[confictura.norma.x] I.

 

—

 

RESIDENCY PROGRAM FOR SAXOPHONISTS AND SAXOPHONE QUARTETS

[October 2026 - June 2027]

 

SOURCE, SUBSTANCE, AND STRUCTURE

Performance as Musical Knowledge: Genealogies and Futures

 

An international residency investigating the historical lineages, present conditions, and future trajectories of solo and ensemble saxophone performance.

 

—

 

PROGRAM AT A GLANCE

 

Program period: October 2026–June 2027

Format: Four online seminars followed by an on-site residency

On-site location: Bled, Slovenia (EU)

Final presentation: Seventh Bled Contemporary Music Week

Application deadline: September 15, 2026

 

—

 

FORMAT

 

Stage I. | October 19, 20, 2026

- 2 online seminars

- Saxophonists and quartets present their artistic practices, performance methodologies, and works in progress

- Q&A

 

Stage II. | December 16, 17, 2026

- 2 online seminars

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

- Q&A

 

Stage III. | June 14-25, 2027

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

 

—

 

ABOUT THE RESIDENCY

 

 

 

[confictura.norma.x] I. is an international, process-oriented residency for the critical, historically informed, and practice-led development of solo and ensemble saxophone performance. It convenes saxophonists and saxophone quartets in a sustained framework extending from the articulation of participants’ practices to performances, lecture-performances, saxophone laboratories, and research presentations at the seventh Bled Contemporary Music Week in Bled, Slovenia (EU).

 

The program unfolds through four online seminars and a concluding on-site residency. This extended structure supports inquiry through presentation, attentive listening, comparative analysis, interpretative experimentation, rehearsal, documentation, and critical reflection. Technique, repertoire, interpretation, and research are approached as mutually constitutive dimensions through which musical knowledge is produced, tested, transmitted, and transformed.

 

Participants may develop solo or quartet repertoire, performance projects, lecture-performances, artistic research, recordings, experimental concert formats, or methodologies addressing the instrument’s histories and futures. Projects may engage canonical or emerging repertoire, improvisation, transcription, notation, extended techniques, electronics, spatial practice, instrument design, archives, or pedagogy.

 

Rather than treating performance as the secondary realization of a pre-existing musical object, [confictura.norma.x] understands it as situated epistemic practice. Breath, embouchure, articulation, fingering, posture, resonance, listening, memory, rehearsal, interpretation, and ensemble coordination are operations through which musical relations become audible, intelligible, coherent, and transformable.

 

The residency attends to reciprocal relations among performer, instrument, repertoire, notation, acoustic space, technology, institution, and collective practice. Participants examine how inherited techniques and evaluative conventions shape present possibilities, how embodied conditions inflect interpretation, and how performance may disclose or reorganize assumptions embedded in works, pedagogies, canons, and professional cultures.

 

Through sustained exchange with peers and mentors, participants articulate methodologies, render tacit knowledge discussable, test interpretative propositions, and situate their work within broader genealogies of saxophone practice. The program combines rigorous artistic development with freedom to pursue divergent methods, speculative questions, and outcomes that cannot be fully predetermined.

 

—

 

MENTORS

 

Dr. Alastair White 

Urban Megušar, Double M.Mus.

Dr. Niki Zohdi

Dr. Dré A. Hočevar 

 

 

COORDINATOR

 

Brina Kren