The Jazz Repertoire
Abstract
H.S. Becker and R.R. Faulkner, starting from their own experiment of musicians of jazz and their work of ground, study the processes of construction of the repertories of the jazz. They take the pieces, the musicians, the situations of play, the usual repertory, as as many units of analysis enabling them to make explicit the choices and the constraints, as well as the processes of negotiation to the work in this construction. The repertories appear indeed as exemplary situations in which in a concrete way the mechanisms of the collective action appear, of the joint action; one consequently sees the interest of the concept of repertory and his extension to other spheres ofthe collective life.
... As a result of their studies of jazz musicians in the United States, American sociologists Howard S. Becker and Robert R. Faulkner established four basic units of analysis: songs (understanding their forms, structures and how they are distributed), the interpreters, the "playing situations" and the "working repertoire" (Becker and Faulkner, 2005). Through the analysis of the repertoire and starting from the knowledge about "what the musicians know, what they think the other musicians know, and what they really know in common" (Becker and Faulkner, 2009), Becker and Faulkner reached different levels of analysis of the dynamics of relationship between the different members of the jazz music collective. ...
This article aims to study the impact that networks of contacts and circles of musicians have in generating work opportunities within the musical field of jazz. The research has been framed within the perspective of Pierre Bourdieu’s artistic field (1984, 1987) and the main characteristics of conformation of collaborative circles studied by Michael P. Farrell (2003). The methodology used is qualitative and is based on semi-structured interviews and participant observation conducted between 2015 and 2016 with musicians from the jazz scene of the city of Barcelona. From this fieldwork, we have analyzed the main contributions that contact networks and collaborative circles of jazz musicians offer to generate work opportunities within the musical artistic field. We have also studied how the collective work and the conformation of musical groups become a crucial artistic and creative platform both for the development of the individual careers of musicians and in the field of joint exploration of the musical language itself.
... Cognitive ethnography is an innovative approach to creativity studies, which typically focus either on micro individual decisions, reasons and conventions (Faulkner & Becker 2009; Buscatto 2008; Sorignet 2004; Becker 1999), or on the objective distribution of capital and resources in the professional hierarchy (Rannou & Roarik 2006; Menger 2002; Bourdieu 1998). Without denying these theoretical positions we adopt a new angle, fully empirical and relational, which will allow us to formalize the relations of production in dance. ...
Creative choice is an individual act. As in other fields such as filmmaking, dance creation is based on a cogni- tive dualism that considers the choreographer as the creative decision-maker, while the dancer is objectified. The dancer’s body is an instrument for exploration of the choreographer’s imagery. We claim that the products of creativity are minute but crucial modifications of transitory stages of a dance rehearsal. On the one hand, attention is given to a dance company as a distributed cognitive system. The choreographer communicates in diverse modalities, which carry specific information, physical as well as symbolic. Through the analysis of an audiovisual and cognitive ethnography with ELAN software we find differences in decision-making patterns across multimodal instructions. On the other hand, we apply Social Network Analysis and UCINET software as a methodological innovation in order to formalize data from observed rehearsal settings. In all, the choice of modalities in the chorographical instruction shapes movement production, which is based on dyads, triads and other forms of creative interaction.
... Feld 1984; Feld and Fox 1994; Feld et al. 2004); particularly for the area of jazz and improvised music, they have explored issues such as apprenticeship and socialization, group interplay, and the relationship between notation, improvisation, and creativity (see, for instance, Berliner 1994; Walser 1995; Monson 1996; Duranti and Burrell 2004; Fischlin and Heble 2004; Black 2008; Duranti 2009; Samuels et al. 2010; Faudree 2012). Further insights on what makes music possible as a social product have been provided by a number of works of sociological and psychological orientation, particularly as pertains the negotiation of musical identities within specific communities of practice, such as jazz (Schutz 1951; Becker 1951 Becker , 2000 Jeffri 2003; Faulkner and Becker 2009; Dobson 2010; D. Veronesi and S. PasquandreaGibson 2010; Wilson and MacDonald 2012) and Western art music, in this latter case also with reference to the conductor's role (Kaplan 1955; Kadushin 1969; Faulkner 1973; Malhotra 1981; Murnighan and Conlon 1991; Glynn 2000; Koivunen 2007). Musical communication has also been examined under a sociolinguistic, pragmatic, and discursive perspective, so as to analyze the role played by language use in constructing communities of practices within musicians, critics, fans, and more generally within the productive system of music business (see Gabbard 1995a Gabbard , 1995b Floyd 1995; Ogren 1991; Stein 2003; Tucker 1999; Bennett 2006; Pasquandrea 2010). ...
