Abstract

Democracy has been a hot topic in experimental improvised music for some time. The self-governance of collectives such as the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (Lewis 2008) and the Scratch Orchestra (Cardew 1969); the widespread use of music in struggles for social justice (Monson 2007); and the theorization of onstage interaction as a normative model for politics beyond music (Fischlin, Heble, and Lipsitz 2013) are a few well-known examples. To support these discourses, scholars and artists regularly appeal to the notion that values such as freedom, listening, openness, and resistance inhere to the music.

But to what extent do these values actually belong to practice itself, as opposed to the aspirations of particular artists? And when we search for democracy in this way of making music, where are we looking for it? In this presentation I will address these question by way of philosopher Martha Nussbaum’s notion of “spheres of ethical choice” (Nussbaum 1988). Rather than idealizing musical improvisation in order to pursue traces of democracy that may – or may not – be at work in actual improvisations, we might look more closely at situations endemic to improvised performance which require choice on behalf of participants. In this way, we could identify “spheres” of experience within which democracy may, but does not by default, take hold.