Doctoral Theses / Doktorsavhandlingar Högskolan för scen och musik

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://gupea-staging.ub.gu.se/handle/2077/18984

Browse

Now showing 1 - 20 of 40

När livet står på spel - En teaterkonstnärlig studie av partnerskap i hälso- och sjukvården
(2025-08-18) Brattström, Victoria
In this dissertation, two worlds are being engaged – healthcare and the theatrical arts – to investigate how partner-creating processes are established in encounters between patients and professionals in healthcare settings aiming for a more person-centred care. Person‐centred care has, since long, been endorsed by patient organizations and professional bodies as one of a set of core competencies needed to effectively meet the complex challenges facing today's healthcare systems and controlled studies have shown that person-centred care can contribute to measurable changes and positive effects. Such a profound change of approach has, however, proven itself to be ‘easier said than done’, and there is a need for methods and approaches that can contribute to how a partnership between healthcare professionals and patients can be established and maintained. This dissertation builds on experiences from my theatrical practice as director and actor. Two methodological concepts are brought in from the theatre through the Stanislavskian concepts of the Magic If and Given Circumstances which actors and directors use during rehearsals to analyse a playscript. To examine the asymmetry in human interaction in healthcare contexts and what means can be effective in creating partnerships in such situations, three care encounters have been selected and transformed into theatre manuscripts. These scripts are explored with the help of actors who have taken the roles of healthcare professionals and patients in staged readings, and finally these actors are also interviewed alternately in the first and third person. The model developed in the thesis is inspired by the philosophical anthropology and critical hermeneutics of Paul Ricoeur and, as such, the work of interpreting a role in a theatrical context, characterised by the actor investigating and testing, in practice, a preliminary understanding of the theatrical situation by performing it, is “read” through the theoretical lens of Ricoeur’s theory of interpretation. Inspired by Kristensson Uggla’s concept laboratory of interpretation, I have chosen to regard the theatre’s rehearsal process and the healthcare encounter dialogues as interpretation labs where the patient-role is being co-created and re-interpreted (thus both discovered and invented) in the collaboration between patients and healthcare professionals during the healthcare encounter.
Gränskontroll – pedagogisk diskurs som villkor för deltagande vid svenska folkhögskolors musiklinjer
(2025-03-03) Eckerstein, Julia
The area of study for this thesis is the music profile courses at Swedish folk high schools. The folk high school is a free education form for adults, and the study departs from the problem area of skewed participation at artistic profile courses at these institutions. The aim of the thesis is to produce knowledge on conditions for participation at music programs at Swedish folk high schools. The thesis’s theoretical point of departure is Bernstein’s theory on social reproduction through education, and specifically the concepts of pedagogic device, pedagogic discourse, classification and framing. Through Bernstein’s theoretical lens, conditions for participation are understood as discursive effects being produced by pedagogic discourse. Data for the project has been produced through audiovisual synchronous focus group interviews with music teachers and students, respectively, at nine different folk high schools. Interviews were transcribed and analysed through critical thematic analysis. The results show that conditions for participation are produced in three ways. Through: 1) external discourses that regulate possibilities for formulation of music program education, 2) principles for identity formation, especially principles centred around strongly classified genre categories and weakly classified conceptions of school and leisure, and 3) admission criteria that are centered around teachers’ conceptions of musical genre and/or applicants’ personalities. Through the analysis, music programs are categorised into three different pedagogic discourses. Although different, the three pedagogic discourses share similarities which means that the conditions for participation are produced in all pedagogic discourses, albeit to varying degrees. The boundary control that operates in the constitution of the pedagogic discourses simultaneously constructs ideals for a student who matches the education. All three pedagogic discourses emphasise personality-centred admission criteria. Furthermore, three external discourses intersect in the construction of these criteria, amplifying their importance.
