Surfacing the Musical Self Through Playful Improvisation

• In Event: Practicing the Possible: An Interdisciplinary Exploration of Improvisation Toward Remedy and Inclusion

Abstract

This study explores musicians’ artistic identities by providing a playful context for improvisation. Using data from playtesting and user interviews for a music improvisation game, I first present a methodological approach for studying artistic identity by prompting and scaffolding improvisational performance. Second, I examine how the personal and social elements of artistic identity come to be expressed, understood, and developed through improvisation.

Improvisation has been described as building from an artist’s personal experiences and histories; a performance can be seen as an embodiment of one’s unique individual self, or a personal “truth telling” (Iyer, 2004). At the same time, improvisation is shaped and supported by social histories and identities. Musicians learn and enact their practice within cultural contexts, which entails generative constraints of genre, technique, conventions, and so on (Berliner, 1994). These influences are complex and multidimensional, particularly in an interconnected and multicultural world. Moreover, artists’ identities are not static, and improvisation is a context for developing one’s identity through practice (Duranti & Burrell, 2004). Understanding how these aspects relate is both important and challenging, given the ephemerality of improvisational performances, the continuous changes that shape identity, and the tacit or unconscious nature of the processes at hand (Sawyer, 2000). This study presents a game that functions both as a context for musicians to develop their artistic identities and a tool for studying the connections between a musician’s practice and their personal and social histories. The game entails interpreting and enacting a visual shape as music, which involves participant decisions about how to create structure within the improvisation.

This study takes a design-based research approach (Barab & Squire, 2004) in which recruited musicians played the game in groups of three. Each performance was video recorded and followed by a video-stimulated recall interview (Martinelle, 2020) in which the group reviewed their performance in conversation with an interviewer. Each trio completed three rounds of play and interview. To analyze this data, we conducted a qualitative microgenetic analysis (Erickson, 1992) that examined the music created (Gershon, 2018), participants’ behavior in the performance (Goodwin, 2000), and discourse that took place in the interviews (Gill, 2000).

Findings indicate the affordances of providing improvisers with an ambiguous and genre-agnostic structure to navigate. Participants drew on different styles, conventions, and devices to enact structure, indicating the importance of structuring as an improvisational practice that is grounded in one’s repertoire, conventions, and influences. Participants also combined genres, referencing recent and early formative influences and drawing on experiences as performers and as listeners. This study offers contributions in three areas. First, the process of refining this game’s design can provide a more effective resource for music education and performance. Second, this game constitutes a methodological tool for studying improvisation, and has potential to be expanded to other art forms. Finally, the study offers insight into self-expression and the intersection of personal and sociocultural histories. This work is especially significant in the context of ever-increasing global connection and interaction, in which cultural identities and artistic forms intersect in novel and important ways.

Author

• Ethan Rubin, University of California - Santa Barbara