What the Rubbing of Forks Has to Do with Curating Music

Recent decades have seen major changes to the landscape of contemporary music in Europe. Since the 1990s, several waves of art and music have explicitly engaged with current political and social discourses. This work has often been labeled “interested” or “social” art.¹ At the same time, festivals, funding organizations, and music institutions have been increasingly addressing questions of inclusion and participation, the decolonization of listening, and ecology while simultaneously reaching out to new audiences.² Even the European Council celebrates the potential of the arts to create fora for social deliberation, conflict mediation, and democratic exchange.

To critically navigate these artistic, institutional, and political dynamics, a new role has emerged in the field of music—that of the curator. Today the curator, originally a profession in the visual arts devoted to taking care of a museum’s collections, combines organizational work with artistic practice and the ability to offer critical-discursive context, representing an important future profession for both musicology and composition students.³ A curator requires a broad knowledge of artistic practices, repertoires, and contexts to do their work. But even more importantly, this work demands a deeper understanding of theoretical discourses, which often fundamentally question well-established and institutionalized forms of knowledge and concepts of art, and the ways in which they relate to concrete music and sound practices. Yet music programs and musicological curricula rarely instruct students on these topics. Students seldom learn about their own situatedness and positionality within different knowledge systems and how artistic practices relate to them.⁴

With the rising demand for curatorial insights, the classroom must become a space for understanding and doing music-curatorial work. This need prompted us to develop a new pedagogical approach. In this article, we share our experience with a seminar taught in the summer term of 2024 in a collaboration between two institutions in Germany. Coming from the fields of composition and musicology, we combined academic and practical approaches to rethink methods of knowledge acquisition and formation and to sensitize students to how different ways of knowing can be related to specific curatorial topics. Our seminar, called “On the way: Current curatorial practices in music theater,” focused on the Munich Biennale for contemporary music theater as a case study.⁵ In the 2024 edition of the festival, also called “On the way,” the Munich Biennale spoke to how our world is on the move in an era of transition, with people and societies entering the unknown and encountering immense—sometimes even violent—challenges.

By addressing music-curatorial work within musicology and composition programs, we seek to contribute to a larger debate about higher education in music. While Germany is still protected from a neoliberal market ideology in education, politics are gradually changing. Recent budget cuts and austerity measures have also found their way into universities in Berlin and continually call into question the applicability and relevance of study programs such as musicology and composition.⁶ In other countries, such as the UK or the Netherlands, these political demands have led to a split between programs that teach more traditional composed music and those that are ostensibly more market-oriented, focusing on music technology, music production, and music as organized sound.⁷

Although we are highly skeptical of this development—in which universities invoke and follow the purported demands of the market—we recognize the necessity of musicology and composition programs that can critically reflect on and respond to such rapidly evolving cultural, political, and musical practices, discourses, and institutions. Our call for critical reflection is closely connected to New Music, the subject of our study. New Music and the concept of the avant-garde have both been established through a long history of critique. More precisely, this history is evident in the questioning of the concert as an institution and in critiques of listening traditions, as seen throughout the history of the Darmstädter Ferienkurse, for example, or among post-Adornian discourses. At the same time, broadly speaking, movements such as Dada and Fluxus challenged the notion of “music” produced within the institution of New Music. With this history in mind, we understand New Music as a discipline and domain of knowledge that shapes bodies and practices through a complex network of institutions and actors, including degree programs, festivals, concerts, composers, musicians, musicologists, and journalists. As authors, we acknowledge our own role in New Music and, as evidenced by this article, how our claims of criticality are closely linked to that role. Thus, for us, being critical does not mean aspiring toward an ideal position outside ideology. Rather, we aim to call into question the invisibility of this discipline and domain of knowledge by examining issues of inclusion, exclusion, and marginalization. To achieve this, we propose developing a more comprehensive and inclusive approach within existing study programs. This would entail creating procedures that allow for denormalizing ways of forming knowledge and engaging in dialogue with artists, theorists, festivals, music venues, curators, and funding institutions. In turn, such procedures would help us to evaluate and rethink who is allowed to define what (new) music is and is not. We aim to develop ways of teaching and thinking about curatorial approaches that render visible formerly accepted networks and structures of power and knowledge from decolonial, ecological, intersectional feminist, and anticapitalist perspectives. However, even these critical perspectives, related curatorial and artistic approaches, and our teaching methods are clearly constrained by the scope of the knowable and sayable. Pointing to these permanently shifting grounds and helping students experience them is how we ensure that our programs remain connected to and accountable for societal issues. It also prepares students for life outside academia, where most of our students will work and where curatorial knowledge and skills are now essential for finding positions or freelance work as composers, musicians, or performers.⁸

We are writing from the perspectives of a composer and a musicologist in the context of the German cultural and academic landscape, which is reflected in the viewpoints expressed and the selection of examples presented in this essay. Nevertheless, we believe that many of our observations and ideas have wider applicability in an international context. In deciding to “speak” with one voice, we intend to unify our thoughts with the goal of merging our academic and artistic expertise rather than merely juxtaposing them in a dialogic structure. This voice is the result of countless meetings, phone calls, emails, and a shared document whose multilayered texture and myriad comments and changes are highly telling of this process. In the context of Berlin, where musicology and composition are largely separate disciplines, this collaborative ethos struck us as appropriate.

After a short clarification of what has been called the “curatorial turn” in music, we first lay out our pedagogical approach. We then discuss different “toolkits” that we have used and present selected case studies drawn from our seminar on the Munich Biennale. With these case studies, we focus on three topics that are crucial for curatorial work and can also be easily applied to other areas beyond music and music theater of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: situated knowledge, collaboration, and aboutness. We approach these topics with the help of reading and practical exercises. The practical exercises—which take the form of collective performances based on short instructions—use sonic as well as visual materials and share a certain theatricality.⁹ They mirror a recent surge of intermedial, interdisciplinary, and conceptual work within contemporary art in general and contemporary music theater in particular. Artists, through expanding their disciplinary practices, often share an interest in assembling heterogeneous elements and questioning established hierarchies by bringing hidden structures of production to light. Consequently, music theater’s traditionally primary focus on composition in relation to sound or music has shifted to include a range of approaches shaping visual, aural, and recently also olfactory objects. Sonic or musical material is therefore only one among many elements in music theater as well as in the exercises we conducted.¹⁰

The “Curational Turn” in Music

Over at least the last twenty years, musicologists and composers have encountered a musical landscape in Western Europe that has undergone fundamental changes. One key change is that music, as well as art in general, has been increasingly considered a uniquely privileged site for engaging with and negotiating critical societal challenges. Since the 1990s, several waves of contemporary art have worked toward organizing different fora and groups that are specific to the art world and have articulated the political stakes of the social connections that artwork fosters.¹¹

A recent statement from the European Council concerning cultural and creative sectors reflects this trend by highlighting the social connections afforded by music and other art forms; it emphasizes their potential for creating sites for social deliberation, conflict mediation, and democratic exchange. The Council views culture “as a source of ideas and a means to create new solutions, address discrimination and reinforce social links, forge new solidarities, enliven spaces, and strengthen our ability to better face current and future challenges.”¹²

Similarly, festivals and funding programs tend to foreground issues of social relevance such as inclusion, decolonization, or ecology instead of relying on widely shared expectations of a given genre, repertoire, or composer. Examples of this change can be seen in festivals such as the Darmstädter Ferienkurse für Neue Musik, the Donaueschingen Festival, and MaerzMusik, but also Oslo’s Ultima Festival, the Borealis Festival in Norway, and the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival.¹³ In this vein, funding programs today require that the proposed projects demonstrate social relevance.¹⁴ For example, the Berlin-based Hauptstadtkulturfonds, which supports artistic projects taking place in Berlin through its fifteen million euros of funding from the German government, demands explicit information about how a proposed project relates to current international aesthetic and social discourses.¹⁵ The Arts Council England requires funded projects to respond to what the Council identifies as some of our most pressing challenges: “Inequality of wealth and of opportunity, social isolation and mental ill-health, and above all of these, the accelerating climate emergency.” Projects should “allow us to reflect and comment on society, to better understand our own lives and those of others, and to occupy a shared space in which we can debate, present alternative views, and discover new ways of expressing our anxieties and ambitions.”¹⁶

