Pocket as Authored Space: Distributed Authority in Embodied Ensemble Practice
Eugene Seow LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore, Singapore
In ensemble performance, authorship is often attributed to a composer, a bandleader, or a single “voice” that directs musical outcomes. Yet in collaborative and improvisatory settings, musicians frequently describe moments in which no one is clearly leading, yet the music coheres. This presentation asks: who speaks in the pocket—and what kind of authority is at work when “feel” is negotiated in real time
Drawing on long-term rhythm-section-based practice, I treat the pocket not as an individual skill or stylistic marker but as an authored space: a situated condition produced through distributed, embodied decision-making. I argue that authority in these moments is often displaced from persons to musical phenomena—form, anticipation, density, metric shifts, and collective momentum—which performers attune to and co-produce. Authorship becomes contingent and momentary, enacted through non-verbal cues such as body orientation, breath, posture, micro-timing, and timbral placement (e.g., playing ahead/behind, grounding and release in preparation for a change). These actions carry knowledge that cannot be fully verbalised or notated and is learned through participation, imitation, correction, and lineage.
Importantly, distributed authority is fragile. It relies on trust and shared attentiveness and can be resisted, ignored, or disrupted by ego-driven attempts to impose leadership. By reframing the pocket as an authored space rather than a technique, this presentation complicates human-centred accounts of authorship. It offers a practice-grounded response to the question of “who speaks” in collective music-making.
Dr Eugene Seow is a Singapore-based music educator, ensemble coach, and practice-led researcher working in higher education. He teaches at LASALLE College of the Arts and has led contemporary ensemble and rhythm-section learning across diploma and undergraduate contexts. His practice research examines how groove, timbre, embodiment, and social interaction shape ensemble coordination and musical meaning in real time. He is developing Structural Momentum Theory (SMT), a framework modelling musical motion as emergent, embodied, and ecological across rhythmic, timbral, harmonic, and ensemble domains.