Composing Improvisational Cells for Networked Music Performance

McCaleb, Murphy

Composing Improvisational Cells for Networked Music Performance

McCaleb, Murphy ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9867-9909 (2025) Composing Improvisational Cells for Networked Music Performance. Performance Research, 29 (6). pp. 55-61.

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Official URL: https://doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2024.2537577

Abstract

This paper explores artistic and technical strategies for musicians to play in a cohesive ensemble while physically remote from each other. Applying to digitally networked musicking as well as events where musicians are distributed around the performance area, the result of this research is expressed through composition and performance. This research also highlights how lived experience and context may inform musical practice in unexpected yet interconnected ways.

As the COVID-19 pandemic began, author David Kessler wrote that 'we're feeling a number of different griefs. … We are not used to this kind of collective grief in the air' (2020). Augmenting this shared grief was my personal grieving for the death of my parents two years prior. This global and personal context provided an opportunity to not only cathartically create art but also research existing parameters of ensemble musicking. Research on networked music performance attracted broader attention as musicians struggled to play together online and prompted me to explore these methods as a means of co-constructing learning with my university students.

Through this experience I composed The Hour of Lead, a large-scale work for mixed ensemble. Rather than attempting to minimise or ignore latency, this piece explores compositional strategies that embrace latency as an aesthetic and logistical feature. Musicians perform from video notation in parallel with each other allowing for structural and harmonic progression. Ambiguities in the video notation, however, encourage a high level of performer autonomy. In this way, large-scale synchronization is maintained while small-scale synchronization is rendered irrelevant. Thus, this artistic research responds to technical and creative issues around networked music performance in a way that explores different lived experiences of grief.