My initial problem as an artistic practitioner was that, although I was aware of the limitations of Western notation, I failed to fully integrate that awareness into my practice. At first, the score retained a position of authority over the more event-based, contingent aspects of music-making. However, as Matthew Goulish notes (2000: 102), ‘a work works when it becomes an event of work’. Guided by this idea, I started to look for what allowed the work to unfold as an event — something living, something situated in time, space, and relation.
In developing the composition with Francisco Corthey, I gradually shifted from treating the score as the central reference point to seeking a balance between notated information and experience-based elements that shaped both his compositional decisions and my own interpretative process. Along the way, I began to recognize the creative agency of my instrument — not merely as a medium, but as a collaborator in its own right. This prompted me to release some degree of technical control and to adopt a more responsive attitude toward my physical relationship with the accordion.
This shift marked the beginning of what I came to understand as a form of unlearning — a deliberate attempt to move away from a paradigm of ‘mastery’ and toward a non-hierarchical mode of cooperation with the instrument. As described in the Incubation section, this was already implicit in the very first session with the composer, where I presented the accordion not neutrally, but through my personal, embodied relationship with it.
I remained open to all of Francisco’s compositional ideas and never asked him to write ‘to my strengths’. Yet I also understood the ethical implications of framing the instrument so personally. Did my approach overly influence his perception? Was the balance of agency tipped too far toward the performer?
When I later asked Francisco about this, his response was illuminating:
My music is about sound itself, rather than notes. I don’t want to write for any instrument, or I don’t want my music to be open for every instrument. [1]
This reassured me that my personal framing of the accordion was not a constraint but rather a productive impulse for his creativity. It helped enable an individual and specific compositional approach — one that treated the instrument not as a standardized tool but as a unique co-creative agent. As Thor Magnusson observes, Western musical instruments are products of standardization and a clear division of labor between composer, performer, and instrument maker (2019b: 18). Our collaboration allowed us to think — and work — outside that paradigm.
This model of co-creation resonates with, yet also differs from, historical examples in the twentieth-century tradition of composer–performer dialogue. Collaborations such as Luciano Berio and Cathy Berberian (Meehan 2011; O’Dwyer 2021), Giacinto Scelsi and Frances-Marie Uitti (Colangelo 1996), or Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf and Peter Veale (Veale and Mahnkopf 2018) often pushed the boundaries of notation, embodiment, and instrumental technique — redefining both the artistic identity and the traditional roles of composer and performer.
More recent research has examined the collaborative dynamics between composers and performers in contemporary music, proposing categories of collaborative models (Roe 2007), analyzing how creative partnerships are shaped through shared authorship (Hayden and Windsor 2007), and suggesting expanded interpretative frameworks (Östersjö 2008) that reflect a broader shift toward inclusive and participatory approaches (Torrence 2018).
While the collaboration with Francisco draws from and aligns with these studies — especially those that challenge the romanticized notion of the composer as sole creator and the hierarchical structures of classical music — it explores yet another aspect. In our work, the focus moved beyond the composer–performer relationship to foreground instrumental agency, relational dynamics, and the emergence of possible meanings through contextual responsiveness.
Rather than tailoring the composition to my technical or expressive range, our process emphasized a situated, co-dependent relationship between multiple agencies, that unfolded through shared sessions, live performances in the evolving conceptual field we came to describe as the Shared Space.
It was only during the first performance that I truly understood how vital the concert context — and its irreproducible energy — was as in shaping the conditions under which meaning could emerge. That experience made it unmistakably clear: musical relationships cannot be composed in advance. They must be activated through presence, through a performative awareness that attends to space, listeners, silence, tension, and instrument in real time.
Thinking through this in light of the Shared Space, I began to understand that meaning, or more specifically — ‘potentiality of meanings’ is not delivered by a performer, but emerges within a relational field. Even in score-based music, musical meaning is not transmitted — it is co-created.
This realization aligned with the emergence of what I later called the imaginary score — a conceptual image rooted in Francisco’s reading of the poem that had accompanied the early stages of our collaboration. That moment became embedded in my memory and grew into a guide for shaping performance in ways not governed by the written score.
Throughout the project, I was seeking ways to unlearn habitual techniques in order to develop a composition-specific, context-sensitive approach. This is very well formulated by Linda Jankowska (2021: 56):
[T]he abundance of practices makes unified instrumental or performance techniques a methodology of the past, work-specific techniques come to the fore. As a result, technique and technical skill undoubtedly need to be approached as a personal process of knowledge formation that cannot and should not be systematised. Virtuosity understood this way might neither be flashy nor noticeable and might not yet have a community of experts to assess its value.
This included redefining my relationship to instrumental skills, allowing more space for the creative potential of both my body and the instrument. The energy I encountered during the premiere — one that felt deconstructive, even destabilizing — ultimately became the seed for a methodology that I later came to formulate as the Shared Space.
The imaginary score complemented this. While I cannot claim it as a generalized method applicable to all works or collaborations, it was crucial for this project. It offered a non-verbal, embodied structure for engaging with the multiple agencies that inhabit a performance. It reminded me that responsiveness can be practiced — and that not all knowledge is written.
This project began with a question about how my embodied relationship with the instrument informs the production of musical meaning within a score-based composition. Over time, this inquiry evolved into a broader investigation into how that relationship is reshaped through acts of unlearning, collaborative responsiveness, and performative context.
What started as an exploration of instrumental and corporeal knowledge became a deeper reflection on how the potentiality of meaning emerges through co-creative dialogue and deconstructive practice. Notions such as the Shared Space and the imaginary score have allowed me to move beyond the framework of interpretation, toward a view of performance as a site of negotiation between multiple creative agents — where agency is distributed, fragile, and context-specific.
The imaginary score, as I have come to understand it, does not replace the notated score. Rather, it sits beside it — as an equally valid, equally powerful guide. It is non-symbolic, non-verbal, and emergent. It helps me move beyond the binary of composition versus interpretation and allows me to articulate a performance process that is both embodied and conceptual, both situated and fluid.
By acknowledging the multiplicity of creative agents in a co-creative collaboration — not just performer and composer, but instrument, space, energy, and audience — I was able to develop a practice that is responsive rather than directive. My collaboration with Francisco Corthey affirmed the value of this approach and showed me that, at its best, co-creation is not simply about making music together, but about creating the conditions under which music can emerge — unique to each moment, each place, each performance.
In this sense, the initial focus on the limits of notation and performer identity has been exceeded — not by rejecting these structures, but by engaging with their instability and responding to what emerges through that encounter.
[1] Francisco Corthey, interview by Sergej Tchirkov, Bergen, May 4, 2022.↩︎