Philosophy of Improvisation

Philosophy of Improvisation
Author: Susanne Ravn
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 200
Release: 2021-05-31
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1000399141

This volume brings together philosophical and interdisciplinary perspectives on improvisation. The contributions connect the theoretical dimensions of improvisation with different viewpoints on its practice in the arts and the classroom. The chapters address the phenomenon of improvisation in two related ways. On the one hand, they attend to the lived practices of improvisation both within and without the arts in order to explain the phenomenon. They also extend the scope of improvisational practices to include the role of improvisation in habit and in planned action, at both individual and collective levels. Drawing on recent work done in the philosophy of mind, they address questions such as whether improvisation is a single unified phenomenon or whether it entails different senses that can be discerned theoretically and practically. Finally, they ask after the special kind of improvisational expertise which characterizes musicians, dancers, and other practitioners, an expertise marked by the artist’s ability to participate competently in complex situations while deliberately relinquishing control. Philosophy of Improvisation will appeal to anyone with a strong interest in improvisation, to researchers working in philosophy, aesthetics, and pedagogy as well as practitioners involved in different kinds of music, dance, and theater performances.

Improvisation in Drama, Theatre and Performance

Improvisation in Drama, Theatre and Performance
Author: Anthony Frost
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2015-10-26
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1137348127

Improvisation is a tool for many things: performance training, rehearsal practice, playwriting, therapeutic interaction and somatic discovery. This book opens up the significance of improvisation across cultures, histories and ways of performing our life, offering key insights into the what, the how and the why of performance. It traces the origins of improvisation and its influences, both as a social and political phenomenon and its position in performance training. Including history, theory and practice, this new edition encompasses Theatre and performance studies as well as drama, acknowledging the rapid reconfiguration of these fields in recent years. Its coverage also now extends to improvisation in the USA, cinema, LARPing, street events and the improvising audience, while also looking at improv's relationship to stand-up comedy, jazz, poetry and free movement practices. With an index of exercises and an extensive bibliography, this book is indispensable to students of improvisation.

Signs of Music

Signs of Music
Author: Eero Tarasti
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
Total Pages: 232
Release: 2012-05-15
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 3110899876

Music is said to be the most autonomous and least representative of all the arts. However, it reflects in many ways the realities around it and influences its social and cultural environments. Music is as much biology, gender, gesture - something intertextual, even transcendental. Musical signs can be studied throughout their history as well as musical semiotics with its own background. Composers from Chopin to Sibelius and authors from Nietzsche to Greimas and Barthes illustrate the avenues of this new discipline within semiotics and musicology.

Naven, Or, The Other Self

Naven, Or, The Other Self
Author: Michael Houseman
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 360
Release: 1998
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9789004112209

This book proposes a novel approach to the analysis of ritual action. Founded upon an in-depth study of the transvestism naven ceremony of the Iatmul of Papua New Guinea, it focuses on the relational and interactive forms entailed by ritual performance.

Push Me, Pull You

Push Me, Pull You
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 1402
Release: 2011-05-10
Genre: History
ISBN: 9004215131

Late Medieval and Renaissance art was surprisingly pushy; its architecture demanded that people move through it in prescribed patterns, its sculptures played elaborate games alternating between concealment and revelation, while its paintings charged viewers with imaginatively moving through them. Viewers wanted to interact with artwork in emotional and/or performative ways. This inventive and personal interface between viewers and artists sometimes conflicted with the Church’s prescribed devotional models, and in some cases it complemented them. Artists and patrons responded to the desire for both spontaneous and sanctioned interactions by creating original ways to amplify devotional experiences. The authors included here study the provocation and the reactions associated with medieval and Renaissance art and architecture. These essays trace the impetus towards interactivity from the points of view of their creators and those who used them. Contributors include: Mickey Abel, Alfred Acres, Kathleen Ashley, Viola Belghaus, Sarah Blick, Erika Boeckeler, Robert L.A. Clark, Lloyd DeWitt, Michelle Erhardt, Megan H. Foster-Campbell, Juan Luis González García, Laura D. Gelfand, Elina Gertsman, Walter S. Gibson, Margaret Goehring, Lex Hermans, Fredrika Jacobs, Annette LeZotte, Jane C. Long, Henry Luttikhuizen, Elizabeth Monroe, Scott B. Montgomery, Amy M. Morris, Vibeke Olson, Katherine Poole, Alexa Sand, Donna L. Sadler, Pamela Sheingorn, Suzanne Karr Schmidt, Anne Rudloff Stanton, Janet Snyder, Rita Tekippe, Mark Trowbridge, Mark S. Tucker, Kristen Van Ausdall, Susan Ward.

