Reporting on the Oslo symposium

The world of artistic research revolves quickly and there is much to see. As I can't be everywhere at all times, I have been lucky: my colleague researcher Darla Crispin gave a keynote lecture at the Oslo conference, earlier this month, and she graciously agreed to act as my guest blogger. Here's her thorough account of what she witnessed, 'up there in the cool North'. (Links inserted by me.)

 

Symposium: ‘The Art of Artistic Research’ 6-8 May 2011

The Norwegian Academy of Music hosted its first International Symposium on ‘The Art of Artistic Research’ from 6 to 8 May 2011. The Symposium had been developed to allow a deep interrogation of presented work at different stages of evolution in this new field. Appropriately, the presentations were searching, almost always strongly based in practice, and demonstrated a keen awareness of the key issues that artistic researchers grapple with – though not always able to supply ‘easy’ answers to the proposed research questions. The Symposium encouraged instead an open approach to working with ideas, and this was of particular benefit to the doctoral students in attendance. Expert Panels were conducted periodically, and included the pianist, Leif Ove Andsnes, who is proud to call himself an artist-researcher!

The ‘Symposium’ model was developed for this event in order to provide an opportunity to discuss various approaches to artistic research. In default of any generally approved definition (of artistic research), there is a continuing need for establishing good examples, relevant research models and a common understanding. The aim of the Symposium was to enhance a collective discussion and reflection on various questions related to artistic research.

The event was organized around four themes:

1) Craftsmanship and Artistic Research
2) The Concert
3) Interdisciplinarity in Arts
4) Defining Artistic Research

Ian Pace (City University, London) gave the opening keynote relating to craftsmanship, relating his analysis of the postwar evolution of piano performances – including the politicization of performance styles – to some of the current themes of artistic research, such as how small-scale aspects of craft might be read in the current turbulent political landscape for Western classical music. As a context to this, he also presented a short recital, including Johannes Brahms’ Klavierstücke Op. 118, Claude Debussy’s Images Book II, and a rare performance of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Klavierstück X, which he performed clad in protective gloves.

Pace’s keynote and the short papers within the thematic group all pointed up the challenges of generating artistic research questions from personal observations from within practice. Some, like Pace, relate their practice very rapidly to existing knowledge – but we witnessed others less certain in their thought-trajectories, and focused more intently of the personal insights of their own practice, prior to the process of contextualization.

This lack of certainty, its potential to leave space for new understanding, also means that musical performance itself has the potential to be transformed by the findings of artist researchers. This potential was discussed by MartinTröndle (Zeppelin University Friedrichshafen) in a trenchant keynote: ‘Transforming performing: new concepts for new audiences’. Tröndle presented a series of sobering statistics for performers attached to traditional concert-giving paradigms, but then challenged his listeners to use artistic research itself as a means of rethinking the manner of musical presentation. There was some resistance to his message in the form of concern that the musical content was being challenged by media packaging and virtuosic light shows, but the current turbulence in the funding for the arts is undeniable, and is an important component for consideration in the world of artistic research, where the scholarly and professional spheres often clash. Examples of contrasting consequences to this were heard in the accompanying papers, from the negative reception of Rudolf Kolisch’s Beethoven cadenzas in America, to the positive revivification of the carillon through innovative approaches to improvisation and performance practice: Carl van Einhoven’s video of his jazz performance on the carillon will stay long in the memory.

This pointed up another challenge for artist-researchers: the necessity to go beyond research in musical practice to learn from other disciplines. ‘Interdisciplinarity was thus an important theme of the Symposium, and was vividly discussed by Sally Jane Norman (University of Sussex) in her keynote: ‘Interdisciplinarity through and beyond the Arts’. She presented numerous examples of projects in which the work engaged with collaborative interdisciplinary practice, relations between art and technology, and disruptive innovation processes. She was also able to offer some insights on research and cultural policy frameworks, which form another site of interface with which artistic research must engage.

As the Symposium, questions arose about how artistic research was going to generate it own critical theories. In her keynote, Darla Crispin (Orpheus Research Centre in Music) drew together all the themes of the Symposium and proposed one model of how the very specific experimentation and observation processes of the artist-researcher might generate broad interpretative frameworks; in her case, this involved relating aspects of Anton Webern’s Piano Variations Op. 27 with the development of a theory for understanding ethics in relation to music performance. This led into a dedicated session for 3rd cycle students, who are developing their own projects in light of their findings during the Symposium.

