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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  Performing Hanne Darboven's Opus 17a and long duration minimalist music (2019) author(s): Michael Duch published in: Norwegian Academy of Music
  Hanne Darboven’s (1941-2009) Opus 17a is a composition for solo double bass that is rarely performed due to the physical and mental challenges involved in its performance. It is one of four opuses from the composers monumental 1008 page Wünschkonzert (1984), and was composed during her period of making “mathematical music” based on mathematical systems where numbers were assigned to certain notes and translated to musical scores. It can be described as large-scale minimalism and it is highly repetitive, but even though the same notes and intervals keep repeating, the patterns slightly change throughout the piece. This is an attempt to unfold the many challenges of both interpreting, preparing and performing this 70 minute long solo piece for double bass consisting of a continuous stream of eight notes. It is largely based on my own experiences of preparing, rehearsing and performing Opus 17a, but also on interviews I have conducted with fellow bass players Robert Black and Tom Peters, who have both made recordings of this piece as well as having performed it live. One is met with few instrumental technical challenges such as fingering, string crossing and bowing when performing Opus 17a, but because of its long duration what one normally would take for granted could possibly prove to be challenging.
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  Wood or blood? (2019) author(s): Astrid Kvalbein, Gjertrud Pedersen published in: Norwegian Academy of Music
  Wood or Blood? New scores and new sounds for voice and clarinet Astrid Kvalbein and Gjertrud Pedersen, Norwegian Academy of Music What is this thing called a score, and how do we relate to it as performers, in order to realize a musical work? This is the fundamental question of this exposition. As a duo we have related to scores in a variety of ways over the years: from the traditional reading and interpreting of sheet music of works by distant (some dead) composers, to learning new works in dialogue with living composers and to taking part in the creative processes from the commissioning of a work to its premiere and beyond. This reflective practice has triggered many questions: could the score for instance be conceptualized as a contract, in which some elements are negotiable and others are not? Where two equal parts, the performer(s) and the composer might have qualitatively different assignments on how to realize the music? Finally: might reflecting on such questions influence our interpretative practices? To shed light on these issues, we take as examples three works from our recent repertoire: Ragnhild Berstad’s Vevtråd (Weaving thread, 2010), Jan Martin Smørdal’s The Lesser Nighthawk (2012) and Lene Grenager’s Tre eller blod (Wood or blood, 2005). We will share – attempt to unfold – some of the experiences gained from working with this music, in close collaboration and dialogue with the composers. Observing the processes from a certain temporal distance, we see how our attitudes as a duo has developed over a longer span of time, into a more confident 'we'.
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  Symphonies Reframed (2019) author(s): Gjertrud Pedersen, Sigstein Folgerø published in: Norwegian Academy of Music
  Symphonies Reframed recreates symphonies as chamber music. The project aims to capture the features that are unique for chamber music, at the juncture between the “soloistic small” and the “orchestral large”. A new ensemble model, the “triharmonic ensemble” with 7-9 musicians, has been created to serve this purpose. By choosing this size range, we are looking to facilitate group interplay without the need of a conductor. We also want to facilitate a richness of sound colours by involving piano, strings and winds. The exact combination of instruments is chosen in accordance with the features of the original score. The ensemble setup may take two forms: nonet with piano, wind quartet and string quartet (with double bass) or septet with piano, wind trio and string trio. As a group, these instruments have a rich tonal range with continuous and partly overlapping registers. This paper will illuminate three core questions: What artistic features emerge when changing from large orchestral structures to mid-sized chamber groups? How do the performers reflect on their musical roles in the chamber ensemble? What educational value might the reframing unfold? Since its inception in 2014, the project has evolved to include works with vocal, choral and soloistic parts, as well as sonata literature. Ensembles of students and professors have rehearsed, interpreted and performed our transcriptions of works by Brahms, Schumann and Mozart. We have also carried out interviews and critical discussions with the students, on their experiences of the concrete projects and on their reflections on own learning processes in general. Chamber ensembles and orchestras are exponents of different original repertoire. The difference in artistic output thus hinges upon both ensemble structure and the composition at hand. Symphonies Reframed seeks to enable an assessment of the qualities that are specific to the performing corpus and not beholden to any particular piece of music. Our transcriptions have enabled comparisons and reflections, using original compositions as a reference point. Some of our ensemble musicians have had first-hand experience with performing the original works as well. Others have encountered the works for the first time through our productions. This has enabled a multi-angled approach to the three central themes of our research. This text is produced in 2018.
