A new journal on and through performance

The first issue of The Scottish Journal of Performance is out. The journal is announced to appear bi-annually, is refereed and of the open access persuasion, and focusses on performance in Scotland and/or wider aspects of performance presented by (early career as well as established) scholars and reflective practitioners based at Scottish academic institutions.

That the content is limited to Scotland must have to do with the fact that it is run by doctoral students. Understandable but regrettable, none the less, as  journals on performance – even if it is as wide as this one, encompassing dance, drama, film, music and television – are hard to come by, especially if they specifically wish to include practitioners’ research.

Still, this new publication may be worth keeping an eye on if music becomes a real integral part of its content. The ten articles in its first issue include only one (a book review) that deals with music, and neither the review nor the book offer a practitioner’s perspective, but if one of the backing institutions – the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland – is to be counted on, the future of the journal may look bright to those wanting to keep abreast of new developments in research on/in performance. The Conservatoire’s research arm was already established in 1999, and 85% of their research – "blending traditional research practices with practice-based artistic research, applied research, consultancy and knowledge exchange" – was commended for its recognized international quality. Amongst the diverse aspects of the programme set-up, I would recognise at least the Centre for Voice in Performance, the Contemporary Ensemble-in-Residence and a former ORCiM artistic research colleague of mine on the staff (violinist Mieko Kanno) as potentially delighting the AR community with new research projects that can be made know through the new journal.

The Scottish Journal of Performance can also be followed on Facebook and Twitter.

Lingua Franca

Hmmm. It’s been a year and a half since I last wrote anything on this blog. I may write something about the reasons for the stand-still in a later post; at this moment I prefer to linger on what annoys me most about the blog’s status quo: the personal reason for starting it in the first place was to keep my writing practice up, as I had noticed how, after my dissertation, its quality deteriorated too quickly to be raised solely by the time-consuming process of publishing articles. So I had better start blogging again…

Any Anglo-Saxon native, reading this blog, can see within the first few sentences that I am not one of them. Richness in vocabulary, diversity and complexity in grammatical constructs, command of metaphors, florid phraseology, etc.: they are tell-tale signs of a mother tongue and I am one of the reported 700 or so million people who use English as an ‘other’ language. Actually, that is impressively more than those who have learnt it as their first language. Besides the obvious consequences for the evolution of the language, some aspects of this evolution are proving to be of influence on artistic research.

At the Orpheus Institute, the majority of pre- and post-doc researchers come from almost all over the world. Such diversity has made English the working language for all activities at the institute. But with so many different backgrounds in the education of first and secondary (even tertiary) language, linguistic standards sometimes have to be leveled to try and fit efficient expression between both the native and non-native users: the former (try to) adjust vocabulary and grammar to ensure being understood by more basic users, the latter can do little more (in live dialogue) than do their best. The worst case is nonnative-to-nonnative communication, with both sides commanding sets and types of vocabularies and grammatical flexibilities that do not completely overlap. In all cases, the leveling influences both groups’ understanding of each other. To add some nuance: it is not only as difficult for a mother tongue speaker to listen to someone with a faulty command of that language than it is the other way around, it is also as problematic for a native to lower the quality of his tongue than it is for a secondary speaker to raise it.

As much as the leveling can be argued to facilitate some aspects of a live discourse, e.g. speed  and decision making, thereby even giving the impression of efficiency, the result remains a language that can lack the richness required to operate on an qualitatively elevated level of the discourse. Often, I witness native speakers come out on top of a debate just because they can form their arguments more quickly and with more of the necessary convincing nuance than secondary users - the latter sometimes not even succeeding in transferring their thoughts to spoken words in time (or at all). Fortunately, the fleeting nature of live debates can be compensated for in writing, where stillborn discussion can be prevented with dictionaries or quotes from those who are more gifted. Time can help out. But the problem of expressing complex notions with simple sentences remains, despite what proponents of globish are claiming. And time invested in raising the linguistic bar is time lost in productivity: my native English speaking colleagues publish more easily, more quickly and therefore just more than I. Of course, I am well aware that my English is not bad, cherishing my TOEFL results and the praise from native speakers, but I am still self-conscious about it to the point that I don’t think I want anyone to know how much time I spend on writing these blog posts.

