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.

A visual map of the RC. Hover over a screenshot to see the title and author. If you click you will see a gallery with a screenshot of each of its weaves. There is a form which allows you to filter based on title, author, keywords, abstract and date. For an exposition to appear in this map, it needs to be public (share -> public or published). The map is updated once every 24 hours. There is an alternative map that allows you to browse all research by keyword.

The project “Echoes from the torn down fourth wall” aims to build bridges between contemporary-music-as-an-art-form and community singing within songs from the Danish songbook ‘Højskolesangbogen’. In a hybrid concert format created for the project, within the context of an abstracted approach to intense, improvised concert music, several passages with community singing occur, where the audience sings along in songs they know. The research process has investigated how to create a musical environment that might bridge the different positions (art music and community singing), how the idea of the listener/spectator can be negotiated within different art domains and how, from a genre perspective, the project can be narrated as a meeting between confirming and destabilising forces. What is being reimagined in the project is not so much the past itself, and not necessarily established narratives about the past, but rather possible current and future narratives of how we may reinterpret songs from the past – together. What is being revealed is not so much specific perspectives in the past but rather hidden potentials in how a majority cultural assemblage like Højskolesangbogen may be renegotiated. Abstract in Danish: Projektet “Genklangen fra den væltede fjerde væg” forsøger at bygge broer mellem kunstmusikken og fællesskabet, her repræsenteret ved den danske sangbog ‘Højskolesangbogen’. I et hybridt koncertformat, skabt til projektet, hvor en intens, abstraheret tilgang til det musikalske materiale er gennemgående, opstår i løbet af koncerterne adskillige passager med fællessang, hvor publikum synger med på sange de kender. Projektet har blandt andet undersøgt hvordan vi kunne skabe et musikalske miljø, der kan bygge bro over de forskellige positioner (kunstmusik og fællessang), hvordan ideer om lytterens/tilskuerens roller kan genforhandles indenfor forskellige kunstdomæner, og hvordan projektet fra et genre-teoretisk perspektiv kan opfattes som et møde mellem bekræftende og destabiliserende kræfter. Det, der bliver gentænkt i projektet, er ikke så meget selve fortiden og heller ikke nødvendigvis etablerede fortællinger om fortiden, men snarere mulige samtidige og fremtidige fortællinger om, hvordan vi kan genfortolke sange fra fortiden – sammen. Og det der opdages, er ikke så meget skjulte perspektiver i fortiden, men derimod skjulte potentialer i, hvordan en majoritetskulturel ’assemblage’ som Højskolesangbogen kan genforhandles. Samtidig nedbrydes barrierer mellem udøvende og lytter, og der etablere nye måder at opleve ny musik på. Og vi mindes om, at vi aldrig ved, hvordan vores kulturelle fortid bliver fortolket i morgen.

Although the bass guitar is a relatively young instrument compared to most other chordophones, its performance has often been confined by tradition, following near-dogmatic conventions of ‘what’ and ‘how’ to play. At the core of these tenets is its monophonic accompaniment role, primarily articulating melodic lines in the low-frequency range with rhythmic patterns. Portfolio presents eight compositions that explore the bass guitar beyond this paradigm. These original solo pieces are outputs of an artistic research thesis and constitute a thematic album centered on a polyphonic approach to the bass guitar.

The perception of the canon of post-war Western art music today is still strongly determined by a constructed dichotomy which keeps Western art music separate from evolutions and radical experiments in jazz and African-American music. The very extensive oeuvre and philosophical body of thought of the American composer Anthony Braxton, what he calls his Tri-Centric Thought Unit Construct (TCTUC), can be seen as the metaphorical elephant in the room. This unique oeuvre has been largely ignored to this day within the repertoire, discourse and performance practice associated with the canon of post-war Western art music. This research project takes Anthony Braxton's TCTUC as a starting point to see how I, as an interpreter of Braxton’s music, can contribute to a broadening of this canon. My intention with this research is to provide artistic responses to the gaps within the existing discourse on post-war Western art music (see Braxton, Lewis, Piekut, Born, a.o.) by approaching a wide selection of Braxton’s compositions on his own terms. By putting these works as specific case studies on the agenda of relevant actors such as the conservatory, contemporary music festivals and concert series and through recordings and other media, I aimed to make a canon broadening possible through my practice as an interpreter. The results of this research, presented in the form of concerts, lectures, articles, workshops and recordings, are collected in this Research Catalogue website.