The selection of faculty is crucial in the success of this project. Each faculty member brings a different approach – one suited to the subject in question – and substantial teaching experience. Teachers developed and shared their intended approaches in a series of preparatory meetings exploring the ethos of the ‘bootcamp’ project. This allowed teachers to reach a common understanding as to the ethos of the project, and ensured parity in terms of the trajectory, intensity and workload of the subjects. It was agreed, for example, that each would give a brief introduction to their subject, its broader contemporary relevance and the particular teaching strategy. The project leader gave a brief general introduction to students at the start of the week, to establish consensus as to the strategy and conduct of the project.
Two particular aspects must be emphasised: preparation and responsiveness. Calibrated and incremental course materials were prepared in advance, and distributed day by day according to the particular learning processes. These materials rendered note-taking unnecessary, so that students could engage fully with the teaching and discussion. In all three subjects, teachers took students through a series of practical exercises, constantly monitoring problems and questions that arose. The sense of ‘safe space’ and the absence of assessment or external observation are important for the cultivation of an environment in which students feel entirely comfortable sharing the progress of their learning and their insights as to the implications and potential of the topics being taught. This is complemented by the ability and willingness of experienced teachers to engage with a group of wide-ranging interests and experience, of intellectual maturity and independence of thought.
The bootcamp thus also becomes a course – in this case, an object lesson – in pedagogy: in how to prepare and present material, how to relate to students individually and as a group, in how to deal with particular instances of obstacle to learning and in group dynamics. The students are presented with the three different high-level examples in a compact and intense framework, and at the same time experience the learning processes of themselves and their colleagues.
While development in the three specific areas was the immediate goal of the bootcamp project, a wider aim was to contribute to the students’ further thought and research in more general terms. Assessment in terms of technical or relative ‘success’ was not a topic – this would have constituted a distraction. Indeed, the notion of ‘mastery’ would be antithetical to the ethos of this project. The careful calibration of teaching, homework, and access to individual tutorial sessions with teachers ensured that all students completed the week with a sense of having assimilated the teaching. Nonetheless, we were keen to investigate the impact of this experience. There are no simple quantitative metrics; we therefore engaged a social scientist to research and report on the immediate and subsequent reactions of particuipants.
It is important to stress that the particular pedagogical strategy, as well as the rationale, motivation and relevance, must be specific to the subject and teacher concerned. However, for illustrative purposes we include here the initial presentational texts for the three topics of the September 2021 project:
Critical Reasoning
Marianne Talbot | Oxford University
Are you rational? Is your cat rational? Is that radiator rational? Most people would answer ’yes‘, ’maybe‘ and ’no‘ respectively. But why is a radiator not rational? We can think
of it as wanting to keep the room warm and believing that a certain temperature counts as ’warm‘, so why not as coming to the conclusion that it should turn itself on when the temperature drops, and as its turning itself on as an act performed for a reason? And why are you so sure you are rational? The empirical evidence is mounting for the view that we are nowhere near as rational as we think we are. Could it be that we are not actually rational at all? During the sessions on Critical Reasoning we will reflect on what it is to be rational, consider what being rational enables us to do, particularly in our pursuit of musical excellence, and finally we’ll look at how, if we are rational, we might get better at reasoning.
Sixteenth Century Counterpoint
Markus Roth | Folkwang University of the Arts, Essen
Why study counterpoint? — The concept of this workshop not only follows the idea that the training of contrapuntal thinking in contexts of Sixteenth-Century Music is a perfect school of combinatory skills and therefore for composition and ’creative thinking‘ in general: In addition, the engagement with both musical Practise and Theory of the Cinquecento can offer fascinating impulses for our own today’s musical experience and thinking. Themes/aspects amongst others: The hexachordum as source of inspiration, Learning from Isaac, Creativity and obligo, A Madrigal in a nutshell, Canon techniques, The ’Open Partition‘, Praise of the paradoxon.
Programming in the arts: practice and reflection
Magno Caliman | Orpheus Institute, Ghent
Computer code can be seen, at first glance, as a cold and deterministic layer hidden behind our everyday digital devices. A strictly defined set of rules (the infamous algorithm), optimized and carefully designed to achieve well defined goals such as posting a picture on Instagram, or calculating a missile trajectory. In this workshop we will subvert that view, by treating code as a plastic and malleable entity, an object to be speculated with by the artist, and therefore embedded with creative potential. While programming experimental instruments capable of sound generation and manipulation, the fundamentals
concepts of computer science — such as functions, variables and control structures — will be presented, discussed, and experimented with. From those ’hard science‘ topics, broader conceptual discussions will be proposed, where we abstract computational principles in terms of a conceptual model to help us understand the world around us. Regardless of whether your area of research is HIP, electroacoustic music, or anything in between, you will see in this workshop how the practice of programming can provide you with tools to help you reflect upon your artistic and intellectual practice.