I would like to invite you / your daughter to take part in my postdoctoral research project. My project is online, but it is hosted at the Grieg Academy, University of Bergen, Norway, and funded by the European Union through the Marie Słodowska-Curie Actions programme.
I am a pianist myself. The idea for this research came after I did some online concerts during the pandemic. In those occasions, I missed a sense of togetherness with the audience. This happened even when they were there watching me live.
I then thought: “how about if we create an online concert together, myself, audience members and musicians? Then, by creating that concert together, will we feel more a sense of togetherness when we are watching it remotely? and, How will this collaborative dynamic make an impact on our feeling of being part of the music as well as of the group?’
This idea has become the music as an invitation project!
In the first year of the project I worked with 14 women from 7 countries, some of them were pianists, some to them were visual artists.
Now, in the second year, I am looking to work with teenage girls (age 13 – 16 years old) from Norway, the UK, and Brazil. I think it will be interesting and rich to give voice to these groups of people (women, and the young), who historically had less space in the world of classical music.
We will meet on Zoom to create an online concert together, and the participants don’t need to have any experience with music.
As a first activity, we will be realising a piece that the British / Bergen-based composer Alwynne Pritchard has written specially for this project. It involves the girls writing short texts, then interacting with each other writings, and exploring sounds and recordings in the places they live.
We will start the workshops with the composer in November, and I will schedule the meetings according to the girls availability. We will be keeping working together until December, or January, then the online concert will be streamed in Spring 2025.
The girls would also give ideas of whatever else they want to explore in the concert (which other pieces of music they want in it, images, text, etc). If they want they can perform, but if they don’t want to perform it is fine too.
After the presentation we will meet to chat about how the experience was, how the fact of doing it together made a difference in how they listened to the music online. There will also be an anonymous feedback form, if anyone wants to fill it out, to tell me about their experience. Then I will write an academic paper with what I learned from this collaboration.
This project has been approved by the Ethics Committee of the University of Bergen. There will be a consent form with all the details for the parents to read and sign, if they agree with their girl’s participation. I will make sure that they feel comfortable all the time, and will take all measures to protect their privacy.
Each girl is free to be involved in the creative process as much as they want, and in the way they want. And they can drop out of the project at any point, with no explanations required.
If you have any questions, of course do feel free to ask me.
For more information or to sign up for the project, you can fill the contact form in this website, or just email me on kesia.decote@uib.no
I hope we can be in this musical creative adventure together!
Best wishes
Késia Decoté
