jwilzewske: bielawa

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Saturday, February 7, 2009

Ambient-Aleatoric Representation: Lisa Bielawa’s ‘Chance Encounter’

I s such musical representation ‘depiction’? Is the listener to imagine perceiving a struggle, [or a lover’s kiss]? The mode of perception may be indeterminate. It need not be fictional that it is, for example, by a combination of introspection, kinesthetic sensation, and vision that one perceives the struggle (one’s own), nor that one merely sees and hears it occurring (a struggle among others). It might still be fictional that in some manner or other one does perceive the struggle. One has a sense of it occurring here and now…
— Kendall Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe, p. 341.

I f you happen to be in New York next Friday, on Valentine’s Eve, you might like to go to the Whitney Museum of American Art (945 Madison Ave at 75th Street), to hear Knights Chamber Orchestra and soprano Susan Narucki perform Lisa Bielawa’s composition, ‘Chance Encounter’. The event is Friday, February 13, with two performances, one at 6:50 pm and the other at 8:05 pm. It’s free with admission to the Whitney under their ‘pay-what-you-wish’ policy on Fridays. No tickets or reservations are required.

C hance Encounter’ is a 35-minute piece in, and about, transient public space with texts overheard in transient, public spaces. Susan Narucki and 12 instrumentalists converge and diverge, one or several at a time, in the context of a public space that contains whatever [transient] objects and [transient] occupants (including you, if you attend) as it may—plus whatever occurrences and ambient environmental sounds arise spontaneously in the space during the performance. Susan will sing songs and arias constructed of extemporaneous utterances that were collected in transient public spaces. The interaction of these vocal utterances/sung texts and the instrumental parts amounts to a re-enactment of a private (yet collective) experience of the then-current performance space itself— as well as a meta-enactment of the original eavesdropped utterances (texts) and spaces. The effect is an exciting, haptically-rich chamber music experience—new and different each time it is performed.

I don’t do anything to it – it just comes out like this.
I’m trying to catch my breath.
I hope they know what they’re doing.
I found a place where we can sit together…
— Lisa Bielawa and Susan Narucki, text excerpt from ‘Chance Encounter’, ambient remarks, overheard in a public space.

C ontinuing my thread on intertextuality and representation from the previous CMT post, I want to suggest that even a composition like ‘Chance Encounter’ can be considered ‘representational’. At least it would be if we agree with the analysis of philosopher Kendall Walton.

F ictional representation’ would point clearly to the exclusion of non-fiction. But I resist the implication that [the category we shall discuss] is a species of a larger class of ‘representations’ … ‘Mimesis’, with its distinguished history, can be understood to correspond roughly to ‘representation’ in my sense … but I disavow any implied commitment either to a ‘picture theory’ of language (or ‘symbols’) or a ‘correspondence theory’ of truth, or to an ‘imitation theory’ of depiction.
— Kendall Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe, p. 3.

T ransient, stochastic, ambient qualities don’t get explicit treatment in Walton’s book, ‘Mimesis’. But some of the examples he uses to illustrate some of his arguments do have those qualities. Just have to extrapolate a little bit; read between the lines.

I f a piece of music is ambient and aleatoric, it’s impossible to ‘know the piece well’ in Walton’s sense. The stochastic performance-time indirection inherent in transient configurations of listeners and passers-by in the performance space preempts listeners’ forming any expectations—other than maybe expecting nothing in particular, or expecting, say, to be surprised by unpredictable rhythmic and harmonic/timbral textures and chance interactions between the text and the music. Lisa and the chamber artists place you in a state of persistent anticipation and collaborative mimesis ...

A ny ‘non-figurative’ or ‘non-objective’ painting that is to be seen in some figure-ground will qualify [as representational]. So, probably, will any design making use of what Gestalt psychologists call ‘closure’: such a design will mandate our imagining a square, for example, when it contains only hints of one. Jackson Pollock’s dripped and splashed paintings may turn out to generate fictional truths about [the processes of--] dripping and splashing. Most or even all music will likely have to be considered representational, for analogous reasons.
— Kendall Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe, p. 56.

