Toby Wren

Palghat Raghu was a master of the mridangam and one of the leading figures in South Indian Carnatic music. In this article, I want to contribute a perspective on his musical life and, through my reflections on my time with him, contribute insights toward a fuller understanding of Carnatic music and Western engagements with it. I do so by drawing on fieldwork I conducted in Chennai, India, at various times between 2005-2013. Specifically, I use examples of solkattu from my lessons with him to illustrate Raghu's approach to rhythm and the general rhythmic approach within Carnatic music, including the kinds of musical-cognitive skills involved in rhythmic production within the Carnatic system. By describing aspects of his practice and his various interactions with other musicians, I also reflect on his position as a culture-bearer and on the relationships between musical cultures.

Pre-print version.

The jazz standard remains an enduring part of the tradition of jazz performance and pedagogy. Contemporary jazz scholarship has tended to focus on improvisation as a practice and jazz-as-lived-experience and, while the jazz standard repertoire has occasionally been the subject of study the relationship between the standard repertoire and the ‘language’ or style of jazz has not been theorised. In this article I argue that the distinctive style of jazz improvisation is at least in part, determined by the characteristics of its shared repertoire and the statements that have accrued around that repertoire. I borrow Foucault’s conception of the archive to propose a reexamination of the historical progression of ideas that troubles the narrative of the individual creative genius and of jazz as the normative condition of improvisation. In this genealogical context, the jazz standard is positioned as an archive of a particular body of thought, a way of organizing and understanding the trans...

The jazz standard remains an enduring part of the tradition of jazz performance and pedagogy. Contemporary jazz scholarship has tended to focus on improvisation as a practice and jazz-as-lived-experience and, while the jazz standard repertoire has occasionally been the subject of study the relationship between the standard repertoire and the ‘language’ or style of jazz has not been theorised. In this article I argue that the distinctive style of jazz improvisation is at least in part, determined by the characteristics of its shared repertoire and the statements that have accrued around that repertoire. I borrow Foucault’s conception of the archive to propose a reexamination of the historical progression of ideas that troubles the narrative of the individual creative genius and of jazz as the normative condition of improvisation. In this genealogical context, the jazz standard is positioned as an archive of a particular body of thought, a way of organizing and understanding the transmission, evolution and connection of ideas over time. The intended effect is to provide an alternative perspective on creativity in jazz, and a theorisation of an idea that is already implicit in jazz pedagogy and practice.

... For East Timor: Scope of hope. A world music concert. Topology, Davidson, Robert, Turquel,Nelson, Jah-Era Band, Cidalia, The View From Madeleine's Couch, Wren, Toby and Weir, Ian (2010) For East Timor: Scope of hope. A world music concert. ...

Here and Now is a snapshot of the artistic process, taken from a particular time and place; musicians based in Brisbane, Australia in 2013-14. Vanessa Tomlinson writes: “It is not a singular story, but an entry point into the multiple ways we can approach the making of music. If we added 10 more authors, we would have 10 more approaches. What is in common here, is the dedication to sound and music as a way of interacting with the world – providing windows of deeply considered process, transformation, interaction, isolation and collaboration.”

Intercultural creative practice is a topic that has attracted a lot of recent scholarly attention. As improvising musicians from very different cultures and traditions, we decided to analyse a recent collaborative performance that we were involved in to unpack the ways that we were interacting through music. As performers, we were interested primarily in the ways that such an analysis would help us to work more effectively in intercultural situations, but we also wanted to understand the synergies and dissonances that exist between improvising cultures more broadly. For the essay we adopt the musical form of a krithi, a Carnatic compositional form that allows for joint statements and improvised exchanges. Through this dialogic process, we propose improvisation as a kind of negotiation that occurs between musicians, and between musicians and their culture, highlighting some of the specific challenges and rewards that we faced.

This paper examines some of the circumstances surrounding the creation of the hybrid intercultural music project, Ultimate Cows. A concert was performed at the Encounters: India festival in Brisbane in 2013, and featured the results of a collaboration between master percussionists Guru Kaaraikudi Mani and Ghatam Vaidyanathan Suresh from the South Indian Carnatic tradition, and musicians including violinist John Rodgers, percussionist Tunji Beier, and myself, a guitarist, from the Brisbane jazz and new music scene. The ways in which the intercultural work was conceptualised, developed, and received are explored with reference to the composition and collaborative process. The discussion reveals aspects of the ways in which musicians relate to culture, and the ways that culture is performed in intercultural hybrid work. In line with the critical theory around hybridity, Ultimate Cows is proposed as symptomatic of hybridity's pervasiveness, a natural consequence of musicians' de...

