Interdisciplinary Lecture Series: Together Alone. Musical Practices between Collectivity and Individuation (Vienna / online)
Interdisciplinary Lecture Series: Together Alone. Musical Practices between Collectivity and Individuation
University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna
Art House Kino, Future Art Lab, Anton-von-Webern-Platz 1, 1030 Wien / online
Current societal transitions are reshaping the collective and individual aspects of musical practices. At the same time, creative practices remain actively in motion, and relations among human and non-human actors are continuously re-configured. While the interconnectedness of global actors has fostered the emergence of new collectives and redefined conventional understandings of identities, the ubiquity of the digital has made the creation and consumption of music an increasingly individual and fragmented experience. As a result, actors involved in music making and music consumption drift in the interspace between individuation, new collective experiences, and persisting forms of collective identification.
By investigating what persists and what changes, we want to reflect on music’s material, aesthetic, and ethical dimensions as well as its manifold—social, symbolic, affective—values against the background of diverse practices, ranging from performing and listening to meaning production, (de)canonisation, and mediation. Touching upon an array of contemporary issues such as activism, inequalities and diversity, racism and racialisation, intimacy and belonging, the lectures also invite us to meditate on music’s transformative potential and impact on culture and society.
In a time of crisis and uncertainty, the lecture series with its multifaceted topics aims to unfold the productive potentials embedded in contemporary creative practices. Drawing on interdisciplinary perspectives, this series seeks to contribute to a contemporary diagnosis of musical matters at the intersection of materialities, practices, and knowings.