Abstract

In this chapter, I explore the ethical dimension of improvised music via an engagement with Gadamer’s conception of the artwork as event. In particular, I suggest that the practice of improvised music offers a direction back to a collective experience that previously was the domain of ritual. This experience, which I will convey via parallels between Gadamer’s work and the anthropology of Victor Turner, coloured with descriptions by practicing improvisers, suggests extensions of subjectivity and agency beyond the human individual – both with other listeners, and with the other-than-human elements of the performance. I argue that the improvised musical or artistic event is a fractal phenomenon in which we play out the ethical relationships of our broader forms-of-life on a microcosmic scale. In important ways, then, participation in improvised art can contribute to a re-interpretation of how we relate to others, and offers paths to how we might live out what Heidegger called an ‘original’ ethics, sharing in the world’s unfolding by actively letting others be. Such a re-understanding can, I conclude, help us clarify our enmeshment with the other-than-human, as well as the value of artistic practice as a form of philosophy.