Nomads (2025)

Nomads is a flexible-instrumentation, situational-form work that may be realized by any combination of instruments covering the appropriate pitch ranges.

A performance of Nomads combines the written materials with improvisation to represent the unpredictable, yet directed, plausible, and need-based nature of transnational and transcultural migration. The piece may be performed by at least eight players, but achieves a certain critical mass with around twelve or more performers. As the performers navigate through the work, the overall effect should be that of several different kinds of musical behaviors heard in juxtaposition, but with a certain common direction. 

John Cage once said, about one possible practice of indeterminacy, that it could be a matter of a performer acting “arbitrarily, feeling his way, following the dictates of his ego.” But in a situational-form work, as distinct from an open-form work, indeterminacy becomes a subset of improvisation rather than oppositional to it. Thus, there is no particular need or reason to adopt an ideology of “letting go” of feeling. Moreover, responding to situations and contributing sonic materials according to what is going on at the moment is certainly not an arbitrary process, but one in which performers assume responsibility for the environment they are creating. Thus, the players feel their way through the piece from beginning to end, establishing and re-establishing consensus—an emergent sonic sociality, a protean assemblage. 

“There is no such thing as a common world,” Bruno Latour once wrote. “The common world is to be composed.” Rather, in the case of Nomads, and indeed in just about every case, that common world is actually improvised. Thus, for both performers and audiences, Nomads reflects and even enacts the experience of modernity itself.