IVE MUSIC
IVE LISTENING
IVE COMMUNICATION
REFLEXIVE
Music
"...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 Premiereat the Opera House, Side Stage Tel Aviv 1999)
Reflexive Music is the music I compose through relationships between sound and other forms of expression. A movement, a visual event, a spoken phrase, or a change of light can have its own line in the composition. I am interested in how these lines meet, affect one another, and remain distinct within the whole.
My experience of synesthesia brings together taste, hearing, and textures. When composing, I began writing scores that could help performers engage with relationships that felt natural to me. This required finding ways to notate what I was composing and developing the listening needed to perform it. In 2009, my Reflex Invisible Score was included in Theresa Sauer’s Notations 21, a collection exploring contemporary approaches to musical notation. See: Reflex Invisible Score
The musical questions have taken many forms. For example in Subito-Cello, first performed in Amsterdam in 1994, a live cello enters a dialogue with a soundtrack of an electronically transformed cello. The performer encounters another realization of the instrument while continuing to play. The relationship between the two is part of the composition.
I am fascinated by what happens to a score (a music notation) when it is performed. Different musicians bring different interpretations, and even the same musician never performs a composition in exactly the same way. I call a score a “Plan for Planning.” Its notation gives us something precise to work with, while its realization asks us to keep listening and making decisions as we play in the moment.
This is where reflexiveness enters the music. What I play changes what I hear, and what I hear affects how I continue. The other performers enter this relationship, together with the audience, the hall, and the surrounding environment. Internal and external listening continually shape one another: what happens around me changes what I perceive within myself, and how I respond changes what happens around me. Through these relations, the inbetween comes alive. Each performer participates in a composition whose unfolding also changes the conditions of their own performance.
An orchestra gives me a useful image for this. Each musician holds a personal interpretation while attending to the conductor and to the other parts. For the performer, this is a polyphonic experience: sustaining one’s own line while listening to several others, moving between the particular voice one is playing and the whole taking shape. The other lines affect how I hear my own, how I phrase it, and how I continue. The conductor participates in this same movement, holding a sense of the whole while responding to what the musicians are producing.
I call this a “Democracy of Dictators.” My inspiration comes from the Roman republican meaning of dictator: a magistrate entrusted with extraordinary authority for a particular task or emergency, expected to relinquish that authority when the task was complete. The exceptional possibility of two dictators serving at the same time with different responsibilities inspired this image of several individual authorities participating in a shared whole. I carry it into music, where each performer takes responsibility for a distinct voice, with the capacity to lead and the flexibility to follow another line. The conductor works with the changing relations among them, guiding the whole while remaining responsive to the voices shaping it.
With the REFLEX Ensemble, founded in 1999, these questions became a continuing collaboration among musicians and artists working through different media. The compositions gave us ways to explore how sound, physical action, visual material, and the conditions of performance could be organized together.
An Operagame is the largest-scale Reflexive Music composition, carrying these questions beyond the concert hall. The composition extends to a whole community: students and staff, neighbors, audiences, and passers-by become performers, and cafeterias, streets, and theaters become the stage. Its structure moves through the recursive process of FIND – PLAY – SHARE – CREATE, crossing the I–YOU–WE–WORLD perspectives, so each person brings their own line while the community composes the whole. Cues and tasks reach the performers through earphones, light, and video, and the relations among them become the music.
Performing this music asks us to move between our own line and the larger composition, sensing the big picture while being able to perform the present. I began calling the listening this requires Reflexive Listening.
Synesthesia
Is often described as a sensory experience or concept automatically and involuntarily evoking an additional perceptual experience—for example, hearing a sound calls up a color, or a taste evokes a shape. These connections are personal and typically consistent over time.
Yet in lived experience, this need not feel like a sequential chain reaction. It can be an immediate, cross-sensory reality in which different perceptual qualities feel present together. Sound, color, texture, taste, or spatial qualities may coexist as connected aspects of a single experience, with the particular combinations differing between individuals.
Spector and Maurer (2009) propose that synesthesia may reflect the persistence or amplification of connections present early in life that become reduced or inhibited during development. This developmental hypothesis suggests continuity between synesthesia and sensory connections found more broadly in human perception; it does not establish that we all begin life experiencing synesthesia.
Work by Michael Haverkamp (2009) explores how relationships among the senses contribute to perception and can inform multisensory design, while distinguishing synesthesia from other forms of cross-sensory connection. Attending to synesthesia as a lived experience in which perceptual qualities can feel immediately present together invites us to expand our expressive vocabulary—and to explore how relationships among sound, color, texture, taste, movement, and bodily sensation might inform creativity, communication, and education.