Guest lecturer Dan DiPiero (Comparative Studies, Ohio State), presents a virtual lecture, “Contingent Encounters: Improvisation, Everyday Life, and the Music of Eric Dolphy,” at 4 p.m. Eastern time.
In this talk, Dan DiPiero will introduce the major aims, scope, and theoretical framings of his forthcoming book, Contingent Encounters: Improvisation in Music and Everyday Life. Subsequently, he will focus on a particular case study: Eric Dolphy’s 1964 recording of “Out to Lunch.” In this talk, the speaker will present both a transcription of the head (as recorded), as well as archival photographs of Dolphy’s handwritten score. However, DiPiero's analysis will focus less on the music-theoretical functions of this tune and more on the social significance of the sounds that we hear. As the presenter will elaborate, Dolphy’s improvisations manifest an eccentric ambivalence that reflects both his artistic innovations and the hostility with which they were met, improvisations that simultaneously broke open a rift in bebop and as a result remained incoherent for the white establishment critical apparatus that viewed any Black avant-garde as threatening. Dolphy’s improvisations thus created a fugitive socio-musical disjuncture, sounding two historical worlds in one. DiPiero draws out these dynamics in the book in order to prove how Dolphy’s improvisations — like all improvisations — remain singular in that they depend on such socio-political, historical, and material factors, as much as they do any particular musical or technical approach.
[Closed] Registrants will receive an email with the Zoom meeting link.
If you require an accommodation to participate in this meeting, please email the event host, Dr. Ryan Skinner (skinner.176@osu.edu). Requests made two weeks before an event will generally allow us to provide seamless access, but the university will make every effort to meet all requests.
Dan DiPiero is a musician and lecturer in the Department of Comparative Studies at The Ohio State University. His work has appeared in Critical Studies in Improvisation, Rancière and Music (Edinburgh University Press), Sounding Out!, Audimat, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. His first monograph, Contingent Encounters: Improvisation in Music and Everyday Life is forthcoming with the University of Michigan Press.
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