Fragment: Accordances - Enactments

Fragment: Accordances – Enactments explores fragments as entities defined by process, reflexivity, and critical interaction with totality. Current musical experience is increasingly shaped by concepts of fragmentation. Listening, creation, and production are often iterative, and imagination and identity in music are similarly fluid, understood not as fixed but as social and curatorial practices. By drawing the long nineteenth century into dialogue with other fields, for example e-textiles, gender studies, and engagement with marginalised musical practices, the project approaches musical practice, interpretation, and repertoire through transhistorical and exploratory lenses. It favours liminalities and processes over result and embraces curation, collation, and reconfiguration as artistic strategies. Fragments, in their openness and historical layering, disrupt fixed narratives and offer dynamic means to rethink musical identity and experience.

In uns bleibt das ewig zage 
Fassen nach den bunten Scherben,
Und im Schatten blasser Tage
Leben wir, weil wir nicht sterben.

Mascha Kaléko, Blasse Tage, in: Das lyrische Stenogrammheft, (Rohwolt, 1990) p. 48

Fragmentation is an essential part of a wide range of musical practices and behaviours; musical performance and musical research often rely upon the deliberate exclusion of “critical splinters” deemed irrelevant to the desired final product and therefore remain unexamined. Musical behaviours of creation and production are themselves often fragmentary and iterative in nature. Experience is mediated through curation and becomes a deliberate act of fragmentary collage, creating new configurations. This behaviour is connected to the shift in perspective on musical identities; no longer seen as fixed entities, they are viewed as behavioural practices of social connection, a result of the aforementioned curation.

Fragments are entities which display complex relationships with totality. Centring research on fragmentation draws attention to the processes of music making and musical experience, and the ideas, materials, and experiences which are neglected or excluded from conventional discourses. Treating fragments not only as a particular type of material, but as the foundational element of artistic practices and musical processes creates a transhistorical space in which fragments are not defined by their origins, but emerge as a mode of perception, generation, and experience.

Through their critical engagement with closed totalities and the accordances between the discarded splinters and open-ended entities, fragments create liminal spaces in which new connections, tensions, and symmetries may be generated. Fragmentation in the twenty-first century is not focused on objects, but is an artistically and interpretationally conditioned mode of experience.

Fragments offer openness and potentiality. These elements bring a potential for fluidity and flexibility into the approaches and performances of older repertoire and the reception of earlier musics and practices into the 21st century, reflecting topics of contemporary salience such as the questions of marginalisation and exclusion, individual and collective identity, and the nature of musical experience and relevance. Fragmentation is no longer a physical characteristic, but a mode of perception and engagement, an invitation to creative intervention and rediscovery.