AP Journal

RCA, Antwerp, 2022-2024

Dear friends,

I have just started a research project in Antwerp titled for now: “WE GROW MUSIC! Ecologies of attention, discrepancy and multiplicity—real and imaginary—in embodied music performance.” It is a practice based research project that will last around a year and a half, ending in March 2024.

The project will be made up of a number of discrete and interacting cycles of activity: ONGOING PRACTICE, GROUP MUSIC, INDEPENDENT MUSIC, WORKSHOP and GUESTS.

The different activity cycles will overlap and interact, contributing in more or less direct or explicit ways to the core themes of the research.

If you are able and willing, I would like to invite you as one of the GUESTS.

It would be XXX 2022 (prob around XXX, to be precise): an independent ‘presentation’ (explained below) of something (of your choosing) during a day/evening. Probably in Antwerp, or Brussels. We would negotiate an appropriate venue, through conversation. Could be in/outside ‘the institution’. I will pay for travel, accommodation and a fee.

I am in the process of double checking practicalities: budget amount, feasibility, but for now, if you are likely free and able, let’s schedule a chat and I can explain in more detail?

Until we might talk it through, for now; to explain a little bit, the context of the invitation: this is a summary from my application, and is the departure point for the research:

The ideas here serve as an invitation, some ingredients, a start point, and an excuse - to provoke some action. In this case to begin to practically articulate and question some of what already happens, when we perform (that is play, listen to, write, imagine) music.

I conceive the research project overall is a stage, and/or garden. That is, a particular, framed space to develop conditions for the investigation of a specific kind growth (culture).

So, I am inviting a few GUESTS to do (perform, present) something (present in the very broadest and non-academic sense) as a kind of perpendicular (oblique, discrepant?) contribution to the themes of the research project. I imagine the guest contributions as being a bit like when you open a window to a room, and the outside sounds come in, being both contingent and organised, related and not.

Hope this might work out…. sorry for the long email,

Let me know!

or MUSIC GROWS US!*

Ecologies of attention, discrepancy and multiplicity—real and imaginary—in embodied music performance.

The subject of this research is a reconsideration of embodied music making as a complex ecology. Practical exercises—for live improvised music—are being developed. These are based on listening as a mode of attention and used to investigate how performing bodies grow music and language—characterised by discrepancy and multiplicity.

This research looks at the aspects of discrepancy and multiplicity as specific generative features of embodied music making, primarily in the context of live experimental improvised music. This follows the idea of music making as an ecology, in which simultaneously real (material, sonic) and imaginary (subjective, embodied) music is grown. The project engages the challenge: how to access, explore, and articulate features of the complex embodied music making process. The body is an “intricately coordinated crowd” and “multiple” but not “fragmented.”

Through practice led research the project focuses in particular on the aspect of attention as a practical guide through this ‘crowd’.

Practical exercises—for live improvised music—will be developed. These will be based on listening as a mode of attention // and learning // and used to investigate how performing bodies grow music and language—characterised by discrepancy and multiplicity. What this sounds and looks like, and what is at stake, will be demonstrated through performed and recorded music, written documentation, and presentations.

This musical growth will be approached as the production of a ‘living archive’ of scores, in an expanded sense.

The subject of this research is a reconsideration of embodied music making as a complex ecology. In the context of improvised and experimental music, I have performed in projects where diverse elements (instrumentation, ideas, languages, bodies) were brought together.

This experience was of a complex musical ecology. This project is (another) attempt at finding new approaches, growing new frames: to practically, conceptually and theoretically explore this specific music making experience.

The themes of the project are approached practically through multiple, overlapping activities. These include independent ongoing practice, collaborative work and guest presentations. This practice is approached conceptually through the terms discrepancy and multiplicity.

The idea of listening as a mode of attention to grow music will be explored, to develop practical exercises—for exploring live improvised music.

What this sounds and looks like, and what is at stake, will be demonstrated through performed and recorded music, written documentation, and presentations. This musical growth will be approached as the production of a ‘living archive’ of scores, in an expanded sense. [1]

The artistic and academic outcomes of this research will challenge disciplinary and idiomatic conventions, standards of practice and therefore access; it will challenge assumptions of homogeneity and raise critical questions about the production, performance and inscription of new music.

This research looks at the aspects of discrepancy and multiplicity as specific generative features of embodied music making, primarily in the context of live experimental improvised music.

This project makes use of the concepts discrepancy and multiplicity to guide an exploration of generative features of embodied music making: primarily in the context of live experimental improvised music.

Specifically, the research aims to encourage an ‘open’ musical context, allowing the combination of diverse elements: conventional and unconventional musical instrumentation; acoustic and electronic sound sources; trained and untrained musicians; scored and improvised, unscripted play.

