Contingent Encounters

Front matter

IMPROVISATION IN MUSIC AND EVERYDAY LIFE

DAN DIPIERO

Improvisation in Music and Everyday Life

Part One: Contingent Music

Intro: Listening to Contingency 33 2. Out to Lunch 36 3. Waves, Linens, and White Light 70 4. Gunweep | Elephant in the Room 88 Outro: Improvisation and Contingency 111

Part Two: Contingent Life

Intro: On the Nature of This Comparison 115 5. The Structure of Everyday Life 118 6. Everyday Practices 138 7. Perception, Situation, Orientation 158 Outro: All Times Are Uncertain 172 8. Conclusion: On Aesthetics and Politics 174

Coda: Improvisation, Cultural Analysis, and Collective Action 192 viii Contents

Notes References

Index

Digital materials related to this title can be found on the Fulcrum platform via the following citable URL: https://doi.org/ 10.3998 /mpub. 12066852

Acknowledgments

This is a very personal book for me, and reflects the winding course of my studies, now appearing in hindsight as a series of happy accidents that have culminated in the work you’re reading. For this reason, I have many people to thank, from many different periods in my life. I’ve always had an easier time writing than talking, so I hope readers will forgive my taking an opportunity to attempt to put some things into words.

Bill Ransom is a legendary figure in the Cleveland music scene, a drummer whose musicianship is only rivaled by his accomplishments as an educator. For my part, I count him as my first real teacher, who knew exactly the right balance of rigor and camaraderie that I needed. Bill accepted me as a student when I could not effectively read music, and in two years got me ready for college auditions. In the process, he reframed my relationship to music, making everything else possible.

In college, Bob Breithaupt inducted me into a long jazz drumming tradition that continues to be passed down, and which I feel privileged to be a part of. Those fundamentals still inform everything that I do. Thanks also to Dina Lentsner, who introduced me to the idea of academic research about music in the first place. Many lessons about musicianship from Stan Smith and Mark Flugge are still with me daily. Among my musical circle, their influence is universal and immense. At the time I chose to attend Capital University, I could not have anticipated the close-knit community that I would find there, and here I have to name a few people in particular: Josh Bryant, Alex Burgoyne, Tom Davis, Aaron Quinn, and Kayla Sadowy, besides remaining lifelong friends in music, also understand me in a way that no one else can.

At CalArts, I had the privilege of learning from some of the most inspiring musicians working, including Wadada Leo Smith, Vinny Golia, x Acknowledgments

Darek Oles, Larry Koonse, and in one special course, Charlie Haden. I was experiencing a lot of growing pains during this period, and my thanks go to all of them for their generosity and patience. Of course, I spent the most dedicated time with Joe La Barbera, my third truly great drum teacher. Thanks to Joe for his encouragement, kindness, and wisdom. Thanks too to the friends I made during my short time in Los Angeles: Lauren Elizabeth Baba, Steven van Betten, Megan Broughton, Jessy V. Castillo, Max Gualtieri, Jak Kyokong, James Brandon Lewis, Michael Timothy Lockwood, Ryan Parrish, Philip Rankin, Gregory Uhlmann, and Colin Woodford continue to inspire me.

It was also at CalArts that I began to transition, very accidentally, into academia. Much credit here is reserved for Kathy Carbone, in whose music research seminar I used a lit review assignment as an opportunity to process my own feelings, including a newly discovered interest in doing research. That she allowed me to work on and then submit a document six times too long ensured that my nascent interest wasn’t snuffed.

In 2010 I enrolled in Contemporary Aesthetic Theory because it was the only class with any slots, and I needed the credit. Deep appreciation goes to Arne De Boever for allowing me into the class having read not a word of any literature, and behind everyone else. The accident of my enrollment became one of those transformative moments in my trajectory, opening up a world that I had not known existed. The following year, I applied to the Aesthetics and Politics program, took the course again, and began my tentative steps into scholarship. Throughout, Arne and Martin Plot were encouraging and invigorating advisers.

