Brandon Farnsworth Curating Contemporary Music Festivals Music and Sound Culture | Volume 47 For C. Brandon Farnsworth , born in 1991, works as an independent music curator, and as a research associate at the Zurich University of the Arts, where he also studied classical music performance and transdisciplinary studies. He pursued his doc- toral degree in historical musicology at the University of Music Carl Maria von Weber Dresden, and was an affiliated researcher with the joint “Epistemologies of Aesthetic Practice” doctoral program at the Collegium Helveticum. His research focuses on the intersection of performance and curatorial studies, and strives for a global perspective. Brandon Farnsworth Curating Contemporary Music Festivals A New Perspective on Music’s Mediation Special thanks to my supervisor Prof. Dr. Jörn-Peter Hiekel, as well as Prof. Dr. Dieter Mersch, Prof. Dr. Christa Brüstle, and Prof. Dr. Florian Dombois. This work would not have been pos- sible without the support of Dr. Fabian Goppelsröder, Dr. Ines Kleesattel, Prof. Isabel Mundry, Michael Schindhelm, Prof. Patrick Müller, or Silvia Berchtold.I would also like to thank Gender Relations in New Music, the entire team of the Munich Biennale, and the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin for their support. This work is an adaptation of the dissertation “Curating Festivals for Contemporary Music” submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the Hochschule für Musik Carl Maria von Weber Dresden. With support from the Zurich University of the Arts, Institute for Theory. 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Contents Image and Figure Rights .................................................................. 9 1 Introduction ........................................................................ 11 1.1 Establishing the Field....................................................................................... 11 1.2 The State of the Art ........................................................................................ 15 1.2.1 Scholarly Literature............................................................................... 15 1.2.2 Literature on Curating Performance ........................................................20 1.3 Scope and Overview ...................................................................................... 23 2 Curating ........................................................................... 29 2.1 Introduction.................................................................................................. 29 2.1.1 The Scopic Regime of the Crystal Palace .................................................. 34 2.1.2 Modernist Exhibition Practices and the Commodification of the Musical Work at World’s Fairs in England ..................................................................... 36 2.1.3 The International Narrative of the Festival ................................................ 38 2.2 The Anatomy of Festivals and Biennales .............................................................40 2.2.1 Fest/ival .............................................................................................40 2.2.2 Arts Festivals...................................................................................... 43 2.2.3 General Characteristics of Arts Festivals ...................................................46 2.3 Curating Biennales ......................................................................................... 61 2.3.1 Documenta V ....................................................................................... 61 2.3.2 Documenta 11 ....................................................................................... 72 2.4 Curatorial Discourse ...................................................................................... 80 2.4.1 Historical Emergence ............................................................................ 81 2.4.2 Curatorial Ambiguity .............................................................................84 2.4.3 Curating and Immaterial Work ................................................................ 88 2.5 Conclusion.................................................................................................... 94 3 Performative Curating and Experimental Performance ............................ 97 3.1 Introduction.................................................................................................. 97 3.2 Reading Shannon Jackson ...............................................................................98 3.2.1 Theatricality as the Violation of Medium-Specificity..................................... 99 3.2.2 Jackson’s Ten Theses ...........................................................................105 3.3 Curating Dance / Dance Curating ...................................................................... 111 3.3.1 Dance is Hard to See ............................................................................. 111 3.3.2 Dance and the Museum ......................................................................... 116 3.4 Curating Theatre / Theatre Curating ................................................................ 124 3.4.1 Dramaturgy vs. Curating ....................................................................... 