Assi Karttunen
Harpsichordist Assi Karttunen has specialized in performing and researching Baroque music. She also performs in interdisciplinary groups with experimental and contemporary repertory. As a soloist she has performed in Italy, Belgium, UK, Ireland, Scotland, Germany, Japan, Russia, Estonia, Denmark and Sweden. And in orchestras and ensembles in the most European countries.
Karttunen works as a lecturer and musician-researcher at the Sibelius Academy of the University of the Arts meaning that she teaches harpsichord playing, basso continuo and early music history at the Early Music department, instrument pedagogy at the Piano Music department and research skills at the DocMus, Doctoral school of Sibelius Academy.
She has recorded solo albums and played in several orchestras and ensembles, currently working also in the Superpluck Trio, which is an ensemble of plucked instruments performing contemporary music. Karttunen has premiered a lot of new harpsichord compositions.The emphasis of her thesis was on the aesthetic and philosophical background of the eighteenth century French cantata.
www.assikarttunen.fi
Superpluck-trio's videos
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvpPDG2L4tBt19z9KXfTAaw
Elysian Fields ensemble and working group
https://www.facebook.com/Elysionin-kedot-1605986346373621/?fref=ts
Karttunen works as a lecturer and musician-researcher at the Sibelius Academy of the University of the Arts meaning that she teaches harpsichord playing, basso continuo and early music history at the Early Music department, instrument pedagogy at the Piano Music department and research skills at the DocMus, Doctoral school of Sibelius Academy.
She has recorded solo albums and played in several orchestras and ensembles, currently working also in the Superpluck Trio, which is an ensemble of plucked instruments performing contemporary music. Karttunen has premiered a lot of new harpsichord compositions.The emphasis of her thesis was on the aesthetic and philosophical background of the eighteenth century French cantata.
www.assikarttunen.fi
Superpluck-trio's videos
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvpPDG2L4tBt19z9KXfTAaw
Elysian Fields ensemble and working group
https://www.facebook.com/Elysionin-kedot-1605986346373621/?fref=ts
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Papers by Assi Karttunen
Artikkelissani Monitaiteisuus, taiteidenvälisyys ja etiikka Helsingin Taideyliopiston yliopistopedagogiikassa käsittelen taidealojen väliseen vuorovaikutukseen tähtäävää, yliopistopedagogista koulutusta ja etiikkaa. Kysyn, pitäisikö taiteidenvälisyyteen ja monitaiteisuuteen sisältyvän erikoisosaamisen kuulua Taideyliopistossa opiskelevan opetussuunnitelmaan. Pohdin taidealojen keskinäistä dynamiikkaa myös eettisestä näkökulmasta ja haastattelen kolmea eri taiteenalaa edustavaa kollegaani: tanssija-koreografi Maarit Rankasta, laulupedagogi Sirkka Lammista ja ohjaaja Ville Sandqvistia. Tuon myös esiin sitä filosofista pohjaa, joka rakentuu moniaistisen, inhimillisen kokemuksen perustalle ja siten vahvistaa ymmärrystämme monialaisen ja taiteidenvälisen työskentelyn elintärkeydestä taiteiden kehittämisen kannalta.
DMus Assi Karttunen
Sibelius Academy
University of the Arts, Helsinki
Sleep, detachment and dizziness: the music-related gestures of Couperin’s Les Pavots in the new performing context
Abstract
My article will describe the ways musical gestures related to sleep, detachment and dizziness are transformed in the new sociocultural context.
According to the definition given by Rolf Inge Godøy and Marc Leman (ed. 2010,13) the musical gesture refers to musically related movement implying both the physical displacement of an object in a place and the mental activation of an experience. The gestures exist in the musical notation and in its live performance, and therefore they are communicating the shared, pre-conceptual layers of experience.
What were the material qualities of a specific performing place, the Chapel of Silence, providing a context for a piece of (so called) early music? What kind of musical gestures did I inevitably embody by playing Les Pavots, a harpsichord piece composed by François Couperin? Furthermore, in what ways did these bodily gestures communicate in the chosen contemporary performing context?
In order to achieve understanding of the new performing context and its performativity, I applied the theory of orientational metaphors to musical gestures. In line with Mark Johnson and George Lakoff (1980) the orientational metaphors speak to our mind-body by “organizing the whole systems of concepts in respect to one another” exactly like the musical gestures of sleep, detachment and dizziness.
The research includes three readings.
The first reading searches for musical-rhetorical sources relevant for the particular piece of music by asking, what kind of horizons of expectations Les Pavots created at the time it was composed. The second reading refers to the actual rehearsal period and its findings. The third reading examines the new performing context of the Chapel of Silence in the centre of Helsinki.
ISSN 0355-1059
By pre-recording organic sound material related to wooden instruments like organ pipes, psalteries and harpsichords, including also concrete sounds of wood, cones, stalks and sticks, these sounds were projected into the concert venue and heard among the music repertory and alive improvisations. Moreover, I wanted to pose a question, whether a concert venue could be understood as a compound of resonating elements and shapes.
