The relation of clave motifs, batá rhythms and vocal performance in Yoruba-influenced Afro-Cuban music
(2025)
author(s): Sarah Raabe
published in: Codarts
Yoruba-influenced Afro-Cuban music blends traditional Yoruba rhythms with Cuban cultural expressions, often serving as a means of communicating with the orishas in Santería. Central to this music are the batá drums, which convey "drum language" that mimics the tonal nature of Yoruba speech. The batá drums and clave rhythms interact closely with the voice, creating intricate polyrhythms and emotional tension. This fusion of drumming and vocal elements is both a powerful artistic expression and an essential part of spiritual and cultural ceremonies.
This research investigates the relationship between clave rhythms, batá rhythms, and vocal timing in Yoruba-influenced Afro-Cuban music, aiming to explore how drums and clave can reinforce vocal timing. The study emphasizes the interconnectivity of these elements and their impact on rhythmic synchronization, tension, and release. The project has progressively deepened the understanding of clave patterns, their integration into vocal performance, and the application of these insights in improvisation and composition.
Through the exploration of batá drumming, clave patterns, and vocal phrasing, the research highlights the importance of internalizing rhythm and understanding its cultural context. The study examines the roles of various rhythms on batá drums, the significance of the clave in guiding rhythm, and the complex interplay between vocal lines and percussion. The research also reflects on the challenges of incorporating 6/8 and 4/4 meters into performances, the importance of rhythmic precision, and the necessity of clear communication within the ensemble.
Throughout the cycles of the study, significant progress has been made in improving rhythmic coordination, vocal projection, and timing, particularly in relation to the clave and batá rhythms. Field research, re-enactment exercises, and expert feedback have refined the performer’s technical skills and deepened the understanding of rhythmic expression. The outcome recordings demonstrate marked improvement in vocal and drumming integration, offering clearer interpretations of traditional and contemporary pieces.
Ultimately, this research contributes to a broader understanding of Afro-Cuban music and its performance practice, expanding the rhythmic expression possibilities of the vocalist while emphasizing the importance of cultural context, musical authenticity, and artistic development.
Performing Gaspar Cassadó’s music through Pau Casals’ legacy
(2025)
author(s): Clara Piccoli
published in: Codarts
The aim of my research is to understand how to improve my playing and develop my interpretation of Gaspar Cassadó's music by incorporating Pau Casals' playing style into my own. My goal is not to emulate Casals but to grasp the spirit of his playing, understanding the key concepts, technical and interpretative, of his performing style, and to apply and adapt them to my playing to develop my performance of some compositions by Cassadó. To accomplish this goal, I will firstly go through an extended data collection, listening to and analyzing many Casals’ recordings, watching his recorded masterclasses on YouTube, and reading articles, theses, books, and treatises about his playing. I will interview, get feedback, and have lessons with some experts on my topic. I will work on the embodiment of my discoveries through a self-critical practice and through my re-enactment of Casals’ recording of Requiebros. I will then apply my discoveries and experiment with them in my performances of Requiebros and in the first movement of the Preludio-Fantasia of his Suite for Solo Cello, which I will then record to show the outcomes of my research. My research has improved my performances of those pieces and my playing in general because of a fuller and more radiant sound, improved articulation and clarity, better phrasing direction, enhanced unity within the pieces, and richer expressivity through the use of Casals-inspired expressive intonation, rubato, vibrato, and portamento. This study is aimed for people who are curious about Casals' approach to music and his performing style, as well as how I was inspired by it and how I used and experimented with my findings to improve my playing and particularly to interpret some of Cassadó's compositions.
Images as Defibrillators: An Attempt to Resuscitate the World
(2025)
author(s): Giselle Hinterholz
published in: Research Catalogue
This visual essay emerges from a confrontation with interrupted spaces, once places of life and labour, now marked by abandonment. It is not an attempt to document the ruin, but to propose a sensitive listening capable of rediscovering vibration where everything appears still. Inspired by Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception (1945), I understand the body as a space of resonance with the world, a place where every surface touched by the gaze gains density and breath.
