The project · Ensemble Studies · BLY · The Hands. The Double. · Seminars
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Artistic work · Creation and collaboration · Becoming an Ensemble
Ensemble Studies, composed in 2019–2021 by Tanja Orning in close collaboration with dramaturg Camilla Eeg-Tverbakk, dancer Gry Klipperberg and folk musician Helga Myhr, explores what it means to be an ensemble. In the work, a Hardanger Fiddler, a dancer, a dramaturg and a cellist, practise and perform as a quartet. Ensemble Studies examines transitions and borders between the collective and the individual, between agreement and anarchy and between amateurism and professionalism.
The work was premiered in the Marmorsalen, Sentralen, at the 2021 Ultima Festival in Oslo and was filmed a few weeks later, in Bærum Kulturhus by the filmmaker Vibeke Heide. This exposition is built on materials from the two-year process: notes and logbooks, music sketches, recordings, videos, conversations and feedback. This text is written from my perspective as composer and ensemble member; Camilla’s own text about the project can be found here.
WHY ENSEMBLE STUDIES?
The work originated as part of a larger project, Extended Composition, and my role was initially that of composer with responsibility for one part of the project – one work – but also that of performer, possibly performing in some of the other composers’ projects. After the preliminary rounds, I landed on the title Ensemble Studies. I wanted to explore an extended compositional practice through the medium of an ensemble. The first version of Ensemble Studies used an existing ensemble as the locus of investigation. But I was not able to actualize this version, and I opted instead to form a new ensemble for the project, with a dramaturg, musician and dancer, preparing the ground for an interdisciplinary project. The motive for bringing in performers from other artistic disciplines was to create more potential for extended composition – the material and practice represented by these artists would in its nature expand the more traditional understanding of musical material.
From the beginning of the collaboration, I wanted to include the other three in the creative process. The dramaturg Camilla Eeg-Tverbakk was already part of the research project, but her role in Ensemble Studies would now be as a performing dramaturg, she would be on the floor with the performers. In inviting folk-musician Helga Myhr and dancer Gry Klipperberg into the project, I chose strong performers with long experience of both solo and ensemble work in their fields. I had already played in a duo with Helga for some years, so I invited her in with the confidence that our performing duo could be a musical foundation in the ensemble. Camilla and I knew the Gry from several projects; her openness, expertise and experience and clear contribution from the dance field, led us to invite her into our project.
The initial idea for Ensemble Studies was grounded in its use of an established ensemble: the studies involved incorporating the ensemble’s history and shared memory in the investigations. When plans changed and I formed the new ensemble, the question arose whether bringing the same explorative issues into a new ensemble could be fruitful? It would then be something completely different from the first idea. I chose to go ahead with the idea of Ensemble Studies. The studies then took on a new dimension, and the question of how to build an interdisciplinary ensemble came to the fore. At the same time that we were examining different perspectives, elements and practices within the ensemble, we were creating the group – building it from scratch. In addition to the performers’ main discipline, everyone played the cello in the ensemble. Aside from me the members of the ensemble were novice cellists; they were building the ensemble and their instrumental knowledge at the same time. Through the construction of an ensemble, we investigated which processes and elements were at play. The leap from the first version of the project, based on a long-time collaboration including an ensemble’s long history, to a study of what an ensemble is and can be in the establishment phase, created new questions. What does it mean to be an ensemble and compose together in an interdisciplinary context? What is the relationship between dramaturgy, movement and composition in an artistic production? What is the relationship between amateur, professional and virtuoso? What unfolds as we explore the ensemble simultaneously as we are building it? We explore the process of becoming an ensemble in real time.
ENSEMBLE + STUDIES
I chose to explore the ensemble through the well-established use of studies (etudes). A study can be highly specific, addressing parameters such as body movement and interactions, instrumental techniques and relations to sound and space. Rehearsing is the core activity of ensemble practice, and repeated, rigorous rehearsals were our method for becoming an ensemble and for examining what an ensemble does. We met regularly for two years and rehearsed for three to five hours each time. Everything was documented via video and audio so that we could assess the material between rehearsals.
