Tora Ferner Lange: The Performing Body in an Extended Music Practice

Field of study: Performance Practice

This study examines the performing body within an expanded music practice in the field of contemporary Western art music. Using Personhood by Jennifer Walshe, Andreas Borregaard and Oslo Sinfonietta, as it’s case, this is an ethnographic study, inquiring into their collaboration and creative process through methods of participant observation and interviews. Through the use of focus group discussion, an audience perspective is also considered. The study approaches the piece and its creative process with questions about how the performing bodies are perceived and conceptualised, and explores the implications of a widened conceptualisation of performing musical bodies in this expanded music practice.

These questions support the dissertation’s aim to produce knowledge about a multimodal musical practice balancing between performance disciplines in three ways: by empirically investigating perceptions and understandings of performing bodies; by contributing a theoretical conceptualisation of performing bodies; and by critically addressing the implications of composing with and perceiving performing bodies in expanded music practice.

Following the insights from thinking through the case of Personhood, the dissertation proposes conceptualising performing bodies in expanded music practice through a multifaceted ‘perceptual equation’, which considers several perspectives and levels of perception simultaneously. As well as viewing the performing body in expanded music practice as musical, theatrical and/or performative, a perceptual equation also allows us to consider several contextual aspects related to the performing body presenting ‘themselves’: as a musician-body, as an ‘authentic’ body and as a gendered body. Lastly, the dissertation discusses some aspects and implications that need to be considered in a composing practice with personal bodies.

The dissertation also contextualises and discusses the persistence of cultures of embodiment and the way classically trained musicians, even when expanding their bodily practice, are influenced by assumptions, mindsets and ideologies within Western art music. The case illustrates that the creative structures, methods and logics of an expanded music practice uphold a ‘white’ form of embodiment. Physical performance and composing with performing musical bodies within an expanded music field then prove to be ambiguous, because of the multifaceted perceptions that performing bodies evoke, and because (bodily) conventions of an ‘old’ discipline persist even when creating something ‘new’.

The dissertation

The full title is Personal bodies. Conceptualising performing bodies in an expanded music practice – a case study of Personhood by Jennifer Walshe, Andreas Borregaard and Oslo Sinfonietta.

The study will be presented in a monograph. The dissertation language is English.