CfP: composition as critical practice

For its 10th Research Seminar, "Sound Work", the Orpheus Institute is investigating "composition as critical technical practice". 

Jonathan Impett

The seminar is convened by composer-performer-researcher Jonathan Impett, and will take pace on 21-23 November 2016, in Ghent, Belgium. At about that time, the last installment of the hot 2015 UK debate on "composition as research" will have been a year old (see here and here for more on that debate). The Orpheus Seminar "will consider composition as a research activity - a process informed by theory and intuition, constraint and contingency, expectation and experience. It is a continuous iterative process of inscription and reflection in which its models, metaphors, aspirations, obligations, tools and technologies all play a part. This process is distributed temporally, socially and materially. The artefacts of composition – however notated, improvised, virtual, embodied or technologically implemented – are hybrid technical objects. Neither pure ‘inspiration’ not unmediated formalism account for what they contribute. We might rather consider composition as a design process, and study its dynamics and decisions in the spirit of critical technical practice – a term coined by Philip Agre in his work on the creation of the artefacts of artificial intelligence."

Keynote speakers are Nicolas Collins (Art Institute of Chicago) and Alan Blackwell (interdisciplinary design - University of Cambridge). The call aims at proposals by practitioners from all disciplines, particularly welcoming "presentations that explore the demonstration of composition as research in innovative ways." The deadline for proposals, to be sent to info@orpheusinstituut.be, is August 17, 2016.

More information can be read here.

"From Output to Impact" - the proceedings

‘Impact’ is a big thing in research. From elaborating in grant applications on how academic, economic, or societal relevance will be aimed at (if not achieved) to intricate author-, article- and journal-level citation analyses, research products and producers are ever more considered successful or worthwhile to invest in on the basis of the impact they are perceived and hoped to make on their discipline and its knowledge status.

If quantitative assessment of this impact is seen as deeply problematic in many disciplines, it is really a non-topic for AR yet. I remember talks about bibliometrics, years ago, but I know of nobody among my peers who feels he has reasons to worry about his h-index. At any rate, the number of AR journals is still so small that none of them ‘count’ for those companies that make a living out of propagating such systems.

This does not mean that AR should not take into account whether or not anybody out there needs it, aside from the researchers themselves and their bosses. After all, AR is still almost exclusively subsidized by the government. (I know of only one company that invests in AR – the exception that proves the rule, surely.)

For me, the most directly interested party is the musician at large: I consider pianists (professionals on stage, teachers, and students) to be my primary targeted research audience; secondary are colleague-researchers. It is not problematic to get a feeling of whether and how the latter are reached: the academic dissemination channels work reasonably well to that effect (peer researchers attend conferences on AR, read journals, etc.).

It is very different to wonder about reaching non-researcher musicians. My dissertation has been downloaded by thousands, but I can only assume that nobody would do that (it’s a big file) without a practical motive, as it can be viewed online just as well. In any case, I regularly meet musicians who are clearly far from up to date on the AR in their own professional field. We can give master-classes in conservatoires, play on concert stages (instead of only at conferences), hope that students and teachers read the publications that the libraries of their conservatoires buy or subscribe to, etc., but that feels decidedly limited.

About a year ago, I convened a seminar "From Output to Impact", on the topic of how to integrate artistic research fingings in the instrumental training at the conservatoire level. It was organised as a joint effort by the Orpheus Institute (Gent) and the Norwegian Academy of Music (Oslo). The proceedings of that gathering, which took place in Gent, are now available online. They comprise 16 presentations as well as the documents pertaining to the event, and are published in the Research Catalogue to take advantage of the possibilities of including multimedia materials.

Next to a pamphlet piece by yours truly and a keynote by OECD Head of the Innovation and Measuring Progress Division Dirk Van Damme, there are contributions by Elisabeth Belgrano, Jeroen Billiet, Amy Bliers-Caruthers, Johannes Boer, Magdalena Bork & Maria Gstaettner, Paul Craenen, Tom De Cock & Vincent Caers, Anthony Gritten, Daniel Leech-Wilkinson, Murphy McCaleb, Anna Scott & Alessandro Cervino, Aslaug Louise Slette & Ingunn Fanavoll Øye, Joost Vanmaele, and Susan Williams.

