Improvising Futures (Canadian SSRHC Partnership Grant, $2.5m CAD, Paul Stapleton PI for QUB) is funding a global network of improvisation researchers, institutions and project partners in and outside of academy to work together over 5 years. The project is led by the International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation (IICSI) which is centred at the University of Guelph in Canada. 

In Belfast, Improvising Futures is supporting work to develop the local improvised and experimental music scene, by enhancing opportunities for performers and audience members through Sonorities Festival Belfast, QUBensemble, and the newly launched Handmade Music. The latter is a monthly experimental music night delivered in partnership with Moving on Music and Accidental Theatre.

 

Improvising Futures also funds ongoing research collaborations between SARC and the School of Psychology at QUB (Matthew Rodger Co-I), as well as a range of other activities led by researchers at SARC (Franziska Schroeder and Simon Waters Co-Is). The project also builds on existing work by two research groups at SARC: MEDL (Music Ecologies Design Lab) and Performance Without Barriers, the latter of which is led by Franziska Schroeder in partnership with Michelle McCormack (CEO Drake Music NI).

As a global network, Improvising Futures is focused on investigating the next generation of guiding research questions that will expand the impact and reach of the field of Critical Improvisation Studies. In addition to 9 executive partner sites, of which QUB is one, this network also includes 60+ non-academic partner organisations, and many more independent researchers from across the world. We are leveraging this international network of partners to carry out practical initiatives, community interventions, and knowledge exchanges in order to imagine and implement new paradigms for confronting a broad range of social issues, and to conduct this research widely across disciplines and borders.

By “conduct,” we mean to draw on both electrical and musical metaphors to describe the range and organizing principles of our research model. Our model allows for the flow of information in multiple directions or “currents” and indeed enacts a long chain of momentum transfer among sites, researchers, artists and other professionals which will continually recharge the field of Critical Improvisation Studies. We are conducing the field by orchestrating diverse partners on multiple “stages”: in the centres of inquiry with whom we partner; in schools, community halls, and shelters of participating organizations; and through publications, conferences, courses, library holdings, the mentoring of next generation scholars, and the establishment of new research centres. While the relationship between orchestral conductor and orchestra could be construed as hierarchical, we are using “conduct” in the sense of an “energetic exchange,” in which, through conduction rather than conducting, a musical form emerges on its own. Our conduction is inherently polyvocal and potentially destabilizing, as the juxtaposition of different discourses and perspectives on a topic will generate not only new knowledge but also new investigative tools/practices.