A Garden of Sounds and Flavours: Establishing a synergistic relationship between music and food in live performance settings
(2024)
author(s): Eduardo Gaspar Polo Baader
published in: KC Research Portal
During the past decade, there has been a surge in the literature about crossmodal correspondences, consistent associations our minds establish between stimuli that are perceived through different senses. Correspondences between sound/music and flavour/taste have received particular scholarly attention, which has lead to a variety of practical applications in the form of food and music pairings, mostly examples of so-called ‘sonic seasoning’, a way to use sound to enhance or modify the tasting experience.
This thesis aims to explore the pairing of food and music from an artistic perspective. Its goal is to find tools that would allow to present both music and food as components of coherent live performances in which neither of them is a mere ‘seasoning’ to the other. Through the description and exploration of different ‘mediating elements’ between them (such as crossmodal correspondences, but also structure, ritual, narrative, and others), a wide range of possibilities is presented to whoever wants to match food and music in a truly synergistic manner.
Readers interested in multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, or transdisciplinary artistic practices of any kind might find the outcomes of this research useful for their own work.
I HAVE THE MOON: aesthetics of contemporary classical music from a composer-performer band retreat.
(2024)
author(s): Samuel Penderbayne
published in: Research Catalogue
The artistic research project I HAVE THE MOON was an experimental group activity or 'band retreat' for five composer-performers resulting in a public performance in the aDevantgarde Festival, 2019, in Munich. Research was conducted around a central research question stated verbally at the outset of the project: how can aesthetic innovations of contemporary classical music be made accessible to audiences without specialist education or background via communicative techniques of other music genres? After a substantial verbal discussion and sessions of musical jamming, each member created an artistic response to the research question, in the form of a composition or comprovisation, which the group then premiered in the aDevantgarde Festival. The results of the discussion, artistic works and final performance (by means of a video documentation) were then analysed by the project leader and presented in this article. The artistic research position is defined a priori through the research question, during the artistic process in the form of note-taking and multimedial documentation, and a posteriori through a (novel) 'Workflow-Tool-Application Analysis' (WTAA). Together, a method of 'lingocentric intellectual scaffolding' on the emobided knowledge inside the creative process is proposed. Insofar as this embodied knowledge can be seen as a 'field' to be researched, the methodology is built on collaborative autoethnography, 'auto-', since the project leader took part in the artistic process, guiding it from within.
Performance as Device for Disorientation
(2024)
author(s): Jennifer Torrence
published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
By its very nature, performance is precarious—there is always the chance that everything might fall apart. In an attempt to mitigate the discomfort of this unpredictability, many musicians develop strategies in the hope of holding the reins on the proverbial cart. But what if one chose not to maintain control and instead embraced the wild nature inherent to performance? What kinds of knowledge and aesthetic experiences might emerge in the inevitable moments of collapse? Drawing on her recent research in the project Performing Precarity, an extended collaboration with composer Simon Løffler, as well as concepts by Jack Halberstam and Sara Ahmed, percussionist/performer Jennifer Torrence meditates on the notion of performance as a device for disorientation—that is, performance as an embodied practice of rupture, of getting lost, and of undoing the order of things.
New (old) Music - Intercontextual Compositional Methodologies
(2023)
author(s): Martín Mayo
published in: KC Research Portal
It would be more than reductive to say that art is not created in a vacuum. Simply said, all art exists in a context, and said context includes medium, genre, style, and idiom, amongst other things. In the realm of Western music, much insight has been given regarding quotation, and less so regarding subtler applications of stylistic, generic, and idiomatic thought in composition. So, if all music exists in a specific context, how can composers creatively account for context in their compositions? This research seeks to answer this question by outlining methodologies via analysis of relevant works. Given the background and musical focus of the researcher, this research predominantly focuses on musical works that adapt or interact with Latin-American folkloric music and traditions, with many works dealing specifically with Venezuelan and Cuban folklore.
Situating Personal Values in Artistic Practice: Towards a Reflective and Reflexive Framework
(2022)
author(s): Annick Odom
published in: KC Research Portal
In what ways can a musician use reflexivity and reflection to situate her personal values in her artistic practice? To answer this question and put the results into practice, the author combined archival and digital research, interviews, and fieldwork. By combining new and found materials inspired by Appalachian folk music and the state of West Virginia, the connected auto-ethnographic case study is a reflective attempt of the author to engage critically with her personal values of empathy, inclusion, and equity in her artistic practice. Using the reflective lenses of the author’s autobiography as an artist, the audience’s reactions, fellow artists comments, and literature review, she was better able to reflexively see her own assumptions and missteps, better allowing her to situate her personal values within her artistic practice. Besides creating a reflective framework by which other artists could consider their own artistic practice, she also found that by taking on new roles outside that of the traditional classically trained performer, she had a greater agency to influence and understand performance elements such as design and form, materials, context, audience, and production process.
