Keywords

1 Prelude

The cover image of this volume greets readers with an ugly spray-painted foam head, filmed in the Swedish barn housing Trond Reinholdtsen’s Norwegian Opra. Over the course of his video opera The Followers of Ø, we learn it is called ‘Mother’, that it births three disciples, and that their mission is to pursue artistic autonomy at all costs, an aim brought to campy, chaotic, and absurdist extremes over the opera’s 17 short webisodes.Footnote 1 In a separate series of videos posted to his YouTube channel, Reinholdtsen takes his ‘opra’ on tour, screening it to ‘everyday’ people including his rural Swedish neighbours, a garden centre parking lot, the bingo hall on a ferry (without sound), for the trees in the primeval Bialystok forest, outside a Polish nightclub, etc.Footnote 2 The video juxtaposes its intention to “directly engage with the proletariat of Europa in the hope that the message of «Ø» will give new power to the struggle of the masses”, as the title card informs us, with the tepid responses of motley audiences receiving the work with a mix of confusion, polite bewilderment, and (for Reinholdtsen seemingly worst of all) disinterest (Reinholdtsen 2018, 1:08).

Between The Followers of Ø and the reactions documented in his screening tour, Reinholdtsen captures a sense of cynicism towards the institution of New Music that resonates with many of the conversations we have had preparing this volume. It is the feeling of continuing on in the face of adversity, despite your own doubts in what you are doing. As Žižek mentions regarding the Hollywood movie Kung-Fu Panda,

On the one hand, the movie mobilises […] military mystique, Kung-Fu fate, warrior discipline […]. [But] the thing is that the movie is totally ironic, making fun of its own ideology. What is so fascinating is that although the movie makes fun of its own ideology all the time, the ideology survives. And this is how cynicism functions. (Žižek 2012, 0:15–0:49).

Replacing ‘military mystique and Kung-Fu fate’ with the fanatical pursuit of musical autonomy and Wagnerian opera makes this into a keen description of The Followers of Ø and its roadshow screening tour. Mocking, imitating, and lambasting both the artistic tradition that informs them and the idealistic vision of audience it fails to reach, it nevertheless remains bound to and dependent on it, as if by fate. For Žižek, this cynicism belies a deep reliance on what is being criticised, suggesting that underneath such irony and sarcasm there exists a latent affirmation of the object of critique, leading to its continued survival. But he also calls attention to all the more real insecurities about what value, if any, still exists in what is being maintained. As Reinholdtsen’s work illustrates, New Music has such self-doubt in surplus, asking anxiously what value the music its institutions produce, and whether they in any way still live up to its lofty narratives of artistic freedom, societal relevance, etc. Reinholdtsen even stokes this doubt further: the ‘everyday’ people for whom this zany, off-the-wall opera filled with expanding foam, detuned voices, and dead fish is screened are not offended. Far worse, we are shown on video that they simply do not care. A fear of apathy replaces shock value.

Reinholdtsen’s campy lambasting of New Music reveals however not just the composer’s own deep uncertainty, it also opens up the possibility for change to take place: in the YouTube comments section for Ø Episode 16, as the disciples of Ø dance among mud, fake smoke, and spewing red goo, a commenter writes “10 years of state support for this. 14-year-olds on DeviantArt show more talent and creative ability than this”.Footnote 3 In an instant, the situation changes. (Finally) provoked, the public speaks up, questioning the funding apparatus that gives Reinholdtsen the resources to make this work in the first place. With Shannon Jackson, we could name Reinholdtsen’s composed campy approach a “hijacked de-skilling”, wherein artists actively mask their skill “in order to interrogate and perhaps explode the art traditions from whence they came” (2014, 58). In order to interrogate in more detail what exactly is exploded and why, what this entails, and how far it reaches, all paths inevitably lead us to some form of question about the institution of New Music. This fundamental tension between mockery and adaptation, critique and destruction, drives much of this volume. Sharing Reinholdtsen’s insecurity about our field, our intention with this volume is to publicly open the floor for discussion, in an institution which, despite its name, is often all too happy to keep such uncomfortable topics until after the performance is over, the gear packed down, and the audience on their way home.

2 Introduction

2.1 Denormalisation

New Music’s relationship to its institutions has never been easy. At its inception in the early twentieth century, it insisted on embodying a radical break with tradition, focussing on the transgression of existing norms while continuing to value its innovativeness and ability to create the new as its highest artistic aim. At the same time, New Music has situated itself in the tradition of classical music and continues to rely on and co-exist within its institutions; since Schoenberg and his students, this dialectic of rupture and continuation has been one of its founding principles.Footnote 4

The continued insistence on the new that its name suggests has a further paradoxical effect, tying it back to a certain historical moment that has long passed—the term New Music was coined by critic Paul Bekker in 1919, burdening it with the modernist ethos of constant innovation. When the gesture of a radical break was repeated after the Second World War, the epithet stuck, continuing to do so especially in the German-speaking world where the capitalisation of Neue Musik is common until today. In choosing a direct translation of this term over other less established, less specific terms like contemporary music, or contemporary art music, it is this tricky historical legacy and its current inheritants that we wish to invoke and explore here.

In all its radicality New Music today is a discipline, understood both in its sense of being a domain of knowledge and as the shaping of bodies and practices through a complex network of institutions, including degree programmes, festivals, concert series, listeners, journalists, awards, funding structures, ensembles, composers, composer-performers, musicologists, etc., each regulated, defined, and normalised in relation to each other and to the world. When this network is working normally, it by definition recedes into the background, invisible. When some part breaks down or changes, it is denormalised and experienced as resistance or conflict (‘this is not okay, this is inacceptable’). This network becomes visible, solutions are proposed, themselves constrained by the scope of the knowable and sayable.

The way it sees itself, New Music is an institution of critique, but this also means it is an institution that can itself be critiqued—perhaps all the more because of all the critically minded people who inhabit it—critiquing the institution of critique. To this end, a recent profusion of research, activism, and artistic production has suggested that its institution itself has (again) become denormalised, particularly from decolonial, diversity, intersectional feminist, and anti-capitalist perspectives.Footnote 5 This volume examines the rift between these registers of critique, rife with mutual misunderstandings, and subtle-yet-meaningful shifts in emphasis.

But to orient ourselves in these shifting grounds, we find it necessary to first establish a position from which to embark on navigating this tricky path. We begin by examining the idea of the institution itself and what it means to criticise it, before contrasting how ideas of institutional critique are addressed in different art historical traditions, and finally concluding by outlining forms of criticality in New Music artistic practices, contrasting the narrative of New Music’s perceived acriticality with current and historical approaches that demonstrate the contrary.

