Improvisation is an art form which has arguably been present since the existence of music itself. Inventing music on the spot, like spontaneous speech, is a common expression of artistry throughout history and across musical boundaries. While improvisation has maintained its importance in jazz, classical organ music and the music of many eastern cultures, this dissertation will focus on the presence of improvisation as acceptable performance practice within the tradition of western classical music. At several points in history, this musical tradition was encouraged and even expected to be a regular part of a musician's life, and yet in the classical music tradition of the twenty-first century, improvisation is rarely, if ever, heard from the concert stage, nor is it regularly included in the general education of the conservatory student.

Der Beitrag würdigt die Improvisation als eine die interpretatorischen und analytischen Verfahren ergänzende Perspektive des Werk- und Stilverstehens. Um die Erschrockenheit zu überbrücken, welche gemeinhin entsteht, wenn dem am Literaturspiel geschulten Instrumentalisten der sichere Boden des Notentextes entzogen wird, wird eine methodisch durchformte Improvisationsanleitung gegeben, die es ermöglicht, den neu gewonnenen Freiraum durch Begrenzung zu bewältigen, bevor es zum Überschreiten des zunächst gesetzten Rahmens kommt. Das Konzept gilt der tonalen Improvisation und orientiert sich an kompositorischen Modellen der Nach-Beethoven-Ära bis etwa 1850. Gleichwohl wird ein eher systematischer Ansatz verfolgt, der Übertragungen auch auf die Improvisation über Modelle der Wiener Klassik sowie eine Fortentwicklung zur Gruppenimprovisation, Akkordinstrument + Melodieinstrument(e)/Vokalstimme(n) gestattet. / This article addresses improvisation as a perspective complementary to interpretation and analysis in the explication of a work and its style. In order to bridge the shock that often results when an instrumentalist trained in playing literature leaves the safe haven of the printed score, a methodical guide to improvisation is offered that enables the player to conquer the newly won freedom by first introducing restrains before one eventually transgresses these initial boundaries. The method addresses tonal improvisation and is oriented around compositional models of the time following Beethoven, ca. 1850. At the same time a rather systematic approach is employed that allows crossover into improvisation over models drawn from Viennese classicism as well as extension activities involving group-improvisation and the combination of chordal instruments, melody instruments, and voice.

Master of Music / School of Music, Theatre, and Dance / Virginia Houser / This Lecture Recital, given in lieu of a Master’s Report, was on the use of improvisation as a teaching aid in the private piano lesson. The lecture and supplemental handout included an historical overview of the role of improvisation, research on its educational benefits in regards to student learning, and a review and demonstration of current piano method books designed to teach the concept of improvisation. A bibliography of sources used in the presentation, as well as reviewed articles, books, and websites were included in the handout. The piano method books reviewed are Scott McBride Smith’s American Popular Piano, and Pattern Play, by Forrest Kinney. This graduate lecture recital was given in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Master of Music degree in piano pedagogy on February 25, 2015 in Kirmser Hall at Kansas State University. It featured demonstrations with the aid of Leah Harmon on piano.

This paper is an exploration of the concept of theatre as education and what I learned about teaching, transformation, and failure through my thesis project. In order to explore these ideas, I reflect on my experience creating and performing a short play with a group of eight 2nd and 3rd grade students over the span of nine weeks. I pinpoint the parts of the process that worked well and discuss how these techniques and activities could be used to enhance curriculum and learning in the classroom. I also discuss which parts of the process failed and what I learned from those experiences. I hope that the paper may serve as a guide for teaching artists undertaking similar work and a resource for teachers looking to incorporate theatre arts into their curriculums.

