Festival Directors are not the only Music Curators: Thoughts on Curating Musical Context
By Brandon Farnsworth
A DFDS cruise ship sails across Oslo Fjord during a performance of SÅLE - Et dansekunstverk i tre deler at the 2022 Ultima Oslo Contemporary Music Festival (photo by the author)
Make friends, not art - Ruangrupa
Some weeks ago, I attended a performance entitled SÅLE - Et dansekunstverk i tre deler at the 2022 Ultima Oslo Contemporary Music Festival in Norway. The performance took place in and around Villa Grande in Bygdøy, the former residence of Vidkun Quisling, Minister President of Norway during German occupation, and current home of the Norwegian Centre for Holocaust and Minority Studies. The performance took place in three parts, starting on the beach with a performance by a dancer and a trumpet player,1 before escorting visitors to a performance in the garden outside the villa by Nordic Black X-press,2 and ending in a performance by three performers in the great hall.3 The work was put together by the choreographer and artistic director Anna Charlotta Nordanstedt, surely in a significant collaborative process with its various participants and stakeholders. Without going into a play-by-play analysis of the performance, it was at least by my account successful, blending clear symbolic gestures (hip-hop combined with formalist sculptural elements in front of this villa haunted by its history) with refined speaker-work on the beach and tense-yet-delicate performances by the three performers in the great hall, evoking a rotten, hairy decadence inside, and capping off the performance. Three clear performance blocks, each standing alone, and juxtaposed together creating an enigmatic and memorable whole.
On the way back to Oslo, I got into a discussion with a colleague about the definition of ‘curating’ in New Music. I argued, as I have elsewhere, that in our field’s short history of discussing the term ’curating’ (which in its current form started, give or take, depending on who you ask and where, around 2015), we have managed to speedrun reinventing the composer as the even-more-powerful figure of the curator, who towers over not just a mere concert event, but an entire festival, infusing it with a grand artistic vision. Rather than accepting this, in this text I argue with the example of SÅLE - Et dansekunstverk i tre deler that festival directors are not the only curators, that we need to realise there are already more curators, and that, circling back, this recognition will help us rethink our approach to curating in New Music. Having established this rather more academic point, I then want to explore some of the practical operational consequences of such a change in thinking. In other words, the goal is first to argue for a change in our perception, and then to think through how this change can be used productively to help New Music address what I see as one of its core challenges at the moment.
SÅLE illustrates that there were in fact a number of artists working in a way we could call curatorial at this festival, but who might not at first instance be recognised as such. While much ink has been spilled on the topic of curating (including by me) over the past decade, I find myself continually gravitating back to a short text by Aneta Szyłak called “Curating Context” as an excellent definition of curatorial practice, and one that touches on several key aspects of curating that I want to activate here:
First, she argues from a general position of uneasiness about what it actually means to ‘curate context,’ writing that “when, on occasion, I have been asked to teach what I mean by ‘curating context’ as a ‘discipline,’ I always feel uneasy about it, as if this disciplinary approach would rob the practice of some as-yet ungraspable element” (2013, 215). Context is by definition relational, and working with it inevitably means working with what is there. Apart from saying just this, it is difficult to pretend such a situated practice can be turned into a ‘method’ that can be translated into a seminar.
Second, she identifies a critical aspect to curating. It is not just about any kind of working with context, but about “activating a context and subsequently changing what we think this context is all about,” as well as “setting a friction between [artworks for display…] and their surroundings” (ibid.). Creating this friction is something fundamentally critical, in the sense of suggesting that something could become otherwise than it currently is, implying a certain vision of change, and a justification for that reason.
The last aspect I want to highlight is how she emphasises the fundamental unknowability of material, a familiar idea to Object-Oriented Ontologists like Barrad or Morton. Szyłak writes:
Contextual activity includes numerous practical demands which, at the level of curating, not only influence curatorial positions and decisions but also reveal and make active its invisible, unpredictable and uncontrollable elements. […] We do not fully control what one can learn from curating context. First, the context can also be activated by something else, thus forcing us to admit that we are not in complete control. Second, the attention of the users of context — never singular — can also point at a ‘meaning’ that simply had slipped through our fingers, as if it had never been there. (217)
During the first part of the performance in Oslo, a cruise ship set sail and made its way across our panorama view of Oslo Fjord. Delighted, the photographer documenting the performance used the occasion to frame the performers against the ship in the background, surely producing performance documentation emphasising aspects of city marketing, and clichées about Norway’s nautical bonafides.
