THE OXFORD HANDBOOK OF

CRITICAL IMPROVISATION
STUDIES
VOLUME 1
 THE OXFORD HANDBOOK OF

CRITICAL IMPROVISATION
STUDIES
VOLUME 1

Edited by

GEORGE E. LEWIS

and

BENJAMIN PIEKUT
 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Lewis, George E., 1952– editor. | Piekut, Benjamin, 1975– editor.
Title: The Oxford handbook of critical improvisation studies / edited by George E. Lewis and
Benjamin Piekut
Description: New York : Oxford University Press, 2016. | Series: Oxford handbooks | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015041014 | ISBN 978–0–19–537093–5 (hardcover, vol. 1 : alk. paper) | ISBN
978–0–19–989292–1 (hardcover, vol. 2 : alk. paper) | eISBN 978–0–19–062796–6
Subjects: LCSH: Improvisation (Music) | Creation (Literary, artistic, etc.)
Classification: LCC MT68 .O97 2016 | DDC 001—dc23 LC record available at
http://lccn.loc.gov/2015041014
This Handbook is dedicated to the memory of Derek Bailey (1930–2005),
Jeff Pressing (1946–2002), and Marvin Minsky (1927–2016).
 CONTENTS

Preface
Acknowledgments
Contributors to Volume 1

Introduction: On Critical Improvisation Studies

GEORGE E. LEWIS AND BENJAMIN PIEKUT

PART I COGNITIONS
  1. Cognitive Processes in Musical Improvisation
ROGER T. DEAN AND FREYA BAILES
  2. The Cognitive Neuroscience of Improvisation
AARON L. BERKOWITZ
  3. Improvisation, Action Understanding, and Music Cognition with and
without Bodies
VIJAY IYER
  4. The Ghost in the Music, or the Perspective of an Improvising Ant
DAVID BORGO

PART II CRITICAL THEORIES

  5. The Improvisative
TRACY MCMULLEN
  6. Jurisgenerative grammar (for alto)
FRED MOTEN
  7. Is Improvisation Present?
MICHAEL GALLOPE
  8. Politics as Hypergestural Improvisation in the Age of Mediocracy
YVES CITTON
  9. On the Edge: A Frame of Analysis for Improvisation
DAVIDE SPARTI
10. The Salmon of Wisdom: On the Consciousness of Self and Other in
Improvised Music and in the Language that Sets One Free
ALEXANDRE PIERREPONT
11. Improvising Yoga
SUSAN LEIGH FOSTER

PART III CULTURAL HISTORIES

12. Michel de Montaigne, or Philosophy as Improvisation
TIMOTHY HAMPTON
13. The Improvisation of Poetry, 1750–1850: Oral Performance, Print
Culture, and the Modern Homer
ANGELA ESTERHAMMER
14. Germaine de Staël’s Corinne, or Italy and the Early Usage of
Improvisation in English
ERIK SIMPSON
15. Improvisation, Time, and Opportunity in the Rhetorical Tradition
GLYN P. NORTON
16. Improvisation, Democracy, and Feedback
DANIEL BELGRAD

PART IV MOBILITIES
17. Improvised Dance in the Reconstruction of THEM
DANIELLE GOLDMAN
18. Improvising Social Exchange: African American Social Dance
THOMAS F. DEFRANTZ
19. Fixing Improvisation: Copyright and African American Vernacular
Dancers in the Early Twentieth Century
ANTHEA KRAUT
20. Performing Gender, Race, and Power in Improv Comedy
AMY SEHAM
21. Shifting Cultivation as Improvisation
PAUL RICHARDS

PART V ORGANIZATIONS
22. Improvisation in Management
PAUL INGRAM AND WILLIAM DUGGAN
23. Free Improvisation as a Path-Dependent Process
JARED BURROWS AND CLYDE G. REED

PART VI PHILOSOPHIES
24. Musical Improvisation and the Philosophy of Music
PHILIP ALPERSON
25. Improvisation and Time-Consciousness
GARY PETERS
26. Improvising Impromptu, Or, What to Do with a Broken String
LYDIA GOEHR
27. Ensemble Improvisation, Collective Intention, and Group Attention
GARRY L. HAGBERG
28. Interspecies Improvisation
DAVID ROTHENBERG
29. Spiritual Exercises, Improvisation, and Moral Perfectionism: With
Special Reference to Sonny Rollins
ARNOLD I. DAVIDSON
30. Improvisation and Ecclesial Ethics
SAMUEL WELLS

Index
 PREFACE

It is far too early to create a history or prehistory of what many are now
calling “critical improvisation studies,” but we can point to some significant
early irruptions. Properly speaking, the project that resulted in this two-
volume Handbook began around the turn of the twenty-first century with an
important early conference, “Improvising Across Borders: An Inter-
Disciplinary Symposium on Improvised Music Traditions.” The conference,
which took place in April 1999, was conceived by Dana Reason, then an
innovation-minded graduate student in the Department of Music at the
University of California, San Diego (UCSD), and produced in collaboration
with her fellow graduate students Michael Dessen and Jason Robinson. The
conference featured performances as well as paper presentations from both
scholars and practitioners, and the call for papers welcomed proposals from
musicologists, ethnomusicologists, and musicians, and also from scholars in other disciplines
such as cultural studies, sociology, women’s studies, and literature. We are interested not only in
performative notions of improvisation but also the cultural contexts that influence and shape
improvised traditions. Possible topics include: cultural location with regard to cross-cultural
trends in current music-making, the politics of reception, theorizing the social and political
implications of improvised traditions, the role of gender and body, and the relationship of
improvisation to current changes in music—or other—pedagogies.1

In 2002, a trio of scholar-artists, also based in the University of California

system, Adriene Jenik and George Lewis from UCSD and Susan Leigh
Foster from UCLA, built on this earlier effort by co-convening a
Residential Research Group at the University of California Humanities
Research Institute with the title “Global Intentions: Improvisation in the
Contemporary Performing Arts.” The co-conveners developed an
introductory guiding narrative for the research project that declared an
intent to focus on
(1) how improvisation mediates cross-cultural, transnational and cyberspatial (inter)artistic
exchanges that produce new conceptions of identity, history, and the body; (2) how
improvisation functions as a key element in emerging postcolonial forms of aesthetics and
cultural production; and (3) how improvisative production of meaning and knowledge provides
models for new forms of social mobilization that foreground agency, personality, and difference.
 The group will ask questions concerning how improvisation expresses notions of ethnicity, race,
nation, class, and gender, as well as how improvisative works are seen as symbolizing history,
memory, agency, difference, personal narrative, and self-determination.2

The conveners observed that any practice for which such expansive claims
could even be entertained, much less sustained, obviously deserved serious
study. Their narrative also identified issues of power, authority, resistance,
dominance and subalterity, the role of the individual in relation to the
social, and models for social responsibility and action, as salient to the
study of improvisation. Improvisation in the arts was seen to subvert
hierarchies; challenge totalizing narratives; empower audiences; exemplify
new (and quite often utopian) models of social, economic, and political
relations; and in one memorable phrase, “overthrow the patriarchal
organization of the art world, preparing fertile ground for a contestatory
politics.”3
The research group discussions at UCHRI, which took place weekly over
a three-month period, often manifested a distinct unease with then-
dominant portrayals of improvisation, as well as with some of the
scholarship that proceeded from those understandings. In pursuing a critical
review of the already substantial literature on the topic, the group gradually
realized that the purview of a new kind of improvisation studies needed to
range well beyond the arts. That discovery crucially informed the current
project.
In the first of this two-volume set, we hear from scholars examining
topics in cognition, philosophy, anthropology, cultural history, critical
theory, economics, classics, organization science, and mobility on stages of
various kinds. We expect readers to jump across sections and volumes, so
for both volumes, we have created a nonlinear order of chapters to foster
surprise. We encourage readers to extend their engagement into Volume 2,
which includes investigations into city planning, music, creativity, media,
literature, computing technologies, and theology.
George E. Lewis and Benjamin Piekut

NOTES
1. Dana Reason and Michael Dessen, “Call for Papers: Improvising Across Borders: An inter-
disciplinary symposium on improvised music traditions,” (1999),
http://goldenpages.jpehs.co.uk/static/conferencearchive/99-4-iab.html. Accessed December 23,
 2014. Presenters included Douglas Ewart, Ed Sarath, Ingrid Monson, Ajay Heble, David Borgo,
Sarita Gregory, Bennetta Jules-Rosette, Catherine Sullivan, Eleanor Antin, Eddie Prévost, Alvin
Curran, Tom Nunn, Jonathan Glasier, and Jason Stanyek. A visionary keynote address was
delivered by Pauline Oliveros, later published as “Quantum Improvisation: The Cybernetic
Presence,” in Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and Culture, ed. Paul D. Miller aka DJ
Spooky That Subliminal Kid (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008). For an account of the conference, see
La Donna Smith, “Improvising Across Borders, the Symposium on Improvisation: A Review and
Personal Account,” (1999), http://www.the-improvisor.com/improvising_across_borders.htm.
Accessed December 23, 2014.
2. Susan Leigh Foster, Adriene Jenik, and George E. Lewis, “Proposal for a 2002–2003 Resident
Research Group: Global Intentions: Improvisation in the Contemporary Performing Arts,” (2002).
The UCHRI research group included Georgina Born, Renee Coulombe, Anthea Kraut, Antoinette
LaFarge, Simon Penny, Eric Porter, and Jason Stanyek.
3. Foster, Jenik, and Lewis, “Proposal for a 2002–2003 Resident Research Group.”
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

These volumes were over a half-decade in the making, during which time
we accrued countless debts. In many ways, this journey began at the
University of California Humanities Research Institute, and we’d like to
thank UCHRI director David Theo Goldberg, who in 2002 sponsored a
scholarly Residential Research Group whose members became the core of
this Handbook. At Oxford University Press, we would like to recognize the
expansive vision of our editor, Suzanne Ryan, who originally suggested the
handbook format as the most effective way to bring together a wide range
of perspectives that can sometimes elude more modest edited volume
formats. Oxford also provided the finest cat-wrangling support we could
ask for from Molly Davis, Lisbeth Redfield, Amy Chang, and Andrew
Maillet. We want to offer a special thank you to Swaathi Venugopal, Preethi
Sundar, and Kathrin Immanuel at Newgen KnowledgeWorks for keeping us
on track. Several PhD students at Cornell University provided crucial
proofreading and copyediting services; our gratitude goes to Samuel
Dwinell, Dietmar Friesenegger, Ji Young Kim, Mat Langlois, Erica
Levenson, Becky Lu, and Mackenzie Pierce. We received invaluable
support from the Edwin H. Case Chair in American Music at Columbia
University.
Our greatest thanks go to our authors, who matched their excitement for
this project with commensurate patience and good humor. We also wish to
thank the many colleagues and friends who shared their thoughts and
opinions on critical improvisation studies over the years, and who, like the
contributors, humored us by maintaining straight faces when we repeatedly
issued assurances of imminent publication.
 CONTRIBUTORS TO VOLUME 1

Philip Alperson is professor emeritus of philosophy at Temple University,

where he is also a senior scholar at the Center for Vietnamese Philosophy,
Culture, and Society. He was the editor of The Journal of Aesthetics and Art
Criticism for ten years. His main interests are in aesthetics, the philosophy
of the arts, the theory of culture, value theory, and theories of interpretation
and criticism. A long-time jazz musician, he has special interests in the
philosophy of music and philosophical questions concerning creativity,
performance, improvisation, personal and musical authenticity, music
education, and the cultural placement of music. Professor Alperson was the
Styrian Endowed Professor at the Institute of Music Aesthetics at the
Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst in Graz, Austria, and
Fulbright Scholar at the Sibelius Academy of the University of the Arts in
Helsinki, Finland.

Freya Bailes is a lecturer in music at the University of Hull. Prior to her

current appointment, she was a senior research fellow at the MARCS
Institute at the University of Western Sydney, collaborating with Roger
Dean on research into the perception and emotional expression of
contemporary music and the role of leadership in musical improvisation.
This research draws on Bailes’s previous postdoctoral experience at the
Laboratoire d’Etude de l’Apprentissage et du Développement (Université
de Bourgogne), the Cognitive and Systematic Musicology Laboratory (Ohio
State University), and the Sonic Communications Research Group
(University of Canberra). Her doctoral thesis, “Musical Imagery: Hearing
and Imagining Music” (University of Sheffield), explored the nature and
prevalence of musical imagery.

Daniel Belgrad is an associate professor in the Department of Humanities

and Cultural Studies at the University of South Florida. His research
focuses on post–World War II American culture. He is the author of The
Culture of Spontaneity: Improvisation and the Arts in Postwar America
(Chicago, 1998), which describes the intellectual and social currents
informing the trend toward spontaneous improvisation in American art,
music, and literature in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s that resulted in such
movements as Abstract Expressionism, bebop jazz, and Beat poetry. In
2002 he won the Oscar O. Winther Award from the Western Historical
Association. His current research interests include dance studies,
biofeedback, and affect theory.

Aaron L. Berkowitz completed his PhD in music at Harvard University,

his MD at Johns Hopkins University, and his postgraduate training in
neurology in the Harvard Partners Neurology Residency. He is the author of
The Improvising Mind: Cognition and Creativity in the Musical Moment
(Oxford, 2010). As a pianist and fortepianist, he has performed throughout
Europe and the United States, and as a composer his compositions have
been performed in Europe and the United States, including Carnegie Hall.
He is currently an associate neurologist and director of the Global
Neurology Program at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, an instructor in
neurology at Harvard Medical School, and a health and policy advisor in
neurology to nongovernmental organization Partners in Health.

David Borgo is a saxophonist, ethnomusicologist, and professor of music at

the University of California, San Diego, where he teaches in the Music
Department’s programs in Integrative Studies, Jazz, and Music of the
African Diaspora. His primary areas of interest include improvisation,
creativity research, technocultural studies, chaos and complexity theories,
and non-Cartesian cognitive science. His book, Sync or Swarm:
Improvising Music in a Complex Age (Continuum, 2005) won the Alan P.
Merriam Prize in 2006 from the Society for Ethnomusicology as the most
distinguished English-language book published during the previous year. As
a saxophonist, Borgo has toured internationally and released eight CDs and
one DVD.

Jared Burrows is a performer, composer, author, community organizer, and

musical instigator in Vancouver, BC. He leads the Jared Burrows Quartet
and Sextet and the Vancouver Improvisers Orchestra, and works in many
other ensembles in jazz, new music, and world music. Jared is the head of
the Jazz Studies Department at Capilano University, where he teaches
improvisation and directs the new music ensemble Narwhal. Since 2008 he
has co-curated Vancouver’s weekly Jazz at Presentation House concert
series, and from 2003 to 2013 was co-director of the South Delta Jazz
Festival. He holds a PhD in arts education from Simon Fraser University.
www.jaredburrows.com.

Yves Citton is professor of French literature at the Université de Grenoble,

a member of the UMR LIRE (CNRS 5611, Littérature, idéologies,
représentations, XVIIIe-XIXe siècles), and co-director of the journal
Multitudes. He taught for twelve years in the Department of French and
Italian of the University of Pittsburgh, and has been an invited professor at
New York University, Harvard, and Sciences-Po Paris. He recently
published Pour une écologie de l’attention (Seuil, 2014), Gestes
d’humanités: Anthropologie sauvage de nos expériences esthétiques
(Armand Colin, 2012), Renverser l’insoutenable (Seuil, 2012), Zazirocratie
(Éditions Amsterdam, 2011), and Mythocratie: Storytelling et imaginaire de
gauche (Éditions Amsterdam, 2010), along with a dozen articles on jazz
and collective improvisation.

Arnold I. Davidson is Robert O. Anderson Distinguished Service Professor

at the University of Chicago and professor of the philosophy of cultures at
the Università Ca’Foscari Venezia. He is also the jazz critic for Il Sole 24
Ore Domenica. He is the series editor of the English language edition of
Michel Foucault’s courses at the Collège de France and has contributed to
critical editions of several of Foucault’s works in French. He has also edited
works of Pierre Hadot in English, French, and Italian, as well as coauthored
a book of conversations with Hadot, La philosophie comme manière de
vivre(Albin Michel, 2004). Among his other works are The Emergence of
Sexuality (Harvard, 2004) and Religión, razón y espiritualidad (Alpha
Decay, 2014). His major writings are in Italian, French, and Spanish, as
well as in English.

Roger T. Dean is a composer/improviser and researcher in music cognition

and computation. His performances on the bass, piano, and laptop range
from the Academy of Ancient Music to the London Sinfonietta; his
improvising collaborations, from Ted Curson to Evan Parker. Dean’s work
is available on 50 commercial recordings and many multimedia and
installation pieces (with Keith Armstrong, Will Luers, Hazel Smith, and
others). His creative work centers on keyboard/ensemble improvisation and
computer music composition. These merge in his solo MultiPiano Event
(live grand piano, real-time audio processing, generative piano, and
electroacoustic sound). He founded the ensemble austraLYSIS, which has
performed in 30 countries, and has previously been a research biochemist,
foundation director of the Heart Research Institute, and vice-chancellor and
president of the University of Canberra.

Thomas F. DeFrantz is chair of African and African American Studies at

Duke University, and director of SLIPPAGE: Performance, Culture,
Technology, a research group that explores emerging technology in live
performance applications. His books include the edited volume Dancing
Many Drums: Excavations in African American Dance (Wisconsin, 2002),
Dancing Revelations: Alvin Ailey’s Embodiment of African American
Culture (Oxford, 2004), and Black Performance Theory, co-edited with
Anita Gonzalez (Duke, 2014). A director and writer, he is the former
president of the Society of Dance History Scholars.

William Duggan is on the faculty of Columbia Business School, where he

teaches strategic intuition in MBA and Executive MBA courses and
Executive Education sessions. In 2007 the journal Strategy+Business
named his book, Strategic Intuition, “Best Strategy Book of the Year.”
Professor Duggan has also given talks and workshops on strategic intuition
to thousands of executives from companies in countries around the world.
He has BA, MA and PhD degrees from Columbia University.

Angela Esterhammer is principal of Victoria College and professor of

English and comparative literature at the University of Toronto. Her
publications include Creating States: Studies in the Performative Language
of John Milton and William Blake (Toronto, 1994), The Romantic
Performative: Language and Action in British and German Romanticism
(Stanford, 2000), Romanticism and Improvisation, 1750–1850 (Cambridge,
2008), and the edited volumes Romantic Poetry (John Benjamins, 2002)
and Spheres of Action: Speech and Performance in Romantic Culture
(Toronto, 2009). Her current research examines interrelations among
improvisational performance, print culture, periodicals, and fiction in the
early nineteenth century.

Susan Leigh Foster, choreographer and scholar, is distinguished professor

in the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance at UCLA. She is the
author of Reading Dancing: Bodies and Subjects in Contemporary
American Dance (California, 1986), Choreography and Narrative: Ballet’s
Staging of Story and Desire (Indiana, 1996), Dances that Describe
Themselves: The Improvised Choreography of Richard Bull (Wesleyan,
2002), and Choreographing Empathy: Kinesthesia in Performance
(Routledge, 2010). She is also the editor of three anthologies:
Choreographing History (Indiana, 1995), Corporealities (Routledge, 1996),
and Worlding Dance (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). Three of her danced
lectures can be found at the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage website,
http://danceworkbook.pcah.us/susan-foster/index.html.

Michael Gallope is an assistant professor in the Department of Cultural

Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota. His
research examines music and sound from a problem-based perspective that
brings together the disciplines of philosophy, critical theory, aesthetics, and
cultural history. He taught previously at the University of Chicago, where
he was a member of the Society of Fellows, and at New York University,
where he completed his PhD in historical musicology. As a practicing
musician, he has worked in a variety of genres from avant-garde
composition, experimental music, and free improvisation to rock and
electronic dance music.

Lydia Goehr is professor of philosophy at Columbia University. She is the

author of The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the
Philosophy of Music (Oxford, 1992/2007); The Quest for Voice: Music,
Politics, and the Limits of Philosophy (Oxford, 1998); and Elective
Affinities: Musical Essays on the History of Aesthetic Theory (Columbia,
2008); and co-editor with Daniel Herwitz of The Don Giovanni Moment:
Essays on the Legacy of an Opera (Columbia, 2006).

Danielle Goldman is an assistant professor of critical dance studies and

dance program coordinator at Eugene Lang College, The New School. She
is the author of I Want to Be Ready: Improvised Dance as a Practice of
Freedom (Michigan, 2010), and she has published articles in Dance
Research Journal, Dance Research, Etcetera, Movement Research
Performance Journal, The Drama Review, and Women & Performance. She
has danced with DD Dorvillier and Beth Gill.

Garry L. Hagberg is the James H. Ottaway Professor of Philosophy and

Aesthetics at Bard College. His books include Meaning and Interpretation:
Wittgenstein, Henry James, and Literary Knowledge (Cornell, 1994) and
Art as Language: Wittgenstein, Meaning, and Aesthetic Theory (Cornell,
1995); his most recent book is Describing Ourselves: Wittgenstein and
Autobiographical Consciousness (Oxford, 2011). He has edited Art and
Ethical Criticism (Blackwell, 2008), co-edited A Companion to the
Philosophy of Literature (Blackwell, 2010), and is editor of the journal
Philosophy and Literature. He is also co-author of The Guitar
Compendium: Technique, Improvisation, Musicianship, Theory (three vols.,
Advance, 1989), is presently working on a book on aesthetic issues in jazz
improvisation, and continues to record as a jazz guitarist.

Timothy Hampton teaches comparative literature and French at the

University of California at Berkeley. He has written widely on literature and
politics, focusing primarily on early modern Europe. Among his
publications are Fictions of Embassy: Literature and Diplomacy in Early
Modern Europe (Cornell, 2009), “La foi des traités” (Yale French Studies,
2013), and “Tangled Generation: Dylan, Petrarch, Kerouac, and the Poetics
of Escape” (Critical Inquiry, 2013). His current projects touch on the
history of the emotions and on popular music.

Paul Ingram is the Kravis Professor of Business at the Columbia Business

School and faculty director of the Columbia Advanced Management
Program. The courses he teaches on leadership and strategy benefit from his
research on organizations in the United States, Canada, Israel, Britain,
China, and Australia. His research has been published in more than fifty
articles, book chapters, and books. Ingram’s current research projects
examine the structure and impact of executives’ professional values, the
impact of income inequality on life satisfaction, and the question of how
social structure and culture influenced participation in the Liverpool slave
trade.
Vijay Iyer is a pianist, composer, improviser, bandleader, and electronic
musician, and the Franklin D. and Florence Rosenblatt Professor of the Arts
in the Department of Music at Harvard University. He holds an
interdisciplinary PhD in Technology and the Arts from the University of
California, Berkeley. His recent honors include a MacArthur Fellowship, a
Doris Duke Performing Artists Award, a Grammy nomination, and the
Pianist of the Year award in the DownBeat International Critics Poll. He has
published in Music Perception, Journal of Consciousness Studies, Critical
Studies in Improvisation, and various anthologies, and has released nineteen
recordings as a leader.

Anthea Kraut is an associate professor in the Department of Dance at the

University of California, Riverside, where she teaches courses in critical
dance studies. Her first book, Choreographing the Folk: The Dance
Stagings of Zora Neale Hurston (Minnesota, 2008), received a Special
Citation from the Society of Dance History Scholars’ de la Torre Bueno
Prize® for a distinguished book of dance scholarship. Her next book,
Choreographing Copyright: Race, Gender, and Intellectual Property Rights
in American Dance, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.

George E. Lewis is the Edwin H. Case Professor of American Music at

Columbia University. A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and
Sciences, his honors include a MacArthur Fellowship (2002) and a
Guggenheim Fellowship (2015). A member of the Association for the
Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) since 1971, Lewis’s creative
work has been presented by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra,
London Philharmonia Orchestra, Radio-Sinfonieorchester Stuttgart,
International Contemporary Ensemble, and others. His widely acclaimed
book, A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American
Experimental Music (Chicago, 2008) received the American Book Award
and the American Musicological Society’s first Music in American Culture
Award. In 2015, Lewis received the degree of Doctor of Music (DMus,
honoris causa) from the University of Edinburgh.

Tracy McMullen is an assistant professor of music at Bowdoin College

and an improvising musician (saxophone). Her teaching and research
engage a variety of issues in popular music, jazz, and American culture. Her
articles have appeared or are forthcoming in journals including Current
Musicology, The Journal of Popular Music Studies, and Critical Studies in
Improvisation/Études Critiques en Improvisation; the edited volumes Big
Ears: Listening for Gender in Jazz Studies (Duke, 2008); and People Get
Ready: The Future of Jazz Is Now (Duke, 2013); and the reference works
The Encyclopedia of African American Music, The Encyclopedia of African
American Culture, The Oxford Handbooks Online in Music; and the Grove
Dictionary of American Music.

Fred Moten lives in Los Angeles and teaches at the University of

California, Riverside. His books include In the Break: The Aesthetics of the
Black Radical Tradition (Minnesota, 2003), Hughson’s Tavern (Leon,
2008), B. Jenkins (Duke, 2010), The Undercommons (with Stefano Harney;
Autonomedia, 2013), The Feel Trio (Letter Machine, 2014), and The Little
Edges (Wesleyan, 2014).

Glyn P. Norton is Willcox B. and Harriet M. Adsit Professor of

International Studies, Emeritus, at Williams College. He is the editor of
Volume 3 (The Renaissance) of The Cambridge History of Literary
Criticism (2008), and author of Montaigne and the Introspective Mind
(Mouton, 1975), The Ideology and Language of Translation in Renaissance
France and Their Humanist Antecedents (Droz, 1984), and numerous
essays on French Renaissance and neo-Latin rhetoric, literature and
criticism, and Quintilian. He has received fellowships and awards from the
Guggenheim Foundation, The National Endowment for the Humanities, and
the École Normale Supérieure. He is currently completing a book,
Eloquence Beside Itself: The Theory and Art of Improvisation in the French
Renaissance and Neoclassical Texts.

Gary Peters is professor of critical and cultural theory at York St. John
University, England. His books include Irony and Singularity: Aesthetic
Education from Kant to Levinas (Ashgate, 2005) and The Philosophy of
Improvisation (Chicago, 2009). He is currently working on a book entitled
Improvisations on Improvisation (also Chicago). With his wife Fiona Peters,
he co-edited Thoughts of Love (Cambridge Scholars, 2013). He plays the
pedal steel guitar and has performed with improvisers such as Lol Coxhill,
Steve Beresford, Veryan Weston, and John Stevens.
Benjamin Piekut is a historian of experimental music, jazz, and rock after
1960, and an associate professor of musicology at Cornell University. He is
the author of Experimentalism Otherwise: The New York Avant-Garde and
Its Limits (California, 2011) and the editor of Tomorrow Is the Question:
New Directions in Experimental Music Studies (Michigan, 2014). With
David Nicholls, he co-edited a special issue of Contemporary Music Review
for John Cage’s 100th birthday. He has published articles in Jazz
Perspectives, The Drama Review, American Quarterly, Twentieth-Century
Music, Cultural Critique, and the Journal of the American Musicological
Society.

Alexandre Pierrepont, an anthropologist whose work focuses on the

concept of diversalité and the phenomena of internal otherness in Western
societies—more specifically on African American music as an alternative
social institution—divides his time between North America and France,
between different “jazz worlds” and the academy. He is an associate
researcher for the laboratories CANTHEL (Centre d’anthropologie
culturelle) at the Human and Social Sciences Faculty at the University Paris
5—Sorbonne, and CERILAC, Centre d’étude et de recherche
interdisciplinaire de l’UFR (lettres, arts et cinema) at the Department of
Literature, Arts, and Cinema at the University Paris 7—Denis Diderot, and
served as postdoctoral fellow at the Improvisation, Community, and Social
Practice group at McGill University.

Clyde G. Reed is professor emeritus in the Department of Economics at

Simon Fraser University. He received his PhD in economics from the
University of Washington. His recent work on inequality was published in
the Journal of Political Economy and the European Review of Economic
History in 2013. As a double bass player, Reed has performed at major jazz
festivals in North America and Europe. Recent recordings with the Rich
Halley 4, Back From Beyond (2012) and Crossing the Passes (2013),
received prestigious 4-star reviews in DownBeat.

Paul Richards was professor of anthropology at University College

London and professor of technology and agrarian development at
Wageningen University, The Netherlands. He retired in 2010 and is now
director of junior faculty research programs at Njala University, Sierra
Leone, where he runs several research projects on post-conflict social and
institutional change. His books include Coping with Hunger (Unwin
Hyman, 1986) and Fighting for the Rain Forest (Heinemann, 1996). His
recent articles include items on war as performance, the distribution of
witchcraft cases in post-war settlements around the Gola forest, and social
pathways for Ebola Virus Disease in Sierra Leone.

Philosopher and musician David Rothenberg is the author of Why Birds

Sing (Basic, 2005), now published in eight languages and turned into a
feature-length BBC TV documentary. Rothenberg has also written
Thousand Mile Song (Basic, 2008), about making music live with whales,
Survival of the Beautiful (Bloomsbury, 2011), on evolution and beauty, and
Bug Music (St. Martin’s, 2013), on insects and their million-years old
music. His music, recorded on ECM, Gruenrekorder, and the Terra Nova
labels, usually involves an integration with his clarinet improvisations with
live and recorded natural sounds. Rothenberg has issued nine CDs under his
own name. He is professor of philosophy and music at the New Jersey
Institute of Technology. www.davidrothenberg.net

Amy Seham is the author of Whose Improv Is It, Anyway? Beyond Second
City (Mississippi, 2001), a book analyzing the workings of gender, race,
and power in six important improv troupes in Chicago. She has given
workshops on “Resisting Stereotypes in Improv” at Second City-Toronto,
Fringe Benefits, The Funny Woman Festival, and numerous universities
across the United States. Director, playwright, and coach, Seham is a
professor of theater and dance at Gustavus Adolphus College, in a program
that focuses on performance for social justice. She lives in St. Peter,
Minnesota, with her daughter, Miranda.

Erik Simpson is professor of English at Grinnell College. He is the author

of Literary Minstrelsy, 1770–1830: Minstrels and Improvisers in British,
Irish, and American Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) and
Mercenaries in British and American Literature, 1790–1830: Writing,
Fighting, and Marrying for Money (Edinburgh, 2010), in addition to articles
on British literature, transatlantic literature, and the use of digital
technologies in undergraduate teaching.
Davide Sparti has written 11 books and over 90 articles in journals such as
the Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie, European Journal of Social
Theory, European Journal of Philosophy, Philosophy and Literature, and
Philosophy and Social Criticism. Co-founder of the journal Studi culturali,
Sparti’s work deals with the epistemology of the social sciences and the
relation between identity and recognition, as well as improvised action,
Wittgenstein, Cavell, and Foucault. After having taught at the Universities
of Milano and Bologna, he is currently professor at the University of Siena.
Sparti is a fellow of the Humboldt Stiftung and the Collegium Budapest and
holds a PhD from the European University Institute.

Samuel Wells is vicar of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, Trafalgar Square, and

visiting professor of Christian ethics at King’s College, London. He was
previously dean of the chapel and research professor of Christian ethics at
Duke University. He is the author of 22 books in ethical, devotional, and
exegetical fields, including Improvisation: The Drama of Christian Ethics
(Brazos, 2004), God’s Companions: Reimagining Christian Ethics
(Blackwell, 2006), Learning to Dream Again (Eerdmans, 2013) and A
Nazareth Manifesto: Being with God (Wiley-Blackwell, 2015).
 THE OXFORD HANDBOOK OF
CRITICAL IMPROVISATION
STUDIES
VOLUME 1
 INTRODUCTION

On Critical Improvisation Studies

GEORGE E. LEWIS AND BENJAMIN PIEKUT

CULTURAL historian Andreas Huyssen has perceptively observed that

Fluxus, an art movement that featured improvisation as a key element, was
“an avant-garde born out of the spirit of music. … [F]or the first time in the
twentieth century, music played the leading part in an avant-garde
movement that encompassed a variety of artistic media and strategies.”1 We
would like to venture that critical improvisation studies was born out of a
similar spirit: music scholars and practitioner-scholars have taken important
leadership roles in the field. Reflecting the pre-eminent position of music in
discussions of improvisation in performance, critical improvisation studies
draws substantially from musical experience. In his essay for this
Handbook, ethnomusicologist Bruno Nettl, one of the pioneers of twentieth-
century scholarship on improvisation, found it “surprising that the word
‘improvisation’ (or any of its synonyms) appears rarely, if ever, in the early
literature of ethnomusicology, and the concept is virtually untouched by the
early scholars in this field.” While acknowledging that music historians had
been interested in improvisation since at least the late nineteenth century,
Nettl cites the work of Hungarian scholar Ernest Ferand as “the first attempt
to synthesize the various kinds of improvisation in Western art music as a
single concept.”2
Around the 1960s, ethnomusicologists began producing detailed case
studies of musical improvisation, concentrating on jazz, Hindustani and
Carnatic classical music, and Iranian (Persian) music—a particular focus of
Nettl’s that formed the basis for his important article, “Thoughts on
Improvisation: A Comparative Approach.”3 Since the mid-1970s and
moving into the 1980s, historical musicology’s increasing interest in
improvisation has gone hand in hand with the field’s turn to cultural history,
popular music studies, and the investigation of experimental music scenes,
as expressed by the term “new musicology.” William Kinderman’s work on
Beethoven; Annette Richards and Kenneth Hamilton’s work on European
Romanticism (a topic Dana Gooley extends in this Handbook); John Rink’s
work in music theory on Heinrich Schenker; the work of Anna Maria Busse
Berger, Julie Cumming, Peter Schubert, and Handbook contributor Leo
Treitler on medieval music; and the editors’ engagement with experimental
music, sound art, and interactive technology constitute only a small part of
musicology’s current engagement with improvisation studies.4
Proceeding from the example of Fluxus, however, critical improvisation
studies is creating an agenda in which the arts become part of a larger
network tracing the entire human condition of improvisation. Critical
improvisation studies has “exploded” in recent years, with a surge in
interdisciplinary inquiry across many artistic and nominally nonartistic
fields; for this Handbook, we commissioned new articles from a sizable
group of distinguished senior and emerging scholars representing a wide
variety of disciplines in the humanities, sciences, and the arts.
One might look to musicology and ethnomusicology as among the
earliest areas in which the study of improvisation might have gained
traction, but we have evidence from Handbook essays by literary scholars
Glyn Norton, Timothy Hampton, Angela Esterhammer, and Erik Simpson,
as well as a recent edited volume by Timothy McGee, that serious scholarly
and informed lay attention to improvisation’s effects and histories, both
within and outside of the arts, have been an integral part of world
intellectual history since early in the Common Era.5 For example,
spontaneous oral composition has a very long history, appearing in the
political arena well before the advent of the eighteenth-century Italian
improvvisatori. One of the earliest focused critical works on improvisation,
the first-century Institutio Oratoria of Quintilian, was forgotten for over a
millennium until the sixteenth-century recrudescence of the theory and
practice of extemporaneous rhetoric in Europe. A 1947 book by a Catholic
nun, Sister Miriam Joseph’s Shakespeare’s Use of the Arts of Language,
neatly analyzes and classifies the vast number of rhetorical devices that
Elizabethan schoolchildren of Shakespeare’s time were expected to learn to
deploy in extemporaneous debate.6
 Thus, while recognizing the important historical role played by music in
the practice of improvisation, it is entirely in keeping with this larger
history of improvisation as an aspect of the broader human condition that
our Handbook is intended to explore both artistic and non-artistic ways in
which improvisation functions in culture. We therefore asked authors to
take particular care to contextualize their work in dialogue with larger
debates and histories in their own and other fields.
We also decided to concentrate on theoretical, metatheoretical, critical,
and historical engagements with improvisation. We fully recognize that this
focus tended to leave out other encounters with the topic, some of which
have been influential and even predominant, particularly in treatments of
artistic practice. For instance, we decided not to feature
(auto)ethnographies, analytical case studies, or treatments of particular
traditions, methods, practices, genres, or works. Also essentially absent here
are some regularly recurring features of edited volumes on traditional
artistic media (in particular, the performing arts), such as (auto)biographies,
interviews, first-person narratives, and how-to discussions of practice.
Finally, although some of our contributors discuss music pedagogy, we
decided to forgo discussions of skill development, and/or working with
children on musical improvisation.7 Although these kinds of writing on
improvisation have produced important texts for the field, we took the view
that critical and theoretical approaches would best enable cross-disciplinary
conversation.

DEFINITIONS AND ISSUES

Once upon a time (at least in musical scholarship), constructing a definition
of improvisation seemed a relatively straightforward matter. The Oxford
Dictionary of Music’s pithy definition was typical, framing improvisation as
a performance conducted “according to the inventive whim of the moment,
i.e. without a written or printed score, and not from memory.”8 These
perspectives appeared to draw implicitly upon an ideologically driven
dialectic between improvisation and composition, reflecting widespread
contention regarding not just the nature of improvisation, but its propriety
as well. This debate dovetailed with improvisation’s fraught status in
Western classical music history and culture, in which improvisation,
particularly since the eighteenth century, was compared with the practice of
composition, with clear prejudices in favor of the latter’s presumed
advantages of unity and coherence in musical utterance.
The British experimental guitarist Derek Bailey’s Improvisation: Its
Nature and Practice in Music, one of the most widely cited books on the
subject, simply avoids creating a definition at all, preferring to describe
cases in which improvisation—as Bailey understands it—works, in order to
fulfill the remit of the book to divine its nature and practice. Similarly, this
Handbook makes no explicit attempt to negotiate a single overarching
definition of improvisation. Rather, as we see it, the critical study of
improvisation seeks to examine improvisation’s effects, interrogate its
discourses, interpret narratives and histories related to it, discover
implications of those narratives and histories, and uncover its ideologies.
Particularly before 1995, scholarly commentary on improvisation in the
West was found largely in discussions of traditional artistic expressive
media—most centrally, music, dance, theater, and their tributaries.
Reflecting its status as the West’s preeminent improvised music, jazz
received a large share of scholarly attention early on, both appreciative and
disapprobative, from social scientists and philosophers in particular,
including Alan Merriam, Howard S. Becker, and Theodor Adorno.9
In dance, as Cynthia Novack, Melinda Tufnell, and Ann Cooper Albright
have extensively documented, the emergence of contact improvisation in
the 1970s was crucial to an emerging experimentalism. In theater, the first-
person accounts and methodological interventions of Keith Johnstone were
highly influential, while the work of Chicago’s Second City scene looked
back to the work of Konstantin Stanislavski and the sixteenth-century
commedia dell’arte. The work of Handbook contributors Susan Leigh
Foster, Amy Seham, Thomas DeFrantz, Danielle Goldman, and Anthea
Kraut has opened up this area of scholarship with additional perspectives on
issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality.10
All three media attracted the attention of specialists in wellbeing and
pedagogy—such as Émile Jaques-Dalcroze, Fritz Hegi, Tony Wigram, and
Patricia Shehan Campbell—who developed therapies based in
improvisation.11 The issues in this literature are well summarized and
extended in the Handbook article by Raymond MacDonald and Graeme
Wilson. Psychological, psychiatric, and psychoanalytic strategies employed
improvisation as well, as in work by John Byng-Hall on family
counseling.12
A large number of key themes resonate throughout much earlier
commentary. However, most of them can be taxonomized under a number
of master tropes, the first of which concerns a certain reluctance actually to
use the term improvisation in discussions of the practice. As a 2002
research proposal by Susan Foster, Adriene Jenik, and George E. Lewis
noted, in art and music histories and criticism, “improvisative practices
were often erased, masked, or otherwise discussed without reference to the
term. Substitutions such as ‘happening,’ ‘action,’ and ‘intuition’ often
masked the presence of improvisation.”13 Even one of the most frequently
cited texts among later generations in improvisation studies, sociologist
Erving Goffman’s 1959 The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, never
invokes the term.14
Related to the trope of masking is the trope of neglect, a point made by
Nettl in the title of the introduction to his 1998 co-edited volume, In The
Course of Performance: “An Art Neglected in Scholarship.” This trope
tends to animate first-generation new improvisation studies; thus, in
compensation for the massive Western cultural investment in neglect,
dismissal, parody, and general opposition to improvisation amid which their
work was appearing, later scholars often (over)valorized the practice. For
instance, as David Gere noted in a 2003 collection of essays on dance
improvisation, “To improvise, it is held, is to engage in aimless, even
talentless, noodling.”15 Gere provides his own riposte, averring that
“improvisation is by its very nature among the most rigorous of human
endeavors.”16
Indeed, writers have emphasized that exhibitions of mastery and
virtuosity compose part of the pleasure of improvisation. Domenico
Pietropaolo identifies this as a preoccupation of long standing, to be found
not only in musical genres, but also in the tradition of medieval rhetoric and
its forebears in Greek and Roman oratory: “[A]‌ great legacy of the second
sophistic with its celebrated emphasis on virtuosity, improvisation was for
medieval rhetoric a skill to be mastered after long hours of practice.”17
Another trope that appears frequently concerns a binary opposition
between process and product. An influential 1989 article by sociologist
Alan Durant, “Improvisation in the Political Economy of Music,” maintains
that the experimental improvised music that emerged in the United States
and especially in Europe in the mid-1960s “foregrounds—in its practice as
well as in its name—the relationship between the product of performance
(the musical ‘text’) and the process through which that product comes into
being.”18 Particularly in music, it is frequently asserted that improvisers are
more interested in the process of creation than in its products. In the
influential formulation of Ted Gioia, this renders artistic improvisation (and
jazz improvisation in particular) an “imperfect” art, governed by an
“aesthetic of imperfection.”19
For Andy Hamilton, writing in 2000, “Gioia’s point about the ‘haphazard
art’ was that improvisation fails more often than art music; not that it
always fails.” Hamilton’s formulation reminds us that the process-product
opposition inevitably becomes mapped onto the improvisation-composition
binary in Western music scholarship, as well as the great divide between
low and high culture that is now so regularly bridged. His essay is one of
many that invoke the process-product discussion as a way of opening the
door to discussions of whether improvised music meets the criteria of the
work concept in Western music.
Anticipating the 1990s work of ethnomusicologist Paul Berliner on jazz,
Berliner, architectural designer Charles Jencks’s 1972 book Adhocism: The
Case for Improvisation used the term improvisation as a trope for a process
of “using an available system or dealing with an existing situation in a new
way to solve a problem.”20 Jencks declared that the principle/practice of
adhocism was observable in and applicable to “many human endeavours,”
an observation also made by philosopher Gilbert Ryle, writing in 1976. In
one of his last essays, titled simply “Improvisation,” Ryle intimates that “I
shall soon be reminding you of some of the familiar and unaugust sorts of
improvisations which, just qua thinking beings, we all essay every day of
the week, indeed in every hour of the waking day.”21 Even if we may admit
that, on some level, not all of our activities are improvised, the line between
improvised and nonimprovised activities may not be as bright as we
suppose, and it may well be that it is the non-improvised event that stands
out as an anomalous event in the flow of everyday life. For example, in his
influential book, The Improvisation of Musical Dialogue, philosopher-
theologian and Handbook contributor Bruce Ellis Benson identifies several
improvisative moments within the nominally non-improvised activity of
music composition.22
Ryle’s essay invokes the quotidian and transposes the language of
adhocism to a near-universal register that sounds a lot like “using an
available system or dealing with an existing situation in a new way”:
I want now to go further and to show that … to be thinking what he is here and now up against,
he must both be trying to adjust himself to just this present once-only situation and in doing this
to be applying lessons already learned. There must be in his response a union of some Ad
Hockery with some know-how. If the normal human is not at once improvising and improvising
warily, he is not engaging his somewhat trained wits in some momentarily live issue, but
perhaps acting from sheer unthinking habit. So thinking, I now declare quite generally, is, at the
least, the engaging of partly trained wits in a partly fresh situation. It is the pitting of an acquired
competence or skill against an unprogrammed opportunity, obstacle or hazard. It is a bit like
putting some new wine into old bottles.23

Remarkably, Ryle’s essay does not mention music at all, an omission that
could well be strategic rather than unmindful. After all, had philosophers of
music of his day wanted to think about improvisation, numerous examples
were on offer, but other than the work of Vladimir Jankélévitch and Philip
Alperson, the philosophy of music offered little where improvisation was
concerned.24 In this Handbook, Alperson directly confronts this near-
erasure, while Gary Peters, whose 2009 book, The Philosophy of
Improvisation, constitutes a new departure in the field, explores the relation
between improvisation and Edmund Husserl’s ideas on time-
consciousness.25
One area that could be taken up by scholars working on the aesthetics of
improvisation is the relation between an aesthetics of
perfection/imperfection and issues of moral perfectionism taken up by
philosophers working largely outside of music but with significant musical
interests, such as Stanley Cavell. Arnold I. Davidson’s Handbook essay
addresses moral perfectionism and improvisation, relating it to Pierre
Hadot’s ideas on the spiritual exercises conceived by philosophers of
antiquity as a means toward transformation of the self, and taking as his
example the music of Sonny Rollins. For Hadot,
Attention (prosoche) is the fundamental Stoic spiritual attitude. It is a continuous vigilance and
presence of mind, self-consciousness which never sleeps, and a constant tension of the spirit.
Thanks to this attitude, the philosopher is fully aware of what he does at each instant, and he
wills his actions fully…. We could also define this attitude as “concentration on the present
 moment.” … Attention (prosoche) allows us to respond immediately to events, as if they were
questions asked of us all of a sudden.26

Samuel Wells’s essay for the Handbook approaches ethics from an

ecclesiastical perspective that invokes improvisational theater. Other
philosophers engage improvisation without often invoking aesthetics or
artistic examples, such as Martha Nussbaum and Barbara Herman’s writing
on moral improvisation and situational ethics, as well as J. David
Velleman’s work on collective intentions,27 an issue that Garry Hagberg’s
article in this Handbook takes up in detail.28
Issues of identity have been strongly connected with discussions of
musical improvisation through such putatively African American cultural
tropes as signifying, storytelling and narrative, personal voice, and
individuality within an aggregate.29 The emergence of jazz studies as an
important academic discipline has attracted both senior and emerging
scholars in film, literature, history, social science, and cultural studies, as
well as music, generating a set of new questions around jazz that are
explored in edited volumes by Daniel Fischlin and Ajay Heble, Robert G.
O’Meally, Brent Hayes Edwards, Farah Jasmine Griffin, Sherrie Tucker,
and many others.30 As a field, literary studies has made significant
contributions to jazz and improvisation studies, and this is reflected in
Handbook articles by Walton Muyumba, Patricia Ryan, Hazel Smith, Sara
Villa, and Rob Wallace.
Particularly in earlier jazz studies literature, the identity of the artist was
often deemed homologous with the musical results, a relationship that Gioia
has forcefully asserted:
Indeed, only a particular type of temperament would be attracted to an art form which values
spur-of-the-moment decisions over carefully considered choices, which prefers the haphazard to
the premeditated, which views unpredictability as a virtue and sees cool-headed calculation as a
vice. If Mingus, Monk, Young, and Parker had been predictable and dependable individuals, it
seems unlikely that their music could have remained unpredictable and innovative.31

It is but a short step from an assumption of this nature to the invocation of

notions of genius and self-expression, as Edgar Landgraf, one of the most
wide-ranging among recent improvisation theorists, points out:
Instead of challenging the aesthetic tradition whose concepts fail to account for the specificities
of this improvisational art form, Gioia propagates an understanding of jazz in terms of
nineteenth-century aesthetics of genius that asks us to ignore this art form’s “imperfections” and
 appreciate improvisation as “the purest expression possible of the artist’s emotions and
feelings.”32

Homologies between musical improvisative practice and sociopolitical

expression were given powerful voice in LeRoi Jones’s 1963 book, Blues
People.33 Around the same time, the phenomenological sociology of Alfred
Schutz, in his well-known 1964 essay, “Making Music Together,” asserted
that “a study of the social relationships connected with the musical process
may lead to some insights valid for many other forms of social
intercourse.”34 Anthropologist John Szwed noted that
The esthetics of jazz demand that a musician play with complete originality, with an assertion of
his own musical individuality…. At the same time jazz requires that musicians be able to merge
their unique voices in the totalizing, collective improvisations of polyphony and heterophony.
The implications of this esthetic are profound and more than vaguely threatening, for no
political system has yet been devised with social principles which reward maximal
individualism within the frame work of spontaneous egalitarian interaction.35

In this way, improvisation is also frequently symbolically endowed with the

potential for the overthrow of hierarchical practices. A contrary turn in this
discussion is provided by political theorist Yves Citton’s invocation of
improvisation’s “diagonality in relation to the traditional parameters of
vertical domination and horizontal equality: its (fundamentally political)
challenge is to devise collective forms of agency which articulate the
outstanding power of the participating singularities with the principle of
equal respect necessary to find non-oppressive strength in numbers.”36 In
his Handbook article, Citton notices that Bruno Latour’s declaration, “Il n’a
pas de monde commun; il faut le composer” can easily be redirected toward
a view of an improvised common world in which, following fellow
contributor Daniel Belgrad, a “culture of spontaneity” exercises strong
sociopolitical effects.37
In any case, as pointed out by both Stephen Greenblatt and Tzvetan
Todorov, improvisation can easily support imperial ideologies.38 Greenblatt
and Todorov see in improvisation a practice vital to the European conquest
of the New World, in particular via what the former calls “the ability to both
capitalize on the unforeseen and transform given materials into one’s own
scenario.” Greenblatt calls this ability “opportunistic,” a term that speaks to
the oft-invoked foregrounding of attention and awareness in discussions of
improvisation but without ceding to the practice any kind of moral high
ground.
The mobile, improvisatory sensibility that Greenblatt identifies in
imperial conquest (and the machinations of Iago) also marks epochal
change: the sensibility, according to Greenblatt, emerges with the early
modern period. We can identify a similar periodizing turn in Michel
Foucault’s late fascination with Kant’s essay on Aufklärung and the specific
qualities of modernity, which Foucault understood to be a kind of
improvisational attitude or ethos toward the self, its contemporary moment,
and its historical contingency—in short, a “mode of reflective relation to
the present.”39 Although he does not use the term improvisation, Foucault
adopts many of its key characteristics in his description of the modern
ethos, which is one of continual performance and testing of the self as an
“object of a complex and difficult elaboration.”40
The point of this experimental historico-critical attitude, for Foucault, is
“both to grasp the points where change is possible and desirable, and to
determine the precise form this change should take.”41 The critic therefore
attempts to convert states of domination, in which power relations are
frozen or blocked, into mobile sites for the conscious practice of freedom.42
The philosopher’s employment of improvisational language
(experimentation, adaptation, reflection on the present, mobility) in relation
to considerations of freedom in his final years was not a coincidence—as
many authors have noted, including Ali Jihad Racy in this Handbook,
improvisation is frequently represented as symbolic of freedom and
liberation. At the same time, however, moderating this image of
improvisation as an engine for change is the binary opposition of
freedom/structure (or freedom/constraint), routinely invoked in response to
portrayals of musical “free improvisation.”
In these invocations, improvisation must always be entirely unfettered,
leading the analyst to develop fettered alternatives in the form of
“regulated,” “constrained,” or “structured” improvisation. For example, in
her 2004 book Undoing Gender, Judith Butler presents a model of how
constraint is encountered in social interaction:
If gender is a kind of a doing, an incessant activity performed, in part, without one’s knowing
and without one’s willing, it is not for that reason automatic or mechanical. On the contrary, it is
a practice of improvisation within a scene of constraint. Moreover, one does not “do” one’s
gender alone. One is always “doing” with or for another, even if the other is only imaginary.
 What I call my “own” gender appears perhaps at times as something that I author or, indeed,
own. But the terms that make up one’s own gender are, from the start, outside oneself, beyond
oneself in a sociality that has no single author (and that radically contests the notion of
authorship itself).43

On this view, the primary constraints on human freedom lie in the social
encounter with multiple agents, mediated as they may be through
convention, language, tradition, or idiom.
Often enough, discussions of constraint turn from the simple presumption
of their presence in any situation to a further assertion of a fundamental
need for constraint as a precondition for a “successful” improvisation, an
assertion that can appear surprisingly bereft of corroboration. For example,
in his 1964 book on the anthropology of music, Alan Merriam admitted,
“While it is clear that there must always be limits imposed upon
improvisation, we do not know what these limits are.”44 Perceptions of
conceptual rigidity in the frequent mapping of the freedom/structure binary
onto low/high culture oppositions, as well as the improvisation-composition
binary (which Merriam adopted in his book), have prompted more nuanced
approaches based in theories of mediation, such as in the recent work of
Georgina Born.45
In any event, attempts to elucidate the nature of constraint have suffered
from a discourse that frames constraints as somehow outside of the system
of improvisative production itself. Sociologist of science Andrew Pickering
saw this discourse as “the language of the prison: constraints are always
there, just like the walls of the prison, even though we only bump into them
occasionally (and can learn not to bump into them at all).”46 Against this
static, essentialist model, Pickering substitutes a related but more flexible
notion of resistance:
In the real-time analysis of practice, one has to see resistance as genuinely emergent in time, as
a block arising in practice to this or that passage of goal-oriented practice. Thus, though
resistance and constraint have an evident conceptual affinity, they are, as it were, perpendicular
to one another in time: constraint is synchronic, antedating practice and enduring through it,
while resistance is diachronic, constitutively indexed by time. Furthermore, while constraint
resides in a distinctively human realm, resistance, as I have stressed, exists only in the
crosscutting of the realms of human and material agency.47

Another frequently encountered trope of the constraints on improvisation

involves the notion of a knowledge base from which improvisers are said to
draw. In music this can involve larger questions of an idiom, genre, or
cultural milieu that grounds musical expression—in Derrida’s formulation,
“the logic that ties repetition to alterity.”48 In his 1978 book Derek Bailey
advanced the now-influential yet still theoretically rocky opposition
between idiomatic and non-idiomatic music,49 and analogously, sociologist
Pierre Bourdieu’s 1977 book Outline of a Theory of Practice asserted that
improvisation in social life draws from a habitus that forecloses the
possibility of “unpredictable novelty.” Bourdieu’s notion of the habitus,
worked out with and against his ethnography of rural Berber kinship
practices, critiques the romantic notion of unmediated spontaneity. He
discovers a “durably installed generative principle of regulated
improvisations.”50 For Bourdieu, the habitus exists (again) within a
recursive logic, both producing and being produced through praxis. Each
individual agent, acting without objectively structured correlation with
others, “wittingly or unwittingly, willy nilly, is a producer and reproducer of
objective meaning.”51 Those who produce these actions manifest a kind of
“intentionless invention.”52
More routinely offered than this early irruption of the notion of
emergence is the idea of improvisation as a process of concatenation and
recombination. Ethnomusicologist Paul Berliner’s 1994 book on
improvisation in jazz described the practice as “reworking precomposed
material and designs in relation to unanticipated ideas conceived, shaped,
and transformed under the special conditions of performance.”53 Often
these materials were portrayed in jazz parlance as “licks”—stock,
memorized phrases (or as the saxophonist Eddie Harris called them in his
book-length compilation, “cliché capers”)—that the players concatenate to
produce the music.54 Cognitive psychologist Philip Johnson-Laird terms
this (somewhat dismissively) the “motif theory,”55 and points out the
theory’s inability to account for change and novelty. Organizational
scientists Kathleen McGinn and Angela Keros, on the other hand, had no
trouble asserting in a 2002 paper that, “improvisations are inherently both
active and interactive and contain both familiar moves and unique
approaches.”56
Though distinct, motif theory is commonly linked to the notion of the
referent or model to which improvising musicians take recourse57 and to the
most widely referenced of all early knowledge-base theories, Albert Lord’s
1960 book, The Singer of Tales. Milman Parry’s pioneering discovery of
recurring formulas in Homeric verse, combined with the fieldwork on
Serbo-Croatian oral improvising poets conducted by Parry and his student
Lord in the 1930s, uncovered major structural analogues between that
poetry and Homeric verse, leading to the development of the now
influential oral-formulaic theory.58 However, Parry was ambivalent about
calling Homer himself an oral poet, and possibly reprising the trope of
masking, Lord was wary of conflating oral composition with
improvisation.59 Both of these cautions, as Angela Esterhammer shows in
this volume and other writings, had been thrown to the winds by nineteenth-
century commentators.60 Theodor Adorno’s anti-jazz polemics again raised
the topic of formulas in the middle of the twentieth century, but in the
context of his critique of a capitalist “culture industry” that only offered
pseudo-individualized performances, standardization, and feigned
authenticity.61
Psychologist R. Keith Sawyer’s wide-ranging and influential work on
improvisation, pedagogy, music, and theater is crucially informed by his
work as a jazz pianist. Sawyer rethinks the notion of the “knowledge base,”
this time in terms of higher-level cultural references rather than individual
formulas:
It’s difficult for casual audiences to believe that improvisers do not draw on material that has
been at least partially worked up in rehearsal, but I’ve performed with many improv groups
repeatedly—and attended rehearsals—and I have never seen even a single line used twice.
However, all groups draw on culturally shared emblems and stereotypes, which in some sense
are “preexisting structures.”

As might be expected, the nature of improvisative temporality became a

major point of commentary. An influential formulation in art music
distinguishes between aleatoric or indeterminate modes of expression and
the improvisative. One well-expressed theoretical binary opposition is
found in a 1971 essay by French musicologist Célestin Deliège, but in the
United States the issue is best known through the writings of composer
John Cage.62
Reflecting reaction to the composition-improvisation binary, musical
improvisation is frequently characterized as “real-time composition,”
“instant composition,” and the like. Most frequently, however, artistic
improvisation is portrayed as an immediate (and even unmediated),
spontaneous, intuitive creation in real time that bears significant analogues
to everyday experience. As dance theorist Cynthia Novack portrayed the
expectations generated by contact improvisation,
The experience of the movement style and improvisational process itself were thought to teach
people how to live (to trust, to be spontaneous and “free,” to “center” oneself, and to “go with
the flow”), just as the mobile, communal living situations of the young, middle-class
participants provided the setting and values which nourished this form. Dancers and audiences
saw contact improvisation as, to use Clifford Geertz’s phrase, a “model of” and a “model for” an
egalitarian, spontaneous way of life.63

Here, the role played by memory and history becomes a particularly thorny
issue. In a complex contradiction, improvisation is viewed as iterative and
repetition-oriented, habit-based, and essentially unrepeatable—all at once.
The presumed ephemerality of improvisative products became provisionally
forestalled via sound recording technologies, and yet the emergence of
these technologies also led to novel formulations of the iterability/alterity
binary in comparisons between the ontology of a real-time improvisation
and its recorded version.
Another dimension of musical improvisation, this time of an aesthetic
nature, is the expectation that a good improvisation be, as Bailey wrote, “a
celebration of the moment.”64 The best improvisation will be unique, avoid
stagnation and the commonplace, and constantly display or embody
innovation, originality (albeit via recombination of existing elements),
novelty, freshness, and surprise. The improvisation must also take risks,
which come in at least two flavors. Dance theorist Curtis L. Carter
maintained that “improvisation as a form of performance runs the risk of
falling into habitual repetitive patterns that may become stale for both
performers and viewers.”65 The other kind of risk, as expressed by
philosopher David Davies, draws upon the composition-improvisation
opposition, in that an improviser is “creating a musical structure without the
resources for revision available to the composer.”66
In his discussion of key issues and ideologies surrounding
ethnomusicological interpretations of musical improvisation, Stephen Blum
writes, “We are not likely to speak of improvisation unless we believe that
participants in an event, however they are motivated, share a sense that
something unique is happening in their presence at the moment of
performance.”67 However, improvisation can take place on much larger
time scales than “the moment,” and with much larger forces, such as the
long-term coping strategies that anthropologist Paul Richards discussed in
his Handbook essay on farming communities in Sierra Leone, where
shifting rice cultivation requires dynamic analysis and response in real—if
extended—time to changing natural and social conditions. A number of
improvisative methods are deployed that must also change dynamically, and
an extensive knowledge base is one result.
Before concluding an overview of this nature, one would need to
consider the frequently invoked metaphorical relation between music and
spoken language. Johnson-Laird’s description presents the fundamental
idea:
If you are not an improvising musician, then the best analogy to improvisation is your
spontaneous speech. If you ask yourself how you are able to speak a sequence of English
sentences that make sense, then you will find that you are consciously aware of only the tip of
the process. That is why the discipline of psycholinguistics exists: psychologists need to answer
this question too.68

Linguist François Grosjean also maintains that spontaneous language

production shares important features with music improvisation, including
recourse to knowledge bases. Most directly, Grosjean asserts that
“spontaneous language production is a form of improvisation.”69 Extending
this insight, Sawyer finds that everyday conversation is “both improvised
and collaborative.”70
[M]‌ost everyday conversation is improvisational—no one joins a conversation with a written
script, and participants generally cannot predict where the conversation will go. Everyday
conversation is also collaborative, because no single person controls or directs a conversation;
instead, the direction of its flow is collectively determined, by all of the participants’
contributions. This view of conversation as both improvised and collaborative will be my
starting point, leading me into a discussion of several key characteristics of group improvisation,
characteristics that I will argue apply equally to both verbal and musical improvisation.71

For Sawyer, the key characteristics of improvisation include

• Unpredictable outcome, rather than a scripted, known endpoint;

• Moment-to-moment contingency: the next dialogue turn depends on
the one just before;
• Open to collaboration;
• An oral performance, not a written product;
• Embedded in the social context of the performance.72
In Sawyer’s work, these features come together to describe a phenomenon
of “collaborative emergence.” In a 2003 book on the topic, he presents an
ethnographic study of improvisational theater in early 1990s Chicago that
explores how conversations work, using analytic techniques developed for
the study of everyday conversation. The result, in Sawyer’s terms, presents
a challenge to traditional “individualist” psychological methods.73
Ingrid Monson’s 1996 book, Saying Something: Jazz Improvisation and
Interaction, provides an important perspective on the ongoing metaphor of
music-as-language by situating jazz improvisation as a kind of conversation
taking place in the context of African American cultural styles.74 The work
draws upon the linguistics of Michael Silverstein, for whom an everyday
conversation amounts to an “improvisational performance of culture” in
which “an interactional text … is a structure-in-realtime of organized,
segmentable, and recognizable event-units of the order of social
organizational regularity…. [S]‌ocial action in event-realtime has the
capacity to be causally effective in the universe of identities as a basis for
relationships and further social action.”75
What emerges from this extended, yet necessarily incomplete, discussion
of issues is the futility of drawing boundaries around the critical study of
improvisation. Rather, in this project, we defer definitions in order to allow
the scholarly conversation to wander into unforeseen areas. Our intent is to
place scholars in virtual dialogue, where the totality of the compendium
itself formulates an articulated, emergent, yet unbounded set of issues,
drawn from multiple fields and thereby moving beyond the preoccupations
of any one.

IMPROVISATION AS A WAY OF LIFE

The view of artistic improvisation as symbolizing social and political
formations was dear to many authors in an earlier moment of improvisation
studies. Newer critical engagements with the practice tended to turn this
view on its head, finding that social and political formations themselves
improvise and that improvisation not only enacts such formations directly
but also is fundamentally constitutive of them. This turn allows the new
critical improvisation studies to free itself from musical and artistic models
while encouraging novel theoretical models of musical improvisation that
can invoke the social in a higher register.
The kinds of theorizations found in abundance in this Handbook tend to
feel comfortable invoking the term improvisation without either special
pleadings or the earlier problematizations and maskings. This is in part
because important new discussions of improvisation are taking place across
a large range of fields: anthropology and sociology; organizational,
political, cognitive, and computer science; economics, theology,
neuroscience, and psychology; philosophy, cultural studies, and literary
theory; gender and sexuality studies; architecture and urban planning;
education; and many others. In working with the contributors for this
Handbook, we realized early on that scholars working in these areas did not
necessarily situate their work in dialogue with the tropes identified in the
previous section of this Introduction, and often had little or no investment in
musical histories and ideologies, such as the cherished opposition between
improvisation and composition. For instance, McGinn and Keros sought to
“define an improvisation in the context of a negotiation as a coherent
sequence of relational, informational, and procedural actions and responses
created, chosen, and carried out by the parties during the social
interaction.”76 The prosaic and provisional nature of this definition, in
expanding the frame of reference beyond the artistic, places considerable
pressure on ideologies that impose upon the concept of improvisation the
special sense of creative autonomy and uniqueness that so many
commentators on music portrayed as fundamental.
Nonetheless, musical improvisation continues to play an important role
as a model for how various fields of scholarship pursue the identification
and theorization of improvisative structure and function in human endeavor
more generally. For instance, in 1998 the influential journal Organization
Science devoted an entire issue to the possibilities of conceptually
migrating concepts from improvisation toward theories and practices of
business management. The issue, which was later published in book form,
was one outcome of a 1995 symposium held in Vancouver, Canada, “Jazz
as a Metaphor for Organizing in the 21st Century.” The conference included
performances by noted Canadian jazz musicians as well as organization
scholars such as Frank Barrett, an accomplished pianist.
The title of the issue’s introduction, “The Organization Science Jazz
Festival: Improvisation as a Metaphor for Organizing,” playfully cast
individual articles as performances on a festival. Influenced by Berliner’s
Thinking in Jazz, contributions by Barrett, Karl Weick, and Mary Jo Hatch
spurred the field’s now influential “jazz metaphor” for reconceiving
interaction and creativity in business and management interactions. This
metaphor provides one route toward thinking of improvisation in ways that
could be applied to both artistic and nonartistic exchanges.77
Around this same time, Claudio Ciborra, whose work combined
organizational theory and information systems theory, published another
influential book, The Labyrinths of Information: Challenging the Wisdom of
Systems, in which he introduced notions of bricolage and what he called
“drift” in his work on improvisation in management systems and their
associated technologies, including his early studies of the Internet. In
Ciborra’s words,
Drifting describes a slight, or sometimes significant, shift of the role and function in concrete
situations of usage, compared to the planned, pre-defined, and assigned objectives and
requirements that the technology is called upon to perform (irrespective of who plans or defines
them, whether they are users, sponsors, specialists, vendors, or consultants).78

For Ciborra, drifting in the life of technological systems takes place in two
related arenas:
the openness of the technology, its plasticity in response to the re-inventions carried out by users
and specialists, who gradually learn to discover and exploit features, affordances, and
potentialities of systems. On the other hand, there is the sheer unfolding of the actors’ being-in-
the-workflow and the continuous stream of interventions, tinkering, and improvisations that
colour perceptions of the entire system life cycle.79

The encounter between freedom and structure ostensibly played out in

musical improvisation also becomes connected with notions of planning.
What is frequently heard is that the best improvisations are unscripted and
unplanned, appearing with little or no preconceptions or premeditation,
and/or drawing upon intuition and the unconscious mind. Hamilton quotes
trumpeter-composer Wadada Leo Smith to the effect that “at its highest
level, improvisation [is] created entirely within the improviser at the
moment of improvisation without any prior structuring.”80
As it happens, both Ciborra’s work and the improvisative approach to
organization and management theory more generally do call into question
the efficacy of traditional models and practices of planning. A 1999 Ciborra
article contrasts planning-oriented views of organization, such as the work
of Allan Newell, Herbert Simon, and the artificial intelligence research of
Terry Winograd, with research that he sees as more compatible with real-
time choice and memory processes, such as the social theory of Anthony
Giddens, the sociology of Alfred Schutz, and the philosophy of Edmund
Husserl. While the discourse of rules and constraints is never far from a
discussion of improvisation, Ciborra’s conclusion is that “ordinary
decisions on markets and in hierarchies are de facto improvised, no matter
how rules and norms are supposed to guide and constrain behavior.”81
Research in ethnomethodology has exercised significant impact on
improvisation studies. Tamotsu Shibutani’s 1966 book Improvised News
anticipated actor-network theory in its investigation of the circulation of
rumor, an outgrowth of his experience in a Japanese American detention
camp during World War II. “If enough news is not available to meet the
problematic situation,” Shibutani wrote, “a definition must be improvised.
Rumor is the collective transaction in which such improvisation occurs.”82
Like Ciborra, later generations of computer science theorists working on
interactive systems design, such as Paul Dourish and Philip Agre, also draw
upon ethnomethodology. Dourish’s interpretation of the ideas of Harold
Garfinkel maintains that “work is not so much ‘performed’ as achieved
through improvisation and local decision-making.”83
The ethnomethodological view emphasises the way in which social action is not achieved
through the execution of pre-conceived plans or models of behaviour, but instead is improvised
moment-to-moment, according to the particulars of the situation. The sequential structure of
behaviour is locally organised, and is situated in the context of particular settings and times.84

Agre’s late-1990s work is critical of the notion of planning as intrinsic to

the operation of a real-time, real-world, situated computational system. For
Agre, a central question concerns how
human activity can take account of the boundless variety of large and small contingencies that
affect our everyday undertakings while still exhibiting an overall orderliness and coherence and
remaining generally routine? In other words, how can flexible adaptation to specific situations
be reconciled with the routine organization of activity?85

Agre maintains that

Schemes that rely on the construction of plans for execution will operate poorly in a
complicated or unpredictable world such as the world of everyday life. In such a world it will
not be feasible to construct plans very far in advance; moreover, it will routinely be necessary to
 abort the execution of plans that begin to go awry. If contingency really is a central feature of
the world of everyday life, computational ideas about action will need to be rethought.86

Asserting that “when future states of the world are genuinely uncertain,
detailed plan construction is probably a waste of time,”87 Agre concludes
that
activity in worlds of realistic complexity is inherently a matter of improvisation. By “inherently”
I mean that this is a necessary result, a property of the universe and not simply of a particular
species of organism or a particular type of device. In particular, it is a computational result, one
inherent in the physical realization of complex things.88

Agre’s use of improvisation as a computational metaphor brings him to a

definition of improvisation that focuses less on materials, as with Berliner’s
notion of recombination, than on an interactionist dynamics of decision
making. Agre proposes a view of improvisation as “a running argument in
which an agent decides what to do by conducting a continually updated
argument among various alternatives,” where “individuals continually
choose among options presented by the world around them. Action is not
realized fantasy but engagement with reality. In particular, thought and
action are not alternated in great dollops as on the planning view but are
bound into a single, continuous phenomenon.”89
The relationship of improvisation to planning has been explored at the
level of management of software projects, particularly the emerging “agile
project management” (APM) model. Stephen Leybourne sees agile models
moving away from “plan-then execute” paradigms toward a multistage
model: “envision, speculate, explore, adapt, and close.”90 “If the known
attributes of APM are mapped onto these accepted and empirically derived
constructs of improvisational working,” Leybourne maintains, “the overlaps
and common areas can then emerge. These constructs are creativity,
innovation, bricolage, adaption, compression, and learning.”91
Of course, not everyone views bricolage as an unalloyed good. Togolese
economist Kako Nubukpo’s scathing critique of African economic planning
deploys the term pejoratively:
Few African economists have a clear theoretical positioning. We are primarily in the register of
bricolage, of opportunism, or if you want to be kinder, of pragmatism! There are two kinds of
bricolage. Some are not bothered by the inconsistencies, provided their power positions are
assured…. The others have no clear theoretical positioning: we are in situations characterized by
the absence of discussion of macroeconomic paradigms, with improvisation in the face of
societal challenges.92
The result of this lack of expertise, as Nubukpo sees it, results in
improvisation: “Economic improvisation is the contextually rational
response of African governments to events perceived as random. The lack
of control of the instruments of economic sovereignty (currency, budget)
translates in practice to an obligation to react instead of acting.”93 On the
surface, Nubukpo’s lament is reminiscent of Richards’s account, in this
Handbook, of shifting cultivation in Sierra Leone. However, what emerges
from the economist’s account seems more in tune with a remark by
Handbook contributors Ton Matton and Christopher Dell, who in their book
on improvisation and urban studies, point out that “improvisation is often
experienced as something rather forced than as emancipatory…. Well, we
had to improvise, is what people say, in the hope that soon a situation will
be established where order rules again.”94
Rethinking traditional approaches to planning has become a focus of the
field of emergency management, as with recent work by Tricia
Wachtendorf, James Kendra, and David Mendonca. Noting that
“improvisation has had something of a checkered history in the emergency
management field since its appearance in a disaster response seems to
suggest a failure to plan for a particular contingency,”95 Wachtendorf and
Kendra nonetheless assert that “while planning encompasses the normative
‘what ought to be done,’ improvisation encompasses the emergent and
actual ‘what needs to be done.’”96 Indeed, the authors assert, following
sociologist Kathleen Tierney, that “improvisation is a significant feature of
every disaster. … [I]f an event does not require improvisation, it is probably
not a disaster.”97
One notes in this work on computation and emergency management a
very different viewpoint on the relation between the indeterminate and the
improvisative. Rather than posing a distinction between the two based on
directed acts of aesthetic choice, these non-artistic theorists assert an
understanding of indeterminacy as an aspect of everyday life that is
addressed improvisatively. Also absent in this expanded context are
ideological debates common in musical research concerning whether or not
improvisations must inevitably rely upon preset, memorized formulae,
rules, and cultural models. Finally, as we see in a number of this
Handbook’s articles, freedom and structure are not taken as oppositional.98
Rather, structure and freedom—as well as power, agency and constraint—
become emergent in improvisative interaction. Indeed, in concert with those
fin de siècle claims that improvisation is uniformly subversive, resistant, or
utopian, we might also wish to see more research into the many other kinds
of communities and institutions that have been “empowered” by their
mastery of improvisational practices, such as the global financial industries,
or the nation-state, which has proven remarkably resilient in spite of the
rumors of its passing.
Computer scientists have also deployed mathematical analogues to
improvisation, notably in process control algorithms, and in experimental
models of Internet search engines. The evolutionary “harmony search”
algorithm, in wide use in civil engineering and industrial applications, is a
metaheuristic path optimization algorithm that adopts the metaphor of a
jazz trio searching for the ideal harmony.
Musical performances seek a best state (fantastic harmony) determined by aesthetic estimation,
as the optimization algorithms seek a best state (global optimum—minimum cost or maximum
benefit or efficiency) determined by objective function evaluation. Aesthetic estimation is
determined by the set of the sounds played by joined instruments, just as objective function
evaluation is determined by the set of the values produced by component variables; the sounds
for better aesthetic estimation can be improved through practice after practice, just as the values
for better objective function evaluation can be improved iteration by iteration.99

Beyond such specific applications in search algorithms, the general relation

between technology and improvisation is explored by a number of
contributors in this Handbook. Tim Blackwell and Michael Young explore
both the mathematics and the social aesthetics of “live algorithms.”
Computer programs that can be said to improvise, as well as interacting in
meaningful ways with improvising musicians, go back to the 1970s advent
of relatively small, portable minicomputers and microcomputers that made
live, interactive computer music a practical possibility. During the 1970s
and 1980s, composer-performers such as Joel Chadabe, Salvatore
Martirano, Frankie Mann, David Behrman, George Lewis, David
Rosenboom, and the California Bay Area scene surrounding the League of
Automatic Music Composers (Jim Horton, John Bischoff, Rich Gold, Tim
Perkis, Mark Trayle, and others) began creating computer programs that
interacted with each other and human musicians to create music
collectively, blurring the boundaries between improvisation (in the
traditional sense of purposive human activity) and machine interactivity.
Much of this work was influenced by discourses in artificial intelligence,
and MIT’s Marvin Minsky, one of the founders of the field and a virtuoso
improvising pianist, was one of the first to propose musical improvisation
as a gateway to understanding larger issues of knowledge representation.100
Later, as computing technology underwent its second wave of
miniaturization, new possibilities opened up for collaborative, networked
improvisation; Ge Wang surveys some of these new possibilities for mobile
music making in his contribution to these volumes. Another widely
influential figure in this area was the groundbreaking psychologist-
percussionist-computer scientist David Wessel, who passed away suddenly
while preparing his article for this Handbook.
Technologists often adopt improvisational theater as an area of focus.
Research on computers as intelligent agents in virtual theater is the subject
of Handbook articles by Celia Pearce and Brian Magerko, while installation
and gaming contexts are explored by Simon Penny and D. Fox Harrell.
Psychologist Clément Canonne, working on Collective Free Improvisation
(CFI), references earlier work by Michael Pelz-Sherman, who calls free
improvisation “heteroriginal” music, in which artistic decisions are made in
performance relationships between multiple agents who seek to construct a
shared representation of the improvisation.101 Other models of real-time
performances, both over the Internet and in live broadcasts, are recounted in
Handbook articles by Sher Doruff, Antoinette LaFarge, and Adriene Jenik
(in the human-to-human domain) and by David Rothenberg, who discusses
his sound improvisation with a very tractable humpback whale. These
articles also consider ways in which improvisation fosters new imaginings
of the aesthetic, social, cultural, and political dimensions of human-
computer and interspecies interactivity.
Research at the nexus of improvisation, neuroscience, music, and
cognitive science has also provided new discoveries about the brain, as
Aaron Berkowitz, David Borgo, Ellie Hisama, Roger Dean and Freya
Bailes, and Vijay Iyer discuss here. This research is presaged by the 1980s
and 1990s work of Jeff Pressing, a crucially important early figure in
improvisation studies. His models of how people improvise encompass
physiology and neuropsychology, motor control, skill, and timing; music
theory and oral folklore; artificial intelligence; and much more.102

CONCLUSION
Since we began this project, a number of influential volumes have emerged
that engage improvisation in unusual and exciting ways that challenge prior
orthodoxies within fields, revise histories that preserve traditional lacunae
in the areas of gender and race, and construct new historiographies.
Spearheaded by University of Guelph scholars Ajay Heble (literary theory)
and Daniel Fischlin (theater studies), the Improvisation, Community, and
Social Practice (ICASP) international research initiative has consistently
provided leadership in the field. Founded with a grant from Canada’s Social
Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), ICASP’s remit
begins with the assertion that “musical improvisation is a crucial model for
political, cultural, and ethical dialogue and action.”103
ICASP features seven interrelated research areas: gender and the body,
law and justice, pedagogy, social aesthetics, social policy, text and media,
and transcultural understanding, all of which come together to produce an
ongoing series of colloquia, summer institutes, publications, postdoctoral
fellowships, and its open-source peer-reviewed web journal, Critical
Studies in Improvisation/Études critiques en improvisation.104 One
important focus of ICASP’s social policy team is on ethics, democracy, and
human rights, as represented in recent books by Tracey Nicholls, as well as
Heble, Fischlin, George Lipsitz, and Jesse Stewart. Other ICASP-affiliated
authors have contributed to legal studies, with recent books and articles by
Sara Ramshaw, Tina Piper, and Desmond Manderson.105 For example,
Ramshaw’s analysis of Jacques Derrida’s remarks on improvisation cites
the “openly responsive dimension of improvisation, which, although never
complete or absolute, glances toward the singular other and keeps alive the
possibility of democracy, ethics, resistance and justice in society.”106 In
fact, both scholars and journalists routinely offer the notion of musical
improvisation as symbolic of democracy itself.
Like ICASP, this Handbook is designed to serve as a marker for what the
interdisciplinary study of improvisation has already achieved in terms of an
exemplary literature. Particularly influential on this project has been the
work of many scholars we have not already cited in this Introduction. The
five edited volumes on improvisation in Walter Fähndrich’s Improvisation
series (1992–2003) have included work on improvisative dimensions in
semiotics, psychology, anthropology, music therapy, aesthetics, film, dance,
and linguistics, among other fields.
As this Handbook goes to press, we’d like to make mention of some
recently published books that bode well for the diverse future of the field:
Improvising Medicine, Julie Livingstone’s ethnographic study of an African
oncology ward; Peter Goodwin Heltzel’s ringing Pentecostal call to justice,
Resurrection City: A Theology of Improvisation; Edgar Landgraf’s
Improvisation as Art; and the important volume edited by Hans-Friedrich
Bromann, Gabriele Brandstetter, and Annemarie Matzke, Improvisieren:
Paradoxien des Unvorhersehbaren.107
With scholarship of this quality emerging, we can be sure that this
Handbook will become a spur to further exploration. So much work has
been going on in so many fields that as researchers and readers become
more familiar with the diversity of new approaches to improvisation—
perhaps more than ever before—they will be surprised to find analogies and
similarities between findings in disciplines seemingly far distant from their
own. In the coming years, we hope to see new work that engages with topic
areas in the posthumanities: new materialism, vitalism, and assemblage
theory, among others. Spanning a wide range of disciplines in the
humanistic, natural, and social sciences, this research examines concepts—
like adaptation, self-organization, uncertainty, translation, and emergence—
that could be profitably viewed through an improvisational squint. If, as
Rosi Braidotti has recently observed, new work on the posthuman has
already begun (and will continue) to bridge the two cultures of science and
the humanities, then critical improvisation studies is well poised to make
significant contributions to these unfolding conversations.108 Indeed, one
important outcome of the volume is to demonstrate that at levels of theory
and practice, improvisation provides a site for the most fruitful kind of
interdisciplinarity. One can also expect that a volume of this magnitude and
scope will generate some controversies as to the propriety and usefulness of
studying improvisation. In our view, sparking this kind of debate is a prime
objective.
We feel that the study of improvisation presents a new animating
paradigm for scholarly inquiry. Borrowing a conceit of David Harvey’s, we
can consider a fundamental “condition” of improvisation, and the essays we
have commissioned for this Handbook demonstrate the ways in which the
study of improvisation is now informing a vast array of fields of inquiry.
Our hope is for these volumes to serve as both reference and starting point
for a new, exciting, and radically interdisciplinary field.

NOTES
1. Andreas Huyssen, “Back to the Future: Fluxus in Context,” in Twilight Memories: Marking
Time in a Culture of Amnesia (New York: Routledge, 1994), 198.
2. Bruno Nettl, Volume 2. See Ernest T. Ferand, Die Improvisation in der Musik: Eine
entwicklungsgeschichtliche und psychologische Untersuchung (Zurich: Rhein-Verlag, 1938).
3. Bruno Nettl, “Thoughts on Improvisation: A Comparative Approach,” The Musical Quarterly
60, no. 1 (1974): 1–19.
4. See William Kinderman, “Improvisation in Beethoven’s Creative Process,” in Musical
Improvisation: Art, Education, and Society, ed. Gabriel Solis and Bruno Nettl, 296–312 (Urbana
and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2009); Annette Richards, The Free Fantasia and the
Musical Picturesque (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Anna Maria Busse
Berger, Medieval Music and the Art of Memory (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2005); Leo Treitler, With Voice and Pen: Coming to Know Medieval Song and How It Was Made
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); Leo Treitler, “Medieval Improvisation,” World of
Music 33, no. 3 (1991): 66–91; Kenneth Hamilton, After the Golden Age: Romantic Pianism
and Modern Performance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); John Rink, “Schenker and
Improvisation,” Journal of Music Theory 37, no. 1 (Spring 1993); George E. Lewis,
“Improvised Music after 1950: Afrological and Eurological Perspectives,” Black Music
Research Journal 16, no. 1 (1996): 91–123; Benjamin Piekut, Experimentalism Otherwise: The
New York Avant-Garde and Its Limits (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011); Melina
Esse, “Encountering the Improvvisatrice in Italian Opera,” Journal of the American
Musicological Society 66, no. 3 (Fall 2013): 709–770; Benjamin Piekut, “Indeterminacy, Free
Improvisation, and the Mixed Avant-Garde: Experimental Music in London, 1965–75,” Journal
of the American Musicological Society 67, no. 3 (Fall 2014): 769–824.
5. See Timothy J. McGee, Improvisation in the Arts of the Middle Ages and Renaissance
(Kalamzoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2003).
6. Sister Miriam Joseph, C.S.C., Shakespeare’s Use of the Arts of Language (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1947).
7. For excellent examples of these kinds of writings on improvisation, see Patricia Shehan
Campbell and Lee Higgins, Free to Be Musical: Group Improvisation in Music (Lanham MD:
Rowman and Littlefield, 2010); Cornelius Cardew, “Towards an Ethic of Improvisation,” in
Treatise Handbook (London: Edition Peters, 1971); Cornelius Cardew, Scratch Music (London:
Latimer New Dimensions, 1972); William Forsythe, Improvisation Technologies: A Tool for the
Analytical Dance Eye (with CD-ROM) (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, [1999] 2012); Malcolm
Goldstein, Sounding The Full Circle: Concerning Music Improvisation and Other Related
Matters (Sheffield, Vt: Self-published, 1988),
http://www.frogpeak.org/unbound/goldstein/goldstein_fullcircle.pdf?lbisphpreq=1; Keith
Johnstone, Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre (London: Methuen, 1981); Stephen
Nachmanovitch, Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art (New York: Jeremy P.
Tarcher/Putnam, 1990); Pauline Oliveros, Software for People (Baltimore: Smith Publications,
1984); Leo Smith, Notes (8 Pieces) Source, A New World Music: Creative Music (New Haven,
CT: Kiom Press, 1973); Viola Spolin, Improvisation for the Theatre (Evanston: Northwestern
University Press, [1963] 1983); Miranda Tufnell and Chris Crickmay, Body Space Image: Notes
Toward Improvisation and Performance (London: Virago Press, 1993); Frances-Marie Uitti,
 “Impossible Music” [special issue on improvisation], Contemporary Music Review 25, no. 5/6
(2006); Ruth Zaporah, Improvisation on the Edge: Notes from On and Off Stage (Berkeley, CA:
North Atlantic Books, 2014); John Zorn, ed. Arcana: Musicians on Music, Vols 1–7 (New York:
Hips Road/Tzadik, 2000–2014). Also see the classic autoethnographic account of the acquisition
of improvisational skill, David Sudnow, Ways of the Hand: The Organization of Improvised
Conduct (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978).
8. “Improvisation,” in The Oxford Dictionary of Music, 2nd revised edition (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2006). Available at
http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com:80/subscriber/article/opr/t237/e5140. Accessed December
5, 2011.
9. See Theodor Adorno, “Perennial Fashion—Jazz,” in Prisms, trans. Samuel Weber and Shierry
Weber (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1981); Alan P. Merriam, The Anthropology of Music (Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 1964), 119–132; Howard S. Becker, Outsiders: Studies in the
Sociology of Deviance (New York: Free Press, 1963).
10. Essays by these Handbook contributors are in Volume 1. Also see Amy Seham, Whose Improv
Is It Anyway? Beyond Second City (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001); Susan
Leigh Foster, Dances That Describe Themselves: The Improvised Choreography of Richard Bull
(Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2002); Danielle Goldman, I Want to Be Ready:
Improvised Dance as a Practice of Freedom (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010);
Thomas F. DeFrantz and Anita Gonzalez, eds., Black Performance Theory (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2014).
11. See Campbell, Free to Be Musical: Group Improvisation in Music; John Byng-Hall, Rewriting
Family Scripts: Improvisation and Systems Change (New York: Guilford Press, 1995); Émile
Jaques-Dalcroze, Rhythm, Music, and Education, trans. Harold F. Rubinstein (New York: G. P.
Putnam’s Sons, 1921); Fritz Hegi, Improvisation und Musiktherapie: Möglichkeiten und
Wirkungen von freier Musik (Wiesbaden: Dr. Ludwig Reichert Verlag, [1986] 2010); Tony
Wigram, Improvisation: Methods and Techniques for Music Therapy—Clinicians, Educators,
and Students (London: Jessica Kingsley, 2004).
12. Byng-Hall, Rewriting Family Scripts.
13. Susan Foster, Adriene Jenik, and George E. Lewis, “Proposal for a 2002–2003 Resident
Research Group: Global Intentions: Improvisation in the Contemporary Performing Arts.”
14. See Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: Anchor Books,
1959).
15. David Gere and Ann Cooper Albright, eds., Taken by Surprise: A Dance Improvisation Reader
(Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press), xv.
16. Gere and Albright, Taken by Surprise, xlv.
17. Domenico Pietropaolo, “Improvisation in the Arts,” in Timothy J. McGee, ed., Improvisation in
the Arts of the Middle Ages and Renaissance (Kalamzoo: Medieval Institute Publications,
2003), 9.
18. Alan Durant, “Improvisation in the Political Economy of Music,” in Music and the Politics of
Culture, ed. Christopher Norris (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989), 253.
19. See Ted Gioia, “Jazz: The Aesthetics of Imperfection,” The Hudson Review 39, no. 4 (1987):
585–600. Also see Andy Hamilton, “The Art of Improvisation and the Aesthetics of
Imperfection,” British Journal of Aesthetics 40, no. 1 (2000): 168–185.
20. Charles Jencks, Adhocism: The Case for Improvisation (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2013 [1972]),
vii.
21. Gilbert Ryle, “Improvisation,” Mind 85, no. 337 (1976): 69.
22. Bruce Ellis Benson, The Improvisation of Musical Dialogue: A Phenomenology of Music
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
23. Ryle, “Improvisation,” 77.
24. Philip Alperson, “On Musical Improvisation,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 43,
no. 1, Autumn (1984): 17–29; Vladimir Jankélévitch, Liszt: Rhapsodie et Improvisation (Paris:
Flammarion, [1955] 1998).
25. Gary Peters, The Philosophy of Improvisation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).
Coincidentally, a recent PhD dissertation uses evidence from the personal archives of Derek
Bailey to advance the possibility that the guitarist was also influenced by Husserl, via his
engagement with an unpublished treatment of Husserlian time-consciousness, written as an
undergraduate senior thesis by one of us (Lewis) in 1974 and borrowed by the guitarist
sometime in the 1980s. See Dominic Lash, “Metonymy as a Creative Structural Principle in the
Work of J. H. Prynne, Derek Bailey and Helmut Lachenmann, with a Creative Component”
(PhD dissertation, Brunel University, 2010).
26. Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault, ed.
Arnold I. Davidson (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 1995), 84–85. A contrasting approach to
consciousness is presented by Edward Sarath’s Handbook essay.
27. See William Day, “Knowing as Instancing: Jazz Improvisation and Moral Perfectionism,” The
Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 58, no. 2 (Spring 2000): 99–111; J. David Velleman,
“How to Share an Intention,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 57, no. 1 (March
1997): 29–50; Barbara Herman, Moral Literacy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007);
Martha C. Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1990).
28. Hagberg’s many contributions to the philosophy of improvisation include his guest editorship of
the special issue of the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism (58, no. 2, Spring 2000) on
improvisation in the arts, as well as contributing, along with William Day, Philip Alperson, and
others, to that journal’s 2010 “Symposium on Improvisation” (68, no. 3, Summer 2010).
29. Henry Louis Gates’s notion of signifying, developed in the context of literary theory, has
become highly influential in jazz studies. See Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A
Theory of African-American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).
Among the many articles invoking notions of storytelling and personal voice, see Lewis,
“Improvised Music after 1950: Afrological and Eurological Perspectives.” For Samuel Floyd’s
notion of “individuality within the aggregate,” see Samuel A. Floyd, Jr., The Power of Black
Music: Interpreting Its History from Africa to the United States (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1995).
30. Among the many new and exciting volumes that have appeared under the aegis of jazz studies in
recent years are Paul Berliner, Thinking in Jazz: The Infinite Art of Improvisation (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press); Daniel Fischlin, Ajay Heble, and George Lipsitz, eds., The Fierce
Urgency of Now: Improvisation, Rights, and the Ethics of Co-Creation (Durham and London:
Duke University Press, 2013); Ingrid Monson, Saying Something: Jazz Improvisation and
Interaction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Robert G. O’Meally, ed., The Jazz
Cadence of American Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998); Robin D. G.
Kelley, “Dig They Freedom: Meditations on History and the Black Avant-Garde,” Lenox Avenue
3 (1997): 13–27; Brent Hayes Edwards and John F. Szwed, “A Bibliography of Jazz Poetry
Criticism,” Callaloo 25, no. 1 (2002): 338–346; Krin Gabbard, ed., Representing Jazz, Jazz
Among the Discourses (two books) (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995); Aldon Lynn
Nielsen, Black Chant: Languages of African-American Postmodernism (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1997); Charles O. Hartman, Jazz Text: Voice and Improvisation in Poetry,
Jazz, Song (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991); Robert G. O’Meally, Brent Hayes
Edwards, and Farah Jasmine Griffin, eds., Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2004); Nichole T. Rustin and Sherrie Tucker, eds., Big Ears:
Listening for Gender in Jazz Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008).
31. Gioia, “Jazz: The Aesthetics of Imperfection,” 590.
32. Edgar Landgraf, “Improvisation: Form and Event, A Spencer-Brownian Calculation,” in
Emergence and Embodiment: New Essays on Second-Order Systems Theory, ed. Bruce Clarke
and Mark B. N. Hansen (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2009), 202n26.
33. LeRoi Jones, Blues People: Negro Music in White America (New York: William Morrow, 1963).
34. Alfred Schutz, “Making Music Together: A Study in Social Relationship,” in Alfred Schutz,
Collected Papers 2: Studies in Social Theory, ed. Arvid Broderson (The Hague: Martinus
Nijhoff, 1964), 159.
35. John Szwed, “Josef Skvorecky and the Tradition of Jazz Literature,” World Literature Today 54,
no. 4 (1980): 588.
36. Citton, this Handbook, vol. 1.
37. Daniel Belgrad, The Culture of Spontaneity: Improvisation and the Arts in Postwar America
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
38. Stephen J. Greenblatt, “Improvisation and Power,” in Literature and Society, ed. Edward Said
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980); Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of
America: The Question of the Other (New York: Harper & Row, 1984).
39. Michel Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?,” in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, trans. Robert
Hurley and others, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: New Press, 1997), 313.
40. Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?,” 311.
41. Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?,” 316.
42. Michel Foucault, “The Ethics of the Concern of the Self as a Practice of Freedom,” in Ethics:
Subjectivity and Truth, trans. Robert Hurley and others, ed. Paul Rabinow, 281–301 (New York:
New Press, 1997).
43. Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge, 2004), 1.
44. Merriam, The Anthropology of Music, 179.
45. See Georgina Born, “Digital Music, Relational Ontologies and Social Forms,” in Bodily
Expression in Electronic Music: Perspectives on Reclaiming Performativity, ed. Deniz Peters,
Gerhard Eckel, and Andreas Dorschel (New York: Routledge, 2012), 163–180.
46. Andrew Pickering, “The Mangle of Practice: Agency and Emergence in the Sociology of
Science,” American Journal of Sociology 99, no. 3 (November, 1993): 583. One detects a
certain anxious Puritanism in the insistence on the inherent presence and power of constraints in
improvisation. It is as though there is a deeply rooted fear that an improvisation, like noise,
slaves, or subjects of authoritarian regimes, could simply get out of hand and run buck wild, de-
authorizing the authorities, overturning well-formed arrangements, and putting out its tongue at
the judgments of theorists.
47. Pickering, “The Mangle of Practice,” 584–585.
48. Jacques Derrida, “Signature Event Context,” in Limited Inc (Evanston: Northwestern University
Press, 1988 [1977]), 7. Quoted in Edgar Landgraf, Improvisation as Art: Conceptual
Challenges, Historical Perspectives (New York: Continuum, 2011), 22.
49. See Derek Bailey, Improvisation: Its Nature and Practice in Music (New York: Da Capo Press,
1992).
50. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge and New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 78.
51. Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, 79.
52. Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, 79.
53. Berliner, Thinking in Jazz, 241.
54. Philosopher Jerrold Levinson has spoken of how his “concatenationist” notion of the
apprehension of musical form might coexist with the experience of improvisation. See Clément
Canonne and Pierre Saint-Germier, “De la philosophie de l’action à l’écoute musicale: Entretien
avec Jerrold Levinson,” Traces 18, no. 1 (2010): 211–221. For a detailed explication of
 Levinson’s theory, see Jerrold Levinson, Music in the Moment (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1997).
55. See Philip N. Johnson-Laird, “Jazz Improvisation: A Theory at the Computational Level,” in
Representing Musical Structure, ed. Peter Howell, Robert West, and Ian Cross (London:
Academic Press, 1991): 291–326. The long-out-of-print Harris book is Eddie Harris, Jazz Cliché
Capers (Chicago: Wardo Enterprises, 1973).
56. Kathleen L. McGinn and Angela T. Keros, “Improvisation and the Logic of Exchange in
Socially Embedded Transactions,” Administrative Science Quarterly 47 (2002): 445.
57. See Nettl’s article in this Handbook.
58. See Nettl’s article in this Handbook. Also see Milman Parry, The Making of Homeric Verse: The
Collected Papers of Milman Parry, ed. Adam Parry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971).
59. According to Adam Parry, Milman Parry “almost never discussed Homer, that is, the author or
authors of the Iliad and the Odyssey, as opposed to the tradition in which Homer worked; nor
did he ever demonstrate, although at times he seems to assume it, that Homer was himself an
oral poet.” The Making of Homeric Verse: The Collected Papers of Milman Parry, lx–lxi.” As
Lord put it, “If we equate [oral composition] with improvisation in a broad sense, we are again
in error. Improvisation is not a bad term for the process, but it too must be modified by the
restrictions of the particular style. The exact way in which oral composition differs from free
improvisation will, I hope, emerge from the following chapter.” Lord, The Singer of Tales, 5.
60. See Angela Esterhammer, Romanticism and Improvisation, 1750–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2008). The range of scholarship in this area is far too great to summarize in
this short Introduction, but the work of Gregory Nagy and D. Gary Miller provide two
contrasting viewpoints.
61. See Adorno, “Perennial Fashion—Jazz.” Among Adorno’s critics, sociologist Heinz Steinert
stands out because of his impatience with the tendency to explain away Adorno’s standpoints on
jazz. See Heinz Steinert, Die Entdeckung der Kulturindustrie, oder: Warum Professor Adorno
Jazz-Musik nicht ausstehen konnte (Vienna: Verlag für Gesellschaftskritik, 1992).
62. See Célestin Deliège, “Indetermination et Improvisation,” International Review of the Aesthetics
and Sociology of Music 2, no. 2 (December, 1971): 155–191. John Cage’s fraught relationship
with improvisation is explored by Sabine Feisst, a contributor to the present Handbook, in
Sabine Feisst, “John Cage and Improvisation: An Unresolved Relationship,” in Musical
Improvisation: Art, Education, and Society, ed. Gabriel Solis and Bruno Nettl, 38–51 (Urbana,
IL: University of Illinois Press, 2009).
63. Cynthia J. Novack, “Looking at Movement as Culture: Contact Improvisation to Disco,” TDR
32, no. 4 (Winter, 1988): 105.
64. Bailey, Improvisation, 142.
65. Curtis L. Carter, “Improvisation in Dance,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 58, no.
2 (Spring 2000): 182.
66. David Davies, Philosophy of the Performing Arts (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 140.
67. Stephen Blum, “Recognizing Improvisation,” in In the Course of Performance: Studies in the
World of Musical Improvisation, ed. Bruno Nettl with Melinda Russell (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1998), 27.
68. Philip N. Johnson-Laird, “How Jazz Musicians Improvise,” Music Perception 19, no. 3 (Spring
2002): 417.
69. Francois Grosjean, “Language: From Set Patterns to Free Patterning,” in Improvisation III, ed.
Walter Fähndrich (Winterthur: Amadeus, 2005), 71.
70. R. Keith Sawyer, “Improvised Conversations: Music, Collaboration, and Development,”
Psychology of Music 27, no. 2 (October 1999): 192.
71. Sawyer, “Improvised Conversations,” 192.
72. “Improvisation and Narrative,” Narrative Inquiry 12, no. 2 (2002): 321.
73. See Improvised Dialogues: Emergence and Creativity in Conversation (Westport, CT:
Greenwood Publishing Group, 2003).
74. Monson, Saying Something.
75. Silverstein, “The Improvisational Performance of Culture in Realtime Discursive Practice,” 268.
76. McGinn, “Improvisation and the Logic of Exchange in Socially Embedded Transactions,” 445.
77. One of the most frequently cited articles is Karl E. Weick, “Improvisation as a Mindset for
Organizational Analysis,” Organization Science 9, no. 5 (September–October 1998): 543–555.
Weick’s work, as well as a recent book by Frank Barrett, draws on the notion of the aesthetics of
imperfection. See Frank J. Barrett, Yes to the Mess: Surprising Leadership Lessons from Jazz
(Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2012). For a compilation of key articles on the topic,
see the chapter in this volume by management theorists Paul Ingram and Bill Duggan, which
serves as an overview of the scholarship in this area, with particular attention to issues of
individual and group decision making, strategy, trust, intuition, and divergent thinking.
78. Claudio Ciborra, The Labyrinths of Information: Challenging the Wisdom of Systems (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2002), 85.
79. Ciborra, The Labyrinths of Information, 87. Ciborra’s ideas on improvisation were integral to
his work on systems. A list of his publications can be found at
http://is2.lse.ac.uk/Staff/Ciborra/publications.htm.
80. Hamilton, “The Aesthetics of Imperfection,” 337.
81. Claudio U. Ciborra, “Notes on Improvisation and Time in Organizations,” Accounting,
Management and Information Technologies 9, no. 2 (1999): 85.
82. Tamotsu Shibutani, Improvised News: A Sociological Study of Rumor (Indianapolis: Bobbs-
Merrill, 1966), 57.
83. Paul Dourish, Annette Adler, and Brian Cantwell Smith, “Organising User Interfaces Around
Reflective Accounts” (paper presented at the Reflections ‘96 Conference, San Francisco, CA)
http://www.dourish.com/publications/1996/refl96-electronic.pdf.
84. Dourish, Adler, and Smith, “Organising User Interfaces Around Reflective Accounts.”
85. Philip E. Agre, Computation and Human Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1997), 149.
86. Agre, Computation and Human Experience, 155.
87. Agre, Computation and Human Experience, 147.
88. Agre, Computation and Human Experience, 156.
89. Agre, Computation and Human Experience, 161.
90. Stephen A. Leybourne, “Improvisation and Agile Project Management: A Comparative
Consideration,” International Journal of Managing Projects in Business 2, no. 4 (2009): 524.
91. Leybourne, “Improvisation and Agile Project Management,” 524.
92. Béatrice Hibou and Boris Samuel, with Kako Nubukpo, “Les macroéconomistes africains: Entre
opportunisme théorique et improvisation empirique—Entretien de Béatrice Hibou et Boris
Samuel avec Kako Nubukpo,” Politique Africaine, no. 124 (Décembre 2011): 89. In the original
French: “Peu d’économistes africains ont un positionnement théorique bien défini. Nous
sommes avant tout dans le registre du bricolage, de l’opportunisme ou, si l’on veut être plus
gentil, du pragmatisme! Il y a deux sortes de bricolage. Les uns ne sont pas gênés par les
incohérences, pourvu que leurs positions de pouvoir soient assurées. … Les autres n’ont pas de
positionnement théorique clair: on est dans des situations caractérisées par l’absence de
discussion des paradigmes macroéconomiques et par l’improvisation face aux défis sociaux.”
93. Kako Nubukpo, L’improvisation économique en Afrique de l’Ouest: Du coton au franc CFA
(Paris: Karthala, 2011). “L’improvisation économique est la réponse contextuellement
rationnelle des pouvoirs publics africains à des événements perçus comme aléatoires. L’absence
de maîtrise des instruments de souveraineté économique (la monnaie, le budget) se traduit
concrètement par une obligation de réagir au lieu d’agir.”
 94. Ton Matton and Christopher Dell, Improvisations on Urbanity: Trendy Pragmatism in a Climate
of Change (Rotterdam: Post Editions, 2010), n.p.
95. James M. Kendra and Tricia Wachtendorf, “Improvisation, Creativity, and the Art of Emergency
Management,” in Understanding and Responding to Terrorism, ed. Huseyin Durmaz, Bilal
Sevinc, Ahmet Sait Yayla and Siddik Ekici (Amsterdam: IOS Press, 2007), 324.
96. Kendra and Wachtendorf, “Improvisation, Creativity, and the Art of Emergency Management,”
324–325.
97. Kendra and Wachtendorf, “Improvisation, Creativity, and the Art of Emergency Management,”
324. Also see David Mendonça, Gary Webb, Carter Butts, and James Brooks, “Cognitive
Correlates of Improvised Behaviour in Disaster Response: the Cases of the Murrah Building and
the World Trade Center,” Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management 22, no. 4
(December 2014). The impromptu/extempore dynamic in improvisation pursued by Lydia
Goehr in this Handbook provides a certain corroboration from a philosophical perspective.
98. For instance, see Handbook contributions by Christopher Dell and Ton Matton, Eric Porter, and
David P. Brown.
99. Zong Woo Geem, Joong Hoon Kim, and G. V. Loganathan, “A New Heuristic Optimization
Algorithm: Harmony Search,” Simulation 76, no. 2 (February 2001): 62. The Handbook essay
by Clyde Reed and Jared Burrows deploys an economics theory based on path dependence to
investigate the dynamics of musical choice.
100. See Marvin Minsky, “Music, Mind, and Meaning,” in Machine Models of Music, edited by
Stephen Schwanauer and David Levitt, 327–354 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1981). Recent
accounts of work with musical computers that explore its improvisative character include John
Bischoff, Rich Gold, and Jim Horton, “Music for an Interactive Network of Microcomputers,”
Computer Music Journal 2, no. 3 (1978): 24–29; Jim Horton, “Unforeseen Music: The
Autobiographical Notes of Jim Horton,” Leonardo Music Journal Online 9 (1999); George E.
Lewis, “The Secret Love between Interactivity and Improvisation, or Missing in Interaction: A
Prehistory of Computer Interactivity,” in Improvisation V: 14 Beiträge, ed. Walter Fähndrich,
193–203 (Winterthur: Amadeus, 2003); “Living with Creative Machines: An Improvisor
Reflects,” in AfroGEEKS: Beyond the Digital Divide, ed. Anna Everett and Amber J. Walllace,
83–99 (Santa Barbara: Center for Black Studies Research, 2007); Chris Salter, with foreword by
Peter Sellars, Entangled: Technology and the Transformation of Performance (Cambridge: MIT
Press, 2010); Scot Gresham-Lancaster, “The Aesthetics and History of the Hub: The Effects of
Changing Technology on Network Computer Music,” Leonardo Music Journal 8 (1998): 38–44.
101. Michael Pelz-Sherman, “A Framework for the Analysis of Performer Interactions in Western
Improvised Music” (PhD dissertation, University of California, San Diego, 1998); Clément
Canonne, “Focal Points in Collective Free Improvisation,” Perspectives of New Music 51, no. 1
(Winter 2013): 40–55.
102. See Jeff Pressing, “Improvisation: Methods and Models,” in Generative Processes in Music:
The Psychology of Performance, Improvisation, and Composition, ed. John A. Sloboda, 129–
178 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988). Psychologists John Sloboda and Eric Clarke are
particularly significant in this area as well. Important early work includes John A. Sloboda,
“Improvisation,” in The Musical Mind: The Cognitive Psychology of Music (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1985), 138–150. Also see Eric F. Clarke, “Creativity in Performance,” Musicae Scientiae
19, no. 1 (Spring 2005): 157–182; David Dolan, John Sloboda, Henrik Jeldtoft Jensen, Björn
Crüts, and Eugene Feygelson, “The Improvisatory Approach to Classical Music Performance:
An Empirical Investigation into its Characteristics and Impact,” Music Performance Research 6
(2013): 1–38.
103. Improvisation, Community and Social Practice website, http://www.improvcommunity.ca/about.
104. The ICASP website is http://www.improvcommunity.ca. The journal is at
http://www.criticalimprov.com. For some of the work produced under ICASP’s auspices, see
 Tracey Nicholls, An Ethics of Improvisation: Aesthetic Possibilities for a Political Future
(Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2012); Fischlin, Heble, and Lipsitz, The Fierce Urgency of
Now: Improvisation, Rights, and the Ethics of Co-Creation; Rebecca Caines and Ajay Heble,
eds. The Improvisation Studies Reader: Spontaneous Acts (New York: Routledge, 2014); Ajay
Heble and Daniel Fischlin, eds., Rebel Musics: Human Rights, Resistant Sounds, and the
Politics of Music Making (Montréal and New York: Black Rose Books, 2003). Also see Sara
Ramshaw, Justice as Improvisation: The Law of the Extempore (New York: Routledge, 2013).
105. Ramshaw, Justice as Improvisation; Tina S. Piper, “The Improvisational Flavour of Law, the
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106. Ramshaw, Justice as Improvisation, 14. Also see Sara Ramshaw, “Deconstructin(g) Jazz
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Études critiques en improvisation 2, no. 1 (2006):
http://www.criticalimprov.com/article/viewArticle/81/179. Derrida’s remarks on improvisation
appear in a published transcript of a 1982 documentary: Kirby Dick, Amy Ziering Kofman, and
Jacques Derrida, Derrida: Screenplay and Essays on the Film. (Manchester, UK: Manchester
University Press, 2005). In addition, a fascinating colloquy between the philosopher and Ornette
Coleman appears in Timothy S. Murphy, “The Other’s Language: Jacques Derrida Interviews
Ornette Coleman, 23 June 1997,” Genre 37, No. 2 (2004): 319–329. Michael Gallope’s
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theory and improvisation is also explored here in essays by Alexandre Pierrepont, Davide
Sparti, Tracy McMullen, and Fred Moten.
107. Peter Goodwin Heltzel, Resurrection City: A Theology of Improvisation (Grand Rapids, MI and
Cambridge, England: William B. Eerdmans, 2012); Landgraf, Improvisation as Art; Julie
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(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012); Hans-Friedrich Bromann, Gabriele Brandstetter,
and Annemarie Matzke, eds., Improvisieren: Paradoxien des Unvorhersehbaren, Kunst-Medien-
Praxis (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2010).
108. Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013).

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 PART I

COGNITIONS
 CHAPTER 1
COGNITIVE PROCESSES IN MUSICAL
IMPROVISATION

ROGER T. DEAN AND FREYA BAILES

INTRODUCTION
IN this article we discuss the conceptual frameworks in which current
empirical studies of cognition in musical improvisation are being
undertaken. We take as our starting point the significant theoretical and
empirical contributions of the late Jeff Pressing, musician and researcher,
several of which were directed toward opening up this area of investigation.
It is on the theoretical bases of such a model that one can most readily
construct experimentally accessible hypotheses about improvisation. We
make some cross-cultural and cross-medium comparisons, though briefly;
we do not address closely the sociological, philosophical, or educational
bases and uses of improvisation, though we have contributed to these areas
in previous work (Dean 1989, 1992; Smith and Dean 1997; Dean 2003).

MODELS OF IMPROVISATION BASED ON JEFF

PRESSING’S IDEAS
Pressing laid the groundwork for a cognitive understanding of musical
improvisation. In spite of his focus on cognition, his work is characterized
by recognition of the integral and often dominant role of motor function in
the performative act of improvisation. This perspective is a natural
consequence of his considering the chain of neural processing involved in
perceiving and producing sound (e.g., Pressing 1988). These two elements,
of perceiving and producing sound, share a special relationship during any
musical performance, since the musicians receive feedback from their
performance, allowing them to detect errors and correct them by
comparison with the intended output. In improvisation, the concept of error
is somewhat different from that in the realization of compositions, because
any event can potentially be incorporated into an improvisation, and while a
sonic event cannot be withdrawn, it can be subject to retrospective
“erasure,” reinterpretation, or repositioning (Smith and Dean 1997). While
motoric function is normally central to musical improvisation, even in this
idiom it may be somewhat evaded, as in the case of the computer-
interactive improviser. More generally, improvisation in some spheres, such
as dance, involves an intensive reliance on motor function, whereas in
others, such as text generation and performance, this reliance can be more
distant.
In musical improvisation, perceptual feedback also shapes the
improviser’s decisions as to the course that the music will take. Influenced
by “closed-loop” theories of motor learning, Pressing describes the
establishment of “perceptual traces,” which are representations of intended
movements established by practice. These perceptual traces come to form
the basis of comparison between intended and realized performance
(Pressing 1988). With increasing experience, Pressing argues, improvising
musicians refine their perceptual abilities as well as their perceptual traces
and error correction, such that performance is nuanced, flexible, and largely
automatized. For Pressing, improvisational control is heterarchical more
than hierarchical, characterized by redundancy and consequent flexibility,
and by a feeling of “going with flow” more than a “top-down” conscious
monitoring of decisions. The concept of “flow” has been elaborated by
Csíkszentmihályi (1996) and championed in relation to free jazz by
Mazzola (Mazzola and Cherlin 2009). Thus the flow of microstructural
events can generate macrostructure in the resultant musical stream. That is
not to say that there is no role for conscious attention in improvisation.
“Tonal imagery” may also play a part, acting as the perception of internal
images of either reproduced (recalled) or produced (created) material, at the
same time as perception of the actual sensory environment (Pressing 1988).
Pressing clearly did not intend the term “tonal” to refer to degrees of
tonality, but rather used the term to refer to the structure of tone material.
 Improvisation is of special interest for cognitive science since real-time
processes place great demands on available resources. In relation to this
argument, Pressing (1988) writes that “the need of the improviser is for a
good solution, not the best,” since the search for an optimum would be too
time-consuming and resource-intensive. Reviewing physiological and
neurological literature, Pressing concludes that improvisers have the
biological capacity to react to unexpected changes, and hence to one
another’s new ideas, about twice a second. This feature of improvisation is
of course one of the aspects that contributes to its potential for unique
outputs and unique interactions between musicians.
Pressing outlined a model of improvisation with aims to explain how
people improvise, how they learn to improvise, and to explain the genesis
of novel behavior (Pressing 1988). The model is simple in its starting point
as a sequence of non-overlapping sections. Each section comprises musical
events and is called an event cluster. Each new event cluster is generated on
the basis of previous events, long-term memory, current goals, and, where
applicable, a referent. The model allows for variations in cognitive strength
associated with different “objects” (cognitive units or entities such as a
chord or gesture), reflecting attentional loading, which is tantamount to the
object’s importance within the improviser’s internal representation. In
producing a new event cluster, Pressing proposes two types of continuation,
namely “associative” and “interrupt” generation. In associative generation,
continuity is sought between event clusters with objects high in cognitive
strength assuming a continued importance, while interrupt generation
represents a break with previous events.
Objects, which can in some ways be conceptualized as musical content,
are not the most crucial elements of Pressing’s model. Rather, what he
terms “features” and “processes” allow for control of the improvisation.
Features are the common parameters of multiple objects. Processes describe
changes in objects or features over time. Features and processes together
form dynamic patterns, and these are at the core of improvisational
cognition. In the modest development of this theoretical stance to which the
first author contributed (Dean 1989, 1992; Smith and Dean 1997; Dean
2003), the role of ongoing process is emphasized and generalized to the
other arts beside music. The process may be such as to generate the objects
rather than simply acting on them. In addition, the distinction between
process and object readily permits the conception that event-clusters might
be non-overlapping in some situations but overlapping in others,
particularly by means of continuity of a single process, while the features
differ between segments, or by continuity of an object set while the process
differs.
The concept of process readily accommodates the situation in which
improvisers play together: they may each bring different processes to bear
on shared objects, or vice versa, hence generating a diversity of features. A
related issue put forward in our earlier work (Dean 1989, 1992; Smith and
Dean 1997; Dean 2003) is the possibility that within certain limits
improvisers may choose whether or not to adopt what we then described as
a “sensory” stance, that is, one in which they respond to ongoing streams
besides their own. Somewhat as John Cage encouraged us to perceive
environmental sounds outside the control of a performer as part of the
musical process, improviser A may construe the musical stream of co-
improviser B either as mutable, susceptible to influence from A, or vice
versa. And similarly, A may consciously or unconsciously adopt an
exogenous (which is a more appropriate term in the context of cognitive
studies than our previous “sensory”) or endogenous (previously “non-
sensory”) orientation in relation to whether to respond to B’s stream.
Extreme cases of such endogenously oriented interactions occur during
improvisations in which the participants do not hear each other (for
example, sometimes in trans-internet improvisation), or in which one
participant is a computer agent that does not “hear” the input of its
partner(s). The work of the Hub, our co-editor George Lewis, and many
others, including the first author, have exploited such possibilities of
computer-interactive improvisation, and mostly emphasized the capacity of
computer-agents not only to generate autonomously, but also to process and
exploit incoming musical streams from their partners. Large-scale
evolutionary processes in musical generation may also occur with such
computer-agents (c.f. McCormack et al. 2009).
Overall, Pressing’s model, together with an enhanced emphasis on
process as a separable element, and on interaction as an additional
dimension, may be thought of as an Interactive Object/Feature/Process
(IOFP) model. This appropriately brings to mind many of the core concepts
of the cognitive processes in creativity in general, such as those in Finke’s
GENEPLORE model. Here, repeated cycles of generation (of objects in our
terminology), followed by exploration (giving rise to detectable features as
a result of ongoing process), and then by a refinement or selection step, take
place. We have proposed a similar model for the long-term processes of
research-led practice in the creative arts (Smith and Dean 2009). But even
in a short-term improvisation, the aspect of refinement and selectivity can
occur, both when a solo improviser chooses which objects, features, or
processes to continue and which to discontinue, and when a group
improviser selects, among all the available objects, features and processes
present or preceding in the performance. It is the selection step that is
central to biological or social evolution in the large time frame, and to the
iterative cycle of research-led practice we have identified. And while
selectivity in evolutionary biology operates largely on the basis of fitness
(for survival and reproduction), it may operate on any basis in a creative or
socio-cultural system. In the case of socio-cultural systems this brings
attendant ethical risks, since many of the selective bases might not produce
outcomes that are beneficial for all or a majority of people. This is not to
say that creative work is ethically free of risk, but rather that the appropriate
and potentially valuable range of selective approaches is exceedingly broad,
since they are not bound by purely functional considerations.

SOME IMPLICATIONS OF THE IOFP MODEL FOR

COGNITIVE RESEARCH
In this brief section we illustrate the kinds of experimental questions that
can be raised on the basis of the simple model just described. These
illustrations are meant to be suggestive rather than exhaustive. Commonly,
the ideas one can develop prove difficult to investigate directly, because of
the complexity of human cognition and the moderate development of the
research field, as well as the complexity implied by an interactive model.
So it is necessary first to investigate what often seem like the most
simplistic questions. To those outside experimental science these reductive
experiments and their conclusions may seem obvious, predictable, and even
intrinsic, but they nevertheless form a necessary step in the long-term
project to understand the cognition of improvisation. In what follows we
mix examples of the inaccessible and complex with the reductively simple,
again, for our suggestive purposes.
 The possible primacy of the motoric considerations emphasized by
Pressing leads to the suggestion that improvisation is largely unconscious,
since it necessitates the learning of basic structures and movements. Can
one readily distinguish a conscious from an unconscious process
experimentally? Sometimes in cognitive science such a question is
reinterpreted as one that asks: is attention required for the task at hand, or
not? As Pressing argued, it may be necessary to learn to minimize the
attention required for many motor actions (musical or during walking, etc.)
such that the organism has enough attention available for other impinging
perceptual streams. A reciprocal possibility when improvising on an
instrument is that it is the motoric demands that drive the production of the
musical objects, features or processes. The experience of David Sudnow in
learning slowly to improvise at the piano (Sudnow 1978) could be seen
partly in this light, and most improvisers would also recognize the influence
of the physical structure of their instrument, and the process of playing it,
on the range of musical outputs they generate. To take an extreme example,
playing chordally is much more obvious for a pianist than a trombonist, yet
both can ultimately achieve this if they wish, the trombonist through the use
of a variety of techniques for multiphonic generation of sounds.
Returning to attention, a common empirical approach to the question of
how much attention is applied to some particular activity is to enquire
whether the precision and speed with which another task is undertaken is
reduced when it is done at the same time as the specified activity (say,
improvising a flurry of notes). It is probably obvious that this is not an easy
experiment to achieve. For example, if attentional resources are in
abundance in relation to demand, there will be no interaction. And if
attentional resources are modality-specific (for example, hearing calls upon
distinct resources from vision), then again there can be no interference
between cross-modal tasks. Even when it can be demonstrated that
performance on one task is decreased by the simultaneous demands of
another, this is clearly a quite indirect assessment of attentional demands
and even less directly related to the issue of conscious versus unconscious
behaviors. The field of attention is huge and developing (Pashler 1998;
Pashler and Johnston 1998; Knudsen 2007), but there are indications that
musical activity can focus it. For example, Jones and colleagues have
demonstrated that if participants are familiarized with a metrical rhythmic
pattern, they develop an expectation of the sonic event that occurs on the
emphasized beat of the pattern, and at that point in time they also show
greater acuity in detecting certain sonic features of the sound than when the
sound is heard at an unexpected (non-metrical) time (Jones and McAuley
2005; Jones 1992). On the other hand, there is evidence for pre-attentive
processing of auditory timing and intensity changes (e.g., Repp 2005;
Tervaniemi et al. 2006).
Returning to the IOFP model, one might readily envisage that increased
attention would occur at moments of associative or interrupt generation
(i.e., at section boundaries). In our own studies, we have reinterpreted this
idea as suggesting that there should be changed skin conductance at such
points, since skin conductance is a physiological response reflective of
psychological arousal (which is commonly related to increased attention),
and it is a response that is seemingly not open to our conscious control. The
response is part of what is therefore termed the autonomic nervous system,
because of its resistance to conscious control. Unlike many neuroimaging
techniques, such as magnetoencephalography (MEG) and functional
magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), skin conductance can be measured
under fairly normal keyboard performing conditions. This line of discussion
suggests that ultimately such studies of the roles of attention in
improvisation will be meaningful, but there is a very long way to go as yet
to translate the observations of neurophysiology and neuroimaging into
clear-cut interpretations specific to this framework.
When we consider the psychology of interactions between co-
improvisers, clearly the difficulties just discussed are magnified hugely, but
there are also new questions. For example, are there leadership functions
expressed across the “interruptions” when musicians are improvising in an
exogenously oriented manner? Some experimental hypotheses can be made
as the first step toward addressing such a complex issue. For example, if
changes in skin conductance (or some other neurophysiological response)
distinguish interruptions from the surrounding periods in the work of a solo
improviser, then one would expect a distinction in the nature or degree of
these changes between different co-improvisers. Similarly, someone leading
an interruption should show a characteristic skin conductance change
signature in advance of a co-improviser. The co-improviser would show
different responses thereafter according to whether or not he chooses to
cooperate and cohere with the form of the interruption (e.g., takes up a
newly introduced process). Such hypotheses become accessible providing
one has the musicological tools and hypotheses to distinguish the postulated
leaderly interruption from a follower’s behavior and to distinguish
cooperation from a decision to ignore the instigated idea. Such distinctions
can be made by computational analysis of musical and acoustic features,
providing one can distinguish among the musical contributions of different
participants. We mention later some simple experiments in which such
musicological analyses are facilitated in some cases by providing clear-cut
referents for improvisers to use, requiring particular types of interruption:
for example, requiring transition from soft to loud or from sparse to dense
playing. We complement these referents with free improvisations to allow
totally realistic conditions also.

A BRIEF SURVEY OF EMPIRICAL STUDIES ON

COGNITION IN MUSICAL IMPROVISATION
There have been numerous empirical studies of the performance of music,
but there is a relative paucity of such work on improvised music. Moreover,
music psychology is often interested in improvisation primarily as a simple
departure from score-based music rather than as a sophisticated object in
itself. One example can be found in the work of Bengtsson,
Csíkszentmihályi, and Ullén (2007). They hoped to uncover the cortical
regions associated with simple improvisations by pianists. In one condition,
pianists were asked to improvise around a visually displayed melody, while
in a subsequent condition they were asked to reproduce their improvisation.
A third condition encouraged improvisation without the need to memorize.
Improvisation complexity was measured so that it could be aligned with the
isolated brain regions active during the condition. Brain activity was
measured using fMRI, which images blood flow. One finding was an
increase in activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex during
improvisation compared to during recall. This brain region is associated
with a number of cognitive functions, including “top-down” attending to
activity, monitoring working memory (namely the short-term memory
necessary for us to relate current perceptions to immediately preceding
events), response selection, and the suppression of stereotypical response
(Bengtsson, Csíkszentmihályi, and Ullén 2007). All such functions are
potentially important in improvisation, and it is perhaps remarkable that
such a result was found in the context of such a simple improvisation
context. On the other hand, changes in blood flow bear variable
relationships to changes in neural activity (Logothetis 2008) and are in any
case representative of massive regions of the brain, comprising millions of
neurons, commonly coordinated with millions in other regions. Thus the
interpretation of such changes is complex, but their occurrence is
encouraging.
It stands to reason that Pressing’s event clusters and their associative or
interruptive generation can be traced by a musicological-statistical analysis
of improvised music along the lines mentioned above. Pressing himself was
one of the first to attempt a detailed and systematic analysis of the micro-
structure of “free” improvisations (Pressing 1987), contrasting with the
broader, more macro-structural studies of Jost (1974), Dean (1992), and
others. Recording himself performing two short synthesizer improvisations
and simultaneously recording the MIDI output, Pressing conducted various
computational analyses of both traditional musical features (pitch, rhythm,
phrase structure, articulation, dynamics, texture) and what he termed
microstructure (essentially expressive properties of music such as rubato,
chordal spread, legato-ness). One of his findings was that even his free
improvisations seem to comprise organized interval and pitch class
structures. A second finding of interest to music cognition was the apparent
categorical production of performance dynamics, similar to the
phenomenon of categorical perception. In other words, dynamics did not
seem to vary continuously; rather, they clustered around certain key
velocity means, reminiscent of the perceptual bias to perceive dimensions
of sound as discrete categories. It should be noted, though, that when
playing with most synthesizers of the time, the relationship between key
velocity and apparent loudness was not as satisfactory or nuanced as with
an acoustic instrument, which might have accentuated the tendency to
clustering that Pressing observed. One of Pressing’s two improvisations was
suitable as a test of his model of improvisation, and he conducted a
partitioning of the music into event clusters and higher-level event cluster
classes. The segmenting into event clusters was determined on a musical,
motoric, and “cognitive” (i.e., based on recorded comments) basis.
In addition to studying free improvisations by retrospectively identifying
the objects, features, and processes, one can simplify the situation
experimentally by providing referent bases for improvisation. In such
improvisations, the musicians improvise around a particular structural or
thematic idea, and these ideas may be arbitrarily simple (for empirical
studies) or complex. For example, we are studying a series of three section
referent-improvisations by professional improvising pianists, in which the
referents are simple musical “features.” We request an ABA improvisation,
over a few minutes, where A might be soft and B loud, but the performance
is otherwise unconstrained. An alternative might be sparse-dense-sparse. In
an experiment we have a series of improvisation referents, preceded and
concluded by a free improvisation (no referent whatsoever). We record
MIDI data from a Yamaha Disklavier, an acoustic grand piano with MIDI
detection. We record all aspects of the keyboard and pedal performance,
together with acoustic and video data, and skin conductance of the
performer. After the participants have recorded their improvisations, we ask
them to listen back to some of the recordings, and to give a continuous
response via a computer interface about their perception of musical
“change” (which we leave them to define, and take as an index of their
perception of musical structure) and their perception of the expressed
arousal and valence (positivity to negativity) of the music. We have
conducted extensive studies of such continuous response measures of
change and affect during listening tasks undertaken by both non-musicians
and musicians (Bailes and Dean 2009, in press; Dean, Bailes, and Schubert
2011).
With this approach, we can use computational analyses informed by the
referent instruction to detect whether segmentation (into ABA) is achieved
as judged by the musical note stream. Having determined segmentation
points, we can also assess whether skin conductance changes were related
to this segmentation, thus testing a core implication of the IOFP model. We
have developed a range of computational analyses to do with key velocity
(relating to loudness produced), pitch and pitch range, tonality versus
atonality, rhythmic pulse, and event density. Many of these are based on
algorithms developed in the literature previously for use with the
performance of composed tonal music. In dealing with the free
improvisations we recorded, we apply a multiplicity of these computational
analyses, and we are developing a range of approaches that take into
account the multivariate nature of our data streams: that is, the performance
may use several simultaneous processes acting on several objects to
generate the features of any particular part of the improvisation. A
combination of quite simple analytical algorithms is surprisingly successful
in segmenting even the free improvisations we recorded.
Each of the component processes, objects, and features is potentially a
continuously variable stream throughout the performance, from an
analytical-computational point of view. We use detailed techniques of Time
Series Analysis, a statistical approach that takes account of the
“autocorrelation” between successive events in these streams: that is, the
fact that if one note is sounded in a high register, the next is more likely to
be adjacent than distant; or if a note is sounded loudly, the next is also
likely to be loud rather than soft. This feature of autocorrelation is very
strong in all the music and perceptual responses we have studied, and if it is
not considered, statistical analyses and conclusions can be insecure (Dyson
and Quinlan 2010). This quite elaborate data gathering approach has
generated a few simple conclusions, generally in support of the hypotheses
we generated from the IOFP model. For example, improvisers are entirely
capable of generating the “interruptions” requested by our referents, and
this is readily revealed by our computational analyses of their outputs. More
interesting, it does seem that at points of interruption, there generally are
changes in skin conductance, and that segments defined by the interruption
points are commonly distinct in their skin conductance characteristics.
In the retrospective perception studies, we find that the improvisers
identify change in such a way that it coheres with both the referent and the
computational analysis. We have yet to complete studies on the perception
of affect. We hypothesize that acoustic intensity profiles will be strong
predictors of perceived arousal, as we have shown in some depth with
composed and improvised electroacoustic and composed piano music
previously. Our FEELA hypothesis (see Dean and Bailes 2010), which
suggests a Force-Effort-Energy-Loudness-Affect chain, may thus link an
improviser with listeners and with other improvisers. This role for energy
and loudness, corresponding to the physical property of acoustic intensity
and its perceptual counterpart loudness, would be consistent with the
suggestions of categorical velocity generation made by Pressing. The role
would also cohere with our other observations that statistical patterns of
intensity in electroacoustic music (both composed and improvised, see
Dean and Bailes 2010) and in a wide range of improvised music (Dean and
Bailes 2010) share recurrent patterns of intensity in which crescendi are
shorter and show faster dynamic change than diminuendi. This can readily
be interpreted as a device, perhaps originating from statistical learning of
environmental sounds, by which musicians are able to modulate attention
on the part of the listener and sometimes of their fellow performers. In
agreement with these suggestions that intensity and timing/rhythm are of
particular importance in the perception of improvisation, Keller, Weber, and
Engel (2011) indeed report that a majority of participants in a study in
which the task was to listen to performances and try to distinguish which
were improvised and which were imitated indicated that they used
information about timing/rhythm (16/22 listeners) and intensity (12/22).
These parameters also correlated with activity in the left amygdala, an area
of the brain with which many functions, including fear and aversion, have
been associated. It is difficult to interpret this functionally, but the existence
of anatomic specificity in the response supports the idea that it is
distinctive.
In ongoing work we will also be assessing the capacity of the various
object, feature, and process streams, discussed earlier, to predict the affect
that listeners of the music perceive, based on our computational analysis of
the performances. In other work (Gingras et al., unpublished), we have
indeed found that expressive performance features (in a baroque
harpsichord fantasia by Louis Couperin), such as event timing, can be
predicted by the information and entropy flow of the composition, using the
Information Dynamics of Music (IDyoM) model of Pearce and Wiggins in
collaboration with them. In the near future our improvisation studies will
assess whether there are separable contributions of the
object/feature/process streams that relate to pitch, timbre, rhythm, and the
acoustic intensity profile. From a computational perspective, a feature, as
characterized by Pressing, would be an amalgam of several objects that first
occur together apposed in time.
These studies of solo improvisers are currently being extended to apply
to pairs of keyboard improvisers playing together. Again we record the
same complex set of data for each performer as described above, except that
they play digital instruments. In this development, we also ask the
musicians to alternate in adopting the role of leader in some of the
improvised pieces, preceding and succeeding them by improvisations in
which the concept of leadership is not mentioned (and not forewarning
them that the issue will be raised, since this produces psychological
“demand” that may alter their performance).
During the retrospective listening task, after the improvisers have
performed, we request some perceptual responses about the music (as
above), but also, separately, we ask for an identification of “musical
leadership” on a continuous scale and continuously across the pieces. Thus,
each player hears the performance back with one player in each headphone
ear, is not reminded who is who, and judges which “side” of the audio is
musically leading. Again, we do not provide guidance as to what constitutes
leadership, leaving that for our musicians to consider in their own terms.
Our analyses of this data are in the early stages, but it does seem that
interruption is achieved well, and leadership is recognized, both in
perceptual retrospection and in skin conductance. There are complex
statistical interactions between the various data strands, such that some
features of one improviser may be quite predictive of those of another,
supporting the idea of there being interactions such as would be expected
from a leader-follower relationship, or for that matter, from competitive
interactions. We hope to gain much more understanding of these data during
the completion of our analyses.

COMPARATIVE AND CROSS-CULTURAL ISSUES IN

STUDIES OF COGNITION OF IMPROVISATION
Of interest is to ask whether the IOFP model is useful in describing the
structure of compositions that have not been improvised. Lehmann and
Kopiez (2010) asked whether musical experts could discern when a piece
had been improvised rather than composed in a listening experiment. The
task was found to be hard, and the authors surmised that the cues listeners
used to identify an improvisation had little to do with structure and more to
do with its performative character. Studies by Engel and Keller mentioned
earlier were consistent with this view, revealing the importance of
“instability” in timing and intensity patterns and the possible role of the
amygdala. This could have important implications for our understanding of
the cognitive processes involved in improvisation. Indeed, Engel and Keller
showed that musically experienced listeners had greater facility in making
the distinction between improvised and imitated performances, and
suggested that this ability “depends upon whether an individual’s action-
related experience and perspective taking skills enable faithful internal
simulation of the given behaviour.” Keller, Weber, and Engel (2011)
pursued their study of instability in improvised music by comparing the
entropy of keystroke variables in improvisations with imitations of those
improvisations. They interpret their finding of greater entropy in keystroke
intensity in improvisations as indicative of irregularities in motor control
associated with greater uncertainty than occur during the certainty of an
imitated performance. While these differences might say more about the
impact of rehearsal on performance mannerisms than the relative
spontaneity associated with improvisation versus imitation, the approach
holds promise for its potential application to compare the entropy
associated with different styles of improvisation. For example, it seems
likely that the entropy of performance variables would be greater in a free
improvisation than in a referent-based improvisation. Keller et al. (2011)
measure the entropy of the distribution of keystrokes across an entire piece.
A potentially fruitful alternative would be to measure the short-term
information content of an unfolding improvisation to explore the time
course of uncertainty in both solo and ensemble improvisations, as we have
already been doing with the Couperin Fantasia, which is closely related to a
long-standing tradition of pre-classical improvisation.
Improvisation can occur in highly defined musical conventions, such as
in the performance of baroque music and in the cadenzas of classical
concertos, where the song structure is often fixed and recurrent, although it
occurs most dominantly in idioms such as jazz and rock. Berkowitz (2010),
focusing on classical music, defines improvisation as “spontaneous
creativity within constraints” and provides neuroimaging data related to
models of improvisation in the classical music context. One can quibble
with the somewhat romantic word spontaneous given the many hours of
training and practice required to achieve proficiency in the required
function in classical music as in jazz (Sudnow 1978) or free improvisation.
But for the purpose of contrast, composition could be construed in the same
terms but as lacking in spontaneity. The cognitive demands placed on
improvisers and composers are likely to differ substantially. Recognizing
that improvisers both create and perform, Eisenberg and Thompson (2011)
examined the effects of competition on their creative production. They
found that improvisations were judged to be more creative when
improvisers had been told that musical experts would be looking for the
“best improvisers.” The link is intriguing, and invites future research into
the contextual factors that shape spontaneous creativity.
Jazz has been the focus of empirical study in other work designed to
examine the neural activity associated with musical improvisation (Limb
and Braun 2008). An fMRI approach was again taken in which professional
jazz pianists were required to play on specially adapted keyboards while
lying with their head in the MRI scanner. Comparing regions of the brain
that were activated during improvisation with those activated during the
performance of overlearned material revealed that the improvisations
activated brain regions associated with internally generated, stimulus-
independent processes, with concomitant deactivation of regions associated
with conscious self-regulation. Limb and Braun suggest that “rather than
operating in accordance with conscious strategies and expectations, musical
improvisation may be associated with behaviors that conform to rules
implemented … outside of conscious awareness” (2008, 4). We have
already noted the complexity and difficulty of such a claim; yet it is
stimulating and worthy of intensive follow-up.
Others have studied jazz as an essentially social process. For example,
Bastien and Hostager (1988) analyzed the performance of a jazz ensemble
that had not previously improvised together through the observation of
video footage. Focusing on inter-musician communication, they describe
the observed importance of shared information and attention. For them,
ensemble improvisation is inherently turbulent, and this “produces
uncertainty for performers insofar as each musician cannot fully predict the
behavior of the other musicians or, for that matter, the behavior of the
collectivity” (Bastien and Hostager 1988, 586). Uncertainty requires a
focused attention, and this is particularly high at moments of structural
change. The authors found that the attention of the musicians was high
around moments of potential change in the solo, with dips in between. This
attentional focus is consistent with the overarching IOFP model of
improvisation outlined above, whereby the structure comprises event
clusters that transition by means of either associative or interrupt
generation. A further cognitive level is that of the establishment of a shared
history of improvisation between the players, during the course of the
performance (or more broadly, an improvisation session or stream of
sessions). This serves to reduce uncertainty with respect to the behavior of
the other musicians and, perhaps, to focus attention efficiently. Bastien and
Hostager (1988) argue that the greater the “center of shared information”
between musicians, the greater the affordance for increased musical
complexity. But many improvisers thrive on the opportunity to play with
new musicians, and quite possibly exploit such situations equally toward
the generation of complexity and of IOFP components that for them are
novel and hardly experienced previously. R. Keith Sawyer has provided
frameworks of social psychology for consideration of group interactions,
notably in improvisation in both theater and music (Sawyer 2003).
Correspondingly, improvisation is the foundation of many approaches to
music therapy (e.g., Nordhoff Robbins), and this may be construed in light
of its capacity to encourage both coherent interaction and personalized
novelty of expression. The communication and regulation of emotions are
important goals, and it is perhaps these goals that prompted Luck et al.
(2008) to investigate listener perceptions of the emotion expressed in music
therapy improvisations, relating these to their musical content. This musical
content tends to be stylistically “free,” which is typically less easily
described in traditional analytic terms. Luck et al. (2008) summarize the
problem as follows: “there is a need to be able to capture the most essential
musical features—whatever they are—and connect them to the
psychological meanings, especially those relating to emotional content, that
they represent. In other words, there is a need to be able to define and
extract the clinically relevant combinations of musical features that are
‘hiding’ within the improvisation” (Luck et al. 2008, 27). The authors were
interested in studying the perception of music for which listeners have
minimal associations, arguing that this is the case for free improvisation
(see our comparable motivation for exploring perceptions of unfamiliar
electroacoustic music in Bailes and Dean [2009]), though acknowledging
that stylistic associations could always exist for any given listener. A
therapist and client jointly improvised at keyboards, with separate MIDI
tracks being recorded for each. As in our work, listeners (but in this case
not the improvisers themselves) rated continuously their perceptions of the
emotion they felt was being expressed by the improvisations. A relationship
was found between the mean velocity of the key strikes of the music and
listener ratings of the activity (arousal) of the music. This is consistent with
other reports of a robust relationship between sound intensity and
perceptions of loudness with heightened perceptions of arousal (Dean,
Bailes, and Schubert 2011), including in improvisation (Dean and Bailes
2010).
We have suggested that in the social context of improvisation, acoustic
intensity may be a cross-culturally shared expressive resource (Dean and
Bailes 2010), which is consistent with the work of Balkwill and Thompson
(1999). In particular, intensity is a powerful predictor of judgments of affect
even in cross-cultural studies of Hindustani and Japanese listeners, who
come from very different musical cultures. Thus, an improviser might be
involved in a real-time collaboration with someone from another culture
(say an African-American from the jazz tradition with an Indian classical
musician) and yet be able to interact successfully in improvisation. Control
of dynamic intensity as a means of projecting an affective profile could be
very important here.
Rhythmic structures differ considerably between, say, Western classical
music and jazz (mostly symmetric meters), Indian music (quite commonly
involving asymmetric meters), and Balkan dance music, with its
characteristic aksak (“limping”) asymmetric rhythms (such as 3+3+2+3).
Yet as can be extrapolated from the discussions by fellow improvising
pianists Vijay Iyer on microrhythms (Iyer 2002) and Pressing on “Black
Atlantic” rhythm (Pressing 2002), what is shared by improvisers from these
different musical and cultural environments is an ability to adapt instantly
(or in about half a second) to a rhythmic event and a perception of the
relative accentuation of particular events. Accentuation is a combination of
acoustic intensity with many features of articulation and timbre (as
discussed by Pressing). Thus again, intensity is among the features that may
assist musical cross-cultural improvisation, and also perhaps verbal cross-
cultural or conflicted discussion through prosody. This may have practical
applications in post-dialogic community discussions contributing to social
policy development. We have developed this argument in more depth
elsewhere (Dean and Bailes 2010).
A cross-cultural study of improvisation was reported by Matare (2009),
who was interested in the practice as a manifestation of creativity or
musical intelligence among twelve European and twelve African musicians.
Musicians from each background were recorded improvising and asked to
listen back and provide a commentary on problems, decisions, points of
interest, and directions taken. On the whole, the commentaries of the
European musicians were focused on aspects of the music itself, such as
characteristics of the structure or details of the sound produced, while the
African musicians made no explicit mention of music.
There are higher-level issues that relate to cross-cultural cognition in
improvisation, such as those adumbrated by George E. Lewis in his contrast
between Afro-logic and Euro-logic in improvisation (Lewis 1996). One
aspect of his interesting dissection is the idea of “telling a story” as central
to Afro-logic improvisation, in contrast to more of a structural/process
approach in Euro-logic. This is not to do justice to these ideas (see also
discussion in Smith and Dean 1997 and Dean and Bailes 2010), but rather
to indicate that both narrative and structural approaches can be readily
envisaged as outcomes an IOFP model: both are formed at the interaction of
feature and process, and where microstructure meets macrostructure.

OUTLOOK
Cognitive studies of musical improvisation are still at a very early stage of
development, but they show great potential. Besides giving insight into
improvisational processes, might such studies eventually contribute to
them? We would argue they have strong potential to do so. As discussed by
Wiggins and colleagues with reference to classical music, a computational
approach to the generation of music can use models of cognition as part of
the generative mechanism. This may occur by using a statistical corpus of
information, as in information content approaches to the prediction of
segmentation timing and emphasis in composition and performance
(Wiggins, Pearce, and Müllensiefen 2009). More interesting, another
computational approach could be to use an ongoing computer analysis of an
incoming musical stream in conjunction with a cognitive model of whatever
degree of elaboration is available. As mentioned, real-time analysis of input
is intrinsic to many computer-interactive improvisation systems that have
been developed since the early efforts of the Hub, George Lewis (Voyager;
Lewis 2000), and Richard Teitelbaum, and large-scale cognitive
architecture models (such as ACT-R; Anderson et al. 2004) are also under
long-term development. A combination of such real-time analysis,
particular generative models, and a cognitive architecture model may
suffice to help take computer interactive sound improvisation to another
level (see also discussion in Dean 2003; Dean and Bailes 2010). For
example, computational “conceptual blending” is an idea of current
importance in improvisation with text (see chapters in this handbook by
Smith, and by Harrell), and it involves exploiting “domains” of knowledge
or of arbitrary codification so as to perform crossovers between them with a
flexibility and variability of outcome that is shared by genetic crossovers in
organismal evolution. This approach can be applied much more freely with
the relatively non-referential components of music than with highly
referential words and verbal concepts. Not surprisingly, it has a long
tradition of related antecedents in the improvisation systems just mentioned
and in commercial software such as the classic program M from the first
days of desktop computers in the 1980s. The potential of such approaches
(discussed in Dean 2009) has probably only been glimpsed.

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 CHAPTER 2
THE COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE OF
IMPROVISATION

AARON L. BERKOWITZ

THE relationship between music and the mind has fascinated some of
Western history’s greatest thinkers, including Pythagoras, Galileo, and
Descartes.1 Broadly defined, the field referred to as “music cognition” or
“the psychology of music” seeks to answer two complementary questions:

1. How does the brain carry out musical processes?

2. What can the study of music tell us about how the brain works?

The first question examines which cognitive processes—and their neural

substrates—allow for the perception, understanding, and production of
music. For example, research addressing this first question has sought to
understand how we recognize, remember, read, understand, compose,
perform, and have an emotional response to music, and what regions of the
brain may be responsible for these features of music cognition.2
The second question treats music as a specialized substrate through
which to study more general cognitive processes. For example, studying the
ability to know how a piece of music sounds by looking at the score allows
for the exploration of mental imagery, as well as transformations between
one sensory modality and another.3 High-level musical performance is a
case study in expertise.4 Investigating musical learning and memory can
provide insights into these higher-order cognitive processes and their neural
substrates outside the verbal or visual domains.5 If areas of the brain are
discovered to be involved in musical processes in addition to previously
ascribed roles, such findings can provide insights into the more general
functionality of these brain regions.
Most early research in music cognition explored music perception, but
more recent work has also begun to explore the psychology and
neurobiology of musical performance.6 From a cognitive perspective,
musical performance requires extraordinary motor dexterity, control, and
coordination; the ability to link the motor system with the auditory system;
and, in the case of performance traditions that use written scores, the
transformation of visual input into motor output. Improvised performance
additionally requires the capacity to generate spontaneously novel musical
structures in real time. This chapter explores the two complementary
questions presented at the beginning of the chapter with respect to
improvisation: What can studying the brain tell us about improvisation?
What can studying improvisation tell us about the brain?
Exploring the neural basis of musical improvisation can aid in
understanding the more general cognitive processes called upon in this
specialized instance of auditory-motor expertise and creativity. This inquiry
has the potential to provide insights into both practice and pedagogy. In
turn, discovering which areas of the brain are involved in musical
improvisation may influence how the function(s) of these regions are
understood.
Improvisation can be defined most generally as “the creation of a musical
work, or the final form of a musical work, as it is being performed.”7
Spontaneous creation in the moment is of course not unique to music.
Improvisation occurs in theater, dance, and to some degree in any artistic
expression that evolves in real time. Improvisation is also part of our
everyday speech and movement. Just as infinite possibilities exist in how
the blues or a Beethoven cadenza can be improvised while still maintaining
its stylistic and formal identity, so too can we create infinite possible
sentences, all the while using a finite vocabulary and obeying the finite
grammatical rules that together allow for the comprehensibility of a novel
utterance. Our everyday actions also incorporate some degree of
improvisation, as we dexterously enact spontaneously created motor
solutions to challenges as mundane as balancing grocery bags while we
unlock the front door and as important as life-saving, split-second
maneuvers to avoid accidents while driving.8 Therefore, while musical
improvisation is a fascinating feat of human cognition worthy of study in its
own right, it also provides a specific instance of a much more general
phenomenon in human behavior: spontaneous rule-based combinations of
elements to create novel sequences that are appropriate for a given moment
in a given context. This chapter presents data from recent brain imaging
studies that explore the neural basis of improvisation. It then discusses
findings of these studies from the perspective of the questions: What can
studying the brain tell us about improvisation? What can studying
improvisation tell us about the brain?

THE NEURAL BASIS OF IMPROVISATION

To date there have been five published studies of the neuroscience of
improvisation.9 This review focuses on the studies of Berkowitz and Ansari
(2008 and 2010) and Limb and Braun (2008), since their work is
complementary both at the methodological level and with respect to results,
and because both studies use functional magnetic resonance imaging
(fMRI) to assess brain activity during improvisation.
fMRI uses a magnetic field to detect changes in blood oxygenation in the
brain as an index of the relative activity of different brain regions when the
brain is engaged in a cognitive process. Because many areas of the brain are
highly active even at rest, fMRI studies often employ a subtraction
technique in an attempt to precisely localize activation during a cognitive
task of interest by comparing this with a control condition. When using a
subtraction technique, brain activity during a control task is “subtracted”
from brain activity during the cognitive task of interest. For example, if
neural activity were to be examined while someone listens to music, many
areas involved in more general cognitive processes would be involved (e.g.,
basic auditory perception, attention). While these regions are surely
involved in music perception, their role would not necessarily be specific to
music perception. Comparing brain activity while listening to music with
that during a control task, such as listening to a less complex auditory
stimulus (e.g., pure tones or white noise), allows for the subtraction of the
activity stimulated by these more basic processes. This subtraction would
thus demonstrate the areas involved in music perception above and beyond
basic cognitive functions such as auditory perception and general attention
to an external stimulus.10
Berkowitz and Ansari (2008)
To study improvisation with fMRI, we designed a simple experimental set-
up that consisted of four tasks allowing for varying degrees of
improvisatory freedom.11 These tasks were performed on a five-key piano-
like keyboard. In the most constrained task, subjects played simple patterns
that were taught to them before the experiment, and they performed these
patterns in the order of their choosing, with one note per beat with a
metronome click. This experimental condition will be referred to here as
Patterns/Metronome. The only freedom of choice provided during this
condition was that of which pattern to play at any given time; the internal
melodic and rhythmic structure of each pattern was fixed. Two conditions
provided freedom in one musical parameter only (melody or rhythm): in
Melodic Improvisation/Metronome, subjects invented five-note melodies,
but these melodies were rhythmically constrained by the metronome (one
note per beat); in Patterns/Rhythmic Improvisation, subjects were free to
improvise the rhythms of the pre-learned five-note patterns. In the final
condition, Melodic Improvisation/Rhythmic Improvisation, subjects
improvised five-note melodies and their rhythms. Comparing brain activity
in Melodic Improvisation tasks with that during Patterns tasks allowed for
the isolation of the neural correlates of melodic improvisation, whereas
comparison of Rhythmic Improvisation tasks with the Metronome tasks
demonstrated the regions of brain involved in rhythmic improvisation.
Melodic improvisation requires creativity in the pitch domain (or, from a
motor perspective, in the spatial domain), whereas rhythmic improvisation
can be thought of as the generation of novel musical structures in the
temporal realm. Melodic and rhythmic generativity would be expected to
have distinct but overlapping neural networks underlying them.12 Areas of
nonoverlap between melodic and rhythmic improvisation would
presumably be taking part in processes unique to spatial/melodic and
temporal/rhythmic generativity, respectively. We were particularly
interested in the areas subserving both melodic improvisation and rhythmic
improvisation. The areas of overlap between these two types of
improvisation would ostensibly be the brain regions giving rise to musical
generativity at the most fundamental (or, alternatively, the “supra-domain”)
level, irrespective of whether the improvisation involves pitch/space or
rhythm/time. We thus performed a conjunction analysis of melodic
improvisation (brain activity in Melodic Improvisation tasks minus brain
activity in Patterns tasks) and rhythmic improvisation (brain activity in
Rhythmic Improvisation tasks minus brain activity in Metronome tasks) in
order to identify the network of brain regions involved in improvisation,
whether that improvisation is in the melodic or rhythmic domain.
This conjunction analysis revealed three areas of the brain that
participated in both melodic and rhythmic improvisation: the dorsal
premotor cortex (dPMC), the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), and the
inferior frontal gyrus/ventral premotor cortex (IFG/vPMC).
The dPMC is involved in the selection and execution of movement
sequences.13 It would thus be expected to be involved in any task involving
motor activity. Our results show that this area is more active in
improvisation as opposed to playing patterns and/or playing with a
metronome, consistent with a possible increased demand on this brain
region as movement complexity increases.
The ACC is known to play a role in a wide variety of cognitive tasks,
including monitoring conflict between stimuli or responses, unrehearsed
movements, decision making, voluntary selection, and willed action.14
These cognitive functions are of course intertwined. Making a decision
involves voluntary, willed choice between potentially conflicting responses
to a stimulus. Improvisation involves near-constant decision making among
a multitude of musical possibilities available to the improviser at any given
moment. A brain-imaging study of performance of a memorized
composition by Bach compared to playing scales did not show differential
activation of this region,15 thus suggesting that the ACC plays a role in our
experiment in improvisation specifically (i.e., beyond a role in mere
musical or motor complexity, since in that role it would likely have been
active in the Bach versus scales comparison of the cited study).
The IFG/vPMC has been found to play a role in language perception and
production as well as music perception.16 The aforementioned study of
piano performance of a memorized composition did not show activation of
this area in that context, suggesting that its role in our experiment is unique
to the improvisatory/generative nature of our experimental tasks. Given that
this region is involved in both perception and production of language and
music, it can be postulated that, on the most general level, it subserves
“analysis, recognition, and prediction of sequential auditory information”17
as well as the production of such sequential auditory-motor information.

Limb and Braun (2008)

Our experiment sought to isolate and study one particular aspect of
improvisation: spontaneous generation of novel sequences. Charles Limb
and Allen Braun designed more ecologically valid tasks in their 2008 study
to explore a broader array of neural activity in improvisation. In the main
experimental condition, jazz musicians improvised over the chord structure
of a jazz composition. Brain activity during this task was compared to that
in a control condition in which subjects played a fixed composition from
memory.
Since their tasks were far more complex than those of Berkowitz and
Ansari and allowed their subjects to improvise based on an actual
compositional structure that evolved in time, Limb and Braun elicited
changes in brain activity in over forty regions when comparing their
improvisation tasks to control tasks, including the network of IFG/vPMC,
ACC, and dPMC described in Berkowitz and Ansari (2008). Additional
areas included the superior temporal lobe (likely to be involved in
processing and memory for musical materials), limbic regions (probably
involved in emotion and memory), the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC)
(activation is associated with self-expression and higher-level goals and
intentions), and the lateral orbital prefrontal cortex (LOFC) and dorsolateral
prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) (deactivation is suggestive of inhibition of
regions involved in monitoring and correction). With regard to these latter
findings in the prefrontal cortex, the authors suggest that
Musical creativity vis-à-vis improvisation may be a result of the combination of intentional,
internally generated self-expression (MPFC-mediated) with the suspension of self-monitoring
and related processes (LOFC—and DLPFC-mediated) that typically regulate conscious control
of goal-directed, predictable, or planned actions.18

In conjunction, the studies of Berkowitz and Ansari and Limb and Braun
complement one another. The precise focus of Berkowitz and Ansari on a
limited type of improvisation with a very small set of possibilities allowed
for relatively specific attribution of functional roles to the brain areas that
were active but probably did not activate the full range of regions of the
brain involved in real-world improvisation. By studying improvisation in as
close to its real-world form as possible in the laboratory, Limb and Braun
offer a more panoramic view of the full panoply of neural activity involved
in improvising.

Berkowitz and Ansari (2010)

In a follow-up study to Berkowitz and Ansari (2008), the brain activity in
musicians and nonmusicians was compared during the performance of the
four improvisation tasks described earlier.19 The behavioral results were
essentially equivalent between the two groups in that the degree of novelty
of the improvised melodies did not differ between them. Comparison of the
three areas described earlier (IFG/vPMC, ACC, and dPMC) showed no
difference in activation between the two groups. The neural substrates of
the generation, selection, and execution of musical sequences therefore
appear to be fundamental to the process of spontaneous motor performance,
whether the intention behind it is that of a trained musician or not. The
pattern of neural activation did, however, reveal one difference outside of
this network. The single difference in brain activity between the two groups
was in an area known as the right temporoparietal junction (rTPJ), which
plays a role in attention. While nonmusicians did not show any significant
change in the activity in this area when melodic improvisation was
compared to pattern performance, musicians showed deactivation of this
region. The difference between a musical mind approaching improvisation
and an untrained mind performing the same task therefore appears to be not
one of generativity, selection, or execution, but rather one of attention.
Activation of the rTPJ region is associated with stimulus-driven or
bottom-up attention (i.e., the type of attention stimulated by salient
characteristics of the stimulus itself).20 Deactivation of the rTPJ occurs in
contexts of goal-driven, or top-down attention (i.e., the type of attention
driven by intention based on one’s pre-existing knowledge, experience, and
memory about a particular stimulus). Specifically, the rTPJ is involved in
the reorienting of attention to task-relevant but unexpected stimuli. Imagine
the example of an archer aiming an arrow at a target. The target, the tension
in the bow, and the wind are all relevant to whether the archer will succeed
in hitting the target. However, the archer would ideally want to “tune out”
any task-irrelevant stimuli that could be distracting—for example, a bird
chirping or the shifting shadows of a tree branch blowing in the wind in the
archer’s peripheral vision. This “tuning out” of stimuli that could cause an
inappropriate reorientation of attention away from one’s intended focus is
thought to be accomplished in part by deactivating the rTPJ. That is, during
sustained attention, the rTPJ is deactivated to allow for focus on one task
while filtering out potentially disruptive stimuli to which reorientation
would prove disruptive to the goal behavior.
Musicians’ deactivation of the rTPJ when improvising as compared to
nonmusicians performing the same tasks suggests that musical training may
allow for an increase in goal-directed attention and the filtering out of task-
irrelevant stimuli in this context. Such an effect can also be interpreted as an
increase in top-down processing of improvisational output as musicians
may have chunked their phrases as musical units rather than strings of
individual notes in sequence; the latter may have been the cognitive strategy
utilized by nonmusicians.21

WHAT CAN STUDYING THE BRAIN TELL US ABOUT

IMPROVISATION?

Underlying Processes: Loci for Practice and Pedagogy

The fundamental cognitive processes supporting improvisation appear to be
the generation and recombination of musical sequences (IFG/vPMC), the
selection among such sequences (ACC), and the execution of the chosen
sequence (dPMC). In addition, when trained musicians improvise, they
appear to enter a top-down state of goal-directed attentional control
(deactivation of rTPJ) when compared to nonmusicians performing the
same tasks. Broken down into its cognitive components, this portrait of the
improvising brain provides insights into loci for improvisational practice
and pedagogy.22
In order to generate musical sequences appropriate for a given musical
context, the improviser must be well versed in a stylistic idiom. For jazz
musicians, this entails the knowledge of chords, scales/modes, forms, and a
large vocabulary of “riffs,” some self-composed, others absorbed through
transcription and imitation of solos by the great masters.23 For Indian
musicians, a long germination period in which fixed compositions and
melodic and rhythmic patterns are learned in various ragas (modes) and
talas (rhythmic cycles) precedes the stage at which the musician can
improvise.24 Robert Levin, a classical pianist who has learned to improvise
in the styles of many classical composers, first internalized the composed
repertoire of those composers.25 It is this learned material that provides the
primordial musical soup from which materials are recombined and selected
in the moment of improvised performance.
With this knowledge base in place, the improviser must learn how to
navigate it to draw on stylistically idiomatic and artistically coherent
sequences of musical materials in the moment of musical improvisation.26
Such selection is governed by “history” on a number of levels: the history
of the style in which the performer is improvising, the history of all of the
improvisational choices by the performer up to that performance, and the
more local history of the musical choices up to that moment in the
performance. The education of an improviser therefore involves not only
the internalization of fundamental musical elements and forms, but also the
acquisition of the ability to appropriately select from them in real time in a
stylistically idiomatic way. To learn to improvise therefore involves
rehearsal of the act of improvisation itself. In this rehearsal process, the
improviser-in-training acquires experiential knowledge about how to
navigate through the knowledge base and develops a personal style for
doing so.
These aspects of learning to improvise ostensibly train the network of
IFG/vPMC-ACC-dPMC in the actions of sequence generation,
recombination, selection, and execution. In a review of the pedagogy of
improvisation in a wide variety of musical traditions across different
cultures, I have described how these principles are incorporated seemingly
universally in improvisational pedagogy and learning.27 Beyond these
principles, improvisers across cultures describe a particular state of mind
when improvising in which creation and a partially detached observation of
what is being created are carefully balanced, referred to as being both
“creator and witness” by Levin and “inventor and recipient” by Paul
Berliner in his study of jazz musicians.28 These ideas seem to resonate with
Limb and Braun’s interpretation of their findings in the prefrontal cortex as
representing a balance between self-expression and self-monitoring. Thus,
the neuroscience of improvisation reflects a near-universal intuitive
understanding by improvising musicians of the component processes
necessary for improvisation and how to cultivate them in practice and
pedagogy, and also appears to correlate with improvisers’ subjective
experience of improvisation.29

Music and Language Comparisons

One widely explored area in music cognition research has been the
comparison of music and language cognition.30 Broadly speaking, these
two systems of human sound communication can be compared at three loci:
production (i.e., the speaker or musical performer), the sound systems
themselves (i.e., the underlying sound structures and the rules that govern
them), and perception/comprehension (i.e., how the listener understands the
utterance of the speaker or musical performer). The majority of research
and theoretical speculation comparing music and language cognition has
focused on the latter two. Improvisation is ideally suited to the study of
production because it can be considered analogous to spontaneous speech;
in both improvisation and spontaneous linguistic production, one needs
both a knowledge base (e.g., vocabulary, grammatical rules, pronunciation
in language; melodic figures, rhythms, timbres, harmonies, musical
structures, and stylistic parameters in music) and the skill set to generate
recombinations of the elements of this knowledge base in real time in a way
that follows linguistic or stylistic norms so that utterances are
comprehensible to the listener.
In Berkowitz and Ansari (2008), we demonstrated that the IFG/vPMC, an
area known to be important in language, is also involved in musical
improvisation. In fact, the triad of regions elicited in this study (i.e., dPMC,
ACC, and IFG/vPMC) is also at the core of a network that brain imaging
studies have shown to be involved in spontaneous speech.31 Musical
improvisation and spontaneous speech therefore appear to be analogous at
both theoretical and neurobiological levels. Many parallels can also be
drawn between how musicians learn to improvise and how languages are
learned.32 This begs the tantalizing question of whether training in musical
improvisation can facilitate language learning and/or whether the data and
experience derived from the extensive research in the pedagogy and
learning of language can be applied to training methods for musical
improvisation. Given the effects of musical training on the brain (discussed
later in the chapter), this seems to be an area ripe for research that could
have implications for both language pedagogy and music pedagogy.
Is music a language? Or, as David Lidov once titled a collection of
essays, “Is language a music?”33 Music and language clearly share much in
terms of cognitive processes, the neural substrates that appear to underlie
them in both perception and performance, and the learning processes
involved in acquiring these two systems of sound communication. The
exploration of such connections between music and language provides one
example of the types of insights that the study of music cognition may
provide about brain function more generally.

WHAT CAN STUDYING IMPROVISATION TELL US

ABOUT THE BRAIN?

The research described demonstrates that musical improvisation, albeit a

highly specialized capacity, occurs through the coordinated activity of brain
regions that are involved in numerous other domain-general cognitive
processes such as motor sequencing, decision making, and attention, to
name a few. This underscores the fact that such networks of brain areas are
highly flexible in the functions in which they can participate. Just as
studying the neural basis of improvisation can yield insights into the nature
of its component cognitive operations, so too can the study of improvisation
provide insights into the functions of the brain regions upon which
improvisation relies.

Mirror Systems
Our finding that the IFG/vPMC is involved in musical generativity
complements data showing that this area is involved in music perception.34
A dual role in production and perception in this region has also been
described for language. Such perception-action coupling in the brain is
referred to as a “mirror system.”35 A mirror system is one involved in both
the performance of actions and the understanding of such actions as
performed by others. Such systems may encode an overarching (or
underlying) concept of an action that can be utilized both in the
performance of that action and in the understanding of the intention behind
the action when observing it performed by someone else. Roles for such
systems in higher-level cognitive functions such as language and empathy
have been postulated.36 What purpose might such a mirror system serve in
music? Itvan Molnar-Szakacs and Katie Overy propose that a mirror system
for music “allows for co-representation of the musical experience, emerging
out of the shared and temporally synchronous recruitment of similar neural
mechanisms in the sender and the perceiver of the musical message.37
As described previously, non-generative musical performance (e.g.,
playing from a score) does not appear to stimulate activity in the
IFG/vPMC. It was therefore through the study of the neurobiological basis
of improvisation that it was discovered that this area plays a role in music
production. This finding, in conjunction with previous work identifying that
this region participates in music perception, provides possible evidence for
a mirror system for music in this region, and it expands our conception of
the range of such a system’s possible functionality beyond the realms of
intentional action and linguistic communication. As Molnar-Szakacs and
Overy summarize, “a mirror neuron system may provide a domain-general
neural mechanism for processing combinatorial rules common to language,
action, and music, which in turn can communicate meaning and human
affect.”38

Music, Language, and Neural Plasticity

As discussed earlier, improvisation provides an ideal musical substrate for
comparison with linguistic processes. In a now (in)famous and oft-quoted
statement, psychologist of language Steven Pinker referred to music as
“auditory cheesecake, an exquisite confection crafted to tickle the sensitive
spots of … our mental faculties.”39 Pinker argues that the brain did not
evolve for music, per se, but rather that music “tickles” brain regions
evolved for other purposes (e.g., language). He has even gone so far as to
suggest that music is “useless” from an evolutionary perspective, and that it
could “vanish from our species and the rest of our lifestyle would be
virtually unchanged.”40 Pinker’s suggestions have, understandably, been
controversial,41 and indeed others have proposed the alternative possibility
that language may have evolved from music.42 We will probably never
know whether music or language “came first,” evolutionarily speaking,
although intriguing theories exist for how music and language may have co-
evolved from a common progenitor.43 Perhaps what is most striking about
the accumulating evidence that music and language share neural resources
and cognitive processes in both perception and production is what this
signifies with respect to the extraordinary flexibility of the brain. An area
such as the IFG/vPMC may have evolved, generally speaking, for the
production and perception of sequences, with the capacity to produce and
perceive music and language, as well as a wide variety of combinations of
elements of actions. Music is probably not “auditory cheesecake,” tickling
innate linguistic areas, nor is language the “auditory bread and butter” of a
musically predisposed neural architecture. Rather, highly flexible neural
circuits can process a veritable buffet of inputs and outputs. Just as
improvising musicians can produce infinite musical possibilities out of a
finite set of musical elements and rules for combining them, so too can the
improvising mind support an infinite variety of processes out of a finite
number of neurons and their interconnections.
This versatility begs the question of whether musical training can
actually foster such flexibility beyond merely drawing on it. A growing
literature suggests that music does indeed change the brain. These changes
are both structural and functional. In terms of structure, musicians have
been shown to have 10 percent more fibers in the corpus callosum, the fiber
tract that connects the left and right hemispheres of the brain.44 This data on
increased size of fiber tracts has been complemented by more recent data
using newer imaging techniques that reveal increases in fiber tract
organization in trained musicians.45 In addition to such changes in white
matter tracts that connect brain regions, increases in the volume of gray
matter in such regions throughout the brain (not merely in auditory and
motor areas) have been demonstrated in musicians.46
Functionally, it has been shown that musical training expands auditory
and sensory representations in the brain.47 Also, in certain contexts,
musicians demonstrate different patterns of brain activity when perceiving
and processing auditory input,48 as well as in performance of motor tasks,49
when compared to nonmusicians. Research by Nadine Gaab and Gottfried
Schlaug has shown that musicians are more successful—and utilize a
different set of neural substrates and cognitive operations—in the
performance of a pitch memory task when compared to nonmusicians.50 In
a follow-up study, Gaab and colleagues showed that when training
nonmusicians on a pitch memory task yielded improved performance in
certain subjects, there was a concomitant shift from using the network of
brain regions that they were using previously (with poorer performance) to
recruiting the group of areas used by trained musicians.51 These studies
reflect that musical training can lead to shifts in how the brain processes
auditory input and motor output, demonstrating the neural correlates of
musical expertise.
Such findings raise the age-old nature-nurture question: Are certain
individuals born with brains predisposed to music, and do these individuals
therefore excel at it and seek musical training—or does musical training
itself lead to such changes? Through studies comparing brain and cognitive
development of children receiving musical training with that of those who
do not, evidence is emerging that musical training changes the brain.52
What insights can the study of the neurobiology of improvisation provide
about neural plasticity? As described above, activation in areas involved in
auditory processing and motor production appears to be identical between
the two groups. The unique difference was that the musicians deactivated
the rTPJ, an area involved in bottom-up stimulus-driven attention that is
deactivated in top-down, goal-directed attention. The finding of rTPJ
deactivation in improvising musicians as compared to nonmusicians
suggests that musical training appears to yield cognitive benefits that are
not merely music-related. If improvisation training leads to a shift in the
ability to activate goal-directed, top-down attention, further research could
explore whether training in improvisation actually enhances the ability to
modulate attention in this way, and whether this remains limited to
improvisatory tasks or is available across domains.

CONCLUSION
Improvisation is one of many musical processes that have inspired recent
investigation with the experimental techniques of cognitive neuroscience.
These studies allow for a deeper understanding of the cognitive processes—
and the neural correlates of such processes—that support such highly
specialized feats of human behavior. Discovering the networks of brain
regions that are involved in music contributes to our understanding of the
more generalized function of such networks and underscores their
remarkable plasticity. Musical training draws on such plasticity in the
development of auditory-motor expertise, but it also appears to cultivate
changes in brain structure and function that extend beyond musical
perception and performance.53 The brain itself can therefore be considered
an improviser in its own right, and the study of improvisation and other
musical processes has and will continue to play a role in shaping our
understanding of this improvising mind.

