From Grieg Academy, University of Bergen
Ricardo Odriozola, Associate Professor of Violin
Back to Basics
This project seeks to provide answers to the following questions:
- How may the conscious and consistent adherence to basic principles of violin playing ensure a reliable and sustainable craft for the violinist?
- How may silence enrich the craft and life (inner and outer) of the violinist?
The subproject is organized in seven sessions. The first four will explore the practice of doing nothing as a vehicle to enable intentional action. The most basic motions related to violin playing will be explored.
The content of the final three sessions will be decided in relation to the results of the first four.
The sessions will be conducted with a selected group of students. They will be open for other participants (both violinists and non violinists), who may choose to engage directly with the sessions or sit as observers.
Einar Røttingen, Professor of Piano
Musical Spaces and Images: Finding a New Approach to Performing Edvard Grieg’s 19 Norwegian Folk Tunes op.66
Edvard Grieg’s rarely played 19 Norwegian Folk Tunes op.66 is one of his harmonically most original and adventurous works, anticipating 20th Century developments. There are clear indications that Grieg thought of this collection as a cycle. How can a pianist find a new and fresh artistic approach to this work and make it interesting and meaningful as a whole? Inspired by the composer George Crumb’s haunting musical imagery and treatment of the piano, this project takes a novel approach to performing Grieg’s folk tunes. It investigates how the composer’s evocative harmonizations can be performed with the help of metaphors, imagery and the idea of creating “musical spaces” with different shades of closeness and distance. The project experiments with an improvisatory attitude to expressive means (such as nuanced sound production, pedalling and tempo-flexibility) as a main methodological approach. The projects main challenge became to re-establish this spontaneous, open frame of mind in live performances where the body, fingers and artistic approach can “find” this sensitive approach and re-discover the intimacy of many of the tunes. The opening of Crumb’s Dream Images from Makrokosmos Vol.1 became a doorway to Grieg’s opus where tunes could appear as an extension of the mood and atmosphere of Crumb’s “faintly remembered music”. The goal of this work is to create an overall artistic concept that goes deeper into each tune’s nature (as in the cow calls and lullabies), performing them within a sense of timelessness and nostalgia in the open acoustic of nature.
The project combines text and video. The text should be read first as preparation for the video of the practical presentation.
Diana Galakhova, PhD candidate and pianist
Rediscovering Franz Schubert through the pianos of his time
The role of musical instruments in the production of musical meaning has often been underestimated in the Western musicological thought and performing traditions. Indeed, the still popular idealistic view of music as an abstract idea contained within musical text continues to diminish the significance of the role that a performer and his/her instrument play in the music making process. In my research I challenge that view and argue that piano-pianist relationships play an important role in the musical meaning creation. In my research project I am going to focus on the performance practice of the piano music of Franz Schubert on the pianos of his time. Recent scholarship suggests that performance notation is rather accidental and advisable in Schubert’s manuscripts. Therefore, I propose that Viennese fortepianos play a crucial role in understanding Schubert’s poetical language and performance practice. A musical instrument with its unique timbre, sound world and tactile qualities inspires the artist revealing musical meanings and expressions hidden behind the musical text. Moreover, I intend to reflect on my artistic practice on fortepianos and find adequate solutions on a modern grand piano. The purpose of my research is to revisit Schubert’s piano repertoire through the prism of Viennese fortepianos and create convincing and informed interpretations. As a participant of the Opener research group I am going to endeavor to open up and articulate aspects that contribute to my artistic practice: stage presence, psychological aspects of the preparational process and performance, the role of the audience in the act of music performance, to name a few.
Christian Stene, PhD candidate and clarinetist
LANGUAGE IN ARTISTIC PRACTICE:
Examining the use of oral language in rehearsal and teaching situations within the music performances field
Performative knowledge is often exchanged during rehearsal and teaching situations. This usually occurs as spontaneous interactions and dialogues between colleagues, teachers, and students and is unique in meeting the needs of that specific event. We rarely reflect on what language we use and how language contributes to shaping the knowledge or insight we wish to communicate. This subproject seeks to give insight into language employed in teaching and rehearsal situations, and how language might influence how and what we communicate.
