Jam Sessions

In this essay, we consider what musical improvisation can offer humanists interested in interdisciplinary cultural study. We begin by exploring our shared backgrounds as jazz-informed percussionists and our coincidental meeting in the same interdisciplinary graduate program. In the process, we identify key homologies between our musical and scholarly practices: namely, careful and constant practice; a deep commitment to listening; and an openness to conceptual translations across a variety of contexts. As we unpack these ideas, we draw on a wide range of artistic-theoretical texts, years of after-hours conversations, and occasional music collaboration; ultimately, we articulate, for each other and potential readers, that the dynamic, collaborative ethic required for successful improvisation nurtures scholarly interdisciplinary practice by valuing individual efforts as part of communal strivings.

Jonathan Lethem's Genre Evolutions

This article proceeds from the observation that all of Lethem's novels subvert traditional genres in some way, and argues that the way genres mutate or evolve reflects one of his central ethical concerns – evolution itself. Many of the characters in Gun, with Occasional Music (1994) are “evolved animals” that have undergone “evolution therapy” and can now talk, walk upright, and carry weapons. As the narrator Metcalf observes, these animals are characteristically reluctant to acknowledge their animal lineage. Here one sees evolution's contradiction: it purports to be progress, but is also a melancholic forgetting of origins. In a world where a drug called Forgettol abstracts people from their own memories, it is the detective's job, though he is despised for it, to continue asking questions and remind people of shared culpability and connected narratives. Metcalf, this paper suggests, is engaged in a struggle to maintain the novel as detective fiction, to resist the encroaching sci-fi elements which symbolize the death of community through increasing dependence on an unethical science of forgetting. Amnesia Moon (1995) depicts a postapocalyptic America in which the typical “evolutionary” reaction to the unspecified catastrophe is a retreat into a blinkered regionalism which, like Forgettol or evolution therapy, encourages the individual to forget any sense of wider responsibility. The article concludes with reflections on literary influence and the evolution of Lethem's own work in subsequent novels.

Britten's New Piano Piece

The ‘Night Piece’ for solo piano was composed in the spring of 1963 in response to a request from the Committee of the Leeds International Pianoforte Competition for a work to be compulsory for all participants. The Committee, of course, regarded it a high honour that the country's leading composer should so generously accede to a request for such a piece of occasional music. In addition to adding to the prestige of the competition the piece was also invaluable in revealing the competitors' imaginative and interpretative powers as they had had no opportunity of hearing any previous performance or recording.