Words, Music, Entanglements: Diffractive Readings of Contemporary Jazz Recordings

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This project investigates the relationship between text and improvised music from the overlapping perspectives of historical, philosophical, and artistic research. That the practices of producing music and text can be meaningfully conducted in conjunction, is implicit in the production of music criticism, lyrics, liner notes, musicological scholarship, etc. However, in the last century, questions have been raised about whether this is a well-founded assumption (Seeger, 1924) and the nature of the relationship has been explored by philosophers (Langer, 1941), aestheticians (Albright, 2014), ethnomusicologists (Feld, 1984), and cognitive scientists (Jackendoff, 2011). This project seeks to re-evaluate the relationship between text and music with a focus on improvised music, so that insights from jazz and improvised music research can be applied to our understanding of the relationship between music and text, and vice versa. This is particularly timely in light of Edwards' (2017) recent work on the historical relationship between literature and jazz music, the increasing tendency in jazz studies to draw on continental philosophy, and the increase in improvising musicians turning to artistic research.The impetus for this project comes from my experience as an improviser and an academic. As a critically acclaimed improviser I have performed nationally and internationally, playing works by myself and others which have involved translation between music and text in various forms. In my academic work I have written about my artistic practice, jazz historiography, and contemporary media practices. My MA dissertation, for which I received a mark of 80%, explored the epistemology of jazz practice-research methodologies and proposed a method for writing about jazz practice which draws on Barad's 'diffractive' methodology (2007) and autoethnography (Holman Jones et al., 2013). My experience crosses boundaries between practice and theory, historical and contemporary concerns, and discipline specific and general philosophical enquiries. This project aims to bring these perspectives together to explore the relationship between music and text.This research will be structured in three parts: a historical survey of jazz literature from the 1960s to the present, a philosophical investigation, and a performance practice. The historical survey will build on secondary literature, using archival work and textual analysis of primary texts. The philosophical investigation will draw on key figures and concepts from continental and contemporary philosophy to argue for a specific framework for understanding the relationship between text and music. The performance practice will use autoethnography, interview, and audiovisual recording to capture rehearsals and performances.