Using autoethnography to create narratives to understand musical taste and the experience of collaborative music performance

For the past decades, insightful memoirs have been published by collaborative pianists, providing an insider’s perspective on the art of piano accompaniment. This paper draws on my doctoral thesis that used an autoethnographic narrative to explore the experiences of collaborative music performance from the perspective of a piano accompanist. The narrative incorporated creative writing elements such as direct speech and descriptive scene setting to recreate the experience of collaborative music performance, allowing the reader to gain some insight into its creative process, and thus understand elements of musical taste and how this impacts on the experience of collaborative music performance. The paper argues that this methodology provides an appropriate way to examine such subjective experiences and that the use of autoethnographic narrative, incorporating creative writing techniques, can be a useful addition to music research methodologies, particularly in the field of music performance research.