I am an artist and a scientist. As a scientist, I conducted research on the embryonic form of the light chain of the muscle protein myosin in a molecular biology laboratory. As an artist, I create musical works that are realized in the form of scores or performances. In both roles, I see my work as the creation of insights and knowledge, or in a broader sense, as the creation of knowledge.
show moreI have never felt that the biologist Georg Hajdu is a fundamentally different person from the composer Georg Hajdu, or that my approach differs from one discipline to another in which this creation of knowledge finds its expression. For both are based on one and the same source: creativity. In his book “The God-Mind in Man,” philosopher Arthur Koestler explored the commonalities in the creative process and identified a fluid transition from art to science. He states that the mental activities in which creativity manifests itself resemble a dream or daydream. I myself have often experienced this state as a trance in which part of my thinking seems to detach itself and I arrive at results whose genesis is difficult to trace in retrospect. There is ample evidence that significant contributions to art and science have been made in dreams: in 1865, for example, the German chemist August Kekulé succeeded in solving the mystery of the ring structure of benzene in a dream. Kekulé’s contemporary Robert Schumann not only composed the famous piece Träumerei, but also wrote about how he woke up in the morning with a melody in his head and immediately used it.
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So what could be more natural than to view art and science as two sides of the same coin and bring them together in a new discipline, namely artistic research (AR)? AR has been an academic discipline since the first half of the 20th century. It was based on the increasingly analytical discourse led by artists such as Kandinsky, Klee, and Schönberg in the first half of the 20th century. On the one hand, it ties in with the self-reflection of Romantic and pre-modern artists, and on the other hand, it is influenced by the groundbreaking work of scientists such as Hermann von Helmholtz, who used scientific methods to examine the material and immaterial objects of the arts. But are science and art epistemologically equal? For Koestler, it is the transition from the subjectivity of beauty to the objectivity of truth that distinguishes the disciplines from one another. But can this separation still be maintained, or did it ever exist in this pure form? In scientific discourse, for example, it is said that science must be objective and verifiable. But the very foundation of scientific knowledge, namely working with hypotheses, calls this dogma into question. Many hypotheses only turn out to be false after a delay, or may not be verifiable, such as those of string theory. Is that not science? Or conversely, can there not be an analogous view of a work of art as a hypothesis that can be falsified or verified, “in the grand scheme of things”? To my ears, Johann Christian Bach’s work sounds like an unfinished hypothesis that was only brought to completion by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and my assessment obviously coincides with that of the general public. After all, how many of Bach’s more than 250 works are still heard today?
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Béla Bartók was both a scientist and an artist who drew his inspiration from the meticulous collection, transcription, and transformation of folk songs. In the spirit of Bartók, music departments in North America equated composition with musicology as an academic discipline, with a score being regarded as a research achievement equivalent to a dissertation in text form. This openness can be traced back to the US composer Roger Sessions (1896-1985), who, after a stay in Europe, began working at Princeton University in 1933 and later taught at Berkeley. Harvard University also followed this example. In Europe, there was a different strand of development in the field of music from the 1950s onwards, which initially bypassed conservatories and universities and developed in centers and research institutions such as Studio Gravesano and IRCAM. It is only since the 1980s that we have seen universities, initially in England, the Netherlands, and Scandinavia, and later also in Austria, Switzerland, and Germany, opening up to the subject and beginning to practice CF. Since 2013, the HfMT Hamburg has been the first German music/theater university to offer the opportunity to pursue a doctoral project in CF as part of the Doctor scientiae musicae program. Since the approach is new, we were free to determine the content of the program, and the only requirement from the Hamburg Science Authority was that the text portion of the doctoral thesis should outweigh the artistic project (as difficult as that is to verify quantitatively). Since 2013, a number of doctoral projects have been completed to a very satisfactory standard, including that of the Australian composer Samuel Penderbayne, who lives in Hamburg and was the first to explicitly address the discourse of KF in his dissertation. Accompanying the studies, two ArtSearch symposia as well as lecture series, workshops, and seminars with some high-ranking representatives of the KF (including Dutch KF theorist Henk Borgdorff) have taken place at the HfMT. In addition, with the support of the Science Authority, the KiSS (Kinetics in Sound & Space) graduate college was launched in 2019 as a joint project between HAW and HfMT, coordinated by Benjamin Helmer and involving six researchers from the fields of music technology, musicology, and theater.