Time, Virtuosity, and Ethics Otherwise: Queer Resonances for Diasporic Play

Abstract

This dissertation enacts the dialogue between my creative work as an improviser-composer and my critical engagements with scholarship. Both creative and academic streams of my work have converged on core themes, which have accompanied me as I experiment with my practice as a composer and as an improviser on the mrudangam (South Indian drum): (1) queering rhythm and temporality in relation to ensemble dynamics and score-based practices; (2) imagining counterpoint to received socio-aesthetic hierarchies; and (3) the transformative possibilities in alternative mappings of the body in music— as related to perception, collectivity, and pleasure. Substantive creative responses to these themes have been, and continue to be reflected in the following projects: (1) two works — Of Agency and Abstraction and Apertures — written for RAJAS, an ensemble I lead, and which embodies a convergence of cross-cultural improvisational approaches; (2) a handful of commissions of through-composed music — for chamber ensemble, string quartet, and for myself as a multi-instrumentalist, respectively; and (3) a nascent, open-format compositional project titled Mangal, which invites interdisciplinary perspectives and possibilities into my musical palette and score design. Reflections and analyses are interspersed with excerpts of the creative works, engaging community-based discourses as well as an array of academic fields— spanning critical improvisation studies, queer of color critique, and performance studies— to comment on musical process and historical and contemporary resonances. In excavating the core themes above, I address my fluid positionality across musical/cultural contexts, my ongoing work with scores, iterative performances, and recordings within an unruly aesthetic network, and the challenges of tracing emergent possibilities with instrument, body, voice, and archival elements. The dissertation aims to spark novel networks of theory and praxis around my music and its social and philosophical undercurrents.