Contemporary Music and the Curatorial Turn: Surveying Curatorial Practices from Curators-as-Authors to Institutional Critique

Contemporary music practitioners have recently begun using the concept of curatorial practice borrowed the visual arts to describe both artistic experimentation with formats, as well as institutions’ experimentation with both programming and their own organizational functioning. This article surveys a number of these initiatives across Europe, identifies four interrelated approaches to curatorial practice operating in contemporary music today, and connects them to curatorial theory from the visual and live arts and to contemporary musicology. It finds that the individual curator of an institution is currently the most widely held understanding of the term in contemporary music, fitting with its understanding of compositional authorship. However, new institutionalist, collective, and artist-led approaches are gaining prominence as the field matures. The article concludes by emphasising the importance of studying how artistic practices are employing curatorial strategies, this approach being less common. It also recommends that for a curatorial ‘turn’ to take place, the relationship between music and its social mediations must be re-examined by a larger group of music’s stakeholders than is currently the case.