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This article explores the cultural hegemonies perpetuated by typical music-theory curricula and advocates for the use of improvisation—as both classroom activity and guiding philosophy—as a way forward.

This article explores the practice of intergenerational listening and its implications for re-imagining social connection in the COVID-19 crisis. Using an approached based in conversation and exchange facilitated through video-conferencing platforms, the authors critically reflect on the possibilities for developing a new sense of social connection by listening to the everyday sounds (Tuuri and Peltola 2019) of particular spaces. More specifically, the principal aim is to investigate the impact of re-imagining the daily sounds of spaces under locked-down as sources of intimacy, accompaniment, and creativity. These sounds include the ‘buzz’ of a cherished clock, the creak of a screened in porch, or records regularly listened to in a family living room. Supported by literature on ‘listening at a distance’ (Finer 2018) and the ‘sonic imagination’ (Street 2019), we ask: how can intergenerational, socially-distanced listeners engage with sound and space to improvise new forms of social connectivity? Asking these questions, we argue, can inform research and action into the roles that intergenerational listening and improvisation can play in the representation and the valuing an ageing population (Lanphier 2019) in an emerging post-pandemic musical landscape.

of two volumes comprising three special issues in total. In these special issues, we invited musicians, performers, scholars, arts presenters, and other cultural workers to reflect on the extraordinary challenges posed by the pandemic and to begin envisaging a post-pandemic musical landscape. The editorial to Volume II includes the introduction from the previous issue, slightly altered to reflect new developments in the weeks since we published the first volume, as well as new writing that provides an overview of the contents of this volume specifically. In this second volume, contributors continue the work of imagining a more equitable and sustainable musical landscape post-pandemic. One year into the pandemic, with tropes of exhaustion vs. resilience circulating like viral contagions in their own right, the voices here suggest something else: the beginnings of a dream of liveness. This is not to say that exhaustion is not present in this volume; it is, in spades, but paired with a determined call to action. Resilience, too, is here, but grounded in the knowledge that celebrating resilience must go hand-in-hand with systemic change. And the dreaming that happens in these pages is tempered by recognition of the voyeurism and biases of social media, where so much music-making occurs at present; the fundamental inequities of present-day structures for compensating creative labour; and the profound injustices of our society. And yet, dreams of liveness, of being and improvising together, persist.

Our paper reflects on our experience with Weaving Music II—a web performance space we built with fifteen artists working across different disciplines. The website and our essay attempt to create alternatives to the “at-the-same-timeness” of streaming technologies as well as the forms of listening defined by data capitalism and corporate platforms like Google and YouTube. At the heart of the alternative practices we propose is an embrace of what we see as the creolizing potentiality of the Web and of listening. To unpack these potentialities, the essay and artwork critically reflect on listening that occurs through Afrofuturistic modes of engagement with technology, space and time. We consider the historical origins of Web improvisations, our approach to collaboration using Weaving Music II, and theories of information that move beyond the need for predefined codes of understanding.

A review of Simon Rose's book 'The Lived Experience of Improvisation'

Lisa Cay Miller is a pianist/composer/improviser and Artistic Director of the NOW Society. In this piece, she offers a poetic description of the technological challenges associated with a large-scale sequential improvisation project in which thirty-six musicians and two sound engineers collaborated with one another to produce a total of thirty-eight videos of improvised musical performances.

Improvising drummer and community organizer Joe Sorbara advocates for the implementation of a Universal Basic Income (UBI) that will “provide everyone with the space to hear and recognise a calling, and . . . ensure that we all have the capacity and support to answer the call.”

