Chapter 1 — Introduction
Chapter 1 introduces the artistic, conceptual, and institutional landscape in which this dissertation is situated. It outlines the motivation for investigating collaboration within Western Art Music (WAM)—a term used pragmatically to denote the academic and professional contexts in which the case studies unfold, while acknowledging the term’s historical, cultural, and hierarchical limitations. The chapter argues that collaboration in current musical practice is not merely a practical working mode but an epistemic condition: a way of producing knowledge, structuring relationships, and shaping aesthetic outcomes.
The opening section (1.1.) situates this research within wider artistic and scholarly discourses. It reviews how developments in interdisciplinarity, digital media, participatory culture, and distributed creativity have challenged traditional models of compositional authorship. It references artists and thinkers—from Pauline Oliveros and George Lewis to James Saunders, Jennifer Walshe, and recent practice-based research in composition—who have expanded ideas of collective agency, listening, and multi-authored creation. These positions form the conceptual horizon against which the dissertation formulates its contribution.
Section 1.2. introduces the personal and disciplinary motivations behind the project, tracing how my collaborations with performers and ensembles revealed the limitations of conventional commissioning structures and prompted a search for more transparent, reflective, and equitable working methodologies. The chapter shows how these artistic experiences intersect with broader institutional debates on collaborative pedagogy, research documentation, and process-based creation.
Section 1.3. surveys institutional and artistic contexts relevant to collaboration in WAM. It highlights how contemporary practices increasingly integrate feedback, negotiation, and shared decision-making, yet often lack explicit frameworks for structuring these interactions. Relevant literature from creativity studies, sociology of art, and musicology provides conceptual foundations for analyzing collaborative dynamics within the dissertation’s case studies.
Section 1.4. introduces the dissertation’s methodological centrepiece: the Iterative Feedback Model for Collaborative Composition (IFMCC). Developed specifically for this research, the IFMCC is presented as a four-phase cyclical scaffold—proposal, response, reflection, integration—that structures collaboration across different artistic settings. The introduction explains why this model is necessary, how it broaches the gap between open improvisation and traditional notation-driven practice, and how it will be tested across the forthcoming chapters.
Section 1.5. formulates the main research question and corresponding sub-questions. These address how the IFMCC shapes compositional decisions, performer agency, group dynamics, technological mediation, and the distribution of authorship. The chapter emphasizes that the research questions are both theoretical and practice-based, bridging empirical observation and artistic reasoning.
The chapter closes (1.6.) with an overview of the dissertation’s eight-chapter structure, establishing a clear path from conceptual grounding (Chapters 1–4) to empirical application in three contrasting case studies (Chapters 5–7) and a final synthesis (Chapter 8). Pivotal throughout is the claim that composition is approached as a recursive, dialogic practice, where making, reflecting, documenting, and revising are inseparable, and where performance becomes a site for producing—not illustrating—knowledge.
Together, these introductory sections provide the conceptual and methodological foundations that guide the dissertation’s artistic investigations and frame the interpretation of the case studies that follow.