Is it possible to animate the concert venue by studying its auditory features more carefully? The 'Et in Arcadia ego'-performance develops performativity of classical music by subtly varying and extending its performative techniques. This artistic research is articulated in line with phenomenologists such as Don Ihde and Maurice Merleau-Ponty and philosopher Gaston Bachelard.
Nowadays many of us agree that a historically informed performance, HIP, is not an objecti ed, historical truth about the music of previous centuries. Even so, we still need to reflect upon the many possibilities of how we actually embody historically informed performing knowledge in practice.
In this article I will explore the music-related movements of la danse grotesque in Jean- Philippe Rameau’s composition, Les Sauvages, as a musician-researcher, harpsichordist, and a basso continuo player. The article deals with the solo harpsichord composition as well as with the version for soloists, vocal ensemble and orchestra as part of the opéraballet Les Indes galantes.
One of the key concepts in my research is the rhetorical actio. However, rhetorical actio is not only about speech or oratory. When applied to music, the tradition encompasses a range of other bodily actions not necessarily related to the act of speaking.
By positioning ourselves in the dialectical space between history and the musical material, we process and modify it. As a result we gain a whole gamut of artistic possibilities. These alternatives are much more historically informed than we might think at first, because our own, temporal position in the historical continuum is comprehended as a part of it.
Keywords: baroque, la danse grotesque, embodiment, historically informed performance, musical gestures, music-related movements, performance practice, practice-based research, rhetorical actio.
About the Author: Assi Karttunen DMus is a harpsichordist specialized in performing and researching Baroque music. She also performs in interdisciplinary groups with experimental and contemporary repertory. Karttunen works as a musician-researcher at DocMus, Doctoral school of the Sibelius Academy, and teaches harpsichord playing and basso continuo at the Early music faculty, Sibelius Academy. She has recorded solo albums (Alba, Divine Arts), has played in several orchestras and ensembles, and is currently working in her Elysian Fields Workshop.
Rhetorical obscurité – musician’s historically informed working process
In this paper I discuss rhetorical obscuritas (obscurity) and claritas (clarity) as interdependent opposites in a music performance. I describe my working processes as a musician in a concert called Animal spirits II the 19th of October 2012. In my article the scale from obscurity to clarity, and vice versa, is understood as a primal bodily schema giving the basic idea for our interdisciplinary music performance. By studying both the composition’s and the actio’s (the actual performance’s) rhetorical perceptions from my point of being I suggest that the traditional rhetorical actio of the eighteenth-century France regarded music performance as a multisensory phenomenon, as sound and movement in time and space. The purpose of this article is to focus on the historically informed musician’s process with the performed music. By placing the rhetorical actio into the spotlight, I am able to describe how the music and the relevant historical information are embodied in this specific concert and during its rehearsals. My aim is to embrace the variety and possibilities we have as performers of the historical repertory and as researchers of the relevant historical information by paying attention to the qualitative changes of the historically informed musician’s intentions.
Työryhmämme Elysionin kedot sai vuonna 2013 apurahan kahden kaupunkikonsertin järjestämiseen. Ideana oli kolmen konsertin sarjassa tuoda esiin muusikon elävä historiasuhde tiettyihin eurooppalaisiin kaupunkeihin liittyvien - sekä muusikoiden että kaupungissa aikoinaan eläneiden ihmisten - muistojen ja tarinoiden kautta. Kaupungeiksi valikoituivat Amsterdam, Pariisi ja Helsinki. Itse kuuluin Pariisi-konserttia rakentavaan työryhmään. Siksi kerron artikkelissani muusikon työvaiheista ja prosessoinnista nimenomaan tämän Pariisi-konsertin kautta. Pariisi-konsertin Elysion-yhtyeessä soittivat Varpu Haavisto, gamba; Essi Iso-Oja, harppu; Assi Karttunen, cembalo; Katja Vaahtera, sopraano ja Hannu Vasara, viulu. Taiteellisessa työssä asiat kehkeytyvät, kiteytyvät, rakentuvat ja muuntuvat. Kaikkia näitä ilmiöitä kuvataan sanalla prosessointi. Sana on varmasti kärsinyt inflaation sen komealta kalskahtavan sävyn vuoksi. Silti käytän sitä artikkelissani kuvaamaan muuten näkymättömiksi jääviä työstämisen vaiheita, joissa kerätystä materiaalista alkaa nousta esiin olennaisia asiakokonaisuuksia, jotka lopulta tulevat osaksi musiikin esittämistä. Vuosikymmenien aikana muusikko muokkaa kohtaamansa vieraan musiikin ja sen tekemisen muodot osaksi omaa musiikillista tekemistään. Musiikin ja muun materiaalin prosessoinnille on tyypillistä, että esiin nousevat teemat alkavat suunnittelu- ja harjoitusjakson aikana luoda uusia yhteyksiä keskenään ja ulospäin ympäröivään maailmaan. Näiden yhteyksien niiden välisen dynamiikan, syy- ja seuraussuhteiden, voimatasapainon ja keskinäisen vaikutuksen laatu on mielestäni analyysivaiheen ydintä. Tällaista monivaiheista materiaalin keruun, tuottamisen, työstämisen, prosessoinnin, ja luotujen uusien yhteyksien analysoinnin kokonaisuutta voisi kutsua taiteilijalähtöiseksi tutkimukseksi. Muusikolle Pariisi on kuin mielen ja ruumiin yliopisto, jota ei voi 'suorittaa' ja josta ei voi 'valmistua'.
