This book offers compelling new perspectives on the revolutionary potential of improvisation pedagogy. Bringing together contributions from leading musicians, scholars, and teachers from around the world, the volume articulates how improvisation can breathe new life into old curricula; how it can help teachers and students to communicate more effectively; how it can break down damaging ideological boundaries between classrooms and communities; and how it can help students become more thoughtful, engaged, and activist global citizens. In the last two decades, a growing number of music educators, music education researchers, musicologists, cultural theorists, creative practitioners, and ethnomusicologists have suggested that a greater emphasis on improvisation in music performance, history, and theory classes offers enormous potential for pedagogical enrichment. This book will help educators realize that potential by exploring improvisation along a variety of trajectories. Essays offer readers both theoretical explorations of improvisation and music education from a wide array of vantage points, and practical explanations of how the theory can be implemented in real situations in communities and classrooms. It will therefore be of interest to teachers and students in numerous modes of pedagogy and fields of study, as well as students and faculty in the academic fields of music education, jazz studies, ethnomusicology, musicology, cultural studies, and popular culture studies.

Improvisation is a performance practice that animates and activates diverse energies of inspiration, critique, and invention. In recent years it has coalesced into an exciting and innovative new field of interdisciplinary scholarly inquiry, becoming a cornerstone of both practical and theoretical approaches to performance."

The Improvisation Studies Reader" draws together the works of key artists and thinkers from a range of disciplines, including theatre, music, literature, film, and dance. Divided by keywords into eight sections, this book bridges the gaps between these fields. The book includes case studies, exercises, graphic scores and poems in order to produce a teaching and research resource that identifies central themes in improvisation studies. The sections include:

• Listening
• Trust/Risk
• Flow
• Dissonance
• Responsibility
• Liveness
• Surprise
• Hope

Each section of the Reader is introduced by a newly commissioned think piece by a key figure in the field, which opens up research questions reflecting on the keyword in question.

By placing key theoretical and classic texts in conversation with cutting-edge research and artists statements, this book answers the urgent questions facing improvising artists and theorists in the mediatized Twenty-First Century. "

Contents:
Preface Acknowledgements Introduction 1. The Poetics of Jazz: From Symbolic to Semiotic 2. The Rehistoricizing of Jazz: Chicago's "Urban Bushmen" and the Problem of Representation 3. Performing Identity: Jazz Autobiography and the Politics of Literary Improvisation 4. "Space is the Place": Jazz, Voice, and Resistance 5. Nice Work If You Can Get It: Women in Jazz 6. Capitulating to Barbarism: Jazz and/as Popular Culture 7. Up for Grabs: The Ethicopolitical Authority of Jazz Conclusion Works Cited Sound and Video Recordings Consulted

This book offers compelling new perspectives on the revolutionary potential of improvisation pedagogy. Bringing together contributions from leading musicians, scholars, and teachers from around the world, the volume articulates how improvisation can breathe new life into old curricula; how it can help teachers and students to communicate more effectively; how it can break down damaging ideological boundaries between classrooms and communities; and how it can help students become more thoughtful, engaged, and activist global citizens. In the last two decades, a growing number of music educators, music education researchers, musicologists, cultural theorists, creative practitioners, and ethnomusicologists have suggested that a greater emphasis on improvisation in music performance, history, and theory classes offers enormous potential for pedagogical enrichment. This book will help educators realize that potential by exploring improvisation along a variety of trajectories. Essays offer readers both theoretical explorations of improvisation and music education from a wide array of vantage points, and practical explanations of how the theory can be implemented in real situations in communities and classrooms. It will therefore be of interest to teachers and students in numerous modes of pedagogy and fields of study, as well as students and faculty in the academic fields of music education, jazz studies, ethnomusicology, musicology, cultural studies, and popular culture studies.

Improvisation is a performance practice that animates and activates diverse energies of inspiration, critique, and invention. In recent years it has coalesced into an exciting and innovative new field of interdisciplinary scholarly inquiry, becoming a cornerstone of both practical and theoretical approaches to performance."

The Improvisation Studies Reader" draws together the works of key artists and thinkers from a range of disciplines, including theatre, music, literature, film, and dance. Divided by keywords into eight sections, this book bridges the gaps between these fields. The book includes case studies, exercises, graphic scores and poems in order to produce a teaching and research resource that identifies central themes in improvisation studies. The sections include:

• Listening
• Trust/Risk
• Flow
• Dissonance
• Responsibility
• Liveness
• Surprise
• Hope

Each section of the Reader is introduced by a newly commissioned think piece by a key figure in the field, which opens up research questions reflecting on the keyword in question.

