As part of the Montréal Nouvelles Musiques festival, matralab is presenting a study day on the subject of postexoticism in occidental composed music (a.k.a. “new music”, “contemporary music”, or “avantgarde music”).

MUSIQUES GLOCALES – GLOCAL MUSICS
Feb 26, 2013
Hexagram Black Box

Tuesday February 26, 2013

9am to noon Session I Contact Zones
1 pm Lecture-Concert with the ARCHITEK Percussion Quartet (works by Steve Reich, Claude Vivier, Sandeep Bhagwati)
3pm-6pm Session II Ramifications

Hexagram Black Box
Concordia University EV Building
Sub Basement -3
Free entry

Description
After more than a century replete with curiosities, exotisms, appropriations, ethnomusicological and post-colonial theories etc. this day would like to look at the situation today and here in Montréal around the kind of music aesthetics often qualified as hybrid or inter-cultural.

Which exemplary works, composers, musicians, musical models and theories, which aesthetic challenges and political/cultural imbroglios, which discourses and ideologies, but most of all, which practices, which economic and administrative frameworks determine the writing, the dissemination and the audience reception of these musics?

What are questions a composer needs to consider once s/he decides to draw inspiration from different musical traditions ? How to navigate the existential tension between complex inter-traditional and post-exoticist practices and aesthetics – and communication strategies that still too often stress the exotic and its clichés ?

How do native music traditions, immigrant musicians and the official identitarian cultural policy of Québec impact the composition and reception of such poly-traditional works ?

How does the global reality inform works written here – and how do local music traditions inform a creative practice such as that of “new music” – an aesthetic of largely European extraction that explicitly sees itself as international and global ?