News, callouts, conferences, jobs, and more...

January 2023

Friends,

Welcome to the January edition of the JEN Research Interest Group newsletter. Below please find a variety of news items, announcements, callouts, new publications, and job opportunities. 

I’m still beaming from all the inspiring conversations and presentations at the JEN conference in Orlando earlier this month. The quality of the research presentations on Wednesday, January 4 was outstanding with a packed room most of the day. And the lively exchanges between researchers and visitors at the poster presentations on Thursday were just as inspiring and informative. Our Wednesday evening dinner brought 15 of our JENRing members from 5 different countries together with lots of new ideas and plans. Let’s do this all again next year in New Orleans! 

In the meantime, applications for the 2024 conference will be open April 1-30 on the JEN website for JEN members. Also, submissions to Volume 5 of JAZZ (Jazz Education in Research and Practice) are open until May 1 on the JAZZ portal. Articles, case studies, quick hits, reviews, are all welcome and the editorial team is happy to help and answer questions, contact Martin Norgaard or Monika Herzig. JAZZ Volume 4 is published, you can purchase copies with your JEN membership discount for $15 here.  JEN members have access to reading the JAZZ articles for free on the JEN website, but also have access for a discounted yearly subscription to the print or electronic edition for $15 through the IU Press website. Please make sure your school library has a subscription to JAZZ.

The International Network for Artistic Research in Jazz (INARJ) invites everyone to their 3rd conference on February 23-25 at the Jam Music Lab University in Vienna and online. Most presentations will be free and hybrid to allow participation from anywhere in the world. Please register here to receive information and zoom links. Renowned presenters from four continents and 10 different countries share their work focusing on embodied research and learning by doing. The evolving field of Artistic Research in Jazz brings new creative approaches to the forefront that will be discussed throughout the conference. Follow this link for more information and feel free to share the invitation with your networks. 

JENRing Mentoring is under way! Mentors and Mentees interested in participating in the JENRing Mentoring Initiative may sign up at this link. We are seeking mentors with experience in publishing peer-reviewed articles or books to assist those seeking mentoring for their research projects, particularly with an emphasis on writing for our Jazz Education in Research and Practice journal. Mentor/Mentee sign up sheets and mentoring guidelines will also be available in the research room at the JEN Conference in Orlando. Questions may be directed to Dr. Tish Oney, JENRing mentoring chair, at tishoney@gmail.com. Thank you for your support of JEN's new mentoring initiative!

The monthly series of webinars will continue after a short holiday break on February 3, 3pm EST  with Glen Brumbach - The Effects of Two Jazz pedagogical approaches....by high school musicians and on the first Friday of every month featuring one of the authors published in JAZZ (Jazz Education in Research and Practice). The goal of the presentations is to share the findings as well as ideas for practical implementations in the classroom and curricula. Please look for links and invitations to the webinars on the JEN website and Facebook page. They’ll be live streamed on Facebook, but those who register for the zoom webinar will be able to ask questions and interact with the panelists. All previous presentations can be accessed here.

Please feel free to share this news compilation and invite colleagues to join the mailing list and/orFacebook page. Remember to check the updated job listingshere. If you have new books/ articles/ dissertations published, send me the info to be included in the newsletter. Also send over ideas on how JENRing can help you in your jazz research and networking. Items of interest related to jazz research may also be shared on the Facebook page.

Sincerely,

Monika Herzig

JEN Research Interest Group Committee Chair

Newsletter Sections

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🎶 FREE WEBINAR 🎶

The Effects of Two Jazz Pedagogical Approahces on Improvisation & Ensemble Performance Achievement by High School Musicians
with Glen A. Brumbach

Friday, February 3 • 3pm ET
Zoom (Members) & Facebook Live (Non-Members)

Join Glen A. Brumbach, Assistant Professor of Music at Texas A&M University as he presents differences and similarities from historically authentic approaches to jazz improvisation and performance in the jazz idiom.

A presentation from the Jazz Education Research and Practice Journal, a publication of the Jazz Education Network.

Have a question you don't see covered above? Once registered, you will be invited to submit any questions you would like answered.

PLEASE NOTE:
JEN Members will receive a link 1-hr before the event to join the Zoom Room.

Non-members & youth (under 18) members will receive a link 1-hr before the event to join via Facebook Live. Click here for membership information.

