In 2013 I had the chance to listen to a performance of Italian composer Luigi Nono’s work No hay caminos . . . a Andrei Tarkowskij (1987), for seven instrumental groups distributed around the... Show moreIn 2013 I had the chance to listen to a performance of Italian composer Luigi Nono’s work No hay caminos . . . a Andrei Tarkowskij (1987), for seven instrumental groups distributed around the audience, at the main hall of the Cité de la Musique, in Paris. I recall being startled about three-quarters through this piece, which lasted approximately twenty-five minutes, by a substantial transformation in the way I experienced some of its sound components. This transformation was not the result of the manipulation of any of the sound elements of the work but of a displacement of my listening focus. It revealed sound as an essentially manifold instance, susceptible of acquiring diverse statuses.In this chapter I would like to use Deleuze’s notion of the “time-image,” developed in his investigation of the role of the image in cinema, to explore what was significant about this experience. Along with this, I sketch a proposal to use the concept of “time-image” as a tool to reassess aspects of how we conceive sound and its role within artistic practices. Show less
While preparing for a concert in 2014, I found certain passages impossible to play in Louis Spohr’s Opp. 115 and 118. I consulted Backofen’s methods for harp, where I knew that he had written... Show moreWhile preparing for a concert in 2014, I found certain passages impossible to play in Louis Spohr’s Opp. 115 and 118. I consulted Backofen’s methods for harp, where I knew that he had written about double-pedalling. I explored all aspects of pedalling on the single-action harp. The research extended across five historical areas of research: treatises and methods, musical sources where a special solution is written by the composer/publisher, scores with no instructions but where multi-pedalling is implied by the music, historical shoes, and finally images of harpists pedalling. To play Spohr’s music, the harpist uses the heel and toe independently and over thirty-seven complex moves are part of his music. When a pedal is folded or unfolded during a piece, Spohr writes at least one bar’s rest for the harpist. Historical pedalling employs the whole foot, completely off the floor, where most pedals are not fixed. Pedals were moved at the moment where an accidental is written in the music and then released. Pedal markings are unnecessary, as pedalling becomes an inherent part of the musical gesture. The physicality of pedalling creates tensions and resolutions that mirror the musical line. Show less
Today’s performances of medieval polyphony have a lot in common with those of other ‘classical’ or ‘early’ music. Ensembles perform pieces written by known or lesser known composers, which the... Show moreToday’s performances of medieval polyphony have a lot in common with those of other ‘classical’ or ‘early’ music. Ensembles perform pieces written by known or lesser known composers, which the listener can revisit by listening to recordings or reading a score. In the middle ages, however, the performance of compositions was only one of the ways available to singers for creating polyphonic music. The ability to improvise a second or third voice above a plainchant melody, called discantare super planum cantum (‘singing above the plainchant’) or cantare super librum (‘singing on the book’), was a crucial skill for a church musician in the middle ages, and singers were trained at this from an early age. Niels’ project aims to expand our knowledge of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century polyphony, through music-historical scholarship as well as practical experiences. An in-depth investigation of the material remains of late medieval musical culture—compositions and theoretical writings about music—forms the basis for experiments with polyphonic improvisation above plainchants together with colleague-singers and students. The project has developed new ways of understanding late medieval polyphony, which are useful not only for teaching and analysis, but which may form a stimulus for contemporary performance practices of early music as well Show less
Tactile Paths: on and through Notation for Improvisers is an artistic research project that articulates and expands the nexus of notation and improvisation in contemporary and experimental... Show more Tactile Paths: on and through Notation for Improvisers is an artistic research project that articulates and expands the nexus of notation and improvisation in contemporary and experimental music. The project interweaves direct artistic experience with insights from improvisation studies, the social sciences, philosophy, and various scholarship in the arts to reveal methodological connections among diverse artists such as Richard Barrett, Cornelius Cardew, Malcolm Goldstein, Lawrence Halprin, Bob Ostertag, Ben Patterson, and the author. By focusing on how notation is used, rather than on what it represents in an abstract sense, the author shows how written scores emerge from and feed back on ongoing improvisational processes. Thus, it is argued, they are not fixed texts whose primary purpose is to prescribe and preserve, but rather tactile paths in the improviser’s ever-crescent musical and social environment. This practice-based approach aims to lay the conceptual groundwork for theorizing and broadening the creative relevance of work whose importance to practitioners belies its marginal presence in academia and institutions. Show less
