Welcome to the February edition of the JEN Research Interest Group newsletter. Below please find a variety of news items, announcements, callouts, new publications, and job opportunities.
I just returned from the Association of European Colleges (AEC) Pop and Jazz Platform Meeting in Rome and took many impressions along about new initiatives for preparing students to enter the gig economy and prepare for the takeover of AI technology. They will need to be ready to conquer a wide variety of challenges and a music industry that is diverse and high tech. It was very inspiring to hear from leaders at many institutions on how they are preparing, diversifying, adding entrepreneurial offerings as well as facilitating crossover studies among art forms.
This weekend, we’re getting ready to present the 3rd conference of The International Network for Artistic Research in Jazz (INARJ) February 23-25 at the Jam Music Lab University in Vienna and online. In addition to teaching needs of the future conservatories, we will look at the way we communicate about our art and design meaningful projects. Most presentations will be free and hybrid to allow participation from anywhere in the world, join the conversation. Please register here to receive information and just in case, here is the zoom link for the three days. Renowned presenters from four continents and 10 different countries share their work focusing on embodied research and learning by doing. I am very excited to present a Talking Jazz Live pilot program in Marian McPartland style with duet partner, bassist Ronan Guilfoyle from Dublin Center University Friday, February 24, 6pm CET - noon EST, streamed at this zoom link. Follow this link for more information and feel free to share the invitation with your networks.
In the meantime, applications for the 2024 conference will be open April 1-30 on the JEN website for JEN members. Also, submissions to Volume 5 of JAZZ (Jazz Education in Research and Practice) are open until May 1 on the JAZZ portal. Articles, case studies, quick hits, reviews, are all welcome and the editorial team is happy to help and answer questions, contact Martin Norgaard or Monika Herzig. JAZZ Volume 4 is published, you can purchase copies with your JEN membership discount for $15 here. JEN members have access to reading the JAZZ articles for free on the JEN website, but also have access for a discounted yearly subscription to the print or electronic edition for $15
through the IU Press website. Please make sure your school library has a subscription to JAZZ.
JENRing Mentoring is under way! Mentors and Mentees interested in participating in the JENRing Mentoring Initiative may sign up at this link. We are seeking mentors with experience in publishing peer-reviewed articles or books to assist those seeking mentoring for their research projects, particularly with an emphasis on writing for our Jazz Education in Research and Practice journal. Mentor/Mentee sign up sheets and mentoring guidelines will also be available in the research room at the JEN Conference in Orlando. Questions may be directed to Dr. Tish Oney, JENRing mentoring chair, at tishoney@gmail.com. Thank you for your support of JEN's new mentoring initiative!
The monthly series of webinars will continue after a short holiday break on March 3, 3pm EST with William Bares - A Jazz History Course for the Information Era and on the first Friday of every month featuring one of the authors published in JAZZ (Jazz Education in Research and Practice). The goal of the presentations is to share the findings as well as ideas for practical implementations in the classroom and curricula. Please look for links and invitations to the webinars on the JEN website and Facebook page. They’ll be live streamed on Facebook, but those who register for the zoom webinar will be able to ask questions and interact with the panelists. All previous presentations can be accessed here.
Please feel free to share this news compilation and invite colleagues to join the mailing list and/orFacebook page. Remember to check the updated job listingshere. If you have new books/ articles/ dissertations published, send me the info to be included in the newsletter. Also send over ideas on how JENRing can help you in your jazz research and networking. Items of interest related to jazz research may also be shared on the Facebook page.
A Jazz History Course for the Information Era with William K. Bares
Friday, March 3 • 3pm ET Zoom (Members) & Facebook Live (Non-Members)
Join Dr. William K. Bares as he presents a rationale for rethinking jazz history curricula in light of recent world events and social movements. It describes a theme-oriented jazz history course offered at the University of North Carolina, Asheville that circumvents some of the pitfalls associated with teaching jazz history chronologically or stylistically. It also describes a jazz history card game developed in conjunction with the course, and the midterm and final projects that integrate the thematic focus of the course with the card game. It concludes with summary remarks about the relationship of today’s jazz history courses to jazz legitimation strategies within the academy.
