Vous constatez une erreur ?
NaN:NaN
00:00
The exchange of ideas and sounds generated from combining Chartwell Dutiro’s mbira music from the Shona tradition of Zimbabwe with a classically trained string quartet results in a creative practice that defines its boundaries through the act of collaboration. This paper identifies the processes involved in devising new music that merges oral and notated traditions and participatory and presentational performance practices. Neither the string quartet repertoire nor the sacred music of mbira stems from an improvisatory tradition but bringing these two distinct cultural strands together invokes an improvisatory style that questions the conventional roles of composer, performer and ‘master musician’ and the definition of authorship.
Combining music from diverse cultures invites practical considerations of many hotly debated topics, often presented as dualisms (including issues of West/East, good/evil, Christianity/Islam, etc. (Nooshin 2003)) or discursive binaries (Brinner 2009). The political notion that difference invokes power is quickly diffused in a creative context where building bridges across cultures requires breaking down boundaries rather than reinforcing them. However, this idea has yet to be fully explored at a practical level. Relatively little scholarship has focused on actual intercultural encounters or documented collaborations of intercultural inquiry.
The paper will include live demonstration. Recorded evidence (video and audio) from participant observation will reveal how the musicians work together to create new music. Observations are made prior to and during the creative process as well as post production. The creative components afforded by the participants that go towards defining a new music are interpreted by the respective etic and emic perspectives of the authors analysing interactions between performers and between composer and performers. The compositional input brings a third cultural dimension to the collaboration with Daniel Linker’s Chilean origins. The composer has two roles in the project: 1. To arrange and transcribe the results of the creative process in a combination of fixed and unfixed notated forms in order to provide a structure to the music and as an aide memoire for performance; 2. To write music specifically for the collaboration in a way that offers new directions and approaches towards musical structure, timbre and notation. Musical parameters such as tuning, technique and tempo are investigated in order to consider how a notation for mbira music might serve future generations.
For all five players and the composer, background and culture are important contributory factors to understanding the independent histories and conventions of the mbira and the string quartet that determine how a fruitful collaboration is subsequently developed. This case study was set up to address the fact that despite Dutiro’s wealth of experience, playing mbira (and saxophone) in many different cultural settings worldwide since the 1980s, his previous collaborations had all been ‘fusions’ rather than founded on creativity inspired by dialogue, historical context, empathy and education. In response to a point made by Martin Stokes – ‘music doesn’t simply “flow” across the gap as some, talking more generally about cultural globalization and transnationalism, like to imply’ (Stokes 2012: 99) – Dutiro identifies that ‘the outcome is not a hybrid with mbira hanging on classical music, or strings on the periphery of mbira music. [...] It’s not a hybrid or a fusion but new music if it’s done in a way that has a historical context’ (Interview 20 August 2014).
Audio and visual evidence from eight days exploring creative practice, composer- performer dialogues, and interviews with the mbira player illustrate that the concept of composition needs to be reconsidered in this context as a product that evolves through a highly creative and collaborative process achieved through trial and error, consultation and negotiation. Theories and methodologies from ethnomusicology, sociocultural studies, network analysis, music analysis and intercultural theatre studies will be employed to interpret observations of dialoguing and musicking. The interactions that take place between musicians across stylistic and cultural boundaries are explained and understood through Benjamin Brinner’s overlapping constellations of analytical concepts: interactive network, interactive system, interactive sound structure, and interactive motivation (1997). His theory of musical interaction is implemented in order to deal with abstractions of sound under the rubric of interactive sound structure and abstractions of human organisation under interactive network.
The methods, the creative process and even elements of the dialogue between Dutiro and the string players have strong parallels with intercultural trends in the making of contemporary theatre. For example, Jen Harvie and Andy Lavender present an ongoing theatrical trend to interrogate the roles of text and director by examining ‘the methods of groups who devise theatre collectively, often led by or working with a director, but always with self-reflexive attention to the dynamics and ethics of power and authorship circulating amongst all participating makers’ (Harvie and Lavender 2010: 2). For the musicians, their starting point was the exchange of ideas about sound, not the notation. Similarly, Harvie and Lavender ‘understand devising to be a method of performance development that starts from an idea or concept rather than a play text; [it] is from the start significantly open-minded about what its end-product will be; and uses improvisation [...] as a key part of its process’ (Harvie and Lavender 2010: 2).
