The project was established at the Norwegian Academy of Music and is partially funded by the Norwegian Artistic Research Programme.
The project's point of departure is how the idea of Klangrecherche – the last six decades' search for new musical sounds – has caused increasing fatigue in the field of contemporary music, particularly in the last twenty years. This fatigue is partly due to an exaggerated attentiveness to musical material, pitch, rhythm and tone quality.
Compared to other art forms, art music has cosseted means and methods of creative activity that lack the openness and the plurality of expression existing in other arts, such as painting, dance, or modern theatre.
For instance, the last substantial innovations in instrumental music are the French school of Spectralism and HelmLachenmann'sn's instrumental Musique concrète of the seventies and eighties. Other art forms have evolved considerably since then, and one might argue that art music has become isolated. Aesthetically speakinToday'sy's contemporary music takes a new interest in ordinary everyday life, reality, and the new appearances of reality brought into being by technology. This is a new source of accessible musical material. More importantly, a new opening in "o "the real wo "ld" means that contemporary music has to relate much closer to reality outside concert halls and music studios.
The research group aims to collect and present practices that bring our attention away from purely abstract sound design and rather engage in dialogue with familiar surroundings, including references and prosaic features of pop culture and the culture of everyday life.