Notes
1. Diana Deutsch, et al., “Psychology of Music,” in Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online,
http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/42574 (accessed May 17,
2011); Robert Gjerdingen, “The Psychology of Music,” in The Cambridge History of Western
Music Theory, ed. Thomas Christensen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 956–
981.
2. Isabelle Peretz and Robert J. Zatorre, The Cognitive Neuroscience of Music (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2010); Diana Deutsch, ed., The Psychology of Music, 2nd ed. (San Diego, CA:
Academic Press, 1999).
3. D. A. Hodges, W. D. Hairston, and J. H. Burdette, “Aspects of Multisensory Perception: The
Integration of Visual and Auditory Information in Musical Experiences,” Annals of the New
York Academy of Sciences 1060 (2005): 175–185.
4. Jeff Pressing, “Psychological Constraints on Improvisational Expertise and Communication,” in
In the Course of Performance: Studies in the World of Musical Improvisation, ed. Bruno Nettl
and Melinda Russell (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 47–68.
5. N. Gaab and G. Schlaug, “The Effect of Musicianship on Pitch Memory in Performance
Matched Groups,” Neuroreport 14 (2003): 2291–2295; N. Gaab, C. Gaser, and G. Schlaug,
“Improvement-related Functional Plasticity Following Pitch Memory Training,” NeuroImage 31
(2006): 255–263.
6. For discussion, see Diana Deutsch, et al. “Psychology of Music,” in Grove Music Online.
Oxford Music Online,
http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/42574pg4 (accessed May 27,
2011).
7. Bruno Nettl et al., “Improvisation,” in Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online,
http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/13738 (accessed May 17,
2011). For a review of a wide range of published definitions of improvisation, see Bruno Nettl,
“Introduction: An Art Neglected in Scholarship,” in In the Course of Performance: Studies in
 the World of Musical Improvisation, ed. Bruno Nettl and Melinda Russell (Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press, 1998), 10–12.
8. The improvisatory nature of human behavior is eloquently described in Gilbert Ryle,
“Improvisation,” Mind 85, no. 337 (1976): 69–83; R. Keith Sawyer, “The Improvisational
Performance of Everyday Life,” Journal of Mundane Behavior 2 (2001): 149–162; and R. Keith
Sawyer, Creating Conversations: Improvisation in Everyday Discourse (Cresskill: Hampton,
2001). For further discussion, see Aaron L. Berkowitz, The Improvising Mind: Cognition and
Creativity in the Musical Moment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 1–14, 177–184.
9. S. Brown, et al., “Music and Language Side by Side in the Brain: A PET Study of the
Generation of Melodies and Sentences,” European Journal of Neuroscience 23 (2006): 2791–
2803; S. L. Bengtsson, M. Csíkszentmihályi, and F. Ullén, “Cortical Regions Involved in the
Generation of Musical Structures During Improvisation in Pianists,” Journal of Cognitive
Neuroscience 19 (2007), 830–842; Aaron L. Berkowitz and Daniel Ansari, “Generation of
Novel Motor Sequences: The Neural Correlates of Musical Improvisation,” NeuroImage 41
(2008): 535–543; Charles J. Limb and Allen R. Braun, “Neural Substrates of Spontaneous
Musical Performance: An fMRI Study of Jazz Improvisation,” PLoS ONE 3 (2008): e1679.
doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0001679; Aaron L. Berkowitz and Daniel Ansari, “Expertise-related
Deactivation of the Right Temporoparietal Junction During Musical Improvisation,”
NeuroImage 49 (2010): 712–719. By neuroscience studies, I refer to studies actually examining
brain activity during improvisation with brain imaging techniques. For theoretical work on the
cognitive psychology of improvisation, see the following brilliant discussions by Jeff Pressing:
“Cognitive Processes in Improvisation,” in Cognitive Processes in the Perception of Art, ed. W.
Ray Crozier and Anthony J. Chapman (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1984), 345–366; “Improvisation:
Methods and Models,” in Generative Processes in Music: The Psychology of Performance,
Improvisation, and Composition, ed. John Sloboda (Oxford and New York: Oxford University
Press, 1988), 129–178; “Psychological Constraints on Improvisational Expertise and
Communication,” in In the Course of Performance: Studies in the World of Musical
Improvisation, ed. Bruno Nettl and Melinda Russell (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press,
1998), 47–68.
10. For an example of a very elegant solution to creating a control task to be compared in order to
elicit the areas involved in hearing musical structure, see D. J. Levitin and V. Menon, “Musical
Structure Is Processed in ‘Language’ Areas of the Brain: A Possible Role for Brodmann Area 47
in Temporal Coherence,” NeuroImage 20 (2003): 2142–2152.
11. Berkowitz and Ansari, “Generation of Novel Motor Sequences.” For discussion, see also
Berkowitz, The Improvising Mind, 131–144.
12. For discussion of the neural correlates of melodic and rhythmic performance, see S. L.
Bengtsson et al., “Dissociating Brain Regions Controlling the Temporal and Ordinal Structure of
Learned Movement Sequences,” European Journal of Neuroscience 19 (2004): 2591–2602; S.
L. Bengtsson and F. Ullén, “Dissociation between Melodic and Rhythmic Processing During
Piano Performance from Musical Scores,” NeuroImage 30 (2006): 272–284.
13. For review, see P. A. Chouinard and T. Paus, “The Primary Motor and Premotor Areas of the
Human Cerebral Cortex,” Neuroscientist 12 (2006): 143–152.
14. For review and discussion, see Berkowitz and Ansari, “Generation of Novel Motor Sequence,”
541; Berkowitz, The Improvising Mind, 139–140.
15. L. M. Parsons et al., “The Brain Basis of Piano Performance,” Neuropsychologia 43 (2005):
199–215.
16. S. Koelsch, “Significance of Broca’s Area and Ventral Premotor Cortex for Music-Syntactic
Processing,” Cortex 42 (2006): 518–520.
17. Ibid., 219.
18. Limb and Braun, “Neural Substrates of Spontaneous Musical Performance,” 4–5.
19. Berkowitz and Ansari, “Expertise-related Deactivation of the Temporoparietal Junction.”
20. For review and discussion see M. Corbetta and G. L. Shulman, “Control of Goal-directed and
Stimulus-driven Attention in the Brain,” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 3 (2002): 201–215; M.
Corbetta, G. Patel, and G. L. Shulman, “The Reorienting System of the Human Brain: From
Environment to Theory of Mind,” Neuron 58 (2008): 306–324.
21. For further discussion, see Berkowitz and Ansari “Expertise-related Deactivation of the
Temporoparietal Junction,” 7–8.
22. For a review and discussion of improvisation pedagogy and learning across musical cultures, see
Berkowitz, The Improvising Mind, 39–96.
23. For review and discussion, see Paul Berliner, Thinking in Jazz (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1994).
24. For review and discussion, see Stephen Slawek, “Keeping It Going: Terms, Practices, and
Processes of Improvisation in Hindustani Music,” in In the Course of Performance: Studies in
the World of Musical Improvisation, ed. Bruno Nettl and Melinda Russell, (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1998), 335–368; George Ruckert and Richard Widdess, “Hindustani Raga,” in
The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music, Vol. 5, South Asia: The Indian Subcontinent, ed.
Alison Arnold (New York: Routledge, 1999), 64–88.
25. For review and discussion, see Berkowitz, The Improvising Mind, 81–96.
26. See Berkowitz, The Improvising Mind, 39–96 and 121–130; Pressing, “Improvisation: Methods
and Models.” In Generative Processes in Music: The Psychology of Performance,
Improvisation, and Composition, ed. John Sloboda (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988),
129–178; Pressing, “Cognitive Processes in Improvisation”; Pressing, “Psychological
Constraints on Improvisational Expertise and Communication.”
27. Berkowitz, The Improvising Mind, 15–96.
28. Berliner, Thinking in Jazz, 208. For discussion of this creator-witness phenomenon see
Berkowitz, The Improvising Mind, 121–130.
29. For further discussion, see Berkowitz, The Improvising Mind, 143–144.
30. For comprehensive review and discussion, see Aniruddh Patel, Music, Language and the Brain
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). See also Berkowitz, The Improvising Mind, 97–120
and 145–152; Erin McMullen and Jenny Saffran, “Music and Language: A Developmental
Comparison,” Music Perception 21 (2004): 289–311.
31. For review and discussion, see Berkowitz, The Improvising Mind, 145–52.
32. For review and discussion, see Berkowitz, The Improvising Mind, 97–120; McMullen and
Saffran, “Music and Language.”
33. David Lidov, Is Language a Music?: Writings on Musical Form and Signification
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004).
34. For review and discussion, see Koelsch, “Significance of Broca’s Area and Ventral Premotor
Cortex for Music-Syntactic Processing.”
35. G. Rizzolatti et al., “The Mirror-Neuron System,” Annual Review Neuroscience 27 (2004): 169–
192; F. Binkofski, “The Role of Ventral Premotor Cortex in Action Execution and Action
Understanding,” Journal of Physiology Paris 99 (2006): 396–405.
36. For recent review, see M. Iacoboni, “Imitation, Empathy, and Mirror Neurons,” Annual Review
of Psychology 60 (2009): 653–670.
37. I. Molnar-Szakacs and K. Overy, “Music and Mirror Neurons: From Motion to ‘E’motion,”
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 1 (2006): 235–236.
38. Ibid., 239.
39. Stephen Pinker, How the Mind Works (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1997), 534.
40. Ibid., 528–529.
41. See for example, Ian Cross, “Music and Biocultural Evolution,” in The Cultural Study of Music,
ed. Martin Clayton, Trevor Herbert, and Richard Middleton (New York: Routledge, 2003), 19–
 30; Elizabeth Tolbert, “Theorizing the Musically Abject,” in Bad Music: The Music We Love to
Hate, ed. Christopher Washburne and Maiken Derno (New York: Routledge, 2004), 104–119;
Philip Ball, The Music Instinct: How Music Works and Why We Can’t Do Without It (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2010), 1–31; Daniel Levitin, This Is Your Brain on Music (London:
Penguin Group, 2006), 241–262.
42. For review and discussion, see W. Tecumseh Fitch, “The Biology and Evolution of Music: A
Comparative Perspective,” Cognition 100 (2006): 173–215.
43. Stephen Brown, “The ‘Musilanguage’ Model of Music Evolution,” in The Origins of Music, ed.
Nils L Wallin, Bjorn Merker, and Steven Brown (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000), 271–300.
44. G. Schlaug et al., “Increased Corpus Callosum Size in Musicians,” Neuropsychologia 33 (1995):
1047–1055.
45. S. L. Bengtsson et al., “Extensive Piano Practicing Has Regionally Specific Effects on White
Matter Development,” Nature Neuroscience 8 (2005): 1148–1150.
46. M. Bangert and G. Schlaug, “Specialization of the Specialized in Features of External Human
Brain Morphology,” European Journal of Neuroscience 24 (2006): 1832–1834; C. Gaser and G.
Schlaug, “Brain Structures Differ Between Musicians and Nonmusicians,” Journal of
Neuroscience 23 (2003): 9240–9245.
47. T. Elbert et al., “Increased Cortical Representation of the Fingers of the Left Hand in String
Players,” Science 270 (1995): 305–307; C. Pantev et al., “Increased Auditory Cortical
Representation in Musicians,” Nature 392 (1998): 811–814.
48. N. Gaab, C. Gaser, and G. Schlaug, “Improvement-related Functional Plasticity Following Pitch
Memory Training,” NeuroImage 31 (2006): 255–263.
49. M. Hund-Georgiadis and D. Y. von Cramon, “Motor-Learning-Related Changes in Piano
Players and Non-Musicians Revealed by Functional Magnetic-Resonance Signals,”
Experimental Brain Research 125 (1999): 417–425; T. Krings et al., “Cortical Activation
Patterns During Complex Motor Tasks in Piano Players and Control Subjects. A Functional
Magnetic Resonance Imaging Study,” Neuroscience Letters 278 (2000): 189–193; M. Lotze et
al., “The Musician’s Brain: Functional Imaging of Amateurs and Professionals During
Performance and Imagery,” NeuroImage 20 (2003): 1817–1829.
50. N. Gaab and G. Schlaug, “The Effect of Musicianship on Pitch Memory in Performance
Matched Groups.”
51. Gaab, Gaser, and Schlaug, “Improvement-related Functional Plasticity Following Pitch Memory
Training.”
52. K. L. Hyde et al., “Musical Training Shapes Structural Brain Development,” Journal of
Neuroscience 29 (2009): 3019–3025. G. Schlaug et al., “Training-induced Neuroplasticity in
Young Children,” Annals of the New York Academy of Science 1169 (2009): 205–208.
53. For discussion, see C. Y. Wan and G. Schlaug, “Music Making as a Tool for Promoting Brain
Plasticity Across the Life Span,” Neuroscientist 16 (2010): 566–577.

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 CHAPTER 3
IMPROVISATION, ACTION UNDERSTANDING,
AND MUSIC COGNITION WITH AND
WITHOUT BODIES

VIJAY IYER

WHAT are we referring to when we use the word “improvisation”? The term
is used in innumerable ways, but always with the implicit assumption that
there are acts that are improvised and acts that are not, and that those two
kinds of acts are distinguishable. Two main aspects of that class of acts we
call “improvised” seem to be (1) a real-time process of making choices and
acting on them, and (2) the sense of temporal embeddedness: the fact that
these actions take time, and that the time taken matters. With this
understanding, we might take improvisation to denote that semi-transparent,
multistage process through which we sense, perceive, think, decide, and act
in real time.
But when construed this broadly, improvisation seems to encompass
most of our behavior, including acts as disparate as walking through a forest
or an airport, hunting and gathering, conversational speech, sport, climbing,
driving, courtship, parenting, social dancing, and surfing the web. The class
of improvisational behaviors is so vast that it may be easier to list behaviors
that are not improvised—the carrying out of routines, plans, checklists, pre-
routed or pre-ordained actions, well-rehearsed songs and dances, rituals,
recitations, pageants, ceremonies, scripted performances of fully composed
works—these last few exemplifying what Edward Said called “extreme
occasions” (Said 1991). It seems that this class of non-improvised behaviors
are the overall exception, a relatively small (but important) subset of human
behavior as a whole.
 Improvisation would also seem to encompass the noisy processes by
which we acquire most skills. Babies learn to talk by babbling; they learn to
walk by staggering, finding their balance, stumbling, finding something to
hold onto; they learn to eat efficiently by first making a lot of messes.
Improvisation is also the means by which we solve problems, by resorting
to a repertoire of skills and adapting them to the situation at hand: putting
out a fire, fixing a leak, doubling back to catch a missed turn, or building a
shelter.
As we expand and refine these lists, we realize that most behaviors
include improvised and non-improvised components. For improvisation
also seems to govern the ways in which we do things; even if we go to a
store to buy the items on a grocery list, we might find ourselves making
moment-to-moment decisions in how we navigate the store, how we choose
specific tomatoes, how and with what (and indeed whether) we decide to
pay. We make choices based on what’s at hand, what’s allowed, and what’s
desired, and also based on what we are taught, trained, forced, or
empowered to do, or on what we are experienced in doing.
And similarly, acts of improvisation can readily incorporate patterns of
behavior. Seemingly spontaneous speech acts can easily lapse into routine
exchanges, or the re-narrating of previously told stories and jokes; a
politician may answer a question from a reporter with a previously crafted
statement; an improvising musician may develop a “personal sound” that
might include hallmark melodic ideas, specific techniques, a habitual way
of producing a certain sound. These facts do not deny their improvised or
real-time quality; rather, they reveal how decades of choosing can lead to
patterned responses to similar conditions.
In light of these observations, it becomes more and more problematic to
identify moments of “pure” improvisation, or to disambiguate them from
the execution of pre-ordained programs. We might think that we can
recognize improvised acts in extreme moments—uncontrolled facial
expressions, slips of the tongue, non-grammatical formulations, or graceful
witticisms on an unscripted television show, for example—but it is still
difficult to prove their unscriptedness; we merely trust or believe that they
are so.
What we seem to be doing, instead of literally identifying improvisation
according to some intrinsic attribute, is allowing cultural and contextual
factors to regulate the presence or absence of improvisation. To attend a
play or a narrative film or a symphony, for example, is to witness what one
knows to be a series of carefully scripted and sculpted human actions, while
to watch emcees in a street corner “cipher,” to hear a performance of
Hindustani classical music, or to attend an “improv comedy” event or a jazz
club is to knowingly witness individual and collective acts of improvisation,
and to parse them in those terms. We may also use visual and auditory cues
to signal an event’s composedness, its un-improvised character: a moment
of ensemble synchrony in music or dance, for example, might seem
statistically unlikely to be improvised, so we take it to be somehow
planned. But in this realm, we can also be tricked: the improvisational
dance technique known as “flocking” can create the illusion of
choreographed group movement; similarly, systems of cues are frequently
embedded in improvised musical settings, whereby moments of synchrony
can emerge from apparent disorder. We therefore arrive at a crucial question
for music cognition: when construed this broadly, does improvisation
“sound like” anything? We will return to this question.

EMBODIED MUSIC COGNITION

A central theme in my work is the trace of the body in music. My
dissertation and subsequent publications (Iyer 1998, 2002, 2004a, 2004b,
2009) explore the role of physical embodiment and sociocultural
situatedness in music cognition. Drawing from recent advances in cognitive
science, I claimed that music cognition should be understood as intimately
tied in with the body and its physical and sociocultural environment—a
perspective that was previously neglected in the music cognition literature.
The paradigm of embodied cognition emerged in the late 1980s as a
corrective response to the Cartesian “dualist” theories of mind that had
prevailed in cognitive science since the field’s inception in the mid-
twentieth century. Dualism held that the mind exists in a realm separate
from the brain—that is, that the mind could be understood as “the software”
and the brain and body as “the hardware.” The dualist paradigm known as
“cognitivism” thereby presupposed that cognition was a kind of rule-based
computation that could happen in any machine using the same rules, and
that there was therefore nothing special about the bodies that housed our
brains. The cognition-as-computation view then influenced the field of
music cognition, where music was treated primarily as a disembodied flow
of forms in an abstract space. Early research in the field focused on
perception of timbre, harmony, and pitch, largely neglecting subjects such
as rhythm, performance, or the physical act of making music, not to
mention the cultural forces that might lead one to prioritize harmony at all.
Theories of embodiment hold that the body, the brain, and the mind must
be understood as one system, and that the brain is an organ optimized for
producing motor (i.e., bodily) output in response to sensory stimuli. This
“sensory-motor loop” becomes the basis for what we call cognition. Rather
than seeing thought as a process separate from sensation or action, we
understand the faculties of perception, thought, and action as codependent,
having developed together both ontologically (from birth through childhood
and into adulthood) and phylogenetically (in the evolution of the species).
It should be noted that adopting this framework does not inherently refute
the idea of abstraction or “concepts.” Intermediate theories such as the
“grounding by interaction” framework (Mahon and Camerazza 2008) allow
for abstract or symbolic concepts to be instantiated in the context of specific
sensory and motor information. Such a framework offers a view of
cognition that is neither fully embodied nor fully disembodied, but contains
aspects of both.
From the embodiment paradigm, or some intermediate form of it, we can
develop a body-based view of musical cognition. This view is borne out, for
example, by brain imaging studies that have highlighted a fundamental
identification between rhythm and human movement. It is understood that
to perceive rhythm is to “imagine movement”; musical rhythm provokes the
brain to prepare the body to move, facilitating or activating a physical
response (Todd 1999, Todd et al. 1999). In consideration of some recent
claims about mirror neurons (Kohler et al. 2002), this might be considered
as a kind of “aural mirroring.” In this view (discussed critically below), we
tend to respond in kind to what we think we hear another body doing,
imagining or actually generating an action that is suggested by the rhythmic
character of the sounds we hear.
Music is then understood as the sound of human bodies in motion; to
listen to music is to perceive the actions of those bodies, and a kind of
sympathetic, synchronous bodily action (i.e., dance) is one primary
response. Of course, this is mediated by culture. Certain cultural settings
may foreground bodily responses to music, while others conceal or suppress
them; these variations express “situated cognition” (Robbins and Aydede
2008, Clancey 1997)—the interrelationship of mind and world, the
interdependence between knowledge and its context.
The notion of music cognition as an embodied, situated phenomenon ties
in well with contemporary ethnomusicological accounts of African
diasporic musics, in which embodiment, performativity, and cultural
context play a crucial role in the production of meaning. The idea of
embodiment can also bring the field of music perception and cognition into
a healthier dialogue with the music humanities, which has in recent decades
seen robust critical engagement with “the body” in terms of race, gender,
and sexuality. When we hear bodies but do not see them, we instead
fantasize about them; listening to music (especially in the disembodied way
that it circulates today) is deeply informed by that same process of
racialized, sexualized fantasy-formation about the virtual bodies that made
those sounds. While interdisciplinarity can, at its worst, provoke an
unproductive confrontation of epistemological incongruities between
paradigms, bodies can still offer a strong focus for dialogue, critique, and
new productions of knowledge across many fields of inquiry. Although
bodies are described from many different standpoints, somehow we can all
agree on their sheer, stubborn presence (or absence, as the case may be).

EMBODIED RHYTHM PERCEPTION

The central idea that music is an embodied, situated activity means that
music depends crucially on the structure of our bodies, and also on the
environment and culture in which our musical awareness emerges. Rhythm,
especially, is a complex, whole-body experience, and its role in music
makes use of the embodied, situated status of the participant. Such claims
have a variety of implications; they lead us to appreciate traces of the
embodiment in instrumental and vocal music, to notice how musical
cultures and individuals variously deal with the role of physicality in music-
making, and to understand music perception as an active, culturally
contingent process.
The claim that music perception and cognition are embodied activities
also means that they are actively constructed by the listener, rather than
passively transferred from performer to listener. This active nature of music
perception highlights the role of culture and context. For example, the
discernment of qualities such as pulse and meter from a piece of music is
not perceptually inevitable; rather, the music may offer perceptual
ambiguities whose resolution depends on an observer’s culturally
contingent listening strategies (Iyer 1998: 83–104). In addition, I have
argued that rhythmic expression is often directly related to the role of the
body in making music, and to certain cultural aesthetics that privilege this
role. In particular, certain subtle microrhythmic variations in rhythmic
performance display striking systematic structure, carrying an encoded trace
of the culturally situated music-making body (for a detailed explanation, see
Iyer 2002).
The salience of fine-grained musical rhythm at this level of detail is
borne out by more recent neuroscientific studies of timing perception (see
Patel 2008, 96–154; Levitin 2009). In particular, microrhythmic perception
appears to take advantage of our ability to differentiate between phonemes
(Patel 2008), and, crucially, our ability to aurally locate and track human
movement around us (Changizi 2011). The assertion of the existence in the
microrhythmic realm of meaningful musical structure, activating our
faculties for perception of human movement and speech, runs counter to
more common descriptions of microrhythmic variation as “discrepancies”
(Keil 1987), “imperfections” or “being slightly off” (Hennig et al. 2012), or,
for The New York Times, “essentially mistakes” and “error[s]‌” (Belluck
2011).
Rhythm—in music, speech, bodily acts, or some interleaved combination
thereof—offers one productive line of inquiry for theories of embodied
cognition. Another such category is improvisation. Rhythm and
improvisation are not mutually exclusive categories in this regard, but two
overlapping fields of behavior, both treating time as a central parameter.

TIME AND TEMPORAL SITUATEDNESS

A fundamental consequence of physical embodiment and environmental
situatedness is the fact that things take time. Temporality must ground our
conception of physically embodied cognition. Smithers (1996) draws a
useful distinction between processes that occur “in-time” and those that
exist “over-time.” The distinction is similar to that between process-
oriented activity, such as speech or walking, and product-oriented activity,
such as writing a novel or composing a symphony.
In-time processes are embedded in time; not only does the time taken
matter, but, in fact, it contributes to the overall structure. The speed of a
typical walking gait relates to physical attributes like leg mass and size and
shoulder-hip torsional moment; this is why we cannot walk one-tenth or ten
times as fast as we do. Similarly, the rate at which we speak exploits the
natural timescales of lingual and mandibular motion as well as respiration.
Changizi (2011) further argues that human speech is made of vocalized
imitations of real-world solid-object events—“hits, slides, and rings”—with
speech’s rhythmic profiles derived from this physical “grammar.”
Accordingly, we learn to process speech at precisely such a rate. Recorded
speech played at slower or faster speeds rapidly becomes unintelligible,
even if the pitch is held constant. The perceived flow of conversation, while
quite flexible, is sensitive to the slowdown caused by an extra few seconds
taken to think of a word or recall a name.
Over-time processes, by contrast, are merely contained in time; the fact
that they take time is of no fundamental consequence to the result. Most of
what we call computation occurs over time. The fact that all computing
machines were originally considered computationally equivalent regardless
of speed suggests that time was not a concern in the original theory of
computation, and that the temporality of a computational process was
theoretically immaterial. Though computational theory is more nuanced
today, “real-time” computer applications make use of the speed of modern
microprocessors, performing computations so fast that the user doesn’t
notice how much time is taken. However, this is not what the mind does
when immersed in a dynamic, real-time environment; rather, it exploits both
the constraints and the allowances of the natural time-scales of the body and
the brain as a total physical system. In other words, Smithers (1996) claims,
cognition chiefly involves in-time processes. Furthermore, this claim is not
limited simply to cognitive processes that require interpersonal interaction;
it pertains to all thought, perception, and action.

THE TEMPORALITY OF PERFORMANCE

In intersubjective activities, such as speech or music making, one remains
aware of a sense of mutual embodiment. This sense brings about the
presupposition of “shared time” between the listener and the performer.
This sense is a crucial aspect of the temporality of performance. The
experience of listening to music is qualitatively different from that of
reading a book. The experience of music requires the listener’s “co-
performance” within a shared temporal domain (Schutz 1964). While the
essentially solitary act of reading a book also takes time, the specific
amount of time is of little consequence. (Literary notions of co-
performance, such as Roland Barthes’ idea of “writerly texts” [1975], do
not fundamentally incorporate the temporality of experience.) The notion of
musical co-performance is made literal in musical contexts primarily meant
for dance; the participatory act of marking time with rhythmic bodily
activity physicalizes the sense of shared time and could be viewed as
embodied listening.
The performance situation itself might be understood as a context-
framing device. In his study of the music of a certain community in South
Africa, ethnomusicologist John Blacking wrote, “Venda music is
distinguished from nonmusic by the creation of a special world of time. The
chief function of music is to involve people in shared experiences within
the framework of their cultural experience” (Blacking 1973: 48). There is
no doubt that this is true to some degree in all musical performance, and we
can take this concept further in the case of improvised music.

WHAT DOES IMPROVISATION SOUND LIKE?

Can one hear the fact that a sound was just decided in its moment of
creation? Does music have any characteristic that announces itself as such?
My sense, from my own performing, teaching, and listening experiences, is
that most listeners can’t tell the difference in isolation; the perception of the
relative presence or absence of improvisation is largely imagined and
profoundly contextual, based on cultural factors and assumptions. And
analytically, it is difficult to find any such traits on the musical surface; the
tendency in the West is to focus on so-called “mistakes” as an indicator of
improvisation, as if they somehow verify the fragile and risky process.
 Limb and Braun (2008), in their fMRI brain imaging studies of skilled
musicians in the act of improvising, found that in a focused state of
improvisation, a soloist has lowered self-correcting inhibitions and
enhanced activation of a self-narrative function. “Just relax and be
yourself,” might be another way to put it; it’s the kind of advice given
before a date or a job interview, both of which are also instances of
heightened, carefully framed improvisation. But Limb (private
communication, 2012) further suggests that there is something else
happening in moments of highly skilled musical improvisation, something
like what Csikszentmihalyi (1990) calls a “flow state,” a mental and
physical state of utmost relaxation, focus, and concentration, known to be
conducive to creative thinking. Such a criterion (if it is indeed a criterion,
and not merely a correlated phenomenon or perhaps an outcome of the
“overlearning” involved in improvisational skill) may enable us to
qualitatively set apart sustained creative musical improvisation, for
example, from our more everyday spontaneous acts.
However, that doesn’t tell us anything about what improvisation “sounds
like” to an observer. So another question is, does the distinction matter?
Why are we, in music, so bound up with the issue? The reason is that the
experience of listening to music that is understood to be improvised differs
significantly from listening knowingly to composed music. The main
source of drama in improvised music is the sheer fact of the shared sense of
time: the sense that the improviser is working, creating, generating musical
material in the same time in which we are co-performing as listeners (Iyer
1998, 80). As listeners to any music, we experience a kind of empathy for
the performer, an awareness of physicality and an understanding of the
effort required to create music. This empathy is one facet of our listening
strategies in any context. In improvisational music, this embodied empathy
extends to an awareness of the performers’ coincident physical and mental
exertion, of their “in-the-moment” processes of creative activity and
interactivity, the risks taken in the face of unbounded possibilities, the
inherent constraints of the mind deciding and the body acting in time.
Perhaps it can be said that improvisational music magnifies the role of
embodiment in musical performance. The perception of improvisation
seems to involve the perception of another body or bodies engaged in
embodied, situated, real-time experience. If so, then a sense of mutual
embodiment, of the shared space, time, and bodily presence of performers
and observers, would seem to open the door to specific kinds of empathy.

A SCIENCE OF EMPATHY
A flurry of recent, intensely debated findings in neuroscience have
suggested a neural basis for empathy that seems to reinforce this view. The
body of research on so-called “mirror neurons” (Gallese et al. 1996; Kohler
et al. 2002; Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia 2010; Gallese et al. 2011) promotes
the idea of action understanding, a kind of empathy at the neural level, and
claims the existence of a “mirroring mechanism” for action understanding,
in which the perception of certain familiar actions in another body can
trigger the activation of similar motor programs in the observer’s brain:
“[E]‌ach time an individual observes another individual performing an
action, a set of neurons that encode that action is activated in the observer’s
cortical motorsystem” (Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia 2010: 264). These
activations may manifest as analogous bodily motion, action or stance to
that of the observed body, or they may just remain at the level of an
“imagined movement.” There is evidence in primates for the existence of
such a neural system—as famously depicted in photographs of a baby
macaque sticking its tongue out in response to a scientist doing the same
(Gross 2006)—suggesting something quite fundamental about this process,
even applying across species in primates (Buccino et al. 2004).
Unfortunately, we cannot allow these findings to paint too rosy a picture
of universal “understanding.” Recent studies on mirror neurons and racial
identification (Gutsell and Inzlicht 2010) actually suggest that the
perception of racialized difference may inhibit or constrain empathy. It was
observed that test subjects (all whites from North America) displayed a
greater mirror neuron-type response to images of other whites than they did
to non-whites. In some cases, whites displayed practically zero empathy-
like mental simulation of actions of non-whites. This finding has been
extended to more fluid “in-group/out-group” affiliations, suggesting a
profound neuroplasticity in this “mirroring” mechanism associated with
empathy. For reviews of such findings, see Eres and Molenberghs (2013)
and Matusall (2013).
 That science might find empathy to be instinctively possible across real
species boundaries, and yet also suppressed across imagined racial
boundaries, suggests that there could be both innate and learned aspects to
action understanding, and that it can be informed by both structural and
superficial qualities visually perceived in the other. It would appear that
there is no such thing as “clean” mirroring; there is perhaps always some
distortion of the metaphorical mirror, since the problematic visual
“perception” of racial difference can seemingly interfere with action
understanding.
However, crucially for music cognition, some recent research suggests
that mirror neurons might be involved in both visual and auditory
processing. Whereas early research in this mirror neuron system focused on
action understanding activated through visual stimuli (Rizzolatti et al.
1996), subsequent work has revealed a similar mechanism at work through
auditory channels (Kohler et al. 2002). It is claimed that “these audiovisual
mirror neurons code actions independently of whether these actions are
performed, heard, or seen” (Kohler et al. 2002). The notion that this process
could occur through sound—that we may undergo a kind of empathetic
action understanding when we merely hear someone do something without
seeing that person do it—offers quite radical implications for how we listen
to music (and especially what happens when we hear music without
seeing).
This offers a tantalizing reading of the history of recorded music, as
bound up as it is with race and twentieth-century American history. Is it
possible that music-heard-and-not-seen (which, of course, was a rarity
before the advent of recorded music, Pythagoras’s “acousmatic” scenario
notwithstanding) might have overridden the visual, racialized, culturally
imposed constraints on empathy? Could the essential humanity of African
Americans have been newly revealed for white American listeners in the
twentieth century through the disembodied circulation of “race records,” by
activating in these listeners a neural “understanding” of the actions of
African American performers? These were, after all, among the first
recordings to circulate on a mass scale in the United States. Could a new
kind of cross-racial empathy, or at least a new quasi-utopic racial imaginary,
have been inaugurated through the introduction and sudden ubiquity of
recorded sound? As the above line of inquiry suggests, this very idea—that
disembodied human sound can elicit in the listener a mirroring or empathic
understanding of the imagined movements of an imagined other—carries
the disruptive potential to restructure our knowledge of what music is, why
it exists, and how it works.
Mirror neurons and their identification with action understanding have
received intense scientific scrutiny and critique, especially in the last few
years (Hickok 2009, Hickok and Hauser 2010, Hutto 2013). Contributing to
the issue has been the fact that “the concept of ‘action understanding’ has
been evolving” (Hickok 2009) due to the persistent, irresolvable question of
what it means to “understand” the action of another. To confirm
“understanding,” must one reproduce the other’s action identically, or does
it suffice simply to “know how” to do the action, or perhaps to understand
its intended goal? Can there be generative mis-“understandings” of the
actions of others, and how are they distinguished from “true” action
understanding?
Still, underlying most instances of the phrase “action understanding” is
the idea that, in certain cases, “self-generated actions have an inherent
semantics and that observing the same action in others affords access to this
action semantics” (Hickok 2009). A recent review by Rizzolatti and
Sinigaglia (2010) concedes that there may be types of action understanding
attributable to non-mirror mechanisms in the brain, and then turns its focus
to a specific type of mirror mechanism “that allows an individual to
understand the action of others ‘from the inside’ ” (264), which seems to
specifically mean the knowledge of how to perform an action that one is
observing.
A tidy resolution of the rapidly evolving mirror-neuron debate is beyond
the scope of this article (or indeed of any article, as of this writing). What is
of direct relevance to our discussion here is the concept of action
understanding—not its exact neural mechanism, but its very existence, and
its explanatory power as an intersubjective framework for music cognition.
The last century’s global cultural transformation—from humankind’s
longstanding identification of music with embodied action to the sudden
propagation of recorded music and its concomitant abundance of music
without bodies—offers us a productive conceptual space to consider the
role of action understanding (or its commodified 20th century replacement
—which can only be called fantasy) in the act of listening to music.
 EXPECTATIONS
If improvisation and rhythm are central to embodied musical cognition, are
these claims borne out in the current literature in music cognition?
Curiously, recent “big-picture” treatises in music cognition have avoided
discussions of improvisation, despite its seeming primacy in musical and
cognitive experience. David Huron’s work on expectation (2008) considers
the evolutionary advantages of humankind’s ability to predict events based
on cues: “Those who can predict the future are better prepared to take
advantage of opportunities and sidestep dangers. … Accurate expectations
are adaptive mental functions that allow organisms to prepare for
appropriate action and perception” (3). These functions, he continues, are
entangled with emotional response: “ [T]‌he emotions accompanying
expectations are intended to reinforce accurate prediction, promote
appropriate event-readiness, and increase the likelihood of future positive
outcomes. … [M]usic-making taps into these primordial functions to
produce a wealth of compelling emotional experiences … including
surprise, awe, ‘chills,’ comfort, and even laughter” (4). Building on
Meyer’s (1956) proposed correspondence between expectation, emotion,
and meaning in the perception of musical form, Huron develops a
perspective on music perception grounded in the science of expectation.
It becomes apparent that Huron’s theory of expectation, while building
on Meyer’s composer-centered theory, is fundamentally similar to
embodied and situated cognition. Expectation is a capacity that guides our
understanding of real-world, real-time events in a way that helps us make
efficacious, life-sustaining actions, to “predict the future” and “take
advantage of opportunities.” This view would seem completely compatible
with, and indeed nearly identical with, our working understanding of
improvisation. It is therefore ironic and unfortunate that Huron’s sole
discussions of improvisation focus on how improvisers cover for “wrong”
notes (234–235, 291). Indeed, the improvisational orientation of Huron’s
entire theory—grounded in an understanding of perception as optimized for
interacting in real time with an information-rich environment—is somehow
repressed in his discussions of music. The reason seems to be that
improvisation is not compatible with his working model of music, which is
characterized by a division between music and its listeners; his and Meyer’s
basic thrust is that music makers (which for Huron and Meyer essentially
means composers) make choices to manipulate the expectations of a passive
audience of listeners. Music, in his view and in the views of many other
researchers in the field, is something that happens to listeners, or something
that they perceive without very much direct engagement; music is rarely
framed as an activity that listeners coexist with as well as participate in
throughout their entire lives, and are always already acculturated to.
The presupposition of a division between music and listener, between
performer and audience, stems from a fundamentally non-participatory
understanding of music, which runs counter to most anthropological
evidence about how music tends to function in culture. That kind of
separation is of course a widespread paradigm in the West and in the court
musics of many non-western cultures, but that does not make it meaningful
in evolutionary terms. We stand to learn more about music’s origins by
attention to humankind’s vernacular and folk musics, which are
participatory almost by definition. Just as we humans have not evolved very
much in the millennia since writing was introduced, we certainly haven’t
evolved significantly in the century since recordings became popular, or
even in the last few centuries since composers started writing for orchestras.
The point here is that the embodied improvising agent, situated in a real-
world physical and cultural environment, is most often the listener and the
doer in the equation. Expectation is perhaps best understood as a capacity of
the improviser—that is, all of us—to take in information, make predictions,
and carry out informed, situated actions based on those predictions, with
real-world consequences. Just as the theory of musical expectation is a
consequence of a more general theory of expectation, this view of
expectation as an improvisational skill has both “real-world” and musical
implications. For example, it has been observed in simulations (Friston,
Mattout, and Kilner 2011) that “mirror neurons will emerge naturally in any
agent that acts on its environment to avoid surprising events”—a startling
conclusion that brings together notions of situated cognition and
improvisation (the agent acting on its environment), expectation (learning
to reduce predictive error, i.e., avoiding surprises), and action understanding
—with repercussions for cognition in intersubjective situations, musical or
otherwise.
 MUSIC AND SPEECH
A recent treatise by Patel (2008) considers fundamental connections
between music and language from a neuroscience perspective. Drawing
from a huge range of research in music and speech perception, Patel
presents a thorough view of the state of our current understanding of the
connections between these two systems.
Given the exhaustive nature of this work, the absence of any substantial
consideration of improvisation is again striking. But certain conceptual
biases about what music is soon reveal themselves, which help explain this
strange gap. In a discussion of linguistic meaning in relation to musical
meaning, Patel imagines composers trying to write short pieces that “mean”
common nouns or verbs (“school,” “eye,” “know”). Would listeners be able
to “hear” their meanings? Most probably they would not, he answers.
However, “lacking specificity of semantic reference is not the same as
being utterly devoid of referential power. … Instrumental music lacks
specific semantic content, but it can at times suggest semantic concepts.
Furthermore, it can do this with some consistency in terms of the concepts
activated in the minds of listeners within a culture” (Patel 2008: 328).
This uncovers a certain assumption about music and speech—that it is all
received, never generated; that composers make music, and others learn to
hear it. The assumption is that language is both simply created by others for
us to learn to use, that it has inherent meanings that we can “hear,” and so
forth—as if language were not itself a vast, improvisational, arbitrary, and
continually evolving system of signs. The inherent bias is that music is not
something that we do, but instead something that we merely accept from
those who have the authority to do it for us. This removes music from the
realm of action into the passive realm of “reception.”
Meanwhile, is the meaning of a speech act simply a question of
processing—of decoding sounds and hearing their meaning? There is also
something very important going on in real time, in the realm of expectation.
A speech act comes into being in the void, in a sense; it not only conveys a
meaning, but it also fills up an experiential space where there might just as
easily not have been such an act. And once it is done, it cannot be undone.
So the very fact of it having been decided in those moments under those
constraints—decided often not even as a complete thought but word by
word—marks it undeniably as improvisation. In other words, to speak is
necessarily to improvise. At some level, to listen to speech is always to bear
this fact in mind; the improvisational nature of speech is essentially
axiomatic, seemingly a precondition for our ever communicating at all.
“Speech acts” are performative in the sense that they represent a filling-in
of shared time with an improvisation that aims to construct meaning.
Certainly in retrospect, speech acts also “are” their semantic meanings, but
before they acquire meaning, they are, first and foremost, acts.
Perhaps one reason that listeners cling to “mistakes” in music as evidence
of improvisation is that “gaffes” do exactly the same thing for speech. Such
“mistakes” (and of course it is difficult to name anything as such)
underscore the fragility of the improvisational act. So we must bear in mind
also the similarity between acts of musical improvisation and speech acts on
this level: they always move forward in time, and they always are in some
way a replacement for their own absence. Their existence is always the
result of a set of choices: that of whether to say anything at all, of what to
say, and of when to say it. The gravity of an improvisational act is the very
fact that it happened at all, as opposed to anything else that could have
happened, including nothing.
Those choices exist within a dynamic web of interacting constraints—
particularly the more social considerations of what is appropriate, what is
expected, what is individually desired, and what is “right.” One of Charles
Limb’s (2008) discoveries is that when we improvise, questions of what is
“right” diminish in importance. In this way a set of constraints is relaxed,
perhaps making it easier to choose, or allowing more choice.

HARNESSING
The latest body of research to support the embodied and situated view of
music is summarized in Changizi (2011). Here it is argued that music takes
advantage of the existing skills we have of recognizing and decoding
audible traces of human action. Instead of emphasizing pitch, harmony, and
the other hallmarks of music perception research, the author focuses on our
perceptual attunement to the specific sounds of human motion.
Since much of the time in everyday life we hear our fellow human beings
in our peripheries without seeing them, Changizi suggests that we have
evolved to decode and respond to these stimuli—to hear everyday human
moving-around noises not as abstract sounds but as markers of bodies in
motion. From an evolutionary perspective, we are optimized to
communicate with and “read” our fellow humans. Building on this idea, the
author argues that the details of music take advantage of our aural
grounding in the perception of specifically human motion: the sound and
rhythmic profile of footsteps as a marker of locomotive behavior; small
Doppler shifts as an indicator of direction of motion (Oechslin et al. 2008);
the correspondence between loudness and distance; and other such sonic
hallmarks. Rather than suggest that humans evolved to hear music, he
argues that humans “harnessed” an existing perceptual apparatus, which had
evolved for the perception of human motion, to develop music, which, he
suggests, mimics human action.
Changizi argues that music takes advantage of our aural ability to notice
human action in the same way that written language takes advantage of our
visual ability to notice contours, edges, and joints, the building blocks of
human vision. Furthermore, human movement is emotionally evocative; we
can recognize the emotion from someone’s gait. Music “can often sound
like contagious expressive human behavior and movement, and trigger a
similar expressive movement in us” (Changizi 2011: 116). But we can take
this argument a step further, since from the perspective of embodiment,
music is more than a mere sonic imitation of human action; indeed, it was
never anything but human action. Until the last century, music was only
ever made by bodily engagement with available sound-producing
technology; whether it was mediated by objects adapted from the natural
world (gourds and logs, animal skins and bones) or pure bodily acts
(stomping, clapping, and singing), the sound of music always was the sound
of people in motion—perhaps a stylized, synchronized, or sustained kind of
motion, but never disconnected from bodily presence or action, nor ever
outside of the realm of plausible human actions. This means that we don’t
perceive rhythms in implausible frequency ranges of 1000 Hz or .001 Hz,
because they do not correspond to any human action. We don’t readily
integrate a stream of stimuli from physically separated sources as if it were
a single source, but, rather, we notice harmonic tones because we are
sharply attuned to the harmonicity of human voices.
In this perspective, crucially, music is inherently social; it taps into parts
of our brains that connect us to other people. We can hear and immediately
understand what people are doing in our midst; their gaits indicate their
behaviors and emotions; the direction of their motion is indicated by
changes in volume and pitch. Working with these very perceptual
ingredients, music recreates for us the sensation and emotional thrill of
people in our midst. Such reasoning falls in line with what J. J. Gibson
called the “ecological mode of perception,” in which our perceptual systems
are tuned to apprehend real-world sound sources in an environment, rather
than only to pure sound itself (Gibson 1979; Shove and Repp 1995). It also
aligns squarely with the views on embodied music cognition—the idea of
bodies listening to bodies—as well as with the neural foundations of
empathy and the notion of auditory action understanding.

CONCLUSION
To summarize the extravagant claims in this rather speculative article:
improvisation “matters” in music because a knowing listener experiences
some kind of empathy for the embodiment of the performer, or some kind
of understanding of the effortfulness of real-time performance. There is
evidence that this phenomenon possibly has a neural basis, which is
grounded in our ability to perceive, recognize, and decode the sights and
sounds of bodies in motion. And this phenomenon is also linked to the
foundations of rhythm perception, since the sound of a humanly generated
rhythm (i.e., the sound of a body in motion) can activate an analogous body
motion in a listener.
Our skill at perceiving, “understanding,” and/or imitating the sonorous
actions of another enables us to synchronize our actions, to operate in
rhythmic unison or in sustained antiphony, to move, sing, dance, or work
together. Improvisation and rhythm, two foundational elements of music
and creativity, both have at their core some kind of embodied perception
and cognition of the other, and therefore they seem to be what enable us, as
human beings, to do anything together in the same time and space.
Music is born of our actions—its ingredients are the sound of bodies in
motion—and therefore music cognition begins as action understanding.
This does not mean that we cannot process musical information without
bodies, but it does mean that our sensations and actions provide the context
for abstraction, symbolic music cognition, and the fantasies brought about
by music-without-bodies.

CODA
What do we mean when we use the word “experience”? It refers to both (1)
the stream of sensation and perception and (2) the accumulation of
cognition through sustained immersion in this stream. (Let us set aside any
notion of “consciousness.”) Our very language suggests an assumed
relationship between the first and second meanings: an “experienced”
person is someone who has “experienced” enough to gain knowledge from
these experiences. So the second sense of “experience” would seem to
encompass the first; to be “experienced,” to have field knowledge, to know
how to handle things in a given situation, is to have undergone prior
“experiences” of a similar sort. In the embodiment perspective, we
understand the first sense of “experience”—sensation and perception—as
connected to and dependent upon embodied action; cognition becomes an
umbrella term for all of these processes, as well as the mental structures that
connect these different stages of the “sensorimotor loop”—sensation,
perception, thought, action.
We might reconsider whether we have cast too wide a net with the
expansive conception of improvisation posed in this chapter. But if we were
to refuse to dignify an infant’s babbling with so exalted a term as
improvisation—if we were to insist instead, for example, that a true act of
improvisation first requires a coherent self, or some threshold level of
“creativity,” or some move away from what is “habitual,” or that it must
display some sort of “resistance” or “non-normativity” or “soul”—then we
might limit the more radical implications of this overall perspective. For I
am suggesting instead that improvisation, in this broad sense, might be
considered as the means by which we acquire selfhood. It is not only a
means of self-transformation, as Arnold Davidson (2005) has eloquently
described it, but of self-generation. In other words, I am positing a
relationship—or more to the point, an identity, a sameness—between what
we call “improvisation” and what we call “experience.” A corollary is that
an observer’s perception of improvisation is contingent upon an
“understanding” of its status as experience—which, again, underscores the
essential intersubjectivity of music cognition.
This broad view does not reject the possibility of political action or
engagement. Indeed, political struggles for selfhood have been advanced by
concurrent transformative improvisations in culture, whether it was the
possible problematization of race brought on by the circulation of music-
without-bodies, or the improvised musical expressions of an African
American subculture defiantly asserting its collective humanity. It is in our
interest to consider these perspectives on the origins of music, so that we
may better understand how fundamental it is to the origins and elaborations
of the self.
Improvisation is a human response to necessity.
Muhal Richard Abrams (2007)

It seems to me what music is is everything that you do.

Cecil Taylor (Mann 1981)

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 CHAPTER 4
THE GHOST IN THE MUSIC, OR THE
PERSPECTIVE OF AN IMPROVISING ANT

DAVID BORGO

ANTS are remarkable creatures. They inhabit almost every landmass on

Earth, survive in most every climate, and make up nearly one quarter of the
total biomass on the planet. They are industrious and exhibit impressive
physical abilities. They are masters of exploiting the cracks, crevices, gaps,
and hollows that other creatures often avoid or ignore.1
Ants work together. They are fearless, even militaristic and conniving at
times, but also generous to the point of self-sacrifice. Most often they
appear to follow their own agenda, yet they secretly communicate with each
other, solving complex problems together and organizing the group without
supervision. The largest ant colonies are frequently described as
superorganisms or vivisystems, since the individuals operate as a unified
entity to maintain the colony. Yet from the perspective of humans, ants are
barely noticeable. And when they are noticed, they are most often perceived
as a nuisance.
Although I briefly discussed actor-network theory in my book Sync or
Swarm: Improvising Music in a Complex Age, Bruno Latour’s recent
overview of the field, Reassembling the Social, has reinvigorated my belief
that ANT offers an important “material-semiotic approach” that could be
invaluable to the study of improvisation.2 Briefly, ANT begins with the
realization that any given interaction overflows with elements from some
other time, some other place, and generated by some other agency. But
rather than becoming paralyzed by the “actor/system quandary” (essentially
the question of whether the actor is “in” a system, or the system is made up
of actors), or even attempting to articulate a “happy medium” that considers
at once the actor and the network in which it is embedded, ANT redraws the
map of the social such that “action is always dislocated, articulated,
delegated, translated.”3
In other words, ANT resists the temptation to invoke social “context” or
social “forces,” or to invoke the “social” or “society” at all as a type of
material with specific properties, since to do so is to accept a collection of
assemblages as being fully formed and no longer open to investigation and
scrutiny. Latour frequently stresses that society, like nature, is “a premature
assemblage” that should be put ahead of us and not behind. His credo for
ANT is to “follow the actors themselves!”4
Critically, Latour argues for an understanding of actor as any thing that
modifies a state of affairs by making a difference: any participant in the
course of action waiting to be given a figuration. The questions to ask,
according to Latour, are, “Does it make a difference in the course of some
other agent’s action or not? Is there some trial that allows someone to detect
this difference?”5 To turn to the contemporary musical domain, it seems
clear that things like hardware and software interfaces and their design, the
underlying code and coding itself, and even the Internet and its propensity
for sharing, collaboration, and institutional gerrymandering, all make a
difference.
In ANT, material objects do not “determine” the action. Hardware and
software clearly do not determine musical style alone any more than
instrument choice does, but neither do they constitute an inert or
inconsequential backdrop to the human actor. Latour argues that objects can
“authorize, allow, afford, encourage, permit, suggest, influence, block,
render possible, forbid, and so on.”6 ANT analysts should be prepared to
investigate who and what participates in the action in order to account for
the durability and extension of any interaction. We cannot content
ourselves, for instance, with the ways in which interactivity is often
discussed in computer music circles or in the music industry itself as if it
were a quality that is designed into a system a priori. John Bowers’s
important work on “Ethnographically Informed Design for Improvised
Electro-Acoustic Music” goes a considerable distance in this regard.7
In my own work in the electro-acoustic environment with
trumpeter/computer musician Jeff Kaiser as the duo KaiBorg, our reigning
aesthetic has been to devise hybrid instruments that both extend and
complicate our sense of agency and control. We wish to avoid the more
conventional divisions of performative labor in electro-acoustic music
between artists and technologists and between acoustic and electronic
performers, as well as any hard and fast distinctions between the so-called
“technical” and “non-technical” aspects of our work. To paraphrase Donna
Haraway’s discourse on the cyborg, we seek pleasure in the confusion of
boundaries and accept the responsibility for their construction.8 One of the
challenges we perceive in the current computer-mediated environment for
musical improvisation is to avoid a situation in which, to again reference
Haraway, our machines are disturbingly lively, and we become
frighteningly inert. Instead, we seek a relationship between the cybernetic
and organic in which the organism becomes one part of elaborate feedback
mechanisms and the cybernetic, in turn, incorporates the sophistication of
the organic into its systems. In an earlier essay, I suggested the term
“configuring,” as it has been used in ANT—and even gave it a Gatesian
twist as configurin’—as a means of understanding the mutually constitutive
processes through which users, technologies, and environments configure
one another.9
My title for the present article references Gilbert Ryle’s well-known
critique of the Cartesian duality of mind and body, “the ghost in the
machine.” In his 1949 book The Concept of Mind, in which the phrase first
appeared, Ryle challenged the “official doctrine” that mind is “self-
luminous,” knowing all that it does, including its causation of action.10 For
Ryle, the “dogma” or the “myth” of the “ghost in the machine” is that the
“will” is a faculty within the mind, and that mental acts determine physical
acts. While Ryle was primarily challenging the views of René Descartes, he
was equally critical of B. F. Skinner’s behaviorism for its insistence that the
actions of conscious individuals were governed exclusively by stimulus-
response mechanisms.
In 1967, Arthur Koestler used Ryle’s turn of phrase as the title of a book
in which he argued that the primitive brain structures upon which the frontal
cortex has developed are the true “ghost in the machine,” in that they can
overpower reason and the higher faculties with destructive impulses.11
Although unconnected to Ryle’s “ghost,” we might also add to this list
Avery Gordon’s provocative book titled Ghostly Matters, in which she
explores the consequences of the historically situated divide between the
social and the individual, the abstract and the concrete, the analytical and
the imaginary, and ultimately argues that we desperately need greater
knowledge of “the things behind the things.”12
In this chapter, I wish to extend the thrust, if not always the character, of
these perspectives into the realm of musical improvisation, arguing that one
of the particular joys of improvising music together is not knowing
precisely the relationship either between one’s own actions and thoughts or
between one’s actions and the actions of others (broadly defined).
Ultimately, I would like to move the site of inquiry beyond the corporeal
and the “social,” as it is normally conceived, in order to investigate more
fully (following Latour) “the trail of associations between heterogeneous
elements.” In addition to actor-network theory, I will draw on insight
concerning “distributed agency” or “interagency” between humans and
technology and on the “extended mind” theory in cognitive science.

CHALLENGING THE OFFICIAL DOCTRINE

The conventional understanding of improvisation, at least in psychological
circles, goes something like this: information, in the form of sound waves,
impinges on the sensorium (perception); we compute an internal
representation of what we are hearing and how we wish to engage/respond
(cognition); and we use this to control action (motor). Work by Philip
Johnson-Laird and Jeff Pressing, for instance, offers a formalized,
computational account of improvisation by maintaining a rather rigid
distinction between perceptual and motor considerations and cognitive
factors.13 Philosopher Susan Hurley amusingly characterizes this general
orientation: “The mind is a kind of sandwich, and cognition is the filling.”14
Researchers with interests in phenomenology or embodied cognition tend
instead to focus on the physicality of performance, on the instrument itself
as a kind of structured environment, and on the intelligence of the body.15
Others have looked beyond the individual and her instrument to take greater
account of evolving group dynamics and shared understandings.16 Herbert
Simon, a Nobel Prize winning psychologist, famously compared the human
mind to a pair of scissors: one blade was the brain, while the other blade
was the specific environment in which the brain was operating. If you want
to understand the function of cognition, Simon reasoned by analogy, you
have to look at both blades simultaneously.17
It is perhaps uncontentious in the modern era to argue that cognition is
both embodied and embedded, in that cognitive processes rely heavily on
features of human bodily experience and depend on the use of external
resources. The extended mind thesis, however, goes further in arguing that
human cognition literally includes elements that lie beyond the boundary of
the human organism.18 Researchers with this orientation argue that we may
be better served, in certain instances, by viewing biological, material, and
semiotic resources as functionally integrated into an “extended” cognitive
system.19 Ultimately, the extended mind thesis is not simply about the
epistemology of mind—how we “talk about” or view cognition—but about
the ontology of mind: what literally counts as cognitive.
This is a challenging proposition for many reasons, not the least of which
is the simple fact that the terms we use—including “mind,” “cognition,”
and “consciousness,” among others—tend to convey the sense of an entity
or activity that goes on entirely inside an organism, and most often entirely
inside the head. To be clear, the agenda here is not to argue that external
artifacts are in and of themselves cognitive, or even that they get to be part
of cognition just because they are causally coupled to a preexisting
cognitive agent. For example, when we pick up a pencil and paper to write
something down, the pencil does not become “cognitive” in its own right.
Rather, the goal is to explain, as Richard Menary writes, “why X and Y are
so coordinated that they together function as Z, which causes further
behavior.”20 Extended mind researchers share a focus on studying the active
exercise of cognitive capacities in the real world and a belief that by
examining just what is involved in the exercise of some particular cognitive
capacity, one finds that it actually does or could well involve causal loops
that extend beyond the body of the individual agent.21
Coupling through language is the paradigmatic example for many
extended mind researchers, since it offers “cognitive scaffolding” to the
individual in a way that depends on its social practice. Hilary Putnam’s
influential work on the social division of linguistic labor demonstrates that
there is no requirement that each individual carry the burden of securing
meaningful reference for words.22 For instance, I might use the word
“sousaphone” or “crumhorn” and have no idea what the instrument looks
like or how it functions. Cognitive neuroscientist and philosopher Alva
Noë, in his recent book titled Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your
Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness, writes:
“Insofar as language is itself socially manufactured and shared by linguistic
communities, then to that extent our cognitive powers require for their very
exercise the existence of a sociolinguistic environment.”23 Although music
does not factor into Noë’s argument for a body- and world-involving
conception of ourselves, he concludes the book with an explicit analogy: “It
is now clear, as it has not been before, that consciousness, like a work of
improvisational music, is achieved in action, by us, thanks to our situation
in and access to a world we know around us. We are in the world and of
it.”24
The perspective of improvising musicians frequently offers compelling
motivation for moving beyond a “head-bound” interpretation of cognition.
In the 2009 film by Phil Hopkins titled Amplified Gesture, saxophonist
Evan Parker explains:
You couple yourself to that instrument and it teaches you as much as you tell it what to do. So
you’re sensitive to … how it’s responding to your efforts to control it. By hearing it, the way it’s
feeding back to you, you learn to control it better. So it’s a very dynamic and very sensitive
process. And the instrument at the same time seems to be giving you additional information. So
[there are] things that you have under your control, but every so often something will go wrong.
You’ll lose control. In that moment you are given an opportunity to learn something else that the
instrument can do. Then gradually the nature of the instrument and its will—it sounds a bit
mystical—in relation to its destiny—it sounds Steinerian! [laughs] But let’s say the saxophone
has a destiny, has a will, and it has a set of intentions in its relationship with you, and you start
to find it difficult to distinguish yourself and your intentions from the instrument’s intentions, or
let’s say I’ve found it difficult to do that.25

Parker’s comment attests to the idea that our cognitive system can be
extended beyond mind-body to mind-body-coupled-with-instrument.
Elsewhere Parker reflected on the social dynamics of improvisation:
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 paranormal nature.26

If the instrument itself and the social dynamics of performance can affect
one’s sense of agency, what role might newer musical technologies play?
Increasingly the electro-acoustic improvised music landscape involves
technologies that can share generation, memory, and judgment capabilities
during performance. In Parker’s view, “It would sort of be crazy not to
work with what’s available. … The creative and the technological always
have a constant kind of interaction, or a feedback relationship with one
another. Your notion of what is achievable affects your intentions.”27
The complex relationship between technological affordances and creative
intentions can be even more tangled in the context of a group performance.
Reflecting on the practice of his Electro-Acoustic Ensemble, Parker notes:
“If you work like this … there’s a kind of uncertainty about whether that
was the first time that sound happened, or ‘Did I miss it the first time and
that’s a replay of a sample of the first time?’”28
Among some contemporary improvisers there also appears to be a
concerted effort to either reduce, deflect, or decenter human agency and
intentionality, whether or not advanced technologies are involved. For
instance, the term “lowercase music” describes a fairly recent subgenre of
free improvisation that, as the name suggests, tends to avoid overt displays
of individual “uppercase” virtuosity. And a recent article by David Toop
titled “The Feeling of Rooms” explores the notion of “atmosphere” in
improvised music (a concept Toop borrows from guitarist Keith Rowe).29
Or for one more example, a recent DVD released on the EcoSono label
showcasing emergent technological systems and human group
improvisation (in many cases recorded together outdoors) is titled Agents
Against Agency.30
I would like to suggest that the agency wielded by the environment is
becoming increasingly important, and that artists often articulate this
interrelationship in compelling ways. In particular, I argue that free
improvisation, especially but not only in the context of its interface with
advanced audio and computer technology, affords simultaneously an inroad
to participating in complexity and the possibility of creating some
provisional closure, some fleeting reduction of complexity, in a world
increasingly characterized by relentless machinic heterogenesis.31 In other
words, if machines are to serve as mediators of human co-evolution with
the environment, then improvising music under the conditions of hybrid
constellations of human and technological actions can offer a situated
practice for exploring interagency and the extended mind—in essence
providing an avenue for exorcising the ghost in the music.

DISTRIBUTED AGENCY AND THE PUZZLE OF

COACTION
In an article exploring distributed agency between humans, machines, and
programs, Werner Rammert argues that the meaning of “agent” in the social
sciences associated with human intentionality is being transferred to
software; we “interact” with machines, and personal software “agents” do
much of the communicating, searching, and aggregating for us.32 In an era
of Google algorithms and biotechnology, it often seems as if we are the
ones being “objectified”—turned into “standing reserve,” to reference
Heidegger—as profiling programs multiply and evolved machines and
manufactured organisms coexist in the same frame of reference. Lev
Manovich, whose theoretical work has been influential in new media
studies and what he now terms “software studies,” highlights that
“transcoding” between the computer layer and the cultural layer—
essentially a process of mutual influence—is an intrinsic and unavoidable
dimension of our interactions with digital and networked media.33
Taking a historical perspective, Rammert identifies a gradual drift over
the past several centuries from crafted tools to mechanical machines to
automatic systems, and, in terms of their agency, a drift through “passive,”
“semi-active,” “re-active,” “pro-active” and, most recently, “co-operative”
systems. Rammert argues that a mechanistic vocabulary suffices for
describing passive, semi-active, and re-active behaviors, but that we must
adopt a notion of interagency with regard to humans and machines when
discussing systems capable of actively searching for new information,
either to select behavior or to change a pre-given frame of action.
Adopting for the moment Rammert’s engineering terminology, most
conventional musical instruments are “passive,” in that they are completely
moved from outside (from a phenomenological perspective, however, the
relationship created as a musician plays an instrument is often anything but
passive!). “Semi-active” instruments are those that have one aspect of self-
acting, including things like mechanical organs and vibraphones. More
recent electric and electronic instruments often exploit the “re-active”
aspects of feedback loops and delay, among other things, while “pro-active”
instruments are increasingly those that operate in the digital realm. Here we
might think of sequencers, score-following programs, and other intelligent
accompaniment systems that utilize self-activating programs and
subroutines.
The final category of “co-operative” agency could describe both the
distributed and self-coordinating systems and networks that compose the
“workflow” of countless contemporary musicians and, more specifically,
the technical design for many interactive environments for improvisation.
Describing the earliest generation of these “interactive composing
instruments,” as he terms them, Joel Chadabe writes that they “made
musical decisions as they responded to a performer, introducing the concept
of shared symbiotic control of a musical process.”34
If technical objects can exhibit multiple and often overlapping levels of
agency, then what of human beings? I am tempted to employ a similar five-
part taxonomy to describe levels of human agency, moving from
“repressed,” “rote,” and “routine” behaviors (for which mechanistic
vocabulary may often suffice) to “reflexive” and “reflective” agency.
Contrary to the “free-from-habit-and-influence” discourse that all too often
circulates around free improvisation, much of the effort involved in
cultivating expertise—whether musical or not—involves building up
fluency and automaticity so that one may be more “reflexive” and
“reflective” in performance. “As I write my mind is not preoccupied with
how my fingers form the letters,” wrote Sir Charles Sherrington in 1906,
“my attention is fixed simply on the thoughts the words express. But there
was a time when the formation of the letters, as each one was written,
would have occupied my whole attention.”35 Envisioning the five “Rs” of
human agency positioned in a spiral configuration rather than in a linear or
even circular arrangement might help conceptualize the way in which many
improvisers do use reflective agency to confront their own repressed, rote,
and routine activities, or just as often to challenge those of the musicians
with whom they improvise.36
Yet I fear that this perspective subscribes all too easily to Ryle’s ghost in
the machine, presenting agency—or at least that agency that matters most—
in the form of an independent, internal, and fully controllable “will” that
reflects and in turn authors one’s thoughts and actions. Experimental
evidence demonstrates that our actions are often either initiated from below
the level of our “conscious” awareness or inflected by social dynamics of
which we are seldom aware.37 For example, when a professional baseball
player “decides” to tip his bat just up or just down as the pitch crosses the
plate, he is performing a feat that, due to processing speed considerations
alone, cannot possibly be conscious or involve the frontal cortex. A similar
process may be involved in the rapid-fire aspects of Parker’s solo
saxophone playing. For a more commonplace example, consider that when
raising one’s arm the brain can actually prepare the action before its
“conscious” operator is aware that it is doing so. And perhaps even more
surprising, one’s experience of “authorship” can be enhanced or
undermined relatively easily by externally directed attention or by
manipulation of environmental and social conditions.
Harvard social psychologist Daniel M. Wegner uses some deceptively
simple alphabet pointing experiments (involving paired participants
working simultaneously and in leading and following arrangements) to
demonstrate how one’s experience of “authorship” can be extremely
sensitive to external social pressures.38 Wegner argues that people come to
understand their actions as their own by using proprioception (the mind’s
ability to learn from the body itself), establishing how the mind may have
contributed to action (via intention, planning, and premeditation), and
incorporating external information about the social circumstance of the
action (the presence and potential contribution of other agents).
For Wegner, these three indicators of authorship may add or subtract
from each other such that the experience of conscious will is the final
common pathway that produces the sense of “I did it,” “I didn’t do it,” or
any gradations in between. In place of a “ghostly” faculty within the mind
that controls action, Wegner envisions a conscious will that emerges from
the mind’s efforts to understand its own authorship. He uses this insight,
and our propensity for social accounting (to constantly keep track of who
does what), to conclude that “authorship judgments have evolved to account
for own agency in a social world where agency in coaction is the measure
of all things.”39
Following Wegner’s insight, I would like to argue that a similar
balancing act is at play in improvised music, as individual musicians
combine informational pathways from proprioception,
intention/planning/premeditation (inspiration?), and the social circumstance
of performance gleaned from the shared acoustic, visual, and material space
and the presence and potential contribution of other agents writ large. It
may be that improvised music also offers a shared experience by which we
can, at least temporarily, lessen our grip on social accounting and celebrate
—rather than merely puzzle over—coaction.40

WHO IS REALLY MAKING THE MUSIC?

The notion of “own agency” in improvisation is an important subject about
which there is little agreement. It may seem incontrovertible that
improvisation is about human agency and intentionality. To improvise
requires the capacity to act, and for it to mean anything at all it must surely
be “about” something, a common definition of intentionality. Duke
Ellington famously remarked: “Improvisation? Anyone who plays anything
worth hearing knows what he’s going to play, no matter whether he
prepares a day ahead or a beat ahead. It has to be with intent.”41 And yet,
while improvising it can remain unclear at times from where and whence
intention and agency actually arise. “The best bits of my solo playing,”
Evan Parker reflects, “I can’t explain to myself.”42
Scholarship on musical improvisation tends to be either concerned with
the ways in which creative expression is structured and confined by certain
rules and traditions, usually conceived of as a model or referent stored in
long-term memory, or the ways in which individual artists variously
confront their influences (in culturally informed ways ranging from anxiety-
ridden to ecstatic).43 While I find these discussions illuminating, and it is
often useful to explore free improvisation as a fascinating boundary case for
these various contentions, I wish here to return to the question of distributed
agency between humans, machines, and programs and, in particular, to
extend the inquiry further into the realm of electro-acoustic music.
One reason for pursuing this is that electronics, on a purely technical
level, can easily produce dissociating factors in musical production and
reception. The history and impact of sound recording technology, for
instance, has been a favorite topic of scholars pursuing this argument,44 but
additional shifts over the last century or so in sound reinforcement
(microphones, amplifiers, loud speakers), sound production (synthesis,
sampling), sound transformation (signal processing), and sound control
(gesture mapping, for example) offer equally pronounced dissociative
potential.
Since the late 1960s, amplification and electronics have played an
important role in free improvisation, and arguably much electro-acoustic
improvisation begins from the realization that the “one-gesture-to-one-
acoustic-event” paradigm has been broken.45 Pioneering groups such as
Musica Elettronica Viva, AMM, and Music Improvisation Company used
“homemade” electronics to amplify “small” sounds, frequently introducing
unexpected sonic elements that seemed unconnected to human agency.
Writing about his time with Musica Elettronica Viva, Alvin Curran
recounts:
We found ourselves busily soldering cables, contact mikes, and talking about “circuitry” as if it
were a new religion. By amplifying the sounds of glass, wood, metal, water, air, and fire, we
were convinced we had tapped into the sources of the natural musics of “everything.” We were
in fact making a spontaneous music which could be said to be coming from “nowhere” and
made out of “nothing”—all somewhat a wonder and a collective epiphany.46

In the wake of noise, techno, house, and hip-hop, and the ceaseless
development of sampling, sequencing, synthesizing, and signal processing
technologies, among other things, the scene today seems decidedly
different. Following Rammert, we might wish to argue that a qualitative
shift in the level of technical agency—or, better stated, human-machine
interagency—is now achieved when advanced computer programs
participate in or take over planning and control activities and their
intelligent coordination.
To illustrate this point, Rammert asks the compelling question: “Who is
really flying the Airbus?” While we may commonly assign agency to the
pilot, in reality the plane transports a load of passengers safely from point A
to point B only if the entire system of people (e.g., pilot, co-pilot, radio
operator, flight controller, tourist office, airline company, and aviation
industry), machines (e.g., engines, rudders, radio equipment, radar, booking
machine, aviation technology, and air traffic system), and programs (auto-
pilot software, navigation systems, radio signals, radar screening,
reservation software, and R&D, and infrastructure plans) are operating
successfully and together.
We might ask a similar question about electro-acoustic improvised music
performance: “Who is really making the music?” Although we may wish to
attribute agency only to the human performers (and undoubtedly this is still
a primary draw for audiences, especially in the context of “live”
performance), similar systemic relationships between people, machines, and
programs are deeply implicated and coordinated. Rough analogies to the
human and technical infrastructure involved in flying an Airbus can be
located in the musical realm as performers, audiences, sound reinforcement
technicians, instrument designers, interface programmers, promoters, and
many others exhibit interagency with an enormous variety of musical,
audio, and computer hardware, software, and media, the performance
space(s), and institutional programs and plans, among other things.
Another possible approach to answering the question of “Who is really
making the music?” is to focus instead on the “perceptual agency” of the
listener, or the idea that what we hear in a particular performance depends,
in part, on where we focus our attention.47 Reflecting on his work with the
Electro-Acoustic Ensemble, Parker comments: “There’s so much going on,
so I think the ideal mix is beyond anybody’s imagination because no one
knows what is the total complement of sonic activity—you only know what
you hear.”48 But returning us to the individual cognitive agent as the locus
of activity does not necessarily reduce or remove the complexity from the
situation, and it runs the risk of keeping us embroiled in the methodological
individualism and representationalist paradigm that has historically
dominated studies of music cognition and psychology.
Even our most mundane tasks now occur across the backdrop of complex
computational infrastructures, what geographer Nigel Thrift has dubbed the
“technological unconscious.”49 Drawing on Thrift’s work, philosopher
Mark B. N. Hansen argues that a pressing question for contemporary
cultural theorists is: “How can one recognize the certain consistency,
perhaps even the autonomy, of the (individual or collective) human
mindbody and at the same time account for the certain non-autonomy that
accrues from its unavoidable reliance on the agency of informationally
complex environments to achieve its cognitive tasks?”50
Hansen’s question has a particular relevance to the realm of
technologically mediated improvised music performance. Can (or should?)
we continue to speak of the autonomy of the improviser even as her
performance practice is ever more embedded in a network of agents and
informationally complex environments? Not only has the “one gesture to
one acoustic event paradigm” been broken, but physical, cognitive, spatial,
and even geographic constraints no longer adhere in quite the same way.51
The mandate in improvisation to compose music together “in the course of
performance” does provide an important aspect of “operational closure,” as
does the flexibility of our autopoietic nature, our “organismic closure,” but
increasingly we are being asked to, in Hansen’s words, “combine multiple
and heterogeneous closures in order to act in the world.”52
Katherine Hayles’s frequently cited book, How We Became Posthuman,
details the complex and conflicted history of this emerging orientation
while also cautioning us against capitulating too easily to dominant strains
of thought in cybernetics and information theory.53 Andy Clark’s equally
influential work argues that the overriding question is not how we became
posthuman, but rather how we have always been posthuman, or as he
prefers, “natural-born cyborgs” or “open-ended opportunistic controllers.”54
Alexander Weheliye, conversely, focuses on the racial and cultural
dimensions of posthuman discourse and argues that people in the African
diaspora, in particular, were never human to begin with, and therefore the
desired “escape” from the liberal humanist subject so often found in writing
about the posthuman actually begins from rather tenuous footing.55
Similarly, George E. Lewis, drawing on the important work of Lucy
Suchman on interactivity, argues that dominant discourses and research
directions in artificial intelligence continue to assume Euro-American
models of human agency and subjectivity.56 Improvising in a
technologically saturated realm may offer an avenue through which we can
explore the active role that the environment plays in driving cognitive
processes, but the choices we make, and the relationships we forge, remain
critical in this endeavor.

WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?

Even if we take the dissociative dimensions of musical technology as a
given—a position, I should add, that may subscribe too easily to
technological determinism and run counter to much of the extended mind
argument—where do we go from here? Some may simply view the current
situation as another opportunity for humans to shape the environment
according to their creative whims. For instance, Simon Emmerson seems to
subscribe to this view when he writes: “We no longer assert our human
presence only by hitting, scraping, and blowing the objects around us, but
through reasserting our power over the new medium—using it as source.”57
Lewis, however, has repeatedly stressed in both his musical and scholarly
work that “the improvised musical encounter may be seen as a negotiation
between musicians, some of whom are people, others not.” Lewis is willing
not only to extend agency to machines but also a certain empathy to his
non-human partners. “Decisions taken by the computer have consequences
for the music that must be taken into account by the human improvisors, an
aesthetic of variation and difference,” Lewis reminds us, “that is clearly at
variance with the information retrieval and control paradigm that late
capitalism has found useful in the encounter with interactive multimedia
and hypertext discourses.”58
Despite Lewis’s insightful critique, I worry that we are in danger of
replacing the false dichotomy between mind and body—the ghost in the
machine—with a trichotomy of mind/body/machine that continues to avoid
complex issues foregrounded by human/non-human entanglements. Simply
admitting machines into the realm of agency, as Rammert and Lewis are
willing to do, may not be enough. This alone cannot adequately confront
the still dominant tendency to make a stark division between humans and
their technological environment: in other words, to separate arbitrarily
“what we make” from “who we (think we) are.” Further, in separating
machines and programs, as Rammert suggests, are we simply recreating the
mind/body split in the technical realm?59
In some ways, ANT extends the “material-semiotic” understanding of the
extended mind thesis outward beyond individual cognition to gain a better
understanding of how assemblages and collectives are formed. Latour asks
that we “restudy what we are made of and extend the repertoire of ties and
the number of associations way beyond the repertoire proposed by social
explanations.” He equally insists that we make ourselves “sensitive again to
the sheer difficulty of assembling collectives made of so many new
members once nature and society have been simultaneously put aside.” I
find this orientation to be, in interesting ways, analogous to the challenges
posed and faced by contemporary musicians. The musician-to-musician
interactions that we experience through improvised music are undoubtedly
the terminus point of a great number of agencies swimming toward them.
And in the wake of the significant rupturing and rethinking of music and
musical style that took place in the last century, contemporary musicians are
now often faced with the daunting challenge of “assembling collectives,”
both for their own personal musical use (as in “technical” assemblages of
instruments, devices, and interfaces, or as in a personal “vocabulary” of
techniques, among other things) and for the purpose of creating a
communal sensibility and shared commitment (as evidenced by the many
artist-run and community-oriented collectives that nurture the music).
Although Latour considered many times renaming the field that he
helped to initiate—due in no small part to the many misrepresentations it
has spawned in the intervening decades—in Reassembling the Social he
fully embraces the name as well as its acronym, since ants, after all, are
“myopic, workaholic, trail-sniffing and collective traveller(s).”
As an improviser, I proudly wear the moniker of ant as well. Improvisers,
like their ANT counterparts, can be equally single-minded and dedicated,
while also supportive and community-minded. Free improvisation, filled as
it sometimes is with quick reactions and dense soundscapes, has even
inspired literal analogies to insect behavior. Toop writes: “Perhaps it was no
coincidence that in the wake of drummer John Stevens and the Spontaneous
Music Ensemble, certain strands of English improvised music were known,
half-disparagingly as insect music.”60 And John Corbett once compared the
improvisation community to “ants stripping a carcass,” working “from the
inside and outside of codes.”61
Latour argues that “it is only the freshness of the results of social science
that can guarantee its relevance.” He stresses that ANT researchers must
work to counteract the premature transformation of what he calls “matters
of concern” into “matters of fact,” a position that seems equally applicable
to musical improvisers, who must work to counteract premature closures on
interactional strategies and sonic techniques/resources, among other things.
Ultimately, how we conceive of and value ant-like behavior also tells us
as much about ourselves as it does about ants. The discourse that has
surrounded improvisation, and the presumed binary between it and
composition, reveals much about the ways in which cultural understandings
are often reflected, reshaped, or remain concealed as we continue
assembling collectives together. Lewis notes, “In Euro-American art-music
culture this binary [between improvisation and composition] is routinely
and simplistically framed as involving the ‘effortless spontaneity’ of
improvisation, versus the careful deliberation of composition—the
composer as ant, the improviser as grasshopper.”62
In addition to their impressive individual and collective behaviors, ants
also co-evolve with other species to form complex interrelationships
ranging from mimetic (involving mimicry) and parasitic (where one
organism benefits and the other is harmed), to commensal (where one
organism benefits and the other is unharmed) and mutualistic (where both
organisms benefit). It may be that these relationships also capture an
essence of the ways in which improvisation plays a role in all musical
traditions, and, writ large, dynamically informs our shared existence.

A PROVISIONAL CLOSURE
In this chapter I have focused on electro-acoustic improvisation as a useful
site of inquiry, since in this domain musicians are entering into increasingly
immersive relations with their instruments and forming increasingly
complex machine-body assemblages. All music, however, relies on an
interconnected series of material mediations involving sound sources and
spaces, for instance, as well as other mediations that may be more tradition-
dependent, such as scores and staging in Western European art music.
Ultimately, I have argued that we are better served by notions of
interagency and interactive contingency between heterogeneous sources of
activities than with the dual concept of human action as intentional and
creative and material and machine activity as inert, repetitive, or rule-
following.
This realization, however, does not preclude the need to interrogate the
ways in which notions of the “technical” and the “non-technical” are used
—when, by whom, and to what effect—as well as to what extent this
distinction itself performs different communities. In an article discussing
glitch music and ANT (as well as Bourdieu), Nick Prior argues that we need
to give increased attention to “how machines produce as well as get
produced, enable as well as constrain, act as well as react,” but that in
addition to opening the “black box of technology,” we must do the same for
the “well-regulated ballet of the field.”63
Although the current essay makes only limited inroads in that regard, my
contention is that the provisional closure provided by electro-acoustic
improvised music performance—it begins, it ends, it starts anew—can
celebrate our fundamental and shared humanity even as it tracks the
alterations imposed on it by our ever accelerating environmental
complexity. Undoubtedly, one of the ongoing challenges that artists face
while working in the rapidly evolving musical technoscape is the extent to
which one chooses to spend one’s time either negotiating new “interface”
environments or developing knowledge, connection, and intuition within
more familiar ones. The trend in recent years toward “ubiquitous,” “social,”
“tangible,” and “wearable” computing, as well as advances in audio and
gesture recognition technology, among other things, has the potential to
make our interfaces more intuitive, but also portends to make the computer
even more entangled in our daily and artistic lives.
Hansen argues that we face an ethical imperative “to avoid the twin
temptations posed by contemporary environmental complexity”: either “to
dissolve boundaries altogether” and therefore flatten our notions of agency
across human and technical configurations, or “to harden boundaries into a
handful of durable autopoietic system types,” which may only redraft
previous distinctions between the human and the technical. In the end,
Hansen believes that we must maintain a commitment to “the irreducibility
of the human perspective” and to “the human as a form of living, in the face
of its ever more complexly configured technical distribution.”64
While I agree with Hansen’s well-honed argument and heartfelt position,
our cognitive and creative abilities are not, nor have they ever been,
achievements we reach in isolation. Creativity is an interactive process and
a consequence of the material-semiotic scaffolding of culture. One goal of
Gary Peters’s recent book The Philosophy of Improvisation is to liberate
improvisation studies from “the foibles and idiosyncrasies of individual
practitioners and their self-legitimizing discourses” and to strip it of “the
humanistic and expressionistic cultural garb that clings to it.”65 Admittedly,
this is still a daunting and potentially dangerous challenge.
An approach inspired by ANT and the “extended mind” theories of
cognition might, however, give us some theoretical and empirical teeth to
speak more precisely about the evolving “group mind” or “group flow”—
ideas that many improvisers already feel comfortable discussing—by
investigating how bodily and interpersonal negotiations and the
manipulation of external cognitive resources are coordinated in such a way
that they jointly cause further behavior. At the very least, this orientation
can help us look beyond the false opposition between social and ecological
relations and avoid assuming that the workings of the mind can be equated
with the operation of neural machinery.
It may be that those most interested in identifying themselves as
“improvisers,” regardless of their particular passions or lot in life, are
simply by disposition those most willing to engage with—and rely upon—
the complexity and unpredictability of brain, body, and world integration.
The feeling of extending one’s mind and consciousness across the sonic,
social, and material environment that can emerge from the improvised
encounter can be transformative. But it also may not last much beyond it.
Not all occasions of improvising music will even engender this “out of
one’s head” feeling. Even glimpses of this feeling, however, and the
growing body of research from several disciplines that helps to support it,
may reveal previously hidden depths and afford new methodologies and
perspectives. It may also help us avoid attributing agency only to individual
human motivations, skills, and activities, “the ghost in the music,” and
instead to find it in the nexus of personal, interpersonal, and material factors
—the “ant.”

NOTES
1. Mark W. Moffett, Adventures Among Ants: A Global Safari with a Cast of Trillions (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2010), 10.
2. David Borgo, Sync or Swarm: Improvising Music in a Complex Age (London and New York:
Continuum, 2005); and Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-
Network Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), Kindle edition.
3. Latour, Reassembling the Social, location 2225.
4. Ibid., location 3231.
5. Ibid., location 937.
6. Ibid., location 3231.
7. John Bowers, “Improvising Machines: Ethnographically Informed Design for Improvised
Electro-Acoustic Music,” M.A. Thesis (University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK, 2002).
8. Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the
Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New
York: Routledge, 1991), 149–181.
9. David Borgo and Jeff Kaiser, “Configurin(g) KaiBorg: Ideology, Identity and Agency in
Electro-Acoustic Improvised Music,” in Beyond the Centres: Musical Avant-Gardes Since 1950
(conference proceedings, 2010), available at http://btc.web.auth.gr/proceedings.html. The
Gatesian twist refers to the influential work of Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A
Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).
10. Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949).
11. Arthur Koestler, The Ghost in the Machine (New York: Macmillan, 1967).
12. Avery F. Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2008).
13. See, for example, P. N. Johnson-Laird, “How Jazz Musicians Improvise,” Music Perception 19,
no. 3 (Spring 2002): 415–442; and Jeff Pressing, “Improvisation: Methods and Models,” in
Generative Processes in Music: The Psychology of Performance, Improvisation, and
Composition, ed. John A. Sloboda (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 129–178. It should be
noted that the vast majority of music psychology research has focused on how we perceive and
process music from the listener’s perspective. Issues of music performance and improvisation
have received far less attention, largely due to the breadth of variability and creativity contained
within these topics.
14. S. L. Hurley, “Active Perception and Vehicle Externalism,” in Consciousness in Action, ed. S. L.
Hurley (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 401.
15. See for example David Sudnow, Ways of the Hand: The Organization of Improvised Conduct
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978); and Vijay Iyer, “Embodied Mind, Situated
Cognition, and Expressive Microtiming in African-American Music,” Music Perception 19, no.
3 (Spring 2002): 387–414.
16. See, for example, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Grant Jewell Rich, “Musical Improvisation: A
Systems Approach,” in Creativity in Performance, ed. R. Keith Sawyer (Greenwich, CT: Ablex
Publishing Group, 1997), 43–66; R. Keith Sawyer, Group Creativity: Music, Theater,
Collaboration (Mahwah, NJ: L. Erlbaum Associates, 2003); and Howard S. Becker and Robert
R. Faulkner, Do You Know …? The Jazz Repertoire in Action (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2009).
17. Herbert A. Simon, “Invariants of Human Behavior,” Annual Review of Psychology 41 (January
1990): 1–19.
18. See Andy Clark and David J. Chalmers, “The Extended Mind,” Analysis 58, no. 1 (January
1998): 10–23.
19. Research related to the extended mind thesis can also be found under the headings of active or
situated cognition, locational externalism, and wide computation.
20. Richard Menary, “Introduction: The Extended Mind in Focus,” in The Extended Mind, ed.
Richard Menary (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010), 12. Among the most compelling empirical
evidence for the extended mind thesis are studies of memory, visual perception, and problem
solving that demonstrate both the integration of explicit symbols located in an organism’s
environment into that organism’s cognitive regime, and the cognitive incorporation of
nonsymbolic aspects of one’s environment, which might include things like social networks and
bodily activities (both one’s own and others). This general theoretical orientation is also
supported by considerable recent thinking in genetics, developmental systems biology, and
environmental physiology. For more on these topics see Robert A. Wilson, “Meaning Making
and the Mind of the Externalist,” in The Extended Mind, ed. Richard Menary, 167–188
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010).
21. The literature employs terms such as “cognitive system” and “cognitive resource” to avoid the
individualistic framework that tends to dominate thinking about cognitive agency. Some critics,
however, fear that the extended mind thesis flouts the distinction between intrinsic and derived
intentionality, or that it mistakes extracranial aids to cognition for the real vehicles of cognition.
Others find it too conservative, insofar as it can be read to support a representationalist (rather
than an anti-representationalist) version of postcognitivism, or that it precludes the extension of
the idea of cognition to other, less complicated life forms.
22. Hilary Putnam, “The Meaning of ‘Meaning,’ ” in Philosophical Papers, vol. 2, Mind, Language,
and Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975).
23. Alva Noë, Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology
of Consciousness (New York: Hill and Wang, 2009), 88.
24. Ibid., 186, emphasis added.
25. Phil Hopkins, dir., Amplified Gesture, DVD, prod. by David Sylvian (London: Opium (Arts)
Ltd., 2009).
26. Quoted in John Corbett, Extended Play: Sounding Off from John Cage to Dr. Funkenstein
(Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), 203.
27. Quoted in Peter Margasak, “Evan Parker: Making Music with Music,” Chicago Reader,
September 24, 2009, accessed June 10, 2011, http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/evan-
parker-making-music-from-music/Content?oid=1200713.
28. Ibid.
29. David Toop, “The Feeling of Rooms,” in Blocks of Consciousness and the Unbroken
Continuum, ed. Brian Marley and Mark Wastell (London: Sound 323, 2005), 308–327.
30. Agents Against Agency: Musical Emergence in Dialog with Nature, DVD (Ecosono, 2011).
31. For more on these topics see Mark B. N. Hansen and Bruce Clarke, Emergence and
Embodiment: New Essays on Second-Order Systems Theory (Durham: Duke University Press,
2009); and Félix Guattari, “Machinic Heterogenesis,” trans. James Creech, in Rethinking
Technologies, ed. Verena Andermatt Conley, et al. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1993), 13–28.
32. Werner Rammert, “Where the Action Is: Distributed Agency Between Humans, Machines, and
Programs” in Paradoxes of Interactivity, ed. Uwe Seifert, Jin Hyun Kim, and Anthony Moore
(New Brunswick and London: Transaction Publishers, 2008), 63–91.
33. Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002).
34. Joel Chadabe, Electric Sound: The Past and Promise of Electronic Music (Upper Saddle River,
NJ: Prentice Hall, 1997), 201.
35. Charles Sherrington, The Integrative Action of the Nervous System (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 1906).
36. For related work, see Donald A. Schön, Educating the Reflective Practitioner (San Francisco:
Jossey-Bass, 1990).
37. See Don Ross, “Introduction: Science Catches the Will,” in Distributed Cognition and the Will:
Individual Volition in Social Context, ed. Don Ross et al. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007),
1–16.
38. Daniel M. Wegner and Betsy Sparrow, “The Puzzle of Coaction,” in Distributed Cognition and
the Will: Individual Volition in Social Context, ed. Don Ross et al. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
2008), 17–38.
39. Wegner, “The Puzzle of Coaction,” 31.
40. Musical improvisation is not alone in this regard. Wegner briefly cites the dancing of Fred
Astaire and Ginger Rodgers as exemplary coaction, and other intimate partner relationships
would fit the bill as well.
41. Quoted in Gabriel Solis and Bruno Nettl, eds., Musical Improvisation: Art, Education, and
Society (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2009), ix.
42. Quoted in Graham Lock, “After the New: Evan Parker, Speaking of the Essence,” The Wire 85
(1991): 33. The historical distance between these two speakers is telling. Ellington developed
his art in a society that too frequently dismissed African American creativity as “improvised” in
the pejorative sense of the word, and Parker came of age “across the pond” at a time when a
“culture of spontaneity” was increasingly revered rather than reviled. Despite these differences,
similar views to those held by Ellington and Parker, I argue, still hold sway in the contemporary
improvised music community.
43. See Bruno Nettl, “Thoughts on Improvisation: A Comparative Approach,” The Musical
Quarterly 60, no. 1 (January 1974), 1–19. For a range of opinion on influence and artistry see
Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); John
Murphy, “Jazz Improvisation: The Joy of Influence,” The Black Perspective in Music 18, no. 1–
 2 (1990): 7–19; and Jonathan Lethem, “The Ecstasy of Influence” in Sound Unbound, ed. Paul
D. Miller, 25–52 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008).
44. See, for instance, Mark Katz, Capturing Sound: How Technology Changed Music, rev. ed.
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010).
45. David Wessel and Matthew Wright, “Problems and Prospects for Intimate Musical Control of
Computers,” Computer Music Journal 26, no. 3 (Fall 2002): 11–22.
46. Alvin Curran, “Cage’s Influence: A Panel Discussion” (with Gordon Mumma, Allan Kaprow,
James Tenney, Christian Wolff, Alvin Curran, and Maryanne Amacher), in Writings Through
John Cage’s Music, Poetry, and Art, ed. David W. Bernstein and Christopher Hatch (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2001), 177–178.
47. See Ingrid Monson, “Jazz as Political and Musical Practice,” in Musical Improvisation: Art,
Education, and Society, ed. Gabriel Solis and Bruno Nettl (Urbana and Chicago: University of
Illinois Press, 2009), 21–37.
48. Quoted in Margasak, “Evan Parker,” n.p.
49. Nigel Thrift, “Remembering the Technological Unconscious by Foregrounding Knowledges of
Position,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 22 (2004): 175–190.
50. Mark B. N. Hansen, “System-Environment Hybrids,” in Emergence and Embodiment: New
Essays on Second-Order Systems Theory, ed. Mark B. N. Hansen and Bruce Clarke (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2009), 117.
51. David Borgo, “Beyond Performance: Transmusicking in Cyberspace,” in Taking It to the
Bridge: Music as Performance, ed. Nicholas Cook and Richard Pettengill (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 2013), 319–348.
52. Hansen, “System-Environment Hybrids,” 118.
53. N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature,
and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
54. Andy Clark, Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).
55. Alexander G. Weheliye, “Feenin’: Posthuman Voices in Contemporary Black Popular Music,”
Social Text 20, no. 2 (Summer 2002): 21–47.
56. George E. Lewis, “Mobilitas Animi: Improvising Technologies, Intending Chance,” Parallax
13, no. 4 (2007): 111; and Lucy A. Suchman, Human-Machine Reconfigurations: Plans and
Situated Actions, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
57. Simon Emmerson, “ ‘Losing Touch?’: The Human Performer and Electronics,” in Music,
Electronic Media and Culture, ed. Simon Emmerson (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing,
2000), 212.
58. George E. Lewis, “Live Algorithms and the Future of Music,” Cyberinfrastructure Technology
Watch Quarterly (May 2007), accessed June 10, 2011, http://www.ctwatch.org.
59. Jeff Kaiser astutely pointed this out after an earlier presentation of this material, and he is
engaging this issue in his doctoral research in music at the University of California, San Diego.
60. David Toop, “Frame of Freedom: Improvisation, Otherness and the Limits of Spontaneity,” in
Undercurrents: The Hidden Wiring of Modern Music (New York and London: Continuum,
2002), 247.
61. John Corbett, “Ephemera Underscored: Writing Around Free Improvisation,” in Jazz Among the
Discourses, ed. Krin Gabbard (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 237.
62. George Lewis, “Too Many Notes: Computers, Complexity, and Culture,” Leonardo Music
Journal 10, no. 1 (December 2000): 38.
63. Nick Prior, “Putting a Glitch in the Field: Bourdieu, Actor Network Theory, and Contemporary
Music,” Cultural Sociology 2, no. 3 (November, 2008): 314, 316.
64. Hansen, “System-Environment Hybrids,” 126.
 65. Gary Peters, The Philosophy of Improvisation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009),
169.

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 PART II

CRITICAL THEORIES
 CHAPTER 5
THE IMPROVISATIVE

TRACY MCMULLEN

THIS essay explores the ramifications of musical improvisation for

understanding self and other. It suggests that musical improvisation may
offer insights into a conception of self and other different from the
dominant model found in most cultural theory. It is my contention that
contemporary cultural theory is too beholden to Hegelian notions of the self
as created through the field of the Other and the concomitant emphasis on
“recognition” as the central factor in the construction of the subject. This
emphasis on recognition is, in part, instilled through the theory of the
performative put forward by Jacques Derrida and Judith Butler. I will detail
my concerns with this theory and then offer an alternative way to
understand the relation of self and other, one that focuses on “generosity”
rather than “recognition.” I describe this as a theory of the “improvisative.”
Using the improvisative as a model turns the conceptual lean from the
Other to the self, focusing on what the self can give rather than on what the
Other will recognize.1 This, I suggest, offers a better approach to expanding
the “livability” of subjects than the current focus on the performative. I
conclude with an example of the improvisative in action, which I observed
during a concert at the Girls’ Jazz and Blues Camp in Berkeley, California,
in 2010.

THE PERFORMATIVE AND THE IMPROVISATIVE

Butler introduced the idea of gender performativity in her 1990 book
Gender Trouble; since then, performativity has become a central
theorization of identity in cultural studies. Derrida’s analysis of Kafka’s
short story “Before the Law” significantly influenced Butler’s conception of
gender performativity. In Kafka’s story, a man stands before a door to “the
Law” guarded by a doorman and asks to enter. The doorman states that the
man may not enter, but that “it is possible” he may be able to enter later.
Although the door is always open, the man decides “that it is better to wait
until he gets permission.” The man waits outside the door for years, in fact,
until the end of his life—periodically asking permission to enter and being
denied, but hoping that one day he will be allowed to enter. As his life nears
its end, the man asks why no one else has come to attempt admittance to the
Law, since “everyone strives to meet the Law.” The doorman, seeing the
man “has reached his end,” reveals to the man that the door was made only
for him and will now be shut.2
Significantly, the doorman never tells the man he is permanently
prohibited entry. The man is in a state of waiting. Derrida argues that this is
our essential relation with “the Law.” The Law cannot be found but gains
its power as we stand before it and ask to enter. Both the subject and the
Law are in fact brought into being in this relation.
Butler applies Derrida’s analysis to the operations of gender. Of “Before
the Law,” she writes, “there the one who waits for the law, sits before the
door of the law, attributes a certain force to the law for which one waits.
The anticipation of an authoritative disclosure of meaning is the means by
which that authority is attributed and installed: the anticipation conjures its
object.” Butler suggests that gender is just such an “expectation that ends up
producing the very phenomenon that it anticipates.” Gender performativity
revolves around the ways “the anticipation of a gendered essence produces
that which it posits as outside itself.”3 Anticipation, waiting, and
expectation attribute and generate the Law, including the law of gender.
Derrida’s theory of the iterability of language is also important to
Butler’s theorization of performativity. For Derrida, “iterability” is
language’s necessary relation to repetition and alterity. Language needs to
be repeated in order to be legible. Inventing a brand new word for the same
concept every time we speak would render us illegible. In this way,
language is always addressed to an Other. When I die or the recipient of my
letter dies, the language itself is still legible. Language precedes and
outlasts me, but it is always addressed to an Other that will continue. Even a
“dead language,” if discovered, can be decoded and read again.
 This iterability, however, also opens language up to “drift.” Writing is
unloosed from the writer, who cannot travel with it and attempt to contain it
within its “proper context” or meaning. Derrida tells us that writing is “a
kind of machine” that is productive and that also “[yields to] reading and
rewriting.”4 Writing can always be “cited” in different contexts, and none of
these contexts can contain and foreclose the play of meaning. For Derrida,
“there are only contexts without any center of absolute anchoring.”5 It is
through this idea of iterability, then, that Butler imagines opportunity for the
subject subjected to the Law of gender. In its repetition and citationality,
gender, as a type of language or code, is subject to drift: there is never a
perfect masculine or feminine, but only metaleptic repetitions of repetitions.
I want to place Butler’s theorization of performativity within the context
of post-Hegelian (or Hegelian) thought.6 Butler has written that “in a sense,
all of my work remains within the orbit of a certain set of Hegelian
questions: What is the relation between desire and recognition, and how is it
that the constitution of the subject entails a radical and constitutive relation
to alterity?”7 Butler’s subject is very similar to the Hegelian “self-
consciousness” outlined in the “Lordship and Bondage” section of his
Phenomenology of Spirit.8 Hegel writes that “self-consciousness exists in
and for itself when, and by the fact that, it so exists for another; that is, it
exists only in being acknowledged.”9 In a similar passage, Butler writes,
“One comes to ‘exist’ by virtue of [the] fundamental dependency on the
address of the Other. One ‘exists’ not only by virtue of being recognized,
but, in a prior sense, by being recognizable.”10 For Butler, the subject will
be acknowledged (or recognized) to the extent that it is “recognizable.”
Subjects are compelled to operate within the confines of intelligibility or
suffer the consequences of illegibility, including the possibility of
“exclusion and violence.”11
The Hegelian/Butlerian subject, therefore, is constituted in its desire. As
Butler writes, “This subject neither has nor suffers its desire, but is the very
action of desire as it perpetually displaces the subject.”12 The subject’s
desire “for and by another” brings forth a “struggle for recognition.”13 Like
the man waiting outside the Law, looking for recognition and
acknowledgment by the Law, the subject is both constituted and delimited
through this struggle for recognition. Rather than a discrete, self-contained,
and unified subject that is impinged upon by outer forces, the subject’s
constitution, its very condition of possibility, is through this desire. The
Hegelian/Butlerian subject, then, is one that only comes into existence in
relation to a “larger cultural order.” Butler writes, “Hegel developed the
view that the struggle for recognition gave rise to a concept of the
individual essentially defined in terms of a larger cultural order, which,
rather than limiting the individual’s freedom, provided for its concrete
determination and expression.”14
Given this view of the subject’s constitution, Butler then asks: What
types of subjects are “thinkable”? Can we expand the thinkability of who is
recognizable (by the Law, the cultural order) as a subject? How do we
expand the conditions of possibility, indeed the “livability” for subjects—in
particular, those subjects who are marginalized, or even unintelligible, and
thus open to “exclusion and violence”? For Butler, the idea of iterability is
key to expanding these conditions of possibility. The iterability of the
subject assures that drift and context will counteract the foreclosure of
meaning. This theory has been taken up by other theorists of identity, for
example in the work of José Esteban Muñoz. Muñoz argues that
marginalized subjects practice a type of “disidentification” in order to
manage “an identity that has been ‘spoiled’ in the majoritarian public
sphere” by re-performing the “spoiled” identity with a type of conscious
embrace and an eye toward subversive context. These subjects use the
iterability of language to reiterate the terms and expand their conditions of
possibility as recognized subjects.15
Butler and Muñoz give convincing arguments for the ways in which
marginalized subjects can expand their conditions of livability. My concern,
however, is that this particular post-Hegelian approach has become an
ideology that grounds contemporary cultural theory and naturalizes one way
of conceiving of the subject’s “conditions of possibility.” Butler places
substantial emphasis on the middle section of the Phenomenology, where
watching, desire, and recognition constitute the subject, rather than the later
pages, where a “final” state of knowledge seems to involve the end of a
self/subject-Other/object split. Hegel’s state of absolute knowledge is “a
state where knowledge need no longer transcend or correct itself, where it
will discover itself in its object and its object in itself, where concept will
correspond to object and object to consciousness.”16 Whether we think it is
possible to come to this state of the dissolution of subject and object, my
concern with the current ideology of thinking about the subject is that while
we generally recognize the contingency of the subject, the “Other” is often
implicitly credited with great stability and power. Butler acknowledges the
equally co-constitutive nature of the self and the Other in Hegel’s account.
She writes, “The self is not its own, … it is given over to the Other in
advance of any further relation but in such a way that the Other does not
own it either. And the ethical content of its relationship to the Other is to be
found in this fundamental and reciprocal state of being ‘given over.’ ”17 I
would agree that the self and the Other are in a “fundamental and reciprocal
state of being ‘given over’ ” to each other. Yet, in my view, in contemporary
cultural theory this lack of ownership of the Other is not adequately
investigated. Instead, the lean is toward the Other as a point of origin. I
believe that it is the focus on recognition that serves to erroneously solidify
the Other.
In my view, the performative places an emphasis on the Other who gives
or withholds recognition. Even if that other is only myself watching myself,
the idea of performance always entails the idea of an other who is
watching.18 But what if we had a different conception of the other—not the
one for which we always perform, for which we want recognition and
acknowledgment? What if we conceived of the other as the one to which we
give? I believe that this conception of giving to the other is actually a bridge
to the dissolution of the self/subject and other/object split. Whereas the idea
of wanting recognition from the other actually imputes a specious solidity
to this other (making it an Other), conceiving of the other as that to which
we give takes away the concern with the (already acknowledged) lack of
solidity of the subject.19 It is this practice that I am terming the
improvisative.

CHARACTERISTICS OF THE IMPROVISATIVE

The improvisative challenges the assumptions that sustain Butler’s focus on
intelligibility, thinkability, recognition, and desire, and leads to a different
understanding of the possibilities for the livability of the subject. The
improvisative is a word I’ve chosen to point toward something; I do not
conceive it as a specific thing or a specific action. The improvisative points
toward a space where the separation between observer and thing or actor
and action is not meaningful. The improvisative is not based on recognition
or intelligibility. It is not concerned with the realm of what is “thinkable”;
indeed, it challenges forms of knowing based on conceptual thought. It is
not historical, although it offers a relationship to the past, present, and
future. What I believe may be most important in a theorization of the
improvisative is its lean toward the subject rather than the prevailing lean
toward the object. As I hope I will make clear, I say “lean” because, while
the emphasis with the improvisative may be on what the “self” can do, in
the final analysis the self and the other are not separate (because they are
equally phantasmagorical). An ultimate preference for one over the other is
not possible. The improvisative may best be related to the idea of
singularity and a type of knowing that is non-conceptual.
The improvisative can be understood as a singular moment, a moment in
the “here and now” that remains open and in which one does not cohere
into the decision. Derrida described the singularity as the non-resembling
event as opposed to the type of machine-like repetition that is part of the
character of language. This singularity happens “here and now,” which, for
Derrida, is not the same as the present. He writes,
I promise in opening the future or in leaving the future open. This is not utopian, it is what takes
place here and now, in a here and now that I regularly try to dissociate from the present.… I try
to dissociate the theme of singularity happening here and now from the theme of presence and,
for me, there can be a here and now without presence.20

For Derrida, the “present” is a designation that is manufactured in relation

to an “absent” (and therefore “other”) past and future. Vincent Descombes
writes, “the present is present only on condition that it allude to the absent
in order to be distinguishable from it (an absent which is the past or the
future).”21 For Derrida, the idea of “presence” is one of our many efforts to
stabilize the openness of the “here and now” into a coherent object or
“decision.”
If we “leave the future open” we are in a place of “undecidability.”
Derrida writes via Laclau that “when I decide I invent the subject.” In
“undecidability” the sovereign subject cannot take form. Therefore,
undecidability “is not simply a moment to be traversed and overcome … by
the occurrence of the decision.” It is here and now where “the singular
event of engagement” can occur.22 Further, I would argue that “deciding”
can be related to the “the anticipation [that] conjures its object.” If we do
not leave the future open in the here and now but decide—cohere around a
decision that names—or anticipate what we are looking for—we invent the
subject (Derrida) or conjure the object (Butler). Deciding or anticipating
brings both subject and object into being.
The improvisative is abiding without deciding or anticipating. The
improvisative is therefore not based on repetition and alterity, and hence
“iterability.” It is not an engagement with the Other of language, but an
openness to the singular other of the moment. It is a space of the unknown,
of openness to the brute fact of the “to come.”23 The emphasis here, then, is
on a type of knowing that is non-conceptual. The Buddhist philosophical
idea of shunyata can help elucidate this idea of the singularity and the type
of non-conceptual knowing that I link to the improvisative.
In Buddhism, shunyata is a state of non-conceptual knowing that
understands “not arising; not ceasing; not arising and ceasing together.”
Tibetan Buddhist lama Tarthang Tulku writes, “ordinary mind falsely
perceives arising and ceasing, and thus reifies every instant of
experience.”24 Through shunyata one recognizes that “when no phenomena
and no single instant have ever arisen, there can equally be no ceasing or
vanishing.”25 This type of knowing can be productively compared to
Derrida’s idea of “here and now” as opposed to “presence” (a reification of
the present through its implicit relationship to a past and future). Tarthang
Tulku writes, “In terms of the three times [past, present, and future], since
the mode of arising that ordinary mind takes to be the infinite ‘nowness’ of
experience has never actually occurred, the vanishing of any phenomena or
instant, perceived as the past, can also not take place. And when nothing
has ever come into being or vanished, there is also no possibility for a
future arising” (43). Tarthang Tulku stresses here that “ordinary mind” will
grasp onto an idea of “infinite ‘nowness’ ” as a type of object. This
observation can be related to Derrida’s discussion of the decision as the
moment of stabilizing the unstable. Tarthang Tulku makes clear that while
we may imagine that we understand something conceptually, the experience
is not something that can be grasped conceptually. He writes that “our
conceptual understanding of the words used to describe the experience is
categorically different from the ineffability of the experience itself, which
remains beyond the reach of the intellect” (44). This is not the “experience”
of the ordinary mind.26 It is a direct form of experience that will come
through training in recognizing shunyata.
 The concept of shunyata points to the importance of direct perception in
consciousness. Whereas the Hegelian-inspired consciousness in
performativity is only understood as self-consciousness (seeing oneself as
an other, a conceptual distancing), in the Buddhist view, this distance is not
only unnecessary, but it also separates us from crucial knowledge. Butler
interprets Hegel as giving us “an ek-static notion of the self, one which is,
of necessity, outside itself, not self-identical, differentiated from the start.”27
In essence, Buddhism would agree. But Buddhism goes much further than
this and offers practices in which a person can learn to see the
phantasmagorical quality of self and other. Self-consciousness is a
conceptual knowing of the self, but there is other knowing beyond
conceptual knowing. The improvisative emphasizes this type of knowing
that does not entail the distancing effect of conceptual knowledge. Further,
the focus changes from the concern for recognition from the other, to the
concern to give to the other. When we change our relationship to the other
from looking for its recognition to giving, the lean is actually in the other
direction: toward the emptiness of the self that can nonetheless give, rather
than toward the emptiness of the other that we imagine can nonetheless take
(by not recognizing us).28

THE IMPROVISATIVE IN ACTION

In order to further elucidate the improvisative, I will discuss it in the
context of middle and high school age girls learning to improvise at the Bay
Area Girls’ Jazz and Blues Camp (GJBC) in Berkeley, California. I hope to
explicate how these students enact a different relationship to “the Law” than
that conceived by the performative. Because the concern with recognition is
connected to the fear of being illegible or excluded, I conclude by arguing
that a concern with “illegibility” or “unintelligibility” is unnecessary when
consciousness is not conceived as fundamentally grounded in the Other. In
elucidating these points, I will focus on a phenomenon that I witnessed with
several of the young students and that struck me especially during one
student’s performance at the camp’s final concert.
In the summer of 2010, I observed the week-long GJBC. Trumpeter Ellen
Seeling and saxophonist Jean Fineberg inaugurated the camp the year
before; according to written evaluations by the students, the camp has been
very successful in developing the students’ skills and confidence in musical
performance and improvisation. With an all-female staff, the camp offers
jazz theory, instrument instruction, and a variety of ensembles, from small
group to big band, with an excellent student-teacher ratio—with around 35
students per year and 15 teachers (some of whom rotate throughout the
week). As part of my observation, I provided the students with a set of
questions to answer about the GJBC. I was interested in how they felt the
all-female environment affected their ability to learn jazz improvisation.
While the younger girls (11–12) did not think the absence of boys made any
difference, most of the girls over 12 years old thought the all-girl
environment allowed them either more of an opportunity to play and
improvise (“there are no guys to take all the solos,” “no boys making rude
comments and interrupting rehearsal”) and/or made them feel less self-
conscious about improvising (“the all-girl camp gives an opportunity for us
to take risks,” “it’s helpful because boys are competitive and intimidating so
it’s easier to put myself out there”).
For many of the girls, learning to improvise in an all-female environment
made them less self-conscious.29 In an all-female environment, the girls
were both given the attention that is often still reserved for boys and given
more chances to make mistakes without feeling like they had fulfilled the
expectation that girls “couldn’t do it” (improvise). In a male-dominated
activity (jazz improvisation) in a still largely patriarchal society, men and
boys are positioned as those who can proclaim competency in the arena of
jazz. An all-female environment allowed the girls the opportunity to learn
improvisation without the explicit male gaze of male peers and teachers.30
What I find important about the GJBC is that the girls were practicing a
different relationship to “the Law” than articulated in “Before the Law.” I
observed this particularly in the students’ negotiation of “mistakes” during
the camp’s final concert. With family and friends in attendance, the final
concert offers the quintessential moment of performance: one taking place
before an audience when the eyes of the other are upon you and the desire
for recognition may be at its greatest, or at least at its most explicit. The
evening consisted of 16 bands ranging in size, stylistic focus, and
proficiency. While it could certainly be described as going off without a
hitch, it was a group of 11- to 17-year-old student musicians and therefore
had its “interesting” moments. At one point during the performance of the
jazz big band, the bass player got off by one beat for a good 12 to 16
measures. As I listened to this problem, I noticed that no one on the
bandstand was batting an eye (although these students were knowledgeable
enough to hear it). The band stayed together and eventually the bass player
got back on the correct beat. It struck me that what they were learning at
this camp was the ability to go forward and to trust despite the presence or
intrusion of “mistakes.” Indeed, a mistake did not need to be understood as
a mistake: a mis-take that entails a new take. It was an event that elicited a
response, including the response of playing on and not following the bass
player. The band played on, as they trusted their bassist would connect back
up with them in due time.
Another example was a moment that I found particularly significant,
despite the fact that it probably barely registered with the audience. It was
later in the concert when one of the more advanced students was playing the
vibraphone with a small Latin jazz ensemble. As she was playing the
opening melody, her mallet grazed the microphone stand enough that it was
clear she wasn’t going to get to the next note of the melody. I saw her face
register the “mistake,” giving a fraction-of-a-second goofy, embarrassed,
concessional face of “oh, I’m such a loser,” which struck me as a very
typical conciliatory gesture for a teenage girl. But in the next fraction of
that second she regained her composure and instead of hitting the “proper”
note of the melody repeated the note she had just played, which worked
beautifully with the harmony and realized the rhythmic shape of the
melody. It was as if I was watching a girl re-route her response pattern from
reflexively falling into an apologetic acceptance of inability to an
immediate recall and regaining of balance in time to negotiate the obstacle
encountered (the mallet hitting the microphone stand).
This different response to “mistakes” is in effect a different relationship
with the Law. Rather than placing the experience of the mallet hitting the
stand in terms of a failure, an obeisance to rules that characterizes that
phenomenon as a mistake, the young student approached that “mistake” as
an event that necessitated a response, not a judgment and a closing down.
“Normally” the “anticipation that would conjure the object” would be the
anticipation of the Law of gender in a patriarchal society: as she hit the mic
stand she would immediately anticipate that Law that she has already
internalized and therefore call it into being again. It would become the
“decision,” the way to name the event and therefore invent herself as the
female subject in a patriarchal cultural order. This pressure would be even
stronger because she was performing before an audience: no longer in the
all-girl environment, the audience’s cultural gaze was unambiguously upon
her. Instead of anticipating and deciding (which I believe was her first split-
second response), however, she turned back to the music, to the event, and
offered a response to that event. That is, she generously turned her full
attention back to the music.31
When we cohere into the decision we become stingy: we limit our
engagement with the world as we turn away from the singular moment.
Cohering into the decision (and thereby conjuring the self and other) is an
act of conceptual knowledge, which is too slow to stay with the moment.
Musical knowledge, when it is learned and assimilated, becomes non-
conceptual knowledge: hearing which note to play when improvising does
not have to go through a slow conceptual process, but, like athletic
knowledge, becomes embodied. Non-conceptual knowledge is much faster
than conceptual knowledge. Therefore, in returning her focus to the singular
moment of the music, the musician has no time to ask for recognition from
the Law. And as such, there is less space for self and Other. Ideas about self
and other are too slow to be able to take place while responding to the
singular moment.32
The practice of the improvisative, therefore, is a practice of continual
generosity. Generosity here is not a focus on giving; focusing on giving is
not quite giving. This generosity is the giving of one’s total attention to the
moment—the “here and now.” It is a focus on the singular other, to
generously give to the other, which in this case is the music. This giving is,
in fact, the letting go of ideas about the self. Giving is not about us deciding
what the other wants, but about being open to the moment and responding
without an ulterior motive, without an eye toward how this might work out
for me or for another, in a waiting type of posture that allows non-
conceptual knowing to respond. In this giving, because there is no time to
conjure the self and other, there is no self or other to benefit. Yet non-
conceptual knowing seems to have an ethical impulse. Without our stories
of self and other, the impulse to do harm seems to find little ground for
action.
As such, the improvisative is responsive, not reactive. It is the shift from
evaluating oneself in terms of the Law—anticipating and finding its
punishment—to turning back to the singular event without
anticipating/reacting to the Law. Therefore agency is not located in a re-
iteration or an address to the (great, symbolic) Other but in a response to the
immediate, singular other. With the improvisative, one focuses on how to
give to the situation without a concern for how one is read or if one is
legible. One does not answer back to an interpellation, but swims past the
bait and opens to the unpredictable. Reactivity takes oppressive comments
as solid and therefore attempts to address and re-dress them; responsiveness
puts the emphasis on the phantasmagorical quality of the comments. Rather
than believing and attempting to counter the meaning of the comments, a
turn to the improvisative is a turn toward the spaciousness and
unlocatability that perpetually occupies all of our comments and actions. As
such, this practice is a lean toward the subject in that the matter of concern
is how one can give, not in how the other or the object may take: giving
defuses the preoccupation with self as it is constructed by and as an other.
And if both self and other are phantasmagorical, separation between them
does not exist. If they both don’t exist, then how can we argue that they are
two separate things?
Musical improvisation is an excellent place to practice this type of
focused, continual generosity, but such an approach can be applied to all
engagements of the “self and other.” When the “mistake” occurs, one does
not retreat into self-condemnation and thereby close into self-
preoccupation, a self that is constructed by and understood as “other.” One
may briefly flounder, but the skill of improvising is to return to generosity,
focusing not on one’s self, but the singular other in that moment.33 Learning
generosity takes time; you can’t fake it. It has to be practiced and
developed. Perhaps the greatest gift the GJBC offers its students is plenty of
freedom to make “mistakes”—and maybe lots of them—for the more
“mistakes,” the more one develops a relationship to them that doesn’t place
them in terms of the Law, but in terms of open-ended generosity. The
improvisative is always available, but it has to be recognized as valuable,
and it has to be practiced. So here’s to practice.

NOTES
1. Throughout this essay I try to use “Other” to refer to an abstract, “Big Other” (as Zižek would
put it) and “other” to refer to a singular, particular other—as in meeting another person. In some
cases, both another person and a Big Other might make sense. In this case, I tend to opt for
“other.” I consider the Other an imputation, an installation of the Law that we “anticipate.”
 When quoting from Butler or Hegel (and when referring back to these quotations), I follow their
conventions for capitalization.
2. Quoted in Jacques Derrida, “Before the Law,” in Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (New
York: Routledge, 1992 [1982]), 183–184.
3. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge,
1990), xv.
4. Jacques Derrida, “Signature Event Context,” in A Derrida Reader, ed. Peggy Kamuf (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1991 [1972]), 91.
5. Ibid., 97.
6. As Butler notes, “Often the marks of a distinctively ‘post-Hegelian’ position are not easy to
distinguish from an appropriative reading of Hegel himself.” I think this can be said of Butler
herself. Judith Butler, The Judith Butler Reader (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), 46.
7. Ibid., 47.
8. G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1977 [1807]).
9. Ibid., 111.
10. Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York: Routledge, 1997), 5.
11. Ibid.
12. Butler, Judith Butler Reader, 48. Further, Sara Salih quotes Butler as stating “self-consciousness
is desire in general” (39).
13. Ibid., 89n18.
14. Butler, Judith Butler Reader, 88n18.
15. José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 185.
16. J. N. Findlay, “Foreword,” in Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, xiv. Findlay goes on, “Hegel
will, however, marvelously include in his final notion of the final state of knowledge the notion
of an endless progress that can have no final terms. For he conceives that, precisely in seeing the
object as an endless problem, we forthwith see it as not being a problem at all. For what the
object in itself is, is simply to be the other, the stimulant of knowledge and practice, which in
being for ever capable of being remoulded and reinterpreted, is also everlastingly pinned down
and found out being just what it is.”
17. Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge, 2004), 149.
18. As Richard Schechner puts it, performing is “showing doing,” it is not “doing.” Richard
Schechner, Performance Studies: An Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2002).
19. Because the self is created through the field of the other, it has no inherent existence. Zižek
describes this as the “void which is the subject.” Clearly, its status as “void” causes concern for
the subject. This is a topic, however, too large to address in this essay.
20. Jacques Derrida, “Remarks on Deconstruction and Pragmatism,” in Deconstruction and
Pragmatism, ed. Chantal Mouffe (New York: Routledge, 1996), 82–83.
21. Vincent Descombes, Modern French Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1998), 148.
22. Derrida, “Remarks on Deconstruction,” 82–87.
23. Ibid., 82–83.
24. Tarthang Tulku, Milking the Painted Cow (Berkeley: Dharma Publishing, 2005), 43.
25. Ibid., 43.
26. Buddhism teaches that we can have direct experience, but that this is not easy. The ordinary
mind mediates experience. Tarthang Tulku writes, “It may seem we could leave concepts behind
and investigate mind through direct experience, but this is far from easy. Experience arises as
feelings, thoughts, and impressions interact with consciousness to label and identify appearance.
Meanings arise from dialogues that depend on mental imagery and sense perception. All this is
 the activity of mind. Since it is mind that narrates experience, experience as such cannot lead us
to understand mind.” Tulku, Milking the Painted Cow, 13. This description is similar to Joan
Scott’s argument in her essay “The Evidence of Experience,” where she asserts that descriptions
of our “experience” tend to be narrations of ourselves as subjects. Joan W. Scott, “The Evidence
of Experience,” Critical Inquiry 17 (Summer 1991): 773–97. The difference is that Buddhism
does not stop at the conceptual ordinary mind; it suggests that we can access another type of
knowing, known as shunyata.
27. Butler, Undoing Gender, 148. Butler goes on, “It is the self over here who considers its
reflection over there, but it is equally over there, reflected, and reflecting.” It is this “equally
over there” that I would link to the self in the Law. The Law is also a reflection of the self, and
therefore we can attenuate the power of the Law (gender norms, stereotypes, etc.) by not
believing it to be solid in the ways I think we still do.
28. Re-cognizing: cognizing again, re-thinking. Cognition emphasizes the distance in relation to the
other by focusing on conceptual thought and language. My concerns with the limitations of
“recognition” also pertain to discussions of the subject recognizing the other (not just the Other
recognizing the subject), as in the chapter “Longing for Recognition” in Butler, Undoing
Gender.
29. Single-sex schooling has been a hotly debated topic. An excellent book on the subject is
Rosemary C. Salomone, Same, Different, Equal: Rethinking Single-Sex Schooling (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2003).
30. This need for a space away from boys would seem to support the contention that consciousness
is “other-centered.” Within the Hegelian rubric, self-consciousness is, in fact, an other-
consciousness, a concern with recognition by and of the other and a split of consciousness that
understands oneself as an other. This, indeed, would account for the power of the patriarchal
gaze. As suggested above, I agree that the Hegelian conception of alienated consciousness is our
normal everyday consciousness. Buddhist philosophy, however, describes a state of
consciousness that, through practice, dissolves the distancing effect produced by concepts
within everyday consciousness. It is this state that I felt the students were able to practice at the
GJBC. The all-girl environment is therefore not an absolute prerequisite for practicing this state
of consciousness (for the girls)—just quite helpful.
31. The improvisative describes a “how,” not a “what.” I am concerned with how she makes this
choice, which of course is very hard to write about and to know—to pin down, as it were. This
is another instance where I believe we need to rehabilitate the “subjective.” The subjective will
never be “pinned down” like the objective, but this does not mean it offers less information than
the objective. I will go out on a limb and say that we can, in our own experience, identify when
we are “opening to the singular moment” and when we are cohering into the decision. We can
identify this in our own mind. And I believe—though I am not so arrogant as to say I am certain
about this—I can hear and/or see when someone is at least more attuned to the singular moment.
You can hear or see when focus is broken during a musical or athletic performance. We have a
saying for this type of concentration: to “get your head in the game.” I will continue to elaborate
the complex topic of the subjective in my work on the improvisative in the future.
32. Of course, the vibraphonist chose a note that she has learned will “work” within the tradition.
This is not a contradiction. The present moment blooms out of the past. Tradition flows through
the moment. Tradition can flow through the moment without our cohering into a decision. This
is how tradition moves and changes. We can operate within and through the patterns that have
preceded us, but in a way that does not make them solid. We perform music, but we do not
compulsively repeat it with perfect exactitude again and again and again, unless we have
cohered into a decision about what we want to establish as the “truth” of the music. Attending to
the singular moment—and not to an ulterior motive of what we want our music to accomplish—
creates the opportunity to perform in new, unexpected ways.
 33. To summarize: this offers a different interpretation of the field of the other, one in which an
other-centeredness is focused on generosity (giving to the other: the singular moment) rather
than recognition (being seen/acknowledged by the Other). Radio host Terry Gross’s interview
with comedian/actress/writer Tina Fey on comedy improvisation echoes this other/object focus.
Fey describes how new improvisers are not sure when they should enter the scene. Do you enter
when you want to join in the fun? When you have a great idea? No, Fey states. “You come in
when you are needed.” Terry Gross and Tina Fey, “Tina Fey Reveals All (and Then Some) in
‘Bossypants,’ ” Fresh Air, WHYY, April 13, 2011, radio broadcast.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Butler, Judith. Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. New York: Routledge, 1997.
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London: Routledge, 1990.
Butler, Judith. The Judith Butler Reader, edited by Sara Salih. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004.
Butler, Judith. Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge, 2004.
Derrida, Jacques. “Before the Law.” In Acts of Literature, edited by Derek Attridge, 181–220. New
York: Routledge, 1992 [1982].
Derrida, Jacques. “Remarks on Deconstruction and Pragmatism.” In Deconstruction and
Pragmatism, edited by Chantal Mouffe, 77–88. New York: Routledge, 1996.
Derrida, Jacques. “Signature Event Context.” In A Derrida Reader, edited by Peggy Kamuf, 80–111.
New York: Columbia University Press, 1991 [1972].
Descombes, Vincent. Modern French Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Findlay, J. N. “Foreword.” In G. W. F Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, translated by A. V. Miller, v–
xxx. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977.
Gross, Terry, and Tina Fey. “Tina Fey Reveals All (and Then Some) in ‘Bossypants.’ ” Fresh Air,
WHYY, April 13, 2011, radio broadcast.
Hegel, G. W. F. The Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by A. V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1977 [1807].
Muñoz, José Esteban. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999.
Salomone, Rosemary C. Same, Different, Equal: Rethinking Single-Sex Schooling. New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2003.
Schechner, Richard. Performance Studies: An Introduction. New York: Routledge, 2002.
Scott, Joan W. “The Evidence of Experience.” Critical Inquiry 17 (Summer 1991): 773–797.
Tarthang Tulku. Milking the Painted Cow. Berkeley: Dharma Publishing, 2005.
 CHAPTER 6
JURISGENERATIVE GRAMMAR (FOR ALTO)

FRED MOTEN

IN his celebrated essay “Nomos and Narrative,” legal scholar Robert Cover
describes it as “remarkable that in myth and history the origin of and
justification for a court is rarely understood to be the need for law. Rather, it
is understood to be the need to suppress law, to choose between two or
more laws, to impose upon laws a hierarchy. It is the multiplicity of laws,
the fecundity of the jurisgenerative principle, that creates the problem to
which the court and the state are the solution.”1 Though Cover is
ambivalent regarding the abolition of this solution, which he understands to
be violent, of necessity, his advocacy of a certain resistance to the very
apparatuses whose necessity he denaturalizes makes it possible for us to ask
some questions that the state and the understanding find not only
inappropriate but also inappropriable. What if the imagination is not lawless
but lawful? What if it is, in fact, so full of laws that, moreover, are in such
fugitive excess of themselves that the imagination, of necessity, is
constantly, fugitively in excess of itself as well? Will law have then been
manifest paralegally, criminally, fugitively, as a kind of ongoing
antisystemic break or breaking; as sociality’s disruptive avoidance of mere
civility which takes form in and as a contemporaneity of different times and
the inhabitation of multiple, possible worlds and personalities? In response
to this anoriginal priority of the differential set, the courts and the state (as
well as critics of every stripe) will have insisted upon the necessity of
policing such collaboration. Meanwhile, relations between worlds will have
been given in and as a principle of non-exclusion. The line of questioning
that Cover requires and enables brings the jurisgenerative principle to bear
on a burden that it must bear: the narrative that begins with the
criminalization of that principle. In studying the criminalization of
anoriginal criminality (which Western civilization and its critique requires
us to understand as the epidermalization of the alternative, but which we’ll
come more rigorously and precisely to imagine as the animaterialization of
the fantastic in chromatic saturation) one recognizes that the jurisgenerative
principle is a runaway. Gone underground, it remains, nevertheless, our own
anarchic ground.
Cover reveals the constituted indispensability of the legal system as an
institutional analog of the understanding designed to curtail the lawless
freedom with which laws are generated and subsequently argues for the
duty to resist legal system, even if from within it, in its materialization in
and as the state. In the concluding paragraph of his unfinished final article
“The Bonds of Constitutional Interpretation: Of the Word, the Deed, and the
Role,” he argues that “in law to be an interpreter is to be a force, an actor
who creates effects even through or in the face of violence. To stop short of
suffering or imposing violence is to give law up to those who are willing to
so act. The state is organized to overcome scruple and fear. Its officials will
so act. All others are merely petitioners if they will not fight back.”2 But
insofar as some of us cling to Samuel Beckett’s notion that “the thing to
avoid … is the spirit of system,” we are left to wonder how else and where
else the resistance of the jurisgenerative multitude is constituted.3
Moreover, we are required to consider an interarticulate relationship
between flight and fight that American jurisprudence can hardly fathom.
That man was not meant to run away is, for Oliver Wendell Holmes,
sufficient argument for a combat whose true outcome will have become,
finally, eugenic rather than abolitionist. To assert a duty to resist, enacted in
and by way of the vast range of principled fugitivity as opposed to the
absence of a duty to retreat, is a reading against the grain of Holmes’s
interpretive insistence on honor, on a certain manhood severely husbanding
generativity, a patrimonial heritage manifest as good breeding and as legal
violence against bad breeding, given in the prolific but inferior productivity
of the unintelligent, whether black or (merely optically) white.4 Reading
Cover, always against the backdrop of a certain multiply-lined, multi-
matrilinear music, requires re-generalizing fighting back, recalibrating it as
inaugurative, improvisational, radical interpretation—a fundamental and
anticipatory disruption of the standard whose cut origin and extended
destination are way outside. This implies a kind of open access to
interpretation that in turn implies the failure of state-sanctioned institutions
of interpretation insofar as they could never survive such openness. One
must still consider interpretation’s relation to force, as Cover understands it,
but also by way of a massive discourse of force in which, on the one hand,
the state monolith is pitted against the so much more than single speaker
and, on the other hand, in which the state, as a kind of degraded
representation of commonness, is submitted to an illegitimate and
disruptive univocality.
Meanwhile, criminality, militancy, improvisatory literacy, and flight
collaborate in jurisgenerative assertion, ordinary transportation, corrosive,
caressive (non)violence directed toward the force of state interpretation and
its institutional and philosophical scaffolding. It’s a refusal in interpretation
of interpretation’s reparative and representational imperatives, the mystical
and metaphysical foundations of its logics of accountability and abstract
equivalence, by the ones who are refused the right to interpret at the
militarized junction of politics and taste, where things enter into an
objecthood already compromised by the drama of subjection. In the end,
state interpretation—or whatever we would call the exclusionary protocols
of whatever interpretive community—tries to usurp the general, generative
role of study, which is an open admissions kind of thing. What does it mean
to refuse an exclusive and exclusionary ontic capacity or to move outside
the systemic oscillation between the refusal and the imposition of such
capacity? This question is the necessary preface to a theory of paraontic
resistance that is essential matter for the theory of language and the theory
of human nature.
Consider the difference and relation between knowing and making a
language: what happens when the intersubjective validity of the moral or
linguistic law within is displaced by the very generativity that law is said to
constitute? Noam Chomsky has tried many times, in many different venues
and contexts, to offer condensed but proper understandings of an
intellectual project called “generative grammar” whose “central topic of
concern is what John Huarte, in the 16th century, regarded as the essential
property of human intelligence: the capacity of the human mind to
‘engender within itself, by its own power, the principles on which
knowledge rests.’ ”5 Such a power must be what composer and historian
George E. Lewis would describe as “stronger than itself,” some thing, some
totality, some singularity that is only insofar as it is in excess of itself and is,
therefore, already cut and augmented by an irreducible exteriority to which
it is constrained to refer and to exhaust, as the condition of its own
seemingly impossible possibility.6 Similarly, that which this power is said to
generate exists only insofar as it, too, is open to and infused by the outside.
However, Chomsky is circumspect in his delineation of this internal
capacity to engender the internal. The outside, which we’ll call historicity,
but which must also be understood as form’s degenerative and regenerative
force, is, for Chomsky, not inadmissible. However, the inside, which we’ll
call essence, is rich in its discretion and therefore able to generate that for
which external stimulus, in its poverty, is unaccountable. Exteriority, which
we might also talk about under the rubric of alterity, is immaterial to the
Chomskyan configuration of the problem of essence. For Chomsky,
Wilhelm von Humboldt’s reference to “the infinite use of language” is
quite a different matter from the unbounded scope of the finite means that characterizes
language, where a finite set of elements yields a potentially infinite array of discrete
expressions: discrete, because there are six-word sentences and seven-word sentences, but no
6.2 word sentences; infinite because there is no longest sentence ([insofar as one can] append “I
think that” to the start of any sentence).7

I’m interested in the difference between a wholly internally driven

understanding of “discrete” infinity and that necessary and irreducible
openness to the outside which will have been productive of an
immeasurable range of linguistic indiscretion because to be interested in art
is to be concerned with the constant and irruptive aspiration, beyond the
possible and the impossible, of the 6.2-word sentence. At stake, on the other
side of the question of discretion (which is to say that for whatever singular
grammar there is the non-sentence, the non-phrase, whose very elements
and order can be made, by way of a certain capacity to engender, into a
sentence) is the capacity for a certain refusal of sanctioned grammatical
capacity, for rupture and augmentation that inheres in the word and the
sentence as the continually circulated gift/power of the outside we take in
and by which we are taken, in the ongoing history of our necessary
dis/possession. The most interesting potential area of inquiry emerging from
Huarte’s insight into a seemingly self-generating power is our capacity to
generate what shows up as the ungrammatical. How do we know and
(re)produce the extra-grammatical, the extra-legal? How do we know (how
to) escape when escape is the general name we give to the impulse by
which we break law? Ultimately, I’d like to understand this question
concerning what might be called grammar’s general economy, its essential
supplementarity, more precisely as that which concerns our general,
criminal, illegitimately criminalized capacity to make law.
In the previous paragraph I offer a synthesized echo of a critical attitude
toward Chomsky that is driven by the belief that historiography is, and
should be, theoretical practice in linguistics and whose work might be
characterized as a methodological extension of Fanon’s sociogenic principle
against the grain of a certain Kantian trace in Chomsky’s onto-phylogenic
project.8 At stake is not simply an historical account of the discipline, which
a textbook would be obliged to provide, but also a recognition of the
priority of the diachronic over the synchronic, the sociohistorical over the
structural(ist), in any account of language. But even an account such as this
is problematic for those critics, since the genuinely sociohistorical account
would, in the end, not really be of language at all. They would argue that a
genuinely sociohistorical linguistics is one in which the question of the
nature of language is displaced by pragmatic concerns regarding what it is
to be a speaker of language, a mode of existence that is irreducibly
sociohistorical in a way that the Chomskyan model of language as a fixed
system is not. The key theoretical precursor in such a model would be
Darwin, not Descartes. And what Julie Tetel Andresen calls “languaging,”
the linguistic action that displaces whatever imaginary thing language is or
has been thought to be, would be understood as a function of and subject to
evolution. The question of whether or not a structure has a history, of how
social history operates in and on, but without eradicating, structure (let’s
call this the post-structuralist question), is set aside, as is its interesting
corollary, the question of whether there can be a structure without a center.
To ask such questions will have already been to veer into the underground
that is called the humanities, when these post-Chomskyan linguists would
insist that linguistics must be not only open but also subject to the “latest
findings from the social and natural sciences” while, at the same time
remaining insistently oblivious to the latest findings of the humanities and
the arts.9 Of course, the idea that a structure has a history, is subject to the
transformative force of history, is, in the arts and humanities, not one of
their latest findings but is, in fact, old news. And while this is of little
moment to those who are interested, finally, in the liquidation, rather than
the historicization, of structure (or, at least, in the indefinite suspension of
the necessarily and irremediably structuralist question concerning the nature
of language), it requires something that composer and instrumentalist
Anthony Braxton might call a “restructuralist” approach to and
rapprochement with the ongoing Chomskyan revolution. By way of this
engagement, the question “What is a language?” is not eclipsed but
illumined by the question of what happens when we hear a sequence of
sounds.
Without adhering to the anti-material restrictions that derive from the
Chomskyan model’s demand that the utterance be both “disembedded and
disembodied,” in Andresen’s terms, there is a certain black study of
language (music) that is itself derived from the inaugurative event of Afro-
diasporic experience understood precisely as an interplay of
disembodiedness and disembeddedness, from which the materialities of
stolen life, its self-contextualizing, corpulent multiplicity, continually
emerge. It’s not that syntax just hovers out there, but that there is a
serialization of the syntactic moment, at once obliterative and generative,
that is materialized by bodies, in context; there is an (ongoing) event out of
which language emerges that language sometimes tries to capture. If it is
the case that even Chomsky’s massive and massively generative attempt
remains incomplete, this is due to a certain refusal to think the relation
between structure and event that is endemic to a certain scientificity (and
which Chomsky himself seems to have identified insofar as he has
repeatedly asserted that it may well be that literature will have had the most
to say about the question of the origin of language). Still, it is as if one
remains in search of a contribution to the theory of human nature that
cannot or doesn’t want to deal with the trace of the event in the thing of
human nature. At stake, in other words, is the history of essence
understood, precisely, as the animation of the thing, the materiality of its
endowment with seemingly impossible capacities such as a range of
deconstructive, ruptural poesis: making laws or making (the laws of)
language or making (the laws of language) music.
Consider the relation between (extra)musical or (extra)legal behavior, on
the one hand, and the internal cognitive systems that make (extra)musicality
or (extra)legality possible. This would entail taking interest in the
generation of musico-juridical possibility and in the materiality of
grammars that Cheryl Wall might characterize as “worrying the line”
between inside and outside or between depth as bio-cognitive interior
endowment or competence (which must at least be understood in relation
both to universality and inalienability) and surface as the open set of
performances in which the musico-juridical is instantiated improvisationally
in relation to exteriority’s anoriginal and irreducible differences,
differentiation and alienation.10 What’s at stake is the universality of
grammatical generativity that is given in the instantiation of the universal
capacity to break grammar. Can the principles upon which knowledge of
language rests (or knowledge of music moves) be improvised? Can
principles, in their very composure, be improvised? Can there be commerce
—beyond mere one-way transport, transformation or loosening—between
principle and anarchy? Can you perform your way into a singular and
unprecedented competence, into an instant and unrepeatable composition?
Addressing these questions requires some consideration of the soloist as a
speaker, as one who languages, who acts linguistically even in and out of a
brutally imposed languishing, but who is also an instrument, through which
others, or through which, deeper still, alterity, speaks; at the asymptotic
confluence of these senses, the speaker is a bridge machine, a resonant
connectivity, an articulate spacing, the transverse, untraversable distance by
which we arrive at multiplicity. However, arrival, here, is a misnomer.
Instead, we might speak, in echo of some Althusser-Brathwaite duet in our
heads, of an ongoing, aleatory arrivance, that endless, vibratory after-effect
of departure, of being-sent or being-thrown (over or overboard), of which
speech, or more generally and more generatively, sounding, always speaks.
Braxton imagines, composes, improvises multiplicity—in a thirty-year
initiative he calls language music—by way of a new mode of structural
planning that will eventually be manifest not only as sound but also as a
kind of technical drawing that is that sound’s and that sonic space’s
prefigurative condition. Braxton calls the initial maneuver of his practice
“conceptual grafting,” which maintains, through minute analysis and
dissection, the differential/differentiated singularity—the cellular
modularity—of musical elements. “I began,” Braxton says, “to break down
phrase construction variables with regard to material properties, functional
properties, language properties; to use this as a basis to create improvised
music and then rechannel that into the compositional process.”11 New
compositional movement, the overturning of musical ground, emerges from
the still, shedded posture of self-analytic listening, the hermetic, audio-
visual attunement to the shape and color of sound and its internal relations.
 We are required now to consider not only the relationship between the
(open) cell and refuge but also the (grafted) cell’s generativity. What is it to
refuse, while seeking refuge in, the cell? This requires some immersion in
the history of the crawlspace, which is also a sound booth, and a
(temporarily preoccupied) corner, and a broken window. Such immersion is
conducted publicly, in hiding, out in broken territory where one has been
preventatively detained. (T)here, Braxton re-initializes the relation between
the internal generativity of the outside and the enunciation of an already
striated intention not to be a single being: he is the unit that is more than
itself, greater than itself, stronger than itself, precisely insofar as he attends
to the internal (and more than simply) phonic difference of phonic material.
The soloist is a black study group, a monastery’s modular calculus, whose
innateness is a plain of abridged presences. Like an autoethnographic
soundcatcher, driven and enabled by eccentric, hesitant, sociopoetic social
logic—a radical empiricism that avoids the spirit of empirical system—
Braxton collates and collects what is beyond category and reveals how solo
performance comes to be the field in which multiplicity is studied and
performed. Beyond the retrograde possibilities of artificial individuality
there was always Spaltung, the split personality, the personal split, the
retrait of the unalone to the woodshed, the wilderness, the desert, the fjord,
the north, in asylum, on Monk’s or Magic Mountain, where solitude is
haunted, crowded. The soloist is unalone; the soloist is not (all) one. She is
and instantiates a power of n + 1, because the one is not the one, this bridge,
and therefore requires some off renewal of the question of the meaning of
being, which will have again been achieved by way of an existential
analytic of the instrument(alist) who is not but nothing other than man, that
public thing.
Idle talk, curiosity and ambiguity characterize the way in which, in an everyday manner,
Heidegger’s Dasein is its “there”—the disclosedness of Being-in-the-world. As definite
existential characteristics, these are not present-at-hand in Dasein, but help to make up its Being.
In these, and in the way they are interconnected in their Being, there is revealed a basic kind of
Being which belongs to everydayness; we call this the “falling” of Dasein.
This term does not express any negative evaluation, but is used to signify that Dasein is
proximally and for the most part alongside the “world” of its concern. This “absorption in …”
has mostly the character of Being-lost in the publicness of the “they.” Dasein has, in the first
instance, fallen away [abgefallen] from itself as an authentic potentiality for Being its self, and
has fallen into the “world.” “Fallenness” into the world means an absorption in Being-with-one-
another, in so far as the latter is guided by idle talk, curiosity and ambiguity. Through the
Interpretation of falling, what we have called the “inauthenticity” of Dasein may now be defined
more precisely. On no account however do the terms “inauthentic” and “non-authentic” signify
 “really not,” as if in this mode of Being, Dasein were altogether to lose its Being.
“Inauthenticity” does not mean anything like Being-no-longer-in-the-world, but amounts rather
to quite a distinctive kind of Being-in-the-world—the kind which is completely fascinated by
the “world” and by the Dasein-with of Others in the “they.” Not-Being-its-self [Das Nicht-es-
selbst-sein] functions as a positive possibility of that entity which, in its essential concern, is
absorbed in a world. This kind of not-Being has to be conceived as that kind of Being which is
closest to Dasein and in which Dasein maintains itself for the most part.
So neither must we take the fallenness of Dasein as a “fall” from a purer and higher “primal
status.” Not only do we lack any experience of this ontically, but ontologically we lack any
possibilities or clues for Interpreting it.
In falling, Dasein itself as factical Being-in-the-world, is something from which it has already
fallen away. And it has not fallen into some entity which it comes upon for the first time in the
course of its Being, or even one which it has not come upon at all; it has fallen into the world,
which itself belongs to its Being. Falling is a definite existential characteristic of Dasein itself. It
makes no assertion about Dasein as something present-at-hand, or about present-at-hand
relations to entities from which Dasein “is descended.” Or with which Dasein has subsequently
wound up in some sort of commercium.12

There’s this other thing that happens when you dance so hard your hand
flies across the room, or when you brush up against somebody and find that
your leg is gone, that makes you also wonder about the relation between
fallenness and thrownness. Improvisation is (in) that relation. But for
Heidegger—and a certain tradition he both finds and founds, and which
resounds in breaking away from him—improvisation bears and enacts an
irremedial inauthenticity that is given in being given to what might be best
understood, though it is often misunderstood, as base sociality where what
is at stake, more than anything, is precisely this: to be fascinated by the
world and by being with one another and to move in this fascination’s
undercommon concern with or engagement in idle talk, curiosity, and
ambiguity, but by way of a certain thickness of accent, a counterscholastic
accompaniment, that troubles the standard speech that is misunderstood to
have been studied. A function of being-thrown into the history we are
making, this sound must also be understood as having prefaced the fall from
ourselves into the world we make and are that is often taken for that sound’s
origin. What’s also at stake, then, is a certain valorization or “negative
evaluation”: not, as Heidegger says, of fallenness as “a definite existential
characteristic of Dasein itself,” but rather of “present-at-hand relations to
[and, impossibly, between] entities. …”
Now I cut it off here because I’m not making that kind of argument about
Dasein’s parentage, its line of descent or even the specific direction of its
fall. This is not some claim to what will have been relegated to a kind of
primitivity (either as a kind of degraded prematurity or as opposed to some
originary and higher purity [recognizing that these are two sides of the same
coin, so to speak]). The issue, rather, is another exemplary possibility for
misinterpretation that Heidegger offers: that Dasein, not itself being
“something present-at-hand,” has subsequently “wound up in some sort of
commercium” with entities to which it has some kind of “present-at-hand
relation. …” What is this commercium? Who are these entities, these
things? What is their relation to world? What is the nature of their
publicness, their “being-lost in the publicness of the ‘they’ ”? What is their
relation to fallenness and thrownness? What is their, and their descendant’s,
relation to thinking and to being thought?
Perhaps “some sort of commercium” is like that which comprises what,
according to Richard Pryor, the police have been known to call, in their
very denial of its present materiality, “some kind of community sing.” It’s a
singing prince kind of thing, a Heidelberg beer hall kind of thing, which is
also a black thing cutting the understanding in the aftermath of serious
lecture. The Commercium is something like the Symposium, replete or
dangerously more than complete or rendering the academy incomplete with
lyrical w(h)ine. It is a fall from, or luxuriant parody of, the Sacrum
Commercium, St. Francis’s exchange with Lady Poverty, his undercommon
enrichment, the fantastic effect of study and prayer in small, public solitude.
And insofar as commercium is a term of business/law since the Romans,
this valence is not entirely foreign to the motivation behind Heidegger’s
off-hand devaluation of the present-at-hand. Yet again we are speaking of
the sociality that attends being-subject-to-exchange, which befalls even
those who are parties to exchange, thereby troubling a distinction so crucial
to a current proliferation of anti-ontological descriptions of blackness.
Heidegger’s negative evaluation bears the materiality that undergirds an
etymological descent he chooses not to trace. But it becomes clear that the
problematic of fallenness into the world, which is an irreducible part of
Dasein’s being, is or can be given to a devolutionary intensification, an
undercommon fall from fallenness, when Dasein gets “wound up” with
“some sort of commercium.” This fall2 from the world to the (under)world,
which is the subject of Heidegger’s offhand dismissal, is, again, an object
(and source) of constant study.
I am concerned with fallenness into the world of things. Theodor Adorno
speaks of this, tellingly, with regard to jazz:
 The improvisational immediacy which constitutes its partial success counts strictly among those
attempts to break out of the fetishized commodity world which want to escape that world
without ever changing it, thus moving ever deeper into its snare. … With jazz a disenfranchised
subjectivity plunges from the commodity world into the commodity world; the system does not
allow for a way out.13

Improvisational immediacy, an effect Heidegger links to thrownness,

becomes for Adorno a substitute for a certain mode of uprising that would
at least reverse the fall from fallenness that itself substitutes escape from the
world for changing the world, thereby displacing fight (or honorable and
manly resistance) with ignoble flight. And this ignobility is necessarily
maternal, which is to say that it is so deeply bound up with sustenance,
maintenance, and a kind of otherworldly, underworldly care, that flight
often turns out to be interinanimate with remaining in the path(ont)ological
zone, as if the one who flees militantly remains for f(l)ight again. What
emerges, as and by way of planning and study, is a certain problematic
where what it is to fly, already wound up in tarrying, is now bound up with
digging (which Baraka has already thought in its irreducible relation to the
music that comes from it and reproduces it) so that the way out turns out, in
fact, to be the way back into that continual reconstruction of the
underground that is carried out—in jazz, let’s say—not by disenfranchised
subjectivity but by the ones who refuse subjectivity’s general
disenfranchisement, the ones whose deep inhabitation of the snare
instantiates the fall2 from “the commodity world into the commodity world”
as continually revalued commercium, continually revaluing community
sing. Moreover, this social life in my head is the way back into the
underground of metaphysics. The soloist not quite learning to read what she
has written, the soloist unable to sight-read what he has composed but who
is willing to fall into difference, into sociality and so to ascend into the open
secret of the cenobitic club, the public monastery, where the anoriginal
criminality of judgment, of legislation, is renewed. The gathering is tight
aeration and subatomic access, the soft rupture of every custom in its
enactment, the sharp cut of every law at the moment of its making.
And solo performance is a kind of bloom! Autostriation in the open
underground is where St. Anthony’s head becomes a rose. If you keep
humming it, if you keep trying to hear that anarrangement, if you practice
all the time, you won’t even have to count it off, you just set it off and
thereby undertake and undergo harmonic mitosis—he splits, her cell splits,
he splits himself in her cell. The trace of having been sold initializes this
auto-conjugative auto-disruption, this self-divisive self-reproduction, as
multiple seriality, expansive conservation. Folded into the commercium like
a one-time would-be sovereign whose song and dance is, finally,
irrevocable abdication of that regulative desire in the name of love,
revolutionary suicide in the name of self-defense, the soloist is drenched,
saturated in color like a slide, a chromatic transparency, through which
other things show up as neither subject nor party to exchange, however
much they are indebted to it, which is to say indebted to one another, for
their very lives. Already there was this juked monasticism. The joint was a
library and a chapel, jumpin’. In considering music’s relation to the
jurisgenerative principle, one comes to think of a certain outlaw asceticism,
the extravagant austerity of a certain criminal aestheticism, that is carried
out in the vast history of various sojourns in the woodshed, of fallenness in
a late night eremitic bridge become practice room or, after an abortive
attempt at the self-generation of the inside, simply and falsely conceived as
the simultaneously artificial and unpremeditated expression of a single
being, in St. Anthony Braxton’s fleeing temptation in Chicago, where cell
and city keep on becoming one another in a range of ways, by joining the
Experimental Band’s disruptive, expansive, sensual intellection, its
performed improvisation through common deformations of membership,
where they celebrate what it is to be indebted to the outside for an inside
song.
Consider how Braxton’s long, cryptographic fascination with various
modes of the switchable track, his practice and study of hiding information
in plain sight, as a kind of riding of the blinds, instantiates, in For Alto, the
methodological assertion of flight in and from a given order. “The
‘diversion from’ is what we put our attention on” in order to consider the
relationship between fugitive inhabitation and generativity.14 The
performed and performative study is the intersection, the switching point,
between nomos and logos—between self-destruktive, sociopoetic law and
dispersively gathered, graphophonic word—but negatively. This is not
graphe paranomon, a suspension of already given legislation that is
instantiated by a solo irruption; nor is it speech uttered by a citizen in the
legitimate (which is to say privatized) realm of public appearance, in which
membership or an already given matriculation is assumed, that disrupts and
suspends the ongoing legislative order. Rather, Braxton performs (by way
of the difference he takes in and brings), the gnomic, paranomic writing of
the non-citizen who refuses the citizenship that has been refused him. His
musicked speech is, as it were, encrypted. It comes from deep outside, the
open, the surround, which resists being enclosed, or buried, as much as it
does being excluded. In the solo performance of his essential, experimental
dismembership, Braxton shows us how one becomes indebted to the outside
for an inside song.
This is part of what Braxton writes about in his notes on Composition
No. 8F, which is dedicated to pianist Cecil Taylor, though its own particular
auto-explosive reach for the outside is directed even more by and toward
John Coltrane’s heights and depths.
The second aspect of Composition 8F’s material breakdown involves the use of long musical
passages built from 32nd—and 64th-note figures. Material constructions from this sensibility
permeate the total canvas of the music and are used in many different ways (i.e., sound register
and focus etc.). The instrumentalist in this context is asked to maintain a super-charged use of
musical formings throughout the total presentation of the music. Given musical formings will
then appear that utilize the entire spectrum of the instrument, and the construction nature of the
work also calls for the use of isolated material and focus directives (as a basis to establish
timbral focus and structural balance). The use of this operative can be viewed in the context of
John Coltrane’s “sheets of sound” language period because all of the language directives in
Composition No. 8F are designed to provide a platform for continuous multiple phrase
formations (invention). There is no slowing of the pulse continuum in this work, nor is there any
decreasing of its sound note input rate. What we have instead is a recipe for a dynamic
unfolding music that calls for the rapid employment of material initiatives—throughout the
whole of the improvisation (from beginning to end).15

Without losing hearing of overabundant multiphonics’ split singularity, the

animation of Braxton’s sound, it remains important to consider the tidal
adventure that marks the ups and downs of his invention. In doing so,
remember that the slave ship is a language lab. The projects are a
conservatory. The prison is a law school. Refusal to acknowledge this is not
a romanticist bulwark against romanticism but an empiricist suppression of
the empirical. While the material conditions always matter, because the
sound will always change, in the end it doesn’t matter if it’s closed or open
air: the fecundity of the jurisgenerative principle, and generative grammar’s
auto-constitutive auto-transgressions, is irrepressible.
With this in mind, let’s stage an encounter between Anthony Braxton and
Edouard Glissant, both of whom have already been in that kind of contact
that deep aesthetic theorists have with the general problematic of
problematized generality that Trane once called “a love supreme.” Spookily,
mutually, inspirited, they are already in action at a distance in a brutal
world, as a duo whose braided incommensurability sounds forth as mutually
non-exclusive enunciations of poetic intention, manifest in the ecstatic
asceticism, the remote coenobitic life they share as impossible movement in
local space, electric slide as terse, monastic glide, tortuous flight from one
pitch to another, accelerated ascent and descent of the scale, of the very
apparatuses of measure. The undercommon gliss is rough, tossed, rolled by
water, flung by waves and it might end up sounding, so to speak, like a
choir at study in Faulkner, Mississippi, the night before s/he hopped a
freight for Chitown. There’s a kind of obscurity, even an always angular
kind of madness, in Braxton’s glissement, his glissando that allows us to
recall Chomsky’s assertion that “Huarte postulates a third kind of wit”
beyond both a certain cognitive docility in which the mind is devoid of
everything but sense data filtered through an internally imposed empirical
system and the internally powered engendering of “the principles on which
knowledge rests.” This other ingenuity, “by means of which some, without
art or study, speak such subtle and surprising things, yet true, that were
never before seen, heard, or writ, no, nor ever so much as thought of” is
understood by Chomsky to be Huarte’s reference to “true creativity, an
exercise of the creative imagination in ways that go beyond normal
intelligence and may, he felt, involve “a mixture of madness.”16 Madness,
here in conjunction with mixture, is one of the names that have been given
to the more than internally driven power of the one who, insofar as he is
more than mere interiority, is more than one. To have turned or taken the
inside out is not only to have embraced, as it were, the dual enablement of
both the poverty of stimulus and the poverty of internal volition. This
potential is Braxton’s constant, circular aspiration, bespeaking, against
Huarte’s grain, the supernatural movement of both art and study. The
language he generates is touched by an externally propelled submergence
and surfacing that he bears as a kind of public property, as chorographic
philosophy’s gift of opacity, the blurred, serrated edge of thinking on the
move, an exhaustive, imaginary mapping of an underworld and its baroque
and broken planes. This ongoing, ruptural moment in the history of the
philosophy of relation, “in which,” as Glissant says, “we try to see how
humanities transform themselves,” is more and less than the same old
story.17 Its torqued seriality—bent, twisted, propelled off line—is occult,
impossible articulation. The line is broken; the passage is overtaken,
become detour; it is, again as Glissant says, unknown; it carries gentle,
unavoidably violent overturning, a contrapuntal swerve of the underside; it
performs a rhizomatic voluntarity, roots escaping from themselves without
schedule into the outer depths. This involuntary consent of the volunteer is
our descent, our inheritance, should we choose to accept it, claim it, assent
to it: forced by ourselves, against force, to a paraontological attendance
upon being-sent, we are given to discover how being-sent turns glide,
glissando, into fractured and incomplete releasement of and from the scale,
into the immeasurable. Braxton’s music, its sharp-edged celebration, has a
dying fall and rise. It descends and ascends us. It sends us and we are
befallen by the fate of the one, which is to become many. Fallen into
sociality, thrown into the history we make in having been thrown into it, we
are given, in being given to this music, to flight away from a given syntax,
from the linguistic law within, into a mode of autonomous auto-regulation
that will, itself, have been escaped.
The rough glide of Braxton’s musical movement, the burred terrain of
Glissant’s words, sends us to find out more of what it means to have been
sent to give yourself away. We are driven to resist this movement, where
consent is now inseparable from a monstrous imposition, but we are also
drawn, at the same time, against ourselves, to the rail, to the abyss, by the
iterative, broken singularity it hides and holds, by the murmur of buried,
impossible social life—that excluded middle passage into multiplicity,
where pained, breathlessly overblown harmonic striation (Sacrum
Commercium, sacred fragment; contra-musical moment; catastrophe’s
counterstrophic movement), from way underneath some unfathomable and
impossible to overcome violation, animates ecstasies driven down and out
into the world as if risen into another: impossible assent, consentement
impossible, glissment impossible, impossible Glissant, unimaginable axe,
unheard of Braxton.
We study how to claim this sound that claims us, and that Glissant and
Braxton amplify, in work that beautifully discovers, in the depths of our
common impasse, our common flight and our common habitation. They
allow and require us to be interested in the unlikely emergence of the
unlikely figure of the black soloist, whose irruptive speech occurs not only
against the grain of a radical interdiction of individuality that is manifest
both as an assumption of its impossibility as well as in a range of
governmental dispositions designed to prevent the impossible, but also
within the context of a refusal of what has been interdicted (admission to
the zone of abstract equivalent citizenship and subjectivity, whose
instantiations so far have been nothing but a set of pseudo-individuated
after-effects of conquest and conquest denial, a power trip to some fucked-
up place in the burnt-out sun), a kind of free or freed “personality” that will
have turned out to be impossible even for the ones who are convinced they
have achieved it, even as they oversee its constant oscillation between
incompleteness and repair, distress and fashion. That refusal is a kind of
dissent that marks our descent, that moves in the terribly beautiful absence
of patrimonial birthright or heritage and in the general, generative,
maternally rotund and black Falstaffic recognition that necessarily
masculinist honor is just a bunch of hot air. Such refusal, such dissent, takes
the form of a common affirmation, an open consensus given in the
improbable, more than im/possible, consent, in Glissant’s words, “not to be
a single being.”18 By what paradoxical means does the black soloist
continue to give that consent, a re-gifting that not only instantiates but also
redoubles just about all of the doubleness we come to associate with giving
and the gift and the given? Here, the given is unfinished, as elastic
composition, not (traditionally or sententiously) well-formed.
Fear of the black soloist is a transcendental clue that tips us off to her
importance. She is subject to beating and attack—whether by the state or its
sanctioned, extra-governmental deputies—because her walking out alone is
understood to be a threat to the order of things, a placement of that order
under attack. But more often even than beating, the preferred institutional
response to the (una)lone transgressor is her enforced isolation, since
solitary confinement is misunderstood to be a method for silencing what it
only serves to amplify. This invasive irruption of fugued, fugitive
singularity into the administered world both figures and performs an
immanent rather than transcendent alterity, the undercommon sociality of
another world in and under and surrounding this one, disruptive of its
regulatory protocols, diversive of its executive grammar. My primary
interest is in that range of explosive, melismatic voicing. I’m after a certain
doo-wopped, post-bopped, aquadoolooped, da da da da da datted
(un)broken circle of study—the general form of the development group, in
some kind of community sing, a Child Development Group of Mississippi,
say, where putatively motherless, always already endangered children
move, not without moving but within movement, in specific, a capella
instantiation of strain, of resistance to constraint, as instruments of
deinstrumentalization, in the propelling and constraining force of the
refrain, in that land of California, where Chicago is a city in Mississippi,
Mississippi a refuge, a (fugue) state of mind, in Chicago. Such voicing
always moves, always in the wilderness, under regulatory duress, and its
own theory has it that that kind of trouble “really keeps us workin’ our
mind.”19 To set it off like that, to go off like that, to anarrange like that, is a
kind of head start, but you have to have some sense of the value of playing,
of being played with, of being played, of being-instrument, of being-
endangered, of mere being, of having fallen, of doing the thing, of doing
your thing, under water, underground, out in the open secret, in public,
exposed in the interest of safety—which is a kind of flower for refugees—
and autonomy, when flown-away hands start clapping. All we have to do is
find somebody that would love to sing. You want to sing? Well, somebody
start singing …
Generativity, our ongoing common growth in difference, is also escape in
contemplative performance, reanimating the itinerant communal form of the
city before as a study hall inside a dance hall. Black study is a mode of life
whose initiatory figures are given as anarchic principles that are form-
generating. Not just the proliferation of form, to which generativity would
then submit itself, but proliferative, generative form. This is what Braxton
is trying to produce, at the intersection of study, competence, composition,
and performance (improvisation). There is a kind of anti-instrumental
rationality that lends itself to a being-instrument. It moves by way of the
instrument’s disruptive extension. Again, this is instantiated, we might say,
in the figure of the speaker, the bridge machine, through and across whom
praises (voices, forces) flow. She consents not to be a single being.
“Common alterity,” he prays, “make me your instrument.” It’s the speaker’s
capacity to generate generative form, this fearsomeness of what the black
soloist is and does, the one who, being so much more and less than one, so
emphatically not but nothing other than human, discomposes for submerged
choir (city), a song in flight that is sung while sunken. She moves in place,
off the track he’s on, for the love of the set it opens. There’s an alto wind at
your back, even if all you’re trying to do is get out of the way of what you
want to ride, so you can keep on generating these monkish dormitory
chants, the archaeology of our potential, past, in the funereal birthplace, the
venereal graveyard, which is a slave ship, a project, and a prison; a sound
booth, a corner, and a broken window; a law school, a conservatory, and a
language lab.

NOTES
1. Robert M. Cover, “Foreword: Nomos and Narrative,” Harvard Law Review 97, no. 1 (1983): 40.
2. Cover, “The Bonds of Constitutional Interpretation: Of the Word, the Deed, and the Role,”
Georgia Law Review 20 (1986): 833.
3. Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable, in Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable: Three Novels by
Samuel Beckett (New York: Grove Press, 1965, first published in French in 1958), 292.
4. For more on Holmes’s response to jurisgenerative fecundity, see Richard Maxwell Brown, No
Duty to Retreat: Violence and Values in American History and Society (Norman: University of
Oklahoma Press, 1994), 3–37; and Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in
America (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2001), 3–69.
5. Noam Chomsky, Language and Mind, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006),
viii.
6. See George E. Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental
Music (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).
7. Chomsky, “What We Know: On the Universals of Language and Rights,” Boston Review 30,
nos. 3–4 (Summer 2005): 23–27.
8. I have been the grateful recipient of extended tutelage on the matter of historicist critique of
Chomsky from my colleague Julie Tetel Andresen.
9. Julie Tetel Andresen, “Historiography’s Contribution to Theoretical Linguistics,” in Chomskyan
(R)evolutions, ed. Douglas Kibbee (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2010), 443–69.
10. Cheryl A. Wall, Worrying the Line: Black Women Writers, Lineage, and Literary Tradition
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005).
11. Graham Lock, Forces in Motion: The Music and Thoughts of Anthony Braxton (New York: Da
Capo, 1988), 167.
12. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York:
Harper, 1962), 219–20.
13. Theodor W. Adorno, “On Jazz,” translated by Jamie Owen Daniel and Richard Leppert, in
Essays on Music, edited by Richard Leppert, with translations by Susan H. Gillespie, Jamie
Owen Daniel, and Richard Leppert (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 492.
14. Anthony Braxton, Liner notes for Donna Lee, America 05 067 863-2, compact disc, 2005. First
published in 1972.
15. Braxton, Composition Notes: Book A (Lebanon, NH: Frog Peak Music / Synthesis Music, 1988),
139–40.
16. Chomsky, Language and Mind, 9.
17. Manthia Diawara, “One World in Relation: Édouard Glissant in Conversation with Manthia
Diawara,” trans. Christopher Winks, Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art 2011(28): 15.
18. Diawara, “One World in Relation,” 5.
19. See Polly Greenberg, The Devil Has Slippery Shoes (London: Macmillan, 1969). Hear Head
Start: With the Child Development Group of Mississippi, Smithsonian Folkways Recordings
FW02690, 2004. First published by Folkways Records in 1967.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Adorno, Theodor W. “On Jazz.” Translated by Jamie Owen Daniel and Richard Leppert. In Essays
on Music, edited by Richard Leppert, with translations by Susan H. Gillespie, Jamie Owen Daniel,
and Richard Leppert, 470–95. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.
Andresen, Julie Tetel. “Historiography’s Contribution to Theoretical Linguistics.” In Chomskyan
(R)evolutions, edited by Douglas Kibbee, 443–469. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2010.
Beckett, Samuel. The Unnamable. In Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable: Three Novels by Samuel
Beckett. New York: Grove Press, 1965 (first published in French in 1958).
Braxton, Anthony. Composition Notes: Book A. Lebanon, NH: Frog Peak Music/Synthesis Music,
1988.
Braxton, Anthony. Liner notes for Donna Lee. America 05 067 863-2, compact disc, 2005. First
published in 1972.
Brown, Richard Maxwell. No Duty to Retreat: Violence and Values in American History and Society.
Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994.
Chomsky, Noam. “What We Know: On the Universals of Language and Rights.” Boston Review 30,
nos. 3–4 (Summer 2005): 23–27.
Chomsky, Noam. Language and Mind. 3rd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Cover, Robert M. “Foreword: Nomos and Narrative.” Harvard Law Review 97, no. 1 (1983): 4–68.
Cover, Robert M. “The Bonds of Constitutional Interpretation: Of the Word, the Deed, and the Role.”
Georgia Law Review 20 (1986).
Diawara, Manthia. “One World in Relation: Édouard Glissant in Conversation with Manthia
Diawara,” translated by Christopher Winks. Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art 2011(28):
4–19.
Greenberg, Polly. The Devil Has Slippery Shoes. London: Macmillan, 1969.
Head Start: With the Child Development Group of Mississippi. Smithsonian Folkways Recordings
FW02690, 2004. First published by Folkways Records in 1967.
Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New
York: Harper, 1962.
Lewis, George E. A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008.
Lock, Graham. Forces in Motion: The Music and Thoughts of Anthony Braxton. New York: Da Capo,
1988.
Menand, Louis. The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America. New York: Farrar, Strauss and
Giroux, 2001.
Wall, Cheryl A. Worrying the Line: Black Women Writers, Lineage, and Literary Tradition. Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005.
 CHAPTER 7
IS IMPROVISATION PRESENT?

MICHAEL GALLOPE

IN October 2002, Jacques Derrida experienced something very

extraordinary: he attended two screenings of a film entirely devoted to his
life and his philosophy. This produced some atypical situations for him. In
the weeks leading up to the premiere, a wave of American press attention
crested, describing the film as “adoring and adorable” (New York Times),
“wise and witty” (New York Post), “complex, and highly ambitious” (New
York Daily News), “the cinematic equivalent of a mind-expanding drug”
(Los Angeles Times), and, perhaps most idiosyncratically, a portrait of “the
Mick Jagger of cultural philosophy” (Boston Globe). The film’s buzz ran
far beyond the circuits of the philosopher’s academic readers, so much so
that Derrida found himself denying a slew of interview requests from
curious journalists and film critics.
So far as I can tell, just one man managed to work around the refusals.
Joel Stein, a staff writer for Time magazine, slipped through the back door
of New York City’s Film Forum on the night of the screenings and cornered
Derrida with a series of unphilosophical questions: Do you like this banana
bread we’re eating? (He loved it.) What are your favorite movies? (The
Godfather, apparently.) And something like: What is the deal with your
flowing white hair? (It is something he was understandably anxious about
losing.)1 While Derrida was forthcoming in these answers, all this real-time
interaction about nonacademic topics seems to have annoyed the
distinguished French philosopher, who claimed to find a certain journalistic
expectation to drop everything and sound off on whatever topic particularly
irritating. At least, this is what Stein reported: to the philosopher’s chagrin,
these days “everyone wants [Derrida] to say something brilliant on love or
war or death.”
Certainly it is not always easy to sound responsive, clear, focused,
genuine, and concise in real-time speech acts. But I wonder if there is a
serious philosophical question at issue here. For Derrida, we might recall,
the anxiety about effective communication in real-time performance
reflected the philosopher’s famous suspicion toward the experience of
hearing oneself speak, which, in his view, often harbored a metaphysical
aura of “self-presence.” Over banana bread, and likely with a range of
deferrals, ramblings, and transferences in mind, Derrida told Stein bluntly:
“It’s frustrating. Especially when you have to improvise.”
By coincidence, I too found my way to Derrida’s attention that night—
not as a journalist, of course, but as a young undergraduate curious as to
whether or not the philosopher had anything interesting to say about music.
In a Q&A session that followed the screening, I raised my hand from the
audience and asked Derrida: “What kind of music do you listen to and why
do you listen to it?”2 Stein described Derrida’s response in the pages of
Time: “Someone asked Derrida what kind of music he likes, and he revealed
his love for free jazz and told a really long story about how Ornette
Coleman once got him to read onstage during a show.” Indeed, as the
philosopher subsequently recounted, five years prior, when Coleman was in
Paris to perform at the La Villette jazz festival in a duo with pianist Joachim
Kühn, he invited Derrida to join in on stage during one of the performances,
in which he read off a prepared text, “Joue—le prénom.”3 By the
philosopher’s own admission, however, it is equally well known that the
audience did not like it; in fact, we are told, their reaction led him to leave
the stage early.4 As Derrida remembered it, “[Coleman’s] fans were so
unhappy they started booing. It was a very unhappy event. It was a very
painful experience. … But it was in the paper the next day, so it was a
happy ending.”5 One could speculate as to why this was so. A jazz festival
audience may have just wanted what they hoped would be an unfiltered
version of Coleman. Or they may have bristled at the idea of a philosopher
explaining music that allegedly should be able to speak for itself.
But I wonder: did the collaborative failure on the part of the two men
mean that they had both misunderstood, or underestimated, a certain
incompatibility between philosophy and improvised music? In light of how
musically inclined thinkers like Ernst Bloch, Theodor Adorno, Roland
Barthes, and Félix Guattari found ways to bring their favorite music into
dialogue with their philosophical views, might Derrida, who was an expert
in literature and philosophy but had little technical background in music,
have provided Coleman’s music with a deconstructive manifesto? Or were
the other side’s expectations at fault: should free jazz’s forays into
conceptual justification (reflected in Coleman’s responses to Derrida’s pre-
festival interview, Anthony Braxton’s Tri-Axium Writings, or Cecil Taylor’s
poetry) just steer clear of lecturing in the concert hall, in order to let the
music speak on its own terms?6
Whatever the case, a difference of medium seems to present us with a
problem. Philosophers do not always feel comfortable accounting for music
in a conceptually driven way (let alone performing with it), and vice versa
for the musicians untrained in philosophy. This chapter considers these
missed connections as a point of departure. When philosophy has trouble
clarifying or deepening our understanding of something that seems to still
lend itself to a conceptual explanation (like Coleman’s free jazz), one way
forward is to try and stage the encounter anyway. This is what I would like
to attempt here, by re-asking the question it seems that Derrida’s thinking
poses to Coleman’s music—Is improvisation present?
Of course, readers familiar with Derrida’s philosophy will probably
quickly realize that the answer is, in fact, “no.” But it is not a simple “no.”
In fact, exactly how his philosophy might answer “no” in the particular case
of music may help us clarify some challenging conceptual terrain. To
explore the structure of this problem, I would like to begin by taking
recourse to the work of a philosopher who puzzled over very similar issues
as Derrida but did write frequently and passionately about music—the
French moral philosopher and amateur pianist Vladimir Jankélévitch. While
there exist, to be sure, substantial philosophical differences between the two
philosophers, both understood the experience of time and the problem of
technical mediation to be the sources of an exceptional aporia for
philosophy. And both issues—time and technical mediation—seem to be
crucial factors for a philosophical account of musical improvisation.
In order to build the discussion up toward my thesis, allow me to begin
by summarizing a few of Jankélévitch’s central positions. Taking
intellectual cues from his mentor, Henri Bergson, Jankélévitch understands
the flux of lived time, or durée, as creative in a sense that stands in excess
of all understanding or intellection. But he also emphasizes that the effects
of durée are as destructive as they are creative. For just as time is the key
axis under which one can understand life to be created, developed, and
reproduced, it is the equally essential axis for the second law of
thermodynamics that ensures the eventual loss of every life, the forgetting
of moral acts, the transgression of laws, and the evanescence of every
musical event. Given the specter of nihilism suggested by the valueless flux
of time, Jankélévitch wonders: why does a moral act, a musical work, or a
life come to exist and sustain itself at all?
In search of a substantial ground for moral, ethical, and aesthetic virtues,
Jankélévitch’s philosophy asks us to turn against scientific or logical forms
of knowing in order to arrive at what he described as virtuous or “innocent”
meditations that are attuned to temporally dynamic aspects of real-life
experience. Consequently, for him, as for Bergson, philosophy requires a
certain attentive fidelity to lived experience:
[T]he generous mind does not remain confined in a blasé memory; it does not impose a
summary solfège on the admirable variety of nature. … Intellectual effort signifies that we have
kept a means of conquering the data of experience by testing the originality of things and the
resistance of problems, by conserving intact this sensibility to the unexpected that produces the
prize of knowledge. For a deep science does not happen without a substantial innocence.7

For Jankélévitch, this virtuous attunement or “innocence” toward lived

experience is intended to follow through on Bergson’s faithful attention to
the qualitative multiplicity of durée, or lived time. For both philosophers,
knowledge of the real comes through access to intuition. Intuition allows us
to overcome the sense that our perception is simply changing from one
discrete cognitive state to another; rather, it gives us access to real
becoming—absolute change at every moment, in every direction, regardless
of our awareness. This is what remains resistant to all forms of
spatialization and intellection.
Becoming does not permit the object to be divided into sectors, according to its corporeal limits;
it is much more the dimension according to which the object undoes itself without end, forms,
deforms, transforms, and then re-forms itself. A succession of states of the body, that is, change
itself, dissolves the limits fossilized by our mental habit of splitting and dividing.8

But whereas Bergson’s concept of durée, first staged in Time and Free Will
(1889), led him to forward a speculative philosophy of memory and
cognition (Matter and Memory, 1896) and a philosophy of evolution
(Creative Evolution, 1907), Jankélévitch’s philosophy focuses on our lived
experience of durée. In particular, he is interested in the knotty and
paradoxical issues that structure the possibility of focusing on the instant as
a point of attentive fidelity.
In the Philosophie première of 1953, Jankélévitch explored this logic
through an inquiry into how experience negotiates metaphysical forms of
knowledge. There, he ventures that just as the conscious mind comes to
isolate the absolute productivity of the creative instant, consciousness itself
paradoxically seems to face phenomenological occlusion. “We can take, in
the smallest being of the instant, only a consciousness itself almost
inexistent, which is to say trans-discursive and intuitive: not so much a kind
of Gnostic clarity, it [the almost inexistent] is the only positive science of
sur-truth [survérité] that might be given to us to claim.” Here, even as we
try to isolate the “smallest being of the instant,” our experience of time does
not give us any kind of “Gnostic clarity” on the exact nature of the instant
itself. Instead, a contradiction presents itself: our efforts at absolute
knowledge of the instant (or “sur-truth [survérité]”) are incessantly
structured by memory, cognition, and intervallic structures of temporality.
This leaves us with access only to the uncertain and approximate poetry of
the “almost inexistent.” He continues: “A discursive and chronic knowledge
of sur-truth is a way of contradiction, and, therefore, a knowledge [savoir]
founded on memory and on the continuation of an interval condemning
itself here to negativity.”9 This “knowledge founded on memory” occludes
the absolute perception of the instant as a moment of self-present
consciousness by rendering it subject to “the continuation of an interval
condemning itself to negativity.” The instant cannot be presented as a form
of absolute knowledge without recourse to a mediating network of
remembered or “absent” temporal intervals.
The lack of sustained knowledge of the lived instant might be visualized
with the following diagram (Figure 7.1). Here, the now is represented by a
singular point on a continuum of experienced time stretching off to the
right. Below the continuum are two arrows representing an absent interval
of time. Only through the mediation of this lower interval can the instant
become known to experience. It is something of a paradox: a positive
instant cannot become present to our experience without the negative
mediation of two other moments that span a minimal interval.
FIGURE 7.1 Fidelity to Jankélévitch’s Instant.