ON MARCH 12, 1955, Charlie Parker collapsed in the Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter’s Upper East Side apartment after a three-day booze binge. The improviser of superhuman poise was dead at thirty-four, eliciting solemn observance from musicians and fans, particularly those who’d been hanging around Minton’s Playhouse in Harlem where, in the early 1940s, a new kind of music called bebop had been invented. “Bird has disintegrated into pure sound!” is said to have been overheard somewhere near the Five Spot on Cooper Square, the Beat tavern where much bad poetry was recited, and where some great musicians nightly turned the style that came out of Harlem
into ever more febrile and kinked contortions. Part of the Bird enigma was the impossible fusion of musical angel and reptilian addict, a miraculously graceful artist who might steal your horn and pawn it for smack.
Four months after Bird’s death, his one-time personal assistant Miles Davis seduced everyone at the Newport Jazz Festival, performing a tune called “Round Midnight,” written by someone who had been part of the Minton’s scene but was still an underground figure: Thelonious Monk, who had only a handful of records under his belt and, then approaching forty, was still playing on other people’s dates. Indeed, he was the pianist behind Miles for the Newport performance, which would help the younger musician sign with Columbia records, putting him on the road to stardom. An oft-told anecdote has the two sharing a car back to New York. “You weren’t playing the tune right,” Monk says, to which Miles replies that he is just jealous, at which point Monk
orders the car to pull over and takes the ferry to the city alone.
OK, that’s funny, but it also implies a problem. People who dismiss the accordion as soon as they hear it, as soon as it triggers associations with bad wedding bands, are not really listening to it. If they really listened to this contraption with the bellows and buttons, they’d recognize its tremendous technical versatility and emotional capacity.
They’d begin to understand why it’s so central to such folk traditions as Cajun, zydeco, conjunto, tango, forró, choro, klezmer, vallenato, township jive, and Celtic—and why it’s becoming ever more visible in the jazz world in the hands of artists such as Gil Goldstein, Gary Versace, Andrea Parkins, Richard Galliano, Ben Thomas, Dino Saluzzi, and Vitor Gonçalves.
“I enjoy the humor about accordion,” confesses Gonçalves, Anat Cohen’s regular sideman. “All instruments have their jokes and it’s nice to laugh about yourself and your instrument. But I also feel it’s important that we spread the word about all the wonderful and diverse music being played on the accordion. After my performances, I often hear people say, ‘Wow, I never knew the accordion could do all these things.’”
Saluzzi, who has released 14 albums on ECM as a bandoneon-playing leader, is less amused. “In these difficult times, I don’t know why someone would make jokes about a culture or a music or an instrument,” he says. “All I know is the bandoneon is an instrument which works very well in various styles, especially in chamber and orchestral music, as well as in jazz or folk music.”
“There’s all these stereotypes of the accordion,” adds Goldstein, who played the squeezebox in the Gil Evans Orchestra, “which I don’t like. People who are mean to the instrument are ignoring all those great zydeco accordion players, all those great Brazilian players, the tango and classical players. And I think it’s back in the jazz world. I don’t know if the Mike Brecker of the accordion has arisen, but I have faith that it’s going to happen.”
The PhD in the Arts at the Mozarteum University Salzburg is looking for art practitioners to launch a new doctoral programme in artistic research. Artists from any field of practice are encouraged to apply, including but not limited to music, the visual arts, theatre, dance, film, digital media, and design. The doctoral programme focuses on the potential of artistic processes to articulate themselves as research, as well as on the capability of these processes for creative and critical reflection, whereby artistic practice becomes both the subject matter of the research trajectory and the method through which research is conducted.
