To be given at the 10th International Belgrade Conference "Between Nostalgia, Utopia and Realities"

Our culture thrives on fabricated histories and idealistic prospects; the temporal voids of the past and the future are filled and glorified through the social, political, artistic, critical and economic apparatus of the present. The past and future may well be temporal antitheses, identified by their orientation to the ever changing here-and-now, but their cultural content is defined by our current nostalgic-utopian outlook.

Academic, commercial and political institutions exert significant influence over the individual, and are thus largely responsible for contextual understanding of our cultural present and the upkeep of its historical ideologies. Through financial or intellectual transaction, we elect these institutions to propagate canonised musical trajectories. At the same time, our access to knowledge enables the development of divergent nostalgic-utopian attitudes, which are subsequently used to inform the establishment’s musico-historical propaganda. The reflexive nature of our social infrastructure begs the question: is institutionalised utopia or individual ideology more formative in the creative present? I propose that musical progress is catalysed by the friction between widely accepted idealism and equally idealistic refutations thereof by individuals.