(Musical) Improvisation and Ethics

In this interdisciplinary, practice-oriented project we investigate the improvised nature of ethical behavior, using live encounters with musical ensembles as case studies. Improvisation and ethics are everywhere. People improvise in so many practices from cooking to sports to migration policy that it often goes unnoticed. The same is true of ethics; as self-interpreting animals, humans reveal and develop ethical values in everything from democracy to empirical science to punk rock. But the role of improvisation within ethics is often overlooked. Instead, many people and institutions tend to characterize ethics as a matter of consciously, rationally adhering to known norms and rules. Disputes over the content of such rules manifest as the ideological tribalism of our era. In this project, we pursue an alternative understanding of ethics as an ongoing process. We take as our starting point an understanding of this process as a combination of habitual actions and the spontaneous refinement of those very actions, all driven by a sensitivity to social and environmental context: in a word, improvisation. To test and develop this idea, we will engage with a practice in which the improvisational qualities of ethics are unmistakable: experimental improvised music. The framework is a series of seven, 10-day-long collaborative sessions a musical ethics laboratory (Lab). In the Lab, musical ensembles improvise with and against given situations, structures, and interventions, in private and public settings. We will design the Lab collaboratively, drawing on our backgrounds in philosophy, anthropology, critical improvisation studies, and artistic research in music. Musicians will also shape the Lab, proposing their own ideas and reflecting on the work as it unfolds. We will interact with the musicians creatively, and through interviews and observation. Each session will result in public concerts and a talk. Our analysis of documentation from the Lab will focus on three things: (1) the evolution of musicians own materials and practical working methods; (2) their improvising mindset, including values, habits, and senses of self; and (3) the way they listen to each other and to other-than-human elements in their environments. This analysis will both inform future Lab sessions and ground a new, holistic conceptual framework for understanding the ethical significance of improvisation across a range of human activity. We hope this framework will be of interest to artists, scholars in the humanities and social sciences, and lay people alike.