Musical Compost, Consorts and Collapsing Pyramids: On the Disintegration of Traditional Performance Practices to Raise a Sound Society

By introducing a consort of instrumentalists representing musical traditions from Iran to the Philippines, Zimbabwe, Japan, Korea and the Americas, the author presents a paradoxical compost approach of defining while disintegrating musical cultural elements, thus conveying the transformative nature of self and society. Improvisation informs the author's chromodal concept, illustrated in the article with a collapsing pyramid model, thereby illuminating co-existence as a shared creative source that ultimately expands human potential through the extinction of the formal.