Time and Ensemble Dynamics in Indeterminacy: John Cage’s Concert for Piano and Orchestra

This chapter examines ensemble dynamics and time consciousness in indeterminate music, using John Cage’s Concert for Piano and Orchestra (1957–8) as a case study. Drawing on interviews and observational studies undertaken with the experimental music ensemble Apartment House, I examine the role of temporal indeterminacy in the socio-musical interactions that characterize performance, and its implications for the musicians’ experiences. In doing so, the chapter makes a broader contribution in its consideration of the ways in which issues of authorship and authority are negotiated in such temporal interactions, and how the dynamics of these negotiations present a sociality based on a ‘separate togetherness’, whereby performers play together (out of time) with one another.

Playful production

This case study of The Assembled, an ensemble based at the University of York, UK, explores the approach, rationale, and processes used to develop performances operating at the intersection of experimental music and devised theatre practices. Detailing the rationale for the formation of the ensemble and the relationship to its institutional educational context, the chapter also discusses the historical background to the work of experimental music ensembles and illuminates the working practices of the group, examining components of collaborative facilitation emerging from participant interviews. These relate to the ethos of the group, methods of operation, considerations of space and audience, and verbal interaction.

Counter-voicing in the avant-garde and experimental music: Selected cases

The present article is a reworking of a lecture that was performed live and with visual and sound examples at the CoFestival. In selected examples, the author tries to articulate various vocal practices through contemporary and experimental music, performative practices and sound poetry, in which the voice escapes gender, meaning, turns into noise, and emerges through the utterances of silence.

Schneemann Sounding: Embodied Sonic Systems

This essay examines the central position the medium of sound played in the work of the artist Carolee Schneemann (US, 1939–2019). By exploring a few key early works such as Glass Environment for Sound and Motion (1962), Chromelodeon (1963), and Noise Bodies (1965), it traces how her exposure to emergent forms in experimental music informed important translations she made of complex sonic structures into expanded, layered, constantly evolving visual systems. The essay argues that Schneemann transformed the body into a soft recording system that broadcast sonic testimonies of everyday encounters with the excesses of conspicuous consumption, the inequalities of gendered relations, and the disturbing encounters with state-mandated violence against other cultures, in particular the US invasion of Vietnam.

Cybernetic Performance Ecosystems: The Im-Medea Cycle

This article presents a series of experimental music theatre performances that took place between 2015 and 2017. This art-based research investigates how qualities of the posthuman condition could manifest in experimental music theatre, by applying cybernetic and system theory principles at different levels (i.e. compositionally, aesthetically, dramaturgically) in the creative process. The aim of this article is to present these creative processes and to introduce this type of performance practice, namely cybernetic performance ecosystem.

Sound and More-than-Human Sociality in Catherine Clover’s Oh! Ah ah pree trra trra

This article transposes questions about socially engaged sound practices into a more-than-human register, turning an ear to the sounds of interspecies encounters. It takes its impetus from a workshop aimed at forming a ‘cross-species choir’ by the artist Catherine Clover, in which participants tried to sing like, with and to birds in a London woodland. I describe how Clover’s speculative choir was informed by theoretical models drawn both from sound studies and from environmental humanities, as well as a down-to-earth, humorous sensitivity towards the limitations and absurdities of artistic practice. Where much theory associated with sound art and experimental music sees sound as what Ochoa Gautier has critiqued as an ontological suture for repairing the fractured relationship between humans and nature, Clover’s practice offers a more ambivalent and, I argue, therefore more generative means of conceptualising the role of sound within more-than-human social worlds. In particular, it uses sound to draw attention to the apprehension of humans by other creatures and to various dynamics of evasion, non-encounter and undecidability in our relationships with the more-than-human world. By amplifying this alternative way of understanding sound and listening, this article seeks to recast projects of social engagement through sound in more speculative and expansive terms.

Jack Ellitt as Director: Documentary Films of the 1940s

This article examines the work of the film-maker and composer Jack Ellitt (1902–2001) who remains something of an enigmatic and marginal figure in historical accounts of British documentary cinema. Research on Ellitt has so far focused on two key aspects of his life and career: firstly, his association with the New Zealand-born film-maker and artist Len Lye, and secondly, his pioneering work as a composer of electro-acoustic music. However, little research been undertaken on the work that he produced during the three decades he spent working as a documentary director in the British film industry, beginning in the early 1940s and ending with his retirement in the 1970s. He was a member of the remarkable generation of film-makers associated with the British documentary movement, and a composer whose radical experiments with recorded sound might well have secured him a more prominent place in the history of experimental music than is currently the case. Focusing on films made by Ellitt during the 1940s, the primary aim of this article is to offer a chronological appraisal of his early work as documentary director, while also considering what new perspectives this group of films might offer on his earlier creative collaboration with Lye, and the extent to which his radical experiments in electro-acoustic composition may have influenced the use of sound within the films he directed.