Sophie Ernst’s doctoral thesis is an artist’s contribution to media art theory. It focusses on the role of projection as material for sculpture. Her research addresses the question in what... Show more Sophie Ernst’s doctoral thesis is an artist’s contribution to media art theory. It focusses on the role of projection as material for sculpture. Her research addresses the question in what manner are projections applied in contemporary art and what image traditions does this relate to. She considers projections to be either immersive, like a cinematic experience, or augmentative, in the sense of a mixed reality. Immersions, the dominant mode in projection art and large parts of the theoretical discourse, presuppose a willing suspension of disbelief. Augmentation, on the other hand, can be seen as ‘magical’. It is a technique in art to ‘make strange’ by creating a distance that can be either pleasant or unsettling. Ernst argues that augmenting projections are persuasive, not because they are materially ‘real’, but rather since they make visible what we could imagine as real. Show less
Inaugural lecture by Marcel Cobussen on the acceptance of his position as professor of Auditory Culture at the Universiteit Leiden on Monday 28 November, 2016
Calypso, Identity and Social Influence, The Trinidadian Experience seeks to establish links between calypso music and the construction and maintenance of identities, and to locate the genre... Show more Calypso, Identity and Social Influence, The Trinidadian Experience seeks to establish links between calypso music and the construction and maintenance of identities, and to locate the genre as a mechanism or as part of a mechanism that has exerted on-going social influence within Trinidadian society. It chronicles the evolution of calypso music from its emergence in Trinidad, and highlights contingent institutions, peculiar traditions, and salient events that have shaped the socio-political and cultural landscape there during the Colonial and Post-Colonial periods. The study is descriptive and explorative, and follows an interdisciplinary route that integrates historical fact, socio-anthropological philosophy, psychological, musicological, and ethnomusicological thought, and notes from my own ethnographic research. It analyses a large corpus of written material, and audio/visual recordings of music performance and participation in calypso and carnival-related events by practitioners and audiences alike. Show less
Central to this research is the Urban Future-project, which consists of a large archive of artworks made from 2002 until now. The original question underpinning this project was: what... Show moreCentral to this research is the Urban Future-project, which consists of a large archive of artworks made from 2002 until now. The original question underpinning this project was: what influence do chaos, entropy and fragmentation have on the viability of the rapidly developing urbanizing world? In the course of the research project, the (literature and field) explorations led to the assumption that there is a demonstrable and necessary link between the quality of life in the city and vital social cohesion on the one hand and chaos, entropy and fragmentation on the other. In the artistic part of the research focuses on the question: is it possible to make the supposed connection between quality of urban life and chaos, entropy and fragmentation visible in artwork and, if so, how? In the written dissertation, working methods and strategies are contextualized and analyzed. The visual part derives from an artist's position which uses non-verbal, sensorial strategies to reach new insights. It mainly focuses on the visual and aesthetic possibilities of aspects of fragmentation, chaos and entropy because Scholten considers these aspects, as productive forces, to be the core of the experience of urbanization. Show less
This PhD-research is conducted to test the hypothesis that Gutenberg and consorts developed a standardised and even unitised system for the production of textura type, and that this system was... Show moreThis PhD-research is conducted to test the hypothesis that Gutenberg and consorts developed a standardised and even unitised system for the production of textura type, and that this system was extrapolated for the production of roman type in Renaissance Italy. For roman type, Humanistic handwriting was moulded into a prefixed standardised system already developed for the production of gothic type. This was possible because there is an intrinsic morphological relationship between the structures of the written textura quadrata and the Humanistic minuscule. Renaissance typographic patterning was in part determined by prerequisites for the production of type. The typographic conventions are not purely the result of optical preferences predating the invention of movable type but are also the result of the standardisation of characters in the Renaissance type production. By mapping the underlying harmonic and rhythmic aspects, we gain more insight into what exactly the creative process in type design comprises, and what its constraints are. Furthermore, it makes the parameterisation of digital type-design processes possible. Show less
