I am Assistant Professor of modern and contemporary music at Utrecht University. My research focuses broadly on the role of technology in musical creativity, and more specifically on questions of notation, improvisation, and performance. I received my PhD from the University of Cambridge for an ethnographic study of the performance practice of the Instant Composers Pool. Supervisors: Nicholas Cook Address: https://www.uu.nl/staff/FJSchuiling/Profile
The Instant Composers Pool and Improvisation Beyond Jazz contributes to the expansion and diversi... more The Instant Composers Pool and Improvisation Beyond Jazz contributes to the expansion and diversification of our understanding of the jazz tradition by describing the history and practice of one of the most important non-American jazz groups: The Instant Composers Pool, founded in Amsterdam in 1967.
The book describes the meaning of “instant composition” from both a historical and ethnographic perspective. Historically, it details instant composition’s emergence from the encounter between various overlapping transnational avant-gardes, including free jazz, serialism, experimental music, electronic music, and Fluxus. The author shows how the improvising musicians not only engaged with the cultural politics of ethnicity and race involved in the negotiation of the boundaries of jazz as a cultural practice, but transformed the meaning of music in society—particularly the nature of improvisation and performance. Ethnographically, The Instant Composers Pool encourages readers to reconsider the conceptual tools we use to describe music performance, improvisation, and creativity. It takes the practice of “instant composition” as an opportunity to reflect on music performance as a social practice, which is crucial not only for jazz studies, but also for general music scholarship.
The ubiquity and diversity of notational practices in music suggest that notation is a significan... more The ubiquity and diversity of notational practices in music suggest that notation is a significant part of human beings' musicking behaviour. However, it is difficult to address its function since the usual conception of notation in music scholarship is at odds with studying performance in the first place. This article presents a methodological outline for an ethnomusicology of music notation by investigating the musicality of notation not in terms of its representation of musical structures, but of its mediation of the social and creative agency of musicians. Rather than detracting from musical reality, it is suggested that notation composes musical cultures. This constructive work is simultaneously ontological and ethical. It is described in terms of three distinct processes, namely mobilization, entextualization, and remediation. In doing so, this article presents an interdisciplinary approach to a topic that has traditionally defined the disciplinary centre of music scholarship.
Musicology's performative turn was formulated in opposition to the disciplinary dominance of musi... more Musicology's performative turn was formulated in opposition to the disciplinary dominance of music notation in favour of a focus on the creativity of performers. However, scores are a central part of many musicians' creative work, and a complete conception of creativity in performance should take this centrality into account. This article investigates performers' uses of notation, particularly annotation, in both composed and improvised musical practices. Through ethnographic methods, we examine how performers engage with their notations and how this engagement resonates in their further creative processes. By approaching the score as a concrete material object rather than a representation of an abstract structure, we move beyond a paradigm that opposes notated permanence to performed and/or improvised transience. Drawing on anthropological work on artistic production, creativity, and improvisation, we propose an understanding of (an)notation as integral to the forms of imagination, creativity, knowledge, interaction, and even improvisation that occur in music-making. One of the most important developments in current musicology has been a disciplinary turn towards performance as the defining element of music. There is a growing body of research investigating the multi-layered forms of social and distributed creativity inherent in the
ACT: Zeitschrift für Musik & Performance No. 5 (forthcoming)
In an issue of ACT dedicated to the methods of studying improvisation, I argue that improvisation... more In an issue of ACT dedicated to the methods of studying improvisation, I argue that improvisation studies needs t rethink the notion of compositions as used within improvised performance. I present some preliminary results of my fieldwork with the ICP Orchestra to provide examples of how compositions may influence improvisatory performance and interaction, and reflect on what this means for some foundational premises of musicology, ethnomusicology and improvisation studies.
This article relates the recent development of a " relational musicology " to debates about parti... more This article relates the recent development of a " relational musicology " to debates about participatory art and relational aesthetics. I present results from an eth-nographic study of the Dutch improvising music collective the Instant Composers Pool, founded in 1967 and still performing. With a background in jazz, experimental music and performance art, this group developed an improvisatory musical practice in which musical notations are freely used. These pieces mediate the social and creative agency of the musicians in the group. As such, they provide a case for reconsidering the nature of musical notation, and the distinction between composition and improvisation, which have been foundational for the academic study of music, and constitutive for a distinction between the aesthetic and the social. I employ the concept of " microtopia " to describe not only the way in which artistic practices subvert such conventional categories, but also to account for the value of ethnographic fieldwork to take such practices as inspiration for disciplinary innovation.
Musicology’s performative turn was formulated in opposition to the disciplinary dominance of musi... more Musicology’s performative turn was formulated in opposition to the disciplinary dominance of music notation in favour of a focus on the creativity of performers. However, scores are a central part of many musicians’ creative work, and a complete conception of creativity in performance should take this centrality into account. This article investigates performers’ uses of notation, particularly annotation, in both composed and improvised musical practices. Using observational methods, we examine how performers engage with their notations and how this engagement resonates in their creative processes. By approaching the score as a concrete material object rather than a representation of an abstract structure, we move beyond a paradigm that opposes notated permanence to performed and/or improvised transience. Drawing on anthropological work on artistic production, creativity, and improvisation, we propose an understanding of (an)notation as integral to the forms of imagination, creativity, knowledge, interaction, and even improvisation that occur in music-making.
One of the most important developments in current musicology is a disciplinary turn towards perfo... more One of the most important developments in current musicology is a disciplinary turn towards performance as music’s defining element. Music is no longer understood as an object, an ideal structure of sounds or notes on a page, but as something people do: music as verb rather than noun. Central to this development has been the deconstruction of the notion of the musical ‘work’ and the questioning of the centrality of notation in musicology.
