Artistic research reports

Frans de Ruiter (1946-2025)

noreply@blogger.com (luk) — Fri, 18 Jul 2025 12:16:00 +0000

On July 16, Frans de Ruiter passed away. He had been a crucial force in establishing and developing AR in the Low Countries, with influences stretching far beyond.

Born in Utrecht, The Netherlands, de Ruiter studied harpsichord and musicology. His career in Dutch music organisations was impressive from the start: at 29, he became director of the Holland Festival (Amsterdam 1975-85), during which time he co-founded and started directing the Early Music Festival (Utrecht, 1982-1994). He took on additional and overarching roles as, amongst others, founder and chairman of the Kunsten '92 interest group (1992-1999), president of the European Festivals Association (1989-2004), and President of the UNESCO associated International Music Council (Paris, 1997-2001 & 2009-2013).

In 1985, after his position at the Holland Festival, de Ruiter added education to his portfolio, as director of the Royal Conservatoire The Hague (1985-2006) and president of the board of the University of the Arts The Hague (1990-2011). He co-founded the Dutch National Opera Academy (DNOA), and was responsible for eye- and ear-catching composer-in-residence events at the Conservatoire, inviting e.g. Karlheinz Stockhausen and Mauricio Kagel for large-scale festival-type collaborations.

When AR came on the radar, with the Bologna Declaration, de Ruiter was instrumental in helping to extablish docARTES, the multi-national multi-university/conservatoire doctoral programme for musicians at the Orpheus Insitute in Belgium. He was professor and dean of the new Faculty (later Academy) of Creative and Performing Arts of Leiden University (2001-2016), which he initiated. In his capacity as promotor of doctoral candidates, de Ruiter handled many dozens of succesful AR PhD trajectories.

De Ruiter's energy was astounding, even in his final years. Meetings with promovendi, of whose dissertations he never failed to read every single sentence, would take place wherever roads could be organised to cross, be it at some international airport, at a highway restaurant, at his or someone else's home, while near-continuously travelling around the globe to festivals, conferences, or board meetings, and finding hotels where he could comply with his swimming routine. His 5-year planner with countless to-do glosses in the tiniest of pencil writing achieved legendary status amongst those who worked with him. Artistically, he was as much of an omnivore as in his organisational work: despite his era's separation of expertise, with early and new music specialisms characteristically the single focus in most other careers, de Ruiter would remain keenly interested in all types of music making. With one eye always on the long-term macro level of what needed to be done, he never neglected the smaller challenges, such as putting his unusually extensive network to use for engaging co-promotors, wherever they could be found, or for tapping into the financial resources of some obscure foundation to help support a student.

AR has much to owe to Frans for his indefatigable and visionary work. In his own words, he was certainly "the right man at the right place".

Thank you, Frans.

The Belle van Zuylen Prize

noreply@blogger.com (luk) — Tue, 28 May 2024 12:14:00 +0000

Isabelle de Charrière, née Isabella van Tuyll van Serooskerken, dite Belle van Zuylen (1740-1805), was a multi-talented artist born in The Netherlands and settled – through marriage – in Switzerland. She was known for her literary and compositional output, a dual interest that seems to have led to writing her own libretti for her own operas long before Wagner. (I am told that this practice was likely inspired in part by her friend and pen pal Rousseau, but this just adds more detail to her impressive social status.) Next to an informative Wikipedia lemma, there are two Dutch-French websites devoted to her (here and, more specifically from the literary perspective, here) – some of van Zuylen's music can be appreciated here.

Belle van Zuylen

In 2006, the Association Isabelle de Charrière established a biennial prize to reward a Master’s thesis, written in French, English, or Dutch, focussing on de Charrière and her work or on other female European writers of around 1800. In 2023, the world's oldest society for music history instigated a new award, the Belle van Zuylenprijs, oriented towards both the Bachelor’s and Master’s level artistic research from the Low Countries, thus complementing their existing yearly Hélène Noltheniusprijs for an outstanding academic Master’s thesis.

On the website of the Royal Dutch Society for Music History, the link between (artistic) research van Zuylen is made clear:

Her work attests to her inquiring, critical attitude, and she did not shy away from satirizing the aristocratic milieu in which she dwelled nor from joining her contemporaries in requesting more and better education for women. She famously claimed “je n’ai pas les talents subalterns”, freely translated “I do not have a talent for subservience”.

Last Saturday, the Belle van Zuylen Prize was awarded to the Scottish Nicola Stevenson for her thesis Blowing Zen on the Silver Flute – A Performance Guide for Shakuhachi-Inspired Repertoire Written for the Western Silver Flute (Amsterdam Conservatoire, 2023). The jury commended the project for its original topic, the clear way the context was explained, the chosen method resulting in a practical guide demonstrating the relevance for other musicians, and the well-structured and -illustrated presentation.

Nicola Stevenson

It is noteworthy that the musicological side of the music research sector in this geographic field is interested in AR to the point of desiring a greater validation of artistic research by seeking out its excellence at the pre-doc levels. In fact, until relatively recently, conservatoires didn’t even offer AR to their students before the doctorate. This makes it meaningful that the jury remarked on the high level of the submissions, normally a platitude meant to hide the nonsensical situation of comparing art-based content outside of formal criteria.

The response for this initiative’s first incarnation was enthusiastic: 22 students from 5 conservatoires in The Netherlands and Flanders sent in their theses, of which three reached the final round – next to Nicola Stevens there were, alphabetically, Marta Cecylia Gołka (When Extremes Meet – Compositional Elements of Animals as Leaders’ Music in Writing for a Modern Electric Small Jazz Ensemble; Amsterdam Conservatoire, 2022) and Maris Pajuste & Rúben Borges (Applied Collaborative Practices of Composition Choir of One: A Case Study; Ghent Conservatoire, 2023).

I wish Nicola, Marta, Maris, and Rúben all the best in their artistic and research careers.

Two programs in Salzburg

noreply@blogger.com (luk) — Tue, 06 Feb 2024 10:36:00 +0000

A call went out for a new Austrian doctoral program “at the interface between science and art”. On October 1, 2024, two collaborating Salzburg institutions - the Paris Lodron University (PLUS) and the Mozarteum University (MOZ) - will be starting a 4-year thematic doctoral school Cultures in Transformation. The program is following their 2019-2023 incarnation The Arts and their Public Impact: Dynamics of Change (see here), set up by the same two organisations and with half of the six candidates promoted and the other half in the final stages.

The new inter-university effort will award the coveted full-fledged Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) degree. The program is held in German, but the dissertation can be submitted in English. Seven paid positions (50% FTE) are offered.

Applications for the new program need to be in by March 15, 2024. All info here.

While that doctoral school’s goal is “to contribute to the development and expansion of knowledge in both areas [of science and art]” and to have the students “make an independent contribution to academic and artistic research”, I am told it is strictly speaking not an AR program. For that, the Mozarteum University has its own inter- and transdisciplinary 6-semester PhD in the Arts program. This one does not offer scholarships or otherwise paid positions. Content-wise, both programs overlap, but the topical one does not feature AR at its core, and its main output is the dissertation. The PhD in the Arts, on the other hand, fully in English, leaves the format of the output to the doctoral candidate, i.e. it could be a sole artwork that incorporates the research findings.

The application deadline for the PhD in the Arts is March 28, 2024 - info here.

These two programs show an interesting institutional take on the discussion about where AR should be situated in the structures of higher education, especially about which type of output should present the research outcome, and which degree is awarded. The one program is directed towards the traditional concept of a dissertation covering all documentation, without mentioning an art work necessarily being in the mix, while the other considers the new knowledge to be sufficiently disseminated through its embodiment in the art work alone, without requiring a written component. This situation is reminiscent of The Netherlands, where the docARTES program is complemented by the new Professional Doctorate (cf. here), though not by all of the same institutions.

The Salzburg duality also fits the national Austrian doctoral AR landscape. Graz considers its dr. Artium program to be neither "purely scientific" (i.e. Dr. Phil), nor a "professional artistic advanced qualification" (referring to for instance a DMA) - see here. That there is nevertheless something posited in between must have to do with the extent to which the PhD proponents wish to see the tradition of their discipline's requirements and title be protected: the dr. Artium dissertation is stated to be "around 100 pages", which seems restricted for a PhD, and rather more typical of a DMA. It is not clear what the difference is between the dr. Artium program and a DMA.

The Linz University of the Arts boasts having over 100 candidates in its PhD program (of which I couldn't calculate the number of music related projects based only on how their topics are titled), and doesn't explicitly mention the dissertation requirements, other than, somewhat cryptically, that "The development of a form (methodology, material, media, as well as the format of the manifestation of the results) corresponding to the project out of the research process is just as important as that of an own language or adequate media in order to document, contextualize and reflect the respective project in a transparent and comprehensible way."

The Vienna Academy of Fine Arts offers a PhD in Practice program "of artistic-academic research". The candidates are "not asked to do research and afterwards develop art works out of your findings, or the other way around" (no doubt taking its cue from the by now famous "in-and-through" designator) but the detailed curriculum requirements are clear about the crucial position of the dissertation.

The Vienna program also issued its call for new candidates. Three four-year paid positions are available (75%). The deadline for application is February 29, 2024. All information here.

Play or perish?

noreply@blogger.com (luk) — Wed, 20 Sep 2023 09:40:00 +0000

At least one artistic researcher has suffered a burn-out. I won't divulge how many post-docs I know who depend on some SSRI to manage their anxiety.

Long gone are the days when artistic research could grow up on innocent terms, with the time and money to explore the onset of its trajectory but free from being confronted with the pressures that characterise established academic research environments. A well-known such stress is having to seek and acquire external funding to support one's research or, worse, to basically guarantee one's own salary. Another perversity stemming from straining "key performance indicators" lies in the fact that there are easily more than one million new peer reviewed scientific articles published in a year (if we take 2006 as representative), in perplexing contrast to how fewer and fewer breakthroughs are achieved (cf. here).

But workload duress is not all just a question of money and quantity of output. In a previous post, I have hinted at how we shouldn’t expect to just be able to add AR to the existing required fields of expertise of a professional musician as if those don't amount to at least a full-time already. You cannot expect to tour, teach, ánd organise conferences and publish articles or books. For a long time, some orchestras have taken into account the teaching schedules of their musicians (by not asking for rehearsals on certain days); vice versa, schools have set up their FTEs so as to allow teachers to take the time to practice and rehearse during the day. But many monographs authored by academics are written during one of their sabbaticals, whereas I don’t know of any institution where artistic researchers are typically employed (conservatoires, arts universities,…) and where sabbaticals are included in the contract.

I play a lot less, compared to before I became a researcher: there is no time anymore to practice at least one new full solo piano program per season, hunt for gigs, rehearse, do the administration, etc. On top of the diminished number of performances, I now also only play what I research, which is not always a complete work (like all of a multi-movement sonata), let alone a full program. Some of my colleagues manage to combine research with concertising, but they are few, and play orchestral repertoire that they don’t research. Nor do they teach a significant percentage of an FTE as traditional teachers of a conservatoire do. Some teach a little, concertise, and seem to be involved in research projects, but then either I see few publications of theirs, or their concerts are not always up to professional standards. I know only one musician-researcher who produces academic output regularly, teaches a typical schedule of classes at a university, and concertises with at least one new 1.5h long program per year. Pretty much the proverbial exception.

This is not to say that the situation is necessarily deplorable. I am more than happy not being on the road between concert stages, anymore. As a former new-music specialist, always only having been asked to perform world premieres at thus specialised venues, I now enjoy being able to play Schumann and Bach (at least when I have a fitting research question). I also enjoy having had that career, and it goes without elaboration that I have needed to have had that career in order to become a (post-doc) researcher. But I was 44 years old when I obtained my PhD, so I was properly positioned to decide to continue the performer’s career or not. This is not the case for many who are at that point in a much younger life.

If there is an average age of an applicant for a doctoral trajectory, it is still a theoretical one. There have been many 40+ year old teachers who decided that they wanted the same degree their students were applying for. These days, though, more and more applicants are coming out of their master’s program, and are in their early 20s, with one foot on the professional stage. We should not ask all of them to contemplate reducing or foregoing the career that their degree was set up to prepare them for most specifically, at an age when the excitement about it, and the energy for it, are at their highest.

This matter even goes beyond merely being open about the potential consequences of the PhD for the workload in a subsequent career. A PhD is a research degree, not a performance degree. (See the post about the PD for the differences.) It allows for widening career perspectives, but we must be careful not to give the impression that all musicians will be better off, or that music will thrive, when everybody becomes a professional researcher. Exposure to AR, and to its principles as well as to its achievements (and the latter for the duration of the musicians’ whole careers, even if none of it is devoted to active research) is most definitely a plus. But a third cycle research degree, with the heavy work that it entails, is not about mere exposure. While I believe in what the academic principles of developing new knowledge can offer to art, and in the benefits of being able to do so in a community of enquiry, the historical development of art has shown that there are other ways and means to progress. The value of artistic research lies in complementing those, not replacing them.

Admittedly, I know of no research about how or whether issues of artistic researchers’ psychological well-being are distinguishable from the society-wide conundrum that cognitive exhaustion appears to have become. Of the 4.8 million people officially employed in my country, there is a staggering 10% at home due to long-term illness, of which almost a quarter because of burn-out or depression. (Cf. here.) At any rate, there is an abundantly clear resistance from teachers in higher music education to just adding AR to their existing workload. One particular effect thereof is the tendency to conflate definitions of research. “All good performers have always done research”, I often hear, with which is meant that they read up on the composers and pieces that they learn, engage critically with the editions from which they play, etc. While these actions are not untypical of part of what research entails, they are a mere matter of learning, not producing new knowledge. Similarly, extending the topic to beyond performance, a new composition may well embody research but should not automatically be equated with, say, an article. For all intents and purposes, underlying such quasi-theoretical discussions is often the fear of extended responsibilities, expertise, and workload in teaching jobs.

Naturally, there are budgetary considerations when it comes to fitting a higher education institute with a research component by enlarging the staff. I would therefore argue for a revision of the traditionally dual identity of the teacher who also plays in or composes for the concert hall. We could have teachers who also perform/compose but do not publish, ànd teachers who research but are not all that active on the stage (anymore), ànd musicians/composers who research but don’t teach. This way, in combination with welcoming initiatives like the professional doctorate (allowing for a non-research based third cycle study – see here for more of my views on that), we could let art be art as well as explore its research-based potential, and we could help young musicians withstand the ever-mounting pressures of automatically following up their Master's with a PhD, so that they can best - i.e. least stressfully - answer to what their calling really is.

The PD: more specifics on the pilot

noreply@blogger.com (luk) — Thu, 01 Jun 2023 13:12:00 +0000

As of May 30^th, the first 11 candidates for the Dutch project of the Professional Doctorate have been approved for funding - see here. This is stated to mean that they can effectively start from today, June 1 2023, onwards. (See a previous post about the PD for background details.)