By placing key theoretical and classic texts in conversation with cutting-edge research and artists statements, this book answers the urgent questions facing improvising artists and theorists in the mediatized Twenty-First Century. "

Drawing on original interviews with improvising musicians, on critical pedagogy and cultural studies, and on the authors’ personal histories with improvised music as a form of activism, community-based pedagogy, Jamming the Classroom examines how the teaching and learning of improvisational musical practices can be understood as vital and publicly resonant acts that generate new forms of knowledge, new understandings of identity and community, and new imaginative possibilities. The book takes its cue not just from the learning in conventional classrooms and credentialing institutions but also from the work that happens in and through broader communities of practice. Heble and Stewart ask how the improvisational practices of artists and the internal educational endeavors within community groups model—and enact—new forms of community-making and critical thinking, as well as what it means to theorize the pedagogy of improvised music in relation to public programs of action, debate, and critical practice and the context of material practices and struggles for institutional authority.

From Thomas Mapfumo to Bob Marley, William Parker to Frank Zappa, Edgard Varese to Ice-T; from American blues to West African drumming, hip hop to son, gospel singing to rock'n'roll cabaret, rebel music is at the heart of some of the most incisive critiques of global politics. With explosive lyrics and driving rhythms, a new wave of rebel musicians are helping to mobilize movements for political change and social justice, at home and around the world.

Original in concept, unrivaled in content, Rebel -Musics is alone in placing human rights issues side by side with different forms of music. A wide range of -accomplished contributors, from a variety of disciplines and performance contexts, examine the ways in which human rights and music are explicitly linked, how musical activism resonates in practical, political terms, and how musical resistance is enacted.

Apart from the editors, contributors include: cabaret artist, author, and musician Norman Nawrocki; film makers Marie Boti and Malcolm Guy; musician Jesse Stewart; poet George Elliott Clarke; author Timothy Brennan; economist Spencer Henson; author Martha Nandorfy; radio host Ray Pratt; editor, author, and music -reviewer Ron Sakolsky.

Daniel Fischlin is professor of English at the University of Guelph and co-author with Martha Nandorfy of "Eduardo Galeano: Through the Looking Glass" (Black Rose Books). He has been active as a musician for most of his life and this is his fourth book devoted to an interdisciplinary musical topic.

Ajay Heble is professor of English at the University of Guelph. He is the author of "Landing on the Wrong Note: Jazz, Dissonance, and Critical Practice" and coeditor (with Daniel Fischlin) of "The Other Side of Nowhere: Jazz, -Improvisation, and Communities in Dialogue." Artistic director and founder of The Guelph Jazz Festival, he is also an accomplished pianist.

From Thomas Mapfumo to Bob Marley, William Parker to Frank Zappa, Edgard Varese to Ice-T; from American blues to West African drumming, hip hop to son, gospel singing to rock'n'roll cabaret, rebel music is at the heart of some of the most incisive critiques of global politics. With explosive lyrics and driving rhythms, a new wave of rebel musicians are helping to mobilize movements for political change and social justice, at home and around the world.

Original in concept, unrivaled in content, Rebel -Musics is alone in placing human rights issues side by side with different forms of music. A wide range of -accomplished contributors, from a variety of disciplines and performance contexts, examine the ways in which human rights and music are explicitly linked, how musical activism resonates in practical, political terms, and how musical resistance is enacted.

Apart from the editors, contributors include: cabaret artist, author, and musician Norman Nawrocki; film makers Marie Boti and Malcolm Guy; musician Jesse Stewart; poet George Elliott Clarke; author Timothy Brennan; economist Spencer Henson; author Martha Nandorfy; radio host Ray Pratt; editor, author, and music -reviewer Ron Sakolsky.

Daniel Fischlin is professor of English at the University of Guelph and co-author with Martha Nandorfy of "Eduardo Galeano: Through the Looking Glass" (Black Rose Books). He has been active as a musician for most of his life and this is his fourth book devoted to an interdisciplinary musical topic.

