[lexicon] I.

 

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CONTEPTUAL FRAMEWORK

 

SOURCE, SUBSTANCE, AND STRUCTURE are analytically distinct but operationally inseparable. Each conditions and transforms the others in performance.

 

 

SOURCE

Conditions of Emergence, Inheritance, and Transmission

 

SOURCE concerns the materials, histories, practices, institutions, environments, memories, and relations from which jazz performance emerges. A source may be a composition, arrangement, standard, recording, transcription, rhythmic pattern, harmonic progression, vocabulary, testimony, archive, pedagogical method, bodily memory, technology, venue, scene, community practice, or previous performance.

 

A source may be fragmented, displaced, contested, reconstructed, or inaccessible. The concept exceeds origin. Some practices are preserved in scores, recordings, and institutions; others persist through imitation, aural transmission, rehearsal, habit, and collective recollection.

 

Every jazz practice carries histories, including those described as spontaneous, intuitive, authentic, or universal. Timekeeping, articulation, phrasing, voicing, accompaniment, improvisation, intonation, and ensemble discipline embody genealogies, aesthetics, technologies, and institutional expectations. Participants may investigate how a technique was transmitted, whom it treated as exemplary, which conditions enabled it, and what it excluded.

 

Archives preserve performance selectively. Recordings, scores, transcriptions, discographies, photographs, ephemera, reviews, documents, and testimonies retain evidence while producing absences. A recording may preserve sound but omit bodily effort, spatial organization, rehearsal, labor, and audience response. A transcription may retain pitches and rhythms while leaving timbre, microtiming, gesture, interaction, and convention unstated. Participants examine not only what an archive contains, but how it canonizes, authorizes, and excludes.

 

Aural transmission is approached as a distinct organization of knowledge, not incomplete notation. Demonstration, imitation, listening, repetition, and participation can communicate time feel, timbre, articulation, gesture, phrasing, and social relation precisely. The residency asks how such knowledge changes when documented, codified, commodified, or institutionalized.

 

The body may itself function as an archive. Performers carry histories of training, embouchure, fingering, breath, touch, repertoire, injury, fatigue, and sensory adaptation. These histories enable fluency but may preserve restrictive assumptions concerning virtuosity, legitimacy, endurance, and identity.

 

Musical language is simultaneously source and material. Melody, harmony, rhythm, quotation, vocabulary, repertoire, and stylistic reference shape form. Transcription and arrangement modify articulation, duration, timbre, authorship, and meaning. Participants should consider who possesses interpretative authority, how vocabularies become normative, and how citation can acknowledge its lineages.

 

SOURCE also includes institutional and economic conditions. Clubs, schools, conservatories, festivals, labels, jam sessions, community networks, platforms, and funding systems shape which practices are sustained, circulated, resourced, and recognized.

Working with sources entails responsibility. Projects using repertoires, samples, recordings, testimonies, community knowledge, or inherited techniques must consider attribution, permission, context, authorship, compensation, and reciprocity. Transformation may be necessary, but never independent of the relations through which material became available.

 

Participants may ask:

– From which histories, communities, and institutions does the work emerge?

– How are its techniques and repertoires transmitted?

– What is preserved or lost across notation, recording, memory, and performance?

– Which lineages have been canonized, interrupted, or marginalized?

– What responsibilities arise when inherited material is transformed?

– How can genealogy support experimentation without demanding reproduction?

 

 

SUBSTANCE

Materiality, Embodiment, and Sonic Constitution

 

SUBSTANCE examines the embodied, instrumental, vocal, sonic, rhythmic, technological, spatial, and perceptual constitution of performance. It does not identify an immutable essence, but the processes through which musical sound becomes materially present and historically intelligible.

 

Performance is produced through bodies, instruments, voices, and technologies but cannot be reduced to one of them. Breath, touch, embouchure, fingering, articulation, posture, coordination, hearing, sensation, fatigue, memory, technique, amplification, environment, and mediation participate in every event.

 

The performing body is not merely an instrument under conscious command, but a perceptive, trained, adaptive, materially limited field. Gesture organizes attack and duration; sensation informs judgment; listening modifies action in real time; fatigue changes what can be sustained; technical formation shapes what feels possible.

 

Technique is not neutral. Each technique organizes performance through assumptions concerning efficiency, projection, tone, intelligibility, control, endurance, virtuosity, authenticity, and value. Participants may examine which sounds and bodies their methods privilege, which efforts they normalize or conceal, and how pedagogical language directs action.

 

In ensemble performance, substance emerges through interaction. Collective timbre forms through differences in instrumentation, touch, register, amplification, experience, and listening. Blend is not the absence of difference, but its organization. The residency asks how orchestration, roles, production, and judgment determine which sounds become central, supportive, corrected, masked, or excluded.

 

Timbre is both acoustic event and perceptual category. Descriptions such as clean, dirty, warm, bright, dark, raw, traditional, commercial, or experimental are historically conditioned judgments. They may be useful, but not innocent. Participants should distinguish acoustic observation from aesthetic evaluation and identify the histories carried by descriptive terms.

