Dialogues on Music: Playing music and other serious matters

In 2023, the lectorate introduces a series of three evenings of thematic dialogue under the name Playing music and other serious matters.

Though we regularly use the word 'play' in connection to music, our association is not related to the playing of a child or an animal or to playing a ball game. Even less would ‘diverting lightness’ - the roots of play - be the first characterization that comes to mind. Playing a concert is a serious matter where your reputation, status and market value are at stake. During each of the three evenings, two invited speakers will engage in a thematic dialogue, approaching the overarching theme from three different perspectives.

29 June
Art as Game as Art
Barbara Lüneburg – Alison Isadora

Many composers are the architects of playful adventures that could also be seen as a game. Open forms in composition often rely on rule-based play that invites creative and often unpredictable musical interaction between performers, sounds, space, objects and sometimes also audiences. Today, digital technologies invite composers and music makers to rethink musical form from the perspective of game aesthetics, multimedial storytelling and player agency. Violinist and researcher Barbara Lüneburg describes a digital game environment as a 'space of possibility' (Lüneburg, 2018). What possibilities does a gamified approach of musical performance have for composers? How can the artistic design of game strategies and scripts lead to meaningful experiences and playful interactions between music, performer and audience? And what can games as audiovisual artworks teach us about the subject of musical play?