Resources

The musician researcher

Artists have always been researchers before anything else, whether they are instrumentalists, choreographers, composers, writers, sculptors, or engaged in any other art form. This idea has led to a considerable evolution in the teaching and sharing of artistic knowledge: methods, teaching approaches, openness to the world and its complexity, musicians’ place in today’s society, etc.

While this evolution is taking place, researches undertaken today with the help of new technologies bring their contribution, partly as a response to the current evolution in musicians’ expectations.

In the same time, the place of these new technologies in the current musical world, performance, creation and happening, represents a large part of today’s musical production and is linked to a real demand coming from festivals, musical centres and both European and overseas national scenes.

Musicians are more than likely to be faced with these technologies one way or another through their careers, whether they are independent or part of an orchestra.

The renewal of concert and on stage learning

Beyond the technical and practical aspects of these new tools, the concept of concert itself, as well as the performer’s place, tends to take a new form.

Various areas of expertise have been blending for a few years, which has been very fruitful in a positive way. On the one hand, technicians are more and more musicians, interested not only in the technical but also the musical and scenic aspects of concerts. On the other hand, musicians themselves take their part in scenography, take the concert hall’s space into account and handle various tools allowing this process; all of this for the sake of a process towards and for the public.

Admittedly, none of this is new. But a part of the contemporary repertoire is taking the form of sort of renewal in the offers made to publics (both young and adult), artistic propositions that are ofen very appreciated by numerous European cultural institutions.

Researching with musicians

Open to all instrumentalists, this approach can also help to polish a Master’s project and to imagine a possible development for the first years following graduation, which can provide a support to professional integration.

The purpose is to bring together musicians from all disciplines around a creation that is to be done under the form of a research workshop on stage performance.

Hence the idea to create this Laboratoire Scène/recherchE, which reunites students with diverse expertise: composition, dance, writing, XX-21 workshop, musical culture, teacher training, improvisation groups, and instrumental classes.

The idea is to provide any interested musician with meetings that will allow them to highlight a particular form of expression around their instrument and a new perspective on their instrument, with the final goal of professionalization.

Implication in teaching

The Laboratoire is linked to the teacher-training department to reflect on new transmission tools. Numerous teaching ways are to be developed through new technologies (movements capture through videos and sensors).

A research on the body’s place on stage, the danced musical art, the understanding of a new vocabulary, dynamics, etc. have to be accounted in the children education process.

Assesment / Validation

The Laboratoire is assessed as an optional subsidiary subject with ECTS credit points as part of the Master’s cycle.

Jean Geoffroy, director of the Laboratoire Scène/recherchE, validates the students’ integration according to their projects and their implication.

A meeting is held at the beginning of the year to present the aims of the Laboratoire and to organise the sessions.