Negotiated Moments edited by Gillian Siddall and Ellen Waterman

8/20/2019 Negotiated Moments edited by Gillian Siddall and Ellen Waterman

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N E G O T I A T E D M O M E N T S

I M P R O V I S A T I O N , S O U N D ,

A N D S U B J E C T I V I T Y

G I L L I A N S I D D A L L A N D

E L L E N W A T E R M A N ,

E D I T O R S


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I M P R O V I S A T I O N ,

C O M M U N I T Y, A N D

S O C I A L P R A C T I C E

A S E R I E S E D I T E D B Y

D A N I E L F I S C H L I N

Books in this new series advocate musical

improvisation as a crucial model for political,

cultural, and ethical dialogue and action—

for imagining and creating alternative ways of

knowing and being in the world. The books are

collaborations among performers, scholars,

and activists from a wide range of disciplines.

They study the creative risk-taking imbued with

the sense of movement and momentum that

makes improvisation an exciting, unpredictable,

ubiquitous, and necessary endeavor.


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Negotiated MomentsI M P R O V I S A T I O N ,

S O U N D , A N D

S U B J E C T I V I T Y

Gillian Siddall A N D

Ellen Waterman, E D I T O R S

D U K E U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S

D U R H A M A N D L O N D O N

2 0 1 6


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© Duke University Press

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper ∞

Interior design by Kaelin Chappell Broaddus; Cover design by Natalie F. Smith

Typeset in Garamond Premier Pro by Westchester Publishing Services

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Negotiated moments : improvisation, sound, and subjectivity / Gillian Siddall

and Ellen Waterman, editors.

pages cm — (Improvisation, community, and social practice)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

---- (hardcover : alk. paper)

---- (pbk. : alk. paper)

---- (e-book)

. Improvisation (Music)—Social aspects. . Music—Physiological

aspects. . Sound—Physiological aspects. I. Siddall, Gillian H.

(Gillian Heather), editor. II. Waterman, Ellen, [date] editor.

III. Series: Improvisation, community, and social practice.

.

.—dc

Cover art: Film still by Carter McCall from Big, Bent Ears, . © Rock Fish

Stew. Courtesy of Rock Fish Stew Institute of Literature and Materials.

Duke University Press gratefully acknowledges the Social Sciences and

Humanities Research Council of Canada for its support of the Improvisation,

Community, and Social Practice () project, at the University of Guelph,

which provided funds toward the publication of this book.


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o our inspiring colleagues in theImprovisation, Gender, and the Body research group.


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Acknowledgments xi

Introduction: Improvising at the Nexus o

Discursive and Material Bodies 1

Gillian Siddall and Ellen Waterman

1. Improvisation within a Scene o Constraint:

An Interview with Judith Butler 21

Tracy McMullen

P A RT I . L I S T E N I N G , P L A C E , A N D S P A C E

2. “How Am I to Listen to You?”:

Soundwalking, Intimacy, and Improvised Listening 37

Andra McCartney

3. Community Sound [e]Scapes: Improvising Bodies and

Site/Space/Place in New Media Audio Art 55

Rebecca Caines

P A RT I I . T E C H N O L O G Y A N D E M B O D I M E N T

4. Improvising Composition:

How to Listen in the ime Between 75

Pauline Oliveros

5. Te Networked Body: Physicality, Embodiment,

and Latency in Multisite Perormance 91

Jason Robinson

6. Openness rom Closure: Te Puzzle o Interagency

in Improvised Music and a Neocybernetic Solution 113

David Borgo

7. Mediating the Improvising Body:

Art atum’s Postmortem Perormance in a Posthuman World 131

Andrew Raffo Dewar

C O N T E N T S


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PA R T I I I . S E N S I B I L I T Y A N D S U B J E C T I V I T Y

8. Banding Encounters:

Embodied Practices in Improvisation 147

Introduction and Conclusion by Tomie Hahn

Essays by Louise Campbell, Lindsay Vogt, Simon Rose,George Blake, Catherine Lee, Sherrie Tucker,

François Mouillot, Jovana Milović, and Pete Williams

9. Learning to Go with the Flow: David Rokeby’s

Very Nervous System and the Improvising Body 169

Jesse Stewart

10. Stretched Boundaries: Improvising across Abilities 181

Introduction and Conclusion by Sherrie Tucker

Essays by Pauline Oliveros, Neil Rolnick, Christine Sun Kim,

Clara Tomaz, David Whalen, Lea Miller, and Jaclyn Heyen

PA R T I V. G E N D E R , T R A U M A , A N D M E M O R Y

11. Te Erotics o Improvisation in

Ann-Marie MacDonald’s Fall on Your Knees 201

Gillian Siddall

12. Corregidora: Corporeal Archaeology,Embodied Memory, Improvisation 217

Mandy-Suzanne Wong and Nina Sun Eidsheim

13. Teorizing the Saxophonic Scream in

Free Jazz Improvisation 233

Zachary Wallmark

14. Extemporaneous Genomics:

Nicole Mitchell, Octavia Butler, and Xenogenesis 245 Kevin McNeilly and Julie Dawn Smith

P A R T V. R E P R E S E N TAT I O N A N D I D E N T I T Y

15. Faster and Louder: Heterosexist Improvisation

in North American aiko 265

Deborah Wong

16. Improvisation and the Audibility o Difference:Saa, Canadian Multiculturalism, and

the Politics o Recognition 283

Ellen Waterman


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17. Perorming the National Body Politic in

wenty-First-Century Argentina 307

Illa Carrillo Rodríguez and Berenice Corti

Discography 327

Reerences 329

Contributors 351

Index 355


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Te Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council o Canada providedthe unding or the Improvisation Community and Social Practice research

project () rom 2007 to 2013. We deeply appreciate the material support we received rom , Memorial University o Newoundland, andLakehead University. Special thanks are due to Rachel Shoup or her effi cientormatting, to Daniel Fischlin and Ajay Heble or their comments, and toKim Torne or her good-humored advice. Beverley Diamond kindly lentus her cottage so that we could write the introduction. Sherrie ucker, JulieSmith, and Deborah Wong talked over big ideas with us and made wise sug-gestions. Tanks to our generous contributors who demonstrated excellentimprovisational skills o listening, response, and adaptation throughout theeditorial process. Our amilies generously allowed us to “escape” or regularretreats over three long years o writing and editing. Tey deserve our biggestthanks.

