Reflection as interference. Eleven thoughts on artistic research as an interruptive practice

Paul Craenen

One of the open and still controversial questions in the approach of artistic practice as an environment for research, is how to relate the subjectivity of the artist, immersed in a performance or creation process, to the reflectivity of that same artist when analyzing or interpreting what emerges in this practice as shareable knowledge. Even if the necessity of discursive or reflective complements to the artistic work in the research output has been contested in some views,¹ the ability to share knowledge beyond one’s own artistic practice, and thus in some way outside or alongside artistic production, is a minimal expectation one may have when the word research is used in an academic context.²

That artists can acquire a form of embodied knowledge and understanding through artistic experimentation will be agreed upon by many. It has also become commonplace to say that artistic practice is central to artistic research, not only because it provides a motivational context for artist-driven research questions, but also as a research tool and method. This emphasizes the role of expert knowledge ‘in action’, and thus the temporal and material situatedness of this knowledge. Within the musical field, it means that we need the temporality of music to make this knowledge audible and visible. But here a tension arises that is felt especially strongly in performing and time-based art forms. Performing or creating music requires a dedication to the doing, to the time of the musical action, which is a very different position from talking or writing about that experience. Yet without words, it is difficult, if not impossible, to share something as a result of research.

Some will insist that the work of creative musicians and composers often entails a good deal of research, without this having to mean that the outcomes are framed as such. In this sense, artistic research offers a conceptual framework to make more explicit what has always been part of artistic practice. Others, however, have argued that it is a category error to call artistic creation "research".³ Whatever the position one wants to take in this ongoing debate, even within an extended or emancipatory understanding of the term “research”, it remains difficult to disconnect it entirely from its association with processes of critical observation, analysis and discussion, activities that require the possibility of reflective distance. They imply a form of abstraction or transposition of the knowledge manifested within the stream of musical events. For the researching musician, then, artistic research rests on a combination of positions inside and outside musical time, of creating or performing music and reflecting on that process. This combination is often taken for granted, as if the fact that the researcher can alternate between these positions guarantees direct access to the experience in practice from a position outside of musical time. But how exactly can researching musicians build their off-time reflections on the moment of performance? What methods do artistic researchers have to report from emerging insights in artistic practice? And in what sense can such a process become ‘critical’?

Alternating positions of proximity and distance

Sharing artistic research results in the musical field usually rests on a combination of contextualisation, performance and discussion, the latter of which may include the use of artistic excerpts or interventions to illustrate research findings. The dissemination strategy thus typically involves an alternation of positions with a variable distance to the flow of the music. Therefore, in the context of artistic research, I believe that the concepts of “proximity” and “distance” are more useful than notions of subjectivity and objectivity, since they refer not directly to person-specific limitations or possibilities of an insider or outsider perspective, but to variable positions with different degrees of music-temporal involvement.⁴ These, in combination, may lead to ‘insight’ and ‘comprehension’ that is not possible to achieve with an explanatory or artistic presentation alone.⁵ In this sense, and in contrast to conceptions of artistic research as a more holistic and ‘organic’ (in contrast to reductionist) kind of research, I argue that the critical force of artistic research in the musical field partly relies on its interruptive character, in its offering the researching musician a context for making deliberate shifts between proximate and more distant positions relative to the musical stream.

The purpose of interrupting in the context of artistic research may be to capture something of the unfolding of that stream before it evaporates, like a snapshot.

With a distant position can be meant a position outside musical time, for instance in the analysis of what was successful or not in a performance. But it may also indicate more subtle shifts within the musical performance, for instance when the performer temporarily shifts the focus from a strong involvement with the musical narrative to an attentive listening to the interplay between the sounds of the performance and the acoustics of the concert hall. Such decoupling requires highly automated skills that allow keeping a certain mental bandwidth free during performance to redirect the attention to the environment or to be alert for new possibilities emerging within the performance. It is important, however, to emphasize that the reflective possibilities arising from such in-time positions are not comparable to the discursive possibilities outside musical time.⁶ Yet one of the supposed hallmarks of artistic research is that the skills and competences of the artistic researcher allow for critical engagement within the flow of sensory, proprioceptive and affective experience. If, as suggested above, criticality requires temporal interruptions and positional changes to make possible reflective distance, then alternating and varying positions of proximity and distance within performance seems to be conditional for this ‘thinking in doing’. Hence, in-time research capacity could be identified in the moments when an inquiring musician experiences (or deliberately chooses for) positional changes in relation to the musical flow. A key question for our discussion is then how the researching musician can build on these in-time interruptive experiences, and connect them with off-time analysis and reflection.

