Presented at the Rethinking Participatory Processes through Music study day at The University of Huddersfield on 15 January 2022.
1. INTRODUCTION
The social behaviour of groups can be used as a means to articulate musical structures and processes, embodying decision-making in live performance. In doing this, it is possible to explore the way choices and actions by individual performers affect the behaviour of the whole group, and the resultant music. When this is done in a self-evident way, it offers the possibility to use music as a metaphor for how social and political systems operate, or might operate, either at a local level in a literal way within small groups or as representative of society more broadly. Such work plays with the notion of a system, both as a musical and socio-political device.
My interest in this stems from a fascination with systems as organisational forces. My focus is on play, exploring how certain systemic decisions might produce unforeseen results which become negotiated and enacted by performers, and correspondingly how these situations might be perceived by audiences. After a performance of my piece you are required to split your attention between multiple sources of information in Vienna in 2018, an audience member vented some frustration to the festival director regarding the dictatorial, disembodied artificial voices shouting impossible instructions at the players for 20 minutes without any break. For me, this acknowledgement of the uncomfortable aspects of witnessing systems operating on people speaks to the innate understanding we have of social processes, and their power to affect us even when made more abstract. But it also emphasises the way perception of such systems might vary: for me, the piece celebrated how people do the best they can in difficult situations.
In this paper though, I want to focus on musical systems that prioritise explicit participatory decision-making, giving players some agency in the way a piece unfolds, albeit within certain constraints encoded into the system. I will outline some principles of participatory decision-making and consider methods of translating these to music through examples drawn from work by others, and my own practice.
2. Participatory decision-making processes
Group decision-making processes are a common feature of our interpersonal interactions in a variety of contexts such as businesses, families, meetings, juries, and government. We gravitate towards group decision-making to solve problems because groups are ‘better informed, they can review and appraise ideas, information and alternatives through discussion, and they use consensus-based standards when making their final choices.’ (Forsyth 2019: 372) Participatory decision-making processes are a particular form of group decision-making where
public or stakeholder individuals, groups and/or organisations are involved in making decisions that affect them, whether passively via consultation or actively via two-way engagement, where publics are defined as groups of people who are not affected by or able to affect decisions but who engage with the issues to which decisions pertain through discussion … and stakeholders are defined as those who are affected by or can affect a decision (Reed et al. 2018: 4)
We value this in part because ‘Participation of the governed in their government is, in theory, the cornerstone of democracy’ (Arnstein 1969: 216), and because of ‘the fundamental value that participatory decision-making should be inclusive, empowering and emancipatory, particularly for the most marginalized and disadvantaged’ (Bell and Reed 2021: 11).
Participatory decision-making is useful because it has ‘the capacity to reduce conflict, build trust and facilitate learning amongst stakeholders and publics, who are then more likely to support project goals and implement decisions in the long term.’ (Reed et al. 2018: 8) It offers a redistribution of power in groups ‘that enables the have-not citizens, presently excluded from the political and economic processes, to be deliberately included in the future.’ (Arnstein 1969: 216)
The components of participatory decision-making processes are predicated on a ceding of power from centralized individuals to the group. Arnstein’s ladder of citizen participation (1969) proposes eight levels of participation, moving from non-participation, to tokenism, to citizen power, recognizing the illusory nature of some approaches with regards to participant engagement and value (see Figure 1). Reed et al. (2018: 6) define four types of stakeholder and public engagement as:
- top-down one-way communication and/or consultation;
- top-down [two-way] deliberation and/or co-production;
- bottom-up one-way communication and/or consultation;
- and bottom-up [two-way] deliberation and/or co-production.
These four vectors also emphasise the precarious balance between publics and stakeholders when making decisions.
In Bell and Read’s more generalized Tree of Participation model (2021: 16), separate domains are introduced, including pre-process principles (safe space, inclusive process and removing barriers), contextual factors (time, space, history, power, process, politics and culture) and the process itself which prioritises valuing, equality, authenticity, transparency, agency, representation and deliberation (see Figure 2). This model offers some key principles and variables for considering how participatory decision-making processes might be organized.
