The “Finite” Art of Improvisation: Pedagogy and Power in Jazz Education

2008 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth E. Prouty
Keyword(s):  
Educational Institution ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Jazz Education ◽  
Performance Practices ◽  
Western Art ◽  
Jazz Pedagogy ◽  
Free Improvisation ◽  
Jacques Attali ◽  
Jazz Performance ◽  
Social Orders

Jacques Attali writes that music can serve to “invent categories and dynamics and regenerate social theory” through improvisational practice. Yet the performance practices of which he writes are those based in free improvisation, structurally boundless and relatively non-hierarchical with respect to the relationships between performers. Many improvised genres, however, are not reflective of such a free approach. Do such improvised idioms similarly open up new possibilities for social relationships, or, by the very nature of their stylistic and practical boundaries of what is considered correct or acceptable, actually reinforce existing social orders? In this essay, I explore these arguments within the context of the critical discourse over jazz pedagogy in the institutional context. It is not a critique of jazz pedagogy pre se, but rather, an exploration of how such discourses reflect, generate, and re-generate social interactions that are often deeply affect by power relations between various entities, such as the western art music tradition versus jazz, the educational institution versus the jazz performance community, teacher versus student, administrator versus teacher. All such relationships have affected the manner in which institutionalized jazz pedagogy has developed, and how it is practiced and lived by all involved.

Mixing with Mozart: Aesthetics and Tradition in Helmut Lachenmann's Accanto

2011 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 71-97
Author(s):  
ALASTAIR WILLIAMS
Keyword(s):  
Classical Music ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Performance Practices ◽  
Meeting Point ◽  
Western Art ◽  
Western Art Music ◽  
Compositional Practice ◽  
Historical Reflection ◽  
German Composer ◽  
Clarinet Concerto

AbstractAccanto (1975–6), for clarinettist and orchestra, constitutes a turn towards historical reflection in the work of the distinguished German composer Helmut Lachenmann, providing a meeting point for the practitioner and the theorist. This article examines how Accanto's dialogue with Mozart's Clarinet Concerto relates to topics such as recording conventions, performance practices, and compositional trends, particularly in the 1970s. It also demonstrates how Lachenmann's conception of musical material is rooted in an understanding of the Western art music tradition, especially with regard to the issue of the ‘language-character’ of music. In doing so, it investigates Lachenmann's aesthetics of beauty in connection with performance practices, sociological models of musical subjectivity, and Adorno's understanding of tradition. In general, the article argues that compositional practice in Accanto is shaped in response to the situation of classical music, especially in the 1970s.

Teaching School Jazz

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Performance Practice ◽  
Music Educators ◽  
Jazz Education ◽  
Jazz Pedagogy ◽  
Collegiate Level ◽  
Specific Teaching ◽  
Service Music ◽  
Jazz Performance ◽  
Instrumental Methods

Teaching School Jazz: Perspectives, Principles, and Strategies is an edited collection of suggested practices in school jazz education authored by a seasoned and diverse lineup of jazz educators with supporting research-based case studies woven into the narrative. It provides not only a wealth of school jazz teaching strategies but also, and perhaps as important, the jazz perspectives and principles from which they are derived. The first part of the book describes the current landscape of school jazz education and offers an overview of basic jazz concepts through the lenses of two expert, yet very different, school jazz educators. Parts II–VI constitute the heart and soul of the book, covering a vast and comprehensive set of topics central to school jazz education. Included throughout each chapter are references and links to audio, visual, and print resources for teaching school jazz that are downloadable from a related website. This text is an invaluable resource for preservice and in-service music educators who have no prior jazz experience, as well as for those who wish to expand their knowledge of jazz performance practice and pedagogy. The book may serve as a primary text for collegiate-level jazz pedagogy courses or as a supplemental text for general instrumental methods and pedagogy classes. Chapters begin with jazz case studies and contain a wealth of jazz-specific teaching material, lists of recommended artists for listening, and visual demonstrations of each chapter’s material.

scholarly journals Improvising Technology: Constructing Virtuosity

2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 87-96
Author(s):  
Jeff Kaiser
Keyword(s):  
Skill Acquisition ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Performance Practices ◽  
Western Art ◽  
Primary Element ◽  
Improvised Music ◽  
Musical Practices ◽  
History Of ◽  
Ethnographic Examination ◽  
Electronic Technologies

In this paper, I explore how contemporary musicians using electronic technologies in improvised music conceptualize skill and virtuosity in their musical practices. This includes ideas about the role and agency of technology, learned and repeatable physical skill, skill acquisition, skill transmission, and the projection of learned skill from traditional instruments onto new instruments. The musicians’ use of idiosyncratic and individually constructed instruments—instruments with little or no history of a performance practice—makes this field a rich resource to examine how such conceptions are developed. Among the musicians I interviewed, the relationship between physical skill and virtuosity is particularly contested. While they frequently value such skill, they also connect it to perceived excesses of certain factions within Western art music, jazz, and other established musical performance practices where physical skill can be conflated with (or considered as the primary element of) musical skill, writ large. This perception of the excess and the prioritization of physical skill have led some interviewed musicians to adopt antivirtuosity as a reactive counter-ideology or to explore the less tangible concepts of hearing, creativity, imagination, memory, novelty, innovation, and even ideas of management as constitutive of musical virtuosity and skill. This paper is part of a larger ethnographic examination of a diverse cross-section of contemporary musicians who improvise with new, repurposed, and reinvented electronic technologies, including Robert Henke (one of the original authors of the software package Ableton Live), guitarist Nels Cline (Wilco), composer and flute player Anne La Berge, and trumpeter/composer Wadada Leo Smith.