This paper aims to create some conceptual room for a positive function of notation within the creative process; not as the representation of an abstract structure but as a concrete material object, in order to move beyond a paradigm that opposes notated permanence to performed and/or improvised transience. We compare two different ethnographic case studies undertaken in the areas of contemporary composed music and improvised music. Concentrating on the scarcely studied practice of annotation, we propose an ontological shift from the work to the score. Annotation is an intimate practice, a way of negotiating one’s agency and ownership of the music, distributing creativity over a network of human and non-human actants. As a prime example of the active role of the score as a fluid quasi-object collaborating in music’s creative process, we hope that a study of such annotations will allow a consideration of notation in its textility rather than its textuality, with the performer reimagined as a weaver, situated ‘in amongst a world of materials, which he literally draws out in bringing forth the work.’ (Ingold 2011: 10).
This paper presents some results from an ethnographic and musicological study of the Amsterdam-ba... more This paper presents some results from an ethnographic and musicological study of the Amsterdam-based improvising collective the Instant Composers Pool Orchestra. This group, founded in 1967 by Willem Breuker, Misha Mengelberg and Han Bennink and still performing, has developed a highly original and distinctive approach to musical performance. Dissatisfied with notions of ‘freedom’ in improvisation, yet critical of the traditional hierarchies in composer-performer relations, Mengelberg wrote an extensive and diverse repertoire, employing various notational and compositional techniques to explore the different improvisatory possibilities that they afford. In each performance, the musicians create an improvised collage of a selection of these pieces, juxtaposing and combining them and improvising transitions between them, thus blurring the distinction between improvisation and composition in both name and practice.
Apart from a detailed historical and ethnographic description of a group that is central to a genre that has been underrepresented in music-historical research, this thesis investigates the repertoire of the ICP and its use as an opportunity to reconsider the relation between musical text and performance. In one of my interviews with cellist Tristan Honsinger, he remarked that a good performance was not about ‘filling time’ but about ‘making time’. I take this statement as the starting point of a critique of Alfred Schütz’s famous phenomenological account of ‘making music together’, in which he argues that a shared ‘inner time’ forms the basis of all social relations. I argue that his account remains resolutely centred on listeners and composers, thus ultimately neglecting the fact that ‘inner time’ is not a given, but a product of performers’ creative efforts. Drawing on the work of anthropologist Tim Ingold and philosopher John Dewey, I argue that this creative work is more fruitfully described in terms of the interaction between an actor and its constantly active environment than in the strict subject-object distinctions of Schütz. From this ecological perspective, musical performance is less about tuning in to a given flow of inner time than about establishing a rhythm or counterpoint by tuning various heterogeneous temporalities. Musical notations, then, do not take music ‘out of time’, but become working materials of performers, which engender their own particular temporalities. I illustrate these ideas with musical examples recorded during my fieldwork with the group.
Amsterdam-based improvising collective the Instant Composers Pool (ICP) was founded in 1967 by Mi... more Amsterdam-based improvising collective the Instant Composers Pool (ICP) was founded in 1967 by Misha Mengelberg, Willem Breuker and Han Bennink and has become one of the central groups of improvised music in Europe. The ambiguous term ‘improvised music’ is used by many musicians to consciously take up an interstitial position between jazz and other forms of music. In the case of the ICP, these include two particular genres of contemporary art music. Mengelberg, the unofficial leader of the ICP since Breuker left the group, was among the first Dutch composers to be taught serialist composition. In the early 1960s he joined Fluxus, a group of performance artists and experimental composers aiming to blur the boundaries between art and everyday life. The music and the musicians of the ICP combine influences from jazz, experimental music and (post-)serialist composition.
In this paper I present historical and ethnographic material collected during my fieldwork with the ICP Orchestra. Drawing on the cosmopolitanism of Martin Stokes and the ideas of Paul Gilroy, Georgina Born and Bruno Latour, I argue that the musical approach of the ICP constitutes not just a negotiation of different approaches to music, but of different forms of modernism; the high modernism of Darmstadt, the Afro-modernism of jazz and the postmodernism of Fluxus. A crucial element dividing these modernisms is the relation of performance to notation. Mengelberg, who coined the term ‘instant composition’, has always maintained there is no fundamental difference between composition and improvisation, and he has composed a vast repertoire of pieces for the group to explore different improvisatory possibilities. I will end with a discussion of what ‘instant composition’ could mean for jazz studies, musicology and ethnomusicology, the disciplinary identities of which have been founded on modernist distinctions between text and performance, art and culture, and composition and improvisation.
Conveners
Clare Foster (Classics, University of Cambridge)
Floris Schuiling (Music, Universit... more Conveners
Clare Foster (Classics, University of Cambridge)
Floris Schuiling (Music, University of Cambridge)
Zoe Svendsen (English, University of Cambridge)
Jonas Tinius (Anthropology, University of Cambridge)
Summary
This single-day curated conference, following on from the first performance-as-paradigm conference in April 2013, explores the politics of acts of creativity and their consumption. Framing and staging have historically been powerful ways to negotiate collectivity, both metaphorically and in practice. This conference looks at ways in which performance is less about objects than the power of frames.
Questions addressed will include:
How do groups – both hegemonic and counter-hegemonic - imagine and perform themselves politically?
Can something be performance without assuming a collective reception, and vice versa?
In cultures that privilege the individual, how can systems be made visible?
How do artworks deal with their situation of complicity with the political relations they seek to critique?
How does creative behaviour interact with its various economic frames?
How does performance subvert prevalent notions of ‘the work’?