In 2014 I returned to Columbus, where I began to try to bring my musical and academic lives together. The Comparative Studies department at Ohio State helped me to do this. Thanks to everyone who makes that department what it is. I am very grateful in particular to my dissertation committee, Barry Shank, Philip Armstrong, Ryan Skinner, and Eugene Holland, for engaging with my project with such care and attention. Ryan helped fill in critical gaps in my thinking, and I thank him for his ongoing and multifaceted support. Thanks to Gene too for his guidance, enthusiasm, and many stimulating talks over lunch. From the beginning, Barry and Philip were the most engaged and responsive advisers anyone could ask for, unfailingly generous, always close readers, and now dear friends.

Here too, a word must be reserved for Barry, who has read more of my work than anyone should have to: of the truly innumerable ways that you have helped me over the years, it seems to me now that I finally

Acknowledgments xi learned how to think about music from talking with you in your office. I don’t know when or how it happened. But that it happened there and because of you is certain. Thank you for all those talks, and many more to come.

Many more people have helped in big and small ways to bring this book into existence. Thanks first of all to those who waded through early drafts and offered help: Barry Shank, Eleanor Paynter, Christine Capetola, and the many others who I sent segments along the way. Throughout the writing process, I had helpful and illuminating conversations with Michael Duch, Andreas Winter, and Ingrid Laubrock. Thanks to them for their candor and easy cooperation. Thanks to Cynthia Pearson and the Eric Dolphy Trust for image permissions, James Newton for putting us in touch, and Chamisa Redmond at the Library of Congress, for the scans of Dolphy’s work.

I was fortunate to have a slate of generous and rigorous peer reviewers on this book. Many thanks to David Arditi for his encouragement and help during both rounds. A second anonymous reader gave me incredibly generous and instructive feedback on chapters 1 and 4. In the second round, a third reader helped greatly with my overall positioning of the project. Much appreciation goes to everyone at the University of Michigan Press, including Marcia LaBrenz, Ellen Douglas, Briana Johnson, and Anna Pohlod, for such detailed work at every level. I especially want to thank Sara Cohen: it’s been wonderful to work with you at each stage, and your close attention and faith in the project have meant the world to me. Additionally, I am proud and very grateful that this book has been published open access thanks to Sara Cohen, University of Michigan Provost Susan M. Collins, and everyone supporting the Fund to Mission program.

Rachel Elliott took an interest in my work at what was for me a critical time. Our subsequent conversations helped me to think through some knotty dissertation problems, and they meant a lot to me besides. Thanks also to Mack Hagood for his encouragement, much appreciated. Tracy McMullen has been super patient and generous with my many questions about the improvisative some years ago. I also want to thank Tracy and Marc Hannaford for helping me to convene what I’m sure will be a fantastic panel on improvisation, as well as Nichole Rustin-Paschal for agreeing to participate. Laura Portwood-Stacer’s work helped me tremendously during the book proposal stage and beyond. Through the luck of the draw, I am also delighted to have won one of her amazing knitting projects, which is based on the cover of this book, and therefore xii Acknowledgments very meaningful indeed. Thanks to Patrick Nickleson, a wonderful editor and colleague, for specific and general support along the way. I’m glad that we were going through this process on a similar timeline, and I hope we can cross paths again soon. Likewise, Chris Stover has been generous with editing, advice, and much support for many years. Since 2017 Christine Capetola has been a constant interlocutor, reader, writing partner, and friend. Huge appreciation to her for her numerous concrete contributions to my thinking, and many long conversations about music.

A special shoutout to the cool kids—Timothy Model, Yuri Ramirez, and Basak Durgun—who brought joy into my Oxford year: thank you for adopting me and not giving me a choice about it. I am, obviously, so much better for it.

Thanks to the brilliant Lucy Zimmerman for being so many things in our lives, and for showing us how to look out for people. And perpetual, warmest appreciation goes to the Dunkle crew, Eleanor Paynter and Gennaro Di Tosto, for the friendship, support, and intellectual community they sustain, from Belle’s to Block Haus.

In addition to those already mentioned, I must name here some friends and family, without whom I would not be myself: Tom Kychun, Joe Mastrantoni, Akshai Singh, Courtney Yergin, as well as all the incredible people that Hannah has brought into my life (there are, almost literally, too many to name). In the years that I was writing this book, my life has felt rich and sustainable in no small part because of the Columbus music scene. Big love to everyone here who makes it feel special, including some I haven’t named yet: Devin Copfer, Lauren Davis, Mollie Haughn, Sydney McSweeney, Andrew Sais, everyone who was in the room when we sang “The Way I Feel Inside,” and on and on beyond.