The co-implied nature of positivity and negativity at work in the

consciousness of an instant is not restricted to the sphere of perception. In
the opening chapter of Le Pardon (1967), the irreversible degradation of
living matter is integrated with Bergson’s durée: “The decay of living
organisms, if it is accelerated by physical or chemical agents, results above
all from a qualitative and irreversible entropy that is essential to a lived
becoming.”10 Just as it is with organisms, so it is with the effect of our
memory upon our experience of the coming now; an irreversible future of
incessant alteration also means that no pure expectations uncontaminated by
memory (and its effacement) are possible: “[B]‌ecoming retains memories,
alteration, slowed down by the weight of the past, and implies the decay of
this past, for the return to the status quo ante is impossible. …”11
The negative character of time (decay, loss, evanescence, mediation of
creativity by memory and idiom) will be key to his account of musical
improvisation. For Jankélévitch, improvising is not simply based in positive
access to the instant of musical creativity. Rather, improvisation carries the
existential burdens of evanescence, loss, and silence; negativity constitutes
“all that is melancholy in temporality.”12 In one of Jankélévitch’s books on
music, we can see the logic explicitly at work. As he says, improvisational
fidelity toward the becoming of the lived instant requires not a submersion
within the embodied present, but a hyperactive attentiveness to the micro-
timing of remembrance and anticipation around the lived instant.
Depending on whether it is antecedent or consequent, tension toward the instant after
rehabilitation or at the instant before, improvisation would be expectation of the future or a
minimum retrospectivity. In the first case, it refers to the urgent future of action or the immanent
future of passion, which is to say to what is immediately subsequent: it awaits the arrival or the
advent of the future that happens, and it is this adventure; a second too late, this coming would
not be next, but far; a second later it would be too late, and this future would be a present. The
second case is that of the smallest possible delay, that which comes immediately after the
minimum reaction time of reflexes; a second too late and it would be too early and the
improviser would find itself nose-to-nose with its present; a second too late and the recent past
would pass far behind. Between the two distances—the past and the future—improvisation
“most closely” follows (or preceeds) a conjuncture that is just barely future or almost present,
just barely present or almost past.13

What we see characterized here is the temporal structure of a committed

“adventure” of improvised time, something I will refer to as a theory of
complex temporality. Rather than a meditative channeling of a
spontaneously expressive now, complex temporality makes clear that
improvisation is the product of an intervallic network that ties the coming
now to the nearest possible anticipation of the future and the nearest
possible recollection of the past. The measure of an improviser’s skill (or
virtue) shows up in the degree to which one maintains attentive fidelity
toward the nearest possible moment without ever becoming simply self-
present. In this sense, improvisation, with its necessary and constitutive
blindnesses and uncertainties, represents a faithful and vigilant operation
that, for Jankélévitch, “leads” presence. Complex temporality is only ever
“quasi-contemporaneous” in being the nearest possible, without becoming
fully contemporaneous with the arriving instant of the vanishing now.
This unpresentability of the instant recurs as a leitmotif in Jankélévitch’s
broader philosophy of music.14 In books like Music and the Ineffable, for
example, it receives the metaphysical name of Charme, which designates
the evanescence that ensures the inexhaustability of musical experience, or
its “divine inconsistency.” He writes: “Charme rejects therefore the
question ‘Where?’ just as it eludes the question ‘What?’ Charme, that is not
keen on this-or-that, does not lie either here-or-there.”15 For Jankélévitch,
the charme of music is not an experience of presence, but rather is based in
a paradoxical sense of occlusion inherent to the passing of a lived instant.
Charme “is therefore essentially evasive—which is to say that it escapes,
invisible, and intangible and yet always present as are music and fragrances
that we can neither see nor touch; it obligates us to an irritating game of
hide and seek.”16 This relentless intangibility of music reflects a property of
time itself—a negative absence one finds at the heart of the lived instant.
Derrida, for his part, would likely agree equally that the vanishing now
cannot simply be made present to experience. But deconstruction thinks
through negativity on a more constitutive level. Derrida argues that the
“negative absence” that makes the lived instant unpresentable is based in
more than the mediation of intervallic synthesis; he insists always and
everywhere that time (or becoming) is always structured by something that
it is not—spatial inscription, or espacement. As he puts it famously in his
essay “Différance”:
An interval must separate the present from what it is not in order for the present to be itself, but
this interval that constitutes it as present must, by the same token, divide the present in and of
itself, thereby also dividing along with the present, everything that is thought on the basis of the
present, that is, in our metaphysical language, every being, and singularly substance or the
subject. In constituting itself, in dividing itself dynamically, this interval is what might be called
spacing, the becoming-space of time or the becoming-time of space (temporization).17

For Derrida, the interval at work in memory or cognition does not simply
occlude the presence of the vanishing now “in an irritating game of hide
and seek;” rather, as Martin Hägglund has recently argued, it mediates all
time from within.18
There are many ways to try and make sense of this very complicated
claim, but for the experience of music in particular I think it may be
instructive to draw a short parallel here with Hegel’s discussion of the
temporality of sound as explained in the Lectures on Aesthetics.19 There,
Hegel explains how sound (passing in time) is a phenomenon that is a
“double-negation”—a being ceases to be itself in the very instant that it
becomes. For Hegel, a sound [Klang] becomes a tone [Ton] when an “idea,”
a reflection of inward subjectivity, allows a sonorous being to overcome the
incessant flux of time’s “double negation” and acquire a proper and discrete
unity.
For Derrida, in order for what Hegel describes as the “double-negation”
of the vanishing “now” to not fly on by as a nothingness or an abyss, lived
moments must “be” in some empirical sense—they must be structured or
“inscribed” by an anticipation (or “protention” in the vocabulary of
phenomenology) as well as one’s memory or “retention,” a topic Derrida
devotes substantial attention to in his critiques of Edmund Husserl.20 This is
a familiar thought for Jankélévitch: in his view, “intervallic” inscriptions
immediately before and after the now are the mediating substance of all
improvisation. But the Derridian logic of inscription goes further in holding
that the instant itself is inscribed. For Derrida, what Jankélévitch described
as “our mental habit of splitting and dividing” does not supervene in a
process of secondary intellectual reflection; rather, it divides the instant of
the now in itself.
The following diagram represents an attempt to formalize this structure:
the instant is shown here on the central horizontal axis of time stretching to
the right. For deconstruction, the passing now is not merely subject to
intervallic mediation as it would for Jankélévitch’s theory of complex
temporality. Rather, the instant—in its instantaneous being—is subject to
spacing, writing, idiom, and many other means of objective mediation. I
have represented this with six radiating fans of symbolic grids that extend
outward from the instantaneous now. Notice further that these mediating
grids are also, for Derrida, “sous-rature”—under erasure by virtue of the
decay inherent to the passage of time. I have represented this erasure with
six countervailing arrows of time (Figure 7.2).
FIGURE 7.2 Derrida’s Instant.

Derrida’s emphasis on structural determination, of course, does not mean

that the creative instant of improvisation is simply determined or “notated.”
Because all forms of life are everywhere immediately based in a
multiplicity of inscribed traces, for Derrida, any single or proper medium of
determination like notation would be subject to deconstruction. In Of
Grammatology, Derrida deconstructs the medium of embodied speech
because its alleged immediacy facilitates a “metaphysics of presence,” an
operation that could be applied to alphabetic script or Western musical
notation for different reasons—any naturalized medium that might claim to
overcome the instabilities of time and inscribe the eternal. By contrast, the
improvised instant is structured by an undecidable multiplicity of
inscriptions.
In marked distinction to Bergson and Jankélévitch, what we do not find
in Derrida’s account are any affirmations that this instant is inherently
creative, even if inscribing something as a trace in order for it to “be” seems
a lot like “creating.”21 One sees consequences of this in Derrida’s method.
Since any metaphysical safety zone for time as a force of creativity might
risk making time look like “God” or a divine cause, at a formative moment
of his career Derrida uses the word “différance” to indicate the absence of
any instance of eternity or immortality outside the finite universe. As
Derrida says, différance constitutes the primordial “becoming-space of time
[spacing] and becoming-time of space [temporization]” and “the ‘active,’
moving discord of different forces and of differences of forces. …”22 In
impersonally marking “the formation of form” and “articulation,” this
general “being-imprinted of the imprint” affirms not vital creation, but
impersonal production via the nonliving or negative motif of inscription,
always “articulating the living on the non-living in general,” forming a
“pure movement that produces difference” that operates “before all
determination of content.”23 These forces of production ensure that
spatialization, mediation, and writing are intrinsic to the structure of any
lived time. For Derrida, creative time does not receive metaphysical priority
over processes of spacing, articulation, and imprinting; space and time are
always co-implied.
Derrida’s impersonal economy of co-implied space-time reveals to us the
comparatively metaphysical nature of Jankélévitch’s commitment to lived
experience, which often retains a hierarchical dichotomy between interval
and the instant. For Jankélévitch, the instant is where a certain creative
magic happens; outside all determination, it is the precise point where one
overcomes structure, idiom, and rules in order to invent, begin, and create.24
In his central text on improvisation, he writes: “You learn to prepare, not to
invent; to continue, not to begin, to provide, not to create; there are no more
rules for inventing or improvising than there are for desiring; learning is
always according to the interval, never done according to the instant.”25
What initially appears to be a mutual exclusion between creative moment
and practiced idiom in Jankélévitch’s thought should, however, be read in
context with the subtleties of the philosopher’s broader ontology. The
instant is the focus of Jankélévitch’s philosophy not because it is simply the
locus of self-present creativity. In my view, Jankélévitch’s instant represents
a horizon of creation just as much as it represents the simultaneous
necessity of nonpresence, erasure, and loss. According to his theory of
complex temporality, the creativity of the vanishing now is constitutively
occluded and structured by memory, synthesis, and the loss of evanescence.
Its non-presence is why improvisation is instead based in an attentive
fidelity to the locus of lived experience.
By comparison, Derrida does not understand the instant of lived time to
be an instance of creativity. So thorough was his commitment to thinking of
time as structured by the negativity of space from within that, when he
discusses improvisation, he does so with a pronounced sense of distance
from the coming present. Consider the beginning of “Joue—le prénom,” the
text he prepared for his onstage performance with Ornette Coleman.
Unmoored from an attentive or skilled grounding in the lived instant,
Derrida initially presents himself to Coleman, Kühn, and their audience as
an improviser in full-on panic mode:
Qu’est-ce qui arrive? What’s happening? What’s going to happen, Ornette, now, right now?
What’s happening to me, here, now, with Ornette Coleman? With you? Who? Il faut bien
improviser, il faut bien improviser. [It is indeed necessary to improvise, it is necessary to
improvise well.] I knew that Ornette was going to call on me to join him tonight, he told me so
when we met to talk one afternoon last week. This chance frightens me, I have no idea what’s
going to happen.26

Here, Derrida’s two varying emphases on “bien” playfully juxtapose the

unchosen injunction to improvise against the ethical imperative to do it
well. But a skilled negotiation of doing it well is what remains at issue, and
Derrida puts his feelings plainly: “This chance frightens me, I have no idea
what’s going to happen.” The following remarks, made in an earlier
interview, present another version of his views of improvisation (though
purged of the sense of anxiety he expressed onstage with Coleman). More
soberly, here he emphasizes the hauntingly absent “prescriptions” and
“schemas” we improvisers are bound to adopt as mere marionettes of a
symbolic order beyond our control and apprehension:
It’s not easy to improvise, it’s the most difficult thing to do. … [O]ne ventriloquizes or leaves
another to speak in one’s place the schemas and languages that are already there. There are
already a great number of prescriptions that are prescribed in our memory and in our culture. …
One can’t say whatever one wants, one is obliged more or less to reproduce the stereotypical
discourse. And so I believe in improvisation and I fight for improvisation. But always with the
belief that it’s impossible. … I am blind to myself. … The one who is improvised here, no I
won’t ever see him.27

For Derrida, it would seem that amidst a multiplicity (“a great number of
prescriptions”) one confronts the reality that no single skilled or measured
relationship to the passing now is constitutive of an improvised experience,
effectively resigning one to an “impossibility” of remaining fully attentive
to one’s experience of the lived instant. It is here that Jankélévitch might
ask: Without a sense of attentive fidelity to the passage of the vanishing
now, how would one improvisation be deemed more successful than
another? Does not improvisation require an account of ethical (or skilled)
criteria based in the actions of an individual’s experience? Or one might
ask: How can one think of improvisation in a way that follows Derrida’s
emphasis on inscription without allowing the weight of mediation to
excessively question a positive focus on skill and virtuosity?
Jankélévitch’s account of musical improvisation, in my view, comes with
limitations that largely stem from his focus on notated compositions. In his
most sustained consideration of the topic, once he elaborates his basic
position of complex temporality, he turns to a discussion of examples. It is
at this point that Jankélévitch turns away from the topic of real-time
improvisation and begins discussing a compositional “Rhapsodie” that
exhibits directly the “initial moment of invention,” a metaphysical “chronos
of the real” unleashed from the immanent powers of Franz Liszt’s rhapsodic
style of composition:
[When thinking of improvisation] the interest shifts from the finished work to the operation, of
the determined form on the undetermined and determining formation. … Romantic man wants
to creep up on the revealed message of the genius and the “how” of creation. But to him
Bergsonism also shows us how one must invert a doctrinal order and an ideal after-the-fact
reconstruction in order to obtain the chronos of the real; the musical work, all the same, is not
fabricated with static themes, it is organized from a dynamic scheme … before being developed,
it was a rhapsody. Yet the inventor incapable of explicating his inexplicable invention can only
demonstrate by the fact of doing, that is to say to lead by example: the poet of the work exhibits
therefore himself the work of the poem. … [H]e represents himself, most intimately, in the most
initial moment of invention. … [I]t has the name Improvisation.28

For Jankélévitch, the rhapsody of improvisation is reflected in compositions

by Liszt that rely less on thematic development, and more so on rhapsodic
transitions that emulate the dynamics of one’s inner creative spirit. In this
way, Liszt’s Rhapsodie emphasizes the brute “fact of doing,” and echoes a
view espoused by George Steiner in his book Real Presences (1991) for
whom “the poet of the work exhibits therefore himself the work of the
poem.”29 No mediating commentary, criticism, or clarification is necessary,
and therefore nothing more needs (or ought) to be said.
But does Jankélévitch really mean to suggest that improvisation is best
thought of us as music without mediation? Empirically, to be sure, it seems
that the philosopher was not terribly interested in jazz or other explicitly
improvised traditions. But there also may be a deeper philosophical reason
Jankélévitch felt comfortable making this move. For the philosopher is less
focused on one problem Derrida takes quite seriously: the constitutive role
of inscription as a mediator. In his writings on music, Jankélévitch typically
thinks of negativity in improvisation through the complex temporality of
the vanishing now, often without considering how forms of inscription (or
forms of musical writing) are structurally intrinsic to the negativity all
improvisation must navigate. My sense is that this selective engagement
with the problem of technical mediation is one reason Jankélévitch
discusses improvisation in music largely as a philosophical explanation of
Liszt’s rhapsodic compositional style, rather than an analysis of real time
musical negotiations.
Conceptually, it would seem, we are left with something of a dilemma:
Derrida offers a theory in which we are “fighting for improvisation” in a
situation that must negotiate a haunting multiplicity of structural
inscriptions, that leaves us without strong criteria for the skilled negotiation
of real time. And on other side we have Jankélévitch, who quite effectively
and vividly theorizes an attentive fidelity to the vanishing now as an
unpresentable horizon of experience, but who does not weigh the effects of
structure and inscription as constitutive forms of mediation.
Perhaps, in staging a conversation that might bridge this dilemma, we can
augment Jankélévitch’s theory of complex temporality (an attentive fidelity
to the vanishing now) with the Derridian injunction that the “intervallic”
support systems of real-time temporality (the nearest possible before and
after) are constituted not only by an “irritating game of hide and seek”
inherent to the passage of time, but also a broader multiplicity of musical
inscriptions. But one would have to stop short of following Derrida in
assuming that the weight of inscription questions the very possibility of
orienting oneself toward the lived instant with a sense of ethical skill. When
Jankélévitch writes: “Improvisation is the returning of mediation to the
immediate. Immediate mediation or discursive immediacy, improvisation is
a sort of instantaneous preparation,” one can then understand “mediation”
to mean not just Jankélévitch’s intervallic synthesis of the instant by the
nearest possible before and after, but now also Derrida’s multiplicity of
potential inscriptions, structures, and idioms that bear upon an improvised
act in the full complexity of their historical and discursive textures.30 In
bridging the two theories, we would restore some dialectical operation
between the lived instant and the inscriptions we actually specify in musical
discourse. And then we might have a philosophical apparatus to more fully
investigate the speculative life of a musical practice based in “instantaneous
preparation.”
Such is the potential middle ground I see between these two positions. A
theory of complex temporality adopted from Jankélévitch and augmented
with Derrida’s views on inscription can offer us a conceptual basis for
understanding improvisation as a furiously active locus of complex
mediations. In replacing the interpreted reproduction of a notated work with
the injunction of consequential real-time decisions, improvisers, according
to this logic, can be understood to affirm a constitutive absence at the heart
of musical practice itself. According to this view, one improvises onward
without a commonly agreed upon medium like notation or without the
regulatory grid of a single musical idiom; and that would be the point of
improvisation—to expose the ground of music to our survival instincts, to
our idiomatic proclivities, to our historicities, to our notably faulty efforts
and to our embarrassing mistakes, and, in some cases, to our utterly
transformative experiences.
In the end, perhaps we also get a glimpse of the way in which the
affirmations at play in musical improvisation exemplify a basic paradox of
lived becoming—that the creative singularity or “freedom” that marks the
very virtue of this modernist practice is at every instant determined by the
threat of impossibility or failure, because all musical improvisation entails
the necessity of reproducing something one has already heard or played. As
Coleman himself says, “repetition is as natural as the fact the earth
rotates.”31 Both philosophically and musically, this is not a tragedy to be
mourned, nor is it the negation of all creativity; rather, it is an affirmation
that allows us to think of improvisation as a virtuous exemplification of
what it means to live through a risk that inheres in the passage of time, one
that ensures the impossibility of any pure immortal or plentiful advent of
self-presence. It is based in a real instant that is everywhere temporalized
and spaced by absent determinations, a multidimensional network that
integrates spatial traces of somatic and socio-technical inscriptions with the
synthesis of the coming present.
I would conclude by proposing that this position is akin to the poetic
commentary Fred Moten offers us in his close readings of the black radical
tradition. For him, the tradition of free jazz represents neither a utopian
musical communion of presence nor a bout of disorienting anxiety; it is
fully mediated, marked by the virtuous singularity of one’s active powers of
musical anticipation that engage attentive efforts to rewrite musical rules in
real time. Here, Moten evokes a synthesis of Jankélévitch’s complex
temporality with a broader Derridian insistence on the scope of the musico-
cultural prescriptions and rules at play:
Improvisation—as the word’s linguistic roots indicate—is usually understood as speech without
foresight. But improvisation … always also operates as a kind of foreshadowing, if not
prophetic, description. … [Y]‌ou need to look ahead with a kind of torque that shapes what’s
being looked at. You need to do so without constraints of association, by way of a twisted
epoché, or redoubled turn in the prescription and extemporaneous formation and reformation of
rules, rather than the following of them.32

Moten’s analysis continues on with a larger speculative totality in mind. For

him, the improvisatory elements of the black radical tradition uncannily re-
articulate a “phonographic” inscription of a scream uttered over a hundred
years prior—specifically one overheard during a brutal whipping recounted
by Frederick Douglass in his 1845 autobiography, Narrative of the Life of
Frederick Douglass, An American Slave. In his analysis, black improvised
traditions are not simple exemplifications of rule bending, but intrinsically
linked to the speculative recollection of this traumatic sound. He writes:
You cannot help but hear the echo of Aunt Hester’s scream as it bears, at the moment of
articulation, a sexual overtone, an invagination constantly reconstituting the whole of the voice,
the whole of the story, redoubled and intensified by the mediation of years, recitations,
auditions. That echo haunts, say, Albert Ayler’s “Ghosts” or the fractured, fracturing climax of
James Brown’s “Cold Sweat.” … Where shriek turns speech turns song—remote from the
impossible comfort of origin—lies the trace of our descent.33

The speculative weight of this “phonographic” memory reminds us that

improvisation is not simply creative singularity, but is rather a structured
practice mediated by a vast multiplicity of absent traces: adopted idioms,
cultural practices, and traumatic memories. These would be the mediating
criteria for creativity, which structure and focus our unseen anticipations of
the future: “Improvisation must be understood as a matter of sight and as a
matter of time, the time of a look ahead whether that looking is the shape of
a progressivist line or rounded, turned.”34 Far from being determined in any
strong sense, for Moten, the lived musical instant is “rounded, turned”
everywhere by an unknowable multiplicity of structures, memories,
histories, anticipations, and determinations (or, in more strictly
metaphysical terms—spatial “death” or “absence”).
Consider, momentarily, text from a loosely transcribed interview with
trumpeter and jazz composer Thad Jones. For Jones, the living present of
improvisation and its associated virtues of selfless attunement can induce a
sense of corporeal communion, in apparent excess of any mixed signals or
crossed wires:
Here the aesthetics of presence holds unrestrictedly. You give yourself up, surrender without
ulterior motives; egoism and spirit of competition yield for generosity, presence and
interdependence. One develops a presence that is like telepathic intuition … during such
moments, improvisation is like the language that develops between two loving partners and that
usually is called eroticism.35

How can one sympathize with this sentiment, but go on to emphasize the
inevitable frictions that result from such aestheticized versions of erotic
“presence?” Moten himself draws a philosophical line, though not a
condemning one: “Thus improvisation is never manifest as a kind of pure
presence—it is not the multiplicity of present moments just as it is not
governed by an ecstatic temporal frame wherein the present is subsumed by
past and future.” Instead, for Moten, improvisation is only intelligible to the
attentive listener who is willing to grasp both the constitutive necessity and
unstable multiplicity of inscription that structure the attentive fidelity of an
improvisational practice. To the listener sensitive to the dynamics of
mediation, Jones then claims musical telepathy only to acknowledge here
that improvisation is “like the language that develops between two loving
partners”—accomplishing not a metaphysical communion or
transubstantiation, but rather a secular negotiation through the erotic
economy of love.
Cecil Taylor’s highly self-reflexive spoken word album, Chinampas
(1987), is equally exemplary in this regard. Moten writes: “Performance,
ritual, and event are of the idea of idiom, of the ‘anarchic principles’ that
open the unrepresentable performance of Taylor’s phrasing.” For him,
inscription is constitutive, entailing necessary absences that invite cognitive
interrogation. Indeed, Moten questions the meaning of Taylor’s improvised
movement, which for him represents an attempt to listen philosophically to
the act of poetic construction itself. For Taylor and Moten, mediation,
writing, and inscription are not relied upon as natural or transparent
vehicles for aesthetic expression, but are rather made explicitly constitutive
of the musical act. Notice here how Moten’s effort to listen to Taylor
virtuously maintains at once an attentive fidelity to complex temporality
and a dutiful form of hermeneutic attention: “What happens in the
transcription of performance, event, ritual? What happens, which is to say
what is lost, in the recording? … What is heard there? What history is heard
there? There is one which is not just one among others … the history of (an)
organization, orchestra(tion), construction. The essence of construction is
part of what that phrasing is after; the poem of construction—geometry of a
blue ghost—is the poem that is of the music.”36 Far from a simple sense of
liberated freedom or self-presence, Taylor’s practice is based in a written
“organization, orchestra(tion), construction,” a formal “poem that is of the
music,” a “history” that is “in the recording” and subject to incessant
mediations. In saying so, Taylor reflects an injunction one finds somewhere
between Jankélévitch and Derrida—that improvisation constitutes a form of
attentive fidelity precisely insofar as the vanishing now is structured by a
multiplicity of meaningful inscriptions and mediations.
Of course, for now these are preliminary inquiries and this chapter only
represents one attempt to understand these difficult questions. But at the
very least, I think we might venture at this point that, under analysis,
Jankélévitch and Derrida together reveal conceptual resources that can help
us develop a deeper philosophical understanding of improvisation.
Specifically, they allow us to see more precisely how improvised music
grounds its sense of virtuosity not on the basis of a singular immediacy or
self-presence, but in remaining mediated after having done away with any
single proper idiom. This view allows us to affirm an unconditional absence
or the lack of common ground at the heart of musical practice itself. It is an
absence that addresses a certain question: How can philosophy explain the
risks taken by a musical practice that is based at once on a profound sense
of negativity and on a determined act of creativity?

NOTES
1. Joel Stein, “Life with the Father of Deconstructionism,” Time, November 18, 2002, accessed
May 17, 2011, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1003736-2,00.html.
2. Kirby Dick, Amy Ziering Kofman, and Jacques Derrida, Derrida: Screenplay and Essays on the
Film (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), 114.
3. Jacques Derrida, “Play—The First Name: 1 July 1997,” trans. Timothy S. Murphy, Genre:
Forms of Discourse and Culture 36, no. 2 (2004): 331–340; originally published as “Joue—Le
 Prénom,” in Les Inrockuptibles 115 (August 20–September 2, 1997): 41–42.
4. Cf. Sara Ramshaw, “Deconstructin(g) Jazz Improvisation: Derrida and the Law of the Singular
Event,” Critical Studies in Improvisation / Études critiques en improvisation, accessed May 18,
2011, http://www.criticalimprov.com/article/viewArticle/81/179.
5. Stein, “Life with the Father of Deconstructionism.”
6. Jacques Derrida and Ornette Coleman, “The Other’s Language: Jacques Derrida Interviews
Ornette Coleman, 23 June 1997,” trans. Timothy S. Murphy, in “Blue Notes: Toward a New
Jazz Discourse,” part 1, ed. Mark Osteen, special issue, Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture
37, no. 2 (2004): 319–329, originally published in Les Inrockuptibles 115 (August 20–
September 2, 1997): 37–40, 43; Anthony Braxton, Tri-Axium Writings(Dartmouth:
Synthesis/Frog Peak, 1985); Cecil Taylor, Chinampas, Leo Records LR 153, 1987, CD.
7. Vladimir Jankélévitch, Henri Bergson (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1989), 131.
Unless stated otherwise, all translations are mine.
8. Vladimir Jankélévitch, Music and the Ineffable, trans. Carolyn Abbate (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2003), 93.
9. Vladimir Jankélévitch, Philosophie première (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1986), 99.
“[N]ous n’en pouvons prendre, dans le moindre-être de l’instant, qu’une conscience elle-même
presque inexistante, c’est-à-dire transdiscursive et intuitive: du moins cette gnose-éclair est-elle
la seule science positive de la survérite à laquelle il nous soit donné de prétendre; un savoir
discursive et chronique de la survérite est une manière de contradiction, et, partant, un savoir
fondé sur la mémoire et sur la continuation d’intervalle se condamne ici à la négativité.”
10. Vladimir Jankélévitch, Forgiveness, trans. Andrew Kelley (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2005), 13.
11. Jankélévitch, Forgiveness, 21, translation modified.
12. Jankélévitch, Music and the Ineffable, 96.
13. Vladimir Jankélévitch, Liszt: Rhapsodie et Improvisation (Paris: Flammarion, 1998), 109.
14. This aporia of unpresentability is the main point of innovation often credited to Jankélévitch’s
philosophy vis-à-vis that of Henri Bergson. See Jean-Christophe Goddard’s entry on
Jankélévitch for The Columbia History of Twentieth Century French Thought, ed. Lawrence D.
Kritzman, Brian J. Reilly, and M. B. DeBevoise (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006),
552–553.
15. Vladimir Jankélévitch, Fauré et le inexprimable (Paris: Librairie Plon, 1988), 346.
16. Jankélévitch, Fauré et le inexprimable, 346.
17. Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1982), 13, emphasis mine.
18. Martin Hägglund, Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford
University Press, 2009).
19. G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1975), 2: 890. “Since, furthermore, the negativity into which the vibrating material here enters
is, on the one side, an Aufheben of the spatial condition which is itself again aufgehoben by the
reaction of the body, therefore the expression of this double negation, namely, Ton, is an
externality that in its coming-to-be is annihilated again by its very existence and
disappears/vanishes of itself. Owing to this double negation of externality, implicit in the
principle of Ton, inner subjectivity corresponds to it because the resounding, which in and by
itself is something more ideal than independently really subsistent corporeality, gives up this
more ideal existence also and therefore becomes a mode of expression adequate to the inner
life” (emphasis mine).
20. Cf. Jacques Derrida, Voice and Phenomena, trans. Leonard Lawlor (Evanston, IL: Northwestern
University Press, 2011); Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry, An Introduction by Jacques
Derrida (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989); and Derrida’s student thesis, The
 Problem of Genesis in Husserl’s Philosophy, trans. Marian Hobson (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2003).
21. For an instructive characterization of Derrida’s project as bearing an implicit relationship to a
metaphysics of creation, see Peter Hallward, “The One or the Other: French Philosophy Today,”
Angelaki 8, no. 2 (2003): 1–32.
22. Jacques Derrida, “Differánce,” in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1982), 13, 18.
23. Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1974), 62.
24. For a second post-Bergsonian account of the creative and poetic instant, cf. Gaston Bachelard,
Intuition of the Instant, trans. Eileen Rizo-Patron (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press,
2013).
25. Jankélévitch, Liszt, 107, emphasis and translation mine.
26. Derrida, “Play—The First Name, 1 July 1997,” 331–332.
27. Derrida, Unpublished Interview (1982), reprinted in Kirby Dick, Amy Ziering Kofman, and
Jacques Derrida, Derrida: Screenplay and Essays on the Film (Manchester, UK: Manchester
University Press, 2005).
28. Jankélévitch, Liszt, xx.
29. George Steiner, Real Presences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).
30. Jankélévitch, Liszt, 107.
31. Derrida and Coleman, “The Other’s Language,” 323.
32. Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 63.
33. Moten, In the Break, 22.
34. Moten, In the Break, 63–64.
35. K. Oversand, Improvisation and the Aesthetics of Presence, ed. Ola Kai Ledang, 74, quoted in
Bjørn Alterhung, “Improvisation on a Triple Theme: Creativity, Jazz Improvisation and
Communication,” Norwegian Journal of Musicology 30, no. 1 (2004): 106.
36. Moten, In the Break, 43–44.

REFERENCES
Alterhung, Bjørn. “Improvisation on a Triple Theme: Creativity, Jazz Improvisation and
Communication.” Norwegian Journal of Musicology 30, no. 1 (2004): 97–118.
Bachelard, Gaston. Intuition of the Instant. Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 2013.
Braxton, Anthony. Tri-Axium Writings. Dartmouth, NH: Synthesis/Frog Peak, 1985.
Derrida, Jacques. Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry, An Introduction by Jacques Derrida.
Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989.
Derrida, Jacques. Margins of Philosophy, translated by Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1982.
Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology, translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1974.
Derrida, Jacques. “Play—The First Name: 1 July 1997,” translated by Timothy S. Murphy. Genre:
Forms of Discourse and Culture 36, no. 2 (2004): 331–340. Originally published as “Joue—Le
Prénom” in Les Inrockuptibles 115 (August 20–September 2, 1997).
Derrida, Jacques. The Problem of Genesis in Husserl’s Philosophy. Translated by Marian Hobson.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.
Derrida, Jacques. Speech and Phenomena. Translated by Leonard Lawlor. Evanston, IL:
Northwestern University Press, 2011.
Derrida, Jacques, and Ornette Coleman. “The Other’s Language: Jacques Derrida Interviews Ornette
Coleman, 23 June 1997,” translated by Timothy S. Murphy. In “Blue Notes: Toward a New Jazz
Discourse,” edited by Mark Osteen. Part 1. Special issue, Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture
37, no. 2 (2004): 319–329. Originally published in Les Inrockuptibles 115 (August 20– September
2, 1997).
Dick, Kirby, Amy Ziering Kofman, and Jacques Derrida. Derrida: Screenplay and Essays on the
Film. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005.
Hägglund, Martin. Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford
University Press, 2009.
Hallward, Peter. “The One or the Other: French Philosophy Today.” Angelaki 8, no. 2 (2003): 1–32.
Hegel, G. W. F. Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art. Translated by T. M. Knox. Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1975.
Jankélévitch, Vladimir. Fauré et le inexprimable. Paris: Librairie Plon, 1988.
Jankélévitch, Vladimir. Forgiveness. Translated by Andrew Kelley. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2005.
Jankélévitch, Vladimir. Henri Bergson. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1989.
Jankélévitch, Vladimir. Music and the Ineffable. Translated by Carolyn Abbate. Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2003.
Jankélévitch, Vladimir. Philosophie première. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1986.
Kritzman, Lawrence D., Brian J. Reilly, and M. B. DeBevoise, eds. The Columbia History of
Twentieth Century French Thought. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007.
Moten, Fred. In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2003.
Oversand, K. Improvisation and the Aesthetics of Presence. Edited by Ola Kai Ledang. Oslo,
Norway: Solum Forlag, 1987.
Ramshaw, Sara. “Deconstructin(g) Jazz Improvisation: Derrida and the Law of the Singular Event.”
Critical Studies in Improvisation / Études critiques en improvisation. Accessed May 18, 2011.
http://www.criticalimprov.com/article/viewArticle/81/179.
Stein, Joel. “Life with the Father of Deconstructionism.” Time, November 18, 2002. Accessed May
17, 2011. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1003736-2,00.html.
Steiner, George. Real Presences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.
Taylor, Cecil. Chinampas. Leo Records CD LR 153, 1987.
 CHAPTER 8
POLITICS AS HYPERGESTURAL
IMPROVISATION IN THE AGE OF
MEDIOCRACY

YVES CITTON

IN what measure and under what forms does improvisation play a role in the
political life of our current media-driven democracies, which I will call
“mediocracies”? In order to address this question, I draw precious insights
both from classical and recent political philosophers (Étienne de La Boétie,
Baruch Spinoza, Gabriel Tarde, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Bruno
Latour, Michael Hardt, and Antonio Negri) and from various theorists of
musical improvisation (Sun Ra, Derek Bailey, Lawrence “Butch” Morris,
Anthony Braxton, George Lewis, William Parker, and Guerino Mazzola).
This inquiry is based on the assumption that improvising musicians, over
the past decades, have developed a uniquely reflexive awareness about the
art of live collaboration, which all of us practice in our daily lives, but
which most of us experience without much reflexive thought. The
assumption is not that “jazz” musicians are better improvisers than the rest
of us (although that may very well be the case), but that they represent the
intellectual vanguard in the effort to understand the ethical and socio-
political implications of the improvisational activities that compose, day in
and day out, the very fabric of our common social and political life. On the
basis of this assumption, however, I attempt, in the second part of this
chapter, to narrow and sharpen our definition of improvisation, in order to
sketch a sharper conception of politics itself, illustrated here by the events
that revolutionized Tunisia and Egypt in the early months of 2011.
THE POTENCY OF THE MULTITUDE IN A WORLD OF
ENCOUNTERS
Going all the way back to Aristotle, we can find statements throughout
history that acknowledge a special form of power emanating from the sheer
number of the multitude (to plèthos, το πληθος): “It is possible that the
many, though not individually good men, yet when they come together may
be better, not individually but collectively, than those who are so.”1 The
insight that not only strength, but also intelligence could reside in numbers
has been developed by a tradition of thinkers that found its highest classical
expression in the work of Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677), who used the
concept of multitudinis potentia (the potency of the multitude) as the
keystone of his political theory. Spinozism provides a most inspiring
groundwork for a theorization of politics as collective improvisation
because of eight basic principles, which can be roughly summarized from
the complex system of thought laid out in the Ethics and in the Political
Treatise (both published posthumously in 1677):2

1. There is no such thing as Providence; the world evolves along the

necessary laws of nature, in the absence of any global (divine)
intentionality; God is nothing more than nature itself (Deus sive
natura).
2. Body and mind are one and the same thing, considered from two
different points of view; the interaction of physical things is strictly
parallel to the development of mental processes.
3. All bodies/minds are animated by a conatus (drive, desire), i.e., by an
inner vital urge which pushes them to persevere in their being.
4. Our human conatus pushes us along two major types of conduct: one
led by the “imagination” (by the impression made upon us by certain
images and sensory encounters), and another led by “reason” (by our
rational understanding of the causal processes that determine reality).
5. Rational understanding allows us to make up partially for the lack of
divine Providence with the potency of human prudence (i.e.,
foresight), insofar as the understanding of causal processes helps us
anticipate some of the future effects of our present behavior; however,
since the complexity of the world exceeds by far the potency of
 individual and collective human reason, most of our behaviors are
bound to be pre-rational.
6. Nothing is more useful to a human being than another human being; a
human being is never more potent and useful than when s/he is led by
reason.
7. Socio-political life consists in the circulation, channeling, capture, and
appropriation of multitudinis potentia, i.e., the actual capacity of
human bodies (and minds) to perform certain acts.
8. Political power (potestas) consists in reapplying the multitudinis
potentia—condensed by its channeling through institutions like the
police, the army, the administration—back onto the multitude in order
to rule its behavior in a top-down fashion.3

The highly scandalous radicalism of this philosophy is directly linked to

the role it assigns to improvisation: in the absence of Providence, we
humans have to improvise ways to sustain and develop a living, within an
environment where nothing is predisposed to being suited to us. This
improvisation concerns both our inscription within our natural milieu and
our dealings with our fellow humans. Life is made of “encounters”—which
are necessarily and mechanically caused by the laws of nature but appear to
us as merely coincidental, since the infinite complexity of nature as a whole
is bound to escape our highly limited mental potency.
In fact, “nature as a whole” does not exist for us, except as an abstract
idea (“God”). Sociologist and philosopher Bruno Latour recently expressed
a similar view with equally radical consequences:
There is no such thing as a common world. There has never been. … The common world is to
be composed. It is not already there, provided by nature, to be discovered in a pre-existing
universal, hidden behind the veils of ideologies and beliefs, expecting to be uncovered so that its
revelation can impose an agreement among us. This common world is to be made, to be created,
to be established. Hence it can fail. That’s all the difference: if the common world is to be
composed, its composition can fail.4

While Latour borrows from the lexicon of “composition,” the vocabulary of

improvisation would be equally appropriate to describe our mode of
existence in a world made of encounters. All of our daily actions result
from a certain mix—the proportions of which constantly change—of
compositional foresight, thanks to which I attempt to anticipate the future
effects of my current behavior according to my rational understanding of
the laws of nature, and of on-the-spot improvisation, thanks to which I can
integrate the unavoidable novelty encountered in each situation.
We do indeed compose a common world by “coming-together” in our
daily interactions. Within our modern urban modes of life, “my” capacity to
act in my most banal gesture is made possible only through the
collaboration of an unfathomable multitude of other human beings, who
collaborate to provide me with the means to act. “My” agency—my
capacity to act, compose, improvise—appears clearly as a function of the
potency of the multitude.
While the notion of “the multitude” is arguably very close to the more
classical notion of “the people” (as elaborated in the republicanist tradition),
it does differ from it in at least two crucial ways. First, contrary to the
strong patriotic, ethnic, or nationalistic overtones that haunt most classical
definitions of “the people,” the multitude is not bound by pre-existing
territorial, ethnic, nationalist, administrative, linguistic, religious, or cultural
borders: as soon as “many people” (to plèthos) interact, communicate, and
collaborate in such a way that their individual potency results from a
composition of their forces, they form a “multitude.” Second, contrary to
the strong pressure toward homogeneity applied by the republicanist
definitions of “the people,” the real strength, vigor, and vitality of “the
multitude” rests on the tensions generated by the diversity of the
singularities of which it is composed. While the ideal (republicanist)
“people” is made of citizens who have been trained to share the same
beliefs and values, as if they all came out of the same mold, the multitude
can only develop its common strength by developing the singularity of each
participant.5
Acknowledging that our individual agency results from the potency of
the multitude (defined as a collective of interacting singularities) provides
the basis of a politics of radical democracy: no matter who you are, no
matter what you do, “your” capacity to act results from a certain
channeling, use, and appropriation of the potency of the multitude (i.e., of
the composition and multiplication of forces made possible by
collaborations, communication, and exchanges among humans). Hence, the
“power” (potestas) of an army general is nothing but the convergence of the
forces and wills (conatus) of the soldiers and officers who obey his
commands. This was the simple but radical argument made around 1550 by
Étienne de la Boétie in his Discourse on Voluntary Servitude: the tyrant’s
“power” is nothing other than willingness of the oppressed to obey his
commands.6 Should the multitude refrain from fuelling the tyrant’s power
(potestas) with the constant flow of its potency (multitudinis potentia),
tyranny would have its carpet pulled from under its feet, and it would
crumble upon itself like a hollow shell. Monarchy, aristocracy, democracy,
theocracy, autocracy, totalitarianism, or dictatorship are only variations on
the basic fact of radical democracy: they all consist in various ways devised
to channel, distribute, capture, and appropriate the potency of the multitude.

COLLECTIVE AGENCY IN THE AGE OF

MEDIOCRACY
Equipped with this basic sketch of Spinozist political ontology and with a
clearer vision of radical democracy, we are now in a position to address the
role of improvisation within the particular type of political regime under
which we currently live—mediocracy.7 At this point, the main question is
the following: What mobilizes nowadays the potency of the multitude? What
sets it in motion?
Three bodies of theoretical work will help us provide a rough answer to
this question. Gabriel Tarde (1843–1904) invited his readers to view social
life as a circulation of flows of desires and beliefs. What defines and
structures human societies, according to him, is not so much the economic
division of labor as a complex interplay of three inter-psychological forces:
imitation, opposition, and invention. Waves of imitation, carried by the
media with increasing speed, spread through modern societies and shape the
way we interact with each other. Fads, fashions, aesthetic trends,
technological inventions, and artistic movements align many of us (to
plèthos) along similar lines of behavior. Even if others among us feel the
need occasionally to resist some of these trends, even such attitudes of
opposition are determined by the waves of imitation toward which they take
a reactive posture. Far from being antithetic to imitation, invention,
according to Tarde, results from the unique intersection and superposition
of several imitative gestures: one becomes originally inventive, not so much
because one was “originally” endowed with a unique gift, but rather
because one ends up being the only person to imitate this particular set of
models. Society appears as woven from an intersection of influences. Tarde
thus provides a first response to our question: what sets my singular agency
in motion results from the flows of desires and beliefs generated in me by
the interplay of imitation, opposition, and invention that constantly
resonates through human societies.8
Michel Foucault’s analyses during the 1970s and 1980s profoundly
transformed the way we tend to imagine “power.” Instead of seeing power
exerted through constraint and threat, imposing its will in a descending
movement from the One on top down to a multitude of powerless and
passive subjects at the bottom of the totem pole, Foucault invited us to view
it as “a structure of actions brought to bear upon possible actions”:
It incites, it induces, it seduces, it makes easier or more difficult; in the extreme it constrains or
forbids absolutely; it is nevertheless always a way of acting or being capable of action. A set of
actions upon other actions. … Power is exercised only over free subjects, and only insofar as
they are free. By this we mean individual or collective subjects who are faced with a field of
possibilities in which several ways of behaving, several reactions and diverse comportments
may be realized.9

Several major implications of this definition are relevant for our purpose.
First, the type of power described here by Foucault does not so much
impede or block our agency, as it conditions it. Being subjected to power
does not mean being passive: power mobilizes us as much as it represses us;
it is carried by desires and hopes as much as by threats and fears. Second,
we constantly participate in a multiplicity of “structures of actions brought
to bear upon possible actions,” and, as we move from one to the other, most
of us alternate between positions of dominance and of subjection. As a
consequence, human societies appear as an intricate fabric conflictingly
woven by many competing and often contradictory structures of power. We
thus have another response to our question: what sets our agency in motion
are the desires and fears induced in us by the many intertwined structures of
power in which we actively participate.
One last body of theoretical work needs briefly to be tapped in order to
complete our picture of what sets the potency of the multitudes in motion
within our mediocracies. A series of recent French thinkers like Guy
Debord (1931–1994), Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007), and Bernard Stiegler
(1952–) have all investigated the politico-ontological consequences of the
feedback loops by which our social reality is being actually shaped and
restructured by the spectacle, which is supposed merely to “represent” it (in
order to “entertain” us).10 The major intuition we should retain from these
thinkers is the following: as it is no longer possible to separate social
“reality” from the simulations through which we stage our interactions,
political agency needs to invest the staging of reality (by the media) as
much as reality itself. Hence a third response to our question: what
mobilizes the potency of the multitude are the various stagings of reality
performed and broadcasted on our mass media.
Taken together, Tarde, Foucault, and the theorists of our staged
“hyperreality” provide us with a striking description of the circulation of
power within our mediocracies. Let us briefly summarize this overall
picture, before focusing on the status of improvisation. The potency of the
multitude, defined as the capacity to act provided by the bodies and minds
of a certain population, is mobilized according to the flows of desires and
beliefs that resonate through this multitude, following complex patterns of
imitation, opposition, and inventive recombination. The media function as
the channels and vectors through which these flows are broadcast within the
population, generating many predictable and unpredictable multiplier-
effects, as well as blockings and neutralizations. Explicit forms and acts of
power—one citizen is elected president of the country, a board of trustee
decides to put 10,000 workers out of their jobs, a judge sentences a man to
death—represent only spectacular local coagulations of this overall
circulation of desires and beliefs, which is endemic in the multitude.
These explicit forms of power can only take place as long as the
incoming flows of desires and beliefs continue to fuel them. Recent history,
in the Middle East and elsewhere, illustrates what happens when these
incoming flows suddenly dry out and change routes: the “legal” president
becomes a hated tyrant, asked to clear the ground (Dégage!). Under the
surface of such an eventful and massive turning around of the flows of
desires and beliefs, the potency of the multitude is constantly woven by
small-scale conflicts of influence, through which individuals and social
groups attempt to assert their relative power. The aggregate flows made
suddenly visible during a time of revolution result from the intertwined and
globally chaotic strategies of individual and collective conatus, that is, from
the constant drives that push individuals and collectives to persevere in their
being and improve their lot. If no benevolent Providence (or Intelligent
Design) has pre-organized the interactions of these conflicting strategies,
power is constantly up for grabs: the actual directions taken by the
aggregate flows result from differentials of pressure, alternatively pushing
toward the right or the left, depending on the largely unpredictable
neutralization or amplification of local movements.
At all levels, since the determining factors in socio-political struggles are
desires and beliefs (rather than brute physical force), representations and
simulations provide a crucial leverage on the channeling, capture, and re-
orientation of the potency of the multitudes. The activity of staging is
performed by the journalists who select the content of the evening news, by
the scriptwriters of Hollywood and Bollywood, by the designers of
commercial ads, but also by each and everyone of us, whenever we tell a
story, express an opinion or write a blog. This activity should be seen as the
key factor when we try to understand what mobilizes and steers the potency
of the multitudes. It is at this level of staging—within the realm of the
imagination—that our social destiny is shaped, day-in and day-out,
progressively or catastrophically; this is where new paths of explorations
are opened or shut, new stories told and old stories rehashed, new myths
launched and old myths debunked—shaping our imaginary and
conditioning our affects, thus causing this particular hope to appear as
believable (or not), this particular perspective as desirable (or not).
This, I would like to believe, was the insight that Sun Ra expressed when
he invented the new political category of “mythocracy”: “I’m telling people
that they’ve tried everything, and now they have to try mythocracy. They’ve
got a democracy, theocracy. The mythocracy is what you never came to be
that you should be.”11 Of course, Sun Ra was offering much more than the
mere description of a political regime: as a potent artist and as a true
political activist, he was trying to inspire us to act in order to become what
we should be. How can we conceive—and stage—the processes by which
we “act” and “become what we should be” within mediocracies? This is
where we need to look at the examples, analyses, and conceptualizations of
collective agency provided by improvising musicians.

NINE STEPS TOWARD A POLITICAL SHARPENING OF

THE REFERENCE TO “IMPROVISATION”
It would be (too) easy to show that “improvisation,” in its broadest sense, is
required from all social agents, at every step of their most daily routine, as a
structural necessity of the type of society sketched in the previous pages.
We all experience a life made of encounters as what Patricia Shaw precisely
describes as a “live” performance (by contrast with pre-recorded footage):
“[d]‌espite the ubiquity of our intentions, plans, rehearsals and scripts, all the
effort we put into anticipating, what happens next is never a done deal,
because we can never completely predict or control even our own response
to what is happening, let alone the responses of others.”12
If we are to “become what we should be,” we need to conceive political
agency on the basis of a somewhat sharper definition of improvisation. I
will tap into the wealth of connotations included in the etymology and
resonances of the word “improvisation” in order to carve a definition more
directly in tune with our political needs in the age of mediocracy. This will
take no fewer than nine steps, but along the way, it will progressively
unfold the political potentials of improvisational agency.

1. Im-Providence. The ontological framework delineated in the first

pages of this chapter is based on the (historically scandalous) rejection
of the common idea of Providence. We need constantly to improvise,
because we don’t believe an Intelligent Design has pre-programmed
our behaviors for the better. Intelligence is our (human) job (in the
form of prudence and foresight). Improvisation is the active side of
human intelligence. In more directly political terms: the need to
improvise goes hand in hand with a radical distrust toward any
institution of control that is supposed to watch over us (on the model
of a Central Intelligence Agency). Political intelligence is to be located
in the resistance of minoritarian and marginal units, rather than at the
level of central command.
2. Un-provided for. We need to improvise because we don’t have a ready-
made routine or a proper tool. The CIA and the Pentagon have
technology and procedures; insurgents make up improvised explosive
devices. While everyone improvises, rich and poor, improvisation
tends to be the weapon of the have-nots: those whose basic needs are
un-provided for. If necessity is the mother of invention, indigence may
be the mother of improvisation.
3. Improvement. It might be equally true, however, that improvisation is
the daughter of luxury. A worker glued to his machine in an assembly
line is left no room to improvise: he is given everything he needs in
order to do his job. Being “over-provided for” generates another type
of poverty (by saturation). Improvisation results both from an urge to
improve one’s lot and from the luxury of benefitting from a certain
margin of action (and margin of error). Here again, improvisation
thrives from the margins, insofar as we escape the saturation of central
control, and insofar as we are animated by a spirit of insurgence
(which defines the specificity of our conatus).
4. Improviso. The authentic etymology of our vocabulary of
improvisation directs us toward the Italian all’improviso, which comes
itself from the Latin improvisus, “unforeseen.” Several variations
spread from Italy to France between 1650 and 1750 (impromptu,
improviser, improvister). During this whole period, improvisation
belongs to the arts of poets and comedians (as well as musicians).
Improvisation, as a word, if not as a practice, has its roots on the
theatrical stage. In his Treatise on Acting from Memory and by
Improvisation, published 20 years after Spinoza’s death, Andrea
Perrucci (1651–1704) remarks that the art of improvising during a
performance (il rappresentare all’improviso le comedie) “was
unknown to the Ancients” and “is an invention of our times.” While
Perrucci contrasts the flexible intelligence of the improvising actor
with the parrot-like rigidity of those who merely declaim a pre-scripted
text (premeditato), he deconstructs in advance the simplistic binary
opposition between composition and improvisation:
Saying whatever comes to your lips will certainly result in blunders. … It is not by stripping
oneself entirely of scripted material that one should take up the challenge; rather, one should be
armed with some general compositions that can be adapted to every kind of comedy.13

Perrucci’s foundational theoretical gesture calls for three remarks

about the status of agency all’improviso. First, it has strong historical
links to the activity of staging. Second, it has been perceived as
specific to modernity, and it is strikingly in sync with the development
of a typically modern philosophical and political (Spinozist)
radicalism. Third, and more important, the very theoretical gesture that
claims the novelty and vivacity of improvisation is haunted by a
 constitutive contradiction: Perrucci’s Treatise has often been seen as
marking the decline of the art of improvisation on the Italian stages of
the commedia dell’arte, an art that it contributed to weakening by its
normative tone and by reducing it to a standardized and homogeneous
practice.
5. Risk, not chance. The apparent contradiction inherent to the
theorization and standardization of a supposedly “spontaneous”
practice should not only make us highly suspicious of the notion of
spontaneity applied to improvisation; it should mainly push us to see
risk as a core component of our definition of improvisation. “Risk, not
chance,” as David P. Brown correctly stresses, with a motto he quotes
from Lawrence “Butch” Morris.14 While the notion of chance puts us
in a passive and powerless posture toward the sequence of the
encounters that awaits us, the notion of risk calls for an active attitude
of prudence, attentive foresight, and intelligent calculation. Perrucci’s
standardization of theatrical improvisation contributed to weakening
the commedia dell’arte by reducing it to a formulaic, repetitive,
predictable, hence riskless practice. The lesson strongly bears on
identifying authentic improvisation in the political field: while all
politicians are exposed to the uncertainty of chance (earthquake,
sudden rise in the price of grain, embarrassing revelation), political
agency is to be measured in terms of the intelligent risks it decides to
take.
6. Non-idiomaticity. If risky improvisation is different from naïve
spontaneity in front of a chance event, similarly, the innovative
dimension of improvisation should be expected to do more than simply
say something heretofore unheard. While every speaker tends to
produce linguistically original sentences (which nobody ever uttered
before him), it requires a very different attitude, and much stronger
skills, in order to produce poetically original sentences, which alter the
manner in which we perceive our world and our language. In his
famous and foundational book, Derek Bailey contrasted idiomatic
improvisation, which remains within the pre-existing norms and
expectations of a certain language, with non-idiomatic improvisation,
which wanders outside of any pre-established language.15
A similar distinction has been made in a very different field of study, but
with important implications for our current concern. In his attempt to
define seven pillars of life under the acronym of PICERAS (Program,
Improvisation, Compartmentalization, Energy, Regeneration,
Adaptability, Seclusion), biologist Daniel E. Koshland feels the need
to separate a capacity to improvise from a mere capacity to adapt. He
defines improvisation as non-idiomatic, “because a living system will
inevitably be a small fraction of the larger universe in which it lives, it
will not be able to control all the changes and vicissitudes of its
environment, so it must have some way to change its program.”
Changing one’s program, altering one’s language, however, takes time
and much effort, and a life of (good and bad) encounters often requires
faster reactions: “[F]or example, a human that puts a hand into a fire
has a painful experience that might be selected against in evolution—
but the individual needs to withdraw his hand from the fire
immediately to live appropriately thereafter.” Aside from
improvisation, which “is too slow for many of the environmental
hazards that a living organism must face,” Koshland defines
adaptability as a spontaneous (instinctive, mechanical, pre-
conditioned) reaction that remains within a given behavioral language.
This distinction can easily be superposed on Bailey’s, when Koshland
states that “improvisation is a mechanism to change the fundamental
program, whereas adaptability is a behavioral response that is part of
the program.”16 While idiomatic improvisation is a behavioral
response that respects and reinforces a pre-existing program, even
when it has to deal with the unexpected, non-idiomatic improvisation
consists in on-the-spot reprogramming. In order to be significant, we
will therefore expect political improvisation to be non-idiomatic.
During a financial and economic collapse, when lawmakers take
emergency measures to boost the demand for cars, in order to prevent
the closing of factories, they illustrate an unintelligent, knee-jerk
“adaptive” reflex, based on obsolete consumerist models that are
ecologically unsustainable. True improvisation would have required
them to “change the fundamental program,” that is, to question our
very definition of “growth,” “unemployment,” or “welfare,” and to
experiment with non-idiomatic solutions (basic unconditional income,
alternative modes of transportation and urbanism, taxation of financial
transactions, etc.)
7. A common sense of purpose. In a more recent discussion of the
differences between improvisation in art and adaptation in biology,
Wolfgang Raible stressed an essential point of departure between the
two.17 Whereas, within the dominant Darwinian (aka Spinozist)
paradigm used in biology, adaptation has no telos (no purpose, no
guiding intention, no value-oriented design, no anticipatory vision, no
providence), musical improvisation is fueled and oriented by a telos:
whether an artist is soloing or whether a collective is interacting, the
evolution of the music is driven by a sense of purpose and can hardly
be understood without some reference to this sense of purpose. A
group of improvising musicians on a stage is radically different from
the encounter of a monkey, a fruit tree, a worm, and a virus in a
tropical forest. While the monkey, the fruit tree, the worm, and the
virus do interact in a complex manner, based on interdependence and
adaptive evolutions, they don’t behave on the basis of a common sense
of purpose. The musicians assembled on a stage for a performance that
includes a strong improvisation component do come with their
individual agendas, styles, abilities, moods, but their interaction is also
driven by a shared telos: minimally, to please the audience; maximally,
to generate a work of art to be remembered. So improvisation is
animated by a tension between open exploration (which, ideally,
should be as “free” as the chaotic recombination that fuels biological
adaptation) and a teleology that is strongly oriented toward a common
goal.
We begin to understand more clearly why it is crucial to put
improvisation at the core of political agency. Human societies—insofar
as they are structured by flows of imitation and by functional
imperatives of collaboration—can be seen as multilayered
superpositions of “common purposes” on different scales—from the
global survival of the human race to the united workers fighting
against the closing of their factory to the individual artist struggling to
perform and broadcast her art. In order to adapt to their changing
environments, these superposed collectives need to invent, and hence
explore, new “ways of life.” Their historical fate is therefore directly
linked to the consistency of their common purpose and to the openness
of their inventive explorations. If they “knew” how to reach their
common goal, they would not need to take the risks of improvisation.
 It is because they don’t have the proper procedure at hand that they are
bound to resort to improvisation—one could say that they are thus
“bound to be free,” in the sense that they have no other choice but to
make use of their freedom to try innovative and untested (i.e., risky)
procedures. Of course, such trials and errors cannot leave their original
common goal unaffected: the unsuspected turns taken by the
improvisation are bound to question and redefine their original aim
along the way.
Thus, explicitly putting improvisation at the core of political agency
short-circuits the traditional opposition between procedure-based
approaches and outcome-based approaches. For many decades now,
“socialism” has been described as a (failed) attempt to organize
societies around a common goal of equality, while “capitalism” (more
modestly, but more successfully) managed to stick to a procedural
approach: let’s give ourselves basic rules of fair exchanges of goods
and services (as self-regulated by market interactions) and, whatever
the outcome may be, it will be deemed “just.”18 The example of
collective musical improvisation neutralizes this false alternative, by
showing how much the exploratory procedure is inherently linked to
the development of a common sense of purpose.
8. Diagonality. The model provided by non-idiomatic improvisation
provides us with yet another way to neutralize a potentially
incapacitating false contradiction that has plagued contemporary
political theory. As Andrea Perrucci well knew and stated as early as
1699, “[I]t is not by stripping oneself entirely of scripted material that
one should take up the challenge” of improvising on stage. Similarly, it
is not by rejecting any form of hierarchy that a collective can best
foster its “freedom.” Most forms of musical improvisation include in
their structure some aspect of temporary inequality that is geared
toward empowering the collective as such: more volume and space is
given to a soloist during his solo, one band-member has pre-written a
series of common themes and compositional devices, or the collective
explicitly decides to put itself under the organizational power of a
conductor. Lawrence “Butch” Morris (b. 1947) is probably the
musician and theorist who has best encapsulated the practical
implications and theoretical stakes of this organizational power within
the scope of improvising ensembles.
 He describes conduction (conducted interpretation/improvisation) as
“a vocabulary of ideographic signs and gestures activated to modify or
construct a real-time musical arrangement or composition,” generally
within a rather “classical” situation where a conductor “directs” an
ensemble of musicians regularly looking to him for various types of
instructions. The common goals stated by Morris clearly reveal that the
vertical superiority enjoyed by the conductor is meant to improve in
parallel the furthering of each participant’s singularity as well as the
consistency and potency of the collective. In a remarkable confluence
with the political theory of the multitude developed by Antonio Negri
and Michael Hardt,19 conduction is designed simultaneously “to
enhance the ensemble’s interpretive and expressive abilities and skills”
and “to engage each musician in a system of music-making that draws
on his or her unique personality, history and ability.” In helping the
participants “to surpass their heretofore-perceived artistic limits,” the
vertical relation of conduction hopes “to expand the intellectual reach
of the individual and collective by elaborating on the elements of the
decision-making process”:
The logic of circumstance(s) dictates the maximizing of encounter, and the musical and social
structures that grow from such encounter. Conduction is the art of “environing,” the
organization of surrounding things, conditions or influences. It is a technique to capture and
discover sonic information, structure and substructure, meaning, implication and expression (as
we construct together)—all primary values in our pursuit of coherence and poignancy, and the
immediacy of place.20

Here too, we see that the reference to improvisation draws a diagonal

in the traditional opposition between vertical (hierarchic) structures of
command and horizontal (egalitarian) structures of (free) interaction.
The Morrisian conductor constitutes one pole of this diagonal, with a
clearly identified organizer set apart from the group of musicians,
while “collective free improvisation” (as practiced by radical
performers who make it a point not to pre-state any explicit common
goal, shape, or frame to their interaction) constitutes the other polarity
of the same diagonal. The inspiring virtue of improvisation as such is
to be located in its very diagonality in relation to the traditional
parameters of vertical domination and horizontal equality: its
(fundamentally political) challenge is to devise collective forms of
agency that articulate the outstanding power of the participating
 singularities with the principle of equal respect necessary to find non-
oppressive strength in numbers.21
9. Diagrammatics. One of the most shining models of the potency of
collective improvisation is provided by the coordinate and schematic
structures imagined by Anthony Braxton (b. 1945). These devices
illustrate how compositional devices can trigger, boost, nurture, and
empower both the singularity of each participant and the potency of
the collective. Since Braxton has often used diagrams in order to
represent such coordinate and schematic structures, I will refer to them
globally—ignoring the differences between their various types and
series—as diagrammatics.22 What seems to me politically relevant in
diagrams, as illustrated in Braxton’s music, is that they consist in
singular formal inventions, driven and inhabited by an individual and
collective sense of purpose, which channel and organize the potency of
a multitude through an explicit gesture of “regulation,” in such a way
that allows them to meet four simultaneous challenges: (a) they
generate their own local language, which spontaneously carries the
participants into non-idiomatic territories; (b) they augment the
singularity of the participants by helping them to take risks and
“surpass their heretofore-perceived limits”; (c) they “expand the
participants’ intellectual reach” by reconfiguring “the elements of the
collective decision-making process”; and (d) they manage to do all this
without the need for an apparatus of power to enforce or regulate the
interaction of the participants—contrary to the conduction model,
which still requires a conductor.
In other words, diagrammatics, on the basis of this singular
example, offer a miraculous device able to augment and channel the
“potency” (potentia) of a multitude without generating positions of
“power” (potestas). Within the highly artificial space created
(“environed”) by the diagram,23 individual agents find a way
collectively to experience and expand their singular and collective
potency, without any one of them being put in a position of structural
superiority while the interaction takes place. Within the perimeter of an
ensemble of musicians on stage or within any other collective
attempting to reconfigure its collaboration through a device formalized
like a diagram, diagrammatics perform an operation very similar to
what political theorists have attempted to describe as “the regulation of
 self-regulation” through formalized “legal procedures and
organizational norms working to equalize the bargaining power of
those parties affected by specific arenas of social activity,” with the
general goal of “reducing power asymmetries by procedural
devices.”24 The main difference between most political theories and
improvisational diagrammatics, however, is that the former are mainly
concerned with circumscribing the perimeter of what should be
allowed by law, while the latter is mostly interested in expanding what
can be achieved by the potency of the multitudes—and this opening of
the scope suffices to make most works of political philosophy look
outdated and mutilating.
Of course, the miraculous device of diagrammatics “sounds too
good to be true”: Mr. Braxton, after all, no matter how brilliant,
generous, unselfish, must have his ego, like the rest of us—and even if
he does not, one cannot construct a politics on the assumption of
individual sainthood. As our previous point made clear,
improvisational practices must be located along a diagonal that holds
no taboo against one member of a collective made of equals taking up
the role of a “leader.” Even if the potency-without-power promised by
diagrammatics remains an ideal never perfectly to be realized, it
deserves to generate hopes and enthusiasm, for the simple reason that
—thanks to Braxton, but also thanks to the musicians who played with
him, and thanks to the countless multitudes of diagrammatists
currently playing on stages all over the world—this miraculous device
sounds real to whomever was fortunate enough to experience it (as a
direct participant, as a listener in the audience or, vicariously, through
recordings). My conclusion will attempt to address the reality of such a
miracle.

TOWARD A POLITICS OF HYPERGESTURES

The main difference, one could object, between music and politics is that it
is enough for a concert to “sound good,” whereas political discourse has to
translate good-sounding slogans into “actual reality.” This is where it is
important to remember that we live in mediocracies (aka societies of
spectacle, of simulacra, simulation, and “hyperreality”). Of course, the
difference between false appearance and hard-nosed reality has not been
abolished. But it is equally obvious that today’s simulations are an actual
moment of production of tomorrow’s world. If, as Sun Ra suggested,
“mythocracy is what you never came to be that you should be,” then the
mystifying appeal of the myth should be understood as a call, as a vocation
(and not only as a lure). From within our individuals and from within our
collectives, it demands that we become “what we should be,” that we
unleash this “power stronger than itself” George E. Lewis has tracked
through the development of a multitude in action, the Association for the
Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM).25
On the face of it, the shining example of a group of musicians performing
the miracles of collective interplay on stage is entertainment, in the
pejorative sense of the French equivalent, divertissement: something that
merely diverts and distracts us from “reality.” It won’t help pay my heating
bill in winter, and it won’t help me find a job if I have been laid off after the
closing of an industrial plant. The momentary potency or joy briefly
experienced during the performance is a “myth”—an illusion, a non-reality:
I would be a fool to count on it to solve my problems. And yet, from
another point of view, such moments have the potential to become
transforming experiences—and they sometimes are, as most of us can
hopefully testify.
Gilles Deleuze often commented on a deceptively simple observation
made by Spinoza: “So far no one has been able to determine what a body
can do” (remember that body and mind, for Spinoza, are one and the same
thing). The unique intensity of improvised music, whether it is experienced
as a player or as a listener, can be best encapsulated by this formula: being
overwhelmed and overjoyed by what a body can do (the singular body/mind
of this musician within the singular body/mind of this collective). This is
the political potency of the myth (mythocracy) fuelled, night after night, by
improvising musicians: since no one has been able to determine what
individual and collective bodies can do, and while it would be foolish to
believe that everything is possible—gas will not come for free, my factory
will not reopen tomorrow morning by miracle—we can and we must
believe that some things which we thought unachievable can be done by
individual and collective bodies, once they invent a diagram capable of
unleashing a power stronger than itself.
 In a mediocracy, what people believe to be possible is not the same as
what is actually possible—but it is just as important. What a body can do
has been illustrated most spectacularly by the collective body of bodies
occupying Tahrir Square in Cairo. From December 2010 to February 2011,
the most important transformation occurred in what people believed to be
possible: within a few weeks, they “came to be that they should be.” The
potency of the multitude became powerful, as the flows of desires and
beliefs pushed more and more people to flow toward Tahrir Square. What
did these people do? Nothing, in terms of contributing to short-term GDP.
They did not “work,” they did not make or do anything. They played. They
played with their lives, of course, under dramatic pressure, with amazing
bravery. But in spite of the gravity of the situation, and in spite of the tragic
outcome it had for too many of them who lost their lives along the way, it is
important to understand their action as a gesture, and their movement as a
play.
More precisely still, we now have a concept that describes what the
demonstrators did on Tahrir Square: they improvised. Their behavior
paradigmatically illustrates the nine features of political improvisation
delineated in the previous pages: a multitude of whatever singularities, most
of them of mediocre origin, (1) turned their minoritarian intelligence against
the illusionary Providence and the deceptive control of their central
government, because (2) they felt un-provided for, and because (3) they felt
a strong urge to improve their lot; they did so (4) by staging all’improviso a
play of disobedience on public square, addressing their performance to a
worldwide audience through mass-media communication; (5) they risked
their lives, (6) inventing non-idiomatic modes of communication through
on-the-spot reprogramming of their resistance strategies and political
agenda; while they were exploring untested tactics, (7) they were
momentarily united by the strongest sense of purpose, which (8) pushed
them to invent new diagonals between the whatever singularity of the man-
in-the-street and a few media-sponsored political figures who associated
with the movement.
The hard question may be (9) where was the diagram that allowed their
flows of desires and beliefs to precipitate on Tahrir Square, causing a
collective political movement to coagulate out of separate individual
frustrations? My closing argument will be the following: this diagram was
provided by a gesture and should be conceived as unleashing the power
stronger than itself carried by gestures.
A sensationalist approach may identify this gesture in the self-
immolation by fire performed by Mohamed Bouazizi (1984–2011), the
Tunisian street vendor who set himself on fire on December 17, 2010, in
protest against police harassment. Of course, this gesture did not “cause”
the Tunisian revolution, even less the Egyptian. But it certainly contributed
to triggering it. And it did so through relaying and amplificatory dynamics
that are typical of mediocracy. One young man sets himself on fire as an act
of protest; a few people demonstrate in solidarity with him. This early
staging receives wider and wider media coverage, to the point where
Tunisian President/dictator Ben Ali has to be shown on TV visiting
Bouazizi on his hospital bed. This sensationalist interpretation could track
the wave of imitation that tragically spread across the Arab world as other
whatever singularities (Mohsen Bouterfif, Maamir Lotfi, Abdelhafid
Boudechicha in Algeria; Abdou Abdel-Moneim Jaafar in Egypt) repeated a
similar sacrifice. It would show that this tragic trail of self-immolations was
closely accompanied by a trail of popular resistance, rechanneling the flows
of desires and beliefs that mobilize the potency of the multitude.
In order to develop a broader and less sensationalist understanding of the
specific form of collective agency at work within this series of events, we
need to borrow the concept of hypergesture proposed by Guerino Mazzola
in his brilliant analysis of the “art of collaboration” involved in free jazz.
This concept is drawn from the definition of the gesture provided by French
philosopher Gilles Châtelet:26 “The gesture is not substantial: it gains
amplitude by determining itself. … The gesture inaugurates a family of
gestures. … One is infused with the gesture before knowing it. … A gesture
awakens other gestures.”27 Mazzola then shows that whether we observe
the actual movements performed by a musician or whether we consider
more generally the way all of us experience our gestures, collaboration is
based on movements of transduction carrying a similar pattern of gestures
from one field of action to another. It is at this higher level of
“hypergestures” that our movements become meaningful and
communicable. The notion of hypergesture “captures the paradigmatic
action of comparing shapes or gestures that are only given as discrete
points, but are cognitively correlated in a continuous way, germinating from
motor actions as required in music, speech, and spatial competences.”28
This insight is summarized in the following manner:
Gestures are not facts, they can create facts, but persist before and outside facticity. Nonetheless,
the entire modus operandi of the art of collaboration is based upon a number of complex
mechanisms that enable gestures to unfold their intense communicative action. We shall see that
in free jazz, gestures appear in various complexions, they are highly articulate like human
bodies and can be aggregated to hypergestures (gestures of gestures), they display a skeletal
scheme and an embodiment in a topological space, and they are not only physical gestures, but
can deploy their bodies in entirely abstract spaces.29

I will conclude this reflection on political agency as improvisation by

analyzing the movements made by protesters on Tahrir Square in light of
the concept of hypergesture. Their actions, staged in front of world media,
were indeed a play, although clearly a risky one: they did not commit the
tragic act of self-immolation performed by Bouazizi and by those who fully
emulated him. This original gesture “awoke other gestures,” “inaugurating a
family of gestures” and “gaining amplitude by determining itself” into a
common attitude of defiance toward authoritarian regimes. The multitude of
“mediocre” political subjects who gathered on Tahrir Square transduced this
tragically concrete gesture (of self-immolation), endowed with an intense
communicative potential, into a hypergesture (of rebellion), thus elevating it
to the status of a “myth” that mobilized the most potent resources of our
mediocracies.
This becoming-myth of a hypergesture is easier to understand in light of
another concept refashioned by Mazzola in order to account for the
“miraculous” moments experienced during the interplay of free jazz
improvisation—the concept of “state of flow.” According to psychologist
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who coined the term in the late 1980s,30 to be in
a state of flow consists in being “completely involved in an activity for its
own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and
thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your
whole being is involved, and you’re using your skills at the utmost.”31
In free jazz, it is known that the flow state of a group emerges when you feel that it is not you
who play the music, but the music that plays you. … Flow is achieved by an intense shift to a
state of making, namely of intentional ordering activity. It is an autotelic state, where the gesture
of the making gains its amplitude. … Flow generates types of external forces of a
comprehensive form that are distributed over all participants, and which seems to impose itself
through that most intense hypergestural activity.32
 There are—very rarely—moments of powerful political agency when a
multitude of people manage (or just happen) to emulate the collective
behavior of a (successful) ensemble of improvising musicians, that is, when
they find themselves in “a state of flow.” The potency of the multitude,
instead of following the usual channels that distribute and steer the flows of
desires and beliefs, locally intensifies and enters into a state of flow that is
“a state of making”: in this case, it is not only music, but history itself that
is in the making.
Such moments of elation have been thoroughly discussed by political
philosophers. However, the problems and lures inherent to what Jean-Paul
Sartre called “groups in fusion” must be revisited in light of the properties
of mediocracies.33 Of course, people argued and disagreed on Tahrir
Square; of course, they were not in a “state or flow” twenty-four hours a
day; it may even be the case that such a state of flow never happened “in
reality.” The workings of mediocracy made it happen through its staging in
the media and imposed it back onto (hyper)reality by broadcasting
something that “played as” a state of flow. In a typically Baudrillardian
turn, the play of group flow, as spread by the media, was more “real” and
more powerful than what was actually happening on the Square itself.
There was a case of power stronger than itself. On the giant Larsen
feedback effect produced between Tahrir Square and the millions of TV
screens that were focused on it for weeks, the difference between “reality”
and “spectacle” collapsed and reversed itself many times per day: a show of
force by the police would kill human lives among the demonstrators, while
the reality of Egypt’s political power would bow down in front of a
common hypergesture of defiance. The study of musical improvisation thus
helps us draw a first lesson in political agency from the events that
revolutionized Tunisia and in Egypt during the first months of 2011: in
mediocracies, the potency of the multitude becomes powerful through the
display of hypergestures capable of short-circuiting and rerouting mass-
mediatization.
When improvisers “play” onstage, and when they approach states of
flow, they too collapse the difference between spectacle and reality. Far
from being a distraction, their show leads us deeper into reality-in-the-
making than we usually reach in our supposedly “real” life. They renew and
reopen the basic political and ethical question: what can a body do? They
make us experience what the potency of a multitude can achieve. Thus, they
produce a unique gesture, ready to “gain amplitude,” “awake other
gestures,” and “inaugurate a family of gestures.” It is up to us all to
transform this unique gesture into political hypergestures capable of
introducing emancipatory short-circuits within mediocracy.

Notes
1. Aristotle, Politics, III.vi (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, Loeb, 1998), 223.
2. For a good history of the development and impact of Spinozism on early modern thought, see
Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650–1750
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), and A Revolution of the Mind: Radical
Enlightenment and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2009).
3. For good English presentations of Spinoza’s philosophy in its political dimension, see Warren
Montag and Ted Stolze, The New Spinoza (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997);
Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy (San Francisco: City Lights Publishers, 2001);
Antonio Negri, Savage Anomaly: The Power of Spinoza’s Metaphysics and Politics
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999); Étienne Balibar, Spinoza and Politics
(New York: Verso, 2008); and Warren Montag, Bodies, Masses, Power: Spinoza and His
Contemporaries (New York: Verso, 1999).
4. Bruno Latour, “Il n’y a pas de monde commun: il faut le composer,” Multitudes 45 (Summer
2011), 39–40 (my translation).
5. For in-depth discussions of the concept of multitude, see the trilogy by Michael Hardt and
Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), Multitude
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), and Commonwealth (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2009).
6. Étienne de La Boétie, Discourse on Voluntary Servitude (1548), available online at
http://www.constitution.org/la_boetie/serv_vol.htm.
7. I am proposing to reclaim this term by turning it against its more traditional (pejorative)
meaning of “the rule of the mediocre” (implicitly opposed to “aristocracy,” the rule of the best),
and by redefining it as a political regime in which the structure and behavior of the electronic
media play the most determinant role in the result of collective decision-making processes. For
an example of the most common (openly reactionary) use of the term, see Fabian Tassano,
Mediocracy: Inversion and Deception in an Egalitarian Culture (Cambridge, UK: Book System
Plus, 2006). For a critical re-appropriation of the term by media studies, see Danny Schechter,
ed., Mediocracy—Hail to the Thief: How the Media “Stole” the U.S. Presidential Election of
2000 (Freiburg: InnoVatio Verlag, 2001). I propose to neutralize the strongly pejorative values
inherent in both current uses of the term, and to consider that (1) the power of the mass media is
a fact (to be accounted for, understood, and dealt with, rather than complained about), and that
(2) the “mediocre” no longer sounds like an insult if we re-interpret it within a worldview that
distrusts elitism and “excellence” but favors the “whatever singularity” presented, for instance,
by Giorgio Agamben in The Coming Community (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1993).
8. Gabriel Tarde’s writings are being currently rediscovered and reedited in French and English.
See, for instance, The Laws of Imitation (1890; repr., Charleston: BiblioBazaar, 2009), and
Gabriel Tarde on Communication and Social Influence: Selected Papers, ed. Terry N. Clark
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). For a good introduction to Tarde’s thought, see,
 in English, Bruno Latour and Vincent Antonin Lepinay, The Science of Passionate Interests: An
Introduction to Gabriel Tarde’s Economic Anthropology (Cambridge, MA: Prickly Paradigm
Press, 2010); and, in French, Maurizio Lazzarato, Puissance de l’invention. La psychologie
économique de Gabriel Tarde contre l’économie politique (Paris: Les empêcheurs de penser en
rond, 2002).
9. Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” afterword to Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow,
Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1983) 220–221.
10. See, among other references, Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (1967; repr., Detroit: Black
and Red, 2000); Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (1982; repr., Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1995); Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, 3: Cinematic Time
and the Question of Malaise (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2010).
11. Quoted in Graham Lock, Blutopia: Visions of the Future and Revisions of the Past in the Work
of Sun Ra, Duke Ellington, and Anthony Braxton (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 61.
12. Patricia Shaw, “Introduction: Working Live,” in Experiencing Risk, Spontaneity, and
Improvisation in Organizational Change, ed. Patricia Shaw and Ralph Stacey (London:
Routledge, 2006), 2.
13. Andrea Perrucci, A Treatise on Acting, from Memory and by Improvisation, bilingual edition,
trans. and ed. Francesco Cotticelli et al., (1699; Lanham: The Scarecrow Press, 2008), 101–103.
14. David P. Brown, Noise Orders: Jazz, Improvisation, and Architecture (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 2006), 128–129.
15. Idiomatic improvisation “is mainly concerned with the expression of an idiom—such as jazz,
flamenco or baroque—and takes its identity and motivation from that idiom. … Non-idiomatic
improvisation has other concerns and is most usually found in so called ‘free’ improvisation
and, while it can be highly stylised, is not usually tied to representing an idiomatic identity.”
Derek Bailey, Improvisation: Its Nature and Practice in Music (1980; repr., New York: Da
Capo, 1993), xi–xii.
16. Daniel E. Koshland, “The Seven Pillars of Life,” Science 295, no. 5563 (March 22, 2002):
2215–2216. Available online at http://www.sciencemag.org/content/295/5563/2215.
17. See Wolfgang Raible, “Adaptation aus kultur—und lebenswissenschaftlicher Perspektive—ist
Improvisation ein in diesem Zusammenhang brauchbarer Begriff?,” in Maximilian Gröne et al.,
Improvisation: Kultur- und lebenswissenschaftliche Perspektiven (Freiburg: Rombach Verlag,
2009), 22–23.
18. This was the basic argument made by the likes of Hayek or Nozick in the 1970s, which inspired
(or justified) the free-market fundamentalists who took over most Western governments in the
last quarter of the twentieth century. See, for instance, Friedrich von Hayek, Law, Legislation,
and Liberty, vol. 2, The Mirage of Social Justice (1974; repr., London: Routledge & Kegan Paul,
1982); and Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974).
19. For a rich reflection on this convergence, see Alexandre Pierrepont, “Musique Multiple de,”
Multitudes 45 (May 2011): 89–94. I hereby thank Pierrepont, Yannick Séité, Frédéric Bisson,
and George E. Lewis for greatly contributing to my analysis of the interaction between
improvisation and political theory.
20. Lawrence “Butch” Morris, Introduction to Conduction Workshops, available online at
http://www.conduction.us/Workshops.pdf (accessed March 30, 2011, italics added).
21. While discussing this paragraph, George E. Lewis made the following insightful commentary:
“The improvisative process that produces Morris as conductor does not take place at the same
time or scale as the process that produces similar voluntary confluences from within an
ensemble of improvisers—for example, Misha Mengelberg’s ‘Instant Composing’ idea, in
which the improvisers’ political arrangement allows for one (or multiple) conductors to emerge
as desired from within the logic of the musical transaction itself and the desires of the
 musicians. Of course, even without a conductor, the musicians may take individual decisions to
follow the lead of one or more people. In this way, we perceive a common purpose to arise
without the intervention of a singular figure, which is part of why people tend to compare free
improvisation with social dynamics. This also makes this kind of improvisation more difficult to
discuss than models which incorporate pre-given interactive structures (conduction).”
22. Brown has recently analyzed and stressed the exemplary virtues of Braxton’s diagrammatics in
the conclusion of his book Noise Orders, 119–132. The reference to diagrams is particularly
useful since this notion had been much elaborated, in its explicitly political implications, by
Foucault and Deleuze in the 1980s. For a good description of Braxton’s diagrammatics, see
Graham Lock, Forces in Motion: The Music and Thoughts of Anthony Braxton (New York: Da
Capo Press, 1988), in particular, 167–174, 257–264, 321–331. See also Braxton’s own
descriptions, in Composition Notes (n.p.: Synthesis Music, 1988, distributed by Frog Peak
Music).
23. Diagrams, from this point of view, illustrate the modern substitution of “cranes” (artificially
produced by human prudence) for the ancients’ “skyhooks” (attributed to divine Providence).
We need something to pull us up to a higher level of life-intensity and accomplishment: instead
of expecting it to come from an otherworldly transcendence, we attempt to generate human-
made devices that will help us benefit from the same experience of elation. Diagrams are one
example of such devices. See Daniel Dennett, “The Baldwin Effect: A Crane, not a Skyhook,”
in Evolution and Learning: The Baldwin Effect Reconsidered, ed. B. H. Weber and D. J. Depew
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 60–79.
24. William E. Scheuerman, Liberal Democracy and the Social Acceleration of Time (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 212. The author is referring to the “reflexive paradigm
of law” promoted by German legal scholar Gunther Teubner in the 1980s.
25. See George E. Lewis, A Power Stronger than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental
Music (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).
26. See Gilles Châtelet, Figuring Space: Philosophy, Mathematics and Physics (1993; repr.,
Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2000).
27. See Guerino Mazzola and Paul B. Cherlin, Flow, Gesture, and Spaces in Free Jazz: Towards a
Theory of Collaboration (Berlin: Springer Verlag, 2009), 74–75.
28. Ibid., 87.
29. Ibid., 35.
30. See Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (New York: Harper
& Row, 1990).
31. Mazzola and Cherlin, Flow, Gesture, and Spaces, 36. This comes from John Geirland, “Go with
the Flow,” Wired, September 1996, available from
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.09/czik_pr.html
32. Mazzola and Cherlin, Flow, Gesture, and Spaces, 36, 103, 118.
33. Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960; repr., New York: Verso, 2010),
especially the section “Group in History.”

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Agamben, Giorgio. The Coming Community. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.
Aristotle. Politics. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, Loeb, 1998.
Bailey, Derek. Improvisation: Its Nature and Practice in Music. New York: Da Capo, 1993.
Originally published in 1980.
Balibar, Étienne. Spinoza and Politics. New York: Verso, 2008.
Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995.
Originally published in 1982.
de La Boétie, Étienne. Discourse on Voluntary Servitude. Available online at
http://www.constitution.org/la_boetie/serv_vol.htm. Originally published in 1548.
Braxton, Anthony. Composition Notes. N.p.: Synthesis Music, 1988. Distributed by Frog Peak
Music.
Brown, David P. Noise Orders: Jazz, Improvisation, and Architecture. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2006.
Châtelet, Gilles. Figuring Space: Philosophy, Mathematics and Physics. Dordrecht: Kluwer
Academic Publishers, 2000. Originally published in 1993.
Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. New York: Harper & Row,
1990.
Debord, Guy. Society of the Spectacle. Detroit: Black and Red, 2000. Originally published in 1967.
Deleuze, Gilles. Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. San Francisco: City Lights Publishers, 2001.
Dennett, Daniel. “The Baldwin Effect: A Crane, not a Skyhook.” In Evolution and Learning: The
Baldwin Effect Reconsidered, edited by B. H. Weber and D. J. Depew. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 2003, 60–79.
Foucault, Michel. “The Subject and Power.” Afterword to Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow,
Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1983.
Geirland, John. “Go with the Flow.” Wired, September 1996. Available from
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.09/czik_pr.html
Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000.
Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. Multitude. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004.
Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. Commonwealth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2009.
von Hayek, Friedrich. Law, Legislation, and Liberty. Vol. 2, The Mirage of Social Justice. London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982. Originally published in 1974.
Israel, Jonathan. Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650–1750. New
York: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Israel, Jonathan. A Revolution of the Mind: Radical Enlightenment and the Intellectual Origins of
Modern Democracy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009.
Koshland, Daniel E. “The Seven Pillars of Life.” Science 295, no. 5563 (March 22, 2002): 2215–
2216.
Latour, Bruno. “Il n’y a pas de monde commun: il faut le composer.” Multitudes 45 (Summer 2011):
39–41.
Latour, Bruno, and Vincent Antonin Lepinay. The Science of Passionate Interests: An Introduction to
Gabriel Tarde’s Economic Anthropology. Cambridge, MA: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2010.
Lazzarato, Maurizio. Puissance de l’invention. La psychologie économique de Gabriel Tarde contre
l’économie politique. Paris: Les empêcheurs de penser en rond, 2002.
Lewis, George E. A Power Stronger than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008.
Lock, Graham. Blutopia: Visions of the Future and Revisions of the Past in the Work of Sun Ra, Duke
Ellington, and Anthony Braxton. Durham: Duke University Press, 1999.
Lock, Graham. Forces in Motion: The Music and Thoughts of Anthony Braxton. New York: Da Capo
Press, 1988.
Mazzola, Guerino, and Paul B. Cherlin. Flow, Gesture, and Spaces in Free Jazz: Towards a Theory of
Collaboration. Berlin: Springer Verlag, 2009.
Montag, Warren. Bodies, Masses, Power: Spinoza and His Contemporaries. New York: Verso, 1999.
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1997.
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http://www.conduction.us/Workshops.pdf.
Negri, Antonio. Savage Anomaly: The Power of Spinoza’s Metaphysics and Politics. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1999.
Nozick, Robert. Anarchy, State and Utopia. New York: Basic Books, 1974.
Perrucci, Andrea. A Treatise on Acting, from Memory and by Improvisation, translated and edited by
Francesco Cotticelli et al. Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, 2008. Originally published in 1699.
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Raible, Wolfgang. “Adaptation aus kultur—und lebenswissenschaftlicher Perspektive—ist
Improvisation ein in diesem Zusammenhang brauchbarer Begriff?,” in Maximilian Gröne et al.,
Improvisation: Kultur- und lebenswissenschaftliche Perspektiven. Freiburg: Rombach Verlag,
2009.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. Critique of Dialectical Reason. New York: Verso, 2010. Originally published in
1960.
Schechter, Danny, ed. Mediocracy—Hail to the Thief: How the Media “Stole” the U.S. Presidential
Election of 2000. Freiburg: InnoVatio Verlag, 2001.
Scheuerman, William E. Liberal Democracy and the Social Acceleration of Time. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2004.
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in Organizational Change, edited by Patricia Shaw and Ralph Stacey, 1–16. London: Routledge,
2006.
Stiegler, Bernard. Technics and Time, 3: Cinematic Time and the Question of Malaise. Palo Alto:
Stanford University Press, 2010.
Tarde, Gabriel. Gabriel Tarde on Communication and Social Influence: Selected Papers, edited by
Terry N. Clark. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011.
Tarde, Gabriel. The Laws of Imitation. Charleston: BiblioBazaar, 2009. Originally published in 1890.
Tassano, Fabian. Mediocracy: Inversion and Deception in an Egalitarian Culture. Cambridge, UK:
Book System Plus, 2006.
 CHAPTER 9
ON THE EDGE

A Frame of Analysis for Improvisation

DAVIDE SPARTI

ALTHOUGH all human agency unfolds with a certain degree of

improvisation, there are nonetheless specific cultural practices in which
improvisation plays an even more relevant role. One thinks, for instance, of
the commedia dell’arte or of tango; of the orator who extemporizes a
speech or the teacher who proclaims a discourse off the top of his head.
Moreover, we are often constrained to improvise in the midst of playing
sports, handling an emergency, cooking, and even in daily conversation.
Although improvised behavior is so much a part of human existence as to
be one of its fundamental realities, in order to avoid the risk of defining the
act of improvising too broadly, my focus here will be upon one of the
activities most explicitly centered around improvisation—that is, upon jazz.
I do not attempt here to sing the praises of the form, but, rather, to examine
the ways in which jazz represents a field in which improvisation manifests
itself in its highest state, offering us the opportunity to find within it a frame
of reference that we may relate to other genres and other modes of
existence.1
My contribution, as Wittgenstein might say, has a “grammatical” design
to it. It proposes to clarify the significance of the term improvisation. In
adopting this philosophical perspective, my intention is not to contend that
the philosopher sees further than the musician who is firmly ensconced, as
it were, in the groove of his practice. My point, rather, is that an improviser
has no need to elaborate upon a concept of improvisation himself; why
should he, after all, when such a conceptual accomplishment is no
guarantee of an aesthetic reward?
 In the attempt to establish its elusive nature, located in the space between
composition and execution, improvisation is often elevated to the status of
an unfathomable event. Gunther Schuller, for example (referring to Billie
Holiday), maintains that jazz is “in the deepest sense inexplicable … and …
remains ultimately mysterious” (Schuller 1989, 528). If this were indeed the
case, however—if improvisation carried with it an ethos so fatally
mysterious that it defied theory—we would have to bow down in
amazement before the occurrence of something we could not fathom, and
the work of analysis would shut down entirely. My aim here is not to negate
that intangible element of unpredictability of outcome that is at the root of
improvisation. Going beyond the system of acquired rules, articulating
itself, to quote Gregory Bateson, in “a message about the interface between
conscious and unconscious” (2000, 138), the improviser’s knowledge is
implicit. How can we rationally answer the question: Where does the music
generated in the course of an improvisation come from? What is the locus
—to paraphrase the eponymous title of the first record cut by Oliver Lake,
Point From Which Creation Begins (Lake 1976)—in which creation is
initiated?
All of this, nevertheless, does not condemn improvisation to explanatory
immunity. There is no reason to consider the ability to improvise more
elusive than the skills necessary to carry on a conversation without a script,
in which we don’t know exactly what will come out of our mouths or what
sort of assertion we will be induced to make. Consider a response elicited
by an unexpected question: the response calls for a reaction, but, more
important, for knowledge of the argument and a strong vocabulary.
Although what we say in conversation can never be completely anticipated,
and, moreover, calls for mental alertness, the language with which we
communicate is familiar enough to us (we are already competent users of
language by the time we have undertaken to tell an unedited story). And the
reason we assume such different attitudes in the comparison of these two
practices—that of conversation and of improvisation—is that while each of
us is a relatively able conversationalist and knows how to ad-lib (although,
mind you, we have taken years to learn this skill, conversation being such
an absolute necessity that we make an enormous commitment to lead
children to the state in which they can do it with fluency and freshness),
artistic improvisation is not a cultural obligation. For the most part, we are
the audience for musicians who have developed this special ability, and so
we are amazed by it, and improvisation appears mysterious to us.
Not all jazz musicians like to comment on their own work (or, at any rate,
they don’t always feel moved to defend what they do against theoretical
statements about it). One may get the (mistaken) impression that jazz is not
arrived at through articulated language. This idea assumes that to
improvise, it is sufficient to avail oneself of natural dispositions, the fruit of
primal reaction coupled with the expression of a range of emotions that
come before discursive rationality. Things are, in fact, different. First of all,
with the combination of notes that make up a musical solo, the jazz player
has “said” what he had to say. If music speaks for itself, to invest it with
words becomes redundant. Moreover, improvisation is a practice (a
complex form of embodied and cooperative human activity), and we should
not lose sight of the distinction drawn by Gilbert Ryle (1949) between
knowing how and knowing that, or between operative knowledge,
associated with that which is done without reflecting on how—and
sometimes without reflecting on why—one does it (let us call it
“background knowledge”) and knowledge that encompasses the mental
representation of a task before it is performed. Jazz musicians mobilize an
awareness-in-action, and because this awareness, incorporated into action,
has no need to pass through mental representation, nor to be thematized (if
it encounters no obstacles), it cannot be brought, without any residual
traces, to the level of consciousness and discourse. Indeed, because we are
dealing with knowledge-in-action, in which the body becomes the vector of
knowledge, we know more than we are able to articulate verbally, hence the
difficult discursive translatability of the (musical) improvised experience.
As Bateson noted, alluding to the artist (2000, 138), “If his attempt is to
communicate about the unconscious components of his performance, then it
follows that he is on a sort of moving stairway (or escalator) about whose
position he is trying to communicate but whose movement is itself a
function of his efforts to communicate.” That said, one need in no way deny
the jazz musician the faculty, or even the necessity, of reflection upon his
own practice, of elaborating and outlining, at least implicitly, an aesthetic of
improvisation.
I said jazz is not the only sphere in which one improvises. Even in the
context of music, jazz is not the only form marked by improvisation. In the
pre-Romantic era in the West (understood here more as a cultural frame
than as a geographic location), musicians rarely worked from an
exhaustively codified score, associating themselves instead with a repertoire
of memorized or recycled pieces, and also with improvisation; they
understood the ability to enrich a preexisting work, allowing the piece’s
thematic, metric, and harmonic structures to furnish the foundation, upon
which they then constructed the activity of variation (see Bent 1983,
Wegman 1996). From the end of the seventeenth century, however, the
score began to become more explicit, and directive in response to the
emerging concept of the musical work—a through-composed work
becoming more and more internally consistent and fixed in a written form
in order to lend itself more easily to musical reproduction—a work that
moved independently of the composer (Dalhaus 1979). Indeed, because the
performance of a work often took place in the absence of its composer, it
was necessary to be faithful to the latter’s will. The ideal of the Werktreue
(interpretive fidelity to the letter of the work) coincided with that of the
Texttreue (respect for the score) (Goehr 1992). Given this historical shift,
musical composition with a notated text (the art of componere) separated
itself further and further from improvisation, which, as a result, was
reduced gradually to the individual musician’s ability to demonstrate
technical brilliance and imagination, and on the whole came to be regarded
as a less noble practice than that of performing from the score (see Sparti
2007b; Moore 1992).2 Let us not forget that improvisation (im-pro-video—
literally, that which is unforeseen) refers to that which cannot be
anticipated, and that the unexpected represents the dominant taboo of a
ocularcentric culture, which privileges artistic activity destined to leave a
lasting imprint behind (and sanctioning a place of worship for it: the
museum), casting correlatively a negative judgment on activity conducted
through improvisation, seen as unplanned and approximate.3

WHAT DOES IMPROVISATION MEAN? SOME

CRITERIA
The task of clarifying the cases in which one may legitimately speak of
improvisation consists first of all in reflecting upon the conditions that
make the practice possible. This does not consist of calling forth
mysterious, esoteric processes that take place in the unconscious or in the
minds of musicians (Sloboda 1988), but, rather, in paying attention to the
criteria that must be satisfied before one may accurately ascribe to an act
the concept of improvisation.
It seems useful to begin with the relationship—differential, but not
necessarily oppositional—between improvisation and composition, music
“in sound” and music fixed in written form, or rather, music as the outcome
of a set of pre-established instructions that prescribe what is compulsory,
forbidden, and optional—hence what counts as correct/appropriate future
performances. When speaking about improvisation, one must start out with
the premise of the existence of the concept of compositional plan (often but
not necessarily tied to scores). Indeed, between improvisation and
composition, there already exists a conceptual relationship: our
understanding of improvisation depends upon—or is a consequence of—a
work-specifying plan, if not of textuality; the (notated) musical work
represents the standard against which (or on the basis of which)
improvisation, by contrast, measures itself, differentiates itself, and lets
itself be admired. At least within this cultural binary, improvisation
presupposes the concept of music that is premeditated and executed from a
score. Nonetheless, they are two distinct modes of musical creation.4
Let us start with the axis of temporality. We may begin to establish the
point at which a musical act is improvised on the basis of the degree to
which the two functions of composition and performance converge in time.
According to this criterion, the greater the proximity and interdependence
(or the smaller the temporal interval), the greater the justification for
speaking of improvisation. In the extreme case, we have coincidence: the
act of composition and the act of performance are inseparable, with the
creative process and the resulting product occurring contemporaneously.
One does not perform a pre-composed text (worked out in advance over
time, i.e. prior to the time of the performance); music is instead created “in
motion,” while it is being brought to completion, in the course of its
uninterrupted flow. As Steve Lacy has observed, “The difference between
composition and improvisation is that when you compose you have all the
time you need to decide what to put in those fifteen seconds of music,
whereas when you improvise you have only fifteen seconds” (quoted in
Bailey 1992). I call this first condition (the collapsing of the distinction
between composition and performance) inseparability.
 In so-called “classical” music—notated music derived from the European
tradition—the moment of creation and the event of performance are
structurally distinct, as are also, more often than not, the two figures of the
composer and the interpreter. The composer first fixes the work, and then in
a separate time, which does replicate the time of its genesis, performs the
work or has it performed. Moreover, the compositional process is
discontinuous: the framework within which the music is generated does not
coincide with that in which it is performed. The composer, therefore,
dispenses with a sense of limitless, indeterminate time in order to perfect
his own musical ideas. Iannis Xenakis (quoted in Restagno 1988, 41)
explicitly emphasized this compositional dimension, subtracted from the
time-flow: “in composing, all the pencil-work (choosing the notes,
calculating the durations) takes place, as it where, outside time. Only the
mise en oeuvre, the performance, puts all of this within a flux of time.
Essentially, all music is based upon this principle of construction, which
draws its material from a dimension outside time, in order to successively
project the music into the time-perspective, and here our power of control
diminishes.” Regarding these differences between composing and
improvising in the temporal dimension, Paul Bley emphasized the contrast
between generating surprising new performances and perfecting an
enduring and reinstantiable entity: “Society accepts and forgives the fact
that it takes a ‘serious composer’ a month to create three minutes of music.
But if you’re an artist who loves creating music, you’d rather play it all in
three minutes and then play something totally different for another three
minutes. Rather than sitting up in bed with an idea, scratching it down on
paper, then going through months of writing and orchestrating and copying
and rehearsing before you or anyone else can hear it” (Bley 1999, 24).
We now come to irreversibility—a condition that, once again, affects the
axis of temporality. We recall that the composer casts his designs, as it
were, at his leisure, so that time finds a true reversibility in slow elaboration
and creative rethinking. When one composes, one is not only writing in a
forward, linear direction; one may also turn back, rewrite and correct, cross
out an unpromising passage, and thus “recover” time (or, to be precise, time
does not turn back but folds down the pages of a musical sketch in order to
make one passage of a piece meet the passage that preceded it, thus
effectively separating the music from the flow of time). As Beethoven’s
famous sketchbooks reveal, the part that is left out often exceeds by far the
part that has been selected to remain. Beethoven produced a great many
sketches, transitory material, and first drafts, and his compositional process
often alternated with long fallow periods. The act of composition is hence
dependent upon the possibility of creating at leisure over the course of time,
of setting down and designing a piece over hours, days, months, or years (it
presupposes, that is to say, the possibility of procrastinating in any given
moment of the creative process). In the case of composition, therefore, we
need to keep an account not only of performance time, but also of the time
spent waiting for inspiration, incubating ideas, correcting, and rewriting. On
the other hand, the improviser does not have the luxury of rewriting or
crossing out; moreover, not only any mistake, but even any possible
strategy of recovering from such mistakes, immediately becomes textual—
that is, part of the music itself. What has been sounded cannot be
unsounded. One may suddenly slow down a tempo, or pause in the thematic
development of a solo line, but there is no going back to the beginning and
starting all over again. There is thus a certain ineluctability to improvisation
(which is also significant for musicians who play from the score; but the
comparison we are making is between composition and improvisation—or,
one might say, between two types of composition).
In sum, composition is marked by three characteristics: a long period of
time leading up to the eventual production of a finished work; the virtually
limitless possibility of revision before the public exhibition of the finished
work; and the fact that the circumstances in which the finished work is
produced, from conception through revision to completion, remain largely
hidden from the eyes of the public, evolving, as it were, backstage.
Now we arrive at the third characteristic of improvised behavior, which
we may call its situationality and contingency. Improvisation is an act that
takes place in an absolutely specific tempo-spatial singularity (here and
now), and—negative condition—one that takes place without availing itself
of the benefits of a score, which presets the location of the notes of a piece
(a solo has no designated points of departure in the music). In contrast to a
composition, which has prescriptive value, improvisation renounces the
support and coherence provided by a score. As Cornelius Cardew has noted,
“Written compositions are fired off into the future; even if never performed,
the writing remains as a point of reference. Improvisation is in the present,
its effect may live on in the souls of the participants … but in its concrete
form it is gone forever from the moment that it occurred” (Cardew 1971).
Improvisation is constitutively performative, it lives and dies in the course
of a single, unrepeatable performance. An action that, while it unfolds,
invents its own way of proceeding—music simultaneously performed and
invented—improvisation can be called the performance of a composition
composed during its own performance (improvisation is in fact called
extemporaneous; Quintilian’s expression, ex tempore action, meaning an
action that is not the fruit of a long and judicious deliberative process). The
past does not control the emerging shape of the future.
Music today is, of course, above all and everywhere reproduced;
recording is a constituent part of the musical event itself, not merely
something that accrues to it. The fact is that even improvisation is often
recorded, and can be transcribed and, therefore, reproduced. Nevertheless,
one should not conflate a piece that has been notated and then recorded with
a recorded improvisation. Unlike a score, a recording is not “performed” in
public. In theory, even the recording (or transcription) of an improvised
performance can be “reproduced,” but the lasting existence of an
improvisation does not have the same status as that of a written
composition, because the latter prescribes something that must then be
played, while the former is limited to describing its own occurrence on a
given occasion. It thus has only a pedagogical value, not an aesthetic one.
Anyone who claimed to improvise by playing the solos (ably transcribed) of
another would, therefore, undergo a form of disapproval.
By virtue of time and writing, then, the composing musician comes to
enjoy a synoptic representation of the music that he intends to perform, or
to have performed. Not so his improvising counterpart. Situationality means
not knowing in advance what the outcome of an improvisation will be. The
melodic trajectory of a solo is not predetermined, and, if analyzing it after
the fact reveals a thematic configuration, it was not already present in the
mind of the musician as an ideal, coiled up, and waiting to spring forth into
actualization. As Ornette Coleman noted, “Before we start out to play, we
do not have any idea what the end result will be. Each player is free to
contribute what he feels in the music at any given moment. We do not begin
with a preconceived notion as to what kind of effect we will achieve” (liner
notes for Change of the Century, 1960). Without implying that when
improvising musicians are acting unintentionally (or are not guided by a
larger conception of what they are doing), the jazz player discovers where
he wants to go—and how to get there—in the course of his improvisation.
 Moreover, in improvisation, the performance can at any moment veer off
into other, different directions, growing in an unexpected manner, leading
us where we never imagined we’d be able to go (this is the characteristic of
contingency). In the course of an improvisation, therefore, the music
emerges in a way that is not always predetermined, and its development
cannot be calculated in advance, either by the one who listens, or by the one
who will bring this music to its completion. As Cecil Taylor told Len Lyons
(1983, 302), who asked him if he heard the sounds he was about to produce
in a piano solo “in his head”: “If you hear it, why is there any need to play
it?” Analogously, after having given numerous classical music concerts,
Keith Jarrett compared the experience to that of playing improvised music,
and, wondering what was lacking, concluded: “I realized it was that I knew
every note that was going to be played already. I could play them really
well, or not really well, but what difference would that make to my life?”
(Shipton 2004, 80). The composer conceives of a piece of music as a whole
entity in light of which he can plan out the refined work, availing himself of
the score that, in turn, allows, as Beethoven described it, “immer das Ganze
vor Augen [zu] haben”: that is, to have the work in its entirety constantly
before one’s eyes. The improviser, on the other hand, is a “myopic” actor in
the sense that he foregoes both the anticipatory and the synoptic visions of
the composer. It is not by chance that Aristotle’s Renaissance translators
and commentators used terms—all’improviso, sprovedutamente,
isproveduto—that were derived from the Latin improvisus (im+provideo),
not seen in advance.
It should be noted here that even though improvisation is considered out
of place in most of modern classical music, certain principles of
improvisation are operational even within this context (see Benson 2003).
In fact, no musical work is an entirely consistent entity, solely and
exhaustively determined by the score. Any realization of a work necessarily
contains sonic details that cannot be ascribed to the work itself (even if one
did everything that the work prescribed, there are still performative aspects
determined by the performer, e.g., filling the gaps left open by the
composition, adding a rubato or varying the tempo). Moreover, musical
works underdetermine their performances: the signs particular to a given
page of music, selected by the composer, cannot play themselves—and,
above all, are incapable of dictating the style in which they should be
played, a circumstance that accounts for the fact that two performances of
the same work can be so different and, even better, can have such different
effects upon us listeners. Yet it is undeniable that the score has a normative
value. It lays the boundaries (or, at least, claims to) of the musical work. Its
symbols are commands; they exert a binding force over anyone who is
called to reproduce them, as the Latin-derived Italian term esecutore so
eloquently reveals. In this way, the differences from performance to
performance will be considered secondary and not essential with regard to
the preexisting entity that the performer is invited to interpret. The multiple
future “executions” of a composition remain, fundamentally, a sort of
repetition.
Following Schutz, who said “there is no difference in principle between
the performance of a string quartet and the improvisations at a jam session
of accomplished jazz players” (1971, 177), one may also take note of the
following circumstance: even the performance of a notated piece seeks
mutual accommodation and implies a common and concomitant way of
acting, as well as contextual anticipation and coordination between the
musicians in one accord with a key, dynamic, or tempo (in the performance
of a string quartet, the musicians do not equalize their playing with the
external time-keeping of a metronome, but, rather, listen to each other
mutually in order to discover the extent to which they are in accord,
harmonizing themselves with one another’s timing). True. But does this
count as improvisation? Improvisation should not be confused with
interpretation. Although performances can be quite different from one
another, they are still the faithful instantiation of a musical work that
remains reidentifiable throughout multiple renditions. Interpretation does
not imply any deliberate departing from the score (contingency) nor the
genesis of any new musical material in the course of a performance
(inseparability), nor does it suggest that the musicians break apart and
recombine a given text in new musical statements, changing structural
properties such as melody, harmony or time. In classical music
performance, unlike that of jazz, we do not find a composition “in motion,”
since we are dealing with music that has been either precomposed or pre-
arranged (on this point I differ from Cook 2007).
Summing up, the distinction between composition and improvisation can
be traced to two distinct forms of creativity: one oriented toward the
product (a picture, a sculpture, a score—a finite product that can be
examined and reexamined at leisure), and another in which the outcome is
undetachable from the particular process of making it, hence in which the
process is the product, a process that vanishes while taking place and that
cannot be retrieved. The very word composition refers to the created
product, while the process of creation appears ancillary. On the other hand,
while improvisation is a noun, it is the verb, the activity, the process, that is
semantically significant. And any process is, by definition, “in due course”
(a process already accomplished is hardly conceivable). A painter or a
sculptor accumulates objects that persist. But the improvising musician, as
Cardew noted, remains always in the present. Like the supernova, which
explodes and dissipates at the moment of its greatest radiance—and not
unlike Hannah Arendt’s (1958, 226) use of the term Energeia, a
phenomenon which exists solely in pure actuality—improvisation is an
ongoing process that exhausts itself while being produced. Moved by a
logic opposed to the preservationist instinct—the logic of creation in the
present moment alone—the jazz player does not play for eternity. He does
not even play for the next day, but, rather, for the circumstances in which he
finds himself tonight, with these particular musicians, before this particular
audience seated around him (Béthune 2003, 112). Time in jazz does not
follow the temporality of classical music, in which each musical fragment is
considered a segment of a progressive and complex time pre-established
and orchestrated by the composer. Rather than deploying this internal
necessity, improvisation actualizes itself anew in each moment, and each
moment has value in and of itself.
In essence, by virtue of the fact that it does not end in an external product
(it has a result, but no product, unless it is recorded), improvisation is
constantly productive—it is music in the making—and it publicly exposes
its own practice. On the other hand, by virtue of the fact that it makes ample
use of time in deciding “what to say,” when composing the very process of
composition becomes subsidiary, and what is relevant is its outcome: the
produced text.5

THE DEMAND OF ORIGINALITY

Since improvisation in jazz deals with the sphere of invention, or at any rate
with the bringing to birth of something new, it requires originality. Each
improvisation must appear more or less different from the preceding one.6 It
follows, therefore, that someone else’s solo, as well as one’s own—the solo
played yesterday—is not transferable. As Eddie Prévost, drummer for the
ensemble AMM, has observed: “Now, nothing is more dead than
yesterday’s improvisation” (Prévost 1995, 60). This problem of the
disinclination to repeat a solo is not a technical one (regardless of the
difficulty of succeeding at this sort of reconstruction) but first and foremost
an ethical one: I am unable to resound what Coltrane, for instance, played,
because I do not see the need for it. If I had to repeat the solos of others, or
even to improvise in order to simply communicate what I already know, I
would never have the courage to begin. In the words of Joe Henderson
(1991): “I can remember going onto the bandstand after being around
Detroit for a few years, and consciously getting my brain to start phrases on
different notes of the bar, with a different combination of notes, and a
different rhythm. I developed the ability to start anywhere in the bar and it
lent to a whole new attitude of constant variation. … What I was developing
was a sense of not falling into that habit of playing the same things all the
time.”
A reverse demonstration of the presence or absence of the required
originality in a solo is elicited by the approval, or lack thereof, of other
musicians. A pointed example is the reaction of Charles Mingus to the
tendency of a young saxophonist in his band toward “playing safe” (the
term used to refer to someone who plays in a clichéd style): “Play
something else, play something else! This is jazz, man. You played that
yesterday, and the day before” (Berliner 1994, 271). One may evoke the
past in a solo, but one cannot recapture it literally; those who try—those
who reproduce the sounds played by others—are called “clones” in the
jargon of the jazz community. “I myself couldn’t copy anybody,” observed
Miles Davis (Mandel 2007, 93). “An approach I could copy, but I wouldn’t
want to copy the whole thing.” Indeed, to do so would be to transform
oneself and one’s own playing into a walking manual of the history of jazz.
To draw upon the conceptual dichotomy introduced by Nelson Goodman
with reference to the classification of the arts: as opposed to an allographic
work, which manifests itself in a plurality of performances, an improvised
performance is an autographic work, a unique unscripted event marked by
a once-only character—a single performance, unfolding here and now as
one plays/listens, that cannot be essentially reiterated.
 Of all the risks to which the improvising musician is exposed, the first
and foremost is that of stagnation. “My greatest fear,” Henry Threadgill has
noted, “is the fear of not being able to go along with change, becoming
stylistic and set” (Mandel 1999, 73). In this scenario, one reaches a certain
“place” musically and can go no further. “Once you get stylistic you stop,”
explains Threadgill further. “There’s no more development” (Enstice 1992,
293). But exactly what sort of risk are we speaking of? Not that of playing
wrong, because, in improvisation, one cannot play wrong (one may not
know how to improvise, or one may improvise badly, but there are no
mistakes in improvisation—in this sense, from the point of view of music
played from a score, improvisation appears to be a practice devoid of risks).
An “error” can only be recognized in relation to something predefined and
prewritten, so that whoever commits such an error can be made to go back
and re-do it differently. Although in classical music, error can be a
necessary teaching tool in the musician’s quest to arrive at the correct
execution of a piece, in the case of improvisation (indeed, in the case of
“secondary improvisation,” in which the improvisation takes off from a pre-
composed piece, for instance, a jazz standard like “Jitterbug Waltz”),
between the violation of a musical text fixed in written form and the
beginning of a different solution than the one preseen and predefined
(toward a change of perspective, or a renegotiation of the hereafter), the line
becomes easily blurred. Because there are no wrong notes in jazz, the moral
notion of guilt that might accrue to musical missteps is suspended.
Instead, the risk of becoming “stylistic,” to use Threadgill’s term, is the
risk of failing to find originality (cf. Corbett 1995, 222–223). Insofar as it is
original, each improvisation maintains a value of revelation. This
“revelation,” however, concerns itself not with anything unearthly, but,
rather, with the musician himself and the world in which he finds himself.
He draws his strength not from fidelity to a musical tradition or a score that
could confer upon him a certain sacred authority, but from the degree to
which he is able to throw new light upon what he plays. But, somebody
could wonder, if every improvisation is an event capable of altering the
identity not only of the piece, but also of the player, how is it possible that
such an event might re-present itself in each new performance? Herein
resides the peculiarity of improvisation: a “miracle” that, instead of
repeating itself only rarely, as every miracle ought to do, is repeated—or,
better, can be repeated—at each performance. It is indicative that Hannah
Arendt compared the faculty of action to the miracle of the unexpected:
human beings “seem to have the talent to perform miracles. … In truth, we
have the right to expect miracles. Not because we believe in miracles, but
because human beings, as long as they are able to act, are able to
accomplish the improbable and the incalculable, and continually
accomplish it, whether they know it or not” (Arendt 1995, 27, my
translation).
By virtue of this generative dimension, birth (Gebürtigkeit), not death,
becomes for Arendt the crux of the matter. We are mortal beings, after all,
but we are also beings who have come into the world through birth, an
absolute contingency to which we react, or respond, by taking the initiative
or by giving initiative to something new. Indeed, the new constitutes “an
ever-present reminder that human beings, though they must die, are not
born in order to die but in order to begin” (1958, 288). It is not by chance,
then, that Arendt calls beginning a “second birth.” And it is because, having
been born into a world that preexisted us, we once partook of newness
ourselves, we are now able to actualize this potential to give life to
something new. Through a combination of diverse generative acts,
experimental jazz is defined by its power to begin, by its capacity to come
out into the open and accomplish the entirely unexpected. The aim of
improvisation does not consist in the production of (finite, complete) works;
on the contrary, its aim consists precisely in generating beginnings, of
producing “utterly unheard sounds, the unheard-of sounds,” as Steve Lacy
describes them in an interview with guitarist Derek Bailey (Weiss 2006,
70). It consists, in other words, in “carrying the music beyond its own
limitations,” as Paul Bley explains further, adding, “nothing is more
difficult than trying to literally force music beyond its own limitations. I
know, because I’ve tried” (Bley 1999, 26). The difficulty lies in that, even
though improvising means engaging in a practice in which, theoretically,
anything could happen (things may at any moment go differently than
planned), in fact the course of a solo often follows a certain pattern,
resulting in outcomes that are, more often than not, similar. Indeed,
something that can, and perhaps should, be a beginning often reveals itself
to be (only) a continuation (Peters 2009, 97).
Again, Steve Lacy to Derek Bailey:
I’m attracted to improvisation because of something I value. That is a freshness, a certain
quality, which can be obtained by improvisation, something you cannot possibly get from
 writing, It has something to do with the “edge.” Always being on the brink of the unknown and
being prepared for the leap. And when you go on 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.
If through the leap you find something, then it has a value which I don’t think can be found in
any other way. I place a higher value on that than on what you can prepare. (Weiss 2006, 51)

To improvise, thus, means to act at the limit, in that extreme place where
our knowledge is just about sundered from our ignorance. It is a myth that
the value and creativity of a musician is connected to his knowledge of
where he finds himself, musically, in a given performance, and is in full
control of what he is doing. Rather, he puts himself into unfamiliar
expressive areas and contexts because the circumstance of not knowing
precisely what he is doing carries him to the very limits of his creative
capacity, where he may find that “freshness” Lacy alluded to.
Regarding the demands of strengthening this capacity to generate the
“unheard-of,” musicians sometimes speak of “emptying the mind.” But
improvisation does not imply the rejection of musical knowledge. Rather,
navigating by the light of a given (and highly personal) concept, the
improvising musician slackens his grip, releasing his cognitive control over
the musical direction. It is a question of remaining in a state of great
sensitivity without, however, becoming too attached to specific musical
ideas, cognitive styles, or pre-determined models. Rather than concentrating
upon his own musical ideas, it is necessary for the musician, as it were, to
displace himself, letting whatever he acquired in time produce its effects. It
is no accident that, according to Miles Davis, musicians are more creative at
the end of a concert, when their usual repertoire of licks and stylistic
expedients has been exhausted. Improvisation requires not so much
intention(originality cannot be deliberately triggered; moreover, if we try
too explicitly to attain a state of autotelic flux, we obstruct it) as attention,
the ability to expose oneself to music in such a way as to respond creatively
to the musical situation as it unfolds, reacting to the changes introduced in
the course of a performance.

RESPONSIVENESS: THE COLLECTIVE NATURE OF

IMPROVISATION
This last observation pushes us to reflect upon the logic that governs the
construction of an improvised performance and upon the position of the
musician vis-à-vis the genesis of new musical ideas. I mentioned that the
outcome of a solo does not allow itself to be seen in advance. Nevertheless,
though he may be myopic, the jazz player does not “drive blind.” Not so
much because improvisers must think “in advance” (if not note-for-note,
then in terms of the structure of his solo), but because he can look backward
at what has already been played and react to it—reframing it, re-interpreting
it, and giving it a new shape in the phrases that are to come. Paul Bley has
noted, enumerating the “lessons” encountered on the bandstand, “One: what
was the last phrase that was played, and what was the last note of the last
phrase that was played, and what should follow that?” (Bley, 1999, 35). In
this respect, the jazz player calls to mind the angel in the famous painting
by Klee that Walter Benjamin analyzed in Theses on the History of
Philosophy: while it is pulled toward the future, its eyes are turned back
toward the past. The jazz player, therefore, should not be represented as
some sort of decision-maker endowed with an internal computational
mechanism granting him, for every two or three possible choices, the power
to pick the best one. In reality, the musician cannot enjoy a global
perception of the dialectic of opportunity and constraint of each
performance—not only because there is no time, in improvisation, to
mobilize the necessary cognitive resources, but also because both the
opportunities and the constraints are generated by the players themselves.
For this reason jazz players have an attitude of retrospection: they play
upon that which has already emerged in the music, discovering the future as
they go on, as a consequence of what they do. The development of a solo
can, therefore, be followed—in the literal sense of reconstructing it from the
past (a process which can be undertaken by either the player or the listener)
—but only very rarely can it be anticipated (see Gioia 1988; Sarath 1996).
But to what can the improvising musicians direct their attention in this
practice of looking backward? There are always various contextual clues in
an improvised performance, clues that a musician will tacitly recognize,
more through hearing them than through any sort of conscious selection. As
a result, the music that has emerged up to a certain moment will affect
subsequent decisions about how to proceed, constituting a contextual
parameter for the music to come (Sawyer 2003). This is not to say that the
music played earlier will determine exactly what is played later, but, rather,
that the former will prepare the hearing of the players or the listeners for
further clues to which to pay attention. Background variables like rhythm,
speed, idiom, and recourse to a particular tonal area, when introduced or
significantly altered, can turn into thematic material and hence reclaim the
attention of the players, offering new possibilities for musical
exploration/exploitation. These parameters are not inert “things,” but rather
affordances that enable and invite the musician to act. Each moment of a
musical performance, then, is a virtual prefiguring of a possible way of
going forward—possible, but not obvious or foreseeable. So to say that a
musical act facilitates or allows the act that follows it is not to suggest that
this act is the cause of, or that it somehow automatically and inexorably
provokes, its musical response. This is not so much because whatever has
already developed musically cannot force me to take it into account, as it is
because the response is also dependent upon the responding musician’s
knowledge of what has gone before and his ability to draw inferences from
it. Perlocutionary force—the circumstance that music expresses, alludes to,
proposes, insinuates, directs—is not only a function of the music itself, but
also of the way in which it is perceived and interpreted by me. In order to
improvise, it is necessary to listen to what is being proposed by the other
musicians, but it is equally important to elaborate upon these musical
suggestions in a way that is both original and distinctive, creating newness
and tension, pulling the music in unexpected directions, without making
this response part of a series of responses that give the effect of being
played from a preconceived script. Indeed, although exposed to conditions
of uncertainty, the jazz musician may nonetheless assume responsibility for
what emerges from his instrument. If we neglect to take this responsibility
into account, improvisation runs the risk of appearing either totally casual
or simply random, something that has “fallen out of the sky.” The interplay
—the collision—among constraint, control, and accident (the ability to
blend the emergent with the intended) is, hence, crucial.
Because jazz is most often played in groups, the above-mentioned
interplay can be attributed to the autocatalytic process of a collective unity
(Monson 1996). A given musician (Ego), constrained by the ways the music
has developed up to a certain point, now produces musical act A, which in
turn suggests musical implications A1, A2, and so forth, which may be
picked up by the other musicians in his group, whom we will call Other 1
and Other 2. These other musicians then draw upon one of these possible
implications, thus determining the course of a new musical emergent (the
response to these affordances is never completely arbitrary; often, in fact, it
represents one of the closest continuations of the musical solicitation). It is
almost as if these implications, when played, gave rise to new imperatives
—sonic demands, as it were, that the musicians have no wish to ignore—
triggering a circular process, which can be called collaborative emergence
(because it springs forth from the interactions among the members of the
musical collective). As Ornette Coleman explained to Nat Hentoff (1975,
242), “If I don’t set a pattern at a given moment, whoever has the dominant
ear at that moment can take and do a thing that will change the direction.”
Each successive act enters into a dialogue with, and in so doing redefines
the meaning of, each of the acts that preceded it, at the same time
prospectively forming the sense of those acts to come (the act which is the
second element of a series of previously initiated acts thus becomes, itself,
an emergent context, to which the act that follows is now able to refer).
Thus, during the course of a performance, context is continually being
created and recreated according to an overarching logic or dynamic—a
context that, nonetheless, must presuppose the competence of the players,
who must maintain a position of constant awareness and therefore also a
margin of reactivity. In the words of Lester Bowie, “we might always try to
be creative and adventurous. We let the music lead. A beautiful march
might come out of the sky. … The percussion might move into a sax solo,
which becomes a bass-sax duet that leads into a particular song that
develops into a free improvisation. We just don’t know” (Mandel 1999, 39).
Loop after loop, the musical flux ebbs and flows, slips and slides, unfolding
endogenously in directions that none of the individual musicians in the
collective can entirely foresee or control. Thus, the musical action—
liberating new potentialities—itself generates further musical potential,
offering up its first fruits to the attention and the sensibilities of the
musicians, who in turn move it forward. According to this logic, it is the
music itself that creates the opportunity to draw the capacity for action out
of each musician (indeed, it is as if the music itself were conducting). In the
case of free jazz, in which the melodic, rhythmic, and harmonic structures
of a pre-composed piece have been dispensed with, the music is entrusted
almost exclusively to this circular, generative mechanism. Thus, in free
jazz, without the necessary degrees of sensitivity and readiness—without,
that is to say, responsiveness—the music could not possibly unfold in an
original and creative manner. A slight decrease in attentiveness or a bit of
mental fog would wreak havoc, not with the musicians’ ability to play, but
with their ability to improvise in a generative way. In this respect, the
notion that the jazz player ideally ought to stop or take a time out in order to
reflect upon how he will proceed musically, or in order to conceive new
musical ideas, is completely misleading.
The topoi of affordance and collective unity lead us to a fifth criteria that
characterizes improvisational conduct, which can be termed responsiveness.
The act of improvisation makes constant reference to (and use of) the
improviser’s ability to expose himself to music in such a way that he is able
to respond both creatively and continuously to whatever happens and to
whatever he makes happen. Improvisation is a peculiar emergent
accomplishment, constructed diachronically and bearing the marks of
collaborative authorship. This circularity, moreover, is only possible
because the musical event itself is implicitly richer than the individual
musicians who have generated it, containing a plethora of virtualities, each
with the capacity to open up new musical horizons. We humans are marked
by limitations in our cognitive ability to anticipate the full range of
consequences of what we express. And further, if the power of suggestion
of a musical act were made equal to the human power to recognize in
advance the consequences of whatever has been played, the possibility of
improvising would cease immediately. Our creativity, however, exceeds our
ability to anticipate the outcome of this same creativity. In this sense,
improvisation deals mainly with the exploration of the possibilities implicit
in the music.
We recall that Arendt linked human agency to the faculty of generating
beginnings and of performing miracles. A miracle (Wunder) is commonly
understood as the occurrence of the infinitely improbable, but for the sake
of our argument this understanding can be extended to include the
miraculous capacity to open these new horizons of possibility. For Arendt,
the capacity to begin is rooted in the fact of being born—not in any sort of
innate creativity or gift—and improvisation ultimately consists of putting
oneself into the state of being born, of seeking to be present at one’s own
birth, of orienting oneself toward the unending search for beginnings, and
of acting differently than expected (Arendt 1958, 178). We must proceed
with caution here, though, because no beginning can be absolute or
divorced from its context; it is constrained to always be the beginning of
something for someone—in particular, for those in whom this beginning
will evoke a response. The fundamental question is, what makes an act a
beginning? Stripped to its essence, it is the circumstance in which someone
starts something, taking it up as a spur to further action. The concept of the
new, then, is associated not so much with what the actor has in mind, as
with the entire fabric of interactions into which he inserts his act, thereby
arousing a constellation of dynamic reactions. Newness, in other words, is
not a fixed state; its character of beginning depends upon the future—that
is, upon the way others respond to it. Arendt thereby turns the intractable
question of how something can be generated out of nothing (which in turn
suggests misleading images of the “sovereignty” of the actor) into one of
how to articulate and intensify the beginnings to which we are exposed; a
perspective that invests less in individual talent than in the intersections
between individuals, as well as those between individuals and the events
that bring them together.
If improvisation is about the ability to respond musically to the clues that
emerge in the course of a performance—to respond, that is to say, to those
musicians who are responsible for engendering these clues—then it is about
responding to the other musicians in a kind of mutual monitoring and self-
monitoring. Each musician generates music, and consequently each is a
contextual witness to the music generated by all. The musicians are not only
committed to a peaceful dialogue, however; they are also adversaries who
challenge each other and challenge themselves, to listen and to take note of
what they are saying musically. And because not all these clues can be
taken as invitations to develop themes, one will encounter, on the
bandstand, not just sensitivity and support or courtesy and mutuality, but
also interference, antagonism, the desire for acceptance, and the will to
supremacy in defining the direction of the music. Ultimately, conflict and
violence are also integral parts of an improvisation, which may be a
collective accomplishment but is not necessarily a dialogic or inclusive one
(Peters 2009, 53). We find in the musical arrangement what Arendt calls the
disjunctive character of “plurality,” that charge of deferral and alteration
contained in every human interaction.

THE MYTH OF SPONTANEOUS CREATION

In my emphasis upon the role of originality in improvisation, I may have
unintentionally created a misleading impression, for as the heirs of the
modernist aesthetic of the new, we tend to celebrate improvisation as a
heroic (and solitary) achievement. But as Peters has suggested,
improvisation is ineluctably tied to fear: fear of the unmarked space, of the
unknown and the unforeseen, and fear of nothingness—that is, that nothing
(interesting or original) will take place. It is precisely this fear of the horror
vacui that the musical score keeps under control. It is not by chance, then,
that a significant portion of most textbooks for beginning improvisers is
devoted to strategies for overcoming that fear. Hence, contrary to the
prevailing view, it is (the possibility of) failure that marks improvisation
(Peters 2009, 44).
Moreover, the quest for the new should not be confused with the idea that
improvisation means creating entirely from scratch. One of the “pictures”
that hold us captive in thinking about jazz is that of improvisation as a
spontaneous and almost instinctive disposition, as though it did not require
interaction, discipline, and certain technologies. While the pattern of an
improvised solo is not planned out in the mind of the musician so much as
discovered in the course of performance, every improvisation nonetheless
refers, at least implicitly, to a set of presuppositions and constraints
acquired during the learning process that made that musician a competent
improviser. The very word solo suggests the misleading image of a gesture
performed in complete autonomy. If a solo appears to be the exteriorization
of an inner flash of inspiration, it is only because we are influenced and
seduced by the religious picture of an absolute beginning (creatio ex nihilo).
In fact, a solo is never an isolated event; it recalls (and may draw upon)
previous solos as a vehicle or point of departure and is necessarily
“reflexive”: the responses generated by its very unfolding are taken into
account, so that the musical context of an improvisation is always the
collective unity made up of the actors connected to each other in creating
(and reacting to) the music, both musicians and audience. As Mingus once
told Timothy Leary, “You can’t improvise on nothing, man, you’ve gotta
improvise on something” (Santoro 2000, 271). Or to put it another way, you
can improvise on anything, but you can’t improvise on nothing. A revealing
analogy, from this point of view, is that of the freestyle skier, who avoids
skiing on a pre-set track, instead making up a route as he goes along. This
creative achievement nonetheless presupposes the existence of certain
givens and technologies: snow, a slope, technical mastery, and the skis
themselves.
If we approach improvisation from the less-spectacular, rarely
acknowledged angle of the learning process, we discover keys to the
formation of the jazz habitus (Thomas Aquinas’s term for those practical,
embodied abilities that increase with use), such as the slow, exhausting
process of acquiring bodily postures or hand positions on a given
instrument. The very form of the instrument suggests the gestures needed to
play it, and it requires an investment of certain parts of the body (the arm-
mouth-neck complex in the case of the reed player, for example),
representing an instance of what Foucault called power-knowledge. Of
course, in experimental jazz, players try to free themselves from the
techniques and routines that have accustomed the body to performing
certain gestures and sounds (think, for instance, of Thelonious Monk’s
unorthodox postures at the piano). And it is also true that, once a certain
stage has been reached, technique works against itself and tends to implode
(indeed, advanced players tend, while improvising, to limit the foreseeable
use of the resources they acquired during their apprenticeships). But this
implies not so much an emancipation from discipline as such as, rather, a
re-disciplining of oneself, the deconstruction of a certain way of playing.
Should we strip the improvising musicians of the trappings of the
performance context, the idioms they have learned, and their complicity
with their instruments, we would deprive them of an invisible and certainly
subvertable—yet indispensable—habitus.
Thus, if the first step in the jazz musician’s learning process is the ability
to exploit the already known, spontaneity (to put it somewhat
paradoxically) is the outcome of a long relational apprenticeship that
inscribes a specific know-how upon the body of the musician. This learning
process is by no means a passive one, in which I merely adopt (and adapt
to) a given idiom. In learning, one is engaged in a reflective practice,
actively figuring out where to place oneself within the community of
improvisers—a vast imaginary community that includes those musicians
whose sounds affect me and demand to be taken into consideration if I am
to have a musical starting point. If each musician selects, as models, his
musical predecessors (and hence also, indirectly, his musical antagonists),
those predecessors will be not so much causal antecedents as chosen (or,
perhaps, invented) sources. This selective apprenticeship on the part of the
jazz musician shows how hazy the boundary between musical production
and musical consumption can be, for in order to produce (new) music, he
must “consume” the musical production of others. Creativity in jazz is not
parthenogenetic: it requires a previous fertilization. Given this version of
the Freudian return of the repressed, we may aptly conclude that in jazz, in
order to innovate, there is no need to commit a symbolic parricide. One’s
precursors are also one’s contemporaries; heritage is brought up-to-date; the
future folds over the past.

OTHER FIELDS
As noted at the beginning of this essay, improvisation takes place in many
fields, not only in music but also, for example, in drama, dance, sports, and
everyday conversation. Take soccer as an example of a sport in which
stretches of improvised behavior occur quite frequently: while there are
game schemes and rules, the actual behavior of the players depends on
contingent factors, such as the behavior of the other players and the
unforeseeable position of the ball. Unlike jazz, however, in soccer
improvisation is an essentially undesired side effect of these contingencies,
for if in fact a player could rely upon a plan of action that would ensure a
goal, he would tediously follow it (and would be unwilling to play each
game differently for the sake of aesthetic variety, at the risk of not making
the goal).
As for daily conversation, it does indeed take place with a certain degree
of improvisation, yet two of the five criteria mentioned above
(inseparability, irreversibility, situationality, originality, and responsiveness)
are missing. Since nothing in conversation corresponds to the act of
composing, the notion of inseparability has no meaning in this context.
Moreover, given the risk of not making oneself completely understood,
conversation is generally devoid of originality. On the other hand,
experimental jazz musicians have often been accused of unintelligibility.
So, while daily life can certainly unfold in unexpected ways, it usually takes
place in a familiar environment that ultimately exempts us from the tiring
necessity of originality in discovering new ways to cope with our
surroundings. On the contrary, by intentionally defying the network of
reference points that characterizes daily life, jazz improvisation embodies
and makes the most of Arendt’s category of natality (ultimately, the courage
to step out into the open). As Miles Davis put it to Nat Hentoff: “I always
manage to try something I can’t do” (liner notes for Sketches of Spain,
1960). We can thus draw a distinction between reactive and elective forms
of improvisation. The first is an induced form of improvisation (we are
forced to improvise) that coincides with the need to react to the
unforeseeable unfolding of the events we are exposed to. The latter
(elective improvisation) is a form of aesthetic experimentation intentionally
practiced (it is deliberate, even if it is not the outcome of deliberation). In a
nutshell, in jazz, improvisation is not a mean directed to an extrinsic end (as
it is in reactive forms of improvisation) but an end in itself.

NOTES
1. Although in jazz the practice of improvisation is especially visible, one must take care not to
conflate jazz with improvisation, as there are some forms of jazz in which improvisation is entirely
absent. This essay does not seek to define jazz, a “minority” art form that emerged from the non-
white world, at least through its offspring. It is not as much a self-contained genre characterized by
precise origins (a clear trajectory of accretion, a closed set of specific protagonists, and a repertoire
of accumulated works) as it is a field—a field, moreover, in which sounds, practices, discourses
and images are interwoven (for an analysis of the jazz field, see Sparti 2007a). There is good
reason, moreover, to contend that even the term “jazz” has become obsolete as a way to describe
the practice of improvisatory music with roots in an African American matrix. It was not for
nothing that the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) rarely uses it,
preferring instead the term “creative music.” See Lewis 2008, 348.
2. Certainly, a not insignificant number of avant-garde composers, beginning in the 1950s, adopted a
new attitude toward composition (whether premeditated or determined by chance), transforming
the role of the musician from that of impeccable interpreter of a score—and in turn reconsidered
the score as a code to be enacted—to that of a performer, a creative accomplice in the work of
composition (as, for example, in John Cage’s “Aria”). This collaboration recast the irrevocable
status of the work of art (as well as the unique role of the score in the process of musical
reproduction), which now assumed an “open” form. Although musicians were called upon to
improvise, this music was not always of an improvisatory nature.
3. Regarding such observations, it is worth mentioning, if only for their eminence, those who have
declared themselves “enemies” of improvisation: Adorno, Artaud, Berio, Boulez, and Cage.
4. In drawing this distinction, I intend neither to negate the value of jazz composition, nor to forget
the “intermediate path” between improvisation and composition—practiced, for example, by
Mingus (one thinks of The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady), consisting in presenting a suite of
loosely interconnected pieces, a performance within which improvisation is overlaid atop a
compositional structure. We would do well to remember the case of Anthony Braxton, who refuses
to draw a sharp division between composition and improvisation, as well as Duke Ellington, in
whom composing, arranging, simulated improvising (i.e., composed passages that seem
improvised), and true improvisation lived as equals, forming a seamless whole of, if a neologism
will be excused, “comprovisation.”
5. One could argue that an improvisation is a work instantiated in only one performance, but to say
this inappropriately stretches the work-concept, which essentially implies the idea of multiple
future renditions.
6. Formulated thus, originality seems a characteristic shared with other human activities that develop
over a period of time. In the case of improvisation, however, originality also includes the power to
surprise, the capacity to push itself beyond the notes already sounded. As music endowed with
epiphanies and occurrences of the not-entirely-expected, jazz is in fact earmarked by the impact of
that which Barthes, referring to photography, has called the punctum: that dazzling, sharp event
that bursts into awareness and breaks through the framework of our expectations (see Barthes
1981). It is a sonic injection (that guizzo of which Calvino speaks in his American lesson dedicated
to Lightness) that strikes me, tearing me away from passive fruition (see Calvino 1993).

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 CHAPTER 10
THE SALMON OF WISDOM

On the Consciousness of Self and Other in

Improvised Music and in the Language that Sets
One Free

ALEXANDRE PIERREPONT

(Translated from the French by Anton Vishio)

IT is written that Finn Mac Cumail, while still an apprentice, carelessly

tasted the Salmon of Wisdom,1 the preparation of which he had been asked
to supervise. From that moment, the moment he sucked on his thumb and
lapped up the cooking juices, the moment he burst forth in song, he knew.
So tells the Fenian Cycle, an accounting of the exploits and escapades of
Finn, the last chief of the Fianna of Leinster, those adventurers who
functioned at the margins of the law in the Ireland of yore.
Yet what must have taken hold of such a hero, conventionally well versed
in the art of poetry? For one thing, teinm laida: the illumination brought by
song. For another, dichetul dichennaib: the act of improvisatory incantation.
And for a third, imbas forosnai: the knowledge that enlightens. One might
say that giving oneself over to song or to the poetry that sets one free forces
language itself to speak. Such a person knows that one must give in to the
voice to understand better, as countless thinkers have made clear. According
to Novalis, “Speaking for the sake of speaking is the formula of
deliverance,” while, for Tristan Tzara, “The thought is made in the mouth.”2
Rather than firmly grasping the reins of language, one who fashions
oneself a Fianna or poet chooses instead to let them slacken, and directs
one’s speech in the manner in which one directs a dream: uncertainly. An
immemorial intelligence, of those who muse on infinitely, will have located
the thread running through verbalization (the necessity of giving a hearing),
improvisation (the necessity of allowing action), and knowledge (the
necessity of fostering revelation), a thread followed over several decades,
according to George E. Lewis, by the men and women working in an
Afrological musical tradition who conceive of “improvisation as a
knowledge-producing, indeed a knowledge-finding activity—a journey of
discovery.”3
For the present purposes, I will treat this perspective, which cannot be
reduced to a single musical genre, under the sign of the “jazzistic field” (le
champ jazzistique),4 meaning the continuum of musics produced by the
African American experience. Characterized by multiple referentiality in
constant revolution, as well as by a double or dialogic dynamic, while at the
same time combining and transforming both its givens (elements that are
stable and prepared) and its spontaneities (those that are unstable and not
premeditated), those most often engaged with the greatest compatibility and
constantly inventing and reinventing collectively, these musics distinguish
themselves by a process of differentiation at each level of their elaboration
—in the sonic signature of each individual on her or his instruments; in the
personal narrative that each develops in playing, in improvising; in original
compositions expected from each one in language systems put into practice
by others; in a complex geography, not of “styles” but of “form-spaces,”
physical and/or symbolic places of specific exchange that open the one to
the other. This incessant production of internal alterities is historically
accompanied by an incessant search for alliances, opportunities to link with
that which is not (in) one. Neither technical nor musicological, this chapter
will scrutinize the universe of internal representations of creative musicians,
with particular emphasis on the practical and theoretical range of elements
deployed over a half century by the members of the Association for the
Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) and their allies and
contemporaries.
But for the moment, let us return to Finn. In letting himself go in song,
which airs out or erupts forth, he frees himself to capture and then transmit
a voice within—or an interior speech—marked by its own coherence; the
surrealists turned this voice within into the source of “message
automatique” (automatic writing), “coulée verbale” (verbal flow), and
“dictée de la pensée” (unmediated dictation of thought). As André Breton
wrote,
 The “inner word” that surrealist poetry has chosen to make manifest and that it has succeeded,
whether we like it or not, in establishing as a recognisable medium of exchange among certain
people, is absolutely inseparable from “inner music” by which it very probably is cradled and
conditioned. How could it be otherwise when the inner word, as registered by “automatic
writing,” is subject at the same acoustical conditions of rhythm, pitch, intensity and timbre as
the outer word, although to a lesser degree? In that it is the effectual opposite of the expression
of controlled thought which has kept no organic contact with music and uses it only
occasionally as a luxury. But above all, being independent of the social and moral obligations
that limit spoken and written language, inner thinking is free to tune itself to the “inner music”
which never leaves it.
I already have protested against the designation “visionary” being lightly applied to poets.
Great poets have been “auditives,” not visionaries.5

In responding via improvisation to the call of that voice, the young man
acquired wisdom, which illuminates like the song that declares it, like the
powers of verbalization or of the orality that it liberates. Édouard Glissant
explains that these powers of speech “are entirely suitable to the diversity of
all things, the broodings, the word turned back on itself, the spiral cry, the
fissures of the voice.”6 Powers: already invoked by Antonin Artaud when
he presented surrealism, that great gathering of poet adventurers in the
disenchanted West, as “a cry of the mind turning back on itself.”7 Powers:
among verbalization, improvisation, and knowledge, so precisely invoked
in turn by Toni Morrison in Song of Solomon:
All those shrieks, those rapid tumbling barks, the long sustained yells, the tuba sounds, the
drumbeat sounds, the low liquid howm howm, the reedy whistles, the thin eeeee’s of a cornet,
the unh unh unh bass chords. It was all language. An extension of the click people made in their
cheeks back home when they wanted a dog to follow them. No, it was not language; it was what
there was before language. Before things were written down. Language in the time when men
and animals did talk to one another, when a man could sit down with an ape and the two
converse; when a tiger and a man could share the same tree, and each understood the other;
when men ran with wolves, not from or after them.8

Seeing or hearing in the universe, a susurrant system of correspondences, of

perceived accords; the making of language into the speaking double—not
mirror—of that universe, as if objects moving through us, speaking through
us, arrive at the fullness of their being: what Morrison describes here joins
up with the Kabbalah of the poets since the dawn of time. As Serge Pey
wrote in a letter to Octavio Paz, “The modern poet does not address the
world, but rather the Word on which the world rests.”9 Because if we are
accustomed to take language, domesticated language, for one of the
privileged vehicles of the human experience, our communication instrument
par excellence, we are at least as much the arena staged by a language not
our own, which, through the forays hurled by its feverish harmonies of
sound and sense, crosses and links beings and things. The human and the
world meet up in poetry, and, in order for the tale to be told, their encounter
requires that one make a poetic use of language, that words be shaped in the
manner that rocks are formed, or the way the eyes acquire color, according
to the same gestations, the same ecstasies.
It is again a writer, an adventurer in language, now from the Kiowa, who
attests: “A word has power in and of itself. It comes from nothing into
sound and meaning; it gives origin to all things. By means of words can a
man deal with the world on equal terms. And the word is sacred.”10 From
nothing—or from a song, that relentless song that entwines sound and
sense, since it has always been in the nature of poetry, according to Breton,
to realize “the perfect synthesis of sound and idea, for the benefit of the
imagination.”11
While the domesticated language is condemned to treat its messages with
due diligence, to attribute to choice an obedient meaning, a literal or
metaphorical reading; while it cannot extricate itself from a relationship of
identity or identification more or less troubled with that which it wants to
name and which along with its context and its destination always escapes it,
poetic language, the language that sets one free, lacking a clear destination,
maintains with its context the most distant and most restorative
relationships, juggles that which is already created with that which it
creates, distributes and redistributes maps of meaning, alters, installs the
reign of generalized multiple reference. One who makes oneself a poet, who
makes use of the illumination and the improvisation of song, speaks in the
name of language, creates a body by means of language which exists within
as a foreign object. Such a person speaks as one divines by casting
seashells: to see (to hear) and to know. One speaks, and leaves in
recognition.
It is surely not impossible that Afrological improvisers in the jazzistic
field and its satellites, in the Afrological musical perspective developed by
Lewis, plough some of the access roads of the highest poetry, if one deigns
to consider the activity of improvisation as a poetic one manifesting
conscious practices resembling those of existence itself, practices that are
never only collected in the pendant of the poem, the condensation or
talismanic fixation of a crossing of the real, in and by language. Humans
have heard voices from the dawn of time, and one could cite as a
precondition for the poetic act as for the improvisatory the necessity, surely
not of falling silent, but rather of silencing in oneself that which is not
language, that which is not music, in order to open oneself more profoundly
to the hearing of that one word on which hinges the world, this flood of
words, this flux of reality. Breton thus restricts poets to being “modest
recording machines,” “deaf receptacles of so many echoes,” and insists on
the “auditory-verbal” as opposed to “visual-verbal” character of the
automatic message, which is understood in the first place as enjoined in this
“Introduction to the Discourse on the Paucity of Reality”: “Let there be
silence so that I might tread where no man has ever trodden, silence!—
After you, my fair language.”12
In the same way one hears it often said that music is in some measure
dictated, possibly by an interior voice, to its improvisers. Didn’t the
bluesmen of the Delta claim to have “collected floating verses” from the
atmosphere before composing their bouquet of words? And from camp
meetings to the Second Great Awakening, such “wandering verses” fall
regularly on the head of the astonished choristers of the first spirituals. If
certain passages of the Bible nevertheless have in particular been objects of
attention on the part of African Americans, such as the story of Pentecost in
the Acts of the Apostles, when the Holy Spirit informed of its presence
through a gusting wind, tongues of flame like crocheted shawls on the
shoulder, and through the broadband of its uncontrollable speech: isn’t the
gift of tongues, of speaking in tongues, not only dedication to the glory of
God or to the fashioning of oneself as its interpreter, but also what sustains
—as required by illumination—the idea of this flood of words as a flux of
reality?
Imagining the human as the canal through which such a flood is led, such
a flux is a matter in general circulation among improvisers, through
practices where the general tendency is not to be satisfied with a single
critical meaning but rather to awaken to other perceptions and
representations, which are being played in oneself and around oneself,
together, allowing them to be guided by different aspects of one’s
personality, of one’s psyche or environment, without definitively abdicating
all clarity of conscience. To give oneself to improvisation that sets one free,
the musician must mobilize the totality of his or her being, consciousness as
well as unconsciousness—a “double consciousness” that permits one to
come to terms with the active and the passive concurrently, to abandon to
oneself and to others without ever renouncing anyone or anything.
Explanations given by systems of thought or belief of individuals on the
exact nature of this flood or this flux notwithstanding, its communally felt
necessity poses the question of the status of identity and alterity in the act of
improvisation.
Behind their indispensable, undeniable technical facility, most
improvisers are inclined to admit that they are not the only masters of the
situation, that rather they are sensors of a much greater reality. As Paz said
of the poet, he “is not the ‘author’ in the traditional sense of the word; he is
a moment of convergence of the different voices which flow into a text.”13
One must first learn to discern that which passes through oneself, this flow,
this flux, to recognize the self’s other. Music can do as much, because one
is not all. Otherwise said, improvisers emit as much as they transmit the
sounds they receive; they make heard that which is given to them to hear.
As pianist Amina Claudine Myers put it, “I like the idea that I’m only a
vehicle through which the creative forces speak. … Stay open. The spirits,
my ancestors, my and your spiritual guides are there, always, but you have
to know how to find them in the music.”14 Bassist Malachi Favors
Maghostut has voiced a similar sentiment: “To truly appreciate music, you
have listen to the spirit of the music, because the music speaks. Because it
says something. And it will say something to you, if you just listen.”15
Many other contemporary improvisers, among them Leroy Jenkins, Lester
Bowie, Muhal Richard Abrams, Steve Coleman, Hamid Drake, Charles
Lloyd, David S. Ware, and Henry Threadgill, have also described their art
in these terms of divination.16
We can interpret this shared responsibility as an idealized plurality of the
forces in attendance, like voices from the unconscious, or even from a
“collective unconscious” in which one recovers the memories of an ageless
past, like the manifestation of other forms of intelligence—the ancestors
connected to the Holy Spirit or the fluctuating beings of vibratory
phenomena. Some here locate the vital force that links all beings, the
ramified spirit of the world in its highest creative principle, that of seeking
for itself a path. The union with this force could become the goal of a socio-
musical quest: A Love Supreme, according to John Coltrane; Spiritual
Unity, according to Albert Ayler; Complete Communion, according to Don
Cherry. Anthony Braxton goes so far as to call music “a highway, an
immense highway, towards Cosmic Forces.”17
Whatever the origin attributed to these voices (the unconscious, ancestors
or spirits, the community, or the cosmos), it is characteristic of improvised
music that it connects people, to others and to that which is divulged within
them. All the work of the improviser consists of knowing how to welcome
these voices, to grab hold of them at the junction of the past, present, and
future. This practice, on the one hand, is always a matter of building an
alliance with an other that is not entirely estranged from the self. On the
other hand, to assert that the free and categorical expression of one’s
self/self’s other and the inclusion of this self in a much vaster plan is not a
contradiction; in fact, each is the condition for the other. To reconcile them,
improvising musicians frequently make allusions to two corollary realities:
that of a reservoir in the middle of which all sounds are permanently mixed
up; and that of a flux through which all sounds pour out with neither end
nor beginning.
Coltrane was perhaps among the first to talk overtly of “a big reservoir
that we all dip out of”;18 but this notion has known innumerable
translations, from a multidimensional sphere encompassing all possible and
imaginable sounds, the living center of reality in its creative manifestations
(musical, artistic, human, natural, universal), to the sacred matrix of
creativity, that of Oshun or of the primordial Om. And the list could be
extended further, on the African side, on the European side, on all sides: the
imago mundi, the Supreme Point of the Zohar and the Kabbalah, generating
and containing the universe, the philosophical egg, the hieroglyphic monad
—in all of these examples, the figure of a greater and more complete reality
serves also to allow freedom of action and of imagination.
As for this reservoir from which one draws, no matter what emerges, this
sonorous flow of reality links up that which is and that which is different,
that which is manifest and that which is latent, looping together the other in
the self and the self in the other (from the individual in the cosmos passing
through the human race and the world). Jules Monnerot, a sociologist born
in Martinique and a friend of the surrealists, wrote of this reservoir in
poetry, which was “born (in that falsely historical manner of speaking,
merely metaphorical) not from those who intended to be poets, but from
those who attained poetry in aiming for existence, invaded by a flux which
allowed them to see and touch in others that which those others themselves
are seeing and touching.”19
From an Afrological perspective, nothing is further from the socio-
musical practices linked to improvisation than the anthropocentric theory or
the so-called central, irreducible, and indivisible character of human
consciousness. Thus Lewis expresses surprise at this “[innate] need of
people to feel that they have control over some aspect of their lives. I think
that it’s important to realize that we’re in a kind of an interdependent
universe here, and I’m not sure how much control that we have over our
lives. I’m sure that control is not total. That’s pretty obvious. We seem to be
faced with forces moving around us all.”20 These forces or energies
circulating around us are the ones the surrealists strived to capture with
automatic writing,21 spiced up by a “mental electricity,” and that writers
like James Joyce or Virginia Woolf attempted to channel into the shape of a
current (electric?) of consciousness.
More recently, Yves Citton has revived the premonition of such a
circulation of energy, as with the intimate conviction of Richard Wright:
“[W]‌ithout a continuous current of shared thought and feeling circulating
through the social system, like blood coursing through the body, there could
be no living worthy of being called human.”22 From this statement, Citton
issues the following forecast, essential for our purposes: “From the
discovery of electrical phenomena and of Mesmerian magnetism in the Age
of Enlightenment, to the diffusion of the great newspapers and of the
telegraph in the era of [Gabriel] Tarde, and up to the networks, Hertzian and
internet, which make up the background of Maurizio Lazzerato’s
reflections, one witnesses the progressive emergence of an imaginary which
represents modern societies as a collective mental universe informed by the
circulation of magnetic currents and resonating waves.”23
Several musicians in the jazzistic field have insisted on reminding us that
music could be understood as the science of vibrations and vibratory
phenomena, with Braxton even pursuing “vibrational alignments.”
Everything that exists in the material or immaterial spheres vibrates at a
certain frequency. In playing, in improvising, musicians have the possibility
and the power to place themselves on the frequency (wavelength) of all that
is, to let themselves be carried by this flux of reality and participate in the
harmonizing or dissonating of beings and things. Creative music is thus the
macrocosmic reverberation of sound, the sonic translation of the chaotic,
cosmic coexistence of all—“the simultaneous and harmonious vibration of
all the phenomena of creation,” according to the Sonic Healing Ministries
of Chicago.24 Musicians may provide relief, calm, health, pleasure, beauty,
or knowledge only to the degree that they offer, in themselves, this
vibration that spears and harpoons the world. Or the opposite. For example,
Avreeayl Ra claims that
there is a frequency to which we hold, and where there is nothing more than the vehicle for what
happens … especially with this kind of music. One thing I often insist on is that no music,
composed or not, will stand if you are not all there yourself before going on stage. Because the
energy expended to continuously face the score can keep you away from the frequency on
which creativity is at its highest level. And so, contrary to common sense, you must find the
music itself, in your heart. The whole universe is here, within.25

Matana Roberts and Kalaparush Maurice McIntyre take up the same

theme. For Roberts, “There is no contradiction between the intimate
appearance and the universal aspect. In fact, I believe in a holistic approach.
Everything is connected, really.”26 As Kalaparush put it, “Everything comes
from you, and from the depths of the universe.”27 A circuit of the self, as far
as the deepest reaches of the universe, poles of a circulation of forces and
energies—a navigation that transcends form. Once more, according to the
improvisers, affirmation of a “me” and participation in a “self” go together,
as Lewis notes: “The best way to look inside is often to look around you
and explore your environment. I have to be an environmentalist … and so I
made this task of interpreting the world around me, trying to be minimally
invasive. I want to harmonize with the world as I find it in music.”28
The idea of a circulation of forces and energies and all that it implies,
interconnecting man and the universe as two rooms of the same haunted
house, distances itself from a modernity which posed the rupture with
nature as a prior condition for the link with the (human) other, with the
social contract and with historical progress. Modernity has classified and
mocked any idea of “magical participation” or “pantheistic fusion,” any
communication or communion between the interior and exterior worlds,
which emanate from a level of thought termed “pre-logical” by Lévy-Bruhl
or “savage” by Lévi-Strauss. That is why free or collective improvisation
could be considered by certain of its practitioners as the ultimate stage of
collaboration among people, in a strict sense of among, the link with that
other-over-there trumping all others.
 If this “fully human” dimension is accepted by the body of creative
musicians, there are others who refuse to confine music’s powers to
humankind alone, claiming instead for music the status of an art of
conversation among all that exists. Charmingly, in his writings over the
years, Braxton has cited what amounts to a census of his partners: children,
women, men, musicians, ventriloquists, scientists, doctors, geologists,
herbalists, and all the kingdoms of nature.29 And in the verbal puzzle of his
composition OQA, Muhal Richard Abrams compares the structure of a
melody in time with the organization of a geometric figure in space,
suggesting the consilience of these universal laws with metabolisms, living
cells, oxygen molecules, atoms, celestial movements, and the zodiac.30
One must understand that, in the relationship with the other that
improvisers have reinvented, alterity can take the form of a material,
quality, property, or object; a human or other living being; or an ancestor,
spirit, divinity, or cosmic force. The other is all that permits the making of
the world, as Robert Jaulin liked to repeat:
The future, the stars, deaths, rain, earth, the visible or perceptible in its immediate functions
make therefore a body with humanity; and vice-versa. Together, they are the universe. By the
game of divination man finds himself thus gifted with a universe in which he is one of the
“divinities,” if the invention of life is of divine order.31

Creative musicians in playing, in improvising, do not dream of ordering this

apparent chaos of the world, but of revealing its “secret” order. As
subjective as this transitivity might be, they play others, in themselves and
around them; they play the world and the universe. All of being is their
instrument. Henry Threadgill:
Before the concert in the amphitheatre [outdoors], during the sound check, I understood that the
wind was at home here, that we would have to play with it, make it a partner, the sixth member
of the group—and not an adversary of the music. … This night, the wind sat in with us on the
stage and when it made itself known, we made a place for it in the orchestra.32

It is thus not a matter of reproducing or transposing “nature,” but acting in

concert with it, to become in one and the same motion a creative and an
altering power. Pursuing the parallels drawn by Paz, if for the utopian
Charles Fourier, “the system of the universe (analogy) is the key to the
system of society,” and if for the poet Charles Baudelaire, “the system of
the universe is the model for poetic creation,”33 for a number of creative
musicians, the system of the universe is the key to socio-musical formation
and creation. The sonorous flux of reality in which they insert themselves
allies itself to the system of correspondences or the tissue of analogies
linking all that is in a continuum of multiple meanings. Raising this voice or
this interior conversation to an audible level is to transport beyond oneself,
toward a self’s other to which the double consciousness imposed on African
Americans has long given rise, an other for the self that is not experienced
as a fissure but as the natural state of the human condition, unique and
double.
To improvise is to fluctuate, to pass from one state to another, from one
form to another, and occasionally to make passage from one into another. It
is to be acted upon by the stream of a speech simultaneously personal and
impersonal, foundational. Far from the received idea according to which
improvisation is concerned only with “self-expression,” in the sense in
which one expresses with a certain uniqueness that which one is, what one
feels, what one thinks, in so far as one is certain of it or assured (one
dreams of the distinction long ago implemented by Tzara between poetry as
means of expression and poetry as activity of the spirit), the activity of
improvisation, like poetic activity, allows the discovery and practice of
one’s own strangeness, one’s own plurality, in a becoming-many of the
subject coming to replace the becoming-subject of the multitude
conceptualized by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. One doesn’t identify
any longer with oneself, master of the word, one attempts the double
identification with one’s self and self’s other. For Abrams, in whose work
and thought the number three has the weight of a structural principle, this
double or triple consciousness is nothing but the image of a necessary
multiple consciousness, the way into the infinitude of possibilities, situated
among the conscious me, the hidden me, and an included third (that which,
in the end, decides).
It is not only that the improvisatory activity of musicians of the jazzistic
field redefines the connections between interiority and exteriority, but also
the combinatorial dynamic of this field invents permanent connections,
where nothing enters in contradiction. Artaud writes of poetic activity in
these terms: “This helps us to understand that poetry is anarchic insofar as it
calls into question all relationships between objects and all relationships
between forms and their meanings.”34 Rather, improvised music and the
language which sets one free are indefinitely associative, having as great a
need of analytical as of analogical thought. They search for the unity among
the plurality of beings and subjects, not one found above or beyond them;
they render them in their powerful alterity, rediscovering without end their
networks of relations, in the lived presence of things—a unity in all the
senses of the union of contraries, in that union in which differences are not
resolved but made resonant, harmonized, in that union of the progression of
chords. Addressing such a union, Anthony Davis comments:
If I take this bet and if I let music make itself, if I let my ideas spin out, then nine times out of
ten, one thing leading to another, one idea modifying another, everything links up. … But
making this jump into the unknown, admitting that the music comes to you sometimes without
premeditation, admitting that one can be proud of something which surpasses reasoned reason,
something that is beyond one’s apparent technical capacity and the control exercised by reason,
here is the true discriminating factor. And this is why I think that every composer must equally
be an improviser. Improvisation is that which gives the musician the courage to make this
leap.35

Creative musicians thus spend their time undoing associations between

sounds and ideas that are stuck in a unique literal-mindedness, possibly that
of “the present order’s uninterrupted discourse about itself,”36 with the goal
of subsequently recapturing them in whole or part and reconnecting them
with other orders, already socio-musical. With Stuart Hall, it is possible to
see or to hear in the undertaking of improvisation, in the undertaking of
poetry, “[the] active work of constructing new meanings and ‘definitions of
the situation.’ ”37 Among the properties of musics in the jazzistic field, isn’t
there precisely this dialogic treatment of so-called oppositions and
contradictions rendered complementary?
On the other hand, the combinatorial dynamic of these musics does not
postulate any definitive organization of sounds: all organization is only as
valuable as played, and as timely or provisional (if not ephemeral: it can be
made use of again, when timely once more), and has value only as a
reserved solution, in a certain space-time, to be retained as a supplemental
possibility. None of the solutions takes its interest from its conformity or
non-conformity to a model, but from how it corresponds to a given
situation, to the beings, spirits, and energies in presence, in the appropriate
yet variable manner, establishing the equivalent of what Hardt and Negri
have called “a regime of the production of identity and difference, or really
of homogenization and heterogenization.”38
This metamorphic principle demands the interpretation of collective
improvisation as an act of invention of “immediate” social structures, made
to order, which are as much the translation of relationships among
individuals and with the world as they are the reflection of preexisting
structures. Out of all the rules of the game, out of all the language systems
to which creative musicians have recourse, the combinatory dynamic of the
jazzistic field creates strategies that are interactive among others. The
dynamic is a multiplier of terms and of relations, allowing individuals to
circulate “in and out,” so that they might unify their contraries of becoming-
subject and becoming-multiple, or interact with partners who design their
elective affinities while conserving a global vision of their interactions;
while developing an acuity for contexts and structures, in order to permit
them to abandon themselves to themselves, to a stream of consciousness, to
the light of the world, while at the same time according the most rapt
attention to what their colleagues are playing, without ever abandoning
them definitively, without ever following them definitively, but inventing
with them the form of an ensemble, in placing themselves in a state of
unconsciousness and hyperconsciousness at the same time: a state, that is,
of double consciousness.
For improvisation is also the liberty of movement, the liberty of living in
the flux of reality, in the enchanted realm of the possible. Rather than
committing to a unique form or a generalized formlessness, rather than
having to choose between conservation and innovation, the transformative
dynamic of the jazzistic field, in consort with its combinatory energetics,
mingles and envelops the sonorous real by practicing upon the world (this
one and some others), admitting a priori the changing and composite nature
of its identities, institutions, and structures. Anyone who has already
participated in a concert of creative music knows that improvisation serves
also and above all as a conduit for moving from one form to another, which
Braxton likens to a “navigation which crosses forms,” Lewis to a “voyage
of exploration,” and which Lawrence D. “Butch” Morris attributed to the
very possibility of improvisation: “An improviser can play with a single
idea and make it take all possible forms within an hour, making it go
through six, seven … ten different structures.”39 Taking up this idea of
navigation, John Corbett writes: “[Sun Ra’s] music was explicitly about
navigation, about the formal construction of vehicles for travel in self-
created space. Ra called for listeners to do the impossible, to make manifest
a fantastic journey, a highly politicized, poetical trip into unknown
worlds.”40
 To “easily slip into another world,” as Threadgill once put it, or to let one
be traversed by other voices, other presences, to relocate in the universe,
oriented toward both an immemorial past (African or other) and the
cosmos, is to ebb and flow like the forms that one assumes, just as the
Salmon of Wisdom steers its course through the wake of currents and
crosscurrents, of apprehensions and illuminations. In the end, the navigation
of fantasy improvisation and poetry may be the only way of being one’s
self, self’s other.

NOTES
1. Translator’s note: The phrase le saumon de la sagesse is generally rendered in English as The
Salmon of Knowledge. For poetic reasons, with the consent of the author, I have used wisdom
here.
2. Translator’s note: This translation of Novalis appears in Susan Sontag, “The Aesthetics of
Silence,” in Styles of Radical Will (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966), 28; Tristan
Tzara, trans. Barbara Wright, “From ‘Dada Manifesto on Feeble Love and Bitter Love,’ ” in
Poems for the Millennium, The University of California Book of Modern and Postmodern
Poetry, ed. Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris, vol. 1, From Fin-de-Siecle to Negritude
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995 [1920]), 301.
3. George E. Lewis, “Singing Omar’s Song: A (Re)construction of Great Black Music,” Lenox
Avenue: A Journal of Interarts Inquiry, no. 4 (1998): 79.
4. See Alexandre Pierrepont, Le Champ Jazzistique (Marseilles: Éditions Parenthèses, 2002).
5. André Breton, “Silence Is Golden,” in André Breton: What Is Surrealism—Selected Writings
(New York: Pathfinder, 1978 [1946]), 268–269.
6. Édouard Glissant, Traité du Tout-Monde: Poétique IV (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), 121.
7. Various, “Declaration of January 27, 1925,” in History of Surrealism, ed. Maurice Nadeau,
trans. Richard Howard (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1989), 241.
8. Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon (New York: Knopf, 1977), 278.
9. Serge Pey, Lettres posthumes à Octavio Paz depuis quelques arcanes majeurs du tarot (Paris:
Jean-Michel Place, 2002), 49.
10. N. Scott Momaday, The Way to Rainy Mountain (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico
Press, 1969), 33.
11. André Breton, “Situation of the Surrealist Object,” trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane, in
Manifestoes of Surrealism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969 [1935]), 260.
12. Breton, “Silence Is Golden,” 25.
13. Octavio Paz, Children of the Mire: Modern Poetry from Romanticism to the Avant-Garde, trans.
Rachel Phillips, new ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991 [1972]), 173.
14. Amina Claudine Myers, interview with the author, Paris, February 2004.
15. Steven Tod, “Malachi Favors: Keep Playin’ Till the Lord Says Stop” (Silver Measure. DVD,
2004).
16. Leroy Jenkins, interview with the author, New York, May 2004; Tim Livingston, “Interview
with Lester Bowie,” Cadence 27, no. 1 (January, 2001); Ted Panken, “Interview with Henry
Threadgill” (WKCR-FM, July 24, 1996), http://www.jazzhouse.org/library/?read=panken3; Bill
Shoemaker, “Muhal Richard Abrams: Focus on the Vastness,” Point of Departure (1995),
http://www.pointofdeparture.org/archives/PoD-3/PoD-3_TurnAround.html; Christian Gauffre
 and Geoffrey De Masure, “Leçons de Von Freeman et Bunky Green,” Jazz Magazine 524
(March 2002): 29; Jesse Stewart, “Interview with Hamid Drake,” Cadence 30, no. 3 (March
2004): 6; Lorraine Soliman, “La médecine invisible du docteur Lloyd,” Jazz Magazine 570
(May 2006): 32; Ben Ratliff, liner notes to David S. Ware, Third Ear Recitation (DIW #870.
Compact disc, 1998). Also see http://www.bb10k.com/Ware_UP.html.
17. Graham Lock, “A Highway to the Cosmics,” in Mixtery: A Festschrift for Anthony Braxton, ed.
Graham Lock (Exeter: Stride, 1995), 249.
18. Frank Kofsky, John Coltrane and the Jazz Revolution of the 1960s (New York: Pathfinder Press,
1998 [1970]), 443.
19. Jules Monnerot, La poésie moderne et le sacré (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), 21.
20. Ted Panken, “Interview with George Lewis” (WKCR-FM, April 30, 1994),
http://www.jazzhouse.org/files/panken16.php3?read.
21. The connection, obviously false, between automatic writing and musical improvisation has been
permitted by an unhappy medium on which the majority of authors have in reality focused their
attention: the problem of velocity, and eventually the connection with time. In particular one
sees comparisons between the immediacy of thought, on the one hand, and the pace of
performance, on the other, with inevitably negligible results. As this chapter suggests, the
relations between improvised music and the language that sets one free are happily not
invalidated by the differences between these speeds of execution.
22. Richard Wright, Black Boy, reprinted in Richard Wright: Later Works, ed. Arnold Rampersad
(New York: Library of America, 1991), 302.
23. Yves Citton, Mythocratie: Storytelling et imaginaire de gauche (Paris: Editions Amsterdam,
2010), 38.
24. Information sheet of David Boykin’s Sonic Healing Ministries, which are divided into a
Microcosmic Sound Orchestra and a Macrocosmic Sound Orchestra. See
http://sonichealingministries.com/Welcome.html. What Myra Melford writes is not at all
different in essence: “Emotion is projected through sound, and when that sound vibrates at the
right frequency to harmonize or create a resonance with the physical world, a space of union and
healing is created.” See Myra Melford, “Aural Architecture: The Confluence of Freedom,” in
Arcana: Musicians on Music, ed. John Zorn (New York: Granary Books, 2000), 134. The same
perspective is manifested by William Parker, who speaks “of a sound vibrating with such force
that it transforms itself into “tonality”: and when that happens, the vibration becomes almost
medicinal. If your body and your nervous system benefit from listening to music, then the
musician is truly doing something worthwhile. I conceive of sound as an element of nutrition.”
See Kevin LeGendre, “Hymn to Silence,” Jazzwise 67 (August 2003).
25. Avreeayl Ra, interview with Alexandre Pierrepont, Chicago, April 2002.
26. Matana Roberts, interview with Alexandre Pierrepont, New York, May 2004.
27. Kalaparush Maurice McIntyre, interview with Alexandre Pierrepont, New York, May 2004.
28. Drawn from interviews conducted in 2005 for the documentary “Beyond Free Sounds” by
Rudolph Bazière, Robin Dianoux, Caroline Humbert, Claire Savary, Serre Marie, and Pauline
Hall, as part of my Masters course in Anthropology, Ethnology, and Religious Sciences at the
University Paris 7—Denis Diderot.
29. One of the earliest examples cited: “Desmond, Trane, Ornette, Earl [sic] Brown, Muddy Waters,
Stockhausen, the Mack Truck Corporation, the streets of Chicago, General Motors and Snooky
Lanson.” See George E. Lewis, A Power Stronger than Itself: The AACM and American
Experimental Music (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 192.
30. Hear Muhal Richard Abrams, 1-OQA + 19, (Black Saint #1200172. Compact disc, 1993
[1978]).
31. Robert Jaulin, Mon Thibaud: Le jeu de vivre (Paris: Aubier Montagne, 1980), 163.
32. Henry Threadgill, interview with Alexandre Pierrepont, Lisbon, August 2001.
 33. Quoted in Paz, Children of the Mire, 70.
34. Artaud, “Mise en scène and Metaphysics,” 235.
35. Anthony Davis, interview with the author, Lisbon, August 2001.
36. Guy Debord, La Société du Spectacle (Paris: Gallimard, 1992 [1967]), paragraph 24. By
convention, Debord scholars quote the paragraph number in this work rather than the page
number.
37. Stuart Hall, “Deviance, Politics, and the Media,” in The Routledge Reader in Politics and
Performance, ed. Lizbeth Goodman and Jane de Gay (London and New York: Routledge, 2000
[1974]), 75.
38. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 45.
39. Lawrence D. “Butch” Morris, interview with Alexandre Pierrepont, New York, May 2004.
40. John Corbett, “Anthony Braxton’s Bildungsmusik: Thoughts on Composition 171,” in Mixtery:
A Festschrift for Anthony Braxton, ed. Graham Lock (Exeter: Stride, 1995), 186.