Performances of solo keyboard repertoire can sound more or less polyphonic depending on the performer’s use of divergence in expression. Rather than being a purely cerebral experience, this... Show morePerformances of solo keyboard repertoire can sound more or less polyphonic depending on the performer’s use of divergence in expression. Rather than being a purely cerebral experience, this expressive divergence is situated in an ecological relationship between keyboard and player where the gestural dynamics of technique and musicianship overlap. Specific body schemata relating to expressive divergence are therefore foundational to the interpretive freedom of the performer in creating polyphonic expression, and feature transparently in the musical result. This dissertation theorises expressive divergence by examining the embodiment of single voices through the hierarchical structuring of coarticulation, and by showing how these multi-layered gestures combine in the polyphony of expression. This performative view of polyphony is contextualised not only in musical practice, but also in the wider interdisciplinary use of polyphony as a metaphor. Single-player polyphonic expression is shown to enact or demonstrate an inner experience of the plurality of subjective agency, an experience made possible by its embodied dimension. Besides verbalising and theorising polyphonic expression, this dissertation provides experiments and exercises useful for developing such a practice, as well as examples of its application in concert Show less
In deze studie staan twee onderzoeksvragen centraal. De eerste betreft de vraag naar de kwaliteit van de orgeladviezen uit de jaren dertig van de vorige eeuw en de invloed daarvan op de... Show moreIn deze studie staan twee onderzoeksvragen centraal. De eerste betreft de vraag naar de kwaliteit van de orgeladviezen uit de jaren dertig van de vorige eeuw en de invloed daarvan op de orgelbouw uit die tijd; de tweede betreft de vraag naar het belang van de dispositieverzameling van Johan van Meurs. Show less
This dissertation together with the artworks documented in it is the result of an investigation across multiple media over a seven-year period of the cultural, artistic and spiritual legacy of... Show moreThis dissertation together with the artworks documented in it is the result of an investigation across multiple media over a seven-year period of the cultural, artistic and spiritual legacy of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Lebensreform (Life Reform) movement. In the course of this research I situate this movement with its origins in Europe and its promotion of a back-to-nature lifestyle (health foods, sexual emancipation, rational dress/nudism, pantheism/syncretic New Age religions) in a long line of radical reform projects, that lead back to the Reformation and the Anabaptist rebellions in sixteenth-century Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland. At the same time, I link the passage to America of Lebensreform beliefs and practices to the rise of the hippy counter-culture in California and the global spread in the decades since the nineteen-sixties of today’s ecological, organic food and naturopathy/Wellness movements. In both the dissertation and the series of artworks discussed within it I set out to unravel and confront the complicated legacy of Theosophy and Anthroposophy, the holistic systems of belief that formed the spiritual backbone of the Lebensreform phenomenon. In the process I probe the question of how it came to be, that an occult world view based on a synthesis of world religions could appeal equally to purist avant-garde proponents of abstraction such as Kandinsky and Mondriaan and to figurative painters and illustrators such as Fidus (Hugo Höppener) and Fritz Mackensen, whose work promoted an idealized ‘Aryan’ aesthetic in line with German National Socialist ideology. As such the present work forms part of the larger reappraisal currently under way among artists and scholars of the history of utopian counter-cultural thinking and alternative life-style experimentation in the West. Following in the footsteps of historians such as Peter Staudenmaier, Janet Biehl, and Susan A. Manning, I argue that this reappraisal forces us to acknowledge the anti-rational esoteric roots of Modernism along with the progressive strands in Modernist thinking and practice, that tend to be foregrounded in most historical accounts. However my interest in this project as an artist is not conventionally historical or academic but rather personal and