Julian Söderberg: A Study of Contemporary Art Music Practices in Oslo, Norway

Field of study: Practice-oriented Musicology.

The research project seeks to develop an understanding of how social practice within the contemporary art music field in Oslo, Norway, is structured. Centrally, it sets out to study how – and in accordance with which principles – social performances within this field are structured and regulated. The project will be grounded in extensive sociological and ethnographic fieldwork, consisting of semi-structured interviews and participant observation fieldwork. Connecting Jeffrey Alexander’s theories of social performance with Erik Hannerz theories of subcultural organization, the research aims to investigate the mechanisms through which social performances within the contemporary art music field are regulated and to illuminate the principles that underpin its structure.

The project takes as its point of departure a range of questions about contemporary art music practices in Oslo, Norway focusing on the ways in which practitioners enact social performances within this practice-context:

• How do contemporary art music practitioners in Oslo understand the socio-musical practices they partake in?
• How do they understand thesocial contexts in which these practices are situated?
• Do they recognize contemporary art music practices as belonging to a certain aesthetic, social or discursive field?
• If so, how is this field defined and delimited? What principles regulate social performances within it?