Situated Agencies: Mediating Places through the Body
(2024-04-12) S. Fari, Nathalie
At a time when our ways of experiencing and inhabiting places in the city have become increasingly entangled with technology, the Situated Agencies: Mediating places through the Body explores how site-specific performance practice can be addressed through an embodied and documentary approach. By employing the notion of agency, this artistic research project examines how we can enter, access, and uncover the multiple layers of a specific place – its historical connotation, social meaning, cultural value and so forth – to collect and generate a performance and/or documentary material. In this process, a special emphasis is placed on grasping and sort of excavating the hidden narratives of a place which in short, refer to all the potential narratives that are neither representative of a place, nor correspond to certain clichés and expectations, but which may be untold, unmanifested or unexpected. With such an emphasis, a series of performance laboratories were carried out in collaboration with artist researchers from different disciplinary fields. Using approaches from place-based research, posthumanism and performance documentation, these laboratories aimed to explore the relationship between embodiment and audiovisuality. On the one hand, through designing a variety of exercises which focused on enhancing a bodily/environmental awareness and on the other, through experimenting with how the audiovisual traces of a laboratory work can serve both as data and a creative source. The claim that by challenging and expanding the documentary status (or truthful meaning) of such traces, new forms of narrativisation and agency may arise, appears here as an approach to site-oriented screen performance research. As a result, this artistic research project offers a contribution to the exploration of how a specific place, in this case, a public square in Gothenburg and another in Rio de Janeiro, can be (re)framed, (re)performed and especially, rewritten through both an editing and archival process. All this is done with and through the co-presence of different cameras and bodies and thus, through the ways in which the situated agencies emerge and operate within an environment.
Techniques of Ecstasy: Rumori - Tracing Sound
(2023-11-03) Järnegard, Esaias
This doctoral thesis proposes the philosophical concept of ontopoetics in relation to an artistic practice of sound (music) and listening. The concept of ontopoetics is used as the backdrop of the developed notion of techniques of ecstasy essentially as an intermediary between listening and language. Ontopoetics becomes the bridge between the archaic and contemporary man. My research is practice-based but nevertheless finds a form of dissemination where the word, the sound and the image work together like a body. Through placing the shaman and the mystic (the ones who originally wield the techniques of ecstasy) as the figure of our present-day artist the thesis offers a more immersive understanding of the artist, and the possibility of imagining how sound, listening and a form-of-life (understood as a way-of-being-in-sound) still can be considered as a way and method of shaping our world. The shaman and the mystic are also a gateway to exploring ontopoetics as a way of understanding sound, listening and communication as something preceding interpreted meaning, yet still producing knowledge. On an equal level of importance, the thesis consists of several musical compositions which extend and materialize what in the thesis is proposed as potentiality and the condition for making music. This interdependence of sound, word, and image (the tracing of sound) is given its own importance in the realization of a strategy of sound. A method, but at the same time not; the strategy gives way to this thesis’s tentative conclusion. Listening is a way of knowledge, through listen ing the world emerges. And this knowledge is accessible through music’s immediacy of expression. Throughout the thesis the work on sound is given predominance. However, a rich material of dialogue partners of both musical, artistic, and philosophical characters is included, most prominently exemplified by the writing of Lotta Lotass where the thesis’s strategy of sound findsa dialogue partner—a dialogue also with the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, Martin Heidegger, Simone Weil, the ravings of Antonin Artaud and Giorgio Agamben as well as the music of Diamanda Galás, Giacinto Scelsi and Luigi Nono. The author of this work places them in a strange and shared space where the artist and the shaman are brought to a common, wordless end in a music which is as much sound as silence.
I otakt med tiden: En genealogi av svensk musiklärarutbildning
(2023-10-20) Ostendorf, Lena
The aim of this thesis is to contribute to knowledge about how Swedish music teacher education today is governed. The theoretical lens is a Foucauldian genealogical approach according to which the educational context is seen as a discursive practice. Questions are raised concerning what kind of discourses are constitutive for music teacher education today, what kind of subject positions are possible for the education´s agents and what kind of power techniques are at play. Another research question is how music teachers are constructed historically. The study consists of two partial studies, the first being focus group interviews with teachers and students respectively at six institutions for music teacher education all over Sweden. The second partial study is an analysis of historical documents between years 1954-2008, mainly governmental official inquiries. Both studies’ material is analyzed using Foucault´s concepts of discourse, governmentality, power/knowledge, and genealogy. Results from the first partial study show three major discourses that are governing music teacher education today, namely a utility discourse, a bildung discourse and a university discourse. Within these discourses there are several subject positions available for the teachers/students such as, for example, guide, generalist, pragmatic, expert or entrepreneur. In the second partial study, the result of the analysis is presented as six constructions of the music teacher: the music teacher as bridge builder, both intellectual, artist and craftsman, competent, flexible, as folkbildare, and as gardener. In the concluding discussion, several discursive discontinuities, as they show themselves in the empirical material, are discussed. Those discontinuities describe discursive breaking points, the first one illustrating the music teachers role shifting from being responsible for cultural and societal wellbeing to becoming an entrepreneur, serving the market. The second breaking point is about the shift in how music education is seen as a mean for bildung towards a utility-discourse and back. The third describes the change in norms and expectations regarding genre and musical context, shifting from orchestra towards pop-band. And lastly, a discontinuity can be detected relating to epistemological aspects: music teachers have moved from being mainly practicians towards becoming more intellectual. Today a practician-discourse can be seen again, mainly concerning a classroom practice.