TENTACULAR THINKING
The cello quartet moves slowly, as if underwater – dreamy, distant, soft. The ensemble contracts and expands – the four of us become one continuous moving body with searching tentacles. We move in slow motion, resisting gravity, the cellists moving weightlessly – bodies and the instruments – towards and away from each other in a constant ebb and flow. The music is expressed through the movement – bodies communicating in gesture alone making tentacular chamber music. Bows glide over remote wooden areas of the cellos producing a wide range of white noise that materializes the friction between the bodies of the humans and the bodies of the cellos. The slow movements are first priority, the sounds are produced with intention, but will be a result of the movements and gestures.
‘Tentacular Thinking’ is the name of the second chapter in Donna Haraway’s book, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (2016), where she explores new ways of ‘thinking like an Octopus’. The tentacles represent the non-human and suggest that many-limbed beings think differently than two-armed and two-legged human beings. Haraway uses the term tentacular thinking as a critique of an anthropomorphic form of thinking and she proposes how a new kind of thinking can generate other and new forms of knowledge. Her insistence that non-linear thinking is a practice we need to include in all activities triggers me to consider our ensemble practice as a way of thinking: tentacular thinking through our limbs, non-verbal thinking, embodied thinking. But also thinking through our interdisciplinary pursuits, our differences, gaps and cracks.
As a feminist philosopher, Haraway’s tentacular thinking points back to her writings about ‘situated knowledges’ (1988) where she argues that every cognition comes from a specific perspective and position, and this always requires critical reflection. I reflect upon where we are thinking from – four female artists in one of the world’s richest countries, given the opportunity to explore ensemble processes in this artistic research project for two years funded by the Norwegian state. I ask myself: will our results make a difference? Does artistic research contribute to art discourses, the artistic field, critical thinking?
The ensemble is drawn to Haraway’s concern for the acute global situation and her experimental thinking informed by biology and metaphors. The word tentacle comes from Latin tentaculum, meaning feeler, and the verb tentare which means to attempt and irritate. What are our extensions, what are our tentacles? Can we generate a form of knowledge that can disturb the world? Gry brought an anatomy book, and she read aloud a detailed text about the umbilical cord and blood vessels. Haraway, her Octopus and the material biological world resonated in the background as we worked.
CONTEXT – DISCURSIVE ACCENTS
My professional context for Extended Composition is my background as performer, composer, improvising musician and researcher within the field of contemporary and experimental music, also including hybrid and interdisciplinary art. In 2016, Irish composer Jennifer Walshe introduced the term The New Discipline as ‘not a style, though pieces may share similar aesthetic concerns. Composers working in this way draw on dance, theatre, film, video, visual art, installation, literature, stand-up comedy’ (Walshe 2016). A year later, composer Marko Ciciliani wrote, in Music in the Expanded Field:
The fact that these composers are confronted with a diversity of other disciplines and discourses means that they do not build their work within the confined and agreed discursive field of New Music. In other words, their work cannot be understood solely with reference to a single discourse. At the same time, there is no discourse of the expanded musical field that has taken its place (Ciciliani 2017).
In Ciciliani’s view, each composer who has expanded their practice field refers to an individual set of additional discourses, with the result that ‘discursive accents exist as tell-tale markers that … indicate the genre, style, or medium into which a work falls’ (Joanna Demers in Ciciliani 2017). How the three projects in Extended Composition are perceived by audience members from different disciplines has been extensively discussed in the project. The feedback from artists situated in different fields after the performances confirms Ciciliani’s claim of the absence of a unified discourse. However, the theory of discursive accents may offer new analytical tools to unravel the complexities of music projects that embrace a diversity of material and elements from different art disciplines.
Regardless of how multifaceted, complex and new this practice claims to be, it has many strong historical precursors. We have the genre of instrumental theatre that focuses on the visual and theatrical energy that is implicit in the performance itself, embracing the energy in the production of sound and music on the instruments. Mauricio Kagel and Dieter Schnebel are central figures in this area’s infancy. In his 1972 book, Denkbare Musik, Schnebel develops a key concept, sichtbare Musik – visible music. He emphasizes and composes with the visual aspects of music, and in numerous works he experiments with transposing elements from one medium to another. Schnebel’s and Kagel’s contributions to this composition and performance practice can be seen as forerunners to the performative turn in music that took place in the 1990s, shifting the focus from work and score towards process and performance, bringing the performing body into music research. The ‘doing’ aspect of music making and the bodies’ materiality is here in the foreground. In my view, this 50-year-old concept of Sichtbare Musik has stood the test of time and is still relevant today, challenging the presumption that music is a sonic art per se, and acknowledging the fact that we attend live concerts using all the senses in our perceiving of the art work.
