Footnotes, a composition written between 1983 and 1985 by a composer allegedly named William Brooks, was recorded between 2011 and 2018 by guitarist Stefan Östersjö and sound engineer Jez Wells, with the help of William Brooks, musicologist. It became evident to the three collaborators that the overall project required the construction of a set of different identities for each participant: guitar, guitarist; score, composer; hardware, engineer. This chapter traces the construction of, distinction between and eventual representation of those identities. It considers the extent to which a single entity – personality, place, artifact or historical event – can be regarded as a collection of irreconcilable differences, whether those differences can be constituted as a series of masks or persona and whether anything can truly be said to reside behind those masks.

This polyphonic audio paper addresses the relation between master and apprentice in the music conservatoire, and gives voice to the central human and non-human agents in this context. We aim to explore the power structures that constitute a structural framework for these relations, with regard to the agency with which students shape their individual interpretations, and therefore also to the role of imitation in instrumental music teaching. Master classes have arguably been seen as the pinnacle of the master–apprentice tradition, and have had a central role within higher education in Western classical music. It has regularly been claimed that such classes are effective for student development (see Hanken, 2008; 2011; Hanken and Long, 2012; Hanken, 2015; 2016; 2017) although, until recently, research on master classes has been quite sparse (see Hanken, 2008; 2011).

Results from a qualitative study of teaching and learning of musical interpretation in a master class setting—first articulated in the form of an ethnodrama (Holmgren, 2018; 2020; Nguyễn and Östersjö, 2020; Saldaña, 1998; 2003; 2005; 2011; Salvatore, 2018), written by Holmgren—constitutes the point of departure for the audio paper. Our staging of Holmgren’s ethnodrama as a Hörspiel constitutes an artistic research process, through dramatical and musical composition (Olofsson, 2018). The research process originated in sound, as well as in questions related to musical performance; ultimately, through the many layers of analysis and artistic production, the final outcomes are again manifest in sound. Originating in music education research, the study seeks a better understanding of how the dynamics between teacher, student and music institution can be better utilised in curriculum development. Hence, the audio paper, and the Hörspiel that it contains, constitutes a central result of the study (see further Holmgren, 2020) in artistic form as a sonic and multivocal artefact. We ultimately propose that the future for instrumental teaching in the conservatoire lies in the creation of situations that allow for sharing experiences of performative knowledge. Hereby, teacher and student can work together towards the goal of fostering an individual musician’s voice (Gorton and Östersjö, 2019), highlighting the importance of personal autonomy, situatedness, and an analytical awareness of institutional and societal power structures. Hence, the study points to perspectives that may contribute to curriculum development in higher music education, specifically with regard to instrumental music teaching.

Centred around a video essay, this exposition aims to develop an understanding of subjectivity within a collaborative chamber music context. Drawing on the theory of situated cognition (see for example Brown, Collins, & Duguid, 1989) and the concept of subjective ‘voice’ in performance (Cumming, 2000), the presentation develops the model proposed by Gorton and Östersjö (2016 and 2019) in which a ‘discursive voice’ may emerge from the process of composer–performer collaboration.

These ideas are explored through a study of the early rehearsals of David Gorton's composition ‘Cerro Rico’, for soprano violin and charango. This is a very slow piece, and while the two instrumentalists both operate at this extreme of the tempo spectrum, they do so guided by different conceptions, one metronomic and the other taxonomic, of how this should be notated; the charango player works with a very slow metronome mark of quaver = 15 while the violinist plays mostly in large note-values: breves, longs, and dotted longs. From these opposed positions, the performers find a shared understanding of time.

Through an appraisal of video footage taken from the first rehearsals of ‘Cerro Rico’, it is argued that the malleable character of coordination, shaping, and timing that is afforded in performance by the extreme slowness of the piece creates the conditions for the emergence of a discursive voice, compounded from the contributions of the two performers and the composer. The ‘collaboration’ between composer and performers can be conceived as being situated within this discursive voice, manifested as a sense of shared ownership of the materials.

This chapter discusses chamber music performance from the concept of discursive voice, previously proposed by the two authors. It takes two recently premiered compositions by David Gorton, for charango and soprano violin, and for two guitars, premioered by Östersjö, with Mieko Kanno and Jessica Kaiser in 2019, as point of departure. Different methods are used in the study of the two collaborations, combining qualitative and quantitative methods. The results suggest that the model of discursive voice is efficient in describing the nature of the interactions between the two performers and the score. 

The Global Hyperorgan is an intercontinental, creative space for acoustic musicking. Existing pipe organs around the world are networked for real-time, geographicallydistant performance, with performers utilizing instruments and other input devices to collaborate musically through the voices of the pipes in each location. A pilot study was carried out in January 2021, connecting two large pipe organs in Piteå, Sweden, and Amsterdam, the Netherlands. A quartet of performers tested the Global Hyperorgan’s capacities for telematic musicking through a series of pieces. The concept of modularity is useful when considering the artistic challenges and possibilities of the Global Hyperorgan. We observe how the modular system utilized in the pilot study afforded multiple experiences of shared instrumentality from which new, synthetic voices emerge. As a long-term technological, artistic and social research project, the Global Hyperorgan offers a platform for exploring technology, agency, voice, and intersubjectivity in hyper-acoustic telematic musicking.

