Experimentation in Improvised Jazz

Experimentation in Improvised Jazz
Author: Andrys Onsman
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2018-10-01
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0429848951

Experimentation in Improvised Jazz: Chasing Ideas challenges the notion that in the twenty-first century, jazz can be restrained by a singular, static definition. The worldwide trend for jazz to be marginalized by the mainstream music industry, as well as conservatoriums and schools of music, runs the risk of stifling the innovative and challenging aspects of its creativity. The authors argue that to remain relevant, jazz needs to be dynamic, proactively experimental, and consciously facilitate new ideas to be made accessible to an audience broader than the innovators themselves. Experimentation in Improvised Jazz explores key elements of experimental jazz music in order to discern ways in which the genre is developing. The book begins with an overview of where, when and how new ideas in free and improvised jazz have been created and added to the canon, developing the genre beyond its initial roots. It moves on to consider how and why musicians create free and improvised jazz; the decisions they make while playing. What are they responding to? What are they depending on? What are they thinking? The authors analyse and synthesise the creation of free jazz by correlating the latest research to the reflections provided by some of the world’s greatest jazz innovators for this project. Finally, the book examines how we respond to free and improvised jazz: artistically, critically and personally. Free jazz is, the book argues, an environment that develops through experimentation with new ideas.

Improvising the Score

Improvising the Score
Author: Gretchen L. Carlson
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2022-07-15
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1496840755

On December 4, 1957, Miles Davis revolutionized film soundtrack production, improvising the score for Louis Malle’s Ascenseur pour l’échafaud. A cinematic harbinger of the French New Wave, Ascenseur challenged mainstream filmmaking conventions, emphasizing experimentation and creative collaboration. It was in this environment during the late 1950s to 1960s, a brief “golden age” for jazz in film, that many independent filmmakers valued improvisational techniques, featuring soundtracks from such seminal figures as John Lewis, Thelonious Monk, and Duke Ellington. But what of jazz in film today? Improvising the Score: Rethinking Modern Film Music through Jazz provides an original, vivid investigation of innovative collaborations between renowned contemporary jazz artists and prominent independent filmmakers. The book explores how these integrative jazz-film productions challenge us to rethink the possibilities of cinematic music production. In-depth case studies include collaborations between Terence Blanchard and Spike Lee (Malcolm X, When the Levees Broke), Dick Hyman and Woody Allen (Hannah and Her Sisters), Antonio Sánchez and Alejandro González Iñárritu (Birdman), and Mark Isham and Alan Rudolph (Afterglow). The first book of its kind, this study examines jazz artists’ work in film from a sociological perspective, offering rich, behind-the-scenes analyses of their unique collaborative relationships with filmmakers. It investigates how jazz artists negotiate their own “creative labor,” examining the tensions between improvisation and the conventionally highly regulated structures, hierarchies, and expectations of filmmaking. Grounded in personal interviews and detailed film production analysis, Improvising the Score illustrates the dynamic possibilities of integrative artistic collaborations between jazz, film, and other contemporary media, exemplifying its ripeness for shaping and invigorating twenty-first-century arts, media, and culture.

Perspectives on Artistic Research in Music

Perspectives on Artistic Research in Music
Author: Robert Burke
Publisher: Lexington Books
Total Pages: 245
Release: 2017-01-23
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1498544827

The increasing interest in artistic research, especially in music, is throwing open doors to exciting ideas about how we generate new musical knowledge and understanding. This book examines the wide array of factors at play in innovative practice and how by treating it as research we can make new ideas more widely accessible. Three key ideas propel the book. First, it argues that artistic research comes from inside the practice and exists in a space that accommodates both objective and subjective observation and analyses because the researcher is the practitioner. It is a space for dialogue between apparently opposing binaries: the composer and the performer, the past and the present, the fixed and the fluid, the intellectual and the intuitive, the abstract and the embodied, the prepared and the spontaneous, the enduring and the transitory, and so on. It is not so much constructed in a logical, sequential manner in the way of the scientific method of doing research but more as a “braided” space, woven from many disparate elements. Second, the book articulates the notion that artistic research in music has its own verification procedures that need to be brought into the academy, especially in terms of the moderation of non-traditional research outputs, including the description of the criteria for allocation of research points for the purposes of data collection, as well as real world relevance and industry engagement. Third, by way of numerous examples of original and creative music making, it demonstrates in practical terms how exploration and experimentation functions as legitimate academic research. Many of the case studies deliberately cross boundaries that were previously assumed to be rigid and definite in order to blaze new musical trails, creating new collaborations and synergies.

