Making it up Together

This is one book on musical analysis that can be truly described as engaging and exciting. Leslie Tilley counters earlier arguments that there is little or even no improvisation in Balinese music. Her study joins a growing body of scholarship whose authors recognize the importance improvisation and its practices—flexibility, variation, and creativity in the moment—for many Balinese gamelan traditions. Tilley, however, looks far beyond Balinese gamelan to describe the wide-ranging but specifically differentiated human phenomenon of musical improvisation, expanding thereby our understanding of its nature. Bruno Nettl’s approach to improvisation within ethnomusicology has now expanded out into several subfields that Tilley draws on, including aspects of cognition as well as the importance of collective interaction in improvised traditions. Tilley thus advances Balinese music studies and Balinese studies generally, which have begun to probe issues of change, transformation, and flexibility against old colonial-influenced misrepresentations of Balinese culture as static and balanced....

Aesthetics · Art · Creativity · Improvisation · Jazz · Musical · Scholarship · Sociology · Visual arts · Diverse Musicological Studies · Diversity and Impact of Dance · Law · Musicology and Musical Analysis · Psychology · Social Psychology