Notational actants: new musical approaches through the material score
(2024)
author(s): AI Grayson
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
This exposition brings together a collection of images, thoughts, and descriptions of the initial stages of a doctoral research project that explores the concept of 'notational actants': materially-focused, 3-dimensional objects intended for touch-based interpretation in musical performance. The majority of the content in this exposition was created during a one-month residency at Mustarinda (Hyrynsalmi, Finland).
Etableringen av en norsk klavertradisjon: Interpretative trekk ved Edvard Griegs Ballade op. 24, Geirr Tveitts Sonate nr. 29 op. 129 og Fartein Valens Sonate nr. 2 op. 38.
(2024)
author(s): Einar Røttingen
published in: Research Catalogue
The theme of this dissertation is three important Norwegian piano works. The dissertation includes a main text, a recording and a critical/practical edition of Valen’s Sonata no.2 op.38. By using a musicological/analytical and artistic approach, this dissertation aims to create a greater understanding for these three works as a part of a Norwegian and continental European piano tradition. The main text investigates the contents of the music and how the works are built. It looks at the performance indications in the score and performance practice traditions (historical recordings). References and allusions to other works in the same genres and to similar piano styles are discussed. By looking at possible autobiographical and metaphorical allusions, the dissertation aims at finding an understanding for the works’ origin and meaning. The critical and practical edition contributes for the first time to correct errors and unclear readings of the existing edition and presents a possible realization of Valen’s incomplete score. The main text also includes general criteria for the interpretative choices on the CD. (Norwegian version only, some parts are translated to English as articles)
Quartertone marimba
(2024)
author(s): Kjell Tore Innervik
published in: Norwegian Academy of Music
A PhD-level project in the Fellowship program for artistic research and development ("Stipendprogrammet for kunstnerisk utviklingsarbeid") at the Norwegian Academy of Music in Oslo, by Kjell Tore Innervik.
Making a simple International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)—For singers, conductors and composers
(2023)
author(s): Bas Ammerlaan
published in: KC Research Portal
This research develops a simplification of a graphical resource: the International Phonetic Alphabet. The choices made to simplify it are based on an analysis of existing diction methods. The thesis format seemed most suitable for my research, as the IPA is a graphical notation method which is meant to be used by writing it down. (While it is of course used to notate sounds, these sounds themselves are not actually the focus of the research. There are also already an abundance of audio examples for the IPA symbols.)
The IPA can be a very useful aid for classical singers, from ensemble singers to soloists, but appears intimidating from the amount of symbols it has. This research looks at which IPA symbols are used and which are not used in five different diction methods for classical singers. These are systematically analysed and presented graphically to the reader to help visualise which of all the symbols presented on the IPA chart are regularly used by singers. The end result is practical in nature: a Simple IPA chart which uses only those symbols a classical singer really needs to sing the five main languages for classical singing: English, French, German, Italian and Latin.
16th-Century Keyboard Tablature as Performance Notation
(2020)
author(s): Christina Kwon
published in: KC Research Portal
As a harpsichordist and HIP performer, I was so fascinated with 16th-century keyboard tablature notation on my first encounter some years ago. Since then, I have been inspired to explore playing from original notation as part of my HIP training. This research is a big part of this artistic endeavor, addressing 16th-century keyboard tablature notation from Spanish and German sources and finding answers for what it is, why it was invented, why it is not in practice today, and how one may bring it back to practice. At the beginning stages of this exploration, I noticed that keyboard tablature was not really in practice as performance notation in the current HIP dialogue. I wanted to investigate why and, through this thesis, present it as a relevant, stimulating topic. This research presents historical and theoretical analysis of this notation and the results of an extensive systematic experiment-survey I devised and conducted with 32 non-musicians and musicians of all levels. Personally, the contents of this thesis have greatly deepened my understanding of historical performance of keyboard music in the 16th century and enriched my experience as an Early Music performer.
Choreo-graphic Figures: Scoring Aesthetic Encounters
(2019)
author(s): Emma Cocker, Nikolaus Gansterer, Mariella Greil, Simona Koch
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
We have developed this exposition for ‘scoring an aesthetic encounter’ with the multimodal (visual, textual, sonic, performative) findings from Choreo-graphic Figures: Deviations from the Line, an artistic research project by Emma Cocker, Nikolaus Gansterer and Mariella Greil. Choreo-graphic Figures stages a beyond-disciplinary encounter between the lines of choreography, drawing and writing, for exploring those forms of knowing-thinking-feeling produced in the slippage and deviation when different modes of practice enter into dialogue, overlap and collide. Within this exposition, our aim is not to present an exhaustive account of the Choreo-graphic Figures project. Rather, we seek to test the specificity of this online context for extending our investigation through the following questions: how can we create a digital archive capable of reflecting the durational and relational aspects of the research process, a mode of online dissemination that enacts something of the liveness or vitality — the energies and intensities — within collaborative live exploration? Beyond the limitations of the static two-dimensional page, how can an enhanced digital format enable a non-linear, rhizomatic encounter with artistic research, where findings are activated and navigated, interacted or even played with as a choreo-graphic event?
