This thesis investigates the role of musical improvisation in relation to composition, innovation, and identity. It draws on the author's experience as an improvising percussionist and on scholarship by Edgar Landgraf, Gary Peters, Bruce Ellis Benson, Judith Butler, James Snead, Rebecca Schneider, Jacques Derrida, and others, on the subject of improvisation.

The work is divided into four chapters. The first chapter argues that improvisation and composition are best viewed as a distinction of degree rather than kind. Chapter two discusses the relation between improvisation, innovation, and discovery and argues that invention is by necessity coupled to iterability. The third chapter investigates the relation between improvisation and identity and proposes a scenario of various platforms with different constraints on which we develop our persona; music making being one of those platforms. The last chapter expands the image of an individual artist to include a multilayered set of influences—past and present, conscious and unconscious, sensed anticipations from an audience and peers—to expand and nuance notions of personal agency.

Discussion and analysis of recorded improvisations by the author is interspersed throughout the text. The intention is to create a call and response situation for the reader by which listening to the recorded musical improvisations invigorates the theoretical approach of the thesis, and similarly, the analytical and theoretical discussion creates a mindset open for listening.

This dissertation is an ethnographic study analyzing how four improvising musicians articulate their music as social interaction and how they conceive of their practice in a larger stylistic and historical context. The musicians—Andrea Neumann, Joe McPhee, Suzanne Thorpe, and Axel Dörner—share in interviews the formative factors of their music practice, including the direct influence of local music scenes, socio-cultural considerations, gender and race dynamics, and their intimate relations to their instruments.

The interviews were preceded by an exchange of recorded solo improvisations with each of the musicians. This exchange served as the catalyst for a broader discussion about musical interaction and what constitutes a musical dialogue.

In my analysis, I focus on: first, their sense of agency in a context of individuality and community; second, performativity in music and the relation between musical practice and social interaction; and third, the connection between a distinct musical practice and the notion of musical fluency.

I pay attention to three vantage points articulated by Ingrid Monson. She proposes a framework of discourse, structure, and practice to parse out the relations between influential external factors and individual agency. I am also applying Erika Fischer-Lichte’s notion of perceptual multistability, in this context signifying the potential overlap or disconnect between the musician and the character of the music, or the blurry lines between an identity on stage and off stage. Ellen Waterman’s use of the term performativity, relating to a listening trust, and Tracy McMullen’s neologism the improvisative serve as concepts to better understand the formative qualities of empathy and generosity in music improvisation.

In conclusion, I am showing the different ways four musicians experience agency and the performative dynamics of interaction in improvised music. The dissertation analyzes the close link between personal identity, music communities, and an individual music practice. In connection to this multilayered context of stylistic influences and social interaction in music, I propose the term family resemblance as a term affording both similarities and differences in a global musical community characterized by a great stylistic diversity but ultimately a shared focus on improvisation.