Writing about a performance situation is challenging. Being in the situation is in a way something private, hidden from what is actually taking place on stage. As audience member perhaps you do not want to know what is going on in the mind and body of a performer when she enters the podium. Maybe you want to experience something superhuman, divine? In Performing Precarity we facilitated unstable performance situations for ourselves to study how unpredictable elements affected us as performers and how they affected the music. In MODES OF PRECARITY I reflect upon some of these situations from my personal point of view moving through the project.
In the morning I go swimming from the ladder on the jetty at Nesodden. I try to let go of the handhold and let myself sink; stop gritting my teeth and tensing up in my body. Not counting down.
18 December 2019
I am sitting facing a bay window in a side room at Ridehuset in Oslo. The window is glowing beautifully in tones of pale grey. I am wearing a woolly hat, fingerless gloves and several layers of thin wool jumpers – the December weather is icy cold. Behind me, people are being let in, but I’m not looking at them because I am turned towards the grand piano and the window, waiting, but I feel their presence strongly and can hear heavy boots striking the stone floor. I sense the audience as a massive yet moving weight on my back. Some of them sit on the floor, while others remain standing.
Concert at ADvent concert series curated by Ditteke Waidelich and Hild Borchgrevink 2019. Ellen Ugelvik performs 4 Derridas by Laurence Crane. Photo: Kristine Tjøgersen
I take a deep breath and begin this tortuous journey. I am aware it might be tough. Some listeners might not make it all the way through; perhaps they will walk out in disappointment and frustration? The music is stripped-back, pulsating, repetitive. Eventually calm is established, and there’s an extreme concentration in the room on the part of people other than myself as the performer, I recognise that. One step at a time up the mountainside, going sideways because it’s so steep. Fill up the spaces with something.
Having the audience sitting behind me affects my playing and, I would imagine, their own experience of the situation. All of our faces are pointing in the same direction, towards the bay window. The lighting around the window frame is reminiscent of flocking birds, and I can sense a cohesion among the others, we are all in the same boat now. I am the one rowing, with long strokes, over the fjord.
6 October 2019
On the research group’s1 first meet-up, we take a trip to the caves at Spro on Nesodden. We have to pass through a narrow crevice in the hillside to reach the centre of the cave. It’s raining today, and there’s a small underground lake into which water is dripping from the cold stone walls and the roof overhead. The indeterminate drip-music rings out, majestic and powerful. On the way out we find mica, thin mineral sheets which you can split apart and crumble with your fingers. I place one on my glass-topped desk. Light shines through the stone sliver.
20 January 2020
The research group has a workshop at the Norwegian Academy of Music using material by Laurence Crane. Whenever I have played this music at concerts before, I have felt especially vulnerable, as if I’m scared that the performance won’t hold up, that the audience aren’t into it. Anders plays the beautiful Bobby J for solo electric guitar. I have heard this composition many times before in different settings, and Anders’s calm temperament fills the space. I am able to relax into the sound and lose my footing. Suddenly he makes a slip with his guitar pedal and his facial expression fractionally changes. I look over at Lisa, who’s smiling. A very different atmosphere takes over the room, an alertness. I am beginning to think that we are sharing this performance, that the tiny error is bringing us closer together, that we are transporting the music together. As listeners, we share the responsibility for the music with those who are playing it.
I pick up that thought and run with it. If we share a responsibility for the situation, then it’s no longer just me who is responsible for creating something where everything runs smoothly, and which the audience will ‘enjoy’. For example I don’t need to try to conceal the fact that the slightly beaten-up grand piano I’m playing has its cuts and bruises. Perhaps its mechanism is not balanced, or it’s not perfectly tuned. It is what it is. If I allow the instrument’s imperfections to come through as a natural part of the performance, instead of doing some pianistic trickery in order to hide something, then together we can listen to what the instrument has to say. It doesn’t necessarily mean that I am playing the piano any differently, but I am listening in a more empathetic way to what I am doing, and maybe also to myself.
