I must first address the topic, which, despite being about the concepts of place and space, can be summed up as engaging with my environment and the emotional process while pursuing this goal. For this piece, I did an important retrospection exercise, where I questioned myself as an artist: what do I really want to do? What excites me the most among the possibilities I have as a musician? How can I integrate my personal experiences with my artistic persona?
I came to the conclusion that moving to a foreign country, with the specific situation of not having a place to stay, was a breakpoint in my life. I was in the middle of a life crisis, hence my questioning and my necessity to connect with my immediate environment.
I had to create a safety net, a sense of security that would enable me to respond to all of these questions with less emotional stress. Place and self are interconnected, as I have stated in the topic study, so when one of these two pillars falls apart, it invariably affects the other. In my situation, I was without a home or a secure place, which led to a sense of loss. I needed to create the identity that would help me to navigate this new context, which includes the master’s studies I came here for. That’s the reason I decided to approach this personal process from an artistic perspective. Ultimately, I explained in the introduction that one of the main motivations for choosing this topic was to learn how to cope with these negative feelings through my musical journey. I had this conception that I should feel guilty whenever my emotions or my daily life affect my professional career, forgetting what Woolf remarks on the excerpt that I extensively quoted through this research: every artist piece is the “work of suffering human beings”.
Working on this piece and with another artist made me realize that even though I have a background in playing, I still belong to an artistic discipline. As classical players, or at least in my case, we have an attitude of subordination towards the score –which doesn’t deny that we have to respect the composer’s work–, meaning that we are limiting our creativity to make a music that is “purely reproductive, at most somewhat interpretative, craftsmanship” (Raes 2014, 56). For some musicians, this realization comes very easily, but it was a significant one for me. I felt unsatisfied with the limited opportunities I believed I would have after my graduation. However, being able to carry this project forward gave me the affirmation I needed to accept that actually I have more artistic resources, but especially, opportunities
Looking at my research question, "How does the integration of environmental dynamics, personal experiences, and place-related concepts influence the artistic development of musicians?" I must share some of the insights and possible answers that I had during the making of this piece.
After knowing and researching more about contemporary artists, I discovered how the majority of them use personal topics, with an especial attention towards bodily experience. This is very visible in more recent disciplines such as Performance art or Happenings, with names such as Marina Ábramovic, Nam June Paik, the Feminist performer such as Yoko Ono, Ana Mendieta; of course, John Cage and Spanish references like Juan Hidalgo, Abel Azcona, etc. They take great care to fully embody their artistic proposals and pieces, displaying a distinct honesty, which makes them dependent on their experience.
Thanks to this, I came to the conclusion that I can use my personal life, including then my interaction with space and my process of relocating myself, as a potent artistic inspiration. Even as a performer, I can approach music not from a very abstract notion of it –a probably successor of the romantic concept of Absolute music as the “discourse of a higher realm” that need only of its own language to communicate with the audience– and start figuring out the human side of music. I firmly believe that we can produce incredibly intriguing and innovative creative solutions in the process of trying to capture the richness and complexity of reality and, by extension, our unique vision of it.
In regard to this, and addressing what the making process meant to me, I realized that I gained trust on myself, and that trust comes from having more clear where I should focus my musical career. As I said, the process included a personal intention of engagement with my surroundings, and for this, I pushed myself to make the most of my experience in this new context, and of all the opportunities that my master’s studies offered me. Engaging with my immediate environment involves interacting with all of its components, which includes people, the city, the conservatorium, teachers, roommates, apartments, and even intangible elements like social dynamics, cultural exchange, travel, getting inspiration from other people's work, concerts, and of course, sounds, images, odors, flavors, etc.
In summary, I realized that this project had become a personal learning and emotional journey. Despite the fact that I still have a lot to learn and that this is only the beginning, it was quite fulfilling to discover that I can be creatively independent and use that to manifest my ideas.