The 16th International Congress on Musical Signification

Sibelius Academy, University of the Arts Helsinki

The 16th International Congress on Musical Signification will be held at the Sibelius Academy, University of the Arts Helsinki, 2–6 June, 2026. Twenty-five years after ICMS 7 and forty years after the first edition in Imatra, the ICMS returns to Finland. Since 1986, the ICMS congress has been organised every 2–4 years to gather together scholars of musical signification, signs in music, and musical meaning – recent developments and future trends in musical semiotics and related fields of research.

The congress is one of the platforms of the Musical Signification Project, launched in Paris in 1984, and directed now for more than 40 years by prof. Eero Tarasti of the University of Helsinki. The International Musical Signification Project has also served as a pedagogical tool educating doctoral researchers in the field.

LECTURE RECITAL FRIDAY JUNE 5, Concert Hall

Lucy Abrams-Husso & Helga Karen: Ontology of creation: Perspectives of new music specialists on interpreting a classic post-tonal work

ABSTRACT

When an experienced musician approaches a new piece of music, the musician's mind and body, sometimes just by the look of the score, already starts creating paths and connections based on the previous experiences and practices. Robert S. Hatten identifies performers as “not merely conduits through which a preconceived set of notational instructions is more or less accurately transmitted but creative interpreters who bring to bear their stylistic competency and their selection from the vast constellation of sound and meanings attributable to a work” (Hatten 2018, 220), which emphasizes the value of interpreter’s knowledge, agency, and the contributions that performers make to both performance practice and listeners’ understanding of a musical work.

This lecture recital presents models for locating meaning from a performer’s perspective using Karlheinz Stockhausen’s (1928–2007) Tierkreis (1975/83) as a case study. Clarinetist Lucy Abrams-Husso researches performer agency and notation culture in contemporary music, while pianist Helga Karen is noted Stockhausen specialist with a forthcoming dissertation on the practice processes of Stockhausen’s Klavierstücke. Tierkreis is a work of many layers, a classic of the post-tonal repertoire that demonstrates the composer's direct impact on the interpretative possibilities via the notation and composer’s instructions. It is also a work that prompts creative dialogue between performers through its notation, negotiated co-creation, and Stockhausen's compositional techniques, which are unique to this work. With multiple analytical avenues to explore, Tierkreis creates an excellent ground for research on musician-researchers’ phenomenological, semiotic and ontological approaches.

The goal of this lecture recital is to model how musician-researcher’s practical approaches to the notation shapes the ways in which Tierkreis could be understood as a musical work. In the lecture, the presenters model the connections between embodied knowledge and their application to new repertoire. Additionally, this lecture recital investigates how performers understand and enact musical structures and gestures that contribute to musical meaning in the contexts of post-tonal and new music works (Grimalt 2017). This case study advocates for more practice-based and performer-driven research on music significations that is developed directly from contemporary music practice.

References

Grimalt, J. 2017. Musical Signification: A Systematic, Analytical and Pedagogical Approach. 10.1007/978-3-319-47060-3_16.

Hatten, R. 2018. A Theory of Virtual Agency for Western Art Music. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Maconie, R. 2005. The Works of Karlheinz Stockhausen. London: Oxford University Press.

Stockhausen, K. 1989. Texte zur Musik 5. Kürten: Stockhausen-Verlag.

KEYWORDS: performer, agency, notation, interpretation, competence, practice

DMus Lucy Abrams-Husso is originally from Chicago, IL, but hasbeen based in Helsinki, Finland since 2013. She holds Bachelor’s degrees in clarinet performance and anthropology from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Master’s degrees from the Eastman School of Music and the Sibelius Academy (Uniarts Helsinki). Her dissertation The Musical Anthropologist was completed also at the Sibelius Academy in 2024. Abrams-Husso is a freelance orchestral and contemporary musician and has performed as soloist with the Sibelius Academy Symphony Orchestra, Mikkeli String Orchestra, and Haapavaesi Chamber Orchestra. She has presented her research on notation culture and performer agency at conferences in the UK, Ireland, Switzerland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Finland.

Helga Karen is a Finnish pianist and researcher specialised in the performance of classical contemporary music. She has performed as a soloist and chamber music musician in various music festivals such as Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, Lucerne Festival and has given world premiere performances of numerous solo piano and chamber music works. Helga is a doctoral candidate based at the Finnish University of Arts working in the field of artistic research, researching the practice methods and the roles of the pianist in the piano music of Karlheinz Stockhausen. Helga has presented papers at various international conferences in Finland, Estonia, Latvia, UK and Switzerland exploring the role of the practice-based methods and autoethnography in artistic research.