Our research
Research at the Academy of Music and Drama is conducted in the subjects of musical performance and interpretation, performance practices, music education, and arts education. The research strives to expand understanding and create meaning around learning, teaching and artistic practice, and it is based on both artistic knowledge practitioners and different social and scholarly fields.
Artistic research in performing arts
Artistic research in the performing arts at the Academy of Music and Drama spans a wide artistic area that includes several different art disciplines: theatre, music drama, dance, performance art and other movement-based, participatory, or cross-disciplinary forms of performing arts. The research explores questions relevant to the field of the performing arts while interacting with other research fields and society at large. This includes research on acting and directing methods and their application within and outside of the theatre, game strategies within immersive opera, the relation between the live event and the documentary, institutional critique as well as decolonial and intersectional practices, and the exploration of new dramaturgic and narrative methods, and forms for publishing and making public. Research methods often involve bodily, collaborative, and performative aspects, and deal with issues related to archives, documentation, and the staging of experimental situations.
Musical performance and interpretation and experimental practices
Artistic research in musical performance and interpretation examines questions of musical practice, the links between musical performance and interpretation and society at large, and other questions where musical practice can make up a part of the research. A touchstone research field is experimental expression and sound creation. This is a broad field that includes instrument and materials research (including about and with historic organs and other keyboard instruments), research on music technology, electroacoustic music, improvisation and computer aided composition. It also includes research on musical expressivity and performance concepts, social and political branches in the urban sound landscape, other sound environments, and research that breaks with conventional roles for music creation. The research methods are often experimental and are taken both from scientific and artistic fields.
Educational research within the arts, practice-based and relevant to society
Research in education and educational sciences in music, theatre and dance at the Academy of Music and Drama include teaching, influencing, fostering and socialising in different types of learning methods, both formal and informal. The research has an interdisciplinary character and is focused on problems relevant for society. This includes research on gender systems and knowledge regimes within higher education in the arts, research on control, social justice and equality in schools and arts and music schools, and subject matter education with a focus on subject conception, expertise and assessment in schools and teacher education. The research is practice-based and often ethnographically inspired, where field notes, observations, interviews and focus group discussions are common methods for achieving interesting research results.