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NEWS

Jazz History Online - 2022:
THE SUMMATION

…And another year has passed. This one seemed to move quicker than the others but not being in quarantine might have made the difference. In 2022, Jazz History Online covered more concerts than in any other year in its history; however, this was also the year with the fewest full issues. Only 3 books and 3 videos were reviewed this year, and because all of them were worthy of recommendation, all 3 items in both categories made the best-of list.  There are a total of 15 CDs selected for recognition here (about half the size of the usual lists) but there are 8 concerts selected from approximately two dozen live performances. As usual, we also pay tribute to the jazz musicians and supporters who left us in 2022.

What makes that song swing?
At last, physicists unravel a jazz mystery
Heard on Morning Edition with Maria Godo

For nearly a century, jazz musicians and scholars have debated the answer to a musical mystery. As legendary jazz trumpeter Louis Armstrong once put it, "What is this thing called swing?"

Swing has long been considered an essential component of almost all types of jazz, from traditional to bepop to post-bop. As Ella Fitzgerald and many others have sung, "It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing." You might describe swing as a rhythmic phenomenon in jazz performances — a propulsive, groovy feeling that makes you want to move with the music.

Still, a precise definition of swing has long eluded musicians and scholars alike. As the Big Band era jazz trumpeter Cootie Williams once reportedly joked about swing, "Describe it? I'd rather tackle Einstein's theory."

Fittingly, physicists now think they've got an answer to the secret of swing — and it all has to do with subtle nuances in the timing of soloists.

Theo Geisel is a theoretical physicist with the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization and the University of Göttingen in Germany. He spent decades studying the physics of synchronization — for example, how the billions of neurons in your brain coordinate with each other. He's also a passionate amateur saxophonist. He even has a band with other physicists. (They play at conferences.)

Geisel is now retired. That's given him more time to use his theoretical physics toolkit to explore other mysteries of the universe, including this one: How do musicians synchronize when they try to create swing in jazz?

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CALLOUTS & CONFERENCES

3rd Conference: International Network for Artistic Research in Jazz (INARJ)

The International Network for Artistic Research in Jazz (INARJ), founded in 2019, will host its Third Conference, February 23–25, 2023, at the JAM MUSIC LAB Private University for Jazz and Popular Music, Vienna.

The aim of the group’s conferences is to strengthen its network and establish a platform for advocacy for artistic research in jazz and popular music. The methodology of artistic research is still fairly new in jazz and popular music genres and INARJ was founded with the mission to establish guidelines and resources for the field. The specific goal for the third conference is to discuss and experiment with questions of methodology, rigor, knowledge exchange, and positioning. Most conference sessions will be provided in hybrid format and include 20 presentations and performances from leading artists and researchers around the globe . Complete Signup Information and Program are available at https://artisticjazzresearch.com/. Conference participation is free, zoom link will be provided following registration.

Call for Applications: Doctoral Studies at Anton Bruckner Private University

Application deadline: 17.2.2023 for doctoral studies starting in the winter semester of 2023/24

The Anton Bruckner Private University (ABPU) in Linz invites potential candidates in both artistic and scholarly research to apply for its transdisciplinary doctoral programme. Our doctoral students are each supervised by an individual team of internationally active experts in their field and receive a comprehensive, structured course programme.

In the artistic doctoral programme, areas of research may be chosen from the following fields of research:

• Composition

• Contemporary performance practice

• Contemporary dance

• Historical performance practice

• Instrumental performance studies

• Theory and practice of artistic research

In the academic doctoral programme, areas of research may be chosen from the following fields of research:

• Cultural studies in musicology

• Interpretation research

• Musicology

• Music Education

Additional highlight in 2023:

For the occasion of the Bruckner Year 2024, the Anton Bruckner Private University announces three scholarships for doctoral researchers from scholarly or artistic scholarly disciplines who intend to engage with the topic of Anton Bruckner. More information can be found here: B-Call 2024 Doctoral Scholarships

THE NETWORK: PARTNER UNIVERSITIES

From the outset and continuing throughout the programme of study, our doctoral candidates will be offered a broad professional network through our cooperation with renowned Austrian and Swiss universities for co-supervision: the Paris Lodron University, Salzburg; the University of Art and Design, Linz; the University for Music and the Performing Arts, Vienna, and the Hochschule der Künste Bern, HKB.