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Artaud, Antonin. “On the Balinese Theater.” In Antonin Artaud: Selected Writings, edited and with
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Citton, Yves. Mythocratie: Storytelling et imaginaire de gauche. Paris: Editions Amsterdam, 2010.
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Davis, Anthony. Interview with Alexandre Pierrepont. Lisbon, August 2001.
Debord, Guy. La Société du Spectacle. Paris: Gallimard, 1992 [1967].
Gauffre, Christian, and Geoffrey De Masure. “Leçons de Von Freeman et Bunky Green.” Jazz
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Glissant, Edouard. Traité du Tout-Monde: Poétique IV. Paris: Gallimard, 1997.
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Routledge, 2000 [1974].
Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000.
Jaulin, Robert. Mon Thibaud: Le jeu de vivre. Paris: Aubier Montagne, 1980.
Jenkins, Leroy. Interview with Alexandre Pierrepont. New York, May 2004.
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Kofsky, Frank. John Coltrane and the Jazz Revolution of the 1960s. New York: Pathfinder Press,
1998 [1970].
LeGendre, Kevin. “Hymn to Silence.” Jazzwise 67 (August 2003): 36–38.
Lewis, George E. A Power Stronger than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music.
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Livingston, Tim. “Interview with Lester Bowie.” Cadence 27, no. 1 (January 2001): 5.
Lock, Graham. “A Highway to the Cosmics.” In Mixtery: A Festschrift for Anthony Braxton, edited
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Malraux, André. La Tête d’obsidienne. Paris: Gallimard, 1974.
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 CHAPTER 11
IMPROVISING YOGA

SUSAN LEIGH FOSTER

ON a good day, my yoga practice convenes a conversation between

something I’ll call my self and something I’ll call my body. I listen very
quietly, although All Things Considered is sometimes playing in the
background, and my body makes a suggestion. What do I mean by this?
Well, the body makes lots of different kinds of suggestions. Sometimes it
tenses in a pattern similar to that of a particular pose, as if proposing that
we do that pose. Other times, it directs my attention to some place of
stiffness or imbalance, asking that we do something about that. From pose
to pose or move to move, it offers a running commentary. Even dwelling
within one pose, parts of the body soften, extend, cramp, or lengthen in
dialogue with the action, and I respond by changing the focus of my
attention, altering something about the pose, or selecting the next pose.
Sometimes eagerly, sometimes reluctantly, my body and I pursue our
conversation for about an hour.
I learned to practice yoga this way from a wonderfully wise teacher,
Donald Moyer.1 In his teaching, Moyer sets up class as a site of inquiry and
investigation. He approaches each asana as if it were a set of hypothetical
relationships: For example, “What happens in tree pose if you lengthen the
lesser trochanter or widen the upper sternum?” Instead of reciting a list of
requirements that need to be accomplished or activated in order to do the
pose properly, he proposes questions, asking students to focus on a
particular part of the body and to assess for themselves how it changes the
pose when they engage with it in a particular way. Each student’s body is
different, with a different history and anatomy, so instructions have to be
modified individually. Moyer also avoids phrasing instructions in the
negative; he seldom tells a student what not to do. Instead, his questions and
propositions help us to establish a relationality among awareness, will, and
physicality.
Following from Moyer’s approach to yoga practice, there is no one
correct set of instructions for how to do a pose, nor is there one single way
to do a pose. Instead, since bodies are each so different, all students engage
in a process of listening so as to adapt propositions about the poses to their
individual situations. In an interview that I conducted with Moyer in 2007,
he observed that specific metaphors that he might use to encourage the
body to lengthen or expand are often effective for only a few weeks.2 After
that time, he says, the body has assimilated those images into its habitual
responsiveness and needs a new image in order to mobilize and explore the
pose in new ways. In other words, the conversation needs novelty in order
to remain vital and engaged.
The conversation that I have with my body takes place in the intersection
between varieties of experience—the nonverbal medium of my kinesthetic
awareness of the body, my reservoir of images about the poses compiled
from years of practice, and my analytic appraisal of how the body is
moving. What I am calling my body’s suggestions and responses are
changes in muscular tension, joint position, lungs, and internal organs that I
perceive thanks to gazillions of sensors located throughout the body that
register these changes. I want to call these changes thoughts, since, as Irene
Dowd has observed, they are produced by neural activity and they leave a
trace of sensation.3 These “thoughts,” along with my memories of images
and my assessment of how I am embodying the pose, all talk to each other.
These three kinds of thoughts improvise together, and my body moves
along with them.
No one type of thought predominates; no one type leads, with the others
following or responding. Instead, it’s more like a coffee klatsch among
friends who know each other really well. Sometimes, two forms of thought
talk at once, or they interrupt each other, or there are periods of silence. As
with friends who are gossiping together, some opinions are reinforced and
some new insights break through. My body might suggest a pose that’s way
out of the normal sequence, and it ends up assisting with another pose. Or it
might assert a tiny adjustment within a pose that I can carry into other
poses. While in a pose, I might think, “Can my back feel longer?” and my
body might or might not find a response.
 The directive “longer” is part of a system of priorities that I have learned
from years of study with Moyer. The analytic capacity that reflects on how
my practice is going is informed by certain values that I have gradually
acquired, and established as those that seem not to produce pain, but instead
to create a sense of well-being, balance, and continual expansion of
possibilities. In establishing these values, I have had to unlearn many other
priorities that I had acquired from different forms of dancing, such as
making the pose look perfect. It took many years for me to realize that a
pose being performed well could look very different on different bodies.
If someone was watching this practice, I imagine they would see a very
slowly changing body: me, gazing off into space for thirty seconds or so,
followed by movement into a pose, followed by very subtle shifts in weight
and changes in lengths of parts of the body, on a good day, in relation to a
pattern of breathing, followed by a return to standing or sitting with a
slightly vacant expression on my face. The exterior calm and relatively
static appearance of the body would fail to indicate, except to the most
careful observer, the degree of animated conversation taking place.
What if I were to enlarge all the actions, making the impulses and
responses more visible? The “dance” would unfold as a set of variations
and riffs on familiar themes (poses). Tracking these variations and assessing
their efficacy, I might occasionally pause to resist the tendency to reiterate
an unproductive habitualized variation, and then push to expand and test
what new variations might yield in terms of bodily states. This dance would
not likely succeed as a group endeavor, since so much attention focuses on
the body’s interior relationships rather than its connection to its
surroundings. It would instead look like the body conversing within itself.
In what ways are my yoga sessions improvisations, and what can they tell
us about improvisation as a practice? Elsewhere, I have argued for
envisioning improvisation as an interaction between the known and the
unknown, as a continual blending together of familiar and unanticipated
materials and/or actions, as a back and forth between pre-determined and
spontaneously discovered events.4 Improvising dancers, for example, select
from a repertoire of established ways of moving in order to create the new.
Some of these ways of moving have been repeated for so many years that
they form part of the dancer’s characteristic style, and others may result
from sequences of movements established and rehearsed in advance that
form the common or shared material upon which discovery is based. Some
forms of improvisation, such as Contact Improvisation, train dancers to
move in certain ways that become not so much a shared repertoire of
moves, but instead a shared aesthetics or set of principles for generating
movement. However much the quest for the new is featured in
improvisation, the familiar, established and known ways of moving also
contribute in determining whatever is discovered.
In my yoga sessions, I spontaneously select from a repertoire of possible
poses, each of which can be performed with attention to myriad different
details. Even one pose could be performed in a thousand different ways.
The sequence of poses is improvised, as is the focus of attention for each
pose. Guiding those selections is the conversation I am having with my
body about how and where to move next—how my body is feeling and also
how I think I’m doing in the pose.
I imagine that both my body and I are mixing up the known and
unknown in our call and response. From my thirty-year study of yoga, I am
familiar with a large number of poses and also with a variety of directives
for how to perform those poses. My body also “knows” both the poses and
numerous ways of moving and coordinating its parts, learned from other
movement practices, including dancing, walking, biking, carrying things,
and so on. Built into my body’s execution of these activities are habitual
patterns of action that also influence the body’s approach to the poses.
These patterns are part of the body’s “known,” and it also registers
sensations of physical status, such as imbalance, stress, relaxation, well-
being, integration, and flow, that inform its inventions of the new. So, it is
not that I call and my body responds. Instead, both body and self can
initiate as well as respond in our conversation.
Moyer’s pedagogy set the conditions for this dialogue by providing
guidelines for both the self and the body that structure perception and
action. Rather than referring to amorphous conditions of consciousness,
such as feeling more integrated, present, or in-tune, he identifies specific
kinds of physical sensations that form the basis for how the body initiates
and responds and also for how the self perceives and directs actions. Thus
he asks students to attend to the ramifications throughout the body of
widening the sternum or lengthening equally both sides of the coccyx. If
students leave his class feeling more “in-tune” with their bodies, it is not
because he asked them to feel in tune, but because he established the
grounds upon which such tuning could take place.
 This improvisation occurs largely within the realm of kinesthetic
sensation rather than in the domains of visual or auditory perception. Parts
of my body articulate one idea and other parts respond, and in that sense it
is not too different from a jazz trio. Kinesthetic information, however, is
often undervalued and undercultivated as a medium within which to
articulate ideas. We tend to envision the body’s movement as either
functional or as an expression of those parts of the self, such as the
unconscious, that are messy and inarticulate. This leads to assumptions
about movement as primordial or prelinguistic, and hence as capable of
generating inspiration or feeling but not actually articulating an idea.
In the practice of yoga that I pursue daily, there is nothing primal or
fundamental. I am not excavating beneath or beyond the social in moving
this way. I am not uncovering some basic human self that is defined by its
penchant for improvisation, nor am I succumbing to some kind of
primordial flow or reflex-level responsiveness to a more natural way to
move. Instead, I am actively working to construct my body as a process of
continual discovery.
This hour-long conversation differs from improvisation in quotidian life
because it allows me to be more conscious than I normally would be about
what the body is thinking. All day long we are improvising activities, tasks,
and social interactions, never so routinized as to repeatedly perform the
same action in exactly the same way. However throughout this negotiation
of needs, requirements, demands, inclinations, and preferences, we often
attend less rigorously to the body’s role in these actions. My yoga practice
is a time to redress that neglect and to bring about a more balanced
engagement with physicality.
Why write about this yoga practice in the context of improvisation? In
part, I want to excavate the politics of the everyday, to examine how
improvisation functions throughout our daily lives and how it contributes to
our sense of identity both individually and socially. I also want to test
improvisation’s potential role in contributing to what Foucault called
“technologies of the self.” Especially at this moment in history, when
bodies are being bullied into accomplishing ever more exacting skills, I
want to reflect on the plausibility of constructing an alternative relation with
corporeality.
Often, physical practices are constructed around a struggle to create the
“perfect” body or to ward off the effects of aging. Many who aspire to
physical fitness work against the impending debilitation of the aging body
and to achieve health by undertaking a regimen based on the assumption
that if there’s no pain, there’s no gain. The tyranny of proscriptions for a
healthy body, coupled with the ideal specifications for bodily appearance
put forward in advertising and entertainment, create overwhelming
demands for physical comportment in which the body has little or no say.
The workings of global capitalism, as Susan Bordo has observed, are
bearing down on the body with increasing force.5 Everyone is telling the
body what do to and how to look.
Is my yoga practice intervening in this accelerating cycle of punishment
and control? At least for an hour a day I am asking my body what it thinks,
albeit about a very restricted set of issues. I do not approach this hour as a
carving out of a private time to nurse a body that has been abused by its
exposure to the social. I do not see it as an indulgence or treat for body or
self. Yoga is not one of the methods devised to pamper oneself, take time
for oneself, indulge oneself, and so forth that are part of the deployment of
global capitalist strategies aimed at creating ever better consumers. Those
activities do not ask the body what it thinks any more than do body
sculpting, spinning, weight training, and fitness classes. Where the
regimens designed to create perfection approach the body as a robotics,
those that soothe and pamper the body infantilize it. In contrast to these
activities that docilize the body by treating it as raw material to be molded
or as tired flesh in need of rejuvenation, I envision my yoga practice as a
way of instating a frank exchange between equals. My body and I are
trading moves, responding to one another’s opinions, on a good day, like
friends.
In discussing improvisation within groups of dancers, I have analyzed the
ways that the group’s decisions about structuring a given performance and
the enacting of that structure resemble basic features of a democracy.6 As
dancers make conscious choices about what to do next within agreed-upon
structural limitations, they embody the processual nature of democratic self-
governance. They decide what rules to impose upon themselves and what
pre-established material to share, and then they explore the fleshing out of
those rules and the ways that shared material can lead to new discoveries.
Often, they reexamine and alter the rules for a subsequent performance.
My yoga improvisation is different, in that it is not social, yet it is not
anti-social. Foucault might call it a technology of the self, a pursuit that
permits individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a
certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts,
conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a
certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality.7
For Foucault, these technologies are inextricably tied to the body politic.
Technologies of the self do not operate outside the purview of power, and
they may or may not be integrated into structures of coercion. However,
they can help to carve out the space for individual agency, choice, and
creative participation in self-fashioning as part of the operations of power.
In his genealogy of classical Greek and early Christian technologies of
the self, Foucault demonstrates how any regimen of self-care is historically
specific in its articulation with the body politic. The pursuit of a concern for
oneself changed during this period from an effort to take care of oneself in
relation to the political into an attempt to cultivate a universal self that
transcended its political moment. Foucault uses this excavation of the self’s
transformation in an effort to sketch out the contours of a contemporary
approach to self-construction. In order to apprehend how we might attend to
and care for the self, he envisions the necessity to first problematize the
very status of the self and to sustain a critical practice of self-forming. This
scrutiny of the self would then facilitate the constitution of oneself as an
ethical subject.
If my yoga practice qualifies as this kind of critical restructuring of the
subject, it is because it undertakes, first, to interrogate and reenvision the
relationship between self and body, giving body a mindfulness and
participatory role in consciousness forming. I make the choice at least for
an hour a day to explore what this alternative identity feels like and how it
functions. By giving this articulateness to physicality, I imagine myself as
participating in the formation of a more balanced and ecological
relationship within the person, one that serves as an antidote to the
aggressive mining of natural resources and plundering of human resources
that we witness daily. I am not uncovering some truer inner self, but instead
carefully activating a set of rhetorical structures to form a body-self.
Following Moyer’s insight that such metaphors have a certain life-span
of efficacy, it is necessary to continually revisit the rhetoric, as well as the
improvisatory process through which it is implemented, in order to
ascertain whether they are continuing to facilitate the formation of an
ethical stance within and toward the world. On a good day, this perpetual
self-scrutiny and re-invention contribute to a sense of resilience and a more
collaborative engagement with others. Some of the improvised give and
take that occurs during yoga extends beyond my hour-long session,
permeating my relationships with students, colleagues, the grocery store
clerk, and others.
There is no goal, such as the discovery of an authentic or truer self, that
will be liberated and activated through mindful attention to the poses. Such
a goal would only reinstate the classic relationship between mind and body
in which the body is used as an instrument or tool for self-awareness or
transcendence. Nor am I seeking a more versatile physicality. Having spent
many years when I first studied yoga seeking the perfect pose, I have long
since realized that the improvisation I conduct leads only to more possible
complexities within each pose and more thoughts to be expressed, both by
my body and my self. Instead of arriving somewhere, the practice affirms a
process, a process that is fulfilling in and of itself.
Others who engage with yoga in this way share a similar focus on
establishing an improvisation with the body. However, their individual
practices might look quite different. We might all take Moyer’s class
together, partaking in a common rubric for exploring what the shoulder
blades, for example, can do, yet if we returned home and merely repeated
that class all week, we would not be caring for the self but instead grinding
both body and self into docile submission.
I know this because I also have bad days, days in which I plod through
routinized sequences of poses noticing very little. My body dumbly obliges,
somehow acquiescing to the assumption that this exercise is good for it. I
have no insights into the feel of the poses, nor do I try anything new. Rather
than “no pain, no gain,” the yoga becomes the way to stave off pain for
twenty-four hours by ministering to the very areas that I have identified as
problematic: just stretch the adductors and they won’t go into spasm, or just
arch the back to compensate for writing so long today. In other words, there
is no improvisation.
But on a good day …

NOTES
1. Donald Moyer, a student of B.K.S. Iyengar, is the founder and director of The Yoga Room in
Berkeley, California. He wrote the “Asana” column for Yoga Journal in 1987, 1989, and 1992 and
 is the author of Yoga: Awakening the Inner Body (Berkeley: Rodmell Press, 2006).
2. In response to a question from me about the relationship of his daily practice to his teaching,
Moyer observed the following: “Usually when I’m practicing, a new movement comes into a
particular pose. I take that movement and apply it to different poses. What works in a forward
bend might not work in a backbend, or you might have to change and do the exact opposite in a
different type pose. I find that when I first work with a theme my body responds with a lot of
freshness, whereas when I repeat that theme day after day, maybe for 2 or 3 weeks, the edge of
freshness starts to fade, and as that fades, there’s generally a new idea, something will kind of
spring up—a new thought will emerge which is related but goes in a slightly different direction.
So, if I’m working with, say, how the head of the femur fits in the hip socket, I might just do that
for a time. And then the idea occurs to me: well, you can’t always move the head of the femur in
the socket. Sometimes you have to move the socket around the head of the femur, ok? And then, if
I work on that for a particular length of time my body gets accustomed to doing that and then the
thought pops up, “Well, if it works for the hip socket, does it work for the shoulder joint?” And
then I’ve got a basis, an analogy. If it worked on the hip joint, how can I make it apply to the
shoulder joint, and then I go off in a new direction.” Susan Leigh Foster, Interview with Donald
Moyer. Personal communication, December 14, 2007.
3. Irene Dowd, Taking Roots to Fly: Ten Articles on Functional Anatomy (New York: Contact
Editions, 1981), 3, 5.
4. Susan Leigh Foster, “Taken by Surprise: Improvisation in Dance and Mind,” in Taken by Surprise:
A Dance Improvisation Reader, ed. David Gere and Ann Cooper Albright (Middletown, CT:
Wesleyan University Press, 2003), 1–14.
5. Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press,
1993).
6. Susan Leigh Foster, Dances that Describe Themselves: The Improvised Choreography of Richard
Bull (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2003), 234–236.
7. Michel Foucault, “Technologies of the Self,” in Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel
Foucault, ed. L. H. Martin et al. (London: Tavistock, 1988), 16–49.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bordo, Susan. Unbearable Weight. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993.
Dowd, Irene. Taking Roots to Fly: Ten Articles on Functional Anatomy. New York: Contact Editions,
1981.
Foster, Susan Leigh. “Taken by Surprise: Improvisation in Dance and Mind.” In Taken by Surprise: A
Dance Improvisation Reader, edited by David Gere and Ann Cooper Albright, 1–14. Middletown,
CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2003.
Foster, Susan Leigh. Dances that Describe Themselves: The Improvised Choreography of Richard
Bull. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2003.
Foucault, Michel. “Technologies of the Self.” In Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel
Foucault, edited by L. H. Martinet al, 16–49. London: Tavistock, 1988.
Moyer, Donald. Yoga: Awakening the Inner Body. Berkeley: Rodmell Press, 2006.
Moyer, Donald. Interview with Susan Leigh Foster. Berkeley, CA, December 14, 2007.
 PART III

CULTURAL HISTORIES
 CHAPTER 12
MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE, OR PHILOSOPHY
AS IMPROVISATION

TIMOTHY HAMPTON

By far the greatest folly is to reject the gifts of the moment.

(Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, X.vi)

In February of 1571 a French lawyer named Michel de Montaigne sat down

in his castle, in the countryside near Bordeaux, to write. The moment was
one of crisis in French history, as the country had been plunged into bloody
wars between rival groups of Protestants and Catholics a decade earlier, and
was in the middle of a wholesale collapse of civil and political order. The
very next year would see the notorious Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre,
in which thousands of Protestants all across France would be butchered by
their Catholic countrymen. A member of a traditional Catholic merchant
family that had become ennobled only the generation before, Montaigne
lived in predominantly Protestant Gascony. He had received a splendid
education in Latin at one of the best schools in France. Yet after some
service in the judiciary he had decided, as he put it, to “retire” from public
life, to turn his thoughts to himself for the brief time remaining him before
death. This “retirement” came at the ripe old age of 38. Several years earlier
he had suffered a devastating personal loss, when his best friend, the
humanist scholar Etienne de la Boétie, had died at a young age. The death
of La Boétie seems to have left Montaigne somewhat adrift, and he now
turned to the preparation for his own end. As a kind of “portrait” of himself,
for the private use of his family and friends, he intended to leave behind a
written record of his cogitations. The text that Montaigne would produce
over the next 20 years, the Essays, stands as a unique instance in western
literature of philosophy produced out of the practice of improvisation.1
 I will argue that the improvisational features of the Essays are shaped by
the intersection of an epistemology and a writing practice. The
epistemology is partly an historical phenomenon, involving Montaigne’s
skeptical relationship to the classical culture that he inherits from
Renaissance humanism. However, that skepticism can only find complete
expression through Montaigne’s unique writing practice. Improvisation in
writing makes possible new types of literary discourse, which in turn
articulate a certain set of attitudes toward authority, the body, and the
constitution of the self. I will suggest that improvisation is a key element in
the generation of new forms of knowledge on the threshold of the modern
era.
Montaigne calls his text essays, a term that he seems to have invented, or
at least applied for the first time to a text. The French verb essayer means,
in common usage, to try or to try out. In Montaigne’s time it also had
implications of tasting. It derives from the Latin word exagium, which
refers to a scale or a balance—from which, of course, we get the modern
English notion of “assaying” gold. Part of Montaigne’s project in the Essays
seems to have involved the weighing of different cultural phenomena—
examples from classical history, bits of personal information, quotations,
current events—in order to test his judgment in the pursuit of a happy,
virtuous, philosophical life.
Yet no ideal of balance is free from the threat of imbalance. Indeed, one
of the principal characteristics of the literary form of the essay—the form
that Montaigne invented and bequeathed to modernity—is its deliberately
fragmentary or limited perspective on things. Essays refuse the claim to
absolute knowledge and proclaim themselves to be the fruit of contingency.
Two aspects of this radical acceptance of contingency link to Montaigne’s
practice as improviser. The first is the way in which the essay refuses
abstract concepts. Rooted as it is in personal experience yet linked to larger
philosophical problems, the essay avoids grand formulations of
philosophical ideals. As the philosopher Theodor Adorno writes in his
study, “The Essay as Form,” “the essay … incorporates the antisystematic
impulse into its own way of proceeding and introduces concepts
unceremoniously, ‘immediately,’ just as it receives them.”2 Adorno’s target
in this dismissal of the “concept” is, of course, the idealist philosophy of
Kant and Hegel. However, in Montaigne’s context one might just as well
point to the ways in which both the Platonic emphasis on ideal concepts and
the later scholastic deployment of definitions are undermined by the
occasional, almost casual, approach of Montaigne’s writing. That is,
whereas classical and scholastic philosophy conventionally set up
arguments by defining terms (“what is virtue,” “what is eloquence,” etc.),
Montaigne tries to discover what those things would be as he goes. Yet in
contrast to the Platonic tradition of the philosophical dialogue, he does not
proceed dialectically. Instead, improvisation becomes the response to an
overly rigid philosophical tradition. Indeed, Montaigne’s acceptance of his
own limitations, of the boundaries of his experience, are articulated in a
metaphor of visuality that suggests the etymology of improvisation as an
engagement with the “unforeseen” (im-pro-videre). He notes in his essay on
the education of children that “My conceptions and my judgment only
proceed by groping, staggering, stumbling, and blundering; and when I
have gone ahead as far as I can, still I am not at all satisfied: I can still see
the country beyond, but with a dim and clouded vision” (107).3
No less important for the improvisational nature of the essay is another
feature of the form pointed to by Adorno. This is the question of the
material that the essay takes as its focus of attention: “The essay,” writes
Adorno, “does not try to seek the eternal in the transient and distill it out; it
tries to render the transient eternal.” It does so, not by focusing on some
unmediated relationship to direct experience (the goal of Romantic
idealism, in Adorno’s context), but by exploring the intersection between
individual consciousness and what we might call the detritus of culture. By
“detritus” I mean the leftovers of cultural production: clichés,
commonplaces, ruins, old ideas, quotations. It deals, in Adorno’s phrase,
“with objects that would be considered derivative, without itself pursuing
their ultimate derivation. It thinks conjointly and in freedom about things
that meet in its freely chosen object. … It is … spellbound by what is fixed
and acknowledged to be derivative, by artifacts.”4 This operation of picking
up on fragments of culture, on ideas that have been set aside or already
worked out and then expanding them or turning them about, opening them
up to reconsideration, offers an instance of the equivalent, in literature, of
the musician who takes a phrase from an old composition and develops it,
or the painter who borrows the brush technique of another and makes it the
focus of attention. The essay takes mediated information and renovates it by
accepting its mediated status and then bringing personal experience to bear
on what it conveys.
 Montaigne makes it clear that his essays are not intended to be
systematic. He is deeply steeped in the writings of classical moral
philosophy, in particular the moral essays of Seneca and Plutarch, his two
favorite writers. Yet the unfolding of the lines of argumentation in any of
his essays is at best digressive and at worst puzzling. There is no system
here. Rather, as Montaigne says, he is following the pathway of his own
thoughts, trying to fix in writing the movement of the mind. This digressive
style is, of course, an improvisational style. It begins from a fragment of
information (a cliché, a citation, an example) and unpacks it, building out
from the limits of its capacity into the unknown.
Yet many of most powerful effects of Montaigne’s style are produced,
not out of the lateral movement of his digressive thought, but out of the way
his discourse turns back on itself to produce new levels of meaning. Thus,
for example, in the opening of what is now probably his best known essay,
the essay called “Of Cannibals,” he begins by noting that while the Greeks
were often thought to consider everyone else as barbarians we have
examples of Greek generals admiring the military ordinances of non-
Greeks, whom they considered anything but barbarian. Thus, concludes
Montaigne, “we should beware of clinging to vulgar opinions and judge
things by reason’s way not by popular say” (150). The rhyming effect
(“way/say”) that Donald Frame’s excellent English translation seeks to
capture here is, in the original French, even more powerful, as “reason’s
way” is a rendering of “la voie de la raison,” and “popular say,” is “la voix
commune” (200). The French word for way, voie, and the word for voice,
voix, are exact homonyms. Their juxtaposition in this important sentence,
the first philosophical reflection of this crucially important essay, is clearly
generated as a kind of improvisational gesture out of the play of sound and
rhythm in the unfolding of the sentence itself. Yet this is not merely a
passing joke. The entire essay, which deals with the problem of European
perceptions of the cultures of the recently discovered New World, will take
as a central theme the contrast between the limits of European culture, with
its imperial way, or “voie,” on the one hand, and the “voice,” or “voix,” of
the oral-based cultures in Brazil, on the other. In other words, the
improvised contrast of “voie” and “voix,” set up at the outset of the essay,
will become, as it is reversed and unpacked, one of the generating
principles for much of the rest of the essay. Verbal improvisation provides a
frame for philosophical reflection, since the voie/voix echo doesn’t work on
paper; it must be pronounced to become clear.
The variety of themes treated in the Essays is vast. In the earliest essays
that make up the first two books, Montaigne frequently takes on
conventional topics from history or moral philosophy (moderation, sadness,
the habits of Caesar, etc.). Occasionally he generates new topics drawn
from contemporary events (cannibals, recent battles, torture) or from his
quirky personal interests (the size of thumbs, odors, sex, and language).
However, as he moves into the third book, the essays become longer and
more complex, culminating in two great meditations, “Of Physiognymy”
and “Of Experience,” in which the very act of reflecting on the self
displaces any concrete theme or body of knowledge. Instead of being about,
say, solitude, or politics, philosophy now becomes about “experience,” the
activity of thinking about solitude and the wisdom gleaned from watching
politics.
Montaigne’s earliest essays, some of the first chapters in Book 1, often
take the form of little more than exercises in which the author meditates on
a well-worn philosophical theme or a particular reference from classical
literature—the “artifacts” of which Adorno speaks. These early essays take
their impetus from two scholarly practices with which Montaigne was
familiar. The first is the practice of humanist rhetoric. In Renaissance
schoolrooms of the kind with which Montaigne was familiar, it was
common practice to give students particular passages from classical texts
and ask them to expatiate on them, commenting on issues of grammar and
vocabulary and attempting to draw moral lessons. These passages were then
supposed to be committed to memory, so that in some future speaking
situation (at court, in diplomatic negotiations, in council) they could be
trotted out and used as scaffolding. Similarly, Montaigne’s legal training
would have involved the process of glossing in the margins of the text of a
particular passage from the body of Roman law. Both of these traditions,
rhetorical improvisation and legal glossing, emphasize the role of
commentary or of annotation as the key to literary originality. Thus the
Essays emerge first as a kind of reflection on the writing of canonical
authors from the past.5
However, neither of these traditions could prepare us for the startling
originality and, indeed, unique nature of Montaigne’s text. For the textual
fabric of this work is unlike that of any other piece of philosophy or
literature, at least until some of the avant-garde experiments of the mid-
twentieth century. Montaigne worked on the first version of his essays for
about a decade. In 1580 he published the first edition of them, consisting of
two books. After this publication, which was followed by a trip to Italy and
a return to public service for a time, Montaigne stayed close by his own
text. He reread his own publication carefully, as if it were the writing of
some classical sage. And he commented on it. He wrote marginalia that
registered his own responses to what he had already written. He added more
examples, quotations from classical works, and insights that ran tangentially
and occasionally even counter to what he had written in the first iteration of
the book. Then, in 1588, he published the second edition of the Essays,
which included the first two books, now expanded by virtue of his own
marginalia inserted into the text, as well as a third book. Montaigne
continued this practice of glossing and expanding his own writing
throughout his life. Upon his death there was found yet another edition,
expanded yet again, filled with comments and reflections in the margin,
which became the definitive version of the Essays. It is important to note
that this is not a process of revision. He virtually never deleted material. It
is a process of expansion through improvisatory self-gloss. As he puts it in
the essay “Of the Resemblance of Children to Fathers,” “I do not correct
my first imaginings by my second—well, yes, perhaps a word or so, but
only to vary, not to delete. I want to represent the course of my humors and
I want people to see each part at its birth” (575).6
This curious writing practice, the process of rereading what one has
already written and then adding to it, expanding, and publishing the
expansion, means that if one reads successive editions of the Essays one
finds each new version to be substantially different from the preceding
version. Modern scholars have been able to collate these different editions,
and conventionally indicate the different layers of the text with the letters
(a) for the 1580 edition, (b) for the 1588 edition, and (c) for the posthumous
edition. This means that when we read Montaigne’s essays we do not only
read them horizontally, tracing the unfolding of his arguments across the
page, from left to right, but we also read them, as it were, “vertically,” from
level to level. We are able to trace, as in an archaeological dig, the ways in
which Montaigne’s philosophical reflections were generated out of his own
rereading of himself. Thus, in a beautifully ironic touch, Montaigne’s
observation, cited above, that he only corrects “a word or so, but only to
vary, not to delete,” is itself an “addition” made at the end of his life and
stuck right into the rest of the sentence, which was written some 20 years
earlier in the first edition. Montaigne’s account of his habit of improvised
textual expansion comes as a bit of textual expansion!
Montaigne’s act of returning again and again to his own creation to add
more text in response to what he already done takes his text beyond the
notion set forth by Adorno that what characterizes the genre is its resistance
to concepts and its acceptance of contingency. Were those the only features
of Montaigne’s text, it would be indistinguishable from other types of
contingent writing (popular commentary, journalism), some of which
Adorno seems to have in mind. Montaigne’s procedure is much more
radical. It has several interesting implications for our understanding of the
relationship between writing and the self. For one thing, it means that the
process of writing—the unfolding of the text—is exactly coterminous with
the life of the author. The Essays are not a narrative autobiography that can
be brought to a close with a flourish of the plot. Each new reading of the
text is also a writing that leads to new insertions of material according to
the movements, ideas, and perceptions of the writer. The text can never end
until Montaigne’s life ends. It grows amoeba-like, out from itself, as his
ideas change. And yet precisely because the project of the Essays is a
“portrait” of Montaigne (“it is myself that I paint,” [2]‌ he says in his
opening address to the reader), this process of improvisatory expansion is
quite different from other, similar artistic projects of revision.7 We might
contrast Montaigne to, for example, Claude Monet, whose famous series of
impressionist paintings of the Rouen cathedral constitute a set of variations
on the same material, each unique because of the changing light conditions.
For Monet, the object of his study is firm, but his perception of it, and
therefore his depictions of it, constantly change with the light. For
Montaigne, the object itself is constantly changing. As he says in the essay
“Of Repentance” (III, 2), “I cannot keep my subject still. It goes along
befuddled and staggering, with a natural drunkenness” (610b).8 And to
paint this changing subject Montaigne asserts that he has developed a style
that is also changing, though, because it emanates from the very subject that
is being portrayed, never “wrong”: “The lines of my painting do not go
astray, though they change and vary” (610b).9 Thus the act of writing is
endless, because there can be no final word on a changing subject—and,
indeed, even the attempt to offer a “final word” would be provisional.
 To see how this works in detail, and to introduce the role of citation in
improvisation, I want to turn to one of Montaigne’s smallest and most
appealing essays. This is the essay titled “Of Idleness” (I, 8), first written
very early in his retirement. There Montaigne tells us that he is only
recently decided to focus his energy on his own mind, “to let it entertain
itself in full idleness and stay settled in itself, which I hoped it might do
more easily now, having become weightier and riper with time” (21a).10
However, he has found that the more he has tried to focus only on himself,
the more his thoughts run wild, like a runaway horse. This reflection on the
instability of the meditating mind is punctuated by two bits of Latin poetry.
One is a quotation from Horace’s famous “Art of Poetry,” in which the poet
describes bad poetry as being “like a sick man’s dreams” (“velut agri
somnia”). Three sentences later, as he is discussing his unquiet mind,
Montaigne quotes the Latin epic poet Lucan: “ever idle hours breed
wandering thoughts” (“variam semper dant otia mentem”). Thus the first
version of the essay seems almost to be an academic exercise on the
traditional theme of idleness, a gloss on two well-known passages from the
classics—passages that seem to offer a kind of moral guidance.
That is, until we look closely at the contexts from which these passages
come. The Horace passage, as noted, comes from a poem about writing.
The Lucan passage is part of a political speech urging soldiers into battle in
the midst of civil war, a context that could not fail to resonate for
Montaigne’s own readers, living, as they were, through their own civil war.
Lucan’s text is an instance of inflammatory rhetoric urging men to violence.
Thus when we do our homework and chase down the sources of
Montaigne’s quotations, we see that the essay raises questions about how
one would write about war, about the relationship between poetry and
political rhetoric. When Montaigne rewrites the essay, however, he changes
the focus through the addition of yet another Latin quotation, this time from
the Aeneid of Virgil. He inserts several lines that describe the mind of
Aeneas in reflection as he considers the decision to go to war, “darting here
and there in endless flight, like the light that reflects off of the water in a
vase of bronze” (“Sicut aquae tremulum labris ubi lumen ahenis”). The
introduction of the Virgil passage turns the essay into one that is about how
the mind reflects on its own creations and about the relationship between
reflection and action. Moreover, the image of the flickering light on the
surface of the water actually gives expression to the very thing that
Montaigne has just done, as his mind skirts across the wavering surface of
his own text and then adds to it with a citation. Thus we see Montaigne at
work in the process of improvisation, re-reading his own text and adding
fragments stolen from the texts of others. As he rewrites the essay, he shifts
the focus by introducing new aspects of his ostensible theme.
This practice of quotation is crucial. For it creates a new kind of literary
artifact that is organized spatially. That is, we might think of the literary
genre of the essay as a space within which other texts can speak to each
other, in dialogue through the practice of juxtaposition. This improvisation
as juxtaposition means that in Montaigne’s text, authors whose texts would
normally have nothing to do with each other—Horace writing on poetry,
Virgil on reflection, and Lucan on political rhetoric—are now all in
dialogue, but only because Montaigne has pasted their words next to each
other. In this regard, we might think of Montaigne’s citational practice as a
form of literary collage. Montaigne deploys a spatial practice of bringing
things together around a theme. This is what Adorno seems to have in mind
when, in the article cited earlier, he notes that the essay form “thinks
conjointly and in freedom about things that meet in its freely chosen
object.” Montaigne’s violent and disruptive use of citations takes Adorno’s
notion of how “things meet” in the object of study one step beyond what
Adorno seems to have in mind. Montaigne quite literally introduces texts to
each other, through a practice of juxtaposition and collage that challenges
us to make sense of their new relationship.11
Because the Essays expand with the changing moods of the author, they
are also deeply marked by that feature of human experience that is most
variable—the life of the body. If improvisation is anything, it is the
struggle, over time, of the imagination against the limits of the body. In the
case of music or painting that may involve a struggle with an instrument, or
with the limits of one’s technical competence. For most writers the process
of writing involves endless patient revision, through which the limits of the
contingent body may be circumvented or overcome. For Montaigne, who
never erases but only adds to his text, the act of writing and the disposition
of the body are centrally linked. This is a central theme of the essay entitled
“Of Practice” (II, 6). There, Montaigne offers one of the few narrative or
anecdotal scenes in the book, an account of a fall from a horse in which he
confronted the possibility of death and thus was able to “practice” dying.
Following this account, detailed in its descriptions of his physical danger,
he shifts to the question of what it means to write about it. Though
traditional Christian teachings say that attention to the self can be
dangerous, he notes, he himself is not proposing any lessons or doctrine:
“What I chiefly portray is my cogitations, a shapeless subject that does not
lend itself to expression in actions” (274a).12 So much for moral instruction,
since, as he goes on to say, actions are mostly prey to chance anyway.
Instead, his topic is the self. As he says in a long addition made toward the
end of his life:
I expose myself entire: my portrait is a cadaver [un skeletos] on which the veins, the muscles,
and the tendons appear at a glance, each part in its place. One part of what I am was produced
by a cough, another by a pallor or a palpitation of the heart—in any case dubiously. It is not my
deeds that I write down; it is myself; it is my essence. (274c)13

The subtle interplay in this passage between body and text is extraordinary.
The portrait is first described as a “cadaver,” for which Montaigne uses the
strange Greek word skeletos (an importation, since he knew no Greek), and
the parts of the text-as-body are enumerated. Then, in the second sentence,
we seem to return to the body, with “one part of what I am” (as body or as
text?) produced by a cough, and so on.
This brilliant linkage of body and text means that the book and the author
become indistinguishable. To write is to be, and vice versa. The improvised
business of living, with the “shapeless subject” of cogitations and the
changes in bodily health, is at one with writing, which in turn will become
part of the self upon the next reading. Moreover, we note that this
description describes a text that is organized, not narratively or temporally,
like a traditional autobiography, but, here again, spatially, as in the case of
the strategy of juxtaposition explicated earlier. If I cough, that will produce
some text (and self); if my face is pale, that will produce another bit of text,
and so on. The text is a kind of anatomy of the self, a spatial diagram in
script that, however, unfolds and changes over time.
However, there is also an ethical project embedded in Montaigne’s
improvisational writing practice. One of the features of the humanist
tradition within which Montaigne was educated was a veneration of what
we might call the heroic culture of classical Antiquity. The epic literature of
Homer and Virgil, with its emphasis on military valor and constancy, no
less than the traditions of Roman moral philosophy and heroic biography,
contributed to a culture of admiration for figures of extreme virtue who
were taken to be models of the self. Indeed, humanist education was deeply
imbued with a focus on the imitation of exemplars from the past. This
emphasis on heroic selfhood took a different, but no less important, role in
the religious wars that form the immediate context for Montaigne’s
reflections. Both Protestants and Catholics deployed, as propaganda, images
and stories of “heroic” martyrs who had suffered for their faith and
therefore offered “proof” of the truth of their doctrine (and reasons for
inflicting suffering on the other side). Montaigne was acutely aware of the
endlessness of this culture of revenge, as well as of the dangers of any
claims to possess absolute authority sanctioned by the divine order. As a
response to this culture of absolutes and of ideal images, he emphasizes his
own fragility and commonness. In the closing passages of “Of Experience,”
he points out that his own soul is anything but a model of virtue: “In fine,
all this fricassee that I am scribbling here is nothing but a record of the
essays of my life, which, for spiritual health, is exemplary enough if you
take its instruction in reverse.” “But as for bodily health,” he goes on, “no
one can furnish more useful experience than I” (826b).14 And he launches
into an account of his many bodily habits: his ways of dealing with the
intense pain brought on by kidney stones, his love of salty meat, his
preference for silk hose over woolen, his hatred of stuffy rooms, and so on.
Each of these observations lends itself to the generation of some type of
wisdom that can be gleaned from “experience.” Montaigne underscores his
own limits and the importance of accepting one’s own common, unheroic
humanity. It is in the common body, with its foibles, habits, and inevitable
decay, he shows, more than in the grand gestures of the hero, that one can
learn how to live. Anything else he calls an “inhuman wisdom, which
makes us disdainful enemies of the cultivation of the body” (849b).15
Montaigne’s focus on the body and on the mutability of corporeal
experience redefines early modern moral philosophy. In place of the
attempts of earlier philosophers to locate wisdom in a set of prescribed
practices that are held up as ideals, and over against the Christian or
Platonic idealism that locate wisdom in an experience of transcendence,
Montaigne locates wisdom in the material world of the body. We all have
bodies that are constantly changing. Each of these bodies is unexceptional.
Yet from our reflections on that materiality and on the mutations of bodily
experience, we can glean wisdom for life that is both unique to us and
useful to others—more exceptional, in its way, than the virtue of Caesar or
Cato. The source of wisdom lies, not in ideal images, but in a particular
attitude toward the mutability of the self. And since the self changes
everyday, the solutions discovered yesterday are not necessarily valid today.
This means that, no less than writing, ethical living is a process of constant
improvisation, of the adjustment of judgment and comportment according
to circumstance, based on certain models but not reliant on them. As
Montaigne says in his essay on the education of children (I, 26): “only the
fools are certain and assured” (111c).16
Montaigne’s emphasis on the mutability of the self, on a process of
change that lies outside of fixed images of ideal virtue or vice, means that
an important part of human experience resides in movement, in the shift
from one mood to the next and from one instant to the next. As he says in
“Of Experience,” “myself now and myself a while ago are indeed two”
(736b).17 This acceptance of change also means that an essential feature of
Montaigne’s consideration of human experience is the question of
personality. This is a topic that is not often talked about either in
philosophical histories or in histories of early modern culture. Yet it is
central to Montaigne’s understanding of human beings. Personality would
seem to consist in the ways in which the self emerges through a series of
changes, the mutation of being from instant to instant. It is personality that
emerges through the practice of writing about the experience of change.
Personality is a central product of all improvisation. Montaigne’s
admiration for his various heroes from classical history and philosophy is
linked to his admiration for their personal style or personality. Thus, in “Of
Cruelty” (II, 11), he takes issue with the heroism of the great Stoic Cato for
his grandiosity, even as he extolls his virtue. By contrast, he admires
Socrates, not for his philosophical idealism, but for the way he moves
seamlessly from defending Athens, to teaching philosophy, to playing with
children in the street, to tolerating the crabbiness of his wife. Only in a
philosophy that would accept movement and change, through a constant
displacement of fixed images of ideal comportment, can personality be
grasped and considered. In this regard, the essential feature of human life
lies in its improvisational nature. In literature, personality emerges as style,
here as a particularly self-reflexive and supple, familiar writing style. To
grasp the mutability of human experience becomes the task of a writing that
itself changes from moment to moment.
At one level, Montaigne’s linkage of improvisation and moral philosophy
is an historical phenomenon. It has to do with his own position as one of the
last figures for whom the moral and political world of classical antiquity
was a source of constant reflection. To be sure, when René Descartes
invents philosophical modernity in the resolutely anti-improvisational
Discourse on Method, some 40 years after Montaigne’s death, he is careful
to bracket and avoid precisely those features that are central to Montaigne’s
philosophy. Descartes’s famous rejection of the body for the certainties of
the rational mind, his turning away from the external political world that
fascinated Montaigne, and his obsession with certainty all run directly
counter to Montaigne’s body-based, mutable embrace of the limits of his
own knowledge. In this regard, we might posit the important role of an
improvisational style at moments of transition in intellectual and artistic
history. As one system of representation falls into cliché and ruin, an
improvisation based on the artifacts of the past (citations, fragments,
commonplaces) makes possible new forms of representation and
expression. This is central to Montaigne’s project, which requires constant
hermeneutical adjustments to recuperate the past while undermining its
authority.
Montaigne’s Essays take as their point of departure the acceptance of
contingency, of the limits of knowledge, which we might link, as does
Adorno, to essayistic writing generally. However, Montaigne intertwines his
investigation of the contingent body and mediated cultural artifacts with a
new kind of improvisation that is linked to the writing practice itself. The
combination of these factors generates a text that sets forth a new ethics of
metamorphosis and improvisation, locating human virtue in the
commonality of everyday life. Finally, it should be clear that this writing
practice is no less linked to the ethics of reading than it is to improvisational
authorship. For Montaigne produces a text that, precisely because it cannot
be reduced to simple arguments, summaries, or definitions, injects the
improvisational imperative into the act of reading itself. The unsystematic
and non-narrative shape of the text means that the act of reading is always a
process of movement between different, often conflicting, points of view.
Montaigne’s use of quotations, often set in contradictory juxtaposition, as
well as the reversals imposed by new additions to the text, force upon the
reader a constant activity of revision and reconsideration. Indeed, the very
notion that the Essays offer not a systematic argument but rather the register
of a shifting mind forces us to revise our own arts of reading, to invent a
reading of the text that is by definition provisional and improvised. To think
that we have “read Montaigne” is to fall into the trap of certainty and ignore
the power of time over our own perceptions. In this way, the Essays are a
text that can only be read by being re-read.

NOTES
1. For an appealing account of Montaigne’s life as a philosophical quest for a happy and virtuous
life, see Sarah Bakewell, How to Live, or a Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty
Attempts at an Answer (New York: Other Press, 2010).
2. Theodor W. Adorno, “The Essay as Form,” in Notes to Literature, vol. 1, trans. Shierry Weber
Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 10.
3. All references to the Essays will be to Donald Frame’s translation, The Complete Essays of
Montaigne (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1985). Passages in French will come from
Michel de Montaigne, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Albert Thibaudet and Maurice Rat (Paris:
Gallimard, “Bibliothèque de la Pléiade,” 1962). Page numbers will be indicated following each
quotation. Here is the French: “Mes conceptions et mon jugement ne marchent qu’à tastons,
chancelant, bronchant et chopant; et quand je suis allé le plus avant que je puis, si ne me suis-je
aucunement satisfaict; je voy encore du païs au delà, mais d’une veuë trouble et en nuage”
(145).
4. Adorno, “The Essay as Form,” 11.
5. The importance of Renaissance rhetorical practice for literary composition in Montaigne’s day is
best explicated by Terence Cave in The Cornucopian Text: Problems of Writing in the French
Renaissance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979). See Part I, chapter 4, and Part II, chapter 4. On
the tradition of legal gloss, see André Tournon, Montaigne: la glose et l’essai (Lyon: Presses
Universitaires de Lyon, 1983).
6. “Au demeurant, je ne corrige point mes premieres imaginations par les secondes; (c) ouy à
l’aventure quelque mot, mais pour diversifier, non pour oster. (a) Je veux representer le progrez
de mes humeurs, et qu’on voit chaque piece en sa naissance” (736–737).
7. “C’est moy que je peins” (9).
8. “Je ne peux assurer mon object. Il va trouble et chancelant, d’une yvresse naturelle” (782b).
9. “Les traits de ma peinture ne forvoyent point, quoy qu’ils se changent et diversifient” (782b).
10. “Il me sembloit ne pouvoir faire plus grande faveur à mon esprit, que de le laisser en pleine
oysiveté, s’entretenir soy mesmes, et s’arrester et rasseoir en soy: ce que j’esperois qu’il peu
meshuy faire plus aisément, devenu avec le temps plus poisant, et plus meur” (34a).
11. On Montaigne’s citational practice, the best studies are Antoine Compagnon, La seconde main
ou le travail de la citation (Paris: Le Seuil, 1979); and Mary B. McKinley, Words in a Corner
(Lexington, KY: French Forum, 1981).
12. “Je peins principalement mes cogitations, subject informe, qui ne peut tomber en production
ouvragere” (359a).
13. “Je m’estalle entier: c’est un skeletos où d’une veuë, les veines, les muscles, les tendons
paroissent, chaque piece en son siege. L’effect de la toux en produisoit une partie: l’effect de la
palleur ou battement de coeur, un autre, et doubteusement. Ce ne sont mes gestes que j’escris,
c’est moy, c’est mon essence” (359a).
14. “En fin, toute cette fricassée que je barbouille icy n’est qu’un registre des essais de ma vie, qui
est, pour l’interne santé, exemplaire assez, à prendre l’instruction à contrepoil. Mais quant à la
santé corporelle, personne ne peut fournir d’experience plus utile que moy” (1056b). On
Montaigne’s relationship to the tradition of heroic exemplarity, see Timothy Hampton, Writing
 from History: The Rhetoric of Exemplarity in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1990); and, in a slightly different context, John Lyons, Exemplum (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1989). On Montaigne’s ethical resistance to the culture of aristocratic revenge
that informed the Wars of Religion, see David Quint, Montaigne and the Quality of Mercy:
Ethical and Political Themes in the Essais (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998).
15. “Moy, qui ne manie que terre à terre, je hay cette inhumaine sapience qui nous veut rendre
desdaigneux et ennemis de la culture du corps” (1086b).
16. “Il n’y que les fols certains et resolus” (150c). On the central role of change in Montaigne’s
philosophy, see Jean Starobinski, Montaigne in Motion, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1985); and François Rigolot, Les Métamorphoses de Montaigne
(Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1988).
17. “Moy maintenant et moy tantost somme bien deux” (941b).

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Adorno, Theodor W. “The Essay as Form.” In Notes to Literature, vol. 1, translated by Shierry Weber
Nicholsen, 3–23. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991.
Bakewell, Sarah. How to Live, or a Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an
Answer. New York: Other Press, 2010.
Cave, Terence. The Cornucopian Text: Problems of Writing in the French Renaissance. Oxford: The
Clarendon Press, 1979.
Compagnon, Antoine. La Seconde main ou le travail de la citation. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1979.
Hampton, Timothy. Writing from History: The Rhetoric of Exemplarity in Renaissance Literature.
Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990.
Lyons, John D. Exemplum: The Rhetoric of Example in Early Modern France and Italy. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1989.
McKinley, Mary B. Words in a Corner: Studies in Montaigne’s Latin Quotations. Lexington: French
Forum, 1981.
Montaigne, Michel de. The Complete Essays of Montaigne, translated by Donald Frame. Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1985.
Montaigne, Michel de. Oeuvres complètes, edited by Albert Thibaudet and Maurice Rat. Paris:
Gallimard, “Bibliothèque de la Pléiade,” 1962.
Quint, David. Montaigne and the Quality of Mercy: Ethical and Political Themes in the Essais.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998.
Rigolot, François. Les Métamorphoses de Montaigne. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1988.
Starobinski, Jean. Montaigne in Motion, translated by Arthur Goldhammer. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1985.
Tournon, André. Montaigne: la glose et l’essai. Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 1983.
 CHAPTER 13
THE IMPROVISATION OF POETRY, 1750–1850

Oral Performance, Print Culture, and the Modern

Homer

ANGELA ESTERHAMMER

AS the word improvisation entered English and other European languages

around 1800, the concept of improvisation had wide-ranging influence in
the domains of aesthetics, poetics, and socio-political thought. In some
ways, improvisational practices during the “Romantic century” (1750–
1850) resembled the modes of improvisation that would become dominant
during the 20th century. Musical improvisation, already well established
with Bach, Handel, and Mozart, proliferated in the age of the virtuoso
performer, and traditions of extemporized theater involving multiple actors,
such as commedia dell’arte, underwent imaginative reworkings on the
Romantic stage.1 But the period from 1750 to 1850 also saw the rise and
decline of a distinctive type of improviser: the improvvisatore (male) or
improvvisatrice (female), a solo poet-performer who spontaneously
composed verses on subjects assigned by the audience. These
improvisations could range in length from epigrams and short lyrics to very
long epics and multi-act tragedies. The tradition of extempore poetry
developed primarily in Italy, and abundant descriptions of improvvisatori
and improvvisatrici can be found in travel accounts, letters, diaries,
periodical articles, and fiction by tourists and correspondents who
witnessed their performances. In the early 19th century and especially
during the post-Napoleonic period, improvised poetry spread across Europe
as Italian improvvisatori increasingly performed abroad and local imitators
began to extemporize poetry in German, Dutch, English, French, Russian,
Polish, and Swedish.
Improvising performers themselves produced little in the way of
memorable poetry, but they did have a notable influence on the forms and
styles of prominent Romantic-era writers—from Goethe and Germaine de
Staël to Byron and P. B. Shelley—who were intrigued by the spontaneous
and interactive mode of composition manifested by improvvisatori. In
addition, the improvvisatore phenomenon gave rise to literary-critical,
philological, sociological, and political debates that looked back to the
foundations of the Western cultural tradition and intersected with the
evolution of modern communicative media. Improvvisatori and
improvvisatrici appealed to the late-18th-century fascination with genius
and to the celebrity culture of the early 19th century. Many of the qualities
to which Romantic ideology assigned a high value—inspiration,
spontaneity, orality, sensibility, and emotional expressiveness—seemed to
be manifested in the performances of improvising poets. For early-19th-
century audiences, the improviser appeared to embody inspiration, and in
their accounts of improvvisatori and improvvisatrici high-Romantic writers
suggest that these performances allow the listener to witness first-hand the
operations of poetic genius.
Yet improvising performers were controversial figures whose aesthetic
value and social relevance became the subject of intense reflection. The
foreign and even bizarre conventions of poetic improvisation—the
hackneyed topics often requested by audience members, for instance, along
with other constraints such as required meters and rhyme words—challenge
the terms of Romantic genius as often as they fulfill them. The
improvvisatore’s public composition of poetry in dialogue with an audience
fits uneasily with English and German Romantic notions of solitary genius
in communion with nature. “Grand thoughts,” writes Wordsworth, “as they
are most naturally and most fitly conceived in solitude, so can they not be
brought forth in the midst of plaudits, without some violation of their
sanctity”—and even if poetry arises from the “spontaneous overflow of
powerful feelings,” he insists that poems of any value can only be produced
when the poet has “thought long and deeply.”2 Despite the impressive talent
displayed by many improvvisatori, the persistent tension between their
theatricality and artificiality and the originality and authenticity valued by
Romantic aesthetics gives rise to an international discourse about the
conditions conducive to the composition of poetry.
At first, the Romantic discourse about poetic improvisation shows a
strong orientation toward national differences: poets and critics attempt to
determine why improvised poetry has such a long tradition in
Mediterranean countries yet seems strange, unknown, or impossible
elsewhere. From the mid-18th century onward, French, English, and
German writers regularly remark that it is much easier to improvise verses
in Italian because of the phonology and structure of the language, its high
number of rhyme words, and its melodic accentuation. They note that the
musical accompaniment used by most improvvisatori, along with well-
established rhyme schemes and rhythmic meters such as ottava rima, acts
as a mnemonic and compositional aid. It is frequently observed that the
sociable context, especially the interaction with a responsive audience, has
a positive effect on the creative process. Many improvvisatori report that
applause and other forms of immediate positive feedback heighten their
creative impulses beyond what they thought they were capable of. Many
commentators also note that the stress and anxiety produced by the presence
of an audience—although potentially harmful to the physical well-being of
performers—seem to have a positive impact on their mental powers.3
More critically, virtuoso feats of extemporization were sometimes
ascribed to the improvvisatore’s ability to make rapid new combinations of
preexisting elements, in contrast to the original and inspired act of creation
that Romantic-era audiences expect to witness. The travel writer Louis
Simond, for instance, reflects on the physical and psychological conditions
involved in improvisation after witnessing performances by the
improvvisatore Tommaso Sgricci, who was celebrated during the post-
Waterloo era for his improvisation of entire multi-act dramas. Simond
compares Sgricci’s ability to compose spontaneously a two-and-a-half-hour
tragedy to various other processes that involve memory and combinatorics,
some of them exceptional and some routine. These include the ability to
play multiple chess matches simultaneously, or the kind of visual memory
and rapid recall that allows one to instantly locate any book in one’s large
library, or even the ability to make new combinations of words in everyday
speech.4 To the extent that Romantic-era commentators reflect on the
cognitive processes involved in poetic improvisation, their explanations
tend to demystify and even disparage the art form by describing it as, at
best, a heightened application of ordinary mental processes or, at worst, a
trick—a clever re-arrangement of preexisting elements that substitutes for
genuine creation. Conversely, when Sgricci himself is asked how he
produces his improvisations, he gives notably laconic responses that serve
to enhance the mystique: “Such and such ideas suggest themselves,” or
“they are involuntary,” is all he can say.5
Overall, Romantic-era writers reflected less on the cognitive processes
involved in improvisation than on sociological aspects and on what would
now be called the “media question.” Writers and journalists discussed the
different attributes of male and female improvisers, theorized about why
improvisation appeared to be at home in Mediterranean countries
(especially Italy) but foreign to the rest of Europe, and wondered whether
the improvvisatore could provide a positive model for public speakers and
political leaders or whether, on the contrary, the spontaneous improvisation
of new verses and even of different personae to suit every occasion
constituted a threat to the stability of social roles. Interwoven with these
socio-political questions is the improvvisatore’s idiosyncratic status within a
rapidly changing media environment. With few exceptions, poetic
improvisation on the Romantic stage, in salons, or in more casual venues
such as the marketplace, was an oral phenomenon. Yet this mode of oral
poetry was thoroughly embedded in a culture of print, from the often
clichéd literary topics that were usually assigned to improvisers to the
widespread practice of recording extemporized poetry in shorthand and
publishing it after the performance to the extensive promotion and reception
of improvvisatori and improvvisatrici in print media. Like the bards, ballad-
singers, and minstrels who proliferate in Romantic literature, the Romantic-
era improviser is in this sense a conscious anachronism. Oral poetry carries
connotations of authenticity: historically, it harks back to an age when
poetry seemed a more natural expression of feeling; experientially, it
appears to give the audience immediate access to the workings of creative
genius. As the Romantic-period critic Carl Ludwig Fernow put it in his
influential treatise Über die Improvisatoren (On Improvisers), the
experience of improvisation is one “where the poet, in the moment of
creative enthusiasm, pours his song directly into the listener’s soul.”6 Even
the ephemerality of oral poetry would seem to work to the improviser’s
advantage insofar as it shifts attention away from the literary quality of the
verses and onto the momentary spectacle of their production. Yet instead of
highlighting orality, Romantic improvvisatori and their audiences tend to be
hyperconscious of their situation in the midst of print culture. The frequent
dissemination of improvised poems and dramas after the performance by
way of reviews and transcriptions makes their reception a matter of reading
and writing as much as an aural and visual experience.
Throughout the period 1750–1850, these and other literary-critical,
sociological, and medial reflections cluster around a recurring and revealing
trope: the comparison of modern improvvisatori and improvvisatrici to oral
poets of classical antiquity, particularly to Homer. The significance of what
one modern critic has called “the rise and fall of the improvvisatore”7 in
European cultural history can thus be explored by reconstructing the
decades-long discourse around the question “are improvvisatori the modern
descendants of Homer?” and its inevitable converse: “was Homer an
improvvisatore?” In addressing these questions, 18th- and 19th-century
writers seek to locate poetic improvisation within—or else to displace it
from—a tradition reaching back to the very foundations of European
culture. At the same time, they struggle to come to terms with the
anomalous status of improvised oral poetry within a rapidly changing media
environment in which improvisational performance is only one of many
cultural phenomena competing for aesthetic valorization.
The recurring appeal to a Homeric paradigm takes several crisscrossing
directions. For improvisers themselves and for their admiring listeners,
identifying improvvisatori as the modern incarnations of Homer is a way of
investing the art-form with an impressive history and a classical pedigree.
Conversely, for 18th- and 19th-century philologists such as Robert Wood
and Friedrich August Wolf, who are pursuing revisionary approaches to the
study of Homer, the performances of improvvisatori offer a living example
of the mode of composition that ancient oral poets might have practiced.
More generally, the comparison with Homer provides a way of reflecting on
processes of oral and written composition, transmission, and reception at a
time when socio-cultural changes brought these questions to the fore. The
popularity of improvvisatori and improvvisatrici coincided with the rapid
expansion of the newspaper and periodical industry and with a burgeoning
urban culture that featured new visual media (panoramas, dioramas, scale
models) and hybrid, often semi-improvisational types of performance
(melodrama, vaudeville, public lectures, live exhibits). Even after poetic
improvisers declined in prestige and popularity in mid-19th-century Europe,
the associations that had been forged between their abilities and classical
traditions of oratory provided a route by which improvisation could migrate
from the theater into print media and professional contexts.
In the 18th century, when the first accounts of improvvisatori were
framed for English readers by classically educated Grand Tourists who
visited Italy, Greek and Latin poetry served as a touchstone for coming to
terms with a distinctly foreign poetics. Indeed, the Italian word
improvvisatore first gets imported into English in the context of classical
philology. In Joseph Warton’s 1753 edition of The Works of Virgil, Joseph
Spence, professor of poetry at Oxford and erstwhile tourist in Italy,
contributes a note explicating Virgil’s seventh eclogue by reference to the
contemporary improvisers he encountered in Florence. Virgil’s
extemporizing shepherd-poets are, Spence writes,
very like the Improvisatori at present in Italy; who flourish now perhaps more than any other
poets among them, particularly in Tuscany. They are surprisingly ready in their answers
(respondere parati) and go on octave for octave, or speech for speech. … There were
Improvisatori of the kind of old[.]‌8

During the century that followed, northern European travellers who

witnessed performances by Italian improvisers continued to place this
foreign performance genre into a tradition by relating it to classical bucolic
poetry, the oratory of ancient Rome, or Homeric epic. A number of
authoritative commonplaces in classical literature helped locate
improvisation at the very origins of the Western poetic tradition. Besides
Plato’s Ion with its depiction of the divinely inspired rhapsode, Aristotle’s
Poetics identifies improvisation as the origin of both tragedy and comedy.
Following their natural instincts for rhythm and mimesis, Aristotle writes,
people “gradually progressed and brought poetry into being from
improvisations.”9 Even in the highly evolved form that it took during the
Romantic period, poetic improvisation maintained obvious affiliations with
the literature of classical antiquity. Greek and Roman myth and history
were among the most common topics offered at improvisational
performances, and numerous eyewitness accounts of improvvisatori and
improvvisatrici extol the classical erudition that performers are able to
weave into their spontaneous verses.
When poetic improvisation first began to impinge on literary circles in
northern Europe it seemed to offer a more natural poetics that transcended
rigid 18th-century canons, and comparisons with primitive rhapsodes were
quickly brought in to support these claims. The Parisian Journal Étranger
began in the 1750s to extol Italian improvvisatori as “an unusual species of
poets, who derive everything from nature and owe nothing to study.”10 But
the journal’s most extended engagement with poetic improvisation is
interestingly triggered by the German poet Anna Louisa Karsch, whom it
baptizes with the epithet “this celebrated improvisatrice of the North.”11
The Silesian peasant Karsch became a cause célèbre in the literary circles
of 18th-century Berlin, when critics championed her as an example of
expressive natural genius in contrast to rule-bound academic verse.
Karsch’s striking ability to extemporize verses leads admirers to liken her to
Italian improvvisatrici. François Arnaud, editor of the Journal Étranger,
draws an important three-way connection among Karsch, Italian
improvisers, and ancient rhapsodes when he prints French translations of
some of Karsch’s impromptu odes and prefaces these translations with
enthusiastic articles on Karsch. Thanks to her “sensitive” heart and her
“ardent and impetuous” imagination, she embodies the furor poeticus
described by Plato and Aristotle, which links her with the enthusiastic poets
of ancient Greece, as well as with the improvvisatori of modern Italy.12
The conjunction among Karsch, the oral poetry of ancient Greece, and
the figure of the improvvisatrice is carried forward in further analyses of
poetic improvisation on the part of the editors of the Journal Étranger. Both
Arnaud and his co-editor, Jean Baptiste Antoine Suard, went on to publish
separate essays entitled “Des improvisateurs” (On improvisers), which
appear to be the first publications on this topic outside of Italy. Arnaud’s
“Des improvisateurs” remains primarily devoted to publicizing Karsch, but
his classicist background prompts him to set her and Italian improvvisatori
in the context of a continuous tradition of extempore poetry that he traces
back to ancient Greece. “The verses that all ages have admired and will
admire,” writes Arnaud, “Homer gave birth to them extemporaneously,
without trouble, without effort, as a spring spills forth its waters.”13 Arnaud
may be the first 18th-century writer to identify the ancient Greek poets,
including Homer, as “improvisateurs.” Promoting a fresh, ardent,
spontaneous poetics in the midst of 18th-century literary-critical debates,
Arnaud testifies to the appeal of the improvvisatrice as a figure who has the
potential to recover a natural poetic voice.
Suard, Arnaud’s younger, more prominent, and more controversial
collaborator, penned a “Des improvisateurs” article of his own (Suard,
1806). It also covers the ground from Plato and Aristotle to Karsch, whom
he identifies as the only “improvisateur” to appear outside of Italy in
modern times. Suard’s article represents the beginning of the sociological
study of poetic improvisation in northern Europe, which would achieve its
most fully developed form in Fernow’s nearly contemporary German
treatise Über die Improvisatoren. An unavoidable point of reference for
later 19th-century writings on improvisation because of its detailed analysis
of the history and popularity of the art-form, Fernow’s lengthy essay
characterizes the improvvisatore as both a Romantic genius and a modern
incarnation of Homer. On the one hand, Fernow describes performances of
improvised poetry in terms of a Romantic ideology of creative genius that
highlights inspiration, immediacy, and intensity. On the other hand, he
documents the long history of poetic improvisation in Western culture and
identifies the Italian improvvisatore as a modern-day “wandering Homer.”14
The classical philologist and archaeologist Karl August Böttiger, editor
of the influential literary journal Der neue Teutsche Merkur (The New
German Mercury) that first published Über die Improvisatoren, praises
Fernow’s observations on the relationship between modern-day Italian
performers and ancient Greek rhapsodes and urges other scholars to expand
the historical and ethnological study of poetic improvisation. In an
enthusiastic postscript to Fernow’s essay in the Merkur of October 1801,
Böttiger writes:
Improvising, in general, still merits a deep and penetrating historical investigation that combines
knowledge of the ancient world intimately with psychology … since the debate over the schools
of singers and rhapsodes, which is so important for criticism of the oldest Hebraic and Greek
inscriptions and has recently attracted such lively attention, is most particularly connected with
it. I would propose, for the purpose, Plato’s Ion; the four kinds of enthusiasm described there are
far from being well enough distinguished and examined.15

Böttiger’s call for a perspicacious study of improvisation—which he

describes as a surprisingly modern interdisciplinary amalgam of philology,
psychology, ethnology, and cultural studies—is both triggered by, and
centered on, the Italian improvvisatore, whom he considers the outstanding
representative of this art-form. “The Italian improvisers,” Böttiger
concludes, “always remain the most excellent.”16
While Böttiger, like Arnaud and Suard before him, believes that modern
poetic improvisation can best be appreciated by locating it in the tradition
of ancient Greek rhapsodes, 18th- and 19th-century classical philologists
find—conversely—that modern improvvisatori might offer the key to a
better understanding of Homer. In the 1760s, the antiquarian Robert Wood
struck a new chord by comparing Homer’s style to “the spirited theatrical
action” of the extemporizing “Italian and Eastern poets” he had encountered
on his extensive travels in the Mediterranean.17 With this revisionary,
performance-oriented perspective on ancient epic, Wood’s Essay on the
Original Genius and Writings of Homer became one of the texts that
founded a new approach to the study of Homer as a rhapsode. A few
decades later Friedrich August Wolf, the single most influential classicist of
the period, laid the groundwork for 20th-century Homeric scholarship when
he argued in his Prolegomena ad Homerum (Prolegomena to Homer) that
the text of Greek epic remained unfixed for centuries, varying according to
the time and place of performance, as well as the talents of each individual
rhapsode who performed it. Wolf backs up his claims about the oral,
performance-oriented composition of the Iliad and the Odyssey by pointing
to living poets “who compose extempore, who are called improvvisatori in
Italian.”18 Modern improvisers provided Wolf and his fellow scholars with
a living demonstration of what would otherwise remain only conjecture:
that it is entirely possible to compose dozens or hundreds of verses on a
given subject without premeditation. Comparisons with improvvisatori
became steadily more common in classicist scholarship during the early and
mid-19th century, being applied to Homer himself as well as to the
rhapsodes depicted within the Homeric epics. Reading the episode in book
eight of the Odyssey, where the singer Demodokos performs a song on a
topic requested by Odysseus, the German classicist A.H.L. Heeren notes
that ancient bards behaved “entirely in the manner of modern improvisers”
and concludes that it is very likely that Greek epic poetry originated in
improvisation.19
One of the most in-depth analyses of Homeric epic as improvised poetry
is to be found in the influential Remarks on Antiquities, Arts, and Letters
during an Excursion in Italy, in the Years 1802 and 1803 by the London
schoolmaster Joseph Forsyth. While travelling in Italy and listening to the
foremost female improviser of the day, Fortunata Fantastici, Forsyth is
struck by the similarities between La Fantastici’s oral improvisations and
Homeric epic. He identifies in both of them “the same openness of style and
simplicity of construction, the same digressions, rests, repetitions,
anomalies.”20 While the comparison elevates the art of the improvvisatrice,
it also leads Forsyth to analyze Homeric poetry exactly as if Homer were a
modern improviser, even critiquing him for the same limitations as “other
improvvisatori.” He enumerates the features of diction, syntax, and
structure that distinguish the compositions of Homer and modern
improvisers from written poetry:
Homer seems to have kept a stock of hemistichs, which recur incessantly at the close of verses
…; expletive epithets … which appear in so many, and so opposite meanings that they cease to
have any meaning at all; expletive phrases which he applies indiscriminately …; set forms
which introduce his speeches … or else begin them … and thus leave him time to collect
thoughts for the speech itself. … Such was Homer and such is the Italian.21

The ellipses mark spots where Forsyth cites copious examples of Greek
epithets and phrases; in other words, he is pursuing a full-fledged
philological commentary on the Homeric text, analyzing it according to the
techniques used by improvvisatori and improvvisatrici. With these
observations, Forsyth comes to the brink of 20th-century theories of oral
poetry, including the oral-formulaic theory of epic advanced by Milman
Parry and Albert Lord and more recent global perspectives on oral poetry
by Ruth Finnegan and J. Miles Foley. Like these later scholars, Forsyth
identifies the features of orally composed poetry as additive or paratactic
style; repetition and redundancy; the use of inherited diction, epithets,
phrasing, images, or commonplaces; deictic references within the poetry to
the situation and occasion in which it is being performed; and a regular
rhythm, often reinforced by musical accompaniment.
The question “was Homer an improvvisatore?” was not only a question
about poetic technique, however, but also about the social and political
impact of improvisational performance. What is at stake is whether the
traditional role of the Homeric rhapsode in drawing a community together
at public festivals and reaffirming its values in a moment of shared
enthusiasm can be recovered in a modern context. Some Romantic-era
writers find in a tradition of spontaneous poetic utterance reaching from
Homer to the improvvisatore the promise of a powerful, socially relevant
poetic voice. Others, however, worry that while the charismatic appeal of
the improvising poet and the compelling excitement of the moment of
performance are undeniable, in the 19th-century context this power is more
likely to be exercised for revolutionary purposes than to promote social
cohesion. These theorists consider it time to draw distinctions: denying the
modern improviser the authenticity and authority of the ancient rhapsode,
they argue that the improvvisatore, if not merely a dilettante, is a potential
demagogue.
The most extensive 19th-century treatise on the subject of poetic
improvisation in ancient times weighs in on the side of the improviser as
social leader. In “De l’improvisation poetique chez les anciens, et
particulièrement chez les Grecs et les Romains” (On poetic improvisation
among the ancients, and particularly among the Greeks and the Romans),
French archaeologist Desiré Raoul-Rochette sets out to compare the poets
of antiquity with modern improvisers ranging from the real-life Francesco
Gianni to Madame de Staël’s fictional Corinne. Raoul-Rochette surveys the
practice of spontaneous poetry among ancient peoples from the Celts to the
Arabs before coming to focus on the importance of public improvisation
among the ancient Greeks and affirming the probability that Homer was a
“poëte improvisateur.”22 In affiliating Romantic improvvisatori with the
authoritative, celebratory poetry of ancient rhapsodes, Raoul-Rochette
draws a crucial distinction between inspiration and improvisation.
Inspiration is a private, subjective, modern phenomenon that takes place “in
the shade of the woods, or the silence of the closet”23—a model of poetic
creation for which Wordsworth’s Prelude and Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan”
have since become familiar Romantic examples. By contrast, the
improvisation practiced by ancient Greek poets at public festivals is a mode
of creativity that “delights in a great number of witnesses, in the same way
that a soldier is animated at the sight of his standards.”24 Citing a plethora
of classical sources, Raoul-Rochette seeks to prove that ancient poets were
the recipients of an instantaneous rush of enthusiasm that allowed them to
extemporize law codes in the form of poetry and that gave them moral and
legislative authority within their community. His history of improvisation
leads him to conclude that “poets, in ancient Greek times, were regarded as
the legislators of nations, as the preceptors of the human race.”25 Raoul-
Rochette’s article thus elaborates a full-scale history of Western poetry that
places Romantic improvvisatori and improvvisatrici in a continuous line of
descent from the charismatic social leaders of classical times. It is an image
strikingly different from the solitary, alienated, or ironic figure of the poet
more commonly associated with Romantic ideology. Whether or not P. B.
Shelley read Raoul-Rochette’s treatise, which appeared in French in the
Classical Journal of London in 1817—and, given Shelley’s interest in the
history of poetry, in classical literature, and in improvisation, it is not
unlikely that he did—it resonates with his strikingly similar formulation in
A Defence of Poetry, written four years later. The conviction that, in
Shelley’s famous words, “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the
World”26 was not only in the air; it was also allied to the discourse of
improvisation.
To other Romantic theorists, however, the differences between modern
improvvisatori and ancient oral bards were more striking than the
similarities. August Wilhelm Schlegel and Friedrich Schlegel both use the
derogatory image of improvvisatori as tightrope walkers (Seiltänzer) to
critique the modern practice of poetic improvisation and underscore its
artificiality.27 For the Schlegel brothers, the comparison between the
productions of improvvisatori and the naturally extemporized poetry of the
ancient Greeks only exposes the stylized and inauthentic quality of modern
improvisers. By the 1820s and 1830s, when performances by Italian
improvisers and their imitators elsewhere in Europe were at their height and
comparisons of improvvisatori to Homeric rhapsodes had become
commonplace, it seemed to some philologists even more urgent to undercut
the assumed classical pedigree of the modern improviser. Writing in 1820,
F. G. Welcker repudiates the comparison between improvvisatori and
Homeric rhapsodes, claiming—with rather endearing scholarly hyperbole—
that there is hardly a greater misconception to be found in all of literary
history.28 Welcker devotes a lengthy essay to clearing up confusion caused
by other philologists’ indiscriminate use of the term Improvisator. Like
Friedrich Schlegel, he distinguishes between the natural improvisation
found in the ancient Greek world, as in other cultures where poetry is still in
its infancy, and the artificial improvisation practised in modern Italy, which
is a phenomenon found only in late stages of cultural development. Rather
than inspiration, modern improvisers manifest (only) quickness of intellect,
extraordinary powers of memory, and enforced enthusiasm or estro. While
he restricts the term improviser to a notably narrow range of meaning
compared with the expansive significance that Raoul-Rochette gives it in
his contemporaneous treatise, Welcker accurately reflects the degree to
which poetic improvisation in the 19th century had become a
professionalized and theatricalized genre.
A late contribution to the “was Homer an improvvisatore?” debate shows
that improvisational performance was increasingly being thought about in
the context of public speaking and socio-political responsibility. In his 1833
book on Homeric rhapsodes, the classicist Johann Kreuser denounces by
name the best-known improvvisatori of his day, as he argues that
improvisation is merely a mechanical ability that produces poor poetry. He
seeks to demonstrate that the pre-literate Homer cannot be considered an
improvvisatore because improvisation actually arises only in literate
cultures once they have developed a sufficiently stable language and an
ample fund of poetic expressions. To that end, Kreuser produces a scornful
but highly perceptive description of extempore poetry. “What is the art of
improvisation?” he asks rhetorically, and answers in part:
It is the ever-ready skill with words, within and beyond bounds, always more or less suited to
the given occasion, always appealing to the masses … important in decisive moments of life and
for public constitutions, but for art in the real sense—always useless. … But when does one
attain this ability to improvise, when aptitude is otherwise present? Only then, when the
evolution of language has reached a stable form; then a common stock of language is available
to the poet and orator.29

While denying the improvvisatore’s affiliation with Homer on the basis of

the crucial distinction between oral and literate modes of composition, and
while denigrating the aesthetic qualities of improvised poetry, Kreuser
recognizes the political force of extemporized utterance. His
acknowledgment that the ability to improvise can sway the masses and
prove decisive in public debate reflects a growing mid-19th-century
tendency to harness the power of poetic improvisation to public rhetoric—
to the oratory of the courtroom, the pulpit, and the professorial chair.
The same socio-political orientation becomes evident in early Victorian
reflections on the improvising poet. Particularly revealing is a documentary
article entitled “Improvvisatori” that appeared in 1839 in the Penny
Magazine, published by the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge,
one of the first and most important mass-circulation periodicals aimed at a
working-class readership. Seeking to give readers a picture of poetic
improvisation in Italy and comparable practices in other countries, the
journalist emphasizes that improvisers can arise from any social class and
that their appeal crosses class boundaries. While far from being social
levelers, these performers provide Italian peasants and workers with an
amusement that is not only “harmless and happy,” but also instructive and
elevating. The “improvvisator” is a “link of communication between the
lofty and the lowly mind,” one who charms the common people in a way
that, the writer implies, English poets would do well to imitate.30 An
engraving published with the article, based on a painting by the Swiss artist
Louis-Léopold Robert, reinforces the message (Figure 13.1).

FIGURE 13.1 Front page of The Penny Magazine, No. 452 (20 April 1839)
Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library (classmark
L900.b.69).
 The image depicts a Neapolitan improviser with a mandolin whose rural
“stage,” a rock by the seashore, forms a harmonious meeting place for an
interested audience of peasants coming in from the fields. The
improvvisatore’s ability to promote social harmony and improve the lot of
the laboring classes, as described in the article and depicted in the
engraving, is presumably to be repeated in the Penny Magazine’s effect on
its audience, the working-class readers who were expected to purchase the
paper with a penny from their Saturday wages. This figurative repetition of
the improvvisatore’s role on the part of the periodical writer is one more
instance of how the popular reception as well as the reflective evaluation of
improvised poetry takes place at the heart of print culture.
The question of whether and how poetic improvisation in the 18th and
19th centuries fits into a tradition that locates its source in Homer was,
therefore, a question about what constitutes authenticity and naturalness in
poetry. Even more compelling, it became a question about the authority of
poetic utterance and the socio-political function of poets. Conversely, the
improvvisatore phenomenon coincided with and even contributed to a
revision in the study of Homeric epic during the late 18th and early 19th
centuries as philologists began to emphasize the oral, performative, and
improvisational nature of Homer’s verse. Last but not least, the question
“are improvvisatori the descendents of Homer?” helps bring some aspects
of the relationship between print culture and orality into sharper focus. It
underscores the peculiar status of the Romantic improviser as a practitioner
of oral poetry within a culture whose perspectives and practices are
thoroughly shaped by reading and writing. While the most conspicuous
feature that Italian improvisation has in common with ancient Greek epic is
oral performance, and while the oral nature of improvisation is its major
difference from the mainstream poetics of Romantic Europe, the
improvvisatore’s art is nevertheless entirely the product of a literate society,
and its reception occurs within the paradigms of print culture. For Walter
Ong, in fact, the Romantic period is precisely the time when “oral habits of
thought and expression” that had persisted since early Greek times were
“effectively obliterated in English” in favor of the “close, mostly
unconscious, alliance of the Romantic Movement with technology.”31
Ong’s view of the historical relationship among orality, literacy, and
technology might suggest that the Romantic-era fascination with
improvvisatori and improvvisatrici was largely due to nostalgia for the
perceived authenticity of a lost pre-literate society. But that is only part of
the story, for increasing technologization also led to some innovative
alliances between oral performance and print publication in the 19th
century. Inventors of new shorthand systems seek to advertise their
inventions by touting their ability to transcribe verses as quickly as they are
being improvised. For example, the poetry composed by virtuoso German
improviser Maximilian Langenschwarz during a performance in Munich on
July 19, 1830, appeared days later as a pamphlet that advertised on its title
page “stenographically recorded and edited by F. X. Gabelsberger”;32 the
royal secretary Gabelsberger proudly explains in a preface how the
stenographic system he has invented has allowed him to preserve
Langenschwarz’s improvisations. No matter what the recording technology,
the persistent impulse of improvvisatori and improvvisatrici to publish their
extempore compositions mirrors the audience’s expectation that written
poetry is the standard that all poetic expression must meet.
When performances by poetic improvisers reach their height in 1820s
and 1830s Europe, the rapid expansion of print media and the increasing
influence of the professional classes give a new turn to discourses about
improvisation, orality, and authority. This is manifested in efforts to channel
improvisational performance toward social responsibility by teaching the
art of improvisation to professional men such as lawyers, politicians,
professors, or clergy. Arguing that the new social order of 19th-century
Germany has a particular need for effective public speakers,
Langenschwarz authored a manual on how to improvise, entitled Die
Arithmetik der Sprache, oder der Redner durch sich selbst (The arithmetic
of language, or the orator through himself). Based on his personal
experience performing extemporized poetry in Germany and abroad,
Langenschwarz seeks to teach a form of philosophical rhetoric that will
help readers discover their inner selves and develop their abilities for public
service by learning to order their thoughts and express them spontaneously
with the help of rhetoric and imagination. The purpose of Langenschwarz’s
book, which is ambitiously dedicated “to humanity,” is
the establishment of a rhetorical system, through the precise following of which it would
gradually be possible for even the most unpractised speaker to become master of his feelings
and ideas, completely and to such a degree that, undeterred by anything going on around him,
and at any given time, he would be capable of expressing what has awakened inside him clearly
and in an ordered and coherent manner.33
Langenschwarz’s system represents a re-assimilation of improvisation from
stage performance into rhetoric. In that sense, it recalls the tradition of
classical oratory, but now there is a crucial, post-Romantic addition:
improvised utterance is also meant to lead to self-knowledge, self-
expression, and self-fulfillment. Several other mid-19th-century “how-to-
improvise” textbooks in German, French, and Spanish also tried to harness
improvisational ability in a systematic way for politics and the professions.
As indicated by their authors—celebrity improvisers such as
Langenschwarz or the self-styled “first German improviser” Oskar Ludwig
Bernhard Wolff (1850)—as well as by subtitles, epigraphs, and direct
allusions to famous improvvisatori and improvvisatrici, these elocutionary
manuals seek to systematize theatrical improvisation into techniques that
can be used to train professional speakers.
As oral improvisation makes its way from the salon and the theater into
parliament and the courtroom, it simultaneously recognizes its affinity with
new print media. Much of the commentary on and analysis of poetic
improvisation cited in this essay first appeared in literary-cultural
magazines, and many more examples from these sources could be adduced.
During the early 19th century, periodical publications avidly review the
performances of improvvisatori and improvvisatrici; they also offer
documentary articles on the history of improvisation, reviews of books
about improvisation, advertisements of upcoming performances, and
transcriptions of poetry that has been improvised in performance. All this
attention seems to indicate a convergence between improvisational
performance and the era’s burgeoning periodical culture. Much in the way
that improvisation offers an application for new shorthand systems,
newspapers and magazines recognize a role for themselves in giving greater
permanence and wider distribution to ephemeral cultural events, of which
improvisational performances are perhaps the foremost example.
Journalism, moreover, has much in common with poetic improvisation
when it comes to the rapidity of production and the responsive interaction
with an audience. Writers and editors of literary magazines share with
extemporizing poets a need to perform in the face of temporal constraint (or
to write to deadline) and an orientation toward the demands of readers or
consumers. Finally, the performances of improvvisatori map onto periodical
articles and magazines insofar as both media share a self-consciousness
about their own status as consumable, ephemeral, popular forms, in contrast
to high or serious literature. These parallels suggest that the popularity of
improvising poets in early-19th-century Europe may correspond to a
general improvisational disposition within print and performance culture
during this age of rapid evolution in media and genres. Improvisation could
well stand as a paradigm for the cultural changes that take place as late-
Romantic and post-Romantic performance genres and print media adopt a
more rapid and reactive attitude toward current events and a closer
engagement with audiences, readerships, and mass markets.

NOTES
1. See Angela Esterhammer, “Improvisational Modes,” in The Encyclopedia of Romantic
Literature, ed. Frederick Burwick (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 652–660; and Edgar
Landgraf, Improvisation as Art: Conceptual Challenges, Historical Perspectives (New York:
Continuum, 2011), especially Chapter 3, “Staged Improvisation.”
2. William Wordsworth, The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, 3 vols., ed. W. J. B. Owen and
Jane Worthington Smyser (Oxford: Clarendon, 1974), 3:83 and 1:122–126.
3. For a fuller discussion of these debates, see Angela Esterhammer, Romanticism and
Improvisation, 1750–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
4. Louis Simond, Voyage en Italie et en Sicile, 2 vols. (Paris, 1828), 1:337–338. Unless otherwise
stated, all translations into English are by the author.
5. “Rosa Taddei and Tommaso Sgricci,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 25 (January–June
1829), 186.
6. Carl Ludwig Fernow, Über die Improvisatoren, in Römische Studien, 2 vols. (Zurich: Gessner,
1806), 2:304.
7. Caroline Gonda, “The Rise and Fall of the Improvisatore, 1753–1845,” Romanticism 6 (2000):
195–210.
8. Joseph Warton, ed., The Works of Virgil, in Latin and English, 4 vols. (London, 1753), 1:121.
9. Aristotle, Poetics, ed. and trans. Stephen Halliwell, in Aristotle XXIII, Loeb Classical Library
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 39.
10. “Poesie,” Journal Étranger, April 1757, 28.
11. “Ode à des alouettes prises dans des filets,” Journal Étranger, March 1762, 210.
12. “Ode à des alouettes,” 210.
13. François Arnaud, “Des improvisateurs,” in Oeuvres complettes de l’Abbé Arnaud, 3 vols. (Paris:
Léopold Collin, 1808), 2:100.
14. Fernow, Über die Improvisatoren, 323–324.
15. Karl August Böttiger, “Nachwort,” Der neue Teutsche Merkur, October 1801, 103.
16. Böttiger, “Nachwort,” 104.
17. Robert Wood, An Essay on the Original Genius and Writings of Homer (London, 1775), xi.
18. Friedrich August Wolf, Prolegomena to Homer (1795), trans. Anthony Grafton, Glenn W. Most,
and James E. G. Zetzel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 109.
19. A. H. L. Heeren, Ideen über die Politik, den Verkehr und den Handel der vornehmsten Völker
der alten Welt, part 3, Europäische Völker, new ed. (Vienna, 1817), 113–114.
20. Joseph Forsyth, Remarks on Antiquities, Arts, and Letters during an Excursion in Italy, in the
Years 1802 and 1803, 2nd ed. (London: Murray, 1816), 52–53.
21. Forsyth, Remarks on Antiquities, 53.
 22. Desiré Raoul-Rochette, “De l’improvisation poetique chez les anciens, et particulièrement chez
les Grecs et les Romains,” Classical Journal 16 (1817): 105.
23. Raoul-Rochette, “De l’improvisation poetique chez les anciens,” 96.
24. Raoul-Rochette, “De l’improvisation poetique chez les anciens,” 97.
25. Raoul-Rochette, “De l’improvisation poetique chez les anciens,” 99.
26. Percy Bysshe Shelley, Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers
(New York: Norton, 1977), 508.
27. August Wilhelm Schlegel, “Über den dramatischen Dialog,” in Kritische Schriften (Berlin:
Reimer, 1828), 377; Friedrich Schlegel, Geschichte der Poesie der Griechen und Römer (Berlin:
Ungar, 1798), 154.
28. Friedrich G. Welcker, “Aöden und Improvisatoren,” in Kleine Schriften zur Griechischen
Literaturgeschichte, Part 2 (Osnabrück: Zeller, 1973), lxxxvii.
29. Johann Kreuser, Homerische Rhapsoden oder Rederiker der Alten (Köln, 1833), 152.
30. “Improvvisatori,” The Penny Magazine of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge 452
(20 April 1839): 146–147.
31. Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London: Methuen, 1982),
26, 161.
32. Maximilian Langenschwarz, Erste Improvisation von Langenschwarz in München (19 July
1830) (Munich, 1830), title page.
33. Maximilian Langenschwarz, Die Arithmetik der Sprache, oder der Redner durch sich selbst:
Psychologisch-rhetorisches Lehrgebäude (Leipzig, 1834), x–xi.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Aristotle. Poetics, edited and translated by Stephen Halliwell. In Aristotle XXIII, 1–141. Loeb
Classical Library. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995.
Arnaud, François. “Des improvisateurs.” In Oeuvres complettes de l’Abbé Arnaud. 3 vols. 2: 96–107.
Paris: Léopold Collin, 1808.
Böttiger, Karl August. “Nachwort.” Der neue Teutsche Merkur, October 1801, 103–108.
Esterhammer, Angela. “Improvisational Modes.” In The Encyclopedia of Romantic Literature, edited
by Frederick Burwick, 652–660. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012.
Esterhammer, Angela. Romanticism and Improvisation, 1750–1850. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2008.
Fernow, Carl Ludwig. “Über die Improvisatoren.” In Römische Studien. 2 vols. 2: 298–416. Zurich:
Gessner, 1806.
Forsyth, Joseph. Remarks on Antiquities, Arts, and Letters during an Excursion in Italy, in the Years
1802 and 1803. 2nd ed. London: Murray, 1816.
Gonda, Caroline. “The Rise and Fall of the Improvisatore, 1753–1845.” Romanticism 6 (2000): 195–
210.
Heeren, A.H.L. Ideen über die Politik, den Verkehr und den Handel der vornehmsten Völker der
alten Welt. Part 3. Europäische Völker. New ed. Vienna, 1817.
“Improvvisatori.” The Penny Magazine of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge 452 (20
April 1839): 145–147.
Kreuser, Johann. Homerische Rhapsoden oder Rederiker der Alten. Köln, 1833.
Landgraf, Edgar. Improvisation as Art: Conceptual Challenges, Historical Perspectives. New York:
Continuum, 2011.
Langenschwarz, Maximilian. Die Arithmetik der Sprache, oder der Redner durch sich selbst:
Psychologisch-rhetorisches Lehrgebäude. Leipzig, 1834.
Langenschwarz, Maximilian. Erste Improvisation von Langenschwarz in München (19 July 1830).
Munich, 1830.
“Ode à des alouettes prises dans des filets.” Journal Étranger, March 1762, 210–213.
Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Methuen, 1982.
“Poesie.” Journal Étranger, April 1757, 28–31.
Raoul-Rochette, Desiré. “De l’improvisation poetique chez les anciens, et particulièrement chez les
Grecs et les Romains.” Classical Journal 15 (1817): 249–257; 16 (1817): 96–109, 357–371.
“Rosa Taddei and Tommaso Sgricci.” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 25 (January—June 1829):
184–186.
Schlegel, August Wilhelm. “Über den dramatischen Dialog.” In Kritische Schriften, 365–379. Berlin:
Reimer, 1828.
Schlegel, Friedrich. Geschichte der Poesie der Griechen und Römer. Berlin: Ungar, 1798.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe. Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, edited by Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B.
Powers. New York: Norton, 1977.
Simond, Louis. Voyage en Italie et en Sicile. Paris, 1828.
Suard, Jean Baptiste Antoine. “Des improvisateurs.” In Mélanges de littérature. 2nd rev. ed. 3:346–
378. Paris: Dentu, 1806.
Warton, Joseph, ed. The Works of Virgil, in Latin and English. 4 vols. London, 1753.
Welcker, Friedrich G. “Aöden und Improvisatoren.” In Kleine Schriften zur Griechischen
Literaturgeschichte. Part 2, lxxxvii–ci. Osnabrück: Zeller, 1973.
Wolf, Friedrich August. Prolegomena to Homer (1795), translated by Anthony Grafton, Glenn W.
Most, and James E. G. Zetzel. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985.
Wolff, O[skar] L[udwig] B[ernhard]. Lehr- und Handbuch der gerichtlichen Beredsamkeit. Jena:
Mauke, 1850.
Wood, Robert. An Essay on the Original Genius and Writings of Homer. London, 1775.
Wordsworth, William. The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, edited by W. J. B. Owen and Jane
Worthington Smyser. 3 vols. Oxford: Clarendon, 1974.
 CHAPTER 14
GERMAINE DE STAËL’S CORINNE, OR ITALY
AND THE EARLY USAGE OF IMPROVISATION
IN ENGLISH

ERIK SIMPSON

ALTHOUGH practices of spontaneous composition and performance have

existed for millennia, variants of the word improvisation entered English
usage only in the eighteenth century, and improvisation itself only in the
nineteenth.1 Today we use improvisation broadly. One can “improvise”
anything from a trumpet solo to a salad dressing. Literary critics have used
improvisation to describe medieval practices or, in the case of Stephen
Greenblatt’s analysis of “Improvisation and Power,” the villainy of
Shakespeare’s Iago in Othello. Greenblatt writes of improvisation as “the
ability to both capitalize on the unforeseen and transform given materials
into one’s own scenario.”2 P. N. Furbank and W. R. Owens, on the other
hand, use the term to describe the stylistic practices of Daniel Defoe:
“Defoe, we feel, when he embarked upon this sentence, had only a vague
idea how it would end. … [T]‌o write in this way, which we may call
“improvisatory,” is quite common, and—as in this case—does not at all
imply that the product will have less form and “architecture” than a more
premeditated style.”3
These formulations and many others demonstrate the utility of ahistorical
uses of improvisation in describing a continuity of spontaneous, anti-
teleological practices across historical periods. We can, however, gain other
kinds of insights by recontextualizing improvisation as readers and writers
in English first encountered it by that name. The Oxford English Dictionary
entries related to improvisation provide a starting point for analyzing the
emergence of its terminology: in English, references to improvisers begin to
appear in the middle to late eighteenth century, while noun forms such as
improvisation and verb forms such as improvise appear rarely, at most, until
the 1820s or later.4 For readers and speakers of English at the time, the
emergence of these terms represented a conceptual as well as a rhetorical
change. The language of improvisation did not enter English as a simple
synonym for earlier terminology, such as that of extempore composition.
Rather, it described a specific practice in Italy, one routinely characterized
as impossible to replicate in Britain.
Isaac D’Israeli set his 1803 poem The Carder and the Carrier in
“amorous Florence, that propitious clime / Where Love is constant tho’ he
talks in rhyme.”5 His footnote describes those lines as “[a]‌lluding to the
numerous Improvisatori, the Minstrels of modern Italy.”6 In 1803, when
D’Israeli needed to explain “improvisatori” for an English-speaking
audience, he chose the ready means of equating improvvisatori with the
already-famous figure of the minstrel.7 The footnote qualifies the analogy
in two ways: these minstrels are modern and Italian. As such,
improvvisatori stand in opposition to the self-consciously archaic
Britishness of their counterparts in, for instance, Walter Scott’s Minstrelsy
of the Scottish Border (1802–03), as well as other works that present
minstrelsy as a dead or dying practice. D’Israeli’s rhetoric epitomizes the
development of literary representations of improvvisatori and
improvvisatrici that would flourish in the first decades of the nineteenth
century, as an increasing number of writers used the modern Italian figures
to rewrite and revise the conventions of British minstrelsy.
As D’Israeli’s effort to explain the nature of “improvisatori” implies,
improvisation had a much shorter history in English than did minstrelsy.
Although the musical term ex improviso (or, later, ex improvviso) had
appeared occasionally, improvisation as such had no discernible English-
language existence before the middle of the eighteenth century. As Caroline
Gonda has noted, the OED places the first use of any English variant in
1765 with Smollett writing of an “improvisatore” as “one of the greatest
curiosities you meet with in Italy.”8 Smollett’s line captures the flavor of the
great majority of eighteenth-century references to improvvisatori. Such
references locate improvvisatori in Italy and present them as “curiosities,”
as things that must be explained to an English audience. And the performers
were generally represented as men. The OED citation of pre-1800 variants
of “improvisation,” in fact, links improvisation with male or ungendered
poets in Italy. The feminine improv(v)isatrice does not appear until 1804,
and then only parenthetically as a synonym for poetess.9
In 1807 came a turning point: the publication in French and translation
into English of Germaine de Staël’s novel Corinne, or Italy. Corinne
presented to British readers a familiar image of a minstrel, a poet
performing verses to the accompaniment of a harp or lyre. The plot of
Corinne relies on British representations of bards and minstrels and their
familiarity to a pan-European audience; the eponymous Corinne knows
“Ossian” and old Scottish songs, which she performs to win the reluctant
heart of Oswald, Lord Nelvil. However, Staël also departs dramatically
from the conventions of British minstrel writing. Her novel’s characters and
its critics both notice the oddity, to British eyes, of a performing woman.
That innovation has attracted much modern critical attention to what Ellen
Moers calls “the myth of Corinne” and “the fantasy of the performing
heroine.”10 But Corinne also differs from her British counterparts in her
compositional method: she improvises, while they recite pre-existing
works. As Gonda has noted, Corinne “did more than any other work to
popularize the idea of the improvisatore or improvisatrice,” and it did so in
a way that gave Britain its first major theory of improvisation.11 The novel
imagines improvisation not only as a compositional method but also as a
means of conceiving the histories of people and nations. As important as
Staël’s work was for women writers, it also initiated a related but broader
“myth of Corinne” in English-language writing, that of improvisation itself.
Corinne’s debut in England illustrates how new the idea of improvisation
remained to British readers in 1807. Writing in French and comfortable
with the Italian terms for improvisation, Staël deployed terminology that
seems to have baffled her 1807 translators. In the novel’s French, Corinne is
an “improvisatrice,” she possesses the “talent d’improviser,” and her poem
at the Roman Capitol is an “Improvisation.”12 These words and phrases,
seemingly simple to translate into their English equivalents, instead reveal
the lack of a modern vocabulary of improvisation. D. Lawler’s translation
describes “Corinna” (as both 1807 English versions call her) as an
“improvisatrix,” with a note promising to explain the term later.13 The sole
vaguely relevant note, however, suggests only further frustration. Lawler
later translates Corinne’s “talent d’improviser” as “her talent for extempore
poetry” with a footnote that reads, “[f]‌or that particular species of poetry
here alluded to, called, in Italian, Improvisatore, the translator can find no
English denomination.”14
The other 1807 translation, by two anonymous translators, lacks Lawler’s
boldness of coinage. There, Corinna is not an improvisatrix but simply a
“composer of extempore rhymes.”15 The translators explain the problem in
a note, using an odd variant of improvvisatore: “The improvvisitore, or art
of composing extempore verses, is an accomplishment peculiar to the
Italians.”16 Even a generation later, the 1833 Isabel Hill translation adopts a
more modern vocabulary for improvisation but only in some cases.
Corinne’s improvisation at the Roman Capitol is a “chant,” and although
her gift is called one of “improvisation,” it also takes other names more
typical in older works, such as “faculty of extemporising.”17 Corinne’s wide
circulation in both French and English thus created a paradoxical effect. Its
French text gave British readers a new theory of improvisation, with its
modern vocabulary largely visible in direct cognates. At the same time, its
English translations, especially those of 1807, reveal how little that same
British audience had previously understood of improvisation.
The lack of significant precedent in English allowed Corinne to establish
the popular connotations of Italian improvisation, which it presented as a
practice with artistic and political implications. Corinne’s improvisation at
the Capitol, much cited as an inspirational presentation of public female
genius, also demonstrated the ideological work improvisation could do.
Asked to improvise on the glory of Italy, Corinne slowly builds a
triumphant historical narrative, to the delight of her Italian audience. Then
Corinne sees Oswald and responds to his emotions: “Divining the thoughts
going through his mind, she was impelled to meet his need by talking of
happiness with less certainty.”18 Here the teleology of the poem breaks
down, and Corinne improvises, changing the direction of her narrative to
accommodate Oswald’s reaction, introducing a note of northern melancholy
and earning his applause.
By altering a narrative of Italy’s past, Corinne suggestively connects her
content and her process: as an improviser, she can rhetorically change the
course of history if necessary. At a time when revolution, reform, and
reaction dominated European thought, a new theory of historical flexibility
could reverberate far beyond the steps of the Capitol. (Staël herself had
earlier asked, “who can live, who can write at the present moment, without
feeling and reflecting upon the revolution of France?”)19 Corinne presents
improvisation as a political path between stasis and revolution, as an artistic
theory of post-Terror moderate liberalism. As a model of innovation
bounded by context, Staël’s improvisation carved out space between a
reactionary emphasis on the authority of previous generations on the one
hand, and Painite optimism that any generation could break free from that
legacy on the other.
Minstrel writers such as Thomas Percy and Walter Scott emphasized the
weight of British tradition, creating a retrospective national culture through
the collection and repetition of carefully shaped cultural materials. Staël’s
presentation of improvisation, on the contrary, emphasized the
contingencies of poetic creation, the way that the plan of a work—or a
nation—could change as it was created. But this freedom has limits. The
improviser’s skill consists of responding continuously to new events,
maintaining flexibility within the boundaries established by a developing
performance. Napoleonic autocracy lacks conversational interchange, an
aspect of improvisation Corinne emphasizes in describing rural improvisers
as using “language full of life that solitary thought could not have brought
into being.”20
The improviser cannot break cleanly with her own history, as
revolutionary nations strive to do. Corinne’s narrator emphasizes repeatedly
the constraints of personal and political history: “We are surrounded by the
remains of history, said Cicero. If he said so then, what do we say now!”21
Italy’s immediate past as the object of imperial ambitions, culminating in
Napoleon’s 1805 coronation as King of Italy, provided an apt example of a
nation’s inability to control its destiny.22 At the microcosmic level, the
novel enacts a similar tension, vacillating between constructions of
irresistible fate and other hints that undermine that inevitability. Corinne,
for instance, experiences her doomed relationship with Oswald as
foreshadowed by the heavens: “I have always known the sky to look
paternal or angry, and I tell you, Oswald, tonight it condemned our love.”23
If we need a further suggestion that these are star-crossed lovers, Corinne
provides it later by acting the part of Juliet while Oswald watches. But the
narrator also assumes paradoxically that “destiny” is not destined at all but
contingent: “Had she acted upon this impulse, what a different destiny she
and Oswald would have known!”24 A destiny Corinne can change is no
destiny at all, but the tension between fate and choice fits well into the
model of improvisation Staël establishes. The project of improvisation is to
acknowledge the constraints of history, constraints so strong they can feel
like inexorable fate, and to produce from that context a new direction.
These principles applied with special force to Italian politics at the time
of Corinne’s publication. France had recently taken control of most of Italy
when Staël wrote Corinne; mention of the French victory is pointedly
omitted from the novel, but readers could hardly fail to consider the novel’s
commentary on Italy’s history in light of the Napoleonic takeover. For Italy
as for Corinne, improvisation allows a measure of freedom and flexibility.
Corinne fully acknowledges that flexibility in the heroine’s ability to alter
her history of Italy to suit the needs of her audience. At the same time, the
novel moves beyond its predecessors, as well as many of its successors, by
recognizing the constraints of improvisation, the way that it constantly
creates new contexts that demand attention and limit the artist’s options.
Italy can alter itself but must still be Italy; Oswald can change but must
remain English; Corinne can love an Englishman but cannot finally leave
Italy; Napoleon (as Staël believed but left unstated in the novel) can
conquer and reform, but his empire cannot integrate the people he controls.
For Staël, these personal and political circumstances call for improvisation,
a concept she played a large role in defining for English-language readers,
as a mode of creative production in politics as well as art.

NOTES
1. This chapter draws heavily on a longer version of this argument in my Literary Minstrelsy,
1770–1830: Minstrels and Improvisers in British, Irish, and American Literature (Houndmills:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).
2. Stephen J. Greenblatt, “Improvisation and Power,” in Literature and Society: Selected Papers
from the English Institute, 1978, ed. Edward Said (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1980), 60.
3. P. N. Furbank and W. R. Owens, “Defoe and the ‘Improvisatory’ Sentence,” English Studies 67,
no. 2 (April 1986): 160.
4. The OED gives four verb forms, all first cited between 1825 and 1835: “improvise,”
“improvisate,” “improvisatorize,” and “improviso.” (“Improviso” predated this, but only as an
adjective, as in Warton’s usage.) At least some of these forms may have emerged before 1825,
but the OED illustrates at least that many forms were simultaneously current after 1825, and the
surviving modern verb “improvise” is the one that shows least evidence of Italian roots, having
 dropped both the -o of improviso and the -at* or -ator* of improvvisatore. “Improvisation,” the
noun, appeared relatively early (1786)—though I argue in this chapter that Corinne’s
translations suggest its use was limited—as did the adjective “improviso.” “Improvizer,”
referring to an improvisatory artist not necessarily Italian, first appeared in 1829 (Oxford
English Dictionary, 2nd ed., v. “improvise,” v. “improvisate,” v. “improvisatorize,” v. and adj.
“improviso,” n. “improvisation,” n. “improviser,” [respectively]
http://www.oed.com:80/Entry/92882, http://www.oed.com:80/Entry/92871,
http://www.oed.com:80/Entry/92878, http://www.oed.com:80/Entry/92887,
http://www.oed.com:80/Entry/92872, http://www.oed.com:80/Entry/92885, [accessed May 31,
2011]).
5. Isaac D’Israeli, “The Carder and the Carrier,” in Narrative Poems (London: John Murray, 1803),
1–2.
6. Ibid., 1.
7. Throughout, I will use the Romantic-era Italian spellings of improvvisator(e/i) and
improvvisatric(e/i). English-language writers of the time used many variations of those
spellings, often omitting the second “v” (as in many of my examples here) and sometimes using
“s” to form plurals.
8. Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., n. “improvisatore | improvvisatore,”
http://www.oed.com:80/Entry/92876 (accessed May 31, 2011). The reference occurs in Travels
through France and Italy, published in the following year. Caroline Gonda provides an excellent
analysis of OED citations for variants of improvisation and some early British commentary on
the subject (“The Rise and Fall of the Improvisatore, 1753–1845,” Romanticism 6, no. 2
[November 2000]: 195–210).
9. The first OED citation of improv(v)isatrice refers to “An honorary name given to the poetess
(improvisatrice) D. Maria Maddalena Morelli Fernandez,” from Matilda Betham’s Biographical
Dictionary of the Celebrated Women of Every Age and Country (Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd
ed., n. “improvisatrice | improvvisatrice,” http://www.oed.com:80/Entry/92880 [accessed May
31, 2011]). However, there was at least one eighteenth-century usage: Hester Lynch Piozzi uses
the term in her 1789 Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through
France, Italy, and Germany (London: A. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1789), I.321.
10. Ellen Moers, Literary Women (1967; repr., New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 174.
11. Gonda, “The Rise and Fall of the Improvisatore,” 198. When I refer to “improvisation” in
Romantic-era writing, I mean the practice of Italian improvvisatori and improvvisatrici signified
by Staël’s French word improvisation, which was generally not yet translatable into English, as I
will show.
12. Germaine de Staël, Corinne ou L’Italie (London: M. Peltier, 1807), I.50, I.65, and I.73.
13. Germaine de Staël, Corinna; or, Italy, trans. D. Lawler (London: Corri, 1807), I.54.
14. Staël, Corinne, trans. Lawler, I.69.
15. Germaine de Staël, Corinna; or, Italy, trans. anonymous (London: Samuel Tipper, 1807), I.51–2.
Lawler’s preface explains that the slightly earlier anonymous translation was produced by two
men (Staël, Corinne, trans. Lawler, iv).
16. Staël, Corinne, trans. anonymous, I.52. This first translation does try to work improvisation into
the text in one odd usage, as the Prince “expatiate[s]‌ on her [Corinna’s] talent for extempore
effusions, a talent which resembled, in nothing, the improvisatorè, as expressed in Italy” (Staël,
Corinne, trans. anonymous, I.67).
17. Germaine de Staël, Corinne; Or, Italy, trans. Isabel Hill (London: Richard Bentley, 1833), 25,
43, and 43. The poet Letitia Elizabeth Landon translated the verse in the Hill edition.
18. Germaine de Staël, Corinne, or Italy, ed. and trans. Avriel Goldberger (New Brunswick: Rutgers
University Press, 1977), 30.
 19. Germaine de Staël, A Treatise on the Influence of the Passions, upon the Happiness of
Individuals and of Nations … from the French of the Baroness Stael [sic] de Holstein (London:
George Cawthorn, 1798), 31.
20. Staël, Corinne, trans. Goldberger, 45.
21. Ibid., 85.
22. Staël’s political theory in Considérations sur les principaux événements de la Révolution
française illustrates her effort to find a theory of political moderation in more direct terms.
There she endorses “the principle of heredity in a monarchy” but emphasizes that legitimacy is
“absolutely inseparable from constitutional limitations” and asks, “what human being with
common sense can pretend that a change in customs and ideas should not result in a change in
political institutions?” (in Madame de Staël on Politics, Literature, and National Character,
trans. Monroe Berger [London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1964], 94–96).
23. Staël, Corinne, trans. Goldberger, 196.
24. Ibid., 355.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
D’Israeli, Isaac. “The Carder and the Carrier.” In Narrative Poems, 1–2. London: John Murray, 1803.
Furbank, P. N., and W. R. Owens. “Defoe and the ‘Improvisatory’ Sentence,” English Studies 67, no.
2 (April 1986): 157–166.
Gonda, Caroline. “The Rise and Fall of the Improvisatore, 1753–1845,” Romanticism 6, no. 2
(November 2000): 195–210.
Greenblatt, Stephen J. “Improvisation and Power.” In Literature and Society: Selected Papers from
the English Institute, 1978, edited by Edward Said, 57–99. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1980.
Moers, Ellen. Literary Women. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Originally published in
1967.
Piozzi, Hester Lynch. Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through
France, Italy, and Germany. London: A. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1789.
Simpson, Erik. Literary Minstrelsy, 1770–1830: Minstrels and Improvisers in British, Irish, and
American Literature. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
de Staël, Germaine. Corinna; or, Italy, translated by anonymous. London: Samuel Tipper, 1807.
de Staël, Germaine. Corinna; or, Italy, translated by D. Lawler. London: Corri, 1807.
de Staël, Germaine. Corinne ou L’Italie. London: M. Peltier, 1807.
de Staël, Germaine. Corinne; Or, Italy, translated by Isabel Hill (London: Richard Bentley, 1833).
de Staël, Germaine. Corinne, or Italy, edited and translated by Avriel Goldberger. New Brunswick:
Rutgers University Press, 1977.
de Staël, Germaine. Madame de Staël on Politics, Literature, and National Character, translated by
Monroe Berger. London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1964.
de Staël, Germaine. A Treatise on the Influence of the Passions, upon the Happiness of Individuals
and of Nations … from the French of the Baroness Stael [sic] de Holstein. London: George
Cawthorn, 1798.
 CHAPTER 15
IMPROVISATION, TIME, AND OPPORTUNITY
IN THE RHETORICAL TRADITION

GLYN P. NORTON

THE thought that there exist in the written text moments so evanescent, so
expressively charged that they call into question their own utterability
presented the Renaissance, in general, and Renaissance Italy and France, in
particular, with a challenge of disquieting proportions. For once one accepts
the premise that there are events so structurally discrete as to lie outside the
recoverable procedures of composition, one glimpses not only the opaque
limits of writing, but also the potential demolition of rhetoric’s grandly
confident superstructure. At the crux of such events is the ancient topic of
improvisation.
The challenge embedded in this topic formed a cluster of imponderables.
The Greek and Roman worlds, while shaping the architecture of these
imponderables, left to later generations the necessity of resuming the
dialogue, of assimilating a legacy harking back to the earliest traditions of
speech and writing. As a consequence, even in those intensely numinous
moments when the Renaissance text purports to craft itself out of
spontaneity (one thinks, for example, of Erasmus’s Praise of Folly and its
gestation on horseback), it seems frequently compelled to draw the reader
away from such immediacy by calling attention to its own location within
the linkage of historical tradition.
A striking example of this process occurs in Book I of Castiglione’s The
Courtier (1528). Having been selected by Signora Emilia to open the
inquiry into perfect courtiership, Count Ludovico da Canossa declares that
since the hour is late and not having given the matter any thought, he will
now be permitted to say without risk of censure all that floods into his
mouth (“[M]i sarà licito dir senza biasimo tutte le cose che prima mi
verranno alla bocca.”1 Well into his ostensibly impromptu remarks,
however, the Count suddenly refocuses the issue. He recalls having read
that certain of the most outstanding ancient orators did their best to make
everyone believe they were ignorant of literature. To accomplish this, they
made their speeches appear as though they had been composed very simply
and according to the promptings of nature and truth rather than toil and art;
for if the people had been aware of their skills, they would have been
worried about being fooled (Castiglione 1981, 60).
Apart from the telling suggestion that impromptu or improvised speech
may not always be what it seems, Castiglione appears to be reminding us
here that the Count’s off-the-cuff performance is steeped in an ancient
rhetorical tradition. A practice fully suited to the specificity of the moment
—a postprandial dialogue generated spontaneously in an unfolding present
—is actually rooted in a forensic past. The layers of that past, left vague in
the above text, were given a more solid frame of reference earlier on by
Erasmus in the De copia (1512), where extemporaneity and copious
discourse are seen to be closely aligned.2 Early in his work, Erasmus traces
his topic to a long literary tradition, winding back through Quintilian to the
early Sophists.3 In other words, a topic deeply relevant to the way
Renaissance man revitalizes his discourse traces its ancestry to two
chronologically separate moments in the classical past. In the one, Sophist
and Hellenic, the emphasis was oral and, as Erasmus correctly points out,
left few written traces; in the other, rhetorical and Roman, speech was
reformulated in a structured (and extant) program of writing and
composition.
What Castiglione’s text demonstrates so convincingly is that it is difficult
to raise the issue of improvisation and of speech emitted on the spur of the
moment (“sùbito uscita”) without becoming entangled in the wider
problematics of speech and writing. More remarkable, however, in the case
of Castiglione’s work, is the way Count Ludovico’s exploratory
preliminaries in Book I will find themselves caught up in the actual
performance of improvisation in the concluding speech on divine love by
Pietro Bembo in Book IV. Here the rhetorical performance marks its own
mortality (the ultimate collapse of the speech), conterminous with the
dissolution of the speaker’s articulating self. Utterance signals its own end,
leaving the audience with a sense of the ravishing disjuncture of the speaker
with himself (“astratto e fuor di sé,” 452). Bembo’s off-the-cuff rapture is,
for the philosopher Kenneth Burke, the paradigm of “pure persuasion,” a
concept with latent ties to improvisation and its Latin root, improvisus
(“unexpected”, “sudden”).4 The experience, as we shall see, has everything
to do with notions of time, ripened and creative, and with opportunity,
challenging and peremptory.
It is apparent early on in sophistic thought that the harmonizing of spoken
and written discourse, developed by Castiglione in the context of
improvisation, had nothing in common with the formal solemnity of the
Urbino court. In early Greek declamation, the emphasis, it appears, was on
informality.5 Actual declamations were frequently preceded by the dialexis,
an informal preliminary talk, conversational in tone, delivered sitting down,
and probably quiet in manner.6 Following the dialexis, the sophist, in
keeping with a tradition going back to Gorgias, would then invite the
audience to suggest topics around which he would craft, on the spot, his
main speech. The improvised results, as D. A. Russell points out, were
probably not always up to the mark. Yet, ancient accounts also tell of
speakers fabled for their fluency and their ability to improvise. One such
case is the Syrian, Isaeus, to whom Juvenal attributes lively intelligence,
shameless audacity, and prompt, torrential speech.7 But it is the rather more
expansive account of Quintilian’s pupil, Pliny, in a letter to Nepos, which
serves not only to capture the physical act of sophist improvisation, but
more significantly for the present essay, to articulate that event in a Latin
discourse which the Renaissance would adopt wholesale, using it to explore
the contours of extemporaneity.
Pliny’s description of Isaeus presents, it would appear, the very ritual of a
sophist performance.8 Nothing, we are told, can approach Isaeus’s facility
(facultas), abundance (copia), and richness (ubertas). He speaks always
extemporaneously, but as though having written it down long beforehand
(“dicit semper ex tempore, sed tanquam diu scripserit”). His preliminary
speeches (viz. dialexis) are careful, unadorned, charming, occasionally
dignified and elevated. He calls for several topics of discussion, asking his
audience to make the selection; he gets up, arranges his clothing, and
begins: “Immediately, all the resources of eloquence are in his grasp at the
same time, the subtleties of thought rush upon him [‘sensus reconditi
occursant’]. … How much reading, how much writing gleams forth from
his improvisations [‘in subitis’]. … His memory is incredible and he is able
to repeat what he has said extemporaneously [‘ex tempore’] without
altering a word. He attains so much hexis [ἕξις] through application
[‘studio’] and practice [‘exercitatione’].”9
When Nepos read this portrait, he undoubtedly must have formed in his
mind a rather vivid image of the legendary Isaeus. The emphasis on
simultaneity (statim, pariter), the force of thought unbridled, and the
radiance of language all combine to produce a quality which Pliny
deliberately calls by its Greek rather than Latin name: hexis [ἕξις]. The
entire phrase, “Ad tantam ‘hexin’ studio et exercitatione pervenit,” thus
depicts a cultural synthesis moving from the Latin values of studium and
exercitatio toward the ultimate dissolution of those values in Hellenic
dexterity (“hexin”). Viewed another way, one could say that Pliny’s account
of sophist performance superposes a restraining Latin cultural frame on the
mantic bursts of Hellenic fluency. What might otherwise seem like a
spontaneous stunt actually emerges as the byproduct of thought-directed
effort and concentration.
To understand how improvisation will affect modes of written
performance in later times it is useful to examine certain sophistic texts. In
his Peri sophiston, Alcidamas (contemporary of Plato and a student of the
ancient rhetorician, Gorgias) not only sustains explicitly the principles of
sophist performance just outlined, but also situates improvisation in a
philosophical code to be later recorded in Renaissance thought. In sections
27–28, the author takes an uncompromising stand against written speeches
in favor of what we have called their oral, improvised counterpart:
And to my way of looking at it written speeches do not deserve even to be called speeches, but
as it were forms [eidola], and figures [schemata] and imitations [mimemata] of speeches. … The
written speech undeviating from one ordered posture, when looked at in a book rouses
admiration, but since it is unmoved by opportunity [kairos], it affords no benefit to its
possession. … The speech spoken straight from the mind on the spur of the moment [parautika]
is living and has a soul and follows circumstances and is like real bodies, but the written one, in
nature like the image of a speech, is doomed to inanition [that is, it lacks energeias or the
capacity to act].10

So conceived, nothing can be more remote from the medium of writing than
oral speech. All the features of Alcidamas’s text that describe either tectonic
or iconic relationships (forms, figures, imitations, bronze statues, stone
images, ordered posture, and the like) align themselves squarely with the
written word. Oral speeches, on the other hand, throw up no replicable
surfaces, their authenticity determined largely by their immunity to
permanence and their crafting of another dynamic dimension (energeias).
Words emitted “straightaway” (parautika) from the mind are circumscribed
within a zone of being that is temporally compressed, shaped by the
circumstantial, the opportune (kairos). No such versatility prevails in
writing. Graven forms and features are rigidly broadcast to an audience
immobilized outside time, deprived of opportunity and unengaged with
circumstance.
For the sophist readers of Alcidamas, it would have been difficult to
dismiss as trivial the antinomies of this text. It is not simply that
extemporaneous speech harbors a reality superior to its written counterpart.
The special resonance of this text relates to the way Alcidamas tailors his
justification of improvisation to one of the great philosophical postulates of
ancient thought, the notion of kairos [opportune time]. The sophist’s
argument against written speeches was founded on the belief that kairos can
not be known by any act which attempts to stabilize it, to give it
permanence, because, by definition, it participates in the constant
eradication of that which has preceded it. And writing thrives on the hubris
of its own indelibility. If, therefore, perfect improvisation refers to an
utterance perfectly in harmony with these self-eradicating contexts, then
one can readily anticipate the urgency with which other traditions would try
to redraw the graph, allowing writing to mime its spontaneous prelapsarian
ancestry. Roman rhetoric would contribute radically to this reappraisal.
The rhetorical agenda for improvisation is made accessible to the
Renaissance through two principal Latin channels: the works of Cicero and
Quintilian. Of the two authors, Quintilian, as we shall see, takes a wider
view of the problem, promoting its status in a total plan of eloquence and
sorting through the richly complex environment from which it has been
synthesized. Cicero, on the other hand, fails to build the topic into the broad
superstructure of his rhetorical program. His approval is more restrained,
less concerned with the underlying torsion between premeditated discourse
and spontaneity or, for that matter, with the technical apparatus of
improvised speech. This leads to a series of statements which, taken
individually, address themselves to particular nuances of the topic while
doing little to advance its place and function in the rhetorical system.
Nonetheless, they are essential to a full understanding of the internal
dialogue that emerges between master and disciple.
 Where Cicero departs from his disciple Quintilian is in his restriction of
the phrase ex tempore to the circumstances in which eloquence occurs.
Never does he adopt this term as a descriptor of authentic speech or
eloquence. This is not yet the ex tempore dicendi facultas that will signal
the culminating sections of Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria. Cicero’s
concerns are not with extemporaneity as a mode of performance but as a
way of describing how rhetoricians tap into the resources of time: “There
are therefore things,” Cicero continues, “which one must judge according to
time [ex tempore] and intention [ex consilio], and not according to their
own nature: in all cases of this type, one must assess what time requires,
and what is appropriate to the persons; it is not the thing itself that must be
considered, but the motives, the performer, the time and the duration.”11
Significantly, when Cicero does address the rhetorical practice of
extemporaneity, he chooses not to extend the range of application of the
phrase ex tempore, referring instead to speech that is subita or fortuita. In
other words, it is the eruptive, random quality of the extemporal utterance
rather than its attachment to certain environmental conditions that defines
its relationship to eloquence. At De oratore: 149–153, Crassus, pressed for
his opinion of the categories of rhetorical training or exercitatio, criticizes
the use of oral exercises that serve only to whip up the “rate of utterance”
(linguae celeritas) and “flood of verbiage” (verborum frequentia). Among
the hierarchy of exercises, Crassus points out, none is more esteemed than
the practice of writing: “For if an extempore and casual speech [subita et
fortuita oratio] is easily beaten by one prepared and thought-out, this latter
in turn will assuredly be surpassed by what has been written with care and
diligence [assidua ac diligens scriptura].”12 Exercitatio is thus broken into
an ascending format, beginning at the lowest level with subita oratio and
advancing, through cogitatio, to preeminent scriptura.
Intimately entwined in this process is the ability of the mind to draw from
the store of commonplaces [the loci], which are the resources through
which writing bodies forth on the page. “The truth is,” Cicero continues,
“that all the commonplaces [loci] … appear [se ostendere] and rush forward
[occurrere] as we are searching out and surveying the matter with all our
natural acuteness: and all the thoughts and expressions that are the most
brilliant in their several kinds, must needs flow up in succession [subeant et
succedant] to the point of our pen.”13 In Cicero’s text, writing becomes the
controlling mechanism of spontaneity.
 Ultimately, it becomes apparent that Cicero is adducing two levels of
presence: writing as the sole authenticating structure of discourse, and
improvisation as a kind of simulacrum of the event, a trace image given off
by a higher medium of articulation. In another, perhaps more vital sense, we
are witnessing here the transcendent reply of the Ciceronian model to its
early Sophist predecessors. Cicero, it is clear, has inverted Alcidamas’s
refraction of utterance in such a way as to shift the onus of iconic inferiority
away from written speeches (conceived earlier on as eidola, schemata, and
mimemata) onto the hitherto “real” extemporal bodies of voice.
Improvisation has suffered a profound reversal of incarnation, its
transcription immobilized, as it were, by the living flesh of the text.
From the preceding discussion, it is safe to say that Cicero left his disciple,
Quintilian, a rather fragile peg on which to hang a comprehensive blueprint
for improvisation. The texts from the De oratore on subita oratio would
play simply no role in the allusive throw-backs contained in Book X: 7 of
the Institutio oratoria. In his authoritative commentary on Book X, William
Peterson examines the distinctive patterns of language separating Quintilian
from Cicero. Among the words “yet not to be found in the republican
period,” Peterson includes the modifier extemporalis, as in extemporalis
oratio for which Cicero would have written subita et fortuita oratio.14
Accordingly, Quintilian’s chapter on the topic not only bears the title “How
to acquire and maintain the extemporalis facilitas,” but also refers
repeatedly to the adjective and its corresponding verbal modifier, ex
tempore, as in ex tempore dicendi facultas. In other words, Quintilian would
appear to be subjecting the notion of improvisation to a semantic stress all
but lacking in Ciceronian language, where the adjectives subita and fortuita
were seen to promote factors of randomness with little or no regard to how
the improviser processes time. Extemporalis, on the other hand, points to a
conceptual reform in which time is of the essence. Through this crucial
lexical shift beyond the constraints of Ciceronian terminology, Quintilian
embarks on a new probe of his topic, one that interrogates the affected
rhetorical tastes of his day, of Silver Latinity and empire, in order to
reconnect him with the faded yet replenishable fluency of republic together
with the Hellenic past.15 He is about to attempt the systematic analysis of a
practice that, by the practitioner’s own enclosure within the event, rebuffs
any clarifying scheme or strategy. His decision to transform radically the
indentifying terminology along more temporal lines is only the most visible
step in this reappraisal.16
A more crucial interrogation of the Ciceronian model occurs in
Quintilian’s overall structural design. It is now writing, constrained within a
fixed spatial and temporal frame, that sets itself qualitatively apart from its
companions: “For we can write neither everywhere nor always whereas in
premeditation time [tempus] and place [locus] are abundantly available.”17
Quintilian is explicitly aware that principles of time (tempus) are, in part,
deeply rooted in the Greek notion of kairos.18 After all, kairos and its
derivatives already enjoy a position of prominence in Alcidamas’s text on
improvised speech, where they seem to describe an inspirational process
arising from unexpected crises [kairoi] and empowering “a mind truly
godlike.”19 Through its corresponding Latin forms, occasio, opportunitas,
and tempus, kairos plays a fundamental role in determining how
Quintilian’s orator exploits the extrinsic conditions of eloquence. As such, it
is a composite of two distinct Greek traditions, the one Aristotelian, the
other Longinian. The Aristotelian view, conferring on kairos an ethical
intensity, proposes that “the end of an action” is relative to its circumstances
(kairos).20 Unlike the Stoic commitment to fixed values, where the
emphasis is on behavior that stands fast and endures, Aristotelian kairos
subverts the morally absolute and substitutes, in its place, a situational
ethics motivated by assertions that temporize our exposure to things.21 It is
no overstatement to assert that kairos embraces the full gamut of these
attitudes and responses, leading Jean Cousin to infer, like Burke, the
investment of rhetorical motives in a shifting, transitory ethics with roots in
Aristotle.
Beyond these ethical nuances, however, there also exists for Quintilian a
dimension to kairos that seems to place improvisation within the same
ecstatic Longinian environment we have already glimpsed in Pietro
Bembo’s off-the-cuff meditation on divine love in The courtier. The ancient
merger of kairos with deus, of opportunity with divinity, highlighted in the
Institutio oratoria, will be an association no less compelling for
Renaissance writers like Erasmus.22 Thus, if early notions of improvisation,
as we have seen, tell us something essential about how eloquence processes
kairos, then it would seem highly likely that further refinements of the
topic, such as those in Quintilian, will construct a new linkage between the
extemporaneous, the kairotic, and the divine. In fact, hints at such linkage
have emerged in modern Quintilian scholarship. In broader terms, the
power of elation that seems woven into the fabric of Quintilian’s chapter on
improvisation would appear to have its roots in Platonic philosophy,
reminding us that Plato himself was fully cognizant of the practice of
autoschediazein (“to act or speak offhand”).23
The ability of the orator to utter what is temporally imminent (kairos)—
to improvise—is closely affiliated to another key Hellenic concept
developed in the chapter on extemporaneity: ἕξις [hexis]. Peterson
describes hexis as “the fixed tendency that results from repeated acts.”24 Its
placement in the opening sentences of Book X, where it is juxtaposed with
the Latin synonym firma facilitas (“assured facility”), mark it as a term that
is quite literally pivotal, falling as it does at the close of the preceding nine
chapters on a theory of eloquence and at the entry into performance and
fluency.
What is increasingly apparent is the fact that hexis shares certain crucial
interests in common with that other element in the extemporal process,
kairos. Just as kairos, in the Aristotelian tradition, defines how we respond
ethically to contingent events, so hexis retains a similar ethical value by
showing how what we do, rather than paste itself to a kind of tensile,
modular ethics recalling Stoic firmitas, is conditioned largely by our
behavioral suppleness. The “fixed tendency” emerging from “repeated acts”
is, thus, not about allegiance to ingrained habits, but rather about our
readiness to repudiate the habitual, to break with routine—to improvise.
Applied to the sphere of aesthetics, these concepts are no less powerful.
Where Longinian kairos describes the empathetic harmony between creator,
creation, and audience, brought into play by a certain cogitative and fictive
stimulus, hexis is no less a creature of our impressions. It determines how
art can seem not to be easy, how our rehearsal of the rhetorical script seems
to place us in a position to make each performance an expendable
commodity.
Hexis thus stands out amidst Quintilian’s abundant Greek terminology for
its unusually high lexical profile. Unlike the tendency of most Greek terms
in the Institutio oratoria to refer to specific technical effects and processes
subsumed within the encompassing Latin notion of cogitatio, hexis has no
such allegiance. The fact that it is not methodologically committed, rather
than mark it for debilitation, sets it apart from the apparatus of eloquence.
Having no fixed venue on the rhetorical map, it nonetheless retains its own
onomastic stability, singled out as “something which the Greeks call hexis”
[“quae apud Graecos ἕξις nominatur”].
No less than hexis, the ex tempore dicendi facultas has all the immediacy
of a process currently at work in the language, but at the same time, is tied
to an almost sacerdotal recognition that improvisers belong to a kind of
priesthood whose gifts are relayed down through time from generation to
generation. Alluding to such continuity, Quintilian points out that “many
have acquired the gift of improvisation not merely in prose, but in verse as
well, as, for example, Antipater of Sidon and Licinius Archias …, not to
mention the fact that there are many, even in our own day, who have done
this and are still doing it” (X, vii, 19). And as we have already seen in
Erasmus, Quintilian himself will eventually take his own place in this long
communion, the scripted Roman norm moving to impose itself on the
legendary hearsay of the Hellenic past.
With the adoption of hexis as a central Hellenic link to improvisation, the
lexical texture of the work changes, the orator defined by his relationship to
the contingent and the unforeseen. The stable, secure spaces of the domus
where meditation occurs are thrown back to reveal a navigator’s world of
“the most serious emergencies” (“praesentissima … pericula”) and of
storm-tossed ships risking destruction in the swell that pushes them into
and, perhaps, against the harbor (X, vii, 1). This place of peril is none other
than the setting of forensic oratory. In this tumultuous environment, the
orator faces alone “the countless sudden necessities” (“innumerabiles
subitae necessitates”), which act to doom all prospects of memory,
premeditation, and “silent, secluded study” (X, vii, 2).25 The sudden issues
(“casus”) refuse to be ignored, leaving the orator to tear up his written
arguments and, once more, play the navigator in a perilous sea: “For often
the expected arguments to which we have written a reply fail us and the
whole aspect of the case undergoes a sudden change; consequently the
variation to which cases are liable makes it as necessary for us to change
our methods as it is for a pilot to change his course before the oncoming
storm. Again, what use are much writing, assiduous reading and long years
of study, if the difficulty is to remain as great as it was in the beginning?”
(X, vii, 3–4). Easily the most ambiguous moment in Quintilian’s entire
work, his text on extemporaneity seems calculated to reflect concentric, yet
adversarial orbits, the one cognitive, quantifiable, motivated, and active, the
other kairotic, incalculable, unmotivated, and linked to a state of reactive
expectancy where imagination and inspiration seem most easily
accommodated.
The sense of cosmic rush and urgency that swirls around Quintilian’s text
on improvisation emerges from a host of issues that lead organically to his
culminating embrace of inspiration as the ne plus ultra of his chapter on
extemporaneity. A detailed accounting of these issues lies outside the
necessarily limited scope of this survey, but together they attest to the
overarching view that eloquence is a process of discovery and insight, a
maieutic ascent toward a charismatic threshold beyond which, like Bembo’s
speech, no more need be said. These issues are rooted in a shared sense of
movement and indwelling power: the velocity and rush of words (cursus
and velocitas dicendi), the nimbleness of mind (mobilitas animi), the flow
of language from its storehouse (copia), the process of discovery itself
(inventio), the recourse to uncanny dexterity (usus irrationalis and alogos
tribe), the capacity to visualize (phantasia), the elation of feeling (pectus),
and the convergence with the divine (spiritus). This cycle of passion-
generated discourse (alogon pathos) is close to the pulse of the quotidian, of
experimentation and empeiria, occurring within a set of encircling temporal
conditions or kairos. But to the extent that kairos may also take on the
attributes of a divinity, it is not surprising to see “feeling and inspiration”
promoted in Quintilian’s text as the sign that “some god had inspired the
speaker” (X, vii, 14).
Improvisers, for Quintilian, are thus endowed with qualities of insight
that turn them into processors of time—its agents—rather than hand-
wringing bystanders awaiting (and perhaps missing) the appropriate
opportunity. The later dialogue depicted in Renaissance emblem books
between Occasio and Metanoia (Opportunity and Regret) is already latently
present in Quintilian’s text. The power of discourse to enable us “to utter
the immediate” [“dum proxima dicimus,” X, vii, 8] locates improvisation at
a decisive moment in which the pectoral eye is synchronized with the
illuminated spirit.
Quintilian’s chapter on improvisation closing Book X is the most
comprehensive, richly allusive discussion of the topic in antiquity. With the
rediscovery of the Institutio oratoria by Poggio Bracciolini in the early 15th
century (St. Gall, 1416), Renaissance humanists could point to a text that,
while largely overshadowed by the legacy of Cicero, would end up more in
the mainstream of how writers and thinkers understood and championed the
mechanisms that inform the related topics of inspiration, improvisation,
time, and writing itself.26 For Erasmus and his contemporaries, there exists
something as generically distinct as a time-centered discourse, one in which
an utterance appears inspired and synchronized with the circumstances that
have brought it into being.
In a sense, the Renaissance fascination with the so-called ex tempore
dicendi facultas could not have taken place were it not for the subversion of
chronological time initiated early on by the same medieval culture
otherwise repudiated by Rabelais in his celebrated ban of chronometers
from the utopian enclosure of the Abbaye of Thélème at the end of
Gargantua (1534). The exclusion of chronos and the implied reinscription
of kairos in his monastic haven suggest that time, so conceived, is
meaningful only to the extent that we ourselves create and shape it.27 The
sense of crisis on which the Renaissance would found its own
distinctiveness as a period could be said to be anchored in the same
amoebic set of issues that propel Quintilian’s text into a new critical
dispensation having to do with the transfiguring potential of discourse in
ways that seem to transcend the technical aspirations of the first nine books.
This moment, emblematized in Rabelais’s text on Thélème, insofar as it
embraces the shared gift of communal insight, signals the power of time to
shape the ontology of this monastic space. Rabelais’s convent, in terms of
its behavioral code synchronized within a spatial design, is a dramatic echo
of the Aristotelian view of time discussed earlier in which the ends of
actions are conterminous with their circumstances [kairos].
Thélème, a name whose etymology (from Greek θέλημα) suggests the
hegemony of will, delineates a space from which clocks are banned.
Conventional time, Rabelais suggests, is the time of the chronometer,
“compassé, limité, et reiglé par heures.”28 In its place, he substitutes a new
dispensation calibrated instead to “les occasions et oportunitez” and to the
“dicté de bon sens et entendement.”29 Rabelais’s text contains a richly
allusive message. This message has to do with a new spatial and temporal
scheme in which chronicity finds itself displaced by a new set of terms, “les
occasions et oportunitez.” Through their Latin roots, occasio / opportunitas
these two synonyms share that common Greek ancestor, kairos, whose
meaning and typology extend throughout ancient mythography, philosophy,
and, above all, rhetoric. In the plural (kairoi), the word refers to moments of
crisis, critical times calling for decision and marking their discontinuity
with the past. Frequently, the term’s resonance relates to its pairing with a
foil, chronos, a relationship anchored in Greek mythology where chronos
(chronological time) and Kronos (the father of Zeus) often share conflated
attributes. In their typology of old age (the full beard and sickle-knife of
Father Time), they symbolize an older temporal order, distant yet
genetically related to Kairos, the youngest of Zeus’s sons.30 Ancient Greek
accounts of the celebrated statue of Kairos sculpted by Lysippus of Sicyon
emphasize the figure’s youthful agility and beauty: the winged feet on
rotating orb, forelock protruding from tonsured head, the razor clutched in
the right hand, the textured blush of skin, all combining to create a picture
of kinetic rush, of velocity too quick to arrest, seductive, yet lacerating in its
contact. In the most striking of these accounts, the Sophist Callistratus
extends the meaning of this symbolism to the achievement itself, the power
of art to recover presence, to seize an opportunity about to slip from the
sculptor’s grasp.31 In other words, a divinity, Kairos, whose being lies in its
capacity to evade projects of human control and design, has been stabilized
by art, that medium whose own transcendent purpose is to seize the
opportune moment when beauty shimmers in all its youthful éclat. And to
the extent that this moment triggers a decision to act—to capture beauty—
and all within the certainty of our impending separation from the moment,
kairos and krisis belong to identical orders of time. They are generated
within the human organism and take on the particular significance we
choose to confer on them.
Few periods of human thought have advertised their own significance
and criticality more eloquently than the Renaissance. Rabelais’s episode of
Thélème celebrates the ascendancy of Kairos and the repudiation of
Chronos in a world that was trying to place itself in a new set of time
relationships. As an episode, it is emblematic of this new sense of
timeliness that permits the humanist scholar to explain his own era through
discourse with a classical past while addressing, at the same time, an even
more transcendent process of fulfillment discovered by New Testament
scholarship.32 The assumption of theological and personal Christian
renewal as a central impulse in Reformation thought no doubt owes part of
its vitality to the role played by kairos in shaping temporal concepts in New
Testament Greek.33 Significantly, the Renaissance relinquished neither the
theological nor the secular tradition behind the notion of kairos because
both, in a sense, contribute to the myth of crisis the era was fashioning for
itself. Henri Estienne, for example, cites ancient and Christian authorities to
describe kairos as a Greek divinity as well as the moment through which
human discourse strives in prayer toward God.34 The commonalities present
in the Olympian and Christological settings of kairos may well relate to the
fact that both traditions are significantly icon- and discourse-centered. In
either case, a notion of time is shaped into human form, becoming
identifiable not only through a set of iconographic features, but also, even
more crucially, through its ability to engage in a process of statement about
itself. The emblem of a personified Kairos, lingering to interpret itself to the
watchful spectator, runs parallel to the New Testament Christ as the
embodiment of divine sermo constantly using language to reveal himself to
an expectant world.
The Renaissance understood clearly that discourse has the power to
synthesize these relationships. It was equally persuaded that there exists
something as generically distinct as a time-centered discourse, one in which
an utterance appears synchronized with the circumstances that have brought
it into being. In a sense, this renewed fascination with the so-called ex
tempore dicendi facultas or improvised speech could not have taken place
were it not for the subversion of chronology initiated early on by the same
Medieval culture framed by Rabelais in the tyranny of clocks. Time, so
conceived, is meaningful only to the extent that we ourselves create and
shape it. Kairos and krisis as structures of action, thought, and utterance
enlarge the individual’s capacity for self-awareness. They are forces with
which we are dramatically and ethically engaged, rather than conditions that
move against us peremptorily through the indeterminate course of events.
The fact that these issues are so deeply embedded in the act of
improvisation and in the later rediscovery of Quintilian would help the
Renaissance see discourse as a process that tells us as much about the
period’s own sense of criticality as it does about the tendency of aesthetic
norms to record instants of crisis. Humanism was thus responsible for
generating a language that would not only authenticate the cultural crisis at
hand, but also base that crisis in its own distinctiveness as a period.
Given the embodiment of myth in the deities of Kairos and Occasio, it is
natural that the issues so vital to how improvisation defines its relationship
to concepts of time begin to take on specific scenic and dramatic
configurations that reflect the engagement of these deities with human
events. Thus, the improvised moment becomes a moment that achieves both
iconic and dramatic force as the depiction of a rhetorical abstraction. These
developments are embedded within a fascinating transgendering of the
myth of time. While retaining most of the iconographic and behavioral
features of its Greek male predecessor, Kairos, Occasio comes to be known
by the company she keeps. An epigram by the Bordelaise poet, Ausonius,
writing in the 4th century CE, pairs Occasio with Metanoia, the companion
goddess of penitence and regret, “who exacts penalties for what is done and
what undone, to cause repentance.”35 But Metanoia, like Occasio, is also an
attribute of human discourse, numbering among the figures of thought and
listed by the Augustan rhetorician, Rutilius Lupus.36 For Quintilian,
metanoia, as the Latin equivalent paenitentia, referred to a process of
rhetorical self-correction, a ploy to convince the judge that the speaker’s
change of heart is evidence of his spontaneity and thus more likely to gain
support for his position.37 Thus, metanoia has a curious semantic double
edge, on the one hand evoking the anxiety of opportunity missed and
attendant regret, and on the other, the possibility that such regret take the
form of a spontaneous corrective shift in the text, a means of changing the
rhetorical course in midstream to catch that opportunity and thereby making
it seem improvised.
The point is that kairos or occasio, like crisis, is a component of our
responsive interaction with time rather than a force hurled against us by
some vaguely perceived cosmic tyranny. Few Renaissance writers
understood this distinction more thoroughly than Machiavelli, who gave
Occasion, along with Penitence, Youth, and Necessity, separate identities
among the refugees of Fortuna’s palace.38 The conflation of Occasio with
Fortuna often found in medieval texts is largely corrected when humanist
emblem scholarship begins to clarify the iconographic muddle surrounding
Occasion and Fortune. Accoutrements often attributed falsely to Fortune
appear correctly in Alciati’s emblem on Occasion and remain intact in the
major French editions of Jean Lefèvre, Bathélemy Aneau, and Claude
Mignault. These editions, represented in Figures 15.1–15.4, record this
consistency, depicting Occasion as Ausonius’s Latin goddess and linking
her to the standard hardware and features of the Greek god, Kairos: the
wheel, the razor, the tonsured head, winged feet, and protruding forelock.
Alciati authorizes this image in an adjoining interpretation based on the
Greek epigram of Posidippus in which the Poet interrogates the sculpture of
Kairos, asking the work of art to stop and explain the mystery of its own
composition. Explanatory notes by Aneau and Mignault each reduce the
scene to its component structures.39 From these summaries, one can derive
a common format with striking resemblance to the rhetorical issues
discussed above. Occasion thus operates in five modal patterns: (1) it is an
articulus (a single critical moment, a point of time), largely irrelevant to any
chronological series that precedes or follows it; (2) like rhetoric, it is a
kinetic force, dynamically engaged with a spectator (expedit); (3) through
the verb secare (to cut, to separate, to decide) embodied in Kairos’s razor, it
enacts the paradigm of crisis; (4) its forelock invites a responsive gesture
(arripere, to seize, to grasp); and (5) the dramatic context in which it occurs
makes it immune from any optative strategy by the spectator. Like
Quintilian’s improvisatory moment, one either catches or loses it, but does
not will it. In fact, all these points suggest that humanist writers are able not
only to sort out the iconographic relationship of Occasio to her Greek
ancestor, Kairos, but to restore the figure’s rich complexity as a projection
of man’s transitory ethics and aesthetics. If Machiavelli dramatized this
awareness in the temporizing world of his Prince, Erasmus records its
philological history in his learned adage, “Nosce tempus” (“Come to know
time”).40 It is no accident, one suspects, that Erasmus’s injunction and the
Poet’s cross-examination of Kairos in Posidippus’s epigram are based in
identical cognitive lessons. To seize Time by the forelock is to separate it
momentarily from its linear continuum and, in the significance of this
moment, to establish bonds of familiarity, acquaintanceship, and
discernment, to come to know it.
FIGURE 15.1 Andrea Alciati. Emblematum libellus. Paris, Wéchel, 1542. “In occasionem,” p. 48.
University of Glasgow Library, Department of Special Collections.
FIGURE 15.2 Andrea Alciati. Emblematum libri II, Lyons, Jean de Tournes and Guillaume Gazeau,
1556. “In occasionem,” p. 30.
University of Glasgow Library, Department of Special Collections.
FIGURE 15.3 Andrea Alciati. Emblemata: Cum commentariis, ed. Claude Mignault. Antwerp,
Plantin, 1577. “In Occasionem,” p. 415.
Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University.
FIGURE 15.4 Andrea Alciati. Toutes les emblemes. … Lyons, Roville, 1558. “Sur occasion,” p.
149.
University of Glasgow Library, Department of Special Collections.

Rooted in a moment of inner stress and crisis, this dramatic narrative of

Occasion is a direct consequence of the Renaissance emblematic tradition.
Ausonius’s prosopopoeia on Occasio and her penitential foil, Metanoia,
provide this tradition with the authority to incorporate both figures in the
emblematic design. In 1541, the Ferrarese court painter, Girolamo de Carpi,
depicted this duality in his painting of Opportunity and Regret, a scene of
shimmering immediacy and unarrested movement.41 In his adage, “Nosce
tempus,” Erasmus himself may have stimulated interest in Ausonius’s text
by citing the epigram in its entirety and calling attention to the addition of
Paenitentia.42 In his later commentary on Alciati, Claude Mignault would
acknowledge Erasmus’s crucial role, but not without first assigning the
rediscovery of Ausonius’s epigram to an even earlier humanist text,
Poliziano’s Miscellaneorum centuriae.43 And while, as a rule, Renaissance
emblem books continue to show Occasion alone in her marine landscape,
familiarity with the texts of Poliziano and Erasmus may well account for
instances of Occasion dramatically engaged with a partner (Paenitentia)
who has been left gesticulating in the wake of this human hydrofoil. Gille
Corrozet’s Hécatomgraphie (1540) contains the most graphic example of
this heightened dramatic complexity, with Penitence rigidly fixed in her
gestures of procrastination and despair (Figure 15.5). Beneath the emblem
is an explanatory quatrain that opens with an allusion to the cautionary
arripe occasionem and specifies penitence as the consequence of inaction.44
Thus, the tiny speck of frantic humanity all but eclipsed by a dominant
Occasion in the 1542 Wéchel edition of Alciati (Figure 15.1) is certainly a
vestige of Ausonius’s goddess, Metanoia, now fallen from partnership and
edging toward spatial and dramatic oblivion in the outer limits of the
picture. In 1588, Jean Jacques Boissard in his Emblemes latins (Figure
15.6) restores Paenitentia to her position of active but now more bellicose
partnership by depicting her as an old crone brandishing a whip as the
looming punishment in store for the figure on the right who has all but
missed his opportunity (one assumes, for Christian salvation).45
FIGURE 15.5 Gilles Corrozet. Hécatomgraphie. Paris, Denys Janot, 1540. “L’ymage d’occasion,”
sig. Miiv.
Houghton Library, Harvard University.
FIGURE 15.6 Jean Jacques Boissard. Emblematum liber, Emblemes latins. Metz, A. Faber, 1588.
Occasio, p. 61.
Houghton Library, Harvard University.

In later editions of Alciati (Figures 15.2–15.4), the figure is deleted

altogether but still remains conceptually viable, as Mignault’s commentary
suggests. With Joannes David’s Occasio arrepta, neglecta (1605), however,
theology draws on mythology and turns Ausonius’s two deities into
extensions of the Christian apocalypse. Secular penitence within the
framework of relativistic ethics gives way to a redemptive Metanoia that
makes contrition not a consequence of missed opportunity, but a strategic
shaping of the opportunity itself.46 Penitence becomes part of the corrective
posture through which the Christian meets his transcendent hour of crisis
and decision: the Last Judgment.
David synthesizes two vital strands in the Renaissance transmission of
Kairos and Occasio: the theological and the iconographic. Together, these
strands approach the topic largely as an ethical problem, a decision either to
act or to not act and suffer the consequences. Even improvisation can have a
penitential consequence. The idea that discourse reflects this same ethical
stress, however, can be traced to the humanist interest in Cicero’s De
inventione, one of the major source works on ancient rhetoric prior to the
rediscovery of Quintilian’s Institutio and of Cicero’s mature rhetorical
works early in the 15th century.47 Early on, the Byzantine teacher, George
of Trebizond, incorporates major segments of Cicero’s statement on
Occasion in the De inventione (I, 27, 40) into his chapter “On dialectical
places.”48 In addition, Trebizond goes out of his way to adapt Cicero’s
crucial distinction between tempus as chronometric space (years, months,
days) and occasio as opportune moment to a statement philosophical in tone
and largely indifferent to elocutionary practice.49 Cicero’s text eventually
becomes the principal supporting authority on the topic of Occasion and
finds its way into many of the major Renaissance treatises on dialectic and
rhetoric, including those of Agricola and Barthélemy Latomus. To these
early dialecticians, Occasion is assigned a rigidly permanent space in the
register of topics.
Dialectical texts were already reflecting this trend in subtle ways. A case
in point is the notion of “adjacency,” one of the “internal” places discussed
by Agricola. Like its Greek equivalent, parakeimenon (meaning “what is at
hand, present”), adjacentia encompasses a temporal and spatial
relationship, referring to presence both as time and as physical proximity.
Subsumed within the topic is the notion of habitus, in a sense the intrinsic
corollary of occasio and similarly adapted from the De inventione (I, xxv,
36). What is significant in this section of Agricola’s text, however, is the
fact that he glosses his remarks on habitus by referring to its Greek
equivalent, hexis, a term likely to spark instant humanist recognition from
its high profile in Quintilian’s Book X.50 And to the extent that hexis is a
quality deeply embedded in the tactics of speech and in the orator’s
response to new rhetorical opportunities, it calls attention to the more
dynamic, elocutionary appeal of Quintilian’s work. Indeed, the zeal with
which hexis must have been read by humanists as a property of discourse
spills over occasionally into outright conflation with the phonetically
similar lexis.51 Agricola, of course, does not commit this error, but by
juxtaposing habitus with hexis he draws explicit attention to the
Quintilianesque theme of facilitas together with its emphasis on
elocutionary timing and opportunity. As dialectical issues, occasio and
habitus remain isolated in their respective cubic spaces. Yet the topical
genera (tempus and adjacentia) that contain them embrace concepts of
space and time compatible not only with each other, but, more significantly,
with a crucial structural shift in Agricola’s own work.
This shift culminates in the highly rhetorical orientation of Book III (“De
effectibus”), where the memory diagrams of place-logic come to fuel the
dynamics of oral fluency, facilitas and copia—a process of disbursement, as
it were, from dialectic’s memory boxes.52 It is precisely at this juncture that
Agricola, like Quintilian before him, leads his reader beyond a purely
technical agenda toward the overriding themes of timeliness and dexterity.
The result, in the final pages, is an explicit homage to improvisation and to
the Quintilianesque notion of discourse as temporal performance.53
The switch to a more time-specific vocabulary in the Institutio oratoria
is, as we have seen, one of Quintilian’s most visible assertions of his
independence from Cicero. To be sure, humanist texts continue to anchor
their abstract understanding of Occasio in Cicero’s terse definition, but as
16th-century writers seek to reconcile dialectic with rhetoric, the bland
timelessness of the Ciceronian formula proves irrelevant to the atmosphere
of stress and urgency in which speech actually occurs. More than any other
ancient text, Quintilian’s work answers these concerns by seeing time as the
critical factor in discourse. The themes that percolate around Quintilian’s
analysis of extemporaneity in Book X—hexis, phantasia, velocitas, and
pectus—are thus virtually the same themes used by the disciples of
Agricola, Melanchthon, and Latomus to give focus to their discussions of
circumstantia in rhetoric.54 In the case of Melanchthon, Occasion and
Circumstance form the contextual enclosure through which Facility,
Quintilian’s Latin corollary of hexis, becomes operative.55 At the same
time, this linkage between the performative and the environmental extends
to other Quintilianesque concerns such as vividness, feeling, and, above all,
inspiration.56 A further consequence of these relationships is the
rediscovery of an obscure post-Augustan definition that connects occasio to
the notion of “supply” or “stock” and thus to the terms copia and facultas.57
The pluralities of opportunity on which the ethics of Rabelais’s Abbey of
Will was founded signaled both an end to the monastic chronometric pulse
and the open embrace of time in all its imagined unboundedness. As now
seems apparent, the year 1534, in which Gargantua first appeared in Lyon,
marks a point of convergence for many of the key issues under review in
the present essay. Fortuitously, it also marks the publication, likewise at
Lyon, of Nicolas Bérault’s Dialogue in which certain principles are
explained by which the faculty of improvisation can be acquired.58
However, any reader expecting a comprehensive handbook on the topic will
find these expectations largely unmet. Bérault’s dialogue, echoing the wide-
ranging postprandial discussion at the Urbino court, describes a dramatic
fiction in which two interlocutors—the Pedagogue (Leonicus) and his
disciple (Spudaeus)—conduct a free-wheeling review of the rhetorical
background (chiefly Cicero and Quintilian) from which improvisation has
emerged over time. But unlike the contained intramural space of the Urbino
court, Bérault’s dialogue unfolds in the open air during a journey through
Navarre and in an environment of seemingly random movement. This
dialogue on improvisation is invested in its own extramural circumstances,
the lush botanical setting of oak, plane, olive, and fig trees framing and
promoting the unimpeded energies of discussion and dialogue (sig. A6v).
Cited liberally throughout Bérault’s dialogue, Quintilian’s text on
improvisation is recalled, above all, for the high profile of its temporal
vocabulary and for the way extemporal eloquence draws on kinetic force.
Tellingly, Leonicus, the Pedagogue, elicits these same inflections when he
juxtaposes the phrase dicere ex tempore with the explanatory synonym
currere [“to run”] [sig. B1v]. To improvise is ultimately a process of
locomotion and mental velocity.
Any understanding of improvisation’s function in the Renaissance text
depends, as we have seen, on a full disclosure of theoretical patterns
worked out in the conceptual transition between early Greek sophistic and
Roman rhetoric. All these patterns ultimately converge in the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries not only in a flood of speculation engaging many of the
greatest minds of the age, but also in the scenic portrayals contained in
emblematic literature. With Nicolas Bérault’s Dialogue on improvisation,
these same patterns find their most (and indeed, only) systematic expression
in a formal dialogue on improvisation. The paired voices of ancient rhetoric
(Cicero, the Master and Quintilian, the disciple) take on a new immediacy
through their later fictional mouthpieces, Leonicus and Spudaeus. This
refraction of the distantly ancient within a coeval present helps to
underscore the fact that improvisation is conditioned not only by an
encompassing contemporaneity, but also, as Jean-François de Raymond
asserts in his compelling inquiry into the philosophy of improvisation, by
the prevailing cultural codes through which it reverberates.59 If humanist
culture rediscovers the luminosity of ancient concepts and codes in which
improvisation may be contemporized, it does so in the awareness that
improvisers are drawn into the elation of unfolding statement. They inhabit
that critical juncture that lingers always on the verge of its own
obsolescence and self-erasure.

NOTES
Research for this study was made possible through the generosity of a
fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
1. Baldassare Castiglione, Il libro del cortigiano, ed. Amedeo Quondam (Milan: Garzanti, 1981),
37–38. All further references will be to this edition with page numbers carried in the body of the
text.
2. See Terence Cave, The Cornucopian Text: Problems of Writing in the French Renaissance
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), 23n and 125.
3. Desiderius Erasmus, De copia, in Omnia Opera, vol. 1 (Basle: Froben, 1540), chapter 2, 2.
4. Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of
California Press, 1969), 221–233. For a discussion of Burke’s reading of Bembo’s speech and its
connection to improvisation see Glyn P. Norton, “Strategies of Fluency in the French
 Renaissance Text: Improvisation and the Art of Writing,” in “Rethinking the Languages of
Criticism,” special issue, The Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 15 (Spring 1985):
85–99.
5. D.A. Russell, Greek Declamation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 77. A full
summary of the act and context of sophist declamation is contained in Russell’s chapter,
“Performers and Occasions” (74–86).
6. Russell, Greek Declamation, 77.
7. “Ingenium uelox, audacia pudita, sermo promptus et Isaeo torrentior.” Juvenal, Satires, 3:24,
translated by G. G. Ramsay, Loeb Classical Library (London: Williams Heinemann, 1918).
8. Pliny, Letters, Book 2:3, 1–5.
9. Pliny, Letters, Book 2:3, 2–4.
10. The translation and Greek text are contained in Marjorie Josephine Milne’s A Study in
Alcidamas and his Relation to Contemporary Sophistic (Ph.D. dissertation, Bryn Mawr College,
1924), 10–11, 16–17.
11. Marcus Tullius Cicero, De inventione, trans. H. M. Hubbell, Loeb Classical Library, 2:176.
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1949).
12. Cicero, De oratore, trans. E. W. Sutton, Loeb Classical Library, 1:150 (London: William
Heinemann, 1967).
13. Cicero, De oratore, 1:151.
14. Quintilian, Institutionis oratoriae Liber X, ed. William Peterson, 2nd ed., xli–xlii. (1903; repr.
Oxford: Clarendon, 1962).
15. On Quintilian’s attitude to stylistic models and to the practices of his day, see Institutionis
oratoriae Liber X, ed. Peterson, xxxix–xli.
16. The ensuing discussion of Quintilian on improvisation is necessarily synoptic. For a fuller and
more detailed accounting see Glyn P. Norton, “Improvisation and Inspiration in Quintilian: the
Extemporalizing of Technique in the Institutio Oratoria,” in Inspiration and Technique: Ancient
to Modern Views On Beauty and Art, ed. John Roe and Michele Stanco, 83–104 (Oxford: Peter
Lang, 2007).
17. “Nam scribere non ubique nec simper possumus; cogitationi temporis ac loci plurimum est” [my
translation] (X, vi, 1). Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, trans. H. E. Butler, 4 vols. (London:
William Heinemann, 1968), X, vi, 1.
18. “Tempus iterum, quod καιρός appellant.” Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, III, vi, 26.
19. Alcidamas, Peri sophiston, in Milne, 16–17.
20. Aristotle, Nicomachean ethics, 3:1, ed. and trans. Robert C. Bartlett and Susan D. Collins.
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 1110 a 14.
21. On this aspect of Quintilian’s use of kairos, see Quintilian, Institution oratoire, ed. Jean Cousin,
tome VI, Livres X et XI, 152–153 (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1979). This terminology is
discussed in the context of Aristotelian thought by Burke in A Rhetoric of Motives, 49–65.
22. See the entry for καιρός in Henri Estienne, Thesaurus Graecae linguae, vol. IV (Paris: Firmin
Didot, 1841): “καιρός apud Graecos Deus est” (col. 818). The pertinent references are to
Pausanias: 5, 14, 9, and to Chrysostom for whom kairos is the time “through which we pray to
God” (“Quo tempore Deum oramus”) (col. 817). Estienne is calling attention to a relationship he
may well have picked up from Erasmus’s Adagiorum chiliades: “apud Graecos mas est hic dues
appellaturque καιρός.” See Adage #70 (“Nosce Tempus”), “Chiliades primae centuria septima,”
in Adagiorum opus Des. Erasmi Roterodami … (Basle: Froben, 1528), 252.
23. Gordon Teskey implicitly remakes Quintilian’s case for a transcendent improvisation subtending
all poiêsis by seeing in autoschediazein a process of “making” through which “complex systems
… change over time, compelling one to rely on instinctive impulse rather than on rules.” Teskey,
Allegory and Violence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), 164. On Quintilian and
Plato, see Norton, “Improvisation and Inspiration in Quintilian,” 83–85.
24. Quintilian, Institutionis oratoriae, ed. Peterson, 12n.
25. I follow here Michael Winterbottom’s reading in Problems in Quintilian (London: University of
London Institute of Classical Studies, 1970), 194.
26. On the early humanist legacy of Cicero and Quintilian, see John O. Ward, “Cicero and
Quintilian,” in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, vol. 3, The Renaissance, ed. Glyn
P. Norton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 77–87. See also the now classic
study of Terence Cave, The Cornucopian Text, esp. Part 1.
27. On relativistic views of Time, see Donald J. Wilcox, The Measure of Times Past: Pre-Newtonian
Chronologies and the Rhetoric of Time (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press,
1987), 119–129. See also chap. 6, “The Time of the Renaissance,” 153–186.
28. François Rabelais, Gargantua, in Œuvres complètes, ed. Jacques Boulenger, Bibliothèque de la
Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 1962), ch. 52, 148.
29. Rabelais, Gargantua, ch. 52, 148.
30. Admittedly, my summary is an oversimplification of a complex set of mythographic
relationships. These relationships are often subject to broader confusion, with Kairos sometimes
taking on traits of the ancestral pair, Chronos / Kronos. For the complete story, see Arthur
Bernard Cook, Zeus: A Study in Ancient Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1914, repr., New York: Bibilo & Tannen, 1964), 2:859–868.
31. Philostratus the Elder, Philostratus the Younger, Callistratus, trans. A. Fairbanks, Loeb Classical
Library (London: William Heinemann, 1931); also Descriptions, 6, “On the Statue of
Opportunity at Sicyon.” Posidippus’ early Greek epigram on kairos is a terse cross-examination
in which the statue explains its meaning to a curious poet. This conversational format is repeated
much later in a poem on Occasion by the Latin poet, Ausonius. Both texts would prove crucial
in Renaissance emblematic interest in kairos / occasion.
32. On Thélème as an episode rooted in platonizing Christianity, see M. A. Screech, Rabelais
(Ithaca and New York: Cornell University Press, 1979), 187–194.
33. See G. Delling on kairos in The Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, ed. Gerhard
Kittel, trans. and ed. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids, MI: W. B. Eeerdmans Publishing
Co., 1965; repr., 1967), 3:455–464.
34. See Delling, n28.
35. See Decimius Magnus Ausonius, “In simulacrum occasionis et penitentiae,” Epigram XXXIII,
trans. Hugh G. Evelyn-White, Loeb Classical Library (London: William Heinemann, 1919).
36. See Claudius Namatianus Rutilius, De figuris sententiarum et elocutionis, ed. Edward Brooks,
Jr. (Leiden: Brill, 1970), 20.
37. Institutio oratoria, IX, ii, 59–60. See also the Rhetorica ad Herennium on correctio, trans. Harry
Caplan, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1954), IV, xxvi, 36.
38. See Machiavelli’s poem “Di fortuna,” Tutte le opere di Niccolò Machiavelli, ed. Francesco Flora
and Carlo Cordie (Rome: Arnoldo Mondadori, 1949–1950), 2:710.
39. Andrea Alciati, Emblemes d’Alciat, en latin et francois vers pour vers (Paris: Hierosme de
Marnef et Guillaume Cavellat, 1574), 177.
40. See Erasmus, Adagiorum opus (Basle: Froben, 1528), Adage #70 in “Chiliades primae centuria
septima,” 252–253. Mignault’s commentary on Alciati’s emblem of Occasion is based, in part,
on this text. Andrea Alciati, edited by Claude Mignault, Omnia Andreae Alciati emblemata: cum
commentariis … per Claudium Minoem (Antwerp: Plantin, 1577), 416.
41. Da Carpi’s painting of Opportunity and Regret is housed at the Gemäldegalerie, Dresden.
42. Erasmus, Adagiorum opus, 253.
43. Angelo Poliziano, Miscellaneorum centuriae (Florence: Antonius Miscomius, 1489), fo hiiiv–
hivr; BN Rés. Z.509.
44. Gilles Corrozet, Hécatomgraphie, ed. Charles Oulmont (Paris: Champion, 1905), 166.
 45. Jean-Jacques Boissard, Emblemes latins […] avec l’interpretation Françoise (Metz: J. Aubry
and A. Faber, 1588), 60–61; Emblem 54 “A tergo calva est” [‘From behind she is bald’].
46. See, above all, Joannes David’s commentary on Figure 15.11, Occasio arrepta, neglecta, in
Occasio arrepta, neglecta, huius commoda: illius incommode (Antwerp: Plantin, 1605), 227–
245. Early in his work, he attributes his knowledge of Ausonius’s epigram to Poliziano (sig.
**2r-v).
47. The second work was Cicero’s Rhetorica ad Herennium.
48. George of Trebizond, Rhetoricorum libri quinque (Paris: I. Roigny, 1538), 286. John Monfasani
traces the notion of opportune moment in Trebizond’s work to the sophist notion of kairos.
George of Trebizond: A Biography and a Study of His Rhetoric and Logic (Leiden: Brill, 1976),
293.
49. Trebizond, Rhetoricorum, 286.
50. Cf. Rudolph Agricola, De inventione dialectica libri tres, ed. Phrissemius, Rodolphi Agricolae
Phrisij, de inventione dialectica libri tres, cum scholijs Ioannis Matthaei Phrissemij (Paris:
Simon Colin, 1527), Book I:11, 50 and 53; Barthélemy Latomus, Summa totius rationis
disserendi (Cologne: P. Quentell, 1527), fo C2v; and Latomus, Epitome commentariorum
Dialecticae inuentionis Rodolphi Agricolae (Paris: Gryphius, 1534), fo 13v.
51. See the following early commentaries on Quintilian: Rafaelle Regio, Ducento problemata in
totidem Quintiliani oratoriae institutionis deprauationes [s.l., 1492]. BN Rés. x.1064: “ita non
satis ad vim dicendi valent: nisi illis formae quaedam facilitas: quae apud graecos λἑξις
nominatur accesserit” (fo d6v); Joannes Sulpicius, Quintilianus de compositionis ratione, in Io.
Sulpitii Verulani: in commentariolum de compositione orationis (Rome: Eucharius Silber,
1487), B.N. Rés. x.1566: “Lexis et si dictionem et locutionem significat tamen Fabius libro
decimo sic habet. Formae quaedam facilitas quae apud Graecos lexis nominatur” (fo 13v).
52. For a full discussion of Agricola’s text, see Walter J. Ong, Ramus, Method, and the Decay of
Dialogue (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), ch. 5.
53. Agricola, De inventione dialectica libri tres (III:16).
54. Latomus deals with these topics in the sections, “De movendis affectibus,” and in a long
discussion of enargeia and copia, Summa totius rationis disserendi, fo D7v-D8r; E1v-E7r. See
Melanchthon’s detailed remarks in the De rhetorica (Paris: R. Estienne, 1527), BN, 8o X.11584
(3), especially the section titled “De circumstantiis” (fo 30v-33r).
55. “Facilitas in occasione, et circumstantiis causae maxime consistit.” Melanchthon, De rhetorica,
fo 36r.
56. Melanchthon, De rhetorica, fo 32r and fo 33r.
57. In fact, Etienne Dolet resurrects this image at the beginning of his entry “Occasio”:
“Occasionem pro copia, vel facultate aliquando poni certum est.” Commentariorum linguae
latinae tomus secundus (Lyon: Seb. Gryphius, 1536), col. 873.
58. Dialogus, quo rationes quaedam explicantur, quibus dicendi ex tempore facultas parari potest
… (Lyon: Seb. Gryphius, 1534), BN X. 20072. An important discussion of this work is
contained in Cave, The Cornucopian Text, 135–138.
59. Jean-François de Raymond, L’Improvisation: contribution à la philosophie de l’action (Paris: J.
Vrin, 1980), 176.

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 CHAPTER 16
IMPROVISATION, DEMOCRACY, AND
FEEDBACK

DANIEL BELGRAD

HISTORICALLY, in American culture, improvisation has been linked to a

problematic of freedom. For most of the twentieth century, the idea
prevailed that improvisation was a mode of creativity that freed the artist
from the weight of tradition and expectations, and that this spontaneity
made it possible to express truths that were typically distorted by those
forces. Perhaps particularly during the mid-twentieth century (from the
early 1940s until the mid-1970s), experimentalism in American arts and
letters emphasized the connections between improvisation, freedom, and
democracy.
According to this line of thinking, the successful improvisation combined
two factors: an unconstrained access to creative impulses; and the
integration of those impulses or “ideas” into the surrounding environment.
As psychologist and political theorist Paul Goodman wrote in the journal
Politics in 1945: “Freedom consists … in the continuing revolution of new
demands and ideas as they emerge from the depths, called forth by and
transforming the reality, including institutions. A free society is one that is
peacefully permeable by this revolution.”1
Some models of improvisation emphasized the first part of this formula
—the expression of impulses that welled up “from the depths”—following
templates laid down by Surrealism and Jungian psychology.2 This emphasis
tended to favor individualistic pursuits like painting and writing. The most
prominent examples include early abstract expressionist painting by Adolph
Gottlieb, Jackson Pollock, and William Baziotes, and the writing of Beat
poets like Jack Kerouac and Michael McClure.
 An alternative model, which came to predominate in the 1960s, placed
emphasis on the transformative group interaction. This model privileged
ensemble work, typically in performing arts like music and dance. In this
kind of work, the artists’ creative ideas were understood to emerge not
“from the depths” of the unconscious mind, but from the group dynamic.
The template for this style of improvisation was bebop jazz, the art of
which lay in picking up on the ideas of other musicians in an ensemble.3
Tenor saxophonist Archie Shepp once described the result as the expression
of a “communal intelligence.”4
Often, in this kind of improvisation, the group interaction is seen as a
microcosm of the ideal democracy. Creative authority, instead of being
concentrated in the person of a director or choreographer, is decentralized,
passing among the performers as they take initiative and relinquish it. Each
individual presence enlivens the others, creating a collective energy that in
turn fosters individual expression. This essay outlines the intellectual
history of this tradition and analyzes in detail two examples from the 1960s
and 1970s: the electronic music of Max Neuhaus and the dance form called
“contact improvisation.”

DECENTRALIZATION AND FEEDBACK

The intellectual environment in which the cultural politics of improvisation
took shape was defined by a historical conflict over two models of social
authority: namely, centralized and decentralized power structures. The
centralization of power promised a more efficient coordination of individual
energies in pursuit of the collective good.5 Whether understood as the
power of national governments over local, or as the dominance of large
corporations over small businesses, the practice of organizing large-scale
enterprises by concentrating power in hierarchical “central command”
structures grew increasingly prevalent in the course of the twentieth
century.
In America at midcentury, the centralization of power in Nazi Germany
and the Soviet Union was understood to be characteristic of their
undemocratic “totalitarianism.” Yet American society was at the same time
undergoing a parallel, though less visible and less overtly violent, process
of economic and political centralization. The Second World War in
particular brought legitimacy to the use of hierarchical bureaucratic
structures and the propagandistic control of information.6 At the beginning
of the war, under the auspices of a group called the Council for Democracy,
anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson spoke out against
such “social engineering” techniques, which they insisted were antithetical
to democratic values.7 “It is hardly an exaggeration to say that this war is
ideologically about just this,” Bateson wrote in 1942. “Could deliberate
social planning be reconciled with the democratic ideal?” Centralized social
planning, he asserted, was characteristic of undemocratic political systems
like fascism. By contrast, democracy had to be embraced as the means as
well as the ends of the American war effort. The paradoxical solution,
Bateson asserted, was that a democratic leadership must “discard purpose in
order to achieve our purpose.”8
In 1944, émigré Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek launched a similar
critique of centralized planning. In an influential book titled The Road to
Serfdom (an expanded version of his earlier essay “Freedom and the
Economic System”)9 Hayek faulted planners for prematurely and coercively
imposing a “unity of purpose” on society instead of allowing “the
interaction of individuals possessing different information and different
views, sometimes consistent and sometimes conflicting” to work out its
own direction.10Planning stifled social and intellectual growth by
attempting to substitute conscious decision-making for this necessary
interpersonal process:
The idea that the human mind ought “consciously” to control its own development confuses
individual reason, which alone can “consciously control” anything, with the interpersonal
process to which its growth is due. By attempting to control it, we are merely setting bounds to
its development.

Like Bateson, Hayek asked his readers to accept the paradox that social
purposes were best achieved not by a central authority but by “an attitude of
humility before this social process.”11
The decentralized social authority that was explored by improvisational
artists in the postwar period had more in common with the ideas of Gregory
Bateson than with those of Hayek, however. The difference between the
two thinkers is that Hayek emphasized individualism and the “invisible
hand” of classical liberal economics, whereas Bateson emphasized
networks of feedback loops constituting an “ecological” or “cybernetic”
system. In a cybernetic (also sometimes called “autopoietic”) system,
feedback governs the behavior of the system by stimulating or constraining
the activities of its various parts. A simple ecological system, for instance,
is represented by the interaction of two dependent populations—say, fox
and geese. Because fox eat geese, an increase in the goose population will
result in an increase of foxes; but more foxes will eventually mean fewer
geese, which in turn means fewer foxes, until fewer foxes means more
geese, and so on. Intricate networks of such feedback loops are now thought
to govern the “chaotic” functioning of many complex systems.
Among American artists of the 1940s and 1950s, whose intellectual
influences included Zen Buddhism, Gestalt therapy, and the physics of
Alfred North Whitehead, the image most often invoked to describe
ecological dynamics was that of the “energy field.”12 The “energy field”
model of experience rejected the liberal paradigm that defined the human
being as an individual mind confronting an objective universe. Instead, the
human “body-mind” was conceived of as one with nature, constituted
through a ceaseless, often unconscious interplay between self and
environment. As Paul Goodman, one of the founders of Gestalt therapy,
wrote in 1955: “Continuous or field theories and discrete or particle theories
seem to be contrasting attitudes … one relying on the flow of spontaneous
energy, the other on deliberate interventions and impositions.”13 Engaging
the energy field’s “flow of spontaneous energy” was the challenge of
improvisational art.
The emphasis on feedback as an organizing principle is what
distinguishes cybernetics from laissez-faire thinking.14 A key form of
feedback is what Bateson called “second-order” information. Bateson’s
wartime recommendations regarding how to encourage democratic values
focused on “second-order” purposefulness, or, as he termed it, “deutero-
learning.”15 Deutero-learning is the process of learning how to learn: the
habits of thought and perspective that are cultivated by the first-order
learning experience. For instance, if a person were to lecture before an
audience and pronounce that “democracy is good; fascism is bad,” the
message on the level of first-order learning would be pro-democratic. The
message on the level of second-order learning, however, would be the
opposite, because the epistemological dynamic (what the audience learns
about how to learn) is that of an authority figure telling others what to think.
For democracy to be operative in second-order learning, the “audience”
members would have to become active participants in a process of
examining the relative merits of democracy and its alternatives, and arrive
at their own conclusions. Then if, say, on the next day, another lecturer (or
the same one) were to return and announce that “there has been a revision:
fascism is good; it is democracy that is bad,” the listeners’ habits of
deutero-learning would resist that message. Bateson understood cultures as
autopoietic systems of social order, sustained by self-reinforcing processes
(feedback loops) of learning and deutero-learning.16
Among artists, the resistant patterns that Bateson called “second-order
learning” were associated with the concept of “plasticity.” Plasticity
referred to how an expressive medium responded to environmental
pressures. The term had been defined by philosopher William James, who
described it as a quality of resistance that made it possible for a material to
be shaped: “Plasticity … means the possession of a structure [that] …
opposes a certain resistance to the modifying cause. … [W]‌hen the structure
has yielded, the same inertia becomes a condition of its comparative
permanence in the new form, and of the new habits the body then
manifests.”17 Mary Caroline Richards, who taught at Black Mountain
College in North Carolina in the early 1950s, wrote about engaging the
plasticity of clay in her 1964 book, Centering: In Pottery, Poetry, and the
Person, portraying the interaction as a mutually transformative dialogue:
Potter and clay press against each other. The firm, tender, sensitive pressure which yields as
much as it asserts. It is like a handclasp between two living hands, receiving the greeting at the
very moment that they give it. It is this speech between the hand and the clay that makes me
think of dialogue. And it is a language far more interesting than the spoken vocabulary which
tries to describe it, for it is spoken not by the tongue and lips but by the whole body, by the
whole person, speaking and listening.

