UC San Diego

This dissertation examines improvisation as a site of continuously negotiated agency, drawing on three original recordings — Echoes of Origin, Emanations, and Misterio Entre Tú y Yo — as primary objects of analysis. Taking an autoethnographic approach grounded in two decades of performance experience, the project argues that musical initiative in ensemble improvisation is not held by a single performer but redistributed moment to moment through a relay of proposal, ratification, withholding, and seizure. To trace this relay, the dissertation develops the Interaction Map, a symbolic notation system designed to capture the transfer of initiative in ways standard notation cannot, applying it through close analysis of an extended passage from Emanations and a comparative passage from Echoes of Origin.Extending this relay inward, the dissertation then asks what happens to musical initiative when only one performer occupies every position within it. Drawing on Bakhtin's account of unmerged consciousness and Cavarero's theory of voice as constituted only in address to another, and building on Katherine Meizel's concept of multivocality, the dissertation develops solitary multivocality through a self-interview analysis of the solo piano recording Misterio Entre Tú y Yo, arguing that the absence of a second performer does not produce a unified voice but reveals a plurality already latent within a single performing body. Finally, the dissertation argues that studio post-production functions not as a technical phase applied to a finished performance, but as a direct continuation of the same improvisatory logic that shaped the original recording session. Drawing on the dual position of performer and producer occupied during the making of Emanations, and taking Teo Macero's editing work with Miles Davis as a methodological precedent, the dissertation develops the concept of reflexive production, tracing through diary and session-file evidence how editing, mixing, and sequencing continue rather than conclude the improvisatory process. Together, these three claims trace a single relay relocated across three axes — interpersonal, intrapersonal, and temporal — resisting any binary opposition between improvisatory process and recorded product. The dissertation contributes a new analytical tool for tracing initiative in real time, extends theories of vocal identity to solo instrumental performance, and offers a practitioner's documented account of how recorded improvisation continues to take shape long after the performance ends.