Research Catalogue

The quest of reconciling scholarship and interpretative freedom has always been present in the early music movement discourse, since its 19th century foundations. Confronted with a plurality of performance practices, the performer of Early Music is forced to make interpretative choices, based on musicological research of the sources and their personal taste. The critical analysis of the sources related to a musical work is often a time-consuming and cumbersome task, usually provided by critical editions made by musicologists. Such editions primarily focus on the composer's agency, neglecting the contribution of a complex network of professions, ranging from editors, conductors, amateur and professional performers and collectors. The FAAM, Flemish Archive for Annotated Music, is an interdisciplinary project at the Royal Conservatoire Antwerp that wishes to explore the possibilities of annotation analysis on music scores for historically informed musicians. Annotations are a valuable source of information to recollect the decision-making process of musicians of the past. Especially when original musical recordings are not available, the marks provided by these performers of the past are the most intimate and informative connections between modern and ancient musicians. Contrary to a purely scholarly historically informed practice approach, based on the controversial concept of authenticity, we wish to allow the modern performers to reconcile their practice with the one of their predecessors in a process of dialectic emulation, where artistic process is improved through the past but does not stagnate in it.

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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This video article presents two pedagogical applications of the artistic research project "Expanding Horizons" for ensembles with adult music students of diverse musical backgrounds. The project is centered around practical explorations of applying improvisation to repertoire from 20th-century Western classical music, in combination with qualitative methods such as autoethnography, participant-observation and semi-structured interviews. The examples in the video demonstrates how approaches that are developed in the project can be applied to pedagogical situations, based on ensemble workshops with musicians of different musical orientations enrolled in music performance programmes in Sweden, one with university-level students in a bachelor programme and another with students at a folk high school. Two pieces were selected and adapted for these situations: Lili Boulanger’s Cortége (1914) and Maurice Ravel’s String quartet in F, movement II (1903). During the workshops, these pieces were then re-worked in a collaborative manner, with an emphasis on mutual exploration and musical expressivity through improvisation. The main pedagogical considerations were: selecting the appropriate repertoire, adapting materials for diverse learners, and fostering agency among performers. Although the improvisational approaches presented are rooted in jazz performance practice, the examples demonstrate how improvisational frameworks can be adapted for music students across musical genres, showcasing the potential for creativity, collaboration and interdisciplinary learning in music education.

This exposition explores the following question: How might an analysis be done in post-qualitative inquiry and performative approaches? Considering that post-qualitative inquiry rejects pre-existing research designs, methods, processes, procedures, or practices, and acknowledging that a research process will unfold and materialize differently in different projects, my aim is to explore one possible approach to analysis. This approach explored herein is specific to my PhD project. At the same time, I invite you to re-turn (to) the pieces you find fruitful and adjust them to your research. The research material being analyzed in this exposition is informed by my PhD project, which explores what might materialize in the matter of digital musicking when a loop station and 1–3-year-olds meet each other in a kindergarten context. Exploring how an analysis might be done in post-qualitative inquiry and performative approaches, and as the title plays on, the method of analyze is with the arts and take an arts-based approach. This exposition contributes to the fields of early childhood music education, post-qualitative and performative inquiry, and arts-based research. This exposition is included in the anthology "Utfordringer og muligheter innen musikk og utdanning", or "Challenges and Opportunities in Music and Education" in Enlgish. The anthology is published as part of MusPed:Research by the Cappelen Damm Academic publishing house. MusPed:Research is a peer-reviewed series of scholarly publications within the field of music pedagogy. The anthology, of which this exposition is a part, has been peer-reviewed, and this extends to this exposition as well.

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