infra.norma.meta I.

 

—

 

ARTISTIC PREMISE

 

The residency begins from the proposition that conducting precedes the first visible gesture and extends beyond the public performance.

 

A conducting project is already taking form when repertoire is selected, editions are compared, instrumentation is determined, collaborators are invited, rehearsal time is distributed, technical requirements are negotiated, and the relation between a work and its public context is imagined. These decisions are not external preliminaries to interpretation. They constitute the material, temporal, institutional, and ethical conditions through which interpretation becomes possible.

 

Conducting is therefore approached as an expanded artistic practice encompassing score study, research, programming, listening, gesture, rehearsal design, ensemble communication, technical planning, production, interpretation, and public mediation. Each of these activities generates knowledge, organizes relations, and affects the musical result.

 

The residency offers conductors a context in which scores, programs, interpretative concepts, rehearsal methodologies, and production strategies can be examined while projects remain open to transformation. Questions of form, tempo, articulation, balance, timbre, instrumentation, notation, edition, ensemble coordination, acoustic conditions, technological mediation, dramaturgical coherence, and public presentation can be addressed as interconnected aspects of a single artistic process.

 

Conducting knowledge is understood as analytical, embodied, relational, temporal, rhetorical, and organizational. It emerges through close reading and critical listening, but also through anticipation, gesture, diagnosis, adaptation, negotiation, and the capacity to translate artistic intention into conditions for collective action.

 

The conductor does not merely communicate a pre-existing interpretation. Through rehearsal, the conductor proposes priorities, organizes attention, elicits responses, evaluates consequences, and participates in the formation of a shared musical understanding. Interpretation is produced through the interaction of score, conductor, musicians, bodies, instruments, technologies, spaces, histories, and institutional circumstances.

 

The residency consequently does not reduce leadership to control, efficiency, charisma, or unilateral authority. It creates a practical and discursive environment in which participants can articulate their methodologies, examine inherited models of conducting, test alternative rehearsal and production strategies, and reflect on the aesthetic, ethical, institutional, and political implications of directing collective musical work.

 

Rehearsal occupies a central position within this framework. It is approached not simply as the implementation of decisions made in advance, but as an epistemic and artistic site: a place in which interpretations are tested, assumptions become audible, tacit knowledge is exchanged, resistance generates information, and musical relations are continuously reformulated.

 

Public performance is likewise understood not as an isolated endpoint, but as the concentrated public realization of a longer process involving research, selection, analysis, coordination, negotiation, experimentation, and collective responsibility.