Segrave City is a wild and glorious home that Iam overwhelmed by and grateful to be a part of. All my love to Carol (first and foremost), Doris, Sam, Etta, Quinny P., Grace, Oscar, Raymond, and the original PoMoBro, Jeffrey. Here’s to many more adventures on both sides of the pond.

Infinite thanks and love go to my family, always. My parents have supported me unequivocally—that I have always known I could count on them is something for which I am deeply lucky and that I constantly feel in my life. Thanks also to my brother Justin, for this completely perfect book cover (and many others along the way), as well as his humor in general. I am lucky to count him as a friend.

Acknowledgments xiii

Finally, I struggle as always with how to thank Hannah Segrave, my partner in everything. This book, like so much else, has been possible because of her support, and the joy she grows in our life. If I really get started here, I won’t be able to stop—instead, Pl just say thank you. You continue to help me understand who I am (and not just because you inspired me to go to grad school). I am so excited to see what comes next for us and to meet it together.

Portions of chapter 1 were published in 2018 as “Improvisation as Contingent Encounter, or: The Song of my Toothbrush,” Critical Studies in Improvisation/Etudes critiques en improvisation 12, no. 2. Early versions of some chapter 8 material appeared in 2020 as “Ranciére and Improvisation: Reading Contingency in Music and Politics,” in Ranciére and Music, edited by Joao Pedro Cachopo, Patrick Nickleson, and Chris Stover, 207- 29. Edinburgh University Press.

This book was written without the support of any grants, sabbatical periods, course releases, research funding, subventions, an indexer, or travel stipends save the small amount to which I had access as a graduate student. In many cases, this is so because I was preemptively prohibited from applying for such opportunities due to my status as a contingent faculty member. For the same reason, excepting one year, this book was also written without the benefit of an office. I raise this here not to portray some feat or accomplishment on my part, nor to glorify a neoliberal sense of the hustle, nor to vent out of bitterness. Rather, I cannot but take space usually kept for acknowledging institutional support to emphasize the fact that such support is reserved for an increasingly rarefied few, and withheld from everyone else—particularly given the ways in which academic disparities are often overlooked or intentionally obscured among colleagues. Without any illusions about its utility, I want to pause here for the perhaps uncomfortable acknowledgment of the systemic inequalities that suffuse and indeed build academic workspaces, overdetermining who can afford to do research in the first place, or how scholarship is produced. The myth of meritocracy in this industry will have us believing that the fact that most published academic books are written by tenure-track faculty is a result of their having written the best work. But of course, it is exactly the other way around; it is the minority with job security who by and large are enabled to produce the research, and it is that work that we then understand as superior. We will never know what scholarship we are losing because of the unsustainable nature xiv Acknowledgments of employment that awaits all those professors and scholars who have not been lucky enough—in the most literal sense of the word—to land a permanent job. In any case, it is only because of the intellectual, emotional, and material support of the above-named mentors, colleagues, friends, and family that I have been able to write this book. Thank you indeed.

ONE | Introduction Improvisation as Contingency Everyday life is improvised to the extent that it becomes invisible.’

[This] is an experiment, not a judgment.?

This project begins with the suspicion that, although references to improvisation are ubiquitous in contemporary American culture, those references seem to invoke improvisation in different ways, for different purposes, and with quite different stakes. Consider some recent examples. In 2018, Nike announced a new branding project and “philosophy” called “ISPA: Improvise/Scavenge/Protect/Adapt.”® Kristian Kloeckl’s 2020 book on urban planning “makes improvisation useful and applicable to the condition of today’s technology-imbued cities and proposes a new future for responsive urban design.”* Columbia College philosopher Stephen Asma thinks that, generally speaking, “We could all do

»5 with learning how to improvise a little better.”? Meanwhile, food blogs offer “6 Ways to Become a Fearless Improviser in the Kitchen.” “Medical Improv” is an emerging term for “the adaptation of improvisational theater principles and training techniques to improve communication, cognition, and teamwork in the field of medicine.”” Relatedly, business consulting firms advise readers on “How to Improvise Your Way through COVID-19.”° More infamously, improvisation has been frequently invoked to describe the behavior of the forty-fifth president, for example in articles like, “Trump’s Dangerous Love of Improvisation”;? “Trump’s

