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showcase of research in-and-through musical practice
15-16-17 September 2010 Orpheus Institute, Ghent, Belgium [ORCiM]
U U U U
2010
FESTIVAL of RESEARCH, MUSIC and IDEAS A total of almost two years’ intensive research in-and-through musical practice by the members of the Orpheus Research Centre in Music [ORCiM] culminates in the second ORCiM Festival of research, music and ideas. Through performances, presentations, talks and two public concerts, Research Fellows from ORCiM as well as guest speakers will share aspects of their cutting-edge insights. Besides offering valuable inspiration to musicianscholars keen to experience the fresh understanding and new questions that artistic research generates, the Festival will set out the future directions for ORCiM. Na meer dan een jaar van intensief onderzoek in-en-door de muzikale praktijk organiseert het Orpheus Research Centre in Music zijn tweede festival van onderzoek, muziek en ideeÍn. De Research Fellows van het ORCiM en enkele eminente gastsprekers stellen via concerten, presentaties en discussierondes hun nieuw verworven inzichten in vele verschillende aspecten van het muzikale bedrijf voor. Voor musici en musici-onderzoekers wil dit ORCiM-festival een bron van inspiratie zijn, op weg naar een beter begrip van de artistieke kennis die door artistiek onderzoek gegenereerd kan worden. Naast het verspreiden van onderzoeksresultaten zal het festival ook aangeven welke richting het ORCiM in de toekomst uitgaat.
20.15 – CONCERT @ Handelsbeurs: ‘Unexpected Variations’ Ludwig VAN BEETHOVEN – from Veränderungen, op.120 über einen Walzer (A.Diabelli) Thema Var. I Var.II Var.III
Var.IV Var.V Var.VI
Paulo de Assis, piano, with the collaboration of: Mieko Kanno, violin; Tania Lisboa, violoncello; Alessandro Cervino, piano
Henrik FRISK - Repetition repeats all other repetitions Stefan Östersjö, guitar
Edward JESSEN – Chamber 119 Catherine Laws, piano, toy piano, voice and recorded backing track
Ludwig VAN BEETHOVEN – from op.120 Var.XIII Paulo de Assis, piano
Edward JESSEN – Chamber 119 Film version
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WEDNESDAY SEPTEMBER 15, 2010
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Ludwig VAN BEETHOVEN – from op.120 Var.XX Var.XXI Var.XXII
Var.XXIII Var.XXIV
Paulo de Assis, piano with the collaboration of Bill Brooks, voice, Alessandro Cervino, piano and Juan Parra Cancino, electronics
Anton WEBERN– Pieces op.11 for cello and piano Tania Lisboa, violoncello and Alessandro Cervino, piano
Morton FELDMAN – King of Denmark Juan Parra Cancino, electronics
Ludwig VAN BEETHOVEN – from op.120 Var. XXXI Var.XXXII Var.XXXIII Paulo de Assis, piano with the collaboration of: Mieko Kanno, violin; Tania Lisboa, violoncello
This concert was made possible with the support of the City of Ghent.
9.00 – 9.15 Welcome 9.15 – 9.30 Introduction 9.30 – 10.35 AROUND THE CONCERTS 1 (Host: Jeremy Cox) 9.30 – 9.50 Paulo de Assis ‘Deleuzabelli’ variations Drawing upon the Deleuzian concepts of ‘becoming’, ‘encounters’ and ‘lines of flight’, this presentation proposes a view of Beethoven’s ‘Diabelli Variations’ as a path of mutation and continuous metamorphosis, precipitated through the actualisation of connections among sound bodies of the utmost disparate origins, situated both in the past and the future. By considering the single variations not as closed, static substances, but as escaping doors from a temporary state of being; and by focussing upon them in terms of unfolding forces, of bodies affecting and being affected by other bodies, a dialogue on identity and difference will be proposed. 9.50 - 10.10 Alessandro Cervino Towards a performance of Alfred Schnittke’s Second Piano Sonata This lecture focuses on those sound aspects of this post-tonal composition that are underdetermined by the score, namely: attack, articulation, dynamics and timbre. Is it possible to find and verbalize criteria which help performers to settle these parameters? Is such an articulation useful to an efficient practice? Criteria can be inferred by reflecting on, and trying to make sense of, the different sound results that can be produced. Since natural language is inadequate to capture their characteristics, an alternative might be to describe the means necessary to produce them, instead of the results themselves. Furthermore, an account of the physical movements employed for playing a composition can help in the generation of a description of the work’s shape from a performer’s perspective.