Abstract
In 2013, the Elysian Fields working group received a grant for two concerts based on the concept of a musician's relationship to a specific city. The idea was to reveal the musician's living relationship to history in the context of three European towns; Amsterdam, Paris and Helsinki. I belonged to the group planning the Paris concert, and therefore my article deals with the musicians' working process and the phases of the practising/rehearsing in preparation for this event, which was staged in January 2015. The Elysian ensemble comprised: Varpu Haavisto, viola da gamba; Essi Iso-Oja, harp; Assi Karttunen, harpsichord, Katja Vaahtera, soprano; and Hannu Vasara, violin. During the artistic process, the chosen material is shaped, crystallized, constituted and transformed. All of these forms of working are referred to as ‘processing', where the word is used to describe otherwise invisible stages of working through which the collected material starts to give birth to relevant sets of themes that emerge from the music and its performance practices. During a musician's decades of processing, the encountered 'alien' musics and cultures are appropriated and incorporated into his or her own musical identity. It is typical that in the practising/rehearsal period, the arising themes begin to grow connections to each other as well as outwards to the 'world'. These connections and relationships, their mutual dynamics and causalities, may be explored and analysed. The multidisciplinary and multistage processing and analysis of the material (finding, collecting, producing, practising/rehearsing, delivering and performing) could be called artistic research or practice-based research. For a musician, Paris is like a university of the mind from which one can never graduate.
Music perceived as sound and movement is one of the key areas of modern music research.
My article discusses the musical-rhetorical gestures of moaning. I proceed from describing single, rhetorical gestures to larger, organizational rhetorical structures. I describe the musical gesture of glissando that unfolds as an embodied expression of lamenting and as a kind of pre-musical, vocal uttering. By the chosen music example, Michel Pignolet de Montéclair’s Déjà Syrinx -recitative in a cantata Pan et Sirinx, the musical gestures (les sons glissés) are mirrored against the eighteenth-century texts describing primal vocalizations and utterings. What kind of consequences the emerging inner consistency of rhetoric has on performing French eighteenth-century vocal repertory?
As a result I end up claiming that the musician´s tactile-kinesthetic ways of rehearsing and performing French eighteenth-century vocal repertory is one way to stimulate and intensify the music’s (and poem’s) multi-sensory features. In addition to this I aim at drawing attention to how the historically informed musician’s (HIP) intentions might have shifted from only engaging in so called early music performance practices to gaining understanding of their intrinsic, bodily field of phenomena, too. This remarkable epistemological shift has been happening as a part of the discussions about the embodied music making including critical comments on the HIP musicianship sometimes hiding behind correctly executed music by Bruce Haynes, who calls it “strait playing”– and here the word ‘strait’ as in ‘straitjacket’. (Haynes 2007, 61.) However, the musicians’ processes of working with the music notation and with other gained knowledge and comprehension are still seldom articulated in the field of music research. Thus the research is relevant and corresponds to the needs of the field by challenging the possible canons of performing baroque music and varying its rehearsing principles.
Keywords:
HIP, historically informed performance, rhetoric, gesture, tactile-kinesthetic.
Kun barokin laulumusiikin esittäjänä tutkin retoriikan actiota (ääni, ele, ilme, asento, liike) osana muusikko-tutkijan tutkimushankettani, pyrin työssäni yhdistämään toisaalta esittämiskäytäntöjen tutkimusta ja toisaalta fenomenologista lähestymistapaa, jossa huomio on kehollisessa kokemuksessa. Hanketta voisikin kutsua historiallisten esittämiskäytäntöjen keholliseksi tutkimukseksi. Monitieteellisen ja -menetelmällisen tutkimuksen aihe on ajankohtainen, koska se liittyy laajaan historiallisesti tiedostavan esittäjän emansipaatiota käsittelevään keskusteluun.
Musiikillisen retoriikan muodoista itse actiota on tutkittu vähemmän verrattuna notaation retoristen ilmiöiden tutkimiseen. Jotta aihetta voisi tutkia, on ymmärrettävä kohteen luonne kehollisena, tilallisena ja ajallisena ilmiönä. Retoriikan action harjoittaminen sekä rikastaa että muuntaa barokkimusiikin esittämiskäytäntöjä, suhdettamme rekonstruktioon ja käsitystä omasta muusikon roolistamme tämän musiikin äärellä.
Artikkelissani käytän tutkimusesimerkkinä André-Joseph Exaudet´n säveltämään menuettiin laulettua tuntemattoman kirjoittajan arkkiveisua La Guillotine (1789), joka on ilmiönä monitasoisen kehollisen ironian läpäisemä. Tutkin esitetyn La Guillotinen kehollista ironiaa ja retorisia tehokeinoja, kuten antiteesiä, ciconiaa ja épimonea.
