Student projects in Music and Research

    Get to know the students of the MA SP Music and Research and their research projects

    Portrait of Alejandro Sarriegui
    The Music and Research programme is a unique opportunity for the development of my project. The methodological knowledge and skills I have gained have broadened my possibilities to reach new intellectual perspectives and to connect musical practice and reflection in a meaningful way. Exploring the frontiers offered by this interdisciplinary training programme allows me to find my own way through critical analysis and hybrid research having a direct impact on my artistic practice.
    Alejandro Sarriegui

    Dakota Wayne:The Principle of Distance in Music

    I use a model of artistic research where a theoretical background is developed, against which an aesthetic object is produced as an exemplification. This process forms a feedback loop between a theoretical portion, which precludes and informs the frame of the artwork, and a work of art, which demonstrates and clarifies the theory. The theoretical envelops and evaluates the artistic while the artistic motivates and practices the theory. With this method, I develop a concept of musical space focused on manipulating the literal and metaphorical distance between the listener and the musical work, moving in between what I have named the reflective and inflective domains of art. In a series of works, I attempt to highlight compositional tools for manipulating distance both immanent and external to musical material. Of special interest to this principle of distance is the role media play in creating this dual character of art that lives between reality and fiction.

    Duration: 2023-25
    Mentors: Dr. Christoph Haffter, Prof. Johannes Kreidler/ Sara Glojnarić, Prof. Svetlana Maraš, Prof. Dr. Michel Roth

    Dakota Wayne is a composer of conceptual and performative music whose work examines the social situation in and around sound. His work has been performed internationally at festivals, including ZeitRäume Basel (2021), impuls (2019, 2023), Darmstädter Ferienkurse (2018), and SALT New Music Festival (2015). He has worked with experienced ensembles in the field such as Ensemble Recherche, kinnekt kollektiv, VanProject, Illinois Modern Ensemble, Purchase Contemporary Ensemble, as well as outstanding performers, Miranda Cuckson, Rebekkah Heller, Gunnhilldur Einarsdottir, Seth Josef, Ellen Fallowfield, Sanae Yoshida, Peyee Chen, Kalle Hakosalo, Mikolaj Rytowski, and Phoebe Bognar among others. Dakota’s work spans disciplines, as he has experience in installation and performance art as well as theater music. Originally from Albany, New York, Dakota has studied in the US and Europe, holding degrees from Purchase College, University of Illinois and the Kunstuniversität Graz. He is currently pursuing the Music and Research programme at the Basel Academy of Music.

    WEBSITE

    Dakota about his research project

    Mauricio Silva Orendain: The Placticity of the Pipe. Microtonality as Sound Synthesis

    The Experimentalorgel by Rieger at St. Martin’s Church in Kassel, Germany, inaugurated in 2021, shook my artistic career like nothing before. Its extremely flexible dynamic wind not only made me fall in love with its soundscapes but also opened new avenues for my musical development, inevitably leading me into the field of research. Two years after composing a piece for its inauguration, starting the new MA programme “Music & Research” fit like a glove, providing the guidance and inputs I needed to deepen my exploration and understand how my artistic practice had the potential to take on a strong research direction, and how to approach it, communicate it and benefit from it. My current project, titled "The Plasticity of the Pipe: Micro-transdimensional Counterpoint", analyses the sound development and sound decay of the organ pipe under dynamic wind, exploring the resulting counterpoint between pitch, intensity, timbre, and rhythm for both composition and performance. It places the Experimentalorgel in Kassel as the central object of study, through which, as an improviser, composer, and performer, I explore its sonic possibilities, analyze them, and structure these possibilities into compositions that I perform myself. By translating and adapting these musical ideas to other organs across Europe, I question how innovations in organ building can trigger new possibilities within a single pipe and how the organ as a whole can offer insights into complex acoustic phenomena that are impossible to imagine or experience without the physicality of the instrument and which give us new perspectives where to observe and understand Klangfarbe from. 

    Duration: 2023-25
    Mentors: Johannes Keller, Prof. Dr. Martin Kirnbauer, Prof. Caspar Johannes Walter

    Winner of the Kaija Saariaho Organ Composition Prize in 2023 and Artist in Residence at Center for Italian Renaissance Studies at Harvard University in 2023, Basel-based Mexican composer and diverse keyboardist Mauricio Silva Orendain works with unconventional tuning systems to explore the bridges between microtonality and sound synthesis, bringing Klangfarbe to the foreground in his search for authentic sound sculptures. He is continuously composing for and performing with Vicentino’s Arciorgano in Basel, the new experimental organs at St. Martin’s Church in Kassel, Germany, as well as at various organ venues across Europe. His innovative approach to the organ — treating each pipe as an individual instrument through partial registration and dynamic wind control — was the catalyst for his artistic research project, “The Plasticity of the Pipe: Micro-Transdimensional Counterpoint.” His performances further explore spatialisation through the 4DSOUND engine as a performance vehicle via acoustic and electronic instruments.

    WEBSITE

    Alejandro Sarriegui:Experimental Percussion Instruments: an Artistic Research in Musical Interpretation

    As a percussionist, I am interested in exploring the musical possibilities of non-conventional percussion instruments. These instruments often lack a substantial repertoire. Through the study case of Josef Anton Riedl's 'Paper-Music,' I discovered not only techniques for generating sounds with non-conventional generators but also a way to stimulate my creativity as a performer. Reconstructing the paper sound sculpture and reinterpreting Riedl's music provided a space for critical reflection on musical interpretation. Studying the historical performance practice of this music helped me develop a procedure for generating repertoire for non-conventional percussion instruments. This process of musical interpretation has transformed my artistic practice into one of creation. Through this reflexive reinterpretation, I have recreated pieces for Riedl's paper sound generators and the Swiss nicophone developed by Lunason.
    Having started within the framework of the MA SP Music and Research, I will further pursue this project for my doctoral degree within the doctoral programme Musikwissen, a cooperation between the Basel Academy of Music and the University of Basel.

