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3. Voicing the Unforeseeable: Improvisation, Social Practice, Collaborative Research
- Wilfrid Laurier University Press
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3 Voicing the Unforeseeable: Improvisation, Social Practice, Collaborative Research Ajay Heble and Winfried Siemerling There is a resonant moment in Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion in which the central character, Patrick Lewis, finds the crucial information in a library that allows him to connect the various stories that he has been tracing up to that point in the novel. Moments later, Ondaatje has Patrick walk by a jazz band, witnessing precisely the point at which the soloists rejoin with one another for the chorus: Leaving the library, Patrick … was walking slowly, approaching a street-band, and the click of his footsteps unconsciously adapted themselves to the music that beganto surroundhim. Thecornetandsaxophoneanddrum chased each other across solos and then suddenly, as Patrick drew alongside them, fell together and rose within a chorus…. The street-band had depicted perfect company, with an ending full of embraces after the solos had made everyone stronger, more delineated. His own life was no longer a single story but part of a mural, which was a falling together of accomplices. (144–45) What is of particular interest to us is how jazz music here functions as the catalyst that joins the visual information that Patrick’s eyes have received from print and paper with the oral stories that he has heard, and heralds something new and unforeseen (Siemerling, Discoveries 163). He comes to understand in particular the linkage of his own life with a polyphony of unwritten and untold histories—including the histories of immigrants who 39 built the city of Toronto (Heble)—and joins them in an unexpected chorus that reveals him as a part of a richly textured community. Together with the image of the mural, Ondaatje uses this musical reference as a structural homology for the novel. We would suggest that this passage evokes a number of key issues that this volume is concerned with, and which we will be addressing here, such as the relationship between the ear and the eye (which Frank Davey also addresses in his discussion of visual and sound poetry elsewhere in this volume), point of view, multiple voicings, and the larger question of intersemiotic practices, particularly the involvement of jazz, improvisation, and interactivity. We offer this textual moment as a kind of epigraph for our paper, especially as it comes from such a canonical Canadian text. It is also, of course, a telling example of the intermedial conversation between literature and music. However, rather than focusing on literature and music per se, what we want to do here is discuss the relation between musical improvisation and other social and artistic practices in the creation of new knowledges— knowledges that have the potential to overcome previous disciplinary protocols , blind spots, and constraints. In order to make such claims, we shall be drawing on and addressing some core issues arising out of the Improvisation, Community, and Social Practice (ICASP) project, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada’s Major Collaborative Research Initiatives (MCRI) program. After a brief description of this new collaborative research initiative, our paper will draw attention to the many ways in which improvisation and jazz have often played important roles in such intersemiotic practices as the use of musical patterns, for instance, in novels and other modes of writing. Such practices, we want to suggest, make use of the often surprising effects that result from the unforeseeable juxtaposition and collision of different art forms. Similar encounters, we will then argue, ensue in musical improvisatory practices themselves, which bring different forms of meaning-making into creative and collaborative collision. If musical improvisation enables people coming from different cultural traditions and contexts to engage in shared, collaborative social practice, then it is important to note that such forms of social collaborative practice often bear significant elements of unforeseeability (one of the etymological meanings of improvisation) that are not contained in given protocols of knowledge production. Our paper will also consider some of the methodological challenges associated with our collaborative project, and we shall conclude by voicing 40 COLLABORATION, CROSSTALK, IMPROVISATION [44.197.113.64] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 02:50 GMT) some examples of the unforeseen, as we discuss the reception of the project thus far, and speculate about the opportunities, but also the risks, involved in our collaborative work. Improvisation, Community, and Social Practice As a context for our discussion, we’re drawing on a new multi-year, multi-institutional research initiative called Improvisation, Community, and Social Practice...