The more I think through it and work on it, the more it seems to me that music itself seems to be a system of systems, a sort of paradigm for systemic activity. From the ancient times on, music was considered the harmony of the spheres, an audible expression of the system of the whole universe that sounded out their relations to each other in chords and intervals. Even when we have a seemingly cacophonic combination of sounds that one may consider as noise, there are some sounds in it that possibly correlate in harmony, stimulating and interfering with others. I say “music” is a system, because the concept of “music” involves conscious decisions on what sounds get produced and what sounds get heard in which contexts. The setting of a framework in which something happens is also one of the basic conditions of a system, every system is creating and filling such a space. This setting can be very narrow, as the resulting system can be very tightly structured, but it can also be wide, loose, fragile, fleeting. Collective creation of musical events is setting up a framework that combines both chaotic, messy and loose procedures of individual work with tight rules and structures of acoustical events and musical instruments.
I found the following text by Jed Speare:
“Art engenders a shared an varied experience that in its nature begets a community of understanding and ideas, though its peoples and practices. In our singularity, we will never be far from the group that we have created, belong to, or who claims us. Human nature through the art world creates a schism through the need to identify individuality, while the work of artists themselves creates communication and hence, the possibility and inevitability of community […] a need to share, affirm and create something larger than ourselves. In the development and excellence modeled through the actions of the individual within the group, we experience what is scrupulously, imaginatively and surprisingly possible, in art as in other walks of life, not through a lessening of personal and artistic integrity but through an essential opening, caring, and heightening of it.”
(Jed Speare, Strange Attractor and The Visual)