Multiple Identities, One Personality
A Satellite Essay
The title of this dissertation makes a claim: identities (plural) and personality (singular). This is not a slip, but rather the conceptual core of everything that follows.
Musical identities, as I've argued elsewhere, are indeed multiple. They are situational, emergent, context-dependent. A drummer in a jazz trio is not the same musical being as a producer in a studio, even when it's the same person, and the identities do not cancel each other out. They coexist, often in a state of mutual unawareness, although it differs a little. The drummer can very well think about mixing decisions while playing a solo, but the producer doesn't worry much about stick technique while adjusting a compressor. Even so, each identity has its own concerns and knowledge, and its own way of being in music, and the fact of the matter is that what becomes the governing identity is governed by the practice being executed. That's probably why I find it very difficult to sing and play the drums simultaneously; it's more about not being able to focus properly on the task at hand, than the technical challenges this doubling of instrumental output demands, but of course, phrasing using a specific time that adapts to the lyric while at the same time keeping the drums meaningful is undoubtedly difficult. To make it work, most musicians who do this, from Karen Carpenter to Phil Collins and beyond, usually finds a common ground for themselves rhythmically, which then removes a lot of detailing that I find necessary to purposely perform and present. Without going further into this, let's just agree that some kind of compromise has to be made, and I usually find the musical result to be more interesting if this is avoided and a part can be played out fully.
Still, if these identities were truly separate, there would be no continuity, no recognizable throughline across different contexts. The music I make as a drummer would have nothing to do with the music I make as a producer or a singer. And yet there is a connection; something persists that makes the work recognizably mine even when it sounds nothing like what I made before. In this thesis, that something belongs to the personality, in the governing body that contains all of these different and varied identities.
Personality therefore, in this framework, is singular. It is not another identity added to the pile, but the container in which all identities exist. It is the continuous thread, the governing logic, the deep structure that allows for surface variation. You might think of it as the difference between what you do and who you are. Identities are what you do. Personality is who you are, persisting beneath and through all the doing. This distinction echoes McCrae and Costa's (2008) differentiation between "basic tendencies" (stable, underlying traits) and "characteristic adaptations" (context-dependent expressions of those traits).
This distinction has philosophical roots also. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) describe identity not as a fixed essence but as a dynamic assemblage, constantly reconfiguring in response to context. Their concept of multiplicity is useful here: I am not one thing, but many things, and those many things are not hierarchically organized with a "true self" at the top. They are laterally connected, rhizomatic, capable of unexpected conjunctions. The drummer-identity and the producer-identity don't report to a CEO-identity. They interact directly, influence each other, occasionally conflict, but are held together by the personality.
However, Deleuze and Guattari's framework doesn't quite capture what I mean by personality. For them, multiplicity tends to dissolve the unified subject entirely. I want to hold onto something more persistent. Not a fixed self, but a continuous one. Personality, in my use, is the set of deep preferences, dispositions, and orientations that shape how my various identities operate. It's why my drumming and my producing and my singing (and my writing, and my teaching, and my paintings) share certain qualities, certain aesthetic commitments, even when they differ in every surface feature.
What does this look like in practice? Let me be honest, and use the following as an example: I'm not very good at booking gigs, and I never have been. This is not a new observation to me, and it's not part of the research, but it's revealing because the trait persists across all my musical identities. Drummer-me doesn't book gigs. Producer-me doesn't book gigs. Songwriter-me definitely doesn't book gigs. They all try, but all fail, most likely because the interest and the need to be "out there" isn't very present in me to begin with. This is not a failure of any particular identity. It's a feature, or failure, at least commercially, of the personality that underlies them all. I produce, develop and create, I don't present, convince or promote. At least not a lot. That's who I am, and it shapes what all my identities can do and how far they reach, and even when I get an itch to play somewhere, I make an half-assed effort to book something, get no response from whatever venue I contact, and then I resume playing my instruments in the studio, pressing rec, n00dling away.
Anyway, the tension between multiplicity and continuity is not a problem that I am trying to solve. All in all it is the engine of this research. When I ask what kind of music arises from multiple musical identities, I'm asking what happens when these different ways of being in music interact within a single personality. Not fusing them into each other or trying create hybrid structure where all is present, but more a negotiation between them all. They all bring something to the table, and my personality decides, both in the moment and later, through reflection, how they relate.
This is also why the skill and concept of improvisation is completely central to my practice, and why the concept shown on III has been selected as the artistic result. Improvisation foregrounds exactly the negotiation between the multitude of identities as described above. There is no script and no predetermined outcome, but yet I speak a language and make a product according to a vague understanding of some underlying ground rules. Each decision is made consciously, drawing on multiple identities filtered through a single personality, responding to circumstances that are themselves in flux. The music that emerges is not the expression of one identity or another. It is the sound of a personality navigating its own multiplicity.
References
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (B. Massumi, Trans.). University of Minnesota Press.
McCrae, R. R., & Costa, P. T. (2008). The five-factor theory of personality. In O. P. John, R. W. Robins, & L. A. Pervin (Eds.), Handbook of personality: Theory and research (3rd ed., pp. 159–181). Guilford Press.