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PROGRAMME AMM
THURSDAY SEPTEMBER 16, 2010
Alessandro Cervino
10.10 – 10.35 Response and discussion (respondent: Janet Ritterman)
Stefan Östersjö
PROGRA
10.50-12.45 AROUND THE CONCERTS 2 (Host: Luk Vaes) 10.50 – 11.10 Stefan Östersjö Richard Karpen’s ‘Strandlines’: a study of different modalities of listening in musical practice This paper reports on my ongoing research project on the musician’s listening, as exemplified in both the composer’s and the performer’s practice. Drawing on the concept of ‘thinking-through’ (Maharaj, 2005; Östersjö, 2008) - dealing with the non-verbal processes of listening and performing - this study further explores the concepts of ‘thinking-through-performing’ and ‘thinking-throughhearing’. The aim is to identify different modalities of listening, specifically in two different contexts: listening to the space in a concert hall, and listening (and re-listening) in the context of mixing and editing in a recording studio. 11.10 – 11.30 Juan Parra Cancino On KVSwalk ‘KVSwalk’ aims to research the possibilities and limitations of physicality and ‘embodied musicality’ in computer music performance. The musical structure is centred on the metaphoric imaginary, as well as on sonic derivatives of the Karman Vortex Street phenomena. For its ensemble version, a set of ‘high-order parameters’ were defined for each performer, favouring timbre variation and texture density control over variety of pitch and articulation. This presentation aims to shed some light on the technical and musical challenges encountered throughout the process of creating the piece, presenting excerpts of the different stages (experiments) that preceded the version you will here at the ORCiM festival. 11.30 – 11.55 Response and discussion (respondent: Frans De Ruiter)
Host: Darla Crispin 14.00 - 15.30 Keynote Speech: William Kinderman From parody to transfiguration: Beethoven’s ‘Diabelli Variations’ There is no better example of a great musical work rooted in commonplace experience than Beethoven’s ‘Diabelli Variations’, his longest composition for piano. Hans von Bülow dubbed the thirty-three variations ‘a microcosm of Beethoven’s art’, yet this enormous musical edifice was built from a trivial waltz that the composer reportedly dismissed as ‘a cobbler’s patch’ on account of its mechanical sequences! Not only does Beethoven ennoble Diabelli’s theme by transforming it into a variety of shapes and characters but he also subjects it to critique, poking fun at its primitive aspects. The ‘Diabelli Variations’ are Beethoven’s most paradoxical composition, and present a uniquely coherent design of vast dimensions. This lecture-recital will be illustrated by fresh discoveries from Beethoven’s sketchbooks and his newly-available autograph score, which has just joined the holdings of the ‘Beethoven-Haus’ at Bonn.
15.40-16.45 THOUGHTS AND CONCEPTS 1 (Host: William Brooks) 15.40 – 16.00 Kathleen Coessens The artist’s body: mapping the interface of performance In this presentation, the musician will be considered as the dynamic interface between artistic material and artistic manifestations, actualizing the internal potentialities of artistic material in a unique way. The investment of the body is a rich source of meaning: intention as well as ‘in tension’, incorporation as well as ex-corporation. How can we map the bodily expression of explicit or implicit
PROGRAMME
12.00 – 12.45 Lecture-recital (Host: Catherine Laws) William Brooks Test and experiment Composers and performers both test alternatives and experiment with processes. A careful distinction between ‘test’ and ‘experiment’ can illuminate some of the ways in which research in-and-through musical practice differs from research in other domains. This presentation will be illustrated by live performances of ‘Small talk’ and ‘Medley’, two of my own compositions, the former heard at this time and the latter presented in the evening concert.
PROGR PROGRAMME
Paulo de Assis
coded signs of different kinds, conveying emotional and aesthetic messages? By blurring times and spaces, body and mind, signification is continuously experienced and unfolded, endlessly created and imagined. 16.00 – 16.20 Paulo de Assis Gilles Deleuze meets Helmut Lachenmann: the conditions of creation and the haecceity of musical material Helmut Lachenmann articulated a series of thesis and typologies around the conditions of musical material, an ‘aesthetical apparatus’ with vast conceptual implications. Lachenmann envisaged the concrete practice of composing as more than a closed system of contemporary aesthetics, defining his own route and giving insights into his ‘musique concrète instrumentale’: music that seeks to liberate the energetic potential of concrete sounds and processes. This suggests an idea of radical immanence of the musical material that approaches some key concepts of Deleuze. Bringing together Deleuze’s ideas on creation and the haecceity of the material and Lachenmann’s theoretical output, this presentation offers an unexpected encounter. 16.20 – 16.45 Response and discussion (respondent: Jeremy Cox)
17.00-17.30 Intermezzo (Host: Catherine Laws) Michael Schwab & Gerhard Eckel Presentation of the collaborative piece ‘Re:Bodyscapes’ Gerhard Eckel (music), Michael Schwab (visuals), David Pirrò (software), Valentina Moar (dance) ‘Re:Bodyscapes’ is a video installation in which the captured motion of a dancer is transformed into a dynamic drawing that, in turn, feeds a musical composition. The installation will show sets of experimental variations that explore the dance movements, the drawing algorithms and the musical structures in an attempt to create aesthetic resonances and convergences. The work investigates how structured creative processes can transpose, rather than represent, the dancer’s movements.
17.45-18.50 THOUGHTS AND CONCEPTS 2 (Host: Luk Vaes) 17.45 – 18.05 Mieko Kanno - What I’m playing is better than the piece! Starting with this occasional remark by musicians, the paper examines the relationship between the singularity of a musical work and its varied forms of identity. First, the concept of mimesis is explored with regard to the formation of identity of musical works in contemporary music. Second, the discussion leads to a model in which authorship and ownership constantly merge and separate in the process of identity formation. Finally, the speaker proposes that the continuous re-drawing of the boundary between authorship and ownership can be a significant strategic component in the practice of contemporary music.