124 3.4.2 Truth is Concrete................................................................................ 130 3.5 Conclusion.................................................................................................. 136 4 Munich Biennale for New Music Theater .......................................... 139 4.1 Introduction................................................................................................ 139 4.2 Hans Werner Henze ....................................................................................... 141 4.2.1 Henze’s Compositional Practice .............................................................. 141 4.2.2 Henze’s Biennales ................................................................................ 142 4.3 Music Theatre? ............................................................................................. 145 4.4 Peter Ruzicka...............................................................................................148 4.4.1 Ruzicka’s Career ..................................................................................148 4.4.2 Two Fragments ................................................................................... 149 4.4.3 Ruzicka’s Biennales .............................................................................. 154 4.5 Daniel Ott and Manos Tsangaris (DOMTS) ............................................................162 4.5.1 Manos Tsangaris................................................................................. 163 4.5.2 Daniel Ott ...........................................................................................165 4.5.3 Concave and Convex ............................................................................168 4.6 The 2016 and 2018 Biennale Editions .................................................................169 4.6.1 Overview............................................................................................169 4.6.2 Biennale Platforms............................................................................... 173 4.7 Compositional and Curatorial Practices ............................................................ 180 4.7.1 Musical Means, Curatorial Ethos............................................................. 180 4.7.2 Education and Dissemination .................................................................185 4.7.3 The Biennale Platforms as a Change in Labour Relations ............................. 194 4.7.4 Heterogenity as a Meta-Narrative............................................................ 199 4.8 The Munich Biennale in Numbers..................................................................... 203 4.8.1 Age of Commissioned Composers at the Biennale...................................... 204 4.8.2 Number of Productions at the Biennale ................................................... 206 4.8.3 Concentration of Productions at the Biennale........................................... 208 4.8.4 Gender of Commissioned Individuals at the Biennale.................................. 209 4.8.5 Number of Co-Producers of Biennale Productions ...................................... 212 4.9 Conclusion................................................................................................... 216 5.1 Introduction................................................................................................. 219 5.2 A Brief Prehistory to the Maerzmusik Festival .................................................... 222 5.2.1 The Berliner Festspiele ........................................................................ 222 5.2.2 Musik-Biennale Berlin .......................................................................... 224 5.2.3 Historical Trauma and the Post-Reunification Musik-Biennale Berlin ............. 226 5.3 Maerzmusik 2002–2014 .................................................................................. 228 5.4 Berno Odo Polzer ......................................................................................... 230 5.4.1 The Programme is now the Text............................................................. 230 5.4.2 Attaca .............................................................................................. 234 5.4.3 Experiments with Concert Staging ......................................................... 238 5.4.4 The Catalogue as the Locus of Discourse-Production................................. 242 5.5 2017 Opening Concert: Julius Eastman.............................................................. 247 5.5.1 The Northwestern University Concert, 16 January, 1980 .............................. 247 5.5.2 A Concert, A Reenactment .................................................................... 253 5.6 Storytelling for Earthly Survival....................................................................... 258 5.6.1 Storytelling for Earthly Survival Part 3: Composting is so Hot! ..................... 265 5.6.2 Compos(t)ing the Evening..................................................................... 266 5.7 Curating and the Maerzmusik Festival .............................................................. 268 5.7.1 Curating Concerts............................................................................... 268 5.7.2 Maerzmusik’s Curatorial Shift ................................................................ 