[simulator] I.

 

—

 

ARTISTIC PREMISE

 

Symphonic orchestra performance contains more history than its apparent continuity reveals. A phrase sounded in the present may carry inherited articulations, ideals of tone, instrumental modifications, pedagogical lineages, sectional conventions, recording technologies, and memories of earlier interpretations. What appears self-evident is neither natural nor outside history, but a situated reconfiguration of conditions preceding the event and remaining open to transformation.

 

[simulator] I. takes the relation between inherited knowledge and performative realization as its field of inquiry. Its questions are epistemological: What does an orchestral performer know while realizing a work? Where is that knowledge located, and how does it become audible? How is it coordinated, contested, revised, or withheld? What becomes possible when established practices encounter unfamiliar repertoire, altered technologies, different acoustic environments, or transformed authority?

 

These questions operate across multiple scales. Bodily performance involves technique, sensation, memory, anticipation, effort, and responsiveness. Sectional work requires local leadership, mutual adjustment, shared conventions, and partial information. Ensemble realization depends on distributed agency, conducting, hierarchy, temporal coordination, and balance. Historically, orchestral practice involves unequal preservation and contested accounts of fidelity, authorship, excellence, and tradition.

 

The residency accordingly treats performance as a site of knowledge production. Orchestral musicians generate understanding through reading, listening, adjustment, rehearsal, resistance, and reflection. A technical difficulty may expose an edition’s assumptions; a discrepancy between parts may reveal a compositional relation; a sectional conflict may disclose hierarchy; a conducting method may redistribute attention. Performance becomes analytical when its consequences modify subsequent practice.

 

Critical reflection is integral to artistic work. Participants formulate the premises of their practices without assuming that every operative form of knowledge can be translated into language. Some knowledge is enacted more adequately through sound, touch, timing, breath, or coordination; nevertheless, conceptual discourse must remain precise and accountable to performative evidence.