Partial Rupture

Cassandra Miller is a longstanding friend and composer whom I have known since we both lived in Montreal in 2011. Miller hails from Victoria, British Columbia, and now lives in London, England. Her practice spans scored and unscored compositions that explore themes of vocality, transfiguration of source material and collaboration.

Miller began working without written scores around 2014 because of a feeling of being ‘fed up’. She relates this feeling to one stage of a practitioner's journey towards enlightenment as outlined in a series of Zen Buddhist poems and illustrations called the Ox Herding Pictures. Miller recalls the height of her frustration occurring when she decided to make art for a weekend alongside media artist Angela Guyton. While Guyton completed many sketches, comics and videos in one weekend, Miller only finished one horn part of a large orchestral work. She eventually realized that this part was formatted incorrectly. After this experience, she decided to explore process-based art-making that would allow for more immediate results.Footnote ²

In one sense, Miller's unscored practice represents a rupture in the framework of her previous compositional activities. She insists on eradicating deadlines, encouraging unpredictable results and creating music in real time. In another sense, her scored and unscored practices explore many of the same concerns, such as embodied notions of musical concepts, vocality and long collaborative processes. The similarities between these two modes of composing make up part of the key findings in Miller's PhD.Footnote ³ Miller relates this discovery back to the Ox Herding Pictures. She says that a person may simultaneously traverse multiple different cycles of discovery. Time becomes cyclical, rather than linear. Many plants grow in a garden at different rates, yet they all respond to a change of season. Miller's partial rupture also bears a striking resemblance to Louise Marshall's description of prominent women-identifying sound artists breaking their frame of reference at key points in their careers.Footnote ⁴

What environmental factors made the discovery of a radical new practice possible? Miller cites the importance of her collaborators – Guyton, Jennifer Thiessen, Silvia Tarozzi and Juliet Fraser – in this shift.

‘So Close’ (2014–present)

Silvia Tarozzi – a violinist and improviser – met Miller in 2015, at the Angelica festival in Italy after a performance of Miller's Duet for Cello and Orchestra. Miller and Tarozzi began collaborating by exchanging recordings of music that inspired them. These initial exchanges took place by email over a long period of time. Tarozzi remarks that ‘time is something that is not a parameter that Cassandra considers like most people do. She has a personal relation with that.’Footnote ⁵ Miller notes that in the early days of their collaboration these email explorations also included artist Angela Guyton.Footnote ⁶ Tarozzi says that while exchanging music, she and Miller ‘tried to go deeply into what is so touching, so important, for us. Why is that music so strong for us? And not only for us, but I mean, where is the power?’Footnote ⁷

Miller notes that, parallel to her early work with Tarozzi, she began collaborating with Canadian viola d'amore player Jennifer Thiessen. Miller originally wrote Thiessen a notated sketch based on complex text-to-pitch transformations. However, the resulting music did not satisfy her. Because she knew that Thiessen also sang pop vocals, she asked her to sing the melody of the original notated sketch while meditating. Despite having a lifelong interest in Buddhism and meditation, Miller does not remember the original impetus for exploring this process collaboratively. Miller eventually layered Thiessen's vocal recordings to create the final piece for the premiere.Footnote ⁸ In this performance, Thiessen sat silently while the multi-layered recording of her singing was played by a small speaker hung around her neck. This exploration proved essential for Miller's work with Tarozzi and Fraser.