“The city of living garbage” tours private houses in Austin transformed by their inhabitants into quasi-public places – art environments and permaculture systems made possible by urban waste. The creators of these micro-utopias collect and improvise with salvaged materials like roadside junk, greywater, unwanted animals, and half-forgotten cultural forms to cultivate habitats where undervalued things flourish. They revalue waste through a variety of practices like caring for, teaching, learning, enjoying, and tinkering. Becoming part of these relational patterns is a way to slow down and find wonder and pleasure in the ordinary, but also to act on ecological problems in the larger world. The landscape patches that emerge are lively but vulnerable assemblages that artists, activists, and their nonhuman allies belong to as local characters. By being open for tours, the places loosely connect publics that share modes of attention set on urban natures, salvageable garbage, and vernacular aesthetics. These informal institutions, non-profits, and vulnerable for-profit businesses are caught up in Austin’s current sustainable and cultural development strategies, but also share in an informal economy through their use of valueless wastes. Some articulate with contemporary localization movements that seek to reconfigure water, food, and energy production to decrease their precarious dependence on globalized economies. Others refuse the boundary between art and everyday life by recasting houses as never-ending aesthetic projects. Similarly, as wildlife habitats and urban gardens, they are thriving examples of cultivated places that disrupt an assumed antithesis between cities and ecosystems. These embodied critiques or dreams are small-scale manifestations of what urban natures might become. Borrowing from Deleuze & Guattari, Haraway, Latour, and Thrift, I attend to these places’ ecological and aesthetic relational dynamics that communicate directly through bodies, senses, and forms. This non-representational approach recognizes the contributions of nonhuman agents like plants, animals, microbes, and machines in composing affective landscapes. The writing strives to be a mode of research that is isomorphic with the phenomena it describes. It is impelled by a love of the places, people, and beings it researches; it aspires to preserve a little bit of them by redoubling their presence in the world. / text

This thesis deals with two related questions. The first relates to a critical inquiry into the processes of curriculum creation and formation within a medical school which has undergone a significant curriculum revision. I explore the notion that such processes can be understood as a form of practice in which the relationship between content and process is held together by what is explored in the thesis as an indivisible, paradoxical tension. Exploring curriculum as a kind of process is a novel approach in a school steeped in the traditions of the natural sciences. The common metaphors for curriculum in this setting refer to blueprints, models, behavioural competencies and objective standards. These are all founded on the belief in an objective observer who can maintain some form of distance between themselves and the subject in question. Issues of method are, therefore, central to my explorations of how we might, instead, locate curriculum in social processes and acts of evaluation involving power relations, conflict and the continuous negotiation of how it is we work together. The paradox of process and content in this way of understanding is that participants in curricular practice are simultaneously forming and being formed by their participation. In this way of thinking, it makes no sense to say one can either “step back” to “reflect” on their participation or that there is a way to approach participation “objectively.” The other question I address in this thesis has to do with the emergence of excellence. By emergence, I refer to thinking in the complexity sciences which attempts to explain phenomena which have a coherence which cannot be planned for or known in advance. “Excellence” is a kind of idealization which has no meaning until it is taken up and “functionalized” within specific settings and situations. In the setting of participating in curriculum formation, excellence may be understood as one possible outcome of persisting engagement and continuous inquiry which itself influences the ongoing conversation of how excellence is recognized and understood. In other words, excellence emerges in social processes as a theme simultaneously shaping and being shaped by curricular practice. This research was initiated as a result of a mandate to establish a program which could demonstrate excellence in the area of relationships in health care. The magnitude of this mandate felt overwhelming at the time and raised a lot of anxiety. I found that the traditional thinking regarding participation in organizational change processes (which, within my setting, could be understood as “set your goal and work backwards”) did not satisfactorily account for the uncertainties and surprises of working with colleagues to create something new. The method of inquiry can be read as another example of a process / content paradox through which my findings regarding curriculum and excellence emerged. This method involved taking narratives from my experience as an educator and clinician and a participant in varied forms of curricular processes and inquiring into them further by both locating them within relevant discourses from sociology, medical education and organizational studies and also sharing them with peers in my doctoral program as well as colleagues from my local setting. This method led to an inquiry and series of findings which was substantively different from my starting point. This movement in thinking offers another demonstration of an emergent methodology in which original findings are “discovered” through the course of inquiry. These findings continue to affect my practice and my approach to inquiry within the setting of medical education. The original contributions to thinking in medical education occur in several ways. One is in the demonstration of a research method which takes my own original experience seriously and seeks to challenge taken for granted assumptions about a separation of process and content, instead exploring the implications of understanding these in a relation of paradox. By locating my work within social processes of engagement and recognition, I explore the possibility that excellence can also be understood as an emergent property of interaction which is under continuous negotiation which itself forms the basis for further recognition and exploration of “excellence.” The social processes which shape and are shaped by “excellence” are fundamental to the practice of curriculum itself. Both curricula and “excellence” emerge within the interactions of people with a stake in the desired outcomes as the product of continued involvement and consideration of ongoing experience. Finally, a process view of medical education is presented as a contribution to understanding the work of training physicians who are comfortable with the uncertainties and contingencies involved in the humane care of their patients.

