Symphony orchestras today acknowledge the need to make their art relevant again in today's societies and innovate their practices. When these innovations regard audience participation, they challenge the ritualised formats of classical music performance and disrupt normative, social, and artistic traditions. The orchestra therefore presents an interesting case to develop a better understanding of the value-laden dynamics of innovation in public participation. Implicit notions of an 'ideal public' and its desirable behaviour often structure the design, setup , and assessment of participatory innovations. Fieldwork during the Empty Minds concerts, that the South Netherlands Philharmonic organised in 2018 to innovate participation, supports this claim. The organisers aimed to assign new participatory roles to the audience. Throughout the organisational process, three forms of frictions developed. The hierarchical pattern of symphonic concerts conflicted with the plan for new audience participation, material routines were challenged, and during the actual concerts, audience members did not participate in new ways. The observed frictions show that what matters artistically cannot be separated from how the performance is organised: artistic qualities emerge in and through socio-material practice. What comes to count as desirable public participation is thus not a given, but needs to be continuously articulated, negotiated and constructed.

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In Halberstadt, a 639 year performance of John Cage's ORGAN 2 /ASLSP (1987) is taking place. With this performance, the initiators aim to investigate the direction 'as slow as possible' that John Cage gave for this musical piece in practice. ORGAN 2 /ASLSP invites people to reconsider what we understand as music: is something still music if the length of the performance extends the length of human lives? The boundaries of performing a musical piece, from the role of the performer to that of the listener and music's material settings, have to be questioned in order to formulate how slow 'as slow as possible' exactly is. In this article, I will examine how in Halberstadt a productive experimental situation has emerged to pose questions about the nature of musical performance. Recently, it has been argued that studies in the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS) on scientific laboratories may help to develop an understanding of the productivity of experimental arts practices. To research the performance in Halberstadt, I will employ the theoretical vocabulary that historian of science Hans-Jörg Rheinberger developed to understand the experimental systems in which scientific experiments are embedded. According to Rheinberger, experimental systems exist of three elements: epistemic things, technical objects, and researchers. By using these elements as a lens, I will investigate how the Halberstadt performance of ORGAN 2 /ASLSP functions and how it brings into view questions that help us to reconsider the parameters of music.

Op welke manier kan tekenen een methode voor reflectie zijn? Van november 2016 tot maart 2017 vond het artistiek onderzoeksatelier ‘Drawing Instruments’ plaats binnen het Lectoraat voor Autonomie en Openbaarheid in de Kunsten aan Hogeschool Zuyd, Maastricht. In dit interdisciplinaire vak tekenden we de artistieke praktijk van Dear Hunter als onderzoeksinstrument. Veerle Spronck brengt verslag uit. In what way can drawing be a method of reflection? 'Drawing Instruments', an artistic research workshop, was organized in the Research Centre For Arts, Autonomy and the Public Sphere of Hogeschool Zuyd, Maastricht from November 2016 to March 2017. For this interdisciplinary subject we took the artistic practice of Dear Hunter, the studio of Remy Kroese and Marlies Vermeulen as the object of research. Veerle Spronck reports.