ABSTRACT Musicking is fundamentally rooted in embodiment. A bold assertion, that serves as the foundation of this paper. Embodied approaches are particularly evident in oral music genres, like Hindustani (North Indian Classical) Dhrupad vocal music, where the transmission of music knowledge relies exclusively on direct interaction between teacher and disciple through live demonstration and imitation. In this paper, I investigate the embodied aspects of conventional in-person Dhrupad music pedagogy through the lens of the 4E cognition framework, which highlights the close interplay between body, mind, and surrounding environment. I adopt an empirical, ethnomusicological approach and present a qualitative analysis of originally collected interview material from prominent representatives of Dhrupad music. The primary objective of this paper is to enhance our comprehension of how body movements are related to the voice and implicated in the communication and transmission of music-related knowledge in face-to-face teaching sessions. By gaining a better insight into these mechanisms, I aim to raise concerns on the suitability of prevailing network-mediated platforms commonly employed for synchronous online Dhrupad music education, and to explore how they might be reimagined to better support the embodied and gestural modes of communication central to Dhrupad vocal music.

ABSTRACT Departing from artistic research into everyday acoustic experience in the Athenian apartment building, polykatoikia, conducted as a PhD at the Department of Theory and Art History, Athens School of Fine Arts, Greece (2011–2021), this article adopts an intertextual approach. The aim is to open space between seemingly diverse subchapters to reflect on techno-aesthetic affects in acoustic perception and artistic creation. It focuses on how technology mediates sensory experience and creative practice. Concurrently, it proposes a tactile framework of connectivity and accessibility by rethinking the polykatoikia’s doorbell system. These subchapters offer positioned insight into memory, imagination, and the situated perception of sound, drawing from sound art works and accounts from inhabitants of the case study. Examining the first tapping machine and its soundproofing standardisation as performative technology, the article traces the creative process of perception. It analyses Alvin Lucier’s Nothing is Real, using the metaphors of the ‘sound vessel’ and ‘vibrational architecture’ to discuss the sonic properties of place. It incorporates the notion of the ‘sonic body’ regarding acousmatic sounds—where a sound's source remains indeterminent—linking them to memory’s capacity to reconstruct auditory experiences in the present.

ABSTRACT The extent of queer inclusion in Norway and opera culture has been widely debated among scholars, with them vacillating between acknowledging marked aesthetic and social progress and the continuing discrimination and erasure of queer people in both contexts. These debates are exacerbated by the lack of scholarship on Norwegian queer opera singers. This study addresses these issues through its ethnographic investigation of Norwegian queer opera singers. Specifically, by adopting Karen Barad's Meeting the Universe Halfway (2007. Durham, NC: Duke University Press) agential realism and diffractive analysis, it examines the wide spectrum of materialities and discourses that impact the gender and sexuality enactments of said singers, such as the prevailing gender concepts and pedagogical materials that masculinise the male operatic voice. Ultimately, the study challenges the notion of Norway as a conclusively ‘queer friendly’ country by revealing the ongoing and potential constraints and tensions faced by Norwegian queer opera singers. In response to such negativity, this study demonstrates how different ‘touches’ (Barad, Karen. 2012. “On Touching—The Inhuman That Therefore I Am.” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 23 (3): 206–223) within Norwegian opera culture might produce new and self-affirming queer operatic lives.

ABSTRACT At first glance, the question of ‘where’ an improvised musical work is might appear to be straight forward. A freely improvised 1 work is surely ‘there’ at the site of performance. Improvised telematic performances, however, where individual ensemble members each perform from different performance sites via Internet network, seem to complicate the question of ‘where’ the work is situated, given that there is no single site of performance. To address the question of ‘where’ with respect to works improvised in a telematic setting, I suggest that asking ‘where’ the work is should not be asked in isolation. Rather, it should be paired with the question of ‘how’ the work functions as a work of art. Despite technological challenges such as latency, and the fact that the work is simultaneously heard in multiple locations, I argue that the happening of the work is always a singular, placed occurrence. From the perspective of philosophical hermeneutics, I argue the work is always and only ever there with the listener, enacting a hermeneutical relationship between itself and the listener who participates in its happening.

