Contemporary Music Review

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Instrumental, Hermeneutic, and Ontological

Indeterminacy in Hugh Davies’s Live Electronic
Music

James Mooney, Owen Green & Sean Williams

To cite this article: James Mooney, Owen Green & Sean Williams (2022) Instrumental,
Hermeneutic, and Ontological Indeterminacy in Hugh Davies’s Live Electronic Music, Contemporary
Music Review, 41:2-3, 193-215, DOI: 10.1080/07494467.2022.2080455

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/07494467.2022.2080455

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Group

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Contemporary Music Review, 2022
Vol. 41, Nos. 2–3, 193–215, https://doi.org/10.1080/07494467.2022.2080455

Instrumental, Hermeneutic, and

Ontological Indeterminacy in Hugh
Davies’s Live Electronic Music
James Mooney , Owen Green and Sean Williams

While many previous studies have explored indeterminacy as a compositional technique,

in this article we explore the concept of indeterminacy, not only from the perspective of the
composer, but also from the perspectives of performer and archival researcher, drawing
upon our experiences of researching and performing several live electronic music
compositions by British experimental musician Hugh Davies (1943–2005). Our core
argument is that beneath the surface level of composed indeterminacy—that is, beyond
the notations and instructions that a composer employs to prescribe indeterminate
musical results—there exist further ‘nested’ planes of indeterminacy that reveal
themselves through the acts of archival research, rehearsal and performance.
‘Instrumental’ indeterminacy has to do with the instruments that are used to perform
the music, and specifically to situations where the boundaries of the instruments are
experienced (by performers or audience members) as ambiguous, fluid, reconfigurable,
or undefinable, or where the behaviour of the instrument(s) is unpredictable or
uncontrollable in the moment of performance. ‘Hermeneutic’ indeterminacy concerns
the composer’s intentions and the ways in which these are revealed, through the
processes of archival and performance research, to be incompletely, ambiguously,
contradictorily, and/or diffusely represented in documents (including but not limited to
scores) and material configurations (including the instruments and apparatus used to
perform the music). ‘Ontological’ indeterminacy is signalled by uncertainty (on the
part of the researchers) about the ontological status of the piece to be performed. By
sharing these perspectives, we aim to contribute to scholarly understandings of the
‘afterlives’ of indeterminacy, beyond the circumscriptions of a composer.

Keywords: Indeterminacy; Live Electronic Music; Archival Research; Performance

Research; 1960s; 1970s

© 2022 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://
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vided the original work is properly cited.
194 J. Mooney et al.
Introduction
In this essay, indeterminacy provides the lens through which we view our experience
of staging several performances of experimental live electronic works by the English
composer Hugh Davies (1943–2005). The three pieces that we discuss were composed
by Davies between 1967 and 1969. Our performances were staged in 2015–2016 as
part of JM’s1 AHRC project ‘Hugh Davies: Electronic Music Innovator’. Timings in
the text refer to video-recordings of our performances, which are available to view
online, along with pre-concert lectures and programme notes that futher describe
and contextualise the pieces (see Mooney 2016a, 2016b, 2016c).
Davies’s compositions feature the use of performance indeterminacy, improvisa-
tion, and text notation, and are thus stylistically consistent, broadly speaking, with
what Anderson has called the classic, post-Fluxus period of British experimental
music (Anderson 2009, 275–276). In our discussion, however, we look beyond the
surface details of ‘composed indeterminacy’ to explore the ways in which indetermi-
nacy was experienced by the ensemble members in the process of preparing and per-
forming these pieces. As such, we take up the mantle of ‘understanding indeterminate
music through performance’ (Thomas 2013).
Our core argument is that beneath the surface level of composed indeterminacy—
that is, beyond the notations and instructions that a composer employs to prescribe
indeterminate musical results—there exist further ‘nested’ planes of indeterminacy
that reveal themselves through the acts of archival research, rehearsal, and perform-
ance. In particular, we posit the existence of ‘Instrumental’, ‘Hermeneutic’ and ‘Onto-
logical’ planes of indeterminacy that reveal themselves through the performing of
Davies’s music. Indeterminacy in the instrumental plane has to do with the instru-
ments that are used to perform the music, the extent to which their boundaries
may be perceived (by performers or audience members) as being ambiguous, fluid,
reconfigurable, or undefinable, and the extent to which their behaviour may be
unpredictable or uncontrollable in the moment of performance. Indeterminacy in
the hermeneutic plane concerns the composer’s intentions, the ways in which these
are revealed to be incompletely, ambiguously, contradictorily, and/or diffusely rep-
resented in particular documents (including but not limited to scores) and material
configurations (including the instruments and apparatus used to perform the
music). Ontological indeterminacy is signalled by uncertainty about the ontological
status of the piece to be performed. Before we explore how we performed indetermi-
nacy, however, it is first necessary to explain how Davies composed indeterminacy.

