[colloquia] II.

 

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RESIDENCY PROGRAM FOR STRING QUARTETS AND INDIVIDUAL STRING PLAYERS

[November 2026 - June 2027]

 

SOURCE, SUBSTANCE, AND STRUCTURE

Performance as Musical Knowledge: Genealogies and Futures

 

An international residency examining the genealogies, contemporary conditions, and future possibilities of string quartet performance as a mode of musical knowledge.

 

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PROGRAM AT A GLANCE

 

Program period: November 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: October 15, 2026

 

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FORMAT

 

Stage I. | November 25, 26, 2026

- 2 online seminars

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

- Q&A

 

Stage II. | January 27, 28, 2026

- 2 online seminars

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

- Q&A

 

Stage III. | June 2027

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

 

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ABOUT THE RESIDENCY

 

[colloquia] is an international, process-based residency devoted to investigating, developing, and publicly articulating string quartet performance as musical knowledge. It convenes a cohort of established string quartets and individual string players, with individual participants forming quartets within the framework of the residency, extending from the critical articulation of participants’ practices to performances, lecture-performances, interpretative laboratories, and research presentations at the seventh Bled Contemporary Music Week in Bled, Slovenia (EU).

 

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

 

Participating ensembles and individual string players are invited to interrogate conventions, advance works in progress, and formulate interpretative or research-led projects. Participants contribute embodied, technical, historical, relational, and practical knowledge to the collective process. The residency accordingly treats string quartet performance not as the execution of predetermined content, but as a situated, reflexive, and generative mode of inquiry.

 

Rather than construing performance as the linear transmission of a fixed score into sound, [colloquia] establishes a reciprocal process in which sources, techniques, memories, materials, rehearsal procedures, and ensemble decisions remain available for shared examination. Repertoires, instruments, bodies, documents, sounds, and performance conditions are considered as mutually conditioning elements within an evolving artistic situation.

 

Within this framework, participants investigate how performance knowledge is inherited, embodied, contested, and transformed; how musical propositions encounter the material and relational realities of four players; how listening, memory, and interpretative judgment generate form; and how rehearsal operates not merely as preparation, but as a site of discovery, analysis, and knowledge production.

 

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MENTORS

 

Dr. Alastair White 

Urban Megušar, Double M.Mus.

Dr. Niki Zohdi

Dr. Dré A. Hočevar 

 

 

COORDINATOR

 

Brina Kren