I teach a graduate seminar called "Theorizing Improvisation" that is pretty interdisciplinary, but really makes students deal with black studies seriously. A lot of authors of color, a lot of women of color - those become central to the intellectual trajectory. It considers music, but it also considers areas of thought that might seem unrelated to music. That's partly because we're expanding the notion of what music is beyond objects, beyond scores, beyond things.
Vijay IyerI find myself skeptical of music that forces you to have a certain experience, emotional reaction, or specific constructive arc of experience. But performers should still take care of that, to a certain extent - how does it add up? What you want from performance, because we're all in a room together, is that somehow we've gotten somewhere at the end, together. You could call that a sense of narrative, but it's not so obvious how that happens. One way it happens is by everyone caring about it happening.
Vijay IyerYou figure out how to create opportunities to make music, and then, if you take care of the music, audiences will come around. They also might leave. What matters is the moment: the moment of making music, with and for and among others, and what that offers to those people in that moment. They might never see me again; they might never learn my name. But it might still be something they carry with them.
Vijay IyerWhat I've learned from my gurus is that when you hear music, you hear a person, or you hear people, and you hear everything about them in those moments. They reveal themselves in ways that cannot be revealed any other way, and it contains historical truths because of that. To me, that is the most important thing. It shouldn't be a footnote, or the last chapter. It should be the complete thesis about a book on listening.
Vijay IyerThis is the last sentence of my dissertation: "What is soul in music if not powerfully embodied human presence?"
Vijay Iyer