C hance Encounter’ was co-conceived by Lisa with Susan Narucki. Lisa composed the piece for Susan and the New York-based Knights Chamber Orchestra. The overheard texts that were selected and transcribed may be ‘found’ objects, but they’re not ‘random’ ones—and their orchestration isn’t mechanical or haphazard or chaotic; they were selected in such a way so as to be capable of forming a coherent narrative arc and being emotionally parsed—by first-time participants/listeners as well as by those who have prior acquaintance with the work. The conceit is a non-figurative ‘ambience and transience as inescapable elements of the human condition’ that acknowledges and includes the space and the ad hoc, transient listeners and passers-by as quasi-performers.

B ut Bielawa clearly had a specific, coherent vision—one that’s beautifully and ably rendered here, with apt, if variable, emotional impact on virtually everyone present. The personnel for any particular performance can change; the sequence and timing can change; the ambient sounds are different each time; the visual and acoustic elements of the performance space are different each time—and all this ‘run-time indirection’ contributes to the representation ... of the human impossibility of mastering or controlling or insuring or preventing any aspect of life, or death. Linguists might term Lisa’s compositional grammar in this piece ‘agglutinative’, because of the multiple [transient] affixes/morphemes per phrase ...

A central thesis of Leonard Meyer’s ‘Emotion and Meaning in Music’ is that ‘affect or emotion is aroused when an expectation—a tendency to respond—activated by the musical stimulus, is temporarily inhibited or permanently blocked.’ (p. 31) The appreciation of music derives largely, he claims, from frustrations of expectations about how the music will proceed. In the case of a deceptive cadence, listeners expect the tonic to follow the dominant, and they experience ‘affect’ when it does not. This may be an accurate description of the experience of the first-time listener, but what about the listener who knows the piece well? … It is fictional that the listener expects the tonic, regardless of what she actually expects, and it is fictional that she is surprised to hear the submediant or whatever occurs instead. This makes music a ‘prop’ in a game of make-believe and, hence, representational in our sense, in much the way that non-figurative painting is representational.
— Kendall Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe, p. 262.

T he piece is nominally ‘in and about transient public space’, as Lisa puts it in her program notes. But it’s also and more deeply about our relationships with each other and with the world. The effect you experience when immersed in a performance of ‘Chance Encounter’ is one of intense ‘expectancy’. It does have a ‘beginning’, a ‘middle’, and an ‘end’. It is possible, were ‘Chance Encounter’ extended to several hours or more in length—like an ultra-long Morton Feldman or John Cage or Karlheinz Stockhausen experiment (instead of Chance Encounter’s 35 minutes, as-composed)—that the effect would wear off, or that the narrative arc would be lost—or that the cognitive and attentional demands, becoming after awhile unsustainable, would cause our emotional response to mutate and the meaning of the piece to shift.

B ut, as-composed, ‘Chance Encounter’ is just the right length—poignant, amusing, thought-provoking, uplifting, satisfyingly listenable. It precipitates something of a ‘tikkun olam’ / ‘repair the broken world, one shard at a time’ / ‘if not us, who? if not now, when?’ sizzle in the audience. The displacement of classically-trained musicians, out of venerable-dear-ossified concert halls and into up-close contact with broader society with more socioeconomic and ethnic diversity, like chamber music in bars or like some of what Greg Sandow exhorts us to do, to make serious music more vibrant and accessible.

I n Haydn’s String Quartet ‘The Bird’, op. 32, it is fictional that one hears the chirping of birds… A ‘depiction’, then, is a representation whose function is to serve as a ‘prop’ in rich and vivid perceptual games of make-believe.
— Kendall Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe, p. 296.

