Research Catalogue

Den gudomliga läckan - tractatus papyrus är en slags operaföreställning som ingick i projektet Paper Music som genomfördes i november 2022 i Mölndal.

This is an exposition in progress. Starting in the 2021/22 season, the professorship Artistic Connective Practices organises and curates a series of encounters with practitioners, the research team of the professorship and audience, in order to explore the notion of Artistic Connective Practices.

Anansi’s Web- Entanglements without Tripping, a Ph.D. research fellow project led by Thomas Talawa Prestø, delves into the intricate weaving of African Diaspora practices and praxis. This exploration uses several conceptual tools to examine how performance can catalyze personal, social, and communal transformation. At its core is ChoreoNommo, a praxis grounded in the African concept of Nommo, which emphasizes the power of words and gestures to create tangible change. ChoreoWanga addresses the architectural and structural aspects of performances, focusing on how these elements can hold and transmit transformative energy (Ashé). PerformancePwen focuses on the energetic effects performances have on communities, highlighting the reciprocal relationship between performer and audience. The Talawa Technique™emphasizes a holistic and culturally rooted approach to dance, and Committography underscores the importance of strategic involvement in arts organizations and policy-making bodies to influence systemic change. The project culminates in two major works: Jazz Ain’t Nothing, an interdisciplinary dance performance incorporating song, dance, music, and visual elements, and That Voudou That We Do, a performative lecture. Both works are accompanied by the Cognoscape, a new writing methodology developed by Prestø. The Cognoscape provides a non-chronological onboarding into the artist’s knowledge scape, offering insights into the artist's praxis, beliefs, and reflections. It serves as a self-referential tool that captures the culmination of practice and experience, focusing on how knowledge manifests rather than attributing ownership to an individual author

The practice-based PhD research project comprises the development and application of composition strategies and techniques generated through interdisciplinary collaboration to integrate elements and ideas from non-sonic disciplines into the musical discourse of new music-theatre works, specifically opera. I explore mechanisms of mapping and association that engage with both the specific subject matter of each piece and the creative collaborative environment in which they are created, thus generating different compositional resources that I use to inform the creative process. By using mapping techniques, I can deeply engage and communicate a subject matter on different levels in the musical composition. The framework for this research is the intertwining of art and science on a variety of levels from a music compositional perspective. Within this framework, I explored the integration of knowledge and data from the natural and social sciences to inform the composition of four science-based music-theatre works: In response to Naum Gabo: Linear Construction in Space No. 1 (2020), Autohoodening: The Rise of Captain Swing (2021), The Flowering Desert (2022), and TRAPPIST-1 (2023). With this approach, I aim to closely link these works with their particular subject matter instead of being composed based just on my personal musical taste. By consistently and cohesively applying the strategies and techniques explored in this research, the outcome is not creating music about science or music inspired by science, but, instead, music embedded with science in which the scientific data and knowledge inform the composition decisions. The subject matter is therefore intertwined within the musical discourse, its performativity and theatricality, and its relationship with the other disciplines and collaborators involved in the creation of these music-theatre works.

Table of contents JSS issues

In this article we propose the concept of "sonic citizenship" as a framework for the multitude of ways in which we, in the rhythms of our everyday lives, form the aural background of each other, and how citizenship is practiced, negotiated, and maintained through everyday sonic activities. With examples of messy, fragile, and difficult interactions with sound from the time of the COVID-19 pandemic, we argue that the effort of tuning the soundscapes of the world needs to be complemented by an attuning approach that focuses on the negotiations we are constantly involved with in our everyday lives. The soundscape approach in the tradition of R. Murray Schafer implies that the soundscape is there as a landscape that we can uncover and tune. Conversely, the attuning approach of sonic citizenship understands soundscapes as relationships and dynamic configurations to which we must continuously attune, and which are themselves reconfigured via breaks in habitual attunements.