Wednesday, March 30, 2011

"Improvisation as a Way of Life"



from Columbia University

On Monday March 7, Prof. George Lewis, Director of the Center for Jazz Studies and Case Professor of American Music at Columbia University, presented the University Lecture on the subject of "Improvisation as a Way of Life" to an overflow crowd in the Low Library Rotunda.

Improvisation as a Way of Life:
Reflections on Human Interaction


Many musical improvisers have understood their sounds and practices as addressing larger questions of identity and social organization, as well as creating politically inflected, critically imbued aesthetic spaces. Following a 1964 suggestion by Alfred Schutz that a study of the social relationships connected with the musical process may lead to some insights valid for many other forms of social intercourse, the realization that improvisation is not limited to the artistic domain, but is a ubiquitous aspect of everyday life, can lead humanists and scientists toward new models of intelligibility, agency, ethics, technology, and social transformation.

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