Background: Davies’s Approach to Indeterminate Composition

I might say that I have never regarded my music as aleatoric, but rather what one
calls statistic, that is to say one knows exactly how a work will turn out in perform-
ance, but there will always be pleasant surprises in the way individual details appear
in a particular performance. (Davies 1968c)
 Contemporary Music Review 195
As a composer of live electronic music, Hugh Davies was not particularly interested in
randomness or chance selection. Rather, he was interested in specifying ranges or
fields of musical probability—an approach that he described in his unpublished
notes (quoted above) as ‘statistic’.
Davies sought to compose probabilistically by deploying a range of techniques that
were oriented towards harnessing the statistical potentials inherent in the bringing
together of specific instruments—often non-standard instruments that Davies built
himself or required the performers to build—specific performers (or specific kinds
of performer), and instructions contained within a (typically text-based) score.2 Of
course, orienting the statistical tendencies of particular instruments and performers,
via instructions contained in a score, toward increasing the probability of particular
musical outcomes would be one way of describing the work that any composer does.
But like many composers of experimental music, Davies was more interested in cir-
cumscribing indeterminacy than eliminating it entirely. To achieve this, he developed
a distinctive approach that involved designing sociomaterial situations3 that exploited
the combined probabilistic tendencies of non-standard instruments (typically of his
own design), individual performers, and scores.
One way that Davies circumscribed ranges of musical probability in his compo-
sitions was by prescribing the use of non-standard instruments. Davies’s instruments
were designed to present the player with a comparatively narrow range of timbral or
interactional possibilities, notionally increasing the statistical probability that certain
kinds of sounds or sonic behaviours would emerge in performance. It was for this
reason that Davies referred to his instruments as having ‘personalities’ (Davies
1972). In Davies’s live electronic works, the instruments tended to be electro-acous-
tically coupled in some way to form an inter-connected system or ‘distributed instru-
ment’—a topology that Davies had first encountered when performing
Stockhausen’s Mikrophonie I (1964) in the mid-1960s.4 Sonically, Davies’s instru-
ments were oriented toward the production of unpitched sounds (i.e. noisy
spectra), electroacoustic feedback, or sounds resembling those obtained via tape
manipulation in musique concrète.
Davies further delineated the ranges of musical probability in his scores. These
tended to include instructions that required the performer to explore the full range
of sonic and interactional possibilities offered by the instrument—possibilities
which, of course, had been tightly circumscribed by Davies in the design of the instru-
ments themselves.
A significant consequence of Davies’s approach was that his poietic intentions
ended up being inscribed partly in his scores and partly in the instruments them-
selves—which, in turn, served as a proxy for the kinds of sounds and emergent
musical behaviours that Davies imagined would result from the players’ interactions
with these instruments during performance. Of course, precisely which sounds or
behaviours will emerge in a given performance depends upon, amongst other
things, the players’ interpretations of the instructions in the score.
196 J. Mooney et al.
Davies’s statistic approach to composition was also reflected in the way he concep-
tualised the interactional dynamics of musical free improvisation in an ensemble
context. As a member of the Music Improvisation Company and Naked Software
—improvisation groups with which Davies regularly performed in the late 1960s
and early 70s—he wrote that ‘In both groups you could play in the secure knowledge
that one or more of the other players, almost always particular players that one was
“aiming at”, would react to you in a particular way, without necessarily playing the
sort of thing that you might have expected them to play’ (Davies 1975, 10). This
suggests that Davies regarded musical improvisation as a statistic process of sorts,
‘almost always’ predicable in the emergent tendencies of musical behaviour but
‘without necessarily’ being predictable at the level of precise musical details. Like
instruments, Davies considered individual performers to have ‘musical personalities’
that enabled improvisational dynamics to be loosely predictable in this way (Davies
2002; Mooney 2016d). Davies was interested in embedding processes of improvisa-
tion in his compositional work, and this sort of ‘statistic’ predictability, arising
from the interactional dynamics of ensemble improvisation, was an implicit feature
of his live electronic works, which invariably involved an element of improvisation.

Preparing and Performing the Pieces

We now turn to the specific pieces that we performed: Quintet (1967–1968), Interfaces
(1967–1968), and Not to be Loaded with Fish (1968–1969).5 These represent Davies’s
first live electronic compositions and his earliest compositional explorations of the
statistic potentials of the instrument-performer-score as socio-technical nexus.
The preparation and performance of the pieces took place in the context of a
fifteen-month AHRC research project entitled ‘Hugh Davies: Electronic Music Inno-
vator’, led by JM, in collaboration with the Edinburgh-based ensemble Grey Area. The
group comprised Nikki Moran, Emma Lloyd, Shiori Usui, Armin Sturm, Dave
Murray-Rust, OG, and SW, and had come together some years previously to
explore repertoire that combines notation and improvisation. Whereas the group
members usually play their ‘normal’ instruments, a striking feature of this project
was the extent to which each of the pieces necessitated the building and playing of
non-standard instruments.
JM engaged Grey Area to develop a concert of Davies’s work, which was curated in
collaboration with SW. The programme was performed twice: once in Leeds, and
once in Edinburgh. Naïvely, one might suppose that such concerts could have
served just as a representation of the fruits of JM’s archival research, of questions
already answered. However, as will become clear, the group’s practical engagement
with the pieces generated questions and uncertainties, prompting a more dialogical
understanding of the relationship between archival and practical work in this
project. We discuss the pieces in turn, in a rough order of how much supporting
material there was at the outset (such as scores and archival documents, for
example), and so, how much we believed we knew.
 Contemporary Music Review 197
Our discussion focusses on two key issues: material and technological choices that
must be made in sourcing or building the (often) non-standard instruments and
other apparatus required to perform this kind of music; and the significance of the
musical backgrounds of the performers in the preparation and execution of a per-
formance. Both variables, we argue, have substantive implications for the way that
the music unfolds in performance.

Quintet
In Quintet, four players (Players I–IV) stationed around the audience produce and
play feedback, according to instructions in the score that describe the pitch (high,
medium, or low) and other characteristics of the desired sound, using a micro-
phone-loudspeaker setup, routed via a central player (Player V) who can adjust not
only individual levels but also microphone-loudspeaker routings. A detailed discus-
sion of this piece is given by van Eck (2017), who notes that the character of the
piece arises from the way the configuration gives rise to a set of cross couplings
that puts players in a position of having to search for their sounds. In particular, feed-
back systems tend to be very sensitive to even small changes in microphone position.
This configuration forms one example of what we’re calling a ‘distributed instru-
ment’, one that exhibits couplings at a variety of scales. Players I–IV are all coupled
to Player V. Changes to volume levels made by Player V may interrupt or otherwise
transform the sound of one of the microphonists, giving the possibility that these
players might end up in a kind of ‘dance’ with Player V as each tries to fulfil their
scored instructions. Furthermore, the instrument also couples to its acoustic environ-
ment: the feel and behaviour of the individual feedback systems is changed by the acous-
tic qualities of the hall. Player V, meanwhile, has their hands full: not only must they be
attending to and dancing with each of the streams from Players I–IV, but they also have
additional sound making duties involving a further microphone-loudspeaker system, as
well as a tone generator used to produce modulation effects with the feedback sound.
In practice, it turns out that the selection and setup of microphones and amplifiers
also has a profound effect on the behaviours of the overall distributed instrument. For
our performances, we elected to use guitar amplifiers, as these were readily available.
Moreover, we found in rehearsal that to produce feedback at sound levels that the
players could cope with, we needed to overdrive the signals. However, the conse-
quence of such a move is to render the microphone-loudspeaker system even more
sensitive and unstable, and the effect of changing acoustic environment is amplified
as a result. Concretely, the behaviour of the system will tend to move away from a
simple one where the resultant pitch is a predictable function of the distance
between the loudspeaker and microphone, to a more complex behaviour where the
pitch is increasingly liable to jump suddenly in response to small movement.
It is perhaps partly due to these dislocations that we felt neither of our two per-
formances of Quintet—in acoustically different venues—went as well as expected.
Whilst we had reached a point in rehearsals where we felt comfortable with the
198 J. Mooney et al.
piece, that we could produce something that felt musically coherent and compared
well with Davies’s recorded version,6 the performances felt less focused and less struc-
tured. One component of this was that Players I–IV were having to, in essence, re-
learn their instruments in the new acoustic surroundings, such was the sensitivity
of the systems. Another more subtle aspect possibly lies in the fact that it is simply
harder to hear what is going on overall in larger, more reverberant spaces. Despite
the score stipulating that Players I-IV are not to coordinate with each other (implying
that Player V takes responsibility for the overall sonority and shaping of gestures), we
had, nevertheless, become used to hearing each other in our acoustically immediate
rehearsal space and did not give this instruction due consideration. In particular,
the sounds of the other players turn out to be helpful in locating oneself in the
overall score (even though we all had stopwatches), especially at the boundary
points between sections.
Finally, even after rehearsal and performance, there remained a couple of points of
mystery in Quintet that subsequently discovered archive material helped shed some
light on. The first of these concerns the final two sections of the piece (08:50–10:30
in the online video recording of our performances), where Player V re-routes the con-
nections between microphones and loudspeakers using the mixing console. We found
that the effect of doing this is that feedback ceases unless the original feedback path is
maintained, as the increased distance between a microphone and loudspeaker means
that considerably more gain would be needed to set the system in motion. Whilst the
score seems to suggest that feedback between these more distal points should still be
possible, our gain structure did not afford this, and we decided that this section was
more poetic: Players I-IV should be seen to be searching for their feedback loops.7
However, we later discovered in a letter from Davies to Jaap Spek that

