Principal Investigator: Jonathan Impett

Put simply, our common repertory of operational concepts is largely derived from technology; this therefore seems the natural place to look for constructive or explanatory models. Technology is fundamentally constitutive of music, its experience, practices and culture. Like all art, music could be seen to function in the context of a common sense of the possible, of the operations and relationships that it might embody, extend or reveal. This sense of the possible derives primarily from science, technology and their cognates such as natural philosophy or cosmology. Music is literally inconceivable without technologies. They participate in the imagining and apprehending of music, but in a bidirectional process also become part of the broader repertoire of conceptual operations that inform human thought at any given cultural moment. There is a continuum from the ‘hard’ technologies of instruments or reproduction through the materials of composition to the mental models we use to understand music. Engagement with music is thus also technical. The techniques of music are inseparably linked with its technologies of imagining, creation and production.

In our self-consciously technological age above all, technology provides a common set of ideas, metaphors and behaviours. It is the natural place to look for discourse that reaches across the many approaches to composition, sound art and improvisation that characterise contemporary musical activity irrespective of style or genre – including the vast body of inherited work for which we constantly search for new relevance.

At the same time, researchers investigating new areas of computer science and artificial intelligence are posing new questions about the nature of digital objects, concepts and experience. Musical works, we suggest, have much in common with virtual or digital objects. They exist in a unique state of materiality/immateriality: while they are intensely bound to direct experience, to technologies, techniques and materials, this physicality can exist in multiple instantiations, they can be manipulated, engaged with and acted upon as cultural abstractions. In cultural terms, music is the area of human activity in which we deal with the virtual, with the constructive relationship between human affect and abstract structures or formal systems. Digital humanities research and computer-based creation use the same repertory of tools; both are acts of musical imagination extended and explored through technology. The boundaries become increasingly blurred.

Principal Investigator: Catherine Laws

The research cluster addresses the question of subjectivity by means of four discrete but closely interlinked sub-projects, each of which takes an experimental and exploratory approach to the process of performance-making, examining how subjectivity is produced through this process; how expressive strategies are formed through the creative process of developing and/or practising musical materials.

Who is the ‘I’ that performs, and how is that 'I' embodied in the performance? Does that 'I' reveal aspects of itself of which it may be otherwise unaware, and if so, to whom: itself (thereby awakening intrapsychic knowledge) or listeners (thereby increasing interpersonal knowledge)? Does it also seek to protect aspects of itself by masking psychological revelation (in the manner of Borges's 'I', who acts as a public face to privatize subjectivity)? What of that ‘I’ is carried from one performance situation to another, or even from the performance of one piece to another: is there here a core set of qualities by which that 'I' may be known and which projects a common set of characteristics? How is that ‘I’-ness perceived by the performer herself and/or by the audience, and does the performing self expand intrapsychic knowledge ?

The construction of subjectivity and formation of identity have in recent decades been matters of great concern in theories linked to artistic practice. Musicological perspectives on subjectivity gradually emerged in the 1980s and beyond, with the focus shifting in recent years towards reception and the listener. Perhaps surprisingly, though, subjectivity in musical performance remains a neglected area, especially in the field of classical and contemporary practice. Moreover, when the topic of performance is addressed it is usually from a purely musicological perspective; there is very little practice-led, artistic research explicitly concerned with subjectivity. Our project seeks to redress the balance, taking the performer as the prime focus of the research and drawing conceptual models into that frame. The project addresses the question of subjectivity by means of 4 discrete but closely interlinked sub-projects, each of which takes an experimental and exploratory approach to the process of performance-making, examining how subjectivity is produced through this process; how expressive strategies are formed through the creative process of developing and/or practising musical materials. We ask how similar and different these processes are for different performers, with different instruments (and repertoires), different working processes and different performance contexts. Practice and theory are interwoven in this project. For many performers, the discourses of expression and the self in performance are at once all-pervasive and somewhat opaque: fragments of philosophy, psychology, psychoanalysis and notions of embodiment are often entangled with matters of instrumental technique and apparently abstract notions of musical expression into a practice geared towards the generation of a 'personal' and 'unique' musical 'voice'. At the same time, performers rarely engage with more complex accounts of subject formation. This project will bring recent notions of subjectivity in performance into the practical arena, experimenting with their claims, testing their validity in different contexts, and bringing the theories into play with each other. From this, new models of performance subjectivity, identity and agency will emerge.

