- 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 Corinne, or Italy 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 THEM
- 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 Impromptu, 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
This chapter investigates the “being in the moment” sought after and celebrated by improvisers. Through an initial reference to Hegel’s phenomenology of the “unhappy consciousness,” the discussion proper begins with Soren Kierkegaard’s commentary and existential radicalization of this in Either/Or. Understood as precisely an out-of-the-moment experience, such unhappiness is here understood as being at the heart of much post-romantic art, exemplified in Theodor Adorno’s perspective on the yearning of modernism understood as the promesse de Bonheur. If unhappiness, conceived as temporal dislocation, is considered essential to art, then the question is posed as to how improvisation’s desire for temporal resolution fits (if at all) into such an aesthetic schema. A conclusion is drawn by combining Kierkegaard’s proto-existentialism with both Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology of internal time-consciousness (retention/intention/protention) and Maurice Blanchot’s writings on solitude, fascination, and “time’s absence.” The result is a far more complex and temporally differentiated conception of the “being in the moment” moment, one that attempts to do justice to the interlaced continuity and discontinuity of the improvised event.
Keywords: moment, unhappiness, improvisation, temporality, time-consciousness, protention, retention, solitude, fascination
Gary Peters, University of the West of England
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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 Corinne, or Italy 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 THEM
- 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 Impromptu, 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