3. Translating participatory decision-making processes to music
These models, and the others that their research cites, demonstrate some of the key factors involved in participatory decision-making, and offer a way into conceiving them as musical processes. In this regard, Forsyth’s (2019: 374) observation that ‘groups engage in a sequence of activities, operations, and practices as they move from uncertainty to decisional conviction and that each step in the series serves some purpose’ suggests a simple framework for modelling decision-making in music, implying the presence of heuristics and algorithms that could be translated as part of a compositional method.
There are two primary considerations to take into account when translating decision-making processes to music, best summarized by Forsyth’s notion of goal clarity and goal path clarity.
Goal clarity focuses on ‘setting specific, attainable goals’ and the results a process ‘intends to deliver’ (Forsyth 2019: 375), which can be characterized as the principal aims of a piece. Goal clarity is important as it shapes the way players are motivated to act. In a jury, jurors know that they must reach a verdict which can be delivered on return to the court. The goal provides an aim which directs the decision-making process towards a specific end.
In a composition, significantly, this sense of purpose is largely absent from scores however (Saunders 2022), which tend to focus on specifying actions rather than the goal they might achieve. There is a sense that a goal or purpose must be inferred from what players are required to do (the goal path), without the explicit context of saying what this is. An exception can be found in Alvin Lucier’s The Duke of York (1971) which states
Two persons design a musical performance in which one of them, the synthesist, uses an electronic music synthesizer or equivalent configuration of electronic equipment to alter the vocal identity of the other, the vocalist … in ways determined by his or her relationship to the synthesist and the particular purpose of the performance. Performances may be used to strengthen personal ties, make friends with strangers or uncover clues to hidden families and past identities. (Lucier 1980: 80)
Here Lucier sets out possible motivations for the piece, both from his perspective and for those realizing it. This is unusual however.
Rather, most scores focus on goal path clarity, which considers ‘how the group will do its work, including identifying tasks and subtasks, organizing members’ roles and responsibilities, specifying how the members will work together, determining how the group will make decisions, and setting milestones and deadlines.’ (Forsyth 2019: 375) This can be characterized as the actions undertaken by the group, outlined explicitly in a score. Goal path clarity presents the means by which a goal might be achieved. In consensus-forming processes for instance, a series of stages can be presented as a flowchart to facilitate a meeting and ensure criteria for achieving consensus are met (see Figure 3). (Seeds for Change 2020: 19) Defined process such as this are used by activist groups, co-ops and communities, such as the Occupy movement. (Cornell 2013)
In a composition, the goal path can be embedded in the actions players are asked to undertake. Instructions and rule systems can provide players with a simple heuristic for parsing the complex flow of information when responding to changing socio-musical situations. A heuristic is a useful decision-making strategy that “ignores part of the information, with the goal of making decisions more quickly, frugally, and/or accurately than more complex methods.” (Gigerenzer & Gaissmaier 2011: 454) Gigerenzer (2002: 43) suggests heuristics are composed of three building blocks that have specific functions in decision-making: search rules, stopping rules, and decision rules. The sequenced nature of a heuristic is useful in music as it maps efficiently to cue-based interactions, asking players to listen and/or look for a cue, determine whether the search is over on discovery, and then make a decision whether to act in response. (Saunders 2015) For example, in Charlie Sdraulig’s between (2012-13) the flute and violin players continuously respond to the questions ‘what sound is it?’ and ‘what is being varied?’, and decide what to do based on their ongoing assessment of what the other player is doing. (Sdraulig 2013: 36) Here the extreme subtleties of player actions are rendered by the heuristic in the score to give the players a simple way to determine how to proceed.
4. it is the behaviour that a system tends towards and encourages that needs to be understood
These concerns underpin my recent piece it is the behaviour that a system tends towards and encourages that needs to be understood (2021) which focuses on the way individual decision-making can invigorate community action to change a local or wider environment.
