AT THE KNOT OF PRESENCE

Weaving with the embodied knowledge of my artistic palette in Liza Lim’s One and the Other (Speculative Polskas for Karin)

by Karin Emilia Hellqvist

Background

From July 2021 to June 2022, Australian composer Liza Lim and myself, Swedish violinist Karin Hellqvist, co-created the work One and the Other (Speculative Polskas for Karin) for solo violin with low octave string, hereafter called Speculative Polskas. Our work is a part of my artistic research PhD project at the Norwegian Academy of Music in Oslo: Transforming with the Artistic Palette (2018–24) where I investigate collaborative composition and my creativity as a performer and co-creator through what I will elaborate on as the concept of the artistic palette. This exposition unfolds experiences, reflections, and knowledge that have accompanied Speculative Polskas on its journey from idea to premiere, and I describe the co-creational process from my perspective.

Liza Lim is one of the leading composers of her generation. She is widely commissioned by pre-eminent orchestras and soloists worldwide. Thoughts around beauty, ecological connection, ritual, transcultural ideas, and collaboration centre her practice. During most of our work on Speculative Polskas, Liza was a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, where we met three times during the compositional process. I first met Liza in 2014 when working with Norwegian ensemble Cikada on her ensemble piece Winding Bodies: 3 Knots (2014). I experienced an immediate connection to the musical language of the work, as well as the ideas behind it. I remember how its phrases and gestures seemed to consort inside my body. The cultural and symbolic meaning of knots that Liza explored in the work and their significance as patterns for storytelling also thrilled me. Integrated in the contemporary music ensemble of the composition was the Norwegian Hardanger fiddle. To me, Winding Bodies: 3 Knots captured Liza’s interest and recognition in the folk music tradition we as a Norwegian group – explicitly or implicitly – carried. The sublime way in which Liza brought the essence of Norwegian folk music tradition and storytelling into the work sparked my idea to propose that she write a violin solo work for me. I imagined a work exploring the Swedish folk music tradition that I have carried with me since my childhood, but never used as a compositional starting point for commissions in my work with contemporary classical music. Seven years later, the collaborative journey of creating Speculative Polskas began. By then, I had embarked on a PhD in artistic research, and questions circling embodied knowledge and collaborative creativity were coming to the fore in my project. I explained to Liza my wish to explore my embodied knowledge connected to the folk music tradition and my will to share the compositional process.

Preceding the work on Speculative Polskas, I had performed contemporary music for almost twenty years and worked with numerous composers on new solo and ensemble works. I had premiered pieces by composers of different ages, nationalities, and aesthetic orientations. Despite this, I had often experienced a separation between the creative processes of the composers I worked alongside and my own role as a performer. This separation would generally manifest as a division of work in which the composer imagined and evaluated the musical materials of a work, structured them in a composition, and notated the work in a score. Then, I as performer would be interpreting it. Little attention would be directed towards what mechanisms that possibly could, and at times also would, play out in between those two separate creative processes. Even though I often knew the composers personally, there were few surfaces of contact between us during the compositional process. Over time, the separation I experienced grew into frustration. As a performer, I was the expert on my own instrument, of interpreting scores, mastering a diverse range of aesthetic musical styles, and structuring performance of music in ensembles. I was ready to contribute with this knowledge to the compositional process in order to make works idiomatic and enriched with my personal voice. Furthermore, I was curious to know more about the process of creating the works I performed.

Context

According to music philosopher Lydia Goehr, the separated practices of composer and performer start emerging from the mid-1800s onwards. The regulative work-concept emerges as a consequence of several decades of societal, political, and aesthetical change from the 1770s (Goehr 1994: 206). Before this time, ‘musicians did not see works as much as they saw individual performances themselves to be the direct outcome of their compositional activity […] Rarely did musicians think of their music as surviving past their lifetime in the form of completed and fixed works’ (Goehr 1994: 185–86). Furthermore, sheet music becomes available on the market as part of an economic system. The different roles that composers and performers take on become increasingly distinct with the composer assuming the role of an artist subject. The related concept of Werktreue (fidelity to the work or its composer) captures the new emerging relation between performers and composers and the loyalty towards the work that performers increasingly come to adopt (Goehr 1994). It ‘emerged to capture the new relation between work and performance as well as that between performer and composer. Performances and their performers became subservient to works and their composers’ (Goehr 1994: 231) and performance practice becomes increasingly directed toward the truthful rendering of the score of the composer. In my research project Transforming with the Artistic Palette, the fidelity toward the score and composer that the concept of Werktreue captures is problematised through explorations of shared compositional processes and by acknowledging the contributions I make as a performer.

