A Body Not Bound By The Same Limitations

A Body Not Bound… was commissioned by Ensemble Proton Bern for the 12th edition of their Protonwerk series. The theme of the 12th edition was audience participation, and composers from around the world were invited to submit a proposal for the project. For my piece, eight audience members were invited to provide their pulses which were tracked through stand-alone, Arduino-powered PPG (Photoplethysmographic) circuits and converted into red flashing lights. Each audience member was assigned to a musician of the ensemble, who used the pulse of the audience participant to guide their performance in lieu of another timekeeping device.

As a result of this architecture, a strong co-dependency is established between audience and musicians; without the musicians there would be no performance but without the participants they would not be able to perform. The subtle variations between each of the pulse rates means that no two performances of this piece can ever be the same, with many different factors affecting the performance such as the audience’s age, health or emotional state.

The score is comprised of 8 very simple, asynchronous parts which explore discrete, pointillistic elements, allowing for the influence of the participants to impact the performance as clearly as possible. The piece follows a rough canonic form, meaning that any biological fluctuations in one audience member’s pulse can impact the entire form of the piece.

The piece was premiered in Bern and later performed in Basel. I would like to extend my heartiest thanks to the phenomenally open-minded and passionate musicians of Proton for their enthusiasm in realising this project, dramaturge Daneilla Strasfogel for her key role in bringing both projects to fruition, and my thanks to Peter Adriaansz, Richard Barrett and Hidde Kramer for their insight and contributions to the creation of this piece.