Interstitial Soundings: Philosophical Reflections on Improvisation Practice and Self-Making

In Interstitial Soundings Cynthia R. Nielsen brings music and philosophy into a fruitful and mutually illuminating dialogue. Topics discussed include the following: musics dynamic ontology performers and improvisers as co-composers the communal character of music jazz as hybrid and socially constructed the sociopolitical import of bebop Afro-modernism and its strategic deployments jazz and racialized practices continuities between Michel Foucaults discussion of self-making and creating ones musical voice Alasdair MacIntyre on practice and how one might harmonize MacIntyres notion of virtue development with Foucauldian resistance strategies. The nature and boundaries of music are continuously being reshaped by musicians and audiences alike. In this book Nielsen nimbly articulates this inherently dynamic ontology using it to bring the compositional structures of both self and society to center stage. Through careful and incisive readings she harmonizes aesthetic and race theory with Foucauldian genealogy and MacIntyrean virtue ethics to produce an excellent synthetic work that will be of interest to readers across multiple disciplines. --Michael Barnes Norton Assistant Professor Department of Philosophy and Interdisciplinary Studies University of Arkansas at Little Rock In her exciting and important text Nielsen employs jazz theory to make multiple complex schools of thought simultaneously accessible and challenging. . . . By applying a thorough and engaging application of jazz improvisation Nielsen succeeds to do what so few have: to make Foucaults work on epistemology clear while adding to our understanding of his contributions. --E. Simon Ruchti Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Womens and Gender Studies West Chester University What is so great about this book is that Cynthia Nielson performs for us the very thing she is writing about--hybridity creativity improvisation and above all the fearless practice of thinking along the edges of thought. . . . She shows us in this book how to make thinking an art. --Peter Kline artist Nielsen wedges herself between the pillars of Kant Nietzsche and Foucault and as a jazz musician herself performs a piece of writing which preserves and expresses her own original thoughts. Her understanding of performance art and the nature of interpretation and improvisation is as substantially profound as it is personal. --Zenos Frudakis sculptor Dr. Cynthia R. Nielsen has taught philosophy and ethics for nearly a decade at institutions such as Villanova University and the University of Dallas. Nielsens work is interdisciplinary and her research interests include ethics social and political philosophy philosophical hermeneutics philosophy of race and the philosophy of music. She is the author of Foucault Douglass Fanon and Scotus in Dialogue: On Social Construction and Freedom (2013).