The move ‘outside’ of the concert hall has repercussions for listening and creative practice beyond simply resituating ‘music’. The building of an environmentally specific instrumentarium draws onin situexploration and cultivation of affordances, but also on the embodied pre-existent knowledge of the artists concerned. A sense of space/place and strategies of listening work together both to situate emergent creative practices within a landscape and to take the affordances of that landscape, the instruments constructed there, and embodied musical experience forward into completed artistic and musical works.

This audio paper is an exploration of the conceptual ideas for, and the sonic results of, a site-specific day-long installation/performance in the Gothenburg harbour presented at the Gothenburg Art Sound Festival in October 2016. The piece is titled Invisible Sounds, A ‘stethoscope’ towards sounds unheard, and its aim was to create a performative situation where the participating artists, as well as audience and by-passers, could explore the complexity of urban noise. An aim with the project was to highlight and make ‘visible’, or heard, concealed soundings in order to reveal “invisible mobility below the surface of a visual world” (Voegelin, 2014, p.3). By creating a series of interactions between human and environment, as with the immediate interaction between performer, aeolian guitar and the wind on site, and further enhanced through the use of sensors and hydrophones to create sensation beyond normal human perception, the installation presents a widening of the performed space, such as defined by Denis Smalley (Smalley, 2007). With an Arena space set in an urban soundscape the installation introduces what we would like to think of as a Nested Ecological Space. Or, more specifically in this setting: A Nested Ecological Sound and Performance Space.

The original (live) installation tries to raise the awareness of this (nested) totality by means of an aesthetic/affective experience (which of course is not possible to represent through a stereo recording); not just space, not just environmental sounds, not just performance, but all this together.

In connection to this the paper also addresses the difference between the two concepts coupling and relation as discussed by Alexander Refsum Jensenius (Jensenius, 2007) and sets these in relation to what Elisabeth Grosz (Grosz, 2008, p.72) writes about sensation versus perception.

The audio paper discusses the installation by revisiting its artistic materials but also through a multi-layered display of auto-ethnography, documentary materials and analysis.

Higher Music Performance Education, as taught and learned in universities and conservatoires in Europe, is undergoing transformation. Since the nineteenth century, the master-apprentice pedagogical model has dominated, creating a learning environment that emphasises the development of technical skills rather than critical and creative faculties. This book contributes to the renewal of this field by being the first to address the potential of artistic research in developing student-centred approaches and greater student autonomy. This potential is demonstrated in chapters illustrating artistic research projects that are embedded within higher music education courses across Europe, with examples ranging from instrumental tuition and ensemble work to the development of professional employability skills and inclusive practices.

Bringing together diverse and experienced voices working within Higher Music Education but often also as professional performers, this edited collection pairs critical reflection with artistic insight to present new approaches to curricula for teaching interpretation and performance. It calls for greater collaboration between Higher Education and professional music institutions to create closer bonds with music industries and, thereby, improve students’ career opportunities. Teaching Music Performance in Higher Education will appeal to scholars, performers, teachers, but also students whose interests centre on innovative practices in conservatoires and music departments.

This chapter focuses on the concepts that have driven the development of Artistic Research in the Nordic countries. Acknowledging, like other regional perspectives, that there are many differences between countries and programmes within them, the chapter aims to bring out key issues informing Artistic Research. In particular, it sheds light on the disposition to include the quality of the arts practice as one criterion in research assessment to meet a “dual requirement.” The chapter also reflects on the various relations of artists with the arts and science worlds and with an institutionalized academy. It concludes that the next challenge in the Nordic countries is a consideration of how art, and artistic research outcomes, might have social and political impact.

This chapter is a set of reflections on the process of making Inside/Outside, an installation built on a concept by Nguyễn Thanh Thủy (VN) and developed in collaboration between The Six Tones (VN/SWE), the choreographer Marie Fahlin (SWE) and sound artist Matt Wright (UK). We discuss the choreography of gender (Foster 1998) in the performance of traditional Vietnamese music and the role of the body in the play with gendered identity which is launched in performance of the piece. 

Qualitative analysis was part of the working method and was carried out by all the participating artists. The study of Inside/Outside focusses on 3rd and 1st person perspectives, where the latter has been approached in two ways: in interview sessions with the three performers and in coding sessions where the coding and the annotations have all referred to the  subjective meaning of the gesture. In 2015, the installation was enhanced by new headphone tracks in which the three performers express their individual experiences of performing the choreography in the piece and reflections on the ways in which they have been socialised into being musicians in their respective cultures. Here, the division between fictive and authentic identities is challenged through the activation of the voice of a narrator (Trinh, 2010). The chapter suggests, by reference to Gadamer’s concept of play, that the process of creating Inside/Outside constituted a situation in which the subjectivity of the individual artist is in a sense bracketed by the rules of the emerging artwork (Gadamer, 2008). Hence, when the artists engage with the body images at play in the choreography of gender in a specific culture, moving in-between different layers of collective and individual identity becomes possible through the rules of the game at play. 