The financing is assured by “Regieorgaan SIA”, the part of the Dutch Organisation for Scientific Research (NOW) that specifically funds practice-oriented research. (More on this Regieorgaan on here.) This is funding for just the pilot, so not to be confused with the longer-term future of this programme, for which both financial support and the degree status need to be sorted by the government.

Of the 11 candidates that are now starting, 8 are situated in the domain of “Arts + Creative”, and 3 in “Health & Well-being:

Risk Hazekamp (Avans Hogeschool)

Unlearning Photography: Listening to Cyanobacteria

Emily Huurdeman (Fontys Hogescholen)

Essaying as (Collective) Performative Practice

Phillippine Hoegen (Hogeschool voor de Kunsten Utrecht)

Performing working

Augustin Martinez Caram (Hanzehogeschool Groningen)

Lifestyle and Digital Sovereignty. A new media arts approach to collective technological empowerment for holistic care

Chinouk Filique de Miranda (ArtEZ University of the ArtsDigitised)

Practices in the Margins; Reimagining Fashion’s Virtual Interface

Soemitro Poerbodipoero (Hogeschool van Amsterdam)

To contribute in an innovative and sustainable way to participation, well-being, and self-management of positive health of seniors living at home

Sarah Ros-Philipsen (Saxion)

Lifestyle interventions: from an individual approach to integrated collaboration

Stefan Schäfer (Amsterdamse Hogeschool voor de Kunsten)

Breaking Apart Together: Performing speculative design with dying mountains and glaciers

Chico Taguba (Hogeschool van Amsterdam)

Towards a better connection: How do young residency permit holders with psychological and addiction problems find their way to assistance?

Reinaart Vanhoe (Hogeschool Rotterdam)

Learning from ruangrupa & documenta fifteen

Nadja van der Weide (Hogeschool van Amsterdam)

The art of mediated dialogue - The role of ownership, technology and participation in facilitating dialogue in local communities

It is always refreshing to read about projects brought to the table by young researchers. To boot: the variety of practice-oriented topics and approaches outside of music is striking and can be inspiring. As noted before, and despite 8 PD-candidates active in the domain of "Arts + Creative", none of the participants in this pilot are musicians. The organisers of the PD are the Duch “Hogescholen”, i.e. the institutions offering higher education outside of the universities, so not limited to conservatoires. For the period of 2023-2029, the PD pilot will be tested in 7 domains: Energy & Durability, Health & Wellbeing, Art + Creative, Leisure, Tourism & Hospitality, Maritime, Education (Learning and Professionalisation), and Technique & Digitalisation. For sure, although perhaps depending on the continuation of funding, a new batch of PD candidates will enter the program in the future, possibly including musicians.

Particularities of expertise

noreply@blogger.com (luk) — Wed, 31 May 2023 08:18:00 +0000

During the Bergen Meeting, following up on the famous Bologna Declaration, and crucially important to the emergence of the artistic research doctorate, EU policymakers linked their proposed synergy between research and higher education to "lifelong learning" and the "knowledge society". (See here for the report of the working group in Bergen, May 2005, proclaiming higher education and research as core elements of the Knowledge Society, and here for bringing Lifelong Learning into the Bologna Process.) These aspirational concepts imply a wide range of factors such as social learning, innovation, service economies, globalisation, information society, etc. (see here). One of the goals has been, for instance, to stop spending less than half as much per student in tertiary education as the United States. (Cf. here.)

Meanwhile, in those very US, tensions between access to and excellende in education have been considered as the cause of what, already in the early 1960s, Richard Hofstadter identified as anti-intellectualism. This has led to deploring 'the death of expertise'.

A while ago, I posted about the desire to see journals cater to specific expertise (see here), as opposed to the very wide aim of e.g. JAR to publish research expositions "from all artistic disciplines". As much as the fundus of architecture, film, drawing, dance, theatre, etc. can be of interest to musical AR projects in a general as well as specific sense, I have found the diversity's benefits relatively meagre for my particular pianistic research practice. Instead, I argued to concurrently establish artistic research journals per instrument, perhaps even per aspect of its performance practice. (See here for that post.)

But the influence on research of expertise in playing a musical instrument has consequences far beyond the need for specialty journals to publish in. The previous post (here), a review of a collaborative project by a musicologist and a violinist, exposed some weaknesses due to the incomplete overlap of their individual expertise in that effort. I also showed how, even as an artistic researcher myself, I was hampered in my review because of my own limited experiences with playing the violin.

I can really only adequately research matters that relate to piano playing. In that respect, my musicological colleagues at the nearby university are very different: one professor (Francis Maes) plays the violin, but his academic career focusses to a significant extent on Russian opera; another one, Marc Leman, is a trumpet player by training but made his career through matters of systematic musicology that don’t have anything to do with his instrument in particular. It is true that I can feel comfortable engaging in some areas of performance studies that have less to do with piano playing, as knowing the relevant methodology is part of my artistic research skill portfolio. Not much needs to happen before this comfort zone starts feeling claustrophobic, though. I can also investigate Kagel’s experimental sound producers, but that is precisely because the definition of these instruments expressly excludes any prior training. A general critical attitude is of course not an issue, as witnessed (I hope) by this blog, but the general always allows for quick and easy ways out of the confrontation with a lack of specific expertise. My real artistic research potential is inextricably linked to piano playing: it reveals research questions that non-pianists do not see, and it allows for perfoming at the level necessary to implement the research findings.

This distinction goes far. When I listen to pianist Nelson Freire’s recording of Strauss/Godowski’s Symphonic Metamorphosis on Themes from Die Fledermaus (cf. here), I automatically hear aspects of his playing – e.g. in this case: the remarkable flexibility of Freire’s rubato – rather than, as one musicologist-friend of mine remarked, the points at which the composition demonstrates structural weaknesses. When I see the above picture of Sviatoslav Richter, with his right hand seemingly ready to play a fist cluster in the bass register, I easily notice that something is wrong. When posting this picture on facebook, quite a few friends were satisfied to identify the piece as being from Hindemith, Boulez, Cowell, Ives, etc., although none of these composers wrote a cluster for the right hand combined with a left hand on the specific keys shown in the picture. Given the set-up of Richter’s limbs, with his left hand visibly depressing an F, the piece in question can only be Prokofief’s 6^th sonata, and more specifically a single passage in its re-exposition. But to really play that passage, the left hand needs to have left the treble keys in time to play its own bass keys at the latest when the right hand fist is ready to strike. (To boot: Richter’s left hand seems placed on too low an octave.) The only way the picture could have been taken was if Richter was posing for it. My non-pianist friends do not have that focus, nor do my piano-playing musicologist friends. I wouldn't notice anything of this kind when it was not about piano playing.

Prokofiev, excerpt from the 6th piano sonata

When working with musicologists and philosophers, I have noticed how I can see a performance-related research question in a score, while they sometimes see different questions that stem from years of being conditioned to apply a different focus or perspective. From the other side, I can only really research what my own pianistic technique allows for. With my hand and fingers (and despite training), Brahms 2^nd concerto is easier than Chopin's. That impacts the repertoire choices in my research, but it is still different from the traditional demarcations on the basis of career-developed interests, which we also have, e.g. my colleague Tom Beghin’s extensive experiences in exploring the Viennese classical repertoire vs. my decades-long interest in new music.

The consequences are manifold. I have already written (here) about how conducting and orchestral instruments are expertises that I rarely see passing by in doctoral applications and finished dissertations. When I wanted to investigate meta questions for my research group HIPEX, which regards historical(ly informed) performances of experimental music, I had to seek funding to employ a guitarist to look into Lachenmann’s Salut für Caudwell. Able to deal with the larger questions only to an extent, myself, I needed Seth Josel to investigate the basis formed by the particulars stemming from the instrumental setting. When investigating a chamber music piece, a researcher may need to collaborate with musicians who have no research background. But the difference between a rehearsal/performance/recording as an artistic project and as a research-based endeavour can be significant: the latter doesn’t necessarily allow for gig musicians who are used to playing their way, and may require experimentation with aspects of the playing that regular musicianship doesn’t consider. Collaborating with a non-researcher composer can be equally tricky: the protocol that connects a research question with an outcome may offer many interesting leaways, and can be exciting to the reseacher, but it offers no guarantee of feeding into the inspiration that the composer may be used to rely on.

In artistic research, expertise is in no danger of dying, but taking it into account is vital.

Sei Solo per due

noreply@blogger.com (luk) — Fri, 28 Apr 2023 09:52:00 +0000

In 1982, Karlheinz Stockhausen gave a speech to introduce his month-long residency at the conservatoire in The Hague, in which he stated:

I believe in a master, a teacher, only if he is able to play himself – if he cannot play he should not teach – and this explains why I asked to be allowed to bring with me to The Hague the singers, dancers and instrumentalists with whom I have worked for many years so that the young people can see and hear how they work. (Cf. here.)

The argument is somewhat crooked: clearly, the teaching to be done in The Hague was going to be that of aligning the performance practice of Stockhausen’s works with his compositional intentions. This approach is common in new music, especially with composers who don’t have time to work with musicians on pieces that have already been premiered. When I contacted Kagel to engage with him with regards to his music for the piano, he initially referred me to his trusted Aloys Kontarsky.

For early music practitioners, this exact composer-performer collaboration is obviously not possible, but, inversely, their repertoire benefits from being the object of interest to countless more historians than what recently composed music habitually enjoys. Long before artistic research was formally imagined, musicians who initiated and developed HIP had their noses in period treatises, often with a degree in musicology in their pocket. No wonder that many artistic research PhD candidates are situated in the early music sector, aiming to tailor their performance practice to insights drawn from historiographical research that they carry out themselves.

All the more surprising, then, to see this CD that came out a year ago, featuring both violinist Daniel Auer and musicologist Dagmar Glüxam on its cover, indicating an in-depth collaboration in a project on Affektenlehr and Bach’s works for the solo violin.

According to her CV in the booklet, Dr. Glüxam can be considered an "internationally active" violinist, and her website lists professional concerts as well as having founded her own ensemble with period instruments. For this project, however, she appears to have preferred to leave the performance of Bach's music to someone else, even if the latter, as heard on a video introducing the project (cf. here), had some initial difficulties identifying with the musicological findings of Dr. Glüxam.

The video promises that the booklet accompanying the CD is "more than a hundred pages", but that is only technically 82, and taking away translations, photographs and bios, we are left with a 32-page German essay. This text starts with the "justification" for this recording, which is stated as (with my highlighting) "[t]his is probably the first one made of an interpretation achieved through consistent application of the principles of affect theory and musical rhetoric." This reads like an odd marketing disclaimer, as if to make sure the project wouldn’t be dismissed as failing to introduce new knowledge other than through the consistency of the application, but claiming it without conviction. An artistic researcher would be expected to know not only the traditional literature on a given topic, i.e. peer-reviewed monographs and articles, but just as well the relevant performance practice, i.e. the recordings of the violinist-peers. In this case, that would have meant that the Sei Solo research were to have been based on the fact that there is, for sure, no such recording yet made, and include a study of what was (not) achieved in those comparable efforts.

I practiced the violin myself, but only for some five years, so I don’t consider myself expert enough to comment on any previous recordings of these Bach pieces, nor on the performance by Auner in this particular CD. I will remark, though, that he states to have used a modern bow and modern tuning. His strings are the Dominant Pro type by Thomastik Infeld (who have "generously supported" the violinist), but on Auner’s personal website, we read (here) that he used "besonderen Barock-Saiten" developed by that company. (On the company’s website, neither I nor a professional violinist-colleague of mine found any mentioning of such special strings.) The explanation for the non-period tuning and bow is limited to claiming that the project’s concepts “need not be restricted to specialists on period instruments”. While I certainly see value in attempting to reach out with the affect theory to violinists who play in otherwise non-HIP ways, it would have been impossible for an artistic researcher to leave the consequences unaddressed. In fact, whereas the essay includes the discussion of "interpretive consequences", of translating an understanding "accurately into sound", and criticizes modern performances of lacking an adequate distinction between "light" and "heavy" playing, it is hard not to wonder why no wider framework of HIP and related in-depth concerns have been looked into.

I do have extensive experiences as recording supervisor, and to read about how

On a harmonic level, the severity of a dissonance (as well as the length of the tone in question) dictates the performer’s dynamic approach: the "harsher" the chord and the longer the notes, the more emphatic or even more aggressive the dynamic needed to evoke the intended affect.

makes me notice even more how sharp and crisp the violin sounds in all of the sonatas and partitas, and not just when a tritone takes centre stage. It also leaves the impression that at least some of the types of "pronunciation" have not solely been a matter of playing, but also of capturing the sound in the studio. But how to appreciate the differences, then?

All in all, I really enjoyed listening to and reading about this project. But as it is of little relevance to my expertise, I have refrained from buying Glüxam’s book Aus der Seele muβ man spielen. While the volume promisingly contains almost 1000 pages, filled with what looks like an exceedingly detailed treatment of the affect theory, it is prohibitively priced at 198€, with a discount of one cent for the pdf.

This is certainly not the first project for which a musician takes into account the work of a musicologist. To my knowledge, though, it is the first time that the scholar gets equal representation on the promotional level. Glüxam may have demanded to visualize her involvement, given the fact that the project was funded (cf. here). Strange, then, that her personal website has no mentioning of this particular output of the collaboration, other than listing the monograph and the Wiener Urtext Edition. On the other hand, and thinking back to what I noticed in a new DGG recording with Zimmerman playing Schubert (see here), this Bach CD may be yet another way in which a label searches for new power in attracting the attention of potential buyers.

In any case, this effort may be the first in a new tradition of giving musicologists more credit for their work, helping them in turn to valorize their efforts in establishing social relevance. It may also point to a possible change in attitude: in a conversation I had with a music theorist, a decade ago, about the potential for music theory to develop insights that could be of use to performers, he argued that scholars should be left to decide for themselves what they wanted to research. Of course, with my nose deep into matters of artistic research, my most pressing feeling is that of looking forward to this project, itself, being investigated from an artistic research perspective. We could then learn more about what things are like when the master is doing the playing.

Topical overview of the blog posts

noreply@blogger.com (luk) — Mon, 13 Mar 2023 17:28:00 +0000

A blog is often meant and taken as something ephemeral. However, I noticed how readers look for bygone posts. To make browsing this blog easier, and since blogger.com doesn't seem to offer this, I hereby list the topics in this blog. I will keep adding to this categorical list as I add posts to the blog, and you should keep seeing it as "featured post".

