REPaMS is an Artistic Research project that explores new ways in which performers can creatively engage with notations and performance practices within Western Art Music.

It starts from the premise that performers do not merely reproduce musical works but create musical structures through their embodied actions. The project reimagines performer creativity as a radically embodied process, where bodies, instruments, notations, artistic practices, and non-musical elements dynamically interact to bring musical structures into being.

Radically Embodied Performance as Musical Structure (REPaMS) is an Artistic Research project that intersects insights and methodologies from Contemporary Philosophy, Performance Studies in Music, Digital Musicology and Contemporary Performing Practices to describe, analyse and explore performer’s creative agency, in particular relation to complex/experimental guitar notations and performing practices within Western Art Music.

REPaMS is centrally advocated on recent compositional practices evidencing a complex and performative transformation of musical material, in which sound-producing actions are immanent layers of the music itself, challenging the performer’s role as a creative agent and urging to rethink the paradigm of music performance as the representation of the work structure as an Ideal. Instead, this research bridges performative knowledge and score-centric analysis, questioning the entrenched composer-performer hierarchy. Based on the premise that performers do not reproduce but create musical structures, REPaMS pursues a practice-led methodology in which the interaction between notations, artistic practices and further non-musical elements emerge as process.

Taking as case studies major guitar works by Richard Barrett, Aaron Cassidy and Wieland Hoban (radical examples of complex notations in which performative actions are specified down to the smallest detail), as well as by collaborating with other composers and approaching diverse improvisational and notational practices, REPaMS examines the possible interactions between body and notation in shaping musical structures, offering new pathways for understanding musical works as dynamic performative constructs rather than static notational artifacts. Also, following the advancements of the ERC project Music Experiment 21 (hosted at the Orpheus Institutt between 2013-18, led by Paulo de Assis), REPaMS adopts a Deleuzian ontology for music, accepting the challenge of a paradigm shift from structure to assemblage. This approach aligns with what Paulo de Assis has recently labelled as ‘hypermusic’, that is, ‘music that factually (and not only implicitly) includes component parts that go beyond music itself’. By exploring the intersections between actual sonic events and virtual epistemic constellations, REPaMS seeks to problematise them though artistic practice and its particular approach on embodiment,  exerting an impact on artistic and research practices, formats of presentation for artistic research outputs and performance pedagogy. The REPaMS project is supported by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme and is hosted at the Orpheus Instituut (March 2025-February 2027), with primary supervision by Paulo de Assis.