This month, I worked with a wonderful group of people for my Risk Related workshop in partnership with Radar at Loughborough University. Supported by a grant from the Hinrichsen Foundation, I’ve been creating new musical games that explore elements of risk in the relationships between performers, drawing on conversations with academics at Loughborough. Workshopping these ideas with a mix of students, academics from different fields, arts enthusiasts and musicians proved a great way to explore our relationships with risk, and to experiment with how these games might evolve into compositions.
My conversations with Dr Ksenia Chmutina and Monia del Pinto (School of Architecture, Building and Civil Engineering) fed into games exploring socially constructed risk. This emanated from discussions about risks that emanate from social relationships and societal structures, how these interface with the organisation of the physical structures that we inhabit, and how this renders some more vulnerable to certain risks than others.
This led me to think about musical games which create different balances and imbalances within the group dynamic through ‘stacked’ situations and systems in which risks and power relationships are experienced differently. For example, individuals were given particular roles or sets of conditions which affected how far they could interact with and affect others. In a musical, performance situation, this led to some quite hilarious scenarios and made for a lot of fun.
We also explored the impact of disruptions from other people, or from changes within the group environment. These disruptions influenced types and patterns of sounds, relationships to pulse and rhythmic cycles, and the fragility or robustness of these bonds.
The discussions I had with Dr Paul Kelly and Prof. Paul Thomas (Department of Chemistry) were particularly rich in investigating strategies and systems for coordinating collectives, and relationships between control and stability. With Thomas, this centred around the complex coordination of emergency response teams to chemical or biological incidents, with the nature of communication between individuals and groups being key. With Kelly I delved into ideas of coordination at the nano scale, considering bonds between tiny particles in crystallisation and the formation of polymorphs – substances which can variably take on different structures or forms. Ideas of bottom-up self assembly and ‘disappearing polymorphs’ led to some precarious musical scenarios in which patterns and groupings of people evolved in flux between states of varying stability, risking collapse and loss of musical structures and patterns, but also giving way to the emergence of new musical and social relations.
It’s been fascinating to encounter and explore these different ways of thinking about and experiencing risk, as well as providing plenty of food for thought for new compositions….
I’m very grateful to the Hinrichsen Foundation for their support.