Matters of discipline

* Very brief, first post 👉

* What is AR? Opening musings on the question of definition 👉

* Breakthrough research 👉

* Composition

- When Composition is not Research 👉

- When Composition is not Research2 👉

- When Composition is not Research3 👉

- Scott McLaughlin’s report 👉

- UK debate & AEC white paper 👉

- Composition as critical practice

• the call 👉

• the complete published introduction to the proceedings & a bit on the then (2022) most recent UK Research Excellence Framework 👉

* Conducting 👉

* Conflating the arts (SHARE) 👉

* Countries and their own situations

- Two programs in Salzurg (incl. wider Austria) 👉

- The Case of Germany 👉

- Brazil 👉

- The Netherlands (and the Professional Doctorate) 👉

- UK

• REF 2014 👉

• REF 2022 👉

* Embodied knowledge and the Frascati Manual

- A move to put our mark on the Frascati Manual 👉

- A move to put our mark on the Frascati Manual² 👉

- The novelty test and the reproducibility criterion 👉

* Expertise

- expertise-specific conferences 👉

- collaborative Bach project 👉

- particularities of expertise 👉

* Florence Principles 👉

* 1st honorary doctorate in AR 👉

* Non-Western music 👉

* Novelty test & reproducibility criterion 👉

* Play or perish? 👉

* The Professional Doctorate 👉 & 👉

* Titles: importance, status, usage

- the sarcastic post 👉

- some more in connection with the Professional Doctorate 👉

* The Professional Doctorate 👉 & 👉

Education

* AR at the Master level 👉

* Non-Western music 👉

* Play or perish? 👉

* The Professional Doctorate 👉 & 👉

For students

* AR vs. collaborating with a musicologist 👉

* The Belle van Zuylen Prize 👉

* Context 👉

* The defence of my dissertation at Leiden University, with some history and details of the protocol 👉

* Language 👉

* Presentation

- Wagenaar's art 👉

- PechaKucha 👉

* Play or perish? 👉

* The Research Catalogue, the Journal for Artistic Research, and the Society for Artistic Research

- ARC, JAR, SAR 👉

- Have you created your first weave yet? 👉

* Writing

- dissemination success, incl. some statistics 👉

- Writing about contemporary artists 👉

- CD booklets 👉

Projects & People

* Daniel Auner & Dagmar Glüxam's Bach 👉

* Tom Beghin’s Beethoven Broadwood project 👉

* Paul Craenen’s PhD 👉

* Peter Dejans’ honorary doctorate 👉

* Alain Franco’s WTK project 👉

* Michael Picknett’s Devised Music 👉

* Lauren Redhead 👉

* Hans Roels 👉

* Jaso Sasaki 👉

* Anna Scott & Valentin Gloor: “when Brahms met Debussy” 👉

* Mareli Stolp - Reflexivity 👉

* Willem Albert Wagenaar 👉

* Lena Weman’s Studio Acusticum Organ project 👉

* Jed Wentz’ PhD 👉

Gremia

* EPARM 👉

* the Journal for Artistic Research and the Society for Artistic Research 👉
* Practice-Research-Unit 👉
* SHARE 👉

* Scottish Journal of Performance 👉

Events (chronological)

* ORCiM research festival (Belgium) 2010 👉
* Excellence in Research conference (Belgium) 2010 incl. on peer review and the link to things economical 👉
* Academy for Music and Theory (Belgium) 2011 👉
* ORCiM seminar on Artistic Experimentation (Belgium) 2011 👉
* Practice-Research-Unit conference (UK) 2011 👉
* Oslo symposium The Art of Artistic Research 2011 👉
* From Output to Impact conference (Belgium) 2014 👉

- call 👉

- program 👉

- proceedings 👉

* “Can Composition and Performance be Research?” (UK) 2015

- anouncement 👉

- Scott LcLaughlin’s report 👉

* Conference on conducting by the Oxford Conducting Instituut 2015 👉
* “Composition as critical practice” (Belgium) 2016

- call 👉

- proceedings, incl. complete published introductory essay, & a bit on the then most recent UK Research Excellence Framework 👉

* Writing about contemporary artists conference (UK) 2017 👉
* ‘Hands on’ piano conference (Portugal) 2018 👉
* Sound Arguments workshops (Belgium) 2023 👉

* The Belle van Zuylen Prize 👉

Jobs

* 2013 👉
* 2014 👉
* 2014 👉
* 2016 👉
* 2017 New Professorship 👉
* 2022 doctoral positions 👉

Breakthrough research

noreply@blogger.com (luk) — Mon, 20 Feb 2023 12:48:00 +0000

To: Universal Edition

Karlsplatz 6, 1010

Vienna, Austria

Dear person,

We had a little mishap, some weeks ago. I had been hoping to buy the score of Hans Otte’s 1960 Daidalos from you, but since you don't consider this work as part of the current repertoire, and there are no resources to examine the materials in your archive, you could not but disappoint me.

These are difficult times. To think of how UE was once supported by “important personalities from the banking sector”, as I read on your website, and how the company name “was both program and strategy: it simply meant the whole world of music, in which one had some catching up to do”... Especially noteworthy, I find, is the era of director Alfred Schlee, showing a deep commitment to modernist music.

I always had great sympathy for UE’s efforts to promote such music. Perhaps the first score I ever bought from you – Boulez’ Sonata No. 3 – was not as practical as the pianist in me had wished for (pretty colours, but I could just never get it to stay upright against the music stand), especially at that price. Fortunately, it looks great hanging on the wall.

Despite some less than happy collaborations, UE and I have enjoyed at least a joint faith in the future of music that can be perceivced as difficult. In my consecutive careers as pianist and concert organiser, I have put countless UE scores on the stage. Now I am a researcher, and I find myself potentially aligned with UE’s fate, or at least with its erstwhile ambitions, once again.

A little while ago, the New York Times published the news of how science doesn’t anymore provide the breakthrough research results that society needs in order to thrive. The study criticised ‘incremental science’. One of the authors is a specialist in "strategic management and entrepreneurship", bringing to my mind the image of research managers studying ways to increase the impact of their employees’ work. It made me think of some directors of research institutions that I have known, telling their staff that they were not impressed by research showing how bar six in Berio’s violin Sequenza contains a mistake. It might just about impress a violinist, but it doesn’t change society. So why spend society's money on it, right? Anyway, said study seemed to me an example of incremental progress rather than the disruptive type that it warns us we should be focussing on.

The NYT article mentioned Einstein’s breakthroughs as being more typical of a past that we don’t seem to connect to anymore. But some of Einstein’s efforts turned out to be proven only relatively recently, didn’t they? So it can be argued, like people such as Schlee did, that disruptions à la Schönberg's don’t necessarily become apparent or have a societal impact straight away, either.

Perhaps that moment is upon us, however. I am writing all this because of another bit of news, also about societal changes. As it seems, some of Roald Dahl’s books are being rewritten to suite present-day sensitivities. I can imagine some artists exclaiming that we should leave the past as it was, and that we won’t learn from it if we rewrite it. But we could just as well argue that we rewrite history as soon as we research it. And what's wrong with having multiple perspectives at the same time? If a Dahl story is well rewritten, then it will reach a larger audience, so that a larger number may get excited to go and find the inappropriate original. An enterpreneur would call it a win-win situation.

Anyway, I just got this idea. What if we rewrite Schönberg? Adjusting his notes to the prevalent taste of today's audiences might not just make his music more “schön”, it might provide us with a huge opportunity for employing re-composers and publishing their work. And we could disrupt at least the modernist part of the musical society. Imagine all the music from your catalogue that we could finetune! We might even make enough money to pay someone to go look for that Daidalos score in your archive. Maybe a simple overhaul is all it needs to be rescued from its current oblivion.

To show my genuine interest in this idea, I took the liberty of trying it out on one of your company's most succesfull modernist output: Schönberg’s opus 11. I only took the first few bars, as this is what researchers have traditionally limited themselves to. (In any case, the whole work is also mostly known only to white male pianists, but that is a problem in itself, worthy of a differently focussed research application. It is perhaps best to be disruptive in an incremental way.)

Herewith, I include my rewrite for you to evaluate. There are details to discuss, of course - the f#, for instance - but we can deal with semantics after we agree on the fundamentals. Let me know how it strikes you. I feel confident there is material for an EU application.

I look forward to hearing back from you.

Meanwhile, I remain yours with my best regards.

The "Professional Doctorate"

noreply@blogger.com (luk) — Tue, 31 Jan 2023 15:55:00 +0000

Last summer, a festive kick-off was organised to formally introduce the new Dutch initiative of the “Professional Doctorate pilot Arts + Creative” (PD), which aims to cater to artists who want a third cycle degree but not a PhD.

The Dutch landscape has seen quite a few doctoral trajectories already: docARTES, PhDarts, MERIAN, GRASP, Creator Doctus, and RASL. Grosso modo, those can be categorised into the two types that determine much of the wider (ongoing) third cycle degree debate. When the Bologna Declaration, and the nuances in the subsequent Bergen Meeting, initiated the European doctorate for artists, it left the decision on how to flesh out the degree content to the individual actors. Most have gone for a research degree, which has led to collaborations between arts institutions and universities; others have chosen the option of a performance degree, which compares to the well-known D.M.A. in the US. Both (most often) include a written and artistic component, but the primacy and relation of one vs. the other varies: for the research-degree, the candidate has to show how the findings constitute new knowledge and how that changes their practice, while the performance-degree is less dependent on the verbalisation. As much as there are nuances to be found within each of the degree types as offered by institutions, there are also different visions on how they compare, and what exactly (ought to) constitute research. (More on this here.)

The new PD is organised by 15 Dutch arts and design schools, including those who had their own non-PhD program, in the list above, as well as some – e.g. the Amsterdam Hogeschool der Kunsten – who already participate in one of the PhD programs. So the PD is a matter of consolidation as much as a new initiative, countering a hitherto confusingly splintered and unevenly successful landscape.

Of the Dutch programmes listed above, the first four lead to a PhD. Creator Doctus doesn’t (not even a written dissertation is required), and I assume RASL didn’t either – the latter’s webpage has disappeared, probably because it is now part of the PD consortium. As the Creator Doctus program does not accept any applications anymore, I gather that is for the same reason. In any case, Creator Doctus resulted in one artist obtaining a “degree”, and another project was started in 2020. GRASP has not seemed to provide information on participants; MERIAN has two candidates in the running, both visual artists. Interestingly, MERIAN stresses that their PhD is “in Maastricht-style artistic research”, reminding us of how the “Brussels model” (cf. here) was thought out and given its own name to seek distinction at the level of understanding AR.

Since the kick-off, a “pre-PD program” was set up, but that is now finished. This first month of 2023, the pilot is to have started with “a first cohort of candidates in five domains, including the creative domain”, enabling the schools to appoint 34 candidates in total. At the moment of writing this, no music student has entered the pilot. The matter of who will pay for it is not clearly settled, yet. The Dutch government was asked for some 56 million euros for the entire pilot, but I have been told that the organising schools would have to pay for that out of their existing budget.

The only FAQ on the PD site is about the legal question of the title. Elsewhere, it is stated that the PD “is the equivalent” of the PhD, demonstrating that it is not the same. (See here for some more on this matter.) The PhD degree is protected to the point that the PD will have to introduce a new name for it, and have that certified by the Dutch government. This will take two years, so the organisers expect to legally secure it before the pilot is concluded. Nevertheless, the wording in the FAQ is carefully chosen so as not to jump the gun: the most optimistic phrase is that “the Minister is positive about the development of the PD phase”, meaning the pilot, not necessarily the acceptance by parliament of the new degree. Oddly, it is stated that [my highlighting]: “following and completing a PD trajectory in the pilot phase (and afterwards) can lead to a broader career perspective and career opportunities.”

The hesitant phrasings are understandable from a legal perspective, but my feeling on this whole initiative is more positive. As a PhD holder myself, this might be surprising, especially given my responsibilities as a co-coordinator of an artistic research PhD program. But I have seen how and understand why many musicians decide not to get a PhD. Most of those who enter a PhD program submit a solo project. Some are involved in ensemble work, but their research is steering the group and its workings. So what about orchestra musicians, who may develop innovations for their instrument and/or their repertoire, but who will have to negotiate with the conductor how much of it they may be permitted to apply on stage? Given the inevitable inflation in degrees, in the next decades, all types of musicians may want a third cycle degree to be able to obtain a faculty position at some conservatoire, not necessarily with any interest in reorienting their careers towards doing research as well as performing. Until now, the only route for a musician towards a third cycle degree in The Netherlands was through the docArtes PhD programme. The PD would give musicians a choice. (In the UK, not having a PhD doesn’t seem to deter musicians from entering academia, although a total absence of an academic degree seems to result in issues of clashing cultures - cf. here.) Personally, I don’t think the PhD programmes will loose applicants to the PD, for I have no doubt the research trajectory will continue to inspire and attract musicians. The only downside I imagine at this point, is that we may continue to see confusion between different degrees and programmes that are called PhD or something seemingly close to it, at least for a while yet, until things settle.

Titulaturiana

noreply@blogger.com (luk) — Wed, 21 Dec 2022 08:39:00 +0000

In James Parrott's Oscar-winning 1932 Laurel & Hardy movie The Music Box, the two protagonists are trying to deliver a heavy crated player piano up a long stretch of steep, narrow public stairs. At one point (see here, at 10'05") they are confronted by a gentleman coming down those stairs. The actor Billy Gilbert expertly builds up the socially awkard way in which his character tries to cope with the road block. While at first he doesn't seem to know how to communicate efficiently with the two workmen, his temper gets the better of him when they propose he walk around the obstacle. In order to impress upon them the preposterous nature of that suggestion, he employs a full verbalization of his status: "Me, Professor Theodore Von Schwarzenhoffen, M.D., A.D., D.D.S., F.L.D., F.F.F. ánd F should walk around?"

The professorial confrontation in The Music Box (1932)

The intonation of the last three words may have the same root as the famous though more recent "handbag" exclamation by British actress Edith Evans. Gilbert has reported that he "decided to do a German accent" to distinguish himself from other actors playing comedy villains with Laurel & Hardy. Even if his memory of that intention was correct, he sounds decidedly more British than German in my ears. Either way, the British upper class is as much a trope in films as is the character of the German professor. Famously, the 1920 Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari and the 1930 Der Blaue Engel had depicted authoritarian but socially inept and alienated figures that are given academic nomers. Some have taken this as far as argueing that this would be symptomatic of a subconscious need in German society for a tyrant to lead them, but the mad certified expert had taken hold in other corners of the cinematic world as well, and even earlier, cf. the 1902 French Le Voyage dans la lune, with the character of Professor Barbenfouillis "satirizing the pretensions of professors and scientific societies."

Asserting one's social position by way of titles also resonates with the British class and honours systems, of course. It ought not to be surprising, therefore, that it has been singled out for comedic effect on the Anglo-Saxon island just as much, if not more. Professor Von Schwarzenhoffen may have accumulated some six titles (of which only Doctor of Medicine and Doctor of Dental Surgery make obvious academic sense), Monty Python went all the way in the 19th sketch of their 1970 "How to recognize different parts of the body" (see here), where an omnidisciplinary surgeon has so many titles to display on his office desk that a special construction was needed to mount them all. As in The Music Box, only some of the degrees listed are potentially real. And as much as Von Schwarzenhoffen's F.F.F still possibly refers to something medical (e.g. the otolaryngological abbreviation for Fibula Free Flap), the Python sketch also pokes fun at the denominational traditions themselves: if you were FRS, FRCS, FRCP, as well as FRCOG, and trained at Oxford, it would have been perceived as less than imposing to add that you had an M.S. from Guadalajara; "B.Litt (Phil)" points not only to the confusing historical relation between the British Bachelor of Letters and Doctor of Philosophy, but goes on to joke on "Phil"; etc. (And yes, Medicine Hat is a place in Canada.)

