President Lee C. Bollinger and Provost Claude M. Steele
host the University Lecture given by George E. Lewis,
Edwin H. Case Professor of American Music.
Improvisation as a Way of Life: Reflections on Human Interaction
Many musical improvisers have understood their sounds and practices as addressing larger questions of identity and social organization, as well as creating politically inflected, critically imbued aesthetic spaces. Following a 1964 suggestion by Alfred Schutz that a study of the social relationships connected with the musical process may lead to some insights valid for many other forms of social intercourse, the realization that improvisation is not limited to the artistic domain, but is a ubiquitous aspect of everyday life, can lead humanists and scientists toward new models of intelligibility, agency, ethics, technology, and social transformation.
