[conspicuum.infra .x] I.

 

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CONTEPTUAL FRAMEWORK

 

Throughout the program, participants are invited to situate their work within the shared conceptual framework guiding the residency’s forthcoming edition:

 

SOURCE, SUBSTANCE, AND STRUCTURE: Performance as Musical Knowledge—Genealogies and Futures

 

These terms function as interdependent analytical fields rather than a prescriptive theme. Together, they direct attention toward the inheritances from which performance emerges, the material and perceptual processes through which it becomes actual, and the relations through which it acquires coherence, generates form, and transforms across historical time.

 

The framework accommodates multiple, potentially divergent artistic positions. Participants are neither asked to illustrate a theme nor expected to converge upon a unified interpretation. Instead, these terms provide a shared critical vocabulary for formulating questions, testing assumptions, and situating practices within broader critical, musical, historical, cultural, social, material, technological, ecological, institutional, and philosophical contexts.

 

 

SOURCE

 

Source designates the genealogical, material, cultural, institutional, and mediating conditions through which percussion performance becomes situated and intelligible.

 

In percussion practice, source concerns the materials and transmission systems through which musical propositions reach performers: scores, notations, recordings, oral histories, pedagogies, traditions, technologies, instruments, objects, spaces, and realizations. It also encompasses instrument-making, material provenance, cultural circulation, institutions, canons, exclusions, and historical narratives governing what may be selected, remembered, rehearsed, legitimized, reproduced, transmitted, and heard.

 

Source also names the embodied, situated, and historically sedimented knowledge carried by percussionists and ensembles. Technique, memory, coordination, bodily habit, listening, touch, responsiveness, and collective experience are not neutral vehicles for repertoire; they are inheritances that condition musical possibility, intelligibility, authority, and meaning.

 

Participants may consider:

– From which materials, histories, ecologies, institutions, and relations does performance emerge?

– Which embodied, tacit, or inherited forms of knowledge sustain performance?

– How do notations, instruments, technologies, institutions, and pedagogies shape interpretative judgment?

– What follows critically from understanding percussion performance as materially, historically, culturally, ecologically, and socially situated?

– How can source function simultaneously as inheritance, resource, constraint, and critical method within practice?

 

 

SUBSTANCE

 

Substance designates the material, embodied, sonic, temporal, spatial, and perceptual processes through which percussion performance becomes present, differentiated, and intelligible.

 

For the percussionist, substance arises through modes of actuation: striking, rubbing, scraping, shaking, damping, pressure, velocity, rebound, resistance, gesture, and touch, together with continuously changing relations among body, implement, surface, instrument, resonant space, and auditory attention.

 

In ensemble practice, substance emerges through relations among bodies, instruments, objects, technologies, and spaces. Attack, articulation, timbre, balance, pulse, density, resonance, decay, effort, coordination, and attention are continually constituted through collective listening and reciprocal adjustment as performance contingently unfolds.

 

For listeners, musical substance takes shape through perception, expectation, recognition, uncertainty, association, memory, and bodily response. Percussion performance can therefore be understood as configuring conditions under which sound, noise, presence, material agency, and musical thought emerge within situated experience.

 

Participants may ask:

– How does performance focus, interrupt, distribute, or intensify embodied attention?

– How do contact, resonance, decay, memory, and judgment become audible?

– What relations emerge among notation, transmission, improvisation, embodiment, and perception?

– How do instrumental action and collective interaction constitute musical substance itself?

– Can percussion transform established perceptions of sound, noise, time, material, effort, collective agency, and relation?

 

 

STRUCTURE

 

Structure designates the processes through which musical relations acquire coherence, generate form, and transform within performatively constituted temporal experience.

 

Structure is not assumed to reside fully within a score, notation, or inherited analytical model. It may emerge through attack, recurrence, density, stratification, interruption, resonance, decay, gesture, spatial disposition, choreography, and distributions of attention. Participants examine how formal relations are actively enacted in performance—and how performance can disclose, reorganize, exceed, or contest historically established conceptions of a work.

 

Within solo and ensemble practice, this inquiry concerns how actions initiate change, how decisions circulate, how authority emerges, how responsibility is distributed, and how coordination, divergence, or independence becomes consequential. It addresses relations among notation and agency, bodily action and emergent form, setup and spatial organization, and institutions through which practices are learned, authorized, and presented.

 

Participants may consider:

– How can performance establish coherence without suppressing difference, instability, contingency, or ambiguity?

– How is agency distributed among performers, instruments, objects, and technologies?

– Which relations become structural, and which remain tacit, marginal, or excluded?

– How do notation, rehearsal, memory, and material histories organize experienced form?

– Can percussion practice generate responsive, transformable, and nonhierarchical modes of organization?

– What does structure mean under the concrete conditions of percussion performance?

 

Together, source, substance, and structure provide a framework for examining performance’s genealogical conditions, material embodiment, perceptual actualization, and relational organization: the processes through which percussion practice generates, sustains, contests, and transforms musical form within historically situated performance.