ABSTRACT
I instigated this practice-led research project to make a concerted change in my
compositional practice and explore how the performers I worked with could be more
meaningfully integrated into my pieces and processes as collaborators. By building a
community of regular collaborators (mostly working one-on-one), I have led multiple
creative projects to critically investigate how the unique behaviour and identity of
individuals can be “used” as a compositional material, and how identity can be
constructed (and co-constructed) through new compositions and performance.
Conceptualising this investigation, and by extension, my music as an ongoing
dialogue between myself and the people I work with, the scores and recordings
presented in this portfolio and thesis are fragments or tracings of the variously
intimate interactions I had with performers around identity. In this thesis I have
defined the abstract spaces which have framed these interactions, which I explain
using concepts of performativity (Butler, 2015; Butler, 2007; Kondo, 2018; Spatz,
2015) and embodied technique (Spatz, 2015; Spatz, 2016) as well as engaging with
critical literature in anthropology and ethnography to analyse how my methods have
curated, disrupted, subverted or accelerated these abstract spaces.
Participating in this project as a composer and performer, at the beginning of this
research (and during the Covid-19 pandemic), I curated a new performance space for
myself that was necessarily detached from the structures of the western art music
(WAM) concert hall. Having instigated a personal enquiry into my identity as a
musician, I created an audiovisual/ ASMR/ experimental piece from the materials of
this enquiry that was framed within a politics of spectatorship (formulated through
McGrath (2001) and Laing & Willson (2020)). Many of the dialogues I had with other
performers subsequently gathered within or around the folds of this reflection,
producing materials for composition that I handled through specific scoring and
audiovisual methods while undertaking a rigorous critique of my own positionality.
This critical and reflexive research expands and integrates composition and
performance strategies to creatively harness and construct performer identity on the
contemporary WAM stage, within notated and non-notated practices.
Thesis: https://e-space.mmu.ac.uk/636435/
Portfolio of works: (coming soon)
Ellen Sargen 