Our three overarching research questions are:
• In what way does forgetfulness affect the artistic practice of a musician, and the interplay within a musical ensemble, when it is used as a guiding method and principle?
• Will forgetfulness and the river Lethe enable us to become artistically reborn by way of aiding us to forget our musical habits and traditional reasonings?
• What will we be willing to forget?
The aim of the project is to investigate how forgetfulness affects: (1) our skills, habits, and the possibility for us to become artistically reborn as individual musicians; (2) our musical communication, experience of agency, and our collective memory as a musical ensemble; (3) how we contextualise, theorise, and reflect on the music that we create with forgetfulness as our artistic method and guiding principle.
• In what way does forgetfulness affect the artistic practice of a musician, and the interplay within a musical ensemble, when it is used as a guiding method and principle?
• Will forgetfulness and the river Lethe enable us to become artistically reborn by way of aiding us to forget our musical habits and traditional reasonings?
• What will we be willing to forget?
The aim of the project is to investigate how forgetfulness affects: (1) our skills, habits, and the possibility for us to become artistically reborn as individual musicians; (2) our musical communication, experience of agency, and our collective memory as a musical ensemble; (3) how we contextualise, theorise, and reflect on the music that we create with forgetfulness as our artistic method and guiding principle.
There is a substantial amount of research done on the relationship between
memory and music, but the possibility of approaching music by way of
forgetfulness has not been researched prior to this project. Memory is an
essential tool for all musicians, and it is particularly true for musicians who
perform music that has no score, e.g., improvised music. With Lethe we want
to investigate what artistic possibilities will become accessible to us if we use
forgetfulness, the antithesis of memory, as our method for creating new music
and to question our musical habits. In addition to the practice-based artistic
research that our project encompasses, we intend to – by way of embedding
ourselves in a discursive process – build knowledge based on theoretical inquiries
and our own essay writing, as well as to present arguments and reasonings to
help us and others to navigate the various streams of Lethe.
We will weave together practice and reflection by way of continually recreating
one and the same piece of improvised music from memory. Given that we
consistently play the same piece of music over and over again over the course of
three years, we can investigate forgetfulness as one of the main phenomena that
changes the music as well as develops it. Once we have finished a performance of
our continually recreated piece of music and it has been recorded, we, as the research
team, will not have access to the documentation of it. In this way, our memory, or lack
thereof, will become implicit to the object of our research. The continually recreated
piece of music will function as a journal for our research, our laboratory, and the
documentation of our process. We will, in conclusion of the project, present an
example of what forgetfulness as an artistic method and guiding principle can
result in artistically and musically.
During the third year of the project, we will arrange and curate a symposium on the
theme of forgetfulness at Stockholm University of the Arts, to which we will invite
international artists and researchers. As our point of departure, we believe that
forgetfulness is an important part of the artistic practice of a musician, and that memory,
in certain cases, can obscure an artistic development. The Roman poet Virgil wrote in his epic poem Aeneid that it is only after we have had our memory erased by Lethe that we can
become reborn. What will we be willing to forget when we meet at the riverbanks
of Lethe and gaze at the waters that can wash away our previous musical lives?