Swinging On The Shoulders Of Giants
(2025)
author(s): Jacob J Johnson
published in: Research Catalogue
This work is intended for those who want to learn more about the methods and arranging techniques that can be used to play the same composition in different ways and how to arrange one's drumming within jazz music. This work is not only aimed at drummers. All the concepts, methods, and analyses I present in this work are also applicable to other instruments.
The aim of this study is to explore the relationship between transcription and creative improvisation in jazz drumming. In order to fulfill this aim the following research questions where formulated:
In what ways does transcribing and analyzing my favorite drummers' playing enhance my musicality and personal musical voice?
What characterizes the idiolect of these four drummers?
How does an established jazz drummer accompany a soloist, and is it possible to hear a clear interaction in their playing with each other?
How does my comping and solo playing develop through the process of transcribing and emulating the performance of these iconic drummers?
In this master's thesis, I have chosen to analyze how four different jazz drummers play the same composition. The song I have selected is one of my favorite jazz standards, titled You & The Night & The Music. This is a fairly well-played jazz standard with several different versions and arrangements.
The drummers I have chosen for this thesis are Gary Novak, Niclas Campagnol, Philly Joe Jones, and Jukkis Uotila, who, in my opinion, are some of the best drummers in the world. I have transcribed these drummers’ comping and solo playing, and I have also learned to play the transcriptions myself.
I have done this to analyze what I can learn from it and to absorb the knowledge and skills of these drummers so that I can apply them to my own playing. I have also recorded myself imitating and replicating my transcriptions. This was done to observe what I can come up with spontaneously when improvising and how I interpret and perform the same composition and arrangement as they do.
In this work, I have also analyzed the equipment that drummers use. I have done this to understand what equipment I need to achieve a certain sound or feel in a song. As a final step, I have recorded my own version of this song together with a jazzband to demonstrate my hopefully newly acquired knowledge and interpretation.
This work has developed my musicianship and has also expanded my personal musical toolbox, enhancing and improving my bag of licks. I have also gained a deeper understanding of how interaction works between different instruments in a jazz band, as well as how improvisation and interplay function between a soloist and accompaniment.
The transcriptions have also improved my technical ability in both my hands and feet, and I have had to practice intensely to be able to play some of the drum grooves and solo phrases that they are playing. My sight-reading ability has also improved, and I have become much faster at reading advanced drum notation. The work has also given me an expanded knowledge of the equipment drummers use and why they choose their drums, cymbals, drumheads, and drumsticks.
On Sworld: Report and reflections on an artistic research into how audio can evoke human experiences of absence, ghosts and lost memories, explored through performance and composed walks
(2025)
author(s): Alexander Holm
published in: Rhythmic Music Conservatory, Copenhagen
Alexander Holm have been developing the artistic research project 'Sworld' on the APD program at RMC in Copenhagen 2021-2024. The project seeks to explore how simultaneous experience of sounds with- and without a visible cause can evoke human experiences of ghosts, absence and lost memories. The project researches and expands on composer and theorist Michel Chion's audio visual concept of Synch Points, examined through a versatile compositional praxis including choreography, text, voice, walks and live performance.
Unburying, from Liminals, Emerging: Three Contexts for a Microtonal Prepared Piano
(2025)
author(s): Matt Choboter
published in: Rhythmic Music Conservatory, Copenhagen
Can an acoustic grand piano be sonically and conceptually reimagined so as to re-negotiate its foundational assumptions around tuning and timbre? Why should the piano continue to be so accustomed to only one tuning system? In contrast, how can “pure sounds” (ratios found in the harmonic series) co-exist with ethnically diverse microtonal tunings?
Spanning a period from 2020-2022, “Unburying, from Liminals, Emerging” explores a microtonal prepared piano in three artistic contexts. These include: a solo project called “Postcards of Nostalgia; a chamber ensemble consisting of saxophone trio, percussion and piano; and a “percussion ensemble with soprano saxophone called Juniper Fuse.
Dialoging with a newly invented tuning system, what emergent properties might we find when magnetic piano preparations are used to evoke specific timbral effects from Balinese Gamelan and Indian Karnatik music? Collectively, how can this expanded notion of “piano” merge with spatialization to facilitate interactive experiences for audiences? How might a process-oriented Jungian-inspired dream work communicate itself so as to distill and coalesce a fertile musical landscape?
