The essay conceives of compositional thinking as a practice of opening up, queering, and rearranging the world—beyond traditional notions of authorship and control. In this context, scores appear as invitations to cooperation, ambivalence, and new forms of collaboration. In this way, composition becomes a transdisciplinary strategy that challenges normative orders and places collective processes at the center.

Compositional thinking as a practice of opening up, queering, and rearranging—beyond authorship, control, and musical autonomy.

What does compositional thinking mean beyond sheet music, parameters, and musical autonomy? This essay conceives of composition as a practice of structuring, opening up, and queering the world. Drawing on music, theater, and performance, a mode of thinking emerges that views scores not as instructions but as invitations: to cooperation, ambivalence, loss of control, and repurposing. Compositional thinking appears here as a transdisciplinary strategy—political, physical, material—that opposes normative order, academic seriousness, and binary logics. Music becomes a field of experimentation for other forms of collaboration, for collective authorship, and for working in the in-between.

Below are a few personal words from Eloain Lovis Hübner about her book: 

“The text is based on a lecture I gave in 2025 at Campus Gegenwart in Stuttgart, and has evolved from that into an experimental essay form in which—inspired by the polyphonic approaches of figures such as McKenzie Wark and Paul Preciado—I bring in voices, borrow voices, from thinkersand artists who are important to me and whom I have accompany various stages of my life here. Building on these episodes, I explore a concept or an idea of compositional thinking —tracing how I have situated and shaped this concept for myself over the years, what theater has to do with it, and what other points of intersection and connection it offers to the wider world. I also reflect on educational pathways and concepts, and with this text I aim to attempt an answer to the question of where, how, and why art and life in the field of New Music actually converge, and where exactly the importance of continually inventing ever-new music lies for life in the present.”

Paperback, 208pp

Wolke Verlag, Synkopen Series, 2026

Bilingual Edition - English & German