Dissertation
Laborinth II: Thinking as experiment- 472 meditations on the necessity of creative thinking and experimenting in the performance practice of complex music from 1962-today
The thesis wishes to examine the pathways of thought underlying the creative act of music making and the performance practice of complex music from the late twentieth and early twenty-first century.
- Author
- Arne Deforce
- Date
- 14 November 2012
- Links
- Full text available in Leiden Repository
Making music is basically research that is practically oriented, experimental
and based on knowledge. Musicians for whom performance practice is an art are also
inherently the practitioners of science. Science, because artists depart within their
research practice from an artistic premise which they want to resolve through their
work; but also science in the sense of the development of technique because their art
of bringing a score to life is based on a certain technical knowledge and skill: the
‘science-art-ship’. Musicians possess know-how, an implicit knowledge which takes
shape in the practice of playing music. They have a theoretical knowledge and
awareness that their technical know-how and skill are based on experience which
immediately allows them to test a new score against the physical reality of their
instrument and convert this into music practice. The premise and the research into
whether a work works or does not work both belong to the domains of the arts and
scientific research. The question of whether in every new score and every new
performance a new kind of science of art is needed, a new kind of know-how, a new
kind of knowing that results in a new interpretive art, lies at the basis of performance
practice as research.