Interruptions in musical artistic research

One of my concerns, in writing things down, is that I am trying to make sense of something that didn’t make sense to me in the moment, (...) In writing it down I am making sense of it, afterwards, as an observer. I think artistic research involves a kind of grieving. {smiles} Here I am, pinning something down, describing something that was special and ephemeral: and we must accept, grieve that loss and move on.⁷

Talking or writing about a past artistic experience can evoke a sense of loss through the feeling of disconnection from the stream of sensory input and the immediate corporeal, emotional and imaginative responses to it. Turning from making or experiencing music to reflecting on that process precludes full access to the musical flow, but also creates an opening for something else. If musical artistic research were to fully coincide with the time of making or performing music, it would make no sense at all to distinguish between research and practice. While such a radical conception of practice-as-research is a legitimate position in the political and ideological debates on artistic research, my interest goes to a possible relevance of artistic research in the playground it offers to temporally suspend practice-as-usual, and to explore different or alternative positions and perspectives in the artistic process. Changing position creates a spatial and temporal interruption; a here and a there, a before and after. In the separation or distance created by the interruption, the singularity or linearity of the artistic process is broken, generating new positions from which a rethinking, transformation or transposition becomes possible. As such, interruptions of musical performance or creation can create the conditions for reflection and criticality, even if this should not be regarded an automatic consequence (interruptions may also create confusion or distraction).

What follows are eleven brief and tentative reflections on the possible role of interruptions in musical artistic research. None of them are particularly new or groundbreaking, and almost all of them are common to musical practice outside the context of academic artistic research. By zooming in on the role of interruptions, however, I hope to expose temporal and positional constraints in musical artistic research, potentially inviting the development of more concrete time-based research methods and strategies.

1. Interruptions as temporal and spatial cuts

From a temporal perspective, one can think of an interruption as a vertical cut within a horizontal stream of events. In music performance, this could be an external event that interrupts the musical performance such as the clichéd example of the mobile phone going off in the classical concert. The phone can destroy the immersive experience of the musical flow in a split second, by shifting the attention from the music to something and somebody in the room. However, it might also be an unexpected sound on stage (intended or not) that disrupts the musical flow and turns the attention to what sounds or how this sound has been produced, ripping listeners (and possibly also performers) out of their immersion in a musical ‘somewhere’ to focus on a more concrete sounding ‘there’.⁸ Other possible examples of musical interruptions are the stretched silence that evokes a heightened presence of instruments, musicians and listeners; the error that forces the musician to adjust on the spot to meaningfully integrate it into the performance; or the surprising harmonic tension that brings to the foreground an inner voice in the musical texture.⁹ The conception of interruption emerging in these examples is one of a non-gradual change in the listening perspective and a raised attention. These examples also demonstrate how the temporal and the spatial are often interdependent in the experience of musical interruptions. Temporal cuts may provoke spatial shifts and vice versa, and this interdependency provides potential for a critical use of interruptions in artistic research.

2. Multilayered causes and effects

The entanglement of the spatial and the temporal can lead to various possible causes and effects of interruptions. It depends on the musicians whether the mobile phone ringing in the concert will literally stop the music; they can also choose to ignore it and continue playing, or they can shift their musical focus and start playing ‘with’ the tune of the phone. Likewise, this interruption can also be perceived and received in different ways by the audience. Some listeners will be disturbed, others will hardly pay any attention to it. For some, it may incite reflection about concertgoers and their behavior in the concert hall; others will try to immediately refocus on the music, perhaps with an increased attention to the music and empathy for the performers, as if the interruption is something to overcome together, and the listener's attention can contribute to this.¹⁰

Unexpected events on or off stage may invite listeners to aesthetic recalibration in the most diverse ways. For performing musicians, interruptions offer opportunities to bring forward musical elements or dimensions that before were not or only implicitly part of the performance. Here one could also think of unpremeditated musical decisions such as a spontaneous response of a musician to a newly perceived rhythmic quality in the music, or to input from other performers. In collectively improvised music, musical complexity often relies on such unpredictable interactions and mutual adaptations between musicians. Music philosopher Marcel Cobussen, discussing a live recording of reed player Jimmy Giuffre, pianist Paul Bley, and bass player Steve Swallow, observes that

their playing is not so much a result of a thinking process that precedes the music or that develops in isolation from this playing; this thinking, these adaptations and adjustments which arise from a critical reflection that occurs simultaneously with the playing, happens in and through their musical (inter)actions. (...) They react to the emergent, partly unpredictable, and complex flow of sonic, social, and physical events.¹¹