Walshe’s inclusion of a multitude of materials (much developed through our multimedia and digital age) naturally expands our understanding of compositional material. But including new material is not news. What is more radical is her claim that
these pieces … they are not ‘music theatre’, they *are* music. Or from a different perspective, maybe what is at stake is the idea that all music is music theatre. Perhaps we are finally willing to accept that the bodies playing the music are part of the music, that they’re present, they’re valid and they inform our listening whether subconsciously or consciously. That it’s not too late for us to have bodies (Walshe 2016).
Here, by claiming this New Discipline, expanded field or extended composition straightforwardly to be ‘music’, Walshe integrates the extramusical, including the bodies, into the music composition and performance discourse. She does not separate music from music theatre. This is a bold claim within traditional and perhaps conservative music discourses; and it changes the perspectives and challenges these prevailing discourses. Music is thus already and always extended, or rather, elements of what has always been there can now be articulated when we write and talk about music. This (extended) definition of music recognizes that we perceive music and everything that comes along with the physical production of music with all our senses. Walshe expresses herself in accordance with the performative turn – in which the role of bodies and performance come to the fore – a turn that has met resistance in certain compositional discourses insisting on the primacy of sound. Walshe’s New Discipline as practice is not so new, then; what is new is that we regard this extended discipline as music, a music that includes the presence of bodies as pronounced material (not just by-products of performance), along with whatever other material the composer desires.
MATERIAL: SOUND OF MOVEMENT, MOVEMENT OF SOUND
What is material in this context? And what is the material relationship between sound and movement? Possible mappings between sound and movement include sound played with sonic intention resulting in sounds, and also movements as a by-product of intended sound production. Or intentional movements without a sonic goal may nevertheless produce sound as well as distinctive movement: bodies producing sound, bodies producing movement. The body is a locus of practice, with and without instruments.
Thoughts on movement from my notes:
Internal movements, external movements. To move and be moved
A sonic act of moving. A slight movement of the body. Listening for movement
Movere, to move, what is set in motion? Movimentum. Momentum music. Music as motion. Motion as music. Music as emotion.
The architect Bernard Tchumi speaks of the logic of material: “Just as there is a logic of words or of drawings, there is a logic of materials, and these are not the same. And, however much they are subverted, something ultimately resists … A word is not a concrete block” (Tschumi in Kaye 2013).
At the core of Ensemble Studies are the skills and bodies of the performers. The material of the work emerged through repeated intensive workshops where the performers improvised, and generated and developed material, sometimes with specific ideas and task, sometimes quite freely. The work evolved through embodied practice with reflection and composition taking place in the time between the workshops. The ‘logic’ of the material can in this sense be seen as the great potential that lies within each human artist, but also as the immense potential that lies in the power of the ensemble, in this case the joint endeavours of four artists. The logic of the material also includes the limitation and constraints of the ensemble, physically, artistically, intellectually.
SOME BODY – ANY BODY – EVERY BODY?
