Making music together, or improvisation and its others

Authors

  • Nicholas Cook Royal Holloway
  • Fausto Borém Federal University of Minas Gerais

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.35699/2317-6377.2007.55070

Keywords:

improvisation, music performance, community, musicology, aural/oral tradition

Abstract

It has often been claimed, for instance by Ingrid Monson, that Western ‘art’ music lacks the interactive, collaborative dimension of jazz. This article works from interaction in jazz, and approaches to such interaction by jazz theorists, towards a more general model of music as social action: I suggest that we value music—-all music—-largely as a medium through which we learn how to work with others, how to negotiate shared courses of action within compositional frameworks that are better understood as prompts to rather than specifications of action. Seeing Western ‘art’ music from such a perspective, and so taking seriously the social dimension of music that Alfred Schutz long ago emphasized in the paper whose title I have borrowed, helps to redress the excessive orientation towards the written text that has arguably given musicologists such a lop-sided view of music.

Author Biographies

  • Nicholas Cook , Royal Holloway

    Nicholas Cook, elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2001, is an Associate Researcher and Professor in the Music Department at Royal Holloway, University of London, where he coordinates the CHARM research group (Centre for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music). He served as editor of the Journal of the Royal Musical Association, co-editor of the Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Music (2004), and is currently an Associate Editor of Musicae Scientiae. He has taught at universities in Hong Kong, Sydney, and Southampton. His academic work is interdisciplinary, including books and articles related to aesthetics, sociology, psychology, and the analysis of both classical and popular music. Among his books published by Oxford University Press are A Guide to Musical Analysis (1987), Music, Imagination, and Culture (1990), Beethoven: Symphony No. 9 (1993), Analysis Through Composition (1996), Analysing Musical Multimedia (1998), Rethinking Music (1999; co-edited with Mark Everist), Empirical Musicology: Aims, Methods, Prospects (2004; co-edited with Eric Clarke), and Music: A Very Short Introduction (1998), the latter published in over 10 languages. His most recent book is The Schenker Project: Culture, Race, and Music Theory in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna. He is currently writing the book In Real Time: Music as Performance and researching performance analysis in recordings of Chopin's Mazurkas.

  • Fausto Borém , Federal University of Minas Gerais

    Fausto Borém is a Professor at the School of Music of UFMG and a researcher at CNPq. He coordinates the research groups ECAPMUS (Studies in Control and Motor Learning in Musical Performance) and PPPMUS ('Pearls' and 'Pickles' of Musical Performance), created and edits the journal Per Musi, and established the Master's program in Music at UFMG. He publishes works in the fields of performance, composition, musicology, ethnomusicology, and music education. As a double bassist, he has received several awards in Brazil and abroad.

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Published

2007-01-07

Issue

No. 16 (2007): General Topics

Section

Articles in Portuguese/Spanish

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How to Cite

“Making Music Together, or Improvisation and Its Others”. 2007. Per Musi, no. 16 (January): 07-20. https://doi.org/10.35699/2317-6377.2007.55070.