The PhD in the Arts provides a framework for the development of individual projects, with a wide spectrum of formats ranging from one-to-one tuition, seminars, workshops, lectures, excursions and an open space dedicated to the self-organisation of candidates. The doctoral curriculum takes place in a collaborative research environment that fosters artistic and intellectual exchange and cooperation and offers appropriate infrastructure and facilities (spaces, instruments, staff, library, etc.).
The programme is designed for a minimum of three years and conducted in English. All courses will take place in monthly gatherings. Residence in Austria is not required, but participants are requested to take part in activities in Salzburg. The Mozarteum University Salzburg cannot provide internal funding or scholarship. Candidates will be supported in all application processes for external funding.
The programme works with the concept of transversality as an operative principle that opposes both a vertical and a horizontal understanding of art. Examples of transversal practices that the programme welcomes include but are not limited to: Practices that engage post-anthropocentric modes of creativity (e.g. reflections on human and other-than-human interaction, environmental awareness, historical and new materialisms, speculative realism, post-human discourses, etc.); Practices that develop divergent and creative approaches to history and cultural heritage (e.g. archival practices, reflections of temporal linearity and anachronism, experimental modes of music performance, montages of found footage etc.); Practices that challenge hierarchical social and
political structures (e.g. centered on feminist, queer, Marxist, decolonial and postcolonial discourses, etc.), as well as traditional divisions of labor in the art market (composer/performer/improviser, artist/spectator, art/society, etc.); Practices that engage with the imaginary and spiritual not as marginal nonrealities, but as means to change epistemologies and to reinvent ontologies.
Application process
Applicants are admitted to the doctoral programme through a two-step selection process (proposal and presentation). In addition, knowledge of English (oral and written) must be proven. The online application tool is open from January 16 to February 28, 2023. Please upload all documents at the link above. The results of the application process will be communicated to applicants at the beginning of June, 2023. For further information please contact: studieninfo@moz.ac.at.
Zurich University of the Arts: Call for Artistic PhD on Sail
Conceived in a moment of profound uncertainty and territorial fragility, Laboratorio Laguna attempts to address spatial, ecological and social issues through immersion in the lagoon environment of Venice. In interaction with different media and intervention scales it intends to advocate, document, and produce work. Artists, architects, researchers, and scholars develop new ways contemporary arts interact with the sciences and society. As a collaboration of several collectives, we navigate with an open fleet of boats in the critical zone of the Venetian lagoon. We want to explore pre-Renaissance engineering and forms of interaction between democratic societies and
precarious environments; as a practice that might be the future.
We seek pronounced positions from the visual, performative, film, literary, sound, spatial, and environmental arts, who wish to complete an artistic doctorate in this context.
We expect:
A mature practice outside the university
The willingness to open up your practice in the making ("sharing")
The desire to contribute to your field and to enter a negotiation with your respective peers ("challenging")
We offer:
4 years PhD curriculum of low residency
You will be involved in Laboratorio Laguna, a yearly, three-week workshop in Venice in the Bohemian Pavilion (obligatory attendance; no further courses) including navigational trips into the lagoon
Personal supervision by a professor at the Zurich University of the Arts or the Kunstuniversität Linz
International PhD network connecting 12 PhD candidates from Berlin, Helsinki, Linz, and Zurich
A substantial contribution to the costs for tuition and the three weeks in Laboratory Laguna by the universities (including housing, excluding food)
There is no further financing associated with the admission
The following documents must be submitted for the application:
Portfolio of your (artistic) practice
Detailed curriculum vitae
Letter of motivation (2-3 pages)
Proof of a Master's degree
Preference will be given to candidates who have a basic knowledge of boat handling, especially sailing.
