Chris Stover

 ‘Artistic research in jazz: eight themes for undisciplinary practices’

This is a talk I gave as part of the launch for Artistic Research in Jazz: Positions, Theories, Methods, edited by Michael Kahr. I contributed the chapter “Mapping Jazz’s Affect: Implications for Music Theory and Analysis” to the volume.

My talk today is a rumination on the email thread that led to the call for papers for this event. Michael Kahr asked about the types of questions that have tended to animate Artistic Research in Jazz, and it became clear that there was a handful of more or less easily discernible categories:

• questions about the nature of one’s individual improvisational practice;

• and about interaction and participation, which center around understanding what it is that is happening when we improvise together (ontological questions), or with how to have something to say about those interactive processes (analytic questions);

• and then underlying questions about what Artistic Research is and how to get it out there in the world.

My idea is to use this as a launching point to consider some other types of questions that might animate our research practices. In a moment I’ll introduce eight ideas, which we might approach in new ways using Artistic Research methods and orientations.

As everyone here knows, Artistic Research begins with practice and an assumption that there are some kinds of questions that science, social sciences, and musicology are not quite equipped to ask. Following Paulo de Assis and Jonathan Impett, I believe Artistic Research questions should be animated by critical theory and philosophically grounded (this is what often distinguishes Artistic Research from conventional musicological or performance-practice orientations). A starting place for my own thought is the distinction Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari make between art, philosophy, and science as discrete forms of knowledge production, suggesting that the purpose of art is to produce affects and percepts, the purpose of philosophy is to invent concepts, and the purpose of science is to construct objects by revealing functions that hold them together in some particular way. Again, all of these are forms of knowledge production. There are suggestions in their work that affects and percepts might ontologically precede the formation of concepts and the constitution of functions; for example, Guattari writes:

Affect is a process of existential appropriation through the continual creation of heterogeneous durations of being […] given this, we would certainly be better advised to cease treating it under the aegis of a scientific paradigm and to deliberately turn ourselves toward ethical and aesthetic paradigms’.

This, in my opinion, underscores the foundational importance of AR.

To summarize thus far, Artistic Research is concerned with questions that arise out of artistic practice, which cannot be answered within conventional scholarly frameworks. These are fundamentally different kinds of questions than those asked by other disciplines: they might not, or perhaps must not have concrete answers. Inquiry involves what James Dodd calls “keeping the questionability of the question open”; on keeping open Henri Bergson’s suggestion that a question that can be answered was not a proper question in the first place. It aligns with Ian Buchanan’s characterization of the task of formulating problems that lead—productively—to further problems; Buchanan’s recent Assemblage Theory and Method should be essential reading for all Artistic Researchers. All this is encapsulated by Jonathan Impett, who insists that, unlike in science practices, AR questions must remain subject to change as the research project unfolds. It is also important to keep in mind that AR is not quite a self-standing discipline nor a fixed set of methods, but is an orientation or attitude toward knowledge creation.

So with that in mind, here are eight kinds of questions that might be valuable for Artistic Research in Jazz. Most of these are not new; my goal is to offer some provocations for new deployments, what Deleuze and Guattari would call new ‘connections, conjunctions, and disjunctions’. I’ve also borrowed an idea from McKenzie Wark’s General Intellects project by providing a single text that seems to encapsulate each theme in a potentially transformative and practicable way: please consider each of these as a “diffraction” of my brief snapshot rather than a “name of the father” steering thought in some particular direction.

1) the ‘sonority of affect’—thinking of sound as always ‘in-between’

Here I’m thinking of using tools from affect theory, 4E cognition, and more to rethink questions about musical interaction, how we interrelate with musical sounds, how sounds interact with one another to form what Erin Manning would call a “relationscape.” Sound is always in-between. Sounds might have meaning, but what a sound ‘means’ relates to how an individual is ‘attuned’ through past experiences, interests, mood, and more. I suggest improvised music involves deliberately manipulating these ‘meaning-trajectories’, and therefore may function as a productive space for understanding how affective forces work.

2) Perhaps another way of saying the same thing: theorizing the relational constitution of subjectivities

What I mean here is using Artistic Research perspectives to better understand how our identities are formed within the relational contexts in which we find ourselves. Perhaps most interesting for ARJ purposes, this could involve interrogating the processes through which we become particular kinds of musicking-subjects (and not others). Our identities coalesce through iterative, performative processes; this involves performing the codes we learn are ‘correct’, but also—crucially—learning to disidentify with them as we develop our own voices. The particular kinds of relational micropolitics at work in jazz practices are ripe for better understanding the kinds of legislative forces at work in shaping identities; this has extraordinary implications far outside of AR practices.

