[conspicuum.infra .x] I.

 

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RESIDENCY PROGRAM FOR PERCUSSIONISTS AND PERCUSSION ENSEMBLES

[October 2026 - June 2027]

 

An international residency examining the genealogies, material conditions, and future possibilities of solo and ensemble percussion as performance-based musical knowledge.

 

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PROGRAM AT A GLANCE

 

Program period: October 2026–June 2027

Format: Four online seminars followed by an on-site residency

On-site location: Bled, Slovenia (EU)

Final presentation: Seventh Bled Contemporary Music Week

Application deadline: September 15, 2026

 

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FORMAT

 

Stage I. | October 19, 20, 2026

- 2 online seminars

- Participants present their artistic practices, performance methodologies and works in progress

- Q&A

 

Stage II. | December 16, 17, 2026

- 2 online seminars

- Critical inquiry and practice-led experimentation centered on SOURCE, SUBSTANCE, AND STRUCTURE: Performance as Musical Knowledge

- Participants develop performances, research processes, and methodologies through critical reflection and exchange

- Q&A

 

Stage III. | June 2027

- Performances, lecture-performances, percussion laboratories, and research presentations at the seventh Bled Contemporary Music Week in Bled, Slovenia

 

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ABOUT THE RESIDENCY

 

[conspicuum.infra .x] I. is an international residency advancing percussion performance as a historically situated, materially specific, and publicly communicable mode of musical knowledge. It convenes percussionists and ensembles within an extended research framework, moving from critically articulating participants’ practices toward performances, lecture-performances, percussion laboratories, and research presentations at the seventh Bled Contemporary Music Week in Bled, Slovenia (EU).

 

The program unfolds through four online seminars and a concluding on-site residency. This structure affords participants continuity to develop performances, recordings, artistic research, writing, and experimental formats through presentation, dialogue, listening, analysis, experimentation, rehearsal, documentation, and critical reflection.

 

Participating percussionists and ensembles are invited to question inherited conventions, develop works in progress, and formulate interpretative or research-led projects. Each contributes embodied, technical, historical, material, and relational knowledge to the collective inquiry. The residency therefore approaches percussion performance not as the delivery of predetermined content, but as a situated, reflexive, and generative inquiry.

 

Rather than treating performance as the secondary realization of a preconstituted musical object, [conspicuum.infra .x] establishes a reciprocal process in which sources, techniques, memories, materials, technologies, setup architectures, and decisions remain open to collective examination. Instruments, objects, bodies, documents, spaces, and sounds are understood as active, mutually conditioning participants in an evolving artistic situation.

 

Within this framework, participants investigate how performance knowledge is inherited, embodied, and transformed; how musical propositions encounter instruments, objects, bodies, and technologies; how contact, excitation, resonance, decay, listening, memory, and judgment generate form; and how rehearsal becomes a site of discovery, analysis, and knowledge production rather than preparation.

 

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MENTORS

 

Dr. Alastair White 

Urban Megušar, Double M.Mus.

Dr. Niki Zohdi

Dr. Dré A. Hočevar 

 

 

COORDINATOR

 

Brina Kren