Erlend Hovland and Otto Christian Pay are to be congratulated for setting up a very good event. The time keeping was precise, especially on the first day, and the programme had been developed with many long, open slots for group discussion. Many of these talks were very productive, sometimes through strong words and unresolved philosophical disagreements, but also with respectful, open research attitudes. Hopefully, this will be the first of a series of such events within the Norwegian Academy of Music.

Remembering W.A.Wagenaar and his legacy

 

During the previous doctoral training session of the Orpheus Institute, Willem Albert Wagenaar passed away. I have written about him earlier, but it is fitting to do so again at this sad occasion as his role in the making of the - apparantly - most sought after doctoral trajectory for musicians in the Low Countries has been more decisive than is generally known.

Dutch psychologist Willem Albert Wagenaar (Utrecht, June 30, 1941 – April 27 2011) studied in Utrecht, Leiden and Pennsylvania State University. He has been professor at both Utrecht and Leiden Universities and is seen as a specialist in matters of human memory. As an expert witness he gained international recognition in court cases such as the one against John “Ivan the terrible” Demjanjuk. Wagenaar avidly collected Magic Lanterns – generally accepted to be invented in the 17th century by Christiaan Huygens, another one of Leiden University’s brilliant students – for which passion he had a home theater built, aptly called the “Christiaan Huygens Theater”. (You can see video’s of Wagenaar’s Magic Lantern presentations here and here.)

Wagenaar's Christiaan Huygens Theater

At the turn of the last century, it was Wagenaar who decided to make a phone call that would eventually lead to the bestowing of the PhD title on creative and performance artists at Leiden University. At that time, Wagenaar was Rector Magnificus of Leiden University, which housed no department handling any focus on music. He fostered the grand thought of the creative arts themselves (not just their study from outside of the practice) constituting an integral part of the university’s responsibility towards society and its knowledge. It was Wagenaar who initiated contact with the Royal Conservatory at The Hague and its then director Frans de Ruiter to set the ball rolling and to see how collaboration could be worked out on the practical level, i.e. how students from both types of institutions could benefit from such an integrated approach towards science and artistic practice. During the discussions that ensued, the academic notions of research and doctoral promotion were put on the table, pragmatically followed up in turn by pioneering efforts to envision what a PhD trajectory in artistic research could or should be like. It was eventually decided that this project deserved a faculty of its own, and in 2001 the Faculty for Creative and Performing Arts (for which de Ruiter acted as its dean) officially combined the Royal Conservatoire and Royal Academy of Art (both at The Hague) with Leiden University in an extraordinary education and research program. (It was later renamed as the Academy for Creative and Performing Arts.) 

Wagenaar’s vision departed from the idea that the historical separation between the arts and sciences had been unjust:

It has long been thought that it was possible to make a good, profitable distinction between arts and sciences because it allows to simultaneously draw a line between ability and knowledge. Science concentrates on knowledge; the ability that follows, doesn’t really belong to it and should be taught outside of the university. […] In the arts, then, it would be mostly about ability without knowledge; that’s why we have separate institutions. As such, we take care that knowledge, as produced by the history of music, of art, of literature, is strictly separated from the world of skills, such as needed to sing and paint. But this distinction is not profitable and not real. The boundary between art and science is based on completely absurd notions about delineations between knowledge and ability, and should therefore be abolished.

[From Wagenaar’s inaugural speech at the launch of the Faculty of Creative and

Performing Arts.]

It is interesting that Wagenaar’s demarche was somewhat independent of the EU’s Bologna declaration, in which a bachelor-master-doctorate structure was decided upon for restructuring higher education in the arts. Wagenaar’s ideal superseded this mere three-fold differentiation, wanting to offer different types of merging scientific with artistic education. At the newly established Academy for Creative and Performing Arts, students can combine optional courses from both scientific and artistic institutions, as well as enrolling in new types of masters (e.g. media technology, in collaboration with the faculty of mathematics and physics), in a simultaneous combination of fully-fledged scientific and artistic trajectories, and in an artistic doctoral trajectory, all jointly operated.