During the paradigm shift of the performative turn in the arts during the 1990s, human behaviour was increasingly seen as performed and socially constructed. The work of art was progressively regarded less as an essentialist unity, and rather as an object in a state of change and development through its performance. Its position as one of objective knowledge came to be challenged. Scores were increasingly seen as one element in the performance of music, not necessarily able to capture all aspects of a musical work. From the 1960s, composer and performer partnerships, such as those between John Cage and Merce Cunningham, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Kathinka Pasveer, and Luciano Berio and Cathy Berberian, had challenged the idea of the score as finished work, incorporating aspects such as indeterminacy and open notation in their works. In such partnerships, the performer had increasingly taken on a more significant role in the development of new works. Thus, despite the regulative impact that the ideal of Werktreue keeps having on the ecosystem of composer–performer–work, collaboration and creative exchange between composers and performers takes place. Following the performative turn, the relationship between composer and performer was consequently increasingly problematised in a growing field of research. Accounts by composers and performers outline how exchange and collaborative work unfold in creative processes.

One such account that has been important for this research is ‘“Recercar” – The Collaborative Process as Invention’(2007) by cellist Neil Heyde and composer Fabrice Fitch. Fitch and Heyde reflect on their work on Fitch’s Per Serafino Calbarsi II: Le Songe de Panurge for speaking cellist (2002–03). Fitch and Heyde’s article is written in a dialogical format, mirroring their respective contributions to the work. Together, they develop new playing techniques and explore a specific scordatura (unusual tuning) of the cello. From their experiences, they argue that when the role of the performer is viewed as a mediator not only between audience and piece, but also between piece and composer, this role is inventive, and a dialogic artistic process can unfold.

A further example is composer Sam Hayden and music psychologist Luke Windsor’s ‘Collaboration and the Composer: Case Studies from the End of the 20th Century’ (2007). The authors problematise composer–performer collaboration, drawing on ten different case studies from Hayden’s own output. Hayden and Windsor find three categories of collaborative work: the directive, interactive, and collaborative categories. In the interactive category, interaction, discussion, and reflection occur but the composer is ultimately the author of the work. Works in the collaborative category are seen as challenging conventional notation, and decision-making is distributed among participants and other agents such as technology.

In artistic research, we see the contributions of the performer raised in several projects. One example is percussionist Jennifer Torrence’s project ‘Rethinking the Performer: Towards a Devising Performance Practice’ (2018), a performer-led investigation into collaborative work. Torrence creates the ‘interpreter-adviser-deviser model’, a scale of performer involvement, where the deviser represents the co-creating performer. This model resembles the one created by Hayden and Windsor (2007) but is designed with the performer in the centre. Authorship of the works created in Torrence’s project are further problematised, oftentimes resulting in shared ownership of the collaboratively created pieces.

New concepts are emerging to describe the performer’s involvement, skills, and agency. Violinist Barbara Lüneburg uses the term charisma to describe how performers are empowered to create concert aura (Lüneburg 2013). Cellist Tanja Orning writes about the polyphonic performer who meets the demands of a new emerging repertoire (Orning 2019). Percussionist Håkon Stene researches the role of the percussionist in the experimental spirit of new percussion music to ‘liberate or decouple the intent of percussion from the materials of percussion’ (Stene 2014: 1). Cellist Marianne Baudouin Lie writes about embodied knowing in her performance practice and methods of reaching an intensified presence in the act of performing (Baudouin Lie 2017).

Liza Lim has a long publication record herself. Additionally, several writings by others target her works. Among those writings, Eric F. Clarke, Mark Doffman, and Liza Lim’s ‘Distributed Creativity and Ecological Dynamics: A Case Study of Liza Lim’s “Tongue of The Invisible”’ (2013) is particularly relevant to this research. By studying Lim’s work with Cologne-based ensemble Musikfabrik, the authors give a social and distributed understanding of the complex mechanisms at play during the workshops with the composer and ensemble. Tongue of The Invisible marks out the ‘rich mix of relationships required by a work that involves a considerable variety of agents and creative practices, incorporating different and simultaneous systems of creative exchange’ (Clarke, Doffman, and Lim 2013: 632). The authors apply an ecological perspective as the framework for ‘domains of material culture, psychological process, social interaction, and institutional context’ (Clarke, Doffman, and Lim 2013: 630), domains that otherwise might be regarded as separated. An article by Liza Lim that comments on aspects of the performer’s contribution in the above-mentioned writing is ‘A Mycelial Model for Understanding Distributed Creativity: Collaborative Partnership in the Making of “Axis Mundi” (2013) for Solo Bassoon’ (Lim 2013). Here, Lim explores fungal mycelia as a metaphor for collaborative creative practice in contemporary music.

