Event
Title:Jazz Music and Its Creation in the Evolving CommonsWhen: 11/06/2013 - 11/06/2013 04:00 PM - 05:45 PM Where:Keene State College - Keene Category:Bakriges & Guests.
Description
Finding Your Place in the Evolving Commons: KSC 2013 Symposium
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Finding-Your-Place-in-the-Evolving-Commons-KSC-2013-Symposium/125998627568751
Additional information can also be found at:
http://symposium.keenecommons.net/
For more information visit: http://sites.keene.edu/symposium2013/
November 3-7, 2013
http://sites.keene.edu/symposium2013/presentations/
“Jazz Music and Its Creation in the Evolving Commons:” Talk and Performance
Symposium Session Coordinator: Christopher Bakriges
Jazz musicians move routinely between two or more national spaces, both geographically and virtually, in order to produce and perform creative improvisational art. The collaboration of improvising musicians coming together to create a larger entity of artistic possibility and opportunity has become a normal creative and business model referred to as musical transculturation. This model involves leadership, democracy, innovation and cooperation across a diverse demographic and has direct parallels in any other ‘common’ environment.
The 2013 Keene State College Symposium, Finding Your Place in the Evolving Commons, is about understanding, locating, and taking responsibility for our places in the public spaces we set aside for care and cultivation of the resources, public and private, that we share in community with others. The commons refers to this space, recognizing that its reality is often rooted in but not limited to physical locality and literal presence. This is especially the case when we recognize the emergent presence of the digital commons, which has dimensions that are local, national, and global – often all at the same time. More traditional terms like commonweal and commonwealth speak about the resources and legacies entrusted to us that we tend and cultivate in these multi-faceted domains. The Symposium will address the dynamic reality that we are calling an evolving commons and it will explore the interdependent relationships and responsibilities that we cultivate there.
As our conceptual map suggests, we are thinking about the commons as a dynamic reality with multiple dimensions and manifestations. Some are specifically local, regional, national, and global. Some manifestations are quite literal and rooted in specific places. Some are just as literal but not necessarily a physical place as much as they are shared entities, like a college’s shared course of study, its core curriculum, or more generally, the public curricula we provide locally, regionally, and nationally as public education. Moreover, as we have tried to show, the commons does not function without our individual and collective action. The evolving commons is dependent on the stewardship of others whose responsibilities we are indicating with verbal forms that draw attention to our roles in the commons, from framing the commons to tending it in its various manifestations.
While the Symposium will be focused by formal events scheduled for November 3-7, 2013, we intend to coordinate that occasion with other events and projects over the next 18 months using our symposium theme as a connecting thread. That is, the campus, along with local community partners, will be working to cultivate our own evolving and multifaceted commons as we move forward. If we are successful, it will be distinguished by clear and hospitable boundaries that promote respect, and safety for its many and diverse constituencies. Throughout this time, the Symposium will be encouraging regular events on and off campus to link their themes, speakers, performances, and projects with those of the Symposium as they consider their offerings as occasions where we embody this evolving commons with each other (e.g, Sidore and Ewing Lectures; Keene Is Reading; The Einbeck-Keene City Partnership Visit, October 4-12, 2013; Keene Public Library programs, the Nov. 7 Kristallnacht Remembrance at The Colonial Theatre).
In its classic sense, a symposium was a special gathering, a feast for body, mind, and spirit. A symposium was a convivial conversation over food and drink about some significant matter to the gathered group. Our plan is to host an extensive feast to nurture our community in an open dialogue about the nature of our public life in this evolving reality we call the commons.
As we move into this dialogue we offer the following observations as food for thought to help focus the conversation to come. The commons is significantly shared, public space that is circumscribed by purpose and distinguished by boundaries of identity, respect, and responsibility. That is, the commons is hospitable space set aside for public purpose and tended by the public for whom it is set aside for the benefit of present and future generations.
The commons, especially in the digital age, is more than physical space and place. The commons is a designated public domain that is manifest in diverse dimensions and forms. Indeed, its digital forms are evolving in extensive and often exponential ways. In this regard, especially, we cannot overlook that the commons is a legacy and responsibility entrusted to those who participate in its life and share its rich resources – its commonweal.
The commons is the designated public space of a community set aside for the economic, political, cultural, educational, and/or personal nurture of that community’s members. Hence, the boundaries and qualities of any commons is dependent upon the scope and respect afforded its members and that community’s understanding of public life and mutual responsibility for one another in and beyond their own boundaries. Quite simply, public life and the commons are interdependent realities. When the commons is diminished, so too is public life. When public life is enhanced and expanded, so is the reality of the commons. When the public life of a community is narrowly defined, so is the commons of that community. In other words, each reality reflects the scope of the other.
Help us set the table by thinking with us about the important features of our public life that are manifest in this space we set aside for nurture and conversation:
The commons is. . . .
• hospitable space set aside for public purpose and use
• safe space for dialogue and nurture
• shared, public space
• respected and respectful space dependent upon those who tend it
• safeguarded space
• entrusted space
• more than a physical space
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