Vous constatez une erreur ?
This paper theorizes and investigates the role of new music festivals, currently among the leading institutional impulses for the creation of contemporary art music. During the last few decades those festivals have gained increasing prominence as an actor in facilitating the creation and performance of contemporary art music. They have provided specific modes of its presentation within a framework of special events, which imposed on composers and performers particular conditions of collaboration (Vera John-Steiner, 2000). Through the practice of commissioning new pieces and growing collaboration within the new music festivals network itself, festivals have come to occupy a new importance in the creation of art music. They became not only mediators between composers, performers and audiences but also are prominent agents for the negotiation and framing of creative processes within the context of live music performance. They provide a contextual framework in which contemporary art music is mediated, distributed, delivered, performed and experienced. These issues shall be discussed in the first part of my paper. Being one of four researchers in the International project “New Festivals as Agorai...” at the University of Salzburg, I provide in this paper some sample perspectives on such processes in more recent years at the festivals Warsaw Autumn, Wien Modern, and Festival d’Automne à Paris.
The main focus of this paper is a specific case study, showing how interactions between several agents like the composer, performers, a visual artist, a sound engineer and the audience are structuring elements that change the possibilities of the creative process itself. In order to do so, I turn to the performance of the piece Not I by Agata Zubel during Warsaw Autumn 2014, tracing collaborative dimensions of the creative process in her piece within the festival context. The piece was composed in 2010 by Agata Zubel, a Polish female composer and a representative of the young generation of composers born after 1970. Not I was written for a soprano, chamber ensemble and electronics to the words of Samuel Beckett’s dramatic monologue with the same title from 1972. The piece was commissioned by the Sactrum Profanum festival in Cracow and premiered there in 2012 by Klangforum Wien and the composer herself as a soloist (soprano). It was performed again by different musicians and technicians at Warsaw Autumn on September 22nd 2014 in the space of the former vodka factory in Praga – the infamous district of Warsaw.
A performance of Not I is multilayered, consisting of intertwined textual, musical and visual elements, directly appropriating Beckett’s stage concepts for the play in which the mouth of the protagonist would be spotlighted while the rest of her body would remain darkened out (as in the memorable creation of Billie Whitelaw with whom Beckett collaborated on the piece’s premiere in 1972). The collaborative performance of Not I at Warsaw Autumn is the result of a collaboration between Zubel, in the double role of composer-performer, with the chamber ensemble New Music Orchestra conducted by Szymon Bywalec, a sound engineer (Ewa Guziołek-Tubielewicz) and a video artist (Marcin Bania). As a visual layer for the piece Zubel’s movements of her mouth were filmed and shown in a video projection on a screen situated above the ensemble.
My research on the creation of Not I draws on my participatory observations during the Warsaw Autumn festival, where I attended the dress rehearsal and the performance of Zubel’s piece. Also a detailed audience survey on this performance was conducted by me as part of a larger study. Besides I pursue ethnographic investigations of modes of communication between the composer and the artists and technicians involved in the piece as observed during the dress rehearsal on the same day. Additionally, I supplement this with my personal interviews with the composer and a thorough study of documents like sketches on her compositional process. I will also draw on performance theory and specifically the approach of “Music-As-Performance” (Auslander, 2006) in order to situate Zubel’s Not I and its specific collective and collaborative dimensions in a dialogue between composer- performer and an ensemble.
