“Documenting Music with Non-Sonic Elements“ is the title of NTA´s new Artistic Research project in a collaboration with Royal Birmingham Conservatoire (UK) that has been selected by the ARTS AND HUMANITIES RESEARCH COUNCIL to be funded with £35.603 for the period 19.08.2019-20.07.2020.
The project led by Prof. Michael Wolters (Birmingham Conservatoire) and co-led by Dr. Philipp Schulte (NTA) concretely investigates concepts of documenting music involving non-sonic elements, for which there is neither an established 'best practice' for documentation nor any reliable archive. This interdisciplinary network will explore the problems raised by, and solutions for, documenting and disseminating exemplars of this type of music around through four workshops taking place in England, Wales, and Germany.
This project has been conceived to respond to the needs of scholars in 20th and 21st Century experimental music, in addition to lecturers in contemporary musical performance practice and musicians outside academia who are involved as performers, composers, ensemble directors and workshop leaders. The aim is to establish a clear and transparent methodology outlining the best-practice for the production, performance and documentation of works with non-sonic elements. This will result in an exemplary public performance and professional-quality video documentation of a historically significant composition. Appropriate licensing will be arranged so that the documentation can be made publicly available.
Results of the project.
A Booklet "An incomplete Organum for Documenting Music with Non-Sonic Elements“
as documented outcome of the Artistic Research Collaboration between Norwegian Theatre Academy and Royal Conservatoire Birmingham 2019/20 has been realised.
You can find it here.
This interdisciplinary network explored the problems raised by, and solutions for, documenting and disseminating exemplars of this type of music around four workshops in England, Wales, and online.
The project led to several results, all of them documented in different media. Next to a documented performance (as exemplaric object of research) and a video lecture summarizing the research process for interested audiences, during the process a list of 24 hypotheses about documenting the non-sonic where developed by the research team. The character of those hypotheses is more general than the very concrete results of the other research modules of the project and can therefore be used as impulse for related research processes at NTA.