Artistically researching non-Western music

Some months ago, I organized a half study day on the issue of artistic research into non-Western music and improvisation. An increase in the number of students wanting to enter a doctoral trajectory with topics relating to these interests had been noticeable throughout the field, so questions of the potential and the problems that such topics bring with them were reason enough for wanting to discuss the matter with policy makers and a few invited specialists. Except for a lecture by Godfried-Willem Raes, arguing that there is no such thing as solo improvisation because players need the unpredictability of interacting with another player, the whole was more than somewhat disappointing for me, however. Especially when it came to the issues regarding AR and non-Western cultures, one specialist’s statement, putting forward that the potential is great and the obstacles non-existent, was intellectually lethal to the get-together. Actually, the prospects had already been condemned from the moment ideas like “Asian pianists coming to Europe to study Chopin can do no more than copy us” clashed with the suggestions that we, ourselves, could just go anywhere and research another culture even if we don't even speak their language. As hard as I tried to steer the debate into the direction of any type of worthwhile insight, both notions remained unconsumed food for thought.

If the soup had been too hot and spicy, here’s a more palatable opportunity to ponder some of the issues. One of the members of the audience, that day, was Liselotte Sels, who is working on a doctoral project involving Turkish folk music. You can read more about her and her project here – basically she is a Western pianist from Ghent (a city with a sizable history and population of Turkish immigrants enjoying an ever more visible cultural life), looking at Turkish folk music from theoretical, aesthetic and sociological perspectives to create “new music based on characteristics emerging from the ‘deconstruction’ of the Turkish folk music repertoire,” including collaborative “explorations of different musical idioms and procedures (composed contemporary classical, free improvisation, jazz, pop,…)” and finding “a meaningful role and appropriate use of the piano in relation to Turkish folk music.”

Liselotte Sels

Naturally, Liselotte’s research takes her to Turkey. She is there at this moment and has agreed to include her research progress in the travel-log that she set up to share the experiences of her trip. Here’s the link to the blog – the posts in English are the ones concerning the research. (Click “volgende” to go to the next post, “vorige” to go back.”)

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.

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.

practice.research.unit

Britain’s Kingston University, with philosopher and professor of Film and Television Studies John Mullarkey as the main motor behind it, has announced their “practice.research.unit” initiative. The broad aim is

to look at all contemporary aspects of PAR (practice led, practice based, etc) within drama and performance, film, music, fine art, dance, and creative writing, with a view to sharing the latest best ideas both in terms of stand-alone research and research-led pedagogy. Its intent is, firstly, to assay where practice-research is across the disciplines right now, and then to take the agenda forward through a number of major events each year (two to three initially) as well as in smaller local workshops occurring more frequently. A pluralism of approach will be a defining trait.

This introduction, communicated to me by John, will be followed by a more explicit and official 'manifesto' once the full website is launched.

The first event of this unit is a one day symposium on 'Capturing Process?', “pitched at both faculty and graduate students working in PAR, be they Kingston based, UK based, or international” and aiming “to establish the problems of disseminating process and establishing a practice research process for our work as practitioners, academics and examiners”:

[…]the challenging terminology for the symposium is deliberate: if an examiner is to read or to see this process it must be retained, disseminated and delivered in a form which the examiner (or peer reviewer, or viewer) can grasp, understand and interpret. By laying an emphasis on process there is an honesty regarding the development and changes of this process. For example, one may compose a piece for a film, or make a film; then one may make a documentary which reflects on this process, as well as writing a thesis about the process, reflecting on the work and on the reflection (this is but one of many possibilities).

The keynote address for the symposium will be delivered by Professor Robin Nelson (Central School of Speech and Drama), other speakers include forte-piano player John Irving (IMR), composer Oded Ben-Tal (Kingston University) and pianist Keith Ford (Kingston University), with more speakers representing drama, dance and film. Two sessions will handle ‘Capturing Process’ and ‘Defining Practice: Rehearsing Applied Strategies’, with a Round Table reflecting on “'Capturing' a Dynamic Process” and a PhD Show to include students from dance, drama, film, music and performance.

Welcome to the practice.research.unit as a new partner in crime. Related news and reports will follow.

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.

Towards a European Platform

For two and a half days, the European Association of Conservatoires, Music Academies and Musikhochschulen (AEC) set up shop in Belgrade to discuss AR. Sounds, Searchings, Sharings: towards a common platform for the development and dissemination of artistic research in music was the inaugural conference of EPARM, a project of the AEC to 

serve the community of European conservatoires as they come to terms, each in ways most appropriate to their unique context, with the phenomenon of artistic research in music 

(joining other AEC platforms, e.g. for Jazz and Popular music or for Early Music). EPARM was formerly known as European Network for Artistic Research, initiated in  2009 by the Orpheus Institute.