Den klingande verklighetens föränderlighet: Mot ett vidgat gestaltningsutrymme
(2022-05-06) Löndahl, Tomas
For artists, the impact of the symbols in a score on interpretational positions may on some occasions be experienced as problematic. This is especially the case for artists, experiencing the classical musical tradition to have an inhibitory influence on their performances. The aim of this dissertation is to investigate – within the field of notated western art music – the performing artist’s potential space for interpretation and its possibilities to expand. One prerequisite for the investigation is to explore how this space can be expanded through a relativization of the correlations between the musical work, the symbols of the score, and the sounding music. Different views on work concepts and on symbols are discussed and problematized, resulting in a formulated new approach to the score. Two series of experiments with works by the Swedish composer Ludvig Norman (1831–1885) were preceded by research on the context of the works, as well as by analyses of the notated musical parameters of the scores. The outcomes from these investigations, together with the new approaches towards the work concept and the notated symbols, formed the premisses for an artistically informed freedom during the interpretational explorations. These explorations included deliberately amended or recomposed versions of the music, and parametrical improvisations based on artistic investigations beyond the original notations. At times musical material not emanating from the notated symbols were also added. This intertwining of thorough research and analysis with an experimental approach, changed the preconditions for the interpretational solutions. Within the widened and flexible space for interpretation, the musical parameters – through the intentional and open-ended reconfigurations of them – were allowed to acquire new properties and new relationships with each other. New sounding realities and new artistic insights were thereby developed, as well as unconventional and cross-boundary ways of interpretational realisations. My articulated method to combine an acquired artistically informed freedom with a new permissive view on the work concept thus displayed sounding solutions, where exploring and expanding interpretative spaces could unleash new and unexpected expressions. In that sense this dissertation contributes to the field of musical interpretation far beyond the music of Norman.
An Operatic Game Changer: The Opera Maker as Game Designer and the Potentials of Ludo-Immersive Opera
(2022-01-28) Jalhed, Hedvig
How can live-performed chamber operas be conceptualized as immersive games with interactive features? This artistic study has resulted in a system model through which degrees of immersion may be generated and analyzed from physical, social, and psychical stimuli. A differentiation of immersive modes has been made possible by the framing of opera-making as game design. The findings indicate that so-called ludo-immersive opera could be developed into operatic chamber opera play for self-reliant participants, constituting an intimate and alternate practice in which dynamic game-masters may replace supervising directors. However, this practice is entangled with the question of future training for operatic practitioners outside the mainstream opera format, and beyond both Wagnerian and Brechtian spectatorship. The shift from the traditional audience/performer relationship to a novel form of immersive interaction requires a new mind-set and training for opera practitioners, to encourage autonomy and active participation by individual visitors. Theoretically, the study connects recent innovations in opera to the aesthetic principles of the Apollonian and the Dionysian and positions ludo-immersive opera in relation the these. The principles bridge immersion, opera, and game-playing, articulated by a reinterpretation of Roger Caillois’ taxonomy of play. The issue of immersion as an artistic aim in opera is highlighted. Moreover, artists’ and visitors’ reciprocal participation in ludo-immersive opera is discussed in regard to its historical context of operatic event-making and forms of presentation. The project explores the detailed consequences of perception and performance in chamber opera with ludic and immersive features, primarily inspired by live-action role playing. The main objective has been to investigate how operatic events can be presented as immersive adventures rather than spectacles, and consequences that the integration of playing visitors in professional opera implies for artistic practice. In four operas created during the period 2016–2020, interventions and encounters between artists and visitors in musically driven situations framed by fictional settings have been staged and studied. The artistic researcher has iteratively been engaged in action as opera singer, librettist, dramaturge, and director. Data from the research cycles include field recordings from the productions and reports from the participants in the form of interviews and surveys.