4–5 March 2020
Pianist Andreas Ulvo and I are going to premiere the piano concerto Woven Fingerprints for two Pianists and Orchestra by composer Therese Birkelund Ulvo, with the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra. The conductor is Edward Gardner, and the premiere is taking place at the Grieg Hall in Bergen at the Borealis Festival. The previous evening, Andreas, Therese and I are alone in the resonant hall beneath its red ceiling. We are using a hair dryer to dry the varnish that we have applied to the soft brushes that will be used inside the grand pianos. Out in the middle of the large hall the sounds made by the brushes don’t sound enough, and we are working on getting a rougher sound, stiffening the bristles so that the sounds will carry better. It’s strange to be alone in such a big space; we seem so small in there, and feel physically how good the acoustic around us is, a kind of warmth. Thinking about tomorrow night, we giggle nervously, a consequence of that special tension that comes with with playing a completely new work in front of an audience for the first time. The concert in the Grieg Hall the following night goes well.
Photo from the premiere in Grieghallen by Thor Brødreskift/Borealis
Video from premiere: https://bergenphilive.no/en/video-concerts/2020/3/woven-fingerprints/
A week later, Norway is shut down thanks to the Covid-19 pandemic. The contrast is enormous for everyone. For a pianist who one week finds herself at the heart of a symphony orchestra in the Grieg Hall’s wonderful acoustic, and the next in the silence of a home office in the loft, it has much to do with the sudden lack of sound and the absence of that wordless contact with colleagues. Togetherness inside the sound. I go for walks with the children to the caves at Nesodden where we light campfires and try to collect pieces of mica. Now, inside the caves, everything is frozen solid, silent; our voices sound muffled. Birgitte Pollen, administrator of the research project, tells us to buy reading matter with our project funding; think slow, this might take time. I fill my rucksack with new books, woollen blanket and Thermos, and venture into the forest. It doesn’t help.
The pandemic shows the research project in a unique light. Suddenly our theme encompasses global events. The idea of playing together on the same instrument, becoming an aural organism, as in rerendered for pianist and two assistants could now be seen as a symbol of the entire world’s situation, in which all of us are now dependent on each other, whatever our nationality or status. What each one of us does now could have consequences for many others. At the same time, aspects of our art project becomes meaningless, in a way, to the extent that we in Norway live in an unrivalled, prosperous, well-functioning society compared to most other countries. Infection rates are rising, we collectively hold our breath.
Our plans for the research project fall apart one by one, and the project has to be redesigned. Helmut Lachenmann’s large-scale piano concerto Ausklang, which for me at least was a central element, is cancelled after six years of planning. Around me I can see that artists are suffering, we are not being prioritised in the grand scheme of government support programmes. Freelance musicians are having to sell instruments just to put food the table. I myself am safe in these times, because of being in charge of this research project. Performing Precarity, a project that is about different types of unpredictable scenario for a performer, has now become a source of economic security for me and my family, even though it will not be possible to do any work as a performer for a very long time. In this sense, it’s a tragicomedy.
An UTFLUKT2 from 2020–2022
Four brave souls3 embark on a digital collaboration to create a new performance work for Performing Precarity, with no clue as to how complicated this work will turn out to be. In retrospect, I think it is pretty much impossible to make a performative work in this way, almost exclusively via digital channels. But during the pandemic we lived ‘day to day’, hoping we would get together soon and work in more familiar ways. Carola, Elizabeth, Jennifer and I remained optimistic that soon, soon, we would be able to meet up and work together. But we only managed one collective meeting, on the actual day of the premiere in Stuttgart on 2 February 2022. Plus a workshop as a trio, with Jennifer, Carola and myself in Sølvsalen, Kongsberg, in autumn 2021.
We began with a brainstorming session over Zoom. The grand piano could be a car we were repairing, with Jennifer as a kind of mechanic working underneath the body of the instrument. Or should the piano be an ambulance with a blue flashing light? We wanted to include the sound of breathing, and chased down some plastic pumps for which Carola composed a musical theme. RYTHM was an early working title which was eventually changed to something that was more about travel, exploration, and even something being explored underwater. Back and forth went our recordings of music improvised using the hub of a bike wheel, various small percussion objects, and nature sounds imitated on whistles. Elizabeth sent samples of ‘rhythms’ made with dried flowers, other samples where she used a broad strokes with a paintbrush, and a film she had made with Professor Malcolm Burrows, featuring close-ups of tiny sea creatures.