270 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 5 Maerzmusik: Festival für Zeitfragen ............................................... 219 Image and Figure Rights Image 1: SC 1950.82.28. Dickinson Brothers, The Transept, from Dickinson’s Com- prehensive Pictures of the Great Exhibition of 1851, 1854, published, lithograph printed in colour on paper, sheet: 16 x 19 in., Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Massachusetts Image 2: Image courtesy of Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2011.M.30). © J. Paul Getty Trust Figure 1: Figure reprinted with permission from Ronald Kolb, Shwetal A. Patel, and OnCurating Journal. © OnCurating Journal 2018 Figure 2: Figure reprinted with permission from Ronald Kolb, Shwetal A. Patel, and OnCurating Journal. © OnCurating Journal 2018 1 Introduction 1.1 Establishing the Field This book is an attempt to establish a theoretical basis for curatorial practice in the field of contemporary classical music (CCM). 1 As organizers and artists alike are experimenting with new forms of mediating and presenting musical work, CCM’s relation to its audiences is becoming a key area of concern both for scholars and for practitioners. There thus exists an urgency for reflecting on these approaches from a scholarly perspective informed by practice, one that can reflect on the interrela- tionships between forms of music’s administration, mediation, and performance. In order to do this, this work will lay out a new way of understanding the medi- ation of contemporary musical practice, one that is both informed by curatorial practices in neighbouring artistic disciplines, but also developed out of the unique and specific challenges that exist in relation to such practices in CCM. Central to this project will be the argument that music curatorial practice is not synonymous with interdisciplinary concert dramaturgy: composing concerts, inte- grating sound installations, performances that feature visual elements, or “expand- ing” the definition of musical material does not necessarily mean success in achiev- ing social relevance, or creating new paradigms of musical production, rather, such initiatives often represent remixes or superficial changes to a robust underlying ideology. In contrast, music curatorial methodologies should be understood as symptomatic of a new and different kind of approach to musical leadership, one with an increased attention to the effect of mediation and contextualization on the perception of musical practice. A variety of relevant sources drawn from curatorial studies in both the visual arts, and in the performing arts of dance and theatre, will allow for connections to concepts and ideas about the mediation of art from a broader array of practitioners. In this way, curatorial practice in music is not the “importation” of something from 1 Throughout this work, the term the term “contemporary classical music” (abbreviated CCM) will be referred to when discussing the field in general, while the term “New Music” will be used when discussing specifically the German context, where the relationship to Neue Musik is an important historical reference. 12 Curating Contemporary Music Festivals a foreign discipline, but rather constitutes specific kind of approach to thinking about mediation, one that is informed by music history, but also takes advantage of an abundance of interesting practices and ideas also from other disciplines. These examples and arguments are used in order to enrich discussion of the mediation of CCM festivals, and to provide additional perspectives on how to interpret the formats being analyzed. Curatorial practices in music are thus argued to be ones that understand the setting of a specific frame for a musical event as itself an expressive and often criti- cal act. In developing a framework for examining such practices, which this volume attempts in the first two chapters, the goal is to create more nuanced understand- ings of music curatorial practice that will in turn spur and inform future music curatorial initiatives. Although important developments are occurring in many different kinds of musical institutions, the focus of this work is specifically on the leadership of festi- vals, in particular focusing on two complementary case studies of curatorial prac- tice in CCM. While it is not just festivals that are beginning to engage with these challenges—important developments are happening also in the programming of concert series and seasons, in the leadership of permanent cultural institutions, and in education—both their central role in the sustaining of European musical life, and their being the site of several significant attempts at addressing these is- sues make them an ideal starting point for investigating the mediation of musical practice. Even just focusing on Germany, a short survey of some of its best-known fes- tivals reveals how many of them are currently undergoing fundamental changes that can be viewed through the lens of a curatorial perspective. For instance, its oldest festival for New Music, and one of few entirely for new commissions, the Donaueschinger Musiktage has over many editions now tried to reflect on how forms of musical presentation must be updated for a changing society. 