Reinterpreting Ysaÿe’s Annotations - Franck's Sonata - Audio Examples
(2024)
author(s): Joanna Staruch-Smolec
published in: Research Catalogue
This website provides musical examples linked to my analyses of Eugène Ysaÿe's annotations on scores of César Franck's 'Sonate pour piano et violon'. It is an appendix to the article: Joanna Staruch-Smolec, 'Reinterpreting Ysaÿe’s Annotations. Musical sources relating to Franck’s Sonata in Viola Mitchell’s collection (Juilliard School Library)', Revue belge de Musicologie, 2025.
Between Performance and Notation: How did Carl Reinecke understand Mozart’s piano concerto No.26 K.537?
(2024)
author(s): Mako Kodama
published in: KC Research Portal
Carl Reinecke (1824-1910) was a German composer, pianist, conductor of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, and professor at the Leipzig Conservatory. His piano performances were admired by Felix Mendelssohn, Robert Schumann and Franz Liszt, and he was reputed as "the greatest and most sincere Mozart player of his time."However, you may be surprised on listening for the first time to his performances preserved on piano rolls, since there is noticeable use of expressive practices such as manual asynchrony, unnotated arpeggiation, and rubato (flexibility of rhythm and tempo), which is quite far from the kind of performance style that is considered good today.
This research clarifies the features of the performance practices audible in early piano rolls, such as those by Reinecke. It focuses on how he arranged and notated the Larghetto from Mozart's Piano Concerto No.26 K.537 for piano solo, how he performed it on piano roll (1905), and how he described the performance of the movement in his book Zur Wiederbelebung der Mozart'schen Clavier-Concerte (1891). The discrepancies between the three source materials give an insight into the implied performance practices of Reinecke’s time and his tacit knowledge. The research culminates with personal experimentation and reflection on how these performance practices can expand the freedom and possibilities of the author’s performances.
A modern analysis of Historical Informed Performance: considerations about the method, its past and its future
(2022)
author(s): Pedro Antonio Pérez Méndez
Limited publication. Only visible to members of the portal : KC Research Portal
The results of this research will be presented to the public in the form of an exposition in which the whole analysis process will be explained and both an answer to the research question and a reflection about past and future of the Historically Informed Performance influence in the musical stage will be stated. Through this exposition we will be addressing relevant questions about the concept of Historically Informed Performance and its application as a work method that I encounter on my research, such as the use of reconstructed or modern instruments, the existence or absence of limitations of time and style frames for which the Historically Informed Performance is a useful tool or the common misconceptions about this idea by some group of musicians, aiming to establish a basis for the correct application of the Historically Informed Performance idea as a useful work method by any kind of musician and leading to a final reflection about the future development of the Historically Informed Performance ideal.
Playing in the Manner of Ricardo Viñes
(2022)
author(s): Håkon Magnar Skogstad
connected to: Norwegian University of Science and Technology
published in: Research Catalogue
Playing in the Manner of Ricardo Viñes is an artistic research project undertaken at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) for the degree of Philosophiae Doctor (PhD) in Artistic Research. The project’s reflection work takes the form of an exposition, which includes texts, videos, annotated scores and the artistic results.
In this artistic research project, Håkon Magnar Skogstad uses an extreme form of imitation to embody and recreate the historical recordings of Catalan-Spanish pianist Ricardo Viñes (1875-1943) with the aim of evoking a romantic performance tradition in classical music. Ricardo Viñes was one of the leading pianists in Paris around 1900 and premiered several compositions, including a substantial part of the piano works of Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel. In his recordings, we hear a tradition of romantic performance practice, which Skogstad claims is not heard in modern-day performances. Furthermore, Ricardo Viñes’s close relationship to the works of Debussy and his recorded performances have the potential to challenge performance practice norms in impressionistic music.
