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IMPROVISATION, CREATIVITY, AND CONSCIOUSNESS Reviewed: Sarath, Edward W. (2013). Improvisation, Creativity, and Consciousness: Jazz as Integral Template for Music, Education, and Society Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
I must begin my review of Edward Sarath's Improvisation, Creativity, and Consciousness with a disclaimer: I am not a musicologist, music historian, or musician, although I wish I were all three. So why am I reviewing the book? Because the book is much more than a unique study of jazz-it is a compelling study of the role that Integral Theory could play in transforming teaching and learning not only in music education, but also in higher education. I have approached the book as one engaged for many years in writing about the history of language theories; developments in higher education in general, and integral education, in particular; and the correlation of consciousness, language, and education.
Given the unusual breadth and depth of the book, Sarath is the only person I know who is equipped to review it in its entirety. He is an accomplished musician, music historian, composer, and improviser as well as prominent scholar, professor, and administrator at a leading research institution, the University of Michigan. In addition, he is the founding director of Michigan's degree granting Program in Creativity and Consciousness Studies, and he is a longtime committed practitioner and advocate of Integral Education.
In his "Introduction," Sarath frames the theme of the book by referring to Buckminster Fuller's groundbreaking work, Utopia or Oblivion (1969), in which Fuller contends that the two remaining options for humanity are in the book title. There is no middle ground. Like Fuller, Sarath argues that if we intend to win in our struggle for survival, we will have to reach a new evolutionary plateau. This plateau, Sarath insists, "will occur on the level of consciousness.. .in terms of the creativity-consciousness relationship" (p. 2).
Sarath defines creativity as "inventiveness, interaction, the ability to synthesize new forms of knowledge from diverse sources, and the emergence of an individual voice or style within a discipline" (p. 2). To him, consciousness "pertains to self-awareness, transcendence, realization of wholeness and interconnectedness, noetic experience, and the wide range of feeling and emotions that are thought to distinguish human beings from other species"...