The switching unit is optional (small halls only); in one section the microphone
connections are switched round aleatorically, so that a performer may find that
he can no longer get feedback with his own speaker, but that it does work with
someone else’s loudspeaker. (Davies 1968d, 5)

Similarly, the final section (from about 10:30 in the video) calls for low frequency
feedback to be produced. We found this hard to achieve in practice, even when boost-
ing bass controls as Davies suggests, because it requires greater distance and greater
gain, and the overdrive we added also tends to attract the system to feedback at
higher frequencies. We did, nonetheless, find that by moving our microphones to
face the rear of the loudspeakers we could produce lower sounds, albeit without
much variation. However, in the same letter to Spek, Davies suggests that he was
able to achieve much more dramatic effects, perhaps again due to having more head-
room in his gain structure (and possibly more drastic equalisation controls):

After the comparatively high pitched sounds for most of the piece, it ends with the
lowest sounds that each player can get, with the amplifier and mixer volumes full
on. The whole place vibrated when we did it! (Davies 1968d, 5)
 Contemporary Music Review 199
Not to Be Loaded with Fish
Not to be Loaded with Fish is a piece for a soloist with record player and electronics.
Among its unusual features is that fact that it requires that one has first interpreted
another Davies piece, Voice (1969), for a solo vocalist and vinyl cutting machine.8
In Voice the performer is instructed to make a gramophone recording in a public
recording booth.9 In Davies’s performance notes, the solo vocalist is instructed as
follows:

The record is to be made vocally, with as much variety as possible (e.g. breathing,
growling, murmuring, whistling, intoning, etc.) but excluding conventional
singing. No intelligible words are to be used, though some passages may sound
as if they are in a foreign language. In particular vary the speed of articulation
and the use of pauses. (Davies 1969)

Not to be Loaded with Fish requires a record player that has been modified so that the
record made for Voice can be played both forwards and backwards at the flick of a
switch. The performer plays the record, ad lib, forwards and backwards, such that
the performance lasts approximately twice as long as the record itself, that is, about
5–7 min. The performer also modifies the sounds played back from the record
using a ‘pulsing unit’, constructed using two dials culled from old rotary telephones.
This pulsing unit chops up the sound, so that repetitive silences are introduced. The
performer also has additional controls that influence the volume and left/right
balance of the sound, via two loudspeakers.
Given that public record-cutting booths are no longer to be found, we had to exer-
cise some licence with how we produced the disc for Voice. For the Leeds perfomance,
Aleks Kolkowski used a portable lathe live on stage to cut a disc of Phil Minton per-
forming a vocal improvisation (this disc was also used in the second performance in
Edinburgh). Whilst this tactic had the palpable benefit of underlining for the audience
how the two pieces are connected, and perhaps making the role of the other elec-
tronics more scrutable, it did also mean that the performer (SW) had only his
memory of Minton’s performance to go by when performing Not to be Loaded with
Fish. In this sense, Not to be Loaded with Fish reveals a different kind of distributed
instrument, in that there is now this temporally displaced connection between
what was recorded, and how that recording is used to structure a performance.
The score makes few suggestions about the actual character of the gestures or
sounds a performer might aim for. Whilst Davies does instruct the player to ‘vary
the frequency of reversal of the turntable and the operation of each set of controls
and their different combinations as much as possible’, it’s unclear to what degree
he expected a performer to have learnt the repository of gestures available on the
disc, or to have scripted the performance.
Something that does become clear through practice is that, in common with
Quintet, the electronics performer is given quite a bit to do; between two telephone
dials, volume faders for the left and right channels, and manipulating the turntable,
200 J. Mooney et al.
considerable dexterity is required. To help with this, SW used a fader setup for the
volume controls borrowed from Stockhausen’s Mikrophonie I10 and techniques used
by Rolf Gelhaar in that piece to control the left and right volumes with a single hand.
In rehearsals, SW found some effective combinations by using the faders to create
deliberate fast and slow envelopes with well controlled attack or decay shapes—some-
times using the dials to cut the sound, raising the faders and then using the dials to
switch the sound in and pulling the faders back very quickly to create percussive
sounds, although these didn’t translate into the performance, mainly due to the
different reactions provoked by the completely new material recorded immediately
prior to performing the piece. Possibly the most effective deliberate result was
achieved by holding the dials so that the sound passed through but in a position
such that a small hand movement could cut the sound off (01:40–02:00 in the
Leeds video).