This video article explores the embodied experience of migration by revisiting the process of making Arrival Cities: Hanoi. This piece of experimental music theatre sought a new format for politically informed theatre that would be responsive to the challenges of a globalized society. It is built on ethnographic fieldwork carried out by the Vietnamese/Swedish group The Six Tones, in collaboration with director Jörgen Dahlqvist and the composer Kent Olofsson.

The role of this ethnographic process was manifold. It was a means of a political engagement, which also created images that could be shared and transformed in the performance. In Arrival Cities: Hanoi, the stage was set so that the three performers could play their instruments, perform choreography, and tell stories. A central aim was to make the individual memories of the performers a cornerstone of the dramaturgy. We are interested in how memory is embodied and how performative ethnography can constitute a method for an ethically and artistically grounded practice, within which we also emphasize the role of empathy and the sharing of individual life stories.

In this video article, we give particular attention to the choreographies that were recorded and created as part of this process. Intercultural music and theatre operate in a liminal space between traditions, where aesthetic choices are difficult to negotiate. Without trust and empathy, these negotiations cannot reach beyond the surface. In Arrival Cities: Hanoi, composer, director, and performers were all engaged in such learning processes, and the music as performed can be seen as the embodiment of a particular narrative, grounded in an intercultural collaboration.

This paper proposes a method to facilitate labelling of music performance videos with automatic methods (3D-Convolutional Neural Networks) instead of tedious labelling by human experts. In particular, we are interested in the detection of the 17 musical performance gestures generated during the performance (guitar play) of musical pieces which have been video-recorded. In earlier work, these videos have been annotated manually by a human expert according to the labels in the musical analysis methodology. Such a labelling method is time-consuming and would not be scalable to big collections of video recordings. In this paper, we use a 3D-CNN model from activity recognition tasks and adapt it to the music performance dataset following a transfer learning approach. In particular, the weights of the first blocks were kept and only the later layers as well as additional classification layers were re-trained. The model was evaluated on a set of 17 music performance gestures and reports an average accuracy of 97.9% (F1:77.8%) on the training set and 85.7% (F1:38.6%) on the test set. An additional analysis shows which gestures are particularly difficult and suggest improvements for future work.

This article approaches listening practices and the role of technological mediation within ecological sound art, building on findings through the artistic research practicesof the two authors. Through documentation of the authors’ ecological sound art practices of aeolian guitar performance, curation, composition, performance on found objects and field recording, we argue that phenomenological variation is inherent to the use of technology across all these forms of performative responsivity, as well as in the analytical forms of listening enacted through stimulated recall and micro-phenomenology. By unpacking the agencies at play in ecological sound art, we discuss how these artistic practices afford “unexpected ways” (Arteaga, 2017, p. 25) to knowledge. The article thus attempts to provide insight into human and non-human agencies at play in phenomenological approaches to ecological sound art and technological mediation, activated through listening.

This paper draws on artistic explorations of territorial and spatial forces through analysis of projects set in the natural landscape, in a specific indoor site or at the threshold between the two. Specific attention is given to the artistic processes at play in the transformation of materials created/collected in the natural environment when shaped for presentation in an indoor location. What is the relation between being and becoming in this liminal space? According to Erwin Straus, the impetus to this process is the pathic moment of sensation, a moment which evolves in two dimensions: as an unfolding of the world and of the self (Straus 1965). Louis Schreel argues that in Deleuze and Guattari, artistic practice activates a process in which «the work ‘captures’ forces at work in the world and renders these sensible. Its effects are above all real and not merely imaginary: the image is not a mental given but a concrete, existing reality» (Schreel 2014: 100). Here, Deleuze distinguishes between the percept – landscape in the absence of man – and affect, the non-human becomings contained in the artwork. This paper wishes to unpack these processes through a study of two concrete instances of artistic practice, aiming to create immediate interaction between musician and environment, in which either of the two authors took part.  

Interwoven Sound Spaces is an interdisciplinary project which brought together telematic music performance, interactive textiles, interaction design, and artistic research. A team of researchers collaborated with two professional contemporary music ensembles based in Berlin, Germany, and Piteå, Sweden, and four composers, with the aim of creating a telematic distributed concert taking place simultaneously in two concert halls and online. Central to the project was the development of interactive textiles capable of sensing the musicians’ movements while playing acoustic instruments, and generating data the composers used in their works. Musicians, instruments, textiles, sounds, halls, and data formed a network of entities and agencies that was reconfigured for each piece, showing how networked music practice enables distinctive musicking techniques. We describe each part of the project and report on a research interview conducted with one of the composers for the purpose of analysing the creative approaches she adopted for composing her piece.

