Creative Construction Set (2015)

Composer note
Created for the Splitter-Orchester of Berlin, an "un-conducted, leaderless" ensemble of twenty-four musicians, Creative Construction Set™ (CCS™) is a mobile, situational-form, open-instrumentation work for an ensemble of eight or more musical performers who, while improvising, make use of a set of instruction cards to create and explore sonic environments. Using the cards, any musician in the group can ask the entire group or any subset to make silences, get louder or softer, play higher or lower, denser or sparser, or even stop playing altogether. The cards provide each performer with the means to spontaneously realize group orchestrational ideas in relatively targeted and specific ways, allowing the creation of more complex musical situations than people could make by just acting alone. In this way, CCS™ enacts a sonic counterpublic in which musical decisions are produced via social relations, and discontinuity, support, and struggle become audible pathways to larger lessons for societies seeking to remain open to change, but also to justice. The title of the work pays homage to the "Creative Construction Company," part of the experimental African American composer-performer collective, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians.

— George Lewis