Interweaving as Method: Collaborative Composition and Imaginative Exchange amongst Cultural Pluralities
This presentation reflects on collaborative composition as an interweaving of materials, artists, culture, and imagination. I draw on two 2026 projects: the Jogja & Melbourne Symphony Orchestra Project in Yogyakarta, and Ma-Shugorei with Tunji Beier and Takako Nishibori.
In the Jogja project, Vishnu Satyagraha and I are co-creating a work inspired by the Mahabharata and wayang kulit. In Ma-Shugorei, Japanese folk and court materials are reimagined within an ensemble of Indian and Western percussion, koto, and electronics. Rather than discrete cultural identities, I frame these as collaborations among artists fluent in layered cultural dynamics.
Using autoethnography, I trace how my assumptions and compositional choices are reshaped through collaboration. I suggest that collaboration often begins from a partial, exploratory position, marked by curiosity, wonder, and artistic instinct. As the process develops, that initial openness can be retained and intensified, allowing new musical forms to emerge.
Across these projects, I consider how composers shape form across different musical logics, how tensions and asymmetries arise, and how collaboration becomes a site of exchange. I ask how mutual curiosity creates affective conditions through which music does not simply represent identity, but actively produces it. Collaboration, in this sense, becomes both a method of composition and a way of working within interwoven cultural conditions.
Dr Thomas Green
Queensland Conservatorium, Griffith University
Thomas Green is a Brisbane-based composer, performer, producer and researcher whose work moves across contemporary classical music, electronics, improvisation and cross-cultural collaboration. He has composed or arranged music for Australian String Quartet, Sydney Symphony Orchestra, Australian National Academy of Music, Opera Queensland and Australian Youth Orchestra, and his work has been performed internationally across Europe, Asia and North America.
His 2024 work Cybernylon, performed by Karin Schaupp, won the Queensland Music Award for Contemporary Classical and Stage. He is a founding member of the experimental duo Shugorei with percussionist Nozomi Omote, whose work combines live percussion, electronics, found sound and improvisation. Shugorei presented at the Yong Siew Toh Conservatory’s Performers(') Present symposium in 2023, presenting the development of The Sounds of Chow Gar, a collaboration with Brisbane’s Chinese kung fu community, presented again at Port Fairy Spring Music Festival in 2026.
He lectures in composition, music theory and music technology at Queensland Conservatorium, Griffith University.