ORCiM Seminar "From Output to Impact"

Next week, the ORCiM seminar “From output to impact” will take place at the Orpheus Institute (Gent, Belgium). I am posting about this not only because I am the convener, but mostly because the topic is – I believe – of enormous potential and importance. 

Citing from the call:

"Musical training of Western canonical score-based repertoire as well as improvisation and non-Western music is traditionally built upon the master-disciple relation. Students at a conservatory are often still taught their trade by one teacher as the main influence; teachers can be put on the payroll without having to show in how far they are up to date with (and apply) the most recent findings in their field of expertise; one-to-one teaching is very much prevalent in instrumental and compositional teaching; instrument and composition teachers are not the most common contributors to the academic journals that are subscribed to by the libraries of their institutions; etc. With the recent developments in Artistic Research (AR), a type of knowledge is being explored that pertains very much to the music practitioner. While it focusses directly on the musician's practice, it applies the latter as part of the investigative method, and aims at impacting that practice, this type of knowledge has not previously been generated explicitly. Now, AR is supported and carried out with an ever-growing intensity and speed, and across educational and institutional levels: the European Association of Conservatoires considers AR as a gateway to the profession, implying that the impact of AR is to extend beyond the mere integration of AR skills in the curriculum (e.g. a Master in AR) to include the application of current AR output. As a consequence, a range of questions arises that enquires into the possible modes of integrating insights generated through AR into the instrumental practice being taught, all the while allowing for the realities of musical training being fed back into AR."

The seminar starts on November 19, at about noon, and ends the next day in the afternoon. The exact time schedule can be found here.

To frame the debate in a wide perspective, the keynote by Prof. Dr. Dirk Van Damme, head of Innovation and Measuring Progress Division in the OECD Directorate for Education and Skills, will deal with The knowledge triangle in the arts: How research, innovation and education interact.

Next to the launch of the Association of European Conservatoires and Hochschules' new handbook Perspectives on 2nd-Cycle programmes in Higher Music Education: combining a research orientation with professional relevance, and a concert showcasing artistic research output ready to be allowed its impact on instrumental training, the seminar program will run parallel sessions that include a very rich content relating to sub topics such as:

The Larger Perspective

• Drew Hammond: At the intersection between expression and investigation: a liberal arts graduate examines the conservatoire environment.
• Bernard Lanskey: Culturing fresh growth: the conservatory as incubator?
•  Paul Craenen: Zooming out on artistic research results.
•  Anthony Gritten: Musical passages between output and impact.
•  Joost Vanmaele: The informed practitioner: mediating between the information galaxy and the piano-studio.
• Michiel Schuijer: When craft becomes profession: the case of the conservatoire.

In Practice

• Magdalena Bork & Maria Gstaettner: Quo vadis, Teufelsgeiger? (Where to, Devil's Fiddler?). The impact of the artistic project findings on the curriculm development in performance studies in Vienna.
• Daniel Leech-Wilkinson: Preparing to escape Utopia.
• Jeroen Billiet: “Avis aux Amateurs”:  integrating artistic research output into elementary music education.
• Anna Scott & Alessandro Cervino: The reflective piano Class: a self-generating experiment regarding the reflexivity of artistic research and higher instrumental training.

Impact Back

• Aslaug Louise Slette & Ingunn Fanavoll Øye: Aural training knowledge in music rehearsing.
• Susan Williams: Training musicians: implementing research into practice.

  

Creativity & Feeling

•  Beate Perrey: Hard Facts, feelings and forms of persuasion.
• Johannes Boer: Playing by the rules. Creativity and research in historical performance.

Models Framed

•  Tom De Cock & Vincent Caers: Improving the efficiency of practice and performance in contemporary percussion repertoire.
• Murphy LcCaleb: Developing ensemble musicians.
• Elisabeth Belgrano: Learning and teaching through madness: using the metaphor of a 17th century operatic mad scene for supervision in higher performing arts education based on artistic research.
• Amy Blier-Carruthers: How I learned to stop worrying and love the studio: a professional and paradigmatic approach to preparing musicians for recording.

This seminar is organized in collaboration with the Centre of Excellence in Music Performance Education of the Norwegian Academy of Music in Oslo. The full potential of the topic will be explored in a longer-term effort, with NAM aiming to put together a follow-up seminar in Oslo in November 2015. 

Proceedings of next week’s incarnation will be produced online in the coming months.

