The Royal Room Collective Music Ensemble

The Royal Room Collective Music Ensemble started off as a fairly loose collective of Wayne Horvitz’s favorite Seattle improvisers playing his music at Seattle’s Royal Room, the club he co-owns and books.

The essential ingredient is Wayne’s adaptation of Butch Morris’s Conduction system for free improvisers into a language for spontaneously arranging and reconstructing his music on the fly, using numbers for a piece’s written motifs, and other hand signals (to individuals or shifting groupings) to indicate how to treat their material.

While maintaining the spontaneity of small group performance, he uses it to structure complexities only possible with a larger ensemble: