Curating Contemporary Music Festivals : A New Perspective on Music's Mediation / Brandon Farnsworth

• Funder: Zürcher Hochschule der Künste
• VerfasserIn: Farnsworth, Brandon
• Author: Zürcher Hochschule der Künste
• Year of Publication: 2020
• Edition: 1st ed.
• Language: English
• Series: Musik und Klangkultur ; 47.
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (326 pages) :; illustrations; digital file(s).

Contemporary music, like other arts, is dealing with the rise of »curators« laying claim to everything from festivals to playlists - but what are they and what do they do anyway? Drawing from backgrounds ranging from curatorial studies to festival studies and musicology, Brandon Farnsworth lays out a theory for understanding curatorial practices in contemporary music, and how they could be a solution to the field's diminishing social relevance. The volume focuses on two case studies, the Munich Biennale for New Music Theatre, and the Maerzmusik Festival at the Berliner Festspiele, putting them in a transdisciplinary history of curatorial practice, and showing what music curatorial practice can be.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter 1 Contents 5 Image and Figure Rights 9 1.1 Establishing the Field 11 1.2 The State of the Art 15 1.3 Scope and Overview 23 2.1 Introduction 29 2.2 The Anatomy of Festivals and Biennales 40 2.3 Curating Biennales 61 2.4 Curatorial Discourse 80 2.5 Conclusion 94 3.1 Introduction 97 3.2 Reading Shannon Jackson 98 3.3 Curating Dance / Dance Curating 111 3.4 Curating Theatre / Theatre Curating 124 3.5 Conclusion 136 4.1 Introduction 139 4.2 Hans Werner Henze 141 4.3 Music Theatre? 145 4.4 Peter Ruzicka 148 4.5 Daniel Ott and Manos Tsangaris (DOMTS) 162 4.6 The 2016 and 2018 Biennale Editions 169 4.7 Compositional and Curatorial Practices 180 4.8 The Munich Biennale in Numbers. 203 4.9 Conclusion 216 5.1 Introduction 219 5.2 A Brief Prehistory to the Maerzmusik Festival 222 5.3 Maerzmusik 2002-2014 228 5.4 Berno Odo Polzer 230 5.5 2017 Opening Concert: Julius Eastman 247 5.6 Storytelling for Earthly Survival 258 5.7 Curating and the Maerzmusik Festival 268 5.8 Decolonizing Time 273 5.9 Conclusion/Coda/Konzertemacher 277 6. Conclusion/Curating Music 281 Bibliography 289 Appendix: List of Productions at the Munich Biennale for New Music Theatre from 1988-2018 311