This exposition displays the documentation of the artistic process in my PhD project:
My Bag of Licks: Exploring a Harmonica Player's Voice.
During this PhD project, I transcribed, and learned to play, all the harmonica parts on Charlie McCoy's first 13 albums. Based on these transcriptions, and interviews with McCoy and two other distinguished country harmonica players, I analyzed McCoy's playing style. One outcome of this analysis was that I identified a number of licks and strategies which McCoy frequently uses, thus constituting an important part of his idiolect. I selected 10 out of these 19 licks / strategies and used those as starting points for my own artistic voice transformation process. I dedicated one or more practice sessions to each lick, with the intent of altering McCoy's licks to the point that they would become my own original material to be used during improvisations, arrangements and composing.
In this exposition you will find the documentation of these practice sessions. The sessions are presented in different ways. Some licks are presented in an edited way, where each lick that I come up with is represented by a short video clip. Other licks are represented with one video, showing the entire lick generation session. Some licks are represented by both one or more long videos, in combination with the short, edited videos.
Also included in this exposition are the handwritten transcriptions of the McCoy recordings, as well notation of my generated licks. There is also one page in which I present my band John Henry.
The aim of the PhD project is to explore the transformation of a performer’s voice through a process of transcribing and practicing solos by an iconic harmonica player. The project also investigates the affordance of the instrument and how they contribute to the (trans)formation of voice. In this project I eventually also explore how I can apply my findings in my teaching in Higher Music Education.
In order to fulfil this aim, the following research questions were formulated:
1 How can a performer’s voice be developed and transformed through a process of transcription and imitation?
2 What is the impact of the affordance of the diatonic harmonica in such processes?
3 How does a transcription from an instrument other than the harmonica alter these processes?
4 In what ways can an application of the process of transcription and imitation contribute to student autonomy in the teaching and learning of music performance in Higher Music Education?
The thesis can be accessed through the following link:
Link