Improvisation and Social Aesthetics

"An indispensable collection that cracks open a site for more rich and interdisciplinary work." -- Dan DiPiero * boundary 2 * "[Readers] will be more than rewarded by the insight it offers into the social aesthetics of improvisation, issues you will no longer be able to ignore as you listen to your next improv recording or attend your next improv concert." -- Lawrence Joseph * Musicworks * "Through both their rigorous theoretical grounding and curation of such a brilliant array of cross-disciplinary contributions, Born, Lewis and Straw offer a thoroughly inspiring set of tools for the academy to begin theorizing where, how and for whom arts social mediations are occurring. I cannot recommend it highly enough." -- Toby Young * Visual Studies *

Georgina Born is Professor of Music and Anthropology at the University of Oxford and the editor of Music, Sound, and Space: Transformations of Public and Private Experience. Eric Lewis is Associate Professor of Philosophy at McGill University and the author of The Video Art of Sylvia Safdie. Will Straw is Professor of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University and the coeditor of The Cambridge Companion to Pop and Rock.

Acknowledgments vii Introduction. What is Social Aesthetics? / Georgina Born, Eric Lewis, and Will Straw 1 Part I. The Social and the Aesthetic 1. After Relational Aesthetics: Improvised Music, the Social, and (Re)Theorizing the Aesthetic / Georgina Born 33 2. Scripting Social Interaction: Improvisation, Performance, and Western "Art" Music / Nicholas Cook 59 3. From the American Civil Rights Movement to Mali: Reflections on Social Aesthetics and Improvisation / Ingrid Monson 78 4. From Network Bands to Ubiquitous Computing: Rich Gold and the Social Aesthetics of Interactvity / George E. Lewis 91 Part II. Genre and Defintion 5. The Social Aesthetics of Swing in the 1940s: Or the Distribution of the Non-Sensible / David Brackett 113 6. What Is "Great Black Music"? The Social Aesthetics of the AACM in Paris / Eric Lewis 135 7. Kenneth Goldsmith and Uncreative Improvisation / Darren Wershler 160 Part III. Sociality and Identity 8. Strayhorn's Queer Arrangements / Lisa Barg 183 9. What's Love Got to Do with It? Creating Art, Creating Community, Creating a Better World / Tracey Nicholls 213 10. Improvisation in New Wave Cinema: Beneath the Myth, the Social / Marian Froger, translated by Will Straw 233 Part IV. Performance 11. Social Aesthetics and Transcultural Improvisation: Wayde Compton and the Performance of Black Time / Winfried Siemerling 255 12. Devices of Existence: Contact Improvisation, Mobile Performances, and Dancing through Twitter / Susan Kozel 268 13. The Dramaturgy of Spontaneity: Improvising the Social in Theater / Zo Svendsen 288 References 309 Contributors' Biographies 335 Index 339