We have modelled the exposition on the experimental score system developed within our research project, for organising our process of aesthetic enquiry through the bringing-into-relation of different practices and figures. The score is approached as a ‘research tool’ for testing how different practices (of Attention, Notation, Conversation, Wit(h)nessing) can be activated for sharpening, focusing or redirecting attention towards the event of figuring (those small yet transformative energies, emergences, and experiential shifts within artistic process that are often hard to discern but which ultimately steer the evolving action) and the emergence of figures (the point at which the experience of ‘something happening’ [i.e. figuring] coalesces into recognisable form).
Within this exposition, our research can be encountered experientially through → Playing the Score, whilst the → Find Out More section contains contextual framing alongside conceptual-theoretical reflections on the function of our score and its ecology of practices and figures.
Anarchiving (in) Ben Patterson's Variations for Double-Bass
(2018)
author(s): Christopher Williams
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
Here I employ techniques of anarchiving to explore the dynamics of notation, improvisatory performance, and analysis in Fluxus artist Ben Patterson's Variations for Double-Bass (1961). Coined by process philosophers Erin Manning and Brian Massumi, the concept of the anarchive refers to "a repertory of traces of collaborative research-creation events. The traces are not inert, but are carriers of potential." Variations' proto-anarchival qualities drive the structure of the exposition, which includes superimposed video documentation from my own performances, as well as brief analytical texts and performance instructions for the reader. I hope that this meta-anarchival process both sheds light on Patterson's work, and shows how documentation and analysis in the spirit of the anarchive can propel experimental (musical) practice forward in unexpected ways.
Tactile Paths: on and through Notation for Improvisers
(2017)
author(s): Christopher Williams
connected to: Academy of Creative and Performing Arts
published in: Research Catalogue
Tactile Paths is a native digital, media-rich PhD dissertation. It aims to articulate and expand 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 into 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.
Understanding Classical and Early Romantic Dynamics 1750-1830
(2017)
author(s): Bart van Oort
published in: KC Research Portal
In eighteenth century scores, dynamics were notated almost exclusively in a general way. The dynamics belonging to the melancholy or passionate development of a musical phrase or the minimal dynamical differences between a dissonant and a consonant in (for instance) a Mozart Adagio or a Chopin Nocturne are so subtle that it is even better to not notate anything. The deepest utterances of both the composer's and the pianist's soul cannot be caught in any notation.
However, in my opinion many of the notated dynamical indications are not fully understood or mis-interpreted. At the same time, implied dynamics can be found (while today often not realized) in virtually every musical phrase.
In this research project I have investigated classical dynamics, focusing on the local function of forte and piano, on crescendos and diminuendos, the influence of harmony, the dissonance-consonance resolution, the relative meaning of ff, the dynamics of high notes, and other factors, such as the density of the notation, the direction of the melody, the register of the phrase and the character of the work.
This research is part of a larger research project on the nature of the classical language, addressing dynamics, rubato and phrasing.
Writing the Ephemeral. John Cage’s Lecture on Nothing as a Landmark in Media History
(2017)
author(s): Simon Aeberhard
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
John Cage’s Lecture on Nothing is one of his early, legendarily forbidding speeches first held in 1950. The score of the lecture can be understood as a reaction to one of the most momentous cuts in twentieth century’s media history. Cage’s lecture overtly responds to the establishment of the electromagnetic recording, storing and distributing of acoustic material after World War II by reflecting on these technical developments. The text, however, also accurately and subtly reacts to the profound destabilization of the relationship between literacy and orality triggered by these inventions by applying new methods of writing.
Seen as such, the Lecture on Nothing can be connected to Cage’s electronic music on audiotape, Williams Mix for example, and his elaboration of 4’33”, which forms the basis of his “silent pieces.” What unifies these three contemporaneous, but essentially different, works is their thought-provoking semantic emptiness. This article argues that these works are best understood as an artist’s quest for an adequate semiotic means of writing an aural event after electroacoustic media have become widely accessible.
