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REFLEXIVE
Music

The innovative music notation 'Reflex Invisible Score' (published in Notations 21 by Theres Sauer) began spreading with Rosenbaum's work while composing communities around the world. The Reflexive mindset of collecting perspectives and self-awareness through our senses. Practicing and performing Reflexive Music provoke imagination, resilience, agility a new trust between body and mind. The music research conducted with professionals began to involve non-professionals and today it is introduced to all.

With Reflexive Music the sum becomes greater than the odd marriage of its various parts. The original musical structure that provokes relationships between elements of different mediums. While the elements maintain an independence they are perfectly synced cohesion while engaging in direct passionate dialogue with the oppositional and complementary forces of other mediums. Developing this unique perspective to musical creation grew out of Rosenbaum’s pre-condition called synesthesia, which is a mixes of senses in her specific case the auditory being interpreted with taste, sound and texture. Reflexive Music is described as avant-Garde music and also referred to as Interdisciplinary music.

 

…”In much art it is not uncommon to have interactions between more than one forms. However most of the time one medium takes precedence and can be seen as dominant. In the reflexive environments that I create, each form is in relation to itself and at the same time is in relation with its counter medium, leading to situations where they become equally important, carrying equal weight and interest. Every participating part is irreplaceable, essential, fully empowered, and therefore inseparable.

In my ongoing research to define Reflexive Music, I've discovered that when mediums move into this type of a reflexive relation there must be strict sets of rules, structures, scores that would allow planning, freedom while engaging in moments of perfect synchronization. In reflexive music the score and the "triggers" create these alignments of precise synchronization while at the same time require an improvisatory freedom so that the raw immediacy can be expressed as it is experienced, much as a tango is danced.

 

The result is always perceived by the audience, as a complex unity of mediums, fascinating in their inseparability and discrete power, as in a perfectly balanced conversation that leads to unforeseen conclusions. In a performance of Reflexive Music the active listeners become an inseparable reflexive counter medium and its part in the situation would re-define the experience. Everything is part of it and at the same time it is not anything.

The understanding that any western notation is an invitation for a planning not a plan is essential. Even when the music score of Beethoven's 5th Symphony may give us the impression of the plan for the music, in reality it is simple an invitation for a situation and even being full of details will always stay all about the planning and not about the plan. This is how grand interpretations are created over and over again.

 

We must understand that 4 C# music quarters, played by a flute, will never be the same even when played by the same person who just initiated them. There is always something new.  It has been told that I create traps, secret pitfalls, and places to get really lost for musicians who enter these scores. It is true that I am extremely interested in surprise - in moments that happen when someone falls hard into an unexpected music, or visual puzzle, or series of gestures."

"...A fraction of a moment in an ongoing musical quest.

 

Each composition starts as a musical seed and grows into its  

parallel visual, movement and taste elements"  

 

(Prof. L. Barshak,
Reflex Ensemble Premiere
at the Opera House, Side Stage 
Tel Aviv 1999)

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