Sync or Swarm, Revised Edition: Improvising Music in a Complex Age 9781501368837, 9781501368844, 9781501368875, 9781501368868

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Sync or Swarm Revised Edition

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Sync or Swarm Improvising Music in a Complex Age Revised Edition

David Borgo

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BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2022 Copyright © David Borgo, 2022 For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. vii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design by Louise Dugdale Cover image © Protasov AN/Shutterstock All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Borgo, David, author. Title: Sync or swarm : improvising music in a complex age / David Borgo. Description: Revised edition. | New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “Originally published in 2005, the revised edition explores musical free improvisation through the lens of several contemporary sciences” – Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2021040194 (print) | LCCN 2021040195 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501368837 (hardback) | ISBN 9781501368844 (paperback) | ISBN 9781501368851 (epub) | ISBN 9781501368868 (pdf) | ISBN 9781501368875 (ebook other) Subjects: LCSH: Free jazz–History and criticism. | Free jazz–Analysis, appreciation. | Improvisation (Music) Classification: LCC ML3506 .B67 2022 (print) | LCC ML3506 (ebook) | DDC 781.65/136–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021040194 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021040195 ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-6883-7 PB: 978-1-5013-6884-4 ePDF: 978-1-5013-6886-8 eBook: 978-1-5013-6885-1 Typeset by Newgen KnowledgeWorks Pvt. Ltd., Chennai, India

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Contents Acknowledgments Preface to the Revised Edition Preface to the First Edition 1

The Sound and Science of Surprise The Age of Complexity Sync or Swarm

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The Study of Improvisation 17 The Field of Improvisation Studies 18 Referent-Based Improvisation  24 Referent-Free Improvisation  26 Freedom Music  29 Freedom Is, Freedom Ain’t 37 Improvisation Is, Improvisation Isn’t  44 A Marvel of Paradox 52

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Strange Loops The Embodied Mind  Enaction and Prediction  Taking the Note for a Walk  It’s a Bit Like Juggling  Lived Body and Living Body  On Repeat  Fractal Correlation  Circular Causality  Hall of Mirrors

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Rivers of Consciousness The Art of the Trio Complexity and Emergence Musical Elephants The Sound of One Note Clapping

57 58 61 66 72 74 77 80 93 96 103 105 109 110 112

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Time and the Qualia of Experience The Phase Space of Improvisation Attractors Hues of Melanin Fractal Correlation Flights and Perchings 5

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Orderly Disorder Chaotics Complex Adaptive Systems Dissipative Structuring Ancient to Future  Sketches of Another Future Sync and Swarm The Science of Sync Entrainment A Coordination Problem  Insect Music The Art of Improvisation in the Age of Computational Participation The Puzzle of Coaction A Web without a Spider Reassembling the Social Harnessing Complexity  The Map Is Not the Territory Situated Musicianship Group Creativity Yes, and … Comprovisation The Shores of Multiplicity Complementarity and Metastability

References  Index 

114 119 121 128 135 141 145 147 151 155 160 166 173 174 177 180 182 191 205 207 216 219 220 224 237 241 245 250 254 261 281

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Acknowledgments To all the musicians I have performed with and learned from. To all the teachers and guides who have shared their wisdom with me. To my many colleagues and students. To the helpful staff at Bloomsbury. To my friends, my family, my parents, my life partner, and our two boys. I am eternally grateful. Portions of Chapter 2 appeared as “The Complex Dynamics of Improvisation,” in The Springer Handbook of Systematic Musicology, Springer International Publishing (2018). Portions of Chapter 3 appeared as “Strange Loops of Attention, Awareness, Affect, and Action in Musical Improvisation,” in Music and Consciousness II, ed. Ruth Herbert, Eric Clarke, and David Clark, Oxford University Press (2019). Portions of Chapter 4 appeared as “Rivers of Consciousness: The Nonlinear Dynamics of Free Jazz” (co-authored with Joseph Goguen) in Jazz Research Proceedings Yearbook (2005) and as “Strange Loops of Attention, Awareness, Affect, and Action in Musical Improvisation,” in Music and Consciousness 2: Worlds, Practices, Modalities, ed. Ruth Herbert, David Clarke, and Eric Clarke, Oxford University Press (2019a). Portions of Chapter 5 appeared as “Openness from Closure: The Puzzle of Interagency in Improvised Music and a Neo-Cybernetic Solution,” in Negotiated Moments: Improvisation, Sound, and Subjectivity, ed. Gillian Siddall and Ellen Waterman, Duke University Press (2016). Portions of Chapter 6 appeared as “The Ghost in the Music,” in The Oxford Handbook on Critical Improvisation Studies, Vol. 1, ed. George Lewis and Ben Piekut, Oxford University Press (2016), and as “The Art of Improvisation in the Age of Computational Participation,” in The Routledge Companion to Jazz Studies, ed. Tony Whyton, Nicholas Gebhardt and Nicole T. Rustin, Routledge (2019). Portions of Chapter 7 appeared as “Embodied, Situated, and Distributed Musicianship,” in Sound Musicianship: Understanding the Crafts of Music, ed. Andrew Brown, Cambridge Scholars Publishing (2012), and as “Musicking on the Shores of Multiplicity and Complexity,” Parallax 13/4 (2007), 92–107. Audio and video examples discussed in the book, as well as some not discussed, are available at https://sites.google.com/ucsd.edu/syncorswarm.

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Preface to the Revised Edition August 2021 San Diego, California, USA I have lost track of which wave of the Covid-19 pandemic we are in. Is it the fourth, or maybe the fifth? How many other disasters have we endured these past eighteen months? Forest fires and hurricanes were exacerbated by continuing climate change, upending delicate ecosystems and displacing entire communities. We saw wide-scale protests against police brutality and systemic racism, an election cycle in the United States that rocked democracy, and the entrenchment of a global mediascape that seems to spread misinformation faster and easier than verifiable facts and good will. This past year, we also experienced the stress placed on music’s ability to promote “togetherness” when physical proximity is removed from the equation. Perhaps one upside of all this horrific news is that people are implicitly becoming more familiar with the emergent dynamics of complex nonlinear systems—those systems in which the relevant variables are not related according to strict proportionality. A one-degree Celsius change in global temperature produces vastly disproportionate effects on ecosystems and the organisms that comprise them. Systemic racism is the result of nonlinear dynamics compounded historically by discriminatory (i.e., disproportionate) practices not only in policing, but also in property ownership, voting rights, education, employment, wages, neighborhood infrastructure, and much more. A highly contagious virus disproportionally affects those employed in essential jobs that cannot be done from home—more commonly people of color and those already suffering financial insecurity. Even as vaccines to help combat this pandemic have been developed, it is already clear that some less advantaged countries and populations will receive them much later, if at all. Pathogens go viral, but so do “tweets” and “memes,” with the most outlandish and unverified seeming to have far greater reach and effect. What might all these topics have to do with improvisation? At first glance, they all appear to illustrate unpredictability and instability. Yet the recent catastrophes

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and promising social changes that are afoot are, somewhat counterintuitively, examples of ordering effects. They involve a collection of otherwise independent objects locking together in a synchronized fashion. A global pandemic occurs when otherwise independent pathogens combine to form a new strand of virus which grows exponentially by spreading through unprotected populations in a more or less orderly fashion. Systemic racism, unlike individual acts of discrimination, is pervasive and self-reinforcing. It persists by maintaining the established social order, the status quo. Stock market crashes, traffic jams, and large-scale weather events—all classic examples of nonlinear dynamics—are also ordered in the sense that large numbers of formerly independent agents suddenly synchronize their behaviors (be they financial agents, car drivers, or “packets” of water and air). Even mass protests—such as those in support of the Black Lives Matter movement—rely on and enact a certain kind of synchronization. These “moments of synchronization” that occur in complex dynamical systems can be extremely powerful and problematic, as the case may be. They frequently grab the headlines. But the really fascinating question is exactly when, why, and how they emerge—and to what extent they linger and produce lasting effects. Complex dynamical systems are those that are able to spontaneously adapt, to move back and forth between ordered and disordered behaviors, without any external help (see Waldrop 1992 and Mainzer 1994). The etymology of the word spontaneous is sua sponte, meaning of its own accord. Musical improvisation is often described as spontaneous composition. I wrote Sync or Swarm to explore the interactive, adaptive, constructive, and potentially revolutionary aspects of musical improvisation in the context of our contemporary understandings of mind and society. In particular, I wanted to situate a type of musical improvisation that I refer to as “open-form” in the context of nonlinear dynamical systems theory and alongside ideas such as emergence, self-organization, far-from-equilibrium dynamics, synchronization, swarm behavior, and more. Systems demonstrating these types of behaviors defy reductionist logic and ask that we embrace complexity, turbulence, disequilibrium, and multiplicity as generative forces. As a musician myself, the dynamics of complexity fascinate me. The ongoing interplay of order and disorder—the “orderly disorder” or “disorderly order”—provides a boundless source of intrigue and excitement. In the book, I was not arguing for a causal connection in either direction, from nonlinear dynamical systems science to musical improvisation, or vice

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versa. Rather, I believed then, as I do now, that the practices and concerns of contemporary improvisation and science (including the philosophy of science and the philosophy of mind), are emblematic of our complex age. I suppose that my most ambitious aspirations were somehow to “fuse the horizons” of these emergent viewpoints and practices into a new, larger understanding. More modestly, I hoped to highlight emergent paradigms that, if not entirely shared, could at least be mutually enlightening. I was also interested in embracing— rather than condemning or ignoring—the spirit of “productive misreading” that often occurs at the intersection of art and science (or between the “art of science” and the “science of art”). While I am pleased by the positive feedback and commendation that I received from scholars and the academic community (and grateful for the critiques that I received as well), I am equally delighted that many artists conveyed to me that the discussion was inspiring to them and to what they do. The fact that a broadly interdisciplinary academic field called critical improvisation studies has flourished since the initial publication of my book—a field that takes under its purview not only creative art practices, but also everyday activities and our relationships with natural and built environments, and much more—provides me some additional reassurance that I was onto something. Ellen Waterman (2019: 141) writes of an “improvisative turn” in arts and humanities research that explores “the contingent, negotiated, and relational aspects of individual and collective behavior.” This improvisative turn comes on the heels of other humanistic turns—beginning in the 1970s with the “cultural” and “interpretive” turns and shifting in more recent decades to “performative” and “intersubjective” turns. These latter two highlight the constructed aspects of perception and identity and the ways that individual behavior derives from nonconscious and collective influences in ways that resonate with my own views. A related “ontological turn”—spurred on by recent research in the social studies of science and technology—goes by several names, including actornetwork theory, new materialism, post-humanism, object-oriented ontology, and speculative realism, among others. These can differ widely in premise, scope, and approach, but broadly they challenge the separation of nature and culture, of the human and non-human, and of the “already” and the “made.” They ask us to think about things, and therefore our material engagements, differently. In the most far-reaching of these theories, phenomena or objects do not precede their interaction; instead, they emerge through particular intra-actions (Barad 2007).

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Taken together, these turns critique many of the presuppositions of humanism, and they wrestle with the complexity that any sense of “agency” always arises from multiple and complex contingencies. My own perspective on this challenging subject foregrounds a relational and phenomenological approach to understanding ontology, and it has been shaped by my ongoing engagements with jazz and contemporary improvisation, and, more recently, with electro-acoustic open-form improvisation (especially in the duo KaiBorg alongside Jeff Kaiser). Research in 4E cognitive science (embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended) and social psychology/cognition has greatly expanded since my book’s initial publication (see Newen, De Bruin, and Gallagher 2018).1 In this book I argue that musical improvisation cannot be adequately addressed via methodological individualism. The unit of explanation should not be the individual, nor their brain, nor their body, nor the environment they “inhabit” or any other kind of external referent. Rather, it is the body-brain-environment understood as a dynamically coupled system. Another productive way to think about this entangled complexity is through John Dewey’s (1939) notion of “situation” in tandem with James Gibson’s (1979) notion of “affordance.” Situation, for Dewey, is not equivalent to the environment, because it also always includes the agent in such a way that agent and environment are co-defined. For instance, it is impossible for an agent to step outside a situation without changing it. And pointing out or reflecting on a part of a situation, while perhaps helpful, also changes the situation, since observing and reflecting become elements of the situation. To rearrange environmental objects is also to rearrange the situation, and it implies a rearrangement of oneself as well. To Gibson, a situation may contain a variety of affordances. Physical affordances are the easiest to understand. In the classic case, a chair affords sitting for a human being, but not for an ant or an elephant. The chair also affords other actions to humans, such as standing on it, burning it (if combustible), or making music with it. Crucially, affordances are also defined by social practices and constrained by experiences and norms. The saxophone affords playing, but if one does not have the skill or experience to do so, it may not be possible. One could seek out instruction and develop the requisite skills to play the saxophone. Related terms include grounded cognition, situated cognition, non-representational cognition, emergent cognition, and anti-Cartesian cognition. 1

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Yet social norms might constrain who is encouraged to do so, or who can afford to do so, or what sort of playing is deemed appropriate, and on and on. Without these experiences and skill development, the saxophone still affords playing, but it will remain unidentified, distant, or out of reach entirely. Specifically referencing the enactive “e” of 4E cognition, Evan Thompson writes: “cognition and the experienced world co-arise in mutual dependence” (in Varela, Thompson, and Rosch 2016: xxv). Or, as Octavia Butler (2012: 3) describes the central tenet of the Earthseed religion in Parable of the Sower: “All that you touch You Change. All that you Change Changes you. The only lasting truth is Change. God is Change.”2 Shaun Gallagher (2020) describes this as an agentive situation, to emphasize not merely that the agent is a part of the situation, but that the situation is defined in relation to the performance of actions and is characterized by varying degrees and kinds of intentionality. These are heady topics that I have tried to unpack through revisions and extensions of the book’s chapters. At heart, I firmly believe that improvising music together presents a “visceral” experience of a complex agentive situation, one which involves musicians, technological agents, listeners, acoustic spaces, social norms, enculturated expectations, and much more. I organized the book with systems thinking in mind. The chapters move outward from the embodied mind of a solo performer, to the complex dynamics of an improvising ensemble, to the further entanglements of networks involving social and technological agency, and ending with the question of pedagogy, and how best to establish a productive “agentive situation” in order to engage and nourish the emerging embodied improviser, completing a journey around the Mobius strip that is systems thought. Above and beyond any musical or academic particulars, my greatest hope was that the book would encourage us all to expand our ability to think in terms of co-constituted systems; to shift from looking for near-term causal relationships to identifying patterns of long-term behavior; and to feel more comfortable in the inherently unpredictable realm of complexity. Perhaps the most encouraging trend since the original publication of this book has been the exponential growth of the global community of artists with extremely diverse backgrounds embracing improvisation as a key facet of their

The novel is a prescient tale set in the 2020s, when society has largely collapsed due to climate change, growing wealth inequality, resource scarcity, corporate greed, and racial, ethnic, and religious discrimination. 2

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creative lives. While it would be impossible to discuss all of this recent research and activity in detail, or to exhaustively cover the ever-expanding roster of improvisation-aligned artists, I have updated the text at certain points with salient themes and additional discussions of contemporary artists and have provided many suggestions for further reading and listening. I have also created a website with multimedia examples of especially compelling performances. At the very least, I hope that my work is understood as standing alongside and in resonance with these contemporary turns and trends. *** Chaos and complexity theories were starting to make headlines in the 1990s when I was completing my PhD in Ethnomusicology. At that time, I was beginning to explore “open-form” improvisation (my preferred term, although “free” improvisation may be more common) with a group of like-minded musicians in weekly “sessions.” The ideas associated with these emerging scientific theories resonated deeply with my experiences in this domain. I still find concepts such as “extreme sensitivity to initial conditions,” “perturbations,” “bifurcations,” “strange attractors,” and other multidimensional “phase space transitions,” along with notions of “recursion,” “self-similarity,” and “self-organization,” to be potent ways to impart an understanding of—and to inspire an engagement with— contemporary musical improvisation. I intentionally avoided using the word chaos in the book’s subtitle— preferring the notion of complexity—in part because so much contemporary musical improvisation (from the earliest jazz onward) had been dismissed by its critics as “chaotic” in the pejorative sense of the word. While thankfully some of the more vehement ideological battles about what constitutes “improvisation” (or “jazz”) and how to situate it vis-à-vis “composition” have subsided, many (often implicitly racist) biases against improvisation do remain. In Sync or Swarm I did not set out to chronicle in detail the history of explicit and implicit forms of bias against musical improvisation. However, references to that history did appear, and I have left many of them in, because this history still informs structural inequalities for working improvisers in terms of the social, political, and economic conditions, and the legal codes and institutional compacts that undergird them. That being said, I do hope that my vision of improvisation comes across as an inclusive one. While I focus a great deal of attention on openform improvisation as a limit case, I do not believe that it inherently has more value than any other form of musicking.

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I also avoided the word chaos in the book’s title because chaos theory technically applies to only a limited set of deterministic nonlinear systems that demonstrate complicated behavior by obeying simple rules. Think of the perioddoubling cascade of a dripping water faucet, or the behavior of a compound pendulum. Music that follows an analogous path to chaos from deterministic rules to complicated results can certainly be fascinating. My focus, however, is on musicking that is complex and adaptive, not simply complicated. Complex music, in my view, involves a relation of relations, rather than a relation of things. Complexity science, in a nutshell, is the study of the phenomena which emerge from a collection of interacting, self-regulating objects or “agents.” For a system to be complex, it must have constitutive characteristics that are not explainable in their entirety from the characteristics of the isolated parts. Agents in a complex system are affected by memory or “feedback.” They behave and adapt according to their history and current dynamics. And the system itself must be open to, and influenced by, its environment. Even these brief descriptions of complexity offer an intriguing analog to improvised music. Improvising musicians pay close attention to what has already transpired, both in their own playing and in the playing of the entire ensemble. What has already transpired in an improvisation profoundly impacts future musical developments. The system is also open to environmental influences, including the space (acoustics), place (social context), and people (other musicians, audience members, imagined listeners) involved. Simon Waters’s (2007) notion of a performer-instrument-environment (PIE) ecosystem captures aspects of this entangled dynamic well. Crucially, “environmental” influences (or, better, those of Dewey’s “situation”) extend well beyond the performance event, all the way outward to what Arjun Appadurai has called the five scapes of global cultural flow: ethnoscapes, technoscapes, financescapes, ideoscapes, and mediascapes. These correspond to the movements of people, technologies, capital, and ideas/narratives, including the increasingly global reach of media. As a result of this plethora of agency, interaction, feedback, and situational influence, complex systems exhibit emergent phenomena that are generally surprising, and may be extreme, as can be the case in moments of unexpected musical synchrony, or in the synchrony represented by the natural disasters and cultural challenges described earlier. These emergent phenomena may be shorter or longer lived, but ultimately, they are always transient (although their perturbations can have enduring consequences).

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Additionally, emergent phenomena can arise in the absence of a central controller. Clearly some musics are more centralized than others. Western orchestral music, for instance, relies to a significant degree on the organizing roles of the composer and conductor, mediated through the notation of a score. Much contemporary electronic music, while often drawing on diverse and vastly distributed sonic methods and resources, is “produced” by a single individual. Jazz music may also have a composer, might use notation in varying ways, and perhaps even have a conductor in some instances, but the performance ethos of jazz tends to be more decentralized. In open-form musical improvisation, the emphasis is on the dynamics of ensemble feedback in the moment of performance instead of centralized control. To invoke thermodynamical terms that will be developed later, open-form improvisation presents a far-fromequilibrium system (one that invites extremely risky moments of positive or “runaway” feedback), whereas more conventional modes of musicking remain closer to equilibrium (often by deploying forms of negative feedback that reduce potential fluctuations in the output). Somewhat paradoxically, however, this far-from-equilibrium “openness” is made possible by enacting a type of cybernetic “closure.” Improvisers working in these domains usually seek to develop a very personal—at times iconoclastic— approach through what we might call a process of “attunement” between agent and sound-producing tools rather than learning a musical “language” per se (although I do not agree that this music is non-idiomatic; see Bailey 1992). In doing so, they separate internal interdependencies (their closure) from system/ environment interdependencies (their openness), while also relating both to each other. The emerging enactive view of cognition views the living body as a self-producing and self-maintaining system (i.e., an autopoietic system) that through cognitive processes enacts or “brings forth” relevance by coupling with an environment. The seemingly paradoxical aspects of this openness from closure are explored in greater detail in the pages to come. Improvisation is clearly a form of composition, in the broadest sense, so I do not wish to create any false binaries. Tim Ingold (2010) makes a useful distinction between a paradigm of textility and an architectonic paradigm.3 Rather than reading creativity “backward,” from a finished object to an initial intention in

According to Ingold (2010: 91): “Historically, it was the turn from drawing lines to pulling them straight, between predetermined points, which marked the transition from the textilic to the architectonic, debasing the former as craft while elevating the latter as technology.” 3

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the mind of an agent, textility, according to Ingold, “entails reading it forwards, in an ongoing generative movement that is at once itinerant, improvisatory and rhythmic” (91). This new edition of Sync or Swarm engages in greater detail with the “textility” of electro-acoustic and digital musicking, and the entangled webs of human-machine configuration that comprise them. Admittedly, however, my approach remains focused on a “performative” view of improvisation as musical creativity “put on display” in real time. Improvisers in this performative mode must work adaptively, contingently, and cumulatively. Sonic gestures can be re-contextualized at a subsequent moment—or through framing gestures made by other collaborators—but improvisers work without the “safety net” of explicit revision or rewind. This inherent risk can produce results to marvel at, but the detritus and debris of musical improvisation also remains out in the open, for all to hear (see Peters 2009). To be clear, musicians who cherish the spontaneity, sociality, and irretrievability of improvised performance also work “out-of-time” to develop their tools and techniques, their skills and strategies, and their concepts and communities (and much more), just as all artists do. And composed music that incorporates improvisation—or, better, blurs any obvious distinctions—is arguably on the rise, with so many contemporary boundary-crossing artists finding innovative ways to blend “previously-composed” and “present-composed” musicking, or “design-time” and “play-time” creativity. In highlighting qualities such as emergence, my goal is not to romanticize improvisation. Emergence implies that the whole is different from the sum of its parts. This is arguably a goal of and motivation for all musicking, given that musicking offers a potent form of sonic and social bonding (which can be funneled in both laudable and loathsome ways; see Goodman 2009). Open-form improvisation may simply dramatize in performance the emergent properties inherent in all forms of musicking. Improvisation communities—however they wish to define themselves—are categorically not different from other communities. They are a microcosm of society. Improvisation “scenes” comprise a wide spectrum of personalities and personal motives where discriminatory practices and bias—both explicit and implicit—can and do appear. The rhetoric around improvisation often celebrates “freedom” and “egalitarianism,” but the practices that surround and comprise it are still very much entangled in the stubborn structures of colonialism, capitalism, patriarchy, and more, even as many of its most visible and verbal champions

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are diligently combating this historical legacy (see Piekut 2010). I have revised portions of the text to highlight issues of gender, sexuality, transculturality, and more, without displacing my overall optimism for improvising music together as a potent site for nurturing “fellow feeling” around a shared experience (ideally, one of empathy and shared vulnerability).4 *** Sync or Swarm investigates creativity through the lens of cognition, and especially social cognition. My ongoing engagement with emerging theories in 4E cognitive science is driven by my belief that aspects of the mind—from perception and action, to affect, reflection, imagining, and reasoning—are best located in the coupling between an agent and the external world. The emerging discourse on the 4E mind do not view cognition in terms of “in-the-skull” information processing. Mind is, according to these theories, continuous with the basic life-processes and adaptive activities that allow an organism to survive and flourish in a contingent and often precarious environment. Philosopher Shaun Gallagher (2017: 1) describes this as “affordancebased skilled coping.” I rather like this turn of phrase, since it describes well what improvisers do. But it also describes what notation-based composers do, what performers who interpret their work do, what technology-based music producers do, and, arguably, what participants in a whole range of skill domains do (e.g., actors, athletes, comedians, dancers, etc.). I am tempted to argue that “We are all improvisers now!” in the tradition of scholars in ethnomusicology and musicology declaring that we are all now working in the same discipline (Cook 2008), once the “culture concept,” developed initially in anthropology, began to pervade both fields. Yet, what we have conventionally referred to as composition, performance, and improvisation do differ significantly in the kind and specificity of their affordances and constraints, so rallying the troops together might still be premature (and the biases and structural inequities alluded to earlier should caution us against making this move too soon, in my opinion). In each case, the specific affordances and constraints will be different, perhaps even dramatically so. An emerging research area called predictive processing—with close ties to the 4E model—insists that minds evolve by constantly anticipating sensory I prefer the notion of “fellow feeling” to “fellowship,” since the latter might imply a shared purpose, which cannot nor should be assumed. 4

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perturbations and acting on them predictively. In this emerging view, it is the sensed deviations from predicted states, and not the raw input itself, that inform what is salient in the environment and in our own experiences. While improvising together, musicians must imaginatively anticipate what other players will do, playing in an “as-if ” mode. Gary Hagberg (2016: 492), developing this idea, insists that when the music is really “happening,” improvisers play “as if the momentary passage were rehearsed, as if they had known in advance what they were going to do together.” Expertise in these cases presents itself affectively as a “degree of confidence” in one’s actions and predictions. Improvising music together, according to Hagberg, involves joint action, embodied coordination, collective attention, and shared intention, in ways that challenge conventional understandings of cognition and consciousness. Referencing William James’s famous description of consciousness, Hagberg describes an improvising ensemble as a “blooming, buzzing confusion,” a microcosm of our perception of the world, in which each player selectively attends “to what is necessary in order to participate most fully, to intentionally interact, to de-individuate for the good of something that is greater than him- or herself ” (489). Drawing on Hillary Putnam’s influential theory of distributed labor, Hagberg adds that “no one player can, in the rapidly unfolding flux of an improvising ensemble, shine spotlights on all aspects of what is unfolding presently. But between them—to share attention and distribute labor—they can” (491). Improvisation, in the view I explore here, is a profoundly incorporating or embodied practice. It is a type of “knowledge” that cannot be separated from its medium and that will always deviate from some abstract norm (which has too often been the gold standard for musical inquiry and musical value). As I argue in Chapter 1, the more adventurous approaches to improvisation taking hold in the 1960s were, from one vantage point, “freeing” themselves from the hegemony of inscription in music and the abstractions it codifies (in particular those of Western music notation, theory, and “conventional” instrumental technique). But improvisation, even of the “freest” varieties, exists in constant interplay with inscriptions that abstract the practices into signs (if not as musical notation, then in the form of musical recordings, or as musical “hardware” and “software,” for instance). And these forms of improvisation now coexist (comfortably or not) within the same “art worlds” (Becker 1982) that have been shaped by musical notation, sound recording, and other forms of inscription.

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While a considerable amount of research has been directed at breaking improvised creativity into its component parts (and recently into its neural correlates, as well), to the extent that improvisation involves organisms interacting together in real time, then reductionism and methodological individualism are woefully inadequate to the task. Complexity science differs in important ways from other forms of inquiry. Instead of smashing things apart to find out what the components are, complexity science looks at the complicated and surprising things that can emerge from the interaction of a collection of objects or agents. Unlike sciences that study phenomena too small or too distant to be detected without amplification, or those that study phenomena that occur too slowly or two quickly for human perception, complexity science is about phenomena that are hidden in plain sight (or plain sound). In complexity science, we don’t need a full understanding of the constituent parts in order to understand what a collection of them might do. While we can never be certain what direction an improvisation will take next, we do know, at a certain level of scale, the directions it might take. In my view, improvisation frees up the rational mind (and even points to the possibility of an emergent “group mind”) but it also demarcates the limits of the (4E) mind’s freedom. *** Improvisation certainly involves, in the best instances, listening closely and carefully to one another, and cultivating empathy among the group. However, negotiations are too often envisioned as succeeding when a compromise has been reached, when order has been restored from a more disordered state of affairs. Order is not the friend we might imagine it to be, an idea to which the health, societal, climatic, and financial disruptions alluded to at the outset can attest. The most pressing challenges facing us today are emergent: viruses leaping between species and spreading uncontrollably; small changes in the global climate producing devastating natural disasters; billions of small financial transactions producing runaway wealth disparity; structural inequities compounding historically to exacerbate systemic bias and discrimination. Crucially, our collective response to these accelerating social and environmental challenges must also be emergent. Improvised music, at its best, does not console us with facile order or easy compromise; it helps us to embrace the open, dynamic, adaptive, and eversurprising aspects of complexity. While it has become commonplace to encounter

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jazz music described as a mirror of American individualism and democracy, as one of my former graduate students put it in the wake of the January 6 attack on the Capitol building, “What are we to make of the jazz-democracy dyad when one of its terms seems to be disintegrating before our eyes?”5 Even more trenchantly, Fumi Okiji, in her book Jazz as Critique (2018: 16–17), argues that “the democracy narrative recognizes a collective in jazz but misconstrues the complex, contradictory, irresolvable relationships as a harmonious resolution to do what one wants, so long as one is tolerant.” Resisting this “harmonious” resolution, Okiji writes of jazz as a “heterophonic expression,” a “subterranean space, where alternative forms of subjectivity are able to flourish,” a “gathering in difference.” The study of improvisation is, encouragingly so, a gathering in difference. There are scholars who theorize a very personal spiritual or emancipatory quality to improvisation. They interpret and promote it as a liberating force in people’s lives (see Nachmanovitch 1990; Rothenberg 2002; Sarath 2013; Miller 2020). Others theorize an anticipatory quality to improvisation. They posit improvisation as a form of social practice that can be projected onto political problems yet to be solved (see Heble 2000; Kelly 2002; Heble, Fischlin, and Lipsitz 2013). This work often blends scholarship, advocacy, and community development in compelling ways. Still other scholars center Blackness, or an Afrological paradigm, as the most appropriate analytic through which to understand improvisation’s social significance (see Lewis 2008; Okiji 2018; Sarath 2018). This work variously focuses attention on the immense global impact that Black music has had in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the challenges that these music communities have faced and continue to face, and the ways in which Black musical conceptions and aesthetics might transform the music academy, much as they have already transformed global musical practice and consumption. There are aspects of all of this work that I personally admire and find compelling, and many scholars draw on several of these approaches, effectively blurring any presumed boundaries between them. As a devoted lifelong fan, practitioner, and student of jazz and improvised music, my scholarship and teaching advocate for these musical practices, the communities that nurture and are nurtured by them, and for the transformative power of both.

Asher Tobin Chodos, personal communication with the author, San Diego, California, January 2021. 5

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There need not—and arguably should not—be only one way to interpret improvisation. Music is a form of participatory sense-making that spans the biological and cultural dimensions of human existence. Improvisation, therefore, reflects a multitude of influences, including biological, cognitive, acoustical, idiomatic, historical, technological, social, cultural, political, legal, economic, and more. Rather than envisioning different approaches to improvisation in some sort of hierarchical relationship, or as a type of Venn diagram, for example, I prefer to envision the situation more cybernetically, as an entangled array of self-regulating-yet-mutually-interdependent feedback loops. The academic and artistic worlds, much like the “natural” one, involve feedback systems within feedback systems suffused with and sustained by processes of communication and exchange. This situation is arguably more challenging to visualize, but the term “ecosystem,” which entails far more than the so-called natural environment, is meant to capture this complex entanglement. *** At its core, Sync or Swarm promotes an ecological view of musicking, moving us from a subject-centered to a system-centered view of improvisation. It explores cycles of organismic self-regulation, cycles of sensorimotor coupling between organism and environment, and cycles of intersubjective interaction mediated via socio-technological networks. Invoking contemporary science as a facet of this endeavor should not be seen as taking a neutral or uncritical stance. Ecologies can be quite delicate, as we are all learning, and amid the innumerable entangled feedback loops, there will always be some systems that work at cross purposes, some that don’t work well, and others that are downright detrimental to the ongoing health of the system as a whole. Until quite recently, scientists believed that social behaviors spread like viruses do. But the spread of changes in human behavior and belief is rather more complex. While a brief encounter with a virus can infect you, simple exposure to a new idea does not effect change on its own. Propagating new social norms involves far more than simply spreading information; there are many countervailing factors, including culture, identity, and one’s social networks, that affect whether new behaviors are adopted. For example, the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic has by now been felt nearly everywhere, but the pace and intensity of the viral spread has differed widely across countries and even regions of the same country, due primarily to whether new behavioral norms were adopted or not. While prominent public

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figures certainly played a role in these dynamics, the science of networks suggests that they more often ride the waves of change than actually provoke them. “As we consider whether to adopt a new belief or behavior,” writes Damon Centola (2021: 10), a leading researcher in this area, “we are guided, much more than we realize, by our social networks.” For another example, the hashtag BlackLivesMatter was first used on social media in April 2012, tweeted by a woman after the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the death of Trayvon Martin. But it was used only a handful of times in the two years prior to the death of eighteen-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. That tragic event in August 2014, and the demonstrations of protest that followed, sparked a movement, and the usage of #BlackLivesMatter grew exponentially. The horrendous murder of George Floyd in May 2020 further transformed the phrase into an emblem of a global protest movement. Centola’s work helps to explain how these more recent events were able to create wide bridges between communities and link together their deepening shared commitment to social justice. Enticingly, music appears to be contagious in both simple viral and complex social ways. Catchy pop songs, engaging music videos, and humorous TikTok memes can be enjoyed and passed on with little effort or investment, often through the click of a button. Yet music can also play a role in changing social beliefs and behaviors, although it can be extremely difficult to predict—or even understand—when and how new ideas and behaviors gain traction. In ensemble improvisation, one often senses a delicate balancing act between moments of perceived synchronization and periods evoking a swarm-like dynamic, in which individual parts may be moving in rather different ways yet somehow evoke a collective purpose. Humans also marvel at complex coordinated-yet-surprising behaviors in nature. We watch carefully as clouds form into intoxicating shapes, and we listen attentively as leaves rustle together in a chorus of cacophonous harmony. We are spellbound by starlings that flock together in surprising formations; by ants that cooperate and self-organize into colonies; and by broods of termites that collectively build mounds of dirt extending meters into the air. We are left speechless at the sight of the aurora borealis lights that refract charged particles of solar wind, and we react with awe to rootstocks that have grown together into an entangled rhizome. We are only now learning that families of trees communicate and share resources with one another, often through networks of fungi, and that the entire forest may operate as a social network. The cover of this book features a photo of mycelium,

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the ancient, extensive, and symbiotic network of cellular threads that helps ecosystems to thrive and regenerate. In a Zoom presentation for a class at UC San Diego, celebrated African American bassist William Parker discussed his experiences playing with English guitarist Derek Bailey: It was like we go down parallel tracks and in order for me to play with him, I had to totally be myself and he had to totally be himself, and then we’ll play together. You know, more like the way raindrops fall hitting a roof, or the way butterflies, birds and bees go together, or the way the wind rustles through the trees and leaves fall. And I found that’s all it was. Connecting to nature in a particular way.6

Improvising music together does not overcome contradictions and differences to arrive at consensus. Instead, it provides a (relatively) “consequence-free” space for exploring, in the words of Edgar Landgraf (2011: 12), “the productivity and inventiveness of contentious social processes that supersede the purview of the individual.” It invites us to engage and embrace the dynamics of the complex age we inhabit. Improvisation is inherently unpredictable—excitingly so—but it is not random. It coheres into emergent patterns that can be sensed by participants, even as each occurrence is decidedly unique. Thriving communities of improvised music—just like any other community—need the resilience of “strong” local ties and the reach of “weak” ties that invite far-flung collaboration, influence, and insight. In choosing to improvise together, we may come to realize that “optimal” solutions to our most pressing problems elude us, but in doing so we are participating in the process, listening carefully and intimately to one another, offering points of intervention, perturbation, and departure, all in the sincere hope that the ecological system—musical and otherwise—will become more robust, more convivial, and more sustainable.

Parker was a guest in Mark Dresser’s jazz history course on February 25, 2021. 6

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Preface to the First Edition I find I do some of my best thinking on airplanes. The romantic in me likes to think that floating above the clouds allows my thinking to become untethered from its normal cycles, habits, and conventions. Perhaps a more down-to-earth explanation, however, is simply that with the complexity and congestion of our daily lives, long flights offer one of the few uninterrupted stretches of time in which to read and contemplate. It was on an eighteen-hour flight from Los Angeles to Yerevan, Armenia in the summer of 1995. At the time, I was a graduate student studying Ethnomusicology at UCLA and I was a teaching assistant and performer in the jazz program. Under the auspices of an exchange program between the university and the Yerevan Symphony, our jazz quartet was invited to travel to Armenia to give a series of concerts at Khachaturian Philharmonic Hall. The group included myself on saxophones, David Ake on piano, Todd Sickafoose on bass, and David Whitman on drums; friends affectionately knew us as “The Three Daves Plus Todd.” For the flight, I brought along a copy of the book Complexity by Michael M. Waldrop (1992), a Christmas present from my parents that, with all my graduate coursework, I had not gotten around to reading. The book explains for general readers the emerging science of complexity and the internal workings of the Santa Fe Institute. My parents—New Mexicans at heart despite their many years spent on the East Coast—thought Waldrop’s descriptions of the institute would be interesting and that these new scientific ideas might rekindle an early love affair of mine with the sciences. They were right. Back in high school—before I started skipping my calculus classes to practice Charlie Parker solos—I was fascinated by the then new ideas of artificial intelligence and had been accepted into the program in computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. But bebop rather than circuit boards was to be my immediate calling. My first saxophone teacher, Larry Aversano, early in my studies gave me a copy of the Omnibook, a well-known collection of Charlie Parker solos transcribed from his Savoy and Dial recordings. I proceeded to practice diligently from the book as if the notes contained within were no different from the other saxophone exercises with which I was familiar, working

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over examples with odd names like “Ornithology” or “Moose the Mooche” until my fingers could at least approximate even the most rapid and angular musical passages. I enjoyed the melodic and rhythmic intricacy of the music— its daunting technical challenge—but at that time I could not fathom how these complicated solos were “composed” in the heat of the moment, nor how Parker’s playing on a given tune could and would differ dramatically from night to night. Since that time, the idea of in-the-moment creativity has become an overriding interest in my life. I declined the offer from Carnegie Mellon and chose instead to pursue a jazz performance degree at Indiana University. After four years of intense “wood shedding” under the tutelage of respected jazz educator David Baker, I embarked on a career as a professional touring saxophonist that took me throughout the United States and to various parts of Europe and Latin America and to the Middle and Far East. Along the way, I became fascinated by the variety of cultures I encountered and, in particular, by the diverse musical traditions to which I was being exposed. I returned to school to pursue a PhD in Ethnomusicology, by this point my fledgling interest in the sciences a thing of the distant past. Early in my graduate studies, I pursued coursework in the musical traditions of Latin America and Asia, and I developed some basic proficiency on the Japanese shakuhachi (flute) and the Indian sitar. My overriding interest in improvisation, however, continued to provide a thread that bound together my disparate pursuits. As my musical horizons were expanding outward, my studies in the discipline of ethnomusicology also provided me with a more nuanced understanding of the complex cultural web that informs all modes of human expression. As a result, I found myself pulled deeper into the vast history of jazz and African American music and the traditions of improvising with which I felt most at home. Many jazz musicians have historically been very welcoming of non-Western influences. Since the 1960s, these proclivities have only continued to grow in magnitude and scope. I was, of course, already aware of the important work of John Coltrane and others in this regard, but at UCLA I began to investigate in much greater detail the “freer” approaches to improvisation that had emerged in the 1960s and had continued to develop since that time, often well under the radar of the increasingly conservative jazz community. Through some fortuitous friendships with other interested ethnomusicologists and musicians, I began to play regularly in an improvising collective called Surrealestate, an exciting and eclectic grouping of performers with backgrounds ranging from “new music” composition and modern jazz, to popular, electronic,

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and various non-Western musics (see Borgo 2002). This diverse yet surprisingly cohesive group met on a weekly basis for nearly six years to explore the practice of improvising music together. These hands-on experiences exploring new musical possibilities, and the particular challenges of doing so within a large and disparate social group, have played an incalculable role in my understanding of the process of collective improvisation. My first realization as a performer in this expanded musical realm was that one couldn’t rely on the forms, harmonies, and conventions of mainstream jazz, practices that had consumed much of my early apprenticeship years. Yet, as the members of Surrealestate became more comfortable playing with each other, it was equally clear that distinct forms and practices were emerging and becoming an important part of our collective identity. Not only did the personnel and instrumentation of the group self-organize to a great degree, as word spread between friends and colleagues about our weekly “sessions,” but also the musical terrain and our collective approach to it seemed to congeal with little to no discussion and no strong leadership. With less shared musical experience and agreed-upon musical “vocabulary,” the members of Surrealestate began to develop a keen ear for each other’s strengths and particular tendencies, an attitude open to unpredictable combinations and experiences, and an outlook filled with collective empathy. I soon realized that the “freedom” inherent in free improvisation is not an “anything goes” type of anarchy but involves collective discovery in a communal environment and a mode of personal liberation made possible through cooperation and mutual respect. On that long flight to Armenia, and while Surrealestate was only in its infancy, I read about “The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos.” Modern science has traditionally sought to take complex systems apart in order to discover their fundamental parts; for instance, to discover the smallest building blocks of matter, or more recently the makeup of the human genome. Reductionism has been enormously successful in helping to explain how complex things are made up of lots of simpler things. But it cannot, by itself, answer important questions regarding how things interact in complex ways to produce striking simplicities: the simplicities of form, function, and behavior. Here I was reading about a new breed of scientist not simply interested in taking things apart, but in understanding how things come together; how diverse systems display collective behaviors that are not predictable in terms of the dynamics of their component parts. As an improvising musician interested in human creativity and collective dynamics, Waldrop’s book (1992) was striking a chord with me. I read on.

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In the book, Waldrop describes scientific work on topics ranging from the origins of life and the workings of the mind, to the unpredictable dynamics of political and social groups and the unnerving disruptions of the stock market. It was not the exact nature of the topics under discussion that caught my attention, but rather the fact that these seemingly unrelated systems might have anything in common at all. I was also intrigued that this wide-ranging and somewhat unconventional approach to science seemed to be gaining momentum. This was the first I had heard of chaos theory. Chaos, in its everyday usage, is synonymous with disorder or even randomness. I soon learned, however, that chaos in its scientific sense describes an orderly disorder in which extraordinarily intricate and unpredictable behaviors can arise from extremely simple dynamical rules. Like many, my first glimpse at the fractal diagrams now made famous by chaos theory produced a deeply felt aesthetic response. But it is not their complexity—or not only their complexity—that is fascinating. Rather, it is their remarkably ordered and eerily familiar simplicity—or is it simplexity?—that makes them captivating and provocative. Waldrop’s descriptions of the science of complexity spoke of systems poised on “the edge of chaos,” never quite locking into place nor dissolving into complete turbulence; systems that could self-organize and adapt to a constantly shifting environment. “The edge of chaos,” he writes, “is where new ideas … are forever nibbling away at the edges of the status quo, and where even the most entrenched old guard will eventually be overthrown … The edge of chaos is the constantly shifting battle zone between stagnation and anarchy, the one place where a complex system can be spontaneous, adaptive, and alive” (1992: 12). I can think of no better definition of improvised music.

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The Sound and Science of Surprise

In 1959, Whitney Balliett, the longtime critic for the New Yorker magazine, published a book of essays on jazz that memorably described the music as “The Sound of Surprise.” Balliett heard in jazz the unpredictable and the astonishing: qualities that continue to thrill performers and listeners alike. Some thirty-five years later, mathematician John L. Casti (1994) grouped a number of the emerging scientific fields—often with ominous names like catastrophe, chaos, complexity, and criticality—under the general title “The Science of Surprise.” Musicians and audiences tend to be interested in the very human surprises of individual and collective creativity. Scientists, on the other hand, are usually most comfortable investigating the surprising yet presumably more objective workings of the natural world. At roughly the same that Balliett fixed his memorable phrase into the jazz lexicon, C. P. Snow published a book titled The Two Cultures (1993), in which he described a breakdown in communication between the sciences and the humanities, a breakdown that he considered to be a hindrance to solving (or even discussing) many of the most pressing problems the world faces. In the second edition of his work, Snow optimistically predicted that a “third culture” would emerge and close the communications gap between the existing two. In working on this revised edition, I am torn on the question of to what extent a “third culture” has emerged in the intervening years since the book’s original publication. Many prominent scientists have become “public intellectuals,” quite skilled at conveying to the general public the thrust of their research and speculating on its implications. Many artists have become ever more skilled in, and savvy about, the technological aspects and scientific implications of their work. And exponents of both “cultures” have become more vocal about how their work can contribute to a more equitable and sustainable world. One might argue that there is a growing appreciation for the role that creativity and imagination play in both “artistic” and “scientific” pursuits, and a greater acknowledgment

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that neither operates in a social vacuum. Academic fields focused on “new media,” “interdisciplinary arts,” and “digital humanities” have proliferated in recent decades, as have fields focused on pressing societal issues, such as “critical data and algorithm studies,” “critical artificial intelligence (AI),” and “bioethics,” among others, perhaps further testament to an emergent “third culture.” At the same time, we are collectively giving over our intellectual capital and personal data to “Big Tech” companies (such as Google, Apple, and Facebook) in ways that trouble any naively optimistic view—and perhaps forewarn that the emerging culture of “integration” is predominantly one of transnational neoliberal corporate culture. In her book Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (2018), Safiyah U. Noble challenges the widely held belief that search engines are value-free tools by demonstrating how they privilege whiteness and discriminate against people of color, specifically women of color. Inspired by her revelation that typing “Why are black women so …” into a Google search bar resulted in horribly racist predictions, such as “angry,” “loud,” “mean,” and “annoying,” I typed “Why are jazz musicians …” into a search bar to discover, much to my chagrin, that Google’s top predictions included “so pretentious,” “snobs,” and “black.” Similarly, a “Why is jazz …” truncated query produced a top suggestion of “hard to listen to,” and a “Why are jazz songs …” query offered, as its top prediction, “so long.”1 The potential consequences of AI’s algorithmic mediation of musical experience—from creation and distribution to consumption patterns and more—are challenging to investigate and hard to predict (see Seaver 2021). This book does not tackle these questions head on, but it does look through the lens of contemporary science, including 4E cognitive science, dynamical systems theory, and the science of networks, to illuminate the process and practice of improvising music, and it explores the ability of musical improvisation to offer a visceral engagement with these emerging scientific notions. The book takes as its starting point the current historical and cultural moment in which our ideas of order and disorder are being reconfigured and revalued in dramatic ways. It argues that the methods and findings of the new sciences of surprise are useful in illuminating the dynamics and aesthetics of musical

Instead of interrogating inherent bias in its algorithms, Google will most often simply remove offending instances when they are brought to its attention. For instance, Google will no longer offer predictive completions when one types in the phrase “Why are Black women so.” “Why are jazz” results were obtained on January 25, 2021. 1

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improvisation, and, conversely, that a better understanding of the workings of improvisation—how musical techniques, relationships, and interactions are refined and negotiated in performance—can offer us new ways of shaping the discourse that surrounds music and provide insight on how we might understand the dynamics of the “natural” world and our place within it. *** During the last century, a “crisis of representation” emerged across many academic and creative disciplines as individuals were forced to abandon the notion that there exists an “absolute” or “privileged” vantage point from which observations, judgments, and analyses can be made. Artists, scholars, and scientists alike gradually shifted their focus from an overriding concern with isolated objects to the changing relationships between those objects: a shift from investigating structures-that-combine to patterns-that-connect. In the humanities, ideas such as history, language, and culture, once thought to have independent meaning and objective status, were repositioned as currents of thought, patterns of behavior, and malleable social and personal constructions. Heady words like post-structuralism and cultural postmodernism were invoked to describe the increasing awareness among scholars of the ethnocentric aspects of static and totalizing investigations. In the natural and physical sciences, several dramatic new theories questioned and eventually altered the accepted view of reality. During the Renaissance, Nicolaus Copernicus argued, rather controversially, that the earth is not the center of the universe. In the nineteenth century, Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution removed man from his privileged position, placing him firmly in the natural order of things. Also in the nineteenth century, the emerging laws of thermodynamics demonstrated that the amount of entropy, or disorder, in the universe is always increasing. In the early twentieth century, Einstein’s relativity theory and pioneering research in subatomic physics appeared to deal a fatal blow to the existing paradigms of Euclidian regularity, Cartesian objectivity, Newtonian reducibility, and Laplacean predictability. The emerging quantum worldview implied that reality does not fundamentally consist of discrete objects in space and that there can never be an exterior, objective viewpoint from which to observe (see Barad 2007). The social sciences have also undergone dramatic changes, perhaps none more radical (and controversial) than the ideas of Niklas Luhmann, the founder of social systems theory. Luhmann insists that we must “de-anthropologize” the

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description of society. He calls this the fourth insult to human vanity (Luhmann 1995). The first “cosmological” insult came from Copernicus’s heliocentric view of the solar system. The second “biological” insult occurred when Darwin demoted humans from the crown of creation. The third “psychological” insult, perhaps most attributable to Sigmund Freud, highlighted how our ego is often undermined or overridden by unconscious drives and forces. Finally, Luhmann’s “sociological” insult argues that human society cannot steer itself. According to Luhmann, we are unable to shape the social world we inhabit according to our ideals, wishes, or intentions (see Moeller 2011). Luhmann inherited a tradition of systems thinking that had launched several critiques of centralized planning. Daniel Belgrad (2016), in his contribution to The Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies, highlights how the United States’ efforts during and after the Second World War provided legitimacy to hierarchical bureaucratic structures and “social engineering” techniques for some. But early systems thinkers, including Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, felt that these were antithetical to democratic values and argued, instead, that social purposes were best achieved not by a central authority but through the interaction of individuals possessing different information and different views, sometimes consistent and sometimes conflicting. Whereas the dominant view in fields such as economics emphasized laissezfaire thinking and the “invisible hand” of classical economics to combat centralizing tendencies, Bateson (1972) emphasized networks of feedback systems constituting an “ecological” or “cybernetic” system. In these types of systems, which we now know constitute much of the natural and social world, feedback between various sub- and super-systems governs behavior by stimulating or constraining the activities of its various parts. As scientists and scholars were grappling with ideas of relativity and uncertainty and the dynamics of feedback in complex systems, many artists were questioning the permanence and certainty of their own work, choosing instead to emphasize its inherent polysemy and permeability. And the sounds of surprise provided much of the soundtrack for these turbulent and exciting times. In the first half of the twentieth century, jazz and other African American musics dramatically changed the sound (if not always the face) of commercial and creative music in the United States and abroad. These syncopated rhythms and improvisatory sounds prefigured many dramatic changes in both music and society. The emerging modernist (read: pan-European) traditions of composed music also underwent significant changes at this time. While some composers

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found inspiration in (or sought to “elevate”) these exciting new strands of “popular” music, others turned toward a substantial increase in complexity, adopting serialized methods for ordering the various musical dimensions as well as more and more sophisticated ways to notate and control their increasingly complex ideas. The pendulum, having swung as far as it seemingly could in the direction of explicitly ordered performance, then appeared to shift back toward uncertainty. At approximately the same time that jazz musicians were expanding the role and conception of improvisation in the new styles dubbed “bebop” or later the “avant-garde,” “new music” composers began experimenting with less deterministic modes of ordering performance (ranging from chance operations to graphic or intuitive instructions that afforded the performer a greater degree of musical latitude). These composers also began reviving the practice of improvisation, an essential part of earlier pan-European practice which was virtually abandoned (at least in art music circles) around the time of Beethoven (see Sancho-Velazquez 2001). Since these formative years, an eclectic group of artists with diverse backgrounds in modern jazz and classical music—and increasingly in electronic, popular, and non-Western traditions as well—have pioneered an approach to improvisation that borrows freely from a panoply of musical styles and traditions and at times seems unencumbered by any overt idiomatic constraints. This musical approach, often dubbed “free improvisation” (although I will favor the term open-form improvisation), tends to devalue the two dimensions that have traditionally dominated music representation—quantized pitch and metered durations—in favor of the micro-subtleties of timbral and temporal modification and the surprising and emergent properties of individual and collective creativity in the moment of performance. Approaches to open-form improvisation do differ enormously in their details and aesthetics—and these issues will be teased out in the next chapter—yet it is remarkable that an interest in (or reevaluation of) uncertainty in music emerges at roughly the same historical juncture as similar moves in the natural and social sciences. Katherine Hayles (1990: 4), in her work on the relationship between contemporary science and literature (and perhaps unaware of similar moves made in improvised music) asks the following question: “Why should John Cage become interested in experimenting with stochastic variations in music about the same time that Roland Barthes was extolling the virtues of noisy interpretations of literature and Edward Lorenz was noticing the effect of small uncertainties

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on the nonlinear equations that described weather formations?” Hayles argues that the work of these and other individuals takes place in a “cultural field within which certain questions or concepts become highly charged.” Judy Lochhead (2001), one of the few music scholars to explore this charged cultural field, writes in her article “Hearing Chaos” that “scant work has been devoted in either music or cultural studies to the role that musicians played in disclosing the new cultural paradigm of ‘chaotics’ ” (211). Two excellent recent books that offer some discussion of how pioneering artists helped to articulate this emerging paradigm are Andrew Pickering’s The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future (2010) (with some coverage of Gordon Pask’s work) and Daniel Belgrad’s The Culture of Feedback: Ecological Thinking in ’70s America (2019) (which highlights work from a wide range of ecologically minded composers, but sadly ignores the work of people of color). For many researchers and observers, the millennial moment brought to light the fact that both scientists and artists engage the world around them through networks of understanding shaped by the current cultural and historical moment.

The Age of Complexity Ours is a complex age—one in which changes appear to be occurring at an everincreasing rate and intensity, threatening to defy our ability to comprehend and keep pace, and exerting immense and unpredictable influence on our personal and shared future. The networks of connections that link various “agents” are becoming ever more complicated and complex. And our combined impact on local and global ecosystems is becoming more pronounced and potentially dangerous. Mark C. Taylor, in his book The Moment of Complexity (2003: 3), writes: This is a time of transition betwixt and between a period that seemed more stable and secure and a time when, many people hope, equilibrium will be restored … Stability, security, and equilibrium, however, can be deceptive, for they are but momentary eddies in an endlessly complex and turbulent flux. In the world that is emerging, the condition of complexity is as irreducible as it is inescapable.

With this new age comes an increased need to understand the nature and behavior of complex systems in the physical, social, and humanistic sciences.

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As opposed to systems that may simply be complicated, complex systems are highly interconnected and through this array of influences and interactions they demonstrate possibilities for adaptation and emergence. Complex systems tend to adapt and even self-organize in a decentralized, bottom-up fashion. They exhibit neither too much nor too little order. Their dynamics are hard to predict but not entirely random. In short, they offer the possibility of surprise. Certain aspects of bottom-up organization have been with us since at least Adam Smith’s notion of decentralized markets and Charles Darwin’s theory of biological evolution, but the dominant metaphors of the Industrial Revolution were the machine and the hierarchy. With the recent development and proliferation of computer technologies, the machine metaphor has continued to hold sway over our collective imaginations. But as these technologies transform from isolated desktop assistants into always-on and always-present portals on an increasingly networked world, new metaphors—both justified and overblown— are beginning to creep into common usage. Businesses, governments, the educational community, and artists are all scrambling to understand—and to take advantage of—the power and potential of network culture. Although the “science of surprise” encompasses diverse work in several disciplines, certain methodological approaches and epistemological notions inform the field as a whole. In general, researchers aim to model spontaneous, self-generating order, not to discover static, reduced, and deterministic laws. Because of the findings of contemporary science, researchers have begun to realize that irreducibility, irreversibility, and unpredictability are essential rather than aberrant behavior in the world. Writing specifically about chaos theory, Steven Kellert (1993) identifies three contemporary methodological concerns: holism, experimentalism, and diachrony. “The behavior of the system is not studied by reducing it to its parts,” Kellert writes, “the results are not presented in the form of deductive proofs,” and “the systems are not treated as if instantaneous descriptions are complete” (85). This general orientation resonates well with the social and humanistic sciences, and with current thinking in music studies as well. Musicking, a semantic turn of phrase first introduced by Christopher Small (1998), has become something of a rallying cry for contemporary music scholars interested in highlighting the dynamic, complex, and intrinsically social nature of their subject. To music is to “take part, in any capacity in a musical performance, whether by performing, by listening, by rehearsing or practicing, by providing material for performance (what is called composition), or by dancing” (9).

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The static and symbolic representation of music as notation has provided an invaluable tool to composers and performers (especially in Western art musics). More recently, audio recording has revolutionized the ways in which we can craft and engage with musical sound. But no static representation of music, no matter its detail or fidelity, can purport to capture the whole of musical meaning. With each new hearing or performance, new subtleties and new meanings will emerge. Each listener not only attends to different details and constructs different meanings while listening, but they will bring to bear on their engagement with music a lifetime of personal and cultural experiences and sensibilities. As a temporal art that invokes and plays with memory, identity, and emotion in countless ways, musicking hinges on individual experience and cultural understandings and exploits both our sense of familiarity and surprise. Much like the way in which our previous scientific models excelled at static and reduced descriptions of physical phenomena, our traditional modes of investigating music have also excelled at illuminating its non-dynamic qualities. In an often-quoted passage, Benoit Mandelbrot (1982: 1), the inventor of fractal geometry, eloquently commented on the impossibility of capturing nature’s beauty within static Euclidian forms: “Clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones, coastlines are not circles, bark is not smooth, nor does lightning travel in a straight line.” It is also impossible to capture the full beauty and complexity of musical expression in its static, Euclidian form as notation. As David Roberts (1977–8: 39) wryly comments, “The score is no more the music than a recipe book is a meal.” Playing and listening to music together provides a cultural space and a cognitive means through which individuals and social groups can coordinate their actions and behaviors. Improvisation focuses special attention on these emergent qualities of performance. By referencing the scientific and cultural paradigm shift that is well underway, I intend to argue for a systems or ecological understanding of music that takes serious account of all of the following: • Music is an event centered on the real-time production of sound; music is not an abstraction, such as a score, transcription, or recording. • Music lives when it is heard and understood; the active, human process of listening is the essence of music. Therefore, the physical and cognitive capabilities and limitations of human listeners are crucial for analysis. What cannot be heard and understood is not (human) music.

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• Music is always situated in a particular social and historical context. This context includes the location at which music production occurs, the prior musical experiences of both performers and audience, as well as their expectations and prejudices. • The above cannot be separated from the immediate and further flung networks of performers and audience, up to and including their communities and cultures. In summary, music is temporal, embodied, enacted, situated, social, cultural, and historical. An important goal of this book is to illuminate these aspects of music in general and, in the process, to demonstrate that the freer forms of musical improvisation, those that have often been dismissed as “chaotic” in the pejorative sense of the word, may actually reveal “chaotic dynamics” that demonstrate turbulence and coherence at the same time. Borrowing poetic language from the new sciences when commenting on a recording of openform improvisation, Fred Bouchard (1998: n.p.) writes: “The music’s splintered fragmentation implies a new wholeness, its seeming chaos a fresh order, its complexity a ringing simplicity, its turbulence an inner peace.”

Sync or Swarm Nothing seems to raise a heated debate among musicians faster than the question of whether improvisation can be taught. In certain respects, the best way to learn about improvisation as a performer is undoubtedly to jump right in and start doing it. When I first joined the faculty at the University of California in San Diego (UCSD), I was asked to teach a graduate-level performance seminar on free improvisation and was somewhat perplexed by the idea. I had studied jazz improvisation in the university setting early in my career, but many graduate students come to UCSD with a background in composed “new” music and little interest in learning the more mainstream approaches to jazz. For my PhD research, I had investigated the cultural and aesthetic dimensions of freer forms of improvisation, but the expectation was that this should be a performance rather than a research-based seminar. My experiences with Surrealestate had provided me with considerable experience improvising in an open-form setting, but these meetings had happened outside of the traditional realm of academic coursework. There were no courses on open-form improvisation at UCLA where

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I did my PhD in Ethnomusicology, and there are few courses of this kind in the university setting anywhere. Entering into this new pedagogical terrain, I had no immediate models on which to draw. So I contacted George Lewis, the noted improviser, researcher, and then professor at UCSD. George gave me a brief description of how he had handled the class in the past and managed to assuage some of my fears that an academic course on open-form improvisation had to be somehow different from a collective workshop. In fact his own teaching approach, indelibly influenced by his association with the AACM (Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians) in Chicago, has always focused on this experiential approach to learning (see Lewis 2000a). In his response to my query, George mentioned that he often begins the class in much the same way that they used to teach swimming—throw them in the deep end and work with what naturally happens. The title of this book is a not-so-subtle riff on that idea. Improvising music most definitely has elements of that “sink or swim” attitude. There is the leap into the unknown or the uncharted, the adrenaline rush that can accompany the excitement and danger of an uncertain future, and the mandate to make something happen— to swim—or else that initial excitement may give way to fear and failure. “Sync or Swarm” also refers to the delicate and exquisite dynamics that can emerge in complex systems, but only under certain conditions that require intense communication and cooperation and a shared history of interactions. It describes the critical moment at which a complex system either moves toward a state of greater fitness or is extinguished. Improvising music hinges on one’s ability to synchronize intention and action and to maintain a keen awareness and sensitivity to the evolving group dynamics and experiences. The most successful improvisations, to my ears, are those in which the musicians are able to synchronize, not necessarily their sounds—although this too can miraculously happen—but rather their energies, their intentions, and their moments of inspiration. During the most complex and dense passages of collective improvisation, a swarm-like quality can emerge, in which individual parts may be moving in very different directions and yet the musical whole develops with a collective purpose. The health of the community of improvisers also depends on the ability of individuals to synchronize, or come together, for an evening of musicking. Yet at the same time, improvisers must act in swarm-like ways such that new dynamics and configurations can percolate through the community and the music.

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The subtitle of my book, “improvising music,” is also meant to be read in multiple ways. Although the term “improvised music” is perhaps a more familiar genre category, its semantic construction of a “music” that has already been “improvised” strikes me as not well suited to this dynamic form of musickingin-the-moment. By adopting the present progressive, improvising, I hope to highlight the fact that even as I write these words (and as you read them), creative musicians are working in and around established practices and codes, improvising music. And with a slight shift of emphasis, my subtitle can be read as improvising music, a play on the fact that the very notion of what we mean by “music” is continually being reshaped as we make our way through a new millennium. *** Sync or Swarm looks through the lens of contemporary science to illuminate the process and practice of improvising music, and it explores the contemporary musical domain for its ability to offer a visceral engagement with emerging scientific notions of chaos, complexity, and self-organization. Before introducing the scientific side of the equation, Chapter 2 presents a more thorough introduction to contemporary improvised music and the growing body of scholarship on the subject. The chapter explores a multitude of ways in which artists, scholars, and involved listeners define, document, experience, and evaluate improvisation, including historical, social, economic, political, and spiritual perspectives. These diverse perspectives can at times appear to be in direct opposition to one another. This chapter argues that we should embrace this dynamic tension rather than try to resolve it. Through this dynamic tension, the music invites us to remember the challenges of the past and to envision a more just future. Many of the themes that are introduced here receive additional treatment in the chapters that follow. In one sense, the remaining chapters funnel outward in scope, from the perspective of a solo improviser, to that of a group interacting in performance and over time, and finally to the network dynamics that comprise improvisational communities. The final chapter on pedagogy reminds us that network dynamics also affect how individuals learn, completing the hermeneutic circle. From a systems perspective, all of these influences—the individual, collective, and communal—play a role at each level of description (see Laszlo 1996). Individuals learn and develop through social experience, groups wax and wane through musical and interpersonal communication,

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and a community is both formed and shaped by the individuals whom it serves. The individual chapters also introduce different aspects of the emerging sciences of surprise, including: 4E cognitive science, general systems theory, cybernetics, phenomenology, nonlinear dynamics and chaos theory, dissipative structures, complex adaptive systems, autopoiesis, actor–network theory, the science of synchronization, swarm intelligence, network theory, and more. While it may seem as if the text pivots between physical, biological, cognitive, and social theories, this is also intentional. The way that we think and get along in the world is indelibly influenced by our biological being and by the fact that we are situated in and continually engage with a material and social world. In other words, although these chapters might be envisioned as investigating separate disciplines, here, too, these approaches are interrelated. One of the hallmarks of ecological thinking is to regard systems as “wholes made up of wholes.” Each component in a complex dynamical system is not only interconnected but also able to maintain its own internal structure and to evolve over time. To treat the individual as merely a part of the improvising group denies not only their wholeness, but also their connection with and responsibility to the musical context and moment. To envision an improvising ensemble as the simple addition of individuals also misses the dynamic, interactive, and emergent qualities of performance. Finally, to examine a group or an individual in isolation of historical, cultural, and societal contingencies and opportunities ignores the richness and challenges of network dynamics. Chapter 3, “Strange Loops,” foregrounds the perspective of the solo improviser in general and focuses on the performance practice of English saxophonist Evan Parker, with additional examples of performances by Sam Newsome and Shabaka Hutchings. The chapter draws together contemporary ideas in 4E cognitive science (embodied, embedded, enactive, extended) and predictive processing that challenge Cartesian dualism and cognitivist representationalism by insisting on a co-arising of brain, body, and world. Representative saxophone solos by Parker are given a fractal correlation analysis (using a system designed by Rolf Bader at the University of Hamburg), offering insight into the emergent qualities of Parker’s improvised musicking. The chapter’s overriding theme of circular causality is explored as feedback between cycles of organismic self-regulation and cycles of sensorimotor coupling between organism and environment that extends basic bodily self-awareness (the lived self) into a world-directed, extended consciousness (the living self or ecological self).