Mukana on myös video baritoni Teppo Lampelan ja Elysionin kedot-työryhmän esittämästä La Guillotinesta ja kuvaus arkkiveisun esityksestä, jossa ironia kehollistuu retoristen tasojen sisäistämisen kautta. Käyn läpi retorisen ironian historiallisia kuvauksia ja kuvaan niiden ilmenemistä omasta basso continuon soittajan, kamarimuusikon, intersubjektin ja korrepetiittorin näkökulmastani.
Avainsanat: Kehollisuus, musiikin retoriikka, historiallisesti tiedostava esittäminen
This demonstration was part of our artistic research project in progress the main body of work on which will begin next fall. In our project, it is our intention to study the performing practices of the past by doing detailed work on fragments of music, by experimenting with different practice methods, by recording our work, by studying it closely, by doing workshops with other musicians and students, by attempting to verbalize the experience of working on this repertoire etc. This work will be supported by the study of source material from the 17th and 18th centuries. One theoretical frame of reference for our work will be the phenomenology of Michel Henry that focuses on the singular, live experience of a human being. As a sideline, we will address the ongoing discussion on Early Music performance.
Conference Presentations by Assi Karttunen
If we wish to do research into historically informed performance, we should be interested in how that will be done in practice. By positioning ourselves in the dialectical relationship between history and the musical material we gain a whole gamut of artistic possibilities.
In this paper I will explore the musical-rhetorical background of Jean-Philippe Rameau’s composition, Les Sauvages, as a musician-researcher, harpsichordist, and a basso continuo player. The paper deals with the solo harpsichord composition as well as with the version for soloists, vocal ensemble (choeur des sauvages) and orchestra as part of the opéra-ballet Les Indes galantes.
In doing this, I will not attempt to argue what might be the historically correct performance of the music. Rather, I would suggest that research into the musical-rhetorical roots embedded in Les Sauvages and its performing traditions will illuminate the musician’s embodied relationship to the music during its performance.
The musician’s working processes are still not often articulated in the field of music research. The reason why these processes are worth exploring is that they change the way we formulate the research questions as well as the means by which we find answers to those questions. The results of the analysis of such processes are both qualitative and descriptive.
One of the key concepts in my research is the rhetorical actio. The tradition of rhetorical actio concerns the delivering of whatever one endeavours to say, perform, utter, pronounce, or sing. It is about perceiving a performance and about experiencing it in a space as a time-filled living phenomenon. However, rhetorical actio is not only about speech or oratory. When applied to music, the tradition encompasses a range of other bodily actions not necessarily related to the act of speaking.
By referring the corporeal musical phenomena of Les Sauvages to the features of la stile grotesque of the eighteenth-century ballet, I am searching for confluences between the harsh, aerial and sharp-witted counterpoint and the way the exotic peoples were corporeally represented in the eighteenth-century ballet. The element of “otherness” as something alien can be detected in the idiosyncratically “skipping” music.
Thus, by doing research into the music-related movements of Les Sauvages, I am reaching out beyond the metaphor that regards music as a kind of language towards conceiving music as a living phenomenon, which intrinsically implies its corporeality and patterns of organism-environment interaction. The musical-rhetorical as well as the phenomenological terminology will help to articulate some of the invisible, embodied aspects of the experience of a professional musician.
What happens when an eighteenth-century solo
harpsichord composition is detached from its original context? ”[…] that is, how musics become subject to inevitable historical processes of reinterpretation and then reinsertion into the changing sociocultural formation.” (Born & Hesmondhaghl ed. 2000, 36.)
In my paper I explore the ways the silence is manifested in the
eighteenth-century music paradoxically through sound. What are the qualities of the musical textures related to silence? The music example I have chosen is François Couperin’s Les Pavots.
Could one also suggest that Couperin detached himself from the most obvious roles the musician had at that time? The musician was seen mostly as a maître de la musique at the court, the composer of church music and as a harpsichord teacher.
By composing a solo harpsichord work Les Pavots
Couperin saw himself as an artist worthy of expressing his own, unique musical world.
Drafts by Assi Karttunen
Mediterranean TOUR in JAPAN 2016 Tokyo-Hiroshima-Nagoya.
Archipelago TOUR in JAPAN 2019 Tokyo–Hiroshima-Nagoya- Shizuoka. Trio Superpluck.
Seaboard TOUR in JAPAN 2022 Tokyo, Okinawa, Nagoya. Trio Superpluck,
Superpluck trio, Rody van Gemert, Eija Kankaanranta and Assi Karttunen, performs contemporary music specifically composed for plucked instruments: guitar, kantele, and harpsichord. This new, Helsinki based trio gave its debut concert in the Temppeliaukio church in Helsinki, Finland 15.11.2019. The trio aims at exploring possibilities of this instrumentation as well as challenging the conventional ideas on the sound, timbre and playing techniques of plucked instruments. Since 2019 they have premiered contemporary music including chamber and solos.
The Seaboard project 2022 consists of concerts in Japan and in Finland encompassing eight premiers of contemporary music. Trio organizes also Superpluck clubs 2022–2023, which combine contemporary music with up-to-date discussions on art and poetry.
Archipelago – New Japanese and Finnish Music
Prof. composer Akira Kobayashi's lecture in the Aikamme musiikkia-lecture series at the Sibelius Academy on November 14th at 1 pm at the Music Centre.
