Multilayeredness in Solo Performance
(2021)
author(s): Søren Kjærgaard
published in: Rhythmic Music Conservatory Copenhagen
This project investigates the multilayered potentials of solo performance with the intention of opening up the single player limitations often experienced during the creative process of play and practice.
In performance contexts ranging from acoustic solo piano to a digital code-based video keyboard, concepts of multilayeredness are explored through compositional and improvisational strategies, that include instrument topography, extended piano techniques, audio-visual sampling and digital keyboard mapping.
The purpose is also to create results that will contribute to how solo artists across formats can express themselves more dynamically and with greater flexibility in the interaction between their various materials and artistic ideas. A contribution also in terms of expanding methodological approaches to how solo performers and research practitioners can work iteratively and interactively in their reflective processes, inviting both a more verbalised and dialogic form, and to explore ways of documenting and communicating these processes in hybrids between text, sound and image.
Meridiana: Lines Toward a Non-local Alchemy
(last edited: 2023)
author(s): Søren Kjærgaard
This exposition is in revision and its share status is: visible to all.
“Meridiana: Lines toward a non-local Alchemy” investigates the line as a sonic, textual and visual phenomenon.
Taking off from the four
literary voices: the Dutch philosopher Baruch de Spinoza (1632-1677), the French philosopher Gilles
Deleuze (1925-1995) and the Chinese Taoists Lü Yan (796 C.E.) and Sun Buer (1119–1182 C.E.),
a multitude of meanings are interwoven in a rich network of musical, textual and graphic lines.
The line as a basic concept is emphasized by the first word of the title, Meridiana (plural for meridian), which has terminological roots in both the East and the West. In Western terminology, it denotes one
geographical line connecting the North and South Pole.
In the East, originating from ancient China, meridians (经络) are energy pathways of the body (both human and non-human), which connect internal organs and a number of vital points in a neurological network.
The meeting between these two interpretations of a "meridian", between the geo-physical and sub-physical, between East and West, are the cornerstones of the project, which intention is to weave together the various
meanings and emphases of meridian, while at the same time unfolding an expanding an intersection of lines:
sonic lines, textual lines, graphic lines.
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TRAVERSING SONIC TERRITORIES (TST)
(2023)
author(s): Søren Kjærgaard, Torben Snekkestad
published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
What happens when musicians improvising on acoustic instruments sample and exchange their sound libraries? How can such a transgression of sonic territories contribute to an expanded understanding of one’s own sonic identity? And could this b/lending of identities point to a more ambiguous yet vibrant field of intra-play? Departing from these questions, this project intends to challenge our idea of sonic identity as a personal subject-oriented entity, and consequently investigate how a collaborative sharing of sampled sounds, can contribute to an expanded understanding of the sounds we play and are played by. Individual idiomatic approaches to one’s own instrument are thus interfered as we transgress habitual boundaries for action possibilities and musical imagination. The practice circulates from the duo of Torben Snekkestad and Søren Kjærgaard toward external collaborators, where the sharing process involves different approaches to audio sampling and mapping, embedding and embodying, listening and playing with each other’s sonic material to a point where authorship, origin, instrument and sonic identity is diffracted.
