A Dialogue of Music between East and West: New Interpretations of 20th-Century Art Songs Based on Ancient Chinese Poems
(2024)
author(s): Zijing Meng
published in: Research Catalogue
This research aims to combine my two artistic identities as a Chinese zither (古筝) player and as a classical singer. After researching, interpreting and analyzing two art song cycles from the 20th century, 5 Poems of Ancient China and Japan by Charles Griffes and Songs of Autumn (秋之歌) by Zhongrong Luo (罗忠镕), I integrate Chinese traditional music forms, ornamentation and instrumentation into my vocal performance. The methodology includes literature review, expert interview, internet media review, score analysis, language analysis and experimental music practice. The outcomes highlight my approach of incorporating inspiration from zither music and folk singing styles into the art song cycles, while also addressing the ethical considerations encountered throughout the research process.
A Study on Ornamentation and Expression in French vocal Music (1650-1750)
(2021)
author(s): Kitty Lai
published in: KC Research Portal
This study aims to understand and learn about the historical performance practice in the 17th century. As an early music singer, I am attracted to the sweet and charming 17th-century French vocal music. In particular, I am interested in the relationship between French ornamentation and expression. This research investigates the background of 17th-century performance practice in France in relation to the ornamentation, the pronunciation of 17th-century French, the different types of ornaments and the expression implied by the ornaments. The performance practice in the 17th century was different from now since it was undergoing a major change from polyphonic to solo music, which emphasised more the text than the music. The knowledge of ornamentation was an expected requirement for all well-trained singers in the 17th century, ornamentation was not merely a decoration, but a tool in emphasizing the importance of the text. Thus, it is necessary to learn ornamentation for a complete 17th-century French vocal performance. Since text was the main element in 17th-century French vocal music, it is important to know the characteristics of French language in this period. The ability to distinguish French long and short syllables was important because ornamentation could only be applied mostly to long syllables. The pronunciation of certain French vowels has undergone a significant alteration, and the ‘old’ way of pronouncing them is included in the study. The research findings also show that some ornaments were meant to be used only in certain expression and they help me to better ‘compose’ French ornamentation in future performances.
Venice 1629: Exposition of Research
(2020)
author(s): Jamie Savan
published in: Research Catalogue, Birmingham City University: Faculty of Arts, Design and Media
This exposition takes the form of a portfolio of materials documenting the research questions, methods and processes underpinning the CD production 'Venice 1629' (performers: The Gonzaga Band, dir. Jamie Savan, released on the Resonus Classics label in July 2018). It includes 10 new performing editions, discussion of performance practice issues including rhythmic proportions, ornamentation and instrumentation, alongside the full recording in streamable MP3 format and a fully referenced version of the booklet essay.
Rethinking ornamentation : a rhetorical approach to da capo arias of Georg Friedrich Händel
(2020)
author(s): Francisca Prestes Branco Gouveia
published in: KC Research Portal
Ornamenting baroque da capo arias is crucial for the historically informed singer. However, the choice of ornaments should do more than fit the affects portrayed in a given piece: it should emphasize their expression and move the affections of the audience. In Mattheson’s Der vollkommene Capellmeister it is suggested that rhetorical figures can be of good use as ornaments. Out of the abundant number of figures listed by theorists associated with the movement of the German Musica Poetica, only a few have simultaneously an affective meaning and can be applied to a pre-existing melody. This research explores some of the existing ornamented melodies by G. F. Händel and singers from the time of the composer to understand how these ornaments can be linked with figures from rhetoric, and how they assist in the expression of the text. This research associates rhetorical figures and manieren with general affects and demonstrates its practical use in selected operatic repertoire by G. F. Händel. This study aims to enhance the author’s aesthetic choices while performing, and furthermore encourage other singers to use ornamentation effectively in similar repertoire.
A Singing Orna/Mentor's Performance or Ir/rational Practice
(2019)
author(s): Elisabeth Laasonen Belgrano
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
This exposition is an orna/mentor’s doing, an attempt, an essay, a performance, a line-of-thinking, a series of relations, a performance-research-model, a beginning of an orna/mentor’s manifesto. It might appear chaotic for some, and inviting for others. Its aim is to allow for the visitor to dive into the ‘orna’ (as in ‘urn’ meaning: an ornamented vase) mentored by a vocal performer. The exposition performs the raw and asymmetric intimacy of a research process searching to penetrate into (while at the same time radically opening up) that-which-is-yet-to-be-known. The performative caring has created an endless amount of philosophizing figures/sounds-in-themselves, as ornamented variations of an original musical score; a translation of one doing of another doing of another doing. Included in this exposition - as yet another ornamented variation – is a ‘peer-review-dialogue’ (a Q & A) between the orna/mentor and a Chorus of Unknown Reviewers. This dialogue has been included to clarify (or perhaps confuse even more) some of the questions that might arise in the mind of the visitor while moving through the exposition.
Ornamenting Vocality. Intra-active methodology for Vocal Meaning-Making.
