Artistic Research Week at the Grieg Academy

New forms of expression
- The very first moment the students meet each other at the Grieg Academy, they also meet each other's different backgrounds, preferences, history and expressions. This meeting carries the great potential for creating new forms of expression if time and space are set aside for this, says Thormodsæter.

According to Thormodsæter, the Grieg Academy has a goal for students to create new forms of expression. This is a new way of thinking for many of the students, who often tend to focus on the playing technique.

-A shift of attention can contribute to increased reflection on one's own practice and one's own instrument. It is often just as interesting to hear about what was not achieved, and about what expectations were not met, as the finished result.

By becoming aware of these processes, Thormodsæter hopes that the level of reflection around the students' own artistic work will be elevated. In Artistic Research Week, they work with a problem of their choice and receive guidance along the way. Most of the organization and process, however, is the responsibility of the students themselves. All jazz students participate, across all years. At the end of the week, everyone meets and presents their problem and challenges for each other in the form of a musical result.

A playground
Martin Hjetland is a third year student playing drums. He talks about the week as a playground with wiggle room and great freedom. 

- This is a very good opportunity to test things you otherwise wouldn’t be comfortable with. As musicians we must dare to take poor and silly decisions, and see what that leads to. There is often a lot of pressure to be perfect from the very start. This can lead to boring and predictable results.This week ended up with 16 projects that could be experiences as 16 genres.

Hjetland himself was in three different bands this week; a piano trio, a folk music duo and their own chamber music project «The Hjetland Massive». With the piano trio, they wanted to test how low-key and calm they could play, without getting bored. "The Hjetland Massive" played music that Hjetland wrote during the corona era.
- Especially the "The Hjetland Massive" project gave me a good experience, and I want to take this project further.

According to Magne Thormodsæter, it is not uncommon for new bands to continue after the project week, while other things quickly turn out not to work. Which is also an important finding.

Study themselves
In the last couple of years, there as been a dramatic change in the atmosphere at the Grieg Academy, Martin says. There are more opportunities to try out new ideas.

- As a student of performing music, you work a lot with it music. During this week you get to focus on new or ongoing projects. This can make students without their own projects, create new collaborations with others.

Thormodsæter says that reduced performance pressure and open frameworks are the result of a conscious strategy for jazz, where Artistic Research Week has played a central part.
Another strength of Artistic Research Week is that it is repeated annually, so that you can constantly develop, turn direction, and challenge yourself. We do a strange thing when we study music at the Grieg Academy, Hjetland concludes. - We really study not only a subject, but also ourselves, in these four years.

About Artistic Research
Artistic Research has been a statutory task for higher education since 1995. There is a continuous discussion in the professional communities about what artistic development work should be. Common is that the artistic core is central, connected with requirements for reflection on process, methods and context, and visibility of results. The artist's own experience and insight is the starting point here, in contrast to research on art, which is the gaze from the outside. (Source: DIKU.no)