THE COMMUNITY: PARL – PLATFORM FOR ART AND RESEARCH LINZ

PARL – Platform for Art and Research Linz offers a variety of exchange and networking opportunities in the fields of art and research, knowledge transfer and research communication. With this series, our research community takes a look at the rich space that opens up between art and research.

Here, doctoral students meet international lecturers and artistic researchers through workshops, concerts and symposia. PARL also offers them the opportunity to present and discuss their own research in front of an audience of peers. The intensive exchange between purely academic fields and the discipline of artistic research opens up synergies for both.

THE RESEARCH ENVIRONMENT AND FINANCIAL SUPPORT

The doctoral students have access to dance studios, the Sonic Lab computer music laboratory, a modern recording studio and concert halls for a wide range of requirements, as well as excellent audio and video equipment dedicated to the doctoral programmes. In addition, they receive funding for conference participation, archival work and documentation of their research. 

Roger Smalley and György Ligeti: Virtuosity, Place and Process 

Conservatorium of Music, University of Western Australia, August 25–27, 2023

Call for Papers- Deadline for submissions: Friday March 3, 2023

The recontextualization of pre-existing material and a preoccupation with process rather than style are central features in the virtuosic compositions of pianist-composer Roger Smalley AM. Born in England and becoming a leading figure in British contemporary music, Smalley emigrated to Perth, Western Australia in 1976. He made a significant impact on the musical landscape of Australia including an academic career of over three decades at the University of Western Australia. The move saw Smalley draw inspiration from the Australian landscape; engage with the music of South East Asia; and later, work with extant material taken from the music of Chopin. These factors served as catalysts for the reengagement with tonality, which became increasingly evident in his music and invites comparison with the music of György Ligeti, with both composers even producing sets of piano études at the end of the twentieth century. With 2023 the 80th anniversary of Smalley and the 100th anniversary of Ligeti, the University of Western Australia will host a symposium exploring themes of instrumental virtuosity; the reconstruction of tonality within compositional process; and identity and place. In conjunction with the symposium, there will be a series of concerts celebrating Smalley and Ligeti, including performances of Smalley’s Second Piano Concerto and Ligeti’s Trio for Violin, Horn and Piano.

We invite submissions for papers, lecture-recitals, panels, and themed sessions. Topics may relate to:

• Interactions between modernism and virtuosity;

• Allusion, quotation and recontextualization of material in compositional process;

• New analytical approaches with relevance to the works of György Ligeti and Roger Smalley;

• Australian Modernism in the 1970’s;

• The émigré composer and cultural identity at the end of the twentieth century.

• 
  

Presentations on other related topics will also be considered.  

Annual Conference of the German Society for Popular Music Studies 2023 Rock Your Body: Bodies in Interaction with Popular Music

Music is bound to bodies. We hear and feel it directly, we move along to it, we watch bodies in music videos and on concert stages, we use our bodies to produce sounds or augment them with instruments. In Popular Music Studies, the body-bound nature of music has been addressed since the inception of the research field. This year’s conference would like to continue and update the discussion by exploring bodies in interaction with popular music. For further specification, four focal points are outlined below, which should serve as suggestions or starting points for possible contributions. In addition, the conference is open to further impulses on the topic

1. Bodies, Subjects, and the Popular

2. Interacting Bodies

3. Connected Bodies

4. Researching Bodies

The conference is supposed to enable as diverse an exchange as possible about the outlined topic. The focus on bodies in particular offers numerous possibilities for workshops and practice-oriented sessions or hybrid contributions that engage in theory as well as practice (e.g. audio papers, film screenings, (lecture-)performances, simulations, dance workshops etc.). We also invite traditional sessions such as individual presentations and panel discussions. As always, members of the GFPM (and those who want to become one) are invited to present their work in free contributions (please include an according remark in the abstract).

Call for Applications - Doctor Artium Program at mdw - University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna

University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna is one of the world’s largest and most renowned universities for performing arts, music, theatre and film.

The artistic doctoral program (Dr. Artium Program) at mdw promotes research that relates to and develops artistic practice and plural methods and forms of knowledge. Dissertation projects are typically characterized by inter- and transdisciplinarity, process orientation and a contextualization in cultural and socio-political realities. The doctoral program is open to all art disciplines represented at mdw (music, theater, film) as well as transdisciplinary artistic research approaches that go beyond them. The program also motivates connections to scholarship and research at the mdw (like musicology, ethnomusicology, film studies, theater/performance studies/dramaturgy, dance studies, music therapy, sociology of music, cultural studies, gender studies, queer studies, acoustics).

