This audio paper is an exploration of part of the process of making Drinking (2014) -

a piece for voice, Vietnamese zither .àn tranh, and electronics. The composition is developed

from composer William Brook’s project After Yeats in which Brooks provides

an instruction describing a collaboration between a performer and a composer. After

Yeats is not itself a composition, but should rather be seen as a method with which a

composer and a performer may realize a score (Brooks 2013). At the outset the chosen

poem–A Drinking Song by William B. Yeats in a translation to Vietnamese, the native

language of Nguyen Thanh Thuy–was recited, and it was the sonic trace of the reading

that was the point of departure for the composition Drinking. In this case the meaning

of the words is of less signicance than the sound of the reading. After Yeats is in

some ways an attempt to revive the tradition of chanting poems to a lyre accompaniment

common in the practice of Yeats and his contemporaries. Henrik Frisk, a Swedish

composer, takes the recording of the reading and, according to the instructions in After

Yeats,works to compose the piece according to the implications of the declamation from

Nguyen’s reading. According toMarcel Cobussen, "listening also involves an opening of

the senses that is not necessarily enfolded in conscious meaningfulness, by sense. It also

takes place outside, before or beyond sense; it also refers to a sense that operates outside,

before or beyond signication" (Cobussen 2008: p. 131). The emotional responses that

arise from engaging in artistic practice operate in similar ways to how Cobussen situates

listening in a space beyond signication. They may be communicated and sometimes

brought to the fore, but they always have a tendency to appear mysterious, arcane and

ephemeral. The inuence by the many diferent kinds of agents that may be found in

Brooks’ meta-composition makes the creative process daunting to understand but is also

wrapped around the idea of what is to be found outside, before and beyond.