Research
About the project
Introduction
'Creative Practice in Contemporary Concert Music' is a three year study at the University of Oxford - one of the four project strands that make up the AHRC Research Centre for Musical Performance as Creative Practice [go to Links to visit the Centre's website]. The Oxford strand of the project focuses on the creative practices that emerge in the collaborative work between composers and performers. Despite the sharp division of labour between these roles that traditional concert culture often presents, much contemporary music is produced through creative processes that are highly distributed and interactive. This project investigates these creative interactions through the specific circumstances of 1) the preparation, and delivery, of first performances of newly commissioned works; and 2) the creative dynamics of improvisation/collaborative composition - both kinds of circumstance conceptualised within the framework of distributed creativity.
The work has three broad aims:
- to study in detail the creative interactions of performers with composers in the specific context of preparing and presenting performances of new works
- to examine a range of notation, preparation and performance practices in contemporary music
- to investigate and interrogate the distributed creativity between composer and performer in contemporary performance, and in so doing to revive a broad notion of improvisation that has been sidelined in the history of performance.
By the end of the project, new understanding will have been gained of the different ways in which composers and performers engage with one another in the creative negotiation that goes into the complex and interestingly ill-defined interface between compositional, interpretative and performative creativity. Since the project involves different kinds of composer/performer interaction by featuring a range of composition/performance circumstances, the project will yield case-study insights into a number of distinct distributional contexts (solo performance, small instrumental ensemble, collaboratively composed/improvised). It will place these new empirical investigations within the context of documented composer/performer interactions from the latter half of the twentieth century, and will develop a view of late twentieth- and twenty-first-century performance practices that incorporates different perspectives on notational explicitness, technique and ‘instrumentalism', collaboration, improvisation, and the aesthetics of determinism/indeterminism.
Methods
The project uses a variety of methods for investigating distributed creativity:
- systematic survey and analysis of documented accounts of post-WWII composer/performer collaborations
- qualitative analyses of diary data, interviews and recorded discussions/rehearsals featuring a number of composer/performer/ensemble interactions
- quantitative analyses of practice and performance data (from MIDI and/or sound recordings)
Primary material for the project will be a number of new works for specific performers commissioned from composers working in associated university music departments around the country. In order to facilitate the sharing of knowledge, skills, and access to performers, composers and specialist facilities, three project workshops will be held in conjunction with these and other universities, taking advantage of their complementary expertise in contemporary composition and performance, and drawing in a wider range of composers, performers and cognate researchers. These interactions will contribute to the Performance Studies Network, and will disseminate knowledge and awareness of contemporary musical creativity out from the network to performing/composing communities and ultimately a wider public audience.