Jorge Lozano Diaz, former student in the MA Arts and Culture at FASoS, focused his thesis on how the concept of autonomy manifests in and shapes classical music practices at Higher Music Education Institutions (HMEIs), taking Conservatorium Maastricht (CM) as a case study through a multimodal ethnographic approach involving semi-structured interviews, participant observation, and document analysis. Autonomy, a fundamental and yet invisible concept in classical music, draws boundaries around the practice that define performance conventions, the roles and social organisation of musicians, and the relationship between classical music and broader social contexts. Lozano Diaz’s findings reveal a stark prevalence of a notion of autonomy originated in the nineteenth century, scholarly termed strong autonomy, that preserves classical music as a self-contained, highly structured practice. In order to move forward, Lozano Diaz concludes, institutions like CM must make the work of autonomy visible and engage with interdisciplinary, reflective approaches to foster more inclusive and socially relevant practices, and better integrate research components in the performance curriculum as required by processes of academisation.

Prof. dr. Peter Peters supervised the MA thesis of Jorge Lozano Diaz. Parallel to writing his thesis, Lozano Diaz also contributed to MCICM’s research on digital technologies in classical music, working together with Dr. Denise Petzold.

To download Jorge Lozano Diaz’s thesis, please click here.