2.2 Institutions as Form, Orientation, and Exclusion

In the long tradition of institutional critique in the arts, various concepts of institution have been employed, ranging from a narrow sense that limits itself to firmly established organisations like museums to a broad sense that encompasses the various actors’ embodied ways of producing art as well as thinking and writing about it. These concepts have often remained implicit and have not necessarily been explicitly related to the rich theoretical traditions exploring it. Indeed, ‘institution’ is one of the fundamental sociological concepts that has spawned an immense body of scholarship and a wide range of theories across several disciplines such as sociology, political science, anthropology, and philosophy. Émile Durkheim, one of its founding fathers, even called sociology as such “the science of institutions, their genesis and their functioning” (Durkheim 2013, 18).

To provide some theoretical background for our queries, we would like to take a step back from the analysis of institutional critique in New Music and turn to some theoretical considerations, focussing on two fundamental aspects: institutions as modes of organising human behaviour and as social entities that raise the question of belonging and exclusion. Rather than giving an overview on theories of institutions, we will base this discussion on two—radically heterogeneous—scholars: Arnold Gehlen and Sara Ahmed. Gehlen is somewhat infamous as a conservative thinker who came to terms with the Nazi government rather easily and who nevertheless played an important role in the post-war intellectual scene in West Germany. Against this background, his praise of institutions appears dubious. Nevertheless, his theory of institutions provides important insights into the reach and importance of institutions for any cultural practice, insights that are particularly relevant for an understanding of musical practices.

Ahmed, on the other hand, is a feminist theorist of diversity and postcoloniality and thus embodies a position that could not be more different from Gehlen’s. Her book on institutions explicitly focusses on the question of exclusion and the possibility of change, topics all but absent in Gehlen’s work. However, this does not lead her to a generalised scepticism towards institutions as such that was common in the political thinking and practice in the 1960s. Rather than imagining an impossible utopian future that would do away with institutions, she insists on the continuous necessity of working within them and making them less exclusionary. We might thus call Gehlen’s and Ahmed’s work two contributions to an institutional realism: acknowledging their fundamentality and indispensability and their inherently problematic character.

For Gehlen, institutions are fundamentally comprised of culturally constituted, stabilised, and habitualised behaviour and its material complements.Footnote 6 One example he gives is the knife and the act of cutting, which are strictly complementary, the knife embodying a normative suggestion (Sollsuggestion) how it should be used. The term reminds us that the affordances of the objects that surround us have a normative social dimension. This simple structure can be augmented up to very complex societal institutions, which have usually lost any obvious connection to everyday concerns and immediate desires. In the end, society is nothing but a network of institutions, which even ideas and concepts are dependent on.

We can look at musical instruments as a particularly illuminative example of why we must consider even the use of the most elementary tools as institutions. The prerequisites of playing an instrument are extensive, learning to play it requires immense effort and discipline, and a good part of this discipline consists in shaping one’s body according to established rules. Some of these rules and norms are built into the instrument, but never all of them, and learning to play it always means learning to play it right (which may extend to the ‘right’ way to play it wrong, etc.), i.e. within a culturally established context, usually an institution in the more traditional sense. Institutions can accommodate a great variety of subjective motives of action without endangering their function. In fact, the “relief” (Entlastung) they offer subjectively depends on precisely this: the possibility to perform actions without reflecting on their form and without having to muster the appropriate motives. Having to rely on a perfect alignment of all individual motives would make the functioning of societal institutions all but impossible. The way the members of publicly financed orchestras in Germany speak about their professional life offers a very revealing example of this: when playing a concert, they are “on duty” (im Dienst).

Gehlen speaks, somewhat brutally, of our being “subsumed” by various institutions (Gehlen 1956, 68), suggesting a relationship of more or less complete subordination. This observation is echoed in Andrea Fraser’s famous statement that “the institution is inside of us, and we can’t get outside of ourselves” (Fraser 2009, 414). This should not be understood as a defeatist statement based on a sloppy appropriation of theoretical concepts (Raunig 2009, 5–6) but primarily as a recognition that an institution is not some mechanism that remains external to us even if we are trapped in it. As Gehlen insists, it shapes our desires and needs along with our abilities.

While it appears harsh and slightly out of place in Fraser’s case, Raunig’s critique is apt in the case of Gehlen’s pitiless evocation of our ‘subsumption’. Raunig quotes Foucault’s observation that the development of what he calls governmentality also engendered a concurrent questioning of its principles, namely, critique

as at once partner and adversary of the arts of governing, as a way of suspecting them, of challenging them, of limiting them, of finding their right measure, of transforming them, of seeking to escape these arts of governing or, in any case, to displace them, as an essential reluctance, but also and in that way as a line of development of the arts of governing (Foucault 1996, 384).

Relating this to institutions and their critique, critique would thus be a shadow of institutional life, something it engenders and suppresses at the same time. This, of course, is something that Gehlen is not willing to acknowledge. Still, Raunig’s flight or escape from the institutions we find ourselves subsumed by is “a flight that is simultaneously an ‘instituent practice’” (Raunig 2009, 7). Countering the fetishisation of closure he finds in Fraser, Raunig describes these instituting practices as something not completely apart from institutions but avoiding the closure and calcified power structures they entail.

While we are not convinced that we can make a categorical distinction between (bad) institutions and (good) instituting practices, we would like to point to an interesting remark Gehlen makes. With no apparent intention of explicitly addressing the question of critique, he writes: “She who raises the question of meaning has either lost her way or expresses, consciously or unconsciously, a desire for other institutions than the existing ones” (Gehlen 1956, 69). His point is that asking for the meaning of institutions and practices already presupposes a minimal distance to them, thus implying that such a distance is possible. Asking why things are done a certain way very soon runs into difficulties, comparable maybe to Wittgenstein’s bedrock where all justifications end and “I am inclined to say: ‘This is simply what I do’” (Wittgenstein 2009, § 217). According to Mary Douglas, this is exactly the point where institutionalisation has been successful (Douglas 1986, 47) because it has become completely normalised. Insistent questioning thus implies either unfamiliarity or dissatisfaction.

Dissatisfaction with existing institutions is the very starting point for Ahmed’s research and practice. Her focus is on diversity work within institutions, which by definition is about challenging and changing them. She illustrates the job description of the diversity worker with a picture of a brick wall and contends: “The institutions can be experienced by practitioners as resistance” (Ahmed 2012, 26). This is the flipside of the orientating and stabilising function of institutions that Gehlen considers unconditionally beneficial: not only are they resistant to change, they may appear as the very embodiment of resistance. This resistance, however, and possibly the very existence of the normative side of the institution will remain invisible to those who seamlessly fit in it and see no reason to change it. As a normative framework of acting, assigning, and recognising legitimacy, the institution thus might not surface at all for those whose legitimacy is never questioned.

