Artistic Research in Jazz

Positions, Theories, Methods

Michael Kahr, Michael Kahr

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000399110
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Música

This book presents the recent positions, theories, and methods of artistic research in jazz, inviting readers to critically engage in and establish a sustained discourse regarding theoretical, methodological, and analytic perspectives.

A panel of eleven international contributors presents an in-depth discourse on shared and specific approaches to artistic research in jazz, aiming at an understanding of the specificity of current practices, both improvisational and composed. The topics addressed throughout consider the cultural, institutional, epistemological, philosophical, ethical, and practical aspects of the discipline, as well as the influence of race, gender, and politics. The book is structured in three parts: first, on topics related to improvisation, theory and history; second, on institutional and pedagogical positions; and third, on methodical approaches in four specific research projects conducted by the authors.

In thinking outside established theoretical frameworks, this book invites further exploration and participation, and encourages practitioners, scholars, students, and teachers at all academic levels to shape the future of artistic research collectively. It will be of interest to students in jazz and popular music studies, performance studies, improvisation studies, music philosophy, music aesthetics, and Western art music research.

Part I

Improvisation, Theory, and History

1Improvising Artistic Research

Marcel Cobussen

Introduction

Can and should there be a (conceptual) space specifically devoted to artistic research and/in jazz or musical improvisation that is not already explored, occupied, or engaged with by other musics? That was perhaps the first and most urgent question I posed to myself when starting to reflect on a proper theme for this chapter. In other words, what legitimates this specific topic? What can be said about the relation between artistic research and jazz or improvised music that cannot be said about the relation between artistic research and “non-improvised” music?¹ How is artistic research taking place within the domains of jazz and improvisation? And although this will definitely be the starting point of my modest meditations, I was immediately thinking of an opposite direction as well: what can improvisation contribute to artistic research? How can artistic research benefit from improvisational strategies? How can artistic research be improvised and what would that imply in terms of its methodology? And perhaps a more provocative statement could be: artistic research cannot take place without improvisation.

In the first part of this chapter I will elaborate on how artistic research might be understood to occur when one wants to learn to improvise. Here the focus will be on an ethnographic and phenomenological study of the improvising body as well as the resulting corporeal knowledge that exceeds or precedes conceptualizations. In the second part a turn occurs: improvisation is not so much the aim anymore, but becomes a method through which artistic research is executed. Here, improvising is conceived and understood as a process of continuous experimentation and exploration, not reproducing or augmenting knowledge per se, as in the sciences, but almost always singular and stimulating a form of reflexivity that affects perception and experience rather than understanding. Improvising as a research method implies opening up a field of possibilities and trying to keep it open – by allowing risks, misunderstandings and ambiguity, etc. – instead of aiming at a clearly demarcated and pre-established endpoint, solution, or answer.

The Knowing Body

Arguably, one of the first written accounts of artistic research on improvisation is David Sudnow’s auto-ethnographic Ways of the Hand from 1978; in fact, this is artistic research or practice-based research through music avant la lettre, as these terms were practically unknown at that time. Sudnow is an amateur pianist, eager to learn to improvise and in the book he attempts to describe – as meticulously as possible and – “from the viewpoint of the actor, not through an introspective consciousness, but by a fine examination of concrete problems” – the execution of “an orderly activity, which improvisation certainly is” (Sudnow, 1978, xiii). Through a phenomenological and auto-ethnographic approach, he describes the process of learning to improvise in a more or less traditional jazz idiom, that is, a corporeal practice in which the body is trained to perform jazz patterns.

“I see fingers doing thinking” (Sudnow, 1978, xiii) – these five words from the Preface expressed (at first) the quintessence of this study for me and, in fact, the rationale of practice-based research in and through music in a nutshell. I see fingers doing thinking testifies to a kind of knowing or consciousness that is embodied rather than articulable in or by the mind, an actual-corporeal involvement instead of or next to (mainly) theoretical doing. This involvement is primarily a sensuous, non-cognitive experience, a term that can be related to Alfred North Whitehead’s term “prehension”, coined by him in order to circumvent rationalistic connotations. Probably this kind of incorporated knowledge is immediately recognizable for musicians and they will (probably) also recognize that, as soon as they try to put this knowledge into words, they start to stammer or fall silent altogether. In my opinion, it is exactly this recognition of a space where knowledge is present, where it presents itself in a non-conceptualizable concreteness, nearly unattainable for verbal reflection and analysis, a space where knowledge can only be expressed through specific and orderly bodily movements, that offers a good entrance to think about artistic research and simultaneously justifies its existence. And to be more precise, I employ the word knowledge here in a rather broad sense, not only as cognition, but also as affect, experience and awareness.

I see fingers doing thinking discloses a space where theory and practice are mutually implicated, where doing and thinking meet: better yet, where doing becomes thinking and thinking becomes doing, where doing = thinking. It is significant that Sudnow starts his book with a quote from Martin Heidegger’s What Is Called Thinking? in which he reflects on the hand’s essence:

[T]he craft of the hand is richer than we commonly imagine. The hand does not only grasp and catch, or push and pull. The hand reaches and extends, receives and welcomes […] [T]he hand’s gestures run everywhere through language, in their most perfect purity precisely when man speaks by being silent. And only when man speaks, does he think – not the other way around, as metaphysics still believes. Every motion of the hand in every one of its works carries itself through the element of thinking, every bearing of the hand bears itself in that element.

