Worlding percussion as creative collaboration: The entanglement of materials, semiotics and practices with percussion

In this practice-led research I examine my work as percussionist, composer and director through the multi-disciplinary work ‘Pigeons’, asking three questions: What is the ontology of percussion? How does percussion manifest through creative collaboration? How is worlding percussion enacted? I propose instruments are intra-acting material-semiotic-practices linking instruments to creative collaboration and worlding practices. Grounded in posthumanist, relational, new-materialist theories (agential realism, material-semiotic actor, assemblage theory), my autoethnographic methodology diffractively analyses notebooks and interviews. Findings show percussion is indeterminate: instruments emerge through human and other-than-human intra-actions, demanding response-ability. It presents contemporary percussion as a more-than-music art form.