Collective

Collective is an ongoing series of large-scale compositions (70+ performers) that brings together an intergenerational mix of musicians from every corner of the New York music community. Professionals, students, teachers, and amateurs who call improvised music, jazz, classical, experimental, folk, or indie home, mingle with one another. Rather than assembling a homogeneous ensemble that rehearses with a precise goal in mind, I create musical structures that allow a temporary community to coalesce in the act of performing.

To date, three iterations of Collective have taken place: the inaugural performance takes its name from the performance date, August 26, 2024, followed by Middle Distance and Collective Delusion.

This compositional approach in these pieces, enacts a larger philosophy. One that sees composition as a form of facilitation, constructing situations in which collaborators retain their individuality while contributing to something larger. A shared collective imagination. And how beautiful it is to notice those frayed edges of collective action.

Collective has a long experimental-music lineage connected to ideas about indeterminacy, open form, graphic notation, and social composition. But what I try to focus on is a potential rub between these techniques, and more narrative forms. These two contrasting modes of thinking become especially compelling in the coordination of the piece: how people listen to one another, decide when to act, follow or resist a group tendency, make room for someone else, misunderstand an instruction, recover, and temporarily organize themselves.

A distinctive aspect of these pieces is the lack of traditional rehearsal. Pieces can be explained or rehearsed in about fifteen minutes. To some, this may seem like a practical workaround, but it is part of the composition. This does not mean that the performance is rough, and, more importantly, it is not trying to create a false equivalence between spontaneity and some sort of realness. I often encounter this stance in relation to improvisation, and I think that the imitation of surface is a dangerous byproduct of our time and worth interrogating.

I like to think that these pieces are more than just spectacle, but are conceptually quite serious. If weeks were spent rehearsing, many uncertainties would disappear. Performers would learn their own tendencies and the tendencies of those around them. Hierarchies would inevitably emerge. The difficulty of the moment would find resolution, and interpretations would stabilize.

My goal is the preservation of some of that instability. The score proposes an unusually elegant compositional problem: how to provide just enough information for strangers to cooperate without determining exactly what that cooperation will sound like.

That makes the project's relationship to experimental music much larger than just improvisation, indeterminacy, or graphic notation alone. The scores are worlds to be lived in: they establish rules, freedoms, responsibilities, boundaries, communication systems, and distributions of agency.

In essence, I guess that the Collective project, at its core, is closer to a civic act. A lot of contemporary music talks about community because musicians gather in a room. Collective actually embeds the problem of community inside the mechanics of the composition.

Collective is a statement of my artistic intent. The folding in on itself of the distinctions between composer, performer, curator, organizer, and host. Composing then, is the organizing of people; organizing people means constructing a social situation; and the social situation is the music.