Discussion - shared work, ownership, temporal ecology, and the artistic palette

 

In this exposition, I have outlined the background and context of the work on Speculative Polskas and shown what function my embodied knowledge plays in the shared work with Liza. In the following discussion, the role that embodied knowledge has had in the ontology of the musical process and work will be discussed; I will elaborate on how Speculative Polskas can be seen as an example of mycelial creativity and one of instrument-building. I will discuss aspects of ownership surrounding Speculative Polskas and I will outline how a temporal ecological perspective emerges from our work. Lastly, I will elaborate on the role of the artistic palette during the work on Speculative Polskas.


Shared work as mycelia, consultative working, or as distributed creativity

The shared process of creating Speculative Polskas starts unfolding in 2020, in the midst of the pandemic. Liza, who is in Australia at the time, and I who live in Stockholm, start exchanging ideas over email and in Zoom calls. The online exchange before September 2021 is based on creating a mutual understanding about the framework of the Swedish folk music tradition. I tell Liza about the characteristics of the polska, how I have engaged with traditional music, as well as about significant fiddlers from the region. The specific village I grew up in, Stjärnsund, with its rich history is also touched upon.

As Liza starts her fellowship at the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin, we have three physical meetings in Berlin: in October 2021; December 2021; and June 2022. During the first of those meetings, we work closely during three days on the material of what will become Speculative Polskas. We explore the dance steps of the violin’s fingerboard, the pulse of the polska, and start experimenting with decoupling of the left and right hands.

During this first workshop, our work has an imaginative character. The aim is to generate ideas and materials, and to develop those further together. This work is done with my violin and Liza’s pen and paper at hand. I experience my role as one of pouring my knowledge and imagination into the work, both through trying out materials with my violin and through verbal dialogue. I try out materials on the spot and improvise with the materials we have created. I am active in non-verbal suggesting-by-doing or imagining-by-doing. Through those actions, I am actively participating in the compositional process. My imagine-by-doing generates materials and form templates. As an example (Video 2), my performed suggestion to insert a specific pocket twice sparks the idea of a web of pockets breaking the linearity of the first and second movements.

As outlined in the introduction, the recent development of research in performance practice has generated a wealth of models and ways of describing shared work between composer and performer. One way to analyse different kinds of shared work that I have referred to in my research is musicologist and composer Alan Taylor’s model to analyse types of shared imaginative working. By asking two questions – is the imagination of ideas shared? Is the evaluation of ideas shared? – Taylor categorises shared work into four groups: hierarchical working, cooperative working, consultative working, and collaborative working. Taylor writes how this model ‘can help in the better understanding of the relationships which composers establish and can act as a stimulus to the review and further development of compositional practice’ (Taylor 2016: 562).

The shared work that Liza and I engage in during our workshop is focused on the imagination of ideas. We are both active in this process. The materials of my suggesting-by-doing, our discussions and Liza’s sketches of notation intertwine and develop between us. During this workshop, evaluation of those materials is not the main focus. However, I argue that the process of evaluation also is embedded in the workshop activities we are engaged in. The shared process of imagination is a pre-decisional process affecting how decisions are later made by Liza in the final score. Through our discussions, an evaluative form for decision-making happens; through my responses and suggestions I become a filter to what I consider works and not. This filter affects what materials are to be included in the score and in what way. Those decisions in turn can be seen as mainly taken by Liza between our meetings. The generated materials we find interesting are then being structured by Liza after the workshop, in what will become the first draft of the score. This means that the process of evaluation of materials and compositional decision-making happens both as embedded in the workshops and between our workshops in Liza’s work.

To make a generalised analysis of our work with Taylor’s model, the answer to the first question would clearly be yes – the imagination of ideas is shared. The second question – ‘is the evaluation of ideas shared?’ – is more difficult to answer with a yes or no. In the specific context of Speculative Polskas, I find that Taylor’s model falls short in describing the complex creative process behind the work. As Taylor points out, there are surely intermediate states between the types of working. ‘There will certainly be cases where the participants move between the different types of working relationship as they carry out different phases of the project on which they are working’ (2016: 569). Through Taylor’s model, questions of how decision-making in Speculative Polskas is undertaken are raised, but it provides limited nuance.

Another concept to describe the nature of our work is the non-individualistic concept of distributed creativity. According to researchers Keith Sawyer and Stacy DeZutter, distributed creativity ‘occurs in situations where collaborating groups of individuals collectively generate a shared creative product’ (Sawyer and DeZutter 2009: 82). The concept of distributed creativity challenges the idea that creativity is a ‘mental process that occurs in one person’s head’ (Sawyer and DeZutter 2009: 82). In Distributed Creativity (2017), Clarke and Doffman describe the cultural and intellectual shifts in the discourse on classical music and the relationship between composition, improvisation, and performance. ‘Framed by conceptual developments in musicology, psychology, anthropology, sociology, computing, and neuroscience, there is increased recognition (long overdue, one might think) of the extended and distributed character of music’s creative processes’ (Clarke and Doffman 2017: 2). The collaborative nature of distributed creativity is further connected to Christopher Small’s concept of ‘musicking’: the verb of to music. In Small’s view, to music is to ‘take part, in any capacity in a musical performance, whether by performing, by listening, by rehearsing or practicing, by providing material for performance (what is called composing), or by dancing’ (Small 1998: 9). All agents involved in facilitating a musical performance are taking part in the act of ‘musicking’.

