Introduction

This book started as a number of notes attached to a wall, with eight people from different academic backgrounds sticking little dots on them. The notes had several keywords written on them, “electronic music”, “live performance”, “improvisation” and the like. The points were used to vote for a keyword that would set the thematic focus of an upcoming workshop, which was meant to prepare the ground for the work on this book. There was a lively debate on which keyword represented the most promising topic in the context of contemporary musical instruments that would be of interest not only to scholars from diverse academic fields, but also to practitioners both from musical instrument design and artistic practice. Eventually, the winning note was the one that read “instrumentality”. There had been a lot of discussion around that term beforehand, and it seemed to offer an interesting anchor for a book that was intended to juxtapose a variety of perspectives related to contemporary musical instruments.