Jazz in Worship and Worship in Jazz: Exploring the musical language of Liturgical, Sacred, and Spiritual Jazz in a Postsecular Age
(2021-05-21) Steinmetz, Uwe
The aim of this dissertation is to identify musical elements that contribute to the generation of religious meaning in jazz performance and to explore how religious experience can inspire jazz composition. In this study, the history of jazz, specifically tailored to the aspects of my inquiry is imbricated with relevant theories and musical interventions from my own artistic practice in composition and performance. In addition to artistic research through my own practice as a performer and composer, the transdisciplinary fields of musicology, music theory, neurology, history of religion, and theology provides further critical tiles in the knowledge-mosaic constructed by this study. Using my own artistic practice as my primary research method, my thesis investigates distinct intrinsic and extra-musical elements that help to create a typology of religiously inspired jazz, grounded in historical reference works. Twenty-five of my own compositions following this typology are submitted with this thesis and are analyzed in the three main chapters. The final chapter (Imagine) summarizes conclusions of the main chapters and includes a brief evaluation of the research process. Conclusions from the thesis include (i) defining six distinct ways of expressing religious belief in jazz, (ii) demonstrating that the extrinsic meaning of religiously inspired jazz changes when placed within a liturgical dramaturgy, and (iii) generating new postsecular perspectives on jazz. Another concrete result of this thesis involves revisiting George Russell ́s Lydian Chromatic Concept as a basis for my own compositions. The practice-based adaption and exploration of Russell ́s theory opens new ways of understanding how his musical philosophy builds a bridge between Western classical sacred music and jazz. Finally, this thesis also raises new areas for further research such as microtonal and twelve-tone tonality in jazz, temporal concepts in jazz composition and improvisation, and the embodiment of Christian faith through music as an extension of the institutional church in society.
Omsorg, välvilja och tystnadskultur – diskursiva dilemman och strategier i lärarutbildningens undervisningspraktik i musik mot yngre åldrar
(2021-03-17) Frick Alexandersson, Monica
The aim of this thesis is to critically scrutinize, identify and problematize discourses in music education within teacher education towards younger ages. The study explores how teaching practice and examinations in music are constructed, and what kind of strategies are used to handle the dilemmas that emerge in music teaching practice. Theoretically, the study is based on social constructionist theory, and the thesis deploys a discourse psychological methodology and approach. The data consist of observational films and field notes, and the material was produced within a period of three years. It included 91 students, 26 student groups and three teacher educators at three Swedish teacher education institutes. The results show two overarching discourses. First, a discourse focusing on care was articulated and legitimized based on an idea that student teachers are scared of express themselves within music education and that they lack confidence in teaching music. This discourse was expressed within a framework of a culture of silence that has a protective function for student teachers lacking self-confidence. Second, a discourse focusing on benevolence was articulated and legitimized based on an idea that a student teacher’s boldness could compensate for their lack of musical skills. This discourse was expressed within a framework of a tolerant and compensatory culture of assessment which has a protective and supportive function for student teachers with a lack of musical skills. To provide a basis for new pedagogical discussions concerning progress and development of quality, the conclusion discusses critical aspects in teaching practice in music within teacher education.
Circumscribing Tonality: Upper Secondary Music Students Learning the Circle of Fifths
(2020-09-29) Rudbäck, Niklas
The fundamental motivation for this research project is that listening is central to all musical activities, and that semiotic means for visualizing, representing, and conceptualizing music are central to educational endeavors aimed at developing trained listening. There is, however, a lack of research on how such semiotic means are taught and learned, especially in the aural skills and music theory subjects and in secondary education. Therefore, this thesis investigates upper secondary music students’ processes of learning the circle of fifths and some associated music-theoretical concepts, and how those processes relate to the practice of aural skills and music theory education they are engaged in. I ask two research questions: 1. How do participants introduce, reproduce, and use the circle of fifths in the educational practice? 2. How do the specific ways in which the circle of fifths is introduced, reproduced, and used in the educational practice facilitate learning processes? Theoretically, the study draws on Vygotsky’s distinction between scientific and everyday concepts, and conceives of the circle of fifths as an inscription. The study takes a qualitative case study approach, combining interviews with students and observation of lessons, both documented by video. The analysis focuses on how participants interact, how they use inscriptions, and on how this constitutes co-constructive microgenetic processes. The analysis shows an educational practice where the circle of fifths is deployed as a tool for solving transposing problems, and where the ability to use mnemonic techniques to reproduce the diagram is highly valued. This focus on mnemonics and algorithms for problem-solving tends to foreground the logic of the representations, rather than the logic being represented, which makes it difficult for students to apply the algorithms on different kinds of problems. For example, circumscribing a group of chords in the diagram is used to represent a key. This makes it difficult to distinguish major and minor keys, and to conceive of key as a property of melodies. The circle of fifths is used to visualize central concepts, which are then used to explicate the circle of fifths, creating a circular conceptual system. While some circularity may be unavoidable given the previous knowledge of the students, it is proposed that the circularity is exacerbated by a lack of musical examples and formal definitions.
