Output details

Letter Pieces 2-8

Research content/process:

Combining physical actions, text and sound, Letter Pieces are a series of performance works that have received over seventy performances by various groups across music, performance and dance contexts in Asia, Australasia, Europe, and North America. Letter Pieces engage the post-war tradition of ‘open scores’ advanced by composers such as John Cage, Pauline Oliveros and John Zorn, where important aspects of the score are left open, requiring performers to make creative decisions beyond the conventional understanding of ‘interpretation’. Letter Pieces propose a collaborative model where performers determine key elements in fashioning their version of a piece. Each score positions a small number of physical actions and sound objects in a fixed order and they are called Letter Pieces because the scores use letters to represent these sounds and actions. The content (the specific sounds and actions) are left to the performers to create within a prescribed conceptual framework. Two performances of a given work will share an underlying organisation, but are likely to be entirely unrelated in terms of the content, posing questions about the relationship between structure and surface and whether in perceptual terms a ‘change of surface’ leads to a ‘change of structure’. Letter Pieces also engage interdisciplinary concepts and cross-arts dialogues through investigating perceptual relationships between physical movement and sound. Examples of this include: coupling one physical action with different sound-events (and vice versa); shifting the degree of synchronisation between a physical action and an attendant sound-event; and, shifting between perception of the isolated action/sound-event and sequences of actions/sound-events that form larger perceptual units and composite meanings. The works also contribute to the establishing of an interdisciplinary performance practice, where musicians incorporate and develop skill sets from other art practices.