In the case of Speculative Polskas, the concept of distributed creativity captures the creative acts of musicking that Liza and I are engaged in during the compositional process. The sharing of background materials and my suggesting-by-doing in our workshops are examples of how creativity is distributed between us as participants. Through the musicking process, we generate a creative product created with our respective artistic palettes.

The third way of viewing shared work that I will discuss is outlined by Liza herself in her writing on Axis Mundi (2013). Her article is a comment on a certain aspect of the article by Clarke, Doffman, and Lim (2013), outlining what Liza describes as a ‘rather recent shift in how I view collaboration and creative exchange with performers and how this is impacting my own practice as a composer’ (Lim 2013: 1). In the research, Clarke, Doffman, and Lim have interviewed the participating musicians from Musikfabrik on how they view their roles and contribution to the work Tongue of the Invisible (Lim 2013). In an interview about creative ownership, trumpet player Marco Blaauw compares his role as a performer to that of the deliverer of bricks to the construction of a house, where the composer is the architect. He does not claim any ownership toward the created work, saying that: ‘It is really the composer’s process... it is really the composer’s piece...’ (Lim 2013: 2). Liza describes this comment as ‘particularly provocative’ (Lim 2013: 1). She writes:

Marco is expressing the status quo in terms of how composer–performer collaborations are often carried out in contemporary music practice. That is, the performer-collaborator is cast as an artisan, a craftsperson providing building blocks for the architectural vision of the composer. Creative ownership is demarcated very clearly where a performer’s creative contribution lies in making ‘good’, that is, reliable even if unusual, technical innovations that can be usefully employed in a general sense by composers. (Lim 2013: 2)

Drawing on the ideas of anthropologist Tim Ingold, Liza instead suggests the analogy of fungal mycelia to describe her view of the collaborative process between performer and composer in her work:

A consideration of the structure of fungal mycelia systems with their complex meshwork of catalytic transformation and an active distribution of nutrients, leads to potentially new ways of thinking about distributed creativity beyond a more mechanistic modelling of creativity as a hierarchy of levels and cogs, or even as the distributed model of a rhizomatic morphology of branching connections and nodes. (Lim 2013:1)

Thinking about creative connections, ‘mycelia’ is further connected to the term ‘rhizome’ as used by French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Through the term rhizome, ontological processes are understood as dynamic and mutating. According to the Cambridge Dictionary, a rhizome is ‘a stem of some plants that growshorizontally along or under the ground and produces roots and leaves’ (“Rhizome," def. 1). Opposed to a tree root, the rhizome spread its threads in all directions and stays alive even if the plant is removed. Liza writes:

I find this [mycelial] systems model of catalytic enzymes, of bio-transformation, and the transport and distribution of nutrients rather potent as a metaphor for a way of thinking about the complexity of creative processes. It offers a useful set of conceptual relationships with which one can investigate a structure of thinking for creative collaboration that moves beyond perhaps a more mechanistic modelling of creativity as a hierarchy of levels and cogs (bricks becoming houses) or even as the distributed model of a rhizomatic morphology of branching connections and nodes (though similar to the latter especially in Deleuze and Guattari’s formulation of a molecular understanding of the rhizome’s decentred multiplicity). (Lim 2013: 3)

The shared work between Liza and the performers she works with is crucial in order to develop the material of the works. She writes:

Because of the non-standardised nature of the sounds I use (often focused on fluctuating, morphing qualities) and the unusual techniques required to produce them, my work does often necessitate close collaboration with performers. (Lim 2013: 6)

In Speculative Polskas, as the tradition of Swedish folk music is new to Liza, my knowledge is necessitated to develop the framework and sound-world of the piece. I find the analogy of mycelia fitting as a poetic description of how creativity is distributed in our process. Our creative work is a meshwork of intertwined threads and contributions reaching out in different directions. The process is not linear and possible to trace by following one thread. Rather, it is messy and made up of multiple simultaneously ongoing explorations. By working together in the same room, ideas and concrete try-outs spark routes for investigation. Liza writes:

Mycelia are the underground, vegetative part of fungi made up of networks of very fine threads forming a sort of colony that comes into an ecological relationship with everything around – trees and other plants, decomposing matter, the soil etc. (Lim 2013: 3)

The overground fungi itself could be regarded as the composition Speculative Polskas, but the underground mycelia are the rich web of connections between Liza and myself, interwoven with agents as the tradition, the violin with the octave string, the notation, recordings, the ghosts of the Stjärnsund mansion, the embodied knowledge and our artistic palettes. This intertwining of our respective artistic palettes is what creates the mycelial structure that the work Speculative Polskas is created through. The work receives its ‘nutrients’ from the threads of the mycelial network of the artistic palettes.