W hen music is representational, is it [necessarily] ‘depictive’? Music and painting appear to be alike in being ‘perceptual’ arts, in contrast to literature… If music is a perceptual art, won’t musical works [always] be ‘props’ in perceptual games? The answer is, often not… In the case of much ‘expressive’ music, it may be fictional not that one sees or hears or otherwise perceives external things, but that one experiences or is aware of (one’s own) feelings or emotions or sensations or sentiments or moods. The listener imagines experiencing excitement, passion, fervor, … It may be fictional of one’s actual awareness of auditory sensations that it is an awareness of such feelings. In place of fictional perception of external objects, then, we have fictional introspection or fictional self-awareness. If I am right, this is likely to be true even of such stalwarts of musical purity as Bach’s ‘Art of the Fugue’. And to whatever extent introspection is analogous to the ‘external’, it will be reasonable to expand our understanding of ‘depiction’ to include this.
— Kendall Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe, p. 334.

susan narucki, soprano
kyle armbrust, viola
mike atkinson, horn
christina courtin, violin
gareth flowers, trumpet
josh frank, trumpet
adam hollander, oboe
colin jacobsen, violin
eric jacobsen, cello
stephen menotti, trombone
alex sopp, flute
lance suzuki, flute.

Y ou can get a sense of the beauty of the indeterminacy that Lisa and her collaborators achieve by looking at this segment of ‘Chance Encounters’ from a 2007 performance, on YouTube:

Performing Bielawa ‘Chance Encounter’, East Broadway, NYC

G ame worlds are paramount in music in a way that they are not in painting. The music still qualifies as representational in our sense: its function is to serve as a ‘prop’ in the listeners’ [introspective fictions and] games. … Listening to music [and performing it--] is thus more like dreaming; one’s imaginative activity is largely solitary [even when it is done in the company of others]. You and I will not, fictionally, notice or learn about something and later compare … when we attend a concert together, we might explain to each other what fictionally we feel; this is like telling our dreams to each other at breakfast. And it can be fictional that we compare notes on what we feel when we hear [perform] the music. But we cannot fictionally compare what we feel about such-and-such a mutually observed event or situation or person. We end up talking about the music, rather than participating verbally together in a game of make-believe using the music as a prop.
— Kendall Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe, p. 337.

C hance Encounter’ songs and arias are made up entirely of speech overheard in transient public spaces including airports, sidewalks, streets, parks, cafes, buses and the subway. Bielawa blogged about her ‘eavesdropping existence’ during the period when she was composing ‘Chance Encounter’. You can read her blog here.

M usical depictions are ‘weak’ in point-of-view [compared to paintings or literature]. When sounds are depicted, very little is fictional, usually, with respect to the angle and distance… When it is fictional of the listener that she hears in the musical motifs a brook gurgling, is it fictional that she hears it from upstream or downstream, from the side or from above, from near or from afar?
— Kendall Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe, p. 340.

Y es, there is the composer’s/eavesdropper’s viewpoint—the issue of privacy. But it is not at all like capturing ‘found sound’ waveforms in the field, and then reproducing them in some mash-up, like some composers of electroacoustic would do. Nor is it like representational art that generifies and refers to extraneous utterances of anonymous any-woman/every-man. Nor are there any ‘mondegreens’ or misheard phrases, at least not in this ‘Chance Encounter’. Bielawa’s composerly role is not at all like a detached observer of a gurgling brook, rendering a representation of those sounds in music.

I nstead, it is musical anthropology in the era of Web 2.0—and the anthropologist is never ‘neutral’ or purely ‘reportorial’, something Margaret Mead used to point out. In ‘Chance Encounter’, anthropology becomes art… we become installation art, and participate in the uniqueness and immediacy of whatever, musically, is created. It reminds me of some of the classical music events I have attended in Second Life, where performers and other virtual attendees array themselves in unpredictable configurations, and ambient sounds and moving imagery are variable.

