THIS IS AN EXPOSITION IN PROCESS, AND WILL BE PUBLISHED IN THE SPRING OF 2026. THE EXPOSITION WILL ALSO BE CONTINUALLY UPDATED FURTHER IN THE PROCESS.
Collaboration with composers
The project started with us contacting some composers we knew where interested in working with microtonality and who could be interested in the connection between folk music and contemporary classical music. We wanted to use enchantments from nordic grimoires/black books and female strenght as a startingpoint, and a red thread thoughout the texts, and every composer where asked to find what they wanted to use. This resulted in lots of different texts, from a psalm about death and being ready to go to heaven, Iranian poems from prison, "Facklorna" about liberation, dreams about the destruction to come, and five incantionas on everything to how to heal your livestock or make someone fall in love with you. So as a whole the texts and the music creates our own "black book" of magic.
An important part of this project is the collaborative model in which we work together with the composers, to
work from the very beginning of creating a composition or to simply understand the composers musical intentions. For this microtonal repertoire, where each composers understanding of microtonality is integral for our understanding of performing the music, and also for being a part of the creaive process, this partnership is essential. Working directly with our composers allows each of their visions of the music to be discovered, tested, and embedded into the performance with our embodied knowledge. We were invited by the composers into different stages of the compositions, where Rehnqvist used our collaboration to develop ideas and try this out, others like Ness, gave us a finished work and only did small adjustments to the work after our comments. But also gave us big interpretative freedom.
The collaboration could ensure that the music was idiomatic and performable. In practice, this means iterating materials with live feedback, which then can reshape the music and also make us, the performers understand how to fill the works with meaning and create a sounding piece of art.
The partnership also clarifies notation. Microtonality requires choices—arrow accidentals, ratio labels, harmonic indications—that must be readable at speed and meaningful in sound. The different composers select the system that best matches how they express themselves, and through working with them we try to understand their intentions, or give inspiration to new ways of composing.
Finally, this type of collaboration builds a living repertoire and a knowledge archive. Each composer contributes a distinct angle, spectral, ratio‑based, quarter‑tone idioms, overtone‑centered tonality, while our documentation (audio, video, annotated scores) captures methods, decisions, and performance practices. In sum, performer–composer collaboration is a core method in our project and it advances the artform and our understanding of music and tonality.
-
- Pushes the music forward — Co‑develop new sounds, techniques, and tunings; turn microtonal ideas into usable practice.
- Makes ideas playable — Real‑time feedback refines notation, pacing, and balance into performable works.
- Builds shared authorship & repertoire — Workshops yield techniques others can adopt; co‑created pieces fit our duo’s expression.
- Deepens pedagogy & musicianship — Inner hearing, drones, and micro‑interval training embed in the creative process.
Further reading: further work "meet the other"