Music 2.0 and artistic research

This reconfiguration can benefit from ongoing developments in artistic research, crucially moving from an aesthetic regime of the arts to more pluralistic, inclusive, and diverse aesthetico-epistemic modes of expression.

This paper is neither intended as research dissemination, nor as an academic essay in the strict sense – it is a position paper, a sort of conceptual manifesto articulating the situatedness of Western art music, stressing its epochality, delimitating its borders, and opening up questions and views for possible future practices. The paper has three parts: the first one offers a condensed overview of a wide range of societal, cultural, technological, and academic transformations; the second part is a critical problematization of Western art music, how it functioned as a closed box, and how it more often than not excluded both the Other and ‘sound’. The third part suggests a pivotal creative role for artistic research, and reviews several challenges for music education and research, presenting critical questions that the musician of the future will have to deal with: How to rethink music in the digital age? How to develop creative musical practices that cope with the conditions and affordances of contemporary society? What is the role and function of a musician in contemporary society? How to relate to digitization, new forms of knowledge production, technological acceleration, the proliferation of media, globalization, and changing cultural-economic conditions? How to cope with the hyper-archive and data overflow?