Musical Improvisation

Musical Improvisation
Author: Gabriel Solis
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 378
Release: 2009
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0252076540

A musical practice used for centuries the world over, improvisation too often has been neglected by scholars who dismiss it as either technically undissectible or inexplicably mysterious. At different times and in different cultures, performing music that is not "precomposed" has constituted an artful expression of the performer's individuality (the Baroque); a wild, unthinking form of expression (jazz antagonists); and the best method to train inexperienced musicians to use their instruments (the Middle East). This wide-ranging collection of essays considers musical improvisation from a variety of approaches, including ethnomusicology, education, performance, historical musicology, and music theory. Laying the groundwork for even further research into improvisation, the contributors of this volume delve into topics as diverse as the creative minds of Mozart and Beethoven, the place of improvised musics in Western and non-Western societies, and the development of jazz as a musical and cultural phenomenon.

Theorizing Rituals, Volume 1: Issues, Topics, Approaches, Concepts

Theorizing Rituals, Volume 1: Issues, Topics, Approaches, Concepts
Author: Jens Kreinath
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 803
Release: 2018-08-14
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9047410777

Volume one of Theorizing Rituals assembles 34 leading scholars from various countries and disciplines working within this field. The authors review main methodological and meta-theoretical problems (part I) followed by some of the classical issues (part II). Further chapters discuss main approaches to theorizing rituals (part III) and explore some key analytical concepts for theorizing rituals (part IV). The volume is provided with extensive indices.

The Routledge Handbook of Language and Emotion

The Routledge Handbook of Language and Emotion
Author: Sonya E Pritzker
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 424
Release: 2019-12-06
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1000740838

The Routledge Handbook of Language and Emotion offers a variety of critical theoretical and methodological perspectives that interrogate the ways in which ideas about and experiences of emotion are shaped by linguistic encounters, and vice versa. Taking an interdisciplinary approach which incorporates disciplines such as linguistic anthropology, sociolinguistics, applied linguistics, psychology, communication studies, education, sociology, folklore, religious studies, and literature, this book: explores and illustrates the relationship between language and emotion in the five key areas of language socialisation; culture, translation and transformation; poetry, pragmatics and power; the affective body-self; and emotion communities; situates our present-day thinking about language and emotion by providing a historical and cultural overview of distinctions and moral values that have traditionally dominated Western thought relating to emotions and their management; provides a unique insight into the multiple ways in which language incites emotion, and vice versa, especially in the context of culture. With contributions from an international range of leading and emerging scholars in their fields, The Routledge Handbook of Language and Emotion is an indispensable resource for students and researchers who are interested in incorporating interdisciplinary perspectives on language and emotion into their work.

Hexametrical Genres from Homer to Theocritus

Hexametrical Genres from Homer to Theocritus
Author: Christopher Athanasious Faraone
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 281
Release: 2021
Genre: History
ISBN: 0197552978

"This book focuses on the evidence for short, non-epic hexametrical genres as a way of gaining new insights into the variety of their often ritual performance, their early history and how poets from Homer to Theocritus embedded or imitated these genres to enrich their own poems, by playing with and sometimes overturning the generic expectations of their audiences or readers. In doing so it combines literary and ritual studies to produce a rich and detailed picture of a number of genres performed in temples, such as hymns and laments for Adonis, or in other spaces likewise dedicated to traditional speech-acts, such as epithalamia, oracles or incantations. It deals primarily with the recovery of a number of lost or under-appreciated hexametrical genres, which are usually left out of modern taxonomies of archaic hexametrical poetry, either because they survive only in fragments or because the earliest evidence for them dates to the classical period and beyond. Of central importance will be the surviving hexametrical poets, especially those of archaic and Hellenistic date, who embed or imitate traditional hexametrical genres of shorter duration either to give a recognizable internal structure to a shorter poem or to an episode or speech within a longer one"--