This research looks at the aspects of discrepancy and multiplicity as specific generative features of embodied music making, primarily in the context of live experimental improvised music. This follows the idea of music making as an ecology, in which simultaneously real (material, sonic) and imaginary (subjective, embodied) music is grown. The project engages the challenge: how to access, explore, and articulate features of the complex embodied music making process. The body is an “intricately coordinated crowd” and “multiple” but not “fragmented.” Through practice led research the project focuses in particular on the aspect of attention as a practical guide through this ‘crowd’.
Practical exercises—for live improvised music—will be developed. These will be based on listening as a mode of attention and used to investigate how performing bodies grow music and language—characterised by discrepancy and multiplicity. What this sounds and looks like, and what is at stake, will be demonstrated through performed and recorded music, written documentation, and presentations. This musical growth will be approached as the production of a ‘living archive’ of scores, in an expanded sense.