On the other hand, those who are explicitly or implicitly excluded from it or whose legitimacy is constantly put into question experience its active resistance, which is often based on social conventions that are never explicitly stated. Ahmed’s prime example is her own as a Black woman in academia (which she has consciously left), but such exclusions exist in the field of music as well. Here, as Scharff argues, gender, racial, and class inequalities have been shown to lead to “underrepresentation of women, black and minority ethnic players, as well as musicians from working-class backgrounds”, in addition to “other patterns, including horizontal and vertical segregation, but also more complex issues such as the association of classical music with whiteness” (2017, 41).Footnote 7

The question of exclusion gives another, less harmless meaning to losing one’s way: those who are structurally excluded will always appear as having lost their way, and instead of experiencing the institution as providing beneficial and reassuring stability, they will continually feel out of place and be reminded of it. For them, there is no normalisation.

For her analyses, Ahmed draws on the “new institutionalism” in the social sciences (Powell and DiMaggio 1991; Brinton and Nee 1998; Lowndes and Roberts 2013) with its attention to the genesis, functioning, and modes of continuance of institutions, shifting the focus away from stability and from the danger of an uncritical affirmation of the status quo. However, her own work leads her to a healthy scepticism towards theories that stress the fluidity and precarity of institutional structures and the categories they embody and enforce. For this reason, she may find herself closer to Gehlen than to, for instance, Actor Network Theory, even though she would abhor his position politically. This is where realism comes in: the fundamental question must be “how what is ungrounded can become a social ground” (Ahmed 2012, 182), thus acknowledging the persistence of institutions as well as their contingency and changeability.

All this reminds us that institutions are instances of “legitimized social grouping” based on mechanisms of (partial or complete) inclusion and exclusion (Douglas 1986, 46). Ahmed calls them “kinship technologies” and explains: “a way of ‘being related’ is a way of reproducing social relations” (Ahmed 2012, 38). This leaves open whether the relations in question are produced by the institution or only actualised and enforced by it. In the case of Western music institutions we have an interplay of both: not everybody is equally welcome, but only those who have gone through the treadmill of institutional training are set apart from everybody else by being legitimised to continue making their way through the institutional network of ‘classical’ music in which New Music largely participates.

In this context we can consider institutions as places or sites both in a literal and in a metaphorical sense: the university and the conservatory are located in specifically designed buildings, the concert hall is a building (and a dispositive that is surprisingly transportable), but entering the building does not make one part of the institution. In order to achieve that, you have to take up residence in it, to inhabit it, as Ahmed puts it—a privilege that is not granted to everyone. Although it may be frustrating or even distressing, not or not quite inhabiting an institution and its norms opens a way of critically reflecting on them: asking why. It is in this sense that the apparent outsider who is continually looked upon as if she had lost her way may be in a good position to analyse the workings of the institution, just like the social climber of petit bourgeois and/or provincial origin who is left with “a cleft habitus, inhabited by tensions and contradictions” (Bourdieu 2008, 100) is a natural sociologist.

In the broad sense expounded here, the concept of institution involves all four levels of mediation of music that Georgina Born has proposed: the first and fourth, which relate to the emergent microsocialities in musical performances and the institutional framework of music in the more traditional sense, respectively, but also the second, which refers to imagined communities projected by musical practices, and the third, which references wider social identity formations in the way they are refracted in and through music (Born 2012).

How can this be applied to a situation where almost no one will subscribe to being ‘subsumed’ by the institutions or of being completely at home in them, even those who appear to be at their defining centre? Where the claim of criticality is a discursive prerequisite for being taken seriously? This is certainly much more pronounced in the art world, but we can observe the same tendency in the world of New Music (Rebhahn 2014). Even though the situation Ahmed analyses is much more hurtful individually and socially, this problem can be compared to what she observes in “critical” white colleagues: “When criticality becomes an ego ideal, it can participate in not seeing complicity” (Ahmed 2012, 179). In our case criticality is not just an individual ego ideal but a professional habitus, a manner of inhabiting the very institution one claims to be critical of.

In the following section we want to consider the way institutional critique has been conceptualised, with a focus on the visual arts. Rather than reiterating its history, which would far exceed the scope of this introduction, we want to focus on the question of how critique relates to its object, or, more specifically, how it situates itself within or vis-à-vis its institutions.

2.3 Critique, the Arts, and New Music

According to Peter Bürger’s well-known analysis, it was what he referred to as the ‘historical’ avant-gardes of the early twentieth century (Dadaism, Surrealism, Futurism, the movements in the early years of the Soviet Union) that launched the first attack on the institution of art, an attack that remains the reference for all later critical endeavours. In their case, the target was not any particular set of institutions but the institution of art as such and its alleged autonomy. For Bürger, the project of the avant-garde was to shock, denounce, and ultimately overthrow the bourgeois construction of the institution of art, which provides its autonomy and thus curtails its ability to intervene directly in society, forestalling its impact. His project involved establishing the historical avant-gardes as a singular historical moment creating a break from tradition that cannot be repeated in the same way again, but also ultimately failing to completely overthrow the institution of art.

From this perspective, the artistic movements of the 1960s, among which institutional critique may be counted, are ‘neo-avant-gardes’, feeble attempts to revive the original impetus without achieving its radicality: “the neo-avant-garde institutionalizes the avant-garde as art and thus negates genuinely avant-gardiste intentions” (Bürger 1984, 58). For Berger, the critique of art as an institution has been superseded by a plurality of critiques of specific institutions of art, none of which still subscribes to the goal of tearing down the boundary between art and everyday ‘life’.

Hal Foster offers a more favourable reading of the neo-avant-garde, arguing that Bürger, in his overreliance on artists’ own interpretations of their work, misses the fundamental relationality of artistic critique and its ultimate dependence on a given historical constellation (Foster 1996, 15–16). In its place, Foster argues for a reading of the avant-gardist project as a more generalised schema, fleshed out by specific historical constellations, but in this sense also able to dialogue with itself across history. This leads to what he sees as ‘waves’ of neo- and neo-neo-avant-gardes across the twentieth century in dialogue with their past manifestations, and a more generalised formulation of its project of critique as “interminable” (Foster 1996, 15). Significantly for us, this leads Foster to frame avant-gardist critique as fundamentally contextual in its reactions to specific historical and geographical situations (e.g. interbellum Zurich Dada vs. post-defeat Berlin Dada), and performative in that “these attacks on art were waged, necessarily, in relation to its languages, institutions, and structures of meaning, expectation, and reception” (Foster 1996, 16).