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Chapter 4, “Rivers of Consciousness,” highlights ensemble dynamics in improvised performance and focuses attention on the work of African American multi-instrumentalist Sam Rivers. The chapter explores terms and ideas from phenomenology and nonlinear dynamical systems theory that resonate with open-form collective musical improvisation in general, and it offers a detailed analysis of “Hues of Melanin,” a lengthy improvisation by the Sam Rivers trio featuring Cecil McBee on bass and Barry Altschul on drums. Chapter 5, “Orderly Disorder,” investigates a range of new sciences and theoretical approaches, including chaos and complexity, dissipative structures, autopoiesis, and neocybernetics, and it explores how contemporary musicking variously articulates the emerging cultural framework of “chaotics.” From there, it homes in on the complexities of improvising music in transcultural situations, and highlights how contemporary creative musicians often resist both essentialist and anti-essentialist constructions of the music and of their own identities. For an illustrative example, it offers an ethnographic look at an open-form improvised performance in Yugawara, Japan by Ko Ishikawa (sho), Kohsetsu Imanishi (koto), and Peter Evans (trumpet). Chapter 6, “Sync and Swarm,” investigates the sciences of synchronization, swarm intelligence, and network theory, moving from instances of physical coupling and biological entrainment, through the decentralized dynamics of swarm behavior, to the complex communication networks that establish and maintain communities, musical and otherwise. Networks organize and inform many aspects of our physical, biological, and social worlds, from living cells to global ecosystems, from the dynamics of the human brain to those of virtual communities. In music, networks organize not only the social world of performance (with whom you play) but also the ideascapes of musical activity (by whom you are influenced and in what directions your creativity flourishes) and the political realities of a musical community (how historical and economic factors often dictate which musicians and musical ideas gain notice and prestige). Networks make communication and community possible, but they can also concentrate power and opportunities in the hands of a few. Chapter 6 also includes a lengthy discussion of the issues surrounding the computational modeling of improvisation and provides a look at the aesthetics and ethics of several computerized systems designed to be semi-autonomous improvising agents. The final chapter, “Harnessing Complexity,” highlights the ways in which learning and cognition are situated within and distributed across physical and

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social settings. Drawing on current research in education and creativity studies, ethnographic interviews with celebrated improvisers and pedagogues, as well as on my own experiences coaching improvisation ensembles, I propose some strategies for reconceptualizing music pedagogy in general and for harnessing the complexity of improvisation in the classroom. *** Within just the last few decades, we have become increasingly aware of the social, cultural, and historical influences that affect the work and perspective of all creative individuals. Researchers and practitioners in both the arts and sciences choose to investigate topics that are deemed interesting, useful, and understandable by the prevailing cultural climate of the times, and their “results” necessarily reflect their prior knowledge and their chosen mode of inquiry. Katherine Hayles (1999: 21) expresses this sentiment succinctly: “Culture circulates through science no less than science circulates through culture.” Philosophers of science now commonly speculate on the broader cultural conditions that authorize or overlook certain scientific fields and modes of investigation. Stephen Kellert (1993: xiii–xiv) argues that contemporary science “provides an occasion for investigating the interaction between our methods for gaining knowledge about the world, our notions of what that knowledge should look like, and our conceptions of what kind of world we inhabit.” Contemporary arts afford these investigations as well. This book argues that methods of modeling the natural world emerging from the sciences of surprise are compatible with the ways in which musicians engage the sounds of surprise, not proof of the music’s inherent worth. For that, we need look no further than the community of performers and listeners who are passionately committed to this music. My comparison often occurs on the level of metaphor, but this should not be perceived as an inherent shortcoming. In fact, a growing body of scholarship suggests that the way we think and learn is deeply ensconced in metaphor; new understandings develop by connecting with and extending previous knowledge and experience (see Lakoff and Johnson 1980). We invoke metaphors when our conventional tools of language and analysis fail to adequately describe something. Contemporary musical improvisation confounds conventional musicological approaches. Any new metaphors we invoke, however, will only succeed by exploring the new understandings and subtle tensions that can emerge through the process of comparison. Sync or

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Swarm uses the lens of the new sciences—their shifting methods, goals, and findings—to illuminate the practice and aesthetics of musical improvisation, and it probes the individual, social, political, and historical aspects of musical improvisation to illuminate our emergent complex age.

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The Study of Improvisation

The study of improvisation, paraphrasing Howard Gardner’s (1987) view of cognitive science, has a relatively short history but a very long past. All instances of human music making, from the most ancient to the most avant-garde, arguably involve at least some degree of improvisation, if by this we mean making musical decisions in the course of performance. The Latin roots of the word “improvisation” refer to the “not-fore-seen” (im-pro-visus). Improvisation as an example of human creativity is somehow both mundane and mysterious. Oral teachings and to a lesser extent written treatises on improvisation can be found in a variety of musical traditions: from Western classical music (at least until the time of Beethoven), to folk and artmusic traditions of the non-Western world, to more contemporary popular music styles, with jazz serving as an important locus of activity. The thrust of these treatments, however, tends to be either prescriptive or anecdotal. General comparisons between various improvising traditions have sometimes been made, but relatively little scholarship has attempted to offer a more systematic or synthetic view of improvisation (with Ferand 1961 and Nettl 1974 as important exceptions). The advent of audio recording provided researchers the ability to capture and rehear a performance, allowing for micro-analysis of sonic details and for comparative studies, often either involving a single musician improvising on different occasions (Nettl and Riddle 1973) or different individuals improvising on the same underlying musical structure (Block 1997). This methodology allowed for more nuanced descriptions of musical improvisation, but the inherent complexities and bias of the transcription and analysis process, whether done by a human or by a machine, are non-trivial. Peter Winkler (1997) highlights many of the insurmountable challenges inherent in any attempt to reduce music as sound to music as notation. He likens a transcription to a blueprint drawn

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after the building is built, and cautions us not to mistake the blueprint for the building. Beginning around the 1960s, the growth of both jazz studies and ethnomusicology as academic fields precipitated an increase in research on musical improvisation, with some of the most influential texts also emerging from non-music-related fields (see Lord 1960 and Sudnow 1978). At roughly the same time, a musical practice emerged often described as “improvised music” or “free improvisation” (although I will opt for the term “open-form” improvisation) that borrows from a panoply of musical approaches and at times seems unencumbered by any overt idiomatic constraints. This practice was originally championed by an eclectic group of primarily American and European artists with backgrounds in modern jazz and contemporary classical music (see Gray 1991). It now involves musicians emanating from around the world and draws on an even wider spectrum of influences, including electronic, experimental, and inter-media arts. This chapter will provide some general observations about the field of improvisation studies, survey important theoretical and empirical work on the subject, offer a brief historical sketch of pioneering developments, and engage with some of the salient issues that surround its production and reception. The scope of the research being surveyed is limited to work published in English.

The Field of Improvisation Studies Bruno Nettl (1998: 1) argued that improvisation is “an art neglected in scholarship.” And Derek Bailey (1992: ix) observed that improvisation enjoys the curious distinction of being “both the most widely practised of all musical activities and the least acknowledged and understood.” Despite this apparent neglect, the academic field of improvisation studies has grown considerably in recent decades, with the publication of numerous scholarly books and articles on the subject, and with the emergence of academic journals, conferences, and graduate programs with improvisation as a central focus. The appearance of the journal Critical Studies in Improvisation/Études critiques en improvisation in 2004, the formation of the International Society for Improvised Music in 2006, and the publication of several edited volumes, including The Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies (Lewis and Piekut 2016), The Improvisation Studies Reader (Heble and Caines 2014), The Other Side of Nowhere (Heble and

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Fischlin 2004), People Get Ready (Heble and Wallace 2013), Playing for Keeps (Heble and Porter 2020), Soundweaving (Ó hAodha and Schroeder 2014), Negotiated Moments (Siddall and Waterman 2016), Improvisation and Music Education (Heble and Laver 2016), and Improvisation and Social Aesthetics (Born, Lewis and Straw 2017), along with an ever-increasing list of monographs on the subject, are all watershed marks for the field’s increasing prominence. While improvisation has often been studied in discipline-specific ways (e.g., in music, theater, dance, or visual arts), only recently have researchers embarked on more multi- and interdisciplinary work, at times spurred on by developments in the cognitive and neurological sciences, or by an interest in understanding improvisation across experience. Research on improvisation now extends well beyond the arts into fields such as education, philosophy, sociology, anthropology, ethics, literature, law, postcolonial studies, gender studies, human–computer relations, sports, and medicine, to name only a few. Improvisation has also become a hot topic in management studies and organizational design, along with other business-related fields. Two special journal issues dedicated to this topic are Organization Science 9.5 (1998) and Critical Studies in Improvisation 9.1 (2013), with the former offering primarily a favorable assessment of employing the “jazz metaphor” to understand and generate creativity in the business realm, and the latter providing a more critical view of the underlying ethics and profitdriven motivations of attempting to “aestheticize” neoliberal economics. What exactly is meant by the term “improvisation” across this variety of work can be remarkably diverse, and at times frustratingly vague. Certainly improvisation involves numerous different types of creativity, a term itself that defies easy definition. In the arts alone, whether it is theater, dance, comedy, painting, or music, improvisation undoubtedly draws on different sets of abilities and experiences, and it offers different demands and rewards. Therefore, the metaphorical comparisons authors frequently make to improvising music from within other fields and pursuits can illuminate, but also obfuscate. Definitions of musical improvisation tend to be vague, overgeneralized, or beholden to conventional notions of musical practice. For example, improvisation is often described as composing music on the spur of the moment, or as performing music spontaneously without the aid of manuscript, sketches, or memory. Both of these definitions downplay the extensive practice and experience that seasoned improvisers bring to performance, and the ways in which memory (both declarative and procedural) and often some form of notation (perhaps functioning as an aide memoire) are still involved when

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one learns how to improvise. Further, the degree to which memory or score could prescribe all facets of “non-improvised” musical performance is often overestimated. Jeff Pressing (1992: 23), whose work on the cognitive modeling of musical improvisation was some of the earliest on the subject, writes that, Even in the most exhaustively notated score or precisely imagined aural conception, gaps and ambiguities remain, and these must be filled in and resolved by the performer. Much unspecified performance detail is provided by relevant traditions of performance practice, some is provided by the performer’s rehearsed interpretation, and some will be different every time due to the vagaries of human action.

If performance involves a certain kind of composition-by-necessity, as Pressing alludes, then composition also involves a certain kind of performance, whether one tries out new ideas literally on an instrument or hears them in the “mind’s ear.” Many celebrated composers never viewed their work as finalized (e.g., Rossini or Duke Ellington), and it seems incontrovertible that performers bring to a given performance of even the most strictly notated or fully memorized pieces a sense of setting, context, and moment. Music is by its very nature a performative art. It is also, in the terminology of Nelson Goodman (1976), an allographic rather than an autographic art, such as sculpture or painting, in which the distinction between original and forgery or copy is paramount. Yet, if composition and performance are already interdependent, does all musical creativity therefore involve improvisation? “The problem with improvisation,” Bruce Benson (2003: 24) writes, “is that it does not fit very neatly into the schema that we use to think about music making—that is, the binary opposition of composition and performance.” In place of a binary, should we view improvisation and composition as identifiable endpoints along a continuum of musical practices, running from explicit pre-composition on the one end, through various gradations of interpretive performance, to a type of stream-of-consciousness performance at the other end? Or is improvisation somehow qualitatively different from conventional notions of composition and performance, reflecting both a different aesthetic and a different ontology? In what ways might it challenge traditional notions that music necessarily involves a two-stage linear process leading from composition to performance? Might improvisation also challenge conventional ideas about cognition that subscribe to a linear progression from sensation to thinking to action (the so-called sense– model–act paradigm)?

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Pressing (1984: 345) defines improvisation as the “simultaneous design and execution of musical ideas,” a formulation that seems both to call on and exceed the conventions of composition and performance. Other similar treatments highlight the cumulative conception and irreversible temporality of improvisation; one can make reference to what has already occurred, but any “editing” must happen retrospectively. My personal favorite illustration of the often-noted differences between composition and improvisation comes from a chance meeting between Frederic Rzewski and Steve Lacy. Rzewski (2002: 141) asked Lacy to describe in fifteen seconds the difference between the two, and Lacy replied: “In fifteen seconds, the difference between composition and improvisation is that in composition you have all the time you want to decide what to say in fifteen seconds, while in improvisation you have fifteen seconds.” Lacy’s formulation of the answer lasted exactly fifteen seconds. The pithiness of this statement and the timeliness of its delivery belies its profundity. On the one hand, Lacy improvised his verbal response to a question about improvisation given the constraints of time and context. If he had been provided a full minute, or ten minutes, or two hours for his response, or if he was speaking to a different audience, or perhaps in French, he would undoubtedly have improvised a different answer. In this way, his particular response is both in the moment and context-dependent; it is spontaneous, yet also made to conform to the expectations and demands of the moment. Yet, Lacy had likely given some previous thought to the general issue, and perhaps he had even offered similar, albeit differently phrased, responses on the subject in the past. So, in what ways was his statement improvised, worked out, or some combination of these? Would his remark have been less effective if he had not delivered it within the provided fifteen-second window of time? Should we view his response as spontaneous, or is it better viewed as fluent, in the same way that fluent speakers do not necessarily intend the construction of their sentences ahead of time? What if his response had been musical rather than linguistic? How would we judge its spontaneity or fluency then? (see Berkowitz 2010). Writing in philosophy and aesthetics about musical improvisation is limited, but often argues that improvisation and composition are driven by unique mechanisms and expressive goals and therefore should not be assessed uniformly. Ed Sarath (1996) asserts that improvisers experience time in an innerdirected manner in which the present is heightened and the past and future are perceptually subordinated. These observations underscore his conviction that

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improvisation demands a distinct “aesthetics of spontaneity.” Arguing along similar lines, Ted Gioia (1988) articulates an “aesthetics of imperfection” for improvisation, concluding that it should not be judged by the same formalist criteria that we use to judge notated composition. Philip Alperson (1984) sees in improvisation an “aesthetics of action,” which, while affording access to the composer’s mind at the moment of creation, should not be viewed as a performative token of a compositional “megatype” or model. Philosophical and aesthetic arguments aside, the most widely accepted approaches to the study of improvisation in cognitive psychology theorize that improvisers deal with the “cognitive constraints” of the moment by drawing on a “model” (Nettl 1998), a “blueprint” or “skeleton” (Sloboda 1988), or a “referent” (Pressing 1998) stored in long-term memory. Depending on the specific musical tradition, the relationship between a given improvisation and its model or referent may be more or less fixed, with open-form improvisation perhaps providing something of a boundary case for this approach, since many of its practitioners disavow the idea that the music is based on a model or has any specific idiomatic qualities attached to it. While it is undoubtedly true that real-time creative processes such as improvisation place great demands on cognitive resources, the brain is only one node in a complex nonlinear feedback system. Notably fewer authors have approached the topic from the vantage point of social or ecological psychology. In other words, the question of “How does one improvise?” tends to elicit cognitivist or computational models concerned with “information processing” and “signal generation” instead of ecological inquiries that explore how one’s perception, action, and sonic and social worlds may be intertwined or entangled (although a considerable amount of newer work is pointing in these directions). Whether cognitivist or ecological in nature, theoretical writing on improvisation still outpaces empirical work on the subject, although this balance is beginning to shift, as more researchers analyze data drawn from, for example, video and other performance capture methods, galvanic skin response and other physiological variables, and/or various brain imaging techniques (see Dean and Bailes 2016 and Limb and Braun 2008). Progress is being made on computational modeling of creativity in many disciplines, and by using brain imaging techniques we are beginning to identify specific neural regions that may be involved in heightened moments of improvisational creativity (see Berkowitz and Ansari 2008)—sometimes referred to as a “flow” state (see Csikszentmihalyi

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1991; Csikszentmihalyi and Rich 1997)—but this research is still in its earliest stages, and questions abound with regard to how to structure our experiments and models, and how to interpret the data meaningfully. The fields of music psychology and music cognition have investigated musical improvisation only to a limited degree. On the whole, their primary focus has been on how listeners perceive and process music. These types of experiments tend to use recorded or computer-generated music examples for their consistency and too often focus their attention on WEIRD listeners— those from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic backgrounds. When researchers have explored the complexities of music performance, they most often do so by looking at the performance of notated music, again for the experimental control it provides. Studying in vivo improvisation from the perspective of the performer or listener remains a challenging proposition. Some approaches use interview tactics or grouping tasks to understand the kinds of choices that improvisers either made in performance or might likely make given certain stimuli (Canonne and Garnier 2012). Framing tasks for participants and employing measuring and recording technologies in ecologically sensitive ways that don’t unduly impede or prefigure improvisational activities remains a daunting challenge in these types of experiments, as does assessing and accounting for differences in improvisational skill level. A few researchers have focused instead on developing automatic improvising systems with the intention of creating competent or even expert performances as judged by knowledgeable human listeners (Bretan and Weinberg 2016). One encouraging aspect of recent empirical work is a shift in focus from primarily investigating performer note choice within harmonic contexts toward studies of intensity, timing, and timbre as key factors in how musicians improvise and how listeners hear and interpret improvised performances (see Järvinen and Toiviainen 2000 and Keller, Weber, and Engel 2011). While many issues persist about how to frame and interpret academic studies of improvisation, on the whole, researchers appear to be moving beyond a priori definitions of improvisation, and there is broad agreement that improvisation involves novel output (for the individual, but only optionally for society) created in non-deterministic, realtime situations by individuals and collectives involving certain affordances and constraints (Johnson-Laird 1988). The following two sections will attempt to clarify these ideas using terms introduced by Jeff Pressing (1998): referent-based and referent-free musical improvisation.

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Referent-Based Improvisation Jeff Pressing, an improvising pianist himself, was one of the first psychologists to put forward a convincing cognitive model of improvisation, and he continued to refine his work on the subject until his death in 2002. In brief, Pressing viewed improvisation as a heterarchical process involving psychological and motor aspects. Although his theory subscribed to an information-processing paradigm, his work often gave precedence to memorized motor patterns over the rule-based procedures which form the core of other cognitivist theories of improvisation, such as Johnson-Laird’s (1988, 2002). Pressing’s work paid close attention to multiple levels of cognition, even as it offered a relatively intuitive way to understand improvisation. Pressing may best be known for the notion that a referent is used in most improvised music performance. His most succinct description of a referent was “a set of cognitive, perceptual, or emotional structures (constraints) that guide and aid in the production of musical material” (Pressing 1998: 52). In other words, having a referent allows improvisers the possibility to prepare before the performance and a means during the performance to anticipate future developments. It provides “material” for variation or development, and since a referent can be shared, it reduces the need for detailed attention to all of the component parts of a given performance. For instance, in mainstream jazz, a “standard” song form can provide a shared template of melodic, rhythmic, and harmonic information, and a means by which performers can synchronize or orient their performances with respect to those of the other musicians. Pressing’s notion of a referent was quite open-ended. It could be in time—either with a pulse (a “clocked referent”) or without one (a “sequenced referent”)—or it could be out of time, with no specification of the order of events. A referent could be quite specific, like the jazz song form mentioned above, or it could be more sublime, such as “a mood, a picture, an emotion, a physical process, a story … virtually any coherent image which allows the improviser a sense of engagement and continuity” (Pressing 1984: 346). A referent, loosely speaking, provides shared musical “seeds” from which an improvisation can grow. Pressing also acknowledged that some improvisation could be referent-free. It is important here to make a distinction between the various timescales involved in improvisation. For the purposes of this discussion, I will divide them into short-term, intermediate, and long-term. In the short term, the

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embodied patterns and learned gestures of procedural memory constitute the bulk of the grist for the improviser’s mill. Improvising at this timescale involves a nonlinear cycle of motoric function and cognitive feedback and feedforward. In reviewing the physiological and neurological literature, Pressing concluded that improvisers have the biological capacity to react to unexpected changes, and hence to one’s own or one another’s new ideas, about twice a second. He argues that the performance of experienced improvisers on short-term timescales can be quite nuanced and flexible, but it is also largely automatized. On an intermediate timescale, the presence of a referent—its underlying scheme or formal image—facilitates the generation and editing of improvised behavior. In brief, Pressing’s model proposes that improvisers draw on parallel representations of musical structure in motor, musical, acoustic, and other aspects. It makes a further distinction between improvisational features (e.g., loudness), objects (e.g., a motif), and processes (e.g., sequencing a motif), but it is primarily focused on the level of the musical event, which may involve just one of the above items, or, more often, include all of them. According to Pressing, improvisers produce a first set of musical events (E1) and then each subsequent set of events (E2, E3, E4)—on whatever timescale— takes into account not only the referent (R) that an improviser has stored in long-term memory (M), but also each previous E—with increased weight given to E instances immediately prior—as well as a player’s cognitive representation (Ck1, Ck2, … Ckn) of what the other musicians may have just done (K1 … Kn). Improvisers, according to Pressing, need only find a good solution, not the best, since the search for an optimum would be too time-consuming and resource intensive. Pressing, however, views this “non-optimum” situation as providing the potential for unique outputs and novel interactions between musicians. Experienced improvisers tend to have a richer knowledge of the referent, an improved motor control and flexibility with their instruments, and an improved cognitive representation with more detail at a smaller grain size about the musical events produced by themselves and others, all of which allows for a mentally nimbler and more responsive performance. At the longest timescale, Pressing theorized about one’s “knowledge base,” which includes the “passive expertise” an individual has about a music style and music culture, as well as the more personal history of one’s own compositional choices and predilections.

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Referent-Free Improvisation What, then, of performances that do not, by the performers’ own accounts, involve a referent? Opinions about this practice vary widely. According to Derek Bailey (1992: 85): “They range from the view that free playing is the simplest thing in the world requiring no explanation, to the view that it is complicated beyond discussion.” “There are those for whom it is an activity requiring no instrumental skill, no musical ability and no musical knowledge of any kind,” Bailey continues, “and others who believe it can only be reached by employing a highly sophisticated, personal technique of virtuosic proportions.” If there is a shared bond between these diverse performers, it may be a fascination with the surprising musical occurrences and interpersonal possibilities inherent to an improvisatory method in which the content and form of the music at the intermediate timescale are radically underdetermined, and, therefore, must be generated and negotiated collectively in performance. In other words, improvised music of this kind moves beyond matters of expressive or interpretive detail to matters of collective coordination and emergent form. Expressing this general sentiment, Evan Parker states: “I’m interested in improvisation because it leads me towards the realization of a particular kind of music, not interested in music because it allows me to improvise” (quoted in Scott 1987). Far from operating without constraints, this approach to improvisation requires skill and communication to select appropriate constraints while developing the content and the form of the music in the course of performance. Even if most overt idiomatic qualities are consciously avoided by some of these performers, referent-free improvisers still incorporate and experiment with the accepted tools of artistic expression: stability, interruption, repetition, contrast, and so on. Improvising music involves a constant balancing act between complexity and comprehensibility, control and non-control, constancy and unpredictability. To revisit the three timescales presented above, in the short term of referentfree improvisation, clusters of musical events are still determined to a great extent by previous training and embodied patterns. Cognitive limitations likely play a role here as well (one can’t decide too much at the same time), but so does a desire to remain flexible (one does not want to decide too much at the same time). At the intermediate timescale, which may range from many seconds to

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many minutes, referent-free improvisers must work to create sonic “identities” in the absence of material provided by a shared referent. Sonic identities include processes or features that are developed or explored for a short time, only to give way to new emergent “identities” via some process of gradual or abrupt transition. How these transitions arrive and are effected by the ensemble provide some of the more fascinating moments in referent-free improvised performance, and they are discussed in greater detail in Chapter 4. Referent-free improvisation is not a “pure” form of improvisation, or a type of ex nihilo creation, as some of its advocates occasionally suggest. Embodied patterns and learned gestures provide the foundations of this approach, and across longer time frames, referent-free improvisation involves the development of a personal, enculturated knowledge base as much as any other practice. In fact, developing an identifiable voice or an individual/ensemble style is an essential part of establishing one’s expertise, according to many. Tom Nunn (1998: 58) believes that free improvisation, by virtue of its open and incorporating nature, invites (indeed demands) the development of personal and group styles. As an improviser accumulates experience, a unique style develops naturally. Likewise, as a group develops rapport and players within a group become increasingly familiar with one another’s musical tendencies (i.e., personal style traits), a general style peculiar to the group will usually develop.

Pressing (2002: 23) argues that the difference between referent-based improvisation and “the more experimental domains” of referent-free improvisation is that “the instrumental competence is subservient to the flow of ideas in the former whereas nascent bodily interaction with the evolving instrument is more likely to form the basis of structure generation in the latter.” This distinction is likely too stark, but it does hint at a range of approaches one may take while improvising. Referent-based improvisation tends to have well-established (though not necessarily unified) traditions of aesthetic evaluation, and the cognitive schemas used tend to be over-learned so that they can be rapidly accessed and adapted to the needs of the moment. Referent-free improvisation, by contrast, may involve less well-established schemas and less shared conventions, but motor patterns still play a prominent role, and shared meta-models can evolve when musicians play together over time. In the absence of an agreed-upon referent, implicit strategies for group coordination emerge to compensate (Chapters 4 and 6 will

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take up this topic in greater detail). Calling the music “non-idiomatic,” as Bailey (1992) does, runs the risk of denying these. Referent-free improvised performance appears to draw attention to itself as performance: to how it defamiliarizes the familiar. Gary Peters (2009) offers two related allusions: the improviser as a contestant in a scrapyard reality TV show in which she must fabricate something original out of the discarded materials readily at hand; and the improviser as the subject of Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus, with her face always turned toward the wreckage of the past as she is propelled into the future by the chaos of the present. In both cases, improvisation has more to do with a way of beginning—or a way of being in the world—than with the content of a fixed work. Many improvisers attracted to referent-free approaches discuss spiritual, ecstatic, or trance-like performance states (see Borgo 2003). Some cite total mental involvement, while others describe a complete annihilation of all critical and rational faculties. Musicians stress performance goals ranging from complete relaxation or catharsis to a transcendental feeling of ego loss or collective consciousness. The sheer energy and density of sound at times experienced in these practices can potentially create a state of hyperstimulation verging on sensory overload. The idea of spirit possession also appears in the improvising community. Saxophonist Jameel Moondoc describes a time when “the music got so intense that spirits came into the room, just hovering around, and in one aspect it was incredibly scary. It was almost like we were calling the ancestors, and they came” (quoted in Gershon 2001: 15). Others describe a voluntary, self-induced form of trance—more akin to shamanic practices—as they guide the listener on a spiritual journey (see Borgo 2003). William Parker, the celebrated improvising bassist, feels that free music can be a musical form that is playing without pre-worked structure, without written music or chord changes. However, for free music to succeed, it must grow into free spiritual music, which is not … a musical form; it should be based off of a life form. It is not about just picking up an instrument and playing guided by math principles or emotion. It is emptying oneself and being. (quoted in Such 1993: 131)

It should be noted that a considerable amount of music that may be grouped under the broad heading “free improvisation” is not referent-free in the way that Pressing uses the term, perhaps highlighting that this binary between

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referent-based and referent-free improvisation is ultimately untenable. Musicians may discuss prior to performance a desired mood, approach, or length, and in settings in which musicians have played together before or those in which they are simply aware ahead of time of the body of recorded work that the other musicians have produced (which is to say almost every professional improvised music encounter), these previous experiences often serve as a type of pseudoreferent for the current situation. Many contemporary musicians do not wish to be limited by any implied binary between referent-based and referent-free improvisation. Percussionist Guillermo E. Brown comments: To me, “free” is not limited. “Free” means I have all this information about the history of whatever’s gone through my instrument, and I can access it at any time and play it free. Or freely access it. It’s not just, “I’m going to do my thing.” For some people it is, but for me it means that I am free to groove here, not groove there. (All About Jazz, February 9, 2021)1

Mike Heffley (2005) highlights three kinds of freedom in improvised music: freedom-from-form, freedom-to-form, and freedom-in-form. Freedomfrom-form describes the reactive process of stretching, challenging, and breaking rules and conventions that were once embraced as laws. Freedom-to-form is a proactive step in which rules, patterns, and conventions from other musical traditions, and those of idiosyncratic origin, are embraced as temporary and mutable structures or designs. Freedom-in-form, for Heffley, signifies the consummate stage as well as the point at which the process has gone full circle: “One path is chosen from among all possible, and its route, uncharted from without, has nonetheless imprinted its own order on the improvising body as a law unto itself … that will come in its turn to be so challenged and changed” (279–80).

Freedom Music For many (in the contemporary Western world at least), jazz represents the most thorough engagement with improvisation, and many authors have drawn connections between jazz, improvisation more broadly, and the ongoing

www.allaboutjazz.com/guillermo-e-brown-freedom-of-music-guillermo-e-brown September 18 2021). 1

(accessed

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struggles for freedom and social justice in the United States and globally. The sounds and sentiments of freedom have been present in jazz music from the time of Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington through to Anthony Braxton and Ambrose Akinmusire. The music’s call for freedom, for radical individualism within a framework of mutual respect and solidarity, carries a strong social justice message. Unfortunately, this message has been diffused or ignored at various times in the music’s history. In the 1930s and 1940s, for instance, Hollywood films and the commercial Swing industry severely limited the amount and type of improvisation that could take place, and either rejected or severely curtailed professional contributions from the African American innovators of the music. The modern sounds of bebop emerged during the war years at least in part as a reaction to these restrictive codes and homogenizing tendencies in the industry, although aspects of bebop, too, were commodified and appropriated by the industry in short order (see Porter 2002). “Evolution or revolution?” has now become a clichéd question asked by jazz historians regarding the transition from swing to bebop, but the music arguably reflected both continuities with and radical departures from earlier jazz practice. Beboppers, on the whole, still favored the conventional instruments of jazz and continued using the most common song forms of earlier periods (12-bar blues, 32-bar AABA), but they also innovated dramatically new harmonic, melodic, and rhythmic approaches, and invited greater portions of improvisation and heightened conversational interactions in their music. It is challenging to imagine, at a remove now of more than eight decades, just how new bebop must have sounded to uninitiated jazz musicians and audiences at the time. Beyond the seamless integration of aural, physical, and intellectual aspects of their music, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Dizzy Gillespie, Kenny Clarke, Bud Powell, and other bebop pioneers challenged the established practices of the music industry, fought against the stereotyped notions of African American artists as “entertainers,” and expressed strong social and political convictions in light of the emerging Civil Rights Movement in the United States and calls for independence in African nations. Many authors have contributed to our understanding of this crucial historical period and the complex relationships that emerged among music, politics, aesthetics, and activism at the time, including Eric Porter (2002), Scott DeVeaux (1999), Ingrid Monson (2007), Mark Anthony Neal (1999), Scott Saul (2003), Valerie Wilmer (1977), A. B. Spellman (1966), LeRoi Jones (1963), and others.

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Several revolutionary aspects of bebop jazz were further expanded in the adventurous jazz emerging at the end of the 1950s, while certain jazz conventions dating from the music’s earliest days—such as the use of metered pulse and cyclic song forms—were challenged or dispensed with entirely by proponents of the “New Thing” (see Litweiler 1984 and Saul 2003). Experimentation with the form and format of jazz could certainly be heard years, if not decades, before this “official” arrival of the avant-garde, but when Ornette Coleman offered the jazz community Something Else!!!! in 1958, his sound and approach did spark the curiosity, creativity, and ire of many performers and listeners. Ornette’s words from the album’s liner notes still seem prophetic: I think one day music will be a lot freer. The pattern for a tune, for instance, will be forgotten and the tune itself will be the pattern, and won’t have to be forced into conventional patterns. The creation of music is just as natural as the air we breathe. I believe music is really a free thing, and any way you can enjoy it you should.

The impact of Coleman’s music was not extensively felt until his two-and-a-halfmonth engagement at the Five Spot in New York City starting in November of 1959. By this point, his early use of 12-bar blues and 32-bar bop tunes had given way to a mature form of thematic improvisation that, while often still swinging in a more or less traditional sense, relied little on preconceived musical harmony and form. According to John Litweiler (1984: 39), Ornette’s playing “makes clear that uncertainty is the content of life, and even things that we take for certainties (such as his cell motives) are ever altering shape and character. By turns he fears or embraces this ambiguity; but he constantly faces it, and by his example, he condemns those who seek resolution or finality as timid.” For sympathetic musicians, critics, and audiences, this emphasis on uncertainty allowed for creativity unencumbered by the harmonies, forms, and meters of bebop and swing styles. It evoked a return to the collective practices and ideals evident in the earliest forms of jazz that emanated from New Orleans and pointed the way toward a more inclusive musical stance that could draw on insight and inspiration from the world over. To unsympathetic listeners, this resulted only in musical mayhem devoid of the swing, melody, and harmony that made traditional jazz music so vital and technically demanding. John Corbett (1994: 50) draws an interesting distinction between people who view free jazz as a failed experiment and those who revel in the constant experimentation of jazz:

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Sync or Swarm Jazz experiments … Is the second word a noun or a verb? … If you see a noun then what we’re talking about are discreet events in jazz history, those “experiments” that punctuate the jazz timeline like great exclamation points, or better yet, like giant question marks … On the other hand, perhaps you read the word “experiments” as a verb and “jazz” as its subject. Thus, experimenting is what jazz does.

Coleman’s performance approach paved the way for the use of melodic improvisation and open forms not based on strict harmonic associations, but the move to sever ties with uniform tempo and to explore dense and complex ensemble interactions may be best witnessed in the work of pianist Cecil Taylor. “His very first record [Jazz Advance recorded in 1956] placed him unmistakably among the jazz avant-garde,” Litweiler (1984: 200) writes, “back when John Coltrane was beginning his career with Miles Davis and still discovering himself in bop; when Eric Dolphy was playing bop in Los Angeles and Ornette Coleman’s cataclysmic first LP was more than two years in the offing.” On that album, bass player Buell Neidlinger and drummer Dennis Charles maintain standard song forms and swing feel throughout, but on the solo piano rendition of “You’d Be So Nice To Come Home To,” Taylor anticipates his mature improvisational style of the 1960s and feels no need to maintain a steady pulse or standard song form (see Block 1997: 226–7). The year 1961 proved to be a pivotal year for Taylor. His father, a loving supporter of his son’s activities, died that year and Taylor recalls that it triggered an introspective assessment of his creative direction. While his newly found convictions often led him to menial labor or the welfare office for financial assistance, his musical fortitude would once again set the jazz world on end. The recording Nefertiti, The Beautiful One Has Come (1962) marks the formation of the Cecil Taylor Unit and the unalterable trajectory of Taylor’s music to move without standard song forms and uniform rhythmic pulse. The rhythmic freedom of the Unit was due in great part to the innovative drumming of Sunny Murray. Murray was, along with Milford Graves of the New York Art Quartet, one of the first jazz drummers to abandon completely the long-established timekeeping role for the instrument. His style involved countermelody rather than accompaniment, deliberate contrast instead of overt collusion. Litweiler (1984: 208–9) aptly describes this new rhythmic direction: This music has two basic modes: ballad-rubato and whirlwind fast, seemingly as fast as the human physique can stand to play or the human ear can distinguish

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between notes. Here is the arrival of energy music; such tempo extremes vitiate the possibility of swing, so in the cyclone tempos, continuity is sustained by kinetic force. In fact, Cecil Taylor is introducing an entirely new concept of rhythm to jazz, in which rubato and terrifically fast speeds are not opposites but alternative aspects of a single tempo.

Coleman’s “harmolodic” ideas of allowing melody and harmony to share equal organizational footing rattled the jazz establishment, but Taylor’s dissolution of jazz pulse and traditional swing pushed the music into vast and uncharted waters. And yet this convenient story is clearly too tidy. In a passage that pokes fun at our desire to pigeonhole the emergence of new musical styles, the editors of Gramophone-Explorations (1998/3: 85) write: “Quite when the equation of ‘tune + improvisation = jazz’ somehow got rearranged into ‘jazz – tune = improvisation’ is one of the more regularly rewritten dates in the history of modern music … Furthermore, it’s unlikely that any committed practitioner of free improvised music … would subscribe to such a facile, simplistic definition anyway.” They continue: Music which is entirely improvised, with no overt reference to a pre-determined structure, has now been with us for many years. It is often assumed to be derived from jazz … The truth is that there are in fact many improvising musicians who have either worked in the jazz tradition but who see free improvisation as something else entirely, or who have abandoned jazz (often in exasperation) by choice, or who have arrived at free improvisation via avant-garde rock, electroacoustic music or sound-art.

*** Centuries before the first strands of jazz music were heard in New Orleans, improvisation had been an integral part of the European art-music tradition. Not only does a tradition of keyboard improvising date to at least the Baroque period, but many of the most respected composers, including Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven, were as well known in their day as improvisers. Instrumentalists were also frequently called upon to improvise the cadenzas to sonatas in performance. According to Alan Durant, only in the nineteenth century did the word improvisation begin to acquire a negative valorization, as in “off-hand” or “spur of the moment,” implying the degree of preparation to be insufficient (e.g., an improvised shelter, an improvised solution) (see also Sancho-Velazquez 2001). During this same period, the improvisational latitude afforded performers of classical music was radically diminished. Durant (1989: 257) writes:

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Sync or Swarm In the development of the new concert forms of the 19th century, which were coupled with larger changes in conceptions of art and the artist in society, the participatory possibilities invited by earlier concert forms are displaced by individual compositions whose concern is less to act as a spring-board to creative performance by the musicians playing on any particular occasion than to record individual insights already achieved by the composer.

In the early twentieth century, composed music underwent a substantial increase in complexity, particularly due to the serialization of compositional practice introduced by Arnold Schoenberg and the Second Viennese School. Beginning with a system for ordering and transforming the twelve pitch classes in the Western chromatic scale, these composers eventually designed additional systems for ordering rhythm, texture, timbre, and dynamics that could work in conjunction with the serialization of pitch. The pendulum, having swung as far as it seemingly could in the direction of explicitly ordered performance, then appeared to shift back toward uncertainty. At approximately the same time that jazz musicians were expanding the role and conception of improvisation in their performances, improvisation appeared to resurface in the pan-European “classical” tradition after a century and a half of neglect. Composers such as John Cage (with his “indeterminate” works) and Karlheinz Stockhausen (with his “intuitive” music) left many musical details of a composition to be decided upon by the performers or through chance operations. These and other modern compositional approaches do vary considerably in their details, and individual composers often express extremely different views on the importance and validity of improvisation, but these new approaches did significantly expand the scope and definition of “composition” as a practice. Some composers at this time even took to exploring the potential of improvisation on their own, in a sense conflating the act of creation and performance by removing the interpretive step from the traditional musical equation. Composers and ensembles who have experimented with improvisation include (in alphabetical order): Ugo Amendola, Larry Austin, Klarenz Barlow, Richard Barrett, John Cage, Cornelius Cardew, Alvin Curran, John Eaton, Robert Erickson, José Evangelista, Lukas Foss, Sofia Gubaidulina, Barry Guy, Jonathan Harvey, Charles Ives, Luigi Nono, Per Nørgärd, Pauline Oliveros, Harry Partch, Terry Riley, Frederic Rzewski, Giacinto Scelsi, Stefano Scodanibbio, Karheinz Stockhausen, Morton Subotnik, and Frances-Marie Uitti, as well as the groups FLUXUS, Il Gruppo di Improvvisazione da Nuova Consonanza (GINC), KIVA

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(at my institution, the University of California San Diego), Musica Electronica Viva, New Music Ensemble (at the University of California Davis), and the Scratch Orchestra. Pioneering work by composers in the American “third stream” movement, such as Gunther Schuller, George Russell, Bob Graettinger, John Lewis, and others, could be mentioned here as well for their early attempts to bridge this perceived divide. Not only was the accepted method for musical composition being questioned, but the very nature of music and musical sound was being challenged as well. In a rather prophetic statement, John Cage remarked in a 1937 lecture titled “The Future of Music”: “Whereas, in the past, the point of disagreement has been between dissonance and consonance, it will be, in the immediate future, between noise and so-called musical sounds” (quoted in Cope 1976: 10). Midcentury pioneering work with electronics further provoked this “disagreement” and composed work that employed graphical scores began to offer additional avenues for composer–performer interaction. Cornelius Cardew (1971: 250), one of the leading exponents of this practice and an early member of the improvising ensemble AMM, writes: Rather than serving as notations, many graphic scores were intended as an “inspiration” to the musicians, or as an aid to improvisation. In this sense graphic music (or musical graphics) represents a reaction against notation— though often preserving relics of musical notation—as opposed to graphic notation which represents a development of musical notation.

A variety of descriptive terms have circulated at various times and in various locales to describe post-1960 musical improvisation, each with its own group of adherents and each with its own semantic shortcomings. The preferred terms tend to highlight the creative or progressive stance of the performers and the cuttingedge or inclusive nature of the music itself: for example, free or free-form, avantgarde, creative, experimental, contemporary or new, collective, spontaneous, and so on. Stylistic references (e.g., jazz, classical, rock, world, or electronic) are variously included or excluded, as are cultural or national identity markers (e.g., Great Black Music, British Free Improvisation, or Japan Noise). In certain cases in which these specifying linguistic markers are not included, terms may still be indelibly associated with specific individuals or locations: for instance, conduction (Butch Morris), sound painting (Walter Thompson), chance or aleatoric music (John Cage), harmolodics (Ornette Coleman), intuitive music (Stockhausen), reductionism (Berlin), onkyokei (Tokyo, meaning “reverberation

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of sound”), new London silence, and so forth. Often one will see generational distinctions marked as well (certainly first, second, and third generation, and we are arguably entering a fourth generation). While it might be futile to attempt to articulate shared aesthetics among these diverse communities, they do appear to share a certain fascination with unusual and surprising sonic possibilities—often privileging texture and action density over melodic, harmonic, or metric relationships—and a desire to improvise, to a significant degree, both the content and the form of the performance together. For this reason, I have employed the term “open-form” whenever possible to describe these practices. Improvisers have also frequently joined together to form artist-run collectives aimed at establishing creative control over the production and dissemination of their work and at ensuring the proper respect and remuneration for their efforts (see Looker 2004 and Lewis 2008). Important artist-run collectives in the United States have included: the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) in Chicago (which has continued to the present date); the Jazz Composers Guild (organized by Bill Dixon shortly after his famed October Revolution in Jazz in 1964); Collective Black Artists (CBA) in New York City; the Black Artists Group (BAG) in St. Louis (also the birthplace of the World Saxophone Quartet); and the Underground Musicians Association (UGMA) in Los Angeles (formed by Horace Tapscott). Notable European collectives have included: the Spontaneous Music Ensemble (SME); the Music Improvisation Company (MIC); the Association of Meta-Musicians (AMM); the London Jazz Composers’ Orchestra (LJCO); the South African-influenced Brotherhood of Breath (led by Chris McGregor); The Jazz Center Society; The Musicians’ Co-operative; the Musicians’ Action Group; and the London Musicians’ Collective, all in England, as well as: the Instant Composers Pool in Holland; the Globe Unity Orchestra and the Berlin Contemporary Jazz Orchestra in Germany; and the Instabile Orchestra in Italy. The tendency to form improvising collectives, for many, was a direct response to the notion that jazz and improvised music most appropriately belong in the underfunded club and cabaret. George Lewis (2001: 121) writes: For the black musicians … the “club,” rather than the concert hall, had been heavily ideologized as the ideal, even the genetically best-suited place for their music. Early on, however, black experimentalists realized that serious engagement with theater and performance, painting, poetry, electronics, and other interdisciplinary expressions that require extensive infrastructure, would

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be rendered generally ineffective or even impossible by the jazz club model. In this light, the supposed obligation to perform in clubs began to appear as a kind of unwanted surveillance of the black creative body.

For a time in the 1970s, the “loft” became an “alternative” space for performances of this kind, with Studio Rivbea as one of the better known. But just as the term jazz had been criticized for decades as a boundary-imposing and financially limiting label, the new loft venues—perceived to require minimal infrastructural investment and therefore undeserving of extensive financial support by established arts-funding agencies—quickly became another obstacle to the recognition-seeking and border-crossing strategies of creative musicians and improvisers (see Heller 2016).

Freedom Is, Freedom Ain’t The scholarly literature on improvisation varies considerably on the question of how to interpret the notion of “freedom” in this music. Some authors explain freedom in terms of varying degrees of liberation from functional harmony, metered time, and traditionally accepted performance roles and playing techniques (see Jost [1974] 1994; Dean 1992; Westendorf 1994; Mazzola et al. 2008). This approach, however, glosses over the very different ways in which individual musicians altered, extended, or broke down conventions, and it offers little insight into the music’s underlying organization. Defining openform improvisation in strictly musical terms also ignores the ways in which this practice may allow for an exploration and negotiation of disparate perspectives and worldviews (see Stanyek 1999). In my view, improvisation is less a what than a how. Many authors have interpreted open-form improvisation, and free jazz in particular, as a sociopolitical response to the appropriation and exploitation of African American music styles (Jones 1963; Kofsky 1970; Wilmer 1977). They focus considerable attention on the birth of the practice during the Civil Rights movement in the United States and on the music’s place within the context of an emerging postcolonial world. Other authors have allied themselves with Marxist or neo-Marxist critiques of hegemonic culture and have focused on open-form improvisation’s implied critique of capitalism and its related market- and property-based economy. For instance, Eddie

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Prévost (1985), a pioneering English improvising percussionist, argues that open-form improvisation is least susceptible to commodification and that it is, therefore, primarily the domain of those who have felt stifled or excluded. Still others view open-form improvisation as a fruitful site for generating social bonds, often across cultural and class divides, or argue for its promising therapeutic uses. The diverse strands of open-form improvisation that have emerged since the music’s formative years also challenge facile notions of shared identity or idiom. Not only has dissent raged within the jazz community since the arrival of Ornette Coleman and other “avant-garde” musicians, but the development of open-form improvisation communities in Europe and elsewhere, and the ongoing hybridization of the music—incorporating experimental, electronic, non-Western, and popular music practices—combine to make generalized discussion of idiomatic qualities or shared cultural aesthetics in the music extremely difficult (see Lewis 2004 and Heffley 2005). John Litweiler (1984: 257) believes that “the precedents of free improvisation … are in all kinds of music, and no single kind.” For some, one’s approach to energy, virtuosity, and stylistic inclusion or exclusion can define quite clearly one’s idiomatic allegiances. Despite their many differences, the first generation of African American innovators all seemed to share an intense approach to energy, momentum, and rhythmic drive; think of Cecil Taylor, Albert Ayler, John Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders, Henry Grimes, Archie Shepp, and Sunny Murray, among many others. The second generation of African American pioneers along with many European contemporaries began to explore other ways—both more and less dense and more and less structured— of creating intensity. For even later-generation improvisers, this extreme range of approaches to energy and aesthetics can provide fertile creative ground, but it also presents a point of considerable contention in the community. The spectrum of contemporary improvisation appears to be both strongly linked to the traditions of free jazz and, at the same time, increasingly open to artists with little to no jazz experience. Steve Day (1998: 4) argues that “jazz always contains improvisation, but improvisation does not always contain jazz.” Nick Couldry (1995: 7) describes free improvisation as “a hybrid of both classical and jazz traditions.” Tom Nunn (1998: 13) elaborates on this often-mentioned connection: One of the common links that developed between these two traditions was instrumental virtuosity, wherein techniques expanding and extending the sonic

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possibilities of instruments provided the material of improvisation. The use of atonality, dense textures, asymmetrical or non-metrical rhythm, and open forms or forms derived from the music rather than imposed upon it are other examples of developments common to both jazz and the avant garde leading up to today’s free improvisation.

Despite any sonic similarities between the emerging avant-garde traditions, many composers were extremely critical of musical improvisation or reluctant to challenge the implied hierarchy of composer–performer–listener. For example, Luciano Berio (1985: 81, 85) dismissed improvisation as “a haven of dilettantes” who “normally act on the level of instrumental praxis rather than musical thought … [By] musical thought I mean above all the discovery of a coherent discourse that unfolds and develops simultaneously on different levels.” John Cage’s frequent and well-publicized objections to improvisation also tended to revolve around the notion that it could only produce music based on habit. In conversation with Joan Retallack a month before he died, however, Cage signaled a potential change of heart: “I became interested because I had not been interested. And the reason I had not been interested was because one just goes back to one’s habits. But how can we find ways of improvising that release us from our habits?” (quoted in Toop 2002: 243). David Toop believes that “this suggests that Cage had not paid close attention to the kind of improvisation, from the 1960s onward, that either began, or learned through practical experience, to do exactly that” (ibid.). The denigrating opinions of open-form improvisation that were frequently expressed by respected twentieth-century composers during the music’s formative years betray a belief in that community that musical notation is the only means to inventing complex musical structures and, by extension, the only valid measure of musical creativity (see Boulez 1975: 115). This tendency to view all modes of musical expression through the formal and architectonic perspective of resultant structure is deeply entrenched in the music academy and derives in great part from a bias toward the study of pan-European composed-notated works. A story from African American pianist Cecil Taylor highlights the issue: I’ve had musicologists ask me for a score to see the pedal point in the beginning of that piece [“Nona’s Blues”]. They wanted to see it down on paper to figure out its structure, its whole, but at that point I had stopped writing my scores out … and the musicologists found that hard to believe, since on that tune one section just flows right into the next. That gives the lie to the idea

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One of George Lewis’s (1996) earliest and arguably most influential articles makes a distinction between an “Afrological” and “Eurological” approach to this music. Lewis’s terms are not intended as ethnically essential but instead refer to historically emergent social and cultural attitudes. His study focuses on the work of two towering figures of 1950s American experimental music: Charlie Parker and John Cage. Both artists continually explored spontaneity and uniqueness in their work, and Lewis argues that each musician was fully aware of the social implications of his art. The essential contrast he draws between the two lies in how they arrived at and chose to express the notion of freedom. Cage, informed by his studies of Zen and the I Ching, denied the utility of protest. His notion of freedom is devoid of any kind of struggle that might be required to achieve it. Parker, on the other hand, was, paraphrasing LeRoi Jones (1963: 188), a nonconformist in 1950s America, simply by virtue of his skin color. Lewis (1996: 94) argues that for African American musicians, “new improvisative and compositional styles are often identified with ideas of race advancement and, more importantly, as resistive ripostes to perceived opposition to black social expression and economic advancement by the dominant white American culture.” An Afrological perspective implies an emphasis on personal narrative and the harmonization of one’s musical personality with social environments, both actual and possible. A Eurological perspective, on the other hand, implies either absolute freedom from personal narrative, culture, and conventions—an autonomy of the aesthetic object—or the need for a controlling or structuring force in the person and voice of a “composer.” Contemporary open-form improvisers often struggle with the issues implied by Lewis’s Afrological/Eurological model. Derek Bailey (1992: 83) betrays a certain Eurological perspective when he describes his practice of “non-idiomatic improvisation” as a “search for a styleless uncommitted area in which to work” or as “playing without memory.” Gavin Bryars, an early improvising partner of Bailey, abandoned improvisation after 1966 to focus exclusively on the “aesthetic autonomy” offered by an Eurological approach to composition (notably, Bryars has returned to doing more open-form improvisation in recent years). Bryars argued that “in any improvising position the person creating the music is

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identified with the music … It’s like standing a painter next to his picture so that every time you see the painting you see the painter as well and you can’t see it without him” (quoted in Bailey 1992: 115). Not all European improvisers, however, favor a Eurological approach to the practice. English saxophonist Evan Parker clearly sees his approach as part of the African American jazz tradition: What’s important to me is that my work is seen in a particular context, coming out of a particular tradition. I don’t really care what people call it but I would want it to be clear that I was inspired to play by listening to certain people who continue to be talked about mainly in jazz contexts. People like John Coltrane, Eric Dolphy, Cecil Taylor—these were people that played music that excited me to the point where I took music seriously myself. That continues to be the case. That’s where what I’m doing has to make sense, if it makes any sense at all. (quoted in Lock 1991: 30)

Contrasting Bailey’s and Parker’s approaches, Scottish critic Ian Carr (1973: 70–1) writes: With monastic vigilance [Bailey] tries to avoid the habitual side of playing. Compared with this religious sense of purity, this sense of keeping an untainted vision, Evan Parker’s approach is secular, agnostic, and robust. He is prepared to rub shoulders and get involved with all sorts and conditions of musicians, and seems able to do this without losing his essential identity.

These and other remarks reflect an intriguing tension within the community of open-form improvisers between Afrological issues of personal and cultural identity and Eurological conceptions of music as an autonomous art. African American drummer and composer Max Roach stated concisely the issues and demonstrated an ability to reconcile this apparent dichotomy: Two theories exist, one is that art is for the sake of art, which is true. The other theory, which is also true, is that the artist is like a secretary … He keeps a record of his time so to speak … My music tries to say how I really feel, and I hope it mirrors in some way how black people feel in the United States. (quoted in Taylor [1977] 1993: 112)

Roach’s comments highlight the fact that African American jazz and improvising musicians have frequently sought to celebrate aspects of black life and culture and, at the same time, cast off the burden of race, especially when that burden of “racial authenticity” infringes on the marketability or the creativity of black

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musicians and their music. This dilemma has played out since the 1960s most clearly in the tension between Black Nationalism and universalism evident in the commentary of many celebrated African American improvisers. Anthony Braxton wryly commented: “Why is it so natural for Evan Parker, say, to have an appreciation of Coltrane, but for me to have an appreciation of Stockhausen is somehow out of the order of natural human experience? I see it as racist” (quoted in Day 1998: 35). Despite the helpful and often-illuminating distinctions between Afrological and Eurological perspectives, the continued hybridization in the community of contemporary open-form improvisation has made discussions of cultural belonging a very prickly topic. A growing scene of Asian American improvisers, centered primarily in the San Francisco Bay Area, and Asian improvising musicians located in Asia—especially in Japan, South Korea, and increasingly in China—also highlights the problematic nature of binary thinking and cultural and aesthetic dyads (see Ho 1995). In a later article, George Lewis (2001: 126) advances the notion that experimentalism was becoming “creolized.” Where the so-called third stream movement (a proposed fusion of jazz and classical styles) had failed to interrogate its synthetic premise fully, Lewis argues that “independent black experimentalism challenged the centrality of pan-Europeanism to the notion of the experimental itself.” According to Lewis, the definition of “composition” among African American creative musicians can be a fluid one, “appropriating and simultaneously challenging and revising various pan-European models, dialoguing with African, Asian, and Pacific music traditions, and employing compositional methods that did not necessarily privilege either conventionally notated scores, or the single, heroic creator figure so beloved by jazz historiography” (ibid.: 128). Black composers from Thomas Wiggins (“Blind Tom”), Scott Joplin, Will Marion Cook, and William Grant Still, to Olly Wilson, T. J. Anderson, Hale Smith, William Banfield, Alvin Singleton, Julius Eastman, Anthony Davis, Wynton Marsalis, and Tyshawn Sorey, among many others, have seamlessly incorporated the spirit of improvisation (if not always the practice) into their composed work. And many African American composer-improvisers— particularly those with close ties to the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM)—adopt and innovate notational practices to suit their creative endeavors. Wadada Leo Smith, for instance, devised an openended symbolic framework he now calls “Ankhrasmation,” the purpose of which

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is “to create and invent musical ideas simultaneously utilizing the fundamental laws of improvisation and composition” (quoted in Porter 2002: 265). AACM members, in particular, frequently rejected the prescriptive tenets of cultural nationalism and questioned the idea that black music is a hermetic field. Yet they presented their work as an example of creative black music and as an homage to black people. Weaving together cultural naturalism, PanAfricanism, and universalism offered, to many, the most effective means to negotiate the constraints put upon their creativity by the hegemony of Western economic, discursive, and aesthetic ideals. Ethnomusicologist Paul Austerlitz (2005) unpacks many of these issues in his far-reaching book titled Jazz Consciousness: Music, Race, and Humanity. Other scholars, including Ajay Heble (2000), Sherrie Tucker (2001, 2004), Julie Dawn Smith (2004), and Ben Piekut (2010) have focused the critical lens of feminist and critical gender studies on these musical communities, which have traditionally been extremely patriarchal and often quite homogenous in terms of race, ethnicity, and sexuality, among other markers of difference. Musicians have, on the whole, become more aware of inequities and bias in the community. Anthony Braxton is, according to Eric Porter (2002: 283), “one of the few male musicians [of that generation] who publicly recognized the oppression of women in artists’ communities and the larger society.” Braxton felt many aspects of bebop jazz were sexist and also found it ironic that many of the more politically and spiritually aware musicians of the 1960s functioned as “chauvinist and oppressor” (284). Braxton’s utopian vision, according to Porter, is “dependent upon equality for women in the music world and, by extension, a feminization of the world community” (ibid.). While open-form improvisation would seem to imply a certain “openness” to approaching the musical process, there arguably still exist many heteronormative and masculinist tendencies in the music and a rather egregious gender imbalance among professional and more casual improvising musicians, and among fans of the music as well. Things have, admittedly, improved a bit in recent years. There are now more highly visible female improvisers, from early generation innovators such as pianists Marilyn Crispell and Myra Melford, bassist Joelle Leandre, and vocal artist Maggie Nicols, to newer generation artists including guitarist Mary Halvorson, saxophonists Ingrid Laubrock, Melissa Aldana, and Josephine Davies, pianists Sylvie Courvoisier and Kris Davis, bassist Linda May Han Oh, percussionist Susie Ibarra, and many more. Discussions about LGBTQIA+ rights have also gained in prominence in the jazz and improvised

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music communities, and #MeToo has raised awareness of situations of sexual abuse and misconduct. There is still considerable work to be done, however, and the establishment of the Berklee Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice, under the leadership of founder Terri Lyne Carrington, is a move in the right direction. The artistic and academic communities that comprise and support this music need to remain vigilant about ensuring that fluidity in gender and sexuality, and intersectionality of gender with race, class, religion, nationality, ability, and more, are well acknowledged and well respected, both in terms of professional opportunity, and in the ethics of improvising music together (see Nicholls 2012). Music theorist Marc Hannaford (2019) has done interesting work exploring how improvising musicians inhabit and move through “conceptual spaces” in performance—via what he terms “subjective (re)positioning”—in ways that can offer a critique of normative associations between gender, the body, and affective musical qualities, among other conceptions of identity given by dominant discourses. Encouragingly, his work suggests that improvisers at times consciously choose to project affective musical qualities such as strength or gentleness in ways meant to combat any notion that these might be determined by gender, race, sexuality, or some other aspect of identity. But as Terri Lyne Carrington slyly remarked in a recent interview focused on her career racking up “first woman” accolades, and on her more recent role as a leading voice for gender justice in the music industry, “being the exception means there’s a rule” (quoted in McCollum 2021: n.p.).

Improvisation Is, Improvisation Isn’t Is listening to musical improvisation—and, in particular, to open-form improvisation—qualitatively different than listening to any other music? Many advocates of this idea comment on the fact that neither the performers nor the audience know at the outset exactly what direction the music will take. Tom Nunn (1998: 93) insists that the fact that both the performer and audience perspectives begin at the same point offers “a level of excitement, involvement and challenge to the audience listener that is unique, at least in degree, to free improvisation.” And Derek Bailey (1992: 44) writes, “Undeniably, the audience for improvisation, good or bad, active or passive, sympathetic or hostile, has a power that no other audience has. It can affect the creation of that which is being witnessed. And

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perhaps because of that possibility the audience for improvisation has a degree of intimacy with the music that is not achieved in any other situation.” As an ethnomusicologist who tries to avoid pitting the “intimacy” of audiences and musics against one another, I find Bailey’s hyperbole here to be unjustified, although as an improviser, Bailey’s notion that audiences can affect that which is being witnessed does resonate. As an audience member, though, I have attended many open-form improvisation concerts in concert halls that did not invite audience input, interaction, or intimacy any more than any other performance of “concert music.” Several theorists have emphasized different approaches to listening to contemporary music. Roland Barthes (1991), in his essay titled “Listening” in The Responsibility of Forms, proposes three types of listening: (1) “alert” listening, in which “a living being orients its hearing to certain indices”; (2) “deciphering,” which involves listening for certain signs or codes (i.e., listening the way we read); and (3) an “entirely modern” way of listening that “does not aim at—or await—certain determined, classified signs: not what is said or emitted, but who speaks, who emits: such listening is supposed to develop in an inter-subjective space where ‘I am listening’ also means ‘listen to me’ ” (245–7). In this latter form of listening, according to Barthes, what is expressed is less important than the fact that it is the production of another human, that it carries with it a sense of identity, and that it holds out the possibility for interaction. In a formation similar to Barthes’s, although with different terms and motivations, composer Barry Truax (1986) describes three general modes of engaging with the acoustic soundscape: background listening, listening-inreadiness, and listening-in-search. For Truax, background listening is akin to “distracted listening” while the listener is actively engaged in another activity. Listening-in-readiness involves focused attention, but the attention is on familiar sound associations built up over time that may be readily identified. With listening-in-search, one scans the acoustic soundscape for particular sounds, attempting to extract or create meaning from their production or the environment’s response to the sounds produced. Adopting terms from the visual arts instead, Mark Bradlyn (1991: 15) writes: “The first step in learning to listen is stopping still and opening our ears, first to figure, next to ground, next to field.” “One performer’s playing may suddenly emerge as a stark figure against the ground of another’s,” Bradlyn writes, “only to just as suddenly submerge into the ground or even farther back into the field as another voice emerges.” Ultimately, he concludes that collective open-form improvisation

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may falter if participants and listeners “fail to hear the texture, the field, in pursuit of the dramatic figure, the gesture.” For Bradlyn, this type of musicking cannot succeed “if listening does not achieve equal status with playing” (18). *** Is listening to a recording of open-form improvisation different than hearing it live? Does it even make sense to record a music predicated to such a degree on the moment and context of performance? Tom Nunn (1998: 154) argues that “much of the unknown-about-to-be-known is lost in recordings. The image of the musicians playing together, communicating, collectively creating in the moment is impossible to capture on tape.” Cornelius Cardew (1971: xvii) felt that “documents such as tape recordings of improvisation are essentially empty, as they preserve chiefly the form that something took and give at best an indistinct hint as to the feeling and cannot convey any sense of time and place … what you hear on tape or disc is indeed the same playing, but divorced from its natural context.” And David Roberts (1977–8: 39) argued that “for musics not predicated upon the dissociation of form and performance, recording can, and often does, spell the kiss of death.” These artists and authors seem to agree on two central points: (1) an audio recording, no matter its fidelity, necessarily reproduces only a limited spectrum of the performance experience; and (2) the act of listening to improvised music away from its initial performance context and on several occasions indelibly alters its meaning and impact. Martin Davidson, of Eminem Records, expresses a rather different viewpoint. He argues that “recordings and improvisation are entirely symbiotic, as if they were invented for each other…The act of improvising is filling time (either a predetermined or an open-ended amount) with music—something that could be called real-time composition, and something that has more need and more right to be recorded than anything else” (Davidson 1984: 23). Most improvisers acknowledge the advantages that recordings can offer in establishing and disseminating a tradition, although individual artists may differ widely in their specific views on how the recording process should be approached. Some embrace, while others disavow, the possibilities of choosing, editing, and reordering performances that are inherent to the process of producing a recording. Mixing and mastering a recording—an unavoidable process if one uses more than just a stereo microphone—also has a significant effect on what a listener hears. A recent release by pianist Oliver Schwerdt, double bassist

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Barry Guy, and drummer Gunther “Baby” Sommer (One For My Baby And One More For The Bass) actually includes two different mixes of this trio’s collective improvisations, presumably so that the listener can decide which they prefer. Improvisers tend to conceive of recordings as important documents or milestones in an evolving career, but there is some disagreement over whether they should be limited to the “best” possible performance of an artist, or if they should simply document one’s playing as on any other night. There is also disagreement about whether musicians might be more or less conservative performing in a studio setting or in front of a paying audience (see Nunn 1998: 252–6). Derek Bailey (1992: 104) remarks that all that is usually claimed for a recording is “that it should provide evidence of musical identity or of changes in identity.” From a purely pragmatic standpoint, the exchange of recordings affords an avenue of social and musical networking, allowing artists and listeners to connect and to build bridges in the often rather small and dispersed open-form improvised music community. And many if not most performers acknowledge the educational value that recordings can offer through repeated listening (although Vinko Globokar reportedly insisted that recordings of this music should be listened to once and then discarded, and also that improvisers should only play once with any given collaborator).2 The increasingly interconnected and technologically sophisticated context for contemporary culture invites us to view music as a complex site wherein new oral/aural cultural forms and practices are electronically inscribed into society. Expanding on concepts introduced by Walter Ong (1982: 2), Daniel Belgrad (1997: 193) proposes that African American musics offer a model of “secondary orality” in a post-literate culture, “the possibility of asserting the values of an oral culture within a culture already conditioned by writing.” Wadada Leo Smith (1973) presciently addressed these issues in a self-published essay titled notes (8 pieces) source a new world music: creative music: In ancient times when all people held improvisation as their art-music form, it was said then that theirs was an oral tradition … In our times now, an oral-electronic tradition is being born, and this signifies the age of a new improvisation-art-music-form. One only needs to think in terms of the media and its proper use to understand how any significant event, and I’m speaking culturally now and particularly of music, can be immediately received anywhere Jonathan Impett recounted these Globokar stories during a talk on March 27, 2021 for the Improvise! 2021 symposium. 2

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Smith also identified how musical improvisation confounds established legal and cultural norms of music ownership and the standard practices of music copyrighting and royalty compensation. The legal battle over the use of an improvised flute passage by James Newton in the Beastie Boys song “Pass the Mic” brought significant attention to this issue. The Beastie Boys paid the proper licensing fees from Newton’s record label for the rights to use the recording but did not obtain rights for the composition from Newton. A panel of judges ruled in favor of the Beastie Boys, arguing that the passage was not long enough to merit the necessity of obtaining a compositional license. Newton argued, however, that the short passage formed the framework for the entire Beastie Boys song and that its distinctive timbral qualities (a pronounced multiphonic on the flute) represented a significant compositional achievement. Timbre is a musical dimension that is not well served by the current copyright law, as evidenced by the fact that the court only considered Newton’s compositional materials in terms of number of notes (see Eric Lewis 2019). *** Can improvisation be criticized? If so, then how, where, and by whom? Several journals, magazines, and blogs publish reviews of improvised music recordings and performances, which provide a window into the critical values espoused in various media.3 According to Marion Brown, “ ‘Criticism’ is by definition a product of the gulf between musicians’ ideas and those of the audience. Once a listener determines that his or her interpretation does not match the performer’s, one becomes a critic” (quoted in Porter 2002: 251). In 1973, Brown self-published Views and Reviews in order to set forth his personal aesthetic philosophy and to challenge the critical status quo of writers who betray a preference for composed music, and who, by virtue of their powerful institutional positions, can dramatically affect the lives and livelihoods of black avant-garde artists. Eric Porter (2002: 253), paraphrasing Brown, writes:

Journals and magazines that provide coverage of this music include Avant, Bananafish, Cadence, Coda, Contact, Downbeat, Gramophone Explorations, Hurly Burly, Improjazz, The Improvisor, Musicworks, Opprobrium, Resonance, Rubberneck, Signal to Noise, and The Wire. Blogs and record outlets focused on this music include: The Downtown Music Gallery, Squidco, The Free Jazz Collective, and many others. 3

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One is prone to judge a piece of music by its formal, or compositional, elements. Because this presents a problem when analyzing fully improvised music or compositions that include improvisational elements, Brown proposes that a different set of aesthetic principles must be invoked when evaluating such music. “Balance” is achieved in improvised music not through a compositional structure but through musicians’ personal expressions and the emotional bond they create with their audience.

