Back to the future! is the result of a three-year research project financed by the Swedish Research Council and housed at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm where four new music musicians (George Kentros, Ida Lundén, Rei Nakamura and Mattias Petersson) apply the techniques we use in our contemporary music lives to historical works of music. We are all classically trained musicians who have in different ways chosen lives within new music and have been looking for alternatives to the way historical music has traditionally been interpreted based on what we know. And what do we know?

Well, for example, the way one goes about interpreting a piece of new music is very different from what we did when we learned the mainstream repertoire. Work with new music often involves using what one knows about life, art, philosophy, tone production and technique to figure out what kind of content might be able to be communicated, and then being given the responsibility to assimilate this into a performance. Work with mainstream music usually involved trying to sound like something or someone else, either a recording or another musician or a teacher.

This all sounds simple enough. But as we began to research, we started to realize that we were getting into ontological territory. “What is an original?” “What is a piece of music?” “What are we supposed to do today with the information found on the pages of these works written a few hundred years ago?” “How can we be, well, authentic?” ”And authentic to whom or what???”

The results found in the different links above all try to answer these questions. Here you can find essays, concerts, films, apps, and diverse other results that try to ask why one plays anything in the way one does.