Shortlisted for the Penderyn Music Book Prize 2017. In this first installment of acclaimed music writer David Toop's interdisciplinary and sweeping overview of free improvisation, Into the Maelstrom: Music, Improvisation and the Dream of Freedom: Before 1970 introduces the philosophy and practice of improvisation (both musical and otherwise) within the historical context of the post-World War II era. Neither strictly chronological, or exclusively a history, Into the Maelstrom investigates a wide range of improvisational tendencies: from surrealist automatism to stream-of-consciousness in literature and vocalization; from the free music of Percy Grainger to the free improvising groups emerging out of the early 1960s (Group Ongaku, Nuova Consonanza, MEV, AMM, the Spontaneous Music Ensemble); and from free jazz to the strands of free improvisation that sought to distance itself from jazz. In exploring the diverse ways in which spontaneity became a core value in the early twentieth century as well as free improvisation's connection to both 1960s rock (The Beatles, Cream, Pink Floyd) and the era of post-Cagean indeterminacy in composition, Toop provides a definitive and all-encompassing exploration of free improvisation up to 1970, ending with the late 1960s international developments of free music from Roscoe Mitchell in Chicago, Peter Brötzmann in Berlin and Han Bennink and Misha Mengelberg in Amsterdam.

In the first book to examine the overlooked relationship between musical improvisation and philosophical hermeneutics, Sam McAuliffe asks: what exactly is improvisation? And how does it relate to our being-in-the-world? Improvisation in Music and Philosophical Hermeneutics answers these questions by investigating the underlying structure of improvisation. McAuliffe argues that improvising is best understood as attending and responding to the situation in which one find itself and, as such, is essential to how we engage with the world. Working within the hermeneutic philosophical tradition – drawing primarily on the work of Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Jeff Malpas – this book provides a rich and detailed account of the ways in which we are all already experienced improvisers. Given the dominance of music in discussions of improvisation, Part I of this book uses improvised musical performance as a case study to uncover the ontological structure of improvisation: a structure that McAuliffe demonstrates is identical to the structure of hermeneutic engagement. Exploring this relationship between improvisation and hermeneutics, Part II offers a new reading of Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics, examining the way in which Gadamer's accounts of truth and understanding, language, and ethics each possess an essentially improvisational character. Working between philosophy and music theory, Improvisation in Music and Philosophical Hermeneutics unveils the hermeneutic character of musical performance, the musicality of hermeneutic engagement, and the universality of improvisation.

"Edgar Allan Poe is one of American culture's most iconic figures, inspiring countless derivations beyond the literary realm, from commercial illustration and kitch to art installations and video games. Why has Poe been so hugely influential in media other than his own? What do filmmakers, composers, and other artists find in Poe that suits their purposes so often and so variously? Poe's works are violent and brooding, memorable both for certain grisly images and for certain prevailing moods-dread, creepiness, mournfulness. They are, in other words, distinctly graphic and richly atmospheric. Jonathan Elmer locates the source of Poe's fascination for artists in these two vernacular aesthetic categories-the graphic and the atmospheric-and how well they describe our experience of the multi-media world. Elmer uses Poe to explore these two terms and track some deep patterns in their use, not through theoretical labor but through close encounters with a wide sampling of aesthetic objects that avail themselves of Poe's work. Poe, we learn, has come to exemplify a modern method of aesthetic production. It is as if he left his box of tools lying around for others to pick up and play with. The bundle of Poe traits-his thematic emphasis on extreme sensation, his flexible sense of form, his experimental and modular method, his iconic personal profile-amount to what could be called a Poe "brand," one as likely to be found in music videos or comics as in novels and stories. Ranging from René Magritte and Claude Debussy to Lou Reed, Roger Corman, and Spongebob Squarepants, Elmer shows how the Poe brand opens trunk lines to aesthetic experiences fundamental to a multi-media world"--

Jean-Paul Sartre’s work has been taken up by writers outside of Europe, particularly in the Global South, who have developed phenomenological and existential analyses of racism, colonialism, and other structures of domination. Sartre’s philosophical concepts are fundamentally open, for instance his notions of humanism, bad-faith, and freedom. As a situational, committed thinker, Sartre worked to illuminate the urgent questions of his time at the concrete and the abstract level. The creolization of Sartrean thinking is consistent with the existential projects of engagement, authenticity, political commitment, and liberation from oppression. This volume asks how his European model of phenomenology was (and can be) transformed when it is taken up by thinkers who have lived experience with colonialism. They book also engages Sartre in his relation to key interlocutors (especially Beauvoir and Fanon) who were influenced by him and who influenced him in turn. The book demonstrates how Sartrean philosophy is productively related to Africana philosophy, Africana phenomenology, and Africana existentialism. This volume treats creolization not as a discrete topic, but as an interdisciplinary, global approach to reading and thinking. Each author’s contribution embodies an aspect of creolizing thinking, understood as the articulation of cultural and conceptual hybridity under conditions of eurocentrism, epistemic colonialism and the legacies of slavery. Creolizing Sartre re-reads Sartrean texts to recast existential themes through the lens of Caribbean philosophies and the broader philosophies of the Global South. Contributors: Lawrence Bamikole, Sybil Newton Cooksey, James Haile III, Paget Henry, T Storm Heter, Thomas Meagher, Michael J. Monahan, Anthony Sean Neal, Nathalie Nya, Kris F. Sealey, Hiroaki Seki, Jonathan Webber.

