The Story of Method of Vienna (MoV) or exploring the epistemic idea of rethinking with a rediscovered concert format
(2024)
author(s): Susanne Abed-Navandi
published in: Research Catalogue
The following article presents the current status of the artistic research project Method of Vienna (MoV) and answers the questions:
How can I imagine the MoV initiative in detail?
Which methodological approach was chosen?
Which MoV events have been realized so far?
The presentation ends with a personal reflection after six years of commitment to Method of Vienna, in which current observations, conclusions and the future of the project are put up for discussion.
Waldorf music education meets Kodály methodology.
(2023)
author(s): Raoul Boesten
published in: KC Research Portal
How can Kodály music methodology contribute to the already existing Waldorf music education in giving the children ownership in music.
(Un-) settling Sites and Styles
(2021)
author(s): Einar Røttingen, Bente Elisabeth Finseraas
published in: Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design, University of Bergen
(Un-)settling sites and styles: In search of new expressive means.
Eight performers (voice, piano, violin, cello), one musicologist and one composer aspired to unsettle their habitual ways of working with musical interpretation of 20th century and contemporary Norwegian composers. By collaborating to develop new perspectives and methods, they investigated questions of style and how different sites influenced their rehearsals and performances.
How do performers find new expressive means? How can intersubjective exchange within a research group contribute to articulating tacit knowledge? How can mutual unsettling approaches influence conventional or subjective attitudes of fidelity to a score or a performance tradition? How can novel sounds, musical material and musical meaning emerge beyond prejudiced conceptions or through improvisation?
The three-year project was facilitated by the Norwegian Artistic Research Programme and the Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design (Grieg Academy), University of Bergen, and resulted in texts, sound recordings, videos, and new commented score editions.
Reconstructing Verses by Henry Loosemore and John Coprario
(2020)
author(s): Helen Roberts
published in: Research Catalogue, Birmingham City University: Faculty of Arts, Design and Media
This exposition comprises a package of outputs from practice-led research around two unique pieces of instrumental music with winds from early seventeenth-century England. Along with the first critical performance edition and a world premiere recording of these two pieces, I present a detailed discussion of the investigation which informed the editorial process, focussing on three historical artefacts: MS Drexel 5469, the fragmentary source of the music in question; the Christ Church cornetts, two original instruments that may historically have been associated with performance of this type of repertoire; and the St Teilo organ, an instrument reconstructed after Tudor archaeological evidence and representative of the style of instrument in use when MS Drexel 5469 was compiled. I examine each artefact in turn, establishing the wider historical context of each and assessing the connections between all three. This process has not only shed new light on two pieces overlooked by historical performers until now, but raised important questions surrounding the performance of early-seventeenth century liturgical music in general.
Tactile paths : on and through notation for improvisers
(last edited: 2022)
author(s): Christopher Williams
connected to: Academy of Creative and Performing Arts
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Tactile Paths: on and through Notation for Improvisers is an artistic research project that articulates and expands the nexus of notation and improvisation in contemporary and experimental music. The project interweaves direct artistic experience with insights from improvisation studies, the social sciences, philosophy, and various scholarship in the arts to reveal methodological connections among diverse artists such as Richard Barrett, Cornelius Cardew, Malcolm Goldstein, Lawrence Halprin, Bob Ostertag, Ben Patterson, and the author. By focusing on how notation is used, rather than on what it represents in an abstract sense, the author shows how written scores emerge from and feed back on ongoing improvisational processes. Thus, it is argued, they are not fixed texts whose primary purpose is to prescribe and preserve, but rather tactile paths in the improviser’s ever-crescent musical and social environment. This practice-based approach aims to lay the conceptual groundwork for theorizing and broadening the creative relevance of work whose importance to practitioners belies its marginal presence in academia and institutions.
The Dim Lit Subterranea of the Ancient Mind: the influence of place in ‘inspired’ composition, and the search for 'Ur' sound.
(last edited: 2020)
author(s): Jonathan Day
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
This interdisciplinary research progresses aspects of musical composition, musicology and organology though the application of specific recent developments within philosophy and physics.
There are two contingent ‘expeditions’–articulated constellations constructed of a suite of compositions (released as a musical album), exegetical writing and performances.
