To be a contemporary music performer today is to have a deeply fragmented practice. The performer’s role is no longer simply a matter of mastering her instrument and executing a score. Music practices are increasingly incorporating new instruments and technologies, new methods of creating works, audience interaction and new situations of interdependence between performer subjects. In these conditions, the performer finds herself unable to keep control and a sense of mastery over the performance. In other words, performing is increasingly precarious.

During its lifetime, the research project Performing Precarity sought to challenge traditional performance paradigms by abandoning notions of mastery and instrument-specificity as the core of a musician’s practice in favour of the idea of relationality and its ensuing precarity. What kind of practices emerge when traditional conceptions of beauty, perfection and subjectivity are relinquished in favour of precarity, fragility, risk, instability, failure and relational interdependence between performers, composers, technologies and audiences? What kinds of reflection result from this repositioning of the performer from 'master' to contingent agent caught in a network of conflicting and mutually conditioning forces? 

Applied by instrument historian Herbert Heyde to describe the mechanics of instruments, the notion of the network suggests new ways of thinking about the interdependencies of musical performance. Unlike the solid conception of instrumental identity implied by the notion of idiomaticity, that of the network suggests a relational conception of performance practice which embraces and potentially affects all aspects of musical performance, highlighting a wholly different set of performative qualities; interdependence, fragility, unpredictability, risk. Through the Performing Precarity project, participants have deliberately explored such qualities guided by an ethical performativity founded upon precarity.

In the work of Judith Butler, the term precarity relates to a heightened sensibility of the frailty of the lives of our fellow human beings. Preparing, performing and participating in the kind of works examined by this research project fosters a heightened sense of the fragility of musical performance. Being constantly exposed to the risks of performative collapse or failure, and to dependency on others or on technology, the performer acknowledging the precariousness of musical performance must also surrender to these hazards, ultimately risking transforming their very conception of self. 

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Performing Precarity was based at the Norwegian Academy of Music from 2019-2024 with kind support from the Norwegian Directorate for Higher Education and Skills and the Norwegian Academy of Music. Other institutional partners in the project have been the Anton Bruckner Private University Linz, Huddersfield University and Moscow State Tchaikovsky Conservatory. Artistic collaborators through the project period have been Carola Bauckholt (composer), Wojtek Blecharz (composer), Christian Blom (composer), Olga Bochikhina (composer), Hild Borchgrevink (artist, writer), Darla M. Crispin (artist, writer), Jorge Gómez Elizondo (composer), Elizabeth Hobbs (animation film maker), Simon Løffler (composer), Tomas Laukvik Nannestad (performer), Pinquins, Trond Reinholdtsen (composer), Tania Rubio (composer), Simon Steen-Andersen (composer), Vladimir Tarnopolski (composer), Theater Corpus, Andreas Ulvo (pianist), Therese B. Ulvo (composer), Bonnie Whiting (performer) and Bethany Younge (composer).

Participants in workshops and seminars have been Per Einar Binder (psychologist), Eivind Buene (composer), Karmenlara Ely (artistic director), Ivar Grydeland (researcher, performer), Annabel Guaita (researcher, performer), Maja Hannisdal (dancer), Vegard Lund (performer), Camille Norment (visual artist), Jan Martin Smørdal (composer, performer), Inga Stenøien (performer), Sergej Tchirkov (researcher, performer), Morten Qvenild (composer, performer) and students and teachers from the Norwegian Academy of Music and the Grieg Academy - Department of Music, University of Bergen, Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design.

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The Performing Precarity exposition contains 14 reflective components in different formats: videoessays, scientific articles, essays, audiopapers and documentaries. Each component sheds light on topics touched upon by the project group. Our wish is that the variety of formats enriches the experience for our audience, who can jump back and forth between the components. Some reflections touch upon the same topics, compositions or performances, but from different angles. In addition to the reflective material, the exposition contains documentary material of 18 musical compositions.