Room 1, Session 2 (11:30 – 13:00) [BACK TO PROGRAM]
How are approaches to performance (in concert, in the studio and elsewhere) changing in the 21st Century? How are real time sound making activities being influenced by and combined with real time manipulation and editorial processes?
Each presenter’s video ‘paper’ can be viewed below – the video immediately below is the conference discussion
James MacKay (University of West London)
The postmodernist claim that musical interpretation is purely subjective and that all interpretations are equally valid raises questions about the consistency in musical interpretation. My research aims to account for the reported consistency of narrative themes and events in musical interpretation by studying “narrative listening” as a mode of attention (Margulis, 2019)
Drawing from psychology, philosophy, and musicology, I have defined “narrative listening” as a mode of attention that is sometimes employed by music listeners in the interpretation of their musical experiences. Research on the lateralisation of the brain has shown that the way we attend to the world changes the way the reality appears to us (Mcgilchrist, 2009) . My research involves a specialised approach to semiotic analysis, which attempts to define musical qualities that are contingent on narrative interpretation through the musical encoding of embodied concepts and image schematic patterns using conceptual metaphor theory.
In my study, participants were presented with audio recordings of two performances of the same jazz standard, performed on solo guitar. One performance was a popular chord-melody arrangement, and the other was performed according to a theory of narrative encoding (semiotic encoding, conceptual metaphor theory) for instrumental jazz ballads. The study found that the performance encoded with the compositional method caused consistently higher levels of narrative engagement from listeners.
The findings from my study provide insight into the consistency of musical interpretation and the role of narrative listening and musical narrative in shaping this interpretation. I will present my methodology and analytical approach in detail in a 20-minute video presentation, which will be available to conference attendees two weeks prior to the in-person session. This presentation will contribute to a meaningful discussion on how rigor can be demonstrated in practice research with attention to hermeneutic interpretation, embodiment, and conceptual metaphor theory.
Jack Adler-McKean (Royal Northern College of Music)
Brass instrument practice research suffers under methodological tribalism. Contemporary studies are dominated by auto-ethnographic approaches to interpersonal artistic relationships, and historical repertoire analyses are based upon musicological research into primary source material, while organologists rely upon upon quantitative, scientific analysis. Recent attempts to address such stratifications fail to nurture any meaningful symbiotic relationships. One recent publication addresses “the musician’s experience and the scientific perspective” but only in “two short chapters” which lack reference to many contemporary practices. Despite referring to thorough organological research, another author states that “the science of acoustics is complex and beyond the scope of this volume,” and that he does not wish to engage with “detailed scientific description[s]”.
The tuba family is the most under-researched subset of this grouping, dominated today by uncritical twentieth-century practices, thus forming an ideal case study of how a multifaceted approach can benefit the examination, teaching, and performance of both historical and contemporary repertoire and instruments. Romantic orchestral composers were able to extensively utilise the diverse low brass instruments that emerged in the early nineteenth century, but the growth of nationalism and military-industrial complexes by the mid-twentieth century had pushed ever larger and louder instruments to the fore. This had a dramatic impact on balance, articulation, and timbre, creating a situation whereby composers to this day do not have full command over the instrument for which they are writing.
Through practice-based experience, my recent research has involved producing written and audio-visual resources to deepen critical practice methods for engaging with historical repertoire, and to establish and cultivate performer- and composer-tuba relationships into the future. This presentation will demonstrate such work, showing how disparate paths of methodological inquiry can combine to form a rigorous, historical-, practice-, and data-driven study that has the potential to significantly impact contemporary performance practice studies.
Hussein Boon (University of Westminster)
Regardless of movements like controllerism (Boon 2021), most productions still exhibit a division between studio and stage for the producer-performer and performer-producer type of artist practitioner. Real time production activities, when encouraged by DAW manufacturers, are usually in the service of creating an artefact for further editing and mixing rather than solving computer performance issues. This position is further complicated by notions of what constitutes real time performance with computers (see Burgess 2013: 85), as well as who controls the computer and who is doing the performing, which become central and critical concerns. Thus, Loraine James, a queer black female working class electronic musician, presents an interesting case for artistic research in this area to fill this clear gap in research. The knowledge implications for performance, production and pedagogy, which are all simultaneously bounded within this process, also extend to the decentering of production power relations and presence, such as women and their access to the identifier producer, within these fields (Reddington 2021: 4).
James’s production-performance/performance-production approach circumvents many issues encountered by DAW artists, by adopting a specific method to their artistic working practice. This encapsulates pre-production, performance and post-production as a combined creative process generating three simultaneously derived and useful artefacts:
1. Performance;
2. Audio recording;
3. Video recording of the performance.
This presentation’s contribution considers the affordances and constraints of James’s approach and why it might signal the reimaginaing of a more conventional production process for electronic music producers. I highlight the implications and applications for emergent producer-performer/performer-producer practitioners and theorise how this approach potentially (re-)solves related work based problems such as workflow and mediatization, possibly even monetisation, of digital musical production-performance labour.