The impact of language on the distribution of research is a more stressing point. A few years ago a prize-winning DMA dissertation was published in which the overview of the existing literature included a seminal 1970s musicological study on the main subject. That the latter had been written in German and was out of print was argued to be a reason for starting the English doctoral study that led to the new book: it aimed to reach performers all over the world, who cannot be presumed to have access to academic out of print German scholarship. I agree that it is worthwhile to republish some older publication’s results instead of merely referring to them, if that reaches a wider audience and when that audience can be expected to benefit from those insights. However, at least at one place in that new thesis, it is clear that the author had not read the German study. Tell-tale of the depth of the problem is the fact that this got past the promotor.

Perhaps more to the point than hoping for someone to translate out of print German 1970’s publications, would be the thought that, today, it seems risky to write about music in a language other than English. For myself, it was clear from the beginning that writing a dissertation on extended piano techniques in Dutch would reach maybe 10 pianists. In English, it has easily and quickly reached hundreds, without any active marketing. (See here.) On the other side of the spectrum, I know of scholars that refuse to write in another than their mother tongue, happy to limit their target audience to their countrymen and even declining offers to have their work translated. The better of those do keep up with the literature in other languages, the worst also limit their horizons to their native language. And they’re not only the older scholars from the more chauvinistically inclined countries. I have seen more than one frustrated Facebook status from promoters deploring how their students are not fluent anymore beyond their mother tongue. The distribution sector seems to go along with this: in The Cambridge History of Musical Performance, not one of the four chapters on twentieth-century music has a single reference to a non-English language source, excepting a reference to one ‘as cited in’ an English book. (I thank Ian Pace for having pointed this out on Facebook – I still don’t know how to reference a FB friend’s status update from four months ago.)

And so I find myself, sometimes, wondering whether to choose digging into non-English literature to keep as wide as possible a view on the evolutions in my field, or focusing on great English prose to keep up my command of this wonderful language. Here’s what I like languishing in, for instance: Michael J. Alexander’s 1989 “The Evolving Keyboard Style of Charles Ives”. Not because I need to know what’s in it – I have read (in) it more than once – but because it is so well written that it inspires me. Perhaps that is the quality that earned it the Outstanding Dissertations In British Universities award of its year. But much depends on the research subject: at present, I am engrossed in the Kagel project, for which 98% of the literature is in German. My German is good enough for reading, corresponding and even taking interviews, but I wouldn’t send in an article in that language without the help of a native speaker, and the Kagel literature is in scholarly German. It is inconceivable that I carry out the research without thoroughly going through all of it (and not just browsing), so several types of dictionaries are in the immediate vicinity of wherever I read up on the subject. I can’t imagine starting on a project of the same scope that would require a serious amount of Scandinavian literature. And yet, over there, they carry out research as well, most of it not translated into English. It’s been a while, already, since my to-do list includes a trip to the Danish national library to investigate a certain composer’s work, but compiling an overview of what has already been done, over there, has proven impossible without a basic knowledge of Danish , or without the help of someone who possesses that.

The dilemma of choosing research topics on the basis of the language in which most of the relevant primary or even secondary verbal sources are written can be different in artistic research compared to academia. Many AR projects are still possible for which only the context may require polyglot skills, since so much has not been researched before from within artistic practice. I wrote ‘may require polyglot skills’, for AR is very much an English matter: I would be hard-pressed to remember one AR project that I did not learn of by hearing it presented at an English-spoken conference, or by reading of it in an English publication. All the conferences on or in AR that I have known have been in English, even when organized in France (which was by the AEC – the Association of European Conservatoires), where opposition against academic anglicisation is still strong.

A less uplifting difference between AR and academic choice of writing language may be that performers and composers have had less training – or exposure to relevant requirements – in different languages than scholars. I remember, in the US, that academic PhD candidates had to prove proficiency in a second and third language, something not expected (there & then) from musicians. For academic classes, non-native language literature had to be prepared, again not a condition sine qua non in artistic curricula. That may have changed, but I expect it would be in the sense that academic requirements in this matter have been let go of as much as or more than musicians being taught multi-lingual skills at a more sufficiently high level. At any rate, EU AR is different from US composition-PhD and DMA work in the early 1990’s in that the latter have – on average – more of a stress on the composition/performance than on the research qualities of the dissertation. And I know that the US must not be presented as a pars pro toto in matters of non-native language mastery. (As detailed in here.)