18.25 – 18.50 Response and discussion (respondent: Stephen Emmerson) 20.45 Concert @ Orpheus Institute: ‘Unexpected Variations II’ Alfred Schnittke - Piano Sonata Nr.2 Gyorgy Kurtag - Jatekok William Brooks - Medley, for soprano and piano Richard Karpen - Strand Lines Juan Parra Cancino - KVSwalk, for (networked) ensemble and electronics. ORCiM Ensemble
PRO
18.05 – 18.25 Darla Crispin Critical variations: new languages, new forms Susan Sontag’s 1964 landmark essay, ‘Against interpretation’, provides a surprisingly timely call to action, in its appeal for a criticism that ‘shows how art is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means’. The new kinds of language – and even non-language - that such a criticism entails in its interrogation of tacit, embodied knowledge, is the domain of artist-researchers. Their understandings come first from the lived experience of artistic creation and performance, and only secondarily in the form of language. They need to find vocabularies that have a fidelity to this lived experience. In this presentation, Sontag’s ideas will be tested through encounters with Anton Webern’s Piano Variations Op. 27 to illuminate aspects of both. Mieko Kanno
Catherine Laws
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FRIDAY SEPTEMBER 17, 2010 9.15 – 10.15 Lecture-recital (Host: William Brooks) Luk Vaes For prepared pianist: meeting the challenge of programming Cage’s prepared piano pieces John Cage’s pieces for prepared piano are among the most cherished in the piano repertoire of the last fifty years, not least in terms of the high number of recordings that have been made with them. On the concert stage, such love for this particular music is hard to discern, however: except for the Sonatas and interludes and the Concerto, these compositions are very rarely performed. The main reason for this discrepancy lies in some unique problems that are presented when programming music for prepared piano. Having researched the music, its performing practice as well as the programming of this repertoire, Luk Vaes will explain the problems, show solutions and demonstrate his findings.
10.30-11.55 BEFORE THE PERFORMANCE (Host: Alessandro Cervino) 10.30 – 10.50 William Brooks & Catherine Laws Co-creative practices A number of ORCiM Fellows are exploring processes of co-creative collaboration, usually between composers and performers but also across art forms. This presentation will examine some of the key questions arising from such projects. They include: consideration of the different ways in which musical material is generated, analysed, developed and refined in such processes; the defining and negotiating of roles; the subsequent implications for the locus of creativity, authority and ownership; the relationship between process and product; the role of notation; the life of the work beyond the collaboration; and interdisciplinary and non-Western perspectives.
11.10 – 11.30 Tido Dejan - Variations and archetypes This presentation explores the fact that, from Beethoven on, ‘variations’, far from just constituting the hitherto assumed ‘simple suites’ or ‘sequences of variations on a theme’, are often conceived as an organic whole. Notable examples are illustrated with works by Beethoven (the ‘Ninth’), Brahms (‘Haydn Variations’), Richard Strauss (Sinfonia domestica), Lutoslawski (Concerto for orchestra). Through Constantin Bugeanu’s analytical methodology, which stems from ‘Gestalt’ psychology, the performer can go beyond the usually taught and practiced ‘one-after-the-other approach’, and perceive these variations as logical and unified structures. He can thus embody an overall shape, a clearly graspable form identified through the formal archetypes first acknowledged by Alfred Lorenz. 11.30 – 11.55 Response and discussion (respondent: Janet Ritterman) Host: Darla Crispin 13.15 – 14.15 Keynote speaker: Stephen Emmerson Remixing Modernism: Re-imagining Schoenberg and Bartók in our time This presentation will outline the rationale and methodology behind a new and provocative recording of piano music from Schoenberg and Bartók (Move Records, 2010). Developing in various unanticipated directions from Glenn Gould’s
PROGRAMME
10.50 – 11.10 Tania Lisboa Expert learning and problem solving: connecting the artist’s musical thoughts and behaviour The noted pianist and pedagogue, Heinrich Neuhaus, suggests that when a great musician first approaches a new piece ‘an instantaneous and subconscious process of work at the artistic image takes place’. This is an important characteristic of expert problem solving. But how do expert musicians approach a new piece and acquire an artistic image whilst dealing with demands on solving technical problems? The experience and insights of a musician studying her own practice and her thoughts during the learning process will be described, relating these to theories of problem solving and expertise.
Tania Lisboa
PROGRAMME
concept of ‘acoustic choreography’, these recordings were the result of a close artistic collaboration between performer and sound producer with a background in popular music production. Beyond aiming merely to capture a performer’s interpretation, the recordings unashamedly exploit the potential of contemporary digital technologies to manipulate the various parameters of recorded piano sound in order to enhance the bold contrasts of space, timbre and texture embedded in the original compositions.
