Practising

Summary

The choice of ‘Practising’ as the title of this section attempts to express our belief that notions of exposition need to be traced into the very fabric of the research that artists conduct before it is narrowed down to questions of academic publishing. As already suggested, on this level, what counts as expositional activity is highly specific and often part of long-established, individual practices, but also part of the specific materials in and with which those practices engage. In other words, the individual approaches to the issue of exposition presented in the following four chapters are so specific that in all likelihood they will not be easily transferable to other artists and practices. Yet by putting them forward as specific artistic examples, we hope to convey an emerging sense of expositionality within artistic research itself.

In doing so, this section picks up on an important point that was raised in the previous section: the fact that the publishing of research poses a challenge to artistic practice, a challenge that started when artists first laid claims on research. Thus we see in the publishing of artistic research an extension and perhaps even an amplification of basic expositional structures with which artists engage when they enter into proximity with academia.

Darla Crispin addresses in her contribution ‘Scaling Parnassus in Running Shoes’: From the Personal to the Transpersonal via the Medium of Exposition in Artistic Research the question of how the artist-scholar's subjective experiences and perceptions can be taken into account when exposing musical practice as research. Drawing on her understanding as a pianist and researcher of music performance, and using as illustration an example of fingering options in Schoenberg's piano music, Crispin argues that experimental research in music is not so much a matter of objectivity as of engagement and attention.

Starting from the observation that in artistic research on music composition expressive and rhetorical affairs are critical, Hans Roels, in Integrating the Exposition into Music-Composition Research, makes a case for what he calls ‘the open sketch’ as expositional form and research tool. Here a specific composition problem can be sonified, exposed and transparently discussed with selected audiences. Through its focus on sound and through its draft status the open sketch occupies a discursive place between the scholarly text and the finished composition, between theory and practice.