it’s not too late for us to have bodies (Walshe 2016)
Composing for a diverse ensemble of two musicians, one dancer and one dramaturg, allows me to use the sound production, materiality and characteristics of all those involved. The main material in the composition is the four bodies with their characteristics, experience, knowledge and skills: the material bodies themselves, with skills such as movement, instrument mastery and performance. In this way Ensemble Studies can be called a site-specific composition, as the site of composition is the performer’s body. In the sense that each body is in fact a person, we could even call it a person-specific composition: a move from any body to some body. The significance in the leap from a body to a person is putting at stake what we humans have in common, and what is unique for every body. German theatre scholar Erika Fischer-Lichte speaks about the dialectic between ‘being a body’ and ‘having a body’ – the co-existence of a phenomenal and semiotic body (Fischer-Lichte 2008, p. 82). This double nature of the performing body, the performers’ specific corporeality and the role in the ensemble context would inevitably fluctuate for the spectator, this oscillation between the two orders is what Fischer-Lichte calls ‘perceptual multistability’. In the postdramatic theatre (a term coined by Hans-Thies Lehmann in 1999), acceptance of the phenomenal body is essential. In that realm, we can openly be ‘ourselves’ on the stage with whatever skills and professionalism or lack thereof. The presence of amateurism in Ensemble Studies (the lack of traditional skills was probably evident in the cello quartet) could direct the focus to the phenomenal body of the players; however, the unity of the cello quartet as an instrumental ensemble, may lead the perception to a semiotic body, the role of four cellists. In Ensemble Studies we experimented with composing with parameters such as the personal voice and body language, and the range of perception modes between the performers. However, the feedback loop between performers and audience can never be controlled by the performers, ‘Perceptual multistability’ can change directions ‘during the very act of perceiving. The perceiving subjects find themselves on the threshold which constitutes the transition from one order to another [presence, and representation]; they experience a liminal state’ (Fischer-Lichte 2008, p. 148).
THE ‘ART WORLD’ OF ENSEMBLE STUDIES
Ensemble Studies is a collaborative composition. It was based on my idea and concept, and I led most of the rehearsals, but everyone in the project contributed greatly to the process and artistic result. Collaborative composition is a growing field, with theoretical and documentary contributions by performers and composers such as Barbara Luneburg, Jennifer Torrence, Heather Roche, Zubin Kanga, Stefan Östersjö and Karin Hellqvist, to name just a few. A number of the studies take as a point of departure the relationship between one composer and one performer. In our case, the collaboration is more complex for multiple reasons: as the main composer, I am working with an ensemble rather than a solo performer, and I hold the role of performer in addition to composer; finally, we come from three different disciplines.
In composing for his group, Bastard Assignments, Josh Spear uses the term ‘project lead’ when he is both the main composer and a performer within that piece. In his artistic PhD he writes:
I can step out, watch and comment, effectively behaving as director or movement director, then slip back into the group to continue the rehearsal and subsequent performance. This is an implicit boundary, useful for clarifying everyone’s position within a process; there are no limitations on suggestions and ideas but when the rehearsal is over, the final call lies with the project lead. This is a concrete example of the composer-performer practice in action; within the same rehearsal session, I move along the continuum freely and regularly (Spear 2022).
He refers to the introduction of specific ideas to try out as his ‘“framing” method for devising what works with the bodies, differences and creativities of my colleagues in the creation of their own movement’ (Spear 2022). And he says that other sections of the work, when composing for the group, were more directive. Our own working methods are close to Spear’s. The common understanding of my role in the group was as a project lead, framing certain studies, and simultaneously opening up and acknowledging each individual’s artistic and intellectual contribution.
Sociologist Howard S. Becker (1982) describes art works as the result of essentially collective activities. He calls his theory of collaboration in the creation of a work of art ‘art worlds’. The production of a work includes division of labour between multiple agents with different skills and knowledge. In this perspective, we can see that our quartet in Ensemble Studies is a ‘composed art world’ – an idiosyncratic, tailored art world where we collaboratively produce and interpret the artwork. If another ensemble were to interpret the piece, another art world would emerge.
We established early on what I perceived as a fruitful and trusting working environment. In the evaluation conversations in the group, the word trust came up numerous times from the other members. In order to create something together, to dare to be vulnerable and take risks, we had to have trust in each other, we had to establish a safe space, protected place for experimentation. The clarinettist Heather Roche writes: ‘I am to build friendships, partnerships, a kind of collaborative “space” where both collaborators are secure. Here in this collaborative space, there is trust in which risks can be taken: collaborators can feel free to make suggestions that might otherwise come across as strange or unrealistic’ (Roche 2011, p. 13).
We spend hours playing together, listening together, moving in synchronicity – as one body, as four bodies – later watching the videos together and reflecting together on the process. As the main composer, I watched all the videos between each rehearsal and decided the next steps. But the others also came with materials and ideas. We did exercises led by Camilla enhancing the perception of our bodies in the room, tempo and distance, energy and composition. Camilla also brought several text exercises – we worked with words as sonic material and everyone brought in texts of different kinds for experimentation. Gry coached us in movement exercises, awareness of limbs, bodies moving together and alone. Helga introduced singing exercises, we used the voice, warming up, speaking and singing. Each rehearsal started with sitting in a circle and reflecting on where we were and what we had been thinking since last session. In the last phase of the project, we often watched a short video immediately after we tried something out, discussing and evaluating together before trying again.
