MiNE: Beyond Mozart

This creative research project addresses the question of whether Mozart’s legacy alone is sufficient for contemporary approaches to listening, conceptualising, and creating classical music. Rather than dismissing Mozart, the project uses his work as a foundation for exploration. The primary objectives are to utilise Mozart’s legacy to investigate curiosity, reintepretation, and creative action within classical music. Curiosity enables renewed engagement with inherited repertoire, while courage supports its expression through innovative methods in the present. Inspired by the Clarinet Quintet in A major, K.581, the project develops Mozart-inspired creative strategies that incorporate contemporary composition, electroacoustic practices, improvisation, and immersive concert design. Selected musical elements such as gesture, structural logic, texture, and harmonic fragments are reinterpreted to promote new forms of musical dialogue between acoustic instruments and electroacoustic sound. The project examines how creation, performance, and listening each contribute to meaning-making in classical music through a practice-based artistic framework. The anticipated outcomes include three original compositions that explore distinct transformations of Mozart’s musical materials through contemporary instrumental and electroacoustic approaches. The study primarily employs reflective artistic documentation, records of experimentation and rehearsal, documentation of compositional decisions, and analysis of knowledge developed through practice. Audience questionnaires, interviews, and observations provide supplementary evidence regarding how these creative approaches are perceived and experienced by listeners. Another key objective is to investigate how listeners interpret the relationships among historical repertoire, contemporary sonic practices, memory, and technological mediation. Ultimately, Mozart is NOT Enough (MiNE), Beyond Mozart argues that classical music should be understood not as a static cultural artifact but as a dynamic field of inquiry, memory, and evolving possibilities.