A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S


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such claims as they are expressed through one o the most visceral and intimatelevels o human experience: sound. Here, we explore sound’s effects in termso both signication and phenomenology.

Sound meta phors are always relational: We sound people out to get anidea o what they think or eel beore we commit to a course o action; we

make moral, intellectual, and emotional judgments (sounds good, sounds di-cult, sounds scary); we express our anger or our strong opinions by sound-ing off or sounding out; we empathize with the riend who (perhaps overthe phone or via the medium o text) is sounding tired or thoughtul or sad.Closely related to sound-as-metaphor is the physical act o hearing and its

psychosocial complement listening: sound cannot be ully understood with-out considering the act o audition. “Hear me out” is a plea to be “soundedout.” “Just listen to yoursel ” is a response to “sounding off.” Tese common

phrases demonstrate the extent to which we use sound as a signier or ourengagement with others and our world.

Sound is also a physical phenomenon: the materialities o air pressure andsolid media such as strings or membranes vibrate the body through tactile im-

pression. Sound penetrates and vibrates the body through and through. Soundis active: it travels, insinuates, reverberates, repeats, and ades away. Sound issensual: it whispers and shouts, tickles your ear, and thumps in your chest.

We embody, and are embodied through, sound. As Julie Dawn Smith writes,“Our experience o, and participation with, sound is inseparable rom ourexperience o, and participation with, our body and the bodies o others. Teresonances o sound waves register in the very bres o each and every body in

ways that conound the assumed discreteness o exterior and interior space”(2001, 32). Indeed, we agree with Smith’s observation that “the invisible pres-ence o sound” complicates representation because “it underscores the cor-

poreal as a process o audition, (re)writing and transormation” (21). Such processes, closely tied as they are to improvisatory practices, are the subjectso this book.

In this interdisciplinary collection o essays, sounding the body is bothmeta phor and materiality. Tis book takes up the many ways that bodies canbe understood as sounding, how the notion o transmitting and receivingsound occurs within bodies, between bodies, in real time, in virtual time, inmemory, in history, and across space. We explore some o these themes in thisintroduction, which is organized in two sections. We begin by unpackingtheories o improvisation and subjectivity in relation to theories o the bodyand embodiment to address questions o agency in improvisation. We thentrace a number o crosscutting themes that organize the book and conclude

with a brie meditation on the sensual nature o sounding bodies improvising.


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Improvising Subjectivity

Subjectivity is a complex negotiation o lived embodied experience and socialorces that work to regulate behavior and thereore shape that experience.

We agree with Elizabeth Grosz that “corporeality can be seen as the mate-

rial condition o subjectivity” (1995, 103); we also recognize, however, thatthe material body is shaped by discourse. Karen Barad’s essay on posthuman

perormativity argues “materiality is discursive (i.e., material phenomena areinseparable rom the apparatuses o bodily production . . .), just as discursive

practices are always already material (i.e., they are ongoing material (re)con-gurations o the world)” (2006, 25). What does improvisation add to thesearticulations o subjectivity? Improvisation is a orm o knowledge creationthrough expressive practice: whether we are conscious o our bodies in themoment, or transported by what psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1990)amously calls “ow,” in improvising we experience the immediate relation-ships between our bodies and others. Improvisation is also a orm o recollec-tion and repetition: we call on learned repertoires o sounds and gestures andmobilize them in the moment. We cannot escape rom our enculturation andour histories; indeed, improvisation is ofen a means o narrating the pastthrough the lter o the present moment.

Musical improvisation makes negotiations o (material and discursive)subjectivity audible, but that is not in itsel a guarantee that improvisationis transormative. Scholars o critical improvisation studies differ in the de-gree o social effi cacy they ascribe to improvisation, and we are especiallyconcerned with avoiding reductive liberation tropes. For Daniel Fischlin,Ajay Heble, and George Lipsitz, musical improvisation enacts a politics ohope. “In its most ully realized orms, improvisation is the creation and de-

velopment o new, unexpected, and productive cocreative relations among people. It teaches us to make ‘a way’ out o ‘no way’ by cultivating the capac-ity to discern hidden elements o possibility, hope, and promise in even themost discouraging circumstances” (Fischlin, Heble, and Lipsitz 2013, xii). Forthese authors, improvisation’s “most ully realized orms” are ofen ound inArodiasporic musics, particularly post– World War II jazz and creative im-

provisation broadly construed, and their politics are indexed to importantstruggles or human rights. But what does it mean or an improvisation to be“ully realized?” In the contributions to Negotiated Moments by Siddall andby Wong and Eidsheim (which we discuss in the second section o this in-troduction), improvisation occurs in the context o narratives that gure im-

provisational jazz and blues as the audible trace o trauma inicted on emale(black and same-sex) bodies. For these women, improvised music may serve


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as a coping mechanism, providing at least a limited space or sel-expression within a repressive environment, but it is also the soundtrack or violence, orrepetitive cycles o hatred passed along generations. Te bruised and batteredbodies o these subjects trouble liberatory claims or improvisation: although“coping” may be one step toward liberation, it may also be an expression o

aint hope in the ace o an impossible situation. One o the aims o this bookis to examine those improvisational moments that are skewed, incomplete,or compromised to bring bodies that are ofen silenced into audibility. Weocus less on moments o improvisational liberation and more on processes oimprovisational negotiation in which agency is understood to be hard won,highly contingent, and relational.