Liza Lim has a longstanding relationship with Australian contemporary music ensemble ELISION. She has written numerous ensemble works as well as solo pieces in close collaboration with the musicians of the group. Asian traditional instruments, such as the Japanese koto, have further figured in those compositions. Aside from working with Liza for over three decades, ELISION has frequently collaborated with British composer Richard Barrett, as well as American composer Aaron Cassidy. Both Barrett’s and Cassidy’s output include works composed with a ‘radically idiomatic’ approach, a term introduced by Barrett. In the radically idiomatic approach to composition, instrumental practice is deeply integrated in the work. Researcher and guitarist Anders Førisdal writes about the radically idiomatic compositional approach in recent guitar repertoire:

In integrating aspects of instrumental practice within the structural fabric of their work – an integration which is also an explicit opening towards the contingency of practice, indeed a traversal of the limit or margin which separates the two – Richard Barrett, Brian Ferneyhough and Klaus K. Hübler suggest a conception of music where work structure cannot be understood outside the horizon of its practical realisation and the interaction of the corporeal and technology. (Førisdal 2017: 2)

Liza herself does not use the term ‘radically idiomatic’ for her compositional technique. However, as I ask Liza about it, she tells me that her approach is indeed somewhat similar. ‘The idea of deeply investigating an instrumental performance practice and the physicality, ergonomics around that and then composing in an embodied/ dynamic way for musicians is central to my practice’ (Lim, email to the author, March 24^th, 2024). Given Liza’s relationship with ELISION as a hub for the development of new works created through similar approaches, as well as the compositional path of our work, the radically idiomatic approach to composition is thus situated close to the compositional approach of Speculative Polskas. As I will elaborate on, in Speculative Polskas, the specific idiom explored is my heritage of traditional music. As Liza phrases it, the ‘idiomatic grain’ (Lim 2021–22) of me as performer becomes a part of the identity of the work through the integration of my performance practice.

In this exposition, I write about my practice as a performer. Practice can be defined as ‘something that is usually or regularly done, often as a habit, tradition, or custom’ (Cambridge Dictionary, “Practice,” def. C2). My performance practice embraces all the activities I engage in, in artistic work. It includes a wide range of activities, such as violin playing, concert performance, artistic collaboration, studying scores, ensemble work, imagining future work, writing, listening to music, and so on. During my artistic research PhD project and my exploration of the artistic palette, I see my practice transforming. In this exposition, I describe how the work on Speculative Polskas reveals new aspects of my practice.

Research on body and embodied knowledge is a wide, growing field, comprising several different strands of embodiment. This exposition does not map the whole field but rather focuses on how I experience embodied knowledge in my practice during the development of Speculative Polskas. Embodied knowledge is associated with ‘tacit knowledge’, a term introduced and explored by Michael Polanyi (Polanyi 1966). According to Polanyi, knowledge resides in our bodies that we do not always have to articulate verbally. This could, for example, be riding a bike, recognising someone’s face – or playing the violin. Polanyi considers all kinds of knowledge to be rooted in tacit knowledge. He writes that ‘we can know more than we can tell’ (Polanyi 1966: 4). The related term ‘embodied knowledge’ is derived from the phenomenology of French existentialist philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, describing a kind of knowledge where the body knows how to act, and where the body also is the knowing subject. In Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, the body is central as it is hosting pre-reflective abilities. In Phenomenology of Perception (1945), Merleau-Ponty writes how ‘the body is to be compared, not to a physical object, but rather to a work of art. In a picture or a piece of music the idea is incommunicable by means other than the display of colours and sounds’ (174). Embodied knowledge resides in the body, and as philosopher Shigenori Nagatomo (1992) argues, it is also acquired through the body. Our bodies develop understanding and remember the surrounding world through experiences and repeated experiences becoming habits. Practice researcher Mimi Sodhi (2008) describes embodied knowledge as ‘a contextual, experiential, and reflective process’ which in turn is based on a combination of internalised feelings created from past life experiences, internal reactions triggered by interactions, and the processing of those internal reactions (Sodhi 2008: 4).

