Making Music Together

This study presents Making Music Together (BRC027), a live album documenting the Royal Musicological Association (RMA) Study Group “Music and/as Process” conference (2023) at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire. Featuring a blend of directed group improvisations and new compositions, the release embodies a process-oriented approach to musical collaboration. The album’s program includes Steve Gisby’s Critical Mass (2023), Sophie Stone’s Post‑Card Sized Pieces (2020), Emmanuelle Waeckerlé’s What Is Left If We Aren’t The World (2021/22), and five spontaneously generated Improvisations by randomly assembled ensembles under Alistair Zaldua’s leadership.

Underpinning the project is an experimental methodology that privileges randomness, collective agency, and open instrumentation, aligning with contemporary discourse on relational aesthetics and participatory music-making. Through performative processes that resist fixed authorship, the album offers insights into emergent sound ecologies and shared creative communities. It contributes to the expanding discourse in creative practice research by foregrounding how live enactment and peer interaction generate aesthetic outcomes that defy conventional composer-performer hierarchies.

With a 52‑minute runtime, Making Music Together functions both as an archival record and a research artefact, inviting reflection on the intersections of improvisation, composition, and collective sonic agency. The release provides a case study in embodied, process-based scholarship, illustrating the potential for music research to engage meaningfully with the dynamics of collaboration, spontaneity, and institutional context.