This lecture is an auto-ethnographic reflection on a practice which has been integral to my identity, performing cello and theremin with the Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra. In this talk it is explained how we have expanded our performance practices during a time of physical distancing, restricted movement, closure of our physical performance venues and first and foremost a period of intense anxiety and mourning on a global scale.
Using telematic music making, a group of musicians maintained (and widened) their community, individual performers kept a sense of identity, and built an impossibly huge archive of recordings as both audio visual artefact, raw material for reworks, and importantly, as oral history.
In this lecture the following questions are answered: what is telematic music making? how do performers feel about telematic music making? how do performers rehearse telematic music? how do performers perform telematic music to an audience? Underscoring all discussion is an emphasis on both the practical technology implementation and the sensitive psycho-social dynamics of such methods. The lecture ends with a performance from the telematic orchestra.

A definition of “telematic music making” from the iconic American composer, performer and scholar of improvisation George Lewis is as follows:
“I think Raymond the thing that interested in being you first started calling for these extended improvisations twice a week was that I don't think maybe you didn't realise how long we were going to go on. You know, maybe like a maybe like a few sessions and then, but what happened was there was this need for extended community. I think people are starting to realise…. I just gave a talk last week on the topic of telematic Afrofuturism. It's a very odd thing. And, and we're starting to realise that there's something about telematics, you know, this combination of telecommunication and, and informatique, which is sort of coined in the 70s by these two French researchers. But it both thrives on distance and tries to eliminate it as a factor which is very interesting thing to think about quantum entanglement.
So that what we've got here is a sense in which we will I don't know when I see 30 or 40 people on screen, in a GIO extended GIO improvisation or virtual GIO Improvisation, which doesn't feel virtual it feels like just improvisation. In the media of the technology. I don't know who's coming from where and I don't really care. But at the same time, it's always interesting to hear that John Russell was wherever he is, and Steve Beresford is wherever he is. You're wherever you are, everybody's where they are, and the sense that people are making these distances not matter anymore, or that they also do matter, and that theres this two different desires that are sort of existing in the same space, but they're not competing and they're not clashing, they are complementing. And that becomes very exciting for me in terms of how, that's what we'll probably need to do.
Because, you know, I see the pandemic right now. It looks like it's coming to a new stage. Maybe for some people, it's made us more aware of a kind of common humanity like anybody can get the thing…”