Call Doctoral Artist-Researchers 2023

PI: Tom Beghin (tom.beghin@orpheusinstituut.be)

Declassifying the Classics combines historical materiality, social culture, and communicative contexts as platforms for modern-day historically informed performance. Historical instruments are studied as tools for musical expression, but also as objects in their own right. Through reconstruction, enactment, and embodiment the cluster revisits familiar scores and explores unfamiliar ones to tell stories of men, women, and their things during a period that has stiflingly been called “classical.” One focus during the following years will be late-Beethoven, applying perspectives of materiality and disability to a long-term study of his late piano music and string quartets.

Profile 

Candidates are urged to develop a doctoral project that is dependent on one or more of the keyboard instruments already available at the institute. In addition, they should:

• Have experience as a performer on historical instruments;
• Have an interest in the technology of historical instruments;
• Assist in creating proper conditions for the daily use and maintenance of the keyboards in our collection;
• Be willing to develop skills to help document and publish the cluster’s work, such as web or graphic design, video-recording and editing, or score transcription;
• Explore collaborative methods for artistic research and actively connect with other members of the cluster.

Overview keyboard instruments: 

The Orpheus Institute has developed a collection of newly built historical keyboards as a laboratory for the study of late 18th  century and early 19 th -century music. Viennese fortepianos by Stein (1786), Walter (1800), and Streicher (1816) are the backbone of this collection. But unique are the replicas of the two non-Viennese pianos that Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827) owned: his French Erard (1803) and his English Broadwood (1817). These were built as part of the research project “Beethoven and his Foreign Pianos.”

We presently house an exclusive collection for research in Beethoven performance on historical pianos. More broadly, the collection facilitates advanced research into the music of the Viennese classics (Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, and contemporaries), and allows for a comparison with the other major centers of Paris and London.

The collection currently consists of the following instruments:

1. Harpsichord Johann Leydecker (Vienna, 1755; original in Steiermärkisches Landesmuseum Joanneum, Graz), built by Martin Pühringer in 2004: five octaves FF–f3, with Austrian multiple-broken bass octave;
2. Fortepiano Johann Andreas Stein (Augsburg, 1786; original in MIM, Brussels), built by Chris Maene in 2016: “Viennese” prell-action, five octaves, FF–f3;
3. Tafelklavier Ignaz Kober (Vienna, 1788; original in Kunsthistorisches Museum,Vienna), built by Chris Maene in 2007: Viennese stoss-action, five octaves,FF–f3;
4. Fortepiano Anton Walter (Vienna, ca 1795; original in Deutsches Nationalmuseum, Nüremberg), on loan from Pianos Maene: Viennese prell-action, five-and-a-half octaves, FF–c4;
5. Pianoforte Erard Frères (Paris, 1803; original in Oberösterreichisches Landesmuseum, Linz,one of the three extant Beethoven pianos), built by Chris Maene in 2016: French stoss-action, five-and-a-half octaves, FF–c4;
6. Fortepiano Nannette Streicher (Vienna, 1816; original in Historisches Museum Basel), built by Chris Maene (2021): Viennese prell-action, six octaves, FF–f4;
7. Pianoforte John Broadwood & Sons (London, 1817; original in Hungarian National Museum, Budapest, one of the three extant Beethoven pianos), built by Chris Maene in 2013: English stoss-action, six octaves, CC–c4;
8. Pianoforte Boisselot & Fils (Marseille, 1839), restored by Chris Maene in 2021: French stoss-action, six-and-a-half octaves, CC–g4.

In addition, the following instruments, owned by the PI, may be brought to the institute for particular projects:

1. Clavichord in Saxon style (ca. 1760), built by Joris Potvlieghe in 2003; five octaves (FF–f3);
2. Fortepiano Gottlieb Hafner (Vienna, ca. 1830), restored by Chris Maene in 2010: Viennese prell-action, six-and-a-half octaves (CC–g4).

As part of a partnership with Pianos Maene (Ruiselede, Belgium), it is possible, finally, to request that a certain instrument from Pianos Maene be put on loan to the institute: this would need to be justified and discussed well in advance of a well-circumscribed project.