Populism is about “the People”, about their claims, their needs, their identity. It is about constructing a people’s unity and political agency. Essentially, it is about transforming the many in one political subject. In doing so, populism is not only a political articulation of discourse (Laclau 2005), it involves aesthetic, symbolic, emotional, and social practices that have the potential to profoundly affect culture (Bulli 2022) as well. Thus, striving to understand populism also means striving to understand its relationship to culture in general and its effects on political culture in particular. Populism produces a specific performative style (Moffitt
2016), it interferes in political codes and in the ways that politicians stage their bodies (Diehl 2021), it shifts communication towards disruption and scandal, thus destabilizing the normative expectations to which political representatives are expected to conform. As such, populism is intimately tied to mass media attention and presentation rules (Mazzoleni 2017). However, populism not only affects political culture, it permeates it (Hall 1985; Flath et al. 2022). It draws on popular culture in order to gain approval and create affective investment in people’s everyday lives (Grossberg 1992; Bargetz 2016).
Approaching populism from this perspective raises a number of questions: How does populism relate to culture? How is popular culture used in populism? Is there a populist political culture? If so, what are its characteristics? Does populism develop specific cultural practices? What role does popular culture play in creating “the People”, or national identities, belonging, and exclusion? What are the differences and similarities between right-wing and left-wing populist cultural practices?
The conference aims to explore these questions by scrutinizing the intersections between populism and culture. In doing so, we stress the connectedness between politics and culture and refer to a broad understanding of culture as a whole way of life (Williams 1961). On the one hand, this means emphasizing that populism can be analyzed by looking at how it interferes in political culture (Berezin 1997). How does populism change the codes, expectations, and norms of politics and its interactions with citizens? How does it activate and articulate discourse, symbols, aesthetics, and emotions? Do populisms develop specific approaches to gender, sex, class, and race/ethnicity? Is it possible to observe new or specific symbolic practices, interactions, expectations, and
attitudes generated by populist interferences in political culture? On the other hand, this understanding of culture implies that populist forces find expression in cultural struggles and thus involve specific cultural domains such as art, theater, pop culture, entertainment, mass media communication, etc.
We welcome theoretical and empirical contributions approaching these and further questions to investigate (1) the relationship between populism and culture, or (2) populist culture. Please submit your abstract (1–2 pages) in English, including references and a short biography, to the organizers at contact.populism@politik.uni-kiel.de by February 28, 2023. Accepted contributors will be notified by the end of March 2023.
Call for Papers: Dialogues on Songwriting: Creativity, Methods and Contexts
Composing music, writing songs, producing tracks, or just simply making music? Whatever labels we choose, they contain cultural and historical references to different processes of fostering new music. In this way, choosing a label for the process will also indicate what kind of process one refers to, that is, how the music is made and what kind of music it is. Music composition, for instance, would often connote classical music composed at the piano and represented by music notation. Producing a track would imply some form of computer-based recording process, generically situated somewhere within the realm of electronic popular music. Both of these labels, however,
refer back to one single agent: the composer or the producer. When songwriting has been chosen as a label for the upcoming symposium, it is for three main reasons. First, it is inclusive towards the importance of vocal melody and lyrics as part of the music. Second, songwriting can also be collaborative, and thus it opens up for discussing various forms of collaborative creative processes. Third, it intersects and is in dialogue as a whole and in particular with listener and audiences, but also with the general technological development. In this context it is of interest to look at the coming AI revolution and what it entails for songwriters and the process of songwriting. What processes, then, can the term songwriting contain in contemporary popular music? How has the process of making music developed through the history of recorded music? In what ways do contemporary songwriters operate according to, or opposed to existing definitions of the term?
Welcoming various perspectives from academic as well artistic research, the research group Songwriting and Production has the pleasure of inviting scholars, songwriters, producers, and PhD candidates in higher music education for a two-day symposium at the University of Agder, Norway, for presentations and panel discussions on these and other related questions. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
Methods of songwriting
The inner voice of songwriting
Songwriting and production
Belonging/ownership
The history of songwriting
Collaborative songwriting
The gendered voice of songwriting
The racial voice of songwriting
Songwriting and mental and physical health
Songwriting and AI
We welcome abstracts of maximum 350 words for individual presentations of 20 minutes. Presentations can take the form of a research paper, an artistic performance, or a combination of the two. The deadline for submission is 15 September 2023.