Interfaces
In contrast to Quintet and Not to be Loaded with Fish, Interfaces doesn’t have a pub-
lished score or a complete set of materials and, as such, we were engaged in an attempt
at reconstruction as well as interpretation. This in itself yielded a very particular kind
of indeterminacy, as uncertainty over what there was to be found in the archives led,
unsurprisingly, to uncertainty about how the piece is meant to come together. To add
to this confusion, Interfaces also has two incarnations, for six people and for two
people. The six-person version, which we were attempting, may not have been pub-
licly performed more than once,11 and Davies had not regarded that performance as a
success.
What is clear enough is that the six-person version of Interfaces is for a collection of
small instruments, played by four people, with tape and electronics operated by an
additional two performers. Our starting materials were an equipment list (see
Figure 1) and a selection of sound files transferred from tapes held at the British
Library, as likely candidates for Interfaces’ tape parts. The equipment list suggested
some similarities in configuration to Quintet: four loudspeakers, a variety of
devices for routing signals, tone generators, signal processors, and an instruction to
devise a selection of small instruments from different materials. However, we were
missing any indication of how the various electronics were to be interconnected, or
any kind of score that indicated when or how to deploy these resources.
The lack of a score and a signal flow was especially troubling because there are so
many elements at play. Each small-instrument player has two instruments, plus a
variety of exciters; the tape parts are very dense indeed, and include highly varied
materials; and there are a great many ways that the various electronic components
can be interconnected and routed. Our early rehearsals were, for this reason, slow,
as we trialled different possible signal flows, and tried to make sense of how these
materials could work together, although the programme note from the 1968 perform-
ance had a small hint:
 Contemporary Music Review 201

Figure 1. Equipment list for Interfaces (© British Library Board, MS Mus.1803/1/10/1,

‘Interfaces (Galactic Interfaces)’).

The title refers to the combination and contrast of the sounds on four tape tracks
with each other and with live sounds produced by the four performers, as well as to
the varied use of modulating, mixing and switching devices. (Davies 1968a)

However, perhaps in part due to the amount of uncertainties we had about the piece,
it wasn’t until the second performance that we properly started to get a grasp on Inter-
faces. Even the first performance, although tempered by apprehension and somewhat
202 J. Mooney et al.
messy, had felt like an improvement on our rehearsal attempts, perhaps because per-
formance in front of an audience forced us to focus on finding the musical potential
in the setup that we had settled upon. The big shift between the two performances
really centred on deciding to ‘invert’ the material driving the piece: instead of
letting the tape drive the small-instrumentalists, we instead opted to make much
less use of this, and to have the four players (now working as pairs) assume a
driving role, as well as paying more attention to how electronic processing could
help thin-out the dense sound-world.
From what we have since learned from archive materials, particularly the especially
valuable correspondence between Davies and Spek (Davies 1968d), the trajectory we
pursued is somewhat in keeping with what Davies had in mind for the piece. For
instance, from the letter we learned both that the tape was meant to be used sparingly,
and that the panning effects were only to be engaged in the final section of the piece
(Davies 1968d, 6). Also, from some handwritten notes (Davies 1968b), we learned
more details about the distribution of small instruments among players (see
Figure 2). Davies clearly intended for there to be some built in differentiation
between the microphonists, by suggesting that each is limited to a different pair of
materials, and providing suggestions for possible instruments.
As it stands, however, we remain uncertain about the ontological status of Inter-
faces, including being uncertain about whether it is (or was) a work as such, or
remained a work in progress. Whilst it appears in Davies’ published and personal
work-lists (Roberts 2001; Davies 2003), and has a date and a programme note, the
fragmented and provisional nature of the archival documents that have been found
so far casts some doubt on how finished it ever was. There is something particularly
vexatious about trying to settle this for indeterminate works such Interfaces—which
might include performance instructions, signal flow diagrams, equipment lists,
among other resources—in that one is always going to be unsure that all the different
types of documention have been found. In this sense, interrogating the piece through
practice has proved fruitful in helping to resolve some questions and to focus others.

Experiencing Indeterminacy in Performance

Each of these pieces brings forth indeterminacy for performers in some ways. Further-
more, there appear to be multiple indeterminacies at work, on different levels. We
want to argue here that these are, in some sense, nested, and that while such
nesting is a conspicuous feature of live electronic pieces, we ought not foreclose the
possibility that it could be a feature of any other kind of musicking. Rather,
coming to terms with the ways in which indeterminacy is experienced in these
sorts of piece might contribute to a more shaded vocabulary and conceptual appar-
atus for analysing musical indeterminacy in general. The following analysis suggests
some planes of indeterminacy at work in these pieces of Davies’s by considering
them, broadly, in systemic terms: comprising in each case some network of people,
an ‘instrument’, and constraints that may (or may not) be taken to add up to a ‘work’.
 Contemporary Music Review 203

Figure 2. Handwritten draft performance instructions for Interfaces (© British Library

Board, MS Mus.1803/1/10/1, ‘Interfaces (Galactic Interfaces)’).

The Edges of the ‘Instrument’

Something that stands out among these pieces, and among pieces for electronics in
general, is that the notion of the instrument becomes less firm than we are accus-
tomed to. ‘Electronics’ denotes, in very broad terms, a medium rather than a particu-
lar configuration of materials that crop up repeatedly within a body of music. Indeed,
electronic music doesn’t seem to have associated with it a stable repertoire of
204 J. Mooney et al.
instruments to the same extent as, say, western chamber music or rock. However, its
instrumentarium, taken as a repertoire of tools that may be combined in practice, is
more stable: almost all the components of the pieces discussed above are still routinely
used in contemporary electronic music practice.
What is conspicuously hard to pin down, though, is where the boundaries of the
instruments are in these pieces. Each of them comprises, in some way, what we have
been calling a distributed instrument, in that the piece is defined in part by a coupled
material system across which agency is shared, but that can also be viewed as a col-
lection of sub-instruments that individuals interact with. In Quintet this distributed
agency is built in by the way that Player V mediates the feedback loops of Players I–
IV, so that the sound at any given moment is a function of the coupled decisions of
Player V with each of the others. In Not to be Loaded with Fish, by contrast, the
coupling of agency is deferred through the act of recording but, nonetheless, the
musical affordances of the overall instrument arise through the coupling of two
sets of action. For Interfaces, partly because of all that we still don’t know about
it, the potential space for different types of coupling is larger, as each of the micro-
phonists has (at least) a pair of sub-instruments, that are available for ad hoc coup-
ling with other players’ (as we saw in the Edinburgh performance), as well as the
potential distributions of agency through the combined actions of the electronics
operators.12
This instrumental indeterminacy can be said in each case to form part of the aes-
thetic themes of a piece. For instance, the way that Quintet is structured offers an
audience different glimpses of the underlying agential network as the performance
unfolds: at the very opening, as Players I–IV search for and gravitate towards a
tonal reference from Player V—‘Gradually find the same pitch as [player] V’, as
the score instructs—we can hear a system of distinct but coordinated actors. Conver-
sely, in the later sections, Player V acts upon the network in progressively more dis-
ruptive ways, first by modulating levels and assuming control over the spatial
modulation of the overall sonority, and then by changing the interconnections them-
selves, revealing the more complex distribution of agency at work.

