Exposition

The Labyrinth: using new music experience in the performance of historical music (2024)

George Kentros

About this exposition

The education of a classical violinist – or mine at least, and I see scant evidence that anything else holds today – begins based on a mainstream Romantic ideal consisting of works, geniuses, and concepts of musical authenticity. This is quite useful as a tool to cajole the young violinist into learning the essentials of tone production and playing styles but is at odds with a questioning attitude towards normative traditions that might allow the musician greater interpretive freedom after gaining that technique. While the historically informed performance (HIP) movement was an early, important manifestation of this sort of questioning attitude, the experimental/avantgarde tradition, which has run parallel to these others from the early twentieth century, has not often been applied to the interpretation of historical music. The experimental tradition does not assume conventional tone production or historical authenticity: instead, it is asking the musician to interpret the symbols on the page according to their own artistically informed predilections and contexts to produce new performances emanating from the artwork, thereby transferring more responsibility for the performance from the composer to the musician. To what extent might the experience of the performer be allowed to contribute to the performance of a historical work? As part of a three-year artistic research project in Stockholm, I have been looking into ways of using interpretive techniques gleaned from the study of new music and applying these to historical works. This article describes some existing research that questions the traditional interpretive paradigm, along with the ontology of a musical work and its interpretation, and concludes with a case study, “The Labyrinth,” showing one way that these sorts of attitudes can be put into practice for a genre of music to which they seldom, if ever, have been applied.
typeresearch exposition
date15/04/2023
published29/10/2024
last modified29/10/2024
statuspublished
share statusprivate
affiliationKMH
copyrightGeorge Kentros 2023
licenseCC BY-NC-ND
languageEnglish
urlhttps://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/2082339/2082340
doihttps://doi.org/10.22501/ruu.2082339
published inRUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
portal issue21. Performing Artistic Research in Music – Performing Music in Artistic Research

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