Enjoy!

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. 

New jobs

The Belgian Orpheus Institute issues a call for a full-time, paid, performer doctoral fellow in artistic research to hook up with the innovative, EU funded research project “MusicExperiment21”, which the Institute hosts.  The project is headed by Paulo de Assis and is set up to  investigate the potential of ‘experimentation vs. interpretation’. The position starts already next January, the call closes on October 6, 2013. It states to aim at young performers, but that is meant to encourage young musicians who might think they lack the type of CV that they may think is crucial, rather than to deter older ones from applying. Full details of the call are here, the application form can be downloaded from the home page of the project’s site.

Paulo de Assis, instigator and Principal Investigator of "MusicExperiment21"

Also in January 2014, is the inauguration of the Stockholm University of the Arts, an effort of the

Swedish government to promote artistic research. The new entity will merge the current University of Dance and Circus, the University College of Opera, and the Stockholm Academy of Dramatic Arts, with a shared department for research and doctoral studies, and third cycle degree-awarding power is said to have been granted (though in some parts of texts, it is suggested this is not the case yet). Research areas of the individual departments currently include Choreography, Media, Opera and Performing Arts, but may be expanded. See here for more of the objectives of the new university’s research working committee, including a link to a pdf on the university’s research strategy.

To support this initiative, an extensive recruitment program is established to seek applicants for a number of full-time, three-year positions of Artistic Professor to develop Profile Areas of “Concepts and Composition”,  “Public Engagements”, “Technology/Materiality/Performance (gestaltung)”, “Bodily and VocalPractices”, and a “Research Leader / Artistic Professor”. Attention: the last date for submission is August 16, 2013 ! There is no mentioning of PhD requirement, only high-level artistic activities and teaching experience.

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.

Academy for Music and Theory 2011

The Orpheus Institute’s yearly Academy intends to build bridges between theory and music, the latter meaning the artistic practice. For this year, three scholars were invited to discuss Aspects of Artistic Experimentation in Early Music. Mark Lindley (US), Martin Kirnbauer (CH) and Edward Wickham (UK) worked with a selective international audience of pre- and post-doc theorists, performers and composers. Lindley handled tunings and temperaments in music by Bach and French harpsichordists, Kirnbauer revealed the ins and outs of enharmonic music on the cembalo cromatico, and Wickham brought in expertise on performing musica ficta from manuscript parts. For each perspective, performers were involved to artistically demonstrate specific arguments and points.

 

Academy 2011 - lecturers and participants (© Joyce)

More information on the details of this year’s incarnation can be found on the relevant Orpheus Institute webpage. Particularly worth highlighting here is the way Lindley’s case was the more perfect demonstration of the difference between music theory and ‘music & theory’, ultimately including how music theory can impact artistic research. His first lecture delved into the interpretative nuances that different meantone temperaments can offer the performer in scores by French harpsichord composers such as Couperin and Rameau, building strong cases for how the composers had played with this potential when composing. A pregnant example I found to be Louis Couperin’s passacaglia in g minor. Depending on the tuning, the Eb-G third in the third bar resonates by the greatest number of beats per seconds compared to the other, more ‘dead’ thirds. The potential for the harmony in the third bar to ‘open up’ has obvious implications for the way the performer builds the sequence in this opening phrase.