From 2004 to 2015 two research centres funded by the (UK) Arts and Humanities Research Council – which represented successive stages of the same project – provided a focus for research in musical performance. Whereas the first (the AHRC Res
10 octobre 2015 55 min
The French literary criticism movement, critique génétique, is an attractive interdisciplinary model for the study of music sketches because of its staggering amount of varied scholarship published during its forty-year history, its conce
10 octobre 2015 32 min
This paper will present the core role of improvisation groups in the late Sixties / beginning of the Seventies in the process of building the new status of music material in the post-serial context. Analysing some “Gruppo di Improvvisazione
10 octobre 2015 33 min
In previous conference presentations and writings I have discussed Henry Brant’s process of “prose-report composition,” which became his primary working method in 1945. The process, which is heavily documented in his sketch manuscripts at t
10 octobre 2015 27 min
My paper centers on the compositional manuscripts of Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-75), the Soviet Union’s leading composer of art music. Opening a window onto the composer’s creativity, fragmentary passages, rejected movements, revised manuscr
10 octobre 2015 29 min
In recent years, the increased availability of recorded music in the instrumental teaching studio as part of performers’ routine for familiarising themselves with musical works they will then go on to perform, has meant that performers are
10 octobre 2015 30 min
The paper is an attempt for reconstruction of coding (creative) and decoding (reading) process, both dependent on temporary collective imaginative patterns, which funded the historic-ontological status of two significant works of the Czech
10 octobre 2015 26 min
When Adorno characterized the introductory measures of “Entrueckung” in Schoenberg’s Second String Quarter as something “never yet heard,” he pointed to a caesura that was both a breakthrough and also a rupture in the history of music. A de
10 octobre 2015 28 min
The present conference aims to study the creative trajectory of the Brazilian contemporary opera confection and also how the creation networks of opera work, within a communicational and semiotical approach. It also aims to explore the ind
10 octobre 2015 26 min
Charles Ives began formulating literary and musical ideas that would evolve into Concord Sonata as early as 1902. The piece was first published in 1921, and significantly revised to the point of being “re-written” in 1947. Throughout those
10 octobre 2015 30 min
In his book The Economics of Creativity: Art and Achievement under Uncertainty (2014), the distinguished sociologist Pierre-Michel Menger offers an analysis of artistic creativity that seeks a middle path between two equally unsatisfactory
10 octobre 2015 01 h 13 min
In my presentation I will elucidate the interplay of several forms of knowledge in composing process in art music. As a general term, “knowledge” includes forms of explicit, propositional knowledge as well as several forms of implicit, embo
10 octobre 2015 23 min
Faced to a more and more digitalized world the interest in artists manuscripts is still growing. Sometimes it is the mystic rising of an idea and its often unexpected development, sometimes it is a surprising simple reason that can be seen
10 octobre 2015 26 min
New things are made with old things. In this sense, all creation is basically a combinatorial process – though not just that. It also implies novelty; but novelty comes into play in a dynamic space between random indeterminacy and routine r
10 octobre 2015 36 min
The concept of "mistake" is antithetical to jazz's spirit of uninhibited creativity. But jazz, like any musical style, conforms to a system of rules and conventions; indeed, this is what defines the style—what makes it sound like jazz and n
10 octobre 2015 26 min
In jazz research and performance practice, emphasis has long been awarded to musicians who exhibit virtuosity or mastery of solo improvisation. Whether Louis Armstrong’s assertive solo cadenza on West End Blues or John Coltrane’s blazing ac
10 octobre 2015 24 min
Since sociology has been historically concerned with the question of how social order is possible, its main focus has been on exploring (the imposition of) conventions, rules, norms, every day routines, etc. As a result, the study of creati
10 octobre 2015 29 min
This paper presents the results of a genetic study of Antagonisme, a chamber work composed by Xavier Darasse on a text by the philosopher Alain Badiou for the 1965 concours de composition at the Conservatoire de Paris. Darasse and Badiou be
10 octobre 2015 26 min
Vers le milieu des années 1980 à l’IRCAM, le compositeur français Marc-André Dalbavie a pris conscience de l’importance de l’espace dans l’existence du son, notamment à travers son contact avec l’acousticien Jean-Marie Adrien. À parti
10 octobre 2015 32 min
From 2004 to 2015 two research centres funded by the (UK) Arts and Humanities Research Council – which represented successive stages of the same project – provided a focus for research in musical performance. Whereas the first (the AHRC Res
10 octobre 2015 55 min
From their compositional and philosophical perspectives, the works of Elliott Carter and Luigi Nono share very little in common. Carter, a true American modernist, strongly opposed the method of twelve-tone music, which was becoming prevale
10 octobre 2015 27 min
The question of whether Henri Dutilleux was a pro- or anti-serialist can be difficult to answer. However, in the 1960s, the composer evidently participated in the serial movement when he composed his two seminal works called Métaboles and
10 octobre 2015 26 min
Vous constatez une erreur ?
1, place Igor-Stravinsky
75004 Paris
+33 1 44 78 48 43
Du lundi au vendredi de 9h30 à 19h
Fermé le samedi et le dimanche
Hôtel de Ville, Rambuteau, Châtelet, Les Halles
Institut de Recherche et de Coordination Acoustique/Musique
Copyright © 2022 Ircam. All rights reserved.