Monty Python's The Nose sketch, with Professor Sir Adrian Furrows F.R.S. F.R.C.S.
F.R.C.P. M.D.M.S. (Oxon), M.A. Ph.D. M.Sc. (Cantab), Ph.D. (Syd), F.R.G.S.,
F.R.C.O.G., F.F.A.R.C.S., M.S. (Birm), M.S. (Liv), M.S. (Guardalajara [sic]),
M.S . (Karach), M.S. (Edin), B.A. (Chic), B. Litt. (Phil), D. Litt (Phil),
D. Litt (Arthur and Lucy), D. Litt (Ottawa), D. Litt (All other places in Canada
except Medicine Hat), B. Sc. (Brussels, Liege, Antwerp, Asse, (and Grower))

TV and film tropes are only that because of a basis in real life. And that real life concerns not only historical figures, as for instance Horatio Herbert Kitchener, 1st Earl Kitchener, KG, KP, GCB, OM, GCSI, GCMG, GCIE, PC (1850-1916). Still today, post-nominals seem important to some. I have received emails signed "Dr. [X], BMus, MMus, PhD, Hon RCM, FRSA". And when I witnessed the setting up of a research group, with the members to be called "fellows", there was first a debate about how to distinguish post- from pre-docs (solved easily enough by adding "doctoral"), then about allowing for seniority on the post-doc level itself. For years, it wasn't clear whether a fellow was just that, or whether s/he was in fact a senior fellow who didn't play along.

In wider social circumstances, abbreviated titles can lead to "knight fever" for those who are not to the manor born: how to address someone with pre- and post-nominals, what is the right order of the titles on the seating distribution cards,...? In a professional context, it can of course be important to know who has which type of expertise, exactly. Collaborating with a PhD can be different from working with a D.M.A. (But, yes, Dr. Phil had a proper DPhil degree.)

Naturally, homo ludens sometimes nuances things into the unworkable, making for some counterefficient situations. For some, the real doctorate is only the DPhil. This is generally considered the same as PhD (philosophiae doctor = doctor philosophiae), "the most common degree at the highest academic level awarded following a course of study", but which is nevertheless only one of e.g. the 51 doctoral titles in the U.S. alone. Next to it, a number of "equivalent" doctoral degrees are recognized, for instance the D.A. (occasionally D.Arts or Art.D.), and neither the US Department of Education nor their National Science Foundation discriminate between them. Already in 1967, this Doctor of Arts degree was offered in Fine Arts as well as History, English, and ... Mathematics. It is even reported that a National Doctor of Arts Association (NDAA) was founded at the State University of Idaho. If only the current address were disclosed, so that one could properly apply to become a fellow.

Not all countries are that open. In 2011, the German Prof. Dr. iur. Dr. h.c. Peter M. Lynen defensively argued for a doctorate in the arts to be a dr. Art and dr. Mus rather than a PhD (see my post on The case of Germany). And despite being alleged as having "defined the differences between a Doctorate in the Arts compared to a scientific doctorate or Ph.D. degree", the 2016 Florence Principles on the Doctorate in the Arts (see here) acknowledge the different names that institutes give (p. 4: "DCA, DPhil, PhD, DFA") but nevertheless proceed to talk about PhDs.

If Peter Lynen lists two doctorates among his prenominals, one earned (in law) and one honorary, it goes to show that the distinction is deemed necessary. To boot: not every doctor becomes professor, and not every professor is a professor. In my home town (Ghent, Belgium), a conservatoire teacher is a "docent" (member of the faculty), but for international communications, some will translate this as "professor". Of course, that annoys the "ordinary professor" ("gewoon hoogleraar") at the university, who already has to contend with the fact that s/he is - counterintuitively - ranked higher than the "extraordinary professor" ("buitengewoon hoogleraar").

Outside of the DCA, DFA and PhDs, artistic research also has e.g. Dr. Artium and Creator Doctus. This creativity in avoiding the name PhD is rooted in the protection that universities seek against the possible erosion of their quality standards at the level of the PhD. Hence the issue of having 'degree-awarding power' or not. Not every country allows its universities to just start a doctoral program, so not every university will like to see Fine Arts institutes or conservatoires granting a PhD without having the necessary certifications themselves. That is why most non-university art institutions collaborate with a (nearby) university, accepting the latter to rule on the use of titles. In The Netherlands, a new artistic research doctoral trajectory will be tested from January 2023 onwards, catering to musicians who don't want to do a PhD, and it is already clear that a new name will have to be chosen (possibly 'PD', as in 'professional doctorate' - see my next post).

Even those who are still working towards getting a PhD (or an equivalent) can be confronted with issues of titles. Again in The Netherlands, the law allows those with a masters to automatically consider themselves as "doctoranda/doctorandus" (dra./drs.), i.e. on the way to getting a doctorate - whether actually enrolled or even planning for it or not. Because of the obvious confusion, a student in a doctoral trajectory is now called "promovenda/us".

There are reasons for keeping certain distinctions, even beyond knowing what expertise you are seeking to engage with. When I coordinated a doctoral program in artistic research, I got emails from a US student who wanted to know if ours was leading towards "a fully-fledged" PhD. If it weren't, she thought she might as well stay in the US to obtain a DMA, which she said was a "second rate degree", meaning that too many already had one, so that a PhD was more efficient in securing a job. Hence the professional doctorate having tried to NOT have to look for a name that isn't PhD. This is close to what is known - in The Netherlands, once more - the "civil effect". That term is used for specifically graded legal degrees in order for them to be valid for certain professional activities. If you did the mandatory years of law school but you did not take some particular courses, the civil effect is not indicated on the degree and you can therefore not become e.g. a notary. Such particular practices do not as a rule apply to artistic research, but it is not difficult to imagine a director of a conservatoire, in some not-too-distant future, having to fill a vacancy and choosing from a large number of applicants of which most have a masters and only some have a doctorate. That director may be hard pressed not to use degree ranking as a short cut. (This speculation is supported by OECD numbers from 2019 on labour market outcomes - see pp.252-253 here.) At any rate, when I was offered my coordinator job, it was made explicitly clear that this was mainly because of my degree - "we can no longer have someone with a masters running a doctoral curriculum". And the times are long gone when it looked cool to say, like one of my conservatoire friends in another century: "I think I should like to go to Paris and get a baccalauréat in something".

New doctoral positions

noreply@blogger.com (luk) — Thu, 15 Dec 2022 15:49:00 +0000

The Academy of Music and Drama, a department of the Univerity of Gothenborg’s Faculty of Fine, Applied and Performing Arts, offers two salaried positions for doctoral students. The subject is musical performance and interpretation.

Interestingly, there is a choice of type of doctoral degree: either a PhD or an artistic doctorate. (More on that distinction on this blog, next month.)

Applications must be in before February 1, 2023 – the positions start on September 1 of that year.

These employment positions are the only way to apply for PhD studies at this Academy.

All information here.

Sound Arguments

noreply@blogger.com (luk) — Fri, 09 Dec 2022 11:01:00 +0000

The Orpheus Instituut (Gent) and ACPA (Leiden) are teaming up to introduce Sound Arguments, “an innovative laboratory-atelier for creative artists dealing with sound.”

Topics include hardware hacking & DIY electronics, live & creative coding, digital fabrication & 3D printing, field recording, and much more.

Guests include Arditto, Cárdenas, Collins, Eckhardt, Krogh Groth, Lane, Lucatelli, Marangoni, Caeso, and van Belle.

Bob George: Duet (1977)

Sound Arguments will meet monthly from February to June, on Mondays 2-6pm and Tuesdays 9am-3pm. The 2023 dates are:

February 27-28 (The Hague)
March 27-28 (The Hague)
April 17-18 (Gent)
May 15-16 (Gent)
June 5-6 (Gent)

Application is open until January 16, but BE AWARE that the number of applicants will be limited!

More details and registration here.

Brazil

noreply@blogger.com (luk) — Wed, 30 Nov 2022 12:19:00 +0000

The 32nd ANPPOM congress in Brazil, last month, was informative, to say the least. Held in the north-eastern coastal city of Natal, with the southern hemisphere's spring well underway, the biotope was more conducive to exploration than the European Autumn I came from. Airconditioning was necessary, of course, even in concert halls during performances, but this proved to be much like listening to a clavichord recital: like the ears easily adjust to the lower dynamic levels of the old keyboard instrument, they quickly learn to filter out the noise of the air conditioners when listening to a colourfully soft piece played on a Steinway. More surprising were the efforts of the organizers towards inclusivity: not only was there space for children from 4 to 6 years old, the presenters were asked to introduce themselves to the visually impaired by describing some characteristics of their countenance, and the whole conference was simultaneously translated in English (for the foreign guests), Portuguese (when the foreign guests presented), and sign language. Curious to know how large the hearing-impaired conference participation had been expected to be, I was told there probably weren't any, but that putting in this type of effort results in the crucially important perception of an inclusive environment. (I later saw that the video recordings of the presentations were being posted on YouTube, where the sign language will no doubt have a more direct effect.)

National Association for Research and Graduate Studies in Music

Impressive as they were, these peripheric practicalities didn't deter from discovering some eye-opening facts about artistic research in Brazil. The conference topic's title - Multiple dimensions of musical praxis in the production of knowledge - was certainly broad enough to allow for the announced intention "to foster a broad debate", but of notable interest, at least to me, was how this production of knowledge was detailed as "scientific-musical knowledge in Brazil". Even if the conference's promotional texts didn't include the words 'artistic research', they were clearly intended to be part of whatever can be understood by the relations between scientific and musical practices. As broad as the conference's content had been intended, as diverse it turned out to be. Large ethno- and historiographic perspectives were deployed to discuss knowledge production as well as interculturality, social impact, and training, but there was quite a bit of live performance as well, with even sizable groups of musicians spontaneously participating in enthusiastically welcomed sessions of choro and samba in the university's hallway.

The congress was held at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte, one of the ten largest universities in Brazil. It's Arts Department (including performance, dance, design, and theatre) spreads over 4,000m², which it considers as potential "to bring the community closer to the academic environment". Indeed, musicologists and musicians work under the same roof, even when there is no conference to unite them. This is quite distinct from the situation on the European continent, where academics and musicians are seen and treated as separate, not only in their identity, but in their work locations as well as through the legal and financial structures. (See here for some insights into how far this can be taken.) In their self-presentation, the UFRN arts department further singles out knowledge production and the link between art and research. However, in the curriculum there is nothing on artistic research, specifically. But there are courses on research in the visual arts and in art teaching, as well as modules in academic and creative writing. Also noteworthy is the absence of musical composition.

Last August, Bibiana Bragagnolo and Leonardo Pellegrim Sanchez mapped artistic research in Brazil (see here) based on keyword searches in 45 journal articles in four journals. Though the sample size is small, some interesting insights can be gleaned from it. It is argued that the beginnings of artistic research in Brazil are situated around 2012, in the Southern region, with expansion into the South- and North-east in 2017/18. Since then, the increase in production seems to follow that which is perceived abroad. The foreign influence is especially visible in the cited literature, with the Mexican Ruben López-Cano (18 references), the Flemish Kathleen Coessens (16), the Dutch Henk Borgdorff (10), and Catarina Domenici (10) as the only Brazilian author frequently cited. Borgdorff's 2012 book The Conflict of the Faculties was cited the most because of (and since) a part of it was translated into Portuguese in 2017. The popularity of Ruben López-Cano's output is analysed as due to its Spanish language (with one article in Portuguese), as well as thanks to the more didactic nature, illustrating AR and its methodology rather than emphasizing a theoretical focus as in Coessens and Borgdorff.

It is further shown that artistic research is still inscribed more in the context of graduate rather than undergraduate studies, and located within the academic production of interpretive performance practices.

Bragagnolo and Sanchez conclude with the remark on the coexistence of different conceptions and perspectives on AR, with two main methodological categories: the theoretical and the autoethnographic. The latter encompasses "quite different texts", and it has been stated that, in many cases, autoethnography has become a "mere transcription of work diaries that do not construct questions or defined artistic research problems".

In 2020, López-Cano considered Latin-American artistic research in music to be in the early stages of construction, lamenting the lack of associations dedicated exclusively to artistic research, specialized journals, etc. Nevertheless, some movement towards consolidation is to be highlighted, with, already a year later, the creation of the Brazilian Observatory and Artistic Research Laboratory (at the Federal University of Mato Grosso) with an e-book on artistic research in the works, and the first Autoethnografia Brasil conference. In 2022, the Claves journal plans a thematic issue.

It is interesting to learn how artistic research started in Brazil. In 1987, concern about music education and research led to a national symposium (SINAPEM - see here), which in turn led to the creation of ANPPOM and of the first music journal in Brazil. In the first years of ANPPOM, most of the research at their conferences was from the part of music education and musicology. Both of these fields are still the most prominent of music research in the country - performance is the smallest. But in 2011 the latter expanded, and a year later, as a consequence, the Brazilian Association of Music Performance was created. It's first conference, in 2013, had Artistic Research as the main theme.

Considering this link between research and education, there's the question of artistic research training. As the arts curricula are part of the university biotope, verbalized reflection is naturally embedded: there is no masters degree to be gotten without writing. And PhDs are possible, e.g. "in music/performance". Composition's place in all of this remains remarkable, though. For composers of a previous generation, this has sometimes been a matter of mixing fields, for instance as part of a PhD in communications (semiotics). This is not the case anymore, but traces can be seen, e.g. at the Federal University of the State of Rio de Janeiro, with the research strands "Language and Musical Structuring" and "Creative Processes in Music", both which programs cater to composers envisaging a PhD. The last paragraph of the latter indicates how the meaning of 'composition' has developed away from the old 'writing music onto paper' type that has been distinguished for so long from the practice of the performers. At the same time, the former strand still demonstrates remnants of the older approach. Here is an example of how post-graduate research projects are distinguished along the lines of education, musicology, composition, and performance, at the Music School of another university in Rio de Janeiro.

Map of Brazil superimposed over Europe

All in all, the most striking to me remains the fact that artistic researchers in Brazil can work under the umbrella of music research as much as musicologists. In Europa, perhaps literally due to its high population density, researchers in music tend to see each other as competitors for space, arguing divisively over money as well as identity. Obviously, a very large country has issues of its own, if also to unite and find financial support. But, at least in some of the aspects touched upon above - and I would add: in more matters of umbrella functionality than merely in artistic research - it would be nice if Europe could be a bit more Brazilian.

I am grateful to Bibiana Bragagnolo, Magno Caliman, Joana Cunha de Holanda, Paulo Dantas and Luis Silva Queiroz for their help in finding sources and pointing out nuances.

The novelty test and the reproducibility criterion

noreply@blogger.com (luk) — Fri, 28 Oct 2022 16:08:00 +0000

In response to SAR's 2013 letter to the OECD, calling for a revision of the Frascati Manual in order to add artistic research as a new and separate scientific category (see here), the new 2015 Frascati manual made a negative but clear stance. I have reported on that briefly (see here), and want to elaborate a little.