2 The Darm- stadt Summer Course, which despite ostensibly being a summer school is also a major “festival” in its own sense, has also been embracing change, creating so- called “open spaces” as of 2010 that give a platform for participants in the course to self-organize and show their work, and is expanding the (sub)genres of musical programming it offers. The Wittener Tage für neue Kammermusik, another im- portant commissioning festival, has been attempting new approaches and concert formats, such as music theatre. The ECLAT festival in Stuttgart has also been em- bracing music theatre, performance installations, and concerts that address their multi-media dimensions. The Munich Biennale for New Music Theater, which will be studied here, has been creating idiosyncratic new forms of music theatre that are experimenting with the limits of the genre. The Maerzmusik festival, another 2 On the festival in Donaueschingen, see Köhler 2006, 87–93. 1 Introduction 13 case study, has been engaging in deep theoretical reflection about its role and the composers it programs. A view just over Germany’s borders reveals similarly large- scale and important festivals experimenting with their formats, such as Oslo’s Ul- tima festival, Vienna’s Wien Modern, the Festival Rümlingen near Basel, or Archipel in Geneva, to name just a few examples close at hand. While certainly worthwhile, a detailed study of all major German New Music festivals would be beyond the scope of the current volume. Instead, the focus will be on two case studies, the Munich Biennale for New Music Theater (Chapter 4), and the annual Maerzmusik Festival at the Berliner Festspiele (Chapter 5), each of which for its own unique reasons can be considered as exemplarily of certain changes and challenges that are currently occurring in this field. While both are also examined historically, the primary concern here is with some of their most recent editions: the 2016 and 2018 editions of the Munich Biennale, as well as the 2017 and 2018 editions of Maerzmusik. 3 These festivals are argued to exhibit important symptoms of a new kind of leadership of music festivals, one that closely combines administrative and artistic considerations together into what will be argued to be a curatorial practice. A study of the more august Donaueschinger Musiktage and Darmstadt Sum- mer Course was decided against. This is because the two case studies that have been chosen here are argued to exhibit under their current leadership unique and exemplary forms of musical mediation not seem to the same extent at the two other festivals. This in turn makes them more significant case studies than their two better-known counterparts. Examining the Munich Biennale for New Music Theater in Chapter 4 allows for the opportunity to explore New Music’s relation to music theatre in depth. The fo- cus in this chapter lies on an examination of the relationship between the artistic practices of both Daniel Ott and Manos Tsangaris, the current co-directors, and in particular the platforms that they have run in the lead up to their two biennales so far. Both composers’ focus on the composition of heterogeneous elements in their compositional practices, a trait that appears again in how they constitute the conditions of production for biennale compositions, establishes an integration of their artistic and administrative practices that is mirrored in their approach to the biennale. This is argued to relate to curatorial practice in its blending of organiza- tional and creative aspects, and resembles the skillset required for the contempo- rary knowledge worker. By in turn encouraging young practitioners to take charge of the mediation of their works as an extension of their artistic practice, they mirror 3 For both the Munich Biennale for New Music Theater, as well as the Maerzmusik festival at the Berliner Festspiele, the festivals were examined both historically since their founding, and through first-person methods (with the author visiting the festival editions that are discussed in-depth in this volume). 14 Curating Contemporary Music Festivals the transformation of their own artistic practices into curatorial ones. This creates a kind of nesting-doll situation that allows for an examination of both new edu- cational practices (and their challenges) in music theatre, as well as the manner in which their commissioned productions are mediated to the festival public. The book then complements the focus on music theatre by examining the Maerzmusik festival and its processes of commissioning that puts emphasis on the experience of the festival event itself as the objective of the curatorial practice of the festival curator, Berno Odo Polzer. The selection of individual works, and the specific ways in which they are programmed, presented, and combined in various formats are understood as a form of artistic expression by the director, achieved through the careful composition of festival concerts. These concerts weave CCM together with related artistic presentations into situated combinations that function through thematic or formal similarity. Developing out of this, Polzer’s music curatorial approach is focused on the specific “composition” and mise en scène of musical and other works in order to investigate various concepts and ideas related to music, its history, and its rela- tionship to issues of time and perception. As Polzer’s position as artistic director of this festival concentrates definitional power in one individual, the festival be- comes a realization of his vision. This relationship between artistic director and the works he programs has been readily established in curatorial discourse. Using the history of exhibition-making as a guide, this approach is forecast to come into tension with musical practitioners taking charge of their own processes of medi- ation, as explored with the Munich Biennale. 