From researcher/performer to artistic researcher: looking back at the past in search of new possibilities

Abstract

Musicians involved in historically informed performance are pulled in different directions, driven by two different motivations, and when one of them is taken to the extreme, the other runs the risk of being, if not overtaken, at least over- shadowed. One is the motivation to observe and analyse the past, i.e., to contribute to historical knowledge; the other is the motivation to conceive a pertinent artistic intervention, i.e., to contribute to an artistic domain. Reinforced and reassured by an analysis of the chapters in this book, I argue that this contribution to an artistic domain is an essential component of artistic research, supported by documentation that clarifies the pertinence of artistic interventions, promotes more empathetic connections and deeper intimate fruition, and results in mythopoetic reconfigurations. Only a discourse in the narrative mode can possibly play this roll, because it does not exclude embodied meanings and processes of subjective self-disclosure (re-enactments). is discursive mode will enable a reflection on the pertinence of the (inter)subjective concerns that motivated the creation, the pertinence of the creative processes, and/or the aesthetic, ethical, and ecological pertinence of the artistic intervention. us, going beyond an understanding of musical practice as simple “artefact-performance-reception” and embracing a sense of possibility, a specific territory opens for HIP performers. It consists of an embodied intersubjective amalgam of beliefs, convictions and mythopoetic configurations, where they, as artistic researchers, can intervene creating new realities and provoking changes and reconfigurations – rhetorically, pedagogically, and above all artistically.