While many of our colleagues are avidly baking and feeding their newly acquired sourdough starters while sheltering in place during the COVID-19 pandemic, we are conducting ethnographic work with individuals who have embraced the stylistics and aesthetics of improvisation in acts of caring for, listening to, baking with, and recording their sourdough starters, as well as performing alongside their bread-kin. Imagine, in some instances, the multispecies improvisational style of David Rothenberg’s co-performance with birds, whales, and insects (Rothenberg 2017; 2016; 2002; Ryan 2020), but with wild yeast and freshly baked bread. In this article we ask: What is it about the conditions of sheltering in place, quarantine, and domestic isolation that fosters an experimental space for reconfiguring multispecies improvisation and performance to include our foodways? Why has baking, specifically bread (and sourdough), rather than other forms of domestic activity and craft fostered this specific sonic response during these pandemic times? How are participants sharing, scrolling through, and listening to these domestic performances across social media? What does the sonic register of these multimodal texts communicate to other socially distancing social media users? Through ethnographic fieldwork of performing with, listening to, musicalizing, and caring for sourdough starters, their “screaming yeast” (Roosth 2009), and the baked result, this article places improvisation studies, domestic practices, multispecies performance, gastromusicology, and pandemic spatial conditions in dialogue to address these questions.

Now we all know that the world and music environment won't be the same after the pandemic. Perhaps we have to define it as a crisis for musicians and performers. However, I'd suggest us to pursue the value of improvisation in bigger desperation. It's like when farmers lost their harvest for some reason, they always go back to the stage of planting a seed. I believe that improvisation becomes more valuable in the crisis because it always leads us to the most essential elements of artistry and humanity. We can start over from there. We have each other and technologies to keep us contacted.

This article is a reflection of a collaboration between musicians Anton Hunter and José Dias who, in April 2020, organised a free, biweekly improvisation streaming festival, which ran for three weeks, entitled The Noise Indoors (TNI). Devised as a way of encouraging musicians and fans to stay home by providing the chance to continue experiencing and celebrating improvised music during confinement, TNI gathered twenty-eight artists based in seventeen cities across Europe who filmed solo or duet performances in their homes. As TNI progressed, this festival became a platform for sharing each artist’s intimate music-making, as well as an opportunity for networking and community building. In this article, using an eclectic mix of critical and dialogic writing styles (including field notes and text messages), they reflect on their experiences as researchers, musicians, and curators who organised and participated in TNI, and the potential wider implications of this.

This piece examines the ways in which management consulting firms have co-opted concepts drawn from jazz and improvised music to develop corporate responses to the pandemic.

Dave Clark is an improvising drummer and founder of the Toronto-based Woodchoppers improv collective. In this piece, he stresses the need for more equitable methods of sharing the revenue generated by musicians working in the creative commons, and discusses an open letter that he wrote to SOCAN in May 2020.

What does the music world three months into a pandemic look like to an Irish fiddler (Liz Knowles), a viola da gamba player (Liam Byrne), a violinist/pianist/composer (Dana Lyn), a Klezmer violinist (Lisa Gutkin), a world-jazz bassist (Juan Garcia Herreros), a venue owner (Terez Fraser), a concert presenter (Tom Rota), and a festival producer (Olga Barry)? Music is about arrivals, landings and leavings. As the pandemic arrived, the arts industry—and so many other aspects of life—"landed” or stopped, and we are now imagining what the future holds: what it will look like to “leave” this shutdown period and “arrive” into the new (and possibly changed) music industry.Musical improvisation is about engaging with and crafting these arrivals, landings, and leavings in the moment. These conversations in this podcast reveal some surprising aspects of the pre-pandemic music world—different musicians’ concepts of time, trajectory, and improvisation in music and in business—and also offer perspectives on how we see the future, both as individuals and as a community.

Both telematic performances and COVID suffer from latency. In telematic performance, it is the lag between a musical gesture you make, and the time that others in the network receive it. In COVID, it is lags between contact and showing symptoms, and between pubic health policy decisions and their effects. I argue that we need to embrace latency as an improvisational partner both in our telematic performances, and in our health care policies. I argue that Black aesthetics and Black approaches to sound and improvisation have long embraced latency, and that we need to become what is sometime called Afro-logical improvisers both in our networked performances and in our COVID related health policies.

