jazz and improvised music, tends to place undue emphasis on notes, chords, and har-
monic progressions since these are most easily represented. The rhythmic, timbral,
expressive, and interactive dimensions of the music do not translate as easily to paper.
To counterbalance this trend, Dresser stresses to his students the importance of ‘‘learn-
ing how to hear spectrally—the big implications of the overtone series.’’ Yet notation
has remained central to many programs that teach improvised music not only for its
perceived convenience—it translates well to blackboards and textbooks and can facili-
tate complex, hierarchical performances easily—but also because it allows instructors
to have an ‘‘objective’’ means with which to evaluate the progress and understanding
of students.12
In a panel discussion on free jazz held at the 2000 International Association of
Jazz Educators (IAJE) Convention—one of the few of its kind in the history of that
organization—Ed Sarath, a flugelhorn player and head of Jazz and Contemporary Im-
provisation Studies at the University of Michigan, and Graham Collier, the former
artistic director of the Jazz Course at the Royal Academy of Music in London, joined
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Allan Chase, a saxophonist and Chair of the Jazz Studies and Improvisation Depart-
ment at the New England Conservatory of Music, for a frank discussion of their experi-
ences exploring freer forms of improvisation with students.13
Chase argued that educators tend to avoid engaging with freer forms of improvisa-
tion in a hands-on way because: (a) they are unfamiliar with most of it (many had an
initial negative experience with the avant-garde and have stayed away ever since);
and (b) they are concerned with how to assess progress, how to measure results. The
first concern is of course a self-fulfilling prophecy if freer forms of jazz and improvisa-
tion are not allowed a place in the academic classroom. Regarding the second concern,
Chase pointed out that it is equally difficult to assess the progress of composition
students, or to grade an abstract painting, or even to measure the quality of a bebop
solo beyond the point where someone masters playing changes in the basic sense. In
all of these situations, he asserted, ‘‘There are things you can teach, ways you can
critique a piece of work. There are suggestions you can make and there is a dialog you
can have with the students.’’
Even when teachers do introduce freer improvisation with their students, Chase
finds that their own reservations affect how they present the music, how they frame
the creative moment. He advises them not to be apologetic, not to say ‘‘Hang in there
with me, because it’s going to be weird.’’ Rather, Chase explained: ‘‘It’s very important
to centre yourself and say, ‘We’re going to create a beautiful work of art. . . . Let’s
listen to each other and be sensitive and play like an ensemble and here’s a new idea
of how to do that.’ Give a structure, a way to guide it, a way to end it so it doesn’t go
one for the rest of the day. Then talk about it a little bit and do it again. Just like
rehearsing any other music.’’14
The English drummer John Stevens discusses in Derek Bailey’s book how he would
try to create a situation with students in which they did not rely on him to set the
improvisation up. Everyone had to respect the playing space and upon arrival be pre-
pared to immediately start playing with purpose and interacting with whomever was
already present. Describing Stevens’s instructional philosophy, Bailey writes: ‘‘The aim
of teaching is usually to show people how to do something. What Stevens aims at, it
seems to me, is to instill in the people he works with enough confidence to try and
attempt what they want to do before they know how to do it.’’15
This implied shift in pedagogic approach does involve some fairly radical ideas for
the educational establishment. Rather than insisting on a prescribed plan and a con-
trolled environment for learning, instructors must focus on creative ways to facilitate
learning in a dynamic context that is shaped and negotiated by all of the participants.
Instead of creating a situation in which there is a predetermined outcome and the
sum of the parts is already known, instructors must be comfortable presenting unpre-
dictable situations and exploring open-ended possibilities. Rather than simply impart-
ing problem-solving skills in the abstract, teachers must motivate and encourage
students to develop problem-finding approaches by demonstrating when appropriate
and by allowing time and creating the context for experiment, exploration, and discov-
ery. The notion of teachers as ‘‘experts’’ and ‘‘gate keepers’’ must also give way to a
more engaged and interactive role as mentors, facilitators, and negotiators.
In the community of jazz and improvised music, the notion that learning is embed-
ded in, and shaped by, its social and physical context is not new. Jazz music instruction
traditionally took place within the context of the family, formal and informal musical
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apprenticeships, and the local community and music scene—often focused on the
well-known practice of ‘‘jam sessions.’’ These highly competitive ‘‘cutting contests’’
played an important role in jazz’s earlier eras, though they have diminished both in
number and arguably in importance in recent decades.16 Freer approaches to improvi-
sation often require a more cooperative approach to learning, perhaps best exemplified
by Chicago’s Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) and the
Creative Music Studio (CMS), founded by Karl Berger in Woodstock, New York.17 The
formal music academy, however, has been less successful at integrating the situated
aspects of learning into the pedagogy of improvisation.
We have to be careful, though, since situated learning is not simply a recommenda-
tion that teaching be ‘‘relevant.’’ It also does not refer to the obvious claim that learn-
ing always happens ‘‘in a location,’’ or the common oversimplification that people
learn best by ‘‘trying something out.’’ Nor should the theory of situated cognition lead
us to conclude necessarily that there are no concepts in mind, no internal representa-
tions of knowledge. Rather, it implies that learning occurs in all human activity, all
the time.
Foundations for this new perspective can be found in the fields of sociology of
knowledge (Marx, Durkheim, Manheim), functionalism (the anti-associationalism of
Dewey and Bartlett), activity theory (Vygotsky, Leontiev, Luria, Cole, Wertsch), cyber-
netics and systems theory (Bateson, von Foerster), ethnomethodology (Garfinkel),
and ecological psychology (Gibson, Jenkins, Bransford, Neisser, Barker). Although lit-
tle known in the West at the time, Vygotsky’s work, in particular, has posthumously
provided a common theme that runs through much of the new educational paradigm.
In a passage that resonates strongly with the title of my book and with John Stevens’s
instructional approach mentioned above, Vygotsky wrote:
Just as you cannot learn how to swim by standing at the seashore . . . to learn how
to swim you have to, out of necessity, plunge right into the water even though you
still don’t know how to swim, so the only way to learn something, say, how to
acquire knowledge, is by doing so, in other words, by acquiring knowledge.18
Vygotsky proposed that activities of the mind, including creativity, cannot be sepa-
rated from overt behavior, from the external materials being used, or from the social
context in which the activities occur. For example, many young children are unable to
name what they are drawing until the activity is completed. Their minds produce
stimuli while they interact with the physical materials (e.g., crayon and paper), and
they react to the resulting visual stimuli and to the responses of others, creating a
cycle of action and reaction. Over time, these experiences can form the basis for more
abstract planning and cognitive reasoning about art, but the art in the mind cannot
exist without mediating tools and a foundation of lived, social experience.
Describing their working methods to me, both Bert Turetzky and Mark Dresser
stressed the importance of disciplined and directed practice: focusing on specific tech-
niques or ideas and exploring their implications fully, so that they begin to form a
personal yet flexible vocabulary of musical creativity. Turetzky shared:
I have file cards, three-by-five, and I write things down on the file cards. And
when I practice, sometimes I pull them out and I say, ‘‘OK, let’s work this for two
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minutes.’’ [Sings an intervallic passage combining the intervals of a third, fourth,

and fifth]. How about contrary motion? How about inversion? My idea was to
develop discipline and just do certain things. Now would I do this in an improvi-
sation? Maybe not. But I was learning how to do two minutes with just scratching
the strings, and doing this, and doing that. And all of a sudden I was enriching my
vocabulary, enlarging my vocabulary, and learning how to not do everything all
at once, the ‘‘young lover’s syndrome.’’
Mark Dresser described his working process as a cycle of moving back and forth
from improvising, either alone or in a group setting, while also recording—in order to
capture what he intuitively does—to then stepping back and analyzing and codifying
those moments that strike him as interesting or filled with potential. This allows him
a process of ‘‘rigorously looking at one’s instrumental sounds, one’s vocabulary, in a
way that you could make a lexicon out of it, try to measure it, much in the way you
would look at parameters of electronic music.’’19 Although this approach to resources
may at first appear to emphasize musical properties in the abstract, Dresser stresses
that it is the process of personal involvement, using one’s analytical abilities to analyze
one’s intuition or one’s hearing, that is most important.
He often asks his students to undergo a similar reflexive process: to create a personal
lexicon of extended techniques, sounds, and approaches. At the beginning of his
course called ‘‘Sound and Time,’’ Dresser asks the students to make a short environ-
mental transcription, say thirty seconds, of a recording of ambient sounds captured
‘‘in the field.’’ He instructs them to create a time line and to locate and describe the
sounds they are hearing. The point of the exercise, he explains, is almost ‘‘Cage-like’’:
to investigate ‘‘how you listen and how you organize how you hear.’’ Then the stu-
dents are asked to use their transcriptions to make an arrangement for the specific
instruments, and, more importantly, for the specific musicians in the class. The ar-
rangements are to be designed as compositions that also use structured improvisation
drawing on the personal vocabularies of the other class members. Gerry Hemingway,
who took over Dresser’s class at the New School in New York City, adopted this same
strategy but also asks the students first to improvise in the style of their environmental
recordings, both as individuals and in groups, before committing them to paper.
Dresser now recommends this practice to his students as well. For him, ‘‘The bottom
line is musicianship. The ability to perceive pitch and time can never be too fine. The
more we teach our musicians to develop ears and skills, the better equipped they will
be to work in an ever-changing situation.’’
There is an inherent danger, however, if we maintain a pedagogic focus on the
individual as the primary locus for knowledge and learning, as has been the educa-
tional norm in the past. Only if ensemble music is conceived of as the simple addition
of parts can skills be taught to individuals in isolation and summed together for per-
formance. But if music is in fact a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts—as
I have argued throughout—then the skills necessary to perform/improvise cannot be
developed in isolation. During our conversation, Dresser reflected on the importance
of performing in front of an audience: ‘‘I believe in the magic of performance to bring
out people’s best thing, best qualities. I’ve seen that happen time and time again. All
of a sudden at the performance people transcend the rehearsal process because there
is that dynamic with an audience.’’
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Yet our educational institutions and curricula have maintained an unwavering and
unquestioned focus on the individual and on her ‘‘acquisition’’ of knowledge. David
Ake suggests that freer forms of improvisation do not conform to standard conserva-
tory values or to the soloist-centered approach of much conventional university jazz
education. ‘‘With lessons, assignments, and practice spaces geared towards the devel-
opment of individual skills,’’ Ake muses, ‘‘little if any time or space remains for the
development of the very different musical tools necessary to improvise successful col-
lective jazz.’’20
The new educational paradigm, by contrast, acknowledges that all learning is inher-
ently a social activity. Rather than conceiving of education as the transmission of ab-
stract information out of context, it stresses that learners and teachers are already
involved in a community of practice, which embodies certain beliefs and behaviors to
be acquired. The theories of situated and distributed learning, therefore, emphasize
issues of participation, membership, and community, and the ways in which knowl-
edge and identity are shaped by these and other factors.
To say that all learning is social, however, is not simply to say that all learning
happens in the presence of other people. Rather, learning is situated because it is
shaped by a person’s understanding of his or her ‘‘place’’ in a social process. The world
in which we live is full of material and symbolic objects that are culturally constructed,
historical in origin, and social in context. Since all human actions, including acts of
thought, involve the mediation of such objects, they are, on this score alone, social
in essence. From this perspective, even individual music lessons or private study are
thoroughly social activities when properly conceived. To arbitrarily separate individual
musical skills from collective ones is to already subscribe to a dualistic mode of
thought.
Again Vygotsky’s work was well ahead of its time in this regard.21 For instance, in
contrast to the work of Piaget, whose theories of childhood development tacitly re-
flected the ideology of individualism, Vygotsky emphasized a sociocultural approach
in which the intellectual development of children is seen as a function of communi-
ties.22 His writings take for granted that the personal and the social are not self-
contained but have a shared existence. For instance, children develop language along-
side the need to communicate with others. Vygotsky also proposed that all of the
higher mental processes, including problem solving and consciousness are of social
origin; they originate as relationships between individuals and are constructed through
a subject’s continuing interactions with a social and physical world. Our inner speech
and self awareness that define thought and consciousness emerge after communica-
tion; they are the end product of socialization. According to Vygotsky, the interpersonal
comes before the intrapersonal, and the latter cannot be fully illuminated without
acknowledging the former.
According to this perspective, separating the learner, the material to be learned, and
the context in which learning occurs is both impossible and irrelevant. As Barab and
Plucker explain: ‘‘A learner’s ultimate understanding of any object, issue, concept,
process, or practice, as well as her ability to act competently with respect to using
these, can be attributed to, and is distributed across, the physical, temporal, and spa-
tial occurrences through which her competencies have emerged.’’23 Far from a nebu-
lous theory of holism, however, the new educational paradigm envisions all learning—
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and by connection all ‘‘knowledge’’—as an activity that involves the concrete particu-
lars of the situation rather than abstracted symbolic representations in the mind.24
This seemingly radical orientation has also sparked a reconceptualization of our
conventional notions of intelligence and talent. Often thought of as static qualities
that are intrinsic to individuals, they are, in the new outlook, conceived of as dynamic
and collective properties; they are ‘‘accomplished’’ or ‘‘engaged’’ through the use of
tools and other artifacts, the development of internal and external modes of represen-
tation, and through collaboration with other individuals. In general, the theories of
situated and distributed cognition seek to displace the conventional notion of causal
influence from either environment or culture to individual with the more systemic
view in which individuals, environments, and socio-cultural relationships can all be
transformed through ‘‘intelligent transactions.’’ Barab and Plucker propose replacing
our standard notion of talent as well with the idea of ‘‘talented transactions,’’ which
describe ‘‘a set of functional relations distributed across person and context, and
through which the person-in-situation appears knowledgeably skillful.’’ This move
has a special resonance for music education, downplaying a notion of ‘‘talent’’ as a
specialized endowment of a chosen few and replacing it with ‘‘talented transactions’’
that are within the reach of all learners.25 According to Barab and Plucker, ‘‘Nobody
has talent, yet everybody can engage talented transactions.’’26 They conclude that edu-
cators must support the development of ‘‘smart contexts’’—not simply smart individuals.
A related concept here is Gibson’s notion of ‘‘environmental affordances,’’ which
describe the possibilities for action that the environment offers to individuals.27 For a
physical example first, consider the perceptual category of an object’s heft. Unlike an
object’s mass, which is a property of the object, and its weight, which is a relation
between the object and gravity, heft is the perceived resistance of an object in motion.
For example, when we move a carton of milk up and down to determine how full it is,
we are measuring its heft. Moving the carton in a certain manner affords us perceptual
knowledge of how full the carton is. Heft, therefore, is measured relative to an organ-
ism’s perception-action coordination; it is characteristic of an affordance relation.
Learning to play a musical instrument involves an affordance relation as well. On
the physical level, we develop a relationship between our actions with the instrument
and our perception of resulting sounds over time. But our perceptions and our actions
are also shaped by a social matrix in which sounds may be deemed desirable or not,
and actions may be encouraged or not, depending on cultural and personal factors.
Playing with a group necessarily creates an affordance situation, since the sounds that
one produces trigger reactions and perhaps responses when perceived by others. But
all music settings, in fact, are group music settings from the perspective of these
emerging theories. Other listeners are always either present, within earshot (as sounds
leak through walls and rooms), or imagined, in the sense that our understandings of
music and performance are already shaped in complex ways by social factors.
Affordances are best thought of as capacities for interactive behavior. Although it
may be possible to talk about music outside of this dynamic and systemic orientation,
it is analogous to talking about the mass and weight of an object. They can be mea-
sured and discussed in the abstract, but they are immediately supplanted by the per-
ceptual frame of heft when a human being becomes involved in attempting to
manipulate or make sense of something. This perspective reconciles the notion that
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musical improvisers are best left to develop entirely ‘‘on their own,’’ with the notion
that they are blank slates onto which must be poured the ‘‘knowledge’’ of theory and
tradition. All musical development is social in its essence, yet individuals develop and
learn based on their particular experiences and accumulated understandings.
Although we commonly talk about information and knowledge as things, they are
in fact relationships. Both depend for their existence on being perceived by living
creatures. In her book How We Became Posthuman, Katherine Hayles questions the
emerging postmodern ideology in which the body’s materiality has been subsumed,
and at times replaced, by the logical or semiotic structures that it encodes; or put more
simply, how information lost its body. She suggests that work in both the humanities
and the physical sciences has reduced the body to its play of discourse systems on the
one hand (e.g., Foucault) or to that which can be encoded into a computer on the
other (Hans Moravec et al.). But Hayles reminds us that, ‘‘Even if one is successful
in reducing some area of embodied knowledge to analytical categories and explicit
procedures, one has in the process changed the kind of knowledge it is, for the fluid,
contextual interconnections that define the open horizons of embodied interactions
would have solidified into discrete entities and sequential instructions.’’28
One of Vygotsky’s more influential concepts for the contemporary educational para-
digm is the Zone of Proximal Development, which describes the difference between
what a child can learn unaided and what he or she can learn when given appropriate
support. While few would argue with the notion that learners can develop further with
adult guidance or peer collaboration, many classroom learning activities still focus on
knowledge that is presented as abstract and out of context.29 In her often-cited work
on situated learning, Jean Lave developed the related notion of Legitimate Peripheral
Participation to describe the process through which novices or newcomers can move
from the periphery of a community of practice to its center by becoming more active
and engaged in the culture.30 In the music-centered disciplines, ethnomusicology, with
its emphasis on ethnographic studies that emphasize apprenticeship in order to reveal
the indivisible character of learning and practice, has been a beacon for this type of
approach for decades.31 In these types of apprenticeship situations, often very little
teaching may appear to be happening and yet a considerable amount of learning is
taking place.
The jazz community has also traditionally stressed the importance of apprentice-
ship, but it has tended to play a much less central role as jazz and improvised musics
have entered the music academy. Describing his educational philosophy, pianist and
composer Anthony Davis stressed that, ‘‘You have to play with someone who is more
experienced.’’ His formative years were spent under the guidance of many jazz and
improvising masters, including Waddada Leo Smith, Anthony Braxton, Jimmy Heath,
Charles McPherson, Leroy Jenkins, David Murray, and Ed Blackwell. Carrying on this
practice of mentoring younger musicians, Davis seems to be intuitively aware of their
Zone of Proximal Distance: ‘‘Playing with them is very important. I try to drop bombs
on them. See what they do with it; stuff that engages them and challenges them in
an immediate way when you play. That’s the best way to do it.’’
He shared three general methods he uses to engage with and to inspire developing
improvisers. First, he pushes them to acknowledge and deal with the tradition. With-
out this, Davis believes, one cannot become a truly profound improviser. For example,
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he might ask students to play a blues in order to push them to find a relationship with
the history of the music, even though at times this makes some of his students rather
uncomfortable. As a second tactic, Davis uses a dialectical approach. While playing
with the students, he likes to ‘‘find something that is in opposition to what they think
is happening to see how they react to it, whether that moves them into different
directions or other kinds of thoughts.’’ He finds that in a group setting people naturally
assume different roles, so he consciously tries to make the students reverse or change
these roles: ‘‘Have someone play up front, and someone who is more aggressive, have
them play a supporting role.’’ For Davis, ‘‘Teaching improvisation is an improvisation.
I try to respond to the group dynamic, the direction, what makes them comfortable,
what makes them uncomfortable.’’ Finally, he looks to build on what students already
do well to assist them in finding ways to do it better, although he acknowledges that
this can be a very subjective process. He pushes them to ‘‘see the bigger picture,’’ to
become aware of the formal aspects of the music as it unfolds. And he tries to make
them aware of their own mannerisms, to ‘‘make them think beyond the limited vocab-
ulary they may have developed.’’
In our interview, Bert Turetzky described an internal dialog that takes place between
the hand and the mind when he plays that helps to offset the subtle dangers that
habits can present for the creative improviser: ‘‘All of a sudden you see that there are
certain things that you go to. I see I’m going somewhere, and I slap my hand—but it’s
invisible—and I say, ‘Don’t go there. Where else can you go? Surprise yourself.’ ’’ Re-
calling a particular instance of this, he continued, ‘‘I was listening to a record with
[Wolfgang] Fuchs. I hit open strings. I do that too often. So I’m listening and shit, it’s
the sixth time in this thing. Stop it! And the next one, it’s not there. . . . So I’m editing
as I go.’’
The internal dialog that Turetzky describes, however, does not need to be viewed
through the lens of traditional Cartesian dualism. The ‘‘mind’’ that keeps the ‘‘hand’’
in check does not exist on some isolated plane, but has been situated through action
and intention over time in much the same way.32 We need to recognize that our current
pedagogical vocabulary and conceptualization has emerged out of the decidedly West-
ern notion that knowledge is about external constructs that can be conveniently in-
dexed, retrieved, and applied by individuals. As long as knowledge is conceived of in
this dis-embodied and de-contextualized way, musicians and music teachers will be
at the mercy of the presiding educational philosophy that values abstract intellectual
concerns as the real determinant of educational worth. Wayne Bowman worries that:
In our determination to substantiate the educational value of music and the arts
. . . we have accepted uncritically notions of ‘‘knowing’’ and ‘‘understanding’’
crafted in different domains. . . . As a result, we find ourselves advocating music
study for reasons that fit with prevailing ideological assumptions about the nature
of knowledge and the aims of schooling, but on which we are ill-equipped to
deliver, and that neglect what may be most distinctive about music: its roots in
experience and agency, the bodily and the social. Our most revered justifications
of music education are built upon deeply flawed notions about mind, cognition,
and intelligence.33
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Even within the community of improvising musicians, however, very different ap-
proaches to education are commonplace. Lisle Ellis, a bassist who studied at the Cre-
ative Music Studios in Woodstock with Karl Berger and Cecil Taylor, contrasted their
approaches for me. Berger, according to Ellis, worked to ‘‘demystify the music.’’ He
focused on the basic building blocks—rhythm and pitch perception—that can help
musicians to engage with a whole world of music.34 Taylor, on the other hand, ‘‘music-
ifies the mystery.’’ In his book documenting the Creative Music Studios, Robert Sweet
writes: ‘‘Music, according to Cecil, is not something that we should be trying to demys-
tify or divide and conquer. Rather than breaking down music, separating its parts, we
should be working on music as a process of unification.’’35
Playing with Taylor, Ellis discovered a way of exploring music through the music
itself, without verbal discussion, or without stopping to ‘‘rehearse’’ in any conven-
tional manner. Taylor is well known for his insistence on teaching his music to fellow
musicians by ear, for always bringing something new for his musicians to learn, and
equally for his penchant to disregard any of the music that was prepared ahead of
time once the moment of performance arrives. As Ellis puts it: ‘‘You want to be an
improviser? Let’s improvise!’’ Referencing Duke Ellington, Ellis explained: ‘‘The music
never stops, you just get onboard . . . This is an old idea. Everyone says this is new
music, but this is some kind of ancient thing going on.’’
Highlighting the important shift from teachers as ‘‘experts’’ to teachers as ‘‘facilita-
tors,’’ Ellis remarked: ‘‘A good teacher is always teaching a lesson that the teacher
needs to learn. I work with students on things that I am interested in and I am trying
to discover myself how to do. It keeps me from going into a rote thing. And also they
can see me make mistakes. I think that is a really good thing to impart to young
people: let them see you fail and let them see you deal with it. And no matter how
many times you fail, you still get up and go back at it.’’ Ellis also made references to
the teacher-student relationship in many traditional African cultures and to the activi-
ties surrounding African festivals, remarking that art need not be viewed as separate
from the rest of life.
Vygotsky’s notion of a Zone of Proximal Development refers not only to the stu-
dent’s activities, but also to the teacher’s. It is mutually constructed to maintain a
correspondence between other- and self-regulated behavior. Learning occurs in the
Zone of Proximal Development by recoordinating perception, talk, and other actions.
The constraints, or better said, affordances are mutual (bi-directional) and the result
is co-determined by each person’s conceptions and actions.
During the IAJE panel discussion, Ed Sarath described some of the particular chal-
lenges of exploring collective free improvisation in the academic setting in general,
and in the large ensemble setting of his Creative Arts Orchestra in particular. At first,
he tried to balance composed parts and sections featuring more traditional soloing
with free ‘‘interludes’’ in order to frame the ‘‘riskier’’ parts of performance. But the
students wanted to do more collective free improvising. After some soul searching,
Sarath decided to program entire concerts of completely improvised performance as
well:
Where I used to sit in the audience and be just terrified as to what was going to
happen, and making a list of who I hoped hadn’t come to the concert, in recent
years I’ve become a little bit more comfortable with this completely improvised
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format. And at the December concert, it was just amazing what happened. It’s
almost like some external force overtakes the ensemble and guides the orchestra-
tion, creative decisions, formal sections, etc. But there’s no middle ground to this
kind of thing. . . . We can extend the boundaries of bad beyond belief! In the
other direction I have to say that when it works it becomes one of the most
profound things I have been involved in. Something takes over the group. We’ve
all experienced this in smaller group situations but there are 25 people up there.
No conductor. No format at all and you have to tune in to whatever that force is
that is going to orchestrate the thing, deal with formal proportions, deal with
transitions. It’s an amazing thing and it’s terrifying. It still is.
Seasoned musicians, in all styles and traditions, are intimately aware of the ways
in which the cognitive demands of performance are distributed across the group.36
Individuals cultivate specific instrumental skills and knowledge about specific musical
roles, but in order to create an effective ensemble they must constantly listen to each
other and synchronize their gestures, sounds, and sentiments in order to create a
compelling performance. Qualities like ensemble timing, phrasing, blend, intonation,
and groove are continually negotiated in a distributed fashion, but even the formal
structures of the music can be spread across the minds of individual musicians in
performance. In notated genres, this is literally the case as each musician has only a
portion of the entire music represented in front of them. But in all musics that involve
oral and aural modes of transmission—in other words, in all music—players commu-
nicate, negotiate, and recoordinate during performance in very subtle ways.
For instance, in a standard jazz performance, if one or more musicians are executing
a particularly risky improvised passage, another individual in the ensemble might
choose to remain more grounded to the beat or to articulate clearly a key moment in
the phrase to ensure that everyone is able to stay connected. Or individuals in the
group might assist one another by articulating an important formal point in a compo-
sition (e.g., the reoccurrence of the bridge in an AABA song form) or a specific har-
monic or rhythmic aspect of a song (e.g., a chord voicing, turnaround figure, or tag).
At times, groups may even need to recover from moments in which the timing or
phrasing of a performance got temporarily derailed, all without making it apparent to
an audience.37 In a more positive light, distributed cognition allows ensemble mem-
bers to negotiate and impart a specific musical or emotional character to a given per-
formance on different nights. And in the freest forms of improvised music, distributed
aspects of cognition can shape the entire performance. Jared Burrows writes:
A group improvisation is a complex social phenomenon. During a performance,

