Curating Contemporary Music Festivals: A New Perspective on Music’s Mediation (Music and Sound Culture)

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. Contents Image and Figure Rights 1. Introduction 1.1 Establishing the Field 1.2 The State of the Art 1.3 Scope and Overview 2. Curating 2.1 Introduction 2.2 The Anatomy of Festivals and Biennales 2.3 Curating Biennales 2.4 Curatorial Discourse 2.5 Conclusion 3. Performative Curating and Experimental Performance 3.1 Introduction 3.2 Reading Shannon Jackson 3.3 Curating Dance / Dance Curating 3.4 Curating Theatre / Theatre Curating 3.5 Conclusion 4. Munich Biennale for New Music Theater 4.1 Introduction 4.2 Hans Werner Henze 4.3 Music Theatre? 4.4 Peter Ruzicka 4.5 Daniel Ott and Manos Tsangaris (DOMTS) 4.6 The 2016 and 2018 Biennale Editions 4.7 Compositional and Curatorial Practices 4.8 The Munich Biennale in Numbers. 4.9 Conclusion 5. Maerzmusik: Festival für Zeitfragen 5.1 Introduction 5.2 A Brief Prehistory to the Maerzmusik Festival 5.3 Maerzmusik 2002–2014 5.4 Berno Odo Polzer 5.5 2017 Opening Concert: Julius Eastman 5.6 Storytelling for Earthly Survival 5.7 Curating and the Maerzmusik Festival 5.8 Decolonizing Time 5.9 Conclusion/Coda/Konzertemacher 6. Conclusion/Curating Music Bibliography Appendix: List of Productions at the Munich Biennale for New Music Theatre from 1988–2018