edited by David Hurwitz and Pedro Ordóñez Eslava, Turnhout, Brepols, 2022 (Music, Science & Technology, 4), pp. xii+272, ISBN 978-2-503-60079-6.
Music in the Disruptive Era contains fifteen essays and commentary assessing the impact of today’s revolutionary digital technologies on the ways audiences and industry professionals perceive, compose, consume, research, and communicate about music of all kinds. After an initial assessment of “the Disruptive Era” in a series of six snapshots offering a summary and review of some of the technological challenges (and opportunities) confronting both music producers and consumers, a group of international scholars considers the impact of the digital era in three major areas.
First, there is the revolution in data storage and retrieval, with online archives and other digital resources making an unprecedented volume and diversity of information available to scholars and researchers for the first time–all from the convenience of a home desktop. Second, three essays assess some of the myriad ways in which composers and music industry professionals have been influenced by the potentialities and discontinuities of the current age to find creative inspiration, attract new audiences, and reimagine traditional musical idioms.
Finally, on the cutting edge of the digital divide, scholarly contributors examine two of the countless new genres birthed by the advent of the latest technological innovations: specifically, the “meme” and the “video loop.”
Music critic, percussionist, independent scholar, YouTube Influencer, and author David Hurwitz is the founder and Executive Editor of Classicstoday.com, the Internet’s first classical music review magazine. Holding MA degrees from Johns Hopkins and Stanford Universities, Hurwitz is the author of more than fifteen books on classical music and various composers. His musicological articles have been published in noted journals such as Music & Letters, Nineteenth-Century Music Review, Ad Parnassum and Early Music America.
Pedro Ordóñez Eslava obtained his BA in both History of Art and Music Sciences as well as a PhD in Musicology from the University of Granada. His research is focused on the bond between music, arts, and poetry in 21st-century creations. Among his interests are new music and arts education, contemporary Flamenco, and sound art. He currently works in the Department of Musicology at the University of Granada.
