Lethe – International Symposium on Forgetfulness in Artistic Processes

Using the mythological river Lēthē as a metaphorical point of departure, musicians Anna Lindal, Andreas Hiroui Larsson, and Johan Jutterström conduct a research project on forgetfulness as a method and guiding principle for an artistic process.

With this symposium we invite you to discuss and investigate forgetfulness from a wide spread of perspectives, e.g., improvisation, memory, and time, in order to hopefully be able to draw conclusions on if and how forgetfulness can be applied to an artistic practice.

How can forgetfulness be an artistic tool?

Will forgetfulness and the river Lēthē enable us to become artistically reborn by way of aiding us to forget our musical habits and traditional reasonings?

What are we willing to forget?
 

Lecturers

Lecturers

Freya Bailes 
Keynote speaker
Associate Professor in Music Psychology, University of Leeds 

Christian Wolff
Keynote speaker 
Composer, Strauss Professor Emeritus in Music, Dartmouth College

Marcia Cavalcante Schuback
Professor in Philosophy, Södertörn University

Røgnvaldur Ingthorsson
Associate Professor in Philosophy, University of Helsinki

Katt Hernandez 
Violinist, PhD-candidate, Lund University

Toby Kassel
Choreographer and Dancer

Lethe Research Group
Anna Lindal, Violinist, Professor Emerita in Music
Johan Jutterström, Saxophonist, PhD in Music
Andreas Hiroui Larsson, Percussionist, Master in Music, Researcher

Moderator

Annette Arlander
DA, former professor in performance, art and theory

Guest Researchers, Musicians and Performers

Eva Lindal, Violinist
Henrik Olsson, Percussionist
Jennifer Torrence, Associate Professor in Music, percussionist
Johan Arrias, Saxophonist
Karl Dunér, Stage Director, Artist
Lisa Ullén, Pianist
Magnus William-Olsson, Author
Mats Persson, Pianist, Composer
Nils Claesson, film maker, PhD in Film and Media
 

PROGRAMME 2–4 March
 

Thursday 2 March

18:30
Registration and Welcome toast

19:00
SONGS FROM HAIDARI

Songs from Haidari is a concert performance that revolves around memory, forgetting and the fictional recreation of things disappeared.

The performance is based on testimonies about how the Greek composer Nikos Skalkottas composed music in the German concentration camp Haidari outside Athens. Skalkottas was imprisoned by the Germans and taken to Haidari, vaguely accused of being a member of the Greek resistance movement. A friend managed to smuggle sheet music into the camp and secretly Skalkottas feverishly composed several works which he then hid in a warehouse. When the Germans left the camp after the summer of 1944, Skalkottas became a free man, but all the music was confiscated and destroyed. However, several titles have been preserved, titles that bear witness both to the horror and to everyday life in the camp.

A few years earlier (1940), Skalkottas composed 32 pieces for piano, which includes the music for the silent film "Catastrophe in the Jungle".

Based on the history, titles and imagination surrounding the confiscated music, the pianist and composer Mats Persson will recreate and perform the music together with the violinists Eva and Anna Lindal. In the same way that Mats Persson has composed new music for the seized and destroyed works/titles, filmmaker Nils Claesson has created an animated silent film for Skalkotta's existing silent film music; a film that no longer exists. Nils Claesson will also participate in the performance with live projections.

Eva Lindal, violin Anna Lindal, violin Mats Persson, composition and piano Nils Claesson, film and live projections

Friday 3 March

9:30
Freya Bailes Associate Professor in Music Psychology, University of Leeds

Psychological meanderings along the river Lethe, and the science of musical forgetting

In this talk, I ask what music psychology can tell us about our propensity to forget, and the artistic affordances of such forgetting. Confluences between research on perception and attention, musical memory, mind wandering, imagination, embodied cognition, improvisation, and emotion will be explored. The Lethe project highlights the importance of considering musical forgetting not only from the multiple psychological perspectives of those directly involved (individual artist(s), co-performer(s), and audience(s)) but also as a reflection of cognitive transience.

11:00–11:20 Intermission

11:20
Lethe

Anna Lindal Violinist, Professor Emerita in Music; Andreas Hiroui Larsson, Percussionist, Master in Music, Researcher: Johan Jutterström, Saxophonist, PhD in Music

The current symposium marks the culmination of our three-year research project, in which we have used the mythological river, Lethe, of ancient Greece, as a metaphorical starting point, in order to research forgetfulness as a method and guiding principle for an artistic process. For our talk we intend to share our research findings thus far in the project, by way of artistic examples and theoretical arguments concerning how forgetfulness can be used as a tool to potentially nuance and critically reflect on the criteria with which we value artistic expression, e.g., aesthetics, form, and tradition. We will also perform the final instance of our practice-based research method, which we have employed throughout the project: To play a piece of improvised music, to let time pass and analyse the playing without partaking in the documentation of the music nor discuss the music with the research group, and then to replay the music from memory.

12:50–13:45 Lunch

13:45
Rögnvaldur Ingthorsson Associate Professor in Philosophy, University of Helsinki

Subjective and Objective Time: Is there a Place for the Creative Process?