The integration of arts and sciences is not unique in the world: especially in the Anglo-Saxon higher education tradition, it is common practice. But on the old continent, Wagenaar’s vision was revolutionary. Since the renaissance, the unity of arts and sciences had eroded, resulting in conservatoires, art academies and universities as separate entities with their own mission concepts and funding. Even in the Low Countries, where artistic research is supported with a surprising sense of unanimity, Wagenaar’s project predates the more loosely-knit Flemish model of university-conservatoire associations, and the real integration of the arts into universities is still less than a worked-out plan.

After his position as rector, and for the rest of his life, Wagenaar closely followed the developments of what he had set in motion. He was a member of the promotion committee of the first promovendus of the Academy for Creative and Performing Arts (yours truly) and continued to be involved in all the artistic research promotions up to and including the last weeks of his life, reading the dissertations and posing his questions during the promotional rituals.

At least in the Low Countries, and potentially elsewhere, Artistic Research owes considerably to this soft-spoken and sweetly kind man with an advanced vision on artistic practice and education.


[UPDATE]

On a Dutch blog remembering Wagenaar, I read more on this fascinating man. Aparently, he received his double first name (Willem Albert) from his two grandfathers. As a kid, he saw the advantage in the two chocolate letters he got from Santa Claus; later on, the double intellectual inheritance - the one grandfather's scientific interests and the other's artistic appreciation - clearly helped shape his vision of an artist's place in the university.

A final anecdote demonstrates how Wagenaar was a creative scientist until the end of his life: getting lost in the woods around his home town, the pressure under his skull made him hear magpie chatter as a trumpet passage in Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, develop a panic fear of flowers, of the sent of lilies and jasmine. "My condition leads to completely new experiences that only patients can have! What luck that the cancer is my head. It is much more interesting than in any other body part." In the mean time, a booklet has been made to offer doctors insights and fellow patients support. Wagenaar had become the object of his own study as much as the artistic researcher that he had envisioned would investigate his own experiences for the benefit of scientists and colleague artists.

practice.research.unit

Britain’s Kingston University, with philosopher and professor of Film and Television Studies John Mullarkey as the main motor behind it, has announced their “practice.research.unit” initiative. The broad aim is

to look at all contemporary aspects of PAR (practice led, practice based, etc) within drama and performance, film, music, fine art, dance, and creative writing, with a view to sharing the latest best ideas both in terms of stand-alone research and research-led pedagogy. Its intent is, firstly, to assay where practice-research is across the disciplines right now, and then to take the agenda forward through a number of major events each year (two to three initially) as well as in smaller local workshops occurring more frequently. A pluralism of approach will be a defining trait.

This introduction, communicated to me by John, will be followed by a more explicit and official 'manifesto' once the full website is launched.

The first event of this unit is a one day symposium on 'Capturing Process?', “pitched at both faculty and graduate students working in PAR, be they Kingston based, UK based, or international” and aiming “to establish the problems of disseminating process and establishing a practice research process for our work as practitioners, academics and examiners”:

[…]the challenging terminology for the symposium is deliberate: if an examiner is to read or to see this process it must be retained, disseminated and delivered in a form which the examiner (or peer reviewer, or viewer) can grasp, understand and interpret. By laying an emphasis on process there is an honesty regarding the development and changes of this process. For example, one may compose a piece for a film, or make a film; then one may make a documentary which reflects on this process, as well as writing a thesis about the process, reflecting on the work and on the reflection (this is but one of many possibilities).

The keynote address for the symposium will be delivered by Professor Robin Nelson (Central School of Speech and Drama), other speakers include forte-piano player John Irving (IMR), composer Oded Ben-Tal (Kingston University) and pianist Keith Ford (Kingston University), with more speakers representing drama, dance and film. Two sessions will handle ‘Capturing Process’ and ‘Defining Practice: Rehearsing Applied Strategies’, with a Round Table reflecting on “'Capturing' a Dynamic Process” and a PhD Show to include students from dance, drama, film, music and performance.

Welcome to the practice.research.unit as a new partner in crime. Related news and reports will follow.

ORCiM seminar on Artistic Experimentation

Last week, the Orpheus Research Center in Music organized one of its yearly seminars, this time to find out more about Artistic Experimentation in the Context of Performance Practice. The topic covers part of the group’s research agenda for 2010-2013, which handles Artistic Experimentation in general. (More on this here.) 

