Composing Situation: An approach for understanding and repeating a musical practice

Abstract

This paper is about finding relationships within my own composition process, how these relate to my relationships with the world around me, and how these impact the music that I make. In this paper I will touch on how my work has been influenced by psychogeography, making music about locations, and my experiences working in community arts. I will discuss my influences from the work Situationists International and later psychogeographic explorations, the community art world in Toronto, discussing how they have influenced my composition process and how the relationships between people, places, and sound play into the music that I compose, and the musical worldviews that helped me shape these influences into my own work. I will further explore, specifically, a part of my process which involves the setting up of situations in which music occurs as part of my compositional practice, discussing how the situation in which music is being made impacts that music, and how the music can impact the situation, finding reciprocity within these musical relationships.