A move to put our mark on the Frascati Manual

According to its latest newsletter, the Society for Artistic Research wrote a letter to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), on August 30, to call for a revision of the Frascati Manual in order to add AR as a new and separate scientific category. (Posted on the society’s FaceBook Timeline on October 29, 2013.)

The Frascati Manual was thought of as initiating a “Proposed Standard Practice for Surveys on Research and Experimental Development” to measure Scientific and Technological Activities. Its latest (6^th) edition dates 2002 and defines types of research and research personnel, deals with measuring expenditure and personnel resources, and also organizes the "Field Of Science" into main and sub-categories. (Buy here or download its free PDF here.) The book is highly influential: worldwide, governments and organisations adopt its definitions for discussing their scientific, technological and economical development policies, and R&D studies acknowledged its function as a standard.

The 2002 edition Field of Science classification was revised in 2006 (freely downloadable here) and is listed as follows:

1. Natural sciences

1.1 Mathematics

1.2 Computer and information sciences

1.3 Physical sciences

1.4 Chemical sciences

1.5 Earth and related Environmental sciences

1.6 Biological sciences (Medical to be 3, and Agricultural to be 4)

1.7 Other natural sciences

2. Engineering and technology

2.1 Civil engineering

2.2 Electrical engineering, Electronic engineering, Information engineering

2.3 Mechanical engineering

2.4 Chemical engineering

2.5 Materials engineering

2.6 Medical engineering

2.7 Environmental engineering

2.8 Environmental biotechnology

2.9 Industrial biotechnology

2.10 Nano-technology

2.11 Other engineering and technologies

3. Medical and Health sciences

3.1 Basic medicine

3.2 Clinical medicine

3.3 Health sciences

3.4 Medical biotechnology

3.5 Other medical sciences

4. Agricultural sciences

4.1 Agriculture, Forestry, and Fisheries

4.2 Animal and Dairy science

4.3 Veterinary science

4.4 Agricultural biotechnology

4.5 Other agricultural sciences

5. Social sciences

5.1 Psychology

5.2 Economics and Business

5.3 Educational sciences

5.4 Sociology

5.5 Law

5.6 Political science

5.7 Social and economic geography

5.8 Media and communications

5.9 Other social sciences

6. Humanities

6.1 History and Archaeology

6.2 Languages and Literature

6.3 Philosophy, Ethics and Religion

6.4 Arts (arts, history of arts, performing arts, music)

6.5 Other humanities

The 6.4 Arts category is specified as containing: Arts, Art history; Architectural design; Performing arts studies (Musicology, Theater science, Dramaturgy); Folklore studies; Studies on Film, Radio and Television. (The 2002 classification saw 6. Humanities as made up merely from 6.1 History, 6.2 Languages and literature, and 6.3 Other humanities.)

The noble but bold request of SAR is to add AR not only to the classification as a new category, but to do so “as a significant category on its own terms.”  The 6.4 Arts category, as “containing various fields of research on art” [my italics] is juxtaposed with the claim that “this classification does not in any satisfactory way reflect the development of artistic research” (i.e. research through art [my italics]). The letter’s phrasing – to see AR as “a field of its own on the 1-digit level” – leaves unclear whether SAR wants AR to sit at the 1-digit level (making it a 7^th high-level group) or under it (as a distinct 6.6).

Next to the notion of the unsatisfactory way that AR would compare to the subcategories under 6., the society’s letter states several other reasons for its claim, such as the Frascati manual’s “aims to reflect changes in the nature of contemporary R & D” (the 2006 revision is indeed considerable), and two recent international initiatives to suggest a similar (1-digit position) solution to the perceived problem. Of the latter, one proposal (from the Head of the Economics Statistics department, Statistics Sweden and the Swedish National Agency for Higher Education) was made in November 2010, and the other (from European League of Institutes of the Arts) in January 2012. Both initiatives were addressed to the OECD Head of Economic Analysis and Statistics.

I don’t know if the two previous attempts were left unanswered, nor can I form a good idea as to how complicated it would be to realize a revision of the classification. The international scope of AR is lauded in SAR’s letter as being well networked an widely recognized, but how much of that will (or needs to) impress whatever entity decides over this, is a mystery to me at the moment. More interesting is the question of the validity of creating a new position for AR. I am all for recognizing AR as separate from musicology and artistic practice (see here), agreeing also in full that research on an artistic practice is not necessarily the same as in-and-through it (the latter can comprise the former, but goes one step further in catering conclusions to the needs of the practice). In my personal opinion and experience, it would also be good for AR to be valued as independent in order to safeguard some of the support that an emerging discipline needs. There’s hardly any money for AR (yet), and funding entities divide their financial pie into smaller slices rather than increasing the available resources as a whole to accommodate a new type of player. That there is already little cash to go around, is further mirrored in the facts that a call for an AR position attracts a significant number of interested musicologists, music-theorists or –philosophers, or that these scholars prefer a term such as ‘artist-researcher’ rather than one that identifies a new type that they feel (unjustly, I think) excludes them from participating. For the time being, I prefer to make clear distinctions, as attempts at appropriation (“AR is musicology with a new focus”, as I have heard argue on an AEC symposium a few years ago) will only leave dire chances for the young category to grow. A spot of its own in the Frascati Manual would certainly offer some hopes, if not guarantees, of being recognized, taken seriously and supported on government levels.

