We inhabit today a dystopia that our authors, filmmakers, philosophers and economists conceived and imagined more than a century ago. From this present moment, each of us seeks to draw meaning, a path, lessons or values.

The composer’s craft is, above all, the creation of a musical gesture and a musical language. It is also the act of carrying projects and structures. It is within this second dimension of my practice that I have sought to build projects whose primary value would be one of sharing. How does one inscribe the composer’s gesture within contemporary society? How does one embody, through one’s own actions, a world increasingly divided between the analogue and the digital? Drawing inspiration as much from the joy of encountering the other as from movements such as Arte Povera, I propose five guiding principles for inhabiting this world as a composer:

1. The artist as “an active link” in the reconstruction of social bonds

2. Instrumental music and abstract art as forms of resistance against the abandonment of the imagination

3. The construction of contemporary representations within artistic narratives

4. The re-visibilisation of craft knowledge, production chains, and materials

5. The invitation to sourcing as an act of vigilance; the reconditioned and second-hand as possible responses

My urgency as a composer is to live a gesture that is made collectively.

1 / The Composer as an active link in the Reconstruction of Social Bonds

It seems to me that within the dystopia we inhabit, the first act of resistance — the first response we can offer — is connection. Where David Bohm had already remarked upon the fragmentation of our world, we now move toward the construction of narcissistic islands drifting in isolation toward their own dissolution. We need to speak to one another; to experience a shared existence. In this, the composer has a role to play. To build projects that bring people and communities closer together around subjects meaningful to them is essential to the construction of an emotional and organic whole. Musical composition can serve as testimony, just as performance can serve as the function of making together. By engaging with social and medical institutions — hospitals among them — and by contributing to a collective artistic gesture, the composer inscribes herself more than ever within the civic sphere and within the fabric of social bonds.

David Bohm — Fragmentation and Wholeness, 1985

2 / Instrumental Music and Abstract Art as Forms of Resistance Against the Abandonment of the Imagination

Religion and industrialisation were once the great catalysts of human imagination. While the individual’s imagination has always been shaped by the collective and while it is also through the work of imagining that a culture constructs itself, through beliefs and spiritual systems — the imagination of the contemporary individual has never been so relentlessly solicited, exhausted, and directed as it has been since the digital age. From the film industry, which functioned as an instrument of mass cultural propagation, to the smartphone industry, we have colonised what has been called “available brain time,” ensuring that men, women and children are no longer left unsupervised within their own imaginative space. The imagination must be directed toward a product — to such a degree that we no longer know how to be autonomous; to such a degree that, as Günther Anders observed, we have become the product of our own products.

In a desire to contribute to the reconstruction of a more personal imagination, and to see the individual reclaim possession of herself, I offer my contribution in the form of listening and writing workshops.

The exercise consists of listening to a piece of instrumental music — without lyrics to guide the imagination — and constructing, through writing, a conscious personal imaginary or projection. In the same spirit, I propose workshops centred on abstract art and the written articulation of one’s own personal response to it.

3 / The Construction of Contemporary Representations within Artistic Narratives

While definitions of our contemporary moment are abundant, I will confine myself here to the observation that a contemporary world may be read as a tension between the present, the past and the future — a tension we experience today with far greater intensity than in preceding decades. Like many others, I feel compelled to reposition myself in relation to certain traditions: to shift perspective with regard to patriarchal structures, for instance, which lie at the heart of so many things. What interests me here is how art can contribute to this shift in paradigm; how the composer can participate in the creation of new representations.

It has long been established that the Western world was built for and by the dominant white male, so that he might flourish within it and realise himself to the fullest. This structural reality frames an entire body of cultural production — the figure of the hero, for example. The hero constructed by earlier Western societies mirrors its dominant subject, functioning at once as a validation and crystallisation of its values. From Superman to the multimillionaire Batman, from the Cowboy to the Explorer, these images map the contours of a system of values and implicit assumptions — capitalism, colonialism, industrialisation, patriarchy — that merit urgent re-examination in the light of our contemporary society.

New narratives must attach themselves to new models: celebrating a nature that is not merely a site of resource extraction; proposing historical figures drawn from diverse horizons; or simply turning to the body of work that women have constructed across the centuries. It falls to art and to the artist to propose subjects, images and imaginaries that illuminate and give value to stories, figures, facts and ideas that find their place outside of what has, until now, been predominantly represented. As a composer, I propose that we draw inspiration from new images in our work, and that our projects unfold within new group dynamics — ones in which leadership is not autocratic.

4 / The Re-visibilisation of Craft Knowledge, Production Chains and Materials

Among the many factors driving contemporary fragmentation, digitalisation, robotisation, accelerationism and the ever more pervasive logic of programmed obsolescence stand as self-evident forces. This generalised fragmentation renders invisible a growing number of skills essential to production chains across every sector. Knowledge and understanding of the other’s gesture become invisible — and then disappear entirely — because we are no longer confronted with them.

As a composer, I propose to build actions that foreground the individuals who have participated in a project and whose contributions were necessary for it to come into being, through a practice of traceability that includes:

• Rehabilitating the concert programme, in which every person who participated in the project is credited in full.

• Organising round tables and public discussions with members of the production chain — extending from composition to live performance — to illuminate each person’s role, as well as their impact on the final gesture.

• The construction of an index that underscores how many individuals contributed to the project.

5 / The Invitation to Sourcing as an Act of Vigilance; the Second-Hand and the Reconditioned as Possible Responses

It seems to me evident today that the invitation to rethink our world and to inhabit it differently is, if not desirable, at least necessary. Within the projects we build, a vigilance toward oneself becomes a contemporary gesture: • The traceability of objects

• The use of second-hand materials wherever possible

• The creation of shared “library parks” of objects necessary to live performance and music production

• The enumeration, within the final programme, of the choices that were made Ultimately, all of this expresses above all a desire for a shared existence — for dialogue and for action that will extend beyond my own individual scale. Alice Orpheus