Conclusion

Sonic Silhouettes Musical Movement presents the musical-gestural perspective through a range of pieces with interdisciplinary influences. This autoethnographic self-reflective document is part of the culminated experiential, experimental and practical approaches enabled by this artistic research. Through the variety of ideas presented and applied across a range of case studies, I hoped to clarify the musical-gestural artistic researcher’s identity both for myself and for others who might be curious. The roles, the responsibilities, the skills, the values, and the goals of this identity when submerged in the multiple disciplinary frameworks showcase how this research’s academic, artistic, pedagogic and social participatory activities cannot be divorced from one another, how with significant investment through embodied learnings of the performing arts and daily practices, and not just voyeuristically creating a tasting plate, can benefit every human expression. Whether it be artistic or academic, as a performer, composer or as an audience member, the musical-gestural perspective allows for clearer transmission and participation with greater presentness in all forms of collective communication.

The creative relationships formed when deeply involved and empathetic to the other artists in this research, produced lasting collaborations which recognise, appreciate and dismantle hierarchies. Mutated dialogues with diverse individuals from all walks of life allowed for sincere and honest discussions with confrontations and resolutions presented from multiple stances. This opportunity to look critically at each others’ perspectives is much needed in our current existing socio-political climate, creating opportunities to act, speak, think and feel collectively. In the sphere of performing arts, it is necessary to adapt to and experiment with diverse audiences, simultaneously teaching, sharing and learning from their reactions. And in respecting one and the others’ whole embodied lived experience and knowledge, we learn from the worlds we have all created, our own ecosystems, regenerating through appreciating, establishing new untrod territories.

Over the course of this artistic research, I have so deeply felt how musical-gestural works encapsulate the elements of human interests. As a human, I enjoy participating in these sound-movement aesthetic acts, my contrapuntal contortions; I value them as demonstrations, re-enactments, reproductions, imitations, abstractions, representations, narratives, aids, escapes, etc…I search through investigating elements and meaning within human interests. Sometimes, when there is a story in the air so powerful, an enveloping theme, when it is in the collective consciousness even if we don’t experience it individually or personally, it still invades an artist’s thoughts. I see it when I work with others who identify as composers, and I see it in myself as a performer and now as a composer. Their diverse voices: all forms of diversity, racial, gender, sexual, generational differences, etc…encouraging diverse stories and critically question all elements of the human experience.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the Orpheus Instituut in Ghent, the docARTES programme, the University of Antwerp ARIA, the Royal Conservatoire Antwerp (KCA) and the research group CREATIE for creating the time, space and encouraging environment for me to pursue this research. I am so grateful to all the academic and administrative staff for their professionalism and attention, and I am deeply thankful to the researchers and students at these institutions for sharing their experiences, knowledge and curiosity on all aspects of musical research.

This project would not have happened without the personal investment and artistic contributions of all the associated artists involved.  I would especially like to thank the Stockhausen Foundation, Jessie Marino, Charlie Sdraulig, and Sivan Elias Cohen. I am so honoured to participate in their artistry, and experience their professionalism and creative ambition. I continue to admire their motivation to create wonderful projects and willingness to seek out the strange and exciting.

Special thanks are extended to my supervisors Dr. Ine Vanoeveren and Professor Peter Reynaert. Their support, insight, critical questioning and direction towards diverse pathways of inquiry allowed for my own methods to flourish.

To my dear soundinitative, I am so grateful to share this little part of life with you all, thank you for making it so much more colourful.

My family and my friends, thank you for everything. You are my everything. Words could never express.

Contact

This Research Catalogue Exposition is only a simplified version of the textual and video content available for Sonic Silhouettes Musical Movement.

If you are interested in gaining more information regarding this research or for the full version of this document, please visit www.winniehuang.net or email contact@winniehuang.net

Sonic Silhouettes Musical Movement

Investigating the Musical-Gestural Perspective

 Winnie Huang

Orpheus Institute, Ghent; Royal Conservatoire of Antwerp; University of Antwerp ARIA

Musical-Gestural Definition

In the contemporary music world of the performing arts, an increasing number of musical-gestural works are being composed and performed. The rise of these pieces, the curiosity in creating them by composers, and the growing demand for these types of performers necessitate investigation from an artistic researcher’s perspective, in the hope of providing insight and agency for future creators, artists, and academics in this field. In identifying what is a musical-gestural artistic researcher, it is necessary to first define these components.

