Sync or Swarm, Revised Edition: Improvising Music in a Complex Age

Description

The revised edition of Sync or Swarm promotes an ecological view of musicking, moving us from a subject-centered to a system-centered view of improvisation. It explores cycles of organismic self-regulation, cycles of sensorimotor coupling between organism and environment, and cycles of intersubjective interaction mediated via socio-technological networks. Chapters funnel outward, from the solo improviser (Evan Parker), to nonlinear group dynamics (Sam Rivers trio), to networks that comprise improvisational communities, to pedagogical dynamics that affect how individuals learn, completing the hermeneutic circle. Winner of the Society for Ethnomusicology's Alan Merriam prize in its first edition, the revised edition features new sections that highlight electro-acoustic and transcultural improvisation, and concomitant issues of human-machine interaction and postcolonial studies.

David Borgo is Professor and Chair of Music at UC San Diego, USA. He has performed around the world, released 13 albums, and published extensively in scholarly and other outlets. The first edition of Sync or Swarm (Bloomsbury 2005) won the Alan P. Merriam Prize in 2006, the Society for Ethnomusicology's most distinguished award.

"I am pleased to have had my work subjected to such rigorous scrutiny and I appreciate all the thinking David Borgo has done in an area where it is almost impossible to make any single uncontested statement!" -- Evan Parker, saxophonist/improvisor/composer "Integrating a broad range of interdisciplinary considerations - from complex systems and sociological theories to cognition and consciousness - saxophonist/composer/scholar David Borgo's Sync or Swarm makes important contributions to the expanding dialogue about contemporary improvised music." -- Ed Sarath, Professor of Music and Chair, Department of Jazz and Contemporary Improvisation; Director, Program in Creativity and Consciousness Studies, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor "Getting excited while you are READING about MUSIC may be common to ethno-musicologists. But for me (a cognitive and computer scientist), music generally lives in one part of my brain while scientific/academic work lives in another. David Borgo's Sync or Swarm successfully lights up both sides of my brain!" -- Richard K. Belew, Professor and Chair, Cognitive Science Department, University of California, San Diego "Not only is this an important book for specialists working in areas of both contemporary music and contemporary science, but it also offers absorbing reading to improvising musicians, their listeners, and the growing cadre of smart, engaged folks fascinated by the human implications of 'complex' music, chaos theory, and other once-foreboding realms." -- David Ake, Associate Professor of Music, University of Nevada, Reno; author of Jazz Cultures "Borgo is familiar with a wide range of the recent literature on complexity, chaos, embodiment, etc. and he's done a creative job of bringing that into his main topic: free-jazz group improvisation." -- R. Keith Sawyer, Associate Professor of Education, Washington University; author of Explaining Creativity: The Science of Human Innovation "David Borgo's Sync or Swarm, a provocative, gutsy, and potentially revolutionary attempt to apply chaos theory, fractal plotting, sociological Actor-Network Theory, the concept of swarm intelligence, and other analytical templates to improvised music, wow!" -- Christopher Delaurenti, The Stranger "a provocative, gutsy, and potentially revolutionary attempt to apply chaos theory, fractal plotting, sociological Actor-Network Theory, the concept of swarm intelligence, and other analytical templates to improvised music. Wow!" * The Stranger * "Worth noting by British readers is the amount of space devoted to Evan, including some new quotations". -- Brian Priestly, Jazzwise This new edition of Borgo's Sync or Swarm is a most welcome addition to the growing literature emerging out of the new field of Improvisational Studies. Borgo's great strength is to point us toward emerging methods and theories that can both help us understand improvisation in all its complexity, and the ways improvisation itself can help make sense of complex and dynamic social and cultural practices. Here in Sync or Swarm, Black diasporic art is shown to be at the forefront not just of creative practices, but of scientific ones too. It is refreshing to see Black art taken seriously as both a test-case for new theories in cognition, group behavior and complex systems, and as a way of enacting such theories. If you want to see where main-stream research in improvisational studies is likely to be a decade from now, read this new edition of Sync or Swarm. -- Eric Lewis, Associate Professor of Philosophy at McGill University, Montreal, Canada, and co-editor Improvisation and Social Aesthetics (2017) With this expanded edition, Borgo presents to us an exquisite, ecological, system-centred view of a profoundly incorporating, embodied musicking practice - improvisation. His journey, deeply influenced by contemporary research in 4E cognitive science (embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended), takes us on a metaphorical Mobius strip that illuminates not only the process and practice, the detritus and debris of musical improvisations, but, that also shows us improvisation as a microcosm of our perception of the world, highlighting the necessity for an open, dynamic, adaptive and emergent collective response to current, pressing social and environmental challenges. -- Franziska Schroeder, Professor of Music and Cultures, Queen's University Belfast, United Kingdom, co-editor of Soundweaving: Writings on Improvisation (2014) David Borgo's original book is already a landmark in improvisation studies. His approach, which seeks to explore improvisation through the lens of several contemporary sciences such as complexity theory, embodied/enactive cognition and actor-network theory, is absolutely original and opens up a field of interdisciplinary studies that has been expanding more and more in recent decades. This new edition brings important updates to the original work, including reflections on electro-acoustic improvisation, cross-cultural improvisation, man-machine interaction, and postcolonial cultural studies. With regard to this last topic, I am sure that my colleagues (improvisors and researchers) in Latin America will be especially pleased. -- Rogerio Luiz Moraes Costa, Professor of Music, Improvisor and Researcher, University of Sao Paulo, Brazil, author of Musica Errante: o jogo da improvisacao livre (2016)