HÃ¥kon Stene: "This is not a drum". Developing the role of the multidisciplinary musician.
Research Fellow at Norwegian Academy of Music
Although it is one of the oldest crafts in musical arts, the art of percussion playing has expanded immensely just within the last 50 years. Alongside the developments and searches for new sounds in Western art music, the role of the percussionist has come to include far more than merely hitting objects.
Striking, brushing, scraping, rubbing, bowing †on hundreds of different instruments from all over the world †has become common language within the western experimental tradition. Possessing the craft of an instrumental virtuoso, ultimately, one is an “instrumentalist without a fixed instrumentâ€. Departing from this standpoint, the project aims at expanding the role of the modern day percussionist through the development of six collaborative works, each exploring and reconstructing a different instrumental, timbral and performative palette beyond traditional percussive techniques and instruments.
A second part of the project will explore interpretational potential on existing work from the percussion repertoire. At least two different readings of each work will be recorded and presented in various formats
