Chicago-born American composer-improvisor Anthony Braxton has established a long career working with musicians from a variety of backgrounds in different ensembles and artistic projects. Yet outside of a few scattered studies, his music has not received the sustained scholarly attention it deserves. As George Lewis noted, his career as a maverick improvisor working within both Eurological and Afrological improvisational frameworks is the exception that proves the rule, regarding the acceptance of AACM-associated musicians into a broader "new music" community. From the beginning Braxton has promoted a wide-ranging approach to influence and homage that refuses all genre boundaries, and his active engagement with his compositions and ideas on multiple fronts have inspired dedicated focus among scholars and aficionados. I argue that the stated evolution of Braxton's "restructural" ideas reaches its pinnacle in the 150 works of his Ghost Trance Music series (1995–2006), which have primarily been discussed in descriptive terms. Ghost Trance works have been presented as events which summarize his multiple pursuits, while simultaneously interrogating the history of multiple musical traditions whose modern forms have become divorced from their roots in ceremony and community. Braxton describes this process as "both composition and improvisation, a form of meditation that establishes ritual and symbolic connections" inspired by his research into Native American ritual. I analyze two works in this series, each designed to create “trans-temporal,” experiential states using an extended melodic format that “has no beginning and no end” yet can accommodate various transformational procedures, eclectic borrowings and self-reference. 

The first-species Ghost Trance Composition No. 193 begins as a single line from which multiple performers spiral out to create a densely-layered tapestry based on their individual interpretation of the score. My analysis will focus on how small-scale elaborations of material (fragments, paraphrases and minor variations) relate to a large-scale polyphony, recording expansive gestures and formal shifts in this performance (Ex. 1). Cycles of repetition and elaboration establish nested time-scales, and invite the listener to mediate their experience of the work. The second-species Ghost Trance Composition No. 245 includes segments of subdivided beats within the core melody, and incorporates complex polyrhythms (Ex. 2). It also features explicit dynamic markings, and invites a greater interpolation of secondary and tertiary materials. I analyze how these interpolations affect the interactions of individual performers and the form the work takes in performance. I argue that the Ghost Trance works appreciated in their "event" context invite the mediation of both performers and listeners. New audiences and those who have long followed Braxton's evolution will find purchase within a multi-leveled temporality that auto-critiques its own relation to tradition, genre, performance, and the cultural logic of late capitalism.

Cauwenberghe, Kobe Van. “A ritual of openness. The (meta-)reality of Anthony Braxton's Ghost Trance Music.” FORUM+ 28/1 (2021).
Dicker, Erica. "Ghost Trance Music," Sound American 16 (2016).
Kitamura, Kyoko and Anne Rhodes. "Syntactical ghost trance Music," Sound American 16 (2016). 
Lewis, George E. “Gittin' To Know Y'all: Improvised Music, Interculturalism, and the Racial Imagination,” in The Improvisation Studies Reader (Routledge. 2015).