Full Description
The contributors to Negotiated Moments explore how subjectivity is formed and expressed through musical improvisation, tracing the ways the transmission and reception of sound occur within and between bodies in real and virtual time and across memory, history, and space. They place the gendered, sexed, raced, classed, disabled, and technologized body at the center of critical improvisation studies and move beyond the field's tendency toward celebrating improvisation's utopian and democratic ideals by highlighting the improvisation of marginalized subjects. Rejecting a singular theory of improvisational agency, the contributors show how improvisation helps people gain hard-won and highly contingent agency. Essays include analyses of the role of the body and technology in performance, improvisation's ability to disrupt power relations, Pauline Oliveros's ideas about listening, flautist Nicole Mitchell's compositions based on Octavia Butler's science fiction, and an interview with Judith Butler about the relationship between her work and improvisation. The contributors' close attention to improvisation provides a touchstone for examining subjectivities and offers ways to hear the full spectrum of ideas that sound out from and resonate within and across bodies.
Contributors. George Blake, David Borgo, Judith Butler, Rebecca Caines, Louise Campbell, Illa Carrillo RodrÍguez, Berenice Corti, Andrew Raffo Dewar, Nina Eidsheim, Tomie Hahn, Jaclyn Heyen, Christine Sun Kim, Catherine Lee, Andra McCartney, Tracy McMullen, Kevin McNeilly, Leaf Miller, Jovana Milovic, FranÇois Mouillot, Pauline Oliveros, Jason Robinson, Neil Rolnick, Simon Rose, Gillian Siddall, Julie Dawn Smith, Jesse Stewart, Clara Tomaz, Sherrie Tucker, Lindsay Vogt, Zachary Wallmark, Ellen Waterman, David Whalen, Pete Williams, Deborah Wong, Mandy-Suzanne Wong
Contents
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction: Improvising at the Nexus of Discursive and Material Bodies / Gillian Siddall and Ellen Waterman 1
1. Improvisation within a Scene of Constraint: An Interview with Judith Butler / Tracy McMullen 21
Part I. Listening, Place, and Space
2. "How Am I to Listen to You?": Soundwalking, Intimacy, and Improvised Listening / Andra McCartney 37
3. Community Sound [e]Scapes: Improvising Bodies and Site/Space/Place in New Media Audio Art / Rebecca Caines 55
Part II. Technology and Embodiment
4. Improvising Composition: How to Listen to the Time Between / Pauline Oliveros 75
5. The Networked Body: Physicality, Embodiment, and Latency in Multisite Performance / Jason Robinson 91
6. Openness from Closure: The Puzzle of Interagency in Improvised Music and a Neocybernetic Solution / David Borgo 113
7. Mediating the Improvising Body: Art Tatum's Postmortem Performance in a Posthuman World / Andrew Raffo Dewar 131
Part III. Sensibility and Subjectivity
8. Banding Encounters: Embodied Practices in Improvisation / Introduction and Conclusion by Tomie Hahn; Essays by Louise Campbell, Lindsay Vogt, Simon Rose, George Blake, Catherine Lee, Sherrie Tucker, FranÇois Mouillot, Jovana Milovic, and Pete Williams
9. Learning to Go with the Flow: David Rokeby's Very Nervous System and the Improvising Body / Jesse Stewart 169
10. Stretched Boundaries: Improvising across Abilities / Introduction and Conclusion by Sherrie Tucker; Essays by Pauline Oliveros, Neil Rolnick, Christine Sun Kim, Clara Tomaz, David Whalen, Leif Miller, and Jaclyn Heyen 181
Part IV. Gender, Trauma, and Memory
11. The Erotics of Improvisation in Ann-Marie MacDonald's Fall on Your Knees / Gillian Sidall 201
12. Corregidora: Corporeal Archaeology, Embodied Memory, Improvisation / Nina Sun Eidsheim and Mandy-Suzanne Wong
13. Theorizing the Saxophonic Scream in Free Jazz Improvisation / Zachary Wallmark 233
14. Extemporaneous Genomics: Nicole Mitchell, Octavia Butler, and Xenogenesis / Kevin McNeilly and Julie Dawn Smith 245
Part V. Representation and Identity
15. Faster and Louder: Heterosexist Improvisation in North American Taiko / Deborah Wong 265
16. Improvisation and the Audibility of Difference: Safa, Canadian Multiculturalism, and the Politics of Recognition / Ellen Waterman 281
17. Performing the National Body Politic in Twenty-First-Century Argentina / Illa Carrillo RodrÍguez and Berenice Corti 307
Discography 327
References 329
Contributors 351
Index 355
