Meta-composing

I have had a rupture in my composing life that spans the pandemic, but I couldn’t say that the pandemic is the cause.  On March 1 of 2020, I enacted a pre-premiere, a “dry run” of a piece whose premiere would end up being postponed for two years, Groundhog Night (the link here is to a recording of the eventual premiere in Los Angeles).  That piece is evidence of the rupture, which I really shouldn’t call a rupture but rather the start of something like healing, or at least an erasure of a boundary that has perplexed people of modern times.  I joined, with this piece, a spotty but growing new urge in composition, and in classical music generally, of erasing the boundary between composer/performer and audience.  

Many have raised an alarm regarding the separation between audience and performers in the classical concert world as evidence of alienation, and a handful of composers have explored ways to erase/break/cross the border between composer and audience.  It rather goes without saying that the composer-performer boundary has been in flux for a long time – think of jazz, think of the baroque-era practice of realizing figured bass in performance – but the audience boundary is a different challenge.  Everywhere, ensembles are experimenting with being on the same physical level as the audience, surrounded by the audience, playing music that soothes rather than challenges audiences, giving audiences something to look at while they listen: all sorts of things to engage them more fully in the concert experience.

What I have come across and continue to develop, is what one might call meta-composing.  The piece I refer to here, Groundhog Night, uses audience members as co-composers, volunteers who take on the role of guiding the ensemble in changing how they play a 30-second passage of music. They know what the direction of change is intended to be, and are empowered to suggest not what the group plays, but how they play it, an important limitation on their input that helps the music have coherence. 

The idea grew from a theory I have developed for years that points to the number of factors always present in music, giving it the energy we respond to. (Only one of those is the realm of pitches, a big one of course!) Changing the dynamic, changing the register, changing the relationships between parts: things like that change the energy we perceive. And those are the things co-composers are asked to change the next time the group plays the 30-second passage. While the co-composers work with the ensemble, the remainder of the audience rates the energy of what they just heard, and we review the ratings before hearing the next repetition. It is amusing/amazing to see how divergent the responses are, or sometimes how convergent they can be! The audience is drawn into the experience of a piece of experimental music thereby, and learns something important about perception and the subjectivity of opinion.

So that’s one aspect of meta-composing, a piece whose shape is rather given but whose contents are flexible and shaped by those present at a given time.  The other aspect follows in considering that all successive performances are what the piece is, not one thing but the collection of all performances.  Not one way to be but a set of possibilities, the whole set of whose realizations constitute “the music”.

Who knows where else this will lead me?  Who knows what kind of an age we are entering, in which boundaries of all sorts are called into question?  Erasing the boundary between performer/composer and audience cannot be achieved by simply putting people closer together, a more fundamental change is required. Music you are involved in is music you hear differently.  That’s an erasure of a boundary leading to a new kind of experience.