Portfolio
(2024)
author(s): Fausto Lessa
published in: Research Catalogue
Although the bass guitar is a relatively young instrument compared to most other chordophones, its performance has often been confined by tradition, following near-dogmatic conventions of ‘what’ and ‘how’ to play. At the core of these tenets is its monophonic accompaniment role, primarily articulating melodic lines in the low-frequency range with rhythmic patterns.
Portfolio presents eight compositions that explore the bass guitar beyond this paradigm. These original solo pieces are outputs of an artistic research thesis and constitute a thematic album centered on a polyphonic approach to the bass guitar.
Textile Cartographie
(2024)
author(s): Célia Ferreira
published in: Research Catalogue
Textile Cartographies is a participatory action research project using textile arts as story telling, coordinated by APECV Research Group on Arts, Community and Education (GriArCE) with 29 groups from universities, schools, collectives and NGOs in Americas; Africa; Asia; Australia and Europe. The project aims to give voice to minority and peripheral groups in relation to issues such as environment; climate justice; social justice and other sustainability issues through exploring visual discourses using arts and textile technologies.
ANTHONY BRAXTON'S TRICENTRIC THOUGHT UNIT CONSTRUCT AND POST WAR WESTERN ART MUSIC
(2024)
author(s): Kobe Van Cauwenberghe
published in: Research Catalogue
The perception of the canon of post-war Western art music today is still strongly determined by a constructed dichotomy which keeps Western art music separate from evolutions and radical experiments in jazz and African-American music. The very extensive oeuvre and philosophical body of thought of the American composer Anthony Braxton, what he calls his Tri-Centric Thought Unit Construct (TCTUC), can be seen as the metaphorical elephant in the room. This unique oeuvre has been largely ignored to this day within the repertoire, discourse and performance practice associated with the canon of post-war Western art music. This research project takes Anthony Braxton's TCTUC as a starting point to see how I, as an interpreter of Braxton’s music, can contribute to a broadening of this canon.
My intention with this research is to provide artistic responses to the gaps within the existing discourse on post-war Western art music (see Braxton, Lewis, Piekut, Born, a.o.) by approaching a wide selection of Braxton’s compositions on his own terms. By putting these works as specific case studies on the agenda of relevant actors such as the conservatory, contemporary music festivals and concert series and through recordings and other media, I aimed to make a canon broadening possible through my practice as an interpreter. The results of this research, presented in the form of concerts, lectures, articles, workshops and recordings, are collected in this Research Catalogue website.
We Invite You To Sleep With Us
(2024)
author(s): Kimey Peckpo
published in: Research Catalogue
As a child my father sung me to sleep with folk songs weaving pain, desire and death. This milieu was comforting and his circumstantial act (not a decision) shaped my sense that songs are a technology of meaning. Is meaning a word for perceiving the story with ourselves as a part of it? Plato told a story about how the dialectic will separate us from becoming a part of the cosmos. F. Scott Fitzgerald told a similar story about a man bound to an idealised concept of beauty who cannot find his way back to the cosmos of feeling. He cannot emerge into the pragmatism of what Catherine Malabou calls the “one life only”. A N Whitehead describes this as the event of the past emerging into the present into the future. Using song, I speculatively invite attendees to experience meaning inside the event.
As a researcher drawn to Barad’s ideas of the intra-relational, I feel stories are the cosmos expressing itself. In stories, as with Plato’s Republic, we can accidentally describe the problem. Fred Moten is clear on how maintaining a reciprocal assemblage methodology in the lyric creates an ability to “stay with the problem”,
“Let’s call it the scene of empathy. Lets call it the hesitant sociological scene. The scene of the in calculable rhythm. It is a scene neither of subjection nor objection. Looking with this hearing is a kind of building with or bearing.” (2017)
My research, along the song lines of Whitehead, Moten, Deleuze and Guattari et al, has arrived in the region of singing in academia. I enjoy the irony of Katherine Rundell concluding in her essay in defence of books that when you make them inaccessible to a child,
“you cut them off from the song that humanity has been singing for thousands of years… To fail to do everything we can to help children hear that song is a stupidity for which we should not be forgiven.”
We Invite You To Sleep With Us because my father’s songs were a gateway to the somatic experience of sleeping, a region where we are once more a part of.
Alterlibrary. A regenerative online library.
(2024)
author(s): Meike Gleim
published in: Research Catalogue
We propose to present the Alterlibrary, an experimental digital and life library that conceives knowledge as Renewable Sources—i.e. as an imaginative and transformative knowledge—with the aim to explore possibilities of fostering knowledge's practical role as an enabler of social and political agency (Arendt, The human condition 1958).
Against the impact of today's communication technologies and AI that have turned the public sphere into a fragmented space where polarized discourses, fake news, and consumer-driven narratives thrive (Zumboff 2019), we claim that knowledge production needs to be reframed.
While the mentioned contemporary productions of “knowledge” come along with manipulative content, encourage a consumerist, i.e. passive, mindset, and blur the boundaries between reality and fiction in a hyperreal scenario (Baudrillard 1994), the Alterlibrary experiments with the continuous critical regeneration of knowledge. The following shifts in knowledge production by the Alterlibrary will be explained through its practical translating of the formats on the website:
Transformative: Instead of conceiving knowledge as static, it is continuously reassessed and renegotiated through comments and questions.
Collaborative: Instead of a focus on the individual, the Alterlibrary emphasises the relational and collaborative dimension of knowledge production.
Active: Instead of producing consumers, it requires active engagement.
Ecosystemic: Instead of locating knowledge in the mind, it locates it in an ecosystemic approach to it that focuses on the interrelations between human and non-human actors (Latour 2005).
These shifts are achieved through a display of the Alterlibrary’s collections - textual and visual - that creates a relational, lateral and rhizomatique environment, generating new reading paths between the sources and revealing the inexhaustible potential of recreation, as well as offering the “users” space to rethink and interact with the sources.
The Labyrinth: using new music experience in the performance of historical music
(2024)
author(s): George Kentros
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
The education of a classical violinist – or mine at least, and I see scant evidence that anything else holds today – begins based on a mainstream Romantic ideal consisting of works, geniuses, and concepts of musical authenticity. This is quite useful as a tool to cajole the young violinist into learning the essentials of tone production and playing styles but is at odds with a questioning attitude towards normative traditions that might allow the musician greater interpretive freedom after gaining that technique. While the historically informed performance (HIP) movement was an early, important manifestation of this sort of questioning attitude, the experimental/avantgarde tradition, which has run parallel to these others from the early twentieth century, has not often been applied to the interpretation of historical music.
The experimental tradition does not assume conventional tone production or historical authenticity: instead, it is asking the musician to interpret the symbols on the page according to their own artistically informed predilections and contexts to produce new performances emanating from the artwork, thereby transferring more responsibility for the performance from the composer to the musician. To what extent might the experience of the performer be allowed to contribute to the performance of a historical work?
As part of a three-year artistic research project in Stockholm, I have been looking into ways of using interpretive techniques gleaned from the study of new music and applying these to historical works. This article describes some existing research that questions the traditional interpretive paradigm, along with the ontology of a musical work and its interpretation, and concludes with a case study, “The Labyrinth,” showing one way that these sorts of attitudes can be put into practice for a genre of music to which they seldom, if ever, have been applied.
