Research Catalogue

an international database for artistic research

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  9. Publications 2024 Expositions from PhD fellows, senior faculty and externally financed artistic research projects.
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  8. Publications - 2023 Artistic research results from research fellows and externally financed projects.
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  7. Publications - 2022 Publications of results of artistic research at NMH in 2022.
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  6. Publications - 2021 Artistic research publications 2021.
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  5. Music & Practice, Volume 7: ‘Expositions & Developments’ Music & Practice, Volume 7
  
  ‘Expositions & Developments’
  
  In July 2018, the Fifth International Conference of the Performance Studies Network (PSN) was held in Oslo at the Norwegian Academy of Music (NMH). Although PSN has always been international in its scope - and in the far-flung home locations of many of its attendees - this was the first time that the biennial event was held at a venue outside the UK. The call for contributions produced a substantial response, amounting to over 150 proposals, which were considered by an international committee of peer reviewers.
  
  In all, around 100 presenters, working singly and in groups, gave talks, performances and hybrid presentations combining these two elements during the course of the event. They addressed a wide range of repertoires, issues and approaches, all linked by their focus on how we understand music in relation to its manifestation through performance, how we analyse our experience of it as sound and how the creative and performative aspects of the art-form relate to one another.
  
  The richness and variety of what was presented demanded that there should be some kind of more durable resource documenting, preserving and disseminating at least a portion of the material that had been laid before the attendees. In view of this, after the event, NMH issued a further call inviting those who had given presentations to take up, if they wished, the opportunity to develop them to be included in a set of publications celebrating PSN 2018. NMH supports the online journal, Music & Practice, whose aims and focus chime closely with those of PSN. It was agreed with the Editor–in-Chief of Music & Practice, Erlend Hovland, that three special issues of the journal would be dedicated to articles and expositions, some of them scientific in scope, others more exploratory in nature, building upon presentations from the conference. Two of these issues would appear on its standard platform; in addition, a third would be mounted on the NMH’s portal within the Research Catalogue (RC) of the Society for Artistic Research (SAR). Here, presentations in which the performative element dominated over that of text or commentary would be published as ‘expositions’; in the standard issues, there would still be ample opportunity to benefit from the journal’s online format by including images, sound files, etc. within the papers, when required.
  
  It was my privilege to be invited to serve as guest editor for these three issues. Doing so has brought home to me the vitality and diversity of activity taking place under the umbrella term of Performance Studies, as well as highlighting the important role that PSN, over ten years and five editions, has played in the development of the sub-discipline. Along with my gratitude for being commissioned to take on this task, I must pay tribute to the open and collaborative spirit in which contributors have engaged with me during the entire editorial process.
  
  This issue, Volume 7 of Music & Practice and the last of the three to be dedicated to PSN 2018, departs from the previous two in its migration to the Research Catalogue, although, importantly, it also retains a presence among its companion volumes on the Music & Practice website with a home page there, offering links to the RC. In keeping with RC nomenclature, the six contributions which make up the volume have been cast in the form of expositions, and authors have been encouraged to use to the full the freer conventions associated with this genre of presentation and with the RC format. The extent to which they have done so varies, but the resulting collection of expositions offers a diverse array of examples of how the material content of contributions and the platform on which they have been gathered may interact in fruitful ways.
  
  Among the contributions, there is a discernible division into two types: those which explore new ways of presenting or exploring pre-existing material and those which use the development of newly-created material as a novel lens through which to examine ideas which may already have been explored in other contexts. With this duality between exposition and development – and with due homage to the famous published conversations between Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft of the same name – the volume takes as its overall title the phrase ‘Expositions and Developments’.
  
  Four contributions fall within the first group, Expositions. Two of these are concerned with particular repertoires, one relatively mainstream but given an innovative treatment and the other existing at the highly specialised margins of both sonorous character and playability. The other two focus on techniques: in the one case, those associated with the drive in the 20th and 21st centuries towards the extension of these to produce new compositional resources and, in the other, those described in certain 19th century singing treatises but long since lost from normal vocal practice.
  