While we are never fully in control of context, working with context is perhaps like painting with Bob Ross, we try to control what we can, creating the conditions for frictions to emerge between the artworks and their surroundings, but in the end, we also need to be at peace with the happy accidents that result. All this is true for Anna Charlotta Nordanstedt, the artistic director of SÅLE, who had to masterfully weave together so many different people, materials, and processes into an act of curating context, as Szyłak calls it. All this is also true for Ultima’s (then) director, Thorbjørn Tønder Hansen, who, in New Music’s current jargon, would also be called the festival ‘curator,’ in charge of infusing it with a vision, a direction, and this contextual ‘friction’ between the artworks and their surroundings.
But how can there be two curators? And while we are at it, are there not then maybe 3 curators, if we include also how the dancers or performers themselves take charge of space and context using their bodies, their sounds, and their props? Is the captain of the cruise ship, who decided to leave port at just the right moment not also somehow a co-curator of the performance too? Or does the fact that contributing to the performance was probably not their intention disqualify them from the event flyer?
The context of a performative event is fundamentally unknowable because it extends indefinitely in all directions at once, meaning any detective work meant to uncover hidden intentionality is a red herring. But this endlessness and its fundamental unknowability are also how we can think the work of multiple curators together, even if each of them do an excellent job thoroughly taking charge and curating their respective contexts.
To state it differently, I argue that we cannot reduce the contextualisation of musical work, nor the ways in which meaning is generated through juxtapositions and collaborations, to any one person, least of which the artistic director of a music festival, which contains so many moving parts. Instead, there are a lot of people contributing to context here, from the festival’s director to SÅLE’s director, to the dancers and musicians, to the cruise ship captain. Finally, as Szyłack mentions, there is always also the totally unpredictable ways in which the ‘users of context’ such as audience members will create their own meanings that could never have been predicted, as in my case wildly overstating the importance of a cruise ship crossing the harbour in determining the meaning of the work.
This might all read as a bit of an academic exercise in shifting perception of who is in charge of curating context. But I would like to now turn to thinking through one of the very practical, operational consequences emerging from this changed perspective, which I hope will also be something productive and empowering within this specific context of the MINU Festival and the younger generation of musicians and organisers surrounding it. In order to explore this, I will focus on a hypothetical: what would a festival that views context as so multi-authored, endless, and rich do differently?
In one way, it would be exactly the same as festivals are now, in that it would host and provide a platform for artists’ performances, such as SÅLE: In suggesting change, it is also important to acknowledge forms of continuity and stable support.
But in another way, it would acknowledge the many different ways artists, curators, and participants can contribute to making a festival or an artistic event. SÅLE could have been seen not as just one ‘work’ among others that have been selected to be part of a festival of other works, but rather as its own additional attempt at working with context to shape a performative event. Once again, a tiny change in perception, but one that begins to let the performance stand on its own, a unit more than ‘just’ another work in the Ultima 2022 festival programme.
Suddenly, credit becomes differently distributed: rather than the performance being a reflection of the curatorial concept of Ultima’s curator, or the latest work by a specific composer, its ownership becomes more shared and ambiguous. Multiple curators and curatorial visions are understood to work together, involving different people, and addressing contexts that gradually unfurl out to the horizon. Not just a call for new titles, this is a call to think in a new way about what could be called the ‘unit of analysis,’ to borrow a term from academia, of the New Music music festival. The unit of analysis is defined as the ‘thing’ being studied, or in our case here the thing that the New Music festival is ‘about,’ at least its audience of professionals and practitioners. Usually the unit consists of the individual work, the concert, or otherwise the festival as a whole. What if this question of the unit being studied, thought about, created, controlled, or as we are dealing with music, composed, was viewed as itself something expressive? It could vary depending on the situation, and include all manner of potentially interesting new aspects of context.
Continuing this exercise, what if the festival had many of these curators such as SÅLE’s Anna Charlotta Nordanstedt, realising their own projects on different days in various spaces with their own communities? Rather than a tight curatorial theme, the festival becomes an infrastructure for supporting the work of various music-making communities, even ones that go beyond the immediate knowledge of the festival director themselves.