 

Time feel is pulse, subdivision, bodily orientation, expressive resource, collective relation, and coordination. Swing, groove, elasticity, placement, and rhythmic intensity emerge among performers rather than belonging to an isolated part. Time therefore reveals musical form and the distribution of attention, authority, and labor.

 

Improvisation intensifies the relation between inherited vocabulary and situated decision. Quotation, variation, repetition, interruption, silence, and response transform meaning. Participants may examine who initiates change, how accompaniment redistributes agency, how risk is shared, and how historical materials can change without losing specificity.

 

The program welcomes acoustic and electronic instruments, voice, noise, extended technique, sampling, looping, turntablism, amplification, processing, and spatialization. Their significance derives not from novelty alone, but from historical position, structural function, and perceptual consequence.

 

Technology constitutes musical substance. Microphones, recording, sampling, editing, streaming, processing, and software alter scale, proximity, timing, dynamics, circulation, and the distinction between live and mediated sound. Technology does not simply transmit performance; it participates in producing what is heard.

 

Space shapes resonance, audibility, balance, interaction, movement, and audience relation. Clubs, studios, concert halls, streets, rehearsal rooms, platforms, and public sites produce distinct conditions of listening and action. Space is not a neutral container, but a material and social condition of the work.

 

Performance entails vulnerability. Musical labor cannot be detached from health, hearing, mobility, fatigue, identity, precarity, and changing bodily condition. Care, rest, consent, accessibility, attribution, and adaptation are not external administrative concerns, but conditions of sustainable artistic precision.

 

Participants may ask:

– What constitutes the material of the performance?

– How do body, instrument, technique, and listening interact?

– Which assumptions organize technical and timbral practice?

– How do groove and collective timbre emerge relationally?

– How do mediation and labor transform production and perception?

– How can limitation, fatigue, access, and care be addressed without treating performers’ bodies as unlimited artistic resources?

 

 

STRUCTURE

Form, Improvisation, and the Organization of Relation

 

STRUCTURE concerns how musical actions, materials, and relations acquire coherence, distribute responsibility, become perceptible as form, and change over time.

 

Structure may be articulated through composition, arrangement, harmonic cycle, song form, groove, cue, rehearsal, improvisational protocol, space, technology, memory, or collective agreement. It may also emerge through interaction without being fully specified in advance.

 

Musical structure cannot be separated from organizational structure. Tempo depends upon coordinated attention; groove, upon reciprocal adjustment; dynamic form, upon distributed effort. Entrances, transitions, solos, and endings depend upon auditory, visual, or embodied cues. An ensemble’s organization therefore affects what it can sound like.

 

Bandleaders, composers, arrangers, soloists, rhythm-section players, accompanists, producers, engineers, presenters, and institutions exercise different authority. Rehearsal, performance, recording, and production determine who initiates, supports, evaluates, edits, owns, and receives recognition. These relations produce the music.

 

Notation is one structured proposition among others. A chart specifies parameters while leaving others to convention, interpretation, improvisation, or negotiation. It directs attention, distributes responsibility, and assumes competencies. Participants may examine whom it addresses, what it leaves implicit, and how written information interacts with aural models and embodied knowledge.

 

Rehearsal and performance are sites of structural formation. Through repetition, an ensemble stabilizes form, time, harmony, timbre, memory, and response while establishing authority and correction. Efficiency may conceal assumptions, and cohesion may suppress difference. Difficulty, misunderstanding, disagreement, and resistance are treated as analytical evidence, not obstacles requiring immediate elimination.

 

Coordination can be led, distributed, technologically mediated, or generated through real-time listening. No model is inherently egalitarian or artistically superior. Directed arrangements may enable complexity and precision; open structures may expand agency while concealing informal hierarchies. The question is how each arrangement functions under concrete conditions.

 

Participants may ask who can initiate, interrupt, correct, redirect, or conclude; how expertise is recognized; how disagreement is negotiated; and how authorship, responsibility, credit, and risk are distributed. Collective agency is produced through procedures, not guaranteed by improvisation or participation.

 

Structure organizes time through recurrence, accumulation, interruption, repetition, harmonic cycles, solos, collective improvisation, montage, or gradual development. Performers experience these forms through effort, memory, anticipation, and attention; abstract design and lived duration may diverge.

 

Spatial structure determines audibility, visibility, balance, interaction, and relation. An ensemble may operate as a frontal group, circle, dispersed field, moving constellation, studio construction, or remote network. Placement can reinforce hierarchy, intensify difference, support immersion, or redistribute listening.

 

Emergent form may arise through feedback, adaptation, and accumulated decisions, but depends upon constraints. Participants identify which parameters are fixed, which remain variable, how change becomes perceptible, and how local decisions contribute to coherence.

 

The issue is not whether a work should be fixed or open, but how its degrees of determination correspond to its premises. Structure requires sufficient stability to become perceptible and sufficient responsiveness to performers, spaces, technologies, histories, and emergent knowledge.

 

Participants may ask:

– How does a performance acquire coherence?

– Where is structure located: in composition, memory, gesture, listening, technology, or agreement?

– How do musical and social structures interact?

– How are authority, authorship, responsibility, and risk distributed?

– When does coordination support difference, and when does it suppress it?

– What must remain stable, and what may change?