Opening up Thinking Space for Improvised Collaborative Public Diplomacy

Abstract

Three singers hold tones while a pianist plays a fast gesture in a high register, a percussionist makes light brushstrokes on a cymbal, and a clarinet player thumps a low tone. George Lewis gestures dramatically across the stage and a second pianist comes in with a dense tone cluster. I sit in the audience, mesmerized by the spectacle of 27 musicians from differing musical backgrounds listening and collaborating in a two-hour performance that felt like five minutes. It was 1996. I was studying electronic music composition at Mills College, and Lewis was conducting a concert after a three-week residency. Almost twenty years later I still remember feeling like something important was happening in the theater between both the musicians on stage and the audience. The musicians had the time and the space to express their own relationships to music and their instruments. Yet, they also listened and responded to each other’s gestures, moving through various sensitivities, exposures, and contrapuntal expressions.