Issue 44 / January 2020
ed. Lars Petter Hagen

Curating Contemporary Music

What are the roles of the curator in the music field, and how does the work materialize? What kind of practices are involved? Defragmentation – Curating Contemporary Music was a project that attempted to highlight some of the problems and urgent questions that we find in today’s contemporary music scene. Within the frame of ideas around gender, diversity, decolonization and technology, Defragmentation looked at – and tried to understand – structures in various institutions of contemporary music. The ambition was to investigate how the urgent sense of fragmentation and disconnection that exists in the public sphere at the moment is materialized in the musical field.

This edition of OnCurating extends the findings of the original Defragmentation to investigate the unique challenges and issues of curation in the contemporary music world, with essays and articles by Heloisa Amaral, Patrick Frank, Kenneth Goldsmith, George E. Lewis, Kamila Metwaly & Katja Heldt and Du Yun.