IICSI is pleased to announce that it is accepting applications for two 12-month residential postdoctoral research fellowships, to be held at the University of Guelph in the 2023–2024 academic year. One of the fellowships will be co-hosted by the Guelph Institute for Environmental Research (GIER). The deadline for applications is May 1, 2023.
The fellowships are valued at $40,500 CAD plus additional stipends, and will provide support for recent PhD graduates conducting original research, publishing research findings, and developing and expanding personal research networks. Candidates will be expected to spend at least three days per week on campus to facilitate cultural and intellectual engagement.
For the one IICSI postdoctoral fellowship, IICSI welcomes applications from scholars working in its principal research areas: music, cultural studies, creative technologies, political studies, sociology and anthropology, English studies, theatre and performance studies, French studies, law, philosophy, and communications. Applications from other research areas are also welcome, with preference given to research that has a direct link with the social, cultural, or political implications of improvised art practices. Candidates with experience in pedagogy and community engagement who can contribute to IICSI’s new Critical Studies in Improvisation Graduate Program are also welcome.
For the one GIER/IICSI postdoctoral fellowship, applicants are encouraged to submit proposals exploring how improvisational skills and frameworks can lead to research discoveries at the interface of disciplines to help address environmental crises, including (but not limited to) climate change and declining biodiversity. Applicants must have experience in interdisciplinary environmental research across both a) the natural sciences and/or engineering, and b) the social sciences, arts, and/or humanities
Application Deadline: Friday, February 24, 11:59 PM ET
The City of Guelph is seeking applications from individual artists or groups for its 2023 Artist in Residence program. The program is open to artists practicing in all mediums—visual, literary, performance-based, new media, multidisciplinary, etc. It seems the sky’s the limit in terms of eligible forms.
The call will involve two stages of selection, with the first being an expression of interest, followed by a request for proposals from the short-listed candidates.
This is not a live-in residency program, so keep that in mind. Artists may be issued permits for the temporary use of public spaces for creation and presentation, however. The budget for the project is $7000, requiring a flexible part-time commitment from the artist(s) from July 1 to October 15, 2023.
Many books have been written about Jazz, with few approaching their readers with a sense of curiosity, inclusion, and passion for the artform of Free-Jazz. Experimentation in Improvised Jazz. Chasing Ideas, by Andrys Onsman and Robert Burke offers a refreshing insight into the universe that is jazz, and more specifically Free-Jazz. The approachable, discussive, and at times cheeky tone of this book propels the reader through Hichcockian twists and turns from science to drama, Plato to the bordellos of new Orleans, offering insightful points of view from jazz critics, academics, jazz lovers, and importantly the musicians themselves.
The authors offer a wide- ranging and at times wilfully exuberant examination of the performance of free jazz from within its creation, surveying its conceptual paradigms of research; acknowledging its theoretically bounded knowledge, and the embodied nature of performance, sociality and identity, without losing focus on what makes the music jazz.
The authors ricochet off creativity, indeterminacy, neurological functioning, exploration, and free will, creative processes, agency, idea generation and development- and the mastery and mystery that exists in the melding of these behaviours, encapsulating how free jazz musicians create and respond to each other in the moment. In so doing, the authors lay an inviting catalogue of ideas that would resonate with those who are interested in how the music that is made is heard and responded to by practitioners, with many insights offered by the people who make it.
The authors discuss through the voices of many including their own, that free jazz is both product and process, and that it continues to be a collective endeavour of creation culturally, socially, experientially, and situationally. Jazz and improvisational creativity inhabits its own communities of practice, evolving its own ecologies, and offering its own palette of togetherness, expression, and meaning making
The book explores how improvisation is a base human trait, based on trust, communion, cohesion, momentum, and collectivity to the common rather than singular good. No doubt improvisation relies on a wealth of learned, embedded material, however the authors challenge the reader through various theories in considering what is brought to the performance arena that is predetermined, and what is wholly of spontaneous complex unity. How musicians resist and react to primal impulses- known vocabulary, reflex, entrainment, swarming, and how they reside in/within/beyond both the mainstream and free-jazz canons are explored.
