On September 4–6, 2018, the third Doctors in Performance festival conference of music performance and artistic research welcomed artist-researchers from all over the world to the Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre.
Doctors in Performance is a festival conference where music performers conducting artistic research at the doctoral and post-doctoral level present their artistic research in the form of recitals, concert lectures, or paper presentations. The first Doctors in Performance festival conference was held at the Sibelius Academy of the University of the Arts Helsinki on September 4–5, 2014. The second edition took place at the Royal Irish Academy of Music in Dublin on September 8–9, 2016.
The Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre hosted Doctors in Performance 2018 in Vilnius, the event being particularly varied in terms of the geographical origins of the participants. Artist-researchers from 22 countries took part in the DIP of that year: Latvia, Ireland, Finland, Belgium, Italy, Australia, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Estonia, Norway, Catalonia, Sweden, Poland, Hungary, Austria, Brazil, Serbia, France, South Africa, and Malaysia. Eleven participants represented the hosting body, the Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre. On September 4 and 5 respectively, keynote lectures were delivered by one of the major figures in music performance studies, musicologist and pianist Prof. Dr. John Rink (University of Cambridge) and Prof. Vykintas Baltakas (Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre, Maastricht Academy of Music), a Lithuanian composer and conductor and founder of the Lithuanian Ensemble Network. Seventy-two recitals, lecture-recitals, and paper presentations were delivered during the 24 sessions of DIP 2018. Nearly half of the participants held a PhD or Doctor of Arts degree, while the remaining ones were doctoral students at the time.
Doctors in Performance 2018 was organized by HARPS, the Hub for Artistic Research and Performance Studies at the Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre (led by Prof. Dr. Lina Navickaitė-Martinelli). Large participant delegations were sent to DIP 2018 by our conference partners, the Helsinki University of the Arts’ Sibelius Academy, the Irish Royal Academy of Music, and the Royal Music Academy (London).
Keynote lectures and those lecture-recitals taking place at the Music Innovation Studies Centre were live broadcasted and are available on the MiSC LMTA YouTube channel. All presentations from the event were filmed and constitute the present virtual archive of Doctors in Performance 2018, and the selected online proceedings Beyond Interpretation are published on the basis of papers delivered at the conference.