CCC at the mdw: Interweaving Artistic and Musicological Exploration at Music University
(2024)
author(s): Chanda VanderHart, Judith Kopecky
published in: Research Catalogue
Even at one of the world's oldest and largest music universities, the mdw - University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna, the siloing of fields is the norm. Thanks to budgetary and organizational structures, it is rare that artistic practice and traditional musicology teaching are actively combined; what conservatory students learn in music history seminars and what they learn from their performance teachers exist largely separately from each other.
This exposition documents an ongoing, pragmatic attempt to interweave traditional music research with artistic practice and interventions, thereby introducing students to Artistic Research at bachelor's and master's levels. The CCC (Content-Concept-Context) module was initiated by Judith Kopecky at the Antonio Salieri Department of Vocal Studies and Vocal Research in Music Education and has enjoyed cooperation with the Institute for Musicology and Performance Studies (IMI) for the past three years. Here she, Stephen Delaney and Chanda VanderHart reflect on the promises, surprises, limits, and potential for intertwining scholarship and artistic practice in an institutional setting.
From Particle Data to Particular Sounds: Reflections on The Affordances of Contemporary Sonification Practices
(2015)
author(s): Thomas Bjørnsten
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
This article reflects on recent notions about data sonification within sound-based experimental and artistic practices. The intention is not to survey the current state of data sonification methods and techniques as such, but rather to suggest a number of selected points of critique for addressing specific assumptions about processes and discourses related to what we may broadly refer to as sonification. Furthermore, these issues will be addressed by critically asking what we understand by “data” in the first place, as something susceptible to be turned into actual sounding material. Considering how specific discourses and cultural understandings frame contemporary notions of data, the article also includes different examples of alternative, exploratory practices. Thus, one of the aims will partly be to open up a transdisciplinary discussion about the critical affordances and potential pitfalls of data sonification seen both as an aesthetic and a knowledge-producing practice. This involves not only attention toward strictly academic and scientific settings, but also relates to how data sonification ventures are being communicated within broader societal, cultural and art institutional contexts.
foaming exercises installation – scenarios of polyspatial co-existencies
(last edited: 2021)
author(s): maiju loukola
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
FOAMING EXERCISES INSTALLATION is the first part of a larger examination of spatial co-existencies. The installation took place in the Research Pavilion (RP#3) during May–August 2019. It staged a material and discursive space in which foam was given a leading role as a material substance, a spatial structure and a metaphorical sphere for contemplative exploration.
The “foam-ing exercises” organised in the pavilion included sessions of reading out loud chapters of related texts, with audience invited to gather around a round table on which a large foam-aquarium provided a contemplative scene for thinking through the materiality of co-joined plural spaces, and the conceptual, concrete, and imaginary scenarios effected by this setting of co-joined existencies.
Inspired by philosopher Peter Sloterdijk’s spatial trilogy Spheres (Volume I: Bubbles, Volume II: Globes, and especially the Volume III: Foams – Plural Spherology), the bubbly installation came to set a starting point for a larger body of research, which aims at enlarging and concretizing the understanding of the role of spatial practices in relation to their emancipatory potential.
FOAMING EXERCISES INSTALLATION is part of one of the RP#3 research cells, AIRA Artistic Intelligence Research Alternator. AIRA explores means of thematising through artistic and discursive processes that produce new narratives, images and constellations.
AIRA deals with suspension of belief in the interplay of concepts, spaces, things and ideas that can be either/both gravitational and tangible (physical, concrete) or floating and ethereal (clouds, spheres). So it is a starting point of a process where things and entities may have a real place, and may as well have no real place. AIRA investigates something that we call New Fiction.
The foam-ing process (foam as a noun + as verb: foam-ing) focuses at its first phase (in RP#3) to foam’s anatomy by way of launching a series of micro-scale (analogical and digital) explorations of foamy existencies, and starting an archive of small scale samples, taking notes of reflections of the four discursive foaming sessions organised in the pavilion context, and documentation of these processes.
GLORIES TO NOTHINGNESS: A Music Research Seminar honouring Accademia degli Incogniti and Claudio Monteverdi
(last edited: 2020)
author(s): Elisabeth Laasonen Belgrano, Päivi Järviö, Johannes Boer, Dinko Fabris, Mauro Calcagno, Björn Ross, Charulatha Mani, Elisabeth Holmertz
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
A Music Research Seminar
honouring Accademia degli Incogniti
and Claudio Monteverdi
Palazzo Grimani, Venice
15 June 2017
Nordic Network for Early Opera and Nordic Network for Vocal Performance Research, in collaboration with Scuola di Music Antica Venezia, are delighted to invite you for a performance seminar in Venice 15 June around the theme of vocality, music drama and the vibrant intellectual / artistic scene in Venice around Monteverdi and Accademia degli Incogniti. The idea comes from a desire to offer a fringe-event / sub-encounter / prologue for (among others) participants of the two symposia co-happening in Venice 16-17 June: The Foundazione Cini conference on Monteverdi (16-17 June) and the symposia "Encounters, Discussions, Experimentations: Art, Research and Artistic Research in Music”, the Research Pavilion of the University of the Arts Helsinki, Venice Biennale 2017 (16-17 June)
We are also hoping to meet anyone interested to explore the fairly new academic field of Artistic Research.
Time:
15 June 2017
15:00-18:30
Venue:
Palazzo Grimani, Ruga Giuffa off Campo Santa Maria Formosa, Venezia,