An Aesthetics of Interference in my Composition Practice

This thesis examines the ongoing role of interference aesthetics in my music, centring the concept as both a compositional tool and a framework for narrating the development of my creative practice. Pieces composed during my participation in the Sydney Conservatorium of Music’s Composing Women Program are discussed through a taxonomy of interference paradigms which articulate distinctions between various aspects of processual disturbances, drawing on translations made across sounds, text, notation, concepts and identities in my work. Analysis of my musical output in these investigations highlights compositional developments across iterations of several projects involving flautist Claire Chase, The Sydney Symphony Orchestra and SSO Fellows, The ELISION Ensemble and Sydney Chamber Opera. This undertaking is demonstrated to have enriched the scope of my creative practice, which originated in technical preoccupations with disturbance patterns and evolved through the pursuit of broader inquiries in fields of multispecies attentiveness, concepts of the uncanny, processual materialities, and speculative figurings of more-than-human phenomenologies. The manner of my engagement with interference paradigms mirrors this shift, as the emergence of contingent threads and taxonomical slippages confound distinctions between categories in compositionally fruitful ways. Threads are drawn between aspects of my musical thinking and the work of composers Chaya Czernowin, Evan Johnson, Bryn Harrison and Salvatore Sciarrino. Discussions of further relations to contemporary art practitioners highlight the vibrancy of interference aesthetics across different mediums and through modes of material and conceptual translation