The Other Side of Here and Now: Cross-Cultural Reflections on the Politics of Improvisation Studies
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Scholarship on African-American avant-garde jazz and European free music is prominently featured in the emergent field of improvisation studies, premised upon an allegorical understanding of the phenomenon as a musical analogue for counter-hegemonic political dialogue and action. However, from an ethnomusicological standpoint rooted in improvisational traditions from Africa to Asia, serious questions arise about the cross-cultural validity of this axiological paradigm. Drawing upon studies of West African and South Asian traditions of improvisation, this essay brings a critical global perspective to bear upon issues of improvisation, community, and social practice, to elucidate the manner in which universalistically conceived ideological commitments can shape the political meanings of extemporaneous music-making. Ultimately, an ethnographic focus on ritual overdetermination of meaning within festive performance frames can reveal the significance that ICASP organizers’ conception of improvisation—as “a crucial model for political, cultural, and ethical dialogue and action”—plays in empowering artists to imagine and realize utopian, transcultural, socio-sonic communities.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.010 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.022 | 0.074 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.019 | 0.014 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.012 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".