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In speaking of Offenbach, the author did justice to his marvelous natural gifts and deplored the way he had squandered them. He was proven wrong as Offenbach came back into fashion. As the public cannot bring itself to do without gaiety, it turned to operetta and, naturally, to the man who was its creator and prolific purveyor. The word “purveyor” is not out of place, because Offenbach was not interested in creating art; gifted as he was with comic verve and an unquenchable fount of tunefulness, his only idea was to feed the theatre of which he was simultaneously the director and, to all intents and purposes, the exclusive composer. But harmonic inventions are rare in Offenbach. What makes him interesting is a richness and fertility of melodic invention that has few equals. He used to improvise endlessly, and at extraordinary speed.

This chapter describes Viotti's becoming the most acclaimed violinist of his time after his sensational debut at the Concert spirituel in Paris. After only two seasons Viotti renounced public performance, but continued to play in private salon concerts (which this chapter treats in some detail) and for a time he was in the service of the queen, Marie Antoinette. Viotti's Paris works are described, including a section on his improvising, as well as his activities as a violin teacher. The possibility that Viotti's trip to his hometown, Fontanetto, took place in the summer and autumn of 1782, rather than the summer of 1783, as is commonly thought, is considered. Viotti's friendships with Madame Vigée-Lebrun, the painter, and Madame de Genlis, the educator and novelist, are introduced in this chapter. Viotti's putative musical participation in the Masonic Concert olympique, of which he was a member in 1786, is speculated upon.

This chapter discusses improvised musics that are embedded in real time. It shows that this topic is relevant in questioning the narrowness of the customary concept of musical creativity. It studies five musicians that improvise in real time and represent a variety of practices. These accounts help explain the status adding to the improvisational creativities in the fields of folk/traditional, electro-acoustic, computer, and community music.

From a psychological viewpoint, sight-reading involves perception (decoding note patterns), kinesthetics (executing motor programs), memory (recognizing patterns), and problem-solving skills (improvising and guessing). Sight-reading skills seem to be highly trainable and differences in sight-reading ability can be explained through differences in the amount of relevant experience and the size of the knowledge base (e.g., repertoire). The ability to perform with little or no rehearsal may be regarded as a reconstructive activity that involves higher-level mental processes. These are primarily initiated by visual input but also by conceptual knowledge and specific expectations. This chapter discusses common problems in sight-reading of pitches, rhythm, articulation, and expression, and presents suggestions for their remediation through the use of technical equipment, practice of isolated parameters, and strategic preparations for playing.

This chapter defines improvisation as the art of making up something as the musician goes along with the music — an instant composition — and ‘the most widely practised of all musical activities and the least acknowledged and understood’. The chapter relates how musical improvisation can be interrelated and how it can appear to be similar to human beings' daily communication and discourse. Composition, on the other hand, is a more complex and sophisticated area which requires deeper psychological study to understand the composers' motivations, intentions, and emotions. Studying composition as a sophisticated musical activity provides insights on cultural creations and myths. The chapter discusses introspection as a major part of this musical skill and activity, and relates psychological studies and concepts involved in such.

The activity described in this chapter is one of many that can help inspire students to compose. Done collectively with a group of people of any age in a community or school context, the facilitator of the activity uses a set of word magnets to ignite the imaginations of the participants and then gets them to write a song in a popular style. Adding fun words that spark social, political, or controlled avenues of exploration are left to the discretion of the facilitator. This exercise is a fun and simple way to improvise lyrics, and begin the process of setting those words to music.

State-led neoliberalization is discussed through the case of rural development in Gujarat, India’s flagship state of market reforms. The essay takes neoliberalization not as given or self-evident, but as a process of reworking of the state’s boundaries with the market and civil society. State transformation in India includes a downsized rural bureaucracy recruiting temporary workers and contract NGOs to implement development, expanding women’s employment while rendering its circumstances precarious, delegating development practice to an ungoverned space in the locality, and employing techniques of self-governance among development subjects to rid the state of these responsibilities. The new state is revealed to be an improvising state, constantly departing from certainty and provisionally administering social life.

The author says the last month was a record-breaking one for the field hospital in terms of blood use. Because the numbers of casualties were not significantly different from previous months, this meant that people were getting increasingly badly injured, fueled by more powerful and often badly contaminated improvised explosive devices. The author also discusses the controversy sparked by one of the doctors' comments that the field hospital should stop giving one of the Afghans more opiates as he wouldn't get the same pain medications in any local hospital. After mentioning the day's casualties, he describes the three helicopter crews that were in charge of the evacuation of casualties: MERT, Dustoff, and Pedro. MERT is a British-staffed medical crew, comprising a physician, one or two advanced paramedics, and an emergency nurse. Dustoff and Pedro are American-staffed helicopter crews with a limited level of medical care.

Sherre DeLys makes a point of bringing no consistent bag of tricks to her projects. She approaches each as an “improvised, open-ended dialogue with [her] subject.” You never know what approach she’ll take, and neither does she, but the result is often breathtaking. Sherre ends one piece, about the late artist Derek Jarman and his seaside home, with six minutes of wordless sound: waves pulling at the shore, gulls, a bell, an electric piano. This dance of pure sound, she believes, can mesmerize us into a “slower, stiller mode that promotes reflective inquiry.”

