This Is Your Pen on Music Using Self-Notations to Investigate Free Improvisation

International audience How can improvisers describe their own performances? How can we get a sense of their understanding and representation of the core elements of their music? While these issues are usually addressed through either ethnographic or experimental studies, here we chose to hybridize both approaches, relying on verbal, notational, and behavioral data produced through a series of workshops with expert improvisers from the Umlaut collective (Paris/Berlin). As part of these workshops, we devised an experiment calling for the musicians to play a short solo, then discuss how they would write it down if they were to play it again, then actually notate it, and finally comment on the self-notation. The findings, based on solos and duets by five musicians, offer a detailed picture of 1) the notational culture of current improvised/experimental music, including verbal and graphic notations; 2) the musicians' implicit ontologies of music, i.e., how they deal with notions such as similarity, persistence, and reproducibility in their improvisational practice; 3) how the interactional dynamics of duet affects those notions forged in solo playing. Against a simplistic view of notation as being adverse to improvisation, we advocate a heuristic use of self-notation in the analysis of those musical practices that are neither alien to, nor dependent on notation.