Jazz Studies And New Media

The RHIZOME Project

by Martin E. Rosenberg

_The RHIZOME Project_ (1988-91; @1991), co-authored with Tom I. Ellis, and created in Hypercard. _RHIZOME_ was a critical thinking hypertext which offered creative as well as rhetorical and logical heuristics for the writing of a range of undergraduate essays. It was available at numerous writing programs in the early 1990's, and several articles were generated to explain its theoretical as well as pedagogical implications. Two other programmers, Stuart Selber, and Johndan Johnson-Eiola, worked briefly on the interface in 1991.

The RHIZOME Project was an experiment in instructional software to use the decision-tree environment of hypertext to... more The RHIZOME Project was an experiment in instructional software to use the decision-tree environment of hypertext to model specific sequential (as in narrative and logic) and non-sequential (as in creative and associative) thought strategies to help students write academic and creative essays. It was available at numerous writing programs in the early 1990's, including U Michigan, UC Berkeley, ASU, University of Illinois and Carnegie Mellon U. Comprised of separate "stacks" each modeling a specific heuristic, these stacks included:
1. Jazzwriting--a non-linear and recursive environment for generating and then exfoliating ideas in response to an automated or self-initiated prompt. Designed with the composing practices of BeBop jazz musicians in mind (improvisation/composition/improvisation), it offered recursive access to strategies for the improvisation of thoughts, and guided students to explore their more formal elaboration according to the rules of rhetoric, which was then linked to another "stack called:
2. Brainstorming--a non-linear, yet also sequential cluster of rhetorical heuristics: "Narrative," "Description," "Definition," "Comparison/Contrast," "Argument,"--each of which consitituted a "stack" which contained a sequence of prompts (often based on challenging heuristics such as Kenneth Burke's Pentad, for Narrative) to help expand the range of implications of ideas generated spontaneously in Jazzwriting. It was also possible to "jump" randomly or deliberately from one to the other of these heuristics, so that five separate threads of thought might be developed from the initial Jazzwriting responses. All five of these stacks then were projected into the next stack:
3. Arguprompt--which guided students through a series of prompts that would generate positions, assumptions, arguments and evidence, objections and replies to those objections, in such a way that each prompt generated a paragraph in sequence. At any point in the process of "inventing" and "arranging" an argument, the user could highlight and then export a particular assertion into another "stack" called:
4. Enthymemes--which would, through the use of dialog boxes, center that assertion into the form of an Enthymeme, which would then prompt the student to respond to a few questions. Answering these additional questions would then trigger the hypertext program to translate the Enthymeme into a formal syllogism; and then offer the opportunity to translate that socratic syllogism into a Toulmin unit of logic, with assumptions and grounds for those assumptions. Furthermore, from Arguprompt, the students could access another stack called:
5. Style--which would offer students exercises to work on semantics, grammar and syntax.
As the student progressed through the sequence of four distinct environments, or worked exclusively with just one of them, the student could export generated text to a word processing program for further engagement with the processes of invention, arrangement and style.

Informed by the specific practices of jazz musicians and composers, the behavior of bifurcating systems in non-equilibrium thermodynamics described by Ilya Prigogine, as well as the non-linear models from philosophy exemplified by the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari and their concept of the rhizome, the project was an application of the theories explored in my theoretical dissertation: _Being and Becoming: Physics, Hegemony, Art and the Nomad in the Works of Ezra Pound, Marcel Duchamp, Samuel Beckett, John Cage and Thomas Pynchon_ (1989). This project was followed by an online real-time text-based virtual reality classroom of multiple rooms with functional tools at the Media Lab MOO called _MER's Fungal Palace_ (1996), with which I taught several graduate seminars linked to seminars at other universities (1996-8); and _Chess RHIZOME_, an exploratory hypermedia database to explore the contradictory epistemological implications of the metaphor of chess across all disciplinary formations (1998).

“Soy Mexicano”: The Creation of Mexican-American Identity in the 1920s San Antonio OKeH Recordings

by Mike D'Errico

Transatlantic Jazz Seminar
Tufts University, 2010
Instructor: Stephan Pennington

Throughout the 1920s OKeH Records pioneered the practice of “location recording,” establishing studios in major cities... more Throughout the 1920s OKeH Records pioneered the practice of “location recording,” establishing studios in major cities across the United States and recording local artists for their new “race records” series. While artists in New York, Chicago, and New Orleans gained international recognition with blues and jazz recordings, Mexican-American artists in Los Angeles and San Antonio had less radio play, working in a multiplicity of styles linked to Mexican, American, and European culture. While most of the physical recordings have been lost without being digitally archived, these significant historical documents reveal a diverse and complex hybridization of styles, reflecting the complexity of creating border identities and “In-Between” cultures which continues to this day.
Through a brief survey of the late-1920s OKeH San Antionio recordings, I will show how musicians were negotiating between Mexican, American, and European musical styles, and thus creating a public space for a Mexican-American identity. Scholarship on the subject of Mexican-American music as well as the creation of border identities tends to focus on either the pre-twentieth century Mexican corrido, or popular Norteña music starting in the mid-1930s, ignoring the stark cultural and technological changes of the 1920s which opened up many media outlets for the creation of a public Mexican-American identity. Expanding upon Maribel Álvarez’s materialist analysis of border identity, my research will highlight knowledge produced by specific histories and uses of cultural goods—in the context of the OKeH recordings—and thus expand upon the homogeneous and essentialist ontology of tradition and consciousness established by scholarship up to this point.