November 15th at 7 pm Temppeliaukio Church
Finnish Soloists' Foundation concert series.
November 18th Kantele concert in Sapporo, organized by Hiromi Hokkanen / Japan Kantele Society
November 22nd Trio's concert in Hiroshima Elisabeth University, Xavier-concert hall, contact prof. Chieko Mibu
November 23rd courses, lectures, workshops in Hiroshima, at the Elisabeth University.
November 24th Event Finnish/Japanese culture at the Japan Broadcasting Cooperation Culture Center in Nagoya (contact person prof. Akira Kobayashi)
November 25th Concert at Aichi Chamber Music Hall / Aichi University of the Arts (contact person prof. Akira Kobayashi)
November 26th Lecture concert together with composer Kazumi Tsukamoto / Shizuoka Tokoha University
30.11.Kantele concert in Tokyo / Concert lab venue. Organized by Japan Kantele Association.
30.11. Harpsichord concert at Space-concert venue, in Tokyo. Contact Kakumi Tomoko.
Kantele Eija Kankaanranta
Guitar Rody van Gemert
Harpsichord Assi Karttunen
Artikkelissani Monitaiteisuus, taiteidenvälisyys ja etiikka Helsingin Taideyliopiston yliopistopedagogiikassa käsittelen taidealojen väliseen vuorovaikutukseen tähtäävää, yliopistopedagogista koulutusta ja etiikkaa. Kysyn, pitäisikö taiteidenvälisyyteen ja monitaiteisuuteen sisältyvän erikoisosaamisen kuulua Taideyliopistossa opiskelevan opetussuunnitelmaan. Pohdin taidealojen keskinäistä dynamiikkaa myös eettisestä näkökulmasta ja haastattelen kolmea eri taiteenalaa edustavaa kollegaani: tanssija-koreografi Maarit Rankasta, laulupedagogi Sirkka Lammista ja ohjaaja Ville Sandqvistia. Tuon myös esiin sitä filosofista pohjaa, joka rakentuu moniaistisen, inhimillisen kokemuksen perustalle ja siten vahvistaa ymmärrystämme monialaisen ja taiteidenvälisen työskentelyn elintärkeydestä taiteiden kehittämisen kannalta.
DMus Assi Karttunen
Sibelius Academy
University of the Arts, Helsinki
Sleep, detachment and dizziness: the music-related gestures of Couperin’s Les Pavots in the new performing context
Abstract
My article will describe the ways musical gestures related to sleep, detachment and dizziness are transformed in the new sociocultural context.
According to the definition given by Rolf Inge Godøy and Marc Leman (ed. 2010,13) the musical gesture refers to musically related movement implying both the physical displacement of an object in a place and the mental activation of an experience. The gestures exist in the musical notation and in its live performance, and therefore they are communicating the shared, pre-conceptual layers of experience.
What were the material qualities of a specific performing place, the Chapel of Silence, providing a context for a piece of (so called) early music? What kind of musical gestures did I inevitably embody by playing Les Pavots, a harpsichord piece composed by François Couperin? Furthermore, in what ways did these bodily gestures communicate in the chosen contemporary performing context?
In order to achieve understanding of the new performing context and its performativity, I applied the theory of orientational metaphors to musical gestures. In line with Mark Johnson and George Lakoff (1980) the orientational metaphors speak to our mind-body by “organizing the whole systems of concepts in respect to one another” exactly like the musical gestures of sleep, detachment and dizziness.
The research includes three readings.
The first reading searches for musical-rhetorical sources relevant for the particular piece of music by asking, what kind of horizons of expectations Les Pavots created at the time it was composed. The second reading refers to the actual rehearsal period and its findings. The third reading examines the new performing context of the Chapel of Silence in the centre of Helsinki.
ISSN 0355-1059
By pre-recording organic sound material related to wooden instruments like organ pipes, psalteries and harpsichords, including also concrete sounds of wood, cones, stalks and sticks, these sounds were projected into the concert venue and heard among the music repertory and alive improvisations. Moreover, I wanted to pose a question, whether a concert venue could be understood as a compound of resonating elements and shapes.
Is it possible to animate the concert venue by studying its auditory features more carefully? The 'Et in Arcadia ego'-performance develops performativity of classical music by subtly varying and extending its performative techniques. This artistic research is articulated in line with phenomenologists such as Don Ihde and Maurice Merleau-Ponty and philosopher Gaston Bachelard.
Nowadays many of us agree that a historically informed performance, HIP, is not an objecti ed, historical truth about the music of previous centuries. Even so, we still need to reflect upon the many possibilities of how we actually embody historically informed performing knowledge in practice.
In this article I will explore the music-related movements of la danse grotesque in Jean- Philippe Rameau’s composition, Les Sauvages, as a musician-researcher, harpsichordist, and a basso continuo player. The article deals with the solo harpsichord composition as well as with the version for soloists, vocal ensemble and orchestra as part of the opéraballet Les Indes galantes.
One of the key concepts in my research is the rhetorical actio. However, rhetorical actio is not only about speech or oratory. When applied to music, the tradition encompasses a range of other bodily actions not necessarily related to the act of speaking.