    Duration: 2023-25
    Mentors: Prof. Christian Dierstein, Prof. Dr. Anne-May Krüger

    Alejandro Neves Sarriegui is an Argentinian percussionist born in Buenos Aires in 1989. After completing his classical percussion studies in his hometown, he pursued postgraduate studies in Germany. Specializing in percussion at the Basel Academy of Music, he focused on the integration of non-conventional percussion instruments into 20th-century and contemporary music. Currently, he's engaged in a research project at the same institution, exploring these instruments and their musical interpretation within the "Music and Research" study programme. An active figure in the contemporary music scene, Alejandro performs in various ensembles, musical theater productions, and solo recitals. He is also a member of Duo Amoeba, a duo dedicated to post-instrumental practices. With Duo Amoeba, he has toured Germany, Switzerland, Asia, and Argentina, sharing their innovative approach to music. They have also had the opportunity to teach as guest lecturers at the National University of La Plata and the National University of Lanús.

    Solo de Nicophone
    Paper-Music Solo Version

    Rubén Bañuelos Preciado:Disembodiment as a performative Spectrum

    This research project develops a series of re-imaginations of a small percussion setup composed by me called Semilla. This particular setup, which highlights certain possible acoustic distortions and empathetic resonances between the instruments of said setup, gets expanded, abstracted, situated under various modifications. Each iteration corresponds to a research question on an artistic, acoustic, or technical degree. The answers to each of these questions feed into the construction of a new apparatus ultimately designed with the goal of harnessing the acoustic and artistic principles found on the original setup to unleash them into non-performative spheres as well as performative and hybrid mise-en-scènes. A looped procedure that renders itself out of its initial conditions and onto a constituted non-performativity.

    Duration: 2024–26
    Mentors: Prof. Christian Dierstein, Prof. Svetlana Maraš, Prof. Dr. Michel Roth

    The Tijuana-born percussionist obtained a master's degree in Percussion Performance at the Basel Academy of Music, under the mentorship of Christian Dierstein. At the same institution, as a current student of the Music and Research programme, he engages with the performance and non-performance of acoustics by building instrument/installation hybrids. He has extrapolated his practice from the contemporary classical percussion repertoire towards instrumental and sound design involving performance and/or installation frameworks. 
    In 2024 he toured the experimental solo-project That weightless flesh is our relative through Mexico and Switzerland, along with composers Luis Fernando Amaya and Nora Vetter. For the latter project he composed a work that applies the principles of acoustic distortion that he explores in depth in his research Disembodiment as a performative spectrum. Said acoustic principles were also developed in his master’s final exam Alma Inmediata (2024)a recital-form mise-en-scène of an installation and several compositions by him that inspired the research.

    WEBSITE

    Varun Rangaswamy:Musical Fabulation, or, Hearing History in a Different Voice

    I make music through the archive. By studying the archives of colonial South India and 19th century Basel missionaries, my research focuses on the types of voices that are audible to readers (and listeners) of the archive. Heeding the historical expertise of Saidiya Hartman, I refrain from reconstructing those voices, instead trying to uncover how they might sound, how heterogenously they could be conceived, and how they came to be un/authorized through colonial hegemony. By staging the text and the drama of the archive, I try to make audible the tensions of history, rearranging that network of conflicting voices, to offer a new sensory experience of the past, and in doing so, the present and future as well.
    In my artistic practice, I put to work my experience in Karnatak vocal, Western classical, and experimental/creative music. By deploying the discourses of those musics in the service of reinterpreting the archive, I hope to bring a varied and unique perspective to archival research.
    The title of my project comes from Saidiya Hartman’s original methodology, which she calls “critical fabulation,” through which she combines historical evidence with artistic writing to produce a counter-history to the archive of American slavery. In my artistic practice, I—though under very different historical circumstances—try to musically fabulate. Quotations, descriptions of sounds, descriptions of voices, and other sonic traces abound in the archive of colonial India. What would it mean to compose or improvise those sonic traces musically? And how might one trouble the authority of those descriptions, inflecting them through a different perspective than the one preserved by imperial venture? My time in the Music & Research program will be spent composing and improvising the traces of sound and voice found in archive, with an aspiration towards offering a different way of hearing the encounter between colonizer and colonized.

    Duration: 2024–26
    Mentors: Prof. Johannes Kreidler, Prof. Dr. Michel Roth

    Varun Rangaswamy is an improviser, composer, scholar, bassoonist, and Karnāṭak vocalist. His self-reflexive debut album REINHERITANCE has been praised for “creating a mesmerizing circular dialect” (I Care If You Listen). As a multifaceted artist, he has worked with such ensembles as International Contemporary Ensemble, Talea Ensemble, and Mivos Quartet in varying capacities as performer and/or composer. Collaborators included Aakash Mittal, Fay Victor, Rebekah Heller, Sara Schoenbeck, and Jasmine Wilson. Varun helped conceive and establish the San Diego Emerging Composers Concert, in which he has participated as composer, performer, and recruiter. This annual concert series offers performance opportunities for undergraduate composers based in the San Diego/Ensenada/Tijuana area. Varun was originally trained in Karnāṭak music. He has studied voice with C.M. Venkatachalam and B. Balasubrahmaniam, and mridanga with Rajna Swaminathan. He has also studied bassoon performance with George Sakakeeny and Valentin Martchev. Varun has degrees from UC San Diego and the Eastman School of Music and is currently a master’s student at the Hochschule für Musik Basel.

    WEBSITE