Improvised Music and Decolonisation

Project Information

IMPRODECO

Grant agreement ID: 101078524

DOI

10.3030/101078524

EC signature date 17 February 2023

Start date 1 September 2023

End date 31 August 2028

Funded under

• European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 1 500 000,00

EU contribution

€ 1 500 000,00

Coordinated by

UNIVERSITEIT UTRECHT
Netherlands

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - IMPRODECO (Improvised Music and Decolonisation)

Reporting period: 2023-09-01 to 2026-02-28

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

In the course of the 20th century, musical improvisation became strongly associated with emancipatory politics, as expressive freedom in music symbolised forms of societal, cultural, and political freedom more generally. In the 1960s, European improvisers distinguished their ‘free improvisation’ from jazz and other improvisatory music by calling it ‘non-idiomatic’, i.e. not drawing on previously existing musical styles. Although the genre of free improvisation has formed a unique space of transnational and intercultural musical collaboration, such a utopian understanding risks an erasure of actual forms of inequality and exclusion. After all, to draw on one’s own musical tradition inevitably means to play in a specific idiom. To what extent has this definition of freedom as non-idiomatic playing excluded the participation of musicians of colour?

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

The aim of this proposal is to understand the politics imbedded in free improvisation in a European postcolonial context. We investigate the hypothesis that non-idiomatic music constructed a form of musical whiteness in the spheres of musical practice, discourse, and institutions. We develop a novel understanding of musical idiom in terms of differentiation rather than convention, and we describe how questions of freedom and idiom were negotiated in musical practice. As a case study, we investigate the musical practice of improvising musicians from former Dutch colonies active in the Netherlands after World War II (ca. 1945-2000), and analyse how they negotiated their position between the idiom of jazz, a supposedly ‘universal’ non-idiomatic form of improvisation, and their own musical traditions.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

Through archival research, oral history, and the analysis of musical practices, IMPRODECO will make a fundamental contribution to jazz historiography, postcolonial perspectives on Dutch music history, musicological theories of improvisation, and to current debates about racial inequality in Dutch music and society.