Improvisation has gone far toward demonstrating the human capacity to constructively engage cultural situations of turmoil and change, and to make the best of-even redirect and overcome-oppressive and repressive conditions. ![]() ![]() As mentioned in Chapter Four, it has begun to engage English-language scholars (as has, again, the concept of "performance" that moved from theater to cultural studies) beyond its identity as an aspect of an art form it has begun to do so concurrently, naturally enough, with the increase of English-language literature on post-free-improvisational issues in music (also mentioned, in Chapter Three, and identified as an international, rather than American, discourse-the most interesting parts of which, from Australia, we will glimpse here). "Improvisation," as both a practical and theoretical issue, has the potential to kindle and anchor a full-blown interdisciplinary discourse. Like the German discourse on German free jazz, albeit larger, this body of literature is new and small enough to consider almost comprehensively, and to seek from it a role for this study as informed as possible by the whole of the discourse. The efficiency of the improvisational process was evidenced by the limited demands that generating novel music placed on the skilled improvisers’ attention, and in the abstract relationship between experts’ musical intentions and the specific actions they produced in bringing their intentions to fruition.Īfter overviewing that political-psychological location, but before "peopling" it with FMP in the chapters to come, we survey yet another site on the discursive map: the literature (mostly musicological, some anthropological and other) on improvisation. The findings in these studies illustrate the extent to which expert jazz musicians acquire and refine procedures for generating well-formed musical ideas at a minimal cognitive cost. Here, the soloist’s attention was focused on the developmental and associative implications of his musical ideas, whereas the accompanist’s attention was devoted primarily to assessing the aesthetic and logistical implications of the soloist’s part while remaining vigilant for opportunities to directly interact. Study 3 examines the perceptions of two musicians performing as a duo, both serving at different times as soloist and accompanist. Their descriptions contained almost no explicit details of the music they were about to play inexperienced improvisers, contrastingly, conceived of upcoming music largely in terms of its specific details (e.g., note selection, the quotation of licks). In Study 2, the contributions of nonconscious processes to jazz improvisation were inferred from experienced improvisers’ descriptions of their intentions for upcoming music during improvised solos. In Study 1, this was demonstrated by the ability of experienced improvisers to generate well-formed improvised solos during dual-task conditions, in which they allocated attentional resources to a secondary nonmusical task. Studies 1 and 2 provide evidence of a process for generating and controlling musical ideas that improvisers can enact with little conscious mediation. The results of three studies that this investigation comprises illustrate the optimizations of thinking and behavior that underlie the capacities of skillful jazz improvisers, enabling them to meet the demands of improvised performance effectively and efficiently. ![]() Jazz improvisation represents one of the more impressive examples of human creative behavior, but as yet there has been little systematic investigation of its cognitive bases.
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