UC Irvine

This dissertation considers the development of musical form in improvised music performances from a perspective based in embodied and ecological theories of cognition. Here, improvised music refers to a wide range of musical practices which utilize “free” improvisation as a foundational process for structuring musical form. As a temporally extended, embodied, and often cooperative creative practice, improvised music composition and performance may be enriched by a perspective informed by theories of cognition which help explain embodied, dynamic, and distributed cognitive tasks. Drawing primarily on the enactive cognition of Thompson, Varela, and Rosch, as well as James J. Gibson’s ecological psychology, I develop a perspective on improvised musical forms as contingent on performers interacting with musical possibilities for action afforded by their environment. Such a perspective suggests that improvised music performances are structured ecologically, as a musical ecology. This has implications for pre-performance organizations of musical form, such as in composition, wherein the musical ecology may be manipulated through a variety of interdisciplinary means, a practice I call Systems Composition. Furthermore, improvising performers may adopt the ecological perspective in order to better understand adapting to a musical ecology as improvisational skill, emphasizing openness and attention to musical affordances over physical or technical virtuosity alone. Finally, I explore ways in which I have applied the enactive and ecological perspectives in my own practice as a composer and improviser, discussing musical works from my dissertation concert, Musical Ecologies of Persons and Things.