Making Sense. The musician's perspective: developing,performin and interpreting music as a performer

In this project, I have performed contemporary works and reflected upon my artistic practice in order to make the processes and insights accessible to a wider audience. An important focus in my project is the inner work or world of the performer, of creating presence in the moment within and around the performer. Presence can be defined in many ways. A quick google search on stage presence gives me 16 600 000 results. I roughly separate presence into two different kinds of presence on stage: the “being present” as in physically being in the room. And the other as a kind of inner concentration, creating an atmosphere around the performer, using charisma to draw in the listener. This latter relates to the notion of an embodiment of presence. They are both important for the experience of the audience, but I believe this inner energy is what can make it feel like magic happens during a performance, or give the feeling of “flow”. I see presence in performance as a special quality. The performance is always built up of many aspects, of which the creation of presence is for me a prerequisite for everything else, and is sometimes the most difficult to achieve. The embodiment create presence, and the idea of music as language is a way of communicating in this state of presence and flow. In working and performing it is sometimes easy to get hung up on one of these aspects, but we have to keep them all, even though we can emphasize them in different degree in different types of music. I am interested in the embodied qualities of presence. It is a playing that engage affectively with the material and the audience. Gilles Deleuze says that you can create a feeling of sense as an embodied feeling through art and music, without a logosentric meaning. I aim to develop a more internally controlled playing, embodied and with affects as a sort of artistic “raw” material for expression, to develop the psychophysical musician. My main research aims have been: • to explore different methods for reaching an intensified presence in performing. • to describe the process of learning and performing a musical work – both physically and mentally thus using and documenting a reflective practitioner approach to musical experience. • to create new understandings about practice with particular attention to contemporary music. I have used the performance of a. o. the three main concertos by Nils Henrik Asheim, Lene Granager and Jon Øivind Ness of the project to give examples of how I think, but of course it is the combination which is the key to the interesting and moving performance. It does not help to have a good presence if you do not fill the interpretation with meaning. I asked probing questions about interpretation and now suggest another approach to the ongoing international debate on interpretation and werktreue, especially with respect to contem-porary music.