The clay’s plasticity creates feedback, demanding that the potter “listen”
as well as “speak.” Because of this, wrote Richards, working in clay
cultivated a quality of heightened awareness,
a state of being “awake” to the world throughout our organism. … When one stands like a
natural substance, plastic but with one’s own character written into the formula, ah then one
feels oneself part of the world, taking one’s shape with its help.18

Many improvisational artists working in the 1950s made such plastic

interaction the focus of their art-making.19 In 1951 Paul Goodman co-
authored a book with Fritz Perls and Ralph Hefferline called Gestalt
Therapy: Excitement and Growth in the Human Personality, in which he
clarified the connections between deutero-learning, plasticity, and social
authority. Goodman argued that oppressive societies demanded the
unassimilated acceptance (or “introjection”) of prescribed values—training
their members, metaphorically speaking, to “swallow things whole.” To
facilitate this introjection, such societies repressed the healthy levels of
aggression that would prompt an individual to reject or ruminate on
(literally, chew over) an unsatisfying attitude or behavior.20 Because this
deutero-learning pattern inhibited direct feedback, the feedback that
resulted took form as a “social neurosis” in which detached cruelty was
normalized; which is why, Goodman wrote, “the wars we acquiesce in are
continually more destructive and less angry.”21 Gestalt Therapy promoted
artistic dialogue in a plastic medium as the best antidote to this atrophy of
healthy engagement with one’s surroundings. Perhaps echoing the artist
Robert Motherwell, Goodman praised collage and abstract expressionist
gesture painting as fostering healthy patterns of interaction through “the
working up of the real surface, the transformation of the apparent or
enchoate theme in the material medium.”22 Such activity cultivated a
spontaneous “awareness,” which he defined as a flexible and emotionally
charged engagement with one’s immediate surroundings or “social-cultural,
animal, and physical … field.”23
This quality of awareness, which Goodman understood as the basis of
improvisational art, is distinguishable from the automatism practiced by the
Surrealists, in which improvisation is thought of primarily as the “welling
up from within” of unconscious contents. For Goodman, the automatic act,
which one performed while unaware of it, was as undesirable, at one
extreme, as self-consciousness was at the other. “Awareness,” he insisted,
“is simple presentness, both perceptual and motor.”24 In group
improvisation, awareness is what is needed for the successful navigation of
the moment.
Goodman, Bateson, and Hayek all asserted that the social valorization of
conscious purposefulness corresponded to a model of the self as governed
by a centralized authority structure. The individual self emerges through an
act of will. By contrast, Goodman’s “awareness” corresponds to a model of
the self as an autopoietic system: an entity constituted by the patterns of its
interactions with the surrounding energy field. If one adopts this autopoietic
model of the self, then group improvisation is seen to distill the essential
process of identity formation: a negotiation relying on what composer John
Cage called “polyattentiveness”—a quality of picking up on and according
recognition to events in the environment, acknowledging others’ claims to
selfhood while simultaneously making one’s own.25

FROM JOHN CAGE TO MAX NEUHAUS

The cultivation of polyattentiveness and the decentralization of authority
are key concepts in understanding the work of John Cage, who earned a
place in music history by his radical refusal of the authority of the
composer. “A composer is simply someone who tells other people what to
do,” Cage wrote in A Year from Monday (1967); “I find this an unattractive
way of getting things done.”26
Cage’s alternative to the traditional model of a composer as someone
who thinks up music for a listener to hear, was to promote what might be
called “second-order listening” because of its parallel to what Bateson
called second-order learning. Cage was not interested in communicating
emotions through the manipulation of a musical message, but in changing
the listener’s idea of what music could be.27 “New music: new listening,”
he wrote in his manifesto, Silence, of 1961.28 The Western musical heritage,
Cage complained, represented a deeply ingrained listening habit.29 He used
indeterminacy to get listeners to discard their habitual expectations and
value judgments and instead to adopt a frame of mind open to all
experience—an aesthetic expressed in the Zen Buddhist maxim, “before the
beautiful and the ugly were differentiated.”30 Cage’s compositions therefore
allow for no distinction between “musical” sounds and “noise.” Typically
they are filled with thumps, screeches, and snippets of radio broadcasts or
tape recordings in addition to notes played on conventional musical
instruments. Because sounds (noises) are everywhere, if the process of
deutero-listening that Cage promoted were to take hold, the listener would
always be surrounded by music.
But what is meant by music is radically redefined in the process. “Not an
attempt to understand something that is being said … just an attention to the
activity of sounds,” Cage wrote.31 As Bateson had written in 1942 that
democratic leaders must “discard purpose in order to achieve our purpose,”
Cage called in 1957 for “a purposeful purposelessness” that would register
as “an affirmation of life.”32 By “giv[ing] up the desire to control sound,”
he hoped to “let sounds be themselves.”33 Consonant with the “energy
field” model of the self, Cage wrote that he wanted his music to lead the
listener to the point “where gradually or suddenly, one sees that humanity
and nature, not separate, are in this world together [and] … there are an
incalculable infinity of causes and effects …, [because] in fact each and
every thing in all of time and space is related to each and every other
thing.”34 It was in order to foreground this complex system of
interpenetrations that Cage made works demanding polyattentiveness on the
part of the listener.35 He once suggested that five simultaneous activities
constituted the bare minimum for a good performance.36 “This
disharmony,” he asserted, “to paraphrase Bergson’s statement about
disorder, is simply a harmony to which many are unaccustomed.”37
As his musical practice illustrates, Cage’s commitment to the principle of
decentralization extended from the role of the composer to the forms of the
music itself. Instead of composing a complete musical score, for instance,
he would compose the parts of a piece and leave indeterminate the manner
in which they were to be combined, because, he insisted, “the requiring that
many parts be played in a particular togetherness, is not an accurate
representation of how things are.” Without a score to provide a centralized
coordination of the musical experience, the plurality of the listeners’
experiences was emphasized: “The central points where fusion occurs are
many: the ears of the listeners wherever they are.”38
Cage felt that such strategies of decentralization achieved an important
ideological effect by means of deutero-listening: a pluralism in which every
point was its own center, in lieu of having a single center that subordinated
everything else. As Natalie Schmitt has explained,
Central focus in space, like central focus in time (climax) is a system of subordination of all the
rest of the space or time, controlling the audience’s attention. But if the audience itself is not to
be subservient to the work, the idea of getting and holding their attention must be
relinquished.39

Instead of attempting to hold the attention of the listener, Cage’s

strategies throw back to each listener the problem of what it means to listen.
One of the most famous expressions of this principle is Cage’s 4′33″
(1952), a piece in which the musicians onstage play nothing—the music is
whatever sounds from other sources are heard by members of the
audience.40 In this extreme statement of Cage’s musical philosophy, a
connection between decentralization and feedback emerges, because the
audience’s output (the sounds they make) is also their input (the very music
they are listening to).
Beginning in 1963, the percussionist and electronic music pioneer Max
Neuhaus staged a number of realizations of Cage’s score Fontana Mix.
Neuhaus’s realizations intensified the role of feedback as an organizing
principle in Cage’s decentralized aural field. Neuhaus used microphones
resting on drums in front of loudspeakers to create a system of feedback
loops. The microphones picked up room sounds, creating electrical signals
that passed through a four-track mixer and were sent out through speakers;
the sound waves from the speakers caused the drums on which the
microphones were resting to vibrate, and these vibrations and sounds were
once more encoded by the microphones into electrical signals that were
mixed and sent around again. Neuhaus christened his hybrid realization
Fontana Mix-Feed.
To Neuhaus’s initial surprise, the “noise” generated by these multiple
feedback loops was not random, but formed standing electronic wave
patterns similar to conventional musical tones. The feedback loops had
functioned as an organizing mechanism for the decentralized field of sound.
As he described it,
In 1963, while exploring ways of changing the timbre of percussion instruments through
amplification, I had discovered a means of generating sound which I found fascinating—the
creation of an acoustic feedback loop with a percussion instrument inserted inside it. Instead of
the usual single screeching tones of acoustic feedback, this created a complex multi-timbred
system of oscillation.41

The result was an autopoietic system that caused pattern, variety, and
beauty to emerge from chaotic complexity. Small differences in initial
conditions (the instruments, the spatial configuration of microphones and
speakers, the acoustics of the room, the ambient room noise) made each
performance unique. Neuhaus compared the system in this respect to a
living organism.42
In 1966, Neuhaus expanded on the idea of the feedback loop with his
own piece, Public Supply. Radio listeners calling in to any of ten phone
lines at WBAI radio station in New York City were mixed into the
broadcast that they were receiving over their radios. The structure of this
process was similar to that of Fontana Mix-Feed, but this time the feedback
loops incorporated living people and encompassed a community-sized
space: the radio station’s entire broadcast range became one virtual
instrument. Public Supply was in this way clearly a next step in using audio
feedback loops as a means for realizing a community or super-organism. As
Neuhaus later explained:
Anthropologists in looking at societies which have not yet had contact with modern man have
often found whole communities making music together—not one small group making music for
the others to listen to, but music as a sound dialogue among all the members of the community.
Although I was not able to articulate it in 1966, now, after having worked with this idea for a
long time and talked about it and thought about it, it seems that what these works are really
about is proposing to reinstate a kind of music which we have forgotten about and which is
perhaps the original impulse for music in man: not making a musical product to be listened to,
but forming a dialogue, a dialogue without language, a sound dialogue.43

In 1977, after four years of preparation, Neuhaus performed Radio Net, a

piece structured like Public Supply but this time spanning a network of over
190 public radio stations in several different cities.44
Cage’s improvisations worked to liberate composing, performing, and
listening from the conventions of central planning. Beginning where Cage
left off, Neuhaus emphasized the possibilities of feedback loops in bringing
form to such a decentralized system. By inventing virtual communities
whose members helped to create their own shared experience, Neuhaus’s
musical networks prefigured the collaborative creations more recently made
possible by computer networking, known as wikis.

CONTACT IMPROVISATION
As with Neuhaus’s Public Supply, the fundamental structure of the dance
form known as “contact improvisation” was a network of people connected
by feedback loops. In this case, though, the feedback was through touch,
bringing it more into line with the midcentury discourse on “plasticity.”
According to dance historian Cynthia Novack, contact improvisation was
“one of a number of enterprises during the late ’60s and early ’70s in dance,
theater, therapy, and athletics which were trying to realize a redefinition of
self within a responsive, intelligent body [and] … an egalitarian
community.”45 Unlike other kinds of dance performance, which were
created for a viewing public, contact improvisation was focused not on how
the dance looked, but on allowing the dancers to develop a “physical
dialogue” rooted in “the experience and ‘truth’ of the body.”46
In contact improvisation, the dance is created by two or more dancers
who stay in physical contact for most of the dance and use their points of
contact as the bases for a mutual improvisation. By trading weight and
momentum, the dancers create a shared center of gravity that each responds
to but that no one is in full control of. Novack described this relationship
using a terminology similar to that which Richards used to explain the
plasticity of clay, writing that the dancers “move in concert with a partner’s
weight. … [T]hey often yield rather than resist. … Interest lies in the
ongoing flow of energy.”47
Novack credits Steve Paxton with inventing the form of contact
improvisation in 1972.48 Working in January of that year in the group
Grand Union, Paxton developed a structured improvisation for some
students from Oberlin College, which introduced what was later known as
the “small dance” or “the stand.” Each dancer stood in place, minimizing
muscular tension and swaying with the resulting subtle shifts of his or her
own weight.49 The stand became the foundation for contact improvisation.
In 2008, Paxton explained to an interviewer the importance of the small
dance as a basis for the awareness that was necessary to group work: “To
move from the small dance, from standing, into highly active work is a very
good transition and a good spectrum. But it’s got to have the base of it, it’s
got to have the stand, in my mind, to really be able to get safely to the fast,
higher, tumble-y fall-y kind of contact.”50
From the self-awareness of the “small dance,” the intersubjective
awareness of contact improvisation could develop. In June of 1972, Paxton,
funded by a $2000 grant, invited Mary O’Donnell Fulkerson and fifteen or
so of their students to work together in a loft in Chinatown in New York
City equipped with an Olympic-sized wrestling mat.51 Their work focused
on groups of dancers maintaining physical contact while falling off balance,
using weight or movement to create a moving, shared center of gravity.52
Novack’s later analysis of her own experience with contact improvisation
offers a good description of the dynamic that evolved:
 Immersed in the feeling of tiny changes of weight and the smallest movement of my joints …
settled in this state, when I came into contact with another dancer, I was intensely focused in
moment-to-moment awareness of change. My sensitivity to touch and weight made me
responsive to subtle shifts in my partner’s actions. I then began to experience periods of an
effortless flow of movement, not feeling passive, and yet not feeling actively in control either.
The sensation of “being guided by the point of contact” with my partner fitted the description of
“allowing the dance to happen” to me.53

It was Merce Cunningham who had begun the decentralization of space

and time in American modern dance in the 1950s.54 Cunningham made
dances that, similar to Cage’s compositions, had no central focus and no
temporal development or climax. Contact improvisation was truly
decentralized, however, because there was no choreographer shaping the
movement. The improvised interactions became more than just a means of
developing choreography; they were the dance itself. Paxton has stated that
he aimed “to break down the hierarchy that seemed to arise between people
when one was a choreographer and one was a dancer.”55 With no central
director, the group of dancers in contact improvisation could approach the
ideal of a democratic community. Their movements were not assigned to
them by an external authority, but emerged from “the dynamic of changing
personnel and the emergence of particular moods and qualities in the
improvisation.”56
The links between decentralization and democracy were explicitly
acknowledged in the culture of experimental dance during the 1960s. As in
Cage’s philosophy, in contact improvisation the decentralized dynamic was
associated with an ideal of acceptance: every movement or non-movement
could be perceived as dance, just as every sound or silence could be music.
Again, Zen Buddhism was an important influence, in this case via the
martial art form of aikido.57 Creating dances was no longer about making
“entertainment” but about facilitating an awareness of one’s physical
interactions—what might be called, following Bateson, “second-order”
movement.58
Among the community of contact improvisers, it was understood as an
art form that implied a way of life. The improvisational regimen during the
summer of 1972 blurred the boundaries between art and life. Performances,
when they happened, were simply a day of the usual work, to which an
audience was invited; audience members were free to come and go, staying
as long as they liked.59 According to Nancy Stark Smith, who was one of
the participating Oberlin students, the emphasis was on “communal
experimentation” rather than “goal-oriented” choreography.
We spent so much of the day rolling around and being disoriented and touching each other and
giving weight. … Everyone had a different way of doing it—the releasing people [Mary
Fulkerson’s students] were very soft and light, very sensitive. The jocks, and I guess I was one
of them, were out there rolling around and crashing about. … But we had to work together, or at
least we did work together, even though people had favorite partners. … How to live together as
a group and how to do this movement were equally new ideas to me.60

Another dancer recalled how, in the mid-1970s, contact improvisation

made difference feel interesting rather than threatening. There was “a
tremendous tension and excitement about encountering anybody, an
anticipation, not knowing what was going to happen—whether you were
going to dance slowly, hardly move, do a lot of lifting and falling, or
whether it was going to be sensuous or kind of playful or combative.”61 At
performances this excitement would be picked up on by the audience
members:
The space would get warmer and warmer throughout the performance, and when it was over,
there would be a lot of dancing in the audience. People would be jumping all over one another.
They would stick around afterwards and really want to start rolling around and want to jump on
you. The feeling was of a real shared experience among performers and audience, a tremendous
feeling of physical accessibility between performers and audience.62

Because of its emphases on responsiveness and on breaking down the

distinction between art and life, contact improvisation performed a sort of
microcosmic modeling of democratic interaction among embodied subjects.
In Novack’s experience, the success or failure of a dance was determined
ultimately on intersubjective rather than aesthetic grounds: “If rapport had
been established in the dance—that is, if the movement with my partner
seemed fairly mutual in direction, momentum, and timing so that it felt as
though the dance had moved us—I also experienced a strong sense of
communion with my partner, even if I had never met him or her before”;
but by contrast, if the movement began to feel conscious or manipulative,
the result was a sense of frustration and failure.63
The evolution of contact improvisation shows that experimental music
and dance share a common historical trajectory. In the same way that
Neuhaus began in 1963 to experiment with feedback as a structuring
principle for Cage’s open forms, so dancers in the 1960s had sought ways to
bring structure to decentralized group improvisations. Carolee
Schneemann’s 1963 piece Newspaper Event for the Judson Dance Theater64
pioneered the use of feedback to provide such a structure. According to
dance historian Sally Banes:
Schneemann had watched the dancers in the workshop using random movements, chance
methods, and nontechnical movement, but was disappointed that they seemed to be working as
autonomous entities even in group dances. Her response, in Newspaper Event, was to provide a
framework within which they could interact physically and spontaneously.

As Schneemann herself described it: “I wanted … boundaries of self and

group to be meshed and mutually evolving … to provide specific
instructions through which contact and improvisation could activate
neglected thresholds of awareness.”65
In the year leading up to the invention of contact improvisation, Paxton
similarly felt that the experimentalism of Grand Union “open[ed] …
possibilities” but “eventually led to isolation” of the individual dancers in
their private worlds.66 He found that the reciprocity of improvised contact
could restore a feeling of coherence or, as he put it, “entrainment.” As he
explained to an interviewer in 2008:
The mind entrains; like our minds are more or less entrained now, we’re having a conversation
and we know the subject and we have a big pool of ideas that we can come from, that’s a sign of
entrainment. So with physical work it’s about finding the expectables, that your partner is
working at, I suppose, finding the range of delicacy or impulse anyway in the movement,
finding the spatial specialness that your partner’s mind has … but sensing them at a level that is
just at the lowest level of your perceptual concentration, something that is almost so small that it
almost is slipping away in terms of fragments of time, fragments of impulses in the body, and
really saying, OK I’m going to look at this.67

Like other decentralized systems explored by thinkers like Bateson, Aldo

Leopold, and Neuhaus, contact improvisation relied on feedback rather than
conscious control as an organizational principle. The ideal attitude of the
dancers avoided both conscious planning and inert passivity in favor of “a
dialogue … between sensations of activity and receptivity” making possible
a “sharing [of] information through the body.”68

CONCLUSION: “THIRD FORCE”

In the history of improvisational art in America, the work of Bateson,
Goodman, Neuhaus, and Paxton represents a coherent and significant
departure from the body of work that equates spontaneity with automatism.
Novack records that “Paxton tried to shed the concept of … the body
dominated by an expressive inner self” and to replace it with a concept of
“the responsive body.”69 Such work is founded on a model of improvisation
emphasizing awareness and interaction rather than interior psychological
contents. It is realized in the creation of an autopoietic system, a
decentralized “society” ordered by feedback processes. As Paxton
explained in the journal Dance Review in 1975: “The more the forms are
understood, the more cooperation becomes the subject—an ‘it’ defined by
the balancing of the inertias, momentums, psychologies, spirits of the
partners.”70
In such group improvisations, a postmodern idea of the self emerges. As
centralization is modern, so decentralized networks are postmodern. And
while a modern sensibility imagines the self as interiorized and conflicted,
the postmodern sensibility imagines the self as relational: a site of physical
and discursive intersections. It has no simple location “inside” a person, but
instead is constituted by an occasion of overlapping events.71
This redefinition of selfhood has implications for political philosophy. In
such group improvisations as Neuhaus and Paxton created, the individual is
integrated into the group through feedback loops. There is neither the
atomism of liberal politics nor the subordination of the individual to a
central authority. There is instead, as in Goodman’s Gestalt therapy, an
emphasis on multiplying and facilitating the avenues of feedback. Feedback
dynamics simultaneously stimulate and set constraints on the activities of
individuals. As Novack described this phenomenon, “contact improvisation
defines the self as the responsive body and also as the responsive body
listening to another responsive body, the two together spontaneously
creating a third force that directs the dance.”72 Novack’s suggestion of a
“third force” is consistent with Archie Shepp’s description, quoted at the
beginning of this essay, of modern jazz as the expression of a “communal
intelligence.” Bateson, too, by the end of the 1960s had arrived in his
thinking about cybernetic systems at what he called “a profound
redefinition of the self” that challenged the ethical premises of liberal
society.73 Morality, he wrote, must be understood in reference to the “larger
Mind of which the individual mind is only a subsystem … immanent in the
total interconnected social system and planetary ecology.”74
Improvisational artists were the first to explore this vision of an alternative
social order that is neither laissez-faire nor centrally regulated, but
networked.

NOTES
1. Paul Goodman, “The Political Meaning of Some Recent Revisions of Freud,” Politics 2, no. 7
(July 1945): 201.
2. See Daniel Belgrad, The Culture of Spontaneity: Improvisation and the Arts in Postwar America
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 29–31, 35–37, and 56–62.
3. See Belgrad, Culture of Spontaneity, 188–192. Musician Anne Farber has said that
improvisation “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 upon precisely
chosen ones.” Quoted in Matthew Rohn, Visual Dynamics in Jackson Pollock’s Abstractions
(Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1987), 118.
4. Archie Shepp, Foreword to John Clellon Holmes, The Horn (New York: Thunder’s Mouth
Press, 1988), iii.
5. See Richard Edwards, Contested Terrain: The Transformation of the Workplace in the Twentieth
Century (New York: Basic Books, 1979). See also Samuel Haber, Efficiency and Uplift:
Scientific Management in the Progressive Era, 1890–1920 (Chicago: The University of Chicago
Press, 1964).
6. George Lipsitz, Rainbow at Midnight: Labor and Culture in the 1940s (Chicago: University of
Illinois Press, 1994), 57, 61; Edwards, Contested Terrain, 149–151.
7. See Margaret Mead, “The Comparative Study of Culture and the Purposive Cultivation of
Democratic Values,” in Science, Philosophy, and Religion, Second Symposium, ed. Lymon
Bryson and Louis Finkelstein (New York: 1942), 56–69. In 1941 and 1942, a group of social
scientists was recruited by the Council for Democracy to consider how best to go about
changing some habitual ways of thinking that could compromise wartime unity, such as
isolationism, racism, and anti-Semitism. Its list of consultants included Mead and Bateson, Ruth
Benedict, Hadley Cantril, Erik Erikson, and Erich Fromm. See Cedric Larson, “The Council for
Democracy,” The Public Opinion Quarterly 6, no. 2 (Summer 1942): 284–285. For more on the
struggle over information management during the war, see Belgrad, The Culture of Spontaneity,
22–25.
8. David Lipset, Gregory Bateson: The Legacy of a Scientist (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall,
1980), 166; Gregory Bateson, “Social Planning and the Concept of Deutero-Learning,” in Steps
to an Ecology of Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), 160–162.
9. Friedrich Hayek, “Freedom and the Economic System,” Contemporary Review 153 (April
1938): 434–442.
10. Hayek, “Freedom,” 438–442.
11. Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1944), 165–
166.
12. For more on this point, see Belgrad, Culture of Spontaneity, 120–127.
13. Paul Goodman, Five Years (New York: Brussel and Brussel, 1966), 18.
14. For another example of ecological thinking from the early 1940s, see Aldo Leopold, “Thinking
Like a Mountain,” A Sand County Almanac (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), 140–
141.
15. Bateson, “Social Planning,” 164.
16. Bateson believed that what distinguished the members of one culture from those of another were
exactly these habitual ways of thinking and contextualizing that were inculcated by
characteristic processes of deutero-learning. He wrote in another essay of 1942 that such
patterns embodied the “holistic and systematic interrelations” among individual members of a
society that accounted for their “knotted varieties of differentiation.” Bateson, “Morale and
National Character” in Steps, 88–106. See also Lipset, Gregory Bateson, 167.
17. William James, Principles of Psychology, (New York: Dover, 1950), 1: 105. First published in
1890.
18. M. C. Richards, Centering: In Pottery, Poetry, and the Person (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan
University Press, 1964), 9. Emphasis mine. See also Belgrad, Culture of Spontaneity, 170–171.
For more on the significance of Black Mountain College to the postwar avant-garde, see
Belgrad, Culture of Spontaneity, 32–35, 142, 157–158.
19. Prominent examples include “gesture field” paintings and collages by Jackson Pollock, Robert
Motherwell, and Helen Frankenthaler and the poetry of Charles Olson. See Belgrad, The Culture
of Spontaneity, 114–119, 123, 135–136.
20. Frederick Perls, Ralph Hefferline, and Paul Goodman, Gestalt Therapy: Excitement and Growth
in the Human Personality (New York: Dell Publishing Co., 1951), 7, 337–339. Perls and
Hefferline wrote the self-help “Part I: “Orienting the Self,” and Goodman wrote the theoretical
“Part II: Manipulating the Self.” In the 1994 edition, the order of the two volumes is reversed.
21. Perls, Hefferline, and Goodman, Gestalt Therapy, 242.
22. Perls, Hefferline, and Goodman, Gestalt Therapy, 395. Motherwell had written in 1946, “For
the goal which lies beyond the strictly aesthetic, the French artists say the ‘unknown’ or the
‘new,’ after Baudelaire and Rimbaud. … ‘Structure’ or ‘gestalt’ may be more accurate: reality
has no degrees nor is there a ‘super’ one (surrealisme). … Structures are found in the interaction
of the body-mind and the external world, and the body-mind is active and aggressive in finding
them. … The sensation of physically operating in the world is very strong in the medium of
[collage] … One cuts and chooses and shifts and pastes, and sometimes tears off and begins
again.” Robert Motherwell, “Beyond the Aesthetic,” Design 47, no. 8 (April 1946): 14–15,
reprinted in Robert Motherwell, The Writings of Robert Motherwell, ed. Dore Ashton (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2007), 54–55.
23. Goodman questioned, “With regard to the adjustment of the mature person to reality, must we
not ask—one is ashamed to have to mention it—whether the ‘reality’ is not rather clearly
pictured after, and in the interests of, western urban industrial society, capitalist or state-
socialist? Is it the case that other cultures, gaudier in dress, greedier in physical pleasures, dirtier
in manners, more disorderly in governance, more brawling and adventurous in behavior, were or
are thereby less mature?” Goodman, Gestalt Therapy, 228, 303.
24. Goodman, Five Years, 19.
25. See Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005),
27–28; Belgrad, Culture of Spontaneity, 161–162. Also see John Cage, quoted in Roger
Copeland, “Merce Cunningham and the Politics of Perception,” in What Is Dance? Readings in
Theory and Criticism, ed. Roger Copeland and Marshall Cohen (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1983), 321–322.
26. John Cage, A Year from Monday (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1967), ix.
27. Richard Kostelanetz, “Inferential Art,” in Richard Kostelanetz, ed., John Cage (New York:
Praeger, 1970), 107–108. Cage famously rejected the style of improvisation that he associated
with the expression of a personality “welling up from within.” For this reason he preferred the
terms “nonintention” or “indeterminacy,” which he felt emphasized the transformative potential
of unforeseen interactions. For more on the discursive divide between “improvisation” and
“indeterminacy” circa 1950, see George E. Lewis, “Improvised Music after 1950: Afrological
and Eurological Perspectives,” in The Other Side of Nowhere: Jazz, Improvisation, and
 Communities in Dialogue, ed. Daniel Fischlin and Ajay Heble (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan
University Press, 2004), 137–149, 156–158.
28. John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings (London: Marion Boyars, 1995), 10.
29. Cage, Silence, 4.
30. Soetsu Yanagi, The Unknown Craftsman: A Japanese Insight into Beauty (New York: Kodansha
International, 1978), 185. See Kostelanetz, “Conversation with John Cage,” in Kostelanetz, ed.,
31.
31. Cage, Silence, 10.
32. Cage, Silence, 12.
33. Cage, Silence, 10.
34. Cage, Silence, 8, 46–47.
35. See Belgrad, Culture of Spontaneity, 162.
36. Cage, Silence, 173; Natalie Crohn Schmitt, Actors and Onlookers: Theater and Twentieth-
Century Scientific Views of Nature (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1990), 16.
37. Cage, Silence, 12.
38. Cage, Silence, 10. Emphasis mine.
39. Schmitt, Actors and Onlookers, 31.
40. Cage wrote, “In this new music nothing takes place but sounds. … [T]hose that are not notated
appear in the written music as silences, opening the doors of the music to the sounds that happen
to be in the environment.” Cage, Silence, 7–8.
41. Max Neuhaus, liner notes for Fontana Mix–Feed (six realizations of John Cage) (Alga
Marghen, 2003). Emphasis mine.
42. Neuhaus, liner notes. For more on reiteration and order in chaotic systems, see John Briggs and
F. David Peat, Turbulent Mirror: An Illustrated Guide to Chaos Theory and the Science of
Wholeness (New York: Harper and Row, 1989), 68–69, 74, 77.
43. Max Neuhaus, “The Broadcast Works and Audium,” in Zeitgleich exhibition catalogue (Vienna:
Transit, 1994). http://kunstradio.at/ZEITGLEICH/index.html, accessed January 14, 2013.
44. John Rockwell, All-American Music: Composition in the Late Twentieth Century (New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 1983), 147.
45. Cynthia Novack, Sharing the Dance: Contact Improvisation and American Culture (Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), 3, 12.
46. Novack, Sharing the Dance, 8.
47. Novack, Sharing the Dance, 51.
48. Novack, Sharing the Dance, 53 and 11.
49. The name of the piece was “Magnesium.” Novack, Sharing the Dance, 62.
50. Steve Paxton, interview with Nathan Wagoner, 2008, http://vimeo.com/1731742, accessed
January 14, 2013.
51. Novack, Sharing the Dance, 63–64. Like Paxton, Fulkerson had studied Limón technique and
Cunningham technique. At the time, she was teaching at the University of Rochester.
52. Novack, Sharing the Dance, 73, 101.
53. Novack, Sharing the Dance, 152.
54. Don McDonagh, The Rise and Fall and Rise of Modern Dance, 2nd ed. (Pennington, NJ: A
Cappella Books, 1990), 36–37. Paxton had studied dance with Cunningham before becoming a
member of the Judson Dance Theater in the early 1960s. Paxton also studied in 1958 with José
Limón.
55. Steve Paxton quoted in Novack, Sharing the Dance, 53–54.
56. Novack, Sharing the Dance, 124.
57. Novack, Sharing the Dance, 184.
58. Novack, Sharing the Dance, 23, 19, 55, 58–59, 133.
59. Novack, Sharing the Dance, 66.
 60. Quoted in Novack, Sharing the Dance, 64.
61. Lisa Nelson, quoted in Novack, Sharing the Dance, 70–71.
62. Nelson, quoted in Novack, Sharing the Dance, 72.
63. Novack, Sharing the Dance, 152–153.
64. Before joining Grand Union, Paxton was involved in the Judson Dance Theater, which evolved
from a choreography class by Robert Dunn (who had studied music theory with Cage and was
the accompanist at Cunningham’s dance studio). Neuhaus worked with the Judson Dance
Theater in April 1964. Sally Banes, Democracy’s Body: Judson Dance Theater, 1962–1964
(Ann Arbor: University Microfilms International, 1982), xi–xv and 197.
65. Banes, Democracy’s Body, 96. Carolee Schneemann, More Than Meat Joy (New Paltz, NY:
Documentext, 1979), 33; quoted in Banes, Democracy’s Body, 96. Compare William Davis’s
description of Yvonne Rainer’s “Dance for 3 People and 6 Arms” of 1962, also for the Judson
Dance Theater: “What it really resembled was jazz musicianship, more than chance operations,
because we were all working for a time when we might, for example, do this, or seeing what
someone else is doing, think, ‘Oh yes, I can connect this to that.’ … It’s a sense of shape taking
place in three people’s minds as the dance is going on.” Quoted in Banes, Democracy’s Body,
52.
66. Paxton, quoted in Novack, Sharing the Dance, 60.
67. Steve Paxton, interview with Nathan Wagoner.
68. Novack, Sharing the Dance, 153 and 183.
69. Novack, Sharing the Dance, 188. This dichotomy is more of a heuristic distinction than a true
opposition, for it was definitively the “expressive inner self” that “the responsive body” was
responding to. The interactive dynamics of contact improvisation have repeatedly been
compared to those of encounter group therapy, but with “honesty” and “trust” arrived at through
physical rather than verbal dialogue. See Novack, Sharing the Dance, 166 and 168. As Nancy
Stark Smith asserted, “The giving and sharing of weight sets up a kind of template. You can’t lie
about that stuff.” Quoted in Novack, Sharing the Dance, 181.
70. Paxton, quoted in Novack, Sharing the Dance, 182. As the practice of contact improvisation
spread from the initial experiments to become a widely practiced dance form, the structure of
round robin developed as an expression of this objective of networking through feedback. A
typical dance session would begin as a duet, which after a time would either dissolve into two
solos (signaling the dancers’ readiness for new partners) or receive a third dancer to become a
trio; when everyone had had at least one chance to dance, the session would end.
71. See Belgrad, Culture of Spontaneity, 126.
72. Novack, Sharing the Dance, 189. Emphasis mine.
73. Bateson, “The Logical Categories of Learning and Communication” in Steps, 304.
74. Bateson, “Form, Substance, and Difference” in Steps, 466.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Banes, Sally. Democracy’s Body: Judson Dance Theater, 1962–1964. Ann Arbor: University
Microfilms International, 1982.
Bateson, Gregory. Steps to an Ecology of Mind. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1972.
Belgrad, Daniel. The Culture of Spontaneity: Improvisation and the Arts in Postwar America.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.
Briggs, John, and F. David Peat. Turbulent Mirror: An Illustrated Guide to Chaos Theory and the
Science of Wholeness. New York: Harper and Row, 1989.
Butler, Judith. Giving an Account of Oneself. New York: Fordham University Press, 2005.
Cage, John. A Year from Monday. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1967.
Cage, John. Silence: Lectures and Writings. London: Marion Boyars, 1995.
Copeland, Roger. “Merce Cunningham and the Politics of Perception.” In What Is Dance? Readings
in Theory and Criticism, edited by Roger Copeland and Marshall Cohen, 307–324. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1983.
Edwards, Richard. Contested Terrain: The Transformation of the Workplace in the Twentieth
Century. New York: Basic Books, 1979.
Goodman, Paul. “The Political Meaning of Some Recent Revisions of Freud.” Politics 2, no. 7 (July
1945): 197–202.
Goodman, Paul. Five Years. New York: Brussel and Brussel, 1966.
Haber, Samuel. Efficiency and Uplift: Scientific Management in the Progressive Era, 1890–1920.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964.
Hayek, Friedrich. “Freedom and the Economic System.” Contemporary Review 153 (April 1938):
434–442.
Hayek, Friedrich. The Road to Serfdom. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1944.
James, William. Principles of Psychology, New York: Dover, 1950. Originally published in 1890.
Kostelanetz, Richard, ed. John Cage. New York: Praeger, 1970.
Larson, Cedric. “The Council for Democracy.” The Public Opinion Quarterly 6, no. 2 (Summer
1942): 284–285.
Leopold, Aldo. “Thinking Like a Mountain.” A Sand County Almanac. New York: Oxford University
Press, 1966, 137–141.
Lewis, George E. “Improvised Music after 1950: Afrological and Eurological Perspectives.” In The
Other Side of Nowhere: Jazz, Improvisation, and Communities in Dialogue, edited by Daniel
Fischlin and Ajay Heble, 131–162. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2004.
Lipset, David. Gregory Bateson: The Legacy of a Scientist. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall,
1980.
Lipsitz, George. Rainbow at Midnight: Labor and Culture in the 1940s. Chicago: University of
Illinois Press, 1994.
McDonagh, Don. The Rise and Fall and Rise of Modern Dance, 2nd ed. Pennington, NJ: A Cappella
Books, 1990.
Mead, Margaret. “The Comparative Study of Culture and the Purposive Cultivation of Democratic
Values.” In Science, Philosophy, and Religion, Second Symposium, edited by Lymon Bryson and
Louis Finkelstein, 56–69. New York: Conference on Science, Philosophy and Religion in Their
Relation to the Democratic Way of Life, 1942.
Motherwell, Robert. The Writings of Robert Motherwell, edited by Dore Ashton. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2007.
Neuhaus, Max. “The Broadcast Works and Audium.” Zeitgleich exhibition catalogue. Vienna:
Transit, 1994. http://kunstradio.at/ZEITGLEICH/index.html
Neuhaus, Max. Fontana Mix—Feed (six realizations of John Cage). Alga Marghen, 2003.
Novack, Cynthia. Sharing the Dance: Contact Improvisation and American Culture. Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1990.
Paxton, Steve. Interview with Nathan Wagoner, 2008. http://vimeo.com/1731742.
Perls, Frederick, Ralph Hefferline, and Paul Goodman. Gestalt Therapy: Excitement and Growth in
the Human Personality. New York: Dell, 1951.
Richards, M. C. Centering: In Pottery, Poetry, and the Person. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan
University Press, 1964.
Rockwell, John. All-American Music: Composition in the Late Twentieth Century. New York: Alfred
A. Knopf, 1983.
Rohn, Matthew. Visual Dynamics in Jackson Pollock’s Abstractions. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research
Press, 1987.
Schmitt, Natalie Crohn. Actors and Onlookers: Theater and Twentieth-Century Scientific Views of
Nature. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1990.
Shepp, Archie. “Foreword.” In John Clellon Holmes, The Horn, i–v. New York: Thunder’s Mouth
Press, 1988.
Yanagi, Soetsu. The Unknown Craftsman: A Japanese Insight into Beauty. New York: Kodansha
International, 1978.
 PART IV

MOBILITIES
 CHAPTER 17
IMPROVISED DANCE IN THE
RECONSTRUCTION OF THEM

DANIELLE GOLDMAN

ON May 10, 1985, the choreographer Ishmael Houston-Jones, the musician

Chris Cochrane, and the writer Dennis Cooper presented a work-in-progress
called THEM. The performance involved a series of structured
improvisations that, as Burt Supree later wrote in the Village Voice,
explored “some ways men are with men—physically, sexually,
emotionally.”1 Cochrane composed and performed the score, Cooper wrote
and recited the text, and Houston-Jones was joined by two other dancers,
Donald Fleming and Jonathan Walker. Less than a year later, the group
performed a portion of THEM as part of Dancing for Our Lives!, the first
official AIDS benefit for New York City’s dance community, held at the
downtown performance space known as P.S. 122.2
In November 1986, Houston-Jones, Cochrane, Cooper, Fleming, and four
additional dancers—Barry Crooks, Julyen Hamilton, Daniel McIntosh, and
David Zambrano—presented a fuller version of the work at P.S. 122. Much
had changed over the previous eighteen months. The work became darker
and more explicit in its reference to HIV/AIDS. Whereas the work-in-
progress contained a series of fragile, and occasionally violent,
improvisations intertwined with Cooper’s melancholic texts, the 1986
version concluded with a devastating section where Houston-Jones wrestled
with a dead goat—blood smearing on the mattress upon which the dance
takes place—and a final improvisation where the dancers tentatively felt
their necks, underarms, and groins, as if checking for inflamed lymph
nodes.3 Moreover, the improvisations seemed riskier—the dancers had
more range, they were more expressive, and they showed a willingness to
be still and to make contact with the floor. Houston-Jones explains, “By
November 1986 I already had friends, ex-boyfriends, heroes who were
dying of The Plague and making an upbeat work about the ways six men
could possibly be together seemed impossible then.”4 According to Supree,
whose lover died of AIDS the week before he saw the final version,5
“THEM has become a much grimmer piece since the chunk I saw at
Dancing for Our Lives! … I remember it as aggressive and vital, but the
current version seems more stiff-lipped, hardened, fatalistic, as if too many
emotional and sensual options have been terminated since then.”6 He
continued, “THEM isn’t a piece about AIDS, but AIDS constricts its view
and casts a considerable pall” (see Figures 17.1 and 17.2).7
In 2010, Vallejo Gantner, the current Artistic Director of P.S. 122, invited
Houston-Jones to reconstruct a past performance as part of a broader
thirtieth anniversary retrospective of significant works performed at P.S.
122. Houston-Jones decided to bring back THEM, and the work was
presented in October 2010 in the same theater as its premiere (see Figures
17.3, 17.4, and 17.5). Reflecting on his decision, Houston-Jones explains, “I
am wondering how particularly the AIDS theme has changed in the twenty-
five years since the piece was made.”8 After holding an audition and
deciding upon a cast for the reconstruction, which involved Cochrane,
Cooper, Houston-Jones, and seven male dancers in their twenties and early
thirties, it became clear that several of the young dancers were not even
alive when the piece premiered and they had varied understandings of the
AIDS pandemic. In fact, at the beginning of the reconstruction process,
some of the dancers felt as though they had no personal connection to the
HIV virus whatsoever. How, then, to give the contextual knowledge that
informed the creation of the piece, and how to give the dancers a sense of
the paranoia, urgency, and sorrow embedded in the work? This became a
complex challenge for Houston-Jones, who insisted that AIDS is so
significant that surely the young dancers have memories or connections to it
somewhere. As he said in an interview, the disease is still present and many
people do still die from it.9
FIGURE 17.1 Clockwise, from left to right: Chris Cochrane, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Jonathan
Walker, Donald Fleming (floor), THEM (1985).
Photograph by Dona Ann McAdams.
FIGURE 17.2 Ishmael Houston-Jones, Chris Cochrane, and Johnny Walker, THEM (1985).
Photograph by Dona Ann McAdams.

FIGURE 17.3 Felix Cruz and Jeremy Pheiffer, THEM (2010).

Photograph by Ian Douglas.
FIGURE 17.4 Ishmael Houston-Jones in THEM (2010).
Photograph by Ian Douglas.
FIGURE 17.5 Joey Canizzaro in THEM (2010).
Photograph by Ian Douglas.

Importantly, improvisation played a vital role in allowing the dancers to

uncover and explore that knowledge. As Houston-Jones reflects on the
process, “We were having an improvisation where they [the younger
dancers] had to speak about their relationship to AIDS/HIV, and they started
saying, ‘Oh, I don’t have any relationship.’ But as we kept probing and
talking, they actually do—like a cousin, or somebody they danced with—
and they would remember.”10
In what follows, I discuss some of the ways that dance scholars have
written about improvisation. Then, resisting the prevalent notion that
improvisation enables “free” dancing, I highlight constraints that the
dancers involved in the reconstruction of THEM negotiated: racialized
assumptions about training, the demands of dancing with a partner, and the
strictures presented by the score and the narrative aspects of Cooper’s text.
But I focus primarily on the ways in which the passage of time affected the
dancers’ improvisations, for this is where the politics of the work emerge
with particular force. As José Muñoz writes in Cruising Utopia, “memory is
most certainly constructed and, more important, always political.”11 Muñoz
goes on to suggest that remembrances enacted through performance,
especially performances that index queer desire and public sexuality, have
the capacity to offer hope in the face of abjection.12 In other words, it can
be powerful, even sustaining, to take on embodied modes of relating to
others that resist heteronormative displays of sexuality. In the
reconstruction of THEM, improvisation enabled the dancers to explore a
past that they didn’t entirely understand, while also demanding that,
throughout the performance, they place themselves—literally and
figuratively—in relation to that past. As Niall Noel Jones, one of these
dancers, explained, “[THEM] feels large, like it has a long life.”13 Jones,
who was twenty-seven years old at the time of THEM’s re-creation, noted
the specter of the original cast from the 1980s and their friends and lovers,
as well as the many people Cooper references in his text. He continued,
“There are multiple ghosts within the work. There are many hauntings that
are danced.”14 The fact that the dancers improvised these hauntings, as
opposed to merely miming what the original cast had done in the eighties,
resulted in a reconstruction that actively reconsiders the past, while quite
possibly gesturing toward a future.

ISHMAEL HOUSTON-JONES: THE POLITICS OF

DANCING
Ishmael Houston-Jones grew up in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and started
taking dance classes as a teenager. He spent two years studying English at
Gannon College before dropping out and moving to Israel in 1971, where
he worked as a pig farmer and then on a banana plantation. After spending a
year in Israel, he moved to Philadelphia and danced for Group Motion
Media Theater. He later participated in an ensemble called “A Way of
Improvising” with Terry Fox and Jeff Cain, and in the mid-1970s helped
form a gay men’s collective called Two Men Dancing.15 According to
Houston-Jones, at that time improvised dance in Philadelphia was both rare
and unloved. Houston-Jones therefore began commuting to New York City
to study contact improvisation—an emerging form where dancers improvise
in contact with a partner—with Daniel Lepkoff. Houston-Jones moved to
New York City in 1979 and created works throughout the 1980s and 1990s
that were grounded in improvisation. Aside from his recent reconstructions,
Houston-Jones stopped making new work about a decade ago. But he still
performs, and he teaches at colleges and universities, including Hollins,
Sarah Lawrence College, and The New School. He also teaches regularly at
the American Dance Festival, where he coordinates the improvisation
curriculum.
Unlike many of today’s aspiring dancers, Houston-Jones never
considered the pursuit of improvisatory training as something separate from
everyday life.16 As he explored improvised dance in the early 1980s, he
also was politically active, working for God’s Love We Deliver, an
organization that prepares and delivers food for people who aren’t able to
provide for themselves due to illnesses. He traveled to Nicaragua in 1983
and 1984 to teach improvisation. For him, activism and dance were never
wholly separate. As Houston-Jones remarks, “There was a sense of urgency
that I don’t feel so much now—from anti nukes, to wars in Central
America. People were in opposition. People were invested more than they
are now, at least visibly, vocally invested—[THEM] came out of that
time.”17 This doesn’t mean that his work was didactic or politically obtuse.
According to the choreographer Jennifer Monson, “Ishmael was engaged in
political work that trusts the dancing. Improvisation in Ishmael’s work gave
dancers permission to feel. He creates a space where dancers can move
toward something, and feel supported, without knowing in precise terms the
nature of the place of arrival. There’s a kind of listening and attentiveness,
and engagement with the outside world, that improvisation requires.”18
Ironically, within the field of dance, most discussions of improvisation
elide the kind of engagement with the outside world that Monson describes.
Critics, scholars, and dancers across a range of genres tend to link
improvisation with notions of “freedom” without examining the precise
meaning of the term. Common celebrations of improvisation’s “freedom”
involve the notion that it enables dancers to escape the tyranny of the
choreographer’s gaze or to present authentic or unmediated forms of self-
expression or to discover new ways of moving. It’s a way, supposedly, of
not engaging with restrictive forces in the external world.
To Houston-Jones, and to other scholars, however, far from representing
an escape, the most skillful improvisations negotiate an ever-shifting
landscape of constraints.19 One’s social and historical positions in the world
affect one’s ability to move, both literally and figuratively. To ignore the
constraints that improvisers inevitably encounter is to deny the real
conditions that shape daily life; it is also to deny improvisation’s most
significant power: as a critical engagement with the world, characterized by
both flexibility and perpetual readiness. Improvised dance involves literally
giving shape to oneself by deciding how to move in relation to an unsteady
landscape. To engage oneself in this manner, with a sense of confidence and
possibility, is a dynamic way to inhabit one’s body and to interact with the
world.
Houston-Jones is well aware of the shifting nature of social categories
and prejudices that performers inevitably encounter while improvising. In
1986, for example, he developed a score20 to use in the rehearsal process
for a performance called Adolfo und Maria. In the score, which he calls
“The Politics of Dancing,” Houston-Jones asks a group of people to gather
in the center of a room. He then utters a pair of binary statements about
identity. For example, “If you are a man, go to one wall. If you are not a
man, go to the opposite wall.”21 Members of the group must make split
decisions, as if standing on a railway track with a train approaching. Once
on the selected side of the room, people look at the individuals close to
them, searching for similarities and differences and taking note of any
surprises or assumptions that the grouping reveals. The individuals then
take note of the individuals across the room. Once everyone has had a
chance to observe the groupings, they reassemble as a tight cluster in the
center of the room. Houston-Jones then issues another pair of
identifications: right-handed/left-handed; blond/not-blond; Jewish/not-
Jewish; have parents who are college graduates/don’t have parent who are
college graduates; want to have children/don’t want to have children, and so
forth.22 Some pairs involve voluntary characteristics, whereas others do not.
Some statements seem more subjective than others, and language is often
fraught and open for interpretation. As Houston-Jones notes, “Defining
sexuality takes quite a bit of finessing. In a single workshop ‘I AM GAY,’ ‘I
AM HOMOSEXUAL,’ ‘I AM QUEER,’ ‘I HAVE INTERCOURSE ONLY
WITH PEOPLE OF MY OWN GENDER’ and their ‘opposites’ can each
produce very different splits in one group.”23 Typically, the group spends
about forty-five minutes gathering and dispersing and then talks about their
experiences for a similar amount of time.
 Houston-Jones has used “The Politics of Dancing” during rehearsals, and
he has presented the structure as a teaching tool in American university
workshops, conferences, and international dance schools. Along the way, he
has experimented with several iterations of the score: he has created
situations in which the person uttering the categories changes throughout
the exercise; he has asked the person speaking the categories to make only
“true” statements for herself and to use first-person phrasing; and he has
asked participants to close their eyes.24 He explains his motivation for these
exercises:
I wanted something more multifaceted that would address the more elusive ways in which
people perceive others and make assumptions about what those perceptions might mean. I
wanted to explore some of the subtle and not so subtle ways people act upon those perceptions
and assumptions. I also wanted people to feel what it was like to be in a minority facing a much
larger group. I was interested to know which groupings caused people discomfort and which
ways they liked to be grouped; when they would lie or resist the categorizing. I wanted to break
down knee jerk responses and for people to look beyond the superficial things they were seeing
and find the origins of the responses they were having.25

“The Politics of Dancing” explores modes of identification and highlights

some of the ways in which bodies are perceived. Yet when Houston-Jones
first started introducing this score to dancers, some of them had difficulty
understanding how these things relate to “dance.” Nancy Stark Smith, a
committed improviser and one of the originators of contact improvisation,
recalls her first exposure to Houston-Jones’s “The Politics of Dancing” in
1988 at the European Contact Teachers Conference in Berlin: “I remember
going through a range of emotions as the categories came and went and I
dutifully plumbed my depths for the truest answers. Among my feelings
were suspicion and irritation, as I wondered what made this ‘The Politics of
Dancing,’ what this had to do with dancing at all, and what it had to do with
me.”26
Although Stark Smith left “The Politics of Dancing” workshop feeling
suspicious and irritated, the score has much to do with dancing, and it has
relevance for performers and audience members alike. “The Politics of
Dancing” is an exercise in seeing and being seen. It is an exercise that asks
one to consider what it feels like to be outnumbered. It asks one to feel the
pressures of categories of identity that are always too simple. It asks one to
make spontaneous choices. This is the landscape in which dancing occurs,
as opposed to the kind of “free” and equal space that discussions of
improvisation in the arts tend to invoke. To imagine that movement holds
the same implications for all bodies, or to imagine that all manners of
moving are equally available or experienced in the same way, is naïve.
Dancing is political, it does relate to the different identities that people
have, and improvisation always occurs amidst shifting constraints. This is
something that Houston-Jones helps others realize.
In the reconstruction of THEM, the strictures at play helped give the
improvisations their urgency and their sense of liveness. Even though the
work was “historic,” the dancers had to navigate a contemporary scene
while deciding how to move. Part of this entailed reckoning with
contemporary ways of being seen, not all of them pleasant. The dancers, for
example, were subject to racialized responses to their style and movement
choices. Niall Noel Jones, the one black dancer in the cast of young
performers, recounted remarks about his “Ishmael impersonation.”27 Being
involved in a dance scene with few people of color, there was a way in
which, for many, Jones’s body became Houston-Jones’s body. Although this
could certainly be taken as a compliment, it becomes something else when
the comparison occurs merely on racial grounds. Enrico Wey, the one Asian
American dancer in the cast, noted a remark made by an audience member
that he must have had prior “martial arts training.”28
Beyond the social and historical constraints that informed how their
bodies and movement choices were read, the dancers also had to deal with
the strictures internal to the work. As the piece contained a great deal of
dancing in contact, the performers needed to contend, too, with the
demands made by their partners. The dancers drew from diverse
experiences and techniques, including contact improvisation, vogueing,
puppeteering, and more canonized modes of modern dance.29 Each style or
mode of approaching movement structures the dancer’s body and entails the
formation of habits. Wey, for example, mentioned in an interview that his
background as a puppeteer required him to channel his energy into an object
while being as invisible as possible onstage. This was a different kind of
presence than what was required in THEM, particularly in a section of the
dance where he had to pose and preen for Niall Noel Jones.30The challenge
of responding to a partner with different habits and modes of virtuosity was
particularly apparent in the opening duet between Noel Jones and Felix
Cruz. Jones, who moves with a weighted quality, frequently displays an
awareness of his surroundings and of his partner’s choices that suggests a
commitment to improvisatory practices. Cruz, on the other hand, has a
tighter musculature and tends toward more recognizable modern dance
sequences—turning with a leg positioned in “attitude,” flinging his arms, or
spiraling quickly onto the floor. It was difficult, therefore, for subtlety to
emerge in the duet, or for the dancers to release into each other—a
difficulty that was fitting for this section of the dance, which, according to
Houston-Jones, “is about ‘contact’ that doesn’t work. About support that
disappears.”31 The dancers also had to contend with the score, which
dictated a series of events with little room for the dancers to negotiate
transitions. Given that the structure itself was not available for critique by
the dancers, the challenge, then, became how to capitalize on possibilities
within it. In addition, the dancers needed to be responsive to both
Cochrane’s music and Cooper’s text, without illustrating either in a literal
manner. As Houston-Jones often says, “no acting.”
Although the dancers improvised in relation to a host of complicated
constraints, they felt especially affected by the weight of history and a sense
of responsibility toward previous generations. When discussing critical
responses to the reconstruction, many of which described the work as being
young and full of technical virtuosity, Noel Jones suggested that the 1980s
version wasn’t as violent as the reconstruction. Highlighting the thrashing
physicality of the young dancers, he then suggested that perhaps the
aggression came from imagining a community being ravaged. He suggested
that perhaps the younger dancers unwittingly created a caricature of what it
was like to have been making choreographic work about AIDS at that time,
which resulted in a kind of aggression.32

“FOR SOME REASON IT STILL MATTERS”

The 2010 reconstruction of THEM begins with Houston-Jones walking
slowly into the dimly lit theater. He approaches another figure, Arturo
Vidich, who stands with his back toward the audience. Houston-Jones
gently places a hand on Vidich’s shoulder and then covers the younger
man’s eyes with a white blindfold made of medical gauze, in what could be
either an act of violence or protection. Houston-Jones turns Vidich around
to face the audience, and then the two men perform a complex yet delicate
duet. They spin each other around, and move through vulnerable points of
contact, including each other’s armpits, necks, and wrists. The duet begins
in silence, but eventually, once Houston-Jones drops to the floor, Cochrane
introduces brooding atmospheric tones into the soundscape.33 Houston-
Jones backs up slowly, until the distance between the two figures is
pronounced. Another young man, Jeremy Pheiffer, emerges from upstage as
Houston-Jones backs away. Pheiffer continues the duet that Houston-Jones
began with the blindfolded man, only with a rougher sense of manipulation.
Houston-Jones watches the two young men. As Pheiffer takes Vidich
offstage into shadow, Houston-Jones begins a solo (see Figure 17.4).
In many ways, the solo shows a weathered man. As Houston-Jones faces
the audience, one notices the bags under his eyes, dark and hanging like
sacks. These bags index fatigue, but also sadness, or a kind of worldliness.
His flesh appears thin and his closely cropped hair is turning grey. He is
aging. Yet the solo is full of quick coils and extensions, in keeping with the
rock-grunge strumming of Cochrane on his electric guitar. Wearing a plaid
shirt with cut-off sleeves, rolled up jeans, and sneakers, Houston-Jones
hurls himself onto the ground, kisses himself, licks his arms, and gestures in
the space mournfully. He makes himself accessible to the audience, but not
entirely, or not without demanding that the viewer reckon with the
complexities of spectatorship. As the dancing winds down, he subtly covers
his nose and mouth, and quietly leaves the performing area.
Houston-Jones did not include this solo in the 1980s version, and it
functions as a prologue for the reconstruction that follows. According to the
score’s notes for the solo, “Ishmael foreshadows movement motifs that will
appear later also with a sense of saying good-bye and passing the material
onto a new generation of performers.”34 Although the audience wouldn’t
necessarily know it, Houston-Jones then finds a spot in the theater and
watches the rest of the show. Enrico Wey, one of the performers in the
reconstruction, explained in a recent conversation that he understood
Houston-Jones’s solo as a kind of “send-off,” or a passing on of
information. All of the dancers are onstage from the beginning of the show,
mostly hidden in shadow, and Wey always watched the solo attentively. “It
helped me to get into a sense of what we were trying to achieve,” he
explained. “It was a passing on of responsibility. I’ve been called upon to
do something, even if it’s not entirely clear what that something is.”35
As Houston-Jones exits the space, a spotlight emerges on Cooper, who
begins to read into a microphone:
 I saw them once. I don’t know when or who they were because they were too far away. But I
remember certain things, like what they wore, which wasn’t anything special—pants, shirts,
regular colors—stuff I’ve seen thousands of times since.
I wanted them to know something. I cupped my hands around my mouth and thought about
yelling out. But they wouldn’t have heard me. Besides, I didn’t belong there. So I sat on a rock
and watched them. For some reason it still matters years later.
I thought about love. I think I confused what they did with it. But my belief made the day
great. I think I decided to make that my goal—to be like them. I put such incredible faith in the
future that I sobbed a little I think.
I can’t believe I once felt what I’m talking about. Those tangled guys have become an
abstraction, a gesture, a recreation. I wish I had taken a photo of them. Then I could rip it up,
because I’m tired of dreaming of what they implied every night of my life, or whenever I close
my eyes, whichever comes first. I thought it mattered. It does and it doesn’t. They’re very
beautiful back there, but put all that feeling in motion now, then try to get it to explode in your
face. It can’t. It’s not built to do that.
But they’re still there, no matter how I misremember them. And redefining whatever it was
they were doing is all I can do now. To sit here and see them again, no matter how cold that
looks. It wasn’t.36

The words come out slowly and with a weighted quality, as if you can
feel them moving around in Cooper’s mouth. This is the text from which
THEM got its name. A series of tableaux takes shape among the dancers as
Cooper reads, followed by an episodic series of improvisations that invoke
young men exploring gradations of desire, at times spiraling into ecstasy,
while at other times buckling under its force. It’s a visceral, gritty work, full
of shadows and violence. As one writer described the reconstruction, “Lit
like a dank alleyway, danced in saggy tee shirts and scuffed hi-tops, the
piece reeked of boy-stank.”37 There are multiple duets throughout the work
that suggest both attraction and repulsion and oscillate between seeing and
being seen. The dancers pose, preen, and grope, frequently hurling
themselves with abandon. There’s a section of the dance called “Dead
Friends,” in which Cooper recites a litany of deaths by various causes
(suicide, a car accident, cancer, but notably not AIDS) as Pheiffer bats
pennies with a two-by-four. With each death, one sees the glint of a penny
tossed into the air. One hears the thin sound of coin on wood, followed by
the muted sound of the coin hitting the brick wall upstage and then landing
on the floor. There’s a wrenching solo that explores the pleasure and shame
of touching oneself, and a cruising section where two dancers move in a
channel of light: tentatively posing for one another, then stalking, and then
outright chasing one another. One dancer gets pushed repeatedly onto a
mattress, and others get pinned against a wall.
 The partnering in THEM involves volatility, risk, and a sense of the
unknown in personal encounters, all of which are amplified by the
improvised nature of the dancing. Because the movements aren’t
predetermined, there’s always the chance of a collision or a missed
connection. As Deborah Jowitt wrote in her Village Voice review, “Because
they improvise their movements based on a score created by Houston-
Jones, their physicality has a reckless edge. They bang into one another
sometimes, stumble into or out of embraces, or fall with a crash. Watching
Niall Noel and Felix Cruz tussle near the beginning, I think of contact
improvisation performed at the edge of a precipice.”38
Toward the end of THEM, Pheiffer enters the space with a goat carcass
slung over his shoulders.39 The gamey stench of the decomposing animal
fills the theater as Pheiffer leads Vidich, the blindfolded young man from
the overture, into the stage-space. Vidich now wears white underwear and a
backward, white dress shirt. His feet are bare. Pheiffer tosses the carcass
onto the mattress, then turns and throws Vidich onto the mattress as well.
Vidich then wrestles with the goat on the mattress in a scene that is
unabashedly sexual, violent, and full of despair. He strokes and pulls the
flaccid carcass; he straddles it with his legs while grabbing onto one of its
horns; at one point, he even thrusts his head inside the animal. According to
Houston-Jones, who originally danced the role and has since described it as
his most terrifying performance experience,40 “The mattress and animal
carcass were a sort of acknowledgment of AIDS. People were dying—
friends, people we knew. There was panic. The carcass on the mattress
came from a dream my friend had. In it he woke up and he was lying next
to his own dead body; he would try to throw it out of bed, but it kept
coming back on top of him.”41 After the goat dance concludes, Pheiffer,
who has been watching the whole time, covers Vidich, except for his bare
feet, with a white sheet.
Soon afterward, the performers re-enter the space one by one. The young
men have taken off their shoes and changed into underclothes. Some of
them are bare-chested, while others wear undershirts. This simple attire
renders them vulnerable. Moreover, it suggests a private, intimate space.
They all face the audience. The frontal nature of this sequence—distinct
from the rest of the work—gives the impression that the young men are
standing in front of mirrors. The performers then slowly palpate their
bodies, roaming from throat to groin to underarms as if checking the size of
their lymph nodes (see Figure 17.5). Meanwhile, Pheiffer takes a piece of
paper from Cooper and reads a truncated version of the opening monologue
with downcast eyes and an inflection similar to Cooper’s:
I saw them once
I don’t know when or who they were
I’m too far away
I remember certain things
What they wore
I wanted them to know something
It still matters
I thought about love
I put such incredible faith in the future
I can’t believe I once felt
I wish I had taken a photo
I could rip it up.42

As Cooper stands by, with his grey hair and quiet slouch, while Pheiffer
reads his text, it becomes apparent that this is no straightforward
reconstruction. The three older men in the piece (Cooper, Cochrane, and
Houston-Jones) testify to an earlier time, and their presence adds layers of
temporal complexity that were not in the original work. Cooper recited
most of the same words in the 1986 performance. Although his voice is
familiar in video recordings of the original performances, the cadence is
quicker, and he’s a young man in his thirties with dark hair and a thin frame.
He looks no different in age than the rest of the 1980s cast. Now, though,
it’s striking to see a young man reciting text that is so retrospective and
melancholic. In Judith Halberstam’s In a Queer Time and Place,
Halberstam argues that “there is such a thing as ‘queer time’ and ‘queer
space’ … that develop, at least in part, in opposition to the institutions of
family, heterosexuality, and reproduction. They also develop according to
other logics of location, movement, and identification.”43 Halberstam notes
that queer time emerged with particular poignancy from within gay
communities during the height of the AIDS crisis. As the poet Thom Gunn
wrote, “My thoughts are crowded with death/and it draws so oddly on the
sexual/that I am confused/confused to be attracted/by, in effect, my own
annihilation.”44For some, the devastation caused by the virus resulted in an
investment in the present moment and a challenge to conventional
narratives of longevity and aging. Perhaps the young Cooper in 1986 was
speaking in distinctly queer time. Moreover, perhaps, if not exactly
“dancing for their lives” as the original cast did in 1985 at the P.S. 122
AIDS benefit of the same name, the younger dancers were improvising in
order to imagine and experience a kind of queer temporality where, as
Halberstam suggests, ways of aging and of forging relations with others
exist outside of the dominant story of how one should mature: “birth,
marriage, reproduction, and death.”45 The fact that these queer temporal
imaginings were improvised meant they were necessarily embodied,
flexible, and contingent, and that the dancers were ultimately responsible
for the choices they made in performance.
When asked what it was like to improvise with Cochrane, Cooper, and
Houston-Jones present, Noel Jones mentioned that the dancers were
“flanked” by the three older men, who are spatially more fixed than anyone
(they perform from specific locations that stay the same throughout the
show) and therefore create a kind of structural boundary for the work. The
younger cast of dancers felt beholden to the trio, as well as to the many
people who had fallen through history due to AIDS. Reflecting on the
dancers’ need to consider their connections to various queer lineages, Jones
remarked, “We’re enacting something that requires a kind of mentorship”
(see Figure 17.6).46 He then talked about the way in which Houston-Jones
brought his dancers verbally and physically into the work, recognizing the
importance of critical conversation but also believing that, ultimately,
embodied practice was necessary for the explorations at hand. Jones, as
well as several of the other dancers, noted that Houston-Jones has his likes
and dislikes, but their precise nature wasn’t clear to the dancers. He gave
them just enough information to proceed, without overly prescribing the
end result. Rather than show the younger cast extensive video
documentation from the 1986 performances, which might have
overdetermined their improvisations, he showed imagery that informed the
original creation of the work, by artists such as Francis Bacon, Gilbert and
George, and Eadweard Muybridge (see Figures 17.7 and 17.8). The dancer
Ben Van Buren noted that the work demanded a level of nuance, but that it
wasn’t dictated. Rather, it was something he had to find through
improvisation.47 Niall Noel Jones talked about trying to access cultural and
physical memories of community, or of fallen comrades, through dancing.
For him, the lymph node section was explicitly about this, given the extent
to which the score required gestures of self-diagnosis. Houston-Jones was
very specific about where the dancers should be touching. But the search
for cultural memory occurred in the more improvised sections of the dance
as well, perhaps in more compelling ways. According to Jones, “The
dancers had just come from forty minutes of feeling—of being a thrown
body—feeling through the wreck of it.”48 This feeling matters, for both the
performers and the audience. In conversation, Wey mentioned that, while
improvising, he sometimes found himself wondering what kind of sense
memories a given movement or gesture would trigger for viewers who had
experienced loss or who had seen the work in the 1980s.

FIGURE 17.6 Ishmael Houston-Jones, Dennis Cooper, and Chris Cochrane. Rehearsal at The New
Museum (2010).
Photograph by Christy Pessagno.

Because Houston-Jones took a long time to assign roles, the dancers

performed everything in rehearsals and spent a long time watching each
other in various relationships. Watching Houston-Jones was particularly
important for the younger dancers. As Wey explained, “There’s so much
history in watching Ishmael’s patterns and timing.”49 Jennifer Monson, a
choreographer who has followed Houston-Jones’s work for decades, also
sensed history within his solo, which, for her, was the same dance that he’s
been performing for thirty-five years. This was not at all a disparaging
comment. Rather, Monson was referring to Houston-Jones’s timing, and the
ways in which he makes himself available to a spectator’s gaze before
recoiling.50 As Houston-Jones wrote in 1987, “a lot of my work has to do
with invisibility—hiding identity to survive artistically, or revealing identity
to be subversive artistically. I try to subvert invisibility through
performance—to bring what’s invisible out into the open. As a black man in
mostly white downtown performance, I became fascinated with the idea of
invisibility. … I’m asking people not to accept certain conventions as either
the norm or as an acceptable way of life. I am going back and searching for
roots in some sense: performance roots, personal roots, historical roots.”51

FIGURE 17.7 Eadweard Muybridge, Wrestling; Graeco-Roman (1887). Plate from Muybridge’s
“Animal locomotion: an electro-photographic investigation of consecutive phases of animal
movements, 1872–1885.”
© Science Museum/Science & Society Picture Library.
FIGURE 17.8 Gilbert & George, Existers (1984).

The notion that movement patterns and timing contain history is crucial
when considering the political stakes of the reconstruction of THEM. As
Muñoz argues, “Gestures transmit ephemeral knowledge of lost queer
histories and possibilities.”52 According to Muñoz, in order to access queer
histories within a straight world one often needs to turn to ephemera, which
he describes as “trace, the remains, the things that are left.”53 When the
younger dancers began the reconstruction process and many of them felt as
though they had no connection to HIV/AIDS, Houston-Jones insisted that
the knowledge exists somewhere inside of them. Once the performers began
to share their stories and move together, connections and experiences that
were deeply embedded in the dancers’ subconscious minds and in their
bodies began to surface. Muñoz continues:
Ephemera are the remains that are often embedded in queer acts, in both stories we tell one
another and communicative physical gestures such as the cool look of a street cruise, a lingering
handshake between recent acquaintances, or the mannish strut of a particularly confident
woman.54
 Muñoz refers to the evidence of queer desire embedded in acts such as
the “cool look of a street cruise,” performed when someone moves through
a public locale in search of sex. It’s a cruise-y world that Cooper describes
in his text: “I used to dream of situations like this. A group of guys; me
among them. Guys so near you reach out your arms, you just put out your
arms and come back with this beautiful thing, this guy. … I’m going to
stroll around now and keep my eyes out for you know what.”55 Yet the
“cruising” sequence in THEM seemed particularly dated to the dancers and,
as a result, particularly challenged them as improvisers. Noel Jones, who
performed the section with Wey in the P.S. 122 reconstruction, noted that
their job was not to represent cruising, but to actually experience it. He then
explained, “Cruising involves seeing and being seen, and making desire
public. Cruising is a practice. It is performative. It is the performance of
something missing. It makes present the absence of what you’re dying to
find.”56 He then remarked, “There’s no real cruising in the city today. Gay
culture is so mediatized. We’re pulled into other spaces where we see each
other. Queerness has shifted to digital space.”57
Whether or not cruising really has disappeared, and whether or not
queerness has really moved wholesale to digital spaces, there has been a
cultural shift noted by several of the dancers. In that respect, the cruising
section provided an instance where, to quote Halberstam, “different
histories ‘touch’ or brush up against each other, creating temporal havoc in
the key of desire.”58 Van Buren, who performed Wey’s role when the
reconstruction of THEM toured the Netherlands in spring 2011, noted,
“Many of the ways I’ve learned about sexual behavior have been very
different from what takes place in THEM.”59 He continued, “This felt like
something from a different era. … I won’t say that homosexuality doesn’t
have the same alterity as it did in the eighties, but something is very
different now. The market is much more able to respond to and to exploit
gay life. Moreover, the spaces of violence in THEM are locatable—in the
bedroom, in a phone booth, on a mattress. It’s not that those spaces don’t
exist anymore, but they’re much more porous.”60 Van Buren then referred
to Cooper’s opening text to explain, “Witnessing a sexuality that is so
clearly located on a rock feels impossible now.”61
 “I WISH I HAD TAKEN A PHOTO/ I COULD RIP IT
UP”
In a review of THEM that appeared on Movement Research’s online site,
Critical Correspondence, Lindsey Drury, a dancer who had studied with
Houston-Jones, criticized the extent to which the reconstruction of THEM
relied on the original precepts from the 1980s. She wondered, for example,
how the work would change if women had been invited to the audition, or
how the work might shift if it were opened up to include transgender
bodies. “What would be lost?” she asked. “What could be gained?”62
Wondering about the goal of a “purist reconstruction,” she then exclaimed,
“I can’t imagine Houston-Jones as an artist who is seeking to make a
history text of himself, especially while he is very much alive.”63
Presumably, Drury was referring to Houston-Jones’s modest and at times
self-effacing demeanor. But Houston-Jones offered a spirited response to
Drury:
You are wrong on one point: I am “an artist who is seeking to make a history text of himself,
especially while he is very much alive.” I really care about how my work is seen and that it is
seen and remembered. I understand your point. I have Scorcese-envy. No one will ever question
another screening of “Taxi Driver” as valid. The wonderful and terrible thing about live arts,
especially dance, is that it happens, it is witnessed and then it is gone. Its ephemeral nature is its
strength and its weakness.64

Both dance scholars and critics have struggled with the ephemerality of
dance.65 In At the Vanishing Point, A Critic Looks at Dance, Marcia Siegel
voices the widely held belief that dance constitutes the ephemeral art par
excellence. “No other art is so hard to catch,” she writes, “so impossible to
hold.”66 But is the ephemeral nature of dance necessarily something that
one must resist? In Cruising Utopia, Muñoz pays particular attention to
Kevin Aviance—a tall, black club dancer who performs high femme drag—
whose gestures highlight the pleasure of queer desires that are often subject
to censorship or cruel dismissal. Elaborating on the materiality of queer
dancing more broadly, Muñoz argues:
Queer dance is hard to catch, and it is meant to be hard to catch—it is supposed to slip through
the fingers and comprehension of those who would use knowledge against us. But it matters and
takes on a vast material weight for those of us who perform or draw important sustenance from
performance. Rather than dematerialize, dance rematerializes. Dance, like energy, never
 disappears; it is simply transformed. Queer dance, after the live act, does not just expire. The
ephemeral does not equal unmateriality. It is more nearly about another understanding of what
matters. It matters to get lost in dance or to use dance to get lost: lost from the evidentiary logic
of heterosexuality. For queers, the gesture and its aftermath, the ephemeral trace, matter more
than many traditional modes of evidencing lives and politics.67

When Cooper and later Pheiffer state, “I wish I had taken a photo/I could
rip it up,” they are signaling the complex ways in which gestures—whether
those of “tangled guys” viewed from a rock, or those of young men
“dancing for their lives” at P.S. 122—have the capacity to nestle in the
minds and bodies of their witnesses. In some cases, that nestling can be
painful; but it also can entail a kind of pleasure. Those guys and their
gestures still matter. And when Muñoz argues that “it matters to get lost in
dance or to use dance to get lost,” he is not talking about some disabling
disorientation; rather, he is highlighting the production and the experience
of “queer time” in Halberstam’s sense. The young dancers in the
reconstruction of THEM were using dance to explore and present
organizations of time that resist a forward march of direct progress, and
they were using dance to explore multiple ways in which men relate to
other men. Through improvisation, the dancers opened themselves up to
ghostly presences and made spontaneous choices in a way that
acknowledged the past—in a felt, bodily way—while gesturing toward a
future. Perhaps it’s a future where dancers know and can state with
conviction that their dancing matters. Perhaps it’s also a future where
expansive possibilities exist for relating to others—for expressing and
acting upon desire—not just in virtual spaces, but also on the ground. When
Van Buren returned from performing THEM on a recent tour to the
Netherlands, he was able to draw from his staged experience of cruising. He
had received some schooling in seduction and was able read gestures
differently and to meet a stranger’s gaze. The New York City streets felt
different.

NOTES
1. Burt Supree, “Men with Men,” The Village Voice, December 22, 1986.
2. David Gere, How to Make Dances in an Epidemic: Tracking Choreography in the Age of AIDS
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004), 79.
3. In a recent e-mail correspondence, Houston-Jones noted that several animal rights activists
wrote letters of protest in response to the 1986 performance run at PS 122, and someone wrote a
letter of complaint to the Board of Health. Mark Russell asked Houston-Jones if he would
 consider using a taxidermic animal for the second week of the performance. Houston-Jones said
no to the request. Ishmael Houston-Jones, e-mail message to author, February 2, 2013.
4. Ishmael Houston-Jones, “On Burt Supree,” in “Heroes and Histories,” special issue, Movement
Research Performance Journal 6 (Spring/Summer 1993), http://ishmaelhj.com/id19.html.
5. Houston-Jones, “On Burt Supree.”
6. Supree, “Men with Men.”
7. Supree, “Men with Men.”
8. Gia Kourlas, “Ishmael Houston-Jones: The ’80s Are Back with THEM,” TimeOut New York,
September 20, 2010. http://newyork.timeout.com/arts-culture/dance/273774/ishmael-houston-
jones#ixzz10LvZix8l.
9. Ishmael Houston-Jones, interview with the author, December 17, 2010, New York, NY.
10. “THEM—Ishmael Houston-Jones op Springdance,” YouTube video, 6:20, uploaded by
“Cultureel Persbureau,” April 22, 2011, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08RXLIm7wVI.
11. José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: NYU
Press, 2009), 34.
12. Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 34.
13. Niall Noel Jones, interview with the author, May 19, 2011, New York, NY.
14. Noel Jones, interview with the author.
15. Anna Drozdowski and Ishmael Houston-Jones, “Dance Talk: Q&A with Ishmael Houston-
Jones,” last modified February 16, 2010, http://www.philadanceprojects.org/blog/dance-talk-qa-
ishmael-houston-jones.
16. In conversation, Ishmael mentioned that several of the younger dancers involved in the
reconstruction of THEM had studied improvisation in college and elsewhere, so it wasn’t
entirely new to them. But it wasn’t as radical as it had felt in the 1980s. He noted, “The times
didn’t feel as urgent to them, perhaps.” Ishmael Houston-Jones, interview with the author,
December 12, 2010, New York, NY.
17. Kourlas, “Ishmael Houston-Jones.”
18. Jennifer Monson, interview with the author, May 18, 2011, New York, NY.
19. In my recent book, I Want to Be Ready: Improvised Dance as a Practice of Freedom (Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010), I refer to these constraints as “tight places,” a term
that comes from Houston Baker’s Turning South Again: Re-Thinking Modernism/Re-Reading
Booker T. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001). I also turn to Fred Moten’s writings,
particularly “Taste Flavor Dissonance Escape: Preface for a Solo by Miles Davis,” Women &
Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 17, no. 2 (2007): 217–246, and Michel Foucault’s
late writings on practices of freedom in order to argue that improvisation’s keenest political
power exists as an ongoing engagement with social, historical, and aesthetic strictures.
20. Different versions of these exercises have been used for years by activists outside the dance
world.
21. Ishmael Houston-Jones, “A Dance of Identity: Notes on the Politics of Dancing,” Contact
Quarterly 21, no. 1 (Winter/Spring 1996): 11–13, http://ishmaelhj.com/id8.html.
22. Houston-Jones, “A Dance of Identity.”
23. Houston-Jones, “A Dance of Identity.”
24. Houston-Jones, “A Dance of Identity.”
25. Houston-Jones, “A Dance of Identity.”
26. Nancy Stark Smith, “A Subjective History of Contact Improvisation: Notes from the Editor of
Contact Quarterly, 1972–1997,” in Taken By Surprise: A Dance Improvisation Reader, ed. Ann
Cooper Albright and David Gere (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press: 2003), 169.
27. Noel Jones, interview with the author.
28. Enrico Wey, interview with the author, June 4, 2011, New York, NY.
29. “Us V Them: A Showcase of Young Improvisers,”
http://archive.newmuseum.org/index.php/Detail/Occurrence/Show/occurrence_id/1199.
30. Wey, interview with the author.
31. Ishmael Houston-Jones, THEM (unpublished manuscript reconstruction score).
32. Noel Jones, interview with the author.
33. The improvised score for THEM includes live electric guitar played by Cochrane, along with
accordion, keyboards, percussion, and tapes.
34. Movement score for THEM, provided by Ishmael Houston-Jones.
35. Wey, interview with the author.
36. Dennis Cooper, “THEM,” Spank NYC Art Zine and Party 17 (January 25, 2011).
37. Lindsey Drury, “Response: Lindsey Drury on Ishmael Houston-Jones, Dennis Cooper and Chris
Cochrane’s THEM, with a Reply from Ishmael,”
http://www.movementresearch.org/criticalcorrespondence/blog/?p=2380.
38. Deborah Jowitt, “From Switzerland, Ireland, and the U.S.: Guys on Guys,” The Village Voice,
January 12, 2011, http://www.villagevoice.com/2011-01-12/dance/from-switzerland-ireland-
and-the-u-s-guys-on-guys/.
39. In an interview with the author (December 17, 2010), Houston-Jones noted that the goat did a
lot of work for the process. Much of what the piece was about was purely theoretical for the
dancers until the goat arrived. They got it from a Halal butcher, who kept saying that it would be
ready soon. They got it just before the dress rehearsal. This was the first time that the dancers
worked with the dead animal. It had only just been killed. It was still warm. And it hadn’t been
drained. It bled, a lot. They weren’t prepared for what that body would do to the work. The dress
rehearsal was crazy and the work transformed itself. Wey (interview with the author) noted that
every night after the performance at P.S. 122, they’d need to put the goat into a freezer. Before
the show, they’d have to give it a warm bath and pat it down to dry it. They used three goats
during the performance run. The carcasses weren’t buried until about a month later.
40. Ishmael Houston-Jones, “Ishmael Houston-Jones FAQ,” http://ishmaelhj.com/id3.html, accessed
December 17, 2012.
41. Ishmael Houston-Jones as told to David Velasco, “Ishmael Houston-Jones,” Artforum,
September 26, 2010, http://artforum.com/words/id=26489.
42. Cooper, “THEM.”
43. Judith Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New
York: NYU Press, 2005), 1.
44. Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place, 2.
45. Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place, 2.
46. Noel Jones, interview with the author.
47. Ben Van Buren, interview with the author, May 19, 2011, New York, NY.
48. Noel Jones, interview with the author.
49. Wey, interview with the author.
50. Monson, interview with the author.
51. Marc Robinson, Ishmael Houston-Jones, John Kelly, Karen Finley, and Richard Elovich,
“Performance Strategies,” Performing Arts Journal 10, no. 3 (1987): 36.
52. Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 67.
53. Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 65.
54. Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 65.
55. Cooper, “THEM.”
56. Noel Jones, interview with the author.
57. Noel Jones, interview with the author.
58. Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place, 3.
59. Van Buren, interview with the author.
 60. Van Buren, interview with the author.
61. Van Buren, interview with the author.
62. Drury, “Response.”
63. Drury, “Response.”
64. Drury, “Response.”
65. See André Lepecki’s Exhausting Dance: Performance and the Politics of Movement (New York
and London: Routledge, 2006), 125.
66. Marcia Siegel, At the Vanishing Point: A Critic Looks at Dance (New York: Saturday Review
Press: 1972), 1.
67. Siegel, At the Vanishing Point, 81.

WORKS CITED LIST

Baker, Houston A. Jr. Turning South Again: Re-Thinking Modernism/Re-Reading Booker T.
Durham: Duke University Press, 2001.
Cooper, Dennis. “THEM.” Spank NYC Art Zine and Party 17 (January 25, 2011).
Drozdowski, Anna and Ishmael Houston-Jones. “Dance Talk: Q&A with Ishmael Houston-Jones.”
Last modified February 16, 2010. http://www.philadanceprojects.org/blog/dance-talk-qa-ishmael-
houston-jones.
Drury, Lindsey. “Response: Lindsey Drury on Ishmael Houston-Jones, Dennis Cooper and Chris
Cochrane’s THEM, with a Reply from Ishmael.” Critical Correspondence. Accessed February 2,
2013, http://www.movementresearch.org/criticalcorrespondence/blog/?p=2380.
Gere, David. How to Make Dances in an Epidemic: Tracking Choreography in the Age of AIDS.
Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004.
Halberstam, Judith. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York:
NYU Press, 2005.
Houston-Jones, Ishmael. “On Burt Supree.” “Heroes and Histories.” Special issue, Movement
Research Performance Journal 6 (Spring/Summer 1993). http://ishmaelhj.com/id19.html.
Houston-Jones, Ishmael. “A Dance of Identity: Notes on the Politics of Dancing.” Contact Quarterly
21, no. 1 (Winter/Spring 1996): 11–13.
Houston-Jones, Ishmael. “Ishmael Houston-Jones FAQ.” http://ishmaelhj.com/id3.html, accessed
December 17, 2012.
Houston-Jones, Ishmael. “Ishmael Houston-Jones.” Artforum. Last modified September 26, 2010.
http://artforum.com/words/id=26489.
Jowitt, Deborah. “From Switzerland, Ireland, and the U.S.: Guys on Guys.” The Village Voice,
January 12, 2011. http://www.villagevoice.com/2011-01-12/dance/from-switzerland-ireland-and-
the-u-s-guys-on-guys/.
Kourlas, Gia. “Ishmael Houston-Jones: The ’80s are back with THEM.” TimeOut New York,
September 20, 2010. http://www.timeout.com/newyork/art/ishmael-houston-jones.
Lepecki, André. Exhausting Dance: Performance and the Politics of Movement. London: Routledge,
2006.
Moten, Fred. “Taste Flavor Dissonance Escape: Preface for a Solo by Miles Davis.” Women &
Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 17, no. 2 (2007): 217–246.
Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: NYU
Press, 2009.
Robinson, Marc, Ishmael Houston-Jones, John Kelly, Karen Finley, and Richard Elovich.
“Performance Strategies.” Performing Arts Journal 10, no. 3 (1987): 31–55.
Siegel, Marcia. At the Vanishing Point: A Critic Looks at Dance. New York: Saturday Review Press,
1972.
Stark Smith, Nancy. “A Subjective History of Contact Improvisation: Notes from the Editor of
Contact Quarterly, 1972–1997.” In Taken By Surprise: A Dance Improvisation Reader, edited by
Ann Cooper Albright and David Gere, 153–174. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press,
2003.
Supree, Burt. “Men with Men.” The Village Voice, December 22, 1986.
“THEM—Ishmael Houston-Jones op Springdance.” YouTube video, 6:20. Uploaded by “Cultureel
Persbureau,” April 22, 2011. Accessed February 4, 2013. http://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=08RXLIm7wVI.
 CHAPTER 18
IMPROVISING SOCIAL EXCHANGE

African American Social Dance

THOMAS F. DEFRANTZ

BROADLY defined, social dance operates as an unavoidable and essential site

of identity formation for individuals and groups; in mythologies of
American youth culture from the 1950s forward, it stands as a primary site
of improvised selfhood. In African American communities, the importance
of social dance to group cohesion through changing historical eras can
seldom be overstated. Social dance allows its practitioners access to modes
of personal expression that provide urgent clues of physical capacity, desire,
social flexibility, and an ability to innovate. In social dance, we discover the
ever-expanding range of possibilities that might define individual presence
within a group dynamic.
This essay explores African American social dance structures of the
twentieth and twenty-first centuries, where improvisation operates as a
crucial methodology and ideology. Improvisation provides a methodology
for the construction of social dance exchange. Improvisation also stands as
a foundational ideology of black social dance practice. Conceptually, this
twinned resource demonstrates an unimpeachable centrality of the physical
practice of improvisation: “creating while doing,” or consistently asking
questions while moving, becomes foundational to the emergence of a social
black self in communion with others.
A black social self might be one that imagines itself in communion with
other black selves, even as it distinguishes its capacities along lines of
ability, interest, and desire. Black exists in relationship to other markers of
identity, black and non-black, and the process of relationship determines
possibilities of recognition that undergird its existence. In other words,
black is not a thing, but rather, a gesture, an action, a sensibility made
manifest. Thus, a black social self is literally a concept in motion, shifting
and forming according to the terms of encounter that determine social
relations.
Social dance offers a site where black motion can be generated,
accommodated, honed, and appreciated; it offers a place of aesthetic
possibility connected to personal expression. For this chapter, social dance
might be dance created in situations without separation of performer and
audience, and without a predetermined intention of expression. The sites of
this genre include school auditoriums, church basements, house parties,
nightclubs, and rented ballrooms, and the genre becomes manifest within
event celebrations such as family reunions, cotillions, weddings, school
dances, and birthday parties. On these sorts of occasions, and in these sites,
social dance emerges as the consecration of an event by the group, as an
embodied aesthetic marking of presence in time. Non-linear creativity
within social dance motion distinguishes it from goal-oriented athletics or
the politically tilted gestures of rallies or sit-ins (choreographies of sport or
protest). For our purposes, social dance hinges upon the possibility of
expression and communication as its own goal within a particular time and
place. Social dance occurs outside of everyday interactions of commerce,
meaning that it cannot be paid labor, and, significantly, it requires the
participation of a larger group who recognize the dance event as such.
Defined thus, by its own occurrence and participation, social dance
constitutes ritual practices that characterize individual action within
communal communication and exchange.

RHETORICS OF AFRICAN AMERICAN

IMPROVISATION
The adage that African American culture “makes something from nothing”
underscores emphases on improvisation and composition that surround
black presence in the New World. Pundits and cultural theorists can easily
align black social dances to an “American inventiveness” and “do-it-
yourself-ness” foundational to an understanding of an American self. In this
narrative line, youthful America creates itself out of incessant volition and
ambition to achieve. Similarly, improvisation arrives as ambition toward
achievement; as an ability to move unexpectedly toward a goal, as well as
an ability to move as the situation demands. The performance of intentional,
directed movement allows for a recognition of the act of black social dance
improvisation, and creative invention in the moment characterize its
possibilities.
Black social dances also align this necessary moving-to-express with an
embodied realization of pleasure. The assumption of a serious pleasure
within the invention of physical improvisation merits special consideration
here. Black social dances conceive of social, rhythmic motion as
pleasurable, and essential, modes of interaction and exchange;
improvisation intends to allow for playful, liberatory embodied choice-
making within the context of the group. The pleasures of social dance relate
to its musicality and embedded processes of choice-making within agreed-
upon group structures; the practice of dancing in this genre demonstrates
emotional and spiritual well-being.
In a nod to the general tendency to value literature over orature, some
dance scholars have labored to define improvisation as choreography in
black vernacular (social) dancing. Dance literature, or choreography, might
be work that could be recorded on paper or via technologies of visual
media, while improvisation might be more akin to structures of spontaneous
oration and rhetoric. In 2001, theorist Jonathan David Jackson called for a
valorization of sensing, or emotion, in social dance as a “path of intelligent
knowing” that might resist the violent Platonic/Cartesian split caused by
writing (Jackson 2001, 43). In black vernacular dance, “improvisation
means the creative structuring, or the choreographing, of human movement
in the moment of ritual performance,” a structuring that aligns
improvisation with intentional composition (44). This line of argumentation
tends to re-stabilize choreography, or writing, as the ideal model for dance
practice. But improvisation, especially in black social dance circumstances,
conveys its own pleasures and urgencies without necessary recourse to
translatable signs and symbols that characterize writing. The
improvisational practices of these dances complete themselves without an
insistence on translation into language or visual mark.
Jackson’s call for “sensing” as a mode of analysis suggests an intangible
analytic for improvisation, one that stresses the impermanent, time-based
nature of social dance production. Sensing becomes manifest in waves, like
thought and motion, and resists a fixing of gesture. Improvisation that
proceeds from a reliance on sensing, then, might become enlivened by the
engagement of unexpected and unusual motion; by physical embellishment
or unruliness that works to unsettle formalized repetitions of gesture. In
other words, the dancer’s innovation in response to a rhythmic/musical
ground provides essential markers toward the production of emotion that
might be sensed within the dance. Fulfilling the age-old adage in a different
way, the “something” produced by the dance builds from the largely
invisible “nothing” of physical perception.

TELEOLOGIES OF IMPROVISATION IN AFRICAN

AMERICAN SOCIAL DANCE
INSIDE the dance, I enjoy the discovery of what we can do together. With
you watching, a willing witness, confidante, and partner in motion, I feel
supported to break the beat, to resist the complex, but steady, grounding
pulse that already offers so many ways to imagine synchronicities of energy.
The complex rhythm that forms the ground for our dance echoes in my
nervous system, pulsing outward from my incessantly rhythmicized life
force, and confirming the potency of this encounter of music and movement.
My pulse, our pulse, the musical pulse converge and align, but then
separate so that our dance can emerge in-between. I grimace at the effort to
move outside of these cadences, I risk movements and fail along the way,
and laugh and smile at any achievement that you or I share as we dance.
Social dance functions as a barometer of connectivity, or a way for
people to recognize a social self. The dance produces relationship; and in it,
we struggle to achieve. Moving among others, we hope for connection to be
born or to be laid bare as we stomp, shift, glide, and dip through passages of
spontaneous motion. This connection is not guaranteed, and the risk of
social dance arrives intertwined with its improvisational imperative. We risk
failure, or a miscommunication that might alter our future capacities outside
of the dance. This risk adds to the sense of urgency surrounding its
execution. Social dance matters, and its improvisations are embedded
within the relationships that it may or may not inspire.
 African American social dance proceeds from the need to communicate
outside of language; a passage of dance may be language-like, but it is not
at all literal. Corporeal Orature, a designator for the process of
communicating through choices of movement, provides methodology
grounded in history for the practice of social dance. Here, body-talking
establishes intertextual connection among steps and gestures performed
inside the dance, with referents often drawn from circumstances outside its
execution. A movement may make reference to someone else’s version of
its form, as in a step done in cousin Jan’s distinctive slow-motion style; it
may reference dances no longer in wide distribution, as in the insertion of a
1980s “Roger Rabbit” in the midst of a 2010s “Wobble”; it may
mimetically suggest direct metaphor, as in bringing hands to the heart to
indicate feelings of affection, or brushing a hand across a forehead, to
indicate exertion or “sweating” a partner or situation. These insertions of
embodied referents arrive in non-linear, evocative assembly; they confirm
the expansive possibility of statement enabled by the dance. Dancers access
these referents in improvised response to the occasion of the dance. The
most successful corporeal orature employs elegant, unexpected assemblage
of metaphor and physical achievement.
A historical dimension of black social dance, alluded to above, renders it
at once archival and futuristic. Dancers rediscover pungent pleasure and
expressive capacity in older, discarded movements, made fresh again now
with unanticipated musical accompaniment. The music of social dance
grounds its improvisational practices and stimulates movement possibilities
with sonic calls that provoke physical response. A propulsive backbeat
suggests fast footwork from 1930s dances; a slow, downward-sliding bass
line can inspire “lean back” gestures from repertories of 1960s or 1990s
dances. Improvisation in this realm, then, reaches back in order to cast
forward, confirming affiliation among movements from a lively past of
dancing while reimagining possibilities of gesture. This reiteration of
motion aligns the practice of social dance with an Africanist aesthetic
imperative that values cycles of repetition (Snead 1981). Social dance can
fulfill the embodied reclaiming, or remembering, of musical
genres/rhythmic bases that define eras and styles of black popular music.

LEARNING TO SOCIAL DANCE

I WANT to dance with you. I want to move alongside you, and toward and
away from you, as we navigate the rhythms and sonic structures that
surround us. I want to guess at what you might do, and I want to be correct
most of the time. I want to surprise you with my ability to do something you
didn’t know I might. I want to ride the rhythm a little longer than we may
have done last time, or to work against the beat in a stutter step and turn
toward the group. I want my dance to confirm me in this moment. To
validate our communion as people in relationship, in the space of the
dance, in the process of discovery. When we dance we wonder at what is
possible, we appreciate how impulse turns into gesture and gesture reveals
desire and intellect. Our dance is multidimensional, and I want it to be
good, I want to be provocative and profound. I never know whether this will
happen, but I do hope for it. Will you dance with me?
The process of learning to social dance is actually a process of learning to
improvise. Or, more correctly perhaps, a process of learning to trust one’s
improvisation. Because social dance has no set outcome, or ironclad form,
its practice may be defined in large part by the willingness of its
participants. The willingness to engage in social dance is a willingness to
accept risk and an unruly inability to know what will happen. Social dance
challenges the faculties of physical engagement and relational
correspondence. To dance well in this idiom is to trust that one’s choices
have value, and that they will communicate something recognizable and
fleetingly noteworthy.
A longstanding Hollywood trope casts awkward young men in the role of
needing to learn to social dance in order to connect with their object of
desire; in this idiom, social dance is defined as a rite of passage.
Formulaically, this scenario usually involves a best friend or mentor leading
the protagonist through a montage of missteps and embarrassments before
the big dance event/prom where tensions and disappointments may be
resolved through the demonstration of dance. In these scenarios, the main
character exceeds his training in the heat of the performative moment, and
in an improvisational flourish, achieves gestures that he didn’t know he
might. Footloose offers a classic portrayal of this genre. Note that in both
the first 1984 iteration and the 2011 remake, the small-city, white dancers
engage in white-derived “rock and roll” dances, as well as African
American-created social dance movements. The black social dance
movements—steps drawn from 1960s “black power”–era social dances
including “the football” and “the Four Tops”—allow the main characters of
the films to shine forth in improvisatory demonstrations of their abilities
and personalities. The black social dance improvisations confirm the arrival
of a recognizable subject in motion, ready to engage others in a physical,
desirous relationship.
To dance well differs little from speaking well: social dance demonstrates
embodied rhetoric. Improvisational movers can align ideas in coherent
sequence to signal agility, ability, wit, or sensual pleasure. Elegance of
execution and composition matters here, and a recognizable “turn of
phrase” separates the best social artists from their companions. But because
dance movement does not carry literal meaning, witnesses and partners
engage the essential act of decoding that confers communicative value. To
reiterate, social dance arrives as a mode of encounter, realized by two or
more participants.
Some social dancers have little to say, and their dance arrives in simple,
repetitive motion. These might be the dances that most people perform:
dances that engage little improvisation, and make few extra-dance
references; dances that answer a simple rhythmic and social need to be in
motion with others. These dances also matter, as sensation and confirmation
of possibilities for a group dynamic. But, as in the Hollywood prototype,
the moments of black social dance that linger longest in memory tend to
derive from those compressed circumstances that produce an unanticipated
articulation of character or self, even if only in the instant of their
improvised realization. These might be small acts, but they can surely shift
the architecture of relationship.

PROFESSIONAL SOCIAL DANCE

THIS is what I already know. If I push back with my weight through my
hips, and grind my feet into the ground with a heaviness of step, I can
amaze you with the acuteness of an angle produced by my bent knees and
elbows; I can stun you into silence with the accuracy and force of my
attacking hips in motion, or the smoothness of my glide across the floor as I
release my weight ever upwards from the ground. I scurry across the floor,
shifting my feet without seeming effort. I curve my arm up my body, circling
my hips, touching my torso lightly, gazing inward, pulling my focus inside,
and as I close my eyes, I suppose I do find something out. I didn’t know
about this weight here, or that possible shift of energy to there. Did you see
me do that? But even in these few seconds of knowing my motion, and
sensing it differently, I need your witnessing to stabilize my discovery.
Professional social dances offer an illusion of improvisation. The
conceptual contradiction between professional and social dance has to do
with the level of improvisation present in performance. Professional
dancers practice and rehearse consistently alone or with others, in order to
engage an expanded repertory of movement available for performance.
Social dancers, though, practice less consistently, and discover possibilities
within the realm of social dancing itself. Talented and highly skilled social
dancers move beyond the category that would seem to define them as they
become the leading participants of any circumstance of dance. Their
leadership typically indicates two truths: one, that their practice intends to
minimize risk and maximize a finished quality of execution; and two, that
their performance might be repeated, or replicated, nearly intact in other
circumstances and on other occasions.
Professional social dance is the dance of television and film, the dance of
the stage, and the dance of demonstration. In this form of dance, dancers
embellish and exaggerate the physical contours, or steps, of the form to
affirm the possibilities of organized performance. Expert social dancers in
any genre inspire and delight their audiences, who inevitably enjoy
witnessing the supremely confident execution of movement that emerges
without the hesitations and ruptured mistakes of everyday improvisation.
The thrill of social dance performed with minimal risk move its contents
toward the space of the refined, the repeatable, the commodifiable.
When black social dance can be repeated and professionalized, it loses its
ability to convey the unexpected discovery. Rather, it seeks to amaze by its
spectacular presence. In this, black social dance has been entirely
successful, from its earlier international achievement in the nineteenth-
century cakewalk, to the twenty-first-century inventions of j-setting and turf
dancing distributed by YouTube videos. The professional social dancers
who practice these forms, and arrive in films made by Thomas A. Edison or
in HD on internet sites, seldom make a living by dancing. Like other dance
artists, they encounter a field full of competition and small opportunity
compared to their number. But for these best of the best, social dancing is
more than avocation, and their presence in social settings transforms the
event from a place of mutual exploration to a place of the show. The
professional social dancers—those in the “cat’s corner” at the Savoy
Ballroom in the 1930s, or on the upper level of the Studio 54 in the 1970s—
demonstrate a soaring potential for social exchange in their embodied
excellence, their practiced expertise. Surely they also improvise to some
degree, but the terms of improvisation arrive in studied difference of effect.
For devoted social dancers, competitions allow a high-level engagement
with the raised stakes of performance necessary for movement invention.
Indeed, African American dance competitions occupy a valued and
essential site of social performance, stretching from dances in seventeenth-
century corn-husking competitions to twentieth-century Chicago Stepping
competitions. In these events, expert social dancers try their skills against
other, equally committed movers, to be judged by other experts and
gathered witnesses surrounding the performance. Here, improvisation arises
as dancers push their movement beyond the routines they’ve practiced so
carefully. Improvisation supplies the burnished energy of desire that marks
physical effort as extraordinary. Collectively, we feel this “push to exceed”
and move beyond the known gestures, and the improvisatory flourish
inevitably wins the challenge.

IMPROVISING SEXUALITY AND FAILURE

THE YOUNG man focuses his energy through his pelvis, through the
muscles that bind the torso and abdomen to the hips and thighs. His face
contorts in the visage of worry. With one arm held high, he reaches forward
with his other arm, hand opened and tensed at once, as if to slap something.
He plays different rhythms across his body: hands moving in a slow patting
gesture against the air, while he animates his hips in staggered but quick
jabbing circles, moving faster and faster as he bends his legs more and
more. The young women who surround him seem concerned as well; they
seem to want to understand what he means to express through his dance.
They clap for him, and hold the beat steady so that he can solo in front of it.
Suddenly, the film cuts to another dancer. The short film clip lasts less than
five seconds, and viewers witnessing the film learn little of its implications,
or what the short improvisation might mean for the dancer or his witnesses.
 Social dance incites considerations of sexuality, and both its practitioners
and detractors tend to conflate ability in the dance with sexual availability.
This makes sense, if we consider social dance as a barometer of intimate
responsiveness and ability to improvise physically; these might be preferred
qualities in intimate encounter. But often, detractors construe black social
dances—these dances that consistently emphasize an agility in all parts of
the body with knees bent, torso engaged, and pelvis released—as agents of
immorality and instigators of lust. The young man described above, dancing
in the documentary Rize, demonstrates movements aligned with “the
stripper dance,” a form named for its borrowing from commodified, and
largely improvised, sexually charged performance dance. Social dancers
conceive the stripper dance as a solo form, practiced in turns amid a
witnessing and supportive group—often at the center of a dance circle. The
stripper dance exists along the border of social dance to be explored in
encounter with another, and dances of labor, to be shared with an entire
group.
The dance circle acts as intermediary between an intimate sociality of
two and the unwieldiness of a dancer viewed by a mass audience. The
dance circle mitigates interpretive distances that arise as social dance
broadens its reach, and provides an “in-between” space of encounter for
prepared dance and improvisation, personal discovery and group consensus.
The dance circle protects and permits, and its boundaries reveal the
limitations of palpable discovery in dance motion. Outside the circle—
sitting in the auditorium watching social dancers onstage, or at home
viewing dancers online—I can only guess at the value of danced exchange.
Without the cues of context that mark any successful and evocative
communication, my guesses at the importance of danced innovations before
me will largely fail.
The circle of the dance, referenced by Fanon, accommodates the needs of
a community to recognize itself in motion. More important, the circle
allows improvisers to find their own form without reference to the
movements of the larger group. Outside the circle—when the group is in its
larger, improvising whole—small gestures and discoveries rise and fall,
emerge and dissipate alongside the rhythmic pulse of the dance. These
small victories in movement matter, but they remain small and contained by
the near-privacy of their occurrence. Without the circle, improvising social
dancers often exceed the emerging trends of the larger group. Within the
circle, physical moments of “flash” or “shine” reveal an inner emotional life
of the dancers. In the circle, these surprising movements are encouraged,
observed, supported, valued, and remembered. But what do they mean?
What of the improvised gestures that resist even the norms of the group
black social dance, the electric slide or cha-cha slide? If these group dances
promote access to a black social self in communion with others, what does
improvisation outside of these formal structures do?
Improvisation, then, poses special problems of interpretation in black
social dance, largely constrained by pressures of everyday racism.
Improvising black social dancers, more than others, may be seen to operate
as provocateurs, non-normative dancers whose moves seek to subvert social
norms. In many ways, this capacity stands, as social dance allows for the
performance of outrageous gesture—sexualized, desirous, intimidating—
within its context of embodied thought. But black social dance also risks
failure in its improvisations, and that circumstance, where movements land
without value or impact, continually reminds us all of the fragility of
gesture, and the abiding need to try again.
Because it is probably in those missteps that improvisation reassures us.
What we need to know: the recovery is always possible, that invention
generates heat and confirms capacity, that figuring the thing out together
reminds us of a possible shared knowledge. Our improvisation enlivens us
because it confirms that we are flexible, willing to not know, but engaged in
the question of what might be.

REFERENCES
Brewer, Craig, dir. Footloose. Paramount Pictures, 2011.
DeFrantz, Thomas F. “The Black Beat Made Visible: Body Power in Hip Hop Dance.” In Of the
Presence of the Body: Essays on Dance and Performance Theory, edited by Andre Lepecki, 64–
81. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2004.
Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth, translated by Constance Farrington. New York: Grove
Press, 1963.
Jackson, Jonathan David. “Improvisation in African-America Vernacular Dancing.” Dance Research
Journal 33, no. 2 (2001): 40–53.
LaChapelle, David, dir. Rize. Lionsgate Films, 2005.
Ross, Herbert, dir. Footloose. Paramount Pictures, 1984.
Snead, James A. “On Repetition in Black Culture,” Black American Literature Forum 15, no. 4
(1981): 146–154.
 CHAPTER 19
FIXING IMPROVISATION

Copyright and African American Vernacular

Dancers in the Early Twentieth Century

ANTHEA KRAUT

IN 1952, the German-born modern dancer Hanya Holm copyrighted the

dances she choreographed for the hit 1948 Broadway musical Kiss Me,
Kate and reportedly “made history” as the first to secure a copyright for a
choreographic composition.1 Although choreography was not recognized by
United States copyright law in its own right until 1976, the Labanotated
score2 that Holm submitted was granted protection as a dramatico-musical
composition. Not included in the score was the jazz-tap routine performed
by African American “specialty” dancers in the musical’s show-stopping
number, “Too Darn Hot.” Instead, notes in the score indicated that “the
exact arrangement varied according to what the negros [sic] could do.”3 The
unnamed “negros” who performed this routine in the late 1940s and early
1950s included the comedy- and class-act dance teams Fred Davis and
Eddie Sledge, Charles Cook and Ernest Brown, Honi Coles and Cholly
Atkins, and the Wallace Brothers.
The exclusion of African American jazz dance from the copyrighted
score of Kiss Me, Kate calls up a set of oppositions that seem to arise
whenever intellectual property law and black cultural practices are
discussed in tandem. Where U.S. copyright law grants protection to
“original works of authorship fixed in a tangible medium of expression,”4
black vernacular traditions that place a premium on improvisation5 tend to
elude the fixity that documentation requires.6 Correspondingly, where the
copyright system has benefited white artists who produce written records of
their output, it has consistently failed to recognize or reward African
American artists, whose oral traditions have so often been treated as “raw
material” and therefore free for the taking. The withholding of royalties
from black blues musicians is perhaps the most vivid example of the
racialized allocation of intellectual property rights in the U.S., but a number
of legal critics have argued that Western ideas of singular authorship and
fixity embedded in copyright law are incompatible with African American
vernacular forms more broadly. As Kembrew McLeod writes, “The
intertextual practices that characterize many aspects of African-American
culture conflict with a particular way of understanding authorship and
ownership that originated in Western Enlightenment and Romanticist
thought.”7 Certainly, a large body of scholarship has demonstrated that
black vernacular traditions are not only collectively created, orally
transmitted, and improvisational, but also make regular use of “signifyin’ ”
or intertextual techniques.8 As such, they fail to conform to the very
“structural elements of the copyright system—such as the requirements of
tangible (written) form, and minimal standard of originality.”9
Yet this narrative of conflict and failure is not the only story to be told
about copyright’s historical relationship to black artists working in
improvisatory traditions. Over two decades before Holm obtained her Kiss
Me, Kate copyright, the African American comic dancer Johnny Hudgins
secured a copyright in London on a booklet that detailed a series of his
pantomime routines, including his celebrated “Mwa Mwa” act, in which he
corporeally mimicked the sounds of an accompanying trumpet. The booklet
proclaimed the originality of Hudgins’s routines and decreed, “No one is
allowed to impersonate me, or use any parts of said Act unless given a
written consent from JOHNNY HUDGINS, and if so it must be announced
on all programs or from the Stage.”10
Hudgins’s turn to the institution of copyright to protect his act suggests
the need to think beyond totalizing oppositions between the ideology of
intellectual property law and the practice of African American jazz dancers.
This chapter aims to offer a more nuanced account of that relationship by
juxtaposing brief case studies of Hudgins and the specialty dancers in Kiss
Me, Kate as they came into contact with legal claims of ownership. Given
copyright’s originality and fixity requirements, these cases force us to
confront questions about the risks and rewards for black vernacular dancers
of claiming uniqueness and of submitting to documentation. As dance
scholar Danielle Goldman has recently written, although performance in
general and improvisation in specific are often valued precisely because
they are thought to resist “the trap of documentation” and thereby evade the
regulatory mechanisms of our capitalist reproductive economy, the stakes of
this “resistance” should not be overlooked.11 The examples of Hudgins and
the Kiss Me, Kate dancers help show that the stakes were not only
historiographic (who was awarded a place in the historical record), but also
economic (who accrued financial and artistic credit for their embodied
expression). Because these African American performers were at one and
the same time immersed in dance traditions that privileged improvisation
and trying to survive in a white-controlled theatrical marketplace, exploring
the complex dynamics of their engagement with copyright can offer insight
into the possibilities and pitfalls of navigating between the ethos of
improvisation and the mandates of intellectual property law.

SPONTANEITY, FIXITY, AND OWNERSHIP: THE

CASE OF JOHNNY HUDGINS
Born in Baltimore, Johnny Hudgins (1896–1990) was what Marshall and
Jean Stearns in their book Jazz Dance call an “eccentric” dancer, the term
serving as “a catchall for dancers who have their own non-standard
movements and sell themselves on their individual styles.”12 A blackface
performer at a time when burnt cork makeup was still a familiar if no longer
universal stage practice, Hudgins’s specialties consisted mainly of
pantomimed movement gestures and sliding steps. He began his career as a
song-and-dance man in local theatres in Baltimore before being hired as a
dancer on the white burlesque circuit, which he toured for a number of
years. In 1924, Hudgins joined the all-black Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake
revue The Chocolate Dandies. One evening in the course of the revue’s run,
he later explained, “I got hoarse and the trumpet man was making these
sounds and I just moved my mouth. The trumpet player caught the way I
was doing my mouth and I cut out all the singing and went into pantomime
with trumpet and this pantomime song. I named it—‘Wow, Wow.’ And I
pantomimed throughout the whole show and I pantomimed ever since.”13
 Apocryphal or not, Hudgins’s account of the impromptu invention of his
dance routine serves as an instructive place to begin assessing the interplay
between markers of improvisation and markers of ownership in his work. A
commonplace trope among jazz artists, Hudgins’s tale of accidental
discovery of the routine that would make him famous signals both his bona
fides as an agile improviser and his authorial “genius.”14 Caught on stage
with a bout of laryngitis, Hudgins ditches the score and literally plays it by
ear, letting his body stand in for his voice. In the process, he discovers a
new specialty for himself as a pantomimist. The story touts his ability to
think on (and with) his feet, a prized quality among vernacular dancers.
Even while celebrating his spontaneity, Hudgins’s narrative serves to
reinforce the originality of his act. Although, as intellectual property rights
scholars have pointed out, the originality requirement of copyright law is
not without contradiction, it has meant, at a minimum, that a work cannot
be copied from another but must issue directly from the author.15 In
practice, the Lockean principle of possessing property in one’s “person” has
weighed heavily on determinations of originality. According to legal
scholar McLeod, “Just as Locke understood property as being created when
a person mixes one’s labor with materials found in nature, the author’s
“property” became “his” own when he stamps his personality on the work
—doing this in an “original” manner.”16 And so a “discourse of the original
genius” has persisted within copyright’s implicit notions of creativity.17
Somewhat counterintuitively, the alleged haphazardness of Hudgins’s initial
“Mwa Mwa” routine actually buttressed its originality to his person: the
pantomimed gestures were a response to and derived from the particular
conditions of his suddenly speechless body. This, incidentally, was also a
defining feature of the eccentric dancer—distinctive moves linked to unique
person.18
Of course, Hudgins’s origination tale doubtlessly conceals as much as it
reveals. An undated newspaper article offers an alternative account of
Hudgins’s creative process:
For nine years he traveled around the country playing at all the major burlesque houses.
During this time he was changing his act and developing it into a pantomime blackface
routine similar to that of the pre-twenties star—Bert Williams—who came to fame doing an
imitation of whites doing imitations of blacks.
He became so successful he was taken into the renowned Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake
production “Chocolate Dandies” that enjoyed long runs in New York and Boston.19
In this admittedly more credible telling, Hudgins’s act was not the
fortuitous byproduct of unforeseen events but the result of time, labor,
calculation, and fine-tuning. This version also identifies Bert Williams, one
of the most popular performers of the late minstrelsy and vaudeville eras, as
a direct source for Hudgins’s routine. Classified by the Stearnses as one of
the earliest eccentric dancers, Williams, like Hudgins, performed in
blackface and was best known for his comedic pantomime, as well as for
dancing the Cakewalk with his partner George Walker, who played the
“strutting dandy” to Williams’s “shiftless, shuffling ‘darky’ ” role.20
Observers of Hudgins often noted his similarities to Williams, who died in
1922, even anointing him Williams’s successor.21 In the same interview in
which he talked up his accidental discovery of the “Mwa Mwa” routine,
Hudgins himself cited Williams’s influence: “In my dances, those steps they
came to me—my first inspiration for dancing was Bert Williams.”22 For
Hudgins, then, claiming spontaneity and originality did not mean
disavowing precursors.
Yet there were times when Hudgins renounced improvisation altogether.
In 1924, Bertram Whitney, the white producer of The Chocolate Dandies,
sued Hudgins for violating the terms of his contract. Facing across-the-
board salary cuts from Whitney, and with his star on the rise, Hudgins left
the Broadway revue to earn higher pay as a featured performer in a New
York nightclub. In an effort to prevent his departure, Whitney sought an
injunction against Hudgins, claiming he was a “unique and extraordinary”
performer whose services were “irreplaceable”—reportedly the first time
this legal claim was made about an African American artist.23 In his
deposition, Whitney appraised Hudgins’s value in terms of his propensity
for improvisation. “He had a limitless number of dance steps,” Whitney
testified of Hudgins. “In fact, no two dances by him were alike; he seemed
to make up his own steps as he went along.”24 In their ultimately successful
defense, Hudgins and his lawyers countered Whitney’s claim that there was
anything dynamic about Hudgins’s performance, maintaining that his dance
act had remained more or less static throughout his stage career. There was
“slight or no variance,” Hudgins stated in his deposition, “between what I
did in burlesque for eight years, what I did in … ‘The Chocolate Dandies’
during my engagement therein, and in what I am now [d]‌oing in the ‘Club
Alabam Revue.’25
 Part and parcel of denying that Hudgins possessed “any unique or
extraordinary ability as a dancer,” then, was rejecting the idea that he was
either spontaneous or adept at transforming his routine over time. Insisting
on his lack of worth as a performer in order to evade Whitney’s injunction,
Hudgins emphasized his unvarying ordinariness.
Following several years on the heels of the Whitney affair, Hudgins’s
decision to take out a copyright on his pantomime acts can be read as an
implicit rejoinder to the position he was forced to take in the Whitney case.
The nineteen-page copyrighted booklet is filled with unequivocal assertions
of Hudgins’s originality. An early clause, for example, reads, “Every
Expression, Move, Gesture, Pedal Evolution, Manoeuvre and Shuffle is
JOHNNY HUDGINS[’s] own original creation.”26 At the back of the
booklet, in what could have doubled as plaintiff’s evidence against him in
the earlier lawsuit, Hudgins includes excerpts from newspaper reviews,
which collectively attest to his uniqueness. An “extraordinary negro
comedian,” trumpets the French L’Oeuvre27 and “one of the most original
things we have ever seen.” “As unique and versatile a comic as graces the
stage to-day,” announces the New York Telegraph, while the New York
Daily Mirror and New York Variety, respectively, declare that “he possesses
a unique way and a distinct sense of originality,” and that “his absolute
originality places him as incomparable.”28
The more explicit goal of the copyright, which simultaneously rested on
and sanctioned Hudgins’s claims of originality, was to block the rash of
imitators seeking to capitalize on his “Mwa Mwa” routine, which became a
sensation on both sides of the Atlantic in the 1920s. When a touring musical
production took Hudgins to Europe in 1925, other performers evidently
rushed in to fill his vacancy. The Lincoln Theater in Harlem even held a
series of “Hudgins-imitator contests.”29 In Europe, too, Hudgins earned a
reputation as “The Most Imitated Comedian on the Continent.”30 A 1928
article in the New York Amsterdam News points to Hudgins’s irritation at
the pilfering. Although reportedly not opposed to duplicators with “the
decency … to give him credit for what they are doing,” Hudgins threatened
to sue “act grabbers” who refused to cite him as the originator of the “Mwa
Mwa” routine.31 While it is unclear whether Hudgins’s British copyright
would have stood up in a U.S. court of law, its very existence gave force to
his legal threats.32
 Bracketed by proclamations of originality, the core of the copyright
booklet transcribes Hudgins’s routines for the tangible medium of print. In
blow-by-blow accounts, he details the entrances and exits, dance steps, and
gestures that composed his seven specialty acts, including the “Mwa Mwa”
number. “Enter Stage with … droll shuffle, business of stumbling over
Stage, nearly falling, also Clown with audience, vamping song with an
eccentric step I call ‘Cutting Capers,’ ” the description of his most famous
routine begins. Stopping suddenly, Hudgins tips his hat, smiles, and mimes
a conversation with an audience member. This is quickly replaced with, in
Hudgins’s words, an
expression of not recognizing them and asking them to leave [the] Theatre—by means of
Pantomime and facial expressions—and just as I am about to put my hat on, it suddenly comes
to me that I do know them and I show it by smiling back, speaking with a very broad smile, and
looking very much pleased. After this … I glide back up-stage and do a long slide to the front[,]‌
landing right at [the] Footlights, … then from there I go into my Pantomime song called the
“Mwa, Mwa, Mwa, Mwa, Mwa, Mwa, mwa.” A song in which I do not utter a word, but move
my lips as if I were singing, while a muted Cornet … gives an imitation of a human voice
singing “Mwa, Mwa.”

After performing a “low bow to the audience” followed by “a fast shuffle”

and slide, Hudgins concludes the act by “skipping from one end of the
Stage to the other” while “throwing imaginary flowers” from his hat to the
audience.33
Was Hudgins’s documentation of his routine for the written page also a
disavowal of improvisation? In one sense, the meticulous transcription
seems consistent with the stance Hudgins took in the Whitney lawsuit that
his routine contained “slight or no variance.” Much as that suit required
Hudgins to make a trade-off—deny originality in order to maintain
autonomy as a performer—it could be argued that copyright demanded
another kind of capitulation—forsake improvisation in order to establish
intellectual property rights over his routines.
But there is no compelling reason to conclude that “fixing” his act for the
purposes of copyright protection squelched improvisation for Hudgins. In
fact, evidence suggests otherwise. As the description above reveals, the
version of “Mwa Mwa” that Hudgins committed to the page contains
openings for “vamping” for and “clowning” with the audience. Even within
a carefully choreographed sequence of gestures, in other words, there was
room for play. Furthermore, a surviving musical score for the “Mwa Mwa”
number (here called “Wa Wa”) contains annotations that read “ad lib with
Johnny” at one point, and “repeat until Johnny drops hand in disgust” at
another.34 These handwritten notes indicate that, far from giving a rigid,
inflexible performance, Hudgins fooled around with timing and engaged in
give-and-take with his accompanying musician, as well as with his
audience. Fighting for ownership of his act in a marketplace where whites
overwhelmingly controlled the means of production, Hudgins asserted
intellectual property rights over his embodied performance but refused to
give up the improvisational leeway that embodied performance afforded
him.

RESISTING DOCUMENTATION? THE CASE OF THE

KISS ME, KATE SPECIALTY DANCERS
The nexus of copyright and improvisation played out rather differently for
the African American dancers who appeared in the musical Kiss Me, Kate
some twenty years after Hudgins’s heyday. From a historiographic
perspective, their omission from the Labanotated score that Hanya Holm
submitted to the Copyright Office in 1952 means that much less is known
about their jazz number. The relative absence of documentation makes it
much more difficult to draw conclusions about their relationship to either
improvisation or intellectual property rights.
What can be said is that a pair of acrobatic jazz-tap dancers named Fred
Davis and Eddie Sledge, known as Fred and Sledge, joined the original
Broadway cast of Kiss Me, Kate and contributed greatly to its success. The
backstage musical about a group of performers in a Baltimore production of
Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew opened on December 30, 1948, at
the New Century Theatre on Broadway. Written by Bella and Samuel
Spewack, with music and lyrics by Cole Porter, the show ran for a
remarkable 1,077 performances.35 The musical’s official choreographer was
the German émigré Hanya Holm (1893–1992), considered one of the “Big
Four” pioneers of American modern dance, who turned to Broadway for
employment when financial pressures forced her to disband her own
company. The choreography for Kiss Me, Kate ran the gamut of dance
styles, from ballet, modern, and jazz, to folk and court dance, but the show-
stopper was “Too Darn Hot,” the only number in the almost exclusively
white musical to feature African American dancers. Set in a back-stage
alley where cast members played dice and smoked cigarettes, the number
was sung by Lorenzo Fuller, who played the black valet Paul, and
spotlighted what one critic termed the “lusty Harlem hoofing,” and another
the “torrid pavement dancing,” of Fred and Sledge, who were eventually
joined by the white soloist Harold Lang.36
Fred and Sledge were part of a black vernacular tradition of two-man
comedy and class act dance teams that peaked during the swing era of the
1930s and 40s.37 Where comedy teams typically incorporated humor and
eccentric dancing into their routines, and class or “flash” acts emphasized
elegance and technical exactitude, both combined virtuosic rhythmic
tapping with spectacular acrobatics. With a contemporaneous review
describing Fred and Sledge as “good-looking well-dressed lads [who] work
very well with precision taps and flying splits,” it is clear that the two were
a class act.38
However little is known about the particulars of Fred and Sledge’s “Too
Darn Hot” number, two-man tap acts like theirs generally infused set
choreography with an improvisatory spirit. As dance scholar Constance
Valis Hill explains, the competitive tap challenge was the “churning engine”
of these theatrical acts:
Instead of being pitted against each other, they were partners (often billed as “brothers”) who,
instead of one-upping each other, combined their specialties in building to a climax a routine in
which structured improvisation was reserved for sections of dance, most often solos. Instead of
mimicking each other’s steps, the two moved as one, each a mirror image of the other. Instead of
copying each other for the purposes of mocking, the practice of signifying evolved into the
repetition of rhythmic phrases that progressed into whole paragraphs of sound and movement.
When traded back and forth, these phrases became a lively and witty dialogue between dancers:
technical perfection personified. Even when the solos were set, the very structure and form of
the class act challenge dance, in which patterns were repeated, varied, traded, and one-upped,
allowed for a dynamic exchange of rhythm and movement that gave the performance the look of
being improvised.39

The aesthetics of improvisation thus left their mark on even these more
“refined” class acts. Like Hudgins, Fred and Sledge surely worked out their
stage routine in advance while preserving the look and feel of spontaneity
in performance.
Holm’s contributions to “Too Darn Hot” were limited to creating “some
non-intruding but atmospherically effective jitterbug passages” for the
Dancing Ensemble, who supported Fuller, Davis, Sledge, and Lang in the
original Broadway staging.40 The Labanotated score for “Too Darn Hot,”
created during rehearsals for the 1951 London production of Kiss Me, Kate
when Holm hired the notator Ann Hutchinson to document her
choreography, records only this background dancing.41 The accompanying
explanation, cited in part at the opening of this chapter, reads:
This is a jazz number done with three negros [sic] who sang and danced. The exact arrangement
varied according to what the negros [sic] could do, it was worked out as a duet with the third
taking over as soloist part of the time. None of this is recorded as it was so individual. What is
recorded is what the group did in the background. If the dance were to be reconstructed the solo
parts would have to be inserted which would mean fresh choreography.42

Notwithstanding its brevity, the passage speaks volumes about the tensions
between copyright and black vernacular performance. Simultaneously a
record of an absence and an absence of a record, the text appears to
epitomize improvisation’s resistance to documentation. The “three negros”
[sic]—the two “specialty dancers,” played in London by the Wallace
Brothers, and the character of Paul, played by Archie Savage43—perform in
such an “individual” manner that their jazz routine eludes capture by
Labanotation and must be newly arranged with “fresh choreography” every
time the musical is staged. This seems the essence of refusing fixity.44
The implications of the jazz routine’s apparent resistance to being
recorded were complex and multifaceted. From one perspective, in evading
documentation, the number also evaded choreographic ownership by Holm.
Because they were not included in the score Holm submitted to the
Copyright Office, the contributions of the African American dancers to the
show-stopping “Too Darn Hot” remained beyond the reach of her
copyright. This case would thus seem to support a dichotomy between
white, copyrightable choreography and black, uncopyrightable
improvisation and, concomitantly, a romanticized view of black
improvisatory dance as refusing to participate in a capitalist economy of
reproduction.
But the costs of such resistance are equally clear here. Too “individual”
to warrant the fixity of notation, lacking any stable relationship to the
musical as a whole (one critic described the “Too Darn Hot” dancing as
“rather alien to the rest of the choreography”),45 the jazz number could be
treated as a mere “insert.” The routine, that is, along with the specialty
dancers who devised it, could be easily extricated from a given production
and replaced by entirely new choreography and dancers. Indeed, quite a few
African American dance duos evidently rotated in and out of this slot.46
While cast changes are hardly an aberration in restagings of Broadway
musicals, when contrasted with the constancy of Holm’s choreography, the
exchangeability of the African American specialty dancers reflects their
lack of durable value to the show.
Moreover, although Holm never explicitly claimed to choreograph nor to
own the rights to the “Too Darn Hot” jazz routine, the acclaim she received
as the putatively sole choreographer of Kiss Me, Kate, including the
celebration of her copyright achievement and a New York Drama Critics’
Award, raises troubling questions about white credit for black
choreographic labor. The experience of another two-man tap team who
appeared in a later version of Kiss Me, Kate proves instructive. In 1949,
several years before a brief stint in Kiss Me, Kate, the class-act dancers
Honi Coles and Cholly Atkins joined the cast of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,
choreographed by the white ballet- and modern-trained dancer Agnes
DeMille, and were featured in a second-act number called “Mamie is
Mimi.” Recounting the episode in Jazz Dance, Cholly Atkins offers a
window onto the choreographic process and subsequent allocation of credit:
“During rehearsals Agnes de Mille didn’t know what to do with us,” says Coles, “so finally Julie
Styne, who hired us, took us aside and said, ‘Look, why don’t you fellows work up something,
and I’ll get her to look at it.’ ” They located arranger Benny Payne, who knew how to write for
tap-dance acts, and the three of them worked out a routine. “One afternoon, Miss de Mille took
time off to look at it,” says Atkins. “She liked it and told us to keep it in.”

On went the show with the Coles-Atkins-Payne routine a hit, and Agnes de
Mille listed as choreographer in the program. “Later on we had to get her
permission to use our routine on Jack Haley’s Ford Hour,” says Coles. “She
was very nice about it.” In her autobiography Miss de Mille writes that the
“Mamie Is Mimi” number, along with several others, was devised “in a
single short rehearsal,” presumably by Miss de Mille. This was the standard
practice.47
Though it would be specious to let this anecdote stand in for all musicals
with white choreographers and black specialty dancers, “Too Darn Hot”
was no doubt put together in a somewhat analogous way. Returning to the
missing notation in the copyrighted Labanotated score, the use of the
passive voice to recount how the jazz tap number evolved—“it was worked
out”—assumes greater significance. The absence of a fuller record of the
routine made it all too easy to elide the labor and creativity of the African
American improviser-choreographer-dancers responsible for it. And all too
easy for Holm, the “highest browed” of white choreographers, who was
armed with fixed and tangible evidence of her contributions, to receive
credit for the whole of the musical’s choreography.48
None of this is intended to detract from what Holm did accomplish in
terms of choreography or copyright with Kiss Me, Kate. Nor is it to suggest
that documentation and intellectual property law were solutions to the racial
inequities that made it so difficult for African American jazz and tap
performers to receive due credit and compensation for their creative
expression in the first half of the twentieth century. Although Johnny
Hudgins was extremely successful at the peak of his popularity, reportedly
becoming the “highest paid night club entertainer of his Race” in 1930, he
fell out of favor with a later generation of performers and critics, due in no
small part to his use of blackface.49 The fact that neither his name nor his
once-famous “Mwa Mwa” routine is remembered today makes evident that
copyright offers no guarantee against historical amnesia.
In addition, copyright, with its requirement that work be “fixed in a
tangible medium of expression,” was (and continues to be) an extremely
fraught construct, especially for dancers working in African American
expressive traditions that privilege improvisation. While solo performers
like Hudgins and two-man dance teams like Fred and Sledge worked hard
to develop audience-pleasing routines that remained largely consistent from
one performance to the next, they also found ways to preserve an aesthetic
of spontaneity within their choreography, whether that meant vamping for
theater-goers or making room for give-and-take with fellow performers.
Indeed, as a rule, jazz and tap dancers were expected to improvise, and as
was the case for Hudgins, their value to white producers sometimes rested
on the (perceived) extemporaneousness of their performance. For these
dancers, the most logical medium in which to record their expression was
the body itself. The fact that Hudgins’s Silence booklet is the only
documented example of a copyright held by an African American dancer in
the first half of the twentieth century that I have been able to locate is a
reminder of how uncharacteristic his formal pursuit of intellectual property
rights was.
Just the same, that pursuit should prompt us to rethink the conventional
wisdom that copyright law is always and already antithetical to
improvisatory traditions, or that it has worked only to disadvantage African
American vernacular performers. However uncertain the legitimacy of
Hudgins’s British copyright inside the United States (obtained decades
before choreography was granted protection by U.S. law), its very existence
afforded Hudgins a means of pushing back against white claims on his labor
and against imitators trying to make a buck off his choreography. By the
same token, the situation of the specialty dancers in Kiss Me, Kate should
prompt us to think carefully about the implications of resisting
documentation. Even as the African American dancers employed in the hit
musical avoided capture by a notation system designed to record Euro-
American choreography, they could not evade a larger, racialized system of
authorial credit that “invisibilized” their contributions.50 For black jazz and
tap dancers working in the white-dominated capitalist marketplace of the
first half of the twentieth century, it was not a matter of simply choosing
between the ideology of copyright and the practice of improvisation but,
rather, of dealing with the consequences when the two converged.

NOTES
1. John Martin, “The Dance: Copyright,” New York Times, March 30, 1952, X10.
2. Labanotation is a system of symbols used to record movement, based on the ideas of Rudolf
Laban.
3. Kiss Me, Kate. Labanotated score, Dance Notation Bureau Library, New York City.
4. U.S. Copyright Office, “Copyright in General FAQ,” http://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-
general.html#what. Accessed June 29, 2011.
5. In Steppin’ on the Blues: The Visible Rhythms of African American Dance (Urbana: University
of Illinois Press, 1996), Jacqui Malone defines “vernacular” dance as that which makes visible
the rhythms of African American music and identifies its hallmarks as “improvisation and
spontaneity, propulsive rhythm, call-and-response patterns, self-expression, elegance, and
control” (2).
6. The conventional wisdom about improvisation and fixation can be summed up by Derek
Bailey’s assertion that “there is something central to the spirit of voluntary improvisation which
is opposed to the aims and contradicts the idea of documentation.” In Improvisation: Its Nature
and Practice in Music (New York: Da Capo Press, 1992), ix.
7. Kembrew McLeod, Owning Culture: Authorship, Ownership, and Intellectual Property Law
(New York: Peter Lang, 2001), 71. See, among others, Siva Vaidhyanathan, Copyrights and
Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How It Threatens Creativity (New York:
New York University Press, 2001), in which he argues that “American copyright … clearly
conflicts with the aesthetic principles of West African music and dance” (126); Richard L.
Schur, Parodies of Ownership: Hip-Hop Aesthetics and Intellectual Property Law (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 2009); and Candace G. Hines, “Black Musical Traditions and
Copyright Law: Historical Tensions,” Michigan Journal of Race & Law 10 (spring 2005): 463–
494.
 8. On black vernacular aesthetics, see, for example: Houston A. Baker, Blues, Ideology, and Afro-
American Literature: A Vernacular Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984); Henry
Louis Gates, Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1988); Richard Powell, “Art History and Black Memory:
Toward a ‘Blues Aesthetic,’ ” in History and Memory in African-American Culture, ed.
Geneviève Fabre and Robert O’Meally (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 228–243;
Robert O’Meally, “On Burke and the Vernacular: Ralph Ellison’s Boomerang of History,” in
History and Memory in African-American Culture, ed. Geneviève Fabre and Robert O’Meally
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 244–260; and Malone, Steppin’ on the Blues.
9. K. J. Greene, “Copyright, Culture & Black Music: A Legacy of Unequal Protection,” Hastings
Communication & Entertainment Law Journal 21 (1999): 342.
10. Johnny Hudgins, Silence, Copyright No. 746, The Cranbourn Press, London, n.d. Jean-Claude
Baker private collection, New York City. My sincere thanks to Jean-Claude Baker for
generously opening his collection of Hudgins material to me.
11. Danielle Goldman, I Want to Be Ready: Improvised Dance as a Practice of Freedom (Ann
Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2010), 11–12. Goldman here is citing André
Lepecki’s essay “Inscribing Dance,” in Of the Presence of the Body: Essays on Dance and
Performance Theory, ed. André Lepecki (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2004), 135.
Performance studies scholar Peggy Phelan (in)famously argued that performance’s ephemerality
—the fact that its very condition is its disappearance—gives it a “distinctive oppositional edge”
and enables it to “elude … regulation and control.” See “The Ontology of Performance:
Representation without Reproduction,” in Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London and
New York: Routledge, 1993), 148.
12. Marshall and Jean Stearns, Jazz Dance: The Story of American Vernacular Dance (New York:
Schirmer Books, 1968), 232. For more on eccentric jazz dancing and on the career of Johnny
Hudgins, see Brian Harker, “Louis Armstrong, Eccentric Dance, and the Evolution of Jazz on
the Eve of Swing,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 61.1 (Spring 2008): 67–121.
My thanks to Brian for sharing information about his research on Hudgins.
13. Mura Dehn, “Johnny Hudgins,” Papers on Afro-American Social Dance, folder 25, Dance
Division, The New York Public Library.
14. See, for example, Brent Hayes Edwards, “Louis Armstrong and the Syntax of Scat,” Critical
Inquiry 28, no. 3 (Spring 2002): 618–649. Hudgins’s one-time cast-mate Josephine Baker also
claimed that the chorus line clowning that helped launch her career was entirely spontaneous.
See Anthea Kraut, “Whose Choreography?: Josephine Baker and the Question of (Dance)
Authorship,” The Scholar and Feminist Online 6, nos. 1–2 (Fall 2007/Spring 2008),
http://sfonline.barnard.edu/baker/kraut_01.htm.
15. The defining ruling on the matter of originality is the Supreme Court case of Feist Publications,
Inc., v. Rural Telephone Service Co., 499 U.S. 340 (1991), which ruled that the information
compiled in a telephone book did not possess sufficient creativity to merit copyright protection.
Paul K. Saint-Amour, The Copywrights: Intellectual Property and the Literary Imagination
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003).
16. McLeod, Owning Culture, 21.
17. Mark Rose, Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1993), 134.
18. See Anthea Kraut, “‘Stealing Steps’ and Signature Moves: Embodied Theories of Dance as
Intellectual Property,” Theatre Journal 62, no. 2 (May 2010): 173–189, for more on the ways in
which a dancer’s idiosyncratic movement could serve as a property-like claim on dance.
19. Sam Spence, “A Vaudevillian Remembers,” n.s., n.d. Newspaper Clippings, Johnny Hudgins
Papers, Box 1, Folder 4, Emory University Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library.
Special thanks to Leah Weinryb Grohsgal for her adept research assistance.
20. Stearns, Jazz Dance, 117, 121. For more on Williams, see Louis Chude-Sokei, The Last Darky:
Bert Williams, Black-on-Black Minstrelsy, and the African Diaspora (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2006).
21. “Johnny Hudgins Is Still Going Big on Broadway,” Chicago Defender, May 8, 1926, 7. One of
Hudgins’s routines, in which he ballroom danced with an imaginary partner, was apparently a
direct take-off on one of Williams’s acts. “Johnny Hudgins Joins Blackbirds,” Chicago Defender
September 1, 1928, n.p.
22. Mura Dehn interview, papers on Afro-American Social Dance.
23. “Hudgins in Suit,” Chicago Defender, November 1, 1924, 6.
24. Bertram C. Whitney v. Johnny Hudgins, et al. (Lee Shubert, Jacob J. Shubert, The Winter
Garden Company, and Arthur Lyons), index no. 40459, submitted October 31, 1924, New York
Supreme Court, County of New York.
25. Bertram C. Whitney v. Johnny Hudgins, et al.
26. Hudgins, Silence.
27. Hudgins, Silence. Although the program booklet attributes this quotation to the “Paris Ceuvre,”
this was almost certainly a mistaken reference to the daily L’Oeuvre newspaper.
28. Hudgins, Silence.
29. David Hinckley, “Not Just Black and White,” New York Daily News, September 3, 2000,
http://www.nydailynews.com/archives/entertainment/2000/09/03/2000-09-
03_not_just_black___white_the_c.html (accessed June 29, 2011).
30. Clipping, Johnny Hudgins scrapbook, Jean-Claude Baker private collection.
31. “Hudgins Protests Use of His Act by Others,” New York Amsterdam News, August 22, 1928,
Johnny Hudgins scrapbook, Jean-Claude Baker private collection.
32. Unlike U.S. law at the time, the British Copyright Act of 1911 deemed “dramatic work” to
include “any piece for … choreographic work or entertainment in dumb show.” Copyright Act,
1911, http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/Geo5/1-2/46/introduction/enacted (accessed June 29,
2011). Although the language of British copyright law does not specify that a work must be
“fixed in a tangible medium of expression” to merit protection, it is possible that, as a non-
British subject, publishing his booklet in London was a way for Hudgins to qualify his work for
protection. The law states that “copyright shall subsist throughout the parts of His Majesty’s
dominions … in every original literary dramatic musical and artistic work, if … in the case of a
published work, the work was first published within such parts of His Majesty’s dominions.”
Furthermore, at least one newspaper believed that Hudgins copyrighted his Mwa Mwa routine
under U.S. law, although I have not been able to confirm the existence of this U.S. copyright.
“Johnny Hudgins is Coming Home,” Chicago Defender, July 28, 1928, 7.
33. Hudgins, Silence.
34. “Wa Wa Number,” Johnny Hudgins Papers, Hudgins/MSS 1029, Box 2, Folder 25, Emory
University Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library.
35. David Ewen, New Complete Book of the American Musical Theater (New York: Holt, Rinehart
and Winston, 1970), 277.
36. “Theater Dance,” Clipping from PM Star, January 4, 1949, Hanya Holm Scrapbooks, Dance
Division, New York Public Library; Brooks Atkinson, “At the Theatre: ‘Kiss Me, Kate,’ ” New
York Times On The Web, December 31, 1948,
http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/11/29/specials/porter-kate.html (accessed June 30, 2011).
37. Stearns and Stearns, Jazz Dance, 244–245.
38. Rev. of Copacabana Night Club, The Billboard, April 1, 1950, 54. The two are characterized as
“Acrobatic, Flash” in Rusty E. Frank, Tap!: The Greatest Tap Dance Stars and Their Stories,
1900–1955 (New York: Da Capo Press, 1994), 288.
39. Constance Valis Hill, “Stepping, Stealing, Sharing, and Daring,” in Taken by Surprise: A Dance
Improvisation Reader, ed. Ann Cooper Albright and David Gere (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan
 University Press, 2003), 94–95.
40. Walter Terry, “Dance: Miss Holm and her Fine ‘Kiss Me, Kate’ Choreography,” New York
Herald Tribune, Hanya Holm Clippings File, Dance Division, New York Public Library.
41. “Copyright by Hanya Holm,” Dance Magazine 39, no. 7 (July 1965): 44.
42. Kiss Me, Kate, Labanotated Score.
43. Program, Kiss Me, Kate, London, 1951, http://www.sondheimguide.com/porter/kissuk.html
(accessed June 30, 2011).
44. Although Labanotation was designed to record Western choreography, the Stearnses include a
host of Labanotated dances in an appendix to their volume Jazz Dance. For more on issues of
notation in dance, see Mark Franko, “Writing for the Body: Notation, Reconstruction, and
Reinvention in Dance,” Common Knowledge 17, no. 2 (2011): 321–334, http://muse.jhu.edu/
(accessed June 30, 2011).
45. Arthur Todd, “A Brace of Musicals This Season on Broadway,” Dance (March 1949): 28–29,
Dance Clipping File, Musical Comedies, Kiss Me, Kate, New York Public Library.
46. As reported by the Stearnses, the comedy dance team of Charles Cook and Ernest Brown
appeared briefly in Kiss Me, Kate while it was still on Broadway (it ran until July 1951).
Stearnses, Jazz Dance, 245. As mentioned above, a pair named the Wallace Brothers took on the
roles of specialty dancers for the British production. And in 1953, Honi Coles and Cholly Atkins
performed in a summer stock production of the musical in Texas. Cholly Atkins and Jacqui
Malone, Class Act: the Jazz Life of Choreographer Cholly Atkins (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2001), 97.
47. Stearnses, Jazz Dance, 309.
48. John Martin, “Broadway on Its Toes,” New York Times, January 23, 1949, SM18.
49. “Johnny Hudgins Back in Night Club Revue,” Chicago Defender, May 17, 1930, 10. Hudgins
continued to tour Europe, South America, Canada, and the U.S. through the 1940s.
50. On “invisibilization,” see Brenda Dixon Gottschild, Digging the Africanist Presence in
American Performance: Dance and Other Contexts (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996).

BIBLIOGRAPHY
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Atkinson, Brooks. “At the Theatre: ‘Kiss Me, Kate.’ ” New York Times On The Web, December 31,
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 CHAPTER 20
PERFORMING GENDER, RACE, AND POWER
IN IMPROV COMEDY

AMY SEHAM

A group of performing improvisers are not simply indulging in freedom, they are creating a
power relationship in which a construct of “freedom” is generated by power and
simultaneously regenerates that power. … Improvisation does not, thus, bypass power.
They intertwine.
— guitarist Davey Williams

(quoted in Corbett 1995, 221)

FROM Dada cabarets to collective feminist troupes, iconoclastic theater

artists have embraced improvisation as a means of subverting the “scripts”
of conventional society. Whether the focus is overtly political, as in
Augusto Boal’s Theater of the Oppressed, or comic and commercial, as in
ComedySportz, many view improvisation as a technique for evading (or
transcending) both psychological and political censorship. A powerful
mythology portrays improvisation as a communal, transformational, even
spiritual performance mode, where spontaneity means freedom, and
intuition (or absorption) reveals cosmic truth. For many idealistic teachers,
directors, and activists, improvisation can look like an ideal mode of group
creation, offering both individual agency and a sense of connection to the
whole. Everyone can play. Everyone’s story can be told. Every possibility
can be imagined and embodied.
This view of improvisation is nowhere more prevalent than among the
most committed practitioners of the performance form generally known as
improv throughout the United States, Canada, Australia, and elsewhere.
Improv is best known when linked with comedy to form a series of funny
sketches and games. Audiences are delighted by the quick-wittedness and
virtuosity of a group of performers who can pull comical characters and
scenes out of thin air. But there are many permutations of this art form that
encompass far more than entertainment.
Teachers and practitioners from Second City to TheatreSports, and from
high school troupes to corporate training programs, share core improv
principles, such as agreement, no-mindedness (being “in the moment”),
status, and groupmind. Adherents believe that these techniques can release
imagination, forge community, and create meaningful original (usually
comic) theater. Moreover, drawn to the immediacy and absorption they
experience in the moment of play, many improv participants believe
strongly that, through improvisation, they tap into a spiritual dimension
where they can access originality, authenticity, and truth.
Yet despite its liberatory ideals, improv (particularly when combined
with comedy) often works to suppress the input of players whose gender,
sexuality, race, ability, class, appearance, or any other form of difference
diverges from social norms. Even in the most well-intentioned and
egalitarian group, improv rules, if practiced uncritically, function to
reinforce power hierarchies; naturalize sexist, heterosexist, and racist
values; and perpetuate stereotypes. The most beloved components of the
improv credo, such as agreement and groupmind, taken at face value, can
make it virtually impossible for marginalized players to participate as
equals.
Rare is the acting teacher who has not drawn heavily on Viola Spolin’s
improvisational games and exercises to form the foundations of his or her
work with improv. Considered by many to be the mother of American
improv, Spolin had great faith in spontaneity’s ability to transform reality
and allow for free expression. In her influential book, Improvisation for the
Theater, she writes:
Through spontaneity we are re-formed into ourselves. It creates an explosion that for the
moment frees us from handed-down frames of reference, memory choked with old facts and
information and undigested theories and techniques of other people’s findings. Spontaneity is
the moment of personal freedom when we are faced with a reality and see it, explore it and act
accordingly. (Spolin 1983, 4)

Building on Spolin’s teachings, virtually every improv troupe teaches the

fundamental rule of “agreement”: the concept of creating scenes, characters,
and situations by saying “Yes—and”—in other words to accept the player’s
offer, and then to add to it by exploring or heightening the given idea.
Agreement is crucial to improv not only at the level of the two-person
scene, but for the entire performance troupe as well. According to Spolin,
“The game is a natural group form providing the involvement and personal
freedom necessary for experiencing. … There must be group agreement on
the rules of the game and group interaction moving toward the objective if
the game is to be played”(5).
Many players use the technique of agreement to create a communal
experience of “groupthink” or groupmind, in which the entire troupe strives
intuitively together toward the same goals. The perfect working of
groupmind is often called “the zone” or “flow” by improvisers who
describe the feeling as a magical kind of high, akin to perfect teamwork in
sports or even great sex. A number of players are even familiar with
Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi’s description of the flow state as one in which
“there is little distinction between self and environment, between stimulus
and response, or between past, present and future” (Csikszentmihalyi 2000,
36).
Players and teachers often equate groupmind with the “collective
unconscious,” and believe that through it they are able to tap into something
universal, genuine and true. According to Truth in Comedy, a guidebook for
long-form improv, when improvisers achieve “group mind” they are linked
to “a universal intelligence, enabling them to perform fantastic, sometimes
unbelievable feats” (Halpern 1994, 93).
While many players and teachers take great pleasure in the seemingly
natural consensus of the improvisers, many social scientists consider
“groupthink” a means of forcible conformity and assimilation (Janis quoted
in Brown 1988, 158). Moreover, despite the ideals of agreement, it is often
the case that the first person who speaks in an improv scene, or the person
who speaks most aggressively, controls the premise of that scene and even
defines the roles that others will play in it. Because female players still tend
to be less assertive in taking initiative and focus on stage than the male
players, women often find themselves “agreeing” to play the supportive,
back-seat position in scenes that express a male perspective, allowing men
to define them, or in improv terms, to endow them exclusively as
stereotypical wives, girlfriends, mothers, or sexual objects.
In her excellent book, TheatreSports Down Under, Australian improv
educator Lyn Pierse points to how a female player is consistently placed in
the “low-status” role in relation to a male player, giving this example from a
fast-paced game called Death in a Minute:
A female player ran to the performance area beginning the scene, making an intuitive physical
offer to establish an operating theatre. She held her hands creating the surgical gloves and made
a perfect offer with her right hand: “Scalpel” … Seeing that offer, a male player entered the
space. He took the imagined scalpel out of her hand and said, “Thanks, nurse.” The audience
hissed and booed. (1995, 301)

While some men have been known to “bulldoze,” or deliberately

dominate, an emerging scene, it can also be the case that a woman player
will revert to her social training, deferring to the man without quite
realizing she is doing so. Lyn Pierse gives an example of this tendency in
another poignant anecdote. In a training session, players were working to
undermine clichéd status relationships. Women were instructed to take high
status, and men were directed to take the lower status in each emerging
scene. A scene at a “psychiatrist’s office” yielded the following result:
Maria, who is a counselor and was a beginner player, stated the scene. Maria yielded to her first
intuitive response. She lay on the couch. This placed David Wood in the high status as “the
doctor.” He immediately dropped his status and fell to the floor. He lay on his back on the
ground and said, “Well, doctor it all started …” (304).

As Pierse explains, that interplay forced Maria to recognize her own

complicity in initiating low-status roles. Maria, a counselor herself,
remarked ruefully that she had left her own life experience “at the door
instead of bringing it into the scene.” But Pierse counters that Maria
probably “had in fact brought her [life experience] into the scene” (304).
Pierse asserts that training and coaching are needed to work against the
“intuitive” subordination of women in improv comedy.
Women, GLBT, African American, and other minority improvisers may
also encounter an unintentional failure to communicate with the white,
heterosexual male players that dominate the field in improv comedy. In the
midst of play, anyone with a different perspective may find that their
references, allusions, and perceptions of comical incongruity are not
immediately grasped by the majority players. Thus, as improviser Frances
Callier has said, African American improvisers may feel that they must
“whitewash [their] humor” in order to participate fully in the group (Seham
2001, 189). Thus, groupmind, so valued in improv, all too often becomes
simply the heterosexual white male mind. As improviser Stephnie Weir put
it, “The white male lifestyle and experience is so on the forefront of
everyone’s mind, TV, everything in our lives, that everyone has that
common experience. We all know how to support that, ‘Oh, that’s familiar,
I can heighten that’ ” (Seham 2001, 70).
As Gay Gibson Cima warns feminist directors,
If you build your directorial work upon actors’ improvisations, plan carefully, because
improvisations can inadvertently reproduce the dominant ideological structures that you are
trying to critique. Actors may spontaneously voice their own unrecognized biases or they may
move in stereotypical ways, ways that reinforce rather than redirect the traditional values
promoted in the canon. (Cima 1993, 100)

Many sincere, experienced players argue passionately, however, that improv

is an apolitical practice. According to traditional improv doctrine, players
must not be too much “in their heads” but rather, must improvise from a
state of no-mindedness that allows them to bypass all societal inhibitions to
reach a “greater truth.” Real improv, they insist, must have no agenda to
distract the player from his or her purely spontaneous response to each
stimulus. Feminist, “ethnic,” and gay perspectives are viewed warily and
supported only in the most homogenized constructions. Thus, a
performance mode with special affinity for subordinated people is all-too-
quickly put at the service of mainstream ideology.
In his discussion of “common sense,” cultural theorist Stuart Hall
suggests that it is highly unlikely for unconscious, spontaneous expression
to break the mold of “handed down frames and references”:
It is precisely its “spontaneous” quality, its transparency, its “naturalness,” its refusal to be made
to examine the premises on which it is founded, its resistance to change or correction, its effect
of instant recognition, and the closed circle in which it moves which makes common sense, at
one and the same time, “spontaneous,” ideological, and unconscious. You cannot learn, through
common sense, how things are: you can only discover where they fit into the existing scheme of
things. (1979, 325)

Yet despite its dangerous claims of truth and neutrality, the possible abuse
of agreement, and the failure of true consensus in groupmind, improv can
be the source of exhilarating and transformative work. A number of
companies and troupes have used improv techniques to create what feminist
theater theorist Jill Dolan describes as “a place to experiment with the
production of cultural meanings, on bodies willing to try a range of
different significations for spectators willing to read them” (1993, 432).
In the following pages, I examine the way in which one particular improv
troupe, called JANE, encountered, reinterpreted, and circumvented some of
the obstacles facing women in improv. In particular, I examine issues
related to improv principles of agreement and groupmind, status and
character, and reference and stereotypes.
In the mid-1990s, Katie Roberts and Stephnie Weir had made their way
onto high-powered performance teams at Chicago’s popular
ImprovOlympics1 theater, but they felt nevertheless that they were missing
out on the kind of intense camaraderie their male counterparts seemed to
enjoy. Weir enjoyed her work with the Lost Yetis, a good, skillful, and even
cooperative group, but realized that she was forced to translate her own
experience into a male language in every show. She remembers thinking, “I
want what they have. I want a girl thing” (quoted in Seham 2001, 69). Weir
and Roberts wanted to create a group in which the mention of Judy Blume
received the instantaneous recognition that sports figures did in the Lost
Yetis. They wanted a venue where women could work to conquer the self-
censorship and self-doubt that was engendered when their references and
initiatives were not recognized. A place, says Weir, that would help “remind
you that your voice is legitimate.” They called the new team “JANE”
(quoted in Seham 2001, 70).
JANE was soon known for creating successful comic scenes that were
slower, more thoughtful, and more detailed than most. The actors often
worked with the blurred edges of gender, looking for the commonalities as
well as the differences between their characters and their selves. But one of
the key pleasures and benefits that JANE provided to its players was the
frequent opportunity to play male roles. In a mixed improv team, the
outnumbered women very rarely attempted to do male impersonations,
although male players were known to present a variety of female
stereotypes with relative frequency. When women did initiate male roles,
they would often be misread and ignored in the midst of improv play, and
simply endowed with a female name, called “honey,” or asked to take a
letter.
In an interview, JANE member Jennifer Bills suggested that it is more
fun for an audience to see a man lower his status to play a woman than to
see a woman play a man. “A woman as a guy is not as wacky,” she
explained, “it’s a higher-status character” (quoted in Seham 2001, 71).
Here, Bills used status as a familiar improv principle derived from Keith
Johnstone. In concept, status describes an improviser’s freely chosen
decision to play a dominant or deferential character. In practice, however,
performance status usually replicates offstage status, and women are far
more likely to play low while men play high—especially in relation to
women.
Male players’ claims to have simply misinterpreted their female
teammate’s lowered voice or aggressive physical choices may have some
legitimacy. In a discussion of male versus female impersonation in camp
performance, feminist theorist Kate Davy notes that “there is no
institutionalized paradigm for reading male impersonation.” Davy suggests
that female impersonation has a rich history extending from classical
theater to television and film because it is “primarily about men, addressed
to men, and for men. [But] male impersonation has no such familiar
institutionalized history in which women impersonating men say something
about women. Both female and male impersonation foreground the male
voice and, either way, women are erased” (1992, 233–234). But the women
of JANE did not feel at all erased by their portrayal of these male
characters. On the contrary, embodying men provided these improvisers
with a sense of physical freedom, the permission to play aggressively both
as characters and as improvisers, and a mode for exploring a variety of
gender roles, relationships, and stereotypes.
It must, of course, be acknowledged that JANE’s improvised shows were
in many ways quite different from the kind of camp performances that Davy
has analyzed. Unlike most drag performances, the women of JANE wore
one basic, casual costume and made no attempt to disguise their sex.
Moreover, improv performance is unscripted and, especially in
ImprovOlympics’ “long-form”2 style of improvisation, flows from scene to
scene with actors playing multiple roles. Players often do not know what
gender they will be until a teammate endows them with a name, calling for
“Bob,” or shouting, “Hortense, we’re out of licorice!” Audiences can
observe the process by which each improviser takes on and discards a
variety of gendered personae, even as she remains clearly identifiable as a
woman throughout the performance. Judith Butler writes that gender “must
be understood as the mundane way in which bodily gestures, movements,
and enactments of various kinds constitute the illusion of an abiding
gendered self …, an act … which constructs the social fiction of its own
psychological interiority” (1990, 270–271, 279). An examination of the
gestures, movements, and enactments that emerged in JANE’s spontaneous
performances may teach us a great deal about the way each of us learns to
do gender.
Feminist director and critic Rhonda Blair writes that “Cross-gender work
requires the actor to identify with a seeming Other, imagine what it must
like to be the Other, and break years of physical, vocal, and emotional
conditioning in order to perform that Other”(1993, 292). In JANE, actors
approached the task in one of several ways depending on the demands of
the scene being improvised. A broadly comic sketch may allow a player to
indulge in a ball-scratching stereotype, or to exaggerate the characteristics
of the aggressive “alpha male.” Blair suggests that “Cross-gender
performance can use stereotyping deliberately to emphasize the nature of
character-as-construction” (1993, 292). For Weir and the other JANEs,
poking fun at the classic bad date, macho barfly, or self-important geek
made use of women’s unique set of shared references and created a
refreshing comedy of instant recognition for the women in JANE’s troupe
and in their audience. Stereotypes or not, says Weir, “these are men I know”
(quoted in Seham 2001, 72).
Strong physical choices were the key to creating both the outer
impression of and a certain inner identification with maleness. Indeed,
many improvisers based all their characters on highly visible body
language, designed to communicate quickly and efficiently to teammates
and audiences. Both males and females who perform across gender develop
what Blair terms “theatrical codes …, a particular gender vocabulary and
hierarchy for each piece” (Blair 1993, 292). Yet, perhaps surprisingly, only
Bills mentioned working with the image of “something between my legs”
as an important element of her cross-gender performance in JANE. For
most of the players, a far more critical concept was the notion of expanding
their use of space and weight.
Pervasive customs throughout the world—from Chinese footbinding to
corseting to high heels—make it clear that women should take up as little
space as possible—whether through free movement, body size, or in the
expansiveness of their gestures. In her essay, “Foucault, Femininity, and the
Modernization of Patriarchal Power,” Sandra Lee Bartky demonstrates the
ways in which Foucault’s theories of the docile body apply to women in
unique and specifically gendered ways:
Today, massiveness, power, or abundance in a woman’s body is met with distaste. … There are
significant gender differences in gesture, posture, movement and general bodily comportment:
 women are far more restricted than men in their manner of movement and in their spatiality …
[they] must exhibit not only constriction, but grace and a certain eroticism restrained by
modesty. … Whatever proportions must be assigned in the final display to fear or deference, one
thing is clear: women’s body language speaks eloquently, though silently, of her subordinate
status in the hierarchy of gender (1988, 64–74).

To portray men, the women deliberately took on movement that was slower
and heavier than their own, and that used a lower center of gravity. JANE
co-founder Abby Sher confided, “a lot of my men are a lot more confident
than women are. They try to command attention or command women,
though I do play other kinds of men as well. For me, the delicious part of it
is taking on the confidence. That kind of attitude sticks out if you don’t play
a man” (quoted in Seham 2001, 72).
Tami Segher, another original member of JANE, summarized her male
characters as “slower, heavier, deeper, and higher status.” A woman of
normal weight, the twenty-four-year-old Segher freely admitted to having
serious body-image problems, even using her fear of fat as material for her
improvisations. It is telling that this young performer confessed, “If I’m
feeling yucky about my body, I play a man” (quoted in Seham 2001, 73).
As a male character, weight is permissible. As an attractive, date-able,
castable female, the same weight is not.
JANE improvisers experienced a sense of empowerment and liberation
when imitating what they perceived to be the male version of these modes
of nonverbal communication. Yet their equation of maleness with a greater
entitlement to space and weight, a more relaxed demeanor, and a sense of
confidence speaks volumes about the way femaleness is constructed in
American society. Their obvious identity as women also allowed JANE
actors to perform, and comment on, aggressive aspects of male behavior in
ways that male actors would never get away with on a comedy stage.
Several of the women reveled in squeezing one another’s breasts or
fondling one another in the guise of a male, or sometimes a lesbian
character. “It’s incredible freedom,” said Bills. “We all grew up and were
raised not to be the center of the dirty naughty funny if you wanted dates in
high school. Women have body parts that are forbidden to be touched, so
when we desire to touch them it’s so much more daring” (quoted in Seham
2001, 71). JANE also explored such serious subjects as date rape and
spouse abuse in a way that is more palatable to their audiences than it
would be if a male body were on the stage.
 As Judith Butler has famously theorized, “If gender is a kind of a doing,
an incessant activity performed, in part, without one’s knowing and without
one’s willing, it is not for that reason automatic or mechanical. On the
contrary, it is a practice of improvisation within a scene of constraint”
(1990, 1). In JANE’s improvisations, that scene of constraint had the
potential suddenly to shift, revealing the constructedness of gender
performance. For example, the actors might begin a scene in one gender but
be endowed in mid-gesture as another. This misrecognition of the intended
performance of gender occurred less frequently among the members of this
troupe than it does in co-ed groups, but when it happened, the JANE players
exploited its comic potential. Characters initiated as men could shift into
lesbians or vice versa. A character in the midst of a conventionally feminine
gesture might suddenly be called Herb. The JANEs reveled in these
moments of incongruity, which helped to keep scenes interesting. The key
was not to reject the seeming error in proper gender performance, but to
incorporate it as an integral part of the character in process. The constant
adaptations and transformations available to improv performers illustrate
the possibility of improvisation outside the scene of constraint and the
potential for interrupting the constant repetition of gender norms.
Although none of the women in JANE identified as a lesbian, the troupe
quite often played romantic scenes between women without a male
character in sight. While audience members might not be able to read the
difference between the actors’ physicalizations of “male” and “lesbian”
roles, Segher, Schachner, and teammates were clear that there was a distinct
difference for them in terms of interior motivation, attitude, and
mannerisms. Nevertheless, their portrayal of lesbians did tend to be less
constricted and less self-deprecating than their renditions of most
heterosexual female characters. Still, as the JANEs increased their
improvisational skills and their knowledge of one another’s styles, they
began to discern in one another the embodiment of women who were
physically strong, relaxed, and confident, but who were not, therefore, to be
interpreted as performing masculinity. In fact, such a character might even
be read as a heterosexual woman. Such is the potential of improvisation.
JANE ended its run in 1997, but a number of other women’s improv
troupes were already emerging in Chicago and elsewhere. Other identity-
based troupes gained traction, and soon Chicago was host to such
performing groups as Oui Be Negroes, Black Comedy Underground,
Gayco, Stir Friday Night, and ¡Salsation! Members of these groups often
reflected that, in a mainstream group that values groupmind and
spontaneity, they would always feel constrained to assimilate to the
dominant culture. These players felt far more supported in identity-based
groups. For example, Ronald Ray of Oui Be Negroes commented on his
mainstream Second City improv class, “I definitely had to hold back. Every
time I tried to initiate a scene, they’d take it somewhere else … so I’m
trying to match them, trying to be where they are instead of where my angle
was at” (quoted in Seham 2001, 210).
Many committed improvisers argue that everyone’s voice is equal when
improv is done by “good,” experienced players. Identity-based troupes are,
to them, a cop-out—an unwillingness to work toward genuine “Agreement”
among disparate people. Debate still rages within the sizeable online
improv community as to the validity of claims of sexism, racism, and
homophobia in the teaching and performing of improv.
In a 2012 article, the blogger Jill Eickmann on her site, Femprovisor,
pointed to the frustration of women improvisers with the unequal power
dynamic in improv and the preponderance of all male troupes. She offered a
series of suggestions for change, including a call for players to be more
sensitive to alternative modes of scene creation that were less competitive
and more emotionally vulnerable. The blogger was roundly attacked by
many male and female players who were proud to say they had no problems
with the power dynamic in improv. One woman spoke for many when she
commented that she would be offended to receive any of the “special
treatment” suggested in the blog. The writer continued, “It is MY job to
jump in, to speak up and much like in life, take what I want and own it”
(Eickmann 2012). But several others shared their experiences being
silenced or bullied in improv performance. A male improv teacher
commented:
Gender issues like the ones mentioned in the article are real, and a real problem. Inexperienced
18–20 year old men get lots of space to try things, to develop, to see what works for them. Their
ideas get run with, and then if the scene goes nowhere, they learn how their idea played out.
Inexperienced 18–20 year old women get steamrolled. If their idea isn’t considered “brilliant”
out of the chute—they wind up being shut down. Offstage, if the woman is taking time to get
Good, she’s written off and not treated with the same respect as the experienced people. If a man
is taking time to get Good, he is considered to have potential and there is much more patience
with him. (Eickmann 2012)
The blog participants were unable to reach consensus on options for solving
the problem, or even on whether a legitimate problem exists. Still, it is clear
that, despite recent advances, American society has not reached a
postsexist, postracist, posthomophobic place. And improv, which mirrors
society, also mirrors the mainstream power dynamic.
Improv plays in the space between freedom and discipline, structure and
openness, individual and group, process and product. The trickiest balance
of all is that between awareness and flow, or “consciousness” and
spontaneity. If improvisers can finally admit that simple spontaneity does
not access “truth,” but rather the sediments of experience and memory that
form our sense of self, I believe these pieces of experience can be called
forth, repeated, rearranged, juxtaposed with others, and used to create
comedy—and even to improvise resistant alternatives to the status quo.

Notes
1. ImprovOlympic is an influential improv comedy school and theater founded in Chicago in 1981 by
Charna Halpern and improv guru Del Close. ImprovOlympic concentrates on “long-form” improv,
a style in which players create extended performance pieces based on a single audience suggestion.
Often considered more complex than the games and brief scenes in “short-form” improv, long-
form appeals to improv aficionados who appreciate its nuance. ImprovOlympic hosts up to 20
improv “teams” who perform regularly at the ImprovOlympic space in Chicago.
2. In “long-form” improvisation, a team of players typically takes a single suggestion from the
audience. Players then use one of several methods to riff on the suggestion, free-associating until
they develop a number of themes. The performers then create three separate scenes based on
various ideas that have emerged. These scenes begin alternating until their separate stories are
woven together at the conclusion of the piece. These long-form pieces, usually 10 to 20 minutes
long, may use a variety of structures, such as “the Harold” or “the Movie” and include a range of
improv games and other elements to explore the themes, create the patterns, and develop the
insights that long-form players value in their work. Long-form improv comedy is the prevailing
mode of play at ImprovOlympic in Chicago and at the Upright Citizens Brigade in New York City.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bartky, Sandra Lee. “Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power.” In
Feminism and Foucault: Reflections on Resistance, edited by Irene Diamond and Lee Quinby, 61–
86. Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 1988.
Blair, Rhonda. “ ‘Not … But’/‘Not-not-Me’: Musings on Cross-Gender Performance.” In Upstaging
Big Daddy: Directing Theater As If Gender and Race Matter, edited by Ellen Donkin and Susan
Clement, 291–307. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993.
Brown, Rupert. Group Processes: Dynamics Within and Between Groups. Oxford: Blackwell, 1988.
Butler, Judith. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and
Feminist Theory.” In Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre, edited by Sue-
Ellen Case, 270–282. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990.
Butler, Judith. Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge, 2004.
Cima, Gay Gibson. “Strategies for Subverting the Canon.” In Directing Theater As If Gender and
Race Matter, edited by Ellen Donkin and Susan Clement, 91–107. Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 1993.
Corbett, John. “Ephemera Underscored: Writing around Free Improvisation.” In Jazz among the
Discourses, edited by Krin Gabbard, 217–224. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995.
Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. Beyond Boredom and Anxiety: Experiencing Flow in Work and Play. San
Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2000.
Davy, Kate. “Fe/Male Impersonation: The Discourse of Camp.” In Critical Theory and Performance,
edited by Janelle G. Reinelt and Joseph R. Roach, 255–271. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 1992.
Dolan, Jill. “Geographies of Learning: Theatre Studies, Performance, and the ‘Performative.’”
Theatre Journal 45 (1993): 426, 432.
Eickman, Jill. “Do you really want ME? 10 Ways to Cast and Keep Female Improvisors.”
Femprovisor, July 3, 2012. http://www.femprovisor.com/2012/07/03/. Accessed October 6, 2014.
Hall, Stuart. “Culture, the Media, and the ‘Ideological Effect.’” In Mass Communication and Society,
edited by James Curran, Michael Gurevich, and Janet Woollacott, 315–348. Beverly Hills, CA:
Sage, [1977] 1979.
Halpern, Charna, Del Close, and Kim Howard Johnson. Truth in Comedy: The Manual for
Improvisation. Colorado Springs: Meriwether Publishing, 1994.
Johnstone, Keith. Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre. London: Methuen, 1981.
Pierse, Lyn. Theatresports Down Under: A Guide for Coaches and Players. Sydney: Improcorp
Australia, 1995.
Ropers-Huilman, Becky. Feminist Teaching in Theory and Practice. New York: Teachers College
Press, 1998.
Seham, Amy. Whose Improv Is It Anyway? Beyond Second City. Jackson: University Press of
Mississippi, 2001.
Spolin, Viola. Improvisation for the Theatre. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, [1963]
1983.
 CHAPTER 21
SHIFTING CULTIVATION AS IMPROVISATION

PAUL RICHARDS

MISUNDERSTANDING SHIFTING CULTIVATION

SHIFTING cultivation—the clearing and cultivation of a piece of land that is
then abandoned to natural fallowing for a period before being brought back
into cultivation—has had a bad press. It is said that the land is not properly
cared for, and that resources are wasted. Both charges have been answered
in detail (Nye and Greenland 1960). Still the negativity persists. Something
else is in play—a mentality of governance that Scott (1996) terms, “seeing
like a state.” The state requires order and imposes rules, on both landscapes
and people. Land should be bounded and clearly owned. Shifting
cultivation meets neither of these requirements. The farm site changes from
year to year (even though a recurrent rotational cycle is often followed) and
is owned not by an individual but by a large and apparently unbounded
group, including (in the famous formulation of one West African chief) “the
living, the dead and the yet unborn.” A core issue in grasping the world of
the shifting cultivator is to understand its improvisatory character. Rules are
few, equivalent to the chord sequences that guide the jazz improviser. The
art cannot be reduced to textbooks and taught by classroom Diktat. In ever-
changing conditions, a cultivator knows how to proceed only through
experience and intuition. A minefield for government officials and nature
conservationists, shifting cultivation is a topic rich in insight for
improvisation studies, and thus for those who aim less for “policy
relevance” and more for a social science offering explanation of that which
is not understood.
 A LONG-TERM STUDY OF RICE FARMING IN
CENTRAL SIERRA LEONE
In 1983, I spent a year carrying out an ethnographic study of the rice-
farming community of Mogbuama (pop. c. 550), an off-road village in the
Mende-speaking region of central Sierra Leone. Most Sierra Leonean
peasants have some cash crops, but the first priority of farming is the
production of the family staple, rice. Not all communities in Sierra Leone
are self-sufficient in rice, but Mogbuama has good rice land, and it produces
a surplus. Here, rice is both a subsistence crop and a cash crop.
The focus of my study was rice farming. I collected data on all 92 rice
farms made in Mogbuama that year, maintained input-output records for
about 30 farms, and took part in all farming activities, from felling the
fallowed bush to harvesting the rice. I wrote a book about the study
(Richards 1986) and have returned to Mogbuama almost every year since,
apart from a period in the mid-1990s when the population was scattered in
refugee camps due to the Sierra Leone civil war.
Over nearly 30 years I have been able to build up observations and data
on the longer-term changes and continuities associated with the shifting
cultivation of rice in Mogbuama. In my more recent work I have been able,
in collaboration with crop biologists, to look at some of the rice genetic
changes associated with farmer improvisation in Mogbuama. This provides
some of the objective “marker” data through which the story of
improvisation can be told.
The picture is one of “melodic” variation over a basic and recurrent
“chord” structure, despite huge changes in the external environment (not
least, the shock of dislocation due to war). The resilience of the system is
confirmed. This resilience, I argue, is the product, in large measure, of
farmer improvisatory skill and adaptive choice.