In his discussion of the treatment afforded various “downtown” musics by The Village Voice in the late 1970s, George Lewis highlighted these issues as well. The Voice, at that time, separated critical discussion of various musical genres under the headings “Music” (i.e., reviews of work from the high culture “West”) and “Riffs” (“the low-culture, diminutively imagined ‘Rest’ ”). Lewis (2002: 124) concludes that the AACM and other creative artists with similar ideologies were “destined to run roughshod over many conventional assumptions about infrastructure, reference, and place.” The practice of jazz and improvising musicians engaging with extended notation and graphic scores, electronics and computers, and multimedia approaches to performance directly challenged, according to Lewis, habits of binary thought: black/white; jazz/classical; high culture/low culture, and so forth. Lewis (2002: 129) points out, however, that African American critics and activists were not immune from attempting to regulate and restrict African American creativity. According to Lewis, Amiri Baraka, whose important early work strongly supported the-then emerging “avant-garde,” later criticized many black creative musicians for being unduly influenced by European modernism. *** In what ways does improvisation rely on, expand, or defy conventional notions of virtuosity? Nick Couldry (1995) highlights the importance of—in addition to conventional notions of instrumental ability or more contemporary notions of so-called extended techniques—a “virtuosity in finding,” or, as he puts it, “the ability to imagine new sounds and discover an individual voice.” He also emphasizes an “intensity of application,” in his view more virtue than virtuosity, as an important facet of gaining expertise in musical improvisation. David VanderHamm (2017) argues that virtuosity is not a simple fact about a performer’s body that audiences encounter; rather, it is a social

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experience that they help construct. His work considers virtuosity from the disciplinary viewpoint of disability studies, exploring how bodily difference in the forms of disability and gender contributes to the construction of virtuosity, and, through careful attention to the music and careers of Ravi Shankar and Yehudi Menuhin, how skill and cross-cultural adaptability become especially prized and mutually dependent as a form of “cosmopolitan virtuosity.” VanderHamm’s research suggests that different understandings of skill are formed and made apparent through the intersection of performance, discourse, and media. Clearly, the diverse personal experiences and opinions of open-form improvisers and the cosmopolitan and hybrid nature of the musical activity make generalized discussions of critical values within the community problematic. But within this dispersed and disparate community, there does appear to be, at the very least, a shared desire to meet together, often for the first time in performance, to negotiate understandings and embark on novel musical and social experiences. One might ask why, if this music is as social and as liberating as many profess, is it not more popular? This question is by no means new. Many black avant-garde artists have been interrogated about why black creativity is seemingly so removed from African American communities. In a recent interview, Archie Shepp acknowledged that his pursuit of experimental free jazz, at times, alienated the audience he wished he could have connected with the most: black people (Bakare 2021). Anthony Braxton, according to Eric Porter (2002: 283), casts blame on a general lack of recognition of artistic creativity in American society and on the market forces that only promote “popular” music to black audiences (see Porter 2002: 283). George Lewis (2002) finds that academic cultural studies have also frequently ignored black musics that are not predominantly based in, or represented as, mass culture. Lewis argues that “the entry into classical music by black composers becomes, rather than bourgeois accommodation, an oppositional stance” (129). He summarizes: Thus, in the age of globalized megamedia, to the extent that certain oppositional black musical forms have been generally ignored or dismissed by academic theorists, the idea is thereby perpetuated that black culture, as academically defined and studied, is in fact corporate-approved culture, and that there is no necessary non-commercial space for black musical production. (130)

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Porter (2002), by contrast, finds historical evidence for a strong connection between creative music making and a vision to make progressive music meaningful to a wide spectrum of people. He expresses that, “difficult as it was to implement effectively, [this vision] can be understood as a reflection of the Black Arts movement in the jazz community, where making a living went hand in hand with making music relevant” (207). Ajay Heble (2000: 8) writes that: “From its very inception jazz has been about inventiveness, about the process of change [and] that sense of change and inventiveness is most powerfully registered in its cultural forms that accent dissonance and contingency, in music making that explores the sonic possibilities of traditionally outlawed models of practice.” John Gennari (1991: 449) asserts that jazz has served and continues to serve “as a progenitor of new forms, an inventor of new languages, a creator of new ways to express meaning.” And George Lipsitz (1997: 178) argues that jazz and improvised music have offered “cultural, moral, and intellectual guidance to people all over the world.” But Jerome Harris (2000: 122) reminds us that “the movement of jazz onto the global stage is a trend that may be judged to hold some dangers.” Among other things, Harris identifies “the possibility that jazz may lose benefits that derive from cultural closeness between the makers, mediators, and audience—among them, some easy broad consensus about its aesthetic direction.” Referencing Ornette Coleman’s seminal work, Harris concludes that “the shape of jazz to come may differ from that which has come before” (124). Open-form improvisation may best be envisioned as an artistic forum rather than an artistic form; a social and sonic space in which to explore various cooperative and conflicting interactive strategies. It highlights process over product creativity, an engendered sense of uncertainty and discovery, the dialogical nature of real-time interaction, the sensual aspects of performance over abstract intellectual concerns, and a participatory aesthetic over passive reception. Its inherent transience and expressive immediacy even challenge the dominant modes of consumption that have arisen in modern, mass-market economies, as well as the sociopolitical and spiritual efficacy of art in general. Yet improvising music also should remind us that all music takes place within and through social relationships. The increasingly cosmopolitan nature of open-form improvisation does seem to preclude the possibility of a broad consensus. Yet, as musical devices and relationships are negotiated within performances and within communities of improvisers, musicians offer important rhetorical commentary on desirable

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social organization, the politics of representation, the public function of art, and the possibilities for resistance to embedded cultural and historical constructions. By paying attention to the ways in which artists and involved listeners define, document, perform, experience, and evaluate this music, we may gain insight into the process of artistic and cultural innovation and into the processes by which we engage with and participate in the world around us. Nearly all societies and artistic communities have an “avant-garde,” a cultural space in which new ideas may be expressed and explored. As musicians and musical practices continue to work across and between national, cultural, identity, and stylistic categories, improvising music may play a special role in both generating and coping with complexity.

A Marvel of Paradox Joel A. Rogers was one of the first writers to note the marvelous paradox of jazz. Writing in Alain Locke’s 1925 collection The New Negro, Rogers explains: “Jazz is a marvel of paradox: too fundamentally human, at least as modern humanity goes, to be typically racial, too international to be characteristically national, too much abroad in the world to have a special home. And yet jazz in spite of it all is one part American and three parts American Negro, and was originally the nobody’s child of the levee and the city slum.” In his book on jazz of the 1950s and 1960s titled Freedom Is, Freedom Ain’t, Scott Saul nods to the “Black is, black ain’t” sermon delivered in the prologue of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (Ellison 1952). The preacher in Ellison’s novel enters into a cryptic call-and-response with his congregation that foregrounds the strength of African American culture and the futility of race-hardened thinking. As Saul (2003: xiii) puts it: “Black is”: racial identity is irreducibly felt; the basic arrangements of American culture—where you live, what work you find, which communities welcome you, what resources you draw on to build your sense of identity—are structured along lines of race. “Black ain’t”: racial identity is the thinnest of fictions, a cover for power plays and an excuse for political complacency, a hard-and-fast line that moves according to those who have the power to control it, a socially invented check on an individual’s ability to invent him- or herself.

Ellison’s achievement, according to Saul, was to hold on to this tension between the reality and the fiction of race, to refuse to resolve it—and to suggest that

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living with its complexity involved both an act of virtuosity and a commitment to one’s community. Saul translates this insight to the world of music: “Freedom is”: freedom took sound and shape in the jazz performances of the 1950s and 1960s, which were exercises in reconciling liberation and discipline, self-expression and collective achievement. “Freedom ain’t”: the music understood freedom as something embedded in struggle, a hard-won realization rather than a gift with no strings attached. (ibid.: xiv)

To improvise music is to be engaged in this complex balancing act. The music is disciplined and playful; virtuosic and inclusive; abstract and down-to-earth; individualistic and collective; cerebral and uninhibited; complex and simple; incredibly loud and dense and unimaginably soft and sparse. It is unabashedly utopian and surreptitiously skeptical. It is both militant and spiritually aspirational. It is race-affirming and cosmopolitan. As Max Roach’s statement provided earlier implies, it is both timely and timeless (Roach quoted in Taylor [1977] 1993: 112). The music embraces Afrological, Eurological, and increasingly Asialogical approaches and ideas, and much more. As the Art Ensemble remind us, it is music of the ancient past and of the distant future (see Lewis 2008). It has been with us for decades, if not millennia, yet it is always very much of and in the moment. I would like to add my nod to Ellison that we not try to resolve these tensions. The most profound message of the music may be to embrace these marvelous paradoxes. Paul Rinzler (2008), in his book The Contradictions of Jazz, contends that one of the most remarkable aspects of the music is to embrace a form of opposition that he calls “dynamic tension,” in which “not only are both contradictory aspects fully present, but their opposition is not resolved” (xv). More poetically, Graham Lock, in Blutopia (1999), explores the lives and music of Duke Ellington, Sun Ra, and Anthony Braxton and argues that African American expressive culture is predicated on a utopic assertion shaded by a blue dystopic truth. Rather than position these as opposed or antipathetic, Lock shows us that this dual impulse can fuse, forming a crossroads in the creative consciousness that simultaneously encourages us to remember (the blues impulse) and to construct a vision of a better, more just future (the utopian impulse). *** When asked about their aesthetic or musical approach, improvisers frequently champion innovation and newness. Yet these qualities arguably can only be

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heard and understood in relation to a tradition, to lived experience, to the tried and true. Similarly, scholars researching improvisation tend to emphasize the music’s distinctive qualities by separating the fleeting from the fixed, the actual from the ideal, the sensual from the intellectual, the lived from the learned. In other words, the field of improvisation studies appears stuck in a binary rut. Authors and artists celebrate the process over the product, the body instead of the mind, originality and singularity above and beyond repetition and variation. They may champion only referent-based or referent-free improvisation, and refuse to acknowledge the creativity or utility of the other. Some adopt the position from the outset that improvisation is indescribable, that it can’t be taught, that it shouldn’t be theorized. They usually do this, however, as a preamble to describing, teaching, and theorizing the subject, often quite eloquently. Theorizing about improvisational processes always runs the risk of reifying the result, or of remaining centered on the individual, whether the focus is on skill acquisition, mental representations, rule-based procedures, or on a more integrated view of cognitive schema involving the parallel processing of motor memory, auditory imagery, and audio-motor integration. Much of the early modeling of referent-based improvisation by Pressing (1998) and others remained firmly ensconced in an individualistic information-processing paradigm. Scholarship on jazz and improvised music has highlighted the complexity and centrality of communal and interactional dynamics, but our understandings of the social dimensions of improvisational performance still often lag behind. Interestingly, Pressing’s final writing on the subject (Pressing 2002) took a more ecological turn: highlighting how the mind, body, and environment are all part of an interacting dynamical system. When viewed ecologically, cognition is best understood as a process co-constituted by the cognizing agent, the environment in which cognition occurs, and the activity in which the agent is participating: action, perception, and world are entangled. In this light, improvisation may be seen as a cybernetic process, without a defined start, finish, or discrete steps. It is a how, not a what. And in this how, the improviser and the environment coevolve; they are nonlinearly coupled and together they constitute a non-decomposable system. Improvisers engage with the world and with one another in ways that cannot be fully captured by an individual- or brain-centric understanding of cognition. The brain of an improviser is, ecologically speaking, always-and-already in a body and in a niche of musical activity. Instead of having to represent or

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interpret a musical model or shared referent, improvisers “bring forth” a musical world from recurrent sensorimotor patterns and actions. “Knowledge” does not emerge from passive perception, or from the analytical study of an agreed-upon referent; it emerges from the need to act in an environment. The burden of improvised performance, in this way, shifts from storing and recalling information to detecting it, in the form of ecological invariants and affordances. In place of a computational model of mind—one that stresses the constraints of our cognitive abilities—an ecological one only requires that individuals follow the need to act in their environment, that they orient their actions so as to make the world appear—or sound—a certain way now. Cognitively speaking, this solution is efficient and cheap, and it produces reliable results under a wide variety of conditions (which helps to explain how seasoned improvisers can so reliably sound great, despite the inherent precarity of the situation). Whether referent-based or referent-free, improvisation appears to involve a continual tension between stabilization through communication and past experience, and instability through fluctuations and surprise. This is likely a dynamic of all creativity in the arts and in life. The critical questions, however, involve how we choose to frame this dynamic; either as an informationprocessing system that struggles to keep pace with the cognitive demands of the moment, producing a type of ‘imperfect’ art; or, as an ecologically sensitive engagement with one’s sonic and social world. The remainder of this book will follow the latter path.

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Strange Loops

A particular joy of improvising music is not knowing precisely the relationship between one’s thoughts and one’s actions (one has to surprise oneself, after all) and, in ensemble settings, between one’s actions and the actions of other improvisers (did you do that because I did that, or did I do that because you did that?). Improvising in electro-acoustic situations can heighten the joy (by extending one’s musical resources and horizons) and the complexity (by introducing additional technological actors and agency) of an already puzzling situation. Kent De Spain (2014: 29) describes the complex sense of agency involved in improvised performance rather succinctly: “There are things that we do, things that are happening that we feel we are a part of, and things that feel like they happen to us.” Given this keen observation we might ask: how and where are we to locate the “we” in all of this? Language betrays us in these moments. Grammatical conventions require distinguishing subjects from objects, and actions from perceptions and effects. But musical improvisation can create a feeling in which one’s physical and psychic systems relate to the sonic and social environment without the mediation of verbal language or the abstractions of representation. Musical improvisers often have a very visceral sense that their playing is interwoven into and inseparable from the physical space and social place in which it occurs, and that it only takes on meaning in the context of what has occurred, what is occurring, and what may occur next. Given this observation, we might also ask: how and where “we” should locate what we “do” in all of this? This chapter invokes Douglas Hofstadter’s (2007) notion of strange loops in an attempt to address the shortcomings of a linear “sense–model–act” conception of musical improvisation, and more broadly of cognition and agency. Hofstadter, best known for his ground-breaking book Gödel, Escher, Bach (1979), describes a strange loop as a paradoxical level-crossing feedback loop—a “tangled heterarchy”—in which there is no well-defined highest or lowest level: moving through the levels, one eventually arrives at the starting point.

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Are there more appropriate ways than the standard information-processing account to characterize the nature of the relationship between an improviser, their instrument(s), their actions, and their environment? Why has the creative role of the body and the environment been neglected in the music academy and conservatory? How might we approach the relation between the lived (or subject) body and the living (or object) body (essentially reformulating the “mind–body” problem as a “body–body problem”)? To address these and other questions, I turn to contemporary approaches in cognitive science, often described under the moniker “4E,” that approach the mind as embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended. In tandem, I introduce the theory of predictive processing, which, while more brain-based, supports a 4E view of cognition, since prediction is intimately coupled to perception, cognition, and action, all of which are different ways of actively engaging the world. Along the way, I offer a detailed investigation of the performance practice and aesthetics of improvising saxophonist Evan Parker, and discuss brief performance examples of Sam Newsome and Shabaka Hutchings. The next chapter looks closer at the complex dynamics of open-form ensemble improvisation and explores the work of the Sam Rivers Trio in particular. Many of the themes developed in these two chapters are taken up again in the final chapter, which champions a pedagogy of improvisation that takes account of its embodied, situated, and distributed nature.

The Embodied Mind Cognition depends on the kinds of experiences that come from having a body with particular perceptual and motor capacities that are inseparably linked and that together form the matrix within which memory, emotion, language, and all other aspects of life are meshed. The contemporary notion of embodied cognition stands in stark contrast to the prevailing cognitivist stance which sees the mind as a device to manipulate symbols and is thus concerned with the formal rules and processes by which the symbols appropriately represent the world. (Esther Thelen et al. 2003: xx)

Embodied views of cognition share a core belief that bodily experiential knowledge is the foundation upon which all new knowledge is built. More

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precisely, this view holds that human motor, sensory, and conceptual processes have coevolved with each other and with their environment such that they are inextricably linked. Views of embodied cognition emerged in part as a reaction to cognitivism, which adopted a head-bound, computational, information-processing, and representational paradigm that tended to model cognition as a kind of passive or disinterested contemplation with no connection to action. Emerging in the middle of the twentieth century, cognitivist views identified mind with computation, and the brain as the hardware on which it runs. For instance, teaching a computer to play chess—a two-player, zero-sum, perfect information board game comprising a formal system involving discrete tokens and rules for manipulating them—was considered at the time to be the pinnacle of modeling human intelligence in a computational system.1 Things have changed considerably since that time. The analytical tradition in Anglo-American and European philosophy also proceeded on the assumption that the body was not terribly important to the workings of the mind, beyond securing perceptual inputs to our conceptual systems and knowledge structures. What interested these philosophers, instead, was a disembodied view of language, concepts, logic, reason, knowledge, and truth. Approaches as different as rationalism, objectivism, realism, positivism, and structuralism, all share this dualistic and, therefore, disembodied perspective. By contrast, the American pragmatist school of philosophers, including John Dewey, William James, and C. S. Peirce, rejected all forms of absolutism and instead explored how organism–environment interactions generate meaningful experience. Their work, and especially that of Dewey, represents an early model for and contribution to the paradigm of embodied and enactive cognition. The phenomenological tradition of Edmund Husserl (1964) and his students has also contributed greatly to this emerging paradigm and to the growing field of neurophenomenology. These insights are explored in Chapter 4. The emerging 4E approach to cognition acknowledges, in varying ways, the important role that the body, emotions, and social and material factors play in how we think (see Johnson 1987, 2017). According to Kevin Ryan and Andrea Schiavio, the 4E view insists that cognition: (1) cannot be taken as separate from

“Perfect information” means that all positions for each player are equally visible: the entire game at each step of play is perfectly visible to each player, and “zero-sum” means that player A’s successful move is to player B’s detriment (a good move for A is a bad consequence for B). 1

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particular facts of the bodies we have (its embodied nature); (2) is scaffolded by the environment (its embedded nature); (3) is geared toward action in the world with a continuum between life and mind (its enactive nature); and (4) extends outside the skull–skin boundary to loop into the world (its extended nature). There is considerable debate among researchers with this general orientation if all 4Es are necessary, or if more than 4Es are required (see Stephan 2020 and Hutto and Myin 2012). However, there is broad agreement that cognition comprises (in some fashion) its embodied, situated, and distributed worldly engagements. A growing number of music scholars have adopted some variant of this 4E perspective as well (and the first edition of this book was among the earliest examples of this trend). Notable researchers include Wayne Bowman (2004), Eric Clarke (2011), Jonathan De Souza (2017), Bennett Hogg (2011), Vijay Iyer (2002), Joel Krueger (2011), Steve Larson (2012), Marc Leman (2007), Juan Loaiza (2016), Mark Reybrouck (2012), Andrea Schiavio (2018), Dylan van der Schyff (2018), Jonathan De Souza (2017), W. Luke Windsor (2012), and Lawrence Zbikowski (2002). Many artists and instrument-designers also begin from this foundational perspective, such as Adam Pultz Melbye, Paul Stapleton, and Simon Waters, among many others. Taken together, their work offers an important corrective to the head-bound orientation of much conventional music research (in music theory, analysis, composition, psychology, and more). Traditionally, these fields have assumed a “passive” stance toward musical reception and a “disembodied” one toward creativity. They have also, on the whole, treated music as if it were primarily a closed, self-contained, near-equilibrium system (historical approaches to music studies, prior to the 1980s or so, also tended to make many of the same tacit assumptions). In contrast, I argue that we are best served by approaching music and mind as open and far-from-equilibrium systems that are embodied, situated, and distributed. Wayne Bowman (2004: 43) notes: “When we hear a musical performance, we do not just ‘think,’ nor do we just ‘hear’: we participate with our whole bodies; we construct and enact it.” Bowman goes on to generate an impressive list of bodily constituted musical “properties” such as “tension and release; dissonance and consonance; volume and balance; accent, meter and syncopation; tonal center and modulation; texture and density; line and phrase; height and depth; advancement and recession; vital drive and groove; movement and gesture— to say nothing of the immense range of so-called expressive attributes like

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seriousness, whimsy, playfulness, tenderness, or violence.” “It is the body’s presence in each of these, and their consequently intimate links to personal and collective identity,” Bowman insists, “that account for music’s remarkable capacity to affirm or offend, to confront or console, and that account for the fact that people are seldom diffident about their musical preferences” (ibid.). In contrast to cognitivist theories, embodied accounts construe mind as an activity emergent from, structured by, and never wholly separable from the material facts of bodily experience. And because bodies are always both physically and contextually situated, theories of embodiment insist on biological, psychological, and cultural dimensions for all human cognition. As Bowman succinctly writes: “The body is minded, the mind is embodied, and both body and mind are culturally mediated” (ibid.).

Enaction and Prediction The 4E approach to cognition challenges several assumptions of cognitivism, such as the idea that we inherit a world outside of ourselves with definite physical properties, that we engage with this world through internal representations and information processing, and that “we” do so from a pre-given and undivided sense of self. In their place, cognition is understood as the “bringing forth” of a world and a conception of self that is inseparable from an organism’s biology and its history of interactions and lived experience. Summarizing this perspective, Evan Thompson, a coauthor along with Eleanor Rosch and Francisco Varela of the influential text The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (Varela, Thompson and Rosch [1991] 2016), writes: “Biology and cognitive science were arriving at the same idea—that human cognition is not the grasping of an independent, outside world by a separate mind or self, but instead the bringing forth or enacting of a dependent world of relevance in and through embodied action” (xviii). Unlike passive accounts of cognition that present an input-dominated view of the flow of neural processing, an emerging research area called predictive processing insists that minds evolved by constantly anticipating sensory perturbations and acting upon them predictively. The mind, in this view, continually weighs top-down expectations with bottom-up sensory perturbations, trying to sensitively minimize the divergences between the two.

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In the predictive processing view, perceptual processes are not passive and bottom-up, they are constructive. In other words, perception is actively driven by top-down processes. Summarizing this view in a recent review article titled “Predictive Processes and the Peculiar Case of Music,” Stefan Koelsch (2019) and his coauthors write that “cognitive processes on the one hand (e.g., prediction, planning, action, learning, and the like), and perceptual processes on the other, are not serial or separable, but intertwined in a hierarchical cascade of prediction error reducing dynamics” (69). In the predictive processing view, it is the sensed deviations from predicted states, and not the raw input itself, that inform what is salient in the environment and in our own experiences. Expectation and context do not merely contribute to or modulate sensory input; they are central to processing at every stage. Philosopher Andy Clark, in his book Surfing Uncertainty (2015), argues that predictive processing presents a very “frugal” answer to the problems of cognition and consciousness. He makes a comparison with video compression, where bandwidth is conserved through algorithms that need only send information about what has changed from one frame to the next. If something is moving against a static background, for instance, there is no need to continue to send the information about the static background. Analogously, predictive processing conserves neural “bandwidth” by focusing on error signals that are produced when deviations from expectation occur, and not by producing resource-intensive “representations” of reality. Current understandings of how the neocortex works support this general notion. There appear to be approximately ten times more feedback connections from so-called higher areas of the neocortex to the “lower” sensory areas than there are feedforward connections (Hawkins and Blakeslee 2004: 25). This suggests that the neocortex is continually learning sensory patterns (likely in an implicit or statistical manner) in order to be able to predict sensory perturbations and to act upon them in an anticipatory fashion. Jeff Hawkins’s (2021) “a thousand brains” theory suggests that cortical columns attach “reference frames” to both objects in the world and abstract concepts. These reference frames enable your brain to understand where it is in the world and to navigate and make sense of it. Hawkins insists that there is no central control room in our brains; rather, our perception is a consensus reached by the columns through a process he calls “voting.” Within the neurons of each column, predictions are made, and depending how successful their predictions are, the columns collectively decide upon a version of events.

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Andy Clark’s theory also suggests that attention involves a process of varying the precision of the weighting between top-down predictions and bottom-up sensory information according to task and context. For instance, if in a given circumstance one sensory modality is more reliable than the others, predictions based on that modality may outweigh other predictions. The McGurk effect is a well-known example of this kind of weighted multimodal integration. When presented with the same audio but differing video images of a speaker’s lip motions, listeners will hear different initial consonant sounds, such as a difference between “baa” and “faa.”2 Contemporary research suggests that we acquire language, including phonology, morphology, orthography, vocabulary, grammar, and reading skills, primarily through implicit forms of associative and statistical learning; essentially through exposure and by making repeated predictions. As we read sentences, we are always anticipating what word might come _____. And as we listen to speakers, we anticipate the next word that will come out of their _____. The real surprise to our brain—and therefore a moment in which to dedicate additional resources in order to revise our predictions and “learn”—would be if those two blanks were filled in by words other than “next” and “mouth.” Many of our sensory experiences also appear to be far more sparse, ambiguous, and incomplete than we previously imagined. In his book Mind Is Flat: The Remarkable Shallowness of the Improvising Brain, Nick Chater (2018) highlights how instead of seeing a full and detailed visual scene, as our intuitive notion of vision might suggest, our fovea darts about, picking up very small areas of detailed and colorful information about the world, while the rest of our visual field is an inchoate, colorless blur. We usually have the sense of a detailed and encompassing visual field, but this is, in essence, an illusion. In reality, we are never taking in more than small chunks of detail at a time. This makes perfect sense from the perspective of ecological psychology and “frugal” predictive processing, since we can rely on the relative stability of the world and rapidly retrieve any specific information we might need in an imperceptible flash. Studies of reading ability using gaze-contingent eye tracking—a system that produces a “window” of meaningful text that follows your eye as it jumps around—demonstrate that when we read, we are only ever seeing about 12–15 characters of text. In these experiments, the rest of our visual field—outside

youtube.com/watch?v=G-lN8vWm3m0 (accessed September 13, 2021). 2

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of that small window—can be filled with arbitrary characters and yet we still imagine ourselves to be “seeing” whole pagefuls of text. In related experiments that use retinal stabilization—presenting the eye with a constant still image that it cannot escape—within a few seconds the image fades from “view,” leaving the perception of a uniform gray visual field. The brain may try to re-engage with the image at various moments, but if it remains unchanged, our vision will again fade to gray. “Our whirring imagination,” Chater writes, “is continually straining to find new material onto which an interpretation can be imposed” (48). In the absence of new material, we appear to conserve our body budget. Ultimately, Chater concludes that the mind-as-mirror-of-reality metaphor can’t possibly be right. In its place, he insists that “our brain is an incomparable improviser: an engine for spontaneously finding meaning and choosing actions that make the best sense in the moment” (10). The predictive processing view of musical listening suggests a similar conclusion to the language and vision scenarios presented above. Just as we attend to language by continually predicting what the next word might be, we attend to music by continually predicting what the next sound might be. In both cases, we predict in terms of how we might generate the action ourselves. In addition to predicting the “content” of what to expect (so-called first order predictions), we also predict the “context” of our prediction (a “second-order” prediction). In other words, we predict the predictability of our predictions (also called their “precision”). When we are less certain of our prediction of an unfolding event (it has low precision and high entropy), then the eventual act resolves more uncertainty about what it could have been, leading us to apply more attention to the moment of that “resolution.” An interesting aspect of this predictive arrangement is that an unpredicted stimulus may be surprising in terms of its content but not in terms of the context; a stimulus can be predictably unpredictable (Koelsch et al. 2019: 68). Clearly accounting for all of the complexity of top-down predictions involving auditory, sensory, long-term, and working memory, and both schematic and veridical knowledge of a musical tradition or performance, is a daunting task. My hunch is that similar to vision, we are only ever “taking in” small chunks of our auditory environment, although we may have the (illusory) sense that we are hearing a full and detailed auditory scene. Albert Bregman’s (1990) pioneering work in auditory stream analysis suggests that we are automatically

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segregating our auditory experience into “streams” defined by spectral/temporal characteristics that may correspond to potential environmental sources. Attention can sharpen stream segregation, and those sounds that violate our expectations or predictions are those that tend to capture our attention and inspire a more focused listening. But evidence suggests that we likely attend to no more than three streams at once (see Schuett 2010). In other words, we are not aware of all that we could potentially hear in our environment (although we may be able to “keep track of ” significantly more auditory sources in our environment, especially in moments of “deep listening”). As with vision, we can actively direct our auditory attention. While listening to music, for instance, this allows us to attend to specific details, and, on rehearing, to attend to new details (either through repetition within the music itself or through the repetition of repeated exposure). With each new exposure, our predictions improve. But we must dispense with the notion that, as listeners, we somehow take it all in. Neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett’s Seven and a Half Lessons about the Brain (2021) debunks other outdated notions of our brains and how they operate, offering her own support for the predictive processing hypothesis. In Barrett’s view, the brain did not evolve for thinking. Its primary role is allostasis, the scientific term for predicting and preparing to meet the body’s needs before they arise (Barrett often refers to this more colloquially as “body budgeting”). Biologically speaking, prediction beats reaction; those brains that predict correctly most of the time, or that make non-fatal mistakes and subsequently revise their predictions, thrive. Of course, our brains do “think and feel and imagine and create hundreds of other experiences,” Barrett clarifies, “but all of these mental capacities are consequences of a central mission to keep you alive and well by managing your body budget” (11). In the theory of predictive processing, the brain relies on previous experiences and past actions that we took at other times in similar circumstances to draw together, in some combination, what is out there in the world and what we construct in our heads. In other words, the brain is reconstructing/reassembling information that was useful in the past to construct/predict what you are experience now, to allow you to successfully operate in the present, and to prepare you for what might be expected to follow. “Neuroscientists like to say that your day-to-day experience is a carefully controlled hallucination,” Barrett explains, “constrained by the world and your body but ultimately constructed by your brain” (71).

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If the idea of a constrained hallucination is somehow off-putting, a more appealing notion might be “affordance-based skilled coping,” a turn of phrase borrowed from philosopher Shaun Gallagher that was presented in the introduction to this book. The world provides us with invariant information— what J. J. Gibson (1966: 201) calls “non-change that persists during change,” such as texture gradients or a visible horizon line—and our engagements with the world create a history of affordance relationships (both material and social, both perceived and not). Using this worldly and experiential information, our mind (understood as a co-arising of brain–body–world) becomes a skilled improviser.

Taking the Note for a Walk The thing I always come back to is Paul Klee’s description of drawing—taking a line for a walk. I think of solo saxophone as taking a note for a walk. And we’ll see afterwards where we went rather than me leading you round a path I know well. —Evan Parker Born in Bristol, England, on April 5, 1944, Evan Parker has established himself as one of the leading saxophonists working with open-form improvisation. His early musical influences, however, were very much in line with those of other English youth growing up in the fifties. A fascination with pop and skiffle music, especially by the singer Lonnie Donegan, gradually inspired Parker to investigate the roots of these musics in the American blues and jazz traditions. Although only a limited number of records were available at the time in England, Parker began to digest the music of Leadbelly, Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee, Louis Armstrong, Dave Brubeck, and Paul Desmond. Parker started his saxophone studies on alto at the age of fourteen, strongly influenced by the velvet sonorities of Desmond’s playing on that horn, but soon switched to tenor and soprano after hearing the music of John Coltrane for the first time. Since Parker’s father worked for the airline industry, he was able to get free flights to New York City in 1961 and 1962 and had the opportunity to hear many jazz musicians in person, including Cecil Taylor and his newly formed unit with Sonny Murray and Jimmy Lyons. From Cecil Taylor (and saxophonist

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Eric Dolphy), Parker claims to have inherited a sense of wide interval playing that moves away from clearly ascending and descending phrase structures. Parker was equally impressed by the explosive saxophone styles being developed by Archie Shepp, Steve Lacy, Albert Ayler, Pharaoh Sanders, and John Tchicai. He explains: In the case of Albert it was to do with his access to the altissimo register, control of the overtones, in the case of Pharaoh, it was to do with his articulation, a certain kind of double and triple tonguing. And in Tchicai’s case, to do with his way of floating over what was already a non-metric pulse, on those New York Art Quartet records … I thought I could achieve … not exactly a synthesis, but I could work my way through the gaps that were left between what those people were doing. (quoted in Lock 1991: 33)

Parker’s early influences also extended beyond the world of jazz: Listening to the drum music from various African cultures on records, especially the wonderful work published by Ocora and thinking about polyrhythms I started to work on patterns of fingerings in which the left and right hands worked in different superimposed rhythms. To some extent, this overlapped with work on broken air columns (so-called cross-fingerings) and thoughts on how to apply the fundamentals of [twentieth-century Italian composer Bruno] Bartolozzi’s pioneering work New Sounds for Woodwind to the saxophone. At a certain point I had a flash of insight the force of which I still find difficult to communicate: that the saxophone can just as well be seen as a closed tube that can be opened in various ways as an open tube that can be closed in various ways. Although this thought may sound obvious I suspect it has been one of the most important keys to my development. (Parker 1992: n.p.)

Parker’s primary “extended” saxophone devices include split tones and multiphonics produced by intricate cross-fingerings or “venting” the instrument in different places along the tube; exaggerated articulations including rapid and multiple tonguing effects and slapping and popping techniques; and polyrhythmic fingering patterns that often produce highly angular and complex linear shapes and subtle microtonal variations of pitch. Following his truncated undergraduate studies at Birmingham University in botany, Parker moved to London and, in late 1966, began playing nightly alongside many of the UK’s “first generation” open-form improvisers at the Little Theatre Club, eventually coalescing into the Spontaneous Music Ensemble. English musicians with whom Parker has collaborated over the years include

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John Stevens, Derek Bailey, Trevor Watts, Dave Holland, Tony Oxley, Kenny Wheeler, Keith Rowe, Paul Lytton, Barry Guy, John Edwards, and Mark Sanders, among others. Parker has also collaborated with the English electronic drumn-bass duo Spring Heel Jack (Ashley Wales and John Coxon) and with many of the South African musicians who fled Apartheid to live in the UK, including drummer Louis Moholo and pianist Chris McGregor’s Brotherhood of Breath. Outside of the UK, Parker has cultivated associations with Peter Brötzman, Alexander Von Schlippenbach, Paul Lovens, Irène Schweizer, Sainkho Namtchylak, Philipp Wachsmann, George Lewis, Anthony Braxton, Steve Lacy, Ned Rothenberg, Paul Bley, Peter Evans, and many others. Beginning in 1990, Parker established his multinational Electro-Acoustic Ensemble and increased his collaborations with artists using electronic sampling and processing techniques, including Joel Ryan, Lawrence Casserley, Ikue Mori, Philipp Wachsmann, Walter Prati, Mario Vecchi, Richard Barrett, Paul Obermayer, Sam Pluta, and Matthew Wright, among others. Despite his continuing interest in collective improvisation and his fascinating range of musical collaborators, Parker is perhaps best known for creating a distinctive solo saxophone language. His use of circular breathing, overtone manipulation, multiphonics, polyrhythmic fingerings, and various slap and multiple tonguing techniques (involving an up/down motion rather than the more traditional throat attack) allow him to form complex, overlapping patterns of sound that are both highly virtuosic and serenely beautiful. He states: My evolution in solo playing has been to exploit technical possibilities and acoustic possibilities unique to the solo situation. When you have all the space to fill, you can listen more closely to the specific resonances in the room, to the specific interaction with the acoustic, to the overtone components in the sound—the harmonic components in any one note become more audible. The temptation to fragment individual tones into their harmonic components becomes very attractive because you can hear yourself that much more closely; you can hear the detail of what’s happening in any one sound. (quoted in Lock 1991: 33)

Evan Parker’s solo saxophone recordings now number in the double digits, starting with the album Saxophone Solos (1975) and followed by Monoceros (1978), The Snake Decides (1986), Conic Sections (1989), Process and Reality (1991), Lines Burnt in Light (2001), Whistable Solo (2008), and Work in Progress (2019), among others. With Chicago Solos (1995), Parker released his first album

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Figure 3.1  Evan Parker (photo by Caroline Forbes)

of solo tenor saxophone playing. Starting in the 1990s, Parker has also released several examples of his solo saxophone playing with live computer processing, including Hall of Mirrors (1990), Solar Wind (1997), and Trance Map (2011). The album Time Lapse (2006) involves Parker overdubbing solo saxophone improvisations. Since his first foray into the relatively uncharted territory of solo saxophone performance—Coleman Hawkins’s Picasso (1948) and Anthony Braxton’s double LP For Alto (1969) were pioneering examples in this format—Parker’s style, technique, and aesthetics have changed considerably, yet a certain fundamental approach remains, along with a very personal sound and relationship to the instrument. In describing his solo approach, Parker has spoken of a desire to create the “illusion of polyphony” on a monophonic instrument. He is able to accomplish this by combining circular breathing with a penchant for rapid, wide interval

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leaps and the ability to sustain a low tone while articulating selected overtones, or its reverse, sustaining an overtone while interjecting low notes. Parker first explored circular breathing after encountering it in the work of saxophonist Roland Kirk and ethnographic recordings of traditional music from Africa and the Middle East. He refined this technique in response to the extended duration sounds of amplified strings and controlled feedback being exploited by his colleagues Derek Bailey and Hugh Davies in the Music Improvisation Company in the early 1970s. Exploiting the continuous airstream made possible through circular breathing, Parker began to develop techniques that combine complex patterns of his fingers, tongue, larynx shape, and air column. The resulting sound has an undeniable physical quality to it, but much of what Parker is doing with the saxophone is concealed from view. Researchers interested in music cognition have proposed a plausible relationship between bodily motions and musical correlates that would seem to be bypassed by Parker’s solo approach. For example, the standard phrase length in music appears to correspond with the dynamic swells associated with breathing or the gradual sway of the body or a limb. The musical beat (particularly of dance-based musics) may correspond to the frequency range of our heartbeat (as the musical term implies), or to the rate of walking, sucking, chewing, head nodding, and sexual intercourse. Subdivisions of the pulse, perhaps at the level of the individual note, seem to correspond to the speed of speech patterns or hand gestures. And microtiming deviations such as grace notes or temporal asynchronies may correspond with rapid flams between fingers or limbs, or to the rate of delivery of individual phonemes in speech. Parker’s solo music seems to deny these first two levels of musical and bodily correlates. His lengthy passages using circular breathing extend well beyond the natural limits of the breath, and his sense of pulse often avoids any obvious connections to the recurring patterns of walking or of the circulatory system. On the level of subdivided pulse, Parker’s rapid, angular, and “polyphonic” structures seem less akin to the pace and design of regular speech than to glossolalia, or other forms of heightened speech. Expressive microtiming certainly plays an important role in Parker’s music, but the literature on this phenomenon tends to focus on groove-based music. The expressive divergence from a shared pulse in these genres would seem to offer little correlation to the more abstract qualities of Parker’s playing. To what, then, might Parker’s music be oriented, if not to these standard notions of bodily correlates?

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On closer listening, in the midst of an extended passage made possible by circular breathing, Parker does tend to introduce a new layer or element at roughly the same interval as a standard phrase. And his repeating-but-notrepetitive patterning seems to cycle at roughly the rate of a medium tempo pulse or beat, though rarely in such an orderly or predictable fashion. By expanding the natural range, timbre, and traditional connection between tongue and fingers, Parker’s music may convey a heightened meaning or immediacy to listeners through embodied metaphors, just as distorting the human voice or overdriving electronic equipment often do (see Walser 1991). His polyphonic approach also allows him to circumvent obvious ascending and descending phrases in a way that challenges the dominant conceptual mapping (derived from notated music) of pitch relationships as relationships in vertical space. It might even be the case that Parker’s use of circular breathing expresses to listeners hyperextension on a biological level, appearing as it does to bypass the human need for oxygen. Ethnomusicologist Ali Jihad Racy (1994) has noted that in the Arab world, the technique of circular breathing connotes a certain mystique and is often an important factor in triggering states of elation and psychological transformation. If you have not experienced Evan Parker’s solo soprano saxophone playing, I recommend watching the video of his 2001 performance at Saint Michael and All Angels Church in Chiswick, London, which was included in the film “Blocks Of Consciousness And The Unbroken Continuum”3 and is available on YouTube. Recordings from this same church also comprise Parker’s CD Lines Burnt in Light (2002). The video initially frames Parker beginning his performance while standing in the sanctuary of the church. But as the improvisation takes flight, and his extended and uninterrupted explorations unfold, the camera slowly zooms in on his upper body, then his mouth and hands embracing the saxophone, and eventually we see just his bearded checks expanding and compressing like the bellows of a bagpipe. This visual intimacy dramatizes the physicality of his performance and its potentially dissociative qualities. Only near the end of the near-thirteen-minute performance does the camera finally zoom out to a more socially acceptable distance as his improvised lines unravel and return to the more conventional range and timbre of the saxophone.

https://youtu.be/tTRy6TKKtTQ (accessed September 19, 2021). 3

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Reflecting on these performances, Parker recalls that the church “had very special acoustic properties” (quoted in Fazzini 2021): “It was as though by directing the instrument towards different spots on the complex boundaries,” he explains, “I felt I could leave a particular pitch ringing on while, by a new orientation, I could move on to find another niche and in the course of the music build up a mental map of the space in a way analogous to the use of architectural space in the Memory Theaters of antiquity described by Frances Yates.” “Of course the results were only partially captured in the stereo recording,” he notes demurely.

It’s a Bit Like Juggling Describing his solo saxophone approach, Parker adopts a telling embodied metaphor that captures the skill, challenge, and risk inherent to the activity, and highlights how it may not conform to rationalized discourse or explanation: It’s a bit like juggling … You have to do the easier tricks first: get into the rhythm and suddenly your body is able to do things which you couldn’t do cold. The best bits of my solo playing, for me, I can’t explain to myself. Certainly I wouldn’t know how to go straight to them cold. The circular breathing is a way of starting the engine, but at a certain speed all kinds of things happen which I’m not consciously controlling. They just come out. It’s as though the instrument comes alive and starts to have a voice of its own. (quoted in Lock 1991: 33)

This passage is replete with implications for a theory of musical embodiment. Juggling, or more simply balancing objects in gravity, is a physical sensation we are all familiar with. The delicate skills and inherent risk involved with the venture can be appreciated on a biological level. But juggling, as philosopher Mark Johnson (1987) might point out, has also been metaphorically extended from the biological into the conceptual domain: “juggling” options, careers, or responsibilities. Cross-domain mappings have a cultural dimension as well. For instance, risk-taking might be frowned upon in certain societies while in others it is seen as an indispensable tool for survival and success. In Johnson’s theory, cross-domain mappings do not simply “represent” one domain in terms of another. They are grounded in our bodily experiences and perceptions and create precise, inference-preserving mappings between the structures of both domains. Our verbal and conceptual imagination, according to

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Johnson, originates in bodily and kinesthetic experiences that are metaphorically extended to give structure to a wide variety of cognitive domains. Cognition, in this view, emerges from basic forms of sensorimotor activity and interaction, providing a preconceptual structure to our experience (see Johnson 1987, 2017). For instance, our physical interaction with a container’s interior, boundary, and exterior give structure metaphorically to our conceptualizations of the visual world (things go in and out of sight) and personal relationships (one gets into and out of a relationship). Container schemata also appear to structure many of our understandings in the musical domain, including when one speaks of playing “inside” or “outside” of the harmony, rhythm, or form of a tune (jazz musicians also frequently speak of “taking it out” when playing in ways unconstrained by conventional harmony; or a particularly tight rhythmic moment might be described as playing “in the pocket” or “in the groove”). Container schemata may also illuminate (another conceptual metaphor, here between light/vision and knowledge) our tendency to place musical practices into genre “boxes,” a practice that can circumscribe creativity and also exclude creators who may not fit the expected racial, gender, or other norms presumed for a given genre. In Johnson’s theory, the mental operations that we perform to work through a problem or situation have analogs to spatial manipulation, orientation, and movement. Returning to Parker’s juggling metaphor, we might explore how attempting to juggle or balance an object in gravity requires clear effort and intentionality but exerting too much conscious control—thinking too hard about the task at hand—can also lead to continual corrections that eventually upset the delicate system. “If I start to think, ‘how many lines have I got going at this point?’ ” Parker explains, “then I couldn’t do it.” “It’s like if a centipede asked itself how it could walk it couldn’t do it … I have to take things to a certain point and get things happening and then they work best on their own” (quoted in Scott 1987). Juggling also highlights that, in order for the system to achieve and maintain its organizational complexity—its constancy—there must be a continual flow of energy and matter and an undercurrent of insecurity. As more items may be added to the “trick,” the organizational complexity of the system, and the resulting feelings of both awe and anxiety can be multiplied exponentially. When witnessing a juggler at the peak of their performance, one can focus on the virtuosic-yet-patterned motions of the performer tossing and catching items in succession—and likely empathize with the long-term unsustainability

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of the task—but the items in flight and the entire system tend to take on a life of their own. The specific associations and feelings that are evoked in individuals by the embodied qualities of performance will of course be based on personal and encultured sensibilities. Some might wish to turn their head away in fear, unable to watch. Others may revel in the system’s remarkable dynamical qualities. Still others may secretly hope for an embarrassing collapse. Last, juggling can bring to light a whole host of personal memories or recollections that have less to do with the actual event than with the lived history of the audience members. Maybe you had a juggler at your eighth birthday party, for instance. Listening to Evan Parker’s solo saxophone flights can inspire an equally wide range of responses. Music is mediated by our experiences of our bodies and our interactions with the material world, just as our bodily and lived experiences are mediated by music, language, and other aspects of culture. Or put more simply, music mediates bodies and bodies mediate music.

Lived Body and Living Body As we reconceptualize the mind away from the disembodied views of Cartesian materialism, the traditional mind–body problem can be recast as a body–body problem. Philosopher Thomas Fuchs (2020) articulates this as the dual aspect of the lived (or subject) body and the living (or object) body. The lived body refers to one’s body as subjectively lived; the living body refers to one’s body as a living organism. Edmund Husserl (1989) highlighted this dual aspect through the example of double touch; as one’s right hand touches the left, the left can be perceived, through a subtle change of attention, as either an object offering resistance to the right, or as a feeling hand, sensing the touch of the right. In everyday life, we shift between the perspective of the living body and the lived body, usually without realizing it. In Chapter 2, I illustrated the duality of lived and living body by reference to the “Black is, black ain’t” sermon delivered in the prologue of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952). Racial identity, in this formulation, is both irreducibly felt (the lived body) and the thinnest of fictions (the living body). Fuchs ultimately argues that processes of living and processes of experiencing (in German: Leben and Erleben) are complementary yet irreducible and

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mutually concealing aspects of the living being, like two sides of a coin. “Only the living being as a whole,” he writes, “may be regarded as the proper subject of feeling, thinking, speaking, acting, and so forth” (2). In order to grasp the embodied mind, Fuchs insists that “we have to extend the narrow focus taken by neuroscience on the brain and take instead a wider view.” Some of the more brain-centric predictive processing theories do leave unaddressed the question of whether and how we may attribute a more than epiphenomenal role to bodily subjectivity. Fuchs addresses the body–body problem through the concept of circularity. He highlights that there are two interrelated feedback cycles that form the basis of the embodied mind: cycles of organismic self-regulation, and cycles of sensorimotor coupling between organism and environment. The former results in an “interoceptive loop” that engenders a basic bodily sense of self and corresponds to a basic bodily self-affection or a minimal form of subjectivity (the feeling of being alive). The latter comprises an “ecological self.” The circularity of this arrangement is apparent, according to Fuchs, in how sensorimotor coupling between organism and environment (the “ecological self ”) is deeply rooted in the organism’s internal self-regulation. In phenomenological terms, the subject’s “being toward the world” is grounded on its bodily selfawareness. Processes of life and processes of mind are inseparably linked. Fuchs describes the relationship between brain and body as a continuous “resonant loop” that integrates the present state of the organism as a whole, adamantly avoiding any notion of representationalism. “Within such a looped circuit or functional fusion,” Fuchs writes, “there is neither place nor time for a separate representation.” “There is no component within the circuit that represents another one, in the sense that it could stand for it while it is absent,” (4) he explains. I contributed an essay to the edited volume Negotiated Moments (edited by Gillian Siddall and Ellen Waterman) that frames this nested circular arrangement of cycles of organismic self-regulation and cycles of sensorimotor coupling between organisms and environment as a type of “openness from closure” (Borgo 2016a). This perhaps perplexing phrase, borrowed from second-order or neo-cybernetics, suggests that a system is open to its environment in proportion to the complexity of its closure. In other words, we bring to every situation a pre-existing orientation, a type of psychic closure (a viewpoint that, I believe, is in line with both enactive cognition and predictive processing). This pre-existing orientation allows us to become

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further entangled in our various communicative environments (by refining our predictions). Systems increase their internal complexity by recursively compensating for external perturbations or irritations, and this recursive psychic organization establishes the environment in which new perturbations can be recognized and accommodated. Summarizing this view, Bruce Clarke and Mark B. N. Hansen write in their book Emergence and Embodiment: New Essays on Second-Order Systems Theory (2009: 37) that our “environmental entanglement correlates with organismic (or systemic) self-regulation.” It is crucial here to remember that the enactive approach to cognition regards perception as a process of active sense-making, and that sense-making has an inherently circular structure. Living beings make sense of their surroundings by interacting with the environment, and their environment becomes a part of their sense-making selves. Gregory Bateson (1972: 445) frequently made this point with a koan-like simplicity: “Is a blind man’s cane part of him?” The question aimed to spark a mind-shift. Although it may be convenient to conceive of human boundaries as defined by their epidermal surfaces, in Bateson’s example, the cane provides essential information to the man about his environment in a way that makes them, from a systems perspective, inseparable. For Bateson’s koan to work, we must envision a blind man actively engaging with his environment through his cane as surrogate “eyes.” A stoic subject who did not move an inch would not provoke our epiphany that his cane is part of his sensorimotor apparatus and therefore his cognitive being. Blind persons have been tested with a type of video camera that translates images into patterns of skin stimulation, and researchers found that participants did not experience “visual” content from the skin patterns unless they actively directed the camera using head, hand, or body motions. Jonathan De Souza’s recent book Music at Hand (2017) investigates how musical knowledge is grounded not in bodies alone, but in an interplay of techniques and technologies. De Souza highlights how retuning, preparing, and redesigning instruments (focusing on work by guitarists Kurt Rosenwinkel, Fred Frith, and Pat Metheny) reconfigures not only the interface but also the performer’s sensorimotor habits and expectations. The book’s central thesis is that the acquisition of instrumental technique—a process of bodily “technicization”— affects the ways that players perceive, understand, and imagine music. For a tour de force exploration of “prepared” and “extended” solo soprano saxophone techniques, I recommend viewing Sam Newsome’s performance from

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August 2020 during the Covid-19 lockdown (perhaps giving another reading to the phrase “openness from closure”).4 Newsome demonstrates a remarkable command of an extended range and various multiphonics on the instrument, and he creatively “augments” his horn with all variety of materials, including attaching a length of plumbing tube and later a kazoo to its neck cork; muting it with some sort of duck call; and playing his horn into a nearby grand piano (both striking its strings with the saxophone’s bell and taking full advantage of its resonating soundboard to add reverberation and harmonic richness). In the final few minutes, Newsome launches into volleys of notes that are somewhat reminiscent of Parker’s style, although they bring to mind Roscoe Mitchell’s saxophone approach even more. While Evan Parker has not prepared or materially altered his saxophone in recent years, De Souza’s focus on sensorimotor habits still resonates with his approach. “There are patterns that I refer to over and over again which are simply to do with the number of fingers on each hand and the number of holes on the instrument,” Parker remarks. “These are the fixed points, these are the things I have to accept as being given every time I go back to the instrument,” he continues. “So very often I start by going through something which is just an affirmation of that,” Parker notes, “then see where the logic of that takes me” (quoted in Scott 1987: n.p.).

On Repeat Of course, Parker’s musical approach involves more than simply repeating a well-worn “juggling” trick. But unlike some who might wish to envision improvisation, particularly in its freer manifestations, as emerging from nowhere, a tabula rasa, Parker does not shy away from certain “fixed” aspects of his performance practice—those things that have been explored and embodied over time. In a more technical description of his solo approach, he remarked: In some ways, in some situations, the freedom of the total music, if it has any sense of freedom, is only possible because some parts are very fixed. And by holding those fixed parts in a loop, putting them on hold for a while, then you can look for other regions where variation is possible. But then I might discover

youtu.be/uZz_Qbq8KII (accessed September 13, 2021). 4

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Arguably, some varieties of contemporary art-music have gone out of their way to avoid repetition. For instance, David Huron’s (2006: 406) research suggests that composers who adopted twelve-tone serialism chose tone rows that were intentionally contra-tonal and not merely atonal (i.e., they avoided tone rows that contained remnants or implications of tonal harmony). Popular musics that feature groove and other forms of repetition have also tended to be devalued in Eurocentric music institutions. But new research suggests that repetition is not only a startlingly present feature in musics around the world, but also that it functions as an “agent of musicalization” for humans everywhere. Research by Elizabeth Margulis (2013) suggests that repetition may be a key to the participatory allure of music. Repetition, according to Margulis (2014: n.p.), invites listeners to imaginatively “inhabit the sounds themselves rather than a concept they ‘stand for.’ ” Repeating any string of sounds over and over—including speech or environmental sounds—appears to give the auditory experience a more musical quality, according to Margulis’s research. Through entrainment and other appeals to our sequencing circuitry, repeated sounds can make music feel, in Margulis’s view, like something you do rather than something you perceive. In these moments, she insists, we listen with music, not to it. These observations may help to explain why music is so central to ritual activities around the world, which often seek to concentrate the mind of participants on immediate sensory details rather than broader concerns. For another exceptional solo wind instrument improvisation using circular breathing, I recommend viewing Shabaka Hutchings performing on bass clarinet, filmed at St. Giles Cripplegate, an Anglican church in the City of London within the Barbican complex.5 Hutchings begins by establishing a repeating-but-notrepetitive finger pattern that establishes a suspended tonal feeling implying E♭ https://youtu.be/_67sUIaaF48 (accessed September 13, 2021). 5

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harmonic minor. About one minute into the performance, Hutchings gradually expands the tessitura of his figure, introducing the ninth scale degree, and soon thereafter the twelfth and fourteenth (fifth and minor seventh one octave above). About one-and-a-half minutes into the performance, Hutchings introduces the raised eleventh scale degree (implying the lydian organization of much modern jazz). Approaching the two-minute mark, Hutchings seems to modulate to G minor, and then a half minute later subtly raises that a half-step to A♭ minor. Here he also starts to introduce unexpected vocalized “screams” on the instrument. About three minutes in, Hutchings shifts from an implied A♭ minor to E♭ major, while also greatly reducing his volume so that the sounds of his clarinet keys begin to make their own polyrhythmic patterns. To conclude the performance, Hutchings gradually slows his pace and then ends with an upward gesture using E♭, F, and B♭, hinting at the suspended tonality of the beginning in a culminating fashion. While exact repetition is clearly not a goal of Hutchings or Parker, they both take advantage of the power of repeating and overlapping cycles to invite sympathetic listeners into a heightened, participatory state. “Something that may compensate for the rather austere nature of solo saxophone as sound is solo saxophone as process,” Parker explains. “As a process it’s actually quite inviting,” he notes, “and I think that’s what people can hear when they listen to a solo performance of mine.” “They can hear a process being worked through, material being worked through,” he explains, “they can hear why things change, how things start and how one thing turns into another” (quoted in Scott 1987). In a rather poetic comment inspired by Alfred North Whitehead’s Process and Reality (1929) and included in the notes to an album of the same name, Parker eloquently expresses the productive tension between pattern and form or permanence and flux that informs his playing and his own brand of systems thinking: Every time I start it’s the same place and every time I start it’s somewhere different. It depends on how you want to look at that place. The same as when you get up in the morning, it’s a new day, but it’s also got a hell of a lot in common with the day before. It’s a question of how you want to incorporate the cyclic repetitive elements into the Heraclitean flux, the river you can never step in twice. Both things are true and both things are absolutely inadequate descriptions of reality. (Parker 1991: n.p.)

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Fractal Correlation [Fractals] provide our first glimpse into a new realization spreading across science—that randomness is interleaved with order, that simplicity enfolds complexity and complexity harbors simplicity, and that order and chaos can be repeated at smaller and smaller scales. —John Briggs and F. David Peat (1989: 43) To some extent all sounds are fractal in nature, for example an organ pipe can be thought of as making sound which begins with air hitting an edge, which creates turbulence, a fractal sound, which is then resonated by the pipe. So by symbolizing a sound as a note, one not only loses most of the data, but also replaces fractal properties with the linear ones of a note. —Chris Melchior (n.d.: n.p.)

Is it possible to analyze the immense complexity heard in Evan Parker’s solo saxophone improvisations? “At its most multilayered,” Steve Beresford (1998: 92) once remarked, “Parker’s solo playing would drive the best human transcriber round the bend, let alone a machine.” While representing Parker’s music in conventional Western notation would be an overwhelming and arguably misguided task, modern computers can analyze musical recordings in ways that can augment our phenomenological engagement with the music and a more contextually rich and culturally sensitive interpretation. With that qualified goal in mind, I worked with Rolf Bader, an expert on fractal analysis of recorded sound, to analyze the fractal correlation dimension of the audio recordings of several saxophone solos by Parker. The results provide a useful visual representation of the evolving sonic complexity of a musical performance that is unavailable through any other existing analytical means. To be clear, this measurement of sonic complexity relates to, but does not fully describe, perceptual complexity, as we will see. Rolf and I focused on representative improvisations by Evan Parker spanning a quarter of a century with the idea that these plots could allow us to see changes within a single performance, to compare different performances in terms of their dynamic properties, and to explore Parker’s evolving approach over longer expanses of time. Reviewing Parker’s latest solo album, Work in Progress (2019), Nick Metzger (2020: n.p.) writes:

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It’s different now, but if you listen to his oldest solo material against his more recent work a common thread remains. The flight of a flock of starlings, the geometry of spider webs, the hexagonal shape of honeycomb, the fractal growth patterns of flora, and Evan Parker’s solo soprano saxophone music. It’s the physical manifestation of his internal mathematics and it is vital and always worth listening to.

An important motivation for exploring fractal correlation analysis was that Parker (1992) himself has highlighted connections between chaos theory and his improvisation process. “Nowadays we all know about fractals in nature and all of that,” Parker stated, “the idea that there is detail at every level.” “So you could look at the landscape, or then you could look at the tree, or then you could look at the leaf, and then you can take a microscope out,” he explained, “and at every level there is detail that’s just beyond what you can focus clearly on.” “I mean to try to have that, in improvisation,” Parker noted, “to have that quality … this is quite a challenge.” He expanded further on this idea: Through the repetition of simple phrases which evolve by slow mutations (a note lost here, a note added there, a shift of accent, dynamic or tone color) their apparent “polyphonic” character can be manipulated to show the same material in different perspectives. The heard sound is monitored carefully and the small increments of change introduced to maintain or shift interest and the listeners’ attention. Recent popularization of the ideas of chaos theory means that most people are now familiar with fractal patterns and Mandelbrot figures. Without wishing to jump on a band wagon, the process involved in the evolution of a phrase in this way of improvising has something in common with the equations that generate these patterns and figures where the output from one basically simple calculation is used as the input for the next calculation in an iterative process which by many repetitions finally generates a pattern or figure whose complexity is not foreseeable from the starting point. (Parker 1992: n.p.)

The most common method for measuring the fractal dimension (D) of a visual pattern involves a box-counting algorithm. Researchers mathematically employ progressively smaller and smaller “boxes” to measure the density and selfsimilarity of a pattern at various levels of magnification in order to calculate an overall fractal dimension to the object. For instance, Taylor, Micoloch, and Jonas (2000) used a box-counting algorithm on computer scans of Jackson Pollock’s paintings. Using color detail to digitally separate the iterations of Pollock’s painting style, they found that each colored layer resulted in a uniform fractal pattern, and when put together, the fractal dimension of the overall painting

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increased. The authors of the study discovered that Pollock was able to produce remarkably consistent fractal properties within a given painting and to increase the complexity of his work gradually over the span of his career (from D = 1.45 to D = 1.72). To be clear, finding fractal properties in the work of Jackson Pollock does not imply that he was attempting to represent the forms of nature, likes trees and leaves. Rather, it demonstrates that his iterative painting approach emulates the patterns of growth found in nature. As an interesting historical side note, Ornette Coleman’s album Free Jazz (1961), which launched the movement for many, prominently featured a Jackson Pollock painting on its cover, and Pollock, according to his wife, “thought jazz was the only other creative thing happening in this country.”6 Analyzing the fractal dimension of patterns in time has proven to be considerably more difficult. Although many of our conceptual metaphors for music make connections to the physical world of height, motion, distance, and texture, these dimensions are not inherent in the musical sounds themselves. Sounds are mechanical pressure variances that, as time series, do not have an immediately apparent independent physical reality in our threedimensional world. Despite these challenges, researchers have developed mathematics designed to analyze transient signals in terms of a fractal correlation dimension. In brief, these techniques calculate how many simple dynamical subsystems would be needed to achieve the complexity of the initial time series. For musical examples, the fractal correlation dimension measures the recorded sound in terms of the number of vibrating subsystems that would be needed to produce its complexity at a given moment. In the procedure used by Rolf Bader (2002), there are three main subsystems taken into account: the harmonic overtone components of the sound; the inharmonic frequencies that are part of the sound; and any large amplitude modulations, all measured by correlating successive moments in time. The harmonic and inharmonic components of sound describe in more technical ways the sonic dimensions we normally associate with pitch, timbre, and noise,

Pollock preferred New Orleans jazz, swing bands, and blues singers to Charlie Parker and other modern jazz artists: according to Nate Chinen, “Jackson Pollock’s Jazz” (Wall Street Journal, February 19, 1999). 6

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among other things. And amplitude modulations take account of traditional parameters such as dynamics, articulations, and phrasing. The exact calculations that Rolf ’s system performs are incredibly complicated, often involving days or even weeks of number crunching. The analysis embeds the time series into a multidimensional pseudo phase space of up to eighty dimensions. It integrates over a minimum time interval of 50 ms, arriving at twenty distinct readings per second of music, and then calculates mean values in order to display an entire performance in twodimensional graphic form (see Argyris, Faust, and Haase 1994). This results in “smoothing” the contour of the plot in ways that reveal broad trends in the musical signal. These plots offer a measure of the complexity of the recorded sound and provide visualizations of the evolving sonic complexity of a musical signal in a way that, when compared against the perceptions of human listeners, can be useful, but they do not encompass all aspects of a phenomenological hearing of the music. For instance, although a complex sound stimulus may provoke listeners’ immediate attention, a sudden diminution in the complexity of the overall sound can also correspond to arresting or intriguing moments for listeners. Comparing these plots to the reported experience of listeners has proven illuminating, but much of our cognitive processing while listening happens unconsciously, so listeners are not always aware of their own judgments or biases. Figure 3.2 provides a plot of Parker’s solo titled “Aerobatics 1,” recorded at his very first solo saxophone concert from 1975. The title is a nice allusion to the juggling metaphor discussed earlier. The improvisation tends to be more segmented than his later work, moving between sections that explore a single dominant extended technique rather than integrating them into a more cohesive whole. The fractal dimension analysis shows five primary sections of development, each roughly three minutes in length. In the first section, Parker starts in the extreme overtone range and gradually intersperses tonguing devices, rapid figuring techniques, multiphonic sounds (split tones), and occasional humming into the instrument (a technique that he would later abandon) to increase the complexity of the performance. The peak in fractal dimension for this section, D = 8+, comes at approximately 1:38 into the improvisation when Parker emphasizes a very rich and powerful multiphonic. This is followed by a section of rapid “chattering” that maintains the fractal dimension near D = 5.