Electronic and Experimental Music

Electronic and Experimental Music
Author: Thom Holmes
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 1080
Release: 2015-10-08
Genre: Music
ISBN: 131741022X

Electronic and Experimental Music: Technology, Music, and Culture provides a comprehensive history of electronic music, covering key composers, genres, and techniques used in analog and digital synthesis. This textbook has been extensively revised with the needs of students and instructors in mind. The reader-friendly style, logical organization, and pedagogical features of the fifth edition allow easy access to key ideas, milestones, and concepts. New to this edition: • A companion website, featuring key examples of electronic music, both historical and contemporary. • Listening Guides providing a moment-by-moment annotated exploration of key works of electronic music. • A new chapter—Contemporary Practices in Composing Electronic Music. • Updated presentation of classic electronic music in the United Kingdom, Italy, Latin America, and Asia, covering the history of electronic music globally. • An expanded discussion of early experiments with jazz and electronic music, and the roots of electronic rock. • Additional accounts of the vastly under-reported contributions of women composers in the field. • More photos, scores, and illustrations throughout. The companion website features a number of student and instructor resources, such as additional Listening Guides, links to streaming audio examples and online video resources, PowerPoint slides, and interactive quizzes.

The Other Side of Nowhere

The Other Side of Nowhere
Author: Daniel Fischlin
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
Total Pages: 461
Release: 2004-03-30
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0819566829

Scholars, composers and performers write about the art of jazz improvisation.

A Power Stronger Than Itself

A Power Stronger Than Itself
Author: George E. Lewis
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 726
Release: 2008-09-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0226477037

Founded in 1965 and still active today, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) is an American institution with an international reputation. George E. Lewis, who joined the collective as a teenager in 1971, establishes the full importance and vitality of the AACM with this communal history, written with a symphonic sweep that draws on a cross-generational chorus of voices and a rich collection of rare images. Moving from Chicago to New York to Paris, and from founding member Steve McCall’s kitchen table to Carnegie Hall, A Power Stronger Than Itself uncovers a vibrant, multicultural universe and brings to light a major piece of the history of avant-garde music and art.

The Free Musics

The Free Musics
Author: Jack Wright (Musician)
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2017
Genre: Free jazz
ISBN: 9781537777245

This book has been provocative, since it views the situation playersfind themselves in and ignores the perspective of consumers, the media,and academics. It explores their assumptions and practices--their musicalapproach, relations to the music world, to each other, and to the socialorder. It traces the changes in these conditions since the origins ofthese musics. The response to it from musicians has been very strong,many saying it puts their own thoughts into words."--Résumé du site web de l'éditeur.

The Routledge Companion to Jazz Studies

The Routledge Companion to Jazz Studies
Author: Nicholas Gebhardt
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 645
Release: 2018-12-07
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1315315785

The Routledge Companion to Jazz Studies presents over forty articles from internationally renowned scholars and highlights the strengths of current jazz scholarship in a cross-disciplinary field of enquiry. Each chapter reflects on developments within jazz studies over the last twenty-five years, offering surveys and new insights into the major perspectives and approaches to jazz research. The collection provides an essential research resource for students, scholars, and enthusiasts, and will serve as the definitive survey of current jazz scholarship in the Anglophone world to-date. It extends the critical debates about jazz that were set in motion by formative texts in the 1990s, and sets the agenda for the future scholarship by focusing on key issues and providing a framework for new lines of enquiry. It is organized around six themes: I. Historical Perspectives, II. Methodologies, III. Core Issues and Topics, IV. Individuals, Collectives and Communities, V. Politics, Discourse and Ideology and VI. New Directions and Debates.

