This doctoral dissertation explores classical music performance from a curatorial perspective, reflecting upon and challenging the traditional configuration of performance environments. Beginning... Show moreThis doctoral dissertation explores classical music performance from a curatorial perspective, reflecting upon and challenging the traditional configuration of performance environments. Beginning with a consideration for the historical origins of absorbed attention and silence as the dominant mode of performing and hearing classical music, the subsequent chapters of this dissertation investigate alternatives to this mode by exploring artistic creations developed during this research. Informed by my combined experience as a curator and performer in the contemporary music field, these artistic creations use what I call ‘metaxical amplification’: the amplification of environmental sounds that are generally considered noise in the context of classical music performances, and that are therefore rarely considered in relation to the artistic experiences generated by these performances. Metaxical amplification proposes a reconfiguration of the performance environment and the ways in which attention unfolds within it. It also challenges a work-centred performance culture, since the performance mode emerging from this form of amplification is oriented towards the sonic exploration of musical environments through these works. More broadly, it propels the development of a practice in which musical interpretation, improvisation, and curatorial thinking are tightly interwoven. Findings are discussed in close dialogue with literature from various fields including sociology, philosophy, media theory, as well as through related examples from the fields of music, theatre, and the visual arts. Show less
This conversation takes Katrine Dirckinck-Holmfeld’s installation and perfor- mative presentation The Christmas Report & Other Fragments (2017) as a start- ing point to discuss legibility in... Show moreThis conversation takes Katrine Dirckinck-Holmfeld’s installation and perfor- mative presentation The Christmas Report & Other Fragments (2017) as a start- ing point to discuss legibility in relation to the mass digitization of the colonial archives in Denmark. To gain access to the archive, Dirckinck-Holmfeld draws on the figure of the Data Thief, inspired by The Black Audio Film Collective, in an attempt to unearth and excel the vulnerabilities and ethical dilemmas at the heart of today’s data desire. The Data Thief, Dirckinck-Holmfeld claims in conversation with Pepita Hesselberth, teaches us to attune to the noise, to the sonorous, affective and textural dimensions of the archive. It compels us to create assemblages of enunciation that cut across semiotic and machinic flows, and invites us to nourish a relationship to time where the past keeps enfolding on itself in the present. This way, she concludes, it demands us to stay in and with the discomfort, and to stay in the cybernetic fold of radical, creative, decolonial and technological reimagination. Show less