In the piece, the individual decision-making of players is explicitly communicated, and directly influences what other players decide to do. Although the main score does not determine what should happen, the programme note indicates a goal:
The aim of the piece, socially, is to explore how placing decision-making power in local levels of social organisation (individual players, immediate neighbours) might lead to broader consensus. It focuses on participatory decision-making instead of representative decision-making where power is ceded to selected others.
This attitude, expressed both in the mode of operation and a more idealistic personal aspiration, as well as reference to the source of the title (Owen Jones’s book The Establishment), informs the way players might approach the piece.
In order to translate this participatory decision-making process to music, the piece uses a series of oral cues to mark the decisions made by individual players, and track the ways the group responds. The goal path is determined by a group of player actions in which they give or respond to a set of 100 numbered cues and 15 modifying cues. The cues are spoken out loud such that they can be heard by at least some of the other players, and the audience. The numbered cues point to specific points in the notated material, so if a player wants to play material in the first bar of the second page, the player would say ‘26’ out loud. The modifying cues affect the way this material is played, for example in relative ways such as ‘faster’, or fixed ways such as ‘back’ to play the material in reverse or ‘wait’ to temporarily stop playing. After hearing a cue given by another player, players may respond or ignore the cue: they are not forced to do what they are told.
Additionally, unevenness in the setups players have available to them may also affect the means of participation. Players are asked to source objects for cues 76-100 from a list of eight item types, but they may not have all of these available, forcing them to be excluded from certain actions. The ability to respond to the spoken cues may also be affected by contingent factors such as the position of a player in relation to other group members or how audible their voice is. Other factors, such as the option to use multiple languages for spoken cues and the availability of portable megaphones for players to use, create a skewed set of forces that impact on the operation of the group, and define the topology of the system being investigated.
Within this system, players are free to operate as they choose. As with any group, there is a spread of behaviours from the passive following of instructions to more active attempts to dominate the group. There is, however, no idealised result, despite the aspirations in the programme note. The piece attempts to actively explore how a group of people work within a system, and within the context of its operation: here, a concert in a converted arts venue in Berlin with an ad hoc ensemble of professional and amateur players from three countries. Another system, other players, and other contexts would create different results, something to which the title alludes, but at the heart of the piece is a desire to see how participatory decision-making might operate in a musical domain, recognising the compromises that entails.
Here is a short extract from the first performance in November in Berlin, with KNM Berlin, and three amateur groups – KNM Campus Ensemble, and CoMA groups from the UK and Netherlands.
5. SUMMARY
For me, one of the interesting things in working this way is the entangling of social and musical decision-making. It recalls Claire Bishop’s observations on the relative success of activist art as either art or activism but not necessarily both, noting in particular ‘that art is perceived both as too removed from the real world and yet as the only space from which it is possible to experiment: art must paradoxically remain autonomous in order to initiate or achieve a model for social change.’ (Bishop 2012: 27) In the piece, when making decisions the criteria affecting what players do is either based on musical decisions – ‘what do I want this to sound like’ – or social decisions – ‘who do I want to play with, or affect, or disrupt’. I wonder though if in this situation these forces might align: creating musical and social consensus where everyone does the same thing can be cathartic, even if it is fleeting.
The paradox here is that in pieces such as these players are working within a system developed by an individual, me, without any sense of participatory decision-making at the composition stage. In that sense, they are analogous to the systems we inherit and have to live within, and which offer limited possibilities for change. There are links with rule systems in other contexts, most notably games, where we willingly submit to constraints for a specific experience, such as entertainment, social interaction, or intellectual stimulation. Systems such as these are staged. In different ways, players are asked to adopt characters and motivations prescribed in part by the system. But the possibility they offer, potentially, is for players to be actors as participants and behave in an authentic manner. Perhaps this is the aim, for a highlighting and stripping away of artifice, so that participants and observers are made aware of that which is controlling them. The system is revealed, it can be understood, its behaviours explained, and consequently challenged where necessary.
REFERENCES
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