From this position we gain two insights. The first is the recourse to the performative situation and a related situatedness of artistic critique. This connection, which with Jackson we will also call a theatricality, will be addressed shortly.

Second, such a generalised (genericised) recipe for critique, with its postmodernist undertones, raises the issue of relativising visual arts critique of the parameters of art production and reception into meaninglessness. As Marina Vishmidt remarks, critique has become “hegemonic”, “the sine qua non for discursive legitimacy in the circuits of art production and mediation” (Vishmidt 2008, 253). Irit Rogoff has characterised this as a

move from criticism to critique to criticality—from finding fault, to examining the underlying assumptions that might allow something to appear as a convincing logic, to operating from an uncertain ground which, while building on critique, wants nevertheless to inhabit culture in a relation other than one of critical analysis; other than one of illuminating flaws, locating elisions, allocating blames. (Rogoff 2008, 99–100)

If we accept Rogoff’s diagnosis, even ‘not quite inhabiting’ the institution is now being rejected by many who insist on their belonging to the institutions they critique and their responsibility towards those institutions. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that this generalisation of critique to an attitude of criticality leads to a certain degree of mitigation, maybe even neutralisation—as if artists were anticipating and assenting to their own ‘subsumption’ by the institution. Indeed, Vishmidt observes “a striking overlap between the ideological coordinates of neoliberal dogma and criticality: mobility, adaptation, boundlessness” (Vishmidt 2008, 259).

This overlap has of course been noted before, namely, as one aspect of what Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello famously called “artistic critique” of capitalism since 1968. In their portrayal of the capitalist system, they argue critique is a major (but not the only) force by which it is able to continually renew itself. Artists’ utopian claims are dismissed as always-already subsumed within this model. As with Foster’s schematic view of avant-gardism, and Vishmidt’s argument that critique has become a prerequisite, there is no aspect of escape or beyond in this model, critique’s relationality means that it is always in a relationship of maintenance with the object of critique, as they write “even in the case of the most radical movements, [critique] shares ‘something’ with what it seeks to criticize” (Boltanski & Chiapello 2007, 40). While the first response to critique can be the loss of effectiveness of one rationale for capitalist accumulation, the result is inevitably a new rationale better adapted to the critique itself.

This builds a fatalistic backdrop, wherein the “attempt to escape the web of fate [is] the web of fate”, as Timothy Morton sets up this looping relationship (2016, 61). The anxiety and paralysis this produces—artists are as determined to break this loop as they are fearful of repeating it and becoming agents of capitalist expansion—can perhaps partly explain this shift away from utopian critical analysis and denunciation and towards situated solutions. But it seems that criticality the way Vishmidt understands it, even with such micropolitical adaptations, is in danger of practicing a type of ‘anticipatory obedience’, anticipating its own utilisation by the institution. By contrast, even though critique cannot shake off its ties to its object, it may be able to retain a minimal distance towards that object and thus gain some room to manoeuvre. It is certainly true that imagining a different future of art, just like imagining a different society, will inevitably share ‘something’ with the (art)world it finds itself in. Anything else would be naïve utopianism or abstract negation. But it would be wrong to construe this as a choice between utopianism and complicity.

The question we have to ask is whether it is possible to retain a perspective that points beyond the affirmation and amelioration of what is, despite this apparent realism. This problem is closely related to the category of the new—the pivotal category of modernism—that has become problematic in contemporary art but still reigns supreme in New Music, inscribed as it is in its very name. Theodor W. Adorno finds an interesting metaphor for a type of newness that is neither an abstract nor a determinate negation nor manages to leap into completely uncharted territory: he evokes the image of a child searching for a truly new chord on the keyboard (Adorno 1997, 32). This image of searching for the new within a bounded multiplicity captures this separation between the intention of utopian newness, which is embodied by the dynamics of art itself more than the intentions of any specific artist, and its groundedness in the already-existing. It is the search for and the promise of the new where the utopian spirit is kept alive.

Of course, Adorno is a difficult ally when it comes to institutional critique. For him, the utopian perspective of art is not to be gained by relinquishing its autonomy, however precarious it may be, but by strengthening it (Adorno 1997, 225–228). Art is autonomous and fait social at the same time, and truly contemporary artworks inhabit this antinomy and reflect it rather than claiming to resolve it to one of its sides. This reflection, however, is supposed to take place in the way they choose and process their material, not in any explicit critique of its institutions. We will return to this in the following section, as it remains the core of New Music’s self-conception. What interests us here is the fact that this way of conceptualising the search for the new might be helpful in our discussion of critique, its relationality, and the institutions’ ability to assimilate it in order to transform themselves. If institutional critique wants to hold on to some kind of utopian perspective instead of just being functionalised and absorbed, it may have to find new ways of not quite inhabiting its institutions.

The question of the new and the image of the child at the piano bring us back into closer proximity to music, which is all but absent in Bürger’s and Foster’s accounts. However, the latter’s understanding of the avant-garde as a generalised schema whose contextual and performative dimensions lend it its particular specificity leaves ample room to describe differences between the various artistic disciplines with regard to the role of critique in relation to their own institutions, akin to the specificity of the subject’s subsumption of the institution with Gehlen combined with the specificity needed to critique it. Many important and influential movements of the 1960s were born out of an awareness of developments in other artistic disciplines, with temporary alignments and mutual borrowings often leading to frictions and productive misunderstandings. Since then it seems like the boundaries between the different artistic disciplines have partly solidified again, and while a lot of contemporary artistic work crosses these boundaries, the frictions and misunderstandings proved to be astonishingly persistent.

The scholar who has worked on this most extensively is Shannon Jackson, with a focus on the performing and the visual arts. She relates the critical project outlined by Adorno directly to both institutional critique in the visual arts and to the societal role of the performing arts. The frequently noted etymological link between theatre and theory as a basis for understanding of theatre’s societal function as “a space of critique, as a space for ‘viewing the very framework’ of social and artistic evaluation”, she argues, is a parallel development to the phenomenon of institutional critique in the visual arts (Jackson 2022, 13). Thus for her, works focussing on the institutional context of artistic work are what has led to a new, broader interarts conversation around the role of the institution in co-constituting artistic work, the role of the art institution in society, and the questioning of art’s autonomy (Jackson 2022, 15).

