The uncanon: radical forgetting and free improvisation

In the first decades of the twenty-first century, the canon narrative within Western Art Music continues to resist the critical deconstructions by feminists and the New Musicology. Its stronghold over the way we talk about musical styles and position our practice is so great that even when we do away with the score and the figure of the composer and improvise freely, we find ourselves still trapped within a logic of canon that pushes certain artists’ contributions to the margins. Emphatically free improvisation implies a conscious attempt to forget our musical training and heritage, and subsequently our musical “families”: style, performance practice, and instrument. Absolute forgetting is of course impossible, and so we are forced to deal with the uncanny traces of our heritage as they make their ghostly appearances in real time. In exploring a new concept of Uncanon, I draw on queer and anti-capitalist texts by Jack Halberstam, Sara Ahmed, Mark Fisher, and Donna Haraway, as well as my own experiences as a classically trained flutist, in order to elaborate a framework by which to understand my own practice and study the work of other artists in the field.