Royal College of Music in Stockholm, 2016–2019, Swedish Research Council
Music in Disorder
Counterplay, complexity and collective improvisation
An artistic research project on what happens when musicians in a group deliberately disturb the order of what they play: tweaking, displacing, clashing and scattering their material so that no one controls the whole. Over three years the project developed techniques and concepts for collective improvisation, tested them with musicians, dancers and circus artists, and asked whether they could be useful beyond music.
What the project did
The research team, led by Klas Nevrin with Anna Lindal, Katt Hernandez and Ricard Österstam, worked through labs, seminars and concerts, often as the Revoid Ensemble, together with guest musicians, dancers and choreographers. Out of the work came a modular approach to improvising, a conceptual toolbox, the Diagram of Attractors and the Rhizomatic Scores. Disorder was never meant as chaos for its own sake. It was a way of letting differences work productively against each other, and of exploring power in a group as something that can be shared and reinforced rather than used to dominate.
Importantly, disorder is not seen as the destruction or negation of order but rather as a more complex form of multi-structural, multi-directional, multi-functional or multivalent organization. When several non-coordinated patterns or gestures are working in tension against each other, this may be rewarding precisely due to the interpretational depth thus offered. Musicians and external listeners must then be active in choosing how and when to relate things to each other. Disorder thus involves distributed forms of listening and acting that entail losing control over the improvisation as a whole. Put differently, improvisation becomes more collectively co-created.
The conference paper
Klas Nevrin, “Music in Disorder: Counterplay, Complexity and Collective Improvisation.” Participatory Innovation Conference 2018, Eskilstuna, Sweden, pp. 183–191. Peer-reviewed.
The paper outlines the project’s aims, method and first results, including the modular approach and the conceptual toolbox, and suggests that they could be taken up in other artistic fields and in design processes that involve group creativity.
What came after
The concepts from Music in Disorder became the starting point for the research project AMIS (2024–26), which took them into organisations, and for the forthcoming book chapter Chaotizing Co-Creation and Attuning to the Blur:
Importantly, the concepts explored here emerged not in solitude, but through the friction of collective practice. Drawing on years of experimentation within the research projects Music in Disorder and AMIS, I approach the blur not as a theoretical abstraction, but as a tangible pressure felt in the rehearsal room and research studio. In these spaces—improvising ensembles, transdisciplinary labs, field workshops—the ‘felt nextness’ surfaced as a shared, precognitive sensation that demanded a new vocabulary.
Facts
- Project
- Music in Disorder: Counterplay, Complexity and Collective Improvisation
- Institution
- Royal College of Music in Stockholm (KMH)
- Funding
- Swedish Research Council, 4.35 MSEK, 2016–2019
- Principal Investigator
- Klas Nevrin
- Recording
- The Revoid Ensemble (Found You Recordings, 2016): Best Experimental Album, Manifestgalan 2017