Miller and Tarozzi's collaborative process continued to evolve organically, following no set path. Miller asked Tarozzi to improvise in response to some of the recordings they were sharing, as well as to send her some written reflections about the notion of vocality. Eventually Miller and Tarozzi chose to focus their attention on a specific improvisation responding to a recording by Nina Simone. First, Miller asked Tarozzi to improvise in response to the violinist's own improvisation. Then, Miller began to meditate and sing in response to Tarozzi's second improvisation, eventually sending these explorations back to Tarozzi. At first, the recordings proved so emotionally wrought that Miller thought them to be unusable. However, Tarozzi heard their potential as musical objects. Miller finally asked Tarozzi to play in response to the composer's singing. Tarozzi remarks that ‘I was learning the same thing that I played before in an improvisation, but as a composition. By listening. By ear. And by that process, slowly we developed, and we are still developing, a personal vocabulary.’Footnote ⁹

Tarozzi and Miller's collaboration began as written and auditory exchanges and has gradually evolved into a realtime collaborative process that requires both participants to be in the same physical location. This process has led to a performance version of So Close as well as a recorded version for Miller's thesis. Miller says that now, after these two milestones, the collaboration remains open-ended. Tarozzi's role is slowly shifting from that of an interpreter to a fully-fledged co-composer who authors many of the ideas of the project.Footnote ¹⁰

Tracery (2017–present)

Soprano Juliet Fraser first performed Miller's music as a member of the London-based vocal ensemble, EXAUDI. She recalls that Guide – one of Miller's creations for the group – was notated, but that it required the musicians to mimic an audio track. After hearing the composer's Duet for Cello and Orchestra in 2014, she decided to ask for a work of her own. At the time, she hadn't considered what medium the score would take. She trusted Miller's creative process. Fraser says that Tracery arose out of a desire ‘to explore – for both of us – vulnerability as creators. And how to find a mode of performance that was authentic without risking too much.’Footnote ¹¹

Tracery is an ongoing collaborative process that still results in new material. The work is broken into modules that can function discretely or as composites of a whole. Fraser and Miller create most modules in one- or two-day-long collaborative session. Fraser notes that these sessions ‘[need] to feel a bit open, timing-wise’ – though she goes on to say that most sessions finish after about six hours.Footnote ¹² In each module of Tracery, Fraser and Miller explore the transformation of a single piece of audio source material using a process of meditation and automatic singing.

There exists a distinct lifecycle to Fraser and Miller's collaborative sessions. The two generally start with some conversation about each collaborator's personal life or about the source material they might use. Fraser notes that questions might arise such as ‘what might this module be about? What are we craving as artists? What are our frustrations, or hungers?’Footnote ¹³ Eventually they choose a piece of source material. They decide together what type of meditation they will explore. Then Miller records any vocal sounds that arise in response to Fraser meditating and listening to the source material through headphones – a process they call automatic singing. After each meditation, Fraser writes some notes that detail her experience and ‘[feeds] that back to [Miller]’.Footnote ¹⁴ This process might be repeated several times. Finally, there is a key turning point when Miller gives Fraser audio recordings that contain stacked recordings of Fraser herself singing, rather than the original source material. Each time the process is repeated the meditation gets longer. Fraser remarks that the process finishes when ‘the process of meditation becomes either so intense that you can't really go much further, or the intensity has sort of burnt itself out’.Footnote ¹⁵

There is a beautiful economy in this cyclical process. While Fraser is meditating, listening to source material and singing, Miller is experimenting with the sound of previous recordings. Miller stretches, layers and arranges the recordings into intricate sprawling canons. After their collaborative sessions, Miller creates the recordings to create a tape part for the performance. Fraser performs the live part of the piece by engaging in the same meditation and automatic singing process that she employs during the collaborative creative process.

Cyclical Reflections

Both Fraser and Tarozzi speak of the importance of friendship in their collaborative practices with Miller. Miller says that the ‘project is the friendship. The music is the offshoots.’Footnote ¹⁶ In this re-imagining of the garden, musical shoots are supported by a main stalk of friendship. Tarozzi fervently echoes Miller's statement, saying ‘for me, it is a really important relation that now is more and more important than the music. What we can do with music is great, but before that there is Cassandra.’Footnote ¹⁷ The intimacy afforded by friendship allows Miller to open up the space to decide on how the mode of collaboration itself might be shaped to fit the lives and practices of both composer and performer.

