[simulator] I.

 

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RESIDENCY PROGRAM FOR SYMPHONIC ORCHESTRA

[October 2026 - June 2027]

 

 

SOURCE, SUBSTANCE, AND STRUCTURE
Performance as Musical Knowledge: Genealogies and Futures

 

An international residency investigating the historical foundations, material conditions, and future trajectories of symphonic orchestra performance.

 

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PROGRAM AT A GLANCE

 

Program period: October 2026–June 2027
Format: Two online seminars, two online seminar-laboratories, and an on-site residency
On-site location: Bled, Slovenia (EU)
Final presentation: Seventh Bled Contemporary Music Week, June 14–25, 2027
Application deadline: September 10, 2026

 

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FORMAT

 

Stage I. | October 19, 20, 2026

- 2 online seminars

- Participants present their artistic practices, performance methodologies, and works in progress

- Q&A

 

Stage II. | December 16, 17, 2026

- 2 online seminars

- Critical inquiry and practice-led experimentation centered on SOURCE, SUBSTANCE, AND STRUCTURE: Performance as Musical Knowledge

- Q&A

 

Stage III. | June 14-25, 2027

- Performances, lecture-performances, simulation laboratories, and research presentations at the seventh Bled Contemporary Music Week in Bled, Slovenia

 

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ABOUT THE RESIDENCY

 

[simulator] I. is an international, process-oriented residency dedicated to symphonic orchestra performance as artistic practice, collective technology, embodied knowledge, and critical inquiry. It brings together orchestral performers within a sustained framework extending from the analysis of participants’ practices to their public articulation at the seventh Bled Contemporary Music Week in Bled, Slovenia.

 

The residency begins from a fundamental proposition: orchestral performance is never a neutral realization of a pre-existing work. Fidelity to a score is produced through accumulated techniques, instrumental designs, editorial decisions, pedagogies, rehearsal conventions, conducting practices, recording technologies, and habits of listening. Every performance emerges at the intersection of inscription and embodiment, inheritance and decision, coordination and contingency.

 

The title [simulator] names the orchestra not as an apparatus of imitation, but as an environment in which possibilities are modeled, tested, negotiated, and made perceptible. A score proposes relations; rehearsal subjects them to material verification; performance stabilizes one realization among many. The orchestra simulates by constructing audible situations through which form, agency, memory, authority, and attention can be examined.

 

The program unfolds through four online sessions and a concluding on-site residency. It enables participants to present interpretative practices, trace their genealogies, test propositions through performance and simulation, and develop artistic trajectories. Scores, editions, recordings, rehearsal protocols, technologies, documents, and working materials enter the process as objects of collective analysis.

 

Participants investigate the histories and procedures organizing their orchestral work. The cohort examines how embodied technique, sectional memory, conducting gesture, rehearsal language, acoustic conditions, institutional routines, and real-time adjustment shape musical realization. Performance is treated neither as transparent execution nor as the preservation of authoritative tradition, but as a situated practice produced under specific historical, material, technological, institutional, and social conditions.

 

The residency combines practice-led experimentation with reflection. Participants articulate methods, identify assumptions, compare vocabularies, and test whether concepts remain adequate to performance. Rather than prescribe a unified aesthetic or ideal of orchestral playing, the program makes heterogeneous practices mutually legible while preserving their historical specificity.

 

The program culminates in performances, lecture-performances, simulation laboratories, and research presentations. These public formats present orchestral performance not only as artistic realization, but as a field of knowledge whose techniques, infrastructures, histories, and consequences can be made available for critical examination.

 

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MENTORS

 

Dr. Alastair White 

Urban Megušar, Double M.Mus.

Dr. Niki Zohdi

Dr. Dré A. Hočevar 

 

 

COORDINATOR

 

Brina Kren