While working with Oblivia on their performance of Turn Turtle Turn for the Munich Biennale—where I served as a techie, scheduler, and general go-to person—I came to know the work and its creators quite well. Our conversations were fruitful, the laughs were plentiful, and I left with a deep appreciation for Oblivia’s dedicated, thoughtful, and innovative approach. Their process is hierarchy-free and bridges various canons and disciplines.
Although Oblivia’s work was a breath of fresh air, the festival also surfaced some deep-seated frustrations I have with the field of Musiktheater. Fortunately, the contemplative atmosphere allowed me to explore why I sometimes struggle as a viewer.
A bit about myself: I’m a composer and performance maker from the United States, currently based in Helsinki, where I’ve lived for the past seven years. I studied composition and performance separately—in different schools and communities, each with its own distinct pedagogy, values, and ecosystem.
What I learned in my performance and live art studies often felt antithetical to my composition training. For me, performance was a community of “outsiders” who expressed their otherness through unconventional, unexpected, or exploratory means. It flirted with both skill and “deskilling,” recalibrating the value placed on technique. This, in turn, allowed for a certain type of accessibility—one could be a performer without specific technical know-how.
On the other hand, my composition studies took place in a community of interpretative artists—musicians who worked tirelessly to master the physical technique of their instruments while conducting exhaustive research on period-appropriate performance practices. Technique and mastery of craft were the bedrock of musical studies—and with craft came rules, and with rules came hierarchies. These hierarchies extended beyond creative practice into administration and audience expectations.
To put it frankly, the field of classical music felt conservative.
And this brings about a dilemma: that as an audience member of Musiktheater, I struggle to see how the values of performance and classical music can coalesce on a formative, developmental level.
While I view performance largely as a challenge to hierarchical thinking, giving space for queer and marginalized voices to hold sway, classical music often upholds hierarchy, with an institutional rigmarole that elevates figures like conductors to the top. Watching a conductor and orchestra rehearse can feel almost militant compared to the heady, open, discussion-based approach of a performance collective.
Then there’s the issue of material differences. For the performer, what justifies the music? How is it relevant to the performance? Performance taught me to think holistically—every decision, passive or active, shapes the performance. Thus, a musical decision can’t be purely musical: How does it look? What meanings and agencies do instruments bring? How do we account for the inherent power dynamic between composer and performer—agency versus executor? All the rules which we take for granted as a concert audience are now challenged when we view the work as performance.
Yet the music in such pieces can feel self-contained in its decisions, much like the music of opera, in an ivory tower, replicated by director after director, dressed in traditional wear or ultra-avant-garde, but always fundamentally the same.
As a maker working in this niche myself, I can’t claim to have arrived at any solid solutions. However, with each project, I strive to draw on my diverse training and consider how we, as an audience, perceive material. I’ve been particularly fascinated with the concept of discipline-specific temporality—shifting an audience between musical, performative, and sculptural time—manipulating audience expectations by re-staging the work according to the “rules” of different disciplines.
I’m thrilled that Oblivia has taken on this venture as well. It was a true pleasure to follow their working process, tackling these same specific challenges and curiosities. I eagerly look forward to seeing what they create next.
