Musical Meaning: A Qualitative Investigation of Free Improvisation

Department of Music, University of Sheffield, July, 1997

Summary

This thesis develops an understanding of musical meaning based on musicians' statements about creative musical experience and psychoanalytic theory. Approaching the musical object first and foremost as experientially constituted, rather than as an objective structural entity, it forms a critique of the positivist analysis of musical meaning traditionally used in musicology. This approach enables the analysis of music's experientially defined dynamics of interaction and process. Following the justification of this position, free improvisation is identified as an especially suitable musical activity through which to study these qualities. With improvisation's creative emphasis it is possible to bring to the foreground the processes (or active dynamics) involved in the construction of musical meaning and to relax focus upon other more structurally based and cultural meanings.

Using the psychological method of qualitative analysis, two separate phenomenological interpretations are presented. The central data analysed is the transcripts of two musicians each recalling and describing the thoughts and feelings encountered during the performance of a duo improvisation. On the basis of these analyses, and after a detailed analysis of the emergent relational categories of a further four studies, the site of what is described as music's ontological meaning is identified. Contrasted with music's cultural and structural meanings, the ontological layer of musical meaning associates the dialectical processes apparent in musical experience with processes identified by psychoanalysis in the formation and development of identity. This notion is clarified through the work of Julia Kristeva, and is considered in relation to theoretical issues within music therapy and music education.