How do live and recorded performances respectively frame interaction between participants of all kinds?
In this interdisciplinary conversation, we take the paradigm of performance as a mode of enhancing cultural critique.
Keynote speaker: Joe Kelleher, author of Theatre & Politics (2009) and (forthcoming) The Illuminated Theatre: Studies on the Suffering of Images.
Featuring: Georgina Born (Professor of Music and Anthropology, University of Oxford), Selma Dimitrijevic (Artistic Director, Greyscale); The Voice Project (Sian Croose and Jon Baker, of Neutrinos fame); Lena Simic, performance artist and founder of the Free University of Liverpool and the Institute for the Art and Practice of Dissent at Home; METIS/World Factory; Rafael Schacter on Independent Public Art; New Art Club (Tom Roden and Peter Shenton); performance architect Helen Stratford; Associate director of the Young Vic Nathalie Abrahami; Vita Peacock, anthropologist and ERSC Postdoctoral Fellow on anti-austerity activism and the rise of ‘spectacular dissent’, UCL, and others....
Once again a series of roundtables and performances throughout the day will be brought together in a summing up discussion at the Cambridge Junction, in a conference ‘dinner’ staged by live artists Hunt and Darton.
This single-day curated conference, following on from the first performance-as-paradigm conferenc... more This single-day curated conference, following on from the first performance-as-paradigm conference in April 2013, explores the politics of acts of creativity and their consumption. Framing and staging have historically been powerful ways to negotiate collectivity, both metaphorically and in practice. This conference looks at ways in which performance is less about objects than the power of frames.
Questions addressed will include:
How do groups – both hegemonic and counter-hegemonic - imagine and perform themselves politically? Can something be performance without assuming a collective reception, and vice versa? In cultures that privilege the individual, how can systems be made visible? How do artworks deal with their situation of complicity with the political relations they seek to critique? How does creative behaviour interact with its various economic frames? How does performance subvert prevalent notions of ‘the work’? How do live and recorded performances respectively frame interaction between participants of all kinds?
In this interdisciplinary conversation, we take the paradigm of performance as a mode of enhancing cultural critique. Featuring:
Joe Kelleher, author of Theatre & Politics (2009) and (forthcoming) The Illuminated Theatre: Studies on the Suffering of Images.
Georgina Born (Professor of Music and Anthropology, University of Oxford)
Jen Harvie, Professor of theatre and performance, QMUL
Selma Dimitrijevic (Artistic Director, Greyscale)
The Voice Project (Sian Croose and Jon Baker, of Neutrinos fame)
Lena Simic, performance artist and founder of the Free University of Liverpool and the Institute for the Art and Practice of Dissent at Home
METIS/World Factory
Lucy Ellison, artist (Grounded, Gate Theatre, Notting Hill) Rafael Schacter on Independent Public Art, BA Postdoctoral Fellow, UCL
Khadija Caroll, artist, Humboldt Foundation fellow, author Art in the Time of Colony New Art Club (Tom Roden and Peter Shenton)
Helen Stratford, performance architect
Eirini Kartsaki
Vita Peacock, anthropologist and ERSC Postdoctoral Fellow on anti-austerity activism and the rise of ‘spectacular dissent’, UCL
Rachel Beckles-Willson, Professor of Music, RHUL Once again a series of roundtables and performances throughout the day will be brought together in a summing up discussion at the Cambridge Junction, in a conference ‘dinner’ staged by live artists Hunt and Darton.
Conveners
Clare Foster (Classics, University of Cambridge) Floris Schuiling (Music, University of Cambridge) Zoe Svendsen (English, University of Cambridge) Jonas Tinius (Anthropology, University of Cambridge)
The Instant Composers Pool and Improvisation Beyond Jazz contributes to the expansion and diversi... more The Instant Composers Pool and Improvisation Beyond Jazz contributes to the expansion and diversification of our understanding of the jazz tradition by describing the history and practice of one of the most important non-American jazz groups: The Instant Composers Pool, founded in Amsterdam in 1967.
The book describes the meaning of “instant composition” from both a historical and ethnographic perspective. Historically, it details instant composition’s emergence from the encounter between various overlapping transnational avant-gardes, including free jazz, serialism, experimental music, electronic music, and Fluxus. The author shows how the improvising musicians not only engaged with the cultural politics of ethnicity and race involved in the negotiation of the boundaries of jazz as a cultural practice, but transformed the meaning of music in society—particularly the nature of improvisation and performance. Ethnographically, The Instant Composers Pool encourages readers to reconsider the conceptual tools we use to describe music performance, improvisation, and creativity. It takes the practice of “instant composition” as an opportunity to reflect on music performance as a social practice, which is crucial not only for jazz studies, but also for general music scholarship.
The ubiquity and diversity of notational practices in music suggest that notation is a significan... more The ubiquity and diversity of notational practices in music suggest that notation is a significant part of human beings' musicking behaviour. However, it is difficult to address its function since the usual conception of notation in music scholarship is at odds with studying performance in the first place. This article presents a methodological outline for an ethnomusicology of music notation by investigating the musicality of notation not in terms of its representation of musical structures, but of its mediation of the social and creative agency of musicians. Rather than detracting from musical reality, it is suggested that notation composes musical cultures. This constructive work is simultaneously ontological and ethical. It is described in terms of three distinct processes, namely mobilization, entextualization, and remediation. In doing so, this article presents an interdisciplinary approach to a topic that has traditionally defined the disciplinary centre of music scholarship.
