‘Becoming-with’ in the Sonic.

Music and bodies ‘become’ through the co-creational processes of sound and different human and non-human bodies within social contexts. To understand better the relation of musicians, traditionally understood as those who produce sounds, and the sounds themselves, we conducted micro-phenomenological in-depth interviews with six cellists. This novel method allowed us to zoom-in to the moment of creation of sound. Extending recent understanding of music as “ontological politics”, and drawing on Karen Barad’s accounts of intra-action, we theorize how sounds, materials and bodies ‘become-with’ each other, and iteratively co-constitute the musician-persona, the sound and the instruments.

Evelyn Buyken is a cellist and music researcher based in Cologne. Her practice involves baroque cello, artistic research, ensemble playing, concert dramaturgy and teaching artistic research at Higher Music Education institutions. She is a research fellow at the Academy of Sciences and the Arts in North Rhine-Westphalia (JungeKolleg). 

From 2018 to 2023 she was professor for artistic research and founder of the FORUM and Labor KünstlerischeForschung at the Cologne Hochschule for Music and Dance and PI of the European research project RAPPLab (Reflection-based Artistic Professional Practice, www.rapplab.eu). Her research includes embodied knowledge practices, rehearsal research, HIPP, trans-disciplinary practices between music and dance, institutional and pedagogical knowledges of artistic research, gender theory in music and music history of the 18th and 19th century. She publishes, performs and lectures internationally. 

Evelyn was trained as a baroque cellist and viola da gamba player, also in musicology, music pedagogy and literature at the Universities and Conservatories of Cologne, Rome and Trossingen. She received her PhD on Bach culture in the early Jewish salons of Berlin and was granted a scholarship from the interdisciplinary graduate school a.r.t.e.s. (University of Cologne) for this research. In 2022/23 she was funded by the KunststiftungNRW for her research on inter-subjective performance practices in a Basso Continuo Group. 

Katrin Losleben is trained as a musicology, literature and media scholar. She received her phD at the University for Music and Dance Cologne. In 2017, she joined the Centre for Women´s and Gender Research of UiT The Arctic University of Norway as professor. Losleben works at the intersection of feminist posthumanist and artistic research on embodiment and embeddedness through sound and listening. Losleben is co-editor of the European Journal of Musicology. Her publications include Singstimmen: Ästhetik, Geschlecht, Vokalprofil, with Saskia Maria Woyke, Anno Mungen and Stephan Mösch, Würzburg 2017 and Gender Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Academia. A Conceptual Framework for Sustainable Transformation, ed. with Melina Duarte and Kjersti Fjørtoft, Routledge 2023. Losleben is PI of the project Arctic Auditories – Hydrospheres in the High North https://arcticauditories.com (NFR 2021-24, 325506).