Projects

Fare Musica Antica (Ebraica) reinventing a usable past

Avery Gosfield

Very little Jewish music in notation from before 1620 has come down to us. Next to this, however, a kind of “shadow repertoire” exists – the hundreds of poems by Jewish authors that we know were sung (at least upon occasion) that have survived in text-only form. My proposal is for a research project centered on Jewish poems from Italian sources, and their relation to extant repertoire: both notated music from Early Modern 'Gentile' sources and orally-transmitted song. The goal would be two-fold: an edition, and a series of performances based on the research. The whole would necessarily be complimented by a discussion of the close intertwining of research and creative expression, and its role in Early Music itself, especially when working with the data-poor repertoires typical of populations living outside of the mainstream, including the moral questions involved, especially considering the questions of authenticity or reception by the modern public.

Rewriting for the salon

Luca Montebugnoli

Au début du XIXe siècle l’art de l’arrangement vit son âge d’or : à une époque qui ne connait pas encore de reproduction technique du son, la publication de transcriptions de symphonies, concertos et opéra pour petits ensembles permet l’écoute ou l’évocation au salon des œuvres destinées au concert public ou au théâtre. La redécouverte de cette pratique dans toute son ampleur et sa créativité est le propos de ce projet de recherche. A travers l’analyse et l’étude musicale des partitions, il ambitionne non seulement à la compréhension historique et esthétique du phénomène, mais à la reconstruction et l’expérimentation d’un savoir-faire, celui de l’arrangement, qui était propre aux musiciens de l’époque et que la modernité a progressivement oublié. La vie musicale parisienne dans la première moitié du XIXe siècle fera de cadre historique à la recherche en raison de la centralité que la ville acquiert au cours de la période.

Paraphrase

Filipa Botelho

Paraphrase - Experimental organism on the body of the musician, its qualities and contexts takes the body of the musician as subject and proposes an exercise that departs from the repertoire for solo clarinet containing movements beyond the ones commonly considered as part of the music-making body and continues proposing an experimentation based on an acoustic feedback set-up where movement, sound and space have a different relation among them in what the instrument of composition is concerned.

Besides that, it proposes a shared experimentation with the same set-up between musicians and dancers to enlarge the method of comparison.

Sonic Silhouettes, Musical Movement

Winnie Huang

On the international stage, we are seeing an increasing presence and growing phenomenon of musical-gestural pieces. Musical-gestural pieces feature prominently physical elements for visual aesthetics, explicitly notated by the composer. Notated as musical scores, performed by highly trained musicians, the role of the musical-gestural performer is one that spans multiple disciplines, between music and movement, and requires a multifaceted and highly skilled interpreter with specific capabilities. The rise of this genre, demands investigation from the point of view of the performer providing insight for future artists and academics in this field.

My doctoral trajectory will investigate the collaborative process in musical-gestural pieces. I will develop a performance practice allowing understanding of the skills required, with a focus on notational and practice problematics, and the physical embodiment of the pieces during the process. Research in the genre of musical-gestural pieces will be completed through artistic collaborations with composers in this field, through analysis and examination of the process, and through public performances. Necessary understanding of this phenomenon will create informed composers and performers, and allow the artistic community the unique opportunity to better comprehend this genre, generating broader interest in new musical-gestural works.