By analyzing, studying and recreating the historical recordings of Ricardo Viñes, Skogstad sets out to research, experience and through this to gain an understanding of of Viñes's playing style on a fundamental level as a performing artist. The method of recreating recordings is carried out by imitating and playing alongside the originals to the point where the recreated performances can be superimposed onto the original historical recordings – achieving a sort of artistic “synchronization”. Skogstad believes that by committing to such extreme imitation, it is possible to extract unique artistic knowledge from these old recordings. In order to examine the performance practice in context, the playing style of Ricardo Viñes is compared to selected and equally thoroughly recreated recordings by contemporaneous pianists Sergei Rachmaninov, Ignacy Friedman and Jesús María Sanromá. Finally, four recordings of pieces by Claude Debussy played by Ricardo Viñes are recreated with the purpose of examining the influence of Viñes’s playing style in the music of Debussy.
In the film Playing in the Manner of Ricardo Viñes, which is one of the artistic results of the research, Skogstad records five of Ricardo Viñes’s original recordings in a “historical recording environment”, approaching that which Viñes encountered in 1930. The aim of this is for Skogstad to expose himself to a similar recording environment to what Viñes experienced – including recording one-off takes without any possibility of editing. The performances are rough, imperfect and on-the-fly - played in a “high-risk” manner just like Viñes's – in contrast to the perfectionism of music production standards today.
Håkon Magnar Skogstad (b.1989) is a prize-awarded diverse pianist and composer holding degrees in classical performance from Trondheim (NTNU, Department of Music), Oslo (Norwegian Academy of Music) and New York (Manhattan School of Music). He has performed in ensembles and as a soloist throughout Norway and played concerts in the U.S., Argentina, Germany, Austria and Sweden. Skogstad released three recordings with critically acclaimed ensembles in Norway, as well as his debut solo album Two Hands to Tango and Visions of Tango, featuring his original Concerto for Piano and String Orchestra with Atle Sponberg and the Trondheim Soloists. Both albums have received numerous outstanding reviews and the latter was nominated in the Norwegian Grammy Awards for best classical album.
(Un-) settling Sites and Styles
(2021)
author(s): Einar Røttingen, Bente Elisabeth Finseraas
published in: Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design, University of Bergen
(Un-)settling sites and styles: In search of new expressive means.
Eight performers (voice, piano, violin, cello), one musicologist and one composer aspired to unsettle their habitual ways of working with musical interpretation of 20th century and contemporary Norwegian composers. By collaborating to develop new perspectives and methods, they investigated questions of style and how different sites influenced their rehearsals and performances.
How do performers find new expressive means? How can intersubjective exchange within a research group contribute to articulating tacit knowledge? How can mutual unsettling approaches influence conventional or subjective attitudes of fidelity to a score or a performance tradition? How can novel sounds, musical material and musical meaning emerge beyond prejudiced conceptions or through improvisation?
The three-year project was facilitated by the Norwegian Artistic Research Programme and the Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design (Grieg Academy), University of Bergen, and resulted in texts, sound recordings, videos, and new commented score editions.
A Study on Ornamentation and Expression in French vocal Music (1650-1750)
(2021)
author(s): Kitty Lai
published in: KC Research Portal
This study aims to understand and learn about the historical performance practice in the 17th century. As an early music singer, I am attracted to the sweet and charming 17th-century French vocal music. In particular, I am interested in the relationship between French ornamentation and expression. This research investigates the background of 17th-century performance practice in France in relation to the ornamentation, the pronunciation of 17th-century French, the different types of ornaments and the expression implied by the ornaments. The performance practice in the 17th century was different from now since it was undergoing a major change from polyphonic to solo music, which emphasised more the text than the music. The knowledge of ornamentation was an expected requirement for all well-trained singers in the 17th century, ornamentation was not merely a decoration, but a tool in emphasizing the importance of the text. Thus, it is necessary to learn ornamentation for a complete 17th-century French vocal performance. Since text was the main element in 17th-century French vocal music, it is important to know the characteristics of French language in this period. The ability to distinguish French long and short syllables was important because ornamentation could only be applied mostly to long syllables. The pronunciation of certain French vowels has undergone a significant alteration, and the ‘old’ way of pronouncing them is included in the study. The research findings also show that some ornaments were meant to be used only in certain expression and they help me to better ‘compose’ French ornamentation in future performances.
