Affect and Improvising Bodies

AFFECT AND IMPROVISING BODIES CHRIS STOVER MPROVISED MUSIC, BY WHICH I MEAN ALL MUSIC when considered from the perspective of its temporal, embodied enactment, involves “force-encounters traversing the ebbs and swells of intensities that pass between ‘bodies.’”1 The affective forces at play between improvising performers are the results of “alertness[es] to the multisided interactions among people ‘beside’ each other in a room.”2 We should read “people” here not only as the performers themselves but as the musical-objects-asbodies that encounter one another in affective exchanges of intensities; “beside” as the operators and vectors that bring heterogeneous elements into close proximity and hold them together on a plane of immanence3; and “in a room” with the full force of Heidegger’s prepositional language.4 Another way of thinking of “room” is space: an emergent space that “does not exist prior to identities/entities and their relations” —another plane in which identities, relations, and space are mutually constitutive.5 Yet another is context, of which room and space might be said to be examples, and which refers, in Deleuzo-Guattarian terms, to the singular ways in which milieus are drawn together in acts of territorialization . The actual ways that bodies come into affective contact with one another provide the conditions for the possibility of a context to emerge. The beside-ness or relationality or context-constitution of affective encounters provides an antidote to analytic frameworks that I 6 Perspectives of New Music ascribe either causal or teleological motivations to improvised musical expression in a way that resonates with Gary Peters’s account of improvisational re-novation, an always new-again, as a productive framework for thinking about how improvised music goes.6 Here are two examples to help explain what I mean here. (1) In jazz, a performer’s note choices are not derived from an a priori melodic/ harmonic plane, but help constitute that plane as a plane of immanence, where communications between stratifying acts (encounters with the histories, syntactic particularities, and other conditioning factors of a practice) on one hand and gestures of coding and decoding (drawing lines between constituent elements in the singular ways that define any particular utterance, and drawing lines of flight into new spaces) on the other are enacted. This is Cecil Taylor’s space “where patterns and possibility converge.”7 In other words, the temporally unfolding, performing/performed subject is in dialogue with the historically and textually bounded nature of the musical material, and the acting out of this dialogue is what defines the context of some specific performed utterance.8 Each performance, in this sense, unfolds as a singularity, a double selection of active and passive syntheses that Deleuze would describe as the becoming-actual of the virtual space of the performance. (2) In Cuban rumba, microrhythmic deviations are not performed inflections of ideal rhythmic events; their variable metric locations reflect relative speeds or slownesses that communicate affective trajectories across the unfolding of the performance and the steadiness versus nonsteadiness of a virtual metric grid. In other words, microrhythmic inflections are engendered by the ongoing affective interplay that creates the conditions for the context of a particular performance. And again, that context also involves communication with historical trajectories (as lineages of performance practices, for example) and with the stuff of the music itself, as physical action and sonic materiality. All of these connections—all of these relations—are irreducible in the sense that none takes priority over any other; performing bodies, historical contexts, sonic materialities, and affective forces exist in an ongoing flux of mutually constitutive relations. In both the jazz and rumba cases, we can map out territorializing networks of relationships that conspire to define the improvisational plane as always-ongoing, always in the process of being defined, immanent to itself, unfolding a double action of territorialization and deterritorialization through which the emergent identity of the context is inscribed. In other words, the context of improvised music “is one with the dynamic form of its coming to fulfillment,” which is to say it is ever-emergent, founded on the multiplicity of factors that condition the possibilities for its emergence.9 Affect and Improvising Bodies 7 This essay is...