Table Of Contenti
Sync or Swarm
Revised Edition
ii
ii
iii
Sync or Swarm
Improvising Music in a Complex Age
Revised Edition
David Borgo
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First published in the United States of America 2022
Copyright © David Borgo, 2022
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Borgo, David, author.
Title: Sync or swarm : improvising music in a complex age / David Borgo.
Description: Revised edition. | New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2022. |
Includes bibliographical references and index. |
Summary: “Originally published in 2005, the revised edition explores musical free improvisation
through the lens of several contemporary sciences” – Provided by
publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2021040194 (print) | LCCN 2021040195 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781501368837 (hardback) | ISBN 9781501368844 (paperback) |
ISBN 9781501368851 (epub) | ISBN 9781501368868 (pdf) |
ISBN 9781501368875 (ebook other)
Subjects: LCSH: Free jazz–History and criticism. | Free jazz–Analysis,
appreciation. | Improvisation (Music)
Classification: LCC ML3506 .B67 2022 (print) | LCC ML3506 (ebook) |
DDC 781.65/136–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021040194
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021040195
ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-6883-7
PB: 978-1-5013-6884-4
ePDF: 978-1-5013-6886-8
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v
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Preface to the Revised Edition viii
Preface to the First Edition xxiv
1 The Sound and Science of Surprise 1
The Age of Complexity 6
Sync or Swarm 9
2 The Study of Improvisation 17
The Field of Improvisation Studies 18
Referent-Based Improvisation 24
Referent-Free Improvisation 26
Freedom Music 29
Freedom Is, Freedom Ain’t 37
Improvisation Is, Improvisation Isn’t 44
A Marvel of Paradox 52
3 Strange Loops 57
The Embodied Mind 58
Enaction and Prediction 61
Taking the Note for a Walk 66
It’s a Bit Like Juggling 72
Lived Body and Living Body 74
On Repeat 77
Fractal Correlation 80
Circular Causality 93
Hall of Mirrors 96
4 Rivers of Consciousness 103
The Art of the Trio 105
Complexity and Emergence 109
Musical Elephants 110
The Sound of One Note Clapping 112
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vi Contents
Time and the Qualia of Experience 114
The Phase Space of Improvisation 119
Attractors 121
Hues of Melanin 128
Fractal Correlation 135
Flights and Perchings 141
5 Orderly Disorder 145
Chaotics 147
Complex Adaptive Systems 151
Dissipative Structuring 155
Ancient to Future 160
Sketches of Another Future 166
6 Sync and Swarm 173
The Science of Sync 174
Entrainment 177
A Coordination Problem 180
Insect Music 182
The Art of Improvisation in the Age of Computational
Participation 191
The Puzzle of Coaction 205
A Web without a Spider 207
Reassembling the Social 216
7 Harnessing Complexity 219
The Map Is Not the Territory 220
Situated Musicianship 224
Group Creativity 237
Yes, and … 241
Comprovisation 245
The Shores of Multiplicity 250
Complementarity and Metastability 254
References 261
Index 281
vii
Acknowledgments
To all the musicians I have performed with and learned from. To all the teachers
and guides who have shared their wisdom with me. To my many colleagues
and students. To the helpful staff at Bloomsbury. To my friends, my family, my
parents, my life partner, and our two boys. I am eternally grateful.
Portions of Chapter 2 appeared as “The Complex Dynamics of
Improvisation,” in The Springer Handbook of Systematic Musicology, Springer
International Publishing (2018). Portions of Chapter 3 appeared as “Strange
Loops of Attention, Awareness, Affect, and Action in Musical Improvisation,”
in Music and Consciousness II, ed. Ruth Herbert, Eric Clarke, and David Clark,
Oxford University Press (2019). Portions of Chapter 4 appeared as “Rivers of
Consciousness: The Nonlinear Dynamics of Free Jazz” (co-authored with Joseph
Goguen) in Jazz Research Proceedings Yearbook (2005) and as “Strange Loops of
Attention, Awareness, Affect, and Action in Musical Improvisation,” in Music
and Consciousness 2: Worlds, Practices, Modalities, ed. Ruth Herbert, David
Clarke, and Eric Clarke, Oxford University Press (2019a). Portions of Chapter 5
appeared as “Openness from Closure: The Puzzle of Interagency in Improvised
Music and a Neo-Cybernetic Solution,” in Negotiated Moments: Improvisation,
Sound, and Subjectivity, ed. Gillian Siddall and Ellen Waterman, Duke University
Press (2016). Portions of Chapter 6 appeared as “The Ghost in the Music,” in The
Oxford Handbook on Critical Improvisation Studies, Vol. 1, ed. George Lewis and
Ben Piekut, Oxford University Press (2016), and as “The Art of Improvisation
in the Age of Computational Participation,” in The Routledge Companion to Jazz
Studies, ed. Tony Whyton, Nicholas Gebhardt and Nicole T. Rustin, Routledge
(2019). Portions of Chapter 7 appeared as “Embodied, Situated, and Distributed
Musicianship,” in Sound Musicianship: Understanding the Crafts of Music, ed.
