Intercultural music: Creation and interpretation

Abstract

Intercultural Music: Creation and Interpretation is a collection of refereed papers from the conference component of the 2006 Aurora New Music Festival, held at the University of Western Sydney. The editors are keen to point out that the definition of ‚intercultural‘ invoked is wide and that the collection presents some awkwardnesses. This is notably in discussion of the problems associated with representing musical creativity and performance as research, a topic that will resonate with tertiary music educators in various locations around the world who are forced into positions of justifying their activities as research for the purpose of securing funding for their institutions. The composition/performance-as-research problem arises within this text where the musical works discussed exhibit some degree of interculturality—even if this is not the basis of the composition/performance- as-research issue—so so some mind juggling is required to fit individual discussions under the book—s title. That said, the majority of essays in Intercultural Music do address cultural interaction in music, and authors who take on the composition/performance-as-research topic, for example, Diana Blom and Michael Atherton, provide useful models of how preparation for performance or the processes of composition (including improvisation) can be packaged and documented as research.