14.30-15.30 MORE UNEXPECTED VARIATIONS (Host: Juan Parra Cancino) 14.30 – 15.00 Paul Craenen On Alvin Lucier’s I am sitting in a room Alvin Lucier’s I am sitting in a room (1968) is a classic that is located on the boundaries between sound art, sound poetry and music. The attractiveness of this work seems to be rooted in a tight connection between conceptuality, situatedness and the experience of variation. In a short lecture I will examine how Lucier achieves a multilayered performativity, starting from minimal means. As a comment I will perform a feedback study that exhibits similar characteristics, although Lucier’s words are replaced by human movements. 15.00 – 15.30 Kathleen Coessens & Anne Douglas Experiential knowledge and improvisation: variations on movement, motion, and emotion The body and its movement, essential in human practices and experiences, are the expressive media of artistic action and creation. The body encounters the world and establishes patterns of action and interaction. These patterns are simply flexible means of variation, always containing elements of improvisation. The body encounters the unexpected, the unknown, the resisting – and, at the same time, appealing - world. Starting from everyday life, we will move on to examples of both visual art and music that sustain this thesis of the dynamics of experiential artistic knowledge. 15.30 – 16.30 Closing remarks by William Kinderman and Round Table (Hosts: Juan Parra Cancino and Alessandro Cervino)
Darla Crispin, Paulo de Assis, Michael Schwab Traditionally, the concept of ‘variation’ in music is associated with a blend of the expected and unexpected, with the former arguably predominating compared with a more obviously dynamic and dialectical musical genre such as sonata form. Starting from a germinal theme, which is an all-pervasive point of reference, the traditional set of variations subjects this theme to a series of transformations within which we are nevertheless always supposed to divine the guiding presence of the theme’s essential character – its harmonic plan, melodic contours, etc. The composer may attempt to tease us by disguising the theme – clothing it in increasingly florid decorative figuration, changing it from major to minor (or vice versa) or turning melodic material upside down (as in the great lyrical tune of Rachmaninov’s Paganini Variations) but essentially, these tricks conform to a fairly stock repertoire of repetitions, reiterations, decorations, mutations and limited developments. This traditional concept presents us with a central identity (the theme) and various satellites orbiting around it (the variations) that embody more-or-less subtle differences to the theme, and more-or-less obvious repetitions of certain aspects of its structure. Such a concept is related to a classical vision in which difference is understood as difference between two things, and repetition as a reiteration of case or turn. This vision doesn’t deal with the concepts of ‘difference’ and ‘repetition’ in themselves, but mainly with a given original position of reference – that of ‘Identity’. ORCiM’s project ‘Unexpected Variations’ emphasises a different balance between the expected and unexpected and proposes another understanding. The project is an implicit critique of ordinary representations of identity, difference and repetition (Cf. Deleuze 1994). More than a play on the relations between contingency and structure, organization and change, the ‘Unexpected Variations’ project proposes a collection
REFLECTIONS
Reflections on ‘Unexpected Variations’
REFLECTIONS
of heterogeneous elements that are diverse but, when bundled together through specific relations and in a particular way, address a common feature: the idea of ‘variation’. In this way, the traditional notion of ‘variation’ (a derivational system) is transformed in the sense that it is the ‘variation’, the difference in itself that becomes the constitutive dimension. Inspired by the idea that different elements can be connected (articulated) or disconnected in order to create new, unexpected unities (or ‘becomings’), this project stresses the urge for articulations that must be made, sustained, transformed and unmade in particular concrete practices. This links to one of the main concerns of researchers at the Orpheus Institute: the nature of artistic research and its potential status in the wider academic community as a special brand of enquiry. There is much at stake in relation to this discourse, because many music institutions are now well aware of the potential – both artistic and economic – of developing artistic research, within which performance plays a crucial role. Operating in this environment makes us ask fresh questions, not just about how art conveys its meanings to us, but also about the nature of the knowledge society and the power structures and spheres of influence within it. The discourse is therefore of an ethical, as well as an artistic and philosophical, nature and the responsibility for sustaining it is central to the Orpheus Institute, given its position as a pioneer of the emerging discipline of artistic research. Artistic research involves particular ways of re-evaluating the past and proposing fresh futures. The linkage of these two in the specific context of a Research Festival has the potential to generate new understanding around the theme of ‘unexpected variations’. Variations vary around points of fixture that allow the variants to be compared. Without securing something somewhere, no knowledge of difference - that is to say, no knowledge at all - will ever arise. In a variation, the point of fixture is the origin that enables the variation, while, at the same time, disappearing beneath the surface novelty of each new manifestation (for we cannot perceive that which does not change). As humans, we associate change with the creation of form, with activity and thus with life. Although potentially containing individual surprises, variations that are ‘expected’ operate against basic, fixed parameters without ever changing the game. As ‘expected variations’, their novelty wears off quickly, because nothing is fundamen-
It has been discussed whether artistic research is in fact nothing other than contemporary art (Cf. Lesage, 2009), since both search for unexpected variations that propose new and different forms of art at the site of a few, limited and sometimes even conceptual objects. But, despite the unexpectedness of these variations in terms of the experience of art that they convey, in relation to their knowledge content, we experience the expected. Taking a different approach, we might consider the concept of ‘variation’ in relation to genre theory. The question of genre concerns the very names that we impart, often rather automatically, to our subjects of study. Whilst, in common practice, the naming process as it relates to musical works has been seen largely as an exercise in denotation, recent scholarship proposes a more connotative view of genre in which implications additional to the central idea of the genre are made. In such a model, genre is not employed as a means of pinning the musical object to the wall; instead, it becomes a communicative concept, and generic examination a means of determining what choices of genre might mean beyond their merely classificatory roles. So, if we consider ‘variations’, then the notion of variation produces a set of expectations upon which we can reflect our observations of non-orthodoxy. As Jeffrey Kallberg points out ‘ works that seem anomalous with respect to a genre, that seem somehow toil on the edge of it, can play a key role in generic studies’. (Kallberg, p. 244). It is at this point that one can begin to be perplexed with definitions of musical variations. One need go no further than the New Grove Dictionary of Music & Musicians, and Elaine Sisman’s thoroughgoing contribution on variations to get a sense of this. The second paragraph begins thus: ‘Variations have always had an “image problem”.’
