Sync or Swarm, Revised Edition

Improvising Music in a Complex Age

David Borgo

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781501368851
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Jazzmusik

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.

1 The Sound and Science of Surprise

In 1959, Whitney Balliett, the longtime critic for the New Yorker magazine, published a book of essays on jazz that memorably described the music as “The Sound of Surprise.” Balliett heard in jazz the unpredictable and the astonishing: qualities that continue to thrill performers and listeners alike. Some thirty-five years later, mathematician John L. Casti (1994) grouped a number of the emerging scientific fields—often with ominous names like catastrophe, chaos, complexity, and criticality—under the general title “The Science of Surprise.”

Musicians and audiences tend to be interested in the very human surprises of individual and collective creativity. Scientists, on the other hand, are usually most comfortable investigating the surprising yet presumably more objective workings of the natural world. At roughly the same that Balliett fixed his memorable phrase into the jazz lexicon, C. P. Snow published a book titled The Two Cultures (1993), in which he described a breakdown in communication between the sciences and the humanities, a breakdown that he considered to be a hindrance to solving (or even discussing) many of the most pressing problems the world faces. In the second edition of his work, Snow optimistically predicted that a “third culture” would emerge and close the communications gap between the existing two.

In working on this revised edition, I am torn on the question of to what extent a “third culture” has emerged in the intervening years since the book’s original publication. Many prominent scientists have become “public intellectuals,” quite skilled at conveying to the general public the thrust of their research and speculating on its implications. Many artists have become ever more skilled in, and savvy about, the technological aspects and scientific implications of their work. And exponents of both “cultures” have become more vocal about how their work can contribute to a more equitable and sustainable world. One might argue that there is a growing appreciation for the role that creativity and imagination play in both “artistic” and “scientific” pursuits, and a greater acknowledgment that neither operates in a social vacuum. Academic fields focused on “new media,” “interdisciplinary arts,” and “digital humanities” have proliferated in recent decades, as have fields focused on pressing societal issues, such as “critical data and algorithm studies,” “critical artificial intelligence (AI),” and “bioethics,” among others, perhaps further testament to an emergent “third culture.”

At the same time, we are collectively giving over our intellectual capital and personal data to “Big Tech” companies (such as Google, Apple, and Facebook) in ways that trouble any naively optimistic view—and perhaps forewarn that the emerging culture of “integration” is predominantly one of transnational neoliberal corporate culture. In her book Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (2018), Safiyah U. Noble challenges the widely held belief that search engines are value-free tools by demonstrating how they privilege whiteness and discriminate against people of color, specifically women of color. Inspired by her revelation that typing “Why are black women so …” into a Google search bar resulted in horribly racist predictions, such as “angry,” “loud,” “mean,” and “annoying,” I typed “Why are jazz musicians …” into a search bar to discover, much to my chagrin, that Google’s top predictions included “so pretentious,” “snobs,” and “black.” Similarly, a “Why is jazz …” truncated query produced a top suggestion of “hard to listen to,” and a “Why are jazz songs …” query offered, as its top prediction, “so long.”¹

The potential consequences of AI’s algorithmic mediation of musical experience—from creation and distribution to consumption patterns and more—are challenging to investigate and hard to predict (see Seaver 2021). This book does not tackle these questions head on, but it does look through the lens of contemporary science, including 4E cognitive science, dynamical systems theory, and the science of networks, to illuminate the process and practice of improvising music, and it explores the ability of musical improvisation to offer a visceral engagement with these emerging scientific notions.

The book takes as its starting point the current historical and cultural moment in which our ideas of order and disorder are being reconfigured and revalued in dramatic ways. It argues that the methods and findings of the new sciences of surprise are useful in illuminating the dynamics and aesthetics of musical improvisation, and, conversely, that a better understanding of the workings of improvisation—how musical techniques, relationships, and interactions are refined and negotiated in performance—can offer us new ways of shaping the discourse that surrounds music and provide insight on how we might understand the dynamics of the “natural” world and our place within it.

* * *

During the last century, a “crisis of representation” emerged across many academic and creative disciplines as individuals were forced to abandon the notion that there exists an “absolute” or “privileged” vantage point from which observations, judgments, and analyses can be made. Artists, scholars, and scientists alike gradually shifted their focus from an overriding concern with isolated objects to the changing relationships between those objects: a shift from investigating structures-that-combine to patterns-that-connect.

In the humanities, ideas such as history, language, and culture, once thought to have independent meaning and objective status, were repositioned as currents of thought, patterns of behavior, and malleable social and personal constructions. Heady words like post-structuralism and cultural postmodernism were invoked to describe the increasing awareness among scholars of the ethnocentric aspects of static and totalizing investigations.

In the natural and physical sciences, several dramatic new theories questioned and eventually altered the accepted view of reality. During the Renaissance, Nicolaus Copernicus argued, rather controversially, that the earth is not the center of the universe. In the nineteenth century, Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution removed man from his privileged position, placing him firmly in the natural order of things. Also in the nineteenth century, the emerging laws of thermodynamics demonstrated that the amount of entropy, or disorder, in the universe is always increasing. In the early twentieth century, Einstein’s relativity theory and pioneering research in subatomic physics appeared to deal a fatal blow to the existing paradigms of Euclidian regularity, Cartesian objectivity, Newtonian reducibility, and Laplacean predictability. The emerging quantum worldview implied that reality does not fundamentally consist of discrete objects in space and that there can never be an exterior, objective viewpoint from which to observe (see Barad 2007).