And what of the music itself? Fraser describes the music as ‘quite raw. It's unrefined. It's been a journey to make noises that I would never normally agree to make in public. Noises that I didn't know I needed to make. It's really not singing. I don't know what the word is. It's kind of just like, it's just emotion. It's just emotion through the medium of vocalization somehow. It's quite often rather sad.’Footnote ¹⁸ Christopher Fox writes that this music is ‘not so much composed as inhabited’.Footnote ¹⁹ Tarozzi describes many people commenting that the music sounds like it is ‘from a country that you don't know where it is’.Footnote ²⁰ All three statements above describe a kind of fuzziness.

To me, it is as if we are witnessing someone sleepwalking. The noises Fraser and Tarozzi produce seem to come from a place between dreaming and waking. Through the process of playing and meditating, the performers allow us to hear the fuzzy space between melody, counterpoint and harmony. While Fraser and Tarozzi play, it is as if we are sitting in a room different to the one we were in before, hearing the reverberations inside a restful mind ebb and swell in an unearthly chorus.

Both Fraser and Tarozzi are also involved in orally transmitted collaborative processes with other composers. Fraser has just started working with Pascale Criton on a new piece for performance in 2020. I will also work with Fraser on a new piece in the next couple years. Tarozzi worked with composers Pascale Criton and Éliane Radigue long before she began work with Miller.

‘Why Write a Score?’

Pascale Criton is a composer and musicologist based in France. She is best known for her in-depth explorations of microtonality and expansive writing on the subject of the philosopher Gilles Deleuze. I first encountered Criton's music at the London Contemporary Music Festival in 2018 and was introduced to the composer by Cassandra Miller.

At the beginning of a written reflection about creating Chaoscaccia with Deborah Walker, Criton asks ‘why write a score?’. She goes on to write about making music that prioritises the ideas of movement, speed, instability, transformation and shifting.Footnote ²¹ Criton breaks open, examines and transforms various aspects of music making. She alters the strings of instruments to reframe idiomatic gestures. She prioritises planning physical gestures over planning their resultant sounds. And, in some works such as Circle Process and Chaoscaccia, she transforms scores into diagrams – mental and physical, oral and written – that allow the performances to have the ‘fluidity of a possession’.Footnote ²²

Circle Process (2010) and Chaoscaccia (2013)

Tarozzi met Criton in Paris while the composer was collaborating with the Dedalus ensemble around 2006. She heard a work of Criton's that was scored for guitar and voices and tuned in 1/12th tones. She wondered how this particular tuning might sound on the violin, particularly because the violin does not have frets and could ‘develop very different sounds and techniques because of the different structure of the instrument’.Footnote ²³ Tarozzi also wanted to explore the way that this tuning would affect which gestures would become idiomatic to the newly tuned instrument. The result of this collaboration was a co-composed work called Circle Process.

Soon after, Deborah Walker approached Criton to collaborate on a new piece for solo cello. Walker met Criton while performing with the Dedalus ensemble in 2007. She began by performing Criton's notated works for cello, such as Plis (2004). Walker remarks that though ‘everything was written down … we spent quite a lot of time really focusing on the kinds of gestures. Immediately, I thought that I could not really figure it out with just the score.’Footnote ²⁴ Criton echoes this statement, writing that in Plis the focus was not on notes but on the different modalities of a gestural process.Footnote ²⁵ While rehearsing Plis, Walker remembers Criton comparing the physical action of her glissandi to that of real-world phenomena such as the elastic waving of tree branches in the wind.Footnote ²⁶ Criton's verbal descriptions of sound became a key part of Walker interpreting the composer's scores.

Despite having previous experience performing Criton's notated work, Walker describes collaborating on Chaoscaccia as a ‘time of shared exploration and improvisation’. She goes on to say that Criton's collaborative process shares many similarities with the way theatre directors or dance choreographers work with actors and dancers. Walker describes a reciprocal process where Criton listened to Walker's improvisations, verbally described what she heard, and then made a few propositions for what to try next. Walker notes that

The open environment of experimental collaboration allows the imprecise nature of words to become generative and expansive rather than reductive. While this process is about listening, it is also about translating.

