...A Personal Beginning In 2007, violist Mary Oliver and contrabassist Rozemarie Heggen invited me to write a piece for their duo incorporating improvisation. Despite my diverse experience writing chamber music, free improvising, interpreting, and working in a host of...

...come out of the box, this will be a situation in which history becomes a pretext for programs. In sum, the future of writing is to write pretexts for programs while believing that one is writing for utopia. (Flusser 2002,...

...1950: Afrological and Eurological Perspectives.” Black Music Research Journal 16 (1): 91–122. doi:10.2307/779379. ———. 2012. “In Search of Benjamin Patterson: An Improvised Journey.” Callaloo 35 (4): 979–92. doi:10.1353/cal.2013.0023. ———. 2013. “Critical Responses to ‘Theorizing Improvisation (Musically).’” Music Theory Online 19...

...Introduction Most composers of notation for improvisers are improvisers themselves. This is no coincidence. As composer-pianist and improvisation scholar Vijay Iyer has noted, The most savvy composers writing for improvisors are those with personal experience as improvisors – those...

...at some point. At the same time, embedded within this dissertation is a temporality – or rather multiple temporalities – of inscription. The writing has taken around four years to complete. Fits and starts of in-time improvisation occasionally bubble up...

...simultaneous action and perception of musicians with instruments, each other, physical and social spaces, and many other “actors, factors, and vectors” (Cobussen, Frisk, and Weijland 2010). Borgo: When viewed ecologically, cognition is best understood as a process co-constituted by the...

...by collecting a library of fifteen commercial recordings, six archival and broadcast recordings, and a few dozen more published online. 9 (Ultimately a total of twenty recordings were used; they are listed in Source Material.) The library encompassed a vast...

...of his tacitly developed Soundings to me and other performers? How do the physical qualities of my reading, his writing, and our imaginations interact in and through performance? What role do these interactions play in the experience of listening and...

...Treatise Remix; and Mary Oliver and Rozemarie Heggen for inviting me to write the piece that spawned this research. THANK YOU readers including Jay Arms, Bill Dietz, Tobias Giezendanner, Robin Hayward, Annea Lockwood, Mathias Maschat, and Charlie Morrow for your...

...Darmstadt Summer Courses, the Arts Council of Catalunya, Goethe Institut, Hauptstadtkulturfonds Berlin, the Festival Acanthes, and the American Documentary Film Festival. He also co-curates the Berlin concert series KONTRAKLANG, and works with sound experience designer Charles Morrow Productions. www.christopherisnow.com...