Last year, Ensemble Decipher was invited to be Ensemble-in-Residence at New Music for Strings in Denmark this year. As part of the programming that would be presented at the festival, the festival’s artistic-director and founder, Anne Sophie Andersen and I were to co-compose a new work for electronics, violin and cello. I would be manning the live-electronics part, and would serve as one of the artists-in-residence for the festival. After half a year of collaboration, the piece has a ‘final bar-line’ so to speak! The instructions are extensive, and the codebase for the automated score GUI is 1000s of line long, while the live-electronics part, which I am coding completely from scratch in SuperCollider, is still being built and tested. I’ll have more to write on the specifics of this compositional process at a later point, but after several collaborative projects that involved developing (cybernetic) systems to support co-creative and open processes, I’ve found the result both creatively and politically satisfying, especially when contextualized in response to the creatively hegemonic world of classical composition.
