Research Catalogue

Unni Løvlid (NMH) and Marianne Baudouin Lie (NTNU), from Norwegian traditional and classical/contemporary music backgrounds, collaborate to explore tonality's diversity, leveraging their distinct practices to enhance inner ear training and pedagogical methods. Their project aims to develop a shared verbal language and deepen collective understanding of varied tonalities, challenging the standardization of tonality in music. By internalizing diverse tonalities through the inner ear, they seek to freely interpret and create music, fostering new artistic insights for both composed and improvised works. In 2021, they partnered with five composers—Sven Lyder Kahrs, Lasse Thoresen, Karin Rehnqvist, Lene Grenager, Ole Henrik Moe, and Jon Øivind Ness—to create new compositions and improvisations centered on tonality, inspired by folk music. The duo investigates how folk singers and classical instrumentalists adapt to new listening and auditive methods, exploring microtonality, quarter tones, and pure intervals. Through artistic research and educational efforts, they aim to develop methods to embody microtonality naturally, benefiting performers, students, and the broader musical community. The project invites collaboration with composers, ear training experts, and music theorists to inspire new music and deepen tonal understanding, contributing to artistic development and a richer musical discourse.

This exposition or archive is a work in progress, under construction, for gathering material of encounters with junipers.

Arts-based-philosophy is an emerging research concept at the cutting edge of the arts, philosophy and the Sciences in which cross-disciplinary research collectives align their research practices to finally stage their investigations in field-performances, shared with the public. Our research explores the significance of the HEART in artistic research and performance philosophy from a cross-cultural perspective, partially based on the concepts of the HEART in the works of two artist-philosophers, in which philosophy already became arts-based-philosophy: Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra and Aurobindo’s poetic opus magnum Savitri. We generally assume that the works of artist-philosophers are not only engaged in “creating concepts” (Deleuze), but their concepts are also meant to be staged artistically to let them bodily matter in fact. The role of the HEART in respect to this process of “bodily mattering” is the core objective under investigation: Firstly, because we hold that atmospheres trigger the HEART of a lived-body to taste the flavor of things it is environmentally engaged with basically in an aesthetic manner (Nietzsche). In this respect the analysis of the classical notion for the aesthete in Indian philosophy and aesthetics, sahṛdaya––which literally means, “somebody, with a HEART”––becomes crucial. Secondly, because the HEART is said to be not just reducible to one’s manifest Nature, but has access to one’s virtual Nature as well. The creation hymn in the oldest of all Vedas (Rgveda) for instance informs us that a HEART is capable of crossing being (sat) & non-being (asat), which makes it fluctuate among these two realms and even allows its aspirations to let virtual possibilities matter. Such concepts show striking similarities with contemporary concepts in philosophy-physics, e.g. the concepts of “virtual particles” and “quantum vacuum fluctuations” (Barad).

This project is about zero time, which is no time, but can also mean the time of change or a new beginning. The phantoms in question are not ghosts or spectres, but placeholders; they stand for something absent, like the mathematical concept of zero. An important example for such a phantom is phantom pain. This term refers to the perception of painful sensations in a part of the body that is no longer there, for example because it has been surgically or traumatically removed. The key point is: The limb, organ or eye is missing, but the pain is still there, and the pain felt there is real. The reality of pain is essential in the context of this work. Not just phantom pain, but the broader concept of phantom experience is the subject of Phantomology. Phantom experiences are experiences that were not really experienced, such as traumatic events in early childhood; events that were not integrated into the ego system and therefore did not become part of our – accessible – memory. The aim of the Phantomology project is to develop artistic strategies for dealing with these phantoms, guided by the question of how to grasp and investigate them as something absent. The challenge is that it is ultimately about nothingness, timelessness, and our striving to fill voids as a basic human desire, this desire to give content to the gaps we are constantly confronted with in the timelines of our lives.

This exposition proposes revisiting as a method for engaging with long term artistic research. The method was developed while returning to a series of twelve year-long works based on repetition called Animal Years (2002-2014) in the context of the Academy of Finland funded research project How To Do Things With Performance (2016-2020). The same method was further explored as an artistic tool in the project Pondering with Pines (2022-2024). The method could be generalised into revisiting understood as return and repeat, recycle and recombine, reflect and reconsider and adapted to many types of artistic practices.

When does the singer become an artist? We ran an opera laboratory at the Department of Opera at Stockholm University of the Arts, during the years 2017-2020. With the searchlight focused on the creativity of the singer, we wanted to explore the borderland between the rehearsed and the spontaneous, in the art of performing opera. Our basic questions were: -when does the performance of the opera singer, which requires a high level of technical perfection, open up towards the unpredictable, creative moment? -Where is the border line between interpretation and improvisation, does it even exist? We commissioned a mini-opera to use as working material;Camilles irrfärder & äventyr, composed by Petter Ekman to a libretto by Tuvalisa Rangström. Windows for improvisation were included in the score, where the performers can play with text, rythm, melody or structure in different ways. In the work we alternated between artistic experiments and reflection. The ensemble reflected on how the different games and methods opened or closed the creative flow, and how the improvisations affected the performers' relationship to the material. A parallel focus was how the singers were inspired to change or expand their voices. We have found new methods in the work of developing the creative ability and force of the opera singer. We have applied the methods in different ways in higher education for Opera singers, developing new pedagogic approaches in the process.