By positioning ourselves in the dialectical space between history and the musical material, we process and modify it. As a result we gain a whole gamut of artistic possibilities. These alternatives are much more historically informed than we might think at first, because our own, temporal position in the historical continuum is comprehended as a part of it.
Keywords: baroque, la danse grotesque, embodiment, historically informed performance, musical gestures, music-related movements, performance practice, practice-based research, rhetorical actio.
About the Author: Assi Karttunen DMus is a harpsichordist specialized in performing and researching Baroque music. She also performs in interdisciplinary groups with experimental and contemporary repertory. Karttunen works as a musician-researcher at DocMus, Doctoral school of the Sibelius Academy, and teaches harpsichord playing and basso continuo at the Early music faculty, Sibelius Academy. She has recorded solo albums (Alba, Divine Arts), has played in several orchestras and ensembles, and is currently working in her Elysian Fields Workshop.
Rhetorical obscurité – musician’s historically informed working process
In this paper I discuss rhetorical obscuritas (obscurity) and claritas (clarity) as interdependent opposites in a music performance. I describe my working processes as a musician in a concert called Animal spirits II the 19th of October 2012. In my article the scale from obscurity to clarity, and vice versa, is understood as a primal bodily schema giving the basic idea for our interdisciplinary music performance. By studying both the composition’s and the actio’s (the actual performance’s) rhetorical perceptions from my point of being I suggest that the traditional rhetorical actio of the eighteenth-century France regarded music performance as a multisensory phenomenon, as sound and movement in time and space. The purpose of this article is to focus on the historically informed musician’s process with the performed music. By placing the rhetorical actio into the spotlight, I am able to describe how the music and the relevant historical information are embodied in this specific concert and during its rehearsals. My aim is to embrace the variety and possibilities we have as performers of the historical repertory and as researchers of the relevant historical information by paying attention to the qualitative changes of the historically informed musician’s intentions.
Työryhmämme Elysionin kedot sai vuonna 2013 apurahan kahden kaupunkikonsertin järjestämiseen. Ideana oli kolmen konsertin sarjassa tuoda esiin muusikon elävä historiasuhde tiettyihin eurooppalaisiin kaupunkeihin liittyvien - sekä muusikoiden että kaupungissa aikoinaan eläneiden ihmisten - muistojen ja tarinoiden kautta. Kaupungeiksi valikoituivat Amsterdam, Pariisi ja Helsinki. Itse kuuluin Pariisi-konserttia rakentavaan työryhmään. Siksi kerron artikkelissani muusikon työvaiheista ja prosessoinnista nimenomaan tämän Pariisi-konsertin kautta. Pariisi-konsertin Elysion-yhtyeessä soittivat Varpu Haavisto, gamba; Essi Iso-Oja, harppu; Assi Karttunen, cembalo; Katja Vaahtera, sopraano ja Hannu Vasara, viulu. Taiteellisessa työssä asiat kehkeytyvät, kiteytyvät, rakentuvat ja muuntuvat. Kaikkia näitä ilmiöitä kuvataan sanalla prosessointi. Sana on varmasti kärsinyt inflaation sen komealta kalskahtavan sävyn vuoksi. Silti käytän sitä artikkelissani kuvaamaan muuten näkymättömiksi jääviä työstämisen vaiheita, joissa kerätystä materiaalista alkaa nousta esiin olennaisia asiakokonaisuuksia, jotka lopulta tulevat osaksi musiikin esittämistä. Vuosikymmenien aikana muusikko muokkaa kohtaamansa vieraan musiikin ja sen tekemisen muodot osaksi omaa musiikillista tekemistään. Musiikin ja muun materiaalin prosessoinnille on tyypillistä, että esiin nousevat teemat alkavat suunnittelu- ja harjoitusjakson aikana luoda uusia yhteyksiä keskenään ja ulospäin ympäröivään maailmaan. Näiden yhteyksien niiden välisen dynamiikan, syy- ja seuraussuhteiden, voimatasapainon ja keskinäisen vaikutuksen laatu on mielestäni analyysivaiheen ydintä. Tällaista monivaiheista materiaalin keruun, tuottamisen, työstämisen, prosessoinnin, ja luotujen uusien yhteyksien analysoinnin kokonaisuutta voisi kutsua taiteilijalähtöiseksi tutkimukseksi. Muusikolle Pariisi on kuin mielen ja ruumiin yliopisto, jota ei voi 'suorittaa' ja josta ei voi 'valmistua'.
Abstract
In 2013, the Elysian Fields working group received a grant for two concerts based on the concept of a musician's relationship to a specific city. The idea was to reveal the musician's living relationship to history in the context of three European towns; Amsterdam, Paris and Helsinki. I belonged to the group planning the Paris concert, and therefore my article deals with the musicians' working process and the phases of the practising/rehearsing in preparation for this event, which was staged in January 2015. The Elysian ensemble comprised: Varpu Haavisto, viola da gamba; Essi Iso-Oja, harp; Assi Karttunen, harpsichord, Katja Vaahtera, soprano; and Hannu Vasara, violin. During the artistic process, the chosen material is shaped, crystallized, constituted and transformed. All of these forms of working are referred to as ‘processing', where the word is used to describe otherwise invisible stages of working through which the collected material starts to give birth to relevant sets of themes that emerge from the music and its performance practices. During a musician's decades of processing, the encountered 'alien' musics and cultures are appropriated and incorporated into his or her own musical identity. It is typical that in the practising/rehearsal period, the arising themes begin to grow connections to each other as well as outwards to the 'world'. These connections and relationships, their mutual dynamics and causalities, may be explored and analysed. The multidisciplinary and multistage processing and analysis of the material (finding, collecting, producing, practising/rehearsing, delivering and performing) could be called artistic research or practice-based research. For a musician, Paris is like a university of the mind from which one can never graduate.