Dance scholar Danielle Goldman (2010) describes improvisation in termso negotiating tight places, an image that has much in common with the ideao making “a way” out o “no way.” She nds political potential in improvisa-tion as “practices o reedom” dened and even enriched by the constraintsunder which they operate. Goldman’s thinking is deeply inormed by the late

work o Michel Foucault. In his “Ethics o the Concern or Sel ” (1984),Foucault draws a distinction between denitive moments o liberation (asan end goal) and practices o reedom (that are necessary to continue theeffects o liberation) (quoted in Goldman 2010, 4). Goldman cautions, how-ever, that “there are times when no degree o improvisational skill is suffi cientto extract onesel rom a situation o duress” (142) whether that situation bea nasty all in the dance studio or a violent attack in a church. Improvisation,she contends, is “a rigorous mode o making onesel ready or a range o po-tential situations. It is an incessant preparation, grounded in the present whileopen to the next moment’s possible actions and constraints” (142). From this

perspective, improvisation is somewhere between assertiveness training anda survival strategy because it rests on both the acquisition o technique anda quality o constant readiness. Improvisational agency, Goldman suggests, ishard won, though it can result in “exquisite moments” that reveal “bravery,and choice, and surprise, and trust” (141).

racy McMullen locates agency in her term “the improvisative.” Riffi ng on philoso pher Judith Butler’s inuential theory o perormativity, described later,McMullen’s idea o the improvisative offers some hope o individual agency inthe sel-aware, alert subject. She maintains, “to the extent that the subject canrecognize his or her own incompletion, contingency and co-arising with theother, s/he can remain open to the productive nature o discourse, allowingnew meanings to emerge” (see chapter 1). In McMullen’s interview with Butlerin chapter 1, Butler accepts the relational aspect o the improvisative but cau-tions against a too volitional theory o improvisation. Describing what hap-


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pens when an actor responds to a gesture in an improvisational scene, Butlerinsists “my agency is determined or ormed in part in that exchange; it doesn’t

well up rom within me. It’s not an expression o my conscious, deliberatechoice” (chapter 1). McMullen and Butler remind us that improvisationalagency is both contingent and relational.

Butler has indeed had a ormative inuence on discursive theories o subjectivity. Her theory o perormativity is especially resonant or our projectbecause o its relationship to perormance and its musical idea o repetition.ake, or example, her inuential theory o gender construction in whichthe gendered subject is called into being by perormative language; observ-ing that the child has a vagina, the doctor cries, “it’s a girl!,” thus hailing thatchild into the social laws pertaining to the eminine gender (J. Butler 2008).Butler draws on discourse theories (especially the work o Louis Althusser,Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida) to demonstrate both how subjects areconstructed by discourse and how they perorm subjectivity within a sceneo constraint. Societal notions o gender are reinorced through the subject’sunconscious repetition o perormative words and actions: rom pronouns toclothing and makeup to compliant behaviors.

Perormativity offers a limited notion o agency both when the subjecttransgresses expected codes (or example, cross-dressing), or by the variation—the space or newness—that is bound to creep into repetition o such codes.Butler cautions that the subject’s agency is strictly limited since transgressingdominant discursive ormations (or example, heterosexuality) can provokebrutal responses rom the state. Perormativity is useul to a theory o im-

provisation as social practice precisely because the citation o social codes(perormative speech and actions) reveals the workings o power.

In her book Agency and Embodiment , Carrie Noland extends perorma-tivity to the realm o gesture, a domain that she asserts is not coterminous

with language because it is embodied and kinesthetic—sensed by the bodyand available to the conscious mind (2009, 10). She denes embodiment as“the process whereby collective behaviors and belies, acquired through ac-culturation, are rendered individual and ‘lived’ at the level o the body” (9).Agency is “the power to alter those acquired behaviors and belies or purposesthat may be reactive (resistant) or collaborative (innovative) in kind” (9). Usingthe analogy o throwing like a girl, and describing ways this set o sociallyconditioned gestures can be retrained, Noland argues that—unlike biologi-cal signiers o gender (vagina, penis)—“gestural routines are particularly

vulnerable to processes o de-skilling and re-skilling; these processes under-mine the culturally regulated body-discourse relation and produce intensekinesthetic and affective experiences o dissonance. . . . In short, the moving,


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trained, and trainable body is always a potential source o resistance to themeanings it is required to bear” (175). In our view, improvisation is the me-dium par excellence or the adaptable body that, however constrained, mayenact potent moments o transgression and unpredictability through sonicand physical gestures that are ofen coterminous.

ake, or example, Clara omaz’s articulation o learning how to speakagain afer mouth cancer surgery, described in chapter 10. A proessional lin-guist, omaz knows numerous languages. Afer her surgery she underwent anintensive process o rehabilitation, learning how to speak again in English (alanguage secondary to her native Italian). Tis process involved entraining a

whole new repertoire o gestures and sounds. “Having to work on each pho-neme individually made me sensibly aware that language is an assemblage osounds just as the body is an assemblage o organs” (quoted in chapter 10).omaz’s experience o her body (taken with the adaptive experiences describedby many people with disabilities) stretches our understanding o subjectivityto include not just repetition with a difference but the possibility o creatingentirely new modes o speaking and acting in the world. o be sure, omaz isconstrained by the laws o language (she wants to communicate in English),but she has also redened what it means to speak (through new ways oorming consonants and vowels). By improvising new ways o embodyinglanguage, omaz reuses to be silenced and redenes uency.

Noland’s idea o gestural perormativity invokes improvisational tech-niques o stylistic entrainment, code switching, adaptability, interoperability,close listening, and responsiveness that orm the technical arsenal o any goodmusical improviser. Indeed, omaz turned to improvisation to make sense oher new adaptation. Her multimedia improvisational perormance Deviations

and Straight Line evokes her sense that “the sound I can produce as a humanbeing is the expression o my personal consciousness. It makes all o my vibra-tions, emotions, perceptions and thoughts resound in the space around me”(quoted in chapter 10). omaz’s evocative description brings us back to soundand sounding.

