Performed Identities: Theorizing in New York City's Improvised Music Scene
Item
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Title
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Performed Identities: Theorizing in New York City's Improvised Music Scene
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:b79b97659aee:11634
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identifier
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12240
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Creator
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Blake, Daniel,
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Contributor
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Stephen Blum | Robert Dick
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Date
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2013
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Music | experimentalism | Improvised music | jazz studies | New York scene | theory
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Abstract
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This research looks at the diverse approaches to musical practice in New York City's improvised music scene. Using the ideas of improvisers living and working in New York, a central aim of this study is to explore the development of a musician's music theory as personal and implicit. Theory is defined here as a subjective and internalized body of knowledge informing the particular choices an individual improviser makes in real time, given an aesthetic landscape consisting of many other theories. The eighteen interviewees were each asked a series of questions pertaining to their experience as contemporary improvisers. From analysis of these interviews, three central topics emerged, which form the basis for the chapters of the dissertation. First, theory is an expression of an individual's identity, and that identity is performed in the act of improvisation. Second, there is a causal link between one's theory and one's musical practice, and this link is often expressed through "extra-musical" metaphors pertaining to the body. Third, the project holds that improvisation is an ethical act, the working out of musical and structural processes in real time, requiring a negotiation between the implicit theories of individual players whose aesthetic beliefs may be quite different from one another.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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2009_2013.csv
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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Music