Musical performance is a multimodal experience, for performers and listeners alike. This paper reports on a pilot study which constitutes the first step toward a comprehensive approach to the experience of music as performed. We aim at bridging the gap between qualitative and quantitative approaches, by combining methods for data collection. The purpose is to build a data corpus containing multimodal measures linked to high-level subjective observations. This will allow for a systematic inclusion of the knowledge of music professionals in an analytic framework, which synthesizes methods across established research disciplines. We outline the methods we are currently developing for the creation of a multimodal data corpus dedicated to the analysis and exploration of instrumental music performance from the perspective of embodied music cognition. This will enable the study of the multiple facets of instrumental music performance in great detail, as well as lead to the development of music creation techniques that take advantage of the cross-modal relationships and higher-level qualities emerging from the analysis of this multi-layered, multimodal corpus. The results of the pilot project suggest that qualitative analysis through stimulated recall is an efficient method for generating higher-level understandings of musical performance. Furthermore, the results indicate several directions for further development, regarding observational movement analysis, and computational analysis of coarticulation, chunking, and movement qualities in musical performance. We argue that the development of methods for combining qualitative and quantitative data are required to fully understand expressive musical performance, especially in a broader scenario in which arts, humanities, and science are increasingly entangled. The future work in the project will therefore entail an increasingly multimodal analysis, aiming to become as holistic as is music in performance.

This paper discusses musical gesture from an understanding of musical perception as embodied and enactive, also drawing specifically on Denis Smalley’s [(2007). Space-form and the acousmatic image.Organised Sound,12(1), 35–58] analysis of performed space. I will provide examples of how choreographies (performed by musicians, with and without their instruments), new music (for Vietnamese and Western instruments), installations, and video art have all been drawn from analysis of gesture in Östersjö’s performance of the guitar compositionToccata Orpheusby Rolf Riehm [1990.Toccata Orpheus. Munich: Ricordi]. In Riehm’s piece, the bodily action of the performer is treated as an intentional compositional parameter and the notated structure thus generates a specific choreography in performance. InGo To Hell, this approach is taken further towards the development of a gesture-based compositional practice, where composition is understood, not as the organisation of sound objects, but as the structuring of gestural-sonic objects. 

This paper discusses the development of artistic collaboration during the global lockdown, related to the COVID-19 pandemic. The art work under study involves the author’s practices of ecological sound art and intercultural collaboration in collaboration with Canadian composer and improviser John Oliver. A primary outcome of this work was the album Isolation Journal, released in 2020, in the midst of the pandemic. One feature of Isolation Journal was how it revisited site-specific recordings made in Vietnam, on the countryside north of Hanoi, for an installation made by Östersjö in collaboration with Nguyễn Thanh Thủy and Matthew Sansom [Östersjö, Stefan, and Thanh Thủy Nguyễn. 2016. “The Sounds of Hanoi and the After-Image of the Homeland.” Journal of Sonic Studies 12. https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/246523/246546]. Through remote interactions, and by building a complex sampler instrument using Östersjö's recordings of Aeolian đàn đáy, a traditional Vietnamese lute, as well as field recordings from the site, Oliver and Östersjö created the album Isolation Journal through remote interaction. This in turn became a fundamental building block when the author's Vietnamese/Swedish group The Six Tones took the initiative to develop a scene for telematic performance at Manzi Art Space in Hanoi. This series started out with a concert with John Oliver, The Six Tones and guest performers from Hanoi in July 2020. Building on audio and video documentation, as well as on qualitative interviews with the participating co-performers, an analysis of the emergence of discursive voice [Gorton, David, and Stefan Östersjö. 2019. “Austerity Measures I: Performing the Discursive Voice.” In Voices, Bodies, Practices: Performing Musical Subjectivities, edited by Catherine Laws, William Brooks, David Gorton, Nguyễn Thanh Thủy, Stefan Östersjö, and Jeremy J. Wells, 29–79. Orpheus Institute Series. Leuven: Leuven University Press] is drawn from these two internally linked artistic projects. The paper develops the analytical framework of tele-copresence, a synthesis of the contrasting concepts of telepresence and copresence, as a means for analysing the virtual presence which emerges through such remote musical interaction. 

Our contemporary, globalised society demands new forms of listening. But what are these new forms? In Listening to the Other, Stefan Östersjö challenges conventional understandings of the ways musicians listen. He develops a transmodal understanding of listening that is situated in the body—a body that is extended by its mediation through musical instruments and other technologies. Listening habits can turn these tools—and even the body itself—into resistant objects or musical Others. Supported by extensive multimedia documentation and drawing on examples from the author’s own artistic projects spanning electronics, intercultural collaboration, and ecological sound art, this volume enables musicians to learn how to approach musical Others through alternative modes of listening and allows readers to discover artistic methods for intercultural collaboration and ecological sound art practices.