there is a subtle, web-like interplay of individual psychological needs and inten-
tions, technical tasks and difficulties associated with playing musical instru-
ments, awareness of the audience (if the performance is public) and, most
centrally, conscious and unconscious reactions to sound stimuli. Cognitive distri-
butions in this context occur between musician and instrument, between or
among two or more musicians, and between dialectical relationships among me-
diational artifacts, stimulus, response, and action. . . . As each new element is
added, it becomes subsumed in the overall tapestry of aural stimuli, and these
stimuli form the basis for further thought and action. Because all members of the
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group both react and contribute to the same set of stimuli, their cognition is
linked in a profound fashion. Once certain sound-actions have been brought into
play, the players construct a kind of group meaning from those actions.38
While the freest forms of collective improvisation not only highlight, but also clearly
hinge on, the distributed aspects of performance, these qualities can be found and
should be emphasized in all forms of musicking. Graham Collier, during the IAJE
panel discussion, advocated for a broad and integrated approach to improvisation:
‘‘How do we teach this in our schools? Not just by playing free. . . . We have to absorb
free jazz into the whole education of the student.’’ As a helpful illustration, Collier
described three kinds of improvisation: (1) soloing, or the conventional approach to jazz
improvisation where one musician provides a dominant voice; (2) textural improvisation,
which occurs in freer improvisation but also in conventional jazz as the musicians
explore and develop a variety of ways to frame a solo or the entire piece; and (3)
structural improvisation, where the shape of the piece itself is improvised by the ensem-
ble.39 Conventional jazz pedagogy focuses on the first type, gives limited attention to
the second, and almost completely ignores the third.
Jonty Stockdale also finds that it is difficult to encourage students to explore simul-
taneous approaches to improvisation. Using language common to jazz musicians, he
finds that music programs rarely give equal treatment to playing ‘‘time over changes,’’
‘‘time no changes,’’ and ‘‘no time no changes.’’40 According to Stockdale, ‘‘A jazz musi-
cian should travel back and forth along the line between playing that which is predi-
gested, through to re-territorisation, and on to new territory.’’ With a hint of optimism,
he writes: ‘‘By explaining ways of thinking and working within a improvised frame-
work and using comparative studies from non-musical pursuits, it is possible to de-
velop an understanding of why improvising freely can be beneficial to the overall
development of any music student, and a jazz student in particular.’’41
To embrace this new perspective does not involve throwing out all of the methods
and techniques that educators have found useful in the past. The theories of situated
and distributed cognition acknowledge the value of descriptive models of knowledge,
but insist that these models alone are incapable of capturing the full flexibility of how
perception, action, and memory are related. Human conceptualization has properties
relating to physical and social coordination that cannot be captured by decontextua-
lized models. As William Clancey explains, ‘‘Knowledge is a capacity to behave adap-
tively within an environment; it cannot be reduced to (replaced by) representations of
behavior or the environment.’’42 These new theories represent a theoretical commit-
ment to avoid the philosophical stance of dualism: to conceptualize knowing and
doing, knower and known, mind and body, intelligence and skill, learned and ac-
quired, content and context, and subjective and objective, as inseparable. And they
represent a pedagogical commitment to develop more useful learning environments.
A perspective on musical creativity that views it as inextricably embodied, situated,
and distributed, may help to overcome the dualistic mode of musical instruction and
inquiry that separates musical ‘‘materials’’—the tools and theory of music—from mu-
sical ‘‘behaviors’’—the application of those materials in context. Improvisation can
play a particularly powerful role in this regard, although it requires us to embrace
complexity and uncertainty in ways that still make many uncomfortable. Learning to
improvise, particularly in a freer setting, remains a rather frightening proposition for
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many musicians. Acknowledging these challenges faced by both younger as well as

experienced players, Turetzky exclaimed:
It’s a terrifying feeling. All of a sudden there is no net and no rules. What does
one do? Well, my answer is you listen. And you just hope that you have an imagi-
nation. And you trust yourself to say, ‘‘I’m going to grab something. It’s going to
be an anchor. I’ll hook up with somebody.’’ And then you do, and you go from
there.
Group Creativity
However much you try, in a group situation what comes out is

group music and some of what comes out was not your idea, but
your response to somebody else’s idea. . . . The mechanism of what
is provocation and what is response—the music is based on such
fast interplay, such fast reactions that it is arbitrary to say, ‘‘Did you
do that because I did that? Or did I do that because you did that?’’
And anyway the whole thing seems to be operating at a level that
involves . . . certainly intuition, and maybe faculties of a more para-
normal nature.43
—Evan Parker
I suspect that it makes more sense to see solo improvisation as a

special case of collective improvisation than [the] other way
around.44
—Nicholas Cook
The nature of creativity in the arts and sciences has been of a topic of enduring human
interest. But the dominant scholarly approach to the subject, until recently, has pro-
ceeded from the assumption that creativity is primarily an individual psychological
process, and that the best way to investigate it is through the thoughts, emotions, and
motivations of those individuals who are already thought to be gifted or innovative.
In the past several decades, however, creativity researchers have begun to focus more
attention on the historical and social factors that shape and define creativity, and on
its role in everyday activities and learning situations.
This shift is attributed in great part to the work of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who
has argued for a systems view of creativity.45 His work introduced two influential no-
tions into our understandings of creativity: the domain and the field. The domain de-
scribes that set of rules and conventions through which, or in relationship to which,
creative work is produced and evaluated as such, while the field refers to those gate-
keepers or senior individuals who in turn evaluate new work and decide which of it is
valuable. In other words, these terms describe the environment in which the creative
individual operates; the domain refers to its cultural or symbolic aspect, and the field
to its social aspect. The work of sociologist Howard Becker has also been influential in
this regard through his focus on the network qualities of art worlds and the informal
or implicit rules of etiquette that can shape and define creative work.46
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Yet despite this shift in the field toward systemic perspectives that take account of
the social, cultural, and historical dimensions of creativity, the notion that creativity
operates primarily on the level of individuals (albeit now situated within a rich and
complex environment), or that creativity necessarily results in a creative product, has
proved to be remarkably resilient. In his recent book titled Group Creativity, R. Keith
Sawyer draws on empirical studies of jazz music and improvised theater in order to
highlight the interactive and emergent dimensions of creativity that are frequently
overlooked or ignored.47
Creativity research has tended to make a distinction between an ideation stage, in
which the non-conscious brain produces novelty through divergent thinking, and an
evaluation stage, in which the conscious mind decides which new ideas are coherent
with the creative domain. Sawyer argues, however, that ideation and evaluation occur
in a complex rather than a linear fashion. During collective improvisation, in both
theater and music, they become externalized into a group process. When one perfor-
mer introduces an idea, the other performers may or may not decide to shift the per-
formance in order to incorporate this new idea. Acknowledging the complexity of
group performance, bassist Richard Davis remarked: ‘‘Sometimes you might put a idea
in that you think is good and nobody takes to it. . . . And then sometimes you might
put an idea in that your incentive or motivation is not to influence but it does influ-
ence.’’48 The quote from Evan Parker at the beginning of the section also attests to the
fact that, from a systems perspective, it is often impossible to separate provocation
from response in group improvisation.
Csikszentmihalyi is equally well known for his notion of ‘‘flow,’’ in which the skills
of an individual are perfectly matched to the challenges of a task, and during which
action and awareness become phenomenologically fused. Sawyer expands this concept
to illuminate the process of entire groups performing at their peak. Group flow can
inspire individuals to play things that they would not have been able to play alone, or
would not have explored without the inspiration of the group. Yet as a collective and
emergent property it can be difficult to study empirically. As Sawyer explains, ‘‘Group
flow is an irreducible property of performing groups, and cannot be reduced to psycho-
logical studies of the mental states or the subjective experiences of the individual
members of the group.’’49
Many improvising musicians and actors speak of the importance of group flow or
of developing a ‘‘group mind’’ during performance.50 This requires, at the very least,
cultivating a sense of trust among group members. According to some, it also involves
reaching a certain egoless state in which the actions of individuals and the group
perfectly harmonize. Percussionist Adam Rudolph described his trio’s approach this
way: ‘‘We all participate in creating the musical statement of the moment. In the
process of being free as a collective, you have to have selflessness to give yourself to
the musical moment and not come from a place of ego.’’51
Facilitating group flow, however, can depend on the level of familiarity between the
participants, and it requires musicians and actors to resolve aspects of conscious and
non-conscious performance in order to achieve a balance appropriate to the moment.
Describing his general approach to improvised performance, Bertram Turetzky remarked:
One way when I play free music, I try not to think of anything. I respond or I
initiate. And whatever my intuitions tell me, I go with them. . . . Other times in
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free music, I play with people perhaps I don’t know. And I say, well, the last one
started soft and slow and got faster and then went back. . . . So all of a sudden I
start banging things and doing all kinds of stuff. . . . For some people, I think you
have to be very rational. And you perhaps have to have an idea of where you
think it could go, and be the quarterback.
Perhaps an even better sports analogy than football for capturing the fluid and com-
plex dynamics of an improvising group during group flow is basketball. George Lewis
writes, ‘‘It is striking to note how an African-American perspective on improvisation
reflects a similarity with recent thinking in the game of basketball, an area in which
African-American players have continually presented revolutionary possibilities.’’
While both a basketball team and an improvising ensemble must utilize each player’s
individual skills, Lewis finds that, ‘‘In both situations it is essential that each individ-
ual develop an intuitive feel for how their movements and those of everyone else on
the floor are interconnected.’’52
Although group flow may be the most desirable state for improvised performance,
Turetzky acknowledged that it is a problem, ‘‘If someone has a big ego and wants
to make everything compositional.’’ When he perceives that the group is not easily
establishing a rapport or a musical direction, he often adopts a third strategy: ‘‘If there
are three of four people, maybe I’ll stop a little bit and let them see what they want to
do. If there is a mess, let them sort it out. Let them start something and maybe I can
support them.’’
As we saw in the previous section, conventional approaches to teaching musical
improvisation tend to stress individual facility through memorization and pre-plan-
ning, leaving little room for collective experimentation. Dramatists, on the other hand,
frequently argue that humans are too skilled in suppressing action. For instance, Keith
Johnstone believes that, ‘‘All the improvisation teacher has to do is to reverse this skill
and he creates very gifted improvisers. Bad improvisers block action, often with a high
degree of skill. Good improvisers develop action.’’53 Drawing a comparison between
the training of actors and musicians, Jonty Stockdale writes:
In the initial training of drama students, considerable emphasis is directed

