Musical Transformations

Transformations is a project that wishes to enable contemporary art music to face the challenge of the multicultural society of today by means of creating meeting points where sound artists, composers and performers from any possible cultural background can come together in a context of mutual learning.

Purpose and research questions

The main purpose with the artistic research on Musical Transformations is to provide reflective and interpretative layers to the collaborative musical productions themselves. The research team needs to be made up of researchers and performers from different cultural traditions. Different sub projects are intended to meet within the different studies involved. The interaction in between these is of crucial importance.

Central issues to the project are aspects of cultural identity and heritage and how these can be kept alive and brought into creative use in the Western multicultural situation. An important figure of thought is how the transmission of a tradition always involves an element of transformation. One may say that it is this transformation that is in focus, in the artistic projects as well as in the research.

Method

Transformations consists of a series of sub-projects that bring together composers as well as performers with extra-European cultural background with players from the ensembles. The intent is to create situations of mutual learning in which different traditions can enrich and influence one another. Considering the complications in attempts of fusing different cultural traditions and modes of expressions, the project demands meticulous documentation on video and audio and a reflective approach in which the outcome of the project can be seriously evaluated, both by the performers and artistic directors of the ensembles as well as of external researchers.

Intended outcome

The output includes a double CD of recordings in Vietnam with a focus on the traditional Vong Co tradition which in itself have seen rapid changes over the last 50-80 years. A book to be released on Cambridge University Press documents the use of the Stimulated Recall Method in the project. There is also a number of conference and journal papers.