Following Sara Ahmed’s institutional critique, we should be cautious about the appeal of these claims. As she points out in On Being Included, the ease with which institutions adopt these claims can also be “a sign of the loss of their critical edge.”¹⁷ To prevent these demands becoming mere lip service, artists and art institutions must provide intricate and critical contextualization and establish complex connections. Thus, the role of the curator becomes crucial in new ways. Until now, the curator has primarily played a role in museum culture, such as in Documenta, an exhibition on contemporary art first established in 1955 that takes place every five years in the city of Kassel, Germany; the event has since been vital for negotiating different aesthetic, geopolitical, economic, and art-historical factors through curatorial practice. Curators such as Harald Szeemann (1933–2005) or Okwui Enwezor (1963–2019), who curated Documenta 5 (1972) and Documenta 11 (2002), respectively, focused on the design of the exhibition experience and emphasized art as an event that happens in the moment of experiencing it and/or in the moment of its performance. Instead of staging an overarching, grand art-historical narrative, they experimented with different conditions for knowledge formation. They did so in fostering a more subjective understanding of art and encouraging audiences to construct their own art-historical narrative, in the case of Szeeman, or by challenging seemingly fixed categories of North–South and East–West and establishing the exhibition in Kassel as a place where many networks of intertwined knowledge could intersect, in the case of Enwezor.¹⁸

To speak of a curator in the Western musical landscape, though, is a relatively recent development.¹⁹ Curating can be understood as producing, communicating, organizing, and formulating knowledge. By combining “things that haven’t been connected before—artworks, artifacts, information, people, sites”—the curatorial allows for different types of knowledge to emerge and be understood as an “epistemic structure,” according to Irit Rogoff.²⁰ Furthermore, curatorial practices suggest an “increased attention to the effect of mediation,” to how music and sound are framed on the microlevel of a single performance or festival program as well as on the macrolevel within certain musical cultures or scenes.²¹ In this sense, the curatorial also implies acting within larger frameworks and thus goes beyond merely finding a range of new tasks and relationships. Rather, the curator needs to constantly shift their self-positioning within these relationships by analyzing the motivation to engage and produce knowledge while examining the possible effects on existing discourse and the perpetuation of power relations.²²

Music-curatorial work in this sense encompasses musicological as well as compositional and other artistic practices. In many cases, it is done by composers and musicologists and therefore contributes to blurring long-entrenched borders between disciplines. The composition process, for example, often does not end with writing the score. It continues with the curatorial work, the creation of “aboutness,” i.e., the framing of a piece through titles, programming, a metanarrative, or other specific access points for the audience. On the one hand, curatorial framing employs conventional musicological methods and approaches, such as providing a critical discourse on musical materials and listening practices and making visible the conditions that shape the artistic event. On the other hand, this work also encompasses artistic approaches, since the framing itself can take an artistic form as an expressive and often critical act. Music curation therefore moves away from understanding knowledge as a fixed signal that is sent out and received by all in the same manner. Rather, knowledge travels within and through the curatorial system, constantly being shaped and reshaped, displaying the contingent nature of its polysemic network.

Recent scholarship on music curation primarily focuses on describing various curatorial practices. Brandon Farnsworth, George Lewis, and Ed McKeon provide insightful descriptions of how curators have approached issues of commissioning, programming, and self-positioning to engage with the denormalization and defamiliarization of the New Music discipline.²³ However, we aim to shift the focus of this discussion by asking to what extent and in what ways such curatorial practices and critical-knowledge creation can be taught. How can we raise awareness in the classroom of the different ways knowledge can be reshaped as experience-based, analytical, subjective, nonverbal, and incommunicable? How can we address the key idea in music-curatorial work that knowledge is often unstable, ambiguous, multidimensional, and emotionally or affectively charged? Recognizing the pitfalls of flattening a more complex understanding of knowledge in the classroom and the need to communicate content, we propose that a combination of conceptual and embodied approaches, based on experimental musical material, can help address this challenge.

On the way: Getting in Touch, Setting Up the Seminar, and Teaching Collaboratively

In seeking answers to these questions, we taught a master’s-level course on experimental music theater together with two other colleagues during the 2024 summer term to explore curatorial work, contemporary music theater, and related critical discourses. This pedagogical collaboration drew on a shared interest in and engagement with contemporary music theater and theory.

The class brought together students from two programs, musicology and composition, each group with different educational backgrounds. While composition students had some experience with creating (small-scale) music theater projects and thus a deeper familiarity with artistic practices, musicology students arrived with skills in reading and applying critical perspectives in the classroom. The group consisted of twenty-three students: six composition students and seventeen students from the MA program in musicology. Half the musicology students had a background as performers and musicians, while the others had a BA in the humanities, mostly in musicology. The group consisted primarily of white European students, as well as four students of Asian heritage.

The class examined the 2024 edition of the Munich Biennale for contemporary music theater and selected works that were premiered at the festival. The Biennale is the only German festival that focuses exclusively on contemporary music theater.²⁴ Unlike their predecessors, the curators of the 2024 edition, Manos Tsangaris (b. 1956) and Daniel Ott (b. 1960), came with a more fluid understanding of opera and music theater. They understood the festival as a laboratory for experimentation with the genre, always posing the question of what music theater even is. The commissioned productions offered one possible “situated, site-specific and time-specific answer.” Thus, they provided insight into “the rich diversity of ways performances can be considered music theater.”²⁵ Since the festival offered a variety of curatorial approaches over a short period of time and within a convenient distance from our home institutions, it fit the needs of our class perfectly. In planning the course, we agreed to expose the students to various types of material. The students traveled to the Biennale and attended a biweekly seminar before and after the event where they were introduced to methodological questions, theoretical readings, and scores. Students also engaged with other material about the productions such as stage drafts, texts, and production comments, which were available before the premiere, as well as interviews with the composers, which students prepared for and conducted. During the visit to Munich, students had the opportunity to attend performances at the Biennale and participate in the campus program of the festival, allowing them to be involved in discussions with curators, stage directors, performers, composers, librettists, and dramaturgs.

We chose to focus on three productions presented at the Biennale: Searching for Zenobia by Lucia Ronchetti (b. 1963), Territorios Duales by Carlos Gutiérrez Quiroga (b. 1982), and The Gates are (nearly) open, by the Berlin-based opera company Novoflot. We considered these productions to be most relevant to helping the students develop an understanding of curatorial topics and skills needed in the changing musical landscape. The productions engage three major aspects of contemporary music theater: first, “situated knowledge” in the projects of Gutiérrez Quiroga and Ronchetti, which both work with non-European musical material, and in the case of Gutiérrez Quiroga, what is called the “ethnographic turn” in the arts;²⁶ second, the added complexities of “collective art practices” that play out in the work of Novoflot; and third, “aboutness” throughout the three productions, a concept that refers to when and through which framings a performance is considered art.²⁷

Methods, Toolkits, and Exercises

To address these three curatorial topics, we developed two different types of “toolkits”: one that was analytical-conceptual and one that was experience based, which together provided a mixture of rational and somatic knowledge. The analytical-conceptual toolkit was designed to serve as a practical memory tool that is central to analytical work taking place after performances (see the appendix, example 1). With the help of a “memory protocol,” a well-established method in theater studies, students learned to sharpen their attention to different dimensions of a performance and to utilize their recollections when preparing a written analysis on specific aspects of the production.²⁸

Along with the memory protocol, a second document provided different categories for analyzing music theater performances. Since the focus of our analysis was more on the performance and less the text or score, we needed to familiarize students with heuristic tools and a framework for deepening observations and opening up hermeneutic perspectives. Therefore, the list of categories presents a variety of parameters, such as the material frame of a performance, its time frame, and locality (see the appendix, example 2).

To introduce a broader spectrum of analytical and practical approaches and open up new points of view, we also devised an experience-based toolkit allowing for more interaction between intellectual and practical knowledge. This toolkit took the form of exercises. In line with Jens Roselt and Ekaterina Trachsel’s work on the concept, we understand the term exercise as both a self-serving practice that acts upon the person engaging in it as well as a piece that can be performed for an audience (like a musical exercise or étude).²⁹ We approached these exercises as processes that become inscribed in the body, offering the students a freedom of scope without any explicit goals. Beyond this bodily dimension, the exercises also reflect the inner attitude of the people who are performing through the way they observe, control, and regulate themselves while doing the exercise.

The exercises we introduced were twofold: They consisted of a reading portion and a practical, more action-based part (table 1). For the reading exercises, we assigned a selection of texts related to the aforementioned three curatorial themes (situated knowledge, collective art practice, and aboutness). The readings included the chapter “Works of Art and Mere Real Things” from The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art (1981) by the American philosopher Arthur C. Danto (1924–2013) concerning the “aboutness” of art, the introduction and first chapter of Dylan Robinson’s Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies (2020) about the situatedness of listening, and Claire Bishop’s “The Social Turn: Collaboration and Its Discontent” published in Artforum (2006).