The social sciences have also undergone dramatic changes, perhaps none more radical (and controversial) than the ideas of Niklas Luhmann, the founder of social systems theory. Luhmann insists that we must “de-anthropologize” the description of society. He calls this the fourth insult to human vanity (Luhmann 1995). The first “cosmological” insult came from Copernicus’s heliocentric view of the solar system. The second “biological” insult occurred when Darwin demoted humans from the crown of creation. The third “psychological” insult, perhaps most attributable to Sigmund Freud, highlighted how our ego is often undermined or overridden by unconscious drives and forces. Finally, Luhmann’s “sociological” insult argues that human society cannot steer itself. According to Luhmann, we are unable to shape the social world we inhabit according to our ideals, wishes, or intentions (see Moeller 2011).

Luhmann inherited a tradition of systems thinking that had launched several critiques of centralized planning. Daniel Belgrad (2016), in his contribution to The Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies, highlights how the United States’ efforts during and after the Second World War provided legitimacy to hierarchical bureaucratic structures and “social engineering” techniques for some. But early systems thinkers, including Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, felt that these were antithetical to democratic values and argued, instead, that social purposes were best achieved not by a central authority but through the interaction of individuals possessing different information and different views, sometimes consistent and sometimes conflicting.

Whereas the dominant view in fields such as economics emphasized laissez-faire thinking and the “invisible hand” of classical economics to combat centralizing tendencies, Bateson (1972) emphasized networks of feedback systems constituting an “ecological” or “cybernetic” system. In these types of systems, which we now know constitute much of the natural and social world, feedback between various sub- and super-systems governs behavior by stimulating or constraining the activities of its various parts.

As scientists and scholars were grappling with ideas of relativity and uncertainty and the dynamics of feedback in complex systems, many artists were questioning the permanence and certainty of their own work, choosing instead to emphasize its inherent polysemy and permeability. And the sounds of surprise provided much of the soundtrack for these turbulent and exciting times.

In the first half of the twentieth century, jazz and other African American musics dramatically changed the sound (if not always the face) of commercial and creative music in the United States and abroad. These syncopated rhythms and improvisatory sounds prefigured many dramatic changes in both music and society. The emerging modernist (read: pan-European) traditions of composed music also underwent significant changes at this time. While some composers found inspiration in (or sought to “elevate”) these exciting new strands of “popular” music, others turned toward a substantial increase in complexity, adopting serialized methods for ordering the various musical dimensions as well as more and more sophisticated ways to notate and control their increasingly complex ideas.

The pendulum, having swung as far as it seemingly could in the direction of explicitly ordered performance, then appeared to shift back toward uncertainty. At approximately the same time that jazz musicians were expanding the role and conception of improvisation in the new styles dubbed “bebop” or later the “avant-garde,” “new music” composers began experimenting with less deterministic modes of ordering performance (ranging from chance operations to graphic or intuitive instructions that afforded the performer a greater degree of musical latitude). These composers also began reviving the practice of improvisation, an essential part of earlier pan-European practice which was virtually abandoned (at least in art music circles) around the time of Beethoven (see Sancho-Velazquez 2001).

Since these formative years, an eclectic group of artists with diverse backgrounds in modern jazz and classical music—and increasingly in electronic, popular, and non-Western traditions as well—have pioneered an approach to improvisation that borrows freely from a panoply of musical styles and traditions and at times seems unencumbered by any overt idiomatic constraints. This musical approach, often dubbed “free improvisation” (although I will favor the term open-form improvisation), tends to devalue the two dimensions that have traditionally dominated music representation—quantized pitch and metered durations—in favor of the micro-subtleties of timbral and temporal modification and the surprising and emergent properties of individual and collective creativity in the moment of performance.

Approaches to open-form improvisation do differ enormously in their details and aesthetics—and these issues will be teased out in the next chapter—yet it is remarkable that an interest in (or reevaluation of) uncertainty in music emerges at roughly the same historical juncture as similar moves in the natural and social sciences. Katherine Hayles (1990: 4), in her work on the relationship between contemporary science and literature (and perhaps unaware of similar moves made in improvised music) asks the following question: “Why should John Cage become interested in experimenting with stochastic variations in music about the same time that Roland Barthes was extolling the virtues of noisy interpretations of literature and Edward Lorenz was noticing the effect of small uncertainties on the nonlinear equations that described weather formations?” Hayles argues that the work of these and other individuals takes place in a “cultural field within which certain questions or concepts become highly charged.”

Judy Lochhead (2001), one of the few music scholars to explore this charged cultural field, writes in her article “Hearing Chaos” that “scant work has been devoted in either music or cultural studies to the role that musicians played in disclosing the new cultural paradigm of ‘chaotics’ ” (211). Two excellent recent books that offer some discussion of how pioneering artists helped to articulate this emerging paradigm are Andrew Pickering’s The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future (2010) (with some coverage of Gordon Pask’s work) and Daniel Belgrad’s The Culture of Feedback: Ecological Thinking in ’70s America (2019) (which highlights work from a wide range of ecologically minded composers, but sadly ignores the work of people of color).

For many researchers and observers, the millennial moment brought to light the fact that both scientists and artists engage the world around them through networks of understanding shaped by the current cultural and historical moment.

The Age of Complexity

Ours is a complex age—one in which changes appear to be occurring at an ever-increasing rate and intensity, threatening to defy our ability to comprehend and keep pace, and exerting immense and unpredictable influence on our personal and shared future. The networks of connections that link various “agents” are becoming ever more complicated and complex. And our combined impact on local and global ecosystems is becoming more pronounced and potentially dangerous. Mark C. Taylor, in his book The Moment of Complexity (2003: 3), writes:

This is a time of transition betwixt and between a period that seemed more stable and secure and a time when, many people hope, equilibrium will be restored … Stability, security, and equilibrium, however, can be deceptive, for they are but momentary eddies in an endlessly complex and turbulent flux. In the world that is emerging, the condition of complexity is ...