Program

17:00 Lecture-performance and discussion
18:30 Aperitivo reception
19:30 Dinner to follow (self-pay)

Neuer Saal (3rd floor)
Gustav Mahler Privatuniversität für Musik
Mießtaler Street 8
9020 Klagenfurt

Musical contributions: Experimental Composer-Performer-Improviser Ensemble (GMPU)
Respondents: Dr. Joshua Bergamin and Univ. Prof. Dr. Lucia D’Errico

Abstract

In this inaugural lecture I will explore the notion of the musical question – both in my current work in improvisation and ethics, and as a beacon for the new professorship for musical performance and artistic research. Music making will of course be part of the event.

For us self-interpreting animals – AKA “humans” – life comes with questions. Why are we here? Who am I? How should one live? Our histories, cultures, and communities occasionally provide durable answers. But such questions perpetually reappear as we move through life, generating new questions and answers. We might not always articulate them with verbal language; nonetheless, our actions in the world disclose them.

In the small world of the university, research questions are similar to life questions insofar as they teleologically structure ongoing activity. Their character seems different, though – more contained, more strategic. Good ones speak to certain communities at certain times; they must be answered under finite conditions.

Yet every research question inhabits a wilderness of “other” questions that might never publicly surface. These often begin with “What if…?” “Why not…?”. If followed, such speculations and anarchic fantasies may lead where one would never expect.

Musical questions, as I conceive them, thrive in this wilderness. They are distinct from aesthetic, technical, or historical (research) questions about music because one asks and answers them in practice. Without them practice cannot move, although not every musician asks them. What do they do? How do they sound and feel? Who asks them and how? And why should anyone care?