Music after the Fall

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tim Rutherford-Johnson
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Contemporary Music ◽  
The United States ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Sound Art ◽  
Musical Composition ◽  
Western Art ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Cold War

By the start of the 21st century many of the foundations of postwar culture had disappeared: Europe had been rebuilt and, as the EU, had become one of the world’s largest economies; the United States’ claim to global dominance was threatened; and the postwar social democratic consensus was being replaced by market-led neoliberalism. Most importantly of all, the Cold War was over, and the World Wide Web had been born. Music After The Fall considers contemporary musical composition against this changed backdrop, placing it in the context of globalization, digitization, and new media. Drawing on theories from the other arts, in particular art and architecture, it expands the definition of Western art music to include forms of composition, experimental music, sound art, and crossover work from across the spectrum, inside and beyond the concert hall. Each chapter considers a wide range of composers, performers, works, and institutions are considered critically to build up a broad and rich picture of the new music ecosystem, from North American string quartets to Lebanese improvisers, from South American electroacoustic studios to pianos in the Australian outback. A new approach to the study of contemporary music is developed that relies less on taxonomies of style and technique, and more on the comparison of different responses to common themes, among them permission, fluidity, excess, and loss.

Tiki Taane’s With Strings Attached: Alive & Orchestrated and postcolonial identity politics in New Zealand

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Oli Wilson
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Cultural Identity ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Performance Practice ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Western Art ◽  
Performance Group ◽  
Representational Practices ◽  
Colonial Experience ◽  
Television Documentary

This chapter explores how the New Zealand popular music artist Tiki Taane subverts dominant representational practices concerning New Zealand cultural identity by juxtaposing musical ensembles, one a ‘colonial’ orchestra, the other a distinctively Māori (indigenous New Zealand) kapa haka performance group, in his With Strings Attached: Alive & Orchestrated album and television documentary, released in 2014. Through this collaboration, Tiki reframes the colonial experience as an amalgam of reappropriated cultural signifiers that enraptures those that identify with colonization and colonizing experiences, and in doing so, expresses a form of authorial agency. The context of Tiki’s subversive approach is contextualized by examining postcolonial representational practices surrounding Māori culture and orchestral hybrids in the western art music tradition, and through a discussion about the ways the performance practice called kapa haka is represented through existing scholarly studies of Māori music.

THE NON-CANONIC STATUS OF MOZART’S CANONS

2006 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-123 ◽  
Author(s):  
NEAL ZASLAW
Keyword(s):  
Art Music ◽  
Orchestral Music ◽  
Dance Music ◽  
Western Art ◽  
Circle Of Friends ◽  
Western Art Music ◽  
Peculiar Nature

Mozart's canons are rather inadequately represented in the Köchel catalogue and the Neue Mozart Ausgabe. The same may be said about other music for his immediate circle of friends, colleagues and patrons, as well as his dance music and his contributions to pasticcios. Neglect of these ‘minor’ genres perhaps arises at least in part from anachronistic paradigms, for instance ‘masterpieces for posterity’. And the canons suffer additionally from the peculiar nature of their sources and transmission, from uncertainty about the position of canons in the ‘canon’ of Western art music and probably also from embarrassment over some of Mozart’s texts. Mozart’s canons have been studied not only less often than his operatic, church, chamber and orchestral music, but also less well.

Hearing Film Music Topics outside the Movie Theatre

2021 ◽  
pp. 548-574
Author(s):  
Janet Bourne
Keyword(s):  
Statistical Analysis ◽  
Extraction Method ◽  
Film Music ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Film Scores ◽  
Western Art ◽  
Western Art Music ◽  
Movie Theatre

This chapter describes a cognitively informed framework based on analogy for theorizing cinematic listening; in this case, it tests the hypothesis that contemporary listeners might use associations learned from film music topics to make sense of western art music (WAM). Using the pastoral topic as a case study, a corpus of film scores from 1980–2014 determines common associations for this topic based on imagery, emotion, and narrative contexts. Then, the chapter outlines potential narratives a modern moviegoer might make by listening “cinematically” to a Sibelius movement. The hypothesis is empirically tested through an experiment where participants record their imagined narratives and images while listening to WAM and film music. The meaning extraction method, a statistical analysis for identifying associational themes, is used to analyze people’s responses.

Landmarks in the Study of Improvisation

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruno Nettl
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Folk Music ◽  
Research Study ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Jazz Improvisation ◽  
Single Model ◽  
Oral Transmission ◽  
Western Art ◽  
Music Making ◽  
History Of

Historically, research on improvisation has been related to the discovery of non-Western musics, folk music, and jazz, and has depended on the development of recording techniques for its principal kinds of data. The concept of improvisation is not unitary, but includes many vastly different kinds of un-notated music-making, which casts some doubt on the efficacy of the term itself. In the history of Western art music, improvisation was originally ignored or seen as craft rather than art, but since ca. 1980 it has occupied increased attention. The association of improvisation with oral transmission has sometimes been misunderstood. The most successful standard research study has been the comparison of performances based on a single model, for example, raga in India, maqam and dastgah in the Middle East, or a series of chord changes or a tune in jazz. Improvisation as a concept—for example, as a metaphor of freedom—has been important in recent research.

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