  In their exposition, ‘Debussy: Beyond Black and White’, Stephen Emmerson and Bernard Lanskey offer a fascinating and original perspective upon the performance of selected piano works by the French composer. Their joint exploration of the possibilities offered by modern digital keyboard instruments provides both a technical explanation of these and a narrative account of the progressive stages of their collaboration. They situate the sometimes unexpected creative decisions that they make along the way within both the historical context of what we know of Debussy’s aesthetic preferences and the here-and-now of their own empirical reactions to the range of choice offered by their digital instruments.
  
  Roger Heaton provides us with a detailed account of Horatiu Radulescu’s The Inner Time, based on the deep knowledge and understanding formed through his own close association with the work since its earliest performances. As its title suggests, his exposition, ‘Horatiu Radulescu – playing the unplayable’, also touches on broader issues of how, in highly demanding repertoire, the performer must mediate at the interface between creative conception and performative practicality to produce the optimum realisation of the work. His text-based account is complemented by a video presentation in which his profound internalisation of the work and his total immersion its technical and aesthetic qualities are vividly apparent.
  
  Ellen Fallowfield uses her concern with extended techniques, in particular multiphonics for the cello, as a lens through which to view the twin phenomena of performance practice and research practice and to critique the shortcomings that commonly arise at the point of their interaction. In her exposition, ‘Multiphonics for Stringed Instruments: Performance Practice and Research Practice’, she highlights, among other aspects, the critical role of the choice of communicative medium in facilitating the incorporation of state-of-the art research into performance practice. As an example of this, she discusses her own smartphone app, Cello MApp. A feature of her exposition is the inclusion of video extracts from this app alongside a discussion of the various rationales which she employed for deciding what should feature in its content and which should be the navigational routes offered.
  
  For Ingela Tagil, too, research practice and performance practice are combined as she explores the lost vocal techniques of ‘Coup de la Glotte’ and ‘Voix Blanche’. In ‘Coup de la Glotte and Voix Blanche: Two vanished techniques of the Garcia School’, she attempts to establish from treatises, contemporary accounts and early experiments with the laryngoscope a clear concept of what was understood by these terms to 19th-century teachers and, in particular, to Manuel Garcia the younger, one of their most vigorous proponents. She then describes her own practical experiments, conducted with present-day singers, whereby these techniques are re-created and, as a result, heard for probably the first time in more than a century.
  
  The two remaining contributions are those which may be seen as partaking of the character of Developments. In both cases, they involve the creation of new works arising from, and acting as test-beds for, the exploration of ideas. In ‘Cerro Rico: the co-production of a discursive voice in chamber music’, the idea being explored is that of creative collaboration between composer and performer – one that has also featured in several other contributions across these three M&P/PSN volumes. David Gorton, Mieko Kanno and Stefan Östersjö have produced an exposition documenting their shared work, as composer and two performers respectively, on the creation of a new piece, the ‘Cerro Rico’ of their title, for the unusual combination of soprano violin and charango. Their exposition both illuminates the collaborative processes feeding into this work’s creation and presents the finished composition. Using video presentation as the primary element of the exposition enables them to show directly how process and product were intimately related during the unfolding of the project and how their ideal of ‘the discursive voice in chamber music’ was able to emerge in the creative spaces of this interrelationship.
  
  Finally, Helena Marinho and Joaquim Branco present their innovative work exploring the possibilities of the fortepiano as an instrumental resource with the capacity to inspire contemporary improvisers and composers. In ‘New music for old instruments: Expanding the fortepiano’, they discuss the range of special effects which were initially commonly built into fortepianos but which rapidly shrank to the sustaining and una corda pedals of the modern piano. Their project considers what they describe as the ‘digital expansion’ of the fortepiano, using sound design and programming not just to re-create the wider palette of historical effects but to strike out in new creative directions. While some of their testing protocols during the developmental phase made use of existing repertoire, the main thrust of their ambitions is towards the electronic interfaces and digital sound objects they have created providing a stimulus for improvisation and for new compositions.
  
