[colloquia] II.

 

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CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK

 

Throughout the program, participants are invited to situate their work in relation to the conceptual framework of the upcoming edition:

 

SOURCE, SUBSTANCE, AND STRUCTURE

Performance as Musical Knowledge: Genealogies and Futures

 

These terms operate as fields of inquiry rather than as a thematic prescription. They enable participants to examine the inheritances from which performance emerges, the material and perceptual processes through which it becomes actual, and the relations through which it acquires coherence, generates form, and changes over time.

 

The framework is designed to accommodate multiple, potentially divergent artistic positions. Participants are not asked to illustrate a theme or converge upon a unified interpretation. They are invited instead to use these terms to formulate questions, test assumptions, and situate their practices within broader critical, musical, historical, social, material, technological, institutional, and philosophical contexts.

 

 

SOURCE

 

Source designates the conditions, inheritances, resources, and mediating systems through which historically situated string quartet performance becomes musically possible.

 

In quartet practice, source concerns the relation between a musical proposition and the materials through which it reaches performers: scores, editions, manuscripts, recordings, oral histories, pedagogies, traditions, technologies, instruments, bows, spaces, and prior interpretations. Source also encompasses institutions, canons, exclusions, and historical narratives governing what may be selected, remembered, rehearsed, legitimized, reproduced, transmitted, and heard.

 

Source additionally names the embodied and situated knowledge carried by performers and ensembles. Technique, memory, attention, physical habit, listening, responsiveness, and collective experience are not neutral conduits through which repertoire is delivered; they are historical inheritances that condition musical possibility, intelligibility, and meaning.

 

Participants may consider:

– From which materials, histories, practices, institutions, and relations does performance emerge?

– Which embodied, tacit, or transmitted forms of knowledge sustain performance?

– How do scores, editions, instruments, institutions, and pedagogies condition interpretative judgment?

– What does it mean to understand quartet performance as materially, historically, institutionally, and socially situated?

– How might source operate both as an inherited condition and as a critical method?

 

 

SUBSTANCE

 

Substance designates the material, embodied, sonic, temporal, spatial, and perceptual constitution through which string quartet performance becomes musically present and intelligible.

 

For the player, substance includes the physical processes through which sound is produced: contact, pressure, velocity, weight, resistance, posture, breath, gesture, touch, and the continuously changing relations among body, bow, string, instrument, resonant space, and auditory attention.

 

For the ensemble, substance emerges through the interaction of four sounding bodies. Intonation, articulation, timbre, balance, pulse, texture, resonance, effort, coordination, and attention are continuously constituted through collective listening, reciprocal adjustment, and the developing relations among players within the contingent temporality of unfolding performance.

 

For the listener, musical substance takes shape through perception, expectation, recognition, uncertainty, association, and memory. Quartet performance may therefore be understood as configuring the conditions under which sound, presence, relation, and musical thought become available within situated listening experiences.

 

Participants may ask:

– How does performance focus, interrupt, distribute, or intensify perceptual attention?

– How do touch, listening, memory, expectation, and judgment become audible?

– What relations emerge between notated material and embodied, real-time perception?

– How does quartet interaction constitute the substance of musical thought itself?

– Can quartet practice transform habitual modes of perceiving sound, time, effort, agency, and collective relations?

 

 

STRUCTURE

 

Structure concerns processes through which musical relations acquire coherence, generate form, and undergo transformation through collectively constituted musical time.

 

Structure is not treated as a property already contained within a score or guaranteed by an inherited analytical model. It may arise through pacing, repetition, differentiation, hierarchy, interruption, memory, gesture, resonance, spatial disposition, and the distribution of attention. Participants examine how formal relations are actively produced in performance—and how performance may disclose, reorganize, or contest established conceptions of a work.

 

Within a quartet, this inquiry concerns who initiates change, how decisions circulate, whose perceptions acquire authority, how responsibility is distributed, and how disagreement becomes musically consequential. It also addresses relations between notated organization and interpretative agency, individual action and collective form, and the institutional frameworks within which ensemble practices are learned, authorized, and presented.

 

Participants may consider:

– How can performance produce coherence without suppressing difference, instability, contingency, or ambiguity?

– How is musical agency distributed within the quartet process?

– Which relations become structural, and which remain tacit, peripheral, or excluded?

– How do notation, rehearsal, memory, and institutional histories organize perceived form?

– Can ensemble practice generate more responsive and transformable modalities of organization?

– What does structure designate under the concrete conditions of quartet performance?

 

Taken together, source, substance, and structure provide an integrated framework for examining performance’s genealogical conditions, material and perceptual actualization, and relational organization: the processes through which quartet practice generates, sustains, and transforms musical form within performed time.