Presentation at annual MCICM Symposium

Presentation at annual MCICM Symposium

On April 23th, I’ll be giving a presentation together with (former) colleague Veerle Spronck at MCICM’s annual symposium. We will be talking about the Learning Orchestra, and the experiments we conducted in the past three years with South Netherlands Philharmonic orchestra. See below for a description of the theme of this year: classical music and society. You can register here: https://mcicmsymposium.nl/

Borderlands: Classical Music and Society

In an effort to make classical music relevant to a wider portion of society, institutions and musicians are increasingly seeking new ways of engaging with partners, social themes and other types of music.  Topics such as climate change, diversity and education are seeing an explosion of energy and attention, and organizations are seeking ways to bring these to the forefront in artistic as well as practical ways.

Such attempts are often explicitly placed as opening up classical music to new themes, locations and people. They are attempts to expand the borders of the discipline. The 2022 MCICM symposium will critically examine this area of interaction between classical music and society, exploring initiatives that seek to blur the traditional borders of classical music practice, while also discussing how such borders are still rigorously policed in certain circumstances.

While a ‘border’ has been described between classical music and society, this symposium also seeks to question whether such inside/outside divisions are accurate or helpful when considering the practice. The orchestra, for example, is a social entity with social dynamics at play both within and outwith the organisation. There is no binary between music and society but a complex web of interactions and networks.

Registration for the symposium will close on 21 April 2022 at 9:00 CET. If you would like to take part, please make sure to register before this date.