Musicology's performative turn was formulated in opposition to the disciplinary dominance of musi... more Musicology's performative turn was formulated in opposition to the disciplinary dominance of music notation in favour of a focus on the creativity of performers. However, scores are a central part of many musicians' creative work, and a complete conception of creativity in performance should take this centrality into account. This article investigates performers' uses of notation, particularly annotation, in both composed and improvised musical practices. Through ethnographic methods, we examine how performers engage with their notations and how this engagement resonates in their further creative processes. By approaching the score as a concrete material object rather than a representation of an abstract structure, we move beyond a paradigm that opposes notated permanence to performed and/or improvised transience. Drawing on anthropological work on artistic production, creativity, and improvisation, we propose an understanding of (an)notation as integral to the forms of imagination, creativity, knowledge, interaction, and even improvisation that occur in music-making. One of the most important developments in current musicology has been a disciplinary turn towards performance as the defining element of music. There is a growing body of research investigating the multi-layered forms of social and distributed creativity inherent in the
ACT: Zeitschrift für Musik & Performance No. 5 (forthcoming)
In an issue of ACT dedicated to the methods of studying improvisation, I argue that improvisation... more In an issue of ACT dedicated to the methods of studying improvisation, I argue that improvisation studies needs t rethink the notion of compositions as used within improvised performance. I present some preliminary results of my fieldwork with the ICP Orchestra to provide examples of how compositions may influence improvisatory performance and interaction, and reflect on what this means for some foundational premises of musicology, ethnomusicology and improvisation studies.
This article relates the recent development of a " relational musicology " to debates about parti... more This article relates the recent development of a " relational musicology " to debates about participatory art and relational aesthetics. I present results from an eth-nographic study of the Dutch improvising music collective the Instant Composers Pool, founded in 1967 and still performing. With a background in jazz, experimental music and performance art, this group developed an improvisatory musical practice in which musical notations are freely used. These pieces mediate the social and creative agency of the musicians in the group. As such, they provide a case for reconsidering the nature of musical notation, and the distinction between composition and improvisation, which have been foundational for the academic study of music, and constitutive for a distinction between the aesthetic and the social. I employ the concept of " microtopia " to describe not only the way in which artistic practices subvert such conventional categories, but also to account for the value of ethnographic fieldwork to take such practices as inspiration for disciplinary innovation.
Musicology’s performative turn was formulated in opposition to the disciplinary dominance of musi... more Musicology’s performative turn was formulated in opposition to the disciplinary dominance of music notation in favour of a focus on the creativity of performers. However, scores are a central part of many musicians’ creative work, and a complete conception of creativity in performance should take this centrality into account. This article investigates performers’ uses of notation, particularly annotation, in both composed and improvised musical practices. Using observational methods, we examine how performers engage with their notations and how this engagement resonates in their creative processes. By approaching the score as a concrete material object rather than a representation of an abstract structure, we move beyond a paradigm that opposes notated permanence to performed and/or improvised transience. Drawing on anthropological work on artistic production, creativity, and improvisation, we propose an understanding of (an)notation as integral to the forms of imagination, creativity, knowledge, interaction, and even improvisation that occur in music-making.
One of the most important developments in current musicology is a disciplinary turn towards perfo... more One of the most important developments in current musicology is a disciplinary turn towards performance as music’s defining element. Music is no longer understood as an object, an ideal structure of sounds or notes on a page, but as something people do: music as verb rather than noun. Central to this development has been the deconstruction of the notion of the musical ‘work’ and the questioning of the centrality of notation in musicology.
This paper aims to create some conceptual room for a positive function of notation within the creative process; not as the representation of an abstract structure but as a concrete material object, in order to move beyond a paradigm that opposes notated permanence to performed and/or improvised transience. We compare two different ethnographic case studies undertaken in the areas of contemporary composed music and improvised music. Concentrating on the scarcely studied practice of annotation, we propose an ontological shift from the work to the score. Annotation is an intimate practice, a way of negotiating one’s agency and ownership of the music, distributing creativity over a network of human and non-human actants. As a prime example of the active role of the score as a fluid quasi-object collaborating in music’s creative process, we hope that a study of such annotations will allow a consideration of notation in its textility rather than its textuality, with the performer reimagined as a weaver, situated ‘in amongst a world of materials, which he literally draws out in bringing forth the work.’ (Ingold 2011: 10).
This paper presents some results from an ethnographic and musicological study of the Amsterdam-ba... more This paper presents some results from an ethnographic and musicological study of the Amsterdam-based improvising collective the Instant Composers Pool Orchestra. This group, founded in 1967 by Willem Breuker, Misha Mengelberg and Han Bennink and still performing, has developed a highly original and distinctive approach to musical performance. Dissatisfied with notions of ‘freedom’ in improvisation, yet critical of the traditional hierarchies in composer-performer relations, Mengelberg wrote an extensive and diverse repertoire, employing various notational and compositional techniques to explore the different improvisatory possibilities that they afford. In each performance, the musicians create an improvised collage of a selection of these pieces, juxtaposing and combining them and improvising transitions between them, thus blurring the distinction between improvisation and composition in both name and practice.
Apart from a detailed historical and ethnographic description of a group that is central to a genre that has been underrepresented in music-historical research, this thesis investigates the repertoire of the ICP and its use as an opportunity to reconsider the relation between musical text and performance. In one of my interviews with cellist Tristan Honsinger, he remarked that a good performance was not about ‘filling time’ but about ‘making time’. I take this statement as the starting point of a critique of Alfred Schütz’s famous phenomenological account of ‘making music together’, in which he argues that a shared ‘inner time’ forms the basis of all social relations. I argue that his account remains resolutely centred on listeners and composers, thus ultimately neglecting the fact that ‘inner time’ is not a given, but a product of performers’ creative efforts. Drawing on the work of anthropologist Tim Ingold and philosopher John Dewey, I argue that this creative work is more fruitfully described in terms of the interaction between an actor and its constantly active environment than in the strict subject-object distinctions of Schütz. From this ecological perspective, musical performance is less about tuning in to a given flow of inner time than about establishing a rhythm or counterpoint by tuning various heterogeneous temporalities. Musical notations, then, do not take music ‘out of time’, but become working materials of performers, which engender their own particular temporalities. I illustrate these ideas with musical examples recorded during my fieldwork with the group.