ABSTRACT The intersection of technology and art has historically played a significant role in both innovation and creation. Each has continuously informed and transformed the other through this entanglement, as artistic inquiry and technological progress evolve through shared processes of experimentation and mediation. In the current digital era, technological advancements reconfigure the very conditions of artistic practice, as digital tools and networks become both its medium and its milieu. This paper attempts to explore the role of technology and connectivity in shaping contemporary music production, examining how artists use technical tools to engage with social contexts. This broad field will be examined in relation to media aesthetics, from the twentieth century to the present, through interdisciplinary fields and methods encompassing musicology, media and cultural studies. The paper aims at investigating whether artists and musicians employ technology to address society and enact social change, or prioritise experimentation within a self-referential artistic system. In parallel with these concerns, the paper critically reflects on the aesthetic conditions under which contemporary artistic production unfolds in technologically mediated environments. It interrogates the extent to which art and music, often structured through self-referential or system-based frameworks, can or cannot effectively engage with social and political realities. Rather than treating technology as a neutral medium of ‘playful’ experimentation, the discussion provoked here explores art’s potential as an instrument of critique and resistance. By situating artistic practice within broader structures of power and communication, the paper examines how creative use of digital systems might not only mirror but also challenge prevailing modes of production, representation, and control. Researching the historical roots of technological connectivity in music and its evolution, the paper reflects upon various socio-political implications of contemporary music's engagement with digital tools and connectivity. It explores the challenges of democratising access to technology, cultivating interdisciplinary collaboration, and ensuring socially informed practices within the experimental music community. Furthermore, it critiques the potential risks of aestheticizing social engagement and appropriating cultural narratives without relevant dialogue and reflection. Ultimately, the paper calls for a critical examination of the role of technology in contemporary music, advocating for socially engaged practices that navigate digital connectivity in relation to the complexities of our era, while addressing pressing societal issues through art.

ABSTRACT In this article, I explore the relationship between repetitive music and meaning in the postdramatic context of two operas by Serbian women composers—Abraham in Flames (2019) by Aleksandra Vrebalov and Deca, opera u 17 pesama [Children, Opera in 17 Songs] (2022) by Irena Popović. I discuss the role of repetition in constructing operatic meanings in three steps. First, I examine how these two composers reinterpret the correlation between music and drama from the perspective of postdramatic theatre. Thereafter, employing the distinction between musematic and discursive repetitions, and traditional and recombinant teleologies of repetitive music, I analyse the meaning of repetition in the two pieces. I show how the higher-order repetitive segments of Vrebalov’s work correlate with the leading female character’s transformation on her journey to discovering her authentic self. Finally, I explore how, in Popović’s opera, repetitive techniques interact to create a moving musical image of a woman’s life.

ABSTRACT The pandemic of 2020 brought about a surge in the use of telecommunications, as concertising closed, and in brief time, those affected looked to the World Wide Web to transmit their work out to the public. Home studios were harnessed, concerts were streamed, educational events and conferences were held online. The world saw more deeply that powerful, yet affordable telecommunications systems have given rise to compelling means for online music making. Consumer access to greater computational power at a lower cost through fibre optics now carries high bandwidth internet into the homes millions at affordable costs. Additionally, telepresence is what brings a sense of liveness to the online interactions that permeates cellular networks, internet, virtual reality, and other connective modes. Today’s explorations of telepresence examine areas such as relational dynamics, human-computer-interactivity, online group practices, and many more. Critical areas include latency, a/v quality, and user experience. Deck 10 Intermedia (2020) is presented as a tool for the realisation of these explorations because it provides an expansive framework designed for a broad range of activities requiring various forms of interactivity. The 2020 Earth Day Art Model Festival (2020) is a good example of how an online festival using this system can become a hub of chat, live performance, media arts, and discussion within a singular eco-system of the web. This is important to artists because as connectivity expands, communities will move further into the virtual world to increase the reach and impact of their musical gatherings.

ABSTRACT Lithuanian minimalism is marked by two earliest works in this style: Bronius Kutavičius’s Last Pagan Rites (1978) and Mindaugas Urbaitis’s Love Song and Farewell (1979). The two works, with distinct backgrounds and implementations of creative ideas, lead to the differentiation of two worlds of minimalism—American and Baltic—emphasising the juxtaposition of the pure/abstract/technologized and semantic/spiritual/narrative approaches. This article offers an overview of the contextual panorama of the 1970s as a period of change in Lithuanian music, paving the way for minimalist music, and presents a classification of the Lithuanian minimalist oeuvre. It is supplemented with an analysis of musical compositions by Kutavičius (Anno cum tettigonia, for string quartet with tape, 1980) and Justė Janulytė (Radiance, for 12 voices, tape and live electronics, 2015) as a fusion of rational and semantised elements of musical form.

ABSTRACT Since its foundation in 1977 under the auspices of the Student Cultural Centre (SKC) in Belgrade, The Ensemble for Different New Music (ADNM) has played a significant role in the development of minimalist music in Serbia and Yugoslavia. Its experimental approach to performance practice reveals unique traits in the model of minimalism pursued in Yugoslavia, as well as a series of causations and appropriations with American minimalism and experimentalism. Representing a new breed of musicians who worked across genres and media, the ensemble had two important roles: to develop radically different creative and performance approaches than those that had existed in Yugoslav music, to accelerate the inflow of ideas from American music, and to creatively affirm those musical currents that came from an international context. This article illustrates that the ADNM played one of the most essential roles in the development of Yugoslav minimalist identity.