And you ghosts rise blue: A Methodology for Composing Art and Community Using Scores, Contemporary Performance Practices, and Voices from the Past

Abstract

This thesis proposes a compositional methodology that draws on scores, contemporary performance practices, and poetics from Western experimental art history as source material for new artistic work. The source material is organized within a matrix of relationality that becomes a site for the scores and poetic voices to interact and transform. This matrix is then activated as a creative scaffold for interdisciplinary, collaborative composition. Research for this thesis was approached via the theoretical development of the proposed methodology and its embodied application towards the composition of an experimental opera, And you ghosts rise blue, which explored summoning voices from the matrix as im/material ghosts able to communicate across life and death, the unreal and the real, and past, present, and alternate time-spaces. The composition of And you ghosts rise blue was accompanied by the creation of the Reader – an archive of the specific scores, theories, and poetics from the matrix that shaped the opera. This thesis ultimately suggests that a compositional methodology centered around multiplicity, communication, embodiment, and agency has the potential to ethically wield creative tools for navigating and composing language, community, systems of power, and time and space.