Some musics and musical situations seem to invite the audience to participate; others insist that the audience should absorb the events of performance in rapt attention. A slippage between such distinctions can also arise: a moment where an audience might be uncertain as to whether joining in is desired or welcome. In an examination of such a moment of uncertainty or surprise, at the close of Raymond MacDonald's Stolen in a Dreamland Heist (2021), we suggest that such events point towards and perform the particular creative spaces and spacing effects that arise in musical events in ways which draw attention to the affective bodily relationships between performers and auditors. The article takes the form of its own nested dialogue: an interview with the composer forms its central portion, framed within theoretical examination both of that critical moment within performance and the reflections on it the interview reveals.

This introductory article defines somatic music/ology as music that emphasises and reflects on its embodied nature and an associated theoretical discourse that addresses this aspect. It further traces the genealogy of this concept to the convergence of different intellectual and artistic currents from the mid twentieth century, including the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ecological psychology associated with James J. Gibson, performance- and body-oriented musicology represented by Roland Barthes and Carolyn Abbate and later developments such as 4E cognition as well as the experimental music theatre emerging from the 1960s. Finally, it introduces the various contributions to the issue.

Sonic Bothy is an inclusive experimental and new-music organisation with an ensemble of musicians with and without disabilities and neurodiversities. This article considers their audiovisual piece Verbaaaaatim (2020–21), its form marked by the context of its development and composition during the COVID-19 pandemic, using a set of interlayered perspectives that mirror the formal layers of the piece. Recorded in a single take, it comprises instrumental sounds, spoken words, written words, static and dynamic graphics and videos of the performers, aligned so that the piece seems consistently to flow onwards, although it is not always clear which element impels its forward motion. The article considers, in particular, Verbaaaaatim's presentation of modes of embodied conviviality between its performers, the ways these find resonance in wider histories of experimental music and the ways in which its elements can be understood in an ecological framework as ‘sound actions’.

In 2019 the present authors, along with our colleague Mic Spencer, began work on a project funded by the Leeds Institute for Teaching Excellence, designed to look at the ways in which we taught composition at the University of Leeds and how we might change them. Mic has focused on postgraduate teaching, and we have considered the earliest parts of the undergraduate curriculum, particularly the first two years of study, when the largest numbers of students with the least experience of the study of composition at tertiary level might be in a classroom (50 or so, in our case).