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Figure 3.2  Evan Parker—“Aerobatics 1”

The second section begins with the sudden drop in fractal dimension, a result of a dramatic decrease in the density of sounds. After a few isolated gestures with pregnant pauses, Parker begins an extended exploration of the extreme overtone range at 2:45 into the performance. While sustaining these high sounds, Parker employs slight fluctuations in pitch and surprising leaps to the normal range of the horn that produce variations in complexity. The long tones that Parker uses prominently in many of the performances on Saxophone Solos gradually disappear in his later work. Although these extreme overtones can produce a perceptual feeling of tension or hyperextension for the listener, their sonic components are relatively noncomplex (and therefore have a lower fractal correlation dimension). In the extreme upper range of the instrument, sounds have few additional harmonic partials above them to enrich their character. For instance, listeners often have difficulty differentiating saxophone and clarinet sounds when the instruments are played in their extreme altissimo registers since many of the identifying timbral qualities of the instruments are absent. At approximately 6:30 into the improvisation, Parker increases his fluttering with these extreme overtones, eventually cadencing at 7:10. The third section begins with high-amplitude multiphonics, the most pronounced of which leaps

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off the fractal dimension plot at just before 8:00. More rapid chattering takes us to the 9:00 mark. Here, Parker produces a type of reverse sound envelope by muting the bell of the horn with his left leg, effectively closing off the tube.7 A return to extreme overtones at 10:10 produces another drop in the fractal dimension, but it is followed by multiphonic exploration at 10:45. A fourth section begins with a more pronounced drop in the fractal correlation dimension, around 11:30. Parker is again in the whistle tone region of the instrument, exploring long tones with fluctuations. His circular breathing technique is often audible at these points, an aspect of his playing that he more effectively hides in his later solo work. The fifth section begins at the 13:00 mark and leads us to the end of the performance. The techniques that were formerly explored independently are now crossing paths in rapid and unpredictable ways. Parker seems to be accelerating toward an ending, all the while increasing the overall density of his sound and patterning. Here we begin to glimpse the “polyphonic” nature of his solo playing that emerges more prominently in subsequent years. The brief dips in the fractal dimension plot during this final section correspond to times when Parker ceases vocalizing along with his playing. Although the final ending follows an intensification of the performance, it still seems to arrive rather suddenly, with little preparation. In the following years, Parker was able to integrate the extended techniques that are already prominently displayed in his first recordings into a more seamless developmental practice; the novelty of these instrumental sounds gave way to a more concerted exploration of the evolving complexity of an improvisation. Figures 3.3 and 3.4 present the fractal dimension plots for “Monoceros 1” (1978) and “Conic Sections 3” (1989), two lengthy improvisations that highlight well this shift in Parker’s approach. The significant decrease in the standard deviation for these two performances as compared with “Aerobatics” (from 1:61 to :62 for both Monoceros and Conic Sections), underlines their more unwavering composition. The plot of “Monoceros 1,” Figure 3.3, shows the outlines of a strong developmental arc; the performance gradually increases in complexity, only to give way in the final minutes. The one prominent drop in dimensionality, just after the 8:10 mark, corresponds to an extended development of In an email, Parker described this technique to me and admitted that he “stole” it from Steve Lacy and developed it further during his time with The Music Improvisation Company. 7

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Figure 3.3  Evan Parker—“Monoceros 1”

Figure 3.4  Evan Parker—“Conic Sections 3”

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extreme overtones, which provides a brief respite in the development and, as mentioned earlier, offers fewer higher partials that otherwise might register higher complexity readings. The other brief drops in the developmental arc also correspond to moments of extreme overtone exploration. During these moments, Parker is employing much more variation than in similar sections of the “Aerobatics” example from three years earlier, and in general, he sounds more comfortable sustaining and controlling the extended sonic properties of the instrument. The fractal dimension plots also illustrate moments when Parker is achieving his full “polyphony”—with three or more distinct registers of the instrument being explored near simultaneously—and moments when he slips (both intentionally and perhaps at times unintentionally) into a reduced texture or into the regular range, timbre, and monophonic qualities of the instrument. For one example, at 12:30 into “Monoceros 1,” following a minute or more of polyphonic exploration, Parker briefly drops the top voice from the texture only to regain it almost as quickly. The plot here shows a drop from the D = 4 range to approximately D = 2.8. In the final minutes of the performance, Parker’s dense, polyphonic exploration seems to be approaching a ceiling of physical possibility. Starting around 19:30, he begins to ease the density of patterning until he is left exploring only the extreme overtone range. With a final graceful decrescendo, he concludes the improvisation. “Conic Sections 3” (Figure 3.4), recorded eleven years after “Monoceros,” demonstrates well Parker’s evolved ability to improvise dense and overlapping patterns. The mean fractal dimension for this twenty-five-minute improvisation is D = 4.78, considerably higher than the other two examples we have already encountered. Some of the increase, it should be noted, may be due to the higher degree of reverberation present on the recording. Parker recorded “Conic Sections” in the Holywell Music Rooms in Oxford, UK. In the accompanying notes, Parker comments: “The acoustics of the Rooms are so distinctive that I was pushed away from the kind of playing I’d had in mind; it seemed as though the room itself had something in mind too.” Reverberation can add chaoticity since if a sound is prolonged as a reverberated event while another event is played, both our perception and the computer’s calculation will take note of the additional complexity. But the performance on “Conic Sections 3,” one of Parker’s most celebrated, does seem to bear out a higher plateau of complexity in general.

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The first half of the plot shows Parker developing an arc of increasing complexity that at times drops down and then continues to climb. He begins the improvisation already deeply entrenched in interlocked patterns. The first small dip arrives at approximately 1:40 when the already dense polyphony seems to reach a moment of temporary gridlock, slowing down but not halting the overall patterning. At 3:35, one of the polyphonic voices disappears briefly, only to be followed by some dramatic register leaps that create even higher dimensionality readings. At nearly the 5:00 mark, the dense sonic traffic comes to a sudden halt, with only one voice surviving to carry on the development. Parker has spoken of his use of “interruptions”—pauses, immediate segues to simpler textures, or the held tones of his earlier work—to regain the listener’s awareness and to allow him the chance to begin combinations anew: When you’ve been playing complex music for longer than a certain amount of time, you’re in danger of losing the audience’s attention. They just oversaturate with the detail, the information. After a while, it’s like there’s new information but it’s the same kind of new information. So the change is no longer a change. It’s like looking at new ways to make changes that are really changes. (quoted in Corbett 1994: 205)

His comments bring to mind Gregory Bateson’s (1972: 459) definition of information as “a difference that makes a difference.” Parker calls these “interruptions on a bigger scale than the usual interruptions.” For him, “the usual interruptions are the substance of the music—the interference between the two patterns or the compatibility or lack of compatibility between two patterns. That’s the usual stuff of the detailed music, so to impose a break on that you need to do something different, with long notes or whatever” (quoted in Corbett: 206). Another interruption occurs at 7:40, followed by one a minute later (8:36) that has more of a gradual rallentando quality to it. Perhaps the most dramatic shift in musical materials occurs at the 14:00 mark. Here, Parker switches from his three-part polyphony to a development centered in the middle range of the instrument focused on a more linear contour with occasional bursts of rapid tonguing. Because of the highly reverberant room, this section lasting until 17:30 has an uncanny “swarm-like” quality to it. Starting around 16:50, Parker begins to relax this insistent texture, adding some high register bursts and eventually slowing the pulse and reducing the dynamic. He resolves

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to a microtonal figure at 17:30, the lowest fractal dimension reading in the performance. The final section of development is interrupted by a few additional brief respites—at 19:18 with a chromatic figure using alternate fingerings, at 20:30 with a flurry of high notes, and at 21:02 with a return to the chromatic figure of 19:18—before building with articulation and fingering cascades to a dramatic conclusion. Parker has discussed in some detail the two ways in which his solo improvisations often conclude: One is where the thing unravels. If you think about the music as the pattern in a carpet—you know how the fringe of a carpet is made out of the weft, you can see the component threads? Sometimes it’s interesting for me to let the thing unravel so the pattern is gradually pulled apart and you’re left with only the threads, the strands. Or another way—and again this is me observing what tends to happen rather than me describing a plan of action—is the complexities reach such a pitch that they cancel one another out and you get a blur of … almost like white noise. Not white noise but an impenetrable kind of thickness. The whole thing locks. It’s a gridlock. Everything locks solid and—it stops! (quoted in Lock 1991: 33)

Figure 3.5 provides a fractal dimension plot of Parker’s performance on “Broken Wing” from the album Process and Reality (1991). This considerably shorter performance provides the most convincing example of a developmental arc (whereas Parker’s longer improvisations tend to follow a more sectional form). The only significant interruptions occur at 1:07, when Parker slows briefly to a sustained tone before continuing, and at 1:19, 1:30, and 1:46, when he offers dramatic breath-length pauses. Figure 3.6 proves a fractal correlation plot of a tenor saxophone solo by Evan Parker from Chicago Solos (1995). Although there are some similarities between Parker’s solo styles on soprano and tenor, there are also many differences. The sheer size of the tenor makes certain acoustic explorations less manageable, and the tenor saxophone may also carry more of the weight of the jazz tradition, given that the soprano sax has been used less frequently in that style. Parker admits to being more conscious of the jazz tradition when he plays tenor, preferring to use that horn when he performs with his trios involving bass and drums, and in venues that cater more to jazz groups and audiences. He prefers the soprano in reverberant venues such as churches and when

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Figure 3.5  Evan Parker—“Broken Wing”

Figure 3.6  Evan Parker—“Chicago Solos 9”

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Figure 3.7  Evan Parker Electro-Acoustic Ensemble—“Turbulent Mirror”

performing with electronic processing, since processing, in his words, makes the tenor sound “weird, thick and clumsy.”8 In “Chicago Solos 9,” Parker enters with a relatively high degree of density and complexity and then develops toward a calmer plateau, only to build up again to a final burst and then subside: a rather different technique than much of his solo soprano playing. Figure 3.7 is a plot of a recording by Evan Parker’s Electro-Acoustic Ensemble titled “Turbulent Mirror” from their first ECM release Toward the Margins (1996). The ensemble comprises Evan Parker’s working trio of many years, with Barry Guy on bass and Paul Lytton on drums and percussion, along with live electronics and signal processing by Walter Prati, Marco Vecchi, and Philipp Wachsmann, who also adds violin and viola. Even in this larger and denser musical setting, the fractal correlation plot reveals a clear developmental arc to the performance. The mean fractal dimension is considerably higher than Parker’s solo performances, due in part to the additional electronic processing that not only keeps certain sounds alive through delays and reverberations, but also interjects sampled and processed versions of the live sound back into the ensemble. http://paristransatlantic.com/magazine/interviews/parker.html (accessed September 13, 2021). 8

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The complex relationship between technological affordances and creative intentions can be even more tangled in the context of electro-acoustic performance. Reflecting on the practice of his Electro-Acoustic Ensemble, Parker notes: “If you work like this … there’s a kind of uncertainty about whether that was the first time that sound happened, or ‘Did I miss it the first time and that’s a replay of a sample of the first time?’ ” (quoted in Margasak 2009: n.p.). Because of the size and the “regenerative” possibilities of the ensemble, each individual tends to play less than they might otherwise, allowing space for comment and transformation and producing something of an undulating quality to the work. When Parker does launch into a circular breathing passage at 1:48, the overall dimension elevates, while the final decrease in fractal dimension corresponds to a thinning of the ensemble texture as the performance ends with sustained sounds of Wachsmann’s viola. Deciding what feature or set of features may have provoked a certain shift in the fractal dimension of ensemble music is not always easy. It is interesting to note, however, that in the softer although no less dense passage from about the 3:30 mark, in which the acoustic instruments all fall silent and the computer processing is more clearly heard, there is only a minimal drop in fractal dimension. The fractal calculations clearly represent aspects of sonic complexity and not merely simple shifts in loudness. Although Parker is adept at explaining the technical details of his solo saxophone practice, and the fractal correlation plots can offer some insight into his performances, he insists that the music is not principally about its technical features. He adopts another kinesthetic metaphor to describe the synergetic impact of his work and makes a strong case against submitting it to a simple reductionist analysis: There’s an analogy with the spokes on a revolving wheel. Everything’s in motion, the rim of the wheel is supported by the spokes, but when the whole thing is turning you don’t see the spokes any more. If the thing didn’t have that speed of rotation, it would make sense to count the spokes and think about them one at a time. But the whole point is to get the thing revolving and the spokes are only there to enable the rim of the wheel to turn. There’s some kind of equivalent of that in the music. You could, you can, after the event, slow the thing down and look at how all the pieces fit together. But the whole point is that the pieces fit together that way in order to generate the speed of movement which is the music. (quoted in Lock 1991: 32)

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Circular Causality Parker’s wheel analogy speaks to the importance of being able to shift attention from the parts to the whole. General systems theory, first articulated by Ludwig von Bertalanffy in the 1940s, is a theoretical approach that analyzes phenomena seen as a whole and not as simply the sum of elementary parts. According to von Bertalanffy (1968: 55): “The meaning of the somewhat mystical expression, ‘The whole is more than the sum of its parts’ is simply that constitutive characteristics are not explainable from the characteristics of the isolated parts.” “The characteristics of the complex,” he explains, “appear as new or emergent.” This does not mean that new forces emerge that would contradict physical laws. Rather, as Thomas Fuchs (2020: 7) explains, “macrostructures are in a position, thanks to their form and configuration, to select specific properties and behaviors of their components and block others.” The part-to-whole and whole-to-part thinking of systems theory is often described as circular causality, and may also be termed downward/upward causation or global-to-local/localto-global causality. In place of circular causality, we could also think here in terms of Hofstadter’s “strange loops,” in which all causes are results, and all results are causes. Hofstadter (2007) finds strange loops in Kurt Gödel’s proof of unprovable mathematical axioms, in M. C. Escher’s “Drawing Hands”—a lithograph depicting a sheet of paper, out of which two hands rise, in the paradoxical act of drawing one another into existence—and in the ever-rising notes of a Bach canon. While many insights into systems thinking developed in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, especially in tandem with the field of cybernetics, the notion of having multiple answers to the question “Why?” has been with us since at least Aristotle’s four causes, which stipulated that one can investigate the matter, form, agent, and purpose of an object in order to arrive at a fuller understanding. Earlier, we looked at the feedback between cycles of organismic self-regulation and cycles of sensorimotor coupling between organism and environment through the work of Thomas Fuchs (2020). Fuchs highlights that these interconnected cycles include a temporal and spatial circularity as well that extends basic bodily self-awareness into a world-directed, extended consciousness. Fuchs describes a circular loop between the experiences/behaviors that induce neuroplasticity that enables experiences/behaviors. The flexibility and

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plasticity of individual neurons, and the far quicker changes in the brain brought about by neurotransmitters and neuromodulators, suggest that an organism and its environment are inextricably bound together in a dynamic process of reciprocal specification and selection. Extending this circular causality in space and time results in a continuous incorporation of lived experience (as habits/ skills/interactive schemes), in the sense suggested by Merleau-Ponty (1962: 192). Fuchs uses the example of anxiety to illustrate this point, and his explanation is worth quoting at length: When I am anxious, there is no causal impact from either my brain activity to my experience or the other way around: rather, my having this experience implies certain brain activities, by way of circular causality or implication. Brain processes certainly enable my experience (upward causation), but the experiential aspect is wider with regard to both space and time. Only my relation to the current situation as a whole and my history of interactions with similar situations can explain my anxiety and the neural processes connected to it (downward causation). And only my anxiety as a future-directed subjective experience is able to motivate and organize the physical actions required for avoiding the threats I anticipate. (Fuchs 2020: 7)

In phenomenological terms that are unpacked in greater detail in the next chapter, actions imply anticipations or protentions (being prepared for the response of the environment) that may or may be not fulfilled in subsequent perceptions. “Protention and response,” Fuchs writes, “form a temporal circle that extends into the future” (5). Objects, too, have a diachronic aspect since they are always perceived as enabling possible actions. Heidegger described objects as “ready to hand” (Heidegger 1962) and this circular relationship is also captured by Gibson’s (1979: 129) notion of affordances in ecological psychology, with its well-known dual aspect: “An affordance is neither an objective property nor a subjective property; or it is both if you like.” We might also recall here the neo-cybernetic phrase “openness from closure” introduced earlier (Borgo 2016a). As the circular structure of internal self-regulation is extended spatially and temporally, the “closure” provided by homeostasis gives way to allostasis, the mode of self-regulation that operates by anticipating needs and preparing to satisfy them before they arise. The theory of affective primacy, exemplified in the work of Antonio Damasio (1999), contends that affective responses precede and shape cognitive resources

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in ways that are especially relevant to one’s needs and goals. Affect, in this theory, acts directly and simultaneously upon attention, perception, cognition, memory, motivation, felt experience, and action. Affect, perhaps perceived through a general mood or specific emotions, can drive more distant goals that require an aversive anticipation (to borrow Fuchs’s terminology). In other words, in order to reach a more distant spatial or temporal goal, we often must avoid more local or immediate opportunities/temptations. Fuchs (2020: 9) stresses that the two-dimensional circle of body–environment interaction diachronically becomes a three-dimensional spiral. “Experiences turn into the organism’s altered dispositions,” Fuchs explains, “which change the perceived environment and its selected affordances, thus in turn enabling new experiences, and so on.” “Perceived affordances are thus shaped by the history of the structural coupling of organism and environment,” he writes. Strange loops indeed! This orientation resonates well, in my experience, with how improvising musicians use exploratory activity and environmental feedback to acquire new motor skills and auditory dispositions, which in turn change the perceived environment and its affordances, enabling new exploratory experiences. In fascinating ways, just as the circular causality of the musicking moment moves from the global to the local—from the performance space and social context to the performative moment—it also extends from the local to the global. “Lately I have come to think,” Parker mused, “that there is a coupling effect that makes it very difficult to decide what is a ‘good reed’ in isolation from the acoustic in which it is played” (quoted in Fazzini 2021: n.p.). Gaining expertise as an improviser, when viewed through the lens of circular causality, may present itself as a “degree of confidence” in one’s actions/ predictions. In group improvisational settings, the dynamics of these strange loops are extended and multiplied, a topic that is explored in greater detail in the next chapter. Fuchs’s work, and also that of Anthony Chemero in Radical Embodied Cognitive Science (2009), suggest that a productive way to bypass the usual mind–body binaries that have plagued discussions of creativity in music is to explore our cognitive lives as involving three interrelated and interconnected modes of agent–environment dynamics: (1) self-regulation; (2) sensorimotor coupling; and (3) intersubjective interaction. In doing so, we might be able to, according to Fuchs (2020: 3), “see both experiential and physiological processes, the lived body and the physical body

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as belonging to a more encompassing system, namely, the system of the living being and its environment, or of the person and her world—an ecological system that is in continuous development.”

Hall of Mirrors What color is a chameleon placed on a mirror? This koan-like riddle, another favorite of Gregory Bateson (1972), illustrates well a central tenet of systems thinking: reflexivity. Katherine Hayles (1999: 8) defines reflexivity as “the movement whereby that which has been used to generate a system is made, through a changed perspective, to become part of the system it generates.” Reflexivity in the humanities and humanistic social sciences generally refers to the examination of one’s own beliefs, practices, and judgments during the research process, including assessing how these may have influenced the research. Scholars invariably filter their research through their own personal experiences and through their own way of seeing the world (as I am sure I have done, myself!). We are also always in danger of being ethnocentric, of making sense of the world by relating it to what we already know and believe (and the predictive processing hypothesis, in my view, offers strong empirical support for why this is the case). The activity of “observing systems,” according to Heinz von Foerster (1984), the primary architect of second-order cybernetics, is inseparable from those “observing systems” who are doing the observing. It is hard to pin down exactly what Hofstadter (2007) has in mind with his notion of a strange loop. In his book of the same name, he “loops” back on several occasions to his fascination with the video feedback patterns produced when a camera is pointed at its own monitor. Ultimately, Hofstadter seeks to explain how it is that living, conscious beings can self-organize from inanimate matter. Consciousness, in his view, is recursive: “The ego emerges,” Hofstadter writes, “only gradually as experience shapes our dense web of active symbols into a tapestry rich and complex enough to begin twisting back upon itself.” At one point he writes: “a loop’s strangeness comes purely from the way in which a system can seem to ‘engulf itself ’ through an unexpected twisting-around, rudely violating what we had taken to be an inviolable hierarchical order” (159). This chapter has used Parker’s decades-long engagement with solo saxophone improvisation as an entry into a broader discussion of ecological or systems thought, with a particular focus on 4E cognition and the predictive processing

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hypothesis. “In the end the saxophone has been for me,” Parker (1992: n.p.) states, “a rather specialized bio-feedback instrument for studying and expanding my control over my hearing and the motor mechanics of parts of my skeletomuscular system, and their improved functioning has given me more to think about.” Parker’s very personal and virtuosic solo saxophone style draws attention to the bodily aspects of his performance while also questioning the idea of a controlling intellect and the very idea of a grounded and objective sense of self. Some of Parker’s more recent projects with electronics further highlight this ecological stance. In Parker’s view, “It would sort of be crazy not to work with what’s available … The creative and the technological always have a constant kind of interaction, or a feedback relationship with one another. Your notion of what is achievable affects your intentions” (quoted in Margasak 2009: n.p.). Parker began working with electronics in the 1960s in his duo with Paul Lytton, primarily by employing contact microphones. Interestingly, another approach used by the duo was to play back tapes of their previously recorded improvisations while they were improvising, enacting a kind of circular causality. But Parker’s collaborations with computer-based musicians who sample and process his saxophone playing starts in the 1990s. His Electro-Acoustic Ensemble was formed that year, which led to related projects in the more intimate solo+electronics format, including the albums Hall of Mirrors (1990) with Walter Prati, Solar Wind (1997) with Lawrence Casserley, and Trance Map (2011) with Matthew Wright (the duo takes on the name Trance Map+ when they work with additional musicians). These projects vary significantly in their sound and approach, but have in common a focus on the cybernetic feedback between Parker’s saxophone playing and its refraction through various electronic processing techniques. “I’m not an expert on cybernetics,” Parker admits, “but bringing an ability to generalize about feedback is a twentieth-century phenomenon.” “Before that there were specific applications,” he notes, “but I don’t think there was a general awareness of how many control systems can be analyzed in terms of the feedback between inputs and outputs; It’s certainly high on my list of analytical tools.” (quoted in Toop 2004: 243). Of these more recent projects with electronics, Hall of Mirrors has perhaps the most straightforward presentation, likely due in part to the constraints in computational processing power from the time period. Solar Wind (1997), however, creates an otherworldly soundscape that is far more difficult to unpack

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since Parker’s “dry” saxophone sound was intentionally removed from the final mix so that what we hear is the hall of mirrors effect produced from Lawrence Casserley’s signal processing instrument. Published reviews of the album make comparisons to choruses of electronic birds, frogs, crickets and geese, bewildered rodents, droplets of water, the sussuration of water in overhead pipes, and, of course, the “sound” of solar winds. Writing for Resonance magazine, Jim Denley insists that “this music mimics natural open-ended systems because this is a chaotic natural phenomena itself.” “The byproducts of process are everywhere,” he notes, “nagging difference tones and the gritty dirt of chaos.”9 One might wonder what appeals to listeners in this gritty, dirty chaos? Ideas about prediction and anticipation have been around for some time in the fields of music psychology and cognition. Hermann von Helmholtz (1863) went against prevailing Kantian notions of perception, arguing that we use unconscious perceptual inference based on prior learning to engage the world. Leonard Meyer’s influential work on Emotion and Meaning in Music (1956) drew additional attention to the importance of expectation in the listener’s experience of music, and David Huron’s Sweet Anticipation (2006) recast Meyer’s general observations in light of subsequent research in the psychology of expectation. The predictive processing hypothesis, however, insists that cognition be described in terms of agent–environment dynamics rather than computation and representation. According to 4E accounts of cognition, the body is not a mere vehicle for head-bound thought, but the very locus of the subject, the source, and the medium of one’s relation to the world. This emerging view integrates core insights about the interconnectedness of cognition, action, and perception, and offers insight into how listeners anticipate and synchronize with musical patterns and coordinate with others in non-representational, ecologically sensitive ways. It also tacitly acknowledges that an engagement with art is always some combination of what the artist(s) provide and what the art perceiver brings to the experience. Wilhelm Wundt’s “inverted U” curve, first proposed in 1874, tends to reinforce the notion that people prefer music that occupies a sweet spot of complexity—music that is neither too simple nor too complex. The idea is

9 touch33.net/catalogue/to35-evan-parker-lawrence-casserley-solar-wind.html (accessed September 13, 2021).

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that people are often conservative in their musical tastes because they like to anticipate correctly, although, as Meyer (1956) pointed out, people also seem to enjoy positive outcomes more after a short period of anxiety or insecurity. Why, then, would people (admittedly a small, self-selecting group) prefer a music that appears to be extremely hard to predict? One recent study investigating how uncertainty can lead to pleasure in listening to the highly dissonant, often atonal, concert musics of the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries suggests that personality traits like “openness to experience,” the framing of these forms as art-music, and the mere exposure effect are key components. Given that uncertainty estimation is an evolutionary necessity for exploratory behavior, the study’s authors suggest that the challenge in processing and decoding uncertainty in these musics represents an incentive to further engage with the stimulus. Further, the pleasure from rarer correct predictions, they suggest, may be more subjectively rewarding since it provides a signal to the individual that their predictive model is improving (Mencke et al. 2019). It may also be that this music appeals to listeners interested in loosening their predictive grip in the relatively “consequence-free” domain of musicking in order to embrace the “strange loops” in which all causes are results, and all results are causes. In Man’s Rage For Chaos: Biology, Behavior & the Arts (a book recommended to me by Evan Parker), Morse Pekham (1967) argues that the arts serve the function of breaking up entrenched orientations, weakening and frustrating our “tyrannous drive to order” (our drive to perceive the environment as comprehensible and to make successful predictions about the future), so that humans may be better able to deal with change, complexity, and chaos. In a statement that anticipates much of the current thinking in cognitive science, Peckham argued: “I am convinced that to every situation a human being brings an orientation which is not derived from that situation but already exists in his perceptual powers before he comes to that situation.” “Such an orientation works,” he continues, “only because it filters out any data which is not relevant to the needs of the moment” (xi). Peckham felt that, since such an orientation does not prepare an individual to deal with a particular situation but only with a category, or kind, or class of situations, much of the suppressed data may very well be relevant. Peckham ultimately locates art not in the “work” itself, but in the perceiver’s role of maintaining a search-behavior focused on awareness of discontinuities (220). Kathleen Higgins (2012: 170), in her book The Music Between Us, notes: “Music that is too startling or alien sounding is not likely to encourage

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a sense that one is at home, or even the sense that one is encountering beings like oneself.” But she also highlights that dropping one’s own habitual musical schemata can be a refreshing experience (atonal music already invites us to do this), so that learning new music is akin to learning new ways to move or to navigate the world. Referencing Bateson’s koan about the chameleon on a mirror, Wired editor and futurist Kevin Kelly (1994: 69) writes: “In the realm of recursive reflections, an event is not triggered by a chain of being, but by a field of causes reflecting, bending, mirroring each other in a fun-house nonsense. Rather than cause and control being dispensed in a straight line from its origin, it spreads horizontally, like creeping tide, influencing in roundabout, diffuse ways.” It is clear that a sense of space and place are crucial to Parker’s solo saxophone approach. “So much of how I work depends upon the people, the instruments, the physical lay-out of the room, the acoustics,” Parker states. “From these parameters I take a ‘reading,’ ” he explains, “then the first idea comes to me and I start from there.” “Nothing else is absolutely fixed in advance,” he states, “but certain ideas may be used in similar situations” (quoted in Fazzini 2021: n.p.). An ecological approach to musical improvisation insists that the improviser, the instrument, and the environment are all coupled together. Simon Waters’s (2007) notion of a performer–instrument–environment (PIE) ecosystem captures aspects of this entangled dynamic well. The space of the performance, both acoustic and social, is not merely incidental or ambient, but is a participant in the unfolding music. Inspired by Fuchs, we can also extend Waters’s “strange loop” of performer– instrument–environment diachronically into a three-dimensional spiral. A recent Facebook post by Santiago Bogacz (2020) discussing Parker’s nearly half-century of solo saxophone playing did just that: Thanks to this fractal development, something happens with time. There is a dichotomy between the excessive speed, which seems to lead us towards a destination, and that labyrinth that does not take us anywhere. It is as if it was a room where everything is already presented and Parker is telling us what to observe, transforming time into space. So the question is: if in each presentation we find multiple layers in every way, couldn’t we take each presentation as one more layer of something greater? Can we take an Evan Parker performance as something independent or is it part of a whole? Isn’t all his work a great space and in these almost five decades, he has been showing us what was always there?

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In the 2009 film by Phil Hopkins titled Amplified Gesture,10 Parker explains his relationship to the saxophone: You couple yourself to that instrument and it teaches you as much as you tell it what to do. So you’re sensitive to … how it’s responding to your efforts to control it. By hearing it, the way it’s feeding back to you, you learn to control it better. So it’s a very dynamic and very sensitive process. And the instrument at the same time seems to be giving you additional information. So [there are] things that you have under your control, but every so often something will go wrong. You’ll lose control. In that moment you are given an opportunity to learn something else that the instrument can do. Then gradually the nature of the instrument and its will—it sounds a bit mystical—in relation to its destiny— it sounds Steinerian! [laughs] But let’s say the saxophone has a destiny, has a will, and it has a set of intentions in its relationship with you, and you start to find it difficult to distinguish yourself and your intentions from the instrument’s intentions, or let’s say I’ve found it difficult to do that.

In his book titled Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness, Alva Noë (2009: 186) argues for a body- and world-involving conception of ourselves. He concludes the book with an explicit analogy to improvised music: “It is now clear, as it has not been before, that consciousness, like a work of improvisational music, is achieved in action, by us, thanks to our situation in and access to a world we know around us. We are in the world and of it.” Summarizing his own aesthetic, Parker states in an interview with Richard Scott (1987: n.p.): “I’m interested in improvisation because it leads me towards the realization of a particular kind of music, not interested in music because it allows me to improvise.” “The interesting thing,” he notes, “is that my idea of what that music is changes in response to a notion of where the improvisational process can lead it.” Strange loops indeed!

10 http://davidsylvian.com/amplifiedgesture/

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exploring permuting soundscapes hurtling through dense shifting harmonic clusters, flowing through turbulent fluctuations of textures swirling in varying bands of multicolored prisms undulating to the throbbing pulse bubbling under the myriad of asymmetric poly-rhythms weaving through multi-hued atonal variations punctuated with percussive explosions scattered fragments of sound eliciting piercing primal screams stimulated by the pyro-technical display of polyphonic auditory collages generating a constantly mind expanding soundshapes evolving into a sonic montage of intricate voicings, complex rhythmic gyrations, tonal aberrations projecting emotion through sounds sounds musical shrieks—howls—cackles sounds embellished through circular deviations a simmering mosaic of endless patterns and structures forming then dissolving into rivers and streams of sound rushing toward collision only to merge into flowing ethereal harmonies intertwining like rills, rivulets, brooks receiving the impetus through the converging tributaries emptying into gulfs, lakes, oceans blending a cacophonous mélange of colors, shapes, textures into a unifying essence. —Sam Rivers (Liner notes to Concept, RivBea RB50101) The previous chapter introduced 4E cognition (embodied, embedded, enactive, extended), predictive processing, and an ecological or systems view of mind and

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life. In an essay that I contributed to the volume Music and Consciousness 2, edited by Ruth Herbert, David Clarke, and Eric Clarke, I explored a strange loop involving 4As: attention, awareness, affect, and action (Borgo 2019a). If we subscribe to the linear ‘sense–model–act’ paradigm, which I have been challenging throughout, then we might assume that improvising musicians first attend to various sounds, become aware of where they came from, get affected by what they might imply, and then decide to act. Improvised music concerts can at times appear to start from an accidental or ambient noise—perhaps a squeaky chair, or someone closing a door or an instrument case—which performers attend to and act upon. Another common formulation of improvisation is that one acts first, letting the intelligent body lead the mind, so to speak, and only later allows attention, awareness, and affect to creep in. I once heard Pauline Oliveros remark that one improvises not at the speed of the mind, but at the speed of the nervous system. Some improvisers express that having something “in mind” before the music begins—a preconception of where the music might or should go—can get in the way. We could instead choose to posit that affect is the best starting place among the 4As, given that it can connote an arising that is in between the capacity to act and to be acted upon. We continually affect and are affected by our environments, both local and farther flung. In contrast to feelings and emotions—which may be slower to arise and change, and are inflected to a greater extent by personal experience and social context—affect is construed, at least by some in its modern incarnation, as essentially pre-personal, as inherently somatic and visceral, as escaping capture and signification (see Deleuze and Guattari 1988). Perhaps we have left out a fifth “A”? Improvisers and academics often discuss the idea of agency, although usually with little agreement on what it might entail, or to what extent it should be cultivated or avoided. David Toop (2016: 26) muses on related themes: I didn’t know who was doing what, improvisers often say. I didn’t always know who was making the sounds, listeners often say. The generative points in any performance may be so slight as to be inaudible—a pause, a shift in atmosphere, an unintended noise, an unvoiced thought picked up through implication or body language, a feint—often followed by a strong assertion that conceals its “follower” nature by sheer bluff.

The entangled landscape of As I have been describing begs the question: from where does creativity emerge? How do thoughts and actions arise? Can we truly

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separate our own actions, motivations, and intentions from the people and things around us? Is our consciousness ours alone, or is it something that is achieved socially? Is allowing oneself to be affected a form of agency? Scholars have begun employing novel concepts to address these compelling questions, such as assemblages (Delueze and Guattari, DeLanda), actor-networks (Latour), co-constitution (Varela, Thompson), interagency (Rammert), intersubjectivity (De Jaeger), even intra-action (Barad). Instead of thinking in terms of a single “stream” of consciousness, held together in some way by an individual, we may be better served exploring “rivers” of consciousness that intersect and intertwine between individuals— and even share resources, as in the case of our many waterways. I tend to agree with Bennett Hogg (2011: 88) that consciousness is not something we have, it is something we do. And, crucially, we only do it together. Consciousness is socially achieved and sustained. And as humans, we are especially attuned to the environmental affordances that emerge through our interactions with other human beings. We can make another analogy to “underground” rivers, in that while recent research suggests that we are only conscious of one thing at a time, the brain is a network of 100 billion neurons communicating by streams of electrochemical pulses. Nick Chater (2018) argues that while we are only ever conscious of the results of our brain’s attempts to make sense of the world, our roughly 100 billion neurons are continually drawing on vast amounts of information from our senses and our memories. Our individual consciousness may turn out to be thinner than we previously imagined, but it flourishes through its interactions (or is it intra-actions?) with other consciousnesses (actually, the plural of consciousness can, tellingly, also be consciousness). This chapter moves us further into the complex dynamics of improvising music together.

The Art of the Trio Saxophonist, flutist, pianist, and composer Sam Rivers (1923–2011) had a distinguished career in jazz and improvised music, performing with his own ensembles and alongside a plethora of “greats”—from Tony Williams to T-Bone Walker, Dizzy Gillespie to Miles Davis—and younger stars, including Steve Coleman and Jason Moran. Despite his long-standing dedication to composing

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challenging music for large jazz ensembles, and his well-respected small group compositions and recordings, Rivers may best be known for his dynamic and exploratory trio work. Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of Rivers’s trio performances, both then and now, is that a delicate yet dynamic order and balance unfailingly emerges, despite the fact that the musicians do not plan any details of their performance in advance. Rivers describes his trio’s approach this way: “The communication is in the music while we are performing. I set a tempo into what we are going into and they’re listening to me. We go in and out of tempo by listening, it’s an intuitive kind of playing” (quoted in Turner 1982: 4). In February of 2004, I had the pleasure of hosting Sam Rivers at UC San Diego under the auspices of the UC Regent’s Lecturer Program for a week of performances, workshops, and talks. Rivers came from Orlando, Florida with his trio, including Doug Mathews on bass and bass clarinet and Anthony Cole on drums, piano, and saxophone. During his visit, Rivers shared his wisdom and musicality in a variety of diverse settings. He spoke with our undergraduate music majors about his half-century of professional experience, and he offered a guest lecture to my colleague Anthony Davis’s jazz history class, ending with an unscripted duo between the two seasoned improvisers that received a standing ovation. He and his trio also spent an afternoon offering a hands-on workshop to my graduatelevel improvisation ensemble, and Rivers was the guest soloist that evening at the large jazz ensemble concert under the direction of Jimmy Cheatham. For the featured evening concert with his trio, I invited trombonist George Lewis to “sit in” with the group and reconnect with Rivers, who had been something of a mentor to him in New York in the 1970s. Several selections from this performance can be heard on the accompanying website. Throughout the week, Rivers’s energy, conviction, and passion for his music were continually on display. During his visit, Rivers often described his musical approach with his trio as “spontaneous creativity”—an approach to improvising without preconceived structures in which everything is created “on the spot.” Far from implying a music without form, Rivers spoke of his preference for music that undulates in an organic manner, foregrounding moments of tension and relaxation, complexity, and simplicity. This connection to natural rhythms, frequencies, and processes has been apparent in much of his recorded work, including the albums Contours (1967),

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Streams (1973), Crystals (1974), Hues (1975), Sizzle (1976), Waves (1979), Crosscurrent (1981), and Colors (1982), for example. Although Rivers feels that “titles come last,” he states “I really try to put a word with the music that will in some way express what the music is all about” (quoted in Turner 1982: 5). In the liner notes to his 1978 album titled Waves, Rivers admitted to “thinking in terms of forces of nature … the motion of waves, changing currents, changing flow.” In the past few decades, several scientific approaches, often grouped under the umbrella of nonlinear dynamical systems theory, have emerged, aiming to model the unpredictable behavior of systems in which the whole is different than the sum of its parts. Nonlinear dynamical systems theory arose from studying natural processes, such as heartbeats, tides, seasons, and plant growth. While the full complexities of musical performance are still beyond the scope of these scientific approaches, their emphasis on systems that involve complex internal dynamics (including both cooperation and competition), along with a pronounced ability to adapt to new circumstances and conditions, may offer insight into the complexities of musical production, interaction, and reception, with particular relevance to how we understand improvisation. For example, sudden transitions from one stable state to another occur in both and can be interesting, pleasing, or disconcerting. Such behaviors cannot arise in the linear dynamical systems that were the focus of natural systems research until recently. This chapter investigates the dynamics of group improvisation, focusing on the importance of transitional moments as the music develops. Many of the most effective collective improvisations, it seems, involve decisive musical “phase spaces” (in the language of nonlinear dynamics) and transitions between phases, all negotiated by the group with an awareness of what has occurred and a conception of what may follow. The exact behavior of the ensemble at transitional moments appears to be both locally unstable and, in intriguing ways, globally comprehensible. These ideas are illustrated with an analysis of a 1973 performance by Sam Rivers’s trio with Cecil McBee on bass and Barry Altschul on drums (“Hues of Melanin”). Although I take into account the rich sonic details of the recording, I do not wish to isolate the analysis from the ways in which listeners (both audience and performers) experience and engage with the qualitative aspects of musical performance, nor from a more comprehensive understanding of the emergent properties of musical consciousness. As we saw in Chapter 3, the dynamic complexity that informs and can be generated by an individual improviser is immense. Mind and body, moment

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Figure 4.1  Sam Rivers

and place, emotion and intellect, preparation, experience, and spontaneity all collide, collude, and (in the best of moments) cooperate to create a compelling performance. When the complexities of individual improvisation are combined and amplified in a group setting—particularly those settings without an overriding “composition” or a shared harmonic or rhythmic framework—the sheer volume and variety of interactions, influences, intentions, and potential (mis) interpretations that come into play would seem to preclude the possibility for anything meaningful to emerge. Yet these open-form settings for group improvisation challenge us to engage with the complexities of collective dynamics and decision-making and with the emergent qualities of ensemble performance.

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Complexity and Emergence Some of the reasons why free improvisation was a logical development in musical history can be understood retrospectively through relatively recent scientific studies of complexity and emergence. Creating musical coherence, variety and beauty without the instructions of a director was possible through the skills of listening and response that many musicians already possessed. —David Toop (2002: 247) The emergent when it appears is always found to follow from the past, but before it appears, it does not, by definition, follow from the past. —George Herbert Mead (quoted in Sawyer 2003: 12) Complex systems are those in which the future emerges out of the interaction of innumerable forces, each leaving its indelible trace on the course of events. As opposed to systems that may simply be complicated, complex systems exhibit the possibility for adaptation and emergence by being open to energy influxes from outside the system and through their own highly interconnected nature (the openness from closure that we encountered in Chapter 3). Their dynamics are hard to predict but not entirely random. They can exhibit regularities, but these regularities are difficult to describe briefly and impossible to describe over time with absolute precision. Within the context of dynamical systems theory, creating the conditions for complexity requires two components: an irreversible medium and nonlinearity. The irreversible medium of most complex systems is time. Whether one is interested in a physical, biological, social, or artistic phenomenon—a snowflake, an ecosystem, a political movement, or an improvised music performance—it is the notion of time that supports the creation of complexity and the possibility for a sense of surprise that makes these systems both fascinating and fragile. Nonlinearity describes the property of a system whose output is not proportional to its input. The popular adage about the straw that breaks the camel’s back or the battle that was lost for want of a horseshoe nail illustrates this principle well; a small quantitative change initiates a dramatic qualitative one (see Gleick 1987: 23). In the mathematics of dynamical systems theory, iterating nonlinear equations can produce surprising breaks, loops, recursions, and all varieties of turbulence, such that the behavior of the whole is not simply reducible to that of its parts.

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Many nonlinear systems also display an extreme sensitivity to their initial state and subsequent perturbations, such that a small change in one variable can have a disproportionate, even catastrophic impact on other variables. In these systems, no amount of access to additional detail can alter their inherent unpredictability. As a result, contemporary work with nonlinear dynamical systems theory often seeks to discover the qualitative features of a system. In other words, it tries to predict the possible general shapes of processes, rather than actual numerical values of parameters that may be associated with them. Most “realworld” phenomena exhibit nonlinear behaviors, from the explosive outcome of earthquakes to the spread of ideas in modern society. Mathematician Stanislas Ulam reportedly described the study of nonlinearity as the “study of nonelephants.” But since nonlinear equations can introduce extreme difficulties and uncertainties into the mathematical modeling of natural systems, scientists have focused the bulk of their attention, until recently, on the elephants. The most common answer to this historical oversight maintains that nonlinear studies needed to wait for the advent of the digital computer to be able to model easily and accurately the long-term behavior of complex equations. Steven Kellert (1993) contends that this may be a partial answer, but he finds equally interesting the social and cultural factors that may have influenced this scientific neglect. According to Kellert, the twentieth century’s overriding social interest in the exploitation of nature contributed to the institutional disregard of physical systems not readily amenable to analysis and manipulation.

Musical Elephants This situation is in many ways analogous to the neglect of the study of musical improvisation in the Western academy (see Nettl 1998). Although improvisation may be, following Derek Bailey (1992: ix), “the most widely practiced of all musical activities,” music notation (whether in the form of prescriptive “score” or descriptive “transcription”) has arguably been the “elephant” of music studies, receiving the bulk of scholarly and pedagogical attention. To some extent, the relative scarcity of studies on improvised music would also seem to have a technological explanation. Improvisation study, according to this line of reasoning, had to wait for the development of technologies that could “capture” the details and nuances of its ephemeral form. Centuries earlier, musical notation had offered the possibility of a concrete record of musical

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creativity. It promised (particularly to composers in the Western tradition) a more permanent and unchanging record than oral tradition alone could provide, and a medium that could facilitate the creation of complex musical ideas by a single individual over time and facilitate their communication to others when organizing intricate performances. From its inception, however, notation was devised as a mnemonic aid for performance, neither intended nor expected to capture the full details of the music (see Gabrielsson 1988 and Palmer 1996). By about the mid-nineteenth century, however, notation began to be viewed by some as the actual music rather than a form of musical shorthand (see Sancho-Velasquez 2001). As musical studies matured in the West, the allure of focusing the bulk of attention on this tool that appeared not only to document but also to define musical activity was too hard to resist. Only gradually are other forms of computational visualization of music (at times for better, at times for worse) beginning to replace the reliance on Western notation in the music academy. Even as early recording technologies were being developed and employed by music researchers, particularly those with an ethnographic bent, notation remained the tool through which these newly recorded music examples were analyzed and shared with other interested researchers, necessarily filtering out many aspects of the sonic and cultural experience. How, one might ask, can the multifaceted and temporal art of music ever be reduced to a two-dimensional visual representation? Jazz music, for its part, has had a complex relationship with recorded sound and musical notation. The development of the music—barring the very earliest decades—occurred simultaneously with the budding recording industry, so that much recorded jazz has been preserved for archiving and analysis. Recording and disseminating jazz undoubtedly helped the music to spread quickly beyond its geographical origins and facilitated the sharing of improvisational ideas and approaches among players. But from an analytical and pedagogical standpoint, an over-reliance on recorded sound necessarily misses some of the spontaneity and flexibility of jazz, focusing undue attention on a canon of celebrated recordings and the expectation that students learn their improvisatory approach from those same recordings. Notation, too, has played a complex role in jazz’s history, as both an important tool for conveying ideas and organizing performances, and also as something with the potential, in the absence of a strong commitment to oral and aural methods, to standardize and canonize aspects of jazz performance practice. One might think here of the near-ubiquitous “real books” at jam sessions that

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present a very specific subset of jazz compositions, transcribed from canonical recordings (sometimes with significant errors in the notation), for budding jazz musicians to play. More diverse “real books” are beginning to be published, including the forthcoming volume called New Standards from the Berkelee Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice, which features notated compositions by women composers, including Mary Lou Williams, Toshiko Akiyoshi, Tia Fuller, Esperanza Spalding, and more. But jazz musicians tend to agree that musicians should not rely too heavily on notation, or that once a composition is internalized, it is best to dispense with the notation, whenever possible, to focus on the ear instead of the eye.

The Sound of One Note Clapping The scientific approaches of reductionism, positivism, and naturalism have relied on a “third-person” approach to breaking down complex systems into their smallest component parts in a search for underlying “natural laws.” These approaches have been extremely successful at illuminating the materials and dynamics of nature at a great range of scales. Yet matter, from atoms to organisms and galaxies, appears to have an innate tendency to self-organize, generating complexity and emergent properties that can be described only at higher levels than those of the individual units. Life, for instance, remains one of the great mysteries of modern science. It is not some sort of essence added to a physico-chemical system, but neither can it simply be described in ordinary physico-chemical terms. It is an emergent property that manifests itself when physico-chemical systems are organized and interact in certain ways. Consciousness, too, appears to be neither an epiphenomenon, nor a simple result of neurons firing. After a certain level of complexity, new behaviors emerge that are not fully describable in terms of the behaviors of their parts. On a more mundane level, the qualities of water—its “wetness” and its ability to flow in a variety of controlled and turbulent ways—is not present in the mixture of hydrogen and oxygen; it has a new unity that sacrifices the properties of its parts. Under the right conditions, water can also undergo a “phase transition” into ice or steam, each of which have qualitative aspects that are not present in the original compound.

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Music, in my view, is also best described as an emergent property of humans attending to organized sounds in time (whether those sounds are organized by fellow humans, other species, or otherwise). At each level of explanation, qualities emerge that are not fully describable in terms of the dynamics of the previous level. On even the most basic level, a single musical tone—say an A-440 produced by an oboe player—can be analyzed in terms of frequency, intensity, duration, and signal and spectral envelope, among other things. But when perceived and processed by a human listener, it will produce qualitative aspects in her conscious experience that cannot be described completely through physical analysis alone. Acoustic phenomena are not the same as auditory phenomena. When asked, she might describe the sound as nasal or buzzing in quality, or it might evoke cultural or geographical references, say to the Middle East, or perhaps a historical reference to the practice of tuning a nineteenth-century symphony orchestra, among other things. That single sound also can never exist in temporal isolation. In other words, it might take on different qualitative aspects depending on what came before it or what might reasonably be expected to follow. When that single oboe sound is combined with a second tone, a musical interval is produced that will have emergent properties with cognitive, emotional, and cultural connotations that were not found in the isolated tones. Add a third sound and a chord is produced, the qualitative and emergent aspects of which inspired these lines of poetry from Robert Browning (from “Abt Vogler” in Dramatis Personæ, 1864): And I know not if, save in this, such gift be allowed to man, That out of three sounds he frame, not a fourth sound, but a star. Consider it well: each tone of our scale in itself is nought …

It turns out that nearly all of our common analytical terms for music describe emergent properties. Harmony and rhythm describe qualities that emerge, as tones and silences are combined simultaneously and in succession. Melody is an emergent phenomenon that draws on harmony, rhythm, contour, and other musical and cognitive dimensions as well that are grouped together as a gestalt in the mind of a listener. Our difficulties in approaching the emergent qualities of music in general, and of improvised music in particular, are not dissimilar to those of traditional physicists who tended to steer clear of the complexity that is readily apparent

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in daily life. Quantum theory and cosmology may have much to say about the behavior of matter at the smallest and largest spacio-temporal scales, but clearly many interesting things emerge at a human scale—including life, intelligence, and consciousness—whose qualities are not simply explainable in terms of interacting particles or unfolding galaxies. Many emergent properties only reveal themselves in the dynamics of collective groupings, not only as a superstructure of culture, but also in the symbiotic relationships that develop between individuals, and in the ways in which knowledge and learning are distributed across groups in a spatiotemporal manner. Exploring these dynamics crucially involves an awareness of the circular causality (or downward/upward causation or global-to-local/localto-global causality) that was introduced in Chapter 3. Adopting a musical analogy, science writers John Briggs and F. David Peat (1989: 29) highlight the interdependent and emergent qualities of complex systems this way: In the sense that parts seem autonomous, they are only “relatively autonomous.” They are like a music lover’s favorite passage in a Beethoven symphony. Take the passage out of the piece and it’s possible to analyze the notes. But in the long run, the passage is meaningless without the symphony as a whole.

Time and the Qualia of Experience One of the most fundamental and also most mysterious features of music (and of experience generally) is the way in which what is essentially a continuous flow gets divided unconsciously and nearly instantaneously into “chunks,” each of which has a distinct qualitative character. In philosophy, the phenomenological units of experience, including their qualitative “feel,” are called qualia (the singular form of this Latin word is “quale”). Qualia are often treated by reductionist science as a “residual category”: that which is left unexplained, or which remains after all objective features have been subtracted. Even philosophers often give simplistic examples of qualia, such as the “redness” of the color red. My notion of qualia differs from that of philosophers, in that qualia are not atomic, nor are they discrete. Rather, they have complex internal structure, consisting of other qualia. For instance, the qualia that appear in music can range from whole performances,

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through sections and phrases, down to fragments of tones and sounds. Following are some conclusions about the nature of musical qualia (see Goguen 2004):

• Qualia are created as part of the process of perception; they do not exist independently. • Qualia are associated with segments of experience, but not all such segments are qualia, only those that are considered significant. • Qualia are hierarchically organized; some qualia appear as parts of other qualia. • Each quale has as its context the larger qualia in which it is embedded, and most qualia have an internal structure consisting of sub-qualia. Foreground and background are determined by the structural organization of qualia; they are not predetermined. • Qualia have different saliencies, which indicate their relative significance; these can change over time. • If left alone, the saliency of a quale will gradually decay, but when it or something related to it is heard, then its saliency increases, since it becomes more likely to be relevant to future musical events. • A quale can also be retroactively “swallowed up” by other qualia, ceasing itself to be a quale; this can be considered an instance of what is sometimes called “downward” or “backward” causation. • There is no direct relationship between the saliencies of qualia and their sizes; very salient qualia can be any size. • Consciousness consists of qualia, and the degree to which we are conscious of a quale is proportional to its saliency. • Our perceptions of time are also linked to qualia; the qualitative character of the flow of time is that of the largest salient qualia (e.g., it may be smooth, bumpy, fast, slow, etc.); our sense of time may even appear to disappear at moments of great intensity, as in Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s (1991) sense of “flow.” Unlike the usual scientific analysis of time that envisions it as a point moving along a line at a constant rate, our phenomenological experience of time is considerably more complex. In music, for instance, both performers and listeners continually look into the future and the past in order to engage with sounds and

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their meanings as they unfold (see Benson 2003). Although actual experience necessarily occurs in the present, we experience the flow of time, according to Edmund Husserl (1964: 67) as a continual “sinking away” of present events into the past. Husserl named this mode of experience retention. With retention, the immediate past can be experienced in the present, but in a different “mode” from that in which it was originally experienced. For instance, in music we can “hear” an “echo” of a phrase just played for about ten seconds after, but beyond that most details are lost. Husserl named this short-term buffer fresh memory, and it has recently been experimentally verified and given a neurological basis in what is called “sensory memory.” This form of memory differs from the more familiar short- and long-term memories that have been much studied in psychology in that it is not conscious; that is, it works whether we are aware of it or not (though conscious attention may make it work better). Humans also continually anticipate what might come next, greatly reducing our cognitive processing needs and allowing us to experience the sensation of surprise. Husserl adopted the term protention to describe this mode, and, like the related concept of retention, it appears to be “hardwired” into the brain. The field of predictive processing, discussed in Chapter 3, is providing ample experimental evidence that cognition involves our brains’ use of past experiences to infer the meaning of incoming sense data and to anticipate what to do about it. For Husserl, “objective moments” of time are not predetermined, but rather, objects-in-time arise through the processes of retention and protention. Unlike moments in physics, these objects-in-time are “temporally thick,” since they relate to real events that take time to process. Based on considerable experimental research, it appears that qualia, or at least “emotional” qualia, function as “indices” for the retrieval of these temporally thick memories and they play important roles in many other mental processes as well (see Damasio 1999). In light of these phenomenological and experimental findings, musical meanings are best located in the act of listening rather than at the structural level of notation or even sound. Just as a painting becomes more than simple brushstrokes when viewed as a whole, music lives when it is heard and understood. The active, human process of listening is the essence of music, making the physical and cognitive capabilities and limitations of human listeners crucial for analysis. Therefore, we will construct models of musical experts

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(either performers or listeners) rather than models of disembodied pure music, a vacuous abstraction that cannot ever really exist. A primary goal here is to define two functions that describe the dynamic qualities of music and listening (see Borgo and Goguen 2005). By music, I mean music making, the process of sound unfolding in time from instruments in response to the control exercised by musicians and to any predetermined instructions that may exist (the “score” in a generalized sense), plus of course any applicable fixed acoustic properties of instruments, microphones, halls, and so forth. By listening, I mean the active, dynamic process of understanding music, which includes the hierarchical segmentation of what has been heard into qualia, the anticipation of what may come in the future, the saliencies associated with these, as well as the current state of relevant memories, including sensory, short- and long-term memories, and transpersonal cultural memories. Music and listening, as I define them here, are tightly coupled, in that the current state of each acts as the control of the other. For example, musicians are continually listening to the combined sound of the performance (and to their own sounds when actively playing) in ways that directly affect what they do next. Listeners are also continually engaging with the acoustic soundscape and the activities of the performance in ways that affect their perceptions and understandings of what is occurring, what has occurred, and what might reasonably be expected to occur next. In other words, our evolving understanding of music (as performer or audience member) and the future directions it may take are determined by what sounds are heard now and our expectations based on what has been understood about what was heard before, taking into account as well long-term cultural patterns and personal predispositions. Nonlinearity can arise in this tightly coupled system due to both the great complexity of factors involved and the fact that the state of each function, music and listening, acts as the control of the other. In improvised performances in particular, small details in sound production or perception can, when attended to or acknowledged by participants and listeners at appropriate moments, trigger transformations in the music or its reception, such that the eventual outcome is disproportionate to any initial causes. This includes the possibility that current activity in the performance, or its reception, can force a reinterpretation of previous moments. In other words, the qualia of musical experience remain

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dynamic; they can be altered, incorporated into, or even supplanted by more recent qualia. I suggest that active listeners try to construct a minimum complexity description of what they hear now by combining and transforming fragments of what they heard before and what they expected to hear now. These stored fragments are not simply unprocessed sonic details; rather, they include the qualia of musical experience. The various transformation possibilities that may be anticipated by listeners are also associated with cognitive weights that reflect the perceived difficulty of their application. By anticipating what might come next and comparing that with what does come next, listeners can greatly reduce the complexity of understanding. The level of surprise at a given moment of listening, therefore, is determined by the difference between what is heard and what is expected. Despite Whitney Balliett’s (1959) memorable description of jazz as “the sound of surprise,” music that is maximally surprising would not, in fact, be maximally “interesting” or good. Jazz and improvised musics do, however, place great importance on engendering a sense of freedom by surprising listeners in ways that involve manipulating expectation through the transformation of both large-grain and fine-grain structure. More technically, the level of surprise can be described by a conditional complexity measure (see Goguen 2004). Intuitively, this measures how difficult it is to understand the current musical moment in relation to those moments that directly preceded it, assuming as well some given knowledge about the types of musical moments of which this is a particular instance. The conditional complexity measure does not measure aesthetic preference; rather, it is an “understanding” of the music based on psychologically and culturally appropriate components and weights. Because our model takes into account memory hierarchy—with sensory, short- and long-term, and transpersonal components—such an analysis will reveal not only finegrain but also large-grain structures, as well as how all these structures are interrelated. It is important to note, however, that human listeners are not capable of doing arbitrarily complex computations in real time. As a result, this process can fail badly for unfamiliar forms of music, resulting in a sense of confusion and displeasure. On the other hand, it seems to work remarkably well for familiar forms of music, and it provides us with a sense of pleasure when approximate understandings are readjusted.

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Humans evolved a general capacity for anticipation in order to enhance survival both in the wild and in highly social communities. We continually predict the physical actions of others and their complex thoughts and behaviors by attributing intention and planning to them. This natural mechanism rewards correct anticipation with pleasure, arouses curiosity when anticipation fails mildly, arouses doubt and uncertainty for greater failures, and arouses fear in case of significant failure in a dangerous situation. To invoke our previous discussion of Husserl, emotion arises from relations in the temporally thick “now” among retention, protention, and perception. When comparing anticipation with reality in the relatively safe environment of music listening, these same instinctive responses appear to provide the origin of musical emotion (see Goguen 2004). Music pleasure, it seems, arrives not from exact matching of expectation with reality, but rather from slight readjustments to our future anticipations following surprise. This also helps to explain the ongoing pleasure that musicians encounter when transforming familiar materials in subtle ways.

The Phase Space of Improvisation This kind of thing happens in improvisation. Two things running concurrently in haphazard fashion suddenly synchronize autonomously and sling you forcibly into a new phase. —Cornelius Cardew (1971: vxii) An important goal of this chapter is to study the structure of the phase space of improvisation, with a particular focus on the transitions between phases. The emphasis will be on a space of possible understandings within that phase space. The phase space of a system is a multidimensional “map,” sometimes referred to as its “geometry of possibilities,” which allows investigators to describe and analyze a system’s dynamics. The number of dimensions of a given phase space is based on the degrees of freedom. For instance, the motion of a standard pendulum can be mapped into a two-dimensional phase space charting its relative position and momentum. The motion of a car driving in open terrain could be mapped into a fourdimensional phase space corresponding to the two dimensions of direction

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available and the relative momentum of the vehicle moving in each of those two directions. A rocket ship moving freely in space has available an extra dimension of direction and momentum, increasing its phase space dimensions to six. Phase space diagrams, just like more conventional forms of mapping, bring into focus aspects of reality that might otherwise be overlooked. We must be careful, however, not to assume any ontological status for the abstractions involved in modeling, no matter their complexity. Models are always constructed by human beings for some particular purpose and should not be viewed as definitive descriptions of reality. In more technical language, phase spaces are lower dimensional subspaces of state space, since only certain variables are given a key role. Conventional music notation, whether used as a prescriptive score or as a descriptive transcription, details a linear dimension of time (running steadily from past to future), a pitch dimension (lower to higher) for each available voice, as well as additional markings that can describe changes in tempo, dynamics, timbre, articulations, and so forth. As notated, these dimensions are discrete, not continuous. Pitches come in twelve chromatic varieties within octave intervals; time markings (rhythms) are available in a limited number of divisions, primarily of twos and threes; and markings for dynamics, timbre, articulation, and so forth also come in a limited array of options. Without a doubt, contemporary composers and skilled transcribers have expanded and elaborated on these available options, but the representation of music on notation paper, by necessity, limits a more complete description. The frequent reliance on notation as a compositional, performance, and analytical tool in the traditional academy has also tended to shape our perceptions and evaluations of music in subtle ways. In other words, notation is never valueneutral. It involves choices of what to notate; that is, of what is important. For instance, standard Western notation assumes twelve-tone equal temperament (12-TET). Even the choice to notate involves the value of exercising certain kinds of control over performers. The situation is similar for transcription and analysis, since an analyst must make value-laden choices of what to analyze, how to analyze it, and how to report the results, among other things. Music performance, in its vast cultural and historical diversity, is of course not limited to the prescribed or described dimensions of notation, nor is it discrete in this fashion. Musicians from all genres and backgrounds (yes, including Western art-music!) explore in performance the continuous features of those

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musical dimensions that can be represented by notation, as well as others such as timbre and the subtleties of phrasing that are even more difficult to notate conventionally. In addition, musics that hinge on a high degree of improvisation in performance often foreground the dynamic qualities of sound and style that are only hinted at in notated form. Jazz history, for instance, is littered with stories of performers from Pee Wee Russell to John Coltrane who, when given a detailed transcription of their improvisations, could not perform them, highlighting the ways in which many important musical qualities remain implicit rather than explicit for performers. The freer forms of improvisation—those without a strong allegiance to notation and with an often more flexible approach to temporal, tonal, and timbral dimensions—would seem to imply a huge number of degrees of freedom and an enormously complex phase space. For our purposes, musical “phases” refer to phenomenologically distinct sound worlds. These might be articulated by a pronounced textural, harmonic, temporal, or timbral quality, or they may involve complex arrangements of these and other factors. During an improvisation, each musician explores their own phase space, while the group phase space is defined by the combination of all of these.

Attractors Researchers have adopted the notion of attractors in phase space to help understand and simplify the behavior of a wide variety of dynamical systems. An attractor is a region of phase space that seems to “pull” the behavior of the system toward it, as if magnetically. A small number of attractor types can describe the behavior of a wide variety of dynamical systems. For instance, a simple pendulum operating with friction will eventually settle on its lowest gravitational point; this final resting point “attracts” the behavior of the system. But many other dynamical systems, say a rock rolling down a hill into a valley, can be described with this same notion of a fixed-point (or static) attractor. In fact, a simplified way of conceiving phase space is to consider the hills and valleys of a real landscape to be hills and valleys of energy. A second type of basic attractor, a limit-cycle (or periodic) attractor, describes the behavior of systems that forever oscillate within a fixed or limited range.

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Take the pendulum discussed above and place it in a vacuum to eliminate the effects of friction, and its continual swing is describable by a limit-cycle attractor (Briggs and Peat (1989: 37). Limit cycles, particularly when coupled together in interesting ways, have proven effective in modeling the behavior of many natural systems, including some simple ecological systems and stable predator–prey relationships. With the introduction of notions such as quasi-periodicity and the sophisticated geometry of torus attractors, scientists had hoped to be able to model accurately the behavior of all complex systems. The Newtonian vision of a regular and predictable universe, however, was placed under stress as early as the late nineteenth century when the French mathematician, physicist, and philosopher Henri Poincaré [1882–89] (1992) wondered about the long-term stability of the solar system. He found that although Newton’s equations work perfectly well for any idealized two-body system (e.g., the moon orbiting the earth), the small effects of adding a third body to the system (e.g., the influence of the sun on the earth and moon) requires a series of approximations, precluding the possibility of a closed-form solution. Initially, Poincaré’s warning shot across the bow of reductionism went unheeded; only a few short years later, physicists were immersed in the emerging fields of relativity and quantum mechanics. In the 1960s, as the story goes, Edward Lorenz (1996) rediscovered a fundamental limit to the predictability of complex systems while attempting to model the dynamics of weather formations. When restarting his computer simulation that involved three nonlinear equations, Lorenz entered a slightly truncated version of the initial values from a previous run, only to be shocked at the rapid and pronounced divergence from his previous results. Lorenz realized then that the complex and nonlinear dynamics of weather formations would preclude the possibility of accurate predictions in the long run. His most picturesque analogy for this postulates that the flapping wings of a butterfly can significantly alter weather conditions halfway across the globe, the famed “butterfly effect” of chaos theory. Lorenz’s 1963 paper published in The Journal of Atmospheric Sciences, however, garnered little attention outside of the field of meteorology until the 1970s, at which time it helped to reinvigorate work on the theory of nonlinear dynamical systems. A third type of attractor in nonlinear dynamical systems was given the evocative title “strange” by David Ruelle and Floris Takens (1971), but the Lorenz attractor and the Mandelbrot set—named after Benoit Mandelbrot (1982) who discovered fractal geometry—are arguably the most familiar strange attractors. Both have

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appeared on thousands of T-shirts and computer screens around the world. A simple system of two pendulums linked in a way that the behavior of each affects the other will produce chaotic results that can be described by a strange attractor. For another example, imagine a rotating water wheel that allows for a controlled drainage in the buckets. When the speed of water supplying the buckets reaches a critical value, the wheel will begin to slow down, reverse directions, and speed up, all with a strange unpredictability. Despite the seemingly controlled nature of this example, even the slightest change in the rate of water flow after the critical point can cause the system to exhibit strikingly different behaviors, highlighting its extreme sensitivity to initial conditions. To conceptualize this principle, you might also imagine shooting two balls into a pinball machine with an extremely small difference in their initial force and then charting their respective trajectories. Although the second ball approaches the first obstacle with only a minor difference in trajectory, that small difference will quickly be amplified by the complexity of the layout and the positive feedback of the bumpers until the second ball’s path diverges radically from that of the first. Or you might envision dropping two snowboards from near identical positions at the top of a ski slope filled with moguls. Here too, due to the complexity of the system and its extreme sensitivity to initial conditions, the path of the objects will diverge significantly (see Lorenz 1996).

Positive Feedback One of the hallmarks of the dynamics of nonlinear systems is iteration, which involves a continual reabsorption or enfolding of what has come before through the process of feedback. Negative feedback is well known as a common way to regulate mechanical and social systems; the thermostat in a house, for instance, uses negative feedback to achieve but not exceed a desired temperature. Piloting a boat, an analogy adopted by Norbert Weiner (1961) when founding the field of cybernetics, involves a constant cycle of steering, assessing deviation from the desired course, and counter steering. Judicial and punitive systems also provide negative feedback in society so that individuals or businesses operate within acceptable bounds (in recent years, it has also become quite apparent that these systems of negative feedback—especially the policing of Black and Brown bodies—are not doled out in a fair or equal fashion).

