Classical Music 'Hyper-Production' and Practice-As-Research

The world of instrumental classical music is comparatively conservative in comparison to other areas of the creative arts where historical works are presented in a contemporary context. The notion of creative contemporary interpretations of a historical text has been explored much less widely in this realm than, for example, in that of Shakespearian theatre. One exception has been historically informed performance, the attempt to recreate musical performances as they would have sounded in the time of the composer of the work in question. This has, of course, been paralleled in London's Globe Theatre's productions of Shakespeare in all its Elizabethan splendour but there have also been numerous productions in modern dress, in radically reinterpreted settings, including multi-media presentations and effects and even in contemporary language. And, at the same time, recorded classical music has stuck to the notion of presenting the work from the perspective of an audience member in a concert hall. Indeed much of the sales rhetoric of classical recordings is framed in terms of realism: just like being in the auditorium. A recent example is that of 'dummy head' binaural recordings made in famous concert halls: experience the orchestral sound from 12th row centre at Vienna's Musikwerein. In the world of film and television, on the other hand, Shakespearian actors can be allowed to whisper and raise an eyebrow in close up or thunder across a battlefield in glorious Cinerama. Their performance techniques have adapted to the potential offered by editing, multiple takes, camera angles, CGI and special effects.
This project seeks to redress that imbalance by utilising the creative non-linear editing, alternate performance practices, spatial staging and digital signal processing that have developed within popular music, to create radical re-interpretations of music from the classical repertoire: from Bach to Debussy. They will be developed through discussion, negotiation and collaborative creative practice between performers, recordists and music theorists. The aim is to highlight particular perspectives and features of the pieces that have been identified as salient by music theorists and to develop performance, production and processing strategies that illuminate them in recordings and technologically mediated performances.
An additional dimension of the project is to utilise digital multi-media to both document and explain the creative processes involved and to put this output online as a proposed new template for practice-as-research publication. The notion of a research question in creative arts practice is a thorny one that frequently only becomes evident in retrospect but it is also often a collaborative and negotiated process which can be subject to a variety of interpretations. Presenting this process through video of the discussion and workflow, the use of video-recall for post-hoc analysis and multi-perspectival commentaries by the collaborative participants, allows this complex nature to be reflected in a published output. The same is true for the demonstration of tacit knowledge and other unique features of practice-as-research that are ill-suited to traditional text based publication.
In addition to being an important contribution to research in classical music and record production, this practice-as-research digital online published output serves as an exemplar or a template for similar work in other areas of creative arts research. The last event in the project will therefore be a hybrid conference, part face to face and part online, in which academics from a range of practice-as-research backgrounds will come together to discuss the merits of this template and the contribution that it makes to the development of formal structures that would produce greater parity in funding applications and research 'excellence' assessments between practice-as-research outputs and traditional text based publications.

One form of impact that these musical outputs will have will be their 'use' by listeners to the recorded music and audiences for the concert performances. In order to enhance this impact the PI has already made contact with Edward Blakeman at the BBC about the involvement of Radio 3 and either the Proms, the Electric Proms or both. He has also contacted Darren Henley at Classic FM. Once there are some initial recordings that can be played to record companies, they would be released as commercial recordings. Any profits that might accrue from that could be used to finance further practice-as-research projects in a similar vein.
As for concert performances, LCM hosts the world's largest RedNet system for networked audio which provides the technical infrastructure for these multi-room performances. The college has already hosted pop and jazz based RedNet events in collaboration with Focusrite, the system's manufacturer and this project would present two live concerts at LCM in London. The PI has also contacted Kings Place in London and discussed the possibility of staging a public event there. There is also a proposal for a public concert in Birmingham to coincide with the RMA conference in September 2015 that is under consideration. More ambitiously, the PI and the CIs are exploring the possibilities of a simultaneous broadcast of Ravel and Debussy pieces in Paris and London and of Chopin pieces in Warsaw and London (possibly at the 138th Audio Engineering Society - AES - Convention in Warsaw in May 2015).
Mention of the AES brings us to another area of impact - within the music production industry in relation to recorded classical music. Performers, producers, sound engineers and record companies will all be interested in this experiment to some extent. On the one hand they may be interested in assessing the potential demand for creating productions like this, and this project 'tests the water'. On the other hand it may provide ideas for different forms of experimentation: setting a precedent that might encourage others to work in other directions.
The more general point about practice-as-research in the creative arts would produce impact in a variety of areas. In the publishing world, this creates a new form of digital publication that meets the demand for outputs that suit the special nature of practice-as-research. In addition, the research councils and other research funding charities in the UK and abroad are facing the problem of evaluating practice-as-research alongside more conventional forms of research without there being a clear set of benchmarks and definitions that allow for such comparisons. At an interdisciplinary level, for example, between visual fine art and music composition there is little agreement about what constitutes a viable practice-as-research output. The aim of this project is to use the academic discourse on practice-as-research by scholars such as Borgdorff to generate a specific and defined template for practice-as-research publications that provides criteria to facilitate this type of agreement. This example and the discussion that takes place in the hybrid conference, producing a digital record of this discourse, will help to create these types of benchmarks and definitions.
In a similar vein, but at the national policy making level of impact, there is a similar need for benchmarking to facilitate research funding policy decisions such as those undertaken within the Research Excellence Framework. If anything, perhaps in the past, the agreement has been that the presentation of the completed physical artifact alongside a very short written exegesis should comprise a research output comparable with a traditional journal article or book chapter. This project would provide another step towards clarity and parity in the assessment of practice-as-research outputs and, as such, should be of particular interest to those involved in this area of research funding policy in the public sector.