Improvising Themes of Abjection with Maggie Nicols
- Submitting institution
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Falmouth University
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 385
- Type
- D - Journal article
- DOI
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10.1080/13528165.2014.908087
- Title of journal
- Performance Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts
- Article number
- -
- First page
- 81
- Volume
- 19
- Issue
- 1
- ISSN
- 1352-8165
- Open access status
- Out of scope for open access requirements
- Month of publication
- June
- Year of publication
- 2014
- URL
-
-
- Supplementary information
-
-
- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
-
0
- Research group(s)
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F - Inequality and storytelling
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- Vocalist Maggie Nicols is a pioneer of free improvisation in the UK. She has developed an extraordinary body of work that reaches from the 1960s to the present day, yet she remains strangely absent from dominant music narratives that tell the story of jazz and free improvisation. Despite the significance of Nicols’ achievements and the innovative quality of her work, little has been written about her vocal practice. Until recently, Nicols’ practice has been ignored or deemed obscure in relation to established narratives of contemporary music history.
This essay discusses the marginalization of Nicols’ practice as testament to a strongly gendered bias in the formation of the music canon, a bias that abjects certain bodies from its appraisal. The author’s conversations with Nicols, as reported in the article, further complicate her outsider status by looking at how Nicols relishes the abject as fundamental to her approach to making improvised sound. In performances and educational workshops, Nicols invites the abject and the abjected to return from social exile via the voice.
The essay argues that Nicols is a vitally significant and political musician, whose ability to create a third space – in music practice – where the abject voice and abjected bodies become audible evidences this. Nicols’ socially inclusive music practice ruptures the political silencing of socially excluded bodies, of the outsiders.
The journal article is a collaboratively written piece that attempts to challenge the standard protocols of journal articles and integrate some of the affects and gestures of improvisation into the writing itself. Presented as a conversation, the published document seeks to retain some of the tensions involved in the continual revision, renewal, structuring and editing of the dialogue between the author and Nicols.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -