Research Catalogue

Hvordan kan en tekst koblet til musikken bidra i både interpretasjon og fremføring?

How can one learn to improvise convincingly within the context of the nineteenth-century piano repertoire? And why is it important to improvise on this repertoire in the twenty-first century? Taking the music of Robert Schumann (1810−56) as a departure point, Playing Schumann Again for the First Time proposes an answer to these questions through methods towards a pianistic practice that is driven by experimentation and strives to continually find more layers where improvisation can take place, both in sounding musical practice and in notation. These practice-based methods are contextualized by a discussion of the presence of improvisation in Western classical musical practice in the nineteenth century. They are then substantiated by an argument to use improvisation as a tool for rethinking the current performance practice of nineteenth-century music. Improvisation itself and the concepts driving this term will also be addressed: improvisation in musical performance will be described as a process guided by a feedback loop between mimesis and morphosis with which the practitioner engages using his or her individual cognitive and embodied approach to listening, forgetting, and conceptualizing; the results of which bear his or her own sonic signature. The knowledge gained in this project lies within the realm of what will be described as improvisation as practice, a category of improvisational behavior that circumvents the need to be presented as art and is rather intended for the development of one’s own music-making.

MUSTEK70 TEKMAST70

This exposition contains the manuscript and artistic components of the doctoral research project "The poetics of autopoiesis: visual arts, autonomy and artificial intelligence." The project aimed to explore the limits of creative autonomy in face of recent developments in generative visual artificial intelligence.

My research is a failed writer's failed attempt to become a literary scholar. I'm researching from the position of an amoeba in academia – at certain moments I claim to be a Trojan Horse, a Trixster, or something else subversive. But more often than not it just ends up being: failure. I write from a writing-reading position. Where my reading of literature is infiltrated by my writing practice. This exposition is based on my failed dissertation in literature, which I am now trying to recover in the form of an artistic research project. The literary dissertation is about Monika Fagerholm's novel "Who killed Bambi?" (2019), and my failure is the inability to be scientific and detached, to stay within the framework. In the exposition I examine this from a queer/lesbian and neuroqueer/autistic perspective. I start from an emotional (un)knowledge and try to distort ideas and boundaries between failure and play.

This research will focus on comparing tasks that are used to measure the development of executive functions (EFs) and musicianship exercises according to the Kodály concept in order to find analogies and functional intersections between them. EFs are essential for our mental and physical health, for school and job success. Since these skills can be improved and early EFs training might help reduce social disparities in academic achievement and health, pinpointing activities that could develop EFs has become an important research topic in psychology, neuroscience, and education in recent years. The main direction of this research will be a close examination of the tasks used for measuring the three core components of EFs - inhibition, cognitive flexibility and working memory alongside musicianship exercises taken from Kodály methodological books and lesson observations that work in a similar way. This study has found similarities between EF tasks and Kodály musicianship exercises in all the three core components of EFs. These findings could indicate that with Kodály’s music education approach we are not only practising musicianship exercises but we might challenge our EF skills as well. This research, therefore, could be a first step that leads to a more complex investigation into the potential positive impact of music education according to the Kodály Concept on EFs.