towards the development of self-confidence, the loss of inhibition, and the ability
to role-play. This is achieved largely through improvisation workshops where indi-
viduals work individually and collectively. Surprisingly, improvisation in jazz
studies programmes is infrequently developed through a collective process, with
a preference for the development of soloing facility through the absorption and
imitation of pre-existing language, usage, and style. Whilst this is regarded as
important for the development of a young jazz musician, matters of self expres-
sion, individualism, and most importantly experimentation are often left to later
stages, by which time exploration of free collective playing can appear unneces-
sary or even redundant.54
Sawyer makes an important distinction between a problem-solving and a problem-

finding approach to art. Artists adopting problem-solving techniques begin with a
relatively detailed plan and work to accomplish it successfully. Those employing a
problem-finding approach, by contrast, search for interesting problems as the work
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unfolds in an improvisatory manner. Many beginning jazz improvisers are stuck in a

problem-solving mode. As Anthony Davis expresses: ‘‘They have been taught right and
wrong—these are the notes, these are the chords, these are the arpeggios that work
on a given chord. This chord happens on the 5th bar [in a blues].’’ But through ex-
tended listening, practicing, and playing with musicians who are more experienced,
Davis finds that jazz players can move from a ‘‘dependence on articulating the form’’
to ‘‘using the form, realizing that [the tune structure] is the beginning of something
and you have to create something else. . . . They have to do more than just keep time,
they have to articulate time. . . . They can make melodic choices that are at least as
strong as the melody that was there before.’’ Even as students become more proficient,
however, Davis reminds them that, ‘‘You have to get beyond your mannerisms to really
come up with a musical idea as opposed to a catalog of what you do.’’
Successful group improvisation demands a problem-finding approach, since it is
often impossible to determine the meaning of an action until other performers have
responded to it. The particular challenge of group improvisation is that each performer
may have a rather different interpretation of what is going on and where the perform-
ance might be going. In other words, intersubjectivity is an inherent property of
improvised performances. For Sawyer, however, ‘‘The key question about intersubjec-
tivity in group creativity is not how performers come to share identical representa-
tions, but rather, how a coherent interaction can proceed even when they do not.’’55
In part, this is possible because individuals shape a performance on both denotative
and metapragmatic levels; they simultaneously enact the details of a performance and
negotiate their interactions together. Even if a singular meaning to performance al-
ways remains elusive, participants can shape the ways in which their various interac-
tions unfold. Listeners, too, must be able to make their own path through the music.56
One of the most common bits of advice to aspiring improvisational actors is known
as the ‘‘yes, and . . .’’ rule, or, inversely, as the practice of ‘‘no denial.’’57 Actors are
taught that in every conversational turn they should do two things: accept the offer
proposed in the prior turn, and add something new to the dramatic frame. In other
words, instead of denying or rejecting what has previously been introduced, they
should present complementary offers or revoice an existing offer. Through a similar
form of incremental development, improvising musicians also build on and subtly
shape those sounds that have come before. They must listen intently and acknowledge
the gestures of others as a form of musical ‘‘offer.’’
Improvising actors are also taught not to ask direct questions or to propose specific
actions that would limit the range of possible responses for others.58 Rather, they are
coached on ways in which they can support the ongoing development in a more open-
ended fashion, or ways in which they can assign attributes to another performer’s
character without limiting the possibilities for narrative development. Often referred
to as ‘‘endowing,’’ this may correspond with the ways in which improvising musicians
support or shape in subtle ways the gestures and ideas of others without circumscrib-
ing or over-directing them.
Although these bits of advice can be helpful in encouraging students to focus on
interactive strategies and the evolving group performance rather than on their own
specific contributions, they remain somewhat general and difficult to evaluate pre-
cisely. For instance, Sawyer points out that, ‘‘The line between a subtle denial and a
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constructive revoicing is fuzzy and open to interpretation.’’ Moments in which endow-

ing is used to good effect also exist on a fuzzy continuum with moments in which
overly specific musical gestures can stifle group creativity. For instance, if a musician
initiates a pronounced idiomatic gesture in a freer improvised setting, perhaps some-
thing with a strong tonal or metric character to it, it can have the effect of limiting the
options available to others.59 Yet at times, or in groups that value a strong play of
signifiers, this practice can be used to good effect to produce either a pronounced
disjuncture in the music or a type of stylistic pastiche.
The advice to accept and build upon the ‘‘offers’’ of others also does not preclude
the possibility of departing from a direction that is already underway. For instance,
one common theatrical practice called ‘‘shelving’’ involves abruptly shifting the focus
of the performance in ways that may make other immediate developments off limits
for the time being, yet keeps them available for future moments of reference or expan-
sion: It displaces rather than denies what has come before. Again, evaluating when
this has been successful presents a tricky proposition.
Excessive or harsh denials, however, can result in one actor over-controlling the
direction of a scene. In improvised theater, this is often referred to as ‘‘driving’’ a
scene, or ‘‘playwriting.’’ It can occur when one actor is attempting to structure a collec-
tive performance too far in advance, anticipating what others will do rather than lis-
tening closely to their performance and responding in the moment. As we have seen,
the notion of ‘‘driving’’ a performance through individual ego also pertains to group
musical improvisations. With inexperienced improvisers, however, the opposite prob-
lem also occurs. Anthony Davis stresses that it is critical in musical improvisation that
students learn the difference between listening and following: ‘‘In order to listen, you
don’t necessarily follow, you respond. You try to construct something that coexists or
works well with something else—not necessarily this tail-wagging-the-dog thing
where you just follow someone.’’ For Davis, ‘‘Listening is knowing what someone is
doing and using it in a constructive way, as opposed to mimicry, just trying to demon-
strate that you are quote-unquote listening.’’
Davis’s comments highlight the fact that, unlike most group theater, group musick-
ing happens concurrently as well as consecutively. Aware of the limitations of analo-
gies between theatrical and musical performance, Sawyer writes: ‘‘In musical groups,
group flow requires a type of parallel processing; the musicians are playing non-stop,
yet while they are playing they must simultaneously listen to their band members,
hearing and immediately responding to what they are playing.’’60 This notion that
everything is heard and immediately responded to during complex moments of impro-
vised music may, however, be too facile. George Lewis describes a type of ‘‘multi-
dominance’’ in improvised music—an African-American aesthetic by which individuals
articulate their own perspectives yet remain aware of the group dynamic, ensuring
that others are able to do so as well.61
Another lesson for aspiring improvisational actors is to avoid ‘‘crossing the fourth
wall’’ that separates the performers on stage from the audience. In other words, step-
ping out of the dramatic frame, either by speaking directly to the audience or by meta-
communicating about the proceedings, can endanger the natural development of the
group’s performance. In theater, it is too easy to drive a scene by stepping out of the
dramatic frame to narrate or direct the action. Although the polyphony and polysemy
of music makes this explicit directing of the unfolding narrative a more complex affair,
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musicians can ‘‘cross the fourth wall’’ when they play to an audience’s expectations
rather than to the evolving group dynamic and musical moment. Although a well-
timed instance of signifyin’ or double-voiced discourse in both improvised music and
improvised theater can evoke humor, recognition, or insider knowledge to both per-
formers and listeners.
In certain instances, the performance spaces themselves lend credence to the idea
of a shared aesthetic. Discussing Derek Bailey’s annual Company Week gatherings of
free improvisers, Ben Watson writes: ‘‘Bailey has always liked theatrical spaces. The
acoustics favour the softest sounds, while the setting makes the musicians appear
larger than life. In plays, actors entertain the conceit of talking to each other rather
than addressing the audience point-blank, providing a workable model for public Free
Improvisation.’’62 One final aphorism for improvising actors may ring true for their
musical counterparts as well: ‘‘Listen and Remember.’’ Many of the pedagogic exer-
cises adopted by both actors and musicians are designed to improve these two basic
skills. For instance, the ‘‘Word at a Time Story,’’ in which each actor offers only one
word to the evolving narrative, is an exercise that focuses the attention of individuals
on quick interactions and on the meaning of the emergent whole rather than on their
own contributions. In certain ways, this exercise is rather similar to the Click Piece by
John Steven’s discussed in the previous chapter, in which each musician plays only
short sounds in order to focus on the group pattern and interaction. ‘‘Zip-Zap-Zowie,’’
another improvised theater game, asks actors in a circle to improvise nonsense sylla-
bles and then point at the next participant. This, too, mirrors many musical improvisa-
tion games that highlight shifting solos or subgroups within a larger ensemble and are
designed to increase the ability of individuals to make effective transitions between
various sections and instrumental configurations. These exercises, in both theater and
in music, can also motivate individuals to remember what has occurred, either to avoid
duplication or to make long-term connections to previous events. As Sawyer explains,
‘‘Not everything is resolved and connected right away, so there will always be small
bits and pieces of plot and frame, waiting to be picked up and connected to the current
scene.’’63
John Zorn’s Cobra may be the best-known ‘‘game piece’’ for improvising musicians,
but others have also explored game-like strategies for improvisation (e.g., Rova Saxo-
phone Quartet’s system dubbed Radar).64 Techniques for using a conductor to structure
musical improvisation in larger ensembles have also been productively explored by
Butch Morris (conduction) and Walter Thompson (soundpainting) among others. Tak-
ing suggestions from audience members, although less common in musical perform-
ances than in improvised theater, can also inspire new creative explorations and
demonstrate that the specific content of a performance is not worked out elaborately
beforehand. Making a distinction between his game pieces and conventional notions
of composition, Zorn remarks:
In my case, when you talk about my work, my scores exist for improvisers. There
are no sounds written out. It doesn’t exist on a time line where you move from
one point to the next. My pieces are written as a series of roles, structures, rela-
tionships among players, different roles that the players can take to get different
events in the music to happen. And my concern as a composer is only dealing in
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the abstract with these roles like the roles of a sports game like football or basket-
ball. You have the roles, then you pick the players to play the game and they do
it. And the game is different according to who is playing, how well they are able
to play.65
With their attentions already engaged in complex ways during performance, others
worry that highly involved schemes for structuring improvisation can hinder rather
than assist the natural development of the music. Tom Nunn writes:
When improvisation plans are complicated—no matter how clear or well ex-
plained they might be—the attention of the improviser is constantly divided be-
tween the plan and the musical moment, having to remember, or look at a score,
a graphic, or even a conductor. What often happens is that both the plan and
the music suffer from this divided attention. When plans, methods or scores are
complicated, they are less immediate, requiring practice individually and re-
hearsal collectively. As long as there is sufficient time under the circumstances,
such devices may work well.66
During our conversation, Mark Dresser acknowledged the challenges inherent in

structuring pieces for improvisers: ‘‘Composition is often about control. You have to
build [improvisation] in. I’ve built pieces that have been little prisons, too. You’re
looking at something really specific.’’ But he added, ‘‘It’s a trip to find the balance.
You try to find combinations where you have real focus and condensation, and points
of real expansion. For me, it is all about being a complete musician. All of those things
are interesting. At different points in the evening I try to have all of those things. Its
funny, though, when you get in the composer’s head it’s really hard to let go of trying
to control it or to create this kind of balance.’’
Acknowledging a similar danger, Anthony Davis commented on the importance of
maintaining an improviser’s aesthetic when he composes:
For me, what is very important when I’m writing music is that sense of discovery
that you have as an improviser: that moment when you get to a place that you’ve
never been before. You don’t know how you got there. You don’t know what’s
happened. And you say, ‘‘Wow, it’s wonderful! How did that happen?’’ It’s that
magical thing that allows you to discover something else, something new. . . .
There’s an improvised aesthetic that I bring to what I compose. As an improviser
you realize that you can discover the form through the music itself. A lot of classi-
cal composers have lost that. They have to apply the form rather than discover
it. . . . This objectification of music is a way of distancing from the immediate.
[With improvisation] you end up with more anomalous things, more interesting
things.
But he also reflected on the delicate balance between structuring music ahead of time
and allowing room for creativity and spontaneity in performance. For an illustration,
Davis recounted a particular performance of his music in San Francisco when the
improvised section opened up and extended well beyond his original intentions for
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the piece. He described it as ‘‘a rubber band that had been stretched too far and it
broke. The focus was lost, even though what happened in it was great.’’
Even compositional strategies that have the sole intent of facilitating group improvi-
sation during performance can backfire. Dresser commented, ‘‘I’ve seen the conduc-
tion thing be a disaster with people who just don’t like to be controlled.’’ Without pre-
conceived strategies, however, there is an ever-present danger that improvised music
will fail on its own. This danger may also increase with the size of the group. Philip
Alperson writes: ‘‘As the number of designing intelligences increases, the greater is
the difficulty in coordinating all the parts; the twin dangers of cacophony and opacity
lurk around the corner.’’67
This makes those moments when group improvisation is deemed successful all the
more powerful. Lisle Ellis explained: ‘‘A lot of improvised music I don’t think is very
good music. But man, when it hits, it’s extraordinary! That’s what I’ve spent my life
doing—waiting for those moments when it really lines up—to find a way to have some
consistency in it. Some days I think I really know how to do that and other days I
think I don’t have a clue.’’ In a telling aside that highlights this balancing act of
harnessing creativity, Ellis remarked, ‘‘I’ve got to write more stuff down. I’ve got to
write less stuff down.’’
When discussing improvisation and composition, it can be particularly challenging
to avoid thinking in terms of simple dichotomies while at the same time remaining
leery of equally facile truisms about the music. Only with dualistic thinking, which
presents two things as opposed and forces one to choose between them, are preparing
for something in advance and the leap of freedom into the unforeseen viewed as anti-
thetical or incompatible. Dresser finds that, ‘‘Within control there are lots of possibili-
ties for freedom.’’ Discussing his time spent as young man in classes with Muhal
Richard Abrams at the AACM school, George Lewis writes: ‘‘Improvisation and com-
position were discussed as two necessary and interacting parts of the total music-
making experience, rather than essentialized as utterly different, diametrically opposed
creative processes, or hierarchized with one discipline framed as being more important
than the other.’’68
Ellis, however, has grown uncomfortable with the facile notion that ‘‘composers try
to make it sound improvised while improvisers try to make its sound composed.’’
Composition and improvisation are not mutually exclusive, but neither are they syn-
onymous with one another; they are interwoven and implicated in one another. Mike
Heffley argues that improvisation and composition are two similar and equal genera-
tive forces in the same one music, pushed to either complimentary or conflicting roles,
according to personal and social dynamics.69 And Dresser recounted a telling moment
during his first tour with Anthony Braxton’s quartet that resonates well with this
issue: ‘‘The only time that Braxton criticized the quartet, he said, ‘Well, you guys are
playing the music correctly, but you’re just playing it correctly.’ The criticism was you
are being too dutiful, you’re not taking a chance. That was the day that the format of
the music actually changed, from being a solo-based music to an ensemble music. All
of a sudden, the nature of the music became different. That moment articulated when
the group came into its own.’’
To return briefly to my own formative experiences with Surrealestate, when I first
began playing with the group I remember struggling with the seemingly insurmount-
able challenge to always play something new, something fresh, or something innova-
tive. Without the conventional song structures of jazz to organize my improvisational
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SYNC OR SWARM
approach, the musical options often appeared to me to be unlimited and, therefore,

unmanageable. I remember fondly, however, fellow saxophonists Robert Reigle shar-
ing with me that, for him, the goal of improvisation is not to play something new at
every moment, rather it is to play something that is entirely appropriate to the mo-
ment. All of a sudden, something that had seemed beyond me—both in terms of its
difficulty and in the sense that music could exist as an abstraction outside of its real-
time production—was transformed into something that was fully situated. I realized
that how I behaved and the music that I made was both affected by and would affect
how others behaved and the music they made. Being myself in the moment, then,
meant acknowledging the interconnectedness of the individual, social, physical, and
historical dimensions of experience.
The Shores of Multiplicity
Of all the travels made by man since the voyages of Dante, this
new exploration along the shores of Multiplicity and Complexity
promised to be the longest.70
—Henry Adams
My feeling about artists is that we are metaphor explorers of some

kind.71
—Brian Eno
Artists teach people how to live.