Innovative artistic work is at the heart of this program. It leads to the production of new knowledge and serves as an independent contribution towards the development and opening up of the arts. The program enables its graduates to generate independent artistic research work which corresponds to international standards. It is expected that within the program new knowledge about specific issues in the arts is generated, the relevant artistic research is contextualized, and the resulting knowledge production is documented and communicated in a suitable way.

Each project is supervised by at least three experts from relevant disciplines. Graduates are familiar with the discourses on gender, diversity and intersectionality which are relevant to artistic research, and can apply them in their practice. All of this puts graduates in a position where they can take on coordinating, executive and teaching functions, and can successfully assert themselves in national and international artistic environments. 

The Artistic Research Center (ARC) at mdw provides courses and organization for the artistic doctorate program and collaborates with the various departments and experts of mdw and beyond, providing a rich network of disciplines, knowledge and facilities.

The mdw is committed to gender equity, equal opportunities, critical diversity and internationalization. We especially welcome applications from highly qualified artists from groups that have been underrepresented up to now and are happy to offer counseling sessions for such applicants.

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RECENT PUBLICATIONS

JAR 28

When JAR started out, we specifically wanted to bracket the question of what artistic research was, to allow for a more experimental space for articulations of practice as research, or expositions, as we call them. By now, some might argue, we have had time enough to conclude what counts and doesn’t count as artistic research, but still we stress that such definitions are not part of JAR’s remit or purpose. In fact, it seems as if the field has quite successfully functioned and expanded without clear understandings of what ‘artistic research’ is. Along the way, of course, a lot of the behaviours have become codified, mostly informed by doctoral education and approaches have been sanctioned; both positively as relevant to the field and negatively as being of a different kind. Under the hood, presuppositions (still) operate.

Issue 28 contains 6 peer-reviewed contributions:

Sara De Bondt’s exposition ‘Curating as graphic design research’ explores her approach to curating Off the Grid, an exhibition on post-war Belgian graphic design at the Design Museum Gent (2019). Focusing on graphic design from a specific country and period, De Bondt’s exhibition raised broader questions around naming, authorship, and canon-formation. She reflects on these questions here, posing the curatorial as a methodology for engaging with both historical research and graphic design practice. 

In ‘A Performative Response to Sites of Surveillance: The Gorilla Park Project,’ researchers Shauna Janssen, Katrina Jurjans, Eduardo Perez, and christian scott describe their collaborative approach to Gorilla Park in Montreal, an area undergoing rapid gentrification. Introducing a series of performative and sonic experiments, the exposition foregrounds an unfolding and iterative approach to artistic research taking place in contested city sites. 

Taking as its starting point an exhibition of her drawings, Paola Villanueva’s exposition, ‘Cajón desastre: notas sobre una investigación artística desordenada’, questions the linear and positivist understandings frequently associated with the idea of project in artistic research. She makes visible subjectivities, using text to add value to the knowledge created in the drawing process, activating, qualifying and dignifying artistic research “in transition”. 

In Kevin Walker’s ‘A topian artistic methodology,’ he outlines a methodology for artistic research based on the book Utopia as Method by sociologist Ruth Levitas. It involves specific methods at three levels of analysis: archaeological, architectural, and ontological. The term ‘topian’ was chosen in order to incorporate both utopian and dystopian perspectives. 

In the exposition ‘Structures for Freedom: In-performance communication in Traditional musicians in Scotland’, Lori Watson explores tacit knowledge, in-performance communication and collaboration in processes associated with contemporary folk music in Scotland. Using a case study experiment and a series of workshop performances, she examines the processes, communication and performance strengths of four leading Traditional and cross-genre creative musicians 

Photographer Sheung Yiu’s ‘Spotting A Tree From A Pixel (With Remote Sensing Researchers)’ contemplates his work together with remote sensing researchers from the Department of Geoinformatics at Aalto University, in the ongoing artistic research project entitled Ground Truth. The interdisciplinary collaboration functions on an operational layer of photography beneath the immediately visible, one that illustrates an expanded notion of photography across contemporary discourse.

