Projects

MCICM and the Sheffield Performer & Audience Research Centre (SPARC) have created a network that aims to understand how classical music forms part of the arts scene in different cities across the UK and Europe. The project focuses on audience research, the careers of composers, performers and other music graduates, and the ‘arts ecology’, meaning how organizations fit together in a place. The selected cities in the UK are Birmingham, Cardiff, Glasgow, Leeds and Liverpool and in Europe, Graz, Austria and Groningen, the Netherlands. 

The network is made possible thanks to a grant by the Arts and Humanities Research Council in the UK. For more information about the network including upcoming events and research, please visit the network website.

Project leaders: 
Prof. dr. Peter Peters and Prof. dr. Stephanie Pitts

MCICM builds on the research conducted within the Online Musicking experiment, and creates and attends to playful experimentations with the role of digital media and technology in classical music practice. Instead of seeing the digital as remaining extraneous to the music, then, we ask what we can learn when practitioners are given the space and incentive to explore the digital as a constitutive, constructive part of their everyday work and practice. From there on, we might be able to propose innovations for the practice that emerge from digitality in a meaningful way and closely connect to the actors, practitioners, and organisations of classical music. 

Project leaders: 
Dr. Denise Petzold and Jorge Lozano Diaz Granados

In this research project, the MCICM aims to contribute to the reflection on storytelling in classical music. Sharing stories can offer new ways to engage audiences and musicians to classical music, to develop new concert formats and to explore non-expert meanings and experiences related to classical music. Building on the People's Salon project in 2020, the MCICM has developed this concert format in three subsequent editions. For the fourth version of this project, Philzuid and MCICM worked together with neighbourhood organisations and inhabitants from the Mariaberg neighborhood in Maastricht. Through this project, members of the orchestra, MCICM researchers and neighbors of Mariaberg discussed the role music plays in their everyday lives, and with those stories, created a concert program. The concerts took place on 3 and 4 April 2024. 

Project leaders: 
Prof. dr. Peter Peters and dr. Veerle Spronck 

MCICM published an edited collection where contributing authors show the many ways in which they are approaching innovation and experimentation ranging from conference roundtable transcripts, practice-based research papers, reflections on concert experiments by organizers, diary entries, and polemics. The edited collection has been published by Open Book Publishers based in the UK and is open access. 

Project leaders: 
Dr. Neil T. Smith, Prof. dr. Peter Peters and Karoly Molina MA

In this interdisciplinary workshop, we addressed the problems, developments, and discussions concerning the performance, preservation, and instauration of three musical genres: Western classical orchestral music, improvised and experimental jazz music, and avant-garde electroacoustic music. The leading question of the workshop was how musical works are brought into existence, how they are preserved and performed over time. Thereby, we worked from the theoretical and practical assumption that, as Antoine Hennion suggests, the existence of this music is always in the making. Taking his concept of ‘instauration’ as a starting point, we attempted to move beyond the tension between fixity and fluidity by studying music as ‘work to be done’.
 

Project leaders: 
Dr. Denise Petzold, Prof. dr. Peter Peters, Dr. Floris Schuiling and Dr. Hannah Bosma

In her doctoral thesis, Denise Petzold explores the relationship between innovation and tradition in classical music, and the broader question of how to conserve its artistic heritage for the future. Petzold argues that innovation and tradition are not a priori contrasts but rather aims to show how they intertwine practically in a classical music context. In doing so, Petzold turns to the contemporary art museum – particularly its conservation department – as a role model for approaching the tension between conservation and change both on a theoretical and a practical level. Petzold defended her PhD thesis on 4 July 2023.

Project-PhD: Denise Petzold

Supervisors: Prof. dr. Peter Peters and Prof. dr. Karin Bijsterveld

On the third edition of this project, Philzuid and MCICM hosted a workshop on storytelling in classical music at the Parkstad Limburg Theatre in Heerlen. The workshop accompanies the concert-experiment ‘De verhalententoonstelling’ (Stories at an exhibition) that philharmonie zuidnederland. Paticipants adressed questions such as: how can storytelling be a means for new forms of audience participation, and play a role in attracting new audiences as well as engaging existing audiences in new ways? What can classical music learn from storytelling in other cultural domains, such as museums, game design, and theatre?

Project leaders: 
Dr. Veerle Spronck and Prof. dr. Peter Peters

Veerle Sponck’s doctoral thesis is a result of ethnographic research where she closely examined how four Dutch symphony orchestras are innovating participation in their everyday practices. In researching the ways of working of these orchestras, spronck unravelled how participation is problematised, done, and (e)valuated in practice. 

Project-PhD: Veerle Spronck

Supervisors: Prof. dr. Peter Peters and dr. Ruth Benschop.

The Artful Participation project was a four-year project, funded by NWO/SIA, in which researchers together with musicians and staff from philharmonie zuidnederland sought to further innovate the practice of symphonic classical music by asking what it means to participate in it as an audience. The representatives of each of the partners for the project were Dr. Ruth Benschop, lector at Zuyd University, Dr. Peter Peters, professor at Maastricht University, and Dr. Stefan Rosu, intendant philharmonie zuidnederland. In addition, Dr. Ties van de Werff joined as postdoc, Veerle Spronck as PhD candidate and Imogen Eve as musician researcher. 

Project leaders: 
Prof. dr. Peter Peters and dr. Ruth Benschop

In order to conduct practice-based research that learn through experimentation and intervention, the project examines how to do so. This Postdoc project buildt the theoretical context of the experiments in the Artful Participation project.How can the public participate more actively in programming, performing and evaluating the concerts? To answer that question, philharmonie zuidnederland organised four experimental concert events during the season 2019-2020, together with students of the Conservatory Maastricht and researchers from the MCICM. During the experiments we tried out how classical music can work in situations other than the concert hall.

Project leader:
Dr. Ties van de Werff 

What does it mean to innovate classical music? And how can we go about it? As the barriers between the performing arts in the 21st century are fusing together, classical music is extending its vision. In light of this, classical musicians need new ways to approach this changing landscape. The Same but Differently explores (and proposes) new rituals, perspectives and skills which can be fostered by classical musicians in order to become more reflexive, and flexible, performers. Through a combination of short stories, essays and exercises, this text invites readers to both imagine and approach classical music performance a little differently – whilst still remaining connected to its performance practice tradition.

Project leader: Imogen Eve