Description
Digital technologies and media have become productive tools to research music: digital databases facilitate the access to and dissemination of scores between scholars and communities; various programmes and innovative AI software help researchers to analyse musical pieces; and digitisation devices and processes have come to play an important role in the successful preservation of music. Such technologies, however, inform and are informed by specific understandings of the music in question, meaning how it exists and how we - as scholars - interact with it: above all, what these technologies and their use have in common is their focus on the concept or notion of the musical work (Goehr, 2007[1992]). This is well visible in what is studied with such technologies, particularly under a more traditional frame of historical musicology: scores and notations, performances, or recordings of musical works are common objects of enquiry (Johnson, 2020).In our paper, we present an intervention into such understandings and research methods based on our interdisciplinary, practice-based research at the Maastricht Centre for the Innovation of Classical Music (MCICM), a collaborative research centre between Maastricht University, the regional symphonic orchestra Philzuid, and the Conservatorium Maastricht (Zuyd University of Applied Sciences). There, we have observed first-hand how digital technologies - both in the context of research but also practice - are commonly understood as ‘extraneous’ to the music, as a tool rather than as an ontological agent. We aim to complicate this picture by asking how digital technologies (1) can be seen as fundamental to the continuing existence of music, (2) they might stimulate opportunities to open up understandings of the music, and how this might, in turn, (3) affect how music can be researched with help of such technologies.
We will do this in two steps: first, we introduce Christopher Small’s (1998) concept of ‘musicking’, a constructivist reading of musical performance that will enable us to address the narrow boundaries of the regulative work-concept so important in music research. This allows us to develop a thought experiment in which we propose music research and music technology scholarship as ‘musicking’ activities, thus questioning the boundaries between music theory and practice. In a second, connected step, we present digital technologies akin to musical instruments, to draw attention to the (dormant) playful and performative capabilities of digital technologies in and for music research. We will reflect on how this analogy could help to innovate the collaborations between music researchers and technology scholars, as well as how it could open up new types of music research.
| Period | 2024 |
|---|---|
| Event title | Digital Technologies Applied to Music Research : Methodologies, Projects and Challenges |
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | Lisbon, PortugalShow on map |