Transient: Creative Affordances of Recontextualized Musical Elements in Transcultural Composition, Improvisation and Performance

This interdisciplinary artistic research (Hannula et al., 2014) aims to create a methodology for the composition and performance of music that challenges representational cultural in-group/out-group dichotomies, perhaps being fully representational only of itself. By revealing the challenges and creative potential of negotiating and integrating culturally diverse perspectives, the research seeks to stimulate and innovate new discoveries and forms of expression.

Drawing from the fields of music theory, musicology, psychology of perception, anthropology and acoustemology, it takes as its model and frame of reference the position of third culture individuals (Useem & Downie, 1976;  Moore & Barker, 2012) whose idiosyncratic cultural hybridity (Bhabha, 1988, 1994) defies and arguably transcends in-group/out-group binaries, and looks for its musical corollary by examining affordance theory (Gibson, 1979/2014), cultural fusion theory (Kramer, 2019) and modular theory (Tenney, 1988) and their applications to the recontextualization of musical elements related to my autobiographical environments: Levantine and khaliji Arabic art and folk music, Zanzibari taarab, jazz, and European and American art and popular music.

Proficiency will be demonstrated through one concert tour, one solo concert and one album-length recording of composed and improvised new music and a monograph-form written thesis aiming to provoke a re-examination of notions of representation and provide tools for composer-performers positioned between cultures.

Jussi Reijonen is a doctoral student in the Research Study Programme at the MuTri doctoral school.

Keywords: transculturality, music composition, music performance, affordance theory, representation, acoustemology