—Lester Bowie72
Due to the proliferation of recordings in the previous century, and the gradual (and
ongoing) shift from a colonial to a postcolonial world, contemporary music (and soci-
ety more broadly) is just now arriving on the shores of multiplicity. Musical traditions,
styles, and approaches co-exist (and frequently intertwine) to a greater extent now
than was ever possible. Yet far from simply expanding our choices at the local record
store, this ongoing shift to multiplicity must engender a growing awareness of varied
and diverse musical understandings and a deeper acknowledgment of one’s own rela-
tionship within and to a given music culture.
The process of improvising music can teach us a way of being in the world that is
particularly appropriate to this new exploration. Multiplicity refers to the state of being
multiple or varied, but a less well-known definition of the word comes from physics,
where it describes the number of energy levels of a molecule, atom, or nucleus that
result from interactions between angular momentum.73 In this light, multiplicity can
describe the varied interactions that occur as performers and listeners navigate impro-
vising music together. Additionally, improvising music has the power to provoke an
internal condition of multiplicity in individuals, challenging us to move beyond simple
binaries and dichotomies. With a playful hint of paradox, John Corbett describes im-
provisation as ‘‘making a decisive statement and at the same time giving oneself over
to the situation.’’74
Here I wish to return to a bit of semantic play that I offered in the introductory
chapter while describing the subtitle of my book. Improvising music—in lieu of the
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static construct ‘‘improvised music’’—refers to the dynamic and indissoluble relation-

ship between performances and people, between sounds and society, that is found in
every culture and in every time. Conventional discourses on music have frequently
reinforced distinctions between composition and improvisation, music and noise,
sound and silence, and tradition and innovation that are, under close scrutiny, unten-
able. While improvising music, individuals balance comfort and caprice, groups enable
structure and spontaneity, and traditions become articulated by and respond to both
continuity and change. Improvising music is not simply an alternative approach to
composition, but rather the ongoing process of internalizing alternative value systems
through music.
Multiplicity, therefore, must mean more than simple pluralism. At its heart, the still
nascent shift to multiplicity must involve acknowledging uncertainty while fore-
grounding complex visions of agency, identity, embodiment, community, and culture.
By necessity, this involves a leap into unknown territory and uncharted waters—
perhaps accompanied by the unsettling yet exhilarating feeling of ‘‘sync or swarm’’—
yet without abandoning a sense of individual, communal, and historical empowerment.
Daniel Belgrad has identified a ‘‘culture of spontaneity’’ that emerged in post-World
War II America articulated by the arts in general, and by modern jazz in particular.
Bebop and free jazz have provided important symbols of spontaneity, liberation, and
resistance to oppression for many in the intervening years, and they will undoubtedly
continue to do so. But acknowledging a shift toward multiplicity will involve augment-
ing, arguing over, and perhaps even replacing many of the notions that have come to
be strongly associated with these forms. George Lewis writes: ‘‘[T]he pluralist ten-
dency to situate African-American music as the vehicle of orchestral transubstantia-
tion, while well-grounded historically, risks becoming overly narrow in the new
century, as improvisation traditions from around the world, influenced or not by
African-American forms, become part of a landscape that could inform the classical
music of the future.’’75 Envisioning what a ‘‘new American classical music’’ might
sound like in a postcolonial world, Lewis continues:
Certainly, such a new music would need to draw upon the widest range of tradi-
tions, while not being tied to any one. Rather than quixotically asserting a ‘‘new
common practice,’’ perhaps such a music would exist, as theorist Jacques Attali
put it, ‘‘in a multifaceted time in which rhythms, styles, and codes diverge, inter-
dependencies become more burdensome, and rules dissolve’’—in short, a ‘‘new
noise.’’
Are there aspects of the emerging scientific understanding of complexity that might
assist us in harnessing the complexities of improvising music? For a system to be truly
complex, it must be an aggregation of simpler systems that both work and can work
independently; a whole made up of wholes. Systems of this sort are able to take ad-
vantage of positive feedback, to cultivate increasing returns. They exploit errors or
unexpected occurrences, assess strategies in light of their consequences, and produce
self-changing rules that dynamically govern. Complex systems, however, must strike
an uneasy and ever-changing balance between the exploration of new ideas or territor-
ies and the exploitation of strategies, devices, and practices that have already been
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SYNC OR SWARM
integrated into the system. In other words, complex systems seek persistent disequilib-
rium; they avoid constancy but also restless change. Because of this uneasy balance,
complex systems are not necessarily optimized for a specific goal; rather, they pursue
multiple goals at all times. Although they cannot be explicitly controlled, they can
respond to guiding rules of thumb and are susceptible to leverage points of intervention.
It is interesting to note that two of the hottest current topics for organizational
design are the sciences of complexity and jazz music. Both domains emphasize adapta-
tion, perpetual novelty, the value of variety and experimentation, and the potential of
decentralized and overlapping authority in ways that are increasingly being viewed as
beneficial for economic and political discourse. Robert Axelrod and Michael Cohen see
in the move from the industrial revolution to the information revolution a powerful
shift from emphasizing discipline in organizations to emphasizing their flexible, adap-
tive, and dispersed nature. They write, ‘‘Just as the clock and the steam engine pro-
vided powerful images for the metaphor of society as a machine, distributed
information technologies can provide a powerful image for the metaphor of society as
a Complex Adaptive System.’’76 And Karl Weick, in a special issue of the journal Orga-
nization Science devoted to an exploration of ‘‘the jazz metaphor,’’ finds that the music’s
emphasis on pitting acquired skills and pre-composed materials against unanticipated
ideas or unprogrammed opportunities, options, or hazards can offset conventional or-
ganizational tendencies toward control, formalization, and routine.77 In a response to
the heavy reliance by journal contributors on swing and bebop as the source of their
jazz metaphors, Michael Zack outlined ways in which free jazz might propel discourse
even further into the realm of emergent, spontaneous, and mutually constructed orga-
nizational structures.78
Are there lessons from improvising music that can help us to understand, or at least
to cope with, the complexity of our world? Improvising music makes us aware of the
power of bottom-up design, of self-organization. It operates in a network fashion,
engaging all of the participants while distributing responsibility and empowerment
among them. Networks facilitate reciprocal interactions between members, fostering
trust and cooperation, but they also can concentrate power in the hands of a few (as
we saw in the previous chapter). Under the best of circumstances, improvising music
encourages social activities that support the growth and spread of valued criteria
through the network. For instance, improvisers tend to value diversity, equality, and
spontaneity and often view their musical interactions as a model for appropriate social
interactions. Tom Nunn writes:
Free improvisers are important to the society in bringing to light some fundamen-
tal values and ideas, for example: how to get along; how to be flexible; how to be
creative; how to be supportive; how to be angry; how to make do. So there is a
social and political ‘‘content’’ in their music that seems appropriate today, though
it may not usually be overt.79
As we continue to explore ways of improvising music, we should look for ways

to assist would-be cooperators in interacting more easily and more frequently. The
robustness and equity of a network system is a direct result of the range and number
of interactions. We should also look to maximize participation from the fringes, rather
than the core. In complex systems, a healthy fringe speeds adaptation, increases resil-
ience, and is almost always the source of innovations. For instance, nearly every new
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NOTES
Preface
1. Waldrop (1992).
2. Waldrop (1992:12).
Chapter One
1. For an example of this ‘‘third culture’’ see The Edge (www.edge.org).
2. For modern treatments of the subject, see Rothstein (1995) and Fauvel et al. (2003).
3. For more on the decline of improvisation in the Western musical tradition, see Sancho-
Velazquez (2001).
4. Hayles (1990:4).
5. Taylor (2003:3).
6. Kellert (1993:85).
7. Small (1998).
8. Mandelbrot (1982).
9. Roberts (1977–78:39).
10. Bouchard (1998:n.p.).
11. Surrealestate Contrafactum (Acoustic Levitation AL-1004). Robert Reigle also used the name
Surrealestate for his 1978 LP, Bob Reigle with Surrealestate (Lincoln, NE: Aardwoof Records).
12. A more complete list of individuals who participating in Surrealestate sessions from 1995–
2000 would also include: Cristian Amigo (electric guitar), Roman Cho (percussion, pedal
steel guitar), Andy Connell (saxes and clarinet), Tonya Culley (dramatic readings), Dave
DiMatteo (double bass), Joe DiStefano (alto sax), Dan Froot (soprano sax), Kaye Lubach
(tabla drums), Brian McFadin (saxes, carinets, trumpet), Brana Mijatovic (drum set, piano,
vocals), and Christian Molstrom (electric guitar).
13. The live performance of ‘‘The Marriage of Heaven and Earth’’ from the concert at the Ar-
mand Hammer, as well as a rehearsal version of the improvisation with Koenig’s ‘‘Ants
Eating Through Brick,’’ can both be heard on Robert Reigle’s compact disc titled The Mar-
riage of Heaven and Earth (1999, Acoustic Levitation AL-1002), which also features Reigle’s
original recording of the title piece.
14. Satie’s composition involves a single, short melody and two subsequent variations on that
melody designed to be played 840 times! Although a complete performance of the piece
lasts roughly 28 hours, we contented ourselves with having the music continuously loop in
the background during our hour-long set.
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NOTES
15. In addition to the ‘‘Surrealism in Music’’ concert describe at the outset of this section,
Surrealestate gave several other notable performances during my time with them including
an interpretation of Ornette Coleman’s seminal 1960 Free Jazz recording, a soliloquy to
Charles Ives entitled ‘‘ImprovIves,’’ a live interaction with painters at UCLA called ‘‘Sponta-
neous Combustion of Music and Art,’’ and a set at the Big Sur Experimental Music Festival.
Most recently the group has ‘‘reunited’’ in newly expanded form for a performance at the
SoundWalk festival, an evening of sound installations and performances in the downtown
corridor of Long Beach, California, and for a special recital at El Camino College near Los
Angeles.
16. In Borgo (2002) I discuss a particular episode when a new member, after sitting in with us
at a rehearsal, joined our group with little discussion and began to play with us regularly.
Although he was a skilled musician, because of personality conflicts and certain actions on
his part that were viewed by many as transgressions, there was some danger that our group
would cease to exist. After much discussion, we collectively made the difficult decision to
inform this person that he would not be able to continue attending our sessions. For many
of us, this episode highlighted the delicate ways in which freer improvisation relies on
shared social codes and a strong bond of trust and conviviality. The process of recording our
group CD also brought to the surface several aesthetic and technical disagreements that
unfortunately led to a few members voluntarily ending their participation.
17. Guitarist and composer Jonathon Grasse was especially prolific in offering new work to the
group and finding inspiration in a wide range of sources. And Robert Reigle’s pieces and
ideas for the group provided much grist for the improvising mill. One particularly sly refer-
ence that I remember was his composition inspired by the Japanese mouth organ used in
the court music gagaku called shô. Reigle’s piece was named ‘‘Shô Tune.’’
18. For instance, for our compact disc release we recorded a version of Charles Ives’s ‘‘Charlie
Rutledge,’’ already a rather humorous piece based on an American frontier ballad, on which
we riffed and signified in ways perhaps more akin to Sonny Rollins’s version of ‘‘I’m an Old
Cowhand.’’
19. Difference tones describe the process whereby two tones are played together at sufficient
volume until the ear hears a fictitious difference frequency. For a tribute to composer Toshio
Hosokawa, we did an extended group improvisation referencing his notion of ‘‘vertical
time.’’
20. This is a common technique used in educational clinics on free improvisation to help stu-
dents better hear what is happening and to focus more responsibility on how they are
contributing to the ensemble.
21. The term contrafact has also been applied to much bebop era jazz when a newly composed
(and often through composed) melody was based on an extant set of chord changes, such
as ‘‘I Got Rhythm’’ or the 12-bar blues.
22. Lewis is currently the Edwin H. Case Professor of Music at Columbia.
23. See Lewis (2000).
24. One of the particular challenges of writing this book has been finding a way to present
what are essentially nonlinear relationships in the linear format of a book without doing
too much harm to them. See Laszlo (1996) for a very readable introduction to systems
theory.
25. Hayles (1999:21).
26. Kellert (1993:xiii–xiv).
27. In other words, just as the bones in the forearm of a dog, elephant, seal, bat, and human
share a fundamental pattern, certain human beliefs, artifacts, or practices—including musi-
cal and scientific practices—can share similarites despite their seeming temporal, geo-
graphic, or social distance.
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NOTES
Chapter Two
1. Corbett (1995:237).
2. Williams (1984:32).
3. L. improvisus; from in-‘‘not’’ and provisus-‘‘forseen.’’
4. Cope (1976:147).
5. Bailey (1992:ix).
6. See Ferrand (1961) for work on improvisation in the European classical tradition and Nettl
(1998) for a survey of ethnomusicological work on the subject. See Ake (2002b) for a de-
tailed discussion of Coleman’s arrival in New York and a general discussion of the debate
surrounding the role of avant-garde jazz in the music conservatory.
7. Quoted in Taylor (1993:48).
8. See Eric Lott (1995) for an excellent treatment of the politics of style associated with bebop
music.
9. See Saul (2003) for an excellent treatment of notions of freedom in hard bop jazz with a
focus on the music of Charles Mingus and John Coltrane. The earliest recorded ensemble
improvisations without preconceived harmony or form are ‘‘Intuition’’ and ‘‘Digression,’’
recorded by a group under Lennie Tristano’s leadership in the year 1949. Charles Mingus
also pioneered the use of open-ended and pyramid-style forms as evidenced on ‘‘Love
Chant’’ and ‘‘Pithecanthropus Erectus,’’ both recorded in 1956. However, few of these pre-
free experimentalists accepted the subsequent challenges of the new jazz. Tristano never
again recorded in this fashion and Mingus, who inspired many free bassists, often ex-
pressed his discontent with the musical practice: ‘‘I used to play avant-garde bass when
nobody else did. Now I play 4/4 because none of the other bassists do’’ (Litweiler 1984:29).
10. Gramophone Explorations volume 3 (1998:85), no author cited. Even from the European per-
spective, this historical development is not entirely clear. Evan Parker remarked of his expe-
riences at the famed Little Theater Club in Englang, ‘‘We started by playing tunes and
stuff and ended by playing free. I don’t know how that happened.’’ Quoted in Beresford
(1998:90).
11. Litweiler (1984:39).
12. Corbett (1994b:50).
13. Litweiler (1984:200).
14. In his discussion of Taylor’s cover of Monk’s composition ‘‘Bemsha Swing’’ from Jazz Ad-
vance, Steven Block (1998:226–27) illuminates Taylor’s ‘‘radical constructionist’’ approach
to improvisation as well as his deep connection with the jazz tradition. He writes: ‘‘Taylor
bases his improvisation on the structural implications of Monk’s composition while avoid-
ing the more overt, observable references which would be expected of the Hard Bop style
(variations based on the chord changes, returning to the tune) which dominated new jazz
works of the period . . . Taylor’s improvisation is still firmly rooted in Monk’s theme, but
Taylor chooses to vary elements [texture, chromatic pitch class transformations] which had
previously been largely ignored in jazz improvisation.’’
15. Litweiler (1984:208–9).
16. Durant (1989:257). For more on the decline of improvisation in the Western musical tradi-
tion, see Sancho-Velazquez (2001).
17. Durant (1989:260).
18. George Lewis (2003) highlights the ways in which terms such as interactivity, indeterminacy,
intuition, and even happening or action, have frequently been employed to mask the impor-
tance of improvisation in the arts.
19. Composers who have experimented with improvisation include Ugo Amendola, Larry Aus-
tin, Klarenz Barlow, Richard Barrett, John Cage, Cornelius Cardew, Alvin Curran, John
Eaton, Robert Erickson, José Evangelista, Lukas Foss, Sofia Gubaidulina, Barry Guy, Jona-
than Harvey, Charles Ives, Luigi Nono, Per Nørgärd, Pauline Oliveros, Harry Partch, Terry
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NOTES
Riley, Frederic Rzewski, Giacinto Scelsi, Stefano Scodanibbio, Karheinz Stockhausen, Mor-
ton Subotnik, and Frances-Marie Uitti, as well as the groups FLUXUS, Il Gruppo di Improvi-
sazione da Nuova Consonanza (GINC), KIVA (at University of California, San Diego),
Musica Electronica Viva, New Music Ensemble (at University of California, Davis), and the
Scratch Orchestra. Pioneering work by composers in the American ‘‘third stream’’ such as
Gunther Schuller, George Russell, Bob Graettinger, John Lewis, and others, could be men-
tioned here as well.
20. Cope (1976:10).
21. Cardew (1976:250).
22. One treatment of the problems associated with categorizing such diverse musical ap-
proaches under a single, often misleading heading is found in Such (1993, 15–29).
23. Quoted in Belgrad (1997:2).
24. Heffley (2005:279–280).
25. Bailey (1992:85).
26. Stanyek (1999:47).
27. For example, Dean (1992), Jost (1994), and Westendorf (1994).
28. For example, Jones (1963), Kofsky (1970), Wilmer (1977), and Hester (1997). For a con-
temporary, impassioned look at the dreams of freedom in the black radical imagination, see
Kelly (2002).
29. For example, Prévost (1995) and Attali (1985).
30. See Monson (1996, 200–206) for a related discussion of ‘‘colorblind’’ interpretations of jazz.
See also Harris (2000) for discussion of issues surrounding the globalization of jazz. And
Atton (1988–89) offers the results of a survey raising important issues of national and
cultural identity in improvised music.
31. Litweiler (1984:257).
32. Gramophone Explorations volume 3 (1998:85), no author cited. For more on the cultural as-
pects of this European ‘‘emancipation’’ from American jazz, see Lewis (2004a and 2004b)
and Heffley (2005).
33. Day (1998:4).
34. Couldry (1995:7).
35. Nunn (1998:13).
36. Berio (1985:81,85).
37. From conversations collected as Musicage, quoted in Toop (2002:243).
38. Toop (2002:244).
39. See Boulez (1976:115) for a similarly critical stance toward improvisation.
40. Quoted in Spellman (1966:70–71).
41. Quoted in Porter (2002:265).
42. Lewis (2002:128).
43. See Heble (2000, 2004), Tucker (2004), Smith (2004).
45. Lewis (1996).
46. Jones (1963:188).
47. Lewis (1996:94).
48. Bailey (1992:83).
49. Quoted in Bailey (1992:115).
50. Quoted in Lock (1991:30).
51. Carr (1973:70–71).
52. Quoted in Taylor (1993:112).
53. Quoted in Day (1998:35).
54. See, for example, Hou (1995, 1985–88). Tracy McMullen (2003) offers a cogent critique of
the Afrological/Eurological dyad presented by Lewis (1996).
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NOTES
55. Lewis (2002:126).

