Remembering W.A.Wagenaar and his legacy

 

During the previous doctoral training session of the Orpheus Institute, Willem Albert Wagenaar passed away. I have written about him earlier, but it is fitting to do so again at this sad occasion as his role in the making of the - apparantly - most sought after doctoral trajectory for musicians in the Low Countries has been more decisive than is generally known.

Dutch psychologist Willem Albert Wagenaar (Utrecht, June 30, 1941 – April 27 2011) studied in Utrecht, Leiden and Pennsylvania State University. He has been professor at both Utrecht and Leiden Universities and is seen as a specialist in matters of human memory. As an expert witness he gained international recognition in court cases such as the one against John “Ivan the terrible” Demjanjuk. Wagenaar avidly collected Magic Lanterns – generally accepted to be invented in the 17th century by Christiaan Huygens, another one of Leiden University’s brilliant students – for which passion he had a home theater built, aptly called the “Christiaan Huygens Theater”. (You can see video’s of Wagenaar’s Magic Lantern presentations here and here.)

Wagenaar's Christiaan Huygens Theater

At the turn of the last century, it was Wagenaar who decided to make a phone call that would eventually lead to the bestowing of the PhD title on creative and performance artists at Leiden University. At that time, Wagenaar was Rector Magnificus of Leiden University, which housed no department handling any focus on music. He fostered the grand thought of the creative arts themselves (not just their study from outside of the practice) constituting an integral part of the university’s responsibility towards society and its knowledge. It was Wagenaar who initiated contact with the Royal Conservatory at The Hague and its then director Frans de Ruiter to set the ball rolling and to see how collaboration could be worked out on the practical level, i.e. how students from both types of institutions could benefit from such an integrated approach towards science and artistic practice. During the discussions that ensued, the academic notions of research and doctoral promotion were put on the table, pragmatically followed up in turn by pioneering efforts to envision what a PhD trajectory in artistic research could or should be like. It was eventually decided that this project deserved a faculty of its own, and in 2001 the Faculty for Creative and Performing Arts (for which de Ruiter acted as its dean) officially combined the Royal Conservatoire and Royal Academy of Art (both at The Hague) with Leiden University in an extraordinary education and research program. (It was later renamed as the Academy for Creative and Performing Arts.) 

Wagenaar’s vision departed from the idea that the historical separation between the arts and sciences had been unjust:

It has long been thought that it was possible to make a good, profitable distinction between arts and sciences because it allows to simultaneously draw a line between ability and knowledge. Science concentrates on knowledge; the ability that follows, doesn’t really belong to it and should be taught outside of the university. […] In the arts, then, it would be mostly about ability without knowledge; that’s why we have separate institutions. As such, we take care that knowledge, as produced by the history of music, of art, of literature, is strictly separated from the world of skills, such as needed to sing and paint. But this distinction is not profitable and not real. The boundary between art and science is based on completely absurd notions about delineations between knowledge and ability, and should therefore be abolished.

[From Wagenaar’s inaugural speech at the launch of the Faculty of Creative and

Performing Arts.]

It is interesting that Wagenaar’s demarche was somewhat independent of the EU’s Bologna declaration, in which a bachelor-master-doctorate structure was decided upon for restructuring higher education in the arts. Wagenaar’s ideal superseded this mere three-fold differentiation, wanting to offer different types of merging scientific with artistic education. At the newly established Academy for Creative and Performing Arts, students can combine optional courses from both scientific and artistic institutions, as well as enrolling in new types of masters (e.g. media technology, in collaboration with the faculty of mathematics and physics), in a simultaneous combination of fully-fledged scientific and artistic trajectories, and in an artistic doctoral trajectory, all jointly operated.

The integration of arts and sciences is not unique in the world: especially in the Anglo-Saxon higher education tradition, it is common practice. But on the old continent, Wagenaar’s vision was revolutionary. Since the renaissance, the unity of arts and sciences had eroded, resulting in conservatoires, art academies and universities as separate entities with their own mission concepts and funding. Even in the Low Countries, where artistic research is supported with a surprising sense of unanimity, Wagenaar’s project predates the more loosely-knit Flemish model of university-conservatoire associations, and the real integration of the arts into universities is still less than a worked-out plan.

After his position as rector, and for the rest of his life, Wagenaar closely followed the developments of what he had set in motion. He was a member of the promotion committee of the first promovendus of the Academy for Creative and Performing Arts (yours truly) and continued to be involved in all the artistic research promotions up to and including the last weeks of his life, reading the dissertations and posing his questions during the promotional rituals.

At least in the Low Countries, and potentially elsewhere, Artistic Research owes considerably to this soft-spoken and sweetly kind man with an advanced vision on artistic practice and education.


[UPDATE]

On a Dutch blog remembering Wagenaar, I read more on this fascinating man. Aparently, he received his double first name (Willem Albert) from his two grandfathers. As a kid, he saw the advantage in the two chocolate letters he got from Santa Claus; later on, the double intellectual inheritance - the one grandfather's scientific interests and the other's artistic appreciation - clearly helped shape his vision of an artist's place in the university.