Music, movement, and drama are inseparably connected as forms of human expression. The cultural field I will be mainly focused on refers to contemporary musical creations in the Western art music tradition, specifically after the 1960s. Though many forms of artistic genres or technical emergences have granted various titles to these types of works, including Music Theatre, New Discipline, Instrumentalen Theaters, and post-instrumental practice just to name a few, I do not present the term musical-gestural as a defined genre, but propose it as a perspective of how one can view, absorb, perceive, learn, compose, think about, speak about, and perform these contemporary works.

Musical-gestural pieces touch upon almost all aspects of music-theatre, performance art, contemporary dance, classical instrumental performance and theatrical drama. Certain works lean more heavily on certain arts, or blend two or more disciplines, and therefore I believe can be chosen to be analysed or perceived differently by other artists of other disciplines. Despite our expressions comprising of an amalgamation of multifaceted sensorial qualities, our dominant use of language means that defining, categorising and determining ideas, and the way we use our definitions both clarify and restrict how we can speak about art that lies on or outside of the boundaries generally accepted as music, dance, theatre, or even the art of the everyday. Therefore, I tentatively use the term musical-gestural as a quality towards a practice of creating expression and perceiving expression in certain works. My research is based on my foundations being rooted in music performance. I chose the word musical as music is a perception of how meaning is added to sound. The word sound contains a certain neutrality linked to the physical ability, the sense of hearing we humans have, but music is a subjective perspective based on what meaning we make out of those sounds. Whether or not that meaning is useful for each individual or in any case meaningful, is not for me to decide, but it is the notion that music does not hold the same connotation as the word sound that made it more important for me to specifically choose that word.

I chose the word gestural as it encompasses so much more than just a movement. Gesture is a movement, but gestures are also concepts of social and cultural behaviour, a meaningful physical, mental, and emotional act that cannot be easily removed from connotations. An abrupt gesture to hit someone, a punch for example, is not the same concept as speaking of someone else’s charitable donation as a gesture of kindness. The way both these words accommodate connotations of intent, meaning, narrativity, expressions of physical sensations and acts is exactly why I chose to group them together and call the works I am focused on musical-gestural works – works that explore sound, movement, intent, story, meaning and expression and all the connotations that sit with these words. For myself as the artist, this definition helps me to work with and through this perspective in understanding how I create, view, perform, embody and comprehend the pieces.

Musical-gestural works feature prominent physical elements, including action and movement detailed by the composer, that have been specifically adopted for their visual aesthetics. Notated, annotated, and usually executed by performing artists, these works require the musical-gestural performer to be someone who spans multiple disciplines, from sound to movement to drama. They therefore require inventive, highly skilled interpreters who possess a specific range of varied and well-developed capabilities. This type of performance thoroughly explores the states of the active and passive body through multi-sensorial communication and expression. It also celebrates the compound aspects of similar inventive creations, past and present, from high-art polyphony to the crassest pop culture.

Motivation

The catalyst for this research started with the difficult nature in which musical-gestural works can be described and spoken about. Not a genre but a perspective in how these works can be admired, learnt, created, and studied. The works presented in this document span these last 50 years. They utilised a full display of elements in performance, from sound, movement, theatre, lighting, performance materials and technology, all on the bodies of highly trained musicians who ultimately seek to construct an expressive and meaningful reality for the audience. With piece-specific practices where the notation of these works and even the interpretation of the notation is a constantly changing format, this freedom allows for innovative creativity, but with that freedom comes a responsibility to be self-searching and self-aware in maintaining some self-, group-, social- or industry-prescribed level of quality. Questions arise, regarding who these artists are and who they are collaborating with, how is the material developed and what are the processes, what is a successful performance and what are the skills required to produce these types of works, where and when does an artist develop these skills, and how does the musical-gestural artist integrate these learnings to create their own identity when so many roles and functions are present… So many unknowns can propel a paralysing identity crisis. One aim of this research is to attempt engaging with these questions and contribute to the current research on contemporary interdisciplinary art from the musical perspective, to encourage more multi-sensorial understanding of these boundary-blurring works, to demonstrate the need for a profound understanding of multiple disciplines in order to be compelling across disciplines, and to showcase the deeply intimate and personal experience that is performing, composing and creating musical-gestural works. “Characteristic of artistic research is that art practice (the works of art, the artistic actions, the creative processes) is not just the motivating factor and the subject matter of research, but that this artistic practice – the practice of creating and performing in the atelier or studio – is central to the research process itself. Methodologically speaking, the creative process forms the pathway (or part of it) through which new insights, understandings, and products come into being” (Borgdorff 2012, 146).