  From the brief descriptions of these six expositions, I hope that their richness of content and breadth of subject matter already shine through, although these qualities will doubtless become more apparent still from viewings and readings of the expositions themselves. Working with the contributors to this volume has been especially rewarding, if sometimes challenging, since we came at the project with very different levels of skill and experience in handling the Research Catalogue platform. Here, I should record my special thanks to Jonas Howden Sjøvaag and Birgitte Grydeland Pollen, whose advice, technical expertise and sympathetic approach towards those unfamiliar with the RC have been of immense help in bringing the volume to a state of readiness for publication.
  
  Looking back over the now-completed trio of special PSN volumes of Music & Practice, and at the just under thirty contributions which they contain, it is impossible to feel anything other than optimistic for the future of performance studies – at least in terms of its own vitality and diversity. This rich corpus of published material now exists thanks to the generous support and commitment of the Norwegian Academy of Music. It is to be hoped that, in a climate where monetary austerity is frequently accompanied by a sense of the arts as being less essential than their scientific counterparts, such enlightened patronage, not just by higher arts education institutions but also by arts and cultural organisations more generally, will not only continue to be seen as important but will remain financially viable. If the unforeseen upheavals of 2020 and the Covid-19 pandemic have taught us anything, it should be that the performing arts are simultaneously more vulnerable than we might have imagined to such a threat and even more precious in times of fearfulness and enforced isolation than many of us may have realised.
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  4. Publications - 2020 NMH Publications 2020
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  3. Unfolding the process Darla Crispin, Director, Arne Nordheim Centre for Artistic Research (NMH)
  
  An international, peer reviewed issue, published by NMH
  ISBN 978-82-7853-270-6
  
  In autumn 2015, the then newly-established Arne Nordheim Centre for Artistic Research (NordART) launched a series of events designed to create an inclusive forum for the exploration of what constitutes artistic research in music, which processes occur during its execution and how its outcomes are articulated through language. Artistic research continues to be a field in which new modes of expression are sought and tested; this endeavour may embrace new ways of using words but also new means of going beyond them and yet still achieving the successful communication of ideas. The aim is always to generate more effective approaches for describing artistic research work and for communicating the essential nature of art-making itself, rather than falling back into the patterns and modes of thinking that characterise more traditional research surrounding music.
  
  From NordART’s very inception, the idea of ‘unfolding’ had been a valuable guiding metaphor, and it rapidly established itself as a central concern of the Centre and its researchers. Thus, it was logical that the first external event organised by NordART should be an international symposium under the title ‘Unfolding the Process’. In the end, two symposia were run, one in 2015 and one in 2016, to explore the theme in greater depth, to share them with a wider community or researchers and to allow the voices of these external researchers to be heard within the NordART research environment.
  
  The expositions in this collection represent a sample of those presented in the two NordART ‘Unfolding the Process’ symposia. Significantly, the expositions selected come not only from the core field of artistic research, whether creative or performative, but also from music education and musicology, where the notion of ‘unfolding’ also finds strong resonances. This fundamental conceptual flexibility and inclusivity allows a strong, music-based yet interdisciplinary discourse to take place. It also accounts for the appearance of the concept of unfolding outside music: in the fine arts, writing and storytelling, film-making, textiles, architecture and many other fields. The exploration of the term presented within these expositions is, therefore, offered as a trans-disciplinary moment, a confirmation that unifying concepts can be developed for artistic research that honour its many media and modes of expression.
  
