organum moda II.

 

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RESIDENCY PROGRAM FOR IMPROVISERS AND IMPROVISING ENSEMBLES

[November 2026 - June 2027]

 

SOURCE, SUBSTANCE, AND STRUCTURE
Improvisation as Musical Knowledge: Genealogies and Futures

 

An international residency investigating the historical lineages, material conditions, and future trajectories of improvisation.

 

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PROGRAM AT A GLANCE

 

Program period: November 2026–June 2027
Format: Two online seminars, two online seminar-laboratories, and an on-site residency
On-site location: Bled, Slovenia (EU)
Final presentation: Seventh Bled Contemporary Music Week, June 14–25, 2027
Application deadline: October 15, 2026

 

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FORMAT

 

Stage I. | November 18, 19, 2026

– 2 online seminars

– Improvisers and ensembles present their artistic practices, methodologies, and works in progress

– Q&A

 

Stage II. | January 18, 19, 2027

– 2 online seminars

– Critical inquiry and practice-led experimentation centered on SOURCE, SUBSTANCE, AND STRUCTURE: Improvisation as Musical Knowledge

– Development of participants’ performances, research processes, and methodologies through critical reflection and exchange

– Q&A

 

Stage III. | June 2027

– Performances, lecture-performances, improvisation laboratories, and research presentations at the seventh Bled Contemporary Music Week in Bled, Slovenia

 

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ABOUT THE RESIDENCY

 

organum moda is an international, process-oriented residency dedicated to improvisation as artistic practice, embodied knowledge, and critical inquiry. It brings together individual improvisers and improvising ensembles within a sustained framework extending from the presentation and analysis of participants’ practices to their public articulation at the seventh Bled Contemporary Music Week in Bled, Slovenia.

 

The residency begins from a precise proposition: improvisation is never historically empty. Its apparent immediacy is constituted by accumulated techniques, instruments, habits of attention, systems of transmission, social relations, technological mediations, aesthetic conventions, memories, and prior forms. Every improvised act emerges at the intersection of inheritance and contingency, activating knowledge that may be explicit or tacit, codified or embodied, institutionally preserved or transmitted through practice.

 

The program unfolds through four online sessions and a concluding on-site residency. This extended structure enables participants to present works and methods, examine their genealogies, test conceptual propositions through performance, and develop new artistic and research trajectories.

 

Individual improvisers are invited to investigate the premises, procedures, and histories that organize their practices. Ensembles are invited to examine how distributed attention, collective memory, negotiation, conflict, trust, and real-time decision-making contribute to emergent form. Across both contexts, improvisation is treated neither as unconditioned spontaneity nor as the opposite of composition, but as a situated activity in which musical relations emerge under specific historical, material, technological, environmental, and social conditions.

 

The program combines practice-led experimentation with critical reflection. Participants articulate methods, identify assumptions, and test whether theoretical concepts remain adequate to performance. The objective is not to impose a unified definition of improvisation, but to make heterogeneous practices mutually legible without reducing them to a single tradition, technique, or ideology.

 

The residency culminates in performances, lecture-performances, improvisation laboratories, and research presentations. The public program presents improvisation not only as an event, but also as a field of knowledge whose histories, methods, and consequences can be made available for critical examination.

 

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MENTORS

 

Dr. Alastair White 

Urban Megušar, Double M.Mus.

Dr. Niki Zohdi

Dr. Dré A. Hočevar 

 

 

COORDINATOR

 

Brina Kren