Choreo-graphic Figures: Beginnings and Emergences
(2015)
author(s): Emma Cocker, Nikolaus Gansterer, Mariella Greil
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
Choreo-graphic Figures: Beginnings + Emergences
Choreo-graphic Figures: Deviations from the Line is an interdisciplinary research collaboration involving artist Nikolaus Gansterer, choreographer Mariella Greil, and writer-artist Emma Cocker, for investigating the nature of ‘thinking-in-action’ or ‘figures of thought’ produced as the practices of drawing, choreography and writing enter into dialogue, overlap and collide.
Central is an attempt to find ways of better understanding and making tangible the process of research ‘in-and-through practice’ — the unfolding decision-making, the thinking-in-action, the dynamic movements of ‘sense-making’, the durational ‘taking place’ of something happening live — and for asserting the epistemological significance of this habitually unseen or unshared aspect of the artist’s, choreographer’s or writer’s endeavour.
Our research enquiry unfolds through two interconnected aims: we are interested in the nature of ‘thinking-feeling-knowing’ operative within artistic practice, and seek to develop systems of notation (and exposition) for sharing and reflecting on this often hidden or undisclosed aspect of the creative process. Through this specific exposition — Beginnings and Emergences — our intent is to share findings from the prologue phase and year one of our three-year research project Choreo-graphic Figures: Deviations from the Line, during which we have explored how various processes of ‘beginning’ performed within live artistic activity might create the conditions for processes of emergence to arise. The intent is to share some of the ‘figures’ developed within this research project for articulating ‘beginning’ within a collaborative artistic process (e.g. Figure of Circulation, Figure of Shared Vibrations, Figure of Clearing, Ordering and Emptying Out, Figure of Touch and Reaching Towards the Other), alongside reflecting on and attending to the process of emergence within artistic labour itself – a process we have called ‘figuring’. Figuring – we use this term to describe those imperceptible or barely perceptible movements and transitions at the cusp of awareness within the process of “sense-making”: the moments of revelation, epiphany, synchronicity, of change in tack or direction or pace, the decision to stop, do something different, begin again. Figuring manifests within those threshold moments within the creative process that are often hard to discern but which ultimately shape and steer the direction of the evolving activity. Our research involves cultivating practices of attention (a perceptual heightening, hyper-sensitizing, sharpening of alertness) for noticing these emergent figurings within the process of creative activity, and devising systems of notation for identifying, marking and even tentatively naming these processes of emergence.
In developing this exposition, our intent has been to remain faithful to the process of investigation itself. Rather than being conclusive, our exposition reflects the process of its own production; itself a diagramming of the multiple and at times competing forces and energies operative within the process of artistic collaborative practice. We propose an exposition that unfolds less as the linear explication of a process, but rather — like artistic process itself — more as an assemblage of overlapping and concurrent components, where attention shifts between the textual and the visual, between what is sayable and what is shown.
Synthetic and natural voice: An inquiry into sensing and perceiving vocality
(last edited: 2024)
author(s): Lawrence McGuire
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
This project tackles the issue of describing, composing, and perceiving vocality in a synthetic context, highlighting an experiential approach to the perception of a vocal signal. The research primarily focuses
on the idea of fusions of sounds, particularly fusions between synthetic and natural voice, where the
resulting quality enriches a vocal experience through the ambiguities and multiplicities it brings forth.
Design choices and aesthetical considerations of a computer program for vocal synthesis are then
discussed in relation to my own approaches to vocal composition.
Poiesis and the Performance Practice of Physically Polyphonic Notations
(last edited: 2023)
author(s): Kevin Toksöz Fairbairn
connected to: Academy of Creative and Performing Arts
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
This dissertation commences from the concept of poiesis, informed
chiefly by Hannah Arendt’s use of the term in The Human Condition (1958) to indicate a form of
creativity married to craftsmanship. This poietic framework will then be used throughout the
dissertation to inform a practice-based analysis of the learning process involved with physically
polyphonic notations (herein defined as notations of dissynchronous physical actions within a single
performative body). Despite polyphonic asynchrony, the unifying performative demands of these
pieces are the learning strategies necessary to accomplish this eventual reassembly of instrumental
practice within a single, performing body. The following essays will explore the physically
polyphonic repertoire of the trombone specifically as a laboratory for problematizing this poietic
approach to the learning process.
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.
Score: Mechanical Asynchronicity
(last edited: 2022)
author(s): Danica Maier, Martin Scheuregger
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
A collaboration between visual artist, Danica Maier and composer, Martin Scheuregger - Score: Mechanical Asynchronicity takes a single historical lace draft from the Nottingham Lace Archive as the starting point for new live and installation-based visual-musical works.
