The Enchanted Forest : exploring the development of relations in artistic collaborations that combine individual and collective creative practices

Birgitta Flick

About this exposition

In this contribution, I reflect on the activity of listening as a prerequisite for the development of relations in creative processes in a composition collaboration. The creation process of my piece The Enchanted Forest (2023) with choir Musa Horti (cond. Peter Dejans) serves as example to shed light on some of the manifold aspects of the development of relations when combining individual and collective work. It is part of my artistic doctoral project, where I, based on an understanding of composing and improvising as conglomerates of entangled creative activities, investigate what activities a musical composition is part of, formed and transformed by and how the participants of creative situations are related through their interacting. Guided by asking how to listen to myself while listening to other(s), I describe my understanding of creative processes as contact processes and how listening engenders a transactional relation to the situation (Schön 2017:150), where my body interacts with the material and nonmaterial participants, thus creating the evolving sound and relations between all participants. A concept of listening inspired by listening’s etymological proximity to obeying, gives a key to grasping the tactile dimension of human interaction with sound and links it to Rosa's sociological concept of resonance (Rosa 2018). Through reflecting on The Enchanted Forest’s different stages of collaboration and my individual work with text and sound, I describe listening as something active that involves movement and transformation. Drawing on Rosa’s concept and the tactile dimension of improvising (Meelberg 2022), I trace the diversity of beginnings of developing relations between me, the choir and the musical material. Understanding thus listening to oneself as a premise for listening to other(s), I show its necessity for the development of tacit knowledge and the awareness of different forms of togetherness.

type	research exposition
keywords	composition, improvisation, listening, tacit knowledge, choral music, resonance
date	21/09/2025
published	17/11/2025
last modified	17/11/2025
status	published
copyright	Birgitta Flick
license	CC BY-NC-ND
language	English
url	https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/3877431/3877432
doi	https://doi.org/10.22501/rc.3877431
published in	Research Catalogue

name	Figure 2
copyright	Birgitta Flick
license	All rights reserved
usages	picture

name	Figure 1_forum artistic research 2024
copyright	Birgitta Flick
license	All rights reserved
usages	picture

name	Figure 4_forum artistic research 2024
copyright	Birgitta Flick
license	All rights reserved
usages	pdf

name	Figure 5_forum artistic research 2024
copyright	Birgitta Flick
license	All rights reserved
usages	pdf

name	Exerpt from the piece's premiere (20240201, interacting with the word shapes)
copyright	Musa Horti, Birgitta Flick
license	All rights reserved
usages	video

name	figure-7 (The piece's end)
copyright	Birgitta Flick
license	All rights reserved
usages	pdf

name	The Enchanted Forest
copyright	Musa Horti (dir. Peter Dejans), Birgitta Flick
license	All rights reserved
usages	video

name	Figure 9_forum artistic research 2024
copyright	Birgitta Flick
license	All rights reserved
usages	picture

name	Excerpt from the piece's premiere (20240201), the piece's end shaped through Peter Dejans
copyright	Musa Horti, Birgitta Flick
license	All rights reserved
usages	video

name	Musa Hort_two groups "attuning" (workshop 20230903).mp3
copyright	Birgitta Flick/Musa Horti
license	All rights reserved
usages	audio

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The Enchanted Forest : exploring the development of relations in artistic collaborations that combine individual and collective creative practices (2025)

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