In artistic research, investigations of embodiment and the role of the performer’s body emerge. Accordionist Andreas Børregaard (2023) has researched how the musician’s body is activated through a growing repertoire of works using voice and body in ways not related to playing their instrument. Violinist and researcher Barbara Lüneburg has developed an epistemic-oriented method of uncovering tacit knowledge in the work of instrumentalists: ‘Re-enacting Embodiment in Classical Instrumental Practice’. Through the method, a performer can re-enact another performer’s physicality in order to uncover tacit skills and insights (Lüneburg 2023).

During my repeated engagement with the traditional music from my home region, my body registers information that over time will construct a resource of embodied knowledge. The embodied knowledge connected to my engagement with this tradition is a knowledge that resides in my body, built during thirty-five years of playing the violin. It captures the conscious as well as the unconscious way I use my body when performing. When I play the violin, my mind does not have to represent all the different actions my body needs to take in order to produce sound on the instrument. My body knows how to act owing to many years of internalised training and practice. I know that I perform the polska of traditional Swedish folk music in a certain way in terms of pulse and ornamentation. However, my body knows how this performance is carried out. For me, embodied knowledge in the context of the work on Speculative Polskas is connected to artistic knowing residing in my body, fuelling the compositional process of a violin solo work in the classical music tradition. I entered the collaboration with Liza imagining a work exploring the Swedish folk music tradition I have carried with me since my childhood. At the start of our work, I had not yet investigated this knowledge from a perspective of research or framed it with concepts or theory. Throughout my work as a performer, I had often felt how this knowledge resided in my body but had still not explicitly used it as a starting point in collaborative work. As I will describe in this exposition, my embodied knowledge is used in the compositional work with Liza and the tradition I carry in my body is inscribed into the work.

The artistic palette

As a result of the separation I had previously experienced between my work and that of the composer, questions about how and with what I as a performer can contribute, and am contributing, to the compositional process started to arise. What do I as a performer bring into work with composers? What skills and abilities do I use in different creative contexts and how do they develop over time? Why is it important that those skills and abilities are specific for my way of performing? How can they be a resource in creative work, and act as the starting point for new works?

In my research, I develop the concept of the artistic palette in order to concretise and conceptualise the skills and abilities I bring into creative work. The artistic palette is a metaphor connected to my artistic identity. The skills and abilities captured by the artistic palette are personal and tied to me, including my body and practice. They are connected to areas as embodied knowledge, artistic-contextual skills, abilities connected to collaboration and intuitive feeling-based abilities. In my artistic development as a performer and on my journey of creating an expanding practice, the concept of the artistic palette becomes central. The artistic palette helps me recognise and develop agency, empowerment, and connection in artistic contexts. Furthermore, it helps me understand how my creativity is intertwined with the creativity of other artists I engage with.

The artistic palette comprises both skills and abilities, or skillabilities, as I sometimes call them. According to the Cambridge Dictionary, skill is the competence ‘to do an activity or job well, especially because you have practiced it’ (“Skill,” def. B1) and ability ‘the physical or mental power […] needed to do something’ (“Ability,” def. B1). In my work with the artistic palette, I view skills as specific, while abilities represent a more general competence. Examples of skills of the artistic palette are mastering the physical act of playing the violin, working with software to create music, developing new playing techniques, studying new works, and memorising musical works. Typical performer abilities would be collaborating with other artists, communicating my artistic ideas, and imagining artistic expressions.

Some skill-abilities of the artistic palette are tacitly embedded in my embodied knowledge but can be brought out through artistic or verbal language. Through my performance practice I can access and bring this knowledge forward. As an example, in this exposition I describe how I communicate with Liza by what I will elaborate on as suggesting-by-doing, where I take part in the compositional process with performed rather than verbal suggestions. In our shared creative process, I sometimes engage in the compositional process by playing artistic suggestions rather than verbalising them in speech. My embodied skills and abilities are being articulated and communicated through my performance.

Furthermore, I currently think of the artistic palette comprising characteristics that include being:

• dynamic – developing, and changing with my artistic encounters;
• situation dependent – I use different parts of it in different situations;
• poetic – expressing emotion, beauty, and playfulness;
• empowering and connected to the agency I have and develop;
• relational – affected by relations to different agents;
• personal and linked to me as an individual but embedded in the cultural and artistic context that I am a part of;
• connected to imagination and therefore linked to creativity and my future practice.

