Music Research Seminar: Mira Benjamin (Goldsmiths University of London)

Event abstract

This talk presents collaborative practice research (2019-2024) between myself, Zubin Kanga (RHUOL) and Scott McLaughlin (Leeds). The focus is McLaughlin’s composition we are environments for each other (2023), in which conventional playing techniques of violinist and pianist become ‘enmeshed’ (Ingold, 2010) through a bespoke electric-violin-resonator-piano-feedback system—where actions by either player will affect the system and its affordances for all the players. A material-epistemic coalition of ‘embodied technique’ (Spatz, 2015) and ‘material agency’ (Pickering, 1995) unfolds across a long-form, open-duration performance  where two musicians are materially entangled with each other through a single sounding instrument. Drawing on the concept of ‘material indeterminacy’ (McLaughlin, 2022) inherent in performing with musical instruments, I discuss how the embodied approaches of two players may form an emergent, coalitional technique (knowledge) through a materially contingent object; an entangled technique. How may such a hybrid knowledge be articulated?

Spatz (2020: 114) calls on performers to ‘return to the language of technique’ in order to get to the ‘aboutness’ of embodied work. In response, I adopt Bachelard’s (1884–1962) framework of phenomenotechnique via Spatz’s (2020) writings on embodied theatre practices, in order to articulate the coalitional technique that constitutes this ‘multimodal participatory space’ (Rebelo, 2006: 28)—what Rheinberger (1997: 24) calls an ‘experimental system’ that ‘plays out its own intrinsic capacities’, producing new epistemic objects in an instrument-cum-laboratory. In this context, phenomenotechnical reflection elucidates somatic, aural, and reflective patterns of technique that are shared and passed between the players—the thick intersection of which may afford useful and consensual knowledge claims among practitioners, as well as insight into the knowledges enacted in performance.

Event Mira Benjamin

Mira Benjamin is a Canadian violinist, researcher and new-music instigator. She performs new and old music with an experimental outlook, and is interested in how the human body holds and experiences knowledge. Since 2014 she has resided in the UK, where she performs with Apartment House and Plus Minus Ensembles. Mira's varied career has spanned many genres of musical practice, including work with electronics, dance, improvised music, film and theatre. As an academic she lectures in music at Goldsmiths, University of London, and has recently been appointed to the faculty of City St George’s, University of London. Her PhD (as Duncan Druce Scholar in Music Performance at the University of Huddersfield) explored a relational epistemology of musical pitch via various ways of practising, modelling, representing, and ultimately knowing pitch space. Current research interests include embodied technique, post-Cagean experimental scored and improvised musics, and practice research. Mira was the recipient of the 2016 Virginia Parker Prize from the Canada Council for the Arts – awarded annually to a Canadian musician in recognition of a valuable contribution to artistic life in Canada and internationally.

Mira Benjamin