Documenting Creative Practice as Research, and Building the 21st Century Orchestra

We're back for the last SPIN session this afternoon. I skipped the post-lunch session to mark some postgraduate coursework students' project proposals (mostly pretty good), and then came in slightly late for the next session by my colleague Steve Dillon, with whom I work on the ACID Press project (soon to be renamed ARMS) within the Australasian CRC for Interaction Design. who began by playing a beatbox-style introduction to his talk, and then had audience members critique this piece. He's using this as an example of how much data emerging around the process of music composition is ephemeral in the process - lost soon after. Steve has also worked on a project called DMAP - digital multimedia art portfolios - which tracks the multimedia artefacts occurring alongside a project.

Overall, Steve notes that the level of documentation in music education is different from other academic pursuits, and he has therefore developed a project called 'Save to DISC' (documenting innovation in sound curriculum). Save to DISC tracks various levels of artefacts: at the very bottom level are what he calls 'media evidence cells' - relatively basic document bits in various formats (audio, video, text, images). Beyond this there is a level of 'theory building, connecting and presenting' which enables Save to DISC users to identify for each piece of evidence to presence of personal, social, or cultural meaning. Further up are peer-validated documents built from this structured data which also refer down to the rawer levels of multimedial evidence; and above there is an audio-visual abstract which again builds on the layers below to extract (and abstract) the most central information. Ultimately, then, Save to DISC enables the development of multimedial, rigorously refereed, and reproducible scholarly work which documents creative practice as research.

Michael Hannan from Southern Cross University is next. He follows on from work he has done in the performance project The Flood, and reflects on the practice of what he calls 'comprovisation', a multi-layered form which uses improvised sounds and then edits them digitally often in random ways. He will investigate whether such practices might constitute creative practice as research, and he now plays some of the music thus composed. To what extent can comprovisation be regarded as traditional research? Checking against common requirements for scholarly research: there is a clear intent of purpose here; there is a significant knowledge of existing literature (including recorded works in a similar vein); it is possible to explain the methodology used and so there is a clear presence of research method and design; a large library of sounds was assembled to execute this project, and so this could be compared to data collection and analysis; this analysis was performed as informed by the researcher's knowledge of the field; and finally the work is subjected to peer scrutiny. While the works are not necessarily reproducible in the same form by other researchers (the original sounds - or data - collected would likely be different), this is however perhaps similar to scientific experiments which are conducted under different circumstances to test the same theory. Therefore, this work might be able to be considered research even without the presence of a traditional scholarly exegesis.

Finally we're moving on to Andy Arthurs, Head of the Music & Sound discipline at QUT Creative Industries. His paper, co-authored with Jennifer Radbourne from the School of Business at QUT, discusses the question of orchestras in the 21st century: how can they be made sustainable and economically viable, given their large size and smallish audiences? Statistically only 1% of Australians (or indeed 0.1% in Brisbane) do go to live orchestral performances, despite the somewhat larger market for recorded orchestral music. A similar picture exists in the U.S., where some three quarters of the 25 top U.S. orchestras posted deficits in 2002. On the other hand, there are also some classical music success stories, including the Australian Ten Tenors who have done very well here and overseas.

Typical orchestral traits are the exalted status of the conductor, and the virtually deified position of the (dead) composer, while the rank and file of musicians are expected to do little more than play and have virtually no say in artistic decisions - they aren't even listed on concert posters and may appear only somewhere in the small print of programmes. The audience similarly is expected to behave in defined ways - remaining still and clapping only at the end of a piece (not for example at the end of individual movements). Audience membership takes something of a select club structure, with levels of membership also visible through how well-behaved members act. At the same time audiences are also very well aware of the anachronistic nature of such forms of social interaction.

The '21st century orchestra' project aims to analyse orchestras at all levels of their existence, reviewing musical and social innovations from previous and current orchestral models, and will identify potential new performance modes, distribution models, and developments in instrument design, as well as implement and test these models to live and/or mediated audiences. It begins by redefining the orchestra as a performing entity that plays music that is immersive, dynamic, and rich in tones and colour - getting back to an older form of experience which today is actually more likely to be found in the movie theatre than an orchestral enviroment.

To make this change, several aspects need to be addressed:

• instrumentation - even the saxophone is excluded from orchestras at present, let alone electric and electronic instruments
• presentation - traditional orchestral environments are highly restricting and almost entirely non-interactive for the audience; perhaps orchestras do not always need to read from scores in their performances either, turning orchestral players into orchestral performers
• repertoire - strangely enough new works translate to small audiences for orchestras, while new works tend to increase the audience in other musical forms (e.g. rock music)
• venue - it would be possible to explore changes in lighting and staging
• ensemble - the ensemble might be able to become more flexible, bringing in additional partners or reconfiguring the orchestra according to specific needs; this would also enable performers to take part more strongly in artistic decisions
• audience - the project will conduct a significant amount of audience research to gauge responses to changes in orchestral models

In other words, the project will develop a sustainable business model which looks at audiences and content and then reshapes the orchestra in this light, exploring also multiple distribution channels in the process; this is opposed to the traditional and unsustainable model of putting the orchestra and content first, then involving the audience at a single distribution point. The aim is not to develop one cover-all model, however, but to come up with a range of possible models away from the traditional approach; it also does not propose to remove the traditional approach altogether, but rather suggests that this outmoded and nonsustainable approach needs to be balanced with other models to make orchestras sustainable again.