Over 100 people were registered to represent 54 institutions from 24 countries interested in AR. That is about 1/5 of the member institutions of the AEC, from about half of the countries that the AEC covers. The top three of heavily represented countries included Belgium (7 institutions), The Netherlands (6) and Sweden (4). It was odd to notice how the UK only revealed one interested party (Royal Northern College of Music) and that the Sibelius Academy did not send anyone - both are as well-known for their tradition and/or efforts in the realm of AR as any in the top three. The Balkan region, on the other hand, showed great interest, but it is unclear how much of that had to do with the geographical location of the conference compared to their actual or projected involvement in AR.

The hallways and rooms of the hosting Faculty of Music at the University of the Arts in Belgrade were buzzing with the energy of intent: policy makers and researchers from diverging individual and national backgrounds made their focus and involvement clear during all of the many presentations. Keynotes included the perspectives of a “successfully graduated doctoral student” (yours truly – still wondering if there is an unsuccessful way to graduate), of the rector of an institution (Georg Schulz, of the University of Music and Performing Arts in Graz), and of those pondering the framing conditions and curriculum building for AR in conservatoires (Massimo Zicari of the Scuola Universitaria di Musica in Lugano and Jeremy Cox, ceo of the AEC).

In between the thematic sessions, 10 composing, interpreting and improvising doctorandi from AR programs in Malmö, Paris, Ghent, Stuttgart, Belgrade and Trieste presented their ongoing ‘solo’ or collaborative research. Once more (cf. my previous post on AR at the Masters level), the diversity of personal artistic curiosity and the resulting research angles was exciting and inspiring, with projects ranging from the Arpeggione to the electric viola and from improvisation in opera to processes in the relationships between performer and composers. The conference reader and some of the presentation Powerpoints can be downloaded here.

The organisers and sponsors (see the reader for details) have gone out of their way to provide maximum conferential comfort. From the technical assistance to the framing entertainment program (including a concert by the Belgrade Philharmonic Orchestra and an evening-long dinner on a boat cruising the Danube), the entire production was imacculate.


The quality and identity of the research was not always discussed as collectively as some later indicated that they would have liked. Despite the humidly warm conference hall, or because of it, debates never heated up to the point that new ideas were forged. Unnecessary fears about having AR distract musicians from their art (or conservatories from their core business), unjustly perceived antagonisms between AR and musicology, hesitance in aiming exclusively at a full-blown AR PhD (thinking of allowing for a DMA-type performance degree as an option or even a substitute), confusion about methodology and identity, worries about the difficulties of standardizing institutional relations between arts and sciences across the EU,… The many challenges ahead (and we can identify a few more than those that were mentioned) may have pulled the symbolism of the confidently sunny early spring climate into the shadows a bit, but the general feeling remained very much that of blossoming determination, as demonstrated by the suggested constructive reasons for initiating further assemblies to look at financial issues, to include trans-ethnic potential, to continue to explore methodologies, etc. It came as no surprise, then, that the closing plenary discussion resulted in a unanimously supported proposal for continuing and broadening the efforts towards “a future for a European platform for AR in music”.

Closing plenary discussion with Frans de Ruiter 

sharing aspects of more than a decade in AR experience

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)

AR at the Master level

Answering to an invitation by a conservatory to be part of the jury assessing the artistic research projects of its Master students, I found myself taking a sample of the youngest generation of potential artistic researchers in an institution that wants to answer to the challenge of preparing them for an AR future.

In total 48 students presented their research, of which I saw 8. The range of projects and creative ideas was inspiring: an aspiring ballet accompanist collected professional experiences, insights and habits that are normally left inaccessible to anyone outside of the little circle made by this type of pianists; a cimbalom player who was a musically illiterate virtuoso when entering the conservatory made some stunningly effective transcriptions of Debussy piano works; another pianist came up with evidence to refute the attention that is normally given to Bellini when considering bel canto influences in music by Chopin; etc. It was heartwarming to see the efforts made to enter the new field of AR.

Although it could seem that some students didn't always grasp all the basic characteristic of a research attitude, it was in fact the lack of clarity and focus of the conservatory AR policy that best explained the uneven quality of what was offered. While some of the teachers (who were part of the jury) showed precise affinity with the essentials of AR, others had no clue. Nobody seemed to know whether a written report was actually required, some confused the lesser distance between subject and object (as compared to purely scientific research) with a complete lack of neutrality towards the research topic. The result was an often poor supervision of students that had greater potential than they ended up being taught to take advantage of.