I detta projektarbete har jag med utgångspunkt i duon Invader Ace utforskat hur vi kan använda oss av improvisation inom ramarna för elektronisk dansmusik. Istället för att producera elektronisk dansmusik med hjälp av dator, har vi med våra instrument och olika typer av tekniska ljudresurser undersökt vad som händer när vi skapar musiken i stunden genom improvisation som huvudverktyg. / <p>I texten har jag valt ut exempel som jag hoppas kan ge en inblick i vad detta projekt inneburit och resulterat i. Dessa finns dokumenterade på tillhörande skiva, eller via länkar i den digitala versionen av denna reflektion</p>

This thesis takes the linguistic concept of metonymy and examines its potential as a creative structural principle both in poetry and in music. I explore the role of metonymy in the work of the poet J.H. Prynne, the improvising guitarist Derek Bailey, and the composer Helmut Lachenmann. I have also deployed some of the ideas arising from this exploration in a modular composition for improvisers entitled Representations, recordings of which accompany this thesis. My argument is that metonymy provides a means by which a work of poetry or of music can be highly sensitive to the world which it inhabits, but can do so by itself being an inextricably linked part of this world, rather than an attempt to reproduce or represent it, or to simply pass judgement from the sidelines. In my introduction I outline the literary theory of metonymy. I discuss the way that metonymy encompasses relationships both of contiguity and causality, and make the case that the many limitations inherent in metonymy (which have often led to its being perceived as inferior to metaphor) can in fact be seen as advantanges, because of the way that they can bind the work of art to the real. I briefly discuss some previous applications of metonymy to music, and outline an understanding of musical metonymy based on linear dissimilarity, historical and social contiguity, the origins and agency behind particular sounds, and an occlusion of the structural middleground. The first chapter discusses the work of J.H. Prynne. I argue that a use of metonymy as a productive constraint is illuminated by a philosophical position according to which the world is known to be real because of the resistances it presents to the actualisation of our desires. I discuss the role of metonymy in the development of Prynne’s poetic oeuvre, before illustrating my argument with a detailed analysis of the 2001 sequence Unanswering Rational Shore. In the second chapter I turn to the work of Derek Bailey. Drawing heavily on unpublished items from the Incus archive, I demonstrate the meticulous way in which Bailey constructed his improvisational vocabulary, and the senses in which that vocabulary and its deployment could be characterised as metonymic. I explore the influence on Bailey of Stockhausen, Beckett and Musil, and show how form and material in his work are inextricably entwined. The third chapter examines the work of Helmut Lachenmann and in particular the 1992 composition „... zwei Gefühle ...“, Musik mit Leonardo. I examine the role of the listener and the productive activity that metonymic structures require of them. I focus on Lachenmann’s deployment both of actual and pseudo-causality in his music, as well as his use of historical reference in an indexical fashion. In my fourth chapter I present my composition for improvisers, Representations. I discuss its mechanics, development, and influences, and I set forth its relationship to the concepts of musical metonymy I have elucidated in the body of this thesis, under the headings of “arbitration”, similarity, referentiality and the relationship between material and the middleground. In a short concluding chapter I take another angle on the links between the themes of this thesis by discussing the role of rubbish in the work of Prynne, Bailey and Lachenmann, and its apparently paradoxical relationship with a certain concept of purity. This allows me to conclude by considering the relationship of metonymic structures to a conception of truth which, I believe, has a certain urgency in the contemporary artistic climate.

This thesis comprises a portfolio of compositions with supporting commentary in addition to a general commentary on past and contemporary models of performance practice. The compositions all use elements of improvisation and are documented in recorded and score formats. Recordings and discussion of the rehearsal process of these works are also included. The thesis is divided into four parts. The first, entitled ‘Context’, examines issues of performance practice through reference to both historical and contemporary models. In this regard, particular attention is given to the work of Miles Davis and Peter Wiegold. Parts 2, 3 and 4 consist of the portfolio of original compositions with sub-headings as follows: ‘Beginnings’, ‘Transition’ and ‘Current Projects’. As a part of the commentary on the portfolio, the role of the performer as creative artist will also be examined.

The Sanford Meisner Technique is among the most mysterious and misunderstood approaches to the craft of acting. Very often, it is taught poorly, incompletely, or even dangerously. Through the exploration of Meisner’s private life, as well as a detailed analysis of his system, this work aims to dispel some of the common misconceptions which plague the Technique and its most fervent supporters. After being made privy to his biography, readers will be taken through Meisner’s foundational exercises, beginning at the first phase of Repetition and ending with the introduction of text. In addition to the descriptions of student responsibilities, the conduct required of a Meisner teacher, both in a studio and in a university setting, will be discussed at length. Finally, to complete this comprehensive view of the Meisner Technique, there will be an analysis of its application to Longform Improvisation.