Multiple Disciplinary Research

The creation of art for the artist is a never-ending search, through questioning and seeking answers. The insatiable curiosity is both self-satisfying for the performer’s ego, while aiming to participate in society through the ongoing dialogue, education, transmission, and the exchange of values and ideas. Through the learnings from other disciplines of art, such as dance, acting, performative art and experimentation with disciplines seemingly outside of artistic practices, my investigations constantly rely on experimentation, employing both quantitative and qualitative methods which are then applied into my own composition-rehearsal-performance processes.

Precise, calculated study with specific manuals and methods were put into action and interviews and perspectives were shared with specialists in their field. Competent, creative, and playful inquiries have proven to be reliable and successful methods in finding my own contextual truth in each multiple disciplinary adventure and in each musical-gestural work and partnership. Whether performing existing pieces or creating new works of art, this research explores a deepening range of methodologies and interdisciplinary practices in tandem with each project. Through experimentation, I question my previous experiences, create new resources and possibilities, hone my intuition and taste, and I enhance my ability to continually create meaning and appropriate truths in my work.

Collaborations

For me, every collaboration is the forming of a unique relationship. A moment in time where the people involved, whether two independent creatives or a whole team, meet, exchange and colour each other’s worlds. Where our personal experiences, learnings and resources can be shared, and jointly we can create something else. Sometimes something new, other times new versions of something known. There is no need to argue for or against the practice of artistic collaboration, and I have participated in all forms of projects that slot in all different parts of the collaborative spectrum. The aim of this research was not to find out whether there is merit in collaboration, but rather how the role of the musical-gestural artist changes within the diverse types of collaborations.

Each collaboration is an opportunity to share, dialogue, exchange, deepen and extend each other’s awareness and perspectives in this world. Though personally I am always aiming for growth and expansion, I do acknowledge that not every collaboration is positive, there can be power struggles, disaccord, disappointment, hurt and manipulation. But I believe in finding the positive within each collaboration through constant reflection on the present and past experiences. Just like all relationships, how we participate in them is different, what we bring to the table, what our role is, what is expected of us, what is not expected of us…so many unspoken anticipations are left to be confirmed or denied or radically deformed, mutated and reborn.

For the musical-gestural production, what has become clear, regardless of the type and degree of collaboration, the background or outlook, a belief in the multiple disciplinary multisensorial aesthetic as a worthwhile and meaningful pursuit, and the allowance of agency, flexibility and trust amongst participants is essential. This requisite for dialogue and experimentation from the perspective of other disciplines thrives when the ability to act and make choices, the ability to change one’s mind or direction, the ability to have patience and trust the other, or trust oneself if there was a need to insist or leave, is present. Not all collaborations or collaborators share the same intentions, and the differences in power dynamics, egos, personalities or viewpoints can lead to a loss of agency and sense of self, so it is also vital to protect oneself. There is no correct way to collaborate but in trying to negotiate a healthy relationship, one can hope to nurture a rich and lasting shared experience.

Dissemination and Transmission

Part of participating in artistic research is to gather knowledge through various formats, seeing all aspects of experience as knowledge. Another component is how you choose to share this knowledge. This can be with new creations of performances and artistic works, through dialogues and presentations, through documents and recorded output, etc. Participating in knowledge creation, is also recognising the connection between a community and how they collect and value that knowledge. However, as I have tried to present in the previous chapters, not all knowledge is transmittable via textbooks or academic writing, it may not even be enough to use human language to articulate awareness. Just as the words we use form the world we live in, the world we live in also formulates the words available, so for this research, an incredibly important factor was to consistently participate in the sharing of the research at whichever level, to as many diverse peoples as possible, to create opportunities for knowledge transmission which in turn also creates more experiences for myself, an ongoing collective transmission.

Deeply rooted in this specific research is the living, creating, artistic body and the embodied knowledge gained from it. Though one can try to articulate as much as possible in words, for some experiences, the degree of nuance and connotations linked with culture and each language will never sufficiently transmit all that I have learnt to someone else “there can be no doubt that the circulation of documents— written words and also visual materials—is essential to academic knowledge production. On the other hand, if scholarship were purely archival, and not grounded in embodied encounters, there would be no need for education: Students could simply read the texts of whichever field they wanted to master” (Spatz 2015, 236). And so over the course of the last four years, I have had the opportunity to give numerous classroom lessons, academic presentations, interdisciplinary workshops and one-to-one mentorships. In each scenario, I have actively tried to time to speak and dialogue as well as physical acts of gestural movement that are relative to my research or describe how it feels as a human to enact these artistic activities, in hopes that the other participants sense and feel something which resembles what I gained in embodied learnings. Just as musical-gestural creations are multisensorial, the transmission of this information necessitates a similar approach.

