Improvisation informs a vast array of human activity, from creative practices in art, dance, music, and literature to everyday conversation and the relationships to natural and built environments that surround and sustain us. The two volumes of the Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies gather scholarship on improvisation from an immense range of perspectives, with contributions from more than sixty scholars working in architecture, anthropology, art
history, computer science, cognitive science, cultural studies, dance, economics, education, ethnomusicology, film, gender studies, history, linguistics, literary theory, musicology, neuroscience, new media, organizational science, performance studies, philosophy, popular music studies, psychology,
science and technology studies, sociology, and sound art, among others.
The Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies, Volume 1
Description
Table of Contents
Preface to Volume I
Introduction
George E. Lewis and Benjamin Piekut
I. Cognitions
1. Cognitive Processes in Musical Improvisation
Roger 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
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
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
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
V. Organizations
22. Improvisation in Management
Paul Ingram and Bill Duggan
23. Free Improvisation as a Path-Dependent Process
Jared Burrows and Clyde G. Reed
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
Author Description
George E. Lewis, Edwin H. Case Professor of American Music at Columbia University, is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a MacArthur Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, and author of the award-winning 2008 book, A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music (University of Chicago Press).
An associate professor of music at Cornell University, Benjamin Piekut writes on the history of experimental and improvised music after 1960. He is the author of Experimentalism Otherwise (University of California Press, 2011) and editor of Tomorrow Is the Question (University of Michigan Press, 2014).