This book is closely linked to a series of cutting-edge artistic works, including a triple concerto recorded with the Seattle Symphony and several video works with ecological sound art. It represents the analytical outcomes of artistic research projects carried out in Sweden, the UK, and Belgium between 2009 and 2015.

This paper discusses the function of listening in intercultural musical collaboration, with reference to a number of examples taken from the author’s practice, within the Vietnamese/Swedish group The Six Tones. Through the lens of Pierre Schaeffer’s concepts of musical and musicianly listening, the paper suggests that inter-cultural exchange takes place in a liminal field between traditions. This demands a particular openness which can be developed by operating musicianly listening, a form of listening which actively seeks to “innovate in the facture of sound objects

Artistic research in music is now at a generational stage of development. How should it deal with its own maturing? From a kaleidoscope of individual pursuits, ethos and methodologies have emerged to encompass more distributed approaches. This transformation has taken place in parallel with changes in the dynamics and structures of culture, its institutions and constituencies. Artistic research maintains a productive dialectic between its potential status as discipline or as practice. It has developed topoi, tropes and its own canon of cases, texts and figures. How does it negotiate relationships with institutions, disciplines and bodies of theory while retaining the critical perspective of the artist?

This chapter discusses the agencies of composer, performer and sound engineer respectively, and further of non-human agents such as score, instruments (widely defined), the concept of authenticity in the making of the premiere recording of William Brooks composition entitled Footnotes, composed  between 1983 and 1985, but never performed in its entirety before this recording by Stefan Östersjö. With the collaboration of Jez Wells, sound engineer, and William Brooks, a 45-minute LP was produced which aim to reconstruct the historical sound of certain musicians and recording technologies. The entire working process was documented on video and analysed using qualitative research methods. Early in their work it became evident to the three collaborators that the overall project required the construction of a set of different identities for six types of participant: guitar, guitarist; score, composer; hardware, engineer. This chapter—itself an intertangled multilogue of mutable voices—traces the construction of, distinction between, and eventual representation of, those identities in the final recordings, but most of all, through an analysis of the extended collaborative process.  

This chapter investigates the relationship between the fluid practices that frequently characterize the work of contemporary musicians, and the more solid roles of performer and composer that continue to hold sway in contemporary music. Focusing on a case study of the collaborative creation of Forlorn Hope for eleven-string alto guitar and electronics, by Gorton and Östersjö, the chapter analyses the processes that lead from research and experimentation with particular guitar tunings and playing techniques, through a more conventionally compositional phase, to the first public performance of the piece. The chapter demonstrates how the affordances of both the instrument in the hands of Östersjö and the particular tuning specified by Gorton combined with improvised discoveries, and the ‘filtering’ force of a piece by Dowland, result in a piece whose creative ecology is distributed across a variety of timescales and practices.

The word ‘expression’, when applied to music, has a comfortably familiar ring to it. However, on careful scrutiny it turns out to be more elusive than one might think. Intrinsic to musical expression is the idea that within music there is something to be expressed, and that this might be reinforced (or undermined) by the performance strategies adopted. The issue becomes more complicated when one asks whether the ‘something’ in question equates to inchoate feeling, to apprehensible meaning or to both in variable proportions. This chapter reviews historical approaches to musical expression and argues that the concept of Werktreue still shapes much of our thinking and teaching in this area. This leads to a consideration of the respective roles of composer, performer and audience, generating a diagrammatic matrix which is progressively modified throughout the chapter. In its final, most dynamic version, the matrix proposes a ‘field of musical expression’ in which the roles of composer, performer and listener interact. The authors suggest that the time is ripe for more interdisciplinary research on musical expression, where a fusion of approaches—from music psychology and computing to performance studies and artistic research—may be the key to a deeper understanding.

This chapter discusses a composition for eleven-stringed alto guitar by the Swedish composer Christer Lindwall. Titled Topography of the (One), this piece may be understood as a meta-composition that reflects on the pre-conditions—both material and philosophical—for its stages of becoming. It thereby holds a special place in the compositional output of Lindwall, whose work has, since the late 1980s, been associated with the practices of New Complexity—composers such as Brian Ferneyhough and Richard Barrett. The conceptual nature of this composition, and its direct quotations from a series of contemporary French philosophers launched an interpretative process that led to a staging that would—as Steven Schick wrote in his discussion of the process of learning Ferneyhough’s Bone Alphabet—“shape and make inevitable an interpretive context which steers the piece in performance” (Schick 1994, 133). The first performance was to take place in a production titled “Words and Music” during the Transistor Festival in Malmö, Sweden, curated by the Swedish playwright and director Jörgen Dahlqvist. A dialogue was launched between Östersjö and Dahlqvist that resulted in a staging that focused entirely on the creation of a sonic framework for the performance. The dramaturgical means were the addition of electronic sound, first by the creation of an introductory tape part, and, second, by doubling up the recited fragments with sampled voice of the same performer, also creating a sonic questioning of the unity of the “one.”[1]The compositional strategies, launched by the composer’s philosophical reflections, in turn become the source for a series of observations regarding musical time, which we address by returning to Deleuze’s writing in Difference and Repetition(1994). 