While concentrating on this primary artistic context, the project moves outside this framework, in an attempt to explode its frame; to find new ways to listen in to practice. This follows the idea of music making as an ecology, in which simultaneously real (material, sonic) and imaginary (subjective, embodied) music is grown. [2] The project engages the challenge: how to access, explore, and articulate features of the complex embodied music making process.

The human body had been called an “intricately coordinated crowd” and “multiple” but not “fragmented.”[3] Through practice led research I will focus in particular on the aspect of attention (for example listening as a mode of attention)4 as a practical guide through this ‘crowd’.[5]

It has been demonstrated that the musical environment (which includes preparations, performance and reception) is animated by polyvalent real and imagined elements. Taking just one aspect of this as an example: in the context of the embodied sense of temporality and musical timing, multiple oscillating rhythms make up organism and environment, through a mix of an internal “endogenous timebase” (pulse, heart, brain) and ‘external’ (gestural and environmental) rhythms. [x]

The musical environment is an ecology consisting, simultaneously, of moving bodies, imaginative ideas and sonic vibrations.6 The music emerging from this ecology is always situation specific: contingent on, co-produced by performer(s) and context.[7]

It is the existing content of this complex bio-musical environment that this project investigates: to grow new music. It is from body to situation to score, that this research plays. Or put another way: “somewhere between heart-beat and truck joke.”

This will be engaged through two core themes: discrepancy and multiplicity, approached through practices of attention.

I will use the concept of discrepancy to imply movement, dynamism, and critically: a challenge to standards, processes of normalisation and raising questions of perceptual filtering and subject constitution. [8] The concept of multiplicity exemplifies a condition of proliferation which is key to developing living, growing and accessible music.[9]

The subjective perception of musical experience has been described as an attentional practice.[10] I will draw on theories and practices of attention [11] starting with an expanded conception of listening to include both (1) the conventional ‘outward’ sense, where we listen to music, with our ears, to the environment, and the organised sounds which may occur within it; [12] and (2) the ‘internal’ sense of the registration of the subjective sensations of what we understand as our body (e.g. pulse, heartbeat, breath), in reaction to the same musical environment.[13]

Alongside artists practices, I will draw on a range of work in the fields of music cognition and perception, embodied music cognition, and supporting ideas in neuroscience.[14]

This project is realised through practice, including the practice of writing. I am starting from (following my PhD research on the emergence of sounds and signs) the provocation that writing is everything happening outside of the time based performance of musical sounds.[15]

Or,

That is, all the semiotic, discursive activity, directly or indirectly contributing to the production of the emerging musical environment. In total this makes up a ‘living archive’ this project is generating.

It is obvious perhaps, but: the choice of words — concepts, terms: technical or poetic (discrepancy, multiplicity, attention) — used to think through, describe and frame the project, change the nature and output of the research investigation and the feel of any practical experiment.

There is no descriptive writing in this project (writing [to me] is never description). The writing (including this writing) is it’s own liquid, set of emotional gravities, material thinking and feeling.

I continue, ongoing, to write and rewrite this description and terms for the project, alongside capturing notes (as a kind of journal) made during practice. As practical investigations stimulate shifts in my understanding of the research — and take me in new material, practical and conceptual directions — I rewrite the terms by which the project is framed and the description of the project. The form and content — sign(s) and sound(s) — of the project continue to feedback and mutate — that is GROW — as it progresses.

This rewriting is one of the ways this project proceeds through iteration or what I’m calling rhythmic returns.

Ultimately this project is an Infinate Rehearsal (to quote Wilson Harris): demonstrating the ongoing growth — of discrepancies, multiplicities, ideas, sounds, feelings — across a range of material, semiotic and emotional registers.

Ideas are collections of travelling vibrations. All the ideas which flow through this research, congeal, release or stick - at any given time - serve as an invitation, some ingredients, a start point, and an excuse - to provoke some action.

The action this project tries to stimulate is to begin to practically articulate and question some of what already happens, when we perform — that is play, listen to, write, imagine — music.

After.[16] The body of the performer—engaged in the specific dynamic physical and semiotic play that music performance necessitates—is the site of an ongoing dynamic mix of tension and generative growth between registers of language and modes of consciousness and communication.

It is not only the body which is already multiple (plural), but the context (environment) that the body is situated. That is, the body is already a collaboration: an ongoing embodied process of transition and translation between sound and sign, animating emerging music.

Performance practice is poly-temporal [17] (repeating, off-grid, de-centred), imaginative (dramatized, metaphorical, fictional)[18] and synthetic (mixing sound sources, symbolic registers, ideas, materials).[19]

The project is realised through practice. Embodied practice. A practice of growth and rhythmic returns. Each rhythmic restart is a chance to reset: re-learn listening, reconsider claims, findings and feelings. Rhythmic returns to cultivate the growth process.

