Circular composition method - creative strategies in an open and multitemporal expression

In collaboration with Sven Dam Meinild, Richard Andersson and Peter Bruun, composer and trumpeter Tomasz Dabrowski explores and challenges the boundaries between improvisation and composition through the creation of a new cohesive work. The focal point of the creative process is a circular compositional method that makes it possible to write a work that in its substance, form and expression incorporates a collective and conversation-based writing process.

Without taking into account instrument-specific needs, Tomasz Dabrowski and Sven Dam Meinild write 10 cells that enable the use of a broad temporal perspective, i.e. the use of multiple tempos simultaneously, individual tempo changes, peripheral rhythms, breathing etc. The cells will largely take the form of musical structures such as note lengths, intervals, tone series. Then, in collaboration with Richard Andersson and Peter Bruun, this basic material is explored in order to interpret it in an instrument-specific way. Through an interaction between conversations, interviews and rehearsing the 10 cells, the four musicians focus on how the musical information from the cells creates new questions and what choices they each make in the process. The project focuses primarily on the multitemporal as a starting point for musical structures, but the resulting reflection and communication will also include more general strategies for working with musical structures, such as tempi, intervals, tone rows etc. in a circular and open composition process.

Based on the conversations and the resulting rehearsal of the music, new combinations of the shared material emerge and are thus explored and expanded. These new groupings of cells are combined into a larger, but still open form. The musicians then reflect on the process through group conversations to identify the movement of information from composer to musician and musician to composer. Here, the focus is on the transfer of the information contained in the composed structures to the instrument-specific and individual interpretive practices of each musician. The aim is to inform, qualify and further develop the composed structures and the open form. This uncovers various connections between the open form and the written material and, based on this, identify and develop one or more methods for working with the interaction between musical content and form.