The conditions generated by the COVID-19 global pandemic led our Musical Learning Community to improvise and face challenging social circumstances. We aimed at maintaining intact our long-term vision to create alternative cultural practices away from neoliberal subjugation. By exploring the lived experiences of musicians, dancers, artists, educators, and community members in North America, South America, and Asia, we learned how imagination became an imperative in the quest to create alternatives. Liberation, while confined, was carried out through artistic practices. However, neoliberal economic policies maintain a stronghold at the social level. Despite that, rural experiences showed different responses to the pandemic. While in urban centers, confinement and curfews were normative; in rural communities, artistic performances and togetherness were common. While in cities distancing was advised, in rural communities, proximity was embraced. We further reflect on how the current circumstances allowed us to improvise the birth of our action research community, which we propose as a humble grassroots alternative to neoliberal knowledge construction.

I'm a dancer who engages improvisation every time I put on my shoes to brush, step, click, and knock the floor. Not surprisingly, my work until March 2020 was primarily with fellow sound-makers, usually folk musicians from Ireland, Scotland, what's now called Canada, and what's now called Appalachia. COVID-19 has forced me to listen to the extemporaneous music I make anew, in the absence of collaborators, within a soundscape of profound uncertainty. In this contribution, I offer a voice from the floor, enunciated by my lowest limbs contacting the surface upon which I stand. This is where my work as an LGBTQ2IA+ improvising step dancer finds its meaning. In this essay, I respond to the incisive queer horizon Thomas F. DeFrantz casts, as "imagining outside of what came before." I share ways I have been thinking about improvisation and offer thoughts on how we might learn from DeFrantz to imagine and improvise “outside of” critically, queerly, and generatively.

William Parker is a bassist, improviser, composer, writer, and educator from New York City. In this journal, he reflects on the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic.

As a professional bassist who identifies as female and queer, I have my share of horror stories about experiences in the music industry. But I also have a solid peer group that is actively working to improve things, and with whom I have an ongoing dialogue. Specifically, in the last year, we started to observe the radical behavioural changes we've made as a society in response to the Covid19 pandemic, and how these protocols could be viewed with an anti-oppressive lens. I started to think about my values as an improvising musician, and how they provide an analogy and a framework for broader social interaction. I used the writing of this article as an opportunity to speak with some of my musical peers about their individual experiences and their ideas for creating safer spaces. We talked about the skills we had as improvisers, and how the pandemic could be a pivot point in creating a safer, more authentically inclusive music scene for women, trans, and gender queer people. This piece reflects those conversations and offers practical considerations and theoretical frameworks that are relevant to individual improvisers and ensembles, as well as promoters, curators, and venues.

Erin Felepchuk and Ben Finley examine the use of improvisation within the language of crisis response. They argue that historic cultural anxieties have generated negative connotations for improvisation within such conceptual metaphors as “illness as war” (where improvisation is positioned as a defensive strategy) and, more broadly, “improvisation as disorder,” and draw on improvisation studies theory and discourse to propose alternate metaphors for disease and disease mitigation.

Nicola Oddy and Rebecca Worden discuss music therapy and the pandemic in this contribution to the special issue.

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted many disparities between diverse social and cultural groups, both inside the academy and throughout society at large. In this essay, Erica K. Argyropoulos reflects on her own experiences as a disabled, nonbinary person in academia during the COVID-19 pandemic.

This article develops the concept of an improvisational aesthetic of imperfection and intimacy for “trebling-effect” music livestreams, or webcasts where listeners may interact with each other (and possibly with the performer) during the stream via text chat. I position the pandemic-era turn towards livestreaming within scholarly discourses of “liveness” and in conversation with recent work on the impact of audio streaming platforms on listeners’ understandings of the functionality of music. I also consider the affective labour required of performers to generate a sense of human connection via livestream, and discuss video mosaics, by which musicians separated by time and space perform together in an illusion of copresence. I conclude with a case study of the #CanadaPerforms livestreaming series, a public-private collaboration between the National Arts Centre and Facebook Canada.

