Rethinking the traditional concert format through the lens of Russian mystic composer Nikolai Obukhov
(2022)
author(s): Carlota Carvalho
published in: KC Research Portal
Born in 1892, composer Nikolai Obukhov belongs to the Russian avant-garde generation and was one of the pioneers in experimenting with twelve-tone systems, notation, and electronic instruments. He stands out from his contemporaries having inherited not only some aspects of Alexander Scriabin’s musical style, but, most prominently, the Russian symbolist belief in transcendence and collective spiritual uplifting through the performative act as well. The metaphysical substance and religious symbolism of Obukhov’s body of work reveals itself as a very rich and exciting source of inspiration for performers today.
In this exposition I analyze the most relevant features of Nikolai Obukhov’s aesthetic, from his conception of the total work of art, to his harmonic language and annotations on the score, contextualizing them in the broader cultural and philosophical panorama of Russian Symbolism. I focus on understanding the social function of musical performance, and by conceptualizing certain basic principles, I shape my own performative approach to Nikolai Obukhov’s solo piano works. In the creative process of building a more holistic performance practice inspired by Russian Symbolism, the role of the modern performer expands from one of mere executor to the curator of an experience both for themself and for their audience. With this research I intend to encourage the musical community to reflect on our current relation with performance, to experiment with different concert formats, and to realize that we too, like the artistic community of Russians mystics, can project our own hopes about the future of civilization in our performance practices.
Letting NOTHING do itself
(last edited: 2022)
author(s): Elisabeth Laasonen Belgrano, Mark Douglas Edmund Price
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Western thought emphasises rival schools winning or losing debates: it speaks of knock-down arguments, fatal inconsistencies, of destroying, attacking, and defending positions. 'Philosophical triumph' is a sublimated mode of WOUNDING and SHAMING any opposition. The ancient Greeks used the word aischuné to talk of an opponent being 'put to
shame' – a feminine noun. The 'loser' of an argument is (dis-)figured as less rational, less human. Their Otherness is amplified until they capitulate. Canonical references to thinkers as midwives, nurses, or mothers of ideas are rare: such metaphors imply intimate co-operation and the fleshy, impure materiality of thought. Yet attempts to vanquish the canonical masculine-dominator style of thought with some version of a non-wounding, compassionate mode of thinking readily mimic the power-structures and gender-binaries they seek to oppose. This 'war-model of thought' is ultimately nihilistic – it characterises differences as antitheses, then seeks to destroy the 'opposition'. Such is the problem we seek to address.
During the last two years we have explored philosophical, theological, and aesthetic issues via a praxis-led 'Ornamentation' method. Starting from NOTHING, we allow elements which seem meaningless in themselves to ‘flash up’ (Barad 2017), entangle through intra-action,
accumulating and complexifying the material 'on its own terms', becoming poetic, scholastic and ecstatic. Unknown to one-another, neither contributor has any 'territory' or 'position' to attack or defend. This is not a dialogue, a dialectic, nor even 'two persons making something together'. It is a trans-human performance, a method for allowing the space and material between the contributors to “endlessly open [...] to a variety of possible and impossible reconfigurings” (Hinton 2013:182); “blasting, bursting open, and scattering […] to effect a complete reorganization of meaning” (Barad 2017:41); becoming a/live environment - an ecology in which the world can create itself.
MusicExperiment21 Timeline
(last edited: 2018)
author(s): Paulo de Assis, Lucia D'Errico
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
A visual representation of the complete activities of MusicExperiment21 with hyperlinks to the most relevant events, performances, publications and meetings.
A visual representation of the complete activities of MusicExperiment21 with hyperlinks to the most relevant events, performances, publications and meetings.open exposition comments (1)