Output details
35 - Music, Drama, Dance and Performing Arts
University of York : A - Music
The Practice of Practising
This volume, which the Orpheus Institute invited me to edit, considers musical practising as a determining factor in processes of musical creativity and signification, examining some of the ways in which musical understanding is enactive, contingent upon embodied experience. My chapter, ‘Morton Feldman’s Late Piano Music: Experimentalism in Practice' draws explicitly on the experience of playing Feldman’s music. However, the specifics of the performance-related research are not detailed in the chapter. The text is one of the outputs of the project ‘The modes of listening, memory, and physicality at play in the preparation and performance of Morton Feldman’s later works for solo piano’ (2009-12). This project, in collaboration with the Orpheus Research Centre in Music, Ghent, was practice-led, comprising a reflective process of practice, performance, listening, interviewing, musicological and analytical study, and writing. Research questions included:
• What, exactly, am I listening to in the process of playing this music? How do I judge relative qualities of resonance across time?
• To what extent (and how) might I reach an understanding of the relationship between technical matters of sound production and duration, and the ambiguous, disorienting effects of timing and patterning in Feldman’s music?
• How is piano sound ‘heard’ (or felt, or judged) through the body?
• What might it mean to practice ‘experimentally’?
Public performances took place in Ghent and at venues across the UK, 2009-2011, including: London’s Warehouse (as part of the BMIC’s ‘Cutting Edge’ series); Peninsula Arts; Beaford Arts; The International Centre for Interdisciplinary Arts, Bath; Audiograft, Oxford; Dartington Arts; Sir Jack Lyons Concert Hall, University of York. Developing from this process, the project uses Feldman's music as a lens through which to re-consider processes of practicing, arguing against notions of interpretation in favour of a particular alertness to the uncertainties and contingencies of performance.