What if we think of contributions to the music festival beyond “The Musical Work,” implicitly understood as existing in some relationship to the 20-minute newly-composed New Music piece in a sit-still-and-listen concert in a purpose-built concert hall? The sustained interest in ‘alternative’ and project-specific concert formats of recent years has resulted (finally) in a build-up of both artistic and institutional lived experience with such projects, meaning that they are able to take place with ever-increasing levels of refinement and nuance. Why not finally cut the tether to the ‘traditional’ or default concert that we still maintain in our minds and integrate curating context directly into how we think about creating musical work?
It is worth continuing one step further. While so far I have addressed different ways of distributing musical authorship in New Music festivals, an expanded notion of context also opens the door to many other kinds of contribution as well. For if context is such an important determinator of the musical experience, examining the many (and frankly unending) other factors that could be curated, and which could enrich the musical experience, can potentially open up even more avenues for engagement.
For instance, commissioning essays, as MINU festival has done, adds to the festival imaginary, infusing it with new and different perspectives from voices both close and far away. Importantly, as we in New Music are currently in a moment of reconsidering the boundaries of our musical genre, essays such as this one tend to focus on meta-level reflections on curating, the boundaries of genre, etc. However, one should just as well imagine more exploratory texts on many subjects related to and enriching the ideas swirling around the festival. But more than just texts, commissioning art book projects, exhibitions, getting artists to design tote bags, posters, or tickets, turning a DJ set into a party, or creating a space for shared cooking, meals, or accommodation, all these things could enrich context, invite more artists and curators to imbue context with their energy, without needing to be discrete works in the festival programme.
Of course, anyone who has ever organised an event would blanch at such a list, or perhaps smile at its naiveté, knowing that with each of these suggestions comes so much additional work, money, and resources that needs to come from somewhere. This is of course a very good point, but also offers the opportunity to explore our priorities as curators. I therefore present two different responses to this criticism:
First, this is in a sense exactly the point of moving away from a model of the festival curator as the even-more-auratic author of an entire multi-day experience comprising a great deal of people. To successfully realise such intricate explorations of various niches of a festival’s context requires delegation and sharing of responsibility, authority, and importantly also credit. This returns to my core message with this text, namely that in our field at the moment, it is not enough to acknowledge the multifacetedness of context and its curation as an academic exercise. There must also be an activist angle to this, acknowledging, celebrating, and duly crediting (as well as paying) the impact of curators-who-are-not-artistic-directors. There can also be a flywheel effect to this approach, particularly when trying to work with the people and resources that already exist in a given context, rather than pretending that each new production needs to be built on a clean slate on which everything must be constructed anew with every concert and festival. This can lead in the best case to discovering the creativity and talent of who and what is already there, the preexisting social infrastructures that make up a part of context.
Second, I want to provocatively suggest that with the limited resources that are currently at the disposal of festival directors forced to make decisions about what to prioritise, it could be worth it to focus a bit less on commissioning new works and invest that energy instead in fully exploring and enriching context. As a thought experiment, what if your festival or event had one less work, and instead used that money and those human resources to more richly explore the context around the remaining works? While some funding may be tied directly to the commissioning of new works or to the neatly-packaged repeat performance of an existing production, the opportunity cost must also be considered (to say nothing of oftentimes overly prescriptive funding programmes, depending on the country you are dealing with). Writing applications, reporting grants, dealing with tech riders and driving around equipment rentals must also be seen as part of the work of festival-making that has the potential to be critically reimagined.
I believe such a shift in focus would allow for the usually genuinely new and interesting ideas presented in New Music commissions to be more fully communicated to audiences. Doing this would also contribute to transforming the New Music work itself away from the classical music idea of ‘work’ that it still takes as its model. Rather than focusing on a ‘work’ becoming ‘canonised’ or not, a perennial problem of New Music, a future could instead be imagined where the ideas latent in a work are teased out in different situations, various contexts, and multiple formats (concert, text, panel discussion, etc.). Considering that most of us are familiar with the view that most newly premiered works will never sound again, save for perhaps in one other co-produced concert in another city, or briefly screened as part of a grant application, then such an idea seems to me more realistic than hoping to reform the canonisation process in New Music.
