Clash collaboration : multifaceted disparateness facilitating fractures and fusions in musical composition and improvisation

Abstract

My work centres around 'Clash Collaboration', which is a term I coined to describe the deliberate engagement with, and inclusion of, collaborators, musical influences, traditions, cultures, ideas, practices, and art mediums that are of a disparate nature to my own. This kind of interdisciplinary, intercultural, and cross-genre engagement facilitates multifaceted fractures within my artistry, as well as within these disparate elements, which in turn leads to what I consider to be new, hybrid fusions and unexplored sonic territories. Within my research and practice, as it relates to 'Clash Collaboration', my primary source of disparateness has been my inclusion of specific East Asian musical traditions, instruments, collaborators, philosophies, and architectural concepts, with a predominant focus on Japanese aesthetics. Another source of disparateness and disruption I employed was involving creatives of differing artistic mediums, to explore the trans-sensory communication and translation of meaning through different artforms, specifically through poetry, painting, and film. My primary drive for such a creative pursuit was born out of a desire to creatively expand both as a musician and a composer, through an identification of my repetitive and non-generative patterns and the need to disrupt them to continue evolving as an artist, but also through a desire to broaden my musical education and understanding of different musical cultures, traditions, and compositional methods. My love for improvisation has strong intersections with aspects of East Asian thought, the specifics of which I will unfold in the following chapters, and this provided me with a logical direction for my research. I feel it is important to state that I have aimed to engage with these traditions, cultures and collaborators in a way that is both respectful and mutually beneficial, through personal engagement (such as travel, experience, and personal relationships with collaborators), active research, musical practice and an attitude of openness and inclusiveness. In my experience, such collaborations in these negotiated spaces of mutual respect facilitate mutual fracture, leading to sonic outcomes that present exciting, new, blended territories of intercultural hybridity, with their own unique meanings, collective identities and contexts that are specific to the intricate complexes of each creative project.

Date of Award	2021
Original language	English