REFLECTIONS
tally gained. But ‘paradigm shifts’ (Kuhn, 1962) occur when other points of fixture suddenly become possible, that is, when everything we know can also and potentially better be organized around other origins. Paradigmatic variations are unexpected, because by definition no fixture can exist that will predict what is to come. This is a field of ‘advanced studies’, but also the field of contemporary art.
REFLECTIONS
Sisman attributes this ‘problem’ to several factors: 1) The reliance upon repetition, so audible limitation versus development; 2) The preponderance of melodic variation as ‘mere decoration’; 3) A backlash against virtuosity after the musical dominance of variations between 1790 and 1840; 4) The arbitrariness of the additive structure of variations. In unpicking these points, and their negative implications, it is necessary to consider the so-called ‘contractual’ aspect of genre. Genre exerts some kind of persuasive force; it establishes what Jauss calls ‘a horizon of expectation’ within the work. To quote Kallberg again: A kind of generic contract develops between composer and listener: the composer agrees to use some of the conventions, patterns and gestures of a genre, and the listener consents to interpret some aspects of the piece in a way conditioned by this genre (Ibid). Given this, it is quite easy to understand how an ‘image problem’ emerged in relation to variations, bearing in mind the associated generic contract that includes repetition, limited development, decoration and a formal arbitrariness. The expected component of the unexpected variation lies in the very notion of ‘variation’ as (formal) change against (material) duration, which is to say, as differential play that enables knowledge. Truly unexpected variations would not only produce new knowledge through shifting paradigms, but would shift what counts as knowledge. Artistic research’s claim towards knowledge is so difficult for our culture to accept, because the register of knowledge has maintained its propositional form across the shifting paradigms despite recent ‘iconic turns’. (Boehm, 2006) There are two further points of relevance to the outcomes of the Research Festival. The first is that certain composers actually took the limitations of the variation form and turned these in upon themselves to create highly integrated, developmental and complex works – one need think only of Bach’s Goldberg and Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations in this respect. The second is that the definitions so far considered point to a practical division between those who improvise variations as part of their musical practice – the performers – and those who read and hear variations as a subject for contemplation – the scholars.
But we should be optimistic and hopeful about the ability of the proponents of the two approaches to work together. And, we should especially welcome and celebrate the work and new perspectives of the artist-researchers, whose particular modes of working and questioning acknowledge, but also potentially heal, the disciplinary fissure by situating their enquiries right at ‘ground zero’, as it were, and embodied within a single, dynamic being: the artist-researcher. Through this being, artistic research becomes the unexpected variation of knowledge. Such ‘new’ knowledge is never based on a framework, even if it offers a new paradigm, because it resists the fixture of anything. Rather, both form and material are, in equal measure, outcomes of a variation with each putting the other into play. Therefore, no (formal) criteria are possible in order to identify what is form and what is material at any given moment. The movement of such variations suspends their determination in a register of knowledge as they become indeterminate and useless for the understanding of anything other than themselves - which however, they do perfectly. If we reflect upon the processes involved in preparing a piece such as the Diabelli Variations for performance, we soon see that the ever-generative state of performance is itself in endless motion toward an idealised event which we can never experience and for which, despite all our detailed practice, we can never entirely prepare. In practice, we face ‘infinite diversity in infinite combination’ – we are happily condemned to variation and to the processes of becoming through a perennial quest to understand more. ‘Performance confronts the world’s immanence. It consumes itself in this
REFLECTIONS
This specific fissure is a tiny symptom of a more general dichotomy that we see emerging as musicology and artistic research contemplate one another. It could be an energetic and volatile fault-line - full of potentiality and scope for new knowledge – provided that the relevant parties work in concert, rather than treating it as a dangerous no-go zone. In the latter case, they will set up boundaries and defend their respective territories with ideological stances based either on nostalgia for the past (associating this with the period of relative dominance of both musicology and the nineteenth century model of performance) or upon a striving for false utopias (focussing upon the sectarian pursuit of their own separate destinies without regarding each other at all, let alone in new ways).
REFLECTIONS
confrontation, in an immanent critique of the world, positing the pervasion of the universe by an intelligent and creative principle’, but one in which our messy entanglement with the world, our embodiment, must be considered first, above all notions of transcendence (Murphie, p. 222). Artistic research leads us to new approaches to, and contexts for, these messy strivings that are a necessary part of our lives as creative artists. The collaborative research-and-performance space, a place of multiple readings rather than singular interpretations, is the kind of space in which such discussions can really thrive. In this sense, the concept of Unexpected Variations prompts us to the most passionate kind of sober engagement with musical texts and their realisations in performance. Indeed, it then demands yet more: nothing less than a new language through which the ramifications of this work can be shared within the knowledge society, free from traditional gatekeepers, carried out with discipline and rigour, and communicated with joy.
