The Fierce Urgency of Now: Improvisation, Rights, and the Ethics of Cocreation (Improvisation, Community, and Social Practice) - Softcover

Fischlin, Daniel

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822354780 ISBN 13: 9780822354789

Verlag: Duke University Press, 2013

Inhaltsangabe

The Fierce Urgency of Now links musical improvisation to struggles for social change, focusing on the connections between the improvisation associated with jazz and the dynamics of human rights struggles and discourses. The authors acknowledge that at first glance improvisation and rights seem to belong to incommensurable areas of human endeavor. Improvisation connotes practices that are spontaneous, personal, local, immediate, expressive, ephemeral, and even accidental, while rights refer to formal standards of acceptable human conduct, rules that are permanent, impersonal, universal, abstract, and inflexible. Yet the authors not only suggest that improvisation and rights can be connected; they insist that they must

be connected.

Improvisation is the creation and development of new, unexpected, and productive cocreative relations among people. It cultivates the capacity to discern elements of possibility, potential, hope, and promise where none are readily apparent. Improvisers work with the tools they have in the arenas that are open to them. Proceeding without a written score or script, they collaborate to envision and enact something new, to enrich their experience in the world by acting on it and changing it. By analyzing the dynamics of particular artistic improvisations, mostly by contemporary American jazz musicians, the authors reveal improvisation as a viable and urgently needed model for social change. In the process, they rethink politics, music, and the connections between them.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Daniel Fischlin is Professor and University Research Chair in the School of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph in Ontario. He is coauthor (with Martha Nandorfy) of The Community of Rights – The Rights of Community.

Ajay Heble is Professor in the School of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph and an editor (with Rob Wallace) of People Get Ready: The Future of Jazz Is Now!, also published by Duke University Press. He is the founder and artistic director of the Guelph Jazz Festival.

George Lipsitz is Professor in the Department of Black Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of many books, including How Racism Takes Place and Footsteps in the Dark: The Hidden Histories of Popular Music.

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THE FIERCE URGENCY OF NOW

Improvisation, Rights, and the Ethics of Cocreation

By DANIEL FISCHLIN, AJAY HEBLE, GEORGE LIPSITZ

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2013 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8223-5478-9

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS............................................................
vii
PRELUDE "The Fierce Urgency of Now": Improvisation, Rights, and the Ethics 
of Cocreation..............................................................
xi
INTRODUCTION Dissolving Dogma: Improvisation, Rights, and Difference.......
1
CHAPTER 1 Sounding Truth to Power: Improvisation, Black Mobility, and 
Resources for Hope.........................................................
33
CHAPTER 2 Improvisation and Encounter: Rights in the Key of Rifference.....
57
CHAPTER 3 Improvising Community: Rights and Improvisation as Encounter 
Narratives.................................................................
99
CHAPTER 4 Improvisation, Social Movements, and Rights in New Orleans.......
141
CHAPTER 5 Art to Find the Pulse of the People: We Know This Place..........
171
CHAPTER 6 "The Fierce Urgency of Now": Improvisation, Social Practice, and 
Togetherness-in-Difference.................................................
189
CODA.......................................................................
231
NOTES......................................................................
245
WORKS CITED................................................................
263
INDEX......................................................................
281

Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

SOUNDING TRUTH TO POWER

Improvisation, Black Mobility, andResources for Hope

In his remarkable book on the influential musicians' collective, the Associationfor the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), the AfricanAmerican scholar and trombonist George E. Lewis tells us that "the insistenceby blacks that music has to be 'saying something' [is] part of a longhistory of resistance to the silencing of the black voice. Indeed," Lewisargues, "as might be expected from a people whose genetic, historical,and cultural legacies were interrupted through sustained, systematizedviolence, every effort was made by the musicians to recover rather than todisrupt historical consciousness" (Power 41). Lewis is writing about AfricanAmerican experimental musical practices, and, in such a context, hisreminder that "black musicians felt that music could effectuate the recoveryof history itself" serves as a vital corrective to some widely heldand oft-institutionalized assumptions about improvised forms of music-making(42). After all, despite being the most widely practiced (and perhapsthe oldest) form of music-making in the world, improvisation, as numerouscritics have noted, is also the least understood and most maligned:its cultural significance, in particular, tends to be ignored or in disputeboth in the academy and in the broader public understanding. Think, forexample, about how, in the context of pedagogies, criticism, arts fundingpolicies, and support structures, improvisative music is often looked ataskance, seen as involving adherence to neither convention nor protocol,as tolerating no system of constraint, as requiring no prior thought, ascoming out of nowhere, simply being made up on the spot. Think aboutthe fact that since improvisational musical practices are central to manymarginalized communities, the resultant failure of scholars to pay seriousand sustained attention to improvisation has led to a broader failure torecognize the extent to which improvisation provides a trenchant modelfor flexible, dynamic, and dialogical social structures that are both ethicaland respectful of identity and difference. And think about the fact that,in Lewis's words, "improvisative discourses disclose the extent to whichmusicians have a vital stake in the ongoing dialogue concerning the futureof our planet. Music becomes a necessity for existence, rather than merelya pleasant way to pass time" ("Teaching Improvised Music" 98).

Improvisation as Social Practice

A necessity for existence, the future of our planet, the recovery of history:large claims, these, we admit. These remarks from George Lewis,whose own stewardship of improvisative musicality has done so much togenerate new critical perspectives, signal a profound shift in long-heldassumptions about improvised music, and they offer a provocative commentaryon how musical practices in which improvisation figures prominentlyare, indeed, social practices, a commentary central to our book'sfocus on key sites of creative activity, sites in which improvisation as amusical practice intersects with rights and social justice discourses. Theypoint, moreover, to what's at stake—culturally, socially, institutionally—ina music that so many anointed narratives of jazz history would haveus summarily dismiss as inconsequential, elitist, eccentric, or incomprehensible.One of the most enduring lessons in Lewis's work is preciselythis: particularly for music-makers whose explorations question settledhabits of response and judgement, improvised music has the potential toinform and transform contemporary cultural debate. It can do so by deepeningand reinvigorating our understanding of the role that improvisingartists can play in activating diverse energies of critique and inspiration,and of the difference they can make (and have made) in their communitiesby using modes of working together to voice new forms of socialorganization, to "sound off" against oppressive orders of knowledge production,and to create opportunities and develop resources for disadvantagedpeople. In short, the working models of musical improvisation developedby creative practitioners have played a powerful role in recastingthe identities and histories of aggrieved populations and in promotingself-representational counternarratives that enable an enlargement of thebase of valued knowledges.

There is a long and illustrious (if too often underrepresented) history,especially within the context of African American creative practice, thatlinks jazz and improvised music with struggles for civil rights and socialjustice. Much can be learned from performance practices that accent andembody real-time creative decision-making, risk-taking, and collaboration.Robin Kelley, a historian and scholar focusing on black culture andradical social movements, has done important work on the role that hopeand the imagination play as revolutionary impulses for social betterment.Key strands of jazz and improvised music-making might be understoodin this context. In an era when diverse peoples and communities of intereststruggle to forge historically new forms of affiliation across culturaldivides, the participatory and civic virtues of engagement, dialogue, respect,and community-building inculcated through improvisatory practicestake on a particular urgency.

Lewis's claim about black musicians and the recovery of history doesmore than simply counter long-standing myths and assumptions aboutimprovisation. It should perhaps also put us in mind of Frantz Fanon'sargument in The Wretched of the Earth about how imperial powers soughtto manipulate and eradicate the subject people's past in an effort to instillfeelings of...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Duke University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2013
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0822354780
• ISBN 13: 9780822354789
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 326
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar