ijereja and entoptic landscape: music as an iterative process

ijereja and entoptic landscape are both pieces that employ an iterative compositional practices. These practices consider the forms of the works as ongoing and evolving; they are shaped by and through their performance practices as compositional practices. As part of this approach, the distinction between composing, performing and notating has been blurred: practices such as the creation of notation have been considered performative and compositional; the mixing and editing of recorded performances in the studio has similarly been considered performative; performances themselves have become notational when they are used as the material for further performances.
This practice research has investigated the temporal nature of performing, composing, and notating practices, positing that they are concurrent and continuous with each other. As such, it has generated documentation that, far from a definitive picture of the work, is a snapshot of one possible view of the music and its practices at a given time. The ontology of such a work is that described in Eco’s The Infinity of Lists (2009) as a ‘non-normal list’ as it contains itself: the set of all materials and performances pertaining to each of these piece is a performance of the piece itself. (pp395-396) The ‘work’ is thus a constantly expanding pool of notation, performance, sound, text and concepts, none of which can be discarded from its multiplicity. In addition, the nature and role of the exegesis within practice research has been questioned as the contextual exploration of the work has been subsumed into its performance practice by way of the performance-lecture.
This portfolio presents a selection of the materials of the two works alongside supporting documentation of their practices and performance histories.