Idioms of the Experimental

A Collection of Tropes in Contemporary Music

Experimental music avoids traditional idioms of music-making, hence it is conceived as nonidiomatic music. Performers and composers working in this field, however, know exactly what a “well-made” piece sounds like: they are fluent in the language of the experimental. Even if they might not have an explicit conception of the norms of their practice, they most certainly possess implicit knowledge of the idioms, i.e. the commonplace figures, textures and phrases that structure the sonic surface of the experimental music repertoire. In other words: musicians know how to construct and articulate a meaningful musical discourse beyond traditional languages and styles.
The contemporary situation of musical thought is odd: There are highly developed artistic idioms of experimental music, and, at the same time, there is an almost complete absence of theoretical descriptions of its constitutive parts and elements. The project Idioms of the Experimental addresses this odd situation: It aims at rendering explicit the practitioner’s implicit knowledge in order to enable listeners to better understand this repertoire and to critically investigate its idiomatic structures in their formal functions and semantical qualities. It proposes a radically collaborative approach between scientists from musicology and the philosophy of music on the one hand, and practitioners from composition, electronic music, improvisation, and performance on the other hand, that will allow to identify, collect, conceptualize and contextualize a collection of examples of idiomatic features in experimental music.

The result of this project will be threefold: Scientific publications, a website presenting the findings with embedded audio files, and – following up the research project – a series of lectureconcerts where the research results are shown to a broader public and critically appropriated in musical performances. The project will thereby have an impact on the scientific understanding of contemporary music, but it will equally intervene in the artistic production and art-critical debates, and, on the long run, help to open new accesses to experimental art for a larger public.

Musikphilosophie, Zeitgenössische Musik

Zeitgenössische Musik, Musiktheorie, Ästhetik, Künstlerische Forschung, Improvisation, Komposition, Elektronische Musik, Performance Studies

Jaronas Scheurer, Michael Kunkel, Christoph Haffter, Dozierende und Studierende des Sonic Space

August 2024 – Juli 2025

Maja Sacher-Stiftung, Musikhochschule FHNW, Universität Basel