Creating an instrument including embodied knowledge

Composer Helmut Lachenmann has described his compositional practice of musique concrete instrumentale as ‘Komponieren heißt: ein Instrument bauen’ (Lachenmann 1996: 77), meaning to compose is to build an instrument. Lachenmann invents new extended performance techniques and through this act he constructs a new instrument for each composition. Fitch and Heyde explore Lachenmann’s idea further in their joint work on the solo cello work Per Serafino Calbarsi II: Le Songe de Panurge (2002–03). They argue that through their joint work on building their instrument with a specific scordatura of the cello as well as through the use of extended techniques, Fitch as the composer, becomes an instrumentalist on their new instrument (2007: 16). They continue: ‘The converse is also true: in the process of reshaping the instrument, the performer takes on some of the attributes of the composer in Lachenmann’s model’ (16).

During the work on Speculative Polskas, a new instrument can be said to be built with the violin stringed with the low octave string tuned to a F in the first octave. The octave string is something I bring into the work on Speculative Polskas and therefore is an example of how I as a performer, in Fitch and Heyde’s idea, also have taken on some of the attributes of the composer. Speculative Polskas also explores specific playing techniques that are not altogether new to the field of contemporary music but nevertheless expanded in the sense that they challenge the conventional way of playing the violin. Examples of those techniques are the use of multiphonics on the violin (an extended technique that produces several notes on one string simultaneously, here created by playing a harmonic between harmonic nodes on the string), circular and lateral bow strokes, and bowing techniques resulting in the distortion of the sound. The characteristics of those techniques, especially as assigned to the low octave string, are explored by Liza and me. We both suggest paths of exploration, through verbal language and through my suggesting-by-doing. By exploring the scordatura of the low octave string as well as those performance techniques, a ‘new instrument’ is created in the compositional process. In this process, we can see it as Liza takes on attributes of a performer of the new instrument while I enter the territory of composition.

In the specific process of ‘instrument-building’ in Speculative Polskas, another main agent enters. The instrument that Speculative Polskas is composed for, explicitly includes the embodied knowledge of my artistic palette. As we have seen, this knowledge is the conceptual starting point of the piece as well as a part of my motivation behind it. Through my performance, the artistic palette is further used to connect the tradition and the score. In the third movement, the embodied knowledge of my artistic palette is the main object of investigation. As an influential agent, through the act of composition as well as in the score and performance of the piece, the embodied knowledge I carry from engagement with the folk music tradition is present. This means that my artistic palette is built into the new instrument Liza and I create for Speculative Polskas. It constitutes an important part of both the concrete and imaginary instrument and thus a part of the identity of the work.


Toward new ownership models

In this exposition, I have argued that the compositional process of Speculative Polskas is one of distributed creativity (Sawyer and DeZutter 2009) and can be viewed as a mycelial network of filaments (Lim 2013). Furthermore, I have outlined how the work takes the traditional Swedish folk music tradition I carry as its starting point. In the compositional process, my personal tradition is woven into the work. What happens to the ownership of the work in such a process? How is the artistic and legal ownership seen in the case of Speculative Polskas? What happens to the ownership of the performance of the work? In the case of Speculative Polskas, ownership is complex to discuss, as the work and process has such an explicit focus on personal embodied knowledge and where this personal knowledge of the performer is woven into a work by a composer.

I will elaborate on my perceived artistic ownership toward Speculative Polskas. I will also discuss how ownership is communicated through the score (representing its legal ownership) and suggest some alternative ways that can spark further discussion on how to communicate ownership as connected to a distributed creative process. I will also discuss how I perceive ownership toward the score and the performance of the work as different.


Perceived artistic ownership

What artistic ownership do I experience toward Speculative Polskas? Liza’s programme note expresses how the piece is composed ‘following the idiomatic grain of player-instrument arising from my observations of Karin’s physical and emotional relationship to her violin as a container of stories and memories’ (Lim 2021–22). The work is explicitly based on explorations of the embodied knowledge of my artistic palette and the tradition I carry. At the same time, my artistic palette is paired with the artistic palette of Liza. Liza has a background as a string player and a longstanding compositional practice of engaging with concrete, imaginary, and constructed instruments, to follow the thinking of Helmut Lachenmann (1996). Following the reasoning of Fitch and Heyde (2007), one could also claim that in the same way as Liza engages in performance of the instrument created for the work, through the compositional process of building the instrument of Speculative Polskas, I am also taking on compositional tasks during the process. Through our workshops, I am active through my engagement with my instrument and embodied knowledge. By suggesting-by-doing, in the mycelial creativity that we are involved in, to use the words of Liza, my active participation in the explorations during the compositional process generates materials and suggestions for form. The indeterminate nature of the third movement is a further example of distributed creativity in which I, by using improvisatory skills, take decisions and create materials and form. All those activities surrounding the work suggest the skills and abilities of my artistic palette is woven into the identity of the work through the mycelial texture of collaboration.

