Martin E. Rosenberg | Investigating the Relationship Between Sound & Time Through Jazz Improvisation

Programmer and Organizer: Sepideh Majidi
Moderator: Sepideh Majidi
Video edit: Shaum Mehra

Investigating the Relationship Between Sound & Time Through Jazz Improvisation, Session 1

Abstract 1: Calculus, Phase Space, and the Extrinsic Manifestations of Emergent Form in Jazz Improvisation:

1. How do assumptions about duration or time shape the very different creative processes in classical and jazz music? I refer specifically to the western tendency to spatialize time since the 17th Century when both calculus and standard music notation, with even temperament and bars and time signatures, emerged.

2. How dependent are John Cage’s compositions, by foregrounding the interdependence of music and noise, upon a carefully considered deconstruction (in the Derridean sense) of the calculus of music notation dominant since those 17th Century innovations in contrapuntal composition. We will then notice how he adopts models of music notation that look uncannily similar to phase space diagrams of such complex irreversible processes as attractor states in thermodynamics.

3. How did the Be-Bop composing practices of Charlie Parker and others engage directly in the calculated yet spontaneous deconstruction of spatialized time in order for new, hybrid processes of musical expression to emerge? Reminiscent of Bergson’s stages of “creative evolution,” these processes enable song structures, as the vehicles for improvisation, as well as the conceptual/linguistic musical content (melody, harmony, harmonic rhythm, and percussive rhythm) of those songs, to evolve into increasingly subtle and abstract forms at breath-taking speed.

4. How may we identify processes of de-territorialization and re-territorialization, and the iterative, emergent or self-organizing nature of the refrain (and of harmonic rhythm generally), as central to an understanding of the micro-political motivations of an aesthetic? We will also see how a shift from the model of calculus to the model of phase space in conceptualizing the nature of duration enables us to theorize and visualize, the crucial role of systemic bifurcations: in both complex processes from physics, and in jazz.

5. How one might define Ornette Coleman's theorization of “Free Jazz,” in terms of a distributed form of musical expression (called "Harmelodics"), as an evolutionary extension of the line of conceptual flight opened up by Be-Bop composing practices. Other artists such as John Coltrane also embraced the distributed nature of jazz performances, involving the maximum freedom in juxtaposing independent and sometimes contrasting melodic, harmonic and rhythmic materials, to reach for a full realization of performative freedom. Thus, attention will shift from cognitive bifurcation to cognitive aggregation during improvisation.

About the Author:
Recently retired, Martin E. Rosenberg wrote his dissertation on the cultural work across the arts of the scientific concept of “emergence,” beginning with Henri Poincaré, Henri Bergson, and Marcel Duchamp, and ending with Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Ilya Prigogine, Francisco Varela and Thomas Pynchon. He has written on Deleuze and Freud, Ezra Pound, Duchamp and Thomas Pynchon, Samuel Beckett, John Cage, Kiki Smith, and the avant-garde architects Arakawa and Gins. He recently published on emergent behaviors, visible in music notation, in jazz improvisation and composition, and currently researches the cognitive neuro-science of improvisers, recently publishing essays on embodied cognition and improvisation, as well as jazz as neuro-resistance with reference to research on “cognitive capitalism.” Martin has programmed instructional software, theorized about hypermedia and interaction-design, and contributed articles on the role of metaphor in trans-disciplinary inquiry. He co-directed the first completely digital global academic conference—AG3-Online: The Third International Arakawa and Gins: Architecture and Philosophy Conference. Originally trained in jazz composition at the Berklee College of Music, he returned (having quit for thirty years) to performing in the Pittsburgh area from 2013-2020.