Translating the position delineated in the manual (2.65-67) to the discourse in artistic research, we have:

research on the arts, includes musicology, art-history, etc.
research for the arts, relates to AR
artistic expression, art itself

(The manual limits the examples of research for the arts to the traditional sectors catering to artists, such as instrument builders, but it should be clear that artistic research targets artists as the beneficiaries of their research just as well.)

Of further interest are the novelty test and reproducibility criterion that are cited as fundamental to research. For art, these are simply considered not relevant: in a paragraph about artistic expression vs. research, it is stated that

2.67. [...] Artistic performances fail the novelty test of R&D as they are looking for a new expression, rather than for new knowledge. Also, the reproducibility criterion (how to transfer the additional knowledge potentially produced) is not met. [...]

The novelty test, although no written rule, is largely considered to be a priority in universities, at least in Europe. During the Bergen Conference of European Ministers Responsible for Higher Education, in May 2005, the qualifications signifying the completion of a third cycle (see here) are awarded to students who (my highlighting):

have demonstrated a systematic understanding of a field of study and mastery of the skills and methods of research associated with that field;
have demonstrated the ability to conceive, design, implement and adapt a substantial process of research with scholarly integrity;
have made a contribution through original research that extends the frontier of knowledge by developing a substantial body of work, some of which merits national or international refereed publication;
are capable of critical analysis, evaluation and synthesis of new and complex ideas;
can communicate with their peers, the larger scholarly community and with society in general about their areas of expertise;
can be expected to be able to promote, within academic and professional contexts, technological, social or cultural advancement in a knowledge based society.

Artistic knowledge is often difficult to determine. Certainly the "embodied" type of knowledge is problematic because of its tacit nature. Unless it is explicated in an efficiently communicable language, there is no use of it outside of theoretical perspectives. But even in the latter case, as in Knowing in Performing, the knowledge is pointed to, considered, and transferred... in writing, not even with an added CD or DVD. In practice, embodied knowledge cannot be considered as such by itself, either. When a dance teacher shows a student how to perform a certain movement, there will always be verbal explication accompanying the demonstration, if only to make sure that there is no inadvertant misinterpretation of some detail. It may be difficult to write efficiently about such knowledge (although a picture painting a thousand words suggests a promising start), but the entirely non-verbal manner is least (re)productive. No surprise the reaction in the Frascati manual, then, about the reproducibility criterion not being met.

Despite the powerful method of one-to-one teaching so typical of performance pedagogy, reproducibility is considered to be against the point of being an artist. Indeed, what is heard/seen on stages and recordings is considered valuable, or at least valid, only in relation to the individuality of the artist. Generally, a new recording is either produced with new repertoire, or with the same repertoire as before but in different interpretations. But this is no more than an assumption, and with globalisation, the idea that countless thousands of pianists would each be able to play the same repertoire in noticeably different ways has no right to keep evading scrutiny. Of course, reproducibility in research is really meant to be that of the applied method. From that perspective, AR is aimed at the peer-researcher or the peer-artist, who need to be able to trust the accuracy of the resulting insights. AR is not aimed at the audience, at least not directly. Hence the misconception that AR should always be audibly distinguishable from art, or that it would destroy the "magic" of making the art (as I was once accused of by a professional performer).

The problem of art vs. art-as-research vs. artistic research relates to the demarcation problem in science, including immunizing strategies and defense mechanisms. In art, and about art, one can express and claim anything. In this New York Times review of a concert by Yuja Wang, little makes sense, except that it can be appreciated as a verbal performance by the reviewer. Perhaps he wanted to transmit knowledge that he felt he acquired; it may even be exactly what Ms. Wang had intended to convey. But it is immune to being refuted, so it might as well be a review of another concert altogether. It is art, about art. No new knowledge or reproducibility needed to be expressed or checked.

In artistic research, what constitutes 'new knowledge' can be seen to underly a division in the genres. Some visual artists have expressed less than emphatic feelings towards musicians who play music of long-dead composers, as if present-days painters would be considered proper artists if they painted à la Rubens. Similarly, the question can be asked whether artistic researchers who investigate, say, performance practices from the 18th century, can be considered to develop new knowledge if, in fact, demonstrably old knowledge is unearthed and reapplied to their practice. Practices in other disciplines, e.g. archeology, can provide answers to this concern. Neverthess, 'novelty' alone is often not enough: there has to be 'impact' as well. From the perspective of the Frascati manual, it goes tangentially deeper. A musician like Ton Koopman could be acknowledged as engaging in scholarship, which in turn may partly qualify as research. But the resulting 'new' expression in his performances would not qualify for research or development. Since the performance can be considered as a product, the discussion would not be whether it is research, but whether it is experimental development. And this development would principly not qualify because of the tests that should then apply.

The Frascati manual is intended as guidance for measuring and reporting policies. Naturally, such guidance can become a proxy debating space, given the sensitivities and sustainability of some institutions and university departments. As such, the manual is meant to avoid that, for instance, artistic performance is taken into account as R&D expenditure, the latter of which can be witnessed here (scroll down to the before-last line of table 3). But, as much as the stance against acknowledging a new knowledge-type for AR is clear, a door is left open for accepting institutional AR: "Higher education institutions have, nevertheless, to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis if they grant a doctoral degree to an artist as a result of artistic performances. The recommendation is to adopt an “institutional” approach and only to take account of artistic practice recognised as R&D by higher education institutions as potential R&D". (2.67)

The first Frascati Manual ever was issued in the early 1960s, and six new versions have appeared in the half-century since, at a rate of about nine years per new issue. (See here for some history.) It may take a while for the OECD to reconsider the matter. It may take that same while before it makes the distinction between artistic performance and composition...

The first honorary doctorate in AR

noreply@blogger.com (luk) — Mon, 20 Jun 2022 10:48:00 +0000

The Hochschule für Musik in Freiburg enjoys university status, including degree awarding power at the PhD level. Next to their collaboration with the University of Strasbourg and the Haute école des arts du Rhin, offering a Ph.D in artistic research, the Hochschule has its own “artistic-scientific” Dr. phil. (See here.)

This university status also means that the Hochschule can appoint a doctor honoris causa. On June 15, they have awarded their first to Peter Dejans, director of the Belgian Orpheus Instituut.

Dr.h.c. Peter Dejans

Peter Dejans became director of the Orpheus Instituut in 1996. "With his exceptional artistic and scientific skills, his entrepreneurial spirit, his high standards of quality and his perseverance, he has turned the institute into a world-renowned centre of higher education. For his brilliant and visionary work, the Hochschule für Musik Freiburg is now awarding him the title of doctor honoris causa."

The official ceremony took place in the Wolfgang Hoffmann Saal at the Hochschule, and included a concert (performed by doctoral students of the above mentioned joint program), the laudatio (by the rector of the Hochschule für Musik Freiburg, Prof. Dr. Ludwig Holtmeier) and a round table discussion on the topic "Perspectives of artistic research”.

More information can be found here and here.

There seems to be no report on the round table, but I can think of a few perspectives on this very event that are noteworthy. Beyond the qualities of dr.h.c. Dejans, it is the Orpheus Instituut that is implicitly being given credit as well. Even if Dejans - a conductor - never considered himself an artistic researcher, it is nevertheless thanks to his efforts that the institute has spearheaded the artistic research movement and its history. The institute was the first to start a postdoc artistic research group (ORCiM), to initiate the concept of an Artistic Research Festival (since then followed by many), and has seen some 50 musicians obtain a PhD in artistic research through its docARTES program.

From the widest perspective, the symbolic value of this event can hardly be overestimated: it is the first AR honorary doctorate in the world, and it emphasizes Freiburg's choice of the PhD path. While some other institutes in Germany are still undecided about whether to offer a research or a performance degree, Freiburg has made a very clear statement.

Composition as Critical Technical Practice

noreply@blogger.com (luk) — Fri, 20 May 2022 10:48:00 +0000

In the UK, the Research Excellence Framework results have been released.

A simple internet search shows only those institutions eager to display pride in their ranking (e.g. University of Bristol, Royal Holloway, Guildhall School and Cambridge). Via (social) media, a more troubling picture can be found, with arts departments under some type of threat despite seemingly encouraging results. Wolverhampton University seems to have done well, but intends to slash a significant number of jobs, reminding us (cynically?) of the many it had added before submitting its REF report. Similarly, De Montfort University boasts positive ranking yet its employees cry for help.

With the financial implications of the results as yet unknown, it is difficult to assess to what extent this negativity is related to the REF. Anyway, some have stated that practice-based subjects are not negatively impacted. Indeed, whereas for the previous REF in 2014, university-employed composers lamented having to seek approval for their creative work by adding academic output, sparking a debate about composition-"as"-reserarch (cf. here, here, and here), this time around, such composers’ sighs seem largely to have dissipated. This may mean that composition itself is (more) acknowledged as research output than before, at least in the UK.

Surely less coincidental is the 2021 Leuven University Press publication of the 373-page multi-authored volume, Sound Work: Composition as Critical Technical Practice, edited by Jonathan Impett, whose roles as composer, director of research at the Orpheus Instituut, and associate professor at Middlesex University, makes his voice(s) especially noteworthy. The book can be acquired for 62,5€ here, where the table of contents can be viewed. Since the publication represents a constructive addition to the debate about composition and research, Jonathan’s introduction, including summaries of the chapters, is reproduced underneath.

Music-Making and Storytelling

Jonathan Impett

This volume is concerned with storytelling: the stories composers tell about composition, to themselves and to others. In the past, the self-reporting of composition has tended to consider the areas in which it aspires to be innovative, or the theories—musical, aesthetic, social, scientific, technological—that have informed the work, rather than the activity of composition itself. The knowledge presented in such cases often lies outside composition. There is no lack of accounts by composers demonstrating how their work embodies this theory or that principle, or introduces a new technical concept. There is no shortage of investigation of the ontology and epistemology of the “work” as a persisting historical cultural phenomenon, but the technologies and context of composition have undergone a paradigm shift. The present, to repurpose a phrase, is another country.

In contemporary science, the role of storytelling is increasingly recognised not only in science communication but also in its self-image and hence in scientific practice (Davies et al. 2019). In the discussion of music creation, several factors contribute to the urgent need for new discourse, new voices, and new kinds of story. The cultural landscape is transformed, and with it the perceived role of “art” music and the nature of public critical discourse. In a prevailing atmosphere of individualism, the commonality of creative experience is all the more important—both among artists themselves and with their audience. And composition is largely supported as an activity of knowledge-production, as research, rather than as creative development per se. We need, therefore, to tell more material, honest, and useful stories—to seed discourse, to find resonances, to encourage critical engagement.

To paraphrase Brian Ferneyhough ([1982] 1995), composition walks a tightrope between formalism and the arbitrary, a process informed by theory and intuition, constraint and contingency, expectation and experience. It is a continuous, situated, iterative process of inscription and reflection in which its models, metaphors, aspirations, obligations, tools, and technologies all play a part; it has a narrative, or rather multiple narratives (Impett 2016). This process and its products embody assumptions, choices, and intentions that have significant implications for the position, role, and impact of artist and artwork alike—critical implications, whether the artist chooses to regard them as such or not. The artefacts of composition—however notated, improvised, virtual, embodied, or technologically implemented—are hybrid technical objects and require a technicity of engagement on the part of artist and listener.

The hypothesis of this volume is that we might rather consider composition as a design process, and that we might usefully study its dynamics and decisions in the spirit of what Philip Agre described as critical technical practice. Agre developed his ideas in the context of his work in artificial intelligence (AI), at a moment of deep transformation in that field, of moving from “mentalist” to “interactionist” models. His fundamental insight is that individual practice— what he described as “the practical logic of computer work” (Agre 2002)—is indivisible from the social context and implications of its products; they constitute a single critical activity:

The word “critical” here does not call for pessimism and destruction but rather for an expanded understanding of the conditions and goals of technical work.... Instead of seeking foundations it would embrace the impossibility of foundations, guiding itself by a continually unfolding awareness of its own workings as a historically specific practice.... It would accept that this reflexive inquiry places all of its concepts and methods at risk. And it would regard this risk positively, not as a threat to rationality but as the promise of a better way of doing things. (Agre 1997a, 22–23)

Agre criticises conventional accounts that present work and theory as a mutually justifying pair—one as the natural embodiment of the other—as insufficient. Such accounts hide narrative, decisions, and parameters, avoid critical context. Instead, he outlines a practice that is reflective in two directions: in terms of what it actually involves—intentions, conditions, means, theory, actions, constraints, events—and in terms of its context—cultural, social, technological, and, in our case, artistic and even personal. He describes a single disciplinary field: “one foot planted in the craft work of design and the other foot planted in the reflexive work of critique” (Agre 1997b, 155). This is not the place to hazard a reductive summary of Agre’s concept, but we must point to a recent resurgence of interest in areas such as software studies (Kitchin and Dodge 2014), intelligent design (Somerson and Hermano 2013), architecture (Parisi 2013), and artificial intelligence itself, which has been massively re-energised with recent advances in machine learning. Like the artefacts of these fields, music inhabits a liminal material state, is heavily dependent on the means of its realisation, retains its identity across manifold instantiations, is adaptive to the context of its embodiment, and is the product of deep concept, abstract imagination, and painstaking technique and experiment.

In critical technical practice, reflection and its articulation are integral and essential to the process; there is no single model any more than there is a single model of composition. This volume explores the potential of critical technical practice (CTP) as an ethos and discourse for the articulation and sharing of knowledge production through composition across styles, practices, and contexts. The technological context, materials, and practices of composition have always been closely coupled. The wider cultural role and understanding of composition as an activity has been transformed with each technological paradigm shift. This volume considers the new cultural, professional, epistemic, and institutional situation of composition in the particular contexts of the wide range of current technologically enabled practices: music information retrieval, live coding, live notation, intelligent instrument-building and hacking, interactive, autonomous, and algorithmic approaches, distributed creativity, sound art, and computer-assisted composition. As an inherently reflexive approach, CTP brings implications for the development of these same contemporary practices.

The opening chapters consider the relevance and potential of critical technical practice in music from wide perspectives. Alan Blackwell’s “Too Cool to Boogie” sets the scene by locating Agre’s thought in the field of artificial intelligence, its issues and subsequent developments. Critical technical practice presents a critical response to the impasse of AI in the 1980s; technical and philosophical views are inseparable if the field is to realise its potential for good, and this relationship is reflected in the stories practitioners tell about their own work. The author explores Agre’s thought by situating it in a specific instance of his own practice: studying funk bass. The interaction of technical methods with the embodied, situated, complexly motivated narrative of human practice emerges as the object of critical reflection.

