Expanded Solo: Performing the Expanded Self

What constitutes solo performance when identity extends beyond the individual body? This project proposes the Expanded Self as a compositional framework through which performer identity, musical agency, and authorship are understood as relational rather than autonomous. Drawing on the idea that identity can extend beyond the individual to encompass objects, relationships, and social contexts, the project examines how a performer’s musical identity may similarly extend across instruments, sound, technology, other performers, and the collaborative processes through which a work comes into being. Across a portfolio of four compositions, it investigates how boundaries between body and instrument, acoustic and electronic sound, composer and performer, and individual and collective identity can be reconfigured through compositional practice. Each work explores a distinct manifestation of the Expanded Self. Ritual (for violin) and Meridian (for accordion) treat physical gesture not as an accompaniment to sound production but as compositional material, integrating movement, theatrical action, and instrumental performance. Mantle Movements #1 (for transducer piano) extends acoustic performance through mediated resonance, allowing electronic processes to function as continuations of instrumental sound rather than independent sonic layers. One (for shō and kamancheh) expands solo identity into a shared performative body, where contrasting instrumental traditions negotiate a common sonic language through collaboration. The project adopts an iterative, workshop-based methodology in which performers are active participants in the creative process, contributing not only technical expertise but also interpretive perspectives and creative decisions that reshape the works throughout their development. Rather than treating composer-performer collaboration as the realisation of a fixed score, the project explores how feedback, resistance, experimentation, and embodied knowledge can become compositional materials in their own right. This process redistributes creative agency and authorship between composer and performer, making the performer an extension of, and contributor to, the compositional process itself. By proposing the Expanded Self as a practical compositional framework, the project offers an alternative understanding of solo performance: not as the expression of an isolated individual, but as an emergent practice in which identity, agency, and authorship are continually negotiated across bodies, instruments, technologies, and collaborative relationships.