Through an exploration of my experience of SÅLE - Et dansekunstverk i tre deler and an exploration of Szyłack’s concept of curating context, I have attempted to show how context is relational and situated, making ‘teaching’ about how to work with it a challenging task, how curating context must come with a critical angle, suggesting a way the world could become otherwise than it is, and how context’s fundamental unknowability means that curating context is inexhaustible. This unknowability and open-endedness is what can help those working in New Music think about all the people who contribute to shaping and designing aspects of context — beyond just the festival artistic director as the ultimate, all-seeing curator controlling everything. I present this insight both as an academic exercise, and as a very consciously-picked basis for a call to action: New Music must acknowledge and value those people curating context beyond just the artistic directors of festivals (for our field currently happens almost exclusively at festivals). In doing so, I have argued that we can enter into a much richer situation where we can see any number of contributions as contributing to the exploration and experience of music. Recentering our focus then on the many other forms of working with, thinking about, and contributing to music will allow us not only to find new ways to include new people and perspectives in the genre of New Music, but also acknowledge and value the work of those people we already know, but whose work does not perhaps fit into a singular notion of The Musical Work.
Works Cited
Szyłak, Aneta. 2013. ‘Curating Context’. In The Curatorial: A Philosophy of Curating, 215–24. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
1 Putli Hellsene and Nils Petter Molvær, respectively
2 Consisting of Franklin Mukadi, Kristine Elisabeth Opsahl, Amalie Sasha Scanke, Yara Emilie, Bjaarstad Medina, Jawad Aziz, Mubarak Muse and Victor Kimathi Mati.
3 Terje Tjøme Mossige, Runa, Rebne and Martin Slaatto
About the author
Dr. Brandon Farnsworth (ORC-ID 0000-0001-9095-2360) is a curator and postdoctoral researcher in musicology based at Lund University, Sweden. After studying at the Zurich University of the Arts, he completed his PhD in Dresden with the publication Curating Contemporary Music Festivals (2020, Transcript). Brandon has worked on projects with Ultima Festival Oslo, Montreal New Musics Festival, Sonic Matter Zurich, and BGNM.
SÅLE - Et dansekunstverk
Some weeks ago, I attended a performance entitled SÅLE - Et dansekunstverk i tre deler at the 2022 Ultima Oslo Contemporary Music Festival in Norway. The performance took place in and around Villa Grande in Bygdøy, the former residence of Vidkun Quisling, Minister President of Norway during German occupation, and current home of the Norwegian Centre for Holocaust and Minority Studies. The performance took place in three parts, starting on the beach with a performance by a dancer and a trumpet player,1 before escorting visitors to a performance in the garden outside the villa by Nordic Black X-press,2 and ending in a performance by three performers in the great hall.3 The work was put together by the choreographer and artistic director Anna Charlotta Nordanstedt, surely in a significant collaborative process with its various participants and stakeholders. Without going into a play-by-play analysis of the performance, it was at least by my account successful, blending clear symbolic gestures (hip-hop combined with formalist sculptural elements in front of this villa haunted by its history) with refined speaker-work on the beach and tense-yet-delicate performances by the three performers in the great hall, evoking a rotten, hairy decadence inside, and capping off the performance. Three clear performance blocks, each standing alone, and juxtaposed together creating an enigmatic and memorable whole.
On the way back to Oslo, I got into a discussion with a colleague about the definition of ‘curating’ in New Music. I argued, as I have elsewhere, that in our field’s short history of discussing the term ’curating’ (which in its current form started, give or take, depending on who you ask and where, around 2015), we have managed to speedrun reinventing the composer as the even-more-powerful figure of the curator, who towers over not just a mere concert event, but an entire festival, infusing it with a grand artistic vision. Rather than accepting this, in this text I argue with the example of SÅLE - Et dansekunstverk i tre deler that festival directors are not the only curators, that we need to realise there are already more curators, and that, circling back, this recognition will help us rethink our approach to curating in New Music. Having established this rather more academic point, I then want to explore some of the practical operational consequences of such a change in thinking. In other words, the goal is first to argue for a change in our perception, and then to think through how this change can be used productively to help New Music address what I see as one of its core challenges at the moment.