Highest-Stakes Improvisation”;'? and “Donald Trump Ushers in the

Era of Political Improvisation,”'’ to say nothing of those that mention improvisation without including the word in the title." Different still: “Improvise, Adapt, Overcome” is something of an unofficial motto for the United States Marine Corps. In the United Kingdom, Tide’s “business current account” is a startup-focused banking service that promises clients “one less thing to improvise.” And as we know, it has been a long-established truism in the business world that flexibility, adaptability, and improvisation itself are valuable skills, characterized as distinguishing qualities, uniquely suited for our increasingly dynamic workplaces." Over and over again, we take recourse to the language of improvisation in order to describe something of our experiences in the world, but what that something involves seems to be quite different in every case. Such differences have gone underexamined, and we continue to discuss improvisation as if its meaning or function is self-evident across all spheres of activity.

Each of these brief examples help to illustrate two points that will be central for the rest of this book: first, that improvisation factors into our everyday experiences in ways that we often take for granted, but which are quite significant for understanding our participation in such experiences. Second, that improvisation is not one thing we can locate in one or another situation; rather, improvisation is utterly dependent on those situations in the first place. In other words, how we understand, experience, and talk about improvisation changes based on the specificities through which the improvisation happens, and therefore, improvisation itself also changes.

The primary purpose of this book is to investigate the relationship between improvisation in music and in everyday life. My central argument is that this relationship is best characterized by and explored through the notion of contingency—that, in both musical and social situations, improvisation is itself a contingent activity that necessarily emerges in response to and as a part of contingent situations. In both cases, subjects interact with the worlds in which they are enmeshed, responding according to their own life experiences and the constraints of the situation. Fundamental to my overall perspective is the claim that the acting subject is only one element among the plurality of interacting forces that constitute an improvisation.

The idea that improvisation is present outside of musical or other creative practices is certainly not new. But while many scholars and musicians have noted the relationship between musical improvisation and everyday life, the quality and character of that relationship have not been explored in detail. This book aims to examine that connection in earnest by asking such questions as: Are there meaningful differences between social and musical improvisation? What is it that links these practices? And finally, what are the aesthetic and political implications of that connection?

In this study, I am not interested in exploring music in everyday life,” nor am I interested in studying improvisation as an artistic practice per se. Rather, I am specifically interested in improvisation as an “idea,” and how it changes or does not change based on its context. In order to explore this idea, I analyze musical and quotidian case studies through the lens of contingency. Critically, in this book, contingency is not only about indeterminacy, but also the structuring presence of quite determined factors—both in and beyond the situation in question—that shape what is experienced as indeterminate. Contingency is not a cognate term for open, spontaneous, or flexible, but references the “open” and “closed” at once. By foregrounding contingency in all its complexity, I propose that we begin to ask different questions about the performances that take place in each sphere. The bracketing—‘“music” (Part One) and “everyday life” (Part Two)—is the first of many artificial categorizations I erect, as there is not necessarily or always a clear demarcation between them. All such categorical distinctions should be taken as heuristics, made in order to help identify the operation of contingency in what are actually impenetrably complex situations.

Improvisation

Despite its ubiquity within Western musical practices, by the twentieth century improvisation had become, in Vijay Iyer’s words, “one of Western music’s principal others: constructed as a kind of epistemological antithesis to composition.” Iyer notes that, given copyright law’s exclusive recognition of “fixed” musical objects, improvisation “enjoys a status (Iyer 2019, 3).'° “Not coincidentally,” as Iyer also notes, improvisation is widely of literally zero value in the Western economy of musical ‘wor understood as a central throughline in African American musical practices.!” Particularly through early jazz history, attention to and dismissal of improvisation emerged as one of the main logics through which white discourses attempted to discredit and decry the music’s validity, further sedimenting improvisation’s disparaged status by racially coding it as a base, instinctual modality opposed to whiteness and artistic merit, both discursively located in the notion of the composition as “work” of art."* Following George E. Lewis, Eileen Southern, and many others, this move can be seen as an extension of racist white perceptions that conflated the musical practices of enslaved Africans with “noise,” beyond the pale of reason, order, or sensibility.

