Joshua Bergamin

Project description

Musical improvisation is often held up as a paradigm of creativity and freedom. But the ‘un-fore-seen’ (im-pro-vised) decisions a musician makes ‘in the moment’ always relate to pre-given pro-visos – e.g., to an instrument’s tuning, or to ‘emergent organising structures’ like rhythms and grooves – that both constrain and facilitate the music that gets made. Furthermore, such provisos are always intertwined with the habits a musician develops as she is initiated into a particular musical praxis.

From an enactivist point of view, we can therefore say that improvisations are not simply the product of individual musicians, but are distributed across materials, spaces, practices, and co-performers, challenging how we conceive of agency and of ourselves as individual subjects.

At AIAS, I will explore the entanglement of habits, rhythms, and creative agency by collaborating with expert improvisors to articulate a situated and systemic account of these phenomena. Reflecting on agency as distributed across provisos, time, and co-participants will have consequences not only for how we think about music, but also the ‘grand improvisation’ we call life.

Short Bio

Joshua Bergamin is a philosopher, amongst other things. His work is highly interdisciplinary, rooted primarily in phenomenology but in close dialogue with enactive cognitive science, music psychology, and artistic research. Before coming to AIAS, he worked at the University of Vienna as co-PI of the FWF-funded project ‘(Musical) Improvisation & Ethics.’ Born and raised in rural Australia, he studied at the Universities of South Australia and Queensland before earning a PhD from Durham University, England.