Performance-based Studies of Virtuosity and Artistic Identity

Abstract

Developed by Wanda Orlikowski and Susan Scott in the field of organization studies, sociomateriality is a framework for studying the interactions between technologies and organized groups. The theory of sociomateriality “makes a distinctive move away from seeing actors and objects as primarily self-contained entities that influence each other,” and posits instead that “material means are not so much tools to be used to accomplish some tasks, but they are constitutive of both activities and identities” (Orlikowski and Scott 2008, 455). In this paper, I apply the sociomaterial perspective to the study of two nineteenth-century double bass virtuosos: Domenico Dragonetti and Giovanni Bottesini.

My paper introduces Dragonetti and Bottesini by examining analogous depictions that fuse the virtuosos’ bodies with their instruments—one in the form of a caricature statuette, and the other as a cravat pin––which can be interpreted as metaphorical renderings of sociomaterial entanglement. From there, I investigate the construction of Dragonetti and Bottesini’s respective careers and virtuosic personas. I argue that Dragonetti’s virtuosity was defined by his activities as an arranger of other composers’ works, and that the strategic dissemination of anecdotes to and by his friends and colleagues was integral to the construction of his public image. By contrast, the burgeoning of mass media during Bottesini’s career positioned the locus of his prestige in the musical press, who conferred nicknames (i.e., “the new Dragonetti” and “the Paganini of the double bass”) and consistently described Bottesini’s playing in terms of his transcendent and transformative abilities.

Practice-based studies of Dragonetti’s arrangement procedures and Bottesini’s technique provide further insight into the roles that their individual approaches to the double bass played in shaping their respective virtuosic identities. These case studies reveal complex webs of relations that mediated Dragonetti’s and Bottesini’s reputations as virtuosos, both during their careers and into the present day. At the center of this web lie the performer-instrument entanglements that shaped Dragonetti’s arrangements and Bottesini’s compositions, and by extension the virtuosic personas they presented to audiences and the legacies that wound their way into the narratives of double bass history.

Biography

Shanti Nachtergaele is a PhD candidate in musicology at McGill University, writing her dissertation on the sociomaterial history of the professional double bassist, 1760–1890. Shanti has published articles in Early Music and Music and the Moving Image, and contributed an essay to the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Arrangement Studies. She is the recipient of a Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship (2018–2021), and International Society of Bassists Special Recognition Award for Scholarship (2021). Also an active performer on double bass and violone, she specializes in historically informed performance practices. She is a member of Rosa Barocca (Calgary) and has performed with ensembles including Arion Orchestre Baroque (Montreal), Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra (Toronto), and Accordes! (Oxford), as well as teaching and performing at the Festival de Música de Santa Catarina (Brazil).

Abstract

How might practices of performance curation be seen as interfaces for artistic identity—dynamic systems in which material bodies, artistic media, creative processes, musical instruments, cultural systems, human relationships, and self-understandings interact to produce performer identities?

Alongside interview data, this paper draws on observation data from Ekki Minna Duo’s experimental performance at Berlin’s Hošek Contemporary to show that the individual creative practice of music curation—the critical assembling, mediating, and negotiating of artistic media in music performance—serves as an interface for artistic becoming.

This paper finds that contemporary accordion and cello ensemble Ekki Minna Duo draws new diagonals in their curative practice, disrupting and expanding the artistic assemblages in which they operate. With bare torsos and jogger pants, they perform the deconstruction of an accordion with a drill and pliers, extracting the inner harmonicas to play as wind instruments during a cross-legged meditation. Accompanied by electronic sound, they orbit the stage—plywood in the rusty hull of a cargo ship—clad in miniature angel wings. They transform the pauses between pieces into performance material. They juxtapose human skin and machines, noise and music, performance time and real time, the mundane and the spiritual, acoustic and electronic sound. The Duo composes experiences that remap the assemblages of performance, music, musical works, musicianship, genre, instruments, and masculinity. They become-with their artistic practice, generating new creative roles and processes, experiencing empowerment, and enacting their humanity.

Existing empirical studies of musician identities consider primarily the roles of human gesture, energy, presence, and social frames in producing people. They lack attention to the intra-active agencies of artistic materiality—the entanglement of sound, movement, bodies, light, objects, and space—as well as to the meanings ascribed to artistic acts by the performers who enact them. This paper considers creative acts, media, and performers’ relationships to them as an assemblage of artistic identity. It aims to expand existing understandings of artistic becoming to account for performative materiality and artistic media.

Biography

Theresa Coffey is a researcher and trumpeter at the Norwegian Academy of Music. Her research centers on performer-curators’ experience and production of artistic identity in music curation, using sonic, visual, kinetic, somatic, ritualistic, temporal, and atmospheric aesthetics. She is particularly interested in forms of artistic work that push, break, or upend the boundaries and norms of the Western art music tradition. 

As a trumpet artist, she has performed at the Ultima Contemporary Music Festival, and with the Norwegian National Opera, Oslo Philharmonic, and Grand Rapids Symphony, among others. She most recently joined Tine Thing Helseth’s TenThing brass ensemble on their US tour. She received her bachelor’s degree Cum Laude from Northwestern University and her master’s degree from University of Maryland. She is currently a Ph.D. research fellow in performance practice at the Norwegian Academy of Music with advisors Tanja Orning and Even Ruud.  

Abstract

The Buzuq is a fretted plucked string instrument originating in Syrian and Lebanese cultures. Its long neck and small spherical body resemble the Greek Bouzouki and the Turkish Saz. Like those instruments, its sound is sharp yet soft, with three double steel strings tuned to C, G, and C that each span one-and-a-half octaves. Although the construction of the modern Buzuq dates to the early 20th century, its complex cultural identity has been in constant transformation.

Unearthing the latent sounds is associated with music embodiment and how one uncovers a deeper understanding of the Buzuq’s mechanism. In this research, my bodily movement has become a source of sound– a sonic experience that technology has aided in amplifying. More importantly, this has sparked the beginning of archiving a sound library of unknown sounds of a marginalized Middle Eastern plucked instrument. In this endeavor, I explore the complex interplay between instrumental practice, sound design, and adaptation of acoustic sounds in the domain of virtual instruments. It is my ongoing objective to deconstruct the tension between Middle Eastern instruments and contemporary Euro-American music practice, as well as in academic discourses that concern practical research and intercultural music scholarship.

Biography

Jiryis Murkus Ballan, Palestinian composer, Buzuq player, performer, and musical director, Jiryis, grew up in Nazareth in the Galilee region.Ballan completed his M.A. studies in the music composition program at SUNY Buffalo as a Fulbright Scholar where he studied with composers Jonathan Golove and Cort Lippe AND focused on concert music, and music for modern dance. Jiryis co-direct The Caravan Orchestra and Choir project, an intercultural orchestra of young Palestinian, Israeli and and German musicians based. Before joining the Department of Music at UCI, he worked as a research assistant at the Music Department of the University of Haifa, researching The Urban Arab Palestinian Wedding Music in the Galilee region and the maqam-based music. His research was on the inclusion of the synthesizer in traditional Arab Palestinian music wedding ensembles.