Material Agency in Improvisation

Pushing the boundary of material and continually innovating instrumental techniques are part of the history of jazz, and can be found in an even more radical form in the improvising avant-gardes of the 1960s and 70s. The branch of improvised music that broke away from the jazz tradition was infuenced by, among other things, the aesthetics of John Cage, which inspired far-reaching experiments involving instruments and material. In this way the emancipation of noise also left its mark on improvisation, opening up new paths for the exploration of material, and it has had a formidable and lasting impact on performance practice in the field. The extension of musical material accompanied a correspondingly wider understanding of what can be considered an instrument, because … >download article

Haenisch, Matthias, »Materiality and Agency in Improvisation: Andrea Neumann’s InsidePiano«, in: Noise in and as Music, ed. by Aaron Cassidy and Aaron Einbond, Huddersfield 2013, 147-170.