It is this practice that continues to reveal that everything in the project — material developments, conceptual architecture, theoretical administration (ideas, taxonomies, claims), aesthetic outcomes — are a set of mutable fictions.

These fictions are approached as partialities — friendly fragments, like sections of an optical lens — catalytic characters who offer new ways of re-considering what has been discovered. These fictions — as characters — are interrogated, encouraged; played with and listened to: through embodied experimental and improvised musical play.

I call this complex ecology; this collection of fictions, characters, sounds and feelings the Dramatic Environment. It is this environment which stages the music of this project.

This research explores growth as a condition — grows, develops — practical and fictional structures through improvisation to // encourage experimental musical play // . I refer to the sum total pf these structures: the total conceptual, fictional and material environment or composition as the Dramatic Environment.

I conceive the research project, overall, is a stage, and/or garden. That is, a particular, framed space to develop conditions for the investigation of a specific kind growth (culture).

Ecologies of attention, discrepancy and multiplicity—real and imaginary—in embodied music performance.

A reconsideration of embodied music making as a complex ecology. Practical exercises—for live improvised music—are being developed. These are based on listening as a mode of attention and used to investigate how performing bodies grow music and language—characterised by discrepancy and multiplicity.

This research looks at the aspects of discrepancy and multiplicity as specific generative features of embodied music making, primarily in the context of live experimental improvised music. This follows the idea of music making as an ecology, in which simultaneously real (material, sonic) and imaginary (subjective, embodied) music is grown. The project engages the challenge: how to access, explore, and articulate features of the complex embodied music making process. The body is an “intricately coordinated crowd” and “multiple” but not “fragmented.” Through practice led research I will focus in particular on the aspect of attention as a practical guide through this ‘crowd’

This research looks at the aspects of discrepancy and multiplicity as specific generative features of embodied music making, primarily in the context of live experimental improvised music. This follows the idea of music making as an ecology, in which simultaneously real (material, sonic) and imaginary (subjective, embodied) music is grown. The project engages the challenge: how to access, explore, and articulate features of the complex embodied music making process. The body is an “intricately coordinated crowd” and “multiple” but not “fragmented.” Through practice led research the project focuses in particular on the aspect of attention as a practical guide through this ‘crowd’.

Practical exercises—for live improvised music—will be are developed. These will be based on listening as a mode of attention and used to investigate how performing bodies grow music and language—characterised by discrepancy and multiplicity. What this sounds and looks like, and what is at stake, will be demonstrated through performed and recorded music, written documentation, and presentations. This musical growth will be approached as the production of a ‘living archive’ of scores, in an expanded sense.

1. Anderson, Sound & Score; Boone and Mignolo, Writing Without Words 2. See Reybrouck, “Music as Environment”; Reybrouck, Musical Sense-Making. 3. Mol, in The Body Multiple contests Western-medical and philosophical conventions of a singular-unified and individuated physical body. 4. Riess Jones, Time Will Tell. 5. See Coessens, Sensorial Aesthetics in Music Practices et. al. 6. Reybrouck, “Music as Environment.” 7. Cox, Music and Embodied Cognition; Clarke, Ways of Listening: An Ecological Approach to the Perception of Musical Meaning. 8. Keil, “Participatory Discrepancies and the Power of Music.” 9. Sloboda, Generative Processes in Music. 10. London, Meter as a Kind of Attentional Behavior; London, Hearing in Time. 11. Riess Jones, Time Will Tell; Small, Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening et. al. 12. Clarke, Ways of Listening: An Ecological Approach to the Perception of Musical Meaning; Schafer, The Tuning of the World. 13. Preester, The Interoceptive Mind; Craig, How Do You Feel? 14. Iyer, “Embodied Mind, Situated Cognition, and Expressive Microtiming in African-American Music”; Leman, Embodied Music Cognition and Mediation Technology; Lesaffre, Maes, and Leman, The Routledge Companion to Embodied Music Interaction. 15. Following—Boone and Mignolo, Writing Without Words; Mackey, Discrepant Engagement: Dissonance, Cross-Culturality, and Experimental Writing; Anderson, Sound & Score; Waterman, “Music Is the Social Body Sounding: Composing Acts of Reading on and Off the Page.” 16. Zorn and Graves, Arcana V: Music, Magic and Mysticism. 17. Ray, “Thesis: Sounding Expanded Affinities: A Polytemporal Approach to Reconceptualizing Egalitarian Social Relations.” 18. Hargreaves, Miell, and MacDonald, Musical Imaginations - Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Creativity, Performance and Perception. 19. Performance is the resistance of the object” Moten, Black and Blur