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The feedback found in nonlinear systems is positive. If negative feedback regulates, positive feedback amplifies. Despite its cheery sounding name, positive feedback, according to Mitchel Resnick (1994: 135), has an image problem: “People tend to see positive feedback as destructive, making things spiral out of control.” The standard examples offered of positive feedback include the screeching sound that results when a microphone is placed near a speaker or the folk notion of “the bandwagon effect,” which tends to evoke a mindless mob latching onto a new idea unthinkingly. But positive feedback plays a crucial role in creating and extending new structures, particularly in nonlinear environments. For instance, a howling PA system is due to the linear effects of positive feedback, but when driven into a nonlinear range, we hear the tools of the trade of Jimi Hendrix and countless other creative electric guitarists. In nonlinear dynamical systems, positive feedback can become a generative or organizing force. Like all forms of human activity, music relies heavily on feedback. Musicians use various forms of feedback when practicing to regulate or iteratively improve specific techniques on their instrument. In ensemble settings, musicians develop a kind of group communication via auditory and other feedback to help tune, balance, and coordinate their sounds together. Notation and rehearsed interpretive decisions can also play a role, in traditions that use them, by stipulating what notes to play when and how (although clearly seasoned performers in all music traditions make important expressive decisions in the moment in order to breathe life into the music). In open-form improvisation, positive feedback may play an especially pronounced role, as the system can display an extreme sensitivity to its initial state. Presumably, even a small change in the first performance gesture—a shift in dynamic level, attack, or articulation—can lead to a sudden divergence from the evolution of a system started with nearly identical initial conditions (if such an experiment could ever be devised). Without predetermined arrangements or techniques for managing the flow of the music (such as a Butch Morris-style “conduction” or a John Zorn-style game piece), the ability to transition as a group from one musical “phase space” to another becomes critical. Like other complex dynamical systems, the exact development and structure of an ensemble improvisation is inherently unpredictable, and yet through

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certain shared understandings, nuanced interactions and interconnections, and a shared cognitive ability to attend to and parse musical sound, dynamical orderings can emerge that are both surprising and comprehensible. Nonlinear dynamical systems theory, in its current form, could not hope to offer a full explanation of the structure or beauty of improvised music. To be clear, the goal here is not to “explain away” these qualities, but rather to offer fresh insight to our discussions of the complex dynamics that are involved in all musical performance, and, in particular, to our discussions of contemporary forms of group improvisation. Music scholarship has always relied on modeling techniques, from formal transcription and/or score analysis to historically and culturally sensitive contextual readings of a performance. A fundamental mistake is made only when a given model is seen to supplant the actual experiences it describes. This is referred to as “reification of concepts”: the belief that our models of experience fully capture it and can replace it. We wrongly make the assumption that the “categories” or cognitive “chunks” that we construct in order to make sense of continuous, information-heavy stimuli are “natural.” What is natural is the human need to “chunk” and to “categorize.” What these will be and will mean is culture-dependent (among other things). Our increasing sensitivity to the nonlinear behavior found in many natural and social systems is already beginning to provoke a shift from quantitative reductionism to a more qualitative and holistic approach to analyzing complex dynamics. Briggs and Peat (1989: 175) explain: Nonlinear models differ from linear ones in a number of ways. Rather than trying to figure out all of the chains of causality, the modeler looks for nodes where feedback loops join and tries to capture as many of the important loops as possible in the system’s “picture.” Rather than shaping the model to make a forecast about future events or to exercise some central control, the nonlinear modeler is content to perturb the model, trying out different variables in order to learn about the system’s critical points and its homeostasis (resistance to change). The modeler is not seeking to control the complex system by quantifying it and mastering its causality; (s)he wants to increase her “intuitions” about how the system works so (s)he can interact with it more harmoniously.

The modeling approach I explore starts from the postulate that many extended ensemble improvisations display a sectional nature in which distinct phase spaces may be explored and then surprisingly discarded.

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In performance, small-scale interactions may continuously occur within the ensemble as relationships and ideas are dynamically articulated, but larger-scale group “phase transitions” occur less frequently, often at moments of unexpected synchrony when the ensemble’s combined explorations seem to coalesce around or imply a potential new direction for the music, or at moments when a need for change (in density, complexity, or comprehensibility, for instance) is felt by one or all of the members. In large ensembles, group phase transitions often involve a significant shift in ensemble instrumentation, since this textural change invariably brings about musical change as well. These types of “orchestration” changes tend to occur naturally, based on who chooses to play at a given moment or not. In very large ensembles, however, orchestration changes may be “scripted” beforehand to ensure that sparser moments in the music will occur. For instance, once Evan Parker’s Electro-Acoustic Ensemble had grown to upward of eighteen musicians sharing the stage together, with ensemble members processing one another’s sonic output, Parker admitted to deciding on a “sequence of overlapping combinations fixed in advance” so as to ensure sonic variety and cohesion.1 In the more intimate setting of a trio, as in the case of Sam Rivers’s group, transitions tend to unfold intuitively and organically, although Rivers does take a certain leadership role, as his statement offered at the outset of the chapter implies (“I set a tempo into what we are going into and they’re listening to me”) and there is an expectation that both shared pulse and more open rhythmic terrain will be explored (“We go in and out of tempo by listening, it’s an intuitive kind of playing”).

Transitions From a phenomenological perspective, transitions in improvised music may appear to happen on their own or be directed by certain individuals or by the group as a whole, but (in the best of instances) their appearance is acknowledged by the group and goes on to influence the formation and reception of the music. Although it may be tempting to imagine locating the initial gesture of an improvisation as a point in phase space and starting an analysis from there, in

1 Liner notes to Evan Parker Electro-Acoustic Ensemble, Hasselt (psi 12.03, 2012).

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truth, that initial point is already implicated by feedback processes in a complex network dynamic (these were discussed in Chapter 3 as the recursively established encultured and embodied techniques and sensibilities of the performer(s), and the specific context for performance, etc.). As the system iterates (as the improvisations continue) and its parts feed back into each other, the complexity and uncertainty begin to reveal themselves. In this way, improvised music is locally unpredictable, but the dynamics of group improvisation can also reveal more stable global behaviors. In nonlinear dynamical systems theory, systems can bifurcate (or multifurcate) by branching off into entirely new states and demonstrating novel behaviors and emergent order in ways that are intrinsically unpredictable. The behavior of the system at these moments, however, is profoundly influenced by the previous history of the system. Depending on which path it has taken to reach instability, the system will follow one of many available branches. By way of analogy, all of the factors that contribute to the development of an improvisation up to the point of transition—including each individual’s personal history and cultural understandings and the ensemble’s collective experience improvising with each other—can affect which subsequent musical path the group pursues. To continue our analogy, contemporary improvisers tend to favor “strange” musical attractors to those that rely on periodic cycles or predictable interactions. They avoid low complexity regions (called “basins of attraction”) while constantly creating new patterns, or patterns of patterns, in order to keep the energy going, all the while working to maintain the coherence of the performance. They metaphorically surf the “edge of chaos”—an evocative phrase that has technical implications that we will explore further in Chapter 5—to ensure continual development and excitement without exceeding the cognitive abilities and aesthetic interests of listeners. Although from the perspective of an uninitiated listener, contemporary improvisation may seem to veer in the direction of confusion and displeasure, it, like all music, engenders an emotional and aesthetic response by playing with familiarity and expectation. For example, if too many references to traditional musical idioms creep into a performance or an underlying harmonic character or tempo lingers for too long, many improvisers will immediately begin to search for more uncharted and uncertain musical terrain. The exact aesthetic approach and tolerance of idiomatic components will vary considerably from individual to individual, ensemble to ensemble, and even from performance to performance, as will the

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speed at which the group transitions into new dynamics, from mere seconds to several minutes or more. Some improvisations, in fact, may not “bifurcate” at all, offering instead a detailed and focused investigation of a single attractor. Improvised performances on the whole, however, tend to contain moments in which apparent order—stable states and limit cycles—can quickly dissolve into “chaos” (in the everyday sense of the word), and sections in which “chaotic” (in the mathematical sense) dynamics can produce surprising periods of emergent order and structure. Like this general description of the music, there is something of an inherent tension or paradox in the dynamics of strange attractors. Even though they can involve an infinite number of loops and spirals, they are also contained within a finite region of phase space. They are seemingly able to reconcile contrary effects; as attractors, nearby trajectories converge on them, but their sensitive dependence on initial conditions means that initially close trajectories diverge rapidly. Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart (1994: 206–7) ask us to think of Ping-Pong balls in the ocean. If you release two balls from near identical locations below or above the surface of the water, they will both be attracted to the surface. But once there, they will continue to bob freely and unpredictably, perhaps quickly diverging from one another only to possibly cross paths at some unlikely future moment. To push this analogy further, even as an improvising group may have temporarily settled into a musical attractor, like our bobbing Ping-Pong balls, each musician will still continue to explore micro-details and personalized variations so that the improvised section remains highly surprising and unpredictable. Additionally, moments of “attraction” in which players seem to be working together toward a shared musical end may be interrupted or compounded by intentionally disruptive or dissociative behavior from others, which may or may not lead to a dramatic transition in the music.

Hues of Melanin To illustrate these ideas in a specific musical context, I focus on a few transitional moments in the work of the Sam Rivers Trio (with Cecil McBee on bass and Barry Altschul on drums) from their 1973 concert at Yale University, released as “Hues of Melanin” (on Trio Live, Impulse! IMP 12682, 1998). The complete improvisation lasted just over forty-four minutes and was broken into three

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distinct sections on both the original and re-release of the performance. I will focus on the first section, before Rivers switches to piano, which comprises the first thirty-four minutes of improvisation. During the performance, a pronounced change in the flow of the improvisation tends to occur every two or three minutes as the trio transitions between moments of rapid propulsion and phlegmatic rubato. The group also moves between more and less dense textures and between periods of polytonal exploration, periods of extended harmonic drones, and more open sections exploring “extended” sounds and timbres. Table 4.1 provides a phenomenological reading of the various transitions between sections and subsections that occur in “Hues of Melanin.” For it, I borrowed terminology about transition types from Tom Nunn’s book, The Wisdom of the Impulse (1998: 52–4), although many of the trio’s dynamics do not fall neatly into one of his seven categories. The large-scale sectional transitions—or bifurcations—are most easily recognized by a shift from shared tempo to more open rhythmic realms, or vice versa. I designated subsections rather than entirely new sections for those moments during which the trio appears to be shifting directions without establishing an entirely new musical space to explore. The catalysts for the sectional phase transitions vary, but a few common ones include trilllike figures, repeated tones, or a gradual descent that can signal a slowing of pulse and energy. Rivers then often uses a quick, tossed-off melodic fragment or rhythmic impetus to jumpstart the group into new improvisational explorations.2 For example, at approximately two minutes into the trio’s improvisation, Rivers begins a trill figure on soprano that triggers Cecil McBee and Barry Altschul to relax their dense and intense development, in favor of more sparse musical territory (A3 in Table 4.1). And at approximately seven and a half minutes into the performance, Rivers plays another trill that eases the group’s energy, then follows it with a quick melodic fragment that triggers Altschul and McBee to shift into up-tempo exploration (D). While signals frequently come from Rivers’s horn, the other two members also can and do initiate bifurcations. For instance, Cecil McBee often adopts a To be clear, although it may be convenient to highlight just one or a few “catalysts” that appear to bring about a transition, in reality there are always multiple, weak, nonlinear causes that produce any given outcome. 2

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similar trill figure on his bass to function as a sectional cue, or he improvises a figure that gradually descends into the lowest register of the instrument to signal a slowing of pulse or lessening of energy to the other musicians. Withdrawing and re-entering into the trio texture, as Barry Altschul often does, or shifting instruments (and adding voice), as Sam Rivers is prone to do, provide other opportune moments for musical bifurcations and nonlinear dynamics in the performance. Although these catalysts can be effective in triggering sectional transitions, the musicians seem to work together so that their use and influence never become predictable. In other words, a cue of a given type can frequently produce dramatically different results over the course of an extended performance. I contend that the transitional devices used early in the trio’s performance— the trills and melodic and tempo triggers—diminish in cognitive “weight” when they reappear at subsequent moments, necessitating altered formulations and responses and highlighting new strategies of collective expression and interaction in order to maintain the overall complexity of the performance. For example, ten-and-a-half minutes into “Hues of Melanin,” Rivers interjects a melodic catalyst that does not provoke a complete shift to shared tempo, but instead a gradual collapse into a drone-filled melodic and rhythmic space. Soon a powerful moment of sync arrives when Rivers and McBee land on the same pitch during a gradual scalar ascent, provoking a moment of heightened intensity and spurring increased collective exploration. Finally, a fresh melodic fragment by Rivers launches the trio into an up-tempo improvisation full of gentle tugand-pull between the three members (E2 to F). Perhaps the most difficult aspect of highlighting the subtleties of the structural transformations and transitions that take place in much improvised music is providing a sense of their hierarchical complexity. The linear aspects of causeand-effect style playing and analysis can be interesting, but the nonlinear, part– whole relationships that emerge in performance frequently convey more subtle meanings to listeners and performers. On close analysis, certain subsections of the performance also have enough similarities to give the listener the impression that the “phase spaces” of the improvisation are warping in on themselves. Attractors in the phase space of nonlinear, chaotic systems are often described as analogous to pulling taffy. Points that may at first be close together can quickly diverge, only to nearly reconnect at surprising moments in the future.

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Table 4.1  Sam Rivers Trio: “Hues of Melanin”—Phenomenological Analysis Transition types: (From Nunn 1998: 52–4) T1 sudden/unexpected segue—an unprepared, immediate change with unexpected continuation T2 pseudo-cadential segue—an implied cadence with sudden and unexpected continuation T3 climactic segue—a peak moment that stimulates unexpected change and continuation T4 feature overlap—one feature of the antecedent section is sustained and becomes part of the consequent section T5 feature change—a gradual change of one feature that redirects the flow (usually subtly) T6 fragmentation—a gradual breaking up, or fragmenting, of the general texture and/or rhythm T7 internal cadence—a prepared cadence followed by a short silence then continuation with new material. (In addition to presenting a moment of resolution, an internal cadence can signal a moment of extreme unpredictability in the performance since there is always the possibility that it will become the final cadence of the improvisation.) Letter Time

Transition Type (salient detail)

Texture/Tempo

A

0:00

A2 A3 A4

0:46 1:57 2:33

T5 (bass repeated tones A♭) T2 (soprano trill D–E♭) T2/T4 (cadence on C)

repetition/density relaxation/intensity layered complexity

B B2 B3 B4

3:02 4:06 4:26 4:55

T1 (soprano descending phrase) T5 (soprano and bass dialog/glissando) T5 (bass drone) T5 (soprano pedal tones)

FAST tempo

C C2 C3 C4

5:29 5:48 6:43 7:05

T2 (soprano trill on D) T7 (drum cadence) T2 (soprano high note) T2/T4/T6 (soprano and bass low A)

OPEN

D D2

7:35 9;20

T7 (trill/melodic trigger) T6 (drums fall out of time)

MEDIUM tempo begins to fragment

E E2

9:54 10:29

OPEN—intensifies

E3

11:04

T7 (cadence to B/unison trill on E) T1/T6 (melodic trigger leads to fragmentation) T2 (C-tonality, unison G, drum cadence)

OPEN—introductory call

(Continued)

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132 Letter Time

Transition Type (salient detail)

Texture/Tempo

F

12:02

T1 (melodic trigger)

FAST tempo

G

13:10

GROOVE

G2 G3

14:04 14:52

T2 (trill on D) followed by T5 (bass groove) metric sync T6 (bass triggers descent)

H H2

15:17 16:45

T7 (trill, drum cadence) T6/T5 (flute and voice hollers)

bass solo w/ voice&perc OPEN—intensifies

I I2

17:55 18:18

I3 I4

18:50 19:25

T7 (drums drop out, bowed bass) flute solo T5 (bass overtone bowing, voice and more activity flute) T2 (flute cadenza, bass drone) T2/T5 (flute, bass, drums, activity, voice) intensifies

J

20:00

J2 J3

21:24 22:00

K

22:36

K2 K3

23:47 24:30

T6/T1 (flute descending phrase, drums time) T5/T6 (melodic fragment) T2 (trill)

L L2 L3

25:25 26:30 27:15

T7 (voice and bowed bass sync—unison) sparse drums T5 (flute reenters, bass bowed harmonics) T2 flute solo

M

28:23

M2

29:10

T1 (flute trigger, bass figure, G mixolydian) T5/T6 (bass alternates whole step)

N N2

29:56 30:50

N3

31:41

O

32:00

O2

32:40

T1 (flute melodic trigger) now expected MEDIUM/fractured tempo T5 (flute fast runs, bass drones)

P

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T6 (voice, bass drone, drums)

OPEN

T7 (brief flute solo, drums bring in time) FAST tempo—very complex T5 (bass rises, interaction, flute&voice) OPEN—interactive T2/T4 (drums briefly relax) FAST—bass drone OPEN OPEN—voice

MEDIUM tempo begins to fragment (esp. bass)

T2/T6 (vocal scream, drums drop down) OPEN T2/T5 (bass drone, speed drums and intensity (screams!) flute) T6/T7 (flute chromatic descent, ritardando)

drum solo (transition to piano section)

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For one example, an intense group development begins to bifurcate at fiveand-a-half minutes into the performance (C1) when Sam Rivers lands on a trill, followed by a medium-tempo melodic trigger that initiates a Latin-esque groove from Barry Altschul. The group, however, soon aborts this groove to explore a rubato, modal area, followed by a decisive climax (C3). And at thirteen minutes into the performance, a similarly intense development is again subdued by a soprano sax trill. This time, however, the groove that was prematurely halted earlier appears to resurface (with slight alterations) from a strong, flowing, funk-type bass line provided by Cecil McBee. A similar modal exploration is still there, but this time layered on top of the reformulated groove in such a way that the earlier moment is both remembered and reconfigured. Although moments of sync and similarity are clearly cultivated and enjoyed by the musicians, the trio rarely lingers in these basins of attraction for long. For instance, shortly after the climax of the first section discussed above (at C3), the soprano and bass briefly synchronize on a pedal tone on concert A (C4). Both musicians appear to be well aware of the connection, and yet rather than linger on its implied togetherness, they quickly, and with apparent conviction, move into more distant, chromatic areas in search of new sonic orderings. This tendency for the group to flirt with the known while surfing the edge of the unknown is apparent as well in the rhythmic domain. At just after the fourteenminute mark, the trio arrives at a shared pulse and meter—perhaps provoked by the strong “and-of-four-into-one” figure by Altschul that seems to lift the energy of the entire group (G2). Though the moment of synchrony is clearly felt by all, the players also quickly begin to work against the groove and any strong sense of tonality so that the nonlinear dynamics of the improvisation can continue to evolve (G). A final example—one I have dubbed “coupled oscillators”—is drawn from near the end of this thirty-five-minute improvisation and illustrates how even the sectional structure and transitional nature of this trio’s music can evolve into a complex layering or coupling of multiple tempos and textures (N2). Rivers is by now on flute and voice and the trio seems able to successfully articulate, not a unified sense of pulse or texture as in many of the previous examples, but the coexistence of conflicting and complementary expressions and motivations. We hear a sort of speed pulse in the drums, a type of sheets-of-sound playing in the flute, and a powerfully articulated and varied drone in the bass. Even as Rivers improvises a final melodic fragment to signal a collective transition back to a shared sense of tempo for the trio (O), the saliency of this type of transitional gesture, which has been used several times by this point in the performance, has increased

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to the point at which new strategies for responding are required to maintain interest for listeners. We hear a new sense of tempo referenced by the group, but in rather loose and playful ways that immediately deconstructs not only the more general aspects of this conventional jazz performance practice, but also the ways in which it has been playfully referenced and revised throughout this specific performance. The notion of signifyin(g) (Gates 1988) refers to a mediating strategy for discourse, rooted in pan-African discursive mythologies, involving aspects of repetition and revision to create double meaning, indirectedness, and subtle humor. To signify is to replace the static concepts of signifiers and signifieds (objects, persons, places, things) with a dynamic in which dialog informs all modes of communication and meanings become malleable and, at times, intentionally ambiguous (see Borgo 2004). Signifyin(g), as described by Henry Louis Gates Jr. (1988), is deeply entrenched in African American arts, language, and music and it invokes a subtle and continual play of reference and revision. This above analytical approach, I suggest, provides a phenomenological description for what the cultural process of signifying might involve on the level of human cognition. I suggest that signifyin(g) in (African American) music tends to occur once the saliency of a quale has become so large that it is incapable of sustaining surprise, and can therefore be used as a riposte, a goad, or even a rebuke. The nonlinear dynamical complexity of the performance arises from the failure of the quale to conform to its previously established role. Another way to put this is that the system becomes increasingly unpredictable and hence chaotic as the saliencies of cadences rise to a critical level. With regard to the general practice of Sam Rivers’s trios and the specific dynamics evidenced on “Hues of Melanin,” I suggest the following: • The improvisation as a whole can be segmented into sections, each a region of phase space, on which intersubjective agreement by expert listeners can be obtained. • Within each segment, performers shift among a number of “voices,” each of which is also a certain region of phase space, again with transitions that are intersubjectively stable. • Thus, the phase space is hierarchically structured. However, different performers may have different subspaces for their own particular set of voices. • Transitions among segments are often prefigured by certain figures, which have quite different saliencies for performers: some are quite subtle, while

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others are rather obvious; all can be considered cadences, in a broad sense of that term. A short trill to signal a lessening of intensity and a quick melodic fragment to establish a sense of tempo appear to be the strongest transition triggers in “Hues of Melanin,” but also appear frequently across other trio performances by Sam Rivers and colleagues. Weaker markers include figures that descend to a strong low note, and hints (of varying strength) of V–I chord sequences. • The presence of a transition-prefiguring cadence may not actually produce a transition, and even when it does, there may be a period of reorganization that precedes it. These figures may at times be repeated, which increases their saliency as transition triggers, but also increases the expectation that they will produce novel, and therefore more complex results on each reoccurrence. At certain levels of complexity, obvious cadence points may even be intentionally ignored or subverted.

Fractal Correlation My work with Rolf Bader analyzing the fractal correlation dimensions of Evan Parker’s solo improvisations was introduced in Chapter 3. Rolf also produced a fractal correlation plot for the Sam Rivers Trio improvisation “Hues of Melanin” (Figure 4.2). Given the extended length of this performance, we produced a few other plots of subsections of the piece (Figures 4.3–4.6) that correspond to salient moments that were highlighted in the discussion above (see also Table 4.1). The overall contour of the plot in Figure 4.2 often corresponds to changes in instrumentation or emphasis within the ensemble. For instance, the first fifteen minutes of the improvisation involve the entire trio, with Rivers on soprano saxophone, Cecil McBee on double bass, and Barry Altschul on drums. The fractal dimension hovers around D=5 with several prominent peaks and a few valleys. The first prominent dip, at 5:45, follows a strong cadence by the trio, after which Barry Altschul drops out for a brief period to allow for a soprano saxophone and bass duet. The prominent peak at 11:07 also involves a strong cadence accented by Altschul, and the subsequent unison moment of sync makes for one of the most dramatic shifts, from D=11+ to D=4.3 within the span of a few seconds. It is important to remember that higher dimensionality does not necessarily correspond to more listener interest, just as the inverse is true.

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Figure 4.2  Sam Rivers Trio: “Hues of Melanin”

In the second half of the performance, Rivers switches to flute (with occasional vocal interjections) and the trio explores several more extended moments in which various solo and duo opportunities arise. These shifts in instrumentation or emphasis within the ensemble tend again to correspond well with changes in the reported fractal dimension. For instance, starting at 15:20, Cecil McBee’s bass playing takes a more prominent role, and at 16:15, after landing on a repeated note figure, McBee is left to play almost entirely by himself for a short time, corresponding to the lowest dimensional reading of the performance. But the dimensionality increases again as Rivers and Altschul add commentary and supportive textures behind McBee’s continuing solo. Rivers’s flute playing rises in prominence near the 18:00 mark, when he is briefly left to perform unaccompanied, producing another prominent valley in the plot. McBee soon joins him, now performing arco and, with Altschul creating percussion colors, the three musicians undulate together. At 19:20, McBee drops out entirely, and by 20:00 Rivers is again by himself on flute. Here he seems intent on not letting the intensity of the music subside, and the bass and drums soon reenter and build to a frenetic up-tempo ensemble section, during which Rivers’s flute gives way to his charming-yet-unpredictable vocalization, beginning around 24:45.

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Figure 4.3  Sam Rivers Trio: “Hues of Melanin” (0:00–4:00)

At 25:30, Altschul drops out briefly again leaving an arco bass and vocal duet. For a full minute, beginning at 27:15, Rivers is heard alone on flute, until he plays an in-tempo melodic fragment at 29:21 inviting the others to reenter. From here, they build together as a trio, with the most prominent peaks corresponding to Rivers’s ecstatic vocal hollers and the ever-increasing density of ideas. With another mid-tempo melodic fragment at the 32:00 mark, the trio shifts to a playful feel for a brief time before falling out of tempo and segueing into a drum solo (after which Rivers switches to piano for the culmination of the performance, which is given a different track indicator on the CD and is not analyzed here). For a more detailed analysis, we need to look at some finer grain structures. In these moments, it is illuminating to explore the ways in which a phenomenological analysis, like that offered earlier in the chapter, relates to the computer analysis of the fractal correlation dimension. Figure 4.3 corresponds with the section from letters A to B in my original phenomenological analysis. Here, as elsewhere in the performance, most of the structural points that I identified correspond extremely well with significant shifts in the fractal correlation dimension. The moments of cadence and transition line up with sudden changes in the calculated complexity of the recording, or often precede

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the shift in calculated complexity by a few seconds as the players respond to or affect changes in the group sound. For instance, the repeated tone in the bass that triggers a shift to more dense and intense exploration at letter A2 appears as a prominent valley in the computer reading, followed by a strong developmental arch. Additionally, the trill figure at A3 that signals a temporary cadence corresponds with the lowest dip in the fractal dimension. Even the pseudo-cadence that I identified as A4 mirrors a relative drop in the plot. And the tempo trigger that launches the trio into a fast-pulsed exploration also lines up extremely well with letter B. Some of the most prominent peaks in the plot correspond to powerful cymbal crashes that, because of their inharmonic frequencies, can produce relatively high fractality (e.g., at 3:32). The more detailed plots can also remind us that, as listeners, the moments in the music that are most compelling from a phenomenological perspective, are often those in which a dramatic shift in perceived complexity takes place, or when a given expectation is either confirmed or denied by the musicians. In other words, increasing musical complexity can attract the attention of listeners, but, as Evan Parker has noted, too much complexity can overwhelm. Listeners are often most provoked by well-timed and dramatic shifts in the relative complexity of a performance. For instance, at 3:15, Rivers ends his improvised line with a short, bluesy call that the others acknowledge through their reduced intensity, rather than by a more direct response. The fractal dimension here drops significantly, but for the listeners, this exchange signals a moment of heightened attention, as an expectation has been created and resolved in a surprising way. Figures 4.4 and 4.5 highlight the section between letters E and H of my original analysis. Broadly speaking, E to E3 acts as an extended cadence, E3 to F is organized around the bass drone, and F results from a melodic trigger that launches the trio into shared tempo. G highlights another temporary cadence brought about by a trill figure, and the trio slowly works into a groove section that eventually synchronizes at G2 and climaxes at G3. H signals the shift to the bass solo as Altschul reduces his complexity on the drums and Rivers partakes in some playful mimicry. Although the drone section at E3 may sound rather relaxed, the fractal dimension is quite high, most likely a result of Barry Altschul using some auxiliary percussion that adds inharmonic components to the combined sound. But here again, the dramatic rise and sudden drop in complexity (provoked by the unison figure) attracts listeners’ attention. The fast-pulsed section at letter F is sprinkled with drum crashes that produce peaks in the fractal dimension, while the trill

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Figure 4.4  Sam Rivers Trio: “Hues of Melanin” (9:45–13:10)

Figure 4.5  Sam Rivers Trio: “Hues of Melanin” (13:10–15:45)

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Figure 4.6  Sam Rivers Trio: “Hues of Melanin” (29:56–32:40)

at letter G triggers a reduction in the overall complexity until a groove slowly emerges. On close listening, the moments when the bass and drums synchronize or when Rivers and McBee land on a unison pitch produce the small dips in the fractal dimension. These moments may, however, be perceived by listeners as structurally important or of increased interest. The final detailed plot highlights the section from letter N to O2 (Figure 4.6). During this section, Rivers begins vocalizing to provoke even more complexity from the group (and perhaps to add a bit of humor as well, since it sounds like he is saying: “Just do it,” “Do it tonight,” “Save me!”). His most pronounced scream is accompanied by heavy crashes by Altschul and a rising figure from McBee, resulting in a fractal dimension of D=9+. The drone section following N2 is also perceptually rich with detail and tension, but sonically it remains in the D=3.5 range: another nice reminder that perceptual and sonic complexity do not always go hand in hand. Rivers cues a lessening of intensity with a chromatic descending line at N3, and a cadence by the trio follows shortly thereafter at letter O. His final melodic trigger launches the group into a shared tempo full of playful fluctuations, discussed earlier through the lens of signifyin(g). The characteristic quality of fractal organization, in which branching structures continue to elaborate themselves in order to allow for maximum

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efficiency in exchanges, provides an interesting metaphor for the delicate sonic filigree of group improvisation. Ensemble improvisation, at least of the type pursued by the Sam Rivers Trio, engenders a speed of communication, and a flexibility for quick shifts and transitions, without losing coherence or clarity of presentation. Noticing this connection, Todd Jenkins writes in his Free Jazz and Free Improvisation: An Encyclopedia: The best free performances are often those in which the players do not seem to clash. Even without set boundaries, musicians build structures based upon intuition, anticipation, and logic. The mathematical discipline of chaos theory states that even supposedly random events can have a basis in logical action and reaction. Good free performances reflect this idea of controlled chaos, and players who work together long enough develop an uncanny intuitiveness as to their next moves. (Jenkins 2004: xxxi)

Flights and Perchings An important goal of improvised music appears to be ensemble self-organization, so that critical levels of complexity, responsiveness, and surprise can be reached and maintained over the course of an extended performance. Self-organization is a challenging concept to wrap our heads around (see Kauffman 1995). Briefly, it refers to the ability of an open system to organize itself as a result of the dynamics of the system; no specific ordering influence is imposed from the outside and no homunculus-like agent or program is driving it from the inside either. Paradoxically, self-organization means the organization of patterns without an organizer, without a self. According to the emerging science of complex dynamical systems, nonequilibrium phase transitions are the hallmark of self-organization in living things, and they appear to play a crucial organizing role in systems, from cells to societies. Our mental lives may also be describable as a nonlinear dynamical system. William James famously wrote: When we take a rapid general view of the wonderful stream of our consciousness, what strikes us first is the different pace of its different portions. Our mental life, like a bird’s life, seems to be made of an alternation of flights and perchings. The rhythm of language expresses this, where every thought is expressed in a sentence, and every sentence closed by a period. The resting-places are usually occupied by sensorial imaginations of some sort, whose peculiarity is that they

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can be held before the mind for an indefinite time, and contemplated without changing; the places of flight are filled with thoughts of relations, static or dynamic, that for the most part obtain between the matters contemplated in the periods of comparative rest. (James 1884: 2–3)

James’s metaphor of consciousness as the “perching” and “flights” of a bird, has, for me, a resonance with Husserl’s “protections” and “retentions” and with the phenomenological unfolding of improvised music. Sam Rivers’s trio clearly takes flight, with a truly impressive range and release of musical energy, but they also perch together, discovering moments of pause and reflection, allowing sounds and thoughts to integrate, before transitioning into new areas that scatter our preconceptions and allow us to summon new ideas. In the workshop setting at UC San Diego with my graduate student improvisation ensemble, Sam Rivers, along with his trio members at the time, stressed the importance of interactions and awareness, but he also made it clear that certain levels of complexity would emerge only if individuals stay true to their own creativity. Although dramatic transitions can conceivably occur at any moment in open-form improvisation, in practice, experienced improvisers tend to explore ideas, identities, and relationships for considerable stretches of time. If distantly related ideas were circulating at every moment, the desired balance between complexity and coherence might never be achieved. Both inexperienced and overbearing improvisers tend to focus too much attention on what they, as individuals, are responsible for. The inexperienced improviser can, through indecision or a reliance on overly simple cat-and-mouse type interactions, offer too much “inertia” and not enough “momentum” to the situation. The overbearing improviser, on the other hand, can offer too much “momentum”—in the overpowering strength of their ideas and convictions—and not enough “inertia” in the form of measured interactions, so that a critical level of complexity and coherence is never achieved. In one case, the coupling between listening to and producing music is too tight, and in the other, it is too loose. In both cases, the lack of coherence within and across the group can preclude the possibility for surprise by not supporting predictions or expectations. A story recounted by Steve Lacy about his time spent playing with Thelonious Monk highlights the issue well. Lacy said of Monk, “He mostly told me what not to do.” Monk would remind Lacy to “play your part, I’m accompanying you. Don’t pick up on my things.” In other words, offer some “momentum” to the improvising situation. But Monk also told Lacy to “make the drummer sound

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good … Don’t play everything. Just play certain things, let other things go by” (quoted in Day 2000: 108). In other words, allow some space (or inertia) for the collective improvisation to develop. Improvising music certainly requires focused listening, quick reflexes, and extreme sensitivity to the group flow, but it equally demands individual fortitude and tenacity not to be overwhelmed by the speed of interaction and the availability of musical options. Sam Rivers expressed it this way: I want to keep moving and experimenting and not be repetitious. I mean when you’re reading The Iliad and The Odyssey, you don’t repeat! You just keep going and going! But how do you do that? Because you have experience with so many different types of melody, so many different kinds of music. So that’s how you become creative and prolific in improvising. (quoted in McGaughan 1998: 12)

Improvising music, then, can demonstrate turbulence and coherence at the same time. The findings of nonlinear dynamical systems theory require that we confront and rethink ingrained notions of order and disorder, simplicity and complexity. Jazz music has, for its brief century or so of development, challenged many of the same notions in the artistic community. Swing and improvisation, hallmarks of even the most conservative definitions of jazz, both rely on nonlinear dynamics to create the sense of momentum and surprise. Since roughly the 1960s, freer styles of improvising have pushed the ideas of nonlinear musical dynamics even further, challenging the adequacy of older musicologies and highlighting the need for innovative approaches to studying the emergent properties of musical performance and musical consciousness. This chapter has focused on the hierarchical complexity of the phase space of improvised music and the pronounced moments of phase transition in which improvisers give listeners the subjective experience of being delicately poised between evolving along two or more quite different paths. Not only is science evolving, as nonlinear, qualitative models and computation-intensive analyses overtake older linear models that demand explicit solutions, but also music and the arts are evolving, as representational, individual-centered works are being overtaken by interactive, socially oriented, nonlinear forms. By drawing on aspects of these contemporary sciences, I offer a way of looking at music that takes account of its inherently dynamical nature and focuses attention on the act of listening, since music only lives when it is heard and understood.

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Next to the rich complexity and subtle self-similarity of fractals, Euclidian geometry seems horribly dull. Mandelbrot demonstrated that irregularity is exciting and that it is not just noise distorting Euclidian forms. According to Briggs and Peat (1989: 91), this “noise” is “the bold signature of nature’s creative forces.” In some ways, conventional European music notation may be akin to conventional Euclidian geometry. The regular and static forms that are at the heart of both approaches have led researchers to ignore many subtle properties of nature and sound. Fractal organization, however, demonstrates that similar principles of growth and form are operating at vastly different scales. Briggs and Peat ask, “How could something that measures thousands of light-years across have anything in common with objects that can be encompassed in the hand or on the head of a pin?” (ibid.). Rather poetically they muse: Strange attractors and fractals evoke a deep recognition, something akin to the haunting recognition afforded by the convoluted and interwoven figures of Bronze Age Celtic art, the complex designs of a Shang ritual vessel, visual motifs from the West Coast American Indians, myths of mazes and labyrinths, the iterative language games of children or the chant patterns of so-called “primitive” peoples. The regular harmonies of classical Western art become almost an aberration set beside these forms. Yet as we look at the greatest art we realize that even in classical forms there is always a dynamism of chaos within the serenity of order. All great art explores this tension between order and chaos, between growth and stasis. In confronting the orders of chaos, of growth and stability, it appears we are now coming face to face with something that is buried at the foundations of human existence. (110)

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Orderly Disorder

The emerging notion of chaos as a creative force, a dynamic form of orderly disorder, has resonated with countless diverse artists in the past several decades. Two heavy metal groups adopted names taken directly from the new sciences— Chaos Theory and Order from Chaos—and general terminological references have cropped up in song and album titles from a wide range of artists, including saxophonists Steve Coleman and Yusef Lateef, pianist Paul Bley, turntablists Otomo Yoshihide and Martin Tétreault, folk rock band The Levellers, the Latin rock band Ozomatli, rapper Jumpsteady, and comedian Weird Al Jankovic. An improvising “supergroup” comprised of saxophonist Peter Brötzmann, guitarist Nicky Skopelitis, and drummer Shoji Hano adopted the name Organized Chaos. Electronic musician Lawrence Casserley titled one of his albums The Edge of Chaos (2002, Sargasso SCD28042). And saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock titled her orchestral works with improvising soloists and improvising conduction Contemporary Chaos Practices (2018, Intakt CD 314). Although chaos may the best-known term connected to the new sciences, there have been others. Catastrophe theory, inspired by the pioneering work of French mathematician René Thom (1989), demonstrated the ways in which abrupt, qualitative changes in a system are caused by sudden disruptions rather than continuous developments. Complexity theory, a more recent term, describes related but in many ways different approaches to the study of nonlinear dynamical systems. John Briggs and F. David Peat (1989), in their very readable introduction to chaos theory, present these as two sides of the same turbulent mirror: a portal through which order and chaos dynamically intertwine. On one side of this mirror, often described as deterministic chaos, researchers are interested in how mathematically simple systems can demonstrate complex behaviors: in other words, in a system’s orderly descent into chaos. On the other side of the turbulent mirror, often dubbed complexity theory,

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researchers attempt to understand how order can emerge out of chaos: how complex dynamical systems can spontaneously give rise to delicate forms and structures. Put another way, chaos theory deals with systems that rapidly become highly disordered and unmanageable, while complexity theory deals with highly interconnected systems that, at certain times and under certain conditions, self-organize in a way that produces emergent forms of order. Scientists on both sides of this turbulent mirror share a fascination with the “edge of chaos,” the balance point between stability and extreme turbulence. The edge of chaos is a technical term (often associated with the Santa Fe Institute) that describes when a dynamical system is in a critical region between order and disorder. You might envision water boiling or evaporating on the boundaries of its phase space. This critical state only occurs in dynamical systems that are dissipating internal energy, are open to continual energy influxes from outside the system and are operating under what are known as “far-from-equilibrium” conditions. Because we now have better probes for collecting data in turbulent situations, and we have powerful computers for analyzing that data, chaos researchers have begun to make some limited progress on the various routes that lead to chaos, and many of these discoveries have directly influenced musical practice. For composers, for instance, chaos theory offers a set of tools that can transform relatively simple operations into extremely complex material in order to generate musical ideas for compositions (see Bidlack 1990). And the mathematics of chaos theory have also been put to interesting uses in the fields of electronic and computer music (see Steinitz 1996). For music theorists, the new sciences hold out the appealing promise of a precise method for analyzing the seemingly insurmountable complexities of much contemporary music (See Madden 1999). Understanding the other side of the turbulent mirror, how order can emerge from chaos, has remained more elusive. The interactive and improvisational dimensions of musical performance can provide a laboratory for this approach but studying emergent dynamics in these situations poses considerable methodological challenges. On both sides of this turbulent mirror, musicians, like their scientific counterparts, are beginning to cross the boundaries that have traditionally separated disciplines, practices, and genres, but as previous ways of doing things begin to dissolve, new tensions can arise, and old ones can persevere.

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In this chapter, we will investigate practices on both sides of the mirror and in the middle, and we will probe further into the fascinating qualities of selforganization that have been identified by chaos and complexity researchers, finding some analogies with aspects of improvised music. Although these new analytical tools provide a window into the orderly disorder of music that was unavailable only a few short years ago, like earlier methods that investigated music in the physical or symbolic domains alone, they must be integrated into a systemic perspective that recognizes the nature of music as inextricable from its personal, social, and cultural particulars.

Chaotics Paradoxically, complex systems, whether in music or physics, produce turbulence and coherence at the same time … As mathematicians topple the tyranny of the straight line of Euclidean geometry, one is reminded of that ecstatic sense of discovery with which 20th-century composers proclaimed their liberation from the bar line. —Richard Steinitz (1996) Somewhere underneath, very deeply, there’s a common place in our spirit where the beauty of mathematics and the beauty of music meet. But they don’t meet on the level of algorithm or making music by calculation. It’s much lower, much deeper—or much higher, you could say. —Györgi Ligeti (quoted in Madden 1999: 14) The music represents our disillusionment with the fundamental impulse of other modern, Western musics to organize nature, as represented in sound. We have a different way of dealing with so-called “chaos”: it is not our enemy, not even a matter to be fashioned into durable, self-validating human objects. We are at “play” with sound. —Jack Wright (http://springgardenmusic.com) I accept chaos. I’m not sure whether it accepts me. —Bob Dylan (quoted in Lehrer 2004: n.p.) Chaos theory has changed not only the findings of science, but also its presiding methodology and epistemology. Katherine Hayles (1990) coined the term “chaotics” to describe the emerging cultural framework that is authorizing new visions of order and disorder in society. Chaotics, according to Hayles, is

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a new cultural paradigm “affecting not simply scientific practices but social and intellectual ones as well” (7). In other words, it affects not only the answer, but also the thought that provokes the question. While much has been written in the fields of science studies on the broader cultural conditions that set the stage for and have been altered by chaos theory, surprisingly little has been written on the role that contemporary music played in articulating this new cultural paradigm (see Pignon 1998). Referencing the work of Hayles, Judy Lochhead (2001), one of the few music scholars to explore this domain, writes in her article “Hearing Chaos” that“ scant work has been devoted in either music or cultural studies to the role that musicians played in disclosing the new cultural paradigm of ‘chaotics’ ” (211). Her work offers an important corrective, arguing compellingly that music gave shape to the new paradigm in ways distinct from literature and science, allowing “a unique visceral engagement with concepts of chaos” (239). Lochhead focuses her discussion on the mid-twentieth-century period during which appeared “multiple construals of chaotics through musical manifestations of disorder, order, probability, randomness, freedom, and indeterminacy” (216). Her article focuses on the work of “experimental” composers such as John Cage, Pierre Boulez, Steve Reich, György Ligeti, Iannis Xenakis, and Elliot Carter, and it highlights the work of “jazz” and “popular” musicians such as Ornette Coleman, Roscoe Mitchell, Jimi Hendrix, and the Grateful Dead. Lochhead devises a descriptive scheme that articulates four categories of musical chaotics: (1) ordering to create unpredictability; (2) ordering to create an aural analog to chaos; (3) chaos as creative potential; and (4) liberatory chaos. She also frames these categories according to three differing philosophical modes of chaos that they imply: ontological chaos (which includes categories 1 and 2 above), denotative chaos (category 3), and expressive chaos (category 4). Within the first category, ordering to create unpredictability, Lochhead locates the integral serialism of Boulez, the process-oriented minimalism of Reich, and the complex micro-polyphony of Ligeti. She argues that although these methods are not identical to the mathematical formulations of chaos, they demonstrate how relatively simple deterministic operations can produce extremely complex and unstable results when iterated. In the second descriptive category, ordering to create an aural analog to chaos, Lochhead explores work by Carter and Xenakis. Although their music also differs in important ways, Lochhead argues that Carter and Xenakis shared an advocacy for control and precision in creating sound worlds that evoke chance

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and unpredictability. Carter’s Double Concerto for Harpsichord and Piano with Two Chamber Orchestras, for instance, evolves from a seemingly random or entropic beginning through the spontaneous creation of order, only to end by returning to an entropic, disorderly sonic flow according to Lochhead. Xenakis’s music, in Lochhead’s hearing, creates aural imagery that presents an analog to chaotic natural events, such as the collision of rain or hail with hard surfaces, or the songs of cicadas in a summer field. In some cases, Xenakis used mathematical formulas, such as the gas laws that describe probabilistic behaviors, to create this type of aural imagery. In her third descriptive category, chaos as creative potential, Lochhead focuses on the chance-based and indeterministic work of John Cage, arguing that his work presents an affirmative sense of chaos derived from his study of Asian philosophical and religious thought (primary Zen Buddhism). Discussing Cage’s Music of Changes, Lochhead explains how compositional choice is replaced by chance procedures, but she also highlights how the relation between performer and score and listener and work in such a “chance” piece differs little from that of a non-chance piece: “Once the piece is learned, its succession of sounds assumes predictability” (232). Lochhead’s fourth category, liberatory chaos, introduces the music of Ornette Coleman, the AACM, Jimi Hendrix, and the Grateful Dead. Lochhead locates these musics within the civil rights struggle and the countercultural rebellion of the 1960s, and she offers a definition of free jazz as liberated from “such things as tonal harmonic structure, hierarchical textures, metrical rhythmic structures, sectional form, and timbres traditionally construed as ‘musical,’ ” ultimately describing the music as enacting a “negation of the status quo” (235). I would not want to downplay the importance of liberatory tropes in the performance practice of free jazz and progressive rock, especially during the 1960s in the United States. People as diverse as George Lewis and Jerry Garcia have highlighted the “anti-authoritarian” impulse in improvisation (Lewis 2000b: 35). In Europe as well, the early years of open-form improvisation were often inspired by a rebellious attitude toward the accepted forms of modern music, as well as a fear of spreading fascism. I do worry, however, that by segregating all of the African American artists and all of the examples that involve improvisation into the category of liberatory (or expressive) chaos, and by defining free jazz in terms of what it rejected musically rather than what it established or championed, Lochhead is foreclosing the possibility that these musics and musicians can also enact the ontological and denotative modes of chaos. In a footnote, she informs the reader that Cage’s work

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would be equally at home in the philosophical category of liberatory chaos, but she does not seem to afford the same latitude for the improvisers to “cross over” (or is it “move up”?) into the modes reserved exclusively for composed music. Many of these composers (e.g., Carter, Xenakis, Cage) espoused rather negative ideas about improvisation at various times in their career, and Lochhead includes quotes from them demonstrating this lack of understanding without an obvious rebuttal. Lochhead also fails to highlight that many African American musicians were influenced by Asian thought; Joseph Jarman, from the AACM, became a Shinshu Buddhist priest after all, and so-called jazz musicians from John Coltrane, Don Cherry, and Joe Harriott, to Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, and John McLaughlin, to name only a few, have expressed considerable knowledge of and empathy with Asian philosophical and spiritual traditions. By effectively reducing the music and musicians to an “oppositional stance to musical order,” Lochhead misses the opportunity, in my view, to highlight the interactive, adaptive, and constructive qualities of improvisation. George Lewis (2005) argues that the “power of whiteness” has served to mask the important role that improvisation played in establishing the contemporary music paradigm and to denigrate the important contributions of African American jazz musicians in this regard. According to Lewis, words like indeterminacy and intuition, or “happening” and “action,” are used to hide the presence of improvisation in contemporary music discourse. Also referencing Cage’s musical and philosophical stance, Lewis writes: After three hundred years of the very real silence of violence and terror, rather than a freely chosen conceptual silence of four minutes or so, one can well imagine the newly freed African American slaves developing a music in which each person is encouraged to speak, without conflict between individual expression and collective consciousness. In contrast to this notion of improvisation as a human birthright, a simple response to conditions, an embodied practice central to existence and being in the world, Cage’s Puritanical description of improvisation contrasted the image of a heroic, mystically ego-driven Romantic improvisor, imprisoned by his own will, with the detached, disengaged, purely ego-transcending artist who simply lets sounds be themselves. (Lewis 2005: 3)

Evan Parker expressed a similar sentiment: At this point, I have no hesitation in saying a lot of what Luc Ferrari was doing was improvising. It’s also true of John Cage and David Tudor, and many of those parallel modern-music developments from the 40s and 50s onward were dealing

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with versions of music made by making decisions in the course of performance. Whether you present that as improvisation or indeterminacy or musique concrète, this is a question of cultural location and cultural preference … But there has always been a degree of convergence. (quoted in Margasak 2009: n.p.)

Daniel Belgrad’s (2019) recent book The Culture of Feedback: Ecological Thinking in ’70s America has a thoughtful chapter devoted to music and musicians that helped to articulate a new ecological paradigm at that time. The chapter highlights work from Pauline Oliveros, R. Murray Schafer, La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Max Neuhaus, Alvin Lucier, Cornelius Cardew, Richard Teitelbaum, David Rosenboom, Stuart Dempster, Steve Reich, Michael Nyman, Nicolas Collins, Charlemagne Palestine, Brian Eno, and Philip Glass, but unfortunately Belgrad provides no discussion of the work of people of color. Far from simply responding to scientific discoveries, musicians have played an active role in disclosing and exploring the paradigm of chaotics. In highlighting this important role, however, we must be careful not to reify existing hierarchies or re-inscribe old hegemonies. In his advanced introduction to the field of science studies, David Hess (1997) argues that the new sciences of chaos and complexity mark a postmodern shift in emphasis toward open systems and patterns of self-organization. But he also worries that applications of chaos and complexity theories to social phenomena “may obfuscate as much as they clarify.” He writes: In a sense, we are back to the key concept of reification: changing social processes are projected onto nature in new scientific models (that may also be “true” in the sense that they represent part of the world that had not been seen previously), and in turn these new models are fed back into theories of society. These theories of society may point to new aspects of the social world that had not been seen previously, but at the same time they may deflect attention from a more critical inspection of the fundamental continuities of modernity and capitalism. (134)

Complex Adaptive Systems Complexity is a surprisingly difficult concept to define well. The Latin root of the word complex, complexus, means different elements interlaced together to form a single fabric, a type of unity in diversity. Physicist Murray Gell Mann argues that a system should be called complex when it is hard to predict, not

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because it is random but rather because the regularities it does have cannot be briefly described. Robert Axelrod and Michael D. Cohen (2000: 16) stress the interconnectivity of complexity, arguing that, “a system is complex when there are strong interactions among its elements, so that current events heavily influence the possibility of many kinds of later events.” Complex adaptive systems arise from nonlinear spatio-temporal interactions between a large number of components or subsystems. Less technically, they are systems in which some form of overall order arises from the local interactions of interconnected and interdependent parts. Complex systems evolve through nonlinear feedback, emergence, and self-organization. Linear systems are those in which a small change to a system’s components leads to a predictable small change at the system level. Nonlinearity in systems implies that a small change to a system’s components may produce a large change, a small change, or no change at all. In nonlinear systems, the causes and effects are not obviously related, and pushing on a complex system “here” often has effects “over there” because the parts are interdependent. Although linear systems can be built to adjust to predetermined stimuli, only nonlinear systems can evolve over time. Nonlinear systems are able to adapt to new stimuli and to internal changes due to their nonlinear dynamics and they actively respond to changing circumstances. For this reason, they are often referred to as self-organizing systems (SOS). To borrow terminology from Kevin Kelly (1994), SOS are adaptable, resilient, and boundless, but they are also nonoptimal, noncontrollable, nonunderstandable in their entirety, and nonimmediate. SOS are resilient in the sense that the “whole” (the system-wide functionality) can often be maintained while individual parts change or even disappear. Moments of change or failure often create the possibility for new forms of order to emerge and for the system as a whole to reorganize itself in new ways. SOS are boundless, in Kelly’s terminology (although I prefer the word emergent), because positive feedback (often called “runaway” feedback) allows them to build on their own scaffolding by extending new structure beyond the bounds of its original state. SOS are inherently nonoptimal, however, since without centralized control, they can foster inefficiencies and redundancies. Although their emergent properties can dampen some of these effects, much as a free market can establish a generally agreed-upon price for goods, SOS can never eliminate inefficiencies as a well-designed linear system could. SOS are inherently noncontrollable, in

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that they can be guided at “leverage points” or tweaked from within, but without centralized control or an explicit hierarchy, it is often impossible to initiate system-wide changes quickly and efficiently. Even when working well, the dynamics of SOS are nonunderstandable in their entirety. Without clear lines of causality, SOS can quickly become tangled swarms of intersecting influence and logic until it becomes impossible to arrive at an objective or complete understanding of the system’s dynamics. Last, SOS may be slow to emerge; they are nonimmediate. The more complex they are, the longer it may take them to warm up: hierarchical layers have to settle down; lateral causes have to slosh around a while; individual agents have to acquaint themselves with one another, so to speak. Summarizing the differences between top-down and self-organizing systems, Kelly (1994: 24) writes: “For jobs where supreme control is demanded, good old clockwork is the way to go.” “Where supreme adaptability is required,” he notes, “out-of-control swarmware is what you want.” Most tasks will forsake some control for adaptability or vice versa. It is not hard to devise a musical analogy here. If absolute sonic control is desired, then working with notation or electronics may be the way to go. Notation provides a strong source of negative feedback, in that it establishes a system in which incorrect notes or rhythms can be detected and corrected. Electronics allow for even more compositional precision in the shaping of sound (an alluring quality for many early adopters and current proponents). If “supreme adaptability” is the goal, however, then creating situations in which individuals with diverse backgrounds and flexible musicking abilities can interact collaboratively, and in real-time via improvisation—or harnessing the potential of modern electronics to exploit nonlinearity—is the way to go. Open-form improvisation lies perhaps closest to the ideal of a human musical self-organizing system. Its bottom-up style emphasizes the possibilities for adaptation and emergence and accentuates real-time creativity and the dynamics of internal change. The structures of improvisation can continue to be extended in boundless ways, although the system may also be circumscribed by the abilities, materials, and experiences of those who are participating. Improvised music can be resilient to individual “mistakes” since sounds can be recontextualized after the fact by either the original performer or others in the group. And if one musician drops out temporarily or is unable to make a performance, the system can often continue to function without major interruption, perhaps even organizing in novel ways that introduce new complexities.

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In other ways, open-form ensemble improvisation may be less resilient to personality conflicts or pronounced aesthetic differences between individuals. With more traditional “top-down” musical practices, personality differences can be managed in deference to the group leader, the authority of the musical score, or the professionalism of “getting the job done.” Idiomatic conventions in other improvisational forms may also provide a general point of agreement that helps to bind engaged participants. The self-organizing aspects of open-form improvisation make it particularly susceptible to certain types of disruption. It may also make the practice susceptible to certain types of discrimination. Barbara Rose Lange’s (2011) ethnographic work among a student group in Texas engaging with open-form improvisation suggests that the frequently expressed ideals of egalitarianism in improvisation are not fully realized in educational settings. The professional world of open-form improvisation may be even less welcoming to individuals with diverse backgrounds and experience, given the limited number of paid opportunities to perform, and the historical connections of the music, in most tellings, to a “pioneering” 1960s generation of predominantly white, European, cis male and hetero musicians. Jessie Stewart (2003) interrogates the relationship between jazz and human rights in and outside of the United States context, and Ritwik Banerji (2018) offers a trenchant critique of egalitarian ethics or utopian ideals in open-form improvisation by interrogating human encounters with an artificial social interactant of his own design (which will be discussed in greater detail in Chapter 6). In addition to the potential for disruption and discrimination, improvisation is also rarely, if ever, the “optimal” means to achieve a specific musical end. Surprisingly, however, it can be a quicker and easier route to certain types of complexity. I remember vividly how surprised a graduate student composer at my institution was after participating in a large improvisation ensemble setting in which we interpreted a relatively simple melody of mine heterophonically and harmolodically (i.e., somewhat in the style of Ornette Coleman). This composer was amazed at the combined effect that could be collaboratively achieved starting from a simple sketch of a rather basic, unadorned melody. The internal dynamics of an improvising ensemble—especially larger groupings of musicians—can be slow to respond to change, however, and are beyond the control of any one individual. Even when things do appear to work well, it will be impossible to analyze the system’s dynamics during or after the fact with absolute precision, and improvisers are often reticent to discuss

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these as well. As a complex, self-organizing system, the collective dynamics of improvisation will always transcend the full awareness of individuals. For these and other reasons, many ensembles choose to adopt certain compositional schemes or devices, or they exert a degree of control (and forsake some adaptability) by limiting who should play when, and so forth. SOS, and improvisation in particular, appear to be adaptable, resilient, and emergent, but there is no guarantee that divergent components will find ways to self-organize effectively in individual performances, or, more broadly, that the nonoptimal, noncontrollable, nonunderstandable, and nonimmediate aspects of the practice will not be exploited in undesirable ways or lead to other discriminatory practices. Similar to mechanical systems, we may learn as much or even more by examining occasions on which improvised performance appears to falter—or when it does not live up to its stated ideals—but even locating these moments provides a distinct challenge, given how many unknowables there are in complex adaptive systems.

Dissipative Structuring Evolution and thermodynamics, two of the most influential nineteenthcentury scientific theories, each proposed an arrow of time leading the world in a different direction. The second law of thermodynamics, first formulated by German scientist Rudolf Clausius, states that the universe is heading toward a state of maximum entropy or disorder: a thermodynamic equilibrium. But to biologists, like Charles Darwin, life represents not only stable order, but an order that can reproduce itself and increase its own fitness over time. Ilya Prigogine, a Russian-born Belgian chemist working in the twentieth century, wondered how these discrepant visions of time’s arrow—one leading to imminent heat death and the other leading toward increased fitness— could be reconciled. Prigogine (1980), rather ambitiously, hoped to unify the fields of dynamics and thermodynamics, and, ultimately, the microscopic and macroscopic worlds. His work focused on the ways in which open systems operating in far-from-equilibrium conditions can spontaneously self-organize. One of Prigogine’s favorite examples of dissipative structuring is Bénard instability. In the early twentieth century, the French physicist Henri Bénard discovered that heating a thin layer of liquid could result in strangely ordered

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structures. Uniformly heated from below, the liquid transfers heat by conduction alone. However, when the temperature difference between top and bottom reaches a critical value, heat convection takes over and an ordered pattern of hexagonal cells appears, transferring heat upward through the center of the cells and downward via the liquid along the cell walls. These rotating convection cells represent patterns that are millions of times larger than the range of the intermolecular forces that cause them. Prigogine’s work with Isabelle Stengers showed in detail how this pattern emerges at a critical point of instability as the system moves farther away from equilibrium, and it now provides a textbook example of emergence and self-organization, or what we might call “order out of chaos” (Prigogine and Stengers 1984). Prigogine named these examples of far-from-equilibrium self-organization dissipative structures, to highlight their seemingly paradoxical qualities of ordering and dissipation. As Briggs and Peat (1989: 139–40) explain, “Dissipative structures are systems capable of maintaining their identity only by remaining continually open to the flux and flow of the environment … arising out of a far-from-equilibrium flux and riding upon it … organizing space and giving an inexorable direction to time.” Prigogine’s work does not violate the second law of thermodynamics, but it relies on a formulation of entropy that contextualizes its dual nature. Briggs and Peat write: “The second law (that entropy overall always increases) is not violated by the appearance of these systems, any more than gravity is violated by an orbiting moon.” “As a moon takes advantage of gravity to stay in orbit,” they explain, “so dissipative structures take advantage of entropy” (139). In what ways might the idea of dissipative structuring be relevant to openform musical improvisation? The notion of an “arrow of time” is of course crucial to all musical performance, and all musical performances take in and dissipate energy. This energy could be measured in the form of metabolic energy from the participants (including their body budgeting predictions), in the form of the acoustic energy of the sounds in the space, or in the form of the organizational energy that went into creating the conditions under which the musicking happens. Improvising ensembles, like all musical groups, draw upon the energy of the performers—not only their current metabolic energy, but also their potential energy, if you like, from the musical (and lived) experiences they bring to the table. All performances, improvised or otherwise, draw on various types of performance interactions as well.

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The “equilibrium” of any music performance is disturbed in a general sense from the expectation by all present that something will happen, that music will emerge. Far-from-equilibrium behavior, however, is not a simple extension of equilibrium or near-equilibrium physics. Instead, it corresponds to qualitatively different types of behavior and response and is typically associated with crossing some threshold into a new regime. Open-form improvisation can be thought of as “far-from-equilibrium” in several ways. Without much or anything in the way of explicit precomposed musical materials, open-form improvisation relies on an especially tight coupling between the control and feedback parameters of the systems. In some formulations, there is an implicit mandate to deconstruct or recontextualize known or familiar musical properties: either as in the case of Lochhead’s “negation of the status quo,” or, as we saw with the Sam Rivers Trio, to recontextualize similar materials, such as the group’s transition cues, in ways that create dramatically different outcomes each time. Far-from-equilibrium phenomena can involve clustering or swarm-like effects (from the formation of galaxies to the schooling of fish) and turbulence or fracture (as with whirlpools or earthquakes), and often both simultaneously. Like the moon that takes advantage of gravity, improvisers ride the entropic waves of their own performances in order to produce temporary “pools of order” in a turbulent sea of sounds and sentiments. These poetic remarks may still beg the question of how, exactly, this happens. There could never be only one answer to this question, but some remarks from Evan Parker strike me as particularly relevant to the question. In an interview with fellow improviser Richard Scott (1987), Evan Parker suggested that “power in a broader social sense is determined by the law and the mechanisms of its enforcement,” but “authority inside a [musical] group is determined by the appropriateness of an action.” Clarifying these remarks, Parker highlights that “there is a certain kind of power that comes from authority in performance— making right decisions, carrying something through, carrying a line, and some nights you’ve got it some nights you haven’t.” “And hopefully on the nights you haven’t,” he observes, “someone else in the band has got it and you can lean on them a little, and on the nights you’ve got it and they haven’t they can lean on you a little.” Parker’s notion of “rightness of action” or “rightness of decision” shifts, in his words, from “power and authority in a political sense to power and authority in a spiritual sense, more akin to somebody whose reached a

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certain stage of religious awareness having a kind of authority because of that state of awareness.” “Or take it away from that and put it in the realm of psychology if you like; you have a certain grasp of your own strengths and weaknesses,” he stresses, “and operate well within that: power over yourself.” Using John Stevens as an example, Parker emphasizes that “strong individuals” with an especially clear set of ideas about what should or should not happen and who are often forthright in communicating these ideas through their instrument(s) betray the idea that this is an “egoless way of playing.” Acknowledging that this ideal was perhaps relevant in the “late ’60s model” (the closest the music came, according to Parker, to “a kind of John Cage aesthetic of egolessness”), “the music has gone different ways since then,” he contends. “If everyone plays in deference to what is already there,” Parker states, “then there’s no music, because there’s no starting point, because nobody wants to assert themselves enough to say, ‘the music could start here’.” “I discovered that asserting myself was part of the discipline and part of what was required,” he recalls. His detailed explanation of this awareness is worth quoting at length: In the end it was more interesting for me to acknowledge that I was doing this because I wanted to do it and that there are certain things that I would like to happen. As long as I remain sensitive to the things that other players would like to happen there’s actually nothing wrong with me guiding the music in a particular direction for a certain part of the time. The distinction between that and a kind of coarse domination of things either by straightforward playing or by using your power as an employer to make sure that other people do what they’re told—the distinction between that and recognizing yourself as an active wanting element in the situation is quite big enough. I mean I know the limits, I know the limits between positively wanting something and negatively not wanting something—denying somebody else a set of opportunities. So I think the idea of collective music has changed a little bit, away from being influenced by Cage and Eastern religions towards, I don’t know, towards a set of values that are determined by its own history. Now that the music has a long history of its own, it’s generated a different set of values. (Scott 1987: n.p.)

Over time, an improvising ensemble that regularly performs together will establish its own sense of identity or coherence, and, as Parker points out, the

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practice of open-form improvisation has been with us for over sixty years now. If humans enact their world through a predictive engagement, as I argued in Chapter 3, then over time, our predictions get refined, and, yes, predictable. Neuroscientists speak about our neurons getting “tuned and pruned” as we interact with the world and with others. Our neural plasticity and the fact that through “mere exposure” we can cultivate new sensitivities and new expertise allow us to re-tune our neurons as well. Musicians who consistently improvise together naturally become better at predicting the actions of their fellow improvisers and they also maintain a desire to introduce new possibilities, to surprise themselves and their collaborators. A substantial body of recorded work and a history of live engagements over many decades and locales also allows listeners to tune their predictions of how the music might go while providing an unending source of potential new experiences. Saxophonist Steve Lacy recounted that after a year of performing open-form improvisation with the same group, he felt that they were playing “freely” but it didn’t sound free anymore: “What is this? I couldn’t believe it—it sounds the same every night. What are we going to do? That’s what we were trying to get away from” (quoted in Watson 2004: 183). Offering a contrasting view, Evan Parker states: Things that are established as known between yourselves probably form as useful a context for the evolution of something new as anything. But the inter-personal relationships should only form the basis for working, they shouldn’t actually define the music too clearly, which they very often do. In practice, the closest I would get to a laboratory situation is working with the people I know best. It can make a useful change to be dropped into a slightly shocking situation that you’ve never been in before. It can produce a different kind of response, a different kind of reaction. But the people I’ve played with longer actually offer me the freest situation to work in. (quoted in Bailey 1992: 128)

From a systems perspective, boundaries simultaneously define the identity of a system and allow for the ongoing dynamics of exchange that are necessary to maintain the system—openness from closure. Of course, a certain danger may lurk for both material and musical systems if this boundary becomes either too porous or too impermeable. If too much exchange is fostered with outside forces, the identity of a system may be put in jeopardy. Likewise, if too little

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exchange is allowed or encouraged, a system may decline either from reduced internal dynamics, or from its inability to continue to adapt to the changing dynamics of its environment.

