MCICM launches website Playing the Digital

MCICM recently launched the website www.playingthedigital.nl. The website summarizes the insights and reflections of MCICM’s research line ‘Digital technologies in Classical Music’ by researchers dr. Denise Petzold, Jorge Lozano Diaz Granados and prof. dr. Peter Peters.

The aim of the research line was to move beyond commonplace understandings of digital technology in classical music as ‘digital tools.’ As the 2020 mid-pandemic Online Musicking experiment of the Maastricht Centre for the Innovation of Classical Music has shown, digital media – for example videos of classical music performances – have their own aesthetic qualities and can create distinct experiences “such as intimacy, directness, authenticity, and visual and narrative criteria” (Online Musicking, 2020). Importantly, these have to be balanced carefully with the existing aesthetic, musical and artistic criteria in the practice. As the centre’s researchers concluded,

The balancing of musical criteria with aesthetic criteria specific for online media, the curating of an online listening space for audiences, and the question of societal relevance of classical music in a societal crisis and online environment, are issues that are not easily overcome – both on an individual and an institutional level. (Online Musicking, 2020)

Instead of seeing the digital as ‘tools’ remaining extraneous to the music itself, we ask what may be learned from viewing digital technologies as an indispensable part of the everyday work that brings classical music into existence. This will not only deepen our understanding of the concrete use of specific technologies within the practice (cf. Hennion & Levaux, 2021), but also provide a more nuanced and multifaceted understanding of how digital technologies actually shape what classical music is or can be.

For more information about the project, please visit https://www.playingthedigital.nl/