Curators all the way down
SÅLE illustrates that there were in fact a number of artists working in a way we could call curatorial at this festival, but who might not at first instance be recognised as such. While much ink has been spilled on the topic of curating (including by me) over the past decade, I find myself continually gravitating back to a short text by Aneta Szyłak called “Curating Context” as an excellent definition of curatorial practice, and one that touches on several key aspects of curating that I want to activate here:
First, she argues from a general position of uneasiness about what it actually means to ‘curate context,’ writing that “when, on occasion, I have been asked to teach what I mean by ‘curating context’ as a ‘discipline,’ I always feel uneasy about it, as if this disciplinary approach would rob the practice of some as-yet ungraspable element” (2013, 215). Context is by definition relational, and working with it inevitably means working with what is there. Apart from saying just this, it is difficult to pretend such a situated practice can be turned into a ‘method’ that can be translated into a seminar.
Second, she identifies a critical aspect to curating. It is not just about any kind of working with context, but about “activating a context and subsequently changing what we think this context is all about,” as well as “setting a friction between [artworks for display…] and their surroundings” (ibid.). Creating this friction is something fundamentally critical, in the sense of suggesting that something could become otherwise than it currently is, implying a certain vision of change, and a justification for that reason.
The last aspect I want to highlight is how she emphasises the fundamental unknowability of material, a familiar idea to Object-Oriented Ontologists like Barrad or Morton. Szyłak writes:
Contextual activity includes numerous practical demands which, at the level of curating, not only influence curatorial positions and decisions but also reveal and make active its invisible, unpredictable and uncontrollable elements. […] We do not fully control what one can learn from curating context. First, the context can also be activated by something else, thus forcing us to admit that we are not in complete control. Second, the attention of the users of context — never singular — can also point at a ‘meaning’ that simply had slipped through our fingers, as if it had never been there. (217)
During the first part of the performance in Oslo, a cruise ship set sail and made its way across our panorama view of Oslo Fjord. Delighted, the photographer documenting the performance used the occasion to frame the performers against the ship in the background, surely producing performance documentation emphasising aspects of city marketing, and clichées about Norway’s nautical bonafides.
While we are never fully in control of context, working with context is perhaps like painting with Bob Ross, we try to control what we can, creating the conditions for frictions to emerge between the artworks and their surroundings, but in the end, we also need to be at peace with the happy accidents that result. All this is true for Anna Charlotta Nordanstedt, the artistic director of SÅLE, who had to masterfully weave together so many different people, materials, and processes into an act of curating context, as Szyłak calls it. All this is also true for Ultima’s (then) director, Thorbjørn Tønder Hansen, who, in New Music’s current jargon, would also be called the festival ‘curator,’ in charge of infusing it with a vision, a direction, and this contextual ‘friction’ between the artworks and their surroundings.
But how can there be two curators? And while we are at it, are there not then maybe 3 curators, if we include also how the dancers or performers themselves take charge of space and context using their bodies, their sounds, and their props? Is the captain of the cruise ship, who decided to leave port at just the right moment not also somehow a co-curator of the performance too? Or does the fact that contributing to the performance was probably not their intention disqualify them from the event flyer?
The context of a performative event is fundamentally unknowable because it extends indefinitely in all directions at once, meaning any detective work meant to uncover hidden intentionality is a red herring. But this endlessness and its fundamental unknowability are also how we can think the work of multiple curators together, even if each of them do an excellent job thoroughly taking charge and curating their respective contexts.
To state it differently, I argue that we cannot reduce the contextualisation of musical work, nor the ways in which meaning is generated through juxtapositions and collaborations, to any one person, least of which the artistic director of a music festival, which contains so many moving parts. Instead, there are a lot of people contributing to context here, from the festival’s director to SÅLE’s director, to the dancers and musicians, to the cruise ship captain. Finally, as Szyłack mentions, there is always also the totally unpredictable ways in which the ‘users of context’ such as audience members will create their own meanings that could never have been predicted, as in my case wildly overstating the importance of a cruise ship crossing the harbour in determining the meaning of the work.
