Refiguring Composition: Artistically Researching the Contact between Composition, Improvisation, and the outside World.
Artistic doctoral project at University of Music and Performing Arts, Vienna, 2021–2025.
To be published soon!
Abstract:
Rooted in a composer–improviser’s fascination with a musical composition’s transformative potential, this artistic research project reflects on the composition through investigating it as a trace of creative interacting. It applies an artistic working method of individual and collaborative compositional experimental setups of iteratively combined creative activities, such as notating or playing saxophone. Interwoven with autoethnographic reflection, this yields a spiral creative-reflective path that focuses both on the activities and their traces, such as notations or recordings, as well as the human being’s perceptive transformations. Drawing on artistic and sociological–philosophical specifications of the human being’s interacting with its world such as Jean-Luc Nancy’s or Hartmut Rosa’s, as well as Sybille Krämer‘s and Jean-Jacques Nattiez’s conceptualization of a trace, the project scrutinizes not only the diversity of evolving relations between all activities–traces– participants as transformative tools for each other, but also seeks a new language as a creative-reflective tool in its own right. Through exploring the notion of the trace, as well as creating neologisms such as the musical Geschehen for a specific notion of created sound, a concept of creative practices as being relational and transformative emerges, leading to the notion of a shared creative practice as shared modes of relating. Creative practice such as improvising and composing evolve as epistemological and semantic grids that conceptualize experiences of engaging with traces, alongside an understanding of a composition as a trace that is formed by and affords specific modes of relating to the “outside” world. Artistic results include new vocal and instrumental scores, lead sheets, electroacoustic pieces, and a selection of recordings.
Supervisors: Samu Gryllus, Fredrik Hedelin, Annegret Huber, Tasos Zembylas
Academic publications:
Flick, Birgitta (2025). “The Enchanted Forest: exploring the development of relations in artistic collaborations that combine individual and collective creative practices (in preparation)”. In: Proceedings of the 1st symposium Forum Artistic Research: listen for beginnings. Ed. by Hanns Holger Rutz. Research Catalogue. https://doi.org/10.22501/rc.3877431 (visited on 12/01/2025)
Flick, Birgitta (2020). Du har lärt mig att lyssna: En undersökning av genomsläpplighet i komposition. Master’s thesis. Stockholm: KMH. url: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:kmh:diva-3500 (visited on 12/01/2025).
Flick, Birgitta & Hanno Depner (2016). „Zur Macht des Augenblicks: Fünf Kompositionen und ihre Aufführungspraxis.“ In: Macht und Reflexion: Deutsches Jahrbuch Philosophie. Band 6, 77-80, 143-144, 199-201, 249-252, 319-321, Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag.
Conference presentations (selection):
Flick, Birgitta (2024). Entangled tools and practices: Reflections on the creative collaboration for PlanetWoman. 4th International Network for Artistic Research in Jazz (INARJ) conference. JAM MUSIC LAB Private University for Jazz and Popular Music, Vienna (AT).
Flick, Birgitta (2024). The Enchanted Forest: Exploring the development of relations in artistic collaborations that combine individual and collective creative practices. Forum Artistic Research: listening for beginnings. Gustav Mahler Private University for Music (GMPU), Klagenfurt (AT).
Flick, Birgitta (2024). Circular composition experiments and the Great American Songbook: Artistically researching the relation between older repertoire and contemporary creative practices through notation. European Platform for Artistic Research in Music (EPARM), Ljubljana (SI)
Flick, Birgitta feat. Maja von Kriegstein (2024). How can artistic research contribute to exploring the contact processes and relations that arise in creative situations of improvising with a notated reference or the interaction of improvising and notating? Musicians’ Perspectives on Improvisation Symposium. Exploratorium Berlin (DE).
Flick, Birgitta (2023). Sinnliche Wahrnehmung und leibliche Erfahrung als Grundlage für Praktiken des Komponierens und Improvisierens. 12th conference by Forschungsnetzwerk Implizites Wissen (FORIM). mdw, Vienna (AT).
Flick, Birgitta (2023). Circular compositions for saxophone solo: Following a composition’s transformations through improvisation and collaborative creating. European Platform for Artistic Research in Music (EPARM). RDAM, Copenhagen (DK).
Presentations available online:
Artistic Research Lab, mdw, Vienna: annual presentations of the artistic dissertation projects at mdw.
Live stream from June 14, 2024 (start at 01:39:00):
Scores as tools and transformators in collective practices: Reflections from the creative collaboration for PlanetWoman.
Live stream from June , 2022 (overview of the project & performance of Khumbaka by Chanda Rule & Birgitta Flick w/ Chanda Rule, Ivar Roban Krizic, Gernot Bernroider)