Lectures of the International Orpehus Acdemies for Music and Theory, 2011, 2012, and 2013, along with interviews of musicians, Leon Fleisher, Frederic Rzewski, and Helmut Lachenmann.

Brings together diverse artistic, philosophical, historical and methodological approaches, creating a broad discourse on artistic experimentation, in dialogue with more orthodox notions of interpretation, and contributing to a better understanding of an "experimental attitude" in music. "Experimentation" is taken to be an adventurous compositional, interpretive, or performative attitude that can cut across different ages and styles; "affinities" suggests connectors and connections, convergences, contiguities, and adjacencies that are found in and through a diversity of approaches and topics. The golden thread running through the essays is the quest for "inherently experimental" musical practices, pursued variously from interrogating, descriptive, or challenging perspectives, and applied to music composed between the thirteenth and the twentieth centuries.