  As discussed more fully in the exposition ‘Artistic Research as a Process of Unfolding’, the concepts and connotations carried by the word ‘unfolding’ are many and varied. This variety is of positive benefit, in terms of how it can stimulate responses in researchers that are both critically reasoned and creative. Perhaps crucially, unfolding is usually seen as a process that occurs through time, whether momentary or prolonged. It therefore shares an essential characteristic with the nature of music-making - a key factor in many of its appearances in this collection of expositions. But this temporal quality of unfolding goes further; it can involve narratives and storytelling, but also the manipultation of paper, cloth, and all manner of materials. It may also indicate moments of change, of matters coming to a focussed point and then leading off into new planes and horizons. Unfolding therefore has a spatial, as well as temporal, dimension, and the term has a long history in architechture, for model-making and prototyping. This multivalent quality of ‘unfolding’ makes it a trans-disciplinary term, invaluable to artist-researchers as a component of their conceptual toolkits, but also reminding them of the connective strands which exist between the multifarious practices of artistic research as the discipline now stands.
  
  The expositions gathered together here have been sequenced to underline this idea of trans-disciplinarity. The first lays out the idea of unfolding as a general concept. The four that follow demonstrate how fluently the concept can be related to both compositional and performative actions and works. What then follows are two expositions that relate unfolding to educational environments, while the final two expositions demonstrate the use of the concept in interpretative readings, one performative, one text-based. The first of these takes an already much-adapted work and explores ways of unfolding yet more aspects of its protean identity; the second examines the processes at work beneath the surface of a small group of interrelated works by one composer.
  
  Whether taken individually and episodically or as a sequential unity, these expositions present a fascinating range of responses to the concept of unfolding. The worlds of enquiry that they address are of considerable diversity, but they also demonstrate that this diversity is one that can be communicatively linked through the shared concept of unfolding.
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  2. Publications - 2019 Publications from NMH 2019
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  1. Publications - 2018 and earlier Publications - 2018 and earlier