"Rörlig och stabil, bred och spetsig”. Kulturell reproduktion och strategier för breddat deltagande i den svenska kulturskolan
(2020-03-03) Jeppsson, Cecilia
One point of departure of this study is the intensified national interest at the policy level in Swedish kulturskolor (Community Schools of Music and Arts) as an inclusive and accessible institution. Yet, the field can be described as torn between tradition and change. The field’s traditional features can be understood as associated with the music field’s institutional discourses. The aim of the study is to deepen our understanding of Swedish kulturskolor as a field in relation to the political mission to strive for widening participation. The theoretical perspective of Bourdieu is applied at an overarching level, supplemented with discourse theoretical perspectives. Discourses are understood as resources in actors’ positioning in the field. This mixed-methods study is based on a survey of 2413 sixth-graders, focus group conversations with 18 teachers, and interviews with five principals of seven kulturskolor. The results of article I identify the typical student as a Swedish-born girl with well-educated parents, in line with Bourdieu’s theory of cultural reproduction. It is suggested that a “kulturskola-appropriate habitus” contributes to children’s satisfaction in their studies. In article II–IV, teachers’ and principals’ strategies for widening participation incorporated various measures from inclusion in existing tradition to inclusion through a wide range of flexible and short-term courses. The strategies and positions are interpreted as orthodox versus heterodox strategies to legitimize the programmes. The theoretically informed conclusions describe the field as heteronomous and affected by media, politics, and economics – a phenomenon interpreted as comprising cross-field effects. Despite the field’s diminishing autonomy, teachers and principals are seen as powerful actors who are encouraged to take action in shaping conditions for participation in the kulturskolor of the future.
Att göra plats för traditioner. Antagonism och kunskapsproduktion inom folk- och världsmusik
(2020-03-03) Hedin Wahlberg, Ingrid
The aim of this thesis is to critically examine the educational area of folk and world music within higher education in Sweden, with a focus on questions of knowledge, power, and governance. The study is ethnographic and the data were produced in the 2016–2017 period through observations of lessons, concerts, and examinations in three educational environ- ments, and through interviews with teachers and students. The analysis identified two antagonistic discourses: music as cultural context and music as autonomous. Techniques of self-governance within a pastoral power mechanism served to disconnect the learning process from the teacher and put responsibility on the student. Two pedagogical positions, the master–apprentice position and the coaching position, were simultaneously present within the educational area, and educational and musical boundaries were drawn between folk and world music education and western art music education. The educational area is characterized through entwining constructions of tradition, place, and identity, and through teaching practices reproducing norms within western folk music. Conflicting interests within the educational area are discussed in relation to questions of power and governance within musical learning. In conclusion, the educational area of folk and world music within higher music education is understood as producing knowledge centred on musical constructions of place.
Orchestrating timbre – Unfolding processes of timbre and memory in improvisational piano performance
(2019-12-05) Mayas, Magda
This doctoral thesis presents how the orchestration of timbre is investigated from a performer’s perspective as means to “unfold” improvisational processes. It is grounded in my practice as a pianist in the realm of improvised music, in which I often use preparations and objects as extensions of the instrument. As practice-based research, I explore multiple, combined, artistic, and analytical approaches to timbre, anchored in four of my own works. The process has also involved dialogues and experimental collaborations with other performers, engineers, an instrument builder and a choreographer. It opposes the notion of generalizable, reproducible, and transferrable techniques and instead offers detailed approaches to technique and material, describing object timbre, action timbre, and gesture timbre as active agents in sound-making processes. Whilst timbre is often understood as a purely sonic perceptual phenomenon, this view does not accord with contemporary site-specific improvisational practice; hence, the need to explore and renew the potentiality of timbre. I introduce and argue for an extended understanding of timbre in relation to material, space, and body that embraces timbre’s complexity and potential to contribute to an ethical engagement with the situated context. I understand material, spatial, and embodied relations to be non-hierarchical, inseparable, and in constant flux, requiring continuous re-configuration without being reduced or simplified. From a performer’s perspective, I define “orchestrating” timbre as the attentive re-organization of these active agents and the creation of musical structures on micro and macro levels through the sculpting and transitioning of timbre—spatially, temporally, physically, and mentally—within a variety of compositional frameworks. This requires recognizing the multiple and complex roles that memory plays in contemporary improvisational practice. I therefore introduce the term timbral memory as a strategic structural, reflective, and performative tool in the creation of performing and listening modes, as integrated parts of timbre orchestration. Reaching beyond the sonic, my research contributes to the field of critical improvisation studies. It addresses practitioners and audiences in music and sound art, attempting to also constitute a bridge from artistic research in music—often viewed as a self-contained discipline—into multiple artistic fields, to inspire discussions, creation and education.
