The art of Jaso Sasaki’s method

At the 3rd ORCiM festival, I watched Finnish violinist Jaso Sasaki present a research project that looked at first sight as if in danger of being somewhat pointless but ended up fascinating me. For much of the presentation, “Historical recording projects” seemed to be merely about making recordings of early-20th century repertoire with the recording techniques and standards from that era. Jaso let the audience listen and look at the sounds and photographs of himself recording his playing on a stroh-violin into a funnel, using reconstructed fabrication processes and materials to effectively make 78rpm discs and Edison cylinders. But this was not the point. His real aim was to try and reconstruct the performance style of violinists from that period, an interest that is based in general on a wish to find out about the acclaimed ‘golden tone’ of masters like Heifetz and Kreisler (in contrast with the often-stated lack of personal color in present-day violin playing), and in particular on the frustrating lack of recordings of Ysaÿe’s solo violin sonatas, contemporary to the composing of these works. To truly understand what lies behind the old recordings’ typical  sound of frying fish, Jaso believes he must enter the original recording process to experience how its limitations may have been as much part of how we perceive the sweetly nostalgic sound than the actual performance techniques.

So far, so good, I’d say, even if understand how this is enough to make some (if not many) feel uncomfortable. As far as I am concerned, I do think it worthwhile to investigate this matter thoroughly, rather than getting stuck in the dismissal of any attempt at recreating bygone aesthetics and in the refusal to rethink the value of progress in the development of recording techniques. I’m anticipating how much more we will be able to deepen our understanding of playing post-early music repertoire by way of Jaso’s approach than e.g. the way Krystian Zimmerman had a go at the Chopin piano concertos in 1999. Those discs were revelatory to me when they came out, and I still revel in them, but they were essentially limited to more intuitive and superficial modes of reconstruction than what artistic research à la Jaso's can actually offer. And I am prone to believe that, at some time in the future, we will want to rediscover and reconstruct the clinical 1980’s playing and recording styles. So why not start filling the gaps?

But I felt the urge to post about Jaso for another reason than what’s above. To me, he is a researcher taking contextualization to a new level, one that perhaps only an artist would think of and estimate as being appropriate. Jaso’s publicity picture is styled in a period manner, the cars he likes to restore are classic, he enjoys archery and records in full concert dress. These aspects, put together with the interest in experiencing the old recording sessions, point to the idea that he in fact likes to live the context of his topic. This is the last straw to the academic, of course, and I would agree to a very large extent that living like Heifetz will not make one play like him. To be correct, I don’t even think Jaso likes Aston Martins, smokes cigars and shoots arrows to accomplish the best results in his research. Nevertheless, the general attitude of enjoying ‘live’ immersion in the past may just be what lead him to the best method for this project. Recording the old fashioned way, in all its aspects, is indeed an excellent method to learn about pre-war performance techniques.

More information on Jaso Sasaki and his project will be up soon at his website, including audio clips. At the festival, I found his Interbellum-type rendering of Gounod-Bach’s Ave Maria, normally considered excessive in every artistic aesthetic aspect, thoroughly enjoyable.

Reporting on the Oslo symposium

The world of artistic research revolves quickly and there is much to see. As I can't be everywhere at all times, I have been lucky: my colleague researcher Darla Crispin gave a keynote lecture at the Oslo conference, earlier this month, and she graciously agreed to act as my guest blogger. Here's her thorough account of what she witnessed, 'up there in the cool North'. (Links inserted by me.)

 

Symposium: ‘The Art of Artistic Research’ 6-8 May 2011

The Norwegian Academy of Music hosted its first International Symposium on ‘The Art of Artistic Research’ from 6 to 8 May 2011. The Symposium had been developed to allow a deep interrogation of presented work at different stages of evolution in this new field. Appropriately, the presentations were searching, almost always strongly based in practice, and demonstrated a keen awareness of the key issues that artistic researchers grapple with – though not always able to supply ‘easy’ answers to the proposed research questions. The Symposium encouraged instead an open approach to working with ideas, and this was of particular benefit to the doctoral students in attendance. Expert Panels were conducted periodically, and included the pianist, Leif Ove Andsnes, who is proud to call himself an artist-researcher!