Music perceived as sound and movement is one of the key areas of modern music research.
My article discusses the musical-rhetorical gestures of moaning. I proceed from describing single, rhetorical gestures to larger, organizational rhetorical structures. I describe the musical gesture of glissando that unfolds as an embodied expression of lamenting and as a kind of pre-musical, vocal uttering. By the chosen music example, Michel Pignolet de Montéclair’s Déjà Syrinx -recitative in a cantata Pan et Sirinx, the musical gestures (les sons glissés) are mirrored against the eighteenth-century texts describing primal vocalizations and utterings. What kind of consequences the emerging inner consistency of rhetoric has on performing French eighteenth-century vocal repertory?
As a result I end up claiming that the musician´s tactile-kinesthetic ways of rehearsing and performing French eighteenth-century vocal repertory is one way to stimulate and intensify the music’s (and poem’s) multi-sensory features. In addition to this I aim at drawing attention to how the historically informed musician’s (HIP) intentions might have shifted from only engaging in so called early music performance practices to gaining understanding of their intrinsic, bodily field of phenomena, too. This remarkable epistemological shift has been happening as a part of the discussions about the embodied music making including critical comments on the HIP musicianship sometimes hiding behind correctly executed music by Bruce Haynes, who calls it “strait playing”– and here the word ‘strait’ as in ‘straitjacket’. (Haynes 2007, 61.) However, the musicians’ processes of working with the music notation and with other gained knowledge and comprehension are still seldom articulated in the field of music research. Thus the research is relevant and corresponds to the needs of the field by challenging the possible canons of performing baroque music and varying its rehearsing principles.
Keywords:
HIP, historically informed performance, rhetoric, gesture, tactile-kinesthetic.
Kun barokin laulumusiikin esittäjänä tutkin retoriikan actiota (ääni, ele, ilme, asento, liike) osana muusikko-tutkijan tutkimushankettani, pyrin työssäni yhdistämään toisaalta esittämiskäytäntöjen tutkimusta ja toisaalta fenomenologista lähestymistapaa, jossa huomio on kehollisessa kokemuksessa. Hanketta voisikin kutsua historiallisten esittämiskäytäntöjen keholliseksi tutkimukseksi. Monitieteellisen ja -menetelmällisen tutkimuksen aihe on ajankohtainen, koska se liittyy laajaan historiallisesti tiedostavan esittäjän emansipaatiota käsittelevään keskusteluun.
Musiikillisen retoriikan muodoista itse actiota on tutkittu vähemmän verrattuna notaation retoristen ilmiöiden tutkimiseen. Jotta aihetta voisi tutkia, on ymmärrettävä kohteen luonne kehollisena, tilallisena ja ajallisena ilmiönä. Retoriikan action harjoittaminen sekä rikastaa että muuntaa barokkimusiikin esittämiskäytäntöjä, suhdettamme rekonstruktioon ja käsitystä omasta muusikon roolistamme tämän musiikin äärellä.
Artikkelissani käytän tutkimusesimerkkinä André-Joseph Exaudet´n säveltämään menuettiin laulettua tuntemattoman kirjoittajan arkkiveisua La Guillotine (1789), joka on ilmiönä monitasoisen kehollisen ironian läpäisemä. Tutkin esitetyn La Guillotinen kehollista ironiaa ja retorisia tehokeinoja, kuten antiteesiä, ciconiaa ja épimonea.
Mukana on myös video baritoni Teppo Lampelan ja Elysionin kedot-työryhmän esittämästä La Guillotinesta ja kuvaus arkkiveisun esityksestä, jossa ironia kehollistuu retoristen tasojen sisäistämisen kautta. Käyn läpi retorisen ironian historiallisia kuvauksia ja kuvaan niiden ilmenemistä omasta basso continuon soittajan, kamarimuusikon, intersubjektin ja korrepetiittorin näkökulmastani.
Avainsanat: Kehollisuus, musiikin retoriikka, historiallisesti tiedostava esittäminen
This demonstration was part of our artistic research project in progress the main body of work on which will begin next fall. In our project, it is our intention to study the performing practices of the past by doing detailed work on fragments of music, by experimenting with different practice methods, by recording our work, by studying it closely, by doing workshops with other musicians and students, by attempting to verbalize the experience of working on this repertoire etc. This work will be supported by the study of source material from the 17th and 18th centuries. One theoretical frame of reference for our work will be the phenomenology of Michel Henry that focuses on the singular, live experience of a human being. As a sideline, we will address the ongoing discussion on Early Music performance.