Table 1 Seminar material

Students gained valuable knowledge from reading these texts and were able to develop various interpretations of the performed works as a result, but the reading exercises were also about a somatic-affective way of experiencing reading itself. One of the signal albeit largely tacit concerns of our seminar became the need to redefine the “reading exercise” as a bodily practice that engages the senses, which should be both distinct from and equal to other bodily practices. It was not sufficient to assign nontheoretical knowledge acquisition the same importance as the more theoretical reading assignments. To question the dualism of theoretical and bodily or practical knowledge, we found ourselves obliged to reframe the act of reading itself as a somatic-affective exercise. Rethinking reading in this way deepened our understanding of our aims. We learned to recognize some preconceived notions about the historical stakes of our fields and about the prioritization of certain forms of knowledge production. We became aware of the historical and conceptual weight that the content brings to the texts themselves and to the experience of reading. This sense of weight could render a text important rather than trivial, exerting a nonverbal form of epistemic pressure.

The exercises consisted of a practical portion alongside the readings. Inspired by the artistic movement Fluxus and concept music, students were assigned in groups to initiate different actions based on written rules of engagement. We paid particular attention to possible deviations if the students did not follow the concept exactly. Initially, we were interested in how conceptual ambiguities would be interpreted and how students would use their creativity and resourcefulness. On a more basic level, we wanted to find out how deviations might reveal comprehension problems caused by miscommunication and highlight discrepancies between the implicit knowledge required to understand the concept and the students’ lack of that knowledge. These deviations reveal the boundaries of the epistemic landscape we present as teachers and invite us to make didactic and methodological adjustments. Thus, the instructions were meant mainly to serve as an impetus to enable a physically active mode, and what exactly this mode would mean or what perceptions would result from it remained deliberately open. As part of these practical exercises, students were asked to produce certain visual and/or sonic material and relate to it in some way. Since the exercises were done collectively, they allowed students to gain practical, firsthand experience of the complexities of collaborative artistic practices. The exercises therefore combined the sensual experience of producing something with a clear social dimension, such as processes of negotiation and communal decision making. Finally, some of our exercises explored the boundaries of our situated knowledge and how they might exert epistemic pressure on our objects of study. The exercises were thus in part conceived as a process of unlearning by deconstructing institutionalized notions of art and stimulating new perspectives and logics of representation.

How did these exercises and the different ways of knowing they imply play out in the classroom? And how did this relate to our three curatorial topics: situated knowledge, collective artistic practice, and aboutness? We will discuss three case studies to address these questions. We will begin with the exercise Punctuation and questions of situated knowledge, and then we will examine collective art practices through the exercise Who is to blame; finally, we will attend to questions of framing through the exercise Aboutness. This discussion will focus on the relationship between an exercise, the different forms of knowledge it enables, and our curatorial topics. Our aim is not to assess how these topics and exercises are entangled with the productions we attended. This would require an in-depth analysis of the pieces and performances, an undertaking that lies beyond the scope of this article, and it would also suggest a mutually exclusive relationship between the exercises and the performances. Instead, we intend to show that these or similar exercises are applicable to a wide range of curatorial topics that are crucial to contemporary music and music listening but also to teaching music history and in a manner that engages with our current cultural context.

Punctuation, Hungry Listening, and Situated Knowledge

Punctuation (piece for two people)

Material: Envelope, strips of paper with grammatically complex sentences, forks

Performers stand in front of each other and hold their forks so that the back sides of the forks meet each other.

1. Pick a strip of paper from the provided envelope.
2. Read the sentence to yourself and memorize it.
3. Say the memorized sentence in your head.
4. Each punctuation symbol (, / ; / : / . / etc.) indicates a “fork action.”
5. A fork action involves the fork rubbing sideways against the other person’s fork.
6. The length of the fork action should always be relatively brief.

Repeat your sentence at a “normal” pace of speech at least five times.

The Punctuation exercise aimed to create a space to explore the tensions and epistemic violence that can arise from the universalization of situated knowledge. The goal was to grasp, both intellectually and physically, how situated knowledge is produced, the ideological limitations that arise when it is applied universally, and the somatic experiences that can emerge from this dynamic. This subject was inspired by our experience with Territorios Duales in Munich, but it is also relevant to any musical performance that presents marginalized music or sonic material within a Western art music institution.

To address this, we proceeded in three steps: We first completed a series of actions called Punctuation, which involved gestures with forks; we then discussed the assigned readings from Dylan Robinson’s Hungry Listening (introduction and chapter one); finally, students reflected on the experience of Punctuation in light of Robinson’s work.

In Hungry Listening, Robinson critically examines listening practices from both Indigenous and settler-colonial perspectives by placing them in broad historical, sociopolitical, and aesthetic contexts to reconsider contemporary artistic practices and systemic power dynamics in the world of art music. He researches and curates “sonic encounters between particular perceptual logics, and between particular bodies, within a larger conceptual framework of critical listening positionality.”³⁰ He demonstrates how Indigenous music is continuously used as a resource in composition and integrated into Western art music. “Such inclusionary efforts,” he argues,

bolster an intransient system of presentation guided by an interest in—and often a fixation upon––Indigenous content but not Indigenous structure. This apathy toward Indigenous structures of performance and gathering leads to epistemological violence through art music’s audiophile privileging of and adherence to its own values of performance and virtuosity.³¹

According to Robinson, it is crucial to address positionality to break this pattern of reception. While an admission of guilt cannot free us from responsibility, it can result in a newfound understanding of our own perceptual bias.³² So, how did this play out in the practical exercise?

Punctuation consisted of two parts: a practical and a reflective phase. At the beginning, groups of four were formed, and then the groups were divided into pairs. Each person first took a piece of paper from an envelope with sentences on it: for example, “ ‘Peter!,’ scolded Petra, ‘please don’t leave your wet swimming trunks on the expensive parquet floor!’ Then she turned away angrily.” At that point, each group of four was given two forks. As soon as the students had memorized their sentence, they met the fork of their partner with the back of their own. While silently repeating their sentence five times, they were asked to briefly move their fork sideways back and forth only at the punctuation marks without losing contact with their partner’s fork. Each pair was tasked with playing the fork exercise once while watching and listening to the other pair a second time.

The aim of the exercise was to retrace a substitute action. A common musical practice (such as playing piano four hands) was replaced by a different practice, the rubbing of forks. The status of this replacement practice, whether or not it was considered musical, was intentionally left open. By emphasizing the pressure and friction created during execution, the exercise fostered tactile and auditory awareness. When we asked students to describe their experience, they reacted to the relational character of rubbing forks and the various emotional qualities it engendered: “It kind of felt like a dialogue,” one student told us. “We didn’t know that we both had the same sentence, but each of us had her/his own tempo and quality of touch. Sometimes when we were playing almost at the same time, it even felt like a fight.”³³

This experience was also central to the second part of the exercise, which provided a set of questions all students had to tackle: “Are these works?” “Which differences exist between object and instrument?” “Should these practices be integrated into the canon?” All these questions were initially intended to generate an “induced” epistemic violence. They forced students to confront their bodily and emotional experience in the exercise with certain arbitrary (Western) criteria. The tension between the experience of the exercise and these questions would primarily be grasped somatically. The non-process-related questions introduced an external, coercive element into the activity, and students had to present the fork exercise to an “audience” (the two watching and listening students); these conditions dislodged the practice from its more intimate space of personal interaction––from its given place and moment within a duet.

Later, the students had the opportunity to reflect on the exercise in light of Robinson’s Hungry Listening and expand their primarily somatic knowledge through a more cognitively defined approach. They clearly recognized similarities between their experience and the problems Robinson describes. They related especially to the aforementioned tension between the intimate practice and the framing (a concert setting). For them, the intimacy of the rubbing of forks not only gave way to highly sensitive ways of listening (auditory and tactile) but also allowed for the emergence of different relationships with the instrument. One student stated, “I liked the forks. It represented a shift for me. . . . Objects can be turned into song through dialogue, engagement, and action. The object can become a subject.”³⁴ In her interaction with the fork, the student thus brings Danto’s emphasis on the transformative power of context (discussed further below) and Robinson’s readings together by pointing to the fork’s multiple possible transformations from quotidian object to musical instrument to living subject. Instead of reaffirming preconceived notions—of what an instrument is and how we listen to it—the exercise allowed the student to imagine myriad modes of relation and understanding.