Reiterate, rerun, repeat
(2021)
author(s): Michael Duch, Jeremy Welsh
published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
Repetition plays a central role in many musical styles and genres. Repetition, rhythm and patterns also play an important part in the visual arts. Here we will show, examine and discuss repetition as a method and main musical element, as well as their correlation with moving images, in a series of audio-visual works we have been working on together since 2016.
Accumulator is one such project and will be the main focus here, where not only repetition, rhythm and patterns appear as musical and visual elements, but is used as an artistic method in itself when repeating performances of a similar material, documenting each one of them and adding the individual performances as layers creating a dense audio-visual orchestral solo performance.
As well as temporal repetition, Accumulator repeats in the spatial dimension, where the staging of a performance features the live performer multiplied, as he is accompanied by pre-recorded video images of himself. According to the spatial characteristics of the given performance space, this repetition of the performer may be frontal / two dimensional, or may extend across several surfaces, creating a surround projection in which the live performer is contained.
Action vs. Reaction
(2020)
author(s): Jacob Anderskov
published in: Rhythmic Music Conservatory, Copenhagen
"Action versus Reaction - Artistic encounters with an aesthetic otherness", was a research project undertaken at the Rhythmic Music Conservatory in Copenhagen in 2015-2016. The primary artistic output of the project is the album ”Resonance”, released on Sundance Music in September 2016.
My ensemble Resonance (previously known as ” Strings, Percussion & Piano”) consists of 3 string players as well as Peter Bruun on drums and myself on piano. The string players all have a background in European classical music and (composed) new music, whereas Peter and I originally came out of improvised music, jazz and its neighbouring regions. In this ensemble, we have been dealing with artistic encounters between our different aesthetics backgrounds for several years. I have realized that my primary curiosity orbits around the questions:
1) How can all members of a cross-genre ensemble stay true to their own musical intuition, developed through decades of full immersion?
2) How can these confident artists then transcend their notion of themselves and meet anew in an aesthetic field different from their respective origins?
In 2018, Jacob Anderskov was nominated for the Nordic Council Music Price for the album Resonance.
Habitable Exomusics
(2020)
author(s): Jacob Anderskov
published in: Rhythmic Music Conservatory, Copenhagen
PROJECT DESCRIPTION:
“The project examines post tonal material structuring principles in improvised music.
It deals with (searches for) unexploited opportunities or new forms of expressions within improvised music through studies of possible ways to organize the musical material - and with relevant practical and creative ways to find room for them in improvised music.”
Original RESEARCH QUESTION:
Through my own artistic practice, I will examine
- To which extent it is possible for me to use definable post tonal structuring principles in my improvisations, and
- Which of these principles can best be used in my improvisational universe.
Songs We Sing
(last edited: 2024)
author(s): Hans Knut Sveen, Alwynne Pritchard
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
This project began in 2018, with the simple desire to play songs that we love. These could be pieces with strong associations, ones we had enjoyed singing and playing before, or songs we had never sung and that were, perhaps, even new to us. When the songs were written or what genre they might come from was not important. Original instrumentation (piano, harpsichord etc) and received ideas about vocal style were also not a priority. Finding a way of creating renditions with the tools at hand (Alwynne's voice and Hans Knut's harmonium) is what originally defined the project.
Alexander Holm have been developing the artistic research project 'Sworld' on the APD program at RMC in Copenhagen 2021-2024. The project seeks to explore how simultaneous experience of sounds with- and without a visible cause can evoke human experiences of ghosts, absence and lost memories. The project researches and expands on composer and theorist Michel Chion's audio visual concept of Synch Points, examined through a versatile compositional praxis including choreography, text, voice, walks and live performance.open exposition comments (0)
PROJECT DESCRIPTION: “The project examines post tonal material structuring principles in improvised music. It deals with (searches for) unexploited opportunities or new forms of expressions within improvised music through studies of possible ways to organize the musical material - and with relevant practical and creative ways to find room for them in improvised music.” Original RESEARCH QUESTION: Through my own artistic practice, I will examine - To which extent it is possible for me to use definable post tonal structuring principles in my improvisations, and - Which of these principles can best be used in my improvisational universe.open exposition comments (0)
This project began in 2018, with the simple desire to play songs that we love. These could be pieces with strong associations, ones we had enjoyed singing and playing before, or songs we had never sung and that were, perhaps, even new to us. When the songs were written or what genre they might come from was not important. Original instrumentation (piano, harpsichord etc) and received ideas about vocal style were also not a priority. Finding a way of creating renditions with the tools at hand (Alwynne's voice and Hans Knut's harmonium) is what originally defined the project.open exposition comments (0)