Fido the Yak

The first performance sounds better to me because of the intensity of the performers and because of the communication between them. They are all listening to each other and playing off of each other. Communication is especially pronounced in Hutcherson's last chorus and the beginning of Tyner's first solo chorus (Bobby Hutcherson plays vibes, McCoy Tyner plays the piano), but the entire performance illustrates a creative process of improvisatory musical dialogue.

Bruce Ellis Benson's The Improvisation of Musical Dialogue: A Phenomenology of Music (Cambridge University Press, 2003) appropriates the idea of improvised dialogue to engage in a hermeneutics of a wider world of music making, in fact the whole world of music making, though he is not an ethnomusicologist, nor does he reference the ethnomusicological literature on improvisation. (I'll blog some of that ethnomusicology soon enough.) Benson intends to critique a notion of music as reproduction, and perhaps also music as repetition. Whether this will take him towards a deeper critique of reproduction or repetition I can't yet say. I'm hoping Benson's critique will suggest some ideas to me as I continue to think about repetition.

I'll be away from a computer for the rest of week. When I return I intend to dig into Benson's book. Also in the lineup:

• Sartre and then Casey on imagination;


• Kristeva on melancholia;


• Cavarero on narrative;


• More Nancy and then Derrida on Nancy;


• Derrida on Husserl;


• Attali on the labyrinth;


• Merleau-Ponty and then Barbaras on Merleau-Ponty;


• Hagi Keenan on "the hidden face of language";


• Nagatomo on the body;


• Assorted musicological monographs;


• Anything I'm forgetting;


• Anything that crops up, which it will;


• Maybe some more math because I mean to do infinity to death;