Sonic Complexion
(2022)
author(s): Jacob Anderskov, Niclas Hundahl
published in: Rhythmic Music Conservatory, Copenhagen
The Sonic Complexion project has investigated from an artistic perspective the musical dimensions texture and ‘klang’ (harmony), with the aim of creating new music and new perspectives. The outcomes of the project are a number of new albums, methodologies and perspectives, coming from quite different starting point in terms of how to systematically-artistically investigate texture and harmony.
Soft to the Touch: Performance, Vulnerability, and Entanglement in the Time of Covid
(2021)
author(s): Jennifer Torrence
published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
What is the nature of human touch and human contact in contemporary music performance, both in general and in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic? In a time when bodies must be kept at several meters distance, what comes of works which explicitly call for closeness, physical contact, and sharing? How might these works be interpreted differently in light of the COVID-19 pandemic? Percussionist and performer Jennifer Torrence reflects on the impact of the pandemic on her artistic practice and on her research as part of the project entitled Performing Precarity, which seeks to explore the inherent risks in performance when musicians and audiences are entangled in codependent structures. In light of COVID-19, this exposition attempts to unfold and trace modes of vulnerability in contemporary music performance—from human contact via eye contact and physical touch, to the precarious negotiation of shared space—and to reflect on how such encounters might breed new understandings and knowledge.
Innovative Practice of Enhancing Musical Perceptions
(2021)
author(s): Noppakorn Auesirinucroch
published in: KC Research Portal
The human sensory system is complex and enigmatic but yet, attractive. Why are we continuously applying expressional words from another sensory modality and understanding it without any suspicion? In classical music, usage of the term dolce (sweet) to specify particular musical tones is frequently applied despite the word initially used to express a character of specific taste, which seems unrelated to music. This curiosity affects the researcher to explores a specific sensorial phenomenon, a crossmodal correspondence.
The study's objectives are to comprehend and utilise the topic of crossmodal correspondences to design multisensory performance with an emphasis on sound-taste associations. This exposition contains scientific reviews on crossmodal correspondences, interviews with a neurologist, and personal experience at a fine dining restaurant; additionally, the related subject, synaesthesia. Lastly, a review on the process of creating a flavour musical piece for solo guitar in collaboration with a prominent Thai composer, Piyawat Louilarpprasert, has been elaborated.
Mouvance. Approaches to re-enacting medieval music
(2020)
author(s): Jostein Gundersen, Ruben Sverre Gjertsen, Alwynne Pritchard
connected to: SAR Conference 2020
published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
This exposition presents three approaches to re-enactment of medieval musical ideas, as explored through the artistic research project Wheels within Wheels. New approaches to interactions between performers and composers. The research project took place at the University of Bergen, Faculty of Art, Music and Design, Grieg Academy – Department of Music, from 2015 to 2018 under the auspices of the Norwegian Artistic Research Programme. The project led to three concerts and a sound installation. This exposition presents documentation of the results and gives an account of the research materials, tools and work methods, as well as discussing ethical and aesthetical dimensions of the working processes and the results.
Telescopic Listening
(2020)
author(s): Eivind Buene
published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
In contemporary music, the ethos of experimentation and newness is constantly confronted with a strong historical presence. The historical residue in the apparatus of production and dissemination can be found in the instrumentation, institutions and formats of performance. Certain periods in time, like that of post-war modernism tried to eviscerate that residue, other periods have seen a keen interest in evoking history, for a variety of reasons. Eivind Buene’s ongoing project Schubert Lounge probes notions of historicity in an explicit way, taking songs of Franz Schubert as a starting point for the investigation. The work challenges the idea of authenticity in musical performance through applying methodologies from one layer in time to materials from a different historical moment. In the project he tries to create a multi-layered experience through a process of ‘telescopic listening’, as different modes of interpretation and creation is brought into conflict in a staged work for singers, ensemble and turntable with recorded sound.
Percussion Theatre: a body in between
(2019)
author(s): Jennifer Torrence
published in: Norwegian Academy of Music
What does the musician become when sound and instrumental thinking are no longer privileged as the foundation of a musician's practice? In what ways does an emphasis on the musician's body cause music to approach art forms such as theatre and performance? After a generation of pioneering work from Mauricio Kagel, Dieter Schnebel, John Cage and many others, where is the theatrical and the performative in music today? How do its recent developments shape, alter, constitute a musician's artistic practice? Through her research, Jennifer Torrence argues that this type of music demands the musician assume a different understanding and relation to their instrument and therefore a different relation to their body. This relation calls for new ways of making and doing (new artistic practices) that foreground the body as a fundamental performance material. Through an emphasis on the body, the musician emerges as a performer.
This exposition is a reflection on the research project Percussion Theatre: a body in between. This project is comprised of a collection of new evening-length works that approach the theatrical and performative in contemporary music performance. These works are created with and by composers Wojtek Blecharz, Carolyn Chen, Neo Hülcker, Johan Jutterström, Trond Reinholdtsen, François Sarhan, and Peter Swendsen. The exposition contains reflections on recent developments in contemporary music that mark a mutation of the executing musician into a co-creating performer, as well as images, artefacts, videos, and texts that unfold the process of creating and performing the work that constitutes this project. The ambition of this exposition is that through the exposure of a personal artistic practice an image of a larger field may come into focus.