Besides the lack of a fully worked out vision for implementing AR on a Masters level, the short supply of Doctors in the Arts must be taken into account. It is very much to be hoped that many doctorandi graduate in the shortest term possible, and that they find their way to the Higher Education institutions. Provided that those create post-doc positions for this expertise.

Something else struck me: one student delivered a splendid presentation, accompanied by a top-notch written-out report of a research project that left nothing to be wished for. While studying at the conservatory, she was also preparing for a PhD in Informatics. There is no doubt that her academic master had prepared her for applying - all by herself - the necessary standards to her AR project. Considering that academic masters do not really include courses specifically engineered to gain sufficiency in scholarly standards, it is curious to see that immersion in the academic biotope is enough to make up for the shortcomings of a traditional conservatory education aiming to integrate AR in the curriculum.

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)

ARC/SAR/JAR 2 – have you created your first weave yet?

The Swiss city of Bern, official home to the Society for Artistic Research, was host to a large delegation of members from the ARC/SAR/JAR conglomerate come together for an update on where we are at with this important project. A previous post discussed the entities here, a brief recapitulation would explain the society (SAR) as a body that exists to publish the journal (JAR), with the Artistic Research Catalog (ARC) being the work group that helps set up the software platform from which the actual Research Catalog and JAR will operate. (Submission for JAR will have to be formatted to fit the Research Catalog first.) The whole operation started a year ago and ARC should be finished in twelve months from now. Then it will just be the Research Catalog and SAR publishing JAR.

The SAR activities in Bern were of a mostly administrative nature (voting a new executive board, informing members of ARC’s and JAR’s status, etc.) and JAR was present via a party celebrating its first issue. The main impact of the Bern meeting was to be felt in the fact that the eagerly awaited beta version of the ARC software was introduced. Some of the ARC coordinators (who oversee individual researchers trying out  the platform), including yours truly, gave a presentation of their own first attempts and findings, some workshop sessions were to ensure that the necessary information and knowhow to operate the platform can be passed on to the many researchers associated with ARC in the next few months.

This is going to be big. For the first time, really, musician researchers will be able to publish findings with sound and video as well as basically unlimited bytes of scores. The latter is at once the Achilles heel of JAR, but that should not spoil the fun yet. I, for one, can hardly imaging publishing anything on paper anymore. A book with a CD/DVD included? Forget it: that’s like developing apps for the telegraph. It is true that personal websites offer at least as many possibilities, but JAR will be peer reviewed, and that makes it the first potential quality control standard for published artistic research in music.

Have a look at JAR-0, and I am sure you’ll be convinced. But you’ll also notice that the future music researcher will not be adequately set up anymore with just a friend who is willing to read through his article before submission for the sake of linguistic and structural soundness. He will now have to scout for additional and new types of friends: those who have experience in lay-out design. Lay-out for paper publications is done by the designers that work for the publication; with JAR, the submitting researcher has to make many choices himself, before sending in his work. If it has already been found that it is not because visual artists are good at their art that they will be good at web-layout, than the consequences for musicians will be multiple.

Coming back to the copyright issue: JAR did a good job in finding a way to secure its own position against potential infringement litigation. But it shoved the hot potato into the hands of the researcher. How many will take risks, warranting that they have secured the rights when in many cases they will not even be able to do so? Existing laws do not adequately meet the demands of paper publishing, they certainly do not provide for the scale that JAR users will want to operate on.

Another worry is the peer review process, especially the choice of criteria for the visual arts submissions. Yet, the need for something like JAR is so great that attention may explode regardless of such worries.

The end of the tunnel is in sight: when the bugs are gone and newly discovered needs are met, we’ll be able to put all our research into the catalog for anyone to assess, have a first discipline-specific journal format, and see other publishers get a license to use the same platform. 

This feels really good.

Oh, and to find out what a ‘weave’ is, log in here. It all looks complicated, for sure, but you had better get used to it: it’s going to be the future!

PechaKucha

There is a trend in the world of presentation called PechaKucha. Pronounced ‘pe-chak-‘cha, the term is Japanese for the noise of chatter. There is much to find on the Internet about its history (e.g. on Youtube or here and here), but its most salient characteristic is the fact that it is formatted by 20 PowerPoint slides, each timed to last 20 seconds – no more and no less. Totaling 6’40”, this presentation model is typically prescribed for PechaKucha Nights, of which there are dozens per night on a global scale and which consist of a dozen or so such presentations. As trends go, one can expect a lot of babble clouding their potential, or lack thereof, so I decided to go and sit in on a PechaKucha Night myself.