The working process and presentation of Score: Mechanical Asynchronicity sees the fine artist become ‘composer’ and composer become ‘artist’. Their roles move from user – of each other’s discipline knowledge, aesthetic understanding and technique – to author of works that are contingent on their collaboration but can still be identified as belonging to their individual practices.
You can navigate this exposition through a series of prompts each focusing on a different aspect or way to engage with the work: Look, Listen, Read, Play, and Watch.
Read: offers an opportunity to understand further details about the project including pilot works, experimental development, key events and practical details.
Look: will share images of the scores created by Maier and Scheuregger, and the original historical lace draft.
Listen: gives you a chance to hear original music box sound pieces as well as Side A and B of the recorded pieces.
Play: allows you to ‘play with' the individual tracks allowing you to create a combined piece in various iterations including 1-4 musicians.
Watch: includes film documentation from four different concert versions to view.
CHOREO–GRAPHIC FIGURES. Deviations from the Line
(last edited: 2020)
author(s): Nikolaus Gansterer, Emma Cocker, Mariella Greil
connected to: University of Applied Arts Vienna
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
"CHOREO–GRAPHIC FIGURES. Deviations from the Line"
The interdisciplinary research project “CHOREO–GRAPHIC FIGURES. Deviations from the Line” (2014 - 2017), led by artist Nikolaus Gansterer (Austria/Vienna) in collaboration with choreographer-dancer Mariella Greil (Austria/Vienna) and artist-writer Emma Cocker (UK/Nottingham), in dialogue with a team of international critical interlocutors was approved funded by the FWF/ PEEK research grant of Austria.
With ‘arts-based research’ at its heart, this research project stages an inter-subjective encounter between drawing (Gansterer), choreography (Greil) and writing (Cocker) in order to
a) investigate those forms of ‘thinking-feeling-knowing’ produced through collaborative, interdisciplinary exchange, ‘between the lines’ of drawing, dance and writing,
b) explore the performativity of notation (figures of thought, speech and movement) for articulating and making tangible this enquiry,
c) contribute new knowledge and understanding to debates about the specificity of artistic enquiry and expanded practices of drawing, dance and writing.
The project explores the nature of ‘thinking-in-action’ or ‘figures of thought’ produced as the practices of drawing, choreography and writing enter into dialogue, overlap and collide. Through processes of reciprocal exchange, dialogue and negotiation between the key researchers, "CHOREO–GRAPHIC FIGURES. Deviations from the Line" will interrogate the interstitial processes, practices and knowledge(s) produced in the ‘deviation’ for example, from page to performance, from word to mark, from line to action, from modes of flat image making towards transformational embodied encounters.
PhD - architectures of speed
(last edited: 2017)
author(s): Ned McGowan
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
In 2016 I began work on a PhD at Leiden University / Orpheus Institute via DocARTES program. Supervisors: Henk Borgdorff, Marcel Cobussen and Richard Barrett.
Architectures of speed: reinventing the tools, functions and potentials of speed within rhythmical frames in music.
The speed of rhythms in live acoustic music, literally the velocity at which notes are sounding, can be defined in absolute terms based on clock time. But there is also the perceived speed that, in the simplest terms, states that musical material can seem fast, slow or some other relational quality.
Speed is articulated by sounding rhythm. Rhythms, however, manifest themselves through a myriad of various implicit and explicit frames, depending on the musical context, including tuplets, meters (traditional and "irrational"), tempo, polytempos, pulses, polypulses, polyrhythms (superimposed frames), additive frames, divisive frames, metric modulation, time brackets and other structures. Through analysis and composition this PhD will research the current practice, precise identities and possibilities of the various time frames in music and the bearing they have individually and in combinations on the speed of the music.
This exposition brings together a collection of images, thoughts, and descriptions of the initial stages of a doctoral research project that explores the concept of 'notational actants': materially-focused, 3-dimensional objects intended for touch-based interpretation in musical performance. The majority of the content in this exposition was created during a one-month residency at Mustarinda (Hyrynsalmi, Finland).open exposition comments (0)
A PhD-level project in the Fellowship program for artistic research and development ("Stipendprogrammet for kunstnerisk utviklingsarbeid") at the Norwegian Academy of Music in Oslo, by Kjell Tore Innervik.open exposition comments (0)
This project tackles the issue of describing, composing, and perceiving vocality in a synthetic context, highlighting an experiential approach to the perception of a vocal signal. The research primarily focuses on the idea of fusions of sounds, particularly fusions between synthetic and natural voice, where the resulting quality enriches a vocal experience through the ambiguities and multiplicities it brings forth. Design choices and aesthetical considerations of a computer program for vocal synthesis are then discussed in relation to my own approaches to vocal composition.open exposition comments (0)