In leaving the more traditional territories of the concert performance for broader societal contexts, professional musicians increasingly devise music in closer collaboration with their audience rather than present it on a stage. Although the interest for such forms of devising co-creative musicking within the (elderly) health care sector is growing, the work can be considered relatively new. In terms of research, multiple studies have sought to understand the impact of such work on musicians and participants, however little is known about what underpins the musicians’ actions in these settings. With this study, I sought to address this gap by investigating professional musicians’ emerging practices when devising co-creative musicking with elderly people. Three broad concepts were used as a theoretical background to the study: Theory of Practice, co-creative musicking, and Praxialism. Firstly, I used Theory of Practice to help understand the nature of emerging practices in a wider context of change in the field of music and habitus of musicians and participants. Theory of Practice enabled me to consider a practice as “a routinized type of behaviour which consists of several elements, interconnected to one another: forms of bodily activities, forms of mental activities, ‘things’ and their use, a background knowledge in the form of understanding, know-how, states of emotion, and motivational knowledge” (Reckwitz, 2002, p. 249). Secondly, I drew the knowledge from co-creative musicking, which is a concept I gathered from two existing concepts: co-creation and musicking. Musicking (Small, 1998), which considers music as something we do (including any mode of engagement with music), provided a holistic and inclusive way of looking at participation in music-making. The co-creation paradigm encompasses a view on enterprise that consists of bringing together parties to jointly create an outcome that is meaningful to all (Prahalad & Ramaswamy, 2004; Ramaswamy & Ozcan, 2014). The concept served as a lens to specify the jointness of the musicking and challenge issues of power in the engagement of participants in the creative-productive process. Thirdly, Praxialism considers musicking as an activity that encompasses “musical doers, musical doing, something done and contexts in which the former take place” (Elliott, 1995). Praxialism sets out a vision on music that goes beyond the musical work and includes the meanings and values of those involved (Silverman, Davis & Elliott, 2014). The concept allowed me to examine the work and emerging relationships as a result of devising co-creative musicking from an ethical perspective. Given the subject’s relative newness and rather unexplored status, I examined existing work empirically through an ethnographic approach (Hammersley & Atkinson, 2007). Four cases were selected where data was gathered through episodic interviewing (Flick, 2009) and participant observation. Elements of a constructivist Grounded Theory (Charmaz, 2014) were used for performing an abductive analysis. The analysis included initial coding, focused coding, the use of sensitizing concepts (Blumer 1969 in Hammersley, 2013) and memoing. I wrote a thick description (Geertz, 1973) for each case portraying the work from my personal experience. The descriptions are included in the dissertation as one separate chapter and foreshadow the exposition of the analysis in a next chapter. In-depth study of the creative-productive processes of the cases showed the involvement of multiple co-creative elements, such as a dialogical interaction between musicians and audience. However, participants’ contributions were often adopted implicitly, through the musicians interpreting behaviour and situations. This created a particular power dynamic and challenges as to what extent the negotiation can be considered co-creative. The implicitness of ‘making use’ of another person’s behaviour with the other not (always) being aware of this also triggered an ethical perspective, especially because some of the cases involved participants that were vulnerable. The imbalance in power made me examine the relationship that emerges between musicians and participants. As a result of a closer contact in the co-creative negotiation, I witnessed a contact of a highly personal, sometimes intimate, nature. I recognized elements of two types of connections. One type could be called ‘humanistic’, as a friendship in which there is reciprocal care and interest for the other. The other could be seen as ‘functional’, which means that the relationship is used as a resource for providing input for the creative musicking process. From this angle, I have compared the relationship with that of a relationship of an artist with a muse. After having examined the co-creative and relational sides of the interaction in the four cases, I tuned in to the musicians’ contribution to these processes and relationships. I discovered that their devising in practice consisted of a continuous double balancing act on two axes: one axis considers the other and oneself as its two ends. Another axis concerns the preparedness and unpredictability at its ends. Situated at the intersection of the two axes are the musicians’ intentionality, which is fed by their intentions, values and ethics. The implicitness of the co-creation, the two-sided relationship, the potential vulnerability of participants, and the musicians’ freedom in navigating and negotiation, together, make the devising of co-creative musicking with elderly people an activity that involves ethical challenges that are centred around a tension between prioritizing doing good for the other, associated with a eudaimonic intention, and prioritizing values of the musical art form, resembling a musicianist intention. The results therefore call for a musicianship that involves acting reflectively from an ethical perspective.
