Improvisation and Social Aesthetics

Georgina Born is Professor of Music and Anthropology at the University of Oxford and the editor of Music, Sound, and Space: Transformations of Public and Private Experience.Eric Lewis is Associate Professor of Philosophy at McGill University and the author of The Video Art of Sylvia Safdie.Will Straw is Professor of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University and the coeditor of The Cambridge Companion to Pop and Rock.

• Acknowledgments  viiIntroduction. What is Social Aesthetics? / Georgina Born, Eric Lewis, and Will Straw  1Part I. The Social and the Aesthetic1. After Relational Aesthetics: Improvised Music, the Social, and (Re)Theorizing the Aesthetic / Georgina Born  332. Scripting Social Interaction: Improvisation, Performance, and Western "Art" Music / Nicholas Cook  593. From the American Civil Rights Movement to Mali: Reflections on Social Aesthetics and Improvisation / Ingrid Monson  784. From Network Bands to Ubiquitous Computing: Rich Gold and the Social Aesthetics of Interactvity / George E. Lewis  91Part II. Genre and Defintion5. The Social Aesthetics of Swing in the 1940s: Or the Distribution of the Non-Sensible / David Brackett  1136. What Is "Great Black Music"? The Social Aesthetics of the AACM in Paris / Eric Lewis  1357. Kenneth Goldsmith and Uncreative Improvisation / Darren Wershler  160Part III. Sociality and Identity8. Strayhorn's Queer Arrangements / Lisa Barg  1839. What's Love Got to Do with It? Creating Art, Creating Community, Creating a Better World / Tracey Nicholls  21310. Improvisation in New Wave Cinema: Beneath the Myth, the Social / Marian Froger, translated by Will Straw  233Part IV. Performance11. Social Aesthetics and Transcultural Improvisation: Wayde Compton and the Performance of Black Time / Winfried Siemerling  25512. Devices of Existence: Contact Improvisation, Mobile Performances, and Dancing through Twitter / Susan Kozel  26813. The Dramaturgy of Spontaneity: Improvising the Social in Theater / ZoË Svendsen  288References  309Contributors' Biographies  335Index  339

"An indispensable collection that cracks open a site for more rich and interdisciplinary work." - Dan DiPiero (boundary 2) "[Readers] will be more than rewarded by the insight it offers into the social aesthetics of improvisation, issues you will no longer be able to ignore as you listen to your next improv recording or attend your next improv concert." - Lawrence Joseph (Musicworks) "Through both their rigorous theoretical grounding and curation of such a brilliant array of cross-disciplinary contributions, Born, Lewis and Straw offer a thoroughly inspiring set of tools for the academy to begin theorizing where, how and for whom art’s social mediations are occurring. I cannot recommend it highly enough." - Toby Young (Visual Studies)