Research Library

Watch and listen to Georgia Simms discuss investigating dance improvisation for the Thinking Spaces Reading Group and Speaker Series.

Watch and listen to Mrdangam virtuoso Trichy Sankaran discuss the role of improvisation in his music during his workshop on South Asian musical traditions with Autorickshaw Trio.

Professor Trichy Sankaran is a world-renowned percussion virtuoso, Indian music scholar and composer, and the founding director of Indian music studies at York University. Over the years, Prof. Sankaran has bridged eastern and western pedagogical styles and has influenced generations of students who have become noted performers, composers, and music educators themselves.

During the 2014 Guelph Jazz Festival Colloquium John Szwed presented “Sun Ra on Earth” as a keynote address.

Negotiated Moments: Improvisation, Sound, and Subjectivity explores how subjectivity is formed and expressed through musical improvisation, tracing the ways the transmission and reception of sound occur within and between bodies in real and virtual time and across memory, history, and space. Essays include analyses of the role of the body and technology in performance and improvisation’s ability to disrupt power relations. The contributors’ close attention to improvisation provides a touchstone for examining subjectivities and offers ways to hear the full spectrum of ideas that sound out from and resonate within and across bodies.

Sound It Out is hosted by Rachel Elliott who is a PhD candidate in Philosophy at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada. Sound It Out is produced in conjunction with the International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation. The show explores whether and how improvised music can serve as a basis for discursive inclusivity, the creation of new forms of shared meaning, and more democratic means of connecting with each other.

By Jason Caslor, Arizona State University In 2014, Musagetes, IICSI and the Laurier Centre for Music in the Community’s Improviser-in-Residence, Dong-Won Kim, spent the fall in Guelph bringing together a…

Sorry about the Sound Quality: Improvisation, Living in the Moment and the Beauty of Mistakes is a collection of interviews by Caroline Gillis with friends and colleagues in theatre about improvisation, how they used it in their work and how it may have impacted their lives. Actors have to be improvisers on a daily basis, juggling many different types of work (creative and sometimes not) to keep body and creative soul alive. You will see how improvisation has positively affected the lives of these artists.

The Improvisation Toolkit includes simple and direct instructions for games, activities and strategies to add improvisation to your classroom and a Toolkit Resource List of external resources relevant to the Improvisation Toolkit including sources on games, school and university classes, special needs, at-risk youth are available as a single download.

Pianist Randy Weston is interviewed onstage by Vijay Iyer during the 2014 Guelph Jazz Festival Colloquium.

During the 2015 Guelph Jazz Festival Colloquium Evan Parker was interviewed by Kevin McNeilly as a keynote presentation.