Illumination

Illumination: Premiere Performance

The first performance took place at the Grieg Academy as part of my recital during the Sounding Philosophy conference on 24 February 2022. The concert featured three compositions: ‘estamos bien, pero tiemblo’ was preceded by Sofia Gubaidulina’s music and followed by an extensive work by Pierluigi Billone. My performance concept and the context of the pieces were described in a short text (Tchirkov 2022: 10). The program note (Fig. 10), including an English translation of Francisco Corthey’s title, framed the event under the phrase: ‘I am fine, but I am trembling’.

Tragically, this date also marked the beginning of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine. The news devastated me as I was thinking about my family and my friends in both countries as well as the political repercussions to come. I was unsure whether I would be able to perform the concert that evening. Ultimately, I chose not to cancel the concert, but rather to make the most of my precarious mental (and physical) state: I focused on trying to project all of that emotional energy, however destabilizing, into what I came to think of as the ‘production of presence’ (Gumbrecht 2004), allowing myself to be guided by the intensity of the moment.

What I had not anticipated was how these tragic external circumstances would affect the context of the performance — and, in doing so, enable a transformation. The concert space, infused with the emotional weight of unfolding world events, allowed the music to shift from mere interpretation to something more immediate and embodied. I experienced the performance not simply as the realization of a score or of my performance strategies, but as an act of musicking performance.

By this, I refer to a process in which a written composition becomes sonically embodied — brought to life through performance by a self-generating energy. This energy emerges within the performance environment itself — in a response to the moment — shaped by the relationships among score, composer, performer, instrument, and audience, each carrying its own form of agency. While I still find it difficult to fully articulate the nature of this environment from an artistic perspective, I felt increasingly able to describe the performance that arose within it.

Using the participle ‘musicking’ as an adjective, I refer specifically to one aspect of Christopher Small’s broader concept (1998; 1999): how the set of relationships — activated through the act of musicking — models ‘the relationships in the wider world outside the performance space, […] relationships between person and person, between individual and society, between humanity and the natural world and even perhaps the supernatural world’ (1999: 13) and how it enable us experience them. 

That night, the tragic context revealed how my human and social experience — along with the existential questions such crises provoke — could directly impact my artistic experience, while the latter tries to engage with the collapse of what Small calls ‘the actual structure of our conceptual universe’ (1999: 14). In this sense, the performance on 24 February was an extra-special experience: I had to rebuild my conceptual universe from scratch.

But it was also through this collapse that destructive energy became deconstructive. All the relationships between the creative agents did not work as I consciously or emotionally expected them to. Instead, they became dismantled — limited to their smallest semantic units: the score became just a set of instructions to follow, the performer’s role narrowed to reproducing the work based on those instructions, the instrument became just a tool, the communication with the audience became a one-way communication, the performance space became reduced to its acoustic properties. Obviously, being a music professional, I could still deliver a technically correct performance. Yet under these conditions, it would probably be limited to a simple more or less accurate execution, and the artistic output would not be very enriching neither for me, nor for the listeners, or for the composer.

And yet, by consciously turning toward my emotional state as an energy source (Walsh, Knott, and Collins 2020) — accepting it fully and letting it guide me — I found a way to reactivate the creativity in performance. This decision became a breakthrough in my learning: both in my understanding of this specific composition, and in my awareness of how profoundly performance context and environment impact artistic possibilities. 

The same energy that had dismantled my pre-established strategies, simultaneously activated a new set of situationally-specific relationships. These could only have emerged at that particular moment, in that particular space. I realized that by delegating creative potential to other agents — including the emerging energy itself — I could remain open and responsive. My role was not to control the performance, but to interpret and respond to stimuli — gestures, sounds, space, silence. Thus, the process of dismantling the existing relationships did not result in destruction, but in a deconstruction that brought into existence new, active creative potential. The new constellation of relationships was not created by someone or something — it was activated by the fact that I accepted the energy and let myself be guided by its self-generative nature.

This wasn’t a passive experience. All creative agents — score, instrument, audience, performer — were actively involved. That is also why I have referred to this experience as a musicking performance.

Illumination → Verification: The Shared Space

Although the premiere performance offered a powerful artistic experience, it left me with a sense of incompleteness in how I understood the relationships between the prepared material, the score, my practicing strategies, and the real-time unfolding of the performance. I had experienced a deconstruction of my practice that opened new ways of thinking and playing, yet I remained unsure: could the conditions that enabled this musicking performance be consciously recreated? Was this energy specific to that tragic context, or could it emerge under other circumstances?

These questions led me to reflect more specifically on the co-creative processes that had shaped the composition from the beginning — and how they might be traced or restructured in future performances. I returned to documentation from the initial sessions, trying to identify what I might have overlooked in my earlier practicing strategies. But I could not draw any clear conclusions. What became apparent instead was the need for a new conceptual framework that could account for performance as a dynamic, relational field.

