Listener Ensemble is a composer’s ensemble based at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts, consisting predominantly of first-year bachelor & diploma students of the Composition and Music Technology course.

One of Listener Ensemble’s focal points, especially in first semester, is indeterminate scores. These are scores which, rather than using conventional musical notation to show the precise sequencing and coordination of sounds, give a lot of freedom to performers to make their own decisions, within some boundaries set by the composer. They can sound very different depending on who is playing them and how they choose to interpret the often open-ended instructions.

The two pieces presented here are ‘text scores’: there is no conventional musical notation at all, but instead a simple one-page text instruction. Listener made the recorded performances here by uploading recordings of their individual parts, made at home, to be assembled together later. The two pieces we chose to play suited this method particularly well.

James Saunders’ piece 100 Devices Being Turned On and Off is a score for the exact situation it’s name describes: each performer has a number of devices that make sound (everything from blenders to synthesizers, guitar amplifiers, hard drives and toys), and follows a score to generate a rhythm at which the devices are switched on and off. Each device is only switched on and off once. Playing this piece over the internet gives us the interesting option of incorporating things that are difficult to take into a performance space, like cars or air conditioning units - which means the results are quite cacophonous.

An unrhymed chord, by Michael Pisaro, is 65-minutes long and its mood is quite opposite to Saunders' work. It is in two 30-minute parts, with a five minute silence in-between. Each performer offers only one sound or sound event to this piece, playing it twice across the 65 minutes. Each sound is either sustained or periodically repeated, lasts between 1 and 15 minutes long, and has a volume inversely proportional to its duration (that is, the longer it is, the softer it is). Performers were given complete freedom as to what sound they decided to use - interestingly, there are a lot of string instruments in this version, both synthesized and acoustic.

Listener is, for many of the students in the ensemble, a first engagement with this kind of experimental music and the group have done a great job engaging with these scores and a number of others that we played throughout the semester, many of which are quite conceptually challenging. We have played works by Shoshana Rosenberg, Mieko Shiomi, Yoko Ono, George Brecht, Dick Higgins, Eva Maria Houben, Jürg Frey, Samuel Vriezen and Christian Wolff, and will perhaps share these with audiences in a live performance at the end of the year.