Affect and Improvising Bodies

Abstract

Improvised 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 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.

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