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april 15, 2004
Mer om Howard Becker, improvisationens etikett samt annat
I förrgår skrevs blogganteckningen The Etiquette of Improvisation som innehöll utdrag från Howard S Beckers essä The Etiquette of Improvisation. Peter Lindberg och jag har diskuterat en del liknande saker tidigare så det var det inte helt oväntat att han också skrev kommentar.
Enär det finns så lite om denna essä på nätet gjordes en googleresearch. Här nedan är en del av det som hittades, både direkt relevant men även andra saker som verkar skoj.
Tidskriften Mind, Culture, and Activity, Volume 7, number: 3 2000 har flera titlar som anspelade på Beckers skrift, tydligen efter en workshop kring denna. Tyvärr är dessa artiklar inte tillgängliga fritt på nätet, varpå sökningen fortsatte.
En kort summering av de Becker-relaterade skrifterna finns i en abstract (något redigerad):
Howard Becker is a sociologist of work and practice, who in a long and fruitful career has written about the work of schoolteachers, jazz musicians, medical students, undergraduates, artists and actors, among other groups. He has also written extensively about social science methodology. A student of Chicago School sociologist Everett Hughes, he shares the Chicago School-Pragmatist emphasis on egalitarian analyses, empirical study, and understanding the ³definition of the situation² as developed by members of a social group. The titles of his books and articles often indicate aspects of these commitments. "Doing Things Together" (a selection of collected papers, 1986) talks about a range of activities from map-making to jazz playing. "Boys in White" (1961) tells about the socialization and tribulations of medical students. One of his best-known works, "Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance" (1963) was pivotal in establishing social theories of deviance that refused to label any community of practice as "sick" or "dysfunctional." Everyone is an outsider somewhere.
The symposium revolves around a short essay on the nature of improvisation in jazz, especially drawing on Becker¹s own experience as a jazz musician in Saturday night pickup bands in Chicago in the 1940s and 50s. Here, as in much of his work, Becker investigates the tensions and affinities between rules and freedom, between membership and outsider status, between credibility and rank. The comments are by Debra Cash (an anthropologist and dance critic), Keith Sawyer (a psychologist studying creativity and improvisation), and Karen Ruhelder (a computer scientist and serious amateur choral conductor) and Fred Stolzfus (a teacher of choral conducting in a prestigious university music department). The conversation comes to replicate aspects of the discussion about improvisation including 'yes, and' and 'no, but' interchanges. The respondents use Becker's jazz improvisation case to extend the range of examples to other cases, improvisational theater and dance, conducting, and everyday conversation.
Susan Leigh Star
Making Music With Cases: Symposium on the Work of Howard S. Becker
Se även:
Första kapiteln från Sorting things out: classification and its consequences (Amazon-länk)
How things (actor-net)work: Classification, magic and the ubiquity of standards
En annan bok: The Cultures of Computing
Följande medförfattaren Geoffrey C. Bowker hittas bland annat Biodiversity Datadiversity (PDF).
R. Keith Sawyer:
Improvisational Cultures: Collaborative Emergence and Creativity in Improvisation
Se vidare:
Improvisation
Emergence
Articles
Abstracts
Debra Cash
Response to Becker's "The Etiquette of Improvisation"
Hittade ingen hemsida, däremot omnämns hon i PeopleFlow: Shared documents and ad hoc workflow (IBM Watson Research Center). En kort bio. Tydligen är hon nu på National Public Radio.
Karen Ruhleder, Fred Stoltzfus
The Etiquette of the Master Class: Improvisation on a Theme by Howard Becker
Avslutningsvis följer ett citat från Howard Beckers essä A New Art Form: Hypertext Fiction:
All art works involve the cooperation of everyone whose activity has anything to do with the end result.
...
All the people who cooperate in making a work of art do that by using mutually understood conventions. All sorts of aspects of art works are governed by conventional understandings as to how they can be done. Some common examples are: musical scales, which are a conventional choice of just a few from all the tones available; the three act play; the sonnet; the history painting; and so on. Such questions as size and shape, length and appropriate subject matters are all decidable by reference to conventional understandings as to how things should be done. Conventional knowledge is what makes it possible for musicians who have never seen each other to play as though they had known each other for years. It is what makes it possible for knowledgeable viewers or listeners to respond to a painting or musical work. Because you know what ought conventionally to happen, you can be surprised by an innovation which would otherwise be meaningless. It meant nothing special to hear Bob Dylan play electric guitar unless you knew that he had always played acoustic guitar. Using conventions makes it easier for people to cooperate and get the work of art done. Changing or ignoring them makes it harder and lessens the possibility of getting others to cooperate.
Becker har skrivit boken Art Worlds (Amazon) som, vad jag förstår, handlar om just detta.
Posted by hakank at april 15, 2004 09:02 EM Posted to Komplexitet/emergens