Difficult Resonances

In this presentation Rachel Beckles Willson shares some of her practice as an artist-scholar, reflecting how it consistently embodies and explores spaces of tension, ambiguity, and awkward positionalities. The projects discussed will be wide-ranging: collaborations with composers in post-Soviet Hungary (1992-1995) and asylum-seeking song-writers in Sicily (2017-2019); use of a musical instrument – the oud – as a hybrid research tool (2010-2022); creative entangling the voices of the other-than-human with resonances of the Great Acceleration (2021-).

Rachel’s discussion will be interwoven with sound and images, and will engage these and related topics: Violent practices (and their veneration), discordant alignments (in cross-cultural sound-making), positional harmonics in performance, and sonic refuges.

The presentation will also reflect on the fundamental purposes of artistic creation: is all this friction useful? What does it generate? What does resolution mean?

BIO: A classically trained pianist and saxophonist turned oud player and composer, a musicologist of European modernism who plunged deeply into historical Middle Eastern musical traditions but also sound art, Rachel’s work spans disciplines and geographies. Her work consistently raises pressing questions about cultural ownership, translation, and the ethics of encounter. She has published numerous books and articles, including Orientalism and Musical Mission: Palestine and the West (CUP 2013), and ‘Migration, music and the mobile phone: a case study in technology and socio-economic justice in Sicily’ (Ethnomusicology Forum 2021), and a series of music releases including forthcoming album The Earth Where We Meet (Blue Cloud Music 2025). She is Professor of Intercultural Performing Arts at the Academy of Creative and Performing Arts (ACPA), Leiden University, and seconded from Codarts to WdKA as Lector for 2025.

*Research in Perspective hosts conversations about research in practice at the WdKA-Piet Zwart Institute. It is a forum for connecting, sharing information and insights, and acknowledging, questioning, and honoring the diversity of approaches, methods, and practices involved in the research we undertake. Research in Perspective invites guests and welcomes proposals for sessions. Convened by Miriam Rasch, Vivian Sky Rehberg and Renée Turner, coordinated via the Research Station and Research Center.