A JOINT SYMPOSIUM OF THE ARTISTIC RESEARCH PROJECT EMBODYING EXPRESSION, GENDER, CHARISMA BREAKING BOUNDARIES OF CLASSICAL INSTRUMENTAL PRACTICES (EMEGC) AND THE INTERDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH NETWORK IMPLICIT KNOWLEDGE (FORIM)
Date: Thursday, 19 and Friday, 20 September 2024
Location: Anton Bruckner Private University, Linz, Austria
Organisers: EmEGC and FORIM
ORGANISERS AND TOPICS
In the artistic research project "Embodying Expression, Gender, Charisma - Breaking Boundaries of Classical Instrumental Practices" (in short: EmEGC), violinist, composer and scholar Barbara Lüneburg, sociologist Kai Ginkel and flutist-researcher Renata Kambarova investigate how the body of instrumentalists is an essential factor for musical expression, gender performance and charisma in Western classical instrumental practice.
The team systematically explores how implicit knowledge that lies in the bodily performance of instrumentalists can be analysed, extracted and expressed. While doing so, they additionally address corporeal, socially constructed and medial forms of embodiment in the field of instrumental performance and its reception. Methodologically, this raises questions that we reflect on using specially developed methods of artistic research on the one hand (including art works) and sociological practices on the other. The artistic-scholarly core method for researching embodiment - Re-enacting Embodiment - utilises three forms of knowledge that are available to the artists in the project: explicit and implicit body knowledge, which in extreme cases becomes tacit knowledge that is often difficult to grasp but can be fathomed using this method. Based on our research so far, we recognise the body a) as an instrument of thought and b) as a source of knowledge.
The international and interdisciplinary "Research Network Implicit Knowledge" (FORIM–Forschungsnetzwerk Implizites Wissen) is interested in the exchange of information on the phenomenon of human expertise from the perspective of implicit knowledge. FORIM was founded in 2009 by Fritz Böhle (Institut für sozialwissenschaftliche Forschung e. V., Munich), Jörg Markowitsch (3s research laboratory), Georg Hans Neuweg (Institute for Business and Vocational Education, JKU Linz) and Tasos Zembylas (University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna).
Since then, the network has met annually and is aimed at researchers who are interested in the study of human expertise that can be described as intuitive-improvisational, situational, flexible, artistic, creative and, as a result, non-formalisable.
Artistic research, and with it the process of doing art and the artwork itself, are at the heart of this investigation. We therefore provide on this page information on the artworks and academic papers we have produced in the course of our research into the embodiment of expression, gender and charisma in the classical instrumental performance practice. By clicking the badges windows will open that displays the annotated artwork, talks or papers indicated in the title. Information on papers will follow shortly.
ARTWORKS 2023
The Artwork Excellence of Listening by Renata Kambarova, Kai Ginkel and Barbara Lüneburg
A series of 25 posters exhibited at Bruckner University on the occasion of EmEGC' Open House on 29.9.2023
The artwork Excellence of Listening (2023) by Renata Kambarova, Kai Ginkel and Barbara Lüneburg, features the audience of Western classical concerts. It grew out of sociologist Kai Ginkel's investigation of how the term "excellence" is not only a driving factor in the concert landscape of classical music and in its branding, but is also physically embodied by the participants in a circle in which everyone participates, thereby reinforcing the "excellence" of the situation experienced together.
Excellence is experienced through the supreme performance of the musicians and soloists we admire on stage, the masterpieces of the centuries presented to us in the constant canon of the magnificent, through the interior of the concert hall with its symbols of royal excellence, golden chandeliers, ruby red velvet-covered chairs, and through the excellence of listening, concentration and dedication embodied by the individual listeners and the audience as an acting collective.
Thus, excellence circulates and is embodied between a network of acting agents in the classical concert situation.
In our artwork, which consists of a series of twenty five different posters, we juxtapose footage from real concert situations of the Western classical music scene, showing the audience in their collective action, with isolated listening attitudes and bodily postures typical of classical concertgoers, which we re-enacted in the premises of the Anton Bruckner Private University. These postures are an expression of what we call "excellence in listening": postures of the most solemn absorption, superb intellectual attention and critical reflection, sensual, devoted enjoyment, and supreme concentration.
The accompanying texts are all quotes from researchers that appear in the anthology Classical Concert Studies, (Tröndle, Martin (Ed). 2021. Routledge).
Read in combination with the imagery we intend to encourage the onlooker to critically appraise and reflect on the classical concert setting.
Kai Ginkel on the concept of 'excellence' in the conception of the Western classical concert hall, and the development of the artwork Excellence of Listening:
The traditional concert hall is a place that stands for excellence in terms of selection, curatorship, and ambience.