4 While this contradiction exists be- tween emancipated values at the centre of the festival and the establishment of the curator at its authorial centre, the festival is nevertheless regarded as a successful instance of using musical means to create a festival that explicitly positions itself towards major societal debates such as decolonization, gender issues, ecological crises, capitalism and neoliberalism, etc. In examining these two case studies, it is argued that they are touching on and beginning to experiment with curatorial concepts, however that there still re- mains avenues of improvement when it comes to the realization of music curatorial 4 Throughout this volume, the term “musical practitioner” will be used to refer to a person who is participating somehow in the act of music-making. This term is used because of its ambi- guity as to the exact nature of the role being played, and allows for description of musical performance without assigning discrete, pre-codified roles at the same time. This is particu- larly relevant in those cases where established roles and responsibilities in the music-mak- ing process are being subverted, or new combinations of responsibilities are being formed. These new forms are then allowed to emerge through their description rather than through recourse to reified categories. Its ambiguity also allows for an openness to exist in regards to the disciplinary or genre affiliation of the music maker—allowing also this to be something defined in the situated event of performance. 1 Introduction 15 practices. Through the close examination of these two exemplary cases, as well as through the laying of a theoretical groundwork for music-curatorial thinking, this volume begins to span the gap between artistic and administrative practices in CCM and those of the larger performing arts field. 1.2 The State of the Art 1.2.1 Scholarly Literature While several fields touch on issues also related to curating in music, a signifi- cant scholarly treatment of the subject has yet to be found. While some prominent scholarly projects relate to the intermixing of artistic and organizational consider- ations in musical practice, this project will be argued to differ from earlier research in significant ways. A first position in this area is Martin Tröndle, with his scholarly project to es- tablish a theory of the concert as a basis for the field of concert studies . This approach has been outlined by Tröndle across two edited compilations, Das Konzert (2011) and Das Konzert II (2018) He is clear throughout both his texts and the articles collected in his compilations that the object of his research is the concert for classical mu- sic in both its historical development, and as it exists today, a field that he claims has received very little academic treatment historically, which also supports the position maintained here (2018, 25). While his chief concern is the classical music concert, and thus slightly different to this project, it nevertheless takes a similar perspective on contemporary musical practice, examining the constitution of its frame. Tröndle argues that the classical concert as it exists today, with its separation of the participants in a concert event into a collective of silent, passive listeners and active musicians, is no longer relevant for a society where individuality is highly prized (Tröndle 2018, 42). In other words, the classical concert format is no longer adapted to the contemporary public, and must evolve to suit their interests. As a remedy to this problem, Tröndle suggests a broad program of experimentation with the various elements of the concert situation, all with the goal of finding vari- ous new ways of presentation that will catch the attention of a contemporary pub- lic. 5 5 As Patrick Hahn suggests, the metric of success that Tröndle uses in this part of his argu- ment quickly reveals itself to be the market. His essay also supports the criticism that Tröndle defines his project extremely narrowly in terms of the traditional classical concert as it has persisted over time (see Hahn 2018, 18–19). 16 Curating Contemporary Music Festivals Tröndle’s approach to defining the basis for a domain of concert studies is prob- lematic in its framing of the field of concert studies using a structuralist methodol- ogy: distinct musical communities are understood as homogenous and self-same, and the relationships between them (i.e. what makes for a successful concert expe- rience in pop music, or techno, or hip-hop, etc.) is established through an equiv- alency of relations (a is to b as c is to d). Therefore, neither the form of audience subjectivity constituted through characteristics of the concert event, nor the con- tent being programmed are permitted to be called into question outside of a rel- ativist understanding of community values. The diagnosed irrelevancy of the clas- sical concert then places an impossible burden on solely the issue of concert