David Rosenboom’s magisterial “Illusions of Form” presents a body of creative thought that has evolved in parallel and kept pace with the developments that have produced the concept of CTP, the current 4E view of cognition (embodied, embedded, enacted, extended), and recent advances in biotechnology. Rosenboom invokes Agre’s ideas to construct a critical reflection on the development and implications of his own radical concept of propositional music. Received boundaries of genre or discipline are abandoned, not to indifference but to a new mode of artistic-technical-scientific endeavour—an artscience, its methodology informed by the current concept of emergent engineering. Composition becomes an activity of world-model building, an imaginative process that engages with the cognitive processes of performers and listeners alike, using means and models derived from and developed with advances in science and technology. Through examples of neuromusical propositions, musical configuration spaces and emergent collaborative projects, Rosenboom lays the ground for a new artscience discourse. In his vision, critical technicity is in operation throughout the acts of composition, performance, and listening.

The software-hardware binary central to current technology-based practice is examined in Nicolas Collins’s “What to Ware?” He suggests a taxonomy, a series of axes along which their different affordances and constraints might be understood. This illuminates the artist’s selection of tools as a series of conscious choices, all informed by a fundamental critical question in art, that of truth to materials—in this case, whether music made with electronics should sound like electronic music.

Collins’s fine-grained analysis of craft is complemented by Ann Warde’s broad recontextualising of the very activity of composition. She pursues a process of substitution to explore the prospect of a “critical musical practice,” such that composition becomes a way of imagining and modelling “a world we’d like to perceive and experience—an environment: a social, physical, tactile environment.” Warde performs a further inversion: by seeing music as a technology, she presents it as having a wider function in its own present. These substitutions shed new light both on the wide relevance of Agre’s ideas beyond their apparent subject area, and on the potential role of music as a critical instrument.

The intimate dance of the technical and the critical is explored in Nicholas Brown’s “The Composer’s Domain.” The essentially transdisciplinary nature of the work of composing with computers emerges from two case studies. Such work becomes a way of interrogating both assumptions about music-making and the world-views embodied in technology; it proposes alternative ontologies for music and poses new questions concerning our relationship with the natural, cultural, and engineered world we inhabit. At the heart of this music is the fulcrum between the digital and the mechanical, developing the thesis of the chapter by Nicolas Collins. The abstraction, conditionality, and absolute nature of the digital are balanced by the situated and responsive materiality of the ways in which the work is shared.

The editor’s “Dissociation and Interference” considers the relevance, implications, and enactment of critical technical practice in the current environment of art as knowledge production. Crucial differences emerge between CTP and actor–network theory: a CTP approach addresses the significant gap in current music discourse between material and social perspectives. Agre insists on the identification of moments of dissociation and interference as a key component, and this is discussed in the context of the practical business of composition.

McLaughlin, Di Scipio, and Romero examine particular aspects of contemporary composition, as they emerge from the writers’ own practices—aspects with broad common resonance. Scott McLaughlin pursues the question of material indeterminacy in “The Impossibility of Material Foundations.” The composer sets the conditions for the development of a relationship between performer and an unpredictable and unstable performance environment—a combination of technique and instrument. This essentialises and micro-examines the situation that effectively obtains in any “conventional” performance. A touchstone comes from Agre, in his description of such a process as “embrac[ing] the impossibility of foundations, guiding itself by a continually unfolding awareness of its own workings as a historically specific practice” (1997a, 23). Composition is thus acknowledged as a situated experimental process, the recursive exploration of the infinite possible networks conceived as a “phase space.”

Agostino Di Scipio puts forward a view of live electronic music as an inherently critical practice in “Thinking Liveness in Performance with Live Electronics.” His chapter begins with a comprehensive historical survey of practice and concepts. Di Scipio’s concept of liveness involves not simply human presence or “real-time” operation—itself a very plastic idea—but the real lived time and space of performance. He proposes the performance ecosystem as an operative unit, such that system and site are coupled in performance. Critical technicity runs through practice and performance into their social context: “By way of turning the hybrid constitution of techno-ecosystems into phenomenologically shared auditory events, these mediators audibly expose the human, all-too-human reality of our pervasive technological condition.”

In “Experiment and Experience,” Lula Romero resists the notion of mastery—of craft or materials. In the pursuit of openness of relationship between composer and work, she finds Cage’s apparent rejection of the subject insufficient as a response. Instead she sees a continuous intra-action between composer and materials; the resulting music is a product of their interference. Such openness becomes a process of continuous critique, evading commodification and offering alternative world models. This critique is confronted with each technical decision: the spatial distribution of multiple possible outcomes, the design of and negotiation with systems. Romero proposes a reformulation of the composer as a feminist subject.

The accounts of Magnusson, Fantechi, Haddad, and Zattra set out from very practical aspects of contemporary composition practice. Metacompositional thought in the design of a performance system is a theme developed in Thor Magnusson’s account of his development of the Threnoscope, a live coding environment. As a mode of compositional inscription, code has its own dynamics in terms of imagining and structuring work—or rather potential work—and in its dissemination and reuse. Here it becomes a context for experimentation as well as a creative tool; conventional categories of modes of practice and expertise dissolve as questions of music theory, cognition, technology, interface, and instrument design provoke and inform one another. Projects such as the Threnoscope invite us to dynamically re-evaluate notions of design, composition, performance, improvisation, and collaboration.

The activity of com-posing—the putting together of music—is predicated at some level on a conceptual model of the resources and materials to be used. The management of resources—their representation, their perceived or ascribed relationships, their disposition—is so fundamental an activity, so practical, that it may seem pre-technical and is certainly lost in most accounts of practice. Instead, the decisions it embodies reflect a critical stance that informs all its artefacts. Daniela Fantechi explores this topic in “A Few Reflections about Compositional Practice,” a refreshingly candid account of personal practice as revealed in a series of case studies. Awareness of choice—of taste, of the changing objects of attention and of provisional, variable parameters of categorisation— evolves from an autoethnographic discipline to a guiding critical stance. This generates a narrative of form emerging from levels of compositional memory and the inherent temporality of the material.

Karim Haddad’s “Temporal Poetics” presents a way of conceiving musical time and of manipulating the temporality of musical entities mentioned by Fantechi. This is contiguous with the roots of Western mensural notation in the ars nova, but also with Hölderlin’s assertion of rhythm as the essential property of art, of nature, and of knowledge. Computer-assisted composition restores the flow of time to the working environment; the temporalities of imagination, experimentation, composition, and performance modulate each other. Haddad’s approach recognises the particular temporality of materials while being situated in both the historical flow of musical culture and a critical exchange with contemporary technology.

Music research has recently focussed on collaborative work in contemporary music creation; we might more accurately observe that music research has recently come to take note of the extent to which collaborative or distributed processes are vital to music creation in general. As the technological possibilities available to musicians have proliferated, distributed technical expertise has become crucial at the stage of composition. A very particular mode of collaboration obtains in institutional studios where composers are invited to work with the assistance of technical experts. Laura Zattra examines the dynamics of such situations in “Collaborative Creation in Electroacoustic Music,” by exploring three cases in detail. Useful terms derive from design practices; workflow, communication, and the co-evolution of musical imagination with technical experimentation emerge as significant factors. The complicity, empathy, creativity, and openness of the assistant are crucial, and yet their professional status is not always resolved.

Finally, Alessandrini and Zhu, Field, and Ciciliani present visions for new ontologies of music, each taking a unique critical stance and exploring its ramifications for their technical practice. Patricia Alessandrini’s feminist multimedia monodrama Parlour Sounds is the case study at the heart of her chapter with Julie Zhu. In the spirit of Haraway-inspired cyberfeminism, the project challenges predominant practices of technology, confronting those of music with those of the domestic environment. Such displacement brings the work into new critical relationships with many aspects of its production and context: the collaborative processes of composition, of interface design and construction, the physical location of work with music technology, the relationship of art with daily life, and the power structures at play in the soliciting and production of music. Cyberfeminist principles inform the proposal of an alternative to dominant paradigms of electronic music, and a theoretical framework in which roles and distinctions between composition, design, improvisation, and performance are blurred.

Ambrose Field seeks to change the vocabulary of creative practice from another perspective. Much compositional activity now happens in an academic context, where it is supported and expected to explain itself as research. This transition has been extensively discussed: from the epistemological implications to the ways in which it reflects a new mode of supporting cultural and creative development. From the composer’s perspective, however, such discussion has largely been concerned with defending creative freedom or claiming epistemological relevance. Instead, Field addresses the question of the practice itself directly. When creative practice also becomes experimental practice, what are the ramifications for both the self-image and the practical behaviour of the practitioner? Field considers the formulation of questions and especially the development of new approaches to workflow, which he describes as “the creative envelope.”

If the practices of music creation are to enter a more dynamic phase of critical awareness, the relationship with the listener, audience, or co-participant becomes crucial. For whom is this work intended? How is it to be received, in what circumstances and with what expectations of attention or investment? Marko Ciciliani’s “Designing Audience–Work Relationships” explores this in detail through three of his audiovisual projects—performance/installation hybrids. They work with time, space, and multiplicity of phenomenon to experiment with modes of social and individual interaction. Hall’s “proxemics” provide a metric of intimacy. Patterns of temporality and attention emerge from the engagement of performers and listeners, not as an epiphenomenon but within the scope of compositional imagination, design, and critical reflection.

Through such processes of critical technical reflection, of detailed discussion of the practical narrative of composition, common themes emerge from this multiplicity of creative practices. Technology is present not for technology’s sake, but because our evolving relationship with technology is one of the defining paths of our current state. A systems view of practice and its artefacts appears often, just as the mid-century visions of cybernetics are informing recent work in the new AI—currently searching for ways to confront its own hidden assumptions, tastes, and prejudices. Above all we see references to building models of possible worlds; David Rosenboom’s propositional music stands as paradigm in this regard.

Composition is not the sudden, unitary embodiment of an idea but a situated, distributed, time-extensive activity. And the products of this activity, of these decisions, reflect world views and values; they propose new models. If we are to talk about music in material ways and music is to do its important work in the world, then composers must begin to have new kinds of conversation with each other and with the wider community. It is hoped that this volume will contribute to such a development.

References

Agre, Philip E. 1997a. Computation and Human Experience. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

———. 1997b. “Toward a Critical Technical Practice: Lessons Learned in Trying to Reform AI.” In Social Science, Technical Systems, and Cooperative Work: Beyond the Great Divide, edited by Geoffrey C. Bowker, Susan Leigh Star, William Turner, and Les Gasser, 131–57. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

———. 2002. “The Practical Logic of Computer Work.” In Computationalism: New Directions, edited by Matthias Scheutz, 129–42. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Davies, Sarah Rachel, Megan Halpern, Maja Horst, David Kirby, and Bruce Lewenstein. 2019. “Science Stories as Culture: Experience, Identity, Narrative and Emotion in Public Communication of Science.” JCOM: Journal of Science Communication. 18 (5): A01. https://doi.org/10.22323/2.18050201.

Ferneyhough, Brian. (1982) 1995. “Form—Figure—Style: An Intermediate Assessment.” In Brian Ferneyhough: Collected Writings, edited by James Boros and Richard Toop, 21–28. London: Routledge. Essay written 1982; first published 1984 in French translation (Labrys 10).

Impett, Jonathan. 2016. “Making a Mark: The Psychology of Composition.” In The Oxford Handbook of Music Psychology, edited by Susan Hallam, Ian Cross, and Michael Thaut, 2nd ed., 651–66. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Kitchin, Rob, and Martin Dodge. 2014. Code/Space: Software and Everyday Life. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Parisi, Luciana. 2013. Contagious Architecture: Computation, Aesthetics, and Space. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Somerson, Rosanne, and Mara L. Hermano, eds. 2013. The Art of Critical Making: Rhode Island School of Design on Creative Practice. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.

The case of Germany

noreply@blogger.com (luk) — Wed, 14 Feb 2018 08:40:00 +0000

Amongst the prolific and consistently high-quality output of Arnold Jacobshagen, Professor of Musicology and dean of the department of Musicology and Music Pedagogy at the Hoschschule für Musik und Tanz Köln, is an edited volume Perspektiven musikalischer Interpretation from 2016, in which his own chapter deals with Musikalische Interpretation als künstlerische Forschung? Konzepte und internationale Kontexte. The value of this contribution lies primarily in the fact that it displays Germany's lagging behind the international AR developments, and argues for breaking with this situation.

Arnold Jacobshagen

Whilst Jacobshagen confounds some of the concepts, e.g. considering Practice as Research to be merely a more precise term than Artistic Research (rather than identifying them to be distinctly different concepts in their own right), and trusts definitions offered by single authors over searching for consensus (or pointing to the lack thereof), such as the odd distinction between Practice as Research and Practice-led research made here, he offers a handy overview of exactly how confused the international terminological usages still are. It remains a pity that the source material for the chapter consists of the theoretical literature on AR, and not a single case of AR, Practice-as-Research, Practice-based Research, etc. is selected to support either the reported arguments or Jacobshagen’s own insights. This points to what is still a serious problem in AR: the discourse is heavily dominated by abstracting syntheses, with an ever-increasing absence of the relevant researchers and their projects, which is remarkable indeed. (Cf. also the lack of musical researcher-practitioners among those referred to in e.g. the Wikipedia page on Künstlerische Forschung.)

The chapter's international contextualization offers a handy overview of most of the global developments (Asia is notably missing) and zooms in on the German situation and its German-speaking neighbors, Austria and Switzerland. Of interest is Jacobshagen’s detailing of the issues pertaining to Germany’s position, e.g. how establishing “Wissenschaftliche Forschung” to be a pleonasm led to the compromise of considering “künstlerische Entwicklungsvorhaben” as both (legally) equivalent to and (otherwise) distinctive from “Forschung” (see also here).

With regards to the third cycle, it is clear how much of a problem is presented by the need to reconcile the demands for the highest artistic standard as well as “eine geisteswissenschaftlich fundierte Ausbildung, die zum Schreiben einer höchsten akademischen Ansprüchen genügenden Dissertation befähigen würde” (p. 75), and that this is not or hardly ever the case. At the time of the publication, an “artistic-scientific” promotion (Dr. Phil.) is still only possible in the Hochschulen in Freiburg, Hamburg, and Karlsruhe. Whilst Hamburg has a large number of artistic-scientific doctorandi (mostly in composition), and the first applications have been submitted in Freiburg, no completed doctoral trajectory was announced yet. In all three cases, the scientific research is primordial, with the artistic project “lediglich eine Ergänzung bzw. Verdeutlichung”; in Hamburg, the dissertation is valued as twice the weight of the artistic component. (Interestingly, in the Medical School Hamburg, the department Kunst, Gesellschaft und Gesundheit has been focussing on AR, having devoted a conference to Artistic Research in Applied Arts in 2013, which resulted in a 2015 book publication.) In the Hochschule für Musik und Tanz Köln, a doctorate can be obtained in musicology, in music pedagogy, “dance science”, art management, and music medicine – not in artistic-scientific matters. There is nevertheless a masters course in “artistic development and reflection”, aimed at enabling the function of a bridge towards artistic research, and offering Hochschule students to embark on a musicological doctoral trajectory.