(2018)
author(s): Elisabeth Laasonen Belgrano
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
This exposition departs from the silence of a non-existing voice. A voice about to touch the ears and eyes of both author and readers/listeners. A voice already sounding in the head of the author - sounding as thoughts, words, letters and sentences. A non/voice being part of a never ending development of new materialities. An onto-epistemological voice diffracted through a singer's process of making sense of a lesson from a 17th century vocal manuscript. A voice as a mattering method for the art of singing through new materialist theories, vocal and discursive narratives and somatic awareness.
"No Self Can Tell"
(last edited: 2024)
author(s): Laasonen Belgrano, E. and Price, M.D.
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
The research explores 'ornamenting' as a transferable method in inter-disciplinary studies, inter-faith dialogues and artistic/therapeutic practices. Adapting techniques of Renaissance musicology, the processes we have developed de-create and re-create vital connections. It is a communica-tions strategy for times of crisis. Starting with simple sonic relations we extend the method far be-yond its traditional musical setting. The practice utilises 'Nothingness' as a component of creativity, providing a novel response to figurations of nothingness as mere negation. Preliminary results sug-gest its potential as a counter force to nihilism and social dislocation.
The work divides into four areas. 1. Primary research on relationships between sound, meaning, and the sense(s) of self, exploring how sense is made of Otherness via processes akin to musical praxis: consonance, dissonance, 'pure voice' and ornamentation. 2. To apply this new perspective to a range of exile experiences – mourning, social disconnection, ex-communication and aggres-sive 'Othering'. 3. To investigate the cancelling of normal time-conditions in crisis situations such as trauma, dementia, and mystical experience, relating non-linear temporality to creative practice and healing. 4. To widely disseminate our results and methods as contributions to the methodology of artistic research via journal articles, live workshops and performances, and a book of original, praxical, testable, and teach-able interventions.
Leçons de Ténèbres
(last edited: 2023)
author(s): Elisabeth Laasonen Belgrano
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
The aim of this project is to investigate vocal ornamentations in French baroque composer Michel Lambert's (1610-1696)'Leçons de Ténèbres. It is an artistic research project where vocal performance practice is diffracted through Karen Barad's theory on agential realism and Japanese philosopher Kitarō Nishida's concepts of Action-Intuition and Basho.
Die Partimenti von Giovanni Paisiello Ansätze zu ihrem Verständnis
(last edited: 2023)
author(s): Nicoleta Paraschivescu
connected to: Academy of Creative and Performing Arts
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
The Partimenti of Giovanni Paisiello: Towards Their Understanding in Context.
Full version only available in German.
This doctoral thesis of Nicoleta Paraschivescu focuses on Paisiello's partimenti and how to approach their realization and performance. To that end I completed an in-depth profile of his pedagogical activities and expanded the already well-known sources—the Regole published in St. Petersburg (1782)—with newly discovered partimenti by Paisiello. Crucial for this study were connections between Paisiello's partimenti and not only his own compositions but also those of his teacher Francesco Durante and his other contemporaries. This broader perspective required taking into account the genre-specific contexts in which Paisiello’s partimenti reside. The inclusion of larger musical forms and complex progressions as compositional models significantly expands the spectrum of possibilities in the realization of his partimenti. A central idea emerging from this study is that partimenti provide a key to the musical language of the time and offer vast possibilities for realization and ornamentation.
Giovanni Girolamo Kapsperger (ca. 1581 – 1651) : Betrachtungen zu seinem Leben und Umfeld, seiner Vokalmusik und seinem praktischen Material zum Basso continuo-Spiel
(last edited: 2023)
author(s): Anne Marie Dragosits
connected to: Academy of Creative and Performing Arts
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
The thesis of Anne Marie Dragosits presents a new perspective on Giovanni Girolamo Kapsperger (ca.1580-1651), who is nowadays only famous for his works for theorbo and lute, his remarkable output of vocal music of all genres being still mostly neglected from musicologists and performers. The thesis aims to change the perception of the composer via three different angles: A reconstruction of his life and career with a substantial amount of new biographical information builds one pillar of the book, whereas in the second part his vocal works are approached and contextualized as prototypes of radical „stile novo“ in Roman characteristic. The last third is dedicated to questions about basso continuo and Roman performance practice in Kapsperger’s lifetime, dealing also with the composers’ own material on continuo as fount of inspiration for continuo players of all instruments.
Important notice from the author:
Further research after finishing the PhD has unearthed important new archival material. Some of my hypotheses have been strongly confirmed, but some chapters of the biographical part of this thesis are not valid any more. Please find an updated version of Kapsperger’s biography here:
https://www.lim.it/en/essay/5964-giovanni-girolamo-kapsperger-9788855430470.html
Vienna, the 14th of November 2020
Anne Marie Dragosits
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.