The two-day seminar gave the floor to 13 speakers, mainly from  the UK and Scandinavia (one from Belgium and one from Chili), among which improvising and reproductive performers as well as composers handling their own works. The organizers evidently took care to treat the widest possible range of historical and aesthetic vantage points: contemporary and historical jazz and an extremely extended range of classical composed music (from Léonin and Pérotin through Palestrina, Monteverdi, Schubert, Chopin, Liszt, Schumann and Ravel to Lachenmann, Kurtág and present-day compositions) were set off against more esoteric concepts as ‘ecosonics’ or silence in computer music performance. (The complete program can be downloaded from the bottom of this page.)

The audience of more than 40 researchers – again demonstrating varied backgrounds and expertise – filled the conference hall to the point where the gathering alone promised satisfaction: crowded but cozily collective, with diverse interests merging into focus and opportunities for debate and networking ready to happen.

It is never difficult to detect the naturally gifted conferenciers: regardless of how their story relates to the listener’s reason for being there – if it even does – they succeed in taking you with them through their efficiently set-up argumentation and compelling rhetorical command. In that respect, the balance between the excellent and the less inspirational presentation was not out of the ordinary in this conference. As the order felt almost ‘cadential’ in the way that it seemed to efficiently time the necessary contrast between the dry and the entertaining, it was never really frustrating to see a less experienced speaker miss the opportunity to fulfill the potential of his topic, or to watch the most talented keep the audience on the edge of the seat beyond what the content of his contribution merits.

Regardless of the solidity of the attention span that speakers were able to win from the audience, plenty of the contributed content was worth having been presented for its own sake. I doubt that anyone will forget the impact that the Swiss tenor Valentin Gloor made with the way he managed to establish a perfectly convincing  symbiosis of a lecture about an artistic research project with the performance of that actual project (in which he worked out concepts of association in a theatrically enhanced performance of Schumann songs). Personally, I was happy to get to be introduced by British composer Nicholas Brown to his compositions, enthusiastically welcomed the myth-busting research of Daniel Leech-Wilkinson into Cortot’s performance practice, and hope to learn more about where Christina Kobb’s as yet tentative hypotheses regarding early 19^th century notation of micro-dynamics will take her (and current pianistic performance practical knowledge).

Due to illness and the reluctance to infect others, I stayed at home for the second day. This turned out to be an excellent circumstance, as I found myself reminded of the fact that ORCiM offers live streaming of its events. I did miss two presentations because the speakers wrongly assumed they didn’t need the collar microphone that would have enabled me to hear what they said, but it was a joy to benefit from this technology. Aside from the inability to pose any questions, the streaming offers an absolutely wonderful way to attend a conference without physically being there. Bravo to whomever thought of that!

As much as the production and the content of the seminar left eminently memorable traces, it nevertheless was a disappointing surprise to realize just how few presentations really matched the promise that their title and/or abstract had held. In contrast to the ability of engaging an audience to the full, which is may be more a question of talent than skill, the way a presentation is made to be about what the description says it will be, is but a matter of intention. To an extent, it is understandable that researchers try and present their projects and findings at different conferences to test them for feedback, and invariably this means that the content must sometimes be bent a little to fit the theme of the conference. Certainly, some flexibility should be offered to facilitate this, and it generally is, but in this instance, such flexibility seemed to have been assumed by some presenters to stretch across an all too wide gap between the theme and the presented content. Many titles incorporated the term ‘experiment’ but very few went on to say anything about experimentation. One presenter dug into the etymology by way of introduction, continuing only to leave it undeveloped. For most, it seemed just a word that needed no elaboration, and if the projects that they presented were to be taken as cases of experimentation, then I have witnessed mostly just that: cases of research that relates (more or less) to performance practice – not case studies on artistic experimentation. I have heard no one posing a research question on artistic experimentation and following it up by arguing his or her way towards any type of answer to that question. In fact, hardly any of the presenters took the opportunity to explore the perspectives and the 8 research questions that were offered in the call for proposals as possible points of departure, as intriguing and as begging for treatment as they are. Some presentations could be defended as being about experimental practice in the performance of early music, but not as “revealing experimental performance practices from the past” (all italics are mine); I did not see a presentation handling “a practical approach that takes the 'skilled body' as its point of departure“. Only the broadest “open-ended approach that challenges state-of-the-art practices in the field of music performance“ was recognizably present in some of the presented material. One presenter did clearly start with one of the proposed questions in mind – “How does experimentation 'between' performances (from performance to performance) work?” –  but this was not worked out to move towards any defined insight. There was certainly chamber music in the mix, but we did not learn “How experimentation [works] through collaboration (e.g. chamber music)”, whether “the use and influence of non-musical elements [is] an important factor in experimental performance practices”, of “the relationships between experimentation and improvisation”, on “How experimentation occur[s] in the daily practicing process”, or “What the tensions [are] between 'fidelity to the score' and individuation of performance”.