When physical distancing became necessary as a result of COVID-19, I wanted to find out how to make music in real time over the internet. Fortunately, I found the Mannlicher Carcano Radio Hour! This improvisational collective has a history of networked performance—now facilitated via the conferencing platform Zoom—that stretches back to its origins in experimental call-in radio collage during the 1990s. This ‘community voices’ piece describes some of the ways participants from around the world join together on Saturdays to improvise and socialize as a networked community.

Liberal arts pedagogy, characterized by its emphasis on adaptability and breadth, thrives on the input of fresh perspectives; arguably, it requires them to maintain its relevance. In this paper, I engage theoretical and applied scholarship on improvisation pedagogy to illustrate how integral improvisational thought is to the spirit of the liberal arts. Considering the liberal arts ‘toolkit’ as, essentially, that of an improviser—a rounded, context-dependent and hybridizing approach that is well-suited to novel and sometimes unforeseeable scenarios—reaffirms the liberal arts’ value in the shifting academic climate of the 21st century, in which such skills are increasingly necessary. In order to explore that potential, I synthesize the foundational works of Lev Vygotsky, Stephen Nachmanovich, and Ed Sarath with newer scholarship on 21st century education.

Considering the stakes of chronic environmental degradation, what are the roles of musicians and artistic institutions in the climate crisis? Weaving through a suite of pieces I composed for duets and landscape (2+1=3) at the Summer Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation in Québec's spectacular Gaspésie, I look into how humans/composers/improvisers, might practice music in ways that recognize and activate its ecological and environmental significance. Drawing from autoethnographic and ecomusicological frameworks, I explore how writing for (and with) people and places might afford vital ways of cohabitating and relating to the biosphere—creating an emergent/spontaneous ethics of care, listening and participation.

Beginning in 2008, American studies professor Sherrie Tucker and dance professor Michelle Heffner Hayes developed a series of concurrent course offerings across American Studies and Dance at the University of Kansas. In this collaboratively authored article, Tucker and Hayes reflect on the surprising ramifications of that first grafted class in 2008, and subsequent collaborations, in order to posit a model of improvisational pedagogy of grafting across disciplines that may invigorate research across disciplines in the liberal arts. Tucker and Hayes describe a praxis that motivates teaching and inspires research in a dynamic interactive relationship.

Intercultural creative practice is a topic that has attracted a lot of recent scholarly attention. As improvising musicians from very different cultures and traditions, we decided to analyse a recent collaborative performance that we were involved in to unpack the ways that we were interacting through music. As performers, we were interested primarily in the ways that such an analysis would help us to work more effectively in intercultural situations, but we also wanted to understand the synergies and dissonances that exist between improvising cultures more broadly. For the essay we adopt the musical form of a krithi, a Carnatic compositional form that allows for joint statements and improvised exchanges. Through this dialogic process, we propose improvisation as a kind of negotiation that occurs between musicians, and between musicians and their culture, highlighting some of the specific challenges and rewards that we faced.

In this essay, we consider what musical improvisation can offer humanists interested in interdisciplinary cultural study. We begin by exploring our shared backgrounds as jazz-informed percussionists and our coincidental meeting in the same interdisciplinary graduate program. In the process, we identify key homologies between our musical and scholarly practices: namely, careful and constant practice; a deep commitment to listening; and an openness to conceptual translations across a variety of contexts. As we unpack these ideas, we draw on a wide range of artistic-theoretical texts, years of after-hours conversations, and occasional music collaboration; ultimately, we articulate, for each other and potential readers, that the dynamic, collaborative ethic required for successful improvisation nurtures scholarly interdisciplinary practice by valuing individual efforts as part of communal strivings.