An Inexplicable Hunger – flutist)body(flute (dis)encounters
(2019-03-18) Cyrino, Marina Pereira
This doctoral research is structured by singular encounters, that happened between 2014 and 2018. Together with a series of collaborators, I have developed a critical and poetic methodology through what I call “mixture”, “contamination” and the practice of “un-goaling”, in which my “flutist-body-flute” relation encounters the practices of other artists. A search for flexible modes of being a flutist, as a way of working around a dominant characteristic of Western musical practices: what I call a fragmented specialisation, or a specialised fragmentation. A flute-body traverses a body-flutist, a pulsating: metamorphosis. A practice of metamorphosis traversed my body-musician. It sowed a fragility, awoke a taste for a creating-in-mixture that also traversed the transverse flute that keeps up with me. It stirred a mixture-experimentation flavour that was already inside, but constrained. It aroused an inexplicable hunger. It taught me how to sustain the time of an estrangement. From the practice of metamorphosis, I imagined a mixture, a “mix-arts” as a method of artistic investigation. I would mix art modalities. I would mix roles: interpretation, improvisation, composition. I would mix “mine” with “yours” through co-creations. I would mix my body with a body-flute until it becomes a “flutist-body-flute” relation. Mixture as method grew out of my growing concern at being an expert at being an excerpt of myself. Without being able to combine the practices that coexisted inside me, almost isolated, I searched for a way to tune out a certain being-flutist, an image-inside that has guided my practices so far. But the mixing did not happen in a random manner: it was guided by encounters. Encounters emerged as method and structure; as a method for finding ways of de-anaesthetise the forces of creating, for finding ways in which artistic creation is guided by a vulnerability to the other as a living presence. The practices of co-creation/composition and performance have been translated into sound/video and written essays, in a process of “deciphering” and “remembering”. Through this method, I claim that each encounter sets the practices that will guide the mixture. These practices are as many as possible encounters, and made sensible to the reader through the present dissertation.
Before Sound: Transversal Processes in Site-Specific Sonic Practice
(2018-10-24) Stjerna, Åsa
This doctoral research explores the capacity of site-specific practices of sound installation to bring about transformation. It claims that in order to understand this capacity, we need to address the complexity of the transversal processes that make up artistic practices in this field, and understand that these transversal processes in fact precede sound. This includes understanding site-specificity as a complex, affective practice spanning across and connecting the material, social, discursive, artistic, and technical realms at the same time in a given situation in public space. Based on experiences from the author’s site-specific practice of sound installation, the thesis explores three approaches, and a series of related conceptual tools, in order to articulate the nuances of such transversal processes. These approaches, informed by a philosophy of immanence, are: mapping the affective lines, establishing new connections, and becoming non-autonomous. These three approaches look to re-negotiate some of the traditions, tendencies, and assumptions that dominate existing artistic sonic strategies. By exploring these three approaches, the dissertation suggests that it is possible to emphasize and practice transversality. This in its turn, has the potential to affect site-specific sonic practice artistically and in terms of research and education. Further, the dissertation shows how such an approach activates the ethical dimension of site-specific sonic practice. In particular, it involves dismantling the established separation between artist-subject, site, and work, in order to acknowledge the transversal affective relations between specific and diverse “bodies” with agencies—human as well as non-human. Beyond making visible the transversal nature of site-specific sonic practice, the explorations also open up future perspectives in thinking about the field. Not least, the research points towards the importance of overcoming hierarchical models of thought that dominate within a range of discourses and institutions central to art practice. Such a shift has the potential to radically transform the power structures that exist between commissioners of art, artists, a site’s own inherent agencies, and the visitor. Further, a change in our thinking of the type described in this work is also needed if we are to broaden existing dialogues on the artistic work, representation, material, and process.
