The Doll's House with A Game of You - for an improvising ensemble, fixed media and video score

This [zygote] piece was commissioned by ensemble notes inegales for their 'tableaux vivants' programme (feat. works by international artists Christian Marclay, Peter Wiegold and Michael Young) and the call to explore “a radical new way of communicating music through the use of live ‘animated’ scores and projected visuals” and to delve “into the relationship between computer and performer with scores that evolve on screens as the players interpret them” (tableaux vivants, 2012). It is a collaborative piece with equal contribution from all.

The work is devised with two interrelated pieces, to be performed simultaneously: A Game of You is for an indeterminate number of instrumentalists, following an animated score, where the pages of a ‘fixed’ score slowly, fluidly merge into one another; The Dollʼs House is a piece for fixed media, to be performed alongside A Game of You, providing the players, with aural materials to suggest and inform their reading of the score., The output extends the socio-political and compositional research themes of the suburban ‘home’ and the utilisation of multiple media layers and perspectives, as explored in the soundtrack to Proto-Type Theatre’s Virtuoso (working title) (2009). The use of animated score was first explored by [zygote] and York in The Slide Show Secret (Eva Zöllner and John Eckhardt) commissioned complicity simplex (2010-11). The works share the employment of nomadology (Deleuze&Guattari, 1980) and dromology (Virilio, 1977), and the application of the ‘shortest’ possible method, or a line of flight (Michel Serres, 2009), in the sculpting/production of sonic materials (incl. score writing and interpretation). The concepts and their application (reading) become manifest in the audio-visual output, the (political/virtual) framework and (actual) processes of composition, improvisation, interaction and the performances themselves.