I, as Noland insists, embodied gesture obeys different laws than linguisticdiscourse does, what does the materiality o sound add to our understand-ing o improvisation and subjectivity? Afer all, in improvised musicking,sound and gesture are intimately related. In addition to the obvious gestureso breathing, blowing, ngering, and bowing, playing an instrument entailsbody movements that are seemingly unrelated to the production o sound(the clarinetist who employs deep knee bends at emphatic moments, or in-stance) and musicians in ensemble ofen unconsciously synchronize move-ments such as head bobbing or swaying in time to the music. Musical sound


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also participates in the discursive realm, however, since style and genre codesconvey very specic gestural and affective inormation. Musicologists havelong ago shown that by virtue o its embeddedness in culture, music is repre-sentational. Still, sound itsel is without doubt a material substance thatis, paradoxically, “mysteriously immaterial” (Connor 2005, 157). Although

sound vibrations are intensely physical, sounds themselves are not easily per-ceived as objects. We are surrounded by sound, immersed in it, vibrated byit, but we cannot easily separate sound rom our experience o it. As StevenConnor explains, “how something sounds is literally contingent, dependingon what touches or comes into contact with it to generate the sound. Wehear, as it were, the event o the thing, not the thing itsel ” (157). What soundadds to the vocabularies o language and gesture is its extreme contextuality.

Ethnomusicologist Harris Berger draws on phenomenology to explainthis trickster quality o sound and our ability to shif our perception o itthrough stance. Berger denes stance as “the affective, stylistic, or valual qual-ity with which a person engages with an element o her experience” (2009,

xiv). He ollows Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s inuential idea that the subject isormed through acts o perception that are both partial and mobile (Berger2009, 57). We can shif the relationship o gure and ground as we experi-ence our body’s relationship to objects and to itsel (my right hand holds acup, my lef hand touches my right hand holding the cup), but we can neverexperience either as complete. We know the world through our body’s directand mediated experiences o the world. Furthermore, Berger explains (ol-lowing Husserl’s Fifh Meditation) that our understanding o subjectivity isrelational: “I understand the type ‘subject’ rom my direct experience o beinga body in the world (o having experiences o the world, o my body’s ownresponsiveness to my intents), and in the pre-reexive constitution o experi-ence, I see the body o another person as another subject” (71).

Berger theorizes that our experience o another subject (like that o ourown bodies) is always partial and “constrained and enabled by the vicissi-tudes o communication and understanding, expression and deceit” (2009,71). Importantly, or our theory o improvisation and sounding bodies, suchstance qualities are a orm o social practice, involving “those complex quali-ties o social relationships that are crucial to the sophisticated interpretationo expressive culture, including but in no way limited to trust and suspicion,domination and resistance, amiliarity and alienation” (72).

In listening to someone play music, then, our stance affects the degree to which we perceive the other as a subject and the attitude we take toward thatsubject. For example, while listening to an ensemble o reely improvising mu-sicians, your stance will be affected by your understanding and sympathy (or


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lack thereo ) toward ree-orm musicking. Depending on your stance, youmay experience the dense interlocking phrases, distinctive timbres o saxo-

phone, bass, and drums, and ast tempo as liberatory or oppressive, virtuosicor chaotic. In his contribution to this book, Zachary Wallmark traces musiccritics’ stances toward John Coltrane’s saxophonic scream, which critics vari-

ously heard as hysterical noise or groundbreaking innovation. Such interpre-tations, he demonstrates, are not purely aesthetic but are instead imbricated

with attitudes toward masculinity and race. Indeed, Berger warns, there is noguarantee that in any given situation the listener will “attend to the other assubject” (2009, 73) an idea borne out in any number o early ethnographicaccounts o “exotic” music heard as “primitive” noise. In this sense, Berger’s

phenomenology is not dissonant with discursive theories o subjectivity, or“both the signicance given to stance and the interpretive processes by whichthe listener constitutes it in her experience are deeply inormed by culture”(73). As Ellen Waterman and Deborah Wong demonstrate in their chapters,in intercultural improvisations, the stylistic and generic rules pertaining todiverse traditions deeply inorm the stance o both musicians and listeners.I, as we assert, musical and sonic improvisations produce audible traces osub jectivity, these traces are seldom either direct or simple, or, or that matter,easily readable.

O course, musical stance is urther complicated by the act that so mucho our experience o music is heavily mediated. For example, musical improvisa-tion may be recorded in concert or studio, edited in postproduction, distributed

via any number o media, learned by another musician by ear, or transcribed in ascore. Te most spontaneous improvised solo may ultimately take on the xedstatus o a composition, aithully studied by jazz students. Improvisational per-ormance, like all musicking, lives in the immediate experience o the listener,but the rhizophonic nature o recordings calls individual accounts o agencyinto question. Jason Stanyek and Benjamin Piekut dene rhizophonia as “theundamentally ragmented yet prolierative condition o sound reproduc-tion and recording” (2010, 19), and they argue that a relational interagencyis demonstrated in recordings “where sounds and bodies are constantly dis-located, relocated, and co-located in temporary aural congurations” (19).Our point is that improvised music’s corporeality is ar rom limited to nodeso perormance and audition; the sonic corpus is diffused across time, space,and media. It resonates in memory and readily mutates into new contexts,new meanings. Indeed, contributions to this book by Jason Robinson andAndrew Raffo Dewar explore aspects o dis/embodiment and hyperem-bodiment through real-time mediations o bodies across time and space.


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David Borgo, in his contribution, explores the puzzle o interagency, arguingthat improvising with newer technologies can extend, but also complicate,our sense o individual authorship and control.