According to musicologist Elena Ungeheuer it provides musicians with a "sacred space" (cf. Thorau 2021,72) for performances and instrumentalists must demonstrate their worthiness of this site.
The audience is also an integral carrier of this cultural excellence, which is thus generated in a collective effort.
The audience in a classical concert is put into specific postures by the spatial environment and the cultural expectations that are associated with it. The listeners' bodies are put into a state of collective discipline.
Through the characteristically immobile seating, the bodies face the stage so that 'the music' becomes the principal focus of attention.
Facial expressions indicate seriousness, attentiveness, and immersion. Even the style of dress is instrumental in embodying excellence as a hybrid element.
Through photographs that are based on our personal experience, our fieldnotes and research in audience footage, we take on a range of observed listening postures by recreating them outside of their venues.
This brings attention to the specifics of embodiment in this context. It indicates a spectrum within which the postures are situated.
In our research process, this spectrum gives us insight into circulating conventions, values and the socio-material achievements of listening practices in traditional concert environments from a perspective that emphasises the role of the body.
Exploring Gestures for airviolin and soundtrack (2023)
Exploring Gestures (2023) is the first composition developed in the framework of EmEGC. It emerged from an exploration of how performers' bodies play a central role in communicating the expression of music. The bodies of soloists on stage, like the music we hear from them, tell a story. Musicians act out not only musically but physically facets of the music they tell. In doing so, they embody different emotions or personalities. In the course of developing Exploring Gestures, Barbara Lüneburg re-enacted the interpretation and analysed the bodily expression of Maxim Vengerov, María Dueñas, Salvatore Accardo, Sergej Khatschaturjan and Janine Jansen and worked out typical postures (see Fig.1). and is based on the analysis of gestures and bodily postures of various violinists that Barbara Lüneburg re-enacted and analysed through her practice of remixing. The video shows the live performance on 30.3.2023 on the occasion of Lüneburg's key note at the EPARM conference in Copenhagen at the Royal Danish Academy of Music.
a photo series by Reinhard Winkler and Barbara Lüneburg
Photo Series RE-ENACTING EMBODIMENT
The photographer Reinhard Winkler artfully captured Barbara Lüneburg re-enacting the soloists Sergej Khatchaturian, Maxim Vengerov and María Dueñas.
ARTICLES
Lüneburg, Barbara. "Knowledge Production in Artistic Research–Opportunities and Challenges" in Music&Practice, Volume 10 (2023)
In this article, I write about knowledge production in artistic research and the opportunities and challenges the discipline offers, interweaving theoretical considerations with examples from practice.
I consider what constitutes artistic research and how it differs from other academic disciplines or the process of art making itself.
I am interested in the conditions necessary for the production of knowledge in artistic research and how, on the one hand, a multi-layered interpretation is fostered on research results expressed through art and artistic practice, but on the other hand, research results can also become ambiguous, making them vulnerable or sometimes questionable from the perspective of traditional academia or even within the discipline.
Lüneburg, Barbara. "Embodying Expression in Classical Instrumental Performance Practice" in Music and Motion. Interweaving of Artistic Practice and Theory, editor: Stephanie Schroedter, mdwPress (to be published in autumn 2024).
The body is the medium through which instrumentalists realize sound, musical ideas, and convey emotion. Their body, simultaneously, is the emotion, and the conveyer of sound and musical idea. Performers use—consciously or unconsciously—gestures and facial expression as well as the staging of the body as a means of expression, communication, and interaction with the audience. Through their corporeality they allow the audience insight into their individual but also staged and culturally shaped personalities. The audience perceives the performers’ intentions and feelings from their posture, movements, facial expressions, gestures, and actions, and reflects these in their own physical and emotional reactions. In doing so, their perceptions are influenced by their tacit body knowledge as well as by the cultural value systems they bring to the concert situation.
In the artistic research project “Embodying Expression, Gender, Charisma – Breaking Boundaries of Classical Instrumental Practices,” funded by the Austrian Science Fund (AR 749-G), Barbara Lüneburg investigates bodily artistic expressions in instrumental playing as an essential part of performers’ musical and cultural expression and of the values they share with their audiences (www.embodying-expression.net). With her team, she asks how boundaries of classical instrumental performance practice can be stretched and how this will affect the relation to the audience. In this paper, Barbara Lüneburg describes the interdisciplinary methodological approach that covers methods from artistic research (including performing and arts creation), discourse analysis and gender studies, and introduces the reader to findings of a pilot project which she conducted in 2021/22.
Embodying Expression, Gender Charisma is funded by the Austrian Science Fund FWF as project PEEK AR 749-G and is located at the Anton Bruckner Private University in Austria. The project has a runtime of forty months starting in August 2022.