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De meeste musea hebben te weinig financiële middelen om alles te halen uit de nieuwe media. Zij dreigen daardoor het contact met het publiek te verliezen. De IT-professional, zeggen Ben Kokkeler, Dennis Ringersma en Harry van Vliet, kan het tij keren. Hij kan musea de weg wijzen door onder meer op te treden als innovatiemanager
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De meeste musea hebben te weinig financiële middelen om alles te halen uit de nieuwe media. Zij dreigen daardoor het contact met het publiek te verliezen. De IT-professional, zeggen Ben Kokkeler, Dennis Ringersma en Harry van Vliet, kan het tij keren. Hij kan musea de weg wijzen door onder meer op te treden als innovatiemanager.
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This publication gives an account of the Public Annotation of Cultural Heritage research project (PACE) conducted at the Crossmedialab. The project was carried out between 1 January 2008 and 31 December 2009, and was funded by the Ministry of Education, Culture, and Science. Three members of the Dutch Association of Science Centres (Vereniging Science Centra) actively participated in the execution of the project: the Utrecht University Museum, the National Museum of Natural History (Naturalis), and Museon. In addition, two more knowledge institutes participated: Novay and the Utrecht University of Applied Sciences. BMC Consultancy and Manage¬ment also took part in the project. This broad consortium has enabled us to base the project on both knowledge and experience from a practical and scientific perspective. The purpose of the PACE project was to examine the ways in which social tagging could be deployed as a tool to enrich collections, improve their acces¬sibility and to increase visitor group involvement. The museums’ guiding question for the project was: ‘When is it useful to deploy social tagging as a tool for the benefit of museums and what kind of effect can be expected from such deployment?’ For the Crossmedialab the PACE project presented a unique opportunity to conduct concrete research into the highly interesting phenomenon of social tagging with parties and experts in the field.
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Jan Van der Noot (c.1540-c.1601) is a central figure in Dutch literature, widely regarded as the first true Renaissance poet in the Netherlands. He was the earliest Dutch poet to imitate Ronsard, Baïf, and Petrarch, and the first to use the sonnetform. Van der Noot also has vital links with sixteenth-century England and English literature. While living in London (1567-72), he produced the source-text for Spenser and Roest's Theatre of Voluptuous Worldlings. Yet despite this contribution, he is frequently overlooked by English-speaking critics. Even when he does receive consideration, he is seldom viewed as a poet in his own right. As an attempt to redress this, we offer here fresh translations from Van der Noot's work, lightly annotated throughout, concentrating on the sonnets that are the lynchpin of his reputation.
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Transcript of a lecture during the conference 'Is contemporary art history', Institute of Fine Arts, New York, 28th february 2014.
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Recent collection display practices signal what has been described as a “comeback” for the integration of broad-ranging object categories in which the boundaries between these previously separated objects resolve.Mixing objects from different object categories can take many forms, and occurs not only at the level of the objects themselves, but also at institutional levels. For categories such as painting, drawing, and applied arts, or the subcategories within, such as Renaissance drawings, porcelain, or twentieth-century art, are akin to the divisions in curatorial departments, galleries, or exhibition spaces and the people that work within them. Also, museums that were initially not “disciplined” have been re-staged to reflect the originally mixed display, such as the Bode Museum, Berlin. Moreover, even in homogenous collections, a mixing of value and status becomes possible when chronology, subject matter, style, or school are not the guiding principle. Such display strategies of mixing therefore typically create new connections and enable collections of varying values, periods, and object categories to merge and their individual artifacts to meet in new and meaningful ways
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