Amsterdam-based improvising collective the Instant Composers Pool (ICP) was founded in 1967 by Mi... more Amsterdam-based improvising collective the Instant Composers Pool (ICP) was founded in 1967 by Misha Mengelberg, Willem Breuker and Han Bennink and has become one of the central groups of improvised music in Europe. The ambiguous term ‘improvised music’ is used by many musicians to consciously take up an interstitial position between jazz and other forms of music. In the case of the ICP, these include two particular genres of contemporary art music. Mengelberg, the unofficial leader of the ICP since Breuker left the group, was among the first Dutch composers to be taught serialist composition. In the early 1960s he joined Fluxus, a group of performance artists and experimental composers aiming to blur the boundaries between art and everyday life. The music and the musicians of the ICP combine influences from jazz, experimental music and (post-)serialist composition.
In this paper I present historical and ethnographic material collected during my fieldwork with the ICP Orchestra. Drawing on the cosmopolitanism of Martin Stokes and the ideas of Paul Gilroy, Georgina Born and Bruno Latour, I argue that the musical approach of the ICP constitutes not just a negotiation of different approaches to music, but of different forms of modernism; the high modernism of Darmstadt, the Afro-modernism of jazz and the postmodernism of Fluxus. A crucial element dividing these modernisms is the relation of performance to notation. Mengelberg, who coined the term ‘instant composition’, has always maintained there is no fundamental difference between composition and improvisation, and he has composed a vast repertoire of pieces for the group to explore different improvisatory possibilities. I will end with a discussion of what ‘instant composition’ could mean for jazz studies, musicology and ethnomusicology, the disciplinary identities of which have been founded on modernist distinctions between text and performance, art and culture, and composition and improvisation.
Conveners
Clare Foster (Classics, University of Cambridge)
Floris Schuiling (Music, Universit... more Conveners
Clare Foster (Classics, University of Cambridge)
Floris Schuiling (Music, University of Cambridge)
Zoe Svendsen (English, University of Cambridge)
Jonas Tinius (Anthropology, University of Cambridge)
Summary
This single-day curated conference, following on from the first performance-as-paradigm conference in April 2013, explores the politics of acts of creativity and their consumption. Framing and staging have historically been powerful ways to negotiate collectivity, both metaphorically and in practice. This conference looks at ways in which performance is less about objects than the power of frames.
Questions addressed will include:
How do groups – both hegemonic and counter-hegemonic - imagine and perform themselves politically?
Can something be performance without assuming a collective reception, and vice versa?
In cultures that privilege the individual, how can systems be made visible?
How do artworks deal with their situation of complicity with the political relations they seek to critique?
How does creative behaviour interact with its various economic frames?
How does performance subvert prevalent notions of ‘the work’?
How do live and recorded performances respectively frame interaction between participants of all kinds?
In this interdisciplinary conversation, we take the paradigm of performance as a mode of enhancing cultural critique.
Keynote speaker: Joe Kelleher, author of Theatre & Politics (2009) and (forthcoming) The Illuminated Theatre: Studies on the Suffering of Images.
Featuring: Georgina Born (Professor of Music and Anthropology, University of Oxford), Selma Dimitrijevic (Artistic Director, Greyscale); The Voice Project (Sian Croose and Jon Baker, of Neutrinos fame); Lena Simic, performance artist and founder of the Free University of Liverpool and the Institute for the Art and Practice of Dissent at Home; METIS/World Factory; Rafael Schacter on Independent Public Art; New Art Club (Tom Roden and Peter Shenton); performance architect Helen Stratford; Associate director of the Young Vic Nathalie Abrahami; Vita Peacock, anthropologist and ERSC Postdoctoral Fellow on anti-austerity activism and the rise of ‘spectacular dissent’, UCL, and others....
Once again a series of roundtables and performances throughout the day will be brought together in a summing up discussion at the Cambridge Junction, in a conference ‘dinner’ staged by live artists Hunt and Darton.
This single-day curated conference, following on from the first performance-as-paradigm conferenc... more This single-day curated conference, following on from the first performance-as-paradigm conference in April 2013, explores the politics of acts of creativity and their consumption. Framing and staging have historically been powerful ways to negotiate collectivity, both metaphorically and in practice. This conference looks at ways in which performance is less about objects than the power of frames.
Questions addressed will include:
How do groups – both hegemonic and counter-hegemonic - imagine and perform themselves politically? Can something be performance without assuming a collective reception, and vice versa? In cultures that privilege the individual, how can systems be made visible? How do artworks deal with their situation of complicity with the political relations they seek to critique? How does creative behaviour interact with its various economic frames? How does performance subvert prevalent notions of ‘the work’? How do live and recorded performances respectively frame interaction between participants of all kinds?
In this interdisciplinary conversation, we take the paradigm of performance as a mode of enhancing cultural critique. Featuring:
Joe Kelleher, author of Theatre & Politics (2009) and (forthcoming) The Illuminated Theatre: Studies on the Suffering of Images.