From Output to Impact

One of the socially most relevant aspects of research is the passing on of newly acquired knowledge. At universities, where research and teaching positions are combined, such transfers are self-evident, even though they are not necessarily immediate. Musical training of Western canonical score-based repertoire as well as improvisation and non-Western music is traditionally built upon the master-disciple relation, with conservatoire students often being taught their trade by one teacher as the main influence, and with teachers profiles that favor concert careers over proof of how far they are up to date with (and apply) the most recent findings in their field of expertise. Conversely, instrument and composition teachers are not the most common contributors to the academic journals that are subscribed to by the libraries of their institutions.   

With the recent developments in Artistic Research (AR), a type of knowledge is being explored that pertains very much to the music practitioner. While it focusses directly on the musician's practice, it applies the latter as part of the investigative method, and aims at impacting that practice, this type of knowledge has not previously been generated explicitly. Now, AR is supported and carried out with an ever-growing intensity and speed, and across educational and institutional levels: the European Association of Conservatoires considers AR as a gateway to the profession, implying that the impact of AR is to extend beyond the mere integration of AR skills in the curriculum (e.g. a Master in AR) to include the implementation of current AR output. As a consequence, a range of questions arises, enquiring into the possible modes of integrating AR insights into the instrumental and compositional practice being taught, all the while allowing for the realities of musical training being fed back into AR. Such enquiries touch upon the fundaments of the conservatoire biotope, targeting aspects such as the authority of the teacher, the structure and content of the 'lesson', the efficiency with which existing journals connect to students and teachers, the possible friction between the cutting edge AR output and the conservational reflexes that link up with the industry (often the orchestra) for which students are prepared, or between the goal of training students to be self-directed (cf. Dublin Descriptors) vs. the collective effort of building new knowledge through research.

It is clear that this topic is crucial to the development of both AR and artistic personalities. Since the potential and urgency are huge, I'm organising a conference to explore "From Output to Impact - The Integration of Artistic Research Results into Musical Training", to take place at the Orpheus Institute (Ghent), and organised together with the Centre of Excellence in Music Performance Education (NAM, Oslo). The keynote will be held by Prof. Dr. Dirk Van Damme, head of Innovation and Measuring Progress Division in the OECD Directorate for Education and Skills.

The deadline for proposals is August 25, 2014. More practical details here. 

ORCiM seminar on Artistic Experimentation

Last week, the Orpheus Research Center in Music organized one of its yearly seminars, this time to find out more about Artistic Experimentation in the Context of Performance Practice. The topic covers part of the group’s research agenda for 2010-2013, which handles Artistic Experimentation in general. (More on this here.) 

The two-day seminar gave the floor to 13 speakers, mainly from  the UK and Scandinavia (one from Belgium and one from Chili), among which improvising and reproductive performers as well as composers handling their own works. The organizers evidently took care to treat the widest possible range of historical and aesthetic vantage points: contemporary and historical jazz and an extremely extended range of classical composed music (from Léonin and Pérotin through Palestrina, Monteverdi, Schubert, Chopin, Liszt, Schumann and Ravel to Lachenmann, Kurtág and present-day compositions) were set off against more esoteric concepts as ‘ecosonics’ or silence in computer music performance. (The complete program can be downloaded from the bottom of this page.)

The audience of more than 40 researchers – again demonstrating varied backgrounds and expertise – filled the conference hall to the point where the gathering alone promised satisfaction: crowded but cozily collective, with diverse interests merging into focus and opportunities for debate and networking ready to happen.

It is never difficult to detect the naturally gifted conferenciers: regardless of how their story relates to the listener’s reason for being there – if it even does – they succeed in taking you with them through their efficiently set-up argumentation and compelling rhetorical command. In that respect, the balance between the excellent and the less inspirational presentation was not out of the ordinary in this conference. As the order felt almost ‘cadential’ in the way that it seemed to efficiently time the necessary contrast between the dry and the entertaining, it was never really frustrating to see a less experienced speaker miss the opportunity to fulfill the potential of his topic, or to watch the most talented keep the audience on the edge of the seat beyond what the content of his contribution merits.

Regardless of the solidity of the attention span that speakers were able to win from the audience, plenty of the contributed content was worth having been presented for its own sake. I doubt that anyone will forget the impact that the Swiss tenor Valentin Gloor made with the way he managed to establish a perfectly convincing  symbiosis of a lecture about an artistic research project with the performance of that actual project (in which he worked out concepts of association in a theatrically enhanced performance of Schumann songs). Personally, I was happy to get to be introduced by British composer Nicholas Brown to his compositions, enthusiastically welcomed the myth-busting research of Daniel Leech-Wilkinson into Cortot’s performance practice, and hope to learn more about where Christina Kobb’s as yet tentative hypotheses regarding early 19^th century notation of micro-dynamics will take her (and current pianistic performance practical knowledge).