The ‘Instrument’ and Musical Time

Because each piece involves building, and combining in to an overall system a series of
sub-instruments, it also involves, by extension, learning to play these things. At one
level, this introduces a very clear species of indeterminacy for performers, insofar as
there is a diminishing—yet lingering—degree to which one is always coming to terms
with the musical affordances at hand. Moreover, precisely because of the ways in
which these pieces hinge on the combinations of sub-instruments, the learning
process isn’t simply a matter of coming to terms with the sonic-gestural vocabulary
of a thing-in-isolation, but also with the combinational possibilities of the thing in
concert with other things-at-hand, and with things that other people are bringing
to the overall assemblage.
 Contemporary Music Review 205
As such, there is a conspicuous degree to which players in this situation are always
learning, and always improvising. Because these pieces all leave certain details unde-
termined of how instruments are to be played or constructed, the articulation of time
and timbre are also undetermined, albeit in different ways for each piece. Going
through these pieces iteratively, in close succession and association with each other,
and with different degrees of specification allows us to make some useful
comparisons.
There can sometimes be a sense, when watching—or doing—improvisation in the
build-your-instrument-as-you-go genre that the results are somewhat aimless. For
instance, we may feel as if the performance is simply a sequence of discovered
moments that don’t seem to refer to each other, or that among a polyphony there
doesn’t seem to be any deliberateness to ways that voices might push and pull at
each other. Arguably such structures are fairly normal in (post-)Cageian experimental
music.13 Nonetheless, in Quintet and Interfaces we were able, albeit to varying degrees,
to move ourselves from this kind of morass to episodes that felt more deliberate, and
more musical,14 but still indeterminate.
First, there is a sense in which one’s sense of musical time relates to how much one
has come to terms with the instrument. Almost involuntarily, the horizon of our
attention can collapse down somewhat when we’re still orientating ourselves to the
basic possibilities in front of us, and in this way can give rise to this somewhat discon-
nected result as we, quite contentedly, experience a series of ‘oh-I-can-do-this’
moments. Experientially,15 we could suggest a reasonably straightforward relationship
between the temporal-horizon of our musical thinking16 and the degree of contextual
fluency we’ve established with our materials: what characterises increasing fluency is
being able to grab at things (Sudnow 2001) in a more timely way, where timeliness is,
of course, conditioned by what else is happening.
Second, there is a sense in which this sort of fluency is accelerated by the particular
constraints offered by the score (in the case of Quintet and Not to be Loaded with Fish)
or notes (in the case of Interfaces). Importantly, whilst the way in which these pieces
comprise sub-instruments that all need to be learned, one can see that Davies took
some care in thinking about the degree of complexity each component might intro-
duce. The individual components tend to be infra-instruments (Bowers and Archer
2005): things consciously selected because they appear to offer very limited musical
possibilities when taken on their own, but that offer (potentially many) ways to be
playfully coupled and combined. This is strikingly true of the instruments and exciters
that Davies suggests for Interfaces, as they all exhibit strictly limited timbral and ges-
tural scope, can readily be explored in combination with each other and with
additional signal processing, and—crucially—wouldn’t take at all long to learn.
The directions that Davies provides in the scores re-enforce this pattern by placing
limits on what players are suggested to do with their components. In Quintet, Players I
—IV are, for the most part, exploring a very limited gestural and sonic space between
two registers and a small number of simple patterns; Player V has appreciably more
work to do, but is still constrained by the score to a subset of the many possibilities
206 J. Mooney et al.
that being able to route-freely between all the microphones and loudspeakers would
bring. In Not to be Loaded with Fish, the player is given an explicit suggestion of how
to interact with the telephone dials, whilst also being prohibited from certain moves
(touching the stylus of the record player).
From this, we can account for some of the differences in how Quintet and Interfaces
came together. Part of the viscosity we experienced with Interfaces can be attributed to
the open-endedness that comes from the limited documentation we were able to draw
upon, and from the need to conjure-up and learn parts of an indeterminate-whole ex
nihilo. In the trajectory between the two performances, we can see how the outwardly
shifted attention, in combination with some added constraints of our own, sharpened
the precision and extended the horizon of the ensemble’s grasp of musical time. Con-
versely, with Quintet, the availability of some constraints in the score meant that we
had a shorter journey to feeling as if we had become fluent. Yet, in performance, we
discovered that the boundaries of our instruments had shifted due to less hospitable
acoustic conditions—and nonlinear instruments—and so the experience went the
opposite way, with attention falling back in towards the local and immediate,
having to re-learn on the fly. We may assume that this kind of re-learning was antici-
pated by Davies, at least for Players I–IV, since in the performance directions he notes:
‘Players I–IV need not be trained musicians and should be able to get good results
after one rehearsal’.
To the extent that this concern with timeliness might be revealed in performance as
an aesthetic theme related to the indeterminacy of these pieces, we would suggest that
in pieces such as these, that involve self-consciously experimental conjunctions of
material in lieu of established instrumental technique, part of the performative
work lies in a somewhat intangible negotiation with the audience that what is happen-
ing is music and that, at some level, this involves establishing some degree of trust.
Further, in pieces where the moment-to-moment details are indeterminate, it
might be argued that when something happens is more important than precisely
what happens17 in terms of establishing and cementing such trust. As such, we
could regard the kinds of constraints that Davies introduces as being geared
towards leaving space for the players to attend precisely to this timeliness.

What Are We Doing?