Georgina Born (Professor of Music and Anthropology, University of Oxford)
Jen Harvie, Professor of theatre and performance, QMUL
Selma Dimitrijevic (Artistic Director, Greyscale)
The Voice Project (Sian Croose and Jon Baker, of Neutrinos fame)
Lena Simic, performance artist and founder of the Free University of Liverpool and the Institute for the Art and Practice of Dissent at Home
METIS/World Factory
Lucy Ellison, artist (Grounded, Gate Theatre, Notting Hill) Rafael Schacter on Independent Public Art, BA Postdoctoral Fellow, UCL
Khadija Caroll, artist, Humboldt Foundation fellow, author Art in the Time of Colony New Art Club (Tom Roden and Peter Shenton)
Helen Stratford, performance architect
Eirini Kartsaki
Vita Peacock, anthropologist and ERSC Postdoctoral Fellow on anti-austerity activism and the rise of ‘spectacular dissent’, UCL
Rachel Beckles-Willson, Professor of Music, RHUL Once again a series of roundtables and performances throughout the day will be brought together in a summing up discussion at the Cambridge Junction, in a conference ‘dinner’ staged by live artists Hunt and Darton.
Conveners
Clare Foster (Classics, University of Cambridge) Floris Schuiling (Music, University of Cambridge) Zoe Svendsen (English, University of Cambridge) Jonas Tinius (Anthropology, University of Cambridge)
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The book describes the meaning of “instant composition” from both a historical and ethnographic perspective. Historically, it details instant composition’s emergence from the encounter between various overlapping transnational avant-gardes, including free jazz, serialism, experimental music, electronic music, and Fluxus. The author shows how the improvising musicians not only engaged with the cultural politics of ethnicity and race involved in the negotiation of the boundaries of jazz as a cultural practice, but transformed the meaning of music in society—particularly the nature of improvisation and performance. Ethnographically, The Instant Composers Pool encourages readers to reconsider the conceptual tools we use to describe music performance, improvisation, and creativity. It takes the practice of “instant composition” as an opportunity to reflect on music performance as a social practice, which is crucial not only for jazz studies, but also for general music scholarship.
This paper aims to create some conceptual room for a positive function of notation within the creative process; not as the representation of an abstract structure but as a concrete material object, in order to move beyond a paradigm that opposes notated permanence to performed and/or improvised transience. We compare two different ethnographic case studies undertaken in the areas of contemporary composed music and improvised music. Concentrating on the scarcely studied practice of annotation, we propose an ontological shift from the work to the score. Annotation is an intimate practice, a way of negotiating one’s agency and ownership of the music, distributing creativity over a network of human and non-human actants. As a prime example of the active role of the score as a fluid quasi-object collaborating in music’s creative process, we hope that a study of such annotations will allow a consideration of notation in its textility rather than its textuality, with the performer reimagined as a weaver, situated ‘in amongst a world of materials, which he literally draws out in bringing forth the work.’ (Ingold 2011: 10).
Apart from a detailed historical and ethnographic description of a group that is central to a genre that has been underrepresented in music-historical research, this thesis investigates the repertoire of the ICP and its use as an opportunity to reconsider the relation between musical text and performance. In one of my interviews with cellist Tristan Honsinger, he remarked that a good performance was not about ‘filling time’ but about ‘making time’. I take this statement as the starting point of a critique of Alfred Schütz’s famous phenomenological account of ‘making music together’, in which he argues that a shared ‘inner time’ forms the basis of all social relations. I argue that his account remains resolutely centred on listeners and composers, thus ultimately neglecting the fact that ‘inner time’ is not a given, but a product of performers’ creative efforts. Drawing on the work of anthropologist Tim Ingold and philosopher John Dewey, I argue that this creative work is more fruitfully described in terms of the interaction between an actor and its constantly active environment than in the strict subject-object distinctions of Schütz. From this ecological perspective, musical performance is less about tuning in to a given flow of inner time than about establishing a rhythm or counterpoint by tuning various heterogeneous temporalities. Musical notations, then, do not take music ‘out of time’, but become working materials of performers, which engender their own particular temporalities. I illustrate these ideas with musical examples recorded during my fieldwork with the group.
In this paper I present historical and ethnographic material collected during my fieldwork with the ICP Orchestra. Drawing on the cosmopolitanism of Martin Stokes and the ideas of Paul Gilroy, Georgina Born and Bruno Latour, I argue that the musical approach of the ICP constitutes not just a negotiation of different approaches to music, but of different forms of modernism; the high modernism of Darmstadt, the Afro-modernism of jazz and the postmodernism of Fluxus. A crucial element dividing these modernisms is the relation of performance to notation. Mengelberg, who coined the term ‘instant composition’, has always maintained there is no fundamental difference between composition and improvisation, and he has composed a vast repertoire of pieces for the group to explore different improvisatory possibilities. I will end with a discussion of what ‘instant composition’ could mean for jazz studies, musicology and ethnomusicology, the disciplinary identities of which have been founded on modernist distinctions between text and performance, art and culture, and composition and improvisation.
Clare Foster (Classics, University of Cambridge)
Floris Schuiling (Music, University of Cambridge)
Zoe Svendsen (English, University of Cambridge)
Jonas Tinius (Anthropology, University of Cambridge)
Summary
This single-day curated conference, following on from the first performance-as-paradigm conference in April 2013, explores the politics of acts of creativity and their consumption. Framing and staging have historically been powerful ways to negotiate collectivity, both metaphorically and in practice. This conference looks at ways in which performance is less about objects than the power of frames.
Questions addressed will include:
How do groups – both hegemonic and counter-hegemonic - imagine and perform themselves politically?
Can something be performance without assuming a collective reception, and vice versa?
In cultures that privilege the individual, how can systems be made visible?
How do artworks deal with their situation of complicity with the political relations they seek to critique?
