Spontaneous preferences and core tastes: embodied musical personality and dynamics of interaction in a pedagogical method of improvisation

Abstract

Free improvisations are unprecedented and underdetermined: their content and the way they unfold are not known in advance. Improvised performances have to be actively shaped over time. To do so, the improviser must articulate his embodied experience. In other words, he has to make sense of his experience1 by relying on his bodily know-how. And so this process of improvisation personally involves the improviser. Therefore, it should be a relevant point of entry for the study of his musical "personality" (or "identity," see Hargreaves et al., 2002). Firstly, to put this argument forward, we link free improvisations and personality in the light of embodied (enactive) and dynamical approaches. However, free improvisations are often played as a group. Secondly, so as to link improvisations and personality in the context of human interactions, we present a pedagogical method of free improvisation (the Kaddouch pedagogy; Kaddouch and Miravète, 2012) in which interactivity between learner and)