The aural garden of sounding materials: performing within the materiality of Et in Arcadia ego-music performance
(2018)
author(s): Assi Karttunen
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
'Et in Arcadia ego'-music performance is an auditory garden deriving its inspiration from 17th-century European meditation gardens. It was premiered at the Helsinki Music Centre in autumn 2016 and performed again in summer 2017 as a part of the Venice Research Pavilion of the University of the Arts Helsinki.The performance was initiated as my KeKe-project 2014 (Sibelius Academy’s former Development Centre, KeKe) and the research question was, how to develop classical music’s performance practices by subtly varying its performative parameters. By pre-recording organic sound material related to wooden instruments like organ pipes, psalteries and harpsichords, including also concrete sounds of wood, cones, stalks and sticks, these sounds were projected into the concert venue and heard among the music repertory and alive improvisations. Moreover, I wanted to pose a question, whether a concert venue could be understood as a compound of resonating elements and shapes. Is it possible to animate the concert venue by studying its auditory features more carefully? The 'Et in Arcadia ego'-performance develops performativity of classical music by subtly varying and extending its performative techniques. This artistic research is articulated in line with phenomenologists such as Don Ihde and Maurice Merleau-Ponty and philosopher Gaston Bachelard.
Ornamenting Vocality. Intra-active methodology for Vocal Meaning-Making.
(2018)
author(s): Elisabeth Laasonen Belgrano
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
This exposition departs from the silence of a non-existing voice. A voice about to touch the ears and eyes of both author and readers/listeners. A voice already sounding in the head of the author - sounding as thoughts, words, letters and sentences. A non/voice being part of a never ending development of new materialities. An onto-epistemological voice diffracted through a singer's process of making sense of a lesson from a 17th century vocal manuscript. A voice as a mattering method for the art of singing through new materialist theories, vocal and discursive narratives and somatic awareness.
Can one wade twice into the same Seine?
(2015)
author(s): Assi Karttunen
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
In 2013, the Elysian Fields working group received a grant for two concerts based on the concept of a musician’s relationship to a specific city. The idea was to reveal the musician’s living relationship to history in the context of three European towns; Amsterdam, Paris and Helsinki.
I belonged to the group planning the Paris concert, and therefore my article deals with the musicians’ working process and the phases of the practising/rehearsing in preparation for this event, which was staged in January 2015. The Elysian ensemble comprised: Varpu Haavisto, viola da gamba; Essi Iso-Oja, harp; Assi Karttunen, harpsichord, Katja Vaahtera, soprano; and Hannu Vasara, violin.
During the artistic process, the chosen material is shaped, crystallized, constituted and transformed. All of these forms of working are referred to as ‘processing’, where the word is used to describe otherwise invisible stages of working through which the collected material starts to give birth to relevant sets of themes that emerge from the music and its performance practices. During a musician’s decades of processing, the encountered ’alien’ musics and cultures are appropriated and incorporated into his or her own musical identity.
It is typical that in the practising/rehearsal period, the arising themes begin to grow connections to each other as well as outwards to the ’world’. These connections and relationships, their mutual dynamics and causalities, may be explored and analysed. The multidisciplinary and multistage processing and analysis of the material (finding, collecting, producing, practising/rehearsing, delivering and performing) could be called artistic research or practice-based research.
For a musician, Paris is like a university of the mind from which one can never graduate.