Ancient to Future I like to put myself on the central point between the extremely old and new things to make my life interesting. This is a good tension. —Ko Ishikawa “Great Black Music, Ancient to the Future,” became something of a slogan for The Art Ensemble of Chicago. Inserting Black between “great music”— an exnominating phrase too often associated exclusively with European artmusic—was an important political statement (and Joseph Jarman apparently first used the expression the day after the ensemble played a Black Panther benefit in Paris), but so too was forging a link between ancient and future (Lewis 2017: 155). In his book Message to Our Folks, Paul Steinbeck (2017: 2) succinctly describes the Art Ensemble’s wide-ranging performance practice: During their concerts, the five group members played hundreds of instruments, creating a vast array of sounds and musical forms. They also recited poetry and performed theatrical sketches, all while wearing face paint and masks, laboratory coats, and traditional dress from Africa and Asia. Their music could be alternately tranquil and raucous, mythic and political, humorous and intense.

According to Eric Lewis (2017: 156), Great Black Music is an “anti-genre genre designation.” “On its surface it seems to endorse an essentialist reading of race and cultural artifacts closely identified with race,” Lewis writes, “but its very point, on further analysis, is to warn one to avoid essentialist readings of black music (and thus of blackness in general).” Lewis concludes that: “The essence of blackness is to lack an essence, to resist essentialist constructions, and to enact blackness artistically is to repel essentialism” (ibid.). Lewis’s notion of “anti-genre genre” brings to mind Paul Gilroy’s conceptualization of “anti-antiessentialism” in The Black Atlantic (1993), which Gilroy invoked to highlight that black consciousness moves between the insufficient terms of “essentialist” and “anti-essentialist.”

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I have for years now given a lecture in my jazz history courses titled “The Two ‘F’ Words,” which interrogates the discomfort evidenced in many conventional jazz history accounts with both fusion and free jazz. These musics, emerging at roughly the same time in the late 1960s/early 1970s, defied conventional genre classification while simultaneously foregrounding improvisation (Weather Report’s early albums and live shows, for instance, are filled with extended moments of open-form “free” improvisation), and together they invite us to confront essentialism of all types. “Fusion,” writes Kevin Fellezs in his book Birds of Fire (2011: 7), “articulates the ill-fitting intercultural mergings occurring at the breaches of cultures, yet increasingly central to individuals’ mobile sense of belonging among competing sets of loyalties.” Fellezs interprets the mixing of genres in fusion as a performance of transculturality, an articulation of “belonging and nonbelonging” which emerged in the wake of the identity politics of the early 1970s. I would like to turn now to a discussion of a performance given by Japanese sho player, Ko Ishikawa, koto player Kohsetsu Imanishi, and trumpeter Peter Evans in Yugawara, Japan, on September 24, 2018. The entire performance, an open-form improvisation lasting approximately twenty-eight minutes, can be watched on YouTube.1 I will refrain from describing the music in great detail and will focus instead on correspondence I had with the musicians by email in early 2021. The performance took place during a twelve-concert tour in Japan that Peter Evans arranged, during which he “played straight ahead jazz gigs, some free improvisation concerts, some solo gigs, a concert in duo with a dancer, and a total of three concerts with this trio.” The YouTube video captures the third and final trio performance of the tour, and all three musicians expressed interest in doing more performances post-pandemic. Evans describes performing with this trio as “the highlight of the tour for me musically” and “one of my favorite musical experiences of my career so far.” And Kohsetsu Imanishi remarks: “The Yugawara’s concert with this trio is definitely one of the unforgettable experiences for me.” Ko Ishikawa provided some additional context for the performance: “The atmosphere was special. Yugawara is a historically famous place for hot springs and scenery. The venue of this concert was located on the hill. We

1 youtu.be/uJ4Ei-PCI2U (accessed September 13, 2021).

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saw the mountains, peninsula, and sea shining with the afternoon sun. It was a beautiful day. My music reflected this atmosphere.” Imanishi shared her feelings about the event as well: “The amazingly beautiful hall filled with the smell of cypress, great acoustic, and great audience, enabled us to play fully in relaxed and good concentration at the same time.” Evans contextualized the encounter this way: From my perspective we are simply three musicians who share a mutual respect and interest in playing with one another. Ko and Kohsetsu share an understanding of traditional Japanese music, including gagaku. Ko and I also have a shared musical experience; we played together in Evan Parker’s ElectroAcoustic Ensemble for a couple of tours and records starting in 2007. We had a few opportunities to play in small formations then and really get to know each other, so that was another layer of background/shared knowledge. Having these two layers I’m sure contributed to the sense of security in how we were able to play together so easily.

“At the beginning it sounds like some ‘Japanese music,’ ” Ishikawa states, “but we did not intend this.” “I do not emphasize Japanese traditional culture in improvisation,” he states. Ishikawa is a professional gagaku musician, but he also has two decades of experience with improvised music. Gagaku is a “Japanese music [that] has been played and protected in the court for 1,300 years,” Ishikawa explains.2 His instrument, the sho, is a free reed aerophone (bamboo mouth organ) derived from the Chinese sheng, with seventeen pipes (two of which are silent) arranged to appear like the wings of a phoenix, since its sound is said to imitate the call of a phoenix. In gagaku music, the sho moves gradually between various tone clusters, using both exhalations and inhalations, timed according to the natural breath, in order to provide an accompaniment to the main melody. Ishikawa explains the “affordances” of the sho in relation to improvised music this way: My instrument is tuned in Pythagorean mode (it is the same as ancient Chinese mode) exactly. I cannot change the tuning. Sho has only fifteen pitches in one octave and half, without D sharp, F, and B flat. I am not good at playing fast, in accurate rhythm. These limitations are my condition. I find my way from this

Ko Ishikawa is a member of the gagaku ensemble Reigakusha. He studied sho and gagaku music with masters Mayumi Miyata, Hideaki Bunno, and Shiba Sukeyasu. 2

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Figure 5.1  Peter Evans, Kohsetsu Imanishi, and Ko Ishikawa (left to right).

start point. The good points of sho are the long, sustained chords without pause and the complex harmonic overtones.

There are only eleven chords for sho in gagaku, but Ishikawa explores many non-traditional clusters, a type of flutter-tongue technique, and some rather unconventional staccato-style playing at various points in this performance. Imanishi began studying piano and koto at the age of four. The koto is a thirteen-string Japanese plucked zither derived from the Chinese zheng and said to resemble a crouching dragon. In addition to her own creative projects, Imanishi has collaborated with a wide range of sound, dance, and visual artists, and has

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premiered compositions by Mamoru Fujieda, Shoichi Yabuta, and Yoshihiko Banno, among others. Imanishi describes her music career as a “ ‘sound quest’ for non-genre music,” which “has been nurtured in the improvised music scene in London, Osaka, Kyoto, and Tokyo.” “I have experienced so many different types of performance, combinations of instruments or non-instruments, venues where music is played,” she added. “To me, it’s a process for deeper understanding about the nature of my instrument,” she reflected, “how flexible and inflexible [it is], what [it] can do and cannot do in the world.” Imanishi describes how she explored different ideas and techniques for each of the three concerts with this trio. For this third one, she states: “I tried some of my original scales which I chose with expectations of some chemical reactions with sho’s harmonies and trumpet’s sounds, and everything went beautifully.” “I used some of my original tools and methods as well, but it wasn’t intentional, rather it happened spontaneously,” she remarks. At various points in the performance, she is using a bow and small hammers (in addition to the standard finger picks) to excite the strings, and she also inserts objects between the strings that, once activated, bounce independently for a short time. Evans performs on both piccolo and B♭ trumpets, often using his hand in the bell (and at one point a harmon mute) to create glissando effects (at times evoking Japanese traditional winds such as the ryuteki flute), and he variously buzzes and blows into the mouthpiece (and the instrument without a mouthpiece) to create a diverse palette of sounds. Evans remarks: “I enjoy recordings of gagaku music as well as shakuhachi music and koto music. There are quite a few musicians who play traditional Japanese music who are open to playing in other contexts, and I was aware of that ahead of this tour.” Ishikawa explains: I think we all are the mixture of different cultures in this world. My profession is gagaku, but I also like a Greek dark-wave band, Sci-fi movies, and so on. These are the parts of my life. I have been influenced by many cultures. Behind [gagaku] music, we find the philosophy of Japanese original Shinto religion. I am not sure I can say this is my cultural identity, because their metaphysic is sometimes very different from ours. I like to put myself on the central point between the extremely old and new things to make my life interesting. This is a good tension.

The performance ebbs and flows beautifully between extended moments of floating tranquility, evolving dissonances, and denser and rapidly shifting ensemble playing. There are three moments of fairly extended silence (around 13:20, 17:50, and 22:45), providing natural cadential points, giving the performance the feel

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of having a sectional form, but within each section, the trio explores periods of long duration sounds (taking advantage of Ishikawa’s and Evans’s circular breathing techniques and Imanishi bowing the strings of the koto), periods with a feeling of regular pulse (especially around the 16- and 22-minute marks and often established by Imanishi’s plucking patterns on the koto), and periods that evoke more chromaticism or dense “free jazz” textures (around the 13-, 15-, and 25-minute marks, often inflected by Evans’s trumpet flurries). In our correspondence, I asked Evans if there are examples of cross/transcultural musicking that have inspired (or infuriated) him. His responses are worth quoted at length, since it highlights many challenging issues about genre and terminology, perceived authenticity, aesthetics, and more: Yes, there are many inspiring examples of what you’re describing. However, the most important thing to me is the quality of the music – does it work? Is it good? There are many negative examples, but I tend to diverge from popular consensus as to why it can be so bad. For instance, of course there are countless examples in which the musicians are misinformed or disrespectful toward the traditions/ styles they are engaging with, but what if that’s not always why the performances fail? I’ve heard many “cross-cultural” musical projects that are super “authentic” in terms of the personnel and their mastery of whatever forms are involved that somehow are still in my view aesthetically flawed and in incredibly poor taste. So in the end, I’ve come to think that maybe this isn’t such a useful way to frame the activity, at least primarily; centering the music as “cross or trans-cultural” can sometimes even contribute to the problem. I think taste or aesthetic quality is often left out of these conversations because it’s something that undeniably exists but it’s difficult to talk about.

Although it is difficult to talk about, Evans does have a concise formulation of what works for him: improvisation is “as simple as a leap of faith fortified by rigorous preparation and an open heart.” Reflecting on related aesthetic issues, Ko Ishikawa states: “I think the improvised music is something unknown, unreasonable and beyond understanding. The musicians themselves do not know what it is and how it goes. The audience is enjoying listening to it attentively. It is a very strange situation, but exciting.” In a description of his process that resonates with many themes in this book, Ishikawa explains: In improvisation, I imagine the natural phenomena as a model, coexisting with others. Sometimes the relationship with other sounds is not important, not obvious, just existing together. When I feel I can contact, I will come close to

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other sounds. Sometimes I blur the boundary of my sound and others. I also open myself to an unknown situation: no need to build up music. If I cannot find a good, shaped end, I do not care … I guess this experience makes us free from conceptual interpretation and broadens the boundaries of our understanding.

Evans would seem to agree: The mystery behind how this works will ultimately always resist explanations with language. The closest models I can find outside of music that sound similar to what I think and feel is happening in a musical situation like this come from writings more concerned with spirituality and spiritual practices. I’ve learned that it’s nice to hope for things but dangerous to expect them.

Imanishi describes how “this experience of sound journey with these two true great musicians opened a new vector to my koto sounds,” and she shares her “feeling there is always a liberated zone called ‘the truth’ beyond ideologies, or theories, like the sky above these electric wires.” In our correspondence Evans shared a distinction that he learned from Thomas Merton between “tradition” and “convention.” Paraphrasing Merton from his book No Man Is An Island (1955) Evans states: In [Merton’s] view, tradition is something that has to be continually reinvented and changed to adapt to the present, whereas convention is something stale and thoughtlessly repeated. I can relate to this framework when considering my own work in the field of music. I study and absorb traditional concepts from various kinds of music (Konnakol, for instance) [a South Indian vocal-percussion system that can be traced to the ancient Vedas] and I think this only helps my music become stronger and more grounded, no matter how strange or “new” the final product sounds to some people. John Coltrane has been someone who inspired me in terms of dealing with this dynamic.

Summarizing his experience performing with this trio in Yugawara, Evans comments: “I think this gig was as good an example as any that I have been a part of, where there was nothing to say before, during, or after the music. The music played us, easy as that.”

Sketches of Another Future Cybernetic systems are not programmed to seek goals in reference to predefined states of the world—goals which would necessarily be extrinsic rather than

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intrinsic—and their actions cannot be fully explained through linear cause-andeffect relationships. Andrew Pickering, in his book The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future (2010), argues that cybernetics refuses the detour through knowledge conceived of as representational on which nearly all modern science relies. Instead, it insists that science, like the arts, is a performative engagement with the world, and that “we” are plunged in medias res into a lively world that we cannot control. Cybernetics, in this reading, is non-dualist and nonrepresentational, and, therefore, can appear simultaneously nonmodern and postmodern—ancient to future. Cybernetics, according to Pickering, rejects the modernist dualism of people and things which is now institutionalized as the natural and social sciences. It abandons simplistic understandings of cause and effect; that something already identifiably present causes things to happen this way or that. And it champions a performative ontology in which reality is always “in the making.” Agents, in this view, learn through an ongoing cycle of perturbation and compensation that resists the detour of knowledge through representation. Perturbation, after all, contains the root word turbid, meaning opaque. Science, in Pickering’s reading, veils the performative aspects of our being, since it is precisely these performative aspects that are unrepresentable in the idiom of the modern sciences. “Theoretical physics tells us about the unvarying properties of hidden entities like quarks or strings and is silent about the performances of scientists, instruments, and nature from which such representations emerge,” Pickering contends (21). This view of cybernetics has resonance with emerging fields such as science, technology, and society (STS), actor–network theory, bioethics, and more, that wish to understand science in broad social, historical, and philosophical contexts, and to highlight how social institutions possess distinctive structures, commitments, practices, and discourses that vary across cultures and change over time. Cybernetics may also contribute to an ecological approach to the perception of musical meaning that insists we resonate with environmental information and do not simply decode, represent, and compute. Pickering argues that the actual construction and implementation of cybernetic projects (such as Gordon Pask’s Musicolour Machine in the 1950s) helped bring the field’s ontological claims down to earth, through a type of “ontological theater.” These projects simultaneously offered “aids to our ontological imagination,” Pickering writes, and provided “instances of the sort of endeavors that might go on with a nonmodern imagining of the world” (22).

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I propose that open-form improvisation offers its own “ontological theater” in precisely these ways. It is a music of imaginative possibilities that is also wrapped in the rather matter-of-fact reality that it relies on and stages a temporally unfolding, interlinked performance. Notions of theatricality or play tend to be marked categories in the English language. A common dictionary definition of theatrical is: “marked by exaggerated self-display and unnatural behavior; affectedly dramatic.”3 The word “play” can also be marked by Puritanical notions of activity that is non-serious, unproductive, frivolous, or even ethically suspect. Non-Western cultures, however, frequently view play as something that is both embedded within cosmology and integral to the daily social activities of individuals. For instance, the Hindu concept of lila is often translated as the divine play of creation, destruction, and re-creation (see Nachmanovitch 1990: 1). And the Yoruban concept of ere can signify both a sense of play and improvisation (see Drewal 1992). The pioneering musical globetrotter Don Cherry was fond of saying: “There is nothing more serious than fun,” and Lester Bowie of the Art Ensemble also enjoyed slyly describing their performances as “serious fun.”4 Hermeneutic philosopher Hans Georg Gadamer (1993: 102) appears to echo these sentiments when he writes: “Seriousness is not merely something that calls us away from play; rather, seriousness in playing is necessary to make the play wholly play.” According to Jay Mechling (1991: 267), the ability to bisociate, or to perceive self-consistent but habitually incomparable frames of reference together, allows both the scientist to “solve the problem” in an experiment and the audience member to “see the joke” or “get the point” of a story or performance. Mechling envisions play not as nonsense, but rather as “uncommon sense.” Anthropologist Edward T. Hall (1992) agrees that, “Play is serious business.” In an article on improvisation in music, Hall discusses the biological origins of play, asserting that play originates in the limbic system of mammals, a region that is also the center of emotions, parenting, and social organization and is distinct from the word- and number-based learning of the neocortex. Hall writes: “Play

wordnik.com/words/theatrical (accessed September 13, 2021). 4 Quoted to me in an interview with Adam Rudolph, a percussionist and former collaborator with Cherry. 3

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is the device which not only permits mammals to have fun, but gives them a means of mastering the skills needed for survival” (224). Improvising music in a complex age, to reference the subtitle of this book, allows participants and listeners to explore complex, decentralized, interconnected, and emergent dynamics without an immediate concern for their own survival. Music is, in the view of biomusicologist Ian Cross, consequence free. People cooperating in a musical activity need not find the same meaning in what they do in order for the musical event to assist them in acquiring and maintaining skills to enactively engage the world, and to—one hopes—get along with one another a bit better. As Cross (2003: 51) sees it, “The singularity of the collective musical activity is not threatened by the existence of multiple simultaneous and potentially conflicting meanings.” The act of improvising together produces a temporal and sensual immediacy, allowing complexity to emerge from a simple and contingent beginning. Improvisations create a movement whose direction we want to see continued, but, critically, this movement occurs through the increased narrowing of possible choices. One person’s playing draws a distinction that is condensed, confirmed, canceled, or compensated by subsequent distinctions (either made by oneself or by others). These sounds and situations also perturb the psyches of listeners (both those in the audience and those performing) into compensating and (potentially) reorganizing the orientation they brought to the performance. In this sense, the music and the performance itself stages particular constraints that encourage the emergence of something new or inventive. A cybernetic reading of improvisation moves us further toward a subjectless reading of communication, away from basic notions of materiality and substance to the idea of distinction and indication. Individual improvisers draw distinctions in the music that will, by necessity, be condensed, confirmed, canceled, or compensated by subsequent distinctions (either made by the initial musician or by others), and on and on. This can give performers the sense that they are being swept along by the music; that by attending closely to the emerging art work, they are not doing what they want, they are doing what the music wants (see Borgo 2014). Inspired by neocybernetics and the social systems theory of Niklas Luhmann, Edgar Landgraf, in his book Improvisation as Art (2011), suggests that improvisation is shaped not by an aesthetics of autonomy but by an aesthetics of autopoiesis, or “self making.” “The artwork,” Landgraf writes, “[must] emerge with and according to a plan that it develops for itself only in

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the process of creation” (79). Instead of locating inspiration in the figure of the artist-genius, Landgraf views it from the standpoint of an “attentiveness that the artist lends to the emerging artwork” (82). “The neocybernetic discourse,” Landgraf writes, “allows us to understand the ‘experience’ created by a person’s cognitive engagement with art without having to assume a representational or an interpretive stance toward the work of art or performance” (150). “With the help of such conceptual substitutions,” he continues a bit later, “we can comprehend the psychic and the nervous system as observing and relating to their environment long before comprehension mediated through language and abstraction is initiated and yet, without having to ignore the laws of iterability or the idea that ‘experience’ is necessary for the appreciation of art” (ibid.). At its core, cybernetics asks us to rethink our fundamental theories of knowledge. Knowledge is not passively received but actively built up so that we adapt with the experiential world. Cybernetics draws back the “veil” that, according to Pickering (2010: 21), the modern sciences have cast over the performative aspects of the world, including our own being. Social systems theory additionally insists that to understand how society functions and operates, we cannot reduce it to the broad and ill-defined notion of the “human being.” By doing so, it may offer a way to understand how complex social systems, including music and art, can function without a legitimating consensus of citizens, without the idea of a common morality or a shared democratic ethos. Where does this leave us with regard to traditional humanist ideas about morals and ethics? For an ethics of improvisation compatible with cybernetics, we might be well served by the writings of Emmanuel Levinas. According to Levinas, we do not choose to be responsible. Responsibility arises as if elicited, before we begin to think about it, by the approach of the other. Language and communication are not the site in which existence arises, nor do they begin by reaching out to the other: rather, they begin in a responding-to-the-other. Levinas was interested in intersubjectivity as lived immediacy, as a precognitive sensibility, a responsibility in responsiveness (see also McMullen 2016 on notions of the “improvisative” and “generosity” rather than “recognition”). The very meaning of being a social subject is to be for-the-other. For Levinas, there is no authentic sociality apart from ethics and there is no ethics apart from sociality. His writings often stepped out of philosophical reasoning into a more performative register. As an improviser, a performative ontology or an ontology of unknowability clearly appeals to me. I am also fond of arguments that resist modernist views that

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value representation, musical or otherwise, above and beyond the performative. Cybernetics is not much discussed these days, and the temptation is to assume that it died of some fatal flaw, but it is in fact alive and well living under a lot of other names. Revitalizing its lineage may provide models for future practice, as Pickering suggests. Even if we are unable to shape the social world we inhabit according to humanist ideals, as scholars such as Niklas Luhmann insist, how we act in the world and how we imagine it inform one another. Complex dynamical systems theory suggests that not only are diversity and adaptability desirable traits, but that irregularity and unpredictability are also essential qualities for the health of a system. Complex dynamical systems function adaptively by allowing for enduring patterns of organization (“pools of order”) and spontaneous responses to unexpected occurrences; they are poised at the edge of chaos. The complex dynamics of human societies appear to illustrate that the more complex a system, the more robust it may become, but also the more numerous the fluctuations that can threaten its stability. In this light, improvising music together may offer a consequence-free space in which to explore the continual tension between stabilization through communication and instability through fluctuations and surprise; in other words, the orderly disorder of the world that we envision and create together.

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Sync and Swarm

This book’s title, Sync or Swarm, was inspired in part by a helpful comment from George Lewis that he often begins his improvisation ensemble classes by throwing the students into the “deep end of the pool” and then works with what happens naturally. Although the “sink or swim” allusion captures well the idea that improvisation involves a level of risk and excitement, a focused commitment to the moment, and a mandate to make something happen, the expression is often used in a more individualistic fashion, to refer to situations in which someone must either succeed or fail by their own efforts. This chapter adopts the notion of sync and swarm to describe dynamics that can emerge in groups under conditions that require communication, cooperation, and coordination, and that rely on evolving interconnections and a shared history of interactions. It explores research and ideas about synchronization, swarm intelligence, and network dynamics for what they might offer to our understandings of collective and collaborative behavior in open-form musical improvisation. If group improvisation may be heard in its best moments to demonstrate complex and emergent properties that are somehow greater than the sum of its parts, then investigating individuals and even ensembles in isolation of the network of surrounding influences will not suffice. We need to reorient our analytical framework to take account of the dynamics that occur as ensembles musick together over days, weeks, months, and even years. And we need to explore the ways in which influences in musical communities circulate through more than just the sounds of performances and recordings. The networks involved include a host of social conventions and material artifacts that affect the ways in which music is made and heard: from the funding sources or media attention that a performer may or may not receive, to the casual conversations and critical reviews that performances can provoke, and much more.

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While it may be fairly common to acknowledge the subtle influence that specific audiences and venues can have on musical performance, and especially improvisational ones, the network of material, economic, technological, educational, and social factors at play, and the complex dynamics that they generate through their interactions, are far more involved than that. Although the spontaneous and surprising occurrences in improvised performance can attract our immediate attention, it is through the dynamic interplay of social, material, and sonic culture that we gain a better sense of “improvising music in a complex age.”

The Science of Sync Sync is perhaps the most pervasive drive in all of nature. It extends from the subatomic scale to the farthest reaches of the cosmos. It’s a deep tendency toward order in nature that opposes what we’ve all been taught about entropy. I mean, I’m not saying the law of entropy is wrong—it’s not. But there is a countervailing force in the universe—the tendency towards spontaneous order. —Steve Strogatz (TED Talk, 2004) Sync makes life possible: from the cascade of biochemical reactions that allow for the operation of a single cell, to the circadian rhythms that control sleep and allow for the proper functioning of our organs, to the firing of neurons whose synchronized symphony leads to human consciousness. Pacemaker cells in our hearts sync up to generate the beat, while the lack of synchronization in a defibrillating heart is what causes no blood to be pumped, leading to dire consequences and even death. Our growing understanding of sync in the physical world has also made countless technologies possible: from the lasers that allow us to listen to CDs, check out at the supermarket, and improve our eyesight; the clock circuitry that allows radio and television signals to be decoded and computer chips to function properly; to the satellite signals that make possible global communication and positioning technologies that can locate and direct everything from cell phones and cars to missiles. The innumerable tributaries of alternating current that comprise the power grid synchronize on their own accord. And positioning two organ pipes in proximity, Lord Raleigh discovered in the nineteenth century,

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causes them to “speak in absolute unison, in spite of inevitable small differences” (quoted in Walchover 2019: n.p.). A new science of sync is emerging as biologists, physicists, mathematicians, astronomers, engineers, sociologists, and artists are beginning to notice connections with the work of others and to find compelling reasons to work together. Steve Strogatz, in his book Sync: The Emerging Science of Spontaneous Order (2003), offered a primer on much of the pioneering work in this area and a reminder of just how far we are from understanding sync in its more complex forms. He writes: “For reasons we don’t yet understand, the tendency to synchronize is one of the most pervasive drives in the universe, extending from atoms to animals, from people to planets” (14). Music offers an excellent site for the study of sync. In his book Keeping Together in Time (1997), historian William H. McNeill makes the argument that coordinated rhythmic activity is fundamental to life in society. Although he focuses his treatment on group activities such as military drill and certain forms of religious ritual and social dancing that produce a type of “muscular unison,” there is no reason to believe that similar forms of collective bonding are not at play in all forms of musicking, including those that that do not rely, at least overtly, on a shared or steady sense of pulse. In fact, there is increasing neurological evidence that perceiving music’s temporal features activates substantial parts of the same neural circuitry involved in bodily movement and action (see Carroll-Phelan and Hampson 1996). So as listeners and performers share in the same sonic experience, they are, in effect, moving together. William Benzon, in his book Beethoven’s Anvil (2001), envisions a type of coupling and entrainment that takes place during musicking, both within the minds and bodies of individuals, and also with the minds and bodies of others. According to him, music requires that our symbol-processing capacities, motor skills, and emotional and communicative skills all work in close coordination such that, under ideal circumstances, it can produce a type of group interactional synchrony. Avoiding many of the “information-processing” and “conduit” metaphors that tend to dominate conventional scholarship on music cognition and communication, Benzon envisions ways in which the sonic flow of music correlates with the flow of neurophysiological substrates, supporting the possibility for tight coupling among individuals, especially those who share a common musical culture. According to Strogatz (2003: 274), these supple forms of sync “embody the qualities that we like to think of as uniquely human—intelligence, sensitivity,

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and the togetherness that comes only through the highest kind of sympathy.” But many other animals sync together, and we can learn much from studying those behaviors. Crickets can chirp in synchrony. Some fireflies blink together in the dark. And social insects frequently display intricately woven group behaviors through a type of swarm intelligence. Colonies of bees, for instance, appear to move around with apparent abandon yet at the same time to display a collective sense of purpose, much like a superorganism. Bees in flight create the prototypical swarm, but in Nepal they also land together in large groups on cliffs and synchronize the clicking of their abdomens to produce a coordinated sonic and visual wave, intimidating the hornets that are pursuing them.1 As humans we are used to choreography giving rise to synchrony, but these creatures are not choreographed, they are choreographing themselves. The phenomenon of sync can appear to be both mundane and miraculous. When all is working well, we rarely notice its precision. But on closer investigation, our internal dance of time—the way we synchronize with the twenty-four-hour day and regulate our various body processes accordingly—is actually rather challenging and complex. Parents with newborns and many blind people know all too well the debilitating aspects of not being able to synchronize with regular sleep patterns. The ways in which we can synchronize with the outside world, through social bonding, language, and music, are truly remarkable. Even our emotions can spread contagiously until we seem to be feeling the same way together. Too little sync can be a problem. Too much sync can be as well. On its opening day, the London Millennium Footbridge notoriously began to wobble at 1Hz (approximately half the normal walking rate) which led the people crossing it to fall into a synchronized pattern of steps, further exacerbating the wobble via a positive feedback loop. Epilepsy also appears to be a condition of too much order, as millions of brain cells discharge in pathological concert. Steve Strogatz (2003) describes three levels at which sync operates for humans. At the lowest, microscopic level, cells within a particular organ vary their chemical and electrical rhythms in lockstep with one another. At the next level, the body’s internal synchronization keeps all of the various systems and organs synched to the same twenty-four-hour cycle yet engaged at different intervals in order to maximize efficiency while conserving energy. At this level

youtu.be/dU2rLhpaMAY (accessed September 14, 2021). 1

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of self-synchrony, we are also able to synchronize our speech with our gesturing, among other things. The third level of synchrony happens between our bodies and the world around us. At this level, we synchronize to the environment and have the ability to entrain with others.

Entrainment The picture that is emerging suggests that we are like wheels within wheels, hierarchies of living oscillators. Or to put it more vividly, the human body is like an enormous orchestra. The musicians are individual cells … The players are grouped into various sections. Instead of strings and woodwinds, we have kidneys and livers, each composed of thousands of cellular oscillators … The conductor for this symphony is the circadian pacemaker, a neural cluster of thousands of clock cells in the brain, themselves synchronized into a coherent unit. —Steve Strogatz (2003: 72) Entrainment describes a shared tendency of a wide range of physical and biological systems to coordinate temporally structured events through interaction. Dutch physicists Christiaan Huygens first identified entrainment in 1665 when he realized that two pendulum clocks in his room were synchronizing on their own. Huygens deduced that vibrations were being transmitted through the wall that physically linked the clocks, thereby minimizing their collective energy expenditures. A well-known biological example of entrainment involves the ability for women who live or work together to synchronize their menstrual cycles (here the interaction happens through pheromones; see McClintock 1971), but we also entrain with others when we enter into conversation, timing our phrases and pauses, and synchronizing our body postures and movements to facilitate close communication. For over three decades, William Condon (1986) and his colleagues have been studying this type of interactive synchrony through close analysis of videotapes. Their research demonstrates that, in conversation, listeners can synchronize their body movements to the speech patterns of others with a lag of only fortythree milliseconds (roughly one frame of film at twenty-four frames per second). Not only are human infants able to demonstrate this type of synchrony twenty minutes after birth (and perhaps they are learning to synchronize to voices

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in utero during the last months of pregnancy), so far as we know, our closest primate relatives can neither synchronize with one another nor hold a steady beat (see Benzon 2001: 27–8). Timothy Perper’s (1985) work on human courtship found that, during dating, a couple moves from standard forms of conversational synchrony to full-body synchrony where they are looking at each other continuously and touching each other regularly. R. C. Schmidt studied the dynamics of two people given the task of coordinating the swinging motions of a leg to a metronome while sitting within sight of one another. He found that, below a certain tempo, people are able to synchronize either in phase (with parallel swinging motions) or out of phase (moving in opposite directions). When the tempo reaches a critical point, however, only in-phase coordination is possible. Surprisingly, these results are the same if a single person is asked to coordinate the movement of their own fingers, suggesting that interactional synchrony and self-synchrony have the same structure and exhibit the same dynamics. Based on this and other research, William Benzon (2001: 28) hypothesizes that “human beings create a uniquely human social space when their nervous systems are coupled through interactional synchrony.” This type of entrainment is a much noticed although sadly understudied aspect of musical performance. Outside of isolated studies of musical meter, and some research in the fields of music therapy and biomusicology, little work has been done on the subject (see Wallin 1992). Martin Clayton, Rebecca Sager, and Udo Will (2004) published a useful resource on the topic of entrainment for music scholars that resonates with research in 4E cognition and ethnomusicology. They write: An entrainment model suggests we look at engagement with music not simply as a process of encoding and decoding information, but of embodied interaction and “tuning-in” to musical stimuli … Entrainment in musicking implies a profound association between different humans at a physiological level and a shared propensity at a biological level. The implications of this view for studies of socialization and identification are obvious, and so too is the link to questions of enculturation: someone’s ability to respond appropriately to a given musical stimulus can, since it is a learned application of a basic biological tendency, be a marker of the degree to which an individual “belongs” in a particular social group. (21)

Studies on groove, many of which emanate from the fields of ethnomusicology and jazz studies, are relevant here as well. For instance, Charles Keil’s notion

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of participatory discrepancies, although a cumbersome phrase, reminds us that music involves participation and that it is founded on appropriate degrees of being “out-of-time,” and Steve Feld’s discussion of “lift-up-over-sounding,” an aesthetic principle of the Kaluli of Papua New Guinea, also evokes a musical relationship that is synchronized but out of phase (Keil and Feld 1994). In fact, Clayton et al. offer what seems to me a compelling definition of groove as “the socio-musical process of being entrained at the preferred degree of synchronicity” (2004: 20). This allows room not only for marches, but also for open-form improvisation to groove. To return to Strogatz’s three levels of sync, the first two occur in music within the individual performer as their embodied mind synchronizes. Writing about jazz improvisation, Paul Berliner (1994: 217) describes this as the moment when “the gap between intention and realization disappears.” The third level of sync, that with the outside world, occurs as performers listen to each other and respond to ongoing events, the audience, and the context of performance in order to make music together. While it might be tempting to argue, as Bruce Johnson (2002: 104) does, that jazz and improvised music offer an especially fertile space for this type of synchronization—“an earsite in an epistemology dominated by eyesight”—all musical performance involves, in its own way, the process of synchronizing actions, intentions, and sounds in order to make for a compelling experience. The process of listening to music together can also bring audiences and performers into a type of neural synchrony as cognitive, perceptual, and motor constructs all may be engaged together. Clayton et al. (2004: 21) believe that “if entrainment is a factor in any interpersonal interaction and communication, we should expect that it is a factor in any variety of musicking.” Audiences can even suddenly synchronize their clapping together after a performance concludes. Who decided to do this? No one did. To counterbalance the “jazz and its others” orientation of much improvisation research, musicologist Nicholas Cook (2016) highlights the interactive format of a classical chamber group and argues that musicians of all types must make continual, detailed, and spontaneous decisions in order to perform music together well. Rather than make a strong distinction between ear and eye music, Cook argues that a more helpful distinction can be made between music as text and music as performance. He argues that in a chamber group, the score choreographs a series of ongoing social engagements between players, setting up a shared framework or goal. While discussing orchestral music, however,

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Cook concedes that we hear the music of large groups as embodying social interaction even when that is not literally the case. Music, for Cook, symbolizes social interaction even when it doesn’t actually represent it.

A Coordination Problem At its most basic, collective improvisation requires synchronizing starting and ending gestures. These brief initial and concluding moments can take on a heightened meaning. Evan Parker once commented, “The starts of pieces are very good often because they are impossible to theorize about” (quoted in Rusch 1979: 11). They occur without immediate sonic materials on which to base the ensemble’s development or the listeners’ expectations (although listeners and performers undoubtedly have implicit ideas of what to expect even before the performance begins). If some other music had recently concluded, a new beginning may also be heard in relationship to it. The history that improvisers share together can also provide a strong point of reference for subsequent meetings. But in principle, beginnings emerge and quickly move in unexpected ways. Endings, too, can be one of the most challenging and satisfying moments of improvised performance, as the entire ensemble must collectively agree on what will then become the final gesture of a given performance. At times during an improvisation, performers may synchronize their sonic gestures without warning: perhaps by landing on a unison pitch together, by implying a similar rhythmic pattern, or by producing a particularly compatible timbral quality unexpectedly during an improvisation. Bertram Turetzky told me in an interview: “Sometimes you play with people who have ESP [extrasensory perception]. You’ll hit a high E and all of a sudden someone else hits the high E. And sometimes they’ll tell you after, ‘I had no idea what you were playing, my hand just went there.’ It has happened to me many times.”2 These moments of transient sync are often greeted as a pleasant surprise and may signal the possibility to transition into new musical territory. Team-reasoning strategies and skills are likely of particular importance to open-form improvisational settings, since without a shared referent, there is little musical “scaffolding” with which to solve group coordination problems.

2 Interview with the author, February 1, 2005.

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Clément Canonne has devised several interesting studies approaching openform improvisation through the lens of coordination theory and game theory. In one study, Canonne (2013) adopts the notion of a “focal point” from game theory to explore how potential transitional moments in the music exert various forms of salience on the performance and for the musicians. At these moments, musicians are collectively trying to single out one of many possible trajectories, or to arrive at a convergence of expectations. Canonne found that experienced improvisers, when compared with musicians from different backgrounds, more often take advantage of these unexpected sonic coincidences or disruptions to signal transitional moments or to singularize musical ideas. Experienced improvisers, in other words, turn these transient moments of sync into focal points that ensure the continuing liveliness of the musicians’ coordination. Canonne’s data show that seasoned open-form improvisers were also more skilled than their counterparts in jazz and classical music not only at determining the salience of the sonic environment for themselves, but also in anticipating the salience that sonic events will have for others, often taking into account particular instrumental constraints and affordances, or, when relevant, their shared history of improvising together. His study suggests that experienced improvisers go for “the most contrasted proposition, the one that has the strongest power of distinction given the musical context … [to] maximize their chances of quick coordination” (Canonne 2013: 8) In a related study, Canonne and Aucouturier (2016) highlight how experienced improvisers come to share an implicit mental model of the practice of referentfree improvisation; a type of higher-level knowledge or meta structure that is task-specific instead of piece-specific. The study asked experienced improvisers to sort short audio examples of referent-free improvisation into groupings based on their “pragmatic similarity”; in other words, how they would react to the sounds in a performance setting. The authors analyzed these responses and found that the degree of similarity with which participants grouped sounds predicted with better-than-random accuracy their degree of musical familiarity. In other words, musicians who played together tended to think about improvised music in the same way. The authors conclude that shared mental meta-models such as these may play a key role in the success of referent-free improvisation by allowing more confident “mind-reading” of the intentions of fellow improvisers, more frequent cognitive consensus in the course of a performance, and swifter repair of “communication errors” when there is cognitive divergence among the improvisers. They note, however, that the normalizing force of familiarity is

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not always desired and is therefore frequently countered when musicians opt to play in unfamiliar situations with unfamiliar collaborators (e.g., Derek Bailey’s recurring “Company Weeks” were founded on the idea of grouping together musicians who had never shared the stage before to improvise together for the first time). Canonne and Garnier (2011) have also devised a mathematical model using dynamical systems theory to approach ensemble open-form musicking as a “coordination problem.” This work formally demonstrates that open-form improvisation can be self-organizing, particularly in situations with a small number of musicians (less than five) who can sufficiently take advantage of their virtuosity, their leadership qualities, and their team reasoning. Canonne’s work suggests that one’s “knowledge base” encompasses the embodied (overlearned motoric practices), personal (conceptual, aesthetic, ideological), and culturally shared elements (i.e., tacit understandings) that allow for the coherent unfolding of a musical performance.

Insect Music People have loved insect sounds for many thousands of years. Prehistoric people, and Neanderthals, would probably have loved analogue synthesizers. —David Rothenberg (quoted in Pilkington 2013) At one level, improvisation can be compared with the ultimate otherness of an ant colony or hive of bees. Perhaps it was no coincidence that in the wake of drummer John Stevens and the Spontaneous Music Ensemble, certain strands of English improvised music were known, half-disparagingly as insect music. —David Toop (2002: 247) Improvisation is not a revolution that pits itself against codification; it is diffuse. Like ants stripping a carcass, it works from the inside and outside of codes. —John Corbett (1995: 237) In Euro-American art-music culture this binary [between composition and improvisation] is routinely and simplistically framed as involving the “effortless spontaneity” of improvisation, versus the careful deliberation of composition— the composer as ant, the improviser as grasshopper. —George Lewis (2000b: 38)

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Scientists, artists, and laypeople alike have for centuries watched in wonder as a flock of birds spontaneously takes flight and navigates in perfect harmony, or as a hive of bees throws off a collective swarm into the air. The ancient Greeks and Romans were famous beekeepers and harvested respectable yields of honey from homemade hives, yet they got almost every fact about bees wrong. As Kevin Kelly (1994: 6) points out in a chapter of his book Out of Control titled “Hive Mind,” the idea of the hive as an emergent, decentralized system was late in coming. It was not until the modern era that the hive was found to be a radical matriarchy and sisterhood (with only a smattering of male drones) and that the notion of the queen bee as supreme supervisor was discounted. When a swarm pours itself out through the front slot of a hive, the queen bee can only follow. As the above quotes indicate, there are several ways in which we might wish to locate musical connections to the swarm. Some improvised music provokes such quick reactions from players and evokes such complicated and dense soundscapes for listeners that a literal analogy to a swarm of insects may seem rather appropriate. And the ways in which individual improvisers can be heard to be “picking at” a shared body of modern techniques and sensibilities but in resolutely individualistic ways, or to be following their own creative spark while also being sensitive to and dependent on the evolving group dynamic, may bring to mind the behavior of social insects that seem to have their own agenda while also working in ways that organize the group without supervision. Finally, the notion of “insect music” has perhaps become most associated with a type of generative compositional scheme, and often with the power of computers to create complex patterns from relatively simple materials, such that questions about the ways in which creativity may be facilitated or constrained and the ways in which cultural understandings may be reflected, reshaped, or remain concealed in this type of work become particularly important. At the dawn of the twentieth century, the Belgian poet Maurice Maeterlinck wondered, “Where is ‘this spirit of the hive’ … where does it reside? What is it that governs here, that issues orders, foresees the future?” (quoted in Kelly 1994: 7). We now know that within the swarm, a half dozen or so anonymous workers scout ahead to check for possible hive locations. When they report back to the swarm, they perform an informative dance, the intensity of which corresponds to the desirability of the site they scouted. Deputy bees follow up on the more promising reports and return to either confirm or disconfirm the desirability of the new location. Although it is rare for a single bee to visit more

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than one potential site, through the process of compounding emphasis, the more desirable sites end up getting the most visitors. In other words, the hive chooses: the biggest crowd eventually provokes the entire swarm to dance off to its new location. The behavior of a swarm can fascinate, but so too can its sound. When Sublime Frequencies released Tucker Martine’s album of insect field recordings titled Broken Hearted Dragonflies: Insect Electronica From Southeast Asia, many listeners refused to believe that the sounds had not been electronically processed in some way. Conversely, Curtis Road’s granular synthesis techniques and realizations of David Tudor’s “Rainforest” can easily be confused for naturally occurring sounds. For her aptly titled “Bee Project,” Miya Masaoka’s positioned a glassenclosed beehive of three thousand bees in the center of the stage and amplified, manipulated, and blended its sounds with those from a trio of improvisers, all according to the instructions in her score. Later versions of the same work have used spatialization software to twist and tilt the sound of the hive so that listeners can be sonically located within the swarm. We can sense in the sounds and behaviors of decentralized decision-making a quality that appears to inform all life: emergence. William Morton Wheeler, the founder of the field of social insects, argued as early as 1911 that an insect colony operates as a type of superorganism: “Like a cell or the person, it behaves as a unitary whole, maintaining its identity in space, resisting dissolution … neither a thing nor a concept, but a continual flux or process” (quoted in Kelly 1994: 7). Other terms have been proposed as well. Kelly (1994: 337) adopts the notion of a “vivisystem” since, like superorganism, it extends certain qualities and dynamics of living systems into the social realm without the more problematic claim of extending life to them. Both terms leave open the idea that “multiorganism organisms” may take a very different form than multicellular ones (see Russell 1983). One of John Stevens’s early pedagogical approaches to group improvisation was titled “Click Piece.” It included little more than the instruction to play the shortest sounds on your instrument.3 In large ensemble settings, one would gradually become aware of an emergent group sound. As David Toop (2002: 242–3) explains, “The piece seemed to develop with a mind of its own

Stevens titled the complementary strategy “Sustained Piece.” 3

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and almost as a by-product, the basic lessons of improvisation—how to listen and how to respond—could be learned through a careful enactment of the instructions.” Stevens’s “Click Piece” highlights one of the central aspects of swarm intelligence, that relatively simple decentralized activities can produce dramatic emergent behaviors. In the scientific and business communities, a growing number of researchers are exploring new ways of applying swarm intelligence (see Bonabeau and Théraulaz 2000). For instance, the foraging of ants has led to improved methods for routing telecommunications traffic in a busy network. The way in which insects cluster their dead can aid in analyzing bank data. The distributed and cooperative approach used by many social insects to transport goods and to solve navigational problems has led to new insights in the fields of robotics and artificial intelligence. And the evolving division of labor in honeybees has helped to improve the organization of factory assembly line workers and equipment. As Eric Bonabeau and Guy Théraulaz see it: “The potential of swarm intelligence is enormous. It offers an alternative way of designing systems that have traditionally required centralized control and extensive preprogramming” (Bonabeau and Théraulaz 2000: 79). Alfonso Iñiguez articulates five general principles of swarm intelligence: (1) awareness (each member must be aware of its surroundings and abilities); (2) autonomy (each member must operate autonomously to selfcoordinate allocation of labor); (3) solidarity (each member must cooperate in solidarity: when a task is completed, each member should autonomously look for a new task, leveraging its current position); (4) expandability (the system must permit expansion where members are dynamically aggregated); (5) resiliency (the system must be self-healing: when members are removed, the remaining members should undertake the unfinished tasks).4 These resonate rather well with qualities that I believe are important in open-form ensemble improvisation. Awareness is key to sensitive improvising. Autonomy and solidarity describe well the dynamic tension between individualism and group awareness touched upon previously. The idea of sharing and coordinating the “labor” of collective improvisation was discussed previously in the Preface to the Revised Edition, referencing work by Hilary Putnam and Gary Hagberg. Last, open-form ensemble improvisation is certainly

4 https://youtu.be/axxXz2BM0yw (accessed September 14, 2021).

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expandable and resilient to personnel changes in ways that pre-composed musics may not be. Without a doubt, there are important differences in the degrees of freedom allowed in a swarm of bees and in the collective improvisation ensembles of humans. But if interesting complexities can emerge from groupings of individuals with a limited array of communication possibilities, how much more can we expect from experienced and creative artists? J. Stephen Lansing (2003: 194), an anthropologist who also serves as external faculty at the Santa Fe Institute, writes: “What if the elements are not cells or light bulbs but agents capable of reacting with new strategies or foresight to the patterns they have helped to create?” Much of the current research by social scientists on complex adaptive systems is concerned with precisely this question. The science of Sync has also evolved in the past few decades, shifting from investigating oscillators that are all identically coupled to their neighbors, to exploring situations of “broken symmetry,” in which larger configurations often split into separate factions creating complex combinations of synchrony and asynchrony. Strogatz dubbed these “chimera” states, after a mythological firebreathing monster made of incongruous parts. The new chimera states have illuminated countless new ways that networks can break up into “clusters” of oscillators that synchronize. Raissa D’Souza comments: “We’re gaining the tools to look at these exotic, intricate patterns beyond just simple, full synchronization or regions of synchronization and regions of randomness” (quoted in Walchover 2019: n.p.). I have explored strategies with larger improvising ensembles arranged in a circular formation that ask individual musicians to “synchronize” or connect with musicians in different locations other than their immediate neighbor, often producing complex forms of orderly disorder. To return to our earlier example of John Stevens’s “Click Piece,” although this generative approach to collective improvisation offered an effective way to make compelling music with a large ensemble comprising players of mixed ability and experience, and more skillful and confident musicians, it may quickly become an unproductive limitation. Simplifying or constraining the parameters for improvisation can be useful to make large ensembles sync or swarm effectively, but in the more intimate setting of a small group, a less restrictive framework is usually desired. Evan Parker highlights the entangled and emergent sense of “freedom” in the music in ways that resonate with sync and swarm dynamics:

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The freedom is of course that since you and your response are part of the context for other people, and they have that function for you, it’s very hard to unravel the knots of why anybody is doing what they do in a given context. I think it’s pretty clear that you could sort of go with the flow, or you could go against the flow. And sometimes what the music really needs is for you to go with the flow, and sometimes what it really needs is for you to do something different. Or anybody, somebody, to do something different. So that’s why people improvise, presumably, because they want the freedom to behave in accordance with their response to the situations. But since their response then becomes part of the new situation for the other players, it’s very hard to say why a particular sequence of events unfolds in the way it does. But we get used to following the narrative of improvisational discourse. (quoted in Corbett 1994: 203)

In his liner notes to the album In Order to Survive, bassist William Parker expresses that “creative music is any music that procreates itself as it is being played to ignite into a living entity that is bigger than the composer and player.” His comments certainly resonate with the idea of a vivisystem or superorganism, and they may highlight an additional dimension of swarm-intelligence research: interactions within a swarm can be both direct and indirect. Direct interactions within a swarm are the obvious ones: with ants, this can involve antennation or mandibular contact, food or liquid exchange, chemical contact, and so forth. But indirect interactions are more subtle. In swarm intelligence research, they are referred to by the rather cumbersome term stigmergy (from the Greek stigma: sting, and ergon: work). Stigmergy describes the indirect interaction between individuals when one of them modifies the environment and the other responds to the new environment, rather than directly to the actions of the first individual (see Bonabeau et al. 1999: 14–17). This helps to describe the process of “incremental construction” that many social insects use to build extremely complex structures or to arrange items in ways that might at first seem arbitrary or random. And because positive feedback can produce nonlinear effects, indirect interaction can result in dramatic bifurcations when a critical point is reached: for example, some species of termites alternate between non-coordinated and coordinated building to produce neatly arranged pillars or strips of soil pellets. Swarm intelligence does have its limits and drawbacks. Social insects can adapt to changes in their environment, but only within a certain degree of tolerance. For instance, many social insects are able to seek out and find new food sources when an existing one is exhausted, or some species are able to reallocate labor

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roles if the number of required workers for a specific task dwindles, all without explicit instruction. But the “army ant syndrome” offers a compelling example of the limits to this adaptability and of swarm intelligence in general. Among army ants, when a group of foragers accidentally gets separated from the main colony, the separated workers run in a densely packed “circular mill” until they all eventually die from exhaustion. Although able to function well within the group under normal circumstances, an unpredictable perturbation of a large enough degree can destroy the colony’s cohesiveness and make it impossible for the group to recover. For a musical analogy, while sensitivity to the group is an essential component of improvised performance, to blindly base one’s own playing on what others do or to simply follow the group as an overriding strategy can lead to rather inflexible or ineffective results, producing a musical “circular mill.” And many improvisers, if they sense that all of the participants are following each other too carefully, will “go against the grain” or “forge out on their own” into new sonic territory; in other words, they will defy the logic of the hive mind. Observing how Roscoe Mitchell works in a group improvisation setting has often left me with just this impression; that he skillfully resists moments in which it might be too obvious or banal to simply “go with the flow.” The cohesion of small groups can also be jeopardized by social concerns and imbalances. Drawing on research with decision-making among corporate boards and committees, James Surowiecki (2004) identifies three qualities that appear to factor into all intimate social settings: (1) earlier comments are more influential; (2) higher status people talk more and more often; and (3) status is not always derived from knowledge/experience. Evan Parker admits that hierarchical relationships do emerge in this music, even if solidarity is an overriding goal. One type of hierarchical relationship naturally emerges, according to Parker, based on who organized the event, who established the ensemble, or, even in situations like Derek Bailey’s famous Company gatherings, on who selects the larger pool of potential collaborators. “This kind of hierarchical relationship is inescapable, is always going to be there,” Parker admits, “because of the way things come about through individual initiatives, individual impulses, individual responses to the practical problems of how to set up performances” (quoted in Scott 1987: n.p.). The field of swarm intelligence is still very much in its infancy. Bonabeau and Théraulaz (2000: 79) confess: “Although swarm-intelligence approaches have been effective at performing a number of optimization and control tasks,

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the systems developed have been inherently reactive and lack the necessary overview to solve problems that require in-depth reasoning techniques.” We still don’t know enough about social insects, much less social humans, to be able to understand how certain group behaviors emerge and evolve. Nevertheless, the notion that a group has capacities and capabilities that extend beyond the scope of any of its participating members is a powerful one. Not only does swarm intelligence represent a type of distributed perception for the hive, but the hive also possesses a type of distributed memory. For instance, the average honeybee operates with a memory of six days, but the hive as a whole operates with a distributed memory of up to three months, twice as long as the lifetime of the average bee (Kelly 1994: 12). Bonabeau et al. (1999: 22) write: We suggest that the social insect metaphor may go beyond superficial considerations. At a time when the world is becoming so complex that no single human being can really understand it, when information (and not the lack of it) is threatening our lives, when software systems become so intractable that they can no longer be controlled, perhaps the scientific and engineering world will be more willing to consider another way of designing “intelligent” systems where autonomy, emergence and distributed functioning replace control, preprogramming, and centralization.

Mitchel Resnick, author of Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams (1994) and the creator of the pioneering StarLogo agent-based modeling program, finds that people tend to assume that patterns are created either “by lead or by seed,” by which he means that when people observe patterns in the world, they either assume a leader orchestrated it or some preexisting or pregiven inhomogeneity in the environment gave rise to the pattern. Resnick (1994: 120) explains: People seem to have a strong preference for centralization in almost everything they think and do. People tend to look for the cause, the reason, the driving force, the deciding factor. When people observe patterns in the world (for example the flocking of birds or the foraging of ants), they often assume centralized causes where none exist. And when people try to create patterns and structures in the world (for example, new organizations or new machines), they often impose centralized control where none is needed.

Our increasingly interconnected and improvisatory lives may suggest that we can benefit from exploring ways of organizing sonic and social experiences that do not hinge on centralized and hierarchical notions of control, but it remains difficult for many people to envision complex systems organizing without

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a leader. The notion that music can be organized in complex ways without a composer, conductor, or obvious leader still leaves many scratching their heads in doubt. Scientists are also predisposed to look for chains of command, instances of clear cause and effect. The emerging paradigm, however, suggests that complex behaviors are often arrived at without a leader, organized without an organizer, coordinated without a coordinator. The Black Lives Matter movement, for instance, has grown and spread considerably without obvious centralized organization or a single charismatic leader. Of course, decentralized movements take many forms, including spreading less progressive views such as nationalism, sectarianism, and racism (among other pronounced biases). In his work using StarLogo as an educational tool, Resnick found an inherent tension: “People felt a gut attraction to decentralized phenomena, even as they clung tightly to centralized preconceptions” (1994: 131). Resnick also noted that his generative models tended to evoke very different interpretations from different observers: an economist was reminded of the development of cities; an education researcher saw the interaction of children in classrooms as they form learning communities; a business student envisioned information flowing through an organization; and a student of Zen Buddhism saw people in search of religion. When people constructed their own multi-agent simulations, Resnick found that they frequently became deeply invested in the fate of their “turtles” and the outcome of their virtual worlds. One student compared the experience to visiting a relative in the hospital and watching the heart monitor alongside the bed continually fluctuating (133). Ultimately Resnick argues: “Our intuitions about systems in the world are deeply influenced by our conceptions of ourselves” (129). This is also true of those conducting the basic research that informs these types of systems. In his book Silicon Second Nature, anthropologist Stefan Helmreich (2000) offers an ethnography of the Santa Fe Institute and argues that the artificial life models being explored there reflect the unconscious cultural assumptions and social prejudices of their creators: “Because Artificial Life scientists tend to see themselves as masculine gods of their cyberspace creations, as digital Darwins exploring frontiers filled with primitive creatures, their programs reflect prevalent representations of gender, kinship, and race and repeat origin stories most familiar from mythical and religious narratives” (quoted in Lansing 2003: 200). Simulation models, just like their generative counterparts, may serve as a type of Rorschach test, revealing the researcher/ creator’s cultural background and psychological idiosyncrasies. Writing about human–computer interactions in general and his Voyager system

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in particular, George Lewis (2000b: 33) finds that “interactions with these systems tend to reveal characteristics of the community of thought and culture that produced them.”

The Art of Improvisation in the Age of Computational Participation As for jazz and computers, the question is what they could possibly have to do with each other. The values and processes of the one—an art of spontaneous, inspired collective improvisation, evolving through an oral tradition, born of African-American culture but accepting creative individuals by way of true meritocracy—seem antithetical to the other … I can imagine computers delivering goods and services on a global scale, much more efficaciously than ever before. But I have a hard time conceding they’ll ever provide us with the sustaining reflections of jazz. —Howard (1996: n.p.) What makes the two things work together is that even though they seem so incompatible the premise of free jazz is that you improvise with whatever is in your environment. If it’s a machine, you interact with that. —Matthew Shipp (quoted in Nicholson 2003: n.p.) In his 1936 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Walter Benjamin [1936] (1968b) interrogated how mechanical reproduction removes the “aura” surrounding art by confounding its unique existence in time and space, thereby altering perceptions of its originality, authenticity, and embeddedness in tradition. In addition, he was concerned with how new technologies shift or augment human perception, cultural production, and social and political participation. For Benjamin, like many of his Frankfurt School colleagues, new modes of appreciation and engagement arise in tension with new modes of deception and distraction. This section focuses briefly on several examples of computerized systems that have been designed and presented as semi-autonomous agents, having the capacity to invent, provoke, and respond to human musicians in improvised performance. Computational modeling of improvisation, I argue, simultaneously elucidates, challenges, and perpetuates normative conceptions of improvisation.

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The implementation of these systems, including how performers choose to interact with them, illuminates how computer-mediated improvisation necessarily reflects specific culturally and historically situated understandings of creativity, collaboration, and computation. For instance, what are the repercussions of exploring musical improvisation through an algorithmic, computational, and combinatorial lens? Do approaches such as these invite us to rethink deeply held assumptions about creativity? Do they encourage novelty and innovation, or might they actually run the risk of undercutting difference by emphasizing and redistributing what is already statistically common? Can we conceive of improvisations as mediated by the skills, bodies, and desires of all the participating actors and agents, including non-human ones? How do artists and researchers reconcile the in-time, phenomenologically rich, and open-ended dimensions of actually doing musical improvisation with the over-time, reflective, and symbolically mediated dimensions of designing non-human improvising agents? In short, in what ways does computational modeling simultaneously elucidate, challenge, and perpetuate normative conceptions of improvisation? The notion of a “virtual” band in jazz has arguably been with us since the introduction of “Music Minus One” and Jamey Aebersold “Play-A-Long” recordings. None of these, however, could be called interactive, in the sense that they are capable of responding to human performers in the course of performance or of using input information derived from a musical performance to shape compositional decisions. François Pachet, the director of Sony Computer Science Laboratory Paris, is a jazz guitarist who has developed several systems for interactive musical performance. His projects titled VirtualBand and Continuator are the most relevant to the current discussion. VirtualBand is the outcome of Pachet’s desire to make a truly interactive playalong system (Moreira, Roy, and Pachet 2013). Like other machine-learning applications, VirtualBand has a “training” period during which musicians on different instruments (e.g., guitar, piano, bass, drums) are recorded in studio situations playing in a variety of styles. These recordings are later analyzed by the system using signal-processing techniques (primarily based on music information retrieval research) that segments and tags different parts of their performances and organizes them into a style database. To use VirtualBand, one selects a song structure (essentially information from a jazz lead sheet such as harmony, meter, and form) and the number and type of accompanying musicians. The important difference, according to Pachet,

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between a standard playalong and VirtualBand is that his system is designed to respond to the dynamics and musical development of a human soloist as the performance unfolds. For instance, as a user builds a solo in intensity (perhaps by increasing volume and/or density of notes), the system detects this change and is designed to respond accordingly. Continuator is a related project that offers a kind of pedagogical scaffolding and performative interactivity to jazz soloists. As its name suggests, Continuator is designed to continue the musical ideas being developed by a human partner in real time in a stylistically appropriate fashion. It is designed to “learn” an individual musician’s performing style in real time so that it can engage that musician in a type of call-and-response playing. An earlier project with a similar goal designed by Belinda Thom was humorously titled Band-OUT-of-a-Box. Videos of Continuator in operation demonstrate engaging moments of musical “trading” as the system quickly builds operational representations of the current style being explored by its human counterpart, and one video in particular pits the system against a skilled improvising pianist in a musical “Turing test” that, at least according to the comments provided for the video by Pachet’s lab, had two music critics deciding largely in favor of the computer.5 The problem with the Turing test in general, as Jeff Hawkins points out, is that it is a performance-based metric. “If you can trick somebody, if you can solve a task with some sort of clever engineering,” Hawkins states, “then you’ve achieved that benchmark, but you haven’t necessarily made any progress toward a deeper understanding of what it means to be intelligent” (quoted in Heaven 2021: n.p.). Each of these systems requires that a considerable amount of standard jazz theory and conventions be built in—either to the software or to the process of training it—for them to function in expected ways. For instance, the computer drummer in VirtualBand switches from playing gentle brushes on the snare drum, to using sticks on the high-hat cymbal with occasional “bombs” on the snare, to eventually keeping time on the ride cymbal and incorporating more pronounced hits on the toms, all in response to the perceived energy of a soloist. Similarly, the bass player in the “virtual band” switches from walking in two to walking in four as the perceived intensity and density of input from the soloist increases. These are conventions of mainstream jazz accompaniment but are certainly not the only way that drums and bass can increase their dynamism

youtube.com/watch?v=ynPWOMzossI (accessed September 15, 2021). 5

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(and arguably some of the most interactive mainstream jazz does not always conform to these conventions, such as the Bill Evans Trio). Likewise, while the Continuator system appears to offer a promising way for improvising musicians to engage a computer system that quickly learns, adapts to, and extends one’s own ideas, it, too, has certain cultural conventions “baked” into its design. The most obvious moments of joy in the video documentation are when the musicians interacting with Continuator hear their own ideas coming back to them in slightly modified form. This kind of cat-and-mouse playing, however, is frowned upon in some improvised music circles, and one may tire quickly of a system that constantly mirrors one’s own behavior or requires continual prodding in order for new musical ideas to emerge. As was alluded to at the outset, these implicit biases designed into computational systems may serve to further codify and disseminate standardized practices in ways that could ultimately discourage real novelty and innovation. Shimon is a robotic marimba player capable of improvising complex jazzinspired melodies and chordal accompaniment. According to Gil Weinberg, one of Shimon’s developers at the Georgia Institute of Technology, the term “robotic musicianship” may strike some as an oxymoron, since to “play like a robot” is a phrase most commonly used to critique a human performer who is unable to add the requisite musicality and sensitivity to “lift” the notes off the printed page, offering only a “mechanical” reading of the score (Bretan and Weinberg 2016: 100). For Shimon’s team of researchers, however, the pursuit of robotic musicianship is an interdisciplinary scientific and artistic endeavor. It has an engineering side, which involves the study and construction of physical systems that generate sound through mechanical means (“musical mechatronics”), and a computational side, which focuses on developing algorithms and cognitive models representative of various aspects of music perception, composition, performance, and theory. Mason Bretan, a key member of Shimon’s research team, explained in a phone interview how Shimon’s playing is shaped by the material affordances and constraints of its mechanical design: It has a representation of some musical language or some musical knowledge, but then on top of that, when it makes its decisions, it thinks about: “I have four arms and they can move in this particular way, so how can I achieve this particular goal?” So something as simple as playing a motif that goes up in pitch, Shimon really has to think about its body in order to do that. So its body influences what note it might start on within the motif, and where it is going

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to end, and what it is going to do in the middle, and how fast it can go is all dependent on its body.6

Shimon has also been programmed with a repertoire of listening techniques and “ancillary” movements—those not directly related to sound production—that are designed to assist with musical coordination and to provide a more engaging performance. For instance, in addition to its anthropomorphizing value, Shimon’s “eye” serves as a visual tracking system that allows it to notice movements made by its co-performers and use this information to attempt to synchronize certain musical behaviors, similar to how human performers can use their own eyes to track Shimon’s body movements to assist with musical coordination or anticipation. For audiences, seeing Shimon wildly swinging mallets, twisting its neck to follow its co-performers, and bobbing its head to the beat, appears to influence the perception of the robot and the music it creates. In one early experiment, listeners were either provided with audio-only or audiovisual recordings of Shimon performing with a human musician. With the audiovisual recordings, participants consistently reported higher levels of appreciation of how well the robot played, how much it played like a human would, and how responsive it was to the human performer and the human performer to it (Hoffman and Weinberg 2015). Shimon is a biblical name that means “he has heard.” It appears that being able to see the robot’s physical embodiment and engaging movements contributes greatly to a sense that it is listening well. That being said, Bretan, a jazz percussionist and pianist himself, admitted to me that his early encounters with Shimon felt like performing with a really amateur musician who needed a strong and clear articulation of the beat in order to stay synchronized. It has improved a bit, and now there are moments where it feels like I am interacting with a person … [but] it is hard to get Shimon to progress the music, the interactions … to create a beginning, and end form, a sort of higher-level structure. Shimon makes a really nice call-and-response demo, but it needs to have a better understanding of higher-level structures … it has to be able to tell a story.7

The Georgia Tech research team has frequently articulated that an overriding goal of the project is to create a system that can “listen like a human but improvise like a machine.” Having the two additional independent “arms” already gives Shimon Bretan, interview with the author, 2015. 7 Bretan, interview with the author, 2015. 6

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Figure 6.1  Mason Bretan and Shimon

the possibility of playing chordal and melodic structures on the marimba that are spaced beyond what even a skilled four-mallet human performer could achieve. This raises the question of whether Shimon’s specific mechanical abilities and constraints might lead to its own idiosyncratic style of improvising. Eitan Wilf (2013: 728), who conducted extensive ethnographic research at Shimon’s lab, quotes one of the researchers describing Shimon’s improvising style: You see, [Shimon] has its own style because of the arm movements and the limitations. You’d hear the beginning of a natural run [i.e., a phrase that consists of notes adjacent to one another] and then suddenly a note would go up in the octave—you’d hear some note being played by a different arm in a different octave because the first arm is not fast enough to play it so the other arm would compensate for it. And I think that’s unique to [Shimon].8

8 Although Wilf anonymizes his sources in this article, in a personal communication with the author, he confirmed that it is based on research done in the Shimon lab.

