Table of Contents

Acknowledgments  vii
Introduction. What is Social Aesthetics? / Georgina Born, Eric Lewis, and Will Straw  1
Part I. The Social and the Aesthetic
1. After Relational Aesthetics: Improvised Music, the Social, and (Re)Theorizing the Aesthetic / Georgina Born  33
2. Scripting Social Interaction: Improvisation, Performance, and Western "Art" Music / Nicholas Cook  59
3. From the American Civil Rights Movement to Mali: Reflections on Social Aesthetics and Improvisation / Ingrid Monson  78
4. From Network Bands to Ubiquitous Computing: Rich Gold and the Social Aesthetics of Interactvity / George E. Lewis  91
Part II. Genre and Defintion
5. The Social Aesthetics of Swing in the 1940s: Or the Distribution of the Non-Sensible / David Brackett  113
6. What Is "Great Black Music"? The Social Aesthetics of the AACM in Paris / Eric Lewis  135
7. Kenneth Goldsmith and Uncreative Improvisation / Darren Wershler  160
Part III. Sociality and Identity
8. Strayhorn's Queer Arrangements / Lisa Barg  183
9. What's Love Got to Do with It? Creating Art, Creating Community, Creating a Better World / Tracey Nicholls  213
10. Improvisation in New Wave Cinema: Beneath the Myth, the Social / Marian Froger, translated by Will Straw  233
Part IV. Performance
11. Social Aesthetics and Transcultural Improvisation: Wayde Compton and the Performance of Black Time / Winfried Siemerling  255
12. Devices of Existence: Contact Improvisation, Mobile Performances, and Dancing through Twitter / Susan Kozel  268
13. The Dramaturgy of Spontaneity: Improvising the Social in Theater / Zoë Svendsen  288
References  309
Contributors' Biographies  335
Index  339

About the Author

Georgina Born is Professor of Music and Anthropology at the University of Oxford and the editor of Music, Sound, and Space: Transformations of Public and Private Experience.

Eric Lewis is Associate Professor of Philosophy at McGill University and the author of The Video Art of Sylvia Safdie.

Will Straw is Professor of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University and the coeditor of The Cambridge Companion to Pop and Rock.

Reviews

"An indispensable collection that cracks open a site for more rich and interdisciplinary work."
*boundary 2*

"[Readers] will be more than rewarded by the insight it offers into the social aesthetics of improvisation, issues you will no longer be able to ignore as you listen to your next improv recording or attend your next improv concert."
*Musicworks*

"Through both their rigorous theoretical grounding and curation of such a brilliant array of cross-disciplinary contributions, Born, Lewis and Straw offer a thoroughly inspiring set of tools for the academy to begin theorizing where, how and for whom art’s social mediations are occurring. I cannot recommend it highly enough."
*Visual Studies*