Sergej Tchirkov, PhD candidate and accordionist
Co-creative Virtuosity
This project endeavors to deconstruct and challenge the conventional understanding of virtuosity in music performance, aiming to transcend its historically hierarchical nature. It proposes a paradigm shift towards a co-creative approach that redefines the roles of composer, performer, instrument, and score within the creative process. Through a series of collaborations with composers, live concert performances, and reflective analyses grounded in personal practice, this project seeks to explore the intricate social dynamics inherent in music creation.
Hilde Haraldsen Sveen, Professor of Voice and Signe Bakke, Professor of Piano
Relations - A Duo-Workshop-Project
As teachers we experience a connection between educational background and research on one side and the experiences as performers on another. This friction opens up for decisions that can surprise, delight or reveal discussions and questions such as:
What characterizes our practice as teachers and what kind of knowledge and understanding are we talking about?
This is one of the main questions in our Duo-workshops- project where the main focus will on relations between:
Performers, song/piano
Teachers/ performers
Teacher/teacher
Performers/content
Teachers/content
The workshops will contain a lively dialogue between students, content (the music) and teachers and hopefully create a path of development for all involved.
From the Academy of Performing Arts, Bratislava
Magdaléna Bajuszová, Associate Professor of Piano
In the Name of Style or How (not) to Play Rachmaninov
In performance and pedagogical practice, including in a global context, one often encounters highly standardised approaches to well-known works and composers. These traditionally established and tested practices form that difficult to grasp notion of 'style'. On the one hand, they are a way of identifying the manuscript code of the composer; on the other hand, the easy and painless conviction of correct style and stylishness risks vulgarising and simplifying the living and dynamic organism of the work.
Just as older music often faces prejudices in the area of 'correct' stylishness, so too new music, or even music from the beginning of the 20th century onwards, is subject to simplistic views and a narrowing of the range of interpretive means, especially in the area of tone creation.
The sub-project with the working title In the name of style or How (not) to play Rachmaninov will be based on the key idea:
Let's look at the old as new and the new as old.
The choice of the figure of Rachmaninov in this case represents a symbolic embodiment of the many pianistic, emotional and intellectual - eo ipso - interpretative simplifications in the name of style leading ultimately to its loss. The situations leading to the common vulgarization of the musical material and the revision of its potential will be analyzed in detail on the basis of both opuses of the pianistic Bible - Rachmaninov's Etudes Tableaux.
On the other hand, the project will also reflect on new music by contemporary composers and approaches to it based on the richness of interpretative nuances acquired precisely in confrontation with the "golden" piano repertoire of the past, in order to fulfill the main motto of the interpretative research.
Martin Krajčo, Associate Professor of Guitar
Bardenklänge, op. 13 – Interpreting and the Creative Process of an Early-romantic Cycle for Solo Guitar by J. K. Mertz
J. K. Mertz's solo guitar cycle Bardenklänge musically reflects the whole conception of the Ossianic tradition, including its literary cyclical nature, and can be regarded as a musical form of Ossian's epic. There are many characteristics coming from the literary work and were successfully implemented into musical form with the intention of the same aesthetic effect on the recipient. Through musical elements and their appropriate expressive and sonoristic interpretation, it is possible to achieve an effect similar to a reading of poetic or fantasy literature, which was widely popular among great artists and the society of romantic period. The series was intended for the home environment, so it is interesting to explore the creative process, which is particularly personal and is based on the principle of playing for one's own use, in which the listener as a recipient is missing. This can be comparable to the act of reading literature, which involves a great deal of individual approach, freedom, or improvisation, leading to a natural interpretation free from the evaluative moment. The artistic research project has the intention of dealing with two questions:
1. Interpretation: explore and find sonoristic and expressive options of the guitar interpretation that would lead to the desired emotional experience and render Ossianic symbols.
2. Creative process: searching and find a description of the process and contexts of the creation of music for one's own use, or just for intimate environment, as one of the important moments of the „music-making“ at the early Romantic period.