Jennifer Torrence and Ellen Ugelvik premiering UTFLUKT by Carola Bauckholt, Elizabeth Hobbs, Jennfer Torrence and Ellen Ugelvik. ECLAT 2022.
Photo: Reiner Pfisterer/ECLAT
This gave rise to many questions along the way. Probably the most challenging thing was generating a ‘story’, a convincing narrative throughout. Or was a ‘story’ even necessary for the composition to hang together? If there was going to be a narrative, then who were Jen and I, the performers on stage? What was our relationship to each other, who were we if not the musicians Ellen and Jen, but suddenly two characters in a film? Would it be weird if we started off the concert with some ‘normal’ pieces of music, and then morphed into ‘actors’ in this particular composition? Would we be convincing in this role, after all we aren’t trained as actors, so what space of possibility was available to us to perform in? How direct should we be in terms of the audience’s own efforts to create connections and ideas, how much clarity was important to allow the audience to keep up with our ‘story’? If we weren’t going to be ‘ourselves’, ought we to be introduced in the film as ‘something else’?
Another important moment was to what extent the performance, music and film should ‘do the same thing’. How precisely did we need to act in unison with the film, and eventually how could we achieve this? At what point would the whole thing become too complicated for an audience to comprehend, or when would it be too flat? What would happen if parts of what Jen and I were doing and playing were improvised, a bit more loosely formed, or was it more exciting to have a combination of improvised and composed music? If we had sounds on tape, how should that work alongside the music we were actually playing on instruments in the room – should the tape contain other sounds than the ones that we were making? Or act as a kind of ‘glue’ holding the whole composition together?
Our list of questions was infinitely longer than the ones I have noted here. At the same time, it was actually impossible to come up with good answers, because we never had the chance to get together and try out these ideas at anything approaching full scale, with good sound and with the fluid working conditions that happen when you are together working on ideas in the same room. We organised workshops where Jen and I were in Oslo and tried to set up a space which could partly give us an idea of how the stage would look during the premiere. Carola took part from Linz or Freiburg, while Elizabeth sat in her London studio. Via these small computer screens, Carola and Elizabeth had to try to imagine the results of what we were trying out in Oslo, and develop the composition via a stuttering dialogue using materials which they could only partially see and hear. UTFLUKT turned into an exercise in co-creating under extreme conditions.
Click on the arrow above to listen
Anders Førisdal, Jennifer Torrence and Ellen Ugelvik preparing and performing 2-METRE HARMONY by Laurence Crane at Karpedammen, Oslo, 2020.
Photo: Lea Ye Gyoung
8 December 2020
Anders, Jennifer and I are standing in a triangular formation, apart, with our backs to each other. We’re on an outdoor stage that’s been built for lively summer recitals at Karpedammen, at the Akershus Fortress in Oslo. Now it’s December, with dampness in the air and freezing rain. We’re going to play 2-Metre Harmony: Uncertain Chorales by Laurence Crane, for pitch-pipes, harmonicas and prerecorded sinetones (downloaded on our mobile phones played out through three small Bluetooth speakers placed on the ground). The pitch-pipes and harmonicas sound fragile, artificial and uneven as they rub up against the damp December air via our warm breath. Sometimes no sound comes out at all, just a hoarse rumbling. We’re playing for each other and the camera, there’s no audience here, large gatherings are illegal now.
I want to find out what happens when we are unable to communicate with eye contact or body language. Is it possible we can just feel each other’s musical pulse despite standing with our backs to each other, socially distanced? What can the lack of the contact we usually have while playing do to both the performing situation and the actual sound of the music? Above and beyond our inability to see or hear very much of each other, there are several other instances of uncertainty involved which allow for a precarious performance situation. We are not trained to play these instruments which are constantly steaming up. We have only just memorised the piece, so some details of the notated score might be overlooked.