57. Important festivals that feature improvisation and new music include Le Festival Interna-
tional de Musique Actuelle de Victoriaville in Québec, The Vision Festival in New York City,
The Guelph Jazz Festival near Toronto, and several in Europe including Saalfelden (Aus-
tria), Willisau (Switzerland), La Batie (Geneva, Switzerland) and Vilshofen, and the Total
Music Meeting (Germany).
58. The annual Company Week, organized by Derek Bailey since the 1970s, is an event that
encourages first-time meetings and unusual groupings of well known improvisers.
59. Nunn (1998:58).
60. Improvisation seminar held at the ‘‘(Re)soundings’’ festival in Atlanta, Georgia, July, 1998.
61. Personal communication with the author, April 2002. The instruction to play one note is of
course not limited to improvisation pedagogy. Long-tones, a staple of much conventional
instrumental teaching, are perhaps examples of this as are pedagogic practices found in
jazz, pan-European classical music, and Indian classical traditions, among others.
62. Personal communication with the author, February 2003.
63. Nunn (1998:70).
64. See Borgo (2003).
65. Quoted in Gershon (2001:15).
66. See Borgo (1997).
67. Quoted in Such (1993:131).
68. See Lewis (forthcoming) and Looker (2004). Important artist-run collectives in the United
States have included the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM)
in Chicago (which has continued to the present date), The Jazz Composers Guild (organized
by Bill Dixon shortly after his famed October Revolution in Jazz in 1964) and Collective
Black Artists (CBA) in New York City, the Black Artists Group (BAG) in St. Louis (the
birthplace of the World Saxophone Quartet), and the Underground Musicians Association
(UGMA) in Los Angeles (formed by Horace Tapscott). Notable European collectives have
included the Spontaneous Music Ensemble (SME), the Music Improvisation Company
(MIC), the Association of Meta-Musicians (AMM), the London Jazz Composers Orchestra
(LJCO), the South African-influenced Brotherhood of Breath, The Jazz Center Society, The
Musician’s Co-operative, the Musician’s Action Group, and the London Musicians Collec-
tive, all in England, as well as the Instant Composers Pool in Holland, the Globe Unity
Orchestra and the Berlin Contemporary Jazz Orchestra in Germany, and the Instabile Or-
chestra in Italy.
69. Lewis (2002:121).
70. See Lewis (2002:121–123) for many additional issues regarding the various ‘‘downtown’’
improvising scenes and the discriminatory arts funding policy regarding ‘‘New music.’’
71. See Sarath (1996) and Borgo (2002, 2004).
72. Nunn (1998:93).
73. Bailey (1992:44).
74. Day (1998:143). Freeman (2001) presents a more limited view of this music from the per-
spective of a rock music journalist who writes primarily as a recently converted fan.
75. Watson (2004:160).
76. Stockdale (2004:102).
77. Stockdale (2004:102).
78. Stockdale (2004:104).
79. Barthes (1991:245–7).
80. Ray Cole in an email response to the author, September 27, 2004.
81. Truax (1986).
82. Bradlyn (1991:15).
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NOTES
83. Bradlyn (1991:18).

84. Bradlyn (1991:15).
85. Stanyek (1999:47).
86. Stanyek (1999:44).
87. Stanyek (1999:47).
88. Stanyek (1999:45).
89. Bailey (1992:102).
90. Watson (2004:251).
91. Watson (2004:229).
92. See, for instance, Bailey (1992:103–104).
93. Nunn (1998:154).
94. Cardew (1971:xvii).
95. Roberts (1977–1978:39).
96. Davidson (1984:23).
97. See Nunn (1998:252–6) for a variety of opinions.
98. Bailey (1992:104).
99. See, for instance, Sidran (1981).
100. Rose (1994:86).
101. Belgrad (1997:193).
102. Smith (1973).
103. The legal battle over the use of an improvised flute passage by James Newton in the Beastie
Boys song ‘‘Pass the Mic’’ brought additional attention to this issue. The Beastie Boys paid
the proper licensing fees from Newton’s record label for the rights to use the recording, but
did not obtain rights for the composition from Newton. A panel of judges recently ruled in
favor of the Beastie Boys, arguing that the passage was not long enough to merit the neces-
sity of obtaining a compositional license. Newton argued, however, that the short passage
formed the framework for the entire Beastie Boys song and that its distinctive timbral
qualities (a pronounced multiphonic on the flute) represented a significant compositional
achievement. Timbre is a musical dimension that is little served by the current copyright
law, as evidence by the fact that the court only considered Newton’s compositional materi-
als in terms of number of notes.
105. Porter (2002:253).
106. Lewis (2002:124).
107. See Lewis (2002:129).
108. Journals and magazines that provide coverage of this music include Avant, Bananafish, Ca-
dence, Coda, Contact, Downbeat, Gramophone Explorations, Hurly Burly, Improjazz, The Improvisor,
Musicworks, Opprobrium, Resonance, Rubberneck, Signal to Noise, and The Wire.
109. Barry (1985:173).
110. Lake (1977).
111. See Couldry (1995).
112. See Borgo (2003).
113. Johnson (1989:461).
115. Porter (2002:283).
116. Lewis (2002:129–130).
117. Porter (2002:207).
118. Heble (2000:8).
119. Gennari (1991:449).
120. Lipsitz (1997:178).
121. Harris (2000:122).
122. Harris (2000:124).
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NOTES
Chapter Three
1. Quoted in Carr (1973:76).
2. Quoted in McCrae (1985:10).
4. In an email with the author (June 7, 2005), Parker recounted that during his time at Uni-
versity he heard Peter Geach lecture, saw Elizabeth Anscombe carrying their baby around
campus in a shopping bag, heard Alex Comfort speak to the Anarchist group, shook hands
with Malcolm X when Malcolm gave a talk at the Student’s Union, and played the national
anthem in quarter tones for the Queen’s visit. He described the early termination of his
studies as ‘‘somewhere between a drop-out and an ejectee.’’
6. See Martinelli (1994).
7. Quoted in Henkin (2003:n.p.).
8. Parker (1992).
9. Quoted in Tisue (1995:n.p.).
10. Parker (1992,n.p.).

11. Quoted in Corbett (1994:204).
12. Quoted in Corbett (1994:206–7).
13. Cardew (1971:xviii,xx).
14. A considerable amount of music analysis and criticism in the past has proceeded under
similar epistemological assumptions. Not only are performances and scores often dissected
into their component parts with little concern for their overall temporal effect or their situa-
tional context, but the supposedly ‘‘rational’’ and ‘‘intellectual’’ aspects of music have often
been heralded above all others. In musical improvisation, however, the connection between
intention and act may be strengthened until the performer achieves a phenomenological
condition that feels neither purely mental nor purely physical. The popular and scholarly
literature that expresses related views on this subject is considerable. For example, see
Berendt (1983,1985), Boyd (1992), Hamel (1986), Khan (1983), Nachmanovitch (1990),
Sarath (1996), Sawyer (1997), Sudo (1997), Sudnow (1978), and the special issue of The
Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 58/2 (Spring 2000).
15. See Hayles (1998) for an excellent overview of the cybernetics revolution and related issues
of embodiment.
16. Bowman (2004:36).
17. See also Varela (1979) and the work of Maturana (1975), the founder of autopoetic theory.
For excellent introductory work see Maturana and Varela (1988) and (1980), Winograd and
Flores (1986), and Whitaker (1996).
18. Capra (1996:68).
19. Maturana et al. (1959).
20. In an interview with Anthony Korner (1996), Brian Eno makes this point while describing
his early interest in minimalist music.
21. See Hayles (1999), chapter six.
22. Varela et al. (1991:9).
23. Varela et al. (1991:149).
24. Bowman (2004:36).
25. Iyer (2002:389).
26. Bowman (2004:36).
27. Bateson (1972).
28. Bach y Rita (1962), Reported in Varela, et al. (1991:175).
29. Reported in Varela et al. (1991:175).
30. Held and Hein (1963).
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NOTES
31. Varela et al. (1991:175). Also cited by Iyer (2002:390).

32. Varela et al. (1991:172). For early representative work, see Maturana, et al. (1959).
33. See Varela, et al. (1991) and Hutchins (1995).
34. Bowman (2004:47).
35. For examples of work with this orientation see Gioia (1988), Johnson-Laird (1988), Sloboda
(1985), and Pressing (1998). Important work on jazz with an ethnomusicological perspec-
tive can be found in Berliner (1994) and Monson (1996).
36. Quoted in Lock (1991:32–33). See also Lewis (1996).
37. Johnson (1987). See also Lakoff and Johnson (1980).
38. See Such (1993) for a detailed discussion of the spatial metaphor of ‘‘outside’’ and its use
in avant-garde jazz.
39. Turner (1996) asserts that simple stories are basic to human communication and cognition.
And Damasio (1999) offers considerable empirical evidence and neurophysiological detail
to support the idea that ‘‘simple stories’’ are fundamental not only to human communica-
tion and cognition, but also to consciousness itself.
40. Lakoff and Johnson (1980).
41. Zbikowski (1998:n.p.).
42. In an email posted on the Society for Ethnomusicology listserv on December 8, 2004, An-
drew McGraw mentioned that these designations are used to discuss vocal music in general,
and are used by some string players as well.
43. Several other musical traditions base their pedagogic vocabulary on the direction of motion
required to produce an instrumental pitch rather than on its perceived direction in pitch
space: for instance, Japanese shamisen and the Dominican button accordion.
44. Email posted on the Society for Ethnomusicology listserv by Julie Strand on December 8,
2004. Strand points out that the more cosmopolitan musicians among the Bamana-Jula
acknowledge that the Western world conceives of pitches differently.
45. One embodied way in which pitches do appear to be higher or lower comes from the feeling
in our vocal chords as we sing, and this may in fact have provided the initial impetus to
map pitches vertically on staff paper.
46. Zbikowski (2002:72).
47. Walser (1991:120).
48. Maquet (1994:18).
49. Walser (1991:122). I agree that timbre and its cultural and psychological impact have been
understudied, possibly due to the fact that its various structures and manipulations are
least amenable to standard notational presentation. It should however be mentioned that
musical timbre, or spectral envelope, has been a major subject area for acoustics and music
perception researchers, although their goals differ considerably from music scholars inter-
ested in context-sensitive and culturally configured meanings. For an intriguing article that
attempts to bridge this scholarly gap see Fales (2002).
50. Cardew (1971:xviii.).
51. Bowden (2004:43), italics added.
52. Fauconnier and Turner (2002).
53. see also Grady, Oakley, and Coulson (1999).
54. For one example see Borgo (2004).
55. Cusick (1994:16).
56. Cusick (1994:20).
57. Hayles (1999:206).
58. Grosz (1994:19).
59. Cusick (1994:16).
60. McClary and Walser (1994:76).
61. Quoted in Lock (1991:30). In addition to jazz influences, Parker is an avid listener to tradi-
tional musics the world over. He contributes the occasional record review or brief article on
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NOTES
world music to Resonance magazine and is an advocate for the field of ethnomusicology in
general. According to Peter Riley (1979:3), Parker’s favorites include ‘‘Scottish bagpipe
music, aboriginal music from Australia, Korean music, music from Southeast Asia gener-
ally, Japanese music, [and] African music.’’
62. Quoted in the liner notes to Towards the Margins, ECM 1612 (1997).
63. For theoretical discussion on the notion of ‘‘noise’’ in contemporary music see Attali (1985)
and Cox and Warner (2004).
64. Racy (1994:50).
65. See Iyer (2002:392–3).
66. Several musicians including Rudresh Mahanthappa (Mother Tongue), Jason Moran (The
Bandwagon), and Greg Burk (Carpe Momentum), have recently made this connection explicit
by composing music for improvisers based on recorded speech patterns.
67. Iyer (2002:392).
68. Bowman (2004:39).
69. After reading a draft of this chapter, Evan Parker provided one possible answer to this
question to me via email: ‘‘I thought of Ornette’s ‘Dancing in Your Head.’ — I have spoken
of a move to dance music for the nervous system too.’’ (June 7, 2005).
71. Quoted in Corbett (1994:204–205).
73. In the late 1990s Parker started his own record label (with the assistance of Martin David-
son) and called it Psi to reference not only the associations with irrational numbers and
golden ratios, but also the psi phenomena which he believes are at the heart of improvised
music making.
74. Quoted in Carr (1973:69).
76. Johnson (1989:461).
77. From the liner notes to the CD reissue of Evan Parker’s album Monoceros (Chronoscope
CPE2204–2).
78. Watson (2004:159).
79. Watson (2004:145). Other authors have commented on an apparent stylistic/aesthetic split
between the various European national traditions. Nick Couldry relays the standard gener-
alization this way: the English are severe, the Dutch are funny, and the Germans are aggres-
sive. But improvisers, while acknowledging the importance of local and formative
influences on their own playing, are often reluctant to give credence to this way of thinking,
and the transnational nature of much contemporary free improvisation can render these
generalziations somewhat flat and meaningless. Christopher Atton (1988–89) compiled
views by various British musicians on the question ‘‘does British improvised music have a
discernible national identity?’’ Nearly all of the respondents, while aware of certain trends
and stylistic qualities related to social, economic, political, and national concerns, preferred
to focus on the global or transnational relevance of the music.
CPE2204–2).
82. Watson (2004:149). Although the music and musicians Watson is referencing are different,
the tone of his comments is not too dissimilar from those of Mark D. Miller who, in 1958,
argued that jazz produces pleasure by satisfying repressed impulses (reprinted in Walser
1999:234–8).
83. Watson (2004:150).
84. Watson (2004:166).
85. As a quick illustration, Derek Bailey was married several times and appears to have had an
‘‘extremely complicated’’ personal life by his own account, but in a biography verging on
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NOTES
450 pages, Watson includes less than a handful of sentences that reference any of this, most
of which were supplied from a taped interview with Bailey’s current partner in which she
asks Bailey to elaborate a bit on some of his earlier relationships (pp.36–38). Bailey re-
sponds with such telling remarks as: ‘‘Single, yes, free as a bird. I think my main sexual
activity was masturbation’’ (36); ‘‘I married this woman because at the time it seemed the
easier thing to do than not marrying her’’ (37); and ‘‘I met a woman there who I lived with.
We had a very successful—the only successful arrangement with a female I’ve ever had
other than my present one.’’ (38).
86. Lock (1999).
CPE2204–2).
88. In an interview with the Monastery Bulletin, Parker has many interesting things to say
about the life of a professional musician in free improvisation and his own personal per-
spective on the spiritual dimension of music (http://www.monastery.nl/bulletin/parker/
parker.html).
89. Prior to the 20th century few individuals traveled more than a handful of miles from their
birthplace during their lifetimes.
90. Hofstadter (1979).
91. von Forester (1981).
92. Hayles (1999:8).
93. Kelly (1994:72).
94. There is an analog here to the fact that we often perceive things that are in flux as relatively
permanent and vise versa. For instance, items that appear to be solid in our environment
are in fact composed of atoms and subatomic particles that are in constant motion., while
dynamical processes such as rivers and waterfalls are often spoken about and perceived as
relatively fixed phenomena. We also have no trouble thinking of ourselves as comrising
relatively stable bodies and personalities despite the fact that our cells completely replenish
themselves every seven years or so.
95. Quoted in Toop (2004:243). In a communication with the author, Parker also recom-
mended Muses (1985) for his perspective on the interactive connectedness of time called
chronotopology.
96. Quoted in Henkin (2003:n.p.). In an email to the author (June 7, 2005), Parker commented,
‘‘Even ‘notation’ and ‘improvisation’ as if they are somehow opposed categories is not sup-
ported by musical practice. Memorised material can be and often is written down is some
sort of aide memoire form.’’
97. Paul Berliner (1993:127–135) discusses a similar relationship between player and instrument.
98. For more about the notion of play in improvised music, see chapter seven.
99. Quoted in Lock (1991:64). This quote may remind some readers of Norbert Weiner’s idea
that, ‘‘We are but whirlpools in a river of ever flowing water. We are not stuff that abides,
but patterns that perpetuate themselves.’’ (Quoted in Capra 1996:52). One of Evan Parker’s
earliest recordings was a collective effort released under the name Cybernetic Serendipity
Music.
100. Quoted in Svirchev (1993:7).
101. Parker (1992:n.p.).
Chapter Four
1. Liner notes to the album Concept (RivBea RB50101).