This chapter approaches the question of subjectivity in the musical practice of composer and performer through a discussion of the emergence of ‘voice’. Part 1 describes a theoretical model by which the subjectivities of performer and composer can be understood in terms of this emergence, arguing that a musician’s ‘voice’ is continually defined through interaction with cultural and psychological tools, such as scores, compositional systems, and musical instruments. These ‘voices’ are explored through the ways they combine within a collaboration to form a ‘discursive voice’. Part 2 presents an analysis of four video recordings made of Austerity Measures I for ten-string guitar by David Gorton, performed by Stefan Östersjö at the ORCiM Research Festival in 2014. This composition requires the solo guitar player to cut materials away across a series of repetitions, replacing them with silence. The analysis draws on quantitative measures of timing and performer movements, and qualitative measures of perceived phrasing structures and performance gestures. While each of these analytical methods alone provides some insight into the performance strategies in the recordings, in the shaping of phrases as materials are cut away, and the structural significance of bodily movement, a much richer understanding is sought through their combination. In doing so the analysis aims to shed light on the interrelations between the embodied knowledge of the performer and the musical structures in the score, and further, between the subjectivities of composer and performer unfolded through the composition and performance of Austerity Measures I. Ultimately this chapter aims to provide analytical evidence for the ‘discursive voice’ within the artistic practice of the authors.

This chapter outlines the role of subjectivity and intersubjectivity in the creation of Arrival Cities: Hanoi, a piece of experimental music theatre with documentary film. The piece seeks a new format for politically informed theatre which is responsive to the challenges of a globalized society. A central concept for the dramaturgy was to make the individual memories of the performers a cornerstone for each situation. Hence, similarly to how the script in verbatim theatre is drawn from interviews with people’s experience of a real-life situation (Forsyth & Megson, 2009), the dramaturgy emerged, as it were, from the creation of situations that would evoke the lived experience of the performers. The stage is set up so that the three performers either play their instruments or tell stories in a position at the front of the stage, where three microphones on stands are placed. The storytelling was developed from memories of encounters with people in migration zones in Hanoi, but would even more draw on personal memories from the city.

Arrival Cities: Hanoi aims to create a space where the boundary between fiction and documentary is dissolved.  While it has been essential to remain in what the performers perceive as the authentic experience in the storytelling, the audience cannot really know whether the stories told by the performers are authentic experiences or scripted dialogues. In  the piece, the documentary material forms part of a multi-layered narrative, without laying out the footage as a documentation. The storytelling places the performers on stage as individuals rather than as actors, an approach which is essential to the political aims with the production. This presence in the moment of performance accompanies the images of the street vendors and other people in the documentary.

Empathy and the sharing of individual life stories became the central nodes in the making of Arrival Cities: Hanoi. It is a piece of music theatre without a script, but with a musical and dramaturgical structure. The role of the documentary is manifold. It is a means for a political engagement but also creates memories and images that can be shared and transformed in the performance. Intercultural music and theatre operate in a liminal space between traditions. Aesthetic choices are therefore difficult to negotiate. Without trust and empathy, these negotiations cannot reach beyond the surface. Intercultural collaboration always demands from each individual to give up a piece of the self. In ArrivalCities: Hanoi, composer, director, and performers were all engaged in such learning processes.

This chapter discusses Vietnamese soundscapes with a particular interest in the politically and culturally embedded complexity of their history. An account of the history of sound art practices in Vietnam is drawn from interviews with artists who have been central to these developments. Further, the authors argue that these practices have emerged out of an engagement with the rapidly shifting soundscapes of the country, also often triggered by a wish to activate memories of lost sounds.  Finally, the chapter also refers to the authors’ collaboration with the filmmaker Trịnh Minh-hà, on the music for her most recent film, Forgetting Vietnam, the making of which spans the short history of sound art in Vietnam, and which engages with memory and forgetfulness in ways that are coloured also by the particular perspective of diaspora. 

   The chapter gives special attention to what Schafer would call the ‘lo-fi’ character of much of the soundscapes found in the natural environment in Vietnam. The density of imprints from human activity is high, also on the Vietnamese countryside. In the city, on the other hand, the soundscape is also characterized by the sound of guestworkers from the countryside, providing yet another perspective on the multi-layered sonorities of Vietnam. 

