ÖR - AS ongoing loop
(2025)
author(s): Aðalheiður Sigursveinsdóttir
published in: Research Catalogue, Iceland University of the Arts
AS this is my final project about my final project at the University of the Arts in Iceland, it serves as a reflection on my own artistic process. AS I am completing my MA in Performing Arts, this moment signifies an ending, yet I feel I am still in the midst of processing it.
AS I set out to create a documentary play rooted in personal experience, aiming to bring realism to the stage. AS I allowed myself throughout the process to repeatedly ask: what am I truly confronting? AS I came to realize that, in the beginning, I was not being honest with myself. AS I tended to lean toward abstraction, to fix things, to escape into dreams rather than meet myself with clarity. AS I was not truthful to my own state of being.
AS a way to hold myself accountable, ÖR ultimately became a kind of encounter, with a meeting within a Program of Honesty. AS if ÖR blends inner and outer realities, flowing in a hybrid form of lived and performed experience.
AS are my initials, it echos in my writings. AS an ongoing loop.
Unburying, from Liminals, Emerging: Three Contexts for a Microtonal Prepared Piano
(2025)
author(s): Matt Choboter
published in: Rhythmic Music Conservatory, Copenhagen
Can an acoustic grand piano be sonically and conceptually reimagined so as to re-negotiate its foundational assumptions around tuning and timbre? Why should the piano continue to be so accustomed to only one tuning system? In contrast, how can “pure sounds” (ratios found in the harmonic series) co-exist with ethnically diverse microtonal tunings?
Spanning a period from 2020-2022, “Unburying, from Liminals, Emerging” explores a microtonal prepared piano in three artistic contexts. These include: a solo project called “Postcards of Nostalgia; a chamber ensemble consisting of saxophone trio, percussion and piano; and a “percussion ensemble with soprano saxophone called Juniper Fuse.
Dialoging with a newly invented tuning system, what emergent properties might we find when magnetic piano preparations are used to evoke specific timbral effects from Balinese Gamelan and Indian Karnatik music? Collectively, how can this expanded notion of “piano” merge with spatialization to facilitate interactive experiences for audiences? How might a process-oriented Jungian-inspired dream work communicate itself so as to distill and coalesce a fertile musical landscape?
Towards a forgotten language I implications of prelinguistic language and aphasia in my vocal works
(2024)
author(s): Nikos Galenianos
published in: KC Research Portal
Prelinguistic language and aphasia share common ground, both in theory as in practice. Approaching the two fields as a pool of information and even more as a metaphor for composing vocal – based music, opens up a new window of tools and potentials.
This paper is a collection of concepts, originating from prelinguistic language, aphasia and from my general vocal composition practice. Application examples are given from my own work, for each of these concepts. These concepts are gathered together into one diagram, which eventually questions whether the playful deconstruction that creators often look for is a step forward or backwards in time. Eventually, the paper questions the use of existing texts in composition under the scope of Jungian theory.