Echoes from the torn down fourth wall - UK version

Jacob Anderskov

The project “Echoes from the torn down fourth wall” aims to build bridges between contemporary-music-as-an-art-form and community singing within songs from the Danish songbook ‘Højskolesangbogen’. In a hybrid concert format created for the project, within the context of an abstracted approach to intense, improvised concert music, several passages with community singing occur, where the audience sings along in songs they know. The research process has investigated how to create a musical environment that might bridge the different positions (art music and community singing), how the idea of the listener/spectator can be negotiated within different art domains and how, from a genre perspective, the project can be narrated as a meeting between confirming and destabilising forces. What is being reimagined in the project is not so much the past itself, and not necessarily established narratives about the past, but rather possible current and future narratives of how we may reinterpret songs from the past – together. What is being revealed is not so much specific perspectives in the past but rather hidden potentials in how a majority cultural assemblage like Højskolesangbogen may be renegotiated.

I skovens dybe stille ro (lyrics: F. Andersen, 1868, melody: Danish folk song) - concert with participating audience, Dronningesalen, Den Sorte Diamant, Februar 2024

Concluding reflections

- and points from the Peer Review process

After the project’s final public presentation (February 2024, at RMC) and in the wake of the peer review process for this exposition, several new reflections emerged, and the project’s inherent choices and omissions appear more articulable.

Among the key choices and omissions made by the project, the following should be mentioned:

* It has not been part of the project’s methodology to conduct systematic interviews with the audience regarding their experience of the project’s concert formats. This decision was not due to a lack of interest in the audience’s experience – on the contrary, this interest is central to the project. Rather, the choice to forgo both quantitative and qualitative systematic interviews was primarily because such an investigation would, in my view, shift the project’s methodology towards a sociological or statistical perspective, thus contravening my Henk Borgdorff–inspired stance that artistic research should be research through art, not just about art or for the benefit of art.^[1] Alternatively, my decision could be articulated as follows: I initially found it more relevant to explore what potentials the artists experienced in the project’s contrasts during the course of the project, rather than what the audience specifically experienced at particular moments. I also anticipated that extensive interview work would fall outside my competence profile and the project’s time frame. Whether this prediction was accurate is another question. However, there were conversations with some audience members at various points throughout the project, which in turn informed the project, though this information was more anecdotal than systematic.

* Similarly, as noted by peer reviewer Malene Bichel, it might have been relevant for the project to explore its potential contributions to the field of art education, beyond and outside the project’s aesthetic.^[2] This could relate to broader pedagogical approaches to communal singing. During the course of the project, articulating this educational perspective more generally was outside its scope, and thus, the current version of the project can at best be said to have indicated such a possibility.

* Additionally, inspired once again by Bichel, it could have been relevant to further investigate how recent research on communal singing and participant experiences could be integrated with the project’s existing perspectives on embodied listening and embodied cognition.^[3] Here, too, it must be concluded that the project did not have the capacity for this expansion within its existing framework.

* Several dialogue partners, including peer reviewer Caroline Høgsbro, have pointed out that the project musically maintains that the audience’s communal singing elements are continuously rooted in recognition. It might also be interesting to imagine a non-recognition-based approach to audience participation. Aesthetically, such an approach could involve an orientation towards artists such as Maggie Nichols, who has worked with audience participation, abstraction and improvisation as a whole. I see it as a hugely relevant challenge to try to think this into other, similar projects, but it is difficult for me at present to see this integration within the current aesthetic of this project.

* The above point is related to a highly relevant comment contributed by Søren Kjærgaard (RMC research and development coordinator), regarding how certain dimensions of music in the project’s concert format are ‘radically changed,’ while others remain ‘radically unchanged’ compared to the original versions of the songs. In most cases, the melody remains unchanged, while other musical attributes are significantly altered.^[4] This is perhaps even a fairly accurate way of saying something about the aesthetic modus operandi of the project: That through the combination of elements that are radically changed and radically unchanged, the cultural baggage of the audience encounters a combination of recognition and destabilisation. In other words, this demarcation of the project (that some musical dimensions remain ‘radically unchanged’) is a key artistic decision, without which the project could not have invited unprepared spectators into a participatory position.

* Several interlocutors, including peer reviewer Caroline Høgsbro, have mentioned that the project contains perspectives and potentials that could also be illuminated through Bakhtin’s thoughts on folklore, ‘the carnivalesque’ and the grotesque. Høgsbro writes in her peer review: “In carnival, all cultural levelling and codes are suspended. Everyone interacts, the bodies melt together to one, communal body. The body opens itself to the world and merges. The carnivalesque is the lowering of all that is abstract, spiritual, noble and ideal to the material level.”^[5] The merging of the community into one body in the carnival becomes a highly relevant addition to the metaphor of the experiential dimension of the project. But at the same time, the aesthetics of the project are not a pursuit of Bakhtin’s “lowering of all that is abstract, spiritual, noble and ideal to the material level.” Rather, the Bakhtin perspective opens up ideas about what other, similar projects could explore.

Overall, the peer review process has – beyond a series of minor changes that have been implemented – highlighted several possibilities for how other, similar projects might be delineated differently from the one described here.

The project “Echoes from the torn down fourth wall” is concluded as a research project at a time when project album number two is in post-production, with several concerts planned using the developed concert format, and various expansions of the concept scheduled for performances during the 2024–25 period. See also the timeline on the following page.

^[1]Henk Borgdorff, The Conflict of the Faculties: Perspectives on Artistic Research and Academia (Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2012).

^[2]Malene Bichel, peer review for this project (internal document).

^[3]Bichel, peer review.

^[4] Søren Kjærgaard, in conversation, February 2024.

^[5]Caroline Høgsbro, peer review for this project (internal document).

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Jacob Anderskov - Echoes from the torn down fourth wall - UK version - 2024