By gathering such disparate points o view on improvising and soundingbodies, we are deliberately reusing any singular theory about improvisational

agency. Like the “exquisite moments” Goldman nds in improvisational dance,the diverse contributions to this book offer several examples o musical orsonic improvisations that change a stance, alter relationships between sub-

jects and their social/cultural environments, and decenter power (at least inthe improvisational moment). Our contributors also describe improvisationalencounters in which sound overpowers and brutalizes subjects, marksthe imposition o orced change, serves to consolidate hierarchies, or dis-

perses bodies altogether. Contingent and mobile relationships in and throughsounding bodies support the idea o interagency that emerges through reso-nance, through vibration. Troughout this collection o essays, improvisa-tion is understood as a complex site o negotiation, and sound and music areheard as both the discursive signs and the embodied experiences o thosenegotiations.

Improvisation, Vibration, Resonance

Negotiated Moments is organized according to ve sections: Listening, Place,and Space; echnology and Embodiment; Sensibility and Subjectivity; Gen-der, rauma, and Memory; and Representation and Identity. Chapter 1, racyMcMullen’s interview with Judith Butler, precedes these ve sections, stand-ing on its own as a special challenge to think about subjectivity and agencyin terms o discourse and corporeality. As already discussed, in the interview

with Butler, McMullen posits her theory o the “improvisative” as a way to dis-rupt Butler’s notion o the repetition compulsion o perormativity. For Mc-Mullen, the improvisative opens up possibilities or creativity—or newness,both musically and socially. Butler, in turn, resists notions o agency, but noto possibilities or newness; or her, that newness comes accidentally and par-tially, when we unintentionally repeat with a difference. Te tension betweenimprovisatory agency and perormative constraint identied by McMullenand Butler is a moti that appears in diverse variations throughout the vesections that make up this book. aken as a whole, these essays remind us o

what is gained when we oreground the body in critical considerations o andaesthetic responses to music and thinking about improvisation. Our ability tomobilize the political and social potential o improvisatory creative practices


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necessarily stems rom understanding the deeply situated, relational, andembodied contexts that shape those practices. In what ollows, we discussthe themes that resonate and vibrate through and across the book’s sections.

Listening, Place, and Space

It is axiomatic that musical improvisation is as much a process o listeningas o sounding. In the two essays discussed here, listening occurs in directrelation to embodied experiences o place and space. In her essay on sound-

walking , Andra McCartney invokes Luce Irigaray’s conception o love asa orm o listening that embraces the unknown in the other. Irigaray con-ceptualizes an ethical model o intersubjectivity that denies mastery overanother: “I am listening to you: I encourage something unexpected to emerge,some becoming, some growth, some new dawn, perhaps” (1996, 116–17). ForMcCartney, this theory o love as listening offers a new model or sound-

walking, a social and aesthetic practice that involves the cultivation o aheightened awareness o sound in the environment. Her commitment tointimate listening has led McCartney to alter her career-long practice oleading people on guided soundwalks and, instead, to develop a ar moreimprovisational orm that promotes individual awareness and invites dia-logue. Soundwalking is thus more than an expressive practice; it becomesa way o articulating ethical relations among subjects moving through andexperiencing space.

Like McCartney, perormance studies scholar and artist Rebecca Caines also wishes to employ improvisation as a methodology or making community-based sound art as a means o helping people articulate their relationships tospace and place. In partnership with John Campbell, a computer program-mer, Caines designed an online sound mixer that enables communities in

widely dispersed locations to share sound les and create soundscape pieces asa creative response to their experiences o site/space/place. Her ethnographiccollaboration with communities in Australia, Northern Ireland, and Canadainvolved complex negotiations o institutional bureaucracies, the vicissitudeso technology, and divisions along class, age, and cultural lines. Improvisationbecame not only a methodological tool or collaboration but a practice oadaptation that allowed Caines and Campbell to listen and respond to theneeds and desires o the communities with which they worked. Within thisimprovisational practice, listening is a way to promote ethical intersubjectiverelations that also registers how difference and power are themselves instru-mental in sounding contexts.


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Technology and Embodiment

Te essays in this section engage the possibilities o technological mediationso the body through improvisation rom extensions o the body in time andspace to the dispersal o bodies across networks and into larger social systems.

Tey explore the persistence o embodiment as particular experience in tech-nology (Hayles 1992).

Pauline Oliveros insists that “listening lies deep within the body and is as yet a mysterious process involving myriad time delays” (chapter 4). Her contri-bution to this volume traces her sixty years o improvising with audio technolo-gies, rom the variable-speed tape recorder she received as a present in the 1950sto her evolving Expanded Instrument System, which connects her perormingbody to digital instruments and networks. An archive o the musical examplesshe discusses is available online at http:// www.improvcommunity.ca such thather essay encourages a ull engagement o the senses, both visual and aural. Oli-

veros has an acute awareness o her body and o embodiment with technology.She delineates the connection she sees between the time delays that occur inthe reel-to-reel tape recorders she improvised with in the 1960s (the delay be-tween the record head and the playback head) and the embodied time delayinherent in humans producing and hearing sound. Oliveros advocates listen-ing to the time/space between to integrate global attention with ocused at-tention. “Balancing these two orms o attention,” she declares, “is the dance oimprovisation—opening to receive and ocusing to a point” (chapter 4).

Jason Robinson deals with the issue o latency that occurs during telematic perormances where musicians in different locations perorm together in realtime via sound and video sent across the Internet. Te result o latency is a dislo-cation o sound rom image that can be unsettling or players and audience. La-tency is an issue that is best resolved, or some, by working toward achieving zerolatency through improved technology and, or others, by adapting musical ormsto compensate or sonic delays. For Robinson, latency is most productively ne-gotiated through improvisation and expressive microtiming. His notion o the“networked body” describes the doubled experience o (dis)embodimentthat marks a perormance practice that, he argues, will open up a new musical

paradigm and a new consciousness o embodied perormance.Andrew Raffo Dewar considers that the perorming musician’s body is

etishized, a concept he explores through technology developed by Zenphthat extracts inormation rom a recording in such a way that the movingkeys o a Disclavier (digital piano) can replicate a piece o music exactly as origi-nally played, in this case by jazz pianist Art atum. Live “reperormances” oatum’s music have been staged with the digital piano standing in or the


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dead musician, and Zenph has also released new recordings that eature thedigital reperormance. Dewar concludes that the primacy o the body as well-spring o creativity may well be prooundly challenged by the advent o newdigital technologies that recongure notions o liveness and embodiment.