Positioner i dans – om genus, handlingsutrymme och dansrörelser i grundskolans praktik
(2016-10-11) Pastorek Gripson, Märtha
Abstract Title: Positioner i dans – om genus, handlingsutrymme och dansrörelser i grundskolans praktik English title: Positions in dance- on gender, agency and dance movements in primary school practice Language: Swedish (with a summary in English) Keywords: Genus, fysisk aktivitet, dansundervisning, estetiskt lärande, kroppslig kommunikation, femininiteter och maskuliniteter, grundskola. ISBN: 978-91-982422-6-3 (printed version) ISBN: 978-91-982422-7-0 (PDF/GUPEA) This doctoral thesis examines gender and dance practice in primary school. More precisely it investigates how gender influences the way dance teachers address their pupils, but also the way that pupils organize and understand themselves and carry out tasks and activities in dance education and dance composition. Accordingly, the thesis takes its starting point in the way that participating schools in Sweden introduce ideas on dance, gender and democracy in education. Theoretically a social constructionist framework is used, mainly drawing upon Butler’s concepts of performativity, the heterosexual matrix and the gaze. The study consists of two parts. The first part focuses on the way that dance education is organized and carried out from a gender perspective. The second part deals with the way pupils carry out a composition task that gives them relatively more freedom to make their own choices. Lessons have been video recorded and analyzed with a focus on the interaction between individuals as well as on a more structural level. The results indicate that many boys enact a limited dance repertoire. They tend to avoid investing in “feminine” movements and they are not used to being observed as bodily symbols. Many girls, on the other hand, are informed by extracurricular dance activities, which give them tools to carry out tasks, but they are also limited by the male gaze. Most of them seem to expand their movements in space by using lines through the body and by interacting with “the audience”. Different genres and educational practices contribute in different ways to the possibility of positioning oneself as two-dimensional or three-dimensional. Dance is presented in mainly two ways, as something and about something. In conclusion, gender plays a crucial role and both restricts and opens up for girls´ and boys´ movements in school dance practice.
The Rhythm of Thinking: Immanence and Ethics in Theater Performance
(2016-08-19) Petri, Johan
The dissertation The Rhythm of Thinking: Immanence and Ethics in Theater Performance is an artistic research project in the field of theater, with directing and theatrical composition and dramaturgy as its main points of focus. The critical exploration is based on the experience of conceptualizing and directing three different theater performances. The project is an attempt to explore the implications of the concept of immanence in the collective creative process of theater making. In particular, it is an effort to illuminate what might be called “processes of immanence” or “theater of immanence”. The research is built around a net of questions, observations, and thoughts ranging from the experiences of collective creative processes and collaborative work with the performers, to academic criticism on discourses related to the fields of performance studies, philosophy and performance philosophy, perception theory, and musicology. The unfurling of this net is intended to contribute to the ideas and theories surrounding the relationship between the structural specifics of theater – dramaturgically and compositionally – and the aspects of meaning and affect. This formulation encapsulates a number of sub-areas to which the investigation aims to contribute with problematizing insertions, areas broadly defined as: transforming theories into concrete compositional and processual measures; developing dramaturgical discourses beyond semantic language; problematizing a binary relation between composition/conceptualization and an intuitive, emotional creative force; discussing how to enhance a readiness for variation in the performers; problematizing hierarchical structures, both in regards to the hierarchy of expressions, as well as creative influence; mapping out a thought process for a directorial practice; and finally, searching for a possible reciprocity between compositional structures and ethics. The investigated materials are theater performances but the critical treatment is mainly done through philosophical discourses, predominately represented by the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995), the Canadian philosopher Brian Massumi (b.1956), and the Italian/Australian philosopher Rosi Braidotti (b.1954).
En avestetiserad skol- och lärandekultur. En studie om lärprocessers estetiska dimensioner
(2015-03-02) Hansson Stenhammar, Marie-Louise
In this dissertation teaching and learning is studied based on the concepts of arts-based learning processes and the methods of art. I discuss the ontology of arts-based learning processes in relation to arts methods and how that relationship can be related to the learning processes that are made visible in the classroom work of a 5th grade class in a Swedish Primary school. Learning and knowledge are also addressed from a sociocultural perspective and within a social constructionist theoretical framework, based on Lev Vygotskij’s theories on the interplay between thinking and language, and the relationship between reproduction and creativity as a prerequisite for development and learning. The main study was preceded by a pilot study in which a portfolio method was tested in three classes in Primary school, grades 2-6. The experience gained from the pilot study led to an ethnographically influenced methodology and method in the main study. The main study is a case study where data from 33 participants were produced over a period of 4 weeks through daily field studies in all subjects on the schedule (with the exception of physical education and health), observations and teacher and student interviews. In order to deepen and gain a perspective on the analysis of the field notes and interviews, they are discussed in relation to artistic, psychological and teaching and learning perspectives, as well as in relation to a poststructuralist view of language. The results show evidence of a de-aestheticised school and learning culture in the sense that the teaching, regardless of the subject, primarily focuses and produces a way of thinking on learning and knowledge formation which is based on a reproducing process of quantitative character. The results also indicate that there are meaning-making actions where pupils describe learning that requires ingenuity, ability to illustrate and imagine, as well as to combine past experiences with new impressions through reflection. These descriptions are identified as innovative, configurative and reflective actions.