Building the ensemble is inspired by Helmut Lachenmann’s dictum: ‘Komponieren heißt: ein Instrument bauen’ – to compose is to build an instrument. How could our quartet become an instrument of its own? This resonates with Becker’s ‘art world’– the artistic criteria and aesthetics follow an inner logic for this specific ensemble-‘instrument’ or art world.
THE CELLO QUARTET – BECOMING AN ENSEMBLE
Everyone in the ensemble was given a cello. What is a cello in this context? A wooden box with four strings, a large object, a cultural-historical artefact inscribed with 400 years of classical music, a sound generator, an extension of the human body, a beast? A prop, a hiding place, a white cane, a friend, a means of expression, a dramatic tool?
We became a cello quartet. Each practice ritually began with cello technique – how to sit, adjusting where the cello rests against the chest, how to hold the bow, how to stroke legato with the bow, feel the steel strings against the fingers, embrace the wooden cello. I sat opposite the other three and played, they imitated me – mimesis – the most basic teaching method in instrumental teaching. The teaching and learning were primarily non-verbal – tacit knowledge in which bodily and intuitive perceptors are activated. We searched for active listening: listening deeply for the timbre of the instrument – for how tone colours change continuously, almost imperceptibly with our subtle physical changes or emotional intentions. The direct connection between what we do and what we hear cultivates a sensibility in which every small movement has sonic consequences: body, mind, intentions, emotions, movements, reactions.
In the cello quartet we explored diverse musical impulses, ideas, techniques and sound areas on the cello. Using the aforementioned studies method, in which each area is scrutinized systematically over time, we tried out the potential of each study: circles with the bow that become rhythm and groove; individual and collective rhythmicity; percussive sounds; the bow hitting the string, jumping, bouncing randomly, or controlled, like drumsticks in common rhythm and pulse; subtle sounds behind the bridge, white noise travelling the geography of the cello. We practised and rehearsed, every meeting almost ritually going through the same studies, but also new and different ones exploring new areas of the instrument, trying to dig deeper and build the connection between performer and instrument. We took turns having the responsibility of leading the group, each cellist leading her chosen technique.
VISCERAL CELLO
The other three members of the quartet had never played the cello before; they were novices. How on earth could they achieve a level that made it possible to perform in public over the course of barely two years? How could I help these newly minted cellists to be able to express themselves, to circumnavigate the painstakingly long process of learning a string instrument? Could the cello become a natural extension of their own bodies and the bow an obedient servant that loyally voiced their emotions on the instrument? My teaching method drew on bodily focus, aural focus and some basic understanding of cello technique, but most importantly, directly plunging into the sensuous, wonderful, sonorous world of so-called extended techniques and a non-pitched sound world. The term ‘extended techniques’ is generally applied to instrumental techniques that are unconventional and unfamiliar, often including novel effects and so-called extramusical sounds (sounds hitherto regarded as noise or by-products of the physical engagement with the instrument). It is self-evident that all instrumental techniques already exist within the spectrum of the instrument; but learning an instrument from this extended technique perspective proved a fruitful method for familiarizing with the instrument.
We worked on embracing the instrument, bringing the instrument closer to the body, imagining the cello as extension of the body. Leaning backward on the chair, standing up, crouching, walking, testing out various proximities between body and instrument. Summoning our inner energy and strength – channelling it up from the body throughout the instrument. We aimed to transpose our emotions and inner power through bodily labour into sound and noise. Searching for a direct line from the body’s organs – the gut – out through the instrument as sounds and movements. Wrenching the inside out to get access to the enormous powers of expression that inhabits each member of the ensemble.
We experimented with different grooves resulting from circling the bow in the area between the bridge and the fingerboard: circles transitioning between horizontal and perpendicular movements. The circling techniques bring out a wealth of overtones depending on variation in the speed and pressure of the bow around the circle as well as proximity to the bridge. Collectively digging into the strings the question arose: how can we get even more power – visceral power – into the cello sound?
