09:30-10:30
(Un)romantic
Live M. Roggen and Ingfrid Breie Nyhus
Norwegian Academy of Music
Moderator: Olaf Eggestad
10:45-11:45
Performing Precarity
Ellen Kristine Ugelvik
Norwegian Academy of Music
Moderator: Olaf Eggestad
(Un)Romantic
Norwegian Academy of Music, NordART
Projet leader: Ingfrid Breie Nyhus and Live Maria Roggen
Project period: 2021-2024
«(Un)Romantic / Improvising interpretation» is an artistic research project 2021–2024 at the Norwegian Academy of Music. The project follows two parallel paths: style and interpretation. It is led by vocalist Live Maria Roggen and pianist Ingfrid Breie Nyhus.
On the one hand, we explore what style/language/aesthetics mean to us as performers. As the main case study, we ask what «romantic» is and isn't. How do we speak of and understand «style» in musical performance across genres, and how can experimentation with a style challenge our own performer aesthetics?
On the other hand, we experiment with «traditioning», especially by working with improvisation as an interpretational process. This brings along additional questions on how we understand concepts such as «composition», «interpretation», «improvisation», and meetings between these activities across genres. The two paths are explored simultaneously and inform each other in the project's core, which is experimental work with (late) romantic songs.
At the beginning of the project period, an album was released, which documents the duo's work in the years leading up to the research project. The album/EP «Demanten» contains improvised interpretations or variants based on four songs by Jean Sibelius.
As a duo, our combined musical backgrounds form a broad knowledge base of different musical traditions (classical, jazz, contemporary, folk music). We also meet with several musicians and artists for conversations, workshops and feedback about the project’s main themes.
During the project, several performances and tests occur of (un)romantic or style-experimenting work, improvised or re-composed interpretation. There will be arranged open panel discussions, musician meetings, student workshops and workshop concerts. At the end of the project period, a recording and concerts are planned. Reflections are to be published in Research Catalogue.
Read more about the project on nmh.no
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Performing Precarity
Norwegian Academy of Music, NordART
Projet leader: Ellen Ugelvik
Project period: 2019-2022
To be a contemporary music performer today is to have a deeply fragmented practice. The performer’s role is no longer simply a matter of mastering her instrument and executing a score.
Music practices are increasingly incorporating new instruments and technologies, new methods of creating works, audience interaction, and new situations of interdependence between performer subjects. In these conditions, the performer increasingly finds herself unable to keep control and a sense of mastery over the performance. In other words, performing is increasingly precarious.
Performing Precarity seeks to investigate this new paradigm by abandoning notions of mastery and instrument-specificity as the core of a musician’s practice in favour of the idea of the network and its ensuing precarity:
- What kinds of practices emerge when traditional conceptions of beauty and perfection are relinquished in favour of precarity, fragility, risk, instability, failure, and mutual dependence between performers, composers, technologies, and audiences?
- What kinds of reflections will emerge out of this repositioning of the performer from “master” to a mutually dependent agent in such a network?
Applied by instrument historian Herbert Heyde to describe the mechanics of instruments, the notion of the network suggests new ways of thinking about the interdependencies of musical performance. Unlike the solid conception of instrumental identity implied by the notion of idiomaticity, that of the network suggests a relational conception of performance practice which embraces and potentially affects all aspects of musical performance, highlighting a wholly different set of performative qualities – interdependence, fragility, unpredictability, risk. In this project, we should like to pursue such qualities guided by an ethical performativity founded upon precarity.
Being constantly exposed to the risks of performative collapse or failure, and to dependency on others or on technology, the performer embracing this must also surrender to these hazards, ultimately risking transforming their very conception of self.
The nature of fragile, unstable, precarious material means it is usually experienced by performers privately, often with a sense of shame at potential or actual failure. In the case of performances where fragility is a productive space of musical meaning, it is often challenging for the performers to convey their resulting experience of interconnectedness and heightened sense of vulnerability. This project seeks to reveal these experiences and tacit knowledges by shining a light on the nature of precarity in performance.
Read more about the project on nmh.no
Simon Løffler: Becoming Animal
Norwegian Academy of Music. Composition department
This research project has investigated ways to translate traces of an animal presence into a musical performance practice. As the project is close to its end, and will present an overview of its trajectory and discuss some of its challenges.
Simon Løffler studied Composition with Bent Sørensen, Hans Abrahamsen and Niels Rosing-Schow at The Royal Danish Academy of Music. Further studies with Wolfgang Heiniger at Hochschule für musik Hanns Eisler, Berlin, and with Simon Steen-Andersen at The Royal Academy
of Music in Aarhus. Since 2017 he has been a lecturer in Composition at the Royal Danish Academy of Music. His works range from intimate set-ups to enigmatic constructions, embracing traditional instruments (transformed in various ways) as well as novel instrumental concepts.
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