By contrast, and in some ways as a response to this history, humanities scholarship in the past twenty years has seen a surge of interest in improvisation as a distinct phenomenon, even as its themes overlap with other inquiries into embodiment, performance, and subjectivity. Largely emerging from the efforts of what is now the International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation (IICSI), critical improvisation studies (CIS) is an interdisciplinary field that engages improvisation in a wide variety of capacities, methods, and topics, from the cognitive sciences to continental philosophy. This field has produced critical work on the kinds of practitioners long overlooked in scholarship, finally historicizing and theorizing artists such as the Feminist Improvising Group (Smith 2004), The Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (Lewis 2008) and Jeanne Lee (Porter 2013), as well as more canonical (but nevertheless underthought) figures like George Russell (Porter 2008) and Billy Strayhorn (Barg 2017). At the same time that it has drawn long overdue attention to many pioneering improvisers, this field is also expanding the study of improvisation into other disciplinary and cultural spaces, enriching and diversifying the traditional association between improvisation studies and jazz studies.'? Additionally, much research around CIS works to expand the notion of improvisation outside the arts, using it to rethink questions of aesthetics, ethics, subjectivity, and politics.”

Critical improvisation studies is a diverse field of inquiry, with many ongoing debates and no unified theory about the function or nature of improvisation.” For the purposes of this book, one of the most salient and central of these debates is also one of the most basic: the question of how improvisation is defined. Interestingly, most scholars associated with CIS defer defining improvisation directly, a tendency that I discuss more thoroughly in the conclusion. Here, I want to briefly address how this deferral inadvertently raises conceptual and political problems in the field. Specifically, while many scholars have declined to outright define the concept, this has not prevented the deployment of a rather specific understanding of the term, what is sometimes referred to as its “ideal” version, as in “improvisation at its best.” This version of improvisation, often derived from scholars’ analyses of African American musical practices, is implicitly and explicitly characterized as specia/—that is, such studies variously suggest that improvisation’s ostensibly distinct and traditionally undervalued qualities have something to teach us about inter acting with others. If we study how musicians, actors, and other artists engage improvisation, the idea goes, we might learn something about how to change institutions outside the arts, introducing perspectives from the former in order to rethink the latter.” I will call this approach the “progressive theory” of improvisation, which is arguably most visibly articulated through the Improvisation, Community, and Social Practice series published by Duke University Press.” At the farthest end of this formulation lies what I will call the “utopian strain” of theorizing improvisation, which posits improvisation as a necessarily subversive and liberatory practice. Both the progressive and utopian understandings are relevant when considering Iyer’s important criticisms of the field, which in turn bear on this book’s framing.

Iyer is straightforward in his critique: while he urges music theorists to take improvisation’s historically disparaged status seriously, he argues that “the resurgent academic interest in improvisation” does not offer a way out, “at least not as it is currently studied” (2019, 1). Iyer argues that the turn toward improvisation in academia, without, often enough, even citing Black scholars, bears all the marks of a “rehabilitative gesture, a vindication, a hollow, performative rescue of what society has deemed abject” (2019, 4) and which usually confers disproportionate value on the institutions and individuals who aim to do the rehabilitating. One part of the problem according to Iyer is that improvisation studies has not adequately dealt with the question of difference.** Returning to the definitional question I raised above, another way of putting this might be that improvisation is deployed in much scholarship according to a perspective that remains unmarked—that is, it is understood as open and flexible where it is actually both consistent and particular. The difficulty here lies in the fact that thinking, for example, about how the legal profession can be retheorized through improvisation seems to presuppose an understanding of what improvisation is in the first place, a presumption that becomes especially untenable when we consider that most improvisation scholars have tacitly or explicitly declined to define improvisation. On this view, part of improvisation studies’ general refusal to define the word, while in some ways testifying to its historically multifaceted deployment, might also be understood as the very means by which convenient assumptions about its ostensibly special qualities are imported without commentary.” More often than not, unspoken implications characterize improvisation as a creative and open-minded process, one that is subject-focused and valorized insofar as it represents a departure from the normal way of doing things. In my view, such assumptions are particularly problematic inasmuch as they mask the exceptions that Iyer raises, diverting attention away from cases in which such liberatory experiences don’t apply evenly or ideally onto social life, and in which the consequences of improvisatory scenes vary wildly for marginalized groups and individuals.

