Improvisation and Social Aesthetics

Improvisation and Social Aesthetics

Addressing a wide range of improvised art and music forms—from jazz and cinema to dance and literature—this volume's contributors locate improvisation as a key site of mediation between the social and the aesthetic. As a catalyst for social experiment and political practice, improvisation aids in the creation, contestation, and codification of social realities and identities. Among other topics, the contributors discuss the social aesthetics of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, the Feminist Improvising Group, and contemporary Malian music, as well as the virtual sociality of interactive computer music, the significance of "uncreative" improvisation, responses to French New Wave cinema, and the work of figures ranging from bell hooks and Billy Strayhorn to Kenneth Goldsmith. Across its diverse chapters, Improvisation and Social Aesthetics argues that ensemble improvisation is not inherently egalitarian or emancipatory, but offers a potential site for the cultivation of new forms of social relations. It sets out a new conceptualization of the aesthetic as immanently social and political, proposing a new paradigm of improvisation studies that will have reverberations throughout the humanities.

Contributors. Lisa Barg, Georgina Born, David Brackett, Nicholas Cook, Marion Froger, Susan Kozel, Eric Lewis, George E. Lewis, Ingrid Monson, Tracey Nicholls, Winfried Siemerling, Will Straw, Zoë Svendsen, Darren Wershler
  • Cover
  • Contents
  • Acknowledgments
  • Introduction: What Is Social Aesthetics?
  • Part I: The Social and the Aesthetic
    • Chapter 1. After Relational Aesthetics: Improvised Music, the Social, and (Re)Theorizing the Aesthetic
    • Chapter 2. Scripting Social Interaction: Improvisation, Performance, and Western “Art” Music
    • Chapter 3. From the American Civil Rights Movement to Mali: Reflections on Social Aesthetics and Improvisation
    • Chapter 4. From Network Bands to Ubiquitous Computing: Rich Gold and the Social Aesthetics of Interactivity
  • Part II: Genre and Definition
    • Chapter 5. The Social Aesthetics of Swing in the 1940s: Or the Distribution of the Non-Sensible
    • Chapter 6. What Is “Great Black Music”? The Social Aesthetics of the AACM in Paris
    • Chapter 7. Kenneth Goldsmith and Uncreative Improvisation
  • Part III: Sociality and Identity
    • Chapter 8. Strayhorn’s Queer Arrangements
    • Chapter 9. What’s Love Got to Do with It? Creating Art, Creating Community, Creating a Better World
    • Chapter 10. Improvisation in New Wave Cinema: Beneath the Myth, the Social
  • Part IV: Performance
    • Chapter 11. Social Aesthetics and Transcultural Improvisation: Wayde Compton and the Performance of Black Time
    • Chapter 12. Devices of Existence: Contact Improvisation, Mobile Performances, and Dancing through Twitter
    • Chapter 13. The Dramaturgy of Spontaneity: Improvising the Social in Theater
  • References
  • Contributors’ Biographies
  • Index
    • A
    • B
    • C
    • D
    • E
    • F
    • G
    • H
    • I
    • J
    • K
    • L
    • M
    • N
    • O
    • P
    • Q
    • R
    • S
    • T
    • U
    • V
    • W
    • X
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