Participants joined Music Research Strategies for a participatory listening engagement which explores metaphors of surveillance management and technologies of resistance, particularly through improvisation techniques. Led by Music Research Strategies, the cultural work persona of Creative Music percussionist Marshall Trammell as well as a community engagement platform, the audience participated as conductors to form an “Insurgent Learning Conductor Ensemble.” The audience became the conductor, and worked with a set of active listening prompts: to listen like lovers, to listen like lawyers, and to listen like wolves. These prompts guided scores for Music Research Strategies’ solo percussion performance, to form an unpredictable and ever-changing narrative.

About Music Research Strategies:

Self-styled Music Research Strategies is, simultaneously, the Creative Music percussionist Marshall Trammell’s cultural work persona and community engagement platform. Their Insurgent Learning Workshops are an ongoing interculturally-situated, Performing Political Education platform designed to amplify the voices, experiences and celebrations of oppressed and discontented communities through Critical Improvised Music technologies, praxeologies (complexity theory and project management), field and case studies in Research Justice, Participatory and Collaborative Research and collective reimaginings of the tactical media from Underground Railroad-era for today’s political landscape.

A Grammar Of Motives is developed in ongoing collaboration with a number of artists, organizations, and creative communities, including:  Leyya Mona Tawil (proprietress at TACMusic at Temescal Arts Center, ArabAmp), Lenny Gonzalez (TACmusic), Peter Redgrave (MoveMove Collective),  Bushmeat Sound System, Dr. Thomas Stanley (Baltimore), Center for Indigenous Studies at Bard College. Inspiration includes: HYDRA (Sara Ramshaw and Paul Stapleton), Cobra (John Zorn), Conduction(r)/Induction (Lawrence “Butch” Morris), JA Deane, Carlos Santistevan.