Rosa García Ascot’s works for piano solo
(last edited: 2023)
author(s): Irene Comesaña Aguilar
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
The name of Rosa García Ascot (1902-2002) started to appear in essays and recordings a few years ago, and not numerously. She was an outstanding pianist and composer, as assured by influential people like Manuel de Falla, who was her teacher, Maurice Ravel, or Igor Stravinsky. Nevertheless, her name fell into oblivion and her music remained unpublished or lost for many years. It was my aim with this research to bring back the figure of Rosa García Ascot by investigating her life story and analyzing some of her piano pieces and to re-discover a performance practice that has been lost, applying interpretative ideas into my performance of her music. Despite the shortage of available information and resources –many of them have been lost, uncatalogued, or simply don’t exist–, I found different strategies to achieve my goal. Through her piece Petite Suite (1935-1938) I studied its neoclassical style and the influence of the harpsichord. For the performance practice of this repertoire, I took references from Joaquín Nin’s edition of Spanish 18t h -century keyboard music, applying some indications to Ascot’s score. The related performance practice of other composers that had a connection with Ascot, like Stravinsky and Prokofiev, also serve as a source of information for other pieces studied in this research: Una Cosita III and Pieza para piano IV. On top of this, expert consultation with Ignacio Clemente and Paula Ríos, musical and recording analysis and self- experimentation complete the research process of understanding the performative style of Rosa García Ascot through her works.
Die Partimenti von Giovanni Paisiello Ansätze zu ihrem Verständnis
(last edited: 2023)
author(s): Nicoleta Paraschivescu
connected to: Academy of Creative and Performing Arts
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
The Partimenti of Giovanni Paisiello: Towards Their Understanding in Context.
Full version only available in German.
This doctoral thesis of Nicoleta Paraschivescu focuses on Paisiello's partimenti and how to approach their realization and performance. To that end I completed an in-depth profile of his pedagogical activities and expanded the already well-known sources—the Regole published in St. Petersburg (1782)—with newly discovered partimenti by Paisiello. Crucial for this study were connections between Paisiello's partimenti and not only his own compositions but also those of his teacher Francesco Durante and his other contemporaries. This broader perspective required taking into account the genre-specific contexts in which Paisiello’s partimenti reside. The inclusion of larger musical forms and complex progressions as compositional models significantly expands the spectrum of possibilities in the realization of his partimenti. A central idea emerging from this study is that partimenti provide a key to the musical language of the time and offer vast possibilities for realization and ornamentation.
The Informed Performer
(last edited: 2023)
author(s): Joost Vanmaele
connected to: Academy of Creative and Performing Arts
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Playing a musical instrument is generally considered to be a complex human behaviour involving the integration and coordination of a broad range of human functions such as perception, imagination, memory, information processing, emotion, communication, and dexterity. From this perspective, it seems only reasonable to assume that, in an age of informational and communicational abundance, this intrinsic multifacetedness manifests itself in numerous informational contact-points between musical practice and a variety of academic and para-academic fields which zoom in on these specific elements of musical activity. Joost Vanmaele’s dissertation is directed at carefully and systematically evaluating the position of musicianship in an age of informative abundance and connectedness, to consider ways of re-balancing and broadening its epistemic grounds and attuning its information systems, with a view to artistic development, enrichment and/or liberation. By proposing a Bio-Culturally informed Performers’ Practice of Western Art Music [BCiPP], an information- and dialogue-friendly, transdisciplinary space is created where musical activities are not considered as phenomena sui generis but rather as informable cultural instances or personal particularisations of the human capacity to meaningfully generate and react to temporally patterned sounds. The potential impact of BCiPP is put to the test in two case-studies.
