This article explores multiple aspects of music-making relating to intercultural engagement, the creation of a shared cultural space, and the power of performance to articulate lived experience. A semi-improvised work for flute and electronics provides an exemplar for exploration through examinations of materials, form, process, and reflection. The essay articulates ideas that arose in the development of the piece, and processes used for bringing together the sound worlds and performance practices of Western flutes and a set of eight bamboo flutes acquired while living and working in Malaysia from 2011 to 2016. In the piece, Western concert flute, alto flute, and three of the bamboo flutes combine with electronically activated sonic transformations and illusions of cultural interplay. The inspiration for the work comes from experience of cultures, human interactions, and vivid memories of place in addition to the distinctive sound and performative characteristics of each flute. While intercultural activity has certainly occurred across millennia, the Anthropocene is situated as a time of unprecedented global connection, frequently seen as a cluttered milieu, with competing voices often pivoted forward according to volume, judgementalism, and monetary gain. Reframing intercultural contexts as inclusive, dialogical, shared spaces creates opportunity for multiple ideas to circulate and shifts in perceptions of ownership and entitlement. Music-making is proposed here as a space to recognize and interpret this situation; to displace, reconfigure, intensify, and transition to new thinking; and to identify and amplify elements of practice and understandings.
Jean Penny (Wed,) studied this question.