2. Quoted in Turner (1982:4).
3. In an interview, Rivers stated: ‘‘The idea of a non-harmonic approach had occurred to me,
but I just didn’t know how to put this situation together. Cecil Taylor and Ornette Coleman
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NOTES
provided me the key that opened the door, and I walked right in along with them’’ (Turner
1982:4). Although Cecil Taylor, Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler, and others had certainly
made an earlier impact with freer forms of improvising, even they tended to rely on struc-
turing devices or short melodies that were learned ahead of time to organize their ensem-
bles. Sam Rivers’s earliest professional experiences improvising in a freer manner were
with a group of classically trained musicians at a Boston art gallery (McGaughan 1998:12).
Saxophonist Steve Lacy reckons that his album titled The Forest and the Zoo (1966) may in
fact be ‘‘the first completely free lp’’ (Watson 2004:182).
4. Quoted in Turner (1982:5).
5. To be precise, a more exact notion is that ‘‘the whole is different from the sum of its parts.’’
In certain cases, emergent properties can arise by focusing on some of the parts at the
expense of others, in which cases the whole may in fact by smaller than its parts. I have
chosen to maintain the better-known phrase ‘‘the whole is greater than the sum of its parts’’
for its poetic ability to challenge the reductionist thinking that has dominated Western
science for centuries.
6. See Borgo and Goguen (2005).
7. The field of consciousness studies is increasingly filled with decentralized models of the self
and mind. In place of a ‘‘stream of consciousness,’’ many researchers are proposing some-
thing more akin to ‘‘rivers of consciousness.’’ In the ‘‘Society of Mind’’ model, for instance,
Marvin Minsky (1987) envisions societies of mental agents that work together and compete
with one another to do things that no agent could do on its own. And Daniel Dennett (1991)
proposes a ‘‘multiple drafts’’ model of consciousness, arguing that multiple narratives are
simultaneously created and edited in different parts of the brain.
8. Toop (2002:247).
9. Mead (1932:2). Quoted in Sawyer (2003:12).
10. Gleick (1987:23)
11. Kellert (1993:119–158). Kellert is only one of many philosophers of science who are cur-
rently seeking to tease out the cultural biases that often profoundly affect notions within
the scientific community about what makes for interesting and worthwhile science. See
also the work of Evelyn Fox Keller (1985,1996), Donna Haraway (2004), David Hess (1997),
and Scott Gilbert (2000).
12. See Nettl (1998) for work that addresses and helps to correct this deficiency.
13. Bailey (1992:ix).
14. There is, however, a large body of scholarship on improvising music, in the Middle East for
instance, dating back many centuries that would seem to negate this claim
15. Regardless of the level of detail of the notation, a score, just like a book, can be read and
interpreted in many ways by different individuals. See Gabrielsson (1988) and Palmer
(1996) for a compelling argument that performance is a better starting point than a musical
score for understanding musical experience and musical expression.
16. See Sancho-Velasquez (2001).
17. In fact, music scholarship on the whole has been surprising slow in adopting formats that
could allow for sound to accompany written text. Most of the journals that have adopted
new technologies and practices are done on the graduate student level (e.g., The Pacific
Review of Ethnomusicology and Echo: A Music Centered Journal).
18. That no recordings exist of the earliest jazz formulations (Buddy Bolden, etc.) is a fact much
lamented by historians of early jazz.
19. See Lewis (2000).
20. The proliferation of so-called ‘‘real books,’’ both illegal and legal, has standardized the per-
formance practice and repertoire of ‘‘gigging musicians’’ at jazz ‘‘jam sessions’’ to the point
that the notational errors and transcription mistakes that exist in the books have become
common practice.
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NOTES
21. Briggs and Peat (1989:29).

22. Although we use the word ‘‘chunks’’ here, our approach is very different from the classic
text by Miller (1956) on the short term memory limit of 7 $ or — 2 meaningful units
23. For more discussion of technical topics in this section, see Goguen (2004). These concepts
were explored and presented in a concert/lecture titled ‘‘Improvisation, Situatedness and
Emotion in Music’’ by Joseph and Ryoko Goguen at Keio University, Faculty of Literature,
Tokyo, December 9, 2003 and also appear in the Keio University Yearbook. See Joseph’s
Qualia Project Homepage for more information (http://www-cse.ucsd.edu/users/goguen/
projs/qualia.html).
24. Saliency should be thought of as a technical concept that will have to be determined empiri-
cally. It is related to protention, but since it also involves expectations over periods that can
greatly exceed 10 seconds, it has much in common with the notion of anticipation found in
Meyer (1956).
25. Csikszentmihalyi (1991).
26. For related work on the phenomenology of music and improvisation in particular see also
Benson (2003).
27. Damasio (1999).
28. For a more technical discussion of these issues see Borgo and Goguen (2005).
29. To demonstrate how this system can be mathematically modeled, let n be the number of
musicians involved, and let i vary from 1 to n, denoting these musicians. Let mi(t) denote
the sound produced by musician i from time t to time t$1, where t is an integer indicating
the number of time units elapsed. This unit is somewhat arbitrary, and might for example
be the reaction time of the musicians, or 1/8 of a beat, or 1/10 of a second. The total musical
sound is a superposition of the sounds of the individual musicians, defined by m(t) % m1(t)
$ m2(t) $ . . . $mn(t). Now let xi(t) denote the state of musician i at time t; this should
include retention, protention, short term memory, and long term memory, as well as all
currently salient qualia with their saliency levels. Note that the long-term memory compo-
nent of xi(t) will include cultural patterns and predispositions for musician i as well.
Let fi be the sound transition function for musician i; it tells what sound mi(t$1) that
musician i will produce at time t$1, given the musician’s state xi(t) at time t and any
influences on performance at time t$1, whether provided by a score in its broadest sense,
denoted si(t), or through more subtle contextual factors. And let gi be the state transition
function for musician i describing that musician’s next state xi(t$1), given the current state
xi(t) and the just prior total musical sound m(t). Then the following is the complete set of
dynamical equations for the music making of n musicians, according to the theory sketched
above:
mi(t$1) % fi(si(t$1), xi(t)) for i%1, . . . ,n

m(t) % m1(t) $ m2(t) $ . . . $mn(t)
xi(t$1) % gi(m(t), xi(t)) for i%1, . . . ,n
The first equation is a formal statement of the definition of music; what musician i does
next depends on what the score, if any, says and on that musician’s current state, including
the understanding of what has gone before, and the anticipation of what might be next. The
second equation says that the total sound is a superposition of the sounds of the individual
musicians. And the third equation provides a formal statement of the definition of listening
previously given: the next state of musician i depends on the sound heard and the present
state. Thus, for n musicians, the system has 2n$1 equations. The first and third sets of n
equations each form a discrete time dynamical system in the usual sense of formal dynami-
cal systems theory, where the first argument of the transition function is a control parame-
ter and the second is the state. The fact that the state of each system acts as the control of
the other says that these two systems are ‘‘tightly coupled,’’ since each involves feedback
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NOTES
from the other. This feedback, along with the sheer complexity of factors involved, can
produce nonlinearity in the system.
30. See Goguen (1977) and (2004).
31. The efficacy of these transformations is, of course, tied to the enculturated and embodied
expectations of specific listeners
32. See Goguen (1977) and (2004).
33. This is called the E (for emotion) Hypothesis in Goguen (2004), which also suggests that
this explanation for emotion applies quite generally to all qualia, just as the Qualia Hypoth-
esis seems to apply to all experience. We are also aware that under certain social, cultural,
and historical circumstance, music listening may not be or have been entirely safe.
34. Cardew (1971:xvii).
35. We must be careful not to assume any ontological status for the abstractions involved in
modeling, no matter their complexity. Models are always constructed by human beings for
some particular purpose and should not be viewed as definitive descriptions of reality. We
believe that models of music should always be grounded in the realities of human experi-
ence, social as well as bodily.
36. Although the bibliography of works discussing free jazz is lengthy (see Gray 1991), only a
few authors have offered detailed analytical work (see Block 1990 and 1997, Jost 1994, and
Westendorf 1994). See also Bailey (1991) for his notion of non-idiomatic improvisation,-
which for him and others, involves a more complete departure from the traditions of Ameri-
can jazz.
37. Technically speaking, the pendulum in a vacuum would need to be mechanically boosted in
order to produce an exact limit cycle. See Briggs and Peat (1989:37).
38. In Russia as early as the 1950s, A.N. Kolmogorov, Vladimir Arnold and J. Moser followed
up on Poincarés ideas by investigating the mathematical aspects pertaining to the stability
of the solar system.
39. Like the term ‘‘chaos,’’ some researchers have bitterly complained that ‘‘strange attractors’’
evoke inexact connotations that do not correlate well with mathematical reality, but the
term has stuck to describe these fascinating, fractal figures in phase space.
40. For more discussion of these examples, see Lorenz (1996). Remember, also, that even
though chaos demands nonlinearity, nonlinearity does not ensure chaos. In the ski-slope-
with-moguls example, the system is certainly nonlinear, but if the height of the moguls
above the adjacent pits is relatively small, the board may, after weaving back and forth at
the top of the hill, gain enough velocity to maintain a constant direction over the moguls.
A second board released very near the first, may diverge rapidly at the top, but further down
the hill converge on the constant directional path of the first board. The qualitative behavior
of a system can often change when the intensity of some disturbing influence passes a
critical level.
41. The word cybernetics is derived from the Greek word for piloting a boat.
42. Resnick (1994:135).
43. This is referred to as ‘‘reification of concepts’’: the belief that our models of experience fully
capture it and can replace it. We wrongly make the assumption that the ‘‘categories’’ or
cognitive ‘‘chunks’’ that we construct in order to make sense of continuous, information-
heavy stimuli are ‘‘natural.’’ What is natural is the human need to ‘‘chunk’’ and to ‘‘catego-
rize.’’ What these will be and will mean is culture-dependent (among other things).
45. Bifurcations (or multi-furcations) technically occur in state space whereas ‘‘transitions’’
occur in the phase space used to describe that state space.
46. Cohen and Stewart (1994: 206–7).
47. Rivers, Sam. 1998 [1973]. Trio Live. GRP CD 278.
48. See Nunn (1998:52–54). Nunn’s terminology, while useful, relies on a linear conception of
musical flow and cannot easily accommodate moments in which the collective phase space
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NOTES
becomes rather dense and tangled. He does, however, acknowledge that oftentimes several
of these transitional approaches may be in play at once.
49. We would like to thank Ryoko Goguen for her helpful observations about these transitional
catalysts.
50. The harmonic relationship here also points to a strong V-I feeling as the trill is on concert
D, the modal section uses concert A as a root, and the final climax is to concert D.
51. There are also some strong similarities and connections between the sections marked I2
and L2 in Tabe 1 with their bowed bass passages and flute modality.
52. Henry Louis Gates (1988) offers perhaps the most comprehensive treatment of the subject.
53. For important work on signifyin(g) in jazz studies see Borgo (2004), Murphy (1990), Mon-
son (1996), Tomlinson (1991), and Walser (1995), as well as Zbikowski (2002), who also
incorporates insight from music theory and cognitive linguistics.
54. Quoted in Day (2000:108).
55. Quoted in McGaughan (1998:12).
56. Of course the performance of a sonata or an improvised treatment based on a 32-bar song
form can exhibit an organic quality that is not bounded by the syntax of the form.
Chapter Five
1. Of course chaos can still mean extreme disorder to some musicians as well. See Lords of
Chaos: The Bloody Rise of the Satanic Metal Underground by Michael Moynihan and Didrik
Soderlind.
2. Thom (1989).
3. Briggs and Peat (1989). Their notion of a turbulent mirror is borrowed from an ancient
Chinese myth, in which the Yellow Emperor imprisoned the forces of chaos in mirrors and
cast a spell compelling them to repeat the actions and appearances of men, until one day
they began to escape again.
4. In particular, their notion of a turbulent mirror is based on the Chinese legend of the Yellow
Emperor who cast a spell to imprison the forces of chaos in mirrors, though the legend also
predicted that the spell would not last and the world of chaos would come bubbling back
into our own. In one Chinese creation story, the forces of yin and yang interact to create the
10,000 things (in other words, everything). And similar cosmological theories in Ancient
Greece and Babylonian speak of the necessary interaction between the forces of chaos and
order.
6. Philosopher of science Steven Kellert (1991:81) uses a witty turn-of-phrase to illuminate
this distinction: ‘‘chaos theory allows us to understand how unpredictable behavior appears
in simple systems.’’ The phrase can be read in two ways: first, in the sense of ‘‘how does it
come to be that simple systems display such complicated behavior,’’ and second, in the less
obvious way of ‘‘how unpredictable behavior appears’’ or ‘‘what does this behavior look
like?’’ How do intelligible patterns persist or emerge from this seemingly chaotic milieu?
7. Modern dynamical systems theory now speaks of four classes of behavior. Class I behavior
describes a system whose dynamics will either disappear with time or settle into a fixed,
homogeneous state. Class II behavior is found in systems whose dynamic pattern evolves
to a fixed and finite size, forming structures or patterns that repeat indefinitely. Class III
behavior represents highly irregular states in which structures never repeat. This represents
chaos in is most disorderly and dramatic form. Class IV behavior, however, is perhaps the
most mysterious, since it can produce complex patterns that grow and contract irregularly.
Although it is usually given its own designation, this type of behavior has been mathemati-
cally shown to exist somewhere between periodic (Class II) and chaotic (Class III) behaviors
and has been described, somewhat poetically, as the ‘‘edge of chaos.’’
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8. One of the first great discoveries of chaos theory, the Feigenbaum number, demonstrates
how a simple period-doubling SOScade—for instance, a dripping faucet with a regular in-
crease in water—reaches a particular point at which the period has doubled infinitely often,
resulting in turbulence or chaos. This period-doubling SOScade is one of the most common
routes to chaos and is now describable in a very orderly way through Mitchell Feigenbaum’s
discovery. Benoit Mandelbrot’s well-known fractal image also contains the Feigenbaum
number and provides another example of the ‘‘new simplicities’’ and ‘‘natural laws’’ in the
realm of chaos, which are of primary interest to order-within-chaos researchers.
9. Ralph Abraham (1994:2).
10. Quoted in Steinitz (1996a:14).
11. Quoted in Lehrer (2004:n.p.).
12. Bradlyn (1988–89) and Pignon (1998) are the only work I have found that specifically deals
with the relationship between chaos theory and musical free improvisation.
13. Hayles (1991:7). She credits the term to Ihab Hassan, but three European scholars, George
Anderla, Anthony Dunning, and Simon Forge, also coined the term, perhaps independently.
14. See Bidlack (1990) for example.
15. See Madden (1999:xii), Bader (2002a, 2002b), Little (1995), and Steinitz (1996).
16. Lochhead (2001:211). Similarly, little work has been devoted on the ‘‘perceptibility’’ of such
mathematical structures expressed in music.
17. Lochhead (2001:216).
18. Boulez (1975:56–57); Gleick (1987:22); Quoted in Lochhead (219–220).
19. By including derogatory quotes about improvisation from Carter and Xenakis without any
rebuttal, Lochhead appears to agree tacitly with the notion that improvisation can involve
nothing more than conditioned habit, and that it is somehow an inappropriate way to
explore the dynamics and intricacies of chaos (its ontological and denotative qualities), or at
the very least that it is an inferior way of doing so.
20. Lochhead (2001:235).
21. Lochhead (2001:239).
22. In her brief discussion of Hendrix and the Grateful Dead, Lochhead points out that the
1960s generation of guitarists were experimenting with new sonic developments resulting
from the electrification of their instruments, including distortion, feedback, and reverbera-
tion. She argues that, ‘‘noise in this context was not a term describing any sound that
presented annoying sonic surfaces but rather a means of sonically charting the multidimen-
sionality of chaos.’’ Although she mentions the sonorous and performance-practice goals of
improvisation, she cannot refrain from describing the work of both Hendrix and the Grate-
ful Dead in terms of ‘‘a Cageian aesthetic of creative chaos,’’ glossing over some important
processual and cultural differences in the ways in which these ‘‘noisy’’ sounds were
articulated.
23. See Lewis (2000:35).
24. This story is recounted in Watson (2004:167–170).
25. Lochhead (2001:232). Lochhead’s formulation of the category chaos as creative potential also
focuses on the ways in which ‘‘Asian conceptions of chaos as a creative force provided the
conceptual basis for the compositional use of procedures which allowed this potential to
emerge within a Western tradition of musical expressivity.’’ But here again she only refer-
ences Cage’s work (217). She makes no mention of how similar Asian-inspired influences
also made their way into the realm of jazz and improvised music in the 1960s; John Col-
trane’s work being only the most obvious example. In Europe, the work of Joe Harriott
and John McGlaughlin also highlights this emerging Asian influence in jazz. Nor does she
acknowledge the ways in which Coltrane’s music in particular influenced early minimalist
composers such as LaMonte Young and Terry Riley.
26. Lochhead (2001:243).
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NOTES
27. Attali (1985).