But, when reading in the manual (pp. 30-45) about distinctions on the borderline of what it considers to be at the core of the manual, i.e. Research & Development, and what it states should be excluded from R&D, then the matter might not be a small task. An example: “[…]even research by students at the PhD level carried out at universities should be counted, whenever possible, as a part of R&D[…]” (p. 31) [my italics] As it happens, doctoral AR is nearly all we have to show for, really. Fortunately, I am now only concentrating on music in this post – the visual arts have more weight to put on the scales. And for music, if all goes well, output streams can and will grow stronger, broader and faster.

On a conceptual level, however, tougher questions remain. As long as doubts are expressed as to whether or not artistic practice in itself is research, and artistic output be valid as research output, and as long as institutions consider a D.M.A. format (e.g. Portugal) for the doctoral cycle, or restrict doctoral candidates’ options to musicology departments (Germany), the communal AR efforts will stay diluted, and it may be hard to convince the OECD that we don’t fall under arts. And while I go along, to at least a certain extent, with the idea that AR can involve a type of knowledge of its own, I still see quite a few AR dissertations and articles being written that do not benefit from artistic practice, do not demonstrably have an impact on it, and do not bring forth new artistic knowledge.

In any case, I warmheartedly favor SAR’s proposition, and I look forward to hearing of any development in the matter – will keep you posted 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.

Lingua Franca

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The thoughts and experiences of Lauren Redhead

 
Lauren Redhead - the name is Viking and matches the mahogany shine in her hair - is a British composer and organist who, at this moment, is in the process of completing a PhD in musicology at Leeds University. She has developed quite a presence on the international conference scene and expresses her well-considered thoughts on her blog-type website.

Perhaps more than her compositions, of which I don't know enough at the moment to go into, really, it is her blog that I am fascinated by and which I want to share here. In her post of 3.6.2011, Lauren deals with questions regarding compositional practice and research. The train of thought is eminently worth reading, especially as it is the only development of any thinking about compositional research that I have come across from the most relevant of practitioners: a composer. Lauren untangles often confused notions of relations between practice and research, offers links to interesting topics, as for instance an AHRC report on the status of writing in Practice-Led Research as well as on practice as a methodological part of research, or an article from the Guardian on why researchers might not want to become involved with people outside of institutions, and why this prerogative would turn their research into a hobby.

Other posts throw light on Lauren's compositional attitude and methods, a focus that can be read and enjoyed as explication of her (re)search. There is quite a bit on collaborative research, e.g. her involvement in the adopt a composer program, or Green Angel, the “contemporary work of operatic Noh theatre” that she wrote with librettist Adam Strickson in 2009-2011. (See some vimeo bits here and here - there is a DVD of the full performance.)

Among the multitude of issues that Green Angel opened up to Lauren, and which she raises and tackles in her presentations and seminars (of which one is coming up on November 7 in Leeds), are:

• dissemination of research to other researchers and the general public in conventional and unconventional ways (including practice-led means that may be currently more favored in the arts);  
• how interdisciplinary dialogue generates new methods of communicating research with a focus on impact and on what researchers can offer each other from their own disciplines; 
• expressing the research interests of both collaborative partners through practice, whilst also creating an artwork with an autonomous function outside of the research context of its creators; 
• the possibility of integrating research interests of more than one party; 
• how practice-led research allows for addressing types of knowledge that are different from traditionally written research; 
• the effectiveness of practice-led research, and of collaboration as a way of facilitating this; 
• considering practice not as an outcome of research but as the medium through which research is conducted, allowing for the consideration that practice itself (without a communicable research element) can be a separate outcome of practice-led research; 
• the outcomes of the performance which are not related to the research.

Lots of food for thought, I'd say, especially for those who are struggling with compositional research. I see proposals from composers that wish to investigate the integration of technology into their work (to name just one typical example) meet with little questioning, perhaps because the research goals or the methods to measure the success with which they are to be met are easy to identify (with). On the other hand, I have witnessed members of assessment panels being puzzled over how to judge the research quality in terms of new knowledge, research method (vs. compositional method), etc. when it comes to someone who writes purely instrumental music in a traditional vein. As a composer and researcher who stands firmly with both feet in the field, Lauren Redhead can be inspiring to those who feel that they are swimming aimlessly in this area of concern.