Summer Institute Fosters Improvisational Encounter and Social Virtuosity 
By George Blake

​The 2014 Summer Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation was held June 29 to July 12 at Memorial University’s School of Music. The institute was integrated with The Sound Symposium, St. John’s Festival of New Music and the Arts.  

More than 30 participants gathered to theorize, critique, and practice improvisation and arts-based research. This included musicians, storytellers, actors, anthropologists, philosophers, and educators. It was an immersion experience into beautiful sounds, thoughtful people, and generative, interdisciplinary confusion. Our collective questioning of the fundamental ideas that brought us together took place in an environment buzzing with animated rigour that didn’t cut improvisation or arts-based research any slack. It was a fresh, living encounter, tingling with the excitement of multiple approaches elegantly colliding.


Jesse Stewart and class prepare a remix of St. John's 2014 Sound Symposium using a reactable. Photo: Frederique Arroyas

Professor Jesse Stewart guided us through a generative and creative experience. In addition to a college seminar format, the institute was organized around the processes of creating a group scholarly forum and a collectively improvised Sound Symposium performance. These multiple formats helped us realize a sensibility of finding comfort in the uncomfortable, or, as participant Kimber Sider put it, “remaining open to the experiences that the experienced hide from.” It was a fresh improvisational space where co-learners reached beyond narrow silos of expertise. During a striking vocal workshop that he led at the institute, Chris Tonelli used a phrase from improviser Maggie Nicols that, for me, speaks to the institute as a whole. Although intellectual and artistic virtuosity were in abundance, it was the space of “cultivating social virtuosity” that defined the experience.

 
Storytelling panel at the Forum on Improvisation as Practice Based Research. Carolyn Chong, Waged Jafer, Kathe Gray, Gabriela Sanchez Diaz, Hadi Milanloo, Leila Qashu. Photo: Frederique Arroyas

Dong-Won Kim is a Korean percussionist, pedagogue, vocalist, composer, and improviser. Since 1984, he has studied various forms of traditional music, ranging from farmers’ drumming and dance, shaman music, and Pansori accompaniment, as well as music theory from the great Korean music masters. Recognized internationally as a master of his form, he has performed at the United Nations General Assembly Hall as a member of Yo-Yo Ma’s Silkroad Ensemble Project. While Dong-Won plays a range of percussive instruments, his primary instrument is the jang-go: an hourglass-shaped drum with two leather heads that are struck with mallets. One side of the drum has a higher pitch than the other. The instrument is used in samul nori traditional folk music, which was popularized by Korean farmers. Samul nori music typically features four different percussion instruments, each of which represents a force in nature. The jang-go symbolizes water or rain.

Dong-Won is celebrated for his participation in a range of intercultural projects. Last year he dazzled Guelph Jazz Festival (2013) audiences with his receptive and energetic playing in various contexts, particularly as part of the World Percussion Summit that opened last year’s Guelph Jazz festival. Dong-Won is also known for his pedagogy, as he has taught at various institutions including Harvard University and the Musik Akademie Basel, Switzerland. He currently teaches music as a professor of Wonkwang Digital University. In addition, he has written several fairy tales for children and was featured in a music documentary film, Intangible Asset Number 82 (2009). In September 2014, Dong-Won will step into the role of IICSI’s Improviser-in-Residence. In this role, Dong-Won will initiate new community impact workshops alongside musical performances in order to promote and advocate community building and diversity through improvisatory practices.

This month’s Oral History focuses on an interview with Dong-Won Kim conducted by Joshua D. Pilzer as part of the Improvising Eye Colloquium that was held on December 17th, 2010 in Guelph. Pilzer is an Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology in the Faculty of Music at the University of Toronto. His first book, Hearts of Pine, about singing in the lives of Korean survivors of the Japanese “comfort women” system, was published in 2012 by Oxford University Press. In the interview, Pilzer and Dong-Won Kim discuss a range of topics, including rhythmic structure, Korean music, the spirit, pitch,
certainty and uncertainty in harmony, and musical inspiration.

The full transcript of the interview is available, here.

Quote of the Month:

"And so the experiment really rests on the following: What happens in the brain during something that's memorized and over-learned, and what happens in the brain during something that is spontaneously generated, or improvised, in a way that's matched motorically and in terms of lower-level sensory motor features? [...] Science has to catch up to art”
―Charles Limb 

Charles Limb is a doctor and a musician who researches the way musical creativity works in the brain. The quotation is taken from his Ted talk entitled, "Your Brain on Improv." In that Ted talk, Limb probes how the brain works during musical improvisation — so he put jazz musicians and rappers in an fMRI to find out. Of course, it could be argued that Limb reduces creativity to a machine-like process, analogous to a computer and program written in synapses. Can and should improvisation be studied this way? What do you think?

Watch the Ted talk, here.

About ICASP

 

The international Improvisation, Community, and Social Practice research project explores musical improvisation as a model for social change. The project plays a leading role in defining a new field of interdisciplinary research to shape political, cultural, and ethical dialogue and action.

As a form of musical practice, improvisation embodies real-time creative decision-making, risk-taking, and collaboration. Improvisation must be considered not simply as a musical form, but as a complex social phenomenon that mediates transcultural inter-artistic exchanges that produce new conceptions of identity, community, history, and the body. This project focuses primarily on jazz and creative improvised music. The dominant theoretical issues emerging from this music have vital social implications.

Check out our diverse research collection.