LAND, LANDSCAPE, RICE, AND RAIN IN

MOGBUAMA
Understanding shifting cultivation as a system of improvisation requires
some basic knowledge of land entitlement, landscape, soils, rainfall, and
rice types. The Mende are patrilineal. Males claim rights to land as
members of an agnatic descent group (a group of brothers). Each group
holds customary title to an area of fallow land surrounding the village
wherein annual choices of farming plots will be made. Brothers will often
tend to farm side by side (in a cluster). Immigrant farmers (strangers)
attached to one or other of the family groups will also often make their
farms as part of one of these clusters. Typically a rice-farming cluster is
occupied by farms belonging to perhaps 5 to 10 households, each with a
recognized relationship to the land-owning descent group.
Plots are contiguous with the others in the group, but demarcated by a
simple boundary made of felled branches, distinct from the more substantial
fences made around the entire area to protect the rice from rodent damage.
Each plot is marked by possession of a simple tent-like farm hut, and a
platform from which children catapult stones toward birds feeding on the
ripening rice. Farm work is undertaken by household groups (generally, a
man, one or two women, and several children). Heavy and time-dependent
tasks (notably clearing, planting, weeding, and harvesting) are often
undertaken by labor-sharing groups. Some are based on informal
arrangements among neighbors in the cluster. Others are labor cooperatives
with elaborate rules, working in strict rotation.
The areas belonging to the different descent groups tell us something
about the likely settlement history of the village. The acknowledged
autochthones (members of a group whose elders are said not to die but to
metamorphose into elephants and disappear into the bush) have title to
some of the best, free-draining land adjacent to the village. Other more
recently arrived lineages have land at a distance. One group descended from
a nineteenth-century warlord has a separate ward in the town, and land
lying several kilometers to the north of the village, serviced from a daughter
settlement (Mende fakai—farm camp). Another group, prominent in
chiefdom governance, has title to a distant grassland area, almost
impossible to cultivate by local methods. The founders of this lineage were
wealthy, migrant cloth traders. Their extensive land grant (of unusable land)
was (by repute) made by other landowners only to impress the British that
they were indeed a traditionally well-established group entitled to contest
the chieftaincy. As wealthy merchants, they probably bought the rice they
needed. Nowadays, they cultivate rice effectively in their grassy domain by
using tractors.
The somewhat hilly land to the east of the village (where the oldest-
settled descent groups have their farms) belongs (geologically) to the
granite escarpment crossing Sierra Leone from North west to South east
(see Figures 21.1 and 21.2 for maps of Mogbuama and the surrounding
area). It is characterized by free-draining sandy or gravelly soils, suited to
late cultivation of higher-yielding rice types when the rains are well set. The
land west of the village belongs to an ancient lagoon system, and is made
up of old river terraces, criss-crossed by rivers running off the escarpment,
with flood plain areas well adapted to wetland rice cultivation using the
natural rise and fall of the seasonal flood. The soils are silty and moisture
retentive, but often of a rather low inherent fertility. Rice can be planted
early, but the area is very hard to clear if early rain catches the felled but
incompletely dried vegetation. Rice does poorly on an incompletely burnt
farm, due to the lack of phosphorus in the soil.
The grassland at the furthest extent of the village has seasonally flooded
hollows associated with ancient marine sediments. Rice can be grown, but
only if the stubborn Guinea grass is cleared and the root-bound soils broken
up by mechanical means.
Rice is in most cases an in-breeding (self-pollinating) crop. Thus it tends
to reproduce true to type, i.e. it forms distinct and stable varieties, generally
recognized and named by farmers. But the plant has some limited capacity
for out-crossing. Pollen exchange takes place between different rice
varieties in perhaps about 1 percent of cases, and new types may then be
selected. An in-field scenario for farmer selection of out-crossed progeny
has been proposed, based on the finding that cross-pollination in rice farms
in The Gambia is ten times more likely for varieties mixed in the same plot
than between varieties on adjacent plots (Nuijten & Richards 2011).
FIGURE 21.1 The escarpment zone in Sierra Leone (Richards 1986, 31).

Rice in Mogbuama belongs to two species—African rice (Oryza

glaberrima) and Asian rice (O. sativa). The most widely planted variety
(gbengben) belongs to the japonica subspecies of Asian rice and ripens in
about 4.5 months on free-draining upland soils. The second most widely
planted variety, ngiyema yakei (also known as ROK 3), belongs to the
indica subspecies of Asian rice, and also ripens within about 4.5 months,
but is equally well suited to both upland and river terrace zones, east and
west of the village. Some varieties are planted in the early rains in low-
lying areas west of the village and ripen within 3.5 months; thus they can be
harvested in the so-called Hungry Season, the preharvest period in July–
August, when rice stocks from the previous harvest have been exhausted. A
few African rices ripening within 3 months are planted as hunger-breaker
crops. Other varieties, currently spreading within the village, are the
products of out-crossing between distinct varieties of Asian rice, or between
African and Asian rice (Nuijten et al. 2009). These hybrid-derived farmer
selections, it will be argued, are among the most distinctive products of
improvisation in shifting cultivation.
FIGURE 21.2 Main soil and land-use types in Mogbuama (Richards 1986, 32).

Farmers in Mogbuama deploy about 45 distinct rice varieties. The top

two varieties are planted by about half of all households. The long tail of
other varieties (planted by 10 or fewer households) reflects personal
preferences, taste, seed quality considerations, and/or the results of adaptive
experimentation with unfamiliar imported or out-crossed material. The
number of types in use has remained constant over a quarter-century (1983
to 2008, the dates of the first and most recent surveys) but composition has
changed somewhat. Some old favorites have dropped out and new types
have entered the mix. Only one or two are products of scientific research
and agricultural extension. Most new types are farmer selections. An
average farm household typically plants between two and four types—often
a quick-ripening type planted on lower slopes, a couple of higher-yielding
medium-duration types planted on higher slopes and hill crests, and a long-
duration type planted in naturally flooding wetlands, to be harvested after
about 5–6 months.
The final contextual variable to be taken into account is rainfall. Rainfall
in central Sierra Leone is abundant (over 2,000 mm/year) but strongly
seasonal, falling mainly between April and October. The months from
November to March are almost totally dry. In some years (about one in
seven) the rains come late and totals are low. In other years (also about one
in seven) rain arrives unseasonably early and is super-abundant. Farmers
fear early rainfall more than drought. The reason is that shifting cultivation
requires the felled trunks of larger shrubs and trees to be thoroughly dry
before they can be burnt. Burning clears the land for rice planting and adds
essential phosphorus to the soil. A poor burn necessitates much clearing by
hand, and lowered soil fertility reduces the crop yield (sometimes by a third
or more). Poorly burnt land is also more rapidly invaded by weeds.
The timing of the annual burn is a major area where improvisatory
judgment is called into play. Each farmer needs to judge how long to leave
the brushwood to dry before setting the mass on fire, in the hope of igniting
a conflagration strong enough to clear the entire field. A bungled burn leads
to hunger and indebtedness. Breaking out of this vicious cycle requires
further improvisation. Management of interpersonal relations within an
established system of clientelism is one major route out of difficulty. But
another is experimentation with rice varieties. Evidence to be reviewed in
later sections suggests that experimentation with rice varieties results in
selective changes in planting material, enhancing adaptability and
resilience.
 IMPROVISATION
Misha Mengelberg, the Dutch jazz pianist, performed regularly at the old
Amsterdam Bimhuis on Thursday evenings, perhaps a welcome change
from his day job teaching counterpoint and composition at the Sweelinck
Conservatorium. His Thursday evening performance involved free
improvisation. A set comprised a number of passages reflecting his mastery
of the pianistic style of Thelonious Monk interspersed with passages of free
improvisation in which anything could happen. At times, the drummer (Han
Bennink) would toss items from the drum kit in the direction of the
audience.
Formally, the interspersing of strict and free passages resembled the
structure of Johann Sebastian Bach’s early and exuberant keyboard
toccatas. But the free improvisation, however wild it became, was highly
respectful of limits imposed by the setting. The performance started exactly
15 minutes late (either a nod toward the Germanic academic quarter, or a
joke aimed at the members of the audience carefully considering whether
they could stay for the third set and still catch the last train home). A glass
of brandy, carefully placed on the meticulously tuned piano, remained
untouched until the end of the second set, surprisingly safe from Bennink’s
flying bric-a-brac. The sound system was tuned to perfection. Intervals
were generous, and drinks could be imported into the venue as a concession
to the bar franchisee, whose business success was required to amplify the
city council subsidy. The music was freely improvised, but the environment
was ordered and safe. Improvisation within strict and safe limits was an
image the city of Amsterdam liked to foster, and not only in the Bimhuis.
The music, it should be added, was as fascinating as it was satisfying.1
It brought home to me how different was the context for improvisation
among shifting cultivators in Mogbuama. Here was an environment as
volatile as could be imagined. Nothing was guaranteed, well ordered, or in
tune. Farmers walked a seasonal tightrope with no safety net; a single
mishap threatened hunger and debt, even death.

MEN DANCING WITH FIRE

The crux of the seasonal performance for male shifting cultivators in
Mogbuama is the burning of the farm. Would the rains be early or late, or
come on time? Portents in the clouds and behavior of birds were anxiously
scanned. Everybody had a theory about timing. There were those who
swore by burning as early as possible, and others who gambled on leaving it
to the very last minute. Some even had no qualms about an unusually heavy
early rainstorm or two, arguing that the sun in March was still so hot that it
would rapidly dry off any dampness. Every week the burn was postponed,
come rain or shine, would improve the eventual result.
Then there was the debate about when during the day (or night) to set the
fire, based on the likely evolution of wind patterns to fan the flames. Folk
divided into afternoon and nighttime burners. Some got it wrong whichever
option they chose, by failing to ignite their own farms but burning an
adjacent farm not yet ready for ignition. This would result in an
acrimonious court case, a fine for damages, and a farmer with perhaps
insufficient funds to pay for subsequent laborers or seed. It was often best
when brothers were sufficiently cohesive and clustered to agree on a family
burn of adjacent farms. The bonfire that day would be truly spectacular. The
mass of combustible material would burn with such intensity that changing
wind patterns, consequent on the rising air currents, would sweep the fire
back and forth. Apart from the smiling faces of satisfied onlookers, the
results would resemble a film set of nuclear devastation.
Individuals also had ideas about where and in how many places to set the
fire. Men would fly acrobatically about their farms, leaping logs and
dodging branches, at great hazard to eyes and limbs, to apply tapers to a
sufficient number of starting points to ensure total combustion. Those who
failed to get the entire farm to ignite had problems in mobilizing labor for
the subsequent, dreary task of piling and firing unburnt logs. Even so, they
might count themselves lucky. On occasion, those too adventurous would
improvise their fire dance a step too far, and meet a terrible fate in the
gathering blaze. Burning was an area of Mogbuama farming where villagers
took great care to offer public prayers and pour libations for personal safety.
Burning was a double improvisation. Nature improvised unfathomable
climatic fluctuations and capricious diurnal wind patterns. The farmer
improvised a pattern of movement sufficient to set the entire mass ablaze,
sweeping around the farm to where the fire was needed most, while taking
account of how the gathering blaze was generating its own dynamics and
where the exit lines lay.

COPING WITH CONSEQUENCES—FURTHER SCOPE

FOR IMPROVISATION

So the die was cast? The quality of the burn determined soil fertility and the
labor needed for subsequent clearing, thus influencing whether timely
planting could be paid for and whether the weed growth (a task for the
women) would subsequently be manageable. The difference between a fine
harvest, capable of meeting family needs until the following year, or a
shortfall and hungry-season debt, was now fixed. Or was it? Much would
depend on household ingenuity in the looming hungry season.
One route was to seek largesse in the social system. Seed or money could
be borrowed. The mutual obligations of kinship could be tapped. Where the
situation was most serious the head of a peasant household might cede
autonomy and seek help from a patron (a merchant or richer farmer—the
categories were often interchangeable). Where debts were not repaid, the
obligations of clientship became permanent—a kind of serfdom was entered
into.
The alternative route was to seek largesse in nature. In effect, there was
reversion to hunting and gathering. Women fished, men trapped. The best
catches were often the large rodents menacing the growing rice, trapped in
the fences running around the farm. Wild mushrooms and honey were
eagerly sought. Wild yams were particularly important, gathered in the
bush, with vines replanted to enrich the gathering grounds. But one special
category of improvised actions seems to have been of longer-term survival
importance. This is the way women—and some men—experimented with
seed selection.

WOMEN PLAYING WITH SEEDS

Jeneba was an old woman and practically blind by reason of cataracts or
river blindness. She could barely see the ground beneath her. I had known
her for the best part of 20 years, always wearing the same huge, thick-
lensed glasses donated by a passing charity. I had never known her to farm.
She was fed by her family. Her sight, they told me, was too poor for her to
plant or cut rice.
With people still returning to Mogbuama after wartime displacement, and
better farming areas around the village grown rank with neglect, due both to
insecurity and lack of young men to do the heavy work of clearing, the
returnees faced enormous initial difficulties over food. Jeneba (to my
surprise) had a rice farm. Indeed, it was not much—merely a pocket-
handkerchief sized plot on the outskirts of the village, on what was in effect
a patch of sand. Somehow she had procured seed of an “extinct” African
rice. African rice will grow on soils too poor for other crops. It gave her a
helpful handful or two of rice at harvest.
African rice reached the Americas in the period of the slave trade. It is
red-skinned and cooks red rather than white. For this reason, it is sometimes
called red rice. Red rice was preferred by the slave traders because it was
the normal food of the Africans they transported to the New World. Its
cultivation by slaves, and in New World maroon communities, is not
surprising. It is hardy, flavorful, and generally reckoned more nutritious
than Asian rice. Legend has it that African female captives—stripped of
possessions but charged with on-board food preparation—hid grains of
unhusked African rice in their hair. The legend may not be wrong. In the
recent war in Sierra Leone women driven to flight often took with them
enough rice seeds to begin the process of planting food again, in whatever
circumstances they might encounter.
Playing with seeds is a major register for improvisation in Mogbuama. It
is practiced especially by women. It was a man—a migrant farmer—who
explained to me the logic of this affinity for seed experimentation. It was an
activity requiring daily attendance at the farm throughout the year, in order
to protect the little trial plots often found around the farm hut from damage
or pest attack. Men do most of the heavy work on the farms in the early part
of the year, but leave the bulk of the work from planting to harvest—exactly
the period when a trial needs a watchful eye—to women. My informant was
unusual, in that he was one of the few men who regularly experimented
with seeds. As a migrant “stranger” in the community (Mende—hota) he
had no part in the political intrigue, court cases, and development agency
meetings that kept the big men in the village for days on end during the
growing season. So like the women, he was on the farm all day, every day,
and had time to see experiments flower and to ponder the results.
When a spare moment at planting time allows, an off-type picked out
from the previous harvest and carefully conserved in a bundle of rag will be
brought out and planted close to the woman’s main base—the farm hut. The
performance of any promising off-type is carefully noted. If it does well
close to the farm hut, on soil well fertilized by kitchen refuse such as husks
from cleaned rice, it will be harvested and conserved, to be planted the
following year on a new farm. The second time around, soil variation might
be probed—by planting the rice on an unusually fertile patch around a burnt
stump, or on an old termite heap. For a third year, on yet a new farm, the
variety might be launched down-slope, toward an adjacent run-off plot or
into a flooding valley bottom, to test its response to variations in water
supply. The process will take several years, at different locations in the
shifting cultivation cycle. All the while seeds will be carefully accumulated,
some to be distributed among trusted friends or kin for testing over an even
broader range of farms and soil types. Eventually, a decision might be taken
to plant an entire area of farmland to the newly discovered rice.
At that stage, fate might take a hand. Aruna and I had climbed a steep
ridge overlooking some farms. Below we saw a patch-work quilt of
varieties. Four patches of a single farm drew my attention. Aruna laughed.
This was his farm. He had cleared about a hectare of land and had started to
plant his favorite rice type. But supplies of seed ran low, and the women
entrusted with completing the work used a different seed type—an African
rice. Some weeks later the farm was due for weeding. The women started
from one side of the farm, weeding both the favored variety and the
makeshift rice. Then they were called to a funeral in a neighboring village,
leaving the farm to its own devices for some time. On the weeded parts of
the farm both varieties did well. On parts not weeded the favored rice was
choked. The African rice, however, had out-competed the weeds. It would
yield hardly less than the weeded plot, Aruna thought. The planting of the
farm was merely an improvised solution. Chance had turned it into an
experiment with treatment and control. Aruna was not going to refuse the
lessons this improvised experiment afforded.
 PRODUCTS OF IMPROVISATION—MARGINAL
WOMEN FARMERS MAKE SEED CHANGES OVER
TIME
Villagers were displaced from Mogbuama by war for a period of about 18
months from January 1995. Most went to camps for the displaced in the
regional center of Bo. Others continued to farm in hidden “corners” of the
bush (Mende: sokoihun). Although most households were short of seed for
several years after returning to the village, there was little if any loss of rice
varieties. Women carried seeds with them into the camps, or kept on
planting favored types in “corners.” When asked to report on what had been
grown “about five years before the war” a sample of both women and men
farmers gave a list that corresponds remarkably well with what was
recorded in 1983.
With two exceptions, the changes appear to be real, and largely the result
of the kind of adaptive improvisation already described. One exception is
not yet explained (a variety—giligoti—said in 2008 to have been widely
planted in the pre-war period but not recorded in 1983 may reflect a name
change). The other—nduliwa—appears to reflect a foreshortening of
historical memory. It was grown by only one farmer in 1983. Field notes I
made at the time record that this was said to be one of the main rices of the
region in “former times.” The year 1983 has now passed into “former
times” for those that do not recall it directly.
If we then turn to the changes for which there is documented evidence, a
number of varieties have declined in importance—for example the three-
month variety jewule grown quite widely in 1983 on run-off plots to
provide an early harvest. Others have gained in importance, perhaps as a
result of agro-ecological changes associated with the war. One such change
is a lengthening of the fallow cycle—the period of time between successive
clearing of land for farming. The lengthening reflects population reduction
due to wartime displacement; there are fewer farmers using the land.
Some of the newer rices—japonica type yabasi and indica type pa kamp
—may be better suited to soils now richer in nitrogen as a result of longer
fallow intervals. Increased cultivation of the indica variety ngiyema yakei
can be attributed to the postwar seed distributions by humanitarian
agencies, since, under the name ROK 3, it is one of the varieties
recommended by the agricultural extension service.
Two other “postwar” rices—pinipini and kebeleh—are interesting for a
different reason. Molecular analysis using AFLP markers was applied to
315 rices collected from Senegal to Togo in 2008 (Nuijten et al. 2009). The
sample included a number of rices grown in Mogbuama. According to the
molecular evidence the total sample was best grouped in four clusters (see
Figure 21.3).2 Three of these clusters corresponded to the main taxonomic
groupings of cultivated rice—African rice, and the two subspecies of Asian
rice. A fourth cluster was identified as farmer-selected African × Asian rice
hybrids.
What kinds of rice are grouped in the fourth cluster? A sterility barrier
affects out-crossing between Asian and African rice. This barrier was
broken by rice researchers in the 1990s, leading to the development and
release of a family of Nerica interspecifics (NEw RICes for Africa). These
are japonica × glaberrima selections. Those tested in our 2008 sample sit (as
expected) between the japonica and glaberrima axes of our taxonomic
structure. The rices of the fourth cluster—such as pinipini and kebeleh—sit
between the glaberrima and indica axes, and can thus be identified as
hybrid-derived rices of a different composition to the Nerica rices. They are
farmer-selected interpecifics.
The question arises: How have West African peasant, shifting
cultivators/farmers been able to develop a range of interspecific rices
independently of scientific research? Broadly, the answer proposed is that
this is a product of improvisation in seed selection. Facing varying
conditions as a consequence of shifting farm sites and fluctuation in climate
and other environmental variables, women farmers find continuous
experimentation with seed choices advantageous. This is not
experimentation by design but in response to contingency, so can properly
be regarded as a type of improvisation.
For a plausible account of the improvised origins of these rices, some
answer has to be found to the question of how the sterility barrier was
overcome under conditions of shifting cultivation. Nuijten and Richards
(2011) offer one potential scenario. It invokes marginality as a key
contextual factor—especially the marginality of women such as Jeneba.
FIGURE 21.3 Phylogenetic relationships among the 315 samples studied (Nuijten et al. 2009).

Older women—perhaps no longer with a husband to make a farm for

them—aim to plant a plot of rice for their own subsistence. But they cannot
readily mobilize young men to clear the heavy vegetation. Typically, an old
woman seeking to plant her own rice will farm opportunistically, perhaps
on a patch of soil in an old rice farm recently abandoned to fallow regrowth
(Mende: jopoi). The soils will necessarily be exhausted, so she tends to be
interested in varieties adapted to low fertility, including weed-competitive
African rice.
The co-flowering of African and Asian rice is a common sight in
Mogbuama. African rice is especially hardy and is often found as a weed
(known as sanganyaa) in plots of Asian rice. Since out-crossing between
varieties is most likely when the varieties are mixed in the same field, then
a certain number of Asian rice plants will have been cross-pollinated by
sanganyaa, and vice versa. When African and Asian rice cross, the first
generation progeny (known as the F1) is infertile. It flowers (and thus
provides pollen) but does not set seed. To break the sterility barrier, the F1
must cross back on to one of the parents.
Let us assume that the old woman has sought permission to farm on the
jopoi of a male in-law (perhaps her late husband’s brother), who is duty-
bound to maintain her. Not only does he give permission to use the land (he
may help clear her plot), he readily gives her some of the seed she needs.
This is likely to be seed from the harvest of the abandoned farm she is now
re-cultivating. It will contain some of the outcrossed F1 but also some of
the parental seed. Backcrossing of the infertile first-generation hybrid on to
one or other of the parents is thus a distinct possibility.
The old woman has spent a lifetime selecting and testing rice, and she is
alert to off-types. This includes the newly backcrossed seed in her little
jopoi farm, and she seizes on the few grains for further investigation.
Painstakingly she continues to nurse and multiply what is, in effect, a new
hybrid type. A farmer-selected interspecific rice is launched on its career.
In our 2008 survey, farmer-selected hybrid-derived rices were among the
most widely grown varieties in Sierra Leone. This genetic improvement has
not come about through scientific planning but through farmer
improvisation, and perhaps improvisation by the poorest and most
marginalized members of the farming community.

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION: LESSONS OF THE

STUDY FOR A THEORY OF IMPROVISATION
Thus far it has been explained that farming in Mogbuama is undertaken
against a background of high environmental flux. Not all aspects of rice
farming in this Mende village require improvisation. There is much that is
based on clear rules of process, encapsulating basic cause-and-effect
principles. A child parked on a wooden platform with a slingshot and
mound of mud pellets is an age-old but still effective means of reducing
bird damage on the ripening rice, for example. But it has been shown that in
two particular respects improvisation is key: the short-term process of
setting fire to the mass of felled vegetation and the long-term process of
adjusting seeds to changing environmental requirements. Mende men are
particularly involved in the dance of fire and women in the play of seeds.
What has not so far been discussed is what improvisation is. This
question is conveniently addressed by setting up a contrast. Improvisation
will be contrasted with organization and planning. For this I will draw a
brief example from war studies. War studies reduce much about human life
to basics, and they thus help point up the basic contrast between
improvisation and planning.
The American Civil War (1861–1864) was fought over a huge theater,
including large expanses of forested land only incompletely cleared and
settled. It was characterized by its very high number of small engagements.
In this sense it can be considered a “shifting” war, often favoring the skills
of the improviser over the planner. The point can be made by contrasting
the strengths and weaknesses of two of the war’s best-known generals.
George McClellan was the second commander of Lincoln’s Army of the
Potomac. He was a gifted organizer and trainer of troops, but notoriously
cautious in battle. With a background in railway management, McClellan
was excellent at marshaling his resources, less good at dispatching them. He
exasperated Lincoln with repeated calls for reinforcement when he should
have been pressing his advantage. For Keegan (2009), his qualities were
also his defects. McClellan’s troops were so well trained and organized that
he was extremely reluctant to risk losing any in battle.
The Confederate general, Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, by contrast, was
McClellan’s exact opposite. Daring and completely without fear, Jackson
pressed ahead at every opportunity, seeking to surprise, mislead, and
mystify the enemy. His generalship was brilliant in the low-intensity, hit-
and-run theater of the Shenandoah valley, where he displayed an intuitive
grasp of the complex topography and its affordances. But Jackson was less
good at coordination, or in communicating his intentions to subordinate
officers. A Jackson ploy succeeded only so long as the man himself was
there to lead it. Jackson was a gifted improviser. Unburdened of the
demands of any strategic “score,” his mind was free to respond to the needs
of the moment.
As distinctive cognitive dispositions shaping individual agency,
“planning” and “improvisation” now need to be explained. How are such
dispositions shaped? One answer has been attempted in the work of the
anthropologist Mary Douglas. Douglas draws upon Durkheim’s inference
that suicide was regulated by two distinct sets of social variables—demands
of authority and affective ties to a group—and seeks to apply the same
reasoning to the regulation of other (nonpathological) forms of human
agency.
Douglas terms the two sets of constraints identified by Durkheim as
“grid” and “group.” Her analysis seeks to map the relative positions of
agents in terms of responsiveness to grid-group factors, and thus to relate
agency to the way the agent is shaped by institutional forces. She often used
a fourfold scheme to illustrate sets of dispositions associated with different
locations within the grid-group space thus defined. The top right-hand
corner is occupied by agents strongly oriented toward group concerns but
also responsive to higher authority. The bottom left-hand corner finds a
place for entrepreneurs (and gamblers). Communitarian (sectarian)
dispositions are located in the bottom right. There is scope to debate what
kind of agency is to be found in the upper left-hand quadrant, where grid is
strong and group influence weak.
In Durkheim’s original elaboration he was not altogether sure what kind
of agency was to be associated with this “top left” action space. In a lengthy
footnote in Le suicide he tentatively proposes the category “fatalistic
suicide,” and offers evidence of mass slave suicides by way of illustration.
Douglas sometimes took over this term, and she labeled the kinds of agency
associated with the top-left corner “fatalistic.” This may seem contradictory.
Does a fatalist exercise agency, or simply accept what comes?
Initially, those who used Douglas’s neo-Durkheimian theory showed
rather little interest in the top left-hand corner of their world. Latterly,
however, it was realized that this neglect undermined claims to offer a
comprehensive schematization of human agency, and more attention was
paid to the “footnoted” space. The label “isolate” has been offered as an
alternative. The term seems to capture better the idea of an agent
constrained by strong externalities, but free from group pressure.
It also fits very well the best source of evidence that we possess on
tactics associated with slave revolts and their prevention—namely, the
documentary record associated with the 420 known slave insurrections
among the nearly 27,000 Atlantic slaving voyages from Africa between
1514 and 1866. Shipboard insurrections rose to a peak of nearly 5 percent
of all voyages from Upper West Africa in the eighteenth century, the most
active period of the Atlantic slave trade (Rediker 2007).
Slavers were very conscious of the danger, and their ships were fitted out
for the eventuality (notably, the barricado, behind which the crew could
retreat and still sail the ship, in the event of slaves escaping their chains
below). The slave traders were also concerned not to fill a ship with too
many slaves from the same “nation,” for fear language or ethnic solidarity
would facilitate a mass uprising. Nascent insurrections were sometimes
nipped in the bud when plans were reported to the crew by captives from
rival groups.
Would-be mutineers tended to work alone or through a small group of
silent accomplices. Even so, their success rate was small. Insurrectionists
were often killed in the attempt, or the ship foundered with loss of all
hands. Some captives aimed to seize the ship and return to Africa, but
others freed themselves with the apparent intent of ending their lives by
drowning. This was seen as the only sure way to return home. Here we see
particularly clearly the close connection between the positioning of
“isolate” and “fatalist” dispositions. Suicide was an active way of
transcending an otherwise impossibly limiting set of circumstances.3
We have detailed records of one mutiny that resulted in the captives
regaining their homes in Africa—the famous case of the schooner Amistad
carrying freshly arrived African captives from Havana to a slave plantation
along the northern coast of Cuba. All but three of the 60 captives were from
Mende country, and all captives spoke that language.4 They also quickly
accepted the authority of a young Mende rice farmer, Sengbeh Pieh, to lead
them and determine tactics. Pieh was a quick-witted improviser in the
Jacksonian mold; or put differently, Jackson was a leader in the Mende
warlord mold—saying little, sizing tactical opportunities in an instant, and
expecting those under his authority quickly (and silently) to adjust to his
every improvisatory feint.
 The site of Pieh’s home is as yet unidentified, but he described it as being
two or three days walk to the north of Komende, in Sherbro. This places it
in the general region of Mogbuama, though perhaps somewhat to the south
west. By appropriate coincidence, the village was called Jopoi, the Mende
word for the old rice farm—the site where old women sometimes do their
improvisatory experiments with rice. The isolate agency displayed in the
improvisation of a successful mutiny on the Amistad is recognizably the
same capacity for improvised solutions in demanding environmental
conditions that remains part of a Mende heritage of shifting cultivation
today.
Improvisation, I want to argue, is a disposition in which strong, arbitrary
external constraints are recognized as being unpredictable and inescapable,
at the same time as group constraints are backgrounded. The improviser
does what is needful, without paying undue attention to what the others in
the group will think. When all accept that conditions demand the modality
of isolate leadership, thus granting it legitimacy, this leadership style can
(perhaps somewhat surprisingly) result in effective coordinated action.
Understood in this way, as the underpinnings of improvisation, “fatalist”
agency is not the contradiction in terms it at first appears. The Amistad
mutineers, led by Pieh, improvised an effective revolt. In doing so, they
activated dispositions shaped by prior experience. This included, I suggest,
the strong, shaping impress of rice farming under shifting cultivation.
The woman playing with seeds does it quietly, in a corner, without
drawing attention to the fact, just as the Amistad mutineers loosened their
shackles and secreted potential weapons. One never knows what might
happen. This can be set aside for a rainy day. No need to advertise the fact.
Mende fire dancers differ in their theories, and argue loud and long about
them in the safety of the village, but once the fire is lit they are agreed on
one thing only—not to get in each other’s way. Sometimes (as in the fire
dance) a brazen self-confidence is required. At others a furtive
experimentalism suffices (as in the play of seeds). Both fire dancer and seed
experimenter do their work with reference to strong grid and weak group
conditions.
A second important question concerns how grid-group dispositions are
formed. Douglas is not fully explicit on this issue, except that they must be
the product of socialization. Fairly clearly, such dispositions tend to endure,
but equally clearly, individuals are not locked into a fixed set. Dispositions
are subject to change. But there is no clear explanation of how these
changes might occur, or how and under what circumstances different sets of
dispositions might be invoked. Douglas’s basic argument (consistent with
Durkheim) is that dispositions are shaped by institutions. Individuals are
exposed to different institutions, and thus acquire a repertory of dispositions
and styles of agency. But it is unclear whether different dispositions shaped
(for example) by school, religious congregation, and occupation jar or
blend.
One view would be to argue that dispositions formed by competing
institutions remain discrete and available for use within a single individual
according to context. On this reckoning, a Mende farmer’s respect for
authority ingrained through sodality (“secret society”) membership and
capacity for improvisatory skill, associated with self-reliance in the bush,
are discrete (and contradictory) sets of dispositions called into play by
varying circumstances in bush and town.
That this might be so is evidenced by the way the corpus of domeisia
(performed folk tales) can play upon obvious disjunctures of dispositions.
Cosentino (1981) describes one such basic archetype with varying
outcomes—stories concerning ndogboyosoi, the bush devil. These are often
used by adults to warn reckless youth about too much solo experimentation
in the bush. But counter-stories—the same scenario and characters with
different endings—are readily told, and Cosentino provides examples, to re-
assert the importance of “isolate” dispositions against the claims of village
hierarchy. One such outcome is when an adventurous young woman is able
to resist the wiles of ndogboyosoi and bring home new resources of lasting
communal value.
Thus enactment of these variant readings in village story-telling
entertainments illustrates the range of dispositions necessary in a world in
which survival depends on the ability to cope with the never-ending
surprises of a rich but capricious environment. Those who have grown too
secure in their schemes and plans need to be re-awakened to the importance
of fatalist and isolate dispositions by the clangorous improvisation of music
without a score.

NOTES
1. I would like to thank Tim Febey, composer and trombonist, for introducing me to free
improvisation at the Bimhuis, and for several enlightening discussions we had subsequently
concerning the study he was making of free improvisation in its social and institutional contexts.
2. Using the taxonomic software SplitsTree; Daniel H. Huson and David Bryant, “Application of
Phylogenetic Networks in Evolutionary Studies,” Molecular Biology and Evolution 23, no. 2
(2006): 254−267.
3. That the two terms are not as far apart as might be assumed is illustrated by the military example
given. Jackson, the commander who kept his plans to himself, put down his complete fearlessness
in battle to his strong Calvinistic belief that God had determined the time of his death (John
Keegan, The American Civil War: A Military History [New York: Vintage Books, 2009]). This
isolate was also a fatalist.
4. The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database (2009, www.slavevoyages.org) shows that the most
rebellious groups of slaves were those from Senegambia and Sierra Leone. In the eighteenth
century, ships from Upper West Africa (including Sierra Leone) were 2.5 times as likely to
experience slave insurrection as those from Lower West Africa (the Bights of Benin and Biafra)
and five times as likely as ships form West Central Africa (Congo and Angola). See also David
Richardson, “Shipboard Revolts, African Authority, and the African Slave Trade,” William and
Mary Quarterly, 3rd Series, 58, no. 1 (2001): 69–92; and Howard Jones, Mutiny on the Amistad:
The Saga of a Slave Revolt and Its Impact on American Abolition, Law, and Diplomacy (Oxford
and New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).

REFERENCES
Huson, Daniel H., and David Bryant. “Application of Phylogenetic Networks in Evolutionary
Studies.” Molecular Biology and Evolution 23, no. 2 (2006): 254−267.
Jones, Howard. Mutiny on the Amistad: The Saga of a Slave Revolt and Its Impact on American
Abolition, Law, and Diplomacy. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.
Keegan, John. The American Civil War: A Military History. New York: Vintage Books, 2009.
Nuijten, Edwin, Robbert van Treuren, Paul C. Struik, Alfred Mokuwa, Florent Okry, Béla Teeken,
and Paul Richards. “Evidence for the Emergence of New Rice Types of Interspecific Hybrid
Origin in West African Farmers’ Fields.” PLoS ONE4, no. 10 (October 2009): e7335, 1−9.
Nuijten, Edwin, and Paul Richards. “Pollen Flows Within and Between Rice and Millet Fields in
Relation to Farmer Variety Development.” Plant Genetic Resources 9, no. 3 (August 2011): 361–
374.
Nye, Peter, and Dennis Greenland. The Soil Under Shifting Cultivation. Farnham Royal, UK:
Commonwealth Agricultural Bureaux, 1960.
Rediker, Marcus. The Slave Ship: A Human History. New York: Viking, 2007.
Richards, Paul. Coping with Hunger: Hazard and Experiment in an African Rice-Farming System.
London: Allen & Unwin, 1986.
Richardson, David. “Shipboard Revolts, African Authority, and the African Slave Trade.” William
and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Series 58, no. 1 (2001): 69–92.
Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database (2009). http://www.slavevoyages.org. Accessed October 6,
2014.
 PART V

ORGANIZATIONS
 CHAPTER 22
IMPROVISATION IN MANAGEMENT

PAUL INGRAM AND WILLIAM DUGGAN

AT Columbia Business School we teach a session on improvisation as part

of the orientation experience of every fledgling MBA. Almost 1,000
students a year practice “yes, and … ” with coaches who are experienced
improvisational actors. We motivate this session by pitching improvisation
as a route to three outcomes: (1) making luck, (2) building relationships,
and (3) creative combination. Smaller groups of students interact with a
jazz band, observing and analyzing their collaborative process for lessons
leading groups. While our school may be on the vanguard of improvisation
for business, it isn’t unique in this regard, and current students at other
leading schools would have similar learning opportunities.
Correspondingly, there is notable research attention in the field of
management on the inputs and process that produces creative combination.
It was not always this way. Until recently, improvisation was antithetical
to scholarship on management and the curricula of business schools. The
foundation of management theory emphasizes order and control, and treats
improvisation, indeed any variation from a plan, as a dysfunction (Lewin
1998). It is tempting to attribute the growing acceptance of improvisation in
management to changes in the environment in which business people
operate, and some efforts to introduce improvisation to management launch
from a position that now things are different—faster changing, more
complex—and improvisation is a solution to the challenges of the day
(Hatch 1998; Ashkenas, Ulrich, Jick, and Kerr 2002). Of course,
participants in every era view their times as complex and fast changing, and
Duggan (2007) cites many historical examples for his improvisational
process of strategy.
 The recent attention to improvisation in management can also be seen as
a manifestation of a long-term contest between forward-looking and
backward-looking approaches to problem solving. Management theory
developed in a tradition of rational decision making, and the advice to
“work backwards from what you want to achieve” is one of the
cornerstones of organizational theory. Various forms of the approach tell
decision makers to identify a goal, choose a strategy to achieve it, and then
design an organization to deliver on the strategy (e.g., Chandler 1962). The
challenge with implementing this advice is that it requires precious
foresight, perhaps more than even able managers can hope for.
Consequently, one of the great moments of departure for the field was the
recognition that managers look for “satisfactory” rather than “optimal”
answers, and that the limits of their rationality affect the organizations they
design and build. Throughout the twentieth century, the field oscillated
between waves defined by an emphasis on rational design and an emphasis
on the bottom-up processes of organization patterned by human interaction
(Barley and Kunda 1992). Thus, the current “era of improv” may represent
the manifestation of a periodic shift in scholarly fashion. We also hold out
the possibility that this wave may be more long-lasting, because new
practices based in current research may be shifting the relative balance
toward more flexible and improvisational organizational forms.
In this chapter we aim to summarize how ideas about improvisation are
being used in management, and to describe how research in management
contributes to understanding improvisation. Applications of improvisation
generate advice for the strategies of organizations, their structures, and for
the behavior of people within them. The contributions of management
research are for understanding and improving the process of creative
combination. We’ll summarize what has been learned in our field about
which individuals and groups have greater access to the inputs for
creativity, and which are better able to combine those inputs. Building off
the research on creative combination, we’ll describe the idea of strategic
intuition, an approach to strategic process that draws on improvisation
(Duggan 2007).

APPLICATIONS OF IMPROVISATION IN
MANAGEMENT
Management scholars emphasize that improvisation involves spontaneity
and novelty—in other words, problem solving and execution in real time,
while developing original actions (Weick 1998). Fisher and Amabile (2009)
usefully compare “improvisational creativity” to “compositional creativity,”
with the difference being the separation in time of planning and execution.
By considering improvisation as a form of creativity, they add the
definitional requirement that the improvised product must not only be
novel, but also “appropriate” in that it is responsive to temporally proximate
stimuli. Whether or not it belongs in a general definition of improvisation,
the dimension of appropriateness is useful in an organizational context,
because organizations are purposive. Of course, the purposes improvisation
serves in an organization can be defined broadly and need not be restricted
to the explicit performance goals of the organization. For example, the
opportunity to improvise might be satisfying and motivating for employees
and thereby satisfy the requirement of appropriateness with only indirect
reference to organizational outputs.
The exercise of improvisation in organizations has been recognized at the
level of strategy, structure, and interaction between participants. Kanter
(2002) identifies an emerging improvisational approach to strategy by
comparing the approach of companies that successfully responded to
technological change to those that were less successful. The pacesetters
“got more members of the organization involved, used their technology
more effectively and creatively, and emerged from the experimentation
period with a clear model indicating how the technology could help the
company. They did not wait to act until they had a perfectly conceived plan;
instead, they created the plan by acting. In short, they improvised” (76).
The improvisational approach to strategy also manifests itself in work
such as McGrath and MacMillan (2009) that recommends building a
strategic trajectory on real options. An option according to these authors is
“a relatively small investment that creates the right, but not the obligation,
to make a further investment later on” (55). These are valuable if
information may be learned between the initial and subsequent investment
that indicates whether further investment is warranted. Strategists may
therefore be able to substitute little steps for comprehensive foresight. Just
as improvisers have their methods, there is a method for managing strategy
through options. It is necessary to gather feedback on the success of initial
investments, as well as establish checkpoints and criteria to decide whether
they warrant further investment. Disengagement—walking away from
investments that don’t represent promise for the future—is behaviorally the
most difficult part of the options-guided result. Organizations and
individuals are subject to the tendency to escalate commitments to past
investments, both in order to save face and because we are biased when we
interpret feedback. McGrath and MacMillan recommend that organizations
that pursue the options-guided approach to strategy must lower the cost of
failure, in terms of culture and concrete incentives. The options logic may
be useful for a guide to other forms of improvisation. The advice from
strategic management for other forms of improvisation is to take small
steps, seek feedback on their success and interpret it well, and be prepared
to take a different direction if the feedback is insufficiently positive.
If improvisation is emerging as a guide to the strategies of organizations,
it is already well established in ideas about how to structure organizations.
The motivation behind this approach is to develop organizations that can be
flexible in an efficient way. The earliest success of organizational theory
was to develop tools, such as specialization of labor, centralization,
departmentalization, and hierarchy, which are efficient ways to achieve an
explicit goal. But what should organizations look like if foresight about
what goals are appropriate is too costly or impossible? At the most basic
level, the answer in organizational theory is that they should do less formal
pre-planning and structuring of the interactions between organizational
participants and allow more informed spontaneity, in other words,
improvisation. One thoughtful guide to developing contemporary
organizations offers advice on overcoming the constraints of an
organizational chart and “freeing up movement” up and down, side to side,
and even outside the organization (Ashkenas, et al. 2002). They recommend
“reciprocal teams” with the opportunity and responsibility for intense
responsiveness when there is the need to change the process of operation or
to create something new, and they present the analogy of a basketball team
(whereas other organizational forms are more like a bowling team or relay
race). Others have referred to decentralization as “disseminating
improvisation rights” (Weick 1998, 549).
Organizational theorists characterize the shift from pre-planned structures
to those that allow for more improvisation as a substitution of informal
organization for formal organization. Informal organization refers to
organizational culture and networks, and it captures the “method and
system” of improvisation within organizations. Culture can be a source of
both motivation and control. In organizations it can serve as a unifying
mindset that allows members to coordinate spontaneously. Hatch (1999)
likens organizational culture to the “groove” of a jazz band. Similarly,
networks are relationships based on social exchange that increase the
flexible capacity of individuals to achieve many ends (Zou and Ingram
2013). Research on the role of networks for organizational performance,
and the performance of individuals in them, has exploded in the last decade.
And recent organizational forms that rely less on explicit hierarchy and
incentives have conscientiously emphasized the development of culture and
networks. This may be seen as an investment in the capacity to improvise.
An interesting argument for organizations that facilitate improvisation is
put forward by Abrahamson and Freedman (2007) in The Perfect Mess, a
celebration of disorganization. They begin with the reasonable observation
that organization is costly, and at the least, the costs should be compared to
the benefits. But they go further and argue that messiness presents
advantages of its own, particularly the opportunity for creative combination.
They give the example of Scientific Generics, a Massachusetts company
that is the organizational manifestation of a strategy guided by options.
Scientific Generics “spins-up” parts of its organization to deal with
emergent opportunities. It is “a fractured conglomeration of transitory,
semi-independent units, some leaping into being and growing quickly,
others withering away, with employees and funding flowing freely and fast
between them” (168). Modular organizations such as this are distinguished
by three principles: growing in pieces instead of holistically; being as quick
to shrink or stop failing pieces as to grow thriving ones; and having the
preparedness to refocus around any piece of the organization.
Management research at a micro level has also drawn on the concept of
improvisation. This work, although rare, can be understood as connected to
the developments above that examine the shift of organizational structures
to rely more on interaction between individuals. McGinn and Keros (2002)
look for the occurrence of improvisation in the execution of negotiations,
which are often seen as central to organizational life. They define an
improvisation in the course of a negotiation as “a coherent sequence of
relational, informational, and procedural actions and responses chosen, and
carried out by the parties during a social interaction” (445). They identify
three forms of improvisation in experimental negotiations, in declining
order of cooperativeness: “opening up,” “working together,” and
“haggling.” Not all negotiators improvised; they could instead engage in an
“asymmetric” interaction, where they talk at cross purposes. McGinn and
Keros found that negotiators that were friends before the interaction were
more likely to fall into improvisation than were strangers and to use more
cooperative forms of improvisation. Strangers negotiating on the phone
tended to have asymmetric interactions, while strangers on email fell into
haggling. Cooperative improvisations yielded more successful negotiations.

INPUTS TO CREATIVITY
Burt (2004) used the concept of a “structural hole” to identify managers
with the right inputs to creativity. A structural hole is a position in a
network where ego is connected to two others who are not connected to
each other. People who occupy structural holes have broad and early access
to information relative to others in less unique structural positions.
Consequently, they have an opportunity to extract ideas about products,
practices, or services from one setting and bring them to another setting
where they are viewed as novel. They also have more opportunity to create
something novel by combining ideas from two different places in the
network. In the simplest sense, structural holes give ego a relative
advantage over the two alters, as the unique crossroads for all of the ideas
contained in the triad. This argument is based on an assumption that people
in a network who do not know each other have different knowledge and
therefore that their combined ideas are not redundant. Of course, this is not
always true, but ideas are localized, and people who do not know each other
are more likely to occupy different locations in the social network and
therefore in the geography of ideas (Granovetter 1973).
Burt tested this theory by examining managers in a large American
electronics company; he found that those with more structural holes in their
networks were more likely to be viewed as the source of new ideas.
Similarly, Gargiulo and Benassi (2000) found that managers who had more
structural holes in their networks made better decisions in adapting to new
challenges. Zou and Ingram (2013) looked at both creativity and decision-
making quality of executives, as perceived by work peers in a 360-degree
performance survey. They found that structural holes along both of these
dimensions of performance were increased by structural holes that cross the
organizational boundary, in other words, when the executive knew people
outside the organization who didn’t know others inside the organization. In
such cases, cross-boundary structural holes take on particular importance,
because these people are even more likely to tap into unique sources of
information and perspective.
While contemporaneous structural positions can be the source of the
diverse inputs to creative combination, the diversity of experiences within a
life may serve a similar function. For example, superior creativity is
relatively prevalent among first- and second-generation immigrants
(Simonton 1997), among bilingual people (Nemeth and Kwan 1987), and
among people with multiple cultural identities (Maddux and Galinsky
2009). Diverse experiences may be direct inputs to creative combination
and may also increase an individual’s psychological readiness to recruit and
accept ideas from unfamiliar sources (Schooler and Melcher 1995).

PROCESS OF COMBINATION
If improvisation is a form of creativity in which the temporal gap between
stimulus and response is shorter, it makes sense to consider not only what
structures and individual histories provide the inputs for creativity, but also
under what circumstances those inputs are more likely to be smoothly and
quickly combined. Research in management offers answers at both the
group and individual levels. For groups, one of the behavioral challenges to
creative combination of ideas distributed among group members is that
group discussions are biased toward shared information (what more or all
members know) as opposed to unshared information (what one member
knows that might inform the others [Stasser and Titus 1985]). One reason
for groups to focus on shared information is to reinforce commonalities and
therefore build cohesion. Presumably, this would be less necessary in
groups whose members already had strong relationships, and there is some
experimental evidence that groups of friends share information more
effectively (Gruenfeld, et al. 1996). Evidence from managers in
organizations suggests that they are more willing to share new ideas with
others when there is more trust in those others, both emotional trust and
trust that they will do their jobs (Chua, Morris, and Ingram 2010).
Reagans and Zuckerman (2001) present an analysis of innovation that
simultaneously supports both the idea that the inputs to creative
combination come from connections to diversely situated others and that
group cohesion facilitates the process of combination. They examined data
from 224 R&D teams in 29 corporations from seven industries. They found
that R&D teams had the greatest innovative productivity when they had
cohesion among the members, but the members had non-overlapping ties to
others outside the team. Uzzi and Spiro (2005) found that a similar structure
explained the artistic and financial success of Broadway musicals.
The structure of dense within-group ties, and weak, non-overlapping ties
outside the group would appear to offer the maximum for non-redundant
information inputs to the team and the best capacity to combine those
inputs. This structural ideal seems relevant to other contexts of innovation.
It would suggest, for example, that creative combination would be best in a
jazz combo with members who possess diverse playing experiences but also
who trust in each other. In organizational research, group cohesion and trust
are typically seen as functions of the direct relationships between members.
It is feasible, however, that trust could derive from other sources, such as
reputation, the norms of a profession, or shared identity in the absence of
direct relationships. The effect of these forms of cohesion on trust,
information sharing, and creative combination is a worthy topic for future
research.
At the individual level, evidence suggests that arousal is the enemy of
creative combination. In other words, creative combination is more feasible
for individuals in a state of calm. Part of the problem is that arousal
produces rigidity, where individuals persevere with inappropriate strategies
rather than restructure their approach to a problem. Decades of research
show that individuals under arousal, for example because they are under
time pressure, warned of impending failure, threatened with physical harm,
and so forth, fall back on learned responses and habituated behavior (e.g.,
Broadbent 1971). This arousal-induced inflexibility is not only in terms of
overt behavior but also of cognitive patterns. Directly related to the
structural inputs to creativity already described, research indicates that high
arousal results in a narrowing of attention. Easterbrook (1959) showed that
arousal induced by stress affects how people scan the environment and
attend to stimuli. As some improvisers know, the effect can be manipulated
chemically: Callaway (1959) showed that subjects’ selectivity of attention
increased when they were treated with a stimulant and decreased when they
were treated with a sedative.
Some of our own research has been to combine ideas about the structures
that provide the inputs of creativity and the individual characteristics that
facilitate the process of combination. Mason, Zou, Ingram and Duggan
(2011) examined the influence on executive networks of (a) plentiful
structural holes, (b) chronic low arousal (calmness, relaxation, the absence
of nervousness and tenseness), and (c) the interaction of the structural and
individual attributes. We found that a network rich in both structural holes
and calmness contributed directly to whether an executive was viewed by
his or her work colleagues as creative. In addition, the interaction between
the two factors was significant. Calmness increases the creative impact of
structural holes (and vice versa). This gives direct evidence in support of
the idea that calmness facilitates the incorporation of diverse stimuli and
their combination into a creative product.

STRATEGIC INTUITION
A new related idea in management offers a structure that combines these
various elements of improvisation as “strategic intuition” (Duggan 2007).
We can define it as follows:
The selective projection of past elements into the future in a new combination as a course of
action that fits previous goals or sparks new ones, with the personal commitment to follow
through and work out the details along the way.

Strategic intuition describes the well-known phenomenon of the “epiphany”

or “flash of insight,” when your brain connects the dots and you see the
path ahead. Modern neuroscience now recognizes this phenomenon as a
form of intuition, that is, an automatic retrieval and combination that
requires little or no conscious thought. Instead, calmness allows the brain to
search widely through memory to make new connections. Arousal comes
after the epiphany, through an eagerness and pleasure in taking action on
the new idea.
 The first formal description of strategic intuition comes from classical
military strategy. In On War, Clausewitz gives four steps: examples from
history, presence of mind, flash of insight, and resolution. Examples from
history are a kind of learning that takes the form not of concepts or
principles but discrete instances of past actions that led to particular
outcomes. Those instances come from personal experience or from studying
what others have done. Presence of mind is Clausewitz’s term for calmness,
where the strategist expects the unexpected and is not surprised or upset by
unforeseen or unwelcome events. In step three, the flash of insight, a new
combination of examples from history come together in a calm mind. That
yields step four, the resolution or will to carry out the new idea.
Strategic intuition is a model of improvisation that applies to situations
new to the manager. Probably no one has faced exactly the same situation,
but there are countless examples from history that can fit different pieces of
the problem. You improvise a new combination to suit the problem at hand.
A related phenomenon is “expert intuition,” where the manager finds quick
solutions to problems by drawing from personal experience. Klein’s (1999)
research on expert intuition shows how firefighters, nurses, and soldiers in
battle quickly draw on subsets of personal experiences to cobble together a
combination of tactics to suit the problem at hand. In new situations, expert
intuition can be the enemy of strategic intuition: it prevents the manager
from looking beyond personal experience to a wider range of examples
from history more suitable to the problem.
Another difference between strategic and expert intuition is in timing.
Expert intuition represents very quick responses to a stimuli, the “blink”
phenomenon popularized by Gladwell (2005). Strategic intuition, on the
other hand, is always the result of a slow process, although it may seem
spontaneous if the antecedents to creative combination are not recognized.
It is probably most accurate to say of strategic intuition that there is no
systematic interval between stimuli and response, and indeed, that many
stimuli don’t receive any response. Epiphany cannot be ordered on demand.
As Duggan (2007) puts it:
[S]trategic intuition becomes like a cottage you come upon in the middle of a forest. You move
up close, look around the outside, and then peer through each window to see what’s inside. Each
window gives you a different view of the same thing. You look in one window, then another,
then another, and then at the end you find you’re inside the cottage. It all comes together in your
mind. (5)
A prominent example of strategic intuition is the origin of Google. In the
late 1990s the Google founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, were graduate
students in computer science at Stanford University, working on applying
data-mining algorithms from traditional retail to the new online retail sector,
as represented by Amazon and the like. While using Altavista, the best
search engine at the time, Page noticed a command to “Find pages that link
to your site.” This reminded him of academic footnotes, and he knew that
academic journals rank researchers by how many times other works cite
their work. So Page and Brin adapted a data-mining algorithm to do the
same thing for websites: the more others link to your site, the higher your
rank. They improvised a new combination: Altavista plus citation ranking
plus data-mining algorithms. The result was a new goal: the world’s best
search engine. When they noticed that another site, Overture, was selling
ads and displaying them as search results rather than as pop-ups and
banners, Page and Brin added that to Google as their revenue model.
Strategic intuition adds the dimension of problem-seeking, where the
goal, and not just the tactics to reach it, can arise in the heat of action.
Improvising a goal seems counter to the purposive character of
organizations, but in reality organizations have many possible goals that are
not all known or explicit at any given time. The greatest innovations by
definition lead to new goals and thus new strategic plans to reach them.
Calmness in strategic improvisation includes a lack of anxiety about
changing goals. In fact, frustration at not reaching goals with enough speed,
quality, or economy is a major cause of negative arousal in organizations.
Of course organizations should not change goals often. But the new
combinations that improvisation creates can sometimes lead to a new goal
that is equal to or better than the previous goal.

IMPROV FOR MANAGEMENT AND MANAGEMENT

FOR IMPROV

Management scholarship and practice is wrestling with the fact that the
foresight that facilitates many approaches to strategizing and organizing is
in scarce supply. One response to this paucity is to build organizations that
look backward instead of forward, and improvisation is a key part of these
efforts. As a result, there is increasing attention to options approaches to
strategy, organizations that decentralize authority and allow flexibility as to
who works with whom and how, and to improvisation as a guide to the
micro processes through which organizational participants come together.
Correspondingly, research in the field is investigating the social structures
and mental processes associated with innovativeness and creativity. The
research yields advice to all improvisers, namely to connect to others with
diverse experiences, to build trust with those you improvise with, and to
stay calm. These efforts come together in the process of strategic intuition,
which combines lessons from history, presence of mind, the flash of insight,
and resolution to produce novel and practical strategic ideas.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
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 CHAPTER 23
FREE IMPROVISATION AS A PATH-
DEPENDENT PROCESS

JARED BURROWS AND CLYDE G. REED

MUSICAL coordination is commonly achieved by means of a score, a

conductor, or the parameters of a shared performance practice. Freely
improvised music lacks these mechanisms, yet improvisers are capable of
finding other ways to coordinate their efforts and make aesthetic judgments
on their success. In freely improvised music, we view musical success as
the attainment of musical and interpersonal interactions in which players
feel able to make strong and distinctive musical contributions and where a
high level of musical coordination is present. Borrowing from economics,
we apply the concept of “path dependence” to musical choices in freely
improvised performance. Our purpose is to explore the process of
improvisation through this lens. Some of the questions we ask are the
following: How is coordination achieved in free improvisation? What
determines the quality of the improvisation? How does our analysis of
improvisation inform economic analysis?
We begin with a definition of improvisation in the context of music
performance. Path-dependent analysis in economics is briefly discussed as
well as its relevance to improvisation. We present a model of musical
choice in the context of free improvisation and path dependence. From this
perspective, we then analyze problems, benefits, and solutions in freely
improvised music performance. Finally, we suggest how improvisation
might inform recent work in economics on human capital formation and
happiness.
 DEFINING IMPROVISATION

Improvisation in music has proven difficult to define.1 Consider a

continuum in musical choice (notes, melodies, texture, dynamics, phrasing,
rhythms, etc.). At one extreme of the continuum, all the choices are made in
advance of performance by, for example, a composer or a constraining
music tradition. At the other extreme musicians make all the decisions in
the moment of performance, unconstrained by external coordination. The
smaller the role of external coordination, the larger the role of in-the-
moment decisions about what to play and how to play, and so forth, the
more improvisation is present in the performance. In this view, there are
two elements in play. The first is the degree of predetermined musical
choice, the second is the range of musical choice allowed to the performers.
An example of the complete absence of improvisation in performance
would be certain electronic music in which preprogramming eliminates all
choice during performance. Composed music played by humans, even when
fully scored and subject to extensive rehearsals, still can be expected to
include subtle improvisation in terms of interpretation during performance.
In most jazz performances there is extensive room for improvisation, but
performers are still constrained in their musical choices by predetermined
harmonic, melodic, and rhythmic structures. Freely improvised music is
perhaps the form of music making closest to the improvisation end of the
music spectrum, but even here the past plays a constraining role. For
example, musical choices are influenced by previous performances, music
vocabulary, practice history, listening history, and the sequence of musical
choices immediately preceding the current choice during performance.

PATH DEPENDENCE IN ECONOMICS AND MUSIC

Path dependence in economic analysis can only arise in cases where an
agent experiences an increase or decrease in the value derived from a good
or activity when other agents consume the same good or engage in the same
activity. This form of interconnectivity between choices across agents is
called a “network externality.” It will motivate agents to coordinate their
choices over goods and activities in order to maximize the benefits they
derive from those choices. Depending on the specifics of the coordination
environment, including the extent of knowledge about the time path of
previous actions taken by agents, path dependence can result in a number of
possible outcomes (“multiple equilibria” in the language of economists).
Unlike in traditional economic analysis, the determination of equilibrium
choice outcomes will be influenced by the specific path followed to realize
them, hence the term “path dependence.” A common phrase associated with
path dependence is “history matters.”
A classic illustration of path dependence involves the telephone. The
value of owning a telephone increases with the number of other people
owning a telephone. Under the expectation that very few individuals will
have access to a telephone, the value of a telephone to a single individual
will be low and the equilibrium outcome is that very few telephones will be
demanded and therefore produced. Under the expectation that most people
will have access to a telephone, the value to an individual of owning a
telephone is high and in equilibrium many will be demanded and produced.
The ability of potential buyers to easily coordinate telephone purchases is
critical for determining which equilibrium outcome will occur.
Paul David uses the example of the longevity of the QWERTY keyboard
for word processing to illustrate a path dependence case in which
coordination is difficult, leading to the “lock-in” of an inferior technology.2
Initial typewriter technology relied on inked letters attached to levers that
were activated when a typist depressed appropriate keypads. When a typist
tried to type too fast, the levers would stack on top of each other, forcing the
typist to stop word processing to disentangle the levers. The QWERTY
layout placed many of the most-used letters in the English language further
apart, thus slowing down typing and reducing the time spent disentangling
the levers. According to David, it was an efficient layout given the
mechanics of early typewriters. Over time, technological advances not only
did away with the lever mechanism, but also with typewriters. In light of
this history, one might expect that most word processing today would be
done on computers using a more efficient keyboard in which the most used
letters are close together and are placed in the most accessible regions of the
keyboard. Instead the original QWERTY layout is still the dominant
keyboard in use. David’s explanation is that, given the network externalities
involved, the required coordination between word processor manufacturers,
people training to be word processors, and buyers of word processors made
it too difficult and costly for agreement to be reached on a better keyboard
configuration. David’s pioneering work has been criticized with regard to
the specific QWERTY example, but the connections between network
externalities, path dependence, multiple equilibria, and the possibility of
lock-in to an inefficient equilibrium are well accepted.
The relationship of this analytic framework to free improvisation can be
seen in the following stylized scenario. A group of musicians get together to
freely improvise music. There is no discussion before playing of how the
music will start, how it will evolve, or how it will end. Players listen
carefully to their own musical expressions, those of the other musicians,
and the combined sounds of the group. They examine their emotional and
intellectual reactions to what they are hearing. They then make musical
choices about when to play, what to play, and how to play. Each player may
choose to lead, to follow, to support, to play in contrast, to attempt to
change musical direction, or to not play at all. This all happens in the
moment. After some time, maybe instantly, the players settle into what we
call a musical “equilibrium” in which players collectively explore and
enhance a coherent musical space. We call the achievement of this
equilibrium “coordination.” This could happen very fast and be very
transient.
An equilibrium could be very complex, involving multiple layerings of
musical ideas, emotions, and intentions. Equilibria may occur on a number
of levels, including rhythmic or harmonic coordination, references to shared
musical vocabularies, shared feelings of “flow,” emotional connection, or in
some cases an ecstatic or trance-like coordination. The best equilibria
involve a feeling of transcendence, of feeling fully alive, of feeling an
overwhelming sense of elevation.
Decay of equilibria can be rapid as players lose emotional or intellectual
interest or think of new ideas, and at some point a player decides that a new
musical direction is required in order to sustain the level of music quality.
The player then makes choices that disturb the old equilibrium. The choices
may range from subtle variations or developments to stark contrasts or
deliberately subversive musical actions. This is not to say that she always
knows specifically where the music should go. The player may only know
that her internal reaction to the music is such that the improvisation needs to
change. She tries something and hears and feels the reaction from the other
players. Do their musical choices change in response? Should the new
direction be continued? Should it be made deeper, made simpler, made
more complex?
Individual players may sense the need for musical change at different
times and have different ideas about the direction of change. They may also
differ in their attention and responsiveness to the musical choices of others
in the ensemble. If the disturbance is effective, the players coordinate on a
new equilibrium. The improvisation proceeds in this way. The quality of the
performance, from the perspective of the musicians, will depend on the
length of time between equilibria, the musical quality of those equilibria,
and the musical relationships between equilibria. The greatest free
improvisations exhibit an uninterrupted series of high-quality equilibria
linked together to form a coherent structure or narrative, a wonder-filled
coordination across equilibria that unifies the overall performance into a
sublime experience.

THE MODEL
Consider a simple case of freely improvised music performance. Let there
be an improvising ensemble small enough such that each musician is aware
of the musical choices of the other players. Let each musician make choices
with the desire to maximize the quality of the improvisation. The choices
will be based on personal aesthetics and the knowledge that the quality of
the musical outcome will be enhanced if musical choices are coordinated.
Let there be M music outcomes in a performance. Think of these
outcomes as either periods of equilibria or periods of searching for
equilibria. Associated with each outcome let there be a musical pay-off in
terms of personal aesthetics, θ, for the individual musician that may be
positive, negative, or zero. Let personal aesthetic preferences differ across
the musicians.
Let each musician make T (= M) sets of musical choices (i.e., one choice-
set per outcome) and gain S > 0 of musical pay-off from each choice-set,
but only when it is coordinated with the choice-set of the other musicians.
Otherwise S = 0. This component of the model constitutes the “network
externality” required in path-dependent analysis.
Each musician will make musical choices in order to maximize her own
musical pay-off, which will be given by the sum of her personal aesthetic
pay-off (θ) plus S in cases in which musical choices across players are
coordinated. The larger is S, the greater will be the role of path dependence
in determining the musical outcome.
The exogenous variables of this choice problem are S and the personal
aesthetic values of the musicians (θ). The endogenous variables of greatest
interest are the choices of the musicians (T) and the corresponding musical
outcomes (M). In our exposition, we assume musicians are trying to
maximize with respect to their own musical pay-off. The same model also
applies if instead the musicians are trying to maximize with respect to their
expectation of the musical pay-off for the general audience, for musicians in
the audience, or for music critics. This model generates the standard path-
dependent outcomes of multiple equilibria, some preferred to others, and
the possibility of lock-in to an inferior equilibrium.3

MUSIC QUALITY AND EQUILIBRIUM

Music is a powerful medium for expressing emotion and states of mind.
Equilibrium in our analysis simply means that improvising musicians feel
connected to each other at a moment of time in expressing an emotion
and/or state of mind. The equilibrium lasts as long as the players continue
to make musical choices that maintain this connection. In our model, the
highest-quality equilibria are those that, in addition to providing musical
coordination, also express emotions and states of mind that are preferred by
the musicians in terms of their personal aesthetics (i.e., highest valued θ).
Low-quality equilibria are those in which the musicians are coordinated on
emotions and states of mind that, while perhaps initially pleasing, impact
negatively on their personal aesthetics—for example, “I am sick and tired
of more of this shrill, high energy, musical blathering,” or “I can’t stand any
more of this overly precious and pretentious spaciousness,” or “can we
please move on from this increasingly boring pointillism?”
“Lock-in” refers to a situation in which the musicians are in a low-quality
equilibrium and cannot coordinate their way to a better one. In general,
when economists analyze coordination games it is common to have an
equilibrium A that is preferred by all participants in the game to another
equilibrium B, but if the participants find themselves in equilibrium B, no
individual will be willing to change unilaterally.
 We assume that individual players approach free improvisation with a
variety of personal intentions and aesthetic frameworks. Obviously, we
cannot account for all combinations of group dynamics or describe all
individual viewpoints. In our model, an individual player approaches
improvising with one imperative: to maximize musical satisfaction for
herself. In order to do this she makes choices based on her personal
aesthetic and also on her need to coordinate with the other members of the
ensemble. In cases in which these bases of choice conflict with each other,
the player makes choices that sometimes work in favor of her vision of the
music, or she makes choices that sacrifice personal desires in favor of the
perceived musical direction of the group. We see an ongoing negotiation of
these values, a natural ebb and flow from one kind of choice to the other, as
an integral part of the improvising process.
For situations in which musicians have substantially different aesthetic
preferences, it is useful to consider an aggregate measure of musical
performance. One possibility is audience response, another is critical
appraisal from reviewers, yet another is to aggregate the aesthetic
assessments of the performing musicians. In the latter case there are a
number of statistical measures to choose from: mean, median, mode, range,
and so on. In the context of a one-off performance, the choice over
alternative measures of aggregate quality may be of small consequence.
From the perspective of long-run viability, the choice becomes more
significant. The prospect for future performances depends on audience and
reviewer responses. Also, for musicians to be willing to continue to play
together in what is primarily an artistic rather than commercial undertaking,
their individual musical needs must be met. When aesthetic preferences
differ, it is especially important for musicians to be sensitive during
performance to how the music is affecting each player and that musical
choices are adjusted accordingly. From this point of view, we suggest that
aggregate musical quality should be measured by the assessment of the least
satisfied performer.

COORDINATION PROBLEMS IN FREE

IMPROVISATION
Limitations imposed by coordination in freely improvised music
performance are reflected in the following description/critique by the
eminent composer (and sometimes free improviser) Gavin Bryars: “[P]‌ieces
always started tentatively, something big in the middle, and then finished
quietly.”4 Our explanation is that coordination problems at the beginning of
pieces cause tentative playing as musicians search for equilibria under
conditions of limited musical information. As the music progresses there is
more time for musicians to signal their intentions and preferences, thus
making for easier coordination and allowing “something big” to happen in
the middle of performance. Quiet and spare finishes make it easier to
coordinate on an ending because details are easier to hear and there is more
time for deliberation. Bryars describes a way of coordinating a simple
narrative arc structure. Of course there is nothing inherently wrong with a
piece that takes this shape, indeed its prevalence as a common practice
probably shows its strength as a vehicle for musical communication. If,
however, a group is unable to achieve other forms and structures, we view
this as a coordination problem.
Equilibria are often easier to achieve when players coordinate by playing
one type of texture or musical gesture: all fast, all slow, all dense, all sparse,
all high, all low, all extended techniques, all pulse-based rhythms, all
turbulent free rhythms, all in one tonal center, all atonal. As with Bryars’s
large-scale structural critique, these textures or gestures are not problematic
in and of themselves. We view all of them as musically useful and
potentially very effective ways of achieving high-quality equilibria. We see
such monotextural equilibria as problematic only when the equilibria
become “locked-in” as players are unable to find alternative means of
coordination, or when such equilibria become the default means for a group
to coordinate.
As one group of musicians improvises together through many
performances, players begin to recognize the musical tendencies and
improvising vocabulary of other players in the group. The musical
vocabularies of players in the group become a structure for coordination as
musical actions are more easily predicted and expectations fulfilled, or
subverted, based on past musical experiences. For many players, this aspect
of group playing can be quite satisfying and desirable. Take as an example
the Schlippenbach Trio, a group that has been playing together for over
forty years. Their creative intensity and inventiveness seem undiminished
by time. On the contrary, each player in this group is able to effectively use
his knowledge of the other players to create and release musical tension and
to predict and reinforce the actions of the others. Their commitment to
heurism and dialogue prevents them from falling into cliché.
On the other hand, for some groups familiarity can breed stagnation and
lock-in if predictable patterns are relied upon too consistently in the
achievement of coordination. This can cause players to stop searching or to
stop listening as intensely as they might otherwise. Once again, we do not
view the emergence and accumulation of such vocabularies and group
musical tendencies as inherently inferior, but they can be problematic when
they become the only means by which players coordinate. Perhaps as a way
to avoid this problem, musicians like Derek Bailey seem to want to play
with the largest and most diverse possible range of players and place a high
value on unfamiliarity and differences in background and approach. In an
interview in Jazziz magazine, Bailey explains his viewpoint:
There has to be some degree, not just of unfamiliarity, but incompatibility with a partner.
Otherwise, what are you improvising for? What are you improvising with or around? You’ve got
to find somewhere where you can work. If there are no difficulties, it seems to me that there’s
pretty much no point in playing. I find that the things that excite me are trying to make
something work. And when it does work, it’s the most fantastic thing. Maybe the most obvious
analogy would be the grit that produces the pearl in an oyster, or some shit like that.5

We agree that the presence of aesthetic or interpersonal tension,

adversity, or friction can be an important and useful factor in producing
valuable musical outcomes. Moreover, it stands to reason that the larger the
differences in what musicians bring to collaborative, free improvisation, the
larger the set of ideas, approaches, and abilities that will be available for
music making. In other words, more diversity in the musical background of
musicians increases the potential benefit from coordination. The downside
is that without shared musical and cultural experiences, musicians may find
it more difficult to communicate and coordinate their ideas, approaches, and
abilities into a musical whole. Musical signals and references will be harder
to interpret compared to a situation in which the musicians share a common
musical background. Taken to extremes, both cases—improvising with
players sharing highly similar backgrounds as opposed to very different
backgrounds—represent a degree of risk with regard to the achievement of
high-quality equilibria. We return to this issue in the section Solutions to
Coordination Problems in Free Improvisation.
 When musicians have invested thousands of hours in achieving
virtuosity, the temptation to display that virtuosity can be overwhelming.
The openness of freely improvised music seems to make it especially
susceptible to virtuosic display, and this is compounded by the tradition of
improvised music that places a premium on uniqueness and technical
innovation (perhaps an inheritance from the jazz tradition and also an
artifact of modernism) in individual musicians’ vocabularies. In addition,
there is a potentially distracting kinesthetic reward to performing a difficult
physical feat. For instance, a trumpet player who has learned to use circular
breathing may decide to use this technique as often as possible just because
she can do it and because it feels good. Continual circular breathing is not a
problem in and of itself if it maintains a musical connection with the
choices made by other players. It certainly will become a problem, for
example, if it limits other players in trying to coordinate on a more sparse or
open musical texture.
By contrast, a lack of technical ability could be an impediment to
coordination. A musician’s ability to hear and react to the sounds of other
players is always governed by the limitations of hearing and instrumental
technique. In a group of three musicians, if two players are playing very
fast, the third player need not go along with them, but if she lacks the
technical ability to play fast, then that option is not open to her, nor is the
possibility of an all-fast group equilibrium. Similarly, if a group
spontaneously coordinates on a series of simple, repeated harmonies, a
player’s inability to hear those harmonic relationships does not prevent her
from making a valuable contribution, but it does preclude her ability to
coordinate with the group on the basis of shared harmonic structure.
Just as some musicians build up virtuosic technique, others develop
elaborate aesthetic and philosophical viewpoints that can have a negative
effect on coordination. In the early 1990s, the British musician Django
Bates appeared at the Vancouver International Jazz festival. One of the
performances included an opportunity for audience members to ask
questions. One person in the audience asked why Bates did not perform
regularly with a list of what were then the leading lights of the European
free-improv scene. Bates said simply, “Because you can’t do this,” and then
walked to the piano and played a C major chord. Following this, he
explained that for some musicians, free improvisation meant that references
from many pre-existing musical forms were somehow forbidden and that he
found this kind of restriction unattractive and frustrating. Indeed, there are
many players active in free playing who seem averse to coordination on
conventional harmonic or rhythmic devices derived from other forms of
music. We see this approach as having a negative impact on coordination.
While it may limit risk by constraining musical vocabulary, this prescriptive
approach also eliminates many potential high-quality equilibria, essentially
preventing people of differing viewpoints from engaging fully in a musical
dialogue.
The obverse of the aforementioned problem can also be a serious
coordination problem. Where players have a significant investment in
competency within a particular style or genre, they may have difficulty
leaving behind the vocabulary or performance practices attached to that
genre. For instance, if a group of musicians includes three jazz players and
one player whose primary field is romantic piano repertoire, the majority of
players who are schooled in jazz can easily coordinate on a swinging
rhythmic vocabulary that will exclude the pianist. Of course it would be
fine for these players to coordinate on swing rhythms for a while and have
the pianist either sit out or juxtapose other rhythms, but if the jazz players
allow the swinging approach to dominate, the pianist may be unable to
contribute fully. In order to realize the full potential of the group music,
players may be required to compromise some of the more comfortable or
common aspects of their own musical vocabulary. For many players, this
impetus to find new ways of playing is precisely what makes free playing
attractive.
In addition to the musical concerns just noted, interpersonal tensions,
mistrust, or negative feelings can have an adverse affect on coordination. Of
course such issues would have an impact on any kind of group
performance, but because improvised music depends primarily upon the
quality of interaction between musicians and their willingness to enter into
dialogue with each other, emotional states are especially important. Some
degree of tension is perhaps desirable and makes interactions livelier, but in
more extreme cases such tension can shut down musical dialogue.
In our experience, freely improvising large ensembles, even those made
up of exceptional musicians, rarely produce great music when all musicians
are improvising simultaneously. One problem is that the human brain seems
to have difficulty in simultaneously keeping track of more than three
distinct musical expressions.6 Without the ability to hear and therefore
interact, even otherwise great improvising musicians will not be able to
coordinate their musical choices. There exist several solutions to this
problem, involving constraints on the kinds of interaction allowed within a
group. One is to intersperse small group improvising within a large
ensemble composition. Another is to engage in “conduction,” a technique
pioneered by Butch Morris, in which a conductor signals, in the moment,
which musicians will be playing and what constraints will be placed on
their musical choices. Many composers have utilized sections of freely
improvised music within larger works or have designed scores or directions
that aid coordination. We recognize the potential musical value of such
external coordinating mechanisms, but will not consider interactions
between composers, conductors, scores, and improvisers in the context of
this chapter.
Finally, there is the problem of multiple motivations for musicians
connected with improvised music making. These are not unique to
improvised music by any means. For instance, audience approval, peer and
critical approval, commercial success (rare for improvisers), performances
at prestigious venues, or with famous musicians certainly can generate
feelings of well-being for most musicians. None of these has an inherently
negative effect on improvisation, but where these considerations become
primary motivations, there is obvious potential for trouble as extra-musical
concerns usurp artistic vision.

PURPOSES AND BENEFITS

We have argued above that freely improvised musical performance is
subject to multiple problems of coordination. Why then do musicians
choose to do it? What are the offsetting benefits of free improvisation?
What makes free improvisation a viable form of music making?
In a workshop during the Vancouver International Jazz Festival some
years ago, the great improvising bassist, Barre Phillips, made the following
case for free improvisation. He started with the question of why he played
music. His answer was that it was a way for him to achieve transcendence.
On the basis of his extensive background in both classical and jazz, Phillips
observed that to achieve transcendence playing Mozart requires multiple
decades of training in the music vocabulary of Mozart, and that a similar
long period of study is required to achieve transcendence playing bebop. In
his view, a virtue of free improvisation is that practitioners could attempt to
achieve transcendence with whatever musical vocabulary they currently
possessed.
An interesting follow-up to Phillips’s view is contained in Alex Ross’s
book, Listen to This. In an interview with classical pianists Mitsuko Uchida
and Richard Goode, co-directors of Marlboro Music, Ross includes the
following discussion about recruiting students:
When I asked Goode to define what qualities he and Uchida were looking for, he said, “A
certain technical excellence is a prerequisite. But you also listen for urgency, emotional reality.
Maybe that is the primary thing in the end. I guess you could call it ‘musicality.’ You can often
hear it right away. There’s a story that when Murray Perahia auditioned for Marlboro he played
the C-Minor Impromptu of Schubert, which begins with fortissimo Gs.” Goode imitated the
sound. “And right after that Horszowski supposedly turned to Serkin and said, ‘Let’s take
him.’ ” Uchida puts it in her pithy way: “As a rule, the imaginative ones are lacking the
technique and the ones that have good technique haven’t got a clue. But there are exceptions to
the rule, and we try to snap them up.”7

“Urgency, emotional reality, musicality”; free improvisation is perhaps

the only western music tradition that values these qualities unconditionally,
regardless of musical vocabulary and technique.
Edwin Prévost sees free improvisation as having two central purposes:
heurism and dialogue.
Improvisation is a practical and secular method of making contact with the flow of existence. It
is the place where the very stuff of things can be affected. The contrast with a more formal
music (for example string quartet playing) is fundamental, although both may strive for a similar
sense of being to enliven their work. The musicians playing a string quartet piece give purpose
to a work through performance. Improvising finds purpose of performance through investigation
of sonic materials and the testing of human responses.8

We see the heuristic process of improvised music making as having a

strong personal benefit. For many musicians and listeners, a rush of
pleasure and excitement accompanies the discovery of new sounds, whether
made by the individual, other members of the group, or in combination. The
potential for the discovery of new sonic materials is enhanced through
group interaction as individual players react and strain to both integrate
with and affect the course of an improvisation.
In the preceding quote, we see two other important purposes and benefits
in improvised music making. First, the “testing of human responses,” to
which Prévost refers, is central to our understanding of the benefits that are
derived through free improvisation. David Brooks suggests that the need for
social interaction is a central motivating force in society. In his book, The
Social Animal, Brooks surveys and synthesizes a large and diverse body of
research on the subject of human interaction.9 He suggests that the most
important and significant social interactions, as well as many important
cognitive processes, occur on an unconscious level. He refers to these
unconscious processes as “level-one” thinking and conscious cognition as
“level-two.” Level-one cognition gathers massive quantities of sense
perception data from the environment, especially subtle physical and
emotional signals from others. It produces raw emotional responses and
reactions, searches for patterns, and does some generalized filtering of and
“fuzzy” thinking about this data. Level-two cognition comprises conscious
analytic, logical, choice-making, and problem solving in large part based on
level-one processes. Brooks suggests that we often attribute choices and
outcomes of choices to level-two thinking even when such choices are
probably made, or at least heavily influenced by, level-one processes. The
more we become aware of level-one processes and their origins and
motivations, the better we are able to use level-two thinking to predict and
understand the thoughts, actions, and emotions of others and to control and
modulate our own.
In improvised music, level-one processes are extremely important. The
sheer speed and volume of musical stimuli in improvised music precludes
extensive level-two analysis and judgment. Impulses for musical action
primarily stem from level-one communications and interactions between
players. Successful improvisers are musicians who are comfortable with
allowing level-one impulses to govern their course of action and over time
hone their ability to rely on these impulses while making very fast and
efficient level-two decisions about them. In this way, we see free
improvisation as a kind of training ground for level-one communication
among individuals and the interaction between level-one and level-two
states of consciousness within an individual.
It is interesting to note that following very successful improvisations, it is
often difficult for the musicians to remember the specifics of the music that
was played. The feeling remains, but not the notes. We see this as evidence
for the primary role of level-one communication in improvisation. Indeed,
in our experience as players, overtly analytical thinking or conscious and
continuous assessment of the music often results in a disconnection with the
music, a lapse in listening, and a delay in response time. These observations
are consistent with recent research in which the brains of jazz musicians
were scanned while they were improvising. According to brain researcher
(and jazz musician) Charles Limb:
During improvisation, the prefrontal cortex of the brain undergoes an interesting shift in activity,
in which a broad area called the lateral prefrontal region shuts down, essentially so you have a
significant inhibition of your prefrontal cortex. These areas are involved in conscious self-
monitoring, self-inhibition, and evaluation of the rightness and wrongness of actions you are
about to implement. In the meantime we saw another area of the prefrontal cortex—the medial
prefrontal cortex—turn on. This is the focal area of the brain that’s involved in self-expression
and autobiographical narrative.10

Music seems to have its own repertoire of feeling and its own infinitely
subtle emotional vocabulary. In their influential article on emotional
intelligence, Salovey and Mayer define “emotion” as follows:
We view emotions as organized responses, crossing the boundaries of many psychological
subsystems, including the physiological, cognitive, motivational, and experimental systems.
Emotions typically arise in response to an event, either internal or external, that has a positively
or negatively valenced meaning for the individual. … We view the organized response of
emotions as adaptive and as something that can potentially lead to a transformation of personal
and social interaction into an enriching experience.11

An improvising musician experiments through sound to discover her own

unique musical-emotional vocabulary in relation to others. This is not a
symbolic vocabulary where sounds stand for feelings but rather the sounds
and feelings are unified in a single motivation and musical gesture. We
view Prévost’s “testing of human responses” through the creation of group
improvisation as a fundamentally level-one activity. We see the impetus for
musical action as primarily emotive where such action proceeds from a kind
of emotional supra-consciousness that the psychologist Mihaly
Csikszentmihalyi describes as “flow.”12 This is a state of absorption in an
activity where thought and action seem to occur effortlessly and inevitably
and where distinctions between physical, emotional, and cognitive
processes are blurred.
We think of musical equilibria as sonic spaces of level-one flow and
interaction. The rich emotional interactions and expressions in these
musical spaces can be highly pleasurable, troubling, uplifting, frustrating,
exciting. Prévost mentions “making contact with the flow of existence.”13
We view this as an essentially transcendent experience; a flow of emotional
and musical creation in which players feel that they have achieved a state of
consciousness beyond what they are normally able to achieve. This could
obviously happen without group interaction, but we feel that the
interpersonal interaction with other musicians and the intensity of thought
and action required to make music in the moment promotes this kind of
supra-conscious experience.
Of course other personal benefits of free improvisation are possible. The
act of creating improvised music can be an existential and possibly even
political act of self-definition. In creating music in the moment, the player
affirms her creative power and the inherent value of her creative acts and
ideas. This is true in any kind of art making, but in improvised music,
confidence in one’s ideas and clarity of communication of intention is key
to successful creation. In the context of a group interaction, the player who
lacks confidence and assurance of musical gesture is unlikely to have the
ability to change an equilibrium or to generate a new one.

SOLUTIONS TO COORDINATION PROBLEMS IN FREE

IMPROVISATION
Two obvious solutions to coordination problems are solo playing
(exclusively) and giving dictatorial power to an individual player in an
improvising ensemble. These can be musically effective but at the cost of
giving up the joy of interactive playing and the musical brilliance made
possible through collective intelligence. For many improvising musicians
these costs are sufficiently burdensome to rule out these options.
Another approach is to solve the particularly difficult coordination
problems prevalent at the beginnings and endings of pieces with written
material, leaving all other musical choices (the vast majority of choices) up
to the in-the-moment decisions of the players. This approach works well,
but is still too restrictive for some improvising musicians.
In our view, more fundamental solutions depend primarily on open
communication, trust, the ability to make selfless choices, unconstrained
and easy negotiation over musical direction, introspection based on internal
responses to musical stimuli, the courage to play with intention and
vulnerability, and listening skills including the ability to hear nuance, to
hear emotional intention, and to simultaneously hear subtle musical details
and macro structural elements. We do not claim that this particular listing of
attributes is unique to us. We suspect most improvising musicians, if asked,
would come up with a similar list.14
We were somewhat surprised, however, to discover that recent work by
social scientists, from a variety of disciplines, on high-functioning group
behavior in non-musical pursuits has generated a strikingly similar list of
attributes. In summarizing this research, David Brooks reports that groups
composed of members with the following level-one talents are more
productive than other groups composed of members with better level-two
abilities:15

• Attunement: the ability to enter other minds and learn what they have
to offer.
• Equipoise: the ability to serenely monitor the movements of one’s own
mind and correct for biases and shortcomings.
• Metis: the ability to see patterns in the world and derive a gist from
complex situations.
• Sympathy: the ability to fall into a rhythm with those around you and
thrive in groups.
• Limerence: This isn’t a talent as much as a motivation. The conscious
mind hungers for money and success, but the unconscious mind
hungers for those moments of transcendence when the skull line falls
away and we are lost in love for another, the challenge of a task, or the
love of God. Some people seem to experience this drive more
powerfully than others.

Finally, free improvisation itself can be viewed as a solution to the

coordination problem involved in collective music making among
musicians from widely divergent traditions. Our experience as improvisers
in Vancouver, Canada, sheds some light on the trade-off between
improvising with players with similar backgrounds (easier to coordinate
musical choices) and players with very different backgrounds (richer set of
musical ideas to coordinate). In recent years, Vancouver has become a
popular destination for immigrants from Asia. Some of these immigrants
are amazing virtuosi in the music and musical instruments of their original
cultures. Vancouver is small enough and open enough that opportunities for
interaction across musical traditions are common, and we have both
participated in such music making. Both authors have a strong background
in jazz. Making music with master musicians in classical music from China
or Vietnam, for example, initially poses the problem of what kind of music
to play. Given our preexisting musical commitments and predilections, it is
not practical for us to spend years learning their music traditions. It is
equally impractical for them to learn the musical vocabulary needed to play
the music of Thelonious Monk or Ornette Coleman. Free improvisation has
proven to be a highly productive and rewarding place to meet musically.
The idea that free improvisation can be a lingua franca for musicians from
around the world is stated explicitly in the following quote from Anthony
Braxton:
At this point in time, we can talk of a global community of global musics. Part of the
significance of the open improvisational music has been its ability to provide a forum for
interactive experiences for people from different parts of the planet, which lends itself to
transglobal, transvibrational experiences.16

IMPROVISATION INFORMS ECONOMICS

The creation of knowledge in economics, as in knowledge creation in all
disciplines, is enhanced by improvisational skills. Improvisation, creativity,
curiosity, the ability to make connections across empirical observations and
across analyses—all are bound together in multiple ways and reinforce one
another. We take this as a given. Our focus is on the pedagogical role that
improvisation can play in determining real-world outcomes having to do
with economic and personal well-being (i.e., material wealth and
happiness).
Consider first the emerging field of the “economics of happiness.” A
central finding in this literature is the strong correlation between an
individual’s personal sense of well-being and the quality of her social
interactions. Surprisingly (to economists) these interactions statistically
dominate the effects of traditional economic variables such as income and
wealth.
Richard Layard provides an extensive review of the happiness literature
and extrapolates those features of life that have been shown empirically to
make the biggest difference to our happiness.17 Foremost among these are
family relationships, financial situation, work, community and friends, and
health. Some of these—family relationships, community and friends—fall
directly into the category of social interactions. We will show that social
interactions are also critical to successful outcomes in finances, work, and
health. A weakness of the economic analysis of happiness is the lack of
discussion on how to achieve and improve high-quality social interactions.
Brooks, for example, laments that “We don’t teach this ability [level-one
skills] in school—to harmonize patterns, to seek limerence, to make friends.
But the happy life is defined by these sorts of connections, and the unhappy
life is defined by a lack of them.”18 We propose that the interpersonal skills
and interactive level-one processes acquired and improved through
participation in free improvisation have the potential to improve outcomes
in the features of life identified by Layard.
Layard suggests that moral and emotional education, or what he calls
“education of the spirit,” is a key factor in increasing the happiness of
societies.19 According to Layard, “controlled trials have shown that well-
designed courses in emotional intelligence have significant effects on
children’s mood and on their consideration for others; these effects are still
evident two years later.”20 Among other important aims for this kind of
education, Layard includes the appreciation of beauty, understanding others
and how to socialize, and understanding and managing your feelings as key
components. The negotiation of values and ideas and building of trust are
also included as primary factors affecting happiness in family, work, and
community relationships.
We view Layard’s aims as strongly overlapping with Brooks’s ideas
about the importance of level-one cognition and quality personal
interactions within groups. As we pointed out earlier, successful free
improvisation in music requires a significant degree of trust as a player
makes choices based on the assumption that others in a group will willingly
and meaningfully interact with her ideas. It also requires the ability to
interpret the intentions and actions of others in relationship both to personal
goals and ideas and a shared group outcome. We argue that free
improvisation in music (and possibly improvisation in other art disciplines)
has obvious pedagogical applications in modeling and teaching these
abilities and should be a part of the core curriculum wherever they are
taught.
 When economists try to understand why some individuals are wealthier
than others, their analytic and empirical focus has traditionally been on
measures of human capital (e.g., health, educational attainment, IQ, labor
market experience). Despite having access to detailed data sets on these
human capital variables, economists have only been able to explain a small
portion of the variation in labor market success across workers by using this
approach. We suggest that what may be missing in the empirical analysis is
the inclusion of more recently identified human capital variables associated
with level-one cognition.
The new work on human capital as summarized in Brooks concludes that
most people work in groups; group efforts are extremely productive
compared to individual efforts; the key to successful group effort in the
labor force is the ability to coordinate effectively; and the ability to
coordinate effectively is determined by the acquisition of level-one skills.21
People who are most successful and happy at work, in communities, and in
families are people who have strong level-one communication abilities and
who allow level-two decisions and analysis to be affected and informed by
this more subtle level of cognition.
Modern production technologies have substituted computers and other
capital goods for labor in the production of goods in a way that has lowered
the productivity of many workers and, along with globalization of the labor
market, caused large increases in inequality.22 In contrast, group production
is an area in which labor productivity has remained high. Moreover, the
most important element in making teamwork highly productive is the
ability of team members to coordinate with each other. According to
Brooks, recent research suggests that working groups display the highest
levels of collective intelligence when group members are good at reading
and understanding emotions and intentions, evaluating each other’s
strengths, and predicting tendencies, when they take turns in taking on
leadership roles, and when the contributions and inputs of individuals are
managed fluidly.23 He concludes that functioning effectively in a group
“requires the ability to trust people outside your kinship circle, read
intonations and moods, understand how the psychological pieces each
person brings to the room can and cannot fit together.” We see all of these
abilities as critical for coordinating high-quality equilibria in improvised
music. We are not making a case for effortless or automatic transference of
qualities and abilities learned from improvisation to other aspects of an
individual’s life, but we are suggesting that improvised music making has
the potential to act as a scaffolding for the exploration and teaching of these
important abilities.
What about health? At first glance, it may seem unlikely that free
improvisation could have an affect on health, but in fact there is growing
evidence that the quality of social interaction and the stability of social
networks has a significant positive impact on health outcomes. Citing a
broad spectrum of health studies (including Patrick and Wickizer, and
Ebrahim and Smith), Lomas suggests that measures to increase social
cohesion (a term he uses interchangeably with social capital) play a
significant role on a health “intervention continuum.”24 According to
Lomas, social cohesion has a measurable, positive outcome on rates of
disease and mortality and “interventions to increase social support and/or
social cohesion in a community are at least as worthy of exploration as
improved access or routine medical care.”25 In the case of heart disease, the
positive influence of social cohesion statistically outweighed the
availability of free medical treatment and was nearly as important as drug
therapies. More recent work has shown the positive influence of friendship
on lifespan.26 Again, we would argue that participating in free
improvisation enhances the ability of people to engage in successful social
interactions and to become active in social networks.
We are not aware of empirical research into the effects of improvisation
on interpersonal emotional interactions. Nevertheless, we predict a strong
potential for improvisation to help people acquire the qualities and skills
that both Layard and Brooks see as key to happiness and productivity. We
can offer strong anecdotal evidence on the positive effects of improvisation
in educational settings. One of the authors has taught many free
improvisation workshops for a wide variety of participants at elementary
and secondary schools, colleges, universities, community groups, and
academic conferences. These workshops are based on the work of British
improviser John Stevens. His book, Search and Reflect, presents a series of
games, exercises, and compositions for introducing people to
improvisation.27 Participants can approach these activities with a variety of
musical backgrounds and skill levels from ten-year old elementary-school
students who have been playing the clarinet for a month to instrumental
performance faculty at major universities. In these workshops participants
begin with very limited improvisational choices and as their listening
abilities, musical vocabularies, and confidence grow, they make more
complex sets of choices and interact more with other musicians. Eventually,
all restrictions are removed and players improvise freely. In many cases
people who previously declared that they couldn’t or wouldn’t improvise
can progress very quickly to free playing in small groups. They meet with
considerable success in terms of understanding the interactions of the group
and in producing music of a quality that is satisfying to them. Participants
almost always report an increased ability to listen to and interpret the
sounds and intentions of other players, a greater trust in their abilities to
make a valuable contribution to the group music, and an increase in general
confidence. In other words, they begin to focus on the kinds of interactions
that contribute to happiness, health, successful relationships, and effective
group work. Moreover, we have observed significant progress in these
interpersonal skills in the space of only one or two sessions.
Of course the same abilities could be learned in other forms of group
music making or other group activities. What are the advantages of learning
these skills through free improvisation? First, the feedback is immediate. In
the absence of externally imposed coordination, interpersonal interactions
are particularly meaningful, instructive, intense, and enriching. Second,
there is no requirement for expensive equipment or location, or extensive
specialist training for students. Musical improvisation is spontaneous and
allows level-one skill learning to occur on a relatively circumscribed
timescale. For most people it is also fun.

CONCLUDING REMARKS
Understanding improvisation as a path-dependent process helps us think
about the purposes, problems, and solutions in this form of music making
and to see it in relationship to other musical traditions. The skills leading to
successful free improvisation in music are the same skills that enrich
personal interactions in all situations, and we argue that the practice of free
improvisation could be a model environment for people to explore,
understand, acquire, and improve these abilities. The concepts of path
dependence and level-one/level-two states of consciousness are key to
understanding the critical role of coordination and communication in both
musical improvisation and economic relationships.
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Earlier drafts of this essay have benefited from comments from Cliff Bekar,
Coat Cooke, Gregory Dow, Bruce Freedman, Brian Krauth, Guy Immega,
Sherrill King, Dylan van der Schyff, Raymon Torchinsky, and Simon
Woodcock. All remaining errors, omissions, and confusions are solely the
responsibility of the authors.

NOTES
1. Derek Bailey, Improvisation: Its Nature and Practice in Music (New York: Da Capo Press,
1992), 83.
2. Paul David, “Clio and the Economics of QWERTY,” The American Economic Review 75, no. 2
(1985): 332–337.
3. The full mathematical exposition of the model, along with supporting simulations, can be found
in B. Curtis Eaton, Krishna Pendakur, and Clyde G. Reed, “Socializing, Shared Experience and
Popular Culture” (unpublished, 2000, available at http://www.sfu.ca/econ-
research/RePEc/sfu/sfudps/dp00-13.pdf), albeit in that paper path dependence is driven by
economic agents coordinating on consumption experiences, while in this chapter path
dependence is driven by freely improvising musicians coordinating on musical experiences. For
related formal modeling of path-dependent processes, see W. Brock and S. Durlauf, “Discrete
Choice with Social Interactions,” Review of Economic Studies 68 (2001): 235–260; W. Brock
and S. Durlauf, “Interactions-Based Models,” in Handbook of Econometrics, vol. 5, edited by J.
Heckman and E. Leamer, 3297–3380. (Amsterdam: North Holland, 2000).
4. Quoted in Bailey, Improvisation, 114.
5. Quoted in Phil Freeman, “The Grit That Produces The Pearl,” Jazziz 19, no. 3 (March 2002), 42.
6. Philip Ball, The Music Instinct: How Music Works and Why We Can’t Do Without It (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2010), 154.
7. Alex Ross, Listen to This (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), 255–256.
8. Edwin Prévost, No Sound Is Innocent: AMM and the Practice of Self-Invention, Meta-musical
Narratives, Essays (Harlow, Essex, UK: Copula, 1995), 107.
9. David Brooks, The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement
(New York: Random House, 2011). Also see the discussion of “System 1” and “System 2”
modes of thinking in Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (New York: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 2011).
10. Quoted in Alicia Anstead, “Inner Sparks,” Scientific American 304, no. 5 (2011): 86.
11. Peter Salovey and John D. Mayer, “Emotional Intelligence,” Imagination, Cognition, and
Personality 9 (1990): 186.
12. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow : The Psychology of Optimal Experience (New York: Harper
and Row, 1990).
13. Prévost, No Sound Is Innocent, 107.
14. Our list has benefited from discussions with Oregon based drummer/improviser Dave Storrs.
15. David Brooks, “The New Humanism,” New York Times, March 7, 2011,
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/08/opinion/08brooks.html.
 16. Quoted in George E. Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American
Experimental Music (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 502.
17. Richard Layard, Happiness: Lessons from a New Science (New York: The Penguin Press, 2005).
18. Brooks, The Social Animal, 211.
19. Layard, Happiness, 201. See also Daniel Goleman, Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter
More Than IQ for Character, Health and Lifelong Achievement (New York: Bantam Books,
1995).
20. Layard, Happiness, 200.
21. David Brooks, “Amy Chua Is a Wimp,” New York Times, January 17, 2011.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/18/opinion/18brooks.html?_r=1&partner=rssnyt&emc=rs; and
Brooks, “The New Humanism.”
22. Paul Krugman, “Degrees and Dollars,” New York Times, March 6, 2011.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/07/opinion/07krugman.html.
23. Brooks, “Amy Chua Is a Wimp.”
24. See D. L. Patrick and T. M. Wickizer, “Community and Health,” in Society and Health, edited
by B. C. Amick, S. Levine, A. R. Tarlov, and C. D. Walsh (New York: Oxford University Press,
1995), 46–92; and S. Ebrahim and G. Davey Smith, “Systematic Review of Randomised
Controlled Trials of Multiple Risk Factor Interventions for Preventing Coronary Artery
Disease,” British Medical Journal 314 (1997): 1666–1674; Jonathan Lomas, “Social Capital and
Health: Implications for Public Health and Epidemiology,” Social Science and Medicine 47
(1998): 1181–1188.
25. Lomas, “Social Capital and Health,” 1184.
26. Tara Parker-Pope, “What Are Friends For? A Longer Life,” New York Times, April 21, 2009.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/21/health/21well.html.
27. John Stevens, Search and Reflect (London: Community Music Ltd, 1985).

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Anstead, Alicia. “Inner Sparks.” Scientific American 304, no. 5 (2011): 84–87.
Bailey, Derek. Improvisation: Its Nature and Practice in Music. New York: Da Capo Press, 1992.
Ball, Philip. The Music Instinct: How Music Works and Why We Can’t Do Without It. New York:
Oxford University Press, 2010.
Brock, W., and S. Durlauf. “Discrete Choice with Social Interactions.” Review of Economic Studies
68 (2001): 235–260.
Brock, W., and S. Durlauf. “Interactions-Based Models.” In Handbook of Econometrics, vol. 5,
edited by J. Heckman and E. Leamer, 3297–3380. Amsterdam: North Holland, 2000.
Brooks, David. The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement. New
York: Random House, 2011.
Brooks, David. “The New Humanism.” New York Times, March 7, 2011.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/08/opinion/08brooks.html.
Brooks, David. “Amy Chua Is a Wimp.” New York Times, January 17, 2011.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/18/opinion/18brooks.html?_r=1&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss.
Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. New York: Harper and
Row, 1990.
David, Paul. “Clio and the Economics of QWERTY.” American Economic Review 75, no. 2 (1985):
332–337.
Eaton, B. Curtis, Krishna Pendakur, and Clyde G. Reed. “Socializing, Shared Experience and
Popular Culture.” (unpublished paper, 2000). http://www.sfu.ca/econ-
 research/RePEc/sfu/sfudps/dp00-13.pdf
Ebrahim, S., and G. Davey Smith. “Systematic Review of Randomised Controlled Trials of Multiple
Risk Factor Interventions for Preventing Coronary Artery Disease.” British Medical Journal 314
(1997): 1666–1674.
Freeman, Phil. “The Grit That Produces The Pearl.” Jazziz 19, no. 3 (March 2002): 42–43.
Goleman, Daniel. Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ for Character, Health
and Lifelong Achievement. New York: Bantam Books, 1995.
Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking, Fast and Slow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011.
Krugman, Paul. “Degrees and Dollars.” New York Times, March 6, 2011.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/07/opinion/07krugman.html.
Layard, Richard. Happiness: Lessons from a New Science. New York: The Penguin Press, 2005.
Lewis, George E. A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008.
Lomas, Jonathan. “Social Capital and Health: Implications for Public Health and Epidemiology.”
Social Science and Medicine 47 (1998): 1181–1188.
Parker-Pope, Tara. “What Are Friends For? A Longer Life.” New York Times, April 21, 2009.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/21/health/21well.html.
Patrick, D. L., and T. M. Wickizer. “Community and Health.” In Society and Health, edited by B. C.
Amick, S. Levine, A. R. Tarlov, and C. D. Walsh, 46–92. New York: Oxford University Press,
1995.
Prévost, Edwin. No Sound Is Innocent: AMM and the Practice of Self-Invention, Meta-musical
Narratives, Essays. Harlow, Essex, UK: Copula, 1995.
Ross, Alex. Listen to This. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010.
Salovey, Peter, and John D. Mayer. “Emotional Intelligence.” Imagination, Cognition, and
Personality 9 (1990): 185–211.
Stevens, John. Search and Reflect. London: Community Music Ltd., 1985.
 PART VI

PHILOSOPHIES
 CHAPTER 24
MUSICAL IMPROVISATION AND THE
PHILOSOPHY OF MUSIC

PHILIP ALPERSON

DISAPPEARANCE, DISPARAGEMENT, DISMISSAL

IN 1976 the distinguished philosophy journal, Mind, marking its 100th
anniversary, published an article on improvisation by the eminent former
editor of Mind, Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy and
Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, Gilbert Ryle.1 Ryle’s essay, which
runs to 6,000 words, managed to cover a wide range of improvisational
activities: having conversations, joking, debating, fencing, making shots on
goal, catching a ball, climbing ladders, climbing trees, stepping on stones to
cross a stream, coping with traffic emergencies, composing verse, decoding
anagrams, and solving philosophical problems. Ryle even found time in an
afterword to pontificate about another kind of activity he called
“initialization”: the habit of philosophers of reducing recurring phrases to
their initial letters. (Thus Alexander (A) attributes premises A1, A2, A3 to
Plato (P) in the Parmenides (P’).) What Ryle did not find time to discuss
was music. Indeed, the only reference to music in Ryle’s essay on
improvisation was a mere mention of the names of Gilbert and Sullivan and
Bach in connection with a short discussion of originality. Surely, one would
have thought, any philosophical examination of improvisation would make
at least passing reference to improvisation in music.
One might have forgiven Ryle his curious omission on the grounds that
the target of his paper was improvisational action in general or
improvisation very widely conceived, and that for such purposes any set of
examples would have sufficed. But the issue goes deeper than this, I think.
Ryle admits in his essay that he finds the words creativity and creation
“repellant.”2 Ryle was in fact known for his open disdain for philosophical
aesthetics—with whose literature he was unfamiliar—and for a certain
affectation of philistinism.3 In this he shared the attitude of many
practitioners of mid-20th century Oxford ordinary language philosophy.4
Given all this it is perhaps not so surprising after all that such an eminent
philosopher could write on improvisation without so much as mentioning
musical improvisation. But the elision of musical improvisation from
philosophical consideration is not limited to philosophers who disdain or
are ignorant of the field of philosophical aesthetics. If one searches for the
keyword music in the database of The Journal of Aesthetics and Art
Criticism, the leading journal in the field, one receives 3,215 hits. If one
searches for “musical improvisation” one receives 23. Searches of the
Journal of Aesthetic Education and the British Journal of Aesthetics yield
proportionately worse results: 1,565 to 5 and 1,612 to 2, respectively.5
Disappearance is one thing. Disparagement is another. Here again
philosophers have not been very kind to musical improvisation. Eduard
Hanslick, the 19th-century Austrian critic whose views helped to lay the
foundations of modern musical aesthetics, characterizes musical
improvisation as “relaxing more than working,” lending itself to a
subjective, “pathological … reckless abandonment of the self” and resulting
in a content-less product “without allowing an autonomous tonal
configuration to come distinctly to the fore.”6 Musical improvisation, on
Hanslick’s view, commits two cardinal sins: it produces a product devoid of
musical content and it encourages a kind of wallowing in emotional
expression. The influential Frankfurt School theorist Theodor Adorno faults
musical improvisation—and jazz improvisation in particular—as presenting
only the appearance of innovation. In practice, especially in the hands of
less adept players, Adorno complains, improvisation amounts only to a kind
of “pseudo-individualization,” a mirage of creativity enabled by a shuffle of
standard musical formulae.7 In a particularly biting passage he writes, “The
insouciant routine of the jazz amateur is nothing other than the passive
ability not to be confused in the adaptation of the models. He is the true
subject of jazz: his improvisations come out of the schema; he manages the
schema, cigarette in mouth, nonchalantly, as if he had just invented it
himself.”8 And, if we may stay on the topic of improvised jazz for a
moment, we may observe that Adorno’s comments echo more general
views in society of the marginality of jazz and of improvised music in
general. Historically, improvisatory jazz has been portrayed as having
unseemly origins, arising in the bordellos of New Orleans, having an
uncomfortably close relationship to prostitution, drugs, alcohol, and crime,
and appealing only to minority tastes. Even when jazz is represented in the
mainstream media, as it was in 1950s and 1960s American television crime
dramas such as Perry Mason, Peter Gunn, and Mission Impossible, it is
used to connote marginality: crime, sleazy clubs, and questionable dealings
with the police.9 And, as a kind of music often seen as appealing to a
relatively small group of aficionados, it enjoyed neither the prestige of
“high” art (especially among those who see its practitioners as untutored,
undisciplined, and unmusical) nor, perhaps with the exception of the big
band era of the 1930s and 40s, has it enjoyed the mass appeal of popular art.
The history of musical improvisation’s invisibility and its disparagement
among philosophers goes beyond the personal tastes of individual
philosophers, the prejudices of particular schools of philosophy, or the
general opinion of improvised music as lacking in social and artistic status.
What is at stake, I want to argue, is something more fundamental and
systemic. The relationship of philosophy to musical improvisation arises
out of a historically defined cultural and artistic perspective, including
certain assumptions about the nature of art and the nature of music that both
enhance and hamper a philosophical understanding of musical
improvisation adequate to its subject.
In this essay I would like to lay out this perspective and its consequences.
I shall start with some general remarks about several interrelated
methodological and strategic tendencies of the general approach of
philosophy to music that bear on its understanding of both music in general
and on musical improvisation in particular. I shall indicate what I take to be
the constraints put upon the philosophical understanding of musical
improvisation by that approach. I shall then explore possibilities for a
deeper, more profound understanding of musical improvisation.
For the most part I shall concentrate on jazz, a musical practice that
typically places a very high premium on musical improvisation. I do not
wish to imply by my choice of examples that I take jazz to be paradigmatic
of improvisatory music. I shall gesture to a few other traditions or genres in
cases where I think there are commonalities. Also, I will not be discussing
cases in which improvisation in music is linked with improvisation in other
art forms, as in the case of 15th-century saltarello, in which musicians and
dancers improvise together. Finally, I shall confine my comments mainly to
Anglophone philosophy in the analytic tradition.10

ANGLOPHONE PHILOSOPHY OF MUSIC AND THE

MUSICAL OBJECT
Beginning with the work of Susanne Langer in the late 1940s and
continuing over the next several decades, led by the writings of
philosophers such as Peter Kivy, Jerrold Levinson, Stephen Davies, Jenefer
Robinson, Roger Scruton, Theodore Gracyk, and others, Anglophone
philosophy of music has been one of the “growth industries” in the field of
philosophical aesthetics, at least insofar as one might measure such things
in terms of the numbers of articles published in its leading journals, the
number of presentations made at conferences of the American, British, and
Canadian Societies for Aesthetics, and the number of monographs
published. To take but one example: in the first 50 years of the Journal of
Aesthetics and Art Criticism’s existence (1941–1991), more articles were
devoted to music and literature than any other art form (about 10 percent of
all articles for music and the same for literature); in the last 20 years over
40 percent of the JAAC’s articles on the particular arts have been devoted to
music.11
Generally speaking, Anglophone philosophy of music has by and large
focused on music as a certain kind of object-oriented practice. More
specifically, it has seen music as an aesthetic practice centered on the
creation of objects—musical works of art—whose specifically musical
features are thought to consist in their disposition to present aesthetic
qualities appropriate to modes of attention and evaluation involving
disinterested aesthetic experience.
One way to understand this perspective is to situate the view historically,
with the birth of the so-called Modern System of the Arts in the 18th
century, when it was proposed that there was a group of arts—the “fine
arts”—that possessed a common thread by virtue of which they formed an
affinity group.12 Throughout this history, whose philosophical lineage runs
from Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, and Baumgarten to Kant, whether the
relevant properties of the fine arts were thought to be formal, aesthetic,
mimetic, or expressive, the created objects at the center of artistic activity
were conceived of as autonomous, designed to be appreciated for their own
sake in a “disinterested” manner, largely independent of any other use or
value the object might have. This view reflected the contemporaneous rise
of performance venues such as court salons and the concert hall, where
musical composers, performers, and listeners were seen as engaging in the
collective activity of the presentation and appreciation of repeatable works
created for the express purpose of presenting autonomous objects to be
apprehended for their own musical, artistic, and intrinsically aesthetic
properties. In the 20th and 21st centuries the notion of artistic expression
gave way to the idea that it was aesthetic experience that was the glue that
held the group together. But the emphasis on the production of objects
presented to subjects, in itself a continuation of Cartesianism, has remained
at the center of the discussion.
Analytic philosophers have accordingly been concerned with questions
about the meaning of works of art and their ontology, the nature of their
properties (notably formal, expressive, and representational properties), and
a range of musical practices concerning musical composition, performance,
understanding, and criticism centered on purely “aesthetic” considerations.
Composers create the works: if the work is not a fully worked out form in
the composer’s mind (as Hanslick had it), the work is some sort of
structure, entity, or type that is the product of the composer’s musical
conception. The repeatability and transmission of musical works are made
possible by the development of musical notation and scores, which enable
performers to present interpretations of the works in public arenas.
Listeners and critics are construed along Humean lines as people aspiring to
the ideal of taste: true and disinterested judges possessed of a delicacy of
imagination and practiced in making judgments appropriate to musical
works of art. Not the least of the critical judgments listeners and critics
make is the extent of the performance’s fidelity to the score, which is to say,
to the work. That is, audiences frequently listen for the work through the
performance.13
This approach to music that focuses on the production and appreciation
of musical works as aesthetic objects is consistent with certain
methodological tendencies of analytic philosophy in general, most
especially a naturalistic orientation toward observable entities and their
properties and the rigorous analysis of concepts and statements that might
be clearly and meaningfully asserted about the ontology of these entities.14
In some cases the identification of what is to count as an aesthetic “object”
is construed rather strictly, as for example in Hanslick’s account of music as
“tonally moving forms” or, more recently, in Julian Dodd’s “sonicist”
position that works of music just are sound-event types—types whose
tokens are datable, locatable patterns of sounds.15

AESTHETIC MONO-FUNCTIONALITY
A second feature, consistent with the orientation toward aesthetic objects, is
the presumption of what we might call aesthetic mono-functionality. By this
I mean that philosophers have not simply directed their attention toward
particular kinds of objects (works of art) but that they have for the most part
assumed, tacitly or otherwise, that works of art, properly so-called, have a
single function and, moreover, that the function of art is to be subsumed
under the traditional categories of aesthetic thought. There has been
considerable debate about the extent to which the function of art can be
specified, essentially defined, or treated as a “cluster concept,” and so on.
But even such accounts as Berys Gaut’s “cluster concept” and Denis
Dutton’s account of “our” concept of art, which assert that there are
multiple criteria that could conceivably count toward the application of the
concept of “art,” take the historical categories of the aesthetic as
normative.16 This is a kind of functionalism, then, according to which one
counts something as art only to the extent to which it can be brought under
the categories of the aesthetic tradition. This is a presumption that may be
stated explicitly, or it may be under the surface when, for example, someone
claims that what he or she is interested in is what makes art art or what
makes music music and then proceeds to include what falls under the
categories within the tradition and exclude or dismiss that which does not.
 EUROPEAN CLASSIC-ROMANTIC NORMATIVITY
AND SPECTATORIALISM

I do not wish to be misunderstood. The philosophical orientation of which I

have been speaking has considerable force. The focus on musical works as
aesthetic objects has resulted in many nuanced discussions of the formal,
emotive, and representational dimensions of musical meaning of musical
works, with special attention to various models of musical expressiveness,
and an imposing literature on the ontology of musical works of art. The
approach has brought considerable insight especially to the range of
musical practice where relatively developed musical works are composed,
elaborated in notation, performed, and appreciated by listeners who listen in
large part precisely for the features of these works that bear this sort of
scrutiny. The approach has had much to say in particular about the musical
practices exemplified by the European “classical” music tradition from
roughly the 16th century to at least as far as the mid-20th century, from
which so many of the musical examples of contemporary philosophy of
music are drawn.17 It is a matter of central importance to our understanding
of, say, Beethoven’s Quintet for Piano and Winds in E-flat, op. 16, to
ascertain what sort of thing the “work” is—whether an abstract object, a
structural type, a particular sound sequence or pattern of sounds, an
indicated structure, or something else—and what the identity and
persistence conditions of a musical work of art are, in order to grasp what it
is that Beethoven composed and created, what it is that performers of the
quintet perform, the role of historically inflected traditions that help to
constitute a style, and the range of evaluative criteria that listeners might
properly bring to the audition and critical assessment of the work.18 It is
important to acknowledge and understand that one of the values of music is
precisely that it can, as Alan Goldman has put it, present us with an
“alternative” world in which we can be fully engaged.19
At the same time it is important to remember that the determination of
the range of phenomena thought of as appropriately targetable by
philosophical analysis is itself a methodological issue, a methodological
choice with important consequences. The presumption that what shall count
as normative for the inquiry is European classical music, with its emphasis
on notated compositions that form the basis of performances of
aesthetically valuable works that sustain disinterested aesthetic value, is a
double-edged sword. On the one hand, the presumption speaks to a musical
tradition of unquestionable cultural importance, and it helps to focus the
discussion by identifying a set of issues, topics, technical terms, and critical
vocabulary for philosophical analysis. On the other hand, the presumption
tends to elide other sorts of questions that might be asked about music and
about improvisation in particular. Specifically, the view tends to favor an
approach featuring the inspection and analysis of the aesthetic properties of
the musical object, and to correspondingly neglect questions about the
social, political, and cultural aspects of musical practice. In short, the
aesthetic object model orientation of Anglophone philosophy, combined
with the presumption of the normativity of classical European composed
music, tends toward a view we might call spectatorialism, an ontological
and evaluative position that concentrates on the more or less intrinsic aural
qualities of musical properties available to the listener in direct experience.

ONTOLOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS I: MUSICAL

IMPROVISATION AS AN AESTHETIC OBJECT
With this overview in mind, how then might we arrive at a more robust
philosophical understanding of musical improvisation? There is of course
an element of improvisation in every intentional action or set of actions in
the sense that every action is, in at least a minimal sense, a unique event
that requires a degree of human agency. I take this to be a truism, albeit for
present purposes a trivial one. I am interested in musical improvisation not
as a mere specimen of human action but rather as a particular range of
musical activity—activity in which improvisation plays a significant role in
our musical understanding. These improvisatory musical activities run the
gamut from minor ornamentation of musical phrases, through improvised
cadenzas, to the kinds of spontaneous improvisation of long-form musical
constructs for which Liszt was especially known, and to the extended
improvised performances of Indian and Persian music and, of course, jazz.
Additionally, improvisations can occur in the course of the performance of
previously composed works as well as in the creation of more or less
original compositions on the spot.
 Perhaps one might start by observing that there are in fact many features
of improvised music that can be fruitfully considered from an aesthetic
point of view. It is possible to lose sight of this point in part because
musical improvisation often occurs in the context of relatively small groups,
not surprisingly since coordinating musical creation on the spot with others,
especially if they are also engaged in extemporizing, is no small feat. One
thinks of the jazz quintet, for example, or the small ensembles of South
Indian Carnatic rāgam-tānam-pallavi or Arabic takht music that typically
number between two and eight performers. One might be tempted to think
that groups with small numbers of participants can hardly be expected to
avail themselves of the possibilities for musical complexity available to,
say, the composer who writes for the standard symphonic complement of 60
to 100 players. These considerations might lead one to dismiss improvised
music as a poor relative to the real thing.
The dismissal of improvisation based on the alleged simplicity of the
music, however common the view may be, is nevertheless too facile. For
one thing, complexity, while often a feature of large masterworks in the
canon of western classical music, especially in the form of contrapuntal
polyphonic structure and elaboration, is not a necessary feature of highly
valued music. Neither Beethoven’s “Für Elise” (Bagatelle No. 25 in A
minor) nor Debussy’s “Rêverie” are possessed of that sort of complexity but
they move us profoundly nonetheless. Similarly, when one listens to pianist
John Lewis’s solo improvisation on “Django,” the tune he composed for the
Modern Jazz Quartet 45 years earlier, what shines forth is not a dazzling
display of melodic, rhythmic, or harmonic complexity but rather a quiet,
spare, haunting eloquence that takes one’s breath away. The elegance of
Lewis’s improvisation is, to use Nelson Goodman’s term, exemplified in the
performance, and, as Goodman puts it, exemplification is one of the
“symptoms” of the aesthetic.20 It is wrong to suppose, then, that complexity
is necessary for musical excellence or that the so-called “simplicity” of
improvised music, when it is encountered, cannot be aesthetically profound.
Moreover, many improvisations do exhibit an extraordinary level of
musical complexity that one can appreciate in the same ways one can
appreciate composed notated music: in performance, by way of recordings,
or through an imaginal reconstruction by way of transcription. All one has
to do to witness the truth of this claim is to listen to or, if one has the
relevant musical skills, examine one of the many transcriptions of
improvisations such as tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins’s “You Don’t
Know What Love Is” or pianist Bill Evans’s “Very Early” in order to
appreciate the heights of melodic, harmonic, rhythmic, and structural
complexities and rewards that improvised music, understood as
spontaneous musical compositions, can achieve.21 The fact that these pieces
were composed, so to speak, on the spot, of course adds to one’s admiration
for what has been achieved, but the relevant point here is that one need
make no apologies for these stunning musical achievements on their own
terms.
Indeed, the notion of musical complexity itself needs to be carefully
examined since, under the model of western classical music, it is often
taken to refer primarily to contrapuntal and harmonic interest. This is too
narrow a conception. As Garry Hagberg has argued, the improvisational
treatment of rhythm, for example, can also exhibit a high degree of subtle
and complex interest. One thinks not only of the handling of syncopation
and ritardandos that play with and against imaginary metrical ideals and
that figure into many styles of music, classical and otherwise, but also of
other rhythmic explorations that are so often fundamental features of
improvised music, such as the superimposition of different pulses against
time signatures, playing on, behind, and in front of the beat, and moving
phrases across bar lines in the case of modern jazz.22 The same can be said
for transformations of timbre, another important feature of improvised jazz.
The signature tones of players such as Charlie Rouse, John Coltrane,
Coleman Hawkins, Lee Konitz, Art Farmer, Jack Sheldon, Maynard
Ferguson, and Miles Davis are instantly recognizable, and what can be done
to modulate timbre by means of growls, shakes, mutes, and various
constrictions and expansions of sound play an important role in the musical
interest. It is open to critics of improvisation to reply that these latter
examples evince not complexity, but something else—“intricacy,” perhaps.
But by this time, if one grants that intricacy, too, can capture one’s
discerning attention and appreciation, one begins to wonder what the point
of the original criticism was.
It should also be pointed out that in cases when an improvisation is based
on a previously composed work, for example Coltrane’s famous 14-minute
improvisation on “My Favorite Things,” it is possible to regard the
performance in terms of many of the same evaluative criteria one would
apply to conventional performances of works. In particular, one can pay
attention to the interplay of interpretive sensitivity, stylistic adaptation and
transformation, and authenticity to the work, or to the spirit of the work, all
of which are as appropriate to Coltrane’s performance as they would be to,
say, Vladimir Ashkenazy’s 1996 performance of Chopin’s Nocturne No. 5
in F-sharp, Op. 15/2. To this extent, the appreciation of improvisations is
very much like the appreciation of performances of conventional, composed
works.

ONTOLOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS II: MUSICAL

IMPROVISATION AS AN ACTIVITY
At a more fundamental level, however, it would be a mistake to limit one’s
attention to improvisations as if they were simply composed works that
happened to be produced more or less spontaneously. The ontology of
musical improvisations is rather more complex than an application of the
aesthetic object model would lead us to believe. The first complication that
musical improvisation presents to the ontology of music is that, if one asks,
“What is it that the improviser creates,” the answer is that while an
improviser often does create a musical object that may be understood along
the lines of the traditional composed musical work, the improviser also
simultaneously creates a different sort of entity: a productive activity. In
listening to improvisations, we are witnessing the shaping activity of the
performer as if we have gained privileged access to the performer’s mind at
the moment of spontaneous creation. Musical improvisation activity is not a
matter of unadulterated spontaneity or a creation ex nihilo; nor is it a mere
shuffling of formulae or motifs, as Adorno would have it. The activity of
improvisation is analogous to speaking: improvisation is a kind of musical
utterance, a musical utterance not requiring another individual to “perform”
one’s musical creation, presented within the constraints of musical
possibilities.23 This is one of the reasons why the notion of a personal style
is so central to the activity of improvisation. Improvisation is a productive,
not merely reproductive, activity in which we perceive the relation of
individual intelligence and intention to action.
 PLAYING ON THE CHANGES
We witness the relationship of intelligence to action especially in
improvised jazz where the activity often consists less in ornamenting a
melody than in developing transformations on harmonic progressions and
patterns. It is noteworthy that even in cases where improvisers do improvise
on a pre-existing work—as in the familiar situation where a jazz player
improvises on a tune standard in the repertoire—the focus is typically on
the particular activity of what the improviser does in the context of the
“changes,” that is, a given harmonic pattern. Perhaps the most common
harmonic pattern in modern jazz, the chord progression from George
Gershwin’s song, “I Got Rhythm,” forms the basis for dozens of well-
known jazz tunes, including Charlie Parker’s “Anthropology,” Ornette
Coleman’s “Chippie,” Sonny Stitt’s “Boppin a Riff,” Count Basie’s
“Jumpin’ at the Woodside,” Lester Young’s “Lester Leaps In,” Nat King
Cole’s “Straighten Up and Fly Right,” and even the theme from The
Flintstones written by Hoyt Curtain. When improvisers improvise on the
“Rhythm” changes, do they focus on the melodic features of the variant
composition? Of course, they may and often do build on some of the
melodic elements. Typically, however, the focus is on the use of the
harmonic changes of the tune. One pays attention to musical creation
against the backdrop of the harmonic structure or chordal progression. As a
matter of practice, what guides the improviser’s activity is the set of
shorthand chord symbols above the staff on a lead sheet, not the melody,
still less the lyrics, even if the lyrics are well known.24 If there is a
discussion among players before the tune begins, it is usually about possible
chord substitutions or perhaps metrical issues, but all in the context of the
harmonic picture. The emphasis on creation in a harmonic surrounding
remains the same even when that environment is modal rather than a series
of more rigidly defined chord progressions. If the typical jazz improvisation
is an interpretation of anything, it is an interpretation of a harmonic setting,
not of a pre-existing compositional work, even in cases where the
improvised performance is—nominally—of a pre-existing work.
Analogously, improvisations on ragas in Indian classical music may
emphasize melodic modes more than harmonic patterns as points of
departure but the point to be made is that here, too, the center of the
improvisational practice revolves around the transformations within a set a
scalar-based structural orientations rather than particular compositions.

LIMITATIONS OF THE WORK CONCEPT

In making these observations I wish to emphasize several things. First, we
need not think of the philosophical understanding of improvisation as
requiring the notion of a work at all. Of course, one can profitably think of
improvisational activities to a certain extent as being work-like: in the case
of composed music and improvisations we attend to the expression of
human design or intention, as I have argued previously. To that extent
musical improvisation exhibits a fundamental—if partial—continuity with
composed music.25 Similarly, thanks especially to the advent of recording
technology, there is a limited sense in which we can regard a recorded
improvisation as acquiring something like a work identity, as for example in
the case of iconic performances sedimented into musical culture.26 Think,
for example, of Coleman Hawkins’s 1939 improvisation on “Body and
Soul,” famously re-presented by Eddie Jefferson (1959) and The Manhattan
Transfer (1988), Paul Desmond’s 1959 alto solo on Dave Brubeck’s “Take
Five” on the Time Out album, or Freddie Hubbard’s 1964 trumpet solo on
Herbie Hancock’s “Cantaloupe Island” on the Empyrean Isles album.
However, given the very wide range of musical practices that are
improvisatory even just in the case of jazz—live improvisations, recorded
improvisations, improvisations on existing works, free jazz, jazz heavily
mediated by studio engineers, jazz in which players record multiple tracks
and then combine them, and so on—it does not seem likely that we will be
able to avail ourselves of a single ontological covering model.27 This does
not mean abandoning the idea of understanding the ontology of music.
Rather it means that the object of philosophical understanding should be,
above all, descriptive, centered in the first instance on musical practices
themselves and the structure of our thought about them.28 It is practice that
must drive philosophical theory.

SPONTANEITY, FREEDOM, AND RISK

When we take such an approach we are drawn to one fundamental feature
of musical improvisation: it is an activity that draws our attention to music
as a living enterprise, as something that reflects human inspiration. Again,
this is not something unique to improvised music. The great conductor
Wilhelm Furtwängler urged, for example, that performances of classical
composed music should follow what he called the “law of improvisation,”
infusing themselves with the vital processes of growth that characterized
the composition’s origins. Conductors, he complained, too often strive to
nail down every effect in rehearsal, a habit he puts down to conductors’
anxiety about the musical unknown, their being bedeviled by the fact that
musical works can be written down and studied, and their tendency to see
works as instantiating unalterable and predestined musical forms.29 Indeed,
one could make the argument that in a certain sense improvisation is an
indispensable Ur-activity of all musical creation, a position that
Furtwängler may have had in mind.
What is remarkable about improvised music, however, is the extent to
which it puts human freedom on display, if we may put it that way. It is not
simply that improvisers produce a series of linked musical events that we
see as concatenated moments or even as the synthesis of such parts. It is
rather that we see human agency in action. We appreciate spontaneous
human achievement within the realm of the musically possible. As Bill
Evans has remarked, everything is done in “the process of making one
minute’s music in one minute’s time,”30 and we appreciate the significance
of the human achievement involved in the activity. In all this, the elements
of spontaneity and risk are central.
It is possible to appreciate this sense of spontaneity, of the idea of
creation in the moment, even in the case of recordings of improvisations
that I mentioned earlier. The phenomenology of this process is quite
interesting. I would suggest that it is possible—and common—for listeners
to put themselves in a kind of bracketed situation in which one imagines
oneself into hearing the improvisation as if for the first time, even if one is
listening to a recorded improvisation one has heard many times. We are all
familiar with this kind of imaginal appreciation. It is the kind of mental
state that children adopt when they ask to be told bedtime stories they have
heard many times before. Each time it is as if one is hearing the story anew.
Or perhaps it is akin to the first moments of tasting a meal that one has
enjoyed many times in the past. In the case of recording improvisations, one
hears them, as it were, in the subjunctive voice rather than the present
indicative.31

SKILLS AND THE REPERTOIRE

One of the chief ways in which improvisatory spontaneity, freedom, and
risk play out is in the exercising of musical skills: not simply the
deployment of rudimentary skills (playing correct notes, etc.), but rather,
the ability of the improviser to create music spontaneously with significant
expressive and aesthetic qualities, to engage in stylistic transformations
(juxtaposing different styles or quoting melodies, harmonies, and rhythms
in the repertoire), and to develop long- and short-term musical
constructions. There are also skills involved in reactive ensemble playing,
whether as a soloist or in accompanying roles, engaging in various
“conversational” protocols with other players. Here one attends to the social
graces of improvisational etiquette by observing standard conventions about
the length and order of solos, by showing respect to your immediately
preceding soloist by building your solo on a musical phrase he or she has
left you, and so on. In these ways, improvisatory skills and activities have
both musical and social dimensions.32
To someone immersed in the practice, whether as improviser or as a
member of an audience, many of these skills involve an understanding of
how the improviser works in the context of a musical repertoire. The
repertoire is a fluid or dynamic kind of thing rather than a discrete list of
items. From the standpoint of the improviser, one sees the repertoire as a set
of common terms that enables musical exchanges, often with complete
strangers on the bandstand, as well as being a fount of materials to be mined
and adapted as one “woodsheds” to build one’s “chops” (i.e., one practices
to develop one’s improvisational facility and creativity).
The idea of the repertoire has important implications for what we take to
count as creation, creativity, and transformation in musical improvisation,
as well as how one conceives the philosophy, aims, and pedagogical
practices of improvised music education. The notion of a “standard”
repertoire, for example, turns out to be a moving target. On the one hand it
is quite something to discover that a jazz improviser can move from
Hartford to Toronto to Graz to Hanoi and find that, thanks to the
proliferation of collections of standard tunes in recordings and in “fake
books” such as the Real Book, musicians who may not share the same
natural language nevertheless have a considerable shared working
repertoire, knowing dozens of the same tunes, even knowing which keys are
standard for which tunes. Even the hand signals for “Let’s go to the head of
the tune” or “Let’s play this in B-flat” travel well.
At the same time, the idea of the repertoire is premised on there being a
relatively stable common musical culture. Musical tastes and modes of
musical distribution change, as do the venues in which adepts learn the
repertoire. It is a common complaint among improvisation teachers that the
current generation of students doesn’t seem interested in learning the
repertoire that their teachers might have learned in the clubs. This is not
surprising, since the days of large touring jazz bands are a thing of the past
and jazz clubs are themselves a vanishing phenomenon, even in large cities
known in the past for such things. That is to say, changes in the range of
places in which improvised music is played have much to do with the
musical context against which we understand the vocabulary and range of
possibilities and achievements in improvised jazz. Much interesting
empirical work on this subject has been done by sociologists of music.33 In
any case, it is clear that the range of improvisatory skills deployed, the
improvisational repertoire, and improvisational practice in general have
both musical and social dimensions and, further, that a full appreciation of
the music rests on an understanding of these aspects of the practice.

THE SOCIAL DIMENSION

It is also essential for a philosophical understanding of musical
improvisation that one take into account the political, national, ethnic,
gendered, class, and racial dimensions of improvisation, and most
especially, in the case of jazz, what has been called the “Afrological”
aspects of the music.34 These are topics that have received considerable
attention in recent years by those working in the fields of cultural studies,
Pan-African studies, and musicology, but they have received notice by only
a handful of philosophers. The debates, when they have been broached,
have tended to focus on a set of interlocking issues concerning a range of
social and political meanings that are thought to pertain to improvised
music and jazz in particular. Discussion has for the most part centered on
the cultural provenance and lineage of features thought to be characteristic
of improvised jazz (“blue” tonality, especially flat 3rds, 5ths, and 7ths,
swing, jazz riffs, polyrhythmicality, musical breaks, “trading fours,” etc.)
and on the question of “Afropurism.” The latter topic involves questions
about whether improvised jazz is fundamentally related to the “African
soul” or to black experience, whether and to what extent concepts such as
“blackness” and “whiteness” can be deployed as analytic categories,
whether improvised jazz can be construed as intellectual and cultural
“property” owned by blacks (and hence something that can be stolen), and,
finally, whether it is necessary to have access to dimensions of African-
American experience encoded in the music to be able to perform it
authentically or to appreciate it.35
There has also been some discussion of the alleged homosocial,
misogynist, and male exclusionary proclivities of jazz.36 The case of Billy
Tipton, a talented and well-known woman jazz pianist who found it
necessary to cross-dress and live as a man for over 50 years so as not to fall
victim to gender discrimination, certainly gives one pause for thought. One
does hear the sentiment uttered from time to time that a woman “plays like
a man.” The comment is usually intended as a compliment but if it is a
compliment, it is a left-handed one. Apart from the implied criticism that
the player falls short of an ideal, the comment rests on the twin assumptions
that one can discern “male” and “female” styles of improvisatory playing
and that, assuming one can maintain the distinction, male styles are to be
taken as normative.
From the standpoint of method, because the social world is a complex of
many factors, a full consideration of these issues would also benefit from
what feminist theorists have called “intersectionality,” roughly, the idea that
social experience is not constituted by a single social category but rather is
the product of the mutual constitution of race, gender, class, national
identity, and so on. And so, for example, the issue of the role of women in
jazz is also a function of certain assumptions regarding heteronormativity
and certain myths about black hypersexuality and the eroticism of black
masculinity.37 The effects of socio-economic conditions must also be
thought to be a part of the picture. It is one thing to gesture toward
stereotypical pictures of jazz musicians as outliers to the system; it is
another to confront the realities.38 Even regional differences can play a role
in the mix and can affect stylistic issues, as for example in the many
differences among East Coast, West Coast, New Orleans, Kansas City,
Chicago, and New York jazz styles and instrumentation. It is interesting that
so many well-known jazz organ players (Jimmy Smith, Lou Bennett, Joey
DeFrancesco, Bill Doggett, Charles Earland, Jimmy McGriff, Trudy Pitts,
and Shirley Scott) came out of Philadelphia, for example. What, if anything,
does this tell us about the development and relevant evaluative criteria for
this genre?
Now it is possible to take a skeptical position regarding the idea that one
is warranted in ascribing social meanings to improvised music in general,
and to jazz in particular. It has been argued, for example, that jazz can be
enjoyed solely for its “purely musical” qualities alone, that one need not see
jazz as a musical representation of oppression, racism, ethnicity, or any
other aspect of, for example, “the black experience,” and, indeed, that it is
implausible to ascribe such meanings to jazz since they cannot be heard
directly “in the music.”39 The question of what is to count as what is “in”
the music, however, is, as we have seen, a fraught one that depends
crucially on what one takes to be “the music.” As I have been arguing to
this point, the skeptical position, put in this way, relies on autonomist and
sonicist ontological commitments that have only limited applicability to the
case of improvised music.

CODA
In this essay I have tried to indicate some of the ways in which the orienting
concepts of the philosophy of music have an application to the practice of
musical improvisation and some of the ways in which improvised music is
resistant to those categories and calls for a different kind of orientation to
music. Throughout the essay I have urged that philosophical inquiry not
constrain itself by presuming that improvised music can be understood
adequately under an aesthetic theory focused unduly on the centrality of
aesthetic objects, mono-functionality, the paradigm of European classical
music, and the spectatorialist perspective, even while acknowledging the
usefulness of these concepts and tenets to particular aspects of improvised
music. I have argued instead for the philosophical consideration of the
gamut of improvisational activity, including the aesthetic aspects of musical
improvisation, the range of musical and social skills made manifest by
improvisers, and the deeper social meanings of the practice, including the
implicit reference to human freedom and more particular situated meanings
that arise from the national, ethnic, racial, gendered, and socio-economic
contexts in which the music arises. It is through these and related aspects of
what is presented in and what is represented by improvised jazz that a sense
of community among members of the practice is developed.
In the interests of space I have not been able to discuss all the ways in
which improvised music calls for a more robust philosophical
understanding than is provided for by the aesthetic tradition. I have not
discussed, for instance, the effects of the advent of musical recording,
technologies of music distribution, and advances in the technology of
musical instruments in improvisational practice that have been a continuous
feature of its history, from Louis Armstrong’s early recordings to Les Paul’s
experiments with multiple guitar pickups, Bill Evans’s multi-track musical
conversations with himself, and Lionel Loueke’s use of the harmonizer
pitch shifter, the Whammy pedal, and a specially designed Rolf Spuler
guitar.40
What I do think is essential, however, is to bear in mind that a philosophy
of improvised music will at once have to be theoretically nuanced,
empirically informed, phenomenologically sensitive, and ineliminably
indexed to the manifold ways in which improvised music situates itself in
the complex of human affairs.41

NOTES
1. Gilbert Ryle, “Improvisation,” Mind 85, no. 337 (January 1976): 69–83.
2. Ryle, “Improvisation,” 70.
3. See Francis Sparshott, The Future of Aesthetics (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998),
101.
4. See for example J. A. Passmore’s infamous and provocative “The Dreariness of Aesthetics,”
Mind 60, no. 239 (July 1951): 318–335.
5. Two notable exceptions to this state of affairs in journal scholarship are the special issue of the
Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 58, no. 2 (Spring 2000) on improvisation in the arts and
the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 68, no. 3 (Summer 2010) symposium on musical
improvisation.
6. Eduard Hanslick, On the Musically Beautiful, trans. Geoffrey Payzant (1891; repr. Indianapolis:
Hackett Publishing Company, 1986), 49, 82.
7. See, for example, Theodor Adorno, Introduction to the Sociology of Music, trans. E. B. Ashton
(New York: Seabury Press, 1976), 15.
 8. Theodor Adorno, “Über den Fetischcharakter in der Musik und die Regression des Hörens,”
Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 7, no. 3 (1938): 349 (my translation, emphasis added). (So ist die
souveräne Routine des Jazzamateurs nichts anderes als die passive Fähigkeit, in der Adaptation
der Modelle von nichts sich irremachen zu lassen. Er ist das wahre Jazzsubjekt: seine
Improvisationen kommen aus dem Schema, und das Schema steuert er, die Zigarette im Mund,
so nachlässig, als hätte er es gerade selber erfunden.)
9. See Alan Stanbridge, “From the Margins to the Mainstream: Jazz, Social Relations, and
Discourses of Value,” Critical Studies in Improvisation / Études critiques en improvisation 4,
no. 1 (2008), http://www.criticalimprov.com/article/view/361. The efforts of Wynton Marsalis
and others to present jazz as “America’s classical music” only serves to underscore the hold of
the mainstream view. I shall not dignify by means of inclusion in the body of the text openly
racist denigrations of jazz, but for an early castigation of jazz with heavy racial inflection by a
well-known art and cultural theorist of the time, see Clive Bell, “Plus De Jazz,” The New
Republic 28, no. 355 (September 21, 1921): 92–96.
10. In thinking about these matters one might be tempted to wonder about the social psychology and
the “disciplining” of the discourse itself, in particular the question of whether the invisibility and
disparagement of musical improvisation in philosophical circles may have something to do with
the cultural prestige of the activity in question. Is it the case that young scholars—or even older
ones—feel safer talking about examples from the realm of high culture, thinking perhaps that
alluding to The Greats somehow places one’s argument on a more secure footing? One can’t
entirely dismiss the speculation. But neither can one place much confidence in it. In the end this
kind of psychologizing is an imponderable, even if it should turn out that in some cases
something of the sort has a role to play.
11. For the 1941–1991 figures see Lydia Goehr, “The Institutionalization of a Discipline: A
Retrospective of The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism and the American Society for
Aesthetics, 1939–1992,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 51, no. 2 (Spring 1993):
114, table 2. The 1991–2011 percentage is from my count.
12. See Paul Oskar Kristeller, “The Modern System of the Arts,” In Renaissance Thought II: Papers
on Humanism and the Arts (New York: Harper & Row), 1965, 163–227.
13. This analysis follows my essay, Philip Alperson, “Facing the Music: Voices from the Margins,”
Topoi: An International Review of Philosophy 28, no. 2 (September, 2009): 91–96.
14. The first 50 years of the JAAC, during which time the ASA moved from being an
interdisciplinary society whose membership included philosophers, psychologists,
anthropologists, artists, and art historians to an institution predominantly populated by analytic
philosophers, saw a 475% increase in the number of articles published on the ontology of art, far
outstripping the increase of any other topic. See Goehr, “The Institutionalization,” 115.
15. See Julian Dodd, Works of Music: An Essay in Ontology (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2007). See esp. chap. 1; and Julian Dodd, “Confessions of an Unrepentant Timbral Sonicist,”
British Journal of Aesthetics 50, no. 1 (January 2010): 33–52.
16. See for example Denis Dutton’s eight criteria of for an artwork: (1) source of pleasure in itself,
(2) exercise of a specialized skill, (3) made in a recognizable style, (4) existence of a critical
language to discuss it, (5) represents in some degree of naturalism, (6) intention of makers to
produce a work that will provide pleasure, (7) frequently bracketed off from ordinary life, and
(8) affords an imaginative experience; Denis Dutton, “ ‘But They Don’t Have Our Concept of
Art,’ ” in Theories of Art Today, ed. Noël Carroll (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
2000), 217–240. Or consider Berys Gaut’s list of ten criteria that count toward an object’s
falling under the concept of art (1) possessing positive aesthetic qualities, (2) expression of
emotion, (3) intellectually challenging, (4) formal complexity and coherence, (5) capacity to
convey complex meanings, (6) exhibiting an individual point of view, (7) being an exercise of
creative imagination, (8) being an artifact or performance that is a product of a high degree of
 skill, (9) belonging to an established art form, (10) being the product of an intention to make a
work of art. See Berys Gaut, “The Cluster Account of Art Defended,” British Journal of
Aesthetics 45, no. 3 (July 2005): 273–288.
17. On this see Lydia Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy
of Music, revised edition (Oxford and New York: Clarendon Press, 2007).
18. See for example Jerrold Levinson’s classic and justly celebrated essay, “What a Musical Work
Is,” Journal of Philosophy 77, no. 1 (January 1980): 5–28.
19. Alan Goldman, “The Value of Music,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 50, no. 1
(Winter 1992): 42.
20. Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols (Indianapolis:
Hackett Publishing Company, 1976), 52–57 and 252–255.
21. Hear Sonny Rollins, “You Don’t Know What Love Is,” on Saxophone Colossus, compact disc,
Fantasy/Prestige Records 1881052, 2006, originally released in 1956 on Prestige Records LP
7079, vinyl disc; and Bill Evans, “Very Early,” on Moon Beams, compact disc, Fantasy/OJC
Remasters OJC33718 (2012), originally released in 1962 on Riverside Records OJC20 434-2,
vinyl disc.
22. Garry Hagberg, “On Rhythm,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 68, no. 3 (Summer
2010): 281–284.
23. I have argued this at greater length in Philip Alperson, “On Musical Improvisation,” The
Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 43, no. 1 (Autumn, 1984): 17–29.
24. Thus a set of changes for “I Got Rhythm” in Bb might be:
| Bb Gm7 | Cm7 F7 | Bb Gm7 | Cm F7 |
| Bb Gm7 | Cm7 F7 | Bb Gm7 | Cm F7 |
| D7 | G7 | C | Cm7 F#7 F7 |
| Bb Gm7 | Cm7 F7 | Bb Gm7 | Cm F7 |
25. “Partial” because it is hard to see how two improvised performances can be said to instantiate
the same type. On this see Alperson, “On Musical Improvisation,” 24–27. For a view that the
work concept has a stronger applicability to jazz improvisations, see James O. Young and Carl
Matheson, “The Metaphysics of Jazz,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 58, no. 2
(Spring 2000): 125–133.
26. See Lee B. Brown, “Phonography,” in Aesthetics: A Reader in Philosophy of the Arts, ed. David
Goldblatt and Lee Brown (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson, 1996), 252–257.
27. For a recent treatment of these issues see Lee B. Brown, “Do Higher-Order Music Ontologies
Rest on a Mistake?” British Journal of Aesthetics 51, no. 2 (April 2011): 168–184.
28. On this see Andrew Kania, “The Methodology of Musical Ontology,” British Journal of
Aesthetics 48, no. 4 (October 2008): 426–444; and “New Waves in Musical Ontology,” in New
Waves in Aesthetics, ed. Kathleen Stock and Katherine Thomson-Jones (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2008), 20–40; Peter Strawson, Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics
(Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1963), from which Kania takes the term “descriptive metaphysics”;
and Alperson, “Facing the Music.”
29. Wilhelm Furtwängler, Concerning Music, trans. L. J. Lawrence (London: Boosey and Hawkes,
1953), 46–52.
30. Bill Evans, The Universal Mind of Bill Evans (New York: Rhapsody Films, 1966; Andorra:
EFOR Films DVD 2869016, n.d.).
31. I thank Andreas Dorschel for this nice formulation.
32. On this see Philip Alperson, “A Topography of Improvisation,” The Journal of Aesthetics and
Art Criticism 68, no. 3 (Summer 2010): 273–280.
33. See for example Robert Faulkner, “Shedding Culture,” in Art from Start to Finish: Jazz,
Painting, Writing, and Other Improvisations, ed. Howard Becker, Robert Faulkner, and Barbara
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 91–117; and Robert
 Faulkner and Howard Becker, “Do You Know …?”: The Jazz Repertoire in Action (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2009).
34. See George E. Lewis, “Improvised Music after 1950: Afrological and Eurological Perspectives,”
Black Music Research Journal 16, no. 1 (1996): 91–122.
35. See, in addition to Lewis, Lee Brown, “Jazz,” Oxford Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, edited by
Michael Kelly, Oxford Art Online, Oxford University Press (2008), accessed February 4, 2014,
http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/opr/t234/e0303; LeRoi Jones, Blues People:
Negro Music in White America (New York: W. Morrow, 1971); Imamu Amiri Baraka and
Amina Baraka, The Music: Reflections on Jazz and Blues (New York: Morrow, 1987); Joel
Rudinow, “Race, Ethnicity, Expressive Authenticity: Can White People Sing the Blues?,” in The
Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 52, no. 1 (Winter 1994): 127–137; and Alperson, “A
Topography.”
36. See Hazel V. Carby, “It Jus Be’s Dat Way Sometime: The Sexual Politics of Women’s Blues,” in
The Jazz Cadence of American Culture, ed. Robert O’Meally (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1998), 469–482; and Hazel Carby, Race Men (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2000).
37. See Sherrie Tucker, “When Did Jazz Go Straight: A Queer Question for Jazz Studies,” in
“Sexualities in Improvisation,” special issue, Critical Studies in Improvisation / Études critiques
en improvisation 4, no. 2 (2008), http://www.criticalimprov.com/article/view/850.
38. See Joan Jeffri, Changing the Beat: A Study in the Worklife of Jazz Musicians, National
Endowment for the Arts Research Division Report, no. 43, 3 vols. (Washington, DC: National
Endowment for the Arts, 2003). The sensitive and moving films Round Midnight (1986) by
Bernard Tavernier and Bird (1988) by Clint Eastwood also provide important perspectives.
39. See Bill E. Lawson, “Jazz and the African-American Experience: The Expressiveness of
African-American Music,” in Language, Art and Mind: Essays in Appreciation and Analysis in
Honor of Paul Ziff, ed. Dale Jameson (Leiden: Kluwer Academic, 1994), 131–142.
40. Not every technological advance is a musical advance, of course, as the use of the much-reviled
drum machine makes clear.
41. I would like to thank Uschi Brunner, Andreas Dorschel, Mary Hawkesworth, Elisabeth Kappel,
and Deniz Peters for helpful suggestions. I would also like to thank the faculty and students at
the Institute for Aesthetics at the Universität für Musik und Darstellende Kunst in Graz, Austria
where much of the research for this essay was developed.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Adorno, Theodor. Introduction to the Sociology of Music. Translated by E. B. Ashton. New York:
Seabury Press, 1976.
Adorno, Theodor. “Über den Fetischcharakter in der Musik und die Regression des Hörens.”
Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 7, no. 3 (1938): 321–356.
Alperson, Philip. “Facing the Music: Voices from the Margins.” Topoi: An International Review of
Philosophy 28, no. 2 (September 2009): 91–96.
Alperson, Philip. “On Musical Improvisation.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 43, no. 1
(Autumn 1984): 17–29.
Alperson, Philip. “A Topography of Improvisation.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 68,
no. 3 (Summer 2010): 273–280.
Baraka, Imamu Amiri, and Amina Baraka. The Music: Reflections on Jazz and Blues. New York:
Morrow, 1987.
Bell, Clive. “Plus De Jazz.” The New Republic 28, no. 355 (September 21, 1921): 92–96.
Brown, Lee B. “Phonography.” In Aesthetics: A Reader in Philosophy of the Arts, edited by David
Goldblatt and Lee Brown, 252–257. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson, 1996.
Brown, Lee B. “Jazz.” The Oxford Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, edited by Michael Kelly. Oxford Art
Online, Oxford University Press (2008), accessed February 4, 2014,
http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/opr/t234/e0303.
Brown, Lee B. “Do Higher-Order Music Ontologies Rest on a Mistake?” British Journal of
Aesthetics 51, no. 2 (April 2011): 168–184.
Carby, Hazel V. “It Jus Be’s Dat Way Sometime: The Sexual Politics of Women’s Blues.” In The Jazz
Cadence of American Culture, edited by Robert O’Meally, 469–482. New York: Columbia
University Press, 1998.
Carby, Hazel V. Race Men. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000.
Dodd, Julian. Works of Music: An Essay in Ontology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.
Dodd, Julian. “Confessions of an Unrepentant Timbral Sonicist.” British Journal of Aesthetics 50, no.
1 (January 2010): 33–52.
Dutton, Denis. “ ‘But They Don’t Have Our Concept of Art.’ ” In Theories of Art Today, edited by
Noël Carroll, 217–240. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000.
Evans, Bill. “Very Early.” On Moon Beams. Compact disc. Fantasy/OJC Remasters OJC33718
(2012), originally released in 1962 on Riverside Records OJC20 434-2, vinyl disc.
Evans, Bill. The Universal Mind of Bill Evans. New York: Rhapsody Films, 1966; Andorra: EFOR
Films DVD 2869016, n.d.
Faulkner, Robert. “Shedding Culture.” In Art from Start to Finish: Jazz, Painting, Writing, and Other
Improvisations, edited by Howard Becker, Robert Faulkner, and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett,
91–117. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.
Faulkner, Robert, and Howard Becker. “Do You Know …?”:The Jazz Repertoire in Action. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2009.
Furtwängler, Wilhelm. Concerning Music. Translated by L. J. Lawrence. London: Boosey and
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Gaut, Berys. “The Cluster Account of Art Defended.” British Journal of Aesthetics 45, no. 3 (July
2005): 273–288.
Goehr, Lydia. The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music.
revised edition. Oxford and New York: Clarendon Press, 2007.
Goehr, Lydia. “The Institutionalization of a Discipline: A Retrospective of The Journal of Aesthetics
and Art Criticism and the American Society for Aesthetics, 1939–1992.” The Journal of Aesthetics
and Art Criticism 51, no. 2 (Spring 1993): 91–121.
Goldman, Alan. “The Value of Music.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 50, no. 1 (Winter,
1992): 35–44.
Goodman, Nelson. Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols. Indianapolis: Hackett
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Hagberg, Garry L. “On Rhythm.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 68, no. 3 (Summer
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Hanslick, Eduard. On the Musically Beautiful. Translated by Geoffrey Payzant. 1891. Reprint,
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American Music.” In Language, Art and Mind: Essays in Appreciation and Analysis in Honor of
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Levinson, Jerrold. “What a Musical Work Is.” Journal of Philosophy 77, no. 1 (January 1980): 5–28.
Lewis, George E. “Improvised Music after 1950: Afrological and Eurological Perspectives.” Black
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 CHAPTER 25
IMPROVISATION AND TIME-
CONSCIOUSNESS

GARY PETERS

ADORNO always insisted that art could not express joy; indeed, that the very
enjoyment of art (by the artist and/or the art-loving pleasure-seeker)
signaled the bourgeois trivialization and, worse, ideological obfuscation of
the despairing heart of modernity: “If you ask a musician if he enjoys
playing his instrument, he will probably reply: ‘I hate it,’ just like the
grimacing cellist in the American joke.”1 Not a very cheery start, but then it
might be argued that a crucial aspect of Adorno’s “logic of disintegration”2
is to remain partially situated within the moment of dialectical nonidentity
described by Hegel in The Phenomenology of Mind as the “unhappy
consciousness,”3 where self-consciousness witnesses and suffers the
“unchangeableness” of universality as an unattainable beyond, leaving only
a “shattered certainty of itself”4 trapped within the fleeting temporality of
particularity. Disintegration, or to use Hegel’s terminology, “disunity,” is
thus conceived as the root of unhappiness and is thereby seen as being
responsible for the appearance and increasing dominance of yearning as an
existential and aesthetic category.
To yearn—the post-romantic predicament par excellence—is to enter a
regime of desire where the diremption of self and other—of selfhood and
otherness—shatters both space and time into a “spurious”5 infinitude of
dislocated subjects eternally striving toward an absolute unity forever
denied. This, for Hegel, is why art, understood as the aesthetic enjoyment
and expression of yearning, must be superseded and why, for Adorno, it
must, on the contrary, be defended as the promesse de bonheur issued from
an unhappy world. Thus, art can only promise happiness; it can never be
happy itself. To be so would be to enjoy callously the very being and
suffering of disintegration and dislocation, something unthinkable for
Adorno but which we will nevertheless attempt to think through with
reference to improvisation.
Thinking about and beyond Hegel’s notion of the “unhappy
consciousness,” Kierkegaard, in the first volume of Either/Or, reflects on
the empty grave to be found in Worcester inscribed with these words: “The
Unhappiest Man.”6 Setting out to determine what might constitute not just
unhappiness but the unhappiest unhappiness, he begins with a gloss on
Hegel’s account:
The unhappy person is one who has his ideal, the content of his life, the fullness of his
consciousness, the essence of his being, in some manner outside of himself. He is always absent,
never present to himself. But it is evident that it is possible to be absent from one’s self either in
the past or in the future.7

It is the final sentence of this passage that begins to open out onto the
terrain that will be scrutinized as we now begin to consider the relationship
between time, happiness, and improvisation. Kierkegaard continues thus:
Now there are some individuals who live in hope, and others who live in memory. These are
indeed in a sense unhappy individuals, in so far, namely, as they live solely in hope or in
memory, if ordinarily only he is happy who is present to himself. However, one cannot in a strict
sense be called an unhappy individual, who is present in hope or memory.8

If, by implication, happiness requires the self to be self-present in the

present (“in the moment”), then Kierkegaard’s version of unhappiness
recognizes that, although perceived as a diminution of happiness, the
temporal dislocation of the self remains a happy unhappiness to the extent
that it still provides the self with the presence it desires, albeit in the future
as hope or in the past as memory. Strictly speaking, as he recognizes, it is
only when the self is not present to itself in its hope or memory that we
should speak of unhappiness, of hopeless hope, or a past denied.
But even this is not the unhappiest unhappiness, for which Kierkegaard
reserves a particular and, on the face of it, peculiar form of temporal
confusion where “it is memory which prevents the unhappy individual from
finding himself in hope, and hope which prevents him from finding himself
in memory.”9
 Consequently, what he hopes for lies behind him, what he remembers lies before him. His life is
not so much lived regressively as it suffers a two-fold reversal. … His life is restless and without
content; he does not live in the present, he does not live in the future, for the future has already
been experienced; he does not live in the past, for the past has not yet come. … [H]e cannot
love, for love is in the present, and he has no present, no future and no past.10

So here we arrive at the opposite pole to being “in the moment,” witness to
a state of radical unhappiness that, through the dual processes of hopeless
striving and forgetful misrecognition, propels the self forever outside of
itself into a temporal vacuum incapable of sustaining life, love, or indeed
the love of life. Whatever truth is contained in this, it is clear that Hegel,
Kierkegaard, and Adorno all recognize that, even if it turns out to be no life
at all, such a predicament is certainly capable of sustaining an aesthetic life.
In other words, within the post-romantic period at least, art practice actually
flourishes within the predicament of being out of the moment and to this
extent the valorization of being “in the moment” would represent, if
anything, the end of art, the vanishing moment of sated aesthetic desire:
anti-art. Unless, of course, being “in the moment” turns out to be something
more complex or something other than the absolute self-presence it is
commonly assumed to be: that is the question.
If being “in the moment” remains the ambition of many improvisers, and
if such in-ness speaks of an achieved (if only fleeting) self-presence within
a momentous present, then can we, contra Adorno, speak of improvisation
as a happy art form? Does the improvising musician necessarily hate
playing his or her instrument? Does the ecstatic smile of the improvising
dancer really only mask a contorted grimace, or are we in the presence of
authentic joy and love? Certainly many of the discourses surrounding
improvisation, in most cases written by improvisers themselves, would
suggest a widespread commitment to the happiness agenda and a
concomitant faith in the possibility, even the necessity, of self-presence as
the goal of goals. The problem, however, is that the centripetal force of
committed self-presencing, so common in the language and literature, is in
danger of sucking all improvisatory practice into a vortex of enjoyment that
drowns out those voices that would speak differently, and perhaps with less
joy, of the experience of time past and time future.
So, starting at the opposite pole—the unhappiest unhappiness—what, if
anything, can “the unhappiest man” teach us about art practice in general
and improvisation in particular? The “two-fold reversal” Kierkegaard
speaks of certainly confronts a radical stripping away of self-presence that
is no doubt as existentially tragic as it is aesthetically challenging, but what
kind of art (if any) could such a predicament produce? What would
unhappy, out-of-the-moment improvisation be like?
Here we need to look again and more carefully at Kierkegaard’s “two-
fold reversal,” where hope and memory mutually efface each other. As a
way of trying to grasp what seems on the face of it to be a slightly bizarre
temporal confusion, we will now introduce into the discussion some
elements of Edmund Husserl’s The Phenomenology of Internal Time-
Consciousness11 in the hope that this might shed some light on what
Kierkegaard himself describes as the “Hyperborean darkness”12 of the
“unhappiest man.” But before turning to Husserl, one last passage from
Either/Or:
This [the unhappiest unhappiness] happens when it is memory which prevents the unhappy
individual from finding himself in his hope, and hope which prevents him from finding himself
in his memory. When this happens, it is, on the one hand, due to the fact that he constantly
hopes something that should be remembered; his hope constantly disappoints him and, in
disappointing him, reveals to him it is not because the realization of his hope is postponed, but
because it is already past and gone, has already been experienced. … On the other hand, it is due
to the fact that he always remembers that for which he ought to hope; for the future he has
already anticipated in thought, in thought already experienced it, and this experience he now
remembers, instead of hoping for it.13

The proto-existentialism of Kierkegaard here characteristically dwells on

the tragic aspect of lived temporality where the experience of duration, in
thrall to endless yearning and disappointment, is forever cast as suffering
and grief in the face of self-negation and absence. As a way of neutralizing
this predicament, Husserl’s phenomenological analysis of internal time
consciousness will act here as an initial guide through the complex structure
of time-experience preparing us for a more sober return to the unhappy
consciousness as a conclusion.
In The Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness, Husserl follows
both St. Augustine (and the aspiring improviser) by insisting on the
primordiality of the now and the primacy of the new, on the face of it an
avant-gardist charter with enormous improvisatory potential.
Every new now is precisely that, a new one, and is phenomenologically characterized as such.
Even if every [musical] tone continues completely unaltered, in such a way that not the least
alteration is visible to us—even if every now, therefore, possesses exactly the same content of
apprehension …—nevertheless, a primordial difference still exists, one that pertains to a new
dimension. … From the point of view of phenomenology, only the now-point is characterized as
an actual now, that is, as new.14
 The constancy in which again and again a new now is constituted shows us that in general it is
not a question of “novelty” but of a constant moment of individuation, in which the temporal
position has its origin.15

The first thing to notice here is the way in which Husserl makes a clear
phenomenological distinction between newness and novelty—between
“originarity”16 and originality—an insight that improvisers would do well
to acknowledge and be mindful of. All too often the valorization of the
moment is coupled with a pursuit of the unheard-of and unseen that, in its
celebration of innovation and difference (the “taken by surprise”
moment),17 obscures the phenomenological sameness of the new and the
newness of the same. Where the “surprised” improviser strives to achieve
the (impossible?) ecstasy of absolute attention, Husserl suggests a different
mode of bracketing, one that welds the present to the future and the past not
through the existential categories of hope and memory but the
phenomenologically neutralized concepts of protention and retention.
Husserl’s aim is to demonstrate how it is precisely the protention and
retention of the future/past that forms the “temporal halo”18 that allows the
self to attend to and “authentically” experience19 the phenomenological
reality of time.
Husserl introduces the terms retention and protention as the historical and
the futural “halo” encircling attention to the present moment, thus ensuring
the temporal experience of continuity and flow. Unlike the Kierkegaardian
vocabulary, where hope and memory are suffered as an existential break
with the present, both absent from the present moment but, in the case of
the “unhappiest man,” also absent from the future and the past, retention
and protention are primary experiences, inherently conjoined—via attention
—not only at the level of experience but, more essentially, as the temporal
extension of intentionality. As Dieter Lohmar explains:
The designations “protend” and “retend” are chosen in analogy to “intend.” This analogy is
based on the fact that retention and protention have a definite content, i.e., an idea of what they
are intending and what they are keeping alive or expecting, which may be viewed as a kind of
intentional content.20

One might say that, at the level of pure primary perception the moment
impresses itself on the ego as ever new, while as a product of intentional
consciousness the ego impresses itself on the moment as that which is
expected and then kept alive. What is expected—thought as protention—is
rooted in retention and thus perceived as sameness (new sameness/same
newness). In this way the intentional “moment” is extended into the future
and the past, giving intentionality the character of flow rather than eternal
fragmentation; it is this that hyperaware improvisers latch onto and “get
into.”
As described then, the moment is no longer identical to the instant but,
through the temporal reach of intentionality, becomes an event that is
sustained as long as attention, retention, and protention hold together and
flow into each other. Improvisation is one (particularly intense) way of
attending to such intentionality: a kind of meta-intentionality. But to come
back to the original issue, the extent to which “getting into” the flow might
be considered a “happy” experience of self-presence will depend on the
degree to which retention and protention remain attached to the present
(like a “comet’s tail,” as Husserl describes it).21
Husserl is absolutely clear: attention, retention, and protention form a
continuum for the duration of a temporal event; once finished, such an
event is remembered or hoped for again but no longer retained or protained.
We characterised primary remembrance or retention as a comet’s tail which is joined to actual
perception. Secondary remembrance or recollection is completely different from this. After
primary remembrance is past, a new memory of this motion or that melody can emerge.22

In other words, internal time-consciousness flows, while memory is re-

collected and reconstructed out of remembered fragments. Perhaps it is not
surprising, then, that improvisers, keen to throw off the constraints of given
structures and the tyranny of (re)collective consciousness, seek out such
moments of flow and commit themselves to devising performative
strategies capable of initiating and sustaining such events, the duration of
which is limited by either contingent, extraneous formal structures
introduced to delimit the flow of time-consciousness, or what might be
called the attention/retention/protention-span of internal-time
consciousness, itself understood here in productive rather than receptive
terms. Put another way, improvisers seek to create as well as experience
temporal events, and it is precisely the challenge to “get into” and hold
together—as performance—the flow of time that gives improvisation the
urgency and intensity it has.
Considering the idea of a created temporal event, the duration of which is
determined by objective givens (materials, spatial/temporal constraints,
socioeconomic-historical constraints, instructions/demands, embodiment,
and so on—the list is endless) and the protention/attention/retention-span of
the improviser(s), the degree of freedom associated with the improvisation
will be determined by which of these two poles predominate. Also, given
the entanglement (confusion?) of freedom and improvisation in so many of
the discourses surrounding it, thought must be given to the balance of
protention and retention within the internal time-consciousness of the
improviser and of the audience, as a productive and receptive moment,
respectively. As Lohmar observes:
In … The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness … protention is only mentioned in a
few places. If we compare this with the analyses of retention, which are distinctly dominant both
quantitatively and qualitatively, protention appears like a phenomenon that is mentioned only
for reasons of symmetry and fairness.23

This is true, but there is one particular passage in The Phenomenology that
is noteworthy: in section 26, entitled “The Difference between Memory and
Expectation,” Husserl makes a distinction between the prophetic and the
open.
In principle, a prophetic consciousness … is conceivable, one in which each character of the
expectation, of the coming into being, stands before our eyes, as, for example, when we have a
precisely determined plan and, intuitively imagining what is planned, accept it lock, stock and
barrel, so to speak, as future reality. Still there will also be many unimportant things in the
intuitive anticipation of the future which as makeshifts fill out the concrete image. The latter,
however, can in various ways be other than the likeness it offers. It is, from the first,
characterised as being open.24

What is suggested here is that within an improvisation, the precise nature

and significance of being “in the moment” will vary depending not only on
whether retention or protention is emphasized but, if the latter (as one
would expect in improvisation), exactly which mode of protention (how
open, how closed). Indeed, to go beyond Husserl and reach out once again
into the existential terrain of Kierkegaard, we might want to trace the
manner in which protention begins to overlap with expectation and, in turn,
how expectation might itself overlap with hope. But before re-engaging
with such “unhappiness,” let us return to Husserl’s apparent favoring of
retention above protention and consider what significance this might have
in our Husserlian analysis of an improvised event.
Rather than understanding the “in the moment” moment as synonymous
with a hyperawareness of the phenomenological attention to the present—
authentic self-presence within the “now”—consider the words of the
renowned improviser and theater director Keith Johnstone: “The improviser
has to be like a man walking backwards. He sees where he has been, but he
pays no attention to the future.”25 Here, already, it can be seen that the
assimilation of retention and closure, on the one hand, and protention and
openness, on the other, is problematic. Unconvincing though this may be as
a model, Johnstone’s backward-looking improviser, utterly inattentive to the
future, is hardly intended as a reactionary figure intent on harnessing
improvisation to the predictability of the known and the has-been. On the
contrary, the ambition here is to be utterly unpredictable: perhaps
impossibly so. Of course, from Johnstone’s perspective (something he
shares with Husserl), paying attention to the past is, in reality, just another
way of paying attention to the present “now,” because for both it is
precisely the nature of retention to always be one “phase” of the “now.”
Describing the consciousness of a sound-event, Husserl writes:
I am conscious of the sound and the duration which it fills in a continuity of “modes,” in a
“continuous flux.” A point, a phase of this flux is termed “consciousness of sound beginning”
and therein I am conscious of the first temporal point of the duration of the sound in the mode of
the now. The sound is given; that is, I am conscious of it as now, and I am so conscious of it “as
long as” I am conscious of any of its phases as now. But if any temporal phase (corresponding to
a temporal point of the duration of the sound) is an actual now (with the exception of the
beginning point), then I am conscious of a continuity of phases as “before,” and I am conscious
of the whole interval of the temporal duration from the beginning point to the now point as an
expired duration.26

Thinking of an improvisation in these terms, it becomes evident again that

the moment is by no means identical to the instant. The moment has
duration (which is why the improviser can get “into it”); the instant does
not. The beginning and the end of a written/composed work coexist within
the simultaneity of the originary document, but in a completely improvised
work they do not and, thus, the improviser has to both begin the
improvisation and then retain this beginning as a (the) moment of the
work’s unfolding and its ultimate end. In other words, the beginning is not
just the commencement of the work (the instant) but also an originary phase
of the moment of the work as a whole; once this beginning phase expires,
through insufficient attention, the work expires with it. Also, again within a
fully (freely) improvised work as opposed to an improvised sequence
within an otherwise composed structure, the beginning is of particular
interest.
 How does Johnstone’s backward-facing improviser begin, given that
before the beginning there is nothing to look back on? The obvious answer
is that the improviser looks back on previous beginnings, either as
something to avoid or as something to embrace. Either way, in Husserlian
terms the claim that the improviser “pays no attention to the future” is,
temporally at least, naive. To explain: even though, as we have already
seen, he insists that re-collective memory must be distinguished from the
flowing continuity of the retentive process, Husserl recognizes that memory
is, among other things, the recollection of protentions—back to the future.
Every act of memory contains intentions of expectation whose fulfilment leads to the present. …
[T]‌he recollective process … renews these protentions in a manner appropriate to memory.
These protentions were not only present as intercepting, they have also intercepted. They have
been fulfilled, and we are aware of them in recollection. Fulfilment in recollective consciousness
is re-fulfilment … and if the primordial protention of the perception of the event was
undetermined and the question of being-other or not being was left open, then in the recollection
we have a pre-directed expectation which does not leave all that open.27

Thought thus, not only does the moment overflow the present to the extent
that it has a protentional and retentional dimension, but in addition to this
the very beginning of the improvised temporal event is dependent upon the
memory and re-collection of past expectations. So, while Johnstone might
seem to be stumbling backward into the unexpected, in truth it is precisely
this backward glance that lets him know what to expect, because what he is
seeing is the fulfillment of these past expectations in the “now.” In this way,
and notwithstanding Husserl’s insistence that recollection represents a break
with the continuity of retention, the exaggerated emphasis on fulfillment
stitches the past back into the present in a manner that, for all intents and
purposes, effectively closes down the assumed openness of improvisation.
This, incidentally, is not a critique of improvisation but, rather, of the
ideology of openness.
Returning to Husserl’s account of what he describes as “protentions in
recollection,” it is worth considering what Lohmar identifies as five
varieties of protention and look more closely at what he calls “unspecific
protention.”28 In essence this is the most open form of protention because,
although there remains the expectation that something will happen, what
will happen is uncertain. Most important, in this mode of protention even
the unexpected is expected. So, placed within an improvisatory context—as
“protention in recollection”—what is remembered by the backward-looking
improviser is a past moment or event of indeterminacy that is resolved in
the present as a determined recollection, albeit one that (one hopes) still
resonates with this originary unexpectedness. Seen in this light, the
improviser looks back at this remembered future in all of its unexpected
futurity and begins again. Why? Perhaps just to relive the experience of
uncertainty, secure in the knowledge that everything will turn out alright in
the end; and there is certainly pleasure to be had here, as much
improvisation confirms. But of course the moment we start acknowledging
that a particular value is attached to expectation is the moment that the
neutrality of phenomenological protention is surpassed. To repeat, it would
be facile to assume that, in spite of the widespread valorization of
“surprise,” a positive value is or should always be attached to the
unexpected within an improvised event: some surprises are bad surprises!
In fact, it might be argued that most surprises are bad surprises, which is
why there are so few of them in the world of improvisation. Again, this is
not a criticism of improvisation but, rather, of the slightly skewed notion of
what constitutes a surprise, one that offers little clue as to why improvisers
continue to improvise other than to satisfy the desire for endless fulfillment
in the present: the most common but least interesting form of being “in the
moment.” So let us now go beyond phenomenology and its
protention/attention/retention continuum and begin to trace instead the
darker side of expectation as it breaks with protention and becomes
entangled with hope.
To repeat, most improvisation (even the very best) is not all that
surprising. Obviously, nice surprises are nice, so it is understandable that
improvisers often dwell on those special moments when the unexpected
flares up within the expected and the space of the “new” seems to “explode
immaculate and untouchable as alterity or absolute newness.”29 But, in all
honesty, such moments are rare and can hardly be considered the main
motivation for improvisers to improvise. As we have seen, if (following
Johnstone) the improviser is presented as one who faces the past, then the
apparent unexpectedness of the future is, in being “fulfilled” in the “now,”
not particularly surprising at all. Thus, while protention describes the
continuous flow of the future into the now and on into the past, expectation
represents a break with the now to the extent that it concerns a future
beyond the phenomenological “hold” of the improviser. But, to say again,
this apparent break disguises the fact that expectation is rooted in a fulfilled
past that is absolutely continuous with the now and thus completely
unsurprising.
But there are exceptions to this rather cozy view of improvisation: what
if instead of the “recollection of protentions” fulfilled in the present we turn
our attention to the recollection of expectations not fulfilled in the now?
What if an improvisation doesn’t turn out as expected—and not in a good
way? The improviser will expect certain things to happen, but that should
not make the improvisation predictable. The improviser will recollect past
protentions, but that should be distinguished from regurgitating past
successes in a series of formulaic repetitions. The list could be extended,
but clearly improvisations often fail, or at least fail to deliver what might
have been expected. To look back on unfulfilled expectations creates a very
different dynamic to the complacency that threatens to engulf those who
bathe in the warm glow of past triumphs, no matter how surprising at the
time. Where the dominant model of improvisation would have improvisers
constantly seek out good surprises, alongside this we must also
acknowledge the improviser’s desire to avoid bad surprises coupled with
the desire to constantly revisit and rework those areas of weakness,
disappointment, unfulfillment, and failure. So, as a response to the question
“why improvise?” consideration needs to be given not just to the excitement
of expectancy and the hyperexcitement associated with the expectation of
the unexpected, but also to the hope that previous shortcomings can be
ironed out, the hope that this time things might be different, better. Here it is
past shortcomings rather than the successes that, as memories rather than
recollections, endlessly draw the improviser back to improvisation, ever
hopeful that something good will come of it this time.
As with protention and expectation, then, expectation and hope must also
be carefully distinguished from each other. To begin with, while it is true
that expectation breaks with the absolute continuity of protention, to the
extent that recollected expectations are fulfilled (either in expected or
unexpected ways), there remains a powerful link forged between the present
and the expected future that results in a certain passivity being associated
with expectation. The yearning we began this chapter with only appears
when the unfulfillment of expectations gives rise to hope, and to hope for
something is very different than to expect it or, for that matter, not to expect
it. Although both are deployed within the language of outcomes, in essence
only expectancy demands an outcome. Hopefulness, as the word suggests,
is full of itself, and, like desire (it is desire), it ultimately feeds only on itself
too. In this regard, hope breaks with temporality, interrupting the internal
time-consciousness of the intentional ego and the expectant improviser with
a discontinuous and displaced existential yearning that, as Kierkegaard
recognizes, sucks all presence from the present, forever casting the yearning
self out of the moment. But, and this is the whole point of the present
chapter, the very experience of being “in the moment,” the real intensity
and profundity of this moment, can only be fully understood if the complex
interplay of protention and retention, expectation and recollection, hope and
memory is brought to our attention as the very moment of attention
necessary to experience not only the happiness of self-presence but also the
all-important presence of absence in the moment and the “unhappiness”
Kierkegaard would associate with that.
So let us consider improvisation in the terms outlined above. And let us
take what might be considered to be the most essential form of musical
improvisation as our example: free improvisation. The improvisation is
about to begin, anything could happen; already in this moment the
phenomenological consciousness, existential experience, and the
ontological sensation (for this is the true nature of hope and memory) of the
improvisers are simultaneously already at work: the silence is buzzing.
Husserl, speaking as a listener, always conducts his phenomenological
analysis in the midst of the work’s unfolding, it is always already under
way. What we need here is a phenomenology of beginnings, one engaged
with the consciousness of the not-yet, of the about-to-happen rather than
this-is-happening. But how can protention and retention be operative prior
to the phenomenological flow of the improvisation? How do we give a
phenomenological account of the beginning? In fact, phenomenologically
speaking we can have no primary perception of what is yet to happen.
Protention only protends the fact that happenings will continue to happen,
offering no insight into the discontinuity of new beginnings. In this regard
phenomenology can only ever speak from within the moment, and the
dryness of this account alone should, if only superficially, alert us to the fact
that the “being-in-the-moment” moment needs a much richer account than
the one phenomenology alone can provide.
Anything could happen, but what is likely to happen? Retention, on the
one hand, allows the improviser to hold onto what is happening in the
moment of a performance; recollection, on the other hand, allows the
improviser to anticipate a new beginning by bringing back to consciousness
previous transitions from what Niklas Luhmann (following Spencer Brown)
calls the “unmarked” to the “marked space.”30 As Aristotle recognized long
ago, recollection will always “try to obtain a beginning of movement … [,
which] explains why attempts at recollection succeed soonest and best
when they start from a beginning.”31 By recollecting beginnings the
improviser can begin again, the same or differently.
But before it begins there is still something else. Remember, while
Adorno denies the possibility of happy art he does nonetheless repeatedly
return to Stendhal’s conception of the aesthetic as the “promesse du
bonheur,” if not happiness at least a promise of happiness. But what does
this mean? Certainly, if an improvisation turns out pretty much as expected
(including the anticipation of the unexpected) there must be experienced a
sense of satisfaction, but satisfaction and happiness are by no means
synonymous: hope, unlike expectancy, cannot be satisfied. Every
improvisation at the moment of its beginning has many possibilities (some
of which one would expect to be realized), but in addition to this it also has
promise, to which can be attached a sense of anticipation over and above
both the primary perception of protention and the secondary perception of
expectation. While, as Adorno would see it (and here can be detected the
influence of Ernst Bloch, as well as Stendhal),32 all art holds out such a
promise, there is a danger that the artwork itself—the product—is too
readily received and consumed as the fulfillment of this promise rather than
merely the satisfaction of an expectation. In its endeavor to avoid the
production of a final definitive Work, the improvisation that is most free
effectively separates the promise of the work from the artwork itself, thus
opening an aesthetic space wherein can be sensed an ontological dimension
that exceeds it (both art and the aesthetic). Unfortunately, this space is too
often and too quickly closed down by improvisers themselves through the
subsequent valorization of the working of the Work rather than the Work
itself, thus resulting in what might be called a model (or ideal?) of being “in
the moment” that exaggerates the immediate perception of process,
becoming, and temporal flow above the highly mediated sense of an
ecstatic alterity (or Being) outside of phenomenological experience. In
other words, the promise of the work (happiness) is outside of the Work and
its working, but nevertheless this working must begin before this otherness
can be sensed, and, to this extent, hope is always to be found alongside
expectation at the beginning of an improvisation.
The improvisation begins: on the face of it the first sounds would seem to
be the freest: anything could happen, but in truth it is usually the
recollection of previous beginnings or the imaginary protention of a
planned beginning that sets things in motion. Not surprisingly then, the
beginning is rarely (if ever) the “moment” that improvisers get “into.” Once
under way, most of what occurs in our free improvisation will respond well
to a phenomenological analysis, and even better to one that goes beyond the
continuity of protention and retention and the fulfillment of recollected
protentions into the more complex experience of unfulfilled protentions and
the impact that this might have on an improvisation. The composer and
anti-improviser Gavin Bryars might mock the musician who practices all
day in order to improvise in the evening but, all joking aside, what this
demonstrates is the improviser’s desire to avoid previous shortcomings, to
build upon earlier successes (without naively trying to reproduce them), and
to develop the technique necessary to outwit itself the moment empty
virtuosity threatens to bring fulfillment.
All of this can be accounted for in phenomenological terms, albeit in the
intensified form adopted by the “hyperaware” improviser whose attention
to the present moment and the desire to control the flow of time-events is so
easily mistaken for the “being-in-the-moment” moment. The ability to take
hold of the situation, to anticipate otherness through the
protentional/intentional/retentional grasp of the event requires all
participants in the improvisation to accelerate the senses; it is a question of
speed and agility, instant responses to instant responses: hyperdialogue,
total control (notwithstanding the penchant for staged chaos).
Phenomenology can account for all of this except for one crucial thing:
dialogue. And it is the failure of Husserl, in spite of his considerable efforts
in the Cartesian Meditations, to offer a viable account of intersubjectivity
(and, thus, dialogue) that requires us to go beyond phenomenology at the
very point where collective improvisation appears to be approaching the
moment of moments.33
The problem, in essence, is that Husserl can only conceive of the other as
an alter-ego that is phenomenologically “paired” with the perceiving ego
within a symmetrical, “mirrored,” empathic space/time.34 Now while on the
face of it this might seem to fit perfectly well with those models of
improvisation that equate dialogue with community and communion (some
might say a rather facile model), it becomes evident, as other writings of
Husserl betray, that the twinning of self and other ultimately breaks down
under the weight of irreducible difference and existential solitude. As he
himself observes in Ideas 1:
Closer inspection would further show that two streams of experience (spheres of consciousness
for two pure Egos) cannot be conceived as having an essential content that is identically the
same; moreover, as is evident from the foregoing, no fully determinate experience of the one
could ever belong to the other.35

In other words, although involved in a process of interaction, the

performative actions of each interactor are unavoidably initiated from
within a singular sphere of “ownness”36 that is irreducible to any other.
What should be said, however, is that it is precisely Husserl’s apparent
“failure” to arrive at a satisfactory phenomenological account of
intersubjectivity that marks the spot where philosophies of solitude
(Maurice Blanchot) or separation (Emmanuel Levinas) can take root, thus
continuing and radicalizing Kierkegaard’s promotion of “the single one.”
Of course, these latter thinkers are unable to offer an account of dialogue
too, but—and this is the essential difference—this is perceived as a strength
rather than a weakness. To use Levinas’s vocabulary, it is precisely the
recognition and conviction that otherness cannot be reduced to the same
that informs the subsequent resistance to all totalities (including, it should
be said, the shared experience of being “in the moment”). But this needs to
be understood correctly; as a moment of intersubjectivity and interaction,
such irreducibility raises the issues of proximity and separation (two key
Levinasian terms) as related to the collectivity of collective improvisation: a
commonality without communion.37 This “alone together” moment is, to be
fair, already acknowledged within improvisation as Jim Hall and Ron
Carter’s exquisitely melancholic album of that title confirms, and it should
act as a reminder that (as Levinas argues throughout Time and the Other)
time-consciousness is the consciousness of our difference from the other: a
difference that can be shared to be sure (but as difference).38
Yet more can be said than this: while the desire for dialogue and the
yearning for communication associated here with separation and difference
can be incorporated into the dialogical model of improvisation that
dominates the field, there remains a solitude that, as describing the self’s
separation from itself rather than the other, requires a shift of emphasis
away from the otherness of the other toward the otherness of the work. As
Blanchot observes in “The Essential Solitude,” to be solitary is not to avoid
—as “loner”—the company of others (it is not a social category); it is,
rather, to be “set aside” by one’s own work and “dismissed.”39 Indeed, for
Blanchot, solitude is a characteristic of the work, not of the self, and it is the
very creation of a work that creates the condition of solitude.
So if we return to collective free improvisation, what do such ideas add
to the phenomenological account already presented? To begin with, there is
what we might describe as a pluralization of time-consciousness, a poly-
temporality that multiplies time-strands by the number of participants.
Indeed, if we were writing this from a Bergsonian perspective we would be
talking of the different rhythms of different durations pulsing or flowing
across the spatialized blocks of objective time: a great description of an
improvised event.40 As it is, phenomenology, confronting each improviser
within a singular “sphere of ownness” that flows alongside but never into
the internal time-consciousness of another, is persuaded to introduce the
concept of empathy as the means by which the “mirroring” of the ego and
the alter-ego can be translated into the language of feeling and
understanding, thus opening up the dialogical possibilities assumed by any
group improvisation. And it is here that the singularity of being “in the
moment”—rather than the plurality of coexisting moments—can be traced
back to its empathic roots and the desire to replace multiple “spheres of
ownness” with a oneness that actualizes the mono-logic at the heart of what
so often passes as dialogue. It would be easy to confuse the experience of
empathic oneness with the “being-in-the-moment” moment, but to do so (as
is often done) is to overlook the fact that, thought essentially, empathy does
not achieve (or allow the achievement of) oneness, on the contrary: it
assumes it. Heidegger grasps this perfectly in Being and Time:
This phenomenon, which is not too happily designated as “empathy,” is then supposed, as it
were, to provide the first ontological bridge from one’s own subject, which is given proximally
as alone, to the other subject, which is proximally quite closed off. … [But] … Dasein, as being-
in-the-world, already is with others. “Empathy” does not first constitute Being-with; only on the
basis of Being-with does empathy become possible: it gets its motivation from the unsociability
of the dominant modes of Being-with.41

The point (if not the language) is clear: the understanding of empathy as a
desirable goal, and the apparent realization of that goal during those
momentous moments within an improvisation obscures the fact that the
communion empathy desires both phenomenologically and existentially is,
ontologically, already given as origin—something to be preserved rather
than created. And what is more, this originary at-oneness (“Being-with”) is
precisely that which is emphatically not perceived, indeed is forgotten in the
rush for sociability and togetherness.
While there is undoubtedly something strange about the idea that “Being-
with” might be considered an unsociable mode of being, one can detect here
the impact of Heidegger on Blanchot’s framing of the “essential solitude,”
central to which is a distinction between loneliness and solitude. As we
have seen, aloneness and togetherness can play very well alongside each
other within the world of improvisation, particularly when situated within
the familiar dialectic of individuality and collectivity; but solitude is of a
different order, not only unsociable but a-social and thus quite removed
from the dialectics of human interaction. Hence Heidegger’s primary
concern is not with one being’s relation to another being, but with a being’s
relation to Being, a relation born (interestingly) out of “listening,”
“hearkening,” and “reserve.” One would hope that all improvisations
contain moments of reserve and listening, but the concern here is not with
other improvisers but with an Otherness that, while sensed, is irreducible to
the perception of interacting alter-egos. It is this sense that, we hope, will
allow us to draw a little closer to the “being-in-the-moment” moment. To
attempt this we need to return to Blanchot.
As with Heidegger then, the “essential solitude,” as Blanchot understands
it, is not concerned with being-to-being relations but, rather, with the
encounter between, for example, the writer and the book, the composer and
the score; a being-to-work relation, where the work represents an
irreducible “outside” that both produces and is sensed by the “essential
solitude.” Blanchot has another name for this sense of solitude and this
solitary sense: fascination. The subject of fascination in Blanchot is indeed
a fascinating subject, but there is only space here to pick up on one specific
aspect of his discussion, what he describes as “the fascination of time’s
absence.” The purpose of this is to try to make sense of the three different
but interlinked and overlapping modes of time-consciousness that are
operative within any freely improvised time event, two of which we have
already acknowledged (the intentional and the empathic) and a third that we
will treat as the fascinating. Thus we might identify three temporalities,
respectively: the phenomenologically reduced time of the self (intentional),
the phenomenologically expanded time of the self and other (empathic),
and, let us tentatively call it, the ontological time of the self and Other
(fascinating for Blanchot, unhappy for Kierkegaard).
Where the first two temporalities assume or seek self-presence and
intersubjective presence, respectively, the contention here is that it is only
with the emergence of a sense of time’s absence that the “in-the-moment”
moment can be said to have truly arrived. Before trying to explain this—the
paradox of internal time-consciousness—note must be taken of Blanchot’s
account of fascination and the absence of time.
To write is to surrender to the fascination of time’s absence. Now we are doubtless approaching
the essence of solitude. … The time of time’s absence has no present, no presence. This “no
present” does not, however, refer back to a past. … The irremediable character of what has no
present, of what is not even there as having once been there, says: it never happened, never for a
first time, and yet it starts over, again, again, infinitely. It is without end, without beginning. It is
without a future.42

It is hoped (and it is certainly the intention) that Kierkegaard’s earlier words

—“he has no present, no future, no past”—can be heard echoing in this
passage, but where the proto-existentialism of the latter is witness to the
tragic dislocation of time as a function of the confusion of hope and
memory, for Blanchot the fascination with time’s absence is neither happy
nor unhappy but neutral, indeed neutrality is the very essence of his
thought.43 Where the Kierkegaardian unhappy one is trapped within the
eternally recurring “two-fold reversal” of time—the tragedy—the neutral
fascination of Blanchot’s solitary artist (something comparable to
Heidegger’s “reserve”) gives rise to a vigilance that directly relates to the
emergence of a work that, as work, remains on the outside of its mode of
production: the working of the work so central to improvisation. And this is
why improvisation is the most essential art form; for by holding the work at
bay and resisting its teleological allure for the sake of its becoming—the
flow of production, the purposiveness without purpose—it does not render
the Work redundant or secondary. On the contrary, it is only in such a
moment of intersubjective/dialogical flux that the work can appear, as the
image44 of that which is absolutely irreducible to this flux. Put another way:
it is only through empathy—the fusion, or attempted fusion of different
time strands—that the essential “unsociableness of Being-with” can be
sensed as that which remains outside the moment of empathy: this is the
work that so fascinates.
So, finally, to try and make sense of this as related to collective free
improvisation and the experience of being “in the moment,” the following
model (or scenario) might be considered. Like Walter Benjamin’s version of
Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus (more dramatic than Johnstone), the improviser
moves into the future with eyes fixed on the past.45 It is through the dual
intentional act of retaining what has just happened and recollecting what
has happened before that an improvisation can get under way and be
sustained—the duration, once under way, being determined by and
dependent upon the ability of the improviser to hold together in a
phenomenological continuum this view of the immediate and the mediated
past and what is to come now (protention) and beyond the now
(expectation). Without an existing work (with predetermined beginning and
end) to perform, the improviser brings into sharp relief this, the essential
temporality of all artworks, and the particular responsibility of the artist to
hold the time of the work together.
In addition to retention and the recollection of protentions fulfilled in the
now the improviser must also negotiate, from moment to moment, the
recollection of unfulfilled protentions and the expectation that the
improvisation might not turn out as expected, that it might “fail.” It is here
that one often witnesses the new within improvisation, but such novelty is,
paradoxically, often the product of considerable rehearsal devoted to the
avoidance of past “mistakes” or shortcomings. At the level of singularity
and the somewhat expanded version of internal time-consciousness
presented here, there is clearly a moment of, let us call it “pleasure,” of
control and even mastery that undoubtedly contributes to the event of being
“in the moment,” but there is more to it than this.
At the level of collectivity an improvisation becomes more than the mere
pluralization or multiplication of singular (but “mirrored”) internal time-
consciousness; it also manifests the radical differentiation of singular
durations within a shared objective time that can never be actualized. This
problematization of dialogue and the communicative community that it
promises represents a direct challenge to the empathic model of
improvisation that dominates the field, one that explains the ecstasy
experienced when such empathy seems—in those fleeting moments—to
have been attained. This apparent sublation of singularity and collectivity is
undoubtedly the “in-the-moment” moment as understood by the dialectical
aesthetics that have lorded it over art for more than two centuries, so to
resist this as the ultimate “moment” is also to resist such dialectics:
Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Blanchot—as anti-dialecticians—have been
marshaled for precisely this reason.
The limits of empathy are the limits of the dialectic, both sharing the
desire to synthesize what is already together (albeit differently). If it is
precisely the unsociability of Being-with that gives rise to the desire for
sociability then the promise of happiness associated with such togetherness
will always remain just that: a promise. But—and this is the essential point
—the sense of this promise, the sensation of that which, as absolute futurity,
is absent from time-consciousness, remains nevertheless an event within the
unfolding of some (and only some) artworks. The claim here is that (at their
best) free improvisations are the most graphic example of this event. If this
is accepted, then to fully grasp the “in-the-moment” moment we need to
acknowledge that in addition to (or in excess of) the self-presence of the
improviser and the empathic co-presence of the collective there is a point of
reservation or neutrality from which it is possible to sense the work “to
come” (as Blanchot describes it).46 Like the promise, that which is eternally
“to come” resides outside of time and thus is forever outside the moment.
But to sense this absence—time’s absence—as a moment of fascination
requires the improviser to step outside of the moment too. Both inside and
outside, feelings of mastery and empathy are countered not by unhappiness
or yearning but, rather, by a vigilance and attention that “listens” with icy
concentration to the Absolute work that never arrives—and yet, in this
moment of moments, is already here.