Clarke, Doffman, and Lim write:

Ownership encompasses the economic power that may derive from artistic production, but perhaps more significantly it expresses affective and subjective engagements—the ways in which a musician might sense that this process or that product is 'a part of me'. (2013: 660)

To use the words of Clarke, Doffman, and Liza herself, I do experience affective and subjective engagements toward Speculative Polskas. To me, the piece has an emotional dimension of using myself – my history, embodied knowledge, and artistic palette – in the imagination of the piece and in the compositional process. I do feel that the work is a ‘part of me’ as Clarke, Doffman, and Lim phrase it. Rather than performing a work that is dedicated to me, as the title including ‘for Karin’ suggests, I feel as if I am a part of it as I play it. Or, that the work is a part of me that I bring out in performance – I am not sure what is most true. I do not feel that I represent the work in my performance. My experience is that I make our collective explorations come out through my performance. Liza has woven my idiomatic instrumental practice into the work and thus, I am a part of it. The work uses my idiosyncratic practice, my artistic palette. My perceived artistic ownership is consequently immanent to the work.

Ownership as communicated through the score

When it comes to how the score communicates ownership of Speculative Polskas, it bears the name of Liza as the author and legal owner, and as such she has dedicated the work to me with the inscription ‘dedicated to Karin Hellqvist’ (Lim 2021–22). The title of the work One and the Other (Speculative Polskas for Karin) further reinforces the dedication. A dedication to a performer on a score can be seen as the composer’s way of showing their appreciation of the performer who has contributed to the process of creating the work or commissioned it, in the sense of arranging with the financial resources required. However, as Nicholas Donin argues in his study of composer Florence Baschet’s work with the French Danel Quartet, a dedication in a score can also highlight the boundary between the author and the dedicatee. In the case of Baschet’s work Streicher Kreis (2006–08), Donin writes:

They [the performers] did not express any particular reaction when the composer put, on the first page of the score, a dedication to a group consisting of the string quartet, the computer scientist, the computer music designer and the ethnographer. By reasserting in words a rather well-established boundary (the author versus the dedicatees) and the order of musical precedence (from doers to observers), the composer reminds us that in contemporary music distributed creativity generally does not correspond to distributed ownership. (2017: 87)

Figure 12. Click to enlarge. Programme notes of Speculative Polskas by Liza Lim with Karin Hellqvist. Courtesy of G. Ricordi & Co. Bühnen- und Musikverlag GmbH, Berlin.

A further glance at the score of Speculative Polskas displays two programme notes of the work, one by Liza and one by me (Lim 2021–22; Hellqvist 2022). Writing programme notes usually is the task of the composer as the authority on the conceptual framework of the work. The presence of my programme note in the score suggests how I as a performer have had the need to describe the work, and how Liza has included it in the preface of the work. In my programme note, written initially as an essay in University of Chicago Press journal Portable Gray (Hellqvist 2022), the body-mindset of the polska is explored, as well as how I experience a temporal polyphony when performing the work. The two programme notes communicate two intertwined narratives of the process, included in the information that accompanies the notated musical score (Figure 12).

When it comes to the musical notation of the score, in the case of Speculative Polskas it is Liza who has done the compositional structuring of the materials in the work and beautifully notated the hand-written score. This is the task of a composer in the traditional sense. Was this something we discussed, or did it just happen? During our process, my imaginative involvement was so profound that I never felt surprised by ‘new’ elements brought into the score. The structure I saw in the notation was aligned with our experimentation with materials. Liza’s sketches all made sense to me following the explorations of embodied knowledge and tradition. I did not bring up discussion around the form or structure as I felt very safe in the way Liza weaved a structure with what we had found out together. In a traditional way, I felt that this part of the process was the task of Liza as the composer. Liza and I never discussed whether the compositional structure of the work could be done together. I am convinced that Liza would have been very open to hearing my thoughts on structural aspects of the composition. However, for me as a young collaborator, the already new aspects of such profound involvement and contribution in the imaginary stages of the work was a new world in itself. I was satisfied with my creative contributions, and I saw our work as a valuable experience for future collaborations where my role in the notational-structural aspect of composition could be more active.