References: Boehm, G. ed., 2006. Was ist ein Bild? 4th ed., München: Fink. Deleuze, G., 1994. Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton, London: Athalone Press, and New York, Columbia University Press. Kallberg, J., 1988. ‘The Rhetoric of Genre: Chopin’s Nocturne in G Minor’, 19th-Century Music, Vol. 11, No. 3: 238–26 Kuhn, T.S., 1962. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Chicago: University Of Chicago Press. Lesage, D., 2009. The Academy is Back: On Education, the Bologna Process, and the Doctorate in the Arts. e-flux journal, (4). Available at: http://www.e-flux.com/journal/ view/45 [Accessed July 2, 2009].) Murphie, Andrew, 2009. ‘Performance as the Distribution of Life: From Aeschylus to Chekov to VJing via Deleuze and Guattari’, in Deleuze and Performance, ed. Laura Cull, Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press.
Peter Dejans in Conversation with Anne Douglas, 11 June 2010 When we started the Orpheus Institute in 1996 with support from the Ministry of Education, we were not in fact founded to create a platform for artistic research. The initial intention was to develop an institute for individuals who had left the conservatoire and who had gained some professional experience. We were supposed to be something between a Conservatoire and a University. The main goal for a conservatoire is to enable a musician to master their instruments or a composer to master their compositional skills. There is little time or mental space for a student to take a significant step back from what he or she is learning and to reflect upon their own practice. However, musicians have questions. They take these questions with them into their daily lives as musicians. Their questions became our starting point. The birth of artistic research for the Orpheus Institute as an idea emerged for me personally through an inspirational three-hour conversation in 2002 with Kari Kurkela, the founding father in the 1980s of the doctoral programme for artists and musicians at Sibelius Academy, Finland. The opportunity to realise the idea in our own doctoral trajectory followed in 2002/2003. The University of Leiden created its new Faculty for the Creative and Performing Arts, in collaboration with the Royal Conservatoire in The Hague. They had the legal structure for organising a doctoral degree but did not have experience of a research environment suitable for musicians. They looked to the Orpheus Institute. We had a laureate programme and the experience of questioning and reflecting on and through musical practice. In January 2004 we officially opened the doctoral programme (docARTES) with the University of Leiden and the Royal Conservatoire of The Hague and the Conservatory of Amsterdam. In 2008, the University of Leuven and the Lemmensinstituut (Leuven) joined us officially as a fourth partner.
THE CONTEXT
ORCiM, a fertile ground for Artistic Research
THE CONTEXT
It has been a process of organic growth in which we immediately faced those practical questions that are strongly linked to content. Did we need a doctoral programme? Why should an artist do doctoral work? What is research in this field? What does research bring to an artist? What does an artist bring to research? How should an artist be guided and supervised and what qualifications are needed to do so? What is the content of an artist led doctoral programme? Should we copy the university system or change it? Could we even question it? We explored how the Orpheus Institute could benefit from taking on an institution like a doctorate and, in turn, whether we could benefit the existing model in universities. We discussed how we might relate to other new disciplines that have emerged in the last fifty years and the processes of change they had brought about during the last half of the 20th century. Up until now, the two means of creating a research environment at the Orpheus Institute are the doctoral programme (docARTES) and the Orpheus Research Centre in Music (ORCiM), which is a group of research fellows. In 2004 we worked in a responsive mode. Individual doctoral students came with their research questions ‘in their backpack’. They opened the backpack and created some interaction with senior researchers, with staff, with colleagues. Then they closed the backpack and moved on. There was some sediment, but not enough to label as a research environment. It was not sufficiently fertile ground. There was no humus layer in which to sustain growth. Creating the humus layer was actually the main motive for creating a research centre. The challenge became to create the research environment, but not predetermine the research. It took me four years of searching like a nomad, somewhat unsettled. I was confident, however, of the destination. In our research centre, we now bring artist researchers together from different nationalities, different cultures, different ages. Most but not all of them are post docs. There are individual researchers working on individual research topics of the daily actions of a musician like rehearsing, analysing, interpreting and articulating. We have collaborative research and individual activities. We reach out to the outside world through conferences or guest speakers. Our doctoral programme is gradually changing its nature from a doctoral curriculum into a ‘junior research centre’. A guest lecturer becomes a guest researcher. Our teaching staff become senior researchers. Courses
A doctoral programme or curriculum has not been an end in itself, but a means to arriving at a thriving research environment. By seeing the doctoral programme through the lens of a research centre, Orpheus Institute becomes a larger entity with different levels: juniors, post-docs, seniors, and general researchers. By being forced out of the utilitarian and income generating modes of a doctoral curriculum, we are forced into examining again and again the core of what we are actually doing in research. We have an ongoing existential fear and this has become our strength. We are not a large institution such as a university or polytechnic. A day in which we are not creative with this development and with articulating to others why, how and what we are doing, is a day that is lost. Through this experience we can see that the emergence of a new discipline such as artistic research begins with a question, a concern or a need. It then becomes a programme. Programming demands institutional settings to link discourse and its dissemination through journals and conferences. Discourse itself is more than writing up what others are saying. It is the digestion of what is said and its transformation into another kind of outcome. It is a long process that you cannot completely steer. You live it. This new discipline is somewhere between the development of a ‘searching’ mind and a ‘researching’ mind. A ‘searching mind’ is a necessary, but insufficient condition for research. It is a starting point. We were already abiding by academic rules but perhaps in a less structured way. We had already determined in 1996 that the work of the Laureate programme should be manifest both in an artistic outcome (not even a result
THE CONTEXT
become reading groups. It is a kind of laboratory in which research and its processes are relabelled. We invite individuals to create. By looking at what we create and how we create it, by looking at methods, questions, frustrations, we are able to develop some advice, some warnings as well as some information, to generate the necessities that one might need in a backpack before starting the research journey. It is about providing possibilities, bringing people and opportunities together and waiting for the ‘chemical reactions’. It is about sensing what is already there as good research in the guild of musicians and artists. We are not creating the gold. We are bringing some of the gold that exists below ground to the surface. We are still at the very beginning. Music itself is unthinkable without time. It is a development of time. That is how we think about our own process of maturing a research culture - through time.