Andrew Brown, Cambridge Scholars Publishing (2012), and as “Musicking on
the Shores of Multiplicity and Complexity,” Parallax 13/4 (2007), 92–107.
Audio and video examples discussed in the book, as well as some not
discussed, are available at https://sites.google.com/ucsd.edu/syncorswarm.
viii
Preface to the Revised Edition
August 2021
San Diego, California, USA
I have lost track of which wave of the Covid-19 pandemic we are in. Is it
the fourth, or maybe the fifth? How many other disasters have we endured
these past eighteen months? Forest fires and hurricanes were exacerbated by
continuing climate change, upending delicate ecosystems and displacing entire
communities. We saw wide-scale protests against police brutality and systemic
racism, an election cycle in the United States that rocked democracy, and the
entrenchment of a global mediascape that seems to spread misinformation faster
and easier than verifiable facts and good will. This past year, we also experienced
the stress placed on music’s ability to promote “togetherness” when physical
proximity is removed from the equation.
Perhaps one upside of all this horrific news is that people are implicitly
becoming more familiar with the emergent dynamics of complex nonlinear
systems—those systems in which the relevant variables are not related according
to strict proportionality. A one-degree Celsius change in global temperature
produces vastly disproportionate effects on ecosystems and the organisms
that comprise them. Systemic racism is the result of nonlinear dynamics
compounded historically by discriminatory (i.e., disproportionate) practices
not only in policing, but also in property ownership, voting rights, education,
employment, wages, neighborhood infrastructure, and much more. A highly
contagious virus disproportionally affects those employed in essential jobs that
cannot be done from home—more commonly people of color and those already
suffering financial insecurity. Even as vaccines to help combat this pandemic
have been developed, it is already clear that some less advantaged countries and
populations will receive them much later, if at all. Pathogens go viral, but so do
“tweets” and “memes,” with the most outlandish and unverified seeming to have
far greater reach and effect.
What might all these topics have to do with improvisation? At first glance, they
all appear to illustrate unpredictability and instability. Yet the recent catastrophes
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Preface to the Revised Edition ix
and promising social changes that are afoot are, somewhat counterintuitively,
examples of ordering effects. They involve a collection of otherwise independent
objects locking together in a synchronized fashion.
A global pandemic occurs when otherwise independent pathogens combine
to form a new strand of virus which grows exponentially by spreading through
unprotected populations in a more or less orderly fashion. Systemic racism,
unlike individual acts of discrimination, is pervasive and self-reinforcing. It
persists by maintaining the established social order, the status quo. Stock market
crashes, traffic jams, and large-scale weather events—all classic examples of
nonlinear dynamics—are also ordered in the sense that large numbers of formerly
independent agents suddenly synchronize their behaviors (be they financial
agents, car drivers, or “packets” of water and air). Even mass protests—such
as those in support of the Black Lives Matter movement—rely on and enact a
certain kind of synchronization. These “moments of synchronization” that occur
in complex dynamical systems can be extremely powerful and problematic, as
the case may be. They frequently grab the headlines. But the really fascinating
question is exactly when, why, and how they emerge—and to what extent they
linger and produce lasting effects.
Complex dynamical systems are those that are able to spontaneously adapt,
to move back and forth between ordered and disordered behaviors, without any
external help (see Waldrop 1992 and Mainzer 1994). The etymology of the word
spontaneous is sua sponte, meaning of its own accord. Musical improvisation is
often described as spontaneous composition.
I wrote Sync or Swarm to explore the interactive, adaptive, constructive, and
potentially revolutionary aspects of musical improvisation in the context of
our contemporary understandings of mind and society. In particular, I wanted
to situate a type of musical improvisation that I refer to as “open-form” in the
context of nonlinear dynamical systems theory and alongside ideas such as
emergence, self-organization, far-from-equilibrium dynamics, synchronization,
swarm behavior, and more. Systems demonstrating these types of behaviors
defy reductionist logic and ask that we embrace complexity, turbulence,
disequilibrium, and multiplicity as generative forces. As a musician myself,
the dynamics of complexity fascinate me. The ongoing interplay of order and
disorder—the “orderly disorder” or “disorderly order”—provides a boundless
source of intrigue and excitement.
In the book, I was not arguing for a causal connection in either direction,
from nonlinear dynamical systems science to musical improvisation, or vice
