Delving into special moments of free improvisation

Abstract

International audienceThis paper investigates the discrepancy between musicians’ subjective experience when they are improvising and their opinion on the musical result when they are listening back to their performance. We identified the importance of this discrepancy when we interviewed twelve New-York-based musicians coming from diverse cultural backgrounds and generations, all having an international career with more than fifteen years of professional experience in free improvisation. To further investigate the contrast between musicians’ memory about their performance experience and their feedback about the musical result, we videotaped three concerts and three studio sessions and then asked these musicians to watch, listen andcomment the video.In our paper we will present the different improvisation processes that we identified through the analysis of our interviews, with an emphasis on the similarities and disparities among the interviewees’ artistic approaches. We will describe the procedure of our feedback sessions that we adapted according to each ensemble or soloist and we will focus on i) special moments for which the musicians reported intense feelings when they were performing and ii) musical moments that were selected when listening back to the improvisations. The descriptions of these moments will be illustrated by video excerpts of the concerts.This paper contributes to designing new methods for analysis of improvisational practices by triangulating semi-directed interviews conducted within a phenomenological approach (Vermersch, 2009), observations in concerts, and self-confrontational interview methods in feedback sessions (Theureau, 2003). Our research takes place in the recent field of Tracking Creative Processes in Music (Donin & Theureau, 2007) that gives greater importance to the practitioners’ voice rather than the analysis of musical elements from recording transcriptions.By adapting the procedure of the feedback sessions to the specificities of each ensemble, we address the complexity of investigating this social practice based on creativity and idiosyncrasy