F rom what I have heard of it, ‘Chance Encounter’ does not seek to subvert the natural expressive properties of the vocal or instrumental parts into a chaotic process or renounce the traditional control that the composer over the material as deep or ‘radical’ indeterminists (like Cage) do. Lisa is not a ‘radical indeterminist’: sounds and utterances do not have equal value, nor is their placement in time or pitch or timbre fungible. Sounds are chosen according to aesthetic principles by the composer and by the performers, and the choices are guided by the narrative and other intentions that they share, with humanly-varying comprehension and faithfulness. So it seems to me that ‘Chance Encounter’ probably embodies an in-between stance, somewhere between ‘moderate indeterminacy’ and ‘moderate aleatorics’. (In ‘strong aleatorics’ or ‘radical aleatorics’, the indeterminacy is controlled more explicitly by the composer—usually by offering the performers a smaller number of possibilities to choose from, and usually not treating the transient performance space or the transient audience and passers-by as part of the acoustic ‘palette’.)

A ttend the event at the Whitney next Friday if you can. I’m sure you’ll enjoy it. Say ‘Hi’ to Lisa and Susan and the Knights or, alternatively, gift them with some ambient original art-utterance that’s worth their overhearing/eavesdropping.

I remember the following: four hundred drunken Finns swarming through the Soviet passport control [pushing and cursing in the Tallinn, Estonia, airport] ... their boots making the noise of dried blood... the metaphysical noise [can only, I think, be] called ‘the edge of Night’.
— Stephen Kuusisto, ‘Eavesdropping: A Memoir of Blindness and Listening’, p. 180 (Kuusisto is blind)

DSM Auer, visiting Second Life Fontana Music Land, chamber music salon

DSM Auer, visiting Second Life Fontana Music Land, concert hall

D o Jackson Pollock’s [drip-and-splatter] paintings represent the actions by which they were made? Should we allow that ‘expressive’ music ‘represents’ emotions or the experiencing of emotions? Is expression a species of representation? Program music is representational, no doubt, but what about background/ambient music in film? How shall we classify Stravinsky’s ‘Pulcinella Suite’, Jasper Johns’s targets and flags, Duchamp’s ready-mades, or happenings? The existence of borderline or undecidable cases, even vast numbers of them, is not the problem. What is of concern is the fact that we cannot easily say why something does or does not count as representational.
— Kendall Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe, p. 2.

DSM miraculously finishes Jackson Pollock jigsaw puzzle, Christmas, 2008, while representational figures from Dickens’s ‘A Christmas Carol’ look on from atop the 1920 side-board

Sunday, October 26, 2008

Emergence: Lisa Bielawa, MMRPGs, and Massively-Multiplayer Chamber Music

T he 23-year-old poet [Rainer Maria Rilke] encountered a phantom self in the Cornet—Rilke’s ancestor whose life was full of wide-eyed courage, action and discovery, but cut short. Rilke’s book was written feverishly, supposedly in just one night. Perhaps Rilke, suddenly aware of his own mortality, was also already aware that—although many of us continue living into more reflective, circumspect years—in a sense all of us die young, because the innocence of our young selves cannot survive the awarenesses that are the inevitable result of prolonged engagement with a troubled world.”
— Lisa Bielawa, program notes, The Lay of the Love and Death [of Cornet Christoph Rilke].

A t daybreak a horseman is there, and then a second, then four, ten. Armored-up, most of them. Then a thousand more behind them: the Army. One must separate oneself.
‘Get home in one piece, Marquis...’
‘Mary protects you, Squire.’
But they cannot bring themselves to part yet. They are friends of a sudden, like brothers. They have more to confide in each other, for they already know so much each one of the other. They linger. Awkwardly. There’s haste and hoofbeat about them. Then the Marquis takes off his right glove. He fetches out the little rose, takes a petal from it ... takes it as one would take and break the host, the communion wafer.
‘That will safeguard you. Farewell.’
Von Langenau is taken aback. He gazes long after the Frenchman. Then he shoves the ad hoc petal into his shirtpocket. It rises and falls on the waves of his breath.
Bugle-call. He rides to join his regiment, Junker does.
He smiles sadly: a woman he does not know is protecting him.