Unexpected decisions in the performance will probably also rely on the ‘feeling’ of the performer, which means that it is not only sound, but also the contact with the instrument, the felt connection with the audience and other musicians, the space of the performance, proprioceptive signals arising from the performer's body, and many other possible inputs that may provoke a change in the course of the performance. From a research perspective, the multilayered causes and effects of decision-making processes and events in performance invite to investigate where and when they occur. Observing moments of change may happen from a third person perspective, for example, by analysing the audiovisual recording of a performance. But unraveling their complex entanglement with all of the aspects mentioned above requires, on the one hand, an insider’s perspective and involvement, and the possibility to register or capture these insider experiences during performance, on the other. Combining these perspectives is far from obvious. For the performing musician, the act of registering a change from within may in itself constitute a form of interruption from without. Musical performances often require such immersion and engagement in the musical action that they don’t allow the distance required for a monitoring task where the musician becomes the critical spectator of their own performance. This may be felt especially strongly in contexts of public performances of repertoire. Artistic researcher Jed Wentz formulates it as such:

My point of view had always been that during performance I have to believe that whatever version I am doing is the only possible best version. (...) So somehow, as a researcher preparing to perform, I have to get myself into a state of belief. As soon as I get off the stage, I can question whether the performance was indeed any good at all, but not in the moment itself.¹²

3. Interruptions as snapshots

Interruptions as temporal cuts and spatial shifts may create new possibilities and as such foster creativity within performance, but they are not enough to produce the reflectivity or criticality needed in research as defined at the beginning of this article. Paradoxically, an interruption becomes most valuable when it gives access to the stream or continuity that was interrupted. The purpose of interrupting in the context of artistic research may be to capture something of the unfolding of that stream before it evaporates, like a snapshot. Interruptions can have this effect very strongly when they are totally unexpected. Most people of my generation will probably know where they were and what they were doing on 9/11. On a smaller scale, interruptions may be used deliberatively to improve or change aspects of musical performance that can’t be changed by just playing ‘through’ the music. A familiar example is the music teacher who suddenly interrupts a student’s playing, thus creating a micro-shock and making the student aware of what he or she was doing at the moment just before the interruption.¹³ This may not only bring to the fore what just has been performed, but also the intentionality of what was going to be played. Indeed, often music teachers use shock effects to make students aware of their automated behavior and ingrained tendencies in performance. The interruption of the teacher offers a temporal pause to let this awareness sink in and try to consciously imagine a new direction or approach.

4. Interruptions from the inside

Interruptions can happen in the sounding reality or on a purely mental level. From the perspective of the listener, the most common mental interruption in a concert is probably the loss of attention to what happens on stage, with the spatial effect of thoughts beginning to wander or eyes starting to look around in the hall. From a performer’s perspective, mental interruptions can be the experiences of distance or alienation in a performance, or, as stated above, the shift of attention to a specific element in the performance or creation process. Mental interruptions can also be negative, in the sense that they don’t interrupt the unfolding of an action, but rather prevent an action or process from unfolding. A familiar example for musicians is the conscious resistance in performance to speeding up the tempo of the music when gradually increasing loudness. Because of their inhibiting nature, negative interruptions may be easily dismissed after performance because they never became directly audible or visible. However, experiences of inhibition in performance may provide exactly the information that is relevant to the first-person perspective in artistic research. More concretely, actively trying to overcome or break through such inhibitions might be part of an interruptive strategy in artistic research. Pianist Anna Scott describes how she tries to ask questions during performances by deliberately provoking certain reactions through her playing, both in the audience and herself:

In the moment of performance, I find that I am searching for what those provocations might be and I am finding myself really alert to forces that might be constraining my performance, and to make a conscious decision in the moment to break through those constraints to see what happens.¹⁴

5. Durations and iterations of interruptions

Durations of interruptions may vary: from the sudden flash of new awareness of something within performance, to the short moment of evaluation in a musical rehearsal when the musician interrupts the playing and then repeats the same musical phrase in a slightly different way, to the longer breaks when artists take the time for an experience or new insight to incubate, or to (re)think artistic approaches conceptually. Insights can also grow incrementally through iterations of smaller interruptions. Conversely, habits in artistic practice can change through an iteration of negative interruptions, as a persistent resisting of habits to gradually make way for something new. From a purely temporal perspective, the question of whether something is called a ‘research project’ or simply ‘trying something out’ is ultimately a matter of degree.

