Inhalt: | Addressing a wide range of improvised art and music forms-from jazz and cinema to dance and literature-this volume's contributors locate improvisation as a key site of mediation between the social and the aesthetic. As a catalyst for social experiment and political practice, improvisation aids in the creation, contestation, and codification of social realities and identities. Among other topics, the contributors discuss the social aesthetics of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, the Feminist Improvising Group, and contemporary Malian music, as well as the virtual sociality of interactive computer music, the significance of "uncreative" improvisation, responses to French New Wave cinema, and the work of figures ranging from bell hooks and Billy Strayhorn to Kenneth Goldsmith. Across its diverse chapters, Improvisation and Social Aesthetics argues that ensemble improvisation is not inherently egalitarian or emancipatory, but offers a potential site for the cultivation of new forms of social relations. It sets out a new conceptualization of the aesthetic as immanently social and political, proposing a new paradigm of improvisation studies that will have reverberations throughout the humanities After relational aesthetics : improvised music, the social, and (re)theorizing the aesthetic / Georgina Born -- Scripting social interaction : improvisation, performance, and Western "art" music / Nicholas Cook -- From the American civil rights movement to Mali : reflections on social aesthetics and improvisation / Ingrid Monson - From network bands to ubiquitous computing : Rich Gold and the social aesthetics of interactivity / George E. Lewis -- The social aesthetics of swing in the 1940s : or the distribution of the non-sensible / David Brackett -- What is "great Black music"? The social aesthetics of the AACM in Paris / Eric Lewis -- Kenneth Goldsmith and uncreative improvisation / Darren Wershler -- Strayhorn's queer arrangements / Lisa Barg -- What's love got to do with it? Creating art, creating community, creating a better world / Tracey Nicholls -- Improvisation in New Wave cinema : beneath the myth, the social / Marion Froger, translated by William Straw -- Social aesthetics and transcultural improvisation : Wayde Compton and the performance of Black time / Winfried Siemerling -- Devices of existence : contact improvisation, mobile performances, and dancing through Twitter / Susan Kozel -- The dramaturgy of spontaneity : improvising the social in theater / Zoë Svendsen |