ORNAMENTING (FORM) AN ECOLOGY OF TRUST (FORCE): Exploring Force and Form through Performance /Performativity
(last edited: 2020)
author(s): Elisabeth Laasonen Belgrano, Fredric Gunve
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
"Let them burn down the library in Alexandria. There are powers above and beyond papyri. We may be temporarily deprived of the ability to rediscover these powers, but we will never eliminate their energy.”
Antonin Artaud
(in: Performance Studies in Motion: International Perspectives and Practices in the Twenty-First Century. Ed. Atay Citron, Sharon Aronson-Lehavi, David Zerbib, Bloomsbury, 2014)
ORNAMENTING (force) an ECOLOGY of TRUST (form)
Exploring Force and Form through Performance /Performativity
23 April, 2015
Pǝ'fɔ:m(ǝ)ns PERFORMANCE/PERFORMATIVITY CROSS FACULTY GROUP
Faculty of Fine, Applied And Performing Arts, University of Gothenburg
What is this power the goes beyond and above structures, rules, and material? An energy and a force, moving ongoingly, turning through any space, ruled by indeterminacy and the emergency of the unexpected. An energy risking its own values, or even the values of others. With these words in mind we proceed asking ourselves: HOW are we as human beings handling our individual forces and energies when facing new and unexpected challenges; or simply when we allow our forces to creatively and madly travel as free and boundless energies; or when our forces are under attack, and when we need to respond or to perform a critical resistance to regimes and superior powers? What can be understood about all non/in/human forces – when we allow ourselves to closely observing our own performative acts of knowing, mattering, sensing, questioning, understanding and making decisions?
The Faculty Group for Performance /Performativity invites you (this is an open invitation!) to an entangled encounter. It is an invitation to enter an academic environment on equal terms, allowing for a broad and at the same time a deep investigation into processes of understanding and knowing. The purpose of this event is to magnifying the motion of force, by placing patterns and fragments of performative ‘doings’ under a microscope and intra-actively analyzing the results in relation to form, space, time, senses, voices, products of knowledge, learning/teaching, and every day practices. We believe there is a need for tracing patterns of forces between scholarly, artistic and scientific doings (forces/practices and forms/theories that at first might appear distant from one another) through a blurred, diffused and diffractioned encounter - in order to re-generate new knowledge. When defining our own ‘doings’ in society we can eventually continue to design solutions creating changes in our habits. In a long-term perspective these changes can transform into new ways of meeting nature, but also in meeting one another as members of a complex global community. The aim of this entangled encounter is to turn forces and forms of academic traditions slightly upside-down/inside-out, somehow mirroring ‘the uneasiness’ sensed around us in our global society. Our common task will be to create an environment where boundaries between subjects and objects at first remain undefined and uncertain in order to intra-actively articulating new knowledge while ORNAMENTING (force) an ECOLOGY of TRUST (form).
For more information:
https://www.facebook.com/events/871813436209632/
Elisabeth Belgrano & Fredric Gunve
Lessons in the Shadow of Death
(last edited: 2017)
author(s): Elisabeth Laasonen Belgrano
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Meaning-making as vocal ornamentation.
This research aims to combine my two artistic identities as a Chinese zither (古筝) player and as a classical singer. After researching, interpreting and analyzing two art song cycles from the 20th century, 5 Poems of Ancient China and Japan by Charles Griffes and Songs of Autumn (秋之歌) by Zhongrong Luo (罗忠镕), I integrate Chinese traditional music forms, ornamentation and instrumentation into my vocal performance. The methodology includes literature review, expert interview, internet media review, score analysis, language analysis and experimental music practice. The outcomes highlight my approach of incorporating inspiration from zither music and folk singing styles into the art song cycles, while also addressing the ethical considerations encountered throughout the research process.open exposition comments (0)
This exposition takes the form of a portfolio of materials documenting the research questions, methods and processes underpinning the CD production 'Venice 1629' (performers: The Gonzaga Band, dir. Jamie Savan, released on the Resonus Classics label in July 2018). It includes 10 new performing editions, discussion of performance practice issues including rhythmic proportions, ornamentation and instrumentation, alongside the full recording in streamable MP3 format and a fully referenced version of the booklet essay.open exposition comments (0)
This exposition departs from the silence of a non-existing voice. A voice about to touch the ears and eyes of both author and readers/listeners. A voice already sounding in the head of the author - sounding as thoughts, words, letters and sentences. A non/voice being part of a never ending development of new materialities. An onto-epistemological voice diffracted through a singer's process of making sense of a lesson from a 17th century vocal manuscript. A voice as a mattering method for the art of singing through new materialist theories, vocal and discursive narratives and somatic awareness.open exposition comments (0)
The aim of this project is to investigate vocal ornamentations in French baroque composer Michel Lambert's (1610-1696)'Leçons de Ténèbres. It is an artistic research project where vocal performance practice is diffracted through Karen Barad's theory on agential realism and Japanese philosopher Kitarō Nishida's concepts of Action-Intuition and Basho.open exposition comments (0)
Meaning-making as vocal ornamentation.open exposition comments (0)