Freies Spiel

About

The over-arching philosophy of ‘free play’ in early child-hood education is that it is an unstructured, voluntary, and spontaneous child-initiated activity where the child can develop their imagination while exploring and experiencing the world around them. It is unhindered by goals and rules set by adults. Many benefits of free play include cognitive development, use of creativity, development of social skills, problem solving, and confidence building. The American Academy of Paediatrics Clinical Report states that the need for unstructured free play in the life of children “is so important to optimal child development that it has been recognized by the United Nations High Commission for Human Rights as a right of every child.”

The two primary aspects of this work are the indeterminate creativity available to the performers in the initial stage and the predetermined fragments (colours) which are then substituted into the work during the performance. The process of ‘audio-graphic substitution’ aims to not only engage the performers and audience in the free creative process of play, but to also allow for a work that is fresh and ‘new’ in every performance. My goal in avoiding conventional notation and scoring was to bypass the ‘re-creative’ process that is so pervasive in classical art-music, where the score is a recipe or script to be followed either as precisely as possible or with the occasional liberty to add interpretive nuance. By utilising a novel method and inviting the players (and audience) into the free-play process using visual, audible and tactile aspects I hope that every iteration of this piece is freely creative in that the work is spontaneously formed in a shared experience.