Composing with and for Lemur

Composition and improvisation are seemingly opposing activities, and music history is full of polarised positions and opinions on their difference. Not so in the case of Lemur. With the formation of the ensemble in 2009, four musicians came together with backgrounds comprising a veritable pamphlet of contemporary sound practices. Our skills and interests ranged from noise and sound art through new complexity instrumental and notational virtuosity, free jazz, electroacoustics and idiomatic improvisation. In this heterogeneous landscape, methodical or stylistic single mindedness was never a choice. That the activities of the quartet gradually trans-formed towards collective composition could probably best be thought of as an organic process more than a change of direction. While continuing to perform as an improvising unit, Lemur has composed 12 large scale works for the ensemble and its various exten-sions in the time between 2012 and 2025.

Each of these bears titles borrowed from canonical works of the 20th and 21st century. By framing the works as a recontextualisation, we tied our entire oeuvre to the mast of history, inevitably confirming the canon as we know it, even as we attempt to criticise it. By connecting our own practice with ideas and concepts warped and transformed by history and its many prophets, we are able to imagine, speculate, and reformulate our perspectives. This allows us to reflect on what has been, what is, and what should have been important in both past and present generations of music-making. In this way, the musical map made out by our twelve or so points of orientation tells its own history, alongside our music.

Lene Grenager and Bjørnar Habbestad, excerpt from LEMUR: Electroacoustic works