Creative (mis)understandings - Methodologies of Inspiration

This project aims to develop transcultural approaches of inspiration (which we regard as mutually appreciated intentional and reciprocal artistic influence based on solidarity) by combining approaches from contemporary music composition and improvisation with ethnomusicological and sociological research. We encourage creative (mis)understandings emerging from the interaction between research and artistic practice, and between European art music, folk and non-western styles, in particular from indigenous minorities in Taiwan. Both comprehension and incomprehension yield serendipity and inspiration for new research questions, innovative artistic creation, and applied follow-ups among non-western communities. The project departs from two premises: first, that contemporary western art music as a practice often tends to resort to certain degrees of elitism; and second, that non-western musical knowledge is often either ignored or merely exploited when it comes to compositional inspiration. We do not regard inspiration as unidirectional, an input like recording or downloading material for artistic use. Instead, we foster artistic interaction by promoting dialogical and distributed knowledge production in musical encounters. Developing interdisciplinary and transcultural methodologies of musical creation will contribute on the one hand towards opening up therightly or wrongly supposedivory tower of contemporary composition, and on the other hand will contribute towards the recognition of the artistic value of non- western musical practices. By highlighting the reciprocal nature of inspiration, creative (mis)understandings will result in socially relevant and innovative methodologies for creating and disseminating music with meaning. The methods applied in the proposed project will start out from ethnographic evidence that people living in non-western or traditional societies often use methods of knowledge production within the sonic domain which are commonly unaddressed or even unknown among western contemporary music composers (aside from exotist or orientalistic appropriations of the other). The project is designed in four stages: field research and interaction with indigenous communities in Taiwan with a focus on the Tao people on Lanyu Island, collaborative workshops in Vienna, an artistic research and training phase with invited indigenous Taiwanese coaches in Vienna, and feeding back to the field in Taiwan. During all these stages, exchange and coordination between composers, music makers, scholars and source community experts will be essential in order to reflect not only on the creative process, but also to analyse and support strong interaction between creation and society. Re-interaction with source communities as well as audience participation in the widest sense will help to increase the social relevance of the artistic results. The University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna (MDW) will host the project. The contributors are Johannes Kretz (project leader) and Wei-Ya Lin (senior investigator) with their team of seven composers, ten artistic research partners from Taiwan and six artistic and academic consultants with extensive experience in the relevant fields.

The project aimed to develop transcultural approaches of inspiration (seen as mutually appreciated intentional and reciprocal artistic influence based on solidarity) by combining approaches from contemporary music composition and improvisation with ethnomusicological and sociological research in close collaboration with members of the indigenous community of the Tao on Lanyu island, Taiwan. The team developed various subprojects on the basis of the interaction of field research, participatory action research and dialogical art production, which explored the research goals deeper and had a synergetic effect on each other. On Lanyu a platform of cultural dialog ("Tao Classroom") was established in order to enable the transmission of traditional songs to the younger generation. (Traditional songs are the most important cultural good of the Tao, since their texts represent a collective archive of traditional knowledge.) The project is successfully ongoing independently, reducing the generation gap - caused by discriminatory education politics in Taiwan but also amplified by certain Taboos of the Tao - and triggering new dynamics and ongoing activities of cultural transfer between members of different generations of the Tao. The participating composers/musicians from Austria / Europe created a rich variety of works, moving out of their comfort-zones and (co)creating works beyond their usual practices and work conditions through dealing in different ways with the knowledge and value system the Tao. This helped to open new discourses in aesthetics and in society. The resulting works were presented in Vienna (Weltmuseum Wien, Heldenplatz, open air), Budapest (House of Music) and on Lanyu (Taiwan) and got a lot of attention from peers and from non-academic visitors. Follow-up events are already under discussion. The involved Tao performers expressed that the participation in the closing performances in Europe strongly inspired them to intensify the creation of cultural frameworks within their community and engage themselves as "ambassadors" of their own culture. The concept of "scalable compositions" was explored intensively. The idea, realizing a work (like the adaptation/transformation of a traditional song) in various instances, which can be adapted to various contexts, suiting both, for events in the indigenous community, in a popular music event or in a new music festival, proved to be a fruitful approach and got a lot of attention. Looking back, it becomes more and more obvious, that with this project a particular branch of artistic research is going to emerge, which could maybe - in analogy to "historically informed performance practice" - be named "ethnologically informed creation practice" or - for the sake of simplicity "transcultural artistic research". In the meantime, this branch has become quite relevant in numerous dissertation projects at mdw.