The Freestyle Orchestra: Questioning Norms in Classical Concert Performance through Ross Edwards’ Maninyas Violin Concerto
(2020)
author(s): Chanda VanderHart
published in: Research Catalogue
The Freestyle Orchestra is a performance collective of classically trained musicians exploring and questioning the limits of how an orchestra can express music in performance. They strive to create an aesthetic Gesamtkunstwerk on stage, incorporating physical movement, aerial arts, staging, lighting, costuming, and fire manipulation in live music performance. Building on contentions regarding the inherent physicality of musical performance as well as precepts within Embodied Music Cognition Theory asserting that meaning-formation is corporeal, they themselves research, train and perform as interdisciplinary artists, constantly experimenting with novel ways to communicate the movement and gesture they experience when listening to music more immediately to their audiences.
The collective is convinced that this aspect of inherent physicality is something which has been sacrificed to the work-centric focus of classical music (and therefore neglected within conservatory training), and believe manifesting the movement they perceive within some music is a natural process which can itself generate meaning for both performer and audience. They envision the body as an instrument and strive to amplify musical gestures and meaning through physical movement, simultaneously enhancing and more deeply expressing their own understanding of musical compositions.
This exposition introduces a 2019 collaboration with Australian composer Ross Edwards which resulted in a choreographed performance in City Recital Hall in Sydney of the composer’s Maninyas violin concerto. It combines audio-visual footage, photos and texts contextualizing the research process, which included contemplation and re-enactment of Edwards’ own musical journey in creating his Sacred and Maninyas styles, a way out of a personal musical crisis. Edwards’ perspectives on the ecstatic and fundamental connections between nature, dance, ritual and music/sound fed the physical and stage treatment as well as the processuel, experimental research of the Freestyle collective as they constructed their own, interdisciplinary performance of the concerto.
SAR 2021 presentation - Chanda VanderHart
(2022)
author(s): Chanda VanderHart
published in: SAR Conference 2020
In June 2019 The Freestyle Orchestra, a collective of classical musicians, headlined at City Recital Hall in Sydney, performing two modern violin concertos to a full house — a feat in itself. Within the performance the ensemble — besides playing their instruments — tumbled, swung from rigging, danced, improvised, handbalanced and spat fire, collectively blurring the performance aesthetics of contemporary circus and classical music.
This performance was the culmination and dissemination of their ongoing research process which pushes the physical and disciplinary limits of what classical musicians do, explores how to share the movement and aesthetic they perceive in some music with a broader audience, and questions how embodied knowledge transfers/translates across disciplines.
Exposition made by Jonas Sjøvaag
CCC at the mdw: Interweaving Artistic and Musicological Exploration at Music University
(2024)
author(s): Chanda VanderHart, Judith Kopecky
published in: Research Catalogue
Even at one of the world's oldest and largest music universities, the mdw - University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna, the siloing of fields is the norm. Thanks to budgetary and organizational structures, it is rare that artistic practice and traditional musicology teaching are actively combined; what conservatory students learn in music history seminars and what they learn from their performance teachers exist largely separately from each other.
This exposition documents an ongoing, pragmatic attempt to interweave traditional music research with artistic practice and interventions, thereby introducing students to Artistic Research at bachelor's and master's levels. The CCC (Content-Concept-Context) module was initiated by Judith Kopecky at the Antonio Salieri Department of Vocal Studies and Vocal Research in Music Education and has enjoyed cooperation with the Institute for Musicology and Performance Studies (IMI) for the past three years. Here she, Stephen Delaney and Chanda VanderHart reflect on the promises, surprises, limits, and potential for intertwining scholarship and artistic practice in an institutional setting.