For Jackson, reflection on and critique of the institutional infrastructure of the arts thus functions as the generalised common ground for interarts discussions. Our question would be whether we could not also turn this argument around: it was and is interarts discussion, interdisciplinary work, movement across artistic boundaries, etc. that have opened the door for a closer look at the various institutions of contemporary art. They come into view precisely when they are defamiliarised by such interdisciplinary work and by hosting people that do not normally inhabit them, as argued with Gehlen and Ahmed in the previous section. Potentially this paves the way for a different kind of critique that might be called lateral. It is, however, revealing that New Music is completely absent from the interarts dialogues Jackson refers to. This may be due in part to her own background and the works she focuses on. However, there is a real absence of contemporary music from these debates, which points to its relatively isolated position in the field of the arts and its complicated relation to institutional critique. In recent years, there has been a surge in intermedial, interdisciplinary, and conceptual work in contemporary music, which may signal a gradual change of this situation. Still, there is a long way to go.

Until then, we find a perfect formulation of New Music’s relation to itself and its own situatedness in Morton’s book on ecological thinking: “something maniacally deviating from itself in a desperate attempt to be itself” (Morton 2016, 110). As he remarks, this is close to Bergson’s definition of what makes us laugh. Taking this humourous view of critique means acknowledging its depressive element, that as Boltanski and Chiapello argue there is no promised escape, no elsewhere that will not be the same as it already is here, but also that the task at hand is not sublimating this depression into artistic practice, but rather inhabiting the already known, the existing, and the problematic in a different way, as perhaps in the case of Adorno’s child searching for new chords on the piano. As Morton argues, the goal is not to stop this loop functioning, but rather to “interrupt the violence that tries to straighten” it, in other words the processes that canonise, that exclude, and that maintain this system of constant manic deviation (Morton 2016, 157).

While such a view hollows out New Music’s existential belief in constant innovation, it also opens the possibility of recontextualising practices that perhaps do not ‘sound like’ the traditional form of avant-gardist critique in music. Latching onto the contemporary interest in searching for excluded and previously omitted voices, we see a new kind of New Music occurring at many contemporary music festivals, one that tries to redefine its capital N Newness in terms of a minority politics.Footnote 8 We argue that this approach is in important ways a departure from the established notions of critique present in New Music that also disrupts many of the norming functions of its institution in both artistic and organisational practices.

2.4 New Music and Critique

While Foster or Jackson reveals genealogies of visual and performing arts practices that bring the institutions of art themselves into view, the starting point of this volume is the chronic under-reflection of these topics in New Music. Here, a narrower view of critique has long prevailed, whose horizon remains the concert event, and which remains fixed on an idea of musical production based on technical virtuosity, hardly ever questioning its medium. Viewing itself as inheriting an avant-gardist tradition, we can observe how New Music critically reflects on various facets of contemporary society, however unlike its peers in other musical genres and art forms, this positioning unfolds within the generally score-based performance of discrete, newly commissioned works by authorial composers in an established style. The institution of New Music qua institution thus remains largely invisible and unreflected. While New Music can be said to reflect on, develop, and expand its medium, what is usually missing is the recognition that the constitution of the medium is itself a product of the New Music dispositive, i.e. product and part of its specific set of institutions. ‘Music’ itself remains largely unchallenged, producing a throttling and limiting of the horizon of critique in New Music (Grüny 2021a).

This section examines some of the spaces of exception to this rule both among artistic practices and current organisational practices. In doing so, we wish to explore facets of New Music production that have accompanied it throughout its history, but have been largely neglected from normative histories of New Music.

2.4.1 Artistic Practices

A key area where self-reflection and discussion about the limitations of the New Music dispositive continue to take place is in approaches most commonly labelled as ‘music theatre’. Referencing again Jackson and the questions of interdisciplinarity, critical work, and the interarts conversation, we find clear reason for this. In her reading of Michael Fried’s critique of minimal art, the concept of theatricality can be defined as “an ‘in-between’ state in which forms belonged to no essential artistic medium; to work across media, that is, to violate medium-specificity” (Jackson 2005, 172). Jackson thus advances the argument that theatricality becomes cast as a method for modernist, medium-specific arts to re-evaluate the conditions of their production (173), as the underdetermined-yet-ubiquitous space of encounter with the work. For those seeking to highlight the conditioning and framing of the work by the institution, she argues that ‘theatricality’ describes the manipulation of the performative encounter with the artwork, bringing into relief how the neutrality and invisibility claimed by its institutional frame occludes as much as it reveals. Understanding theatricality as an extension of the encounter with the work, the argument for music theatre as a key site for artistic resistance to the institution of New Music becomes clear. The ability to address not just materials authorised by New Music, creating instead ‘a space for viewing’ the authorising framework itself, and ultimately for suggesting how it can be otherwise, continue to be powerful tools used by institutionally critical artists.

The work of Mauricio Kagel is an illustration of such a practice focussing on deconstructing the New Music dispositive. With his concept of Instrumental or New Music Theatre explored in works such as Staatstheater (1967–70), Kagel’s practice focussed on critiquing established categories through the de- and re-composition of their components. Similarly, the compositional approaches of Vinko Globokar and Dieter Schnebel, and, even more radically, the Scratch Orchestra initiated by Cornelius Cardew reimagine the role of the composer through forms of collaboration in an attempt to overcome the alienation of the musicians from their performance. Adding to this, Cage’s music theatre works are some of the clearest examples of the composer engaging directly with institutions and their functioning. This can be seen, for example, in Europeras 1&2 (1985–1987), which (re)combines elements from 128 eighteenth- and nineteenth-century operas using chance operations, or Rolywholyover A Circus (1993), which transposes his aleatoric approach into the museum context, employing chance operations to transform the museum’s constituent aspects (collections, staff, visitors) into the materials for a performance (see Skurvida 2017).

Notably, not all these examples took place within the institutional context of theatre, which imposes its own restrictions. While Kagel explicitly relied on the proscenium stage and the degree of control it allows (Kagel 1975) and Globokar’s and Schnebel’s practice remained tied to the concert hall, the Scratch Orchestra preferred more flexible settings. We can distinguish three different ways of working with theatre or theatrical elements: music theatre in the sense of a new genre that sets itself apart from the more restricted and traditional genre of opera; musical practices that incorporate theatrical elements on the concert stage without necessarily using them as a mode of institutional reflection; and music theatre as a conceptual tool to describe practices that employ theatricality in the broad sense expounded by Jackson in order to assemble the disparate elements necessary to bring the hidden structures of musical production to light, rather than leaving the constitution of this assemblage to the disciplinary defaults of New Music and its concert format.