Jacobshagen's chapter certainly relates to the 2011 article, Die Verleihung des dr. Art und dr. Mus, by his Cologne Hochschule colleague Prof. Dr. iur. Dr. h.c. Peter M. Lynen, who, at the time, was director of the Zentrum für Internationales Kunstmanagement, and vice-president of the Nordrhein-Westfälischen Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Künste. In such relevant functions, Lynen established an elaborate but purely negative view on AR in the context of the "hochschul- und bildungspolitischen Raum", noting issues of financing and legal status, as well as putting forth the said pleonasm and what he sees as the consequent softening of the research concept. All the while, Lynen apparently considers AR at its most limited, i.e. as Practice-As-Research with the simplistic "man nehme dies und das" methodology. In his view, neither the cultural sector nor academia is waiting for the research "hermaphrodites" that would be created by mixing completely different standards of quality.

Philipp Spitta

Lynen's notion of the research-wise incompatibility of art and art-science can be traced back to Julius August Philipp Spitta's 1892 Kunstwissenschaft und Kunst essay (in his Zur Musik - I thank Karin Gastell for pointing me to the Spitta and Lynen texts.) Spitta revealingly claimed "It is conceivable a state in which [art and science] live peacefully side by side, each one of his work, the one of the work of beauty, the other the struggle for truth" (p. 14) but that "[t]he paths of arts-science and art must never interrelate" (p. 13).

Indeed, with gaps between pro and con running so deep, there is still much to do in Germany. For the upcoming Darmstadt Summer Course 2018, a Call for Applications was issued by the Internationales Musikinstitut Darmstadt, offering a workshop Artistic Research as Compositional or Performance Practice. Tutors are violinist Barbara Lüneburg from the Staatliche Hochschule für Musik Trossingen (Germany) and composer Marko Ciciliani (Graz, Austria). Both list their involvement in AR through Austrian Science Fund projects (TransCoding, resp. GAPPP) at the University of Music and Performing Arts Graz, however. The Musikhochschule in Trossingen does not (yet) seem to offer anything related to AR.

Jacobshagen's 2016 text concludes that “[i]n view of the excellence and dynamic of these international developments, it is to be hoped that Germany, as a country with a particularly dense landscape of Musikhoschulen and international student body, will be able to catch up in the field of artistic research in the near future”. Perhaps his contribution will help ignite the further efforts necessary to enable musicians to develop their AR ambitions in German higher education.

Expertise-specific conferences

noreply@blogger.com (luk) — Tue, 30 Jan 2018 10:36:00 +0000

Time flies when you are having fun. I generally don't find plane rides much fun, but during my flight from Portugal last week, it struck me how much I had enjoyed the Research 'Hands on' PIANO conference in Aveiro, and how it had only been a few years since I started thinking how we need this type of event.

Back then, I had voiced some frustration to the founders of the Journal for Artistic Research, which aims to publish expositions of research "from all artistic disciplines". To be exposed only to a variety of types of creativity and its fundus, including architecture, film, drawing, dance, theatre, etc., doesn't really cut it for me when considering the relatively meagre benefits of this diversity for my particular piano practice. Yes, AR is a common interest, but my expertise is that of piano playing, not of pan-disciplinary methodology. As wonderful as JAR is, I would prefer there to be artistic research journals per instrument as well - even per aspect of its performance practice. Similar to academia, to have output disseminated in specialized channels allows for professionals to be updated on what goes on in their field more efficiently than having to browse through many more publications to find relevant output. This fits the wider debate about AR types of output that need to include formats which extend to different multi-medium levels (hybrids like a monograph-with-DVD, full-online publication, research-CDs and -DVDS, annotated scores,...) and even to the outside of the traditional dissemination framework, like workshops.

So that was just a few years ago. Now, in a way, we're already there. Not that we have many specialized online journals for artistic research, but we now have such conferences. That's a big step. Since 2017, the University of Aveiro, through its communication platform IMPAR - Initiatives, Meetings and Publications on Artistic Research - has been announcing its Research hands on events. The first one was for flute in April of last year. There was one for guitar later in 2017 (no call for proposals, though) and, just now, one for piano. During 2018 there will be new ones for flute and guitar again. The aim of these events is to "bring artistic production and academic research closer together, creating opportunities to combine the artists' and the researchers' knowledge". To be fair, this is what the Orpheus Institute had in mind for its "Research Festivals", presented from 2009 to 2015: to merge the academic conference with the artistic festival in order to avoid the typical conference-with-some-music-as-well while making the point that a concentrated presentation of AR projects should be more than a display of artistic output. The research festival concept has been welcomed by other institutions, notably the conservatoires of Rotterdam and Tilburg. (Apparently, other disciplines have them too - e.g. here - and already from before 2009, but these "festivals" are thought of more generically as a celebration.) Typically, the research festivals' content is organized to include compositional and pan-instrumental expertise. Many of these events use a topic to apply cohesion, but that is not the same as having instrumental (or compositional) expertise be the common denominator.

The four-day conference in Aveiro that I witnessed (Jan. 24-27, 2018) catered exclusively to pianists. The colleagues hailed from Spain, Croatia, Greece, the UK, Belgium, China, Canada, and Mexico, as well as from the more predictable linguistic background (Portugal and Brazil). The students at the masters and doctoral levels, and the concert pianists and teachers who were newer to the research scene, compensated amply for the presence of the more established scholarly types. The merchandise table in the hallway offered not just scholarly books, but new editions of scores as well, signalling how the target audience was not the academic per se. This became immediately palpable in the parallel sessions. Noticeable categories in the presentation contents included geographic overviews of repertoire from three different continents, gender-related topics (women composers; more than half of the presenters were women), the entire range of 18th to 21st century music, from solo to concerto, from Ligeti to graphic scores, etc., i.e. categories that could have been taken to satisfy the desktop scholar for all that the titles in the program indicated. Although perspectives often did include the historical and analytical, by far most of the presentations were purely practitioner-oriented however: from the technical (virtuosity, memorizing, pedagogy, practicing, bodily relaxing) to the fringe of the professional activities (medicine, marketing & management). Even the seemingly archaeological or the instrumental innovation catered insights that are useful in developing interpretation.

I particularly found Luís Pipa's personal experimentation and reconstruction of the final bars of Mozart's Fantasie in d minor K.397(385g) to my liking, in which he made insightful and distinctive use of the Neapolitan sixth to musically argue a connection to Mozart's own preceding materials.

Kate Ryder's session on expanded pianos, including the Magnetic Resonator Piano, offered interesting information on what seems to be a trend in the UK, what with the country's self-perceived history of experimental music and the work of a handful of Ryder's UK colleagues in this regard (e.g. Sarah Nicolls and Geoff Smith's "fluid piano").

Inja Stanovic's investigations of Julius Block's cylinder recording technology offered views on how to distinguish the performer's interpretation style from the influence on the sound from the mechanical recording equipment. (Reminding me of Jaso Sasaki.)

And then there was Dr. Hara Trouli, performing arts medicine specialist, whose cause is worthy of a separate post on this blog.

Not all was to be taken as research output. One odd presentation listed the presenter's past projects, which could be seen to lean towards AR because of the personal perspective but lacked an argumentation to consider it as really providing new knowledge in any way. Some of the concerts merely demonstrated little known repertoire. There was also nothing dealing with the pianoforte (though this may have to do with the lack of appropriate instruments on the premises). But what I take away most of this event is precisely the benefit of the balance of those diverse takes and foci, from the musicological to the performance, with everything in between, showcased in research presentations, concerts, workshops, masterclasses, panel discussions, poster presentations, film, etc. It gave the pianist-audience the impression that they could spend less than a week's time and be submersed in just about any type of development that they could wish to be updated on. The richess made me think back of what I once heard a competitor in a Liszt competition state: "Playing and listening to all that Liszt makes you remember why you like the piano so much". If it wasn't exactly interdisciplinary, the conference was nevertheless multi-subdisciplinary, covering a wide range of very different methodologies and perspectives from within the field of piano playing. I

I look forward to other institutions experimenting with this concept, whilst noting that the next 'Research Hands' on PIANO gathering is scheduled in Aveiro in 2019.

Signs o' the times

noreply@blogger.com (luk) — Mon, 09 Oct 2017 09:36:00 +0000

Last week, this CD arrived in the mail:

It can be seen as symbolic of today's status of the performer: the pianist's name printed more prominently than the traditionally perceived "owner" of the "works" recorded (who and which seem to have receded into the background), the three half- to full-page photographs of the musician inside the booklet (plus a full page with images of four others of his CDs, which themselves include pictures of Zimerman, and the CD cover copied onto the front page of the booklet), and two more portraits from the same black-and-white shoot included inside the cardboard CD case. Indeed, such a personal visual focus is already more extensive than what, e.g., Herbert von Karajan enjoyed decades ago, as without a doubt the most self-absorbed musician of that time, when this type of marketing started to become part of the professional profiling business of any high-end performer. (Incidentally, Zimerman's Deutsche Grammophon recording of the Grieg and Schumann concertos with the Berlin Philharmonic 'under' Karajan in 1982 had the 'accompanying' soloist, i.e. the conductor, photoshopped in such a way as to keep the pianist in the background. I have always wondered how Zimerman, then still young but more than up-and-coming, had felt about that decision, no doubt taken, or forced, by Karajan himself. Maybe it was argued to be a take on another soloist-conductor cover, from a competing label.)

In the Zimerman-Schubert CD booklet, the composer's signature is the only image related to the man who originally made the sonatas. The two-page interview with the pianist, which replaces the programme notes traditionally written by a musicologist, features a mere six questions, one about Schubert ("He had syphilis, but was he really expecting to die soon?") and the rest about the pianist: why he waited so long with a new solo recording and why he chose these sonatas, why he prefers to use the self-made keyboard, and what particular qualities does the recording hall in Japan offer, and, lastly, "How would you characterize these sonatas?"

This CD is all about Zimerman, and it seems as if it was decided that he, and not Schubert or the two sonatas, would be selling it. It is in the same vein as the apparently unavoidable focus on Yuja Wang's dresses in photographs and interviews. But at least Ms. Wang is an expert on the choice of her clothing; judging his interview, Zimerman could hardly be recognized as an expert on the historical or music theoretical value of Schubert and his compositions, unless he read it somewhere (hopefully written by an expert historian or theorist). Idem for the acoustics of the recording hall - personally, I would have found it interesting to hear from the recording engineer how he managed the sometimes peculiar sound of the CD - and the suggestion that Zimerman designed, manufactured and assembled the keyboard and the hammer action himself. The glaring lack of detail emphasizes the superficiality of the entire interview. Whoever was in power must have deemed it absolutely fine to invest in expensive glossy paper filled with romantically impressionistic pictures rather than enlightening information. Perhaps the DGG offices are still motivated by - as I remember - the unexpected US sales success of Ivo Pogorelich's solo Beethoven-Schumann record in 1982, which was reportedly due to the cover photograph of the pianist being favored especially by female customers (see here for a type of confirmation of this).

Excepting the answers Zimerman gave in the interview, the above criticism may not have much to do with his range of influence in the production. His playing, on the other hand, is actually often very much to my liking. Beyond his technical abilities, which allow him to devise interpretations based solely on their musical merit, it strikes me how he appears to systematically look for pieces in which he can innovate traditional interpretations from a purely pianistic perspective. It was both eye-opening and musically satisfying to hear him play the huge sweep with which the piano part opens the finale of the Rachmaninov's second piano concerto at a speed which is audibly most consistent with the tempo of the movement (at 24'06" in here). Yuja Wang aligns the passage with the orchestra as well, though at a slower metrical ratio (three instead of two bars' worth to arrive back in the bass, see 22'44" in here); Rachmaninov himself (at 21'03" in here) applies an opening rubato to the effect that the sweep takes about four bars. I find Zimerman's entrance to be the most striking one, not because it is the only one I know that follows the composer's notation (though not his recorded performance), and not because of the breathtaking speed (which does not make it sound more "quasi glissando" than Rachmaninov's), but for the way it continues the momentum that the orchestral material created.

Rachmaninov Concerto 2, 3rd movement, bars 16-24

In Liszt's Funérailles, the distinction between producing the famous left-hand ostinato with and without the damper pedal is managed by Zimerman with notable consistency. (Listen here, starting at 8'04".) The score prescribes the pedal from bar 115 onwards for an entire bar, or more, at a time - regardless of harmonic changes. The less muddy sound and the lighter action of pianos in Liszt's day allowed for this with more aesthetic comfort than the present-day instruments. The advantage of the damper pedal on a modern piano is that it can disguise the difficulty of clearly and evenly articulating all the notes in the right-hand triplet chords in bar 116 and 118, and that its building up of sound requires less force, and thus less exhaustion, in playing the octaves from bar 133 onwards. The price to pay is that, with lots of pedal, it becomes impossible to distinguish the metrical layers (left-hand triplets, left-hand 'drums' per half note, right-hand quarter note march), to maintain clarity and lightness in the galloping bass triplets and octaves, and to avoid the confusion of having legato and non-legato sounding chords. The ramifications of this are audible in many performances, even of great virtuosos like Martha Argerich (from 6'16" in this video).

Liszt Funérailles, bars 111-119

Not so in Zimerman's version. Until the Allegro energico assai section at bar 143, where no metrical layer or left-hand articulation is endangered, his use of the damper pedal is extremely limited, so that all of the above mentioned details come to the surface. Most excitingly, the rests in the dotted rhythms are now audible (see e.g. bars 141-142), driving the music forward to great effect.

Liszt Funérailles, bars 141-146

This is an elegant solution to the problem that using the damper pedal to compensate for technical difficulties can distract from, or even disrupt, the perception of the musical flow when that is composed on the basis of musical structures rather than technical prowess. However, the pianist must be able to pull it off. While Zimerman does so in Funérailles, his approach is less consistent in the two Schubert sonatas he just recorded, where there are comparable pedal vs. no pedal decisions to be taken.

Schubert Sonata D. 959, opening second movement

Schubert Sonata D. 960, opening second movement

There is more to say about that, but I would prefer to return to it in one of my next posts. More interesting for the argument, here, are the fp octaves that characterize the final movement of D.960, for which Zimerman uses the resonance of a staccato articulation captured with the damper pedal.

Schubert Sonata D. 960, opening final movement

It is ironic that this CD highlights the extent to which marketing efforts can take the professional dissemination of musical performance into the foggy field of amateurism, where the means are indistinguishable from the ends, while the experimental nature of the recorded artist's practice, exemplary of the value of the scholarly paradigm shift towards including the study of performance, is blatantly neglected. The trajectory that led from Janet Schmalfeldt's 1985 article, On the Relation of Analysis to Performance, to the present day legitimation of musicians as researchers in-and-through their practice, has run parallel to the recording sector's continuous zooming in on the marketability of performers. These roads would offer more interesting directions if they would intersect more often. Why not ask a musicologist to write a few pages about Schubert and his sonatas, and - leaving out some of the pictures - add a text by (or an interview by another pianist with) Zimmerman on what he was looking for when working out his interpretations? It may not always be easy to cater to layman audiences, who may have less of an interest perhaps in the type of issues discussed above, but there is rather exciting terrain to be cultivated.