6. Planned and anticipated interruptions

Receptiveness to accidental or unexpected interruptions may contribute to the emergence of new ideas, experiences and approaches in artistic research.¹⁵ However, from a methodological perspective, it would be relevant to investigate whether interruptions can be used and integrated more systematically and in a more or less pre-planned way without losing their effectivity. In rehearsals of a musical composition, the music is usually split up in fragments that are repeated until they are mastered sufficiently. The pauses between repetitions usually have an analytic-evaluative function, although they are unlikely to have the attention-grabbing power characteristic of the unsuspected interruption. Musicians may also already have a clear idea of how the rehearsed fragment should sound, hence the pre-planned stops and repeats can be considered part of a methodical tuning to a more or less fixed sound ideal. But the repetitions may also have a more open-ended purpose of searching ‘for’ something, like a rhythmical feel or particular sound quality that does not yet have a clear shape in the auditory imagination. Repeatedly interrupting can be a strategy for testing and inquiring the potential of a specific musical passage. An even more open and search-oriented variation is the strategy of listening for ‘something’ without knowing beforehand what, or when and where it will happen. Like the composer improvising at the instrument, searching for inspiration to start a composition. The moment of finding or recognizing musical material with potential, can be considered a moment of interruption that creates a new position from where a compositional process may unfold. Obviously, the exact moment of this interruption cannot be planned beforehand, but at best anticipated by creating the optimal conditions for it to happen.

7. Collaborative interruptions and intersubjectivity

A form of interruption that can keep something of the power of surprise in a more controlled environment is what I would call the “collaborative interruption”. An example of this can be found in the recording studio where the studio engineer listens from a position with more distance to the musical flow than the performers being recorded, but nevertheless with an involvement that is radically different from that of a concert audience. The responsibility of the audio engineer is to actively follow the music, with an ear to sound balance, tempo, technical flaws or imperfections, in order to decide about final takes, but also to interrupt the performance when and where necessary. Often they will also be involved in a more artistic sense, reflecting with the musicians on what happened in a specific take and pointing out new possibilities for a next try.

When researching artists interrupt an artistic process they are involved in, the cut they make is never pure or absolute; there is always a bleeding or afterglow of the interrupted process.

Another example of collaborative interruption can be found in group creation, when at specific moments in the process somebody in the group temporarily takes the role of a listener or observer to reflect and comment on what others are testing out. Again, what makes this different from a listener’s perspective in a concert situation, is that the observing artist takes a more directly involved and informed position, a second-person perspective. Moreover, in contrast to the audio engineer, the observing artist in a group creation may also be able to respond artistically afterwards, and this artistic response may be understood by fellow musicians as an artistic reflection on what they played before.

Intersubjectivity is often presented as a form of criticality that artistic research can provide, and the two cases described above give examples of how this can work in reality, namely by sharing performance time from different positions of proximity and distance to the musical flow, while holding an interruptive responsibility to bring to the foreground elements or qualities in the artistic process that would be difficult to perceive from an individual perspective. Although interruptive responsibility is integral to most artistic collaboration processes, I believe it is worthwhile to more explicitly acknowledge this potential from the perspective of artistic research methodology. Possibly, a considered and more systematic integration of in-time interruptions from first-, second- and third-person perspectives could lead to artistic research methods with a critical force that is complementary to the typical open, off-time and non-judgmental feedback methods that are common today in the context of arts research education.

8. Direct reporting from interruptions

I have already referred to the difficulty of reliably documenting and sharing first-person experiences and insights from musical performance. Music psychologist John Sloboda once raised the question of how to isolate and access the mental operations in composers while they are composing. Pointing out the unreliability of introspective methods, he proposed that “the only thing which gives a chance of working is to have a living composer speaking all his or her thoughts out loud to an observer or a tape-recorder”.¹⁶ Recognising the limitations of introspective methods, interruptive experiences (sounding, mental, negative) are arguably the moments that stand out in memory and are relatively easy to recollect and document after an artistic activity. One might think of different forms of journaling or keeping practice diaries to collect experiences of interruptions right after performance. If approached with discipline, this can be part of an autoethnographic research method.¹⁷ Techniques of “stimulated recall” – where listening or watching audiovisual documentation from a performance is used to elicit verbal feedback – are another example of strategies to get more direct access to memories of important events in performance.¹⁸ Finally, direct reporting may also be part of a more collaborative effort (see 7) where performing, interrupting, observing and reporting may be shared tasks.