One way to understand more about the skill-abilities of the artistic palette is to explore the artistic palette as multidimensional. I see its skill-abilities as co-existing in the embodied, contextual, intuitive, and relational dimensions. This multidimensionality is not an attempt to organise the skill-abilities in separate groups. They all have embodied, contextual, intuitive, and relational aspects. However, depending on the different contexts of my research, different qualities of the skill-abilities can be addressed and explored.

In the embodied dimension, skill-abilities closely connected to embodied knowledge reside. Embodied knowledge is accumulated in my body over time by experiences preserved by the body’s memory. This pre-reflective knowledge can uncover itself through my artistic explorations. My personal way of playing trills, dynamics, experimenting with contact points of the bow on the strings, my ability to create direction in melodic materials, evoking the ‘swing’ of the polska and my way of improvising are abilities intertwined between the embodied and contextual dimension of my artistic palette.

Furthermore, skill-abilities can be viewed in the contextual dimension. They are connected to the context of the artwork in a wide sense, including parameters such as the specific aesthetics, the composer, the situation of performance, and surrounding artistic field and society. They are linked with artistic materials, as developing specific playing techniques, the ability to find a suitable tempo, to adopt to a certain style, or to develop form. Skills in the contextual dimension are closely intertwined with abilities of the embodied dimension.

In the relational dimension of the artistic palette, I find skill-abilities connected to communication and interaction. As I engage in collaborative work, the relational dimension is the structure upon which the other layers are communicated. Being able to compromise, discuss, suggest, understand other’s perspectives, and respond are abilities I develop through shared creative work. During the project, new collaborative territory has opened in my practice and hence also the extended and new skills of co-operation.

Lastly, closely connected to the embodied dimension, the intuitive dimension represents skill-abilities connected to the feelings and driving forces behind the creative projects – to my values, desires, pleasures, struggles, and fears. According to the Cambridge Dictionary, intuitive means ‘based on feelings rather than facts or proof’ (“Intuitive”, def. 1 ). The intuitive dimension comprises abilities needed in order to act in line with my values to create the collaborations and practice that I imagine. Establishing connection, building trust, and acting with responsibility have been important abilities that I have cultivated throughout the Transforming with the Artistic Palette project. As a performer entering the territory of composition, I often have had to overcome my shyness, follow my intuitive feelings, and connect to my aesthetic preferences.

Throughout the Transforming with the Artistic Palette project, I have focused on different parameters of the artistic palette, and how different parts of it are active and developing in different contexts and different artistic collaborations. I have explored the artistic palette as a multidimensional concept in the exposition ‘Circular Bowing – Cyclical Work’, in VIS Nordic Journal for Artistic Research #8 (Hellqvist 2022). In this exposition, I will explore embodied skills and knowledge of the artistic palette in the framework of Liza Lim’s violin solo work One and the Other (Speculative Polskas for Karin). All dimensions of the artistic palette are engaged in the shared artistic work with Liza. This exposition especially targets skills and abilities closely connected to the embodied dimension of the artistic palette and how they contribute to the work.

About the research

A great deal of recent solo and ensemble works in contemporary music are created through collaborative processes. Research on those works provides a wide spectrum of studies on collaboration between composers and performers and a wealth of theories on collaborative work. This exposition does thematise aspects of the collaborative work on Speculative Polskas. However, the main focus of the exposition is targeting my contribution to the work connected to the embodied knowledge of the artistic palette. The main research question that this exposition targets is: how is the embodied knowledge of my artistic palette active in the shared work with Liza during the compositional process of Speculative Polskas? As a sub-question, I further ask how the tradition I carry of Swedish folk music serves as an imaginative starting point in the piece.

The co-creative work with Liza and my background of playing traditional Swedish folk music act as the main artistic framework within which my research is undertaken. I share materials from our creative process such as recordings, pictures, sketches, video documentation from the process, and a video of the full work. My aim in this exposition is to investigate the notion of embodied knowledge in the context of this specific composer–performer collaboration. I describe how embodied knowledge is anchored in my body as well as how this embodied knowledge is explored in Speculative Polskas. By doing so, I aim to exemplify how awareness of the embodied knowledge of performers can act as a resource in a compositional process.

The exposition is interspersed with personal recollections, illustrating my past engagement with folk music, as well as of recent performances of Speculative Polskas. Those sections lyrically express in words the sensations that engaging with this music evokes in my body. They are a form of ornaments in my narrative: personal verbal embellishments in the process of explicating the tacit embodied knowledge. However, they are also sites of knowing. As such, threads from those recalls are drawn into my discussions around embodied knowledge.