Do you notice a mistake?
NaN:NaN
00:00
Since sociology has been historically concerned with the question of how social order is possible, its main focus has been on exploring (the imposition of) conventions, rules, norms, every day routines, etc. As a result, the study of creative processes has been mostly left aside. This has changed within the last years, but sociology is still lacking profound studies of creative processes, such as composing, improvising, playing, inventing, etc.
My contribution is aimed at filling this theory driven gap. For this purpose, I conducted an empirical research project to explore improvising processes in music from the perspective of the sociology of action and interaction. Two genres were chosen to enable an explicitly contrastive analysis so that a higher level of generalization could be achieved: free jazz and flamenco.
A qualitative, ethnographic data collection strategy was applied. Data were collected in three steps: first, audio and visual recordings were made of the performances of three free jazz trios and two flamenco ensembles (a duo and a trio), all of them professional musicians, in a recording studio. One at a time, the groups were invited to the recording studio of the Institute for Composition and Electroacoustic of the University for Music and Visual Arts in Vienna to perform improvisations, so that participant observation could be made while they performed. In a further stage, the ensembles were confronted – immediately after playing – with the audio-visual material in which they could see and hear their performances, the audio- visual data functioning as a trigger for the musicians to make free comments, observations, and evaluations about their improvisations. Also, as part of this second step, a non-structured interview with the group was carried out. Afterwards, the musicians were asked to name the best improvisation piece of the session. In a third step, the researcher accompanied each of the musicians separately to the technical room and heard with him or her the selected piece of music, carrying out an individual in-depth interview, within which the artist told her what she/he thought and did during each sequence of the piece. This way, the subjective experience of each musician and his/her ways of acting regarding the action-interaction process of improvisation could be examined, all of this being again video-audio recorded. As a result, the same selected piece of music had been examined and narrated from the point of view of each of the musicians, which enabled to reconstruct the process of improvisation at the level of the individuals and at the level of the interaction within the group.
The method employed for the analysis of the observation protocols, and the individual and group interviews was grounded theory, a qualitative, flexible and systematic strategy that enables the formulation of a theory based on the analysed data and that does not force empirical data into theoretical corsets.
As a result, an action and interaction model emerged, that aims to explicate improvisation processes from the double perspective of action and interaction theory. It consists of four dimensions: 1) the (malleability of the) musical material, 2) the (more or less intense) interaction between the players, 3) the attitude of the actors (from “open” to “closed”), and 4) the (more or less emergent) music. These dimensions are closely intertwined with one another and each of them can vary from a minimum to a maximum.
Improvising is modelling musical material. By musical material, a key category within my model, I mean not only perceptible sounds, scores or instruments, but also the knowledge that musicians carry with them and that is incorporated as sedimented experience. Depending on the musical genre, the material is more or less malleable, i.e., can be formed while performing. The more malleable the material is, the more intense is the interaction between the musicians that respond to new or unanticipated forms of it. In an “open attitude mode”, the artists experience a high receptivity towards the musical materials offered by the others within the performance and respond according to them: imitating, continuing musical ideas, etc. A high degree of the first three dimensions leads to a high degree of the emergent quality of the music performed. The more emergent the music is, the more it results from the playing process. At the same time, a high emergent music influences the other dimensions back.
The advantage of the proposed model consists in the fact that it does not postulate a single criterion (i.e. primary vs. secondary musical parameters) to decide whether improvisation is or is not taking place, and conceives of it as a continuum from minimum to maximum. It takes into consideration the mutual influences of four central, empirically driven dimensions of improvising processes. Including such “variables” that have been normally left aside by improvisation models, like musical material, or attitude, the creative practice of improvising can be comprehended in a more holistic, broaden way. The four dimensions discussed, as well as their mutual influences, which could be complemented and completed in further studies, show that, for musical improvising, the knowledge of the artists (their material), their attitude towards contingency, their interaction, and their music as output of their action are mutually influential factors that determine, on the whole, creativity in performance.
