- The Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies
- Dedication
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Contributors to Volume 1
- Introduction: On Critical Improvisation Studies
- Cognitive Processes in Musical Improvisation
- The Cognitive Neuroscience of Improvisation
- Improvisation, Action Understanding, and Music Cognition with and without Bodies
- The Ghost in the Music, or the Perspective of an Improvising Ant
- The Improvisative
- Jurisgenerative grammar (for alto)
- Is Improvisation Present?
- Politics as Hypergestural Improvisation in the Age of Mediocracy
- On the Edge: A Frame of Analysis for Improvisation
- The Salmon of Wisdom: On the Consciousness of Self and Other in Improvised Music and in the Language that Sets One Free
- Improvising Yoga
- Michel de Montaigne, or Philosophy as Improvisation
- The Improvisation of Poetry, 1750–1850: Oral Performance, Print Culture, and the Modern Homer
- Germaine de Staël’s <i>Corinne, or Italy</i> and the Early Usage of Improvisation in English
- Improvisation, Time, and Opportunity in the Rhetorical Tradition
- Improvisation, Democracy, and Feedback
- Improvised Dance in the Reconstruction of <i>THEM</i>
- Improvising Social Exchange: African American Social Dance
- Fixing Improvisation: Copyright and African American Vernacular Dancers in the Early Twentieth Century
- Performing Gender, Race, and Power in Improv Comedy
- Shifting Cultivation as Improvisation
- Improvisation in Management
- Free Improvisation as a Path-Dependent Process
- Musical Improvisation and the Philosophy of Music
- Improvisation and Time-Consciousness
- Improvising <i>Impromptu,</i> Or, What to Do with a Broken String
- Ensemble Improvisation, Collective Intention, and Group Attention
- Interspecies Improvisation
- Spiritual Exercises, Improvisation, and Moral Perfectionism: With Special Reference to Sonny Rollins
- Improvisation and Ecclesial Ethics
- Index
Abstract and Keywords
Abstract: Beginning with Pierre Hadot’s idea of spiritual exercises and Stanley Cavell’s conception of moral perfectionism, this essay argues that improvisation can be understood as a practice of spiritual self-transformation. Focusing on the example of Sonny Rollins, the essay investigates the ways in which Rollins’ improvisations embody a series of philosophical concepts and practices: the care of the self, the Stoic exercise of cosmic consciousness, the problem of moral exemplarity, the ideas, found in the later Foucault, of a limit attitude and an experimental attitude, and so on. The underlying claim of the essay is that improvisation is not only an aesthetic exercise, but also a social and ethical practice that can give rise to existential transformations.
Keywords: spiritual exercises, moral perfectionism, relation to oneself, self-transformation, moral exemplarity, cosmic consciousness, ethical practice, limit attitude, experimental attitude
University of Chicago
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- The Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies
- Dedication
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Contributors to Volume 1
- Introduction: On Critical Improvisation Studies
- Cognitive Processes in Musical Improvisation
- The Cognitive Neuroscience of Improvisation
- Improvisation, Action Understanding, and Music Cognition with and without Bodies
- The Ghost in the Music, or the Perspective of an Improvising Ant
- The Improvisative
- Jurisgenerative grammar (for alto)
- Is Improvisation Present?
- Politics as Hypergestural Improvisation in the Age of Mediocracy
- On the Edge: A Frame of Analysis for Improvisation
- The Salmon of Wisdom: On the Consciousness of Self and Other in Improvised Music and in the Language that Sets One Free
- Improvising Yoga
- Michel de Montaigne, or Philosophy as Improvisation
- The Improvisation of Poetry, 1750–1850: Oral Performance, Print Culture, and the Modern Homer
- Germaine de Staël’s <i>Corinne, or Italy</i> and the Early Usage of Improvisation in English
- Improvisation, Time, and Opportunity in the Rhetorical Tradition
- Improvisation, Democracy, and Feedback
- Improvised Dance in the Reconstruction of <i>THEM</i>
- Improvising Social Exchange: African American Social Dance
- Fixing Improvisation: Copyright and African American Vernacular Dancers in the Early Twentieth Century
- Performing Gender, Race, and Power in Improv Comedy
- Shifting Cultivation as Improvisation
- Improvisation in Management
- Free Improvisation as a Path-Dependent Process
- Musical Improvisation and the Philosophy of Music
- Improvisation and Time-Consciousness
- Improvising <i>Impromptu,</i> Or, What to Do with a Broken String
- Ensemble Improvisation, Collective Intention, and Group Attention
- Interspecies Improvisation
- Spiritual Exercises, Improvisation, and Moral Perfectionism: With Special Reference to Sonny Rollins
- Improvisation and Ecclesial Ethics
- Index
