My MFA thesis project focused on the concept of the improvisational referent, a body of learned musical rules or frameworks that help guide improvising musicians (such as jazz song form). Musicians access and process learned musical information to produce improvised sounding by negotiating complicated systems of stylistic guidelines, cultural expectations, and personal choice. In my capstone paper I propose that the referents we use to learn improvisation, even as they enable us to play fluently, can limit or occlude a deeper relationship between mind, body, and performed improvisation.
More specifically my paper explores the concept of the improvisational referent in jazz and proposes a pedagogy for learning how to access and enable a more personal improvisational referent rooted in individual musical experience. There is no right or wrong way of developing an improvisational voice; my work seeks to point the way to discovering new paths to expressive improvisational music. My current research has three goals;
1. to better understand my own relationship to improvisation and its roots in African American improvisational traditions and American popular song.
2. develop a coherent alternative to teaching improvisation for singers, instrumentalists, and composers
3. investigate the neurological systems used in improvisation.
The introduction to my thesis paper is below. The full text is available as a pdf file here.
INTRODUCTION
The complex relationships between a musician’s sounded improvisation and their source materials present consistent challenges to both musical analysis and cognitive research. Many great improvisers express little interest in this nuts and bolts aspect of their process, leaving lesser practitioners and nonmusicians to speculate about what combination of cultural influence, inner psychology, and physical ability can produce the often transcendent effect of skilled improvisation.
Perhaps even more astounding are the achievements of musicians who, beyond achieving great fluency and charisma as improvisers in an already established style, manage to discover and develop innovative new approaches to and forms for improvisation from the musical materials presented by their surroundings. Examples of this sort of groundbreaking musician abound in mid-20th C. American music–Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Ornette Coleman, and many others both well and little known—and their work continues to amaze and directly inspire improvisers today more than forty years after their period of greatest progress. A long period of time has passed since this dual explosion of both improvisational skill and innovation in the development of musical structures for improvisation, and it is time to reassess the ways improvising musicians learn to develop new materials and ways of playing.
Section 1 of this paper will examine and expand on the concept of improvisational referents in jazz improvisation, introduce a complementary concept, that of the mimetic trope, and argue that together in jazz today these improvisational mechanisms form a closed loop that, while continuing to evolve on its own terms, is largely anachronistic. Jazz is a loose and ill-defined collection of disparate styles; please note that my use of this term directly correlates with its use in American academic jazz studies circles. Section 2 will propose a possible method for the development of new improvisational frameworks based on a pedagogical practice of turning inwards to discover internally located and generated improvisational referents that can be used as new vehicles for improvisational expression. Selected writings by musicians Joseph Jarman, Pauline Oliveros, and Francois Rabbath, as well as writer and philosopher Maxine Greene, will be discussed.
Section 3 describes my own ongoing work as an improviser attempting to implement a personal pedagogy based on the concepts presented in section 2, discusses some possible drawbacks to my rationale for this attempt, proposes a general set of rules based on this personal pedagogy, and describes the performance of a piece based on this process. The goal of this paper is to establish an awareness that it is possible to discover new and powerful improvisational referents, whether by using the process I describe or some other method, which can serve to further develop our depth of improvisational expression, sharing, and truth through music.
