Performing Reflection: Improvisation in Word, Thought and Action

This exposition contains the complete artistic output and accompanying reflective documentation of the artistic research doctoral project I conducted at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna between 2021 and 2024.

Free improvisation in music offers a unique field for exploring how artistic practices develop through embodied engagement, critical reflection, and collaborative experimentation. This research focuses particularly on the process of practicing within this context, tracing the evolution of specific exercises and preparatory methods. These were initially tested in collaborative projects with other musicians and later refined through a series of workshops. A central theme that emerged throughout this process is the role of reflection—both musical and verbal—as a vital component of artistic development. This realization culminated in the project Performing Reflection, which established a dialogical relationship between musical improvisation and reflective discourse. The work contributes to a deeper understanding of how structured exercises and reflective practices can support and expand the art of free improvisation, offering new perspectives on its preparation, pedagogy, and performance.

Research Catalogue

Feedback

In Feedback, I explore the double bass as a resonant body extended through loudspeakers, allowing feedback to become an active, controllable element of performance. Shifting between improvisation and structured exploration, the project opens a space where sound, instrument, and player constantly reshape each other. Feedback is both a sonic study and a physical dialogue, pushing the double bass beyond its traditional acoustic frame.

Digital Doppelgänger

An AI based interactive musical agent written in MaxMSP and trained with the artists’ own playing. The boundary between human and machine becomes blurred, forcing us to question notions of improvisation and creativity.

WhereWhen Collective

The WhereWhen Collective brings together musicians from jazz, experimental, and contemporary music to explore collaborative composition and improvisation. Working across genres and disciplines, the collective creates open frameworks for shared authorship, drawing on collective intelligence and real-time exchange to shape each performance anew.

Tobias Meissl Trio

Mr. Resolved captures the Tobias Meissl Trio — Tobias Meissl (vibraphone), Valentin Duit (drums), and myself on bass — after three years of growing and shaping a shared repertoire. The album brings together older and new pieces, moving between detailed structures and open spaces, always aiming for a lively, conversational interplay. We recorded everything live in one room to stay true to the sound and spirit of the group, with Thomas Lang’s incredible touch giving the music a special depth.

Perspectives on Improvisation

In the current Viennese art scene, a diversity of artistic practices can be observed that utilize improvisation as the primary method. From jazz to free improvisation and experimental electronic practices in music to various forms of contemporary dance, improvisation has been an essential part of Vienna’s art landscape for decades. The symposium Perspectives on Improvisation aims to provide a format that allows practitioners and protagonists from various fields to critically engage with the topic of improvisation.

Performing Reflection 2.0

An extension of Performing Reflection 1.0, the role of the performer of reflection taken over by the philosopher Christian Grüny. A project which eventually culminated in a large scale ensemble which had a residency at the 2023 Music Biennale in Zagreb.

Performing Reflection 1.0

“This is an attempt…”, an attempt at performing reflection. Donald Schön’s notion of reflection-in-action taken too literally. In its essence a duo performance for a solo performer, an interplay between an internal monologue and an external soundscape.

Recontextualized Sound

Exploration of a space, with its historicity, implications, and context. Objects teeming with sonic potential. A way to explore theories of preparations, and to free the sounds hiding within. An art foundry, founded in 1907, a workshop covered in dust more than a century old. Brushes, screws, sandpaper, rust, wires, wrenches, pliers, hammers, saws, chisels, rulers, oil, cabinets, calipers, tape, grease. Objects used to bring into being thousands of artworks; artisans working for the benefit of artists. The space encircling the border between art and craft.  

Sound

How does one capture the epistemology of a practice in the context of spontaneous musical creation? What kind of connection does the work of art have with the thought process behind it? If we consider the field of artistic research, I am still under the impression that musical material often faces quite a complex task in transmitting its underlying reflective processes. Nevertheless, the material exists, and carries with it both the preparatory work, its results, and possible future developments. One such document of my individual research on preparations and approaches to improvisation was the album “Sound,” which came out in 2021 under the Croatian label Cantus. This album is a collection of solo and duo recordings that were made during the initial developments of the project–sound as a document of a thought process.

Concert for Double Bass In Absentia

How does a willing audience deal with an absent performer? And what can we learn about improvisation from such a setting? Inspired by live-stream concerts, this project attempted to invert the paradigm, placing an audience in a concert hall without a performer–an instrument prepared with transducers serving as a stand-in, while the artist streamed his playing into his wooden avatar.