Freedom Moves: Hip Hop Knowledges, Pedagogies, and Futures
by H. Samy Alim (Editor), Jeff Chang (Editor), Casey Wong (Editor) 

This expansive collection sets the stage for the next generation of Hip Hop scholarship as we approach the fiftieth anniversary of the movement’s origins.

Celebrating 50 years of Hip Hop cultural history, Freedom Moves travels across generations and beyond borders to understand Hip Hop’s transformative power as one of the most important arts movements of our time. This book gathers critically acclaimed scholars, artists, activists, and youth organizers in a wide-ranging exploration of Hip Hop as a musical movement, a powerful catalyst for activism, and a culture that offers us new ways of thinking and doing freedom.

Rooting Hip Hop in Black freedom culture, this state-of-the-art collection presents a globally diverse group of Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian American, Arab, European, North African, and South Asian artists, activists, and thinkers. The “knowledges” cultivated by Hip Hop and spoken word communities represent emerging ways of being in the world. Freedom Moves examines how educators, artists, and activists use these knowledges to inform and expand how we understand our communities, our histories, and our futures.

Linked auditory and motor patterns in the improvisation vocabulary of an

artist-level jazz pianist
by Martin Nogaard, Kevin Bales, & Niels Chr. Hansen

New research published in the journal Cognition with contribution from Aarhus University and Georgia State University investigated how expert jazz musicians improvise, and what makes their solos so fascinating to listen to. The findings point to a ‘personal music library’ and can help us understand human creativity, and why some musicians are more successful than others.

World-renowned jazz musicians are often praised for their creative ingenuity. But how do they make up improvisations? And what makes artists’ solos more enticing than those of less skilled players? These questions continue to puzzle not only jazz aficionados, but also psychological researchers. Two leading theories have dominated so far: Either musicians learn to master

rules telling them what they can and cannot play – a sort of “secret language of jazz.” Or, each musician build up a personal library of melodic patterns – “licks” – that they can draw upon and recombine in new and interesting ways. Over the years, musical scholars have collected many such volumes of “licks” for learners to practice. Yet, the fact that a certain combination of notes recurs many times is no proof of an underlying movement pattern stored in the brains of musicians—it could just be a

sheer coincidence.

The ‘library theory’ of jazz improvisation

A new scientific study, just published in the journal Cognition, provides the first solid psychological evidence for the library theory of jazz improvisation. For the first time ever, researchers from Aarhus University and Georgia State University found that

expert jazz musicians play certain note combinations with much more consistent timing and force than others. Regardless if these “licks” were played fast or slow, loud or soft, the relative rhythms and accents remained very similar. This stronglysuggests that each player possesses a collection of patterns that are directly grounded in their own body and brain. Many jazz

experts have called it their personal “vocabulary.” Interestingly, the new study found that these improvisation vocabularies vary between different players.

Martin Norgaard, born and raised in Denmark, now Associate Professor of Music Education at Georgia State University in Atlanta comments further: “It is fascinating that expert jazz musicians store linked audio and motor representations in the brain – that is both the sound of licks and information about how to play them. As a jazz violinist myself, I often hear licks I want to play while improvising but the motor representation is not complete so the lick doesn’t come out right. Based on our research, that should happen less as expertise develops.”

Representing melodic relationships using network science
by Hannah M. Merseal, et. al

Music is a complex system consisting of many dimensions and hierarchically organized information—the organization of which, to date, we do not fully understand. Network science provides a powerful approach to representing such complex systems, from the social networks of people to modelling the underlying network structures of different cognitive mechanisms. In the present research, we explored whether network science methodology can be extended to model the melodic patterns underlying expert improvised music. Using a large corpus of transcribed improvisations, we constructed a network model in which 5-pitch sequences were linked depending on consecutive occurrences, constituting 116,403 nodes (sequences) and 157,429 edges connecting them. We then investigated whether mathematical graph modelling relates to musical characteristics in realworld listening situations via a behavioral experiment paralleling those used to examine language. We found that as melodic distance within the network increased, participants judged melodic sequences as less related. Moreover, the relationship between distance and reaction time (RT) judgements was quadratic: participants slowed in RT up to distance four, then accelerated; a parallel finding to research in language networks. This study offers insights into the hidden network structure of improvised tonal music and suggests that humans are sensitive to the property of melodic distance in this network. More generally, our work demonstrates the similarity between music and language as complex systems, and how network science methods can be used to quantify different aspects of its complexity.

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