ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how the performances of students, and the work of music they were performing, in classrooms, rehearsals, and concerts observed in the fieldwork at the Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre, the Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music, and the Sibelius Academy, University of the Arts Helsinki—enact, transform, and construct the nationalised and gendered classical musical heritage of Europe. In the chapter, we draw on the idea that cultural heritage, in this case musical heritage through the musical work, is shaped through “connectivities” regarding choice of repertoire, interactions, and materials. We ask what type of musical heritage is presented in the three institutions, and how it is performed and developed by the students and teachers to form the future of classical music on stage and in society. Relating to the overall theme of the book, the chapter discusses how the three institutions perform European-ness through ideals of nation and gender when musical heritage is enacted on stage. Its analysis is performed in dialogue with research on how classical music as an aesthetic form and practice is both historically rooted and taking new routes through an internationalised and mediatised contemporary world based on ideas of the musical work as a historically grounded but changing concept.