Distributed ownership

When breaking down the different aspects of ownership in Speculative Polskas, I would further like to make a distinction between my perceived ownership of the score and ownership of my performance of it. My feelings of ownership toward the notated score are not as profound as the emotions I feel toward the act of performing it. As I perform the work, I play it by heart. I have memorised and embodied the piece and do not need the visual framework of the musical notation in order to perform it. Through the body-mindset of the polska, it is an act of embodiment to perform it. However, I experience somewhat cooler feelings of ownership toward the notated score. The score is the vehicle that I use to enter the world of the piece in my performance. For me, it does not contain the whole work, but reflects one aspect of it. I do not feel as if I represent the score in my performance, because my artistic palette is inscribed in the work as a part of the music that is not possible to notate in the score.

As performers start engaging more explicitly in the compositional process, authorship and artistic and legal ownership are problematised, as for example in the work of Torrence (2018). Given the parameters of ownership that I have outlined above, when considering the ownership of Speculative Polskas, what do I consider the right way to view ownership, with my experience of the process and my contributions in mind? I feel ambiguous toward this question I pose to myself. In the field of classical music that our shared work unfolds within, despite the shared mycelial texture of the world of the work, Liza and I still identify as composer and performer. One way to look at this issue is to follow the reasoning of ownerships as directed differently toward score and performance, as described in Liza’s discussion on Axis Mundi (2013):

The creative ‘DNA’ of the performer is an intimate part of the compositional work just as the compositional work becomes part of the life-history of the performer’s technical apparatus and musical functioning. Whilst the notated score still gives a certain creative primacy to the composer, albeit with acknowledgements to the performer in the working process, the work in performance ‘belongs’ to the musician in a myriad subtle and obvious ways – the music is quite strikingly made out of the ‘matter’ of the performer’s world in the wider sense. (Lim 2013: 12)

The discourse on authorship of composition versus authorship of performance that Liza touches on has been explored by, for example, violinist and musicologist Mieko Kanno (Kanno 2012), and cellist and researcher Tanja Orning (Orning 2019), as well as from a legal perspective by author and researcher Ananay Aguilar (Aguilar 2018). Nicolas Donin writes that distributed creativity generally does not correspond to distributed ownership (Donin 2017). However, in the case of Speculative Polskas, as I experience ownership of the performance as stronger than ownership of the score, this can perhaps be seen as a form for ‘distributed ownership’I experience ownership differently toward the different parts of the complex (mycelial?) ecosystem of ‘compositional process–notation–performance’.


Alternative ways to communicate ownership

Works created within the Transforming with the Artistic Palette project (2018–24) have applied different ways of sharing ownership between composers after collaborative and consultative work on new pieces. With pianist and composer Christian Wallumrød on the violin and tape work Eiksmarka Omland (Wallumrød and Hellqvist 2024), distributed creativity occurred but the notation was predominantly created by Christian as the composer. We decided to share ownership by seventy to thirty per cent, Wallumrød to Hellqvist. In a programme note on a concert featuring our two names as authors this reflects how work has been created through a shared process.

Given that distributed creativity is becoming increasingly common in the field of contemporary classical music and in my own practice, I call for new, creative, poetic, concrete, or speculative ways of communicating the distributed creative nature of works. With its two programme notes and preface, the full score of Speculative Polskas clearly indicates that the creative process behind it is beyond that of a dedication. However, few people engage with the full score unless they study the work. If they do so, they are also rather likely to know of Liza’s compositional practice. In a performance situation however, most audiences would probably think of the work as the creation of Liza dedicated to me. In this exposition, I have argued that there is more to it than what they see in the concert programme. The work is based on my history, tradition, and embodied knowledge. It is created ‘with my voice’ (Östersjö 2020) and I experience it as ‘a part of me’ (Clarke, Doffman, and Lim 2013). I therefore challenge musical scores to implement more nuance when it comes to ownership of distributed works. Using Speculative Polskas as an example, what could be written in the programme of a concert and on the first page of the score?

Liza Lim together with Karin Hellqvist?

Liza Lim, through a shared process with Karin Hellqvist?

Liza Lim, composition and Karin Hellqvist, idea and creative contribution?

Liza Lim, with tribute to Karin Hellqvist?

Liza Lim, devised with Karin Hellqvist?

Liza Lim, with the artistic palette of Karin Hellqvist?

As a performer in the classical tradition, there are expectations, identity-making, responsibilities, and creative territories inscribed in our roles from the tradition. Speculative Polskas is a commission in the traditional sense in our field. To commission is defined as ‘to formally choose someone to do a special piece of work, or to formally ask for a special piece of work from someone’ (Cambridge Dictionary, “Commission,” def. 1). As a performer, I have asked Liza about a solo work and provided the finances for her to work on it. This procedure set a hierarchical premise at the start of the work that is common in the field of contemporary music. As I view our collaboration in retrospect, I see that we have not touched on the question of authorship. I was too shy, afraid to challenge the creative partnership and new friendship that had established between us. Already before our work, I admired Liza greatly for her artistry. During the course of the work, I become very fond of Liza as a person too, and the work we engage in is meaningful to me artistically, personally, and for my research. However, questions about the fact that we never talked about ownership in such a complex process linger. Therefore, I write Liza to ask about how she looks at ownership in collaborations such as ours and whether she sees new models of ownership emerging in our field.