Lea is filming. My consciousness slowly becomes aware of this strange, unfamiliar situation. The city is playing along. The rain on this temporary cover slung over the stage, the thudding drone of traffic, an ambulance siren and the bells of the City Hall all intrude into the soundscape, with an equally important effect as the sounds we make ourselves. I listen intently to the others and hear that we swap instruments at roughly the same point that’s proscribed in the score. But eventually I become unsure of our precision and slip into a state of mind where I stop caring about the bigger picture, or whether or not we are ‘together’. I just listen to how the composition unfolds, according to its own rules. I feel the warmth from the triangular space between us, a collective artistic drive.
In Ugla Lyd1, we record Piano Piece no. 23 'Ethiopian Distance Runners' for solo piano. Laurence Crane uses the term ‘low interpretation’ as an ideal way of performing his music. This means not ‘over-interpreting’ the material, but rather leaving it to the listener to hear the connections. It is ‘enough’ to just put the music out there. To lay it out with no extra layers of clever-clever elements. This still leaves space for the players’ own interpretations, in terms of the treatment of sound and phrasing at a micro-level, but without performing ‘grand emotions’. I play in a laid-back way. Try to think of myself more as a listener receiving the music rather than as the one actually playing it. At Ugla Lyd, we alternate between Morten’s Steinway grand and his old Sauter upright piano.
Something happens when I play that old instrument. As if the composition gains more layers than when I’m playing the same piece of music on the pristine Steinway. Listening to it on the battered old piano adds further associations to the connections the music itself conjures up. The piano has a different personality than the grand piano, it emerges as stubborn and darker, older and more angular, with visible nicks and gashes.
After the Second World War, Steinway reigned supreme over the international grand piano market because so many piano factories in Germany were destroyed in the war. Bechstein, Bösendorfer, Petrof, Schimmel, Sauter and other famous brands with different sound qualities are now the exception in the biggest concert halls and in the salons where our students sit their piano exams. Our listening and technical development is being aurally polished towards the sound of a Steinway during our education as classical pianists. There are certain Steinway artists who are practising exclusively on Steinways and commit to play concerts only on this brand2.
‘If you play my piece again I’m gonna break your legs.’ This is an urban legend, supposedly said by a composer to a musician after a concert. Some people argue that musicians with a flat technique shouldn’t play Laurence Crane’s music because the music is so transparent. I recognise myself in some of this. It’s possible to feel a little ashamed when you’re going to play someone else’s music and you start to fear that what you’re doing isn’t good enough. That you can’t express the ideas this other person has for the music, and that the composer is unhappy. As a pianist, you don’t ‘own’ the music, it’s been made by someone else. You are aware that it’s the other person who has the last word when it comes to interpretative decisions.
I read up on shame online3.
In psycho-dynamic therapy, shame is understood to mean an inwardly-directed anger as a form of self-sacrifice and protection of loved ones. We learn early in childhood that expressing anger, usually towards a parent or carer, can lead to negative reactions both internally and externally.
Internally, we feel guilty for being angry at someone we love at the same time. Most often, being angry with someone you love is anxiety-provoking, painful, ‘forbidden’ and paralysing, and we learn to keep our distance, bury our anger or suppress our feelings of closeness, intimacy and vulnerability. It’s as if the part of us that is the good son, daughter, lover, partner and friend descends into anger on behalf of the part of us that is hurt, traumatised, frightened, injured, neglected, ridiculed, criticised, betrayed or ostracised.
It’s as if we have a big angry bear inside us that we are constantly fighting against by distracting it, caging it in or simply letting it attack us instead of the one we love.
Most people do not see this on the outside and there is no appreciation or compassion for this exhausting, scary, self-destructive internal struggle.
