A Power Stronger Than Itself - Alejandrocasales.com

xvi : : Acknowledgments
Griffi n; and Daniel Fischlin and Ajay Heble’s The Other Side of Nowhere. 3
Heble’s tireless eff orts have led directly to the recent emergence of a peerreviewed,
bi lingual, Web- based journal devoted to improvisation studies,
Critical Studies in Improvisation/Études Critiques en Improvisation, which is
providing a forum for new critical work by a new crop of younger scholars,
some of whom are represented in these anthologies. Jason Robinson,
Julie Dawn Smith, Michael Dessen, Dana Reason Myers, Stephen Lehman,
Salim Washington, David Borgo, Daniel Widener, Tamar Barzel, Kevin
McNeilly, Ellen Waterman, Vijay Iyer, and Jason Stanyek explore experimental
improvisation by combining ethnographic and historical practice.
To many of us, the work of Sherrie Tucker, while not directly concerned
with experimental music, has nonetheless been important for its theorizing
of the place of gender analysis as a necessary component of our work.
As my UCSD colleague, the psychoacoustician Gerald Balzano, pointed
out to me at the outset of my academic career, the teaching of improvisation
as an academic discipline requires an exemplary source literature, and
my aim is for this book to take its place among the growing body of new
studies on improvisation.
Finally, my interest in anglophone work should not be taken as undermining
my interest in work on improvised music by nonanglophone
writers, whose work I draw upon extensively in this book. In a globalized
environment, the lack of attention paid in the United States to the very
well- developed nonanglophone writing on improvisation by people like
Ekkehard Jost, Wolfram Knauer, Bert Noglik, Franco Bolelli, Hans Kumpf,
Davide Sparti, Christian Broecking, Jean Jamin, Patrick Williams, Francisco
Martinelli, Alexandre Pierrepont, and the late Peter Niklas Wilson (one of
the few whose writings have been rendered in English) can be seen as a
serious lacuna that impoverishes Stateside scholarship. Here, as in the anglophone
case, some of the most intriguing texts have been written by
practicing musicians, such as vibraphonist Christopher Dell’s Prinzip Improvisation.
I’d also like to thank all the people who have been asking me about when
this book would fi nally be fi nished and available. It has been very gratifying
to receive the moral support and encouragement of so many people,
including both colleagues and members of the concertgoing public. After
my 2005 interactive computer performance with the drummer Louis
Moholo- Moholo at Johannesburg’s UNYAZI festival—the fi rst computer
music festival held on the African continent—I found that even in South
Africa, a country I had never visited, people were anticipating the book’s