Dr Claudia Molitor, ‘Composition as hyper-object’. Chaired by Dr Erik Nyström.

I have always been interested in the strangeness of the tempo-reality of compositional practice, and in relation to that I have been pondering the idea of composition as hyperobject. What does it mean for compositional practice to consider itself part of a bigger whole rather than a discrete activity by a singular entity producing seemingly self-contained events? Of course we have long left behind the idea of a piece of music as some ‘thing’ that exists for and in itself. But composition as hyperobject is another matter. For a start it asks us to consider the collaborative and the collective. Timothy Morton tells us that in thinking about hyperobjects we must confront the impossibility of metalanguage and the gap between phenomenon and thing. But might the practice of working with sound in itself already be a contemplation of such impossibilities? In this talk I consider these ideas by looking at some examples of my work.