28. Lochhead (2001:240).
29. Lewis (2003).
30. Lewis (2003:3).
31. Quoted in Lochhead (2001:233).
32. Even if Cage was successful at removing personal ego from the act of composing many of
his works, his ego frequently resurfaced as he edited his final work and as he presented
that work to audiences. Joseph Goguen recently recounted to me the details surrounding a
particular Cage concert in the 1960s at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado when his
ideas were highly criticized by the veteran Buddhist monks in attendance.
33. Steinitz (1996:17). Steinitz’s uses the word ‘‘composers’’ instead of musicians emphasizes
the fact the nearly all of the interpretive and analytical work on the relationship between
the new sciences of chaos and complexity and music has been on so-called ‘‘New Music’’
composers.
35. Melchior (n.d.).
36. Quoted in Sardar and Abrams (1999:34).
37. The recent horrendous tsunami in the Indian Ocean also reminds us that coastlines are
constantly being reshaped and reformed by natural processes.
39. Beresford (1998:92).
40. http://www.monastery.nl/bulletin/parker/parker.html
41. Parker (1992). In an email communication with the author, Parker added more context to
the original occasion when he first made correlations between his musical processes and
fractal patterns. He was giving a solo concert at the Slade School of Art at which Michael
Parsons, a co-founder of the Scratch Orchestra (along with Cornelius Cardew and Howard
Skempton), was in attendance. On this occasion, Parker felt some pressure to elaborate on
the ways in which he works on audible processes in improvised music, so he drew parallels
with Mandelbrot figures.
42. Reich (1974).
43. Email communication with the author, June 7, 2005. Parker’s formal response appears in
the first issue of an obscure publication titled Microphone.
44. Taylor et al (2000).
45. Nicolis and Nicolis (1984).
46. See Bader (2002a, 2002b).
47. Technically, the pseudo-phase space must involve 2n$1 dimensions, where n is the maxi-
mum fractal number finally calculated.
48. For a technical explanation of this process, see Argyris et al (1994).
49. Of course, one can use intersections to get an even more detailed version, i.e. using 50ms
sections starting from time points in a series of 10ms resulting in 100 values per second.
But as the calculations take much time, for large pieces this makes little sense since we
have to use mean values to display the data in a useful form.
50. Argyris et al (1994).
51. In this light, I welcome any feedback from readers on their experiences following the
various plots while listening to the musical recordings.
52. See Keefe and Laden (1991) for a technical discussion of the correlation dimension of wood-
wing multiphonics.
53. In an email, Parker described this technique to me and admitted that he ‘‘stole’’ it from
Steve Lacy and developed it further during his time with Music Improvisation Company.
55. Parker’s comments also relate to the well-known ‘‘inverted U’’ curve of Wilhelm Wundt.
Wundt’s curve indicates the relationship between complexity and preference/interest rela-
tive to a listener. Very simple stimuli contain little information and are therefore boring,
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NOTES
while extremely complex stimuli are so informative as to be difficult to comprehend and

appreciate. Listeners tend to prefer an intermediate level of complexity that is both compre-
hensible and challenging. In other words, their interest level will peak slightly in front of
their preference level. Parker’s use of the term ‘‘information’’ also highlights the fact that
two conflicting interpretations (Shannon’s and Brillouin’s) have circulated for this common
term. For related discussion, see Hayles (1990, chapter two).
58. This performance is also available on the 2-CD set compiled by David Toop titled Not Neces-
sarily English Music.
59. Cadence magazine, September 1997.
60. After recently listening to this recording on headphones, and then removing them, my
entire office space seemed to be humming with this drone for minutes. The only explana-
tion I could find was that the music left in my head had augmented the natural hum of the
fan on my laptop, but even that explanation did not seem to account for the phenomena.
61. The phenomenological analysis from chapter four was completed well before I undertook
the computer analysis with Rolf Bader, and I left it unaltered to provide the most accurate
point of comparison.
62. See Meyer (1956) for more on expectations.
63. Jenkins (2004:xxxi).
64. Briggs and Peat (1989:70) make an interesting point about the ‘‘chaos’’ found even in
Euclidian geometry: ‘‘It seems ironic that pi, the number used to calculate the circumfer-
ence of what many consider to be the most perfect and ordered object of our imagination—
the circle—can never be calculated exactly. Even in the Euclidian world, order and chaos go
hand in hand.’’ (70)
66. The qualities most associated with Western notation—tempered and chromatic pitch, me-
tered rhythms, functional harmony, etc.—have also undoubtedly imfluenced the way in
which diverse non-Western musics are often grouped together under the meaningless yet
marginalized category of ‘‘world music.’’; what some have referred to as the ‘‘West and the
Rest’’ syndrome.
69. Some current research also shows that our heart follows a subtle chaotic rhythm so that no
individual cells or group of cells are unduly stressed by performing the exact same function
at the exact same pace.
70. Kauffman (1995:20–21).
71. Briggs and Peat (1989:139–40).
72. Prigogine (1981)
73. In the early twentieth century, the French physicist Henri Bénard discovered that heating a
thin layer of liquid could result in strangely ordered structures. Uniformly heated from
below, the liquid transfers heat by conduction alone. However, when the temperature dif-
ference between top and bottom reaches a critical value, heat convection takes over and an
ordered pattern of hexagonal cells appears, transferring heat upwards through the center
of the cells and downwards via the liquid along the cell walls. Prigogine’s work showed in
detail how this pattern emerges at a critical point of instability as the system moves farther
away from equilibrium.
75. Quoted in Bailey (1992:141). Also recounted in Rzewski (2002).
76. Quoted in Watson (2004:183). Lacy was perhaps the first to record a completely free album,
one with no preconceived themes or structures (The Forest and the Zoo in 1966).
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77. Quoted in Bailey (1992:128).

78. Quoted in Lochhead (2001:228).
79. Bailey (1992:127). Evan Parker responded directly to the quote by Eliott Carter in an inter-
view with John Corbett: ‘‘Improvisation is played to keep the player from playing what the
composer already knew’’ (Corbett 1995:223).
80. Montuori and Purser (1997:10).
81. Axelrod and Cohen (2000:16).
83. Kelly (1994:22–23).
84. Kelly 91994:24).
85. It is interesting to note that, for a music predicated on what can be a very risky en-
deavor—to improvise collectively in a group setting—accounts of failure can be very difficult
to locate in both the academic and trade coverage of the music.
86. I was unable to attend the festival in 2004, but I did have the opportunity to talk with two
of our graduate students who attended the concert in question and I was able to view a
video that an audience member had made of the entire event. Several articles appeared in
connection with the festival and a vibrant internet debate continued for weeks after the
event. Much of the relevant Internet commentary can be found at http://www.zoilus.com/
documents/live_notes/2004/000208.shtml under the heading ‘‘Guelphgate.’’
87. For a helpful introduction to Namtchylak, see Corbett (1994:160–2).
88. ‘‘Singer wails up a storm,’’ The Globe and Mail (Toronto), Monday, September 13, 2004.
89. Ms. Namtchylak seemed disturbed that a major sponsor of the evening’s concert whose ad
appeared in a prominent place in the program was a therapy organization and she had, in
fact, only recently recovered from a vicious personal attack. She also let the audience know
that she had not been picked up at the airport or hotel and, in general, was not in her
opinion treated professionally. Several audience members attributed this shoddy treatment
to the fact that she was a non-Western woman, one proclaiming ‘‘If they’d been dealing
with Cecil Taylor or Anthony Braxton, you know they’d make damn sure that nothing like
that got screwed up.’’ Other comments by Ms. Namtchylak were less easy to decipher and
some seemed to lash out at the audience, so that those in attendance appeared at turns
sympathetic and confused. The growing unrest was surprisingly quelled when William Par-
ker began to rub the sides of a Buddhist meditation bowl, prompting the crowd and Ms.
Namtchylak to quiet their conversations and the musicians to begin performing anew.
90. Luke Bowden, the volunteer who was directly responsible for handling the artists’ needs
during the festival, and in particular those of Ms. Namtchylak, provided some additional
context on the behind-the-scenes deliberations in a lengthy email post. Twenty-or-so min-
utes into her rather stoic performance, Ajay Heble, the Guelph festival organizer, reportedly
was frantically soliciting opinions offstage on how to handle the situation. The sponsors
had stormed out by that point exacerbating the situation, according to Bowden. Initially,
and following Bowden’s suggestion, the festival staff told the soundman to remove her
from the in-house mix, but this change was not even noticed by most in attendance as her
voice still projected well and was picked up in the microphones set for the other musicians.
One audience member after the fact rather pointedly described this decision by the organiz-
ers as a ‘‘passive-aggressive approach’’ by ‘‘Canadian wimp-ass pissants.’’ Eventually the
emcee for the evening was instructed to ‘‘give her the hook’’ as many of the Internet con-
tributors later described it. The official press release from the festival apologizing for the
event described this as ‘‘a very difficult decision . . . made in consultation with numerous
Festival organizers, the artistic director, audience members, volunteers, artists performing
at the Festival, and other experienced arts presenters.’’
91. Day (1998:129–30).
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NOTES
92. Heble (2000:225).