Our project was very directed from the first because you had such clear and focused research questions about making work that stems from your embodied knowledge and the lineages you both hold and are developing. I think what gives the work its particular energy is the way this has been activated as a partnership with my own embodied ‘player’s’ knowledge as an ex-violinist, the work I’ve done with strings and string techniques, string figures which I’ve articulated using language from the environmental humanities literature. I do think the work is very much ‘owned’ by you in that it’s about opening spaces for emergent expressions of who you are in a speculative way and the nature of the frame has come out of our conversations and ‘thinking together’. It’s not an ‘identity piece’ in any fixed way – that would not interest me so much – rather, the imaginary/fictional gaps, the not-knowing, the ‘ghosts’ are given space and in that way, the frame of the piece does also allow others to inhabit those spaces. This is the way I like to work with all performers if I have the chance […].

Perhaps we didn’t examine co-creative ‘ownership’ as a theme because we were practicing it in a very natural way? ie: it’s part of what I do as a composer – bringing in, weaving with the embodied knowledge of musicians, instruments, institutions, traditions is so central to me which is why you asked me to be part of this in the first place. But then, yes, what does joint authorship mean – could it be like scientific papers where 200 people are listed including those who assist on experiments but don’t write or analyse the results. And certainly in the more recent anthropological literature, those who were in the past ‘native informants’ are now credited as co-authors. That really could be a way to go. […] So to go back to the question for our project, I hadn’t considered having you as a legal co-author on the score yet of course, your name is in the title and your writing in the score so your authority is everywhere there! I just feel that the compositional frame is ultimately my responsibility but perhaps that is an emotional limitation on my part! I will certainly mull this over for future projects. (Lim, email to the author, January 5th, 2023)

As I read Liza’s open-ended answer and how she refers to her possible ‘emotional limitation’ I understand how the ‘affective and subjective engagements’ described by her, Clarke, and Doffman (2013) also are valid for her. The compositional work on Speculative Polskas is a process of constructing an artwork, with the sense of ownership that comes with it. It is a part of Liza in the same way as the performance of it is a part of me. Liza experiences ownership toward a score that she is the creator of. Ownership of the performance on the other hand, she regards more as in the domain of the performers. Receiving her response, I am satisfied with the fact that I have brought the topic up despite the vulnerability I experienced beforehand. Through the work on Speculative Polskas, I have framed authorship and ownership with a set of questions. In the future, those questions may catalyse new ways of communicating ownership of a product of distributed creativity.

In June 2024, as I am about to finish the last texts of my PhD project, I ask Liza whether we could consider communicating the authorship of the work as ‘Liza Lim with Karin Hellqvist’ and Liza is happy about my suggestion. From now on, we decide to use this new way of describing the work in articles as well as in concert programs. 

Performing Speculative Polskas at Rainy Days, Luxembourg Philharmonie, November 2022.

Ghosts and the knot of presence

Beside the presence of the folk music tradition in my body, in the work Speculative Polskas, Liza and I further explore the presence of the past time by thinking about ghosts. This thread of conversation is sparked early on by the recordings I make for Liza at the Stjärnsund mansion. By many inhabitants in Stjärnsund, the mansion is regarded as being inhabited still by Lady Emerentia (1703–60). In a similar way as the generationally transferred tradition of the polska, the stories of Emerentia exemplify how the past time resonates in my present day, affecting how I perceive my surroundings. In the storytelling surrounding my homeplace, a polyphony of times exists. As Liza writes together with Joseph Browning in Sonic Figurations for the Anthropocene: A Musical Bestiary in the Compositions of Liza Lim‘ghosts are absence and invisibility. Ghosts suffuse landscapes with many kinds of time’ (Browning and Lim 2021). I tell Liza about the experience recording at the mansion. In an email in September 2021, Liza writes:

I’ve been thinking more about ghosts based on the photo you sent of the house where you recorded the examples. Here are some notes:

Ghosts – ancestral essences, resonances – human, animal, other – that hang around places and people perhaps because of a certain intensity/violence or attachment/devotion/love. Ghosts – repetition of assemblage of connection can also be thought ecologically – a famous example is the bee orchid ophrys apifera (see Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble) where the flower looks like the genitals of a female bee luring the mate for pollination. The bee is now extinct except in some Mediterranean regions, but the flower still retains the semblance, painting, art/representation or memory of that creature. Ghosts make form.