How does creative behaviour interact with its various economic frames?
How does performance subvert prevalent notions of ‘the work’?
How do live and recorded performances respectively frame interaction between participants of all kinds?
In this interdisciplinary conversation, we take the paradigm of performance as a mode of enhancing cultural critique.
Keynote speaker: Joe Kelleher, author of Theatre & Politics (2009) and (forthcoming) The Illuminated Theatre: Studies on the Suffering of Images.
Featuring: Georgina Born (Professor of Music and Anthropology, University of Oxford), Selma Dimitrijevic (Artistic Director, Greyscale); The Voice Project (Sian Croose and Jon Baker, of Neutrinos fame); Lena Simic, performance artist and founder of the Free University of Liverpool and the Institute for the Art and Practice of Dissent at Home; METIS/World Factory; Rafael Schacter on Independent Public Art; New Art Club (Tom Roden and Peter Shenton); performance architect Helen Stratford; Associate director of the Young Vic Nathalie Abrahami; Vita Peacock, anthropologist and ERSC Postdoctoral Fellow on anti-austerity activism and the rise of ‘spectacular dissent’, UCL, and others....
Once again a series of roundtables and performances throughout the day will be brought together in a summing up discussion at the Cambridge Junction, in a conference ‘dinner’ staged by live artists Hunt and Darton.
Questions addressed will include:
How do groups – both hegemonic and counter-hegemonic - imagine and perform themselves politically?
Can something be performance without assuming a collective reception, and vice versa?
In cultures that privilege the individual, how can systems be made visible?
How do artworks deal with their situation of complicity with the political relations they seek to critique?
How does creative behaviour interact with its various economic frames?
How does performance subvert prevalent notions of ‘the work’?
How do live and recorded performances respectively frame interaction between participants of all kinds?
In this interdisciplinary conversation, we take the paradigm of performance as a mode of enhancing cultural critique.
Featuring:
Joe Kelleher, author of Theatre & Politics (2009) and (forthcoming) The Illuminated Theatre: Studies on the Suffering of Images.
Georgina Born (Professor of Music and Anthropology, University of Oxford)
Jen Harvie, Professor of theatre and performance, QMUL
Selma Dimitrijevic (Artistic Director, Greyscale)
The Voice Project (Sian Croose and Jon Baker, of Neutrinos fame)
Lena Simic, performance artist and founder of the Free University of Liverpool and the Institute for the Art and Practice of Dissent at Home
METIS/World Factory
Lucy Ellison, artist (Grounded, Gate Theatre, Notting Hill)
Rafael Schacter on Independent Public Art, BA Postdoctoral Fellow, UCL
Khadija Caroll, artist, Humboldt Foundation fellow, author Art in the Time of Colony
New Art Club (Tom Roden and Peter Shenton)
Helen Stratford, performance architect
Eirini Kartsaki
Vita Peacock, anthropologist and ERSC Postdoctoral Fellow on anti-austerity activism and the rise of ‘spectacular dissent’, UCL
Rachel Beckles-Willson, Professor of Music, RHUL
Once again a series of roundtables and performances throughout the day will be brought together in a summing up discussion at the Cambridge Junction, in a conference ‘dinner’ staged by live artists Hunt and Darton.
Conveners
Clare Foster (Classics, University of Cambridge)
Floris Schuiling (Music, University of Cambridge)
Zoe Svendsen (English, University of Cambridge)
Jonas Tinius (Anthropology, University of Cambridge)
The book describes the meaning of “instant composition” from both a historical and ethnographic perspective. Historically, it details instant composition’s emergence from the encounter between various overlapping transnational avant-gardes, including free jazz, serialism, experimental music, electronic music, and Fluxus. The author shows how the improvising musicians not only engaged with the cultural politics of ethnicity and race involved in the negotiation of the boundaries of jazz as a cultural practice, but transformed the meaning of music in society—particularly the nature of improvisation and performance. Ethnographically, The Instant Composers Pool encourages readers to reconsider the conceptual tools we use to describe music performance, improvisation, and creativity. It takes the practice of “instant composition” as an opportunity to reflect on music performance as a social practice, which is crucial not only for jazz studies, but also for general music scholarship.
This paper aims to create some conceptual room for a positive function of notation within the creative process; not as the representation of an abstract structure but as a concrete material object, in order to move beyond a paradigm that opposes notated permanence to performed and/or improvised transience. We compare two different ethnographic case studies undertaken in the areas of contemporary composed music and improvised music. Concentrating on the scarcely studied practice of annotation, we propose an ontological shift from the work to the score. Annotation is an intimate practice, a way of negotiating one’s agency and ownership of the music, distributing creativity over a network of human and non-human actants. As a prime example of the active role of the score as a fluid quasi-object collaborating in music’s creative process, we hope that a study of such annotations will allow a consideration of notation in its textility rather than its textuality, with the performer reimagined as a weaver, situated ‘in amongst a world of materials, which he literally draws out in bringing forth the work.’ (Ingold 2011: 10).
Apart from a detailed historical and ethnographic description of a group that is central to a genre that has been underrepresented in music-historical research, this thesis investigates the repertoire of the ICP and its use as an opportunity to reconsider the relation between musical text and performance. In one of my interviews with cellist Tristan Honsinger, he remarked that a good performance was not about ‘filling time’ but about ‘making time’. I take this statement as the starting point of a critique of Alfred Schütz’s famous phenomenological account of ‘making music together’, in which he argues that a shared ‘inner time’ forms the basis of all social relations. I argue that his account remains resolutely centred on listeners and composers, thus ultimately neglecting the fact that ‘inner time’ is not a given, but a product of performers’ creative efforts. Drawing on the work of anthropologist Tim Ingold and philosopher John Dewey, I argue that this creative work is more fruitfully described in terms of the interaction between an actor and its constantly active environment than in the strict subject-object distinctions of Schütz. From this ecological perspective, musical performance is less about tuning in to a given flow of inner time than about establishing a rhythm or counterpoint by tuning various heterogeneous temporalities. Musical notations, then, do not take music ‘out of time’, but become working materials of performers, which engender their own particular temporalities. I illustrate these ideas with musical examples recorded during my fieldwork with the group.
