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 project aims to develop transcultural approaches of inspiration (which we regard as mutually appreciated intentional and reciprocal artistic influence based on solidarity) by combining approaches from contemporary music composition and improvisation with ethnomusicological and sociological research. We encourage creative (mis)understandings emerging from the interaction between research and artistic practice, and between European art music, folk and non-western styles, in particular from indigenous minorities in Taiwan. Both comprehension and incomprehension yield serendipity and inspiration for new research questions, innovative artistic creation, and applied follow-ups among non-western communities. The project departs from two premises: first, that contemporary western art music as a practice often tends to resort to certain degrees of elitism; and second, that non-western musical knowledge is often either ignored or merely exploited when it comes to compositional inspiration. We do not regard inspiration as unidirectional, an “input” like recording or downloading material for artistic use. Instead, we foster artistic interaction by promoting dialogical and distributed knowledge production in musical encounters. Developing inter­disciplinary and transcultural methodologies of musical creation will contribute on the one hand towards opening up the—rightly or wrongly supposed—“ivory tower of contemporary composition”, and on the other hand will contribute towards the recognition of the artistic value of non-western musical practices. By highlighting the reciprocal nature of inspiration, creative (mis)understandings will result in socially relevant and innovative methodologies for creating and disseminating music with meaning. The methods applied in the proposed project will start out from ethnographic evidence that people living in non-western or traditional societies often use methods of knowledge production within the sonic domain which are commonly unaddressed or even unknown among western contemporary music composers (aside from exotist or orientalistic appropriations of “the other”). The project is designed in four stages: field research and interaction with indigenous communities in Taiwan with a focus on the Tao people on Lanyu Island, collaborative workshops in Vienna, an artistic research and training phase with invited indigenous Taiwanese coaches in Vienna, and feeding back to the field in Taiwan. During all these stages, exchange and coordination between composers, music makers, scholars and source community experts will be essential in order to reflect not only on the creative process, but also to analyse and support strong interaction between creation and society. Re-interaction with source communities as well as audience participation in the widest sense will help to increase the social relevance of the artistic results. The University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna (MDW) will host the project. The contributors are Johannes Kretz (project leader) and Wei-Ya Lin (project co-leader, senior investigator) with their team of seven composers, ten artistic research partners from Taiwan and six artistic and academic consultants with extensive experience in the relevant fields.

Documentation of preliminary steps and collection of musical material and related reflections during the first Term of the Master's Program in Improvisation and World Music. December 2022

Olskroksmotet Blues är den avslutande delen i mitt autoetnografiska projekt som pågick i olika former mellan 2014-2021, och där jag bland annat publicerat två artiklar (Kroon 2015 och 2016). RC expositionen består av tre delarbeten - arkivblad, arkivmönster och göteborg grid – jämte bakgrund och teori & metod. Utifrån min historia som fosterbarn söker jag fånga såväl mina egna erfarenheter och uttryck, som att sätta dessa i ljuset av större samhälleliga skeenden. Olskroksmotet Blues var också del av Mikrohistoriers fysiska grupputställning på Konstfack, Stockholm i september 2021.

This article explores monotheistic religions as powerful linguistic and social structures that function through a mechanism of collective delusion. Drawing on Jacques Lacan’s structuralist insights, the text argues that these faiths are not based on objective history but are fictions codified long after the events they describe.

MINA is a collaborative project that investigates sharing as a material condition of artistic practice. It seeks to create situations where practices can remain active and in relation, fostering exchanges between different forms of knowledge through situated encounters and provisional configurations. Rather than treating sharing as a discrete act, MINA understands it as an ongoing practice that shapes how attention circulates, how relations are formed, and how practices are sustained over time. Dialogues, exchanges, critiques, and other forms of mutual influence operate here not as supplementary moments, but as constitutive forces within artistic processes, even when their effects are subtle, delayed, or difficult to trace. Working without predefined methods, MINA approaches artistic practice as a field of orientations that emerges through games, conversations, and shared situations. Each encounter becomes a way of testing how sharing can redistribute attention, unsettle habitual positions, and open space for collective thinking.