No conference convener can foresee how presenters will work out their abstracts into presentations, and there was certainly enough that made it worthwhile for anyone with any interest from any angle to have been present. On balance, the seminar invoked the urge to taste more – given ORCiM's long-range interest in artistic experimentation, we can be sure to be offered more.

Towards a European Platform

For two and a half days, the European Association of Conservatoires, Music Academies and Musikhochschulen (AEC) set up shop in Belgrade to discuss AR. Sounds, Searchings, Sharings: towards a common platform for the development and dissemination of artistic research in music was the inaugural conference of EPARM, a project of the AEC to 

serve the community of European conservatoires as they come to terms, each in ways most appropriate to their unique context, with the phenomenon of artistic research in music 

(joining other AEC platforms, e.g. for Jazz and Popular music or for Early Music). EPARM was formerly known as European Network for Artistic Research, initiated in  2009 by the Orpheus Institute.

Over 100 people were registered to represent 54 institutions from 24 countries interested in AR. That is about 1/5 of the member institutions of the AEC, from about half of the countries that the AEC covers. The top three of heavily represented countries included Belgium (7 institutions), The Netherlands (6) and Sweden (4). It was odd to notice how the UK only revealed one interested party (Royal Northern College of Music) and that the Sibelius Academy did not send anyone - both are as well-known for their tradition and/or efforts in the realm of AR as any in the top three. The Balkan region, on the other hand, showed great interest, but it is unclear how much of that had to do with the geographical location of the conference compared to their actual or projected involvement in AR.

The hallways and rooms of the hosting Faculty of Music at the University of the Arts in Belgrade were buzzing with the energy of intent: policy makers and researchers from diverging individual and national backgrounds made their focus and involvement clear during all of the many presentations. Keynotes included the perspectives of a “successfully graduated doctoral student” (yours truly – still wondering if there is an unsuccessful way to graduate), of the rector of an institution (Georg Schulz, of the University of Music and Performing Arts in Graz), and of those pondering the framing conditions and curriculum building for AR in conservatoires (Massimo Zicari of the Scuola Universitaria di Musica in Lugano and Jeremy Cox, ceo of the AEC).

In between the thematic sessions, 10 composing, interpreting and improvising doctorandi from AR programs in Malmö, Paris, Ghent, Stuttgart, Belgrade and Trieste presented their ongoing ‘solo’ or collaborative research. Once more (cf. my previous post on AR at the Masters level), the diversity of personal artistic curiosity and the resulting research angles was exciting and inspiring, with projects ranging from the Arpeggione to the electric viola and from improvisation in opera to processes in the relationships between performer and composers. The conference reader and some of the presentation Powerpoints can be downloaded here.

The organisers and sponsors (see the reader for details) have gone out of their way to provide maximum conferential comfort. From the technical assistance to the framing entertainment program (including a concert by the Belgrade Philharmonic Orchestra and an evening-long dinner on a boat cruising the Danube), the entire production was imacculate.


The quality and identity of the research was not always discussed as collectively as some later indicated that they would have liked. Despite the humidly warm conference hall, or because of it, debates never heated up to the point that new ideas were forged. Unnecessary fears about having AR distract musicians from their art (or conservatories from their core business), unjustly perceived antagonisms between AR and musicology, hesitance in aiming exclusively at a full-blown AR PhD (thinking of allowing for a DMA-type performance degree as an option or even a substitute), confusion about methodology and identity, worries about the difficulties of standardizing institutional relations between arts and sciences across the EU,… The many challenges ahead (and we can identify a few more than those that were mentioned) may have pulled the symbolism of the confidently sunny early spring climate into the shadows a bit, but the general feeling remained very much that of blossoming determination, as demonstrated by the suggested constructive reasons for initiating further assemblies to look at financial issues, to include trans-ethnic potential, to continue to explore methodologies, etc. It came as no surprise, then, that the closing plenary discussion resulted in a unanimously supported proposal for continuing and broadening the efforts towards “a future for a European platform for AR in music”.

Closing plenary discussion with Frans de Ruiter 

sharing aspects of more than a decade in AR experience