Musical Migration: Establishing New Paradigms for Intercultural Music-making

Intercultural musical collaboration presents many practical, aesthetic and ethical challenges. Not only are there significant differences to navigate between musical practices, systems and performance traditions, but social factors, such as each participant’s perception of their function within the ensemble, play an integral role. Moreover, the fact that approaches to musical performance, composition, improvisation – and more pertinently, the teaching and/or acquisition of these modes/skills – are so varied across different cultures, raises important questions, especially in the 21st century (when the potential for intercultural exchange and the migration of ideas is more significant – certainly, in pragmatic terms – than ever before).

This pilot project considered the following research questions:

- To what extent can diverse and distinctive approaches to music-making be migrated, shared and combined to generate engaging new musical material, whilst simultaneously preserving and/or inaugurating contextually relative creative environments?

- How do learning experiences in relation to improvisation and composition differ across cultures? And, how is the ‘collaborative process/exchange’ perceived and understood by each participant?

- How successfully can distinct pedagogical methods/systems migrate and combine to enable musicians (teachers/students/participants) to establish/develop fresh insights/approaches?

- What role can (or do) fretless and microtonal guitars play in the collaborative process.

As part of an already established bilateral collaboration between UoK and ITU (Istanbul), this Signature Research Theme pilot project/case study, allowed the exploration of innovative music-making approaches.