Our final plane of indeterminacy occurs at the ontological level: indeterminacy about
what it is, in broad terms, that we’re performing. On the one hand, we are concerned
with these pieces as historical artefacts, and by performing them, trying to discover
otherwise elusive aspects of their nature. On the other, we are engaging with them
as artefacts in the musical present, where a great many of the techniques present in
these pieces have become more commonplace than they were in the 1960s, clichés
have been established, and the technological landscape has shifted markedly. On
the one hand, using period technologies to perform such works, as media archaeol-
ogists have suggested (Fickers and van den Oever 2013), can help to (re)produce
 Contemporary Music Review 207
knowledge about interactions with the technology that would be missing if modern-
day alternative technologies were used. This approach is useful, we argue, not only
from the perspective of research and interpretation, but also because works of live
electronic music are often defined sonically, performatively, or ontologically by the
sonic-tactile affordances of specific instruments and equipment. On the other hand,
sounds and sound technologies have cultural meanings that change over time (Bij-
sterveld and van Dijck 2009), and attempts to re-enact ‘historic’ sounds and perform-
ance practices in the present day, as critics of historically informed performance have
passionately argued (Taruskin 1995), will inevitably yield cultural meanings different
from those that might have been produced at the time of a work’s inception.18
In either case, we are left with hermeneutic indeterminacies, in trying to puzzle out
how these pieces may have functioned in the late 1960s or how they may be made to
function in the 2020s. We are surely not the first to consider these questions in
relation to work from this period; Simon Emmerson (2006), for instance, provides
a useful overview of many of the issues at hand for this generation of live electronic
music. Here we use a productive model from Nikki Losseff, who suggests a ‘musical
Johari window’ as a schema to help relate the different knowledge positions of
interpreters and composers (Losseff 2016). Losseff suggests four categories: the
Arena forms a basis of common knowledge between a composer and interpreter;
the Façade, those things only known to a composer; the Blind Spot, those things
known only to the interpreters; and a final, Rumsfeldian Unknown—things that
nobody knows. This provides a productive model, allowing for a certain degree of
contingency in what it might mean to ‘know’ something in the first place when
dealing with complex phenomena.
Clearly, certain things can move from the Façade into the Arena, through further
trips to the archives, re-examinations of materials, or by talking to those people still
available to tell the tale, and we have seen, in the case of Interfaces how many useful
pointers have since emerged. Nevertheless, even in the case of Quintet—the most for-
malised and ‘work-like’ of these pieces—key performance issues remain behind the
Façade. For instance, how loud was it? Davies comments in his letter to Spek, that
the room could be felt vibrating at the end of one performance (Davies 1968d)
which suggests that it may have been quite a bit louder, or at least with much
more headroom, than we performed it. However, approaching it this way—possibly
more ‘authentically’—would imply quite significant changes to how we approach it.
Would the performers need hearing protection? Would the audience? Is authenticity
worth pursuing under such circumstances?
When it comes to relating how Quintet might be received in a contemporary
setting, Losseff’s model yields interesting interactions between the Façade and the
Blind Spot. What interpretative emphasis might one put on the piece being concerned
with the sonic character of its materials versus the materiality of its performance
scheme? Does the sound world still hold interest for a contemporary audience con-
siderably more exposed both to relatively simple electronic sound, and to feedback
pieces? Would updating it in any way be tasteful, ethical, even? Clearly, 1968-
208 J. Mooney et al.
Davies had no possible way of knowing how well particular sounds would age, but on
the other hand, a later-Davies would have had plenty of opportunities to revisit a
piece should he have felt it to be a matter of any urgency (Façade).19
Clearly, in the case of Interfaces there is a great deal more that is left to be resolved,
sitting behind the Façade. Some of it may even be in the Unknown: we don’t know
that Davies ever actually finalised a version of Interfaces, despite it being included
in his work-lists. The greatest lacuna remains the score and, whilst we can only specu-
late at what it contains (if it exists), our work on the other pieces means that we can
possibly make quite informed speculations. One possible path, starting with Davies’
observation to Spek that the scores for Quintet and Interfaces were quite similar
(Davies 1968d),20 would be to base a putative score for Interfaces on some set of
interpretations (viz. guesses) about aspects of Quintet.
We could identify one thread in Quintet, for instance, that seems to be concerned
with moving steadily away from the sound of feedback in its plain form: in the earlier
stages of the piece we have slower moving gestures, turning into arpeggios, then being
interrupted first with hands and then by Player V, and finally settling on the elusive
low tones that may well have been outside people’s routine associations with the
sound of feedback. Another thread might be concerned with how the directness of
performance gestures were made apparent, and how the network of connections
reveals itself over the course of the piece, as noted above.
What might a score for Interfaces along similar lines be like? We can certainly
imagine how similar trajectories might be enacted, perhaps with the microphonists
remaining relatively un-processed at the start, and the sound world becoming increas-
ingly abstract as the piece unfolded. We know, again from the letter to Spek (Davies
1968d), that the panning device was only to be engaged at the end of the piece, which
perhaps suggests another similar trajectory at work as the network of connections is
only gradually revealed. It is also possible that a set of numbers next to instrument-
exciters in Davies’s handwritten notes could have been related to sections of the piece
(Davies 1968b), which might indicate that different sections achieved some coherence
by having the microphonists coordinating over how they drew sounds from their
instruments.21
Whilst such an undertaking is clearly possible, then, the question remains of
whether such an undertaking would be of value. Besides helping to produce a
more engaging performance of Interfaces, albeit one that has a more problematic
set of claims to make with respect to ‘authenticity’, re-approaching Interfaces in
this way may well turn out to reveal further areas of indeterminacy.

