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.
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 Greek poet Virgil wrote in his poem Aenid 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?





















In contemporary civilization where everything is standardized and where everything is repeated, the whole point is to forget in the space between an object and its duplication. If we didn't have this power of forgetfulness, if art today didn't help us to forget, we would be submerged, drowned under those avalanches of rigorously identical objects (For the Birds, 1981).  -John Cage