MetamusicX explores novel performative and compositional creative practices that intersect music (past and future), art, digital humanities, and contemporary philosophy. This research cluster focuses on three primary research areas:

1. Experimental Performance Practices
2. Hypermusic, Artificial Intelligence, and Blockchain
3. Assemblage Theory for Music

In its combination of practice-based research and conceptual investigations, MetamusicX reevaluates the role, function, and purposes of musicians in contemporary society, arguing for a new breed of musicians — ones who are not only skilled in their craft but are also capable of operating at the intriguing boundaries of human and posthuman creativity.

Principal Investigator: Luk Vaes

The HIPEX project traces, reconstructs, and documents historical practices in the performance of experimental post-WWII compositions, deepening our understanding of the role of the performer in the establishing of new repertoire and new performance aesthetics.

The second half of the 20th century saw an exploration of performance practices that was both radical and systematic. The full investigation of extended techniques for each instrument, the decisive pushing of the limits of playability to beyond what’s physically possible, the ruthless questioning of every aspect of traditional notation, the development of new ways to music together, and the position of technology in all of this, impacted performance practice in its diversity as well as fundamentally. This innovation wasn’t always the sole result of composers’ impulses: often, historical performers were directly involved in putting authorial thoughts onto paper, sometimes helping to create new performance practices and starting new traditions. Even a new type of performer emerged: the expert soloist who travels the world to work with composers and premiere and record new compositions dedicated to him. The HIPEX project is set up to scrutinize and document the position of such musicians with respect to the composers they worked with and the scores they played, as well as their influence on the performance practice of the works that they premiered and disseminated, and issues of performance practice of specific iconic works. Next to repertoire, personalities will be researched as well as types of collaborations they were/are engaged in.

Case studies include Mauricio Kagel’s own performance practice of Ludwig van, reconstructions and completions of the compositions and performance practices of his Tactil and Unter Strom, Lachenmann’s Salut für Caudwell, early live electronics, and the personal legacies of particular historical performers. For the purpose of experimenting with the performance practices, as well as to help disseminate the HIPEX project findings, a unique ensemble is established – the O.E.M. Consort (Orpheus Experimental Music Consort). This ensemble is a world-wide first in that it consists of artistic researchers that go out into the world to perform their newly established research outcomes. The ensemble will perform in and outside of Flanders, complementing the existing new and early music ensembles.

Principal Investigator: Tom Beghin

“Haydn, the orator; Beethoven, the philosopher.” These labels have their roots in early 19th-century music criticism. They encapsulate a paradigm shift between an old way of thinking about music as a rhetorical act and a new view of the musical work as independent art. As we perform repertoires by various composers of 1750–1850, we place ourselves at the traditional end of this shift, and focus on rhetorical instinct even in a composer as socially isolated as Beethoven.

This means, however, to expand notions of interactivity. Beethoven may have been notoriously bad with people, but because of growing deafness became all the more alert in his responses to things or technologies. Conversely, Haydn’s music was successful at creating social interaction precisely because of his sensitivity to concrete environments and things.

Our artistic research aims to combine historical materiality and social culture as platforms for modern-day, historically informed performance.

What does it mean, for example, for four men to be seated around a quartet table, and how can an in-character reconstruction of such a set-up help revive specific qualities of a Haydn quartet? When Beethoven had a hearing machine built to go on top of his Broadwood piano, how did this new environment affect his creative process? Can we gain by a multi-sensorial, disability-driven experience of Beethoven’s late piano music?

