Critical Studies in Improvisation uses weird words as if everyone was going around using them in plain conversation. I know because I’m middle age and if you come across a bunch of new words at middle age, then they are weird. Here’s a home for all the words I’ve had to look up since starting grad school.
Lexicon
Ontological
The thingyness of the thing. Kind of the opposite of its essence. For some reason this word is used in every academic article.
Episteme
A way of knowing.
Hegemony
What pretentious a-holes think about everyone else. Trump’s general attitude.
Musiking
Don’t you wish you were a noun and a verb? Music used to until Christopher Smart came up with this term to incorporate all parts of interacting with it. This term can be used by an audience member or dancer etc…
Methodology
“The way you do the things you do” –Smokey Robinson
Improvisational Pedagogy
“It’s not what you look like when you’re doing what you’re doing. It’s what you’re doing when you’re doing what you look like your doing” -Sly Stone
Exceptionalism
The condition of being different from the norm. A myth proliferated about female musicians.
Essentialism
The idea that people are the way they are because of the categories they qualify for. e.g. sating that women play “sweetly”, or black musicians are inherently rhythmic.
Transculturation
a process of cultural transformation marked by the influx of new culture elements and the loss or alteration of existing ones
Murmuration
refers to the phenomenon that results when hundreds, sometimes thousands, of starlings fly in swooping, intricately coordinated patterns through the sky.
Reify
To make more real and abstract concept.
Communitas
A spirit within the community, a shared otherness emerging from collaborative efforts. The experience of the community.
Compass and Cadence 