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Abstracts 2006

Session I: Ethnographies of Improvisation (9:00–10:30 a.m.)
 
A Concert without Audience

Carolyn Chen (Stanford University)

This paper will account my experience of playing with the Oxford Improvisers, a semi-professional community improvising group in Oxford, England which runs weekly informal playing sessions that I attended in the spring of 2004. In particular, I consider my participation in an improvising workshop and concert led by composer Howard Skempton. The concert, which lacked non-performing audience members, collapsed distinctions between composer, performer and audience that are characteristic of Western art music. Each player present fulfilled the function of active listening, originating and executing musical material, and shaping the performance space as well. I read the architecture of the black-box theater in relation to a history of experimental music developed in lofts and alternative spaces as recounted by George Lewis. The fluid, adaptable nature of these spaces allows for a departure from the system of values and behaviors inscribed into the design of the classical symphony hall interpreted by Christopher Small. This flexible, communitarian alternative reflects the values of the music-makers. Although diverse in age, musical background, and instrumental genre, the improvisers' aesthetic concerns, as articulated in personal interviews, commonly center on the value of community over technical virtuosity or structural complexity. This sense of value in the social relations created by music parallels the observations of George Lipsitz and others regarding the historical association between African American improvised music and an agenda of social justice. I examine my own role in this concert without an audience and improvised music more broadly, with regard to possibilities for social change.


Playing Off Site: Silence and Sound in Tokyo's Onkyo Scene
David Novak (Columbia University)

Beginning in the late 1990s, a new improvisational music developed in a tiny room in Tokyo. Onkyo, which simply means "sound," seemed to have many specific features of an emergent genre. It is typically performed with electric or electronic instruments, and its performance is often predominated by silences and pauses punctuated by sparsely placed singular sounds. Onkyo had a delimited and distinctive set of performers, including a charismatic leader, Otomo Yoshihide. Perhaps most importantly, onkyo had a specific place of origin – the spartan Off Site, a "livehouse" that became the focus of intense international appreciation for its newly local creative style. In Japan, too, Off Site quickly became so well known that it began to be considered as a stylistic "school" (onkyo-kei), and home of a formal generic category (onkyo-ha).

This paper discusses onkyo as a problem, both in its musical sound and stylistic narrative, for the generic construction of "improvisation" in the interstices of its intercultural exchange. It questions the cultural location of "free improv" as a non-idiomatic expressive form, and the range of its often-imagined intercultural reach. I question the correlation of genre names and locality in narratives of "jazz" and "experimental music," and unpack the multiple levels of "Japanese" identity at stake in the naming of onkyo and its Tokyo "off" site. Is onkyo the product of a strategic local effort, or motivated instead by a larger avant-garde strategy to remain marginal, and regain the power and mobility of unnamed sounds for themselves?


Embodied Improvisation: Gesture and Melody in Hindustani Vocal Music
Matt Rahaim (University of California at Berkeley)

The gestures of Hindustani classical vocalists range from subtle, occasional waves of the hand to dramatic movements of the whole upper body. These gestures have conventionally been understood as part of abhinay (acting) rather than sangit (music). Indian music criticism has tended to regard gesture as, at best, an accessory to music, and at worst, a distraction from music. For the past hundred years, Indian music theorists have framed music as a sequence of disembodied notes, and improvisation as the generation of proper note sequences from rules.

An alternative view is suggested by the work of psycholinguist David McNeill, who studies the gestures that people make while speaking. He considers gesture an integral part of the communicative act rather than an incidental accompaniment to speech. Using his theoretical framework, I propose to view gesture as a means of seeing melody in terms of embodied shapes rather than a chain of discrete entities. I am undertaking analyses and transcriptions of the gestures of Hindustani vocalists, treating gesture as part of musical improvisation rather than as an extra-musical accessory. After an overview of the advantages and disadvantages of McNeill's approach, I will present some analyses of video segments of Hindustani vocalists improvising. Gesture will be taken alongside sound as a means of apprehending music. The goal of the analyses will be to foreground the relationship between the musical grammar of raga and the musicking body.

Session II: Theorizing Performance 1
(10:40–11:40 a.m.)
 
Building Theory from Performance: A Process-Oriented Approach to the Study of Gesture in Music Rehearsal and Performance
Linda T. Kaastra (University of British Columbia)

This study highlights the communicative role of gesture in music rehearsal and performance. Rehearsal data is collected and analyzed according to grounded theory methodology. The researcher builds theory from the complex and rich rehearsal data, with a responsibility to accurately reflect the experiences of performing musicians in the context of real world practice. Eight rehearsals and one performance are video-taped, transcribed, and analyzed. Discourse categories of performance goals and strategies, rehearsal suggestions, statements of satisfaction and dissatisfaction, and decisions about repetition and interpretation are analyzed; gestures during conversation and performance are identified and characterized. By drawing relationships between the performers' stated goals, their gestures during speech, and their motions while performing, the author is able to show how performance gestures coordinate musical expression between individuals.