This makes heavy reading, in which many of us can perhaps recognise ourselves to different degrees, at least I do. When the person or thing you love unconditionally becomes the seed of something painful or hurtful. Compromising yourself in relation to someone or something, and failing to stand up for yourself and what you love. Many professional musicians began playing in their childhood. The instrument you have chosen, and the way you play it, become part of your identity. Whenever I ask a musician what it is they do, they often say that they are a pianist, not that they work as one. Year after year, classical musicians practise the great works of certified-genius composers such as Bach and Beethoven; 10,000 hours of childhood can be invested in this. In the course of playing this music, there is something unattainable, since the music is considered to be perfect. You can be humbled next to these so-called masterpieces. And gradually come to the realisation that your own interpretation will constantly be exposed to judgement and criticism. A childlike approach to the instrument and the music you love can be pushed to one side and replaced by crushing seriousness. And a habit of automatically subordinating your own artistic impulses to those of the composer, whether they died 300 years ago or are standing over your shoulder as you play right now.
From the premiere of Keine Ideen. Keine Neue Perspektive by Trond Reinholdtsen. Jennifer Torrence and Ellen Ugelvik, performers.
Photo: Reiner Pfisterer/ECLAT
March to Stand Still
Berlin 7–8 November 2023
I finally get to meet the Ukrainian composer Vladimir Tarnopolsky in the entrance to the lecture-hall in the giant villa which serves as the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin (Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin). After almost ten years of exchanging mails and a few online meetings, we encounter each other in the flesh, on the last day but one of my involvement in the project. When war broke out between Russia and Ukraine, Tarnopolsky had to flee from Moscow immediately because of his political views, and now he and his family are living in exile in Germany. For more than twenty years he has lived and worked as a professor of composition at the Tchaikovsky Conservatory, where he founded a contemporary music ensemble and played an extraordinarily active role in Russia’s musical life. Now, in Berlin, I am going to be performing Tarnopolsky’s composition Out of Step, Out of Time. March to Stand Still to mark the opening of a Ukrainian virtual institute. VUIAS4 has been set up by the German Institute for Advanced Studies in collaboration with international partners who had to leave the country, thus working against the massive brain drain that results from the Russian invasion.
Vladimir and I connect straightaway and quickly get started on a run-through of the composition on the piano in the lecture hall, on the evening before the concert. In moments like these, when musicians and composers are working with a great score, it’s as if all the differences between us are pushed aside. What Vladimir has experienced in his lifetime, and the unimaginable situation he now finds himself in, together with my own experiences, are united towards a common goal; we want the composition to work, to be open enough, and at the same time make enough compromises that the audience can enter it, exist within it for a while, and discover something inside the sound. We try to get a more metallic timbre from the inside of the piano, and a sense of rhythm that is suggestive without being too overpowering. It’s hard work. The hours flit by and the garden outside goes dark.
Selfie of Vladimir Tarnopolski and Ellen Ugelvik after performance in Berlin
Next morning I feel that sense of unease which is the daily experience of many musicians I know. I’m nervous about the evening’s events, which I’m not sure about, or even whether the piece is going to work. Will it be a positive experience for Vladimir? The whole thing feels like such a big responsibility. As I wait here, I wonder how the ideas we have been discussing in Performing Precarity might also be applied to the lead-up to performing: that perhaps it could be less intense every time, especially before a solo performance. I take a long walk in the streets of Grünewald and realise there’s no point in any more rehearsals, just warm up properly and get some rest. Let the day unfold, allow the familiar anxiety in my stomach do its work of preparing me to hit the ground running, focused. ‘I know that I am here. I know you are here. I like you. And I know what I can.’8
Walking in the early morning between the big, expensive villas and their beautiful gardens, I feel pretty small. I search up Janne-Camilla Lyster’s reflections on the way she sees herself from outside in MIRROR9, which I have saved on my phone. I interpret the text as how you can somehow be disappointed in yourself and who you are or appear to be. It’s a kind of self-criticism I recognise in myself right now, especially since I am about to give a big performance. But at the same time the text gives me hope for an empowerment I possess in the form of lived experiences and connections whose extent we may not even realise, which exist in us in parallel with more direct experiences. There’s something fragile about such a piece of scaffolding, but at the same time it gives you something to press your forehead against on a day like this. All the music that has passed through my body is stored somewhere, impressed on me in different degrees, and is present in or around me like an invisible, warm cloak.