If we wish to do research into historically informed performance, we should be interested in how that will be done in practice. By positioning ourselves in the dialectical relationship between history and the musical material we gain a whole gamut of artistic possibilities.
In this paper I will explore the musical-rhetorical background of Jean-Philippe Rameau’s composition, Les Sauvages, as a musician-researcher, harpsichordist, and a basso continuo player. The paper deals with the solo harpsichord composition as well as with the version for soloists, vocal ensemble (choeur des sauvages) and orchestra as part of the opéra-ballet Les Indes galantes.
In doing this, I will not attempt to argue what might be the historically correct performance of the music. Rather, I would suggest that research into the musical-rhetorical roots embedded in Les Sauvages and its performing traditions will illuminate the musician’s embodied relationship to the music during its performance.
The musician’s working processes are still not often articulated in the field of music research. The reason why these processes are worth exploring is that they change the way we formulate the research questions as well as the means by which we find answers to those questions. The results of the analysis of such processes are both qualitative and descriptive.
One of the key concepts in my research is the rhetorical actio. The tradition of rhetorical actio concerns the delivering of whatever one endeavours to say, perform, utter, pronounce, or sing. It is about perceiving a performance and about experiencing it in a space as a time-filled living phenomenon. However, rhetorical actio is not only about speech or oratory. When applied to music, the tradition encompasses a range of other bodily actions not necessarily related to the act of speaking.
By referring the corporeal musical phenomena of Les Sauvages to the features of la stile grotesque of the eighteenth-century ballet, I am searching for confluences between the harsh, aerial and sharp-witted counterpoint and the way the exotic peoples were corporeally represented in the eighteenth-century ballet. The element of “otherness” as something alien can be detected in the idiosyncratically “skipping” music.
Thus, by doing research into the music-related movements of Les Sauvages, I am reaching out beyond the metaphor that regards music as a kind of language towards conceiving music as a living phenomenon, which intrinsically implies its corporeality and patterns of organism-environment interaction. The musical-rhetorical as well as the phenomenological terminology will help to articulate some of the invisible, embodied aspects of the experience of a professional musician.
What happens when an eighteenth-century solo
harpsichord composition is detached from its original context? ”[…] that is, how musics become subject to inevitable historical processes of reinterpretation and then reinsertion into the changing sociocultural formation.” (Born & Hesmondhaghl ed. 2000, 36.)
In my paper I explore the ways the silence is manifested in the
eighteenth-century music paradoxically through sound. What are the qualities of the musical textures related to silence? The music example I have chosen is François Couperin’s Les Pavots.
Could one also suggest that Couperin detached himself from the most obvious roles the musician had at that time? The musician was seen mostly as a maître de la musique at the court, the composer of church music and as a harpsichord teacher.
By composing a solo harpsichord work Les Pavots
Couperin saw himself as an artist worthy of expressing his own, unique musical world.
Mediterranean TOUR in JAPAN 2016 Tokyo-Hiroshima-Nagoya.
Archipelago TOUR in JAPAN 2019 Tokyo–Hiroshima-Nagoya- Shizuoka. Trio Superpluck.
Seaboard TOUR in JAPAN 2022 Tokyo, Okinawa, Nagoya. Trio Superpluck,
Superpluck trio, Rody van Gemert, Eija Kankaanranta and Assi Karttunen, performs contemporary music specifically composed for plucked instruments: guitar, kantele, and harpsichord. This new, Helsinki based trio gave its debut concert in the Temppeliaukio church in Helsinki, Finland 15.11.2019. The trio aims at exploring possibilities of this instrumentation as well as challenging the conventional ideas on the sound, timbre and playing techniques of plucked instruments. Since 2019 they have premiered contemporary music including chamber and solos.
The Seaboard project 2022 consists of concerts in Japan and in Finland encompassing eight premiers of contemporary music. Trio organizes also Superpluck clubs 2022–2023, which combine contemporary music with up-to-date discussions on art and poetry.
Archipelago – New Japanese and Finnish Music
Prof. composer Akira Kobayashi's lecture in the Aikamme musiikkia-lecture series at the Sibelius Academy on November 14th at 1 pm at the Music Centre.
November 15th at 7 pm Temppeliaukio Church
Finnish Soloists' Foundation concert series.
November 18th Kantele concert in Sapporo, organized by Hiromi Hokkanen / Japan Kantele Society
November 22nd Trio's concert in Hiroshima Elisabeth University, Xavier-concert hall, contact prof. Chieko Mibu
November 23rd courses, lectures, workshops in Hiroshima, at the Elisabeth University.
November 24th Event Finnish/Japanese culture at the Japan Broadcasting Cooperation Culture Center in Nagoya (contact person prof. Akira Kobayashi)
November 25th Concert at Aichi Chamber Music Hall / Aichi University of the Arts (contact person prof. Akira Kobayashi)
November 26th Lecture concert together with composer Kazumi Tsukamoto / Shizuoka Tokoha University
30.11.Kantele concert in Tokyo / Concert lab venue. Organized by Japan Kantele Association.
30.11. Harpsichord concert at Space-concert venue, in Tokyo. Contact Kakumi Tomoko.
Kantele Eija Kankaanranta
Guitar Rody van Gemert
Harpsichord Assi Karttunen