A durational performance of Two Hundred Pieces of Music by Lawrence Dunn performed by the Set Ensemble.

The Set Ensemble is a UK-based collective dedicated to the performance of experimental music and contemporary composition. The exact composition of the group shifts from performance to performance, but all the members of the ensemble are also composers and they often write for one another, using the group as a testing ground for new ideas and approaches. This process is a collaborative endeavour with the score acting as one material amongst many, directing or shaping actions within a complex field of activity.

Members include: Angharad Davies, Patrick Farmer, Bruno Guastalla, Sarah Hughes, Dominic Lash, Tim Parkinson, Samuel Rodgers, David Stent, and Paul Whitty.

In 2016, we performed a durational realisation of Lawrence Dunn’s Two Hundred Pieces of Music at Hardwick Gallery. The scene is something like this:

A room is filled with a large assortment of papers, books, scores, poems, sketches, tables, musical instruments, objects, and, in amongst these effects, a group of people. The musicians seem to be playing with each other, but at times they do quite a bit of reading. They move from one written document to another. Some of what they are doing seems prepared. Other times, things appear unplanned, accidental. Sometimes the musicians seem in a state of deep listening—but at others they seem to be entirely divorced from the rest of the ensemble. Or in a state of disrupt; or fugue; or languor. There also seems to be some kind of pattern underlying their actions. Sometimes, after glacial change, there appears some large, articulatory shift. But while the title of the performance mentions a large number of individual ‘pieces’, it is not clear exactly what this means.

Meanwhile, the music continues.