A recent example of the latter can be found in Johannes Kreidler’s product placements (2008), which the composer himself lists as “music theatre” (in quotation marks). The work consists of a short, 33” track consisting of 70′200 musical samples along with video documentation of the process of registering the samples with the German copyright organisation GEMA and delivering the resulting truckload of paperwork to their offices. The work was meant to demonstrate how copyright laws impede artistic creativity and freedom of expression, using a form of malicious compliance to surface the system’s absurdity, as the administrative work of processing so many applications would have led to major disruptions at GEMA. In the documentary video, Kreidler explains that “the musical composition, the essay, the sculpture, the performance, and the entire discussion are materials: one could say it’s a multimedia theatre work” (Kreidler 2019, 6′27″).In listing these elements together, Kreidler assembles disparate elements together in the Jacksonian sense, producing a situation that violates New Music’s medium-specificity and makes visible a portion of its institution.

There has been an increase in recent years in artists assembling such heterogeneous elements together, creating project-specific ways of working with context and formats that emerge out of internal artistic logics. As Jörn Peter Hiekel argues, presentation is increasingly a core part of the artistic concept, blurring the line between music theatrical and concert situations, and thus often between musicians and performers (Hiekel 2018, 23). These productions are also increasingly eschewing interdisciplinary collaborations (defined by discrete roles working together) in favour of more transdisciplinary, team-based, and collective forms of production (Hiekel 2018, 33). While we have already shown the historical precedents for this kind of experimentation in experimental music, it must also be understood as symptomatic of a renewed artistic critique of the limitations of New Music’s institutions, with all its affiliated complexity.

While ostensibly undermining the role of composer-as-author, as Groth has argued in her analysis of composer-performers onstage, such experiments also rely on and activate New Music’s institutions in new ways, with such “‘letting go’” of established hierarchies of composer and performer also paradoxically potentially strengthening auctorial presence (2016, 703). This again illustrates the dynamics of critique, here the attempted departure from the composer-as-author model, and its being interpreted as a potential retrenchment within the institution.

Groth also gestures to Jennifer Walshe’s widely circulated “The New Discipline” text as an articulation of Jackson’s concept of theatricality as the assemblage of messy and disparate elements to undo medium-specificity. Groth summarises it as

a practice in which composers no longer remain behind their desks to write scores addressing professional musicians, instead engaging with several aspects in the process of creating a work: the concept, rehearsals, production, staging, and, finally, being present at the performance either off or on stage. (Groth 2016, 693)

While Groth examines works by Hodkinson, Steen-Andersen and Rønsholdt, this approach is also well-represented in Trond Reinholdtsen’s The Norwegian Opra which opened this introduction.

In addition to addressing forms of collaboration and presentation, many artists are also directly addressing social and political issues with their work, as well as experimenting with new organisational structures. These include projects like Hannes Seidl’s Good Morning Deutschland (2016) giving a voice to a wave of refugees arriving in Germany through the creation of a radio station, or experimental contemporary music publisher Y-E-S collaborating with C.A.S.C.A.T.A. and the Sardinian anti-militarist movement to publish A Bucolic Treasure Hunt (2020), a score for a treasure hunt around the RWM bomb factory in Sardinia. Artist-run networks and groups, often organised around supporting gender minorities in contemporary music, furthermore, are practicing non-normative and experimental organisational structures to support such new practices. These include Damkapellet in Denmark, Konstmusiksystrar in Sweden, and Gender Relations in New Music (GRiNM) in Germany, among others. In addition to providing support networks for those excluded by the New Music institution, these artist-run organisations typically mirror their values in their forms of organisation, such as collective and non-hierarchical leadership, while also experimenting with alternative structures for creating contemporary music performance, such as Konstmusiksystrar’s experimentation with chance operations in musical programming (Antonsson and Jakobsson 2020).

2.4.2 Institutional Practices

In part as a response to these institutionally critical approaches, artist-run institutions, and alternative formats carried out over the past decade, as well as due to a larger interest among cultural institutions in issues of representation and minority politics following the mass social movements of the 2010s (Occupy Wallstreet, Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, Fridays for Future, Extinction Rebellion, etc.), New Music institutions have recently also engaged in forms of institutional critique as well. This can be described as a form of new institutionalism, following Ekeberg (2003), wherein the organisers of New Music institutions are adapting themselves to the aforementioned working methods of artists, as well as critically intervening in their own embeddedness within institutions of arts funding and patronage, city marketing and tourism, and the vision of experimental musical cultures they reproduce in the city.

Triggered by the recognition of the lack of female composers programmed at New Music festivals, many New Music institutions are currently placing a major programming focus on the inclusion of previously excluded voices. With this new perspective, they explore the ways in which the musical autonomy they have long sought to provide has not lived up to their universalist rhetoric, and are inflected by larger societal forces that lead them to take note of implicit exclusions on the basis of gender, class, ethnicity/‘race’, and/or ability.

What appears unique to this moment are these activist approaches to running and maintaining the institutions of New Music: historically, many well-known institutional efforts such as, for example, those by Karl Amadeus Hartmann (founding Musica Viva in Munich), Pierre Boulez (founding IRCAM in Paris), or Hans Werner Henze (founding the Munich Biennale for New Music Theater) seem better understood as attempts at achieving the stability that institutions provide in order to more richly realise their ultimately musical goals. By contrast, institutions’ stratification and maintenance of a status quo opposed to organisers’ commitments to intersectional diversification, decolonisation, and accessibility are now framed as the problem to be overcome. This new approach has more in common with the history of critical and activist institutional work in New Music briefly sketched above, focussed less on reproducing stability than on an expansion of a socially engaged art to the field of organising. Such an approach also connects more readily to Bürger’s definition of the avant-garde as “protest, whose aim it is to reintegrate art into the praxis of life, [revealing] the nexus between autonomy and the absence of any consequences” (Bürger 1984, 22), which fuelled initiatives such as Cardew’s Scratch Orchestra.

Other movements that from today’s perspective might be understood as institutional critique were unique to music: Arnold Schoenberg’s Verein für Musikalische Privataufführungen was created to provide a space for those who were willing to engage in the challenge of listening to new, complex works, and excluding those who were not, thus withdrawing from the public into an even more exclusive space, while Paul Hindemith’s attempts of promoting Laienmusik took the opposite route of attempting to reintegrate contemporary music—not necessarily ‘New Music’—into amateur musical practice, thus broadening its reach and impact (Hindemith 1952, ch. 11). While reacting to the “crisis of the musical public” (Kapp 1998) by moving in different, irreconcilable directions (freedom of individual artistic expression vs. social practices to overcome alienation), what these examples share is a rejection of the institution’s attempts to make itself invisible.

