Landscape Quartet: Creative Practice and Philosophical Reflexion in Natural Environments

context
Since the 60s artists have explored the environment as not only a place for art, but as artistic material. Richard Long, Andy Goldsworthy, among many others make interventional actions in the landscape, while "soundscape" composers (Murray Schafer, Westerkamp, Truax) have used environmental recordings as raw material for electroacoustic composition. Acoustic ecology has grown from Schafer's "World Soundscape Project" (WSP), producing some remarkable creative, philosophical, and political fruit. However, much acoustic ecology relies on the model of preservation (recording), an ecological strategy that has less and less credence in contemporary environmental debate. Against this is proposed a participative approach to the sonic environment, where performers and audience produce sounds in dialogue with the specific sites explored, in keeping with the more participative and engaged turn in contemporary environmentalist thinking. Such an approach seeks to model an ethical but participative approach to environmental sound art that moves beyond preservation, as a model of ecology, towards interaction and co-operation with the environment; participation rather than representation.

aims and objectives
The project seeks to develop a genuinely "ecosystemic" approach to environmental sound art by confronting our (musical) listening practices, and our notions of the role of musicians in the production of such art, with the phenomenological reality of the aural environment. Practice-based artists will work from physical intervention into environments through to the deployment of meditative spiritual practices to explore the sonic potential of particular places; from highly mediated applications of digital technologies to acoustic improvisations with the sounds found in different environments; from sounding an environment through musically significant actions within it through to playing instruments with the environment, so to speak - confronting the compositional challenge, for example, of allowing a flute to be played by the wind, recording the sounds of violins and guitars being floated on rivers and lakes - unmistakably "musical" sonorities structured by the gently chaotic energies of water and wind. These examples are from experiments already undertaken by that have produced successful artistic and conceptual results that have been presented publicly. Exhibitions in the UK and Sweden along with site-specific performances will result, four symposia held during the project will bring the practical and intellectual findings into a public forum, and a special themed issue of The Contemporary Music Review will publish the philosophical results of these symposia, alongside articles by invited respondents.

potential applications and benefits
The project seeks to raise awareness of the sonic environment and ecological concerns more widely, modelled not on preservation but participation; in simple terms how might we live with and be a responsible part of the environment rather than "put fences around it".
The practical side of the project will involve developing strategies of presentation that give audiences insight into the process of the work, exposing assumptions about our relationship to the natural environment that will also lead to educational applications.
The project seeks to develop practices that are flexible and may be adapted to different specific places and events, either in the form of single-authored works or events, or as collaborations between the different partners. The work can be adapted to fit with outdoor sites, gallery or concert spaces, and educational workshop projects, giving it a wide applicability in the broader culture.
A broad community of environmentally-oriented artists and intellectuals exists (e.g. WSP, CRiSAP) to whom the project will be of direct interest. This community will be accessed through exhibitions and publications already noted, and via RSS feeds from a project website

Throughout the project's duration site-specific performances will take place, some with live audiences, others will be documented for presentation elsewhere. A series of discreet, multichannel compositions will also be made, some with an integral audiovisual dimension. Four public symposia will be held during the project, each with two invited external respondents, to publicly present work-in-progress, emerging philosophical perspectives, discuss the progress of the projects, share experiences, and receive feedback from external specialists. Near the beginning of the project work already developed by the participants will be presented in Newcastle in a public symposium with performances that will serve as a "launchpad" for the project, establishing a national and international profile for the project, and bringing the participants together for an inaugural public symposium. Ongoing work will be presented as part on Newcastle University's Culture Lab "Creative Practice", an online facility developed for researchers in creative practices to share ideas and audiovisual work with each other and with the world at large. Participants will also keep running blogs on their individual work, collaborations, and practical experiences throughout the project, leaving behind a significant digital dossier of information, hosted by Newcastle University's web-servers. The contingent and "ongoing" nature of this aspect of the project will be complemented by a series of "summative" exhibitions/performances in which completed projects will be showcased, and presented to audiences. The research findings of the project as a whole, but in particular those aired in the symposia already mentioned, will be published in the form of a themed issue of The Contemporary Music Review. The project is strongly committed to ensuring that the philosophical, ethical, and political aspects of the work are represented equally as strongly as the creative practice aspects. The researchers bring with them a strong network of contacts across the contemporary arts world, including galleries and performance spaces in Stockholm, Malmo, Berlin, Munich, Belfast, London, Newcastle-Gateshead, and Norwich, several of which have expressed serious interest in programming outcomes from the project. More generally, the philosophical and ethical insights concerning our cultural engagement with the natural environment may inform approaches taken towards the environment more generally. The project aims to model a participative rather than an objectifying approach to the natural environment, showing how humans are "part of" the environment, not privileged observers or users. The project also seeks to develop ways to produce environmentally-situated sonic art that is flexible, both in terms of its situation and in terms of the means used to arrive at it. This leaves room for non-experts to gain insight into the creative processes and their philosophical grounding, and an essential aspect of any performances will be discussions with audiences about how we listen, and how we interact with one another and the environment, with the possibility of audiences actively participating in the artworks through workshops associated with some performances. Audiences will thus reach a deeper understanding of the potential value of environmental arts, and contacts have been established (and will be developed) with Kielder Art and Architecture (environmental arts in the Northumberland National Park) and Newcastle University's "Intersections" project on public art. Members of Landscape Quartet will thereby develop their own community educational practice (all four have direct experience of community music work) oriented specifically towards "the environmental", and outside of the normative confines of "the classroom" or lecture theatre. The project will impact upon the researchers' HE teaching, community involvement, and on the work of artists in the emergent field of environmental arts.