At one point the cello quartet all stood and played, one started headbanging, the long hair flapping up and down in time with the music.
Cellist Elisabeth Le Guin coined the term ‘carnal musicology’, bringing the performing body forwards as an important source of information by its gestures and tactility (2005). Carnal is a powerful adjective, evoking the physical bodily, with sexual overtones. Le Guin writes of ‘Cello-and-Bow Thinking’, and she attempts to analyse Boccherini’s music from the ‘carnal perspective’ of behind the cello, with its physical actions, sensations and perceptions (Le Guin 2005).
I am searching for a way to compose music from a carnal perspective with this physical energy. How can we transmit and transform these immense physical powers we have as individuals and which are multiplied when melting into the ensemble – into music? Or rather than transforming, how do we generate, develop and refine the carnal, embodied actions through repeating the same studies and exercises, again and again? We allowed ourselves to be grotesque and ugly, digging the bows into the strings with rawness, strength and vigour. We dig more deeply into the exercises, challenging the physical and aesthetic borders but still aiming to keep the sensitivity and awareness of the group play.
ROBOT – STUDY
Disciplined bodies are socialized into disciplined performance practices; hours of practising become internalized movements engraved into our bodies. Repeating and repeating again, we are an ensemble of discipline. We explore a study where everyone makes ‘the same’ repetitive movements: two planes, vertical and horizontal; two different dimensions visually emerging through arms moving in sharp angles, up and down, right and left. Mechanical, robot-like movements. We perform ‘the same’ thing on different instruments: Helga on the Hardanger Fiddle, Gry stroking and hitting on her body, Camilla with (amplified) pens on paper on the wall and I on the cello. We all perform the movements with the same vertical and horizontal intention on our respective ‘instruments’. And these same actions on our different ‘instruments’ produce different sounds.
Danish composer Simon Steen-Andersen uses the term hyper-idiomatic as the concrete and physical translation from one unique instrumental language (idiomaticism) to another, something he explores in Study #1 for string instrument (2007) and Next to Beside Besides (2003/6.) The term is clearly inspired by Lachenmann’s concept of musique concrète instrumentale, with his remarkably concrete approach to instrumental composition – the material qualities and physical energies of the sound. In Steen-Andersen’s works, movement is isolated as an autonomous compositional parameter. Each instrumentalist can make ‘the same’ movements which are transferred from one instrument to another, but which still will sound differently.
In Steen-Andersen’s hyper-idiomatic realm, the instrumental practice is valued in itself and not regarded as a vehicle or a means to express the music. For the performer, there is a major psychological distinction between these different intentions in practice and performance: sound of the movement or movement of the sound. (Orning 2014)
The underlying principle of ‘sameness’ is something we explored in this part, tuning into our ensemble idiomaticism through our idiosyncratic practices with the same intentions, resulting in visible music, or perhaps concrete visual music – what you see is as important as what you hear.
In the last part of Ensemble Studies, we explored expressing ‘the same’ intentions further. How can slow string arpeggios be translated into dance? How can a low wave through the body be transferred to music? How do we get beyond imitation and mickey mousing? How can we have a shared understanding of a concept, a term, a movement, a sound? What does ‘common understanding’ mean? How do we speak about these things? Which terms can we share and believe we understand together? How can we develop a common language of movement and a language of sound? Can we communicate through actions, common perceptions and energy? We explore communicating as we perform – studying ensemble skills.
EXTENDED PERFORMANCE PRACTICE
Extended composition can be understood as extending the parameters of the creative process. The most important expansion for me in Ensemble Studies is that of time: working time, the affordance of resource of time spent together in combination with working in an interdisciplinary way. In the arts, work structures are conditioned by finances. Institutions have their established frameworks, whereas within the independent artistic field the various disciplines work differently. While performing arts such as dance and theatre have extensive rehearsal periods prior to performances, the music field often operates more efficiently and in shorter time slots closer to performance. A common model for commissioned musical works is for the composer to work on the creative process on her own before the musicians receive the material, preferably in the form of notated music in a score. (Although several collaborative methods of music creation have emerged, this division between the roles of the composer and performer prevails.) Then follows, generally, a short trial period that culminates in a concert.