set- up and staging to solve, while unquestioningly upholding core aspects of Werktreue and the classical canon as seemingly faultless and beyond criticism. Added to the methodological problems with this approach, Tröndle’s project is, because of his underextension of the classical concert, dealing with the estab- lished canonical classical music repertoire and the implications for it of new and different kinds of stagings. The material is pre-assumed, and seemingly cannot be called into question, rather, only its “framing” is in need of further reflection for him, in a schema that thus implies that these can be freely separated from each other. This volume seeks to establish a more dynamic relationships between artistic practices, their mediation, and their reception. The focus is on understanding the situated assemblages of contemporary music festivals, rather than on application of presumed values. It is furthermore focused more on the dissolution of homoge- nous, container-based conceptions of cultural production (not a chief concern for Tröndle). For these reasons, the work of Tröndle does not establish a significant forerunner to the following project. Jonas Becker’s Konzertdramaturgie und Marketing: Zur Analyse der Programmgestal- tung von Symphonieorchestern (Concert dramaturgy and marketing: an analysis of the program design of symphony orchestras) is subject to similar criticisms. Leav- ing aside that the work deals mainly with three symphony orchestras in Duisburg, Essen, and Bochum, rather than with festivals, the work would conceivably be rel- evant to this volume through its titular examination of the relationships between concert design and marketing. This connection is a fundamentally curatorial con- sideration, in its focus on the ways in which managerial and economic concerns can be reconciled with artistic ones (see section 2.4.2). Furthermore, the term curating is often implicitly understood as somehow synonymous with a form of program design by many who use it in writing about CCM, as will be shown in the next section. Becker’s conclusion seems to sketch the outlines of some important curatorial problems that would need to be solved in order to better realize non-normative con- cert dramaturgies, audience outreach, and more diverse programming at the three institutions analyzed. However his project is clearly one of description and not of 1 Introduction 17 engagement or theoretical action. He states that due to certain resistances among programmers, musicians, and the audience, only modest amounts of change are possible (2015, 199–202). A balance is called for between “convention and innova- tion,” forming a synthesis that is already heavily weighted towards stasis, and is not further expanded upon (202). Unwillingness to thoroughly explore the consti- tution of the categories he describes means that he does not succeed in developing any useful theoretical tools for transforming the status quo. For instance, the du- alism between “music-internal” and “music-external” ( inner- and aussermusikalische Themen ) is steadfastly maintained throughout, along with once again the untouch- ability and immutability of the concept of the musical work, preventing more fun- damental analysis of the issues that are diagnosed to be pursued. In contrast to the previous two positions, Christa Brüstle’s Konzert-Szenen (2013) has been a useful reference, in that the work follows musical practices over the course of the 20 th and 21 st centuries that understand the moment of their perfor- mance as not a moment of reproduction, but as an event happening in the moment. Through this shift, she is able to write an history of alternative concerts, ones that acknowledges that all senses of perception make up the concert experience, not just the ear, and that so-called “musical autonomy” should perhaps not always be the sole focus of the concert (Brüstle 2013, 9–10). She furthermore astutely points out that the separation into aspects “internal” and “external” to music, crucial to both positions above, may be better understood as “external to musicology” instead (ibid.). The scope of Brüstle’s work does not however include approaches to festival leadership; her concern is with artistic practices. Her work is nonetheless signif- icant in its portrayal of artists who see the mediation of their works as integral to their musical expression. Thus, while not explicitly positioning itself in regards to issues of arts administration, as with Tröndle or Beckert, Brüstle ends up de- riving an approach to concert mediation out of artistic experiments with it. The trajectory of her work provides an important account of the historical factors in contemporary musical practice that have led to many of the mediational strategies employed by musicians discussed here. Because as a matter of course it does not focus on institutional questions, or questions of the festival event, the work is then nevertheless not a significant forerunner to this volume. While no major scholarly projects may currently exist in this regard, there have been attempts particularly within the realm of journals and publications about CCM that have begun to explore the implications of curating in the field of mu- sic. A recent notable example was the May 2018 issue of Neue Zeitschrift für Musik , focusing on the theme of curating and its