Romanticizing Brahms: Early Recordings and the [De]Construction of Brahmsian Identity
(last edited: 2023)
author(s): Anna Scott
connected to: Academy of Creative and Performing Arts
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Despite most pianists' claims of historical deference and creative agency, their performances of Brahms's piano works are nothing like the early-recorded performances of the composer and his students: gaps that are mediated by understandings of Brahms's Classical canonic identity, the performance norms that protect that identity, and those norms' underlying aesthetic ideology of control. This predication of Brahmsian identity on restraint leaves the composer and his students in a precarious situation, as their recordings evidence an approach that is governed by the inhibitions typically associated with Romanticism. This volume, by Anna Scott, seeks to problematize understandings of Brahms's identity: by investigating the origins and vestiges of the aesthetic ideology of control; by analysing and copying the recordings of pianists in the composer's inner circle; and by applying these pianists' styles in ways that are just as disruptive to modern notions of Brahmsian identity as their early-recorded models. In so doing, a thoroughly Romantic performance style emerges that catalyses a fundamental shift in understanding as related to Brahms's identity; thereby opening up a new palette of expressive and technical resources, and both elucidating and narrowing persistent gaps between modern and early-recorded Brahms style, as well as between what performers believe, know, and ultimately do.
What late medieval chant manuscripts do to a present-day performer of plainchant
(last edited: 2023)
author(s): Hendrik Vanden Abeele
connected to: Academy of Creative and Performing Arts
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
This book is witness to Hendrik Vanden Abeele__s research into the development, construction and creation of a present-day performance practice of late medieval plainchant, based partly on his work with the Belgian chant group Psallentes. The study focuses on sometimes very specific aspects of the performance of plainchant, relating to a rich and diverse body of chant manuscripts. Meanwhile, the constantly recurring personal storytelling draws a picture of research-acts as ingrained characteristics of the every day activities of a musician. The many challenges and obstacles faced when performing plainchant may turn into opportunities, where the performer fills in the blanks with ideas, colours and textures. He may even be tempted to draw outside the lines, countering any practical or historical constraints in a creative way.
Poiesis and the Performance Practice of Physically Polyphonic Notations
(last edited: 2023)
author(s): Kevin Toksöz Fairbairn
connected to: Academy of Creative and Performing Arts
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
This dissertation commences from the concept of poiesis, informed
chiefly by Hannah Arendt’s use of the term in The Human Condition (1958) to indicate a form of
creativity married to craftsmanship. This poietic framework will then be used throughout the
dissertation to inform a practice-based analysis of the learning process involved with physically
polyphonic notations (herein defined as notations of dissynchronous physical actions within a single
performative body). Despite polyphonic asynchrony, the unifying performative demands of these
pieces are the learning strategies necessary to accomplish this eventual reassembly of instrumental
practice within a single, performing body. The following essays will explore the physically
polyphonic repertoire of the trombone specifically as a laboratory for problematizing this poietic
approach to the learning process.
Shekasteh Mouyeh
(last edited: 2019)
author(s): Saman Samadi
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Radif – or, the traditional repertoire of Persian classical music, consisting of more than 200 short melodic motions (gusheh), which are arranged into seven principal modes (dastgāh) with five secondary branches of these modes (āvāz) – is the oldest documented version of Dastgah music, developed by Mirza Abdollah in the 19th century. This exposition represents the confrontation of these microtonal modes with and within electroacoustic music material and techniques, and the problematisation of the results along with objects of video-art and visual effects, creating a set of compositions that would exhibit novelty; furthermore, the assemblage of them for and through a live performance utilizing improvisational methods as an attempt to expand timbral possibilities in a contextual relationship with Western contemporary classical music. The aim of this artistic research is producing a syncretistic multimedia work of art that could serve in assimilating two perspectives of Eastern and Western into a new coalescence towards the grail of a universal totality of classical forms.
On Stockhausen Solo(s)
(last edited: 2016)
author(s): Juan Parra, Johannes (Jos) Mulder
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Using Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Solo für Melodieinstrument und Rückkoppelung (1965 - 66) as starting point for investigating the affect and effect of technological transference when reproducing historical repertoire with live electronics, we aim to shed light on the misconception of “transparency” of sound reinforcement and current digital media, and how this colouring can (and perhaps should) be used to inject new life and ask new questions to the works it aims to preserve. On the footprint of a rendition that will aim to reflect as close as possible the original performance tradition of the piece, we will later allow the possibilities of current Network, signal processing and reinforcement technology shape and colour a radical interpretation of simultaneous Solo(s).