This chapter investigates the issue of landpower from a demographic perspective, exploring the realities of military manpower in a time when fewer than 1 percent of the American people serve in uniform. Since 9/11, the United States has deployed in combat situations this minority of the population in Afghanistan and Iraq, where thousands have been exposed to a new-age weapon of choice, the IED, the Improvised Explosive Device. Many hundreds have been killed or maimed for life. Many thousands more have suffered debilitating, if not life-changing, head and brain injuries. The latest generation of diagnostic tools now available to medical professionals, magnetic resonance imaging, makes clear the catastrophic damage such weapons inflict on the human brain. These findings have enhanced the scientific and popular understanding of the nature of post-traumatic stress disorder, and such precursors as Combat Fatigue, Shell Shock, and Soldier's Heart. The lingering question remains the extent to which the USgovernment and the governed will recognize and act on the revealed science.

This chapter discusses the music of the men surrounding pianist Lennie Tristano in the mid-1940s. Their music is usually regarded as crucial to the development of the jazz avant-garde because “Intuition” and “Digression”—recorded in 1949 by an ensemble that included saxophonists Lee Konitz and Warne Marsh and guitarist Billy Bauer—are reputed to be the first “free,” totally improvised jazz performances. The Tristano ensemble's free pieces sound very Tristano-like and would seem to have little or no organic connection with the music of Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler, Cecil Taylor, and company. The deeper significance of the Tristano-ites lies in Tristano's transformation of jazz's historical self-consciousness into a rationale for making a new kind of music.

This chapter positions machinima within current discussions of liveness in performance studies. It shows that within the incorporeal species that make up the evolving ecology of machinima exists a continuum of performance conventions that mirrors the conventions of process drama, on the one hand, and those of improvised cinema on the other, with each grade in the range connected to a specific level of liveness. Although all variations ultimately depend on the game engines for their dramatic frame, they occupy different niches, and different communities of practice have developed around them. The machinima performance range includes the following: live puppet machinima operating for a physically present audience, or a virtual audience in a shared game space; demos and “speed runs” working as game engine replay; and “recamming” of demo data files using software to alter game engine replay.

Chapter One examines the life and work of former inmate and sociologist Tamotsu Shibutani, and how the afterlife of a historical event can develop from a generalized sense of injustice and its costs into a clear topic for scholarly study and political engagement. Though Shibutani had been interested in race relations and social disincorporation long before Executive Order 9066, and had worked for the Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Study where he gathered ample data for his graduate theses at the University of Chicago, nearly three decades would pass after his release from camp before he began publishing on the complexities of interpersonal experience and social disincorporation. This chapter treats that interval, as well as the work that came after it, as a study in the trajectory of afterlife from lingering memories to explicit analysis, and from personal experience to broad political engagement.

Grounded in the research and promising practices literature, Chapter 3 discusses concepts and skills, pedagogies, and technology related to musical creativity. Creativity is usually an assumed part of being musical. While there are creative aspects to a variety of musical activities—for instance, developing an interpretation of a musical composition involves creative thinking—the focus in this chapter is on the development of original musical ideas through two primary musical processes, improvisation and composition. The chapter provides an overview of creativity, discusses the process of learning to improvise and compose, describes pedagogical strategies to use with students, and suggests technological tools that can support creative musical experiences. Contemporary approaches to musical creativity such as remixing and mashups are also addressed.

This chapter first looks at the information age and its networking mindset. It then examines three tenets from the study of complex systems: structure, synchrony, and stability. It describes the concept of ‘improvising society’, which refers to new social forms of processing alignment and fine-tuning. In both tightly structured and more fluid compositions, arrangements and spontaneous play produce a kaleidoscopic image of networks, clusters and subcultures. The improvising society reflects the new institutional relations. Institutions develop on the basis of tradition and renewal, and give society stability. The alignment of one actor (person, organization) with another actor, and vice versa, ad infinitum, is the ordering process of the current network society.

In the second half of the eighteenth century, women became most acclaimed and prominent improvisers in Italy. Women improvisers such as Maria Maddalena Morelli, Teresa Bandettini, and Fortunata Sulgher Fantastici were especially popular and successful. This chapter explores the social and aesthetic foundations that contributed to the emergence of improvising and the success of women improvisers in eighteenth-century Arcadia and Italy.

This chapter documents how individuals and couples are improvising, responding to the challenges, risks, and opportunities of life today, and in so doing helping to define the contours of an evolving twenty-first-century life course. It also charts the unevenness of this evolving paradigm of a more voluntarily customized life course. What many want, but can’t always find, are chances to reset the time clocks of their lives, often in the form of different combinations of flexible, frequently less-than-full-time work, volunteering, learning, caring, and leisure, including more healthy lifestyles. Despite the absence of institutionalized options for such configurations, growing numbers of Boomers are indeed time shifting, resetting their lives and their identities, making them up as they go. Others are less fortunate. Boomers are following four pathways through encore adulthood: neotraditional time shifting, time shifting for the long game, portfolio time shifting, and unanticipated time shifting.