Case Study 5.2

Self-composed works

tick tock iiiiii by Winnie Huang (2021) for 6 musical-gestural performers

During the pandemic, my ensemble soundinitiative allowed me the intriguing opportunity to try to work with many sounding bodies as a medium for compositional creation. To curate a performance piece of self-created musical sounds and specialised physical choreography specific to many physical bodies. Using interdisciplinary skills, pushing different boundaries for myself and other performers, trying various types of notations, exploring changing roles and expectations, and examining performance dynamics, I wanted to use my creativity to take on a new and exciting challenge.

tick tock iiiiii is a composed and scored interdisciplinary piece exploring the concept of ‘masking’. Masking is a habit where an individual changes or 'masks' their usual personality to either conform to or disassociate from social and environmental pressures, expectations, abuse or harassment. In today's world, we both choose to create our behavioural and material masks, but we are also taught, through daily encounters, to expect to be 'masked', sometimes even to the safety that masking gives. We all 'mask', but why, why not, when, where, how, with what kind of mask and how does it feel to 'mask'? Inspired by many thoughts and concepts that had been present in my mind, I tried to create a work not based on a narrative but on abstract references – the physical masks worn during the pandemic, the neutral mask of Lecoq’s work, the masks women are asked to wear when they are told to ‘smile’, the stiff masks of bravery when living through the trauma, the withdrawn masks of fear when confronted with racism, etc. This piece is also exploring all these factors reflected in the power of social media (referencing the application tiktok in the name) and the ongoing cycle of absurd repetition that is life as the piece ends in the same way as the beginning, ready to recommence the same actions again.

Case Study 5.1

Self-composed works

tentacles by Winnie Huang (2020) for two musical-gestural performers

A piece for two performers, tentacles is the exposition of an anthropomorphistic hand that represents a type of character—a curious, octopus-like monster. The narrative resembles a first-love romantic comedy gone wrong: the work commences with a minimalist, slightly virtuosic start with very little activity, moving into an absurdist, cartoonish second act of surprises, continuing with a kind of falling in love, and finishing with a revulsion-inspired ending. The piece was composed alone over two evenings, workshopped with both of us over three afternoons, and filmed in one morning. Beyond the somewhat vague character traits and the general narrative theme, I wanted us to work as a duo specifically on the delivery of certain types of energy levels and the exploration of physical movement and expression within the confines imposed by space and gravity. It was also very important to devise a notation for the work, as transmission and dissemination are crucial aspects of the process of creating.

Out of what was a singular collaboration with Marino, emerged a composing-performing duo, and the evolution of a new identity in myself. Though not a sudden change from performer to composer, I will always be so grateful for this collaboration and how it provided me with the support and generosity to feel legitimised in calling myself a composer and calling the works I produce my compositions.

Case study 2

Work with collaboration on already existing score

How to Make a Monster by Sivan Cohen Elias (2017) for solo performer with objects and live electronics

Composed in early 2017 by Sivan Cohen Elias, How to Make a Monster (HtMaM) is a mixed media work for a performer with objects and live electronics. Premiered by Swiss-based, Australian clarinettist Richard Haynes at Harvard University, the performer uses the objects in a way that merges between visual dramatic expression and sound production. The sound making gestures are highly detailed by a score called a script, which instructs the performer through a succession of interactions between the objects themselves, and between the objects and the performer. These exchanges generate numerous references and associations that evoke various forms of monsters. This is further enveloped by a larger narrative structure in which we see the creation of a monster, its growing development and how it seizes control or rather integrates with its own Creator, the performer; examining the transition and perspective of the Creator/performer as also possibly a/the monster.

The sounds in the piece are structured as phrases of energetic progression, made through ranging the intensity of the quality, quantity and type of sounds created. However, these phrases or waves of energetic progression must be understood with a dual mindset. The sounds are phrases just like a purely musical work, but the performer also needs to support the sound world with the visual dramatic qualities, whereby the theatrical narrativity is also presented as waves of energetic progressions, and the quality, quantity and type of gesture, movement and character expression are equally considered. Not just a performer of sounds and gestures, each movement evokes and references concepts, themes, and ideals that need to be presented at varied ranges from subtle to overtly extreme. Changes in dynamics, rhythm, and speed are factors that are considered in sonic, visual and dramatic worlds. They all play a part on each phrase/scene and each ebb and flow of the energetic waves. The interplay between these varied artistic worlds is then furthered as the acoustic sounds are processed through a Max Patch, an electronic sound world element, granulating, delaying, freezing and resynthesizing the acoustic landscape.

