Bertrand Chavarría-Aldrete

PhD research project: “Plastic Extension of Music”

PhD supervisors: Kent Olofsson (main supervisor), Karin Johansson (second supervisor), Jan Eric Olsén (co-supervisor)

Institution: Malmö Academy of Music

Period: September 2020 – March 2025

I really enjoy working at IAC, the space and facilities are simply amazing, but that would be meaningless if there wasn’t a great staff working inside; a team that is always happy to help you with your ideas and projects. The fluid exchange between the visiting artists, the staff and more stable users like myself, makes the IAC a very happy place to work efficiently!

“Plastic Extension of Music” is as a new form of interpretation beyond the canonical performance, translation, synesthesia or musical analysis. An artistic intervention in music performance, that is a physical or visual extension in space, taking the instrumental interpretation (praxis) of a musical work as a poietic process preceding a plasticity of the artistic object that emerges in space originated from the music and the interpreter.

“Plastic extension” considers the musical performance as an incompleteness that creates a recollection and awareness of the different elements and codes issued from the score, the musical performance and the interaction with the instrument, to extend with the same hands, the ideas, practise and deconstructed embodied knowledge on different medias issued from other art worlds, as metaphorical vehicles to create new models of music interpretation and plastic-visual art creations.

Visit Bertrand’s artist website – chavarria-aldrete.com

Bertrand’s research was awarded “Research of the month” for the 250 anniversary of the Kungliga Musikaliska Akademien in 2021. See the video here.

Listen to kinamárabâfrena [Rika Usami] – an experimental poem written for Eric-Maria Couturier in hommage to Rika Usami, 2022 on Youtube

Listen to pômrô, an experimental poem for for guitar, sirimcho, stones and electronics by Bertrand Chavarria-Aldrete, 2020 on Souncloud

Listen to fomio, an experimental poem for sirimcho, loop pedal and objects by Bertrand Chavarría-Aldrete, 2020 on YouTube

Learn more about PhD education at the Malmö Academy of Music, by visiting the following website – mhm.lu.se