Absolute premise is the performance on historical instruments—newly built. The new construction of some specific types of keyboards—to fill crucial gaps in our knowledge of the past—happens in partnership with the Early Keyboard Workshop of Pianos Maene (Ruiselede, Belgium). Engaging technology, but resisting teleology, our artistic research revisits familiar scores and explores unfamiliar ones to tell real stories of men, women and their instruments in a period that we so reverently—but stiflingly—call “classical.”

The cluster currently consists of five Doctoral Researchers, one Post-Doctoral Researcher, and two Associate Researchers. Projects include: Beethoven and his Foreign Pianos; From Avant-gardist to Classic: Carl Czerny and Franz Liszt interpreting Beethoven 1827–1857; Rewriting for the Salon: A Practice of Arrangement for Accompanied Piano; The Twenty-first Century Salon: Innovation and Tradition; Composing for the Fortepiano: Idiosyncrasy and Historicity; Time Flexibility in Beethoven’s Piano Sonatas; In the Making: François Xavier Tourte and l’archet de Viotti.

Principal Investigator: Bruno Forment

In one of his many writings, the philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) pleads for the maintenance of a bibliothèque bien garnie. Such a book collection, Leibniz argues, constitutes an indispensable instrument of reform in every realm of human endeavor. There exists one condition for success: the library must excel in its arrangement and accessibility. Self-evident as though Leibniz’s point of view might seem, the issue of orderly, high-speed retrieval is key to realize the full potential of the newly acquired Ton Koopman Collection at the Orpheus Institute. Pitfalls are luring around every corner. The average scholar might take an interest in this acclaimed musician’s personal library as a treasure trove, hunting for first editions or unfindable items. Others will eagerly fetishize it as a series of autobiographical relics, looking for signatures or ex libris of famous previous owners. Without discounting any of the two approaches, Koopman’s library focused on Baroque music and culture has a more sustainable asset, acting as a stimulus to rethink the role of libraries in musical practice and to devise new ways of performing and enjoying the Baroque.

Recent decades have witnessed a redefinition of historically informed performance (HIP) from a rather naïve, utopian quest for the Holy Grail of authenticity, into a self-conscious, critical form of musicking which acknowledges tensions between past and present, performed object and performing subject. Music philosophy and criticism, on the other hand, have produced studies on the peculiarities of pre-Romantic compositions, confronting us with the inconvenient fact that the individual ‘works’ or ‘masterpieces’ we cherish in today’s concert halls might not have been considered as such in their own time.

While having thus paid attention to the what and how of performing Baroque music, HIP has been significantly less concerned with the temporal organization, the disposition, that is, of concerts and recordings. Pre-Romantic compositions are as a rule performed in their entirety. Recitals tend to comb together thematically related compositions into highly predictable formats, more indebted to the listening strategies of Romantic and post-Romantic recitals than to musical presentations in the Baroque. In addition, performers and the recording and publishing industries tend to indulge in the very Romantic museum culture the HIP movement was supposed to resist, upon its full emergence in the late 1960s. What does this state of affairs have in common with, for instance, Buxtehude’s Abendmusiken in Lübeck, the sociétés and salons of eighteenth-century Paris, Carnival opera, or Handel’s appearances at the theaters and learned societies of Rome and London? Shouldn’t we explore formats of production that answer Baroque ways of considering repertoire?

As Michel Foucault demonstrated in his seminal essay Les mots et les choses : une archéologie des sciences humaines (1966), seventeenth- and eighteenth-century knowledge (savoir) was mapped according to rational concerns of logic, measure, and order, favoring, on the one hand, categories of small units, such as Leibniz’s Monaden, and on the other impressive taxonomies of dispersed signs, such as the botanical charts of Carl Linnaeus’ Systema natura (1735). Gilles Deleuze (Le pli : Leibniz et le Baroque, 1988) expanded on Foucault’s view in describing Leibniz’s philosophy and Baroque esthetic in terms of ‘infinite folds’ of space, movement, and time, which tend towards systems in constant flux. In this view, Baroque knowledge and knowhow consist in endlessly chopping up and recombining matter.

