Composition strategies for the creation of science-based interdisciplinary and collaborative music-theatre
(2024)
author(s): Daniel Blanco Albert
published in: Birmingham City University
The practice-based PhD research project comprises the development and application of composition strategies and techniques generated through interdisciplinary collaboration to integrate elements and ideas from non-sonic disciplines into the musical discourse of new music-theatre works, specifically opera. I explore mechanisms of mapping and association that engage with both the specific subject matter of each piece and the creative collaborative environment in which they are created, thus generating different compositional resources that I use to inform the creative process. By using mapping techniques, I can deeply engage and communicate a subject matter on different levels in the musical composition.
The framework for this research is the intertwining of art and science on a variety of levels from a music compositional perspective. Within this framework, I explored the integration of knowledge and data from the natural and social sciences to inform the composition of four science-based music-theatre works: In response to Naum Gabo: Linear Construction in Space No. 1 (2020), Autohoodening: The Rise of Captain Swing (2021), The Flowering Desert (2022), and TRAPPIST-1 (2023).
With this approach, I aim to closely link these works with their particular subject matter instead of being composed based just on my personal musical taste. By consistently and cohesively applying the strategies and techniques explored in this research, the outcome is not creating music about science or music inspired by science, but, instead, music embedded with science in which the scientific data and knowledge inform the composition decisions. The subject matter is therefore intertwined within the musical discourse, its performativity and theatricality, and its relationship with the other disciplines and collaborators involved in the creation of these music-theatre works.
On Klänge - Space, Time and Body
(last edited: 2024)
author(s): Erika Matsunami
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
ON KLÄNGE - SPACE, TIME AND BODY
This artistic research project entitled "Variations'' by Erika Matsunami was started to explore a multi-layered open score, "Corona" (1962) for pianist(s) by Toru Takemitsu in 2020, which became a starting point of Takemitsu oeuvres. Thereby, I developed the different ideas of three variations from the aspect of the 21st century. The research question is: "Is music rather phenomenal than to express?"
The starting point of this artistic research is a new interpretation "Corona-STEMS-GALAXYOMEGA" (May 2020) by Lukas Huisman who is a pianist and holds a PhD in the performing arts/piano in classic-modern music. (It is the same as the artistic master in the classical sense for teaching. He is not a performer, he can practically study the piano (artistic material) techniques at the academic level, and he can teach his techniques as his original in Toru Takemitsu. He is the PhD master of classic modern in piano for education.) He started to embody "Corona" (1962) by Takemitsu together with the composer and sound artist Patrick Housen. Huisman and Housen are called Graphology duo. (Graphology duo is a musical performative duo formed by Patrick Housen with live electronics and Lukas Huisman on piano.)
With "Variations", I attempt to address the question of immateriality in the arts and the academic meaning (Sinne) on immateriality in artistic research. I question the context from the critical aspect of neuroscience, and ask whether "immateriality" – the aesthetic value in the arts – is or is not in today’s technology? How can "immateriality" in the arts be judged today with the technology in aesthetics? (The approach of Kant in today's aesthetics as well as philosophy, without the study of neuroscience, this subject could not be researched.)
Takemitsu's aim of the study in his multi-layered open score "Corona" (1962) is not only for the general piano piece, it was also started in his musical composition study under Cage.
In "Variations", I have been working and researching the origin of Toru Takemitsu's ideas.
I collaborate(d) with Housen as a visual artist for a sound installation in this artistic project. This resulted in the artistic research project "Variation I", which relates to this artistic research on "Klänge - Space, Time and Body". I, as a visual artist, have been exploring the subject of time and space in "Corona" (1962) for pianist(s) by Toru Takemitsu for the exploration of a new interpretation; it was the starting point of "Variations" which consists of three parts of artistic research.
My practical contribution is a performance in the site-specific installation for "Variation I" - ("Corona without Pianist for 4-ch discrete sound installation - an invisible sense ‘who is left to drift in the loneliness of the remaining scent’" in 2020. Thus, the theoretical exploration is in terms of ongoing artistic research in the philosophy of sound. The aim of this artistic research "On Klänge - Space, Time and Body" is toward the new multi-layered open score "Variation I, II and III". In 2020, it was simultaneously the subject of "Corona-STEMS-GALAXYOMEGA" by the Patrick Housen and Lukas Huisman duo, and "Corona without Pianist for 4-ch discrete sound installation - an invisible sense ‘who is left to drift in the loneliness of the remaining scent’" by Erika Matsunami.
Variation II consists of a collaboration with the composer Valerio Sannicandro (PhD in Musicology) and deals with the subject of the spontaneous within the topic of DNA from the biological aspect. Therefore, joint artistic research will explore the philosophy of sound from the aspect of musicology and aesthetics in 2021.
(In the works)
"Convertere ad Deum Tuum": A Road Map Through the Landscape of Performative Theology
(last edited: 2023)
author(s): Elisabeth Laasonen Belgrano
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
This exposition is a bilingual presentation - in Swedish and in English - of two parallell tracks through the Landscape of Performative Theology. One of them is the result of a course taken during the Autumn of 2022, as part of my theological training towards priesthood in the Church of Sweden. The other track is a collection of entangled fragments part of a MA thesis in Systematic Theology were a diffractive reading is carried out through theologist Prof. Graham Ward's "How the light gets in. Ethical life I" (2016) and Prof. Erika Fischer Lichte's "The Transformative Power of Performance. A New Aesthetics" (2008). This reading will also embrace results from the fields of Artistic Research and Performance Philosophy.
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
Glories to Nothingness
(last edited: 2018)
author(s): Elisabeth Laasonen Belgrano, Björn Ross
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
GLORIES TO NOTHINGNESS
SORROW. MADNESS. NOTHING.
A voice. A gesture.
A beginning. An experiment. A sketch.
A becoming.
... based on the story of a singer’s performance of paradoxes and passions
in 17th century Venice.
... based on a singer’s research – performed in the 21st century – about the Art of Performing Everything and Nothing.
GLORIES TO NOTHINGNESS is an artistic research project investigating performative acts of moving between Vocalizing ≈ Articulating ≈ Mattering ≈ Trusting.
The research question: How to perform trust?
Every movement, utterance, projection and articulation is consciously exploring and honoring Nothingness as an idea and a concept much debated at the time when the first public opera productions were performed in Venice around 1640. Based on a performative research approach and new materialist theories, performance acts are methodologically diffracted through musical fragments composed by Luigi Rossi (c. 1597 – 1653), Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643) and Francesco Sacrati (1605-1650); through selected poems from the volume Le Glorie della signora Anna Renzi romana (Venice, 1641); through thoughts entangled with figures such as RESISTANCE, VULNERABILITY and TRUST; through the practice of exploring force and form as every day performative acts.
Elisabeth Belgrano
vocal projections / performance
Björn Ross
visual projections / scenography