Collaborative interaction and negotiation in jazz composition: An autoethnographic practice-led enquiry into individual and collective identity and music-making in the Scottish jazz scene

This practice-led investigation aims to generate new knowledge, insights, and understanding of authorship and collaborative aspects, as related to music-making. Through participating in and reflecting upon my practice as a jazz musician and composer, I investigate the ways in which collaborators share authorship when interpreting and performing original music. My research interrogates how creative musicians come together around a composition and the musical referent, as well as the social interactions that contribute to the eventual emergence of the occasion. This draws and builds upon prior research in musical analysis and processes in music, the cultural discussion on the authority of the musical text and how musicians coordinate themselves in creative settings. By focusing instead on knowledge transmission through performance and the interactions between performers “we can understand performance as a generator of social meaning” (Cook, 2001, p. 1). Within my research, attention is directed towards the centrality of the product/process binary in collaborative practice within a small ensemble, with a musical artefact as the main distributor of the research and the written thesis as a discursive framework. Throughout my research I reflect on the implications of my findings for both research and practice purposes, offering fresh perspective on how we conceptualize, approach, and engage with collaborative music-making.