Thinking Through Improvisation implies two meanings: 1) carefully examining all that improvisation encompasses including how it is practiced, and 2) using improvisation to generate ideas or performances. Using a First Year Seminar course I taught for 20 years, I illustrate how a general course in improvisation can introduce students to improvisation as a way of thinking in diverse fields and can strengthen liberal arts skills in critical and creative thinking. Interdisciplinary and multicultural approaches are readily incorporated as are a range of activities including writing, critical reading, performance, and creative problem solving. Risk taking, trust, creativity, adaptability, teamwork, respect for knowledge, abstract and practical thinking and the joy of creative discovery are explored through discussion and practice of improvisation. Scientific explanations of improvisation are compared to subjective experiences of improvisational performance. These activities lay a groundwork for creative explorations of the discipline-oriented curriculum in the range of fields subsequently encountered by liberal arts students.

This paper proposes the term generative improvisation to describe free improvisations that are constrained by a set of human-determined limits. The purpose of this term is to emphasize the way that rules limit performer choices and define the meanings of different musical gestures to generate specific kinds of performances. By examining Narrative Generator (for Living Machine), a rule-based improvisation for narrator, instruments, and electronics, I demonstrate that generative improvisation can be used to produce a performance of a coherent improvised narrative and soundtrack by basing the rules of the work on the theories and practices employed in film and video games. From there, the paper examines the relationships between different performers, the performers and the composer, and the composer, performer, and audience in the work, discussing the potential impacts of these relationships. Finally, I consider the role accessibility plays in spreading these potential impacts to a broader audience.

The short article recollects Pauline Oliveros's transmission of Deep Listening through everyday, direct, and playful means of improvisation.

This article hazards a definition of improvisation as a "contingent encounter," not in order to settle definitional debates, but in order to productively re-evaluate questions around improvisation as an aesthetic and socio-political force. Here, I argue that thinking improvisation through contingency highlights several key characteristics while leaving behind a set of problematic assumptions that often accompanies thinking improvisation in social spaces. First, I outline these characteristics, establishing what it might mean to bring contingency to bear on a musical performance. Subsequently, I compare two instances of "transatlantic improvised music": Eric Dolphy's "Out to Lunch," and "Waves, Linens, and White Light" by contemporary free improvisers, Mr. K. I conclude by sketching some of the implications of taking this experimental definition seriously, arguing that it re-orients improvisation away from a rarefied behavior and more towards a potentiality hidden inside each moment.

There is increasing appreciation for the role that location plays in the experience of a musical event. This paper seeks to understand this role in terms of our habitual relationships to place, asking whether and how being musical somewhere can expand and transform our habituated comportment there, and with what consequences. This inquiry is anchored in a series of site-specific improvised performances by Jen Reimer and Max Stein, and the theory and practice of the late experimental music pioneer Pauline Oliveros. The argument made interpreting these performances is grounded in Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of embodiment, and Alia Al-Saji’s reception of it. This paper claims that such site-specific improvised performances can elicit a sort of hesitation in our everyday style of sensory-motor conditioning, and, concomitantly, awaken a layer of sensory living amenable to radically new sonic and behavioural configurations.

This paper highlights the positive role that improvisation can have in addressing trauma, and the utililization of improvisation within music therapy and creative music practice. After a brief overview of these topics, the musical piece Wisconsin is examined. Practical insights are gained into the use of improvisation as an effective tool to address and alleviate trauma within the Sikh community. Improvisation can serve as a powerful device to speak to trauma, uncover unconscious experiences, and move towards healing.

This piece includes IONE's reflections on her experiences at the “Just Improvisation: Enriching Child Protection Law Through Musical Techniques, Discourses, and Pedagogies” symposium, held May 29-30, 2015 at the Sonic Arts Research Centre, Queen's University of Belfast.