PechaKucha is an excellent exercise in being concise and to the point, and in timing the telling of a story. The ruthless format makes it easy to identify the gifted or well-prepared presenters: for some those 20” are too long and they are embarrassingly lost for words when the image is not ready to move on yet, for others it is by no measure enough to say all they think they should tell, ending up explaining a slide that has already been replaced a while before and struggling to catch up.

Here also, of course, Wagenaar’s art (see another post) applies – I don’t think I'll forget about the Smart Grid presentation, in which that term was smartly repeated with every slide – but it does so also to the verbal part: since slides are the focal point, much more than in regular presentations where they change only when the presenter is ready to move on (the PechaKucha audience sees a clock on the screen to make the passing of time explicit), their choice is an even more crucial ingredient. The images form the backbone of the presentation: the slide selection enables or disables the flow of the talk and the timing steers the structure of what has become a storyboard. The presenter’s challenge is reduced to a tough one for he has to develop a story structure that is both flexible to match the narrative logic and strict in keeping with the 20” rhythm.

With the naïve expectation of going to the PechaKucha Night to hear research presentations (I’ll explain why that was my mind set), I soon feared to have made a mistake and to be surrendered to enduring sales pitches from corporate marketing executives that had discovered yet another way to Spam their way into an audience’s awareness. Yet, I am happy to conclude that those had actually been a minority: most were idealists who came to show their passion for something that would have the hardest time getting exposure through the regular promotion channels in their field, such as a chef who showed how his restaurant thrives on food that is cultivated under his own supervision in a radius of maximum 30km, or a young gallery owner developing new ways to connect the collector with the artists. Most satisfactory was to realize that I would probably never have learned of such initiatives if I hadn’t gone to this event.

The format is definitely a sign of the times, with people seeking new ways to divulge information, ways that are in keeping with the possibilities of new media and cater to the frustration of the limits that the old media suffer from. The way PechaKucha Nights further connect to our time is noticed in the interaction that the audience is offered by seeing live Twitter comments appear on a second screen.

Wondering if anything can be relayed in some 6 minutes without losing the opportunity to explore some depths, the format is also easily associated with the sound-bite needs of the zapping generation. Yet, looking and listening to a radiologist showing the potential of present-day technology in his field, it must be admitted that the advantage of being forced to compress for PechaKucha’s sake outweighs the danger of overloading a longer and more loosely timed presentation. Perhaps more problematic is the level at which the image rules, rendering facial expression of the presenter not only useless (nobody sees it, especially in the big halls PechaKucha is staged in, with a large screen for the slides but no comparable interest in highlighting the presenter), but even a waste of misplaced effort: it is the inflexion of the voice, if anything, that must take care of the expressive necessities.

Why posting this, then? I am very much occupied with dissemination of artistic research and how it can be developed to be more efficient than by taking over formats from other/older disciplines. An artistic researcher’s presentation is not well served by some of the traditional ways: concerts are deficient because to play a composition does not transfer enough information to know how the piece or the performance can be reproduced; paper alone will not do either, since new insights in making sounds are often better off when heard instead of read about. New technologies provide opportunities here, with e.g. on-line publishing that can integrate sound and moving image. In the same vein, new media and new formats are worthwhile to keep an eye on: it is easy to see how PechaKucha sessions may replace the tradition of posters sessions at scientific gatherings. The event I witnessed was the closing session of an international conference, providing those for whom there had been no time to schedule a fully-fledged presentation an alternative to be heard.

On an artistic level, the PechaKucha format is inspiring as well. One presentation was made by a photographer who showed 20 items of her work while a live flutist played a composition that had been written for that particular slide show. There were no spoken comments. Thinking of the specificity of live artistic research dissemination, a composer may well see the creative advantage in showing 20 slides of text while a musician plays the necessary musical comment, proof or illustration, neither necessarily continuous nor necessarily live. 

As the official PechaKucha website finds that a good PechaKucha presentation uncovers “the unexpected, unexpected talent, unexpected ideas”, I cannot but look forward to see the doctorandi at docARTES experimenting with this format. If the timing of the slides turns out to be prohibitive of fluency or efficiency (which may end the infatuation – already variants are popping up), then it will still be excellent for the reasons stated in the second paragraph of this post.

ARC & JAR & SAR

A few days ago, I attended a meeting in Gothenburg, Sweden, on furthering the work to set up the Artistic Research Catalog, an on-line workspace that aims at developing a high standard of referencing, storing and documenting artistic research projects.

