"Why don't you just write an article?":
Reflecting on Composing Complex Music with Socially Engaged Texts

The question I want to explore in different ways in my works is how we function together. What strategies do we have for interaction in a time the sociologist Richard Sennett describes as characterized by a late capitalism that, rather than building character, reduces our ability to solve things together? Sennett’s books Corrosion of Character and Together are interesting analyses of the influence of the great social machine right down to the individual’s ability to see and be with others, questioning whether the market and cultural commerce's false representation of us as sovereign, individual consumers and “experiencers” of the world only confuses people and makes us believe that we don't have to develop our abilities in interaction and togetherness.

This is the background for the works Together, Public Behaviour and Social Behaviour. All pieces are the result of compositional processes where the semantic meaning and the musical material is brought together by mélange, contradiction, polyphony, mimesis and instrumentation. The musical expression and the reflections on the lack of attention, togetherness, cooperation, listening, the rise in aggression, mimetic envy and other topics are composed together in both musical forms and theatrical outcries.

But does this really work? Is the content and concepts of the sociological and philosophical texts possible to perceive when brought into a musical works with complex instrumental structures and vocal expressions? Does it communicate, and if it does, what does it communicate? Is there a possibility of a unique mélange of musical expression/emotion and rational/analytic semantic meaning, or will the layers of semantic and musical meaning become too dense to make any sense? These questions will be raised through presenting audio recordings and videos of the three works.