This month I’m starting a new artistic research project at the Conservatory in Antwerp and the Antwerp University (ARIA). It will be a four-year project leading up to a PhD in the arts. It is an extension of a two-year research project that I started in 2019, focussing on Anthony Braxton’s Ghost Trance Music. For this PhD-project I intend to take a closer look at Braxton’s holistic vision of his entire oeuvre and explore the many different aspects of his work from a performer’s perspective. In doing so I hope to be able to contribute to broadening the canon of post-war western art music, which, still today, fails to recognise the vast and unique body of work Anthony Braxton has created over the past 55 years.
Excerpt from Composition 366 “Falling River Music” (c) Anthony Braxton
I described my intentions in the following research abstract (which can also be found here):
The perception of the canon of post-war western art music today is still strongly determined by a constructed dichotomy which keeps Western art music separate from evolutions and radical experiments in jazz and black American music. The very extensive oeuvre and philosophical body of thought of the American composer Anthony Braxton, what he calls his Tri-Centric Thought Unit Construct (TCTUC), can be seen as the metaphorical elephant in the room. This unique oeuvre has been ignored to this day as part of a larger canon of post-war Western art music and is rarely performed as such. This research project takes Anthony Braxton's TCTUC as a starting point to see how I, as an interpreter of Braxton’s music, can contribute to a broadening of this canon.
The intention of this research is to approach a wide selection of Braxton’s compositions on their own terms. By putting these works as specific case studies on the agenda of relevant actors such as the conservatory, contemporary music festivals and concert series and through recordings and other media, I hope to make a canon broadening possible through my practice as an interpreter. In addition to this I will address the gaps within the existing discourse on post-war Western art music through Braxton's own writings (Tri-Axium Writings) as well as recent texts by George Lewis, Benjamin Piekut, Georgina Born, a.o.
The results of this research will be presented in the form of concerts, lectures, articles, workshops and recordings.