Prior to this, over twenty years ago Patrice Pavis (1992) proposed a new way of understanding intercultural theatre practice using an hourglass model which will be evaluated to determine its suitability as a methodology for music performance analysis.
By examining the dialogues and the sounds that have developed through the interactional processes of creative collaboration, an ethnographic approach helps to understand the nature of interculturality in music. A performative vocabulary can begin to be constructed from the discourse and playing that arises directly from the musicians’ interactions. By bringing the conditions of making and hearing, history and culture, to the forefront of research, in preference to the dominant musicological interest in works as self- contained entities (Taylor 2007), the unfolding of events at a practical level deals in turn with cultural difference, social practice and improvisation. Languages of speech, gesture and music are shaped by the practices of communities. A new ‘community’ of musicians provides an opportunity to identify how creative practice can create a new musical language.
Often it may seem that electroacoustic music provides fewer resources and less evidence for musicologists to work on when investigating creative processes. Electroacoustic works are produced in the studio, often composed directly onto disc
9 octobre 2015 26 min
Sustainability, a computer music work’s chance of surviving far into the future, even if the composer and the performer at the première are no longer supporting the work and the implementation technology has long become obsolete and/or una
9 octobre 2015 30 min
1. Introduction L’analyse des processus de création musicale ne cesse d’élargir son domaine d’action vers les musiques faisant appel aux moyens électroniques et informatiques. Les contributions récentes sont nombreuses, notamment dans
9 octobre 2015 27 min
The musical composition process has been studied so far mostly from an individual perspective (e.g. Donin07). Alternatively some studies have addressed the issue of collaborative composition (Donin06). In this study, we are interested in a
9 octobre 2015 31 min
In an autonomous field such as that of contemporary music, or new music as it is commonly called in the American context, it is the creators themselves who are called on to evaluate the work of their peers. This evaluative work is familiar
9 octobre 2015 29 min
La dimension créative de l'interprétation musicale constitue l'un des postulats fondateurs des performance studies : constater la variété des interprétations d'une même œuvre, y mettre de l'ordre, considérer ce qu'elles signifient et
9 octobre 2015 27 min
Since the beginning of recording, there have been debates about the balance of and interaction between the technological and artistic processes at play in the recording studio. It would seem that in classical music, recording has not achiev
9 octobre 2015 30 min
En psychologie cognitive, plusieurs recherches auprès de musiciens experts ont permis de définir ce qui constitue des répétitions efficaces (Parncuttt and McPherson, 2002; Jørgensen and Lehmann 1997), d’identifier le rôle de l'expressi
9 octobre 2015 28 min
This paper presents some key results from a doctoral study undertaken by the author into elite performers’ decision making. Professional concert soloists spend many hours developing and refining their performances via a complex process of d
9 octobre 2015 27 min
It has been well argued that ‘the score’ underdetermines performance in significant ways, leaving room for unique performance outcomes (Cook 2004, Clarke 2012), the products of which underpin the current classical music economy. The attribu
9 octobre 2015 33 min
Following a cross-disciplinary approach, we will explore two different musical improvisation cultures, one issuing from the jazz tradition in the United States, the other from Northern Indian classical named Hindustani music. At the crossro
9 octobre 2015 28 min
When playing an acoustic instrument, the musician applies force from his body to the instrument’s exciter, which is amplified by the resonator. Except for vocal music and electronic music, the hands of the musician are the main vectors of s
9 octobre 2015 31 min
Since the digitization of the realization tapes of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Gesang der Jünglinge (Stockhausen, 1955-56) and their availability for research from 2012 it has been possible to gain new insights into the creative process of the
9 octobre 2015 30 min
Simha Arom and Susanne Fürniss (1992) assert that Aka polyphony is fundamentally pentatonic, yet does not operate under any sense of absolute pitch or fixed interval size. Their groundbreaking study of this phenomenon documents various ins
9 octobre 2015 23 min
The goal of this practice-led research is to apply concepts drawn from ecological psychology, namely affordance and effectivity (J. Gibson, 1979), and also the hallmarks of human behaviour (E. Gibson and Pick, 2003), to the author’s composi
9 octobre 2015 28 min
