What Are They Building In There?
This artistic research project investigates how bandleader-led improvising ensembles navigate hierarchy, leadership, collaboration, and difference, and how these dynamics shape artistic output. It examines how each ensemble’s established “group language”, the shared but often unspoken understanding of what is possible or appropriate within a specific ensemble, affects the interpretation of written scores and the improvisations that emerge from them.
By focusing on two long-standing ensembles, Anthropods, led by principal investigator Mark Holub, and Sloth Racket, led by Cath Roberts, the research explores how collaborative ensembles bring together the varied musical, social, and cultural backgrounds of their members to produce cohesive artistic output.
The project’s central innovation is a comparative score-exchange model. Holub and Roberts will each compose a 45-minute work for non-specific instrumentation. These scores will then be swapped, so that each ensemble rehearses, records, and performs both works. This makes it possible to compare how two distinct groups respond to the same musical material, revealing how each ensemble’s group language, leadership structure, hierarchy, trust, and communication style affect the resulting music.
Rather than using jazz improvisation only as a metaphor for leadership or collaboration, the project treats artistic practice itself as a research method. It combines composition, rehearsal observation, studio recording, live performance, musician journaling, and three rounds of focus groups. The process will be documented through audio and video recordings, written reflections, and facilitated group discussions.
The planned outputs include four concert symposiums, a physical and digital music release, an online project platform, conference presentations, and three journal articles focusing on the artistic outcomes, leadership and hierarchy in ensemble performance, and the project’s implications for organisational science. The research will be carried out by Mark Holub, an experienced bandleader, composer, improviser, and artistic researcher, at JAM MUSIC LAB Private University in Vienna, supported by an international advisory group with expertise in artistic research, music psychology, improvisation, communication, and organisational creativity.
The findings will contribute to artistic research on jazz and improvisation, while also offering insights for ensemble pedagogy, leadership studies, and organisational science. By examining bandleader-led ensembles as systems in which central artistic vision and self-organising collaboration coexist, the project offers new ways of understanding collective creativity, trust, communication, and shared decision-making. These insights have relevance beyond jazz, offering perspectives on how groups integrate different experiences, skills, and backgrounds, especially in situations where leadership, individual freedom, and collective responsibility must be continually negotiated.