One of the key aspects of Chaoscaccia is the interrelation – or coexistence – of different states or moods. Walker notes that a central aspect of the piece is the idea of a ‘shift … a passage between one state and another’.Footnote ²⁸ In her writing about the piece, Criton echoes this, writing that ‘the basic principle is concerned with instability and sudden changes (shift process) between different states. Each state proceeds in an unstable mode and emerges without a forced beginning or ending.’Footnote ²⁹ Walker notes that while performing she needs ‘an extreme attention into sound – a very profound way of listening, being open to different possibilities while playing’.Footnote ³⁰ Similarly, Tarozzi says that while playing Circle Process she ‘[works] to transform a sound world into a different one, by means of a flexible gesture, finding solutions in the body-sound to evolve in the new state. Pascale calls them styles. And this continuous work is the process.’Footnote ³¹ On the subject of performing Criton's music, Tarozzi and Walker remark that the quality of gesture takes precedence over the musical result. According to Criton, this is an inversion of the role gesture takes in notated music.Footnote ³²

Chaoscaccia and Circle Process sound uncanny. In Chaoscaccia, Walker performs on four C strings – the lowest string of the cello – and, as a result, the piece often sounds like multiple cellos are being played at once. The sound oscillates between low rumbling, snaking polyphonies and brittle and prismatic reflections created using struck bowing and harmonics. In Circle Process, Criton begins by employing a circular motion with her bow to produce a dry scrubbing sound that eventually gives way to a plurality of dizzying techniques and moods. This is music that seems perfectly balanced between constant transformation and deep stasis.

Both Walker and Tarozzi have also created pieces with the French composer Éliane Radigue. Their interest in concentration, tuning, and virtuosic instrumental technique as well as their experience in orally transmitted collaborative processes make them an ideal fit for Radigue's collaborative practice.

A Surprise Gift

Unlike the other three composers mentioned in this article, Éliane Radigue's compositional process has never involved making written scores. In 2006, after decades of creating electronic music, Radigue began collaborating with acoustic and electronic musicians. This shift occurred abruptly. Radigue had recently repaired her ARP 2500 synthesizer and completed the electroacoustic piece L'Île Re-Sonante. She intended to continue making works in this new series. In an interview with Julia Eckhardt, she says that she ‘had no idea whatsoever that what followed would be completely different. It wasn't a decision, it was exactly the opposite. A real gift.’Footnote ³³ A bassist, Kasper Toeplitz, asked her to work with him to create a new piece, Elemental II. She says that thanks to Toeplitz, she ‘discovered the infinite joy of sharing and collective creation’.Footnote ³⁴ Since then Radigue has not made another electroacoustic composition.

After making her first collaborative work with an ensemble of acoustic musicians – Naldjorlak with Charles Curtis, Carol Robinson and Bruno Martinez – Radigue says that ‘for the first time I finally heard the music I wanted to make, which I'd always dreamed of and had tried to get close via electronic means’.Footnote ³⁵ In a personal interview Radigue spoke to me of waiting long periods of time to realise ideas the core conceptual ideas of both Naldjorlak and the Occam Ocean series.Footnote ³⁶ The process of making Naldjorlak, and later the Occam Ocean series, was largely pioneered with her first acoustic collaborator, cellist Charles Curtis. Of this process, Julia Eckhardt writes that ‘intuitively, Radigue decided against traditional music notation for these collaborations and opted for oral transmission … oral transmission is also a means more apt to give the music enough flexibility to mature, change, flourish, and adapt through time in different spaces’.Footnote ³⁷

