Reflexive Music first stepped into the world through its notation—the Reflex Invisible Score, later published in Theresa Sauer’s Notations21—and began rippling outward as I composed not just pieces, but communities across the globe. At its core, the reflexive mindset is about collecting perspectives and waking up our self-awareness through the senses. Practicing and performing this music provokes imagination, resilience, physical agility, and an entirely new trust between body and mind, opening into a profound synesthetic experience where the stimulation of one sense naturally ignites another. What began as rigorous musical research with professional musicians soon opened to non-professionals, and today belongs to anyone willing to step in.

 

In Reflexive Music, the sum becomes far greater than the odd marriage of its parts. It is an original architecture that provokes intense relationships between different mediums. While each medium guards its fierce independence, they enter into a direct, passionate dialogue with opposing and complementary forces, creating sudden, breathtaking moments of precise synchronization and cohesion. This entire approach grew out of my own synesthesia—a lifelong intertwining of hearing, taste, movement, and physical texture. The music never settles in one comfortable place; it walks directly in the InBetween. Often labeled avant-garde or interdisciplinary, it operates on a different logic than traditional mixed-media art, where one form almost always dominates the others. In the reflexive environments I build, every single form is in dialogue with itself and simultaneously in intimate relation with its counter-medium. They carry equal weight, equal risk, and equal fascination.

 

Every participating element is irreplaceable, autonomous, and inseparable. The result is what I call a Democracy of Dictators—a utopian orchestra where each player acts with a complete wholeness of mind and body, holding the capacity for both full ego and zero ego. In this democracy, the conductor is never a ruler imposing control, but an attuned guide shaping the living balance between collective expression and individual presence. Walking, stopping, aligning, breaking apart—every sound, every silence, every sudden shift carries its own necessity. It is my rhythm of Stop-Listen-Go-Stop-Listen-Go-Stop.

 

When different mediums enter this kind of reflexive tension, strict rules and structured scores do not restrict us; they give us the exact container needed to balance meticulous planning with absolute freedom. The score and its triggers create alignments of razor-sharp synchronization while demanding raw improvisatory freedom, so that immediacy can be experienced and expressed in the flesh, much like dancing a ferocious tango. In earlier pieces, I used the Earphone Click-track technique to hold this balance and generate an aware flow, serving as an invisible guide that allowed players to stay locked in collective time while remaining entirely loose and responsive inside the moment. The synesthetic dialogue became both the language of performance and the compositional method of the score itself. Sound was never isolated—it existed only in living relation to movement, texture, and presence, producing a complex unity of distinct forces meeting in a balanced conversation that leads to unforeseen conclusions.

 

This relies on understanding that Western notation is never a fixed plan—it is an Invitation for Planning. Even a score like Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, which seems carved in stone, is in reality an invitation into a situation. No matter how dense its detail, the art lives in the planning, never in the plan. That is why grand interpretations are reborn endlessly: four C-sharp quarter notes played on a flute will never sound the same twice, even when played by the exact same musician who just initiated them. People have often said that I build traps, secret pitfalls, and places to get gloriously lost inside my scores. It is true—I am endlessly interested in surprise, in what happens when someone falls hard into an unexpected sound, a visual puzzle, or an unfamiliar series of physical gestures. To walk is to be acutely aware of where you come from and where you are headed, holding both sides at once by dwelling completely in the InBetween. It is an aware flow: listening to what was, what might be arriving, and what is unfolding right now. And then—silence. A held breath. Does the audience wait, or does the audience move?

 

In Reflexive Music, the listener is never a bystander; they are an essential counter-medium. Active listeners enter the reflexive field, and their presence fundamentally redefines the piece. A shift in attention, a collective inhale, the quiet rustle of a sleeve—all of it enters the composition, whether acknowledged or not. Everything is part of it, and at the same time, not anything is part of it. At its heart, Reflexive Music is an act of infinite playfulness walking the fine wire between control and release, structure and improvisation, self and other. There is no point zero. No fixed beginning. No absolute conclusion. There is only motion, the unfolding of sound and presence, and the courage of the next step—which might land exactly where you thought, or vanish into thin air. WALK / DON’T WALK. Listen... really, really listen.