Music-lovers from Australia and New Zealand have collected and bound sheet music and handwritten music since the earliest years of settlement. In these nine essays, the authors discuss music and dance collections found in libraries, historic houses, archives and homes, explaining what these cherished artefacts reveal about the owners, their emotional life and their musical practice. Beautifully illustrated, and with suggestions for how these collections might be further explored or disseminated, this is a landmark book in the history of music in private life.
“This multifaceted collection uses the material traces of music making—the music books that were treasured by their makers and owners and oftenhanded down through families over generations—as a springboard to explorethe vibrant musical cultures of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Australiaand New Zealand. Providing fascinating insights into patterns of migration,sociability, gender roles, professionalism and more, the authors make aconvincing case for why these books should still matter to us today”.
New research published in the journal Cognition with contribution from Aarhus University and Georgia State University investigated how expert jazz musicians improvise, and what makes their solos so fascinating to listen to. The findings point to a ‘personal music library’ and can help us understand human creativity, and why some musicians are more successful than others.
World-renowned jazz musicians are often praised for their creative ingenuity. But how do they make up improvisations? And what makes artists’ solos more enticing than those of less skilled players? These questions continue to puzzle not only jazz aficionados, but also psychological researchers. Two leading theories have dominated so far: Either musicians learn to master
rules telling them what they can and cannot play – a sort of “secret language of jazz.” Or, each musician build up a personal library of melodic patterns – “licks” – that they can draw upon and recombine in new and interesting ways. Over the years, musical scholars have collected many such volumes of “licks” for learners to practice. Yet, the fact that a certain combination of notes recurs many times is no proof of an underlying movement pattern stored in the brains of musicians—it could just be a
sheer coincidence.
The ‘library theory’ of jazz improvisation
A new scientific study, just published in the journal Cognition, provides the first solid psychological evidence for the library theory of jazz improvisation. For the first time ever, researchers from Aarhus University and Georgia State University found that
expert jazz musicians play certain note combinations with much more consistent timing and force than others. Regardless if these “licks” were played fast or slow, loud or soft, the relative rhythms and accents remained very similar. This stronglysuggests that each player possesses a collection of patterns that are directly grounded in their own body and brain. Many jazz
experts have called it their personal “vocabulary.” Interestingly, the new study found that these improvisation vocabularies vary between different players.
Martin Norgaard, born and raised in Denmark, now Associate Professor of Music Education at Georgia State University in Atlanta comments further: “It is fascinating that expert jazz musicians store linked audio and motor representations in the brain – that is both the sound of licks and information about how to play them. As a jazz violinist myself, I often hear licks I want to play while improvising but the motor representation is not complete so the lick doesn’t come out right. Based on our research, that should happen less as expertise develops.”
Music is a complex system consisting of many dimensions and hierarchically organized information—the organization of which, to date, we do not fully understand. Network science provides a powerful approach to representing such complex systems, from the social networks of people to modelling the underlying network structures of different cognitive mechanisms. In the present research, we explored whether network science methodology can be extended to model the melodic patterns underlying expert improvised music. Using a large corpus of transcribed improvisations, we constructed a network model in which 5-pitch sequences were linked depending on consecutive
occurrences, constituting 116,403 nodes (sequences) and 157,429 edges connecting them. We then investigated whether mathematical graph modelling relates to musical characteristics in realworld listening situations via a behavioral experiment paralleling those used to examine language. We found that as melodic distance within the network increased, participants judged melodic sequences as less related. Moreover, the relationship between distance and reaction time (RT) judgements was quadratic: participants slowed in RT up to distance four, then accelerated; a parallel finding to research in language networks. This study offers insights into the hidden network structure of improvised tonal music and suggests that humans are sensitive to the property of melodic distance in this network. More generally, our work demonstrates the similarity between music and language as complex systems, and how network science methods can be used to quantify different aspects of its
complexity.
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