Piano four-hands, "once again"
(2021)
author(s): Alessandra Di Gennaro
published in: KC Research Portal
This work arises from the long and passionate research the author has been conducting as member of a professional piano duo in order to understand why the piano four-hands repertoire has always been stigmatized as an “inferior genre” despite its unquestionable beauty, and to shed light on the contemporary repertoire for this medium, which is at present almost unknown, unperformed and undiscussed, despite it embodies masterpieces of undoubted artistic value.
To do so, the work focuses at first upon the technical challenges, the distinctive features, the possibilities of expression as well as the limitations that characterize the piano four-hands repertoire, explaining why they are of a completely unique order and why they make the medium itself so distinctive and so controversial at the same time.
The script then explores the medium also from a more historical point of view, setting it into its social-cultural-musical context and deeply investigating that process that has brought it from being considered one of the most fascinating socio-cultural phenomenas of the 19th century to its almost complete extinction at the beginning of the 20th century, with the ultimate scope of analyzing what’s left of it nowadays and its role in the current musical scene.
The results of the investigation point out that once the historical and sociological factors that have allowed the extreme popularity of the medium fell short, it could finally assume a completely new value and be a site of compositional and performance innovation which absolutely deserves to be discovered, performed and analyzed.
The outputs of this dissertation have also inspired the young Chinese composer Ching-Fang Teng to write “Entanglement”, a proper homage to the medium and to its endless compositional potential.
SOUND IDENTITY
(2020)
author(s): Sara Maganzini
published in: KC Research Portal
The purpose of my Research is to explore why at the beginning of the XX° century wind orchestras in different Countries in Europe sounded so singular and why nowadays the sound is so similar one to the other.
Haven’t found any book which speaks about this specific topic I decided to research about the subject hoping it will maybe be useful or interesting not only for my development as conductor/musician but also to other people, be they conductors, composers, musicians or just wind orchestra music lovers.
Above historical issues I will also include some artistic material such as examples, audio samples and scores which support the development of my Research.
Special focus will be given to the analysis of a couple of significant original scores from the first decade of the XX° century which will be the guide line throughout my research.
Re-imagining: A Case Study of Exercises and Strategies
(2019)
author(s): Hanna Järvinen
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
Exploring a case of a historian collaborating with dance makers on the contemporaneity evident in a past work, this exposition outlines how the corporeal methods of dance practice can assist a historian in their archival inquiry just as the historian's methods can subvert dominant ways of understanding re-performance of past dance. Interest in how past performances survive and are made to re-signify in the present and what is the role of the archive in a performing art are growing trends in both dance and performance scholarship and in performance practice. Drawing from this scholarship and critical performances, I distinguish between reconstruction (re-creation of dance from the archive) and re-imagining (working from the present practice towards corporeal relationship to past dance) to argue that any performance holds potential to uphold and conserve as well as question and subvert predominant histories of the art form. In contrast to theories of performance that juxtapose performance with history, repertoires with archives, I argue that it is possible to perform the epistemological questions through emphasis on what is not known. The practical exercises used in the studio and the strategies in the performance of Jeux: Re-imagined (2016) offer one example of destabilizing earlier claims to knowledge about a historical work. The seven pages of this exposition follow the structure of the seven events of the performance.