Diving Deeper into Occam Ocean

Silvia Tarozzi was Radigue's second collaborator in the Occam Ocean series, and remains a prolific participant in Radigue's ongoing combinatorial works for ensembles. They met in Paris after Tarozzi had heard a performance of Naldjorlak in 2009. Tarozzi did not know anyone personally involved in that project but she had friends who helped her to establish contact with Radigue. By the time she met the composer, Tarozzi had become pregnant, and Radigue advised her to wait until she gave birth to her son before they began working together. Tarozzi explains that Radigue ‘dedicated ten years to her children when she was younger before coming back to music. So her experience was very specific, and also in a certain social context’. Tarozzi returned to Radigue in Paris months after her son was born to begin embarking on their collaboration, Occam II.Footnote ³⁸

For Tarozzi, the process of working with Radigue is ‘less experimental’ than her collaborative work with Criton. Instead, she says that Radigue has ‘a very precise idea of the kind of sound that she wants to listen to … [she] was allowing the existence of the process, of the oral transmissions, and discovering it as a way to produce the music in a collaborative way – but the music that she really desired to listen to’.Footnote ³⁹ Radigue had already begun to establish a collaborative way of working with Kasper Topelitz on Elemental II and with Charles Curtis when she developed Naldjorlak. She had also begun to establish the specific process of creating Occam Ocean pieces with harpist Rhodri Davies, with whom she made the first Occam Ocean piece. Describing Radigue's working method, Tarozzi says that she uses her violin to find musical ‘solutions’ to represent a chosen conceptual image. As with Criton, there is a process of translation involved. Radigue's musical vision is translated to Tarozzi orally. Then Tarozzi proposes sounds to Radigue. Finally, Radigue gives oral feedback on the sound and this process shapes the music.Footnote ⁴⁰

Like Tarozzi, Deborah Walker also discovered Radigue's work after hearing a concert of Naldjorlak in Paris at the Louvre in 2009. Until that point Walker was unable to conceive of working collaboratively with a composer on a piece without a written score. Soon she had the opportunity to speak with Kasper Topelitz about Radigue's first collaborative piece Elemental II, which Radigue created with him in 2004. Walker recalls Radigue's liner notes for the recording of the work detailing a ‘concordance of sensibilities’ between her and Topelitz.Footnote ⁴¹ Finally, in 2012 Walker was introduced to Radigue by Tarozzi.

In our interview, Walker describes the periodic rhythm of working with Radigue. Walker says that in their collaborative sessions she always plays for at least ten minutes before stopping, at which point Radigue makes some comments. She mentions that this is very different to working with Criton, where they might make tests of smaller sections or gestures.Footnote ⁴²

This periodic rhythm of collaborating may be related to Radigue's earlier methods of creating electronic music. Charles Curtis describes these methods as a ‘performance without an audience’. He goes on to write that his task in creating Naldjorlak was to enact this same process on the cello for larger audiences and without a margin for error.Footnote ⁴³ Walker also relates Radigue's collaborative method to her earlier electroacoustic composition practice.Footnote ⁴⁴ Walker's description of playing for 10–20 minutes before stopping – in both solo and ensemble pieces – mirrors Radigue's careful setting up of parameters for her electronic works followed by a concentrated ‘performance without an audience’.

Walker echoes Tarozzi's earlier sentiment that Radigue aims to find a specific sound rather than to engage in open-ended experimentation. On finding this specific sound in performance, Walker notes that while playing Radigue's work she has to focus on how to ‘play this sort of three-dimensional sound with this rich sound with partials that [are] telling their story’.Footnote ⁴⁵

Radigue's practice has expanded far beyond these initial solo pieces and now includes countless ensemble pieces for combinations of her Occam Ocean collaborators, an orchestral piece for ONCEIM ensemble directed by Frederic Blondy, a work for Quatuor Bozzini and a co-composed work for Decibel Ensemble.

Cat Hope, flutist, composer and artistic director of Decibel Ensemble in Perth, began working with Éliane Radigue in 2016 on Occam Hexa II. This first collaboration was co-composed for Decibel by Radigue and Carol Robinson, the only work of its kind in the Occam Ocean series.Footnote ⁴⁶ After working on this piece, Hope began a collaboration with Radigue that resulted in Occam XXVI, a solo piece for alto flute.

