Playing the Digital:
Explorations in Music, Machines, and Meaning
What digital technologies come to your mind when you think about classical music?
You might think about digital streaming apps for listening, or recording technologies. Maybe you use a digital metronome while practising, have recently explored what AI programmes have to offer, or follow your favorite artists’ or ensembles’ social media.
Whatever popped into your mind may not be so new: as a matter of fact, even before the digital transformation of classical music after the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, classical music organisations such as orchestras, ensembles, and conservatoires have explored digital media. This relation to digital technology takes many forms but may be pinpointed to three key areas:
The recording and publishing of CDs and MP3s has changed the entire music industry (Sterne, 2003). It has become a particularly important cornerstone of classical music’s precarious economical structures and organisational visibility and survivability (for example of orchestras and ensembles). For a long time, digital streaming – in both audio and video format, live and pre-recorded – has come to complicate the materialities that constitute digital music (Petzold, 2023). With its ubiquitous access via online streaming platforms, the digitisation of classical music and its global dissemination has picked up considerable speed, thereby also linking this music ever closer to increasingly capitalist and neoliberalist logics.
Classical music organisations and communities have recognised digital technology and media as important tools to foster audience participation and engagement. On the one hand, this concerns the rise of social media in the 2010s and their effect on marketing and outreach. The still growing role of social media for both maintaining or deepening existing relationships with audiences, as well as for recruiting new ones, can be seen as an example of new ways of advertising, for example on platforms like Instagram or TikTok. However, this is only one way in which classical music institutions use digital technology to engage their communities: take for example, the growing provision of digital programme notes and digital listening guides. These aim at not only getting to know the organisation better, but at fostering new understanding of the music as well as creating new listening experiences (Thorau, 2020). Here digital technologies are used and understood differently depending on an organisation’s idea of what participation is and what it should entail: as many scholars have noted, ‘participation’ constitutes an ambiguous and ill-understood term in the art sector (Bishop, 2012; Elffers & Sitzia, 2016; Spronck, 2022).
Musicians depend on digital technologies to play or make classical music. Digital tuners and metronomes have changed how musicians interact with their instruments; iPads have become bottomless archives of musical scores, sometimes even replacing flimsy paper on note stands. The latter’s ready-made adaptability also shapes how musicians annotate and mark their music, challenging ideas of ‘definite text’ and long-established concert routines (such as turning pages or the absence of digital screens in concert halls, see Da Fonseca-Wohlheim, 2016). Self-recorded performances document the history and progress of musicians and ensembles, while helping to prepare and practise future ones (Wakin, 2011). YouTube has become an indispensable source for musicians to study past performances and learn about specific techniques, interpretations, and ways of playing. Other technologies and software such as Artificial Intelligence and digital audio workstations have enabled new ways of composing, transposing, and improvising, touching deeply on the creation of music and helping to organise practice time more efficiently (Kilroy, 2022).
Though overlapping, mutually constitutive, and by no means complete, these areas provide productive starting points to explore and problematise the role of digital technology in classical music.
To create this website, we have organised and participated in a range of activities related to digital technologies and classical music: from conducting a (non-traditional) literature review to developing an experimental workshop on digital tech in classical music to reflecting on AI and an AI-generated performance to reflecting on a conference on digital technology in music (history) research that we attended as presenters. These activities constitute the colorful playground that is the relationship between digital tech and classical music. Whilst giving insight into the research we conducted, the website also serves as an (incomplete) archive of lingering thoughts and ideas that will hopefully open up new avenues for the exploration and interrogation of digital technologies in classical music.
How digital technologies shape what classical music is.
In classical music practice, digital technologies are often described as tools or means to an end. As Lydia Goehr (2007) points out, classical music is an artistic practice that has revolved steadily around what she has called idealist aesthetics. Here, the authentic performance of musical works – which are inscribed in the musical text written by the composer – is seen as the core business of the practice. The work-concept, according to Goehr, made it possible for music to be understood as autonomous or essentialist art, untouched by outside factors and thus capable of being performed faithfully to varying degrees. This ‘Beethoven Paradigm’ has positioned classical music as transcendent, independent from worldly matters such as technologies. It is the reason why the digital today is still mostly understood to remain an appendix to the practice, an extraneous feature or object to the ‘music itself’.
The aim of the research line "Digital technologies in classical music” 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 (MCICM) 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.
Start exploring
Notes and Networks: A Literary Cartography of Digital Tech in Classical Music
An (Incomplete) Inventory of Digital Technologies in Classical Music
Sounding the Possible: Reflections and Blueprints for Digital Experiments
Dear Algorithm: Letters on Music and Machines
A Violist Exploring AI: Reflections on Creation and Agency in The Uncanny Valley of Art
“It’s as if We’re Beyond Philosophy”: A Report from a Digital Humanities Conference
A Playful Intervention into Music Research: Ontological Musings on Digital Technologies as Musical Instruments
Lessons Learned: A Conversation on Remaining Thoughts and Questions
Looking for Sources?
Find bibliography and appendices here.