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– an outcome) and a verbal articulation. There are advantages and disadvantages to making the shift towards greater levels of structure. Mission statements listing proposed outcomes, entrance examinations, supervision committees and interim reports can have a very positive effect. It can make you take another step in your development from an unconscious and intuitive way of organising things to a more reflective one. You are forced to grow from a child to an adult but in that growth, you may also lose. Many adults keep the positive character of a child and childhood. These are the most interesting adults, I would say. Challenges emerge when we have to apply rules and would like to change the rules. We looked further and we saw that, in the community of a university, there was an enormous range of individuals, departments and disciplines. There was a place for our discipline. It needed some bureaucracy to grow, but if we went too far, there would be a loss. We had to search for the balance. There is always, in this kind of negotiation, something that one can influence. It comes down to the attitude of people and the power of negotiation, of being a diplomat and of being creative. It is like a submarine that only surfaces when what you want to show cannot be ignored. Through artistic research we are changing the way knowledge is generated both in relation to more traditional disciplines and within music research cultures such as ORCiM. We are creating a language. It is by doing research that we are learning how to do research. We learn more from our students than they learn from us. The impact of this new research on existing knowledge and its methodologies goes well beyond the presentations and insights of a particular doctorate or a particular curriculum. Within ORCiM, we started with delineating research fields that existed in the experience of its researchers. Different individuals related to themes of analysis, notation, creativity, sound works and listening. This was our first account in the first year. In the second year we identified a meta level grid: thoughts and concepts, embodiment and the materiality of music. This grid organises a field but does not create a field. It is easy enough to impose a research agenda that determines research questions and activities but it can be the wrong kind of entry point. To create a humus layer we needed a pars pro toto, a part that would stand for the whole.
To return to the metaphor of the humus layer, by precisely nor determining which plants should grow but rather creating an environment that was immensely rich in terms of good conditions for the growth of the discipline itself, we would be able to detect which were the interesting doctoral and post doctoral projects as well as the less interesting ones. Artistic research has a developmental role to play within the practice of art rather than an explanatory role. Experience and knowledge are interwoven in our discipline. Experience can become a form of enlightenment. When it becomes crystallised into existing knowledge and is repeated as a sequence of enlightenments over time, it becomes not just ‘an experience’, but a manageable, useful and replicable form of knowledge. We are still at the very beginning. In this development, ORCiM in the context of Flanders has four unique selling points. The first is the combination of a doctoral programme and a research centre operating as an inter university and international institution. I do not know of another example in the discipline. The second is our role in setting up a relevant network that is important for our discipline. On the occasion of the official opening of our research centre (February 2009), Orpheus Institute started off with EPARM; the European Network Artistic Research in Music, whose operational work might in future be organised under the umbrella of the AEC, the Association Européenne des Conservatoires. The third is our supporting the process of academisation of artistic research in higher
THE CONTEXT
Three criteria began to emerge that would guide the way to come to a choice. The research had to be practice based. That means that the individual’s own artistic practice is the source and target domain of the research and this practice needs to generate something that we do not yet know. Secondly it should be anchored within local rather than imported expertise. In this way we could sustain ourselves. Thirdly, it should be distinctive, not in the sense of not doing what others were doing, but rather to find the distinctiveness in what we were doing already. If we could not find that distinctiveness, we should abandon the particular line of inquiry. Through these three criteria and after a lot of exploration we came to ‘artistic experimentation’.