Ajay Heble is professor of English at the University of Guelph. He is the author of "Landing on the Wrong Note: Jazz, Dissonance, and Critical Practice" and coeditor (with Daniel Fischlin) of "The Other Side of Nowhere: Jazz, -Improvisation, and Communities in Dialogue." Artistic director and founder of The Guelph Jazz Festival, he is also an accomplished pianist.

In "People Get Ready," musicians, scholars, and journalists write about jazz since 1965, the year that Curtis Mayfield composed the famous civil rights anthem that gives this collection its title. The contributors emphasize how the political consciousness that infused jazz in the 1960s and early 1970s has informed jazz in the years since then. They bring nuance to historical accounts of the avant-garde, the New Thing, Free Jazz, "non-idiomatic" improvisation, fusion, and other forms of jazz that have flourished since the 1960s, and they reveal the contemporary relevance of those musical practices. Many of the participants in the jazz scenes discussed are still active performers. A photographic essay captures some of them in candid moments before performances. Other pieces revise standard accounts of well-known jazz figures, such as Duke Ellington, and lesser-known musicians, including Jeanne Lee; delve into how money, class, space, and economics affect the performance of experimental music; and take up the question of how digital technology influences improvisation. "People Get Ready" offers a vision for the future of jazz based on an appreciation of the complexity of its past and the abundance of innovation in the present.
"
Contributors." Tamar Barzel, John Brackett, Douglas Ewart, Ajay Heble, Vijay Iyer, Thomas King, Tracy McMullen, Paul D. Miller/DJ Spooky, Nicole Mitchell, Roscoe Mitchell, Famoudou Don Moye, Aldon Lynn Nielsen, Eric Porter, Marc Ribot, Matana Roberts, Jaribu Shahid, Julie Dawn Smith, Wadada Leo Smith, Alan Stanbridge, John Szwed, Greg Tate, Scott Thomson, Rob Wallace, Ellen Waterman, Corey Wilkes

"The Fierce Urgency of Now" links musical improvisation to struggles for social change, focusing on the connections between the improvisation associated with jazz and the dynamics of human rights struggles and discourses. The authors acknowledge that at first glance improvisation and rights seem to belong to incommensurable areas of human endeavor. Improvisation connotes practices that are spontaneous, personal, local, immediate, expressive, ephemeral, and even accidental, while rights refer to formal standards of acceptable human conduct, rules that are permanent, impersonal, universal, abstract, and inflexible. Yet the authors not only suggest that improvisation and rights "can "be connected; they insist that they "must" be connected.

Improvisation is the creation and development of new, unexpected, and productive cocreative relations among people. It cultivates the capacity to discern elements of possibility, potential, hope, and promise where none are readily apparent. Improvisers work with the tools they have in the arenas that are open to them. Proceeding without a written score or script, they collaborate to envision and enact something new, to enrich their experience in the world by acting on it and changing it. By analyzing the dynamics of particular artistic improvisations, mostly by contemporary American jazz musicians, the authors reveal improvisation as a viable and urgently needed model for social change. In the process, they rethink politics, music, and the connections between them.

In "People Get Ready," musicians, scholars, and journalists write about jazz since 1965, the year that Curtis Mayfield composed the famous civil rights anthem that gives this collection its title. The contributors emphasize how the political consciousness that infused jazz in the 1960s and early 1970s has informed jazz in the years since then. They bring nuance to historical accounts of the avant-garde, the New Thing, Free Jazz, "non-idiomatic" improvisation, fusion, and other forms of jazz that have flourished since the 1960s, and they reveal the contemporary relevance of those musical practices. Many of the participants in the jazz scenes discussed are still active performers. A photographic essay captures some of them in candid moments before performances. Other pieces revise standard accounts of well-known jazz figures, such as Duke Ellington, and lesser-known musicians, including Jeanne Lee; delve into how money, class, space, and economics affect the performance of experimental music; and take up the question of how digital technology influences improvisation. "People Get Ready" offers a vision for the future of jazz based on an appreciation of the complexity of its past and the abundance of innovation in the present.
"
Contributors." Tamar Barzel, John Brackett, Douglas Ewart, Ajay Heble, Vijay Iyer, Thomas King, Tracy McMullen, Paul D. Miller/DJ Spooky, Nicole Mitchell, Roscoe Mitchell, Famoudou Don Moye, Aldon Lynn Nielsen, Eric Porter, Marc Ribot, Matana Roberts, Jaribu Shahid, Julie Dawn Smith, Wadada Leo Smith, Alan Stanbridge, John Szwed, Greg Tate, Scott Thomson, Rob Wallace, Ellen Waterman, Corey Wilkes

