Beyond. A pianist-composer’s thoughts on musical simplexity, emotion and the soul.

Philippe Lamouris
Promotors: Jan Michiels, Kathleen Coessens

My research is about a lot of things, but most importantly, it’s about music. It’s about my relation to music. It’s about performing, composing. It’s about emotion, expression, and the soul. It’s about a musician’s thoughts, ideas, and inspiration.

There are two main concepts/questions which guided me through my Ph.D. The first one was called “The investigation into emotion-evoking parameters and techniques of the late romantic music and its recontextualization into my artistic practices”. The second one was more ambiguous with the question: “How does one become a better musician?” My aim was to link these two ideas and find a way of incorporating the research into my artistic practices.

Experiments, compositions, discussions, lectures, and performances were all part of this journey. At first, I was searching for answers trying to fully comprehend the above-mentioned subjects such as emotion and expression and I wanted to unravel the mystery of music. However, by the end of this Ph.D. I realized that while we must search, hoping to find concrete answers, we should at the same time secretly hope we never find them.