I’m interested in how you carry really complex lineages of musical practice and would like to know more about your lineages and how you might observe that in your physical make-up, habits, emotional/conceptual associations etc. So, I’m interested in working with these forcefields of performance practices that belong to you and that come through your playing/thinking/decision making, intervening, interweaving, dancing in the fissures with some of these ghosts in a music of resonance, distortion or noise and breath. (Lim, email to the author, September 2021)

The past time is present in my performance through the tradition and in my history of growing up in this specific geographical place. Furthermore, in the act of performing, I also experience the sense of a future time being present. Speculative Polskas is an act of imagination. The use of the pockets in particular evokes the necessity to imagine the future outcome of my actions. Although the linearity of the score is challenged through the pockets and the nested repeats, as I play the piece, I keep the long narrative of the form in my mind. In order to make detours to the pockets, I have to know where to come back to the main form.

Thus, the work on Speculative Polskas generates an understanding of both the past and future as present in my performance. Liza and I develop the metaphorical picture of a figure-eight loop with a knot in the middle. This loop connects temporal aspects from the past, the present, and the future. The knot itself is the present. From this knot, I bring different layers of time together in the music (Figure 13).

In her programme note, Liza writes:

The first two parts of the work provide templates for navigating and evolving a performance practice derived from Karin’s body of knowledge which we imagined as a figure-eight loop travelling between past, present, and future. In each present moment, elements of the past have the potential to slip out and speak, carried by the body momentum generated by repeated motions and recurrences in form; whilst the future is also always threaded into the work through elements of indeterminacy that require the performer’s fantasy. This relation between possession by the past, and the futurity of invention is grounded in the violinist’s body which is the sliding ‘knot’ in the infinite twist of the music. (Lim 2021–22)

Figure 13. Sketch of figure-eight-loop. Workshop notes by Karin Hellqvist.

A temporal ecological perspective

Clarke, Doffman, and Lim (2013) apply an ecological perspective to analyse the surrounding framework of Liza’s ensemble work. This ecology, they argue, comprises ‘domains of material culture, psychological process, social interaction, and institutional context’ (630). According to the Ecological Society of America, ecology is ‘the study of the relationships between living organisms, including humans, and their physical environment; it seeks to understand the vital connections between plants and animals and the world around them’ (The Ecological Society of America 2022). An ecological view such as the one suggested by Clarke, Doffman, and Lim could be applied to the work on Speculative Polskas as wellOur ecology comprises the materiality of the violin and especially the instrument ‘built’ with the low octave string and my embodied history weaved into my artistic palette. Our psychological process has been one of shared work and distributed creativity. From the outset, Liza and I did not know each other apart from our work on Liza’s ensemble music in 2014. Over the course of the work, we develop a shared process where Liza gets to know my history, tradition, and artistic palette at the same time as I get to know more about her compositional practice. Our process included social interaction both in the domain of artistic work on the piece as well as outside our bubble of work. There is also the framework of the artistic research project, with its institutional conditions; as a site for research, our process is explicitly being studied and reflected upon in order for others to learn from it.

However, apart from this suggested perspective of ecology in the process of creating Speculative Polskas, there is another dimension of ecology that stands out as important. As I engage with Speculative Polskas, I see myself as an actor within the figure-eight loop, closely connected with different temporal dimensions. I develop a temporal ecological perspective connected to the dimensions of time that inhabit my performance practice. In this temporal ecological framework of the piece, the tradition of the Swedish folk music comes alive through my embodied knowing. Through the act of bringing the tradition into our work, the tradition is carried into the future and developed through our shared work. Furthermore, my imagination in the act of performance, as I engage with the challenged linearity of the score, suggests a temporal messiness, where I use imaginative abilities of the outcome of my decisions along with the presence of the decoupling of my body parts. Through this perspective, I come to develop an understanding of how my artistic palette is far from an isolated thing. As my personal creative ecosystem, the artistic palette is connected to my larger surrounding culture and environment.

 

Speculative Polskas and the artistic palette

I use the notion of the artistic palette to conceptualise the ever-evolving personal skills and abilities that I use in creative work. By engaging with the artistic palette, I can understand as well as develop the contributions I make as a performer in shared creative processes. During the work on Speculative Polskas, the artistic palette has been used in the shared work with Liza. Skills and abilities entangled between the different dimensions of my artistic palette have been engaged and developed.

The embodied dimension of the artistic palette has been our main focus during the compositional process and embodied skills connected to my heritage of the traditional music have been woven into the work. The ability to enter the body-mindset of the polska and my skills of ornamentation are examples of elements that come to constitute an important part of the work’s identity. In the compositional process, I take part through suggesting-by-doing by bringing my aesthetic ideas forward though the act of playing. Additionally, new skills have been added to the embodied and contextual dimension, as my artistic palette is entangled with the artistic palette of Liza. Performance techniques of chopping, multiphonics, and decoupling are introduced by Liza and become internalised in my body through my engagement with the piece. The repeated act of practicing Speculative Polskas has engaged and developed skills of the embodied dimension by physically learning how to play and memorise it.