THE CONTEXT
musical education. The fourth addresses the question - Where does the development of the arts happen? Does it happen in the work of a concert organisation, in a recording company, in an orchestra and its programming or through the orchestra’s director? Does it happen in education or in a research centre? In artistic research, we are researching developments through those who are applying the research. This is a difficult concept. It is like a hologram in which you never have a fixed picture but one that is always diffused. If you take away the diffused quality, you loose something. It is perfectly possible to remove it but you loose what you have. We build on the past rather than trying to understand the past. It is like a cathedral that starts with the Byzantine, follows with the Roman. Instead of changing it in the Gothic, we build on a third layer. With the choir that I conduct, Musa Horti, we have performed some choral music of the Swedish composer, Sven-David Sandström, who wrote six motets based on J.S. Bach’s famous motets, using the same text and form, but with his own style and tonality. It is impossible for us to say that Sandström’s music is better or worse than that of Bach. That we are unable to make that judgement is remarkable. Other disciplines judge change by declaring that something that was deemed right in the last century, is no longer right in this. Our relationship to knowledge in artistic research is developmental, but not one of creating better knowledge by improving on the past through structural growth. It is rather by creating structures for growth such as ORCiM, where the artist, through his daily activity, through doing, makes a development. This is the real meaning of embodiment. Sandström, in writing these motets, is entering into a discussion with Bach. I am not sure I would label that as research. What then is research in the arts? It is in the doing - in the writing of a composer and also in the performing and listening and experiencing. It is in the whole rich phenomenon of creation and production, how it affects our being human and how it informs us about who we are and how we look at things, how we judge, how we are ‘in being’. Last week we celebrated two hundred years since the birth of Schumann. We have the sense that Schumann lived a long, long time ago, but if I live to be seventy, I only have to go back three full lives and I am already with Schumann. He becomes extremely close. If I try to re-imagine something, I feel a new experience of time within me that is very personal. Information in and of itself is
If I acknowledge that research is about creating original knowledge – new insights, better understanding, then it is extremely challenging for an artist researcher, in the short trajectory of doctoral research, to label what he or she is doing and its affect as the production of new knowledge. Artistic understanding is situated between the maker and his or her work. If the maker happens also to be a researcher, what difference does it make to the work? The difference is this : how can I, as an artist researcher, better articulate what I am doing and how does my researching mind, through processes of contextualisation, through theory and through verbal, textual and bodily articulation, literally develop the work? That is the aspect that makes artistic research, research and it is necessary to demonstrate it as such. The humus layer, for me, is situated between the artist and the making of the thing. Viewed this way, research provides the potential to generate something that is greater than the artist’s first intention. Production of knowledge and understanding in art is not new. It is inherent to good art. It is the knowledge generated by the artist and reflected upon in order to question and improve the production itself by contextualising the work, that brings the work into the research field. The doctorate is a research qualification through which you are judged by peers to be able to do the research on your own. A doctorate is the very beginning, not an endpoint. For me the phenomenon of the artist researcher does not touch the core of art, as some fear. An artist researcher is an artist that cannot avoid being a researcher. It is a way of life, of creating a disturbance through critical thinking. As the artist researcher you are fascinated by something that you do not have to be fascinated by, to be a good artist. You do not need a doctorate to be a good artist. Research does not pervert art. It makes concrete something that is inherent in art.
THE CONTEXT
not knowledge. This impulse to reflect on an experience we have, the digging out of information and digesting it, this can bring us knowledge. If in the guild of musicians we experience people in the doing, in creating and passing the experience on to each other, if this can be developed, it can become knowledge. We need water to make wine, but wine is not water, just as information is not experience and experience is not research. Each requires a process of transformation to become the other.
2010 2013 For the period 2010-2013 ORCiM focuses on
Artistic Experimentation in Music Experimentation is inherent to artistic practice and to the processes of music making. Artistic experimentation encompasses the actions that an artist undertakes in developing and constantly renewing a personal artistic identity and expertise. Exploring this field has the potential to give greater insight into how art unfolds, and opens new possibilities for artistic practice and reception. ORCiM’s research for this period will be inspired by the following fundamental questions:
What is the character, function and potential of experimentation in musical practice? How does experimentation shape artistic identity and expertise, and how can it disclose aspects of embodied knowledge? How does artistic experimentation affect the development of musical practices, both historically and currently? How does artistic experimentation in music relate to other fields of human activity? To address these questions ORCiM is undertaking a comprehensive exploration of artistic experimentation, covering a broad spectrum of topics and methods and articulated in various research projects. For further details, see the forthcoming project brochure.
Orpheus Research Centre in Music [ORCiM] The recently launched Orpheus Research Centre in Music is an important new player in the artistic research community. The centre provides musician-researchers with a unique environment where the artist “makes the difference”. ORCiM brings together an international team of excellent musician-researchers which forms the backbone of the research centre. The centre addresses emerging issues that are of concern to all involved in the artistic community in both practical and developmental areas where artistic knowledge is critically needed by stakeholders. Further, through active and close collaboration with other specialised research centres worldwide, the ORCiM operates across disciplines and national boundaries. Met de recente oprichting van het Orpheus Research Centre in Music zorgt het Orpheus Instituut voor een primeur binnen de artistieke wereld. Het centrum vormt een unieke artistieke onderzoeksgemeenschap waar de kunstenaar centraal staat. Een internationaal team van uitstekende musici-onderzoekers werd samengesteld en vormt de ruggengraat van het centrum. Het ORCiM gaat in op thema’s die sterk aanwezig zijn in de muzikale praktijk, die zich lenen tot verdere ontwikkeling en kennisvorming, en die een meerwaarde kunnen bieden aan de artistieke gemeenschap. Bovendien werkt het ORCiM ook over lands- en disciplinegrenezen heen, door de samenwerking met andere gespecialiseerde onderzoekscentra van over de hele wereld.
Orpheus Institute Orpheus Research Centre in Music Korte Meer 12 9000 Ghent, Belgium T: 0032 (0) 9 330 40 81 F: 0032 (0) 9 330 40 82 info@orpheusinstituut.be www.orpheusinstituut.be www.orpheusinstituut.be/nl/research-centre-orcim www.orpheusinstituut.be/en/research-centre-orcim
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