In this talk I will present different theories about what time is really like—theories such as Presentism, Growing Block View, Moving Spotlight Theory, and Eternalism—and draw out the implications of those theories for our understanding of creative processes such as baking cakes or improvising a musical passage. I will also mention the cognitive processes believed to be required to produce our experience of time—for instance, memory and anticipation—and speculate whether they can enlighten us on the role of forgetfulness in musical improvisation. 

15:15–15:45 Intermission

15:45
Christian Wolf Composer, Strauss Professor Emeritus in Music, Dartmouth College  

Lethe and Music

This talk is a collection of material on Lethe, forgetfulness, and, necessarily, memory, in general, and then as they may relate to composed, performed, listened to, and improvised music.

17:15
Jennifer Torrence and Karl Dunér

Plenum - Concluding discussion with Lethe reference group

Jennifer Torrence is an experimental musician based in Oslo, Norway. Her practice includes percussion/performance, artistic research, collaborative projects, curation, composition, writing, teaching, etc. She is Associate Professor II of percussion at the Norwegian Academy of Music and a member of Pinquins. Jennifer Torrence is part of the artistic research-project Performing Precarity at Norwegian Academy of Music and part of the reference group of Lethe

Karl Dunér is a stage director and visual artist living in Stockholm. He started his directing career at Dramaten with Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in 1990 and has since been active as a stage director, also for opera and radio play. His repertoire includes, among others, Beckett, Weiss, Jarry, Kyrklund, Strindberg and Aischylos. As a visual artist he had solo-exhibitions in Sweden, Germany, France, Ireland, Belgium and Japan. He also makes the scenography for his stage performances. Karl Dunér has carried out the artistic research project Poetics of Unlearning together with Anna Lindal at Stockholm University of the Arts and is part of the reference group for Lethe.

18:10–18:20 Intermission

18:20
Sappho - fragment

Sappho (c. 630- d.570 BCE). Greek poet of immeasurable importance to the history of poetry. Only one entire poem is known. The rest of her work, collected in nine books by Alexandrian philologists, is either known to us by hearsay or in fragments. The fragment to be read in the performance, nr 105, is taken from the second full translation of her work into Swedish by Vasilis Papageorgiou and Magnus William-Olsson (the first one was published 1999) and is to be found in the book Sapfo. Dikterna och fragmenten, Ordfront, Falun 2022.  

Reading Music
Lisa Ullén, piano Johan Arrias, soprano saxophone Henrik Olsson, percussion 
Reading: Magnus William-Olsson poet
 

Saturday 4 March

9:30
Marcia Cavalcante Schuback Professor in Philosophy, Södertörn University

Future, in need to forget

Discussions on oblivion and forgetfulness have been developed in philosophical tradition in relation to memory, as both source or resource of memory and above all as its destruction and threat. In this talk I will sketch some thoughts of oblivion beyond the dominant opposition between oblivion and memory, and make an attempt to show how oblivion can be experienced as source of creation since future, is in need to forget.

11:00–11:30 Intermission

11:30
Toby Kassell choreographer and dancer
Workshop 

Spontaneous Creativity From Systemic Failure of Memory

In this one hour workshop we will investigate how to generate a structured musical work though improvising with spatial composition utilizing memory, or failure of, to create themes that are repeatable and are transformed into variations which further digress into  chaos. This will be achieved by behaving under conditions in an imperfect system where the ambiguity of said system is exploited creatively by the performers and the struggle that exists while trying to exercise short term memory within it.

The workshop will start with the audience and the ensemble learning and exercising the base spatial compositional structure as a physical introduction to the work. By doing this we offer an opportunity of deeper empathic understanding to the audience while viewing and listening to the performance. We will then agree upon the conditions for the ensemble to perform with and the performance will begin. The audience will observe and listen to the ensemble creating work produced by problems and questions that arise and are being addressed in real time while reflecting on the memories of their own recent experience. 

13:00–14:00 Lunch

14:00
Katt Hernandez Violinist, composer, PhD-candidate, Lund University

Lost Stations: The Transmutation of Catharsis

The varied strains of experimental music in late 90s and early 00s Boston unfolded in a host of unstable, disappearing places. Other cities on the east coast had similar qualities. While Roulette, the Issue Project Room, and whatever John Zorn happened to be calling his venue of the hour stayed fast, a cavalcade of disappearing rooms hosted catharsis after epiphany. I spent the first years I was in Boston steadfastly not recording my or anyone else's improvised music, dance, video art or performance art events. I believed that true improvised music should disappear into the ether, and that it's waxing shadow should inform the on-going stories of those who were present. In my experience of these scenes, activism against gentrification, wars and other injustices were inextricably tied to the artistic pursuits at hand. As causes were lost to struggle or time, the forgotten drives of those imminent hollers buried themselves in the next music and performance, sleeping fitfully. As with many experimental arts scenes, the on-going telling of the local mythology was dependent on proximity. Boston's population turned over to a staggering degree, in the face of the on-going housing crises and resultant exodus from the city. Stuck between the end of archiving and the beginning of YouTube in breathless anticipation of the internet, all the carefully unrecorded and forgotten music phased into the cosmic lexicon. In this performance-talk, I will address these histories and how their disappearance into the passage of time, along with most of the gathering points these activities flourished in, grow into blind and sleeping spaces in the under- and- background of my and others' makings.

15:30–15:45 Intermission

15:45
Concluding discussion with Lethe reference group and plenum.
 

Read more about Lethe here

Image: Ryan Packard