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HGTV 2
“In melodrama, the soundtrack is the supreme genre of ineloquence, or eloquence beyond words: it’s what tells you that you are really most at home in yourself when you are bathed by emotions you can always recognize, and that whatever dissonance you sense is not the real, but an accident that you have to clean […]
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HGTV
is an entire channel devoted to cruel optimism. What’s interesting to me is how neatly its form of cruelty fits into a seemingly prescribed genre of American mythology about home-ownership and upward mobility. As these notions become increasingly fanciful for more and more Americans, the teary-eyed “reveal” of HGTV becomes increasingly uncanny. What I would […]
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BRIEF THOUGHT ON THE HIGH/LOW DISTINCTION
Brief thought: most cultural studies scholars, perhaps excepting those coming from a more rigid, Frankfurt-school perspective, accept that the modernist distinction between high and low art has completely collapsed. Question: is this collapse so forceful as to have inverted the equation? Follow up: particularly with the question of radical politics, it now seems that the […]
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SMALL MUSIC (?)
Right now I’m thinking a lot about music that doesn’t reach many people. For many music scholars, one of the key reasons that music is important to study is in how it contributes to the battle over hegemony or the contestation over meaning. Music articulates what we might call its “meanings” (but which are complex […]
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IMPROVISATION AND EVERYDAY PERFORMANCE
Yesterday I presented “Improvisation and Everyday Performance” at the Cultural Studies Association conference in New Orleans. Our panel was a part of the performance studies working group, so my main point was to try to understand how improvisation relates to questions of performance and performativity. Briefly put, my argument is that improvisation studies is overdetermined […]
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NEW ESSAY
I’m very excited to share that I have a new essay out in the most recent (and excellent looking) issue of Critical Studies in Improvisation. You can find it HERE.
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COMMON THINGS
My friends and I have recorded some music for a new improvisation project called Common Things. The band is Joshua Bryant on bass, Alex Burgoyne on alto, myself on the drums, and Aaron Quinn on the guitar. This is a teaser video that Aaron made: There will be more soon.
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THE MAJOR SEVENTH
No other interval carries an equivalent ambivalence or affect. The major seventh simultaneously belongs to its tonic and nevertheless sounds a world apart. No other interval sounds so strange while belonging to its home major scale. For the other intervals, one must travel outside for a dissonant sound–Far from this crass and cartoonish dissonance, the […]
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Capacious(ness)
This past weekend I was lucky to present at the Capacious conference in Lancaster, PA. Subtitled “Affect Inquiry/Making Space”, the title alludes to affect’s transdisciplinary spread as well as the omnivorous attitude that such a spreading-capacity engenders, at least in my experience, in those who think with it. I found the conference to be incredibly […]
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Podcast Interview
Last year I was interviewed for a podcast about improvisation and sound called Sound it Out. We talked about my research in general, and the idea that there is a connection between musical improvisation and everyday life. For me, this connection has always centered around “contingency”—the idea that at the heart of the matter, what it […]
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Dan DiPiero 