Case Study 4
Works with strong composition collaboration

Savoiardi Dance by Jessie Marino (2019)

The piece is mainly performed with the soloist’s hands, with bright lights pointed towards them while placed on an angled tabletop and with contact-microphones placed under the tabletop to clearly amplify the sounds every hand movement made, no matter how small or slow. Ideally this table is black and the room is also blacked out. Starting with a loud bang, both hands arrive on the tabletop and immediately lights appear. Smooth slow gestures turn into dense sounds of fingertips dragged on the table. Sonic moments of speed, articulated hits, slow caresses, and silences are all noticeably captured due to the contact-microphone. With each change in sound we see the changes, subtle or large, of the hand movements. The piece was inspired by theatre shows, tap-dancing and clowning, my stories about performing Inori, Thierry de Mey’s Musique de tables, protagonists and antagonists, the fact that almost all of us have hands and have done or can do these gestures, and a mix of other videos, ideas and concepts we had spoken about. Along with some mouth sounds, Savoiardi Dance is a collection of hand gestures at play, a fist hitting, fingers flickering up and down the table top, a scratch of fingernails, fast swoops of the whole palm from left to right of the tabletop; all these movements look, sound and feel different as we see the density and change of atmosphere due to the simple contraction and relaxation of the muscles of the performer hands. Named Savoiardi Dance; as we wanted a nod to Italy the country where we developed it, Savoiardi biscuits are named Ladyfinger biscuits in the English-speaking world, and so the idea of lady fingers dancing on the stage felt appropriate.

Case study 1
Work with no collaboration with composer

Inori by Karlheinz Stockhausen (1973–74), for dancer-mime soloist/s and full orchestra

Inori was composed by Karlheinz Stockhausen in 1973–74. Presented as a grand meditative orchestral prayer of over an hour, the work is composed for soloist/s (dancer-mime) and eighty-nine-piece orchestra. One of the 20th and 21st centuries most important and innovative composers, Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928 – 2007) is renowned for his pioneering work in electronic music, serial composition, aleatoric techniques and for original musical spatialization. Inori is one of the most extreme instances of musical-gestural performance, with exceptionally detailed musical and gestural notation and annotation. Mounting it required me to work as part of a group of multiple disciplinary artists, memorising a large-scale work with a new vocabulary, exploring and devising interdisciplinary methods, and using a wide range of techniques to achieve the desired performance goals. A proactive artistic attitude was central in developing a process that contributed to successfully learning and performing the work.

I was invited by the Stockhausen Foundation to be one of the soloists to perform Inori at the 2018 Lucerne Summer Festival and at the 2018 Musikfest Berlin. For this series of performances, two separate couples were selected to perform two concerts each. My couple comprised two professional musicians (Diego Vasquez and myself); the other couple comprised two professional dancers. For over fourteen months, on a monthly basis, we trained with two different original performers of Inori (Alain Louafi and Kathinka Pasveer). This unique opportunity to prepare Inori allowed me to gather knowledge from the performance practice traditions associated with Stockhausen, which became essential after the passing of the composer.

Case Study 3

Works with some composition collaboration

tend by Charlie Sdraulig (2019) for gesturing, vocalising performer, and single audient

In 2019 Charlie Sdraulig created tend, a performance piece that resulted from our collaborative research into hypotheses about human behaviour. It is the central work in a series of three—one to one, tend, and enfold—each of which places one performer and one audience member (an audient) inside a dimly lit room. These intimate works explore non-verbal gestural communication and changes of atmosphere through non-spoken interactions. They require the performer (generally an instrumentalist) to place the body, physical language, and visual communication on the same level of expression as the music in which he or she is usually trained. Intimacy, nuance, and quietude are the core themes of Australian Charlie Sdraulig's creative practice. His work often draws attention to the social dynamics of musical situations, focusing on subtle sonic and gestural behaviours.[1]

For me, the process of making this work is what really defines it as a deeply personal and meaningful collaboration. The experience we had while conceiving it was almost a larger version of what the work would eventually become. Through a long series of dialogues and conversations, through sharing of personal anecdotal observations and confusions, and through discussions about shared and personal concepts and values, there emerged a strong sense of empathy between us. The way tend was made directly mirrored the experience we wanted to provide to our future audients.