Abstract
In this paper I discuss two collections of pieces that illustrate my commitment to practices of re-working. These pieces join a well established tradition of such practices in composition ranging across art and popular musics (from Kurtag to Dylan) and across artistic disciplines (for example the ‘rep and rev’ techniques of playwright Suzan Lori Parks, the choreographic recreations of William Forsythe and the cinematic re-make). The two collections I propose to discuss (originating in the pieces Divertissements and Dance Maze) are united by their relatively distant historical origins (roughly 18 and 27 years ago) but differentiated by method - whilst the re-working of Divertissements was relatively ‘self-contained’, the latest version of Dance Maze was re-worked by establishing a relationship with music by another composer (Tom Johnson in this case).
My paper will focus less on the how and more on the why of re-working. I will posit re-working as a fruitful creative strategy, perhaps particularly amendable to the chart/matrix-based procedures of post-serial composition as musicology on Boulez (Salem 2014) and Maxwell Davies (McGregor 2010) attests. I will also discuss re-working as a means to buttress the sense of self in relation to the world around us and the waxing and waning of confidence, taking my cue from choreographer Jonathan Burrows’ (2015) claim that any repetition of our own history is an attempt to make sense of the past at the same time as stabilising the future - an ultimately unattainable goal. My method may be described as ‘automusicological’; through the careful scrutiny of my compositional documentation I aim to contribute a convincing case study of a composer’s engagement with their own past.