David Borgo goes even urther in challenging conventional notions o em-

bodied creativity by looking beyond methodological individualism. Drawingon research in social psychology, neocybernetics, and social systems theory,he argues that the human being is neither a suffi cient nor a necessary entry

point into understanding social and communication systems. Far rom a posi-tion o hermeneutic despair, however, Borgo argues that collective improvisa-tion affords an opportunity to celebrate the ubiquity o agency in coaction,and that looking beyond traditional understandings o communication as aorm o inormation exchange actually moves us closer to a perormative un-derstanding o, and engagement with, the world.

Sensibility and Subjectivity

In contrast to the ragmented, distributed, and diffused bodies discussed in the previous section, several contributions to this volume ocus on ways materialbodies engaged in improvisatory practices can effect a reorientation o iden-tity and community. Sherrie ucker and omie Hahn invoke the dynamic ideao stretching to articulate what happens when improvising bodies engage witheach other in ways that accommodate difference and expand our understandingo both sensibility and subjectivity. Teir chapters share similar collaborativeormats: in each case the author solicited short contributions rom a number oother writers and ramed those contributions with her own insights. ucker’schapter eatures the voices o seven artists who work with and through physicaldisabilities. Hahn’s chapter has nine meditations by people who participatedin her workshops on improvisation and movement in the context o a summerinstitute on improvisation as social practice. Tese chapters express commonthemes about bodily interaction and awareness.

For Hahn, improvising community is acilitated by the literal stretchingo industrial rubber pallet bands. Connected by the bands at ankles and el-bows, eet and torsos, necks and knees, the participants in her banding work-shop improvised together, moving vertiginously through space like somemany-headed alien creature with a dozen arms and legs. As the participants’

journal responses attest, banding highlights—indeed, makes visible—thecomplex dynamics o collaborative improvisation. As one o the participants

writes o the experience: “Trough the push and pull practice o engagement, we ound a sensibility o process” (chapter 8).


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ucker (who was one o the banding participants) extrapolates rom thatactivity a model or improvising across abilities. Her essay reminds us that ofentheories o the social unction and effects o improvisation ignore differentlyabled bodies and make an assumption about the primacy o sound basedon normative notions o hearing, vocalization, and language. She asks the

provocative question: “What i experimental musical communities commit-ted to explorations o difference in realms such as harmonics, time, timbre,and orm, were equally avid about the differential variable in musicians’ andaudience members’ modes o sensory and perceptual relationships to sound

waves, as well as difference in mobility, range o motion, ratios o voluntary/involuntary mobility, multiple modes o cognitive processing and language?”(chapter 8). Te artists responding to this question greatly expand our under-standing o what it means to move, sound, touch, see, and be an expressivebody in relation to other bodies.

One o the things that ascinates Hahn about the banding exercise is howquickly the participants achieve “ow,” dened as a state o being where peopleare so immersed in what they are doing that they become unaware o any-thing else: a state o extreme attention that transcends technique (Csik-szentmihalyi 1990, 4). Csikszentmihalyi studied ow in the context o eliteathletes and concert musicians, but ow does not depend on any particu-lar bodily conguration. In ucker’s chapter, David Whalen, a visual artist

with paraplegia, similarly describes the conditions under which he achievesthis state while digitally painting and drawing using an adaptive instru-ment. Te state o ow implies a highly integrated mind/body connectionthat can acilitate a reorientation o one’s sense o sel in relation to othersand the environment.

Jesse Stewart invokes the notion o ow in his analysis o what happens when people interact with artist David Rokeby’s Very Nervous System. usesmotion capture technology to create an environment in which a person’smovements trigger sounds in three-dimensional space, although not alwaysin predictable ways. As with the banding exercise, participants interacting

with appear to enter into a state o ow much more quickly than wouldnormally be the case because their bodies are put into an immediate relation-ship with sound, movement, and space that does not depend on specializedskills as musicians or dancers. Stewart argues that thus democratizesmusical experience, albeit within an atmosphere o surveillance: it producesits effects by literally watching (and sounding) our every move, ofen produc-ing an uncanny sense that the technology reacts beore it receives a bodilystimulus.


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Gender, Trauma, and Memory

Te our essays in this section bring literary analysis into contact with improvisational music by considering gendered narratives o trauma and memory.In writing about trauma and memory, Cathy Caruth identies the paradox o

the continual reexperiencing o an event that one cannot actually remember:“Te nal import o the psychoanalytic and historical analysis o trauma isto suggest that the inherent departure, within trauma, rom the moment oits rst occurrence, is also a means o passing out o the isolation imposed bythe event: that the history o a trauma, in its inherent belatedness, can onlytake place through the listening o another” (2007, 204). For Caruth, thedialogic pro cess o attempting to heal rom trauma involves a particular kindo listening: “by carrying that impossibility o knowing out o the empiricalevent itsel, trauma opens up and challenges us to a new kind o listening, the

witnessing, precisely, o impossibility” (204). Her articulation o listening to what is impossible to know resonates with conceptions o improvisation thatoreground listening as partial and provisional but also open to new ways othinking. It also resonates powerully with ways scholars like George Lewis(1996) have conceptualized Arican American orms o improvised musicsuch as jazz as embodying the traumatic memory o slavery.