From 2004 to 2015 two research centres funded by the (UK) Arts and Humanities Research Council – which represented successive stages of the same project – provided a focus for research in musical performance. Whereas the first (the AHRC Res
October 10, 2015 55 min
The French literary criticism movement, critique génétique, is an attractive interdisciplinary model for the study of music sketches because of its staggering amount of varied scholarship published during its forty-year history, its conce
October 10, 2015 32 min
This paper will present the core role of improvisation groups in the late Sixties / beginning of the Seventies in the process of building the new status of music material in the post-serial context. Analysing some “Gruppo di Improvvisazione
October 10, 2015 33 min
In previous conference presentations and writings I have discussed Henry Brant’s process of “prose-report composition,” which became his primary working method in 1945. The process, which is heavily documented in his sketch manuscripts at t
October 10, 2015 27 min
My paper centers on the compositional manuscripts of Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-75), the Soviet Union’s leading composer of art music. Opening a window onto the composer’s creativity, fragmentary passages, rejected movements, revised manuscr
October 10, 2015 29 min
In recent years, the increased availability of recorded music in the instrumental teaching studio as part of performers’ routine for familiarising themselves with musical works they will then go on to perform, has meant that performers are
October 10, 2015 30 min
The paper is an attempt for reconstruction of coding (creative) and decoding (reading) process, both dependent on temporary collective imaginative patterns, which funded the historic-ontological status of two significant works of the Czech
October 10, 2015 26 min
When Adorno characterized the introductory measures of “Entrueckung” in Schoenberg’s Second String Quarter as something “never yet heard,” he pointed to a caesura that was both a breakthrough and also a rupture in the history of music. A de
October 10, 2015 28 min
The present conference aims to study the creative trajectory of the Brazilian contemporary opera confection and also how the creation networks of opera work, within a communicational and semiotical approach. It also aims to explore the ind
October 10, 2015 26 min
This paper theorizes and investigates the role of new music festivals, currently among the leading institutional impulses for the creation of contemporary art music. During the last few decades those festivals have gained increasing promine
October 10, 2015 30 min
Charles Ives began formulating literary and musical ideas that would evolve into Concord Sonata as early as 1902. The piece was first published in 1921, and significantly revised to the point of being “re-written” in 1947. Throughout those
October 10, 2015 30 min
In his book The Economics of Creativity: Art and Achievement under Uncertainty (2014), the distinguished sociologist Pierre-Michel Menger offers an analysis of artistic creativity that seeks a middle path between two equally unsatisfactory
October 10, 2015 01 h 13 min
In my presentation I will elucidate the interplay of several forms of knowledge in composing process in art music. As a general term, “knowledge” includes forms of explicit, propositional knowledge as well as several forms of implicit, embo
October 10, 2015 23 min
Faced to a more and more digitalized world the interest in artists manuscripts is still growing. Sometimes it is the mystic rising of an idea and its often unexpected development, sometimes it is a surprising simple reason that can be seen
October 10, 2015 26 min
New things are made with old things. In this sense, all creation is basically a combinatorial process – though not just that. It also implies novelty; but novelty comes into play in a dynamic space between random indeterminacy and routine r
October 10, 2015 36 min
The concept of "mistake" is antithetical to jazz's spirit of uninhibited creativity. But jazz, like any musical style, conforms to a system of rules and conventions; indeed, this is what defines the style—what makes it sound like jazz and n
October 10, 2015 26 min
In jazz research and performance practice, emphasis has long been awarded to musicians who exhibit virtuosity or mastery of solo improvisation. Whether Louis Armstrong’s assertive solo cadenza on West End Blues or John Coltrane’s blazing ac
October 10, 2015 24 min
This paper presents the results of a genetic study of Antagonisme, a chamber work composed by Xavier Darasse on a text by the philosopher Alain Badiou for the 1965 concours de composition at the Conservatoire de Paris. Darasse and Badiou be
October 10, 2015 26 min
Vers le milieu des années 1980 à l’IRCAM, le compositeur français Marc-André Dalbavie a pris conscience de l’importance de l’espace dans l’existence du son, notamment à travers son contact avec l’acousticien Jean-Marie Adrien. À parti
October 10, 2015 32 min
From 2004 to 2015 two research centres funded by the (UK) Arts and Humanities Research Council – which represented successive stages of the same project – provided a focus for research in musical performance. Whereas the first (the AHRC Res
October 10, 2015 55 min
From their compositional and philosophical perspectives, the works of Elliott Carter and Luigi Nono share very little in common. Carter, a true American modernist, strongly opposed the method of twelve-tone music, which was becoming prevale
October 10, 2015 27 min
The question of whether Henri Dutilleux was a pro- or anti-serialist can be difficult to answer. However, in the 1960s, the composer evidently participated in the serial movement when he composed his two seminal works called Métaboles and
October 10, 2015 26 min
Do you notice a mistake?