This quality in particular proved to be most fruitful and sparked students’ imaginations about alternative musical settings. Coming from Ireland, the student quoted above associated the fork exercises with an Irish musical folk practice that considers performing a song a sort of musical kinship rather than the performance of an object, an approach that is “respectful toward both the song itself and also the people and community who have been responsible for this moment of performance.” She states that during the fork rubbing,

I was thinking of this and perhaps yearning for a setting where this is a known performance practice and not doing it also has reasons. The other person holding the fork spoke first and said how we would do the performance. I tried to interrupt this, but also was acting in a deferential and respectful manner which is in line with this performance practice and this ‘intersubjective interaction’ as Robinson puts it and I did not find the space to articulate this performance practice or introduce it. . . . I realized the absence of this made me feel a bit floaty and untethered.³⁵

Our students’ reactions show how the exercise helped them experience listening habits and practices as a result and indicator of cultural norms and their respective value systems.³⁶ Furthermore, it shifted what Robinson describes as the “hungry” premise of listening-as-consumption to a moment of listening as a relation between the listening subject and an-other, be it another human body or a sounding body like the fork. It created a space for negotiation and confrontation that does not demand or expect a place for reconciliation and reaffirmation. Thus, exercise and reading not only created an interaction of somatic and explicit intellectual knowledge but also exposed students to a key part of music-curatorial practices—the pursuit of strategies of unsettlement and different understandings of listening.

Claire Bishop, Collaboration, and Authorship––Who is to blame, an Exercise on Collective Artistic Practices

Who is to blame (piece for small groups of three or four people)

Material: Paper, pencils, envelope, strips of paper with situational sentences

The piece works by splitting the workload in sections.

1. Decide an order of action, who starts, who comes after, and who ends.
2. Person 1 picks a strip of paper from the envelope and reads it secretly.
3. Person 1 makes a list of sounds by analyzing the acoustic content of the sentence.
4. Person 2 receives the list and assigns a sound produced only with the body to each of the elements in the list.
5. Person 2 writes the assigned sounds on the list.
6. Person 3 receives the list and thinks about an order of performance. Elements in the list may be omitted, performed simultaneously, or in any other way.
7. Collectively choose an appropriate space for performance.

Since the 1970s, collaboration between many people from various trades has become an important way to produce musical works, especially in music theater. A large variety of artistic practices have since emerged from the different working methods that groups of artists have generated for themselves or achieved with the help of an audience. At the Biennale, nearly every piece highlighted this collaborative character.³⁷ These working methods question, even if indirectly, the status of authorship and often subscribe to an aesthetic that art critic and curator Nicolas Bourriaud has termed art as relational practice. “Art is the place that produces a specific sociability . . . because it tightens the space of relations.”³⁸ In order to become familiar with the different ramifications and implications of collaborative practices, the class discussed Claire Bishop’s highly influential text “The Social Turn: Collaboration and Its Discontents.”³⁹ Bishop argues for a “surge of artistic interest in collectivity” and sees the common basis for these different projects in “a belief in the empowering creativity of collective action and shared ideas” that motivate artists to use “social situations to produce dematerialized, antimarket, politically engaged projects.”⁴⁰

When planning our seminar, we decided to present a variety of readings to offer a broad spectrum of perspectives. We asked students to read the provided literature and encouraged them to engage in critical discussions. They were tasked with registering and noting their first emotional response to the texts and with carefully analyzing the structure and outline of the texts’ arguments as well as their possible implied assumptions.

Students told us that they felt uncomfortable reading Bishop’s article. They said that they felt tense and uneasy, and that they agreed with and resisted the article simultaneously. They were unable to pin down this kind of tension, which took the form of a strong emotional reaction—a reaction against the authoritative voice they heard in this text, against an authority they knew of in the cultural field. Students then tried to understand their emotional response via more explicit intellectual engagement and attempted to deconstruct Bishop’s argument. Her text is known for helping to launch an intense debate on the so-called “social turn” in the arts, which focuses especially on the reevaluation of social over aesthetic criteria and an accompanying dissolution of the distinction between artistic and nonartistic practice. Bishop contests an art-critical discourse that applies the criterion of social relevance as the decisive measure for assessing artistic practice. Instead, she claims that successful artistic practices are those that address a “contradictory pull between autonomy and social intervention” and reflect this tension “both in the structure of the work and in the conditions of its reception.”⁴¹ Rather than placing social relevance and aesthetic qualities in opposition, art criticism should strive to “think the aesthetic and the social/political together, rather than subsuming both within the ethical.”⁴²

By looking at the different examples of single-authored and collaborative artworks that Bishop discusses, students managed to pinpoint the reason for their strong reaction against the text. While they agreed with Bishop’s overall argument, they explained how, in their view, the author constructs an asymmetrical dualism. While she ascribes single-authored works a high aesthetic value in the tradition of the Western avant-garde aesthetic (via modernist values such as “careful construction,” “conceptual density,” “disruption,” etc.), she does not, the students felt, take into consideration the aesthetic dimension of the collaborative works at all. Students argued that Bishop obscures the variety of aesthetic practices in collaborative and participatory art by creating a nondifferentiated, homogenous notion of the field. Therefore, they emphasized that Bishop here does precisely what she criticizes in the overall artistic discourse, that she creates an opposition between the aesthetic and the social without overcoming it.

Almost all students shared this critique of the text. The group was united in a palpable pleasure in deconstructing a voice of authority. The discussion transformed the quite heterogeneous group of students into one voice of contradiction, which was highly affectively charged. In reviewing the reading and discussion, we worked with the students to make this affective-somatic dimension of the reading exercise explicit. Students reflected upon how their affective and sometimes even bodily reactions not only guided their initial approach but also influenced their way of critiquing and countering the epistemic pressure they sensed in the text. They explained that by performing critique, they entered into a ritualized “power game” in which they had themselves become a quasi-authoritative voice institutionalized within the university and in a manner that left almost no space for disagreement.

Along with the reading exercise, we approached the topic of collaboration through a practical exercise focused on collaborative composing, where Bishop’s fundamental ideas were to be processed through the body and challenged. Ultimately, this exercise aimed to explore whether the actions involved in the exercise could achieve the status of art. We broached this question repeatedly, which helped us to reflect continually on the limits of situated knowledge.

This second exercise was split into four phases, each of which was undertaken by one student only—secretly, so to speak. First, students were divided into groups of four. Each person was assigned a number between one and four, which organized the order of the process. First, the person with number one was allowed to draw a slip of paper from an envelope. Everyday occurrences were written on these slips of paper, such as “When I got home after a long conference, I realized that my fly was open.” This person was then asked to make a list of the acoustic elements implied by the occurrence described in the sentence. Second, this list was passed on to person two. This person had the task of assigning sounds that could only be produced with the body to each element on the list. These bodily instruments were added to the list and passed to the third student. The third person then had to decide in which order the elements should take place in a small performance. Fourth, after rehearsing, the group was tasked to collectively decide on a space for their performance.

Compared to the first exercise, Punctuation, the procedural and pedagogical aspects of Who is to blame were more transparent. It was clear from the distribution of the work alone that it was a collaborative composition, in which students shared authorship for what they produced. But what say the students had in each other’s work remained deliberately undefined. This intentional lack of instructor mediation enabled an independently managed space for negotiation to emerge within the process. One goal of the exercise was to have “emergency conversations” take place in a very limited time span (fifteen minutes) in which ideas could be exchanged and weighed to bring the communal project forward. The time constraints of the exercise clearly had the effect of encouraging such conversations. Yet our desire for students to focus on the collaborative process of creation met some resistance. In the discussions with her classmates, one of the students expressed that she had difficulties overcoming patterns established by training and habit; she felt she was so trained to focus on the exercise’s outcome that she could not resist constantly looking for an “aesthetic result.” Furthermore, the negotiation process within the different groups was influenced by sociological factors (such as personal identity shaped through class, race, gender, etc.) as well as the specific setting of the collaborative exercise, which immediately shaped the different roles assumed by the students, such as who took initiative and who followed others. But even when considering these different factors, it is clear that students entered into a somatically and sensually informed mode of conversation about aesthetics. Furthermore, the different steps involved in Who is to blame allowed participants to explore myriad possible aesthetic approaches in a way that was not at all limited to Bishop’s narrow catalog of modernist aesthetics. By collaborating in this exercise, students could share responsibilities of authorship and negotiate aesthetic decision making. At the same time, authorship need not be limited to one subject, nor does it disappear. Rather, through the sum of the students’ labors, the notion of authorship in Who is to blame expands. By adding authorial layers in the collaborative process, practices of authorship are rendered both visible and destabilized.⁴³ The exercise is therefore a valuable tool for thinking about curatorial approaches to address and challenge notions of collaboration and authorship.

Transformative Agency Through Framing and Naming: Danto and Aboutness

Aboutness (piece for small groups)

The piece shows performative agency/transformative agency through framing and naming.

1. Choose three to four items that can be held with one hand.
2. Organize them in an assemblage.
3. Designate the frame of the stage where the assemblage is allocated.
4. Give it a name.

