The Construction and Representation of Identity within Freely Improvised Music

Representation in Music / Musical Representation, Istanbul Technical University, Turkish Music State Conservatory, TURKEY. October 6-9, 2005

Abstract

Drawing on qualitative analytic studies of improvising musicians this paper discusses ways in which the construction and representation of self-identity can be observed in improvisational practice.

As a contribution to the now well-established challenge to musicology engendered by post-structuralist and post-modern thought, it explores musical meaning's ontological significance through an analysis of the dialectical processes apparent in musical experience. Demonstrating a connection with processes that serve to define the self, as expressed in social theory and psychotherapeutic models, it becomes possible to better understand music, in particular creative musical experience, as a carrier of identity.

As an alternative to a more structuralist semiotic agenda, this paper's epistemological orientation seeks musical meaning in the experienced dynamics of the encounter. As such, it is a phenomenological and interpretive analysis that views musical experience as a meaning-making activity through which, following Julia Kristeva, the subject is both made and unmade . This paper gives examples of how such making and unmaking serves in the construction and representation of identity within the meaning-making processes of freely improvising musicians, and from there to offer some conclusions about meaning in musical experience more broadly defined.

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