[Einmal, am Morgen, ist ein Reiter da, und dann ein zweiter, vier, zehn. Ganz in Eisen, groß. Dann tausend dahinter: Das Heer.
Man muß sich trennen.
»Kehrt glücklich heim, Herr Marquis...«
»Die Maria schützt Euch, Herr Junker.«
Und sie können nicht voneinander. Sie sind Freunde auf einmal, Brüder. Haben einander mehr zu vertrauen; denn sie wissen schon so viel Einer vom Andern. Sie zögern. Und ist Hast und Hufschlag um sie. Da streift der Marquis den großen rechten Handschuh ab. Er holt die kleine Rose hervor, nimmt ihr ein Blatt. Als ob man eine Hostie bricht.
»Das wird Euch beschirmen. Lebt wohl.«
Der von Langenau staunt. Lange schaut er dem Franzosen nach. Dann schiebt er das fremde Blatt unter den Waffenrock. Und es treibt auf und ab auf den Wellen seines Herzens.
Hornruf. Er reitet zum Heer, der Junker.
Er lächelt traurig: ihn schützt eine fremde Frau.]”
— Rainer-Maria Rilke, De Weise von Liebe und Tod des Cornets Christoph Rilke

You really should try to avail yourself of the opportunity to hear composer Lisa Bielawa’s new works in upcoming performances in Boston and New York (see links below). Bielawa has written a number of acclaimed chamber music compositions. She regularly writes choral and symphonic works that are also highly regarded.

Bielawa’s conceptions of chamber music and musical intimacy are admittedly broader than most. Her scoring and novel orchestrations are wondrous. Bielawa’s nominally ‘symphonic’ works, such as ‘The Trojan Women’ (2002), entails a large orchestra performing virtuosically, but sans conductor. For the world premiere of her symphonic piece ‘The Right Weather’ (2004), orchestra members were spatially dispersed in and around Zankel Hall, at Carnegie, again performing without a conductor. As such, Bielawa’s symphonic compositions involve the emergent, multi-player intimacy that is characteristic of chamber music. The pieces just happen to involve conductorless ensembles that are the size of full orchestras, playing in halls whose ambient acoustics are larger and more reverberous than is usual for chamber music venues.

C oncert-hall venues impose social conventions upon classical music. I love orchestras. But I have a problem with the fact that it costs $65 to hear them, and somebody is waving a stick and s/he’s in charge.”
— Lisa Bielawa.

Her conductorless pieces are fascinating to listen to and, I imagine, fascinating too to perform, as a member of such a peculiarly deployed ensemble. When done this way, the sense of acoustic depth can be cavernous—far larger than when the same number of performers are under the baton of a strong conductor. The communicative gestures that one uses to stay in-sync with others—or to encourage others nearby to sync-up with you—are complex and unfamiliar. And each performer’s maneuvers to recover or accommodate rhythmic and harmonic contingencies that arise are totally different from those that are routine in small ensembles. Creatively speaking, it’s like being placed in a wilderness survival situation. So much is uncertain. The inter-personal distances and vulnerability seem so great. So much, beyond what’s written on the page of music, can happen.

You become acutely aware of the extreme fragility, the tenuousness of the social fabric that defines the cooperation of the ensemble members. There are people here who, no matter how many years you’ve collaborated with them, you don’t really know very well, and who do not, when it comes down to it, know you. Nor do [some of them] care tremendously deeply about you as an individual. These things are hidden when there is a conductor…

In other words, you become acutely aware of the feral, borg-like ‘organism’ that the ensemble really is, and it is a very different kind of organism than, say, a string quartet. It is an alternate reality; there is no ‘spoon’, not really. (Not, anyhow, if you intend to bend the thing, pitting your will as a performer/ensemble-member against the psychokinetic wills of other fellow musicians.)

Lisa’s forthcoming CD, ‘The Lay of the Love and Death’, is also a meditation on the tensions between individual and collective action; between individual destiny and collective/societal destiny. It is due to be released next May by Premiere Commission Recordings, a new record label based in New York. The Lay was written for violinist Colin Jacobsen and baritone Jesse Blumberg and based on an epic poem by Rainer-Maria Rilke (‘Die Weise von Liebe und Tod des Cornets Christoph Rilke’), and was premièred at Alice Tully Hall in March 2006.