A Shift in Perspective can also Lead to a Shift in Practice
This might all read as a bit of an academic exercise in shifting perception of who is in charge of curating context. But I would like to now turn to thinking through one of the very practical, operational consequences emerging from this changed perspective, which I hope will also be something productive and empowering within this specific context of the MINU Festival and the younger generation of musicians and organisers surrounding it. In order to explore this, I will focus on a hypothetical: what would a festival that views context as so multi-authored, endless, and rich do differently?
In one way, it would be exactly the same as festivals are now, in that it would host and provide a platform for artists’ performances, such as SÅLE: In suggesting change, it is also important to acknowledge forms of continuity and stable support.
But in another way, it would acknowledge the many different ways artists, curators, and participants can contribute to making a festival or an artistic event. SÅLE could have been seen not as just one ‘work’ among others that have been selected to be part of a festival of other works, but rather as its own additional attempt at working with context to shape a performative event. Once again, a tiny change in perception, but one that begins to let the performance stand on its own, a unit more than ‘just’ another work in the Ultima 2022 festival programme.
Suddenly, credit becomes differently distributed: rather than the performance being a reflection of the curatorial concept of Ultima’s curator, or the latest work by a specific composer, its ownership becomes more shared and ambiguous. Multiple curators and curatorial visions are understood to work together, involving different people, and addressing contexts that gradually unfurl out to the horizon. Not just a call for new titles, this is a call to think in a new way about what could be called the ‘unit of analysis,’ to borrow a term from academia, of the New Music music festival. The unit of analysis is defined as the ‘thing’ being studied, or in our case here the thing that the New Music festival is ‘about,’ at least its audience of professionals and practitioners. Usually the unit consists of the individual work, the concert, or otherwise the festival as a whole. What if this question of the unit being studied, thought about, created, controlled, or as we are dealing with music, composed, was viewed as itself something expressive? It could vary depending on the situation, and include all manner of potentially interesting new aspects of context.
Continuing this exercise, what if the festival had many of these curators such as SÅLE’s Anna Charlotta Nordanstedt, realising their own projects on different days in various spaces with their own communities? Rather than a tight curatorial theme, the festival becomes an infrastructure for supporting the work of various music-making communities, even ones that go beyond the immediate knowledge of the festival director themselves.
What if we think of contributions to the music festival beyond “The Musical Work,” implicitly understood as existing in some relationship to the 20-minute newly-composed New Music piece in a sit-still-and-listen concert in a purpose-built concert hall? The sustained interest in ‘alternative’ and project-specific concert formats of recent years has resulted (finally) in a build-up of both artistic and institutional lived experience with such projects, meaning that they are able to take place with ever-increasing levels of refinement and nuance. Why not finally cut the tether to the ‘traditional’ or default concert that we still maintain in our minds and integrate curating context directly into how we think about creating musical work?
It is worth continuing one step further. While so far I have addressed different ways of distributing musical authorship in New Music festivals, an expanded notion of context also opens the door to many other kinds of contribution as well. For if context is such an important determinator of the musical experience, examining the many (and frankly unending) other factors that could be curated, and which could enrich the musical experience, can potentially open up even more avenues for engagement.
For instance, commissioning essays, as MINU festival has done, adds to the festival imaginary, infusing it with new and different perspectives from voices both close and far away. Importantly, as we in New Music are currently in a moment of reconsidering the boundaries of our musical genre, essays such as this one tend to focus on meta-level reflections on curating, the boundaries of genre, etc. However, one should just as well imagine more exploratory texts on many subjects related to and enriching the ideas swirling around the festival. But more than just texts, commissioning art book projects, exhibitions, getting artists to design tote bags, posters, or tickets, turning a DJ set into a party, or creating a space for shared cooking, meals, or accommodation, all these things could enrich context, invite more artists and curators to imbue context with their energy, without needing to be discrete works in the festival programme.