Conclusion
We return now to our core argument. Davies composed indeterminacy by producing
scores whose instructions indexed the indeterminate, ‘statistic’ behaviour of complex
systems comprising multiple players and spatially (Quintet, Interfaces) and/or tem-
porally (Voice/Fish) distributed instruments. But beyond this level of composed
 Contemporary Music Review 209
indeterminacy, our practice-research has uncovered three further species of indeter-
minacy—Instrumental, Hermeneutic, and Ontological—that reveal themselves
through the iterative processes of assembling Urtext materials (Emmerson 2006),
constructing (distributed) instruments, and rehearsing and performing pieces.
Instrumental indeterminacy manifests itself as uncertainty about just where the
boundaries of the instrument—and by extension, the boundaries of the individual
performer’s agency—lie. Indeed, this locus may shift within the duration of a per-
formance (Mooney, Parkinson, and Bell 2008). A corresponding uncertainty about
the boundaries of the instrument may also be experienced by the audience, and to
remedy this it may be deemed necessary for the players to ‘perform’ (in a demonstra-
tive sense) the boundaries of the instrument. Did Davies (and do other composers of
this kind of repertoire) have this in mind when he composed these pieces? We suggest
that this is a poietic and aesthetic dimension of indeterminate live electronic music
that would be worthy of analysis in future studies of this kind of repertoire.
In the performance of music for non-standard instruments, and even more so in
the case of distributed non-standard instruments, indeterminacy may be experienced
by the performers as uncertainty about the operational affordances of the instrument
at hand. This, in turn, may affect the performer’s ‘phenomenological experience of
musical time’ (Théberge 1997, 170) and, by extension, the form and content of the
music as it unfolds in time. Again, this has aesthetic ramifications for how an audience
may experience and appreciate (or not appreciate) this kind of repertoire.
Hermeneutic indeterminacy—or, perhaps, under-determinacy—is signalled by the
absence (or ambiguity) of information needed to make a satisfactory interpretation of
a work. Performers may experience hermeneutic indeterminacy when evaluating a
composer’s ambiguous prescriptions or non-determinations, deciding which of
these might have been part of the poietic intent qua indeterminacy (whether actively
or passively (Butt 2002, 89–91)), and devising practical ways of resolving them.
In the case of historic live electronic music—a category into which all the pieces we
performed fall—a further dimension of hermeneutic indeterminacy arises from the
fact that the cultural meanings of media and telecommunications technologies
(such dial telephones and ‘Record your Own Voice’ booths) and performance prac-
tices (such as those associated with live electronic music) shift over time, so that the
cultural meanings that had currency in the 1960s—when live electronic music was a
little-known experimental medium and dial phones were a banal fact of everyday
communication—are different from those that obtain in 2016, where live electronic
techniques have long been ubiquitous in popular and academic music cultures and
dial phones signify as ‘retro’. For the performers of historic live electronic music, her-
meneutic indeterminacy may thus present itself as a lack of information about the
composer’s intentions vis-a-vis these kinds of cultural meanings. Insofar as the
interpretation of indeterminate scores already requires the performers to interpret
the composer’s intentions qua indeterminacy, this situation, we can say, means that
the performers have to negotiate an additional indeterminate parameter (viz. the
composer’s orientation toward cultural signification) that presumably would not
210 J. Mooney et al.
have existed for performers interpreting the work during the 1960s. Of course, similar
kinds of observations have been made—and critiqued—in the context of academic
discussions around the ‘authentic’ performance of early music (see for example Taru-
skin 1984).
Ontological indeterminacy is signalled by uncertainty about the ontological status
of the piece to be performed and is perhaps best illustrated by the case of Interfaces.
On the one hand, there is archival evidence to suggest that Davies considered this
piece to have the ontological status of a work. He included it in several of his
written work-lists and wrote a programme note in which he stated when the piece
was ‘composed’ (Davies 1968a). On the other hand, the appearance of subscribing
to a more-or-less traditional notion of the work concept does not necessarily prove
that Davies genuinely regarded his creative practice in that way (see Goehr 2007,
243–286), and the nature of the archival documents themselves—their fragmented
state and messy, ‘provisional’ appearance—perhaps suggests that Interfaces was
never any more than a work-in-progress, fossilised in the archive in a state of perma-
nent provisionality.
Of course, the potential for this kind of ambiguity is not unique to musical works
and could arise in relation to other forms of creative practice when their material
traces make their way into an archive. But the potential for ontological indeterminacy
may be particularly pronounced in the case of indeterminate musical scores, and this
has precisely to do with the indeterminate nature of the poietic intent and the fact that
indeterminate scores often rely upon the artful omission of information and/or the
use of deliberately ambiguous or ‘provisional-looking’ notations as a way of repre-
senting this poietic intent (Cardew 1961; Behrman 1965). In this situation it may
be difficult for the researcher to distinguish between the traces of a work-in-pro-
gress—such as sketches of a work that was subsequently completed—and the traces
of a finished work that merely have the appearance of incompleteness or provisional-
ity because of the forms of notation that the composer has used to achieve the desired
indeterminate effects.
For these reasons, reconstructing an incomplete score of indeterminate music can
be a vexed process, and again, this is illustrated by the case of Interfaces. Knowing what
we know about Davies’s musical aesthetics, the idea that Davies may have composed a
live electronic work where the materials given to the performers consisted of nothing
more than an equipment list and a rubric about the interrelation of narrowly-defined
instrumental sound worlds and the distinctive musical personalities of the perfor-
mers, the rest being left down to the ‘statistic’ determinations of improvised perform-
ance, seemed plausible—in a way that it would not have done had Davies been a
staunch advocate of more deterministic compositional approaches (in which case
the materials might have more decisively announced themselves to us as ‘incom-
plete’). On the other hand, the statistic nature of Davies’s approach affords the possi-
bility of approaching a reconstruction of what we now understand more clearly to be
an incomplete score, since the statistical tendencies inherent in the bringing together
of the prescribed instruments and the generative tendencies of performers
 Contemporary Music Review 211
(qua musical personalities) can be used to approach a plausible solution empirically
via the emergent behaviour of the system itself—in a way that would not have been
possible had Davies’s poietic object been represented in the score simply as a sequence
of note tokens.
Finally, in practice research of this nature, indeterminacy may be experienced by
the researchers (who in this case are two performer-researchers and one non-per-
forming archival researcher) as a certain ontological plurality vis-a-vis the objects
of study (i.e. the works), which must simultaneously be viewed as historical artefacts
and artefacts in the musical present. While this is broadly true for any ‘historic’ reper-
toire, the performance of indeterminate historic works, which, furthermore, involve
the use of non-standard electronic and electro-acoustic instruments whose ‘statistic’
potential, moreover, is an integral object of the composer’s poietic intent, poses a par-
ticular set of problems that perhaps are unique to this kind of repertoire.

Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Funding
This work was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council [grant number AH/
M005216/1].

Notes on Contributors
James Mooney is Associate Professor of Musicology and Music Technology at University of Leeds,
UK. His research explores histories of electronic music and sound technologies. He has published on
mid-century electronic music instrumentation, sociotechnical/sonic imaginaries, technological
affordances in music-making, noise music, electronic music on television, and multi-loudspeaker
sound systems, as well as on the work of experimental musician Hugh Davies.
Owen Green is an improvisor, systems builder and theorist, interested in the entwining of the social
and technical in music technology research. He currently works at the University of Huddersfield,
UK, as a research fellow on the ERC project ‘Fluid Corpus Manipulation’, developing platforms for
musical creative coding research with machine listening and machine learning.
Sean Williams is a senior lecturer in Music at the Open University. His main area of research is in
electronic music technology and practice in the second half of the twentieth century. As a practice-
led researcher he builds, maintains and customises analogue electronic instruments, using them to
realise and perform new and existing pieces. He performs internationally and runs the Free Range
Orchestra.