Poznámky k vývoji studií nových médií

by Jakub Macek

Published in "Czech and Slovak Media Studies", 2011.

Stať se zabývá vývojem studií nových médií a jejich vztahem k mediálním studiím. Studia nových médií jsou zde... more Stať se zabývá vývojem studií nových médií a jejich vztahem k mediálním studiím. Studia nových médií jsou zde nahlížena jako interdisciplinární akademické metapole, v němž se sociální vědy a humanitní obory setkávají ve výzkumu a teoretizování nových informačních a komunikačních technologiích založených na digitálním kódování obsahů a v jehož rámci je k těmto technologiím přistupováno jako k sociálním a kulturním fenoménům. Vzhledem k tomu, že mediální studia jsou jen jedním z oborů, jež tematickou oblast nových médií kolonizují, identifikuje studie v první řadě ta témata, která tato jsou v oblasti zájmu právě této disciplíny. Následně pak stať rekonstruuje vývoj studií nových médií od 60. let 20. století po první desetiletí 21. století, a to s důrazem na ty klíčové vlivy, které metapole studií nových médií a jeho teoretickou a empirickou výbavu formovaly.

The paper deals with new media studies and focuses on their historical development and their relationship to media studies. New media studies are conceived as a interdisciplinary metafield of shared interest where social sciences and humanities meet in their need to research and theorize new ICT based on digital coding of contents as social and cultural phenomena. Since media studies play role of one of several disciplines colonizing the thematic field of new media, the paper at the first place aims to identify set of new media issues being solved specifically by this discipline. Consequently, the paper reconstructs history of new media studies since 1960s until 2000s, with an emphasis on key influences that shaped the metafield of new media studies and formed their theoretical and empirical body.

If It Ain't Broke.... Copyright's Fixation Requirement and Cultural Citizenship

by Larisa Mann

Copyright subsists in creative works that are “fixed in any tangible medium of expression,” usually understood as... more Copyright subsists in creative works that are “fixed in any tangible medium of expression,” usually understood as making fixation a prerequisite for protection. However, some argue that denying copyright to unfixed works unfairly denies protection to certain classes of artists or works, and that fairness, or concern for those classes of artists or genres, requires that they receive the benefit of copyright ownership for those unfixed works. These arguments generally assume the benefits of copyright protection to the artist, and often by unexamined extension to society. However, copyright ownership has social costs as well as social benefits. This paper examines the possible costs of applying copyright protection to unfixed works, in the context of the specific artists, traditions, genres, and practices that rely mainly on unfixed works. It argues for a deeper, more empirically grounded understanding of the creative process and a broader definition of values that arise from culture-making, and thus a broader understand of the public policy implications in copyright law.

Jazz as a Black American Art Form: Definitions of the Jazz Preservation Act

by Jeff Farley

Mediating the Improvising Body: Art Tatum's Postmortem Performance in a Posthuman World

by Andrew Raffo Dewar

Article manuscript in preparation for inclusion in the below edited volume, forthcoming in 2012:
Sounding the Body: Improvisation, Representation and Subjectivity.
Ellen Waterman & Gillian Siddall, eds.
Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.

Dissertation Proposal: Jazz and Radio in the United States

by Aaron J. Johnson

Jazz and Emergence--Part One: From Calculus to Cage, and from Charlie Parker to Ornette Coleman: Complexity and the Aesthetics and Politics of Emergent Form in Jazz

by Martin E. Rosenberg

Published December, 2010, in _Inflexions: A Journal of Research-Creation_ Vol. 4, pp 183-277 http://www.senselab.ca/inflexions/volume_4/n4_rosenberghtml.html
(html and pdf.)

This two-part essay inquires into the history of jazz from Be-Bop composing practices of the 1940’s, to the... more This two-part essay inquires into the history of jazz from Be-Bop composing practices of the 1940’s, to the development of Free Jazz in the 1960’s, in terms of the concepts of “complexity” and “emergence” in physics and cognitive science. Thus, it continues my past attempts at cross-disciplinary investigations, which drift from the relationship between complex systems and art into the realm of philosophy, by addressing the transgressive and yet inevitably complicitous nature of avant-garde art and its posture towards dominant cultural formations.

Much of my early work on the avant-garde demonstrates how Deleuze and Guattari ground the concepts of nomadology and micro-political aesthetics to a great extent in the discourses of complex systems in physics and cognitive science, as those discourses have evolved throughout this century, but especially since the 1960’s. Since the late 1980’s, I have argued, along with Manuel Delanda, that many other concepts such as the refrain, multiplicities, territorialization and de-territorialization, difference and repetition—recently discussed by Deleuzean scholars with reference to music--also share these grounds. We need to justify this venture into the careful forging of alliances among scientific disciplines, the philosophy of science and contemporary aesthetic philosophy, in order to reflect on the following five main lines of inquiry (or what Deleuze and Guattari would call “lines of [conceptual] flight”) traversing the realms of science, philosophy and jazz aesthetics:

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.

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.

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 (harmony, melody and rhythm) of those songs, to evolve into increasingly subtle and abstract forms at breath-taking speed.

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 cognitive science in Part Two), and in jazz.

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 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.

The Art of Transformation: Jazz as a Metaphor for Education

by Alfonso Montuori