Never Heard Before: A Musical Exploration of Organ Voicing
(2015-02-09) Segurado, João
This dissertation examines the practice of voicing and its implications for musical performance. Organ sounds are shaped to suit the practice of musical performance, and they influence that practice in significant ways. This study seeks to describe precisely the role those sounds play in the context of musical performance and interpretation. More broadly, it examines the visions and artistic perspectives of those who create the sounds and those who use them in performance— voicers and musicians. Pipe sounds are shaped by a practitioner called a voicer, in a process that is essentially one of gradual transformation of sound; that process is called voicing. The task of voicing demands excel- lent manual dexterity, solid theoretical knowledge, and a keen sense of hearing. The name voicing also suggests an approach to sounds that seems to transcend those aspects of the craft. Voicing means to give voice, and to give voice means to give life. The sounds of the organ are thus shaped with the intent to epitomize forms of human expression, and those forms of expression will be heard in the context of a musical practice. Thus: what exactly constitutes an organ voice? What type of concerns emerge during this process of voicing? In which ways do the voices that are created influence the music performed on the organ? The answers to those questions were investigated in the context of a collaboration between a voicer and an organist (the author), over a period of roughly two years, while an organ was being built for the concert hall Studio Acusticum at Piteå, in northern Sweden. Since the researcher was a musician, the research questions are naturally approached from a musical stance. This study comes under the umbrella of artistic research, and its results are not only articulated verbally, but also, and just as importantly, enacted through artistic content. The dissertation includes the creation of new artworks, and the exploration of artistic media. The ethnographic model is clearly felt within the text as well, as it deals mostly with examination of documents, dialogues, sounds, events, and the perspectives of different people. The title of the dissertation—Never Heard Before—was originally the motto for the new Studio Acusticum organ, that served as a platform for the study. Here it serves to express the idea that the voicer-musician encounter has not previously been the subject of research, and that the mate- rials presented in the text—both the dialogues and the sounds collected during the process of voicing—were things never heard before.
Signing and Singing - Children in Teaching Dialogues
(2014-09-08) Kullenberg, Tina
The dissertation examines children’s dialogical sense-making in task-oriented teaching activities, the aim of which is to explore children’s values and ideas in musical learning, in order to investigate how musical knowledge is constructed collaboratively through different levels of dialogicality. Hence, the study addresses the organizational resources and values at stake when children take part in pedagogical dialogues. The four children studied are allocated the pre-given task of instructing each other, without the presence of adults, to sing songs in dyads (two and two). Five singing activities are video-documented, transcribed and analysed in depth through dialogical activity analysis, and group interviews with the children in pairs are also conducted, transcribed and analysed. A sociocultural perspective on learning and communication with an approach based on dialogue theory forms the analytical point of departure for the study, where constitutive relations between the mediating acts of the participants and the resources in use – in the shape of discourses, cultural tools, representations, interaction orders, activity frames and values – are focused upon, and where teaching and learning are viewed as primarily communicative activities, and where learning as a purely individual process is dismissed. The practice of musical teaching is seen to be an embodied and materialized practice, even though the young practitioners taking part in the study displayed different knowledge ideals, as well as different educational strategies, throughout the instructional phases of activity. In other words, they emphasized that there was a distinction between learning the songs and knowing the songs. The participants also used signing and singing with the help of artefacts, words and their bodies in a number of multi-functional, multi-semiotic and subtle ways. Moreover, the children organized their activities as traditional classroom teaching in several ways, and displayed skills in schooling as practitioners of a social practice. Accordingly, they established a school-specific task culture that took the form of a communicative activity type, where their orientation to double dialogicality, that is, the dialogue of the culturally established dimension on the one hand, and the interpersonal, local context on the other, is of significance.

Browse

Recent Submissions