performative. And the way the arguments are made, for the most part through installations, drawings, sculptural objects, video works, artist statements and performances, bears little relation to the orderly modes of presentation and detached forms of analysis that mark traditional academic discourse. Instead, the project unfolded over time as a prolonged archaeological dig into two intersecting strata, the muddy history of the Lebensreform movement and my own formation as someone born into an anthroposophical/Reform Church household in Leiden. The tension between Progress (social engineering/the collaborative ideal) and ℞egression (back to nature/childhood/basics) dictates the rhythm of the dig. The excavation metaphor gets literalized as I move closer to home, and in many of the artworks (Dutch) mud and compacted soil become the primary material: both the medium in which the inquiries are conducted and the consumable message/medicine dispensed at the door in pill-form to the departing exhibition visitor. Show less
Frans Preumayr's nineteenth century virtuosic bassoon repertoire. An approach with a fine Grenser & Wiesner bassoon from Dresden: Issues of material and technique.What techniques and tools must... Show moreFrans Preumayr's nineteenth century virtuosic bassoon repertoire. An approach with a fine Grenser & Wiesner bassoon from Dresden: Issues of material and technique.What techniques and tools must be developed by period bassoonists in order to successfully approach the performance of Frans Preumayr's virtuosic repertoire? "A Very Fine Eleven-Keyed Stained Maple Bassoon by H. Grenser & Wiesner, Dresden, circa 1825" - as titled in an entry in a London auction catalogue - is one of the few surviving examples of a complete period bassoon with all its parts, offering valuable information for both period instrument builders and players today. This research project is based specifically on the unique opportunity that the Grenser & Wiesner instrument presents us with: an investigation of early nineteenth century bassoon works written for the Swedish virtuoso Frans Preumayr by composers such as Franz Berwald and Bernhard Henrik Crusell. Solutions for technical problems found in this repertoire are sought and described, and include a discussion of reed styles and fingering systems for the period bassoonist. Show less
The Partimenti of Giovanni Paisiello: Towards Their Understanding in Context. This doctoral thesis focuses on Paisiello's partimenti and how to approach their realization and performance. To that... Show moreThe Partimenti of Giovanni Paisiello: Towards Their Understanding in Context. This doctoral thesis focuses on Paisiello's partimenti and how to approach their realization and performance. To that end I completed an in-depth profile of his pedagogical activities and expanded the already well-known sources—the Regole published in St. Petersburg (1782)—with newly discovered partimenti by Paisiello. Crucial for this study were connections between Paisiello's partimenti and not only his own compositions but also those of his teacher Francesco Durante and his other contemporaries. This broader perspective required taking into account the genre-specific contexts in which Paisiello’s partimenti reside. The inclusion of larger musical forms and complex progressions as compositional models significantly expands the spectrum of possibilities in the realization of his partimenti. A central idea emerging from this study is that partimenti provide a key to the musical language of the time and offer vast possibilities for realization and ornamentation. Show less
This thesis examined two previously neglected topics, Baroque Italian recorders and the Neapolitan Baroque repertoire for the recorder, and then combined both aspects. First, information was... Show moreThis thesis examined two previously neglected topics, Baroque Italian recorders and the Neapolitan Baroque repertoire for the recorder, and then combined both aspects. First, information was collected on all Italian Baroque recorders currently known, including biographical references about the makers of these recorders, as well as technical drawings, measurements and photographs. The practical experience with the copies of a few of those recorders was described by the author. Second, the Baroque repertoire composed in Naples for the recorder was researched, uncovering a rich and forgotten corpus of music written and copied between 1695 and 1759. The Neapolitan recorder works were also listed with a brief analysis and further commentary on the recorder part, with a view of connecting the works with the instruments that might have once been used to play them. Furthermore, an overview of the social and cultural atmosphere of Naples in the early eighteenth century was offered as contextualization to the musical ambience, aided by iconographical references. Conclusions on performance practice are presented as a result of the combination of both research aspects. The artistic outcome of this study has brought together, also in performance, the two main aspects of the research: 'new' instruments and 'new' works. Show less