MIRROR by Janne-Camilla Lyster
When I unintentionally catch a glimpse of my own reflection in, for
example, a large window, I look different from the image I have of
myself. It seems I always have a fast pace, with lightly raised shoulders
and my head leaning slightly forward, as if I am eagerly going thro-
ugh a rough wind. My legs never stretch out completely when I walk,
neither pushing off nor receiving the floor the sole of the foot. It
looks as if I am continuously enduring a number of small, insignifi-
cant falls. I am both taller and wider than how I experience myself.
Arms and legs move more sideways than I imagine from the experi-
ence of walking, more sideways than forward and backward. It looks
tight. Is this body so stiff, so hard? I, who have made it my profession
to move easily and adeptly? There is always some degree of of disap-
pointment and a subsequent desire to change myself when I meet
my own reflection. Often, I change my gait immediately, stretching
my knee as I push off the ground, straightening up, trying to release
the tension in my shoulders as much as I possibly can, letting my
arms swing forward and backward, following gravity, letting myself
be free and ready for the world. It always fails me, it seems. To main-
tain this ease I am longing for. But maybe there is something that
changes in me, a little, every time, over hours and days, months and
decades. And maybe there is something in this rough wind, something
that I do not see, besides through my own reflection in the window,
which I do not understand, but which is an important part of how I
move forth. Or maybe one can imagine that there is a whole register,
through imprints and traces in time and things, places and other pe-
ople, with insights about myself, which I will never have access to.
Evening comes. A chair has been reserved for me in the first row. In front of us is a large screen to allow an audience from Ukraine to participate digitally. Valentin Silvestrov sits idly at the piano, playing something resembling folk music with a large, rustling bag slung over his shoulder while the room fills up with serious-faced people wearing dark clothes. It’s a welcome distraction, but he is soon ushered to his seat. Speech after speech follows, and I begin to realise just what a huge and important occasion this is. Then the human rights activist Oleksandra Matviichuk stands up. She is head of the Ukrainian Centre for Civil Liberties, the organisation that was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2022. It is involved in documenting war crimes committed against Ukrainians. The speech she gives is heart-wrenching; in an unwavering voice, she gives concrete descriptions of war crimes as tears appear to run down her cheeks. A newly-wed female friend of hers bringing her husband home in a bag because the corpse had been dismembered into many parts. A little boy shot while out playing football in his back garden. A widow mourning her husband: ‘He was not a farmer, he was my whole universe’. Matviichuk speaks of all the ‘ordinary’ people sacrificing their lives for others whom they don’t even know. And how a human being can become one among many, just a figure in the tally of our war dead. People are not numbers. When she is finished, the room is silent for a long moment before thunderous applause breaks out for several minutes. I wait until it’s over, then rise to my feet.
In Performing Precarity we have been exploring how the so-called unpredictable elements of a performance can be actively worked into a concert situation. When I sit down at the piano, I have two choices. Should I try to blank out the lingering effects of Matviichuk’s speech, and concentrate on ‘just playing’? I am literally trembling from the sheer power of what she said. It’s tempting to push past the discomfort and the new revelations I have had after meeting people here; a deeper understanding of the hell on earth which I had never remotely experienced in my sheltered existence in Norway. Or should I allow the new, unprocessed impressions to filter into the performance? Tarnopolsky portrays war in music, everything he composes is about war now, he composes mainly for his family’s survival and not for art’s sake, like before. Dangerous living conditions, flight, exile. The laughter, the personality, the amusing and lovely way that I can see he relates to others. And the upright Matviichuk in her blue-grey dress, quietly recounting her tireless work and gruesome findings.
