Discussing Diversity in New Music
Symposium: Islands on the Move
Ultima Context
On the 17th of September, 2021 musicologist Brandon Farnsworth and Anna Jakobsson, executive leader for Konstmusiksystrar, organised Islands on the Move Symposium, an all day in-person event with thirty stakeholders in contemporary music mainly from across the Nordic Countries at the Ultima Contemporary Music Festival in Oslo.
The aim of the project was to initiate a series of dialogues between key actors in the musical field, exploring how issues of gender equality and cultural diversity in new music were being impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. The symposium had a Word Café format which meant that the participants discussed in small groups based on menus of topics prepared by the organisers. Topics included “The next 9 years of festivals”, “Artistic self-organising” and “Digitality” amongst others. Documentation and reflections provided by the participants were gathered in a series of newsletters, illustrated by the artist Lea Ye Gyoung, published in the autumn of 2021.
Read the newsletters here.
The project's steering group: Brandon Farnsworth, Vanessa Massera, Anna Jakobsson, Thorbjørn
Tønder Hansen, Sandeep Bhagwati, Aida Aoun
Production by Ultima in collaboration with Konstmusiksystrar, Concordia University/Matralab, SMCQ (Société de musique contemporaine du Québec)
Organisers:
Brandon Farnsworth and Anna Jakobsson (Konstmusiksystrar)
With the support of the Nordic Council of Ministers and the Ministère des Relations internationales et de la Francophonie du Québec.
Taking the Temperature: Crisis, Curating and Musical Diversity
The Second Expanded Edition
As part of the exchange project Global Musics Network: Discussing Diversity Anna Jakobsson, Vanessa Massera and Kajsa Antonsson from Konstmusiksystrar co-edited the publication Taking the Temperature: Crisis, Curating and Musical Diversity together with the curator and musicologist Brandon Farnsworth. Bringing together interviews with music curators, musicians, activist networks and institutional leaders, the book details various practices and approaches of diversifying the field of new music. The focus of this book builds on the discussions generated at the Ultima Festival in Oslo, Norway, tracing connections to related contemporary musical practices in Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Iceland, and Canada. Among the interviewees are Marcela Lucatelli (SKLASH+), Pauline Hogstrand (Damkapellet), Siri Haugan Holden (Balansekunst) and Marta Forsberg and Adele Kosman (Konstmusiksystrar). The second expanded edition contains five new interviews as well as follow-ups with a large number of the original interviewees.
Production by Ultima in collaboration with Konstmusiksystrar, Concordia University/Matralab, SMCQ (Société de musique contemporaine du Québec)
Supported by: Nordic Council of Ministers and Ministère des Relations Internationales et de la Francophonie du Québec
22 x 28 cm (US Letter), 187 pages, Text in English
Cover and book design by Asia Pietrzyk
Published by OnCurating.org
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