Hope speaks about the preparations she made before meeting with Radigue. She says that she

This sentiment is echoed by other performers of Radigue's music.

Radigue's music ‘shines a light on infinitesimal sonic details, such as the tiny rhythmic beating found when high frequencies sound simultaneously, and the subtle change in the timbre of a sound when certain frequencies jump to the fore’.Footnote ⁴⁸ When I hear this music in concert, I experience a flattening of time that allows me to shift my attention between the music I am hearing and my own perception of the act of listening. I experience this mobility as a kind of sonic generosity. Radigue and her performers are not trying to capture my attention or force my perception toward a predefined path. Instead, they invite me to lean in and pay attention to subtle transformations in sound. This is music that could not possibly be notated. Radigue and her collaborators have provided me with an undeniable source of inspiration for my own orally transmitted compositions.

[factory] (2013–present)

I met violinist Mira Benjamin in Montreal in 2011 through mutual colleagues. Benjamin and I quickly became close friends but we didn't collaborate musically until the summer of 2013. At that time, I began searching for new ways of creating music. Benjamin encouraged me to investigate graphic and verbal notation. She recorded a short graphic score of mine, and as a result we decided to embark on a larger collaborative project that became [factory].

In creating [factory], I began to explore a new kind of collaborative situation where Benjamin's creative voice took precedence over my own. [factory] initially existed as a set of verbal scores that I wrote for Benjamin. However, we both agreed to delete these scores permanently in their physical form. This allowed the scores to exist solely in Benjamin's memory. After this point, Benjamin also became a ‘living score’, allowing other musicians to access the piece. Jennie Gottschalk writes that Benjamin is ‘aware of her unique and somewhat strange function in the development of the work, not only in dialogue with Nickel, but especially in her interactions with the musicians who access it’.Footnote ⁵⁰

Benjamin's generosity was a key aspect in creating [factory]. She is a fearless performer, and one who is committed to energetically and fastidiously realising composers’ ideas. In an interview with Jennie Gottschalk, I say that ‘I think creating [factory] was specifically about [Benjamin] and her particular skills of conceptualization, realization, ultimate generosity, pragmatism. … these characteristics if divorced from the piece would not allow it to exist.’Footnote ⁵¹ I reflected Benjamin's openness back at her, allowing the piece to become porous and to be absorbed by her brilliant mind and hands. Benjamin says that in performing [factory] she ‘doesn't feel a huge sense of pressure to preserve some historical thing’ and that engaging in the piece is ‘infinitely interesting because [she] just keep[s] forgetting things’.Footnote ⁵²

While creating [factory], I began searching for other composers using similar processes of oral transmission. My PhD supervisor at the time, James Saunders, told me that he had heard that a double bassist, Dominic Lash, was undertaking a somewhat similar collaborative process with Éliane Radigue. Lash lived in Bristol so I was able to speak with him fairly quickly. At the time, there was relatively little English language scholarship about Radigue's collaborative compositions. I decided to undertake a research project in which I interviewed many of Radigue's collaborators. This project not only shaped my understanding of Radigue's work, but also guided me along the path toward a more robust orally transmitted practice.

A Hushed Workshop (2018)

I met clarinettist Heather Roche through a mutual friend, Thierry Tiedrow. Roche is a prolific performer who has commissioned numerous pieces from composers who employ diverse methods of creation and notation. While we did not work together immediately, Roche writes that she sought out my work after encountering Laurence Crane at a concert. She describes Crane mentioning ‘some of the difficulties Nickel was having experimenting with alternatives to traditionally notated scores’.Footnote ⁵³

Unlike [factory], where the information was initially transmitted via written verbal notation, in creating A Hushed Workshop I transmitted information using short audio recordings of myself speaking. Tim Rutherford-Johnson describes these recordings as a medium where ‘tone of voice, vocal cadence and vibe are compositional parameters. Some of these [can] be listened to more than once; others [will] have to be deleted, Mission Impossible-style, after hearing.’Footnote ⁵⁴ Roche writes that my work

My work did not begin as collaboratively as that of Radigue, Criton or Miller. These composers all encourage a two-way dialogue. In my early works, once I transmitted a score to a performer, I sought to erase myself from the collaborative process. However, as I have created more living scores, I have begun to see myself as a key participant. At the end of each collaborative process I now take time with my collaborators to listen to their interpretations and to provide feedback. I try not to topple their interpretations, but rather to strengthen latent musical aspects such as unstable partials or sub-tones. For this process, and for my expanded sense of hearing, I owe a great debt to Éliane Radigue.

