Lets consider the museum as performance space.
The distiction between visual, performing and literary arts have become blurred and in many cases beside the point. For instance the role of the composer, when working in the context of opera or non-traditional transmission of his musical ideas, can be one that combines the role of author on the one hand and director on the other fluently with his musical work.
During the work on my opera ‘These fragments I have shored against my ruins’ I spent the first two months editting texts. The structure of the script had such a strong compositional character that it was essential for the development of the actual music to materialise it before. After I started to put the actual notes down on paper, my view on directing the singers and musicians had an equal importance on the musical choices I made due to the space the piece would take place where audience, performers and sounds move freely.
Still I don’t cross the invisible border of putting myself in the position of becoming an designer or director. I include the function of these disciplines inside the context of my own way of thinking, which remains unaltered and unquestionable the point of view of the composer.
It is just that a spatial dimension is as important in the musical experience as the actual notes the musicians perform, and all of their actions are concieved musical as well performative. In fact it becomes unnescessary to make the distiction: performative, musical, textual and architectural aspects can possibly come together for the purpose of a specific artistic idea.
If I assume that directors, composers and performers want to be free to express their ideas in any media, or at least want to consider how and where to interact with audiences, it is logical that we question the limited spatial possibilities, and the quite rigid organisation of the relation between artwork, performers and audience that a traditional performance setting implies. An audience seated in a fixed place on one side, and the performers fixed on the other has become just one out of the many possibilities. The artist has to deal with the expectations and possibilities that such a specific performance setting offers, like he would have to consider those parameters in any other space for his work.
For me as a composer it means that any type of public platform can serve as a stage for my work. A space for my music to sound in is not nescessarily a concertstage anymore. It can be just as well, or even more probable, the internet, a specific in- or outdoor location, in fact any ‘space’ that serves the content of the artwork and provides an audience the possibility to attend.
If we consider the museum as one of these possible performance spaces, we might discover it as a stage that offers unique perspectives, exactly because of its neutral character and unpredefined spatial possibilities.
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