Henry McPherson

The University of Manchester, School of Arts, Languages and Culture, Post-Doc

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I'm an artist-researcher with specialism in improvisation practices (Music, Dance), contemporary and experimental music(s), inter- and trans-disciplinary practice in the arts, applied arts in social and health contexts. My current research interests centre improvisation practices as applied and emergent within social and wellbeing centred work, as well as improvisation for/as empowerment of marginalised individuals and communities.

I currently work as a Research Associate with Creative Manchester, and in the School of Health Sciences as a Research Associate on an NIHR SSCR funded study evaluating the impact of an improvised music-making programme on the wellbeing of staff and family carers in dementia care contexts.

I came to the University of Manchester in June 2023, having completed my PhD at the University of Huddersfield School of Music/School of Drama, Dance, and Performance across the Covid-19 pandemic. My doctoral project was a practice-led study investigating transdisciplinary improvising practices, with a substantial component addressing intersections of gender, racialisation, embodiment, and the axiologies of practice in communities of improvisers in Europe and North America from 1950 to the present.

Between 2019 - 2023, during my PhD, I was a part-time lecturer at the University of Huddersfield School of Music, where I developed and led an undergraduate module-component on Free Improvisation for students of diverse musical backgrounds. I also maintain a role as Visiting Lecturer at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, where I have co-developed and co-taught a short course in interdisciplinary improvisation practice, encompassing improvisation and sociality, improvisation and politics, with co-ordinator Dr. Maria Sappho.

My professional arts practice draws across the performing and fine-arts disciplines, and I have worked internationally in contemporary composition for concert and stage, live performance, gallery installation, audiovisual production, recording, arts pedagogy and residency contexts. I have an interest in issues of artistic practice and marginalised identity, particularly around LGTBQ(+) and disability visibility, agency, and advocacy.

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Thesis Chapters by Henry McPherson

More Than One Thing: A Practice-Led Investigation into Transdisciplinary Free Improvisation in Sound and Movement

PhD Thesis, 2023

This thesis is a practice-based investigation into my artistic practice of Transdisciplinary Free... more This thesis is a practice-based investigation into my artistic practice of Transdisciplinary Free Improvisation (TFI) – a performance practice of live improvisation integrating expressive sound and movement, enacted concurrently by one performer (myself), as well as in collaboration with other artists (performing with co-improvisers). Within the conceptual frame of TFI offered as a form of performative world-making (see Hayot, 2016; Bench, 2016), and underpinned by the epistemological principles of Transdisciplinarity, I explore the emergent characteristics and qualities of my practice across text and audiovisual documents, presented side-by-side in a multimodal exegesis of improvisation practice-as-knowledge. In Part I, situating my practice genealogically at the crossroads of multiple improvising cultures, I draw intersectionally on feminist and critical race theory in addressing the impact of hegemonic masculinity and whiteness upon the aesthetic development and discourse of sound and movement improvisation in the western transatlantic context, considering the way in which the human body and corporeality have been both foregrounded and occluded in performance practices from the 20th century to the present. Moving from an acknowledgement of its historical and cultural precedents, Part II of the thesis foregrounds emergent aspects of my own performance practice, presented as a non-linear series of interreferential mini-chapters. These sections integrate conventional academic prose, reflective writing, participant interviews, and annotated audiovisual practice documents (constituting the portfolio component of the thesis) in a syncretic whole. Part III proposes open conclusions regarding improvisation as/in contemporary epistemology, and offers thoughts on a critical trajectory for developments in practice-based improvisation studies. Throughout the thesis, my own voice is interpolated with quotations from practitioner-colleagues with whom I have undertaken documented interviews and informal conversations, as well as practical sessions in studio and online, across the course of this research. These voices, largely uncited elsewhere in academia, are included in a pragmatic effort to better represent the diversity of the global community of improvisers within the academic arena, and to recognise intersubjectivity as an essential, rich, and insightful aspect of artistic research.

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Papers by Henry McPherson

Listening like an improviser: reflections on composing in the studio with collaged acoustic free improvisations

CeReNeM Journal, 2023

"Listening like an improviser is responsive, spontaneous play with the emergent interactions of m... more "Listening like an improviser
is responsive, spontaneous play with the emergent interactions of
materials.
is accepting the in- and inter-dependent autonomy of (even recorded) sounds.
is practising agile aurality, seeking mutable points of sonic contact.
is hearing and enjoying coalescence and dissipation without pushing for either.
is valuing the presence of partial aspects, half forms, and incomplete utterances.
is moving and choosing with urgency in iterative, momentary
response.
is staying with the changes (when changing, and being changed).
is not prioritising how to begin, or how to end."

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Considering the Fixed Naming of Entitites: Towards a Transdisciplinary Approach to Free Improvisation

CeReNeM Journal, 2020

In this article I want to throw some thoughts into constellation on the topic of naming and what ... more In this article I want to throw some thoughts into constellation on the topic of naming and what I feel is a problem with the notion of fixed identities in free improvising contexts. These thoughts are permeable and maybe even unfinished, and form part of an ongoing investigation into disciplinarity and embodiment in my own practice, and that of my co-improvisers and research participants. I propose that in free improvising, the imputation of fixed disciplinary identities onto an individual’s improvisational activity risks delimiting the creative agency of the improviser and other entities with which they might come into contact. I will suggest in this article that a home might be found away from this issue in the language of transdisciplinarity, in particular in the concepts of transcorporeality,4 porousness, and transformation. I emphasise the ephemerality of identities in improvising contexts, and advocate for an understanding of improvisers as expressive interdependent singularities—as entities able to “choos[e] multiple and sometimes contradictory idenfications”,5 whose agency lies not in the ‘successful’ execution of forms within disciplinarily sanctioned aesthetic frameworks, but in their capacity to generate and innovate spontaneously,6 and whose improvisations might be radically considered as contexts unto themselves. I also propose that as we write and talk about improvisation in an effort, as Kent de Spain puts it, to “translate [improvisational experiences] into language that can be understood and analyzed by others”,7 we must also undertake a necessary reappraisal of the use of disciplinary language to describe the diverse, often obscure forms of embodied expressivity which arise in improvising contexts, particularly in those which are named as inter-, trans-, poly-, multi-, or otherwise supra-disciplinary. Interspersed throughout this article are video-excerpts from my PhD project Bodies of Meaning, featuring studio work with co-improvisers Maria Sappho, Colin Frank, Sky Su, and various objects.

More Than One Thing: A Practice-Led Investigation into Transdisciplinary Free Improvisation in Sound and Movement

PhD Thesis, 2023

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Listening like an improviser: reflections on composing in the studio with collaged acoustic free improvisations

CeReNeM Journal, 2023

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Considering the Fixed Naming of Entitites: Towards a Transdisciplinary Approach to Free Improvisation

CeReNeM Journal, 2020

Henry McPherson

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Thesis Chapters by Henry McPherson

Papers by Henry McPherson

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