The Jazz Social was an online virtual jazz club which started during the first shutdowns for COVID in Australia from April to July 2020, now archived as ten videos on The Jazz Social YouTube channel. It was designed as an opportunity for musicians to perform and make up lost income when gigs disappeared overnight. The venture was arguably successful for a virtual jazz club: it employed 47 musicians, paying on average $116AUD for each performance; and each gig reached an average of 340 people, a considerably larger audience than a typical face-to-face jazz performance would attract. The Jazz Social gigs also brought together geographically diverse musicians and provided a platform for them to share music and discuss their experiences. With an understanding that Australia is entering a ‘new COVID normal environment’ which may have ongoing implications for face-to-face performance practice, this article reflects on what The Jazz Social has revealed about the nature of jazz performance, collaboration, community, virtuality, and the limitations and affordances of new technologies in producing knowledge through improvisation.

This research considers musicians from different cultural backgrounds, improvising together, and ‘improvising’ new musical contexts. It springs from my practice as a composer and improvising guitarist, exploring the borders between South Indian Carnatic music and jazz. The process of collaborating with musicians from different traditions raises questions about the ways that musicians draw on their acquired knowledge in the production of intercultural music: How do musicians from different cultures interpret each others’ musical gestures and negotiate a cohesive performance? At play throughout the dissertation are the conflicting notions of individual expression, and culturally derived archetypal models of expression. The relationship between musicians and cultures is explored through an ethnographic methodology.

The dissertation begins with a critical review of the literature on intercultural hybridity that reveals the way that power inequalities have historically characterised many of the exchanges between the West and its Others. In the course of analysing the products of interculture, the discussion also examines the inherent problem of hybridity’s reception, given the different cultural frames of reference of different audiences. From the analysis of hybridity, improvisation emerges as a key locus for examining the way in which musicians are heard to negotiate self and culture in intercultural hybridity.

A new understanding of improvisation is proposed based on an examination of the literature from diverse disciplines including cognitive psychology, complex adaptive systems, embodiment and ethnographic accounts of improvisers. Improvisation is situated as a dynamic process of developing preferences based on cultural acquisition, which enables us to understand the different approaches developed by improvisers and broader cultural differences between musical systems. The relationship between improvisation and culture necessitates a rethinking of the way that we listen to and analyse the products of interculture.

I propose the critical framework of Discursive Interculturality as a way of unpacking intercultural exchange through a close analysis of the musical work. This type of analysis is based on the theories of hybridity and improvisation as developed in previous chapters, to reveal the intersection of cultural archetypes and individual expression within the intercultural hybrid work. In doing so it reveals the way that power is implicated in intercultural exchange through collaboration and performance and reveals the way that musicians play their culture and play beyond their culture in intercultural hybridity.

Discursive Interculturality is tested as a form of critical analysis used to examine two case studies from my practice: the intercultural concert series Cows at the Beach (Wren, 2011, 2013), and a jazz quartet recording, Rich and Famous (Wren, 2012). The specific ways in which Carnatic and jazz structures have evolved to enable creative expression are explored as an important piece of context and to show how they have informed the various experimental compositional structures and collaborative frameworks employed in the case studies. These compositional structures are described as a way of establishing the enabling and limiting factors on the improvisers. The Discursive Intercultural analysis examines recordings of the case studies, participant interviews, reflective practice, music analysis and recordings and reveals the way that musicians draw on their cultural inheritance in negotiating a satisfactory musical outcome based on intercultural dialogue. The recording of the Ultimate Cows concert (Wren et al. 2013) acts as a musical coda to the dissertation, serving to answer some of the questions raised and demonstrating a dialogic intercultural project based on a Discursive Intercultural aesthetic.

This paper examines some of the circumstances surrounding the creation of the hybrid intercultural music project, Ultimate Cows. A concert was performed at the Encounters: India festival in Brisbane in 2013, and featured the results of a collaboration between master percussionists Guru Kaaraikudi Mani and Ghatam Vaidyanathan Suresh from the South Indian Carnatic tradition, and musicians including violinist John Rodgers, percussionist Tunji Beier, and myself, a guitarist, from the Brisbane jazz and new music scene. The ways in which the intercultural work was conceptualised, developed, and received are explored with reference to the composition and collaborative process. The discussion reveals aspects of the ways in which musicians relate to culture, and the ways that culture is performed in intercultural hybrid work. In line with the critical theory around hybridity, Ultimate Cows is proposed as symptomatic of hybridity’s pervasiveness, a natural consequence of musicians’ desire to extend their practice through interactions with the musical Others that they encounter. The discussion of power and perspective is acknowledged as central to the discussion of hybrid works, and the various ways that difference is made manifest with reference to the musical work No Can Do. The compositional development of that work is shown to simultaneously explore and reconcile archetypal musical structures from Carnatic and jazz musics, and explore some of the inherent problems that are consequently implied for the works’ reception. In the process it uncovers differences in musical approach, perception, and the notion of acquired cultural archetypes, which affect the way that musicians orient themselves to the music in performance.