Musical Identity
A Satellite Essay
What is a musical identity? The question seems simple until you try to answer it. Is it a genre affiliation? An instrumental specialization? A stylistic signature? In this research, I use the term differently: musical identity is not something you have, but something you do. It is enacted, situated, and constantly in flux.
This understanding draws primarily on the work of MacDonald, Hargreaves, and Miell (2017), whose Handbook of Musical Identities offers perhaps the most comprehensive treatment of the concept to date. They argue that musical identity is socially and culturally situated, co-constructed through interaction rather than biologically inherited or stylistically assigned. You don't arrive at a musical identity and stay there. You build it, continuously, through the accumulation of meaningful musical experiences: performing, listening, learning, collaborating, failing, trying again.
This resonates with Judith Butler's (1990) broader theory of performative identity. For Butler, identity is not an essence that precedes action, but something constituted through repeated acts. We become what we repeatedly do. Applied to music, this means that identity emerges through gesture, timing, tone, phrasing, and the countless micro-decisions a musician makes in the act of playing. You are not a drummer because you own drums. You are a drummer because you drum, and keep drumming, and develop a way of drumming that becomes recognizably yours.
Derek Bailey (1993) takes this further in his account of improvisation. For Bailey, musical identity is not merely constructed over time; it must be actively re-established in every performance. "The identity of the improviser," he writes, "has to be re-established with every improvisation" (p. 115). There is no resting on prior achievement. Each performance is a test, a risk, an opportunity to discover whether what you thought you were still holds true. This makes improvisation not just a musical practice but an epistemological one: a way of knowing through doing, where the knowledge is inseparable from its enactment.
What does this mean in practice? When I sit behind a drum kit in a jazz trio, I enact one musical identity. The context shapes everything: the listening of the other musicians, the acoustic of the room, the expectations of the genre, my own history with these particular players. When I program a synthesizer alone in my studio, I enact another identity entirely. The tools are different, the feedback loops are different, the relationship to time is different. And when I sing lyrics I've written, yet another identity emerges, one I've never been entirely comfortable with, which is itself a kind of information.
These identities are not masks or costumes I put on and take off. They are genuine modes of musical being, each with its own history, its own knowledge, its own way of listening and responding. They overlap, inform each other, occasionally conflict. The drummer knows things the producer doesn't; the producer makes decisions the songwriter would never consider. This is not a problem to be solved. It is the condition of a practice that spans multiple roles, multiple contexts, multiple ways of making music.
The important point, for this research, is that musical identity is not fixed. It is emergent. It arises through playing, through interaction, through the ongoing negotiation between self and context. And this has implications for what happens when different musical identities meet, whether within a single practitioner or between human and machine.
My Time-Signature: An Example
What is a drummer? What is time? These questions have occupied me as long as I've played drums. After many years, I've come to think that a large part of my preoccupation with them stems from not having the background most drummers have. My main instrument until I was 18 was piano. Drums were a hobby, something on the side. The typical drummer's trajectory, through rock workshops and rehearsal rooms to bands and gigs, that wasn't mine. When I switched to drums, improvisation was the triggering cause. Classical piano, as I experienced it, could only exist as either right or wrong. I sought something less rigid.
This history shapes everything. What I've built my time-signature on is my background as a classical pianist, where tempo and phrasing support melody, mood, and content. I studied at NMH, bachelor and master, both as a performing improvisation musician, and there I encountered the American time-jazz tradition that forms a foundation for most who studied at NMH or NTNU. But I ended up with a time-signature that makes itself known behind the drum kit, and also when I sing. When I try to articulate what this signature consists of, I find no better description than this: it is phrase-focused. It seeks to support what is to be communicated by pushing or pulling, by leading or receding, depending on what the material requires.
This is what I mean by identity being emergent and historically grounded. My drumming identity is not a genre or a style. It is a way of relating to time that comes from somewhere specific, from years of classical training that preceded years of improvisation. The two are layered, not fused. The pianist is still there, shaping how the drummer thinks.
The answer to the opening questions, then: a drummer is a musical actor who communicates something through their instrument, and time is the distance between points on a timeline, which through various manipulations results in an expression that can function both as solo and as support for other musicians. The question could just as well have been "what is a musician," but I see myself as a drummer first and take that as my starting point.
References
Bailey, D. (1993). Improvisation: Its nature and practice in music. Da Capo Press.
Butler, J. (1990). Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. Routledge.
MacDonald, R., Hargreaves, D. J., & Miell, D. (Eds.). (2017). Handbook of musical identities. Oxford University Press.