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  Releasing the 'Loudie' (2020) author(s): Christian Kjos published in: Norwegian Academy of Music
  My artistic research project at the Norwegian Academy of Music aims to highlight the role of the harpsichord player and the interpretation of basso continuo in G. F. Handel’s continuo cantatas – i.e. cantatas for one voice with continuo accompaniment only. How the continuo realization is shaped in performance of this repertoire is crucial to the overall sound since there are no other obbligato instruments, unlike in the instrumental cantatas. A wide range of possible solutions emerge in the intersection between improvisation, composition, imagination, and speculation within a source-oriented approach. To give these cantatas a musical guise that is rarely heard among performer’s today, I focus on an advanced and soloistic harpsichord continuo that includes different use of imitation, counterpoint, harmonic additions, ‘duet-making’ with the vocal part and other rarely heard features; inspired by certain German 18th-century continuo treatises such as Heinichen’s Der Generalbass in der Composition (Dresden, 1728), Mattheson’s Grosse Generalbass-schule (Hamburg, 1731) and Daube’s General-Bass in drey Accorden (Leipzig, 1756) in addition to several preceding Italian(ate) and English sources, as well as idioms from Handel’s own keyboard music. There are frequently significant discrepancies between how historical sources describe basso continuo playing and how today’s harpsichordists interpret and perform their part within the context of the HIP-movement. In the last decades, two contrasting approaches stand out: those who accompany discretely with few parts and a transparent accompaniment: unofficially nicknamed ‘Softies’; and those who play generally fuller: ‘Loudies’ – from which my project receives its title. With this project, I aim to deepen the understanding of the discipline of continuo playing and to develop realizations that go beyond mere chordal playing often heard today in a much-neglected repertoire by one of the greatest composers of the Baroque era. Hopefully, this will challenge existing views and conventions among several branches of today’s early music community, where strong performers and personas foster strong opinions.
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  Site Awareness in Music – recontextualizing a sensation of another place (2020) author(s): Knut Olaf Sunde published in: Norwegian Academy of Music
  The project argues that a sensation of another place is vital to the recognition of unfamiliar perspectives. Space and sound are inextricably connected. The surroundings and context are central to how we perceive external stimuli, such as images, events, history, ideas or music. The brain interprets and make choices by association, based on what the body perceives and based on previous knowledge and experience. How humans listen, hear, see, perceive, interpret and react to our surroundings are based on our cognitive structures. An unformatting of society is needed. A risk makes the body and brain aware and alert. Adrenalin is released to the blood, enabling the organism to sudden and severe effort. Risk implies something unestablished, uncertain, a danger, something unknown. Risk implies the possibility of failure and ultimately death. Risk increase anxiety and excitement, enabling the alertness needed to maneuver away from or solve problems. When something is at stake, interest is set into play. The unknown is by its very nature beyond the body’s experience. The project is about increasing the awareness of the situational and contextual implications of music. This is enquired through three works. For each site or situation I work with, I analyze its characteristics, such as acoustical conditions, the relations of the place to its surroundings, the shape of the landscape and historical or political context. I try to create immersive, audiovisual projects that are connected to a certain place. I aim to involve qualities and characteristics from the place, shaping a conversation, putting something at stake. I conceive a music activating the place, making created situations. I do this because there is a close link between memory, comprehension and place. The sense of place and ability to navigate is essential to our memory and bodily existence in the world. Main supervisor: Ole Lützow-Holm Second supervisor: Marianne Heier
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  Artistic Research as a Process of Unfolding (2019) author(s): Darla Crispin published in: Norwegian Academy of Music
  As artistic research work in various disciplines and national contexts continues to develop, the diversity of approaches to the field becomes ever more apparent. This is to be welcomed, because it keeps alive ideas of plurality and complexity at a particular time in history when the gross oversimplifications and obfuscations of political discourses are compromising the nature of language itself, leading to what several commentators have already called ‘a post-truth’ world. In this brutal environment where ‘information’ is uncoupled from reality and validated only by how loudly and often it is voiced, the artist researcher has a responsibility that goes beyond the confines of our discipline to articulate the truth-content of his or her artistic practice. To do this, they must embrace daring and risk-taking, finding ways of communicating that flow against the current norms. In artistic research, the empathic communication of information and experience – and not merely the ‘verbally empathic’ – is a sign of research transferability, a marker for research content. But this, in some circles, is still a heretical point of view. Research, in its more traditional manifestations mistrusts empathy and individually-incarnated human experience; the researcher, although a sentient being in the world, is expected to behave dispassionately in their professional discourse, and with a distrust for insights that come primarily from instinct. For the construction of empathic systems in which to study and research, our structures still need to change. So, we need to work toward a new world (one that is still not our idea), a world that is symptomatic of what we might like artistic research to be. Risk is one of the elements that helps us to make the conceptual twist that turns subjective, reflexive experience into transpersonal, empathic communication and/or scientifically-viable modes of exchange. It gives us something to work with in engaging with debates because it means that something is at stake. To propose a space where such risks may be taken, I shall revisit Gillian Rose’s metaphor of ‘the fold’ that I analysed in the first Symposium presented by the Arne Nordheim Centre for Artistic Research (NordART) at the Norwegian Academy of Music in November 2015. I shall deepen the exploration of the process of ‘unfolding’, elaborating on my belief in its appropriateness for artistic research work; I shall further suggest that Rose’s metaphor provides a way to bridge some of the gaps of understanding that have already developed between those undertaking artistic research and those working in the more established music disciplines.
