Lecture #6

01.09.2022

Knowledge in the Arts #6 Paul Craenen

15.00-17.00 CET, The Royal Academy of Music & Online

The event will be live streamed on our YouTube channel here.

Venue: Kammermusiksalen, Musikhuset, Det Jyske Musikkonservatorium, Skovgaardsgade 2C, Århus

The presentation will be in English.
Moderated by Kristoffer Gansing (International Center for Knowledge in the Arts)

We warmly invite you to the sixth Knowledge in the Arts event which this time will be hosted by The Royal Academy of Music in Aarhus. .

How and when do musicians reflect about their artistic knowledge? Artistic Research is the field where the focus is on the development of new knowledge and directions in and through artistic practice. In this lecture, the composer and researcher Paul Craenen discusses the delicate balance between musical flow, reflection and criticality.

Paul Craenen: Flow, interruption and reflection in musical artistic research

Performing music requires an immersion and dedication that is different from talking or writing about that experience. Nevertheless, without words it is very difficult, if not impossible to conceptualise or integrate musical experience as a central locus of artistic research. Thus, artistic research in music usually relies on an alternation of positions inside and outside musical time. Relying on the first-person perspective of the researching musician, transfer of knowledge and experience from in-time to off-time positions and back is often taken for granted.

In this presentation, Paul Craenen explores limitations and possibilities of artist-researchers to combine positions of artistic proximity and reflective distance. He proposes the concept of musical artistic research as an interruptive practice, in which the systematic and conscious alternation of time positions relative to the musical flow can create the conditions for reflection and criticality.

Bio Paul Craenen

Paul Craenen is a researcher, composer and a frequently demanded expert at the intersection of artistic practice, education and research. He studied piano and chamber music at the Lemmens Institute, Leuven and received a PhD from Leiden University (2011) for artistic research on the status of the performing body in contemporary composed music. His book “Composing under the Skin. The music-making body at the composer’s desk” (2014) has been published by Leuven University Press. He taught piano and experimental music at various music schools and intermedia studies at the Conservatory of Amsterdam. He has been director of Musica, a Flemish organisation for art education, from 2012 to 2018. In early 2018 he was appointed Research Professor and head of the lectorate Music, Education and Society at the Royal Conservatory The Hague. He is also a staff member at The Academy of Creative and Performing Arts (ACPA) at Leiden University, where he teaches as a guest lecturer and is involved as a supervisor for artistic research.

About Knowledge in the Arts
In spring 2021, the International Center for Knowledge in the Arts, launched its lecture series, ”Knowledge in the Arts”. The focus is on transdisciplinary themes and current debates in Artistic Research, both within the Center institutions and in relation to artistic research’s wider relevance in society. The lectures will mainly be given by artists with a research-oriented practice, but also by other voices, relevant to the knowledge of art. This series features speakers and topics that will be of interest across the center’s institutions as well as for a wider public.

You can see examples of previous presentations in our Media Archive: https://artisticresearch.dk/medie-arkiv