Musical improvisation is often held up as a paradigm of creativity and freedom. But the ‘un-fore-seen’ (im-pro-vised) decisions a musician makes ‘in the moment’ always relate to pre-given pro-visos – e.g., to an instrument’s tuning, or to ‘emergent organising structures’ like rhythms and grooves – that both constrain and facilitate the music that gets made. Furthermore, such provisos are always intertwined with the habits a musician develops as she is initiated into a particular musical praxis.
From an enactivist point of view, we can therefore say that improvisations are not simply the product of individual musicians, but are distributed across materials, spaces, practices, and co-performers, challenging how we conceive of agency and of ourselves as individual subjects.
At AIAS, I will explore the entanglement of habits, rhythms, and creative agency by collaborating with expert improvisors to articulate a situated and systemic account of these phenomena. Reflecting on agency as distributed across provisos, time, and co-participants will have consequences not only for how we think about music, but also the ‘grand improvisation’ we call life.