Going with the Grain: Listening to Language, Music and the Voice in the Performance of Schubert's "Am Feierabend"
Jennifer Ronyak (Eastman School of Music)

A sung performance of a lyric poem invites varied, often personal, and complex ways of hearing the voice as it produces both language and music. The voice has the capacity not only to express in the traditional (if highly problematic) sense, but also to make possible a way of experiencing the beauties of language as they intersect with music that changes the way we view both. Roland Barthes's 1972 essay The Grain of the Voice suggests a framework for understanding these relationships, but his subtle arguments have often met with oversimplification, resulting in responses that fail to respond either adequately or critically to the "grain" as a signifier or to the even more useful concepts of pheno– and geno–song. By redefining and refining Barthes's terms pheno– and geno–song and incorporating the idea of kinesthetic empathy as it appears in the work of David Lewin, Andrew Mead, Suzanne Cusick, and Marion Guck, this paper provides a new framework for understanding the importance that bodily performance, whether our own or another performer's, plays in our musical experience of sung lyric poetry. As a specific case, I examine Schubert's Lied, "Am Feierabend," considering the reader's kinesthetic role as a performer of the poetic text, the text's musical setting, and the effect that individual performances ultimately have on our understanding of language, music, and the body as apprehended through the singing voice.

Session III: Theorizing Performance 2
(12:00–1:00 p.m.)
 
Corpo-Realities: Where 'Always Already' meets 'Sometimes Not Yet'
Tracy McMullen (University of California at San Diego)

The claim that improvisation affords a particularly democratic model for social interaction harbors a significant ethical gap: in practice, most communities of improvisers remain monochromatic by gender, class and race. As a white female improviser I feel marginal to many such communities, repelled by various stories and practices that define jazz or improvised music as: hyper–masculine (almost always), black (sometimes), particularly white–masculine (most of the time), or urban working class (sometimes). Strategically, I have used personal corporeal practices (including meditation and Tibetan yoga) to counter such exclusionary discourses. These practices relax the body and make manifest the constructed and insubstantial nature of mental narratives, thus privileging an "anti–historical/anti–narrative" approach that challenges the conception of embodied practice as particularly historical. My paper engages Western theoretical conceptions of the body, as theorized by Judith Butler, George Lewis, Luce Irigaray and others, from the site of my white, female, middle class, meditating, tenor–saxophone-honking subjectivity; here I investigate embodiment in performance as it informs an increasingly complicated question in Western discourse, "Where does the body reside in history?" I include personal experiences of performing music and of interacting in the social milieu of improvising communities, and also my attempts, through these two, to embody and/or strategically use various philosophical approaches to confront hegemonic narratives. It is a report of my continuing investigation into the theory and practice of the body as it manifests personally for me at the site of musical performance.

Embodied Sound: Aural Architectures and the Body
Gascia Ouzounian (University of California at San Diego)

Sound artists have variously conceived of the body as a resonant space, designing works that are not only heard by the ears but produced at an intersection of bodies, sounds, and technologies. In Laurie Anderson's Handphone Table (1978), for example, sound is conducted through listeners' bones, transmitting a barely audible song directly into the body: "Now I in you without a body move."

Sound works designed for the body tend to bear a strong sense of ritual, conjoining physical spaces with their metaphysical complements. An encounter of real and imagined spaces, wrought in the body, produces alternating fields of vibration – at times beating positively to create an augmented awareness of self, spirit, and surrounding; at other times clashing to reveal the limits of the body: that it is socially determined and determining; that it is an instrument of control; that, ultimately, it fails the user.

Transferring the listening-point from the ears to the tissues of the body – a tangle of information, memories, and physical and psychic relationships – requires new models of aural reception and analysis. How does the body get mapped out as a score or sound stage? How do these mappings privilege certain bodies and kinds of relationships between bodies and spaces? How does a situated, embodied listening inform and disrupt traditional models of musical analysis? Referencing Bernhard Leitner's Headscapes(2003) and Maryanne Amacher's Sound Characters (Making the Third Ear)(1999), this paper explores the intersection of sound, space, and sensation, negotiated in sound works that focus the body as a site of experience, knowledge, and the indefinite.

Session IV: Culture, Knowledge, and Performance (3:20–4:50 p.m.)
 
