Vexations of ephemerality.

What do we do when we subject musicians and audiences to music prompted by real-time scores? Such situative scores create a new kind of immanent relationship between performers and audiences, between composers and performers, composers and audiences – a relationship whose ingrained disregard of context, memory, and knowledge has often been ignored. The use of situative scores seems to inscribe itself into a more general societal trend that uses technology to ephemeralize our lives, to decouple presence from its history. While this immanence has often been perceived as a force for the emancipation of performers and spectators, it can also give rise to unaccountability. Do artistic practices that ephemeralize our artistic 'regime of perception, sensation and interpretation' (Rancière) - such as situative scores – foster abuses of immanence?. In this paper, I will look at such questions from the perspective of the performers, the audiences and the makers of such scores – the composers.