(Heidegger, 1968, 16)

Sudnow doesn’t refer to or reflect on this quote in the rest of his book, but it is interesting to dwell for a moment on Heidegger’s ideas on what it means to think. As J. Glenn Gray makes clear in his introduction to the English translation of Heidegger’s twenty-one university lectures from 1951–1952, which together form What Is Called Thinking?, Heidegger sets his ideas about thinking apart from more regular definitions such as having an opinion, representing a state of affairs, forms of ratiocinating that lead to logical conclusions, or systematic conceptualizing. Instead, thinking for Heidegger is an involved, patient and disciplined focusing on what lies before us in order to discover the essential nature of things; thinking is receptive and attending to what things convey; thinking is responding to their call, non-conceptually and non-systematically, yet with rigor and strictness: “The call of thought is thus the call to be attentive to things as they are, to let them be as they are and to think them and ourselves together” (Heidegger, 1968, xiv-xv). Heidegger connects this to the principle of inter-esse, to be among and in the midst of things, which differs from finding things interesting, as the latter can freely be regarded as uninteresting the next moment, to be replaced by something else (Heidegger, 1968, 5).

The hands come in when Heidegger compares thinking to building a cabinet, that is, to a handicraft, with “craft” literally meaning the strength and skill in the hands. For a true cabinetmaker, all the work of his hands is rooted in the kind of thinking Heidegger proposes. Instead of merely using tools and simply making furniture, a true cabinetmaker

makes himself answer and respond above all to the different kinds of wood and to the shapes slumbering within the wood – to wood as it enters into man’s dwelling with all the hidden riches of its nature. In fact, this relatedness to wood is what maintains the whole craft. Without this relatedness, the craft will never be anything but empty busywork.

(Heidegger, 1968, 14–15)

The kind of doing Heidegger refers to here not only bears similarity to the way he wants to rethink thinking; thinking is this doing, establishing this relatedness to things, that is, being with and in the midst of things. Using wood means handling it – “which has always been a turning to the thing in hand according to its nature, thus letting that nature become manifest by the handling” (Heidegger, 1968, 195). Once more, thinking and doing are not simply comparable activities: the one is present in the other. Heidegger uses almost the same words when defining thinking as when describing handicraft.

Sudnow summarizes Heidegger’s thoughtful meditations with the simple phrase “a hand knowing” (Sudnow, 1978, 52), which of course also echoes the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and, as already stated, also underlies an important rationale for artistic research: the body has knowledge, practical knowledge, which (perhaps) cannot be achieved through thinking with the brain alone.² Connected to Heidegger’s thoughts on handling, Sudnow’s “knowing hand” knows how, where and when to touch the keys in order to make the piano sound optimally; the knowing hand treats the instrument with respect, responding to its actual state. In that sense, the common phrase “to master the instrument” would need some reconsideration from the perspective of Heidegger’s contemplation: musician and instrument enter into a dialogue, a mutual exchange of actions and reactions.

The Instrument

In a subtle way, another agent has entered stage here: the instrument. Better yet, what has been emphasized in the above paragraphs is the interaction between two bodies, the human body and the instrument’s body. In fact one could state that music making in general and improvising in particular emerges from this interacting between human and instrument:³ the fingers press the keys, pluck the strings, or close the holes; the feet press the pedals; the mouth senses the reed, Bakelite or metal; the violin presses against arm and shoulder; the cello touches the knees; the saxophone makes you feel your neck, etc. As catchy a title as it may be, Ways of the Hand seems to ignore that improvising requires more than being able to put your hands at the right places and let the fingers doing thinking. Of course Sudnow is aware of this too: not only does he mention the role of the arms and shoulders and, in fact, the position of the whole body when discussing the possibilities within improvising, he also stresses the role of vision (“Looking’s work became expansive in scope”, 9), of the ears (“I was immediately listening in a different way”, 14; “I was listening-in-order-to-make-my-way”, 38; “To leave the hands out of the ‘hearing’ enterprise at the piano is to leave music as a production unexamined”, 43), and, perhaps most importantly, the necessity of utilizing various functions of the brain, from motivation (“The hand had to be motivated to particular next keys to depress”, 18) to recognition (“I would play a figure, go for its repetition, get some way into it, and […] accomplish the beginning of a reiteration (transposition, inversion, pitched-essential duplication, exact duplication, etc.)”, 56). Additionally, he mentions the keyboard as an active participant:

The keyboard is a setting of places, with measurable dimensions. The hand is an ‘organ’ with measurable dimensions. The knowing relationships obtaining between them, the way the hand finds itself correspondingly configurated to fit dimensions of this keyboard, involves a mobile hand engaged in a course of action.

(Sudnow, 1978, 58)

Almost thirty years after Sudnow’s auto-ethnographic report, Aden Evens emphasizes in Sound Ideas that the instrument doesn’t disappear in the act of music making; instead it offers itself to the musician. But what sort of offer is this? According to Evens, “it offers to the musician a resistance; it pushes back […] [T]he instrument cooperates by resisting” (Evens, 2005, 159). And, he continues, the technique a musician develops by practicing is not meant to minimize this resistance:

on the contrary, technique is designed to place the instrument’s resistance in contact with the musician, to allow him to feel the many dynamics it offers of force and sound […] [T]echnique is experiment, feeling the subtlest shape of the instrument, the tiniest textures of its response as inseparable from the timbral minutiae of the sound.

(Evens, 2005, 160)

In other words, the instrument is not just a passive tool, submitted to the musician’s desires; neither does a musician simply seek to impose his will on the instrument: “Musician and instrument meet, each drawing the other out of its native terr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• Contributors
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Artistic Research in Jazz: An Introduction
• Part I Improvisation, Theory, and History
• Part II Institutional and Pedagogical Considerations
• Part III Specific Projects
• Index