Due to the disparate nature of many of the pieces featured at the Biennale, some of which contest notions of art altogether, it was crucial to revisit our conceptions of art. As composers and musicologists, we usually take the nature of pieces of music for granted. They are available in their various forms (score, text, video, performance) as objects to be analyzed. Their status as art is not scrutinized—only whether the relationship between design and intention has been successful according to an externally imposed set of standards. With the help of Danto’s text on “works of art and mere real things” and the practical exercise Aboutness, we aimed to get a better sense of when and how we consider a performance a piece of music theater and thus a piece of art.⁴⁴ Danto argues that the “work” can only achieve its status as art in its context. The metadata of a piece of music (with “music” itself an indicator of what to expect) such as genre designations like “music theater,” “opera,” “symphony,” and the like perform a descriptive and orientating function. The audience is thus briefed in advance of or during a work’s unfolding. The expectation created by these metadata and the actual experience of the piece often create a strong friction. This tension is one of the fundamental aspects of art in the Western context.

To emphasize the essential connection between artistic metadata and the art object, we designed an exercise about “aboutness.” In this exercise, students were asked to arrange three to four objects that they carry with them every day (a key ring, a telephone, a calendar, pens, glasses, etc.) within a section of the room that had been demarcated in advance. They then gave this microinstallation a name, one that opened up many possibilities for the generation of meaning. By making and then visiting each other’s installations, everybody was able to experience the transformative power that can be exerted on the ontological status of everyday objects simply by organizing them within a frame and giving them a title.

This became abundantly clear in a student’s installation called Left. Different implications of the title (left versus right, being leftover, and the political left) intersected with the surroundings of the installation in interesting ways. The installation consisted of a toothbrush and a pencil in a cup. They were placed on a huge windowsill in the department building’s hallway and, due to their size and quotidian nature, created a sharp contrast with the building’s large facade. The installation was positioned so that a shadow fell on its left side. Carefully framed by the hallway window, the installation could only be seen from inside the building from the main hallway. The building, where the musicology department is located, was constructed in 1938 as the house of the German Research Foundation, an institution that worked to align politics and research during the Nazi period.⁴⁵ A marble entrance hall, a theatrical double staircase, and long hallways give the building a sense of historical monumentality and demonstrate the overwhelming and intimidating character of Nazi architecture.

Additionally, a large photograph of the Nazi book burning at Bebelplatz in Berlin in 1933 was displayed next to the area where students installed their pieces. The installation sparked different interpretations from the group. Some students emphasized that the contrast between the installation and the monumental aesthetics of the building brought the objects’ fragility to fore. Others interpreted the title Left as a turning of the objects into traces of and reactions to Germany’s political history as alluded to in the historical photo next to the objects, while still other students perceived them as “leftovers” of an absent human presence. Thus, the positioning of the three objects in this context allowed the installation to highlight material qualities and meanings that transcend everyday associations with the objects.

Aboutness provided students with insight into how framing—the placement of objects within a specific space and institution along with the assignment of titles—potentially guides the perceptions of objects or performances, and how it opens up potential meanings and blocks others. The exercises allowed them to experience the transformative power of aboutness and sensitized them to the scope and impact of a crucial curatorial activity—creating this aboutness.

Conclusion

To explore what we identified as key topics in curatorial work (situatedness, collaboration, and aboutness), we fostered among students different experiences that would allow them to understand academic and artistic knowledge as complex networks of somatic, intellectual, and multisensory ways of knowing. This approach allowed us to gain a deeper understanding of the three topics and how they relate to the performances in Munich and our perceptions of these works. Furthermore, the practical and reading exercises and analytical work gave us space to experience not only knowledge in different forms but also how one might relate to these different types of knowledge. This helped us to grasp how music curation turns away from treating knowledge as fixed and instead conceives of it as a contingent, polysemic network that is constantly being reshaped. This contingency was particularly evident in the exercises Aboutness and Punctuation, where students confronted listening habits and practices as a result and indicator of cultural norms and their respective value systems. Finally, the combination of different types of knowledge exposed students to key aspects of music-curatorial practice: namely, the pursuit of strategies of unsettlement and differing understandings of listening. As Pedro J. S. Vieira de Oliveira puts it, “Every listening moment is a curating moment, for with every listening moment spaces are re-configured and re-sounded for new possibilities of listening to emerge.”⁴⁶

These insights as well as their experience of the exercises clearly affected the students’ understanding of and work on the Biennale, which became all the more evident in the students’ feedback and in their papers on topics from the class. Students writing on Territorios Duales, for example, perceived and grasped the tensions between framing, experiencing, and understanding Territorios Duales as a decolonial intervention in a white European cultural sphere and as an artistic piece. In Territorios Duales, Bolivian composer and performer Carlos Gutiérrez Quiroga and collaborator Tatiana López Churata frame a sonic encounter through their composition of a sound-theater piece performed by one hundred amateur musicians with DIY instruments.⁴⁷ Referring to the assigned readings as well as their engagement with Punctuation, students described and analyzed their own listening experience and positionality when perceiving the performance at the Munich Biennale. They especially pointed to how Territorios Duales negotiates the tension between artistic practice and aesthetic reception in a European institutional context and related that back to their experience with Punctuation. Rather than adding elements of Bolivian music to a Western performance setting, the students argued, Territorios Duales creates a situation in which different performance settings coexist. Explaining how the structure of a performance on a square in a rural part of Bolivia became the guiding framework for the Munich performance, students elaborated on how the piece asks its assumed non-Bolivian/non-Indigenous audience to widen their conceptualization of what art music is and can be. Tracing the piece’s multiple cultural and aesthetic codes, such as Western classical avant-garde aesthetics, social music making, and Indigenous procession music, they claimed that the piece invites a mode of critical engagement that is aware of these different codes and potential mutual tension, which might arise between them and at the same time allow for fluid exchange across, within, and beyond boundaries. Their ability to reflect critically upon and discuss the extent to which the performance in Munich at the Gasteig allowed for this fluidity demonstrates that the seminar exercises and discussions helped students to develop critical curatorial sensibilities.⁴⁸

Teaching such a hybrid seminar with an artistic-academic approach turned out to be a rewarding experience for us as instructors. It challenged us to leave our comfort zone of institutionalized teaching practices in composition and musicology and to rethink our roles. We saw ourselves as facilitators of risk, suggesting questions or ways of reflection instead of expecting specific answers. Facilitating risk implied taking a step outside our domains, since we often simply did not know in advance if students would be open to this kind of approach and if we would find a fruitful way to engage with their experiences. At the same time, we had to learn to focus less on the results of a reading, analysis, or discussion and instead turn our attention to process––the process of doing and of continually remaining open to observation and self-reflection. Finally, teaching together meant for us questioning our own ascribed positions as teachers by trying to understand our own situatedness as academic and artist. We had to remind each other more than once that the practical exercises were not about producing art; they were about unlearning certain attitudes and practices and developing different ones while constantly asking what art could be. Furthermore, the seminar was crucial for reflecting on preconceived knowledges that stem from how the disciplines of “composition” and “musicology” have historically been delineated, the contingent character of these classifications, and how these classifications have been instrumentalized throughout history.

Yet in teaching the class, we also encountered some practical challenges that might be helpful to consider for those wanting to adopt a similar approach. The combination of reading and practical exercises (along with some reflections on them) takes time. In our experience, it is especially important to plan for longer sessions if one wants to introduce, for example, “gallery walks” in which students visit each other’s performances. We usually planned for around forty-five minutes per exercise, which worked rather well, depending on the size of the group.

Another important factor is the student’s feedback, which proved central to the communal reflections. The reading and practical exercises were designed to open space for experiences that did not necessarily correspond to our preconceived ideas. We understood our role as facilitators of potential experiences who would guide students through a selection of theoretical and practical material with the aim of actively creating room for dissenting voices. We were not interested in creating an echo chamber in which students had to reproduce certain formulations of knowledge; we encouraged a wide spectrum of student perspectives in our discussions. In our case, there was a distinct group that regularly responded in class and was very outspoken. To capture the bigger picture of student reactions, especially from those who are more introverted or who do not feel comfortable sharing personal experiences with a group, we regularly asked students for anonymous written feedback on the sessions. Some students have less experience completing such feedback forms. We as teachers could therefore only develop our interpretation of the exercises using the feedback we received. While no one refused to participate, it often remained unclear what dissenting voices we may have overheard or overlooked while soliciting feedback. With the exception of Punctuation, in which questions about the status of art were part of the exercise, we explicitly asked students to observe how they themselves and their partners reacted to the exercises, where and why they encountered resistance or difficulties, and which moments they connected to. They could always share these observations with the group if they felt the need. But we also valued their experiences remaining in the realm of bodily and thus tacit knowledge.

