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 exposition brings together a collection of images, thoughts, and descriptions of the initial stages of a doctoral research project that explores the concept of 'notational actants': materially-focused, 3-dimensional objects intended for touch-based interpretation in musical performance. The majority of the content in this exposition was created during a one-month residency at Mustarinda (Hyrynsalmi, Finland).

The exposition provides an insight into the collaborative process of creating and performing Fragmente2 (2021) a choreomusical work by musician Kerstin Frödin and choreographer-dancer Åsa Unander-Scharin based on the Japanese avant-garde composer Makoto Shinohara’s solo piece for tenor recorder, Fragmente (1968). The exposition is an attempt to describe the methodology and creative process in this project, wherein music and dance intertwine in a non-hierarchical manner. The exposition follows the structure of the performance, which consists of a series of fragments, each of them analysed and descibed in terms of choreomusical interaction. We used Don Ihde’s experimental phenomenology and perspective variation (1986) as an artistic method to analyse and explore different aspects of our choreomusical materials and interaction concepts. To address and elaborate the choreomusical elements, we used Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s distinction between abstract and concrete movements (1945/2012), Pierre Schaeffer’s musical objects (1966/2017), and our own concept of choreographic objects. Furthermore, to jointly analyse and evaluate different interaction concepts we used video recordings, annotated scores, choreography scripts, movement instructions, personal reflections, and metaphorical descriptions of the 17 fragments. The process resulted in a contrapuntal choreomusical work where music and dance act as equal parts.

In my dissertation, I examine the manifestation of identity through material means - interior and clothing - and observe their dialogue in offline and online environments. I explore the occurrence of these spheres on social media, in everyday life and across history. I look for interesting connections in the context of the modern Western society we are part of. The key analysis was carried out by the Faculty of Applied Sciences at the University of West Bohemia in Pilsen, where various artificial intelligence methods looked for visual and conceptual parallels and colour schemes in the so-called mirror seflies, which I consider to be artefacts of contemporary society. The current academic year has been conducted mainly on the theoretical level, while the following year I plan to implement practical outputs that will materialize the data and findings.