NOTES
1. Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. C. Lenhardt (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul,
1984), 19.
2. Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Seabury Press, 1973),
144.
3. G.W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, trans. James Baillie (London: Allen and Unwin,
1977), 251ff.
4. Ibid., 259.
5. G.W.F. Hegel, Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller (London: Allen and Unwin, 1976), 149.
6. Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or, trans. David and Lillian Swenson (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1971), 217.
 7. Ibid., 220.
8. Ibid., 221–222.
9. Ibid., 223.
10. Ibid., 223–224.
11. Edmund Husserl, The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness, trans. James S.
Churchill (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1964).
12. Kierkegaard, Either/Or, 224.
13. Ibid., 223.
14. Husserl, Phenomenology, 89.
15. Ibid., 90.
16. Ibid., 92.
17. A representative example would be Susan Leigh Foster, “Taken by Surprise: Improvisation in
Dance and Mind,” in Taken by Surprise: A Dance Improvisation Reader, ed. Ann Cooper
Albright and David Gere (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2003).
18. Husserl, Phenomenology, 58.
19. Ibid., 28.
20. Dieter Lohmar, “What Does Protention ‘Protend’?: Remarks on Husserl’s Analyses of
Protention in the Bernau Manuscripts on Time-Consciousness,” Philosophy Today 46, no. 5
(2002): 157. (my emphasis)
21. Ibid., 57.
22. Ibid.
23. Lohmar, “What Does Protention ‘Protend’?,” 154.
24. Husserl, Phenomenology, 80.
25. Keith Johnstone, Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre (London: Faber and Faber, 1979), 116.
26. Husserl, Phenomenology, 44.
27. Ibid., 76. (my emphasis)
28. Lohmar, “What Does Protention ‘Protend’?,” 160.
29. Emmanuel Levinas, Time and the Other, trans. Richard Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University
Press, 1987), 80.
30. Niklas Luhmann, Art as a Social System, trans. Eva Knodt (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
2000), 117.
31. Aristotle, “On Memory and Reminiscence,” in The Works of Aristotle (Chicago: Encyclopaedia
Britannica Inc., 1952), 1: 693.
32. Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, 3 vols., trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul
Knight (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986).
33. Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology, trans. Dorion
Cairns (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1995), 89 ff.
34. Ibid., 140.
35. Edmund Husserl, Ideas 1, trans. W.R. Boyce Gibson (London: Allen and Unwin Press, 1969),
241.
36. Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 95.
37. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis
(Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969).
38. Jim Hall (guitar) and Ron Carter (bass), Alone Together, recorded August 1972, Milestone 9045,
1972, 33 1/3 rpm.
39. Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, 1982), 21.
40. Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer (London:
Allen and Unwin, 1911), 272. “The duration lived by our consciousness is a duration with its
own ‘determined rhythm,’ a duration very different from the time of the physicist.”
 41. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1962), 162.
42. Blanchot, The Space of Literature, 30.
43. Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1993), 298ff. “Every encounter—where the Other suddenly looms up and
obliges thought to leave itself, just as it obliges the Self to come up against the lapse that
constitutes it and from which it protects itself—is already marked, already fringed by the
neutral” (306).
44. Blanchot, Space of Literature, 32. “The gaze gets taken in, absorbed by an immediate movement
and a depthless deep. What is given us by this contact at a distance is the image, and fascination
is passion for the image.”
45. Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” trans. Harry Zohn, in Walter Benjamin Selected
Writings, vol. 4, 1938–1940 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 392. “His eyes are
wide, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how the angel of history must look. His
face is turned toward the past. Where a chain of events appear before us, he sees one single
catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it at his feet.”
46. Maurice Blanchot, The Book to Come, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 2003).

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Adorno, Theodor. Aesthetic Theory. Translated by C. Lenhardt. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul,
1984.
Adorno, Theodor. Negative Dialectics. Translated by E. B. Ashton. New York: Seabury Press, 1973.
Aristotle. “On Memory and Reminiscence.” In The Works of Aristotle. Vol. 1. Chicago:
Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc., 1952.
Benjamin, Walter. “On the Concept of History.” Translated by Harry Zohn. In Walter Benjamin—
Selected Writings. Vol. 4, 1938–1940, 389–400. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003.
Bergson, Henri. Matter and Memory. Translated by Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer.
London: Allen and Unwin, 1911.
Blanchot, Maurice. The Space of Literature. Translated by Ann Smock. Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 1982.
Blanchot, Maurice. The Infinite Conversation. Translated by Susan Hanson. Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1993.
Blanchot, Maurice. The Book to Come. Translated by Charlotte Mandell. Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2003.
Bloch, Ernst. The Principle of Hope, 3 Vols. Translated by Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice and Paul
Knight. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986.
Foster, Susan Leigh. “Taken by Surprise: Improvisation in Dance and Mind.” In Taken by Surprise: A
Dance Improvisation Reader, edited by Ann Cooper Albright and David Gere, 3–10. Middletown:
Wesleyan University Press, 2003.
Hall, Jim, and Ron Carter. Alone Together. Milestone 9045, 1972. Vinyl disc.
Hegel, G.W.F. Science of Logic. Translated by V. Miller. London: Allen and Unwin, 1976.
Hegel, G.W.F. The Phenomenology of Mind. Translated by James Baillie. London: Allen and Unwin,
1977.
Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. Oxford:
Blackwell, 1962.
Husserl, Edmund. The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness. Translated by James S.
Churchill. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1964.
Husserl, Edmund. Ideas 1. Translated by W.R. Boyce Gibson. London: Allen and Unwin Press, 1969.
Husserl, Edmund. Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology. Translated by Dorion
Cairns. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1995.
Johnstone, Keith. Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre. London: Faber and Faber, 1979.
Levinas, Emmanuel. Time and the Other. Translated by Richard Cohen. Pittsburgh: Duquesne
University Press, 1987.
Kierkegaard, Søren. Either/Or. Translated by David and Lillian Swenson. Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1971.
Levinas, Emmanuel. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Translated by Alphonso Lingis.
Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969.
Lohmar, Dieter. “What Does Protention ‘Protend’?: Remarks on Husserl’s Analyses of Protention in
the Bernau Manuscripts on Time-Consciousness.” Philosophy Today 46, no. 5 (2002): 154–167.
Luhmann, Niklas. Art as a Social System. Translated by Eva Knodt. Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 2000.
 CHAPTER 26
IMPROVISING IMPROMPTU, OR, WHAT TO
DO WITH A BROKEN STRING

LYDIA GOEHR

IN APOLLO’S HALL
ON Amateur Night at the Apollo Theater, New York City, musicians and
singers come to the stage to compete for public recognition of their talent.
Participating audiences issue their judgments sometimes with expressions
that drown out the performances. Where there’s a noticeable failure to
please, a designated “executioner” pulls the performers away.
The Apollo Theater inherited its name from an institution of dance,
“Apollo Hall,” founded in the 1860s by a Civil War military man, Edward
Ferrero. In his treatise, The Art of Dancing, he articulated his aim to secure
an Apollonian harmony and civility for his art while acknowledging its
more turbulent origins in the Dionysian and bacchanalian cults of
antiquity.1 After his death, the institution saw several transmutations,
through burlesque and vaudeville, through blues, jazz, swing, R & B,
Motown, and soul, eventually to become what it is today, a theater of
diverse musical offerings.2 Nevertheless, for all the changes of musical
style, street address, and clientele, the continued presence of the executioner
suggests something that has never left the hall: an agonistic atmosphere that
recalls the ancient gods contesting the terms of order and inspiration in
society and the arts.
In the ancient myths, surprisingly many musicians were maimed or killed
—if not by Apollo himself, then according to his divine principle: Marsyas
was flayed, Orpheus beheaded, Linus knocked out, and Thamyris blinded.3
Homer wrote of Thamyris, here in Pausanias’s description, that he “lost the
sight of his eyes”; that his attitude was “one of utter dejection”; that his hair
and beard were “long”; and that “at his feet” lay “thrown a lyre with its
horns and strings broken.”4 What had he done to deserve so extreme a
punishment? He had shown hubris in claiming, first, that his musical
performance was superior to that of the divine Muses, and second, that were
he to win, he would take the Muses in sexual intercourse. When he was
punished, he was stripped equally of his art and his eros. Nowadays, on
Amateur Night, the Apollonian executioner does not actually physically
maim the amateurs when he punishes them, though he does still have
license to unstring the spirit of dilettantes who distress the assembled
audiences. In other contemporary settings, however, the situation is not
always so restrained.
In this essay, I draw on an agonistic background of contest, judgment,
and punishment to help articulate a concept of improvisation that I call
improvisation impromptu. I distinguish this concept from the more familiar
concept of what I call improvisation extempore. I draw these two concepts
apart, despite a substantial overlap, as a contribution to a critical theory that
regards our lives, practices, and concepts as constantly contested.
Improvisation impromptu is a concept of wit and fit, of doing exactly the
right thing or wrong thing in the moment. Although the concept can be
articulated independently of the agonistic background, its agonism brings
its use into a sharp relief, especially when it’s used to mark a winning (or
losing) move. To speak of agonism is not necessarily to speak of explicit
contests: even in everyday situations of life, we can take our lives,
positively and negatively construed, to be “on the line.” Suitable to its
content, the concept is also very hard to pin down or to circumscribe with
clear lines. It is a dynamic, even a tightrope concept, closely tied to
judgment, that speaks to the differences between acting with humility or
with hubris, with divine exhibition or with egoistic exhibitionism. I
illustrate its tense application through a history of more subtle philosophical
thought, juxtaposed with several rather blatant examples of competitive
musical situations from very diverse traditions, from the “cutting contests”
of jazz and rap, to the “cutting edge” performances of the concert hall, to
the deathly “cutting down” of karaoke singers in the Philippines.
A strong motivation I have for articulating the concept of improvisation
impromptu is to address the concept of improvisation extempore insofar as
the latter has been used to bring down the work-concept of the practice of
classical music. I begin the essay by explaining this motivation and
conclude with an example that illustrates the argument as well as any single
example could. It is drawn from a 1940 film of the Harlem Renaissance, in
which an old violinist, a father, must contend with a broken arm and a
young violinist, his son, with broken strings. Broken Strings is the film’s
title and part of my own. The film pits the work-music of the classical
tradition against the improvisational freedom of swing, not, however, to
perpetuate the division between two types of music—classical versus jazz—
but between two qualitative ways of making music, whatever type of music
it is. The film brings attention to what is most divisive, cutting, or
prejudicial in our social categorization of persons and in our social
conceptualization of music.

CONCEPTS AND CRITIQUE

When musicians make up music in performance, from this moment forward,
their act falls under the familiar umbrella concept of what I’m calling
improvisation extempore. The second, less familiar concept, I’m calling
improvisation impromptu. The latter refers to what we do at singular
moments—in the moment—when we’re put on the spot, particularly when
we’re confronted with an unexpected difficulty or obstacle. Closely
associated with both concepts is a quality or characteristic of the
improvised or improvisational, although, in qualitative assessments, we tend
to say that a person, a performance, or an act is inspired or innovative, or,
by contrast, uninspired or dull. In an extensive literature that extends far
beyond the musical domain, the extempore and impromptu acts, along with
the quality, tend to be run together without very explicit distinction. I think
it necessary also to hold them apart. For, this way, we may put one of the
concepts to work, to upstage or, better, unstage the other for the sake of
critique.
Many contemporary scholars attach the concept of improvisation first off
to the art of music and to a specific type or genre of music, most often jazz.
With jazz regarded as the primary example of improvisation, the term
improvisation has come to mean improvisation extempore, making music up
in performance from this moment forward. After this, the terms jazz and
improvisation have become thinned out or unmarked enough to signify a
free music-making anywhere in the world. This way of making music has
then become utopian in intent: to pave the way for a free music or a free
future in a society of constraint.
This utopian claim has assumed a blood-red persistence: although rule-
governed and conventional in many ways, jazz improvisation—especially
free jazz—has been made to stand for the general resistance to a regulation
assumed by a standardized or pre-made music or a pre-packaged concept—
and most typically the work-concept. In this discourse of resistance, a
practice regulated by a work-concept is a practice where compositional
determination is taken typically to occur prior to the performance such that
the performance is seen not to create the music but only to reproduce what
is already created. Accordingly, whereas performances improvised
extempore are taken to be productive, performances of works are taken to
be only re-productive.
Although few would affirm this crude opposition, the opposition has
nevertheless structured a way of thinking that assumes that more or less
around 1800, the work-concept emerged in the practice in part as a contrary
concept to that of improvisation extempore. Increasingly, it came to overtax
musical practice, and not just classical music practice.5 To diminish its
power or authority, improvisation extempore, especially as tied to jazz,
came to be accorded an emancipatory potential. But then, and this is the
additional step I want to add to this discourse, this concept came to overstep
its bounds, too, by coming to serve as though it exhausted all that
improvisation and emancipation can mean descriptively and qualitatively,
musically and socially.
But where does this leave us? I believe with the thought that just as it has
been necessary to limit the work-concept, it is necessary to impose limits
now on the concept of improvisation extempore. One way to do this is to re-
release the power of the work-concept, to show that it does not exclude
improvisation, given that improvisation can mean much more than
improvisation extempore. Another way is to re-release the power of a way
of thinking about improvisation that has fallen out of the picture the more
the idea of improvisation extempore has dominated. This way of thinking
corresponds in part to the quality of improvisation, as when we say of
persons or their acts—of whatever sort—that they are inspired, innovative,
or creative. But it also corresponds to what I am calling improvisation
impromptu, which is both a particularly apt concept and in fact the more
traditional concept to serve the purposes of an emancipatory critique.
Critique articulates concepts at the extreme to render explicit their
negative and positive social tendencies in the different practices in which
they have found complex and concrete applications. To so articulate the
concepts is not to let the descriptions fall into mere caricature, although as
in smart caricature, the descriptions are exaggerated and provocative
enough to reveal an often-concealed truth-content or truthfulness. To claim
that improvisation impromptu can help to deflate the conceit of
improvisation extempore is thus deliberately to disguise all that potentially
runs these two concepts together as one.6 In what follows, one might think
that most of what I say about the impromptu concept belongs just as well to
what others think of as improvisation extempore. It is reasonable and
accurate to think this way. The risk it runs, however, is then to think that a
practice governed by a concept, such as the work-concept, which almost
“by definition” has come to exclude the practice of improvisation
extempore, has no claim on improvisation, which would be an unreasonable
way to think. Drawing the conceptual distinction clarifies the point.

THE POSSIBILITY OF THE IMPOSSIBLE

In an oft-quoted, unpublished interview of 1982, Jacques Derrida described
improvisation as occurring within a space of free fantasy in which we are
able to imagine ourselves as liberated from repressive concepts or, as he put
it, from the “great number of prescriptions [or names] that are prescribed in
our memory and culture,” such that all seems always already to be
“preprogrammed.”7 In articulating his utopian appeal to improvisation,
Derrida did not tie improvisation to a particular type of music, art, or action.
Instead, he construed improvisation negatively, following the terms of a
dialectical critique, and thus, as he used this term, as an impossibility. “One
is obliged more or less to reproduce the stereotypical discourse. And so I
believe in improvisation, and I fight for improvisation, but always with the
belief that it’s impossible.” Part of what he meant was that what we desire
but can never actually achieve is a free space in which improvisation is
what we do completely spontaneously. The free space thus becomes a
matter less of what we do than of what we appeal to, to resist all that
restricts this spontaneity. The space of imagination is a space for
broadening and opening up our thoughts to counter spaces that are filled up
by that which is already familiar, given, pre-packaged in the culture. But to
open up the imagination to counter such spaces is so extremely difficult that
improvisation becomes well-nigh “impossible,” yet, as Derrida insists, he,
and we, must continue to believe in it.
Derrida’s view draws on an extensive history in which “improvisation”
has been appealed to, more in its impromptu than extempore form, to
capture a way of acting in the world with what Emerson, for example,
described as a certain “elasticity” of mind, attitude, and ability.8 What
exactly this elasticity comprised came, in the same history, to be drawn out
through what Nietzsche, at the same time as Emerson, referred to as an
entire “mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms.”
Yet what the history also shows is that such an elasticity or spontaneity of
mind and action cannot in fact do without a certain habituation, training, or
preprogramming of our practices. Without fit, no wit. When Derrida said in
his interview that one cannot do or say “whatever one wants,” was he only
lamenting the loss of freedom or was he also recognizing, dialectically, that
one must “reproduce” the discourse to some degree, in order to show one’s
productivity? Most theorists who have articulated a critical concept of
improvisation have done so not to dispense with all habit, discourse, or fit,
but to counter a situation where our habits become too habitual or our
discourses too stereotyped or fixed. If they overstate the claim to make it
seem as if they really think freedom is possible without any compliance or
fit, then it is to put a high note and often a blue note on the extreme
difficulty or near impossibility of fighting all that which strikes others
simply but falsely as self-evident.

ON THE EDGE OF HAPPINESS

Improvisation impromptu is equally distinct from a music freely or entirely
extemporized and one worked out in advance. It refers to what we do in any
sort of activity or performance of life when we’re suddenly confronted with
an obstacle which, to win, continue, or survive, we must overcome. But to
overcome the obstacle, to get “out of a jam,” offers no guarantees and no
certainty that the world or our lives, social or individual, are improved
thereby. We need always also to ask to what end our overcoming is
directed. Conceived as without guarantees, the concept has nothing
essential to do with this or that kind of music, or even with the art of music
at all, and much more to do with how we live our lives precariously and
contingently—on the edge.
Before Derrida, Nietzsche argued for improvisation to overcome a certain
forgetfulness of what it means to live life. We have become passive as
though we sit in an audience looking and listening to our lives without
participating in their making. Our society and culture have become
antiquated, even deadly, because we act as though what we know is always
already known: pre-packaged or certain in advance. Nietzsche urged a
rebirth of a perspective that would put us back onto the stage, where the
not-knowing with certainty how the drama unfolds would leave us dancing
joyfully “in the dark.” To be “joyful,” he wrote, we must become
improvisers of our lives. “The day and the dance are beginning, and we
don’t know the programme. So we have to improvise—the whole day
improvises its day.”9
But having written this, he then tempered the thought. A life in which all
our habits and knowing were suspended, a life that “demanded
improvisation” without any abatement, would be “impossible,”
“intolerable,” an “exile” from all community: indeed, a “Siberia.” On the
other hand, he recognized that the habits, values, and know-how needed to
live life tend to fall all too easily and quickly into stagnation: before we
know it, we have forgotten how to improvise, how to live in a way that
shows us to be active, even “alive.” Between the two extremes, he
articulated the fragile or almost “impossible” terms of an agonistic life lived
on a tightrope with and between joy and suffering, affirmation and doubt,
experimentation and habit.
To illustrate, he distinguished two types of “happiness,” saturated with
connotations of good fortune and luck. In this distinction, he captured
everything with which my essay is concerned: the agonism of living life;
the two senses, separated, of improvisation extempore and impromptu; and
the quality of being inspired derived from being able to act with readiness
“in the moment.”
There is one happiness, he began, of those who, despite their youth, grasp
“the improvisation of life.” These persons are those who, less than grasping
the extemporaneous character of life, are able to act impromptu, in the
moment. They are the persons who astonish us, for while engaged in “the
most daring games,” they are never caught out making a mistake even when
they make one. Nietzsche drew an analogy to those “improvising masters”
of the “art of tone,” to whom we ascribe the quality of a “divine
infallibility”—göttliche Unfehlbarkeit—of the hand. That these masters are
mortal means that they do make mistakes, he explained, but that they are
“divine” means that they make it seem as though their mistakes were no
mistakes at all. Whenever, through “a mood” or “jerk of the finger,” “an
accidental tone” enters their performance, they are able to overcome it then
and there, impromptu, by animating the tone “with a fine meaning and
soul.”
In addressing the “great improvisers” of the musical art, Nietzsche had
the Liszts, Chopins, and Paganinis of his time in mind, and, hence, a music
pre-composed but for a qualitatively improvised performance such as a so-
named Impromptu for the piano or Caprice for the violin. Had he been
addressing a purely or freely improvised music extempore, the very idea of
making a mistake or entering an accidental tone would have been less clear,
given that, in pure extemporization, all tones are, in some sense, either
accidental or necessary given that none is determined in advance. In
extempore activity, making a mistake must be conceived of in terms more of
flouting a convention or expectation according to the type of music being
made. But the point is that Nietzsche’s description was about far less this or
that sort of mistake than what one does when any sort of mistake threatens
to derail a performance. He named persons “improvisers” of their art when
they are “always ready in the moment”—im Augenblick immer bereit—to
act, but where the readiness does not itself come in the instant. It comes
rather from a practice or training in the art—Übung (from geübt)—and from
a certain sort of fortune or divine luck, or what Bernard Williams later
articulated as a “moral luck,”10 such that, in the moment, they can actually
show themselves “inventive”—erfinderisch—enough to do what they must
do.
Nietzsche then contrasted the happiness of these persons with those
whose happiness is drawn not from their ability in accommodating
accidental tones, but from a rejection of this ability altogether. These
persons focus on their failures and disappointments, he wrote, on how,
when “in a scrape,” they’re left with far more than “a black eye,” looking,
indeed, over the cliff edge into life’s “abyss.” Almost toppling over the
edge, they reason to themselves that the value of life must lie elsewhere
than in winning or succeeding, and, accordingly, they remove their “bull’s
horns.” They know instead what it means to see their lives as (almost) lost
to them. Did Nietzsche regard this second kind of happiness as a cop-out or
as strength? He left the answer undecided. Sometimes he saw these persons
as simply rationalizing their inability or “dilettantism,” but sometimes as
having reached some sort of melancholic or stoic withdrawal, a
Schopenhauerian contentment of resignation, arrived at quietly, in solitude.
In Nietzsche’s view, both sorts of happiness are attitudinal in the face of
the contingency of life. Both also situate persons sometimes in the most
“tragic” situations of knowing and not-knowing on a stage where
“accidental tones” turn out to be grave errors that cannot, in the end, be
covered up by an “infallible hand.” Sometimes, as in the ancient tragedies,
protagonists are blinded in punishment for their blindness in not fully
grasping or knowing their situation. But also in this view, a space or
possibility is held open for improvisation impromptu, in which moments of
joy might happen that reveal a divine inventiveness on the part of those
who, though perhaps, strictly speaking, deceiving others by covering up a
mistake, exhibit a know-how without exhibiting a false sense of their
selves.

GETTING THE POINT

Improvisation extempore and impromptu are both acts and arts of exchange
between actors on the stage and between actors on and off the stage. Both
demand a wit and a fit: the wit of flexibility and the fit of propinquity.
Whereas, however, improvisation extempore asks us to attend to what is
achieved in the performance as a whole, improvisation impromptu picks out
the inspired or exemplary turn in a performance when, on the spot, one does
(at best) the right or winning thing.
The combined demand for wit and fit recalls Castiglione’s famed
description of sprezzatura, the particular nonchalance and wit exhibited by
a courtier that makes it seem as though all he does—with perfect fit—he
does effortlessly. Yet, as so stated, sprezzatura captures a quality of
behavior and character that is equally distinct from improvisation
extempore and impromptu: it is less a creative quality than a quality of wit
and fit. Nevertheless, it is what Castiglione then adds to his description of
the courtier that more particularly picks out the quality associated with
improvisation impromptu: namely, when the courtier displays a readiness—
prontezza—for or of ingenuity, to do what must be done in the moment and
at just the right moment.11
Like the term prontezza, the term impromptu or, from the nineteenth
century, promptitude, captures the immediacy and quickness of the
movement, gesture, and decision. This quickness was well described by the
German Romantic aphorist, Friedrich Schlegel, in terms of a social wit or a
situation when one must, as we say, “have one’s wits most about one” or
“be on one’s toes.” Schlegel aphorized this quick wit variously. He spoke of
it as capturing the suddenness of the act or its singularity, momentariness,
or fragmentariness, as when we deliver a punchline of a joke and deliver it
well. To not deliver it well usually means trying too hard, as when, Schlegel
quipped, the English try too hard to be witty in the name of mere
sociability. He further distinguished the wit of a divine or mystical flash of
imagination from one led by a Roman nose that has a prophetic instinct. In
this “flash,” he saw a quality of “improvisation” that could provoke,
release, or “explode the confined spirit.”12 Yet he knew that not all
explosions are worthy ones. Where there is too much freedom without
control, or vice versa, there is no genuine provocation of the spirit. In the
improvised style of his own aphorisms, he captured the tension between
freedom and control as first staged in the ancient mythic contests, the
agonistic tension between two sorts of human and social characteristics: the
divine or godlike and the animalistic or satyr-like. Though inspiration was
attached to the former—the high—and instinct to the latter—the low—it
wasn’t always clear, especially in his more ironic moments, which he
preferred.
What Schlegel wrote about acts of life, he also wrote about philosophical
thoughts. He wrote of enigmatic or riddled meanings as being those that are
grasped with immediacy when exactly the right word is “hit upon.” He used
the term getroffen, from treffen—fitting—to capture the immediacy of an
exclamation, such as “bull’s eye!,” which is clearly painful for the bull but
pleasurable for those who have shot the arrow straight. The English term
“hitting” does similar work. In presenting someone with an unfamiliar
concept, as Wittgenstein later repeated, it’s preferable not to hit persons
over the head until they “get it,” but to offer just enough that the concept
suddenly strikes them as making sense. In describing what it means to
master a term in a language or a rule or concept in a game, Wittgenstein
noted that one grasps the meaning of a particular application “in a flash”
[blitzartig]. He often used the dynamic term fitting—usually passend
instead of getroffen—to capture the final relation between a term and a
particular use that at first seems not to fit. For Wittgenstein, to experience
something as “fitting” is often also to engage aesthetically with the thing, as
when someone cuts a fine figure in a suit, but it is also to speak of getting a
joke without needing, either before or after, an “explanation.”13

SHOWING AND SHOWING OFF

In his Institutes of Oratory, Quintilian wrote of how after a long education,
the fruits of all our labor are meant to culminate in the ability to speak “ex
tempore.” Yet a primary reason for training this ability, he added, is to meet
conditions impromptu. There arise “innumerable occasions” when there are
“the most pressing or sudden emergencies,” when it’s absolutely necessary
to speak in the instant—in a court of law, say, when new evidence is
brought forward that one isn’t expecting. The point of the training is of
course to be prepared to do something in the instant. For it wouldn’t be
right for an advocate just to stand there dumb, waiting for “his voice and
lungs [to be] put in tune,” to beg for “a voice to save” him, or to ask for
“time for retirement and silent study till his speech is formed and
committed to memory.” No, what such emergencies demand is a wit or
know-how that entirely fits and springs from the situation, and if one
doesn’t have it, Quintilian concluded, one would be better off staying home,
avoiding public life, and seeking another profession.14
But when Quintilian then tempered his remarks on the wit of
improvisation, he introduced his remarks on fit, on a fittingness, as he
explained, that shows but does not simply display one’s ability to overcome
an obstacle impromptu. When improvising in the moment, we must not
suddenly digress into “extempore effusions.” For to so digress is to show
our lack of patience in waiting “for the thought to supply the matter.” Here
we exhibit only “a passion for display” that shows no respect for method or
training, but relies only on an inarticulate hubris that a “magnificent
inspiration” will suddenly come to one. He offered a deliberately manic and
cultish image of persons rocking their bodies to and fro, booming and
bellowing as though they had “a trumpet inside,” “gesticulating wildly,”
and wagging their heads “with all the frenzy of a lunatic.”15 He evoked this
image to differentiate the exhibitionist or hubristic tendency to display from
the more sober act of finding a fitting solution on the spot. In this view,
humility was clearly to be preferred to hubris. And improvisation
impromptu had come to mean less an act performed fast than one performed
at the right time with just the right amount of time in perfect response to an
obstacle that had occurred unexpectedly.
Much later, in his observations on the delivery of jokes,16 Freud picked
up less on good timing than on bad timing, on the tendency specifically
toward display or exhibitionism stemming, as he saw it, from a deeply
engrained narcissism that saturated not only individuals but also the society
as a whole. Wanting to fill up an uncomfortable silence, he explained, or
wanting to free ourselves from a pressure, we act out, as we dream, in
involuntary or sudden ways. Following Karl Groos’s 1899 diagnosis of the
sickness of civilization that attends our human games (Die Spiele der
Menschen), Freud analyzed the satisfaction of delivering a joke in terms of
a release of an instinct, either lustful or hostile, that is repressed given “an
obstacle” that stands in its way. He identified the obstacle as the entire
disciplining or civilizing tendency of a society that had made saying
“excuse me” (or “please pass the salt”) a cover-up for wanting to kill an
interlocutor (or a parent) who feels much more like an opponent than a
friend. Freud’s analysis was more to show that the prevalent
“psychopathological” condition of our lives was such as to create constant
obstacles, such that, even when the moment seemed “everyday,” we would
produce endless slips of the tongue, sleights of the hand, or accidental
tones, which, more than overcoming in glorious acts of the soul, we would
simply cover up as best we can. In these everyday contexts, Freud believed
that we would usually not even realize that we had made a mistake or that
there had been an accident until we were forced to the analyst’s couch, at
which point our agonizing mistake would be revealed to have been, in
another sense, quite determined.

FOR GEORGE
A perfectly complex passage from Mark Twain’s novel The Innocents
Abroad (chapter 4) finds the character, a young singer named George, being
admonished for improvising—“Come, now, George, don’t improvise. It
looks too egotistical. It will provoke remark. Just stick to ‘Coronation’ like
the others. It is a good tune—you can’t improve it any, just off-hand, in this
way.” To which George responds: “Why I’m not trying to improve it—and I
am singing like the others—just as it is in the notes.” What exactly is
George doing wrong? Is he changing the notes, embellishing or
ornamenting them, or singing simply in a way that makes him stand out in
the (choric) crowd? It turns out that George neither knows the tune nor its
notes, which, the writer quips, “was also a drawback to his performances.”
Not knowing leads George to “turn” his voice this way and that, but
occasionally “to fly off the handle and startle every body with a most
discordant cackle.” But more than this, George honestly believes that he is
singing “just as it is in the notes,” leading the writer to conclude that
George had, therefore, “no one to blame but himself when his voice caught
on the centre occasionally, and gave him the lockjaw.” In this passage, “to
improvise” means to sing the notes of a tune when you don’t know them,
hence, to follow along slightly behind, which might be done well or, as in
George’s case, not well. And it means to do something “just off-hand,”
where “off-hand” carries connotations of acting in a way unceremoniously,
that is, without due care, or, as the OED further specifies, “extempore” or
“impromptu.” Here, the two terms that I am drawing apart are equated to
capture not an impressive skill but a tendency to ride roughshod over a
practice or to act in the moment, overly confident that one knows what one
is doing every step of the way. Luckily, not all Georges in the world are like
this George.

MAKING THE CUT

Since the 1920s, there have been “cutting contests” or “jam” sessions,
which nowadays have migrated also into “rap battles.” Here, “vying
musicians” more or less improvise extempore, though the agonistic point is
to demonstrate their social and artistic ability to improvise impromptu. An
individual or group starts with a tune, rhythm, riff, or refrain that the
opponent then follows with the aim to do it better. (“Anything you can do, I
can do better.”) Much of the contest asks for one opponent to fit what the
other does, so long as he—and it is usually a he—then improves on the
performance.17 To prove his superiority, a contestant must finally cut the
other off, using his instrument or performance “as a knife.” The winning
move is a moment of improvisation impromptu with a twist. One wins by
overcoming the previous obstacle laid down by the opponent by responding
with an insurmountable obstacle. When the obstacle is insurmountable, the
loser either “crashes” in performance or simply gives up and exits the stage.
Some call the winning move or wit “the fastest shout”; rappers call it “a
flyt,” by which they also mean a “poetic insult”—which is what we see
perfectly demonstrated, and hear in abundance, in Scott Silver’s 2002 film 8
Mile and justified in the film’s parting song, “Lose Yourself”:
Look, if you had one shot, or one opportunity
To seize everything you ever wanted in one moment
Would you capture it or just let it slip?
…
The whole crowd goes so loud
He opens his mouth, but the words won’t come out
…
He better go capture this moment and hope it don’t pass him
…
You better lose yourself in the music, the moment
You own it, you better never let it go
You only get one shot, do not miss your chance to blow

The cutting contest staged in Jeremy Kagan’s 1977 film Scott Joplin
dramatizes a contest among ragtime piano players, but it is immediately
preceded by a discussion as to whether playing by ear or writing one’s notes
down is the better way to proceed in the musical marketplace. Joplin
comments that without “note music,” he will be excluded from a market
that will make him famous. This argument, right for the time when popular
sheet music was the way to spread the notes, was almost outdated even
then, for the technology of recording made Joplin more famous than any
sheet music ever could.18 John Fusco’s 1986 film Crossroads turns a
cutting-contest between guitarists into a Faustian fight to save a human
soul. Here, the musical proficiency is demonstrated by the guitarists as they
improvise on the tightrope between musical understanding and devilish
technique on two pieces: Mozart’s Turkish March and Paganini’s Fifth
Caprice. Once the contest is won and the soul restored, the music turns to
rock. In all these examples, as in the ancient contests, the musical contest of
who performs best is saturated by social and moral tests of character,
judgment, and desire.
Several descriptions of cutting contests suggest comparisons with other
and earlier modes of contest and music-making. One brings them in line
with what the Romantics described, after Goethe, as an “elective affinity,” a
utopian-styled agonistic and sometimes Faustian play between repulsion
and attraction. This imagery is still found in contemporary aesthetic theory
as well as in chemistry and medicine, where we find (in the latter) talk of
“reversible competitive antagonisms” that are produced when cells are
blocked or cut off by others. Yet another description conceives of cutting
contests as staged as though occurring between musicians or even
orchestras that accidentally bump into each other on the road and decide to
“duel” or “duke” it out, or, as in cowboy movies, to fight to the death. Here
the language often turns toward the animalistic, so that the contests can be
described also as “hunts,” “chases,” or “bucking contests.”19 Although
cutting contests may show the cooperative, congenial, or collective
aspirations of musicians—of answer and response—they also display all the
bloodiness and soul-searching of the ancient, mythic contests.

A CUTTING EDGE
Can or do cutting contests occur also in “classical music” practice?
Certainly yes, for there have been many sorts of contests where composers,
performers, or groups of musicians have upstaged and unstaged each other
in formal and informal situations. Here, again, outwitting each other by
word or musical deed has often proved as important as showing oneself the
better musician: Rameau versus Rousseau; Mozart versus Salieri. But there
is also another sort of cut in a classical contest, where we speak not of
musicians cutting each other out, but of the performance having a “cutting
edge,” a sort of antagonistic wit that brings the work that is being performed
to a perfect fit.
In this matter, I once heard the pianist Peter Serkin rhythmically
outwitting, almost cutting out, the violinist Pamela Frank, in a deliberately
“dissonant” performance of a Bach Violin Sonata. While Pamela Frank
played “the straight (wo)man,” Peter Serkin competed with her “feeds.” Yet
the point wasn’t for Serkin to win; nor was it, as “accompanist,” for him to
cover or make up for the violinist’s errors or dull performance, for she made
none and played very well. The aim, rather, was to defamiliarize a “classic,”
a well-known or standard(ized) work that we all think we know prior to the
performance. The art of the great performer is to show that, in some sense,
we do not know the work at all without this particular performance. Even a
classic, and especially a classic or standard, needs to be played in a way not
heard before, if, that is to say, we want to hear the work as though it were
being re-created or, better, newly-created in the moment of its performance.
Here, the enigmatic quality of being newly-created—improvised—cuts
across the distinction between improvisation extempore and impromptu. We
aren’t deceived into thinking that the performer is really creating the music
from this moment forward; but nor are we in awe of the performer
overcoming an obstacle unless, and this is the point, the obstacle is “the
work itself,” that is, if the work-concept misleads us into thinking that to
perform a work is to perform it just as “it is,” as though, as Twain put it, it
can’t be “improved upon.” But the agonistic point of the performance is
precisely to show that without the performance, and without each particular
performance, the “work” might be “perfect” but its perfection will remain
silent and reach no ear.
Another example of how an agonistic wit may enter an exemplary
performance of a work comes from 1969. Preserved as a film clip on
YouTube, five great musicians are warming up to perform Schubert’s Trout
Quintet: Jacqueline Du Pré, Daniel Barenboim, Pinchas Zuckerman, Itzhak
Perlman, and Zubin Mehta. We see them swapping their instruments and
beginning to play, compliant with the score but with an extreme infidelity or
unfit of pitch. Yet the slightly competitive wit of their musicianship wins
the moment. They give us a perfect sense of what is to come, the combined
wit and fit of a perfect performance of a work. This is not an example of
improvisation extempore; it is closer to improvisation impromptu although
it’s not exactly that either. It’s more an impromptu preparation for a
performance for which they are completely prepared. In this in-between
conceptual space, it makes sense to see these musicians as having done
something “improvised” behind the scenes that reduces the tension and
makes them laugh, a laughter that then becomes a smile carried over in Du
Pré’s bodily comportment into the public performance, for which, as Mehta
reminds them as they are about to go on, “there’s a serious public waiting
outside!”20

WITNESSING A PUBLIC ACT

Improvisation impromptu situates persons in unforeseen circumstances and
confronts them with unexpected obstacles. It asks what one does “in the
moment,” and the question has normative weight. By stressing the element
of mishap, where there is a sudden deficiency or lack, the concept asks for a
quick recovery. One might say that the concept is all about not screwing or
covering up in a situation of pressure, or of not running off the stage when
we have stage fright. Yet these thoughts don’t by themselves capture what I
think lies at the core of the agonistic concept: namely, its publicity. Of
course public actions or matters of exhibition or display are tied to inner
obstacles or unconscious wars that persons fight with themselves, but
actions of improvisation impromptu are typically tied to what is also
witnessed by others. At times when we do witness persons overcoming
their inner fear, we tend to respond with relief, with a “phew!” When,
however, we go to witness an act of improvisation impromptu, we want
something more. As the eighteenth century distinction has it: we want and
need, as witnesses to the act, not merely the phew but also the awe.21
Quintilian saw public speaking as carrying an ekphrastic significance and
responsibility, especially in a court of law, to render compelling or
persuasive something visible to an audience in a performance, “before their
very eyes,” or, more accurately, “before their mind’s eye,” so that, with
Derrida, the “mind’s eye” or imagination would be set into motion, but
where this means less an aesthetic free-play than a freeing-up or unbinding
of our thought and emotion.22 Derrida construed the publicity by addressing
again the extreme difficulty or almost “impossibility” of “improvisation.”
Where “there is improvisation,” he said, “I am not able to see myself. I am
blind to myself. And it’s what I will see, no, I won’t see it. It’s for others to
see.”
Often, as we have seen, improvisation impromptu means “going for
broke”—showing that one is prepared to go somewhere or take a way out
for which others are not prepared. Sometimes it means creating an obstacle
in return that one’s opponent cannot surmount. But, from the perspective of
reception, it is about visibly or audibly overcoming an obstacle, to show
“the victory” as evident to all. This way, it thrills, causing an audience to
gasp, to applaud spontaneously, to proclaim the victor without doubt.
Etymologically, “to surprise” is to “take hold of” or “affect” somebody else
by something unexpected. When an audience is unexpectedly well taken, it
affirms the act or performance. When ill taken, it might appreciate many
other things but not “that certain thing.”
When improvisation impromptu goes well, the performer might well say
“I couldn’t have done other than improvise, but what I did turned out to be
exactly the right thing to do.” Here, there is a feeling both of contingency
and necessity felt by both the performer and the audience. When the
performer says, “This is what I had to do given the situation in which I
found myself,” the words evidence an alertness: that the performer was
ready to act in response to anything that might happen, even though the
performer couldn’t have thought out the solution in advance because she or
he didn’t know the obstacle in advance. The not-knowing is what Derrida
meant by the blindness. In improvising impromptu, unlike in improvising
extempore, the not-knowing is threefold: we do not know that we will have
to improvise at all, or how we will improvise when we do have to
improvise, and we do not know how our improvising will turn out,
although, if well-trained, we might well feel secure that we will indeed
know how to employ our wit to make the right fit. All this not-knowing is
quite different from the ignorant George, the dilettante who, improvising
“off the cuff,” offers, as we also say, only a band-aid to cover the wound.
When one acts badly like this, one might well meet with a moral stare from
the audience suggesting that one’s act was dishonest, deceitful, even artless
—which it was. Here, we may say, one is literally caught out in the act.

DOING IT THE WRONG WAY

We come now to another example, not of impromptu performance but of
impromptu judgment. It shows not performers acting badly as much as the
audience or responders who fail to get the point of the performance. To an
extent, this example mirrors what goes on in the Apollo Theater. When
amateurs don’t perform as others think they should, they are “executed,”
only now they actually lose their lives. In this example, the execution shows
no wit, no fit, and no etiquette as befits the Apollo Theater. It shows, rather,
the impotence and rage of an impromptu or ill-considered response of
“judges” to something they witness on the stage. It has little to be said in its
favor.
A New York Times editorial of February 7, 2010, reported six cases from
the Philippines of karaoke performers who were killed for singing Frank
Sinatra’s song “My Way.” The matter was so severe that singing the song
was banned. Norimitsu Onishi, the reporter, asked if there was something
sinister in the song, something offensively associated with the West, or
something about the song’s renown that caused the audience to react as it
did. The last explanation was preferred. Because the song was so familiar
and popular among those who frequented the karaoke club, only the
performance was judged, not the song itself. Indeed, this fits the very idea
of karaoke: that anyone, whatever their talent or training, is both free to and
meant to improvise on a well-known song in their own way, not heard
before. What, then, accounts for the killing? A deflated explanation
suggests that the performers were killed simply for singing “out of tune”; a
more complex explanation says that they were somehow singing “the
wrong notes,” that how they sang the song was “the wrong way” to sing it.
Onishi read this latter explanation, agonistically, as a mode of
“triumphalism.”
Consider the matter this way. I go to a karaoke club to hear how others
sing a familiar song their way, yet I believe that my way of singing the song
is better, maybe even the best or the only way. So convinced am I of my
own way that I execute those who sing the song in a different way. In this
way, I transgress the etiquette of the club: to each her own way. The
transgression sometimes results in real physical violence. In this case, it is
the audience that acts badly, even belligerently, and not the performer, but
significantly because the audience is constituted by overly-competitive
performers. But killing a competing performer on the spot is not how one
proves or shows that one’s own way to sing “I did it my way” is the better
way. It would be much better to take one’s competitor on with a song.

IN AND OUT OF THE GROOVE

The account that best captures the positive moral, social, and existential
connotations of improvisation impromptu is the one that Gilbert Ryle
offered in his article of 1976.23 Though he titled his piece “Improvisation,”
he started not with this term but with the associated term, “innovation,” to
remind his readers of the admiration and envy that most of us feel toward
those who are innovative and who, by being innovative, produce innovative
products. He offered a list of qualitative terms associated with character,
temperament, and personality—“imaginative, inventive, enterprising,
inquisitive, ingenious, witty, cunning, observant, responsive, alert or
creative”—and then a list of productive terms associated with the ability to
“compose, design, experiment, initiate, select, adapt, improvise, undertake,
contrive, explore, parry, or speculate.” To include the term improvise in the
second list, as only a passing mention, was a little odd given that
“improvisation” was meant to be the overall concept of his enquiry. But
perhaps it was his way of alerting his readers to the possibility that, in
addition to the broader concept, there is a narrower concept: when, in my
terms, we improvise impromptu. Ryle did not make explicit the distinction
between the narrower and broader concept, but went on instead to address
improvisation mostly as a mode of innovation and ingenuity so that he
could capture the difference he believed it makes in human life if we cross a
river, climb a ladder, or pursue a philosophical train of thought only
carefully, step-by-step, or by means also of one or more larger, inspired
leaps—impromptu. Of what value, he wanted to know, is the ability to think
and to act with a certain blindness, without having thought everything out in
advance? In part he showed the value by writing his essay about
improvisation as though he had improvised it “off the cuff”—yet he wrote it
not out of “mere sociability,” as Schlegel put it, but with a typically British
“cuttingness” of wit drawn on the basis of his considerable experience of
doing philosophy in his “ordinary language” sort of way. Though he
maintained a cheerfulness of description, behind the scenes was a harsh
criticism of those to whom these cheerful terms did not apply.
Having made two lists, of characteristics and abilities, Ryle now listed
the sort of exemplary persons who are admired for being able to move
beyond habits without reaching the extremes of eccentricity or craziness.
He named the “geniuses,” “pathfinders,” “jaywalkers,” those of high wit
and swift repartee, and those whose intelligence enables them “to seize new
opportunities and to face new hazards.” To illustrate these types, he alluded
to a verse, often quoted in discussions of freedom and determinism, and
sometimes attributed to Maurice E. Hare: that these exemplary persons are
not trams, whose lifelines are carved out on the street in advance; they are
rather busses for whom their life passages are (more) open. Here is one
version of the verse:
There was a young man who said “Damn!
I perceive with regret that I am
But a creature that moves
In predestinate grooves
I’m not even a bus, I’m a tram.”

Having started out on the conceptual path of “innovation,” Ryle ended up in

the company of persons whom, as he wrote, “every hour of the waking
day,” or “every day of the week” engage perhaps “familiar and unaugust
sorts of improvisation.” Following Nietzsche, it sounds like an exhausting
way to live life! Yet Ryle’s point was only to remind us that in doing,
thinking, and writing, we “essay” (from essai) solely because we are (or are
meant to be) thinking beings. Those who think by following the “groove,”
in contrast to those who “groove” while thinking, are those who believe that
we act, think and write solely from a pre-packaged mechanism or pattern.
Explicitly recalling Wittgenstein and Chomsky, Ryle offered an analogy to
the mechanism or technology of music. We shouldn’t think of ourselves, he
argued, as outputting or reproducing an internal and constantly-spinning
gramophone record. For what the assumption of such a mental
“mechanicalness” prohibits is a “freshness,” “Ad-Hockery,” or willingness
to turn or move in the moment in unexpected ways. To allow ourselves to
improvise is to open ourselves up to the “cleverness” of “the caricaturist or
conversationalist” or the “adroitness,” as he put it, of a “dialectical” thinker
or “fencer.”
Ryle noted that when persons act or think on their feet, we tend to ask
them not what they have done but “how on earth” they got from A to B.
And typically their answer is that they don’t know, that the movement or
thought just came to them, that it was unrehearsed, “on-the-spur-of-the-
moment.” But how, he then asked, do we assess or judge their actions?
Should we hold them responsible given that what they did was not
“intended” in the sense of premeditated, but nor again was it merely
accidental? Their acts, rather, were the outcome of a wit, a style, a certain
“presence of mind.” But how does one lay down the criteria for judging all
this? Ryle did not pursue this intriguing question of judgment; he jumped
instead to what it means to move by unpredictable leaps and bounds. Here,
he might have well drawn on Aesop’s fable of the competing tortoise and
hare, but he didn’t do this either because he was finally most concerned
with the impromptu characteristic of a sort of “detective” work, where, with
all the evidence before one and with no new evidence forthcoming, one
cannot at first see the solution and then, suddenly, one sees it—in the
moment. But from this, he didn’t then further articulate his idea of
improvisation, as I have, as an act of improvising (impromptu); he saw it
only as evidence of a quality or characteristic that persons exhibit when
they have the wit, ingenuity, nerves, or luck enough to allow the unexpected
to happen to enter into what they do or think—everyday.

CHALLENGING COMPLIANCE
When I first read Ryle’s essay a few years ago, I was writing about Nelson
Goodman’s thesis of perfect compliance, the strict condition that preserves
the identity of a musical work through its many performances. Perfect
compliance along the tram tracks is required, Goodman had argued, to
prevent an identification of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony with Three Blind
Mice, an identification that follows, logically, if we allow one, two, three …
non-compliant elements or errors to enter into a performance of a work.24
Having once been very absorbed by why, in discussing the ontological
status of musical works, Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is most usually
selected by philosophers as the paradigmatic example, I was now asking
why Goodman had selected Three Blind Mice as where we might end up if
we take the wrong bus. It turned out that there were many fascinating
reasons, including one suggested by Ryle. When, in an academic “epidemic
of initialization,” as he put it, we abbreviate phrases—as when Three Blind
Mice becomes TBM—we eventually become blinded to what the words
once meant—all the ordinary words that Ryle had put into his lists. But had
Goodman, I then asked, really been taken in by this epidemic? Not as much
as he has been accused of by those who have rejected his perfect
compliance. In specifying so exact or strict a condition, Goodman had
insisted that he was concerned only to preserve the identity of the work: all
that made the work aesthetic, innovative, qualitatively exciting in its
performance was another matter, lying beyond questions of identity.
Whereas, with the later Wittgenstein, Ryle tried to capture the qualitative
content of improvisation by appealing to extraordinary examples of
ordinary things, Goodman, with the early Wittgenstein of the Tractatus, put
the aesthetic matter outside the scope of what strictly could be accounted
for by logical means. But in both cases, the result was the same that singing
it, as George does, just as the notes say need not exclude improvisation as a
quality of performance.

BROKEN STRINGS
I conclude this essay with a single example that pulls all the threads that I
have introduced together into an uneasy image of epidemic blindness or
prejudice that is at once both musical and social. Through a son’s act of
improvising impromptu, a blindness is revealed to a father who cannot see.
The son’s act is necessitated by a broken string; the father’s blindness is
signified by a broken arm. The father is so obedient to the classical work-
concept that he cannot see a space for a way of making music differently,
his music or anyone else’s. He is especially blinded to the improvisational
quality of swinging with one’s notes. The story doesn’t, however, ask us to
take sides with one sort of music against another, but nor does it say that we
should not take sides. It rather shows us the danger of taking sides for the
wrong reasons. This is not a new point, but, as the example shows, it
resurfaces as urgent whenever conceptual strings are pulled to the wrong
extremes. Consistent with the aim of critique—and with the concept of
improvisation impromptu placed at its core—the example aims to break the
thickest string of all: unwarranted prejudice.
Broken Strings is the title of a Harlem Renaissance film, directed by
Bernard B. Ray and starring Clarence Muse, an actor suitably named given
the film’s subject matter.25 (There is “suitable” naming throughout the
film.) It opens with the father, Arthur Williams, performing a piece of
standard virtuoso violin music before an all-black audience in a concert
hall. The audience is mostly enthralled, though the camera focuses twice on
a person who sleeps. A hint is given that the classical work-music Williams
is performing, or how he is performing, is not to the liking of all (black
people). The concert ends with Williams telling the audience of the special
“kinship” he feels with “my folks,” although usually he plays for “the
[white] people of the world.” The tension is deepened when, later, his
manager tells an enthusiastic fan from the local church that Williams does
not play for free even for “his folk,” and that his fee remains at a thousand
dollars. Williams’s son, Johnny, is standing nearby and asks to carry his
father’s violin home while his father goes off with his manager. While
driving the father away in a car, the manager becomes distracted. There is a
crash leaving the father with a broken arm and hand.
Weeks later, the cast is removed, but the nerve damage remains. Williams
is “reduced” to teaching. One pupil is talentless and is thrown out. The
second, Dickey Morley, is disciplined but overly compliant. The third is his
young son, Johnny, who is undisciplined but entirely talented. The father is
frustrated: his “great soul” no longer has an outlet. So he puts his hope in
his son. However, the outlet Johnny desires is one that demands neither
“repose” nor “control,” but demands that one “play” as a bird flies, “this
way and that, up and down … ringing and swinging through the air.” He
wants to play “just music” (as though there were something that was “just
music”), but illustrates his desire by “swinging” on an already given work:
Dvořák’s “Humoresque.” His father thinks only of the work and not the
swing, and accuses his son of “desecrating a classic,” and more, of
“committing a crime against music.”
A parallel drama involves Williams’s daughter, suitably named Gracie,
who loves one man but not another, leading the unloved to enter into a
contest with the beloved. The contest is lost by the unloved because he
cheats. Being a sore loser, he acts badly, leaving his father, a Mr. Stilton, the
owner (suitably) of a beauty products store, having to put things right.26
With Gracie jobless and her father bitter, the family falls into poverty.
Johnny takes matters into his own hands and goes busking with his
accompanist Mary in the swing clubs. He will use the money earned to feed
his family and to pay for an operation that might save his father’s musical
hand. He receives enthusiastic applause in the “Mellow Café,” where his
“humoresque” keeps everyone on their toes (dancing), including a very tall,
thin, and talented banjo player named Stringbean Johnson. The café is a
high-class establishment with standards that Johnny meets, until his father
arrives to haul him off the stage. His father punishes him, forcing him to
play scales for “twenty hours if need be” until “the spirit of jazz” is “driven
out of him.” Gracie arrives home, Johnny collapses, and the father is
scolded. Gracie declares: “Johnny did all this for you!”
The drama’s moment of recognition but uneasy reconciliation comes
when Mr. Stilton offers a cash prize for an amateur radio contest, for those
who never before have had “the opportunity to express themselves.” The
contest is introduced with a demonstration at the piano, to urge that,
whatever music is performed, it should be true to the expression of its
mood. “There is beauty in all music,” we are told: music “is the
international language,” after which the introducer demonstrates how
different musics express joy. But apparently music is not a “universal”
language for everyone to enjoy equally. Reiterating the idea of a special
kinship or affinity, he notes that “We [of the black race] are considered one
of the most musical people on earth, because we have suffered.” His
statements are for us, but immediately for Arthur Williams, who is
nervously perched in the front row of the live radio audience wondering
how his son will perform the classical “mazurka” he has promised his father
he will play.
The contest begins with three little muses—the Stevens Sisters—singing
and tapping popular fox trots, and then Stringbean Johnson performing on
his banjo a piece that he says he first heard Arthur Williams play—only
now it is “jazzed” up. Third to go is Dickey Morley, who plays
(appropriately) a tarantella, for when, again backstage, he takes a knife and
cuts the strings of Johnny’s violin almost to a breaking point. When Johnny,
going last, begins to play his mazurka, he begins on the G string. It snaps
and he looks forlorn. The audience gasps then laughs, which inspires him to
go on—until the D string snaps. With two strings left, he can no longer play
the piece compliantly, and starts to swing. Soon enough the backup
orchestra and everyone else join in, showing that he is the obvious winner.
His father applauds with vigor enough to bring the nerves in his hand back
to life. Still fearful of his father, the son apologizes: it was “the only honest
way out.” Dickey apologizes to Johnny for having cheated. And Williams
declares that although his “heart still belongs to the Masters”—(which
Masters?)—it is swing that has mended his strings. “Look,” he says, taking
back his violin from his son, “what swing has done for me!”
But has Williams, or the film, accepted “swing” as a legitimate music?
Yes, though not at the expense of the music “of the Masters.” The point is
not to decide between musics, but between persons who are stuck in their
ways—trammed up—and persons who are open to “swinging” on whatever
bus they take, for, as one song goes, nothing means “a thing if it ain’t got
that swing.”
This rather obvious point assumes more subtlety only when we note that
when confronted with broken strings, Johnny does two things at once: he
improvises impromptu and he begins to swing or improvise extempore on
the melody of the mazurka. But for which is he rewarded or more
rewarded? Would he have won had Dickey not cut his strings: would he
have played his mazurka well? Or would he have performed without
inspiration, preferring to play another sort of music? The film does not
answer these questions. Instead, it shows us the awe of an audience who
sees Johnny turning an obstacle into an advantage. To be sure, the audience
moves to the swing, but, in the end, it is his act of improvisation impromptu
that wins him the contest: that he could accommodate an obstacle or injury
in a way that his father had not been able to do.
This conclusion has precedents, one of the first being in Pindar’s twelfth
Pythian Ode where words sung in the Dorian mode told of a contest in
which, when the mouthpiece of Midas of Akragas’s pipe broke off, he
played on. And then it is said that his act “so surprised the audience,” that
“he was declared the winner.” But what he played or how he played was not
described. He seems to have been rewarded for his ability to improvise a
solution impromptu, for this said something about him as a “musical”—
muse-inspired person—beyond his being merely a performing musician.
There are many more stories of this sort, perhaps the best known but also
the most double-edged regarding the broken strings of Paganini’s violin.
Paganini cut his own strings to show his divine hand and for the latter, he
was praised as being godlike. But staging the event repeatedly to impress
his audience, he renders the apparent obstacle no real obstacle at all. For the
deception, he was compared to the devil.
In the end, broken strings, arms, minds, and bodies have no value in
themselves. They only provide opportunities to act or to keep on acting, or
to stop acting. In the musical contests, new and old, it isn’t only the music
played that has counted but also, and sometimes more, what has been
shown about the performers or actors as musicians, artists, and thinkers. Put
like this, however, a conceptual critique of improvisation that looks at
contests in art and life to reveal what is best about ourselves risks a sort of
blind utopianism not much better than what Ryle described as an epidemic
of academic initialization. If improvisation shows us at our best, it also
shows us at our worst. If, therefore, I have urged a distinction between
improvisation impromptu and improvisation extempore in order to open up
a conceptual and musical space to let more music and more persons into the
arena, I conclude on a different note: with a recommendation that we take
from my argument less the distinction than the complex descriptions of how
the terms, improvisation impromptu and improvisation extempore, have
done their work, and continue to do their work, apart and together, in
situations that only ever seem ordinary but never really are.

NOTES
1. Cf. Edward Ferrero, The Art of Dancing (New York: Ferrero, 1859), 27.
2. Richard Carlin, ed., Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing: The Apollo Theater and American
Entertainment (Washington DC: Smithsonian Books, 2010).
3. I have treated the plight of musicians and the musical art in several recent companion essays, for
example, in my manuscript, “ ‘All Art Constantly Aspires to the Condition of Music,’ Except
the Art of Music.” The present essay is written for George Lewis, whose own work on
improvisation, thought and performed, I admire greatly. Thanks also to the many friends and
colleagues who have commented on this essay: most especially to Bernard Gendron, Felix
Koch, Marlies de Munck, Erum Naqvi, and Beau Shaw.
4. Pausanias, Description of Greece, tr. W.H.S. Jones (Cambridge MA.: Harvard University Press,
1934): 10.30.8.
5. I have outlined the terms of this discourse in my The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An
Essay in the Philosophy of Music (New York: Oxford University Press, [1992] 2007), esp.
chapter 8.
6. This notion of critique is drawn most explicitly from the work of Theodor W. Adorno, whose
ideas of improvisation, risk, and experimentalism I have treated in “Explosive Experiments and
the Fragility of the Experimental,” in Elective Affinities: Musical Essays on the History of
Aesthetic Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 108–135.
7. Cf. Gary Peters, The Philosophy of Improvisation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009),
168.
8. Ralph Waldo Emerson (1878): “Of no use are [those] who study to do exactly as was done
before, who can never understand that today is a new day. … We want [persons] of original
perception and original action, who can open their eyes wider than to a nationality …; [persons]
of elastic, [persons] of moral mind, who can live in the moment and take a step forward.”
Fortune of the Republic (Boston: Houghton, Osgood and Co., 1879), 35.
9. I am drawing in this section from sections 22, 303, and 295 of Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay
Science: With a Prelude in German Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs, ed. Bernard Williams
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
10. Bernard Williams, Moral Luck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 20–39.
11. Baldassare Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, ed. Daniel Javitch (New York: Norton, 2002),
32.
12. Cf. Friedrich Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, tr. Peter Firchow (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1991), esp. 11, 24.
 13. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology, and Religious
Belief, ed. Cyril Barrett (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).
14. Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, tr. Harold Edgeworth Butler (Cambridge MA: Harvard
University Press, 1920), 10.7.1. See also Chris Holcomb, “ ‘The Crown of All Our Study’:
Improvisation in Quintilian’sInstitutio Oratoria.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 31, no. 3 (Summer
2001): 53–72.
15. Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, 2.11.4 and 2.12.9.
16. Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, ed. James Strachey (New York:
Norton, 1960), 119–123.
17. Cf. Philip Alperson, “Musical Improvisation,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 68, no. 3
(Summer 2010): 273–299.
18. In the present essay, I do not treat, for reasons of space, the enormous impact of recording
technology on concepts of improvisation, other than indirectly later in the essay, when a
distinction is drawn between an open and a mechanical mind.
19. See Jurgen E. Grandt, Kinds of Blue: The Jazz Aesthetic in African American Narrative
(Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2005), chapter 4.
20. In his Philosophy of the Performing Arts (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), chapter 8, David
Davies draws the concept of improvisation into contact with that of a rehearsal. The discussion
is focused on the work of preparation or bringing constraints to a performance of any type of
music. To this discussion, one may add the thought that all the revision and decision making that
goes on behind the scenes is precisely that which is not shown as such in the public
performance, but which is turned into a demonstration of “perfect” fit and wit.
21. Deborah Brown, “What Part of ‘Know’ Don’t You Understand?” The Monist 88, no. 1 (January
2005): 11–35.
22. Cf. my related account of ekphrasis in “How to Do More with Words: Two Views of (Musical)
Ekphrasis,” British Journal of Aesthetics 50, no. 4 (October 2010): 389–410.
23. Gilbert Ryle, “Improvisation,” Mind 85, no. 337 (January 1976): 69–83.
24. Lydia Goehr, “Three Blind Mice: Goodman, McLuhan, and Adorno on the Art of Music and
Listening in the Age of Global Transmission,” New German Critique 35, no. 2 (Summer 2008):
1–31.
25. Krin Gabbard persuasively connects this work to the 1927 film, The Jazz Singer. See Krin
Gabbard, Jammin’ at the Margins: Jazz and the American Cinema (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1996), 108–109. But one might also connect it to Krenek’s opera Jonny spielt
auf, also of 1927.
26. In this double drama, over music and love, the film interestingly mirrors the complex agonisms
of Richard Wagner’s Die Meistersinger, agonisms that I have explored in “—wie ihn uns
Meister Dürer gemalt!”: Contest, Myth, and Prophecy in Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von
Nürnberg,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 60, no. 1 (2011): 51–118.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Alperson, Philip. “Musical Improvisation.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 68, no. 3
(Summer 2010): 273–299.
Brown, Deborah. “What Part of ‘Know’ Don’t You Understand?” The Monist 88, no. 1 (January
2005): 11–35.
Carlin, Richard, ed. Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing: The Apollo Theater and American
Entertainment. Washington DC: Smithsonian Books, 2010.
Castiglione, Baldassare. The Book of the Courtier. Edited by Daniel Javitch. New York: Norton,
2002.
Davies, David. Philosophy of the Performing Arts. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Fortune of the Republic. Boston: Houghton, Osgood and Co., 1879.
Ferrero, Edward. The Art of Dancing. New York: Ferrero, 1859.
Freud, Sigmund. Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. Edited by James Strachey. New York:
Norton, 1960.
Gabbard, Krin. Jammin’ at the Margins: Jazz and the American Cinema. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1996.
Goehr, Lydia. “‘All Art Constantly Aspires to the Condition of Music,’ Except the Art of Music.”
Unpublished manuscript.
Goehr, Lydia. Elective Affinities: Musical Essays on the History of Aesthetic Theory. New York:
Columbia University Press, 2008.
Goehr, Lydia. “How to Do More with Words: Two Views of (Musical) Ekphrasis.” British Journal of
Aesthetics 50, no. 4 (October 2010): 389–410.
Goehr, Lydia. The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music. New
York: Oxford University Press, 2007. Originally published in 1992.
Goehr, Lydia. “Three Blind Mice: Goodman, McLuhan, and Adorno on the Art of Music and
Listening in the Age of Global Transmission.” New German Critique 35, no. 2 (Summer 2008): 1–
31.
Goehr, Lydia. “—wie ihn uns Meister Dürer gemalt!”: Contest, Myth, and Prophecy in Wagner’s Die
Meistersinger von Nürnberg.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 60, no. 1 (2011):
51–118.
Grandt, Jurgen E. Kinds of Blue: The Jazz Aesthetic in African American Narrative. Columbus: Ohio
State University Press, 2005.
Holcomb, Chris. “ ‘The Crown of all Our Study’: Improvisation in Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria.”
Rhetoric Society Quarterly 31, no. 3 (Summer 2001): 53–72.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science: With a Prelude in German Rhymes and an Appendix of
Songs. Edited by Bernard Williams. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
Pausanias. Description of Greece. Translated by W.H.S. Jones. Cambridge MA: Harvard University
Press, 1934.
Peters, Gary. The Philosophy of Improvisation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009.
Quintilian. Institutio Oratoria. Translated by Harold Edgeworth Butler. Cambridge MA: Harvard
University Press, 1920.
Ryle, Gilbert. “Improvisation.” Mind 85, no. 337 (January 1976): 69–83.
Schlegel, Friedrich. Philosophical Fragments. Translated by Peter Firchow. Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1991.
Williams, Bernard. Moral Luck. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology, and Religious Belief.
Edited by Cyril Barrett. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.
 CHAPTER 27
ENSEMBLE IMPROVISATION, COLLECTIVE
INTENTION, AND GROUP ATTENTION

GARRY L. HAGBERG

EVERY performer knows, I think, that there is a difference of a fundamental

kind between performing solo and performing in an ensemble. Similarly,
performers in ensembles who have performed both non-improvisational and
improvisational music know there is a fundamental difference in kind there
as well. On the level of embodied action, these differences are fairly
evident. But the articulation of them—that is, articulation with the kind of
detail sufficient to both the nuances and the depth of the actual
phenomenology in question—is a more difficult matter, and interestingly
so.
One of the first models for ensemble performance that presents itself is
that of the social contract: the collective is no more than a convergence of
individuals who, as individuals first, choose one at a time to join a group
that offers benefits (in our case musical) that expand what the individual
could create alone, in exchange for a corresponding reduction in individual
or autonomous freedom. The violist in a string quartet agrees to play under
—in terms of both pitch and authority—the first violinist, and that violist
(like the other players) has by virtue of the musical-social contract an
obligation to play with (in tempo, articulation, phrasing, timbre, line
shaping, and overall interpretation) the collective will of the other players.
What is of central interest here for present considerations is that, in the
ensemble variant of the social contract model, the individual, as individual
(in political and ontological terms), is present and intact from start to finish.
If the collective authority, or Hobbes’s Leviathan, turns and starts working
against the individual’s interests, the individual—always present as one
atom in a collective organization—counters that turn by resisting, rebelling,
or removing. And on this model, the entire content of the collective is
simply the sum of the individuals combined. And there—exactly there—
lies the rub.
A conception of the human self rests beneath the social contract model,
and it is one we both easily presume and rarely articulate. That conception
shapes and restricts, to a far greater extent than commonly realized, our
thinking about the nature of ensemble performance. The social contract
model, with an individualistic picture of human selfhood underwriting it,
does some justice—perhaps a good deal of justice—to non-improvised
ensemble performance. Each player plays her part, each player practices
individually and then brings the pre-cognized part to the larger whole, and
the end result is the sum of those parts. I know that gifted ensemble players
will say that magical things can happen in such ensembles—moments of
musical grace that seem to transcend individuality, and I certainly would
not dispute that. But the point remains that the end sonic result is both (1)
additive in nature and (2) the predetermined end toward which the pre-
cognized means have been aiming. The individual—or actually a
philosophical picture of the individual that some philosophers call the
Cartesian self, that is, a hermetically sealed consciousness transparent unto
itself that is invariably present in experience and that is only contingently
related to any external thing—remains undisturbed on this understanding of
ensemble participation. Thus, the picture of selfhood generates the social
contract model, which in turn generates the picture of ensemble
participation that we then—closing the circle—use as evidence for the
accuracy of the picture of the self that started the whole thing in the first
place. Stated most directly, the submerged conceptual model determines
how we see organized human action in ensemble performance.
All this would generate a way of seeing and then of describing the
fundamental difference between solo and ensemble performance: the
soloist, as individual, is present and alone; the section player is also present
as individual, but contained within a larger collective. Simple—but when
applied to the difference between non-improvisational and improvisational
ensemble performance, simple and—instructively—wrong.
Here’s why, I believe: intention, on the Cartesian model of selfhood,
would without exception be mentally private to the intender. There could be
no such thing as an intention that transcended, or was external to, any given
single individual. Thus the intentional content of, say, the Tokyo String
quartet playing Bartok’s Fourth Quartet would be the exact sum of—and,
with a metaphysical guarantee, no more than—each of the four players
added together, where that intentional content includes both the intentions
as enacted within the performance and the intentions prior to it—in
individual and ensemble practice—that shape what happens. Here of course
we would have what we might call meta-intentions as well, that is,
intentions in the performance to reenact sonically pre-performance
intentions as set down in rehearsal. Cecil Taylor’s great improvising quartet
—one should probably say fiercely and relentlessly improvising—of the
early 1970s, would then, given the conceptual limits on intention and the
picture of selfhood beneath them, be seen as a kind of performance that
telescopes pre-performance intentions into performance-only ones (where
thus no meta-intentions of the kind just mentioned are possible). Each
member of the quartet, as socially contracted individuals, intends to play
what he plays in the moment, and the sum total of intentional content is, in
principle, like that of the Tokyo Quartet’s performance—with the difference
of telescoping time into the moment. This is often described as the
collapsing of the roles of the composer and the performer into one. And in
that very description, once one is prepared to look for it, one can see fairly
plainly the preservation of autonomous individuality and its corresponding
privacy of intention, be it prior to or in the performance. But what I think is
actually taking place within an improvising ensemble of the kind developed
in Taylor’s, or John Coltrane’s later groups (as in his Ascension session, for
example),1 is considerably more interesting than the foregoing line of
thought would allow us to see or say.
A number of recent philosophers have developed a conception of
collective intention (which, admittedly, given Cartesian presuppositions,
sounds like an oxymoron).2 This new conception originates in the insight
that there is something essential to the phenomenology of collective action
that remains after we subtract the sum total of individual intentions from the
final result. That is something we hear in Taylor, Coltrane, and many others;
it is something we can, with a little luck and the right preparation,
experience in our own performances within improvising ensembles; and it
is the difference between non-improvisational and improvisational
ensemble work that is so easily misdescribed when using only our standard
stock of heretofore available terms. But why should we think, against the
settled philosophical intuitions that intentions require minds, and only
individuals—not collectives or ensembles—have minds, that nevertheless
room for collective intentional work must be kept open? Or if our standard
terminology would already close that room, how then do we reopen it to
describe accurately the work of a creative ensemble and not only the
creative work of the individuals in it?
Against additive accounts of group intention, John Searle3 has offered a
striking contrast. In Case 1, a group of individuals are seated near each
other in a park. Sudden dark clouds move in and a heavy rain suddenly
starts falling. They all leap up and run under nearby shelter. Case 2: A
group of actors in a play are in the same situation and, as part of the
rehearsed play, leap up together and run for shelter. Outwardly, the actions
look pretty much the same. But Searle observes that the collective intention
in Case 2 is different in kind from the collection of individual intentions in
Case 1, and—here’s the important point for us—no number (hence the
difference in kind or quality, not quantity) of “I intend to X” pieces can add
up to a single “We intend to X.” Even with a common set of shared beliefs
(e.g., It is starting to rain; I don’t want to get soaked; I can run over there
and get shelter; etc.) and subsequent common actions, and even with what
appears outwardly to be a group moving, we still do not have a group
moving. Thus, mutatis mutandis, we will never capture the true character of
the “we-intention” exemplified with such interactive creativity in the
ensemble performances of Taylor, late Coltrane, or Ornette Coleman’s
groups of the 1960s and 1970s. And as Searle also sees, the content of the
individual intentions that one forms and upon which one acts within the
context of a “we-intend” structure will themselves be different from any
autonomous intention formed as an individual, or, for us, as a soloist. (Just
think of the difference in frame of mind between a soloist playing an
unaccompanied solo recital and what we call the soloist performing a
concerto.) Collective intentions, Searle sees, necessarily include a sense
(here we return to some of the telling nuances of the phenomenology) of
believing, acting, and willing—and for us, performing—together. I would
add that collective intentions, as a distinct kind, are necessarily relationally
constituted: to sound rather like William James for a moment, the relations
between the sets of beliefs, desires, actions, aspirations, interactions,
thoughts, second thoughts, and all the rest are as important as those mental
events themselves.4 And if that is true, then we are now getting closer to
capturing the distinct something that is present in improvisational ensemble
work that is not capturable on individual-based models and that is at the
heart of the difference between improvisational and non-improvisational
ensemble performance. Searle suggests that the human ability to conceive
and enact “we-intentions” is of itself (1) biologically basic of us as humans,
and it is (2) unto itself logically primitive, that is, this ability does not break
down into still more fundamental constituent parts. No less than the social
fabric of reality, for Searle, is constituted by collective intentionality. If this
is true, I want to add that here then is another specific way in which group
jazz improvisation is—if a bit surprisingly—a mimetic art form5: it holds a
mirror up to what Searle identifies as the complexly interwoven sets of
collective intentions that make society real over and above mere arbitrary
convention. But as I have argued elsewhere, group jazz improvisation is
more than mimetic: it enacts within its own musical world what it reflects
as mirror of society. To capture this, we turn to another major contributor to
the collective intention issue, Michael Bratman.6
Like Searle, Bratman sees that the summative picture of organized and
cohesive collective action can only rise to a weak sense of any shared
endeavor: here, as a new Case 1, let’s say you and I each have a ten-pound
note (and thus in the weak sense share the property of having ten-pound
notes).7 As new Case 2, you and I go together with one ten-pound note and
share it to pay for afternoon coffee together. Some players—often beginners
—in improvisational ensembles, who do not yet have the requisite
developed concepts and skills of ensemble interaction, share in the
performance in the weak sense. Like adding sums of autonomous
intentions, we will never, I want to suggest, get to a full understanding of
the great achievements of group improvisation from this. (Incidentally, the
old joke about the importance of keeping romance alive in a marriage plays
on a conflation of these weak and strong senses: The husband says, “I know
it’s important to keep romance alive, so we go out two nights every week. I
go on Monday and Wednesday, and my wife goes on Tuesday and
Thursday.”) As a teacher of jazz ensembles, I myself have seen wonderful
moments in the lives of young players when it suddenly dawns on them that
there is much more going on than the weak sense of sharing in creative
group interaction—it is as though a new world of possibility opens by
glimpsing the strong sense.
 So, what more precisely is the strong sense; how do we fully describe it?
Bratman rightly believes that the action we are after is to be found in the
interrelations between the collectively inflected intentions of the individuals
as they work together. And the act of working together is not a moment, but
a process, within which we coordinate individual actions into a cohesive
unity that transcends the capacity of solo action, where this involves
attending to the distributed progress of the agreed-upon action in the act of
performing it. Here, I want to add (and this is part of what the close study of
group improvisation can give to philosophy) that the mere fact that
intentional action so much as can take place in this multi-fronted or
distributed progress-monitoring way, where intentional movements are
altered in the act of performing them, seriously unsettles the Cartesian
picture of pre-cognition followed by subsequent embodied enactment; what
we have in jazz improvisation is fully intentional action without being, by
virtue of that intentionality, temporally pre-conceived action. (In this
respect, incidentally, expert soccer players can show us something about the
spontaneous dimension of ensemble improvisation.) A shared intention
then, so far, will (1) be of a kind that is non-summative, (2) irreducible (in
the strong sense) to the individual (i.e., I cannot share the ten-pound note
with myself; my spouse and I do not go out together on different nights),
and (3) is worked out, with limited variations, across the span of its
enactment. If one wanted to capture the distinctive kind of creative
ensemble work undertaken in Coleman’s 1959 recording The Shape of Jazz
to Come,8 one could do far worse than to list precisely these three features.
This is also true, as we shall see shortly, of Coltrane in his most advanced
group-improvisational work.
Bratman, emphasizing the necessarily public character of this distinctive
intentional content, speaks of an “our intention,” where the socially
engaged and socially interactive role of the intention comes into clearer
focus. Norms of “consistency, agglomeration, means-ends coherence, and
stability”9 come to the fore here; when Coleman was asked by a new
ensemble member about chord sequences, unison melodies, and so forth, he
famously replied: “Forget all that, but be sure to play within the range of the
idea.” That is consistency, and that is agglomeration, and it is an
inducement to remain mindful about means-ends coherence, yielding
interpersonal—I mean inter-ensemble—stability. Bratman speaks of
interlocking intentions, and of the necessity of finding consistency within
subplans for carrying out a larger shared intention. But the element I most
want to emphasize today is what he calls a “semantic interconnection
between our intentions.”10 The point here is that—now truly leaving the
individualist social contract model in the dust—the specific content of my
shared intention, as it unfolds, will in part be determined by my linked
intention that your intention also “be realized in the right way,” as it
contributes within a shared dialogue and exchange along the process of
realizing our larger shared intention. Coltrane’s pianist, McCoy Tyner,
equipped with, as players say, huge ears (and still larger technique), is (1)
supporting, (2) prodding, (3) commenting upon, (4) developing in
microcosm the thematic gestures of, (5) reharmonizing the melody of, (6)
sequencing the rhythmic figures of, and (7) shaping the dynamic growth of
Coltrane’s improvised solo. What we might call the musical-semantic
content of Tyner’s intention to support Coltrane’s work in all these ways is
not specifiable in advance of the performance in any detail (although one
could list in advance these seven modes of improvised accompaniment
generically). What Bratman identifies as the subplans that give specificity
to shared intentional action only emerge in medias res, only within what
Wittgenstein called the stream of life.11 It is in this sense, as I suggested
earlier, that creative group improvisation not only mimetically reflects, but
also simultaneously, within its own world, enacts. Like the painted numbers
on Jasper Johns’s canvases—where those numbers are at once numbers and
representations of numbers—Tyner’s playing under and with Coltrane at
once is and represents the distinctive kind of shared intentional action that
makes Searle’s social reality, well, real.
It was Emily Dickinson who said that we dwell in possibility, and in an
improvisational ensemble, indeed we do. Tyner, supporting Coltrane, within
their four-part world of musical possibility, needs constantly to filter
options12 incompatible with the musical-semantic content flowing in and
out of his intention, seizing some, rejecting others, holding still others in
abeyance, listening for their right moment. In the great movie The Lion in
Winter,13 in a sharp-edged verbal sparring match between Eleanor of
Aquitaine (the wife of Henry II) and her son Prince Geoffrey, he says, “I
know. You know I know. I know you know I know. We know Henry knows,
and Henry knows we know it,” adding the closing line, “We’re a
knowledgeable family.” A good improvising ensemble is in this sense a
knowledgeable family living inside a world of possibility: Tyner knows of
the long-form intentions of Coltrane in playing his modal composition
“Impressions,” he learns quickly of the instantaneous shared-intentional
enactments of Coltrane, he knows Coltrane knows of his awareness on both
of those levels, he knows the bassist knows of his knowledge of Coltrane’s
knowledge, where the bassist knows the drummer knows … and so it goes.
So the semantic interaction is as thick in music as it is in life, and we need
to capture that—and not a reduction of it—in our thinking about jazz.14
Bratman summarizes his position on shared intention: in them we will
find “(i) intentions on the part of each in favor of the joint activity, (ii)
interlocking intentions, (iii) intentions in favor of meshing subplans, (iv)
beliefs about the joint efficacy of the relevant intentions, (v) beliefs about
interpersonal intention-interdependence, and (vi) common knowledge of
(i)–(vi)”15 (where this includes, importantly, common knowledge of this
common knowledge). And at the end of his summary he places special
focus on “mutual responsiveness” as an essential condition of the enactment
of shared intention. This is precisely what we hear—that is, all of (i) though
(vi) along with a strong dose of mutual responsiveness, in Coltrane’s
quartet, in Taylor’s groups, in Coleman’s ensembles, and numerous others
at the high end of group-improvisational achievement.
But speaking of that: John Coltrane, reducing his quartet to a trio for one
number on November 2, 1961, at the Village Vanguard, gave a performance
he said that he himself did not quite understand (or perhaps, given the
available terminology, was not able to describe without the sense of an
essential remainder lost to language).16 Something very special in the world
of improvised art happened that night. From the first moments of that
particular performance of his “Chasin’ the Trane,” it was clear that the
melodic line he started with, over what were ostensibly straightforward
blues changes, was being negotiated, fragment by fragment, against an
imaginary model that he was not playing. This put the piece, as heard
sound, already in the opening measures against an absent, unheard piece—
one might say an unheard piece on the other side of the sound. Or: the heard
functioned as an increasingly intricate commentary on the unheard. The
moment-by-moment negotiation of the close thematic logic of small bursts
of motifs, four-and five-note rapid-fire assaults, began right from the fifth
measure and then cut itself loose from what the listener expected (as the
underlying harmony, itself already to some extent removed into the mind’s
ear by the absence of the piano for this piece). By the beginning of the solo
in the second chorus—a solo that was actually already started in the
complex negotiations from the start of what one might in an unsettled way
take as the head—Coltrane established a sense of urgency not by himself,
but within and across the trio. It is not reducible to the relentless high-
burner heat of Jimmy Garrison’s walking (more like sprinting) bass, nor to
Elvin Jones’s oceanic power with wave crashing upon wave, nor to
Coltrane’s own motivic bursts. The urgency remains above any one of those
things, and no sum total can convincingly account for it. Then under this
fragmented motivic logic,17 we soon get Garrison interrupting the force of
the four-to-the-bar sprint with strong momentary pedals held beginning on
the second beat, then as quickly locking back into the momentarily unheard
but still sensed four-to-the-bar movement. The effect is a momentary
floating—4/4 gravity ceases to pull—and Jones moves to a highly intricate
fleet-footed dance on the ride cymbal. This combination of bass and drum
movement away from the expected, away from what is now for both bass
and drums only an implied foundation, lifts the trio, as one, to a place
where the sound becomes like what one imagines coming from the ground
just at the beginning of a volcanic eruption. This then becomes the new
ground—so that extreme rhythmic vitality, extreme forward movement, is
sustained as much with rumble and thrash as with precise downbeats. And
this now confers onto Coltrane’s rapid-fire motifs a new, vital purpose in
terms of rhythmic definition as well as thematic logic. Stream, then river,
and now torrent moves to a place where a near-explosive texture is more
important than any underlying harmonic mooring, and in a flash—about a
third of the way into a sixteen-minute piece—the ensemble, now in a de-
individuated collective sense that I can only try to describe as one
increasingly powerful organism breathing, interweaves rapidly sequenced
figures in the saxophone with rising and falling punched-out strides of the
bass with hyper-animated increasingly complex cymbal movement. With all
harmony now more dimly sensed than heard—rather like seeing shapes
form and then as quickly dissipate in the fog—a kind of audible mutual
trust emerges that seems to make anything possible within the enlarged
bounds of a rapidly moving collective intention. Three-note fragments, still
working through and within their own logic, give way to rapid clusters of
closely grouped pitches; strong but momentary pedals in the bass now leave
the listener hanging between disorientation and reorientation; bass-drum
and tom bombs go off right and left as we propel forward—yet these
constituent parts do not capture without significant remainder the event
taking place here. Recall Bratman’s list for true collective intention: non-
summative; irreducible to the individual; worked out across the span of its
enactment.
And recall the semantic interconnections between intentions. That was
where the content of one rapidly progressing intention is inflected by the
nuances of the very ensemble context within which it is being enacted. And
as we hear unmistakably in what actually takes place in these sixteen
minutes in 1961, the intentional content was without any doubt there at the
highest level of improvisational mastery—and yet it could only have been
articulated in the most vague and general terms prior to its enactment. I
mentioned the sense that one is floating above the ground in a way that
gravity will not allow, yet with a conjoined sense of urgent forward motion
—like floating in the air atop a high-speed train. In a similar sense, upon
repeated listening one realizes that time—as sonically marked, but also as
implied on the other unheard side of this piece—seems to bend and
undulate as well. This is not an effect any one person could achieve—if one
tried, it would be heard as rushing or dragging against the established tempo
of the other two players. (This sense is not reducible to what is within the
reach of the social contract model, i.e. accelerando or ritardando.) There
are moments within Coltrane’s solo when he refers back—but with a
retrospective edge of an aggressively experimental present commenting on
a somewhat more mainstream past—to his playing with Dizzy Gillespie,
Miles Davis, and others: he fleetingly plays a figure from the jazz-blues
language over a twelve-bar form. And we know that he had just been
listening to, and thinking about, the unrelieved intensity displayed in John
Gilmore’s saxophone playing with Sun Ra.18 This intertextual content is of
course of the moment, but it is—against the Cartesian picture of intention-
as-precognition—nevertheless one indisputable part of the intentional
content of Coltrane’s work.
Phrases we often use to point toward phenomena of this kind—group
interaction, group dynamics, and so forth—can too easily implicitly
reinforce the social contract picture and the picture of autonomous selfhood
beneath it. But the churning, thrashing, intense, seemingly gravity-defying
and time-bending character of an ensemble like this—collective jazz
improvisation at its best—lives and breathes in a place beyond what these
models can accommodate. Coltrane knew this: registering the sense that this
particular performance was above and beyond any of them individually or
as a trio of individuals, he said, “I used to listen to it and wonder what
happened to me.”19 The self beneath all this has become a relationally
intertwined entity, the referent of the “me” is not in this context
autonomous, and Coltrane knew it.
A term I used earlier, de-individuation, is a psychologist’s name for the
regrettable phenomenon of merging into a mob and then doing things as a
collective that no individual within that mob would choose to do. But if
there is a positive side to this experience, then de-individuation into
collective intention—where here as well, an act is performed that no
individual could choose to do for the simple reason that no individual could
do it—may help us arrive at a better understanding of something that, for
want of better language, we call magical. Such experiences, once had, are
not easily—perhaps ever—forgotten. Coltrane, within a high-velocity life of
ever more performing and recording, kept thinking back to that defining
moment of de-individuation at the Village Vanguard. And drummer Leroy
Williams said, “I remember the first time I experienced that floating, out-of-
the-body feeling. It was a number of years ago, when I was playing in
Chicago. At the time, I didn’t know what it was,”20 and he goes on to refer
to the special kind of empathy required—I think he is referring to the
musical variant of a highly cultured and finely attuned moral imagination as
preparedness for creative cooperation21—before, as he puts it, “this music
can really happen.”22 And he mentions a special “chemistry” as well—
where the very term evokes an image of one set of independent elements
undergoing a process whereby—through transformative interaction—they
merge into one new compound entity with properties all its own.
Accomplished players know this experience when it occurs, and
accomplished listeners know it when they hear it. Like Williams, players
call this special ensemble phenomenon simply “happening”; let Wynton
Marsalis’s remark stand for many when he says, “Everybody’s part is
equally important. If you have one weak link, it doesn’t happen, man.”23
However, the phenomenon as I have described it thus far concerns the
merger of individual into non-summative collective intention, where the
semantic interlocking of intention, or irreducible or group-emergent
intention, is to the fore. There is another aspect of this kind of ensemble
performance that should not be missed. In the context of discussions of
word and sentence meaning, Hilary Putnam has written of a “division of
labor” in terms of articulating, or capturing all of the content of, the
meaning of a word. Even a novice student of etymology will immediately
recognize that words have connotations from word-origins and the history
of usage that lurk, often fascinatingly, within them—it is as though such
connotations are waiting within the semi-hidden content of the word to be
discovered by a nuanced user. This linguistic fact has been taken by
Putnam24 and others to argue for semantic externalism, that is, the notion
that the content of a word or sentence need not be contained within the
intentional use of any given speaker at any given moment—the labor of
covering all this is distributed across a range of usages and contexts.
Indeed, on such a view, it is highly unlikely that any given speaker could
ever achieve a single comprehensive and simultaneous grasp of a
connotative range more extensive than the present speaker’s intention, and
thus on this externalist view of word meaning, any theory restricted to
explicit intentional content would miss more than it captured. I want to
suggest that the special phenomenon heard when an ensemble plays as one,
when it is truly happening, is deeply like this distribution of labor—where
the labor just is the work of attending with exacting discernment to different
but interconnected aspects or elements of the interrelated whole sonic (and
as we shall shortly see, also the linked imaginative) event. And one way to
describe this is in terms of group attention.
William James (and here we see yet another direct link between the best
of American philosophy and American music) has given us a number of
famous phrases: “stream of consciousness” is one, and the “blooming,
buzzing confusion” is another.25 The latter describes, for him, the massive
overload of information, of sensory input, that any person (and particularly
an infant, before it learns to navigate that overload with selective attention)
experiences at any moment, outside the bounds of a narrow selection of
attended-to data. For James, we make our world into what it is by
selectively attending, and the composite result of any such act of selective
foregrounding against massive backgrounding is our perceptual world at
that moment. This is an illuminating description of one half of sensibility:
we select from the much larger set of what is given in experience to make
our world (in a way distinctive to our patterned histories of selection) what
it is. (The second half is then the presently-activated recollection of our
distinctive history of related experiences that inflect our perception of
whatever it is to which we presently attend.)26 An ensemble in motion can
be, taken in toto, just such a blooming buzzing confusion, and a player
selectively attends within that ensemble—that microcosm of our perception
of the world—to what is necessary in order to participate most fully, to
intentionally interact, to de-individuate for the good of something that is
greater than him- or herself.
Given the early critical reaction to Ornette Coleman’s double quartet
recordings, the phrase “blooming buzzing confusion” would seem
comparatively gentle. On first listening—as with much work in the free jazz
tradition—the ensemble sound can put a rather heavy strain on the listener’s
ability to make sense. But that is just the point: the larger collective is one
from which one actively, in a Jamesian way, selects in order to make one’s
distinctive “world.” To do this, one needs to listen as a player, just as
painters often say that in order to really see what is taking place in a given
canvas one has to see as a painter. And here lies the heart of the matter: the
listener, in this form of music, is cast into the position of a player, who must
selectively attend to coherence-making parts while backgrounding others.
This demand on the listener is readily perceivable in single quartets, for
example, consider again Coltrane’s Impressions, but it is doubled—and so
very much more apparent—in the doubled quartet. And it is within the
world of that doubled quartet that one can hear players of the same
instrument most exactingly selecting the other player of their instrument
first (listen to the two bassists). Then once that focal point of attention is
mutually agreed upon (this is shared attention, to which we will return
shortly), each will select other elements to include in their distinctive
worlds of selected attention, and the contributions they make to the whole
differ accordingly.
Like James’s perceptual world, nothing in this situation is static. This
constitutes within its own musical world, as well as mimetically represents,
the active power of the human mind in world-perception. A player will have
a form of attention that is constantly in motion, tracking what has happened
within foregrounded elements, what has happened in other tracked
elements, and then more generally what has happened in what we might call
a semi-backgrounded (i.e., not foregrounded but not ignored either)
foundation. Painters do not use the expression “Big Eyes” (although they
might), but players do use the expression “Big Ears,” and that term names
just this skill, developed to an exceedingly high degree (that is, well beyond
what becomes in this context merely rudimentary ear training involving
interval, arpeggio, and chord recognition, melodic memory, orientation
within form, rhythmic pattern-recognition, motivic-development
recognition and anticipation, etc.). A person will switch focal points as they
are intertwined with other related events minute by minute, and perhaps
moment by moment, and in the extreme case of sudden and repeatedly
emergent attention-demanders, a number of times within a moment. Life
offers a broad range here—just as does group improvisation. And if the
listener is asked to replicate the labor, the active listening, of a selectively
attending player, then the demands are indeed uncompromising: it is not for
nothing that the advanced regions of this artform have been called
“musician’s music.”
Some theorists of attention have developed the metaphor of the spotlight:
attention functions as does a spotlight in the dark, where the strength, focal
point, sharpness or diffuseness of focus, and duration determine the
character of the act of attention under consideration. This is helpful, but one
should note that in the case of the semantically interlinked ensemble, each
player has more than one spotlight, and while one may have a very sharp
focus, another will illuminate everything around it. In this way, one can
follow Coleman’s motivic suggestions with great concentration while
tracking not just the bass player or drummer individually, but what the
entire rhythm section (e.g., piano, bass, drums) is doing as its players move
under those motivic suggestions, only some of which will be taken up and
acted upon. (Again, the double quartet doubles the complexity of this
negotiation.) The spotlight metaphor has its limits—and it does itself attend,
through its terminology, to visual attention—but I bring it in here to offer a
model that will link together James’s idea of selective attention as presently
in play and the previous remarks concerning Putnam’s distribution of labor.
Just as with the half-hidden and expansive range of word connotations that
no single user of a word can intentionally incorporate at any one time, so no
player can, in the rapidly unfolding flux of an improvising ensemble, shine
spotlights on all aspects of what is unfolding presently. But between them—
to share attention and to distribute labor—they can. No one player can
selectively attend to everything—the very word selectively would seem to
preclude that, just as not everything can be in a foreground. Nor can any
one listener hear everything with the requisite attention at one hearing—the
sense of artistic exhaustion, redundancy, or having, as we say, “heard it all
already” in the experience of this music is rare, and just for this reason. The
American pragmatists also wrote of what they called “perspectival
perches,” that is, vantage points from which one could take in an event,
where the change of perch would correspondingly change what we did and
did not attend to—which is what gives the experience in question its
determinate content. With the notions of selective attention and distribution
of labor in mind, one can monitor one’s own acts of close listening, with the
result that one sees more clearly how a player, within an ensemble of this
kind, moves in a Jamesian way realizing one specific subset of possibilities
out of a larger expansive set.
But the reality of what is taking place here—when it is happening—is
more complex still. Group or shared attention has been studied in depth
recently in developmental psychology, where the ability to recognize that
one is focusing upon one given thing in the environmental field rather than
another, and then to focus upon that thing in tandem with the other, is now
seen as foundational to our ability to interact with others. This is a
precondition for recognizing and responding sympathetically to their mental
states or conditions, as well as for recognizing the meanings of the words
and sentences they are using (in labor-distributed or cooperative ways;
demonstratives here become the test cases for understanding). Serious
developmental impediments (e.g., autism) are now being explained in terms
of arrested development on precisely this score.27 To the extent (which, as I
am suggesting here, is considerable) that collective ensemble improvisation
depends on acts of shared or group attention (where the sharing can happen
within any subgroup of the ensemble), music of this kind puts on display, in
the world of art, what takes place when it is, in complex societal
organizations (to borrow the musicians’ term), happening.28 The failure of
one player to appropriately listen to another player or to the ensemble (or
where one possesses insufficiently developed “Ears,” so that the skill base
is not present in the first place) will yield exactly what Marsalis described
above concerning the “weak link”; the player is not sufficiently selectively
attending, sharing in divided labor, and jointly attending.29 (One direct
analogue between poor performance and a category of moral failing is to
listen to oneself as the sole spotlighted element against what will then be
heard as a perceptually indistinct ensemble background). But it is just here
that the phenomenon in question becomes more intricate still.
 James brings another aspect of the kind of attention we are considering
into focus by discussing an example from Hermann von Helmholtz; this
aspect, important to understanding what shared attention in this kind of
ensemble actually entails, is all too easily missed.30 If we play a strong low
C on the piano, in a limited or far-off, distant-background sense, we hear
the overtone of G above it or in its upper harmonics, but we do not
primarily attend to it (we are, by contrast, clearly attending to the C as the
focal sonic experience). If, as Helmholtz observes, we then sound a strong
G, spotlight our attention on the sound of that pitch, and then imagine what
that G overtone will sound like as contained within the overtone structure of
the C when actually sounded a moment later, we will now, on hearing the C
again, be able to hear the G clearly and unambiguously. The sound, of
course, did not change; but what we heard changed very much. This, for
James, shows in a single case what he believes to be true of all human
perception, that is that our imaginative anticipations of what we are about to
perceive will itself enable us to discern more clearly what is anticipated
when that anticipated sensory phenomenon is actualized. And this,
precisely, is the part that is so easily missed in our consideration of the
content of selective attention, and it constitutes an important part of what
“Big Ear” players actually do in the course of improvised performance. To
put it another way, it is far too easy to restrict any account of the content
that is selected in attention to only what has already been sounded, what has
already been played out. But the truth, in terms of players at this level
sharing attention, is here again more interesting than that.
Players, inside the expanded network of improvisational possibility,
closely attending to their selectively chosen foci, move from possible to
actual in the blink of an eye. They actualize, as discussed in the Coltrane
example, and as they do with doubled complexity in the Coleman case of
the double quartet, in the moment, in a way that (1) transcends the
autonomy of the individual as discussed above, (2) develops semantically
interactive intentional content of an irreducible “our intention” kind, and
that (3) shows the attentive patterns that make up the interactive style of a
given player (and these will differ from player to player in a way as
distinctive as fingerprints). To do this together, players often anticipate,
with considerable sophistication, what another player will do, and this
allows them to play in an “as-if” mode: they play as if the momentary
passage were rehearsed, as if they had known in advance what they were
going to do together. And in a special sense (a sense that further defines
what the term happening means), they do know: the extent to which they
know the idiom intimately, and more importantly the extent to which they
know each other as players intimately, comes out in this kind of “as-if”
performance; and one important measure of the success of the performance
is taken in just these terms.31 This part of an ensemble’s work can seem
mysterious—indeed almost magical—but the phenomenon in question is in
truth no more mysterious than the capacity for human intimacy and deep
interpersonal understanding that it both exemplifies and mimetically
represents: players can imagine, immediately before the event as a result of
what has just come before, where a player is going. This is not mind-
reading or clairvoyance any more than is the act of rightly anticipating
where a person we truly know well is going in a sentence, in a thought, in
an expression of hope, regret, fear, or delight, in a resigned sigh or in an
elated gesture. We know these things of each other as a function of shared
attention and all the interweaving of semantic and intentional content that
such sharing makes possible.32 And we feel alone when just such shared
improvisational interaction is frustrated or when the special sense of
“playing as one” seems blocked by insurmountable obstacles.
So to conclude: Searle’s “we-intentions” are by their nature mindful of
the contribution of the others as the group—acting as a group in the
theatrical play—runs from the rain in the way a cluster of individuals would
do, but with a group focus that cannot be reduced to the sum total of a
collection of individuals. Bratman’s “our-intentions” advance beyond that,
bringing into focus the semantic interaction—what we might call the
chemistry on the level of meaning—that allows your intentional content to
become a part of my unfolding and presently performed intentional plan. A
relational conception of selfhood, by contrast to the Cartesian hermetic self,
can accommodate this. Tyner, performing in the stream of musical life all
the spontaneously interactive yet intentional things he does, in fact in
himself becomes a part of Coltrane’s solo—the intentions, in Bratman’s
terms, interlock. And at Coltrane’s high point—those sixteen minutes of
energized grace at the Vanguard in November 1961—his trio departs from
the point of chemical reaction, semantic merger, de-individuated intention,
and collectively composes intentional music in the moment in a way no
social contract model of participation can capture. And this is done through
extraordinarily highly developed skills of selective and group-participatory
attention. Some individuals—Marsalis, others—have called jazz the
essential American music for its democratic, socially contracted
participation of the individual within the larger purpose-driven collective.
But as Marsalis’s own practice richly shows (and actually consistent with
his remark, mentioned earlier, concerning what it takes for the music to
happen), the truth, as we have glimpsed, is more remarkable than that. An
account without remainder must, I think, accommodate the kind of creative
ensemble work that allows complex or compound intentional work to
emerge within, and not prior to, its realization, work that cannot be
descriptively captured from the false starting point of the Cartesian or
hermetically sealed individual. The events that happen here are not pre-
cognized, they are not the shady semi-realities of a mental interior, they are
not the sum total of perhaps clustered yet still metaphysically preserved
autonomy, and they are not the result of a self-spotlighted attention that
backgrounds everything else. Players are right to sense a profound
difference between solo and ensemble performance, and again between
non-improvisational and improvisational group performance. The
individual-transcending events that happen here—and they have been
happening in the highest reaches of jazz improvisation for a long time—
seem to be finding an articulate voice in, of all places, recent philosophy of
mind. It seems a propitious moment to bring this music and this philosophy
together.
One final note: One wonders what if, some decades back, the New
Criticism that generically barred intentional considerations from
interpretative considerations (where, importantly, that view was built on the
conceptual picture of Cartesian intention we have discussed), along with
premature pronouncements of the death of the author coming from another
tradition, had not held sway for so long. One imagines we might now be
more nuanced in our recognition of the complex intentional content of, and
the collective-intentional and group-attentive work undertaken within, the
creative ensemble performances that give this distinctive American music
its power and special sense of animate presence. And then also, if we hadn’t
had intentional considerations barred for so long, perhaps we would have
seen much sooner the significant contribution the study of intentional work
in improvisation and the phenomena of interactive selective attention can
make to the philosophy of mind and action. But, as was also said in that
great film I mentioned earlier, “ ‘What if’ is a game for scholars.” Like
Coltrane, let us just go forward together from where we are right here, right
now.

NOTES
1. John Coltrane, Ascension, Editions I and II, compact disc, Impulse! 1792024 (2009), originally
released in 1965.
2. The unearthing and disentangling of these presuppositions is hardly the brief or straightforward
matter I make it sound like here. I offer an attempt in Garry L. Hagberg, Describing Ourselves:
Wittgenstein and Autobiographical Consciousness (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2008).
3. John Searle, “Collective Intentions and Actions,” in Intentions and Communication, ed. P.
Cohen, J. Morgan, and M. E. Pollack (Cambridge, MA: Bradford Books, MIT Press, 1990), 403.
4. For a discussion of this focus on relations in aesthetic contexts, see Garry L. Hagberg,
“Imagined Identities: Autobiography at One Remove,” New Literary History 38, no. 1 (Winter
2007): 163–181.
5. I discuss the counterintuitive representational content of jazz improvisation in Garry L.
Hagberg, “Jazz Improvisation: A Mimetic Art?,” Revue Internationale de Philosophie 238
(2006): 469–485.
6. See, for the most relevant papers to this discussion, Michael Bratman, “Shared Agency,” in
Chris Mantzavinos, ed., Philosophy of the Social Sciences: Philosophical Theory and Scientific
Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 42–59; and “Acting Over Time,
Acting Together,” paper for the 2010 Conference on Collective Intentionality (Basel,
Switzerland, August 2010), http://philosophy.stanford.edu/community/documents-
papers/view/Acting_Over_Time_Acting_Together/, accessed January 27. 2014.
7. In what follows I have been helped considerably by the excellent overview article by Deborah
Tollefson, “Collective Intentionality,” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2004),
http://www.iep.utm.edu/coll-int/, accessed January 27, 2004; see also her very helpful
“Collective Epistemic Agency,” Southwest Philosophy Review 20, no. 1 (2004): 55–66.
8. Ornette Coleman, The Shape of Jazz to Come, compact disc, Atlantic Records WPCR13429
(2009), originally released in 1959. The examples of Coleman’s work that I have in mind
throughout this chapter come primarily from this recording; examples taken from Ornette
Coleman, Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation by the Ornette Coleman Double Quartet,
compact disc, Warner Jazz 8122736092 (2002), originally released in 1961, would only thicken
the complexity (as we will see) of the collective intentional action considered here. One could
write a separate essay, for example, on the interactive work of the two bassists (Scott LaFaro
and Charlie Haden) alone. For a particularly helpful essay that articulates in brief scope much of
Coleman’s achievement, see Gary Giddins, “Ornette Coleman (This Is Our Music),” Visions of
Jazz: The First Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 467–476. Also, I should
mention that the examples I have in mind of collective improvisation do seem to cast the
performance of collective intentions in higher relief, but collective intentional work in jazz
improvisation is by no means restricted to free or experimental jazz; hear, for example, the
performance of “Lush Life,” where the ensemble coalesces unforgettably on John Coltrane,
John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman, compact disc, Impulse! 1764897 (2008), originally
released in 1963.
9. Bratman, “Shared Agency,” 65.
10. Bratman, “Shared Agency,” 48.
11. The fact that such intentions are manifested only within a stream (or expanded frame of group
creativity as shared and intertwined activity) is nicely elucidated by J. David Velleman, where
 he rightly places emphasis on the way in which group intentional activity is clearly intended,
and yet not intended (in a way corresponding to the traditional dualistic view of intention as
inner preconception) in a full way that predicts all detailed outcomes within that frame of action.
See J. David Velleman, “How to Share an Intention,” Philosophy and Phenomenological
Research 57 (March, 1997): 29–50. Another way of capturing this important point for the nature
of group intention is to say that one of the conditions under which individual-transcending
group intention is possible is that I be able to predict not what you will do precisely in fulfilling
the ensemble intention, but that I be able to predict that you will develop and fulfill precise
subintentions interactively as we process, and vice-versa. In this connection see Wynton
Marsalis’s remark concerning the preconditions for the music “happening” (n. 23). For a helpful
article setting this out in detail, see Michael Bratman, “I Intend that We J,” in R. Tuomela and
G. Holmström-Hintikka, eds., Contemporary Action Theory, vol. 2, Social Action (Dordrecht:
Kluwer, 1997), 49–63. The significance of this point concerning intended-yet-not-fully-
preconceived action (where no single individual can determine the outcome but where no single
individual’s contribution could be deleted without profoundly altering the outcome) is, I think,
quite large for achieving a fuller comprehension of the art of jazz improvisation: jazz soloists
have been described and celebrated repeatedly as, indeed, soloists, where this focuses on the
individual expressing him or herself as an autonomous voice, which again comports with the
social contract model. For a fine essay that, like so many, focuses on individual expression as
the heart of this artform, see Lawrence W. Levine, “Jazz and American Culture,” in Robert G.
O’Meally, ed., The Jazz Cadence of American Culture (New York: Columbia University Press,
1998), 431–447. Levine therein quotes Henry Osgood (author of one of the first books on jazz):
jazz performance is “ a protest against … the monotony of life … an attempt at individual
expression” (438). I would add that it is also, seen one way, a protest against a false conception
of hermetic selfhood and a corresponding false but entrenched picture of the relation between
the individual and society. If one were to attempt to answer the question “Why is jazz
improvisation a truly American art?,” here one could do worse than to point to collective
intention, where the individual moves spontaneously and interactively within a network of
possibilities that are themselves made possible by the collective (and where, as we shall see in
the example of Coltrane’s trio, the semantic content of the individual’s intention is not
specifiable independently of the other contributors to the collective action). That would be a
more true representation of the melting pot. (In this connection see the opening line of Ralph
Ellison’s “The Golden Age, Time Past,” in O’Meally, Jazz Cadence of American Culture, 448–
456: “That which we do is what we are.” To put what jazz improvisation shows too briefly:
Because what we do is itself invariably relationally intertwined, the referent of the “we” is
relationally, interactively constituted.
12. Bratman, “Shared Agency,” 10.
13. James Goldman, The Lion in Winter (script) (New York: Penguin Books, 1983, first published in
1966).
14. See Bratman, “Shared Agency,” 12.
15. Bratman, “Shared Agency,” 14.
16. John Coltrane, “Chasin’ the Trane,” in A John Coltrane Retrospective: The Impulse Years, with
notes by David Wild, compact disc, Impulse! 119 (1992), originally released in 1962. See the
particularly helpful liner notes by David Wild.
17. I should mention that this is an extraordinarily advanced form of working through what I am
calling motivic logic; one could write a separate study of the development of this aspect of
Coltrane’s music over the full course of his development. This is not to suggest that this
progress moves in a linear fashion chronologically, that is, where the sophistication increases
steadily as time goes on. Rather, Coltrane and his colleagues work at the degree of rapid-fire
intensity (of motivic logic) called for by the piece and their collective approach to it at the
 moment: for a telling contrast to “Chasin’ the Trane,” hear his quartet’s exquisite performance
of “You Don’t Know What Love Is” (John Coltrane, “You Don’t Know What Love Is,” on John
Coltrane Quartet: Ballads, compact disc, Impulse! 1703697 [2007], originally released in
1962). The motivic logic is both powerful and intricate, but it functions with more relaxed
phrase-structuring and across longer-reaching melodic spans.
18. See Wild’s liner notes (note 16), 11.
19. Wild, liner notes, 11.
20. Leroy Williams, quoted in Paul F. Berliner, Thinking in Jazz: The Infinite Art of Improvisation
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 413.
21. I offer a discussion of the ethical elements in play within improvisational performance in “Jazz
Improvisation and Ethical Interaction: A Sketch of the Connections,” in Garry L. Hagberg, Art
and Ethical Criticism (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), 259–285.
22. Williams, in Berliner, Thinking in Jazz, 414.
23. Wynton Marsalis, quoted in Berliner, Thinking in Jazz, 411–412. Although it is not the central
purpose of this chapter, I do believe the fuller understanding of the experience of positive de-
individuation into an ensemble of collective intention, and the powerful magnetism that special
experience exerts on a certain kind of creative soul, goes some way toward explaining why
improvising musicians have traditionally endured the rigors of the road and less-than-
comfortable lives to intensively pursue the work they do. If one example may here also speak
for many, saxophonist Stanley Turrentine, speaking of such difficulties, said of touring long-
term with a group with organist Shirley Scott, “A lot of small places, with bad sound systems,
small audiences. … We used to deadhead a lot. Twice we drove to the coast in three days, New
York to L.A., eating in the car, sleeping in the car, with the organ in a little trailer in the back.
You’d get there to the gig and for days you’d still feel like you’re still riding. It’s funny now; it
wasn’t so funny then. We’d get to clubs where the hallways were too narrow for the organ, and
once in Virginia, we had to carry the organ up three flights of fire escapes. But for all that, we’d
go in that night and we’d blow our hearts out.” Quoted in David H. Rosenthal, Hard Bop: Jazz
and Black Music 1955–1965 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 108. Concerning the
term happeningas (what I believe to be) a shorthand reference to highly successful collective-
intentional work, see also Quincy Troupe and Ben Riley, “Remembering Thelonious Monk:
When the Music Was Happening Then He’d Get Up and Do His Little Dance,” in The Jazz
Cadence of American Culture, ed. Robert G. O’Meally (New York: Columbia University Press,
1998), 102–110.
24. Hilary Putnam, Philosophical Papers, vol. 2, Mind, Language and Reality (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1985).
25. William James, The Principles of Psychology (New York: Dover, orig. pub. 1890).
26. See also in this connection Garry L. Hagberg, “Imagined Identities,” note 4.
27. For a study that shows the instructive contrast between (1) children who, through “joint
linguistic interactions with adults” (1982), learn to develop autobiographical narratives that
unfold in terms of long-form story cohesion, and (2) those children who do not (i.e., those who,
in failing to integrate an awareness of the points of view of others, do not develop plot-
unfolding narratives that others would follow), see Sylvie Goldman, “Brief Report: Narratives
of Personal Events in Children with Autism and Developmental Language Disorders: Unshared
Memories,” Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders 38 (2008): 1982–1988.
28. See, for an enlightening examination of a number of these issues, N. Eilan, C. Hoerl, T.
McCormack, and J. Roessler, Joint Attention: Communication and Other Minds (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2005).
29. For an enlightening and deeply practice-based examination of a number of particular cases,
especially in connection with the too-often-overlooked or insufficiently investigated
 contribution of the rhythm section to ensemble improvisation, see Ingrid Monson, Saying
Something: Jazz Improvisation and Interaction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
30. For a helpful discussion of attention in its philosophical and experimental contexts, see
Christopher Mole, “Attention,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Palo Alto, Stanford
University, 2009, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/attention/, accessed January 27, 2014); he
discusses the Helmholtz case and shows its larger significance for James, which I have followed
here.
31. Consider in this light the instructive passage by Berliner in Thinking in Jazz 413: “The
disruptive experiences [in unsuccessful performances] cited above illustrate why musicians
diligently cultivate sensibilities to group interplay on the bandstand. By necessity, the process is
a gradual one. Excited by their discovery of jazz, students initially seek opportunities to
improvise at every accessible performance venue and in any group that will have them. They
are, in the beginning, less particular about the partners with whom they form musical
relationships, because they have yet to appreciate the subtle dimensions of interpersonal
communication and the intricate meshing entailed in successful improvisation. Many are not
immediately attuned to the exceptional moments of performances, nor acclimated to the
extramusical experiences that accompany them.”
32. There is a deep connection between improvisation in speech and in music that, I believe, music
would cast a good deal of light on (rather than, as has become customary, assuming that it is
language that will cast light on music). See particularly in this connection the extraordinarily
helpful discussion in Monson, Saying Something, 73–96. Glenn Gould is also one to note (if in
passing) in this direction (i.e., going from music to language and not vice-versa): “[S]o it is with
the written word; we all improvise with it continually.” The Glenn Gould Reader, ed. Tim Page
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984), 257. Regarding the prerequisite of understanding a person,
or more specifically a sensibility, in order to seriously communicate in language, just as is the
case in improvised ensemble music (and where the insight that we need such understanding in
language extends from the musical experience to language and not vice versa), see the closing
remark by Cecil Taylor in the instructively difficult interview with Len Lyons, in his The Great
Jazz Pianists, reprinted in Reading Jazz: A Gathering of Autobiography, Reportage, and
Criticism from 1919 to Now, ed. Robert Gottlieb (New York: Pantheon, 1996), 320: “I don’t
know what language you speak or what you’re prepared to hear. If we’re going to talk, I need
some idea of who you are.”

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Berliner, Paul F. Thinking in Jazz: The Infinite Art of Improvisation. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1994.
Bratman, Michael. “I Intend that We J.” In Contemporary Action Theory. Vol. 1, Social Action,
edited by R. Tuomela and G. Holmström-Hintikka, 49–63. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1997.
Bratman, Michael. “Shared Agency.” In Philosophy of the Social Sciences: Philosophical Theory and
Scientific Practice, edited by Chris Mantzavinos, 42–59. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2009.
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http://philosophy.stanford.edu/community/documents-
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 CHAPTER 28
INTERSPECIES IMPROVISATION

DAVID ROTHENBERG

TO explain to you why improvisation between species makes sense, I’ll

need to say a little bit about why there is so much more music out there in
the natural world than that made by humans alone. If we are to make sense
of that music as improvisors, we’ll need to find some way to join in.
Certain species of birds have very complex songs that they seem to sing
for hours at a time. Young male birds usually learn these songs from adult
males, not always their fathers. Nightingales, mockingbirds, warblers, great
reed warblers, shamas, butcherbirds, and song thrushes are a few of the
world’s best bird singers. They all listen to what their fellows are up to and
thus find their own way to sing, in most species quite stylized, so that we
humans can easily identify a species from the precise notes of his song. But
in some species, individuality and distinctness are what let us identify what
we hear. Left to their own devices, these species are able to improvise the
music they need.
What happens if you raise a baby male singing bird alone, with no
example for him to hear and to imitate? Donald Kroodsma tried just such an
experiment on an American catbird.1 The gray catbird, Dumetella
carolinensis, is a common medium-size North American bird known for its
flashy, aggressive presence. He sits on an exposed perch (where the phrase
“catbird seat” comes from), imitating whoever he likes, adding snatches of
pretty melody, and then interjecting short harsh notes in between the
chortling phrases. Sometimes these squawks sound a lot like a meowing cat,
hence our common name for what the Chippewa called Ma-ma-dive-bi-ne-
shi, the bird that cries with grief.
 Samuel Parker, author of the intriguing nineteenth-century volume
Twelve Months with the Birds and Poets, includes the following verses on
the curious dual quality of the catbird’s song:
You, who would with wanton art
Counterfeit another’s part
And with noisy utterance claim

Right to an ignoble name,—

Inharmonious!—why must you,
To a better self untrue,
Gifted with the charm of song,
Do the generous gift such wrong?

Oh! you much mistake your duty,

Mating discord thus with beauty,—
’Mid these heavenly sunset gleams,
Vexing the smooth air with screams,—
Burdening the dainty breeze
With insane discordancies.2

Catbirds are easy to hear singing during springtime, and not everyone
thinks they are musical. To many humans they sound like avant-gardists
with no sense of repetition, prettiness, or humane melody. It takes a
different kind of human listener to be drawn to the catbird. This cat sounds
like an avant-garde jazzman destined to shock the world into something
more than pretty melodies. The contemporary poet Richard Wilbur heard
the catbird’s quirky mix as somewhere in between truth and fiction: “… it is
tributary / To the great lies told with the eyes half-shut / That have the truth
in view. …”3
We aim for the truth of what we hear, but, when we listen to sounds not
meant for us, we eavesdrop with our ears half-closed. What of the catbird
behind bars? Kroodsma raised young catbirds in the laboratory in a
situation where their song learning could be controlled. Two groups heard
only a repeated, 10-second clip of normal catbird song. Two other groups
heard a much longer, 16-minute clip of song, repeated over and over. The
fifth group heard no taped song at all. Kroodsma expected to discover some
correlation between the amount of practice material each bird heard and
what it came to sing, which is what had been found in similar studies on
other species. However, something rather surprising occurred. Each bird
developed its own unique song, using a process Kroodsma decided to call
“improvisation,” making up a song on its own, with no teacher to help. All
the birds in the study developed distinct repertoires of hundreds of separate
song syllables. Even the birds that heard no catbird song during the crucial
learning period were able to create their own distinct songs that later got a
favorable response when the birds were released into the wild. The
distinctiveness of the song seemed to ensure success, not any particular
sounds being copied or assimilated.
What exactly were the catbirds singing, out there on their seats?
Kroodsma says nothing about the particular qualities of the hundreds of
sounds his team identified, only that they were diverse, catbirdesque, and
appreciated by other catbirds, regardless of how much training each bird
had. They were all creative individualists, driven into their own tunes.
Were they in fact improvising? As a musician I might say the catbird is
more of a self-taught composer. He worked his song out on his own, not
needing to hear others in order to create what he is supposed to create, the
song he needs to attract his mate and defend his territory. Each bird species
has its own style, its own aesthetic, maybe even its own genre of music that
outsiders always strain to hear. Who cares if we humans like the catbird
song or not? It was never meant for us.
And yet, and yet. … so many bird songs are beautiful to human ears.
They preceded our music for millions of years, so they are a kind of
bedrock beneath all we have created. This is the real classical music, the
truly ancient stuff. We know not exactly what it means for the bird, and we
have a hard time figuring out what makes for better or worse nightingale or
mockingbird songs. There is rarely any clear correlation between any
particular kind of song and more mating success, more strength, or that
elusive “male quality” that biologists are always trying to find in the alpha,
number one, top birds.
No, more often there is just rampant exuberant individuality, among
whole species that have evolved madly complex songs, or, in particular,
individuals who just sing and sing, endlessly, expressively, beautifully,
without anyone being able to figure out why.
I know this is not a very scientific answer to the question of why birds
sing. I wrote a book with that title and I answered on the last page that birds
sing because they have to, they must, it is of their very essence as they have
evolved.4 They may do it while they are looking for mates or defending
territories, but those tasks do not define the structure and beauty of what is
sung. We need to think musically to try to understand that, and as an
improviser, I have found that it can be best to jam right along with the birds.
And the whales. And even the bugs. The experiential knowledge that one
gains from joining in with a foreign music you can barely understand
enables a special kind of interspecies communication that can be difficult to
understand but easy to appreciate. It can even have some scientific value,
confounding what we think we know about what birds do sing and why.
Most birds with complex, extended repertoires surprise us a bit every
time. Improvisation, based on certain styles and forms unique to that
species, is the name of the game. And most of these male singers are solo
performers, more interested in getting their own song out there than
listening to anyone else.
Dietmar Todt and Henrike Hultsch have studied nightingales in Germany
for decades, both in the wild and in captivity. Because of their work and the
work of their students, more is known about the singing behavior of these
famous birds than of any other species with so complex a song. Their first
studies focused on how the birds sing in the wild, while later experiments
examined how the birds learn to sing in controlled circumstances.
One of the first aspects of the nightingale’s singing behavior that they
uncovered is that there are three distinct ways nightingales sing and
countersing to each other, beginning late at night and ending by dawn in the
first weeks of spring. Adjacent male nightingales tend to sing back and
forth with each other, timing the beginning of each song phrase in a precise
way. Most males are “inserters,” meaning that they wait about one second
after a neighbor’s song finishes before starting their own. Songs alternate
between one bird and another. Mutual listening occurs, and timing is
everything. Then there are “overlappers,” who start their song about one
second after their neighbor begins, as if to cover up or jam the neighbor’s
signal. It’s some kind of threat or a mask of the first song, cutting into his
air time. Then there are “autonomous singers,” who sing and sing according
to their own schedule, paying no heed to what any nearby nightingales are
doing. The top bird listens to no one else. He doesn’t care who comes in
when, and he is more interested in his own song than anything else. We all
know human musicians like that.5
The standard evolutionary model of bird song says the males are
competing with each other, that they listen to others only to define their
own status. Not very cooperative, more like war with music as the weapon.
That’s the mainstream story, but anyone who goes out in the woods to listen
hears much more than this. There are trees full of yellow goldfinches, all in
a giant tweeting chorus. A thicket full of European marsh warblers, all
cavalcading their collections of African bird song imitations that they have
collected on their winter migration to the tropics, a giant jam session where
everyone seems to be singing together, not against each other or alone.6
Erich Jarvis has found that bird brains release dopamine while they are
singing, so it’s realistic for us to say they like singing, they may even love
it. At least they are addicted to it.7
An improvising human musician doesn’t need to know all of this.
Wander through an aviary with your instrument, and listen to what happens.
One of the best places is the National Aviary in Pittsburgh, which has a
whole rainforest room full of exotic singers. Although most species do have
these simple few-note identifying songs that seem mostly the same each
time they blurt them out, there are a few with long, extended songs that
seem different every time. Are they improvising? Or singing back exact
phrases they have learned by rote imitation?
I step through the artificial leaves of the aviary with my clarinet, testing
out phrases, throwing up licks. If you want to improvise with birds, you
must leave them space. Don’t just get up there and play your favorite tune,
or show off your arpeggios to the max. And for god’s sake don’t imitate the
songs you hear—that’s too close to what scientists call a playback
experiment, or what bird watchers call “pishing,” making sounds just to get
the birds to come out. Take them seriously as musicians, play something
you think they might like to join in with. Get them to want to listen to you.
Most of the Aviary birds just kept singing their own songs, showing little
interest in my strange and foreign phrases. But one bird, a male white-
crested laughing thrush, Garrulax leucolophus, suddenly hopped over and
began to sing along with me, phrases that seemed to interweave in a truly
jazzy way with what I was handing him. More than a few people have seen
a clip of this on YouTube,8 documenting the very first moment I got a real
musical response from a bird and the genesis of my interest in interspecies
music-making. It was in the year 2000, despite that 1980s-vintage sweater
I’m wearing. This bird really seemed to want to join in. He didn’t seem to
be competing with me, or trying to attract me. We were making music
together.
As I played through the net mesh cage, astonished with each new phrase
the bird would sing me, I imagined this was a male singing for the usual
dual male reasons to sing. Later I learned that it was no accident that the
laughing thrush was the one bird that found a way to join in with me.
Frederic Vencl and Branko Soucek found in 1975 that male and female
laughing thrushes each have a different musical “program,” that is, each
decides which of 25 different syllables it will sing next after hearing its
mate sing a preceding syllable. Their decision trees and transition matrices
show a definite pattern that could be reasonably modeled on the vintage
computers they had in those ancient days. When I read that this is a species
in which the males and females sing precisely structured duets, then the
whole thing took on another light. This is a species where the males and
females make music together, performing a complex duet that somehow
sounds a bit like jazz. Suddenly I could imagine myself part of a pair-
bonding ritual, where my phrases were interpreted by the bird within an
exact two-part regimen. Science illuminates the experience.
In fact, it is remarkable that, in the 30 years of computer advances since
these studies, hardly anyone has conducted an analysis of bird songs into
programs as elaborate as this, even though any notebook computer has
more than enough processing power to do this kind of work. Vencl and
Soucek found a definite order and structure to the duets that they were able
to reasonably model with simple computer programs. They described the
male and female birds as each having a distinct “song program” that
determines what they sing. Bird as machine. What do they think all this
exactness means?
At this time, it is speculation to suggest what the birds are saying to one another. We have noted
that certain syllables are given more often under some conditions. For example F2-M23 seem to
be called up after a disturbance such as a loud noise. This reply loop might mean something
like, “I am OK, how about you?” M6/22-F1 may represent a synchonization which “entrains”
both birds for further singing. It may signify, “I’m ready to sing, are you?”9

The practical value of this structured duetting, they surmise, must lie in the
fact that there is a plan to it all. The birds need to stay in touch with each
other in very specific ways.
What does this have to do with my jamming with a thrush in an aviary in
Pittsburgh? Now I listen back to the recording of what I did, and then print
out my bird/human duet as a sonogram (Figure 28.1). Smack in the middle
of our song, the bird begins by delivering a characteristic dee to deeto dee
to dee to deeep and I respond with a rising arpeggio and fall. Then he
repeats his same riff, as if daring me to get it. (The clarinet is the lower,
gray phrase that goes up and comes down. The bird’s phrases are similar
alternating patterns to the left and to the right):

FIGURE 28.1 A fragment of a live duet between clarinet and laughing thrush; bird in black, clarinet
in gray.

Notice that both the clarinet and laughing thrush tones make simple, clear
marks. Maybe that’s why so much easy music evolves between us. Later I
try a descending slightly syncopated bluesy scale. The bird seems to be
trying to match it with high back-and-forth whistles, those parallel marks
above mine (Figure 28.2). Does he know I’m not a bird? Most likely he
does. Does he hear my clarinet tone as being related to his own? I suspect
something about my instrument’s overtone series gets to him. Whether I am
rising, falling, or slinking down a scale, the bird finds a way to insert his
characteristic phrases along with mine. I don’t feel he is trying to jam my
signal or intimidate me into silence. Will I ever know if this is more than an
anthropomorphic hope that someone else in the natural world likes what I
play?
Music is made with a mix of control and daring, answering in sound at
the moment more questions are raised. That’s the nature of art inside nature:
we will always hear more music than we can find reason for. Even a tiny
bird brain can be attuned to the magic of organized sound, where the form
might be greater than the function, beauty ever resonant and present, long
before we were able to learn from its ways and hear the opposite of time.
 Some who have heard my interactions wonder why I don’t just try to
copy the bird, to show I admire what he sings. I remind them that music is
not at its best as a battle or copycat imitation. We learned from song
sparrows that it is most aggressive to parrot back to a bird with exactly his
same song. Bending what you hear, weaving it with your own songs—now
that is suggestive of much more respect.
Some people laugh at such an approach and consider it wishful thinking
or musical self-congratulation. What right have you, they say, to imagine
that a bird would care about clarinet and saxophone wailing when he has
evolved to care only about his own rightful songs? This is why scientists’
playback experiments must be done with such rigor and care. You don’t
want your bird to become assimilated to irreverent human sounds. Look at
parrots for goshsakes! They’ll imitate anything, if it gets them attention. But
only in cages. In the wild, they hardly use their mimicking abilities at all.

FIGURE 28.2 Laughing thrush begins to respond musically to the clarinet.

Birds are smarter than some scientists give them credit for. In my
experience they can be interested in all kinds of sounds, not just their own.
As much as we have tried to track birds’ behavior while they sing, or when
we play sounds back at them, we know very little of how they listen, what
sounds in their surrounding world matter to them. We know they have
extremely sensitive ears that can detect rhythms five times faster than any
human can catch. Tiny nuances in texture can mean a lot to them. It also
might not be a coincidence that so many of the sounds they make are right
in the range of human hearing. Our musicality is accessible to them, as
theirs is to us.
Two musicians from different parts of the planet who might not speak the
same language can easily get up on stage and start performing together.
This is why we’re always told not to shake the hands of anyone in the band
we’ve not met before because the audience doesn’t believe it’s possible for
musicians to make sense together if they haven’t rehearsed, or haven’t
spoken. This is part of the magic of music’s ability to communicate—that
its rhythms, melodies, and forms can cross cultural lines. Clarinetist
Barbaros Erköse tours the world with oud player Anouar Brahem, even
though Brahem speaks no Turkish and that’s the only language Erköse
knows.10 They make perfect musical sense together, and I have been
fortunate to interview Erköse as well, using only my clarinet to ask my
questions.
It takes a leap of faith to extend this sense of music’s communicative
power to use it to cross species lines, not only boundaries of culture. If birds
make music, as nearly all human cultures think they do, by virtue of our use
of the word song to describe their learned, species-specific sounds, then we
take their sounds most seriously when we address them musically, and dare
to play along.
Now this isn’t easy, learning to find a sudden way into the unfamiliar.
Still, I think it’s something that all human musicians should try, and
Interspecies Improvisation 101 should be a sanctioned part of our music
education system. First, learn to listen. Pick up on the structure and
inflection of the sounds animals are making. Take it in as an unknown
musical world, and take it seriously by preparing yourself to join in. If
you’re ready to play, just play a little, try things out, announce your
intention. Leave space, mostly space, plenty of silence, for the other species
to admit you—to join in, to take your music seriously as part of a possible
music, a new whole, that no one species could make on its own.
Remember why jazz spread across the world and had such influence.
Sure, it was at one time based on pop songs that everyone knew, but jazz
extended them into feats of freedom and rhythmic coolness. But another
part of its influence comes from how it found a way into so many kinds of
music around the world. It could learn from anything, adapt to anything,
bring a personal, player-centered vision of creativity to any existing genre,
introducing originality and exploration into forms that previously might
have seem hemmed in. Play fast and loose with Indian music, break the
raga rules that tell you to go up the scale one way and down another, and
you can quickly make mistakes that the terms of Indian classical music will
quickly tell you are wrong. Jazz is more forgiving.
Sure, there can be right and wrong notes for a particular chord
progression, but somewhere, sometime, a cat has put forward just those
wrong notes and tried as hard as he could to convince you they are right.
The successive acceptance of more and more bending of the rules has
pushed jazz onward to unexpected directions and innovations. That’s why
jazz musicians may be the best prepared to take on the music of other
species; they have been stepping over boundaries for more than a hundred
years.
Some birds even seem like natural jazzers. Consider the song of the
veery, Catharus fuscescens, a brown, spotted-belly thrush that lives in
temperate American forests, known for its querulous, queasy descending
line heard every spring in the green wooded forests of Eastern North
America. I believe the bird’s song is the source of its name, a swirling,
peeooweeeoooweeeooo descending invisible behind dense green leaves.
You will almost never see this bird, but you will often hear him, sometimes
from very far away. An early Native American forest guide said, “this
sound really makes me sick,” but I find it captivating, mysterious.11
How are we to represent the sound, to bring it within the realm of human
understanding? A pioneering work in this field, F. S. Mathews’s Field Book
of Wild Birds and Their Music (1904), describes it in Figure 28.3, and
Aretas Saunders, author of a famous mid-20th century (1951) Guide to Bird
Songs, represented the sound like so in Figure 28.4. Here the graphic
notation of the veery song looks like a sweeping round sigh descending
through the trees, or graphic notation by Tibetan monks or Cornelius
Cardew. Not as musical to our classical aesthetes, but more like a wash of
synthesized atmosphere present in the electronic music of today.
FIGURE 28.3 F. S. Mathews’s graphic and musical notations of a veery’s song (1904).

FIGURE 28.4 Aretas Saunders’s graphic and mnemonic notation of a veery’s song (1951).
FIGURE 28.5 My transcription of a slowed-down veery’s song (2005).

How does the veery become a suspected jazz bird? Using the popular
computer music software Ableton Live, I slowed the veery’s song down and
discovered a syncopated line like a phrase out of Miles Davis’s electric
fusion period, which conventional musical notation can only partially
report, in Figure 28.5. I really didn’t expect something like that to come out,
a melody that changes from C minor to G7 midcourse. And who knew a
veery was swinging like that, with the sound so high and too fast for us to
hear it.
Modern science prefers computer-generated sonograms, like the one
created by the shareware program Amadeus, with frequency on the vertical
axis plotted against time in Figure 28.6. That reveals the structure, but not
really the sense of syncopation. So we have the wishful-thinking early
transcription of the transposed melody into the astonishing realm of a Miles
Davis-like cool jazz trumpet phrase, and then a more precise transcription,
which in the end demonstrates a very refined sense of musicality in the
single utterance of this musical bird. He’s veerying with feeling, he means
something because he’s got that swing. In the end we have the sonogram,
produced by a machine seeking no nuance. Is that then our most accurate
representation of what this veery sings?
FIGURE 28.6 Sonogram of a slowed-down veery’s song, printed out by the program Amadeus
(2005).

What does the veery song mean? Some call music the language of
emotions, pulling our heartstrings the way nothing else can. Others say its
meaning is purely musical, to be understood only between precise rules of
form and order that most listeners hardly know. There is truth in both these
claims, and this is true for both humans and animals.12
I haven’t played live with veeries and I’m not sure they’d really care for
my licks. The coolness of their phrase can only be heard when their
distinctive tune is slowed down into our range of rhythm and pitch. Then I
can learn with it, and I’ve certainly played live on stage with recordings of
the veery, sliced, diced, moved around, turned into musical material for
electronic improvisation. But that is closer to interspecies emulation than
interspecies communication. The best dialogue I’ve had with actual
creatures has come, ironically, with an animal thousands of times heavier
than me, a humpback whale.
In the case of humpback whales, we have a song that very few humans
knew about until the end of the 1960s, so we have only a half-century of
attempts to make sense of what it might mean. Once again, only the males
do the singing. Their half-hour-long songs are sung mostly during mating
season, so sex probably has something to do with it. But unlike in
songbirds, we have zero evidence that female whales care—we have never
seen them show a whit of interest in the males’ amazing singing. So either
the sexual selection of whale song is far more subtle than we have been able
to see, or something else may be at work.13
Humpback whales and nightingales are far apart on the tree of evolution,
and yet there is something quite similar about their songs. How can this be?
Both of these creatures are outliers, because the sounds they make are
particularly intricate, extended, and beautiful. Nightingales sing from
twilight long into the dark hours—if you haven’t yet heard one you may be
surprised that their songs are not immediately melodious, but rhythmic,
strange, like a secret pulsed code emitting from an alien star. There is
indeed something otherworldly about their clear whistles and ratchety
rhythms heard across a forest lake in the middle of the night. From our
current listening vantage they sound a bit like a DJ scratching records or
some Euro techno artist; perhaps to Shakespeare or John Clare they
sounded like something else entirely. Their songs, though, are full of
energy, sung all night long while the birds sit motionless on a high branch,
easy for a predator to pick off.
Rhythms at different frequencies, interspersed with long, clear whistle
tones, a few whoops and bleeps. Definitely organized, with a structure not
yet much analyzed by human scientists, or human musicians. But a music is
there, an always alien music. Is it beautiful? To the female nightingales, it is
supposed to be. To other males? A challenge.
Ask a person what a slowed-down nightingale song sounds like and they
might say, “Huh? It sounds a lot like a humpback whale!” Those whoops,
blats, chirps, and grumbling rhythms happen at a whole different metabolic
scale, in a different medium, the tough-to-see-through tropic underwater
world, slow enough that humans again have a hard time paying attention to
the whole way it moves. But again, there are clear patterns, rhythms, tones,
a definite structure. Speed it up, raise the pitch, and it strangely resembles
the nightingale’s song in terms of the kinds of different elements, the
spacing of the silences between sounds, and the relative complexity of
structure. Figure 28.7 presents a small sampling of each, with scale of time
and pitch adjusted to see the similarity, ten seconds of bird compared to one
minute of whale.
Why should these very different animals have songs with similar
attributes? If they are supposed to be the result of sexual selection, a
process of evolution that favors extended preference of random qualities, or
at least arbitrary qualities, why should the songs of these very animals be so
alike instead of wildly divergent? There may be certain sonic patterns that
appear in all the music of the animal world, and these musical axioms may
be the reason that it is possible to jam with a humpback whale, and why the
whale, in the best moments, might actually listen to a clarinet and want to
chime in.
FIGURE 28.7 Thrush nightingale and humpback whale sonograms compared.

The song of the humpback whale is the most extended patterned

vocalization produced by any animal. These songs were first described by
Roger Payne and Scott McVay, who took a bold step for scientific rhetoric
when they praised the “surprising beauty” of these sounds in the prestigious
journal Science in 1971.14 The structure of 11 minutes of humpback whale
song looks something like McVay’s hand-traced sonogram (Figure 28.8)
from this famous paper.
During the following decades the astonishing moans of this whale made
its way into human culture, becoming the inspiration for famous classical
compositions by Alan Hovhaness, George Crumb, and later John Cage and
Toru Takemitsu. In the pop world the humpback whale song and the plight
of the whale found its way into works by Pete Seeger; Judy Collins; Captain
Beefheart; Crosby; Stills and Nash; Jethro Tull; Yes; Paul Winter; Charlie
Haden; the Partridge Family; Country Joe and the Fish; Laurie Anderson;
Alice in Chains; Tom Waits; and Lou Reed, to name but a few. The original
recording assembled by Payne, Songs of the Humpback Whale, became a
platinum record, selling more than a million copies, and in 1979 an excerpt
from it was included as a “sound page,” in National Geographic. With more
than 10 million copies printed at once in many languages, this remains the
largest single pressing of any audio recording in history.15
FIGURE 28.8 Scott McVay’s hand-traced sonogram from Payne and McVay (1971).

Humpback songs are far more musical in structure than the sound of any
other dolphin or whale. They consist of repeating patterns, hierarchically
organized at the level of unit (or motif), phrase, theme, and song. Each
complete song consists of five to seven themes. Some of the phrases end
with the same contrasting sound, so they can be said to rhyme, in a way
analogous to human poems. A series of these songs can be repeated
extensively, up to 23 hours in a single session. Since singing mostly
happens only during the winter breeding season, when the whales
congregate in specific breeding grounds, such as the Hawaiian Islands, the
Silver Bank off the Dominican Republic, and Archipelago Revillagigedo
off of Mexico, it is generally assumed to be a male sexual display with the
purpose of attracting females, who do not sing. However, no one has ever
seen a female humpback whale show any interest in the song whatsoever,
but other males do respond to a singing male, in a usually nonaggressive
manner. A rival theory, less popular, but the only one with any evidence,
says the humpback whale song serves to organize the male whales together
in a manner different from any other animal we have yet observed.16
The most remarkable aspect of this amazing song is that, unlike nearly all
bird songs, it constantly changes during the breeding season. When an
innovation appears in the song, all other males strive to copy the new
element and in a matter of weeks all are singing the same new song. They
all want to sound the same, yet the sameness continually evolves. No one
has postulated a good reason for this, and no one can yet explain why
whales in any given ocean, say, the North Pacific, change their songs in
tandem even though they are likely too many thousands of miles away to
hear each other.17 The whales in Hawaii and Mexico are changing their
songs in tandem, in a similar way, even though they can’t hear what the
other population is doing. In birds, widely separated populations tend to
have different dialects in their songs, but widely dispersed humpback
whales have the same song, and they are changing it very rapidly in several
ways. Again, no one can explain it.
With its extended, clear structure, humpback whale song is more clearly
musical than the songs of most birds. And with the uncertainty about who
the males are singing for, the song of the humpback whale is full of
mysteries impenetrable to humanity. But for our species, a mystery means a
challenge. As a musician, I wanted to hear for myself. Having spent several
years playing my clarinet to birds, sometimes getting a response, sometimes
not, I was eager to try this interspecies jamming with humpback whales. To
my surprise, I got a very different result than the researchers did. So
different, that when I played my recording of a humpback whale/clarinet
duet to several leading humpback scientists, they did not believe the
encounter was real. But I assured them it really happened. What surprised
my audiences most was that nearly everyone considered the sound they
heard to be music: a music made between human clarinetist and humpback
whale.
In January–February 2007 I spent several weeks off of Maui, Hawaii,
trying to interact musically with humpback whales. The making of these
duet recordings does not involve getting the clarinet wet. I’m safely
onboard a boat and the whale is, ideally, about 10 meters underwater,
directly under us or within 100 meters at most. He can be much further
away and still sound loud and clear. In fact, singing humpback males
usually situate themselves about one kilometer apart from each other.
Figure 28.9 shows how it’s done. The chain of technology enables the
clarinetist to talk to the whale or, more accurately, use music to cross
species lines. Why do I think this is even worth trying? Because music can
communicate across cultures in a way language cannot.
Can I do the same with a nameless whale? Humpback males usually
suspend themselves motionless underwater in a curved posture, singing
continuously in a solo trance. I am essentially interrupting a reverie whose
purpose we do not know. In the musical moment I do not care about the
purpose, but instead wish to understand the result. Can I prove the whale is
responding to me? I will show you the best of such duets I have recorded,
and you can judge for yourself.
Many things can go wrong in such an experiment: the whale might stop
singing and move away, a loud motorboat might come near and mess up the
sound quality. Scientists might call my duet statistically insignificant,
because it represents the one best case scenario rather than the probable
result of broadcasting a clarinet underwater next to a singing humpback
whale male. But even a single interesting improvised performance is worthy
of musical analysis. I want to figure out why I like it, why even the skeptics
I have played this to have responded to this sudden music.
In the whale/clarinet duet sonograms you are about to look at (Figures
28.10–28.14), I have adjusted the appearance so that the two parts are
clearly visible. Here is a summary of the whole mood: The whale sounds
have a huge range, from 100 Hz (G2) (in the form of clear broomphs [not a
technical term]), visible as round, sine-like tones with few overtones. But
then the whale may suddenly jump to high, wavering whistles that resemble
the timbre of the clarinet, with a series of parallel overtones. The pitch of
the whale’s high whistles, though, is rarely steady, but warbles about twice
a second around 300–600 Hz (E4–D5), in the third octave of the clarinet.
Then occasionally there will be an extremely high note, around 4800 Hz,
coming almost immediately after the broomph, from the same whale. How
can he jump so high so fast? I’m afraid we really have little idea how the
humpback whale makes these sounds at all.
FIGURE 28.9 How to play music live with a humpback whale, from Rothenberg (2008).

FIGURE 28.10 Whale tried to match the clarinet’s steady pitch.

The clarinet sounds are often high, held-out notes, more constant in pitch
and thus closer to straight horizontal lines on the sonogram printout. There
are usually at least a few parallel lines of overtones, more than usual for the
instrument because the clarinet is being broadcast underwater, and the
properties of underwater sound propagation seems to add overtones to the
timbre, making the clarinet more bell-like, closer to a soprano saxophone
(which, because of its conical bore, produces more overtones). Yet after
some minutes, my clarinet starts to produce higher, shriekier, and more
uneven, warbling notes, not exactly like the whale but somehow more
compatible with the whale.
And what does the whale do? Does his sound become more clarinet-like
during the encounter? I am not really sure, but some of our high squeaks are
quite hard to tell apart. And the clearest sign of communication comes when
I stop, and he begins with a direct sense of response, in some cases
continuing the very same note I just finished, and in other cases trying to
join in, and overlap me with a complementary sound.
To truly assess the musicality of this encounter, and decide for yourself
whether this interspecies duet is music or not, you should first of all listen
to it; an mp3 of this four minute excerpt is available online at
http://terrain.org/columns/21/Rothenberg_Clarinet_Humpback.mp3. Listen
for yourself, and perhaps we can set up our own Martinellian survey: is this
duet music: yes or no? There is a play-by-play account of the best part of
the duet, including a complete sonogram, also online.18 I have posted this
because I am frustrated that in so many scientific papers on animal music,
complete sonograms do not appear, only summary statistical analysis. Here
you can assess the whole thing, and next is my play-by-play account of the
duet as I understand it.
FIGURE 28.11 Whale sings a previously unheard sound.
FIGURE 28.12 Whale matches my sound as I play.

FIGURE 28.13 Whale responds to the steady clarinet tone with a gritty growl.
FIGURE 28.14 My own song is changed after hearing the whale.

Right at the outset we hear a form of tone and rhythm matching, where
the whale seems to match the middle C, 260 Hz (C4) he hears on the
clarinet twice (2.1″ and 5.5″). Then his successive descending whoops echo
the roughly one-second beats suggested by the clarinet. If we compare the
pacing of this response with the usual speed of this particular theme, it is
faster than usual, suggesting that the clarinet’s presence is having an effect
on the whale’s overall tempo. Now the clarinet moves up to a 370 Hz (G-
flat4) for its repeating beats. Note that at 10″ and 14″ the whale inserts a
whoop followed by rhythmic descending notes. My approach in the duet is
to play tentative, testing notes, leaving space to listen for what the whale
does. A skeptical listener could say this makes any interaction sound like a
duet, but let’s see what happens. At 21″ and 23″ the whale adds a
descending gulp after his whoop, and then after I play a glissando up to 831
Hz (Ab5) at 26″ the whale clearly responds with a high cry immediately
afterwards at 26.5″, the closest acknowledgment from the whale thus far. At
41″ the whale sings an insanely high squeak around 4700 Hz (D8), and then
at 45.5″ I try to imitate it by playing my teeth on the reed. Fellow humans
on the boat did not enjoy this sound, and most of them were not listening to
the underwater whales through the headphones, so they weren’t hearing the
whole thing.
As the encounter progressed, I found myself playing fewer phrases that I
enjoyed and more that seemed to engage the leaps and plunges of the
whales’ aesthetic world. Listening to both species, it’s unclear just who
such music would be for, if neither people nor whales really want it. I guess
each of our kinds can expand our awareness through such an alien musical
process. At 55″ the whale makes two super-high squeaks again, and then
after my short bluesy phrase he seems to match with the booweah sound,
and then we are all together, me and whale, playing almost a single chord at
1′02″. In this passage one clearly sees and hears the tendency of the whale
to respond with a full spectrum whoop up to the stratosphere as soon as the
clarinet stops playing. From 1′12″ to 1′14.5″ is the grand phrase from
whoop to squeak, then with a deep grunt (almost like the boom of a giant
bullfrog) showing in a few seconds the full range of humpback music. At
1′15″ the clarinet moves from 1175 Hz (D6) to 784 Hz (G5) (only higher
overtones appear on the sonogram, so the notes look similar, the movement
from three to four parallel lines is the key), and at 1′18″ the whale appears
to gliss up to join my steady G5 with an up-sliding moan that anticipates
my pitch.
In response to two instances of a held-out G5 on the clarinet, the whale
offers two responses: first, the great warbling whistle at 1′22.5″, and then
the upsliding pitch-matching moan at 1′27″. At 1′32″ we hear the whale
attempting to match the changed pitch of the clarinet held note from G5 to
932 Hz (Bb5), a frequency of warble we have not previously heard, a third
or so higher, 698 Hz (F5), than a similar warble at 1′12″, 587 Hz (D5). At
1′43.5″ the whale remarkably matches the earlier pitch, D5, with a warbling
that gradually approaches the steady note. At 1′55″ a different contoured
whale whistle attempts to match the clarinet pitch. Or is this all wishful
thinking of an interspecies dreamer? Even the long upsweep from 2′00″ to
2′02″ seems to strive for that clarinet pitch. From 2′07″ to 2′08″ we hear the
grand culminating seagull scream. And at 2′19″ it appears again. And again
with greater flourish at 2′30″. At 2′38″ he responds with a downgrunt and
then I seem to match his upsweep at 2′41″. At 2′46″ comes the newly heard
chopping sound, clarinet high on top of it, then more steady notes broken by
a whale upsweep, as the rhythmic presence of the low grunts increases.
The choppiness comes again at 2′57″, before a blustering clarinet gliss at
3′01″ brings another upsweep of whale into a high held note. This is
becoming a familiar pattern. A new kind of very high whale sound appears,
like rapid bow strokes on the bridge of a violin. This builds the mood for
the moment when the situation really draws me in to create a sound quite
unlike any I had ever played before. When I look at these dramatic, warbly
clarinet things at 3′24″ and 3′28″, I clearly see that something has happened
to me here. I don’t know if I am musically becoming a whale, but I have
definitely been driven by the encounter to wail in a whole new way. It does
look a bit like the klezmer madness of my ancestors, but an octave too high,
way up at 2800 Hz (F7).
At this point the rest of the crew was ready to throw me off the ship. At
3′33″ the whale is matching with a new kind of high squeak we have not
previously heard. I wasn’t sure before but now I am convinced that this
animal is modifying his song in response to mine, a musical result that is a
true surprise. This new and nearly painful shriek is, for me, the climax of
this alien musical encounter. When something similar recurs between 3′43″
to 3′44″, I can no longer quite tell, either by ear or on the page, which is
clarinet and which is whale. And at 3′55″, for the first time, the held out
notes of clarinet and whale occur in tandem, like some kind of high altitude
harmonic choir. After a bit of further matching the whale makes a high
growl at 4′01″ that looks like a fingerprint on the sonogram, and the
overlapping continues. Following this, the whale slows down his low
phrases to his more usual tempo. Perhaps he is no longer so excited by this
strange new clarinet sound. From a low trill the whale upsweeps in and I
join in with a final new shriek. The whale stretches out his final moan and
is back to his usual self.
The remaining eight minutes of the duet are less dramatic, but there are
still moments where the whale seems to change the pacing and nature of his
phrasing in relation to clarinet sounds. Since this is a musical, not a
scientific experiment, I am sorry I do not have enough data to be
conclusive. But I do think it is relevant that a high percentage of scientists I
played this recording for, all of whom were familiar with the official line
that humpback whales do not reliably respond to human sounds, were
shocked by what they heard.
 The shock might wear off once they begin to try to explain what they
heard, but I believe the music is still there. Back on the boat, the rest of the
humans on board got tired of these strange clarinet squeaks, and eventually
some jumped in the water to hear the underwater mix for themselves, and
the whale didn’t seem too pleased with that and slowly moved away.
The engineer listening in on the hydrophones shouted out, “David, stop
playing! I need to adjust this equipment,” but I told him, “Kent, I stopped a
few minutes ago.” Noonan turned to me and was taken aback. By now, at
least to Kent, the whale was sounding as much like a clarinet as the clarinet
was trying to sound like a whale. My music had become whale-like, and the
people could stand it no longer!
Throughout this duet are several clear examples where the whale seems
to match the clarinet. Several of my favorites are enlarged in Figures 28.10
to 28.14: at 2′50″, where the whale is striving to match the steady clarinet
pitch (Figure 28.10); at 3′31″, where my whale-like wail garners a never
previously heard squeaky response (Figure 28.11); at 3′51″, where the
whale dares to match my sound as I am playing it. He can’t quite hold the
pitch but he is wavering up and down around it (Figure 28.12); at 3′58″ I
am now playing wavering tones as he has taught them to me, he responds
with a gritty growl (Figure 28.13); finally, at 4′06″ he joins in with my
steady note by uttering a deep, complex boom, then after my riff of discrete
pitches he comes in with a whistle that finally matches me truly in tune,
then I end with that new whale wail I have learned during this performance
(Figure 28.14).
As I reflect on the visualization of this experience, which seems to
clearly reinforce my hunches that the whale was listening and trying to
match me, I remember what I have learned from many years of jamming
with birds. Most birds have their own set and specific songs, and when they
hear a clarinet, if they respond at all, it will be with their own well-known
tunes. Even a bird with a vast repertoire like a nightingale or a mockingbird
is going to use its own licks when and if he plays along with you.
No one disagrees with the basic fact that, unlike any other species we
know of, male humpback whales constantly change their song, and yet
every whale seems to be singing the same song at the same time. How is the
song changing, then? The best evidence we have of hearing a change
suddenly appear comes from a one-page article in Nature by Michael Noad,
who reports that at least one, maybe a few Indian Ocean humpback whales
from the West Coast of Australia got lost one season and turned up in his
research area off Australia’s East Coast, in the South Pacific Ocean. They
arrived with a completely different song, and in a matter of weeks all those
Pacific whales had switched to the Indian Ocean song.19 In 2010 an even
more rapid example of humpback song change was documented, also in the
South Pacific.20
Is the drive for innovation so strong in this species that any new tune is
going to displace the one in action before? This observation suggests it. But
the new song probably has to have some particular qualities unknown to us
to really become popular. Just as the music industry cannot manufacture a
hit, we do not know what makes a catchy whale tune. But there must be
some riffs they like and others they do not, explaining why some units stay
in the humpback repertoire for decades and others come and go in a matter
of months or years.
So if a whale has a penchant to learn from another whale, and be able to
take on a new sound very quickly, then of course if he hears a clarinet out of
the deep blue he’s going to try the new sound on for size! Not only should I
not be surprised that the whale is imitating me, I should expect it. If he
didn’t do it, then I would want to question the theory that whales learn
songs from other whales. The sounds I was playing were well within the
range of possible notes a humpback whale could make. So he tried them on
for size.
Would this whale retain some of my phrases, work them into his
repertoire? If he did, and all the whales have this real need for a new song
that rapidly takes over the airwaves, then in a few months I might hear
some of my motifs incorporated as new units in the song of the humpback
whale. That would indeed be the highest compliment an interspecies
musician could receive. Not praise from one’s peers, but a piece of my
music in the group mind of the whales.
I imagine it would take a lot more time playing the same phrases for the
whales. Jim Darling told me he would like to get a permit to do that kind of
research, but he doubts the Office of Marine Mammals would grant it—too
much meddling in things we know little about!21 But already there is no
doubt that the whale’s live music has influenced what I play. Performing
along with a whale, I try to inhabit the rhythm and shape of the song, which
a written or printed description cannot contain.
 How to train oneself to be an interspecies improviser? Like any form of
improvisation, first of all, just listen. Then only when you feel like there is
space to make a musical announcement of your presence, go ahead, do it.
Be a bird among birds, a whale among whales. Then leave more space,
listen again. Know that most musical creatures will only sing their own,
stylized song. The best species to communicate with are those who share
with humanity a curious interest in a range of sounds, and who have
evolved to want to improvise, to try something new, to enjoy real play with
sound. Take a stab at their style and twist the essence of what you do. You
may be surprised and just might effect a change in a musical world of which
you cannot quite speak. Learn to appreciate more than what your own
species has attuned itself to hear. Make a more-than-human music just past
the edge of what you expect and could believe. A music greater than the
sensibility of one species alone might slightly show us a way to live better
with nature and not destroy our planet with rampant human aesthetics,
saving the Earth while there still is time.

