Anno 2023/2

The performer’s freedom is a balance between individual freedom and stylistic and contextual awareness of possible artistic expressions. In classical music, the notation system has been cultivated throughout the centuries. The composer’s notation represents a significant loss of information that the musician must try to compensate.

The contemporary university has been an inextricable component of the critical discourses on the emergence, nature and role of Artistic Research in the twenty-first century. However, there has not been any recognition of the fact that universities are now permeated globally by neoliberal managerial practices, with detrimental consequences for the physical and mental well-being of academics, and that broadly speaking, artist-researchers continue to flourish in spite of, rather than because of, the institutional environments and circumstances that the contemporary academia affords them.

Transformations in global culture and changing priorities in education policy have led to several waves of curriculum reforms in higher music education in recent decades. There have been attempts to integrate elements of research, entre-preneurship and student-centred learning into curricular frameworks that traditionally focused on achieving artistic excellence through master apprentice learning models. Recently, the emphasis in curriculum design seems to be shifting towards the potential role of performing musicians as creative and engaged ‘makers in society’.

This chapter addresses the scope and impact of Artistic Research in Music (ARM) as a field of scholarly concerns and – more importantly – as a cultural practice of our times. More particularly, it focusses on the scant weight academic ARM genealogies acknowledge to developments usually associated with Music Technology Research (MTR) but not in the least aligned with simplistic and pervasive technocratic views nor absorbed into engineering matters entirely. Often counted as marginal, such experimental MTR practices should be deemed instead as expressive of a more acute awareness and competent insight into the hyper-technologized environments in which music is made and listened to, in late-modern and contemporary societies.

The possibility that alto recorders in g′, or G-altos, co-existed alongside the standard F-alto size in the eighteenth century has been the subject of much debate among players, makers, and researchers alike. In 2007, Federico Maria Sardelli proposed that Antonio Vivaldi wrote his chamber concerti in sharp keys for G-alto, reserving those in flat keys for F-alto. However, his argument relies on modern recorder technique, with only a passing glance to historical sources on the subject. He also gives no consideration to the impact a different size of recorder has on timbre and expression.