The Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies, Volume 1

Improvisation informs a vast array of human activity, from creative practices in art, dance, music, and literature to everyday conversation and the relationships to natural and built environments that surround and sustain us. The two volumes of The Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies gather scholarship on improvisation from an immense range of perspectives, with contributions from more than sixty scholars working in architecture, anthropology, art history, computer science, cognitive science, cultural studies, dance, economics, education, ethnomusicology, film, gender studies, history, linguistics, literary theory, musicology, neuroscience, new media, organizational science, performance studies, philosophy, popular music studies, psychology, science and technology studies, sociology, and sound art, among others.

George E. Lewis, Edwin H. Case Professor of American Music at Columbia University, is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a MacArthur Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, and author of the award-winning 2008 book, A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music.

Benjamin Piekut, Associate Professor of Music at Cornell University, writes on the history of experimental and improvised music after 1960. He is the author of Experimentalism Otherwise (2011) and editor of Tomorrow Is the Question (2014).