For the court and processes of child protection the course of events and outcomes are not known before hand - responsiveness, temporal sensitivity, adaptability, creativity, all features of improvisation, are necessarily apparent in seeking just outcomes. In this way, the experience of those engaged in the urgent process of child protection offers a real-world account of improvisation in action. One in which there may be great cost to individuals and families. At the heart of this process is listening and the quality, nature and intent of such listening is critically discussed. The surprisingly “myriad out-workings,” the need for “bespoke solutions” together with the understanding of listening emerge as key features of law and improvisation. The distinct articulations of this process become an inter-disciplinary description of improvisation that is of value for practice in music and the breadth of improvisation research.

The Blooming of Forgetting is a report on two community music projects grounded in improvisation and deep listening that took place in Melbourne, Australia, in 2016: combining personal reflection and theorising, an attempt is made to analyse what occurs "on the ground" in community music improvisation; what resonances for ideas of community ontology might arise, and why "deep play" could be an ideal zone for such projects to aim towards.

At present improvisation appears to be a tacit practice within law; regularly used but largely unacknowledged amongst legal practitioners. This article advances the benefits of improvisation and calls for a more conscious and critical practice of improvisation in law. However, in this process of moving from the tacit to the critical it is imperative to avoid an abstract practice of improvisation, as has often been advanced in recent musical improvisation literature. The way in which we propose this can be avoided is by foregrounding contingency. This discussion urging towards a contingent practice of improvisation in law will focus on the role of the judge and judicial improvisation.

Her Honour Judge Patricia Smyth (HHJ Smyth) was interviewed on Wednesday 22 June 2016 at the Newry Courthouse, Northern Ireland, by barrister Seamus Mulholland and legal academic Sara Ramshaw. HHJ Smyth was an invaluable contributor to the Into the Key of Law research project, volunteering as a project interviewee, focus group member and a panel participant at the “Just Improvisation: Enriching child protection law through musical techniques, discourses and pedagogies” Symposium at Queen’s University Belfast, 29 – 30 May 2015. In this interview, HHJ Smyth provides valuable insight into a variety of important issues, such as training judges to become better improvisers, the limits of improvisation in, particularly, Northern Irish family law, the existing structures or skills that make improvisation possible and, perhaps most importantly, the importance of creativity, “bespoke solutions”, and attentive or deep listening in the family law realm.

The practice of “free-improvised” music would seem to present a privileged site for the study of contingent relations: a world in which individuals dynamically adapt within a network of conduct which constitutes its own meaningfulness; in which sound and touch seem co-extensive. This would seem to be an ideal context for the discovery of empathic and ethical behavior. It is argued here, however, that “doing” empathy is in itself improvisatory, and that improvising can thus be placed centre-stage as an essential adapting and organizing skill, rather than a peripheral or abstruse “aesthetic” conduct.

Focusing on dance and music improvisation, this paper explores the parallels between these practices and social therapeutics - a performative and radically humanistic approach to psychology, therapy, education and community building. This methodology has helped us further frame our experience of performance and improvisation as powerful tools for social transformation. We structure the paper around the growth and development of the artistic and community-based work of the Institute for Improvisation and Social Action (ImprovISA), an organization we co-founded and now direct on the U.S.-Mexico border.

This piece includes Dr. Ellen Waterman’s reflections on the “Just Improvisation: Enriching Child Protection Law Through Musical Techniques, Discourses, and Pedagogies” symposium, held May 29-30, 2015 at the Sonic Arts Research Centre, Queen's University of Belfast.

The language we use to talk about things, as is self evident, affects what we are able to think and do. Western musical culture, as Small has eloquently argued, has a strong focus on the musical work, music as a thing rather than an activity. There are parallels with judicial process being focused on judgments, the outcomes of the process. However, bringing judicial process and musical improvisation into a dialogue resonates the extent to which terminologies may block understanding and possibilities for progress/alternative views. In this paper I argue that the concept of the musical work is inimical to an understanding of improvisation, and speculate on the extent to which this is paralleled by the notion of judgment as outcome rather than process.