Working with Roche solidified this more collaborative working process. While making the piece, she frequently sent me recordings of her practice sessions. Roche writes that ‘his changes never touch the material that I've come up with, he's simply trying to refine the work a bit, to help me to focus on certain sounds, to slow down a little bit. I can hear such a difference from one day to the next.’Footnote ⁵⁶ I believe that reforging this connection has greatly strengthened the work.

Time is a Garden

Time is an essential ingredient in the collaborative processes of all these composers and performers. In the cases of Miller and Radigue, long collaborative sessions blur the line between social engagement, ritual and music making. Of these practices, Radigue's collaborator Julia Eckhardt writes that ‘a condition for this way of working is slowness. Observing the unfolding of time, moments of maturation, care to sharpen the senses, long duration, etc.’Footnote ⁵⁹ Though Criton employs a more practical process that is broken into smaller meetings, both Walker and Tarozzi mentioned that it took upward of 20 sessions to complete their co-signed pieces. In my own work, performers can listen to audio transmissions at their own leisure. However, these transmissions include long silences, ensuring that time is taken by the performers to digest information. Many performers remarked that it would be impossible to create this music if they lived further from the composers with whom they were collaborating. Whether structured or unstructured, long or divided, real or digital, these collaborative processes require performers and composers to be present with one another in dedicated periods of time.

This sense of extended time and the importance of the moment of encounter is carried into performers’ perception of playing this music. Tarozzi summarizes this relationship, saying that

Radigue echoes this statement, saying that ‘another mystery about music [is] that … time [is] whole at every moment. I mean, the past, is there in the present, and future is there in the present, all the three times are just one.’Footnote ⁶¹

A quotation by Toru Takemitsu pulls these notions of time together. Takemitsu famously said that ‘my music is like a garden, and I am the gardener. Listening to my music can be compared with walking through a garden and experiencing the changes in light, pattern and texture.’Footnote ⁶² Cultivating plants in a garden takes an extraordinary amount of time for a gardener. For plants, time is cyclical, with the kernels of all stages of development being present at all times. And for audiences, gardens offer an opportunity for us to wander and allow our perception to shift outside normal chronological hierarchies.

Hospitable Environments

The physical site of collaboration affects some of the practices mentioned in this article. Though Radigue has said that it is completely natural to create Occam Ocean pieces outside her apartment, many performers have remarked on her home being a key aspect of their work together.Footnote ⁶³ Miller writes extensively in her PhD thesis about the idea of the kitchen as a creative space – both metaphorically and physically. Fraser remarks that the physical space in which collaborations occur is less important than feeling relaxed and natural.Footnote ⁶⁴

In my own practice, I work to establish hospitality in the digital medium. I do this by creating a meditative atmosphere in my audio transmissions and inserting long silences that allow for reflection. Cat Hope remarks that the soothing tone of my voice becomes a compositional parameter that musicians imitate in their performance.Footnote ⁶⁵

In all these practices, performers and composers share deep friendships that often shape their collaborations. This, too, is a kind of hospitality that is essential to the work. Of these friendships, Tarozzi says