This returns us to the utopian and progressive theories of improvisation. Each of these share the view that improvisation is a positive social force; the difference between them lies in that the progressive theory recognizes this force as historical and contingent, rather than inherent and necessary. In other words, the progressive theory tends to study particular cases in which improvisation has produced social good in order to understand how such possibilities—never guaranteed—were actualized in specific contexts. This view allows that oppressive, mundane, or otherwise nonideal cases of improvisation exist, but implies that scholars should focus on improvisation’s capacity to foster social change, and that asymmetries born of difference provide opportunities to learn, rather than barriers.” In this way, such theories also overlap with and in some ways reinforce the most dominant, “common-sense” deployments of the term in public discourses: this normative understanding, including many of the examples offered in the beginning of this book, consistently characterizes improvisation as open, spontaneous, and socially useful, implicitly contrasting improvised activity with normal, boring, routinized existence.

In contrast to those perspectives which assume or seek to draw out improvisation’s special qualities, this book follows Iyer, Lewis, and others who have theorized improvisation as variously not special. Emphatically ordinary, improvisation is, for Iyer, simply synonymous with living, or as he puts it, “experience” itself (Iyer 2016). Contingent Encounters, as both a project and a term, aims to foreground, elaborate, and probe this minor perspective in improvisation studies, which cuts against the progressive view outlined above, and which posits improvisation—far from a special kind of experience or activity—as simply our mode of being alive. The notion of a contingent encounter is offered here to articulate the particular, embodied facticity of our everyday improvisations, to specify how contingency appears in and structures our lives, concurrently engender ing improvisation as a normal matter of course.”’

Improvisation is everywhere because existence is contingent. It is tempting to dismiss this line of thinking, either because it seems to bear a kind of common sense (and thus appears obvious), or else because it is easy to sublimate the actually interesting provocations this formulation raises into a dismissal along the lines of, “if X is everything then it’s also nothing.” But what if we pushed past either what seems so uncontroversial as to be accepted (thus ignored), or else what can be dismissed, both of which amount to the same insofar as they discourage a full accounting? What if we take seriously the idea that improvisation is the same thing as living? How might that change our understanding of improvisation’s aesthetic, political, and theoretical implications?

Throughout this book, my approach to that challenge is to show how contingency is the one constant that remains true of all improvisations— that contingency is not a “feature” of improvisation, but rather the fundamental core of what it means to improvise. In conversation with Georgina Born, Eric Lewis, and Will Straw’s characterization of the “radically contingent nature of improvisation” (2017b, 11), I ask: What would it mean to take this “nature” seriously, to center it above any other characteristics? Throughout this project, my answers to these questions will involve the following four points, each flowing from the main thesis:

1. Contra the notion of improvisation as a creative capacity developed by subjects, improvisation can be productively understood as coextensive with a contingent encounter between subjects, objects, and multiple environments, where environments encompasses everything that has an effect, from physical spaces to the discourses governing how things are perceived or known. In this formation it is the subject’s role that has historically overdetermined theorizations of improvisation.

2. Given the radical contingency of every improvisation, each is incommensurate with every other instance, even within the same genre or medium—that is, improvisation is always a singularity.

3. If improvisation is always a singularity, then its ontology must be understood through contingency, and contingency alone, as this remains the only constant from improvisation to improvisation. In spite of every irreducible, irreplicable difference, it is always true that improvisation is contingent, and equally so.

4. The singularity of improvisation tightly links it, on a formal level, with practices in everyday life. This link is so tight, I suggest, that it is not so much that improvisation in music and in social life are identical, but more that all musical and social actions (and the musical and social spaces they create) are inherently improvisatory. That is, we do not act but through improvisation.

One early consequence of this thinking is that improvisation can’t necessarily be understood as an open or spontaneous process; against conventional readings of improvisation as a domain of relative freedom, I elaborate how thinking improvisation through contingency shifts our perspective, showing that particular social investments cause improvisation to be read as an exercise in freedom. Rather than necessarily involving openness, risk-taking, or unpredictability, contingency insists that every improvisation simply depends. Following this, another consequence might be a recognition of the impossibility of valorizing improvisation, or to paraphrase Iyer (paraphrasing Wadada Leo Smith), the necessity of taking the term out back and beating it to death.”