Artistic Experimentation in Music

Artistic Experimentation in Music
Author: Darla Crispin
Publisher: Leuven University Press
Total Pages: 417
Release: 2014-10-07
Genre: Music
ISBN: 9462700133

Essential reading for anyone interested in artistic research applied to music This book is the first anthology of writings about the emerging subject of artistic experimentation in music. This subject, as part of the cross-disciplinary field of artistic research, cuts across boundaries of the conventional categories of performance practice, music analysis, aesthetics, and music pedagogy. The texts, most of them specially written for this volume, have a common genesis in the explorations of the Orpheus Research Centre in Music (ORCiM) in Ghent, Belgium. The book critically examines experimentation in music of different historical eras. It is essential reading for performers, composers, teachers, and others wanting to inform themselves of the issues and the current debates in the new field of artistic research as applied to music. The publication is accompanied by a CD of music discussed in the text, and by an online resource of video illustrations of specific issues. Contributors Paulo de Assis (ORCiM), Richard Barrett (Institute of Sonology, The Hague), Tom Beghin (McGill University), William Brooks (University of York, ORCiM), Nicholas G. Brown (University of East Anglia), Marcel Cobussen (University of Leiden), Kathleen Coessens (Vrije Universiteit Brussel, ORCiM); Paul Craenen (Director Musica, Impulse Centre for Music), Darla Crispin (Norwegian Academy of Music), Stephen Emmerson (Queensland Conservatorium, Griffith University, Brisbane), Henrik Frisk (Malmö Academy of Music), Bob Gilmore (ORCiM), Valentin Gloor (ORCiM), Yolande Harris (Center for Digital Arts and Experimental Media – DXARTS), University of Washington, Seattle), Mieko Kanno (Royal Conservatoire of Scotland), Andrew Lawrence-King (Guildhall School of Music and Drama, London, Royal Danish Academy of Music, Copenhagen, University of Western Australia), Catherine Laws (University of York, ORCiM), Stefan Östersjö (ORCiM), Juan Parra (ORCiM), Larry Polansky (University of California, Santa Cruz), Stephen Preston, Godfried-Willem Raes (Logos Foundation, Ghent), Hans Roels (ORCiM), Michael Schwab (ORCiM, Royal College of Art, London, Zurich University of the Arts), Anna Scott (ORCiM), Steve Tromans (Middlesex University), Luk Vaes (ORCiM), Bart Vanhecke (KU Leuven, ORCiM)

Improvisation in Music and Philosophical Hermeneutics

Improvisation in Music and Philosophical Hermeneutics
Author: Sam McAuliffe
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 138
Release: 2023-02-23
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1350338036

In the first book to examine the overlooked relationship between musical improvisation and philosophical hermeneutics, Sam McAuliffe asks: what exactly is improvisation? And how does it relate to our being-in-the-world? Improvisation in Music and Philosophical Hermeneutics answers these questions by investigating the underlying structure of improvisation. McAuliffe argues that improvising is best understood as attending and responding to the situation in which one find itself and, as such, is essential to how we engage with the world. Working within the hermeneutic philosophical tradition – drawing primarily on the work of Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Jeff Malpas – this book provides a rich and detailed account of the ways in which we are all already experienced improvisers. Given the dominance of music in discussions of improvisation, Part I of this book uses improvised musical performance as a case study to uncover the ontological structure of improvisation: a structure that McAuliffe demonstrates is identical to the structure of hermeneutic engagement. Exploring this relationship between improvisation and hermeneutics, Part II offers a new reading of Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics, examining the way in which Gadamer's accounts of truth and understanding, language, and ethics each possess an essentially improvisational character. Working between philosophy and music theory, Improvisation in Music and Philosophical Hermeneutics unveils the hermeneutic character of musical performance, the musicality of hermeneutic engagement, and the universality of improvisation.