Atlantic Drifter investigates and evidences interactions developing from the implications of Object Orientated Ontology, (Harman, Bogost et al) for composition. OOO identifies the independent cosmopoesis of non human objects–the manner in which objects-with-agency declare the nature of their ‘world’ through artefacts. It calls the interaction of object worlds ‘encounters’. This research interrogates and transcribes a series of these encounters, experienced in locations internationally. It explores and reveals the agency of place, Genius Loci–air, water, stone, architecture interacting with the composer/philosopher. The research resulted in new music released through Proper Records. A chapter in Music, Myths and Realities (2017) offers a detailed exegesis of the theoretical advances facilitated by the creative work. The works and ideas were shared by invitation as concerts and keynote lectures at prestigious venues internationally.
The second expedition, A Spirit Library, develops from this and examines the ‘encounter’ with the physical presence and agency of sound itself. Schopenhauer’s exposition of music as Will was revisited though the lens of String Theory and aspects of Steven Hawking’s ideas about universal futures. The work explored the sound/human/instrument ‘encounter’, resulting in novel engagements with the cosmopoesis of sound. It allowed an extension into organology, where the generative influence of ‘Ur’ sound was applied to the construction of instruments, offering a novel understanding, shared in a streamed Keynote lecture, available online.
The work was performed by invitation at high status venues and on radio internationally. The music was positively reviewed, including selection as Album of the Year 2019 by Folk Radio UK.
Musical Source as Part of a Performative Ritual: Crossing borders through Explorative Strategies
(last edited: 2018)
author(s): Elisabeth Laasonen Belgrano, Johannes Boer, Assi Karttunen, Catalina Vicens, Dinko Fabris, Björn Ross
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Proposal peer-reviewed and accepted as ”Themed Session”,
18th Biennial conference on Baroque Music,
Cremona 10-15 July 2018
In the light of the conference main theme ’Crossing borders’ the aim of this round table / themed session is to develop an experimental discourse departing from a musical source from the period 1550-1750, as part of a performative ritual for crossing borders and strict dichotomies. The objective is to search from new chiasmatic crossings between a musician’s gaze, a musical source from the Baroque era and musicological findings. Following the discourse of letting go of the perceived strict dichotomy between musical text and music performance (Schulze 2015:3) this session proposes a radical move towards a borderless entangled reading of musical sources based on performative methodologies. This approach may allow for new relations to develop between traditional distinctions pronounced through musicological findings and artistic performance methods; it might also allow for closer collaborations between musicologists and artistic researchers in music. Artistic research in music is a fast growing experimental academic field, with a strong link to musicology. Highly significant to this new field is the desire to find ways of merging sensuous (subjective) knowledge with a variety of other research methodologies. The artistic research purpose is often to follow the performing process of understanding a musical score and the active performance practice calling for praxical strategies such as ritual thinking, musicking through texts and theories (ex. hermeneutics, feminist new materalism), reflective/diffractive methodologies, meaning-making through translation studies, essayistic writing, and speculative performance philosophy. For this session four short (5 min.) presentation will be performed with one common point of departure: ‘musical source a part of a performative ritual for crossing borders and strict dichotomies’. With reference to these four presentations the stage will open up for an intra-active and explorative dialogue between all participant in the session.
An Erotics of Art: A Specific Attempt at Failure
(last edited: 2018)
author(s): James Wood
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Is it possible to conceive of a form of musical criticism that reflects the very subject(s) it attempts to mobilise? To embrace the fluid ontologies of music while limiting the ossifying nature of linguistic criticism?
An Erotics of Art was a project I ran in 2016 to try and create such an art form. Myself and a select few artists, writers and musicians were asked to create "responses" to musical works of their choice. These responses had to be created in real-time, as they listened. These are my submissions.
Because of my grounding, the majority of each response is text based (I am loathe to say linguistic...) but occasionally text fails me. I stretch it to what I saw as its intelligible limit at the time, and used images and free-drawing.
The resulting pieces are a searing autoethnographic matrix of my situation at the time, as provoked by these musics. The inspiration came from both Susan Sontag, from whom I clearly ape the name of the series, and an old Downbeat Magazine section called "Blindfold Test". Examples are easily found. They may seem discursive but rest assured: I am talking about the music itself and nothing else.
The following article presents the current status of the artistic research project Method of Vienna (MoV) and answers the questions: How can I imagine the MoV initiative in detail? Which methodological approach was chosen? Which MoV events have been realized so far? The presentation ends with a personal reflection after six years of commitment to Method of Vienna, in which current observations, conclusions and the future of the project are put up for discussion.open exposition comments (0)
How can Kodály music methodology contribute to the already existing Waldorf music education in giving the children ownership in music.open exposition comments (1)