The two-volume 'Oxford Handbook of Music Performance' provides the most comprehensive and authoritative resource for musicians, educators and scholars currently available. It is aimed primarily for practicing musicians, particularly those who are preparing for a professional career as performers and are interested in practical implications of psychological and scientific research for their own music performance development; educators with a specific interest or expertise in music psychology, who will wish to apply the concepts and techniques surveyed in their own teaching; undergraduate and postgraduate students who understand the potential of music psychology for informing music education; and researchers in the area of music performance who consider it important for the results of their research to be practically useful for musicians and music educators.

The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical and Qualitative Assessment in Music Education offers global, comprehensive, and critical perspectives on a wide range of conceptual and practical issues in music education assessment, evaluation, and feedback as these apply to various forms of music education within schools and communities. The central aims of this Handbook focus on broadening and deepening readers' understandings of and critical thinking about the problems, opportunities, spaces and places, concepts, and practical strategies that music educators and community music facilitators employ, develop, and deploy to improve various aspects of music teaching and learning around the world.

The two-volume Oxford Handbook of Music Performance provides a resource that musicians, scholars and educators will use as the most important and authoritative overview of work within the areas of music psychology and performance science. The 80 experts from 13 countries who prepared the 53 chapters in this handbook are leaders in the fields of music psychology, performance science, musicology, psychology, education and music education. Chapters in the Handbook provide a broad coverage of the area with considerable expansion of the topics that are normally covered in a resource of this type. Designed around eight distinct sections - Development and Learning, Proficiencies, Performance Practices, Psychology, Enhancements, Health & Wellbeing, Science, and Innovations - the range and scope of The Oxford Handbook of Music Performance is much wider than other publications through the inclusion of chapters from related disciplines such as performance science (e.g., optimizing performance, mental techniques, talent development in non-music areas), and education (e.g., human development, motivation, learning and teaching styles) as well as the attention given to emerging critical issues in the field (e.g., wellbeing, technology, gender, diversity, inclusion, identity, resilience and buoyancy, diseases, and physical and mental disabilities). Within each chapter, authors have selected what they consider to be the most important scientific and artistic material relevant to their topic. They begin their chapters by surveying theoretical views on each topic and then, in the final part of the chapter, highlight practical implications of the literature that performers will be able to apply within their daily musical lives.

The revised edition of Sync or Swarm promotes an ecological view of musicking, moving us from a subject-centered to a system-centered view of improvisation. It explores cycles of organismic self-regulation, cycles of sensorimotor coupling between organism and environment, and cycles of intersubjective interaction mediated via socio-technological networks. Chapters funnel outward, from the solo improviser (Evan Parker), to nonlinear group dynamics (Sam Rivers trio), to networks that comprise improvisational communities, to pedagogical dynamics that affect how individuals learn, completing the hermeneutic circle. Winner of the Society for Ethnomusicology's Alan Merriam prize in its first edition, the revised edition features new sections that highlight electro-acoustic and transcultural improvisation, and concomitant issues of human-machine interaction and postcolonial studies.

Music's role in animating democracy--whether through protests and demonstrations, as a vehicle for political identity, or as a means of overcoming social divides--is well understood. Yet musicians have also been drawn to the potential of embodying democracy itself through musical processes and relationships. In this book, author Robert Adlington uses modern democratic theory to explore what he terms the 'musical modelling of democracy' as manifested in modern and experimental music of the global North. Throughout the book, Adlington demonstrates how composers and musicians have taken strikingly different approaches to this kind of musical modelling. For some, democratic principles inform the textural relationships inscribed into musical scores, as in the case of Elliott Carter's 'polyvocal' compositions. Pioneers of musical indeterminacy sought to democratise the relationship between composer and performers by leaving open key decisions about the realisation of a work. Musicians have involved audiences in active participation to liberate them from the passivity of spectatorship. Free improvisation groups have experimented with new kinds of egalitarian relationships between performers to reject old hierarchies. In examining these different approaches, Adlington illuminates the achievements and ambiguities of musical models of democracy. As a result, this book not only offers an important new perspective on modern musicians' engagement with a central political idea of the past century, but it also encourages a deeper and more critical engagement with the idea of democracy within present-day musical life.

Global Jazz: A Research and Information Guide is an annotated bibliography that explores the global impact of jazz, detailing the evolution of the African American musical tradition as it has been absorbed, transformed, and expanded across the world’s historical, political, and social landscapes. With more than 1,300 annotated entries, this vast compilation covers a broad range of subjects, people, and geographic regions as they relate to interdisciplinary research in jazz studies. The result is a vivid demonstration of how cultures from every corner of the globe have situated jazz—often regarded as America’s classical music—within and beyond their own musical traditions, creating new artistic forms in the process. Global Jazz: A Research and Information Guide presents jazz as a common musical language in a global landscape of diverse artistic expression.