Write for LA Laptop Orchestra

The call

WRITE FOR LA LAPTOP ORCHESTRA is an open call supporting the development of new work for shared harmonic infrastructure: a room full of phones, laptops, voices, and instruments playing one harmony together. We are looking for new pieces, new frameworks, and new instruments, notations, and rituals to inhabit them, and we prioritize work that challenges form, expands sonic language, and takes risks in process, structure, and presentation.

The call is open to projects in early stages or active development that will benefit from a mixed ensemble of trained and untrained players. Selected pieces receive rehearsal time with the orchestra, help adapting the work to the framework, an engraved score in the event zine, and documentation of the performance. Every selected piece culminates in a performance at a public music ritual.

If you compose, code, sing, solder, or draw: propose something.

Propose Something →

What the framework gives you

One shared harmony Your piece defines a sequence of scales, chords, and directions. A conductor app broadcasts that state to everyone in the room in real time.

Many ways in Performers follow your harmony through phone instruments, staff notation and tablature, MIDI into any DAW or synth, live-coded Strudel patterns, or auto-tuned microphones. You write the harmonic road; players choose their vehicle.

A form strip Every piece gets a graphic score strip on performers' screens: a contour of the piece's shape with a moving playhead, so the whole room sees where it is and where it's going.

Untrained players Phone instruments are constrained to the current scale, so the audience can play along without wrong notes. Write for a room, not just an ensemble.

The first three pieces

Oneiric Warning Wagner's Brangäne's warning stretched across 29 slow harmonies, sung by the room through auto-tuned microphones.

CFGC Ostinato A 16-chord cycle over a produced backing track, with the harmony sweeping through the scale network twice.

Untitled An arch by Nicolas Maldonado and Susana Pineda Correa: a quintal drone, an 8-bar chord pattern, and everything stripping away in reverse. One scale the whole way.

What to send

A short description of the piece or idea, roughly how long it runs, what the room is doing during it, and anything you'd need from us. Sketches, recordings, drawings, and half-formed ideas are all welcome. You don't need to know the framework's internals; we'll adapt the piece together.