NOTES
1. Donald Kroodsma et al., “Song Development by Grey Catbirds,” Animal Behavior 54 (1997):
457–464.
2. Samuel Harper, Twelve Months with the Birds and Poets (Chicago: Ralph Fletcher Seymour,
1917), 83–84.
3. Richard Wilbur, “Some Notes on ‘Lying,’ ” in The Catbird’s Song: Prose Pieces 1963–1995
(New York: Harcourt, 1997), 137.
4. David Rothenberg, Why Birds Sing (New York: Basic Books, 2005).
5. Silke Kipper, Roger Mundry, Henrike Hultsche, and Dietmar Todt, “Long-Term Persistence of
Song Performance Rules in Nightingales,” Behaviour 141 (2004): 371–390. See also Marc
Naguib, “Effects of Song Overlapping and Alternating on Nocturnally Singing Nightingales,”
Animal Behaviour 58, no. 5 (1999): 1061–1067.
6. Françoise Dowsett-Lemaire, “The Imitative Range of the Song of the Marsh Warbler
Acrocephalus palustris, with Special Reference to Imitations of African Birds,” Ibis 121 (1979):
453–468. See also Françoise Dowsett-Lemaire, “Vocal Behaviour of the Marsh Warbler,” Le
Gerfaut 69 (1979): 475–502.
7. Erina Hara, Lubica Kubikova, Neal A. Hessler, and Erich D. Jarvis, “Role of Midbrain
Dopaminergic System in the Modulation of Vocal Brain Activation by Social Context,”
European Journal of Neuroscience 25 (2007): 3406–3416.
8. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zVO4X0Gl4EI
9. Fredric Vencl and Branko Soucek, “Structure and Control of Duet Singing in the White-Crested
Laughing Thrush,” Behaviour 57, no. 3–4 (1976): 221.
10. Anouar Brahem, Conte de l’incroyable amour (Munich: ECM Records, 1457, 1991), compact
disc.
 11. Arthur Cleveland Bent, Life Histories of Familiar North American Birds (New York: Harper,
1960), 271.
12. Rothenberg, Why Birds Sing, 221.
13. David Rothenberg, Thousand Mile Song (New York: Basic Books, 2008).
14. Roger Payne and Scott McVay, “Songs of Humpback Whales,” Science 173, no. 3997 (August
13, 1971): 585-597.
15. Rothenberg, Thousand Mile Song, 9.
16. James D. Darling, Meagan E. Jones, and Charles P. Nicklin, “Humpback Whale Songs: Do They
Organize Males during the Breeding Season?” Behaviour 143 (2006): 1051–1101.
17. Salvatore Cerchio, Jeff Jacobson, and Thomas Norris, “Temporal and Geographical Variation in
Songs of Humpback Whales: Synchronous Change in Hawaiian and Mexican Breeding
Assemblages,” Animal Behaviour 62 (2001): 313–329.
18. See David Rothenberg, “To Wail With a Whale: Anatomy of an Interspecies Duet” (2007),
http://www.thousandmilesong.com/wp-content/themes/twentyten/images/wail_with_whale.pdf.
Accessed October 5, 2014.
19. Michael Noad et al., “Cultural Revolution in Whale Songs,” Nature 408, no. 6812 (2000): 537.
20. Ellen Garland et al., “Dynamic Horizontal Cultural Transmission of Humpback Whale Song at
the Ocean Basin Scale,” Current Biology 21 (2011): 1–5. doi:10.1016/j.cub.2011.03.019.
21. Rothenberg, Thousand Mile Song.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bent, Arthur Cleveland. Life Histories of Familiar North American Birds. New York: Harper, 1960.
Brahem, Anouar. Conte de l’incroyable amour. Munich: ECM Records 1457, 1991. Compact disc.
Cerchio, Salvatore, Jeff Jacobson, and Thomas Norris. “Temporal and Geographical Variation in
Songs of Humpback Whales: Synchronous Change in Hawaiian and Mexican Breeding
Assemblages.” Animal Behaviour 62 (2001): 313–329.
Darling, James D., Meagan E. Jones, and Charles P. Nicklin. “Humpback Whale Songs: Do They
Organize Males During the Breeding Season?” Behaviour 143 (2006): 1051–1101.
Dowsett-Lemaire, Françoise. “The Imitative Range of the Song of the Marsh Warbler Acrocephalus
palustris, with Special Reference to Imitations of African Birds.” Ibis 121 (1979): 453–468.
Dowsett-Lemaire, Françoise. “Vocal Behaviour of the Marsh Warbler.” Le Gerfaut 69 (1979): 475–
502.
Garland, Ellen, et al. “Dynamic Horizontal Cultural Transmission of Humpback Whale Song at the
Ocean Basin Scale.” Current Biology 21 (2011): 1–5. doi:10.1016/j.cub.2011.03.019.
Hara, Erina, Lubica Kubikova, Neal A. Hessler, and Erich D. Jarvis. “Role of Midbrain
Dopaminergic System in the Modulation of Vocal Brain Activation by Social Context.” European
Journal of Neuroscience 25 (2007): 3406–3416.
Harper, Samuel. Twelve Months with the Birds and Poets. Chicago: Ralph Fletcher Seymour, 1917.
Kipper, Silke, Roger Mundry, Henrike Hultsche, and Dietmar Todt. “Long-Term Persistence of Song
Performance Rules in Nightingales.” Behaviour 141 (2004): 371–390.
Kroodsma, Donald, et al. “Song Development by Grey Catbirds.” Animal Behavior 54 (1997): 457–
464.
Naguib, Marc. “Effects of Song Overlapping and Alternating on Nocturnally Singing Nightingales.”
Animal Behaviour 58, no. 5 (1999): 1061–1067.
Noad, Michael, et al. “Cultural Revolution in Whale Songs.” Nature 408, no. 6812 (2000): 536–548.
Payne, Roger, and Scott McVay. “Songs of Humpback Whales.” Science 173, no. 3997 (August 13,
1971): 585–597.
Rothenberg, David. Thousand Mile Song. New York: Basic Books, 2008.
Rothenberg, David. “To Wail With a Whale: Anatomy of an Interspecies Duet” (2007),
http://www.thousandmilesong.com/wp-content/themes/twentyten/images/wail_with_whale.pdf.
Accessed October 5, 2014.
Rothenberg, David. Why Birds Sing. New York: Basic Books, 2005.
Vencl, Frederic, and Branko Soucek. “Structure and Control of Duet Singing in the White-Crested
Laughing Thrush.” Behaviour 57, nos. 3–4 (1976): 221–229.
Wilbur, Richard. “Some Notes on ‘Lying.’ ” In The Catbird’s Song: Prose Pieces 1963–1995. New
York: Harcourt, 1997.
 CHAPTER 29
SPIRITUAL EXERCISES, IMPROVISATION,
AND MORAL PERFECTIONISM

With Special Reference to Sonny Rollins

ARNOLD I. DAVIDSON

(Translated from the French by Anton Vishio. Revised by the

author.)

The great Irishman Edmund Burke once said: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of
evil is for good men to do nothing.” We must accept our destiny, the destiny to struggle for
the unattainable, because there is nothing absolute, nothing definite, and it is only in
struggling for the unattainable that we can conquer evil. I have often wished that the fathers
of the American Constitution had affirmed “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of the
unattainable.”1
I simply want to play and speak the truth. Every time I sit down at the drums, I have
enough ego to say that what I played last night was good. But not good enough for tonight.
I don’t play as well as I would like. … I have never attained the level of total satisfaction. It
is truly impossible. … You demand more and still more from yourself. Self-satisfaction is
your enemy. It’s over for you as an artist if you think “Well, I am so good that I don’t need
to try anything more difficult.” Art Tatum didn’t play as well as he wished.2

IN this essay I would like to study a model of improvisation that links the
practice of spiritual exercises to moral perfectionism and precisely to that
perfectionism that aims at the perpetual surpassing of oneself—at an
overcoming always renewed, never definitive.3 This perfectionism is at the
heart of recent work by Stanley Cavell: in speaking of it, he often uses the
expression “Emersonian perfectionism,” since Emerson is the starting point
for his elaboration of moral perfectionism.4 We will see that in ancient
philosophy, the idea of wisdom, or better the figure of the sage, could be
interpreted as the historico-philosophical origin of this ideal. But we must
begin with the practice of spiritual exercises. Regarding the notion of a
“spiritual exercise,” at the beginning of his book What Is Ancient
Philosophy?, Pierre Hadot writes:
By this term, I mean practices which could be physical, as in dietary regimes, or discursive, as
in dialogue and meditation, or intuitive, as in contemplation, but which were all intended to
effect a modification and a transformation in the subject who practiced them. The philosophy
teachers’ discourse could also assume the form of a spiritual exercise, if the discourse were
presented in such a way that the disciple, as auditor, reader, or interlocutor, could make spiritual
progress and transform himself within.5

In short, as Hadot said in our book of conversations, a spiritual exercise is

“a voluntary, personal practice intended to bring about a transformation of
the individual, a transformation of the self,” and among the significant
examples of such a practice he cites a certain practice of Beethoven,
precisely because Beethoven “referred to the exercises of musical
composition that he required of his students, and that were meant to allow
them to attain a form of wisdom—one that might be called aesthetic—as
spiritual exercises.”6
According to Hadot, in antiquity, philosophy is “that activity by means of
which philosophers train themselves for wisdom”; here one must underline
the expression “train for wisdom,” because wisdom itself is a “transcendent
norm.”7 Thus, “philosophy, for mankind, consists of efforts toward wisdom
which always remain unfinished.”8 Describing in detail the figure of the
sage in ancient philosophy, and especially in the Stoic school, Hadot writes:
Foremost, for the Stoics, the sage is an exceptional being; there are very few, perhaps one, even
none at all. The figure of the sage is thus for them an almost unattainable idea, more a
transcendent norm than a concrete figure. … The Stoic philosopher knows that he can never
realize this ideal figure of the sage, but it exercises on him its attraction, provokes in him
enthusiasm and love, allows him to hear a call to live better, to become aware of the perfection
which he strives to attain. … The philosopher who trains for wisdom will try to form a nucleus
of inexpugnable inner freedom via spiritual exercises.9

Thus, it could be concluded, I believe, that philosophy as a spiritual

exercise toward wisdom is a form of moral perfectionism and therefore a
particular way of life.
Now, I can easily imagine your perplexity: spiritual exercises, moral
perfectionism, wisdom, what does all of this have to do with the
improvisations of the saxophonist Sonny Rollins? From my point of view,
philosophy is not primarily a doctrine or a theory, but rather an activity and
an attitude. This is why nothing prohibits the attitude that is expressed in
certain acts of improvisation from being named, without hesitation or
equivocation, “philosophical.”10 The activity of improvisation becomes a
philosophical activity when one deploys a practice of spiritual exercises that
aims at perfecting oneself. From this perspective, Rollins is a perfect
example of a model of moral perfectionism sustained by spiritual exercises.
In a 2006 interview, Rollins said, “I’m dissatisfied and I’m always
striving. … A lot of guys have learned their craft and they get to a place,
and they are satisfied, and the stuff they do is great. … In my case, my thing
is constantly looking for something else. I’m not satisfied yet. I know there
is more there.”11
Rollins’s dissatisfaction is certainly an aesthetic disposition, but it is also
and above all an ethical attitude: Rollins is always searching for his “next
self”—something beyond himself, a spiritual place never completely
reached. In discussing his concerts, famous for their extreme ardor and
energy, Rollins affirms:
There are certain concerts that I play, performances when I do feel that I have reached the higher
level. When that happens as a normality rather than rarely, then I will feel that I am there. Then
there will probably be something else I need to do, but I do feel that I am getting closer to more
of a complete expression. It’s a reachable goal, it is not something which is never going to
happen, but that doesn’t mean that will be the end. There will always be something else to do. I
think I can get to a better place.12

Here we can glimpse the possibility of a progress that is, so to speak,

spiritual (“the higher level,” “I am getting closer to a more complete
expression”), but, at the same time, the feeling that a definitive end is
impossible (“then there will probably be something else I need to do”).
Moreover, Rollins makes use of an explicitly ethical vocabulary to
characterize his attitude (“I think I can get to a better place”).
In another interview, from 2008, Rollins clearly articulates the paradox
represented by the duty to attain an end that is indeed impossible to attain—
a paradox typical of moral perfectionism: “What I’m looking for perhaps is
unattainable. I know that. But I certainly have a right to try to achieve it. It’s
my duty to achieve it.”13
This duty of reaching an inaccessible place is no metaphysical
abstraction: it is rather a duty that is made concrete in the necessity of
exercising oneself. In effect, this existential obligation, with its highly
particular structure, is elaborated in various traditions of thought and of
practice. Cavell has often insisted on the fact that moral perfectionism is not
another moral theory, but rather an attitude, a perspective, a vision of the
world that traverses the history of thought and of life. To cite a single
unexpected example of this perfectionist dimension: in a system of
practices as remote as possible from those of Rollins, namely Orthodox
Judaism, one finds, according to Yeshayahou Leibowitz, the idea of a
“reality always beyond that which is, that one can never attain, but which,
nevertheless, one must ceaselessly strive to attain.” What is such a reality
called? According to Jewish tradition, its name is precisely “redemption,” a
redemption therefore that is always still to come.14 In my opinion, as we
will see, in his own tradition Rollins himself is a figure of this redemption,
that is to say of this infinite exercise of ourselves.
Rollins is renowned for the periods during which he did nothing other
than practice, up to 15 hours per day. That which Rollins dubbed his
“relentless practicing” is a way of manifesting his ethical attitude:
I’ve taken several sabbaticals from performing and recording. I have a certain ideal when I play,
and this ideal has changed over the years. I’ve taken breaks because I’ve been frustrated with a
performance or I just wanted to go to the woodshed and experiment. I always become frustrated
when I’m not reaching what I hear for myself. … I never viewed practicing as a chore. I always
saw it as a necessity to improve.15

The interminable exercises of Rollins also highlight the priority of a certain

relationship with oneself and, in the case of Rollins, the necessity of
forming oneself in such a way that improvisation can become unlimited.
This improvisation, infinite in a certain sense, presupposes, according to
Rollins, a very particular relationship with oneself—strong but at the same
time mobile. It is just such a relationship with oneself that occupies the
center of Rollins’s existential attitude: “This is the struggle of life, to be
better people. That’s how I figured out what life is all about. This is what I
am trying to do. Life is an opportunity, but the hardest battle is with
ourselves. That is what I realize, and that’s what I am doing. … What
matters is you winning the battle with yourself.”16
This attitude is the foundation, the core of Rollins’s judgment: “As far as
I am concerned, a good band starts with yourself. It starts with me getting
my stuff together.”17 And “getting your stuff together” is a task that one is
never finished with.
Let us take the example of the relationship with oneself expressed by
Rollins in the music he created in the 1950s. In this music, one finds what I
will call a “horizontal inexhaustibility” within a form of the self. Let me
explain: Rollins created a form of himself that allowed him never to exhaust
an improvisation, to always invent new possibilities, as if the improvisation
was, literally, an infinite creation without determinate limits. The form of
Rollins’s self at the end of the 1950s is a form never filled in, one that
precedes all substance, a form without weight, always in movement, vital, a
form, one might say, whose dimensions are limitless. It is a form that
responds precisely to Rollins’s incessant exercises. Consider “I’m an Old
Cowhand” from the recording Way Out West (1957; see Figure 29.1).18
Rollins’s solo is magnificent; one perceives in it, at the same time, both
imagination and organization, yet it is a solo that is in a clear sense
unfinished. However, its felt incompleteness is of a very particular kind; it
concerns the inexhaustibility of the improvisation, an inexhaustibility
achieved thanks to a certain practice, a certain form of the self. In listening
to the alternate take of “I’m an Old Cowhand,” nearly twice as long as the
first version, one understands immediately that Rollins is capable of
continuing ad infinitum, until the end of the world, without repeating
himself. The fadeout of this alternative take is a sign of the interminable
activity of his improvisation, a symbol of his capacity to never fill in his
own form of the self; rather, he is always ready to dilate himself and to
prolong himself, to go forward. Without any doubt, in these years, there was
a sound, a clear style, that is to say a distinctive form called Rollins,
precisely that form which, within a piece, authorized a beyond, always
elsewhere, further on, which knew no permanent pause, no definitive
conclusion, no resting in peace.
Often it is Rollins’s cadences that demonstrate in the most unforgettable
manner this horizontal inexhaustibility; these are very evident moments of
his infinite creativity. The form that Rollins gives to these cadences
expresses, moreover, a musical version of the cosmic consciousness
described by Hadot. Among the aspects of this cosmic consciousness that
Hadot emphasized, there is the exercise of dilation, of the expansion of the
self into the cosmos, that is, the exercise “of becoming aware of his being
within the All, as a minuscule point of brief duration, but capable of dilating
into the immense field of infinite space and of seizing the whole of reality
in a single intuition.”19 At the same time that he describes the ideal of stoic
wisdom, Hadot speaks of cosmic consciousness, evoking a connection
between each instant and the entire universe:
 By becoming conscious of one single instant of our lives, one single beat of our hearts, we can
feel ourselves linked to the entire immensity of the cosmos, and to the wondrous fact of the
world’s existence. The whole universe is present in each part of reality. For the Stoics, this
experience of the instant corresponds to their theory of the mutual interpenetration of the parts
of the universe. Such an experience, however, is not necessarily linked to any theory. For
example, we find it expressed in the following verses by Blake: To see a World in a Grain of
Sand / And a Heaven in a Wild Flower, / Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand / And Eternity
in an hour.20

FIGURE 29.1 Sonny Rollins ([1957] 2010).

The intuitions, the pulsations of Sonny Rollins unveil the entire musical
universe, infinity heard in the mouthpiece of a saxophone. Rollins’s
breathing is metamorphosized into a short melody of several notes that
leads us on to a second melody, and then to yet another, etc.—melodies
between which we discover a reciprocal compenetration never imagined. Or
else a melody transforms itself into an extended improvisation that links, in
a spontaneous and natural manner, “high” music with “popular” music, jazz
and classical music, all the different moments of the history of jazz, and so
on. All things considered, it seems that a single note of Rollins
encompasses, from the outset, all musical worlds, as if his improvisation
unravels the cosmos itself. And one can understand that the consciousness
of Rollins “is plunged, like Seneca, into the totality of the cosmos: toti se
inserens mundo.”21
The greatness of Rollins, however, does not stop here, since there
remains another modality of “transcendence,” perhaps rarer than that which
I have just described, and which I will call the “vertical displacement” of
the form of the self: the hard, unexpected and shattering process of
surpassing oneself. One surpasses not simply a particular content of the
self, but even its established structure. This is the invention of a new form
of oneself, a transfiguration of one’s own identity, of the “ontological”
form, so to speak, of the self: it is a self-transcendence in which one goes
beyond the sound, the expression, the style, that is to say the form of the
self already realized—it is the occasion in which one becomes another. At
stake is no longer a horizon that extends without end; instead, the
fundamental configuration of the self is transformed. The experience is that
of the birth of a new self, lived as an elevation to a new plane of possibility
—hence a vertical surpassing, rather than a horizontal dilation (see Figure
29.2).22
This arduous, disturbing change is often provoked by an encounter with
another, not with just any other but with an exemplary figure, in which is
revealed the possibility and necessity of a vertical surpassing of the self. In
the case of Rollins, one could interpret in this way his encounter with
Coleman Hawkins, on the 1963 album Sonny Meets Hawk (see Figure
29.3).23 In general, Rollins makes a distinction between “copying from”
and “learning from”: “I didn’t try to copy others. I just tried to learn from
them.” And he continues: “If you have enough talent and you’re committed,
working with people who are superior to you always will improve your
playing.”24 In the specific relationship that interests us here, we must take
account of a remarkable letter, written to Hawkins in 1962 after having
heard one of his recent concerts, where Rollins expresses his esteem for him
utilizing the vocabulary of moral perfectionism: “Such tested and tried
musical achievement denotes and is subsidiary to personal character and
integrity of being.”25 And then, just after this, Rollins writes a remarkable
sentence on the exemplarity of Hawkins, a sentence worthy of Nietzsche in
Schopenhauer as Educator: “For you have ‘lit the flame’ of aspiration
within so many of us and you have epitomized the superiority of
‘excellence of endeavor’ and you stand today as a clear living picture and
example for us to learn from.”26
FIGURE 29.2 Sonny Rollins ([1965, 1968] 2008); hear, in particular, “Darn that Dream” to “Three
Little Words” (47:15–49:10).

In my view, Hawkins’s response to Rollins is found on Sonny Meets

Hawk. This very same Hawkins indubitably shows here his own capacity to
learn, and, more precisely, he makes us hear the lessons that he has learned
from Rollins. At this moment, Hawkins transcends the magnificent
Hawkins of “Body and Soul” of 1939; this transcendence is also a praise of
Rollins’s sound (see Figure 29.4). Instead of remaining within his own
style, Hawkins demonstrates his force, at one and the same time aesthetic
and ethical, through the creation of a new form of himself.27 This is a
Hawkins who, in a dazzling manner, comes after Rollins, a Hawkins
reformed, renewed, thanks to the practice of Rollins. Hawkins’s phrasing,
his rhythm, his attitude, are fully modern. In this context, the term modern
has the sense that Foucault brought to the fore:
I wonder whether we may not envisage modernity rather as an attitude than as a period of
history. And by “attitude,” I mean a mode of relating to contemporary reality; a voluntary choice
made by certain people; in the end, a way of thinking and feeling; a way, too, of acting and
behaving that at one and the same time marks a relation of belonging and presents itself as a
task.28
FIGURE 29.3 Coleman Hawkins and Sonny Rollins, ([1963] 2003).

In Sonny Meets Hawk, Hawkins shows his capacity to put himself into
relation with the contemporary, that is with Rollins, given that in 1963 the
contemporary tenor saxophone was represented precisely by Sonny Rollins,
or, more exactly, Rollins was one of the two reference points of the
contemporary tenor saxophone, the other of course being John Coltrane.
Hawkins thus manifests a voluntary choice in the new mode of playing that
he adopts; in short, he exhibits a manner of thinking and of feeling, of
acting and of conducting himself that marks his belonging to what is
happening now, and at the same time presents a task to accomplish. If we
take the piece “Lover Man,” for example, we can see, and the effect is
unforgettable, this modern attitude of Hawkins.29 It is as if Hawkins had
said to Rollins, “Thanks to your example, I too have learned to surpass
myself, to play beyond my usual style, that style which is the basis for my
immense reputation.” It is an understatement to say that this ethics of
vertical displacement is a risky task. And with his customary light-
handedness of expression, Rollins recognizes the success of Hawkins:
“Hawkins is timeless and what he plays is beyond style and category. In
fact, it’s a shame that people tend to categorize music. A fine musician can
play with anyone, just as a fine person can get along with anyone.”30

FIGURE 29.4 Coleman Hawkins (2004).

 In reality, very few musicians are “beyond category,” in such a way that
they can play with “anyone.” This is another way of measuring the
exemplarity manifested by Hawkins.
This musical response of Hawkins to Rollins finds a disconcerting
reaction in the new mode of playing of Rollins himself. In “Lover Man,”
the enigma is that Rollins no longer plays like the young, and already
celebrated, Rollins. He does not compete with Hawkins; on the contrary, he
turns away from the new style of Hawkins, that is to say that very Hawkins
reformed by the imprint of Rollins himself. Rollins creates here a new form
of himself, not only by a phrasing and a rhythm far from that of the 1950s,
but by an innovative, unprecedented sonority and tonality. We hear Rollins
in the very process that consists of “detaching himself from himself.” This
radical change could provoke a misunderstanding, as if Rollins had not
respected the victory (over himself) of Hawkins. In effect, this is the
judgment of Lee Konitz:
It bothered me what he [Sonny Rollins] did on the recording with Coleman Hawkins and Paul
Bley. I thought that he was being disrespectful. Maybe it was necessary for him, to separate
himself from Hawk as a father figure. But if he’d played inspired, the way he can, it would have
been a great tribute to Hawk, and it wouldn’t have sounded like Hawk at all. … He just played
very out. But I think Paul Bley [the pianist on the date] can do that for you, by playing a cluster
or two—I’ve had that experience with him of just wanting to go out. But why do it when Pappa
[Hawkins] is there playing beautifully? Sonny could play beautifully too.31

I don’t hear Rollins’s playing as answering to a psychological necessity, that

is, as anxious to “separate himself from Hawk”; on the contrary, I see this
recording as a true homage to Hawkins, inspired by the new sound of Hawk
—no doubt, it is a very singular homage, an homage rendered to an
exemplary creativity, the homage of moral perfectionism. Typically, when
the term beautiful is pronounced in a judgment directed against someone, it
is a question of trying to narrow the possibilities of being creative. We
already know the sound of the beautiful; and it is certain that in 1963 it was
not the sound of Rollins on Sonny Meets Hawk. Rollins wanted to go
beyond the “beautiful,” beyond his beauty, and create an alternative
acoustic space, inventing a form that puts to the test the beauty expected by
those who have heard his recordings; that is to say he wanted to render less
stable and less evident that modern beauty represented on this recording not
by Rollins, but by the “post-Rollins” sound of Hawkins. Let us hope that
jazz will always remain a privileged site of such creativity, such newness.
As Rollins said, “The essence of jazz you know, it’s improvisational; you
know you do like the creator, there is always something creative, every
raindrop is different, so there is always something to do that has not been
done in a way that’s creative so there is no end to creativity.”32 The practice
of jazz as creative improvisation without fixed limits is not in the least
banal, but here we must distinguish several levels of improvisation. It may
well be that the level of creativity that is the most unusual and the most
disquieting is that which gives rise to a new form of oneself, and in this
recording it is precisely this level that is attained twice, in two different
ways, by Hawkins and then by Rollins.
In my view, the manner in which Rollins responded to the exemplarity of
Hawkins manifested the most profound respect. It is as if Rollins had said
to Hawkins: “In light of the way in which you have surpassed yourself, I
see myself obliged to create new relations with myself, I acknowledge my
own incompleteness,” and then Rollins creates an unanticipated form. It is
precisely in playing with Hawkins that Rollins gives a new and intensified
ethical-political attention to his modernity, a modernity that, in the terms of
Foucault, is at once a limit attitude and an experimental attitude. Rollins’s
playing poses the central question of the limit-attitude: “In what is given to
us as universal, necessary, obligatory, what place is occupied by what is
singular, contingent, and due to arbitrary constraints?”33 The “performance”
of Rollins is in effect a philosophical critique, not a Kantian critique
exercised “in the form of necessary limitation,” but a practical critique
brought about “in the form of a possible overcoming.”34 Every form of
ourselves that is sedimented in history, that has become rigidified, seems to
us to be a natural, inevitable form, and consequently overcoming,
considered as “unnatural,” never gives rise to the reassuring feelings of
beauty and of harmony. The attempt at overcoming is necessarily linked to
an experimental attitude: “But if we are not to settle for the affirmation or
the empty dream of freedom, it seems to me that this historico-critical
attitude must also be an experimental one,” that is to say an attitude that
must “put itself to the test of reality, of contemporary reality, both to grasp
the points where change is possible and desirable and to determine the
precise form this change should take.”35 And it is up to Rollins, through his
vertical displacement, to give a precise form to the musical transformation.
In order to specify Rollins’s ethos, it does not seem to me exaggerated to
use the description given by Foucault: “I shall thus characterize the
philosophical ethos appropriate to the critical ontology of ourselves as a
historico-practical test of the limits that we may go beyond, and thus as
work carried out by ourselves upon ourselves as free beings.”36
This putting to the test of oneself as a free being is found again during the
performance with Ornette Coleman that took place at the concert for
Rollins’s 80th birthday. The piece “Sonnymoon For Two,” played by
Rollins who knows how many times, begins in a very typical manner: after
the entry of Coleman and the “freer” sound for which he is known, Rollins
begins to detach himself from the melodic and rhythmic contours of the
piece, and in the end Rollins attains a level of freedom which magnificently
demonstrates the value of his practice of spiritual exercises and his
commitment, even at 80 years old, not to rigidify himself, not to let himself
become petrified, to be always animated and courageous (see Figure
29.5).37 Here again one can link Sonny Rollins and Foucault in the precise
sense that Rollins is “never completely at ease with his own self-
evidences”; he is always looking for the “indispensible mobility.”38 Sonny
Rollins is the living image of moral perfectionism.
Let us now return to the work on oneself and to Rollins’s spiritual
exercises. In a 2005 conversation, Rollins claims, “I’m always trying to
prove myself and improve myself. … I’m never satisfied with my playing
and that’s led me into experimenting with lots of different kinds of
things.”39
The availability, the receptivity, the agility of Rollins allow us to see an
attitude of experimental freedom, prepared by a constant practice of
exercises, exercises that involve the entire spirit. Thanks to these spiritual
exercises it is possible to prepare oneself, to make one’s spirit open and
lively; yet these spiritual exercises in themselves are not the guarantee of a
striking, brilliant, truly creative result. They are, one might say, a condition,
a crucial discipline, even if not sufficient, for reaching the summit of
improvisation in jazz. Moreover, it is exactly at the moment when one
glimpses the possibility of the vertical surpassing of oneself that the fields
of uncertainty and risk widen; thus, it is also the moment in which the
support and orientation furnished by an exemplary personality provide
courage and the strength to put oneself to the test. Nevertheless, we never
find ourselves faced with an ineluctable necessity to recognize and accept
the exemplarity of someone; at most we perceive the attraction of the
exemplary figure, we feel a provocation that provides us more energy: a
new élan. Without the challenge of exemplarity, our exercises remain static;
without the work of spiritual exercises, exemplarity is a nebulous ideal. In
the end, it is up to each of us, as individuals, to go forward or to remain in
place, that is to say to construct a certain relationship to ourselves. In moral
perfectionism, there is no ethical inevitability.

FIGURE 29.5 Sonny Rollins (2011).

In an interview given in 2007, Sonny Rollins weaves together creativity,

the perspective of transcendence, and exercise. I conclude, therefore, with
his philosophical intuition, as an emblem of moral perfectionism: “Music
itself has no end, there’s always more to learn. I know I want to be able to
reach a way of playing that transcends everything. I’ve not done that yet,
that’s why I keep practicing.”40

POSTSCRIPT
In this essay I have emphasized the relation between Sonny Rollins’s
improvisations and certain Stoic spiritual exercises.41 Other modes of
improvisation can be linked to the spiritual exercises of other schools of
ancient thought. Elsewhere I have argued that Steve Lacy’s last recorded
solo concert, Reflections, manifests a form of Plotinian spiritual exercise,42
and I have claimed that the posthumously released duo between Charlie
Haden and Jim Hall exhibits a form of epicurean improvisation.43 I would
also not hesitate to say that John Coltrane’s Ascension exemplifies the
existential attitude and spiritual exercises of ancient cynicism.44 The
diversity of kinds of improvisation can be related to the multiplicity of
spiritual exercises. All of them, however, aim at self-transformation, which
always also has a social dimension. The problem for all of us, as Haden so
clearly and compellingly put it in 2014, is that “when I put down my
instrument, that’s when the challenge starts, because to learn how to be that
kind of human being at that level that you are when you’re playing—that’s
the key, that’s the hard part.”45 In other words, as I might put it, the spiritual
exercises of improvisation must become a way of life.

NOTES
1. Yehudi Menuhin, Musica e vita interiore (Palermo: Edizioni rueBallu, 2010), 78.
2. Buddy Rich, quoted in Georges Paczynski, Une histoire de la batterie de jazz, (Paris: Outre
Mesure, 1997), 1: 276.
3. I would like to insist on the fact that to understand the meaning of my text, one absolutely must
listen to the indicated tracks of music and video.
4. See, for example, Stanley Cavell, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of
Emersonian Perfectionism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).
5. Pierre Hadot, translated by Michael Chase, What Is Ancient Philosophy? (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2002), 6.
6. Pierre Hadot, translated by Marc Djaballah and Michael Chase, The Present Alone Is Our
Happiness: Conversations with Jeannie Carlier and Arnold I. Davidson (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, [2001] 2011), 87, 92. In this connection, Hadot cites a book by Elizabeth
 Brisson, Le sacre de musicien: La référence à l’Antiquité chez Beethoven (Paris: CNRS
Éditions, 2000).
7. Hadot, What Is Ancient Philosophy?, 220.
8. Hadot, What Is Ancient Philosophy?, 265–266.
9. Pierre Hadot, “La figure du sage dans l’Antiquité gréco-latine,” in Études de philosophie
ancienne (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1998), 242, 245, 248.
10. Cf. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. C.K. Ogden (Mineola, NY:
Dover, [1922] 1999), 4, 112, “Philosophy is not a theory but an activity”; and Michel Foucault,
“What Is Enlightenment?,” in The Foucault Reader, trans. Catherine Porter, ed. Paul Rabinow
(New York: Pantheon Books, 1984).
11. Sonny Rollins, “Interview,” Academy of Achievement: A Museum of Living History,
http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/rol0int-4 (2006), accessed March 15, 2015.
12. Rollins, “Interview.”
13. Sonny Rollins, with Marc Myers, “Interview: Sonny Rollins, Part 3,” Jazz Wax,
http://www.jazzwax.com/2008/02/sonny-rollins-2.html (February 21, 2008), accessed March 15,
2015.
14. Yeshayahou Leibowitz, Les fêtes juives. Réflexions sur les solennités du judaïsme (Paris: Cert,
2008), 112.
15. Rollins, “Interview: Sonny Rollins, Part 3.” Also see “Interview: Sonny Rollins, Part 1,” Jazz
Wax, http://www.jazzwax.com/2008/02/sonny-rollins-p.html (February 21, 2008), accessed
March 15, 2015.
16. Rollins, “Interview.”
17. Franck Médioni, “Sonny Rollins and David S. Ware: Sonny Meets David,” All About Jazz,
http://www.allaboutjazz.com/sonny-rollins-and-david-s-ware-sonny-meets-david-by-franck-
medioni.php?&pg=5, (October 21, 2005), accessed March 15, 2015.
18. The alternate take of “I’m an Old Cowhand” is on Sonny Rollins, Way Out West (with bonus
tracks), Original Jazz Classics 7231993, [1957] 2010, compact disc.
19. Hadot, What Is Ancient Philosophy?, 205.
20. Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault, trans.
Michael Chase (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 260.
21. Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, 252.
22. Watch Rollins’s performance from “Darn that Dream” to “Three Little Words” (47:15–49:10) on
Sonny Rollins, Sonny Rollins Live in ’65 & ’68,Jazz Icons 2119011, [1965, 1968] 2008, DVD-
video disc.
23. Coleman Hawkins and Sonny Rollins, Sonny Meets Hawk, BMG 37349, [1963] 2003, compact
disc.
24. Rollins, “Interview: Sonny Rollins, Part 1.” Also see “Interview: Sonny Rollins, Part 2,” Jazz
Wax, http://www.jazzwax.com/2008/02/sonny-rollins-1.html (February 21, 2008), accessed
March 15, 2015.
25. Rollins, “You Have Lit the Flame of Aspiration Within So Many of Us (letter to Coleman
Hawkins),” Letters of Note, http://www.lettersofnote.com/2010/10/you-have-lit-flame-of-
aspiration-within.html (October 13, 1962), accessed March 15, 2015.
26. Sonny Rollins, “You Have Lit the Flame of Aspiration.”
27. The classic performance of “Body and Soul” is on Coleman Hawkins, Jazz Ballads 6, Membran
222536, 2004, compact disc.
28. Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?,” 39.
29. The performance of “Lover Man” is on Hawkins, Sonny Meets Hawk.
30. Hawkins, Sonny Meets Hawk, liner notes.
31. Andy Hamilton, Lee Konitz: Conversations on the Improviser’s Art (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 2007), 83.
 32. Médioni, “Sonny Rollins and David S. Ware: Sonny Meets David.”
33. Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?,” 45.
34. Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?,” 45.
35. Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?,” 46.
36. Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?,” 47.
37. Sonny Rollins, Road Shows, Vol. 2, Doxy Records/Emarcy 0015949-02, 2011, compact disc.
38. Michel Foucault, “For an Ethic of Discomfort,” in Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, vol.
3, Power, trans. Robert Hurley and others, ed. James D. Faubion (New York: The New Press,
2000), 448.
39. Hamilton, Lee Konitz, 58.
40. Sonny Rollins, “In My Mind, I Haven’t Reached My Vision,” Inter Press Service,
http://www.ipsnews.net/2007/11/qa-39in-my-mind-i-haven39t-reached-my-vision39/
(November 1, 2007), accessed March 15, 2015.
41. In revising this translation, I have sometimes modified published translations of other French
texts. My primary concern has been to preserve philosophical precision, even if occasionally at
the cost of literary elegance. The author and the editors would like to thank Diane Brentari and
Souleymane Bachir Diagne for additional close reading of the text.
42. Arnold I. Davidson, “L’improvvisazione matura,” Il Sole24 Ore Domenica,
http://www.banchedati.ilsole24ore.com/doc.get?uid=domenica-DO20141228032AAA
(December 28, 2014), accessed March 15, 2015.
43. Davidson, “Epicuro si curerebbe con il jazz,” Il Sole24 Ore Domenica,
http://www.banchedati.ilsole24ore.com/doc.get?uid=domenica-DO20141228032AAA (March
15, 2015), accessed March 15, 2015.
44. John Coltrane, “Ascension (Editions I and II),” Impulse! #1792024. Compact disc, [1965] 2009.
45. Charlie Haden, “ ‘Live in the Present’: Charlie Haden Remembered,” National Public Radio
(United States), http://www.npr.org/2014/07/18/332544960/live-in-the-present-charlie-haden-
remembered (July 18, 2014), accessed March 15, 2015.

WORKS CITED
Brisson, Elizabeth. Le sacre de musicien: La référence à l’Antiquité chez Beethoven. Paris: CNRS
Éditions, 2000.
Cavell, Stanley. Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian
Perfectionism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.
Coltrane, John. “Ascension (Editions I and II).” Impulse! #1792024. Compact disc, [1965] 2009.
Davidson, Arnold I. “Epicuro si curerebbe con il jazz.” Il Sole24 Ore Domenica,
http://www.banchedati.ilsole24ore.com/doc.get?uid=domenica-DO20141228032AAA (March 15,
2015), accessed March 15, 2015.
Davidson, Arnold I. “L’improvvisazione matura.” Il Sole24 Ore Domenica,
http://www.banchedati.ilsole24ore.com/doc.get?uid=domenica-DO20141228032AAA (December
28, 2014), accessed March 15, 2015.
Foucault, Michel. “What Is Enlightenment?” In The Foucault Reader. Translated by Catherine Porter.
Edited by Paul Rabinow, 32–50. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984.
Foucault, Michel. “For an Ethic of Discomfort.” In Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984. Vol. 3,
Power. Translated by Robert Hurley and others. Edited by James D. Faubion, 443–448. New York:
The New Press, 2000.
Haden, Charlie. “ ‘Live in the Present’: Charlie Haden Remembered.” National Public Radio (United
States), http://www.npr.org/2014/07/18/332544960/live-in-the-present-charlie-haden-remembered
 (July 18, 2014), accessed March 15, 2015.
Hadot, Pierre. “La figure du sage dans l’Antiquité gréco-latine.” In Études de philosophie ancienne,
233–57. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1998.
Hadot, Pierre, translated by Marc Djaballah and Michael Chase. The Present Alone Is Our
Happiness: Conversations with Jeannie Carlier and Arnold I. Davidson. Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2011.
Hadot, Pierre. Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault. Translated
by Michael Chase. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005.
Hadot, Pierre. What Is Ancient Philosophy? Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002.
Hamilton, Andy. Lee Konitz: Conversations on the Improviser’s Art. Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 2007.
Hawkins, Coleman. Jazz Ballads 6. Membran #222536. Compact disc, 2004.
Hawkins, Coleman, and Sonny Rollins. Sonny Meets Hawk. BMG #37349. Compact disc, 2003.
Leibowitz, Yeshayahou. Les fêtes juives. Réflexions sur les solennités du judaïsme. Paris: Cert, 2008.
Médioni, Franck. “Sonny Rollins and David S. Ware: Sonny Meets David.” All About Jazz,
http://www.allaboutjazz.com/sonny-rollins-and-david-s-ware-sonny-meets-david-by-franck-
medioni.php?&pg=5 (October 21, 2005), accessed March 15, 2015.
Menuhin, Yehudi. Musica e vita interiore. Palermo: Edizioni rue Ballu, 2010.
Paczynski, Georges. Une histoire de la batterie de jazz. Vol. 1. Paris: Outre Mesure, 1997.
Rollins, Sonny. “In My Mind, I Haven’t Reached My Vision.” Inter Press Service,
http://www.ipsnews.net/2007/11/qa-39in-my-mind-i-haven39t-reached-my-vision39/ (November
1, 2007), accessed March 15, 2015.
Rollins, Sonny. “Interview.” Academy of Achievement: A Museum of Living History,
http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/rol0int-4 (2006), accessed March 15, 2015.
Rollins, Sonny. Road Shows. Vol. 2. Doxy Records/Emarcy #0015949-02. Compact disc, 2011.
Rollins, Sonny. Sonny Rollins Live in ’65 & ’68. Jazz Icons #2119011. DVD-video disc, [1965, 1968]
2008.
Rollins, Sonny. Way Out West (with bonus tracks). Original Jazz Classics #7231993. Compact disc,
[1957] 2010.
Rollins, Sonny. “You Have Lit the Flame of Aspiration Within So Many of Us (letter to Coleman
Hawkins).” Letters of Note, http://www.lettersofnote.com/2010/10/you-have-lit-flame-of-
aspiration-within.html (October 13, 1962), accessed March 15, 2015.
Rollins, Sonny, with Marc Myers. “Interview: Sonny Rollins, Part 1.” Jazz Wax,
http://www.jazzwax.com/2008/02/sonny-rollins-p.html (February 21, 2008), accessed March 15,
2015.
Rollins, Sonny, with Marc Myers. “Interview: Sonny Rollins, Part 2.” Jazz Wax,
http://www.jazzwax.com/2008/02/sonny-rollins-1.html (February 21, 2008), accessed March 15,
2015.
Rollins, Sonny, with Marc Myers. “Interview: Sonny Rollins, Part 3.” Jazz Wax,
http://www.jazzwax.com/2008/02/sonny-rollins-2.html (February 21, 2008), accessed March 15,
2015.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Translated by C. K. Ogden. Mineola, NY:
Dover Publications, [1922] 1999.
 CHAPTER 30
IMPROVISATION AND ECCLESIAL ETHICS

SAMUEL WELLS

IMPROVISATION in the theater is a practice through which actors seek to

develop trust in themselves and one another in order that they may conduct
unscripted dramas without fear. In my own work I have sought to describe
how the Christian church may become a community of trust in order that it
may faithfully encounter the unknown of the future without fear. This
involves a treatment of how the story and practices of the church shape and
empower Christians with the uninhibited freedom sometimes experienced
by theatrical improvisers. What is involved is a renarration of Christian
ethics, not as the art of performing the Scriptures, but as faithfully
improvising on the Christian tradition. To understand that renarration
requires a journey through the contemporary field of Christian ethics, an
identification of the most fertile territory for Christians seeking to be
faithful in challenging times. It then involves a brief outline of what is at
stake in improvisatory ethics, and some examples of its promise and
challenges in a contemporary context.

CONTEMPORARY CHRISTIAN ETHICS

Universal Ethics. Ethics is conventionally taught as a face-off between two
rival conceptions of how to pursue the good. One approach, known as
deontological ethics, is based around an absolute sense of right and wrong.
Precisely where those qualities of right and wrong are located is understood
differently by various proponents. Most obviously, those who follow divine
command ethics locate them within God’s revealed word—explicitly, the
Ten Commandments and other scriptural passages that leave little apparent
room for ambiguity. Meanwhile, those who advocate natural law ethics
locate right and wrong in the discernment of the precepts, limits, and
purposes written into human existence. Then there are those who follow
Immanuel Kant, for whom right is equivalent to duty, and duty can be
rationally discerned by each individual person’s conscience, provided they
follow a rule which he calls the categorical imperative.1
Another approach, known as consequential ethics, makes relative
judgments about right and wrong by evaluating the likely outcomes of
different possible actions. In other words, this approach shifts attention
from action (or motivation) to outcome. The most common form of
consequentialism is utilitarianism, which seeks to calculate the good by
assessing what will bring about the greatest happiness for the greatest
number.2 Consequentialism has attracted a great deal of anxiety because in
most of its forms it seems to abandon an absolute sense of right and wrong,
and thus to open the door to moral relativism. Nonetheless, because it
doesn’t appear to require commitment to a prior system of belief or
reasoning, and because it upholds the subtler quality of common sense over
the simpler commitment to consistency, consequentialism has proved to be
the dominant style of reasoning in public discourse and policy-making.
When Barack Obama said in his 2009 inauguration address that he was
committed to “what works,” he was propounding the essence of
consequentialism.3
While these two understandings of ethics long seemed the only players in
the game, in the last 50 years they have come under criticism on broadly
two grounds, both of which highlight what they have in common; thus, I see
them as two versions of the same approach, which I call “universal ethics,”
rather than two rival approaches.
Subversive Ethics. The first criticism of deontological and consequential
ethics is that both are unaware of, or unconcerned by, their common
assumption that the white, Western male is the unquestioned universal
moral subject. Because they are both fundamentally concerned to offer a
perspective that is binding on everybody, these perspectives exclude or
ignore information that is particular to agents or circumstances or activities.
But such information is, the criticism maintains, the heart of ethics.
Moreover, the Jesus of the gospels seems less inclined to overarching
theories that work in all circumstances, and more drawn to the plight of the
least, the last, and the lost. Jesus, this criticism maintains, exhibits a bias to
the poor. Thus, Christian ethics should imitate Jesus in privileging the
perspective of those on the underside of class, race and/or gender prejudice,
disadvantage, discrimination, or exclusion. I call this criticism, and the field
of ethics it inaugurates, “subversive ethics,” because it believes ethics is not
so much for everybody, but principally for the excluded.
Ecclesial Ethics. The second criticism is that both perspectives assume
that the focus of ethics is the agent’s moment of decision. But life is not
lived lurching from crisis to crisis. What agents even perceive as a
dilemma, and the way they would describe that quandary, is dependent on
the world in which they imagine themselves to be living, and how they
already see that world. When agents do face a crisis, they will act from
habit rather than from rule or calculation. On January 15, 2009, US Airways
flight 1549 from New York to Charlotte, North Carolina, with 155
passengers and crew on board, was disabled by a flock of Canada geese that
flew into its engines three minutes after takeoff. The pilot, Chesley
Sullenberger, drawing on countless years of rehearsal for multiple
emergencies, calmly surveyed the possible options before ditching safely in
the Hudson River, with no loss of life. Sullenberger was not aware at any
stage that he had made a decision; he had simply conformed to the best
practice in which he had been trained.4 Hence the significance of the Duke
of Wellington’s words after the final defeat of Napoleon in 1815: “The
battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton.”5 By the time the
English troops were on the battlefield, the key factors relating to their
success or failure were already in place. They had been settled in the
formation of character of the commanding officers at English public schools
a decade or more previously.
The question then becomes, how does character become formed so that,
when a flock of geese hit an aircraft, or soldiers face a battle, the important
parts of the story have already happened, and what would otherwise be a
crisis no longer appears like the crucial moment? It is this question that is at
the root of the third strand of contemporary ethics, which I call “ecclesial
ethics.” I call it “ecclesial” because the answer many contemporary
theologians give to this central question is that this is precisely what the
Christian church does: it forms the characters of its members so that they
learn to take the right things for granted, and no longer experience life as a
sequence of insoluble dilemmas. Sullenberger and the Duke of Wellington
are not substitutes for the church, but rather they witness to the fact that the
only way in which character is formed is through sustained communities of
practice that foster traditions in which the character of members is shaped
over time.
How the church actually does this has been the subject of a good deal of
my own writing.6 What binds the diverse field of ecclesial ethics together is
that, like subversive ethicists but for slightly different reasons, its
proponents are suspicious of the whole project of universal ethics, which
they see as an attempt to save the world without the need for the church in
general and Jesus in particular. Ecclesial ethicists often share the criticisms
subversive ethics makes of universal ethics, but in turn find fault with much
of subversive ethics because it seems to be content with criticism and to
lack a sufficiently constructive agenda.
Many people in higher education and public life find it easier to
incorporate subversive ethics than ecclesial ethics. It has become
commonplace to advocate for diversity and promote programs that enhance
the accessibility of education to underrepresented social groups. But the
fear about ecclesial ethics lingers in two minor and two major keys.
The two minor reservations are, first, that the church the ecclesial
proponents talk about does not exist—that it is a fantasy made possible only
by ignoring the hopelessly divided contemporary reality and its convoluted
and often ignominious history. To this I can only say that I have served as a
priest for over 20 years and throughout that time I have always been able to
say that the church the ecclesial ethicists describe exists in the congregation
I have been with at the time. Critics who say the church of ecclesial ethics
doesn’t exist seem to assume that Jesus founded the church on the Beloved
Disciple, full of grace and truth, whereas all the gospel writers tell us in fact
he founded the church on Peter, full of clumsiness and fragility. The second
minor reservation is that Christians have no special claim on the good, in
theory or in practice. There are plenty of people who are good but not
Christian. I have no problem in celebrating vignettes of grace wherever they
may dwell, but it seems to me the logic of this version of universal ethics is
to assume that Jesus Christ’s incarnation, life, death, and resurrection made
no material difference to human possibility, and that, while being a
respectable philosophical position, is not an orthodox theological one.
The two major reservations are, first, that if it gives up the shared project
of universal ethics, Christianity has no public way of advocating that its
claims are true. Kantian and consequential ethics are all about seeking
grounds for public evaluation that do not depend on revelation. To give up
on this quest feels to many like fideism—the holding to truth claims that
have no visible means of support. The second, and most widely aired, major
reservation is that if Christians are principally concerned with fostering
their own virtues, they might be expected to withdraw from the public
square into a sequestered space of pious righteousness.
I would respond to both these concerns by asking again, in a postmodern
vein, whether there really is such a thing as universal ethics, or such a thing
as a unitary public square, that are not the construction of those with the
power and interest to claim it is so.7 If there is no neutral territory for ethics
to occupy, no neutral public square for the church to inhabit, surely the
church must ensure that, when it is interacting with those of other faiths or
none, it is doing so as the church, and when its members are in plural
conversations across traditions it is their baptism, rather than their race or
nationality or species, that they are regarding as the definitive mark of their
own identity.8
Simply put, the first characteristic of ecclesial ethics is its fusion of
Aristotle and the New Testament. In more contemporary terms, it is the
sometimes uneasy meeting-point of two major turns on philosophy and
theology: the recovery of virtue, represented by figures such as Alasdair
MacIntyre; and the Christocentric turn in ethics inspired by Karl Barth but
embodied more specifically by the Mennonite theologian John Howard
Yoder. To map the contours of ecclesial ethics I shall, initially, outline these
two dimensions in turn, beginning with virtue.
Imagine a European country were to be invaded and overrun by a foreign
power. Imagine there remained pockets of resistance. What would the
foreign power do? Most likely it would round up such insurgents as it could
find, and torture them until it garnered sufficient information to discover the
whereabouts of the rest. And what kind of people would it find most
threatening? Probably those who had sufficient convictions, and came from
sufficiently deep-rooted communities, that they had a profound sense of
their own identity and a confidence that their people would still be around
long after the invaders had been sent back or been assimilated. In other
words, those whose communities had a character that could not be
dismantled by simply picking off individuals.
 A painful question for those who are members of churches is this: Would
they, or would any members of their churches, be considered worth
torturing? Have they concentrated so much on aligning themselves with
public imagination or developing inner states of the heart that they have lost
sight of the communal practices that might constitute a genuine threat to an
invader by offering a deeply rooted alternative tradition? Or would they
simply be pushovers, ready to accommodate, eager to find influence,
personal wellbeing, or a safe place in a dangerous time?
This is what virtue ethics are about.9 Virtue ethics portray the
development of a particular kind of power, known as virtue, which might
precisely enable a person or a people to withstand fear and temptation and
deprivation and persecution in the face of an invading army. Virtue ethicists
examine the “playing fields of Eton” and similar places where character is
formed through communal practices shaped over generations in tradition.
Such practices are time-honored activities, integral to a whole way of life,
which are not only good in themselves, but also manifest training in
excellence more broadly. In the 1985 film Witness, set in Lancaster County,
Pennsylvania, the whole Amish community at the center of the film gathers
in one place to raise a barn for a young couple who recently married.
Raising the barn combines technical skill, communal interdependence,
corporate celebration, and a kind of liturgical focus for the village.10 These
kinds of practices create a tradition—not as a static inheritance from the
past, but as a lively ongoing debate about the good, shaped by practices
honed over time.11
One further dimension of virtue ethics is their teleological character—
that is, their orientation to a particular goal. For example, in 1 Corinthians
14, in his discussion of speaking in tongues, Paul insists that his readers
follow the telos that says, “Let all things be done for building up,” that is,
for the building up of the congregation. This then provides an index by
which the relative merits of a wide variety of activities and expressions may
be evaluated. For virtue ethicists, it is hard to see how a vulnerable person
may be enjoined to fulfill an onerous commitment without an explicit
articulation of a telos. A frequent criticism of liberal democracies by virtue
ethicists is that they strive to forge a society without identifying a telos.
The second major dimension of ecclesial ethics is its Christological turn.
The term narrative is used in a number of ways in ethics and theology. It
can identify the way the agent is inextricably embedded in a network of
relationships and commitments, and can also articulate the way in which the
self comes to have a coherent identity over time. In these senses, narrative
is part of the critique of decisionist ethics. Inspired by figures such as
MacIntyre and John Milbank, it has become fashionable for those involved
in ecclesial ethics to trace a historical account, known as a declension
narrative, of some kind of a fall from a time when ethics and theology were
less problematic to their present impoverished state.12 But the sense of
narrative that is most prominent in ecclesial ethics is that which follows
Karl Barth in saying that the narrative of Jesus portrayed in the gospels, and
more broadly the narrative of Israel and the church that surround it,
preceding and flowing from it, constitutes the definitive narrative in relation
to which all of Christian ethics takes shape.13
This view is most fully articulated in the work of John Howard Yoder,
who demonstrates how the particular details of Jesus’s life disclose the
elements of Christian social ethics. Yoder identifies the key moment as
Jesus’s nonviolent confrontation with the powers in Jerusalem. It is what
Jesus represented—in contrast to what the violent Barabbas, or the
accommodating Caiaphas, or the withdrawing Essenes stood for—that, for
Yoder, constitutes the heart of Christian ethics.14 Thus it is a quick leap
from Christocentrism to a commitment to nonviolence. Jesus said, “Love
your enemies”: when he listed the details of what this involved, telling his
followers to turn the other cheek and bless those who cursed them, he was
outlining an ethic that he himself embodied on his journey to the cross. For
those like Stanley Hauerwas who seek to combine Yoder’s Christocentrism
with MacIntyre’s virtue ethic, nonviolence becomes the testing ground,
because to be a nonviolent community requires profound practices that train
disciples in witness that falls short of violent fight or terrified flight.15
Such an emphasis on Jesus’s ministry and on the ethical significance of
his cross and resurrection challenges conventional notions of politics. Now
the church, living in the power of resurrection and Pentecost, has the key to
a very different understanding of public life. It offers a transformed notion
of the past, based around the forgiveness of sins, and a transformed notion
of the future, based on the promise of eternal life. Thus Christians can
balance the ways they seek to infuse the social order, as salt, or offer an
example, as light, knowing that the possibilities of human interaction have
been renewed and charted in Jesus.
Improvisation
I now consider how improvisation fits into the sphere of ecclesial ethics.16
The first move is to suggest that drama is a better notion than narrative for
describing the way the Christian story is embodied.17 The Bible becomes
the neck of an hourglass, situated between the enacted events of which it
tells the story, and the embodied action with which the church seeks to
respond. While the neck of the hourglass is narrative, the events and the
response are both performed; thus drama is a more suitable genre than
narrative for understanding the role of the Bible in Christian ethics.
Think of the Biblical drama as a five-act play. Act One is creation; Act
Two, Israel; Act Three, Jesus; Act Four, the church; and Act Five, the
eschaton. Secular ethics are inclined to assume that they operate in a one-
act play, where it is their responsibility to bring about the right outcome.
But living in Act Four, the church has an eschatological perspective. The
most important things have already happened in the first three acts (notably
the third), and all that is unresolved will be completed by God in Act Five.
Many of the wrong turns the church makes can be described as living in the
wrong act. For example, to live as if the Messiah has not yet come and
God’s character has not been fully revealed is to live in Act Two; to assume
our day is the crucial one and what we do today will determine the future of
creation is to live in Act Three; to believe it is our responsibility to make
the world come out right is to live in Act Five.
For all the strengths of the metaphor of scripted drama, it is not
sufficient. Life continues to present novel and unpredictable challenges that
the text does not explicitly allow for. There have been 2,000 years of
performances of the script, and these must be included in the discernment of
faithful embodiment. The idea of a script implies that ethics is about
recreating a golden era when disciples once got the story right. All these
shortcomings in the notion of ethics as performance can tend toward the
church withdrawing from engagement with the challenges of the world—
like the slave with the one talent burying it, rather than trading with it, for
fear of getting things wrong.
Thus emerge the themes of theatrical improvisation as a way of
understanding the practice of Christian ethics. Scripture offers countless
models of improvisation. In particular the Old Testament account of the
Exile and the New Testament account of the Acts of the Apostles provide
sustained studies in how the people of God may draw on long-practiced
habits to act in new circumstances. Jeremiah portrays God as a potter who
finds the clay is spoiled in his hands and refashions it into another vessel.
This is a simple picture of God as improviser, committed neither to discard,
nor destroy, his creation or his people, but to keep the story going through
creative adaptation.
As I have written earlier, “Improvisation in the theatre is a practice
through which actors seek to develop trust in themselves and one another in
order that they may conduct unscripted dramas without fear.”18
Improvisation is not about being clever, witty, spontaneous, or original.
Theatrical improvisers find they have to overcome such urges, which in fact
kill the drama. Instead they must learn to be obvious, trust in their learned
habits, and trust and enjoy one another. Improvisation may be funny, but it
is not thereby trivial or self-indulgent. It is an ordered, skilled, and
courageous series of practices that offers enormous potential for helping the
church become a community of trust in order that it may faithfully
encounter the threatening and the unknown.19
There are four broad areas where the training of improvisers has
sustained analogies with the character of Christian ethics. The first is the
formation of habits. In just the same way as advocated by virtue ethics,
improvisation requires extensive immersion in learning to take the right
things for granted. Unlike decisionist ethics, it does not assume the actor
will spontaneously discern the right thing to do; on the contrary, only the
actor who has long been shaped to be obvious will be able to keep the story
going. Improvisers seek to cultivate a relaxed awareness that in many
respects resembles what it means to be a person of character.
The second area is that of status. Status draws attention to the element of
power and role in every single interaction between two or more people.
Much of the dynamism of improvisation arises from its attention to status
interactions, and its recognition that every interaction has a status
dimension. “Status informs every single interaction between people—no
casual movement or gesture is without significance. There are no innocent
remarks or meaningless pauses. Status interactions are the ways people try
to manoeuvre conversations and interplays into forms that reaffirm their
preferred mode of relationship. Behind every status interaction is an
implicit incipient story, and in many ways status names the negotiation over
what kind of story this might become.”20 Improvisers love to begin with
conventional scenes, such as a man asking a woman to marry him, or a
person undergoing a police interrogation, or a shop assistant advising a
customer on a purchase, and then to transform those scenes by altering the
status each character adopts. The crucial point to grasp is that status is
something one chooses, not something that is imposed. This is a difficult
point to grasp for those whose theological commitments have been oriented
toward the liberation of the oppressed. The key to understanding status is to
grasp the difference between the status a person has and the status that
person plays. The building in which I currently work has a housekeeper
who acts in almost every way as if he were the most senior person in the
organization. The status he has is low, but the status he plays is high. The
fascination lies in the difference between the two.
Even the oppressed can play high status, because status is something one
plays, not something one is. In the 1983 film Merry Christmas Mr.
Lawrence, set in the Far East during the Second World War, prisoner of war
Major Jack Celliers is being interrogated by the Japanese camp
commander.21 At one point the commander, relishing his power, and
determined to play the highest status possible, says to Celliers, “Do you
know what I am thinking?” But Celliers responds, “No. Do you?”—an
equally high status retort that provokes a predictably brutal reaction.
Celliers shows it is perfectly possible to play high status even in the direst
circumstances. The expert status player is able to alter status at will to
produce the desired effects. When one is aware of a person changing status
adeptly and enjoying it, one tends to call it charm; when one is not enjoying
it, one tends to call it manipulation.
The third area is known as overaccepting. Whenever a dialogue partner
says or does anything, whether friendly, hostile, or indifferent, they are
making what is known as an “offer.” You have three options in return. You
may “accept.” This means to accept the premise of the offer and let it shape
your subsequent interaction. Or, you may “block” the offer, by rejecting its
premise. The third is to “overaccept” the offer. This means to accept the
premise of the offer but place the offer on a much larger canvas than had
been supposed by the person making the offer. A friend was approached by
a sex worker who said, “Would you like a good time?” To have accepted
would have been to have said, “Yes, how much?” To have blocked would
have been to have said, “No, thank you.” Instead my friend overaccepted
and said, “I’d like to talk to you. I don’t think what you’re offering me right
now is what I’d call a good time. If I can buy you a drink I’d like to talk to
you about what I would call a really good time.” Improvisers seek to train
themselves to accept all offers. This seems a terrifying, even foolish
commitment. But sometimes blocking is not an option. Sometimes blocking
assumes one has access to superior violent force. In many cases violent
blocking is futile, even if it seems justified. Overaccepting is especially
significant for those who lack sufficient power simply to block threatening
offers.
The fourth area is called reincorporation. One influential writer describes
improvisation as like walking backwards.22 Instead of walking forwards to
face the daunting emptiness of an unknown future, the improviser walks
backwards, seeing discarded material, near or far, as a host of gifts enabling
the continuance and resolution of troubling narratives. Reincorporation
comes about when discarded elements from earlier in the narrative begin to
reappear, especially at moments when redeeming these discarded elements
offers the resolution to what seemed insurmountable problems. Children are
often highly attuned to reincorporation, and refuse to believe they have
reached the end of the story until elements and characters earlier set aside
finally reappear. Charles Dickens’s novels are notable for immense and
rapid reincorporation in their closing chapters, where it sometimes seems
almost every character in a sprawling narrative comes back into the story in
a new way.23 Act 5 of the Christian drama is entirely made up of discarded
elements from earlier parts of the story—the victims of history, the least,
the last, and the lost, the hungry, thirsty, naked, stranger, sick, and
imprisoned of Jesus’s parable of the last judgment in Matthew 25:31–46.
This becomes the key motif in Christian eschatology: the study of how God
brings back into the story as gifts those elements that have previously been
suppressed or oppressed as obstacles or superfluous elements.

Putting Improvisation to Work

I want to illustrate how improvisation works by looking briefly at the
sociological place of Christianity in contemporary Western Europe. I want
briefly to describe that context and show how ecclesial ethics, specifically
the four aspects of improvisation I’ve just outlined, may be helpful. Charles
Taylor describes three dimensions of this context. The modern Western state
and all levels of social interaction—in short, the public square—has been,
as Taylor points out, largely emptied of a day-to-day connection to faith in
God; religion becomes a largely private matter. Meanwhile, Europe has
experienced the falling-off of religious belief and practice, with people
turning away from faith and no longer going to church. In a more subtle and
third sense, there has been a move from a society where belief in God is
unchallenged and unproblematic to one in which it is one option among
others, and not the easiest one at that.24 To Taylor’s analysis I would add
one further dimension. The related cultural, social, and religious challenge
of Islam in Europe has countered the universality of these secular
assumptions in ways that cause confusion and sometimes evoke clumsy and
counterproductive responses.
Let’s look at what the practices of improvisation may bring to this
context. Taylor’s first observation, about the disappearance of religion from
the public square, is really about status. In the story of David and Goliath in
1 Samuel 17, David at first tries on Saul’s armor. But in the end David goes
out to fight Goliath armed with a slingshot and five smooth stones.
Everyone reads this story and loves David, identifies with David, applauds
David. But if the churches in Europe love David so much, why are they
trying so hard to play Goliath? The story of the church in Europe is that
once the church was David. But it became Goliath. It became the
overblown, inflexible powerbroker it started its life by evading. That’s the
first irony of the contemporary church in Europe: it’s turning back into
David, but it doesn’t like it. It would much rather remain Goliath. In fact it
feels Goliath is its natural God-given status.
The church is being presented with an opportunity to be faithful in a way
it hasn’t been for a very long time, and all it can do is lament. It would be
funny if it weren’t so sad. If the church could realize it is called to be David,
it could reincorporate all those moments in its past that look like faithful,
honest failures, and see them for what they truly are: icons of true holiness.
Likewise, it could reincorporate the faithful, honest failures of Christians in
parts of the world where the church is distressed and persecuted, and realize
that these pangs of suffering are the seed of the church today. God has given
the church in Europe everything it needs to look like David—just not
everything it needs to look like Goliath.
Here we have the second, even greater irony of the church in
contemporary Europe: How did it happen that Christians in Europe lost so
much of the respect and trust of people of other faiths and of no expressed
faith? It happened by Christians turning Jesus into Goliath. And that’s a
tragedy. Jesus is not a cosmic or political or cultural bully. Jesus is not
Goliath. Goliath is not God. Christians made a terrible theological wrong
turn when they started to assume that their role in society was to be in
charge, when they decided they imitated Jesus best when they looked like
Goliath rather than like David. Right now they are being forced to look
more like David, but they keep itching to put on Saul’s armor.
And this is where overaccepting comes in. Status analysis points out the
difference between trying to be Goliath and trying to be David. The choices
are to block and try to be Goliath; to accept and lie down as a dead Goliath;
or to overaccept and recognize this isn’t about Goliath at all. The churches
have a chance to become David like they haven’t had for a long time and
like maybe they should have been all along.
Let’s look for a moment at the challenge of Islam. In the conventional
configuration, Islam is a challenge to the secular state and Christians are so
invested in the secular state that they perceive Islam as a challenge to them,
too. But this is a sign of just how much the church has lost its identity.
Rather than attempting to block Islam, the church should be overaccepting
Islam. That’s to say the church should look at the habits in which it has
been forming its people. Why are Christians not as distinctive as Muslims,
if not more distinctive? Christians stand for democracy and the rule of law
and free speech, it seems. But are there not values more fundamental to
Christians than that, values in significant tension with those of the secular
state? If the heart of the Christian faith is the forgiveness of sins and the
resurrection of the body, should not Christians be most famous for practices
that reflect those commitments, practices like restorative justice and
partnering with ex-offenders, practices like end-of-life hospice care and
cherishing those with learning and mobility difficulties, practices like debt
relief and reconciliation of warring parties?
For generations Christians have been formed to be good disciples of the
secular state, but the state was never the church; being its disciple is at best
a distraction, and at worst, idolatry. Christians seek its welfare, but as an
additional activity, not as their main purpose. Islam is challenging
Christians to rediscover their Christian identity, not as Goliaths dominating
the state but as Davids being renewed in the practices and habits of the
disciples of Jesus. When Christians say religion is not a private matter, it
should not be because they are claiming some right to state power or
influence, but because everywhere Christians are combining around issues
at the core of their identity and getting a reputation for being found with the
least, the last, and the lost, in all the places the gospels suggest Christ most
frequently shows up.
Once, when I was the pastor of a church with a rather small congregation,
a woman said to me, “You know, there are so many things we do here that
we couldn’t do if we were a larger church.” It was a breakthrough moment
for me because I’d been pastor there about three years and it was the first
time anyone had said that. Previously there had solely been lament that we
were not larger like other, proper churches. Like Israel, we too much
wanted to be like our neighbors. But the fact that it took three years showed
how hard it is for old patterns of thought to die. The church in Europe is
locked into denial and lament. If only it could wake up and realize it has an
opportunity to be what the church hasn’t been for a very long time: a
distinctive community whose traditions point to the death and resurrection
of Christ and which invites strangers to become companions through the
beauty of its life, the love of its members, and the hope of its witness.

NOTES
1. Kant’s categorical imperative is described in his Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals: On a
Supposed Right to Lie Because of Philanthropic Concerns, 3rd ed., trans. James W. Ellington
(Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993), 19–48.
2. The classic utilitarianism text is John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism, ed. Roger Crisp (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1998). See also Jeremy Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of
Morals and Legislation (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2009).
3. “Barack Obama’s Inaugural Address,” New York Times, January 20, 2009,
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/20/us/politics/20text-obama.html?pagewanted=all.
4. Alex Altman, “Chesley B. Sullenberger III,” Time, January 16, 2009, accessed July 18, 2012,
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1872247,00.html.
5. The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 567.
6. See, for example, Samuel Wells, God’s Companions: Reimagining Christian Ethics (Malden,
MA: Blackwell, 2006).
7. In doing so I challenge contemporary thinkers such as Jürgen Habermas, whose notion of
“discourse ethics” assumes such a public square. See his The Theory of Communicative Action
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1984).
8. John Howard Yoder, “The Constantinian Sources of Christian Social Ethics,” in The Priestly
Kingdom: Social Ethics as Gospel (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), 135–
47. Some ecclesial thinkers have been criticized for a somewhat loose employment of the term
Constantinian to refer to the church’s overextended desire to have a significant influence in
public life. But Constantinianism fundamentally means the tendency of Christians to regard
 themselves as having a mark of identity more fundamental or more consequential than their
baptism.
9. The terms virtue ethics and ecclesial ethics are related but not interchangeable. Virtue ethics is a
well-established strand of ethics with a long philosophical and theological history; ecclesial
ethics is my own connotation for a distinctly theological form of virtue ethics. The simple
distinction between the two is this: virtue ethics are oriented toward a telos and shape actions
accordingly; ecclesial ethics are oriented toward the eschaton, which is in many respects like a
telos but is fundamentally a new heaven and earth. The eschaton is something that God reveals,
rather than one that human effort can bring about, and has already been revealed in the life,
death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
10. Witness, directed by Peter Weir, screenplay by Earl Wallace and William Kelley (Paramount
Pictures, 1985).
11. The definitions of practices and tradition draw from Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in
Moral Theory, 2nd ed. (London: Gerald Duckworth, 1990), 207, 222.
12. John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990).
13. Karl Barth, Dogmatics in Outline, trans. G. T. Thomson (London: SCM Press, 1949).
14. John Howard Yoder, The Politics of Jesus, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1994).
15. Stanley Hauerwas, The Peaceable Kingdom: A Primer in Christian Ethics (London: SCM Press,
1983).
16. For a contrasting proposal for how improvisation may chart a vision for Kantian deontological
ethics, see J. David Velleman, How We Get Along (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2009). For a review of improvisatory tropes in modernist writers Henry James, T. S. Eliot, and
Gertrude Stein, see Omri Moses, “Fitful Character: The Ethics of Improvisation in Modernist
Writing” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2005).
17. This theme is explored in Samuel Wells, Improvisation: The Drama of Christian Ethics (Grand
Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2004).
18. Ibid., 11.
19. The most common way in which improvisation is treated in theological circles is in
interpretation generally or, more specifically, preaching. See for example Kirk Byron Jones, The
Jazz of Preaching: How to Preach with Great Freedom and Joy (Nashville: Abingdon Press,
2004); Bruce Ellis Benson, “The Improvisation of Hermeneutics: Jazz Lessons for Interpreters,”
in Hermeneutics at the Crossroads, ed. Kevin J. Vanhoozer, James K. A. Smith, and Bruce Ellis
Benson (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 193–210. Thoughtful studies in other
spheres also exist, for example, Deborah J. Kapp, “Improvisation and the Practice of Ministry,”
Journal of Religious Leadership 9, no. 1 (2010): 35–57; Steven Spidell, “Improvisation and the
Pastoral Conversation,” Chaplaincy Today 22, no. 2 (2006): 15–19; in relation to liturgy,
Cyprian Love, “Musical Improvisation and Eschatology: A Study of Liturgical Organist Charles
Tournemire (1870–1939),” Worship 81, no. 3 (2007): 227–49; and in relation to community
development, Jodi Kanter, Performing Loss: Rebuilding Community through Theater and
Writing (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2007). There is also a helpful checklist
of themes in Frank J. Barrett, “Creativity and Improvisation in Jazz and Organizations:
Implications for Organizational Learning,” Organization Science 9 (September/October 1998):
605–22. For a more doctrinal approach, which refers to improvisation but is not closely
dependent upon it, see Jeremy Begbie, Theology, Music and Time (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2000). In a more popular vein, with an interest in issues of creation/science
and creativity, see Ann Pederson, God, Creation, and All That Jazz: A Process of Composition
and Improvisation (St. Louis, MO: Chalice Press, 2001).
20. Wells, Improvisation, 88.
21. Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, directed by Nagisa Oshima, screenplay by Nagisa Oshima and
Paul Mayersburg (Universal Pictures, 1983).
 22. Keith Johnstone, Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre (London: Methuen, 1981), 116.
23. For example, in David Copperfield Dan Peggotty, Little Em’ly, Mrs. Gummidge, and the
Micawbers all reappear in the conclusion en route to a new and happier life in Australia.
24. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press,
2007), 1–4.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Barrett, Frank J. “Creativity and Improvisation in Jazz and Organizations: Implications for
Organizational Learning.” Organization Science 9 (September/October 1998): 605–22.
Barth, Karl. Dogmatics in Outline. Translated by G. T. Thomson. London: SCM Press, 1949.
Begbie, Jeremy. Theology, Music and Time. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Benson, Bruce Ellis. “The Improvisation of Hermeneutics: Jazz Lessons for Interpreters.” In
Hermeneutics at the Crossroads, edited by Kevin J. Vanhoozer, James K. A. Smith, and Bruce
Ellis Benson, 193–210. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006.
Bentham, Jeremy. An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation. Mineola, NY: Dover,
2009.
Habermas, Jürgen. The Theory of Communicative Action. Boston: Beacon Press, 1984.
Hauerwas, Stanley. The Peaceable Kingdom: A Primer in Christian Ethics. London: SCM Press,
1983.
Johnstone, Keith. Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre. London: Methuen, 1981.
Jones, Kirk Byron. The Jazz of Preaching: How to Preach with Great Freedom and Joy. Nashville:
Abingdon Press, 2004.
Kant, Immanuel. Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals: On a Supposed Right to Lie Because of
Philanthropic Concerns. 3rd ed. Translated by James W. Ellington. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993.
Kanter, Jodi. Performing Loss: Rebuilding Community through Theater and Writing. Carbondale:
Southern Illinois University Press, 2007.
Kapp, Deborah J. “Improvisation and the Practice of Ministry.” Journal of Religious Leadership 9,
no. 1 (2010): 35–57.
Love, Cyprian. “Musical Improvisation and Eschatology: A Study of Liturgical Organist Charles
Tournemire (1870–1939).” Worship 81, no. 3 (2007): 227–49.
MacIntyre, Alasdair. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. 2nd ed. London: Gerald Duckworth,
1990.
Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence. Directed by Nagisa Oshima, screenplay by Nagisa Oshima and Paul
Mayersburg. Universal Pictures, 1983.
Milbank, John. Theology and Social Theory. Oxford: Blackwell, 1990.
Mill, John Stuart. Utilitarianism. Edited by Roger Crisp. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Moses, Omri. “Fitful Character: The Ethics of Improvisation in Modernist Writing.” PhD diss.,
University of California, Berkeley, 2005.
The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. 3rd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979.
Pederson, Ann. God, Creation, and All That Jazz: A Process of Composition and Improvisation. St.
Louis, MO: Chalice Press, 2001.
Spidell, Steven. “Improvisation and the Pastoral Conversation.” Chaplaincy Today 22, no. 2 (2006):
15–19.
Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007.
Velleman, J. David. How We Get Along. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Wells, Samuel. Improvisation: The Drama of Christian Ethics. Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press,
2004.
Wells, Samuel. God’s Companions: Reimagining Christian Ethics. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006.
Witness. Directed by Peter Weir, screenplay by Earl Wallace and William Kelley. Paramount Pictures,
1985.
Yoder, John Howard. The Priestly Kingdom: Social Ethics as Gospel. Notre Dame: University of
Notre Dame Press, 1984.
Yoder, John Howard. The Politics of Jesus. 2nd ed. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1994.
 INDEX

AACM. See Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians

ABA improvisation, 45–46
Ableton Live, 508
Abrams, Muhal Richard, 88, 206, 209–10
abstract expressionist painting, 289, 293
ACC. See anterior cingulate cortex
accentuation, 51
acceptance
of change, 235
contact improvisation and, 298
of contingency, 228, 231, 236
of limitations, 228
acoustic intensity, 47, 51
action understanding, 81–83
auditory and visual processing and, 81–82
empathy and, 81
music cognition and, 87
recorded music and, 82–83
activity
gender as, 8
improvisation as, 16
music as, 83
musical composition as, 5, 426–29, 432
actor-network theory (ANT), 15, 91–93, 102–3
actor/system quandary, 91
Adhocism: The Case for Improvisation (Jencks), 5
adjacency, 280
Adolfo und Maria, 315
Adorno, Theodor, 3, 144, 433n8
on art and happiness, 439, 448–49
critiques of jazz, 10, 25n61, 135, 228,
on essays, 228–29
musical improvisation criticized by, 199, 420, 427
aesthetics
criminal aestheticism, 136
of birds, 501
black vernacular, 349n8
computer algorithms and, 18
economics and, 399–400
of genius, 7
happiness and, 449–50
of humpback whales, 517
 of imperfection, 4, 7, 26n77
of improvisation, 184, 345, 424–26
improvised poetry and, 240, 242, 248, 268
of indeterminacy, 294
life and, 440–41
mono-functionality, 423, 432
the musical object and, 421–22
of the new (modernism), 196
of perfection and imperfection, 4–5
personal aesthetics and, 399–400
of presence, 155
Ryle’s disdain for philosophical, 419–20
social, 18–19
of social dance, 331, 333
of spontaneity, 347–48
Stendhal’s conception, 448
African Americans
le champ jazzistique and, 203
black social self and, 330
copyright and vernacular dance of, 332, 339–41, 345–48
cultural tropes and styles, 6, 13
improv comedy problems with representation of, 357
social dance and improvisation of, 330–38
vernacular dance of, 332, 339–41, 345–48
African rice (Oryza glaberrima), 368–70, 373, 377
Afro-logic, 51–52
Afrological, 205, 207, 431
“Afropurism,” 431
agency, 92, 96–100. See also collective agency; distributed agency; political agency
Amistad mutiny and, 380
cognition and, 106n21
computer-interactive improvisation and, 101
“co-operative,” 97
in electro-acoustic music, 100–101
environment and, 96
fatalism and, 378–80
grid-group dispositions and, 378–80
the improvisative and, 123
institutional forces and, 378
intention and, 95–96
interagency, 96, 103
levels of human, 97
musical improvisation and technology’s impact on, 95
software and, 96–97
Agents Against Agency, 96
agile project management (APM), 16
Agre, Philip, 15–16
agreement, improv comedy and, 355–56
Agricola, Rudolph, 280–81
AIDS
 Ishmael Houston-Jones’ discussion of, 309–10, 319–20
queer time and, 320–21, 323–24
Alciati, Andrea, 272, 273f, 274f, 275f, 276f, 277, 280
Alcidamas, 264–65
Ali, Ben, 174
all’improviso, 167–68
allographic work, 190
A Love Supreme (John Coltrane), 206
Amadeus (music software), 508–9, 509f
Amateur Night, Apollo Theater, 458–59
Amistad mutiny, 379–80
Amplified Gesture, 95
AMM, 190
amygdala, 47, 48
Andresen, Julie Tetel, 131
Aneau, Barthélemy, 272, 276–77
Angelus Novus (Klee), 453
Anglophone philosophy of music, 421–23
anoriginal criminality, law and, 128, 136
Ansari, Daniel, 58–61, 63
ANT. See actor-network theory
anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), 59
anti-art, 441
anticipation, 116–22, 147–55
in improvisation, 448–49, 492–93
ants, musical improvisation and, 91–92, 102–3
APM. See agile project management
Apollo, 458–59
Apollo Theater, 458–59, 471
Aquinas, Thomas, 197
Arendt, Hannah, 189, 191–92, 195–96, 199
Aristotle, 161, 243–44
Armstrong, Louis, 432
Arnaud, François, 243–45
arousal
improvisation in management threatened by, 390–91, 393
musical improvisation and, 45–47, 51
art
Adorno on happiness and, 439, 448–49
criteria for work of, 423, 434n16
life and, 298, 477
presence seized by, 271
Artaud, Antonin, 203–4, 210
Ashkenazy, Vladimir, 426
Asian rice (Oryza sativa), 368–70, 377
Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), 173, 199n1, 203
associative generation, 41, 43, 45, 50
Atkins, Cholly, 346–47
attention. See also group attention
arousal and, 391
 brain activity and, 58, 61–62, 64, 66
IOFP model and, 43–45, 50
in musical improvisation, 40–41, 45, 193–95, 449, 489–94
phenomenology of, 442–46
selective, 491
Stoic view of, 6
uncertainty and, 50
in yoga, 217, 219
attunement, 408
aural mirroring, 76
authenticity
African American musical experience and, 431
in improvised dance, 314
in improvised theater, 355
Heidegger’s critique of, 134
poetic improvisation and, 240–41, 246, 250
political improvisation and, 168
rhetoric and, 265
authorship, 8, 98, 100–101, 236, 348
collaborative, 195
copyright and, 339–40
autographic work, 190
automatism, 293, 300
automatic writing, 203, 205, 207, 213n21
in computer systems, 96
in performance, 40, 97
autonomic nervous system, 43
autopoietic system, 291
Aviance, Kevin, 325
awareness, 7, 49, 80, 97, 183, 195, 277, 486
autism and, 497n27
dance improvisation and 292–93, 297–300
ensemble improvisation and, 293
hyper-awareness, 444
self-awareness, 222, 272
in yoga, 217–18
Ayler, Albert, 154, 206

Bach, Johann Sebastian, 59, 239, 371, 419, 469, 371

Bailey, Derek, 3, 160, 168, 402
on the celebration of the moment, 11
on idiomatic and non-idiomatic music, 9, 168, 178n15
interest in Husserl, 23n25
views on documentation, 348n6
Baker, Josephine, 349n14
Banes, Sally, 299
Barrett, Frank, 14, 26n77
Barth, Karl, 542, 543
Barthes, Roland, 79, 144, 200n6
Bartky, Sandra Lee, 360
Bates, Django, 403
Bateson, Gregory, 183–84, 290–92, 294, 300, 301n16
Baudelaire, Charles, 209, 302n22
Baudrillard, Jean, 164
Beat poetry, 289
bebop, 289, 405
Beckett, Samuel, 129
Beethoven, Ludwig van, 1, 57, 186, 188, 424, 425, 474
spiritual exercises and, 524
“Before the Law” (Kafka), 115–16, 121
beginnings, in musical improvisation, 191–92, 195–96, 408, 445, 448
Being and Time (Heidegger), 451
beliefs
in mediocracy, 163–65, 173–74, 176
shared, 483–86
religious, decline in, 547
Benjamin, Walter, 193, 453, 456n45
Bennink, Han, 371
Benson, Bruce Ellis, 5
Bérault, Nicolas, 281–82
Bergson, Henri, 145–47, 150
Bergsonism, 152
Berkowitz, Aaron L., 19, 49, 58–61, 63
Berliner, Paul, 9–10, 14, 62, 497n31
Bible, 205, 544–45
Bills, Jennifer, 358, 360
birds
behavior monitoring by farmers, 367, 371, 377
bird song studies, 500–503
humpback whale songs compared to nightingales, 509–10, 510f
imitation of parrots, 506
intelligence of, 506
laughing thrush musical improvisation, 503–5, 504f, 505f
meaning of songs of, 509
musical repertoire of, 519
singing motivations of, 502
surprise from songs of, 502
veery’s song notations, 507–9, 507f, 508f, 509f
Black Atlantic rhythm, 51
Blacking, John, 79
black social self, 330
Blackwell, Tim, 18
Blair, Rhonda, 359–60
Blake, Eubie, 341–42
Blanchot, Maurice, 450–54, 456n43, 456n44
Bley, Paul, 186, 192, 193, 532
Bloch, Ernst, 144, 449
“blooming buzzing confusion” (William James), 489–90
Blum, Stephen, 11
Blume, Judy, 358
Boal, Augusto, 354
body
embodied cognition and, 76–77, 81, 86
Essays (Montaigne) linking text to, 233–34
Essays (Montaigne) on limitations of, 234–35
gender in improv comedy and, 360–61
habits and, 292, 316
Jankélévitch’s view of, 145
as knowledge vector, 183–84, 197–98
mind and, 93, 95, 98, 102, 291, 302n22
Montaigne’s view of, 233–36
music-making and, 78
responsive body, 300, 304n69
resurrection of, 548
social constraints on, 316
social dance and, 333, 335–37
Spinoza’s view of, 161, 173
truth and, 296
yoga and body pedagogy of, 217–23
Boissard, Jean Jacques, 277, 279f
Bordo, Susan, 220
Born, Georgina, xiii, 9
Böttiger, Karl August, 244–45
Bouazizi, Mohamed, 174
Bourdieu, Pierre, 9, 103
Bowers, John, 92
Bowie, Lester, 195
Boykin, David, 213n24
Bracciolini, Poggio, 270
Brahem, Anouar, 506
brain, bird, 503, 505
brain, human
embodiment and, 76–77
improvisation and activity in, 44–49, 56–60, 80, 406–7
mirror systems and, 64, 81–82
music’s impact on, 64–66
neuroscience of improvisation insights on, 63–66
Bratman, Michael, 484–85
Braun, Allen, 60, 80
Braxton, Anthony, 131, 136–40, 144, 160, 199n4, 206–9
“conceptual grafting” and, 133
diagrammatics and, 171–72, 179n22
on global community of music, 409
Breton, André, 203–05
bricolage
in management systems, 14, 16–17
in economic management, 16, 27n92
Brin, Sergey, 392–93
British Journal of Aesthetics, 420
Broken Strings (film) 459, 474–77
Brooks, David, 406, 408, 410
Brown, David P., 168, 179n22
Brown, Ernest, 351n45
Brown, James, 154
Brown, Spencer, 448
Bryars, Gavin, 401, 449
Bryson, Lymon, 301n7
Buddhism, 119–20, 125n26
Zen, 291, 298
Burke, Edmund, 523
Burke, Kenneth, 263
burning, shifting cultivation and, 370–72, 377
business management. See management, improvisation in
Butler, Judith, 8, 115–18, 124n6, 125n27, 359

Cage, John, 10, 25n62, 41, 199n1, 199n2, 303n40

alternative approach to composition of, 293–95
composition liberated by, 296
decentralization and, 294–95
feedback and, 295
indeterminacy and, 294, 302n27
improvisation and, 302n27
polyattentiveness and, 293
Cain, Jeff, 313
Callier, Frances, 357
Canizzaro, Joey, 312f
Canonne, Clément, 18
capitalism, 170, 220
The Carder and Carrier (D’Israeli), 256
Cardew, Cornelius, 187, 189, 507
Carter, Curtis L., 11
Carter, Ron, 450
Castiglione, Baldassare, 262–63, 464
catbirds, 500–502
Cato, 235
Cavell, Stanley, 6, 523, 525
Centering: In Pottery, Poetry, and the Person (Richards), 292
centralization, 387
of power, 290–91
CFI. See Collective Free Improvisation
Chadabe, Joel, 18, 97
“changes,” playing on, 427–28
Changizi, M. A., 85–86
“Chasin’ the Trane” (John Coltrane), 486–87
Châtelet, Gilles, 175
Cherry, Don, 206
Chicago Stepping (competition), 336
Chinampas (Taylor), 155
Chomsky, Noam, 130–32, 138, 473
choreography
 improvisation and, 297–98, 304, 332, 339–48
goal-oriented, 298
of Kiss Me, Kate, 344–45
recognition for, 339
Christian ethics
Bible’s role in, 544–45
consequentialism and, 540
in contemporary Europe, 547–49
decisionist ethics and, 543
ecclesial ethics and, 540–42, 549n9
habits and, 545
improvisation and, 544–49, 550n19
overaccepting and, 546, 548
reincorporation and, 546–47
status and, 545–47
subversive ethics and, 540–41
universal ethics and, 539–40, 542
virtue ethics and, 542–43, 545, 549n9
Christocentrism, 542–43
chronometers, 270
Ciborra, Claudio, 14–15
Cicero, 258, 280
Quintilian’s independence from, 281
on time and eloquence, 265–67
on writing and improvisation, 266
citations, Montaigne’s use of in improvisation, 229, 233, 236, 237n11
Citton, Yves, 7, 207
Civil War (American), 378
Clark, Andy, 101
Clarke, Eric F., 28n102
classical music, Chinese, 409
classical music, Vietnam, 409
classical music, Indian, 2, 52, 75, 428
classical music, Western, 3, 49, 51–52, 188, 459–60
compared with jazz, 189, 191
composition process in, 185–86
cutting contests and, 469–70
improvisation in, 49, 188
jazz as “America’s classical music,” 433n9
normativity of, in philosophy of music, 423–26, 432
risk in musical improvisation, compared to, 191
temporality in jazz, compared to, 189
variance in performance of, 188
Clausewitz, Carl von, 391–92
cliché, 229,
in improv comedy, 356
in improvisation, 402
jazz and, 10, 190
Montaigne and, 236, 241
Close, Del, 363n1
cluster
in rice farming, 366–67, 375
“cluster concept,” 423
Cochrane, Chris, 309, 310f, 311f, 318, 321f
cognition, 146, 148
agency and, 106n21
embodiment and, 93–94
free improvisation and levels of, 406, 410–11
of language, compared to music cognition, 63
cognition, in musical improvisation. See also music cognition
associative generation and, 41
comparative and cross-cultural issues in studies of, 48–52
computational approach to, 52
empirical studies in, 44–48
importance of studies on, 52
instability and, 48–49
interrupt generation and, 41
IOFP model and, 42–44
jazz studies and, 49–50
models for, 39–42
social dynamics of, 95
cognitive neuroscience. See neuroscience of improvisation
cognitivism, 76
Coleman, Ornette, 194, 494n8, 533
on consistency, 485
Derrida’s collaboration with, 28n106, 144, 151
on improvisative process and results, 187, 194
on repetition, 154
“we-intention” in the music of, 483
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 247
Coles, Honi, 339, 346–47, 351n45
collaboration, 222
collaborative nature of improvisation, 12, 195, 402
in jazz, as model for business, 386
collaborative emergence, 12, 194–95
collective
action, ensemble improvisation and, 484–85
in actor-network theory, 102
in conversation, 12
improvisation, 7, 18, 75, 170–71
as model for political action, 170–72
in politics, 161, 165, 169, 172
power, 164
in propagation of rumor, 15
collective agency, 7, 163–66, 174–75. See also agency
Collective Free Improvisation (CFI), 18
collective improvisation. See ensemble improvisation
collective intention, 6
consistency and, 485
“de-individuation” and, 488, 496n23
 individual transcendence of, 495n11
jazz and, 495n11
“our-intention” and, 493
semantic interconnections and, 487–88
shared, 485–86
solos supported by, 485–88, 493
“we-intention” and, 483–84, 493
collective unconscious, 206, 356
collective unity, 194–95, 197
Coltrane, John, 137, 190, 206–7, 426, 483, 535
collective intention supporting solos of, 485–88, 493
“de-individuation” and, 488
motivic logic and, 496n17
Columbia Business School, 385
comedy. See improv comedy
ComedySportz, 354
commedia dell’arte, 168, 182
commercium, 134–36, 139
common purpose, improvisation and, 169–70, 179n21
communication, 143, 163, 174, 204, 208
through music, 50, 63, 184, 301, 401, 406, 497n31, 506
through language, 204
through social dance, 331, 333, 337
interspecies, 502, 509, 514
Complete Communion (Cherry), 206
compliance (philosophy)
improvisation and, 474
composition, dance, 331–32, 339–340
African American, 331
composition, literary, 237n5
composition, music
affect of, 152
avant-garde, 199n2
by Beethoven, 524
brain activity during performance of, 59
Cage’s approach to, 293–94, 296–97
characteristics of, 186
compared with improvisation, 40, 49, 370, 386
inspired by whale song, 511
improvisative dimension of, 5
interpretation of, 188
in jazz, 199n4
Latour’s metaphor of, 162
as mode of creativity in business, 386
musical improvisation compared to, 184–90
performance’s convergence with, 185
performance timing of, 47, 52
processes of, 133, 137, 170–71, 179n22, 184–86, 404
perspective and, 187
in philosophy of music, 422, 424
 product of, 189–90
revision and, 186
Western dialectic with improvisation, 3, 5, 9, 11, 13, 103, 167, 184
composition, oral, 2, 255–56
compared with improvisation, 25n59
compared with literary composition, 245, 248
by improvvisatori, 239–40, 242
computation, 15
analysis of music through, 44–47, 52
improvisation and, 16
as early model for cognition, 76
emergency management and, 17
generation of music through, 52
as model for jazz improvisation, 193
temporality of, 79
computer
analysis and modeling of bird song, 504, 508
part of everyday life, 104, 411
computer science, 13, 15, 17, 392
computer improvisation
in music, 18, 40, 92, 101
in theater, 18
conceptual blending, 52
conceptual grafting, 133
conceptual knowledge, 120–23
as cognition, 125n28
contrasted with non-conceptual knowledge, 119, 122–23, 125n26
conceptual migration, 14
The Concept of Mind (Ryle), 92–93
Conduction, 170–72, 179n21, 404
consciousness, 87, 117–18, 205, 219, 221, 406–7. Also see double consciousness
as achievement, 96–97
cosmic, 527–28
current of, 207
in Buddhism, 125n26
in Hegel’s thought, 120, 125n30
Husserl on prophetic, 444
in improv comedy, 362
in Jankélévitch’s thought, 146–47
musical improvisation and, 94–95
of self. See self-consciousness
of time. See time-consciousness
of sound-event, 445
stream of (William James), 489
unhappy, 439–40
universal interconnectivity of, 208
consequentialism, 540
Considérations sur les principaux événements de la Révolution française (Staël), 260n22
consistency, collective intention and, 485
Constantinianism, 549n8
constraint
body and social, 316
in dance improvisation, 313–14, 316–17, 327n19
empathy and, 82
freedom and, 8
gender and, in improv comedy, 361
grid and group (Mary Douglas), 378
of history, 258
in improvisation, 8–9, 15–17, 24n46, 85, 154, 259, 380
on individual activity, 300
in music improvisation, 49, 194, 197, 301n3, 403–4, 427, 443–44, 460, 479n20, 533
in oral improvisation, 240, 252
in organizations, 387
power and, 164
resistance and, 9, 140
self-generated, 193
of time, 252
contact improvisation, 3, 219, 290
acceptance and, 298
decentralization of, 297–98
evolution of, 299
excitement of, 298
expectations for, 11
feedback and, 296, 299
flow and, 296–97
group therapy compared to, 304n69
Houston-Jones studying, 314
origins of, 297
self defined in, 300
shared principles of, 219
contests, 343, 458–59, 465, 476–77. See also cutting contests
context
cultural, 13, 77
emergent, 195
improvisation and, 15, 116
musical improvisation and, 195
social, 12, 51, 91, 381n1
socio-economic, 432
contingency
improvisation and, 12, 17, 103, 187–89, 228, 236, 375, 471
conversation. See also speech acts
with body during yoga, 217–18
improvised nature of, 12–13, 74, 182–83, 198, 420, 473
jazz as, 12–13
language and social practice compared to, 94
musical improvisation compared to, 198–99, 429
as performance, 13
processing, 78–79
spontaneous production of, 12
status interaction, 545
Cook, Charles, 351n45
Cooper, Dennis, 309, 318–21, 321f, 324
cooperation, 44
contests and, 468
in dance, 300
improvisation as, 183, 388–89
“co-operative” agency, 97
coordination, 94, 97, 104
in musical improvisation, 396–97, 400–4, 408–9, 411, 425
in music performance, 57, 188–89
in political action, 171
path dependence and, 397–99
role of culture in, 388
copyright
African Americans and unfair treatment with, 339–40, 346, 348
choreography recognition for, 339
Hudgins and improvisation despite, 344
Hudgins obtaining, 340, 342–43
improvisation challenges with, 347–48
Kiss Me, Kate dancers’ omission from, 344
Copyright Act of 1911 (British), 350n31
Corbett, John, 102, 211–12
Corinne, or Italy (Staël), 256–59, 260n16
Council for Democracy, 301n7
Couperin, Louis, 47
The Courtier (Castiglione), 262–63
Cousin, Jean, 267
Cover, Robert, 128–29
Crassus, 266
creative combination, improvisation in management and, 390–91
Creative Evolution (Bergson), 146
creative time, 150
creativity, 57–58, 104, 154–56, 198
in agile software design, 16
copyright and, 341
group, 495n11
in improvisation, 147
improvisational, compared to compositional, 386
as interactive, 104
liberated, 289
madness and, 138
in management, 14, 389–91
neural processes and, 60
non-linear, in social dance, 331
process and, 189
product and, 189
Sonny Rollins on, 532
spontaneous, 49
creator-witness phenomenon, 62, 69n28
critical improvisation studies, xi, 1–2, 13, 20.
 growth of, 2
music and origin of, 1
cross-dressing, 431
cross-gender performance, in improv comedy, 356, 358–60
cross-racial empathy, recorded music and, 82
Crossroads, 468
cruising, 319, 324, 326
Cruz, Felix, 311f, 317, 319
Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly, 175–76, 355–56, 407
Cunningham, Merce, 297, 303n54, 304n64
Curran, Alvin, xi (n1), 99
cutting contests
in 8 Mile, 467–68
in Broken Strings, 476
in Crossroads, 468
improvisation impromptu and, 467, 469–70
in Scott Joplin, 468
Western classical music and, 469–70
cybernetics, 92, 101, 291, 300,

dance. See also contact improvisation; THEM; social dance

decentralization of, 297
Houston-Jones’ education and background in, 313–14
improvisation in, 4, 11, 40, 57, 75, 296–300
as political, 316
“Roger Rabbit,” 333
scholarship on improvisation in, 314, 325
“Wobble,” 333
on YouTube, 336
dance circle, 337
Dancing for Our Lives!, 309
Darling, Jim, 520
Dasein, 133–35
David, Joannes, 280
David, Paul, 398
Davidson, Arnold, 88
Davies, David, 11, 479n20
Davis, Anthony, 210
Davis, Fred, 344–45
Davis, Miles, 190, 192, 199, 488, 508–9
Davis, William, 304n65
Davy, Kate, 358–59
Death in a Minute (improv comedy game), 356–57
Debord, Guy, 164
de Carpi, Girolamo, 277
decentralization
Cage and, 293–95
contact improvisation and, 297–98
of dance, 297
democracy and, 298
 in management, 388
of power, 290–91
decision-making, 271, 280
of computers in music, 97, 101
collective, 171–72, 177n7, 221
Derrida’s discussion of, 119–20
ethics and, 540–41
in improv comedy, 358
in improvisation, 6, 15, 40, 153, 397, 406, 408, 411, 479n20
the improvisative and, 125n31
in management, 26n77, 385, 389
mistakes and, 122
neural processes and, 59, 64
planning and, 291
as running argument, 16
tradition and, 126n32
decisionist ethics, 543, 545
declamation, 263
A Defence of Poetry (Shelley), 247
Defoe, Daniel, 255
de-individuation, 488, 496n23
de La Boétie, Étienne, 163, 227
Deleuze, Gilles, 173
Deliège, Célestin, 10
de Mille, Agnes, 346–47
democracy, 166, 292
Christian ethics and, 548
decentralization and, 298
Derrida on improvisation and, 19
improvisation and, 221, 289–90
“mythocracy” (Sun Ra) and, 166
radical, 163
research on improvisation and, 19
second-order learning and, 292
de Raymond, Jean-François, 282
Derrida, Jacques, 9, 115, 156, 471
critical reactions to film on, 143
on embodied speech, 150
on “here and now,” 119–20
on improvisation and democracy, 19
on improvisation as impossibility, 461–62, 470
on iterability of language, 116
Jankélévitch on temporality compared to, 153
on lived instant and negative absence, 148–51, 149f
Ornette Coleman’s collaboration with, 143–144
Descartes, René, 93, 236
Descombes, Vincent, 119
desire, 161, 319, 326, 330
in Butler and Hegel, 116–18, 124n12
Constantinian, 549n8
 in improv comedy, 361
improvisation and, 336, 447, 449, 461
queer, 313, 324
in Spinoza, 161
yearning and, 439
deutero-learning, 291–94, 301n16
developmental psychology, group attention studies in, 491, 497n27
diagonality, improvisation and, 7, 170–71
diagrammatics, 171–74, 179n22, 179n23
dialexis, 263–64
Dialogue on improvisation (Bérault), 282
Dickens, Charles, 546
Dickenson, Emily, 486
discourse, 270–72, 280
Discourse on Method (Descartes), 236
Discourse on Voluntary Servitude (de La Boétie), 163
disorganization, improvisation in management and, 388
D’Israeli, Isaac, 256
distributed agency, 93, 96–97, 99–100. See also agency
disunity, 439
DLPFC. See dorsolateral prefrontal cortex
Dodd, Julian, 423
Dolan, Jill, 358
domeisia (performed folk tales), 381
dorsal premotor cortex (dPMC), 59
dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), 46, 60
double consciousness, 205, 207, 209–11
Douglas, Mary, 378–80
Douglass, Frederick, 154
Dourish, Paul, 15
Dowd, Irene, 218
dPMC. See dorsal premotor cortex
Drury, Lindsey, 324–25
dualism, embodiment and, 76
Dunn, Robert, 304n64
Durant, Alan, 4
durée (lived time), 145–47
Durkheim, Émile, 378–80
Dutton, Denis, 423, 434n16

ecclesial ethics, 540–44, 547, 549n8, 549n9

economics, 291
free improvisation informing, 409–12
of happiness, 409–10
human capital and, 410–11
improvisation and, 17
knowledge creation in, 409
labor productivity and, 411
path dependence and, 27n99, 396–98, 409–12
Edison, Thomas A., 336
education
emotional and moral, 410
free improvisation in, 412
for improvisation impromptu and improvisation extempore, 465–66
interspecies improvisation and, 506, 520
for musical improvisation, 62
Quintilian on fruits of, 465–66
ego, 194, 389, 443, 448, 450–51, 467
Egypt, 173–76
Eickmann, Jill, 362
8 Mile, 467–68
elective affinities, 211, 468
elective musical improvisation, 199
electro-acoustic music, 92, 99–100
authorship and agency in, 100–101
challenges and trends in, 104
conventional boundaries of, 92
distributed agency and, 99–100
interagency and, 103
electronic music, 290, 507
preprogramming in, 397
Ellington, Duke, 99, 107n42, 199n4
eloquence, 265–68, 282
Emblemes lains (Boissard), 277, 279f
embodiment, 175
in Christian theology, 544
cognition and, 93–94
Derrida on speech and, 150
dualism and, 76
experience and, 87–88
fantasy and, 77
in musical improvisation and empathy, 80, 87
music and, 86
music cognition and, 76–77
rhythm perception and, 77–78
sound of motion and, 86–87
temporality and, 78–79
emergency management
improvisation and, 17
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 478n8, 523
Emmerson, Simon, 101
emotional intelligence, 407, 410
emotions, 7, 405
equilibrium and, 400
expectation and accompanying, 83
expression of, as Romantic value, 240
flow and, 407
free improvisation and, 407, 411–12
in improv comedy, 359, 362
improvisation and, 420, 434n16
 John Cage and, 294
levels of consciousness and, 406
in management, 390
moral education and, 410
music as language of, 509
music therapy and regulation of, 50–51
neural processes and, 56, 60
path dependence and, 398
projected through sound, 213
recognition of, 86
in social dance, 332
empathy
action understanding and, 81
auditory processing and, 81–82
embodiment in musical improvisation and, 80, 87
free improvisation and, 451, 453, 488
limits of, 454
mirror systems and, 64
neuroscience of improvisation and, 81–83
in performance with interactive computer systems, 101
recorded music and cross-racial, 82
time-consciousness and, 454
Energeia, 189
energy field model, 291
ensemble improvisation
anticipation in, 492–93
awareness and, 293
bebop and, 289
collective action and, 484–85
familiar vocabulary in, 401–2
group attention and, 489, 491
jazz and, 493
mutual responsiveness in, 486
self and, 300
shared attention in, 491
shared history and, 50
social contract and, 481–82
entropy, 47–49, 147
environment, agency and, 96
epiphany, 391–92
equipoise, 408
Erasmus, Desiderius, 262–63, 267, 270, 277
Erköse, Barbaros, 506
Essay on the Original Genius and Writings of Homer (Wood), 245
essays. See also poetry
Adorno on, 228–29
mediated information used in, 229
Montaigne and terminology of, 228
Montaigne’s style with, 229
quotation in, 232–33, 236
Essays (Montaigne)
body linked to text in, 233–34
body’s limitations in, 234–35
continued expansion of, 231
improvisational features in, 227–28
improvisatory expansion in, 231–36
originality of, 230
re-reading, 236
rhetorical improvisation in, 230
strategy for reading, 231
translation of, 236n3
variety of themes in, 230
Estienne, Henri, 271, 283n22
Ethics (Spinoza), 161
ethics, 6, 267–68, 277, 280–81, 531. Also see Christian ethics
ICASP research group on, 19
subversive ethics, 540–41
discourse and problem of, 280.
ethnomusicology, 1–2, 11. See also musicology
Euro-logic, in improvisation, 51–52
Evans, Bill, 425, 429, 432
event clusters, 40–41, 45
event timing, 47
excitement
of contact improvisation, 298
of expectation, 447
in musical improvisation, 405
of oral poetry, 246
exemplification
in musical improvisation, 425
existence, recognition and, 117
Existers (Gilbert and George), 323f
expectation, 83–84
emotion accompanying, 83–84
excitement of, 447
in free improvisation, 449
gender and, 116
habit and, 294
hope compared to, 447–48
memory and, 147, 444–49, 453
musical meter and, 43
musical improvisation and, 83–84
path dependence and, 397
recollection and, 447
experience
aesthetic, 422
Afro-diasporic, 132
of art, 434n16
black (African American), 431–32
in Buddhism, 125n26
 of consumption and path dependence, 413n3
of contact improvisation, 297–99
of de-individuation, 488
embodiment and, 87–88
energy field model of, 291
everyday, 11
in improv comedy, 355–57, 360, 362
of improvisation, 88, 184, 188, 241–42, 263
of listening, 79–80
lived instant and improvised, 145, 150–51
of the moment, 450–51, 453
in Montaigne, 233–35, 237n14
of music, 148
philosophy and lived, 120, 145, 230
of “queer time,” 325–26
of rhythm, 77
of sexuality, 315
of time, 146, 442–43
extemporaneity, 263, 265–66, 269
ex tempore dicendi facultas, 265, 267–72
extended mind theory, 93, 94, 102, 106nn19–21

Fähndrich, Walter, 20
failure. See also mistakes
African American social dance and, 337–38
group attention and, 491–92
familiarity, 277
stagnation and, 402
fantasy, 461
embodiment and, 77, 83
of the performing heroine, 256
Farber, Anne, 301n3
fascination, time-consciousness and, 452–54
fear
of ecclesial ethics, 543
in improv comedy, 545
of improvisation, 24n46
improvisation impromptu and, 470
musical improvisation and, 196–97
originality and, 190–91
recognition and, 120
of stagnation, 190
features, 41, 45–46. See also Interactive Object/Feature/Process
Febey, Tim, 381n1
feedback, 92, 291–93, 300
Cage and, 295
contact improvisation and, 296, 299
in management, 387
Max Neuhaus and, 295–96
perceptual, 40
FEELA. See Force-Effort-Energy-Loudness-Affect
Femprovisor, 362
Fenian Cycle, 202
Ferand, Ernest, 1
Fernow, Carl Ludwig, 241–42, 244
Ferrero, Edward, 458
Fey, Tina, 126n33
Field Book of Wild Birds and Their Music (Mathews), 507, 507f
Findlay, J. N., 124n16
Fineberg, Jean, 121
Finkelstein, Louis, 301n7
Finnegan, Ruth, 246
Finn Mac Cumail, 202–3
fit and wit, 464–65
“flash of insight,” 391–92
Fleming, Donald, 309, 310f
flight, law and, 129, 137–39
“flocking,” 75
flow
contact improvisation and, 296–97
emotion and, 407
energy field model and, 291
free improvisation and, 407
group, 104
Husserl on time-consciousness and, 443
improv comedy and, 362
musical improvisation and, 40, 80, 175–76
Fluxus, 1, 2
fMRI. See functional magnetic resonance imaging
Foley, J. Miles, 246
Fontana Mix (Cage), 295
Fontana Mix-Feed (Neuhaus), 295–96
Footloose, 334
For Alto (Braxton), 137
Force-Effort-Energy-Loudness-Affect (FEELA) hypothesis, 47
Forsyth, Joseph, 245–46
Foucault, Michel, 8, 197, 360, 530
on power, 164
on technology of self, 220–21
4’33’’ (Cage), 295
Fourier, Charles, 209
Fox, Terry, 313
Frame, Donald, 229, 236n3
Frank, Pamela, 469
Freedman, David H., 388
freedom, 117, 533
control and, 465
democracy and, 289
discipline and, 362
improvisation and, 8, 153, 258–59, 289, 314, 354–55, 359–60, 444
 to make mistakes, 123
in music of Cecil Taylor, 156
philosophy of music and, 428–29
in politics, 170
with spontaneity and risk, 428–29
structure and, 9, 17
free improvisation, 49–50
attention in, 449
“being in the moment” and, 453
cognition levels and, 406, 410
collective. See Collective Free Improvisation
constraints of, 403
coordination in, 396, 401–4, 408–9
desirable tension and, 404
economics informed by, 409–12
electronics in, 99
in education, 412
emotion and, 407, 411–12
empathy and, 451, 453
familiar vocabulary in, 401–2
flow and, 407
habit in, 97
health and, 411
heurism and, 405–6
hope and expectation in, 449
of Mengelberg and Bennink, 370–71, 381n1
influence in, 97
“lowercase music” and, 96
micro-structure of, 45
motivations for, 404
oral composition and, 25n59
phenomenological analysis and, 449, 451
protention and retention in, 448
purposes and benefits of, 404–8
recollection in, 449
self definition through, 407–8
skills for, 412
social dynamics and, 179n21
social interactions and, 406
solitude and, 451–52
transcendence through, 405
virtuosic temptations in, 402–3
Freud, Sigmund, 466
friendship, health and, 411
Fulkerson, Mary O’Donnell, 297
Fuller, Lorenzo, 345
functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), 43, 45, 49, 80
neuroscience of improvisation studied with, 57–58
subtraction technique and, 58
Furbank, P. N., 255
Furtwängler, Wilhelm, 429
Fusco, John, 468
future, Husserl on improvisation and, 445–46

Gaab, Nadine, 65
Gabbard, Krin, 479n25
Gabelsberger, F. X., 250
gaffes, 85
Gantner, Vallejo, 310
Garfinkel, Harold, 15
Gargantua (Rabelais), 270, 281
Garrison, Jimmy, 487
Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., 23n29, 105n9
Gaut, Berys, 423, 434n16
gbengben (rice variety), 368
gender, 315
bird song and, 502–3
humpback whale songs and, 509
in improv comedy, 356, 358–62
discrimination in jazz due to, 431
law of, 116
mistakes and, 122
performance of, 8, 115–16
self-consciousness and, 121, 125n30
Gender Trouble (Butler), 115
GENEPLORE model, 42
generative grammar, 130–32, 140–41
generosity, 122–23, 126n33, 155
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, 346–47
Gere, David, 4
Gestalt therapy, 291, 300
Gestalt Therapy: Excitement and Growth in the Human Personality (Hefferline, Perls, Goodman,
Paul), 292–93, 302n22
gesture, 174–76
blackness as, 330
gendered, in improv comedy, 359–61
hypergesture, 173, 175, 177
queer gesture, 323–25
in social dance, 333–34, 337
gesture field painting, 302n19
gesture mapping, 99
gesture recognition, 104
Ghostly Matters (Gordon), 93
Gibson, J. J., 86
Gilbert and George, 322, 323f
giligoti (rice variety), 374
Gillespie, Dizzy, 488
Gilmore, John, 488
Gioia, Ted, 4, 6–7
Girls’ Jazz and Blues Camp (GJBC), 120–23, 125n30
GJBC. See Girls’ Jazz and Blues Camp
Glissant, Édouard, 138–39, 203
glitch music, 103
God’s Love We Deliver, 314
Goffman, Erving, 4
Goldman, Alan, 424
Goldman, Danielle, 340
Gonda, Caroline, 256, 259n8
Goode, Richard, 405
Goodman, Nelson, 190, 425, 474
Goodman, Paul, 289, 291, 293, 300, 302n22, 302n23
Google, 392–93
Gordon, Avery, 93
Gould, Glenn, 497n32
grammar. See also language
generative, 130–32, 140–41
jurisgenerative principle and, 130–31
physical, 78
Grand Union, 297, 299, 304n64
Greek antiquity, poetic improvisation affiliations with, 243–47, 250
Greenblatt, Stephen, 7–8, 255
grid-group dispositions, agency and, 378–80
Groos, Karl, 466
Grosjean, François, 12
Gross, Terry, 126n33
“grounding by interaction” framework, 76
group attention
developmental psychology studies on, 491, 497n27
ensemble improvisation and, 489, 491
failure and, 491–92
listening and, 490
spotlight metaphor for, 490–91
group flow, 104
groupmind, 104, 355–57
Group Motion Media Theater, 313
group observation. See ensemble improvisation
group therapy, contact improvisation compared to, 304n69
Guattari, Félix, 144
Guide to Bird Songs (Saunders), 507, 508f
Gunn, Thom, 320–21

habit, 5, 11, 75, 88, 97, 190, 250, 268, 294, 301n7, 462
the body and, 234, 292
Christian ethics and, 545
in dance, 317
ethics and, 545, 548
in organization studies, 391
in yoga, 218–19
habitus, 9, 197–98, 280–81
Haden, Charlie, 494n8, 535
Hadot, Pierre, 6, 524, 527–28
Hagberg, Garry, 6, 23n28, 426
Hägglund, Martin, 148
Halberstam, Judith, 320
Hall, Jim, 450, 535
Hall, Stuart, 210–11, 357
Hamilton, Andy, 4–5, 15
Hansen, Mark B. N., 100, 104
Hanslick, Eduard, 420, 422
“happening,” 496n23
happiness
Adorno on art and, 439–41, 448–49
economics of, 396, 409–10
improvisation and, 412, 441
improvisation impromptu on edge of, 462–64
presence and, 440
types of, 463–64
unhappy consciousness, 439
in yoga, 221
Haraway, Donna, 92
Hardt, Michael, 171, 210–11
Hare, Maurice E., 473
harmony search. See search algorithms, improvisation and
Harris, Eddie, 10
Hawkins, Coleman, 528–33, 531f
Hayek, Friedrich, 290–91
Hayles, Katherine, 101
health, free improvisation and, 411
Hécatomgraphie (Corrozet), 277, 278f
Heeren, A. H. L., 245
Hefferline, Ralph, 292, 302n22
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 115–18, 124n16, 157n19
on temporality of sound, 148–49
on unhappy consciousness, 439–40
Heidegger, Martin, 133–35, 451–52
Helmholtz, Hermann von, 492
Henderson, Joe, 190
Hentoff, Nat, 194, 199
“here and now,” 5, 119–20, 187, 190. Also see moment
heteroriginality, 18
heterosexuality, 320
heurism, free improvisation and, 402, 405–6
hexis, 264, 268–69, 280–81
Hill, Constance Valis, 345
Hill, Isabel, 257
Holiday, Billie, 182
Holm, Hanya, 339, 344–46
Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 129
Homer, 10, 25n59, 234, 458
improvvisatori compared to, 242, 244–48, 250
homosexuality, 320–21, 323–26, 361
hope, 447–49
Hopkins, Phil, 95
Horace, 232–33
Houston-Jones, Ishmael, 309, 310f, 311f, 312f, 321f, 327n16, 328n39
contact improvisation studied by, 314
dance education and background of, 313–14
identity exercises of, 315–16, 323
political activism of, 314
“The Politics of Dancing” and, 315–16
on race, 323
on significance of AIDS, 310
THEM 2010 revival and direction of, 321–22
THEM 2010 revival and solo of, 318, 322–23
How We Became Posthuman (Hayles), 101
Huarte, John, 130, 138
Hudgins, Johnny, 349n14
blackface and, 347
copyright obtained by, 340, 342–43
creative process of, 341–42
as eccentric dancer, 340–41
imitators of, 343
impromptu invention of, 341
improvisation despite copyright of, 344
Whitney suing, 342
Hultsch, Henrike, 502
human capital, economics and, 410–11
humanism, 228, 272, 281
human movement, sound of, 86–87
humpback whales
constant change and musical improvisation of, 519
extended pattern and structure of, 511–12, 511f
gender and songs of, 509
imitation of songs by, 512, 519–20
interspecies improvisation methodology for, 513, 513f
interspecies improvisation of clarinet and, 512–14, 513f, 514f, 515f, 516f, 517–19
nightingale songs compared to, 509–10, 510f
popularity and inspiration of songs of, 511–12
rhythm matching of, 517
seasonality and songs of, 512
sonograms of clarinet and, 513–14, 514f, 515f, 516f, 517
Hurley, Susan, 93
Huron, David, 83
Husserl, Edmund, 5, 15, 23n25, 149, 441
on consciousness of sound-event, 445
on flow of time-consciousness, 443
on improvisation and future, 445–46
intersubjectivity problem of, 449–50
on moment’s dependence on recollection, 446
on new and now, 442
 on prophetic consciousness, 444
on retention and protention, 442–44, 446
Hutchinson, Ann, 345
Huyssen, Andreas, 1
hypergesture, 173, 175, 177

ICASP. See Improvisation, Community, and Social Practice

ideology
Romantic, 240, 244
in black social dance, 331
of intellectual property law, 340, 348
in improv comedy, 357
identity, xi, 115, 117, 330, 528
baptism and, 542
between improvisation and experience, 88
Christianity and, 548, 549n8
compliance and, 474
formation of, 293
Houston-Jones’ exercises on, 315–16, 323
idiomatic improvisation and, 178n15
improv comedy and, 360–62
musical improvisation and, 6–7
of the musical work, 474
poetry and, 204–5
“The Politics of Dancing” and, 315
through recorded music, 428
idiomatic improvisation, 62, 168–69, 178n15
See non-idiomatic improvisation
idiomatic music, 9
See non-idiomatic music
IDyoM. See Information Dynamics of Music
IFG/vPMC. See inferior frontal gyrus/ventral premotor cortex
Iliad (Homer), 245
imagination, 128, 161, 165, 204, 237n6, 434n16, 461
“I’m an Old Cowhand” (Sonny Rollins), 526
imitation
entropy of improvisation compared to, 48–49
flows/waves of, 169, 174
of humpback whale songs, 512, 519–20
interspecies improvisation avoiding, 505
invention and, 164
jazz learning and, 62
of parrots, 506
Tarde’s notion of, 163–65
immediacy
improvisational, 135–36
in embodied speech, 150
in improvisation, 153, 156
of place, 171
of thought, 213
imperfection, 78
aesthetics of, 4, 7, 26n77
in organizational science, 26n77
imperial ideologies, improvisation and, 7–8
impossibility, of improvisation, 461–62
improv comedy, 354
African American problems with, 357
agreement and, 355–56
cross-gender performance in, 358–60
Death in a Minute game in, 356–57
flow and, 362
gender issues with, 356, 358–59
generosity and, 126n33
groupmind and, 355–57
homosexuality and, 361
identity and, 362
long-form, 363n2
mainstream ideology in, 357
principles of, 355
short-form, 363n1
status and, 358
stereotypes perpetuated by, 355, 359
improvement, improvisation and, 167
improvisation. See also critical improvisation studies
African American social dance and, 331–33
African Americans’ traditions with, 154–55
all’improviso and, 167–68
eroticism and, 155
as aesthetic object, 424–26
burning as, 372
Christian ethics and, 544–49, 550n19
Cicero on writing and, 266
common purpose and, 169–70
compositional creativity compared to, 386
conceiving histories through, 257
constraint and, 8–9, 24n46, 85
conventional understanding of, 93–94
conversation compared to, 183
copyright challenges with, 347–48
Corinne, or Italy and, 256–59
created temporal event and, 443–44
definitions of, 3, 13–14, 16, 57
democracy and, 289
Derrida on democracy and, 19
Derrida on impossibility of, 461–62
Derrida’s frustrations with experience of, 143–44
detecting presence of, 80
diagonality and, 170–71
diagrammatics and, 171–72
dismissal and disparagement of, 419–421
economics and, 17
entropy of imitation compared to, 48–49
experience’s relationship to, 88
ex tempore dicendi facultas and, 265, 267–72
first English usage of, 255–59, 259n4, 260n9
freedom and, 258–59, 289
gaffes and, 85
happiness and, 441
history of, 2
Hudgins’ copyright and continued, 344
Husserl on future and, 445–46
identifying, 75
idiomatic and non-idiomatic, 168–69, 178n15
illusion of, 75
imperial ideologies and, 7–8
improvement and, 167
inspiration compared to, 246–47
intelligence and, 166
jurisgenerative principle and, 132
knowledge and, 202
law of, 429
learning through, 74–75
masking trope with, 4
mistakes and, 40, 80
Montaigne linking philosophy to, 235–36
in Montaigne’s Essays, 227–28
moral perfectionism and, 6
musical improvisation compared to shifting cultivation and, 371
neglect of, 4
neural basis of, 57–61
origin of term, 255–56,
planning’s relationship to, 15–18
Plato and, 268
as poetry, 205
political agency and definition of, 166–72
poverty and, 167
present and, 144–56
process-product opposition and, 4–5
Providence rejection and, 166–67
pure, 75
qualities of, 74
Quintilian on, 266–70
rarity of surprise in, 446–47
Renaissance and, 264–65, 270, 282
rhetorical tradition and, 263, 265
risk and, 168
search algorithms and, 17–18
self and, 88
soccer and, 198
software, 18
 structured, 8, 297, 310, 345
Tahrir Square, political agency and, 174
therapies based on, 4
as way of life, 13–19
yoga and, 219–22
Improvisation, Community, and Social Practice (ICASP), 19
improvisational behaviors, 74
improvisational theater, 6, 18–19
improvisation extempore
Broken Strings and, 477
concept of, 459–60
critique and, 460–61, 478n6
education for, 465–66
ego with, 467
improvisation impromptu compared to, 459, 477
jazz and, 460
mistakes and, 463
Ryle on, 472
wit and fit demand of, 464
Improvisation for the Theater (Spolin), 355
improvisation impromptu
Broken Strings and, 459, 474–77
compliance and, 474
concept of, 460
critique and, 460–61, 478n6
cutting contests and, 467, 469–70
on edge of happiness, 462–64
education for, 465–66
ego with, 467
fear and, 470
impossibility and, 461–62
improvisation extempore compared to, 459, 477
karaoke murders and, 471–72
as public act, 470–71
Ryle on, 472–74
wit and fit demand of, 464
Improvisation: Its Nature and Practice in Music (Bailey), 3
improvisation models, of Pressing, 39–42
improvisative, the, 115
agency and, 123
characteristics of, 118–20
generosity and, 122–23
mistakes and, 121–22
as responsive, 123
singularity and, 119–20, 125n31, 126n32
improvisatory expansion, of Montaigne, 231–36
Improvised News (Shibutani), 15
ImprovOlympics, 358–59, 363n1, 363n2
improvvisatori/improvvisatrici, 2, 259n7
artificiality criticism and, 247
 audience impact on, 240
controversial nature of, 240
first English translation of, 256–57, 260n9
Homer compared to, 242, 244–48, 250
minstrels compared to, 256
oral phenomenon of, 241
in print media, 241–43, 250–52
rise of, 239–40
socio-political power of, 248–50
tourists discovering, 242–43
virtuoso feats of, 241
indeterminacy
Cage and, 294, 302n27
compared with improvisation, 10, 17
course of events and, 272
memory and, 446
Indian classical music. See classical music, Indian
inferior frontal gyrus/ventral premotor cortex (IFG/ vPMC)
evolution of, 65
mirror systems and, 64
neuroscience of improvisation and, 59, 63
The Infinite Conversation (Blanchot), 456n43
Information Dynamics of Music (IDyoM) model, 47
information systems theory, 14
“initialization,” 419, 474
innovation, 6, 11, 16, 168, 460, 472–73
conservation and, 211
in bird song, 512
in humpback whales, 519
for Husserl, 442
in jazz, 198, 420, 507
in organizations, 390, 393
social dance and, 330, 332
inscription, lived instant and, 149, 149f, 155
inseparability, in improvisation
of composition and performance, 185–86, 189, 198,
inspiration, 98
improvisation compared to, 246–47
instinct and, 465
in Quintilian, 269, 281
Romantic ideal of, 240, 244
instability, 242
cognition in musical improvisation and, 48–49
instant, lived. See lived instant
“instant composition,” 11, 179n21
Institutio Oratoria (Quintilian), 2, 270, 465
intelligence
of birds, 506
artificial, 15, 19, 101
collective, 408, 410–11
 communal, 289, 300
emotional, 407
improvisation and, 166
political, 166–67
intention. See also collective intention
avoidance of, 302n27
agency and, 95–96, 106n21
compared with attention, 192–93
definition of, 98–99
ex consilio, 266
group, 482–89, 495n11
interpreting, 408, 410–12
moment and, 443
musical improvisation and attention compared to, 192–93
neural processes of, 61
in Spinoza, 161
temporality and, 442–43, 445, 452
intentionless invention, 9
interactivity
in artificial intelligence, 101
in computer music, 92,
human-machine, 18
interspecies, 19,
Interactive Object/Feature/Process (IOFP) model
attention and, 43–44, 50
cognition in musical improvisation and, 42–44
non-improvised compositions and, 48–49
interactivity
in computer music, 2, 18–19, 40–41, 52, 92, 97
in negotiation, 10
interspecies, 19
interagency, 93, 99. See also distributed agency
electro-acoustic music and, 103
interpretation, 129, 188–89
in black social dance, 337
interrupt generation, 41, 45, 50
interruption, skin conductance and, 44, 46–47
interspecies improvisation. See also birds. See also humpback whales
between laughing thrush and clarinet, 503–5, 504f, 505f
education and, 506, 520
of humpback whales and clarinet, 512–14, 513f, 514f, 515f, 516f, 517–19
humpback whales and methodology for, 513, 513f
humpback whale songs compared to nightingales, 509–10, 510f
imitation avoided in, 505
jazz and, 507–9
knowledge from, 502
training for, 520
veery’s song notations and, 507–9, 507f, 508f, 509f
intersubjectivity
cognition and, 79, 82, 84, 88
 in contact improvisation, 297–98
Husserl’s problem with, 449–50
interval
learning and, 150
of time, 146, 148–150, 153, 157n9, 185, 392, 445
in-time processes, 78–79
intuition, 95, 104, 145, 155,
as criterion for the best improvisation, 15
knowledge of the real through, 145
as masking term for improvisation, 4
strategic, 386, 391–93
invention, 152, 167, 190
African American social dance and, 331
Cicero’s view of, 280
Hudgins’ impromptu, 341
imitation and, 164
intentionless, 9
IOFP. See Interactive Object/Feature/Process
Ion (Plato), 243
irreversibility, musical improvisation and, 186, 198
Isaeus, 263–64
Islam, 547–48
iterability, 11, 116–17, 119
Iyer, Vijay, 19, 51

Jackson, Jonathan David, 332

Jackson, Thomas “Stonewall,” 378
James, William, 292, 484, 489
jam session, 188
of birds, 503
JANE (improv troupe), 358–61
Jankélévitch, Vladimir, 156, 157n9
Derrida on temporality compared to, 153
on Liszt’s compositions, 152–53
on lived instant, 146–47, 146f, 150–51
lived time and, 145–47
on memory and time, 147
on musical improvisation and mediation, 152–53
on musical improvisation and presence, 147–48
Jarrett, Keith, 188
Jaulin, Robert, 209
jazz
adaptation and appeal of, 506–7
African American roots of, 199n1, 431
brain activity during, 406–7
as classical music, 433n9
cliché and, 190
cognition in musical improvisation and studies on, 49–50
collective intention and, 495n11
collective unity and, 194–95
 composition in, 199n4
as conversation, 12–13
creativity precursors in, 198
elusive nature of, 182–83
ensemble improvisation and, 289, 493
gender discrimination in, 431
habitus, 197–98
improvisational immediacy and, 135–36
improvisation extempore and, 460
intellectual vanguard and, 160
interspecies improvisation and, 507–9
as knowledge-in-action, 183–84
learning process of, 197–98
male domination in, 121
motif theory and, 10
without musical improvisation, 199n1
musical repertoire and, 430
organizational theory and metaphor of, 14
playing on “changes” in, 427–28
pop culture’s representation of, 420
race and, 431
retrospection and, 193–94
Rollins on creativity and, 532
signifying and, 6, 23n29
social psychology and, 50
“state of flow” in, 175–76
studies, 6–7, 23n29
temporality in Western classical music compared to, 189
timbre and, 426
Jazz Dance (Stearns, Marshall, and Stearns, Jean), 340–41
jazz metaphor, in organizational science, 14
The Jazz Singer, 479n25
Jencks, Charles, 5
Jeneba (Mogbuama woman), 373, 376
jewule (rice variety), 375
Johnson, Stringbean, 476
Johnson-Laird, Philip, 10, 12, 93
Johnstone, Keith, 358, 444–46
Jones, Elvin, 487
Jones, Thad, 155
Joseph, Miriam, 2
Journal Étranger, 243–44
journalism, poetic improvisation compared to, 251–52
Journal of Aesthetic Education, 420
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 420–21, 433n5, 434n14
Jowitt, Deborah, 319
j-setting, 336
Judaism, 525
judgment, 459
Judson Dance Theater, 299, 303n54, 304n64
jurisgenerative principle, 128, 137–38
grammar and, 130–31
improvisation and, 132
state interpretation and, 129–30

Kafka, Franz, 115–16, 121

Kagan, Jeremy, 468
KaiBorg, 92
kairos, 265, 267–69, 271, 283n22
Kairos (deity), 271–72, 276–77, 280
Kaiser, Jeff, 92
karaoke murders, improvisation impromptu and, 471–72
Karsch, Anna Louisa, 243–44
kebeleh (rice variety), 375
Kendra, James, 17
Keros, Angela T., 10, 13
Kierkegaard, Søren, 439–41, 448, 452–53
kinesthetic sensation, yoga and, 220
Kiss Me, Kate dancers, 339
choreography and, 344–45
copyright omission of, 344
recasting of, 346
Klee, Paul, 193, 453
knowledge
base for musical improvisation, 62–63, 192
conceptual compared to non-conceptual, 122–23
economics and creation of, 409
experience and, 87
for Hegel, 117, 124n16
from interspecies improvisation, 502
improvisation and, 183, 203, 228, 244
jazz as action and, 183–84
of language compared to language creation, 130
limits of, 236
lived instant and, 146
of queer histories, 323
of the real, 145
shared, 338
knowledge-base theories, 9–10, 12
Koestler, Arthur, 93
Konitz, Lee, 532
Koshland, Daniel E., 168–69
Kreuser, Johann, 248
Kroodsma, Donald, 500–501
Kühn, Joachim, 144, 151

Labanotation, 346, 348n2, 351n43

labor productivity, 411
economics and, 411
The Labyrinths of Information: Challenging the Wisdom of Systems (Ciborra), 14
Lacy, Steve, 185, 192, 535
LaFaro, Scott, 494n8
Lake, Oliver, 183
Landgraf, Edgar, 7
Lang, Harold, 345
Langenschwarz, Maximilian, 250–51
language, 204–5. See also conversation; grammar; communication
communication through language, 204
conversation and social practice with, 94
emotions, music as language of, 509
gendered, 358, 360
iterability of, 116
knowledge of compared to creation of, 130
law of, 131–32
music and evolution of, 65
music and neuroscience connections to, 84–85
music as, 183
music’s relationship with, 497–98
music cognition compared to cognition of, 63, 64
non-idiomatic, 168n6
oral improvisation and, 248
poetry and, 202
production, as improvisation, 12
shared neural resources with music, 65
language lab, slave ship as, 137–38
“language music,” 133, 139
lateral orbital prefrontal cortex (LOFC), 60
Latour, Bruno, 91–92, 102, 162
laughing thrush, 503–5, 504f, 505f
law
anoriginal criminality and, 128, 136
flight and, 129, 137–39
of gender, 116
imagination and, 128
of improvisation according to W. Furtwängler), 429
of language, 131–32
mistakes and, 121–23
recognition and, 117
Lawler, D., 257
Layard, Richard, 410
Lazzerato, Maurizio, 207
leadership
in improvisation, 380
in musical improvisation, 48, 411
learning
African American social dance, 333–35
of bird song, 501
compared with copying, 528
deutero-learning, 291–93, 301n16
through improvisation, 74–75
interval and, 150
 from mistakes, 191
of musical improvisation, 16, 57, 62, 120–21, 197–98
music and language compared, 63
overlearning, 80
second-order, 291–92
of social dance, 334
theories of motor, 40
Leary, Timothy, 197
Lectures on Aesthetics (Hegel), 148–49
Lefèvre, Jean, 272
Leibowitz, Yeshayahou, 525
Lepkoff, Daniel, 314
Levin, Robert, 62
Levinas, Emmanuel, 450
Levinson, Jerrold, 25n54
Lewis, George E.,
the AACM and, 173
the Afrological and, 51, 205, 430–31
comparing improvisation and indeterminacy, 302
on Conduction, 179n21, 211
on control, 207
on exploring, 208, 211
on improvisation and knowledge, 202
interactive computer music of, 18, 41, 51–52, 101–3
Lewis, John, 425
Leybourne, Stephen, 16
liberation
improvisation symbolic of, 8
gendered, in improv comedy, 360
Lidov, David, 63
Limb, Charles, 60, 80, 85, 406–7
limerence, 408–9
linguistics, 131
The Lion in Winter, 486
listening
by birds, 502
culturally contingent, 78
deutero-listening, 294
embodied, 79
experience of, 79–80
group attention and, 490
by humpback whales, 519
to humpback whales, 517
to improvised music, 80, 427, 429, 452, 488, 490–91
Liszt, Franz, 152–53, 425
live/liveness
lived instant
creative time and, 150
Derrida on negative absence and, 148–50, 149f
experience and, 150
 inscription and, 149, 149f, 155
Jankélévitch on, 146–47, 146f, 150–51
moment compared to, 445
lived time (durée), 145–47
“lock-in,” musical quality and, 400
LOFC. See lateral orbital prefrontal cortex
Lohmar, Dieter, 442–44, 446
long-form improv comedy, 363n2
Lord, Albert, 10, 25n59, 246
Lost Yetis (improv troupe), 358
Loueke, Lionel, 432
Lover Man (Rollins), 531–32
Love Supreme (Coltrane), 206
“lowercase music,” 96
Lucan, 232–33
Luhmann, Niklas, 448
Lyons, Len, 188

MacIntyre, Alasdair, 542–43

Magerko, Brian, 18
Maghostut, Malachi Favors, 206
magnetoencephalography (MEG), 43
Malone, Jacqui, 348n5
management, improvisation in
applications of, 386–89
arousal threatening, 390–91
creative combination and, 390–91
disorganization and, 388
in emergency response, 17
emotions in, 390
expert and strategic intuition and, 392–93
feedback and, 387
inputs to creativity and, 389
negotiations and, 388–89
networks and, 388, 391
organizational culture and, 388
organizational structure and, 387–88
outcomes of, 385
planning in, 15–18
purposes of, 386
of software projects, 16
strategic intuition and, 391–93
“structural holes” and, 389
theoretical opposition to, 385
Manovich, Lev, 96
Marlboro Music, 405
Marsalis, Wynton, 433n9, 489, 493, 496n23
masking trope, with improvisation, 4
Mathews, F. S., 507, 507f
Matter and Memory (Bergson), 146
Mazzola, Guerino, 175
McClellan, George, 378
McGinn, Kathleen, 10, 13
McIntyre, Kalaparush Maurice, 208
McVay, Scott, 511, 511f
Mead, Margaret, 290
media, 164–66
medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC), 60
mediocracy, 160
belief and reality in, 173–74
circulation of power in, 165
collective agency and, 163–66
terminology of, 177n7
MEG. See magnetoencephalography
Melford, Myra, 213n24
melodic improvisation, 58–59
memory
being in the moment and, 448
cultural, 322
Derrida on, 148–49, 151–52
expectation and, 147, 444–49, 453
indeterminacy and, 446
happiness and, 440–41
Husserl on, 442–46
Jankélévitch on time and, 146–47, 151
improvised performance and, 44–45
neural processing of, 60–61, 65
in performances by improvvisatore Sgricci, 241
performances by improvvisatori/improvvisatrici and, 247–48
Pliny on Isaeus’s, 264
political nature of, 313
rhetoric and, 281
spontaneity and, 355, 362
Menary, Richard, 94
Mende people, rice farming in Sierra Leone and, 366, 377, 380
Mendonca, David, 17
Mengelberg, Misha, 179n21, 370–71
Merriam, Alan, 9
Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, 546
metanoia, 272
metis, 408
microrhythms, 51
micro-structure, of free improvisation, 45
Mignault, Claude, 272, 276–77, 280
Milbank, John, 543
mimesis, 103, Also see imitation
Aristotle’s account of, 243
in classical rhetoric, 264–65
improvisation as, 484–85, 490, 492
Mind, 419
Mingus, Charles, 190, 197, 199n4
minstrels, improvvisatori compared to, 241, 256
Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (Scott, Walter), 256
miracles, agency and, 195–96
mirror neurons, 76, 81, 84
Miscellaneorum centuriae (Poliziano), 277
mirror systems, 64, 81
mistakes
freedom to make, 123
gaffes and, 85
gender and, 121–23
improvisation and, 40, 80, 85, 186, 191, 335
improvisation extempore and, 463–64
improvisative and, 121–23
law and, 121–23
learning from, 191
Modern System of the Arts, 422
Moers, Ellen, 256
Mogbuama, Sierra Leone, 366, 368f, 369f, 373. See also rice farming, in Sierra Leone
Molnar-Szakacs, Istvan, 64
moment, the, 11. Also see here and now; moment-to-moment
ego and, 443
experience of, 450–51, 453
fascination and, 452–53
free improvisation and, 453
here and now, 5, 119
intention and, 443
lived instant compared to, 445
memory and, 448
presence and, 440–41
recollection and, 446
spontaneity and, 57
Stoic view of, 6
surprise and, 442
whim and, 3
moment, in the, 57, 62, 80, 241, 331–32, 355, 407,
Emerson on living, 478n8
Husserl on being, 444
in improvisation, 448, 463
Kierkegaard on being, 440–41
moment-to-moment, 12, 15, 75
Monet, Claude, 232
Monk, Thelonious, 197, 371, 409
Monnerot, Jules, 207
Monson, Ingrid, 12–13
Monson, Jennifer, 314, 322–23
Montaigne, Michel de. See also Essays
on body limitations, 234–35
citations used by, 233, 236
essay style of, 229
 essay terminology and, 228
improvisational features in writing of, 227–28
improvisatory expansion of, 231–36
legal training of, 230
on mutability of self, 235–36
on personality, 235
philosophy and improvisation linked by, 235–36
retirement of, 227
rhetorical improvisation of, 230
moral education, 410
moral improvisation, 6
moral perfectionism, 6, 523–25, 528, 533–34,
“moral luck,” 463
moral perfectionism
as attitude, 525
improvisation and, 6
Sonny Rollins and, 524–25, 528, 533, 535
Morley, Dickey, 475, 476
Morris, Lawrence “Butch,” 168, 170–71, 211, 404
Morrison, Toni, 204
Moten, Fred, 154–56
Motherwell, Robert, 293, 302n22
motif theory, 10
motor system, music cognition and, 57
motivic logic, 487, 496n17
Moyer, Donald, 217–19, 222, 222n1, 223n2
MPFC. See medial prefrontal cortex
multitude, power of, 161–63, 165, 172
Muñoz, José Esteban, 117, 313, 323–25
Muse, Clarence, 475
music. See also philosophy of music
brain and impact of, 64–66
Braxton on global community of, 409
communication through, 184, 497n32, 506
critical improvisation studies’ development and, 1
embodiment and, 86
idiomatic and non-idiomatic, 9
as language, 183
language and neuroscience connections to, 84–85
language evolution and, 65
listener’s participation in, 79
“lock-in” and quality of, 400
mirror system for, 64
motivations for, 404
recorded, 82–83, 187
reproduction of, 187
Ryle on technology of, 473
social psychology and, 86
technological advances in, 432, 436n40
vibration and, 207–8, 213n24
Musica Elettronica Viva, 99
musical complexity, 425–26
musical equilibrium, path dependence and, 398–401
musical improvisation. See also cognition, in musical improvisation; free improvisation; path
dependence, free improvisation and; recorded music
as activity, 426–27
Adorno’s criticisms of, 420
as aesthetic object, 424–26
agency and environment in, 96
ants and, 91–92, 102–3
automatic writing and, 213n21
beginnings in, 191–92, 196
catbird studies on, 500–502
in Western classical music, 49
collective unconscious and, 206
complexity of, 425–26
composition compared to, 185–86, 189–90
computation and, 18
consciousness and, 94–95
context and, 195
conversation compared to, 198–99
criteria for, 184–90
definition of, 396–97
education for, 62
elusive nature of, 182–83
empathy and embodiment in, 80, 87
ethnomusicology studies on, 1–2
exemplification in, 425
expectation and, 83–84
expectations of, 11
fear and, 196–97
features and, 41
flow and, 40, 80
generosity and, 123
history of, 184
humpback whales and constantly changing, 519
identity and, 6–7
inseparability and, 185–86
intention and agency in, 95–96
intention compared to attention in, 192–93
interpretation compared to, 189
irreversibility and, 186
Jankélévitch on mediation and, 152–53
Jankélévitch on presence and, 147–48
jazz without, 199n1
knowledge-base theories and, 10
of laughing thrush, 503–5, 504f, 505f
limitations and, 192
as model, 14
motivations for, 404
 musical repertoire and, 430
nightingale studies on, 502–3
originality and, 190–93
perceptual feedback and, 40
philosophy and compatibility with, 144
philosophy and invisibility of, 419–21, 433n10
philosophy disparaging, 420, 433n10
processes and, 41
product of, 189–90
reactive compared to elective forms of, 199
responsiveness and, 195–96
risk in Western classical music compared to, 191
in Romantic century, 239
shifting cultivation improvisation compared to, 371
situationality and contingency of, 187–88
skills of, 429–30
small size of groups in, 425
sound of, 80
speech acts compared to, 427
stylistic idiom and, 62
technology and agency in, 95
tonal imagery and, 40
musical leadership, 48
musical repertoire, 430, 519
musical skills, 429–30
Music and the Ineffable (Jankélévitch), 148
music cognition, 75. See also cognition, in musical improvisation
action understanding and, 82, 87
early research in, 56–57
embodiment and, 76–77
improvisation and rhythm central to, 83
intersubjectivity of, 88
language cognition compared to, 63
mirror systems and, 81
motor system and, 57
neuroscience research in,
performance and, 45
process of, 56
situated, 77
musicology, 1–2. See also ethnomusicology
music therapy, emotional regulation and, 50
mutual responsiveness, in ensemble improvisation, 486
Muybridge, Eadweard, 322, 322f
“Mwa Mwa” (Hudgins), 340–41, 343–44
Myers, Amina Claudine, 206
myth, 175–76, 196–98
“mythocracy,” 166, 173

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (Douglass), 154

National Aviary, Pittsburgh, 503
nduliwa (rice variety), 374–75
neglect, of improvisation, 4
negotiations, improvisation in management and, 388–89
Negri, Antonio, 171, 210–11
Nepos, 264
Nettl, Bruno, 1, 4
network externalities, 397–99
networks, improvisation in management and, 388, 391
Der neue Teutsche Merkur, 244
Neuhaus, Max, 290, 299, 300
feedback used by, 295–96
virtual communities created by, 296
neuroscience of improvisation, 56
ACC and, 59
Berkowitz and Ansari’s studies on, 58–61, 63
brain function insights from, 63–66
DLPFC and, 60
dPMC and, 59
empathy and, 81–83
fMRI for studies on, 57–58
IFG/vPMC and, 59, 63
language and music connections in, 84–85
on language cognition compared to music cognition, 63
Limb and Braun’s studies on, 60, 80
LOFC and, 60
melodic compared to rhythmic improvisation in, 58–59
MPFC and, 60
musicians compared to nonmusicians for, 60–61
rTPJ and, 61, 66
studies on, 57–61
underlying processes of, 61–62
neutrality, time-consciousness and, 452–53
new, in time-consciousness, 442
New Criticism, 493–94
ngiyema yakei (rice variety), 368–69, 375
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 462–64
nightingales
humpback whale songs compared to, 509–10, 510f
musical improvisation studies on, 502–3
Noë, Alva, 94–95
Noel Jones, Niall, 313, 316, 319, 321–22
Noise Orders (Brown), 179n22
Noise Orders (Brown), 179n22
non-conceptual knowledge, 122–23
non-idiomatic improvisation, 168–71, 174, 178n15
See idiomatic improvisation
non-idiomatic music, 9
See idiomatic music
Novack, Cynthia, 11, 296–300, 304n69, 304n70
now, in time-consciousness, 442
Nubukpo, Kako, 16–17

objects, 41–42, 46
musical, 421–23
musical improvisation as aesthetic, 424–26
Occasio (deity), 270, 272, 277, 280
Occasio arrepta, neglecta (David), 280
Occasion, 280
Alciati’s emblem book on, 272, 273f, 274f, 275f, 276f
modal patterns of, 277
Odyssey (Homer), 245
Office of Marine Mammals, 520
Of Grammatology (Derrida), 150
“Of Idleness” (Montaigne), 232
“Of Physiognomy” (Montaigne), 230
“Of Practice” (Montaigne), 233
“Of Repentance” (Montaigne), 232
“Of the Resemblance of Children to Fathers” (Montaigne), 231
“On Cruelty” (Montaigne), 235
Ong, Walter, 250
Onishi, Norimitsu, 471
On War (Clausewitz), 391–92
oral speeches, Sophist preference for, 265
organizational culture, improvisation in management and, 388
organizational structure, improvisation in management and, 387–88
organizational theory, 14–16
Organization Science, 14
originality
copyright and, 340–44
of Essays, 230
fear and, 190–91
improv comedy and, 355
musical improvisation and, 7, 11, 190–93, 196, 198–99, 200n6
Romantic aesthetics and, 240
surprise and, 200n6
Oryza glaberrima. See African rice
Oryza sativa. See Asian rice
Osgood, Henry, 495n11
Other, 115, 118–20, 123n1
“our-intention,” 493
Outline of a Theory of Practice (Bourdieu), 9
Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain and Other Lessons from the Biology of
Consciousness (Noë), 94–95
overaccepting, Christian ethics and, 546, 548
over-time processes, 78–79
Overy, Katie, 64
Owens, W. R., 255
Oxford English Dictionary, 255–56, 259n4, 259n8, 260n9

Paenitentia, 277, 279f

Page, Larry, 392–93
pa kamp (rice variety), 375
Le Pardon (Jankélévitch), 147
pantomime, 341–43
Parker, Evan, 95, 99, 100, 107n42
Parker, Samuel, 500–501
Parker, William, 213n24
parrots, imitation of, 506
Parry, Milman, 10, 246
Patel, Aniruddh, 84–85
path dependence, free improvisation and
coordination problems and, 401–4, 408–9
economics and, 396–98, 409–12
familiar vocabulary in, 401–2
“lock-in” and, 400
model of, 399–400, 413n3
musical equilibrium and, 398–401
network externality and, 397
purposes and benefits of, 404–8
quality and, 400–401
QWERTY keyboard and, 398
solutions to coordination problems and, 408–9
telephones and, 397–98
understanding, 412–13
virtuosic temptations and, 402–3
Paul, Les, 432
Paxton, Steve, 297, 300, 303n54
Payne, Roger, 511, 511f
Paz, Octavio, 204, 206, 209
Pearce, Celia, 18
Pelz-Sherman, Michael, 18
Penny Magazine, 248–50, 249f
perception
ecological mode of, 86–87
embodiment and rhythm, 77–78
of improvisation, 80
language, 59, 63–65
music, 46–47, 50–51, 58–59, 63–65, 83, 86–87
primary, 443, 448–49
of racialized difference, 81
shifting cultivation and negative, 365
shunyata and, 120
in Buddhism, 125n26
perceptual feedback, musical improvisation and, 40
perceptual traces, 40
Percy, Thomas, 257
perfection/imperfection, 6
The Perfect Mess (Abrahamson and Freedman), 388
performance, 396–97
automatism and, 40, 97
cognitive aspects of, 39, 45, 57
 comparison of language and music, 63
composition’s convergence with, in improvisation, 185
conversation as, 13
coordination, in musical, 57, 188–89
cross-gender, 359–61
ensemble, 482
the everyday and, 298
gendered, 8, 115–16, 359–61
improv comedy and cross-gender, 358–60
improvisation and, 188–89
with interactive computer systems, 101
extempore, 460
memory and improvised, 44–45
mirror systems and, 64
neural processing of, 65
oral, 239, 264–65, 268
physicality of, 93
queer, 313
social dynamics of, 95
solo, 133–135, 137
Sophist, 263–64
of speech acts, 85
temporality of, 47, 52, 79
unrepeatability of improvised, 187
Western classical music and variance of, 188
performativity, 115
of gender, 116
the improvisative and, 115
Other and, 118
self-consciousness and, 120
speech acts, 85
performed folk tales (domeisia), 381
Peri sophiston (Alcidamas), 264
perlocutionary force, 194
Perls, Fritz, 292, 302n22
Perrucci, Andrea, 167–68, 170
personality, 235
“perspectival perches,” 491
perspective, composition and, 187
Peters, Gary, 104, 196–97
Peterson, William, 266–68
Pey, Serge, 204
Pheiffer, Jeremy, 311f, 317–20
Phelan, Peggy, 349n11
The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness (Husserl), 441–42, 444
Phenomenology of Mind (Hegel), 439
Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel), 117, 124n16
Phillips, Barre, 405
Philosophie première (Jankélévitch), 146
philosophy. See also philosophy of music
 idealism in, 228
lived experience and, 145, 230
Montaigne linking improvisation to, 235–36
musical improvisation and compatibility with, 144
musical improvisation disparaged by, 420, 433n10
musical improvisation’s invisibility in, 419–21, 433n10
as spiritual exercise, 524
The Philosophy of Improvisation (Peters), 104
philosophy of music
aesthetic mono-functionality and, 423
freedom and, 428–29
jazz, playing on “changes” and, 427–28
jazz and debates on race and gender in, 431
musical complexity and, 425–26
on musical improvisation as activity, 426–27
on musical improvisation as aesthetic object, 424–26
musical improvisation skills and, 429–30
musical object and Anglophone philosophy, 421–23
musical repertoire and, 430
recorded music and, 432
repeatability and, 422
risk and, 429
social dimension of, 430–32
spectatorialism and, 424
spontaneous creation and, 429
Western classical music’s normativity and, 423–24
work concept and, 422, 428
Philosophy of the Performing Arts (Davies), 479n20
photography, 200n6
pianists, 44–45
Pickering, Andrew, 9
Pieh, Sengbeh, 379–80
Pierse, Lyn, 356–57
Pietropaolo, Domenico, 4
Pindar, 477
pinipini (rice variety), 375
Pinker, Steven, 64–65
pitch, 47
planning
computation and, 15–17
emergency management and, 17
improvisation’s relationship to, 15–18
organizational theory and, 14–16
plasticity, 292–93
Plato, 243–44, 268
Pliny, 264
poetic improvisation. See also improvvisatori/improvvisatrici
artificiality criticism and, 247
authenticity and, 250
comparisons with Homer, 10, 25n59, 242–49
 Greek antiquity affiliations of, 243–47, 250
journalism compared to, 251–52
mechanical ability criticism and, 248
national differences of discourse on, 240
Romantic century and, 239–40, 243
Poetics (Aristotle), 243
poetry. See also essays
as activity of spirit, 210
African Americans and, 205
Beat, 289
Bible and, 205
collective unconscious and, 206
identity and, 204–5
improvisation as, 205
language and, 202
sound and, 204
surrealist, 203–4
system of the universe and, 209
Point From Which Creation Begins (Lake), 183
political agency. See also agency
all’improviso and, 167–68
common purpose and, 169–70
diagonality and, 170–71
diagrammatics and, 171–72
improvement and, 167
improvisation definition and, 166–72
non-idiomatic improvisation and, 168–69
poverty and, 167
Providence rejection and, 166–67
risk and, 168
“state of flow” and, 176
Tahrir Square, improvisation and, 174
Political Treatise (Spinoza), 161
“The Politics of Dancing” (Houston-Jones), 315–16
Poliziano, Angelo, 277
Porter, Cole, 344
poverty, improvisation and, 167
power
centralization and decentralization of, 290–91
Foucault on, 164
improvvisatori’s socio-political, 248–50
in improvisation, 17
in improv comedy, 354–55, 360, 362,
mediocracy and circulation of, 165
of multitude, 161–63, 165, 172
self-generating, 130–31
power-knowledge, 197
Praise of folly (Erasmus), 262
preprogrammed electronic music, 397
presence
 art seizing, 271
happiness and, 440
Jankélévitch on musical improvisation and, 147–48
moment and, 440–41
present, 119–20, 126n32
improvisation and, 144–56
The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Goffman), 4
Pressing, Jeff, 19, 93. See also Interactive Object/Feature/Process
on attention, 43
on features and processes, 41
improvisation models of, 39–42
micro-structure of free improvisation in studies of, 45
Prévost, Eddie, 190, 405–7
print media, improvvisatori in, 241–43, 250–52
Prior, Nick, 103
“pro-active” instruments, 97
processes, 46. See also Interactive Object/Feature/Process
attention and, 42–43
creativity and, 189
in-time, 78–79
musical improvisation and, 41
neuroscience of improvisation and underlying, 61–62
over-time, 78–79
product opposition to, 4–5
of yoga, 222
product
creativity and, 189
process opposition to, 4–5
professional social dance, 335–36
Prolegomena ad Homerum (Wolf), 245
prophetic consciousness, 444
prosoche, 6
protention, 442–44, 446, 448
Providence, 161–62, 165
improvisation and rejection of, 166–67
Pryor, Richard, 135
P.S. 122, 309–10, 321, 324
psychology of music, 56. See also cognition, in musical improvisation
public speaking, 470
Public Supply (Neuhaus), 295–96
punishment, 459
pure improvisation, 75
Putnam, Hilary, 94, 489
Pythian Ode (Pindar), 477

quality, path dependence and musical, 400–401

queer
dance, ephemeral nature of, 325–26
time, AIDS and, 320–21, 323–24
In a Queer Time and Place (Halberstam), 320
Quintilian, 2, 265, 283n16, 284n23
Cicero and independence of, 281
on extemporaneity, 269
on fruits of education, 465–66
on improvisation, 266–70
on public speaking, 470
quotation, in essays, 232–33, 236
QWERTY keyboard, path dependence and, 398

Ra, Avreeayl, 208

Rabelais, François, 270–71, 281
race
dance training and, 313
dance style and, 316
copyright and, 339, 347–48
critical improvisation studies and, 3, 19
improv comedy and, 355
improvisation and, 431–32
mirror neurons and identification by, 81
recorded music and empathy across, 82
radical democracy, 163
Radio Net (Neuhaus), 296
ragas, 428
Raible, Wolfgang, 169
Rainer, Yvonne, 304n65
rainfall, rice farming in Sierra Leone and, 370–71
Rammert, Werner, 96–97
Ramshaw, Sara, 19
Raoul-Rochette, Desiré, 246–47
rap battles, 467
rational understanding, 161–62
Ray, Bernard B., 475
Ray, Ronald, 361
reactive musical improvisation, 199
reality
media staging, 164–65
in mediocracy, 173–74
Real Presences (Steiner), 152
real time, 13, 15, 52,
composition, 11
musical creation evolving in, 57, 62–63, 74–75, 83, 85, 153
problem solving in, 386
speech acts, 143
reason, 161, 210, 291
Reassembling the Social (Latour), 91, 102
reciprocal teams, 387–88
recognition, 115, 125n28, 126n33
of auditory information, 59
existence and, 117
fear and, 120
 gesture, 104
in improv comedy, 357–59
law and, 117
Other and, 118
recollection
expectation and, 447
in free improvisation, 449
Husserlian, 443, 445, 448
moment’s dependence on, 446
protentions in, 446
of protentions, 447, 453
recorded music
action understanding and, 82–83
cross-racial empathy and, 82
identity through, 428
philosophy of music and, 432
reproduction of, 187
redemption, 525
referent-based improvisation, 45–47, 49
Reflections (Lacy), 535
reincorporation, Christian ethics and, 546–47
Remarks on Antiquities, Arts, and Letters during an Excursion in Italy, in the Years 1802 and 1803
(Forsyth), 245–46
Renaissance, 230, 262
improvisation and, 264–65, 270, 282
time-centered discourse and, 270–72
repertoire, 75, 102
bird song, 501–02, 519
dance, 219
humpback whale song, 519–20
musical, 62, 192, 430, 519
resistance, 128, 460
constraint compared to, 9
to documentation, 346
minoritarian and marginal, 167
of the multitude, 129
popular, 174
plasticity and, 292
responsiveness, improvisation and, 123, 195–96, 220, 387, 486
retention, 149, 442–44, 446, 448
retrospection, jazz and, 193–94
rhetoric, improvisation and, 2, 230, 251,
rhetorical tradition, improvisation and, 262
rhythm, 47, 51
cultural aesthetics and, 78
embodiment and perception of, 77–78
human movement and generation of, 86–87
humpback whales matching, 517
neuroscientific studies of, 58–59, 67
of nightingale song, 510
 of social dance, 332–35
rice farming, in Sierra Leone. See also shifting cultivation, as improvisation
African and Asian rice co-flowering in, 377
autochthones and, 367
burning and, 370–72, 377
cross-pollination and, 367–68, 377
debts and, 372
escarpment zone and, 367, 368f
farm clusters in, 366–67
harvest quality and, 372
lessons of experimentation and, 374
Mende and, 366, 377, 380
planting and scheduling strategies of, 369
priority of, 366
rainfall and, 370–71
rice species varieties used for, 368–70
rules and process for, 377
scientific studies on post-war, 375–76, 376f
slave trade history and, 373
soil and land use types in, 367, 369f
war displacement and adaptation with, 374–75
weather prediction and, 371
women farmers and seed experimentation in, 373–77
Richards, Mary Caroline, 292
Richards, Paul, 11
right temporoparietal junction (rTPJ), 61, 66
risk
aesthetics of, 11
compared with chance, 168
originality and, 190–91
philosophy of music and, 429
in THEM, 319
in Western classical music compared to musical improvisation, 191
Rize, 337
The Road to Serfdom (Hayek), 290
Robert, Louis-Léopold, 248
Roberts, Katie, 358
Roberts, Matana, 208
“Roger Rabbit” dance, 333
Rollins, Sonny, 425, 527f, 529f, 530f, 534f
cosmic consciousness and, 527–28
on creativity, 532
dissatisfaction of, 525
on Hawkins’ success, 531
learning from Hawkins, 528–32
moral perfectionism of, 524–25, 528, 533, 535
practice’s importance to, 525–26, 533, 535
redemption and, 525
self relationship of, 526
solos of, 526
 spiritual exercises and, 533–34
Romantic century (1750-1850). See also improvvisatori/improvvisatrici
musical improvisation in, 239
poetic improvisation and, 239–40, 243
poetic improvisation manuals in, 251
technology and, 250
Ross, Alex, 405
Rowe, Keith, 96
rTPJ. See right temporoparietal junction
Russell, D. A., 263
Russell, Mark, 326n3
Ryle, Gilbert, 183, 419–20
“ghost in the machine,” 92–93, 97
on improvisation as thinking, 5,
improvisation extempore and, 472
improvisation impromptu and, 472–74
on innovation, 472
on technology of music, 473

Said, Edward, 74
“Salmon of Wisdom,” 202, 212
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 176
Saunders, Aretas, 507, 508f
Savage, Archie, 346
Savoy Ballroom, 336
Sawyer, R. Keith, 10, 12, 50
Saying Something: Jazz Improvisation and Interaction (Monson), 12–13
Schechner, Richard, 124n18
Schlaug, Gottfried, 65
Schlegel, August Wilhelm, 427
Schlegel, Friedrich, 427, 464–65
Schlippenbach Trio, 402
Schmitt, Natalie, 294–95
Schneemann, Carolee, 299
Schuller, Gunther, 182
Schutz, Alfred, 7, 188
Scientific Generics, 388
Scott, Joan, 125n26
Scott, Shirley, 496n23
Scott, Walter, 256, 258
Scott Joplin, 468
search algorithms, improvisation and, 17–18
Search and Reflect (Stevens), 412
Searle, John, 483–84, 486
Second City, 355
second-order learning, 291–92
seed experimentation, by women rice farmers, 373–77
Seeling, Ellen, 121
Segher, Tami, 360
selective attention, 491
selectivity, 42
self, the, 123, 125n27, 220, 222, 293
black social, 330, 337
collective intention and, 482–83
contact improvisation and definition of, 300
ensemble improvisation and, 300
Foucault and, 8, 220–21
form of, 526, 528
free improvisation and definition of, 407–8
gendered, 359
happiness and, 440
improvisation and, 88
Montaigne on mutability of, 235–36
other and, 115, 118, 122, 206–7, 209, 212
postmodern idea of, 300
Sonny Rollins’ relationship with, 526
technology of, 220–21
body and, 219
energy field model of, 294
self-awareness, 282, 297
self-consciousness, 252, 293, 439,
in Hegel, 117, 120–21, 125n30
in Stoic philosophy, 6
self-expression, 7, 210,
in African American dance, 348n5
neural processes and, 60, 62, 407
ummediated, 314
Romantic ideal of, 251
self-presence, 153, 154, 156, 440–41, 443–44, 448, 452
self-regulation
self-transformation, 88, 524, 535
semantic interconnections, collective intention and, 485, 487–90, 492–93
semantics
action understanding and, 82
music lacking in, 84
sensorimotor loop, 88
Serkin, Peter, 469
sexuality, 313, 315, 324, 336–37, 361
Sgricci, Tommaso, 241
Shakespeare’s Use of the Arts of Language (Joseph), 2
The Shape of Jazz to Come (Coleman), 485, 494n8
shared intention. See collective intention
shared time, 79
Sharing the Dance (Novack), 304n69, 304n70
Shaw, Patricia, 166
Shelley, P. B., 247
Shepp, Archie, 289, 300
Sher, Abby, 360
Shibutani, Tamotsu, 15
shifting cultivation, as improvisation, 365. See also rice farming, in Sierra Leone
 American Civil War compared to, 378
burning and, 370–72, 377
debts and, 372
harvest quality and, 372
lessons of experimentation and, 374
musical improvisation compared to, 371
negative perceptions and, 365
rainfall complications and, 370–71
slave insurrections compared to, 379–80
weather prediction and, 371
women farmers and seed experimentation in, 373–77
short-form improv comedy, 363n1
shunyata, 119–20, 125n26
Siegel, Marcia, 325
Sierra Leone. See rice farming, in Sierra Leone
signifying, jazz and, 6, 23n29
Silence (Cage), 294, 303n40
Silver, Scott, 467–68
Silverstein, Michael, 13
Simon, Herbert, 94
Simond, Louis, 241
Sinatra, Frank, 471
The Singer of Tales (Lord), 10
singularity, improvisative and, 119–20, 125n31, 126n32
Sissle, Noble, 341–42
“situated cognition,” 77
situational ethics, 6
situationality, of musical improvisation, 187–88
Sketches of Spain (Davis, Miles), 199
skills, musical improvisation, 429–30
skin conductance, 43
interruption and, 44, 46–47
Skinner, B. F., 93
slave insurrections, 379–80, 381n4
slavery, African rice and, 373
Sledge, Eddie, 344–45
Sloboda, John, 28n102
“small dance,” 297
Smith, Nancy Stark, 298, 316
Smith, Wadada Leo, 15
soccer, improvisation and, 198
The Social Animal (Brooks), 406
social cohesion, health and, 411
social contract, ensemble improvisation and, 481–82
social dance
aesthetics of, 331, 333
the body and, 333, 335–37
communication through 331, 333, 337
contradiction with professional dance, 335
creativity in, 331
 improvisation of, 330–38
invention and, 331
learning of, 333–35
social interaction, 8
free improvisation and, 406–7, 411, 547
in negotiations, 13, 388
socialism, 170
social psychology
jazz and, 50
music and, 86
Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), 19
Socrates, 235
software, agency and, 96
soil, rice farming in Sierra Leone and types of, 367, 369f
solitude, 450–52
Montaigne on, 230
free improvisation and, 451–52
solo improvisation, 136–37
choice in, 44,
black soloist, 139–40,
collective intention supporting, 485–88, 493
collective unity and, 197
coordination solutions with, 408
of Houston-Jones in THEM 2010 revival, 318, 322–23
neural processing in, 80
of Rollins, 526
studies of 42, 44, 47
Song of Solomon (Morrison), 204
Songs of the Humpback Whale, 511–12
Sonic Healing Ministries, 213n24
sonicism, 423
Sonny Meets Hawk (Rollins), 528–30, 530f
sonograms, of humpback whales and clarinet, 513–14, 514f, 515f, 516f, 517
Sophists, 263–65
Soucek, Branko, 503–4
sound, 148–49, 204, 492
Anthony Braxton and, 133–34, 137–38
Cageian view of, 294–95, 303n40
cognitive processes ad, 39, 43, 45, 51, 63, 86–87
Hegel and, 148–49
Husserl’s description of, 445
interspecies communication and, 506, 512
musical improvisation and, 407
sonicism and, 422–23
of Sonny Rollins, 532
recording of, 99
space, 324
free, 461
in improv comedy, 360, 362
queer, 320
The Space of Literature (Blanchot), 456n44
space-time, 148, 150, 211, 450
spectatorialism, philosophy of music and, 424
speech acts. See also conversation
Derrida on embodiment and, 150
musical improvisation compared to, 427
performance of, 85
Spence, Joseph, 243
Spewack, Bella, 344
Spewack, Samuel, 344
Spinoza, Baruch, 161–63, 173, 177n3
spiritual exercises
Beethoven and, 524
philosophy as, 524
Rollins and, 533–34
Spiritual Unity (Ayler), 206
spoken language. See conversation
Spolin, Viola, 355
spontaneity
in aesthetics of interaction, 7
Cicero and, 265–66
culture as basis of, 388
culture of, 107
effortless, 103
freedom and, 354, 428–29
Gestalt therapy and, 291
as hallmark of African American dance, 348
Johnny Hudgins and, 341–42
in improv comedy, 354–55, 357, 362
in language production, 12, 63
in management scholarship, 386
myth of, 196–98
naïve, 168
in oral composition, 2, 239
in oral improvisation, 241, 243, 246, 256
philosophy of music and, 429
postprandial, 263
Quintilian and, 272
restrictions on, 461
as Romantic ideal, 240
spontaneous creation, 49, 57, 60, 196–98, 427, 545
unmediated, 9, 11
Spontaneous Music Ensemble, 102
sports, 182, 198
Spuler, Rolf, 432
SSHRC. See Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council
Staël, Germaine de, 256–59, 260n16, 260n22
stagnation,
avoidance of, 11
familiarity and, 402
 risk of, 190, 463
“the stand,” 297
state interpretation, jurisgenerative principle and, 129–30
“state of flow,” 175–76
status, 545–48
in improv comedy, 358, 360
Stearns, Jean, 340–41, 351n45
Stearns, Marshall, 340–41, 351n45
Stein, Joel, 143–44
Steiner, George, 152
Steinert, Heinz, 25n61
Steppin’ on the Blues: The Visible Rhythms of African American Dance (Malone), 348n5
stereotypes, 10, 125n27
in improv comedy, 355, 358–59
Stevens, John, 102, 412
Stiegler, Bernard, 164
strategic intuition, improvisation in management and, 391–93
“stream of consciousness,” 489
“structural holes,” 389
Studio 54, 336
stylistic idiom, musical improvisation and, 62
Suard, Jean Baptiste Antoine, 244–45
subject, 117, 124n19
subtraction technique, fMRI and, 58
subversive ethics, 540–41
Suchman, Lucy, 101
Sudnow, David, 43
suicide, slave insurrections and, 379–80
Le suicide (Durkheim), 379
Sullenberger, Chesley, 540–41
Sun Ra, 166, 173, 211–12, 488
Supree, Burt, 309–10
surprise
from birds’ songs, 502
improvisation and rarity of, 446–47
improvisation impromptu and, 470, 477
moment and, 442
originality and, 11, 200n6
Surrealism, 289, 293, 302n22
poetry, 203–4
sympathy, 408
system of the universe, poetry and, 209
Szwed, John, 7

Tahrir Square, Cairo, 173–76

Tarde, Gabriel, 163–64, 177n8
Tarthang Tulku, 119–20, 125n26
Taylor, Cecil, 88, 137, 144, 155–56, 188, 482–83
Taylor, Charles, 547
teamwork productivity, 411
“technological unconscious,” 100
technology, 14
agency in musical improvisation and impact of, 95
distributed agency and, 96–97
music and advancements in, 432, 436n40
in Romantic century, 250
Ryle on music and, 473
of self, 220–21
telephones, path dependence and, 397–98
telos, 169
temporal event, created, 443–44
temporality
axis of, 185–86
Derrida compared to Jankélévitch on, 153
“drifting” and, 14
embodiment and, 78–79
Hegel on sound’s, 148–49
of performance, 79
of the self, 221
in the Romantic era, 250
in Western classical music compared to jazz, 189
tension
anticipation and, 29, 89
between fate and choice, 258
between freedom and control, 465
free improvisation and desirable, 404
novelty and, 194
in Stoic thought, 6
Tesky, Gordon, 284n23
Texttreue, 184
theater, 182
extemporized, 240
as model for Christian ethics, 539
virtual, 18
Theater of the Oppressed, 354
TheatreSports, 355
TheatreSports Down Under (Pierse), 356
Thélème, 270–71
THEM
AIDS references in, 309–10, 319–20
animal carcass in, 319–20, 326n3, 328n39
criticism of 2010 revival of, 324–25
cruising and, 324
ghosts and, 313
Houston-Jones’ direction for 2010 revival of, 321–22
Houston-Jones’ solo in 2010 version of, 318, 322–23
1985 performance of, 310f, 311f
risk in, 319
2010 revival of, 310, 311f, 312f, 317–18, 325–26
work-in-progress performances of, 309
therapy
compared to contact improvisation, 304n69
Gestalt, 291, 300
improvisation-based, 4, 50,
Theses on the History of Philosophy (Benjamin), 193
Thinking in Jazz (Berliner), 14, 496n23, 497n31
Threadgill, Henry, 190–91, 209, 212
Thrift, Nigel, 100
Tierney, Kathleen, 17
time, 185–86, 189, Also see real time; temporality; time-consciousness
AIDS and queer, 320–21, 323–24
Derrida on, 148–51
eloquence and, 265–67
Jankélévitch on memory and, 147
lived, 145–4
lived instant and creative, 150
queer, 320–21, 325
Renaissance and discourse centered on, 270–72, 276–77, 281
shared, 80
temporal situatedness and, 78–79
Time and Free Will (Bergson), 146
time-consciousness, 5, 23n25, 441–44, 448, 450–54, 455n40
empathy and, 454
fascination and, 452–53
Husserl on flow of, 443
intersubjectivity and, 450
neutrality and, 452–53
new and now in, 442
pluralization of, 451
Time Series Analysis, 46
Tipton, Billy, 431
Todorov, Tzvetan, 7
Todt, Dietmar, 502
Tokyo String Quartet, 482–83
“Too Darn Hot,” 345–47
Toop, David, 96, 102
totalitarianism, 290
Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, 381n4
transcendence, free improvisation and, 405
Travels through France and Italy (Gonda), 259n8
Treatise on Acting from Memory and by Improvisation (Perrucci), 167–68
Tri-Axium Writings (Braxton), 144
Truth in Comedy, 356
transgender bodies, 325
turf dancing, 336
Turrentine, Stanley, 496n23
Twain, Mark, 466–67
Twelve Months with the Birds and Poets (Parker, Samuel), 500–501
two-man comedy and class act dance teams, African Americans and, 345
Two Men Dancing, 313
Tyner, McCoy, 485–86

Über die Improvisatoren (Fernow), 241–42, 244

Uchida, Mitsuko, 405
uncertainty, 20, 168, 194, 446, 512
attention and, 49–50
Undoing Gender (Butler), 8, 125n27
unhappy consciousness, 439–40
universal ethics, 539–40, 542
Upright Citizens Brigade, 363n2

Van Buren, Ben, 322, 324

Vancouver International Jazz Festival, 403, 405
At the Vanishing Point, A Critic Looks at Dance (Siegel), 325
veery, song notations of, 507–9, 507f, 508f, 509f
Velleman, J. David, 495n11
Vencl, Frederic, 503–4
vernacular dance, African American, 332, 339–41, 345–48
vibration, music and, 207–8, 213n24
Vidich, Arturo, 317–20
Virgil, 232–34, 243
virtual theater, 18
virtue ethics, 542–43, 545, 549n9
virtuosity, 4, 96, 152, 156, 317
with the improvvisatori, 239
virtuosic temptations, free improvisation and, 402–3
von Humboldt, Wilhelm, 130

Wachtendorf, Tricia, 17
Walker, George, 342
Walker, Jonathan, 309, 310f, 311f
Wall, Cheryl, 132
Wang, Ge, 18
Warton, Joseph, 243
Way Out West (Rollins), 526, 527f
weather prediction, rice farming in Sierra Leone and, 371
Wegner, Daniel M., 98
Weheliye, Alexander, 101
Weick, Karl E., 26n77
“we-intention,” collective intention and, 483–84, 493
Weir, Stephnie, 358
Welcker, F. G., 247–48
Werktreue, 184
Wessel, David, 18
Wey, Enrico, 316, 318, 322, 328n39
whales. See humpback whales
Whitehead, Alfred North, 291
Whitney, Bertram, 342
Wilbur, Richard, 501
Williams, Arthur, 475, 476
Williams, Bernard, 463
Williams, Bert, 342
Williams, Leroy, 488
wit and fit, 464–65
Witness, 543
Witness, 543
“Wobble” dance, 333
Wolf, Friedrich August, 242, 245
Wolff, Oskar Ludwig Bernhard, 251
women farmers, rice farming and seed experimentation of, 373–77
Wood, Robert, 242, 245
Wordsworth, William, 240, 247
work, philosophy of music and concept of, 422, 428
The Works of Virgil (Warton), 243
Wrestling; Graeco-Roman (Muybridge), 322f
Wright, Richard, 207
“writerly texts,” 79

yabasi (rice variety), 375

Yamaha Disklavier, 46
A Year from Monday (Cage), 293
yearning, 439, 447, 450
Yoder, John Howard, 542–43
yoga
body conversations during, 217–18
improvisation and, 219–22
kinesthetic sensation and, 220
process of, 222
Yoga: Awakening the Inner Body (Moyer), 222n1
Young, Michael, 18
YouTube, 336, 469, 503

Zen Buddhism, 291, 298