For a number o our contributors, improvised music becomes a means oembodying and replaying such traumatic memories. In Nina Sun Eidsheimand Mandy-Suzanne Wong’s essay, Ursa Corregidora, the eponymous hero-ine o Gayl Jones’s novel, is characterized as dealing with her ancestral historyo trauma through both deliberate and unconscious acts o memorialization.Ursa responds to her personal experiences o domestic abuse and the sexual

violence experienced by each generation o women in her amily (dating backto her enslaved grandmother) by singing the blues, an intentional act o me-morialization, and unconsciously through the timbre o her voice, unawarethat to others her very voice is marked by generational traumatic memory.

Wong and Eidsheim assert that “to play music, especially to improvise, is in part to bring onesel under the inuence o other bodies rom the past. We perorm memories, our own and those o others” (chapter 12). Riffi ng onFoucault, they coin the phrase “corporeal archaeology,” which they dene asan awareness o one’s own improvising body as “a living, bleeding archive oother bodies, ideologies, and values” (chapter 12).

Smith and McNeilly also explore the connections among memory, his-tory, and improvisation in their analysis o Octavia Butler’s science ctiontrilogy Xenogenesis and jazz musician Nicole Mitchell’s musical reimaginingo it. Tey argue that “Mitchell’s music materially re-members . . . the atroci-


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ties committed on black women’s bodies” (chapter 14), responding to Butler’sreerence in Xenogenesis to well-known cases o black women’s bodies beingabused by medical science. Similarly, Gillian Siddall points to the explicitconnection between trauma and improvisation in her analysis o Ann-MarieMacDonald’s novel Fall on Your Knees. One o the most horriying scenes in

the novel is one in which a woman is severely beaten by her ather in a passagethat employs tropes o various musical styles to describe the brutality o thebeating as well as the daughter’s resistance to her ather.

In these contributions, the trope o motherhood is key to the authors’conceptualizations o how memories live on in subjects across generations. AsKevin McNeilly and Julie Dawn Smith put it (invoking Julia Kristeva): “Temother subtends a concurrent existence o sel and other—a paradox o ‘beingonesel and someone else at the same time’ (Kristeva 1984, 223) and mediatesmind and body” (chapter 14). Octavia Butler’s narratives o interspecies survivalassert motherhood as a central trope or the complexity o human identity andcommunity and “trouble static notions o human subjectivity” (chapter 14).For Wong and Eidsheim, motherhood is the embodied trace o past traumaand resilience that lives on in the heroine’s improvisational blues. In Siddall’sanalysis o Fall on Your Knees, Materia’s relationship with her daughters is con-strained and limited by her husband, but she and her daughter Frances in par-ticular are connected by their improvisatory practices. Materia’s improvisedaccompaniment to silent lms allows her to dene hersel in the context othe call and response o community music-making—in concert with her au-dience. Frances employs a similarly improvisatory and ironic approach to her

perormances in a speakeasy, where her parodic stripteases denaturalize socialcategories o gender and sexuality. Te gure o the mother in these chaptersembodies notions central to improvisation— past and uture, memory, creativ-ity, and intersubjectivity.

As a counterpoise to these narratives o emale gender and sexuality, Zach-ary Wallmark analyzes the critical reception to John Coltrane’s saxophone

playing and demonstrates how our precognitive reaction to sonic timbres cannevertheless invoke tropes o masculinity and race, as already noted. In his analy-sis o the saxophonic scream (an incredibly high- pitched, raw, and intense ex-

plosion o timbre rst developed in the context o ree jazz), Wallmark empha-sizes a perceptual/cognitive approach that ocuses on the degree to which thelistener identies with the sound. Citing recent research on the neurophysiol-ogy o audition, Wallmark locates a biological reason or the phenomenon omusical empathy—the perception that in listening to a sound we also partici-

pate in it. Our participation, however, is culturally conditioned. Coltrane’ssaxophonic scream was variously interpreted by music critics as the sound o


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black masculine violence and rage or as a sign o the jazz icon’s spirituality,a transcendent sound. Music critics’ visceral, embodied interpretations oColtrane’s saxophonic scream turned on their reactions to the birth o ree

jazz in the context o the U.S. civil rights movement.

Repre sentation and Identity

Te three chapters in this nal section o the book situate improvisation interms o representations o national and ethnocultural identities. Illa Car-rillo Rodríguez and Berenice Corti ocus on improvisational responses to theoffi cial celebrations marking the two hundredth anniversary o Argentina’srst inde pendence movement against Spanish rule that troubled (classed andraced) narratives o nationalism. Deborah Wong explores the power relationsound in gender and ethnic identities in Japanese taiko drumming, and Ellen

Waterman analyzes an improvisational peror mance by the intercultural trioSaa through the lter o Canada’s offi cial policy o multiculturalism.

Carrillo Rodríguez and Corti return us to themes o trauma and memory,this time situated in the context o historical narratives employed in the ser viceo nation-building. Tey argue that the government’s bicentennial celebrationsserved to memorialize a national history that elided the violence done to thou-sands o Argentine citizens during the period o state terrorism in the 1970sand early 1980s, and they argue that various improvisational artistic responsesto that imposed national narrative provide a powerul counternarrative borneout o collective memory. Carrillo Rodríguez and Corti also explore “dissonantiterations o motherhood” (chapter 17) in their discussion o the Madres, moth-ers publicly protesting their “disappeared” children in Buenos Aires during the1970s. Te improvisational techniques o the Madres were reconstituted by thetheater group Fuerzabruta in a street parade during the Argentinian bicenten-nial that included the responses o thousands o people who encountered this

powerul commemoration with improvisations o their own, described by theauthors as perormances o historically charged silence.

