What Endarkened Co-Composition holds
The participant is the expert
Endarkened Co-Composition unsettles the hierarchy in which the researcher knows and the participant is known. The composer is one co-composer among others, making the work and its meaning together.
Listening as resistance
Listening is active, ethical and relational. It is not arriving with questions whose answers are already expected.
Endarkened co-presence
Researcher and participant meet with their whole positionality in the room, and with room for every kind of refusal.
Opacity and refusal
Non-clarity on purpose is a right and a source of knowledge. Not everything is owed to the listener.
A reimagined compositional hierarchy
Graphic rather than Western notation, a large part for improvisation, and participants shaping how the work sounds.
Where it comes from
Endarkened Co-Composition comes from Black and Indigenous storytelling epistemologies, in which memory and imagination exist on the same plane. It challenges an Enlightenment paradigm in which more knowledge means a people has been “enlightened” about their own lives.
“Endarkened” comes through S. R. Toliver’s application of Cynthia Dillard’s endarkened feminist epistemology. Endarkened Co-Composition is also in conversation with Édouard Glissant on opacity, Saidiya Hartman on critical fabulation, Fred Moten, and Christina Sharpe.
Here the BaKongo cosmogram, the dikenga, shapes both thinking and practice: it structures ideas and how gatherings move through time and space.
Three provocations
Read aloud at Listening Across, each facing a direction of the cosmogram and each followed by silence.
Opacity as ethic and aesthetic
Endarkened Co-Composition treats opacity as a right and a method of care. It resists the colonial urge toward legibility and consumption. To be opaque is to remain sovereign.
Allow the composition to withhold, not usher.
Listening as an act of regard
It is not extraction. It happens with, not at, or to. The composer listens alongside participants, environments and histories without claiming to know.
Let the silence speak first.
Endarkened co-presence as a research praxis
Research, composition and community engagement are one field. The studio becomes the room where people speak, breathe, sing, refuse, decline and remember.
Listening becomes the method, not the afterthought.
How it shapes the work
- Small groups. Pieces are made with no more than seven people at a time.
- Accounts return to their owners. Participants receive full transcripts before any text is set to music.
- Ownership of the sound. Participants shape instrumentation and sound, not only words. If someone hates the cello, the cello goes.
- The voice sets the key. Composition begins only after listening to the interviews, and the home key is taken from the speakers’ voices.
- Hesitation stays in. The “ums” and pauses usually cleaned from a transcript are kept, because the sound of hesitation is different from someone describing it.
- Translation is not assumed. In Three Gold Threads, made with seven women who had made new homes in Stratford-upon-Avon, speech in Arabic and Farsi was left untranslated, as protection and care.
Endarkened Co-Composition was developed through doctoral research at City, University of London (Co-composing an Endarkened Acoustemology, 2023). See Publications for more.