Priorities
Of course, anyone who has ever organised an event would blanch at such a list, or perhaps smile at its naiveté, knowing that with each of these suggestions comes so much additional work, money, and resources that needs to come from somewhere. This is of course a very good point, but also offers the opportunity to explore our priorities as curators. I therefore present two different responses to this criticism:
First, this is in a sense exactly the point of moving away from a model of the festival curator as the even-more-auratic author of an entire multi-day experience comprising a great deal of people. To successfully realise such intricate explorations of various niches of a festival’s context requires delegation and sharing of responsibility, authority, and importantly also credit. This returns to my core message with this text, namely that in our field at the moment, it is not enough to acknowledge the multifacetedness of context and its curation as an academic exercise. There must also be an activist angle to this, acknowledging, celebrating, and duly crediting (as well as paying) the impact of curators-who-are-not-artistic-directors. There can also be a flywheel effect to this approach, particularly when trying to work with the people and resources that already exist in a given context, rather than pretending that each new production needs to be built on a clean slate on which everything must be constructed anew with every concert and festival. This can lead in the best case to discovering the creativity and talent of who and what is already there, the preexisting social infrastructures that make up a part of context.
Second, I want to provocatively suggest that with the limited resources that are currently at the disposal of festival directors forced to make decisions about what to prioritise, it could be worth it to focus a bit less on commissioning new works and invest that energy instead in fully exploring and enriching context. As a thought experiment, what if your festival or event had one less work, and instead used that money and those human resources to more richly explore the context around the remaining works? While some funding may be tied directly to the commissioning of new works or to the neatly-packaged repeat performance of an existing production, the opportunity cost must also be considered (to say nothing of oftentimes overly prescriptive funding programmes, depending on the country you are dealing with). Writing applications, reporting grants, dealing with tech riders and driving around equipment rentals must also be seen as part of the work of festival-making that has the potential to be critically reimagined.
I believe such a shift in focus would allow for the usually genuinely new and interesting ideas presented in New Music commissions to be more fully communicated to audiences. Doing this would also contribute to transforming the New Music work itself away from the classical music idea of ‘work’ that it still takes as its model. Rather than focusing on a ‘work’ becoming ‘canonised’ or not, a perennial problem of New Music, a future could instead be imagined where the ideas latent in a work are teased out in different situations, various contexts, and multiple formats (concert, text, panel discussion, etc.). Considering that most of us are familiar with the view that most newly premiered works will never sound again, save for perhaps in one other co-produced concert in another city, or briefly screened as part of a grant application, then such an idea seems to me more realistic than hoping to reform the canonisation process in New Music.
Conclusion
Through an exploration of my experience of SÅLE - Et dansekunstverk i tre deler and an exploration of Szyłack’s concept of curating context, I have attempted to show how context is relational and situated, making ‘teaching’ about how to work with it a challenging task, how curating context must come with a critical angle, suggesting a way the world could become otherwise than it is, and how context’s fundamental unknowability means that curating context is inexhaustible. This unknowability and open-endedness is what can help those working in New Music think about all the people who contribute to shaping and designing aspects of context — beyond just the festival artistic director as the ultimate, all-seeing curator controlling everything. I present this insight both as an academic exercise, and as a very consciously-picked basis for a call to action: New Music must acknowledge and value those people curating context beyond just the artistic directors of festivals (for our field currently happens almost exclusively at festivals). In doing so, I have argued that we can enter into a much richer situation where we can see any number of contributions as contributing to the exploration and experience of music. Recentering our focus then on the many other forms of working with, thinking about, and contributing to music will allow us not only to find new ways to include new people and perspectives in the genre of New Music, but also acknowledge and value the work of those people we already know, but whose work does not perhaps fit into a singular notion of The Musical Work.
Works Cited
Szyłak, Aneta. 2013. ‘Curating Context’. In The Curatorial: A Philosophy of Curating, 215–24. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
1 Putli Hellsene and Nils Petter Molvær, respectively
2 Consisting of Franklin Mukadi, Kristine Elisabeth Opsahl, Amalie Sasha Scanke, Yara Emilie, Bjaarstad Medina, Jawad Aziz, Mubarak Muse and Victor Kimathi Mati.
3 Terje Tjøme Mossige, Runa, Rebne and Martin Slaatto
About the author
Dr. Brandon Farnsworth (ORC-ID 0000-0001-9095-2360) is a curator and postdoctoral researcher in musicology based at Lund University, Sweden. After studying at the Zurich University of the Arts, he completed his PhD in Dresden with the publication Curating Contemporary Music Festivals (2020, Transcript). Brandon has worked on projects with Ultima Festival Oslo, Montreal New Musics Festival, Sonic Matter Zurich, and BGNM.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic License.