The premiere had clearly revealed that the interplay between performer, instrument, composer, audience, and context could not be understood as a fixed architecture. It had to be reimagined as a shared space — a fluid and responsive environment in which musical meaning arises from interaction, not hierarchy.

Defining the Shared Space

Emerging from my artistic practice and personal experiences that accompanied my work with Francisco, the Shared Space became both a conceptual framework and a performative method. It is a context in which the experience of the composition arises from the interaction of various agents — including performer, score, instrument, audience, and situational environment. In this model, these agents are not fixed roles, but interdependent participants in an unfolding process.

In addition to my own practice, the notion of the Shared Space draws on research that challenges traditional hierarchical structures in music (Torrence 2018; Hellstenius and others 2023; De Assis 2018; Rink and others 2018; Goehr 1992). Its theoretical foundation is further influenced by Michel de Certeau’s (1988) idea of space as a ‘practiced place’ and Gernot Böhme’s theory of atmospheres (2017). Böhme frames perception as a relational experience, where atmospheres are not simply subjective impressions or objective properties, but are defined by the ‘co-presence of subject and object’ (Bille 2018). Atmospheres emerge in the space between bodies and environments. They are felt qualities — moods or tones — that shape how we encounter the world. In the context of performance, this means that sound, gesture, space, and listeners co-create a shared environment that makes possible ‘the availability or potentiality of meanings’ (Kramer 2002: 118).

As Böhme writes: ‘Music occurs when the subject of an acoustic event is the acoustic atmosphere as such, that is, when listening as such, not listening to something, is the issue’ (2000: 17). From this perspective, the role of the performer and composer is not to present a fixed message, but to shape the conditions under which a specific acoustic and affective event can emerge.

Second Performance and Poetic Framing

My initial thoughts on the Shared Space began with the idea of sharing as a gestural process — of giving and receiving information through sound, movement, tension, and presence. But it soon became clear that gesture alone could not define this field. The gestures were unpredictable, shaped by context, and dependent on multiple interwoven agencies. A methodology based solely on gestures would not capture the responsive nature of live performance.

Around this time, I was invited to perform Corthey’s composition in a concert in Stavanger. When asked to write a program note, I decided to test this developing idea by presenting the performance as an event that unfolds within the shared space. I titled the program accordingly and opened with a short text inspired by Cat Hope and Louise Devenish’s Manifesto on New Virtuosity (2020) — a format that allowed me to articulate the conceptual framework in a rather poetic yet practical way (Fig. 11):

The shared space is a sonic development.

The shared space recognizes the authorship — it is ‘The’ situation and ‘The’ space being developed.

The shared space is based on personal experience.

The shared space creates a new virtuosity which emphasizes fragility and uniqueness of every performance.

The shared space embraces identities and differences.

The shared space is the body and its vibrations.

The shared space is itself different.

The shared space is generous.

The shared space is meant to be shared.

The shared is space.

The shared

‘The’.

In contrast to my earlier focus on gesture, I now saw that these lines — along with the program notes written for another concert [1] — contained the key points of both my practice and concert experience, that could reveal the methodological potential that I was seeking. They were not just artistic statements, but reflective of a shift in how I approached my role as a performer.

This new setting — surrounded by different works, presented in a new venue, for different listeners — allowed me to observe how ‘estamos bien, pero tiemblo’ transformed in dialogue with this new context. It became clear to me that, as a performer, I was not simply transmitting or interpreting meaning. I was perceiving and co-shaping experience in a situation where ‘perception is understood as the experience of the presence of persons, objects and environments’ (Böhme 2017: 14).

From this perspective, transitions between tones, gestures, noises, acoustics, and whispered text began to feel more clearly structured in my perception. I no longer saw myself as a central actor in performance. Instead, I was one participant among others contributing to the unfolding of the shared space.

Virtuosity Revisited

The awareness of the Shared Space opened up a different perspective on virtuosity — the central part of my PhD project (Tchirkov 2025). In this context, virtuosity does not imply control, mastery, or technical dominance. Rather, it becomes the ability to perceive and to respond to what is present in the room, in the moment, with these specific people, sounds, and silences.

Each performance, then, is not simply fragile — it requires fragility as a condition for its emergence. But this fragility is not a weakness. It is a strength grounded in openness, trust, and embodied sensitivity to the space, the instrument, the audience, and the flow of energy.

In the Stavanger performance, I experienced a new kind of clarity in my conscious interaction with these agents. I could feel how the energy of the performance was shaped by more than my interpretative decisions and learned skills. The music wasn’t performed by me, but through me — as part of a web of forces in motion (Audio 2).