Ephemeral Byproducts

None of the collaborations mentioned in this article have yet resulted in a written score. Yet many of the composers and performers create written notes, sketches and diagrams to aid in creating and remembering these pieces. Fraser describes creating written notes detailing her body-scan meditation process with Cassandra, saying ‘there is a body of words on paper that documents and supports what we've been doing, but there definitely isn't a score’.Footnote ⁶⁷ Similarly, in describing her work with Radigue, Hope says that she keeps ‘a lot of notes … which [are] just notes with fingerings next to them to remind me that I have to keep going back into my diaries and remaking each time I play it’.Footnote ⁶⁸ Radigue herself takes some notes on her collaborative works. Tarozzi highlights that even while playing Criton's notated scores, the ‘notation isn't enough … it's impossible to really share what her aesthetic just by the score. It's really not the music.’Footnote ⁶⁹ Walker says that while working with Criton, she created notes that were ‘more on the side of how to do things – maybe 70 per cent that and then 30 per cent what to reach with the ear. What to reach, what is the intention? What is the direction? So, I guess that is more close to a description of sound’. She goes on to say that she does not keep these notes, but instead that she has rewritten them many times before subsequent performances of the work.Footnote ⁷⁰

In my own work, initially I imagined a wholly un-notated orally transmitted practice. I asked performers not to take notes while listening to my instructions, but in most cases performers made notes despite my request. In recent collaborations with Roche and Hope I have begun to see the value in allowing performers to choose between what they allow to decay and transform in memory and what they need to remember, such as instrumental fingerings for specific techniques.

The notes performers take do not unbalance the delicate musical environments in which they function. Instead, they serve as aids, reflections, charts and diaries. They are not intended for anyone else to look at, a key difference in status to most musical scores. The composers and performers in this article use many methods to transmit musical information, such as audio files, diagrams and texts, but oral transmission is the primary way they communicate.

The Fruit of Responsibility

Deborah Walker points out one of the main differences between creating and performing this music and traditionally scored composition: the performer must keep the piece alive, not only in performance, but also in transmitting it to future generations of performers. It is the performers who will be responsible for gatekeeping the next generation of interpreters of this music and sculpting how it will be passed on. Walker adds, ‘a score is a very democratic thing. But those processes mean that I would like to choose the people. And so, this means that I'm controlling this … So I have to assume, yes, I want to control this thing.’Footnote ⁷³

Secondary transmission is still a nascent aspect of many of these collaborations. Canadian cellist and composer Émilie Girard-Charest is currently poised to be the first cellist to learn Chaoscaccia from Walker and Criton. Whether this collaboration will be orally transmitted or involve a written musical score still remains to be discovered.Footnote ⁷⁴ Several of Radigue's collaborators have also begun to embark on transmitting their works, but none have currently completed this. The way these plants bear fruit and create new life is still relatively unknown.

A metaphor for scored music composition is that of construction. I believe that the differences between the metaphors of construction and gardens perfectly illustrate the differences between notated and orally transmitted music composition. Constituent parts of the metaphor of construction might be resilient materials, physical labour and organized hierarchies; in contrast, gardens are complex ecosystems of cyclical organic growth. Time runs differently in gardens. They encourage reflection, repose and celebration. They bear fruit and flowers, and support vast flora and fauna. Gardens are made of and made by living beings.

The border between the collaborative compositional gardens discussed in this article and other experimental music becomes hazy when considering ideas of rhizomatic transmission,Footnote ⁷⁵ performance practice, interpretation and collaboration. Many other artists – such as Pauline Oliveros, Malcom Goldstein, Émilie Girard-Charest, Patricia Alessandrini, Michael Baldwin, Solomiya Moroz, Meredith Monk and Charles Curtis – engage with similar concepts and processes. Indeed, the composers and performers discussed in this article use many methods that enrich and expand the notion of oral transmission. So what subterranean network of roots and soil connects these gardens of music? In discussing creating Naldjorlak, Eckhardt and Radigue highlight one of the key aspects of making orally transmitted music. It is as simple as the fact that it is music you cannot make alone. It can only be made together.Footnote ⁷⁶

Like watering a garden that bursts into bloom, ‘What's wonderful is that the more you allow the music to go forth from inside you, the more it spreads’.Footnote ⁷⁷