3) sound and biopolitics

Michel Foucault’s theory of biopolitics describes how technologies of power can be used to enact transformations in human subjectivities and relationalities. From a musical perspective, this returns us to the question of what sound can do (extending Spinoza’s famous aphorism, “we do not know yet what a body can do”), interpreting musical sound as a type of technology of power. This is especially intriguing for thinking about revolutionary streams of jazz where sounds and their political valences were very much intended to reflect one another; I’m thinking of Albert Ayler, Archie Shepp, Nina Simone, Fred Ho, and many others. This gets into important questions about the uses to which sounds are put, including the way even mainstream progressive jazz values rhythmic or harmonic complexity. I’ll turn back to this idea from a different perspective in a moment.

Another question related to biopolitics and the related concept biopower has to do with the ways jazz musicians’ identities are conditioned through the kinds of sounds they encounter and discourses about what kinds of sounds are or are not allowable. This relates to the subjectivity theme, and the pedagogical theme I’ll turn to shortly.

4) Posthuman ethics and the critical posthumanities

Carolyn Abbate once asked if music is a thing toward which we ought to adopt an ethical position. Her question was rhetorical, but it is interesting to ask it seriously, to think about how sound has agency, how we intra-act with it, how we affect and are affected by it. This, perhaps, inverts the biopolitics question. But posthuman ethics in musicking contexts can involve more than sound; for example, we might consider cyborg ethics—as in human-instrument prosthetics and the way manipulations or de- or re-formations of bodies are enacted through musicking practices.

The critical posthumanities have developed as an interdiscipline out of a general failure of the humanities to account for all humans or their ways of being/doing. This leads to number 5:

5) Undercommons practices

Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s concept of the undercommons is a theory of how being, knowing, and doing are practiced at the margins of institutional structures, and how those practices are necessarily nimble, creative, subversive, and improvisatory. This is a ripe space for ARJ to reimagine where and how its political valences might potentially operate. This also connects to pedagogy in important ways.

It is an easy step from undercommons theorizing to thinking seriously about how postcolonial philosophy and political theory can inform an Artistic Research praxis. I’m thinking of mid-century work by Léopold Senghor, Aimé Césaire and others (setting the stage for a range of specifically African and Afrodiasporic philosophical-aesthetic positions) and the ways their work has been taken up more recently by Africana philosophers.

Similarly, we might pursue lines of inquiry stemming from what Britt Rusert calls ‘fugitive sciences’, interpreting the theories and practices of seminal figures like Muhal Richard Abrams, Roscoe Mitchell, Anthony Braxton, and Cecil Taylor as examples of proto-Artistic Research. This starts to lead to a minor history of artistic expression that problematizes how we understand jazz’s history to have unfolded, and indeed what we understand jazz to be at all.

6) Overcoming the myth of scientific objectivity

In the early 70s Benjamin Boretz and James K. Randall invented a mode of musicological engagement that functioned much more “like music,” where inquiry proceeded from “right in the middle of the musical action.” I think of this work as proto-Artistic Research too, and it ought to be better known in AR circles than it is. I also think jazz provides an especially potent space for doing that thinking from the middle. A great number of jazz musicians are also composers, and many of them are theorists in all but name, so the context of jazz practice is already a multivalent spacetime where the relationship between inquiry into musical form and process and practice itself is made especially clear.

The myth of objectivity, which has been thoroughly critiqued by Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour, Karen Barad, and many others, is what drove earlier false starts in what could have been a whole generation or two or three of Artistic Researchers, who lost the spirit of artistic practice as inquiry in the ideology of scientism and the (understandable) drive to validate their practices by appealing to more established disciplinary perspectives.

7) Returning to jazz as expression of freedom or democracy

These ideas of course had great currency in the 60s and 70s, with occasional resurgences since, from Fred Ho’s provocative interventions (fully marrying musical structure and process, economic self-determination, and transformative activism) to Wynton Marsalis’s revitalization of the idea of jazz as the sound of democracy. Artistic Research ought to be a vital space for developing these kinds of ideas not as ideals but as praxis, following Marx’s famous aphorism about changing the world.

8) Pedagogical implications

Every one of these has intriguing implications in terms of teaching and learning. But just a few overarching ideas that Artistic Research can underscore might include:

• rethinking the jazz pedagogy of the last 50+ years; making arguments from practice for turning away from fixed procedures, repertoires, and attitudes, and toward individual expression, undercommons voices;

• recuperating figures that have been lost in dominant historiographical trajectories, which facilitates rethinking even things like base-level jazz harmonic and melodic syntax;

• returning to what jazz has meant as a revolutionary practice;

• embedding all of these ideas in how we teach and how we ourselves continue to learn.

I’ll stop there: I look forward to your thoughts and to much discussion in the virtual bar!