93. springgardenmusic.com
94. Steve Lacy, The Wire 1 (Summer 1982:6–7). Quoted in Cox and Warner (2004:249).
95. Quoted in Sardar and Abrams (1999:169).
96. Peckham (1965:xi).
97. Peckham (1965:79).
98. Peckham (1965:220).
99. Cross (2003:51). The notion of music as a ‘‘consequence free’’ activity is somewhat problem-
atic, but it is used here in the biological sense that music, in most all cases, does not by
itself do physical harm to humans. Since social interactions play an important role in our
cognitive development (a topic we will look into in greater detail in chapter seven), it should
also be clear that these two properties cannot be easily divorced from one another.
100. For instance, the Hindu concept of lila is often translated as the divine play of creation,
destruction, and re-creation (Nachmanovitch 1990:1). And the Yoruban concept of ere can
signify both a sense of play and improvisation (Drewal 1992:12).
101. Quoted to me in an interview with Adam Rudolph, a percussionist and former collaborator
with Cherry.
102. Gadamer (1993:102).
103. Yet even a scientist such as Richard Dawkins, whose famous work The Selfish Gene has often
been read (and misread) as reductionist, can state unequivocally: ‘‘Science proceeds by
having hunches, by making guesses, by having hypotheses, sometimes inspired by poetic
thoughts, by aesthetic thoughts even, and then science goes about trying to demonstrate it
experimentally or observationally. And that’s the beauty of science that it has this imagina-
tive stage but then it goes on to the proving stage, the demonstrating stage. (Quoted in the
online journal The Edge 153 (2005), www.edge.org).
104. Mechling (1991:267). Mechling envisions play not as nonsense, but rather as ‘‘uncommon
sense.’’
105. Hall (1992:224).
106. Hall (1992:233). I am less fond of Hall’s distinction between high and low context commu-
nication and acquired and learned aspects of culture. Although they may be helpful in
articulating the poles of learning continuum, maintaining this dualistic conception runs
counter to much current thinking in education, as we will see more in chapter seven.
107. Cross (2003:51).
108. Hess (1997:133–4).
109. Some recent studies show that a healthy human brain maintains a low-level chaos that
self-organizes into simpler order when presented with a familiar stimulus.
Chapter Six
1. Strogatz (2003:14).
2. Strogatz (2003:2).
3. Carroll-Phelan and Hampson (1996:554)
4. Benson’s position here draws heavily on the research of Nils Wallin (1992).
5. Quoted in Strogatz (2003:274).
6. Strogatz (2003:274).
7. Strogatz (2003:72).
8. See Martha McClintock’s classic article titled ‘‘Menstrual Synchrony and Suppression’’ (Na-
ture vol. 229,pp.244–5, 1971).
9. Condon (1986). Cited in Benzon (2001:26).
10. Benzon (2001:27–8).
11. Perper (1985:75–111). Cited in Benzon (2001:28).
12. Benson (2001:28).
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NOTES
13. See Wallin (1992) for an introduction to the field of biomusicology. See also Deutsch (1999)
for related research.
14. Clayton et al (2004:21).
15. See Keil and Feld (1994).
16. Clayton, Sager, and Will (2004:20).
17. Berliner (1994:217).
18. Sudnow (1978:152).
19. Johnson (2002:104). Quoted in Cook (2004:8).
20. Clayton et al (2005:21). For related work see Schutz (1964) and Weeks (1996).
21. Cook (2004:16).
22. Rusch (1979:11).
23. Evan Parker has named the record label he recently started ‘‘Psi’’ to reference these types
of parapsychological phenomena.
24. Interview with the author, Feb 1, 2005.
25. Strogatz (2003:2).
26. Strogatz (2003:2).
27. Quoted in Strogatz (2003:11–12).
28. See Strogatz (2003) chapter two.
29. Strogatz (2003:52–3).
30. Strogatz (2003:13).
31. Toop (2002:247)
32. Corbett (1995:237).
33. Lewis (2000:38).
34. Kelly (1994:6).
35. Quoted in Kelly (1994:7). Maeterlink’s book is available online at http://www.eldritchpress
.org/mm/b.html#toc.
36. Quoted in Kelly (1994:7).
37. For a compelling discussion of why the notion of humanity as a superorganism or a global
brain is a ‘‘non-crazy’’ question see Wright (2000:302–9), particularly his lengthy footnotes.
Also Peter Russell (1983) and Howard Bloom (2000) have both written intelligently on the
notion of an emerging global brain. And Pierre Teilhard de Chardin may be best known for
his notion of a noosphere that represents an emerging planetary consciousness, similar to
the biosphere that describers the combined effects of life on the planet. If the reader still
thinks that these notions are truly crazy, it may be beneficial to ponder our own conscious-
ness: not simply how we think or why we are self-aware, but more broadly, and as Thomas
Nagel expressed, ‘‘Why is it like something to be alive?’’
38. Stevens titled the reverse strategy ‘‘Sustained Piece.’’
39. Toop (2004:242–3).
40. Bonabeau and Théraulaz (2000). Although this field is often presented as evolving in only
the past few years, examples drawn from the world of social insects can be found in early
cybernetics theory (Weiner 1961:156–7) and in dissipative structures as well (Prigogine and
Stengers 1984:181–6).
41. Bonabeau and Théraulaz (2000:79).
42. Bonabeau et al (1999:9–11).
43. Here we might want to envision the creative process of each individual as a type of swarm
dynamic, drawing on Marvin Minsky’s notion of a ‘‘Society of Mind.’’
44. Lansing (2003:194).
45. Similar pedagogical strategies abound in the world of free improvisation. For instance, Jack
Wright and Bob Marsh presented a version of this same idea at a clinic at UCSD in late
2004. Instead of asking participants to use instruments, however, they asked us to recline
on the floor and to shout out individual words (eventually moving to short phrases) that
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NOTES
were not meant to relate to one another. Although a valuable lesson on the emergent possi-
bilities of group improvisation was imparted, with only limited interaction possibilities and
without an intended semantic dimension (many of course chose to ignore that particular
instruction), the exercise seemed to languish a bit. But clearly pedagogical approaches like
this one that aim to control certain parameters can instill a sensitivity in performers that
makes the more open and adaptive approaches to improvisation possible. These ideas are
taken up in the final chapter as well.
46. See Bonabeau et al (1999:14–17).
47. Surowiecki (2004) chapter 9.
48. Bonabeau and Théraulaz (2000:79).
49. Kelly (1994:12).
50. Bonabeau et al (1999:22).
51. Resnick (1994:120).
52. Mainzer (1994:271).
53. Nunn (1998:157).
54. Keller (1985). Also recounted in Resnick (1994:122).
55. For other research offering a feminist critique of science see Keller (1985), Keller and Lon-
gino (1996), Haraway (2004), and Gilbert (2000)
56. Resnick (1994:123–129). The StarLogo program has been supplanted by more recent multi-
agent modeling systems including NetLogo and Swarm, the latter developed at the Santa
Fe Institute.
57. As one of my astute readers pointed out, one may be compelled to ask: could our ‘‘inven-
tion’’ (for some) of God be proven to be as much an assumption/presumption error?
58. Resnick (1994:129).
59. Resnick (1994:131).
60. Johnson (2001:20–21).
61. The Institute for Complex Studies at the University of Michigan is also supporting similar
innovative work.
62. Waterman (1990).
63. Quoted in Toop (2004:242).
64. The main criticisms of a view of evolution focused exclusively on random mutations include
an insufficient or inconclusive fossil record regarding intermediary species in the evolution-
ary timeline leading to the emergence of new species, insufficient time for random muta-
tions to create many of the remarkably complex features of biological species (like the
mammalian eye), and a general difficulty in understanding how gradual mutations can
explain certain behaviors that seem to arise without continuous selective pressures (like
insect mimicry) or that lead to both older and newer forms of a given species inhabiting the
same geographic area or ecological niche.
65. Capra (1996:227–28).
66. Margulis (1998:5).
67. Quoted in Joseph (1990:39).
68. Margulis and Sagan (1986:15).
69. Margulis (1998:33).
70. Margulis (1998:6).
71. Toop (2004:244).
72. Toop (2004:244).
73. http://www.shef.ac.uk/misc/rec/ps/efi/.
74. ‘‘New Research Opens a Window on the Mind of Plants.’’ http://www.csmonitor.com/
2005/0303/p01s03-usgn.htm
75. http://www.miyamasaoka.com/interdisciplinary/.
76. Quoted in Toop (2004:245). See Rothenberg (1995 and 2002).
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77. Most people envisioned computers in their infancy as offering little more than simple num-
ber crunching or bookkeeping assistance. And since the earliest models filled entire rooms
and were off limits except to a privileged few, many initially viewed computers as represen-
tative of a centralized mindset. Computers do still function as excellent bookkeepers and
electronic typewriters, and they are still out of reach of many, but increasingly computa-
tional tools and networking technologies are playing a role in the spread of decentralized
ideas.
78. Eno (1996)
79. Helmreich (1998:95). Quoted in Lansing (2003:200).
80. Quoted in Toop (2004:245)
81. Eno (1996).
82. Quoted in Henkin (2003:n.p.).
83. For one example of future directions, the Brooklyn-based group of artists and technologists,
LEMUR (League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots), is developing robotic musical instru-
ments that ‘‘play themselves’’ and can interact with human performers as well.
84. Resnick (1994:133).
85. Although this blurring may be artistically encouraging, we still need to be aware of cultural
assumptions that accompany our notions of musicking. Eddie Prévost, in his book Minute
Particulars, recounts an AMM performance after which a woman came up to the musicians
and remarked how moved she had been by the music. Once she learned that the group had
been improvising rather than playing from a memorized score, she not only doubted their
artistic and intellectual integrity, but she was forced to question her own powers of discrimi-
nation. ‘‘How had it been possible for her to enjoy and admire such work when its practice
had been so . . . primitive.’’
86. I am indebted to Pantelis Vassilakis for this intriguing comment. See also Russell (1983)
and Bloom (2000).
87. For another example, in an economic downturn or upturn, people often struggle to identify
the cause for celebration or dismay. Was it the rise in oil prices, or the drop in consumer
confidence? Is the Federal Chairman responsible for this?
88. Resnick (1994:137).
89. Resnick (1994:8).
90. Capra (1996:39).
91. Lansing (2003:192).
92. Lewis (2004c)
93. Barabási (2002:222).
94. Margulis (1998:2).
95. Shaviro (2003:10).
96. Six Degrees of Separation gained popularity through John Guare’s play of the same name
and more recently in the Oracle of Kevin Bacon game on the Internet.
97. Watts (2003:28), italics in original.
98. Like all of these emerging sciences, the contemporary study of networks did not emerge
from whole cloth. Graph theory in mathematics dates to at least the early eighteenth cen-
tury when Leonhard Euler solved the problem of taking a stroll across all seven bridges in
the Prussian city of Königsberg without crossing the same bridge twice by constructing an
elaborate graph. The methods that were developed in the following years, however, were
exclusively linear. Paul Erdós and Albert Rényi were first to introduce the notion of random
graphs. Since Erdós was such a prolific scholar, co-authoring hundred of papers, he is also
well known for the notion of an Erdós number that calculates how many degrees of separa-
tion lie between any given mathematician and the master. Most have no more than 3 or 4
degrees separation and no mathematician who has co-authored a paper has more than 17
as their Erdós number.
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99. Barabási (2002:39) makes the point that six degrees is a product of our modern society in
which people are insistent about keeping in touch and they have the opportunity to do so.
And Watts (2003:132–5) explains many of the shortcomings of Milgrams’s original experi-
ment and the difficulty of establishing the notion of ‘‘six degrees of separation’’ empirically
and unequivocally so that it could be considered any sort of ‘‘universal.’’
100. Scientists have studied extensively the connections in the brain of the nematode worm
since the map of its 282 neurons is well understood.
101. See Barabási (2002).
102. Economist now believe that Parteo’s law only holds for the richest people in a society. The
majority of others may follow a distribution closer to gas laws. See Hogan (2005).
103. For example, in many instances it may be accurate to say the 20% of the workers produce
80% of the profit for the compoany, but it is not accurate to say the 20% of the workers do
80% of the work.
104. Barabási (2002:66).
105. For a very readable introduction to power laws and the related study of self-organized
criticality, see Bak (1996).
106. Barabási (2002:97, 103).
107. Barabási’s team was able to show that the Microsoft example follows the quantum laws of
a Bose-Einstein condensate. See Barabási (2002:105–6).
108. Diamond (1997).
109. So that this does not read like Bailey bashing, a particularly astute Amazon.com reviewer
noted recently that Evan Parker has drastically reduced the rate at which he is releasing
new CDs: ‘‘Perhaps Parker is trying to answer the increasing jadedness of music critics &
fans who feel that he has released too many discs in recent years while treading water as a
player.’’
110. Hajdu (2003:54).
111. For a recent example of how powerful these hubs have become, the San Francisco Jazz
Spring 2005 series of concerts features no less than seven tributes to the music of John
Coltrane within a month’s time, including versions of his music from the albums A Love
Supreme, Ascension, Africa Brass, Crescent, and Interstellar Space. There is also a concert by the
Mingus Big Band and a tribute to the music of Rashaan Roland Kirk planned as well.
112. Hajdu (2003:54).
113. For a rather technical discussion of this topic see Song et al (2005).
114. Kleinberg (2000). See also Watts (2003:139–146).
115. The cartoon conveniently summarizes the attitude of many American jazz musicians as
well, that New York City is the ‘‘center of the musical universe.’’
116. Watts (2003:53).
117. Law (1999:5). For other important work in ANT see the publications of Geoffrey C. Bowker
and Susan Leigh Star.
118. http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/sociology/soc054jl.html.
119. http://carbon.cudenver.edu/"mryder/itc_data/ant_dff.html. Goguen is referencing the work
of Michael White, Isaac Newton: The Last Sorcerer (Perseus Books, 1999).
120. Barabási (2002:225).
121. Watts (2003:302–2).
Chapter Seven
1. William Clancey (1997:4). See also Clark (1997) for a very readable introduction to this
perspective.
2. Lave (1988) studied adults of various backgrounds using arithmetic while grocery shopping.
In making purchase decisions, they employed a flexible real-time arithmetic in order to
select better prices per unit weight, continually taking into account the constraints imposed
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NOTES
by the layout of the stores, the capacities of their home refrigerators, and the dietary re-
quirements of their family members. These skills with situated arithmetic, however, were
rarely reflected in their performance on grade-school math problems.
3. Nunn (1998:179).
4. Stockdale (2004:112).
5. Latour (1987:7).
6. From the book by Eddie Harris, Jazz Astrology, Nemerology, and Information. Quoted in
liner notes to his album There was a Time — Echo of Harlem (Alfa/Enja R2 79663).
7. Quoted in Nunn (1998:180).
8. William Clancey (1995:49). See also Korzybski (1948: 58).
9. Despite this and subsequent generalizations, I am aware that there are many music educa-
tors who have developed innovative pedagogical strategies, usually in isolation. They tend
to be, however, the exception that proves the rule. Brown, Collins and Duguid (1989) write:
‘‘Though there are many innovative teachers, schools, and programs that act otherwise,
prevalent school practices assume, more often than not, that knowledge is individual and
self-structured, that schools are neutral with respect to what is learned, that concepts are
abstract, relatively fixed, and unaffected by the activity through which they are acquired
and used, and the ‘just plain folks’ behavior should be discouraged.’’
10. This and all subsequent quotes from Turetzky, Dresser, Davis, and Ellis stem from inter-
views with the author in January and February of 2005.
11. For an intriguing example of this, consider the case of Mike May. May is one of only a
handful of individuals who, blind from early childhood, were able to regain their sight.
After cornea- and stem cell-implant surgery in 2000, sight was restored to May’s right eye.
But vision is more than just eye function, just as ‘‘good ears’’ means much more to a
musician than having properly functioning ears. Although May can interpret many objects,
often through the perception of simple shapes and colors, and he can perceive objects in
motion (a process that may in fact be hardwired into the brain), three-dimensional percep-
tion and the ability to recognize complex objects such as the faces of his family and friends
remain severely impaired. His optical hardware is in perfect order, but May’s brain has not
learned to process the visual information it receives. Vision, like language and hearing,
appears to be a skill that is developed and honed through experience.
12. For more on this issue and the many important curricular questions it raises see Ake
(2002a).
13. Chase et al (2000).
14. Although the notion of repeating an improvisation exactly runs counter to its very practice,
I have found that recording student improvisations not only helps to center everyone’s
creative energies during performance, but it has the additional benefit of providing the
possibility for listening back as a group and critiquing, in constructive ways, what occurred
and how the ensemble might work together to improve on things for the next time.
15. Bailey (1992:121).
16. See Lewis (2000a) and Ake (2002b) for related discussion.
17. See Lewis (2000a and In Press) and Sweet (1996).
18. Vygotsky (1997:324).
19. See more technical detail see Dresser (2000).
20. Ake (2002a:268).
21. For an excellent introduction to the work of Vygotsky and its impact on current thinking,
see Daniels (2001).
22. See Vygotsky (1978). For a dynamical systems perspective on developmental psychology,
see Thelen (2003).
23. Barab and Plucker (2002:170).
24. Much of the important work on distributed cognition has been completed aboard vessels at
sea. Thomas Gladwin detailed how traditional Micronesian sailors use the local conditions
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NOTES
of the sea, including waves and winds, combined with a final objective rather than a formal
plan to navigate long distances successfully. And Edwin Hutchins (1995) worked aboard a
Navy ship investigating the ways in which the cognitive demands of successful navigation
are distributed among the various crewmembers and the tools and physical layout of the
ship’s bridge. See Bereiter (1997) for a cogent critique of a strong reading of situated
cognition.
25. For a related ethnomusicological study on the social dimensions of competence and talent,
see Brinner (1995) on Central Javanese gamelan.
26. Barab and Plucker (2002:179).
27. Gibson (1977).
28. Hayles (1999:13,202).
29. The educational activities that surround the notion of a Zone of Proximal Development are
often referred to as ‘‘scaffolding,’’ although the term originated not from Vygotsky but from
his later commentators.
30. Music is clearly an ideal area for this type of participatory learning, but Lave’s work with
Etienne Wenger (1991) demonstrated that in settings as diverse as Yucatec midwives, Vai
and Gola tailors, US Navy quartermasters, meat-cutters, and non-drinking alcoholics in
Alcoholics Anonymous, individuals gradually acquire knowledge and skills from experts in
the context of everyday activities.
31. See Davidson and Torff (1992) for related discussion.
32. See Sudnow (1978) for a related treatment of this subject.
33. Bowman (2004:33). Although the widely influential theory of Howard Gardner (1983) cate-
gorizes multiple types of intelligences, including a ‘‘musical’’ one, it still treats the notion
of intelligence as the exclusive provenance of an individual. And while Gardner acknowl-
edges the role that the environment and context can play in the application of intelligence,
he does not highlight the ways in which they can shape its ontological existence.
34. Berger’s system called ‘‘gamala taki’’ helps musicians to break down complicated rhythms
into patterns of threes (‘‘ga-ma-la) and two’s (‘‘ta-ki’’).
35. Sweet (1996:108–9).
36. For a technical study of the distributed and emergent aspects of song performance in a rock
cover band see Flor and Maglio (1997).
37. See Monson (1996) for examples in jazz and Sawyer (2003:176–8) for discussion of related
work on interactional synchrony in orchestral performance.
38. Burrows (2004:n.p.)
39. For more, see Collier (1996).
40. Stckdale (2004). In other language, Stockdale’s three borad categories might be described
as bebop, freebop, and free.
41. Stockdale (2004:112)
42. Clancey (1997).
44. Cook (2004:14).
45. See Csikszentmihalyi and Rich (1997).
46. Becker (1982).
47. Sawyer (2003). Much of his work with jazz draws on ethnographic treatments by Paul
Berliner (1994) and Ingrid Monson (1996).
48. Quoted in Monson (1996:88).
49. Sawyer (2003:46).
50. Sawyer (2004:195).
51. Borgo (1996:80).
52. Lewis (2000b:37–8). John Corbett (1995:233) also points out that sports analogies describe
well the constant transgression and reestablishment of codes that takes place in the process
of improvising music.
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NOTES
53. Johnstone (1979:95). For a related treatment regarding jazz improvisation, see Werner
(1996).
54. Stockdale (2004:109)
55. Sawyer (2003:9).
56. This sentiment comes from Wadada Leo Smith and was quoted to me by Ralph ‘‘Buzzy’’
Jones.
57. Sawuer (2003,2004).
58. Sawyer (2004) uses this and other examples of the actor’s craft to suggest ways in which
classroom teachers might be more effective in encouraging collaborative discussion.
59. See Borgo (2002) for one example.
60. Sawyer (2003:44).
61. See Lewis (2000b).
62. Watson (2004:263). Peter Brook, in his classic theater text The Empty Space (1968:9), draws
attention, however, to the inextricable relationship theater has with an audience: ‘‘I can
take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across the empty space whilst
someone else is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theater to be
engaged.’’
63. Sawyer (2004:198).
64. See Larry Och’s essay on RADAR (http://www.rova.org/foodforthought/radar.html) or his
essay in Zorn (2000). Ensemble strategies or role playing may also be used in less explicit
ways or they may intentionally be hidden from the awareness of audiences.
65. Solothurnmann (1985:32). Quoted in Corbett (1995:233).
66. Nunn (1998:162).
67. Alperson (1984:22).
68. Lewis (2000b:86).
69. Heffley (2005:292).
70. From the first sentence of chapter XXXI in The Education of Henry Adams (1918).
71. Eno (1996:n.p.).
72. Quoted in Sweet (1996:47).
73. From Microsoft Word dictionary.
74. Corbett (1995:225–6).
75. Lewis (2004c:n.p.). See Attali (1985:147) for the complete quote in context.
77. Weick (1998).
78. Zack (2000). Other authors, including Kamoche (2003) worry that there are inherent dan-
gers in relying on the jazz metaphor to the exclusion of others and to the exclusion of
grounded and empirical research.
79. Nunn (1998:133).
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................. 11558$ $$FM 09-01-05 15:19:54 PS PAGE i

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The Continuum International Publishing Group Inc

The Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd

Copyright ! 2005 by David Borgo

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

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List of Figures 000

List of Audio Examples 000

1. The Sound and Science of Surprise 000

2. Reverence for Uncertainty 000

3. The Embodied Mind 000

4. Rivers of Consciousness 000

5. The Edge of Chaos 000

6. Sync and Swarm 000

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7. Harnessing Complexity 000

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Table 1: Sam Rivers Trio—‘‘Hues of Melanin’’—Phenomenological Analysis 000

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Figure 11b: The Art Ensemble of Chicago—‘‘Ancestral

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The Sam Rivers Trio with special guest George Lewis

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I find I do some of my best thinking on airplanes. The romantic in me likes to think

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The Age of Complexity

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In summary, music is temporal, embodied, enacted, situated, social, cultural, and

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improvised music in a collective setting, I propose some strategies for reconceptualiz-

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A compromise between order and disorder, improvisation is a nego-

Free improvisation is not an action resulting from freedom; it is an

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In the early twentieth century, composed music underwent a substantial increase

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