Perspectives on Artistic Research in Music

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The increasing interest in artistic research, especially in music, is throwing open doors to exciting ideas about how we generate new musical knowledge and understanding. This book examines the wide array of factors at play in innovative practice and how by treating it as research we can make new ideas more widely accessible. Three key ideas propel the book. First, it argues that artistic research comes from inside the practice and exists in a space that accommodates both objective and subjective observation and analyses because the researcher is the practitioner. It is a space for dialogue between apparently opposing binaries: the composer and the performer, the past and the present, the fixed and the fluid, the intellectual and the intuitive, the abstract and the embodied, the prepared and the spontaneous, the enduring and the transitory, and so on. It is not so much constructed in a logical, sequential manner in the way of the scientific method of doing research but more as a braided space, woven from many disparate elements. Second, the book articulates the notion that artistic research in music has its own verification procedures that need to be brought into the academy, especially in terms of the moderation of non-traditional research outputs, including the description of the criteria for allocation of research points for the purposes of data collection, as well as real world relevance and industry engagement. Third, by way of numerous examples of original and creative music making, it demonstrates in practical terms how exploration and experimentation functions as legitimate academic research. Many of the case studies deliberately cross boundaries that were previously assumed to be rigid and definite in order to blaze new musical trails, creating new collaborations and synergies.

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This book enters the core of artistic research and connects developments in Australia with the world. From many angles artistic research is explained from within experimentation, exploration and discovery, unraveling intentions, processes, outcomes and dissemination of research in and through musical practice. It asks the difficult but necessary questions and is aware of all actual, contemporary relevant international literature on the subject. It is a must for any artist/researcher. -- Frans de Ruiter, Leiden University

Author Bio

Robert Burke is associate professor of jazz and popular music at Monash University. Andrys Onsman is learning and academic advisor at the University of Melbourne.