The core forces behind this project are the Bern and The Hague Universities of the Arts, supported by a host of institutions from The Netherlands, Britain, Switzerland, Germany, the US and pan-European consortia such as the European Association of Conservatories, the European Society for Literature, Science and the Arts, and the European League of Institutes of the Arts.

Several meetings with many individuals representing these institutions are set up to gage the needs of the generic artistic researcher in order to develop the software that would attain the sought after standard. As most of the members of this project are from the visual arts sector (including representation of the art of design, of architecture and of some interdisciplinary orientations), with Dutch improviser Peter van Bergen, Flemish composer Paul Craenen and me representing music, there is a distinct gravitational force weighing in on the exchange of ideas. The imbalance has not only its effect on the topics of the discussions but on the terminology as well (‘exposition’ / ‘works’), and hence on the concepts with which the software developers will work. It remains to be seen how efficient it will be to insist on merging audio and visual culture in such an enterprise. The problem is of course inherently linked to the notion that ARC wants to be a bottom-up enterprise, interested in learning from existing artistic research projects to know what researchers and artists require for the storage and publication of their work. Apart from the ongoing or unsettled debate on what constitutes artistic research in music, making it difficult to know the wishes of the generic researcher, there are many less artistic researchers in music than in the visual arts, where the notion has been entertained more widely and for a longer period already.

Fortunately, it has been decided that a prototype of the software will be available soon for the members of this initial phase to work with and learn from. That should speed things up, so I am looking forward to seeing what is possible and what is lacking. Only then will we find out what we want this catalog to do for us.

The software is meant to be open source so that other initiatives can use it as well. If the idea of more than one such catalog based on this software is still not more than a concept, one project is being developed to use this digital ARC platform as we speak: the Journal for Artistic Research. More on JAR can be read here. The first issue is planned for publication in the coming months – it is said to be a ‘zero-issue’, probably meaning that the double-blind peer review standard will be used from the next issue onwards. The publisher of JAR is the Society for Artistic Research, of which a little information is to be read here.

As much as SAR would seem to be fundamental to both the other enterprises, it appears to be least active and only be called into existence to work out JAR, which in turn needs ARC to function. As ARC is a two-year project (at least if the supporting grant is not renewed or replaced with alternate financing) already in the beginning of its second year, it is not clear how and by whom the catalog will be exploited as an independent workspace for researchers once it is up and running. For the time being, it looks like JAR is the real aim of the community that called it into life. As for SAR, there is much potential still to be tapped. If the number of artistic researchers is still small, it feels great enough to start acting like a society, exploring its critical mass far beyond creating a channel to disseminate its findings. But the impetus is there and soon the first exploits will make history.

Dr. Jed Wentz

We have a new Doctor in the Arts! Yesterday, traverso player and conductor Jed Wentz promoted at Leiden University on his research into The Relationship between Gesture, Affect and Rhythmic Freedom in the Performance of French Tragic Opera from Lully to Rameau. The dissertation is available on-line here – more info on Jed here.

Jed Wentz

As part of his defense, Jed presented a well-attended and -received concert at the Conservatory of Amsterdam with a program containing chamber music by Telemann and Blavet, and monologues from Luly's Armide as well as texts by Shakespeare and Bary. Other performers included Musica ad Rhenum with a.o. baroque dancer Jennifer Thorp and soprano Andréanne Brisson Paquin.

The concert was a delight, enabling the audience to enjoy ingenious and intriguing links between non-musical aspects of period stage craft (such as facial expressions and bodily gestures) and rhythmic freedom in the performance of the music itself. Jed has examined historical sources that treat acting and rhetorics in order to attempt at recreating a language of gesture suitable for experimentation in operatic scenes from the genre. As a flautist, he went as far as learning to master Gilbert Austin's gesture notation to perform Shakespeare's Speech of Brutus on the Death of Caesar (see the illustration at the top of this post), studying the Beauchamps-Feuillet dance notation, even consulting medical sources to understand the broader context of affect and the body within which gesture and musical performance were situated.

Jed's research proposes that the performances at the Paris opera were far from static representations of the notes on the page, but rather an exciting synthesis of word, music and gesture that strongly stirred the hearts of the listeners. By way of his own performances, Jed achieved exactly that: the meticulousness with which specific types of physical expression were linked to the meaning of a text had clearly demonstrable artistic merit and was inspiring to witness.

Jed is the second Doctor in the Arts from Leiden University and the docARTES program. Welcome to the club, buddy!