This article offers an analysis of the function of listening in the musical practice of the Vietnamese/Swedish group The Six Tones, based on video documentation recorded between 2006 and 2011. A discussion of the function of openness, drawing on Gadamer, and the distinction between ‘musical’ and ‘musicianly’ listening suggested by Pierre Schaeffer provides the ground for an understanding of mutual learning in cross-cultural artistic practice. Östersjö and Nguyễn identify the same principles in the making of two music theatre works, Idioms (2010–11) and Arrival Cities: Hanoi (2014–15) together with the Swedish playwright and director Jörgen Dahlqvist. The authors, who are both performers in the group, argue that true listening must build on trust that also allows the participating artists to accept the opacity of the other. The ethics implied by the notion of the ‘right to opacity’ also become the ground for a discussion of a politics of listening. Here, the authors claim, following Attali, that the political dimensions of intercul- tural musical practice can be traced in the hybridity that characterizes the artistic output.

This paper discusses the soundscape of Hanoi and of the countryside north of Hanoi in the Bac Ninh province with the experience of the two authors as artists in two collaborative projects, Arrival Cities: Hanoi and Que/Homelands. The content is structured in three layers, a conversation between the two authors on their individual experience of the projects, a jointly written text which takes a more distant perspective to the topic and a series of video and audio files taken from the two artistic projects. While the two projects were completely independent, this paper identifies ways in which they complement each other and, taken together, the sound art collected within the projects may have a further political meaning. The authors suggest that the shifting soundscapes of Vietnam are a direct reflection of social and political change in the country.

This Element demonstrates how a combination of stimulated recall and collaborative autoethnographic strategies can be applied to artistic and scholarly work at the intersection of ethnomusicology and practice-led-research. The authors relate recently collected material from fieldwork in Vietnam to the long-term method development within the Vietnamese/Swedish group The Six Tones, of which three authors are the founding members. The discussion centers around the inter-subjective forms of stimulated recall analysis, developed through the creative work of this innovative intercultural music ensemble. The aim of this Element is to create a decolonized methodology—for both music performance and research—and it provides a detailed account of this method development starting in 2006. Furthermore, the authors discuss how this practice was successfully shared with three master performers in the south of Vietnam as part of a collaborative project in 2018–2019.

These site-specific improvisations were recorded on a stony shore by Edsviken, north of Stockholm. Here there is water passing between stony shores and cliffs, in sight of apartments, villas, boat houses and Ulriksdals slott, a castle from the 17th century. The area is replete with the sounds of boat engines and the distant motorway, water both still and stirred, distant bells and all manner of land and water birds.  Stefan Östersjö plays aeolian guitar, an acoustic instrument, with strings extending out from the bridge, strung around trees on the site. The extended strings allow the performer to capture harmonics played by the wind, but also to control their pitch, and the number of strings playing. Katt Hernandez plays a violin with a low scordatura. She is focused on extending the sound and voice of that instrument through twin practices of playing with a varied array of improvising musicians from all walks of life, and of playing with animals, birds and all manner of inanimate entities in long walks across all the cities where she has lived. Here, she played to unite the sounds on the site with the sound worlds created by the aeolian guitar through the multi-faceted use of extended techniques drawn from those years of listening. These respective ecological sound-art practices seek a connectedness to place through immediate interaction with the elements at play on the site. Although a particular stillness characterized Edsviken on this day, in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, the amount of activity is also striking. Not only do a few motor boats occasionally pass at a distance, but ducks sometimes dominate the soundscape, while the ever changing sonorities of the waves on the shore continue to ornament the shifting inflections of the duo improvisations. So they played at Edsviken one afternoon in July – the water, the motors, the birds and Stefan and Katt – on an outcropping of the stoney shore, between the forest and the water.

The "Consort Set in Five Parts" by British composer David Gorton is a composition which is about music from the 17th century, not in the sense of history, but rather as a journey: a personal exploration of the music of that period. Rather than playing it, Gorton "plays with" this music, as he puts it. His works are neither pure editing nor pure composition, but are somewhere in between. The original sources are always present, but are transformed into something unfamiliar. In this work, the similarly title work by William Lawes is transformed and commented on in a small consort setting of period instruments, with the addition of the contemporary 11-string alto guitar. the piece forms part of a great number of works created by David Gorton in collaboration with the Swedish guitarist Stefan Östersjö. 

John Dowland’s pavan Lachrimae was one of the hits of the early 1600s: musicians all over Europe made their own versions of it. The English composer David Gorton (b. 1978) proves that Dowland’s fascination endures, with this album of music that has its points of departure in Dowland, linking his time and ours over a span of 400 years – with a dig at some contemporary politicians along the way.

Devil’s Water is a piece of ecological sound art recorded by Bennett Hogg and Stefan Östersjö at Devil's Water, Northumbria, 21-22 Maj 2013. On site, Hogg and Östersjö built a sculpture of a guitar placed in a tree, strung with fishing line to trees down by the shore. The recordings feature Hogg playing violins, bowed by sinking the body into the current, and Östersjö performing on the guitar-violin-tree sculpture. Mixed and edited at The Music Studiosand at Culture Lab, University of Newcastle.  The video was created by Merrie Snell, using documentary footage from 2013 as well as additional shootings made with Hogg and Östersjö at Devil's water in August 2016. A first film version was premiered at Panora cinema, during the Transistor Festival in Malmö in May 2017. This audio and video installation, using the same material, was premiered at Cheeseburn Sculpture Gardens, and screened in the Chapel on June 29-30 2019.