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  Modulations through time (2019) author(s): Stephen Emmerson, Bernard Lanskey published in: Norwegian Academy of Music
  This article explores the rationale behind a performance given by the authors at the Unfolding the Process symposium held in Oslo in November 2015. For this occasion, the authors devised a new version of Bach’s Goldberg Variations that builds upon Emmerson’s arrangement of the work for two pianos in 2012. A shortened version of the work (c.30 minutes) was designed that aimed nonetheless to maintain the original work’s sense of structural balance and coherence. This version involved the transposition of a number of variations into different keys to explore the possibility of adding a satisfying tonal structure to our experience of the work, in a context where both performers see potential communicative value in 'playing with' dimensions of original masterworks with a view to giving fresh perspective to the listener experience. The article is written from the alternating perspectives of the authors; one of which is primarily concerned with the rationale and process of devising the arrangement while the other reflects upon the performative aspects and implications arising from it.
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  Professional identities in progress – developing personal artistic trajectories (2019) author(s): Tanja Orning published in: Norwegian Academy of Music
  We have seen drastic changes in the music profession during the last 20 years, and consequently an increase of new professional opportunities, roles and identities. We can see elements of a collective identity in classically trained musicians who from childhood have been introduced to centuries old, institutionalized traditions around the performers’ role and the work-concept. Respect for the composer and his work can lead to a fear of failure and a perfectionist value system that permeates the classical music. We have to question whether music education has become a ready-made prototype of certain trajectories, with a predictable outcome represented by more or less generic types of musicians who interchangeably are able play the same, limited canonized repertoire, in more or less the same way. Where is the resistance and obstacles, the detours and the unique and fearless individual choices? It is a paradox that within the traditional master-student model, the student is told how to think, play and relate to established truths, while a sustainable musical career is based upon questioning the very same things. A fundamental principle of an independent musical career is to develop a capacity for critical reflection and a healthy opposition towards uncontested truths. However, the unison demands for modernization of institutions and their role cannot be solved with a quick fix, we must look at who we are and who we have been to look at who we can become. Central here is the question of how the music students perceive their own identity and role. To make the leap from a traditional instrumentalist role to an artist /curator role requires commitment in an entirely different way. In this article, I will examine question of identity - how identity may be constituted through musical and educational experiences. The article will discuss why identity work is a key area in the development of a sustainable music career and it will investigate how we can approach this and suggest some possible ways in this work. We shall see how identity work can be about unfolding possible future selves (Marcus & Nurius, 1986), develop and evolve one’s own personal journey and narrative. Central is how identity develops linguistically by seeing other possibilities: "identity is formed out of the discourses - in the broadest sense - that are available to us ..." (Ruud, 2013). The question is: How can higher music education (HME) facilitate students in their identity work in the process of constructing their professional identities? I draw on my own experience as a classically educated musician in the discussion.
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  Creating with timbre (2019) author(s): Magda Mayas published in: Norwegian Academy of Music
  Unfolding processes of timbre and memory in improvisational piano performance This exposition is an introduction to my research and practice as a pianist, in which I unfold processes of timbre and memory in improvised music from a performer’s perspective. Timbre is often understood as a purely sonic perceptual phenomenon. However, this is not in accordance with a site-specific improvisational practice with changing spatial circumstances impacting the listening experience, nor does it take into account the agency of the instrument and objects used or the performer’s movements and gestures. In my practice, I have found a concept as part of the creating process in improvised music which has compelling potential: Timbre orchestration. My research takes the many and complex aspects of a performance environment into account and offers an extended understanding of timbre, which embraces spatial, material and bodily aspects of sound in improvised music performance. The investigative projects described in this exposition offer a methodology to explore timbral improvisational processes integrated into my practice, which is further extended through collaborations with sound engineers, an instrument builder and a choreographer: -experiments in amplification and recording, resulting in Memory piece, a series of works for amplified piano and multichannel playback - Piano mapping, a performance approach, with a custom-built device for live spatialization as means to expand and deepen spatio-timbral relationships; - Accretion, a project with choreographer Toby Kassell for three grand pianos and a pianist, where gestural approaches are used to activate and compose timbre in space. Together, the projects explore memory as a structural, reflective and performative tool and the creation of performing and listening modes as integrated parts of timbre orchestration. Orchestration and choreography of timbre turn into an open and hybrid compositional approach, which can be applied to various contexts, engaging with dynamic relationships and re-configuring them.
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