Periodic Reporting for period 1 - ARPOEXMUS (Archiving post-1960s experimental music: Exploring the ontology of music beyond the score-performance dichotomy)
Reporting period: 2021-09-06 to 2023-09-05
ARPOEXMUS aims at expanding contemporary ideas about musical archiving (storage and preservation) and conservation (management of heritage assets so as to enhance their significance) by contending with the heterogeneous musical materials and traces that derive from post-1960s experimental music — including instruments, scores, objects (e.g. preparations and instrument modifications), electronic instruments, custom-made devices. The work was divided into 5 Research Objectives (ROs) and 4 Work Packages (WPs).
The questions that this project will address are:
Q1: How do we archive musical works and performances that resist traditional archiving centred on written transmission?
Q2: What role can musicologists play in the process of music conservation, and what can contemporary thinking in the ontology of music offer to archival and preservation work?
Q3: How can musical archiving practices, together with musicology, preserve and illuminate the work of composers who have been marginalized due to gender, race, or disability, thereby counteracting biases in the processes of selective canon formation?
ARPOEXMUS aims to break new ground by researching approaches for the archiving, conservation and study of musics that deliberately challenge the assumptions of permanence and repeatability that the concept of the archive is based on. Work packages (WP) 1–3 compare technologically, conceptually and socially different music- and sound-based art, all of which challenge the ontological primacy of the notated score.
The questions that this project will address are:
Q1: How do we archive musical works and performances that resist traditional archiving centred on written transmission?
Q2: What role can musicologists play in the process of music conservation, and what can contemporary thinking in the ontology of music offer to archival and preservation work?
Q3: How can musical archiving practices, together with musicology, preserve and illuminate the work of composers who have been marginalized due to gender, race, or disability, thereby counteracting biases in the processes of selective canon formation?
ARPOEXMUS aims to break new ground by researching approaches for the archiving, conservation and study of musics that deliberately challenge the assumptions of permanence and repeatability that the concept of the archive is based on. Work packages (WP) 1–3 compare technologically, conceptually and socially different music- and sound-based art, all of which challenge the ontological primacy of the notated score.
All of the WPs have been extensively tackled by now, except for WP4, which will be tackled in the last year of the grant.
WP1: This work package benefitted from a secondment at the Fondazione Isabella Scelsi (FIS), Rome, IT, that happened between April and May 2022. The foundation had just acquired the part of the Mario Bertoncini collection consisting of his objects. However, the collection had not yet been processed by the archivists, and thus represented a blank slate on which to collaborate to be able to devise the most appropriate structure of series and subseries that will determine the organisation and ordering of the collection content. Following the work done on Mario Bertoncini’s collection, I started to work with the McGill Music Library, because they hold the Charles de Mestral collection, which comprises the Sonde subcollection. The improvisation group Sonde was created in Montreal in 1974 out of a course taught by Mario Bertoncini at McGill. While the two collections feature similar problems, in that Sonde created sound sources that are similarly shaped as those created by Bertoncini, the fact that Sonde was a collective endeavour creates a critical difference when compared to Bertoncini’s collection, and I explored what it meant for the Sonde collection to be a sub-collection within a single-author collection.
WP2: This package focused on Gayle Young’s bespoke instruments and her performance practices. After several online and in-person meetings with the composer, in April 2023 I facilitated a 10-day research residency focusing on the following questions:
• What knowledge do you need to perform Young’s music?
• When do you need that knowledge (is there knowledge you need to have BEFORE approaching this music? Is knowledge created only AFTER you learned this music?)
• Whose knowledge is it, once learned? What if it ripples into other authors’ musics?
• What is the role of performer’s intuition and performer’s agency?
• How can you use this knowledge and why? On what occasions?
The research residency was very successful as it generated a lot of material and possibilities. Some of them are being explored in a proposal for a special issue of the journal ‘Echo. A Journal of music, thought and technology, to be submitted soon.
WP3: This work package and the work on AUMI consortium, dedicated to use and promotion of the Adaptive User Musical Instrument (AUMI), has proven to offer many possibilities for future work. This is because the AUMI consortium exemplifies our contemporary way of working, which happens among complex relationships between individuals and institutions, between the private and the public sector. It also creates fluid social formations with no strong institutional powers, increased co-creation of materials, as well as complex platform ecosystems. All this requires us to rethink ownership and custody in the music archive.
WP4: This topic is the object of the final year reflection.
WP1: This work package benefitted from a secondment at the Fondazione Isabella Scelsi (FIS), Rome, IT, that happened between April and May 2022. The foundation had just acquired the part of the Mario Bertoncini collection consisting of his objects. However, the collection had not yet been processed by the archivists, and thus represented a blank slate on which to collaborate to be able to devise the most appropriate structure of series and subseries that will determine the organisation and ordering of the collection content. Following the work done on Mario Bertoncini’s collection, I started to work with the McGill Music Library, because they hold the Charles de Mestral collection, which comprises the Sonde subcollection. The improvisation group Sonde was created in Montreal in 1974 out of a course taught by Mario Bertoncini at McGill. While the two collections feature similar problems, in that Sonde created sound sources that are similarly shaped as those created by Bertoncini, the fact that Sonde was a collective endeavour creates a critical difference when compared to Bertoncini’s collection, and I explored what it meant for the Sonde collection to be a sub-collection within a single-author collection.
WP2: This package focused on Gayle Young’s bespoke instruments and her performance practices. After several online and in-person meetings with the composer, in April 2023 I facilitated a 10-day research residency focusing on the following questions:
• What knowledge do you need to perform Young’s music?
• When do you need that knowledge (is there knowledge you need to have BEFORE approaching this music? Is knowledge created only AFTER you learned this music?)
• Whose knowledge is it, once learned? What if it ripples into other authors’ musics?
• What is the role of performer’s intuition and performer’s agency?
• How can you use this knowledge and why? On what occasions?
The research residency was very successful as it generated a lot of material and possibilities. Some of them are being explored in a proposal for a special issue of the journal ‘Echo. A Journal of music, thought and technology, to be submitted soon.
WP3: This work package and the work on AUMI consortium, dedicated to use and promotion of the Adaptive User Musical Instrument (AUMI), has proven to offer many possibilities for future work. This is because the AUMI consortium exemplifies our contemporary way of working, which happens among complex relationships between individuals and institutions, between the private and the public sector. It also creates fluid social formations with no strong institutional powers, increased co-creation of materials, as well as complex platform ecosystems. All this requires us to rethink ownership and custody in the music archive.
WP4: This topic is the object of the final year reflection.
The work done so far has also already had wider societal implications, given the many collaborations with and contributions to archival institutions. In particular, the project has generated important transferable insights into: the evolution of the media landscape in Europe and Canada and its impact on the arts, an element that is present in all WPs, but that emerges particularly in WP3; how to preserve works across these contexts; how digital cultural heritage can be considered endangered heritage and what to do about it.