I remember, two decades ago, that Arabic was predicted to become a practical world language (meaning that, instead of being spoken by a very large population, it would be used across non-Arabic cultures) – the rise in Belgian students reportedly wanting to learn Arabic was sudden and (relatively) impressive. Not long after that, I first heard of sinology. But neither Arabic nor Chinese (nor Spanish, etc.) are expected to replace English: a 2012 English Proficiency Report states that the British Council predicts 2 billion people to be actively learning English by 2020. That same report analyses how innovation thrives on English.

It was always explained to me that one shouldn’t learn Italian and Spanish simultaneously, so I used to have the hardest time deciding between the latter (to get around in the world) or the former (for its historical literature and relevance for musical practice). Being a researcher, now, and expected to write for my living, I think I best keep blogging in English. This post is long enough, though, so 'off I go', back to my article on keyboard clusters in 18^th century France and Germany…

"Who's gonna read this ?"

A friend of mine, in the midst of the final rush towards finishing his dissertation, vented his contradictory feelings of dutifulness and despair: "for whom am I doing all this??" I always considered myself lucky to not have suffered from this state of mind, as the answer had been obvious to me. I was also extremely confident that 'they' would want to read it, and my experiences ended up proving me right. For a presentation on post-doc artistic research life, I took the trouble of investigating the matter into some detail. I think it is uplifting and promising.

I started my doctoral research long before an artistic doctorate was an option. In the early 1990's, coming back from the US with lots of inside information from my working with composers that I knew my fellow new music pianists in the EU were lacking in their performance practice, I had decided to write a book. Compelled to reach as many musicians as possible, merely teaching didn't look as if it was going to be satisfying. Even if I got a position at a conservatoire, I'd still be looking at reaching some 200 to 300 students at best during the rest of my teaching career. There were going to be concerts, of course, but passing on the kind of professional performance practice information that I had to spare did not suite the stage: the questions on 'how did you do that?' would still be left unanswered. A book it was going to be. In English, of course: the few dozen Dutch speaking new music pianists would hardly make the effort worthwhile.

In 1996 I heard of a new institute that would support and frame projects that were too big to fit conservatory degrees. It looked perfect for my idea, so I hooked up to the Orpheus Institute. After a few years, Bologna became the name for a process that lead directly to the artistic doctorate and my book became a dissertation without much ado. A burn-out and many pages later, in 2009 the dissertation-book was finished and in March 2010 it was put on the repository of Leiden University, where it can be viewed and downloaded for free.

A nice feature of the repository enables the visitor to see the statistics on how many people view and/or download dissertations, revealing the worldwide interest by country, referrer and month.
Here is the ratio views/downloads for the first year per month:

                            2010/03       13  /    11
                            2010/04       96  /    77
                            2010/05       73  /    67
                            2010/06       28  /    40
                            2010/07       13  /    08
                            2010/08       11  /    10
                            2010/09       23  /    18
                            2010/10       19  /    14
                            2010/11       21  /    14
                            2010/12       54  /    44
                            2011/01       36  /    22
                            2011/02       23  /    34
                         
                                TOTAL     410  /   359

[ updates: 2011/03-'12/02 :     379  /   258
                2012/03-'13/02 :     498  /   289
                2013/03-'14/02 :     631  /   381
                2014/03-'15/02 :     625  /   281
                2015/03-'16/02 :     654  /   289
                2016/03-'17/02 :     866  /   375
                2017/03-'18/02 :   2302  /   400
                2018/03-'19/02 :   2564  /   491
                2019/03-'20/02 :   1481  /   535

                            TOTAL   : 10410  / 3658 

UPDATE Oct. 2022: the Leiden University repository has stopped giving the detail of the statistics as listed above. I can now only see the numbers for the calendar year and for the last three months. So I have decided to stop updating this list.]

The surge in April is probably due to the fact that I announced the repository on Facebook. I have not made any targeted publicity campaign since then, not even by way of a link on my homepage or in my e-mail signature. There is an increase in September 2010 and March 2011, two months in which prospective doctoral students are in touch with me about their entrance exam and application for our doctoral program. One would expect them to look for examples of artistic research dissertations, but the few such students don't completely explain the differences. I have no idea why there's a peak in December 2010. (The total views/downloads for March 2010-October 2011 are 585/481.)