The ‘Symposium’ model was developed for this event in order to provide an opportunity to discuss various approaches to artistic research. In default of any generally approved definition (of artistic research), there is a continuing need for establishing good examples, relevant research models and a common understanding. The aim of the Symposium was to enhance a collective discussion and reflection on various questions related to artistic research.

The event was organized around four themes:

1) Craftsmanship and Artistic Research
2) The Concert
3) Interdisciplinarity in Arts
4) Defining Artistic Research

Ian Pace (City University, London) gave the opening keynote relating to craftsmanship, relating his analysis of the postwar evolution of piano performances – including the politicization of performance styles – to some of the current themes of artistic research, such as how small-scale aspects of craft might be read in the current turbulent political landscape for Western classical music. As a context to this, he also presented a short recital, including Johannes Brahms’ Klavierstücke Op. 118, Claude Debussy’s Images Book II, and a rare performance of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Klavierstück X, which he performed clad in protective gloves.

Pace’s keynote and the short papers within the thematic group all pointed up the challenges of generating artistic research questions from personal observations from within practice. Some, like Pace, relate their practice very rapidly to existing knowledge – but we witnessed others less certain in their thought-trajectories, and focused more intently of the personal insights of their own practice, prior to the process of contextualization.

This lack of certainty, its potential to leave space for new understanding, also means that musical performance itself has the potential to be transformed by the findings of artist researchers. This potential was discussed by MartinTröndle (Zeppelin University Friedrichshafen) in a trenchant keynote: ‘Transforming performing: new concepts for new audiences’. Tröndle presented a series of sobering statistics for performers attached to traditional concert-giving paradigms, but then challenged his listeners to use artistic research itself as a means of rethinking the manner of musical presentation. There was some resistance to his message in the form of concern that the musical content was being challenged by media packaging and virtuosic light shows, but the current turbulence in the funding for the arts is undeniable, and is an important component for consideration in the world of artistic research, where the scholarly and professional spheres often clash. Examples of contrasting consequences to this were heard in the accompanying papers, from the negative reception of Rudolf Kolisch’s Beethoven cadenzas in America, to the positive revivification of the carillon through innovative approaches to improvisation and performance practice: Carl van Einhoven’s video of his jazz performance on the carillon will stay long in the memory.

This pointed up another challenge for artist-researchers: the necessity to go beyond research in musical practice to learn from other disciplines. ‘Interdisciplinarity was thus an important theme of the Symposium, and was vividly discussed by Sally Jane Norman (University of Sussex) in her keynote: ‘Interdisciplinarity through and beyond the Arts’. She presented numerous examples of projects in which the work engaged with collaborative interdisciplinary practice, relations between art and technology, and disruptive innovation processes. She was also able to offer some insights on research and cultural policy frameworks, which form another site of interface with which artistic research must engage.

As the Symposium, questions arose about how artistic research was going to generate it own critical theories. In her keynote, Darla Crispin (Orpheus Research Centre in Music) drew together all the themes of the Symposium and proposed one model of how the very specific experimentation and observation processes of the artist-researcher might generate broad interpretative frameworks; in her case, this involved relating aspects of Anton Webern’s Piano Variations Op. 27 with the development of a theory for understanding ethics in relation to music performance. This led into a dedicated session for 3rd cycle students, who are developing their own projects in light of their findings during the Symposium.

Erlend Hovland and Otto Christian Pay are to be congratulated for setting up a very good event. The time keeping was precise, especially on the first day, and the programme had been developed with many long, open slots for group discussion. Many of these talks were very productive, sometimes through strong words and unresolved philosophical disagreements, but also with respectful, open research attitudes. Hopefully, this will be the first of a series of such events within the Norwegian Academy of Music.