A final anecdote demonstrates how Wagenaar was a creative scientist until the end of his life: getting lost in the woods around his home town, the pressure under his skull made him hear magpie chatter as a trumpet passage in Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, develop a panic fear of flowers, of the sent of lilies and jasmine. "My condition leads to completely new experiences that only patients can have! What luck that the cancer is my head. It is much more interesting than in any other body part." In the mean time, a booklet has been made to offer doctors insights and fellow patients support. Wagenaar had become the object of his own study as much as the artistic researcher that he had envisioned would investigate his own experiences for the benefit of scientists and colleague artists.

Wagenaar's art of presentation

In 2004 I heard a lecture by Prof. Dr. Albert Wagenaar on how ‘People don’t remember the weather forecast’. This was not the topic but the message. After all these years, every member of the audience that I still meet remembers it - how to achieve this effect was the real topic of Wagenaar’s lecture, which he gave again at the Orpheus Institute last year in front of an audience of doctoral students. 

At the beginning, Wagenaar explained it was not really a lecture, for he wouldn’t read anything. It was going to be more of a ‘causerie’, a ‘talk.’ And that was exactly what he did: for more than a half hour, without accessories such as paper, microphone, seat, blackboard, PC or beamer, he needed only his voice and his visual presence. He is a very sweet-looking man with the type of voice that makes for excellent radio. Like Garrison Keillor, Wagenaar can draw in your attention with his voice alone, never needing to raise it to be articulate, or searching for words, always at ease and in command. For Wagenaar, to be in command of the audience is the main technique to communicate a message. His work as a clinical psychologist (having been, amongst other, a member of the faculty of law at Leiden University and a renown juror-expert in legal trials) has given him ample opportunity to test this thesis, both as the one who talks and the one who studies those who talk. But it is not just a question of the voice. Wagenaar intended his talk to be of help to people who need to present their doctoral research to a live audience, and filled it with techniques that are necessary to make the difference between an aural and a written presentation. 

The entire talk was structured along a list of such techniques, which each one being demonstrated while being explaining. Form and content matched perfectly. Some of the techniques are very basic, e.g. being on time (excepting force majeure) shows you care as much as those in the audience that are on time. Talking directly to your audience allows them to engage with what you say. Other techniques are less self-evident, e.g. "Do not read from paper": it gives the impression you are not fully prepared and every time you need to look at the paper to know where you are, you lose contact with your audience. Do not hand out bunches of photocopies on which only small items are relevant: these will give the audience the chance to loose concentration and shift their focus. If you need PowerPoint, be aware of how much the frames distract audiences, who are looking at them instead of listening to you. Apart from the risk of technical problems, overhead projections of text (especially listings to follow the structure of the talk) are counterproductive. Some techniques are self-evident but not necessarily easy. If you really command your subject, you must be able to say what you have to say in 10 seconds. The rest is illustration to make that point or to keep the attention of the audience. (Wagenaar is a professional expert on the workings of the human memory.) Unlike reading a brief or a novel, an audience of a talk cannot go back to read something again in case it feels it missed or misunderstood something. The attention span does not last for a half hour, and an audience’s attention will most definitely wander and miss bits. Some of those bits can be crucial to the argument and for someone who misses such a point the whole talk may be wasted. It is therefore important to repeat the message and the crucial points. That’s why the message should be announced at the beginning of the talk rather then spending the first minutes (which are at the most profitable point of the attention span) on how you are happy to be here, and how you suppose the audience might appreciate what happened to you yesterday and how that connects to the subject at hand. Repeating the message and closing of with it can be literally impressive, as Wagenaar demonstrated in both of his talks that I witnessed. Wagenaar compared an aural presentation to an onion, with the core being the message, and the layers the illustrations and attention grabbers. A written account can be structured like the unwinding of a cotton-ball, spinning a long thread of logically connected but sequentially arranged arguments. In an aural presentation such a thread will easily and quickly brake apart. At such points, the structure must then be left for another one to repair the damage: going back to previous stages of the argument and explaining the matter again. This may in turn enlarge the disruption of the thread, and only the most experienced ‘talkers’ may pick up where they had been forced to stop. 

A few of the layers that he used to make these very points are worthwhile relaying here. Simulating a search for the right word can put the audience’s attention back on track: the listeners that feel the urge to complete the sentence will provide some relief in the monotonousness of the talk. If one of the members that you know (organiser, colleague, etc.) is drifting away, you may mention his name in some made-up reference. At least that person will be with it again immediately, and the rest will have occasion to turn their heads and see whom it is that the speaker is referring to. Small tricks like this, expertly timed by Wagenaar, revealed to be more effective than one might expect. 

After Wagenaar’s talk, the students were scheduled to give presentations themselves. Of course, not having prepared with any of his advice in mind, their presentations suffered heavily from the comparison. But a comparison between an experienced presenter like Wagenaar and fresh students (who are already accomplished performers but with sounds instead of words) is unfair. It was much more of a surprise to witness a seminar later that day by someone who was a professional researcher, without a doubt used to lecturing, teaching and presenting. It had certainly not been the intention of the organisers to follow up on Wagenaar’s talk with a demonstration of how it should not be done, but to witness a lecture that did not benefit from his experiences was the best way to learn the lesson that he had come to teach.