Significant about the renewed interest among New Music institutions in their own construction is that once again it is the institutions of New Music, their stability, norms, and related exclusions, that come into view. Just as New Music artists have generally been content to operate within the parameters of the concert event set out for them by New Music institutions, so too have organisers operated complicitly with the status quo in this regard as well. But when, for example, New Music was confronted with its longstanding and systemic gender imbalances, there comes also the need to contend with how sustained institutional policies and artistic norms, as well as their interactions, come together to produce (and continually reproduce) the problem.Footnote 9 Attempting to reform the institutional infrastructures in order to address this problem involves returning to the matter of critique of the institution, which must justify itself within the framework of what is possible given the specifics of a particular institution, while also engaging in a different kind of utopian rhetoric and engagement with the new than the art works they aim to support. We view the attempts at addressing these critiques as belonging to two categories, representing bifurcated visions of role of the arts institution in society.

The first are attempts at including more diverse artists in the programming of New Music festivals using measures such as quotas, targeted open calls, workshops, and programming efforts to include people with more diverse backgrounds into the education and commissioning of New Music, thereby attempting to remedy this injustice and widen the group of people offered the possibility for artistic creation with a relatively high degree of autonomy, free of most economic pressures, etc. At the core of this approach is an underlying belief in the continued importance of New Music’s institutions. This is all the more significant because in contrast to the general situation of the visual arts, New Music has over the twentieth century cultivated a proximity to hegemonic power, with most of its funding coming from governmental subsidies for the arts. Many hard-fought political battles have carved out this niche where relatively autonomous artistic production is not purpose-bound [zweckgebunden], which this position views as needing to be preserved. Acknowledging New Music’s shortcomings in terms of its diversity is the acknowledgement that these conditions for production are not accessible to everyone, but that with specific reforms there remains a vision of New Music which this idealist and emancipatory aspiration with an updated effort of achieving civic universality. Here, as with Schoenberg’s Verein für Musikalische Privataufführungen, the individual freedom to self-realise without constraint is prioritised above all else, and the critique follows the familiar path of holding the institution’s promise against its reality—the classical mode of immanent critique that we find in some of the critiques of the institution of the museum as well.

The second set of responses can be characterised as social ones, acknowledging that the functioning of New Music institutions is experienced as resistance to participation, and instituting changes to make more people feel welcome, as with Hindemith’s approach. Borealis: A Festival for Experimental Music, for example, has focussed a lot of work on this inclusivity aspect, such as working with local security companies to create more tolerant spaces, introducing gender-non-binary bathrooms in all venues, training festival volunteers in non-violent confrontation, etc. Such measures seek to dismantle in the words of Ahmed how the institution can present itself as a brick wall to some, or otherwise as a result of its functioning discriminate against certain kinds of people.Footnote 10 Here, assembly and music’s capacity to elicit the festive and the communal become forms of resistance to a society focussed on individual responsibility and accumulation. Diversification of artists and audiences occurs to these ends, with the increasing of local resiliency viewed as an act of micropolitical resistance to a molar politics in permacrisis, as we have already explored in the previous section. Musical programming is put in service of these goals, favouring collaboration and accessibility over its autonomy.

As these experiments and debates are still in their infancy, these artistically and socially critical approaches remain reconcilable with each other among the most progressive festivals. However, they represent significant-yet-distinct avenues to the future of New Music that must still be debated and explored. Yet this also points to something more fundamental as well. Such fundamental critiques coming from seemingly every direction suggest we are in a current moment defined by a will to renegotiate the assemblage of the institution of New Music itself. Understood as a way of organising human behaviour, as a stratified social entity in which we as subjects are subsumed, its deployment has become denormalised, appearing in this moment of its breaking down, surfacing itself by creating resistances and what are perceived as brick walls. It is from this (already past) moment of rupture and the epistemological break it has caused that the institution itself is moved from background to foreground, becoming the object of study. The historical conditions and shifted power relations that have led to the New Music institution itself becoming the “object of discourse” have become open questions that this publication is now able to explore (Foucault 2002, 44 ff.). This is the project of New Music and Institutional Critique, probing this new object from different perspectives, attempting to tease apart the tightly wound knot of institution and critique in light of such sustained, varied, and basal attacks on its core principles. What follows is thus the beginning of our attempt, together with others, of thinking through a discourse shifting away from the limited, internalist discussion of the discrete New Music work within the concert event and towards discussion about music and its place and function in society.

In this introduction, we have used the capitalised term ‘New Music’ because it refers to the musical genre that unifies this publication. It also points to its situatedness, which we are not attempting to hide: We are writing primarily from a European, more specifically German perspective. This is where our examples come from, and this is the institutional situation we are referring to. However, we have not insisted that authors adopt any specific terminology. Given the subject of this volume, we think it is of particular importance to allow for this heterogeneous cluster of terms with their variously inflected and often locally connotated meanings to be communicated also to the reader.

3 Chapters

Scholars

Contrasting Ari Benjamin Meyer’s Rehearsing Philadelphia (2022) and Kevin Beasley’s Assembly (2019) at The Kitchen, NYC, G Douglas Barrett presents in Chap. 2 two examples of artists’ parainstitutional music projects reimagining the institutions of art music by borrowing methods from contemporary art. While both wield the authorising power of art curatorship to frame certain kinds of experiences as art, they move in opposite directions. At the centre of this chiasma lies Barrett’s attempt to reconstruct our understanding of art music as a category of artistic production as vibrant and diverse as contemporary art. He demonstrates how this can be achieved by working within and alongside existing institutions, rather than outright rejecting them, as earlier forms of institutional critique would have it.

In Chap. 3, Christa Brüstle then explores why addressing gender and diversity issues remains a fundamental critique of music’s institutions. She argues that the thematisation of gender remains a radical critique of music’s phallocentric basis, understood as the universalising of the male perspective, which underpins most musical education, performance, and theory. Addressing the specific configurations of this problem in both classical and new or contemporary music, she sketches the range of issues that adopting a position sensitive to issues of gender and diversity would implicate, including addressing gender disparity in canon formation, divestment from a narrative of neutrality, the open thematisation of marginalised sexual orientations, attention to bodies, and the phenomenological aspects of musical perception and listening, as well as the relationship between music and audience.

In Chap. 4, Martin Iddon provides a detailed historical account of the institutional critiques of the Darmstadt Summer Course in the 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s, which in addition to providing stunning parallels to today, hones in on a key moment in the institution’s history. Critiques of the course’s rigidity and academicism in the early 1960s later give way to fundamental calls for its democratisation and diversification in the face of an institution increasingly out of touch with young composers. Iddon portrays how over the course of the 1970s, the reforms initiated in response to these critiques would result in it increasingly turning its attention inwards to territorial disputes between compositional styles and away from critique of the institution itself. He concludes by highlighting the work of some lesser known attendants at the courses during that time, specifically Grillo, Henderson, Kubisch, and Mosconi, who represent for him an unrealised future past of New Music in the 1980s, and whose progressive visions of New Music may still retain their potency as historical precursors to a rearticulated vision of its critique today.

