Changing the System

Changing the System is a 55 minute video documentary exploring the rehearsal process of a group of musicians preparing a performance of Christian Wolff’s open-scored composition of the same name from 1973. The documentary focuses on the particular way in which, in the rehearsal process of a piece of music, the distance between the score and actual performance is covered.

Changing the System contributes 1. to the understanding of the dialogical relation between performance and composition (c.f. Bruce Ellis Benson, The Improvisation of Musical Dialogue, 2003), 2. to the understanding of the potential of documentary as an exploration of such practices and processes, 3. to the development of dialogical method in documentary filmmaking, which I have also theorised in my PhD dissertation (Seeing Connections, 2007).

Dal Niente, who put on the concert series this performance was to be part of, are a leading organiser of concerts of avant-garde modern music in Britain. The video includes interviews with Michael Parsons, Dave Smith (University of Hertfordshire), Ian Mitchell (University of Exeter) and Dave Ryan (Anglia Ruskin University)—leading musicians in the field.

Current Research

In my own practice and in my work as a theorist I am interested in the variety and nature of different contexts that our practices generally take place within - our aesthetic, economic, domestic etc practices. I seek to address this primarily through paying attention to the dimension of social practice that Mikhail Bakhtin called 'dialogic'. This term designates the implicit tensions and affinities between different social groups - in their values, interests and ways of life, etc. - which animate actual encounters or dialogues between particular individuals.

In my theoretical and practical work I seek to foreground such tensions within 'enunciative' practices, i.e., those in which an artefact is presented to an audience within a certain context and is thus charged with a specific form of significance. Currently I am particularly interested in the relation between 'rehearsal' and 'performance'. I have been exploring this in a documentary about musicians' rehearsal processes, and in interviews with artists and other practitioners whose work that touches on this issue.