Interstitial Soundings: Philosophical Reflections on Improvisation, Practice, and Self-Making - Paperback

by Cynthia R. Nielsen (Author)

In Interstitial Soundings, Cynthia R. Nielsen brings music and philosophy into a fruitful and mutually illuminating dialogue. Topics discussed include the following: music's dynamic ontology, performers and improvisers as co-composers, the communal character of music, jazz as hybrid and socially constructed, the sociopolitical import of bebop, Afro-modernism and its strategic deployments, jazz and racialized practices, continuities between Michel Foucault's discussion of self-making and creating one's musical voice, Alasdair MacIntyre on practice, and how one might harmonize MacIntyre's notion of virtue development with Foucauldian resistance strategies.

Author Biography

Dr. Cynthia R. Nielsen has taught philosophy and ethics for nearly a decade, at institutions such as Villanova University and the University of Dallas. Nielsen's work is interdisciplinary and her research interests include ethics, social and political philosophy, philosophical hermeneutics, philosophy of race, and the philosophy of music. She is the author of Foucault, Douglass, Fanon, and Scotus in Dialogue: On Social Construction and Freedom (2013).