In an essay that traces the surprising historical links between Japanesetaiko drumming and American jazz, which came into contact in Japan during

World War II, Wong addresses the ways in which taiko solos are both racial-ized and gendered. aiko is a communal drumming practice in which playersstep orward to perorm “improvised” solos as part o composed pieces. De-

pending on the condence o the soloist, such solos may indeed be sponta-neous or they may be precomposed displays o virtuosity. Wong argues thatearly taiko solos emulated the hard-driving beats o Arican American (male)

jazz drum solos and have been remasculinized over time in the North Ameri-can context in a complicated response to the Western eminization o Asian


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men. Her analysis o the gendered nature o improvised solos highlights thesolo as a domain o gendered bodily anxiety.

Waterman similarly explores intercultural encounters in musical improvisa-tion, this time through the work o Saa, an ensemble that brings Iranian classi-cal music together with modal jazz and Latin American rhythms. Trough her

ethnography o a particular perormance, she explores the musicians’ negotia-tions o diverse musical styles, revealing their deep enculturation and the circu-lation o power involved in their elaboration. While the musicians’ experienceo collaboration is one o almost spiritual unity based on mutual respect andmusical authenticity, members o an audience ocus group interpreted the

perormance as a display o Canadian multicultural values that privilege theaccommodation o difference within an (unacknowledged and hegemonic)norm. Tis dissonance invites Waterman to work out rom her close read-ing o the perormance to consider questions o selood and subjectivity inthe context o the politically charged discourse on Canada’s offi cial policy omulticulturalism, a policy that is designed to simultaneously celebrate andcontain difference.

An Erotics of Improvisation

As our summary o the contributors’ diverse approaches to improvisationindicates, these essays open highly productive and crosscutting themes thatreveal the intricacies o improvisational relationships through agency and in-teragency, body and bodies, sel and selves, sounding and (other means o)sensing. One o our goals is to ensure that valences o bodies and embodi-ment that are not always heard in critical studies o improvisation resound inthese essays: gendered and sexed bodies, differently abled bodies, and bodiesthat are imaginatively extended through technology.

Perhaps not surprisingly in a book ocused on bodies, an erotics o em-bodied improvisation pervades many o these essays, as they explore and as-sert the sensuality o musicking, o improvising bodies responding to otherimprovising bodies, to listeners, and to embodied histories. Sexual and/orsensual intimacy is gured in several o these essays as a proound connec-tion that creates new, albeit partial and complex ways o being and knowing.For example, Smith and McNeilly capture this notion in their descriptiono Nicole Mitchell’s music: “Sense—as sensation and meaning—emergesin Mitchell’s sound- world as a recombinant amalgam that [ . . . ] prod[s]us to question how and where our own bodies begin and end, how sel andother interpenetrate, collaborate, dissolve, and (mis)comprehend, and howcommunity can arise rom cohesion and rom misres” (chapter 14). Smith


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and McNeilly use the word sense to capture the integration o sensuality—bodies—and meaning in a way that also dissolves distinctions between othersand ourselves. Improvisation here is understood as a highly intimate and sen-sual intermingling o bodies and ideas, a process more chaotic than volitional,and the result is unpredictable but undeniably new—the very o sense

altered in the “recombinant amalgam” o new meaning, new identity, andnew community.

In embodied improvisations, subjectivities are ormed and re-ormed inthe proound and unpredictable dissolution and recombination o identities,

whereby misres can lead to cohesion. Tere is no clear sense o individualagency here; indeed, there is a sense o loss, or at least o the uidity o iden-tity, but also o the capacity or individuals and communities to change basedon their willingness to engage with others, embrace the intimate chaos, andrecognize that meaning and sensuality cannot exist separately. It is, in its own

way, a hopeul means o conceptualizing improvisation, but it is oundedon the necessary unpredictability o human connection. Such an erotics oimprovisation, we suggest, invites us to think about the social effects o im-

provisation differently: they result rom the complex and unpredictable in-terchanges between bodies and meaning, sound and subjectivity. By payingclose attention to improvisation as a site o negotiation among embodied,sensing subjects, we listen or the ull spectrum o ideas that sound out, romclarion calls o reedom to sounds o struggle and cries o despair.

Notes

1. Tis book is an extension o a growing body o literature on critical studies in improvisation. We are particularly inspired by contributions rom Fischlin and Heble (2004);Fischlin, Heble, and Lipsitz (2013); Heble and Wallace (2013); Monson (1996, 2008, 2009);Rustin and ucker (2008); Smith (2004, 2008); and D. Wong (2004). See also the early

prognostications or the effi cacy o improvisation as a social practice made by Attali (1985).For a good cross-section o the emerging literature see the online journal Critical Studies in Improvisation/ Etudes critiques en improvisation at http:// www.criticalimprov.com.

2. Noland is reerring to the amous essay by political philoso pher Iris Marion Young(1980), who analyzed the constricted physical movements o women in urban, postindus-trial society in phenomenological terms.

3. McClary’s landmark book Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (2002), which stirred great controversy in academic music on its original publication in 1991, isnow arguably orthodox.

4. See Bellman (1997) or a ascinating collection o essays that position “exotic”

music, rom the blues to Romany ddling, as primitive and thereore a sign o Othernessto be exploited in Western art music.


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5. In their article “Deadness,” Stanyek and Piekut offer an intriguing analysis o duetsrecorded by live musicians who “collaborate” with an extant recording by a dead musician.Such recordings, they argue, trouble the ontology o deadness.

6. Te Summer Institute on Critical Studies in Improvisation was organized by theresearch project Improvisation, Community and Social Practice () and took place

at the University o Guelph in 2011.7. We are grateul to have been part o two large-scale multiyear grants rom the So-cial Sciences and Humanities Research Council o Canada that enabled us to engage insustained research on critical studies in improvisation within interdisciplinary teams andcommunity partnerships. Te International Institute or Critical Studies in Improvisation(a partnered research institute across ve Canadian universities) promotes the kind o

perormance- and community-based research that is proled in many o the contributionsto this book (http://improvisationinstitute.ca/).

Documents

Negotiated Moments edited by Gillian Siddall and Ellen Waterman