This special issue aims at analyzing music as a site of social semiosis, i.e., at investigating the manifold ways in which music is constituted as a socially shared event. The papers collected here follow three main threads, considered as central aspects of music making: studying the kind of coordination and participation required to make music together; looking at the semiotic resources employed by musicians to construct their roles in interaction; examining the relationship between language and music. A variety of perspectives is adopted, ranging from social semiotics to conversation analysis, anthropology, multimodal analysis, and critical discourse analysis. Such a variety is also reflected in the musical traditions – Western art music, jazz, gospel, church hymns, pop music – and in the settings under examination, which comprise instructional activities like musical classes and rehearsals, as well as ordinary conversations and written accounts of musicians' biographies. Issues of epistemicity and authority, intersubjectivity, correction of musical action, solidarity, and ideology are thereby addressed. The issue thus aims at exploring the richness and complexity of music making as a social practice, and documents how the integration of different disciplinary perspectives can offer fruitful insights on music as a domain of sociality which lies at the intersection of aurality and writing, norm and creativity, individuality and collectiveness.
What are the social factors shaping musical repertoires? This paper analyzes repertoires as social relations among performers, refracted through factors such as the organization of industry, genres, race, and gender. Using data from American popular music recordings, performers and songs are treated as a two-mode network and repertoire communities are operationalized as bicliques. The production of culture perspective, the sociology of genres, and theories of race and gender imply hypotheses that are tested diachronically. Analysis finds support for the first two, with genres becoming the strongest basis of repertoire community membership while race and gender are surprisingly weak. Importantly, these factors worked in tandem as reflexive mechanisms for each other. The repertoire community system documents the rise of genre as the primary means of categorizing American popular music in the early twentieth century and mediated the effect of other factors.
A significant part of the work of orchestras that interpret composed music is aimed at optimizing the coordination of activities between different musicians by means of time-consuming rehearsals, in order to reduce the degree of contingency of their performances to a minimum and thus to remain loyal to the musical composition, whose score has already been largely defined. However, in the case of free jazz we are confronted with a phenomenon, which counteracts this pursuit of certainty because it deliberately produces uncertainty, thereby stimulating the musicians’ artistic productivity. By looking at the example of free jazz improvisation, I wish to tie two central topics in sociology into the following reflections: the structure of human action and the mutual coordination of action. Using these topics I will analyze certain aspects with regard to the contingency within a specific type of human action – improvising – and with regard to the related interactions. These aspects have received little attention in the empirical research until now.
While the potential of creativity and of the arts for societal transformation towards sustainability has gained attention over recent years, a specific focus on music is lacking in sustainability science. What are the specific potentials of music, and why should we care? Collective musical practice enhances group cohesion, and musical improvisation trains social creativity, both of which are important resources for organizational resilience. Turning to the experience of music on the individual level, cultures of sustainability can be fostered through a musical aesthetics of complexity that opens up to the ambiguities, ambivalences, contradictions and creatively chaotic dimensions of a transformation towards sustainability. However, music is a “double-edged sword” and its emotional power can be deployed instead to strengthen prejudice, simplify worldviews, and restrain creativity. This paper offers the first broad transdisciplinary review of research at the intersection of music and sustainability. It exposes the mechanisms operating at this intersection and highlights key areas where the social experience and practice of music can contribute to the cultural dimension of sustainability in communities, organizations and society.
Menschliches Handeln und Interagieren sind ohne Improvisieren nicht möglich, weil sowohl das Handeln als auch die Interaktion immer einen Grad an Kontingenz einschließen, die ex improviso bewältigt werden muss.
What are the potentials and limits of culture (in the sense of arts) to mitigate the alienation of manual work? How are these potentials and limits different in contrasting modes of production? Dudley's Guitar Makers epitomizes not only Becker's insistence that the art objects help explain how art operates but also Braverman's focus on the labor process in the social relations around the production of fine acoustic guitars. Korczynski's Songs of the Factory crosses the Becker/Braverman bridge from the other side, demonstrating how the workers at a blinds-making plant created a culture of sustenance and resistance through song and humor. The two books together reveal how music affords opportunities for mitigating alienation. A relational perspective is applied to conceptualize the social nature of music and work.
This contribution explores the potentiality of the subjectivity approach represented in the phenomenological theory of Alfred Schutz to explain processes of musical improvisation from a sociological perspective. This constitute a challenge to Schutz’ theory, since his idea of typified projects of action can explain improvisatory action and interaction only partially. However, this same theory opens another – still less explored – path to explain phenomena of improvisation with the notion of subjective and social stock of knowledge. The principal contribution of this article is to connect the notion of stock of knowledge with that of musical material, and with it, to link improvisatory action and interaction.
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