Research Catalogue

This project aims to develop transcultural approaches of inspiration (which we regard as mutually appreciated intentional and reciprocal artistic influence based on solidarity) by combining approaches from contemporary music composition and improvisation with ethnomusicological and sociological research. We encourage creative (mis)understandings emerging from the interaction between research and artistic practice, and between European art music, folk and non-western styles, in particular from indigenous minorities in Taiwan. Both comprehension and incomprehension yield serendipity and inspiration for new research questions, innovative artistic creation, and applied follow-ups among non-western communities. The project departs from two premises: first, that contemporary western art music as a practice often tends to resort to certain degrees of elitism; and second, that non-western musical knowledge is often either ignored or merely exploited when it comes to compositional inspiration. We do not regard inspiration as unidirectional, an “input” like recording or downloading material for artistic use. Instead, we foster artistic interaction by promoting dialogical and distributed knowledge production in musical encounters. Developing inter­disciplinary and transcultural methodologies of musical creation will contribute on the one hand towards opening up the—rightly or wrongly supposed—“ivory tower of contemporary composition”, and on the other hand will contribute towards the recognition of the artistic value of non-western musical practices. By highlighting the reciprocal nature of inspiration, creative (mis)understandings will result in socially relevant and innovative methodologies for creating and disseminating music with meaning. The methods applied in the proposed project will start out from ethnographic evidence that people living in non-western or traditional societies often use methods of knowledge production within the sonic domain which are commonly unaddressed or even unknown among western contemporary music composers (aside from exotist or orientalistic appropriations of “the other”). The project is designed in four stages: field research and interaction with indigenous communities in Taiwan with a focus on the Tao people on Lanyu Island, collaborative workshops in Vienna, an artistic research and training phase with invited indigenous Taiwanese coaches in Vienna, and feeding back to the field in Taiwan. During all these stages, exchange and coordination between composers, music makers, scholars and source community experts will be essential in order to reflect not only on the creative process, but also to analyse and support strong interaction between creation and society. Re-interaction with source communities as well as audience participation in the widest sense will help to increase the social relevance of the artistic results. The University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna (MDW) will host the project. The contributors are Johannes Kretz (project leader) and Wei-Ya Lin (project co-leader, senior investigator) with their team of seven composers, ten artistic research partners from Taiwan and six artistic and academic consultants with extensive experience in the relevant fields.

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Timelessness and temporality (Kruse, 2011) are widely studied topics in the classical music of the second half of the 20th century and the 21st century, mainly concerning the perspective of musical composition and auditory perception of music. But what is the perspective of temporal layeredness in the performer’s experience? This quote offers a starting point (Noble, 2018): “music whose temporal organisation optimises human information processing and embodiment expresses human time, and music whose temporal organisation subverts or exceeds human information processing and embodiment points outside of human time, to timelessness .” Specialized in the repertoire of Karlheinz Stockhausen, I want to investigate the role of temporality in music from the perspective of a performer. I will delve into the richness of different layers of temporal awareness in an artistic experience through experiential, embodied, and sensorial knowledge, using different temporal compositions by Stockhausen as case studies: HARMONIEN (2006) for flute solo,, Xi (1986) for flute solo and STOP (1969) for ensemble.

Home page of the Journal of Sonic Studies

This exposition explores how the Betty Nansen Theatre in Copenhagen, with the artistic research project, BETTY DEVELOPS, works with spreading a collaborative practice to the infrastructure of an entire institutional theatre and how this renegotiates the notion of artistic genius and the star. The exposition offers a meta-reflection on the author’s artistic research activities at the theatre. These reflections shed light on what happens when collaborative methods of working and producing are implemented in an institutional theatre and discuss the extent to which artistic research can develop methods for collaborative co-creation as well as resistance to the neoliberal individualised performance culture. Could such methods prevent you from falling back on a modernist understanding of the artist as the original creator of an individual expression and instead support a collaborative art and knowledge practice? As opposed to defining artistic creation as something that springs from and comes from an individual (the artistic genius or star), the author argues that artistic creation is a relational act, and that art is something that comes to be between people. This exposition is a collage of empirical material, text, images, and video gathered and produced over the last five years while facilitating, documenting, researching, and sharing the development of fourteen BETTY DEVELOPS productions. Download Accessible PDF

Environmental science has shown that the global use of concrete has led to significant challenges today and will seriously trouble future generations. Nevertheless, international building industries advertise concrete as a natural, regional, sustainable, and hence green material. In 2020, global human-made mass exceeded all living biomass, with concrete accounting for nearly half of it, making it a signal of the Capitalocene. A radical transformation of industrial building culture is asked for, otherwise anthropogenic mass will be three times biomass by 2040. The growth of the technosphere is amplifying multiple negative currents in the pluriverse — air pollution, lithospheric extraction, and hydrosphere depletion — all with catastrophic effects on biodiversity. This exposition displays the steps in and findings of the artistic research project Greenwashed Concrete. Setting out to widen understanding of the multi-layered material concrete, this project applied a methodology of juxtaposing two sculptural practices in order to collaboratively design experimental settings to engage scholars from heterogeneous fields. Download Accessible PDF