The production of the soundscape recording in 2013 was carried out by Hogg and Östersjö within a two year artistic research project with The Landscape Quartet, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, headed by University of Newcastle. A DVD with the film version of the piece will be released in the Orpheus Institute series, Leuven Univertsity Press in 2020. 

Inspired by this freely adapted couplet from the prominent Vietnamese poet Nguyễn Duy, which he wrote thinking of his compatriots in foreign lands, this concert’s unique piece, Exercices d’étrangeté I (Exercises in Estrangement I) by Sandeep Bhagwati, revolves around the notions of proximity and distance, closeness and farness, familiarity and estrangement, expressed not only through music, but also through words and images.

The soloists from different musical and geographical backgrounds, each with their own tradition (popular, baroque, jazz, experimental, interdisciplinary) and context (Vietnam, Sweden, Canada, Québec) rediscover and reimagine their instruments and traditions by immersing themselves in various musical situations devised by the composer. Short segments are arraigned and layered into a rich musical journey that lets each performer become familiar with the “strange” artistic universes of their friends and travel companions in this musical adventure.

Footnotes is a composition by the American composer Bill Brooks from 1983-86. This recording also constitutes the first complete performance of this highly unique and demanding solo work for the instrument. The process of creating this version of the piece is discussed in a recent book chapter by Brooks, Östersjö and the sound engineer Jez Wells. The artistic process has been documented and analyzed as part of a research cluster exploring musical subjectivity at the Orpheus Institute in Gent. 

Gaman að kynnast þér // Pleased to meet you! 

An encounter between two performers of the Icelandic ensemble Nordic Affect playing baroque instruments, two members of the Vietnamese group The Six Tones playing traditional Vietnamese instruments, and two musicians from the Intelligent Instruments Lab at University of Iceland. Each musician brings their individual instrumental skills and the performance practice of their instrument, and their cultural resonances, to a production based on the attentive listening characteristic of free improvisation, and the explorative approaches characteristic of experimentation with electronic media. The production was produced by Nordic Affect,  in collaboration with the ERC-funded Intelligent Instruments Lab. The concert was produced with funding from The Icelandic Ministry of Culture’s Music Fund and Reykjavík City. 

The music of the Swedish, but Paris-based, composer, Madeleine Isaksson, is at the core of this concert, and not least the premiere of her new chamber work, Infiltrations where the concert hall organ mixes with electric guitar and acoustic instruments. Isaksson’s music is characterized by her clear, poetic touch, which can often be heard in her chiseled sounds and long, musical lines. Regarding the almost 20-year-old work Fibres, Isaksson talks about the thread as a musical metaphor. A long, drawn-out musical line becomes surrounded and ornamented by the various instruments. In the new work, Isaksson’s choice of organ and electric guitar in the instrumentation is tonally motivated, to bind the ensemble together. 

This portrait CD presents an opportunity to examine almost the full span of Isaksson’s career as a composer, through works composed between 1998 and 2022. The album features the guitarist Stefan Östersjö in three works, including Far (2011) for alto guitar and electronics, as well as Infiltrations (2022) for pipe organ, electric guitar and chamber ensemble. The earliest of these works is Fibres (2004), the creation of which became the beginning of the collaboration between Isaksson and Östersjö. This collaboration has entailed explorations of multi-stringed instruments like the 10-string guitar (in Fibres) and the 11-string alto guitar (in Far), as well as the timbral and dynamic range of the electric guitar in Infiltrations. 

This portrait album with compositions by Madeleine Isaksson is released on CD but is also available in Dolby Atmos as a digital download. 

The composer's programme note on the CD reads: 

Locust wind, rattle and hum (2002-2013) for guitar and electronics was written for the Swedish guitarist Stefan Östersjö. It belongs to a series of pieces I have written for solo performer and electronics. Like in the previous pieces of this series (Elpia II, STRINGendo, Flautando), the playing of the performer is transformed into MIDI data. The MIDI data is processed on four independent layers by a computer program I've written which then control a sampler, playing all sorts of sounds and noises previously recorded from the particular instrument. Pitches and velocity values can be transformed, notes can be delayed, a played note can trigger many other notes etc. Each of the processing parameters can either be exactly determined, or it can be defined as a random interval within which the processing will be carried out. The live performance keeps the piece fresh while the fact that processing is done on four separate layers enables the performer to trigger complex musical textures. Furthermore, „tape“ parts are played back in some sections of the piece.

• Executive Producer: John Oliver
• Editing and mixing: Rainer Bürck
• Mastering: John Oliver
• Cover photo: Reimo Võsa-Tangsoo
• Cover design: Seiya Oliver
• Booklet design: John Oliver