Orpheus Doctoral Conference (ODC)

The annual Orpheus Doctoral Conference, organised by the second year docARTES PhD students, will take place on 6 and 7 October 2021 as a virtual event.

The Orpheus Doctoral Conference 2020, organised by the second year docARTES PhD students, was planned for 28 and 29 May 2020. The world decided otherwise, unfortunately, and this edition was postponed to September 2021. This conference is an experiment in form as much as content.

This conference explores musician’s long relationship with their instruments and instrumentalities, questioning issues of autonomy and agency in the apparent dichotomy between tools and musical expression. From the mechane of Greek theatres from which gods were suspended, to Mozart’s description of the Stein fortepiano’s knee-lever as “Die Maschine”, to the epoch-defining technologies of recording, sound synthesis, and algorithmic composition of more recent times, performers and composers have relied on mechanical means to create magic in their art.

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Music, and the arts in general, has always been a source of inspiration in times of crisis; it establishes rapport between peoples and cultures and serves as a laboratory for the creation and expression of cultural values.
Dissolving Borders invited proposals that will investigate and problematize how musicians create political spaces that transcend demarcated space and culture, on scales both global and local, macro and micro. We seek work that engages with the complex realities of inter-cultural contact, including issues of migration, communication, integration, acceptance, and symbiosis. As the world experiences radical displacement during an era of unprecedented enforcement of borders, we seek earnest engagements with the vibrant history of music’s entanglement with these issues. Looking to past musics, musicians, and scholarship, we encourage imaginations of music’s current and future role as a cultural and political agent.

The Orpheus Doctoral Conference 2017, Traditions-Transitions, will explore how different modes of relationships between past and present affect musical performance practice and composition. Further, practitioners and researchers from the fields of music and social sciences will draw on Eric Hobsbawm’s notion of “invented traditions”, examining how traditions are forged, broken or interrupted and how they might be used as sources of renewal.

The conference will feature lectures by Richard Taruskin, Joanna Dudley (tbc), Sigiswald Kuijken and Esteban Buch as well as a musical gallery in which performances and installations addressing the conference topics will be interspersed with moderated discussions between artists and our guest speakers.

In 'Here and Now', music performers, trainers, teachers, and thinkers meet to exchange concepts, experiences and perspectives dealing with the particular moment of being on stage. The central topics are self-awareness, presence and the state of 'flow' in music performance.

The Second Annual Orpheus Doctoral Conference takes three words as its theme: Transcription, Translation and Interpretation. These terms suggest different possibilities to different musical communities, but common to all perspectives is the idea of distance – temporal, cultural and stylistic – and the rich artistic discourse that emerges from this distance.

For as long as we have had the desire to communicate that which words cannot express, we have imagined and fashioned instruments. Indeed, in the sphere of musicianship, the instrument, tool, or material is integral to almost every aspect of musical practice – and vice versa. Performing musicians often take this symbiotic relationship for granted. However when performance practices are thoughtfully examined in the context of artistic research, a startling array of multifaceted interrelationships, co‐dependencies and contradictions can often arise.