UC Irvine

This dissertation extends the standard notion of musical entrainment as the human capacity for rhythmic synchrony to propose that the cooperative, improvisational and conversational aspects of lexical entrainment can describe communal engagements with artistic expression and sociopolitical alignment. Focusing primarily on African American creative improvised music and conceptual art since the 1960s, it interrogates dualities of structure/intuition, subjectivity/objectivity, and materiality/conceptualism. This research then provides context for a series of original musical and intermedia works, and reveals how empathy and mindfulness interact with scholarship and artistic discipline to support a more fully-embodied approach to engaging process-based transformations of instrumental technique, notation/orchestration, and artistic expression.

This scholarship considers the creative and conceptual processes of various artists, with one main trajectory focused on improvising performer/composers Ornette Coleman, George Lewis, Roscoe Mitchell, and Matana Roberts, and another on artists Terry Adkins, Charles Gaines, David Hammons, and Benjamin Patterson. Two significant ways in which materiality and conceptualism become imbricated in this investigation are in Charles Gaines’s grid-based deconstructions of form and identity, and in Roscoe Mitchell’s embodied approach to process-based transformations of both instrumental technique and notation/orchestration. Both artists’ distinctive vocabularies and practices are presented as methods for the lexical entrainment of artistic practice.

The original intermedia works, also discussed in this dissertation, reconsider assumptions about time, narrative, and temporality, and showcase relationships between extended techniques on the 5-string contrabass, retuned in a Just Intonation-derived scordatura called the Alien Generator system, and the Autonomous Mechanical Instrument Array (AMIA), a family of twelve servo-controlled mechanical instruments that engage in various subtle processes often associated with Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR). Through these works, lexical entrainment can be seen as the process by which individuals defer their own subjectivities to conform to the dictates and functionalities of materials and conceptual frameworks. In this respect, group dynamics and materiality exert similar influence on behavior, mindfulness, and empathy.