One final consideration involves the instructions associated with the exercises and how much freedom they allow. We read the instructions aloud before each exercise. While it was clear that the exercises were to be performed in a certain way, we deliberately left it to the students to decide whether a group or an individual would follow the instructions or bypass them and perform the exercise differently. We considered them a way to stimulate a physically active mode of engagement, not a directive to do so.

***

In separating artistic and academic knowledge in curricula and related pedagogical practice, musicology and composition programs tend to run counter to recent debates in the arts and humanities.⁴⁹ Ongoing discussions over the last twenty years about the relevance and character of artistic research emphasize the arts’ potential for generating their own forms of knowledge.⁵⁰ Artistic knowledge, so the argument goes, explores the epistemologies of aesthetics and thus opens up different ways of knowing beyond common linear paths of logos and deduction, such as phoné and empiricity. Paralleling this development, there has been a tendency within the humanities over the last several years to gain and circulate academic insights not only through texts but also through artistic productions. In disciplines like anthropology and ethnology, it is already a well-established practice to produce not only books and articles but also films or sound works as results of academic research.⁵¹

While there is great awareness of different ways of knowing and their political and epistemological implications in the humanities and the arts, this awareness remains largely foreign to the music classroom and curriculum. This is especially true for teaching in Germany. Contrary to the flourishing of musicological research that considers a variety of epistemologies, study programs rarely address the nature and formation of the knowledge taught and its relationship to other types of knowledges, such as implicit, tacit, or embodied ones. In both musicology and composition curricula, little time is allocated to an updated critical epistemology. Thus, they run the risk of inadvertently reproducing cultural norms and their respective value systems. Furthermore, the formulation of pedagogical goals for study programs—such as training students to look at music or judge musical performance and interpretation according to passed-down and unquestioned criteria—evidence a continued belief in academic knowledge as singular and “objective” knowledge.⁵²

Thus, coming back to our initial questions of how we can address the core idea in music-curatorial work that knowledge is often unstable, ambiguous, multidimensional, and emotionally or affectively charged, we found a potential solution in the combining of conceptual and embodied approaches based on experimental musical material. By bringing together musicology and composition students, these different approaches allow us not only to understand but also to experience a multiplicity of knowledges, which is central to gaining an overview of and practical experience with the new musical landscape that we outlined at the start of this article. We consider this one possible way to expand our teaching and thinking to face some of the recent artistic, institutional, and political dynamics. Furthermore, it provides an effective method to integrate “metaquestions,” such as those concerning the historicity, situatedness, and contingency of the analytical and critical paradigms we use in our teaching.⁵³ We suggest that working with this hybrid approach could help to integrate these topics into the classroom and engage students in different modalities of knowledge, thus addressing some of the current curatorial challenges in music.

Appendix

Example 1: Memory Protocol

Initial questions for a memory protocol:

What did I see, hear, perceive?

What was my involvement?

What was I particularly attracted to/repulsed by?

What expectations did I have?

What prior knowledge did I bring with me to the performance?

What does it tell me? What can I do with it? What does it mean to me?

Clarify the difference between describing something perceived (phenomenological) and assigning a meaning to what is perceived (semiotic dimension).

Example 2: Parameters for Performance Analysis of Music Theater Used in the Seminar

1. Material Frame

The material frame refers primarily to the materials used (text, image, light, sound, space, voices, gestures, bodies, etc.). It is about perceiving and describing these materials both in their selection and in their materiality. We are therefore dealing with a double “frame.” The first relates to the production of the artwork, as the artist has already selected certain materials and excluded others. This material frame is revealed to us through sources and an analysis of the production and rehearsal processes. A second frame concerns the perspective of the person observing, which in turn is selective and bound to their situatedness.

2. Time Frame

The time frame opens up several levels of reflection on time—first and foremost in terms of rhythm. Rhythm arranges elements, sounds, or atmospheres on a temporal level. It can serve as an acoustic, visual, olfactory, or haptic rhythm in music theater to structure time, space, and, if necessary, action. In contrast to beat or meter, which provide a regular sequence of stimuli over an extended period of time, rhythm combines the predictable and the unpredictable, repetition and the deviation from it. Perceiving rhythm, the auditor-spectator engages with certain temporal structures and anticipates continuations or pattern formations, which can enable or irritate temporal orientations. Repetitions, standstills, and reversals of causal sequences can, for example, unsettle conventional perceptions of time and obscure objectively measurable time sequences. The time frame also refers to the psychological or mental time that the audience experiences before, during, and after a given event. Equally important is the personal and physical perception of time, which is constituted differently for each audience member (subjective inner perception of time); this can be affected by, for example, one’s own bodily rhythm or individual state at the time of reception. Finally, the time frame refers to the tentacular layers of the materials at hand, in that some materials offer meaning that can be related to the past or the future.

3. Density

Density refers to the frequency of theatrical actions and presents an alternative to a vocabulary that refers to form. Density is the relationship between the volume of a space and its content. The more content there is in a given space, the higher the density and vice versa. Accordingly, the more actions per unit of time, the higher the density.

4. Concurrency

Concurrency makes it possible to talk about simultaneous events in terms of both unintentional commonality and intentional simultaneity. We thus focus on a selection of actions to read them as competing and/or cooperating. Through these selective framings of analysis, we counteract our habit of always necessarily perceiving an event or piece as a self-contained, organic whole. Concurrency allows us to focus instead on possible inner tensions and contradictions.

5. Locality

Locality refers to the spatial dimensions of the performance in the broadest sense. The materiality of a space shapes the contours of a performance (e.g., through reflection/reverberation, absorption, etc.). How does the performance relate to the location? Which aspects of the location are taken up, and which are obscured? How does the performance change the site and our perception of it? Locality also refers to the location of the performance and thus raises the question of site specificity.

The location of the performance can also be in different places simultaneously, for example on the internet, in social media, and in archives. At the same time, the performance in the space changes the space itself, as the performance event can generate a variety of possible perceptual perspectives depending on the placement or movement of audience members within the performance space. Through these different evolving perspectives, the performance always implies a social dimension (i.e., a relational character). This spatial-social dimension can involve concrete spaces as well as spaces that are not tangible (virtual space, psychological space, etc.).

Locality also refers to the spatial character of a performance event. Various elements are perceived, for example, as foreground, middle ground, or background and are thus constructed as “spatial” in the reception. Finally, locality refers to the places that are evoked in a performance or in sounds. These can be fictional, future places (such as an imagined train station in the future, to take a random example) but also concrete historical and/or geographic places that are evoked by the materials used (texts, instruments, sounds, etc.) and their origin or content. Likewise, “nonplaces” can also be evoked by elements that evade and refuse a concrete location. To describe the spatial character of performances, we suggest focusing first on their range and examining this in terms of three levels: the intimate, the local, and the global. The intimate environment of the perceiver limits perception to events as much as possible. Accordingly, perception in the local environment extends to what is located within a section of space, but not to the entire space (not even that of a digital space). The global environment entails spatial extension, to digital media (including social media), archives, and all other forms of storing artistic phenomena. The global enables the inclusion of kinship lines, networks, and “rhizomatic” roots in one’s analysis.

