[conspicuum.infra .x] I. 

—

 

PROGRAM STRUCTURE

 

The residency unfolds across three consecutive stages, each performing a distinct function within the inquiry. Its trajectory moves from the articulation and contextualization of participants’ practices toward investigation, practice-led experimentation, development, and public presentation at the festival.

 

Stage I. | October 2026

2 online seminars

 

Stage I establishes the residency’s shared artistic, methodological, historical, and discursive foundations.

 

Participants introduce their practices, working methods, selected performances, current projects, and research questions. These presentations establish a basis for examining the interpretative, historical, technical, material, relational, and methodological positions represented across the cohort.

 

Participants present repertoires, instruments, technologies, recordings, documents, works in progress, or research frameworks for development. Soloists and ensembles articulate their approaches to interpretation, embodied technique, source criticism, setup design, rehearsal, decision-making, and collective artistic organization.

 

The seminars initiate substantive exchange and enable participants to formulate questions that will guide subsequent development. Inquiry may address relations among historical inheritance, embodied technique, material agency, sonic materiality, instrumental configuration, technological mediation, ensemble interaction, emergent form, and performance documentation, while the shared framework clarifies how these dimensions become mutually operative in concrete acts of performance.

 

Stage I includes:

– 2 online seminars

– Presentation and articulation of participants’ artistic methodologies

– Contextualization of selected performances, research, and current projects

– Presentation of works in progress, recordings, research materials, or initial propositions

– Exchange among percussionists, ensembles, and mentors

– Discussion of interpretative and methodological priorities

– Identification of technical, historical, and conceptual questions

– Formulation of sustained inquiries and strategies for focused artistic development

– Introduction to source, substance, and structure as interdependent fields

– Q&A

 

Stage I does not seek to finalize projects, but establishes a rigorous basis for their development. Participants begin to specify what their practices require, which historical and methodological commitments they entail, and how sustained exchange may productively transform methods and outcomes.

 

 

Stage II. | December 2026

2 online seminars

 

Stage II advances critical inquiry and practice-led experimentation through SOURCE, SUBSTANCE, AND STRUCTURE: Performance as Musical Knowledge—Genealogies and Futures, the residency’s shared conceptual framework.

 

Participants present developed performances, recordings, interpretative propositions, rehearsal materials, research documents, and experiments. The cohort engages these materials through close listening, comparative analysis, discussion, critical reflection, and collective methodological inquiry.

 

This stage provides an experimental setting in which substantive artistic questions can be addressed before the on-site residency. Depending on each project’s premises, inquiry may concern repertoire, source materials, notation, oral transmission, memory, form, duration, technique, articulation, resonance, decay, timbre, balance, spatial configuration, technology, coordination, rehearsal methodology, or relations between propositions and perceptible outcomes.

 

Practice-led inquiry is treated not as the demonstration of stabilized interpretations, but as an analytical encounter among historical materials, instrumental affordances, embodied technique, perceptual organization, material resistance, ensemble relations, and judgment. Participants examine how performances produce musical meaning and knowledge, and where ambiguity, friction, failure, or unforeseen possibility may become artistically generative.

 

Stage II includes:

– 2 online seminars

– Development of performances, research processes, and methodological frameworks

– Collective listening, analysis, and critique

– Analysis of sources, materials, and emergent form

– Examination of interpretative decisions and perceptible consequences

– Technical and methodological critique from participants and mentors

– Critical examination of each project’s artistic and epistemological premises

– Identification of questions requiring rehearsal, revision, or documentation

– Specification of spatial and technical requirements

– Development of presentation formats and realization strategies

– Preparation for the on-site residency and subsequent festival presentations

– Sustained engagement with source, substance, structure, genealogies, and embodied knowledge

– Q&A

 

By the conclusion of Stage II, participants should possess a precise understanding of the artistic, technical, interpretative, and logistical conditions required for the on-site phase. Projects need not be considered fully resolved; they should, however, be sufficiently articulated to enter an intensive process of rehearsal, testing, revision, contextualization, and public realization.

 

 

Stage III. | June 2027

On-site residency at the seventh Bled Contemporary Music Week

 

The concluding stage takes place in Bled, Slovenia, within the seventh Bled Contemporary Music Week.

 

During the on-site residency, participants enter an intensive environment dedicated to realizing, articulating, and publicly presenting their projects. Materials developed through the online stages are brought into rehearsal, discussion, and experimental testing under specific acoustic, spatial, technical, material, embodied, historical, technological, institutional, and interpersonal conditions that materially shape performance.

 

The on-site phase is not conceived as the execution of decisions settled in advance. Rehearsal remains an active mode of inquiry. Participants may discover that materials require clarification, expansion, reduction, reorganization, or reinterpretation. Encounters among instruments, objects, repertoires, research, space, audience, and performance may disclose formal, sonic, technical, methodological, or conceptual possibilities.

 

Participants develop their presentations through playing, listening, setup, movement, discussion, experimentation, and collective decision-making. Peers and mentors provide observations that help clarify relations among methods, materials, historical positioning, and appropriate public forms.

 

Stage III includes:

– On-site residency at the seventh Bled Contemporary Music Week

– Critical exchange among participants, ensembles, and mentors

– Situated artistic development and public realization of participating projects

– Performance, listening, analysis, and testing

– Focused percussion research laboratories

– Interpretative experimentation and refinement

– Revision where warranted by each project’s artistic process

– Investigation of acoustic, spatial, material, and relational conditions

– Preparation for public presentation

– Performances, lecture-performances, percussion laboratories, and research presentations

 

The public presentations culminate the residency while remaining accountable to the processes of project development. They articulate performance, interpretation, rehearsal, research, reflection, and exchange as interdependent dimensions of situated musical knowledge rather than isolated outputs.

 

Where appropriate, presentations may include premieres, recontextualized interpretations, experimental formats, or first public realizations developed through the residency.