Within the context of my practice the Shared Space became not a theory but a lived responsive experience. It is not a method for controlling performance, but a way of remaining open to its unfolding. It offers a room in which co-creation is not only possible but necessary — and where virtuosity is no longer measured by technical skills, but by the capacity to hold and respond to the fragility of the moment.

As a method, the Shared Space goes beyond site-specific (Sunde 2020; Wilkie 2002) or collaborative performance (Torrence 2018). It requires me, as a performer, to remain aware of situational contexts — temporal, spatial, and emotional — and to engage with the unique, vulnerable nature of each performance. Therefore, the Shared Space led me to think of my practice in terms of responsive performance, in which tension exists between the pre-composed material and the performer’s immediate, embodied response to the real-time situation. This creates a context-responsive event that is never fully repeatable and always co-produced in the moment.

Illumination → Verification ↔ Insight

The Poem Revisited

At this point, I returned to Ortiz’s poem — not as a metaphor, but as a source of practical insight. I already had an image of the poem in mind, along with certain associations that had emerged during my first encounter with Francisco’s reading. But now, after performing the piece in two different settings, I began to recognize how the poem — and my memory of it — functioned as a kind of performative script, one that helped me make decisions in real time.

Take, for example, the line ‘pero tiemblo’ — ‘but I am trembling’. I began to interpret this not just emotionally, but also physically: as a guide for how to shape a tone, how to lean into instability, how to listen for fragility. The image of trembling helped me shift from executing gestures to inhabiting them.

Each line of the poem can function in this way. Although I do not recite them during performance, they are present in the background as interpretive cues. They offer a parallel structure — a poetic map — that helps orient my response in performance.

It eventually dawned on me that the sonic image of Francisco reading the poem during one of our first working sessions had become embedded in my mind. Over time, it grew into a conceptual image that guided my understanding of both the music and my own performance narrative. I came to understand this image as an imaginary score — a score not written on paper, but formed in my mind. Though inspired by the composer, it exists outside notation and cannot be fixed, corrected, or even fully verbalized. And yet, it allows for a fluidity and offers a powerful interpretive structure for navigating a performance built on multiple creative agencies.

Unlike a notated score, the imaginary score does not prioritize certain musical parameters — like pitch and rhythm — over others. [2] It does not filter out non-notated aspects of performance — such as breath, physicality, or atmosphere — but instead embraces this variety.

Three key characteristics define the imaginary score from the perspective of the performer:

1. It contains my experience, since the image arose in my own mind and perceptual field.
2. It reflects the composer’s experience, as it was inspired by his personal connection to the poem and his reading of it.
3. It is contextually rooted in the composition, as both the reading and my reception of it took place within the co-creative process of working on ‘estamos bien, pero tiemblo’.

These characteristics have become crucial to how I understand the transition from a conceptual image to an imaginary score — one that leads to more reflective practice and responsive performance.

For instance, the imaginary score helped me resolve a persistent issue in my practice: finding a balance between the motor skills required to perform the score’s technically demanding passages and the experience of fragility, which I could only access when I allowed sounds and gestures to guide my performance strategy. The imaginary score offered an independent source of information, disconnected from the notated score — non-symbolic and non-textual, yet deeply informed by both the composer’s and my experience.

By recognizing the notated score as just one creative agent — a symbol of what the composer wishes to convey — I learned not to see it as the sole authority. This allowed me to better structure my performance process, whether I was focusing on finding sounds instead of producing them, working through imprecisions in technique, or dealing with the discomfort of having to perform fragility rather than experience it. The imaginary score, with its three core characteristics, became the tool that helped me address these tensions while remaining fully within the work.

Depending on the concert situation, the imaginary score — as a conceptual image — co-informs the flow of energy that enables the deconstruction of pre-existing relationships and the formation of new ones. Because this image is non-symbolic and emerged without explicit intent, its impact on my performance is more immediate and embodied. It cannot be separated from my perception of the work, whether in practice or in concert.

Unlike the notated score, the imaginary score is responsive to the energy and vibrations of the shared space. It proved capable of informing my real-time performance narrative just as effectively as it shaped my working strategies.

Through this realization — that the score is not the only source of information — I became aware of the divergences between Francisco’s experience (as encoded in the score) and my own interpretation and practice. Rather than flattening these differences, the imaginary score allowed me to explore and work within them — turning them into productive tensions in the shared space of performance.

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[1] A few months later, I performed two recitals at Kalvfestivalen in Sweden, titled The Shared Space I and The Shared Space II. The lines quoted above were complemented by the program notes written for The Shared Space II, which are available via the provided link.↩︎

[2] For an in-depth discussion on the limitations of Western musical notation in fully representing the range of musical expression, including aspects of performance that are not traditionally notated, see Trevor Wishart (1996).↩︎