1. Participatory and socially engaged music carries a long tradition, from the early avant-garde movements in the 1920s to its flourishing in the 1970s with composers like Hans Werner Henze (1926–2012), Dieter Schnebel (1930–2018), and Mauricio Kagel (1931–2008). The more recent situation differs from that of the 1970s and has been characterized by an abundance of research, activism, and artistic productions that have challenged the institution of contemporary music, particularly from decolonial, intersectional feminist, ecological, and anticapitalist perspectives. Composers and artists involved in this critique often thematize questions of in- and exclusion. In his Good Morning Deutschland (Donaueschingen, 2016), Hannes Seidl, as one example, created three communal radio stations and gave voice to a wave of refugees arriving in Germany. Raven Chacon and the collective Postcommodity address the forced displacement of Indigenous communities. In their Let Us Pray for the Water Between Us (2020), a site-specific installation, they respond to the complexity of human relationships bound by shared sources of water that are increasingly difficult to protect. Projects motivated by similar critical attitudes have been realized by composers such as Cathy Milliken (b. 1956), Brigitta Muntendorf (b. 1982), Sandeep Bhagwati (b. 1963), and Ari Benjamin Meyers (b. 1972). On this new register of critique, see Christian Grüny and Brandon Farnsworth, eds., New Music and Institutional Critique (J. B. Metzler, 2023). On the relevance of queer, feminist, postcolonial, socialist, and subcultural initiatives in the visual arts since the 1990s, see Juliane Rebentisch, Aesthetics of Installation Art, trans. Daniel Hendrickson with Gerrit Jackson (Sternberg Press, 2012), 261–65.↗
2. To give a few examples: The Donaueschinger Musiktage celebrated their one hundredth anniversary with an extensive research and performance project, Donaueschingen Global, focusing on contemporary and experimental music in the Global South, funded by the German federal government (Kulturstiftung des Bundes). The project was accompanied by a publication that framed the program within post- and decolonial debates. See Elisa Erkelenz and Katja Heldt, eds., Dynamic Traditions: Global Perspectives on Contemporary Music (Südwestrundfunk, 2021). MaerzMusik, a Berlin-based festival, regularly features topics like decolonial listening (in the 2022 edition) or posthumanism and music (in the 2025 edition); the Switzerland-based program “CONNECT – The Audience as Artist” by the Art Mentor Foundation Lucerne requires public participants to be an integral part of the performance. Composers experiment with ideas of shared curation, empowering audiences to play their own role in art.↗
3. Curators currently in the field of music often have multiple identities—not only as curators, but also as composers and/or researchers. Take, for example, the curator, composer, and musician George Lewis (Columbia University) or the curator, researcher, composer, and performer meLê yamomo (University of Amsterdam). Curating often means drawing on these different fields and bringing multiple identities together. Lewis, together with the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) at the MoMA, curated a performance series called “Composing While Black Volume II” (2024) based on his research on Afrodiasporic New Music. Similarly, yamomo drew on his research on Asian diasporic occupation, colonialism, and postmigrant music traditions in his curatorial project “Decolonial Frequencies” at Ballhaus Naunynstrasse Berlin (2021–22). Music curators often work part-time freelance and part-time as festival directors, such as Peter Meanwell (Borealis, a festival for experimental music, Bergen, Norway), Kamila Metwaly (Savvy Contemporary and MaerzMusik, Berlin), Björn Gottstein (Donaueschinger Musiktage until 2021), or Lydia Rilling (Donaueschinger Musiktage since 2022).↗
4. Some critical pedagogical methods that address the intertwining of academic and artistic knowledge are found in, for example, Ursula Brandstätter, “Experimentelle Musik erfordert experimentelle Didaktik: Das Projekt ‘Querklang’ an der Universität der Künste Berlin,” Diskussion Musikpädagogik (2011) 51: 12–16; as well as Lucy Green, Music Education as Critical Theory and Practice: Selected Essays (Routledge, 2014).↗
5. In the announcement of the seminar, students were informed that they would learn about current curatorial practices and experience how artistic and academic approaches could influence each other and be intertwined.↗
6. Most recent cuts and debates happened in January 2025.↗
7. This shift correlated with a tendency toward an uncritical, fetishistic technophilia in educational and policy discourses. For a more detailed account of this development as well as its gendered implications, see Georgina Born and Kyle Devine, “Music Technology, Gender, and Class: Digitization, Educational and Social Change in Britain,” Twentieth-Century Music 12, no. 2 (2015): 135–72, https://doi.org/10.1017/S1478572215000018. See also Carola Boehm et al., “The Discipline That ‘Became’: Developments in Music Technology in British Higher Education Between 2007 and 2018,” Journal of Music, Technology & Education 11, no. 3 (2018): 251–67, https://doi.org/10.1386/jmte.11.3.251_1.↗
8. Due to the funding requirements mentioned above and general developments in the arts, curatorial experience and knowledge in music and sound has become increasingly important on the job market in German-speaking countries and other parts of Europe, whether for artistic managers, curators of festivals or ensembles, or freelance composers and musicians.↗
9. Following Shannon Jackson, we understand theatricality here as an “‘in-between state’ in which forms belonged to no essential artistic medium.” Shannon Jackson, “Performing Show and Tell: Disciplines of Visual Culture and Performance Studies,” Journal of Visual Culture 4, no. 2 (2005): 163–77, https://doi.org/10.1177/1470412905055050.↗
10. See Jörn Peter Hiekel, “Grenzüberschreitungen und neue Arbeitsweisen: Zu einigen künstlerischen Suchbewegungen im Musiktheater der Gegenwart,” in Gegenwart und Zukunft des Musiktheaters: Theorien, Analysen, Positionen, ed. Jörn Peter Hiekel and David Roesner (Transcript, 2018), esp. 33–34; as well as Björn Heile, “A Theatre of Sound and Movement: Experimental Music Theatre and Theories of Embodied Cognition,” European Drama and Performance Studies 15, no. 2 (2020): 217–37.↗
11. See Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (Verso, 2012).↗
12. “Council conclusions on the recovery, resilience, and sustainability of the cultural and creative sectors (2021/C 209/03),” in “Information and Notices (English Edition),” “IV: Notices from European Union Institutions, Bodies, Offices and Agencies,” Official Journal of the European Union 64: 3, https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=OJ:C:2021:209:FULL.↗
13. See footnote 2.↗
14. We are aware that German public funding programs for the arts and their guidelines may seem unrealistic in light of political and social degradation in other parts of the world. All statements in this article should be understood within the context in which they were formulated. While they might not be transferable to other countries, we hope to provide at least some insight into how we respond to changes in the practice of music work.↗
15. See Hauptstadtkulturfonds, accessed January 29, 2025, https://hauptstadtkulturfonds.berlin.de/.↗
16. “Strategy 2020–2030: Introduction,” Arts Council England, accessed January 29, 2025, https://www.artscouncil.org.uk/lets-create/strategy-2020-2030/introduction. Similarly, the Swiss foundation Pro Helvetia and the program “Impuls neue Musik” funding contemporary music in France, Germany, Switzerland, and Luxembourg emphasize that applicants should elaborate how their artistic strategies contribute to a socially relevant discourse. See “Förderkriterien,” Impuls neue Musik, accessed January 29, 2025, https://www.impulsneuemusik.com/foerderung/foerderkriterien/; and “Allgemeine Voraussetzungen,” Pro Helvetia, accessed January 29, 2025. https://prohelvetia.ch/de/allgemeine-voraussetzungen/.↗
17. Sara Ahmed, On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life (Duke University Press, 2012), 1.↗
18. On Documenta and the rise of European star curators, see Charles Green and Anthony Garner, Biennials, Triennials, and Documenta: The Exhibitions That Created Contemporary Art (Wiley Blackwell, 2016). While the profession of curator in the visual arts originally referred to someone taking care of a museum’s collections, the storage and preservation of works, and their hanging and transportation, the profession underwent significant changes in the late 1960s. Since many contemporary works became more immaterial, referential, or performative, the role of the curator shifted away from the care of collections toward the staging of exhibitions. One example of this shift can be seen in the Swiss curator Harald Szeemann, who was responsible for the famous Documenta 5 (1972). Szeemann, who worked with art that could not be traditionally displayed in the museum, such as conceptual art and land art (works that must be referenced through documentation), is one of the first examples of a freelance curator. In 1969 he founded the Agentur für Geistige Gastarbeit, an agency consisting only of Szeemann himself as a private individual, no longer employed by an institution but offering his freelance services for hire on a project-by-project basis.↗
19. This discussion about curating music, especially contemporary music, was evident in the initiative “Defragmentation – Curating Contemporary Music,” a 2016 collaboration between the Darmstadt Summer Course, the MaerzMusik Festival in Berlin, and the Donaueschinger Musiktage in cooperation with the Ultima Festival in Oslo. “Defragmentation” aimed “at enduringly establishing the debates currently ongoing in many disciplines on gender & diversity, decolonization and technological change in institutions of New Music, as well as discussing curatorial practices in this field.” “Defragmentation: Viertägige Convention zum Kuratieren Neuer Musik,” Internationales Musikinstitut, accessed February 9, 2025, https://internationales-musikinstitut.de/de/ferienkurse/defragmentation/. The group’s work consisted of meetings between festival directors and advisors as well as a final conference at the Darmstadt Summer Course in 2018. Defragmentation was itself a response to the demands of the curatorial collective Gender Relations in New Music, which was formed at the 2016 Summer Course; they asked for a long overdue opening into institutional acknowledgement of these issues. As Brandon Farnsworth, author of the first monograph on music curation, has shown, the term music curator became established in academic literature that is primarily focused on the organizers’ willingness to reflect on how they frame musical practices. See Farnsworth, Curating Contemporary Music Festivals: A New Perspective on Music’s Mediation (Transcript, 2020), 18–19.↗
