Three decades of The Necks: Reciprocal Patterns of Improvised Music and Organisational Behaviour
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article explores the nature of organisational behaviour within a long-standing improvised music group and its reciprocal relationship with their musical practice. It uses ideas from Ingrid Monson (1996) relating to social activities expressing the values and aesthetics of musical practice and adopts research findings from business management literature, in particular Kenneth Bettenhausen’s (1991) notion that the task patterns of a group play a role in shaping attitudes and behaviour, informing our understanding of the way improvisational music practices correlate with social and organisational behaviour. The Australian piano trio, The Necks, perform minimalist extended improvisations with ritual-like patterns in performance and social behaviour. Being self-managed with the same line-up since 1987, they present a unique case study in how a band’s organisational behaviour has a mutual relationship to its musical practice. This study traces out their organisational patterns to show how these have developed in tandem with an improvisational ethos in which members undertake slowly evolving group minimalist improvisations guided by an unspoken set of behavioural patterns with adaptable parameters for change. The findings reveal an underlying narrative of tension between group homogeneity and individual autonomy, experiences of group flow, the use of varying modes of communication for varying contexts, similarities between their musical improvisation parameters and their social interaction, and strategies for implementing change and innovation. The article sketches how their social and organisational behaviour converges with their musical process: a slow rate of change, effortless, and yet with a long arc of possibilities.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".