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.
YEARNING TO CONNECT A Short Introduction to Music Curatorship
(2021)
author(s): Heloisa Amaral
published in: Research Catalogue
A presentation of the master elective With and Beyond Music combined with a description of own curatorial projects and the disclosure of findings of the research project Curatorship and Social Engagement, led by the lectorate Music, Education & Society.
Breathing Lessons
(last edited: 2024)
author(s): N Liebenberg
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
In one of the chapters of the 1959 publication, 'Plant Pathology: An Advanced Treatise', two scientist, Ikuzo Uritani and Takashi Akazawa, formulated an equation for depicting what a change in the metabolic process of respiration in a plant caused by an outside pathogen might look like.
This exposition will use this equation as a starting point to think through empathy and more-than-human modes of being. Using disease and the afflicted body (human and more-than-human) it will explore how art-making and curatorship can translate this equation into the affective and the visual realm through various modes of play. In this manner, it will also speak back to, and subvert, the clinical scientific language through which these occurrences are conveyed in scientific communities - making the familiar strange to these practitioners.
Documentation of these various translations will take on the form of text, sound, video and images of personal explorations, as well as manifestations from a range of other artists and disciplines (such as architects, musicians, historians, sociologists, anthropologists, and philosophers, to name a few). As such, the exposition will be an expanded 'object-study' of this equation, realised curatorially.
A presentation of the master elective With and Beyond Music combined with a description of own curatorial projects and the disclosure of findings of the research project Curatorship and Social Engagement, led by the lectorate Music, Education & Society.open exposition comments (0)