Nicholas Bourriaud’s ‘journey form’ and auto-ethnographic observation are both employed to analyse my performances of open notation scores for organ and electronics in this presentation.
Examples are drawn from my own works and collaborative work with composer Caroline Lucas and visual- and sound artist R. Armstrong. Graphic and text scores, their notation, and my performances, will be examined from a composer-performer perspective. Bourriaud (2010) identifies the creative artist as a ‘semionaut’ and contemporary artistic forms as ‘journey forms’ that both internalise and externalise an experience of movement, displacement and crossing. Within the interpretation of graphic notation, and within this context, I am conscious of creating a tangible link between notation and performance. I have also sought ways of enabling non-organ performances of these works which retain the ‘journey form’ of the work and reflect on the way that notation might have a gestural relationship with the sound of the work. In this way, a gestural approach to performance is understood as a conceptualisation of the sound, notation and performer in space and territory. This, then, suggests a process of which the compositional act, notation, and all subsequent performances are single iterations or points. It posits gestural relationships in performance as inherent to the structure of the relationships that form this music gesture as an integral aspect of the ‘journey form’ of the work.

Inventions du geste musical / Inventing Gestures

In recent years, musicological study of gesture has become an important emerging field of inquiry. Video and motion capture technologies, modes of analysis borrowed from other arts (such as the Laban method for movement analysis in dance) as well as new systems and notations for describing the movement of performers, have allowed a wide variety of approaches to study the structure and expressive potential of gesture. In parallel, the study of composer-performer collaboration has become a leading research field, with musicologists, performers and composers all contributing multiple perspectives with the aid of modern ethnographic techniques. What can our study of collaborative processes reveal about the creation of new approaches to gesture? Featuring artists and researchers examining the performance of canonical works as well as examining the creation of new works today, this symposium explores whether the precise mode and location of the genesis of new gestural approaches can be identified. The use of technology to both augment the composition and allow the performer new methods of control, the integration of elements of theatre and dance and the exploration of new extended techniques will all be particular foci for the presentations. By examining collaborative approaches to gestural innovation, a deeper understanding of both fields can be uncovered, opening new avenues of artistic and musicological research.