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The Birth of Error: Jazz Improvisation as the Abduction of Mistakes

Publikace na Fakulta humanitních studií |
2023

Tento text není v aktuálním jazyce dostupný. Zobrazuje se verze "en".Abstrakt

If it is true that every step in cognition has the nature of inference, and that emotions are among the cognitive forms through which we come to know the world, the following question arises: What about the musical domain, which is one of the privileged modes in which simple emotions evolve into complex signs that are associated with various forms of inferential chains? I will focus on a significant aspect, which is the specific handling of mistakes in jazz music. When jazz musicians make mistakes during performances, they often adapt and incorporate those mistakes and turning them into new harmolodic or rhythmic pathways; into the sings of renewal.

When jazz musicians say that it's good to "lie your way out of a mistake", it rings bells in the heads of semioticians (when one of the famous definitions is that semiotics studies everything that can be used to lie). The aim of the paper is then to try to describe and analyze some selected abductive aspects of the improvisational process, using some examples of postbebop jazz and inspired by some of Peirce's thoughts on diagrammatic reasoning, precisely in relation to mistake.