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Statement of Ben Morrison and Simon Opit:
Ben Morison and Simon Opit began working in collaboration during 1991. Their decision to forsake individual ‘artistic’ identity reflects a shared empathy with an increasingly widespread mode of joint creative practice. In the visual arts, such well known partnerships as Gilbert and George or the Boyle family or in architecture, Future Systems, have made such collaborations familiar. However, in the notated composition – where the myth of the preciously singular utterance still holds sway, such an arrangement as Morison and Opit is almost without precedence. Where it has existed, it has almost always meant the subordination of diversity to the tyranny of a unified and homogeneous surface.
In Morison/Opit the essence of their collaboration is simply the willingness of each composer to share the available acoustic space; however, the result is often more ambiguous. Indeed, while each work is made up of at least two separately composed pieces (– written and thought of as self-sufficient), the simultaneous occupation of that space means there is an inevitable ‘blurring’ of the boundaries between one music and the other. All divergences as well as any convergences in the music’s surface, are celebrated as being authentic, as both realities are contiguous with a conception of music which wishes to acknowledge the phenomenological fact of it’s own existence and coexistence.
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