Though neither Foucault nor Deleuze’s argument considers music, their views equally apply to Baroque music culture as exemplified by a myriad of instantiations:

the ‘miscellany’ programs of the earliest public concerts and printed anthologies, which, for all their seeming heterogeneity, do propose genuinely coherent tableaux of performative and compositional acts;
the open-ended number structures of cantatas, operas, and oratorios, which aim at a transparent representation of music-poetic, ideological, and other types of meaning through established, but fundamentally interchangeable figuræ, moduli, partimenti, topoi, Pathosformeln (Aby Warburg), extra-musical signs, borrowings, paraphrases, and so on, while simultaneously leaving unrestrained room for revisions, insertions, and extractions—to the extent that every Baroque composition represents but a phase in an (ongoing) artistic process;
lexicography between Praetorius’ Syntagma musicum (1614-20) and Gerbert’s Historisch-biographisches Lexicon der Tonkünstler (1790-2), via the music dictionaries of Brossard and Rousseau, the treatises of Mattheson, and the early music histories of Martini, Hawkins, and Burney, all of which constitute densely ‘folded’ networks of quotes, recorded opinions, earlier writings, marginalia, etc.
Though assembled in the years 1957-2019, Ton Koopman’s library exemplifies early modern ways of structuring information in that most of its volumes contain lists of handwritten keywords (both subjects and person’s names) followed by page numbers referring to passages the owner found noteworthy. Neither referring to any preconceived thesaurus or set of structures terms, nor subsequently collected into a single index or inventory where each term can be retrieved, these lists in front of each individual book constitute a kind of personal knowledge map based on a vocabulary of terms which, on the level of the collection as a whole, remains implicit and intuitive.

Tk Keywords
When transcribed and structured digitally, however, these keywords can gain a whole new range of interest. Not only will Koopman’s personal system itself be rendered explicit and searchable, but the keywords can also provide a direct entry into the content of the books themselves, thus further unfolding and opening up the collection at a deeper level. By bringing the keywords and the pages in the books to which they refer into the realm of linked data, readers will be able to retrace one eminent musician’s reading habits, but also gain an unprecedented tool to disclose a large corpus of texts. By connecting these keywords to digital versions of the books and individual pages, both the library itself as well as the way it was read will become available digitally. In addition, by mapping Koopman’s keywords to existing thesauri and controlled vocabularies, his terminology becomes embedded within a larger system for retrieving and linking information.

By furthermore using these combined sets of terms and keywords, focused on issues of musical creation and performance, for yet further digital resources—other texts, sound and video recordings, images, etc.—we can start building a detailed and dense web of interlinked resources. In that way, it will open doors to fresh presentations and new understandings of Baroque music in general. For each Baroque composition to become fully comprehensible to a modern listener, it must be re-retrievable (re-perire) so that its internal grammar and position in the greater taxonomy of repertoire become clear and distinct in relationship to precedents and antecedents alike. Romantic, linear standards can be of little help here; rather, one must take recourse to a flexible, open-ended system whereby constituent compositional and other discourses become nodes in networks of related utterances, which can be permuted (e.g., recombined with other ‘nodes’) and extended (with new compositions, writings, lectures, …) at will.

Hence, if we want to exploit the Orpheus Institute’s new library to its full potential, we need to embrace digital networks, making profitable use of hypertextual databases and non-linear, user-defined methods of audio-visual retrieval—the libraries of audio streaming services, deejays, game level editors, and music production apps. Such a digital, well-disposed Baroque music library can broach larger questions about the relation between musicians and books, codified knowledge and know-how, thus becoming the dreamed apparatus for future musicking.