As Dr Franziska Schroeder says, you can’t be in several places at once. But that’s a technical detail that she and her collaborator Professor Pedro Rebelo are trying to overcome.
Through an imaginative concept known as Distributed Performance, they have developed a dynamic international collaboration and a new way of bringing music to audiences. And it is another achievement in innovation for the Sonic Arts Research Centre (SARC) where Pedro is Director of Research.
At the heart of the research project are multi-site concerts involving performers at SARC and in other parts of the world – including Stanford University in California, the University of São Paulo in Brazil, New York University and the Institute for Electronic Music and Acoustics at Graz in Austria.
A recent European Union-funded Culture 2007 project, CoMeDia, was a prestigious grant which allowed them to develop work in this area over four years, along with leading players in Europe, such as IRCAM in Paris.
As part of the Sonorities Festival of Contemporary Music in Belfast in 2010, a showcase event consisted of three concerts involving Belfast, Graz and the Hamburg University of Music and Theatre.
Franziska describes another concert, this time with São Paulo. ‘Not only did we have musicians in different places but we had one of our students walking down one of the main roads in Brazil and his interventions, running a stick along railings, for example, directed what the musicians in Belfast were playing.’
Pedro says, ‘SARC is important as an infrastructure, both in terms of facilities and people, and the fact that it was created as a way of bringing together synergies. The Sonic Lab allows us to rethink in practical ways what the role of the audience member is in relation to the stage or the performer in relation to a group of other performers.
Both"Out of this new environment we can conceive music that wouldn’t be possible otherwise." acoustically and visually we can re-configure the space fairly easily and that opens up doors to explore different ways of performing in a space and, in our case, spaces that are outside SARC, bringing in other concert venues.’
Franziska is a saxophonist and theorist and has written widely on performance. She trained at a conservatoire in Australia and later in Bordeaux. With a PhD in performance and theory from the University of Edinburgh, where her colleague also studied, she is currently an Academic Fellow and lecturer at SARC.
She says, ‘Distributed performance needs both the technology and the people. I think that was partly the reason I received an AHRC Fellowship from 2007 - 2009. There were composers and engineers at SARC but I was one of the first performers to come on board.’
Pedro is a composer/digital artist and performer. His music has been published, recorded and performed at international festivals. A pianist and improviser, his work has been released by Creative Source Recordings and he has performed with Chris Brown, Mark Applebaum, Carlos Zingaro and Evan Parker. He has also contributed sound installations at Belfast’s newest arts venue, the MAC.
Franziska points to practical issues which have to be resolved with Distributed Performance. What sort of experience is it for both performer and audience? What kind of performance language has to be developed?
‘It was an eye-opener in the beginning – people in different spaces texting questions on social platforms during our performance about who’s playing and where. It’s important to engage with new ideas about what it is to listen in a space.’
Pedro says, ‘If you look historically, there are a number of critical moments in music in which the link between new performance practices and spaces and new musical language are tied together.
In large cathedrals, for example, certain kinds of music are possible and some are not. Smaller churches allow you to create more intricate music, such as Bach’s counterpoint.
We’re at the stage where we’re experimenting with different types of music and performance strategies, the main hope being that out of this new environment we can conceive music that wouldn’t be possible otherwise.’
In order to bring together resources created all over the world, SARC is releasing an international online archive for distributed performance repertoire. For more information visit www.somasa.qub.ac.uk/~comedia/
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