Taleem Transformations: Embodied Mediation of Musical Knowledge in a North Indian Classical Music Lesson

Nikki Moran (Open University/Cambridge University)

This paper examines musical interaction as a form of embodied, social interaction; it is founded on the premise that musical structure can be studied by observing the physical, embodied ways in which people mediate musical knowledge and behave musically together. Precedents for this study include ethnomusicological research on the physicality of musical events by Baily (1991), Blacking (1974) and Stone (1982), and social interaction and non-verbal communication studies by such scholars as Goffman (1969) and Kendon (2004).

The communicative processes of face-to-face social interaction happen in real time, and individuals' utterances are better described as dovetailing in time than turn-taking. From a corpus of data consisting of video–recorded instances of Indian musicians in socio–musical interaction (rehearsals; informal and concert performances; interviews; and music lessons), this paper examines excerpts from a session of taleem where a guru and his wife teach a senior student which clearly demonstrate the overlapping, reciprocal nature of co–constructed interactions.

Using video analysis to observe and time-code the non–verbal communication of musicians in spontaneous interaction, the paper probes the relationship between behavior and musical structure. The three individuals in the excerpt collaborate to sustain the pulse and meter underpinning their interaction, and where this fails they use various non–verbal mechanisms to recover the musical coherence of the lesson.

The results show participants negotiating the way in which musical material is shared, and how the structure of their interaction develops, with very little recourse to verbal instruction. In conclusion, the importance of timing of non-verbal gesture for meaningful communication is highlighted, and the paper describes analytical access to this essential aspect of musical behavior.


The Virtuous Virtuoso: Women at the Pianoforte in Jane Austen's England
Elizabeth Morgan (University of California at Los Angeles)

As its prominence in the novels of Jane Austen suggests, the pianoforte played a central role in the lives of middle and upper class women in Regency England. In social settings, skill at the instrument indicated the nature of a young woman's breeding and it reflected her character. Performance at the piano was a way in which women impressed and wooed suitors; thus, it upheld the patriarchal structure of genteel Regency culture and was sanctioned by men – particularly by young women's fathers. As a solitary activity, however, piano practice provided women with an exclusive arena in which to excel. It acquainted them with their bodies and potentially was a means for them to explore their sexuality. Playing the piano, therefore, mediated between two conflicting aims: maintaining social order and undermining it simultaneously.

Taken from a larger project which explores the various roles of music in the lives of Regency women, this paper focuses on the pianoforte as what Mary Wollstonecraft called a "corporeal accomplishment," or an embodied practice. Drawing on the work of Michel Foucault, it suggests that the solitary act of playing was a form of auto–erotic exploration. It contrasts private practice with performance before men, examining three representative works that a woman might have performed at the piano, and the meanings conveyed through the performer's body with each piece.


Signifying on his Jelly Roll Soul: Collective Practices of New Orleans Jazz in Charles Mingus's Jazz Workshop
Jennifer Griffith (The Graduate Center, City University of New York)

Composer, bandleader, and bassist Charles Mingus was among the earliest modern jazz figures interested in dialoguing with New Orleans jazz, and his compositions and Jazz Workshop performances speak to the earlier conventions – including, for instance, shout choruses and free improvisation sections combining frontline and rhythm players. His work represents innovations within the tradition that provide a link between traditional practices of collective improvisation in New Orleans and the avant-garde players of the Sixties. Presenting recordings of "Dizzy's Moods" (RCA, 1957), "My Jelly Roll Soul," (Atlantic 1959), and "Jelly Roll" (Columbia, 1959), I examine how he signifies on traditional jazz practices. He reused dance rhythms and 'feels' – the Stomp and stoptime – that many listeners and players of his generation sneered at as "square." But are the "Jelly Roll" pieces merely homages to Morton? Mingus wasn't responding to Jelly Roll's music per se, and is quoted as saying "it must have had to do with how I heard Monk interpret Jelly Roll, or thought that's what he was doing." Mingus's leader–improviser role resembled Jelly Roll Morton's in the 1920s, and his use of the earlier composer's sound – which by the mid–50s was associated with Uncle Tomming, mugging and minstrelsy – was hardly without some critical distance. How was he reconstituting the music of his predecessor? And how might the legacy of Morton and his music have served Mingus in making meaning of his own experience as a black man in America?

 

 
CMSC 2006
when: February 3–4, 2006
where: 301 Philosophy Hall,
              Columbia University
theme: Music Performance and Improvisation
concert: Friday, 7pm
paper sessions: Saturday,                                9am–5:30pm
contact: cmsc@columbia.edu.
The organizers of the CMSC would like to thank the following for their support:
counter)induction
Current Musicology
Collegium Musicum
Columbia Composers
Department of Music
Graduate Student Advisory Council
The Fritz Reiner Center
The Alice M. Ditson Fund
Columbia University