Bien que la musique d’avant-garde après la Deuxième guerre mondiale ait plus que jamais valorisé la figure de l’« auteur » (le compositeur) au détriment de ses médiations (commanditaires, interprètes, exégètes, etc.), certaines figu
9 octobre 2015 29 min
The study of collaboration between performers and composers is a flourishing area of research, but an aspect of creative work that remains unexplored is contemporary compositions that employ period instruments. These projects add another di
9 octobre 2015 28 min
Serious art music may seem to have lost its relational aspect and to be veering off into modernist oblivion lost in the noise of exponential technological development. Whether or not this is fanciful, there’s no doubt there are challenges —
9 octobre 2015 21 min
The music of Flemish composer Cipriano de Rore (1515/6-1565) was eagerly sought by patrons and printers alike. One of the most coveted of his compositions was the monumental setting of the eleven-stanza canzona in honor of the Virgin Mary b
9 octobre 2015 26 min
9 octobre 2015 01 h 10 min
Prologue Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World in 1931—the same year that Stravinsky began composing his Duo Concertant. Huxley quoted from The Tempest and other Shakespearean plays in his New World, whereas Stravinsky in his Duo quoted from
9 octobre 2015 27 min
The paper gives an overview of several of the surviving live and studio recordings of the song Fire, as performed by the Jimi Hendrix Experience between 1967 and 1969. The pivotal points consist in two versions of the song dating to January
9 octobre 2015 25 min
Entre 1903 et 1904, le compositeur Déodat de Séverac (1872-1921) écrit une suite pour piano intitulée En Languedoc, dans laquelle un ensemble de procédés compositionnels relevant de ce qu'on peut nommer une "écriture imrpovisatrice"
9 octobre 2015 25 min
La dialectique, bien connue dans la critique génétique, entre la reproduction de modèles pré- composés et la transgression de ces modèles est un angle d’approche qui permet de se demander comment un compositeur produit une œuvre origi
9 octobre 2015 30 min
La dialectique, bien connue dans la critique génétique, entre la reproduction de modèles pré- composés et la transgression de ces modèles est un angle d’approche qui permet de se demander comment un compositeur produit une œuvre origi
9 octobre 2015 30 min
Communément appelés par les journalistes sportifs à « laisser parler [leur] créativité » (Natation Magazine, n° 93, 2008), les entraîneures et le musicien de l’équipe de France sont en réalité contraints à composer avec ce qu’ils
9 octobre 2015 29 min
Communément appelés par les journalistes sportifs à « laisser parler [leur] créativité » (Natation Magazine, n° 93, 2008), les entraîneures et le musicien de l’équipe de France sont en réalité contraints à composer avec ce qu’ils
9 octobre 2015 29 min
Dans le champ des musiques actuelles et de la chanson, coexistent deux types de supports : le disque (ou version phonographique) et le concert (ou version scénique). Si ces supports cohabitent, leur statut ontologique ainsi que leur proces
9 octobre 2015 19 min
Dans le champ des musiques actuelles et de la chanson, coexistent deux types de supports : le disque (ou version phonographique) et le concert (ou version scénique). Si ces supports cohabitent, leur statut ontologique ainsi que leur proces
9 octobre 2015 19 min
Collaboration has been a constant feature of electroacoustic music, due to the complexity of the technology. Since the beginning, all laboratories and electronic music studios have involved the presence of different individuals with diverse
9 octobre 2015 24 min
Collaboration has been a constant feature of electroacoustic music, due to the complexity of the technology. Since the beginning, all laboratories and electronic music studios have involved the presence of different individuals with diverse
9 octobre 2015 24 min
Bien que la musique d’avant-garde après la Deuxième guerre mondiale ait plus que jamais valorisé la figure de l’« auteur » (le compositeur) au détriment de ses médiations (commanditaires, interprètes, exégètes, etc.), certaines figu
9 octobre 2015 29 min
9 octobre 2015 25 min
This paper aims at deepening the relationship between digital technology from the one side and compositional thought and techniques from the other, focusing on Marco Stroppa’s music of the late 1980s and early 1990s. This relationship will
9 octobre 2015 28 min
Friedemann Sallis’ Music Sketches (2015) is the first comprehensive overview of sketch studies research. For all its impact on musicology since its rise in the 1970s, this field has only rarely been considered critically, e.g. Thomas M. Whe
9 octobre 2015 01 h 10 min
9 octobre 2015 01 h 36 min
Vous constatez une erreur ?
1, place Igor-Stravinsky
75004 Paris
+33 1 44 78 48 43
Du lundi au vendredi de 9h30 à 19h
Fermé le samedi et le dimanche
Hôtel de Ville, Rambuteau, Châtelet, Les Halles
Institut de Recherche et de Coordination Acoustique/Musique
Copyright © 2022 Ircam. All rights reserved.