Emergence/y. A sound difference

In a famous 1988 interview with Enzo Restagno, Luigi Nono recalled his trip to the Greenland Sea, pointing to the richness of its constantly mutating colours and its contrasting sonic world of silences and powerful acoustic forces. Such extraordinary acoustic events arise from a fraught texture of sound absences and sound presences – a texture in which the unexpected transits prove to be relevant and fragile at the same theme. Can these imponderable shifts in sonic behaviour be read as figures of emergence and as figures of emergency?

Similar to the case of the icebergs, what emerges is often not the totality of a thing but rather a figure of it – a figure that at the same time reveals and disguises something.

How is then emergence related to (full, or phantasmatic) visibility, stability and salvation? Is then emergence not a sheer an-archic event, something that can simply disappear under the brink showing just its own trajectory? Is emergence as exposed, naked precarity only the anticipation of a future loss, or is it the ecstatic fulfilment of a desire?

• Emergence is a space and a motion magnitude (etymologically, ex-mergo literally means I plunge upwards, I un-sink) that becomes a time category – the category of an urgent, always too compressed time span where things can be destroyed or mended: emergency.
• Emergence/y then as an urge, as appeal, as a call to assembly, to action and to resistance, as a physical action, a push, an impetus, as an interruption and as a fight - as an intervention that has to be carried out in a brief, already almost desperately elapsed time.
• Emergence/y: what stands against annihilation, resistance to a force, opposition to (cyclic/recurrent/incumbent) submersion and to merging with something politically, environmentally and technologically violent.
• Emergence/y as the richness of production, of research, of a manner of playing, composing, acting – even – or perhaps in an exemplary way– as the matter and as the experience of sound and as an occasion for artistic research.

Schedule

Times correspond to Central European Time (CET)

October 6

Morning session (11:00–13:00 h)

• 11:00 h: Welcome, introduction
• 11:30 h: Keynote address by Agostino di Scipio: The Emergence of Emergence (soundwise, musicwise, and beyond)
• 12:30 h: Questions

Afternoon session 1 (14:00–16:00 h)
Three 40' presentations by guest speakers (20 min + 20 min questions/discussion),

• 14:00 h: Presentation 1. Guest speaker: Cathy Van Eck (Hochschule der Künste Bern): Amplifying what I hear—on technical and compositional amplification
• 14:40 h: Presentation 2. Ricardo Thomasi (University of São Paulo (USP): Operationalizing feedback-loop in Ecos Studies: Strategies for Performing Audible Ecosystems
• 15:20 h: Presentation 3. Lucia D’Errico (University Mozarteum Salzburg): Rhopophony (performance/presentation)
• 16:00 h: 30' pause

Afternoon session 2 (16:30–19:00 h)
Three 40' presentations (20' + 20' questions/discussion) by guest speakers, focused on historical improvisation

• 16:30 h: Presentation 4. Guest speaker: Niels Berentsen (Haute école de musique de Genève): The Adjacent Consonance Principle. A medieval rule of the octave?
• 17:10 h: Presentation 5. Guest speaker: David Mesquita (Schola Cantorum Basiliensis): Improvised Counterpoint in Spain around 1700
• 17:50 h: Presentation 6. Guest speaker: David Mesquita (Schola Cantorum Basiliensis): Improvised Counterpoint in Spain around 1700
• 18:30 h: Group discussion on the historical improvisation presentations
• 19:00 h: end

October 7

Morning session (10:00–13:00 h)
Four 40' presentations (20 min + 20 min questions/discussion)

• 10:00 h: Presentation 7. Masafumi Oda (Tokyo International Thought-Art Cross (TITAC)): Music Composition from the Outside of Music by using Game Engine
• 10:40 h: Presentation 8. Presentation 8: Daniele Pozzi (Doctoral School for Artistic Research, University of Music and Performing Arts, Graz): Composing (with) Emergence
• 11:40 h: Presentation 9. Presentation 9: Katrina Toner (University of Cambridge: How can a feminist approach to aesthetic philosophy present new compositional possibilities?
• 12:20 h: Presentation 10: Dougal “Henry” McPherson (University of Huddersfield)Sounding-Moving Emergence in Transdisciplinary Free Improvisation

Afternoon session (14:30–18:15 h)

• 14:00 h: Breakout session 1
• 14:45 h: Breakout session 2
• 15:30 h: Wrap-up
  • 16:00 h: 30' pause
• 16:30 h: Presentation 11. Carlo Siega (‘Anton Bruckner’ Privatuniversität): The 'Composing Performer’. Creative approaches and re-interpretation practice after the premiere
• 17:10 h: Presentation 12. Luc Döbereiner & David Pirrò: Emergence in Contingency and Synchronization
• 17:50 h: Conclusion

A virtual event

In view of the current epidemiological situation, the 2021 edition of the Orpheus Doctoral Conference (ODC) will be a virtual event, hosted by Orpheus Institute Ghent, 6–7 October 2021.

The conference keynote speaker will be composer, sound artist and scholar, Agostino di Scipio.

Guest speakers: Niels Berentsen (HEMGE), David Mesquita (SCB), Catherine Motuz (SCB) and Cathy Van Eck (HKB).

Schedule: odc2021.prrll.com/schedule

Join the conference as an observer: https://forms.gle/7hmKBoyghM13hCEz8

Convenors

docARTES PhD students started in 2019:

• Michele Del Prete (docARTES & Leiden Univ.)
• Vicente Parrilla (docARTES & KU Leuven)
• Johann Vacher (docARTES & KU Leuven)

Partners