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.
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.
We Can Work It Out - Calibration as Artistic Method
(2015)
author(s): Anna Einarsson
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
Based upon the work with the chamber opera Ps. Jag kommer snart hem! (Eng. Ps. I will be home soon!), this presentation aims at describing the working process towards a new musical work, as it takes place in the setting of exploratory workshops. Drawing upon observations and conversations, benefits and challenges are brought forward and discussed through the use of examples. An over-arching concept of calibration is presented; the work in focus housed calibration on at least two different levels: calibration towards the work and calibration within the work. As the article concludes, this process is of great artistic value and may also assist in facilitating for the commissioner, and possibly in extension, the presumed audience of a new musical work.
Timbral Microperspectives
(last edited: 2020)
author(s): Martyna Kosecka
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Project "Timbral Microperspectives" rediscovers the processes leading the composer in his/her artistic preferences through the immerse analysis of the factors of artistic discovery, lifelong learning, and contribution. The starting point for executing "Timbral Microperspectives" research lies in investigating innovative solutions in various tuning systems' interrelations within a musical composition. Driven by the initial idea for distinct timbral concepts, creative, quite often non-musical impulses or attraction by certain sound phenomena, Martyna Kosecka tries to rediscover and establish microtone's functioning in the harmonic landscape of music, as well as its overall significance in the creation of her new musical work. What is the process of transformation of the artist within the artistic process? What can be the possible triggers that shape our decision making in art? How if to document our choice-making and analyze it along with the growth of artistic creation itself?
This project contributes to the dialogue within musical aesthetic and artistic research theories. It provides a new look at the compositional processes and corresponding methodology practices in an artist's self-development.