a philosophical mood

Aesthetic judgment, as simultaneously synthetic and analytic, is therefore intrinsically mystagogic. This means that aesthetic experience in which aesthetic judgment is formed on the basis of an exclamation that leaves the subject staggered, mouth agape, is a sort of initiation into mystery, and into transformative, aesthetic mystery.

The Decadence of Industrial Democracies
Bernard Stiegler

We need a new metaphysics of creation; there is no piece of music, there are instantiations of potential the manifold of possibility, and for all of their ephemerality, each reshapes the world.  The tendencies described previously collectively describe this area of research: the foundations of musicking within a specious present, a seemingly singular now emerging from enmeshed pasts. And in the mixing of these tendencies, thoughtful consideration of these foundations is as much 'necessary' as forced upon both the makers and the audience. 

Consider The Winter Journey, a project commissioned from the ensemble Yarn|wire, is based on a short story by George Perec; the story itself takes the form of a 19th-century fairytale of memory and loss, and so the new composition will involve transformation of the French and German art-song tradition of the 19th and early 20th century.  Or consider Fortuitous Variations, an assay connecting the phenomenology of performance to the distinctly American philosophy of James and Peirce.

This approach and the works themselves connect to many aspects of the scholarship in the humanities, including history, anthropology, literary studies, and philosophy. While using such 'learned' devices, the pieces also have traces of early experiences in punk, progressive rock, jazz, and other improvisation-focused practices, and minimalist experiments.  This mood, then, is one of consideration, of reflection upon reflection, of the musical-being that is curious about the nature of its being.