Introducing ‘Re-coupling’: The Compositional Appropriation of Instrumental Physicality to disrupt Pattern-based Musical Materials

In recent years, many composers have explored a strategy to instrumental writing known as ‘de-coupling’. In such work, the parameters involved in the physical operation of a musical instrument (e.g. slide position, tonguearticulation, etc.) are stratified into separate quasi-polyphonic musical layers ? often notated on individual staves. The instrumentalist executes all of these parametric strands simultaneously, the moment-to-moment sonic result determined by the automatic reunification of the data-streams in performance (e.g. Aaron Cassidy’s The Crutch of Memory (2004), for solo string instrument, or Klaus K. Hübler’s Opus Breve (1988), for solo violoncello). A transposition of the above model has arisen as a result of my own research into this area in which the reunification of stratified parametric strands is prioritised as part of the compositional process; a strategy I define in my own work as ‘re-coupling’. In this work, patternbased musical materials (intervallic cycles, rhythmic loops, etc.) are composed independently for physically defined parametric strata of a single instrument (fingering, string-crossing, etc.) and then superimposed in the musical sketch. From here, only actions with significant sonic results are transcribed into the final score (instructions for fingers to depress unbowed strings, for example, are removed). The collision of the strata operates as a mutually affective filter, necessitating a disfiguration of the patterns they originally contained. More broadly, re-coupling allows hidden processes of elision to be reclaimed from a performative space and activated within a compositional methodology. An ecology of material is created where living musical behaviours compete to survive inside a shared instrumental habitat. This paper will demonstrate the applicability of these ideas to both micro and macro-scale musical design, with reference to recent examples from my own compositional work, and discuss the wider space created by this position: to what extent does the compositional and editorial act coalesce in this framework?