Set in the suburban district Hökarängen (a typical 1950s government-led town planning project) of Stockholm City, the project “Oath of Love” investigates the question of harmony and relation through a collaboration with Hökarängen-based “Konsensus Kören” (i.e. Consensus Choir) and the Stockholm-based experimental music ensemble The Great Learning Orchestra. These two groups are invited to discuss, perform and interpret an English text composition entitled “The definition of good manners is to ask three questions to every one answer,” written by the Australian composer Chris Mann for this performance in a dialogic, unrehearsed fashion. Together, they work to negotiate, organize and reconfigure the set of questions proposed by Mann’s text in the effort to generate a conversation.

The German composer Herbert Brün once said, “If a country music group invented atonal aperiodic country, it would change the meaning of country, and would be a sign of change in the country and would be a change towards creating an atonal aperiodic country, and we could begin to imagine there were no country.”

“Oath of Love” seeks to explore the meaning of “local” and to interrogate the visible/invisible border that defines it.