Joint Winners: Katalin Koltai ‘The Transformed Space of the Ligeti Guitar’ and Lauren Redhead ‘54 stops, Grésillement, Alphabet des Rauschens: Collaboration and/as Performance Autoethnography.’
The panel felt both winners provide excellent contrasting examples of practice research, one that is clearly articulated as an organological innovation applied to performance and classical guitar repertoire, and the other focussed on performance as process by expanding ‘performance’ practice through reflective and ethnographic methodologies.
Koltai’s Ligeti Guitar utilises a magnetic system to apply capos to individual strings, allowing for different harmonic configurations that can be easily altered mid-performance. This practice research is an innovative and creative development in instrument technology, with consequences for performance and composition that can be broadened in scope for further guitar repertoire development.
Redhead’s practice research is on-going and explores the role of the performer and the performance setting, taking not only the specifics of each organ into account but also the adaptations and explorations of the organist-performer. The relationships between instrument, performer and other collaborators (composer Annette Schmucki and live electronics performer Alistair Zaldua) are explored as the process unfolds. In this work Redhead makes a case for heterogeneity being important. The research continues to evolve and in this sense can be seen as a living document.
In their own words:
Katalin Koltai: The Transformed Space of the Ligeti Guitar
This innovative artistic research aims to transform guitar performance practice by utilising an augmented instrument, the Ligeti Guitar. Initially, the design aimed to facilitate radical open string sets in my guitar arrangement of György Ligeti’s Musica Ricercata, allowing for the replication of Ligeti’s pitch sets. Designing magnetic technology, this instrumental augmentation evolved into a completely new instrument, radically extending the guitar’s voicing and harmonic capacities, allowing any combination of fretted notes. Building on these extended affordances, I have been developing the Ligeti Guitar’s new repertoire through arrangement and collaboration with composers.
The work includes a book chapter that demonstrates the affordances of the Ligeti Guitar’s transformed space through case studies of my arrangements of Bartók, Ligeti, and Chopin, as well as new compositions by Gorton. The chapter also illustrates how the practice of this new instrument contributes to knowledge in the context of guitar space, cognition, and embodiment. The practice includes my video recordings of the mentioned arrangements of Bartók, Ligeti, and Chopin, as well as new compositions by Gorton. Additionally, it contains a recording of Gryllus’s Guitar Concerto for Ligeti Guitar and Creative ensemble. The concerto reflects on the sonic transformations of Ligeti’s Continuum, extensively showcasing the affordances of the Ligeti Guitar by using thirty different open string sets in a flow of continuous transformation, commencing with a six-note cluster and finally resolving on a row of perfect fifths.
Commentary:
Koltai, K. (2023) ‘The transformed space of the Ligeti Guitar’ In: Perks, R., McGrath J., ed. 21st Century Guitar – Evolutions and Augmentations. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
Recordings:
Béla Bartók: The Night’s Music*
György Ligeti: Musica Ricercata no.1,2*
F. Chopin: Berceuse Op.57.*
S. Gryllus: Concerto for Ligeti Guitar and Creative ensemble
*Arranged by Koltai.
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Lauren Redhead: 54 stops, grésillement, alphabet des rauschens: collaboration and/as performance autoethnography.
The questions of how performance can be positioned within a collaborative practice research project, and how research methodologies can effectively account for and foreground performance processes are addressed in this work. This portfolio outlines the practice research processes of collaboration and performance in which the researcher was involved towards the presentation of the piece 54 stops, grésillement, alphabet des rauschens (2020) by the Swiss composer Annette Schmucki. It is considered how the heterogeneity of performance situations for the combination of organ and live electronics can be addressed as an affordance in this type of work, and the methods of achieving this are proposed and reflected on through collaborative work on the creation of the piece that is the subject of this portfolio. The role of the organist as an individual musician-collaborator (rather than a generic performer of a generic instrument) is emphasised through this process. Further, methods of reflection combining Collaborative Event Ethnography and Performance Autoethnography are suggested and trialled, allowing for the focus of such reflection to be the sounding and created materials of the piece rather than only post-hoc considerations of it. In doing so, embodied knowledge arising from performance processes is given primacy. The research insights in this project suggest that heterogeneity can be addressed through an expanded consideration of the instrument that also includes the performers. The project also proposes how performative autoethnographic methods can be enacted concurrently with composition and performance in practice research. The outcomes of the research have been shared internationally through contemporary music festival performances and a broadcast on Deutschlandfunk Kultur. Academic audiences have been engaged through conference presentations and journal publications.
Congratulations to our 2024 winners, and thank you to everyone who entered for this year’s prize.