"what will this container contain?"

I nearly used this as the name for my blog, but "Tupperware Research" won the moment I thought of it. I have fond memories of the plastic tubs, being a child of the "Tupperware Party" generation. I've ended up with a quasi-C17th English book title instead because there were things about my first effort that I still liked. The rest flowed from there.

I hummed and harred for a while trying to spot any meaningful differences between "what will this containter contain?" and "what can this container contain?". The single most obvious distinction (the future-orientated nature of "will") isn't the most interesting to me at the moment, although it's not unimportant. It strikes me that "what can this container contain?" is a question posed to reveal the nature of the container itself. The answer will be something like: "it has these characterstics, as revealed by its capacity to hold this but not that". My primary interest is in *content*, however, and I purposefully don't want any slippage to take me away from that concern. I could try instead: "what does this content demand of its container?". We're approaching chicken-and-egg territory here though, because I don't know whether content can emerge independently of a container. If it can't (which is what I suspect), then we have no easy way of discerning whether the characteristics we have found in the content--which we are now trying to house in an ideal structure--are *actually* internally organised, or have become that way under pressure from the walls of the (temporary) container.

My thinking about this--and my use of the word "container" in this slightly technical sense--derives from the work of the British psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion, who developed a sophisticated theory of thinking ("The Grid") early on in his career. These are ideas I'll develop another time.

Why these questions? I've taken a rather back-to-front route through this. One of my responsibilities at work is to oversee the management of our practice-based research degree programme. In common with all doctorates, these awards appeal to those who have progressed through their earlier training with some obvious success and who now want to get their teeth stuck into a significant final project as a supervised student. Our degrees are practice-based, so we are concerned with better understanding some aspect or another of what goes on when we, as musicians, perform. How are the insights that have been identified over years of detailed research to be revealed? My answer to this as a PhD candidate in musicology was easy: write a thesis. There was nothing I wanted to communicate that I couldn't get down in words relatively neatly. Content and container were well suited to one another. But, as a performer? Is it possible to communicate my artistic insights in prose? And, if it is, what is being assessed when someone reads that work? My accomplishments as a musician, or a writer? Given that we want to elucidate the former, it had better not be the latter. Content and container are perhaps not so well suited in this scenario.

Hopefully, my question about containers now has more urgency. What will make an appropriate container for a performing artist to illustrate the working method ("research") which preceeded the resulting "product" (for musicians, this is typically a performance, whether live or recorded). What tools will help capture research data, provide space for its analysis and offer a benign scaffold in which a report of findings can be constructed?