Notes
[1] We use initials to refer to each of the three authors when required.
[2] For further discussion of Davies’s self-built instruments see Mooney (2017).
[3] In sociology and organisation studies, the term ‘sociomateriality’ connotes the idea that
‘ontologically, the social is so implicitly entwined with the material that distinctions
between the two are artificial’ (Jarzabkowski and Pinch 2013, 581). We use the term here
212 J. Mooney et al.
to highlight the way Davies leveraged, as a compositional technique, the probabilistic ten-
dencies of constitutionally entangled networks of humans and materials.
[4] A filmed performance of Mikrophonie I, including Hugh Davies on potentiometers, was pro-
duced by Dhomme and subsequently released on DVD by the Stockhausen Foundation
(Dhomme 1966). At the time of writing, this film is also available online (Zoy 2012). The
three pieces that we discuss here all involve the use of distributed instruments topologically
similar to the one used in Mikrophonie I. A particularly good example of the distributed
agency that characterises such instruments can be seen in our Edinburgh performance of
Galactic Interfaces, where one performer strikes a bell-like instrument and the sound is sim-
ultaneously ring-modulated by another (SW) (5:55–6:35).
[5] Instrumentation as follows: Quintet, for 5 performers, 5 microphones, sine/square-wave gen-
erator, 4-channel switching unit, potentiometers, amplifiers, and 6 loudspeakers; Interfaces,
for 6 performers, 4 self-built amplified instruments, 2 stereo tapes and electronic equipment;
Not to be Loaded with Fish, for solo performer, record player, 2-channel pulsing unit and elec-
tronic equipment.
[6] Davies’s recorded version of Quintet is available on the following compilation CD: An Anthol-
ogy Of Noise & Electronic Music / Second A-Chronology 1936–2003, Sub Rosa SR200 (2003).
[7] Cathy van Eck interprets this part of the piece similarly (van Eck 2017, 86–87). While no
explicitly theatrical performance directions are included in the score for Quintet, our
interpretation is in line with Davies’s approach to performance aesthetics as seen in his
other works, such as The Birth of Live Electronic Music (see Mooney 2016c). We are grateful
to Scott McLaughlin for useful discussion around this point.
[8] Video recordings of our performances of both Voice and Not to be Loaded with Fish may be
viewed online (Mooney 2016c), so that the relationship between the two pieces as we per-
formed them can be better understood.
[9] Such booths were, at one time, reasonably common, for example in train stations; one would
insert a coin, record sounds for three minutes or so, and a gramophone record would drop
out. They are no longer common nowadays, and for our performances, a disc-cutting lathe
was used to cut the sounds produced by the vocalist directly to disc.
[10] Which, as Stockhausen’s assistant between 1964 and 1966, Davies had performed extensively
(Mooney 2016d).
[11] At the London Planetarium on 22 March 1968 (Park Lane Group and Society for the Pro-
motion of New Music 1968).
[12] Weinberg (2005) outlines a useful vocabulary for starting to describe these various topolo-
gies. Quintet has something in common with what he calls a ‘flower’ (p. 35), in that a
series of unconnected agents are mediated by some central agent; the temporal displacement
in Not to be Loaded with Fish could be represented by a simple ‘wheelbarrow’ (p. 34); and the
possibilities of Interfaces could be modelled in terms of a hybrid topology that the dynamic
scope of the assemblage. However, to be more generally applicable, Weinberg’s framework
needs to be decoupled from two unneeded moves in the text. First, a narrative of technologi-
cal-musical progress that takes a priori that more modern technologies present richer topo-
graphical possibilities that lead to richer musicking; and, second, an over-simple coupling of
‘social philosophies’ to types of topology that seems to assume that the political character of
these things can be assessed independently of the concrete social and historical circumstances
in musical acts occur.
[13] We are grateful to Scott McLaughlin for this observation, though we also note that a ‘post-
Cageian’ reading is not the only, nor indeed the most accurate way of interpreting Davies’s
work. As JM has noted elsewhere, influences upon Davies’s work in the late 1960s were many
and varied. Cage was among them, but it would be erroneous to assume that Cage was a more
significant influence than, say, Stockhausen, Max Neuhaus, Gordon Mumma, or the many
 Contemporary Music Review 213
composer-performers and improvisers that Davies worked together with as a member of
Gentle Fire, the Music Improvisation Company, and Naked Software. For further discussion,
see Mooney and Pinch (2021) and Mooney (2022).
[14] What we mean is that, through rehearsal, we were able to reach a point where our engage-
ment with these pieces felt more musical to us as performers. Implicit here is the assumption
that ‘musicality’ is contingent on (historically situated) social negotiation which takes place
through musicking itself (in Small’s wide sense [Small 1998]).
[15] Viz., this is not a psychological claim.
[16] ‘Thinking’ is not to imply that we are reducing musicking to a purely ‘mental’ process or
engaging in any other form of Cartesianism; ‘thinking-doing’ might be better.
[17] This is more our interpretation than a specific directive gleaned from Davies’s scores.
[18] Magnetic tape meant different things to audiences in 2016 compared to audiences in 1968,
for example, as did the phenomenon of acoustic feedback, which represented a new and
novel sound-world in the 1960s but has since been assimilated into the musical mainstream.
[19] More playfully, we can wonder how Not to be Loaded With Fish could be ‘translated’: given
the extent to which the material setup makes a feature out of using what were everyday tech-
nologies of the 1960s, in the form of record players and rotary telephone dials, what would
the contemporary equivalent be?
[20] Of Interfaces, Davies states that ‘the 4 performers have identical parts with freedom for
overlapping’.
[21] It is, however, also possible that these numbers were intended as cross-references to photo-
graphs of the instruments, to be included in printed documentation for the piece that ulti-
mately never materialised. Such a system was later used by Davies when documenting his
‘Solo Performance Table’ (see Toop 1974, 5).

ORCID
James Mooney http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7925-9634

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