B ielawa’s music explores the ritual and phenomenological nature of music-making and listening, employing [emergent] instrumental forces in ways that are both dramatic and intimate in their use of time and space.”
— Premier Commission Recordings jewel-case blurb.

Lisa Bielawa’s choice of this Rilke text leverages her degree in literature and literary criticism. Rainer-Maria Rilke’s confabulation based on the death of his ancestor in battle is a dark tale—a study in the limits of human trust; the foolishness (but inevitability) of anticipation; the spontaneity (but random happenstantiality) of genuine friendships; the innateness (but immutability) of our character and personality. It is at once an affirmation of our moral duty to live thoughtfully and responsibly among other people, and at the same time an acknowledgment that the human condition is trouble, no guarantees. Create good and beauty in the face of the void because it is the right thing to do; do not do it in expectation of any reward, in this world or in any hereafter. There is emergent quality to the text, plus the timeless ‘thrownness’ of war. There is an emergent quality to Lisa’s compositional methods that lends a distinctive openness to her writing.

Bielawa is currently composer-in-residence for the Boston Modern Orchestra Project. The present work, ‘The Trojan Women’, paints portraits of three grieving women—Hecuba, Cassandra and Andromache—who lost their husbands in the gruesome Trojan War. The three movements differ from each other in emotional content, tempi, harmonic textures, and modes of expression. But each conveys a distinc kind of mourning. Beautifully written.

[50-sec clip, Lisa Bielawa, First Takes, ‘Trojan Women-Andromache’, 1.2MB MP3]

[50-sec clip, Lisa Bielawa, First Takes, ‘Trojan Women-Cassandra’, 1.2MB MP3]

[50-sec clip, Lisa Bielawa, Handful of World, KafkaSongs-II, 1.2MB MP3]

[50-sec clip, Lisa Bielawa, Handful of World, KafkaSongs-VII, 1.2MB MP3]

W itty, dramatic and poignant by turns, [Bielawa’s ‘Handful of World’] songs offer a probing take on Kafka’s texts, and the scoring—for one performer simultaneously singing and playing the violin—makes possible all kinds of tonal resonances and multipart counterpoint. The other music ... is no less arresting or literarily astute.”
— San Francisco Chronicle.

Bielawa’s compositions are diverse, but they each bring character development and story-telling to the fore. And, having as I do some acquaintance with both composing and with computer game engineering, I would say that Lisa’s conductorless compositions contain some voice-leading and phrasing ‘devices’ that would be considered by game developers to be classic ‘anti-cheat mechanisms’, designed to insure continuity, preserving fairness and rationality of gameplay.

There are few, if any, opportunities for rogue or errant ensemble members to ‘hack’ the score, or ‘cheat’, or ‘grief’ other players. Would-be ‘Hackers’ spend time discovering and testing exploits to commandeer the score and exert undue influence over the musical outcomes. Would-be ‘Cheaters’ spend time using the exploits devised by others, or riding on the coattails of Hackers’ exploits. Would-be ‘Griefers’ reinforce the side-effects of others’ exploits, to alter the sociology of the game-world and to subvert the score to suit their own purposes or to advance their own perceptions of its statements or value.

Hack_type1: Client executable alteration (score annotations)
Hack_type2: Rehearsal subversion (adjusting the ensemble's understanding of the inside lore of the game)
Hack_type3: Part augmentation (injecting control through extra-textual embellishments)
Hack_type4: Denial-of-service attack (preemptiveness or recalcitrance, forcing other ensemble members to accomodate the attacker)

In a large, heterogeneous ensemble, the ‘client’ apps cannot be trusted. They are running on the Cheaters’ hardware—their minds; their performance muscle-memories—and any would-be Cheaters among the group have all of the means to reverse-engineer your score and bypass all of the markings and controls you put in place.

