Archiving and Advancing the Glasgow Improvisors Orchestra: Creative Practice and the Psychology of Large-Group Improvisation
HEI: Royal Conservatoire of Scotland
School: Music
Supervisors:Una MacGlone (RCS) & Raymond MacDonald (ECA)
About Ruari ‘s Research:
In partnership with Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra (GIO), this research will involve the development of an archive of GIO’s 25 year history, along with a practice based research portfolio containing original music and thesis.
In aleatoric musical structures, large-group improvisation and generative music systems share a fundamental characteristic: local decisions produce emergent global behaviours. In a generative system, parametric rules produce complex, unpredictable outputs. In GIO, individuals make improvisational choices that produce collective compositional murmurations in real-time.
This project employs the researcher’s own practice (generative and stochastic music) and examines the application of derived theory to both large-group improvisation as a compositional tool, and responsive systems designed around using the developed GIO archive as creative sound resource, signalling towards an open-source, publicly available sound library.
The research approach is multidisciplinary, drawing from improvisation studies, ethnomusicology, music psychology, and archival studies with a strong emphasis on archival activation via a practice-based, compositional approach encompassing stochastic and generative experimental music outputs, responding to the developed archive.
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