20. Beatrice von Bismarck and Irit Rogoff, “Curating/Curatorial,” in Cultures of the Curatorial, ed. Beatrice von Bismarck et al. (Sternberg Press, 2012), 23.↗
21. Farnsworth, 11.↗
22. When using the term curatorial, we refer to Irit Rogoff’s distinction between curating and the curatorial. While curating refers more to the older meaning of the term curator (taking care of an exhibition and establishing a theme), she sees the curatorial more as an epistemic structure. The curatorial is not representation-driven but more an activity of constellation, “by combining things that haven’t been connected before—artworks, artifacts, information, people, sites.” The focus is on process, and Rogoff refers to the “trajectory of ongoing, active works,” less to a final product such as an exhibition. Finally, the curatorial allows for a moment in which “different knowledge interacting with one another produce something that transcends their position as knowledge.” Von Bismarck and Rogoff, “Curating/Curatorial,” 24, 23.↗
23. See Farnsworth, Curating Contemporary Music Festivals; Lars Petter Hagen and Rob Young, eds., “Curating Contemporary Music,” On Curating (2020), no. 44, especially the article by George Lewis, “A Small Act of Curation,” https://www.on-curating.org/issue-44-reader/a-small-act-of-curation.html; Ed McKeon, “Making Art Public: Musicality & the Curatorial (PhD diss., Birmingham City University, 2021); and Syliva Freydank and Michael Rebhahn, eds., Defragmentation: Curating Contemporary Music (Schott, 2019).↗
24. The Biennale was founded in 1988 by the composer Hans-Werner Henze (1926–2012) and taken over by composer and conductor Peter Ruzicka (b. 1948) in 1996. From 2016 until 2024, it has been directed by the composer-curators Manos Tsangaris and Daniel Ott.↗
25. Farnsworth, Curating Contemporary Music Festivals, 180. Farnsworth provides a detailed account of the Biennale, its curational ideas, its modes of production, and the works premiered.↗
26. Already in 1995, art critic Hal Foster pointed to a wave of art productions that turn to anthropological research and fieldwork to map practices and histories otherwise invisible in hegemonic centers of art and knowledge production. He especially reflects on artistic production in the name of the oppressed other, raising questions of positionality and situatedness. See Hal Foster, “The Artist as Ethnographer?” in The Traffic in Culture: Refiguring Art and Anthropology, ed. George E. Marcus and Fred R. Myers (University of California Press, 1995), 302–9.↗
27. Yet the different curatorial topics also played out within one production. Territorios Duales is a piece of social art, since it relies on a collaboration with nonprofessional performers from the Munich Volkshochschule. But through a confrontation with a traditional way of music making, in this case between Indigenous processions from Bolivia and the Biennale setting, it also points to the situatedness of knowledge and raises questions of aboutness and thus the performance’s status as art.↗
28. Christel Weiler and Jens Roselt, Aufführungsanalyse: Eine Einführung (Narr Francke Attempto Verlag, 2017).↗
29. Jens Roselt and Ekaterina Trachsel, “Üben üben,” in Üben üben: Praktiken und Verfahren des Übens in den Künsten, ed. Jens Roselt and Ekaterina Trachsel (Brill Fink, 2024), VIII–XI.↗
30. Dylan Robinson, Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies (University of Minnesota Press, 2020), 2.↗
31. Robinson, 6.↗
32. Cf. Robinson, 39.↗
33. Nick S. Krause, email to the authors, May 16, 2024. Quoted with Nick S. Krause’s kind permission.↗
34. Maebh Murphy, email to the authors, May 17, 2024. Quoted with Maebh Murphy’s kind permission.↗
35. Murphy.↗
36. Other students pointed to our own practiced colonial reception of “art.” They discussed how even the word “concert” is completely out of place when describing non-European musical practices, as it implements a regime of Western cultural reproduction in which “other” musical practices are torn out of their cultural, cosmo-ethical context and “received” and compared in relation to Western art music.↗
37. Exploring different processes and ways of collaboration has been crucial to the Munich Biennale. The festival therefore worked between 2013 and 2016 with so-called platforms to develop productions. The two curators invited directors, scenographers, writers, and composers who did not necessarily know each other beforehand to different locations. During a short working period, groups were formed and project ideas developed. At a later stage, the curators chose some productions among these projects that would be realized for the festival. The platforms worked as a sort of experimental space with an emphasis on team building and interpersonal skills. The idea was to establish new modes and collaborations to find alternatives to the highly individualist mindset and top-down decisions characteristic of opera houses. The platforms offered an alternative space to break up the traditional division of labor between different actors and make nontransparent, individual working processes—long associated with an air of genius—more transparent. See Farnsworth, Curating Contemporary Music Festivals, 173–75.↗
38. Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (Presses du réel, 2002), 18.↗
39. Claire Bishop, “The Social Turn: Collaboration and Its Discontent,” Artforum 44 (2006): 178–83.↗
40. Bishop, 178–79.↗
41. Bishop, 183 (emphasis original).↗
42. Bishop, 179 (emphasis original).↗
43. On notions of multiple authorship, see Camilla Bork, “Der Interpret als Autor: Bemerkungen zum Phänomen multipler Autorschaft am Beispiel von Schönbergs Pierrot lunaire,” in Wessen Klänge? Interpretation und Autorschaft in neuer Musik, ed. Hermann Danuser and Matthias Kassel (Schott, 2017), 69–90.↗
44. Arthur C. Danto, “Works of Art and Mere Real Things,” in The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art (Harvard University Press, 1983).↗
45. Susann Apelt, “Ein Haus für Wissenschaft und Forschung,” in Front, Stadt, Institut: Theaterwissenschaft an der Freien Universität 1948–1968, ed. Peter Jammerthal and Jan Lazardzig (Verbrecher Verlag, 2018), 263–66.↗
46. Pedro J. S. Vieira de Oliveira, “ ‘Offensichtlich unbegründet’: A Work-in-Progress Meditation on Sonic Biometry, Migration and the Archive,” in Postcolonial Repercussions: On Sound Ontologies and Decolonised Listening, ed. Johannes Salim Ismaiel-Wendt and Andi Schoon (Transcript, 2022), 82.↗
47. See “Territorios Duales / Doppelter Boden,” Münchener Biennale, accessed October 29, 2025, https://2024.muenchener-biennale.de/en/produktion/territorios-duales-doppelter-boden/.↗
48. This paragraph relies on a summary of twelve student papers submitted at the end of the class. They were summarized with kind permission of the authors.↗
49. Dieter Mersch, Epistemologien des Ästhetischen (diaphanies, 2015), 146. The fact that artistic research programs, first in the UK, have their origin in the “growth of audit culture in university research, and the marketization of higher education,” has generated and still generates quite some criticism, but the interest in exploring and blurring the boundaries between art and knowledge and articulating an aesthetic-epistemological practice is still very much alive. Clive Cazeaux, Art, Research, Philosophy (Routledge, 2017), 1. Especially in the UK and in Scandinavian countries, there is a wide variety of programs that offer theory-led research in the arts or artistic research. While most programs began in the visual arts, the last ten years have seen a rapid growth of programs in the field of music. The Orpheus Institute for advanced studies and research in music in Ghent is one institutional outcome of this development; doctoral programs in artistic research in music such as at the Hochschule Hamburg, the University of Huddersfield, the Zürcher Hochschule der Künste, or the Kunstuniversität Graz are other examples.↗
50. For a critical discussion of the political and economic implications of artistic research, see Kamini Vellodi, “Thought Beyond Research: A Deleuzian Critique of Artistic Research,” in Aberrant Nuptials: Deleuze and Artistic Research 2, ed. Paulo de Assis (Leuven University Press, 2025), 215–32. On the variety of approaches (artistic research, theory-led research in the arts, practice-based research), see Henk Borgdorff, The Conflict of the Faculties: Perspectives on Artistic Research and Academia (Leiden University Press, 2012).↗
51. See, for example, ethnomusicologist Steven Feld’s collaboration with the musician Nii Otoo Annan to articulate research on listening and playback in experimental formats in Feld, “Listening to Histories of Listening: Collaborative Experiments in Acoustemology with Nii Otoo Annan,” in Musical Listening in the Age of Technological Reproduction, ed. Gianmario Borio (Routledge, 2015), 91–103. Another example is the French sociologist, philosopher, and anthropologist Bruno Latour, who communicated his research not only through books and articles but also through lectures and curatorial work at the Zentrum für Kunst und Medien (ZKM) Karlsruhe.↗
52. Similar impressions arise from a quick overview of selected programs in other Western countries. Although the historical perspective is usually enriched by a more critical and self-reflective approach—with classes that view music in the context of current debates in cultural studies or from a more global perspective—historical and practical knowledge are still separated. Even if performance, composition, and musicology students share general classes on music history or music aesthetics, there are rarely signs of a more integrated approach.↗
53. See, for example, “Global Music History Course Design: A Pedagogical Toolbox with Syllabi,” ed. Gavin S. K. Lee, special issue, this Journal (2024) 14, no. 1, https://jmp.amsmusicology.org/vol-14-no-1/.↗