Workshop “Letting go”: Control and its loss in the context of musical actions

Panayiotis Kanellopoulos, musician, associate professor, Department of Pre-School Education, University of Thessaly.

The workshop is part of the course “Audiovisual Representations and Image Processing Techniques”, Tuesday 10/11/14, 18:00 -21:00pm, Department of Architecture

How is music written down? Is the score an accurate representation of the music? Which are the logics that underpin different ways of written representation of musical events? What is being gained and what is being lost when a piece of music is notated? Which are the aspects that different forms of notation seek to control and why? Who controls what escapes control of the 'composer'? Which are the aspects that different forms of written musical representation 'let go'? And why? Looking at different ways of notating music (from Bach to Cardew) we aim at discussing the issue of controlling (or refusing to control) different aspects of the musical material; this discussion is going to lead us to a practical experimentation with ways of controlling noise so as to render it 'musical'. We end by creating a little piece that addresses the issue of the relationships between music, noise and multitude.

See the workshop’s poster.

Panagiotis A. Kanellopoulos received his M.A. and Ph.D. in Music Education from Reading University (UK). His research focuses on developing socio-cultural perspectives on children’s musical improvisation, on ethnographic approaches to young people’s musical creativity and on collective improvisation and composition as a form of socio-political musical practice. He has co-edited the volume Arts in Education, Education in the Arts (Nissos, 2010, in Greek) and has published articles in international publications and leading scholarly journals (including Psychology of Music, Philosophy of Music Education Review, British Journal of Music Education, Action Criticism and Theory for Music Education, Educational Philosophy and Theory). He is active as a mandolinist, performing and recording in a variety of musical contexts. Panagiotis has led many experimental educational workshops that focus on collective free improvisation with variable forces, in a wide range of venues and contexts. He currently serves as an Assistant Professor of Music Education at the University of Thessaly, Greece, and is co-chair of ISPME (International Society for the Philosophy of Music Education).