Perspectives on time in the music by Stockhausen: the experience of a performer
(last edited: 2024)
author(s): Karin DE FLEYT, Federica Bressan
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Timelessness and temporality (Kruse, 2011) are widely studied topics in the classical music of the second half of the 20th century and the 21st century, mainly concerning the perspective of musical composition and auditory perception of music. But what is the perspective of temporal layeredness in the performer’s experience? This quote offers a starting point (Noble, 2018): “music whose temporal organisation optimises human information processing and embodiment expresses human time, and music whose temporal organisation subverts or exceeds human information processing and embodiment points outside of human time, to timelessness .”
Specialized in the repertoire of Karlheinz Stockhausen, I want to investigate the role of temporality in music from the perspective of a performer. I will delve into the richness of different layers of temporal awareness in an artistic experience through experiential, embodied, and sensorial knowledge, using different temporal compositions by Stockhausen as case studies: HARMONIEN (2006) for flute solo,, Xi (1986) for flute solo and STOP (1969) for ensemble.
Fair Games
(last edited: 2022)
author(s): Thomas Robert Moore
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
The authors of Defragmentation: Curating Contemporary Music (Darmstäder Beiträge zur Neuen Musik, 2018) all by (un)spoken agreement appeared to take for granted that nothing in new music curation can be taken for granted. In other words, all aspects of any given event were fair game. They suggested that not only could the choice in pieces, soloists, conductors, and ensembles be (re)tooled, but even site-specific aspects, roles of the musicians and audience, and even value regimes could be instrumentalized to fit the artistic need of the curator. Dorthee Richter, by way of introducing the bundle, proposed that curation should be a ‘practice that is deeply involved in the politics of display, politics of site, politics of transfer and translation, and regimes of visibility’. If we understand politics as, ‘the total complex of relations between people living in society’ (Merriam-Webster), then Richter suggests that every thinkable way people relate can, and perhaps should, be considered. Curators should reflect on how relationships in our world are displayed, the interplay involved on site (e.g. the history of specific concert venues), the participation (or lack thereof) of an audience, the participant’s ability to understand, enjoy, and be entertained (or not), and even the audience’s and presenter’s perceived position in society and how that interplays in concert.
We, a performer-researcher, a culture-sociologist, and a musicologist, will rearticulate this premise, applying Boris Groys’ philosophy of care to examine curatorial practices. We will question the curator’s central role and probe any shifts in power between festival directors, receptive venues, and performing ensembles. And finally, drawing on Pascal Gielen’s previous research into fine arts curation and Jennifer Walshe’s piece splendor_solis.wav (2022), we will delve into the influence ‘flying’ curators have on artistic, social, and financial stability of individual musicians and ensembles.
Shekasteh Mouyeh
(last edited: 2019)
author(s): Saman Samadi
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Radif – or, the traditional repertoire of Persian classical music, consisting of more than 200 short melodic motions (gusheh), which are arranged into seven principal modes (dastgāh) with five secondary branches of these modes (āvāz) – is the oldest documented version of Dastgah music, developed by Mirza Abdollah in the 19th century. This exposition represents the confrontation of these microtonal modes with and within electroacoustic music material and techniques, and the problematisation of the results along with objects of video-art and visual effects, creating a set of compositions that would exhibit novelty; furthermore, the assemblage of them for and through a live performance utilizing improvisational methods as an attempt to expand timbral possibilities in a contextual relationship with Western contemporary classical music. The aim of this artistic research is producing a syncretistic multimedia work of art that could serve in assimilating two perspectives of Eastern and Western into a new coalescence towards the grail of a universal totality of classical forms.
It would be more than reductive to say that art is not created in a vacuum. Simply said, all art exists in a context, and said context includes medium, genre, style, and idiom, amongst other things. In the realm of Western music, much insight has been given regarding quotation, and less so regarding subtler applications of stylistic, generic, and idiomatic thought in composition. So, if all music exists in a specific context, how can composers creatively account for context in their compositions? This research seeks to answer this question by outlining methodologies via analysis of relevant works. Given the background and musical focus of the researcher, this research predominantly focuses on musical works that adapt or interact with Latin-American folkloric music and traditions, with many works dealing specifically with Venezuelan and Cuban folklore.open exposition comments (1)
The Sonic Complexion project has investigated from an artistic perspective the musical dimensions texture and ‘klang’ (harmony), with the aim of creating new music and new perspectives. The outcomes of the project are a number of new albums, methodologies and perspectives, coming from quite different starting point in terms of how to systematically-artistically investigate texture and harmony.open exposition comments (0)
This exposition presents three approaches to re-enactment of medieval musical ideas, as explored through the artistic research project Wheels within Wheels. New approaches to interactions between performers and composers. The research project took place at the University of Bergen, Faculty of Art, Music and Design, Grieg Academy – Department of Music, from 2015 to 2018 under the auspices of the Norwegian Artistic Research Programme. The project led to three concerts and a sound installation. This exposition presents documentation of the results and gives an account of the research materials, tools and work methods, as well as discussing ethical and aesthetical dimensions of the working processes and the results.open exposition comments (0)