The Cognitive Neuroscience of Bifurcation During Jazz Improvisation: From Aesthetics to Micropolitics
Previously, Rosenberg has described how jazz musicians (1945-60) learned to exploit cognitive bifurcations in melody, harmony, harmonic rhythm and percussive rhythm, which proved central to Be Bop's accelerating improvisational and compositional complexity. These bifurcations are extrinsic, visible in music notation, and hint at intrinsic neuro-phenomenological processes enabling spontaneous creativity during jazz performance. Following Francisco Varela, Rosenberg argues that a jazz musician is a cognitive multiplicity, with different time-scales operating simultaneously during performance, sometimes at cross-purposes, sometimes in synchrony. Rosenberg will contrast the dysfunctional aspects of jazz, when performers describe “getting lost,” with experiences of optimal performance, to help visualize these different time-scales. By illustrating how competing forms of time cognition seek synchrony when performing jazz Rosenberg then proposes a direct connection between jazz aesthetics and micro-politics.
Please make sure to read the text “Jazz As Narrative” before joining the seminar. “The Gift of Silence” is optional.
Martin E. Rosenberg wrote his dissertation on the cultural work across the arts of the scientific concept of “emergence,” beginning with Henri Poincaré, Henri Bergson, and Marcel Duchamp, and ending with Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Ilya Prigogine, Francisco Varela and Thomas Pynchon. He has written on Deleuze and Freud, Ezra Pound, Duchamp and Thomas Pynchon, Samuel Beckett, John Cage, Kiki Smith, and the avant-garde architects Arakawa and Gins. He recently published on emergent behaviors, visible in music notation, in jazz improvisation and composition, and currently researches the cognitive neuro-science of improvisers, recently publishing essays on embodied cognition and improvisation, as well as jazz as neuro-resistance with reference to research on “cognitive capitalism.” Martin has programmed instructional software, theorized about hypermedia and interaction-design, and contributed articles on the role of metaphor in trans-disciplinary inquiry. He co-directed the first completely digital global academic conference—AG3-Online: The Third International Arakawa and Gins: Architecture and Philosophy Conference. Originally trained in jazz composition at the Berklee College of Music, he has returned (having quit for thirty years) to performing in the Pittsburgh area for the last six years.