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

Application summary

This interdisciplinary artistic research aims to create methodologies for the composition and performance of transcultural music that challenges representational cultural in-group/out-group aesthetic dichotomies, perhaps being fully representational only of itself. By examining the challenges and revealing the 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, musical semiotics, anthropology and acoustemology, I position myself within the frame of reference of a third culture individual whose idiosyncratic cultural hybridity defies and arguably transcends explicit in-group/out-group binaries. I seek a musical corollary of this hybridity by examining an intersection of affordance theory, cultural fusion theory, modular theory and theory of musical semiotics and, as composer and performer, its applications to the recontextualization of musical elements and phenomena related to aesthetic practices from my autobiographical environments: Levantine and khaliji Arabic art and folk music, Zanzibari taarab, American jazz, and European and American art and popular music. Proficiency will be demonstrated through two new longform compositions for transcultural ensemble and their respective studio recordings and one improvised solo studio recording made available to the public, two peer-reviewed published articles focusing on analysis of uncovered musical-aesthetic phenomena and developed compositional methodologies, and a summary thesis aiming to re-examine notions of aesthetic representation and provide tools for composer-performers liminally positioned between cultures.