potential meaning in New Music prac- tice. Among the articles was an interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist (by the director of Wien Modern, Bernhard Günther), underscoring the importance of that star curator as the symbol of curatorial practice par excellence in New Music’s imag- 18 Curating Contemporary Music Festivals ination of curatorial practice (Obrist and Günther 2018). This was complemented by an article by Jörn-Peter Hiekel contextualizing the field’s interest in curating with music historical examples of earlier attempts at rethinking the concert for- mat (Hiekel 2018a). This author also published an essay, situating the interest in curating by other fields within a history of curating’s emergence as an indepen- dent field (Farnsworth 2018). Also of note is a significant article in the New Music publication MusikTexte that asked a series of questions about festival leadership to the leaders of ma- jor European festivals themselves (Eclat, Wien Modern, Wittener Tage für neue Kammermusik, etc.). The article is noteworthy in its premise that festival directors themselves can and should be a source of discourse about their festivals themselves (Nonnenmann 2017). Perhaps the most ambitious project so far has been the initiative Defragmenta- tion: Curating Contemporary Music, a cooperation between the Darmstadt Sum- mer Course, the Maerzmusik Festival in Berlin, and the Donaueschinger Musik- tage, in cooperation with the former director of the Ultima Festival in Oslo. The initiative describes itself as a research project aimed at enduringly establishing the debates currently ongo- ing in many disciplines on gender & diversity, decolonization and technological change in institutions of New Music, as well as discussing curatorial practices in this field. (Internationales Musikinstitut Darmstadt, n.d.) The project consisted of internal meetings between festival directors and expert advisors in the fields they wished to address, as well as a final conference at the Darmstadt Summer Course in 2018. Whether the initiative will have any long-last- ing effects remains to be seen, but so far has seemed to only act as a fig-leaf, ad- dressing these issues superficially rather than show any fundamental willingness for change in either programming or festival infrastructure. In their response to the Defragmentation conference in Darmstadt, the curato- rial collective Gender Relations in New Music characterized the initiative as such: The “Defragmentation” initiative—responding to our initial call to action [at the 2016 Darmstadt Summer Course]—is a long overdue opening into institutional acknowledgement of these issues; an important and laudable start. That being said, “Defragmentation” has yet to make any specific public commitments to seri- ous structural change. Instead, the primary outcome of the overall initiative seems to be this week’s “convention”—an outcome that threatens to do little more than pay lip service to and tokenize the issues without tackling them head on. (Gender Relations in New Music n.d.-a) 6 6 Note that the author was involved in the drafting of this statement. 1 Introduction 19 These issues remain unaddressed by the organizers. In other words, it seems as if, though there is gradually an acknowledgement of the importance of curating CCM—understood here as a cypher for critical knowledge production, an interest in issues of social justice, and a willingness on the part of organizers to reflect on how they are framing musical practices in their festivals—there still remains a lack of serious commitment to these issues on the part of festival leaders. A further aspect that can be studied is how CCM practitioners use the words “curating” and “curator.” Examining the occurrences of these terms and the con- texts in which they are used allows for an insight into how curatorial practices have been perceived implicitly by music practitioners. In order to do this, an opportu- nity sample (n = 16 individual selected sources) of instances where the term has been used specifically by prominent figures in New Music and concert studies in recent years has been made, and its discursive context analyzed. 7 These consisted mainly of texts by musicologists, introductions to festivals and projects, essays in specialized magazines, and one interview. While this sample is small and statisti- cally non-representative, it allows for a small survey of the use of the term across important figures in the German New Music community. The result shows both a range of meanings, and a general consensus about specifically two key character- istics of the term’s definition as it is currently being used. The first finding is that the use of the term curating often seems to be used as a rhetorical marker to flag that the approach to organizing is based on some kind of theme, and therefore rather than operating within one single artistic tra- dition, is willing to engage with any related artistic discipline. It is also commonly associated with references to the visual and performing arts in this respect, and to practices that engage or navigate through multiple fields. An observed emphasis on experiments with concert staging, creating alternatives to established forms, relationships between various forms of knowledge, and by extension often also po- litical considerations, means that curatin