Lauren Redhead - ijereja: music as an iterative process

'ijereja' is a transliteration of the transliteration of the Mycenean Greek word for ‘priestess’ in the Cretan-Minoan script known as Linear B. The piece draws from disparate sources including Linear B text, Minoan art, modernist fakeries of Minoan art, cartographic practices, fictional maps, Hörspiel drawn from the speech of Countess Geschwitz in Alban Berg's revision of Wedekind for the opera Lulu, and organ improvisation. This piece is the development of a method of working, established in my entoptic landscape works, which uses iterative composition and performance, over-recording, and notation-as-performance to establish a set of materials that can be used to create performances of different durations and content but with the same musical identity. 'ijereja' is interested in the interrogation of the potentially liminal space between performance, voice, speech, language, text, writing and notation.

Nicholas Bourriaud (2010) identifies the creative artist as a ‘semionaut’: one who must navigate between signs and signifiers in order to negotiate, interpret, and create meaning. In the ‘work’ of music, the composer, performer and listener can all be thought of as semionauts; they take part in the same processes to create and re-create the ‘work’. In my own practices I embody and enact all three positions and I seek to blur the boundaries between listening, performing and composing. Contemporary artistic forms in Bourriaud's terms, then, are ‘journey forms’: they both internalise and externalise an experience of movement, displacement and crossing. This journey is a kind of shared psycho-history between the composer, performer and listener: it bears the traces of the previous artefacts of the ‘work’, of its inter-objective comparison materials, and of its encounters with itself and other ‘works’.

The music presented here both metaphorically and literally embodies an idea of territory: it offers an opportunity for the exploration of the journey form as a compositional strategy, a tool for performance and interpretation, and a framework for criticism. This performance lecture combines my interests and practices in composition, instrumental performance, graphic notation, and acousmatic sound.