Research Library

The International Society for Improvised Music (ISIM) hosted the panel discussion, AACM: The Next Fifty Years with active AACM members Douglas R. Ewart, Ann E. Ward and Khari B. The panel was moderated by Brian Lefresne and the panel was concluded with an improvised performance.

The International Society for Improvised Music hosted a panel and performance featuring Douglas R. Ewart, Ann E. Ward and Khari B. The panel presentation was moderated by Brian Lefresne, a PhD candidate at the University of Guelph.

The 2015 Play Who You Are camp was hosted by Rainbow Programs for Children at the University of Guelph, and facilitated by pianist/improviser/student music therapist Laura Stinson.

Douglas R. Ewart was the 2015-2016 Improviser-In-Residence in Guelph and Waterloo. Ewart’s residency included instrument building workshops, musical improvisations with local artists, a performance at the 2015 Guelph Jazz Festival & Colloquium and culminated in his orchestrated, massive community improvisation Crepuscule 2016, in Guelph’s Arboretum. The Improviser-in-Residence program is a collaborative partnership between IICSI, the Laurier Centre for Music in the Community, and Musagetes.

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…