Making Music Together: Analytical Perspectives on Musical Interaction

Music is a complex creative process involving many individuals, from performers to improvisers to composers to listeners and beyond. Yet, music analysis has often focused on individual composers’ processes, much to the exclusion of a myriad of other activities that occur during the music making process. Making Music Together offers an interactive turn for music analysis, one that acknowledges the deeply collaborative creativity at the center of all music making. This perspective, fresh and novel in its approach, affords a more inclusive and expansive view of music analysis. It enables an understanding of the numerous kinds of interactions that take place in music-making contexts: interactions between musicians, between performers and their instruments, between musicians and dancers, between musicians and machines, and much more. This book engages a diverse breadth of musical styles, including Western Euroclassical musics, collaborative improvisations in jazz and free genres, and a range of global music practices. With an emphasis on the vibrant interactivity at work in all aspects of music making, Making Music Together demonstrates how detailed music analysis can attend not only to sounds made, but to the human lives, experiences, and societies defined by it altogether.

Garrett Michaelsen is an independent music theorist and trumpet player living in the San Francisco Bay Area. He has written on many topics surrounding improvisation in music. His work appears in numerous journals, including Critical Studies in Improvisation, Engaging Students, GAMUT, Music Analysis, and Music Theory Online, as well as in the edited volume Analyzing the Music of Living Composers (and Others). He has previously taught at University of Massachusetts Lowell, Indiana University, and Marin School of the Arts.

Chris Stover is a music theorist, composer, and improvising trombonist. His book Reimagining Music Theory: Contexts, Communities, Creativities was published by Routledge, and he is co-editor of Rancière and Music (Edinburgh University) as well as eight special journal issues. He is a Senior Lecturer in Music Studies and Research at Queensland Conservatorium, Griffith University, where he convenes the Higher Degree Research program.