Interrogating Comprovisation as Practice-led Research

In this paper the author describes his practice of comprovisation, the making of new compositions from recordings of improvised material, and interrogates its validity within the debate about creative practice as research. Although the practice has random and intuitive elements he concludes that it is likely to produce new knowledge and is grounded in the tacit knowledge of composition technique. Interrogating Comprovisation as Practice-led Research ‘Comprovisation’ is a term I have adopted to describe my practice of making new compositions from recordings of improvised material, either performed by myself or by other musicians under my direction. This paper interrogates its validity within the debate about creative practice as research. Although the comprovisation practice has random and intuitive elements, I contend that it is likely to produce new knowledge through its strongly experimental approach, and that it is grounded in the tacit knowledge of professional compositional craft. In a recent conference paper (Hannan, 2004d) I made a case for the idea that my creative practice can be considered as research by reflecting on the writing of the music for The Flood, a large-scale music theatre work produced by the Northern Rivers Performing Arts (NORPA) in April 2004. Part of my case was organised around the fact that I had already produced a number of exegetical papers (Hannan, 2004a; Hannan, 2004b; Hannan, 2004c; Thom & Hannan, 2004) on the score and its sources. More