I’m aware that I’m playing slower than usual, without it being forced. It’s as if something is putting a drag on my timing, inexorably, impenetrably, while at the same time my body feels relaxed. I have to work incredibly hard to keep up with the tempo changes from 86 bpm to 96, 102, 112, and so on. It almost feels like it slows down with each shift instead of speeding up, there’s a deep drone, steady breathing. Whenever the piece calls for me to scrape my nails and cuticles across the black keys, it doesn’t hurt as it usually does. In fact, I seem to be able to make the glissandi last longer than usual. I think it sounds like lots of genuine soldiers marching, because of the way the beats within the repeating glissandi are not regular. I am no longer controlling the duration of each glissando. Earlier than usual in the final section, which is meant to be played at a very fast tempo, the lactic acid kicks in and my arms grow heavy as lead. In the cluster section where I use my clenched fists directly on the strings, I get sort of stuck in a rut, hammering away. The accelerando which is meant to lead up to the final chord becomes impossible, in a way. The section with syncopated rhythms marked with different emphases, which has previously sounded a bit ‘funky’, becomes hard and stiff, almost desperate. The timbre of the finale becomes colder than I would have liked; since my arms are so stiff, I cannot generate the warm resonance that a looser touch would allow. When I am done, silence resounds in the space.
REFERENCES
Butler, J. (2004) Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London and New York: Verso.
Butler, J. (2006) Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable. London and New York: Verso.
Costa, M. et al (2021) Performance in an age of precarity. London, New York, Dublin: Methuen drama.
Crispin, D. M. (2016). ‘Whereof we cannot be silent, thereof must we speak’; Susan Sontag’s ’silences’.
Fourbythreemagazine.
Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant Matter. A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, London: Duke University Press.
Binder, P.E. (2018). Hvem er jeg? Om å finne og skape identitet. Bergen: Fagbokforlaget.
Dunker, A. (2019). Gjenoppdagelsen av jorden. 10 samtaler om naturens fremtid. Oslo: Spartacus
Echenoz, J. (2006). Ved klaveret. Overs. Tom Lotherington. Oslo: Aschehoug.
Feuvre, L. Le (2010). Failure. Cambridge: Whitechapel Gallery, Documents of Contemporary Art.
Haraway, D.J. (2016). Staying with the Trouble. Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham/London: Duke University Press.
Hverven, S. (2018). Naturfilosofi. Oslo: Dreyers forlag.
Leikvoll, J.R. Fiolinane. Oslo: Samlaget.
Lyster, J.C. (2019). Choreographic Poetry. Oslo: Tiden Norsk Forlag.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1994). Kroppens fenomenologi. Overs. B. Nake. Oslo: Pax Forlag A/S.
Schwab, M. (2013). Experimental Systems Future Knowledge in Artistic Research. Leuven: Leuven University Press
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Singh, J. (2018). Unthinking Mastery. Durham/London: Duke University Press
Thomas, P. (2016). The music of Laurence Crane and a post-experimental performance practise. Tempo, 2016 (Volume 70).
Worringer, W. (1997). Abstraction and Empathy. Chicago: Elephant Paperbacks.
MUSICAL WORKS
Bauckholt, C. et al. (2021-22). UTFLUKT. Commissioned by Performing Precarity.
Crane, L. (2020). 2-Metre Harmony: Uncertain Chorales. Co-commissioned by Performing Precarity.
Crane, L. (1999). Bobby J. for solo electric guitar.
Crane, L. (1985-86). Derridas, No. 1. Jaques Derrida goes to a nightclub for solo piano.
Crane, L. (1985-86). Derridas, No. 2. Jaques Derrida goes to a massage parlour.
Crane, L. (1985-86). Derridas, No. 3. Jaques Derrida goes to the beach for solo piano.
Crane, L. (1985-86). Derridas, No. 4. Jaques Derrida goes to the supermarket for solo piano.
Crane, L. (2009). Piano Piece No. 23 'Ethiopian Distance Runners'.
Lachenmann, H. (1984-85). Ausklang.
Reinholdtsen, T. (2021-22). Keine Ideen. Keine Neue Perspektive. Commissioned by Performing Precarity.
Steen-Andersen, S. (2003). rerendered for pianist and two assistants.
Tarnopolski, V. (2023). Out of Step, Out of Time. March to Stand Still. Commissioned by Performing Precarity.
Ulvo, T.B. (2016). Woven Fingerprints, Concerto for two Pianists and Orchestra.