Improvisation/Indeterminacy

Abstract

Improvisation and indeterminacy seem to be aligned terms, both being associated with an acceptance of contingency and an openness to the unexpected. We can find diverse discussions of contingency across improvisation studies. Dan DiPiero, for example, usefully proposes a simple definition of improvisation as a ‘contingent encounter’, where contingency stands as an umbrella term temporally spanning the not-yet-known and the could-have-been-otherwise (2018, 2). Similarly, Gary Peters highlights that improvisation characterises choices ‘within a contingent context, without absolute criteria, where all outcomes are thus intrinsically uncertain’ (2012, 2). Meanwhile, indeterminacy in music is most associated with the work of John Cage and with the development of his understanding of ‘experimental music’. DiPiero’s and Peters’s conceptions of improvisation are at first glance congruent with Cage’s famous definition of the experimental act: ‘not [...] an act to be later judged in terms of success and failure, but simply as of an act the outcome of which is unknown’ (1961, 13). But how the terms of improvisation and indeterminacy have been deployed, and the musical practices they have been associated with, has not always borne this congruence out. The connections and divergences between improvisation and indeterminacy remain an open area of inquiry. This special issue of Contemporary Music Review follows from volume 38, issue 5, on the theme of ‘Improvisation and Social Inclusion’, edited by Franziska Schroeder, Koichi Samuels, and Rebecca Caines. That issue emphasised how, through the field of improvisation studies alongside a wide variety of practical endeavours, improvisation has come to take on a valence far beyond its traditional musical domain, becoming a tool for thinking through notions of exand in-clusion, diversity, and access, as well for engaging with wider social, cultural, and political issues, in diverse performance practices. The essays included in that issue took as their task examining how improvisation can enable us to explore new modes of inclusion and social organisation (Schroeder, Samuels, and Caines 2019, 442). Improvisation was widely understood Contemporary Music Review, 2021 Vol. 40, No. 4, 359–365, https://doi.org/10.1080/07494467.2021.2001934