masterpiece management

How can one describe the quality of contemporary music? Are there any objective and valid criteria or is the recipient thrown back on his subjective perception? Are quality and success connected anyway? And if so, what is this connection? Could an empirical survey measure the quality of art or is art necessarily beyond the scope of such assessment? Could one enhance the quality of a music piece by the engagement of consulting? How might a piece change after extending the authorship?

All these questions are of great relevance for our project masterpiece management, premiered in Cologne in 2014 at new talents biennale. masterpiece management 2014 had its special production process that became art itself.

First of all, we composed an instrumental piece of approx. 4 minutes (hear the piece and see the score). After that we thought about subjective and objective criteria that might be relevant for this piece or for New Music in general. We did not expect these criteria to be all of the same relevance for this piece and we did not expect the piece to fulfill them all.

The criteria were e.g. sound, form, individuality, topicality, relevance in the aesthetic discourse (subjective and objective). We derived a questionnaire from these criteria, comprising a visual analogue scale (to the questionnaire).

The piece and the questionnaire were sent to several reviewers which were asked to assess the piece by the given criteria and look for optimisation potential. Furthermore, we asked for more criteria that might be relevant for a piece in 2014.

The engaged "Consultants" are or were experts in the field of New Music or consulting. The composer`s team consisted of Trond Reinholdtsen, Manos Tsangaris and Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf, the musicology/festival organisation team consisted of Armin Köhler, Martin Zenck, Lydia Rilling and Bastian Zimmermann and we had a team of 3 professional consultants not being experts of New Music (but with some music education in general) but having vast experience in quality management.

The reviews were documented and plublicated in a blog (/https://masterpiecemanagement2014.wordpress.com/). Targeting the piece as well as our whole concept, the improvement suggestions and comments can also be seen as contribution to the discourse about New Music today with all its problems and implications.

The evaluation process was not only initiated for the discourse, but also had its impact on the piece as well: the improvement suggestions resulted in a new version of the piece. The original version and the reviewed version were performed in the same concert to enable the audience to perceive and observe the changes triggered by the suggestions and the extended authorship.

masterpiece management was premiered the 23th May 2014 within the new talents biennale Cologne 2014. The piece was performed by MAM.manufaktur für aktuelle musik, conducted by Susanne Blumenthal.