Meeting on December 2, 2022—Dr. David Borgo

December 2, 2022 ONLINE
6pm ET
RSVP: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cdi-welcomes-dr-david-borgo-tickets-446156063797

Improvisation and the Seven Tropes

This talk will provide an overview of themes explored in Sync or Swarm: Improvising Music in a Complex Age (revised edition, 2022), and it will highlight seven of the most common tropes that inform research on musical improvisation—which I have termed the ‘emancipatory’, ‘annunciatory’, ‘Romantic’, ‘cognitivist’, ‘ecological’, ‘predictive’, and ‘post humanist’ tropes—offering some suggestions on how we might integrate insights from each of these into a more comprehensive approach to improvisation studies focused on complementarity.

David Borgo is a Professor of Music at UC San Diego where he teaches in the Integrative Studies and Jazz and Music of the African Diaspora Programs. He is affiliated faculty in Ethnic Studies and Cognitive Science. David received a 2013 Distinguished Teaching Award from the African and African American Studies Research Project and a 2020 campus-wide Diversity Equity and Inclusion Teaching Award.

David earned a B.M. degree in Jazz Studies from Indiana University and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Ethnomusicology from UCLA. He joined the UC San Diego faculty in 2002 and served as the Department Chair from 2017-2020.

As a saxophonist, David has toured extensively, including performances in Europe, Asia, Africa, and throughout The Americas. He has released twelve CDs and one DVD of original music on a variety of record labels (Cadence Jazz, Resurgent Music, pfMentum, OA2 Records, Circumvention Music), and his most recent recording is an album-length work composed during the pandemic titled Suite of Uncommon Sorrows. Later this year, he will return to the studio to record a new suite of original compositions titled Cautiously Optimistic. In addition to modern jazz and contemporary improvised music, David performs electro-acoustic improvisation with KaiBorg and intricate polymetric music with Kronomorfic.