ABSTRACT
While improvisation has been practiced – and in some cases, theorized – for millennia, author mark the development of the Jazz Study Group in 1995 at Columbia University, and the Improvisation, Community, and Social Practice initiative in 2007, based out of the University of Guelph, as important beginnings of explicit research about the nature and complexity of improvisation in a variety of different fields. In addition to several other symposia, conferences, and contemporaneous research initiatives, these two origin points provide the basis for an interdisciplinary field of inquiry now called Critical Improvisation Studies. In the Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies, George Lewis and Benjamin Piekut note three “master tropes” from the historiography of improvisation studies, common to how improvisation has been defined. Foley also argues that oral poetry is a highly diverse category of verbal art, much larger and more varied than written poetry.