9. Indirect reporting and speculation

Although autoethnographic, stimulated recall and journaling methods can be very useful in many cases, they are not the only ways to build on artistic experience in research. As stated before, trying to come closer to the artistic process by creating a verbal analog or following the timeline of the events in a creative or performative process does not necessarily lead to a greater proximity of practice in reflection. More abstract or less direct ways of thinking and writing, informed by a multiplicity of past artistic experiences, may in some cases be better suited to giving access to mental dispositions, attitudes and approaches in artistic processes. This also works in the opposite direction. Researching artists often integrate phases of conceptual thinking, studying other sources, and meta-discussion into their research process, or insert longer pauses to allow artistic experiences to rest and incubate. These reflective pauses can have a decisive impact when returning to their artistic practice, even if the reflections were only indirectly linked to the artistic activities. As a result, it is often impossible to say exactly how and when pauses of off-time reflection concretely affect in-time performance in artistic research. Nevertheless, to account for their impact, artistic researchers sometimes resort to more essayistic, metaphorical and speculative ways of reporting. Artistic research is by its very nature often a balancing act between experimentation, experience, reflection, and digestion. Hence, both direct and indirect reporting can be necessary to bring this research process to life as fully as possible. As such, it also requires awareness and honesty about the speculation that is an integral part of this process, without implying that such speculation can or should be avoided.

10. Reflection as interference

I should now return to the question of what can create critical reflection if an artistic process is interrupted. In my introduction, I referred to the transfer of knowledge from in-time to off-time positions that is often taken for granted. The sketch of artistic research as an interruptive practice that I developed above invites an adjustment of this image. What can happen upon the temporary interruption of an artistic process is not so much a transfer as an interference. My speculation here is that when researching artists interrupt an artistic process they are involved in, the cut they make is never pure or absolute; there is always a bleeding or afterglow of the interrupted process. Even more, the afterglow is precisely what makes the snapshot possible (see 3). Therefore, it is a precious moment in artistic research, and more generally also in artistic creation, since it makes possible interference with elements that were not yet part of the performative or creative process (or not consciously so) and as such may generate some form of reflectivity and creative change (see 2).

Such interference may need a radical interruption and suspension of practice-as-usual, but it may already manifest itself on a much smaller time-scale in daily music practice. Returning to an earlier example: performing musicians may use isolated notes or silent rests in a score to gauge the resonant qualities of the concert space. When playing the next notes, they can try to integrate this new acoustic awareness into their playing, for example, by adjusting timing and articulation and making interaction with reverberation audible in the performance. This example explains how shifting the spatial focus in performance can open the linearity of the musical narrative to things or processes with different time scales, life cycles and durations. It also clarifies why reflection in artistic research is often not (only) analytical in nature, but relies on feeling and perception. In the context of artistic research, the report of this experience can be both artistic and discursive in nature.

11. Shocks from practice

Finally, if the above statements mainly point to possibilities of self-reflection and transformation within artistic research, the artistic performance as a whole can provoke a reflective interruption within an environment or the course of daily life. This is reminiscent of the ideal of the work of art creating a shock effect in the world, not only by provoking astonishment or scandal, but at best by leading to awareness and reflection in society. Here one could think of the role artistic interventions in public space, inviting attentiveness, imagination and sensory exploration. How such interventions can lead to change in public space is a topic beyond the scope of this article, but they remind us that a methodology for interruptive research should always account for the interaction between doing and reflecting. Researching artists can make interruptions for reflection, but they also need to return to practice in time to challenge any of the off-time assumptions they are making about artistic processes through generating interference between discursive thinking and artistic and aesthetic experience. If there is one thing that is crucial to reflection in artistic research, it is that it needs the shocks from practice and from the experience of something that moves, inspires and convinces on its own terms.

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Paul Craenen

is a sound artist, composer and scholar at the intersection of artistic practice, music education and research. He is research professor at the Royal Conservatoire The Hague and Assistant Professor at Leiden University.

p.craenen@koncon.nl

Footnotes