Comprehending improvisation as a principal creative paradigm affects the way we make music, how we understand it, and how we listen to it. By reflecting on my own practice, I discuss the idea that improvisation exists not only in so-called improvised music but also in composition, in interactive computer systems, and in audio mixing. Presenting the case study Strings and Syllables, an album of duet improvisations I released in 2020, I create a discourse between indeterminate, interactive, collaborative, and co-authorial working processes, and the idea of the musical work (Goehr, 1992).

In classical music performance, if the only tool to sustain the great tradition may be seen to be perfectionism, it may hijack artistic expression and freedom. Possibly it will also limit the expressive potential of the performer. Taken together, the vast repertoire, the pressure to compete, and the institutional demands levied in order to make a career leave very little room for exploring new and radical parameters in performance or interpretation.

This paper aims to posit performers and performance (within the Western Art Music tradition) as a source of knowledge in a reconsideration of the musical work’s ontology. I argue that performance, when involving precomposed pieces, cannot be fully understood without an acknowledgement of a “relationship” between performer and work, and vice versa—that the work cannot be properly understood without serious consideration of performances. 

This polyphonic audio paper addresses the relation between master and apprentice in the music conservatoire, and gives voice to the central human and non-human agents in this context. We aim to explore the power structures that constitute a structural framework for these relations, with regard to the agency with which students shape their individual interpretations, and therefore also to the role of imitation in instrumental music teaching.

This audio paper draws on analysis of a case study within the field of artistic research. In summer 2018, the project sent poet Gunnar D. Hansson, composer Anders Hultqvist and ecological sound artists Stefan Östersjö and Halla Steinunn Stefánsdóttir on a search for the sounds of the book Tapeshavet (Hansson, 2017). The work links to the author’s Activation Series, which employs the artistic method of activation through a practice of performative responsivity to an environment. It therefore falls under the field of ecological sound art.

The term historically-informed has a long-standing association with musical performance. Indeed, for over half a century performers have been developing and describing strategies for delivering performances that are historically-informed, typically involving the use of period (or replica) instruments to present historic works, with some performers adopting performance conventions that were (ostensibly) used at the time such works were composed. There are, of course, many reasons for adopting such historically-informed performance strategies. For example, one might reason that historically-informed performances respect the composer’s intentions, or help to re-establish forgotten readings of musical texts, or even revive musical contexts, behaviours and customs that disappeared long ago. Whether these aims may be reasonably achieved, however, has been the subject of much debate among scholars, with critical notions of historical accuracy and authenticity taking centre stage.

Founded in 1892 and known as the birthplace of modern astrophysics, the Yerkes Observatory in Williams Bay, Wisconsin ceased operations in 2018. That year, its mechanical technologies were captured by Coppice (Noé Cuéllar and Joseph Kramer) to draw parallels between its acoustic signatures and functions, and those of Coppice’s glossary of study since 2009.

This audio paper is produced by Salomé Voegelin and Mark Peter Wright as part of the UK research council funded project Listening Across Disciplines II. It reflects on the practice and teaching of auscultation – a medical technique for listening to the body with a stethoscope – in relation to how we know the body as a physiological and a political entity from its sound.