Extending the modus operandi to Bach, Lindley devoted his second lecture to the implementation of a tuning of his own devising on the first book of Bach’s Wohltemperirte Clavier. A regular theory conference would have had to take note of the unsettled dispute between Lindley and Brad Lehman. The latter also devised a particular temperament for Bach’s masterpiece, based on a perceived indication that Bach himself would have integrated cryptically into an ornament of the manuscript’s frontispiece. Both scholars vehemently defend their ground (read about it in minute detail here), but in the framework of the Orpheus Academy, this debate is besides the point. Lindley had asked for two contemporary pianos, one tuned to his system, the other in equal temperament. Performing preludes and fugues (Lindley, with the help of pianist Cecilia Oinas), Lindley convincingly demonstrated how mean-tone temperament (his or someone else’s) has a compelling influence on the performer when making decisions about phrasing, articulation, even about the general aesthetics of the interpretative approach. Beyond the insight that equal temperament has almost destroyed our ears (eminently warned against by Ross W. Duffin, and experienced by every participant of the Academy who needed to strain the ear to adjust to the nuances that sometimes only Lindley seemed trained to hear), the ultimate point Lindley impressed his audience with was how a present-day pianist need not become a harpsichordist who tunes his own instrument: awareness of these fine nuances and how they relate to tonal character is enough to inspire the interpretation of a pianist, even when s/he plays on a well-tempered instrument.

The papers will be issued as part of the ongoing series Collected Writings of the Orpheus Institute (see here for previous volumes). Next year’s Academy will treat experimentation in the 19^th century.

Lindley on Bach (© Joyce)

Dr. Paul Craenen

Yesterday afternoon, at 4.15pm, Leiden University and docARTES saw Flemish composer Paul Craenen defend his research to become Doctor in the Arts.

The subject concerned “composed performers” and applied the perspective of the composer to investigate the body in musical performance. The remarkably well-written dissertation (download here - buy the English publication here) looks at this topic from a thoroughly thought-out set of angles, including the body of the composer himself, the relation between performing bodies and instruments, technology and space (physically sounding and mentally perceived) and embodiment of silence as well as non-linearity. More than showing how his insights influenced his compositional practice, the dissertation gives a very detailed and in-depth account of the status of this subject in recent history. The relation with his own, extremely creative work was revealed in the concert and lecture that preceded the day of the promotion. 

P. Craenen: Dubbel Gaan (2007-08)

The value of the research goes beyond showing how Dr. Craenen thinks about the bodies for which he composes music. Besides working out a complete set of concepts to frame his line of thought (including new meaning given to Lachenmann’s “musique concrète instrumentale”), this research is important as it details the reflections of an artistic practitioner on the trendy topic of embodiment. All too often, issues of embodiment are considered from a neutralizing distance that renders the research outcome theoretical rather than effective. Amongst other, his approach shows - once more but with compellingly novel evidence - why performances must be experienced live and visually. More to the point of artistic research yet, some of the conclusions indicate precisely how the old dichotomy between reproductive performers and innovative composers is out of date when compared to the musical potential that the bodily parameter, well… embodies. 

P. Craenen: Tubes (2007)

A new millenium, a new discipline

In 2000, the EU issued what is known as the Bologna Declaration, a pledge by 29 countries to reform the structures of their higher education system. One of the consequences is that performing artists and composers can now obtain a doctoral degree in the EU. Until then, doctorates where the prerogative of universities and limited to academic programs (e.g. musicology or art history). Higher education outside of universities was limited to first and second degrees (equivalents to bachelor and master degrees) - a D.M.A. or a PhD. in composition, as commonly offered at many US universities, had been non-existent in those EU countries.

Since 2000, the reform has been carried out and musicians and composers can now enroll in more and more art schools (in association with universities) to obtain a doctoral degree. This is all very new to the old continent. Artists had not been considered (or trained) to spend their time writing dissertations and publish articles. The new degrees would require a fundamental rethinking of some educational and professional habits. The question of how scientific an artist’s research should be to be worthy of a doctoral level, and to what point a doctoral dissertation might be artistic, has been the subject of innumerable debates across Europe. Often very heated, these discussions have led institutions to take a stand, shape their curriculum, and start enrolling students in programs that can be very considerably different from school to school.

At the time of starting this blog, only a few doctoral students have finished their ‘artistic research’ in music and have become doctors in the arts – I just promoted a few months ago as the first one at Leiden University, the fourth one in the Low Countries.