Compositions for Belonging
-a maturation project
The development project Compositions for Belonging formed the foundation for this work, exploring how compositional frameworks could facilitate shared musical reflection and embodied connection. The maturation process led to a wish for a deeper and more comprehensive investigation into the topologies of belonging. The term topology is chosen deliberately: it points to a way of thinking that concerns plasticity, elasticity, and relations rather than fixed structures. In this context, it reflects the project’s central question — how musical form can remain flexible, relational, and open to transformation through engagement
The Compositions The project includes four compositions that aim to create a plastic framework—a flexible field where the music only truly emerges when the compositions are placed in relation to one another, each from the individual perspective of the performers. All pieces are grounded in metric multiplicity, allowing several temporal and rhythmic layers to coexist and interact. In a longer-term investigation, new and more perceptual tools will be developed to stage compositional elements in fluid and shifting relations, expanding the field of musical reflection and shared experience.
The Pendulum One of the central experiments involved the use of a pendulum — both as a generator of compositional material and as a compositional element in itself, functioning like an analog sequencer. The pendulum became a source of reflection on aesthetic meaning-making, where the aesthetic is not merely decorative but rooted in the musical narrative itself. Here, gravity served as both a compositional and conceptual point of orientation: as a physical force, a metaphor for tension and release, and as a dynamic field between multiple temporalities — suggesting several perceptual “dimensions” of gravity. In the piece Strange Tools, for example, the rhythmic design is animated by the pendulum’s energetic states — base, axis, apex, gravity, and levity. The rhythmic foundation and “centers of gravity” are described through two notions: noise (the full underlying rhythmic grid) and relation (the approximated, perceived pulse that shifts throughout the piece). These ideas are inspired by Alva Noë’s understanding of perception as an enactive process — not passive reception, but something we do. For Noë, perception unfolds as an active exploration of the indeterminate richness of perceptual experience that becomes structured through engagement. In this project, the idea of “pushing against the noise” serves as an artistic translation of that principle