Due to illness and the reluctance to infect others, I stayed at home for the second day. This turned out to be an excellent circumstance, as I found myself reminded of the fact that ORCiM offers live streaming of its events. I did miss two presentations because the speakers wrongly assumed they didn’t need the collar microphone that would have enabled me to hear what they said, but it was a joy to benefit from this technology. Aside from the inability to pose any questions, the streaming offers an absolutely wonderful way to attend a conference without physically being there. Bravo to whomever thought of that!

As much as the production and the content of the seminar left eminently memorable traces, it nevertheless was a disappointing surprise to realize just how few presentations really matched the promise that their title and/or abstract had held. In contrast to the ability of engaging an audience to the full, which is may be more a question of talent than skill, the way a presentation is made to be about what the description says it will be, is but a matter of intention. To an extent, it is understandable that researchers try and present their projects and findings at different conferences to test them for feedback, and invariably this means that the content must sometimes be bent a little to fit the theme of the conference. Certainly, some flexibility should be offered to facilitate this, and it generally is, but in this instance, such flexibility seemed to have been assumed by some presenters to stretch across an all too wide gap between the theme and the presented content. Many titles incorporated the term ‘experiment’ but very few went on to say anything about experimentation. One presenter dug into the etymology by way of introduction, continuing only to leave it undeveloped. For most, it seemed just a word that needed no elaboration, and if the projects that they presented were to be taken as cases of experimentation, then I have witnessed mostly just that: cases of research that relates (more or less) to performance practice – not case studies on artistic experimentation. I have heard no one posing a research question on artistic experimentation and following it up by arguing his or her way towards any type of answer to that question. In fact, hardly any of the presenters took the opportunity to explore the perspectives and the 8 research questions that were offered in the call for proposals as possible points of departure, as intriguing and as begging for treatment as they are. Some presentations could be defended as being about experimental practice in the performance of early music, but not as “revealing experimental performance practices from the past” (all italics are mine); I did not see a presentation handling “a practical approach that takes the 'skilled body' as its point of departure“. Only the broadest “open-ended approach that challenges state-of-the-art practices in the field of music performance“ was recognizably present in some of the presented material. One presenter did clearly start with one of the proposed questions in mind – “How does experimentation 'between' performances (from performance to performance) work?” –  but this was not worked out to move towards any defined insight. There was certainly chamber music in the mix, but we did not learn “How experimentation [works] through collaboration (e.g. chamber music)”, whether “the use and influence of non-musical elements [is] an important factor in experimental performance practices”, of “the relationships between experimentation and improvisation”, on “How experimentation occur[s] in the daily practicing process”, or “What the tensions [are] between 'fidelity to the score' and individuation of performance”.

No conference convener can foresee how presenters will work out their abstracts into presentations, and there was certainly enough that made it worthwhile for anyone with any interest from any angle to have been present. On balance, the seminar invoked the urge to taste more – given ORCiM's long-range interest in artistic experimentation, we can be sure to be offered more.

ORCiM Research Festival 2010

The Orpheus Institute, where I coordinate the DocARTES curriculum and where I am a fellow at the Orpheus Research Center in Music (ORCiM), has just had its second incarnation of its Research Festival.

The existing conferences are not always the ideal places to present artistic research: reading an article and perhaps letting the participants listen to a recording or illustrate a little on a nearby piano is rarely enough to adequately convey artistic research results. More problematic still, the conference formats do not attract the peers that artistic researchers are looking for. Recognizing the gap in the dissemination chain, the Orpheus Institute established the first Research Festival (since then copied elsewhere), in which the products of artistic research heard, explained and discussed.

The ORCiM Research Festival 2010 is the second installment of this initiative. Its theme was ‘Unexpected Variations’ and it was handled by a bundle of speakers, many of whom ORCiM members, from often very different perspectives. My most vivid recollection regards what one of the two keynote speakers came from Australia for to show us. Stephen Emmerson “re-imagined” some key piano pieces from the first decade of the previous century by multi-mixing his own recordings, i.e. following up on what Glenn Gould had started in the recording studio by manipulating and mixing microphone perspectives like camera angles in cinema. Emmerson’s transposition of that principle (which Gould can be heard and seen here applying to music by Scriabin) to Schoenberg’s opus 11, Berg’s piano sonata and Bartok’s bagatelles opus 6  may not always result in the most convincing showcases for the potential of this technique, but it remains exciting to think of granting artistic license to recording techniques and taking Gould’s initial experiments one or more steps further. 

The CD that was produced to disseminate the findings contains both the original recording and the ‘remix’, including a detailed account of how Emmerson got the idea, contextualized it and realized it. If this project stands for ideals of an artistic research festival, let there be more such events!