[lexicon] I.

 

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GENEALOGIES AND FUTURES

 

Genealogies and Futures defines the residency’s temporal orientation.

 

Genealogy does not recover a single, pure, or uninterrupted origin. Jazz emerged from African American musical practices and developed through Black Atlantic histories, forced displacement, urban migration, racial segregation, technological mediation, commercial circulation, and encounters with Caribbean, Latin American, European, and other traditions. Its histories involve continuity and rupture, preservation and loss, canonization and marginalization, appropriation and transformation.

 

Genealogical inquiry asks how techniques, repertoires, ensemble models, and forms of authority became possible. It may examine how clubs, recording industries, schools, conservatories, festivals, and media established standards of legitimacy; how recording altered repeatability and authorship; how urban economies organized labor; and how some expertise entered canonical history while other knowledge remained unnamed or excluded.

 

Futures does not designate prediction, novelty, or stylistic progress. It identifies possible transformation through new media, recovered histories, redistributed agency, accountable authorship, sustainable working conditions, and new relations among performers, institutions, communities, technologies, and listeners.

 

The residency asks how inherited practices can change without being immobilized by genre, and how experimentation can proceed without erasing its historical conditions. Imagining otherwise depends upon the precision with which present practice understands its inheritances.