
The Fierce Urgency of Now: Improvisation, Rights, and the Ethics of Cocreation
Daniel Fischlin
Improvisation is the creation and development of new, unexpected, and productive cocreative relations among people. It cultivates the capacity to discern elements of possibility, potential, hope, and promise where none are readily apparent. Improvisers work with the tools they have in the arenas that are open to them. Proceeding without a written score or script, they collaborate to envision and enact something new, to enrich their experience in the world by acting on it and changing it. By analyzing the dynamics of particular artistic improvisations, mostly by contemporary American jazz musicians, the authors reveal improvisation as a viable and urgently needed model for social change. In the process, they rethink politics, music, and the connections between them.
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About Daniel Fischlin
Reviews for The Fierce Urgency of Now: Improvisation, Rights, and the Ethics of Cocreation
Lou Glandfield
TLS
“A rather important book that seeks for the first time—or the first time with quite this level of intellectual rigor—to make clear the defining connections between improvisation and rights, and to suggest that improvisation’s basic heuristic, which is the capacity to discern potentials in any given situation, has a powerful social function.”
Brian Morton
The Wire
“The Fierce Urgency of Now is both a testament to the veracity of the rapidly growing field of improvisation studies, but also an impassioned, far-reaching, interdisciplinary investigation into ways that musical improvisation can activate new perspectives on rights discourses.”
Jason Robinson
Journal of Popular Music Studies
"[This] collaborative effort offers not just a rigorous articulation of improvised music’s ethical potential but also a manifesto about how that potential’s realization should take place."
Michael Borshuk
English Studies in Canada
"The Fierce Urgency of Now clearly stands out as a powerful and profoundly inspiring manifesto of great potential interest to ethnomusicologists seeking to engage issues of social justice through their scholarly practice."
A. Scott Currie
Ethnomusicology