Patrick Valiquet’s Chap. 5 expands a speculative historiography of the same historical period. He focusses on the Centre Universitaire Expérimentale de Vincennes (Paris 8), created as a concession to May 1968 protestors, whose radical music department at an epicentre of postmodernist thinking was both important and has since been largely erased from histories of twentieth-century music. In his reading, New Musicology’s trope of music scholarship’s lateness is symptomatic of how those critical experiments gave way to an aesthetic and social stagnation of music research starting in the 1980s that continues today. For Valiquet, universities and contemporary musicians have become complicit with each other in erasing the public memory of modernism, but thus find themselves equally disarmed in the struggle against austerity.

In Chap. 6, Benjamin Piekut examines the history of twentieth-century Black music in the USA, focussing on how its existential struggles manifested themselves in a range of institutions and institutional critiques. Beginning with jazz’s position as the first aesthetic dispositive to challenge European fine arts, he details the lasting importance of its central critiques for thinking about musical avant-gardism, including its impact on post-Cagean avant-gardes. He then outlines numerous strands of Black aesthetic traditions and their relationships to critique, accounting for the socioeconomic conditions of their possibility as an important part of understanding their achievements. Lastly, he connects this extensive overview of historical examples and debates to Raunig’s concept of instituent practices, highlighting how Black musicians’ approaches to navigating market forces and hegemonic power resulted in a range of strategies and tactics of resistance.

Artists

Opening the book’s second section, Trond Reinholdtsen details in Chap. 7 how his fanatical pursuit of ultimate artistic autonomy and control of the means of production have led him to founding his own artist institution, The Norwegian Opra. Weaving together Broodthaers’ affirmative critique of the museum with the aspirations of Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen, he makes the case for the musical pursuit of a freely interdisciplinary compositional engagement with musical ‘material’, casting off historical cruft where it does not suit. Reinholdtsen points to our global institutional instability to underscore the need for musical artists to reaffirm their importance in society in a positive light, while never compromising their artistic expression.

Sandeep Bhagwati’s contribution for Chap. 8 also turns the perspective away from critiquing publicly funded cultural institutions in liberal and democratic societies. In doing so, he brings into view the many private, corrupt, or authoritarian cultural institutions around the globe on which critique is wasted, as well as framing the idealistic belief in constantly improving to serve the public good at the foundation of institutions who do entertain critique of their operations. Bhagwati argues that the fundamental social contract underlying these institutions is threatened across several vectors, and thus that the tools of critique today must take the form of allyship, collaboration, and constructive engagement rather than controversy and idealistic righteousness.

In Chap. 9, Rosanna Lovell and Brandon Farnsworth reflect on the actions of the activist group Gender Relations in New Music, which has been involved in many protest actions advocating for more diversity in the field of New Music. Sharing an inside view of the motivations, intentions, and challenges of these actions, they reveal the different modes of institutional critique practised by the collective and discuss the important role collectives can play in speaking out against institutions.

In Chap. 10, Manos Tsangaris provides a short meditation on the relationship between music and its institution, starting from first principles and exploring the constitution of the musical dispositive to arrive at an articulation of the critical project of the New Music scene. He ends by outlining the gradual stratification of this kind of critique, the slow process of its solidification until it finally becomes an institution unto itself.

Through an exploration of the motivations behind his ‘meta-institutional’ work Kunsthalle für Musik, Ari Benjamin Meyers argues in Chap. 11 that the fundamental difference between working in the institutions of music and contemporary art is that the former lacks a sustained critique of its conditions of production, presentation, and perception. By working within visual arts spaces such as the white cube, Meyers argues he is able to draw on just such a tradition of critique and institutional boundary pushing in his practice, affording a greater degree of autonomy in self-defining the parameters of the artistic work. To achieve this in music, he argues, the concept of audience understood as the product of the fundamental separation of musical production from its reception (i.e. its commodification) must be overcome.

Interviews

Chapter 12 opens the final section of the publication with an interview between Peter Meanwell and Tine Rude (current artistic director and former managing director, respectively) of Borealis – a festival for experimental music in Bergen, Norway, and Brandon Farnsworth. The festival works with an expanded definition of experimentation in both programming and how it is organised. It focusses on including artists pushing boundaries in a variety of contexts, trying to move beyond being a festival for any one genre. The festival also extends its concept of experimentation to include how it is organised, linking the act of hearing others’ perspectives that experimental music demands of its listeners with fostering a sense of community among marginalised people and groups. This approach has led the festival to implement a number of accessibility and inclusion measures, creating a unique mix of forms of musical experimentation and community-building that materialise many other contributors’ calls for modelling change in both form and content.

Chapter 13 consists of an interview between Berno Odo Polzer and Christian Grüny, discussing how Polzer approached being artistic director of the MaerzMusik festival at the Berliner Festspiele. His approach focussed on strategies for situating contemporary music and sound practices within an interdisciplinary arts landscape, investing a unique level of care into the relation between musical programming and its contextualisation. To this end, Polzer emphasises fostering forms of collectivity and communality as the site of production of musical meaning, while also checking the often-hyperbolic claims that arts institutions make regarding their value to society.

In Chap. 14, Samson Young is interviewed by Brandon Farnsworth about his artistic practice starting as a composer of concert works now working mainly in visual arts contexts on musical topics. In discussing his practice, Young reveals a conception of the composer moving away from singular authorship towards collective creativity, and which fosters criticality through the dialogue it strikes with its audiences.

In Chap. 15, Hannes Seidl discusses with Christian Grüny the limitations of the New Music institution today through the lens of some of his recent work. His approach bears similarities to Reinholdtsen’s artist institution, creating ad hoc coalitions of curious collaborators rather than relying on existing customs and defaults, which lead to creating works that mostly re-actualise the structures they are contained within. In doing this, Seidl discusses how much of his artistic practice unfolds in between the institutional norms and expectations of the venues that host his work, revealing further complex puzzles of audience expectations, working methods, and affordances of spaces themselves.

In Chap. 16, meLê yamomo is interviewed by Theresa Beyer about his views on efforts to decolonise New Music, issues of critique that this raises, and how his biographical experience being Dutch and Filipino cause him to reflect on his status in between coloniser and colonised. For yamomo, decolonialism, as with feminism and queerness before it, has already been eaten up by capitalism and now serves as a way of acquiring more capital. He argues that within contemporary music, the goal must not be to replace one system with another, but rather to focus on understanding the methods through which hierarchies and power positions are perpetuated in order to inform our decision-making as practitioners.