"The Fierce Urgency of Now" links musical improvisation to struggles for social change, focusing on the connections between the improvisation associated with jazz and the dynamics of human rights struggles and discourses. The authors acknowledge that at first glance improvisation and rights seem to belong to incommensurable areas of human endeavor. Improvisation connotes practices that are spontaneous, personal, local, immediate, expressive, ephemeral, and even accidental, while rights refer to formal standards of acceptable human conduct, rules that are permanent, impersonal, universal, abstract, and inflexible. Yet the authors not only suggest that improvisation and rights "can "be connected; they insist that they "must" be connected.

Improvisation is the creation and development of new, unexpected, and productive cocreative relations among people. It cultivates the capacity to discern elements of possibility, potential, hope, and promise where none are readily apparent. Improvisers work with the tools they have in the arenas that are open to them. Proceeding without a written score or script, they collaborate to envision and enact something new, to enrich their experience in the world by acting on it and changing it. By analyzing the dynamics of particular artistic improvisations, mostly by contemporary American jazz musicians, the authors reveal improvisation as a viable and urgently needed model for social change. In the process, they rethink politics, music, and the connections between them.

Times change, lives change, and the terms we need to describe our literature or society or condition-what Raymond Williams calls "keywords"-change with them. Perhaps the most significant development in the quarter-century since Eli Mandel edited his anthology Contexts of Canadian Criticism has been the growing recognition that not only do different people need different terms, but the same terms have different meanings for different people and in different contexts. Nation, history, culture, art, identity-the positions we take discussing these and other issues can lead to conflict, but also hold the promise of a new sort of community. Speaking of First Nations people and their literature, Beth Brant observes that "Our connections ... are like the threads of a weaving. ... While the colour and beauty of each thread is unique and important, together they make a communal material of strength and durability." New Contexts of Canadian Criticism is designed to be read, to work, in much the same manner.

Drawing on original interviews with improvising musicians, on critical pedagogy and cultural studies, and on the authors’ personal histories with improvised music as a form of activism, community-based pedagogy, Jamming the Classroom examines how the teaching and learning of improvisational musical practices can be understood as vital and publicly resonant acts that generate new forms of knowledge, new understandings of identity and community, and new imaginative possibilities. The book takes its cue not just from the learning in conventional classrooms and credentialing institutions but also from the work that happens in and through broader communities of practice. Heble and Stewart ask how the improvisational practices of artists and the internal educational endeavors within community groups model—and enact—new forms of community-making and critical thinking, as well as what it means to theorize the pedagogy of improvised music in relation to public programs of action, debate, and critical practice and the context of material practices and struggles for institutional authority.

In Landing on the Wrong Note, Ajay Heble provides a groundbreaking analysis of jazz in its cultural context and a lucid exploration of the music itself. Drawing on personal anecdotes, observation, conversations with jazz artists, and cultural theory, Heble demonstrates that although jazz may be free-form, its rich and varied history makes it an important point of entry into some of the most hotly contested issues of our era - power, identity, representation, history, ethics, and social change.

eBook available with sample pages: 0203901002

Much of the critical writing on the fiction of Alice Munro has explored and emphasized Munro's 'realism'. But her stories frequently turn on what has been left out; they are rife with unsent (unfinished) letters, with things people mean to, but do not, say or tell. Ajay Heble's study focuses on Munro's involvement with a 'discourse of absence' and suggests that our understanding of these texts often depends not only on what happens in the fiction, but also on what might have happened. Munro's stories confer their meaning not simply by referring to an outer reality, but also by bestowing upon the reader a stimulating wealth of possibilities taken from what we might call a potential or absent level of meaning. Characteristically, they articulate an unresolvable tension between variants on these positions: between, on the one hand, her delineation of a surface reality - a world 'out there' which we are invited to recognize as real and true - and, on the other, her involvement with a discourse of absence that challenges the very conventions within which her fiction operates. Drawing on structuralist and post-structuralist theories of language and its relation to meaning, knowledge, and systems of power, and on theories of postmodernist fiction, Heble offers both a careful reading of Munro's stories and a theoretical framework for reading meanings in absence. His book extends recent revisionist analysis and makes a valuable and original contribution to the criticism on Munro.