Research Catalogue

Pagina para recopilar los textos y ejercicios del modulo, Sensilidades del lenguaje.

A silence lingers where words once stood, a fragile pause between what was said and what remains forever untold. I’m gonna build the cemetery of echoes, words suspended in time, each gaze a question, each absence a weight. Fragments of lives held in stillness, unfinished moments longing for release. Across the space, words rise like shadows. Memory dances with loss, the tangible and the fleeting entwined. It is not closure we seek, but the tender acknowledgment of incompleteness.

Transmutations seeks to redefine the term transformation through a staged concert — a concert conceived as a work of art in itself. The traditional concert format and conventional performance practices are showing signs of stagnation, thus calling for the emergence of a voice adapted to this transformation. The boundaries of music, especially within the classical realm, have gradually blurred in recent times. Increasingly, artists are exploring the concert as a form of expression that not only integrates other artistic disciplines but also embraces technological advancements. This approach challenges traditional aesthetic conventions and the notion of genre and musical style. The omnipresence of technology in contemporary society underlines the need for research that explores the many possibilities of the concert format. This staged concert aims to redefine the concept of transformation by avoiding any stylistic boundaries. The works of Richard Strauss, John Cage, and Alexander Schubert are included not only for their artistic value but also for their contribution to the very notion of transformation.

This chapter will detail the evolution of a set of improvised performances that explored Empathic Speculation in both live and studio settings. As a means to elevate musical attunement in live performance based on an atmosphere of musical trust that ‘allows for creative risk-taking, which can result in the production of spontaneous musical utterances’ (Seddon, 2005: 58), Empathic Speculation (Bain, 2021) describes a further level of interaction that attempts to encourage another member of the ensemble beyond their perceived musical boundaries; or ‘comfort zones’.

When starting a composition, waiting for the fabled “inspiration to hit” can be unreliable at best and frustrating at worst. To investigate this issue, I look at how experts in other art disciplines approach the practice of creativity, specifically when beginning a new project, which, in composition, equates to starting a new piece. This paper explores how encounters with six creativity exercises originating from the disciplines of writing, choreography, and visual art can result in new possible approaches to jazz composition. The approaches explored include a Daily Method from author Julia Cameron, an Animal Method from poet Ted Hughes, a Haiku Method from authors Linda Anderson and Derek Neale, an Improvisational Method from choreographer Twyla Tharp, a Habit Method from choreographer Jonathan Burrows, and a Modeling Method from visual artist Austin Kleon. Throughout my research, I tested these six methods in my compositional practice and recorded the musical outcomes. I then shared three methods with musical colleagues to try before collecting their thoughts. In each method, I will recount my writing process using the method, my journal entries, and my overall thoughts. In the animal, haiku, and improvisation methods, I will also compare this to the experience of my colleagues. Each section will conclude with a musical work created from the method and my own evaluation of the resulting composition. The research demonstrates viable conceptual strategies for approaching jazz composition derived from other art disciplines and suggests that creative practice can be both accessible and sustainable over the long term.

The project comprises text, location photos, photos of artworks, and video animations that record the experiences of a natural flood that affected house and studio. The project’s content is a consideration of the consequences of the flood towards an existing project in progress at the time and on existing finished artwork. The finished exposition had two unsuccessful reviews; the first due to insufficiently proposing a workable consideration of failure, the second for insufficient clarity of purpose. As this self-published iteration, screenshots taken from the original iteration as formatted on the RC are overlaid with short summaries of aspects of the project’s content, in terms pertaining to both the staining of the flood water and the often unacknowledged writing, re-writing, and over-writing of whatever is the language basis of one's practice. The screenshots, as simulated text-and-image cameos, have the summaries ranged next to them as legible text. The original submitted project is archived though accessible as a PDF only, along with its supplementary papers and video clips.