As it happens, another new CD arrived on my desk, this week. Again, with some famous early 19th-century solo keyboard sonatas written during a famous composer's late compositional period.

Beethoven's three last piano sonatas are performed on a replica of the composer's Broadwood piano, made by Chris Maene and "outfitted with a modern-day interpretation of Beethoven’s hearing machine". The pianist is Tom Beghin, also a musician with projects that I always eagerly await, ever since I discovered him on the box with all 32 Beethoven sonatas played on period instruments (see here). As with Zimerman, I don't agree with everything, or I wouldn't play/record all of it in the same way, but, to name just one aspect of Tom's recording, his improvised ornamentation is nothing short of delicious. Some pictures of his adorn the cover and the inside of the booklet, but there is so much more. Four essays deal with the perspectives of those involved in the project: "Beethoven’s Broadwood, Stein’s Hearing Machine, and a Trilogy of Sonatas", "The Deaf Composer and His Broadwood: A Working Relationship", "The Acoustics of Beethoven’s Hearing Machine", "Recording Beethoven’s Broadwood: A Tonmeister’s Perspective"; bonus materials include "Building the Stein/Broadwood Hearing Machine: A First-hand Report from Beethoven’s Conversation Books" and videos that are available on an accompanying website. All was clearly devised to be enjoyed by experts and laymen alike, and a fine balance was found between the diverse elements of the project as well as between the various demands of marketing a CD and demonstrating artistic creativity.

New professorship

noreply@blogger.com (luk) — Fri, 07 Apr 2017 13:02:00 +0000

The University of Music and Performing Arts in Graz (KUG) is offering a fulltime professorship in Artistic Research, beginning with the winter semester 2017/18. Minimal monthly salary is €4891,10 brutto.

The call can be found on the university’s Career Service Center website (download the bilingual "Universitätsprofessur für künstlerische Forschung in Musik" PDF here). Details with regards to tasks include management of their artistic doctoral school (currently 11 students), independent research, teaching, setting up an artistic research center, acquiring third party funding, supervision of doctoral and master students, international networking, and admin. A doctoral degree is prerequisite, as is artistic status. Women and persons with special needs will be given preference in the case of equal qualification. Written applications need to be submitted before May 31, 2017.

This is very exciting, as such openings are still extremely rare. Slowly, EU conservatoires have begun to appoint AR doctores to head their bachelor and master curricula, but at the university level a professorship is still almost exclusively the prerogative of musicologists. Their lack of artistic on-stage expertise – visible in the type of research their departments engage in, as well as in the way their doctoral students approach their topics – is mostly (though not always successfully) compensated for by including an artist in the doctoral supervising team. Moreover, a post-doc problem lies in the fact that without a university position the researchers' options for securing external funding can be severely limited. Between the very large EU grants and the small private trusts there is a huge gap that is best addressed by appealing to national funding agencies, for which typically a university affiliation is required. In terms of output, this problem can be felt in an imbalance of project size.

Kudos to the KUG – may many more such initiatives follow!

The Florence Principles

noreply@blogger.com (luk) — Tue, 28 Mar 2017 08:18:00 +0000

At their latest conference, in a Northern Italian city not far from where the oldest university has seen the start of a process leading to the third third cycle degree in Europe, the European League of the Institutes of the Arts (ELIA) presented their position paper on the doctorate in the arts: The Florence Pinciples. It follows a string of reference documents issued in recent years, each marking an ever firmer grip on doctoral training and therefore AR in the approximately 280 European institutions that offer research degrees in the arts. With the European University Association's 2005 Salzburg Recommendations on Doctoral Education (and their 2010 and 2016 follow-ups Salzburg II Recommendations and Taking Salzburg Forward), the 2011 European Commission’s Principles for Innovative Doctoral Training, the 2013 European Association for Architectural Education's Charter for Architectural Research, and the AEC's 2015 White Paper on AR (see also here), the institutional community have come full circle in bringing together both matters and formulating their views on them collectively after years of tentatively coming to terms with the challenges from individual perspectives.

Besides the typical points of interest, such as appropriate funding, embedding in institutional policy, critical mass, etc., especially noteworthy have been the Salzburg Recomendations' confirmation of advancement of knowledge through original research, the aim at diversity, and recognising pre-docs as early stage researchers; Salzburg II wanting to steer away from the traditional one-on-one supervision model; the European commission adding exposure to industry & other relevant employment sectors; the third Salzburg position's interest in engagement with non-academics; the EAAE expressing the need for specific and inclusive types of communicating knowledge within research and spanning artistic and scholarly projects. Worthwhile adding in this respect is SHARE's Handbook for Artistic Research Education, identifying examples of best practice and offered a Toolkit for curriculum building.

According to the Florence Principles, the strategic areas in the international debate include formats for presenting and disseminating output, best practices, supervisors, doctoral programmes, and career perspectives. Some of their "seven points of attention" are deserving of specific attention, indeed. Already in the preamble to the Seven Points, it is striking how artistic aspects seem dominant. To "make an original contribution in their discipline" [my emphasis], "develop artistic competence", "extend artistic competence", "create and share new insights by applying innovative artistic methods" during the doctoral studies leaves plenty of room for the candidates to allow for e.g. a new painting or composition to be the knowledge contribution. What "innovative artistic methods" might be is a mystery to me - they may not be intended to be musical.

For Career Perspectives, it is envisaged that holders of doctoral degrees in the arts can "enter (or continue) an academic career at a higher education institution and/or enter/continue their careers as artists." In its simplest meaning, this may be taken as the wish for doctores in the arts to continue to do research rather than returning to the stage and the classroom. As valuable as an objective that is, it would be even more exciting if academic positions (i.e. university professorships) become available to artistic researchers so that they may join the pool of researchers that can apply for grants that are limited to university employees.

Under Doctoral Work, it is stated that the project "uses artistic methods and techniques" and that it "consists of original work(s) of art and contains a "discursive component" (note the hesitance to put "written component" in writing) that critically reflects upon the project and documents the research process". Again, this can easily be understood as performing a number of recitals or handing in a newly composed opera, accompanied by an ultimately negligeable written analysis or logbook. More cryptically, it is stated that internationalism, interdisciplinarity and interculturality "can benefit from doc programmes in the arts".

A Research Environment with a critical mass of faculty and doctoral researchers, all of them artistic researchers, is rightfully commended.

As for Supervision, "at least two supervisors are recommended". It is not explained why and how that function is split, but my guess is that the shortage of artistic researchers with the ius promovendi causes the supervising teams to necessarily consist of a university professor and an artist in order to attain an equilibrium of academic and artistic expertise.

Finally, the attention point of Dissemination mentions - of course - the need for appropriate channels and peer-review. More interesting, though also not further elaborated upon, is the effort that is stated to be needed in order to "create adequate archives for results of doc work". It is also good to see open access claimed as a guiding principle.

All in all, the historical weight of the visual arts in this discourse is again noticeable, as it has been in the SHARE handbook and elsewhere. Whether the developing committee of the Florence Principles, with one musician among four visual artists, effectively represents the current balance of involved institutional parties is a question that I look forward to seeing treated on its own. Also curious: the European University Association - representing the institutions with the actual degree-awarding power - is not among the interest groups listed as supporting and endorsing this document, even if it takes their own recommendations as a point of departure. Anyhow, it is stimulating to see how the grey literature evolves steadily towards ever more nuanced positions, with ever clearer vision and purpose.

When Brahms met Debussy

noreply@blogger.com (luk) — Mon, 13 Mar 2017 21:08:00 +0000

I once had a teacher, Claude Coppens, who had meticulously looked for statistical information among the dynamics in the complete known works of Johannes Brahms. His exercise revealed an extraordinarily high number of “mezzo”-dynamics (mp, mf), leading him to conclude that Brahms was to be seen as a representative of German Impressionism.

Other evidence of a deep-seated link between Brahms and Impressionism, this time with one of its more readily known proponents, Claude Debussy, is now available and provides me with an excellent and long awaited opportunity to introduce two of my favorite colleagues: pianist Anna Scott and tenor Valentin Gloor. They collaborated in a unprecedented investigation of two meetings that the older Brahms had with the much younger Debussy in Vienna in 1887. Apart from the regular type of decorative Auseinandersetzung, Anna and Valentin strikingly complete the picture with a stylistic exploration into an alternate version of one of Debussy’s songs and a posthumously reconstructed Brahms fragment, both dedicated to each other. See and listen for Anna’s and Valentin’s findings in this video recording of a remarkable presentation:

Anna Scott rose to AR fame with her doctoral work on how to perform Brahms at the piano in a style that is now lost (see here for downloading her dissertation). I found epiphanic pleasure in experiencing the consequences of Anna's research during one of the workshops she has been conducting, when I physically felt the difficulties in learning to adapt my performance style to the discoveries that characterise her project.

Valentin Gloor is among the Orpheus Institute's best kept secrets. Not only is he one of the very few artistic researchers active in matters of the voice, he also developed his own brand of taking a theatrical angle from which to present his work. It is a real shame that so few videos of his projects are to be found - see here for one more.

Dead or alive

noreply@blogger.com (luk) — Thu, 09 Mar 2017 14:50:00 +0000

Any performer active in new music has experienced it when working with living composers: they aren't necessarily the Holy Grail of answers to the questions we may have about their pieces. The previous sentence sounds perhaps odd, as if it is a choice not to work with a dead composer. But we all do want to communicate with the composers of the music we want to play, whether we interpret what they wrote in letters two centuries ago or what they are going to say to us during the dress rehearsal for tomorrow's world première. In other words: it can be as difficult to get the information you want from a living composer as from a dead composer.

This may be one of the reasons that musicology has been mostly interested in the deceased. Other reasons are of course the convenience of a closed oeuvre and of an extensive literature to build upon, but these should be outweighed easily by the advantages of investigating living beings and their actions, one would think. Besides the fundamental urge to assess the act of (co-)creation without the distorting prism of the score, there is the prospect of insights unique to dialogue and common context (e.g. contemporaneity of language, research focus and perspective, knowledge,...). Nevertheless, research into living composers is often not much more than a way to propagate those composers’ ideas. In this regard, Ian Pace’s thorough critique on such spokesman-musicology is certainly valid for quite a few more cases than the one involving Brian Ferneyhough. I remember vividly the awkwardness of seeing David Osmond-Smith read a paper on Berio with the composer sitting next to him, and how nobody knew who to address with a question during the Q&A session. Or how Kagel visibly – dare I say “theatrically” – nodded or shook his head (dis)approvingly during each consecutive presentation at a conference in his honor.

It is none the less good to see that recent music is the object of study. It is not a very recent evolution, but there seems to always have been a kind of schism between those who scrutinize long bygone eras and those who look around themselves. The moving wall between them, gradually shifting with time at the speed of about a generation, represents defining lines between interests as well as methods. Already in 1933 Henry Cowell published a book “to present the composer’s own point of view”.* Some of the rationale behind the “experiment unprecedented in musical history” demonstrates a sense of critical perspective, such as the urge to display diversity (“Special consideration was given to composers who are developing indigenous types of music”), or the doing away with any "pretense of being complete”. (Cowell 1933, v) Other aspects betray a level of superficiality, however: while ostentatiously called “a symposium”, there was never a conference and it is reasonable to assume that Cowell oversaw and controlled the whole enterprise himself rather than organize a peer process to work out the content; contributions were sought, and when it was impossible to obtain original ones, articles were reprinted from “various periodicals”. From an academic point of view, there is a thin line between amateurism and journalism.

Interviews are similarly dubious. Since 1969, the Oral History of American Music has been collecting thousands of “voices of the major musical figures of our time” in audio and video interviews. As tempting as these look (and I have not been able to resist them, myself), there is only limited use for them, e.g. to corroborate, negate, or contextualize insights found elsewhere. Investigative journalism never depends on letting the investigated do most of the talking – the interviewer is just another prism. And then there are the multiple issues on the side of the interviewee, not least with regards to purposefully remembering one's own past. (When it comes to wilfully constructing false memories, Cowell has shown himself to be quite skillful.)

As long as we revere the writings of artists as a product of an oracle, as we so often do their compositions, critical assessment stands little chance. Such issues of “the work” are accompanied by those of power. It is not a coincidence that I added the names of two dead composers to the second paragraph of this text. I could list others – and not just of composers – but I could also name projects of which I had to see the potential vanish into thin air because it became too dangerous to mine the field of knowledge embodied in the mind of the living being who was the object of the study. If I thought myself strong enough to put aside my own ego, that of the other was not so easy to take out of the equation.

Nevertheless, AR can mitigate some of the above concerns. From that perspective, Cowell’s book deserves to be quoted some more, even if his rationale did not include letting composers discuss their own works:

...critical estimates from composers who may not always have a polished literary style but who know their subject, instead of from reviewers who are clever with words but do not know the principles of composition. (Cowell 1933, iii)

...to obtain a synthetic and sympathetic understanding of the aims of any particular composer, why not ask him to relate them himself? He knows more about his aims than anyone else! (Cowell 1933, iii)

Composers who were included had to be persons who could write intelligibly. While literary style is not here the paramount consideration, it must be admitted that some very talented composers have absolutely no ability to set down their ideas in words. (Cowell 1933, iv)

...it was expected from the beginning to reveal as much about its authors as it did about their subjects…(Cowell 1933/62, ix)

To be fair, Cowells aims and ideas need to be seen in their historical context (i.e. reacting against a perceived bias in the reception of "modern" music), all the while taking into account his penchant for combining instruction with provocation. Yet, some of it anticipates ideals and conundrums of AR: today, we still recognize the added value in and the issues with an artist contemplating his/her own practice. But the problems of auto-ethnography overlap with those mentioned above, and the intentionality and poetic fallacies are treacherous at any distance between subject and object.

These challenges are very typical of AR, as the researcher necessarily involves his/her artistic practice. Through regular such confrontations in my own research, I am thus simultaneously researching (in-and-through that practice, so to speak) possible ways around the pitfalls, whether investigating living composers or performers. And although I am convinced that enough safeguards can be put in place to make scrutiny of living beings’ actions worth its while, I don’t have all the answers to all of the issues. It is therefore very fortunate that an international, multi-disciplinary three-day conference (with Ian Pace on the board of conveners) is planned to discuss just these matters. Writing About Contemporary Artists: Challenges,Practices and Complexities will be held at Surrey University's Institute for Advanced Studies on October 20-22, 2017. The closing date for sending in abstracts is May 29th, 2017.

The proposals are expected to cover a range of different artistic fields, disciplines, musical genres, methodological perspectives, and types of discourse and artist; to focus upon all forms of writing as well as its conventions and boundaries; and – naturally – to focus on living (or recently deceased) artists. A roundtable proposal is encouraged, “exploring questions around the status of creative practice as a form of research in different arts disciplines.”

Many important reasons to be in Surrey in October!

* Cowell, Henry. American Composers on American Music. A Symposium. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., Inc. 1962 edition. xiv + 226 p.

CfP: composition as critical practice

noreply@blogger.com (luk) — Sun, 17 Jul 2016 09:59:00 +0000

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

Jonathan Impett

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

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