Publisert: 04. March 2011
Stipendiatprosjekt: Critical Repetition - On the use of old music in new works. Oppstart høsten 2009.
Making new music with old music has become a widespread practice within contemporary music the last forty years. In my fellowship project I want to investigate the critical potentials of repetitions or re-enactments of historical music. Not primarily as an act of reinterpretation or celebration of the musical canon, but as a way to address and discuss current ideologies and practices within the field of 'contemporary' as well as 'classical' music. The fact that new music often is performed within institutions of old music (e.g. the symphony orchestras) opens up for working with the friction between these different practices and their ideologies.
My main method will be a critical repetition, where new practices re-enacts old ones while trying to show and clarify the constituting powers and ideologies governing the performance apparatuses for music. In these terms my take on criticality is one of self-reflecting, an art that tries to investigate and show its own devices while acting them out. A critical practice is also one that allows for a careful examination of the body of received practices to see which of them has become empty clichés, to quote architectural critic Jeffrey Kipnis. Or, as composer Brian Ferneyhough puts it, using the language in which you work to criticize the language in which you work.
As a point of departure I want to deal with the idea of new music as situated: A score is not an abstract set of instructions for interpretation, but an address to a specific situation. In terms of situation, it is important to regard music history not only as a history of works; it is also a history of performance and of recording. This calls for incorporating practices from recording technologies (sampling etc.) in working with historicity.
Over three years I will produce three works, investigating three different situations for musical performance and listening:
* The site of the orchestra – a work for concert hall with orchestra and electronics
* The music chamber – a work for chamber music ensemble
* The intimate music space – a performative work in the context of a «hauskonzert»
In the course of this work I will try to approach the following questions:
* How can old music be used in order to create new music with a critical potential?
* How can one make this potential is evident in the musical work itself?
* Is it possible to establish a critical stance in music without resorting to materials and forms with established ideological connections? In other words: Is it possible to combine critical composition with a wider area of sensuous imaginations of music, and with heterogeneous contexts in terms of style?
There are several other questions involved, not least the need to discuss problems of autonomy with regard to a positive re-thinking of the nature of communication in music. The investigation will draw upon ideas of cultural and aesthetical theory, as well as the intrinsic debates in the field of new-music, and the reflections in the project will be presented in the form of essays.
English
Utskriftsversjon