Here, the images function as defibrillators: distortions, cuts, and movements inserted into the photographs act as electric shocks, attempts to resuscitate territories that no longer breathe. Each photograph is less a documentary proof of abandonment than a sensitive reverberation, where silence and noise converge. If social and urban abandonment crystallises time, artistic practice seeks to open fissures, to return a pulse to what once seemed lost.
Thus, the images do not merely record, they react. The photographic gesture is one of listening and response, not restoration, but insistence that something might still vibrate, even when life has already ceased.
How Audience Bodies Form
(2025)
author(s): Tuomas H Laitinen
published in: University of the Arts Helsinki
This artistic doctoral research approaches art, not as a variety of artworks or performances, but as a variety of collective bodies that are summoned. It addresses the subordinate and complicit way collective audience bodies form in relation to artistic performances.
The commentary introduces the concept of an “audience body”, emerging when individual bodies gather to become an audience. Audience bodies are described through preconditions that are needed for one to appear, conditions that contribute to its subsistence and variables that determine the primary qualities and the degree of actuality of that audience body. More specifically, the commentary addresses the local genre of “esitystaide”, developed especially in the Helsinki-area during the last 30 years. Neologism “beforemance art” is introduced due to a lack of an English equivalent. Esitystaide/beforemance art is the artistic context of this study and is presented as a genre of art, in which the complicity of audience bodies is a fundamental material of artistic creation. The Finnish word “esitys”, being the medium of the genre of esitystaide, is defined as the sum of a performance and an audience body. The theoretical approach towards audience bodies is presented as impartial with regard to different genres of art, but the practice of research favours esitystaide/beforemance art. This leads to political conclusions that defend the exposed complicity of and the experimental relation to audience bodies which are characteristic for this specific genre.
This theoretical argumentation has been developed through an iterative series of 30 drafts and two examined artistic parts, made by the author, as well as through a parapractice of audience membership. The drafts and examined parts are works of esitystaide/beforemance art, in which printed or digital texts are staged in different ways for audiences to read. The works and the thinking developed in them have been significantly affected by dialogues with audience members and their feedback. The commentary discloses how the process of thinking, resulting in the main arguments of the work, has evolved through this artistic research practice and how temporal, spatial, textual and material design of the events has been developed to address more adequately the phenomenon of an audience body. The parapractice of audience membership is introduced as a term describing the attendance of artworks made by others—a way of accumulating knowledge parallel to and yet different from practicing art.
The arguments made in the commentary aim to provide conceptual tools for artists, scholars and pedagogues who attend the phenomenon of audience in their work. They can also serve as a basis for further research on the political significance of esitystaide/beforemance art and related art forms. Methodologically, the research offers an example of an iterative and dialogical artistic research practice and its presentation; the relationship between art and theory unfolds as both fruitful and troubled. Through the introduction of the parapractice of audience membership, it argues for using art, equally to the use of bibliographical materials, as reference material of artistic research. Through the use of a Finnish term and its local context as part of concept-creation in English, the work defends the importance of local thinking, which links artistic research to the land upon which it takes form.
The Body That Never Was
(2025)
author(s): Giselle Hinterholz
published in: Research Catalogue
This project was born from an old discomfort, but only found form when the body — finally — began to speak. A body that, for years, was shaped by obedience, guilt, and restraint. A body that served more to please than to exist.
The Body That Never Was is not merely a visual installation. It is a passage. Each frame carries fragments of a story interrupted, silenced, violated — but once told, it becomes a material of resistance.
These pieces are not illustrations of pain. They are gestures of defiance. They are symbolic bodies constructed from layers of memory, lived experiences, open wounds, and poorly healed scars. Within them, there are traces of abandonment, escape, abuse, and the absence of protection. But there is also something else: the impulse to persist.
The project arises from deeply personal stories, yet it offers a mirror in which other women may recognise their own paths — without fear, without shame, without the guilt inherited from centuries of silence. Here, art does not seek to console. It seeks to expose what was hidden, to name what was smothered, and to open space for other possible forms of existence.
More than a healing process, this project is a rite of insurgency against the mechanisms that perpetuate pain as destiny. Here, the wounded matter rises as discourse.