PI: Bruno Forment (bruno.forment@orpheusinstituut.be)

Established around the Ton Koopman Collection, a comprehensive library focused on the Baroque, Resounding Libraries aims to rethink the multifaceted role of libraries in artistic practice. The cluster is developing innovative tools and sustainable strategies for the digital retrieval and artistic reprocessing of archived musical knowledge. It furthermore seeks to critically remap music within the intermedial data space of the present, past and future, questioning standard formats of music performance and creation.

Profile 

Resounding Libraries is looking for doctoral researchers (performers, composers, producers, sound designers, etc.) addressing one or more of the following topics:

• Intermedial perspectives on (Neo-)Baroque aesthetic and compositional logic, both on the micro and the macro level—from schemas and topoi to concert programming;
• Practice-based revitalizations of the epistemological frameworks underlying seventeenth- and/or eighteenth-century musical composition and performance;
• Artistic possibilities of knowledge graphs and Semantic Web with regard to the seventeenth and/or eighteenth century.
• Particularly welcomed are candidates with: a proficience in European languages other than English; a multidisciplinary background demonstrated by experience or education; an active interest in Digital Humanities; familiarity with post-structuralism, critical theory, actor-network theory, and/or New Historicism.

PI: Luk Vaes (luk.vaes@orpheusinstituut.be)

HIPEX is a collective of artistic researchers applying methods of HIP music making in order to critically engage with 1960s-70s performers and their performances of experimental music.

Profile 

HIPEX is looking for doctoral researchers to investigate one of the next topics or areas of interest in the framework of a doctoral project:

• the artistry of pianist Geoffrey Douglas Madge. The output of this prolific specialist of virtuosic and complex 20th C music – recordings and scores – will serve as primary research fundus, together with personal access to the pianist himself. Topics under scrutiny will include pianistic performance technique, interpretation (work- and career-level development and evolution), performer-composer relationships, position in the historical and contemporaneous landscape of comparable performers, and intellectual views on music making. The candidate must be equipped to perform the repertoire typical of the Madge collection (e.g. Xenakis, Sorabji, Stockhausen), and speak and write fluent English.
• performance vs. compositional (work) aesthetics
• conducting
• performer-composer relationships
• the development of interpretative traditions
• open works (open structure, improvisation, graphic scores,…)

PI: Jonathan Impett (jonathan.impett@orpheusinstituut.be)

Music, Thought and Technology (MTT) investigates the fundamental role of technology in shaping thought and practice in music. MTT explores the present and future reconfiguration of the practices, artefacts and understanding of music. Its researchers are all active practitioners in contemporary and electronic music, improvisation and sound art, pursuing individual and collective projects in artistic research.

Profile 

MTT has an opportunity for doctoral researchers with an artistic research project in one of the following areas:

• Creative strategies in AI and machine learning;
• New models of collaboration between technologically-facilitated creative practices;
• STS (Science and Technology Studies) approaches to music history;
• New material/software approaches to music/sound art creation;
• Design methodologies in creating new technical objects;
• Innovative approaches to computer-assisted composition.

PI: Paulo de Assis (paulo.deassis@orpheusinstituut.be)

MetamusicX explores novel performative and compositional creative practices that intersect music (past and future), art, digital humanities, and contemporary philosophy. This research cluster focuses on three primary research areas:

1. Experimental Performance Practices (deconstructing musical works to transcend traditional concepts of ‘interpretation’);
2. Hypermusic, Artificial Intelligence, and Blockchain (investigating future modes of artistic creation at the intersection of music, digital art, AI, and complex notational systems);
3. Posthumanism in Music (articulating practice-based relationships between Assemblage Theory, Hyperobjects, different forms of New Materialism, and Posthumanism).

In its combination of practice-based research and conceptual investigations, MetamusicX reevaluates the role, function, and purposes of musicians in contemporary society, arguing for a new breed of musicians — ones who are not only skilled in their craft but are also capable of operating at the intriguing boundaries of human and posthuman creativity.

Profile 

Candidates should:

• be accomplished musicians and have an interest for the most recent technological innovations;
• have a passion for creative and transformational artistic practice;
• foster a keen interest in writing and publishing;
• display a profound interest in critical thinking, contemporary thought and philosophy;
• conduct a doctoral project that connects to at least one of the above mentioned areas of research.