Performing WIKI-PIANO.NET : Strategies for Realizing Alexander Schubert's Ever-Changing Internet-Composed Piano Work

• Published in: Leonardo (Oxford) Vol. 54; no. 2; pp. 234 - 241
• Main Author: Kanga, Zubin
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: One Rogers Street, Cambridge, MA 02142-1209, USA MIT Press 15.04.2021; The MIT Press; MIT Press Journals, The
• ISSN: 0024-094X; 1530-9282
• DOI: 10.1162/leon_a_01962

This article explores strategies for interpreting Alexander Schubert's , a composition commissioned and performed by the author in an international tour in 2018 and 2020. Schubert's score is a website, all sections of which can be edited by the public, similar to a Wikipedia page. The author's strategies for interpreting the huge range of content added to the website-score draw upon Schubert's suggestions, the interdisciplinary rigor advocated by Jennifer Walshe, Henri Bergson's theories of comedy and the author's own experience as a composer-performer. These strategies are devised so that, despite the hundreds of compositional contributors, in performance, the final piece is perceived as an “Alexander Schubert work.”