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  The unheard voice and the unseen shadow (2019) author(s): Jeremy Cox published in: Norwegian Academy of Music
  The French composer Francis Poulenc had a profound admiration and empathy for the writings of the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca. That empathy was rooted in shared aspects of the artistic temperament of the two figures but was also undoubtedly reinforced by Poulenc’s fellow-feeling on a human level. As someone who wrestled with his own homosexuality and who kept his orientation and his relationships apart from his public persona, Poulenc would have felt an instinctive affinity for a figure who endured similar internal conflicts but who, especially in his later life and poetry, was more open about his sexuality. Lorca paid a heavy price for this refusal to dissimulate; his arrest in August 1936 and his assassination the following day, probably by Nationalist militia, was accompanied by taunts from his killers about his sexuality. Everything about the Spanish poet’s life, his artistic affinities, his personal predilections and even the relationship between these and his death made him someone to whom Poulenc would be naturally drawn and whose untimely demise he would feel keenly and might wish to commemorate musically. Starting with the death of both his parents while he was still in his teens, reinforced by the sudden loss in 1930 of an especially close friend, confidante and kindred spirit, and continuing throughout the remainder of his life with the periodic loss of close friends, companions and fellow-artists, Poulenc’s life was marked by a succession of bereavements. Significantly, many of the dedications that head up his compositions are ‘to the memory of’ the individual named. As Poulenc grew older, and the list of those whom he had outlived lengthened inexorably, his natural tendency towards the nostalgic and the elegiac fused with a growing sense of what might be termed a ‘survivor’s anguish’, part of which he sublimated into his musical works. It should therefore come as no surprise that, during the 1940s, and in fulfilment of a desire that he had felt since the poet’s death, he should turn to Lorca for inspiration and, in the process, attempt his own act of homage in two separate works: the Violin Sonata and the ‘Trois Chansons de Federico García Lorca’. This exposition attempts to unfold aspects of the two men’s aesthetic pre-occupations and to show how the parallels uncovered cast reciprocal light upon their respective approaches to the creative process. It also examines the network of enfolded associations, musical and autobiographical, which link Poulenc’s two compositions commemorating Lorca, not only to one another but also to a wider circle of the composer’s works, especially his cycle setting poems of Guillaume Apollinaire: ‘Calligrammes’. Composed a year after the ‘Trois Chansons de Federico García Lorca’, this intricately wrought collection of seven mélodies, which Poulenc saw as the culmination of an intensive phase in his activity in this genre, revisits some of ‘unheard voices’ and ‘unseen shadows’ enfolded in its predecessor. It may be viewed, in part, as an attempt to bring to fuller resolution the veiled but keenly-felt anguish invoked by these paradoxical properties.
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  Intimate Relations (2019) author(s): Eivind Buene published in: Norwegian Academy of Music
  Blue Mountain is a 35-minute work for two actors and orchestra. It was commissioned by the Ultima Festival, and premiered in 2014 by the Danish National Chamber Orchestra. The Ultima festival challenged me – being both a composer and writer – to make something where I wrote both text and music. Interestingly, I hadn’t really thought of that before, writing text to my own music – or music to my own text. This is a very common thing in popular music, the songwriter. But in the lied, the orchestral piece or indeed in opera, there is a strict division of labour between composer and writer. There are exceptions, most famously Wagner, who did libretto, music and staging for his operas. And 20th century composers like Olivier Messiaen, who wrote his own poems for his music – or Luciano Berio, who made a collage of such detail that it the text arguably became his own in Sinfonia. But this relationship is often a convoluted one, not often discussed in the tradition of musical analysis where text tend to be taken as a given, not subjected to the same rigorous scrutiny that is often the case with music. This exposition is an attempt to unfold this process of composing with both words and music. A key challenge has been to make the text an intrinsic part of the performance situation, and the music something more than mere accompaniment to narration. To render the words meaningless without the music and vice versa. So the question that emerged was how music and words can be not only equal partners, but also yield a new species of music/text? A second questions follows en suite, and that is what challenges the conflation of different roles – the writer and the composer – presents? I will try to address these questions through a discussion of the methods applied in Blue Mountain, the results they have yielded, and the challenges this work has posed.
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  Organized time (2019) author(s): Christian Blom published in: Norwegian Academy of Music
  For many years I was a part of a performance group called Verdensteatret. We made large scale performances and installations. They were often dense with information. Speech, movements, video, lights, sounds and music, all utilizing their full scales at once, fast to slow, loud to soft, bright to dark and so forth. This meant that we had many situations where the amount of information was overwhelming. Anyone attending would have to make choices of where to focus and what to follow. I recall sitting in rehearsal for the work Louder (Verdensteatret 2007) thinking: Isn’t that sound finishing off Marius’ movement? They are both coming to a halt after finishing a similar arch through the room. And the sound continues ten seconds after Marius has stopped. They start together but finish separately. A connection appears as they separate. The connection is clear for the ten seconds between when Marius is finished, and the sound finishes in a similar manner as Marius did. Nothing else enters and connects more strongly to either and their initial connection is strong since they start out as if in unison. I didn’t think all this then, it’s only now that I can put words to it. After all things are indications before they become phenomena (Bachelard 1958, 176). This glimpse and my imaginative memory is the basis for organized time. Through this research project I have tried to recreate this glimpse, to isolate it and force it to show itself. It has been a hunt. I started fiddling about, juxtaposing things and hoping for a dialectic miracle and as things became more clear I increased precision and gradually formulated a strategy for transmedial composition.
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