In this paper I present historical and ethnographic material collected during my fieldwork with the ICP Orchestra. Drawing on the cosmopolitanism of Martin Stokes and the ideas of Paul Gilroy, Georgina Born and Bruno Latour, I argue that the musical approach of the ICP constitutes not just a negotiation of different approaches to music, but of different forms of modernism; the high modernism of Darmstadt, the Afro-modernism of jazz and the postmodernism of Fluxus. A crucial element dividing these modernisms is the relation of performance to notation. Mengelberg, who coined the term ‘instant composition’, has always maintained there is no fundamental difference between composition and improvisation, and he has composed a vast repertoire of pieces for the group to explore different improvisatory possibilities. I will end with a discussion of what ‘instant composition’ could mean for jazz studies, musicology and ethnomusicology, the disciplinary identities of which have been founded on modernist distinctions between text and performance, art and culture, and composition and improvisation.
Clare Foster (Classics, University of Cambridge)
Floris Schuiling (Music, University of Cambridge)
Zoe Svendsen (English, University of Cambridge)
Jonas Tinius (Anthropology, University of Cambridge)
Summary
This single-day curated conference, following on from the first performance-as-paradigm conference in April 2013, explores the politics of acts of creativity and their consumption. Framing and staging have historically been powerful ways to negotiate collectivity, both metaphorically and in practice. This conference looks at ways in which performance is less about objects than the power of frames.
Questions addressed will include:
How do groups – both hegemonic and counter-hegemonic - imagine and perform themselves politically?
Can something be performance without assuming a collective reception, and vice versa?
In cultures that privilege the individual, how can systems be made visible?
How do artworks deal with their situation of complicity with the political relations they seek to critique?
How does creative behaviour interact with its various economic frames?
How does performance subvert prevalent notions of ‘the work’?
How do live and recorded performances respectively frame interaction between participants of all kinds?
In this interdisciplinary conversation, we take the paradigm of performance as a mode of enhancing cultural critique.
Keynote speaker: Joe Kelleher, author of Theatre & Politics (2009) and (forthcoming) The Illuminated Theatre: Studies on the Suffering of Images.
Featuring: Georgina Born (Professor of Music and Anthropology, University of Oxford), Selma Dimitrijevic (Artistic Director, Greyscale); The Voice Project (Sian Croose and Jon Baker, of Neutrinos fame); Lena Simic, performance artist and founder of the Free University of Liverpool and the Institute for the Art and Practice of Dissent at Home; METIS/World Factory; Rafael Schacter on Independent Public Art; New Art Club (Tom Roden and Peter Shenton); performance architect Helen Stratford; Associate director of the Young Vic Nathalie Abrahami; Vita Peacock, anthropologist and ERSC Postdoctoral Fellow on anti-austerity activism and the rise of ‘spectacular dissent’, UCL, and others....
Once again a series of roundtables and performances throughout the day will be brought together in a summing up discussion at the Cambridge Junction, in a conference ‘dinner’ staged by live artists Hunt and Darton.
Questions addressed will include:
How do groups – both hegemonic and counter-hegemonic - imagine and perform themselves politically?
Can something be performance without assuming a collective reception, and vice versa?
In cultures that privilege the individual, how can systems be made visible?
How do artworks deal with their situation of complicity with the political relations they seek to critique?
How does creative behaviour interact with its various economic frames?
How does performance subvert prevalent notions of ‘the work’?
How do live and recorded performances respectively frame interaction between participants of all kinds?
In this interdisciplinary conversation, we take the paradigm of performance as a mode of enhancing cultural critique.
Featuring:
Joe Kelleher, author of Theatre & Politics (2009) and (forthcoming) The Illuminated Theatre: Studies on the Suffering of Images.
Georgina Born (Professor of Music and Anthropology, University of Oxford)
Jen Harvie, Professor of theatre and performance, QMUL
Selma Dimitrijevic (Artistic Director, Greyscale)
The Voice Project (Sian Croose and Jon Baker, of Neutrinos fame)
Lena Simic, performance artist and founder of the Free University of Liverpool and the Institute for the Art and Practice of Dissent at Home
METIS/World Factory
Lucy Ellison, artist (Grounded, Gate Theatre, Notting Hill)
Rafael Schacter on Independent Public Art, BA Postdoctoral Fellow, UCL
Khadija Caroll, artist, Humboldt Foundation fellow, author Art in the Time of Colony
New Art Club (Tom Roden and Peter Shenton)
Helen Stratford, performance architect
Eirini Kartsaki
Vita Peacock, anthropologist and ERSC Postdoctoral Fellow on anti-austerity activism and the rise of ‘spectacular dissent’, UCL
Rachel Beckles-Willson, Professor of Music, RHUL
Once again a series of roundtables and performances throughout the day will be brought together in a summing up discussion at the Cambridge Junction, in a conference ‘dinner’ staged by live artists Hunt and Darton.
Conveners
Clare Foster (Classics, University of Cambridge)
Floris Schuiling (Music, University of Cambridge)
Zoe Svendsen (English, University of Cambridge)
Jonas Tinius (Anthropology, University of Cambridge)