The happiest remark to be made concerns the realization that one year has been enough to reach more individuals than I would have hoped for in several decades of teaching. Not all of these views and downloads (the numbers don't overlap, by the way) can be assumed to lead to actual knowledge transfer and application, but that isn't guaranteed with teaching either.

It can also not be taken for granted that all the viewers and downloaders are pianists, but search keyword information suggests that most of them are. Through my profile on Academia.edu, where a link to the repository can be found, I can see the keywords that were entered into search engines and that lead the surfer to my profile page. Apparently, views and downloads are not so much generated by any particular interest in me as a person, or in a more general interest in artistic research. Hardly ever do I see my name pop up - mostly, it is 'extended techniques for piano' or some other combination of such words that the search engine then links to the title of my dissertation. I cannot imagine many non-pianists wanted to download a large file with information on piano performance techniques. Together, the search information and the repository statistics show that people find the dissertation because they look for the content: they are in need of the knowledge. The answer to my friends exasperation with the effort to write his dissertation and the fear of it being in vain - "Why would anyone want to read what I have to say?" - is very clear, and very exciting, I think.

Here is the list of 25 dissertations from other departments of Leiden University that were put in the repository at the same time as mine, again with the ration view/download for the 12-month period March 2010-April 2011:

                          48/292    Medicine
                          50/220    Medicine
                          26/94      Law
                          60/139    Biosciences
                          93/261    Social and Behavioral Sciences
                          36/237    Physics
                          60/465    Medicine
                        134/199    Observatory
                        133/125    Humanities
                          89/312    Art History
                          35/205    Medicine
                          51/309    Medicine
                          48/139    Medicine
                          85/416    Biology
                          31/209    Medicine
                        148/217    Environmental sciences
                          55/704    Medicine
                          45/243    Medicine
                          56/141    Medicine
                          33/236    Medicine
                          50/158    Psychology
                        139/465    Institute for Area Studies
                          74/207    Medicine
                          18/110    Psychology
                          66/465    Medicine

I can only wonder at why certain dissertations seem so much more or less sought after than others. Of immediate interest here is the fact that the views are mostly much less than the downloads. Compared to the other disciplines, my dissertation has more views (449) than any of the others (max. 148). In my case, the proximity of view- and download-numbers can be explained by the supposition that a new discipline leads people to have a look at output out of interest more than to have and use the content. I surmise that established disciplines have developed a tradition of interested parties systematically downloading new knowledge to have and read it.

If any of my numbers are a success, it has - again - nothing to do with me or any notion of quality: the numbers for my colleague doctors in the arts with a dissertation at the Leiden University repository are equally impressive. If mine is the 6th in a ranking of most downloads, compare to the other 25 (better are medicine, biology, and 'area studies'), Paul Craenen's 216 downloads in six months and Jed Wentz' 450 in nine months will be as much up there, if not more, when their first post-doc year is over. Paul and Jed's viewing numbers (185, resp. 334) are and will likely remain lower, which may be explained by the novelty wearing off. (My dissertation was the first artistic research output on music in The Netherlands, the country which many of my viewing numbers came from; it was also the only one at the repository for nine months.)

In terms of geographical interest, Paul generated views and downloads from a total of 18 countries, jed 22 and I 59. It is true that automated search engines will get to the repository without a genuine interest in the matter, but these will not result in actual downloads. In all three cases, only two to three countries had had someone viewing while nobody downloaded.

I didn't study the differences in download/viewing behavior according to country: Paul's dissertation is written in Dutch and Jed's and mine in English, the subjects are wildly divergent, etc. Of further interest, however, is the fact that only Jed's dissertation was (twice out of 334 views and 450 downloads) referred to by Google Scholar. This can show how most of the interest is from musicians rather than musicologists: few of the former typically use Google Scholar.

All this is very exhilarating for the artistic research discipline and its researchers: it proves that musicians all over the world are hungry for this type of knowledge to enrich their expertise. And they are willing to go to great lengths for it: I made a limited number of hardcover bound copies of my dissertation to give to family, promotor etc. Some pianists pleaded with me to sell them one (as they didn't like reading from a monitor or printing out a thousand pages), and when they heard from me that the cost to make some more would run up to 80€ per copy, they argued that they would pay much more than that to have it. I can only imagine one bigger incentive for publishers to take artistic research very seriously: there are many more musicians than academics. And they need catering to.