Composing in Stillness: A Case Study of Meditation for Bass Saxophone and Live Electronics

This article develops a piece-derived compositional method through Meditation for bass saxophone and live electronics, situated within electroacoustic practices that treat attention and bodily state as materially consequential. It specifies a five-step protocol that makes attentional practice operational in planning, drafting, and revision through breath-centered settling, somatic scanning, brief journaling, a bounded drafting window, and a separated reflective listening pass. The protocol is evaluated through traceable consequences in the work’s materials, including a reversed Fibonacci durational scaffold across fourteen alternating movements titled “Chaos” and “Silence,” extended-technique writing that foregrounds breath and instability, and a live electronics system realized as nine loudspeaker output channels governed by notated gate states, allowing diffusion and reinforcement to function as formal parameters rather than as post hoc mixing. Cognitive and creativity research is used only as descriptive vocabulary, not as validation. The discussion then distinguishes what transfers as craft to other electroacoustic contexts from what remains bound to this instrument, electronics configuration, and performance ecology.