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One might argue, however, that there is a certain disconnect between programming Shimon with human music—melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic structures that are indelibly stamped by the physicality of human performers and human instruments—in order to have it produce machine music. In the more theoretical portion of his work, Wilf (2014) writes compellingly about both the material constraints and the normative ideals that inform computational and mechanical approaches to modeling improvisation. For example, Shimon’s research team has recently explored ways of imbuing the software with an ability to mix improvising styles by combining aspects of the styles of historically important improvisers, as derived through statistical analysis of transcriptions of their improvisations. Wilf writes about a session in which Shimon was tasked with improvising with a mix of 33.3 percent the style of Miles Davis, 33.3 percent the style of Charlie Parker, and 33.3 percent the style of the player improvising with Shimon, which Shimon could learn in real time. According to Wilf, not only does a residual style still pervade Shimon’s playing regardless of which mix of styles it is asked to perform, at least in part a result of its physical embodiment, but this tactic of quantifying creativity, dividing it into building blocks, and recombining them, betrays many normative beliefs and practices (ibid.: 719). What is deemed important in music is invariably culturally inflected, and Wilf argues that Western music analysis has a long history of emphasizing an underlying parametric paradigm of creativity, which can now, through computational mediation, be taken to its logical extreme. I also worry that by dividing mechanical from computational dimensions, and listening from generative procedures, this type of research subscribes to binaries that are unsustainable. When I asked Bretan if Shimon was listening to itself, he laughed and admitted that they “try to isolate Shimon from being able to listen to itself because in order to get a clean audio signal, they need it to focus only on the other sounds around it.”9 This, to me, highlights a significant shortcoming, in that improvisers listen intently to their own sounds, along with those of others, and often explore new musical directions based on intimate forms of auditory and haptic feedback and feedforward provided by the tight coupling of player and instrument, in addition to that between the various musicians. At its best, however, this research does offer substantial empirical insight into issues of timing, anticipation, expression, mechanical dexterity, and social

Bretan, interview with the author, 2015. 9

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interaction—at least in terms of expressive behaviors and musical cueing— that are central to music making and to human behavior more generally. At times, however, the researchers’ aspirations seem to get the best of them. For instance, Bretan and Weinberg (2016: 102) write that Shimon will inspire humans to “invent new genres, expand virtuosity, and bring musical expression and creativity to uncharted domains,” a type of language not only filled with teleology and hyperbole, but also seemingly unaware of the ways in which it is culturally situated and arguably gendered as well, in that it appears to reflect stereotypically “masculine” experiences and prejudices. Maxine is a software-based improvising system designed for more experimental forms of open-form improvisation created by Ritwik Banerji, an ethnomusicologist from the University of California, Berkeley. In intriguing ways, Banerji (2018) envisions Maxine as both a performance system and as a tool for ethnographic investigation of the improvisation community. I begin with a brief discussion of the technical aspects of the system before exploring the ethnomusicological dimensions of Banerji’s project. Maxine is realized using Ableton Live software and Max/MSP, a programming language commonly used by computer musicians whose name Banerji borrowed and intentionally feminized. Maxine’s design uses multiple agents analyzing auditory input and controlling sonic output simultaneously. Many of these agents are linked to a pitch detector, the Max/MSP object called [pitch~], that, when presented with the complex and often pitchless sounds of open-form improvisation, usually fails. This means that Maxine’s output will correspond in general to the overall pacing and event-density heard in the playing of a human partner, but how and why particular correspondences are made can be difficult to deduce. For the sound-producing agents, Banerji employs digital instruments and processes from Ableton Live that create “unusual” timbres, such as “metal percussion, synthesized versions of prepared or ‘extended’ guitar and piano techniques, a variety of synthesizers, and signal-processing tools” (Banerji 2016: 51). After experiments with early versions of the system, Banerji (a saxophonist himself) decided that Maxine’s output conformed too closely to the temporal and timbral developments of its human partners. He felt that Maxine required too much prodding to produce things of interest (a concern I raised with respect to Pachet’s Continuator above). To address this shortcoming, Banerji decided to add a type of cybernetic feedback to the system by positioning an additional microphone close to the system’s own speaker output (a marked contrast

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to Shimon’s design team, who intentionally avoid having it listen to its own playing). While it is conceivable that this setup would create runaway feedback, Banerji found that the unusual timbres he chose for Maxine’s output continued to confound its pitch detector, producing more unpredictable and idiosyncratic output and, in his words, providing the system with a sense of “mystery and individualism” (ibid.: 48). Somewhat fortuitously, Banerji realized that he could alter the distance from speaker to microphone as an additional variable affecting the system. For human partners who desire a more “aggressive” profile, Banerji positions Maxine’s microphone closer to its speaker, providing it with more independence. For those wishing for a more “sympathetic” response, he moves the microphone further away, causing its output to correspond more closely with theirs. With these new possibilities in place, Banerji began soliciting postperformance feedback from Maxine’s musical partners for insights that might lead to further improvements in system design. Some players found Maxine to be “too meek, hesitant, or reserved in its interactive behavior,” unable to inspire their own improvising (ibid.: 51). Others felt that Maxine was too “selfabsorbed,” unable to “meet them halfway” (ibid.: 53). Some felt Maxine needed to be more skilled at recognizing and (re)producing conventional musical features, such as meter, interval relationships, harmonic progression, standard phrasing, etc., while others wished for more unpredictability. Interestingly, Banerji found that opposing traits were sometimes desired by the same individual, depending on the context of the unfolding musical performance. After all, while musical “aggression” in one context might be desirable, in another it may be repugnant. Many felt, in ways similar to Bretan’s concerns with Shimon, that computer systems have difficulty creating the impression of evolving musical form across longer expanses of time—of “telling a story.” One participant expressed that Maxine demonstrated “a frustrating inability to sustain the drama of the interaction” (ibid.: 51). Others expressed that Maxine lacked the important ability to be able to switch between leader and follower roles, or to provide longer periods of either support or opposition in musically appropriate ways. Many wished that the system could produce musical materials to mesh better with their own, often expecting Maxine to emulate the style of human improvisers personally familiar to them. Banerji soon realized that the feedback he was receiving offered valuable insight into the unspoken norms and cultural politics that emerge in scenes of musical improvisers, a kind of insight that is not easily attainable since open-form

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improvisers tend to avoid conveying these kinds of explicit preferences or critiques to one another, likely out of deference to their musical liberty. Since Maxine is a non-human agent, participants felt far more comfortable critiquing its performance. While Maxine appeared to be failing from the perspective of a Turing test—it was failing at a performance-based metric—Banerji found that these experiences were opening up more interesting conversations about the kinds of intelligence Maxine’s musical partners were looking for or were willing to acknowledge as “intelligent.” Through this process, Banerji also became more self-aware that his design decisions with Maxine betrayed his own cultural location, making the interactions between Maxine and its partners an opportunity to elucidate the relative distances between their cultural locations and his own. Ultimately, Banerji realized that it is impossible to separate out an evaluation of Maxine’s performance provided by her human co-performers—and here I intentionally shift to using the feminine pronoun—from an evaluation of their own performance, in terms of how they interacted with the system. As an improvising “system,” Maxine’s performances do not rely on traditional notions of leader and follower, or reify ideas about instrumental virtuosity or creative teleology, which appear to be dominant motivators in the labs of Pachet and Weinberg, based on their system designs and published comments. Following actor–network theory, we might argue that any assessments of musical quality in a performance with Maxine are mediated between the skills and desires of all agents, including the human participants, Maxine and Banerji, and all of the programmers and designers behind Ableton Live and Max/MSP, and more. On a purely technical level, it can be argued that Maxine is a less complex computer system. It is not based on a massive database of transcribed solos or on complex “style modeling” methods. In fact, it does not attempt to represent musical knowledge in any way. Its primary feature extraction method (pitch tracking) is arguably poorly chosen, given the kind of musical “information” it will most likely encounter. Yet, because of these things, rather than despite them, it represents an overture toward a different paradigm for understanding and modeling collective improvisation. Traditionally, artificial agents have been programmed to sense, represent, compute, and respond to an agent-independent pregiven world. Banerji’s approach, by contrast, is more in line with a cybernetic view that upholds a vision of the world as a place of continuing interlinked performances. Banerji’s system does not have any explicit memory, learning, or predictive capability,

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Figure 6.2  Ritwik Banerji with Maxine (photo by Peter Kaars)

which might be seen as a significant detriment, but when viewed as a cybernetic system, his interventions in the system (e.g., altering microphone placement or revising the number and behavior of software agents), along with how Maxine’s co-participants alter their musical behaviors to mesh better with hers, can all be viewed as forms of systemic learning. In this more cybernetic view, humans both configure—and are configured by—the technologies around us (see Borgo and Kaiser 2010). In the same year that Benjamin wrote his well-known essay “Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” ([1936] 1968b), he authored a less well-known essay titled “The Storyteller” ([1936] 1968a). These essays deal with different technologies—cinema and photography in the former, and printing in the latter—and seemingly offer rather different perspectives on our engagements with technology: a difference that some have read as a change of heart in Benjamin’s own thinking. In “Work of Art,” Benjamin celebrates the

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potentially democratizing aspects of cinema and photography, as well as their ability to alter human perception and experience through new camera-angles and editing techniques such as slow-motion and close-up. In “The Storyteller,” he mourns the passing of storytelling as a lived, oral tradition under the impact of the printed word and the pre-digested nature of information conveyed through newsprint. Benjamin feared that storytelling was disappearing in modernity because face-to-face contact and living praxis were giving way to “information” as decontextualized and instrumentalized knowledge. Read together, however, these essays demonstrate less a change in heart than a call to be cognizant of the different ways that different technologies interact with culture, and of how the same technologies can lend themselves to diverse and divergent readings. Without a doubt, there have been significant strides made in artificial intelligence and machine learning in just the past few years, but consideration of social and cultural issues within these research communities remains rare. One obstacle is the simple fact that gaining the requisite knowledge in both the technical aspects of learning algorithms and in the critical theories of the contemporary social sciences and humanities is an imposing challenge. Media coverage of this research also tends to promote sensationalist views that favor hype over reality, using dystopian or utopian rhetoric in place of real critical engagement. The following, for instance, are recent headlines from articles covering the activities of the robotic musicianship research group that created Shimon: “A Four-Armed Robot Can Now Improvise Music as Well as Human Bandmates” (Murphy 2016); “This Robot Is a Better Jazz Player Than You” (Mills 2016); and, perhaps with a shrewd reference to this trend, “Your New Robot Overlord Turns Out To Be A Pretty Good Marimba Player” (Tsioulcas 2016). Nick Collins (2006), who has both technical skills in this domain and a desire to address relevant social and ethical issues, argues that these emerging musical agents are best understood as “projected intelligences” rather than artificial intelligences, since they result from a composer’s anticipation of the dynamics of a concert setting made manifest in programming code. Collins (2011: 37) admits in a slightly later publication, however, that “machine musicianship continues to advance, and machine learning techniques may undermine many sureties here.” One thing that does not change, however, are the ways in which specific technologies mark and often maintain specific cultural positions and presuppositions. For instance, Cathy O’Neil’s (2016) research suggests that

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sexism, racism, and other forms of discrimination are being built into machinelearning algorithms simply because these already exist in the data that are being learned. Just as face recognition software trained on photos of people who are overwhelmingly white will have a harder time recognizing non-white faces, it stands to reason that computer improvisers trained on a heavy diet of Sonny Stitt and Michael Brecker will have more difficulty “understanding” Ornette Coleman and Albert Ayler. Learning algorithms are only as good as the data they are trained on (“garbage in, garbage out”), and data of this sort have a complex history. Extracting only a “solo” voice from the complex, collaborative, and social environment that informs jazz musicking is already problematic, as is the reliance on parametric representations of jazz “vocabulary” as analyzed through the transcription of recorded solos. While music may have some language-like qualities, it is not language, and its differences should not be minimized or ignored just so that researchers can conveniently borrow deep learning algorithms that have proven successful in that realm. Recognizing and predicting correlations between written text is not the same as developing spoken fluency (which involves the pragmatics and prosody of language use, among other things), nor would generating expert-level musical improvisations using the symbols of music notation be the same as performing and interacting fluently in a live context. On the whole, researchers in artificial intelligence have realized that it is relatively easy to get computers to do formalized adult things (like play chess and do math—or perhaps even to play a generic form of bebop), but decidedly more difficult to get them to do things that come naturally to a small child (like play with a ball, identify a dog, develop a sense of humor, or entrain to a musical beat). It is also worth noting that designing computers to learn how to emulate jazz—either from recorded or real-world examples—and then injecting that emulation back into the world ultimately affects the world that the system is intended to emulate. This is not simply a pedantic question of which style will be favored in the world of computer-based jazz. It is also a pressing question of diversity and inclusivity. Kate Crawford (2016: n.p.) writes: Like all technologies before it, artificial intelligence will reflect the values of its creators. So inclusivity matters—from who designs it to who sits on the company boards and which ethical perspectives are included. Otherwise, we risk constructing machine intelligence that mirrors a narrow and privileged vision of society, with its old, familiar biases and stereotypes.

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New technologies tend to mask the ways in which decisions about the integrity, usefulness, and funding of public art are culturally sanctioned. And many have commented on the problematic and biased language adopted by computer engineers. For instance, computer terminology is filled with problematic military and masculine metaphors of control—enter, escape, command, target, master, slave, and so forth. It has also become commonplace to talk about machine “languages,” “memory,” and “intelligence” in ways that not only encourage the metaphor of humans as machines but also ignore the fact that these terms are full of rich, subtle, and not always well-understood meanings in the human realm. To invoke Benjamin [1936] (1968b: 88) one final time, a story differs from information in that it allows—even demands—that listeners interpret, reflect, share, remember, and transform it in their own way—to make the story their own. Narrative, according to Benjamin, “achieves an amplitude that information lacks.” Information, seen only as raw data, denies wisdom, shared experience, and the networks that forge community. In “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Benjamin interrogates not only the modern media technologies of cinema and photography but also psychoanalysis, which provided new understandings of the workings of the unconscious mind and promised a therapeutic method for bringing this material into our conscious awareness. The thread that connected these for Benjamin was their ability to provide the necessary critical distance for new understandings to emerge. Working with computers has provided new ways to share and experience the social and psychological dimensions of our lives, but it may be the critical distance they can offer on our own creativity, our own humanity, and our own failings that will prove to be among their greatest contributions. In an interview exploring his approach to combining electronics and jazz improvisation, Matthew Ship remarked: “The machine is something that takes you outside yourself, but I’m actually finding the machine is allowing [me] to connect more inwardly with myself.” “It’s a kind of a paradox,” he mused, “but it’s really fascinating how it’s working out” (quoted in Nicholson 2003: n.p.). George Lewis (2018: 130), a pioneer in designing creative machines for improvisation, eloquently writes: Perhaps our improvising computers can teach us how to live in a world marked by agency, indeterminacy, analysis of conditions, and the apparent ineffability

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of choice. Through improvisation, with and without machines, and within or outside the purview of the arts, we learn to celebrate our vulnerability, as part of a continuous transformation of both Other and Self.

The Puzzle of Coaction Growing experimental evidence demonstrates that our actions are often either initiated from below the level of our conscious awareness or inflected by social dynamics of which we are seldom aware. For instance, Harvard social psychologist Daniel M. Wegner (Wegner and Sparrow 2008) uses some deceptively simple alphabet-pointing experiments (involving paired participants working simultaneously and in leading and following arrangements) to demonstrate how one’s experience of “authorship” can be enhanced or undermined relatively easily by externally directed attention or by manipulation of environmental and social conditions. Interpreting this research, Wegner argues that people come to understand their actions as their own by: (1) using proprioception (the mind’s ability to learn from the body itself); (2) establishing how the mind may have contributed to action (via intention, planning, and premeditation); and (3) incorporating external information about the social circumstance of the action (the presence and potential contribution of other agents). In other words, these three indicators of authorship may add or subtract from each other such that the experience of conscious will is the final common pathway that produces the sense of “I did it,” “I didn’t do it,” or any gradations in between. In place of a “ghostly” faculty within the mind that controls action, Wegner envisions a conscious will that emerges from the mind’s efforts to understand its own authorship. He uses this insight, and our propensity for social accounting (to constantly keep track of who does what), to conclude that “authorship judgments have evolved to account for own agency in a social world where agency in coaction is the measure of all things” (31). Following Wegner’s insight, I argued in an article titled “The Ghost in the Music” (Borgo 2016b) that a similar balancing act is at play in improvised music, as individual musicians combine informational pathways to establish a sense of “authorship” by piecing together their own actions/intentions from proprioception, interoception, and social circumstance, including the confounding factors of sharing the same acoustic space with other agents (both human and non-human). It may also be the case that collectively improvised music also offers an experience

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by which we can, at least temporarily, lessen our grip on social accounting and celebrate—rather than merely puzzle over—coaction. In my own work in the electro-acoustic environment with trumpeter/ computer musician Jeff Kaiser as the duo KaiBorg, our reigning aesthetic has been to devise hybrid instruments that both extend and complicate our sense of agency and control. We wish to avoid the more conventional divisions of performative labor in electro-acoustic music between artists and technologists and between acoustic and electronic performers, as well as any hard and fast distinctions between the so-called technical and nontechnical aspects of our work. To paraphrase Donna Haraway’s (2004) discourse on the cyborg, we seek the pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and accept the responsibility for their construction. One of the challenges we perceive in the current computer-mediated environment for musical improvisation is to avoid a situation in which, to again reference Haraway, our machines are disturbingly lively, and we become frighteningly inert. Instead, we seek a relationship between the cybernetic and organic in which the organism becomes one part of elaborate feedback mechanisms and the cybernetic, in turn, incorporates the sophistication of the organic into its systems. In a coauthored essay (Borgo and Kaiser 2010), we suggested the term “configuring,” as it has been used in ANT—and even gave it a Gatesian twist as configurin’ (Gates 1988)—as a means of understanding the mutually constitutive processes through which users, technologies, and environments configure one another. I would like to suggest that the agency wielded by the environment is becoming increasingly important, and that artists often articulate this interrelationship in compelling ways. In particular, I argue that open-form improvisation, especially but not only in the context of its interface with advanced audio and computer technology, affords simultaneously an inroad to participating in complexity and the possibility of creating some provisional closure, some fleeting reduction of complexity. Insisting on the cybernetic closure of cognizing systems as they reduce the chaotically complex to the manageably complex also somewhat paradoxically prevents agency from being “overrun,” following Clarke and Hansen (2009: 2), “by the technoscientific processes that are everywhere transforming the material world in which we live.” In other words, if machines are to serve as mediators of human coevolution with the environment, then improvising music under the conditions of hybrid constellations of human and technological actions can offer a situated practice for exploring interagency and the 4E mind.

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Decentralization may be biologically coded for ants and other social insects, but it does not seem to be as natural or automatic for humans. Or it may simply be that, because we are within the system, we remain unaware of its emergent properties, just as individual bees and ants may be unaware of their group’s emergent social organization (see Bloom 2000). Contemporary research into human cognition increasingly demonstrates that our minds are composed of thousands of interacting neural networks and that we function cognitively by distributing resources and demands among the material and social environment. Because our consciousness filters out this more distributed engagement, we still tend to experience ourselves as singular. Dan Siegal, a Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at UCLA, suggests that we adopt the term “Mwe” to describe how we are an individual self (me) linked and interconnected to everyone and everything else (we).10

A Web without a Spider In the new systems thinking, the metaphor of knowledge as a building is being replaced by that of a network. As we perceive reality as a network of relationships, our descriptions, too, form an interconnected network of concepts and models in which there are no foundations. —Fritjof Capra (1996: 39) For mathematicians and physicists, the biggest surprise is that complexity lurks within extremely simple systems. For biologists, it is the idea that natural selection is not the sole source of order in the biological world. As for the social sciences, I suggest that emergence—the idea that complex global patterns with new properties may emerge from local interactions—may someday have a comparable impact. —Stephen Lansing (2003: 192) Because we tend to value individualism and innovation so highly (at least in contemporary Western cultures), we have often fostered the notion that individual musicians spin their own individual web from whole cloth as they

10 youtu.be/uo8Yo4UE6g0 (accessed September 15, 2021).

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create. But as we move our gaze into the social, historical, and technological realms, the notion that any one individual is controlling the unfolding web becomes rather untenable. Models that focus on the creativity of individuals are not wrong, but like Newtonian science, they may be inappropriate for trying to make sense of certain types of phenomena. What we need are new models operating at a different level. The complex and interconnected age we inhabit is making it increasingly clear that structure and organization can emerge both without lead and even without seed. What happens and how it happens depends on the nature of the network. Music, as an inherently social practice, thrives on network organization. On perhaps the most tangible level, a musician’s livelihood and creative opportunities frequently depend on the breadth and depth of one’s network of social and professional contacts. But network dynamics shape the sounds, practices, and communities of music in decidedly more complex and subtle ways. Musicians are influenced by their years of training or apprenticeship, countless hours spent listening to music both publicly and privately, and perhaps most comprehensively (yet frequently least acknowledged) by the historical and cultural conventions of a given time and locale. The topics and techniques of music education also depend on these network-style dynamics, which inform the process of choosing canons and of exploring and imparting the intricacies of music theory and music aesthetics. Finally, the music industry’s far-reaching networks of production and distribution have the power to structure, at some degree or another, the networks of inspiration and possibility for nearly everyone who is deeply committed to music. What implications does the study of networks have for musical scholarship and more broadly for our understandings of human creativity, history, and culture? Networks organize not only the social world of musical performance (with whom you play) but also the ideascapes of musical creativity (by whom you are influenced and what you choose to create) and the realities of musical community (how historical, cultural, and economic factors often dictate which musicians and musical ideas gain notice and prestige). Well aware of these concerns, George Lewis (2006: 432) writes in an essay reflecting on improvisation and the orchestra: Orchestra performers operate as part of a network comprised not only of musicians, composers and conductors, but also administrators, foundations, critics and the media, historians, educational institutions, and much more. Each

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of the nodes within this network, not just those directly making music, would need to become “improvisation-aware,” as part of a process of resocialization and economic restructuring that could help bring about the transformation of the orchestra that so many have envisioned.

Networks make communication and community possible, but they can also concentrate power and opportunities in the hands of a few. In this section, I explore some recent insights from the emerging fields of network study in order to investigate some ways in which musical studies might productively grapple with the complex of factors that establish, maintain, expand, and potentially destroy musical communities. Although networks have interested researchers for decades, until recently, each system tended to be treated in isolation, with little apparent reason or possible means to see if its organizational dynamics had anything in common with other networks. Yet from molecules to microorganisms, plants to people, and genes to Gaia, networks play a crucial role in shaping our physical and biological worlds. Electric power lines and transportation routes crisscross the country. Satellites relay signals to distant parts of the planet. The World Wide Web links ideas and information in ways that cannot be easily predicted or understood. And on the social level, networks organize the structure and activities of everything, from families and friends to corporate boards and terrorist cells. We are only now beginning to piece together characteristics of the study of complex dynamic networks on a broad scale. Albert-László Barabási (2002), one of the leading researchers in this still nascent field, optimistically predicts: “Network thinking is poised to invade all domains of human activity and most fields of human inquiry” (222). “Networks are by their very nature the fabric of most complex systems,” Barabási continues, “and nodes and links deeply infuse all strategies aimed at approaching our interlocked universe” (ibid.). The notion of networks may bring to mind rather bare-boned models of how things are connected. To some extent, this is true, since simplifying detail on one level of a network can highlight organizational similarities on another that would otherwise go unnoticed. For instance, Lynn Margulis’s research into symbiosis in microbiology, combined with James Lovelock’s research into the self-regulating aspects of the earth’s atmosphere, led to the memorable idea (first quipped by Gregory Hinkle, a student of Margulis) “Gaia is just symbiosis as seen from space” (Margulis 1988: 2): all organisms coexist symbiotically since they are all bathed in the same air and the same flowing water.

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Network models, however, are increasingly able to take account of some of the rich dynamics that occur when individual components are not only doing something—generating power, sending data, even making decisions—but also are affecting one another over time. Steven Shaviro (2003: 10) writes in his book Connected, Or What it Means to Live in the Network Society: As it seems to us now, a network is a self-generating, self-organizing, self-sustaining system. It works through multiple feedback loops. These loops allow the system to monitor and modulate its own performance continually and thereby maintain a state of homeostatic equilibrium. At the same time, these feedback loops induce effects of interference, amplifications, and resonance. And such effects permit the system to grow, both in size and in complexity. Beyond this, a network is always nested in a hierarchy. From the inside, it seems to be entirely self-contained, but from the outside, it turns out to be part of a still larger network.

The notion of “six degrees of separation,” based on an experiment by sociologist Stanley Milgram, popularized “small-world” networks to many. Despite this intriguing idea, that individuals are much more closely linked than might normally be imagined, we still know very little about how these network dynamics evolve. How can seven-plus billion people on the planet be linked so closely? And if this is the case, why are we usually unaware of this small-world property? Are there ways that we might more successfully navigate in a small world, to take advantage of these close connections? Or are others already doing so in ways that make for an inherent power imbalance? What are the implications of small-world properties for other networks besides our network of friends? And how does the structure of networks change over time or reflect both internal and external dynamics? As Duncan Watts summarizes: Networks are dynamic objects not just because things happen in networked systems, but because the networks themselves are evolving and changing in time, driven by the activities or decisions of those very components. In the connected age, therefore, what happens and how it happens depend on the network. And the network depends on what has happened previously. (Watts 2003: 28; italics in original)

Our own brains appear to exploit small-world properties. There are approximately the same number of neurons in a marble-sized portion of our gray matter as there are people on the planet. And clustering plays an important role in localized processing centers. But long-distance axons can link different

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parts of the cerebral cortex in ways that appear to facilitate the integrated qualities of consciousness. These long-distance “weak” ties allow for speed, flexibility, efficiency, and resilience in cognitive functioning. Recent research on our working (or short-term) memory also points to a small-world dynamic, in which neurons participate in self-sustaining bursts of electrical activity in order to store a memory temporarily. Although only limited work has been done on music networks to date, one study that explored the relationships between jazz musicians from 1912 to 1940 found small-world properties. By using the Red Hot Jazz Archive database on the internet, Pablo Gleiser and Leon Danon (2003) found that, on average, early jazz musicians were separated from one another by only 2.79 steps. Their model also captured the clustering of jazz musicians by geography, with New York and Chicago as the major hubs, and by race, due to the highly segregated nature of the music industry at the time. As in most human networks, a few individuals had very high degrees of connectivity. Guitarist Eddie Lang topped their list, with connections to 415 other musicians, while artists like Jack Teagarden, Joe Venuti, and Louis Armstrong were all in the top ten of most connected musicians. The Linked Jazz network (linkedjazz.org) allows visitors to discover interesting properties of clustering and connectivity among more contemporary jazz artists using powerful network visualization tools. It draws on digitized jazz history materials (including many oral histories housed in institutional jazz archives) and crowdsourcing techniques to organize and interpret the data. The purpose is to allow scholars and more casual visitors to explore relationships between musicians and reveal their community network. When data sets are made machine-readable in ways such as this, they can facilitate the kinds of analyses that machines are well suited for, including culling large-scale patterns, networks, and relationships. Many informative websites about open-form improvisation have emerged primarily due to the Herculean work of individuals, such as the European Free Improvisation website (efi.group.shef.ac.uk). More contemporary sites, however, invite artists across a range of improvisatory practices to contribute information about their work, methods, and principles in a collaborative fashion (e.g., instantcomposition.com, genetic-choir.org, paalabres.org, etc.). A significant challenge in studying networks is taking account of their temporal evolution. In real-world networks, new nodes may be added all the time, and established nodes—those already with many connections—tend to attract even more. On the internet, a few sites, such as Google, Facebook,

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Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and Amazon—all with very dynamical content— are incredibly prominent and influential, while an enormous number of static web pages languish in obscurity. Hubs tend to emerge in systems that take account of the compounding effects of historical development. For instance, visible web pages attract links, visible researchers attract citations and coauthors, and well-connected musicians attract both attention and imitation. Two qualities are essential for this: growth and preferential attachment. Growth offers a clear advantage to senior nodes, but preferential attachment can, in some instances, allow relative latecomers to quickly establish themselves as hubs. Barabási (2002) revised his early network models to take account of both external growth—the new links that are formed as new nodes are continually added to a system—and internal growth, which may involve the disappearance or rewiring of existing nodes and links. In the social realm, these internal dynamics correlate to the fact that senior members of a community may begin to take in fewer new connections or may lose connections as they age or retire. In the business world, while early arrivals certainly prosper, established companies can lose their edge and rival companies with innovative ideas or products can attract their customer base and outpace them (as long as the possibility for healthy competition remains in the system). In the real world, there can also be material limits to growth potential. Barabási found that for his models to be more realistic, he needed to include an intrinsic property for each node, a fitness factor, that could account for the ability of newcomers to succeed in a “rich get richer” environment. For instance, Google has emerged as the undisputed hub of the search engine market even though it was preceded in the marketplace by several years by Yahoo! and AltaVista among others. Due to Google’s superior technologies, its fitness factor outweighed the advantage of the earlier arrivals. Barabási calls this “beauty over age” or the “fit get rich” principle (ibid.: 103). Are there lessons in all of this network research for musical studies? One lesson of network thinking in the social domain is that the emergence of wellconnected hubs cannot be attributed solely to the properties of individuals. To attribute the inequities of Pareto’s principle strictly to the “talent” of individuals— whether we are discussing money or music—is to miss the point that emergent structure is also shaped in important ways by the dynamics of the system. Many of the first-generation African American free jazz innovators eventually found general critical acceptance and acclaim, but others received little to no attention

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from the industry, both during and after their lives. The reemergence of players late in their lives, such as Sonny Simmons, Charles Gayle, Henry Grimes, and others, attests to the fact that countless skilled and innovative musicians do not fare well in the network of the music industry. Focusing on network dynamics does not deny the merits of any individual’s work, but it does acknowledge that countless other factors play a role in how their work is accomplished and in how it is brought to the attention of others (or not). While the improvised music world may seem insulated from the rapid fads and fashions of the music industry on the whole, as any musical tradition expands in scope and popularity, better-connected “hubs” will emerge. In jazz, for example, the “hubs” of Armstrong, Ellington, Parker, Davis, and Coltrane are impossible to ignore. During their lifetimes, they were well respected and well connected (although not always early in their careers and not by everyone), but their influence has only grown since. With the spread of jazz education and the practice of major labels re-releasing canonical jazz recordings (since the economics of this model are hard to ignore), the visibility and “connectedness” of these hubs may only continue to grow. For an artistic tradition to remain dynamic and healthy, however, the dynamics that take note of history and provide hubs that help to establish a common musical “language” or style should not become too powerful. The hubs of jazz are not in jeopardy of disappearing. Pops, Duke, Bird, Miles, and Trane will continue to be remembered, esteemed, and emulated—as they should be. And as individual clubs, record labels, local scenes, and musicians come and go, there is little possibility that the mainstream styles of jazz will disappear. But if the disparity between the hubs and the remainder becomes too great, there can be a “tipping point” beyond which communication and innovation in a tradition can suffer dramatically. The recent popularity of tribute concerts to the music of past jazz masters, while in many cases quite laudable, also reflect an economic model that is hard to ignore (akin to the reissue model of the jazz record industry) and can create a climate in which newer ideas and younger artists are disadvantaged. Does network theory have anything to say about ways in which to navigate the web? In the original “six degrees” experiment, Milgram asked people in Nebraska to send a letter to a specific stockbroker in Boston by passing it on to a close friend that might be in a better position to know the target person. Jon Kleinberg (2000) wondered how these folks might have arrived at their decision. He reasoned that they used contextual cues to pick an optimal person to whom

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to forward the letter. Geography may be the most obvious clue—think of someone near Boston who could help out—but the other cues were undoubtedly based on things like profession, class, race, income, education, religion, or personal interests: in short, all of the social cues that people use every day to identify themselves and others. The fact that early network models ignored these “affiliation networks” to simplify the situation is a reminder how often scientists ignore those exact characteristics that add complexity and meaning to our daily lives. Taking into account affiliation parameters, Steinberg developed a model of an “ideal” small-world network in terms of “searchability” in which each person has the same number of friends in their neighborhood as in the rest of the region, the rest of the country, and the rest of the world. Although certainly an idealized situation, this may increasingly be the case for “cosmopolitan” individuals—and many musicians—who travel extensively and who rely on social networks to maintain and grow their contacts and fan base. Kleinberg found the perfect drawing to illustrate this principle: a 1976 New Yorker cartoon that shows Ninth Avenue taking up roughly as much space as an entire city block, which in turn occupies the same space as the rest of Manhattan, the rest of the United States, and the rest of the world. The cartoon also conveniently summarizes the attitude of many American jazz musicians, that New York City is the “center of the musical universe.” Watts, inspired by Kleinberg’s research, developed a more nuanced model that took account of a homophily parameter, named after the sociological tendency of like to associate with like. Watts’s new model could now begin to take account of the fact that people, in order to maximize the efficiency of their small-world searches, take account of multiple social variables at the same time. The notion of “distance” from the original model no longer applied simply to geographical remove, but also to how one perceives themselves as more or less distant to others based on a variety of social factors. People who share a profession, for instance, may regard themselves as close even if they live in different parts of the country or world. Watts reasoned that the multidimensional nature of individual social identity could enable messages to be transmitted via a network even in the face of what might appear to be daunting social barriers. In the Preface to the Revised Edition, I alluded to the fact that changes in social behaviors do not spread as easily as viruses do. Propagating new social norms (and among those would be musical participation and preference) involves a more sustained and substantive engagement than simply sending a

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letter, and there are many countervailing factors, including culture, identity, and one’s social networks, that affect whether and when new behaviors are adopted. The physicists and mathematicians whose work had propelled modern network theory into the spotlight finally had to take a dose of sociological reality. Recent research by Damon Centola (2021) suggests that we are far more likely to be convinced to change a familiar behavior or adopt a new one—and therefore also to overcome the inertial forces at play, including time, physical proximity, financial responsibility, among many others—if we are influenced by people who are especially relevant to us for that particular situation. The key is context. Centola’s research suggests that three principles are especially important: (1) credible sources; (2) creating solidarity; and (3) establishing legitimacy. According to the first two principles, people are more likely to adopt a new behavior and to remain excited about it if they see people similar to themselves adopting it. But if the behavior is based on legitimacy—that is, believing that it is widely adopted—then the opposite is true, and diversity will be an important reinforcing source of adoption. To adopt change, individuals often need to see that those around them are willing to adopt it, but in certain cases also that the change is being adopted by peers from diverse social circles, who could establish the movement’s broad legitimacy. Building a successful social contagion, therefore, involves not merely similarity, but relevance. A strong similarity among adopters can actually strengthen the countervailing factors that ultimately make broad change more difficult, since it can give pause to anyone but the most diehard supporter of a cause. A crucial lesson from this research is the importance of cultivating diversity to enact and sustain change. Centola also advocates for using the network periphery, for establishing what he calls “wide bridges” to provide some redundancy to the long-distance “weak” ties, and for focusing on incubator neighborhoods and teams to stimulate new knowledge discovery. The field of sociology is intimately concerned with the relationship between individual agency and social and network structures. And some remarkable insights have emerged from analyses that take into account the complex dynamics of individuals, the role or position that they may take in social groups, and the ways in which social groups are related to network structures such as economic, political, and social organizations. But sociologists have also been guilty of centralized conceptions of networks (and perhaps humanists even more so), searching for those key individuals or institutions that wield the most influence. Watts summarizes this challenge:

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But what if there just isn’t any center? Or what if there are many “centers” that are not necessarily coordinated or even on the same side? What if the important innovations originate not in the core of a network but in its peripheries, where the chief information brokers are too busy to watch? … In such cases, the network centrality of individuals, or any centrality for that matter, would tell us little or nothing about the outcome, because the center emerges only as a consequence of the event itself. (Watts 2003: 53; italics in original)

Reassembling the Social Bruno Latour’s Reassembling the Social (2005) offers a concise introduction to actor–network theory (ANT). ANT is a sociological approach that emerged out of science and technology studies. It is geared toward embodying this tension between the centered “actor” on the one hand and the decentered “network” on the other. John Law and John Hassard (1999: 5) describe ANT as “a way of performing both an elision and a difference between what Anglophones distinguish by calling ‘agency’ and ‘structure.’ ” ANT, according to Law and Hassard, “does not accept the notion that there is a macrosocial system on the one hand, and bits and pieces of derivative microsocial detail on the other.” They write: If we do this we close off most of the interesting questions about the origins of power and organization. Instead we should start with a clean slate. For instance, we might start with interaction and assume that interaction is all that there is. Then we might ask how some kinds of interactions more or less succeed in stabilising and reproducing themselves: how it is that they overcome resistance and seem to become “macrosocial”; how it is that they seem to generate the effects such as power, fame, size, scope or organisation with which we are all familiar. This, then, is the one of the core assumptions of actor-network theory: that Napoleons are no different in kind to smalltime hustlers, and IBMs to whelk-stalls. And if they are larger, then we should be studying how this comes about—how, in other words, size, power or organisation are generated. (ibid.)

In what is perhaps its most radical move, ANT attempts to take account of the heterogeneous networks that include not only social or human dimensions, but also the material dimensions that make human and social behaviors possible. ANT explores how these heterogeneous networks come to be patterned to generate effects such as organizations, inequality, and power.

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In short, ANT begins with the realization that any given interaction overflows with elements from some other time, some other place, and generated by some other agency. But rather than becoming paralyzed by the “actor/system quandary” (essentially the question of whether the actor is “in” a system, or the system is made up of actors), or even attempting to articulate a “happy medium” that considers at once the actor and the network in which it is embedded, ANT redraws the map of the social such that action is, according to Latour (2005: 166), “always dislocated, articulated, delegated, translated.” ANT resists the temptation to invoke social “context” or social “forces,” or to invoke the “social” or “society” at all as a type of material with specific properties, since to do so is to accept a collection of assemblages as being fully formed and no longer open to investigation and scrutiny. Latour frequently stresses that society, like nature, is “a premature assemblage” (171) that should be put ahead of us and not behind. His credo for ANT is to “follow the actors themselves!” (179). To turn to the contemporary musical domain, it seems clear that things like hardware and software interfaces and their design, the underlying code and coding itself, and even the internet and its propensity for sharing, collaboration, and institutional gerrymandering, all make a difference. In ANT, material objects do not “determine” the action. Hardware and software clearly do not determine musical style alone any more than instrument choice do, but neither do they constitute an inert or inconsequential backdrop to the human actor. Latour argues that objects can “authorize, allow, afford, encourage, permit, suggest, influence, block, render possible, forbid, and so on.” Marcel Cobussen’s The Field of Musical Improvisation (2017) explores aspects of ANT, assemblage theory, and more, and illustrate these observations with carefully chosen musical/sonic examples. Ben Piekut’s historiographic work on New York City’s “avant-garde” musical communities in the 1960s, in his book Experimentalism Otherwise (2011), adopts a compelling ANT approach. And my article “The Ghost in the Music, or the Perspective of an Improvising Ant” (Borgo 2016b) in The Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies offers another perspective on the promise of these methods. ANT analysts commit to investigating who and what participates in the action in order to account for the durability and extension of any interaction. Although network theory often focuses on large-scale behaviors, these large-scale behaviors are fundamentally provoked by the ability of one individual to influence another and the notion that people can change their strategies depending on what other

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people are doing. Barabási (2002: 225) acknowledges: “We must move beyond structure and topology and start focusing on the dynamics that take place along the links. Networks are only the skeleton of complexity, the highways for the various processes that make our world hum. To describe society we must dress the links of the social network with actual dynamical interactions between people.” The goals of network theory are gradually shifting from describing the topology of systems to understanding the mechanisms that shape network evolution. Network theory tells us that very different things can be connected through surprisingly short distances. Small effects can have large causes, while at other times large disturbances may be absorbed without much notice. Although the predictive power of network theory is still an open question, it may be enough that through these perspectives and approaches we can gain a better understanding of the structure of connected systems and the way that different sorts of influences propagate through them. Watts (2003: 302) reminds us that “Darwin’s theory of natural selection, for instance, doesn’t actually predict anything. Nevertheless, it gives us enormous power to make sense of the world we observe, and therefore (if we choose) to make intelligent decisions about our place in it.” The musical community has a vested interest in understanding network dynamics, although individuals may vary considerably in their specific expectations. Network thinking can shed light on the cultural power inequities that produce imbalances in social and economic interactions. It may also tell us much about the spread of ideas in musical communities and marketplaces under diverse historical and cultural conditions. Creative musicians may hope to find in network dynamics glimpses of future directions for innovation or influence, strategies for how to avoid or disrupt network hubs and established practices in hopes of alternative community reorganization, or the means by which they might increase their own professional contacts and opportunities. And our pedagogical practices must take account of the complex dynamics of our networked age.

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Western educational systems have traditionally relied on a strong distinction between knowing and doing, tending to value the former over the latter. Knowing, in this dichotomous formulation, comprises static information structures within one’s head, and doing refers to the straightforward process of executing a given operation based on these pre-existing knowledge structures. A related dichotomy is also apparent in folk wisdom, which makes a distinction between “know what” and “know how,” in this case often valuing the latter over the former. But a small revolution is underway in fields related to psychology, education, and cognition (including things like robotics and artificial intelligence), involving a shift in perspective from knowledge as stored artifact to knowledge as constructed capability-in-action (see Clark 1997). From a systems perspective, what people perceive, how they conceive of their activity, and what they physically do, all develop together. In other words, knowing is a process co-constituted by the knower, the environment in which knowing occurs, and the activity in which the learner is participating. In contemporary lingo, it is both situated and distributed—situated in the general sense that all knowledge is in part a product of the activity, context, and culture in which it is developed, and distributed because knowledge as action rather than artifact exists not simply in the mind of the individual, but rather as something shared between individuals in a physical and social setting. Learning, from this perspective, is not so much a matter of what one knows, but who one becomes. And education becomes less about the transmission of abstract knowledge and more about helping students to participate in a community of practice. In other words, learning should not be thought of as receiving a body of factual knowledge, but rather as a process that involves becoming a different person with respect to possibilities for interacting with other people and the environment. Music provides an especially fertile site for acknowledging and studying the situated and distributed aspects of learning,

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and improvisation, broadly conceived, becomes a critical component of the learning and teaching process. Improvisation in the contemporary music classroom has been, for the most part, neglected. Tom Nunn (1998: 179) laments that “it may be acknowledged— in a way akin to chicken soup as a cure for a cold (it can’t hurt)—but it is not taken seriously.” “It may be presented in some extramusical way,” he continues, “such as notation, analysis, etc., but as an expression of composition, it goes unrecognized.” Even more pessimistically, Jonty Stockdale (2004: 12) remarks: “The ability to improvise freely is a common skill applied whether in conversation, role-play, movement, dance, or the playing of games, and yet it is an ability that is seemingly suppressed through the conventions of music training.” In this chapter, I investigate and scrutinize methods for imparting the skills, culture, and ethics of improvisation. In addition to my own experiences performing with and coaching improvising ensembles, I draw on ethnographic interviews with Anthony Davis, Mark Dresser, Lisle Ellis, and Bertram Turetzky.

The Map Is Not the Territory Abandon Knowledge About Knowledge All Ye Who Enter Here. —Bruno Latour (1987: 7) There are no wrong intervals if played in succession There are no wrong chords, only wrong progressions There are no wrong notes, only wrong connections There are no wrong tones, only wrong inflections —Eddie Harris (There was a Time—Echo of Harlem) The score was never meant to imprison the performer’s imagination. —Larry Soloman (quoted in Nunn 1998: 180) It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing. —Duke Ellington

Referencing the well-known phrase by semiotician Alfred Korzybski, William Clancey (1995: 49) writes in his tutorial on situated learning: “Knowledge is not a thing or set of descriptions or collection of facts and rules. We model knowledge by such descriptions. But the map is not the territory.” Our educational system in the West, however, has notoriously under-appreciated the situated and distributed aspects of learning, often tacitly accepting that knowledge, or at least

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knowledge worth having, is primarily conceptual and hence can be abstracted from the situations in which it is learned and used. By downplaying the situated and distributed aspects of the learning experience, educators and educational institutions have struggled to provide robust and flexible knowledge to students. Improvisation courses often do an admirable job of balancing the presentation of theoretical knowledge with practical applications, but rarely do they challenge this inherent distinction. The process of learning is most often conceived as distinct from the process of doing. “Though there are many innovative teachers, schools, and programs that act otherwise,” write Brown, Collins, and Duguid (1989: 34), “prevalent school practices assume, more often than not, that knowledge is individual and self-structured, that schools are neutral with respect to what is learned, that concepts are abstract, relatively fixed, and unaffected by the activity through which they are acquired and used, and that ‘just plain folks’ behavior should be discouraged.” Pedagogical approaches that prescribe “materials,” “parameters,” or “structures” for improvisation (usually in some form of Western notation) are not wrong, but they may devalue the visceral, embodied, and experiential qualities of improvisation, and underemphasize the importance of developing musical ears, memory, instincts, sensitivity, and creativity. Bertram Turetzky states: “The academics talk about scales and this and that strategy—and I’ve read all the books—but that is not the way the masters taught.”1 Turetzky favors a more embodied and experiential approach. When working with students, his goal is “to hook up the fingers to the ears.” For one exercise, Turetzky asks students to sing a passage from a fixed starting point—at first simply a few notes—and then to reproduce the passage on their instrument. Turetzky finds that even many advanced players can’t perform this exercise well at first. “If you can’t do it,” he remarks, “you are depending on scales.” “It is not visceral, it is not integral to your being, it doesn’t express anything except the tricks that you have learned,” he explains. Turetzky is referring to a disjuncture between inscribed and incorporated forms of knowledge. Many music schools, and jazz programs in particular, place more emphasis or a higher value on the normalized, abstract, and detached mode of inscription, rather than the more collective, visceral, and engaged qualities of incorporation. If one learns to play music through the predominant use of This and all subsequent quotes from Turetzky, Dresser, Davis, and Ellis stem from interviews with the author in January and February of 2005. 1

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inscribed forms of knowledge, making the necessary cognitive connections (between ear and fingers) to become a fluent improviser may feel unattainable. Mark Dresser, a former student of Turetzky, comments: “You find in jazz schools there are some very skilled people, but the music ends up being variations on the same theme, because the notation ends up leading the way that everything is formed.” Dresser is referring to the fact that Western notation, when used to convey aspects of jazz and improvised music, tends to place undue emphasis on notes, chords, and harmonic progressions since these are most easily represented. The rhythmic, timbral, expressive, and interactive dimensions of the music do not translate as easily to paper, yet notation has remained central to many programs that teach improvised music not only for its perceived convenience—it translates well to blackboards and textbooks and can facilitate complex, hierarchical performances easily—but also because it allows instructors to have an “objective” means with which to evaluate the progress and understanding of students (see Ake 2002). In a panel discussion on free jazz held at the 2000 International Association of Jazz Educators (IAJE) Convention (Chase, Collier, and Sarath 2000), Ed Sarath, a flugelhorn player and head of Jazz and Contemporary Improvisation Studies at the University of Michigan, and Graham Collier, the former artistic director of the Jazz Course at the Royal Academy of Music in London, joined Allan Chase, a saxophonist and Chair of the Jazz Studies and Improvisation Department at the New England Conservatory of Music, for a frank discussion of their experiences exploring freer forms of improvisation with students. Chase argued that educators tend to avoid engaging with freer forms of improvisation in a hands-on way because (a) they are unfamiliar with most of it (many had an initial negative experience with the avant-garde and have stayed away ever since) and (b) they are concerned with how to assess progress, how to measure results. The first concern is of course a self-fulfilling prophecy if freer forms of jazz and improvisation are not allowed a place in the academic classroom. Regarding the second concern, Chase pointed out that it is equally difficult to assess the progress of composition students, or to grade an abstract painting, or even to measure the quality of a bebop solo beyond the point where someone masters playing changes in a basic sense. In all of these situations, he asserts, “There are things you can teach, ways you can critique a piece of work. There are suggestions you can make and there is a dialog you can have with the students.” Even when teachers do introduce freer improvisation with their students, Chase finds that their own reservations affect how they frame the music and

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the creative moment. He advises them not to be apologetic, not to say “Hang in there with me, because it’s going to be weird.” Rather, Chase explains: It’s very important to centre yourself and say, ‘We’re going to create a beautiful work of art … Let’s listen to each other and be sensitive and play like an ensemble and here’s a new idea of how to do that.’ Give a structure, a way to guide it, a way to end it so it doesn’t go on for the rest of the day. Then talk about it a little bit and do it again. Just like rehearsing any other music.

The English drummer John Stevens discusses in Derek Bailey’s book how he would try to create a situation with students in which they did not rely on him to set the improvisation up. Everyone had to respect the playing space and upon arrival be prepared to immediately start playing with purpose and interacting with whomever was already present. Describing Stevens’s instructional philosophy, Bailey (1992: 121) writes: “The aim of teaching is usually to show people how to do something. What Stevens aims at, it seems to me, is to instill in the people he works with enough confidence to try and attempt what they want to do before they know how to do it.” This implied shift in pedagogic approach does involve some fairly radical ideas for the educational establishment, which has too often had an antagonistic relationship to improvisation. Rather than insisting on a prescribed plan and a controlled environment for learning, instructors must focus on creative ways to facilitate learning in a dynamic context that is shaped and negotiated by all of the participants. Instead of creating a situation in which there is a predetermined outcome and the sum of the parts is already known, instructors must be comfortable presenting unpredictable situations and exploring openended possibilities. Rather than simply imparting problem-solving skills in the abstract, teachers must motivate and encourage students to develop problemfinding approaches by demonstrating when appropriate and by allowing time for the group to cultivate a context for shared experiment, exploration, and empathy. The volume Improvisation and Music Education edited by Ajay Heble and Mark Laver (2016) offers a wealth of perspectives on teaching music improvisation in a wide variety of pedagogical and community settings. The editors suggest that teaching improvisation has practical, philosophical, and political connotations. It contributes to the ongoing decolonial move to decenter the musical text and the hegemony of “great composers,” it invites educators to deterritorialize the classroom (in the spirit of critical pedagogues

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such as Paulo Freire, Henry Giroux, and bell hooks), and it can encourage an ethic of empathy toward alternative voices and empower students to develop greater critical acuity. For this emergent paradigm to take hold, instructors must cede their presumed role as “experts” and “gate keepers” to a more engaged and interactive role as mentors and facilitators; a move from the “sage on the stage” to the “guide on the side.”

Situated Musicianship Musicianship is most often conceived as a nexus of personal attributes that includes knowledge, skill, and artistry, among others. Musicianship is that ineffable “something” that makes a musician great, or not, or so the thinking goes. Opinion may vary about the extent to which musicianship is innate or learned, but the tendency to locate musicianship within the individual is rarely questioned (and a surprising number of people still assume that it is simply something someone is born with). One of the central tenets of the 4E view of cognition, however, is that we cannot arbitrarily separate our intentions, our perceptions, and our acting from each other, or from the material–social world in which they take part. In other words, mind—and by extension what we might call musicianship—is an activity emergent from, structured by, and never wholly separable from the material facts of bodily and lived experience. Musicianship in this view is “embodied,” in the sense that mind is not only rendered possible by our bodily sensations and actions but is coextensive with them. It is “situated,” in the sense that all knowledge is in part a product of the activity, context, and community in which it is developed. And it is “distributed,” because knowledge as (en)action rather than artifact exists not simply in the skull or skin of the individual, but rather as something shared between individuals and their material–social environment. A related revolution has been happening in education circles in the past few decades. Situated learning, a theory first proposed by Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger (1991), is not simply a recommendation that teaching be “relevant.” It also does not refer to the obvious claim that learning always happens “in a location,” or the common oversimplification that people learn best “trying something out.” Rather, it implies that learning occurs in all human activity all the time, and that learning is inherently social.

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Instead of envisioning education as the transmission of abstract information out of context (so-called propositional knowledge), situated learning stresses that learners and teachers are already involved in a community of practice, which enacts certain beliefs and expects certain behaviors to be acquired. The theory of situated learning emphasizes issues of participation, membership, and community, and the ways in which knowledge and identity are shaped by these and other factors. Foundations for this new perspective can be found in the fields of sociology of knowledge (Marx, Durkheim, Manheim), functionalism (the antiassociationalism of Dewey and Bartlett), activity theory (Vygotsky, Leontiev, Luria, Cole, Wertsch), cybernetics and systems theory (Bateson, von Foerster), ethnomethodology (Garfinkel), and ecological psychology (Gibson, Jenkins, Bransford, Neisser, Barker). Although little known in the West at the time, Vygotsky’s work, in particular, has posthumously provided a common theme that runs through much of the new educational paradigm. In a passage that resonates strongly with the title of my book Vygotsky (1997: 324) writes: Just as you cannot learn how to swim by standing at the seashore … to learn how to swim you have to, out of necessity, plunge right into the water even though you still don’t know how to swim, so the only way to learn something, say, how to acquire knowledge, is by doing so, in other words, by acquiring knowledge.

Vygotsky proposed that activities of the mind, including creativity, cannot be separated from overt behavior, from the external materials being used, or from the social context in which the activities occur. For example, many young children are unable to name what they are drawing until the activity is completed. Their minds produce stimuli while they interact with the physical materials (e.g., crayon and paper), and they react to the resulting visual stimuli and to the responses of others, creating a cycle of action and reaction. Over time, these experiences can form the basis for more abstract planning and cognitive reasoning about art, but the art in the mind cannot exist without mediating tools and a foundation of lived, social experience. I would like to argue here that the easy distinctions we traditionally draw between musicians, musical objects, and the environment—and the instrumental relationships we tend to assume operate from the first acting via the second on the third—may prove to be not so easy or tenable after all. Musicianship, far from being a property associated solely with an individual musician, is “co-constituted” by the musician, the environment, and the activity in which the musician is involved.

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Theories of situated learning invite a substantial reconceptualization of conventional views on music, music performance, and music education. To adopt this orientation requires replacing conventional notions of causal influences in music, whether from genes, environment, or culture, with a more systemic view in which individuals, environments and sociocultural understandings are seen as a set of functional relationships distributed across person and context, all of which are continually and actively transformed. A considerable amount of musical learning, from our earliest years onward, occurs through unsupervised investigation. For instance, a child discovers the loudness and pitch contours of a xylophone through more-or-less unregulated experiments. During this seemingly undirected activity, a profound process of self-tuning is occurring; the child is picking up environmental information through a cycle of action and perception. This exploratory orientation toward one’s environment, and the way in which learning occurs through a feedback cycle of action and perception, differs little from how mature musicians hone their skills. Eric Clarke, in his important book Ways of Listening (2011), makes a useful distinction between “passive” and “directed” perceptual learning. The above is an example of passive perceptual learning, whereas directed perceptual learning describes a situation in which others model a behavior, either through demonstration or by offering verbal instruction or emotional support in ways that encourage the learner to try out certain actions or to pay attention to specific aspects of the resulting sounds. In this way, a learner’s actions and understandings are indelibly shaped not only by the material and social specifics of a given learning environment, but also by their perceived “place” in a social process. All musical encounters— including public and private ones—are inherently social since other listeners are either present or imagined. When practicing alone, for instance, even if other listeners are not within earshot of the sounds leaking through walls and rooms, one is still intimately aware of making music for imagined others, which ultimately affects what and how one plays. As we learn to play a musical instrument, we develop a relationship between our physical actions and our perception of resulting sounds over time, but those same perceptions and actions are also shaped within a social matrix in which sounds may be deemed desirable or not, and actions may be encouraged or not, depending on specific sociocultural and individual factors. From this perspective, what people perceive, how they conceive of their activity, and what they physically do all develop together and in tandem with the

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material–social environment. Learning is not simply transmitting or receiving stored artifacts; rather, it must be viewed as a process of developing constructed “capabilities-in-action” and of becoming a different person with respect to possibilities for interacting with other people and the environment. Clearly, musical education is inseparable from an ethical commitment. *** In describing their working methods to me, both Bert Turetzky and Mark Dresser stress the importance of disciplined and directed practice: focusing on specific techniques or ideas and exploring their implications fully, so that they begin to form a personal yet flexible vocabulary of musical creativity. Turetzky shares: I have file cards, three-by-five, and I write things down on the file cards. And when I practice, sometimes I pull them out and I say, “OK, let’s work this for two minutes.” [sings an intervallic passage combining the intervals of a third, fourth, and fifth] How about contrary motion? How about inversion? My idea was to develop discipline and just do certain things. Now would I do this in an improvisation? Maybe not. But I was learning how to do two minutes with just scratching the strings, and doing this, and doing that. And all of a sudden, I was enriching my vocabulary, enlarging my vocabulary, and learning how to not do everything all at once, the “young lover’s syndrome.”

Mark Dresser describes his working process as a cycle of moving back and forth from improvising, either alone or in a group setting, while also recording—in order to capture what he intuitively does—to then stepping back and analyzing and codifying those moments that strike him as interesting or filled with potential. This allows him a process of “rigorously looking at one’s instrumental sounds, one’s vocabulary, in a way that you could make a lexicon out of it, try to measure it, much in the way you would look at parameters of electronic music” (see also Dresser 2000). Although these approaches to developing vocabulary or resources may at first appear to emphasize musical properties in the abstract, Dresser stresses a feedback cycle in which using one’s analytical abilities to analyze one’s intuition or one’s hearing is most important. He often asks his students to undergo a similar reflexive process: to create a personal lexicon of extended techniques, sounds, and approaches while developing them in a collaborative space.

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At the beginning of his course called “Sound and Time,” Dresser asks the students to make a short environmental transcription, say thirty seconds, of a recording of ambient sounds captured “in the field.” He instructs them to create a timeline and to locate and describe the sounds they are hearing. The point of the exercise, he explains, is almost “Cage-like”: to investigate “how you listen and how you organize how you hear.” Then the students are asked to improvise collaboratively in the style of their environmental recordings and then to use their transcriptions to make an arrangement for the specific musicians in the class. The arrangements, Dresser insists, should be designed as compositions that use structured improvisation and draw on the particular strengths and proclivities of the other class members. These pedagogues appear to agree that the skills necessary to improvise collaboratively cannot be developed solely in isolation. During our conversation, Dresser reflected on the importance of performing in front of an audience: “I believe in the magic of performance to bring out people’s best thing, best qualities. I’ve seen that happen time and time again. All of a sudden at the performance people transcend the rehearsal process because there is that dynamic with an audience.” In his scholarship on institutionalized jazz pedagogy, David Ake (2002) suggests that the situated knowledge required for collective improvisation is not well served by conservatory values and soloist-centered approaches. “With lessons, assignments, and practice spaces geared towards the development of individual skills,” David Ake suggests, “little if any time or space remains for the development of the very different musical tools necessary to improvise successful collective jazz” (268). *** Again Vygotsky’s work was well ahead of its time in this regard (see Daniels 2001). In contrast to the work of Piaget, whose theories of childhood development tacitly reflected the ideology of individualism, Vygotsky (1978) emphasized a sociocultural approach in which the intellectual development of children is seen as a function of communities. His writings take for granted that the personal and the social are not self-contained but have a shared existence. Ultimately Vygotsky proposed that all of the higher mental processes, including problem-solving and consciousness are of social origin; they originate as relationships between individuals and are constructed through a subject’s continuing interactions with a social and physical world.

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In Vygotsky’s view, children develop language alongside the need to communicate with others. Our inner speech and self-awareness that define thought and consciousness emerge after communication; they are the end product of socialization. The interpersonal comes before the intrapersonal, and the latter cannot be fully illuminated without acknowledging the former. Considerable contemporary research suggests that Vygotsky was right—that the presence of interpersonal communication, collective goals, and social activities has measurable beneficial effects on children learning (see Garzotto 2007). From a sociocultural perspective, separating the learner, the material to be learned, and the context in which learning occurs is misguided. As Barab and Plucker (2002: 170) explain: “A learner’s ultimate understanding of any object, issue, concept, process, or practice, as well as her ability to act competently with respect to using these, can be attributed to, and is distributed across, the physical, temporal, and spatial occurrences through which her competencies have emerged.” It is worth pointing out that early artificial intelligence research was constructed according to a model radically at variance with these ideas, but more recent research, especially in robotics, embraces the importance of situated learning and cognition. These fields have also sparked a reconceptualization of conventional notions of intelligence and talent. Rather than static qualities intrinsic to individuals, intelligence and talent are best conceived, in this view, as dynamic and collective properties; they are “accomplished” or “engaged” through the use of tools and other artifacts, the development of internal and external modes of representation, and through collaboration with other individuals. This move has a special resonance for music education, replacing the notion of “talent” as a specialized endowment of a chosen few with “talented transactions” that are within the reach of all learners. Instead of aiming to develop smart individuals, Barab and Plucker (2002) insists that educators develop “smart contexts,” in which individuals, environments, and sociocultural relationships can all be transformed. *** Gibson’s (1979) notion of “affordances” may also be helpful in this discussion. In the physical domain, affordances are often described as the possibilities for action that an environment offers to individuals. But affordances are best thought of as capacities for interactive behavior. Consider the perceptual category of an object’s heft. Unlike an object’s mass, which is a property of the object, and its

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weight, which is a relation between the object and gravity, heft is the perceived resistance of an object in motion. For example, when we shake a carton of milk to determine how full it is, we are measuring its heft. Moving the carton in a certain manner affords us perceptual knowledge of how full the carton is. Heft is measured relative to an organism’s sensorimotor coordination; it is characteristic of an affordance relation. Although it may be possible to talk about music outside of an affordance relation, it is analogous to talking about the mass and weight of an object. They can be measured and discussed in the abstract, but they are immediately supplanted by the perceptual frame of heft when a human being becomes involved in attempting to manipulate or make sense of something. Learning to play a musical instrument involves a clear affordance relation. We develop a relationship between our actions with the instrument and our perception of resulting sounds over time through ongoing sensorimotor coordination and feedback. One of the challenges of working with digital instruments is that the affordance relation is often far less stable than with acoustic ones. In either case, however, our perceptions and actions are also indelibly shaped by a matrix of conceptual affordances in which sounds may be deemed desirable or not, and actions may be encouraged or not. Playing in a musical group necessarily creates an affordance situation, since the sounds that one produces change the sonic environment in which all others are engaged. Theories of situated learning insist that we understand all music settings as group music settings, since other listeners are, if not within earshot, then imagined, since our engagements with music are, from our earliest years on up, indelibly social. This perspective can help to reconcile the notion that musical improvisers are best left to develop “on their own,” with the notion that they are blank slates onto which must be poured the “knowledge” of theory and tradition. All musical development is social, yet individuals develop and learn based on their particular engagements and accumulated experiences. One of Vygotsky’s more influential concepts is the “zone of proximal development,” which describes the difference between what a child can learn unaided and what they can learn when given appropriate support. The educational activities that comprise a zone of proximal development are often referred to as “scaffolding,” although the term originated not from Vygotsky but from his later commentators. In their often-cited work on situated learning, Lave and Wegner (1991) developed the related notion of “legitimate peripheral participation” to describe the process through which novices or newcomers can move from the

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periphery of a community of practice to its center by becoming more active and engaged in the culture. These educators highlight the importance that situated apprenticeships within communities of practice have for all forms of learning, including musical learning. *** Ethnomusicology has been a beacon for this type of approach with its emphasis on ethnographic engagement and apprenticeship in order to reveal the indivisible character of learning and practice. In these types of apprenticeship situations, often very little teaching may appear to be happening and yet a considerable amount of learning is taking place. The jazz community has also traditionally stressed the importance of apprenticeship and of community-based performances and cooperatives, but these have played a less central role as the music entered the academy. Describing his educational philosophy, pianist and composer Anthony Davis stressed that “you have to play with someone who is more experienced.” His formative years were spent under the guidance of many jazz and improvising masters, including Waddada Leo Smith, Anthony Braxton, Jimmy Heath, Charles McPherson, Leroy Jenkins, David Murray, and Ed Blackwell. Carrying on this practice of mentoring younger musicians, Davis seems to be intuitively aware of their Zone of Proximal Distance: “Playing with them is very important. I try to drop bombs on them. See what they do with it; stuff that engages them and challenges them in an immediate way when you play. That’s the best way to do it.” Davis shared three general methods he uses to engage with and inspire developing improvisers. First, he pushes them to acknowledge and deal with the tradition. Without this, Davis believes, one cannot become a truly profound improviser. For example, he might ask students to play a blues in order to push them to find a relationship with the history of the music, even though at times this makes some of his students rather uncomfortable. As a second tactic, Davis uses a dialectical approach. While playing with the students, he likes to “find something that is in opposition to what they think is happening to see how they react to it, whether that moves them into different directions or other kinds of thoughts.” He finds that in a group setting, people naturally assume different roles, so he consciously tries to make the students reverse or change these roles: “Have someone play up front, and someone who is more aggressive, have them play a supporting role.” For Davis, “teaching

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improvisation is an improvisation. I try to respond to the group dynamic, the direction, what makes them comfortable, what makes them uncomfortable.” Finally, Davis looks to build on what students already do well to assist them in finding ways to do it better, although he acknowledges that this can be a very subjective process. He pushes them to “see the bigger picture,” to become aware of the formal aspects of the music as it unfolds. And he tries to make them aware of their own mannerisms, to “make them think beyond the limited vocabulary they may have developed.” In our interview, Bert Turetzky described an internal dialog that takes place between the hand and the mind when he plays that helps to offset the subtle dangers that habits can present for the creative improviser: “All of a sudden you see that there are certain things that you go to. I see I’m going somewhere, and I slap my hand—but it’s invisible—and I say, ‘Don’t go there. Where else can you go? Surprise yourself.’ ” Recalling a particular instance of this, he continued, “I was listening to a record with [Wolfgang] Fuchs. I hit open strings. I do that too often. So I’m listening and shit, it’s the sixth time in this thing. Stop it! And the next one, it’s not there … So I’m editing as I go.” The internal dialog that Turetzky describes does not need to be viewed through the lens of Cartesian dualism. The “mind” that keeps the “hand” in check does not exist on some isolated plane, but has been situated through cycles of action and intention (see Sudnow 1978). Our current pedagogical vocabulary and conceptualization is rooted in the (Western) notion that knowledge is about external constructs that can be conveniently indexed, retrieved, and applied by individuals. As long as knowledge is conceived of in this disembodied and decontextualized way, musicians and music teachers will be at the mercy of the presiding educational philosophy that values abstract intellectual concerns as the real determinant of educational worth. Wayne Bowman (2004: 33) writes: In our determination to substantiate the educational value of music and the arts … we have accepted uncritically notions of “knowing” and “understanding” crafted in different domains … As a result, we find ourselves advocating music study for reasons that fit with prevailing ideological assumptions about the nature of knowledge and the aims of schooling, but on which we are ill-equipped to deliver, and that neglect what may be most distinctive about music: its roots in experience and agency, the bodily and the social. Our most revered justifications of music education are built upon deeply flawed notions about mind, cognition, and intelligence.