In the work on Speculative Polskas, abilities in the contextual dimension are closely intertwined with the embodied dimension, being connected to the performance of traditional music as well as to contemporary classical music. Liza and I have brought performance skills from different contexts together in Speculative Polskas, resulting in a hybrid work situated somewhere between traditional and classical music. Our ‘instrument-building’ is a result of this weaving with the traditions. Performance techniques from different contexts co-exist and hybridise in Speculative Polskas.

Furthermore, the relational dimension of my artistic palette has developed with new collaborative skills. I have developed the ability to understand the compositional work of Liza and her motivations and interests. The temporal ecological perspective and my position at the ‘knot of presence’ that has developed in our work has further made me aware of my relation to generations of fiddlers before me.

Lastly, in the intuitive dimension of the artistic paletteabilities such as connecting to my motivation behind the work and collaboration have been active. Tuning in to my embodied knowledge is a skill situated between the embodied and intuitive dimension that has played a key role through the body-mindset of the polska. My desire to be a co-creator and sharing the compositional process with Liza has been communicated through abilities connected to the intuitive dimension. The ability of suggesting-by-doing is an intuitive as well as embodied way of communicating artistic preferences.

Through the many ways in which my artistic palette develops, the shared work with Liza has, for me, had importance beyond that of a commissioned violin piece. It has offered me new understanding of the embodied knowledge of my artistic palette. I have come to see my embodied knowledge as my unique resource, a well of materials that I can use in creative explorations. The recognition of this resource in the creative process has in turn catalysed feelings of agency and empowerment that I will bring with me in new contexts.

Practicing Speculative Polskas.

 

Exploring further within external and internal geographies

Recollection: We play the final upbow of the polska. Our bow strokes start slowly at the tip. Then, we speed up the motion and add an accent on this evening’s final downbeat. In synchronised motion, we lift our bows off the strings. We freeze for a fraction of a moment with our bows in the air. Our eyes meet, and we smile. We have been in this space of the polska together; walking its path of retakes, through major and minor sections, embellishing it with resonance strings, exploring shifts in intensity, losing our individual voices in intertwining ornaments, remembering other performances of it and imagining our future ones. This connection that I experience, both to my body, to the tradition, to the audience, Stjärnsund as my village and to Stina with me on stage, is a feeling I will keep searching for in my music making. It is a feeling of being immersed in the music, of complete, grounded presence and joy.

Within the field of art, the term site-specific indicates that an artwork is ‘created, designed, or selected for a specific site’ (dictionary.com, “Site-specific,” def. 1). In the same way, Speculative Polskas is a work specifically created with and for me – it is personalised to me and is me-specific. It is not unusual that musical works are being composed with a specific performer’s voice in mind and notated so that others can perform it. However, in this case, as the piece is personalised through the explicit focus on my embodied knowledge, does this fact mean that other performers cannot play it? The piece is explicitly created with my artistic palette. Because of this, I believe that the piece carries challenges, but perhaps also attractions, for other performers who might want to play it. For a performer with no previous relation to the Swedish folk music tradition, this piece can serve as a way of exploring this tradition from another angle. The question of how the piece sounds in the hands of a violinist not acquainted with traditional Swedish folk music arises. When notation implicitly counts on an activation of a tradition through embodied knowledge, to what degree does the music sound different when the tradition is not yet embodied by the performer? I further wonder how a performer acquainted with the tradition through Speculative Polskas would engage with the polskas from my home region? I would be interested to see whether Speculative Polskas could serve as a framework for exploration both of the tradition of Swedish folk music and of personal embodied knowledge for others too.

The work on Speculative Polskas has been a process of push-and-pull with the Swedish folk music tradition, where I have not only explored my own relation to the tradition I am situated in but also perceived how our work has given something back to this tradition. Through new creative paths, we have invited the Swedish folk music tradition into our respective practices. Sharing the process with Liza has for me resulted in a unique piece of music that neither of us could have created on our own.

Thank you so much for our beautiful project – for me, this piece is a key step forward – as important to the evolution of my work as ‘Invisibility’ was for me more than 10 years ago and I’m so grateful for the collaboration we’ve had. I hope the piece has a long life and takes you to interesting places where you can play it (geographically, and also within, an internal geography). (Lim, email to the author, 2022)

Video of Speculative Polskas. Karin Hellqvist, violin. Oskar Kullander, video editing. Recorded at Stjärnsund mansion, March 2024.


One and the Other (Speculative Polskas for Karin) was commissioned with the support of Arts Council Norway and is published by Casa Riccordi Berlin.