Abstract
In this chapter, I explore the ethical dimension of improvised music via an engagement with Gadamer’s conception of the artwork as event. In particular, I suggest that the practice of improvised music offers a direction back to a collective experience that previously was the domain of ritual. This experience, which I will convey via parallels between Gadamer’s work and the anthropology of Victor Turner, coloured with descriptions by practicing improvisers, suggests extensions of subjectivity and agency beyond the human individual – both with other listeners, and with the other-than-human elements of the performance. I argue that the improvised musical or artistic event is a fractal phenomenon in which we play out the ethical relationships of our broader forms-of-life on a microcosmic scale. In important ways, then, participation in improvised art can contribute to a re-interpretation of how we relate to others, and offers paths to how we might live out what Heidegger called an ‘original’ ethics, sharing in the world’s unfolding by actively letting others be. Such a re-understanding can, I conclude, help us clarify our enmeshment with the other-than-human, as well as the value of artistic practice as a form of philosophy.
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Notes
- 1.
All musicians quoted in this chapter, identified by pseudonymous codes, are experienced professional improvisors who participated in workshops and phenomenological interviews as part of the (Musical) Improvisation & Ethics artistic research project.
- 2.
Of course, improvisation is a broad term, and there are countless improvisatory practices across the world’s musical cultures. This chapter was written in the context of working with contemporary European free and free jazz improvisors, but I expect that its core arguments are applicable to other forms of music. Indeed, Benson (2003, 82) has argued that all music is improvised to some degree, since even the most precise scores require active interpretation and responsive awareness to each performed moment.
- 3.
Or more precisely, daseinsmaßig, ‘sharing the form of Dasein.’ As Haugeland (1982) argues in his ‘freewheeling’ reading of Being and Time, Dasein describes a ‘pattern’ of meaning that is for-the-sake-of-itself, and this pattern – or at least fractal variations of it – might be found or extended into other-than-human beings or collectives.
- 4.
See McAuliffe (2021) for a Gadamerian defence of the ‘improvisation as conversation’ model.
- 5.
See www.improv-ethics.net . For more on phenomenological interviews, see Høffding & Martiny (2016).
- 6.
- 7.
Although there is, possibly, just as little necessity for it to be harsh or overly ‘serious.’
- 8.
- 9.
Not necessarily in a traditional, tonic sense.
- 10.
I use ‘virtues’ here in the broad Aristotelian sense, as the capacities which enable ethical action.
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Acknowledgements
Thanks especially to Mattias Solli, but also to Mike Wheeler, Sam McAuliffe, and audiences at Southern Denmark University and KHÔRA in Lower Austria, for interesting discussions that helped develop this chapter. Thanks also to my colleagues on the (Musical) Improvisation & Ethics project, Christopher Williams and Caroline Gatt, and to all the musicians and audiences who shared their time with us. This research was funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) under the Zukunftskolleg programme, grant no. ZK 9300-G.
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Bergamin, J.A. (2024). The Participant Belongs to the Play: The Ethical Dimensions of Improvised Music. In: McAuliffe, S. (eds) Gadamer, Music, and Philosophical Hermeneutics. Contributions to Hermeneutics, vol 12. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41570-8_3
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