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*** Within communities of improvising musicians, there exist very different approaches to education. Lisle Ellis, a bassist who studied at the Creative Music Studios in Woodstock with Karl Berger and Cecil Taylor, contrasted their approaches for me. Berger, according to Ellis, worked to “demystify the music”; he focused on the basic building blocks—rhythm and pitch perception—that can help musicians to engage with a whole world of music.2 Taylor, on the other hand, “musicifies the mystery,” according to Ellis. “Music, according to Cecil, is not something that we should be trying to demystify or divide and conquer,” writes Robert Sweet (1996: 108–9): “Rather than breaking down music, separating its parts, we should be working on music as a process of unification.” Through playing with Cecil Taylor, Ellis discovered a way of exploring music through the music itself, without verbal discussion, or without stopping to “rehearse” in any conventional manner. Taylor is well known for his insistence on teaching his music to fellow musicians by ear, for always bringing something new for his musicians to learn, and for his penchant to disregard any of what was prepared ahead of time once the moment of performance arrives. As Ellis puts it, paraphrasing Taylor: “You want to be an improviser? Let’s improvise!” Referencing Duke Ellington, Ellis further explained: “The music never stops, you just get onboard … This is an old idea. Everyone says this is new music, but this is some kind of ancient thing going on.” Following this line of thought, Ellis made reference to the teacher–student relationship in many traditional African cultures and to the activities surrounding African festivals, remarking that art need not be viewed as separate from the rest of life. Highlighting the important shift from teachers as “experts” or “sages” to teachers as “facilitators” or “guides,” Ellis explained: A good teacher is always teaching a lesson that the teacher needs to learn. I work with students on things that I am interested in, and I am trying to discover myself how to do. It keeps me from going into a rote thing. And also, they can see me make mistakes. I think that is a really good thing to impart to young people: let them see you fail and let them see you deal with it. And no matter how many times you fail, you still get up and go back at it.

Berger’s system called “gamala taki” helps musicians to break down complicated rhythms into patterns of threes (“ga-ma-la) and two’s (“ta-ki”). 2

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Crucially, Vygotsky’s notion of a zone of proximal development refers not only to the student’s activities, but also to the teacher’s. It is mutually constructed to maintain a correspondence between other- and self-regulated behavior. Learning occurs in the zone of proximal development by recoordinating perception, talk, and other actions. The affordances are mutual (bi-directional) and the result is co-determined by each person’s conceptions and actions. During the IAJE panel discussion referenced early, Ed Sarath describes some of the particular challenges of exploring open-form improvisation in the academic setting in general, and in the large ensemble setting of his Creative Arts Orchestra in particular. At first, Sarath tried to balance composed parts and sections featuring more traditional soloing with open-form “interludes” in order to frame the “riskier” parts of performance. But the students wanted to do more collective improvising. After some soul searching, Sarath decided to program entire concerts of completely improvised performance as well: Where I used to sit in the audience and be just terrified as to what was going to happen and making a list of who I hoped hadn’t come to the concert, in recent years, I’ve become a little bit more comfortable with this completely improvised format. And at the December concert, it was just amazing what happened. It’s almost like some external force overtakes the ensemble and guides the orchestration, creative decisions, formal sections, etc. But there’s no middle ground to this kind of thing … We can extend the boundaries of bad beyond belief! In the other direction I have to say that when it works, it becomes one of the most profound things I have been involved in. Something takes over the group. We’ve all experienced this in smaller group situations but there are twenty-five people up there. No conductor. No format at all and you have to tune in to whatever that force is that is going to orchestrate the thing, deal with formal proportions, deal with transitions. It’s an amazing thing and it’s terrifying. It still is.

Seasoned musicians, in all styles and traditions, are intimately aware of the ways in which the cognitive demands of performance are distributed across the group. Individuals cultivate specific instrumental skills and knowledge about specific musical roles, but in order to create an effective ensemble they must constantly listen to each other and synchronize their gestures, sounds, and sentiments in order to create a compelling performance. Qualities like ensemble timing, phrasing, blend, intonation, and groove are continually negotiated in a distributed fashion, but even the formal structures of the music can be spread across the minds of individual musicians in performance. In notated genres,

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this is literally the case as each musician has only a portion of the entire music represented in front of them. But in all musics that involve oral and aural modes of transmission—in other words, in all music—players communicate, negotiate, and recoordinate during performance in very subtle ways. For instance, in a standard jazz performance, if one or more musicians are executing a particularly risky improvised passage, another individual in the ensemble might choose to remain more grounded to the beat or to articulate clearly a key moment in their phrase in order to improve the chances that everyone is able to stay connected. Individuals within the ensemble might also assist one another by articulating an important formal point in a composition (e.g., the bridge in an AABA song form) or a specific harmonic or rhythmic aspect of a song (e.g., a chord voicing, turnaround figure, or tag). At times, groups may even need to recover from moments in which the timing or phrasing of a performance got temporarily derailed, all without making it apparent to an audience (see Monson 1996). Distributed cognition is not only important to avoiding moments of musical derailment, but it also allows ensemble members to negotiate and impart a specific character to a given performance on different nights. In open-form improvisation, distributed aspects of cognition essentially shape the entire performance. Jared Burrows (2004: 2) writes: A group improvisation is a complex social phenomenon. During a performance, there is a subtle, web-like interplay of individual psychological needs and intentions, technical tasks and difficulties associated with playing musical instruments, awareness of the audience (if the performance is public) and, most centrally, conscious and unconscious reactions to sound stimuli. Cognitive distributions in this context occur between musician and instrument, between or among two or more musicians, and between dialectical relationships among mediational artifacts, stimulus, response, and action… As each new element is added, it becomes subsumed in the overall tapestry of aural stimuli, and these stimuli form the basis for further thought and action. Because all members of the group both react and contribute to the same set of stimuli, their cognition is linked in a profound fashion. Once certain sound-actions have been brought into play, the players construct a kind of group meaning from those actions.

*** An ongoing pedagogical challenge in institutions is how to balance more mainstream and more open forms of improvisation. In the IAJE panel referenced

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earlier (Chase et al. 2000), Graham Collier describes three kinds of improvisation: (1) soloing, or the conventional approach to jazz improvisation where one musician provides a dominant voice; (2) textural improvisation, which occurs in freer improvisation but also in conventional jazz as the musicians explore and develop a variety of ways to sculpt or frame a solo or the entire piece; and (3) structural improvisation, where the content and form of the piece itself is improvised by the ensemble. Conventional jazz pedagogy tends to focus on the first type, give limited attention to the second, and almost completely ignores the third. Jonty Stockdale (2004) also finds that it is difficult to encourage students to explore simultaneous approaches to improvisation. Using language common to jazz musicians, he finds that music programs rarely give equal treatment to playing “time over changes,” “time no changes,” and “no time no changes” (or, in other words, bebop, freebop, and free). According to Stockdale (2004: 112), “A jazz musician should travel back and forth along the line between playing that which is predigested, through to re-territorisation, and on to new territory.” With a hint of optimism, he writes: “By explaining ways of thinking and working within an improvised framework and using comparative studies from nonmusical pursuits, it is possible to develop an understanding of why improvising freely can be beneficial to the overall development of any music student, and a jazz student in particular” (ibid.). To embrace this new perspective does not involve throwing out all of the methods and techniques that educators have found useful in the past. The theories of situated and distributed cognition acknowledge the value of descriptive models of knowledge but insist that these models alone are incapable of capturing the full flexibility of how perception, action, and memory are related. Human conceptualization has properties relating to physical and social coordination that cannot be captured by decontextualized models. As William Clancey (1997: 7) explains, “Knowledge is a capacity to behave adaptively within an environment; it cannot be reduced to (replaced by) representations of behavior or the environment.” These new theories represent a theoretical commitment to avoid the philosophical stance of dualism: to conceptualize knowing and doing, knower and known, mind and body, intelligence and skill, learned and acquired, content and context, and subjective and objective, as inseparable. And they represent a pedagogical commitment to develop more useful learning environments.

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A perspective on musical creativity that views it as inextricably embodied, situated, and distributed, may help to overcome the dualistic mode of musical instruction and inquiry that separates musical “materials”—the tools and theory of music—from musical “behaviors”—the application of those materials in context. Improvisation can play a particularly powerful role in this regard, although it requires us to embrace complexity and uncertainty in ways that still make many uncomfortable. Learning to improvise, particularly in an openform setting, remains a rather frightening proposition for many musicians. Acknowledging these challenges faced by both younger as well as experienced players, Turetzky exclaimed: It’s a terrifying feeling. All of a sudden there is no net and no rules. What does one do? Well, my answer is you listen. And you just hope that you have an imagination. And you trust yourself to say, “I’m going to grab something. It’s going to be an anchor. I’ll hook up with somebody.” And then you do, and you go from there.

Group Creativity However much you try, in a group situation what comes out is group music and some of what comes out was not your idea, but your response to somebody else’s idea … The mechanism of what is provocation and what is response—the music is based on such fast interplay, such fast reactions that it is arbitrary to say, “Did you do that because I did that? Or did I do that because you did that?” And anyway, the whole thing seems to be operating at a level that involves … certainly intuition, and maybe faculties of a more paranormal nature. —Evan Parker (quoted in Corbett 1994: 203) I suspect that it makes more sense to see solo improvisation as a special case of collective improvisation than [the] other way around. —Nicholas Cook (2007: 330) The nature of creativity in the arts and sciences has been of a topic of enduring human interest. But the dominant scholarly approach to the subject, until recently, has proceeded from the assumption that creativity is primarily an individual psychological process, and that the best way to investigate it is

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through the thoughts, emotions, and motivations of those individuals who are already thought to be gifted or innovative. In the past several decades, however, creativity researchers have begun to focus more attention on the historical and social factors that shape and define creativity, and on its role in everyday activities and learning situations. This shift is attributed in great part to the work of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1990), who has argued for a systems view of creativity. His work introduced two influential notions into our understandings of creativity: the domain and the field. The domain describes that set of rules and conventions through which, or in relationship to which, creative work is produced and evaluated as such, while the field refers to those gatekeepers or senior individuals who in turn evaluate new work and decide which of it is valuable. In other words, these terms describe the environment in which the creative individual operates; the domain refers to its cultural or symbolic aspect, and the field to its social aspect. The work of sociologist Howard Becker (1982) has also been influential in this regard through his focus on the network qualities of art worlds and the informal or implicit rules of etiquette that can shape and define creative work. Yet despite this shift in the field toward systemic perspectives that take account of the social, cultural, and historical dimensions of creativity, the notion that creativity operates primarily on the level of individuals (albeit now situated within a rich and complex environment), or that creativity necessarily results in a creative product, has proved to be remarkably resilient. In his book titled Group Creativity, R. Keith Sawyer (2003) draws on empirical studies of jazz music and improvised theater in order to highlight the interactive and emergent dimensions of creativity that are frequently overlooked or ignored. Creativity research has tended to make a distinction between an ideation stage, in which the non-conscious brain produces novelty through divergent thinking, and an evaluation stage, in which the conscious mind decides which new ideas are coherent with the creative domain. Sawyer argues, however, that ideation and evaluation occur in a complex rather than a linear fashion. During collective improvisation, in both theater and music, they become externalized into a group process. When one performer introduces an idea, the other performers may or may not decide to shift the performance in order to incorporate this new idea. Acknowledging the complexity of group music performance, bassist Richard Davis remarked: “Sometimes you might put an idea in that you think is good and nobody takes to it … And then

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sometimes you might put an idea in that your incentive or motivation is not to influence but it does influence” (quoted in Monson 1996: 88). The quote from Evan Parker at the beginning of the section also attests to the fact that, from a systems perspective, it is often impossible to separate provocation from response in group improvisation. Csikszentmihalyi (1991) is equally well known for his notion of “flow,” in which the skills of an individual are perfectly matched to the challenges of a task, and during which action and awareness become phenomenologically fused. Sawyer expands this concept to illuminate the process of entire groups performing at their peak. Group flow can inspire individuals to play things that they would not have been able to play alone or would not have explored without the inspiration of the group. Yet as a collective and emergent property, it can be difficult to study empirically. As Sawyer (2003: 46) explains, “Group flow is an irreducible property of performing groups, and cannot be reduced to psychological studies of the mental states or the subjective experiences of the individual members of the group.” Many improvising musicians and actors speak of the importance of group flow or of developing a “group mind” during performance (see Sawyer 2004: 195). This requires, at the very least, cultivating a sense of trust among group members. According to some, it also involves reaching a certain egoless state in which the actions of individuals and the group perfectly harmonize. Percussionist Adam Rudolph describes his trio’s approach this way: “We all participate in creating the musical statement of the moment. In the process of being free as a collective, you have to have selflessness to give yourself to the musical moment and not come from a place of ego” (Borgo 1996: 80). Facilitating group flow may depend on the level of familiarity between the participants, and it requires musicians and actors to resolve aspects of conscious and non-conscious performance in order to achieve a balance appropriate to the moment. Describing his general approach to improvised performance, Bertram Turetzky remarks: One way when I play free music, I try not to think of anything. I respond or I initiate. And whatever my intuitions tell me, I go with them … Other times in free music, I play with people perhaps I don’t know. And I say, well, the last one started soft and slow and got faster and then went back … So all of a sudden, I start banging things and doing all kinds of stuff … For some people, I think you have to be very rational. And you perhaps have to have an idea of where you think it could go and be the quarterback.

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Perhaps an even better sports analogy than football for capturing the fluid and complex dynamics of an improvising group during group flow is basketball. George Lewis (2000b: 37–8) writes: “It is striking to note how an African American perspective on improvisation reflects a similarity with recent thinking in the game of basketball, an area in which African-American players have continually presented revolutionary possibilities.” While both a basketball team and an improvising ensemble must utilize each player’s individual skills, Lewis finds that: “In both situations it is essential that each individual develop an intuitive feel for how their movements and those of everyone else on the floor are interconnected” (ibid.). Although group flow may be the most desirable state for improvised performance, Turetzky acknowledged that it is a problem “if someone has a big ego and wants to make everything compositional.” When he perceives that the group is not easily establishing a rapport or a musical direction, he often adopts a third strategy: “If there are three or four people, maybe I’ll stop a little bit and let them see what they want to do. If there is a mess, let them sort it out. Let them start something and maybe I can support them.” As we saw in the previous section, conventional approaches to teaching musical improvisation tend to stress individual facility through memorization and preplanning, leaving little room for collective experimentation. Dramatists, on the other hand, frequently argue that humans are too skilled in suppressing action. For instance, Keith Johnstone (1979: 95) believes that “all the improvisation teacher has to do is to reverse this skill and he creates very gifted improvisers. Bad improvisers block action, often with a high degree of skill. Good improvisers develop action” (see also Werner 1996). Drawing a comparison between the training of actors and musicians, Jonty Stockdale (2004: 110) writes: In the initial training of drama students, considerable emphasis is directed towards the development of self-confidence, the loss of inhibition, and the ability to role-play. This is achieved largely through improvisation workshops where individuals work individually and collectively. Surprisingly, improvisation in jazz studies programmes is infrequently developed through a collective process, with a preference for the development of soloing facility through the absorption and imitation of pre-existing language, usage, and style. Whilst this is regarded as important for the development of a young jazz musician, matters of selfexpression, individualism, and most importantly experimentation are often left to later stages, by which time exploration of free collective playing can appear unnecessary or even redundant.

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Sawyer (2003) makes an important distinction between a problem-solving and a problem-finding approach to art. Artists adopting problem-solving techniques begin with a relatively detailed plan and work to accomplish it successfully. Those employing a problem-finding approach, by contrast, search for interesting problems as the work unfolds in an improvisatory manner. Many beginning jazz improvisers are stuck in a problem-solving mode. As Anthony Davis expresses: “They have been taught right and wrong—these are the notes, these are the chords, these are the arpeggios that work on a given chord. This chord happens on the 5th bar [in a blues].” But through extended listening, practicing, and playing with musicians who are more experienced, Davis finds that jazz players can move from a “dependence on articulating the form” to “using the form, realizing that [the tune structure] is the beginning of something and you have to create something else … They have to do more than just keep time, they have to articulate time … They can make melodic choices that are at least as strong as the melody that was there before.” Even as students become more proficient, however, Davis reminds them, “You have to get beyond your mannerisms to really come up with a musical idea as opposed to a catalog of what you do.”

Yes, and … A particular challenge of open-form group improvisation is that each performer may have a rather different interpretation of what is going on and where the performance might be going, although intersubjectivity is an inherent property of all improvised performances. In a passage that echoes the discussion of an “aesthetics of autopoiesis” from Chapter 5 of this book, Sawyer (2003: 9) writes: “The key question about intersubjectivity in group creativity is not how performers come to share identical representations, but rather, how a coherent interaction can proceed even when they do not.” Sawyer argues this is possible because individuals shape a performance on both denotative and metapragmatic levels; they simultaneously enact the details of a performance and negotiate their interactions together. Even if a singular meaning to performance always remains elusive, participants can shape the ways in which their various interactions unfold. Listeners, too, must be able to make their own path through the music. One of the most common bits of advice to aspiring improvisational actors is known as the “yes and” rule, or framed differently as the practice of “no

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denial” (see Sawyer 2003, 2004). Actors are taught that in every conversational turn, they should do two things: accept the offer proposed in the prior turn and add something new to the dramatic frame. In other words, instead of denying or rejecting what has previously been introduced, they should present complementary offers or revoice an existing offer. Through a similar form of incremental development, improvising musicians also build on and subtly shape those sounds that have come before. They must listen intently and acknowledge the gestures of others as a form of musical “offer.” Improvising actors are also taught not to ask direct questions or to propose specific actions that would limit the range of possible responses for others (Sawyer 2004). Rather, they are coached on ways in which they can support the ongoing development in a more open-ended fashion, or ways in which they can assign attributes to another performer’s character without limiting the possibilities for narrative development. Often referred to as “endowing,” this may correspond with the ways in which improvising musicians support or shape in subtle ways the gestures and ideas of others without circumscribing or over-directing them. Although these bits of advice can be helpful in encouraging students to focus on interactive strategies and the evolving group performance rather than on their own specific contributions, they remain somewhat general and difficult to evaluate precisely. For instance, Sawyer points out that the line between a subtle denial and a constructive revoicing is fuzzy and open to interpretation. Moments in which endowing is used to good effect also exist on a fuzzy continuum with moments in which overly specific musical gestures can stifle group creativity. For instance, if a musician initiates a pronounced idiomatic gesture in an openform improvisation setting, perhaps something with a strong tonal or metric character to it, it can have the effect of limiting the options available to others. Yet at times, or in groups that value a strong play of signifiers, this practice can be used to good effect to produce either a pronounced disjuncture in the music or a type of stylistic pastiche. The advice to accept and build upon the “offers” of others also does not preclude the possibility of departing from a direction that is already underway. For instance, one common theatrical practice called “shelving” involves abruptly shifting the focus of the performance in ways that may make other immediate developments off-limits for the time being yet keeps them available for future moments of reference or expansion: it displaces rather than denies what has come before. Again, evaluating when this has been successful presents a tricky proposition.

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Excessive or harsh denials, however, can result in one actor overcontrolling the direction of a scene. In improvised theater, this is often referred to as “driving” a scene, or “playwriting.” It can occur when one actor is attempting to structure a collective performance too far in advance, anticipating what others will do rather than listening closely to their performance and responding in the moment. As we have seen, the notion of “driving” a performance through individual ego also pertains to group musical improvisations. With inexperienced improvisers, however, the opposite problem also occurs. Anthony Davis stresses that it is critical in musical improvisation that students learn the difference between listening and following: “In order to listen, you don’t necessarily follow, you respond. You try to construct something that coexists or works well with something else—not necessarily this tail-wagging-the-dog thing where you just follow someone.” For Davis, “Listening is knowing what someone is doing and using it in a constructive way, as opposed to mimicry, just trying to demonstrate that you are, quote, unquote, listening.” Davis’s comments highlight the fact that, unlike most group theater, group musicking happens concurrently as well as consecutively. Aware of the limitations of analogies between theatrical and musical performance, Sawyer (2003: 44) writes: “In musical groups, group flow requires a type of parallel processing; the musicians are playing non-stop, yet while they are playing they must simultaneously listen to their band members, hearing and immediately responding to what they are playing.” This notion that everything is heard and immediately responded to during complex moments of improvised music may, however, be too facile. George Lewis (2000b) describes a type of “multidominance” in improvised music—an African American aesthetic by which individuals articulate their own perspectives yet remain aware of the group dynamic, ensuring that others are able to do so as well. Another lesson for aspiring improvisational actors is to avoid “crossing the fourth wall” that separates the performers on stage from the audience. In other words, stepping out of the dramatic frame, either by speaking directly to the audience or by meta-communicating about the proceedings, can endanger the natural development of the group’s performance. In theater, it is too easy to drive a scene by stepping out of the dramatic frame to narrate or direct the action. Although the polyphony and polysemy of music makes this explicit directing of the unfolding narrative a more complex affair, musicians can “cross the fourth wall” when they play to an audience’s expectations rather than

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to the evolving group dynamic and musical moment. Although a well-timed instance of signifyin’ or double-voiced discourse in both improvised music and improvised theater can evoke humor, recognition, or insider knowledge to both performers and listeners. In certain instances, the performance spaces themselves lend credence to the idea of a shared aesthetic. Discussing Derek Bailey’s annual Company Week gatherings of open-form improvisers, Ben Watson (2004: 263) writes: “Bailey has always liked theatrical spaces. The acoustics favour the softest sounds, while the setting makes the musicians appear larger than life. In plays, actors entertain the conceit of talking to each other rather than addressing the audience point-blank, providing a workable model for public Free Improvisation.” One final aphorism for improvising actors may ring true for their musical counterparts as well: “Listen and Remember.” Many of the pedagogic exercises adopted by both actors and musicians are designed to improve these two basic skills. For instance, the “Word at a Time Story,” in which each actor offers only one word to the evolving narrative, is an exercise that focuses the attention of individuals on quick interactions and on the meaning of the emergent whole rather than on their own contributions. In certain ways, this exercise is rather similar to the “Click Piece” by John Stevens discussed in Chapter 6, in which each musician plays only short sounds in order to focus on the group pattern and interaction. “Zip-Zap-Zowie,” another improvised theater game, asks actors in a circle to improvise nonsense syllables and then point at the next participant. This, too, mirrors many musical improvisation games that highlight shifting solos or subgroups within a larger ensemble and are designed to increase the ability of individuals to make effective transitions between various sections and instrumental configurations. These exercises, in both theater and in music, can also motivate individuals to remember what has occurred, either to avoid duplication or to make long-term connections to previous events. As Sawyer (2004: 198) explains, “Not everything is resolved and connected right away, so there will always be small bits and pieces of plot and frame, waiting to be picked up and connected to the current scene.” In my own coaching of improvisation ensembles, I have often introduced students to a “Seven ‘C’s” heuristic. At a primary level, improvisers have three “C”s from which to choose: to continue, to change, or to cease. One either continues what one is doing, decides to change in relation or response to what else is occurring in an ensemble, or becomes silent, ceasing activity. If a

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measure of change is deemed desirable, then there are four additional “C”s to consider. One can copy, complement, contrast, or create. Obviously, the lines between musically copying, complementing, and contrasting are not fixed, but I find that having some clarity in my own mind about my musical intentions produces more dramatic and interesting results in an ensemble. The final “C,” creating, implies that one is intending to make a dramatic or distinct change without being explicitly beholden to other sonic occurrences in the ensemble. Whereas copying, complementing, and contrasting are means of either adopting or augmenting what is occurring, creating implies forging out into uncharted sonic domains. Although developing clarity in how one’s playing relates to the ensemble is an important facet of this process, the combination of multiple strategies being explored simultaneously invariably creates a complex and unpredictable outcome.

Comprovisation Music is understood as a dynamical complex of interacting situated embodied behaviors. These behaviors may be physical or virtual, composed or emergent, or of a timescale such that they figure as constraints or constructs. All interact in the same space by a process of mutual modeling, redescription, and emergent restructuring. —Jonathan Impett (2001: 108) While it may still be common to make a terminological distinction between composition and improvisation, we may be better served focusing on the complex interrelationship between musical inscription and musical incorporation. Inscription involves placing the mark of one thing within the fabric of another. Despite their different affordances and constraints, music notation (whether conventional or unconventional) and sound recording are both inscriptions. In the former case, one “carves” atoms of paper, in the latter case one “carves” particles of shellac or magnetic tape, or bits of computer memory. Programming code, such as in Max/MSP, could also be described as a form of latent musical inscription, in that it provides an algorithmic “recipe” for the production and/or transformation of sound. Broadly speaking, musical inscription could be understood to encompass any externalized record of already-accomplished creative activity.

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Viewing musicking as an incorporating knowledge–practice, by comparison, involves the complex of perception–action cycles related to sound production/ reception that encode into bodily memory/cognitive predispositions over time through repeated “performances” (and here I am using the term to encapsulate all of the activities Christopher Small (1998) includes in his conception of musicking). Many of the theories already discussed begin to pull apart these distinctions between externalized and internalized modes of creativity. Ultimately, the affordances, constraints, and invariants upon which music depends are not isolatable within the body of the performer (or listener), the object of the instrument, the acoustic and social environment of performance, or even the situated “smart context” in which learning and musicking occurs; rather, they are to be found in the dynamic relationship between all of these and more. In more practical terms, this means that contemporary creative musicians are free to draw upon and draw together any combination of these resources/ dispositions they may wish. John Zorn’s “Cobra” may be the best-known “game piece” for improvising musicians, but others have explored game-like strategies for improvisation (e.g., Rova Saxophone Quartet’s system dubbed “Radar”). Conducting techniques to organize musical improvisation in larger ensembles have also grown in prominence, with notable approaches including the conduction system of Butch Morris, sound painting developed by Walter Thompson, and the spontaneous orchestration techniques explored by Adam Rudolph. Taking suggestions from audience members, although more common in improvised theater than improvised music settings, can provide an organizing impetus to creative exploration (perhaps by establishing a mood or context) and also demonstrates to the audience that the specific content of a performance was not worked out elaborately beforehand. Stephanie Richards, who worked with Butch Morris, has used novel scent creations to provide an olfactory starting point for her group improvisations, and she provides a scratch-andsniff card with her CDs so that listeners can experience the same scents as well (Varga 2016). In other words, almost anything can serve as an organizing strategy or trope for improvisation, although different modalities and differing levels of precomposed detail will establish different sets of affordances and constraints, so finding an appropriate balance for a given situation can be challenging. Making a distinction between his game pieces and conventional notions of composition, Zorn remarks:

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In my case, when you talk about my work, my scores exist for improvisers. There are no sounds written out. It doesn’t exist on a time line where you move from one point to the next. My pieces are written as a series of roles, structures, relationships among players, different roles that the players can take to get different events in the music to happen. And my concern as a composer is only dealing in the abstract with these roles like the roles of a sports game like football or basketball. You have the roles, then you pick the players to play the game and they do it. And the game is different according to who is playing, how well they are able to play. (quoted in Corbett 1995: 233)

With their attentions already engaged in complex ways during performance, some do worry that highly involved schemes for structuring improvisation can hinder rather than assist the natural development of the music. Tom Nunn (1998: 162) writes: When improvisation plans are complicated—no matter how clear or well explained they might be—the attention of the improviser is constantly divided between the plan and the musical moment, having to remember, or look at a score, a graphic, or even a conductor. What often happens is that both the plan and the music suffer from this divided attention. When plans, methods or scores are complicated, they are less immediate, requiring practice individually and rehearsal collectively. As long as there is sufficient time under the circumstances, such devices may work well.

During our conversation, Mark Dresser acknowledged the challenges inherent in structuring pieces for improvisers: “Composition is often about control. You have to build [improvisation] in. I’ve built pieces that have been little prisons, too. You’re looking at something really specific.” But he added, It’s a trip to find the balance. You try to find combinations where you have real focus and condensation, and points of real expansion. For me, it is all about being a complete musician. All of those things are interesting. At different points in the evening, I try to have all of those things. It’s funny, though, when you get in the composer’s head, it’s really hard to let go of trying to control it or to create this kind of balance.

Acknowledging a similar danger, Anthony Davis commented on the importance of maintaining an improviser’s aesthetic when he composes: For me, what is very important when I’m writing music is that sense of discovery that you have as an improviser: that moment when you get to a place that

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you’ve never been before. You don’t know how you got there. You don’t know what’s happened. And you say, “Wow, it’s wonderful! How did that happen?” It’s that magical thing that allows you to discover something else, something new … There’s an improvised aesthetic that I bring to what I compose. As an improviser you realize that you can discover the form through the music itself. A lot of classical composers have lost that. They have to apply the form rather than discover it … This objectification of music is a way of distancing from the immediate. [With improvisation] you end up with more anomalous things, more interesting things.

But Davis also reflected on the often precarious balance between structuring music ahead of time and allowing room for creativity and spontaneity in performance. For an illustration, he recounted a particular performance of his music in San Francisco when the improvised section opened up and extended well beyond his original intentions for the piece. He described it as “a rubber band that had been stretched too far and it broke. The focus was lost, even though what happened in it was great.” On a related theme, Dresser commented: “I’ve seen the conduction thing be a disaster with people who just don’t like to be controlled.” Pre-conceived strategies for improvisation are usually employed to minimize its inherent risk. Philip Alperson (1984: 22) writes: “As the number of designing intelligences increases, the greater is the difficulty in coordinating all the parts; the twin dangers of cacophony and opacity lurk around the corner.” This makes those moments when group improvisation is deemed successful all the more powerful. Lisle Ellis explained: “A lot of improvised music I don’t think is very good music. But man, when it hits, it’s extraordinary! That’s what I’ve spent my life doing—waiting for those moments when it really lines up—to find a way to have some consistency in it. Some days I think I really know how to do that and other days I think I don’t have a clue.” In a telling aside that highlights this balancing act of harnessing creativity, Ellis remarked, “I’ve got to write more stuff down. I’ve got to write less stuff down.” When discussing composition and improvisation, or musical inscription and incorporation, it can be particularly challenging to avoid thinking in terms of simple dichotomies, while at the same time remaining wary of equally facile truisms about the music. Only with dualistic thinking, which presents two things as opposed and forces one to choose between them, is (1) preparing for something in advance and (2) the leap of freedom into the unforeseen

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viewed as antithetical or incompatible. Dresser finds that “within control, there are lots of possibilities for freedom.” Discussing his time spent as a young man in classes with Muhal Richard Abrams at the AACM school, George Lewis (2000b: 86) writes: “Improvisation and composition were discussed as two necessary and interacting parts of the total music-making experience, rather than essentialized as utterly different, diametrically opposed creative processes, or hierarchized with one discipline framed as being more important than the other.” Ellis, however, has grown uncomfortable with the facile notion that “composers try to make it sound improvised while improvisers try to make its sound composed.” Composition and improvisation are not mutually exclusive, but neither are they synonymous with one another; they are interwoven and implicated in one another. Mike Heffley (2005: 292) argues that improvisation and composition are two similar and equal generative forces in the same one music, pushed to either complimentary or conflicting roles, according to personal and social dynamics. Dresser recounted a telling moment during his first tour with Anthony Braxton’s quartet that illuminates this issue: “The only time that Braxton criticized the quartet, he said, ‘Well, you guys are playing the music correctly, but you’re just playing it correctly.’ The criticism was you are being too dutiful, you’re not taking a chance. That was the day that the format of the music actually changed, from being a solo-based music to an ensemble music. All of a sudden, the nature of the music became different. That moment articulated when the group came into its own.” To return briefly to my own formative experiences with Surrealestate, when I first began playing with the group, I remember struggling with the seemingly insurmountable challenge to always play something new, something fresh, or something innovative. Without the conventional song structures of jazz to organize my improvisational approach, the musical options often appeared to me to be unlimited and, therefore, unmanageable. I remember fondly, however, fellow saxophonist Robert Reigle sharing with me that, for him, the goal of improvisation is not to play something new at every moment; rather, it is to play something that is appropriate to the moment. All of a sudden, something that had seemed beyond me was transformed into something that was fully situated. I realized that how I behaved and the music that I made was affected by and would affect how others behaved and the music they made. Being myself in the moment, then, meant embracing the interconnectedness of the moment.

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The Shores of Multiplicity Of all the travels made by man since the voyages of Dante, this new exploration along the shores of Multiplicity and Complexity promised to be the longest. —Henry Adams (1918, Chapter XXXI) My feeling about artists is that we are metaphor explorers of some kind. —Brian Eno (1996: n.p.) Artists teach people how to live. —Lester Bowie (quoted in Sweet 1996: 47) In The Education of Henry Adams, privately printed by the author in 1907, Adams self-consciously marks the rupture between the ordered certainties of a Newtonian world and the chaotic multiplicities that he saw as characteristic of the twentieth century. His complex, nonlinear, and ultimately unresolved personal journey marks an important entry point into a century characterized by the “crisis of representation” that swept across academic disciplines. From the sciences to the arts and humanities, researchers in the twentieth century were led, often reluctantly, to shift their focus from objects to relationships, from products to processes, from content to context, and from ideas of permanence to those of permeability and polysemy. Articulating this pronounced conceptual shift—often from several directions at once—Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari write in their influential book A Thousand Plateaus (1988: 482–3): “It was a decisive event when the mathematician Riemann uprooted the multiple from its predicate state and made it a noun, ‘multiplicity.’ It marked the end of dialectics and the beginning of a typology and topology of multiplicities.” Through the complex relationship between social actors and technologies, and the gradual (and still very much ongoing) shift from a colonial to a postcolonial world, contemporary music may just now be arriving on the shores of multiplicity. Musical traditions, styles, and approaches coexist and intertwine to a greater extent now than was ever possible. Yet far from simply expanding our choices at the local record store or online streaming service, this ongoing shift to multiplicity must engender a growing awareness of varied and diverse musical understandings and a deeper acknowledgment of one’s own relationship within and to a given music culture. Multiplicity challenges us to move beyond simple binaries and dichotomies and to

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dismantle hegemonies, and the process of improvising music together may have an important role to play. There are some signs that awareness in this regard is increasing. For many of his performances and recordings, saxophonist Hafez Modirzadeh intentionally retunes certain keys of the piano (according to his own tastes rather than specific scientific or cultural principles) in order to comprovise new music. Modirzadeh articulates his work as a response to “chromatic supremacy” (a canny reference to the even more troubling idea of “white supremacy”): They call it equal temperament, but I think it’s better called “separate but equal temperament.” The colonialism and the capitalism is in quantifying everything. [The piano] carries with it the weight of colonizing minds, because it represents what I call “chromatic supremacy.” It has hegemonically usurped all these other beautifully shaded diverse tunings of all the indigenous peoples of the world, right? (quoted in Kaliss 2021: n.p.)

Modirzadeh’s music sounds inflected with Persian or Arabic ornamentation and phrasing, but when asked about the specific ethnic or cultural references, he responds: “It’s more of a human idea, where we’re trying to understand how we can coexist while keeping the integrity of who we are” (ibid.). Khyam Allami, an electronic music producer, expresses related views and has produced software that allows music producers to explore non-Western tuning systems more easily. Discussing how young global musicians struggle getting hegemonic software platforms to produce digital sounds that feel authentically local, Allami notes: It’s not that the music they make will sound “more Western,” but it is forced into an unnatural rigidity. The music stops being in tune with itself. A lot of the culture will be gone. It’s like cooking without your local spices, or speaking without your local accent. For me, that’s a remnant of a colonial, supremacist paradigm. The music is colonized in some way. (quoted in Faber 2021: n.p.)

Tuning is not the only site of musical colonization through software. Rhythm and meter, too, play a hegemonic role. “Even as I try to break away from the loops and the 1-2-3-4 drive of these music tools,” states Kenyan producer Slikback, “I always end up back there somehow” (ibid.). In complex ways, new technologies serve as loci of social forces, both constituting and mitigating change, both transforming and maintaining received

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ways of knowing, specifically with regard to critical aspects of culture, class, and race that still often remain concealed in contemporary discourse. The semantic wordplay in the subtitle of this book, improvising music in a complex age, emphasizes the dynamic and indissoluble relationship between performances and people, between sounds and society. Improvising could be read as an adjective, describing the kind of music being made in and of the moment. However, my intent is for improvising to be read as a verb, with music as its object. We improvise music together, not as an alternative approach to composition, but in order to negotiate and internalize alternative value systems. While improvising together, individuals balance comfort and caprice, groups enable structure and spontaneity, and traditions become articulated by and respond to continuity and change. The still nascent shift to multiplicity must involve acknowledging uncertainty while foregrounding complex visions of agency, identity, embodiment, community, and culture. By necessity, this involves a leap into unknown territory and uncharted waters, yet without abandoning a sense of individual, communal, and historical particulars. Daniel Belgrad (1997) explores the “culture of spontaneity” that emerged in post–Second World War America articulated by the arts in general, and by modern jazz in particular. Bebop and free jazz have provided important symbols of spontaneity, liberation, and resistance to oppression for many in the intervening years, and they, and related Afro-Diasporic musics will undoubtedly continue to do so. But acknowledging a shift toward multiplicity will involve augmenting, arguing over, and perhaps even replacing many of the notions that have come to be strongly associated with these forms. George Lewis (2006: 433) writes: “The pluralist tendency to situate African-American music as the vehicle of orchestral transubstantiation, while well-grounded historically, risks becoming overly narrow in the new century, as improvisation traditions from around the world, influenced or not by African-American forms, become part of a landscape that could inform the classical music of the future.” Envisioning what a “new American classical music” might sound like in a postcolonial world, Lewis continues: Certainly, such a new music would need to draw upon the widest range of traditions, while not being tied to any one. Rather than quixotically asserting a “new common practice,” perhaps such a music would exist, as theorist Jacques Attali put it, “in a multifaceted time in which rhythms, styles, and codes diverge,

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interdependencies become more burdensome, and rules dissolve”—in short, a “new noise.” (ibid.; see Attali 1985: 147)

Are there aspects of the emerging scientific understanding of complexity that might assist us in harnessing the complexities of improvising music? For a system to be truly complex, it must be an aggregation of simpler systems that both work and can work independently; a whole made up of wholes. Systems of this sort are able to take advantage of positive feedback, to exploit errors or unexpected occurrences, to assess strategies in light of their consequences, and to produce self-changing rules that dynamically govern. Complex systems also strike an uneasy and ever-changing balance between the exploration of new ideas or territories and the exploitation of strategies, devices, and practices that have already been integrated into the system. In other words, complex systems seek persistent disequilibrium; they avoid constancy but also restless change. Because of this uneasy balance, complex systems are not necessarily optimized for a specific goal; rather, they pursue multiple goals at all times. Although they cannot be explicitly controlled, they can respond to guiding rules of thumb and are susceptible to leverage points of intervention. It is interesting to note that two widely discussed topics in organizational design are the sciences of complexity and jazz music. Both domains emphasize adaptation, perpetual novelty, the value of variety and experimentation, and the potential of decentralized and overlapping authority in ways that are increasingly being viewed as beneficial for economic and political discourse. Robert Axelrod and Michael Cohen (2000) see in the move from the Industrial Revolution to the Information Revolution, a powerful shift from emphasizing discipline in organizations to emphasizing their flexible, adaptive, and dispersed nature. They write, “Just as the clock and the steam engine provided powerful images for the metaphor of society as a machine, distributed information technologies can provide a powerful image for the metaphor of society as a Complex Adaptive System” (30). And Karl Weick (1998), in a special issue of the journal Organization Science devoted to an exploration of “the jazz metaphor,” finds that the music’s emphasis on pitting acquired skills and pre-composed materials against unanticipated ideas or unprogrammed opportunities, options, or hazards can offset conventional organizational tendencies toward control, formalization, and routine. In a response to the heavy reliance by journal contributors on swing and bebop as the source of their jazz metaphors, Michael Zack (2000) outlined

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ways in which free jazz might propel discourse even further into the realm of emergent, spontaneous, and mutually constructed organizational structures (see also Kamoche 2003). This enthusiastic embrace in business and managerial circles of metaphors of improvisation and complex adaptive systems must be accompanied by a strong cautionary note. The journal Critical Studies in Improvisation (2014, vol. 9/1) dedicated a volume to “Ethics and the Improvising Business,” and scholarship by Dale Chapman (2018) and Mark Laver (2015) suggests that these metaphors are often pursued to serve neoliberal financial capitalism over and above the interests of individuals and workers. Chapman’s work also suggests that the “neoclassic” turn in jazz (beginning in the late 1970s and leading to the establishment of Jazz at Lincoln Center) provided nostalgic comfort for a New York facing multiple social and economic crises and, more broadly, for those who perceived the rise of fusion jazz and hip-hop as threatening. This neoclassic approach to jazz still dominates academic jazz classrooms and serves as the model for the majority of these organizational metaphors.

Complementarity and Metastability Our only way of avoiding the extremes of materialism and mysticism is the never ending endeavor to balance analysis and synthesis. —Niels Bohr (quoted in Kelso and Engstrom 2006: xi) It can seem as if the world is becoming ever more polarized. Political parties are less able to work together toward compromise or the common good. Communities already divided by locale, population density, level of education, ethnicity, age, gender, sexuality, and more become further divided by increasing disparities in wealth and opportunity. Religious followers summarily discard the ideas and beliefs of others. Countries with long histories of conflict dig in their ideological heels still further. Groups promoting nationalism, white supremacy, terrorism, and other forms of extremism, find new ways to radicalize new members using new technologies. And the sciences and the humanities—C. P. Snow’s “Two Cultures”—diverge even further as the “culture wars” only seem to escalate. The world just described appears to be dominated by a mutually exclusive either/or mentality. You are either with us or against us.

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Contraries, polar opposites, dualities, opposing tensions, binary oppositions, dichotomies, and more, are all various ways of expressing an either/or mentality. Musical improvisation has suffered too, as it is often positioned in opposition to composition, notation, performance, computation, and more, in everything from casual conversations to media coverage, and from institutional curricula to concert programming, too often creating mutually exclusive either/or musicking conditions. In their book The Complementary Nature, Scott Kelso and David Engstrom (2006) outline a whole host of either/or traps that we continue to fall into: subject/ object; self/other; us/them; theory/practice; part/whole; competition/cooperation; individualism/collectivism; leader/follower; order/disorder; integrating/ segregating; mind/matter; organism/environment; reductionism/holism; science/ philosophy; quantitative/qualitative; being/becoming; persistence/change; life/ death. Their motto, borrowed from famed quantum physicist Niels Bohr, is that contraries are complementary. “Though contraries are diametrically opposed by definition,” the authors write, “they are nevertheless coexistent, mutually dependent and inextricable” (2). In their writing, Kelso and Engstrom introduce the tilde (~) or squiggle symbol, not to concatenate or bridge between polarized aspects, but to signify that they exist as a complementary pair. Both members of a complementary pair and the dynamic relationship between them are required, they argue, for a full understanding of the complex world we live in. Kelso and Engstrom work in a field called coordination dynamics, and their research explores the notion of metastability, emphasizing how individualist tendencies of the parts of a system coexist with tendencies of those same parts to couple and cooperate as a whole. For instance, functional segregation and functional integration are both crucial to how our brains operate. The diverse regions of the brain express their independence and they couple and cooperate as a whole. Kelso writes: In the metastable brain, classical dualities like segregation and integration, competition and cooperation, individual and collective, parts and wholes, etc. exist in a kind of coordinated communion, a complementary code. They are not polarized opposites, diametrically opposing either/or’s.3

3 http://ccs.fau.edu/hbblab/pdfs/Kelso_OpEd.pdf (accessed September 15, 2021).

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The tendency for individual coordinating elements to couple or bind together (an integrative, cooperating tendency) and the tendency for them to retain and express their independence (a segregating, differentiating tendency) appears to be important to systems from brains to societies, contributing to their metastability. The conventional terminology that we deploy to discuss musical improvisation and the communities that nurture it could also benefit from thinking in terms of complementaries. I chose the verb “nurture” in the previous sentence, but perhaps I would have been better served by the complementary “afford~constrain” to discuss the complex, metastable dynamics of improvisation-aligned communities. Improvisation already invites us to think beyond some of our inherited contraries—such as by turning composer/performer into composer~performer— but we can move further in this direction; for instance, moving from performer/ listener to performer~listener, since every listener is involved in a kind of musical performance, and every musical performer is listening. Improvising music—to again use the formulation from my subtitle— is informed by countless complementary pairs (that are still too often discussed in either/or terms). In the section “A Marvel of Paradox” in Chapter 2, I highlighted how the music often explores a wide range of seemingly conflicting approaches, aesthetics, and affects that we can now understand as complementary pairs: for instance, serious~playful; disciplined~uninhibited, virtuosic~untutored; cerebral~embodied; abstract~grounded; complex~simple; loud~soft; dense~sparse. Socioculturally, improvising music exhibits other complementarities: utopian~skeptical; militant~spiritual; democratic~anarchic; exclusive~inclusive; essentializing~anti-essentializing; Great Black Music~antigenre; nationalistic~cosmopolitan. Improvising music together is about tendencies and dispositions rather than absolutes. It highlights the relationship between the individualist tendencies of the parts and the tendencies of those same parts to couple and cooperate as a whole; it is individualistic~collective. Improvisation, in my hearing~performing, exhibits a complex dynamical flow, with the tendency to converge toward musical “attractors” coexisting with the complementary tendency to diverge from them; it is convergent~divergent music. Improvising music together invites us to embrace other process-oriented complementarities: anticipation~reaction; attention~awareness, affect~action; stability~instability; linear~nonlinear; sync~swarm! Improvising music is not only a “whole made up of wholes,” it is also a “whole existing within another whole,” as, for instance, improvisation~composition, or as improvisation~creativity, or as improvisation~life.

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Contemporary science suggests that many of our either/or propositions— nature/nurture; biology/culture; electricity/magnetism; space/time; particle/ wave—are in fact complementary ways of understanding the world. We tend to think in idealized extremes, but the world exhibits complementarity and metastability. At its best, open-form improvising music makes us aware of the power of bottom-up design, of self-organization. It operates in a network fashion, distributing engagement and responsibility among the participants, and it encourages social activities that support the growth and spread of valued criteria through the network. Improvisers tend to value diversity, spontaneity, and mutual respect, and often view their musical interactions as a model for appropriate social interactions. Tom Nunn (1998: 133) writes: Free improvisers are important to the society in bringing to light some fundamental values and ideas, for example: how to get along; how to be flexible; how to be creative; how to be supportive; how to be angry; how to make do. So there is a social and political “content” in their music that seems appropriate today, though it may not usually be overt.

In a recent podcast interview (Switched on Pop), Vijay Iyer was asked by the host, “How can instrumental music communicate a message of protest?” “That’s a hard one, and I’m not sure it does,” he answered. If we did a blindfold test and we just played a piece of music without telling you the title, what’s it doing? It might do something to my emotions, or at the level of sensation, or movement. But to connect that to something, quote, unquote, political. I’m not sure that’s the right question. The distinction I often try to make is not whether or not a song is, quote, unquote, political. A title can announce and insist to you that that’s the case. But I think more about what kind of political work is being done in a certain creative circumstance.

While the social network and network dynamics of improvisation can facilitate reciprocal interactions between members, fostering trust and cooperation, they, like any network, can also concentrate power in the hands of a few. As Simon H. Fell (2019: 506) bluntly writes: “Improvised music is no more immune to the machinations of musicianly ego and the need to massage an established hierarchy of ‘stars’ than any other field of performance; however, its limited value in the music marketplace makes such pressures less acute and easier to deflect.”

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After highlighting improvisation’s potential exclusivity, Fell confronts its often-presumed inclusivity: “While Free Improvisation may be best placed to welcome rapidly the inexperienced, untutored, or experimental musician into a performing situation, such a musician will nevertheless be required to demonstrate the ability to make an effective or stimulating contribution, albeit perhaps limited, if relationships with their peers within the improvised music community are to develop or thrive” (510). As we continue to explore ways of improvising music together, we should look for ways to assist would-be cooperators in interacting more easily and more frequently. The robustness and equity of a network system is a direct result of the range and number of interactions. I have had many memorable experiences in my life improvising music with wonderful collaborators and at times even with “star” jazz and improvising musicians. But one of the most memorable for me was a performance given by Surrealestate, the open-form open-membership improvisation ensemble at UCLA that drew me to this subject in the first place. This particular performance was at, of all places, a Los Angeles public middle school auditorium (a cafeteria, really) in front of hundreds of twelve- to fourteen-year-olds, representing many different communities, and, undoubtedly, musical tastes. An excerpt from the performance, titled “Neither By Lead Nor By Seed,” can be heard at the accompanying website.4 Before we began to play, I was nervous that the kind of music we would make that day would not go over well with this younger demographic. After some welcoming applause, Robert Reigle and I launched into a saxophone duet (tenor and soprano respectively). We started—by happenstance—on a tritone (the Devil’s interval!) and proceeded to modulate it through several octaves into the extreme registers of our horns and decorate it with wild glissandos. We gradually worked our way back to the middle register of our horns, and, after a nice cadential moment, we launched into some spiky “chirps” and “quacks” rhythmically interwoven in complex ways. The kids burst out into laughter. At that moment, my attitude toward the concert—and toward the idea of improvising music more broadly—shifted. We were all in this together! After some swarming saxophone flurries and synchronized dissonant dyads, Robert

4 https://sites.google.com/ucsd.edu/syncorswarm.

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and I landed on some rather pleasing, patterned harmonic territory and gradually brought our volumes and intensities down together to a convincing conclusion. The students erupted into cheers and wild applause. We had all taken a sonic journey together. I can’t say that we changed anyone’s lives beyond those few minutes together. But the idea that music could create a shared space and cultivate empathy (from all directions!) left a lasting impression on me. As we continue to improvise together, we should look to maximize participation from the fringes, rather than the core. In complex systems, a healthy fringe speeds adaptation, increases resilience, and is almost always the source of innovations. For instance, nearly every new style of global popular music has emerged from the periphery—from a localized, and often disadvantaged, community—to capture the attention of national and international audiences (at which time the music’s original context and meaning may have shifted, often quite dramatically). Improvising together—musically and otherwise—has the potential to overcome the inherent problems of a slow-moving traditional hierarchy, providing an effective way to handle unstructured problems, to share knowledge outside of traditional structures, and to inject local knowledge into the system. It can also encourage a certain flexibility in the cognitive models and metaphors we live by and remind us that our flexibility to learn and adapt are grounded in the bodily and the social. At its best, it invites a both/and rather than an either/or worldview. Cultivating an awareness of complementarity and metastability through improvisation encourages us, in my view, to embrace the complexities of musicking rather than the complicatedness of music, and the ontology of intra-action, rather than the epistemology of interaction. In her groundbreaking book Meeting the Universe Halfway, Karan Barad (2007: ix) writes: Existence is not an individual affair. Individuals do not preexist their interactions; rather, individuals emerge through and as part of their entangled intra-relating. Which is not to say that emergence happens once and for all, as an event or as a process that takes place according to some external measure of space and of time, but rather that time and space, like matter and meaning, come into existence, are iteratively reconfigured through each intra-action, thereby making it impossible to differentiate in any absolute sense between creation and renewal, beginning and returning, continuity and discontinuity, here and there, past and future.

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The value of improvising music lies not in the outcome of a single performance, and perhaps not in the notion of outcomes at all. Rather, it invites an engagement—an entangled one—over time and through continued musical and social intra-actions. Improvising music together does not necessarily produce optimal outcomes, but the commitment to improvise together might just contribute to the metastability of our shared world.

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Index 4E cognition 2, 12, 58–61, 76, 96, 98, 103, 178, 206, 224 actor-network theory 12, 105, 167, 200, 216–17 Adams, Henry 250 affordances comprovisation 245–6 consciousness 105 ecological 55, 66, 94–5, 229–30 instrumental 162, 181, 230 Johnson-Laird 23 skilled coping 66 technological 92, 194 Vygotsky 234 Afrological/Eurological 40–2, 53 Ake, David 228 algorithms 2, 62, 81, 147, 192, 194, 202–3, 245 Altschul, Barry 13, 107, 128–30, 133 arrow of time 155–6 Art Ensemble of Chicago 53, 160, 168 Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians 10, 36, 42–3, 49, 149–50, 249 attractors 121–2, 127–8, 130, 144, 256 autopoiesis 12–13, 169, 241 Ayler, Albert 38, 67, 203 Bader, Rolf 12, 80, 82, 135 Bailey, Derek audiences for improvisation 44–5 Company Week gatherings 182, 188, 244 improvisation 18, 26, 110 non-idiomatic improvisation 28, 40–1 Parker, Evan 41, 68, 70, 159 recordings 47 Stevens, John 223 Balliett, Whitney 1, 118

Barabasi, Albert-Laszlo 209, 212, 218 Barthes, Roland 5, 45 basins of attractlon 127, 133 Bateson, Gregory 4, 76, 88, 96, 100, 225 Belgrad, Daniel 4, 6, 47, 151, 252 Benzon, William 175, 178 Berger, Karl 233 Berio, Luciano 39 Berliner, Paul 179 bifurcation 127–30, 133, 187 body-body problem 58, 74–5 Bonabeau, Eric 185, 187–9 Boulez, Pierre 39, 148 Bowie, Lester 168, 250 Bowman, Wayne 60–1, 232 Bradlyn, Mark 45–6 Braxton, Anthony 30, 42–3, 50, 53, 68–9, 231, 249 Briggs, John 80, 114, 122, 125, 144–5, 156 Brown, Guillermo E. 29 Brown, Marion 48–9 Bryars, Gavin 40 Burrows, Jared 235 Cage, John 5, 34–5, 39–40, 148–50, 158, 228 Canonne, Clément 23, 181–2 Capra, Fritjof 207 Cardew, Cornelius 34–5, 46, 119, 151 Carter, Elliot 148, 150 Casserley, Lawrence 68, 97, 145 Casti, John L. 1 chaos Angelus Novus 28 art 144–5 chaotics 6, 13, 147–51 edge of 127–8, 146, 171 fractals 80 improvised music 9, 81, 98, 141, 147 Man’s Rage for Chaos 99

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282 Index order out of 156 theory 1, 7, 11–13, 122, 145–6 Chase, Allan 222–3 Cherry, Don 150, 168 circular causality 75, 93–7, 114 circular breathing 68–72, 78, 85, 92–3, 165 cognitivism 59, 61 Coleman, Ornette 31–3, 35, 38, 51, 82, 148–9, 154, 203 Collier, Graham 222, 236 Coltrane, John 32, 38, 41–2, 66, 121, 150, 166, 213 complexity age of 6–8 defining 109, 151–2 fractal 80–82 musical 26, 34, 52, 73, 80, 117, 130, 134–5, 143, 153–4, 206, 237–9 organizational 253–4 perceptual 83, 98–9, 118, 126, 138 scientific 109, 145–7, 152, 253 social 53, 151–2, 207, 214, 218 conceptual metaphors 71–3, 82, 230 conduction 35, 124, 145, 246, 248 Creative Music Studios 233 cross-domain mapping 72–3 Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly 22–3, 238–9 cybernetics 12, 75, 93, 96–7, 123, 167–71 Darwin, Charles 3–4, 7, 155, 190, 218 Davis, Anthony 42, 220, 231–2, 241, 243, 247–8 Davis, Kris 43 Davis, Miles 32, 105, 197, 213 Davis, Richard 238–9 decentralization 207 degrees of freedom 119, 121, 186 dissipative structures 155–6 Dresser, Mark 220, 222, 227–8, 247–9 ecological music 8, 54, 97, 100, 151 psychology 22, 55, 63, 94, 225 self 12, 75 systems 4, 12, 96, 122, 167 Ellington, Duke 20, 30, 53, 213, 233 Ellis, Lisle 220, 233, 248–9

embodied metaphors 71–2 emergence 7, 76, 109, 152–3, 156, 169, 184, 207 entrainment 13, 78, 175, 177–9 entropy 3, 64, 155–6, 174 Eurological (see Afrological/Eurological) extended techniques 67, 70, 76–7, 83–5, 87, 198, 227 extreme sensitivity to initial conditions 123 far from equilibrium 60, 146, 155–7 feedback (see also circular causality, cybernetics, emergence, self-organization, and strange loops) culture of 4–6, 151 haptic 197 positive/nonlinear 123–4, 152–3, 176, 187, 199, 253 sensorimotor 25, 226, 230 feminist studies 43–4 flow (see Csikszentmihalyi) fractals attractors 122 correlation analysis 12, 80–5, 87, 89, 91–2, 135–8, 140, 144 in Jackson Pollock’s paintings 81–2 in music 8, 82, 100 in nature 8 self-similarity 144 Gaia 209 gender 19, 43–4, 50, 73, 112, 190, 254 Gibson, J.J. 66, 94, 225, 229 Gioia, Ted 22 Gleick, James 109 Grateful Dead 148–9 groove 29, 60, 70, 73, 78, 133, 178–9, 234 Grosz, Elizabeth, group flow 239, 243 Hall, Edward T. 168–9 Hawkins, Jeff 62, 193 Hayles, Katherine 5–6, 14, 96, 147–8 Heble, Ajay 18–19, 43, 51, 223 Hendrix, Jimi 124, 148–9 homophily parameter 214 Huygens, Christiaan 177

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Index improvisation artist-run collectives 36–7 Black composers 42–3 classical music 5 conduction 35, 124, 145, 246, 248 criticism 48–9 etymology 17 game pieces 35, 244, 246–7 graphic scores 5, 35, 49, 247 groove 29, 179 identity 35–6, 41, 44, 47, 158–9, 164 idiomatic qualities 38 orchestral music 208–9, 234 recording 17, 46–8, 72, 227 spirituality 11, 28, 51, 150, 157–8, 166 sports analogies 239–40 theater 36, 238, 240–6 timescales 24–5 virtuosity 38–9, 49–50, 198, 200 invariants 55, 66, 246 Iyer, Vijay 60, 257 Jarman, Joseph 150, 160 jazz Asian thought 150 audiences 50–1 civil rights 37 computers 191–4, 203–4 education 221–2, 228, 231, 235–6, 240–1 ethics 154 experimentalism 42–3, 49, 51, 143 gender 43–4 globalization 51 history 4–5, 29–34, 38–9, 161, 252 Jackson Pollock 82 John Cage 150 mainstream 24, 235–6 management studies 19, 253–4 metaphors 73 networks 211–14 notation 111–12, 121 paradox 52–3 Parker, Evan 41, 66–7, 89 race 41–2 recording 111 search engines 2 studies 18, 178–9 surprise 1, 118

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Johnson, Bruce 179 Johnson, Mark 14, 59, 72–3 Johnson-Laird, Philip 23–4 Johnstone, Keith 240 Jones, LeRoi, (aka Amiri Baraka) 30, 37, 40, 49 Keil, Charles 178–9 Kellert, Steven 7, 14, 110 Kelly, Kevin 100, 152–3, 183–4, 189 Kirk, Roland 70 Kleinberg, Jon 213–14 Korzybski, Alfred 220 Lacy, Steve 21, 67–8, 142, 159 Lakoff, George 14 Landgraf, Edgar 169–70 Lansing, Steven 186, 190, 207 Latour, Bruno 105, 217, 220 Law, John 216 Levinas, Emmanuel 170 Lewis, Eric 48, 160 Lewis, George 10, 18–19, 36, 38, 40, 42, 49–50, 53, 68, 106, 149–50, 173, 182, 191, 204, 208, 240, 243, 249, 252 Ligeti, György 148 Lipsitz George 51 listening ecological 8, 256 entrainment 179 fractal correlation 83 machine 195, 197 minimum complexity description 118 open-form improvisation 44–7 Parker, Evan 67, 71, 75, 81 phenomenological 116–19 predictive processing 64–5 Rivers, Sam 106, 126 uncertainty 99 versus following 243 Litweiler, John 31–2, 38, living body and lived body 74–5, 95 Lochhead Judy 6, 148–50, 157 Lorenz, Edward 122–3 Luhmann, Niklas 3–4, 169–71 Mandelbrot, Benoit 8, 81, 122, 144 Margulis, Elizabeth 78

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284 Index Margulis, Lynn 209 Masaoka, Miya 184 McBee, Cecil 128–30, 133, 135–6, 140 McNeill, William H. 175 Mechling, Jay 168 Milgram, Stanley 210, 213 Mitchell, Roscoe 148, 188 Morris, Butch 35, 124, 246 musicking 7–8 Nettl, Bruno 17–18, 22, 110 Noble, Safiyah 2 noise 35, 82, 104, 144, 253 nonlinear dynamical systems theory (see also bifurcation, chaos, complexity, emergence, feedback, phase space, and self-organization) 107, 109–10, 122, 125, 152 notation aide-memoire 19, 111 complementarity 255 control 153 graphic 35, 49 improvisation 39, 220 jazz 111–12 nonlinearity 80, 111, 120–1, 144 pedagogy 221–2, 245 transcription and analysis 17, 80, 120–1 Western 8, 144 Nunn, Tom 27, 38, 44, 46–7, 131, 220, 247, 257 Oliveros, Pauline 34, 104, 151 open-form improvisation aesthetics/values 36, 50–1 Afrological/Eurological 40–1 boundary/limit case 22, 153–4 community 47, 51 coordination problem 180–2 far-from-equilibrium 157 freedom 37, 154, 159, 187 groove 179 history 5, 18, 67, 149, 161 identity 42–4, 154 idiom 38 interaction/interagency 124, 159, 206 listening 44–6 Maxine 198–200

networks 211, 257 notation, relation to 39 pedagogy 234–5 power 158, 188, 258 swarm intelligence 185–6 transitions 142 openness from closure 75–7, 94, 109, 159 Parker, Charlie 30, 40, 197, 213 Parker, Evan Afrological/Eurological 41 Bailey, Derek 41 biofeedback and coupling 97, 101 biography and approach 66–72 Braxton, Anthony 42 complexity 138 coordination 180, 237 electronics 97–8, 126 fractal correlation 80–1, 83–92 freedom 186–7 improvisation 26, 150–1, 159 juggling metaphor 72–4 power and authority 157–8, 188 reeds 95 repetition 77, 79 revolving wheel analogy 92 sensorimotor habits 77 space and place 100 Parker, William 28, 187 participatory discrepancies 178–9 Peat, F. David (see John Briggs) Peckham, Morse 99 performer-instrument-environment ecosystem 100 Peters, Gary 28 phase space 119–21, 124, 126, 128, 130, 134, 143, 146 Piaget, Jean 228 play 168–9 Poincaré, Henri 122 Pollock, Jackson 81–2 Porter, Eric 19, 30, 43, 48, 50–1 Prati, Walter 68, 91, 97 predictive processing 12, 58, 61–5, 75, 96, 98–9, 116, 159 preferential attachment 212 Pressing, Jeff 20–8, 54 Prigogine, Ilya 155–6

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Index problem-solving versus problem-finding 241 protention 94, 116, 119 qualia 114–18 Racy, Ali Jihad 71 Reigle, Robert 249, 258 Resnick, Mitchel 189–90 retention 116, 119 Rivers, Sam 13, 58, 103, 105–8, 126, 128–42, 157 Roach, Max 41, 53 Rudolph, Adam 239, 246 Sarath, Ed 21, 222, 234 Sancho-Velazquez, Angeles 5, 33 Sawyer, R. Keith 238–44 self-organizing systems 152–3 Seven C’s heuristic 244–5 signifyin(g) 134, 140, 244 situated cognition 9, 60–1, 232, 236 learning 219–21, 234, 236, 229–30 machines 192, 198, 206 musicianship 224–6, 228, 231, 237, 245, 249 six degrees of separation 210 small-world networks 210–11, 214 smart context 229, 246 Smith, Wadada Leo 42, 47 Snow, C. P. 1, 254 Stevens, John 68, 158, 182, 184–6, 223, 244 Stockdale, Jonty 220, 236, 240 Stockhausen, Karlheinz 34–5, 42 strange loops 12, 57, 93, 95–6, 99–100 Strotgatz, Steve 174–7, 179, 186

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superorganism 176, 184, 187, Surrealestate 9, 249, 248 swarm intelligence 12–13, 173, 176, 185–9 symbiosis 209 sync 174–81 systems theory (see also cybernetics and nonlinear dynamical systems theory) general 12, 93 social 3, 169–71 talented transactions 229 Taylor, Cecil 32–3, 38–9, 41, 66, 233 Taylor, Mark C. 6 thermodynamics 3, 155–6 third culture 1–2 tipping point 213 Toop, David 39, 97, 104, 109, 182, 184 Truax, Barry 45 Tucker, Sherrie 43 Turetzky, Bertram 180, 220–2, 227, 232, 237, 239–40 Varela, Francisco 61, 105 vivisystem (see superorganism) Von Foerster, Heinz 96 Vygotsky, Lev 225, 228–30, 234 Wachsmann, Philipp 68, 91–2 Watson, Ben 159, 244 Watts, Duncan 210, 214–16, 218 Wright, Matthew 68, 97 Xenakis, Iannis 148–50 zone of proximal development 230–1, 234 Zorn, John 124, 246–7

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