Performing ‘the radicality of unknowing who we are becoming’

(cf Phelan, 1997, 17). To create something in a specific way is not in itself a pathway to knowledge. Nevertheless, for the artist-researcher, the process of creation allows insight into the performative nature of materials and their subsequent meaning-making. To this end, practices of performative writing (Pollock, 1998), or performance autoethnography (Denzin, 2003), offer opportunities to understand articulation as a further creative practice; one that is able to investigate itself through and beyond its meaning-making. This performance-lecture will explore my practice research in the materiality of notation within the field of contemporary and experimental music composition, broadly conceived, by using examples of processes and practice from my own creative practice research. At the same time, it aims to reflexively examine the methodology of practice research in music composition and creation, considering creative practice both as its means of investigation and mode of presentation and communication. Here, the performance-lecture is explored as a form of ‘writing out’ (Igweonu, et al, 2011), as a method in itself, and as an interrogation of method/ology within practice research. Drawing on Knorr Cetina’s (2001) concept of ‘objectual practice’, it critically engages with the academic context by rendering it as inherently performative as is the articulation of artistic research and its related experiences. My aim is to make explicit methods for and of doing and knowing, that are situated in my embodied position as a researcher, composer, performer and improvisor, but also to use those same positions to interrogate and question the pathways to knowledge within them. Beyond this, the political connotations of the practice of performative writing are also explored in the way that it, ‘expands the notions of what constitutes disciplinary knowledge’ (Pelias, 2005, 417), throwing into question not only what disciplines contain or describe, but the way that knowledge is accessed and communicated within them