The luxury of the two-year working period in this project created the space for a collaborative process. Also, opening the process of composition and performance to material and practices from outside of the musical/sound domain, had profound implications. Not only did this radically change the aesthetic and content of the work, but it meant that all artists involved learnt new skills, which in its turn created an opportunity for new working methods. The instrumental practice and embodied practice are weaved into the work, and therefore it no longer makes sense to reiterate the division between composition and performance of the work. The performance practice is now part of the work as we have seen Ensemble Studies unfold. We thus cannot speak of ‘extended composition’ without speaking of ‘extended performance practice’.
Being part of the larger research group of performers and composers allowed for new perspectives throughout the project and created resistance and challenges that could be fruitful, but also that we sometimes also disagreed with. Shila Anarki introduced the DasArts feedback method, which gives the receiver of feedback more agency, something that resonated well with the group. Ensemble studies received comments that, as four women performers, we perhaps emphasized the feminine to excess if we played fragile and weak music as the beginning of the piece. We discussed this at length in the group and decided that this expression chimed with our artistic intentions for the opening of the piece; we wanted to go along with it. Composing is traditionally a quite individual working situation, we rarely have editors, producers or critiques along the process. For me, this experience of ‘allowing’ others to critique the work in progress on so many different stages, was new and fruitful, but also irritating when the same critique was repeated, and it reflected the fact that no work of art arises in a vacuum.
As the date of the concert approached, the concern of having to decide a form and shape of the work in performance increased. Now was the time for a metamorphosis from process to work (product). The beautiful non-committal brainstorm sessions, where unknown and surprising things happened, came to an end, and the material we chose to keep needed to be sharpened and rehearsed. We had to ‘kill a lot of darlings’, and we realized that we had produced a huge amount of material that was not used in the end. Nevertheless, choosing the final material came quite naturally, as we had narrowed it down gradually by working rigorously within the realms of different studies and thus ended up with clear, almost distilled ideas in the form of distinct parts and aesthetics of the piece. Dropping elements became imperative, as the work otherwise would have become a long series of events without any coherence. The final selection was thus determined by the artistic weight and the coherence of the material forming a whole, mainly decided by me, but in steady dialogue with Camilla primarily, and also the ensemble during common rehearsals.
We cannot escape discussing that two of the project’s three years took place during the pandemic. For several periods, we were allowed by the institution to work together despite the shutdown. We had to keep to the one-metre and eventually two-metre distance rule, but the school allowed us to meet and work. What a blessing! What a luxury to tear yourself away from the zoom meetings to meet other artists physically and work in a room together.
The Ensemble Studies quartet had a remarkably harmonious working environment. We had camaraderie, trust and positivity; everyone’s ideas were heard and there was an eagerness and curious attitude towards developing material and ideas. Strangely, I did not experience any disagreement or conflicts, something rarely avoided in artistic collaborations. I would say that the working methods we were able to develop within the group, given the access to a generous resource of time, can be seen as an idealistic, perhaps even utopian way of working that we rarely experience. An important result for me is that I have become very interested in continuing to work in this artistic direction, both as a composer and performer. I now have a new project with a choreographer which will explore this interdisciplinary professional landscape further.
REFERENCES
Becker, H.S. (1982) Art Worlds. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Ciciliani, M. (2017) ‘Music in the Expanded Field – On Recent Approaches to Interdisciplinary Composition’. In M. Rebhahn and T. Schäfer (eds). Darmstädter Beiträge zur Neuen Musik, vol. 24, Mainz: Schott.
Fischer-Lichte, E. (2008) The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics. New York: Routledge.
Haraway, D. (1988) ‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective’. Feminist Studies 14 (3): 575–99
——— (2016) Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press.
Kanga, Z. (2014) ‘Inside Composer–Performer Collaboration’. Resonate Magazine, May 15. www.australianmusiccentre.com.au/article/inside-composer-performer- collaboration.
Kaye, N. (2013) Site-Specific Art: Performance, Place and Documentation. London: Routledge.
Lachenmann, H. (2004) ‘Über das Komponieren’. In Musik als existentielle Erfahrung: Schriften 1966–1995. 2nd edn. Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1996.
Le Guin, E. (2005) Boccherini’s Body: An Essay in Carnal Musicology. Berkeley: University of California Press.
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