Delinking the Practice Room

Abstract

In this article, the author experiments with options of epistemological emancipation through writing and practice/practise as a process of delinking from colonial institutional knowledge. By viewing the practice room as ‘laboratory’ space (Brooks 2014, 194) combined with ‘decolonial thinking’ from the work of Walter Mignolo (2012, 3), the author explores auto-ethnographic writing merged with self-notated fragments of sound motifs to document, ‘delink’ and experiment with clarinet sound practice. These modes of writing experiment with ways of delinking from the constructs of undergraduate and post-graduate Western music classical education from a global South perspective. Combining decoloniality with artistic research and artistic experimentation, the link between practice and theory is strengthened in the practice room to invite decoloniality into the sounding capacity of the clarinet’s ‘decolonizing embodiment’ in embodied art practice (Spatz 2019, 21). This article concludes that each practice room session has the potential to discover sounding capacities of the clarinet and clarinettist through deconstructing practice room routines as an ongoing process of practising decoloniality in the ‘laboratory’ (practice room).