Despite the large number of players (high cardinality) and despite the polyphonic complexity of her writing (high dimensionality), the architecture and phrasing constructs that Lisa uses are cohesive and self-repairing. The virtual sound-worlds she creates are stable. Their beauty can be edgy—there is nothing predestined or deterministic, for individual parts or for the ensemble/society. But the worlds do not readily fall apart nor do they make us worry that they might. Cohesive, stable ‘emergence’—for the individuals and for the group.

Emergence occurs when interactions between players and objects result in consequences that are not explicit in the text and performance rules, a sort of aleatoric runtime indirection that is spontaneous and not explicitly intended by the composer-developer. Emergence requires some stochastic or random elements, but it’s not predominantly random; satisfying types of emergence are reproducible from performance to performance, and they are memorable and rehearsible. That, I think, is a distinctive feature of Lisa’s compositions… Stockhausen and others, not so much.

What else? Well, systems—and compositions—that possess the quality we would call ‘emergence’ have, I think, the following minimal features:

‘Global’ phenomena emerge from ‘Local’ interactions among individual entities
There is [usually] no evidence of the global phenomena at the local or individual level [like much of Elliott Carter’s writing, say];
Global phenomena have a time-course that is different from the time-course of individual/local phenomena, and global phenomena are governed by different physics or collective forces than the ones that are exerted on individuals.

And we can recognize, I would say, at least 4 ‘levels’ of emergence. We can recognize them, and composers can bake them in.

First-order: When local interactions have ‘knock-on’ or chain-reaction effects and spread by contagion;
Second-order: When players use the score and performance environment to improvise their own expressive strategies and deliberately enable para-social interaction types that were not created or intended by the developer; the improvised strategies in turn change how various contingencies in the game play out;
Third-order: When new gameplay involves players’ carving new paths or creating new ‘public commons’, that are accessible to most or all players or that directly affect the overall, global character of play.

The Lay of the Love and Death of the Cornet’ is an early Rilke work, written in Berlin in 1899. The event that precipitated its writing was the discovery of a fragment of a family heirloom document, something from a trunk or attic in the Rilke house. He had no expectation of finding any such thing, nor was he planning to write any poem having to do with his ancestral history. This item was serendipitously noticed when he was browsing among some family papers. The document concerned one young Christoph Rilke, who was killed in Hungary in 1663 in a military campaign against the Turks. This fragment of a document concerning the young man’s duties as a cornet in the army was the only historical fact that Rilke had to go on; not much else was known about this Christoph, other than the meager bits that the document fragment contained. The story, however, almost wrote itself. Rilke’s vivid imagination produced overnight this poignant, open-ended 63-page romantic invention.

In similar fashion, Bielawa’s works—including the latest Rilke one—have likewise an open-ended, improvisational feel to them, regardless how carefully orchestrated her scores are. They are natural; playable; listenable. They sound so intuitively true, so plausible that you might imagine them to have almost written themselves, like Rilke in an inspired fever. They evoke a politics of ethical engagedness, an acoustic pluralism, and an expressive ‘commons’—all precious things in an age gone amok with private property, mutual misapprehension, isolation.

Have a look at Lisa’s compositions. They are like fantastic interactive fictions or MMRPGs, each inviting you to discover a richly detailed, extensible story. Consider adding one or more of her pieces to your group’s repertoire, not just to experience the beauty that’s in them but also to extend and further develop the ways that you have at your disposal to achieve new dimensions of expressiveness amongst your ensemble’s members. Lastly but not least, do buy and enjoy her recordings, and try to catch upcoming performances. You’re sure to be emergently pleased.

G ame developers [composers and conductors] and players [performers] speculate that it would be fantastic if we could achieve gameplay [performance] that is open and natural, where players can choose their own strategies independently, and the gameplay is limited only by each player's imagination and creativity. In recent years, games [compositions] have taken steps toward this with emergent interactions made possible by Valve Corp’s source engine and the availability of advanced game physics middleware... However, game developers [composers and conductors] realize the trade-off between emergence and design. Giving players control [means that the developers and conductors relinquish their own control].”
— Penny Sweetser, Emergence in Games, p. 3.