ED SARATH
Ed Sarath is Professor of Music at the University of Michigan, director of the U-M Program in Creativity and Consciousness Studies, and active nationally and internationally as performer, composer, recording artist, and scholar. He is founder and president of the International Society for Improvised Music, and has recently launched the Alliance for the Transformation of Musical Academe. His most recent book is Black Music Matters (Rowman and Littlefield 2018). His prior book, Improvisation, Creativity, and Consciousness (SUNY/Albany, 2013) is the first to apply principles of Integral Theory to music. An earlier book Music Theory Through
Improvisation: A New Approach to Musicianship Training (Routledge, 2010) is based his innovative approach to core curriculum musicianship. He is lead author of the widely-read CMS Manifesto, which appears in a co-authored book Redesigning Music Studies in an Age of Change (Routledge 2016). His recording New Beginnings features the London Jazz Orchestra performing his large ensemble compositions. |
Black Music Matters: Jazz and 21st Century Transcultural Musicianship
In this talk, I use Black Music in general, and jazz in particular, as a lens to distinguish between prevailing multicultural approaches to diversity and what I call an integral transcultural model. Whereas multiculturalism is predicated on engagement with cultural categories as discrete entities in a fundamentally segmented musical worldview, the transcultural model—embodied by jazz—shifts the locus of inquiry and engagement to the creative processes that are central to contemporary musical syncretism. A jazz-based, transcultural paradigm has the capacity to promote excellence in conventional areas, robust global exploration, and address social justice concerns that elude both conventional and multicultural discourse.