Blast die wohlgegriffnen Flöten: Understanding and comparing J.S. Bach’s use of recorder and traverso
(2025)
author(s): Dante Jongerius
published in: KC Research Portal
As a recorder and traverso player, J.S. Bach’s works form a crucial part of my repertoire. They include some of the most technically advanced music written for the recorder, in which the instrument seems to be pushed to its limits. Meanwhile, the traverso is welcomed into the orchestra, and it has come to stay. In order to understand the many problems surrounding the recorder and traverso parts from Bach’s music, I need to know how Bach used each instrument specifically. And to be able to make the right artistic choices, I need to know why he chose the recorder for one composition, and the traverso for the other. In answering these questions, I have used my experience in playing both woodwinds to my advantage. My journey has led me through an analysis of terminology, tessitura, symbolism, clefs and pitch surrounding Bach’s flute parts. And for context, I have compared Bach’s use of the recorder and traverso with that of his contemporaries. With my research, I present an overview of the characteristic differences between the two instruments in Bach’s music, giving my own artistic view on some of the unsolved mysteries surrounding Bach and his use of flutes.
Holding Open Space
(2025)
author(s): Nicola Visser
published in: Research Catalogue
This practice-as-research (PaR) project explores how we use our eyes in seeing and being seen within the context of the mover and witness roles, as practiced in the ‘open space’ segment of Contemplative Dance Practice (CDP). As a dance artist-researcher, I am interested in how a witness holds space for another in ways that go beyond the concept of ‘non-judgement’. My PaR was animated by the question: How do we hold ‘open space’ across distance? Framed in the context of Covid-19 social distancing, it opened up a research inquiry into practices of looking for the witness and leads me to propose that witnessing is not only an embodied technique but an improvisational skill.
Witnessing is a co-creative act, how we look changes what we see. My study was invigorated by the theoretical frameworks and writings of key thinkers—including Erin Manning on the Minor Gesture (2016, 2022, 2023), Eugene Gendlin’s practice steps of a Process Model (2017), and Lauren Berlant on transformational infrastructure (2017)—and finds re-orientation with/in the project of decoloniality. My methodology includes studio practice of MoverWitness relation in the open space segment of CDP, parallel methods of close reading, close talking (Schoeller 2022), ‘close drawing’ and ‘close dancing’, and interviews with artists about how they use their eyes in their practices. Ultimately, my PaR project formulates a principle and practice that I term Slow Seeing. The study of looking, attention and perception lead me to detail findings that contribute to ways of seeing as an epistemological concern. The insights are arranged into three broad fields. These include, first the practice as it pertains to contemplative dance training, where I propose a unit of embodied technique called ‘easy eyes’ and an improvisation score for the witness in a MoverWitness relation. Second, a reframing of CDP as a transformational infrastructure and a place of radical hospitality for fugitive gestures. And third, reflections on the socio-political implications of this eye practice and its potential to delink dance praxis as part of the project of decoloniality. A key insight is the notion that the eye technique and practice levers a shift in the sediment of our habitual unquestioned ordering of the world and cultivates courage in doing and knowing other-wise. It is strikingly significant because it wedges up a fulcrum and shifts the way we perceive small and big things —where we sit, how we stand, which tea we buy, movement, relation, migration, borders, identity, capitalism, power paradigms, ideology, the far away-nearby, love, everything-everything. So small. It makes a rupture, a crack, a glitch, and a fertile place for lively possibility
echoes of a journey through eco
(2025)
author(s): Bødvar Hole
published in: Royal Academy of Art, The Hague
Thesis of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2023.
BA Photography.
The research paper Echoes of a Journey Through Eco is a record of several-yet-one-and-the-same journey(s). I departed guided by the two questions:
What can I learn from the forest?
How can I learn from the forest?
The first part of the journey I started as a humble, aimless observer in Haagse Bos, where I would sit and let my surroundings dictate what I would write. The symbolic, yet totally non-existent line between culture and nature became subject of my research.
I did not even know the history of the forest, or anything about trees from a more universally agreed upon perspective (science). I had to alter my approach to the research. Slowly the humble observer discovered a part of him inquisitively searching for questions and answers. I was approaching the field of ecology.
Some months into my journey I carved the fateful words “bark bark” in the bark of a tree. I questioned myself as an artist making a mark on nature. I started writing a text to underpin a few things I think an artist should think about when their practice takes place in and with nature involved. Some very critical, almost cynical part of me took stead of the humble observer. It seems I needed to vent some things.
The final paper holds fragments from all parts of the journey, from the humble observer to the cynical critic. As a journey it has barely begun, and as a text it is full of superficial reflections, very subjective opinions, and shortcomings. But, as the seed this text sprung from was planted only 6 months ago, it should be expected that it is still only a sapling about yay tall (20-30cm were I a Scots pine). If there is one thing I learned from trees, it’s patience.
Writing and instructing research video
(2025)
author(s): Sara Hulkkonen
published in: Aalto University
This video sequence is part of a practice-led research that explorest the social and material actors in glassblowing practices. In this video the designer of the glass vessel under making is learning how to write on the clear glass blank with a blue glass stringer. During this process the designer becomes an apprentice glassblower. She also works as a research assitant in this project. The practitioner-researcher works as the designers gaffer for the vessel, as well as a master who is instructing the apprentice in learning a new skill.
The four camera angles in the multiscreen video inform about different perspectives taken on the social and material actors in the study.
Decatastrophizing Failure Through Playfulness
(2025)
author(s): Nicholas Cornia, Arabella Pare
published in: Research Catalogue
This is an invitation to generate your own article about playfulness and its power to reconceive failure in artistic research, through a simple game of chance and knowledge. This text contextualises the game within the experiences of the authors, researchers at Orpheus Instituut, who have been engaged in creating explorative spaces for new types of collaboration, using the principles of playfulness. Through a combination of artistic and theoretical work and practical experience with iterative case studies in which game mechanics are tested, refined, and tested again, the authors are engaged in a process of discovery within a “magic circle”. Open-ended experimentation and collaboration are central areas of focus. Failure is re-conceived as a learning process and its catastrophic effects are integrated into the make-believe space of the game, while the insights and experiences drawn from these failures are retained once we step out of the magic circle.
